Quick and the Dead

by Susan Moody

  ‘Absolutely. You from California?’

  ‘No, New York. Why?’

  The pseudo New Age jargon had alerted me. Wrongly, as it turned out. ‘Just wondered. Look, can you think of anyone who disliked her enough to want to kill her?’

  He pressed his mouth into a downward-turning grimace, hiding his over-white teeth, for which I was grateful since I’d been contemplating retrieving my sunglasses from my bag. ‘Pretty extreme, huh? I mean, murder? Just because she wasn’t very nice? No, I don’t think so. You need a lot more than that. Murder? Eeugh!’ A thought seemed to strike him. ‘Hey, I hope to God you’re not looking at me for it.’ The veins writhed again. ‘If so, look away. You came to the wrong place, lady. Me kill someone? I can’t bear the sight of blood. As for Amy, from what I read about her death in the papers, I’d say she just got unlucky with her latest stud.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘The woman is – was insatiable. I mean, on a good day I’m quite a swordsman, not bad in the sack, know what I mean? But whoa, no way could I keep up with Amy. No way. Never thought I’d find myself saying this, but like, there’s more to life than a good fuck, am I right?’

  ‘Probably.’ It was a long time since I’d had a good fuck, or even a bad one. ‘She did manage to hold down some kind of a day job, and to write a scholarly treatise on a lesser-known eighteenth-century painter,’ I said.

  He tapped the side of his nose. ‘So she did,’ he said. ‘So she did. In any case, I’ve remarried, got a little boy and another kid on the way. No reason to waste time on Ms Morrison. Let alone whack her.’

  ‘Any idea what inspired her to choose Masaccio?’

  ‘What the hell’s that? Some kind of hair product?’

  ‘He’s the painter I just mentioned. So did she talk to you about him at all? Show you pictures? Did the two of you travel to Italy together?’

  ‘Look, lady, like I said, at the end of a working day, we’d tumble into bed and start on a working night. If you take my meaning?’ He winked lasciviously. Ran a pink tongue across his upper lip. I wanted to slap him.

  ‘Hey Jason … what gives?’ Some straining youth in a sweat-stained vest was trying to turn his head in Jason’s direction without dropping a bar and crushing his chest.

  ‘Gotta go.’ Jason stuck out his hand and I automatically took it, immediately afterwards wishing I hadn’t since it was slippery with sweat. I was waiting for the inevitable I’m-stronger-than-you-are tough-guy grip but it didn’t arrive. He was never going to float my boat, but I decided I’d been too hasty in my estimate of Jason P. Despite the soul patch, he seemed a pleasant guy, who’d probably deserved better than Amy Morrison.

  ‘One last question – and please don’t think I’m being insulting – but did you, you know, gain anything from the divorce?’

  ‘Not a dime.’

  ‘Was that because she wouldn’t pay out?’

  ‘Sorry, lady, you got it wrong. It was because I wouldn’t. Didn’t want her cash. Didn’t want nothing more to do with her. If ever anyone needed help …’ Shaking his head he turned and strutted over to the guy working on his bench-presses, pausing to murmur encouragement to a guy doing crunches and perspiring heavily. Watching Jason’s retreating back, I realized the strut was due to the gross over-development of his quads.

  Just Amy’s type, I figured.

  With one more husband to go, I stopped at a tacky pub and ordered a half-pint of shandy. Questioning suspects was thirsty work. Besides, I needed time to mull over the information I had acquired so far. Assess what I knew now that I hadn’t known before. Which was minimal. At least I had a preliminary list of suspects, which included just about anyone who had ever come across her. Because the main theme of what I’d learned was Amy’s unpleasant character. On the other hand, as Jason P had just pointed out, you’d have to be pretty riled up to kill someone just because they were not hugely … well, I was always steered away from the word at school, but … nice.

  So what next? Motive, I guessed. Find the motive, they taught me on my fast-track course, and you find the man. Or woman. In my head, I ran through what are generally accepted as the main motivations for murder: fear, jealousy, gain, revenge and protection of someone you love. Of the five, I could imagine all but the last being relevant in the Morrison case. The last? By all accounts, the only person Amy had loved was Amy.

