by Simon Brett
Then I rang Ben’s mobile. He’d still been in his bedroom when I’d left first thing, and I’d curbed my instinct to open the door and check he was all right. On the phone I told him I was about to go to the police and didn’t know how long I’d be.
‘Oh dear, what have you been up to, Ma? What crimes have you been keeping from me?’
‘It’s about the body I found on Friday.’
‘Yes, of course, it would be. There’s been reams of stuff about that on social media.’
Entirely predictable that there should be. I’d avoided looking at any of it, only checking out work stuff on my SpaceWoman Facebook page.
‘Look, Ben, I don’t know how long I’ll be, but there’s plenty in the freezer and I’m sure you’ll be able to entertain yourself.’
‘Yes.’
He sounded unnaturally perky, even a bit brittle, but I hadn’t got time to worry about that. ‘You will be all right, won’t you?’
‘Yes, Ma.’ The response was glib and automatic, and I had to be satisfied with it. ‘Might go out on the bike. Or a walk on the Downs.’
‘Fine. Weather looks a bit iffy.’
‘Into each life some rain must fall.’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, and, Ma …’
‘Yes.’
‘If it turns out you need someone to stand bail for you … I’m quite prepared to increase the borrowing on my student loan.’
I do love my son.
The detective inspector said it would be easier if I were to come to him. ‘No police cars outside your door for the nosy neighbours, eh? If you don’t mind …?’
I said I didn’t mind.
‘Since the Major Crime Units of Sussex and Surrey merged, we work out of offices all over the area.’ He gave me an address in the centre of Chichester. Reasoning that leaving my distinctive SpaceWoman Yeti too near a police station might prompt the same kind of reaction as a Panda outside my house, I parked in a public car park a little way away.
I needn’t have worried. The address I’d been given was in a featureless office block the grottier end of South Street, near the train and bus stations. Its business looked more likely to be settling insurance claims than interrogating murder suspects.
Before I entered the building, I switched off my mobile, as if I was going into a theatre. Though I wasn’t certain what kind of performance I was about to be part of.
When the inspector reintroduced himself, it was like I had never seen him before. I must have been really traumatized on the Friday evening. Normally I’m pretty observant, but neither the names nor the looks of the police I met then had stayed with me.
Now I did take notice of him, I found Detective Inspector John Prendergast to be a tall man round the fifty mark. His grizzled grey hair was thinning, and the cheeks of his long face were concave. He wore an anonymous dark grey suit, and his voice had a residual East London twang.
Though I hadn’t really taken in the policewoman who’d been with him on the Friday, I could recognize that his colleague today was not the same one. Different gender, for a start. Introduced to me as Detective Sergeant Prasad. Of Indian origin, obviously. Small, neat, shirtsleeves and jeans, hair only a few millimetres up from being shaved bald. His voice was pure Croydon.
The office in which I was interviewed was as anonymous as the block that contained it. A desk, one chair behind, two in front. Nothing on the walls. I was offered coffee but refused. I was actually afraid that my hand would shake if I tried to pick up a cup. When I thought about it, I realized I had reason to be nervous.
Pleasantries out of the way, the inspector moved straight on to the purpose of our meeting. ‘You said on the phone that, since Friday, you have realized that you did actually know the murder victim …?’
His tone was not accusatory, but still made me aware of how suspicious my delayed recollection sounded.
‘Yes. I didn’t recognize her on Friday because her hair was dyed, her face was bruised and she had … changed considerably since I last saw her.’
‘Maybe you could fill us in on when you did last see her, Mrs Curtis?’
‘Please, call me Ellen.’
He hesitated, but after minimal eye contact with Prasad, said, ‘Very well, Ellen.’ Was he perhaps a policeman of the old school, uncomfortable with the new informalities of his working environment? ‘So, when did you last see Kerry Tallis?’
I gave him an edited version of my previous contact with the family. I did not reveal the scale of Jeanette’s hoarding problem. Nor the uncomfortable conclusion of our transactions.
But Prendergast was on to it pretty quickly. If I’d thought, I’d have realized that he must have already spoken to the Tallises. ‘And, so far as you were concerned, was your business relationship with the family satisfactory … Ellen?’ He used my name as if he was checking out something unfamiliar.
‘No, it wasn’t,’ I said, waiting to see how much he knew before volunteering anything more.
‘Both sides agree on that,’ said the inspector. ‘In fact, Mr Tallis used some fairly choice language to describe your behaviour.’
‘I’m sure he did.’
‘There’s no reason why I shouldn’t tell you this: he said that the threat of his daughter going to the police with details of your appropriation of the return money might have given you a motive to kill Kerry.’
‘Did he? And what do you think about that, Inspector?’ Somehow, though I was happy to be called ‘Ellen’, calling him ‘John’ didn’t seem right.
‘What I think is usually dictated by the information I have. In this instance, I have an accusation against you by Mr Tallis in relation to your stealing money from him … and I have yet to hear your side of the story.’
