Ray looked away, clearly disturbed by the question.
“Ray? Something you want to tell me?”
“Look, I…I would never have…I mean…”
“Were you in love with her, Ray?”
His silence told me all I needed to know.
“Was it you who told Valerie about Tony and Jacqui?”
Ray jerked his head in an abrupt nod, then turned damp brown eyes on me. “How could he? How could he treat her like that. Oh, she never looked at me twice. It’s not that I thought…or even hoped…but I couldn’t bear to see it anymore, them carrying on the way they did, and Valerie not knowing.”
“So you told her.”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Just before dinner.”
“Did you kill her, Ray?”
“Why would I kill her? I loved her.”
“Maybe you went round to the house later and found her alone, Tony in the shower. You thought you were in with a chance now, but she turned you down, laughed at you, and you lost it. Is that how it happened, Ray?”
For a moment, I thought he was going to confess, then he said, “No. I didn’t do it. But I’d have a closer look at Jacqui Prior if I were you.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because of something Valerie said when I told her about the affair.”
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘I’ll ruin her. The little bitch. You see if I don’t. And don’t think I can’t do it, either.’”
PART SEVEN
“You’d better not have come around with more of those ridiculous accusations,” Jacqui Prior said, flopping on the sofa and crossing her long legs.
I took out the safety-deposit box key and held it in front of her. “I’ve been talking to Tony,” I said, “and we’ve been through some of Valerie’s papers. According to her Visa bills, there’s an annual fee of $40 at a BC credit union. The people there were not forthcoming, but they did admit that Valerie rented a safety-deposit box. I asked myself why she kept a box in Vancouver when she lived in Toronto.”
“And?”
“It’s my guess she got it while she was still living there, and she doesn’t need frequent access.”
“So it’s probably empty.”
“But why keep paying? She can’t have forgotten about it. The annual bill would remind her.”
“So what’s your explanation, great detective?”
“That there’s something in it she wants to keep.”
“And how does that relate to me?”
“The two of you grew up together in Vancouver.”
“So?”
“What’s in the box, Jacqui?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“You’re lying.”
“How dare you!”
“What’s in it? Was it worth killing her over?”
“I didn’t kill her.”
“So you say. But the way it looks to me is that you had the best motive. You were having an affair with her husband. She threatened you. And she was keeping something in a safety-deposit box in Vancouver that may be related to you.”
“That’s just conjecture.”
“But it’s a pretty reasonable conjecture, you must admit.”
“I’m admitting nothing.”
“Well,” I said, standing to leave, “the police will probably be less polite than me, and there’ll no doubt be media interest. Your choice, Jacqui. If you’re innocent, you’d be far better off telling me the truth. I don’t have to tell anyone.”
I could see her thinking over her options: Whether to tell me anything. How much to tell. How many lies she might get away with. What she might use to bribe me to keep silent. In the end, she came to a decision. “I need a drink first,” she said, and went over to the cocktail cabinet and poured herself a Pernod. It turned cloudy when she added a few drops of water. As an afterthought, she asked me if I wanted anything. I said no.
“Strictly between you and me?”
“Of course.”
“When Valerie dropped her little bombshell and all hell broke loose, I took her to the washroom.”
“I’ve always wondered what went on in there.”
“She told me she’d ruin me.”
“How?”
“When Val and I were students,” Jacqui said, “we were…well, to put it mildly, we were a bit wild. We got into coke and stuff in a fairly big way and it can skewer your judgment. There was a man. We were so high we thought it would be fun to make a video. He didn’t know. No copies. Only the original. Need I say more?”
“The three of you?”
“Yes.”
“And Valerie kept this?”
“I told you she liked control.”
“Why would she want to have control over you?”
“Not me, you fool. Him. He was a politician. Still is, and climbing the ranks.”
“So Valerie used it to blackmail him?”
“She never used it for anything as far as I know.”
