Dying to Write

by Judith Cutler

  Sidney might have been observing with interest since his future was no doubt involved, but someone had bought him a Kit-Kat and he was more concerned with that.

  ‘I was wondering if you could use a lift,’ said Ian.

  ‘I’m staying here,’ said Matt. ‘Say goodbye to everyone for me, OK?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I’ll be in touch, Sophie – I take it Hugh has your address.’

  I could feel Ian stiffen. I’d have asked him for a page from his notebook but I’d an idea they were sacrosanct, and I didn’t want to make an issue of it.

  ‘What about yours?’ I asked.

  He suddenly noticed his tears, and rubbed his face with a fistful of NHS tissues. ‘Wherever Kate is, for a bit. And then I’ve got to sort out – everything.’

  ‘If you need a base in Brum, I’ve got a spare room,’ I said. And bent to kiss him.

  He laid Kate’s hand down on her chest for a moment. Then he got up to meet me, and held me. Eventually the nurse came back, and we patted each other’s backs affectionately – time to let go.

  I turned to Ian and propelled him from the cubicle as fast as I could. For I knew what the nurse was going to say: ‘And what about the rat? Can’t your friend look after him?’

  Ian heard too. And we did the nearest I could manage to a scamper.

  I was running out of clothes, of course, and my tracksuit was hardly the festive garb demanded by our last lunch together. I was suddenly hungry, and wondered what Shazia might have managed to produce, given all the comings and goings. Whatever it was, she wasn’t wearing an apron when she pushed into reception to hug me.

  I excused myself for a couple of minutes to see what make-up might do to the ravages of my face. Someone had shifted all my clothes on to the desk so they could make the bed. But they hadn’t packed. I shoved the lot willy-nilly into my case. I couldn’t even lift it.

  The officers outside thought it was a great joke. One grabbed the case with one finger. The other grabbed me and carried me to reception. End of term for them too. I’d better get into the swing of things.

  What I did not expect to see, when I picked my way into the lounge, was a bottle of champagne, and Gimson pouring it. He saw me and bowing with only the minimum of irony, presented me with a glass. At the sight of my ear he tutted professionally and then said, quite quietly, so no one else could hear: ‘The bruises will heal fast enough. But you may be encumbered with unpleasant memories for some little time. Travel might help – a peak in Darien, perhaps.’

  I nodded and smiled. We would never like each other but we could at least observe the proprieties.

  I toasted him vaguely, and looked about me. No Chris, but he’d be busy tidying up ends. No Hugh. No Tabitha. My God, I couldn’t be about to discover jealousy.

  Laughter from the corridor: yes, I could. But as soon as he came into the room he looked for me. When our eyes met, he abandoned Tabitha and stood over me proprietorially until Shazia urged us into the dining room.

  Christmas had come early, courtesy of Fortnum and Mason. It was fortune for someone’s bank balance that there had been so few of us to cater for. Mr Woodhouse demurred that game pie was too rich for him; Jean urged him to take a little more caviare, and the sci-fi freak picked negligently at olives. But the rest of us weighed in. Gimson passed plates with enthusiasm. Mr Woodhouse cleared his throat as if to make a speech. I didn’t want a speech to listen to: there were still far too many goodies left.

  ‘I’m sure we would all like to thank –’ he began.

  Hugh popped a canapé into my mouth and held his fingers to be licked.

  ‘– Mrs, er, Shazia for her kind hospitality and for maintaining the highest standards when chaos was trying to reign.’

  Another bonne bouche. I fed Hugh several grapes.

  ‘And Matt and Hugh for being patient teachers.’

  Hugh’s smile was necessarily tight. Perhaps the others thought he was modest and embarrassed.

  ‘And Sophie for finding Kate.’

  I bowed my head in acknowledgement, wondering when I might chew on the lobster vol-au-vent.

  ‘And lastly I would like to express my – our – appreciation to Mr Gimson for providing this delectable luncheon.’

  Gimson!

  Due applause from everyone. Mostly it was the rattling of glasses agaisnt dishes – no one wanted to stop yet. And as Hugh and I embarked on drumsticks, the memory of that sixties film of Tom Jones came bubbling to the surface of my mind.

