by Adam Baron
‘What you want here?’
‘Mikey,’ I said, ‘is Mikey home?’
‘He called him Dominic before,’ the girl said helpfully.
‘Fuck off!’
The door was slammed in my face so hard I thought the glass would jump out.
Oh well.
I picked up the pictures from Carl and sat in my flat listening to PM and attaching a small sticker with my name and number on to the back of each one. When I had done that it was nearly eight so I made a quick bowl of pasta with Molise’s red pesto. I packed up a small bag and, remembering to put a bunch of the repros in the side pocket, headed out the door. I picked up my bike from the hallway and carried it down the stairs.
Down at the gym I went through the circuit training, worked out, and then sparred four rounds with a wiry old bruiser called Archie. He must have been about fifty but he was a tough old bastard and certainly didn’t expect any favours. So I didn’t do him any. After getting under the shower I asked Sal if she could spare a minute.
I stood next to her while she looked at the photograph under the light of her office desk lamp. She nodded her head to herself and then shook it in irritation.
‘You know what, I think I’ve seen this guy,’ she said. ‘Just for the moment though, don’t ask me where.’ She stared at the picture so hard I thought she’d wear it out.
‘What’s he done, this one?’
I told her what the police wanted him for.
‘Well, you know me, Bill, the further you can keep me from the Boys in Blue the happier I am but I’ll tell you, if I remember where I’ve seen this nonce I’ll get on to you straight.’
‘Thanks, Sal,’ I said.
‘And I’ll show it round the gym, see if anyone else has any idea.’
‘Thanks,’ I said again. I gave Sal a cheque for some subs that I owed her and reached in my bag for my bike key.
There’s a gay pub called The Centre quite near Sal’s gym and I stopped off there on my way home and chatted to some of the clientele. They had all heard of the murders and were interested in the photograph I had. No one could place the man, however, though one nervous-looking sixtyish teacher type did look at the picture a little longer than necessary and was just a touch too vehement in his denial. When I mentioned this to him he said that he had had a rough day, that’s all, and the last thing he wanted to think about was a serial killer. I told him that if he wasn’t careful that would be the last thing he ever did think about.
Back in my flat the washing-up stared at me like an angry lover. I plunged into it and felt good when it was done. I lay on my futon and looked through some more of the newspaper articles but didn’t get anywhere. The beginning of an investigation is always the most frustrating; you want to make connections but you haven’t got anything to make them with. I put the papers aside and then remembered that I still hadn’t read Luke’s poems, the ones which Sharon had given me. I got up and fetched them from the kitchen table. I sat looking at the blue folder Sharon had put them in for a long time without taking the poems out. I didn’t know why. The folder was made by a company called Avery and the style was a Guidex Bradford® BLUE 21113. I stared at it a few minutes more and was about to open it up when the phone rang.
It was Nicky, wanting me to go down to The Old Ludensian.
‘I can’t tonight, mate,’ I told him, looking at the folder, ‘I’ve got something I should do.’
‘Should?’ Nicky laughed. ‘Billy! I thought you were self-employed. Didn’t they tell you when you got your Schedule D number that there was no such thing as should any more?’
‘I think I missed that bit of the form.’
‘Come on down,’ Nicky insisted. ‘There’s no one in the bar, it’s quiet. Come and keep me company.’
‘Nicky…’
‘Come on!’
I let Nicky talk me into it and I drove down and joined him. The place was jumping. I thought perhaps that he’d just got a rush on, but when I finally managed to push my way through the crush to the far end of the bar where Nicky always sits I realized I’d been had. He was with two friends. New friends. Hi, hi. Hi, hi. I ended up with the blonde one and a nose full of hooter in a flat off the Fulham Road. I didn’t get back to Exmouth Market until well after seven the next morning. The blonde didn’t seem too upset that her friend had got Nicky, and her me, or if she was she was polite enough not to show it. Her name was Trish and she was in Advertising.
