by Bill James
‘I don’t remember reading about the T-shirt,’ Emily replied. She did, but it seemed kinder not to say so, kinder to herself as well as to Iris Mallen. The first shot knocked him down, but he’d stood again and made himself a target for the next. Emily had met Mallen-Parry several times when he was part of Leo’s firm. She’d liked him and would prefer not to revisit too thoroughly the details of his slaughter. She’d leave that fullness to Iris Mallen. Possibly, talking about it without constraint had become a sort of therapy for her. People dealt with their setbacks in all sorts of ways.
‘You wanted to have a look at the location for yourself?’ she asked Emily. ‘Not the right shoes, but with a torch.’
‘It was a terrible time back then.’
‘You can see why I wouldn’t greatly want the Elms to become . . . to become . . . what did you call it, “a nice, tidy estate”, everything concreted over, including this sliver of soil where it happened. This will be a pavement. The milkman will step on it every morning.’
‘Yes, I see, I do see your thinking,’ Emily said. So, the Elms, and this house on the Elms, and this small stretch of ground, did combine to make a symbol - a grief symbol for Iris Mallen. ‘But you live elsewhere, don’t you?’
‘A different police manor, yes. That was important - so Tom wouldn’t be recognized here. A wise precaution, of course. Routine in that kind of spy job, he said. But also, of course, sometimes the routine doesn’t work. It’s not all that far for me and a fair bit of it is fast motorway. I can get here and back in less than four hours. I’ll be home around half nine. The children are at friends’ houses.’
Emily thought there might be two, a boy and a girl, the boy a teenager. It must have come out at the trial and been reported. Obviously, Tom Mallen-Parry wouldn’t have told her that, or anything else about his real background. His real background had been an absolute secret. Evidently it had become not so absolute at some point.
‘I don’t know who you are,’ Iris Mallen said, chattily. ‘We share an interest, are both, as you put it, held somehow by this house and slice of ground, and yet you haven’t told me why you’re here.’
And Emily couldn’t say, could she, couldn’t admit she was married to the outfit who might have done for her husband, Tom, also known as Tom; the outfit who had put him down on to the mud and then put him down again via his Torremolinos heart after he’d somehow managed to stand once more? ‘It’s not of any significance,’ Emily said, in her coolest chairperson voice. She was used to editing meetings into the shape she wanted.
Iris Mallen shrugged, didn’t show annoyance or resentment. Maybe, married to a spy, she’d learned that many of her questions would go unanswered.
She’d be doing some guesswork. Emily couldn’t edit and shape that. ‘You seemed to be searching for something when I first saw you,’ she said.
‘I was. It’s missing. A Biro. An old Biro. I stuck it in the ground to mark where Tom lay, in case after a spell away I got confused about the location.’ She paused, shook her head. ‘No, that’s rot. I’d always know the couple of square metres, wouldn’t I? The pen was a sort of symbol, I suppose. It used to belong to Tom. Green ink. He liked green ink. One of the last things he wrote with it was a birthday message to our son, Steve - tied to a mountain bike Tom had bought him. I heard these rumours about construction picking up and was afraid the Biro might disappear under tarmac. So, I would have liked to reclaim it, a memento. No luck.’
She began to walk swiftly away, the wellingtons making a gentle flapping sound against her lower leg, like driving on a flat tyre. She turned her head and called out: ‘Nice to see you, whoever you are, expensively, inappropriately garbed and shoed. Don’t take that wrong. Please. I’m sure you have your reasons. You’re involved in all this somehow, aren’t you? On the distaff side?’
‘Look where you’re going. You’ll trip,’ Emily replied.
‘I must get to the multi-storey in Guild Square and hot tail it. Perhaps we’ll meet here again. It might be a neighbourhood by then, though, the house alive with lights and a family, and all the shit families can run into willy-nilly.’
Yes, families could, couldn’t they? Emily stayed. She had another fifteen minutes or so to spare. This expedition hadn’t turned out as she wanted, not so far. She might still salvage something. She’d come here to get comfortingly acquainted with the solid, honest, temporarily skint basics of property building, and instead had been shanghaied into Iris Mallen’s terse but heavy sentimentalizing of the Torremolinos T-shirt, her boy’s birthday mountain bike and an old green Biro. Yes, poignant and graphic, but not what Emily sought. In fact, they were the kind of emotive items she didn’t quite trust: too many bloody overtones. Overtones should be kept under.
