“Will do. You think she was there with Quintin?”
“That’s what I want to find out; they’re about the same age.”
“Sure, it makes sense to check it. Erm… listen, George. If you ever fancy a family meal of an evening then you’re always welcome here, you know that, right? Ashley’s just about house trained and Jason could do with having another bloke about the house.” I looked through to the dark kitchen.
“Thanks for the invite.” And I meant it.
* * *
John the maintenance man had told me, after making a couple of phone calls, that Morley recycling was collected on a Monday morning. Which is why I left home at ten-thirty Sunday night dressed in dark clothes – torch, gloves, and extra strong bin bags in the boot of the car. On the way I stopped at a McDonald’s and had a scalding coffee, which I sipped with care. I watched the night-shift truck and taxi drivers sit on their own and wolf down what had been lying in the keep-warm tray – the staff had long stopped cooking.
I brooded over the futility of what I was about to spend a cold evening doing and what a miserable career profession I had drifted into when a young woman in a McDonald’s uniform and row of gold stars on a badge that read ‘Cathy’ came up to me. She was holding a large bunch of keys.
“We’re closing,” she said. “Would you mind drinking up, please?” I looked round to see that I was the only person in the place and half the lights were switched off. I emptied my cup.
“I was savouring the coffee.” She gave me a polite grin. She was probably a few years older than Lucy, but with a face toughened by too much responsibility too early. She picked up my empty cardboard cup.
“Sorry, but I have to close up and write something original about hybrid polymers.” I stood up.
“Really? Where are you studying?” I asked as we walked to the doors.
“Wolfson College.”
“You sound like a Cambridge girl. Am I right?”
“Yeah, one that is actually going to Cambridge University, would you believe?” We stood at the doors and she searched for a key amongst the many on her key ring.
“Tough, is it?” I asked.
“It is when I’m in my final year and have to put in three nights a week here and the customers won’t leave.” She opened the door and smiled at me. For a moment I forgot that I was about to riffle through other people’s rubbish.
18
IT WAS AFTER ELEVEN WHEN I CONTINUED THE DRIVE UP TO Morley in a light drizzle, this time parking in the public car park rather than driving up to the Bookers’ house. I sat in the car for a bit watching to see whether my gravel-crunching arrival had made anyone curious. About a third of the lights were on behind drawn curtains in the student block. None of them twitched and nobody was wandering around this late on a cold and wet Sunday.
Once I was halfway confident that I wasn’t going to be seen I got out and removed the gear from the back of the car. I stepped onto grass as soon as I could and then headed towards the bursar’s house, keeping to the bush-lined edge of the large lawn separating the house from the student residences. When I got to the wall that surrounds the house I looked through the open gate I had driven through last night. I could see a light on in one downstairs room and the Saab was parked in the drive, but no Mini. Staying on the outside I followed the wall round to the back of the house, where compost bins and gardeners’ sheds huddled in the gloom. Just outside a wooden door set in the wall surrounding the house there were two plastic recycling containers, one full of glass, plastic and tin, one full of paper. I emptied the paper into one of my bin bags and tried the door in the wall. It was locked.
Instead of heading back to the car as any sensible private investigator would have done, I searched for something to climb on. I pushed a wheelbarrow full of leaves over to the door. With my feet in wet leaves I could just see over the wall into the garden. It was about a hundred and fifty feet to the house. Light leaked from between long blackout curtains at the French windows on the ground floor. The top floor of the house was dark. Curiosity and that little buzz of voyeurism I get from spying on people got the better of me. I pulled myself up until I could get a leg on the wall and then scrambled over the top, dropping heavily onto thankfully soft earth the other side. I had to lie there and catch my breath for a minute; I was getting too old for this shit.
I walked up to the house and the French doors where the light was coming through the drapes. The gap in the curtains was wider at the bottom so I bent down to have a look. I wish I hadn’t bothered, because I saw Elliot Booker hanging from the ceiling. Hanging by his neck.
