Quick and the Dead

by Susan Moody

  ‘You do realize that this gives him a motive for killing her, don’t you?’ Sam said, before Ainslie could work himself up into another rage.

  Ainslie shook his head forcefully. ‘No. Absolutely not. The boy is an artist, with the makings of being a damned fine one. No wonder he was mad at being expelled for some footling little reason or other. All he wants is to paint.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  Madame Montras was attired in a white boilersuit stained with fish guts, white wellington boots, a white cap on her hair, and an apron that might have been white many fish ago. Disconcertingly, she had only one tooth, which did not match the pervading colour scheme, by being black rather than white. As we approached, she burst into a loud and raucous pitch for the fish spread enticingly across her stall on plastic parsley. A fine example of a fish wife.

  As a sweetener, we purchased some prawns prior to introducing the subject of Laurence. Her face wrinkled with disdain on hearing his name, before she launched into a rant that was as salty as her wares. We gathered fairly quickly that she didn’t care for the lad. Nor for his womanizing ways. Nor for his affreux motorbike. Nor for his attitudes. He is mal-élevé, she told us vigorously, several times. Arrogant, indifferent, selfish, boorish and discourteous were just some of the kinder adjectives she used to describe him. I began to wonder if she had a daughter who had fallen for Laurence and been used then discarded. Or maybe she herself had succumbed to the young Englishman’s charms, though given her general demeanour and dental challenges, it seemed unlikely.

  ‘He has gone away,’ she finished, ‘gone back to England and good riddance to bad rubbish, say I.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Sam.

  ‘He told me.’ She slapped a shiny grey fish against her marble counter, laid it back among the plastic greenery which decorated her stall, and picked up a fan of pink skate wing.

  ‘What? He came to your house? Or to the market?’ I said. It sounded unlikely that he would have made a special stop to speak to her, given her low opinion of him, of which he must have been aware.

  ‘We bumped into each other the other day.’ She sounded as slippery as one of her own pilchards. Evasive as an eel.

  Somehow I couldn’t see Laurence wandering round the place, greeting the locals. It didn’t ring true. ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Oui, madame. He told me then.’

  ‘A likely story.’

  We didn’t get anything further from her. When she turned to attend to a customer wanting a dozen scallops, we moved on.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Sam.

  ‘I don’t know. There seems to be some kind of agenda there which I couldn’t quite follow.’

  ‘Cherchez la femme …?’

  ‘Or in Laurence’s case, chasez la femme, do you think?’

  ‘If he was chasing anyone, it certainly wasn’t Madame la poissonière.’

  ‘There’s something else that’s bothering me,’ I said. ‘Several things, actually.’

  The previous night we had spent a chaste evening in Riberac, renting two rooms at a choice little hotel we found in the centre of the town, eating in a local café. Now we were in the hire car, heading for the airport at Bergerac.

  ‘Yes?’ Sam said.

  ‘That motorbike: surely Laurence wouldn’t ride it all the way to Calais, would he?’

  ‘If he’s a motorbike enthusiast, I can’t see why not.’ Sam gestured at the landscape outside the windows. ‘Nice views, empty roads, places to stop for a sandwich or whatever.’

  ‘It takes eight hours by car. Imagine being crouched over the handlebars of a bike for that length of time.’

  ‘I don’t see it as a problem.’

  ‘I suppose it would be possible to fly over from France and hire a machine in England,’ I mused.

  ‘Probably. But you’re underestimating the thrill of the open road.’ He touched my knee. ‘What’re the other things?’

  ‘If he wasn’t the one who killed Helena in a rage at being abandoned as a baby – and I am aware that it was only a theory, based on little or no facts – or for being kicked out of art school thanks to her, then who was? And what had she done to deserve it?’

  ‘That won’t be hard to find out.’

  ‘Also, who broke into my flat and searched it? And what was he, she or it looking for? And was the intruder the same person who killed Helena? And is the same killer responsible for both Helena and Amy?’

  ‘Looks like we’ll have to dig deeper. And whether or not he, she or it was the same person who murdered Amy Morrison, my hunch is that one way or another, you’ve already come across the person responsible.’

