by Simon Mason
And now, despite himself, he felt a familiar mental itch.
He couldn’t help it. He sat, puzzled, at his table.
For a while he considered the equation. It was so simple it was dull: . Somehow that wasn’t the point. The point was elsewhere, tantalizingly out of reach.
What was it?
Trying to rid himself of the itch, he got up and went to the window again, and stood there restlessly and went back to the table. The itch remained, itching furiously like the itch on a phantom limb, impossible to scratch because it didn’t exist. Like an imaginary number, which existed only in the imagination.
Everyone knows what you have to do with imaginary numbers.
He started to tremble.
He glanced at his bedroom door. Then he ripped a sheet of lined paper from a pad and looked at it for a few seconds, and carefully tore it on the left-hand edge about an inch below the top. Taking a black felt-tip pen, he wrote without hesitating fifteen words in a list ten lines long in the top left-hand quarter of the sheet:
plain choc
milk
white
butter
pecans
plain flour
baking powder
eggs
vanilla essence
castor sugar
When he’d finished, in the bottom right-hand quarter he wrote:
And in the bottom left-hand quarter: jacket.
And finally, in the centre of the page: Gone for a run Back 7.30 p.m., which he circled in a thick black line.
Even as he wrote it he didn’t like it. But he forced himself to look at it. After a while he added a vague doodley scribble underneath the probability equation and got some spit on the tip of his finger and smeared it across the words eggs and vanilla.
He didn’t like it any better than before. The itch hadn’t gone away, either.
He stood at the window with his knuckles between his teeth.
‘There was nothing in the pocket,’ he said out loud. ‘No casino chip, nothing. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t—’
He froze mid-sentence, his head cocked to one side as if listening to the sound of three very precise memories rotating into a different dimension.
He went back to the desk, took up the paper, folded it in half, crumpled it, threw it in his waste-paper basket, fished it out again, smoothed it and put it back on the table. And stared at it for five seconds.
‘Shit,’ he said.
First he called Felix.
‘Got a memory test for you, man. Remember Chloe bringing chocolate brownies in to school?’
‘Yeah. Sort of.’
‘What day was that?’
Felix heaved a sigh. ‘Don’t know, Garv. Not long before she got bumped. Sometime that week.’
‘I need to know the exact day. You said it was MacAttack’s birthday.’
‘Yeah, but it’s not like his birthday’s in my diary.’
‘Come on, Felix. Think. You said he was doing the register.’
‘Oh yeah. Must have been ... Must have been the Wednesday, then. He has meetings or something the other days, and this temp does it.’
‘You sure?’
‘Definitely. Wednesday. Do I get something for remembering so well?’
‘No.’
Next he phoned Jess.
There was a small noise, something between a gulp and a sob, at the other end of the phone.
‘Jess? That you? I need some information.’
There was a long silence. ‘Can’t your new girlfriend tell you?’
‘Don’t pull that, Jess. This is important.’
He heard her snort.
‘Only you can help me. I need your perfect memory. Listen. When you told me about Chloe turning up that Friday, you said you hadn’t spoken to her since revising with her for a maths test.’
‘So?’
‘Test on probability, right?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Outcomes. Lots of fractions. One over x plus two plus one over three equals minus one. That sort of thing.’
‘Yeah. I s’pose.’
‘You were revising at Chloe’s.’
‘That’s right. But, Garv, I—’
‘What day?’
There was a long silence. ‘I dunno.’
‘That same week?’
‘Yeah.’
‘All right. What days do you have maths?’
There was another long silence. ‘Monday. Wednesday. And Friday.’
‘OK. So the test wasn’t Monday, ’cause you’d have revised for it the week before.’
‘I s’pose.’
‘Was the test Friday? Had you just had it that morning?’
‘No.’
‘So it must have been on Wednesday. So you’d have been revising Monday or Tuesday night.’
‘Yeah, that’s right. I remember now. It was Monday. The test was on Wednesday. We didn’t do much, to be honest. And anyway, she went off for a run after a bit.’