* * *
Too early the next morning I opened my front door in pyjamas to stop the urgent knocking that was aggravating my alcohol-induced headache. I was faced with a rain-sodden Stubbing. Behind her a female uniform was noting down my Golf’s licence number. Brampton was standing at her car, which they had squeezed onto the drive so it was bumper to bumper with mine. She was under an umbrella and squinting upwards into the rain, looking as if she was appraising the state of my roof – possibly noting that it was the only one on the street that hadn’t had a loft conversion done. There was no way they could have traced my anonymous call reporting Elliot’s death, and I’d carefully removed any trace of myself from the back garden, raking over my footprints and replacing the wheelbarrow.
“Ah, the witch and her flying monkey,” I said, taking advantage of the fact that Brampton was out of earshot. Stubbing’s white face reddened and she angrily worked those thin lips as Brampton walked up the drive. The uniform showed Brampton the licence number she had written down. Brampton glanced at it and came to the door. The uniform got in the driver’s seat of the unmarked police car to escape the rain.
“George, how are you?” Brampton asked. Up close she was pale and tense, her eyes puffy. “I hope you don’t mind us waking you up so early?” It wasn’t a question I was meant to answer.
“He probably went to bed late, ma’am,” said Stubbing, leering at my pyjamas. Brampton ignored her.
“May we come in, George? It’s raining outside,” Brampton said. I really didn’t want them to come in.
“Is this a social call?”
“Not at six-thirty in the morning, it isn’t,” Stubbing said. She sounded very tired. No doubt they’d been up all night. I opened the door wide, shepherding them into the sitting room.
They sat on the sagging couch and I remained standing, thinking it gave me some sort of psychological advantage, although what advantage it might have given me was more than offset by the fact I was in my jimjams. “I won’t offer you tea, I’m sure you won’t be here long enough,” I said, even though I was gasping for some myself.
“OK, George. We’ll get to the point,” said Brampton. “What were you doing on the grounds of Morley College last night?” Stubbing, dripping on the worn rug, was piercing me with those icy blue eyes, intent on my answer. Perhaps I was better off sitting down after all; it would give me time to think about whether they were trying it on or whether I had been seen. Perhaps an OCD-afflicted student sat at his window and made a note of every car that parked in the Morley car park. I couldn’t think of a reason to lie; I didn’t need to tell them why I was there. After all, I could have been dropping someone off, or making a nostalgic late night pilgrimage to where my father used to work. Lame, I know, but they were ideas to work with. I took a seat in an old armchair, my father’s favourite.
“I was there for about half an hour.” Stubbing beamed triumphantly at Brampton, who simply looked as tired as the carpet she was staring at. She raised her eyes to me without moving her head.
“What time did you get there, George?” she asked. I didn’t say anything, remembering something my occasional lawyer had said about the police trying to place clients at the scene of a crime before they even knew there was a crime, but I’d kind of blown it already.
“Last night sometime. Why, is there a problem?”
“Do you want to tell us what yo
u were doing there?” Brampton asked. Stubbing was piercing into me with a laser-like intensity that was uncomfortable.
“Not really,” I said, beginning to feel hot. “Not until you tell me what is going on.” They exchanged a glance and Brampton stood up and examined the Bakelite clock on the mantelpiece above the gas fire. A gas fire with asbestos-backed plates that glowed nicely when hot – Olivia had wanted to replace it with an imitation ‘real’ gas fire with pretend coal but I couldn’t see the point in anything imitation. Brampton turned to study me.
“Elliot Booker was found dead at Morley College last night. Someone called it in.”
“How did he die?” I asked, my thinking being that it was the first thing I would ask if I didn’t know. The vision of him hanging from the light fixture in what looked like his study with a step ladder lying on its side beneath him was still fresh in my mind. I was struck at the time at how high the ceiling was in the house.
“What were you doing there, George?” Brampton asked.
“I was on a case.”
