by John Harvey
Then it was gone.
I opened my eyes again and turned back from the window. Back to the bed.
She had been lain carefully upon it, as though someone had put her gently down to rest. She was wearing a white nightdress that was split from between the top of her breasts to above her waist. This was tied across in several places by bows of white lace. Her eyes were closed and there was no sign of worry on her face. From the angle at which her head lay I could see that her neck had been broken.
I wondered what she had been thinking when it had happened.
I stood gazing down at her for a long while: but other than that she was young and beautiful and dead there didn’t seem to be very much to think about her. Not now: not any more.
I went back down the stairs and poured out the last drops of the coffee. I swallowed them back, then went out to the car.
I still had quite a way to go.
It was mid-morning. I knocked on the door and waited. As I stood there staring at the expensive wood I could already see those strange, thin lips.
And then the door opened and he was standing there himself, wearing some kind of quilted smoking jacket and looking like a second lead from a Fox movie of the early forties. All he needed was the neat, dark moustache.
A thought struck me. Maybe that was why they all had moustaches. Maybe they all had funny lips.
They moved.
He said, ‘This is a surprise, Mitchell. I wasn’t expecting you.’
‘Weren’t you?’ I snapped as I pushed past him and into the hallway. ‘What kind of an idiot did you think you’d hired anyway?’
He shut the door firmly, yet quietly, and stared at me with the appearance of someone who is used to expressing his authority through a glance.
Not with this guy he didn’t.
‘I don’t understand your meaning, Mitchell, but I do resent your attitude.’
It was all that I could do to stop myself from slugging him right then but I was afraid that once I started I wouldn’t be able to stop. And he wasn’t worth getting put away for.
‘Let’s get somewhere a little more private,’ I said, ‘then we’ll make things clear enough. Too clear for your liking.’
I pulled open the door to the room where we had first talked, where he had sat listening to all that Beethoven or whatever it was, where he had hatched who knew what thoughts?
Crosby Blake moved past me and I closed the door behind us.
‘I’ve seen her,’ I told him.
He wasn’t bad. The sudden turn had almost the right amount of surprise in it. The voice when he next spoke had something approaching the correct querulousness. But it was already too late for all that.
‘Where is she?’
‘You know where she is, Blake. She’s laid out on the bed in the cottage where you left her.’
The eyes blinked, the mouth tightened even more; his right hand made a vague flapping movement by his side, then was still.
‘What … what do you mean?’ He was still trying, but the command was almost gone from the voice. He looked strained, broken.
‘She’s lying on that nice white bedspread with a twisted neck. Or had you forgotten? So soon.’
‘But I … why should … there was no … I loved her. Loved her!’
He screamed the last words in my face and as he did so he moved towards me and I thought he was going to strike out. But instead he began to crumple slowly towards the floor, knees giving way, body folding under him until he was at my feet and all I could hear in the room was the quiet ticking of the clock and a strange choked sobbing sound which came from his throat.
‘You loved her all right. If that’s what you want to call an emotion that screws you up so much you’ll kill because of it. Her running away from you and trying to get back the money you’d once promised her—you would have stood for that. But the man’s testimony of how she got him to do as she wanted, of how she had given herself to him in payment. That was something you couldn’t stand. She had to be yours and yours only.
‘You had this twisted vision of her as a mixture of virgin innocent and lover. But that vision would only admit her as your lover. If it was anyone else, then the whole thing fell apart.
‘So you drove up to where you guessed she would be and she was there all right. I don’t know if she tried to get round you; I don’t know if you tried to come to terms with what she had done to you … to herself. Either way, the result was the same.
‘She’s seventeen years of age and she won’t get any older. Ever.’
The moaning increased and he moved his arm until the ends of his fingers rested on the leather of my shoe. I looked down as though I was staring at a number of pale white slugs. I eased my foot away and turned round.
I shut the door behind me and went over the hall to the telephone.
For the rest of that day and all of the night, I was alternately sitting and standing in front of a number of police officers at West End Central. My bones ached worse than ever and my head throbbed like someone was perpetually kicking at it with a steel-capped boot. They weren’t but in its own way it was as bad. If I slumped forward in my chair and they could see that I was almost beyond staying awake, they made me stand up. When I swayed enough to make it seem that I might fall over, they pushed me down on to a chair. And started over again.
Tom Gilmour was my friend and he was the biggest bastard of the lot.
But by about five the following morning, it was beginning to look as though they might be going to believe everything I had told them and let me go.
When Tom finally said I could get the mothering hell out of there, he gave me the other bit of good news. My car had been found: it was wrapped round a lampost on the Southend road and looked to be a total write-off.
‘I’ll get someone to drive you back,’ Gilmour said grudgingly.
I looked at him blearily and it took me several minutes to get him in focus. ‘Sure. Only I’m not going straight home. I want to go to the Blake place. There’s something in the medical report on Cathy that I want to tell her mother.’
