by Penny Kline
‘Is there a list of students who live here?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose so.’ And she disappeared down a corridor.
A noticeboard, screwed to the wall at the opposite end of the entrance hall, proved to be no help at all. Fire regulations. A forthcoming pop concert. A curled-up poster advertising the Student Counselling Service.
I stood in the corridor wondering what to do next, wondering why I was taking so much trouble over what would almost certainly turn out to be a wild-goose chase. Diane Easby seemed to have lost interest in her brother’s fate and if it hadn’t been for Bruce’s phone-call I would have let the whole thing drop. His suggestion that Chris worried about his safety seemed a little implausible. On the other hand, it was true that social workers were attacked far more often than most people realized, and perhaps Housing Officers fell into the same high-risk bracket.
As I climbed the stairs to the first floor I was aware that I was trying to justify what amounted to interference in other people’s business. A tall, lanky student with his hair tied back in a pony-tail approached from the other end of the long corridor. I decided to have one last try, then give up and forget all about the murder.
‘Excuse me, I’m looking for a student called Fleur Peythieu.’
He stopped abruptly, almost losing his balance. ‘Sorry?’
‘Fleur Peythieu, I wondered — ’
‘Last door on the left. I don’t know if she’s there.’
‘Thanks.’
He hesitated for a moment as though I might have more questions for him, then shook his head and loped off, his shoes squeaking loudly on the shiny linoleum floor.
I knocked on Fleur’s door but there was no answer. I was just about to walk away when a head appeared.
‘What d’you want?’ She spoke with a strong Lancashire accent.
‘Fleur Peythieu?’
‘If that’s how you want to pronounce it.’ She was large and plain, quite unlike the image of her I had created in my head.
‘My name’s Anna McColl. I’m sorry to interrupt your work but — ’
‘You’re not, I was eating.’
‘Oh.’ Perhaps I should arrange to come back another time. Perhaps I should forget the whole thing.
‘Come in if you’re coming.’ She had opened the door just wide enough for me to squeeze through, then she closed it firmly behind me.
The room was tiny, only just big enough to contain a narrow bed, a fitted cupboard, a hand basin, a desk with an upright chair pushed under it, and two shelves of books.
Fleur sat on the bed finishing off her low fat Fruits of the Forest yogurt. She was wearing red and green flowered trousers, a thick maroon sweater that reached almost to her knees, and black lace-up boots.
I pulled out the hard chair and introduced myself properly.
‘It’s about Karen Plant.’
‘Oh, aye, you don’t look much like a cop.’
‘I’m not. Actually I’m a psychologist.’
‘One of them.’ She was scraping out the last drops of yogurt. I almost expected her to stick her tongue in the empty pot. ‘I’ll tell you something for nothing, you’re bloody soaked to the skin.’
‘Oh, yes. Sorry.’
‘Don’t apologize. I should take off your shoes, put them by the radiator. It cracks the leather so they say but I’ve never had any bother.’
I did as I was told, then sat down again and pulled my sweater over my head. Fleur draped it over the hand basin.
‘What happened to your coat?’
‘I left it in the car.’
‘Oh, aye.’
It was ridiculous, I hadn’t even explained why I’d come but Fleur seemed to think nothing of a total stranger knocking on her door and making themselves at home in her room.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘the reason I wanted to talk to you — ’ I broke off. I hadn’t even planned what I was going to say. It would be quite inappropriate to tell her about Diane Easby but, on the other hand, she deserved some explanation. For all she knew I could be a journalist or just someone with an unhealthy interest in violent crime.
She was watching me, smiling at my discomfort.
‘You want to know if Keith did it.’ It was a statement, not a question.
‘Yes. I mean, I have a client — a friend of Keith’s.’
‘Oh, you have, have you?’ She tossed the empty pot into a metal wastepaper bin. ‘Of course he didn’t kill Karen.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘You never met him?’
‘No.’
‘If you had you’d know. He was nuts about her. Pathetic it was.’
She stared at me, willing me to make the obvious remark. That Keith might have misunderstood Karen’s interest in him, reacted badly to what seemed like a rejection, then attacked her, going too far, losing control.
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘What is there to say? Poor bloke’s dead and buried, won’t make any difference what happens now. He came from up North, same as me although he’d left when he was a small kid. You’re probably wondering about my name. My mother’s French, born in Rouen. We took her name after my dad buggered off.’
‘Yes, I see.’
‘Just thought you’d like to know. People usually do.’
I smiled but she didn’t smile back.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry to call round on you like this. I’m sure you told the police everything you knew.’
‘I told them he couldn’t have done it but they had their own ideas.’
‘Just one last question. Why d’you think he hanged himself? If he was innocent, I mean.’
‘Who knows? Scared of going to prison? He wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes. Like a little kid, he was. I’d say he had a mental age of about seven or eight.’
‘But surely the police — ’
‘He wasn’t with them that long. Hadn’t been questioned in detail. Couldn’t have been in the short time they had him locked up. Want a cup of tea, do you?’
‘Oh. Well, thanks.’
