by Janet Neel
‘Is he a friend of yours?’ the landlord asked between hope and distaste.
‘Never seen him before. Has someone called that ambulance?’
‘Wouldn’t he be better in the air outside?’
‘He’d be better not moved too much.’ He saw open rebellion on the landlord’s face. ‘You don’t want to find yourself being sued.’
‘By you, for instance.’ The man had gone suddenly scarlet, his hands clenching, and Matthew gaped at him.
‘Nothing to do with me, mate. That’s free advice you’re getting.’
‘John.’ The man’s head jerked round at his wife’s sharp, alarmed summons, and he went reluctantly over to the bar, with one backward look full of venom at Matthew. No wonder there was no one under fifty in the place, he thought, taken aback as always by middle-aged male aggression. The man on the floor was breathing at least, so he made sure the airway was unobstructed and that he didn’t seem to have broken anything. He looked up but the landlord and his wife were huddled behind the bar, muttering, and several of the customers leaving. So he went over and got his drink and sat stolidly on the floor beside the limp body.
The ambulance arrived before he had got more than half his beer down; he explained succinctly to the crew and declined their invitation to join them in the ambulance. He stood back to watch them loading the casualty on to a stretcher and found himself hemmed in by two men in suits and short haircuts, both youngish.
‘Friend of yours, sir?’
‘Never seen him before.’
‘But you called the ambulance.’
‘No, no. Landlord here did that.’ He nodded to the man behind the bar and got a look of hatred in response.
‘We’d like to take a statement about the incident, if we may, sir?’ They both showed him warrant cards which he had been expecting since he saw them on either side of him.
‘Nothing to make a statement about. He fell off the chair flat, as you saw. I said an ambulance would be needed. It came. I’m not sure why you did, nobody was exactly wrecking the place.’
The two did not so much as look at each other. ‘So you are unwilling to come to the station with us?’
‘Damn right I am. I was just a spectator and I want to get home. Ask anyone.’ He waved an arm round the pub and realised he was in enemy territory. The half-dozen remaining patrons looked away, or buried their faces in their drinks, while the landlord and his wife busied themselves over glasses, their backs to him. He looked at the policeman incredulously. ‘You’re not serious. Why don’t we sit down here and I’ll tell you what happened? It’ll take about a minute and a half.’
‘It would be better for you if you accompanied us, sir.’
‘Crap.’ It was, he knew, not wise, but he was outraged, and saw too late the gleam in the senior man’s eye. He heard through an incredulous haze himself being arrested on suspicion of trafficking in drugs and cautioned. ‘Bugger that,’ he said, recovering his voice, ‘what do you stupid shits think you’re doing?’
He never saw the blow that caught him in the stomach and doubled him up, but he was in the waiting police car, sicking up his beer, before he could register any further objection. He was whisked through the streets and bustled into a police station he recognised; it was Notting Dale and the sergeant on the desk knew him at once.
‘If it isn’t Mr Sutherland! What’s he done? Drugs, is it? Well, well, well.’
Matthew had himself in hand despite the sickness and the pain in his stomach. He knew he was not among friends here, as a lawyer in the firm that represented much of the local criminal fraternity. ‘No, it isn’t. I just stopped one of your local citizenry dumping a sick man in the street.’
‘He’s been charged, Bill. Obstruction.’
The sergeant, lips compressed, assembled a pencil and paper and Matthew, objecting loudly, turned out both pockets and spread the contents on the desk. The four of them, and several members of the general public, contemplated a heap of handkerchief, keys, change, four pens, a notepad, and finally a small plastic bag full of a dark lumpy powder.
‘Is there anyone you would like to telephone, Mr Sutherland?’ the sergeant broke the silence to ask.
An hour later, he was sitting in a cell, hunched over, feeling deathly cold. He heard the clear commanding voice from the passage and sat up, disbelieving.
‘And how are you, Bill?’ she was asking as cheerfully as if she had dropped in for tea. ‘I’m sure John would have sent his regards if he’d known I was going to be here. How nice of you. What were the chaps called again who made the arrest? Killigan and O’Brien – I’m sure John will remember them.’
He managed to stop shivering and get his head up as the door opened.
‘Ah, Matthew. Come along, you must be hungry. I understand you have to appear tomorrow somewhere. West London, Bill? Thank you so much.’
The Seventh Cavalry was wearing the same yellow jacket as she had the night he had first seen her. She’d had her hair done since Monday and was wearing expensive executive-type jewellery and carrying an aggressively shiny black leather briefcase. The desk sergeant, who seemed to have shrunk, avoided his eye and the two detectives were nowhere to be seen. He followed her through the waiting area, getting a fleeting impression of people falling back before them. They were in the big McLeish Volvo before he felt able to speak and then he swore for two minutes consecutively.
‘Dearest Matthew, quite yourself again, I hear.’ He blew his nose, noisily, hoping he wasn’t going to cry, or be sick, eyeing his driver’s strong profile and spiky dark hair. ‘Silly me,’ she said, swinging the big car past a bus, ‘I’d expected, oh I dunno, some cries of how clever of you to get here, how lucky you happened to be around.’
‘Aha,’ he said, gratefully realising he wasn’t after all going to fall apart. ‘But then I recognised you as Wonderwoman the very first time I saw you. Your cunning disguise as an ordinary person never fooled me.’
She grinned in acknowledgement. ‘You gave my poor mum a hell of a shock. She couldn’t think what to do when you rang, struggling as she was with three new battered women.’
‘But she remembered that if she rubbed a lantern you’d pop up?’
‘That’s right. And by great good luck Susannah was in and is listening for William.’
