by Granger, Ann
Carter looked round. ‘So, who killed him? One of his clients, if that’s the word for it? Did someone not like the version he gave of his or her life? Did a book not sell in expected numbers? Was he in dispute with anyone? Did he, in his researches, unearth something embarrassing?’ He paused. ‘Should we be looking for any sign that he was a blackmailer? We’ll have to get permission to examine his bank accounts. Did he have an agent? Who’s his next of kin?’
‘Well,’ Jess said slowly, ‘it’s all got to be here somewhere . . .’
But it quickly became obvious that it was going to take a very long time to go through everything. They packed up some of it in plastic bags and left the rest in the locked flat for later attention.
‘This will keep Sergeant Nugent busy,’ Carter said, shutting the haul of assorted paperwork into the boot of his car. Dave Nugent was their computer expert.
‘Me, too,’ muttered Jess, foreseeing endless new lines of enquiry opening. But something else had caught her eye. They were being observed. The twitch of a net curtain at the window of a downstairs flat betrayed the watcher.
‘Downstairs left,’ she murmured to Carter.
He glanced in that direction but the curtain now hung still. ‘We need to talk to his neighbours, anyway.’
‘I’ll go,’ Jess said.
She walked back to the house and rang the bell for the flat occupied by the watcher. For good measure, she stepped back and rapped on the pane. After a moment the curtain was twitched aside and a face appeared.
Surprise almost made Jess laugh aloud. The face was very much that of an elderly and angry baby. It was round and pink, surmounted by tufts of fairish hair and its small, rosebud mouth was pursed in disapproval. Jess held up her warrant card on the other side of the intervening pane of glass.
The baby scowled even more ferociously and let the curtain drop. Soon a rattle at the door revealed the body belonging to the head. Before them stood a short, podgy individual, wearing a ginger woolly cardigan, baggy brown corduroy trousers and slippers.
‘What do you want?’ he snapped.
‘We’ve been investigating the top flat,’ Jess began.
She was interrupted.
‘I know that! You should have introduced yourselves first! I didn’t know who you were! Stamping around up there, poking and prying. Where did you get the keys? You might have been thieves. I kept an eye open and I saw you had taken some things away. You were putting them in the boot of your car. I made a note of the registration. I was getting ready to ring the police.’
‘We are the police,’ said Jess patiently.
‘I know that now. I didn’t know it then. You didn’t introduce yourselves. You should have done. I’m the house-owner. You should have rung my doorbell first. I need to know if the police are visiting one of my tenants, especially as he isn’t there. Is he in trouble with the law? I can’t have any tenant who’s got a police record. It wouldn’t do.’
‘Mr Taylor has no police record . . .’ Jess began.
Hopkins hadn’t finished his complaint. ‘You were ferreting about in Mr Taylor’s flat. If he’s a law-abiding citizen, what were you doing up there? What would he have to say about it? He didn’t say anything to me about you coming.’
Oh dear, thought Jess. He doesn’t know Taylor is dead. Taylor must go away frequently and doesn’t always bother to inform his landlord first.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You are Mr . . . ?’
‘Hopkins!’ said the man.
‘Perhaps we could come in a talk to you for a moment, Mr Hopkins? This is Superintendent Carter.’
Carter had approached during the conversation and now stood by her side.
Hopkins looked Carter up and down, then scanned Jess again before finally inviting them in with a grudging, ‘Well, all right then.’
He turned and shuffled back inside. They followed.
Hopkins’s living room suited his personality. It was cluttered and claustrophobic, lined with bookshelves and knick-knacks of all kinds. A canary in a cage began to spring from perch to perch, alarmed at the entry of strangers.
‘I’ll cover up Osbert,’ said Hopkins. ‘He doesn’t care for visitors.’
Like his owner, thought Jess, watching Hopkins drape what appeared to be an old curtain over the cage.
‘Now then,’ said Hopkins, returning. ‘What’s it all about, eh? What authority have you got to remove items from that flat? Where’s your warrant. I want to see your warrant.’
‘Mr Hopkins,’ Carter spoke for the first time. ‘Perhaps you’d like to sit down? We have some rather sad news for you.’
‘What?’ Hopkins glared at him. ‘What news?’
‘That looks a nice comfortable chair,’ suggested Jess, indicating an armchair that looked, from its sagging state, as if it might be in regular use.
‘It is a comfortable chair, what’s that got to do with it?’ demanded Hopkins. But he sat down.
‘I’m afraid,’ said Carter to him, ‘that Mr Taylor has died.’
This silenced Hopkins for a minute; otherwise he reacted to the news, as he seemed to react to most things, with fury.
‘Died? What do you mean died? He’s a young man, well, fairly young. I don’t know how old he is – was. He wasn’t ill, or he wasn’t the last time I saw him.’
‘When was that?’ asked Carter. ‘When did you last see or speak to Mr Taylor?’