She switched on the torch and walked across the front garden, as this stony, brambled oblong should one day be, and put a hand on an immaculately pointed area of wall beneath a boarded downstairs front window. This was going to be a house, just a house, with charmingly antiqued, factory-made brickwork, and a black damp course let into it near the ground, guaranteed to keep the rooms weatherproof and snug. She felt better for the simple contact. She patted the wall three times and thought, ‘Well done, house.’
She moved her hand up to get similar contact with the window boarding and was surprised to find it shifted slightly under this minimal pressure: surely damn useless if it gave way so easily. She played the torch beam on to where the screws should have been keeping it in place and saw instead that all the bottom ones had been removed and, at the top, only a single screw plugged each board to the wall. It meant a wooden panel could swing on it; could be pushed aside, like a curtain. This was probably the same for each nearly completed house. They’d probably all have unofficial guests squatting in them now and again. Some might not fancy sleeping in number 14, the actual murder house.
Emily realized that maybe she should have given more weight to what Noreen had told her. Then she wouldn’t have been startled to find the boarding here so adjustable. This must be the spot where the woman seen by Noreen’s chums had been talking to somebody inside the house - as if in a chinwag with the Delphic oracle, as one of them had suggested: Noreen would have that sort of mouthy, bookish mates. Emily eased a board aside and lit up part of the room. The floor was wood block and almost as littered with rubble as the ground where she and Iris Mallen had talked. It didn’t smell as Emily would have expected an oracle to smell. Just the same, Emily thought she should get through the gap and have a look around.
She had come here to prove to herself that a building was a building and not much else. And buildings had interiors to be taken account of, as well as outsides. It would be chicken, wouldn’t it, to turn away now. To retreat after finding this entrance might suggest the house husk really did represent a special, forbidding symbolism.
Getting in required some gymnastics. She pushed one of the boards back on its fulcrum screw, leaned over the sill and put the torch, alight, down flat on the inside, because she needed both hands free. With her left, she held the board open, then used her right to help lift and drag herself up and over, taking care not to kick and possibly dowse the torch. As Iris Mallen had said, Emily wasn’t really dressed for clambering about on a construction site but she’d give herself a good brush down with her fingers before she arrived at the museum committee meeting. She had on a dark woollen suit - pricey, as Iris Mallen had also said - and any creasing should fall out of such quality material all right.
Of course, when she stood in the room she had to let go of the board and it slipped back into place behind her, clunking against the other one with a noise like a door blown shut in the breeze. That shook Emily for a moment; more than a moment, although she ought to have foreseen it would self-close: gravitational pull. She should have put something there to prop the board part-open so the gap was easy to identify when she wanted to get out, and she might want to get out in a rush.
She felt enclosed, trapped, too dependent on the torch. It woul
d have been sensible to put new batteries in before starting all this. She couldn’t remember how much use the present ones had had. She picked up the torch, turning the beam on to where the entrance gap was, and tried to get a picture into her memory of the exact location in the bay window space. The light seemed OK, no flicker-ing, no fading from white to yellow. She let it linger on the board for a few moments, scared to give it over to darkness and perhaps make it unfindable - particularly if she were panicked. Then she became ashamed of her timorousness and brought the ray around to the other side of the room and to the door space leading from it, though no door was hung yet.
She could see part of the hall and the foot of a wide, curving staircase. Once complete the house would have some style and spaciousness, for this category of dwelling. Yes, some. She considered it very suburban and ordinary, though, when compared with where she lived and its grounds. You needed Leo’s kind of money to buy and develop a place like Midhurst: converted and extended farmhouse, gardens, outbuildings, driveway, paddock. This moment of snobbishness meant she was hit by the big question again: how did Leo get his kind of money - the ample, splash-around kind? Where did the loot come from that entitled her to sneer at this house and the rest of the Elms’ future billets for the nouveaux? Leo was ‘old money’ - five or six years at least - and slump-proof. Not investigation-proof, though. Should she ask herself whether Leo had actually come to this address to judge its suitability for an assassin? Oh, hell, no! He wouldn’t be hands-on to that degree, would he? Would he? Was something like that what these two ferreting pry-guys from another force hoped to prove? Mrs Mallen, too, would no doubt like this possibility looked into by impartial, invasive eyes.
