The Clutter Corpse

by Simon Brett

  ‘I’ve been trying to do that,’ said Bruce.

  Then why don’t you own up, I thought, that it was you. Les recognized you from the photograph. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could stop myself from participating in the conversation. I had to remember that somebody in that room had just tried to kill me. Or maybe everyone in that room had conspired to try and kill me. I stayed immobile.

  ‘I still don’t know why she come here,’ said Ramiro plaintively.

  ‘I do,’ said Jeanette. This was a surprise to me and, from the sounds of the others’ reactions, to them too. She went on, ‘Since I heard she discovered the body, I’ve done some research on Ellen Curtis.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I hired a private detective, Bruce. And he told me that she had a husband who committed suicide using the car exhaust method.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, she comes here to kill herself by the same method. But, of course, she was saved from doing that. Which will perhaps turn out to have been a pity.’

  I did not agree with her on that.

  ‘But why on earth would she have come here to commit suicide?’ asked Bruce.

  ‘Because she could not live with the guilt any longer,’ his wife replied.

  ‘What guilt?’

  ‘The guilt of having killed Kerry.’

  ‘What on earth makes you think she killed Kerry?’

  Bruce’s question was a very valid one, and I too would be interested to hear the answer.

  Jeanette sounded very composed as she said, ‘She was the first one to find the body. Often that person turns out to be the murderer.’

  ‘In crime fiction maybe, Jeanette. Not in the real world.’

  I heard Ramiro’s voice next. ‘I agree with Madam. It would have been better, sir, if you had let her go through with it. With the suicide.’

  ‘I couldn’t have done that! I walked past the garage. I heard the engine running. I couldn’t just let her die. I’m not in the business of killing people.’

  Aren’t you? was my silent question.

  ‘Sir, Madam.’ It was Constancia. ‘I must talk. There have been bad things going on here.’

  ‘That’s no worry of yours,’ said Jeanette. ‘You’re shortly going back to Albufeira. Nothing that happens here will ever concern you again.’

  ‘But why are we going back to Albufeira?’ Constancia asked.

  ‘To open the bloody restaurant that Ramiro has been going on about ever since you started working here!’

  ‘But why can we open the restaurant? Why do we suddenly have money to open the restaurant?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jeanette. ‘That’s not my business.’

  And suddenly I saw it. I understood. And I realized there had not been just one man in the photograph I’d sent to Les. There had been two. One in the passenger seat. And one in the driving seat.

  Time for me to join the conversation. I sat up, which caused a moment of shock for the other four.

  ‘It is your business, Jeanette,’ I said, ‘because you have provided the money to buy the restaurant.’

  ‘You’re talking nonsense,’ she said.

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘No, she’s not,’ Constancia echoed me.

  ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ asked Bruce, frustrated by his bewilderment.

  ‘What is going on,’ I said calmly, ‘is that your wife has been paying Ramiro to do her dirty work.’

  ‘It’s not true!’ shouted Jeanette.

  ‘Yes, it is.’ Constancia backed me up again.

  ‘Ramiro was paid to find Kerry, who by that stage was calling herself “Celeste”. He was the one who supplied her with drugs in her last weeks.’

  Bruce looked incredulously from me to his butler. ‘But why? Why would he do that?’

  ‘Money,’ I said. ‘We’ve established that.’

  ‘It is true,’ said Constancia. ‘I found the heroin and the drug equipment under our bed. First, I think Ramiro has a habit himself. But when I accuse him, no, he says. And he tells me the truth. Like what he is doing is a good thing. Like, when we have the money for the restaurant in Albufeira, all will be happy for the rest of our lives. And I say, no, not with that money. The way you earn that money, it will always be bad money. But Ramiro does not listen to me.’

  Bruce had now emerged from his bewilderment. Confusion had been replaced by fury. He turned on Ramiro. ‘You! You supplied Kerry with heroin!’