  There was enough left to fill plates for Chris and Ian when they appeared, both looking grimmer than I expected. Suddenly I felt sick: was it news of Courtney? But Ian shook his head. Courtney might not be much better but he certainly wasn’t any worse. It was losing Toad that was their problem. It was better for all if justice could be seen to be done, and neither anticipated a very favourable reaction from those in power when it became generally known that they had allowed an epileptic to drown.

  ‘Tough,’ said Hugh. ‘At least Sophie’ll be spared the pressures of a trial.’

  ‘And Kate and Matt, of course,’ I added.

  Hugh looked at me. We both knew, didn’t we?

  ‘Jesus: what about his wife and family?’ he said at last.

  I shook my head. ‘He’s not budging at the moment. So presumably he’ll have to tell his wife something.’

  ‘Bloody hell! Twenty years of marriage. Just like that.’

  I couldn’t work out his tone. I drank another glass of champagne, not to clear my brain but to stop it worrying.

  Chris watched with concern, and poured mineral water ostentatiously.

  ‘Maybe you shouldn’t drink too much, Sophie. I’ll be needing a statement from you this afternoon. And from Hugh. I take it I can rely on you to give her a lift to Harborne? Maybe a couple of my lads to keep an eye on you? See you at about three, then.’

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  At last, there was a general and rather hypocritical leave-taking. People who’d hardly spoken to me during the course now decided I was worth hugging and kissing; Gimson kissed no more than my hand, true, but Tabitha and the two girls clutched me as if I were suddenly precious.

  ‘I hope you’ll keep in touch,’ said Shazia, sounding as if she meant it.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, sounding as if I did too.

  I never bothered to check whether Hugh had had his tail-lights repaired, not even when I was watching him stow my luggage in his boot. Chris had assumed he’d be taking me to Harborne, and found I was too tired to argue. Not that I wanted to, especially.

  ‘You need a bit of pampering,’ said Hugh, glancing at me as he pulled out of the gates. There were police cars fore and aft to discourage the press. Chris had mentioned a press conference later. Much later, I’d insisted. Probably tomorrow.

  ‘A sauna. That’d be nice,’ I said eventually. I wondered how long he’d been waiting for me to speak.

  ‘And a massage?’ he said, with a pleasantly suggestive smile.

  I nodded. First, perhaps, I ought to make him explain his rather extreme reaction to my activities. Maybe later. I’d see how much energy I could summon. I eased myself back in the seat and winced.

  ‘You’re sure you’re all right?’

  ‘A bit sore. Must be heaving all that coal. You know,’ I added, ‘if I were a multimillionaire I would invest all my money in light industry in Yorkshire and wherever to ensure no one would ever have to go down a mine again. Never mind – I dare say government will do it for me. Without the investment, no doubt.’

  He didn’t speak. My God, with that office, this car, he was probably a card-carrying Tory! What did I really know about this man? Now wasn’t the moment to ask. And I wasn’t going to apologise for my views either.

  We drove on in silence. I felt my eyelids drooping.

  I couldn’t help crying aloud. Toad was slicing my ear, in the darkness of the mine.

  ‘What is it, Sophie?’ Hugh stopped the car and took my hand.
r />   Safe on the surface. I shook my head.

  ‘Sophie?’

  ‘Flashback, I suppose. I was down there again. Toad.’ I didn’t want to go on.

  Suddenly Ian, who’d been in the leading police car, was at the window. Hugh pressed a button to wind it down for him.

  ‘OK?’ Ian didn’t wait for an answer, but dug in his pocket. I knew what was coming. Extra-strong mints. I took them, and managed a grin.

  The convoy set off again.

  But the peppermints didn’t cheer me up, not this time. For what I couldn’t conceal from myself was that I had killed someone.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Chris briskly, when back in Rose Road I put it to him. ‘You may have walloped him quite hard, but not hard enough to kill him.’ He smiled at me across his desk, and poured more coffee.

  ‘But that twitching. And then that awful fit. And then – then …’

  Suddenly I was there. Seeing it all happen.

