“I’ve been promoted,” he said.
“That was fast. Does this mean you’ve solved the murder?”
“They had me in uniform for a while. Now I’m back on the team. It’s a new initiative meant to give us broader experience working with the public.”
Right. I wondered if he’d pissed someone off, or broken some rule, or both. Been spotted rifling through the drug locker or caught fixing parking tickets—either of which, I realized, would mean he was off the force for a good long while, if not serving time somewhere at Her Majesty’s pleasure. And so far as I knew, they didn’t put you back in uniform and send you out on patrol and then change their minds. The whole thing was odd. But surely whatever his misdeed, it had been something petty.
Unless being on patrol had been some undercover thing.
Whatever it was, I was sure he had not rushed over to my house wearing his awful tie to share it with me. He wasn’t particularly welcome at that moment. I’d told him what I could tell him, at least for the time being. When I was ready, I planned to spoon-feed him some tidbits.
His training showed in his every move. He walked over to the window overlooking the back garden and the river as if admiring the view, but my sense was that he was casing the joint—checking out the view from my place into Anna’s back garden. He then planted himself in the middle of the living room, where he carried out some sort of visual appraisal, hands on hips and biceps flexing. The bookshelves seemed to hold a particular fascination for him, but the contents were as blameless as could be: A collection of leather-bound classics imported from Will’s ancestral home. A stack of Country Life magazines. Gideon’s unread book on the Middle East.
I had read an article not long before about how you could count the number of civilians killed by British police forces on one hand, while all across America the police seemed to be on a crime spree of their very own. The article explained that firearms were not handed out in the UK to anyone who thought they might make a good cop; instead there was a rigorous vetting procedure that included psychological testing, along with plenty of time spent just walking the streets unarmed, learning to deal with people rather than thinking largely in terms of self-defense.
Milo turned and gave me a fleeting grin of—what? Reassurance, I guess. He never in all the time I knew him—and I came to know him well—looked like he might lose it with me, or as if he were capable of that. This self-possessed calm seemed inborn, as much a part of him as his hair color, while training had further drilled into him that he was there to help people get themselves sorted, not to punish them senseless. If he had to take some guy down, someone violently drunk or strung out on drugs, he’d probably apologize first, like Colin Firth.
I could tell he thought I was cute, but honestly? I didn’t need the complication.
I indicated a chair for him at the breakfast bar and offered him coffee.
As I put the cup and saucer before him he peered at my face and asked, “When are you going to tell me what happened to your eye?”
I put up a hand to where a shiner of moderate proportions had begun to glow. I would later successfully hide it with one of Rashima’s miracle concealers.
“I ran into a door,” I said, and I didn’t plan to elaborate. Not even if he promised to burn the tie. Off his look, I added, “Really. I did.” To change the subject, I said, “To what do I owe the honor?”
“Actually, there’s been a complaint.”
“There’s been a complaint,” I repeated woodenly, although I could guess.
“Colin Livingstone.”
“MP,” I said. “Don’t forget the MP. He loves titles. On that topic, Sergeant, do you have a first name?”
He hesitated, clearly weighing whether becoming too chummy with a witness in an investigation was a good idea. The police couldn’t get rid of helpful citizens and grieving families once that door was opened. “It’s Andrei,” he said. “But everyone calls me Milo. My parents were Russian. They immigrated here.”
Ah. That might explain why Milo struck me as sympathetic. He was only one generation away from being a foreigner himself.
“I see.”
“Mr. Livingstone says he feels you’ve harassed him.” Milo leaned back in the chair and reached for his coffee cup. The wooden slats made a creaking sound against his weight, just as they did when Will sat there. I had a wild image of the chair collapsing and Milo disappearing from sight like Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff.
So Colin had ratted me out, a good and fast offense being the best defense. I should have known. This was a man who thrived on backroom politics. He would try to silence me by intimidation. But I wasn’t intimidated, not by a long shot. In fact I felt he might have played into my hands.
“Did he tell you about his relationship with the victim?” I asked. “With Anna?”
“He did. He made a clean breast of things. Said he wanted it all out in the open, nothing to hide, etc.”
“Did you believe him?”
“It’s neither here nor there if I believed him or not. You are playing a very dangerous game, Mrs. White. He may be innocent. He may be guilty. But he’s already brought you into a situation that doesn’t involve you. And that part is dangerous. For you.”
I would maintain that I brought myself in with my visit to Colin, but I pretended not to see Milo’s point.
“What do you mean, doesn’t involve me? I found her body. Anna was my friend. Sort of. She was my friendly neighbor. And her living—having lived next door means I might be in danger from whoever did this. A sort of double whammy of involvement. So I’m sorry if Mr. Livingstone, MP, doesn’t like it but I don’t like my neighbors being strangled, either.”
Milo looked at me a very long time. I couldn’t read what was in his eyes. Compassion? Concern? Exasperation? All those. And suspicion: What was I up to?
“He doesn’t have an alibi, you know,” I said. “Not really.” I told him about the school visit.