Emily took a couple of steps towards the hall and the scraps underfoot crackled and popped. She paused. Had those little explosions almost drowned out another sound, perhaps coming down the stairwell from one of the upper storey rooms? It was a much slighter, softer noise than the crunching caused by her shoes, but she thought she’d heard something - perhaps a small, infinitely careful slither movement and very brief. Had an occupant been alerted by the torch gleam and the mild but definite racket? She wanted to switch off the torch, because it gave away her location, but she feared the darkness: feared she might stumble and fall, but also just feared the darkness as darkness.
She decided she’d done enough, had enough. A range of funks gripped her, one - the most minor - a dread that something could happen here to make public she’d broken into an Elms house - the Elms house. How could she explain it to Leo and others? This was no proper setting for the joint owner of Midhurst, and no situation for the chair of the city museum committee. ‘Something might happen.’ What something? This was where the real terror lay. Who was slithering about upstairs? Who might come downstairs to find her? She swung the light back around to the loose boards, located them absolutely OK, shoved one hurriedly aside, exited and made for her car. She’d get her breathing and heartbeat back to reasonable on the drive to the museum.
Just before the meeting started, Noreen said: ‘Gosh, Emily, don’t mind my mentioning it, but your shoes! Well, they’ve obviously taken a hammering. Have you been gardening in them, or what?’
Yes, ‘or what’ would cover it. Emily said, ‘Geraldine’s going to give us an evaluation on that Nantgarw china collection first, isn’t she? We must make sure we get it.’
EIGHTEEN
As was normal for these police-on-police inquiries, Maud had fixed for a special, dedicated, secure, private phone line with an extension to be installed in 3V, the room allocated to Iles and Harpur by Rhys Dathan at his headquarters. Iles said: ‘Maud’s Oxbridge-brill, Col, and could tell you instantly the difference between the Peloponnesian War and a G-string, yet she really believes a special, dedicated, secure, private phone line in a place like this is going to turn out to be secure and private. In its quaint way, such innocence is charming, particularly, you’ll say, when combined with a fine arse and effulgent tits. But there are those in a place like this who have worked out how to eavesdrop on calls to and from a special, dedicated, secure, private phone line in a place like this.’
Maud rang now on the line. Iles answered. Using the extension, Harpur listened in, and occasionally spoke. ‘Desmond,’ she said, ‘Dathan has been in touch with the Department here about some incident - has been in touch at a level above mine and not much below the Minister himself.’
‘Incident?’ Iles said in a voice that hinted incidents were right up his street, but she would have to specify.
‘He felt he had to - yes, had to - take it up with us. I’ve been told to put it to you.’
‘You’re going to put something to me?’
‘Since I’m your point of contact with the Department,’ she said.
‘Might I caution you?’ Iles replied. ‘This line, although, ostensibly special, dedicated, secure and—’
‘It’s to do with a theatre play,’ Maud said.
‘A theatre play?’
‘The Revenger’s Tragedy, by Cyril Tourneur.’
‘Do you remember that Barbara Streisand mot in What’s Up Doc? when she hears of someone named Eunice? “There are people called Eunice?” she queries. I’d adapt that to “There are people called Cyril, even in the seventeenth century?”’ Iles replied.
‘Or Thomas Middleton,’ Harpur said.
‘Something of a display,’ Maud said.
‘Oh, really? In which respect, Maud?’ Iles said.
‘Two displays,’ Maud answered.
‘I believe I know what you’re getting at,’ Iles said.
‘Featuring in the first incident, a lead actor telling you, as I understand it, to “Shut the fuck up.”’
‘Vendici,’ Iles replied. ‘Aka Vindici.’
‘Not a play I know,’ Maud said.
‘You’d have been preoccupied with the Peloponnesian War,’ Iles said.
‘Totally unlike a G-string,’ Harpur said.