He stared at me as though I really was all those kinds of idiot he had spent the last endless hours telling me. But he agreed.
Mrs Skelton came to the door straight away, although it was still very early. From the way her face was shaping up she hadn’t had any sleep at all and she’d spent most of her time crying.
Until we were in the kitchen and she’d poured me a cup of tea I didn’t say anything. Then I told her what I thought she would want to know.
‘Mrs Skelton,’ I said, ‘I’ve just come from reading the doctor’s report on your daughter. I thought you’d want to know one of the things it said. There’s been a lot of dirt thrown about one way and another, a lot of claims and a lot of accusations. There’ll probably be a whole lot more before the trial is over.
‘But the doctor was positive about one thing. Whatever she or anyone else said, Cathy was a virgin.’
She gazed at me and her timid, tired face broke into tears once more. I wanted to hold her, but somehow I couldn’t. So I sat there until the crying had stopped and she had wiped her reddened eyes yet again on her apron.
I got up and made to go.
She said after me: ‘Thank you, Mr Mitchell. You’re a good man.’
I knew it was a lie, but it wasn’t until the coldness of the early morning hit me that the warmth of it was driven away. Sometimes you needed lies like you needed a good overcoat: it was when they became a straightjacket that you had to watch out. Though by then it was usually too late.
I looked up at a red post office van as it drove past me. The sign on the side told me to post early for Christmas. I didn’t think I’d bother.
They didn’t deliver cards back into the past.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Scott Mitchell Myste
ries
1
I looked at my watch: three minutes off nine o’clock. I yawned and stretched my legs out straight from the chair. I had been sitting there for a long time. Had been in that room for a long time. With a few short breaks to go and take a leak, I had been there for almost twelve hours. I checked my watch again: one minute off nine o’clock: twelve hours all but one minute.
The room was cold and steadily getting colder. There was a gas fire but the gas had been disconnected. I tried to huddle up further into my overcoat, but the coat wasn’t having any. Maybe I had bad breath. Maybe I just stank of too many rooms like this, too many days and nights spent watching other rooms, spying on people I didn’t know on behalf of more people I didn’t know. Maybe … but what the hell! There were always a lot of maybes hanging around, some of them trying to fool you into thinking they were something more definite. Something that would stand. Something that would last.
But they weren’t fooling me. Not any more. The world was a lot of little maybes, all running round looking for answers that didn’t exist. And over it all presided the Great Maybe in the Sky.
Across the road, the tall wooden door was opening at its centre. A guy came out, looked quickly up and down the street, then hurried down the steps. He pulled his coat collar up around his ears. It had to be even colder out there.
The coat was in a kind of salt and pepper fleck and it hung too low to the ground to have been his. He had dark tightly curled hair and a youngish face that looked bleak in the dull orange pallor of the streetlights. He walked quickly along the pavement and out of sight.
I made a note in my notebook. A methodical man. Method in the face of so much maybe. It didn’t solve anything but it kept me in touch with some strange illusion of reality that still bounced around somewhere at the back of my head. And it might mean something to whoever was paying me for my precious time.
Not that the notebook would tell anybody very much. Except that the same guy who had walked out had earlier, walked in. Much earlier. Mid-morning. Seven after eleven to be precise. It was in the book. The book didn’t say that he had come up to the place with the same quick walk, had looked around anxiously at the top of the steps before going through the door. He looked like a guy who was worried, as if he was expecting someone to jump out at him, to be watching him.
Well, someone was. I was. Scott Mitchell: private investigator.
Very private. So much so that there were weeks when the phone failed to ring and the postman failed to call and I thought that I was the most private person on earth.
Then something would turn up that would make me realise that I was wanted after all. A nice cosy little job like this one.
I glanced down at the thermos on the floor, but I knew it was empty. I looked at the transistor radio I had brought along to help while away the pleasant hours; but I knew that if I turned it on then I would be reaching out a couple of minutes later to switch it off.
I thought about the bottle of Southern Comfort I had decided that I couldn’t afford to buy.
I thought about … steady, Mitchell, that way madness lies!
I directed my mind back to the reason for my being there. As far as I understood even that.
It had been three days ago and I had been sitting in what I laughingly referred to as my office, indulging in some piece of activity with the spring of my biro. Anything to prevent total atrophy. Then the phone had started to ring. The sudden sound in that empty room made me jump and I dropped the pen on to the desk. It rang on and I sat there listening to it, thinking it had to be a wrong number and watching the various parts of the biro gently rolling towards the edge of the desk.
Finally, I reached out a hand and lifted the receiver towards me.
‘Mitchell,’ I said.
A man’s voice at the other end said, ‘Ah, Mr Mitchell, I thought you were out.’
‘So did I.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Don’t be.’
There was a pause. Now it was his turn to wonder if it was a wrong number.