“But that gave him a motive for killing her. Who is he?”
“He didn’t even know about it. I’m sure of that.”
“But Valerie threatened to use it against you?”
“Yes. This Cherub contract is a really big deal, and I need to be squeaky-clean. It’s a family line, so if it got around that their cherub wasn’t quite as cherubic as they thought, I think you can see where that might lead.”
“The unemployment line?”
“Exactly.”
“You do realize, don’t you, that you’ve just given me another motive for killing Valerie? If she made the video public, you’d have been ruined.”
“No. You don’t understand. There was no video.”
Now it was my turn to look puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“You don’t think I wanted that thing lying around, do you? I can make myself look enough like Valerie to fool people, especially strangers behind the counter in a bank, and her signature is easy enough to forge. One day, while she was at the dentist’s, I borrowed her key and her ID.”
“So you’re saying—”
“Valerie didn’t know, because she never checked from one year to the next, but the video was gone. I destroyed it. That safety-deposit box was empty.”
“Then who…?”
Jacqui put her hand to her mouth. “Oh, no,” she said, turning pale. “Oh, God, no!”
PART EIGHT
“You again,” said Scott, when I called at their Scarborough home early that evening. I had spent the rest of the afternoon doing the sort of digging I usually do when I’m not investigating murders. Ginny walked through from the kitchen and nodded a curt greeting.
“What can I help you with this time?” Scott asked.
“When you were driving Jacqui home from the restaurant the night Valerie was murdered, you asked her about what went on in the washroom, didn’t you?”
“So what? I was curious.”
“And she told you that Valerie had threatened her with something that could ruin the whole Cherub deal.”
“She did? I don’t remember.”
“Oh. Come off it, Scott! You mean to tell me you were so curious you can’t even remember what she told you?”
“What does it matter?”
I leaned forward. “It matters because it gave you a motive to kill Valerie.”
“That’s absurd.”
“No, it’s not. I’ve been doing a bit of research this afternoon, and I’ve discovered that your precious agency is in serious financial trouble. You’re in debt up to your eyeballs, second mortgages, the lot, and you can’t afford to lose the Cherub contract. When you thought that was in jeopardy, you knew you had to get rid of Valerie. Maybe you planned on killing them both and making it look as if there’d been an intruder, but when you saw Tony wasn’t there, you changed your plan.”
“It’s an interesting theory,” said Scott, “but that’s all it is.”
I knew he was right. What I�
�d discovered, and what Jacqui had told me, might point the police in Scott’s direction, but they’d need much more if Tony were to be exonerated.
“You know what the sad thing is?” I said. “You did it all for nothing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jacqui was upset. All she said was that Valerie had threatened to ruin her. What she didn’t tell you was that Valerie no longer had the means to do it. You killed Valerie Pascale for nothing, Scott.”
Ginny turned pale. “What did you say?” she asked.
“Don’t, Ginny!” Scott warned her.
But it was too late. Ginny glanced at her husband, turned back to me and said, “Do you think for a moment I would let her destroy everything we’d worked for?” She looked over tenderly at Scott, who was gnawing on a fingernail. All his deepest fears had now come true. If he wasn’t an accomplice and had, say, passed out after drinking too much, he must at least have suspected and worried that the truth would come out. “She deserved to die,” Ginny went on. “She was going to ruin all of us just because of a stupid adolescent affair. And now you tell us it was all for nothing.” Her laugh sounded like a harsh bark.
“You still have no evidence,” Scott said. “Ginny will deny everything. I’ll say she was with me the whole time. Do you realize what you’re doing? You could ruin all of us, Jacqui, Tony, Ray included.”
I stood up to leave. “Jacqui will survive. And so will Tony and Ray. The one thing neither of you seem to have given a moment’s thought to,” I said, as I headed for the door, “is that Tony Caldwell is awaiting trial on a murder charge. A murder he didn’t commit. Think about that when you lament your business losses.”