Hopkins’s fat little hands gripped the arms of the chair as his forehead puckered in thought. ‘Three days ago, early morning. He used to come and go at all hours. Didn’t have anything of a proper, regular job that I could see. He told me, when he first moved in, that he wrote books. I asked him, what kind of books? He said he wrote autobiographies. I said, ‘You can only write one autobiography, your own. Have you written your own? What have you done that’s so remarkable that you’ve written about it?’ I asked him. No, he said, he wrote other people’s autobiographies. I told him, in that case, they were biographies he wrote. You can’t write another person’s autobiography because they have to write it themselves. He would have it they were autobiographies because they were in the first person. We had an argument about it.’ The landlord drew breath. ‘But he paid his rent on time. What did he die of?’
‘We’re looking into that, Mr Hopkins,’ Jess told him.
Hopkins put his head on one side and she was struck by how bright his eyes were. It was as though Osbert had escaped his cage, grown in size, and now observed them.
‘Did he smashed himself up in that car?’ the landlord asked.
‘No, not exactly. When you saw him, three days ago, did you have any conversation with him?’
‘No, not what you’d call conversation. He bid me good morning. I returned the same. That was about it. I never had conversations with him. I don’t know where he went, what he got up to. If I’d thought he was into anything shady I’d have had it out with him. I’d have told him I couldn’t be doing with it, not in a tenant of mine.’
‘How was he dressed on that last occasion you saw him? Was he entering or leaving the house?’
‘He was leaving. It was about ten thirty. He was dressed smart, but he was always a smart dresser,’ Hopkins admitted grudgingly. ‘I’ll say that for him. I didn’t think anything of it. I told you, he came and went a lot.’
‘Who else lives in the house?’ asked Jess, thinking that Hopkins probably had arguments with anyone about anything. His tenants quickly learned not to volunteer any information or get into conversation. They scuttled in and out, avoiding the landlord. Unfortunately this meant Taylor wouldn’t have said where he was going. Nor, apparently, was his being smartly dressed unusual. But if Tom Palmer were right in his guess that someone had doctored Taylor’s last lunch, then it made sense to suppose that Taylor had been going out on his way to meet someone for lunch. Where though?
Hopkins pointed at the ceiling. ‘Miss Jeffrey lives on the first floor. She’s always reckoned he had a raffish look. That’s her
word, “raffish”. She wouldn’t have any conversation with him. She’s very religious. She doesn’t speak to anyone who isn’t a member of her church. She don’t speak to many who are, I reckon. It’d surprise me if any of them speak to her.’
Hopkins jabbed a finger upward again. ‘Mr and Mrs Simpson live on the second floor. They’re in New Zealand visiting relatives, been gone for a month now. Taylor had the top flat. It used to be the attics. I had it converted. It’s my income, leasing the flats in this house. Are you clearing Taylor’s flat? Because he’s paid up to the end of the month and after that, I’ll have to lease it again. I can’t afford to have it standing empty. I’ll be out of pocket. I’ll have to decorate it, too, I dare say. He’s probably left it all knocked about. I’ll use his deposit to repaint it. I always ask for a deposit against damages when I lease. You wouldn’t believe what people do. I’ve had people knock cup hooks through kitchen tiles.’ Seamlessly, Hopkins added, in a change of subject, ‘He used to go to the races, I know that, horse racing.’
‘Mr Taylor used to go to the races a lot?’
Hopkins nodded. ‘There’s a lot of racing goes on round here. People come in from all over the country for the Cheltenham meetings. Lot of Irish people come. Miss Jeffrey told me Taylor must be a gambler and it’s a sin. Well, she would say that.’
‘Thank you, Mr Hopkins,’ said Carter to him. ‘Do you hold a key to the top flat?’
Hopkins gave him a sour look. ‘I have all the keys. I have to have them. Suppose there was a plumbing emergency when the tenant is out?’
‘I am afraid,’ said Carter firmly, ‘We’ll have to ask you for your key to the top flat.’
‘It’s my flat!’ Hopkins was outraged. His baby features glowed scarlet. ‘I’m not giving you the key.’
‘I am afraid the flat must be regarded as sealed pending our investigations,’ Carter went on inexorably. ‘We’ll be sending someone over to put a tape over the door and also to talk to Miss Jeffrey. In the meantime, no one must go into the flat. Can I have the key, please? It will be returned to you as soon as we’ve finished.’
Grumbling, Hopkins hauled himself out of his chair and went to hunt in the drawer of a sideboard. He returned with a key attached to a luggage label. ‘It’s this one.’ He held it up. ‘And sealed for your investigations or not, his rent is only paid until the end of the month. You’ll have to get the place cleared out by then – and clear out yourselves!’
‘What do you think?’ Carter asked Jess as they set off again. ‘He was going out to lunch?’
‘Yes, I was thinking that when talking to Hopkins back there. I was remembering what Tom Palmer said about his last meal. Do we trawl the restaurants?’