When you have a hangover and haven’t slept more than a couple of hours and generally feel like a piece of sun-dried shit, the best thing to do is shave, shine your shoes, put a tie round the collar of a bright white shirt and all in all look a lot smarter than you usually do. Then, not only will you feel more together, but if you happen to run into anyone you know the first thing they’ll tell you is how good you’re looking these days.
I did all these things and got to my office around ten. The temperature had fallen from the day before and the cold perked me up a bit. I didn’t actually feel that bad but I wasn’t so foolish as to think I’d got away with it. I knew it would hit me later. I ducked into the cafe for a coffee and because Mike was still out making deliveries Ally was there on her own. She looked me up and down as she handed me Kojak, and smiled.
‘You know, Billy,’ she said, ‘it’s not a bad effort but you should get some of that stuff which whitens the eyes. You know, takes away the little veins?’
I looked in the mirror behind her; blood-red cobwebs.
‘Any time you want to give this job up just tell me, Ally, just say the word.’
I did my accounts, paid a few bills, and wrote a couple of letters reminding people that they had actually employed me in a professional capacity and that because of such I would be very grateful if they would send me some money. I had another look at Andy Gold’s file and read the notes on Charlotte Morgan. At thirty-eight Charlotte was four years younger than Edward and had been married to him for seven years. She worked for a PR firm and had met her husband when her company won the BA account and decided to boost the profile of the airline’s actual staff in their corporate identity. A sort of upgrade for the pilots. They had married after a courtship of only six months and moved into the Highbury apartment in which Edward’s body had been found, often spending weekends at Mrs Morgan’s family home in Pevensey, Sussex, which she had inherited on the death of her father a year earlier. Neighbours reported them to be a quiet couple who were amiable enough but kept mostly to themselves. I had to smile at this. As a DC I had been given this description many times by people anxious to keep out of the picture or protect themselves against charges that they should have reported their neighbours’ activities long ago. It didn’t mean anything; the Morgans could have been holding sado-masochistic sex parties which included sacrificing chickens to voodoo gods and the description would have been the same. Quiet, kept to themselves.
The police had routinely ruled out any hint that Mrs Morgan was involved in her husband’s murder. The only suspicious fact was that she had been away at the time, something which could look just a little convenient if there was anything else pointing to her. But there wasn’t. The two PCs who had responded to her 999 call reported that her shock and trauma were genuine on discovering her husband lying dead with a champagne bottle jutting out of him. DI Drake, who was the first to interview her, also testified to her very real grief and shock. Everything pointed to the homosexual slasher idea, and when semen was discovered inside the corpse it was generally agreed that Mrs Morgan wasn’t the one who put it there.
The semen. That made me think. Had they crosschecked it with that found on James Waldock? I called Andy quickly and managed to catch him. Of course they had checked it, what sort of prat did I take him for? There was no match. Another change then – the killer had been even more careless: he’d wiped his prints but left his DNA.
So. Mrs Charlotte Morgan wasn’t a suspect and had no idea that her husband was, or even might have been, a homosexual. She hadn�
�t seen anyone suspicious hanging around in the area before she went away on business, and when she spoke to her husband on the phone from New York she didn’t notice anything different about his mood or his tone of voice. In fact, she knew nothing, nothing that was any help to the police. But maybe, like Alex Mitchell, I would be able to get her to remember things she didn’t even suspect she knew.
I’d arranged to meet Charlotte Morgan at twelve, in the small coffee lounge of Agnieszka’s, the Polish expat club on Exhibition Road, South Ken. I’d thought of it because it is always very quiet, especially in the mornings, and is only five minutes’ walk from where Mrs Morgan told me she worked. When I suggested it I was surprised that she actually knew where it was and had even been there. Nobody else I’d ever mentioned it to had.
I parked on a meter near Imperial College and got to Agnieszka’s about ten minutes early for my meeting. From the outside the club looks like a house. There is only a very small plaque on the large black door to announce its identity to the world, as well as a small sign which asks that visitors ring the bell. I did so. The doorman, a small elderly man in a dark suit and tie, opened the door and showed me into the hallway.
