Also after kneeling astride him and bringing him to climax, she no longer immediately rose with a friendly smile and retired to the washroom, emerging a few minutes later, perfectly composed and ready to take dictation. She had taken to sinking forward against him, offering her lips to be kissed and murmuring inanities like, ‘Was that good for you, lover?’
When by his responses he made it clear that he wasn’t in the market for either idle gossip or post-coital tendresse, she desisted, but the experience had not been pleasant. So, time for a change, perhaps. Not in terms of size, of course; he liked his office furniture well upholstered; but colouring was another matter. Morag was fair and freckled, her generous breasts milky pale and small nippled. He found himself fantasizing about a brown-skinned girl with nipples like thumbs set in a boss of plum-dark crushed velvet . . .
The thought made him languid and he looked with displeasure on Morag as she entered his office after a barely perfunctory knock and said, ‘You’re no’ forgettin’ you’re lunching wi’ Kitty Locksley?’
Was his hearing faulty or had her Scots accent grown more intrusive in the past few days? She really would have to go. He’d have a word with Miss Jenner, the office personnel manager. She would arrange for a transfer to general duties downstairs. No drop in pay, but they usually got the message and left of their own accord after a week or so.
He said irritably, ‘Of course I haven’t forgotten. Though why I’m lunching with the bitch, I’ve no idea. Still, always best to keep the press on board.’
Kitty Locksley was the news editor of one of the slightly more literate tabloids, the kind that people he knew sometimes admitted to reading.
He stood up and waited. Morag usually went into the cloakroom to fetch his overcoat and help him into it. Today she didn’t move. That did it. She definitely had to go. He got the coat himself and as he struggled into it he said, ‘I should be back by three. Ask Miss Jenner to come and see me then, will you?’
Morag waited till she heard the lift door close, then took out her mobile and dialled.
‘Hi, Mr Murray,’ she said. ‘He’s on his way.’
‘Good girl. Got to go. Talk later.’
She put the phone down and strolled round Estover’s expansive desk and settled into his very comfortable leather swivel chair. She prided herself on always trying to see things from other people’s viewpoint and things certainly looked very different from here. Not that she was complaining. She’d come into the job with her eyes wide open. She’d have had to be very naïve indeed not to recognize what was on Toby Estover’s mind as his eyes ran up and down her body at the interview. Well, that was fine, he seemed a nice enough guy, and she was a thoroughly modern girl with no hang-ups about enjoying sex for its own sake, plus there were all kinds of perks as well as the Christmas bonus. So it had merely amused her when some of the other girls felt it their bounden duty to tell her that on average Estover’s secretaries lasted three years. There would come a time when Miss Jenner, the office manager, would approach her, shoot some shit about moving staff around to give them a variety of experience, then invite her to leave her comfortable ante-room outside Estover’s lofty office and dive into the common pool below.
‘That’ll be nice,’ she’d replied with a smile. ‘I really look forward to seeing more of you guys.’
On her return to work after the Christmas break, she’d been almost immediately approached by her Scottish friend. He had a new proposition that took her aback. Keeping Murray apprised of Estover’s movements was no more than a bit of harmless disloyalty. But, however you wrapped it up, accessing, copying and selling Estover’s confidential records was unambiguously criminal.
The money Murray offered had been good. And she liked the guy. So she hadn’t refused him out of hand. Next time they met, he brought up the proposition again, upping his offer from good to generous. Also he assured her he was working for the good guys and that nothing would happen to Estover as a result of her actions that he didn’t deserve. Which, from her own knowledge of Toby’s working practices, suggested the poor bastard was in for a very bad time indeed!
Still she hesitated. As well as being a thoroughly modern girl, Morag was also an old-fashioned sentimentalist. She didn’t expect declarations of eternal love from Estover, still less did she have any hope or indeed desire that he should make an honest woman out of her. But she did feel that after what they’d been to each other for the past couple of years, there must be some affection there.
