“CreamPants.” DCI Eric Leach kept his face impassive. He'd been a cop for twenty-six years, and he'd long ago realised that in his line of work only a numbskull optimistically concluded he'd heard everything there was to hear from fellow members of the human race. But this one was clearly something for the books. “You did say Cream-Pants, Mr. Pitchley?”
They were in an interview room at the police station: J. W. Pitchley, his solicitor—a diminutive man called Jacob Azoff with nostril hairs like feather dusters and a large coffee stain decorating his tie—a police constable called Stanwood, and Leach himself, who was doing the questioning as he tossed back Lemsip like cider and wondered sourly how long it was going to take his immune system to catch up with the single life he was back to leading. One night on a pub crawl and he became a breeding ground for every virus known to man.
Pitchley's solicitor had rung not two hours prior to this meeting. His client wanted to make a statement to the police, Azoff had informed Leach briefly. And he wanted to be assured that this statement would be confidential, just between us boys, treated with kid gloves, and blessed with holy water. In other words, Pitchley didn't want the press to get hold of his name, and if there was a ghost of a chance that the press were going to be given his name … et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yawn.
“He's walked that route before,” Azoff had said in a tone that was portentous. “So if we can reach a preliminary agreement about the confidentiality of this conversation, Detective Chief Inspector Leach, I believe we have on our hands a man who deeply wishes to assist you with your enquiries.”
So Pitchley and his brief had shown up, had been ushered through the back door of the station like covert operatives, had been given the refreshment they requested—fresh orange juice and sparkling mineral water with ice and lime not lemon, thank you—and had ensconced themselves at the interview table where Leach had pressed the tape recorder's play button, reciting the day, the time, and the names of all individuals present.
Pitchley's story had so far not altered from what he had told them on the previous night although he'd become more detailed as to arrangements and places and relatively more specific as to names. Unfortunately, aside from the sobriquets adopted by his partners in amorous encounters at the Comfort Inn, he was unable to come up with the actual name of anyone who could confirm his story.
Thus, Leach asked reasonably, “Mr. Pitchley, how is it that you expect us to track down this woman? If she wasn't willing to give her name to the bloke who was poking her—”
“We don't use that term,” Pitchley said with some offence.
“—then how do you expect her to be forthcoming when the coppers want to track her down? Doesn't the withholding of her name suggest something to you?”
“We always—”
“Doesn't it suggest she might not wish to be tracked down in ways other than through the internet?”
“It's merely part of the game that we—”
“And if she doesn't wish to be tracked down, doesn't that suggest she's got someone hanging round—like a husband—who might not look kindly on a bloke—who's had a naked romp with his wife—showing up on the front steps with flowers and chocolates and the hope that she'll confirm his alibi?”
Pitchley's colour was growing high. But then, so was Leach's level of disbelief. With much hemming and hawing, the man had confessed to being an on-line Casanova who regularly seduced women of advancing years, none of whom gave him their names or ever knew his. Pitchley claimed that he couldn't remember the number of women he'd had assignations with since the birth of e-mail and chat rooms, and he certainly couldn't remember all their cybernames, but he could swear on a stack of eighty-five religious books of DCI Leach's choice that he observed the same procedure with all of them once an agreement to meet had been reached: drinks and dinner in the Valley of Kings in South Kensington followed by several hours of athletically creative sexual intercourse at the Comfort Inn on Cromwell Road.
“So you'll be remembered at either the restaurant or the hotel?” Leach asked the man.
That might be, Pitchley was sad to admit, a bit of a problem. The waiters at the Valley of Kings were foreigners, weren't they? The night receptionist at the Comfort Inn was a foreigner as well. And foreigners often had a spot of difficulty remembering an English face, didn't they? Because foreigners—
“Two-thirds of bloody London are foreigners,” Leach cut in. “If you can't come up with something more solid than what you've come up with so far, Mr. Pitchley, we're wasting our time.”
