In At The Deep End

by Anabel Donald

  Unasked, silent, she made me a cup of coffee, and that swung it. ‘Claudia, go down to the desk and book yourself a room here. Unless you’d much prefer to drive up to London tonight and back in the morning.’

  ‘I’ll stay with you. But do I need another room? You’ve got two beds in here.’

  ‘You need a room. I need peace and quiet.’

  ‘I don’t like sleeping alone in hotels,’ she said.

  ‘And I don’t give a tinker’s teacloth what you like. I want another room for you to work in and another telephone line for you to use,’ I said. ‘Go and book one.’

  She didn’t argue. She didn’t pout. She went, and came back ten minutes later with a message. ‘It was the ghastly little man on the desk. He chatted me up, and he gave me this. Masses of Japanese in this hotel, have you noticed? But the room next door was free, so I’ve got that, isn’t it excellent?’ I was looking at the message.

  3.6.92am

  Ring Martin Kely

  it said, with a number. It gave me a prickling feeling at the back of my neck. If Kelly came through, his whole fantasy of whatever evil he’d found at Rissington Abbey could be laid out before me, and I could stop looking for corruption in the break buns.

  ‘He was very apologetic.’

  I was reaching for the telephone. ‘Who was?’

  ‘The Trainee person.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The message. It was overlooked, he said. Mislaid.’

  I looked again at the date, and time. Yesterday morning. ‘Shit,’ I said, and dialled the number. It rang and rang. I let it ring thirty times. Unless he lived in Buckingham Palace, he’d have had more than enough time to get to the phone. Maybe he was out. I grabbed the phone book, flicked through it, dialled the Banbury Courier. A man’s voice answered. ‘Martin Kelly, please.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said the voice, gravelly and phlegmatic, a Drunken Has-Been. ‘He’s not in today.’

  He’d told me Tuesday was his afternoon off.Today was Thursday. Why hadn’t he been in? ‘Is he off work?’

  ‘Dunno. He’s not in, that’s all. ‘Bye.’

  ‘Wait! I’ve a home number for him. Could you check it for me?’ I gave him the number, and waited. The Trainee could have garbled that, surely, he cocked up everything else.

  ‘Confirm that number,’ said the voice.

  ‘Did he call in sick?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘His address,’ I said. ‘Give me his address, and I’ll get off the phone.’

  ‘12 Waterford Avenue,’ he said. ‘It’s in one of the little streets behind the church at the top of the town. Now some of us have work to do. ‘Bye,’ and this time he rang off.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Claudia. ‘You look – shocked.’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘We’ll eat in here, tonight, OK?’

  ‘Not in the hotel restaurant,’ she said, looking equally shocked.

  ‘No. In the room. I want you to go and buy us food. Healthy food,’ I said. ‘Free of additives, low in cholesterol, expensive. And picnic cutlery, and plates. Can you do that?’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘I’m going to pay a call on Martin Kelly.’

  ‘Then I’m coming too. I’ll get the food after.’

  ‘No. I want to go by myself. It’ll be quicker.’

  ‘I’ve paid you for training. I can’t be trained if you protect me. What are you afraid of? Do you think something’s happened to the priest?’

  ‘You can come on one condition. That you promise to do exactly what I say, when I say it.’

  ‘I’ve already promised that. And I’ve done it. Haven’t you noticed?’

  She had. And she had. And I had. So I let her come.

  Waterford Avenue was a quiet little cul-de-sac, semi-light industrial. Number twelve was tucked away at the end, between a van-hire yard, now closed, and a Baptist chapel which looked as if it had been closed since Cromwell. The few remaining houses, down the other end of the street, were in multiple occupation, judging from the peeling paintwork and the plethora of rickety bells, but Kelly’s was in spanking condition.

  We’d parked down the road, and walked. Now we stood outside the neat little house with its fresh curtains and weed-free path, and I looked at the milk bottle on its side on the front step, and the dried pool of curdled milk that had seeped into the rosebed. I rang the bell. It whirred in the silent house. We waited, and I rang it again.