’Hello, hello again!’ the man said, bobbing the top half of his body up and down, his mouth breaking into a huge, cracked smile. I had no idea if he remembered me or whether this was simply his standard greeting. The man looked disapproving, upset even, when he saw that I didn’t have a coat to hand him. I informed him that I was here for coffee and he showed me through to the lounge.
As he sat me down on one of the broad sofas I handed him my card and I told him that I was waiting for a woman to join me, and would he show her through when she arrived. His grave nod told me that he took it on himself as a great personal responsibility to do so, and he left me to my thoughts.
The coffee lounge in Agnieszka’s takes up one end of the dining room, and as I waited for Mrs Morgan I let my eyes wander to the far end of the room. The impression is one of an old faded salon. The ceilings are high and the walls are almost completely hidden behind hundreds of oil paintings, their tops jutting forward slightly from the wall as if they are all competing for attention. The paintings are passionate, dramatic, especially the portraits of beautiful, dispossessed countesses, their eyes burning, their gaze set towards distant and lost horizons. What wallpaper that can be seen beneath the pictures is a dull, yellowy-cream colour that is torn in places and hasn’t been changed in years. Dinner there is reasonably cheap and can be surprisingly good, but it isn’t the food that I go there for. I go because the tableclothes aren’t paper, the cutlery is silver, and because, in contrast to those found at The Portman Club, the manners there demonstrate genuine warmth rather than stiff English formality.
There was no one else in the lounge so I had only Bartók to disturb me. A waiter came over and asked me if I wanted please to tea or to coffee. I said that I wanted thank you to coffee, and to mineral water also if it was possible. He said it was. Just as he was setting the tray down on the low table in front of me the door opened and Mrs Morgan was shown in by the doorman. I stood up and greeted her.
‘William Rucker,’ I said, shaking her hand.
‘Charlotte,’ the woman replied.
* * *
After the waiter had brought her coffee and she had taken a sip of it Charlotte Morgan folded her hands in her lap and looked at me. She looked very composed as she sat there and I was reminded of Sir Peter, the control he had shown. Two people with an ever-present pain inside them which they carried through their daily lives like a tumour. I looked for a sign which might give away her current emotional state but I couldn’t see one.
‘Well,’ she said.
I met her gaze for a second and thought how I should begin with her. Charlotte Morgan was a tall woman with black, full-bodied hair and a firm, lightly tanned face which I couldn’t imagine looked any more beautiful when she was younger than it did now. Her eyes were an amber-brown like those on a toy bear and set between them was a firm, slightly square nose which she probably hated, but which actually stopped her good looks from being simply the bland glossy-magazine sort. She had slim, long hands which she kept almost unnaturally still. They ended in Rioja-coloured nail varnish and I noticed that her left hand still bore a wedding ring. She was dressed in a fitted charcoal skirt-suit and a cream silk blouse, a thin gold chain flirting with the first closed button. I smiled politely into those deep eyes and I told her I was very grateful that she had been able to spare the time to see me.
‘May I ask who employed you?’ Mrs Morgan said. Her voice was light and more feminine than I would have imagined. I detected a purpose behind it, however, that made me imagine her shouting at one of her assistants who was taking too long over something.
‘I’m sorry,’ I replied, shaking my head slightly. ‘You’ll understand that I won’t be able to tell you that.’
‘No, I suppose not,’ she conceded. She didn’t press me. I think she had guessed it was Sir Peter. I wondered what she thought about that.
‘I called DI Gold after you left your first message,’ she told me. ‘I wanted to know if it was all right for me to talk to you. He said it was. He said you used to work with him.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I did.’ I smiled again.
‘Why did you resign?’ she asked.
What is this, The Prisoner?
‘I didn’t want to end up fat, overworked and cynical,’ I explained, thinking of the Chief Inspector. I thought about Luke.