“Might I remind you, DCI Leach, that Mr. Pitchley's visit to the station is voluntary,” Jake Azoff pointed out at this juncture. His had been the orange juice, and Leach noticed that a particle of pulp clung to his moustache like a punk-dyed bird dropping. “Perhaps a more marked degree of civility would serve to encourage a deeper recollection on his part.”
“I assume that Mr. Pitchley came to the station because he had something more to tell me than he told me last night,” Leach retorted. “So far, we're getting a variation on a theme here, and all it's doing is producing more quicksand in which your boy is already up to his chest.”
“I don't see how that conclusion is at all accurate,” Azoff said, affronted by the implication.
“Don't you, now? Let me enlighten you. Unless I've been dreaming, Mr. Pitchley has just informed us that his hobby is to use the internet to root out women over fifty—to chat up and coax into bed. He's just informed us that he's enjoyed a rather marked degree of success in this arena. So much so that he can't even recall how many women have been on the receiving end of his erotic talents. Am I correct, Mr. Pitchley?”
Pitchley shifted position on his chair and took a sip of water. His skin was still flushed, and his hair—dust-coloured with a central parting that created wings which flopped into his face—swept downwards when he nodded. He kept his head lowered. From embarrassment or regret, as a means of obfuscation … Who the hell could tell?
“Fine. Let's continue. Now, we have an older woman who's run down by a vehicle on Mr. Pitchley's street, a few doors from his own home. This woman just happens to be in possession of Mr. Pitchley's address. What does that suggest to you?”
“I wouldn't draw any conclusion myself,” Azoff said.
“Naturally. But it's my job to draw conclusions. And the conclusion I draw is that this lady was on her way to see Mr. Pitchley.”
“We've made no admission that Mr. Pitchley was expecting or knew the woman in question.”
“And if she was on her way to see him, we have from Mr. Pitchley's own lips one hell of an excellent reason why.” Leach pressed his point by leaning forward, the better to see beneath Pitchley's protection of hair. “She was just round the age you like them, Pitchley. Sixty-two. Nice shape to her body—what was left of it, that is, after the car did its work with her. She was divorced. No remarriage. No children at home. I wonder if she'd got herself a computer? Something to use to while away the nights when she was feeling lonely out there in Henley?”
“That's just not possible,” Pitchley said. “They never know where I live. They never know how to find me after we've … once we've … well, after we've left Cromwell Road.”
“You just fuck 'em and flee,” Leach said. “That's rich, that is. But what if one of them decided she didn't like that arrangement? What if one of them followed you home? Not last night, of course, but on another night. Followed you, saw where you live, and bided her time when you never contacted her again.”
“She didn't. She can't have done.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don't ever go directly home. I drive round for at least thirty minutes—sometimes an hour—once we leave the hotel to make certain …” He paused and managed to look relatively miserable about the admission he was making, “I drive round to make certain she's … well, not on my tail.”
“Very wise,” Leach said with irony.
“I know how it sounds. I know it makes me look a pe
rfect shit. And if that's what I am, then that's what I am. But what I'm not is a man who'd run down a woman in the street and you damn well know it if you've examined my car and not used the opportunity to joyride it round London. So I'd like the Boxter returned, Inspector Leach.”
“Would you, now?”
“I would. You wanted information, and I've given you information. I've told you where I was last night, I've told you why, and I've told you with whom.”
“With CreamPants.”
“All right. I'll go on-line again. I'll get her to come forward if that's what you want.”
“You can do and will do,” Leach agreed. “But by your own admission, I don't see how that's going to help much in the larger picture.”
“Why? I can't have been in two places at once.”
“True enough. But even if Miss CreamPants, or perhaps it's Mrs. CreamPants”—Leach couldn't hide his smirk and he didn't bother to try—“confirms your story, there's part of it she can't help you with, isn't there? She can't tell us where you drove for an hour or thirty minutes after you finished with her. And if you're about to argue that she may have followed you, then you're on thin ice again. Because if she followed you, there's a very good chance that Eugenie Davies, after a similar romp on the Cromwell Road, once did the same.”
