Killed in the Fog
Page 10
Bristow looked tired, frustrated, and depressed. “We’ll do that later. Right now, how about the two of you coming to lift a couple of pints with me?”
I was inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth, but Roxanne raised her eyes to heaven and said, “Great, let’s get out of here.”
12
“He’s terrific, he’s magnific,
“He’s the strongest, he’s the bravest, he’s the best!”
Theme song
Danger Mouse, Thames TV
BRISTOW BROUGHT US TO a place not far from the morgue. I expected it to be called the Formaldehyde and Scalpel or something like that, but it turned out to be the Green Man, like at least five hundred eighty-seven other pubs in London, to say nothing of the rest of England.
I suppose, though, if a significant proportion of the clientele staggered in there for fortification after a session at the morgue, the name could have a certain appropriateness for this particular establishment that the others lacked.
At that, this was an okay place. A lot of pubs have been Americanized, offering English approximations of pizza and nachos, with jukeboxes blaring. This place, though, retained the kind of Englishness that Americans come to England to see in the first place and fail to find, because so much of British culture is a mad scramble to catch up with U.S. culture of three years ago.
Mostly, when a tourist finds something that seems English through and through, it’s something that’s been carefully calculated to be that way expressly to catch the tourist trade.
But tourists don’t go to Battersea (and most of them don’t go to Barnes, come to that), and the Green Man was simply what it was—an English pub with an established clientele, one that didn’t have to struggle to be hip.
So there was no jukebox, just a small TV over the bar showing soccer highlights. No pizza, just a platter of Scotch eggs down one end of the bar.
A Scotch egg is a hard-boiled egg that is shelled, coated in sausage meat, dipped in the toxic orange breadcrumbs they use in England, and then fried. They really are remarkable-looking constructions. Bristow grabbed one as we walked in, yelled, “Hey, Tel” to the barman and showed it to him, then led us to a table in the back.
“Missed my dinner,” he said, and took half the thing in one bite.
“Jesus,” Roxanne breathed and turned her head away.
Bristow seemed genuinely sorry. “Oh, goodness, miss, I didn’t realize.” He stuffed the rest of the thing in his mouth.
“All right,” he said, still chewing. “All gone now.”
Just about the time Rox decided it was safe to look again, a handsome, hennaed, middle-aged woman proudly wearing a low-cut blouse came to the table. She kissed Bristow on his bald spot, greeted us with a big smile, and asked for orders.
Bristow asked for a pint of Youngs, and I went along with him.
“How about you, love?” she asked Rox.
“Lemonade, please,” Rox ordered. In Europe, “lemonade” means an extremely sweet carbonated beverage.
“Actually, Miss,” Bristow said, being helpful, “after your visit, you might want something a bit stronger.”
Roxanne doesn’t drink. She’s convinced that having been hooked on drugs once, she’s a walking invitation to another addiction. She may even be right. She can get pretty testy when people urge her to do something she doesn’t want to, but she said, “Lemonade will be fine,” and Bristow and the barmaid left her alone.
The pleasant clatter and chatter of a bunch of guys playing skittles in the open area of the pub came to us, and I took a deep breath. This was turning out okay on a night that had started out with my thinking I was going to be arrested again. Instead, I’d gone from Christieland to Edgar Wallaceland with only a brief stop at reality in between.
Soon our drinks came. Roxanne sipped her lemonade (it’s the only way you can drink the stuff) and Bristow and I took long pulls at our nutty brown ale.
Then Bristow put his glass down on the table, sighed mightily, and muttered, “Oh, bloody ’ell.”
I tried in vain to stifle a laugh. That was the other kind of show you were likely to tune in on when you switched on British TV at random—a bunch of people sitting around a pub, looking into their ale and saying, “Bloody ’ell, bloody ’ell.”
“This is funny to you, is it?”
“Not really,” I said. “No disrespect meant. It was just something I thought of. It would take too long to explain.”