After I’d shut the door behind me, I slid my hand in my inside pocket and turned off the tiny digital recorder that had been on the whole time I’d been with Scott and Ginny. Maybe it wouldn’t stand up in court, but it would be enough to convince Enamoretto, get Tony off the hook and reopen the case. And, who knows, perhaps Susan Caldwell would be grateful enough to have dinner with me. We could talk about Darwin’s influence on Wordsworth.
The Price of Love
Tommy found the badge on the third day of his summer holiday at Blackpool, the first holiday without his father. The sun had come out that morning, and he was playing on the crowded beach with his mother, who sat in her striped deck chair smoking Consulate, reading her Nova magazine and keeping an eye on him. Not that he needed an eye kept on him. Tommy was thirteen now and quite capable of amusing himself. But his mother had a thing about water, so she never let him near the sea alone. Uncle Arthur had gone to the amusements on the Central Pier, where he liked to play the one-armed bandits.
The breeze from the gray Irish Sea was chilly, but Tommy bravely wore his new swimming trunks. He even dipped his toes in the water before running back to warm them in the sand. It was then when he felt something sharp prick his big toe. Treasure? He scooped away the sand carefully while no one was looking. Slowly he pulled out the object by its edge and dusted it off with his free hand. It was shaped like a silver shield. At its center was a circle with “METROPOLITAN POLICE” curved around the top and bottom of the initials “ER.” Above this was a crown and a tiny cross. The silver glinted in the sunlight.
Tommy’s breath caught in his throat. This was exactly the sign he had been waiting for since ever his father died. It was the same type of badge he had worn on his uniform. Tommy remembered how proud his dad had sounded when he spoke of it. He had even let Tommy touch it and told him what “ER” meant: Elizabeth Regina. It was Latin, his father had explained, for Queen Elizabeth. “That’s our Queen, Tommy,” he had said proudly. And the cross on top, he went on, symbolized the Church of England. When Tommy held the warm badge there on the beach, he could feel his father’s presence in it.
Tommy decided not to tell anyone. They might make him hand it in somewhere, or just take it off him. Uncle Arthur was always doing that. When Tommy found an old tennis ball in the street, Uncle Arthur said it might have been chewed by a dog and got germs on it, so he threw it in the fire. Then there was the toy cap gun with the broken hammer he found on the recreation ground—“It’s no good if it’s broken, is it?”—Uncle Arthur said, and out it went. But this time Uncle Arthur wasn’t going to get his hands on Tommy’s treasure. While his mother was reading her magazine, Tommy went over to his small pile of clothes and slipped the badge in his trouser pocket.
“What are you doing, Tommy?”
He started. It was his mother. “Just looking for my handkerchief,” he said, the first thing he could think of.
“What do you want a handkerchief for?”
“The water was cold,” Tommy said. “I’m sniffling.” He managed to fake a sniffle to prove it.
But his mother’s attention had already wandered back to her magazine. She never did talk to him for very long these days, didn’t seem much interested in how he was doing at school (badly), or how he was feeling in general (awful). Sometimes it was a blessing because it made it easier for Tommy to live undisturbed in his own elaborate secret world, but sometimes he felt he would like it if she just smiled at him, touched his arm and asked him how he was doing. He’d say he was fine. He wouldn’t even tell her the truth because she would get bored if she had to listen to his catalog of woes. His mother had always gotten bored easily.
This time her lack of interest was a blessing. He managed to get the badge in his pocket without her or anyone else seeing it. He felt official now. No longer was he just playing at being a special agent. Now that he had his badge, he had serious standards to uphold, like his father had always said. And he would start his new role by keeping a close eye on Uncle Arthur.