  ‘He did more than that,’ said Constancia. Her voice was low with pent-up fury. ‘He told me how he got the money. He thinks I will admire him. He thinks I will not tell anyone. Which just shows how little he knows me, how little he has ever known me. You know, he was actually proud of what he’d done.’

  ‘What did he do?’ asked Bruce, dangerously quiet.

  ‘He found where Kerry was in Portsmouth. She was calling herself “Celeste” by then, and her drug habit was out of hand. He procured heroin for her. He spent a lot of time around her, watching, waiting for his opportunity. One day he follows her into this flat on the Hargood Estate. It is in a terrible mess, the right place, he thinks. He has with him, prepared, a syringe of pure heroin, not cut with anything. He tells me it is powerful enough to kill someone not used to such strength. He offers it to Kerry in the flat.’

  Ramiro was watching his wife, in a state of silent shock. I don’t think he had ever heard her talk so much.

  ‘But Kerry will not inject herself,’ Constancia went on. ‘Something makes her suspicious. Ramiro realizes he will have to force her to do it. She is now very weak, but still she resists. He hits her in the face, subdues her. Then he ties her wrists with plastic ties. Still she resists. He hit her on the head with a chair leg. Then he injects her forcibly and she dies. He removes the plastic ties and leaves her body, feeling pleased with himself.’ The last words were imbued with a lifetime’s rancour, a lifetime of subjugation to an unworthy man.

  Before we could stop him, Bruce had rushed across the room and was pummelling the shorter man, blows raining on to his face and chest. The pent-up fury inside him was terrifying to behold.

  Eventually, Constancia and I managed to pull the two men apart. Ramiro sank down on to the floor, whimpering, blood pouring from his nose and mouth.

  ‘Let the police deal with him,’ I said. ‘And while they’re at it, they can question him about trying to murder me in the garage.’

  Jeanette did not move from her armchair. She just sat there, the picture of middle-class elegance.

  Bruce turned on her. ‘And you paid him? You paid him to kill Kerry?’

  She smiled. A cool, charming smile. ‘Well, darling,’ she said, ‘I had to get your attention somehow.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  My throat was still very sore when I got home. Not to mention the wound in the back of my head. I washed the area around it and fixed on a plaster as best I could.

  I opened another bottle of Merlot and realized what I really wanted to do. I wanted to talk to Oliver about everything that had happened in the previous week. That’s one of the worst things about bereavement, and people say it’s the same when you lose a partner to dementia – you no longer have someone to process events with. And Oliver could also have seen where to fix the plaster neatly on the back of my head. But he wasn’t there. Never would be again.

  So, I just sat at the kitchen table and drank wine.

  It was all of a piece, I suddenly understood, Jeanette Tallis’s behaviour. The problem we had first met over had been prompted by the same motive. She overbought and hoarded clothes in the hope that Bruce would see what she was spending and remonstrate with her. But he, being the man he was, regarded her actions as some kind of validation. He was so rich, his wife could overspend outrageously and he deliberately would not call her to account.

  And, in a way, bringing me in had kind of worked, from Jeanette’s point of view. It had alerted him to her habit of extravagance, and he had reacted by taking her to the Georges Cinq in
Paris. ‘Time out for just the two of us,’ she had said proudly at the time. She had succeeded. She had his attention.

  But, with a man like Bruce Tallis, that was never going to last for long. When I thought about it, there was a similarity between him and Philip Boredean. Both obsessed with their work, and neither fully aware of the effect their behaviour was having on their wives.

  So, Jeanette Tallis had resorted to the ultimate way to focus Bruce on her. She would remove what he loved more than her, by having his daughter killed.

  No doubt, cushioned by money and belief in the power of money, she thought she would get away with it. I wondered how she would have played her trump card. Would she have been content just to have eliminated the rival to her affections? Or, if Bruce continued to ignore her, might she at some point have admitted to organizing the killing and really got his attention?

  I had no means of knowing, but I inclined to the latter view.

  Certainly, there was now no possibility that Kerry’s murder would go unpunished. As I had, somewhat unsteadily, departed from Lorimers that evening, I had left Bruce Tallis in no doubt that I would tell the police everything I knew. Constancia, appalled by her husband’s behaviour, assured her boss that she would do the same.