“I believe you, Cobb,” he said. “When I first met you I had a premonition that nothing about you would be easy to explain. Come on, drink up. You should be celebrating.”
“I’m completely off the hook, I take it.”
“Completely. A bobby found our friend huddled in a doorway of an abandoned shop not far from the London Bridge tube station. Nudged him to move him along, saw the bullet holes when he fell over. He’d been killed somewhere else and brought, you see.”
“Who was it?”
“Turned out to be a hood named Winston Blake. Twenty-four years old, plenty of form. Colleague of mine in Brixton who knew him said he’d always known our Winston would wind up on one end of a murder or the other. Turned out to be both.”
“Solid?”
“Solid as can be. He was found with murder weapon on him, stuck in his back pocket. And the nitric-acid test showed that he had fired a gun recently.”
I saw loopholes.
“I may be silly for pointing this out, but that’s not airtight. It doesn’t prove he fired the murder weapon at Aliou—just that he fired something. The murder weapon might have been planted on him later.”
Bristow took a long swallow of bitter. It was the first time I’d ever seen him enjoy anything. “Might have been,” he conceded, “but I know bloody well that you didn’t do it, don’t I? About the time Winston was getting his American sporting kit ventilated, you were in the nick, telling me what a right ruddy bastard I am. And Miss Schick was at home, having gone straight there after showing up on Lady Arking’s doorstep.”
“You had her followed? I didn’t even know you knew about her until this morning.”
“Ah, but that’s because you didn’t know she stood on the pavement after the wagon had taken you off for five minutes screaming curses at my men like a whole village full of fishwives.”
Roxanne sipped her lemonade and looked very demure. “I was upset,” she said.
“So I am off the hook,” I said. Not that I had been on too securely at any point, but there is a difference between running around loose because the cops don’t think they have enough evidence, and being loose because they do have enough evidence, and the evidence says you didn’t do it.
“Right,” Bristow said. “So celebrate.”
I lifted my glass and drank. It was damn good beer.
“You said Winston got his American sports kit ventilated. Literally? He was still wearing it when he was found?”
“Exactly as you described him,” Bristow said. Then he frowned. “You’re an American. Why do you think that bloody stuff is so popular here? It’s not like the sports themselves are, just the kit of the American teams.”
“Integrity,” I said.
“Integrity? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean that if you want a souvenir of the Orlando Magic, God knows why, it has ‘Magic’ written on it. If you buy something representing the Kansas City Chiefs, you get an arrowhead symbol. If you try to buy a Chelsea football jersey, it’s got the name of some goddamn Dutch beer plastered across it, or some Japanese TV, I forget which. It’s bad enough for the players to be renting out their chests as billboards. For a fan, I think it would be downright embarrassing.”
“Well, it’s a thought. I never thought I’d find an American TV executive denouncing commercialism.”
“I’m not denouncing commercialism. I love commercialism. I’m saying get it right. A sports team is basically selling its fans identity and permanence. It’s more like a religion than anything else. Th
e identity of the team has to be paramount. Instead of companies paying the teams to advertise the product, in the States the teams charge companies for the privilege of identifying themselves with it. The New York Yankees don’t have CANON plastered across their chests, but Canon does promote itself as ‘the official camera of the New York Yankees.’ See the difference?”
Bristow was sitting there with his mouth slightly open. I was afraid I’d lost him.
“So you’re a philosopher, too; then,” he said. “Miss Schick, I think you ought to know you’ve linked yourself up with a truly amazing man.”
Roxanne twinkled. “He’s got possibilities,” she said.
“More than possibilities. I’ve spent a lot of time with the phone to my earhole over the last twenty-four hours, most of it to New York, and I wouldn’t mind facing St. Peter with the sort of recommendations he’s gotten.”