Uncle Arthur wasn’t his real uncle. Tommy’s mother was an only child, like Tommy himself. It was three months after his father’s funeral when she had first introduced them. She said that Uncle Arthur was an old friend she had known many years ago, and they had just met again by chance in Kensington High Street. Wasn’t that a wonderful coincidence? She had been so lonely since his father had died. Uncle Arthur was fun and made her laugh again. She was sure that Tommy would like him. But Tommy didn’t. And he was certain he had seen Uncle Arthur before, while his father was still alive, but he didn’t say anything.
It was also because of Uncle Arthur that they moved from London to Leeds, although Tommy’s mother said it was because London was becoming too expensive. Tommy had never found it easy to make friends, and up north it was even worse. People made fun of his accent, picked fights with him in the schoolyard, and a lot of the time he couldn’t even understand what they were saying. He couldn’t understand the teachers, either, which was why the standard of his schoolwork slipped.
Once they had moved, Uncle Arthur, who traveled a lot for his job but lived in Leeds, became a fixture at their new house whenever he was in town, and some evenings he and Tommy’s mother would go off dancing, to the pictures or to the pub and leave Tommy home alone. He liked that because he could play his records and smoke a cigarette in the back garden. Once he had even drunk some of Uncle Arthur’s vodka and replaced it with water. He didn’t know if Uncle Arthur ever guessed, but he never said anything. Uncle Arthur had just bought his mother a brand-new television, too, so Tommy sometimes just sat eating cheese and onion crisps, drinking pop and watching Danger Man or The Saint.
What he didn’t like was when they stopped in. Then they were always whispering or going up to his mother’s room to talk so he couldn’t hear what they were saying. But they were still in the house, and even though they were ignoring him, he couldn’t do whatever he wanted, or even watch what he wanted on television. Uncle Arthur never hit him or anything—his mother wouldn’t stand for that—but Tommy could tell sometimes that he wanted to. Mostly he took no interest whatsoever. For all Uncle Arthur cared, Tommy might as well not have existed. But he did.
Everyone said that Tommy’s mother was pretty. Tommy couldn’t really see it himself because she was his mother, after all.
He thought that Denise Clark at school was pretty. He wanted to go out with her. And Marianne Faithfull, who he’d seen on Top of the Pops. But she was too old for him, and she was famous. People said he was young for his years and knew nothing about girls. All he knew was that he definitely liked girls. He felt something funny happen to him when he saw Denise Clark walking down the street in her little gray school skirt, white blouse and maroon V-neck jumper, but he didn’t know what it was, and apart from kissing, which he knew about, and touching breasts, which someone had told him about at school, he didn’t really know what you were supposed to do with a girl when she was charitable enough to let you go out with her.
Tommy’s mother didn’t look at all like Denise Clark or Marianne Faithfull, but she wore more modern and more fashionable clothes than the other women on the street. She had beautiful long blond hair over her shoulders and pale flawless skin, and she put on her pink lipstick, black mascara and blue eye shadow every day, even if she was only stopping in or going to the shops. Tommy thought some of the women in the street were jealous because she was so pretty and nicely dressed.
Not long after they had moved, he overheard two of their neighbors saying that his mother was full of “London airs and graces” and “no better than she ought to be.” He didn’t know what that meant, but he could tell by the way they said it that it wasn’t meant as a compliment. Then they said something else he didn’t understand about a dress she had worn when his father was only four months in his grave, and made tut-tutting sounds. That made Tommy angry. He came out of his hiding place and stood in front of them red faced and told them they shouldn’t talk like that about his mother and father. That took the wind out of their sails.
Every night before he went to sleep, Tommy prayed that Uncle Arthur would go away and never come back again. But he always did. He seemed to stop at the house late every night, and sometimes Tommy didn’t hear him leave until it was almost time to get up for school. What they found to talk about all night, he had no idea, though he knew that Uncle Arthur had a bed made up in the spare room, so he could sleep there if he wanted. Even when Uncle Arthur wasn’t around, Tommy’s mother seemed distant and distracted, and she lost her patience with him very quickly.
The Price of Love and Other Stories Page 26