  Then I stepped onto the tiny square of lawn under the front window and looked in. Nothing. A tidy parlour, with a crucifix on the wall.

  ‘It’s got a back garden,’ said Claudia. ‘If we go down the side of the chapel, we can climb over the wall into the garden, and break in.’

  ‘We won’t break in,’ I said. ‘We’ll find the back door is open.’

  ‘How do you know?’ she said, following me down the narrow damp alley beside the church and giving me a leg-up over the wall, then scrambling up behind me. We both jumped down onto the back lawn.

  ‘I know the door will be open because breaking in is illegal,’ I said. Nothing and no one, as far as I could see, overlooked the garden and the back door. The catch was a simple Yale. ‘Giss a credit card,’ I said. She passed me a platinum American Express card. ‘Don’t you have a less useful one? I’ll wreck it.’ While she sorted through her collection, I checked, through the window, that there was nothing upsetting in the kitchen.

  ‘Harvey Nichols?’ she said.

  ‘Thank you. That’ll do nicely.’

  Whoever’d used the door last hadn’t left the catch on. I well and truly mangled the card – Claudia’d have to omit Harvey Nichols from her shopping plans for a day or two – but the lock clicked back, I pushed the door with my elbow, and we were in.

  The kitchen was clean, and tidy except for an empty bottle of whisky and one glass on the small Formica table, and a grate overflowing with ashes and scraps of burnt paper.

  ‘Stay here,’ I said. ‘Don’t touch anything.’ Then I went upstairs, towards the smell and the buzz of flies, to discover the body.

  I’d hoped it would be an overdose, but it was a hanging. It was darkish on the stairs: as I reached the top I could see his body up to his armpits. The upper part was hidden by the ceiling. When I got closer, holding my breath, I could look up through a trapdoor in the ceiling to his face, the noose and a rope thrown over a beam in the attic above. I only looked at his face once, to check it was him, though I realized as I quickly looked away that I’d confirmed it already by the bitten nails on his swinging hands.

  I leant against the wall and waited till the giddiness went. At least his neck was broken. He’d been lucky: he could have just throttled. It hadn’t been a long enough drop to guarantee a quick death. By his feet was a torn sheet of paper Printed on it: god forgive me.

  I looked beyond him, into the front bedroom. Neat, bare, another crucifix on the wall, with a palm cross tucked behind it. The back bedroom and the bathroom door were shut.

  I went down again. Claudia was standing exactly where I’d left her. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Don’t touch anything as we go.’

  ‘You told me that already,’ she said mildly. ‘Is he dead? What’s the smell?’

  ‘Double incontinence,’ I said closing the door behind us, using my T-shirt to hold the handle. ‘He’s dead. Hanged. With what could be a suicide note by his feet, or could just be a page from one of his notebooks.’

  ‘Why? What did it say?’

  ‘God forgive me.’

  ‘He wrote that all the time, didn’t he? I’ve got that from his notes about six times already. Do you think he was mad?’

  ‘Depressed. Guilty.’

  Back in the street again, I headed for the car, and Claudia followed. ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘That’s up to you.’

  ‘Up to me?’

  ‘Yes. We’ve found a dead body. We should report it.’

  ‘What would you do if I wasn’t here?’
r />   ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Then that’s what we’ll do.’

  ‘We’re breaking the law.’

  ‘Tant pis. We must have a reason. I expect you’ll tell me in due course.’

  I didn’t want to tell the police because I didn’t want them tying Kelly in with Rissington Abbey. Not yet. I didn’t want that particular ant’s nest overturned for a day or two, until I’d had a chance to work it out for myself. I should be able to: he’d given me the notebooks, probably for that very purpose. I didn’t know if it was suicide or if someone had fixed it to look like that. If he hadn’t killed himself, I wanted to find out who had. I hadn’t known Kelly at all, but I felt for him. He’d been trying to work something out, and if he’d been killed before he’d resolved it, someone had cheated him.

  We went back to the hotel. When Claudia had gone shopping, we settled down to a picnic. I didn’t notice what I ate. She put the food on a plate for me, poured me what she said was fresh-squeezed orange juice, and waited.