  I still wanted to visit Husband Number One – or possibly Number Two, if Miranda at Amy’s publisher was right – but I could already tell that expecting him to give me any clues that would help me find Helena was a pretty forlorn hope. Looking down at the bubbles in my half-pint glass, I thought about my missing friend. I fully accepted that I’d been wrong about Jason P. Maybe I was also wrong about her. Maybe she really was responsible for killing Amy.

  I pictured the scene. She comes home after the night out with friends, tired, ready to hit the hay, probably after a glass or two more than advisable, finds Amy there, not just there, but actually in her bed, getting it on with yet another of the guys she seemed to favour. I could easily envisage the main components: Helena shouting What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?, Amy trying to cover herself, the bloke sitting up in bed saying nothing, Helena picking up a weapon and— And what? I couldn’t see any further.

  Which reminded me. I took out my mobile and pressed in the numbers for Fliss Fairlight. At the station, they told me she wasn’t available. I rang her home number, and this time got her.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Oh.’ A cautious pause. ‘Which me exactly?’

  ‘Quick. Look, Fliss, regarding the Amy Morrison murder, I haven’t seen or heard anything about a weapon.’

  ‘That’s mostly because we haven’t found one.’

  ‘So what’s the preliminary supposition?’

  ‘The ME is thinking something flat-headed. A big hammer, some kind of mallet, along those lines.’

  ‘Are we assuming the perp brought the weapon with him?’

  ‘We’re looking at the possibility, yes.’

  ‘Kind of awkward to carry around with him. Lots of questions there. Amy might have wondered if he’d started following her into Helena’s house carrying a croquet mallet.’

  ‘I never said it was a croquet mallet, you dweeb. There are dozens of different kinds of flat-headed implements which could have been used to kill her.’

  ‘And Inspector Garside and his team haven’t found anything?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Questions, questions. Are we supposing the killer wasn’t her boyfriend? And if not, who would have known that Amy would be at Doctor Drummond’s house that evening? And was it Amy they were after, or Helena? And since Helena was out all evening, how the heck did Amy get into the house in the first place?’

  ‘They haven’t worked any of that out yet.’

  ‘Perhaps the killer had been stalking her.’

  ‘Or stalking Doctor Drummond. And in the circumstances, would even Amy seriously have slept with this notional pick-up? There were no signs of forcible sex.’

  ‘Okay. Another theory bites the dust.’

  ‘But there were signs of consensual sex.’

  ‘Aha. So it looks either as though she knew the killer, or arrived with the killer, or fancied the killer even though she didn’t know him.’

  ‘Doesn’t it just?’

  ‘And why do the police think Helena was responsible? What do they consider her motive to be?’

  ‘They haven’t got that far yet either, far as I can tell.’

  ‘Thanks, Fliss.’

  ‘My pleasure, Quick.’

  Switching off, it occurred to me that Amy might have found it exciting to have sex with a complete stranger. That the thrill would far outweigh the possible danger – though it was unlikely that she would have anticipated being bashed to death after a bit of fooling around. Which led me to wonder whether male spiders are aware that they’ll be eaten by their mates after copulation.
Is the knowledge typed into their genes, and if so, is the sex urge strong enough to overcome it? In a reversion of roles, is that what happened to Amy?

  I forced myself to concentrate. Was I wasting my time, talking to people who knew Amy in the hope of finding someone who wasn’t Helena but might possibly have killed her? Maybe so, but it was better than sitting doing nothing, since I had no idea where Helena might have gone. Or what would have induced her to flee. If she had.

  So rethink the scenario. Helena arrives home, finds Amy screwing some anonymous male in her bed, gets mad, picks up weapon (lamp, candlestick, croquet mallet – yeah, right, lots of those strewn about her house – chair, knobkerrie, or whatever) and brings it crashing down on Amy’s head. Anonymous male grabs his Y-fronts and high-tails it down the stairs and out the door, and vanishes into the night, leaving Helena herself to vanish, none knew whither.

