by John Harvey
‘Oh, and one more thing, she didn’t die from the beating up. She died from something else.’
He hadn’t tried to say anything; he hadn’t interrupted. He had sat there and taken it, his face growing a stronger shade of purple as he listened. Now that I had finished he didn’t do anything either. Not immediately.
Then his eyes went past mine to the uniformed man standing at the back of the room. They motioned him towards the door. I heard it shut hollowly behind him. Watched the man in front of me stand up.
He walked round behind me. Stood there. The muscles at the back of my neck tensed for a blow that didn’t come. Not yet.
When he did speak his voice was low, controlled. I wondered how much effort that control took.
He said, ‘How do you know the beating didn’t kill her?’
I said, ‘I don’t. It just didn’t feel right.’
He stood there, not saying anything. His presence bore down on me.
‘What did kill her?’ I asked.
I thought he wasn’t going to answer, but then he said, ‘Somebody injected an overdose of something, probably morphine, into her system.’
I thought about it for a while, then said, ‘Or she did it herself by mistake.’
I couldn’t see him shake his head, but I thought he might have. ‘She was a regular user, from the marks on her. She would have known what she was doing.’
‘On purpose then?’
‘Suicide? No note, no explanation. How many cases do you know of people who’ve killed themselves right after being smashed around the face the way she was?’
He was right. I didn’t. He didn’t. Two professionals together. But he was still standing behind me. The muscles in my neck were still tense, waiting.
‘Get up.’
I got up.
‘Turn round.’
I turned round.
‘All that stuff you gave me a few minutes ago. You know there’s no way you’re going to get away with that, don’t you.’
I knew. I told him so.
Still he did nothing. Just looked, his face very close to mine. I could smell something on his breath that might have been brandy and I wondered again where he had been earlier. Not that I supposed it really mattered. It was just that I had a naturally curious mind.
Something to do with my line of work.
‘Are you charging me with anything?’
His eyes told me he wasn’t.
‘All right if I go then?’
He said, ‘Get out!’ through his teeth. But he still didn’t move out of the way; even without his top coat he was broad. I couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t hit me again.
He said, ‘There’s no hurry for me, Mitchell. I can haul you in any time I want you. And want you I do. But I’ll wait until the right time, when you can’t wriggle out. Then I’m going to throw everything possible at you and you’ll wish that licence of yours was somebody else’s confetti.’
I turned my back on him again and picked up the licence and my card. Something plopped on to the table alongside my hand. My wallet. I put the things back inside it and slipped the wallet into my inside pocket.
I didn’t like the way it felt light; I was still annoyed about getting taken for the money. I knew that I was going to try to get it back.
I faced him again. ‘There’s nothing else?’
There wasn’t anything else. I stepped around him and walked to the door. When I opened it to leave and looked back he was still standing close to the desk, looking over at the blank wall: a man with things on his mind.
But then, who didn’t?
The car crawled along the kerb as though it was aiming to pick up a girl walking home alone and late. It was a dark Ford and there were three men in it. One in the front, two at the back. It had caught up with me by the time I reached the Natural History Museum. It was unmarked, but I thought I could guess where it had come from; who had sent it. It wasn’t looking for girls.
There didn’t seem to be anything else to do, so I carried on walking. I didn’t even have enough money for a cab. I thought of waiting for the car to catch me up and asking them for a lift.
After all, they could follow me better if I was inside there with them. But I didn’t want to be in there with them. I didn’t want to be with them at all.
I had the usual kind of choice: none.
I walked on. The car followed slowly, fifty yards behind. At least there was no danger of feeling lonely.
I had a flat, but that was too far away so I thought I’d go back to my office near Covent Garden and spend the rest of the night there on the sofa. I could use a good sleep. There were a lot of things I wanted to do in the morning.
Like see if I could track down Mr Hugh Blagden.
Like taking a look for the guy in the pepper and salt overcoat.
Like calling Tom Gilmour at West End Central and asking him a few questions about a West London cop with preoccupations.
Like …
I realised that the sound that had accompanied me for so long had disappeared. I looked round and the car squatted close to the kerb, stationary.
They couldn’t have run out of petrol. Perhaps they’d simply lost interest. Then again, they might have realised where I was going. I turned a corner and when next I looked back there was nothing but a grey and white cat stalking the empty street.
The office was up a couple of flights of stairs with a landing in the middle. It was dark but I didn’t bother with the light. Why should I? I’d been up them enough times before. Knew the number of steps, the number of paces along the lino-covered floor to the outer office door.
I unlocked it and stepped inside. Still I didn’t reach for a light switch. The second door now. Inside, I nearly locked it behind me but what was the point? I didn’t want the door kicked in. I couldn’t afford to pay for a new one.