Milo took out his notebook and made a show of writing that down. But he must have known about that already, if Colin had indeed bared his soul to him. He was probably just jotting down a reminder to buy aspirin.
“We’ve got only his word for it that he and Anna were no longer a thing,” I said.
“We?”
“Maybe she was trying to shake him off. She and Alfie had a bit of an unconventional relationship, you know. Maybe Colin was in love and thought she would leave Alfie for him. But lots of people probably thought that.”
“Lots of people?”
“Anna got around—anyone can tell you that. She was a highly sexed woman married to an invalid. The suspects here are without end. And that’s just the male suspects.”
“I can see you’ve given this some thought.”
“It’s the new sport in Weycombe,” I said. “A sort of ‘pin the tail on the donkey’ guessing game. I used to see her with the pool guy, you know. But that was years ago.”
“The pool guy?”
“Yes, the guy from the pool cleaning service. I could see them from the first floor window at the back. I mean, I’d see them go into the pool house and I wouldn’t see them come out again for ages. Could mean nothing, of course.”
“Maybe they were just straightening out the hoses.”
I couldn’t quite believe he’d said that. I breezed on. “By the way, I’ve remembered something from that morning.”
“Oh?” He drank coffee with his left hand while his biro hovered over the notebook.
“Something about the man I saw in the distance. He looked like he might be a vagrant—shabby clothes and shaggy hair and beard, as I said. He also walked with a pronounced limp—there was something wrong with his right leg. I would bet it wasn’t an old polo injury.”
“How old would you say this individual was?”
“He might have been forty. Fifty. It’s h
ard to tell with someone like that. A beard hides a lot. And it was at a distance.”
“It sounds like Roger. We’ll look into it.”
“I just saw him in the vicinity,” I said firmly. “I didn’t see him do anything.”
“Got it.”
“I’ve seen him before, in fact. In the village. He seems to be like the token poor person.”
That made Milo laugh; it was a good, rumbling laugh that made me like him more. I pushed the plate of biscuits I’d unearthed from the cupboard closer to his reach.
“Got it,” he repeated. “It’s Roger. He’s a schizophrenic and he probably should not be out on his own. But so far as we’ve ever known, he’s harmless. He comes to us all the time to report angels are living inside the post box. He refuses treatment, if there’s any to be had. Won’t go into the shelter, not willingly, even when it’s cold; he says they rip him off, steal his kit. The system’s broken as far as people like Roger are concerned.”
“It’s the same back home. Anyway, I thought you should know.”
“Where was home, again?”
“You’d never have heard of it. Augustus, Maine. It’s in the rural part of the state. Way up north. Past Bangor.”
“Ah. Stephen King,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Stephen King.” Why does everyone assume everyone who has ever been in Maine knows Stephen King? Like he sits on a bench in front of the local bait-and-tackle store whittling ducks and swapping jokes with toothless yokels all day long. Assume, while they’re at it, that he’s the only writer the US ever produced, apart from Mark Twain. Because Maine’s population is so low-density, I guess. Where I had lived, no question, you could disappear forever into the forest and the trees and never be found. I did love that about it: the loneliness, the rugged individualism that was the hallmark of the place. In my memory, it was a perfect place to grow up, wild and free and anonymous. But you could go quite, quite mad living there as an adult, and if you wanted to make anything of yourself, as I did, you had to get out. You first had to have the smarts that would carry you out on the wings of a scholarship to a high-toned place where, if you couldn’t read a menu in French, you were considered unfit to join the human race. But I got through that; I excelled. I showed them all. Didn’t I just?
Milo wrote down my date and place of birth, which was Kansas. I had to spell it for him, seeing him start off with a “C.” His jotting all this down kind of freaked me out. What was he going to do, put out a request for information on me through Interpol? Did Anna’s death really rate that sort of international scope? Well, good luck finding anything of interest; I was clean as a whistle apart from some traffic citations, but still, it was disconcerting to be reminded I was in the thick of a murder investigation and likely to remain there until they made a good arrest for this.
“Will I have to testify?” I asked him. “When you find the guy, I mean.”
“Probably,” he said. “Let’s worry about that when it happens, all right?”
His manner was so Mayberry reassuring, so calm and matter-of-fact. Murder was just a routine disruption like a traffic jam, nothing to worry about. I was beginning to see why they were likely fast-tracking this guy, despite the little detour to patrol. His good looks probably didn’t hurt, either. I mean, when you think about it, you don’t want some ferrety-looking creep covered in hair and tattoos investigating crimes for you. You want Superman. As mentioned, Milo was heaven-sent as far as the police’s public relations department was concerned, and might one day be great in front of the TV cameras reassuring the Great British Public about whatever it was they needed reassuring about. This was, you may recall, my job in my former life. Sizing up the talent not just for their expertise but even more for the way they came across. Did they seem trustworthy? Believable? Like someone you would want to have in your living room for an extended visit? Go on vacation with; climb a mountain with? If they were nervous in front of the camera it was not necessarily a deal-breaker, so long as they didn’t positively collapse with fear, of course. Anyone could be coached. But my assessment was that Milo would, in a self-guided sort of way, go far. He would regard the camera as just another challenge to overcome, another skill to master. No problem.