  Bruce, I was sure, would hire the most expensive lawyers available, who would no doubt build up Ramiro’s responsibility for the crime, but I didn’t think Jeanette could escape scot-free. Somewhere there must be financial records of the dealings between her and her Portuguese ‘blunt instrument’.

  The whole set-up made me desperately sad. Apart from anything else, the murder was probably unnecessary. Given the trajectory of Kerry Tallis’s life, before too long she was likely to have killed herself with an accidental overdose.

  Anyway, I did my duty as a good citizen the following morning, the Saturday. Detective Inspector Prendergast came to my home and I gave him the full details of everything I had found out. He was, of course, cagey about how far the official investigations had gone. No doubt their researches would in time have found out Liam Burgess’s true identity and tied him to the murder of Nate Ogden. But he didn’t reveal how much of what I told him he knew already.

  Once I’d talked to Prendergast, I felt exhausted. Traumatized too, I suppose, after the events of the night before. And still with a splitting headache.

  Once again, I couldn’t settle to anything. I had an instinct to call someone. Not Hilary, though. Nor Ben; I didn’t want to spoil his weekend of potential passion. And certainly not Jools or Fleur.

  I rang Dodge. His phone must have identified the caller because he didn’t sound at all surly.

  ‘Hi, Dodge,’ I said. ‘Are you brewing nettle tea?’

  ‘Just this minute,’ he said. ‘Fancy a cup?’

  We drank it outside his living quarters. Even though it was still April, the weather had decided it couldn’t be bothered to put off summer any longer. We sat at a pallet table on two of his beautifully made pallet chairs. His seat was plaited orange nylon rope, mine blue.

  ‘What’s with the back of your head?’ he asked.

  ‘Someone hit me there.’

  He got out of his chair and moved round to look at the wound, still covered with my inexpertly applied plaster.

  ‘Do you want me to tell you what happened?’ I asked.

  ‘No. Not until I’ve patched you up.’

  I shouldn’t have been surprised, though I didn’t know till then that Dodge’s skills extended to herbal medicine. He went back inside and returned with a neat box made from recycled panelling. He put it on the table and opened it to reveal a row of glass bottles, some tubs and dressings. Though obviously I couldn’t see what he was actually doing behind my back, I could see which treatments he took out of the box.

  The one he applied first, which I think was just to cleanse the wound, stung a bit, but the next seemed to numb that pain like a local anaesthetic. I could hardly feel the ointment being applied, was just aware of it being rubbed in. Then Dodge pressed a pad of something against my skin and fixed it somehow.

  He went back to his chair and his nettle tea. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘who’s been beating you up?’

  ‘The butler did it,’ I began. And I gave him the whole narrative of the previous week. Needless to say, this was a more personalized account than the one I had given, in serial form over the last week, to Detective Inspector Prendergast. Nor did Dodge interrupt me with supplementary questions.

  When I had exhausted both the story and myself, he finally commented. ‘You took a lot of risks.’

  ‘What do you mean? I was desperate to know the truth of what happened.’

  ‘Maybe. But you were still asking for trouble going to the Tallises’ place yesterday.’

  ‘I suppose I was.’ The anaesthetic effect of whatever he’d put on the back of my head was wearing off, and the revived ache made me realize just what a risk I had taken.

  ‘Hmm.’ There was a silence. Dodge moved his head, as if he was about to look directly at me. At the last moment he lost his nerve. ‘If you ever get involved in anything like that again,’ he said, ‘… which I hope you don’t … be sure you take me along with you next time.’

  ‘Thank you, Dodge,’ I said, warmed by the offer. ‘I will. Incidentally, your mate Les …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I might ring him, just to confirm that, in the photo I sent him, it was Ramiro he identified as Kerry’s dealer, rather than Bruce.’