Since then she’d given Estover every chance to show his regard for her, to demonstrate he regarded her as something more than just a high-class wanking machine.
He hadn’t taken the chance. So a few days earlier she’d taken the plunge. Next time she saw Murray she’d passed over the tiny flash drive he had given her.
‘Everything’s on there,’ she said. ‘A lot of it’s encrypted.’
‘No problem,’ he said. ‘I’m grateful.’
Then he’d leaned forward and looked into her eyes and she’d thought, here it comes – he’s going to hit on me!
But instead all he said was, ‘If you ever fancy a job back in Glasgow, I might be able to fix you up.’
She was surprised to realize how disappointed she was his proposition was commercial rather than personal!
‘I’ll think on it,’ she said coolly.
‘Good,’ he said, sitting back. ‘Now some time soon, a journalist called Kitty Locksley is probably going to want to fix up a meeting with your boss. Over lunch, I’d guess. I need to know where and when.’
Back to business, she thought. They’re all the same! One way or another, they’ll squeeze every last drop of use out of you, then it’s On your bike, girl!
He was muttering something else that her irritation made her miss.
‘Eh?’ she said.
‘I was just wondering,’ he said rather awkwardly. ‘Maybe you and me could meet for a drink some time, you know, just to meet.’
‘Like a date, you mean?’ she said, hiding her pleasure.
‘Aye.’
‘I’ll think about it.’
Well, now she’d thought about it. A date seemed good. And as she had no intention of letting the bitches downstairs get in their cracks about her being rolled off Estover’s desk a year earlier than the average, what Murray had said about working in Glasgow sounded good too. She’d had enough of the fucking Sassenachs – in every sense.
She picked up the desk phone and punched in Miss Jenner’s number.
Estover, meanwhile, was finding his welcome at the restaurant more to his taste than his departure from the office. As the pretty blonde on reception helped him off with his coat, she said, ‘Nice to see you again, Mr Estover. Miss Locksley’s already at your table.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, giving her a warm smile. Pity she was so willowy. And fair-skinned too, so probably no crushed velvet there.
‘Miss Locksley?’ said a man’s voice. ‘That Miss Kitty Locksley?’
He turned to see a man in the courier’s outfit of crash helmet and leather jacket standing behind him. He was lanky, what was visible of his face had an impatient expression on it, and he had a Scottish accent which at the moment Estover felt was a strong strike against him.
‘Who are you?’ he said in his most patrician fashion.
‘Courier. Got a package for her. Here, chum, could you take it? The bike’s on the pavement, probably being clamped by now!’
He thrust a small package into Estover’s hand then turned and left.
Bloody cheek! thought Estover. The Celtic fringe seemed to be in a conspiracy to irritate him today.
‘Shall I take that, sir?’ said the receptionist.
‘No, that’s all right.’
At the table Kitty Locksley smiled up at him as he approached. He stooped to give her a perfunctory kiss. Small, fine-boned, with not enough flesh on her to feed a hungry bluebottle, she definitely wasn’t his type.
As he sat down he said, ‘This i
s for you.’
‘A late Christmas present, Toby?’ she mocked.
‘No! Courier was leaving it as I came in.’
She slipped it into her bag down at her feet and said, ‘You’d think they’d let me enjoy my lunch in peace!’
‘But this is a working lunch, surely?’ said Estover. ‘You haven’t just asked me out because you’ve taken a sudden fancy to me, have you, Kitty?’
‘Definitely not,’ said the woman, rather too emphatically for Estover’s liking. Even where he did not desire, he liked to be found desirable.
A waiter interrupted them to ask if they’d like a drink and they chatted in a desultory fashion till her gin and tonic and his large scotch came. When he was talking to journalists, Estover liked to have a prop to hand, in every sense.
‘So, Kitty, what’s this all about?’ he said. ‘My secretary said you were quite mysterious.’
‘I certainly didn’t mean to be,’ she said. ‘It was just a rather odd thing. Does the name Arnie Medler mean anything to you?’