“Wherever you go people end up dead,” said Stubbing. “Funny that, isn’t it?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Who are you working for?” Brampton asked. “The Bookers are old friends of mine, you see,” she said. Stubbing shot Brampton a glance; perhaps as surprised as I was. Brampton’s professional face rearranged itself for a second and I understood that she was upset at Elliot’s death. She was friends with the Bookers, but Sylvia hadn’t confided in her, or at least Brampton wasn’t letting on. It was going to be difficult to keep it from the police now that Sylvia’s husband was dead. I decided to play it straight, but without telling them anything.
“I’m working for Sylvia Booker,” I said. I stood up, to indicate that it was the end of the conversation. Stubbing stood up as well, watching me as if I might bolt for the door. Brampton turned professional again.
“In what capacity?” she asked.
“That’s between me and her.”
“Then perhaps we should continue this conversation at Parkside.”
“Are you arresting me?”
Brampton slowly got up.
“Well, you were at a crime scene with no reasonable explanation, so in theory you would qualify as a general suspect, if not a specific one. But I would like to think of you as a witness at this stage, George, so you’ll be helping us with our enquiries. Unless of course you don’t want to?”
19
I WAS PUT IN THE SAME INTERVIEW ROOM WHERE I’D GIVEN MY statement to Stubbing on Wednesday. I was left to stew for a couple of hours, visited occasionally by DS Turner, the same guy who’d claimed on my previous visit that Stubbing was a good detective. I tried to pump him for information but he wasn’t having any of it. I counted holes in the foam tiles on the ceiling until Brampton and Stubbing came back carrying a cup of coffee each. It smelled good.
“Don’t I get any?” I asked. They ignored me. Brampton flicked through a file and Stubbing wrote at the top of a yellow pad. Brampton examined me and folded her hands on the table, as if in prayer.
“What time did you get to Morley College last night, George?”
“Sometime after eleven and before half past.”
“Can anyone verify that?”
“The night manager at the McDonald’s on Huntingdon Road,” I said. “We had a conversation just before I left. It was just before closing. Cathy, her name was.”
Stubbing and Brampton exchanged a look. Stubbing said, “Blimey, reduced to chatting up McDonald’s employees, are we?” Brampton ignored her. So did I.
“Who did you meet at Morley?” Brampton asked.
“No one,” I said.
“So what were you doing there?”
“That’s between me and my client,” I said, even though Sylvia was not aware that I was going to collect her rubbish, nor, I imagined, would she be terribly pleased about it.
“Your so-called client has yet to confirm that she even is your client,” Brampton said.
Stubbing piped up again. “Even you can understand that the last thing on her mind at the moment will be lowlife like you.”
I continued to ignore her and concentrated on Brampton.
“How did Elliot Booker die?” I asked.
“Did you meet with Elliot?” she countered.
“No, I just told you I didn’t meet anyone.” Stubbing took a long drink of her coffee.
“Did you go near the bursar’s residence?” Brampton asked.
“Look, am I a suspect or what?”
“What time did you leave Morley?”
“I wasn’t there long, about half an hour.”
“Did you go in the house?”
“No.”
“What about the back garden?” Stubbing spat.
I shook my head, knowing I had to give them something. “Look, I went there to meet with Mrs Booker but she didn’t turn up, so I left.”
“You went to her house at eleven-thirty to meet her?” Sylvia asked disbelievingly.
“Yes, well, no. I was to meet her in the car park, not at her house.”
“And she can verify this can she?”
I shrugged noncommittally. It was a weak point in my story, but I was hoping Sylvia would see that I was trying to protect her privacy, although she could be forgiven for throwing me to the police at this stage. “So am I a suspect?”
Brampton consulted her file. “When you left Morley you would have driven past the McDonald’s you were at earlier, outside of which is a phone box from which a 999 phone call was made at 12.03. Did you make the call?”
“No.”
She pursed her lips.
