Number 11

by Jonathan Coe

  Nathan was now twenty-four. At the station in Guildford he was a popular figure, although his colleagues certainly regarded him as eccentric, and were prone to teasing him, both to his face and behind his back. In part this was prompted by the seriousness – not to say earnestness – of his manner. But his fellow officers were also both fascinated and amused by his approach to police work.

  PC Pilbeam’s theory, developed over many years’ reading and thinking, was that every crime had to be seen in its social, political and cultural context. The modern policeman, he maintained, had to be familiar with, and attuned to, all the most diverse currents of contemporary thought. In a recent case of indecent exposure, for instance, he drew on the modish discipline of psychogeography (as pioneered by Guy Debord, and practised in the present day by the likes of Patrick Keiller, Iain Sinclair and Will Self), to prove that the accused could not possibly be the culprit, because the anniversary of his mother’s death would have prompted him to walk a different route home on the afternoon in question, away from the public park and through the interwar council estate on which she had grown up and spent her early life. He solved another case after reading an article by James Meek in the London Review of Books, about the coalition government’s infamous Bedroom Tax, a charge levied on council house owners with spare or unoccupied rooms. In order to avoid paying this punitive levy, some badly off married couples were pretending to be estranged and therefore to be making use of two separate bedrooms. By proving, in the case of one such couple, that this was a lie, PC Pilbeam unravelled the mystery of a burglary that had taken place in their home. If both husband and wife were indeed sleeping in the main bedroom, he argued, then the intruder’s point of ingress was likely to have been the spare bedroom, and not the kitchen as they – in their fear of being reported to the authorities – had insisted. Sure enough, the spare bedroom window frame was found to be covered in fingerprints, and the thief was swiftly apprehended.

  ‘In both of these examples,’ Pilbeam wrote in his article for Police magazine, ‘traditional lines of enquiry proved inadequate. The criminal does not act in a political vacuum. To understand motive, one must understand what motivates: and this involves taking into account the effect of economics and environment, culture and capital, landscape and cityscape, the politics of identity and the politics of party. To solve an English crime, committed by an English criminal, one must contemplate the condition of England itself.’

  It was this final sentence, read aloud by one of his colleagues, in tones half sarcastic, half admiring, to a bemused audience in the canteen one lunchtime, that had earned Nathan Pilbeam his own nickname: ‘Nate of the Station’.

  *

  PC Pilbeam was in the middle of a few days’ annual leave, but he was not exactly taking a break from police work. He had no wish to relax, in the sense in which most people would have understood the word. After sending his message to Scotland Yard in the morning, he made a brief visit to the local supermarket, to buy ingredients for the dinner he intended to cook that evening for his inamorata. After that, he opened the package from Amazon which his overworked postman had delivered earlier.

  It contained two DVDs, which bore a striking resemblance to one another. The cover of the first showed a young, tousled, slightly overweight white man wearing a loose brightly coloured shirt, untucked at the trouser. He was talking into a microphone. The DVD was entitled Mickey Parr – Would You Credit It? – On Stage and On Fire. The cover of the second showed another young, tousled, slightly overweight white man wearing a loose brightly coloured shirt untucked at the trouser. He too was talking into a microphone, and his DVD was entitled Ray Turnbull – Last in the Queue – Live and Outrageous. Nathan could remember seeing both of these releases advertised on posters on the London Underground in the run-up to Christmas last year, along with about half a dozen other posters all advertising DVDs by young, tousled, slightly overweight white men wearing loose brightly coloured shirts untucked at the trouser. For the purposes of these posters, all of these men had adopted the same slightly quizzical expressions; they had also, it seemed, all been on tour earlier in the year, and had recorded their performances for use on these Christmas DVDs.

  It had struck Nathan, even then, as being an interesting phenomenon. His understanding was that none of these men were regarded as world experts in any field of human endeavour, or public thinkers possessed of radical new insight. Nonetheless, they were able to command generous sums of money and attract large audiences for their ability to comment in a casual, sometimes humorous way on various aspects of contemporary life. Occasional cutaways during the DVDs would reveal well-dressed and seemingly affluent young audience members roaring with laughter at a series of unremarkable observations about gender roles or the minutiae of everyday social interaction. In the new A5 Moleskin notebook which he had recently bought and labelled ‘STAND-UP COMEDY’ PC Pilbeam copied down an observation from Hermann Hesse:

  ‘How people love to laugh! They flock from the suburbs in the bitter cold, they stand in line, pay money, and stay out until past midnight, only in order to laugh a while.’ – Reflections

  Both DVDs were about eighty minutes long. He had been watching the second one for almost an hour when the breakthrough came. He had been certain, all along, that there would turn out to be some connection between the two men, something more than the generic similarity between their acts. And now he had the proof.

  *

  Like many great men – and most great detectives, for that matter – Nathan Pilbeam had a weakness. A fatal chink in his armour.

  It was not alcohol, or drug addiction. He was too young to have a broken marriage behind him, or a teenage daughter with whom to have a fraught and problematic relationship. His flaw, in fact, was much simpler than that. It was an unrequited passion.