  ‘But you know it was, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, must have been.’ I havered for a moment. That wasn’t why I’d introduced Les’s name into the conversation. I went on, ‘He’s desperately sorry to have let you down … over the ReProgramme thing.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Is there any chance he could get back on to the counselling training …?’

  ‘I’m working on it, Ellen. My argument is that, for a set-up like ReProgramme to black someone after one lapse back into using, well … it goes against the whole spirit of the organization.’

  ‘Do you think you will be able to get him back?’

  ‘Quietly confident.’

  I knew how much difference that would make to someone in Les’s situation. He’s one of the good guys, Dodge.

  ‘You want more tea?’

  ‘I’m fine at the moment, thanks.’

  ‘You going to be all right, Ellen?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ve been through a lot.’

  ‘I’ll be all right, Dodge.’

  ‘When you’ve processed it.’

  ‘When I’ve processed it, yes.’

  ‘Some people find that stuff easy.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lucky them.’ Dodge sighed. ‘There’s a quote from Queen Elizabeth the first on that very subject.’

  ‘Is there?’ I was surprised. Not one of his usual sources.

  ‘“They pass best over this world who trip over it quickly; for it is but a bog – if we stop, we sink.”’

  ‘True. Funny, I wouldn’t have expected that from Queen Elizabeth the first.’

  ‘Trouble is,’ said Dodge, ‘neither you nor I are very good at doing that, are we – tripping over quickly?’

  ‘No,’ I said ruefully. ‘We’re not.’

  I never did hear whether Ricky Brewer was brought to justice. Given his planning in terms of the way he’d got into Hilary’s confidence, it was quite possible that he’d planned his escape route with equal efficiency. Maybe, satisfied to have achieved the revenge that he’d always sought, he lived out his life in another country, under yet another identity (probably without a beard). But I doubt whether he lived it out happily. No one who’d written the kind of stuff Ben had found on his laptop could have lived happily.

  Bad news on the Ashleigh front, though. The inevitable happened. Another shouting match with one of her neighbours led to the police being called to the block. Ashleigh was found to be using again. I’ll do what I can, so will the socia
l workers, but I don’t think we’ll be able to prevent Zak from being taken into care. And the downward spiral will start all over again, just as it had with Ricky Brewer.

  Sometimes, with my clients, I almost scream with frustration about how little I can do.

  Ben was good about sending texts and I was delighted to receive one on the Saturday afternoon to say he wouldn’t be back till Sunday evening. Maybe this relationship with Tracey will work out. I hope so. The test will come the first time she sees him really depressed. If they can survive that, the prospects are good. And I know he will get depressed again. He may get better, but he’ll never be completely cured. He has to live with that, and I have to live with the resultant anxiety.

  Something I did do on the Saturday was go to the cupboard under the stairs and take out one of the cartoons I’d had framed for Oliver’s forty-third birthday. I hung it up in the hall. I have come that far.

  I didn’t hear from Jools in the week after she’d been down for Sunday lunch, but that’s not unusual. I’m sure she’s fine.

  But of course, I did hear from my mother and, would you believe, she had heard from Jools. On the Saturday afternoon Fleur rang, inviting me to lunch at Goodwood with her the following day. Kenneth, needless to say, would be playing golf.

  For a moment I wondered if Fleur Bonnier could make up a threesome of neglected wives. Like Hilary, like Jeanette, a third one suffering from her husband’s inattention …?

  But the minute I saw her on the Sunday, I knew she didn’t fit the template. Her self-esteem was far too strong. I have a sneaking admiration for the way it has kept her buoyant through a series of reversals that might have downed a lesser woman. It just never occurs to her that she could be in the wrong.

  I’d arranged taxis both ways to Goodwood, so I could drink with impunity. Drink and listen. My mother, annoying though she can frequently be, is a good raconteur. In her telling of it, she can dress up the dullest of events into something sparkling. And she spent most of the lunch dressing up the events of her week – basically a couple of lunches and a few phone calls to showbiz friends – into a compelling narrative.

  When we’d ordered coffee, she paused for breath. ‘Anyway, darling, how’s your week been?’