‘No chance of that I shouldn’t think,’ Charlotte Morgan said, as she ran her hands back through her hair. I found myself blushing slightly. Was she flirting with me? No. She was just trying to act natural, to keep the black event which clouded her life from gaining sway. Or was it the PR lady, trying to get me onside, wanting to deal with me as effortlessly as possible?
I reached down for my coffee and took a sip of it, thinking that it was a good job I didn’t go to Agnieszka’s for that either.
‘I’d just like to go over a few things with you if that’s OK.’ I tried to sound like I understood, that I wasn’t a threat to her. Like an old male friend she could tell things to.
‘Fire away,’ she said.
Mrs Morgan took a deep breath and got herself together. I reached down for my briefcase and clicked the latch. It’s an old brown leather manuscript case which I like to think makes me look arty.
‘Have the police shown you this yet?’ I asked. I pulled out a copy of the picture which Andy Gold had given me, and handed it to her.
‘No,’ she said, taking it from me. Mrs Morgan’s voice was surprised and tentative. ‘No.’ She looked at the postcard askance, frowning, holding it between her thumb and index finger as if it were radioactive. I saw her taking the picture in, seeing Edward behind the man.
‘I spoke to them yesterday,’ she managed to say, ‘and they said they would come to the flat, where I’m staying, later tonight. They said they had a picture but no, no I…I haven’t seen it.’
Mrs Morgan looked at the picture that was shaking very slightly in her hand. I suddenly realized how difficult and shocking this must be to her, to look at a picture of the man who had very probably murdered her husband, a picture taken only hours before he did so. For some reason I had assumed that Andy Gold would have got round to her straight away. Then I realized that he was in no hurry for her to see it. Edward’s wife was hardly likely to recognize some guy her husband had picked up in an airport bar and taken home for sex while she was away.
Charlotte Morgan looked at the picture. Her gaze had changed and she was just staring at it blankly.
‘I can’t believe…’ she said. ‘It’s so…’
I waited.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Morgan,’ I said, when she didn’t go on. ‘Do you think you’ve ever seen that man?’
‘No,’ she said. A wistful look came over her face which betrayed a bewildered hurt.
‘It seems so bizarre,’ she went on, �
�to think of my husband. With a man. This man.’ She put the photograph down on the table. ‘And to think of what this man did to him. It’s …’ She looked for the word. ‘It’s surreal,’ she said. She shrugged her shoulders in a way which suggested that once she thought she knew about things, but she didn’t know anything about anything any more.
‘You never suspected?’ I asked quietly. ‘I mean, that Edward may have been interested in men?’
Her face set.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t.’
‘Never?’
She let out a breath. ‘There was one time when we talked about it, I mean the whole gay thing, but every couple must do that at some time or other.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘But why did you talk about it? I mean, how did it come up?’
‘What?’ Mrs Morgan looked a little shocked. I was sure that Edward had told her about his brother being gay. Why shouldn’t he have, they were married after all? I could see her wondering why I asked the question, wondering if I could possibly know as well.
‘You know,’ she said dismissively, ‘one of those talks.’
‘And what did Edward say?’
‘Well, he just said that it wasn’t for him. He thought it was OK for other people but not for him.’
‘And you believed him?’
‘Yes. Why shouldn’t I believe him?’
‘I don’t know. If you suspected he might be gay, for instance. Is that why you brought the matter up, because you did have an idea he might have feelings towards men?’
‘No!’
Mrs Morgan was getting flustered. On the police we were taught that when this happens the interviewee is generally hiding something. What was Charlotte hiding? I told her that I was sorry I had to ask questions like that but I was only doing it to find out who killed her husband.
‘You see, Mrs Morgan,’ I explained, ‘it doesn’t really make any sense if your husband wasn’t at least bisexual. If he wasn’t, then it doesn’t seem likely that he would be lured to his death by a man posing as a potential partner. Either that or the sexual activity that occurred was not consensual. That would mean that the killer had deviated a great deal. Also, the police have evidence which suggests that Edward went with the man in the picture there quite willingly.’