by John Elliott
Suddenly, instinctively, Geraldine knew exactly what the bird had said. ‘What’s up, chucky, tiger got your?’
Norma nodded. ‘In the end, you see, when everything got too bad, I poured the doctored libation. Her hemlock, so to speak. I’d done the research.’
‘Mine’s a double Krepkaya.’ Parrot phrases seemingly born out of amusement were taking on a sombre significance. Geraldine felt tears pricking her eyes. Norma, too, had momentarily given way. Only Lacenaire retained his unconcerned composure.
‘I sat here and wrote. Wrote what she had said in our last conversations. Later I tore it up and destroyed it when things went wrong.’
It was the last piece of the jigsaw. ‘The writer did it.’ Geraldine’s words were superfluous. Norma had had to bear them many times. She looked round the room with new eyes. Was this why Norma lived in Dollis Hill, yet kept West Hampstead as — what exactly? A kind of shrine or memento mori? ‘Went wrong?’ she asked.
Without replying, Norma rose, studied the book spines on the middle shelf of the bookcase nearest to Lacenaire and finally pulled out a thick tome whose opening pages she riffled with her fingers. ‘Yes, went wrong as some things do.’ She replaced the book into its vacant slot.— Geraldine tried to remember where — and returned to her chair. ‘Grief affects us all in different ways. At first, when Christabel came back, we grieved together. Then she changed. Her anger at herself turned towards me. Displacement, some would say. She divined I had base motives: money, envy, selfishness. She had charges brought. The post mortem, anyway, already had me in difficulties. I wasn’t going to deny what I had done if directly asked.’
‘You?’
‘I was arrested, charged with manslaughter, which in this case should have been sister-slaughter, and convicted. Of course, in prison I had to dress as Norman. The law had not taken kindly to my womanly demeanour. Throughout it all Alison was so kind. She came to see me as often as she could. She tried to patch things up with Christabel, but no dice. After a time, Christabel left for Wisconsin where she got a fellowship at the State University. I agreed to buy out her share of this place. We haven’t met or spoken since.’
‘I’d no idea. Can you bear to be here?’
‘Time’s passed. Some truisms are true. Now you’re here it’s different. Being with youth cheers me up.’ Norma’s body posture relaxed. Her usual equilibrium was returning. ‘I didn’t mean to be over gloomy because really all of that was only a preface. We need to keep concentrating on the murder of Augustin Cox. You see, the intriguing thing about our departed client was her saying she had been at school with Christabel; a lie soon disproved by Alison. As befits her trade I guess she wanted some kind of control over us. The knowledge I had been to prison perhaps. A fact she could turn to her advantage, or else she thought I might already know something germane to the case. Something that, to begin with, I was unaware of, unable immediately to see the connection.’
‘Fat.’ Lacenaire spat out the word and followed it up with a shrill whistle.
Norma and Geraldine turned and gazed at him their wonder tinged with relief.
‘Fat fat fat fat fat.’ A triumphant whoop and a rhythmic shuffle along his perch completed for the moment his attention grabbing routine. Enthralled by his sudden dynamism, his audience wouldn’t have been totally surprised if he had donned a top hat, tapped a cane and glided into a soft shoe shuffle.
‘Is he saying fat, or is it phat like the sound of a splatter when something collided in the comic strips?’ inquired Norma.
‘I think it’s fat. He has said it before. Who or what it applies to I don’t know. There’s nothing tangible I can link it to. At least he’s spoken again, that’s the main thing. But you were going to tell me more.’
‘Yes, and it wasn’t going to be either fat or phat. When they moved me from Wandsworth to the Scrubs, among the delightful people I met was a man called Micky Rubin.’
Geraldine looked alarmed. ‘Surely though, you went to an open prison. You weren’t a criminal.’
