The Clutter Corpse

by Simon Brett

  If accessing data on a laptop was going to be required, I needed someone with me who knew about computers. He wasn’t aware of it yet, but I had sorted out how Ben was going to spend his day.

  I woke him up and told him what was happening. While he was dressing, I made him a bacon sandwich (heavy on the ketchup, just as he likes it) to eat in the car. Then we set off in the Yeti for West Wittering.

  I had never before seen Philip in the state he was in. I had never before realized how utterly dependent he was on Hilary. You wouldn’t have guessed it from his customary laid-back attitude, his obsession with his work.

  ‘No sign of her?’ I asked.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Or of Liam?’

  ‘No.’

  It wasn’t appropriate for me to get Ben involved in Philip’s fears of his wife’s infidelity, so I said, ‘You mentioned stuff on his laptop …?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Perhaps, if you’re happy for him to do so, Ben could take a look at that while we chat?’

  ‘Good idea.’ Philip gave an elaborate throat-clearing, as if that would shake him out of his vulnerability. ‘Come upstairs and I’ll show you.’

  The spare room was as immaculately appointed as everything else in the cottage, but not as tidy. The duvet was half on the floor, there were clothes scattered over the chairs. And the window opened out on to the roof of the conservatory beneath.

  ‘Looks like that’s how he made his exit,’ I suggested. ‘And in a hurry.’

  ‘A real hurry, to leave his laptop behind,’ Ben contributed. He knew how essential a bit of kit that was to any student.

  ‘Possibly,’ said Philip.

  ‘If you’re happy for Ben to have a look …?’

  ‘Sure, sure. I tried, but it kept asking for passwords.’

  ‘I might be able to get round that,’ said Ben, confident of his generation’s techie know-how.

  Philip lingered, uncharacte‌ristically inert. I’d never seen him not being proactive.

  ‘Why don’t we go down and have a coffee,’ I suggested gently. ‘You want one, Ben love?’

  ‘I’m fine, Ma.’

  The conservatory didn’t get the morning sun. Philip and I sat opposite each other, coffees on a low table between us.

  I put the straight question. ‘Do you honestly think that Hilary’s run off with Liam?’

  ‘What else is there to think?’

  I could have come up with a great many answers to that, but it wasn’t the moment. ‘Has she said anything to you about him?’

  ‘No, but … well, she wouldn’t in the circumstances, would she?’

  ‘Look, you know over the years she has worked with quite a lot of younger men?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And, well, frankly because she’s so bloody beautiful, a lot of them have fallen for her.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘And didn’t that worry you?’

  ‘God, no. It amused me. It amused us. We used to giggle about it.’

  That suggested a level of light-heartedness in their marriage which I wouldn’t have suspected. But was encouraged to hear about.

  ‘So Hilary was aware of the effect she had on these young men?’

  ‘Of course she was. She liked it. I think it gave her extra validation, as a woman. I liked it too. It was as if I had actually won the prize that so many men lusted after. Our marriage was strong, and that was all that mattered to me.’

  ‘So why is Liam different? Why are you worried about him if you weren’t worried about the others?’

  ‘Because Hilary’s changed in the last few months.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, as you know, she’s always had a high level of insecurity …’

  That came as something of a bombshell to me. No, I hadn’t known that. Of all the women I knew, I would have said Hilary was the most confident. She had a high level of expectation for herself, yes, but not insecurity. Though, when I came to think about it, the two could be opposite sides of the same coin. I felt chastened for my ignorance of my best friend’s real personality.

  But all I said to Philip was, ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mean, some elements of it have always been there. You know, having had the father she did.’

  ‘She never talked to me about her father.’

  ‘Didn’t she? Really?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Hilary’s father was Gerry Cruden.’

  ‘Gerry Cruden the journalist?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He must have died at least ten years ago, but Gerry Cruden was a name that had been hard to escape for a couple of decades before that. He was a right-wing controversialist who worked for a lot of national newspapers in the old days of Fleet Street, and then found a permanent soapbox as a columnist for the Daily Mail. If he was as much of a bully in his private life as he was on the printed page, then it was no surprise that Hilary had described her childhood as ‘private grief’.

  ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘It wasn’t something she advertised. She wouldn’t have told me, except there was some life insurance paperwork we had to sort out for which I needed the details of her parents. Of course, I never met him, which I gather was a blessing. Very hard man to please, from all accounts. Nothing Hilary could do was ever good enough for him.’

  A few other details clicked into place. Hilary’s desperate need to succeed, to prove herself. Maybe the creative writing courses had been attempts to beat her father at his own game …?

  But while I was still processing one bombshell, Philip detonated another. ‘And then, of course, there’s Hilary’s sense of inferiority in relation to you …’

  I couldn’t stop myself from uttering an incredulous: ‘What?’

  ‘Things have got much worse in the last year, though. I don’t know if it’s her age …’ I’m always amused by the lengths men will go to to avoid using the word ‘menopause’ ‘… but she’s become very … I’m not sure what the right word is. “Paranoid”, perhaps? She really worries about losing her looks. I suppose age is cruel to someone as beautiful as she is.’

  Something I’ve never had to worry about, I thought, still reeling from the thought that Hilary might be jealous of me.

  ‘Anyway, I was thinking …’ Philip went on, ‘I mean, I’ve seen enough movies about this kind of thing … that a woman worried about her fading charms might be susceptible to adoration from a younger man.’

  ‘Like Liam, are you suggesting?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I am.’

  ‘Well, you know Hilary better than I do.’ A lot better, I was beginning to realize. ‘But I would be very surprised if that’s what’s happened. I think it’s much more likely her disappearance has something to do with events at Walnut Farm.’

  ‘Walnut Farm?’

  ‘The place where the body of Nate Ogden, the lifer Hilary had been working with, was discovered.’

  ‘What?’ Panic lit his normally placid eyes. ‘You mean she’s involved with criminals? That they might have abducted her?’

  ‘No, no,’ I soothed. ‘Look, you know Nate Ogden is believed to have murdered the girl whose body I found in the flat in Portsmouth?’

  ‘I’d heard that, yes.’

  ‘I’ve been trying to find out the truth of what happened there. In both cases, actually. Partly, that’s to get the police off my back.’

  ‘Are they on your back?’

  ‘They will be. I’m sure they haven’t finished with me yet. By unlucky coincidence, I was the first person to discover both bodies. So far as the police are concerned, that makes me a very suspicious person. Only finding out who actually committed the murders will get me off the hook.’

  ‘Murders in the plural? I thought the convict topped himself.’

  ‘Yes, of course, sorry. I was getting mixed up.’ Forgetting who was meant to know what.

  ‘What’s this got to do with Hilary’s disappearance?’

  ‘Well, if I know Hilary …’
Though now I wondered whether I did ‘… she is at least as curious by nature as I am. And since she was involved in my appearing at both crime scenes, the police will have an unhealthy interest in her too. I would think what she is currently doing is her bit of amateur sleuthing, trying to find out the truth of what happened.’

  ‘And that’s meant to comfort me, is it? The idea that my wife has been away all night investigating a murder? I think I’d rather—’

  What he’d rather I never found out, because at that moment the cottage shook and creaked as my son came thundering down the stairs and into the conservatory.

  ‘I’ve got some rather interesting news,’ he said. He was glowing with excitement.

  ‘From Liam’s laptop?’

  ‘That’s right, Ma. Except it isn’t Liam’s laptop.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Liam Burgess does not exist.’

  Philip and I went up to the spare room with Ben, who demonstrated what he had discovered. First, he told us a lot of technical detail about how he’d accessed the password-protected files. I didn’t listen, it meant nothing to me.

  It was then with considerable, and justifiable – come on, I am his mother – pride that Ben revealed the real name of the laptop’s owner. Ricky Brewer.