‘I took that coarse language from the actor in very good part,’ Iles said. ‘This is their livelihood, after all, performing these works. They’re bound to feel protective of the whole shemozzle, so the expletive is pardonable, possibly inevitable.’
‘The theatre manager recounted things to Chief Dathan, and we have no cause to doubt their veracity. Dathan is presenting a serious issue - or so it is viewed here. To do with your fitness for the task in hand. To do with your fitness, or lack of fitness. Jointly.’
‘Jointly? No, no, Col wasn’t a part of this. Admittedly he’ll shag other people’s wives, but theatre qua theatre is rather beyond him, except for, say, pantomime - Mother Goose, although he thought that meant incestuously fondling a parent and left, disappointed, before the interval. That’s right, isn’t it, Col?’
‘I can’t make up my mind between Tourneur and Middleton,’ Harpur replied.
‘Jointly in the sense that Rhys Dathan doesn’t believe the two of you can work effectively together,’ Maud said. ‘He sees these troubles at The Revenger’s Tragedy as springing from an abiding enmity between Col Harpur and you, which makes wholehearted cooperation unachievable. Certain parts of that play touched off in you this intense hostility towards Colin.’
‘There are some quite acceptable aspects to Harpur,’ Iles replied. ‘I’d be the last to deny that. Well, among the last.’
‘And I’ve often heard Mr Iles praised by quite sensible people, on the face of it,’ Harpur said.
‘Which people?’ Iles asked.
‘What we’re getting from Chief Dathan is pressure to shut down this inquiry owing to the clear unsuitability of the investigating team,’ Maud replied. ‘There are colleagues here, some higher placed, who regard the operation as unnecessary and even malicious. They argue that the killer of Tom Mallen was convicted and jailed, and consider further interference redundant, even ultra vires - exceeding legitimate powers. They see in your Revenger’s Tragedy behaviour a sign that the difficulties - impossibilities - of the assignment are such that
they have destroyed mental balance.’
‘Meaning that, if we were pulled off, it would be unthinkable to send different investigators to look at this impossible conundrum,’ Iles replied.
‘The Chief maintains that the antipathy between the two of you is perhaps at its most blatant in a facial injury suffered by you, Desmond, probably done with the writing end of a Biro, judging by the injury’s dimensions, which he puts at five millimetres square, and almost certainly inflicted by Col.’
‘“Probably”, “almost certainly” - is this the language of the factual?’ Iles said.
‘Hardly,’ Harpur replied.
‘Several here agree overall with Dathan’s attitude and conclusions,’ Maud said.
‘We’ll stand by you, won’t we, Col?’ Iles said.
‘This is our mission and we’ll stay committed to it,’ Harpur said.
‘The Chief argues that you, Col, are unforgiven for having it away in low-quality settings with Mrs Iles, and this will always undermine any attempt by you and her husband to function as a successful unit.’
‘What do you say to that then, Col?’ Iles asked.
‘This is certainly one of the most complex cases I’ve ever met,’ Harpur replied. ‘We did get Jaminel.’
‘There you are, Maud,’ Iles said.
‘Yes, obviously, but what about Dathan’s comment that—’
‘Many, many angles,’ Harpur said.
‘There you are, Maud,’ Iles said.
‘Yes, yes, but how do I convince my superiors here that—’
‘These many angles require patient, systematic attention,’ Harpur said.
‘There you are, Maud,’ Iles summed up, unwaveringly.
NINETEEN
Harpur continued to worry over Ivan Hill-Brandon. His whereabouts remained unknown, supposing he still had whereabouts. Harpur went and did the obvious - checked the Newspapers Only skips at Tesco, and the house on Elms. Negative. He felt a sort of impoliteness in just throwing back the bin lids at Tesco without warning, like breaking down someone’s front door in a Nazi-style raid. But to knock on the metal and wait for a response as if on a doorstep would have prolonged things, and he might get spotted by the store’s security people going from bin to bin and mistaken for a scavenger. He could flourish his warrant card, of course, and explain his purpose, but he’d rather keep this side of the investigation confidential. He didn’t want Tesco alerted to the lodgings role of the bins in case Hill-Brandon needed to come here on the quiet some time in the future.