  The object of his infatuation was called Lucinda – Lucinda Givings. It was an antiquated name, and Lucinda was, in many ways, an antiquated person. This might even have been the very reason he was attracted to her. Brought up on a diet of Miss Marple and Lord Peter Wimsey, he could not believe his luck (or misfortune, depending on how he looked at it) in having stumbled upon someone whose natural home seemed to be in one of their stories, rather than the Guildford of 2013. Her speech was formal and demure, as was her manner of dress. One of her few concessions to modernity was that she sometimes used the branch of Starbucks where Nathan himself liked to call in at the end of a long shift. She was usually to be found there late in the afternoon, marking her pupils’ homework. After a few occasions when they had made shy eye-contact and nothing more, Nathan had finally summoned the courage to strike up a tentative conversation.

  Like Nathan, she was in her mid-twenties. She was extremely pretty, and determined not to show it. She wore baggy trousers and shapeless jumpers which gave away nothing about her figure (thereby allowing Nathan to imagine it all the more freely). She wore her hair pulled back and tightly tied behind her head, thereby encouraging Nathan to picture, during his fevered nocturnal fantasies, the moment when she would untie it, shake it loose and remove her horn-rimmed glasses, which would be his cue to utter the traditional words, ‘Why, Lucinda – but you’re beautiful.’ She was a strict devotee of the Catholic faith. She taught chemistry at the local private girls’ secondary school, where she was famous for her abhorrence of indiscipline and her unquestioning respect for the school rules, prompting students and fellow teachers alike to refer to her, behind her (long, shapely) back, as ‘Severe Miss Givings’.

  ‘I had Severe Miss Givings last night.’ That was the joke which was passed around the staff room at least once a week. But a
joke was what it remained: for nobody had ever had, or was likely to have, Severe Miss Givings. Least of all Nathan Pilbeam.

  Never mind. PC Pilbeam’s passion was not of the base, physical sort. Nothing would have delighted him more than to gain admittance to Lucinda Givings’s bed, or to welcome her into his, but he realized that this was but a distant goal, and in the meantime, to spend time in her presence was enough. Which was why he proposed to entice her into his flat that evening with the prospect of penne alla puttanesca and a bottle of Marks and Spencer’s finest Chilean Rosé. It would be their third date, but the first time he had cooked for her; and he was hoping that it would precipitate a degree of thawing in her habitual froideur.

  However, when she arrived, at 7.30 precisely, clutching a bottle of wine in her hand, she did not seem in the calmest of moods.

  ‘Lucinda,’ said Nathan, taking her coat, ‘are you all right?’

  ‘As a man,’ she replied, ‘you cannot possibly understand how fraught with stress and complication the simplest of tasks can be. On the bus over here I had to ward off the persistent attentions of a man who was sitting with his legs splayed – you know the type? – and kept saying, “Do you want this seat, babes?” Babes! I ask you …’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘He was your usual, casual labourer type. Paint stains all over his jeans.’ She shuddered. ‘The brazen cheek of these people! The arrogance!’

  ‘You poor thing. Have a drink.’

  He handed her a glass of rosé and went to fetch some dips and bread sticks from the kitchen. When he returned, Lucinda was standing at the window. She explained that she liked to watch the autumn leaves spiralling down from the trees in the encroaching dusk. Nathan’s gaze, by contrast, had been fixed on Lucinda herself. He was impressed, in particular, by her dress. It was made of some thick bottle-green material and was positively heroic in its shapelessness. For a mere arrangement of cloth to be so accomplished at not just hiding the contours of somebody’s body, but even giving the impression that these contours didn’t exist and must be the product of the spectator’s lurid imagination was, he thought, quite a triumph of the dressmaker’s art. How was it done? The more time he spent with Lucinda, the more he realized that – whatever professional heights he might go on to scale in the future – there would always be some questions that could never be answered, or mysteries solved.

  Over dinner, they discussed her day at school. The calm of her lunch break had been disrupted, it seemed, by the tactless overtures of the French assistant, Monsieur Guignery, who had insisted on sitting next to her. For some weeks now he had been conducting a campaign of low-level flirtation.

  ‘He’s your usual, self-confident, French type,’ she explained, nibbling uncertainly on her pasta. (Nathan had put a little too much chilli in the sauce.) ‘If it goes on much longer I shall have to complain to the headmaster.’

  ‘You do seem to be unlucky,’ said Nathan, ‘in the amount of hassle you get. And yet, I suppose it’s only to be expected. After all …’

  The compliment trailed away into nothingness, as he realized that he could not find the words to complete it. Lucinda, in any case, allowed a half-smile to tremor at the ends of her exquisite mouth.

  ‘In my opinion,’ she answered, composing herself, ‘the trouble with all of these louche, sexually driven types is that they have too much time on their hands. Too much time to devote themselves to these … disturbing thoughts. It’s a lack of occupation, a lack of industry. It’s far more healthy for a man to be busy – like you are. That’s why you’re able to keep these things in proportion.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Nathan. ‘I do love my work. Never more so than at the moment.’

