The Clutter Corpse

by Simon Brett

  And then there was the revenge stuff. The unhinged rantings about how his life had been destroyed by his mother’s murder. The determination to kill her killer as soon as he finished his sentence.

  I didn’t know where Ricky Brewer – or Liam Burgess – was, but I had found out the identity of Nate Ogden’s killer. When I passed over my findings to Detective Inspector Prendergast, I would be off the hook for at least one of the murders.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Investigating the other murder would have to wait. I had more personal priorities.

  One obviously was Ben. I came home from Clovelly to find a note from him on the kitchen table. ‘Back up to London. Meeting up with Tracey again. Be back some time tomorrow. And I’m all right, Ma. More than all right.’

  I took his word for it. And I was really encouraged by the fact that he was going to stay overnight. Funny, when did the moment come for a mother to be more worried by a son not sleeping with women than she was by him sleeping with them?

  So that was one of my personal priorities solved. The other was Hilary. Unlike Philip, I wasn’t really worried about her. For some reason, I didn’t share his fears of her having been abducted. And yet the way he’d been unmanned by the fear of her running off with the young man we then thought of as Liam Burgess suggested that all was not as serene as their marriage appeared on the outside. Maybe Hilary’s refusal to respond to Philip’s calls was a way of punishing him for some unknown shortcoming.

  She wasn’t taking calls from her husband. Maybe she might take one from me.

  The phone rang and rang, which was encouraging. It meant she was well enough to keep it charged, rather than lying in a ditch somewhere with her head caved in.

  The answering message clicked on. Not Hilary’s voice, just a generic one. But that’s what she always used.

  ‘Hilary,’ I said, ‘if you want to talk, please call me.’ That was enough. No point in adding more.

  She rang back within five minutes.

  ‘Are you all right?’ was my first question.

  ‘I’m not quite sure what that means, Ellen. I’m not ill.’

  ‘No. But you realize Philip’s been frantic about your disappearance.’

  ‘Has he? I’m surprised he noticed.’

  Was that just a reference to his workaholic character or something deeper? Not the moment to investigate. ‘Hilary, if you want to meet up and talk, I’d be happy to come to wherever you are.’

  There was a long silence. Then she said, ‘Maybe that would be a good idea. Better face one’s demons, eh?’

  Which struck me as a very odd thing to say.

  I was not surprised to find that Hilary had simply booked into a hotel for the night. More of a pub with rooms than a hotel, really. Lovely seaside setting near Pagham Harbour Local Nature Reserve. Popular on summer evenings for the spectacular sunsets. Quite pricey, but money was never a problem for Philip and Hilary.

  We had coffee in the garden by the sea. The view good enough for a brochure. No one else there mid-morning. No one to eavesdrop. No one to inhibit any revelations that might be made.

  ‘It’s about Liam,’ Hilary said.

  Oh dear. Had I got it all wrong? Had Philip been right all along? Was I about to hear some confession of illicit passion with a younger man? But all I said was, ‘What about Liam?’

  ‘I was such a fool about him.’ That too might have been heading in the same direction, but then she added, ‘I should have seen through him, seen what he was after from the start.’

  I didn’t want to unload all I had found out about Liam – or Ricky Brewer – until Hilary had told me how much she knew.

  ‘I was a fool,’ she repeated. ‘I welcomed him in, believed his stories about studying criminology. I thought here was someone I could actually do some good for.’

  ‘He appeared very plausible,’ I said, ‘on the one occasion I met him.’

  ‘Yes, but I should have seen through him,’ she insisted. ‘It’s not the first time I’ve got carried away by doing my Lady Bountiful routine.’

  This was more self-knowledge than I had expected from her. ‘When did you find out he wasn’t who he claimed to be?’ I asked.

  ‘Tuesday. The day he did a runner. When I think about it, I should have realized.’

  ‘Realized what?’

  ‘Why he did a runner.’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘It was the arrival of the police that frightened him off. You remember – Prendergast and his sidekick arrived that morning to talk to me. I came to see you straight after. It was the police coming that frightened Liam off.’

