‘This carer seems very involved. What’s her story?’
That’s the trouble with Donna; she doesn’t miss much.
‘She’s called Natalka Kolisnyk and she’s Ukrainian,’ says Harbinder. ‘I’ve looked into her background. She’s been working for the care company for two years and has a mother back in Ukraine. Natalka told me that she’d been involved in some cryptocurrency fraud and she thought that some Ukrainian heavies might be after her.’
‘Do you believe her or is she a bit of a nutcase?’
Harbinder doesn’t look at Neil. She is honestly trying to think. ‘I think she’s genuinely scared,’ she says, ‘but she could just be dramatising things. I don’t know why she went dashing off to Aberdeen like that. She sent me this selfie today.’ She shows her phone to Donna who scrolls back through the texts, frowning.
‘She seems very pally with you,’ she says. ‘Be careful.’
Neil unexpectedly comes to Harbinder’s aid. ‘Natalka’s with her boyfriend and some old bloke who knew Peggy. The three of them are just on some sort of road-trip,’ he says. ‘We haven’t allowed ourselves to become distracted.’
‘That’s good,’ says Donna. ‘For now, let’s concentrate on Dex Challoner. A well-known writer murdered in his own home. There’s lots of press interest and we need to get a result. Look again into his movements on the night before the murder. Have we got his phone records?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Get onto the provider. There’s usually a clue in the texts. Remember his phone was on the sofa beside him when he died.’
Harbinder goes back to her desk to chase the phone provider but, as she does so, she sees an email from Sandy, the graphologist.
I’ve managed to transcribe most of the Joan letters, but there are a few gaps, here and there. Hope this helps.
She has sent the letters as a document attached to the email.
Dear Peggy,
How lovely to hear from you. I’m glad the move to Shoreham is working out. It’s hard to time these things right, isn’t it? But you are still healthy and can enjoy the [illegible, possibly ‘sea’] and the walks. I’m finding walking a little difficult these days. Hazel (Jason’s wife) says I need to lose weight. Bloody cheek! I’m glad you’ve found congenial friends though. Fancy Weronika knowing about [illegible]. There aren’t many of us left.
Much love
Joan
Dear Peggy,
I’m sorry about Weronika. You must miss her. Surely you can’t [illegible] your carer? Can you send me a list of books, some good old-fashioned detective stories. I need something to keep my brain alive. I can’t even do the quick crossword these days, let alone the cryptic.
Much love
Joan
Dear Peggy,
Edwin sounds fun. I wish I had a neighbour like him. Days, weeks, go by sometimes without me seeing anyone. Don’t want to be a [illegible—misery guts?] but it gets me down sometimes. Jason comes when he can but he’s very busy at work. Hazel says I should have carers in but I don’t fancy it somehow. Did you say you were thinking of employing carers? How I wish I was [illegible]. They knew how to live!
Much love
Joan
Dear Peggy,
It’s so funny, I was thinking about the boys only the other day. Fancy you running into one of them! What a time that was! Can you believe that we took them to the Bolshoi that night as if nothing had happened? Do you know what happened to the others? I’ve always been afraid that they ended up in prison after all. The Crimean situation is so terrible. I’ve always felt that Putin was [illegible]. Jason says that I don’t understand about politics but he’s a kulak, just like your Nigel. Have you read [illegible]. Fascinating insights, I thought.
Much love
Joan
Dear Peggy,
Sorry for the delay in writing. I’ve been finding it hard to concentrate somehow. I’m sure Jason thinks it’s Alzhimers (sp?). He can’t wait to put me in a home and forget about me. I wish I could see you again. What fun we had.
Much love
Joan
The first letter is dated June 2006, the last October 2015. They strike Harbinder as incredibly poignant. ‘I wish I could see you again.’ But the two old friends never had met again. The unpleasant-sounding Jason was right; Joan did have Alzheimer’s. And he had put her in a home and, if he hasn’t forgotten her, he certainly doesn’t visit very often. Harbinder thinks of the shrunken woman in the orange cardigan. It’s hard to imagine her exclaiming ‘Bloody cheek!’, doing the crossword or talking about the Crimean situation, yet she had once done all this, and more.