‘OK, Jess, that’s perfect. Thanks.’
She was about to say something else but he rang off fast. He had one more call to make.
He looked up the number and dialled.
‘Bolloms dry cleaning.’ A harsh voice, all pins and starching.
‘Hi. I wonder if you can help me. It’s about a jacket left for cleaning a few weeks ago.’
‘Name?’
‘Dow. Chloe Dow.’
The phone went dead. Several minutes passed, then the voice said, ‘Dow?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Jacket, white, cotton.’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Picked up already. Long time since, I think.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, really.’
‘Can you tell me when?’
A silence followed, broken only by snippets of harsh breathing and the tapping of a keyboard. Garvie was holding the phone so tight his knuckles almost popped.
‘Yeah,’ the voice said at last. ‘Got it right here.’
‘What day?’
‘The eleventh. Wednesday.’
He sat there shivering.
Ingredients for chocolate brownies taken in to school on Wednesday.
Maths revision for a test on Wednesday.
Reminder to pick up a jacket on Wednesday.
He’d been right. Everything matched. Grabbing his coat, he went fast out of his room and was halfway to the front door before he remembered his mother in the kitchen. When he turned, she was looking at him with those watchful eyes and he muttered, ‘It’s OK, it can wait,’ and went back into his room.
He called Alex.
‘Man, I need a favour. Yeah, right now. Listen, you know the sports shop in the centre? Yeah. I want you to go there and ask some questions. You got a pen? Write this down. Asics Lady GEL-Torana 4 Trail Running Shoes. Size 4. Lime green with orange pattern and laces. Got that? OK. Here’s the question. Somebody bought a pair of those shoes from that place the Friday Chloe got killed. Late afternoon. That’s right. I want you to find out who that person was. No, it wasn’t Chloe. Yes, it’s important. It’s the most important thing you’ve ever done in your life. Yeah, well, ask. Get hold of whoever who was serving. Those shoes are evil ugly. There’s a chance they’ll remember. Give me a ding soon as you know.’
When he got the call an hour later he was lying on his bed, hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. His mother had been in twice but he hadn’t responded to her, hadn’t even moved. But when his phone rang he leaped like a salmon to grab it.
‘Alex? What’s the news?’
And he stood there in the middle of his room, listening in horror.
55
ON MONDAY MORNING he finished breakfast, his mother wished him luck and he went down the stairs with his bag containing everything he needed for his exam and out through the lobby into the morning sunshine. Halfway down the street he turned to look back and saw her still watching him, ar
ms folded at the window, and forced himself to walk on, slowly, all the way to the end and round the corner.
Just out of sight he stood there, considering. In one direction was school and exams and pleasing his mother. In the other was doubt and pain and the desperate pursuit of something like the truth. He glanced down the street towards school. Then hurried across the street and caught a bus going in the opposite direction.
At ten o’clock Fox Walk was deserted: most of the people who lived there had gone to work or to school. The cul-de-sac lay empty and gleaming in the sun. Red and yellow tulips were out in the front gardens, and purple pansies in hanging baskets, and a few early roses, white and pink, in plastic tubs. The council had trimmed the verges and the grass was the fresh green of summer. Garvie ignored all this. He walked past the end of Fox Walk to the wicket gate leading to the Marsh Fields and turned into the path that ran along the backs of the houses. As he’d thought, the fence behind ‘Honeymead’ had been repaired but it wasn’t difficult to climb, and inside a minute he was standing on the patio next to one of those modern vinyl doors beloved by Felix.
Garvie’s information was that Mrs Dow had returned to work and the house would be empty, but he stood for a moment listening. Except for a blackbird in the shrubbery everything was quiet. He unrolled the oil-cloth Felix had lent him and took out a tension wrench and the half-diamond pick. Putting the short end of the wrench into the plug of the door-handle lock and holding it firm with the thumb of his left hand, he slipped the end of the half-diamond in with his right and prodded around for the shift of the pins until they fell into line, then swung the tension wrench anti-clockwise until the handle moved freely. He repeated the trick with the deadlock above. Again he waited for a moment, listening. Then he opened the door and went quietly into the Dows’ conservatory.