‘My side of the story will not take long. You presumably know the background of where the money came from?’ Both men nodded. ‘I agreed with Kerry that I would sort out the return of the goods and the considerable paperwork involved, and she would deal with the money paid for the returns. I assumed she meant by that that she would pay it into one of her father’s accounts. From what he said to me at the time – and what he said to you more recently – that didn’t happen. Kerry told him that I had paid it into my own account … whereas, presumably, she’d paid it into hers. All of this can be checked by looking at the statements for the relevant bank accounts, to which I assume you can easily get access. I certainly can show you mine. Because I run my own business and need to cover myself in the event of inspection from the tax authorities, I have kept all of the paperwork since I started SpaceWoman.’
‘Thank you,’ said the inspector.
‘Though we will have to check through the statements,’ said the sergeant, ‘to corroborate what you’re telling us.’
I spread my hands wide. ‘Be my guest.’
‘Thank you,’ said Prasad.
‘Have you any idea, Ellen,’ asked the inspector, ‘given the evident generosity of Mr Tallis towards his daughter, why she would want to steal from him?’
‘I can only think that her heroin habit had already started, and she didn’t want him to know about it.’
‘How do you know about it?’ asked Prasad, as if he’d caught me out in some lie.
‘Because I read the papers and check social media,’ I replied, at least half truthfully. ‘There’s been plenty of righteous tub-thumping there, following Kerry’s death. How heroin is now the curse of the middle classes.’
Prasad seemed about to ask another question, but Prendergast stopped him with a little shake of the head. ‘Ellen …’ the inspector said, ‘I know we talked about this in considerable detail on Friday, but could we just go back to why you went to Maureen Ogden’s house …?’
‘Very well.’ I could have said something like: ‘in very considerable detail’, but I didn’t. I was determined to curb my naturally combative instincts and be as cooperative as possible. Though I’d very little to feel guilty about, I still had no wish to get on the wrong side of the police
.
So, I very patiently did a rerun of the Q & A we’d been through on the Friday. There was now a slight change of emphasis in the detective inspector’s questions. He seemed more interested in Hilary than he had been then. I told him how we’d met, how we’d stayed friends, and gave him an outline of her research project at Gradewell. He responded to some of this as if it was new information to him.
‘So, through this “research project”, your friend actually knew Maureen Ogden’s son?’
‘Yes, he was – is – an important part of her study. But surely you know this.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You rang Hilary over the weekend, asking if she knew where Nate Ogden had gone.’
He shook his head. ‘It wasn’t me.’ He looked peevishly across at Prasad.
‘It wasn’t me either, Inspector.’
Prendergast grimaced with annoyance. ‘The lack of liaison inside this investigation is …’ He stopped himself, unwilling to talk about police shortcomings with me present.
‘Have you met Nate Ogden?’ he asked.
‘No. There’s no reason why I should have done.’
‘Of course not. Or did you meet his mother?’
‘No.’
‘No.’ He was silent for a moment, pulling his fingers down his long face.
‘Have you tried to contact Hilary since the weekend?’ I asked.
Prasad replied, ‘Yes. Getting no response from her mobile. Tried her home this morning, spoke to her husband. He hasn’t been able to get through to her either.’
A chill of fear ran through me. Just how far would Hilary go in pursuit of her research project? Might she have some means of contacting Nate Ogden? Might she know where he had disappeared to?
‘Have you been in touch with her recently?’ asked Prendergast.
‘Saw her on Sunday.’
‘Did you talk to her about Kerry Tallis?’
‘Not about Kerry Tallis, no. About the murder victim, about the body I found. At that stage neither of us knew it was Kerry Tallis. And, in fact, Hilary had no reason to know who Kerry Tallis was.’
‘Of course not.’ A silence. ‘And you’d had no contact with Kerry Tallis since the time when you dealt with her over her stepmother’s hoarding problem?’
‘Since the time she accused me of theft,’ I emphasized. ‘No, I haven’t had contact with her since then.’
I hoped they weren’t about to ask me whether I’d had any news of her since that time. If they didn’t raise the matter of her disappearance into the Celeste persona, I wasn’t about to. Basically, I had no desire to get Dodge involved. I somehow didn’t think he’d react well to being questioned by the police. Within his complex personality, I had detected a streak of paranoia. And I didn’t want him to have to talk about his past drug use.
They asked me a few more questions, but it was going over old ground. Eventually, an exchange of looks between the two detectives confirmed that they had no reason to detain me any longer. They thanked me politely and urged me to be in touch if I found out anything which might have bearing on the case of Kerry Tallis’s murder. But I did not leave the building feeling that all their suspicions of me had been quashed.
I was surprised how tense my back was. When I got into the Yeti, my spine seemed rigid against the seatback. I did some of the breathing exercises I’d been taught to calm myself down. I looked at my watch. I’d only been in there an hour and a quarter. It felt like a lot longer.
When I’d regained some kind of normality, I wondered what I should do next. I had time to visit Queenie or Ashleigh, but the temptation just to go home was very strong.
I switched on my phone. There was a message on the voicemail.
It was from Les, the man with whom Kerry/Celeste had defaulted from ReProgramme. He wanted to talk.
TWELVE
‘Have the police been in touch with you?’ I asked.