  Or she comes home to find Amy already dead on the bed – in which case she’d certainly have called the cops. Or she finds the murder still taking place? Same thing: she’d have called the police. And then me. Which would indicate that there had not been a corpse lying on her bed when she returned to her house the previous night. If she did.

  But carrying on the notion of this corpse in her bed, in what situation would she not call the police? If she had recognized the killer? And where would she go, in such circumstances? Where could she go? Melbourne, where she might find temporary safe harbour as a familiar Visiting Fellow? Scotland? Paris or Rome or Madrid? But the police would be on to her eventually. And she couldn’t keep hiding, moving on, setting up new identities, let alone maintaining the old one. I looked bleakly into a professional future which did not include Helena.

  But the alternative scenario kept intruding. The one where Helena was being kept somewhere against her will.

  If only I had the slightest idea where to start looking for her.

  TEN

  ‘My problem is that I’m not ambitious,’ Sam Willoughby told me. ‘At least, I am, but not in the hierarchical sense of climbing ladders to the top, or beating out the competition, or stepping on the shoulders of others to achieve my aims.’

  ‘You mean that your ambitions are small.’ We were sitting at one of the café tables Sam had recently installed in a corner of his bookshop, thick white mugs in front of us. His contained a caffe latte, mine held the nursery comfort of a hot chocolate sprinkled with cinnamon.

  ‘Precisely. I want to keep on selling books, and naturally I want the business to do well, but I don’t feel any urge to, for instance, found a whole chain of bookshops across the country. And I like living where I am. After ten years in London, working in an insurance company, taking the Tube in and out from Queen’s Park every day, battling the crowds and the traffic and the noise, I favour a quiet life.’

  ‘Mmm …’ I said encouragingly. To a large extent, I agreed.

  ‘See, I don’t even watch TV. I much prefer a good book. Or even a bad one, if it comes to that.’

  ‘I’m with you on that one,’ I said. ‘Most of the stuff on TV is total bollocks.’

  ‘And call me naïve, but I truly believe that most people would prefer a proper book as opposed to an eBook.’ He laughed. ‘Sometimes I think I’m a poster-boy for dull.’

  ‘You don’t look dull down at the gym,’ I said. ‘Or didn’t, when I used to go.’ I remembered his biceps glistening with sweat, and the way his thick blond hair flopped over his forehead when he was on the running machine.

  ‘But I have to face it, selling books is kind of wimpish. I mean, how many macho rugby players or transatlantic oarsmen are booksellers?’

  ‘This may well be true.’

  ‘On the other hand, how many booksellers are – like me – crack shots and can (with difficulty) bench-press their own weight for ten reps?’

  ‘Very very few, I should imagine.’

  He laughed again. ‘And as my old granny used to say, my sweaters are always cashmere, which has to count for something.’

  ‘Can’t go wrong with a nice bit of cashm—’ I am not the sort of woman who breaks down in tears at the slightest excuse, but to my embarrassment, my throat thickened and my eyes welled up. I’d heard Helena saying the exact same thing only a short while ago.

  ‘Want to talk about it?’ Sam said gently, passing me a clean handkerchief. ‘But not if you don’t want to, of course.’

  I did. I explained about finding the body, about Helena’s disappearance, about my concerns for her. How little she had given away about herself. I snorted and snuffled into Sam’s handkerchief. ‘And on top of everything else, the police are after her, too.’

  ‘You’re sure she’s … well, that she’s not …’

  ‘Dead?’ I said, brutal because the thought that she might be was so appalling. ‘No, I’m not sure. Which is why I’m so worried about her.’

  ‘Tell me what you know about her.’

  I did. It took all of forty seconds.

  ‘Melbourne, eh?’ Sam said, nodding.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And the academic books she’s written, of course. Plus the anthologies she’s done with you.’

  ‘Yes, but that doesn’t tell me a lot about her personal life. I can’t imagine how we could have worked so closely together and the only interesting detail I’d gleaned was that she’d been married twice. One of her husband’s being Ainslie Gordon!’

  ‘The artist?’

  I nodded.

  ‘That’s amazing.’