  That made sense, explained the disarray I’d seen in his bedroom at the West Wittering cottage. He must have thought the police were coming for him.

  ‘But did you find out who he really was?’

  Hilary nodded painfully. ‘After I got back from seeing you, I found papers in his room, stuff about his plans to kill Nate as soon as he was released. And I realized just how much information I had given him.’

  ‘About Walnut Farm?’

  ‘Yes. I was so proud about my lifers PhD, and he seemed to admire what I was doing so much … I was very indiscreet. Now I look back on it, I realize just how easily he set me up. Playing to my vanity. I answered every question Liam asked me about Nate Ogden. I’d spent a lot of time interviewing him at Gradewell over the last year. I knew a lot. And Liam just siphoned all that information off.’

  ‘Including the fact that Nate might lie low at Walnut Farm?’

  ‘Yes. Nate’d mentioned the place to me at some point, during one of our interviews. There was some dispute between the brothers who’d inherited the place, so they could never agree about selling it and it just went to rack and ruin. Nate said if he ever got in trouble with the police again, there was a hideout he could use. It was kind of a joke. But he meant it. Apparently, he went and checked the place out, to see that it was still unoccupied, after one of his visits to his mother.’

  ‘And you told Liam?’

  As she nodded, Hilary looked as if she was in actual physical pain. ‘So, by the end of Tuesday afternoon, I knew that Liam was about to go to Walnut Farm to kill Nate. And I did nothing.’ Tears welled over her lower lids and ran down the perfect face.

  I tried to reassure her. ‘You couldn’t have known for certain that was going to happen.’

  ‘No? I still knew enough to tell the police about the possibility. But I didn’t. And do you know why? Because I cared too much about my PhD. I didn’t want anything to threaten my completing that. And, as a result, I allowed Nate Ogden to be murdered.’

  ‘When you say you “cared too much about your PhD”, what do you mean exactly?’

  ‘I mean I’d got a good story about Nate Ogden and I wanted to follow it through.’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘A good bit of investigative journalism. I knew there was a book in it.’

  ‘A True Crime book?’

  ‘Yes.’ The blue eyes sparkled with enthusiasm. ‘A potential bestseller.’

  ‘And a book whose chances of becoming a bestseller would become greatly enhanced by ending with a murder? Where the son of the victim waits throughout the perpetrator’s long prison sentence till he can exact his revenge?’

  ‘Yes.’ She liked my response, reading it as if I shared her enthusiasm for the project. And I realized how little I actually knew her.

  ‘So,’ I said evenly, ‘you would finally have produced a work of investigative journalism that your father would have been proud of?’

  The sparkle in her eyes dulled. ‘How do you know about my father?’

  ‘Philip told me.’

  ‘Did he? I told him he should never mention it to anyone. But of course, for Philip, different rules apply when you’re involved.’

  I ignored that. I wasn’t sure what she meant, anyway. There was a silence. I tried to convince myself that she was overstating her guilt in the case, but I knew she wasn’t, really. If she had warned the police wh
at was about to happen at Walnut Farm, Nate Ogden might still be alive. Possibly facing false charges for murdering Kerry Tallis, but still alive.

  I tried to find an excuse for her behaviour. ‘But you did try to intervene, didn’t you? Presumably that was why you went to Walnut Farm that evening? To try to stop Liam from committing the murder?’

  ‘I didn’t go to Walnut Farm that evening.’

  ‘What? OK, I know you told Prendergast you didn’t go, but you arranged to meet me there.’

  ‘I didn’t go.’

  ‘Then why did you send me there?’

  There was a long silence. Then Hilary said, ‘This is difficult.’

  ‘I’m sure it is, but for God’s sake tell me what you mean!’

  ‘It goes back a long way. To when I first met you, Ellen. And I realized I could never be like you.’

  ‘You don’t have to be like me. That’s why we get on. Because we’re different.’

  ‘Not what I meant. I meant I could never be as good as you.’