  ‘Assuming we rule out passing rapists or mad axe-men, you’re probably right. Thing is, I cannot come up with any rational explanation for why Helena would be strolling along a river bank and accidentally fall in. And you have already heard the basis of my objections to the somewhat ludicrous notion that she might have killed herself, despite the discovery of stones in her coat pocket.’

  ‘What about those stones?’

  ‘As Ainslie Gordon would say, bullshit. It’s all smoke and mirrors, Sam. Somebody is trying to pull the wool over our eyes – and failing – because whoever it is did not have a sufficient knowledge of the victim.’

  ‘You mean this fear of water?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ I was aware of a sudden deep weariness. How long was it since Helena had been discovered in the river at Dovebrook? Three days? ‘So now we have to work with the knowledge we have and check out all our suspects, see if we can come up with something else.’

  I thought of Professor Hadfield. He might be worth cross-examining, though with him, I doubted we’d get away with any attempt to sound official. But he seemed blunt and from-the-shoulder: we might get more from him than he intended to give.

  ‘I don’t want to sound picky, but who exactly are our suspects?’ asked Sam.

  ‘Good question.’

  EIGHTEEN

  It was late in the evening when Sam and I arrived back at my flat. By then, the weather had moved into tempestmode. A bitter sleet-specked wind had got up and was screaming round chimney pots and church spires. The moon came and went as dark clouds surged across it, while waves crashed onto the shingle, flinging up tall plumes of spray which gleamed white against the blue-black sky.

  Once we were indoors, with winter locked outside, I went round the place, checking all the windows and doors, including the formerly defective one leading onto the fire escape, but couldn’t find anything to indicate that my space had been invaded yet again. I looked at the answering machine but there were no messages – so nothing new on Helena’s death. If there had been, DI Felicity Fairlight would certainly have telephoned with a progress report. I had picked up the mail on my way in, and now I started sorting through it, while Sam poured us both a small nightcap. Among the usual drabness of bills and charity begging letters, there was a picture-postcard showing an aerial view of Paris. On the rear side it said: Back 8th. No signature. No unnecessary words. From my mother, of course.

  Today was the 7th. ‘I shall have to drive over to Dovebrook tomorrow,’ I said. I wondered if either Edred or Mary was aware that Helena was dead. Like most offspring, I saw my parents as ever-fixed, unchanged by time, immutable and enduring. But of course they were not. Even though these days the sixties were no longer the killer years, Edred would be sixty-four on his next birthday, Mary sixty-three. So they were no spring chickens. I didn’t want the shock of Helena’s death to overwhelm them. ‘I need to be there when my parents get back.’

  ‘Understood. Meanwhile …’ Sam said, lifting his glass to his face and sniffing the single-malt it contained, a look of near-ecstasy on his face. ‘… pleasant as it was, did we learn anything from our little foreign excursion?’

  I made a face. ‘Almost nothing. Except that the fishmonger lady needs to see a dentist.’

  ‘What about Laurence? Do you still like him for it?’

  ‘I think he
’s unpleasant and arrogant enough to kill someone – in fact, as we know, he already has done.’ I remembered Helena’s description of her stalker: slim, tall, dressed in black leathers. And the sound of a motorbike either coming or going. It could easily have been him. ‘But since we’ve had to discard my theory that she was the mother who gave him up at birth, what would be his motivation?’

  ‘Something to do with his days at art school? Do we know what college he attended, or whether he and Amy ever connected?’

  ‘That’s certainly something to check out. But even if we find that any or all of them coincided at any point, it’s a long way to come to seek revenge for an essay given a poor grade or a painting criticized.’

  ‘And anyway, why now?’

  ‘It just has to be connected in some way with Amy Morrison and her book.’

  ‘I agree. But what way? Laurence is much younger than Ms Morrison, so they can’t have been contemporaries.’

  ‘Except we already know she had a bit of a thing for men young enough to have just about started shaving.’ I yawned. And again. ‘Sorry, Sam, I’m exhausted. I’m going to have to kick you out. You’ll get home all right, won’t you?’ Thinking: of course he will, he only lives a mile or so from here.