Carter considered this briefly and shook his head. ‘There are any number of them in the city and outside of it. It would take all the manpower we’ve got available and there’s only a slim chance we’d turn up anything. If Palmer’s right about his last meal containing crushed pills, that’s unlikely to have happened in a restaurant setting. How would the murderer manage it? No, it’s far more likely he met someone in a private setting somewhere. That could be anywhere.’
Jess sighed. It seemed they were not much further forward, after all.
‘Perhaps Nugent will strike lucky with Taylor’s computer,’ she said.
Carter grunted.
The thing about a secret is not simply that you don’t tell anyone. It’s that you have no way of knowing whether it’s exclusive to you; or whether any others are hugging the same secret to their chests, having found it out by a totally different route. If that’s so, it isn’t a secret at all; that’s the desperate irony of the whole thing. It’s just something everyone knows but no one mentions. Unknown to yourself, you are part of a great conspiracy to hide an unpalatable truth.
Monty worked all this out later in life, much too late for the knowledge to be any use to him. Meantime, the secret of what he’d seen that fateful day in Shooter’s Wood, like all the things no one mentions, continued to fester like a hidden sore. The answer, logically, would be to share the horror, drag it kicking and screaming into the light of day and hang the consequences.
‘But that’s it, ain’t it, Hamlet?’ muttered Monty into the darkness, lying sleepless in the comfortable bed Bridget had given him. He tossed about and wondered why he didn’t sleep as well here as he had done back on the unyielding chaise longue at Balaclava House.
It was the fear of the consequences that kept you silent, stopped you taking the way out with all that revelation would mean. To speak or not to speak. Either way, concluded Monty with the wisdom that comes to you in the middle of the night, either way you’re trapped. Treacherous things, secrets.
He wondered why events that were associated with his family home, and ought to stay there when he walked away from it, had followed him to Bridget’s. He screwed up his eyes, as if that would make any difference, and faced them again.
The realisation that he wasn’t the only one to know or guess what went on in Shooter’s Wood also came to him far too late. For years, growing up, he tried to forget what he’d seen and couldn’t. Things that won’t go away come to the surface, sooner or later.
It was Christmas and Monty had begun the seasonal celebrations by breaking his ankle. People asked him if he’d done it skiing. But he had to admit he’d only done it jumping off a bus before it stopped at Piccadilly Circus. He’d sprawled on the wet pavement surrounded by Christmas shoppers, with an irate bus conductor yelling from his platform, ‘Serve you right, mate!’
It was his last year at school and he’d been offered an opportunity to train as a draughtsman the next summer, if he could avoid the looming period of National Service first. He still hadn’t really decided what to do with the rest of his life. The decision had been complicated by a change in the lives of his family, a change that ought to have been entirely for the better. In fact it caused that festering wound, spreading its poison for such a long time, finally to burst out and triumph.
The good news, the positive change in the Bickerstaffe fortunes, had been when a multinational monster came along and gobbled up the brand name and associated ailing family business. Bickerstaffe’s Cakes and Biscuits still counted for something in the national psyche. They were a quality name. The surviving Bickerstaffes, including Monty, suddenly found that they should have a modest income for life, if they were sensible with the windfall. For the first time his mother had planned a turkey for Christmas Day. In other, leaner, years they’d made do with a cheap leg of pork, courtesy of the Colleys. Now they’d eat the pork at New Year in place of the usual stringy fowl obtained from the same source. They always had a Bickerstaffe’s boiled fruit cake in lieu of a Christmas cake, even though so few had been produced in latter years. Probably the famous delicacy would be the first product to be discontinued; now the new bosses had their hands on the tiller.
‘It’ll be a damn shame, of course,’ said Monty’s father. ‘After all these years, well . . .’ But he couldn’t make his voice sound as if he really cared.
Monty didn’t fret over the demise of the cake. He’d always disliked it, anyway. So he hobbled home with his ankle in plaster and into Balaclava House. Its normal gloomy welcome was only slightly alleviated by his mother’s annual effort at Christmas decorations. That meant the same few tatty paper chains and a wreath that had lost a few more of its berries and leaves each year it was brought out, and now resembled nothing so much as a funeral offering. It annoyed Monty that no one had thought to replace these sad apologies for festive cheer. But he understood that his mother had begrudged paying out any of the new wealth on paper lanterns and artificial swags of nameless greenery. Economy was bred into her heart and soul now. Even so, the sight of it all brought home the full horror of their family Christmases. Monty gritted his teeth and prepared to enter into the awful pretence of merriment; and his mother’s mince pies that had hardly any mincemeat in them.
It was a rainy winter and bad for coughs, colds a
nd influenza. The first thing Monty discovered, once he got past the hall and into the drawing room, was that his father had gone down with a cold some ten days previously. Then he had developed a persistent cough, wheezing and struggling for breath. He sat over the meagre fire with an old plaid travelling rug wrapped round him. It was the same rug with which the twelve-year-old Monty had toiled uphill carrying it on his shoulder, with Penny alongside him, issuing directions. When his father extended his hand in greeting it looked an old man’s hand, thin-skinned, brown-spotted and thick-veined. But he wasn’t an old man, only forty-nine.