The gaps are annoying. Surely you can’t . . . your carer? How I wish I was . . . They knew how to live! Sandy has sent scans of the original letters and Harbinder squints at them now. Could one of the words be Russian? How I wish I was Russian. They knew how to live!
But the big revelation is surely that Peggy met one of the students whom she and Joan had helped in Russia. Surely this is what she means about Peggy meeting one of the ‘boys’? When was the Russian trip? Sally had said that Peggy was in her seventies at the time, which puts it between 1998 and 2008. Peggy must have moved into Seaview Court just before 2006. Edwin, she thinks, arrived about six years later. The letter about meeting one of the boys is dated 2014, which must mean that he got in touch four years before Peggy died and maybe as much as sixteen years after the trip.
The mention of Weronika is interesting too, although Joan mentioned congenial friends, in the plural. What did Peggy say to Maria? That Weronika’s death was suspicious? Are there any clues in the letter?
‘What are you peering at?’ Neil has made one of his surprisingly soundless entrances.
‘The letters from Joan to Peggy. The ones we found in Peggy’s desk. Sandy’s transcribed them. Have a look.’ She shifts her chair back so Neil can see.
He reads quickly. ‘Bloody hell,’ he says, ‘poor old Joanie.’
‘Yes.’
‘She was getting Alzheimer’s. No wonder she couldn’t do the crossword. And Peggy did meet one of the Ukrainians again.’
‘Looks like it.’
Neil is still gazing at the screen. Harbinder wonders if he needs glasses. Then he says, ‘I wonder what this means. “There aren’t many of us left.” ’
He’s right, Harbinder has to admit. That is a significant line. And she has no idea what it means.
* * *
RATHER THAN GOING straight home, where she’ll probably be confronted with all sorts of domestic chores that somehow only a woman can do, she decides to call in on Clare. Harbinder met Clare Cassidy on a murder case last year. She’s head of English at a local comprehensive school (Harbinder’s old school, in fact) and is not, on paper, the type of person Harbinder would normally associate with. For one thing Clare is tall, thin and effortlessly elegant, for another she is going out with a Cambridge don and loves talking about books written by dead white men. But, somehow, they have become friends and Harbinder is also very fond of Clare’s teenage daughter, Georgie.
Clare, stylish even in sweatpants and an oversized jumper, greets Harbinder warmly. Georgie, who is watching TV in the sitting room, waves and Herbert, Clare’s lunatic dog, acts as if he hasn’t seen Harbinder for years and must compensate for this by running round in circles and barking shrilly.
‘Quiet, Herbert,’ says Clare. ‘Would you like a cup of tea or a glass of wine? Let’s go into the kitchen. Georgie’s busy watching Queer Eye. I think it’s one of her set texts for A Levels.’
Despite claiming that she is opposed to competitive exams, Georgie got a string of A stars, or 9s as they are now inexplicably known, for her GCSEs in the summer. She’s now at sixth-form college where she’s studying English with a woman who claims to be a white witch. Schools have certainly changed since Harbinder’s day.
Harbinder loves Clare’s kitchen. It’s all sleek lines and concealed lighting, unlike her parents’ house where, on top of everything, the
re’s something. They sit at the table overlooking the garden, which is also subtly spotlit, and drink red wine. Harbinder tells Clare about the case, aware that Donna probably wouldn’t approve.
‘I don’t expect you’ve read Dex Challoner,’ she says. ‘He’s not a Victorian with a beard.’
‘I love his stuff,’ says Clare. ‘I’m a big crime fiction fan. Wilkie Collins wrote detective stories. So did Dickens.’
‘If you say so.’
‘Have you got any idea who killed Dex?’
‘Not really. We’ve got a few leads but they’re all rather far-fetched. Literally far-fetched. Russia and Aberdeen.’
‘I love Scotland,’ says Clare, as Harbinder knew she would. Clare’s grandmother lives in Ullapool.
‘I might have to go up there,’ says Harbinder. ‘There’s a mad Ukrainian girl who keeps sending me texts.’
‘A girlfriend?’ says Clare.
‘No,’ says Harbinder.