This time I did flick on the light. Just for a moment. There were one or two things I wanted to do, one or two things I wanted to stash away where even the most prying eyes might not find them. Things like my Smith and Wesson .38. I didn’t want them getting the wrong ideas about me.
I put out the light and went over to the window. I was in time to see the dipped headlights ease along the street, then halt, then cut off. I went over to my desk and sat in my chair. It was quiet enough to be able to hear their footsteps all the way up the stairs, even through the two closed doors. If you listened very hard.
I was listening very hard.
One of them stopped half-way up; the other two kept on coming.
Then they were in the room. Big men. Hard, anonymous men. Night visitors. They had nothing against me; I had nothing against them. The finger had been pointed. They had a job to do. I hoped they were good. I hoped they wouldn’t be careless or messy.
I stood up. One of them switched on the light. I looked at them: the faces, the trilby hats, the suits. I had seen them a hundred times before: I had never seen them in my life.
A hand switched out the light. They came towards me. I moved out from behind my desk to meet them.
I knew I couldn’t just stand there. Even this game had rules. I feinted towards the one on the right and threw a punch at his partner. It caught him on the jaw and sent him staggering back across the office carpet. At roughly the same time a fist landed hard against my ribs and another went in lower down at the centre of my stomach. My head folded forwards on to the bones of his knuckles.
I shook my head and tried to step out of reach. All I did was step into the arms of the guy I had punched. And he wasn’t asking me to dance. Not this time.
He grabbed both arms and held them fast, then brought me sharply backwards so that his upraised knee struck me in the small of the back. I shouted out something which was cut off by a fist full in the face.
I think one of them said something at
this point, but I couldn’t be too sure. One of them held me while the other one hit me, mostly about the body now. No longer hastily, but with a lot of deliberation.
I had shut my eyes but when they opened involuntarily for a second I saw the figure of the third man standing in the middle of the outer office, watching through the open door. Not a face, an identity; merely a shape.
The one who was holding me got tired of it and they changed round. Pretty soon, it didn’t matter which of them was hitting me. Just as long as they stopped.
They did. Suddenly there was no one holding me and I was vaguely aware of the floor coming up to meet me for the second time that night. Then nothing …
When I came to there was something lying close to me that seemed to be in pain. Something that hurt. A body. It was several minutes before I realised that it was my own. I didn’t want it. To hell with it!
I lay there a while longer but it didn’t crawl away. It got so that I didn’t think it would. I picked it up carefully off the carpet. It tried to fall down again so I leant it against the side of the desk for a few minutes.
My eyes blinked back the daylight from the window. My watch had stopped. My throat felt thick and my tongue tasted like yesterday’s news.
They had gone through the filing cabinet, the cupboard, the drawers of the desk. Papers were strewn across the room; two empty Southern Comfort bottles stood side by side close to the door. I didn’t know what they had been looking for. Perhaps they hadn’t known either. Perhaps there hadn’t been anything to look for. Perhaps it was just the natural course of events: you knocked a guy about on his own premises and then you searched them.
It was the way of the world.
At last I thought my body and I could make it back together again, so we moved away from the desk and stood on our own two feet.
It was a lonely thing to do.
I reached over to the phone and dialled the time. It was seventeen minutes after ten precisely. At the third stroke.
I started to pick up the papers from the floor, but each time I bent down if felt as though someone inside my head was trying to knock his way out with a heavy duty chisel. So I decided to leave the mess where it was and go out and buy myself a cup of coffee. Better, three cups of coffee. There was this coffee shop down the road where they made really good coffee.
As I passed the mirror I’d put in the outer office so that my clients could tidy themselves up while they were queuing up to see me, I caught sight of someone who bore a passing resemblance to somebody I used to know.
I looked again. If I went into the coffee shop looking like that they’d probably call the cops.
I went back into the other room and cleaned myself up at the small sink in the corner. After several minutes I decided that it wasn’t going to make any difference but I needed the coffee enough to take the risk.
The stairs took a long time to get down and by the time I was out on to the pavement, my ankle was aching again. The least of my troubles, I concentrated on it like mad until Tricia had poured me my coffee and I was sitting down staring at its dark brown surface.
3
The place was small and friendly enough without getting intrusive. Upstairs they sold health food and down where I was sitting they had things like chick peas and lentil soup. And cheesecake. And Brazilian Plantation coffee.
The tables were scrubbed and varnished pine, with rush mats and dark wooden bowls of soft brown sugar. The first cup of coffee tasted good, the second even better. I was half-way through this when three young girls came in.
They were smartly dressed and nicely made up and they couldn’t have been any older than fourteen. I wondered idly why they weren’t at school.