Abruptly, Pitchley pushed back from the table, and with so much force that his chair shrieked like a siren against the floor. “Who?” His voice was hoarse, as if it were sandpaper trying to speak. “Who did you say?”
“Eugenie Davies. The dead woman.” Even as he spoke, DCI Leach read the new reality on the other man's face. “You know her. And by that name. You know her, Mr. Pitchley?”
“Oh God. Oh hell.” Pitchley moaned.
Azoff said to his client in a flash, “Need five minutes?”
No answer was required of the suspect, because a quick tap sounded on the door of the interview room, and a female PC popped her head inside. She said to Leach, “DI Lynley on the phone, sir. Now or later?”
“Five minutes,” Leach said curtly to Pitchley and Azoff. He picked up his paperwork and left them alone.
Life wasn't a continuum of events, although it wore the guise of exactly that. Instead, it was actually a carousel. In infancy, one mounted a galloping pony and started out on a journey during which one assumed that circumstances would change as the expedition continued. But the truth of life was that it was an endless repetition of what one had already experienced … round and round and up and down on that pony. And unless one dealt with whatever challenges one was meant to deal with along the route, those challenges appeared again and again in one form or another till the end of one's days. If he hadn't subscribed to that notion before, J. W Pitchley was a believer now.
He stood on the steps of the Hampstead police station with his solicitor and listened to the peroration of Jake Azoff's harangue. This consisted of a soliloquy on the topic of trust-and-veracity between a client and his lawyer. He was ending with, “Do you think I would have bloody well walked in there if I'd bloody well known what you were bloody well hiding, you twit? You made me look like a fool and what the hell do you think that does for my credibility with the cops?”
Pitchley wanted to say that the current situation wasn't about Azoff, but he didn't bother. He didn't say anything, which encouraged the solicitor to demand, “So what would you like me to call you, sir?” The sir was no indication of anything other than contempt, which coloured it appreciably. “Is it to be Pitchley or Pitchford for what remains of our legal relationship?”
“Pitchley's perfectly legal,” J. W. Pitchley replied. “There's nothing dodgy in how I changed my name, Jake.”
“In that, perhaps,” Azoff retorted. “But I want the whys, the wherefores, and the hows in writing on my desk, by fax, messenger, e-mail, or carrier pigeon before six o'clock. And then we'll look at what happens next in our professional relationship.”
J. W. Pitchley, AKA James Pitchford, AKA TongueMan to his cyberacquaintances, nodded cooperatively even though he knew Jake Azoff was blowing smoke in the air. Azoff 's track record of managing his money was so appalling that he wouldn't be able to exist for a month without someone at the helm of his investments, and Pitchley-Pitchford-TongueMan had been handling them for so many years and with such a degree of expertise in the financial legerdemain department that to give control over to a lesser fiscal guru would be to put Azoff within striking distance of the Inland Revenue, which the solicitor was understandably loath to have happen. But he needed to let off steam, did Azoff, and J. W. Pitchley—formerly James Pitchford and currently AKA TongueMan—couldn't really blame him. So he said, “Will do, Jake. Sorry about the surprise,” and he watched as Azoff huffed, raised the collar of his overcoat against a chill wind, and set off down the street.
For his part, Pitchley, with no access to his car and no invitation from Azoff to drive him back to Crediton Hill, set off disconsolately for the railway station near Hampstead Heath and prepared to submit himself to its insalubrious embrace. At least it wasn't the underground, he told himself. And there hadn't been a smash-up between competing railway lines vying for the Excellence in Ineptitude Award in at least a week.