‘I’d love to go if it wasn’t term time,’ says Clare. ‘I need a holiday. Work is mad at the moment.’
‘How can English teaching be hard work?’ says Harbinder. This is a joke between them. ‘Just tell them to read silently for half an hour.’
‘The students are fine,’ says Clare. ‘It’s everything else. Targets and tracking and triangulation.’
‘Alliteration,’ says Harbinder. ‘Things must be bad.’ She occasionally likes to remind Clare that she’s not totally illiterate.
‘Have you ever read J. D. Monroe?’ she asks. ‘She wrote a book called You Made Me Do it.’
‘I don’t think so,’ says Clare. ‘Doesn’t sound my sort of thing.’
‘What about Lance Foster, Laocoön?’
‘I’ve read that. I thought it was brilliant. A bit pretentious, but brilliant.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘It’s about a man with locked-in syndrome, you know, where you’re conscious but you can’t move at all. He knows that someone has tried to kill him but he doesn’t know who. Eventually he works it out but he can’t stop the person trying again and succeeding.’
‘So he dies in the end?’
‘The ending is ambiguous but I think so.’
‘It sounds a bundle of laughs.’
‘It’s not very jolly, no. Why are you asking? Is there a link with Dex Challoner?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Harbinder. She’s thinking of Natalka’s text. Met Lance Foster. He had postcard too. Plot thickens!
* * *
WHEN HARBINDER FINALLY arrives at her parents’ house, a woman in a vaguely nurse-like uniform is letting herself out.
‘Can I help you?’ says Harbinder, hearing the officious note in her own voice.
‘Oh, hi. I’m Vicky. Maria can’t make it today so she asked me to pop in on your mum.’
‘Very kind of you,’ says Harbinder. She thinks that Maria should have cleared it with her first.
Vicky clicks to open her car door. ‘Your mum’s fine,’ she says, ‘but she’s doing too much. I caught her vacuuming today. I told her to leave that to me.’
‘Thank you,’ says Harbinder. She’s pretty sure that vacuuming is not one of Vicky’s appointed tasks. Or Maria’s, come to that. She suspects that it might become her job in the near future.
Inside, her mother is preparing supper. Her father is reading the paper. Sultan is lying at his feet like a hearthrug.
‘Who’s in the shop?’ asks Harbinder.
‘Kush,’ says her father. ‘How’s my little girl?’
‘Catching a murderer,’ says Harbinder, although the murderer is far from caught. She tells her mum to sit down and takes over the food preparation, with only slightly bad grace.
‘Leave that to me,’ says Deepak. ‘You go and have a shower. You’ve had a hard day.’
Deepak thinks that a shower is the answer to everything. He has about five a day. Harbinder almost refuses, just for the sake of looking martyred, but suddenly she craves the hot, steamy water.
‘OK,’ she says and heads up to her bedroom. When she moved back in with her parents, the best thing was inheriting the second-largest bedroom with en-suite bathroom. She showers and then lies on the bed wrapped in a towel to play a few restorative games of Panda Pop. It’s only then that she realises that her phone is still switched off.
There are three messages to call Donna. She knows it’s important as soon as she hears her boss’s voice. ‘I’ve had a call from the Aberdeen police,’ says Donna. ‘Lance Foster is dead. Looks like he may have been murdered. They think there could be a link with Dex Challoner. Anyway, your presence is requested. The DI asked for you by name.’ Donna sounds quite impressed.
* * *
HARBINDER FLIES FROM Shoreham Airport at ten p.m. ‘There are always flights to Aberdeen,’ Donna told her. ‘It’s because of the oil rigs or something.’ Shoreham, officially now called Brighton City Airport, is a pretty art deco–style building which doesn’t look, from the outside, as if it could possibly be concerned with anything as mundane as air travel. But the woman at security tells Harbinder that it’s actually very busy. ‘It’s not just the riggers. We have lots of essential workers coming through here. Doctors, nurses, fire-fighters, police.’ She glances at Harbinder’s warrant card but is too discreet to say more.