“Bit of a coincidence. You being there and it being the same place someone makes a call from, telling us to go to Morley?”
“Yes it is,” I said. “Can I go now, if I’m not a suspect?”
“Perhaps you’d prefer to be one?” Stubbing said.
I made a show of thinking about it: finger on the chin, eyes scrunched in concentration at the ceiling.
“Let’s see…” I said.
Stubbing snorted. “Let’s book him on suspicion, ma’am, we can place him at the scene of the crime.” But Brampton seemed oblivious to Stubbing’s eagerness and I knew they weren’t going to because Stubbing wouldn’t have asked Brampton in front of me.
“Just what are you doing for Sylvia? Does it involve Elliot, or perhaps her daughter Lucy?” Brampton asked. Stubbing shot her a glance, like Brampton had veered from the script. Also, something was wrong about the question but before I could answer Brampton stood up and said, “I’m curtailing this interview for the moment.” Stubbing looked confused at this turn of events, but quickly rallied and stood up too.
“Am I free to go?” I asked.
“I’d rather you didn’t. I’d like to check your McDonald’s story and confirm that you are working for Sylvia Booker and had arranged to meet her.” She checked her watch. “If you left I might get the wrong idea and make you stay. That would take a lot longer than it would if I went and made a couple of phone calls; there’s so much paperwork involved with charging someone you see, Stubbing here is very meticulous.” Stubbing showed me her gappy teeth.
“Can I have some coffee at least? While I’m waiting.” Brampton nodded and left the room.
Stubbing stayed long enough to pour the remainder of Brampton’s coffee into hers and pass it to me. “There you go, Kocky.”
* * *
Three boring hours later I left Parkside police station and emerged into a dark but dry Cambridge. According to Brampton, Elliot Booker hung himself at least a couple of hours before I’d picked up his rubbish. She’d come back to the interview room and given me the news in brutal fashion. She also told me that Lucy and her mother had been in London on the Sunday, with Sylvia staying on for a Monday morning meeting and Lucy heading straight for Morley College. Sylvia couldn’t remember whether we’d arranged to meet and I said she must have forgotten. I was just relieved that
neither she nor Lucy had been the ones to find Elliot. Brampton had been thinking the same.
“I’m pleased that someone,” and here she gave me a meaningful stare, “made that call from a public phone box outside that McDonald’s on Huntingdon Road, otherwise Lucy would have been the one to find him.”
“Did he leave a note?” I asked. She thought about whether to tell me then said, “No, but they just as often don’t as do.”
* * *
I stood looking over Parkside towards town, wondering whether to walk home or to the office. I pulled my raincoat lapel up against a bitter breeze.
“George?” A familiar voice at my ear. I turned to see Sylvia behind me, having come out of the police station. She was pale, red-eyed and makeup free. She still looked beautiful, but in a tragic and vulnerable way, like she should be in a black and white film with Humphrey Bogart. I wanted to give her a hug but where we were standing was not the place for it.
“Sylvia, I’m really sorry about your husband.”
“Thank you. I put Judith right about you.”
“Judith?” The name that Jason had overheard Quintin using on the train.
“Sorry, Judith Brampton. You know her as Detective Chief Inspector Brampton.”
So Quintin had been talking to Brampton. “Yes, she said you were friends.” Something flitted across Sylvia’s face. A concealed emotion involuntarily leaked.
“We were…” She shook her head, then: “I’ve known her a long time.” She looked round at the police station; many of the blinded windows still had lights on behind them. Perhaps, like me, she was wondering whether Brampton was looking down on us.
“Did you tell her why I hired you?” she asked.
“Of course not. Did you?”
“I told her I’d asked you to watch Elliot. She said something about us meeting last night. I told her I couldn’t remember, I hope that was the right thing to do?”
“Perfect.” That explained why Brampton had accepted my lie about meeting Sylvia. Sylvia looked at me and I waited for her to ask me what I’d been doing at the house. But she had other things on her mind.
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