He walked up Downshire Hill and veered right into Keats' Grove, where at the eponymous poet's house and library, a middle-aged woman was just leaving the waterlogged grounds, a large satchel in her right hand that was painfully sloping her shoulder with its weight. Pitchley-Pitchford slowed his footsteps when she turned right and headed in the same direction as the one he was taking. In another time, he would have hurried forward to assist her with her burden. It was, after all, the gentlemanly thing to do.
Her ankles, Pitchley-Pitchford saw, were a little too thick, but the rest of her was just as he liked a woman to be: a bit worn, a touch disheveled, and possessing a somewhat harried academic mien which suggested not only an agreeable level of intelligence but also the sort of lack of sexual confidence that he always found so stimulating. Chat-room women were invariably like this woman when he finally met them, which was why he was drawn to the internet, despite his own better judgement, not to mention the threat of sexually transmitted diseases. And, considering what he'd just been through at the Hampstead police station, even though the better part of his mind was lecturing him about the idiocy of future encounters with women whose names had thus far been inconsequential to him, the other part of his mind—his reptilian brain—would have no part of lessons learned or trepidation about the future. There are more important considerations than a bit of mess with the police, James, the lizard cerebellum declared. Dwell, for example, on the infinite pleasures to be given to and taken from the individual orifices of the female anatomy.
But that was pure madness, that kind of adolescent fantasising. What wasn't fantasy was the death of Eugenie Davies in Crediton Hill, Eugenie Davies, who had been carrying his address.
When he first knew Eugenie, he'd been James Pitchford, twenty-five years old, three years graduated from university and one year graduated from a bed-sit in Hammersmith the approximate size of a fingernail. A year in those lodgings had offered him access to the language school he needed where, for an exorbitant sum that took ages to recoup, he'd purchased individual instruction in his native language, suitable for business dealings, for academic purposes, for social gatherings, and for cowing doormen at fine hotels.
From there, he'd snagged his first job in the City from whose perspective a central London address had sounded so absolutely right. And since he never invited office mates home for drinks, dinner, or anything else, there was no way for them to know that the letters, documents, and thick party invitations sent to a lofty address in Kensington were actually delivered to the fourth-floor bedroom he occupied, which was even smaller than the bed-sit he'd begun with in Hammersmith.
Cramped accommodation had been a small price to pay all those years ago, not only for the address but also for the companionship the address had afforded. In the time since those days in Ken
sington Square, J. W. Pitchley had schooled himself not to think of that companionship. But James Pitchford, who had reveled in it and had deemed himself an unmitigated success in self-reinvention because of it, had scarcely lived a single moment without experiencing some passing thought about one member of the household or another. Especially Katja.
“You can help my talking English, please?” she had asked him. “I am here one year. I learn not as good as I wish. I will be so grateful.” All those charming V's in place of W's when she spoke were her own variation of the abhorrent missing aitch he'd worked so hard upon.
He agreed to help her because she was so earnest in supplicating him. He agreed to help her because—although she couldn't know it and he would die before telling her—they were two of a kind. Her escape from East Germany, while far more dramatic and awe-inspiring, mirrored an earlier flight of his own. And although their motivations were different, the core of them was identical.
They already spoke the same language, he and Katja. If he could help her better herself through something as simple as grammar and pronunciation, he was glad to do so.
They met in her free time, when Sonia was asleep or with her family. They used his room or hers, where they each had a table that was just large enough for the books from which Katja did her grammar exercises and for the tape recorder into which she spoke. She was earnest in her efforts at diction, enunciation, and pronunciation. She was courageous in her willingness to experiment in a language that was as foreign to her as Yorkshire pudding. Indeed, it was for her courage that James Pitchford had first learned to admire Katja Wolff. The sheer audacity that had carried her over the old Berlin Wall was the stuff of a heroism he could only hope to emulate.
I will make myself worthy of you, he told her silently as they sat together and worked on the mystery of irregular verbs. And while the table light shone on her soft blonde hair, he visualised himself touching it, running his fingers through it, feeling it caress his naked chest as she lifted herself from their shared embrace.
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