Curious, and seeing no reason not to ask, I said, “Where is your boss today?”
“DCI Attwater lets me out on my own once in a while. When she thinks it’s a routine visit.”
Something in his voice made me ask. “And isn’t it? Routine, I mean?”
He didn’t answer directly. In fact, I wasn’t sure what unasked question he was answering when he said, “Attwater isn’t as dumb as she acts. I wouldn’t underestimate her.”
“Meaning what?”
“She comes across as not the brightest, but they don’t promote dummies to her position. Not often.”
“Sure. Okay.” Why tell me this?
“What makes you think Anna was strangled?” he asked. His deep voice was casual, melodious, but I didn’t think the question was casual. It was a reminder that Milo, while he might be officious, was also not as dumb as he seemed, and a sign that this was not the casual drop-in for a chat he’d led me to believe.
“Anyone could tell. From her eyes, the way they were, you know … bulging. Why?”
“You could see that through the trees?”
“I went a bit down the slope so I could peer over but yes, I had a clear view of her face through the trees. Why?” I was getting a bit het up at this point, as my grandmother would have said. Exactly what was he implying? “I thought I saw red marks on her neck. And those eyes … God. Those eyes … I mean, I just assumed.”
“Okay, that adds up,” he said evenly. They could have saved all the money they’d wasted on the autopsy. “Just checking. We have to cover every angle.”
I thought about taking his coffee away from him. All thoughts of providing more biscuits for this little coffee klatch vanished, too.
“Good,” I said. “I’m so glad you’re being thorough.”
29
When the BBC handed me my walking papers, I went to a therapist, a service provided by the company, which practiced only the best and most advanced Human Resource techniques. I said this already, right? If Rashima’s husband hadn’t endorsed her I wouldn’t have bothered.
I’d been down this road before and I was getting used to the process. Maybe everyone in Recession World was. As my newspaper back home was slowly dying, they had brought in professional vultures to sit by the windows and talk ever-larger groups of people out of jumping whenever more layoffs were announced. Private counseling was offered to those who wanted it and golden parachutes were offered to those who didn’t deserve it. We had one jumper in all that time, actually an overdose, a hyper girl in marketing who, in turned out, was only pretending to be engaged to some made-up boyfriend or other because she thought it made her seem more stable or more interesting or something. That was one of the worst stories ever, and her death (which in fact was mourned by no one, her entire family having been lost in some foreign war or another) amped up the already rampant paranoia of the place.
I survived several rounds of layoffs at that paper before it was at last my turn on the wheel of fortune. Toward the end I stopped believing, as we were told repeatedly, that these group therapy sessions were part of the corporation’s deep paternal concern for its employees. By then I had stopped believing in a lot of things, and only the youngest employees were dumb enough to believe they had a sort of second family in the corporation, where we celebrated diversity on a daily basis. Anyway, the counseling was meant as a safety valve in the case of employees who were ready to explode—the therapists served as a sort of early warning detection system in the cases where someone left destitute might be at home sharpening the knives with a former supervisor’s fat neck in mind.
Anyway, I went to the three BBC sessions. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to ma
intain a semblance of normalcy, to board the train to visit an office in the city before returning home to the hopeless task of finding a job comparable in pay and prestige to the one I’d lost. I was sensible enough to realize how lucky I was—thanks to Will, I wasn’t destitute. He was not a make-believe husband, and I had a roof over my head and food in the fridge. And several business suits dry-cleaned and ready to wear to interviews, should there be any of those. To keep busy I developed hobbies: I started to take more interest in the kitchen arts, in baking pies and cakes and experimenting with gourmet meals, as a way to compensate for being at home all day and not bringing home the bacon. To make it up to Will. To stop what soon became his harping on the subject. I began to frequent the local kitchen shop, buying lemon squeezers and other gadgets I never knew I needed. I ended up with three types of garlic press.
As it turned out, Will was less interested in my cooking than in my monthly paycheck, which came as a huge surprise to me. Didn’t all men secretly want someone like our neighbor Heather waiting for them at home? Well, maybe not someone like Heather, but someone whose only focus in life was cooking and sewing and in general tending to her man’s needs, especially in the bedroom? But it was about this time his interest in sex became sporadic, too.
All this was especially galling because, in the very back of my mind, with the encouragement of the therapist, I’d started to think of the layoff as a blessing in disguise. We could try for that baby now. No pressure, lots of time. All I needed was a willing partner. I had even, in an idle moment, visited a few baby naming sites; I was thinking Natalie White had a nice ring to it. But something told me not to mention that plan to Will just yet.
The name of the therapist whose job it was to Marie Kondo the closets of my mind was Dr. Dray. I thought of her as Dr. Dre: I would settle into the chair in her office and put on earphones, metaphorically speaking. I usually left her presence with the sense of a burden shared and lightened. I never got around to telling her about my plans to add to my family, somehow, but she had a calming demeanor and I left feeling that things would be all right. The feeling lasted about an hour and then it wore off, like painkillers, and I was again left alone with myself.
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