‘Never stay longer than an hour. Always secure more than one exit.’ Remembering Felix’s advice, he crossed the living room to the hall and unlocked the front door. In the hallway he paused, listening once more before padding silently up the stairs. The heavy silence of emptiness filled the house, but he took no chances, going along the landing as quietly as possible, ducking below the level of the window. Chloe’s room was still sealed, a drooping piece of police tape strung across the door. But it wasn’t Chloe’s room he was interested in. He went past it to the box room at the far end of the landing. He’d seen inside it once, in that brief period when he was going out with Chloe, and he remembered what was in it: a desk and a chair and lots of shelves. It would be where Mr Dow did his paperwork. Garvie opened the door and slipped inside.
He sat at the desk and tried the drawers. The first was filled with stationery – neatly bound bundles of biros and pencils, boxes of paperclips and drawing pins. The second contained cables, plugs and chargers, again all neatly bundled together and secured with plastic ties. The third was packed with files – records of jobs and copies of invoices. It was only when Garvie took them out that he found something more interesting at the back of the drawer. A ten-spot and a packet of cigarette papers. Mr Dow had a secret little habit. Garvie thought about that while he put the papers back and looked around the rest of the office.
The files he wanted were on the top shelf, all neatly labelled: House, Car, Garden, Holidays, Misc, Bank, Tax. He took down the file labelled Misc and began to look through it. Twenty minutes went by in slow quiet stages. He put Misc back on the shelf and took down House. More minutes passed as he flicked steadily through correspondence about the conservatory extension and receipts for bamboo-cane furniture, then he put House back and took down Garden.
He marvelled at the obsessive orderliness of Mr Dow’s files. He himself had no use for neatness whatsoever; to him it seemed a form of private stupidity. In fact he was hoping to prove it.
He put Garden back, took down Holidays and went through it slowly, glancing at brochures of hotels in Spain and printouts of booking confirmations, then put it back and took down Tax and went through it more rapidly, and put that back too. Looking at his watch, he saw he’d been there for nearly an hour, and sighed and got to his feet. And that was when he saw the other file, lying open on the floor.
Everything in Leisure was arranged in chronological order, and he flipped straight to the place for Friday the 13th, and there, neatly logged in a little plastic jacket, he found the thing that should never have been filed at all, that really ought to have been thrown away; the thing that proved neatness a fatal stupidity.
His hands were shaking so much he could hardly make the call.
‘Singh.’
‘Get here now. Honeymead, Fox Walk.’
‘Garvie? Is that you?’
‘Now. Immediately. Straight away.’
‘What are you talking about? Why are you whispering?’
‘Just get here, fast. I’ve found something new. It changes everything.’
‘Oh no. Not again. Don’t do this, Garvie, I beg you.’ Singh’s voice was brisk, but there was no disguising his anger. ‘Listen to me, Garvie. If you have anything to say about any detail of the Dow case, you can ask your mother to arrange a meeting at your house, and I’ll—’
‘It’s the running shoes.’
There was a brief silence at Singh’s end.
‘What about the running shoes?’
‘I know what happened. I can prove it. I’ve got the proof right here, in my hand. Come on, Singh. Trust me.’
Something in the tone of his voice must have been convincing. He could almost see Singh’s face change at the other end of the phone. ‘I’m on my way,’ the policeman said, and hung up.
Leaning against the desk, Garvie closed his eyes and allowed himself to relax for a moment. Then there was a click, very near, and he opened them to find Mrs Dow standing a couple of metres away in the doorway wearing a plump pink dressing gown and pink felt slippers, looking at him open-mouthed in astonishment.
‘Mrs Dow,’ Garvie said politely.