When I knocked on the door I had expected her to tell me to mind my own business. Now she seemed more inclined to settle down for a good long chat. Perhaps she was curious to find out why I had come. Perhaps she was just bored and talking to me was preferable to starting work on an assignment from her tutor in the Computer Science Department.
‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘if it wasn’t Keith it was someone else.’
She laughed. ‘That figures.’
I wondered how upset she had been about Karen Plant. After all it was only a couple of months since the murder but she seemed able to talk about it in a perfectly relaxed kind of way.
‘It must have been dreadful for you.’
‘Wearing your psychologist’s hat now, are you?’
‘I just feel a bit guilty raking it all up again.’
‘The people at the counselling service wanted me to go over and over what happened. Every detail from start to finish. I couldn’t see the point. What’s done’s done.’
But she had been the one who found the body. Surely it wasn’t that easy to forget. It occurred to me, with a slight feeling of coldness down my back, that if Keith Merchant was innocent the next most likely suspect was
Fleur herself. She looked quite strong enough to overpower a slightly built woman. But what possible motive could she have had? An argument that got out of hand? A lovers’ quarrel?
She had opened a cupboard and taken out an electric kettle and two mugs. She filled the kettle at the hand basin and plugged it in, then she sat down and felt under the bed, pulling out a cardboard box. I wondered what she was going to show me but she was only searching for a packet of biscuits.
‘Look,’ she said, straightening up and tearing at the cellophane wrapping, ‘If you want my opinion it was one of her clients. God-awful job she had. All those people wanting something done about their lives, then accusing her of interfering.’
‘Yes, I know.’
>
‘Same with your job, is it? More fool you. That’s why I’m going to stick with computers. They’re awkward bastards but they don’t make impossible emotional demands.’
She passed me two halves of a broken chocolate digestive biscuit, took another for herself and held it poised a few inches away from her mouth.
‘I was the one who had to pick up the pieces. Such a state she’d get herself into. Head reeling with all the problems she was supposed to be dealing with. Old ladies being moved into homes, not allowed to take their pussy cats. Women wanting their kids taken into care, then changing their minds and accusing poor Karen of calling them inadequate mothers. Look, I’d say, you can’t save the whole world. Just do the best you can and don’t be so hard on yourself.’
She sounded like Martin. She had placed her biscuit on the bed and was standing in front of the two metal shelves, reaching up to the top one for a teaspoon. I glanced at the books, expecting to see computer manuals, books on logic, mathematics, but they were all paperback fiction. American blockbusters, tales of the ultra-rich, whose life styles forced them into intrigue and infidelity.
‘You read this one?’ she asked. ‘Identical twins separated at birth. One went to a posh family, the other ended up in the slums.’
I shook my head. ‘No, I don’t think I have.’
‘You look tired,’ she said, ‘want to ease up a bit or you’ll end up like Karen. I’ll tell you something for nothing. She had something bothering her and it wasn’t Keith Merchant.’
‘What kind of thing?’
‘Search me. I haven’t a clue.’
‘Something about one of her clients?’
‘Could’ve been. She’d never betray a confidence.’
‘So she never told you what it was about?’
Fleur shook her head. ‘I told her she ought to talk to someone at work, her supervisor or whatever, but she said it was her own fault, she’d brought in on herself.’
‘Did you tell this to the police?’
‘Of course I did. You sure you’re not one of them, disguised as an ordinary human being?’
The kettle boiled and she dropped a tea bag in the red mug, filled it up, then fished out the bag and dropped it in the yellow one.
‘I expect they’ve told you us from up North like our tea so strong the spoon can stand up in it.’
I smiled.
‘You lot don’t know you’re born,’ she said, passing me the red mug. ‘Hope you don’t take milk ’cos I haven’t got any.’
‘I wonder,’ I said, ‘could you tell me a little about Karen. What kind of a person she— ’
‘What d’you want to know? Well, let’s think. She was very neat and tidy. Obsessional, I’d call it. A place for everything and everything in its place. And she was always making lists.’
‘What kind of lists?’
‘Oh, you know, bills that needed paying, people to phone, bits and pieces that wanted doing round the flat.’
‘I believe Keith Merchant did some repairs for you.’
‘If you can call them that. Hadn’t even a proper set of tools. Said he’d strip the paint off an old chair I’d picked up in a junk shop. Ended up with paint-stripper all over the carpet and the chair looked a bloody sight worse than when he’d begun.’
‘So really Karen was just being kind, giving him odd jobs to do.’
‘Kind or half-witted. I warned her but she never took a blind bit of notice. Tiny little thing she was but tough as old boots underneath. D’you know the type?’
Why was she telling me so much and without even checking for certain who I was? She couldn’t have cooperated more if she had been invited down to the police station. Perhaps she needed the company. She was tough, independent, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t lonely. All the same, it was difficult to believe, as Bruce had suggested, that Karen had been looking after her. I was inclined to think it must have been the other way round.
*
On the way home I drove past Iris’s house, slowing up, then accelerating fast in case David looked through a window and recognized my car.