‘No, but I wasn’t a model prisoner either.’ Norma smiled. ‘Anyway he was gangster numero uno on our landing. A hard nut in the protection business who liked to hurt people. The law had only managed to convict him on lesser charges of fraudulent dealing. Inside, people can become strange bedfellows. Don’t take that literally. I abhor violence. I’ve seen too much of the wreckage it leaves. On the outside he certainly would have felt his masculinity threatened by me as you see me now. I’m sure he would have had to hurt me, yet in the Scrubs, over time, we came to an understanding, an incongruous tolerance. Well needed in my case for, of course, I was ostensibly the weaker vessel, and he was very much the alpha male. Sometimes on visits, instead of the usual thuggish acolyte, a young teenage girl came to see him. She was his daughter, I learned later from his own lips. He was divorced from his wife and someone else, whom I never saw and he never mentioned, brought her there. You remember after we talked about the Halcyon spanker I said to leave Mandy to me. Well I, too, downloaded and watched. LR is not Lucy ‘Mandy’ Revell, she’s Lucy Rubin.’
‘Fat,’ carolled Lacenaire again, this time into a void, for in spite of his vocal resurrection and another fetching hop, no heads turned.
‘As the always to be read Sir Arthur would have admirably put it,’ continued Norma. ‘The game is truly afoot. Metaphorically, dear Geraldine, it’s time to pack your service revolver.’
Chapter 19
A Boy’s Best Friend
‘Jerzy’s gone to Enfield. They’ve got a corpse up there linked to our Coxie,’ Pat informed Hamish as he deposited the remains of his canteen bacon buttie on the corner of his desk. ‘Why they couldn’t come over to sunny, bracing Feltham only the Commissioner and his gaggle of eunuchs can divine. By the way, that waft of your dead pig isn’t doing my diet plans any favours, and don’t say you’re slim enough without it, skipper.’
Taking a large mouthful, Hamish polished off the desire-inducing smoked Tamworth dropping a few errant crumbs onto the floor. ‘Perish the thought. It never crossed my mind, even if we are more self expressing nowadays.’
Pat ignored the jibe. ‘Messy blighters everywhere. Typical of young offenders. Hasn’t your skinny librarian started to mend your slipshod ways?’
‘Leave her out of it. So far she sees no need to change me. Anyway what’s with this Enfield stuff?’
‘Murder victim name of Blythe Fuller. Strangulation. Turns out our Mr Cox is all over her computer files like an outbreak of impetigo. She did a bit of moonlighting for some dominatrix set up. Watching naughty boys getting their botties reddened. Right up your alley I’d say, DC Ogden.’
It was Hamish’s turn to ignore an unwelcome remark. Since his excursion into the spanko scene ‘who’s got a smacked botty then and did Mummy dearest kiss it better?’ had become part of Pat’s non-hilarious repartee. ‘You’re sweeter to the crims than you are to your colleagues, sarge,’ said Hamish with as much sarcasm as he could muster.
She gave him a searching look. ‘True. Occasionally, and only occasionally mind, they’re more redeemable than any of us. Like them, we get hardened in our ways but find it easier not to change. Now stop bothering me. I’ve got stacks to sift through — supposed last Coxie sightings — and I’ve got a search warrant for your Milly Simpson’s place.’
‘The dom’s name and whereabouts. Did Enfield divulge?’ he asked, refusing to rise to the Milly bait.
Pat searched through a file from the rack on her desk. ‘Print out’s here somewhere. Why? Want a butcher’s?’
‘I thought I might show some initiative. Learn to express myself.’
She smiled as she handed the sheet over. ‘Go on. Get out of it. At least you won’t be feeding your face and interrupting me all the time, but if the muck spreader starts throwing out the shit, don’t say I knew.’
Hamish in acknowledgement gave a half bow. As he had suspected and hoped, the quoted applier of discipline was one and the same as Geraldine’s former c
lient.
*
On first inspection Carlton Crescent was as prosperously suburban as Hamish would have expected from the postal district of N 19.Two of the facades of the substantial semi-detached Edwardian villas were shielded by scaffolding erected for an obligatory loft conversion. No doubt conservatories and newly fitted kitchens had also been installed. Number 63 was no different from its neighbours. He unlatched the low gate, went up the short pathway to the porch and rang the bell. Was he here purely on behalf of Feltham CID or as an adjunct of Mycroft and Ogden, lovers in sleuthing to Her Majesty the Queen? The answer ostensibly lay in the first part but the second, well time would tell.
After a brief pause the door was opened by a petite, middle-aged woman dressed in a black Jean Muir-style frock with an incongruous lavender cardigan draped round her shoulders and sequined slippers on her feet.