She said nothing, staring at him blearily, her face crumpled with sleep. Confusion made her slow. She glanced behind her towards her bedroom and back at Garvie. ‘I’m not well,’ she faltered. Then, anxiously: ‘I heard voices, Garvie.’ She peered past him, as if to find someone else there.
He nodded. ‘I can explain.’
‘Explain ... why you’re here?’
‘Explain ... about Chloe. But why don’t we go downstairs and talk in the kitchen? If you’re not feeling great I could make you a cup of tea.’
‘Explain what about Chloe?’ she said, not moving, looking at him with the unpredictable blankness of a hysteric.
‘Well, it’s a bit difficult.’
‘I want you to tell me about Chloe.’
‘OK.’ He spoke soothingly, as he might to a child. ‘I know how hard this has been for you, Mrs Dow. I know how much you’ve suffered. Every time the police say they’ve got it sussed it turns out they’ve made a mistake. But now I know what really happened.’
Lulled, she nodded her head. ‘Good,’ she murmured. ‘Tell me.’
He only hoped he wouldn’t get to the end before Singh arrived. Speaking in the same soothing voice, he said, ‘Do you remember the note?’
‘Note?’
‘The note Chloe left on the living-room table, telling you she’d gone for a run? It said: Gone for a run Back 7.30 p.m. You remember that.’
She nodded.
‘Well, there was other stuff written on the paper too: jottings and doodles. A list of ingredients for making chocolate brownies. Some maths revision. A reminder to pick up her white jacket from the cleaner’s.’
A sad smile appeared very briefly on Mrs Dow’s face. ‘I bought that jacket for her. For her fifteenth birthday.’
He nodded sympathetically. Keeping his voice as low as possible, he went on.
‘Well, she picked the jacket up on the Wednesday of that week. Wednesday was the day she took those brownies in to school too, and it was Wednesday she had the maths test she was revising for. So, you se
e, all those doodlings and jottings on the piece of notepaper must have been written before Wednesday. Which is interesting.’
‘Why?’ Mrs Dow was listening more closely now, her head cocked on one side, her eyes smaller and harder. Garvie began to wonder how long it would take for Singh to arrive.
‘Because,’ he went on, ‘it made me think, What if the bit about the run was written before Wednesday too? Everything was written in the same black felt-tip pen; it could easily have been written all at the same time. And, in fact, it turns out that everything in the note was written on ... Monday.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Chloe left the note when she went out for a run on Monday night. And when she got back she threw the note away, in the living-room waste-paper basket probably.’
She gazed at him for a long time, and he began to think she could see it all. But she couldn’t.
‘I still don’t understand,’ she said. ‘It was on the living-room table when Mick and I got back from the Centre on Friday.’
Garvie took a deep breath. By now he was listening out all the time for the sound of Singh’s car.
‘I can explain that too. Unless you’d like a cup of tea first.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I want you to explain it.’
Very carefully, Garvie went on. ‘On Friday Chloe had a problem. There were two – no, three – men bothering her. You already know about the caretaker at school and Darren Winder at the casino. Friday afternoon Chloe was trying to sort things out. She was scared. She didn’t know what to do. After lunch she left school and went to see Jess. You know Jess.’
‘Yes, she’s a little cow.’
‘Well, it didn’t do Chloe any good seeing her, so she left and went to see Alex.’
‘I know him too. He’s no good.’
‘That didn’t work, either, so ... she came to see me, at school.’
Mrs Dow smiled. ‘She always liked you, Garvie. I liked you too. Before all this.’
He said, very carefully, ‘But I didn’t know what Chloe’s trouble was, so seeing me didn’t do her any good, either.’ He paused. ‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Mrs Dow said automatically. ‘We can’t know everything, can we?’
Garvie went on, slowly. ‘She came home then. About half past four. She’d decided what she was going to do. She was going to pick up her bank card, which she’d left here, and go out to the shops to buy some new running shoes. But while she was here, before she could go out, she met him.’