‘No. Not recently.’ Les sounded bewildered by the question. His voice had a rasp in it, as if he was recovering from a bad cough. ‘Why should they be?’
‘Think about it. They’ll soon find out that you met Celeste at ReProgramme. Once they get in touch with the drop-in centre, they’ll be told about you and her going off together.’
‘We didn’t exactly “go off together”,’ he complained.
‘All right. But they’re going to find out that you knew her. It’s only a matter of time before they contact you.’
‘They may not be able to find me,’ he said defiantly.
‘I didn’t have too much difficulty.’
‘You haven’t found me.’
‘I’m talking to you.’
‘Yes,’ he conceded. ‘But you don’t know where I am.’
‘Anyway, you know we are now talking about a case of murder?’
‘I still haven’t got over hearing that,’ said Les, sounding genuinely shocked. ‘If I’d heard Celeste had died from an overdose, I’d have been sad, but I wouldn’t have been surprised. She’d been heading that way for a long time. But why anyone would want to kill the kid …’
‘You presumably don’t have any idea who might have wanted to do it?’
‘None. There’re whole areas of her life I didn’t know anything about. She came from a wealthy family, I think, but she never talked about that stuff.’
I was faced with a moral dilemma. Moments before, only a couple of hundred yards from where I now was, I’d been asked by two policemen to tell them anything I found out that might have relevance to their investigation into a murder. I was now talking to someone who had known the victim very well. And the police had yet to make contact with him. My obvious social responsibility was to give Detective Inspector John Prendergast Les’s contact details.
I didn’t consider that option for very long. My natural curiosity was too strong. I wanted a private session with the witness before I put the police in touch with him. And I wasn’t even certain that I ever would put them in touch. Surely it wouldn’t take them long to make the connection under their own steam? I had no wish to obstruct their enquiries, but I was starting to regard the investigation as personal.
I fixed to meet up with Les that afternoon.
He was where he’d said he would be, on a park bench, not far from the much-advertised Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. There were good children’s play facilities within sight, but I reckoned the place would be considerably less family-friendly after dark. Still, it was a warm day. As I approached him, Les was blinking into the sun. The pallor of his face and arms suggested they hadn’t seen much of it recently.
He looked wary as I approached. He wasn’t about to say anything until I identified myself. ‘I’m Ellen.’
He stretched out a hand to me. ‘Les.’
For an addict – or perhaps recovering addict – he looked in pretty good shape. Though he was slender, the biceps bulging against his T-shirt sleeves suggested time spent in the gym. The tattoos on his arms didn’t look as if they’d been done by a professional. He wore jeans and anonymous trainers. His thinning hair was cut short.
I was dying for a coffee and there was a snack kiosk nearby. But I didn’t want to break the moment. I sat on the bench beside him.
‘You were right, incidentally,’ said Les. His voice still sounded as though he needed to clear his throat.
‘About what?’
‘The Boys in Blue. Had a call from them just after I’d finished talking to you.’
‘Was it Detective Inspector Prendergast or Detective Sergeant Prasad?’
He shook his head. ‘Somebody called Williams.’
‘Ah. So, are they coming to pick you up?’
‘No, Ellen … mind if I call you Ellen?’
‘Please.’
‘“Pick me up” sounds like they’re accusing me of something. They only want to talk to me for background information about Celeste.’
‘Of course. So, do they want you to go to Chichester?’
‘No, no, they gave me an addr
ess right here in Portsmouth.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Said I’d be there in half an hour. I’d probably be on my way by now if you hadn’t turned up.’
‘What made you think I might not turn up?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know you, do I? I get a call from you out of the blue. You could be anyone.’
‘I did say on my message that I know Dodge.’
‘Yes,’ he conceded. ‘Good bloke, Dodge.’ He looked rueful. ‘Like a role model for me. I really admire the stuff he does at ReProgramme. I thought I could go down the same route … you know, get qualifications, be a counsellor, help people who’re into this kind of shit. But that got screwed up after I met Celeste and – as you put it – “went off” with her.’
‘Don’t you think you can get back into the ReProgramme set-up?’
‘I don’t know. I let them down – I let Dodge down, in particular. And, of course, I let myself down – when I started using again.’
‘Are you using now?’
‘I haven’t done anything since I heard about Celeste.’
‘Well, that’s a start.’
He looked at me cynically. ‘Yeah? I heard on Saturday that she’d died. And where are we now – Monday? Clean for more than two days – let’s string up the bunting, shall we?’
‘All I’m saying is that, if the other staff at ReProgramme are anything like Dodge, I’m sure they’ll give you another chance.’
‘Maybe. We’ll see.’ His voice had a tinge of cynicism, but he was attracted by the idea.
‘Incidentally, Les, I meant to say, you know, given the fact that you were … close to her … I’m sorry for your sake about what happened to Celeste.’ I’d keep calling her that until he volunteered that he knew her real identity.
‘Thanks. Kind of thing that keeps happening, when you’re using. Sort of people you mix with. Number I’ve known who … you know, overdose, accidentally while under the influence … You get used to losing people.’
‘When did you last see her?’