Harbinder is rather startled to see that her plane actually has propellers but it’s a smooth flight and she arrives in Aberdeen at ten minutes to midnight. She feels rather lost when she emerges into the rain. Donna told her to go straight to her hotel (a Travelodge, natch) and start the investigations in the morning but how does she get there? She can’t see a taxi rank and maybe they’re called something different in Scotland. Should she save police funds and get a bus? But they might not be running at this time of the night. She stands, holding her bag, feeling unpleasantly at a loss.
‘Harbinder!’
She turns. A man is calling from a police car. He looks oddly familiar and, as she gets closer, the features slide into focus. Red hair, dark eyes, aquiline nose.
‘Jim!’ She’d met Sergeant Jim Harris last year, when they’d both been on the track of a killer. She’d thought he was based in Ullapool though.
‘I’ve moved to Aberdeen,’ he tells her, as they drive away from the airport. ‘Promotion. It’s DI Harris now.’ The penny drops. This is the DI Donna mentioned.
‘Congratulations,’ says Harbinder, happy for him yet she feels a familiar sour taste in her mouth. When is she going to become DI Kaur? She passed the inspector’s exam earlier in the year but there are no vacancies in West Sussex. Maybe she should move.
‘Tell me about Lance Foster,’ she says.
‘Lance Foster, aged fifty-five, found dead in his hotel room. We’re treating it as suspicious.’
‘Who found him?’ says Harbinder, although she thinks she can guess the answer.
‘Well, this is the interesting thing. He was found by a very odd trio who claim to be friends of yours. They say they’d arranged to meet Lance for a drink in the bar. When he didn’t turn up, they went to his room to find him.’
‘Natalka Kolisnyk, Benedict Cole and Edwin Fitzgerald,’ says Harbinder.
Jim shoots her a sidelong glance. ‘Aye. Want to tell me where you fit into all this? I couldn’t believe it when your name came up.’
Harbinder sighs. ‘It’s a long story.’
She tells him about Dex and Peggy and the mysterious postcards. She tells him about Joan Tate and the Ukrainian students. She tells him about Natalka’s fears and Benedict’s knowledge of out-of-print books. The unfamiliar streets slide past, the rain reflected in the car’s headlights. Harbinder stops speaking just as Jim parks in front of the Travelodge.
‘Bloody hell,’ he says. ‘It’s like an episode of Taggart.’
Harbinder wonders if this is a joke. She’s too tired to tell.
‘I’ve set up an incident room at the hotel,’ says Jim. ‘See you there tomorrow at nine.’
‘OK,’ says Ha
rbinder. ‘Thanks for the lift.’
She checks in, takes the lift to the third floor, finds her room, lies down on her bed and falls asleep almost immediately.
27
Harbinder
Safe House
HARBINDER IS TUCKING into the full Scottish when Benedict appears in the dining area.
‘Morning, Benedict,’ says Harbinder.
‘Harbinder! DS Kaur, I mean.’ Benedict looks very surprised to see her. He takes off his glasses and polishes them as if it were their fault that she has suddenly appeared in front of them.
‘I hear you’ve been having an exciting time,’ says Harbinder.
‘I don’t know if you’d call it exciting,’ says Benedict. He seems to have recovered his self-possession and goes to the counter to fill his plate before joining her at the table.
‘Why are you here?’ he says. Then, perhaps realising that this doesn’t sound very polite, he says, ‘Did DI Harris . . . ?’
‘Jim sent for me,’ says Harbinder. ‘We worked together on another case.’
‘I thought he seemed to recognise your name.’
‘Well, it was you who told him about the Dex Challoner link,’ says Harbinder. ‘Jim got in touch with my boss and asked if I could help on this case. I flew up last night. From Shoreham.’
‘From that little airport?’
‘Yes. My plane had actual propellers. It was terrifying.’
There’s a short silence. Harbinder thinks that Benedict looks different somehow, more assured, despite the events of the last twenty-four hours. She wonders if Natalka is about to make an appearance. Will she be in her cheery, detective mode or will she be dramatising Lance’s death, making it all about her?
It’s Benedict who speaks first. ‘Does DI Harris . . . goodness, it’s hard to think of him as Jim . . . think that Lance was murdered?’
The Postscript Murders Page 20