He put his hand on his heart. “Honestly, Miss. To hear the New York Police Department tell it, he’s a cross between Sherlock Holmes, Abraham Lincoln, and John Wayne, he has that much brains, virtue, and courage. Good to his mum, too, his secretary tells me.”
This was getting embarrassing.
“Ex-secretary,” I said.
Bristow ignored me. “Matthew Cobb,” he pronounced, “is apparently such a paragon, that I was right embarrassed in the knowledge that I had had him in the nick.”
He finished his pint (twenty ounces to a pint in England) and waved for another.
“He is, I can only conclude,” Bristow said, getting louder and louder as he went, “the absolute pinnacle of modern Anglo-American manhood—”
“He’s pretty good in bed, too,” Rox said.
I nearly sprayed bitter all over the bar.
“Roxanne!” I said.
She was laughing her head off.
“Did it, by God,” she was crowing. “Did it at last! All these years, and I’ve finally seen Cobb blush! You’re blushing, Cobb.”
“Lovely shade, too,” Bristow added admiringly. “Sort of a bridal-suite pink, wouldn’t you say?”
“I don’t know,” Rox said demurely. “I’ve never been inside a bridal suite.”
“For God’s sake,” I said, “let’s not get started on that again.”
At that, I was almost treated to a sight I suspected was every bit as rare as me blushing—Bristow laughing. The corners of his mouth definitely twitched a few times, but he managed to control himself.
“Quite right, quite right,” he said. “Can’t be going off on tangents, now, can we? Not when we’ve still a long list of the man’s virtues to catalog.”
“Don’t start that again, either,” I said.
“Oh well, if you insist. I was quite warming to the task, though.”
“Just cool off.”
“I will in just a moment, if you please, after I have made my original point.”
“There was a point? I mean, other than extracting as much Michael from me as possible?”
“Yes, there was a point. As before, I shall address my remarks to Miss Schick, who has a proper appreciation of them.”
I don’t think it was the beers that were making Bristow so ... so whatever he was. He’d only had one and a couple of swallows of the other. I had to accept he was just being playful, something I previously would have rated somewhere below Jane Fonda’s elevation to the papacy on a scale of likelihood. I wondered how many other undiscovered sides he was still hiding.
Bristow turned to Roxanne and said, “My point, my dear, is this: In the face of all the undeniable evidence of Cobb’s preeminence as a human being, a solver of crimes, and as other things too delicate for a stranger such as myself to mention, why is he so sodding awful to me?”
“What do you mean?” Rox asked.
“I’m off to the loo,” I said.
Roxanne took me by the hand. “Stick around,” she ordered. “This won’t be nearly so much fun if you’re not around to be embarrassed by it.”
“Here, we have a perfect little scenario. Little Winston, a noted thug, finally makes the big time, and does his first contract murder. But he picks his employer unwisely, and gets three bullets in the ticker instead of a roll of the liquid readies.”
“That’s how I read it,” I said. Bristow looked at me. “For what it’s worth,” I added.
“What’s wrong with that?” Rox asked.
Her he deigned to answer. “What is wrong with it is that it leaves one little question unanswered. I mean, we would still have an investigation on our hands, but it would be one set in the nice, wholesome squalor of the underworld. You and your class of friends would be completely out of it, and good riddance. If we had the answer to one little question.”
Roxanne asked him what the question was, but I already knew.
Bristow told her. “What was he doing with those sodding money orders?”
“I’d hoped you’d have forgotten about those,” I said.
“Oh, right, fat chance of that with the chief inspector on my arse every fifteen minutes about this case. Believe me, Jack Bristow isn’t likely to forget anything associated with this case.”
“Wait here,” I said.
“What? Oh, off to the loo, eh?”
“I’m going,” I said, “to make a phone call.”
I went to the loo first. I found more evidence for my conclusion that England has been declared the international testing ground for finding out how many different ways you flush a toilet. This particular one had a chrome knob in the middle of the tank lid, which you had to pull up, then plunge down, as if you were setting off a charge of dynamite. Made about the same amount of noise, too.