  ‘Let’s start a little earlier in the proceedings, Sophie. Let’s start when he pulled your arm up your back. Or when he sliced your ear. Or implied he was going to imprison you with Kate. In fact, why don’t we kill two birds – sorry, I really didn’t … My God, I’m so sorry.’

  He looked so contrite I managed a laugh.

  ‘I mean, if we could get this together as your statement – and we could really do with yours, Hugh. Could we decamp to an interview room? Ian, will you take Hugh’s? Then we’ll meet again up here, and I’ll tell you about the oriental gentlemen I spoke to last night. But first things first, I suggest. The sooner Sophie’s told us everything, the sooner she can start to forget it. Until the inquest, at least.’

  We all exchanged smiles. Chris used his phone to request two extra officers. We all trooped off through the civilised corridors to our respective interview rooms. I was introduced to a WPC – Claire. Tina was off for the weekend, of course, and I suppose I accepted Claire as her substitute. But it transpired that Claire was one of the team of women trained as counsellors that I’d met during my afternoon in the rape suite. She’d be prepared to keep in touch with me for months, if necessary – as long as I had problems with the incident. Kate, she said, had also been assigned an officer to support her, she’d be at the hospital on call when Kate came round.

  So that was what Chris was doing. Reminding me that if I had killed Toad it was for Kate’s good. I looked at him ironically, but he merely looked serious and alert. Between them they took me through the morning’s events as briskly and unemotionally as I wanted. I baulked at the torch episode. I had concealed it, intending to use it as a weapon.

  ‘Why did you think you’d need a weapon?’ asked Chris.

  ‘Because anyone else would have called out to reassure me. I was sure that the voice I had heard was Kate’s. I suppose I put two and two together.’

  ‘And made exactly the right total,’ said Chris dryly.

  ‘Chris, I could do with a loo. All this coffee.’

  Claire accompanied me, chatting as if we’d just met socially. I suppose they don’t let people wander round anyway, but I’d have been happier with a ‘take the first stairs on your left and it’s just on your right’ approach.

  She used the other cubicle herself, and I was out and washing my hands before she was. It’s automatic, isn’t it? Swill your hands and peer across the washbasin into the mirror while you’re doing it. But I didn’t. I concentrated on my hands. There was still some coal dust under the nails. No nailbrush, of course. And my nails didn’t take kindly to being picked with the other nails. I stood staring at them, my hands stretched in front of me.

  ‘All the perfumes of Arabia,’ I murmured, embarrassed that Claire had emerged to find me still staring.

  ‘Bad luck to quote the Scottish play,’ she said, standing beside me. She tipped the soap dispenser.

  On the way back she talked about her degree in drama. Then she turned. ‘You ought to be in a better room than this,’ she said. ‘But they’ve just brought in a kid who got caught up in that affray down the Lozells Road. Asian girl, fourteen. Gang of skinheads found her on her own. Gang-bang, they call it. And she was too ashamed to go back home. Thought it would bring disgrace on her family.’

  ‘Skins?’ I interrupted her. ‘I wonder if they might go in for smashing car tail-lights too.’

  After that it was easy. It was as if getting sidetracked like that got my brain into a higher gear, one which enabled me to think, not just react. I wanted to get on to the business of describing our skinheads, and Chris wouldn’t let me until I’d got, as he put it, the Toad scenario out of the way. One day I’d ask him if he’d set up the conversation with Claire.

  The officer in charge of the Photofit was a jocular man in his thirties, and the atmosphere became surprisingly carnival. Chris left Hugh and me to it. One or two things to see to, he said.

  Five thirty on a wet Sunday night, and we were still at Rose Road, but back in the comparative luxury of Chris’s office. It was cold, though, with those two sides of windows for the rain to drive at. He saw me shivering and produced a fan heater, which purred away in the background while he poured more tea and offered us fruitcake. I could have eaten the lot.