  Philip was less than impressed. ‘Liam might just have stolen the laptop from someone of that name.’

  ‘No,’ said Ben firmly. ‘I’ve managed to access his emails. In some he definitely says he’s using the alias of “Liam Burgess”.’

  ‘Are there any sent to Hilary?’ asked Philip with sudden urgency.

  ‘Have a look.’ Ben opened the relevant window.

  I saw no reason not to peer over Philip’s shoulder. It didn’t feel like intruding on his privacy. There were four emails from ‘Liam’ to Hilary. All had attached academic papers about the psychology of prisoners sentenced to life, research which she must have asked him to dig out. In none of them were any personal sentiments expressed. There was no mention of love.

  Having found that out, Philip lost interest. He went downstairs to phone around some of their friends and see if Hilary had been in touch. He wasn’t optimistic about the results, but he didn’t want to report her as a missing person yet.

  I stayed with Ben and the laptop. The news of Liam’s false identity had set a whole new cavalcade of logic racing in my mind.

  First, I got Ben to go back to the computer and find out anything he could about Ricky Brewer. There was surprisingly little. The laptop was new and the email account had only been opened a few weeks earlier. Maybe Ricky Brewer – if it was him – had bought it for one specific project and not imported any personal data from his previous machine.

  Though it couldn’t help me with details about its owner, it was still a working laptop, offering all kinds of online information. My mind was working very quickly and clearly now. I knew what the next step had to be.

  Ben’s interest in fonts meant that he had access to the archives of a lot of newspapers. There’s so much of that stuff online these days. I knew what I was looking for and, under my direction, he very quickly found what I had hoped he would find.

  Yesss!

  TWENTY-TWO

  In my call to Dorothy Lechlade, I said I was just checking she was in. I imagine she thought I was making contact about the prospective decluttering of her husband’s workspace.

  I dropped Ben at home – there was some comedy stuff he wanted to catch up with on Netflix – and printed up the research he’d found for me. I put it in a folder. I thought Ben’d be all right for a couple of hours on his own. He was really energized by his success with the laptop at the cottage. I hoped he’d ring Tracey to tell her about it.

  Philip had had no objection to my taking the laptop from the cottage. I put it in the car, along with the folder.

  I parked the Yeti directly outside Clovelly. I didn’t care if the neighbours knew the Lechlades were having dealings with a declutterer.

  The door was opened by Tobias, looking as charm-free as ever. His roguish smile was already in place; he knew it was me who was arriving. ‘Can’t keep away from me, eh?’ he said.

  ‘I’ve actually come to visit your wife,’ I said.

  ‘What’s hers is mine.’ He grinned. ‘That’s what marriage is about.’

  He backed away to let me in, but not far enough. I had to pass too close to him to get into the hall. Once again, he smelled unwholesomely of tobacco. Dorothy emerged and ushered me into the sitting room. Now I knew why her face had looked familiar.

  She offered me coffee and went through to the kitchen to make it, presumably with the old Cona percolator. The sitting room, like the rest of the house, had probably not been decorated for thirty years. Dorothy, I could see, was going to have an uphill struggle erasing her deceased in-laws’ legacy.

  Tobias sat on a sofa and patted the space beside him. I moved deliberately to plonk myself in an armchair. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I want to talk to Dorothy on her own.’

  ‘Oh, Dotty and I share—’

  ‘I want to speak to her on my own,’ I continued. ‘And if you don’t leave the room, I will tell her about your putting your hand on my breasts during my last visit.’

  ‘Oh, that wasn’t anything.’

  ‘No? Putting a hand on a woman’s breasts isn’t anything?’

  ‘Just a bit of fun. Nothing to get aerated about.’

  ‘Shall I describe what you did to me to your wife and see if she gets “aerated” about it?’

  ‘Don’t be childish. I’m sure you wouldn’t go and—’

  ‘Want to try me?’ I demanded.

  Nothing more was said until Dorothy returned with the coffee. ‘I’ll take mine up with me,’ her husband grunted. ‘Some work I’ve got to get on with.’