  ‘But I only discovered this in the last couple of days. From a colleague at the uni. She didn’t tell me herself, even though I’d said several times how much I liked his work.’ How safe and ordered my life had seemed prior to Amy being discovered dead in Helena’s bed. Would it ever be again?

  ‘How are you getting on with your search for her?’

  I spread my hands. ‘I’m not. I’m trying to come at it from the other end … find someone who really had a reason to kill Ms Morrison, or even find the person who did kill her, and then Helena will be exonerated and can come out of hiding – if hiding is what she’s doing.’

  ‘And how’s that going?’

  ‘I keep hitting complete dead-ends. Of course, people could be lying – some of them probably are – but so far I haven’t found anything. I need to hire a private detective, I think.’

  ‘If there’s any way I can help.’ He hesitated. Flushed slightly. Tugged at an earlobe.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Well, I do harbour a secret dream, though I’ve never allowed it to drift any further than the doorway into my brain.’

  ‘Come on, then. Spill the beans.’ I hoped he wasn’t going to confess to some perverted desire or habit. Something I might feel I should report to the police.

  He made an embarrassed face. ‘It’s too Boys’ Own. Too unlikely of fulfilment.’

  ‘Go on. Tell me.’

  ‘Sam Willoughby, Private Eye. Sam Willoughby, Master Spy. That’s what I’d really like to be,’ he said in a rush. Then laughed self-consciously, trying to make it sound of no great concern. ‘Can you see it?’

  As a matter of fact, I almost could. The trench coat, the fedora, the safe houses and the letter-drops, the lean body and the honed mind, eyes flicking hither and yon, picking up the tiniest clues, constantly on the alert for threat and menace, taking out assassins, shaking off villainous pursuit, chosen for the most hazardous missions:‘We need you, Willoughby – your country needs you.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I almo— I can.’

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Never happen, I know that. Which doesn’t stop me working out at the gym, lifting weights, pumping iron, cycling three times the equivalent of the Tour de France on the stationary bike. I’ve even joined a rifle club and become a crack shot.’

  ‘This gun’s for hire, sort of thing?’

  ‘Precisely! I am ready!’ He threw back his head and laughed again. ‘Just another of my unfulf
illable dreams.’

  I looked at him. And smiled. Kindly. With his floppy blond hair, his specs, his diffident smile and nice face? Nah. Hard to imagine a more unlikely Sam Spade. Though on the other hand, diffidence could hide a ruthless heart, an iron will. It might be the perfect disguise. Might being the operative word.

  ‘Tell me another dream.’

  ‘Well, there’s the country and western singer one.’

  Lose the specs, Buddy Holly notwithstanding, and again I could just about see Sam in a tasselled sequinned shirt, Cuban-heeled cowboy boots and a suede ten-gallon hat, two back-up singers swaying and crooning behind him into a shared mike, lost loves and wayward women, crowds calling out for more.

  ‘Can you play the guitar?’ I said.

  ‘I know a few chords.’

  ‘Sing?’

  He shook his head. ‘Unfortunately I can’t carry a tune.’

  ‘So another dream bites the dust.’

  ‘’Fraid so.’

  ‘But there’s nothing to stop the private detective dream coming true.’ I liked his self-deprecating manner. But steely-eyed or not, I’d never heard of a self-deprecating PI.

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  We smiled at each other. ‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘I have to get going.’

  Outside the shop, I turned left, towards the older part of town. The outlet next door to Sam’s was a small wine shop, owned by the appropriately named Edward Vine, who was standing at the window, gazing out at the almost-empty High Street. I waved to him as I passed and saw his pleasant face light up as he waved back.

  Back in my flat, I called Amy’s publisher and asked to speak to Donald Lewis.

  Put through to him, his voice resonated down the line, fruity as a Christmas cake. I could almost smell the brandy. ‘Lewis here.’

  ‘It’s Alex Quick,’ I said. ‘I came to see you the other day.’

  ‘Ah yes. In connection with the death of Amy Morrison, if I’m not mistaken.’

  ‘That’s right. At that time, you mentioned that she had had three husbands.’ Four actually, but I didn’t want to muddy the marital waters.