‘You are Scott Mitchell? The private detective?’
I looked down at myself to check. ‘That’s me,’ I told him, ‘but I thought there were more of us than one.’
‘Sorry?’ he said.
‘Let’s not go through that again. You want to talk to me?’
‘That’s why I phoned.’
‘Fine. You want to tell me now or …’
‘I’d prefer if we met.’
‘So would I. Can you come to the office?’
‘Couldn’t we meet somewhere else? A pub or something?’
‘I could force myself into a pub.’
‘Do you know the Seven Dials?’
‘Sure. It’s near here.’
‘That’s why I suggested it.’
‘Smart. You sure you need a detective, Mr …?’
‘Blagden. Hugh Blagden. Yes, I’m sure. Will eleven thirty suit you?’
‘Well, normally I don’t drink until after lunch, but I guess I could make an exception.’
‘Do that. I’ll see you at eleven thirty sharp.’
And he rang off.
I spent five minutes or so searching the carpet for the spring from my biro. Finally, the only way I found it was by treading on it. Just the thing to inspire a detective with confidence. I went out of the office, locking both doors as I did so. You couldn’t be too careful. I didn’t want anybody wandering in and stealing my stale air as soon as my back was turned.
I made sure that I got to the pub early and took my beer over to a table facing the door. All part of my Wild Bill Hickok complex. And I wanted to be able to pick him out before he saw me. I managed it, but not by much.
He came through the door like a man who was used to walking through doors and having people jump to some kind of attention on the other side. I hitched myself back into my chair and sipped at my beer. He was around six foot and at least a stone heavier than he should have been. He was, wearing a brown suit in some kind of shiny material, three piece, the waistcoat straining slightly over his stomach.
He stood there and checked out the customers, then finally picked me out as the man most likely. As he walked over I was thinking that he might be okay: but I wouldn’t have bought a used car from him.
‘Mitchell?’ he asked, leaning a little over the table.
I nodded and he asked me if I wanted a drink. I shook my head and he walked over to the bar, coming back with what looked to be a large gin and tonic.
So that was the way it was. I wondered casually who signed his expenses form.
He tried the gin, took a cigar case from his inside pocket, shook out a cigar, fingered a lighter from the right hand side pocket, lit the cigar, put the lighter and cigar case back where they belonged. He blew a couple of puffs of smoke across the table, then decided to look at me.
He didn’t show much but he must have liked what he saw because a minute or so later he asked me if I would like a job.
‘Sure,’ I told him, ‘who wouldn’t? Times are hard and getting harder. Or so I read in the papers.’
‘That’s good,’ he said.
‘That things are getting tough?’
‘No. That you read.’
‘Nice.’ I applauded him quietly with three slow claps of my hands. ‘You don’t need a detective. What you need is a straight man. Try the home for out-of-work comedians.’
He had another go at the gin. The hand holding the cigar rested along one leg. The cigar seemed to have gone out.
‘Not the home for out-of-work detectives?’ he asked.
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning you don’t look like a man who usually orders a small beer.’
I shrugged my shoulders and wondered who was investigating who. He was turning out to be smarter than my first impression of him had s
uggested; but I still wouldn’t buy a car from him.
‘What’s the job?’ I asked.
He realised the cigar was out and tried to light it. He gave up and pulled his chair in closer towards the table.
‘I have an interest in a large block of flats. What agents call substantial and the previous owners used to call mansions with some chance of being taken seriously. It’s going to be redeveloped, only . . .’ Another drink, another pull on the dead cigar. ‘Only one flat is still occupied. The people have a lease and they’re not being receptive to any offers we’ve made. It’s got to the point where they won’t answer any letters we write and have refused to communicate with us in any way.’
He stopped. I was sitting there looking at him, not feeling any too keen on what I had heard so far. I put my empty glass back down on to the table.
‘Sorry,’ I said, shaking my head, ‘it’s not my kind of job.’
‘What isn’t?’
‘Hiring myself out as muscle to force people out of their property. There are plenty of others around who’ll do that with pleasure.’
‘You’ve jumped the gun, Mitchell. That wasn’t what I was going to ask you to do.’
‘Okay. Fire away.’
‘As far as I can find out, the leaseholders are no longer in the flat themselves. But somebody else is. Now that may mean they’re subletting. If they are, then they’ve broken the agreement in the lease and that puts us into a stronger position in getting them out.’
‘Who’s us?’
‘Some associates and myself. Surely that doesn’t matter?’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Watch the flat. Find out who goes in and comes out. Try to establish who’s living there.’
‘You could go and ask them yourself—you or one of your associates.’
‘Uh-uh. There’s one of those arrangements you have to speak into before they open the outside door. And they’re not answering. They’re certainly not letting me in. Of course, they have a perfectly legal right to refuse their permission.’
‘Is that how you want it played?’
He raised his eyebrows a little, as though he had not really heard what I’d said.