‘Mrs Joan Oliphant?’ Hamish returned her bright smile of greeting by fishing out his warrant card. ‘I’m DC Hamish Ogden from Feltham.’
She nodded almost as if he had turned up on appointment but took the card out of his hand and studied it carefully before giving it back with another, this time forced, smile. ‘One can’t be too careful. Do come in. Would you mind awfully taking off your shoes here in the hall? I’ve had a new carpet laid in the sitting room. Unless of course, the law is above such considerations.’
Hamish complied. He had showered as usual that morning and had applied a spray of foot deodorant between his toes. His newly put on dark grey socks recently bought in Tesco and found painlessly and immediately under his new everything-in-its-place regime were without a hole. Shod or unshod he reminded himself he was an investigating officer with all the powers that entailed.
The sitting room into which he was ushered was high-ceilinged with a three-piece suite covered in what he had once learned on a shopping trip with Eunice was eau-de-nil upholstery. The new carpet already mentioned was unobtrusively floral with an off-cream background.
‘Please.’ Joan Oliphant motioned to the sofa and when Hamish subsided, sat herself elegantly, legs together aslant, in the Windsor chair to his left. Seeing his quick, circular, barely disguised shufti at the surroundings she smiled and said, ‘No cameras or hidden mics, officer. This isn’t my work room. This is private. Would you like some tea?’
‘No thanks.’
‘I expect you want to talk about Sparky,’ she went on before he could open with his prepared lead in.
‘Sparky?’
‘Yes. Augustin Cox, to give him his formal title. I did know him, as I’m sure you are aware. Just as you know about my select retail outlet here.’
Hamish for the moment chose to ignore the latter remark. ‘Why was he called Sparky?’
‘Oh, that’s just me. Because he was a bright spark. At least he was when I first knew him. Inevitably, like all of us, he changed.’
‘You knew him through work?’
‘Yes and no, and not in the way you’re thinking, Hamish. You see I can read people, and I made sure when I inspected your card I’d remember your first name. First Enfield. Now Feltham. Not unlike London buses wouldn’t you say? Nothing immediately so one waits and waits then two turn up in quick succession.’
In spite of himself Hamish smiled, before reminding himself that two dead bodies outweighed any possible traffic timetable problems. She was quite disarming. He decided to play her game at least for a little. ‘Well, I’ve got to give it to you. Getting me to take my shoes off, calling me by my first name, running the interview almost. You’re trying to turn the tables on me.’
‘I knew we’d get along fine. I’ve nothing to hide, Hamish. It’s plain Enfield are concentrating on Blythe, poor girl, and you on Augustin, poor lad. That’s the geography of it. Anyway, although Sparky, Blythe and I were, as you might say, in the same field of endeavour at one time, that’s not why he continued to come here. As you possibly have ferreted out, I’d known him since he was a youngster, since he was one of the Milky Bar Kids in fact, the one dark one amongst all the other blondies. Myself and another woman used to chaperone them all over London or wherever the shoot was. I’d already done it with others for several years. The studio experience was what guided him into finding out about lighting and then the camera work. Unfortunately he didn’t apply himself enough, and then, well he drifted into what he did. But I guess you already know about the latter part of his career. I’m genuinely sorry he’s dead.’ She fumbled momentarily with the hem of her cardigan. ‘That they’re both dead. He and Blythe.’
She’s very self-possessed, thought Hamish, always giving me full eye contact. I wonder exactly what’s behind the motherly facade. ‘We don’t have the full details of what you call the latter part yet. Perhaps you could?’
‘Easy to oblige. There’s a scene, not that I’m part of it. I don’t advertise widely. I much prefer word of mouth from my existing gentlemen callers. Anyway, there are parties where like-minded people play and, of course, there’s the internet where the sites share material, and where now more and more there are photos and downloads to produce and sell. Sparky worked on and off for one of them behind the camera or setting up the lighting. None of it’s illegal.’
‘When did you last see him?’