It occurred to me that I had visited Fleur in the hope that she would convince me once and for all of Keith Merchant’s guilt. Then I could forget about the case. I had spent too much time thinking about Karen Plant. It was morbid. I had never even met her when she was alive. Dead, she was becoming more and more real. A workaholic like me, but what had she been trying to escape from? Another David? Or perhaps her relationship with Fleur had been closer than anyone realized. Perhaps it was not Keith that Karen had rebuffed. But then Fleur would have been only too happy to confirm
Keith’s guilt. Of course, the most likely explanation was that Fleur had failed to understand what was going on in Keith’s mind. He had seemed inadequate, incapable of holding down a proper job, so she had assumed he was harmless when all the time he was expecting far more from Karen Plant than she was prepared to give. The police had seen him as a common thief, who had been found out by Karen and had then attacked her when she threatened to have him arrested. But from what I had learned about her Karen would have given him a second chance, then a third and a fourth.
It was my father’s birthday and I had forgotten to post his card. It was a relief that he would be away for the next six weeks. One less person to worry about, a chance to sort out my own life, separate business from pleasure, reality from illusion. The post cards were from Rob, of that there was very little doubt. But I doubted if he was the intruder. Since the over-watered plant there had been no sign of anyone having been in the flat. Not that I had checked very carefully but it was impossible not to look round each room whenever I returned home.
In my mind I had eliminated David and Chris. If it wasn’t Rob, that left Iris. She could have found the key in one of David’s jacket pockets and had a copy made before he noticed it was missing. I considered phoning her, not just about the key, but to exchange information. But it was a crazy idea. Most likely we would both find out things we would have preferred not to know.
Then I thought about phoning the osteopath. I had forgotten what he was called but if I looked up ‘osteopaths’ in the Yellow Pages the name would soon come back to me. I decided against that idea too. Supposing he expressed surprise that I wanted to speak to David, told me he had no idea where he was living, that they hadn’t been in touch for several months.
Rain was streaming down the windscreen. I switched on the wipers and as the screen cleared I thought I saw Rob, walking, head down, in the direction of Queen’s Road. I slowed down, hoping he would look up so I could see his face and as I drew level he turned to stare through my window. Tall, thin, with dark hair, loose-fitting jeans, and a leather jacket. He grinned at me and made a gesture which invited me to open the passenger door. One of his front teeth was missing and he had a straggly moustache that hung over his upper lip. He was nothing like Rob.
Chapter Fifteen
Diane Easby had turned up at reception, looking as though she was spoiling for a fight and demanding to see me straight away. I expected her to ask what I had done to convince the police that her brother Keith had been innocent. Why was it taking so long? Why hadn’t I kept her fully informed of what was going on?
She glared at me and I waited, in silence, knowing I would discover the purpose of the visit sooner if I left her to tell me in her own time.
‘You fitted me in then. I suppose you thought you’d better in the circumstances.’
‘I usually try to keep one or two spaces free. For emergencies,’ I added.
‘It’s an emergency, all right.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘What’s happened? They sent round some bloke to check up on me, didn’t they? Banged on the door, he did, hoping to catch us red-handed.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Oh, don’t you sit there looking all innocent.’
I tried again. ‘Who was it who came round to your house?’
‘Don’t ask me. You’r
e the one should know.’ She hesitated. Had she made a mistake? ‘It was your idea, must have been.’
‘Look, I’m sorry, Diane, but I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Oh, pull the other one. I was fool enough to tell you about me and Alan and you got in touch with the bloody social workers.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
She could tell I was speaking the truth.
‘Who did then?’ She wanted to apologize but that would mean losing face. And, besides, now the adrenalin was flowing she needed someone to attack.
‘Tell me what happened,’ I said. ‘I expect it was just a routine call. You saw a social worker before and — ’
‘I told you, didn’t I, that Karen Plant. You found out any more about who done her in?’
‘Not yet. I’m working on it.’
Better not to tell her about my meeting with Fleur Peythieu. Not at this stage.
She relaxed a little, then launched into a lengthy description of the new social worker, ‘a long streak of piss’, who she could swear was barely out of school, knew nothing about kids, and left with his tail between his legs after she’d given him a good going over.
‘What was his name?’ I asked.
‘Search me. Damian? Duncan? He did say but I never took it in.’ She leaned forward and patted me on the knee. ‘Sorry, love, only the reason I lost my cool, that Karen Plant threatened to have my Lisa taken away.’
‘Your daughter?’
‘Bloody nerve, who did she think she was?’
‘But why? What did she say exactly?’
‘Oh, nothing straight out, just hinting. That’s all they think of these days. As if he would. Just the thought of it’d make him sick.’
I was beginning to understand.
‘Karen Plant thought your husband … thought Alan … ’
‘All because of something she told her teacher.’
‘Lisa? What did she say?’
‘God knows. Jealous of the baby, she is. Always has been. I thought, being ten when the baby was born she’d be pleased, help with the bathing and that, like having a real live doll. Like hell, she was, wanted to drown her more like.’
‘Let’s get this straight. Lisa was jealous of Siobhan. Then later on she told her teacher Alan had … ’