After that, I found a phone along the wall not far from the bathroom. There are almost as many kinds of pay phones in England as there are kinds of toilets, some of which do not accept coins but only deduct money from a prepurchased magnetic card.
This was the kind wherein if you didn’t push the little red button marked “A” after the other party answered the phone, your voice could not be heard and your money was wasted. I have spent the better part of several rainy mornings trying to figure out what purpose this procedure serves, but aside from being a way to make sure nobody too dumb to figure out the red button (me, for instance, the first three times) gets to make a phone call, I haven’t made a lot of progress on it.
The phone rang, three chirps, then two at a time. It took a while. I pictured Banbridge toddling along on old, sore legs to pick up the phone.
It was a true picture.
“Arking House,” Banbridge announced.
“Hello, Banbridge, this is—”
“Hello? Hello? Are you there?”
God damn it, I thought vehemently, and jabbed the stupid red button so hard I hurt my finger.
“Hello, Banbridge,” I tried again. “This is Matt Cobb. I’d like to talk to Lady Arking, please.”
“I’m not sure that will be possible, sir,” he said.
“Why not?” I demanded. I was pretty indignant about it, too. Here I was going out of my way to phone the woman when I really had no duty or obligation to, and a butler was giving me this crap.
Then I caught myself, and I decided I had been listening to Bristow a little too eagerly when he’d been laying it on so thick about how great I was.
My tone had been sharpish, but Banbridge was unruffled. “She may not be able to come to the phone, sir.”
“Will you find out, please?”
“I shall do so straightaway, sir.”
“Straightaway” used up the rest of my original twenty pence, and I fed more coins into the phone, hoping I had enough.
The little liquid crystal display near the red button informed me that I had used up another thirty pence listening to silence, when a voice came on the line.
“Mr. Cobb?”
“Ah, Lady Arking.” At last, I thought.
“The police are still here,” she informed me.
“Oh,” I said, “are they being impertinent?”
>
“I don’t think I could say that, in fairness,” she admitted reluctantly. “But they are being remarkably thorough to no purpose that is visible to me.”
Up until then, I hadn’t been completely sure how I felt about Pamela Arking, but at that moment, I decided that I loved her. I’ve known a lot of rich people in my time, and powerful ones, and for the vast majority of them, the question of fairness never has a damn thing to do with whether they think you’re impertinent.
“It’s okay,” I said. “They’re still here, too.”
“Oh. Is it horrid?”
“No, actually, we’re at a pub, and Bristow thinks he’s standing us drinks. I’m not going to let him, of course.”
“Have you had another idea?”
“Sort of,” I said. “I’ve changed my mind. I’ll handle the case for you.”
“Oh,” she said, sounding more like a schoolgirl than I would have believed possible. “That’s wonderful. Come to the office tomorrow, and we’ll make all the arrangements.”
“Hold on a second. You may not think it’s so wonderful when I tell you what I have in mind.”
“Go ahead.”
“We won’t make any arrangements, and I’m not coming into your office. This is going to be tricky enough to handle without my running around inviting the Home Office to throw me out of the country.”
“I’ve told you, that can be arranged.”
“I don’t want it arranged. I like it fine the way it is.”
“All right,” she said, and I loved her even more. No arguments, no “Now see here, young man.” It was great.
“Now,” I said, “here’s the part you won’t like: The cops have to know about Aliou.”
“Oh. May I ask why?”
“Sure, you may ask why. The answer is that the killer will never be caught if we don’t tell them.”
“I see. Then there’s no choice then, is there?”
With that, her conquest of my heart was complete. There are plenty of people with higher priorities than catching the murderer of a relative stranger.
I told her I’d fill in Bristow, but she might as well make a few Brownie points by turning loose of it herself to the cops there. Then I explained what Brownie points were, hung up the phone, and went back to the bar to get back up Bristow’s nose.