They sat down at the table next to mine without noticing that I was there. One of them went up to the counter and ordered three portions of cheesecake and three coffees. When she got it back to the table they started to talk in low voices about how much it had cost and how much they had left. They began to push coins across the table from one to the other.
I went and got my third coffee. On my way back I noticed the girl in the middle. Her hair was long and fair and she had a face that was perfect. I watched her again when I sat down. When she opened her mouth to speak she showed a flawless set of white teeth and tongue that was pink and pointed. She was eating blueberry cheesecake.
She dropped a coin on to the floor and it rolled near my feet. I could have reached down and picked it up. I didn’t.
Her friend got up and bent down for it. I sat a while longer, sipping my coffee and watching the girl as she put the cheesecake into her mouth with her fork.
She still didn’t know I was there. None of them did. I put my empty cup back in my saucer and walked up the stairs. Half-way up I remembered that my ankle hurt.
Back in the office I tried to raise Gilmour but the cop on duty said that he was out. I looked in the phone book for Hugh Blagden. There were thirteen Blagdens in the book, none of them with the initial letter H. I tried the numbers anyway.
One was a fishmonger and poulterer, one a chemists’ merchants; another was a spinster lady of somewhat advancing years who thought I was the young man from the book department at Harrods. The rest were either out or so far away from being any use as to be impossible.
I dropped the book to the floor and tried West End Central again. Tom had that minute got back into the building. After a couple more minutes he was at the other end of the line.
‘Hello, Scott, what’s up?’
‘Have you read the papers?’
‘Not yet. Should I?’
I told him he should and waited while the rustling of pages sounded down the line from his desk.
After a while he said, ‘You mean the dead girl in Earls Court?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘How are you mixed up in that?’
‘I found her.’
‘They haven’t given you a name check.’
‘You’re surprised?’
He wasn’t. He asked me what had happened. I told him. It sounded even sillier this time.
‘Who did you have to pull that one on?’
‘A heavy guy with a face that’s getting flabby and a lot on his mind.’
‘Hankin?’
‘I guess so.’
Tom whistled down the phone.
‘You know him?’ I asked.
‘By reputation. I’ve seen him a few times, passed the odd word. Nothing much.’
‘Would he be the kind of guy who would send a nice little visiting party out to tuck me in for the night?’
‘He might. That would depend if you gave him cause.’
I let that one ride. I said, ‘He seemed very preoccupied. Any ideas about that?’
A slight pause, then, ‘Could be he’s snowed under with work. Could be trouble at home. Anything. Perhaps he didn’t need another case dumped on him. Especially not a murder.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Does it matter?’
‘I don’t know. It might. Probably not, though.’
‘You’ve no idea where this character who hired you might be?’
‘None at all.’
‘Then you’d better find him. You might end up needing him.’
‘And just how do you suggest I go about doing that?’
‘Why ask me? You’re the detective.’
‘So are you.’
‘Sure. But I don’t want to find anybody called Blagden.’
‘Thanks, Tom. You’re a great help.’
He laughed pleasantly down the line. ‘That’s okay, Scott. Anytime. Anytime at all.’
And he hung up. Fast.
I took a slow walk down to the Seven Dials and asked the barman some questions about the man in the brown suit I had met there several days before. He didn’t remember seeing him; he di
dn’t even remember seeing me. He told me I looked as though I could use a drink but not in such a way as I thought he was offering to buy me one. I left the pub and took a tube down to Earls Court.
I got into the room opposite the flat I had been watching and picked up the few things I had left behind. From the window I could see a uniformed cop standing guard on the front steps and I didn’t need to walk round the back to know there would be another one round there.
A few buildings further along there was an estate agent’s board advertising flats to let. Across it had been posted diagonally the words, ‘One Remaining.’ I made a note of the address and left clutching my thermos and transistor. I would pay them a visit but not until later, when I had been able to do something about my appearance.
Some sticking plaster and a suit that was recently back from the cleaners made me look more presentable. After all if I was going to make enquiries about property then I had to create the right sort of impression. I would be getting close to life’s real nitty gritty: property was what it was mostly about … wasn’t it?
I found a hat that was big enough to cover the bump on the back of my head and set off for Knightsbridge. I wasn’t going to waste my time with any old two bit estate agent. Not me. I was after the big time.
From the minute I entered the place I could tell that I was going to get it. The carpet was several feet thick and when I stood in it my shoes disappeared from sight. Behind a glass desk, a brunette with tied-back hair and rimless glasses was talking into the telephone. She was dressed like something out of Vogue and she had all the warmth of cut-glass. If you liked cold things she was very beautiful. I didn’t think that I did, but I stood there staring at her anyway, up to my ankles in deepest acrilan. Wide-eyed and legless.