Now Estover was glad of his prop. He took a long pull at the scotch and said cautiously, ‘It does ring a bell.’
‘DI in the Met, till he retired to live in Spain.’
‘Yes, of course. That’s how I know the name. The fuzz. In my line one has to make contact from time to time.’
He was sounding a little too jolly, perhaps. He resisted the temptation to take another drink and said, ‘So?’
‘I’m glad he’s not a friend,’ she said. ‘Because he’s dead.’
‘Good Lord!’
‘Yes. He died in a rather macabre accident some time over Christmas. You didn’t know?’
‘No, why should I? Was it in the papers?’
‘No. Not a trace. Mind you, so many good stories about rows over Christmas dinner turning into family massacres that an expat’s death in sunny Spain was hardly going to stop the presses. So what was your connection with him, Toby?’
By now Estover was fully back in control.
‘More to the point, Kitty, as it’s you who got me here, what’s your interest?’ he said.
She shrugged. ‘Nothing sinister. Someone rang the desk with the story and said there was a link between you and the dead man that might be worth following up. Also they intimated it was something you’d prefer to discuss face to face, so, as a girl’s got to eat, I thought why not get a lunch on the paper with my dear old chum?’
What the caller had actually said was, ‘You might like to have Estover where you can watch his reaction, preferably some place he can’t have his secretary primed to interrupt him with an urgent call.’
So far the watching had been interesting but a long way from suggestive.
He said, ‘Well, as I say, I barely remember the name and I’d need to check back to see what the nature of my acquaintance with the man was.’
She said, ‘The caller mentioned something about helping with Medler’s purchase of a villa in Spain. Didn’t know you went in for that kind of stuff, Toby.’
‘Oh well, you know, seven years back, I was still making my way,’ he said.
‘Really?’ she said, noting the clash between the claim of barely remembering and the precision of seven years. ‘Just shows how wrong our records can be. They’ve got you down as top stud, legally speaking, back then. Didn’t realize you were still picking up pennies with a bit of conveyancing.’
He ignored the sarcasm and said, ‘So, delightful as it always is to see you, Kitty, I fear your well-known reputation for probity will make it hard for you to claim this lunch on expenses. Retired policeman dies in Spanish accident. London solicitor may have been acquainted with him. Even your ingenious editor would be hard pushed to work that up into a story! By the way, you described the accident as rather macabre. How so?’
He spoke casually. Why was it lawyers always spoke casually when they approached something they really wanted to know? wondered the journalist.
She watched his face carefully as she replied.
‘It seems your old friend, sorry, acquaintance, Mr Medler, had taken to hitting the bottle quite hard in his retirement. His wife returned home early on Christmas morning to find he’d drunk himself silly and managed to fall in their villa. As he fell, he must somehow have triggered the mechanism that brought the heavy metal security shutters down over the sliding patio doors. Unfortunately, they were open and he fell with his arms stretched across the threshold. The first thing his wife saw when she got home was his severed hands lying on the patio, looking like they’d been chopped off with an axe.’
Now this was more interesting, thought Kitty Locksley. Either that detail had a special significance for Estover or maybe he just had a very weak stomach. Either way, she didn’t think she was going to have to pick up too heavy a bill for his lunch.
And Davy McLucky, now helmetless and sitting in a car parked across the street from the restaurant, was so entertained by Toby Estover’s expression that he took another photo to add to the ones he’d already shot of this fascinating encounter.
4
The Sunday after her conversation with the Trapps, Alva Ozigbo ate her frugal breakfast, pressed the mute button on her answer machine, and sat down on the floor of her flat surrounded by all the material she had gathered relating to the Hadda case.
The only thing scheduled for the day ahead was tea at John Childs’s house. He’d rung the previous day to say that he’d bought his godson, Harry, a copy of Curing Souls for his birthday and hoped she’d be kind enough to sign it. She’d said of course she would and he had then wondered in his diffident manner if she might like to do this while having tea with him the following day.