  ‘Good?’

  ‘Naturally good. I’m not like that. There’s too much evil in me.’

  ‘Evil? You haven’t got an evil bone in your body.’

  ‘Oh, I have, Ellen. A whole skeleton of them.’

  For a moment I wondered if she was having me on, playing some elaborate joke. But the expression on her face told me that wasn’t the case. And I remembered what Philip had said about her inexplicable sense of inferiority where I was concerned.

  ‘Ellen, I’ve always been jealous of you.’

  ‘Jealous? Why?’

  ‘Because you have everything so sorted.’

  ‘Sorted?’ I thought about my life – a husband who had killed himself, a depressive son, a distant daughter, a difficult mother. How could anyone imagine my life was sorted?

  ‘And, of course,’ she went on with difficulty, ‘there’s you and Philip.’

  ‘Me and Philip?’

  ‘Yes. You were his first girlfriend.’

  ‘I know I was his first girlfriend, Hilary, but we’re talking more than thirty years ago and—’

  ‘He’s never met anyone who’s matched up to you.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! Philip adores you.’

  ‘He still doesn’t think I match up to you. You don’t deny that you slept together, do you?’

  ‘No, of course I don’t. But in retrospect, I think we’ve both realized the sex wasn’t even that good.’

  ‘You may have realized that. Philip hasn’t.’

  ‘Has he ever talked to you about it?’

  ‘No, it’s not the kind of thing he would talk about.’

  ‘Then how do you know he thinks that?’

  ‘I just know.’

  I realized now what I was up against. It never for a moment occurred to me that what she thought was true, that Philip genuinely found all women a disappointment after a few inept fumbles in bed with me. But I could see how deeply Hilary believed it, how she had hoarded these feelings of inferiority over the years, and how they had grown uncontrollable.

  I knew, from living with Oliver, how thoughts like that can never be unthought. Paranoia, resentment against a person (however unjustified), self-loathing … though, in more stable moods they can be laughed off, the logic they once dictated leaves a permanent mark on the memory. And when the depression or paranoia returns, they can all too readily return with it. Like replaying the same track of music.

  There was one thing I still needed to know from Hilary. ‘So why did you send me to Walnut Farm on Tuesday?’ A memory came to me. ‘And was it you who sent me there the first time? Last Friday, when I found no one there? Did you set that up?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said coolly.

  ‘But why?’

  She looked me straight in the eye and said, without vindictiveness but with something that she regarded as perfect logic, ‘I wanted to cause trouble for you. I wanted to hurt you, Ellen.’

  Before I left the pub garden, I did persuade Hilary to call Philip. They had a lot to sort out. But it was between them. Or, if input from a third person was required, that person should be a psychiatrist. I wasn’t going to get involved.

  As I drove slowly back home, I tried to come to terms with Hilary’s bizarre revelations. I would have said she was my best friend. But it just goes to show how impossible it is to know anyone fully.

  I hoped we’d stay in touch, but I wasn’t sure whether she’d still be my best friend.

  When I got home, the first thing I did was to check that Ben wasn’t in his room, that he actually had gone to London. He had, but my old habits of vigilance die hard.

  To my surprise, I found that I was very hungry. So, since I knew I wouldn’t be able to settle to anything, I indulged myself with a proper lunch. One of my regular standbys: Spanish eggs with chorizo and peppers. Lovely. And, as I continued to puzzle over what I had heard from Hilary, I had a couple of glasses of Merlot from the bottle Ben and I had opened the previous evening.

  I then lay down on the bed and, unsurprisingly, given the wine and the tensions of the last week, I slept for more than two hours.

  I woke with a feeling of completion. I’d come to the end of one sequence of events. I had no idea how the police investigation into Kerry’s death was going, but at least we knew who had killed Nate. I texted Philip, suggesting he should contact the police about Liam’s actions. It was, after all, from his cottage that the murderer had done a runner. I was sure the police would want further information from me at some point, but at that moment I didn’t want to have anything to do with them.