‘Oh, it all seems so long ago now. Of course I would have visited him in that ghastly place of his if I’d known he was all alone and no-one coming to see him.’ She stopped and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief which she had daintily extracted from her sleeve. Presumably deciding cardigan-fretting alone no longer sufficiently fitted the bill. ‘Let me think. We were sitting in here, decor a bit different from now, sharing a pot of Earl Grey and some M&S florentines, chatting just like us two now. If Blythe had been there it would have completed our preferred picture, our own self-selected home grown family. As for the exact date, I’ll have it somewhere if you absolutely must have it. Now I’m going to make myself a cuppa even if you’re not participating. After all, I’m in my own house and free to do as I please. You’re not arresting me are you, Hamish? I believe the days of fit-ups and verbals are as antiquated as saucy seaside postcards.’ She smoothed her dress down the sides of her thighs and got to her feet. Hamish rose as well. ‘No, please, sit down. It might be business for you but for me you are my guest. Make yourself comfortable, I won’t be long. Before you came I’d decided to tell everything if the chance arose. There’s no need for detection, you see.’
Left alone, a smidgeon deflated by her last remark, although over all elated by the prospect of her spilling the full can of borlottis and brine. Hamish fished out his mobile and selected Geraldine’s number. This could be his breakthrough to impress Jerzy and Pat. An away goal for the young offenders, and one moreover scored from a midfield scorcher rather than a goalmouth scramble. On this form he might even manage to keep Ricky Hatton at a distance.
When Geraldine answered he quickly brought her up to speed. ‘We’re on the verge,’ he told her, managing to say we rather than I. For some reason she seemed slightly preoccupied and not her usual enthusiastic self. ‘Got to go,’ he said, hearing footsteps. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. Remember, I’m meeting the grandparents tonight. Love you.’
‘Happy with your own thoughts?’ Joan deposited two mugs and a plate of jammy dodgers on a side table. To Hamish’s surprise the one she selected for herself had a chip at the rim. ‘Builders,’ she said, ‘sweet and strong. Help yourself but try and avoid the crumbs. The carpet you know.’
For an embarrassing moment as Hamish, no longer a tea refusenik, reached over and took the remaining mug and a biscuit, he visualised a clumsy, crumb-dropping gentleman caller lying across his hostess’s lap, trousers and pants round his ankles, behind in the air awaiting the descending sting of her open palm or hairbrush back. For an even more embarrassing second the behind belonged to him. Joan Oliphant smiled as if his thoughts were printed on his forehead for all the world to see.
‘Families, Hamish. They’re the very devil. Do you have one? Are yo
ur mother and father still alive?’ She paused. ‘Don’t worry. You don’t have to answer.’
‘I don’t have one if you mean wife and children. Yes, my parents are alive. They don’t think a policeman is the best thing to be.’ He swallowed the rest of the jammy dodger and tried a gulp of tea without mishap. Sweet it certainly was. Far too much so for his usual taste.
‘I belonged to a criminal family. Can you imagine what it was like? Nobody ordinary could ever come to our house. I couldn’t bring back any friends. Gear waiting to be disposed of, other things better not mentioned,’ she added to Hamish’s inquiring look. ‘My father was a hard man. He had a definite reputation south of the river. They talk of the criminal fraternity. They’re right. There’s no criminal sisterhood. The women are just there to procreate, make tea and fry-ups at all hours of the day and night. Keep their mouths shut. Provide an alibi. Trudge to the slammer with the kids if it all goes wrong. I wanted to get out at the earliest opportunity, and what did I do?’ She laughed mirthlessly. ‘I fell in with a petty crook. Not even a proper villain like my dad. Just a chancer, thankfully long discarded.’ Her hands nestled round her mug of tea. For the moment she was more lavender cardigan than little black dress.
‘Augustin,’ prompted Hamish as her silence continued.
The name seemed to float upwards in the quiet of the room like dust motes suddenly visible in the rays of the sun. Outside, the sound of an engine followed by a mechanical voice repeating ‘Attention! Attention! Vehicle reversing’ awoke Joan from her reverie. ‘Bin men,’ she said. ‘It’s their day. Tea’s cold. I always forget to drink it when it’s hot. Orphan really, Sparky. First his father when he was twelve, then his mother, some kind of Paraguayan or whatever she was, in his mid teens. She scrimped and saved to get him into stage school. All part of a show biz dream.’