So she had all morning to trawl through the Hadda files, and seeing them laid out neatly on her floor, it struck her she was going to need all morning!
There was a hell of a lot of material here.
More, she guessed, than normal with the majority of her clients.
But that was explicable, she reassured herself, by the complexity of the case rather than any special interest in Hadda.
She didn’t feel all that reassured.
Taking a deep breath, she went back to the beginning.
Three hours later she emerged from her second complete review, poured herself a stiff gin, and in search of a temporary distraction checked her messages.
All were negligible except one from her mother sounding fraught and asking her to ring as soon as she had a moment. Since Ike had come home to convalesce, most messages from Elvira took this form, so she didn’t let herself feel too anxious, but she rang straight back. To her relief it was the mixture as before.
‘He won’t eat what he should, won’t rest when he should, says it’s all a plot to keep him away from his work and claims I’m up to my neck in the conspiracy!’ said Elvira.
As she spoke, Alva heard Ike’s rich bass distantly demanding to know who was on the phone. Elvira ignored him, the voice got louder till finally she was cut off in mid syllable and Ike’s voice cried, ‘Elf! Thank God! Send for the SAS, I’m being held here against my will! Or if you can’t do that, restore my sanity by saying something sensible.’
Alva laughed out loud, partly with relief at hearing that voice at its old decibel level, partly because she knew that this was the response her father wanted.
It was strange, she thought, that Elvira, the actress, never seemed to have caught on that her husband’s outbursts were usually purely histrionic, and all that was required of his audience was appreciative applause.
Then she recalled her growing suspicion that she’d been played by Hadda and stopped feeling superior.
Her laughing response quickly reduced the performance to a more conventional discussion of Ike’s progress. But after they’d been talking a few moments, he said, ‘That’s enough of me. How about you, Elf? You sound a bit strung out.’
He’d always been very sensitive to her moods.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’ve just realized a patient may
have been fooling me, that’s all.’
He said, ‘Serious? I mean, you’ve not turned some nut loose who’s going around cutting people’s throats?’
‘No. Nothing like that.’
‘Then why so down? Being fooled’s an occupational hazard in your business, I should have thought.’
‘I know. It’s just that I feel like I’d been fêted for translating the Rosetta Stone, only to find out later maybe I’d got it all wrong and the hieroglyphics were nothing but an Egyptian laundry list.’
He boomed a laugh and said, ‘Think of it this way. You’d find out a lot more about the Egyptians from a laundry list than the kind of high-falutin’ crap folk usually carve on monuments.’
‘I suppose,’ she said.
‘You sound like you’re taking it personally,’ said Ike. ‘Now why should that be? I seem to recall you once telling me that there was a line between professional and personal that your patients were always pressing up against and you had to make sure it was never crossed either way.’
God, but he was sharp!
She said lightly, ‘Daddy, didn’t we agree: you do no analysis and I’ll do no surgery?’
‘Never agreed to stand by and let my little girl get hurt,’ he said.
‘And if I want someone beaten up, you’re still the first guy I’ll call,’ she said. ‘But I need you back to full fighting fitness for that. So get back into bed and stop being an asshole to Mummy. You know she takes it personally even though it means nothing.’
‘Yeah. Maybe that’s where you get it from. Bad gene. Don’t worry, I promise to be good. You take care, Elf. I love you.’
‘Me too.’
She switched the phone off. Was Ike right? Was she taking personally something that meant nothing?
She returned to the notes she’d been making as she went through the Hadda files.
The way in which they differed from her original case notes was the input of new information. Not that this amounted to much.
Imogen Ulphingstone at fourteen hadn’t been the skinny, early pubescent girl that Hadda had described having his first sexual encounter with on Pillar Rock. She had been a rapidly maturing young woman with a bosom already giving promise of the perfect breasts Hadda had been distracted by in his first piece of writing.
The Woodcutter Page 34