  What I did fancy, though, was an evening in front of the telly. I’ve always got a lot of medical dramas recorded. My guilty secret, perhaps. Not that I feel guilty about it. Nothing I like better than people in scrubs shouting orders at each other while they negotiate their complex love lives.

  I had got to the point in the story where the grandson of the old man with terminal cancer had just been brought into the same hospital after a cycling accident, when my phone alerted me that I’d got a text.

  From Les. It read: ‘Thanks for the photograph. I do recognize the bloke. He was Celeste’s new dealer.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  As I drove towards Lorimers, I realized how delusional my sense of completion had been. There was no way I could relax until I had resolved the Tallis family’s part of the mystery.

  And now I knew that Bruce Tallis had been supplying drugs to his daughter during the last weeks of her life, I also knew that I had to confront him.

  I brought the Yeti to a halt on the hardstanding in front of the house. To the side I could see the open garages with their complement of cars. The Jaguar, the BMW, the Porsche and the Mercedes. Conspicuous consumption or what? Typical of a man who thought a sufficiently large dose of money could solve any problem.

  Good news, though. If the cars were there, it probably meant their owners were too.

  I stepped out of the Yeti and started towards the front door. Then I felt a sudden, crushing pain on the back of my head and the world went black.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I woke to the familiar dream. I was strapped in a car seat, somehow immobilized, and there was no oxygen in what I was breathing. Just the vile smell of petrol. The only difference was that now I also felt a terrible pain at the back of my head.

  Oh, and there was one other difference. This wasn’t a dream. This was real.

  My main thought, the terrible crippling thought was: what will happen to Ben? Will he be able to manage in the harsh world without me?

  I tried moving but couldn’t. My wrists had been joined together by what felt like plastic plant ties. Just like Kerry’s had been.

  This wasn’t how I’d wanted to go. In fact, I’d never wanted to go. My relentless optimism did not allow such thoughts.

  But it didn’t seem like I had a lot of choice in the matter, I thought, as consciousness once again slipped away.

  The next thing I was aware of was bein
g lifted by strong arms and carried. I was too woozy to know who my rescuer was, but gradually I began to taste air with some nourishment in it. The ghastly metallic fog in my throat was diluted by oxygen. My head throbbed with pain.

  I felt myself being laid down on something – a bed, perhaps. As my senses recovered, I realized it was a sofa. The ties had been removed from my wrists.

  My eyes had been closed tight against the stinging fumes, but when I opened them, I found myself in the Tallises’ sitting room. Jeanette, flawlessly dressed as ever, was sitting in an armchair opposite me. And standing around the sofa were Bruce, Ramiro and Constancia.

  I still didn’t know which of them had rescued me. Or indeed which had brained me and fixed me in the car with a pipe from the exhaust. I did realize, though, that I was in a potentially very dangerous situation. I closed my eyes and feigned continuing unconsciousness. But I didn’t think I’d be able to keep up that pretence for long.

  I heard Jeanette’s voice asking, ‘Has she recovered?’

  ‘She’ll live,’ said Bruce. It was hard to tell from his tone whether he thought this was good news or bad.

  ‘Why on earth did she come here?’ asked Constancia. ‘She’s just a woman who once helped do some tidying up for Madam.’ A bit of an understatement, I thought, but maintained my pose of insensibility.

  ‘Also,’ said Bruce icily, ‘the woman who discovered Kerry’s body in that flat in Portsmouth.’

  ‘That could be just coincidence,’ said Jeanette.

  Her husband snorted. ‘Rather a big coincidence.’

  ‘It is a good question, though. Why does she come here?’ asked Ramiro. ‘She must be suspicious something is wrong.’

  ‘Something definitely is wrong,’ snapped Bruce. ‘My daughter’s dead.’

  ‘It was going to happen one day,’ said Jeanette, a new callousness in her tone. ‘No one who uses drugs like she did is going to die in bed, are they? If you’re looking for culprits, you should be finding out who was supplying her with drugs towards the end.’