  Eventually I explained why I didn’t want to tell the police. She nodded. ‘What do we do this evening?’ she said.

  ‘Get sorted. First, I want you to finish going through Kelly’s notes, and we’ll look at what you’ve got.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For letting me keep on with his notes. When you gave it to me, it was a rubbish job, to keep me busy. Now, it’s important.’

  ‘No big deal,’ I said. ‘If you’re given a job to do, you should do it. There are enough people in television already who make every small thing a three-legged hurdle race.’

  ‘Alan wouldn’t have left it to me.’

  ‘Alan doesn’t like anyone to pee without getting it cleared by a conference. Now bugger off to your room and don’t come back till you’ve finished.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  When Claudia’d gone to her room, I watched the news. The Rio summit: Major ruled out a referendum on Maastricht: nothing else, much. I turned it off. I wished I hadn’t taken Claudia along to Kelly’s. She seemed very subdued by it, even though she hadn’t seen the body. She didn’t seem worried by the police, though, and I thought the chances of the police ever tying us in with Kelly were slight. I also thought they’d take his suicide at face value.

  I turned off the lights, lay on the bed and watched the sun set. I’d never seen a hanged man before, though I’d seen photographs. I hoped I’d never see another one.

  He’d meant it about the evil at Rissington Abbey. One way or another, I was sure, it had killed him. I’d come to Banbury: he’d given me his notes; he’d called me, the hotel had cocked it up, I hadn’t called back, and he’d died. I looked at the sun flooding the horizon with pink and let my mind float on the day, on what I’d seen and heard, what I knew. Something would come, if I didn’t force it.

  After a while it was dark and I sat up, put the light on, and wrote down what my thoughts had come to. They looked sparse enough.

  What’s the connection between Brown and Kelly?

  What’s the Major’s hurry to get the documentary made?

  Who’s keeping a watch on me?

  Why did Alistair Brown ask me to dinner?

  Where’s Mrs Ellis, and why?

  I felt melancholy. Work was the answer, and it would help to keep Claudia going, so she didn’t fall into a melancholy too. She’d been tiptoeing round me with her food and orange juice and gentle voice. She needed to learn that feelings had to be put aside, if she was to be a professional.

  Then she came back.

  She had very neat, sloping, foreign child’s writing. Easy to read. And most of what she’d found was easy to eliminate, because she hadn’t recognized references to British news items over the past two years. ‘When did you move to London?’ I asked.

  ‘Three months ago,’ she said.

  It figured. My pencil raced down her five A4 sheets, crossing out. When I’d finished, I looked at what we’d got. Apart from the ever-recurring ‘God forgive me’, it all came in the pages relating to the Rissington Abbey sports day.

  dark armour.

  buttocks on the diving-board spotlight

  0325 63812 RP 86 28833311

  Bernard Corrigan

  031 22331

  Very little, entirely obscure. Kelly had certainly meant me to work for it, if there was anything to work for.

  ‘I can’t make anything of it,’ said Claudia, ‘but that’s what I’ve got. I’ve been thinking. Suicide’s a terrible sin. The sin of final despair. And look, if he keeps writing “God forgive me”, he obviously hasn’t renounced the faith, has he?’

  It was what I thought too, though I said, ‘He could just have been depressed. Unbalanced. If he was drunk, too. He could have been a recovering alcoholic, and starting to drink again might have pushed him over the edge.’

  ‘Buttocks on the diving-board spotlight? That doesn’t even make sense. You don’t have spotlights on diving-boards.’

  ‘That came from his notes on last year’s Rissington Abbey sports day, didn’t it? Could be any of the divers.’

  ‘Perhaps Olivier?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘But why did Kelly write that?’

  ‘Maybe he fancied the anonymous buttocks.’

  ‘Is he queer?’

  ‘Say “gay”.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s more politically correct.’

  ‘My mother says “queer”.’

  ‘Your mother isn’t hoping to work in the media. Trust me. You should, you’re paying me enough. He may be talking about himself.’

  She looked at me oddly. ‘Are you feeling better?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just then. You were talking to me as if – as if a man hadn’t died.’