  ‘I expect so. Unless you’d like me to stay, do the bodyguard thing.’ He looked wistful. ‘Or anything else, for that matter.’

  ‘That’s sweet of you,’ I said firmly. ‘But no thanks.’

  The following day I was seated at my desk, drinking a cup of coffee and examining a spread of paintings Helena and I had been contemplating for inclusion in Ripe for the Picking. Somehow the whole concept had lost its zest without her. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to continue putting together these compilations on my own. I pulled towards me an exuberant painting of some quinces on a blue dish, and thought how much they were a metaphor for life. So ripe, so golden, such maternally rounded haunches, such sweet promise. And how tough that yellow skin was, how bitter and inedible the fruit, how disappointing.

  There was a ring at my front door. I thought of ignoring it but then it came again. If nothing else, interacting with someone, however briefly, might serve to lift my melancholy mood. Through the spyhole I clocked a man standing outside, half-turned away from me. I knew I had never seen him before and yet there was a teasing familiarity about him. Quietly I shot the knob of the door-chain into its groove then opened the door as far as the chain would allow.

  He turned. ‘Oh, good morning. You don’t know me—’

  ‘I’m well aware of that.’

  ‘—but my name is Terence Briggs.’

  I shook my head. ‘Sorry, don’t know anyone by that name.’

  ‘I’m Noreen’s brother.’

  ‘Don’t know anyone called Noreen either,’ I said.

  He sighed lugubriously. ‘Amy, then. Amy Morrison.’

  For a moment I stared at him through the narrow gap in the door. The hint of recognition was explained. He had his late sister’s colouring, her high cheekbones and full mouth. But according to Lev Goldsmith, he had been a wild boy in his youth, violent and uncontrollable, popping up before the Bench more often than a jack-in-the-box, covered in tats, terrorizing the rest of the housing estate along with his brother Vincent. ASBOs. Drugs. In and out of the nick, like his father and brother. Despite the high-grade shirt, the dark suit with ten-button waistcoat, the good-quality overcoat, was he to be trusted? I looked him up and down. Not tall, quite stocky, even overweight, bit of a paunch. Built like a street-fighter. But older than I was by a good ten years. I decided that in any struggle, I could take him.

  In any case, he didn’t look all that threatening. I pushed the door closed, released the knob, opened it wider. ‘You’d better come in.’

  I showed him into the living room, offered him coffee, which he accepted, made some and brought it in.

  ‘Thank you.’ He was mildly-spoken, mildly-mannered.

  He was carrying a pair of yellow pigskin driving gloves, the perforated ones with the back of the hand cut out. Rimless specs, which gave him an air of gravitas and reliability. He seemed the last person likely to lunge at me and attack. Apart from anything else, what possible motive could he have? Nonetheless, I remained wary, remembering that he used to be somewhat more than a mere tearaway.

  ‘So what exactly can I do for you?’ I asked again.

  ‘I understand you were the person who found her … who found Noreen,’ he said. ‘Please, just fill me in on my sister’s death. How you found the poor woman. That sort of thing. I want to know, not from any prurient curiosity, I assure you. We just want what they nowadays call “closure”, something we are sadly lacking.’

  ‘You have a brother, don’t you?’

  He shook his head. ‘Had.’ He drank some of his coffee. ‘Vincent, I’m afraid, is no longer with us. He was killed by another inmate while doing his latest stretch inside. Stabbed in the neck. He bled to death before he was found by the screw— by the officers. They don’t know who’s responsible, and I don’t personally care very much. If that makes me a bad person, so be it.’ He cleared his throat.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I wasn’t really, since I didn’t know the man, and what little I had heard didn’t incline me to like him, but conventionalities exist for a reason and ought to be observed.

  ‘Don’t be,’ Briggs said. ‘He took after our father. His prospects were poor and unlikely ever to improve. Frankly, death was probably the kindest thing that could happen to him.’ He sipped his coffee delicately, like a cat. ‘No, as regards Noreen, by we, I meant my wife and myself. And to a lesser extent, our two sons, who never met her.’ He sighed again. ‘Poor Noreen. She didn’t have the upbringing she deserved. None of us did, I suppose, but she was cleverer than either me or my brother. She had an enquiring mind, should have had a bright future ahead of her. This book she’d written … about the Italian artist … has been having excellent reviews, or so I read.’