  ‘Why? Are you working on another of your fascinating cases?’

  ‘It’s early days yet, but I may be on to something. Two people have met with sudden deaths in different parts of London in the last few weeks, and I think the deaths might be connected. Both were comedians.’

  ‘Comedians?’ Lucinda wrinkled her adorable nose. ‘I don’t like – I mean, I would never murder one, or anything – but I’ve never understood the appeal of comedians.’

  ‘Well, you know, there’s an old Yorkshire saying: “Jokes is all right for them as likes laughing.”’

  ‘But I do like laughing,’ Lucinda insisted, and to prove it, she let out a bright, tinkling, musical laugh, like a joyful glissando played on some distant glockenspiel. ‘It’s just that … the world is so sad, and nothing much amuses me, I’m afraid, and the idea of paying money in order to get something that should be spontaneous … It’s always seemed a bit desperate, to me. It’s almost like paying for sex.’

  ‘Very true,’ said Nathan, who at that moment would have offered her £5,000 cash on the spot if he’d thought she would have accepted it. ‘But comedians are everywhere. They sell out stadiums. They pop up all the time on television. No matter what the subject – even if it’s asylum seekers or global warming – every kind of public discussion has to have a veneer of comedy. Politics especially.’

  ‘I would have thought people listened to comedians to get away from politics.’

  ‘They listen to comedians to relax and escape from having to think about things too hard. Which is why it’s all right to talk about politics as long as you don’t say anything too disturbing. The important thing is to pick on a safe target. And when I watched their DVDs this afternoon, I realized this is what both of these unfortunate guys did. The same safe target, as it happens.’

  ‘And this,’ said Lucinda, leaning forward now that her interest was piqued, ‘is why you think their deaths might be connected?’

  ‘Exactly. One factor – indeed, one name in particular – links their material, and therefore, in all probability, links their murders. It’s the name of a journalist, whom they both attacked in the most aggressive and personal tones.’

  ‘And the name of this journalist?’

  Nathan paused for effect, and looked directly into the measureless blue depths of her eyes.

  ‘Her name is Josephine Winshaw-Eaves.’

  2

  Josephine Winshaw-Eaves. Not surprisingly, Lucinda had never heard of her. She was not a great reader of newspapers, after all: especially not their online editions, where most of Josephine’s rantings were to be found.

  She was the daughter of Sir Peter Eaves, one of the longest-serving national newspaper editors in the country, and the late Hilary Winshaw, who had been famous, in her day, as both a newspaper columnist and a television executive. Hilary had died in 1991, when Josephine was only one year old, so she was not even a distant memory to her daughter. And yet Josephine had grown up fascinated by her mother’s legacy. Her father, on the rare occasions when they had had a real conversation, was forever telling her that Hilary had been a genius among columnists, a superstar, a woman capable of taking the most minor event in public life and spinning from it 1,000 words of pure energizing vitriol. Not only that, but she had belonged to one of the most influential British families of the postwar era, of which Josephine, now, was the only direct descendant. No wonder that, from a very early age, she had carried with her a burdensome sense of her own importance.

  The teenage Josephine had struggled to reconcile this sense of importance with a contradictory awareness that, as far as her father was concerned, she barely mattered at all. With the violent and premature death of his wife, Sir Peter had lost all interest in family life – if indeed he had ever had any. Increasingly, he lived at the offices of his newspaper (in which he had installed a comfortable bedroom right next to his own office) and rarely visite
d his Kensington home, in the spacious confines of which Josephine grew up, alone, under the desultory supervision of a series of nannies. A fiercely intelligent, articulate girl, she made smooth progress through London’s private education system – Glendower, followed by Godolphin and Latimer – before proceeding to Cambridge, where she graduated with first-class honours in art history.

  Along the way, however, she made few friends. Those who tried to get close to her found her both conceited and needy. She had a tendency to make snap judgements about people, and developed a reputation for wounding and gratuitous put-downs. In this respect, at least, she was following in the footsteps of her father, who was well known for his bruising economy with words (and occasionally, after one too many brandies at the Garrick, his fists). One memory stood out in particular, for Josephine. During the school holidays, aged about thirteen or fourteen, she once had to spend a few hours with him at the newspaper, childcare arrangements for that day having fallen through at the last minute. She sat in on one of the editorial meetings and could remember vividly, for years afterwards, the way that each of the section editors, ranged around Sir Peter in a circle, had been obliged to pitch their story ideas to him. To each one, in turn – often before they had even finished speaking – Sir Peter had spat out his instant verdict: ‘Crap.’ ‘Bollocks.’ ‘Fucking awful.’ ‘Shit.’ ‘Bollocks – nobody’s interested in that fuckwit.’ ‘Great – we need an excuse to shaft that cunt.’ And so on. It had been an awe-inspiring lesson in editorial procedure which had increased her respect for her father a hundredfold, and made her more desperate than ever to gain his attention.