  ‘I’m not feeling better. I wasn’t feeling particularly worse,’ I lied. ‘In this business you can’t afford to give in to your feelings all the time. We’re doing the same job, and we must do it just as well.’

  ‘But if we make no sense of it, where do we start?’ she said.

  ‘Always start with the facts. Here, it’s the telephone numbers. Too late to ring either of them now, and we won’t get an answer if they’re business numbers anyhow. We could place them. Find where the first dialling code is. The other’s Edinburgh.’

  She rang the operator ‘Darlington,’ she said. ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘Leave it,’ I said, ‘until we can call tomorrow morning.’

  ‘How important do you think this stuff is?’

  I’d been thinking about that. ‘To him, very,’ I said. ‘He seemed to make a decision before he gave it to me.’

  ‘Why do you think he rang you?’

  ‘I wish I knew.’

  It was melancholy. I kept remembering his bitten nails, his fierce and willed smile. ‘Tell me what you think you learnt today,’ I said.

  ‘I talked to Peter Newman. He was in my French class and the history class. D’you want to hear?’

  ‘Please.’

  She fiddled with the tape. ‘This is before the history master came in, between lessons.’ ‘Hang on. I thought Alistair Brown taught history. He was with me.’ ‘They split the teaching of A-level history between two teachers who each do a different part of the syllabus. Schools often do.’ ‘Does Rissington split other subjects as well?’ ‘I didn’t ask. Does it matter?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘This is the bit,’ she said, and put the recorder on the table.

  CLAUDIA: I saw in the paper about Olivier Desmoulins. Wasn’t it sad? I’ve always been a terrific fan of his father, I lived in France, you know, and Michel Mouche is very big in France.

  BOY: I could tell. Your French is great.

  CLAUDIA: Olivier was at school here, wasn’t he? Did you know him?

  BOY: Sure.

  CLAUDIA: What was he like?

  BOY: He was an OK guy. Bloody good diver.

  CLAUDIA: How sad. It was that that killed him, wasn’t it?
<
br />   BOY: [knowing laugh]: The vodka, more like.

  CLAUDIA: I often wonder about premonitions and things like that, seeing into the future, I believe in the paranormal, do you?

  BOY: [Hesitation. But he fancied her enough to lie]: Yeah. Right. We can’t know everything, can we?

  CLAUDIA: What’s your sign? I’m Aquarius.

  BOY: Leo.

  CLAUDIA: Wow. Leo. That’s the leader’s sign.

  BOY: [Flattered laugh]

  CLAUDIA: And I wonder if we know when we’re going to die, like animals do, elephants go to a graveyard and stuff, don’t they?

  BOY: I’ve heard that. Yeah.

  CLAUDIA.: Did Olivier know? The day before he was going to die? Did he have a premonition?

  BOY: He didn’t say if he did.

  CLAUDIA: Was he happy?

  BOY: Yeah, he was. Kind of – pleased about something, but he didn’t say what.

  CLAUDIA: Had something happened?

  BOY: Like what?

  CLAUDIA: Maybe he’d had some good news from home, or something, like a letter?

  BOY: He never opened his letters from his mother.

  CLAUDIA: What do you mean?

  BOY: She wrote to him a lot, and he just looked through the envelope, you know, held it up to the light to see if there was a cheque in it, and if there wasn’t he just chucked them on his desk.

  CLAUDIA: Was there a letter from his mother, that day?

  BOY: Dunno.

  Claudia stopped the tape. ‘Then the teacher came in,’ she said.

  I was impressed. ‘Well done,’ I said. ‘That was smooth. What else did you get?’

  ‘Lots of background. Nothing else about Olivier.’

  ‘What was the teaching like?’

  ‘OK. That’s the thing, Alex, it just seems like an OK school to me, all round. Bit peculiar with the military stuff, but no odder than Eton with those penguin suits. And I like the Major, he’s a sweetie. What did you get?’

  I looked at my list. ‘Brown was in a seminary. He originally wanted to be a priest. So the Matron said.’

  ‘That’s terrifically important!’ fizzed Claudia.