  ‘Let me tell you what I’ve established so far,’ he said, passing me the last piece of cake. ‘Now we’re not intruding on someone’s personal life –’ he looked at me sternly, but without rancour – ‘I have been able to speak to Kerwin’s GP. It seems that Mr Kerwin was indeed unfortunate enough to suffer from epilepsy, but that it was controlled very satisfactorily by regular medication.’ This time, when he looked at me, he smiled. ‘This medication was phenobarbitone. We found an empty bottle where Kate was imprisoned. Blood tests show she has been taking regular doses: no doubt she’ll explain why he gave them to her when she’s able to talk. I suspect, though it’s too late to verify it now, that he intended to kidnap her on Monday night, and thought the drugs would make her sleepy and more docile.’

  ‘Why should he want to kidnap a perfectly innocent writer?’ asked Hugh.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘there’s some answers in the stuff I, er, liberated the other night. In his eyes she was wicked because she kept Sidney incarcerated. A rat deserves his liberty, not life on a lead. I wonder if he saw Sidney’s cage. He might well have done; we all visited the tutors’ rooms. And he was one of those helpful people – according to the cuttings he’d kept, those in the back of that scrapbook – who released a load of mink into the wild, thus buggering up the habitat for the local fauna, incidentally.’

  ‘But – Jesus, that cage thing!’ Hugh covered his face, as if to shut out the memory. Chris must have let him see it for himself. Perhaps that might explain his behaviour.

  ‘I suppose he might see it as justice,’ I said. ‘Tie it in with his love of real-life crime stories. I dimly remember he had an argument with Matt about all fiction being derived from fact, too.’

  Chris nodded, and then looked at me interrogatively. No, I had no more to say. He resumed. ‘Perhaps you’d like to look at these.’ He spread some papers. ‘We took them off the notepad computer. The printer was a Canon, by the way, Sophie, and the print remarkably similar to that on the letter to you and the one purporting to come from Kate.’

  ‘I wonder if he made her write it – and she used that lousy style to alert Matt?’

  ‘We’ll find out when she’s ready to talk. Meanwhile –’ He gestured at the papers on his desk.

  Hugh and I peered: Toad had prepared a set of press releases. He’d planned to make Kate set her name to them – a road-to-Damascus conversion, just like Patti Hearst. I shook my head wearily. It all seemed so much effort just to make his point. Somewhere there must be a deeper reason. Perhaps his press cuttings would show it.

  Hugh rubbed his face in disbelief. ‘Can we go back to Kate being sleepy?’

  ‘To administer the drug would be difficult. I borrow Sophie’s theory here. I think, though it’s too late to check now – it doesn’t stay in the body th
at long – that he ground it up and put it in the chocolate pudding. So many people reported sleeping deeply that night that I think the theory holds water.’

  ‘And greedy pigs like me who had second helpings had vicious hangovers,’ I said.

  ‘Serves you right.’

  ‘At least I didn’t lick the plate,’ I said virtuously, ‘like Nyree did. Chris, do you have the same idea as I have?’

  ‘Probably a couple of hours ago,’ he said.

  The fan heater developed an irritating rattle. Chris kicked it gently and it subsided.

  ‘I think that Nyree’s excess of chocolate-flavoured phenobarbitone coupled with the whisky she consumed led to her death. I think it was entirely accidental. The conversations I’ve had with various oriental groups suggest that they wanted her alive, not dead. Dead women can’t broker profitable deals. Her husband seems to have combined a love of golf with a desire for a comfortable retirement. Possibly his sojourn in Vietnam has rekindled some capitalist light in his breast. I don’t know. If that Mercedes the Japanese drove ever comes to light, we’ll find out more.’

  ‘I shan’t press charges,’ I said. ‘But I do wish I’d taken that money.’

  Chris gaped.

  ‘For a car. A holiday. A spell in a health farm. That sort of thing. Instead of which it’s back to work on Wednesday. Enrolment,’ I added.

  Chris continued to stare at me.

  ‘Do you reckon our friend planned to kidnap Kate in advance? I mean, that cage –’ said Hugh.

  Chris shrugged. ‘I suspect he might have been thinking about holding someone to ransom. We’ve had a look at some of his reading matter, too. There was a Dick Francis thriller about kidnapping beside his bed at Eyre House.’

  ‘Brilliant book,’ I said.

  Chris looked at me with distaste. ‘You call a book brilliant that puts that sort of idea into someone’s head?’