  He reached into his jacket. I was instantly alert, remembering his past. As if he was aware, he half-smiled, held up a hand. ‘I’m just getting out my business card,’ he said.

  He gave me a rectangle of pasteboard card decorated with a sheaf of white lilies and a single autumnal maple leaf drifting down. Very tasteful. TERENCE BRIGGS & SONS, I read. INDEPENDENT FUNERAL DIRECTORS, with an address in Leytonstone.

  ‘My sister got out through her artistic abilities,’ he said. ‘I got out in a different way. Luckily I married my childhood sweetheart, a girl who was as determined as I was to give our sons a better upbringing than either of us had.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Respectability, Miss Quick. That’s what it’s all about. It’s a bit like money. People such as yourself, who are born with it, don’t have the faintest idea how hard it is to achieve if you don’t automatically have it. You have to work for it. Cut ties with people who were once friends or even family. Remodel yourself.’

  ‘So what exactly do you want from me?’

  ‘I regret to say that my sister and I had been out of touch for a while, but I would like to hear details of her demise, should you be prepared to tell me, if only, as I said, to establish some kind of closure.’ His speech was measured and precise. Sober. Very different from the image I had built up in my mind following my lunch with Lev Goldsmith.

  I described for him the scene which had greeted me in Helena’s bedroom, making it as wholesome as possible. Reliving it, again I had the teasing sense that there had been something present at the scene (or not present, its absence making it remarkable) which might make it clearer who was responsible. But it was Helena’s room, not Amy’s: why should there be any clue to Amy’s death?

  He nodded slowly when I had finished talking. ‘She was a clever girl … too clever, really. I don’t know where the genes came from, because there were certainly no signs of it in either of our parents. In fact, my father was illiterate. Poor Noreen … I don’t blame her for cutting communication as soon as she could, getting right away f
rom it all. It took me a lot longer, of course, but I’ve achieved what I wanted.’

  ‘Good …’ I couldn’t think what to say.

  ‘As I say, if you haven’t got it, but want it, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to find.’

  ‘When did you last see your sister?’

  ‘See?’ He thought about it, frowning slightly above his rimless specs. ‘Several years ago now. But seeing’s not the same as talking to, or having any kind of relationship with. That’s how she wanted it, and I respected that.’

  ‘So you couldn’t suggest anyone who might have wanted to kill her?’

  He shook his head. Gave an undertakerly sort of semi-snort. ‘Though from what I’ve heard, she seems to have got on the wrong side of most people she came into contact with.’

  ‘I’ve heard that too. But it’s a big step from dislike to murder.’

  ‘That it is.’

  ‘So where did you last catch up with her?’

  ‘As I said, quite a few years ago I took my wife to New York for one of those short breaks they advertise – Shop Early For Christmas or something, take advantage of cheaper prices, I’m sure you know the kind of thing – and read about her in one of those gossip magazines. She’d been widowed, and my wife said that since we were more or less on the spot, we should at least deliver our condolences.’ He paused.

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Well …’ Another pause. ‘… I saw her in a restaurant, one evening.’ He frowned. ‘Somewhere small, insignificant. Italian – I think it was called Mario’s. Near our hotel. Perhaps she was looking for anonymity, choosing a place like that where no one would recognize her. That we were there is just one of those strange coincidences that life throws at us sometimes.’ He looked away from me, and I could see he was having difficulty bringing out what he wanted to tell me.

  ‘Yes?’ I said encouragingly.

  ‘She was … well, in short, she was with a young man. A much younger man than her. So much so that I wondered at first if he was her son. Except that she wasn’t so much with him as draped all over him. It was a disgusting exhibition. In public, too. I was too embarrassed to point her out to my wife – it seemed unseemly, to say the least, to be behaving like that with her husband barely cold in his grave.’