  She looked a little puzzled as he abruptly left the room and we heard his footsteps clumping up the stairs.

  Then Dorothy said, ‘It’s very fortunate that you’ve come. It’s sort of made a decision for me.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Well, I’m still keen to get Tobias’s workspace sorted, and he’s been dragging his feet about it, but now you’ve actually arrived, we can sort out—’

  ‘I haven’t come here about the decluttering.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’ve come here to talk about your former career.’

  ‘As a teacher?’

  ‘No, as a social worker.’

  She coloured. ‘That was a very long time ago.’

  ‘And you gave up the job in rather unusual circumstances, didn’t you?’

  ‘I was very young at the time and—’

  I pulled out the printed sheets of the newspaper cuttings Ben had found for me. I indicated one of the headlines. ‘THE LOST BOYS SCANDAL’, it read. ‘I vaguely remember reading something about it at the time, but I had no reason to associate the name of “Dorothy Lechlade” with “Dorothy Brunton”.’

  ‘I was cleared by the investigation.’

  ‘Cleared of criminal charges. Not cleared of incompetence.’

  ‘Ellen, that was a very unhappy period of my life.’

  ‘I’m sure it was.’

  ‘Nothing I’d done in my training had prepared me for being responsible for children in that kind of situation. I was brought up in a very cushioned, middle-class way – “privileged” you might say – and I had this idealistic view that I had something to give to society. I never realized quite what society was like, real society, real life. I was far too young to have been put in charge of fostering those children.’

  ‘I’m sure you were. Listen, Dorothy, I’m not here to blame you, or criticize you. From what I’ve read of the case, you were treated very badly by your employers, given no support at all.’

  ‘I was so desperate to succeed. It was my first job.’

  ‘I understand. And I’m sure you were very trusting. It’s a failing that often goes along with idealism.’ One that I’d suffered from a few times myself. ‘T
hose people seemed like suitable foster parents. You weren’t to know that they’d falsified their paperwork.’

  ‘I didn’t. I should have checked. So many things I should have done back then.’

  I was stirring up memories that had been quiescent for a long time. I didn’t want to hurt the woman, I just wanted to get information out of her. So I softened my tone as I said, ‘I’m not here to be judgemental about you, Dorothy. You made the kind of mistakes that could have been made by anyone of that age, if they weren’t properly supervised. When the investigation came out, there was much more blame attached to your bosses than there was to you.’

  ‘That’s true,’ she said, determined to snatch at any thread of self-justification.

  ‘All I want from you is some information about one of the boys.’

  ‘Boys?’ she echoed vaguely.

  ‘One of the boys who was allocated to unsuitable foster parents.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I took out another scan of a fifteen-year-old newspaper’s front page. This time the headline read: ‘JUDGE SENTENCES “BRUTAL” KILLER OF GIRLFRIEND’. It concerned the end of the murder trial of Nate Ogden. ‘You remember this case, Dorothy?’

  ‘Yes. It happened round the same time as the investigation into the fostering scandal was published. Brought it all back into the news again.’

  ‘Megan Evans was the name of Nate Ogden’s victim. And she had a son who had been taken into care some years before her death.’

  ‘Yes,’ Dorothy confirmed without intonation.

  ‘He was one of the ones you were responsible for? One of the ones who ended up with the abusing foster parents?’

  Another flat ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was his surname “Evans” at that point?’

  ‘Yes. But it was thought to be a good idea to change it after his mother’s murder.’

  ‘And what was the boy’s name changed to, Dorothy?’

  ‘Richard Brewer.’

  Ben had shown me how to access the data, and as soon as I got back to the Yeti, I looked at some of the other stuff he’d found on Ricky Brewer’s laptop. Though the young man had only had the machine a short time, there was still information from his search history about how he’d found out where Nate Ogden was completing his sentence, about how he had targeted Hilary Boredean as someone who had contact with the prisoner.