‘And your husband? The copper?’
‘Don’t say it like that, we traded heavily on his name to get you out. Why didn’t you call Peter Graebner or someone from your shop? Matthew, have you died on me?’
‘Because they were going to keep me when I qualify. Partnership prospects. Only I’m not qualified, not yet, and with a conviction for drugs I never will.’
‘Get off. There’s lots of criminal solicitors.’
‘You’re thinking of admitted solicitors who abstract all the clients’ monies, or who give crappy advice which just enmeshes them in further shit. Not solicitors who do drugs. Your Law Society won’t even let me get to the starting post with a conviction.’
‘Ah.’ He did not, she noticed, protest his innocence. ‘It was cannabis they found on you?’ she asked carefully. ‘That’s not a Class A, I do know that.’
‘Doesn’t matter for this purpose. It’s still a conviction for drugs.’
A harder mind than her siblings, she thought, respectfully, for all he was younger even than the twins. He had faced his situation instantly and without evasion.
‘So you need not to be prosecuted, or if prosecuted to be found not guilty?’ she asked, determined to match his standards.
‘That’s about it.’ He was huddled against the window of the big car, hugging himself, and she speeded up, flying down the familiar streets to her house.
‘Come in, Matt.’ She took his hand as he hesitated, disconcerted, on the steps and led him downstairs to the kitchen, and heated up soup for him and occupied herself with tidying the kitchen while he ate the soup and the remains of a chicken and half a cake.
‘I can’t immediately work out what to do,’
she said, finally, when he had finished and was drinking coffee, ‘but I’ll think of something.’
‘Not your problem.’ The response was swift and decisive. ‘You’re a good girl to come and get me, and hang on to me, so I didn’t go and spill it all over Graebner. But you forget about it, I’m not one of your siblings.’
‘No, indeed. Though now you mention it, it was just like old times. Only with Tristram it was heroin, and in America, which made the whole thing that much more difficult.’
‘You mean you had to get into your tights, Wonderwoman, and fly across the Atlantic? What did your husband, the policeman, say?’
‘We weren’t married then.’
‘He was totally pissed off, in short. Don’t you worry about it, Frannie.’ He was sitting at the end of her table, elbows planted, the red hair looking flat and dejected, and as she watched him he fished out a handkerchief and blew his nose, lengthily.
‘Matt,’ she said, her heart wrung, and sat down beside him, and managed awkwardly to put an arm around his shoulders. He sat, stiff and tight, then turned his head to look at her. I need to move, she thought, frantically, and leant over to kiss him briskly and in a sisterly manner on the cheek, then disengaged herself and got to her feet. ‘Get some sleep,’ she said, idiotically, and pulled her voice back to the normal register. ‘I’ll drive you home, I know it’s near the Refuge.’
‘I agree, I can’t afford any more trouble tonight.’
She peeped at him anxiously, but he was shrugging himself into his layers of jacket, so she was able to hunt for the car key and call to Susannah that she would be back again very soon.
8
Thursday, 14 April
Luke Fleming arrived early, but Margaret Howard was there before him and made him coffee. He stopped to enquire about the welfare of her aunt. The business needed to keep Margaret in place, not too much agitated by the policemen who seemed to infest the office. He decided that they had nothing to worry about in this quarter; the murder had acted on her like oxygen and she was looking younger and fitter by the minute, bright-eyed and cheerful as she described the three days non-stop of phone calls, and the armies of nice young policemen, customers and neighbours that she had entertained.
‘And it’s good to have you in charge now, Mr Fleming. Poor Mrs Price is of course not able to deal with all these things.’ She gave him a flirtatious look and he remembered she was only five years his senior.
‘Mrs Price and I need to spend a couple of hours together, then I’ll need you to help me … us … with letters and so on … You know the people this end better than I do. Can you organise your lunch hour accordingly?’
Nothing, it turned out, could be easier. Miss Howard had felt it her duty, from the day the death had been discovered, to defend her desk against all comers. To which end she no longer left the building for lunch and brought in sandwiches from home, in which Luke would be most welcome to participate.
He thanked her and pushed through the interconnecting door which separated the office from the staircase to the first floor, and went up the thickly carpeted stairs. He was expected; Sylvia was not much of a one for surprises, and she opened the door to him, carefully dressed and made up and smelling deliciously of a flowery perfume.
‘Did you lock the door downstairs?’
‘Of course I did.’ He closed the living-room door behind him and took her in his arms. ‘You’re looking better,’ he said into her hair. ‘Did you sleep?’
‘Yes, I sleep. And you?’
‘Not well. I wanted to be here with you.’
‘This would not be proper.’ She detached herself from him in order to pour him coffee. He took the cup and put it down on the mantelpiece. It was important to discuss the business but he had one need more urgent than any of that. He took her cup away as well and held her, hands moving over her body.
‘Luke. We have not time.’
‘Oh yes, we have. We’ll work much better after.’ He felt for the nipple under the silk blouse as he kissed her mouth, and felt her lean on him.
‘Well…’
‘Upstairs quick then, unless you want it here on the floor.’
She didn’t, as he knew, preferring a decent bed. Well, he had no complaints, he was happy to do anything she wanted in return for her compliance in anything he’d ever asked for, and a couple of things he hadn’t thought of before.
He lay back in bed afterwards, listening to the noises in the bathroom, grinning to himself. It had been very good. And it would be even better to be able to do it when he wanted to, in a decent climate, as an acknowledged couple.
‘Luke, you must get up now.’ She appeared in the doorway wrapped in a travelling dressing-gown, looking soft and elegant. He made an effort and swung his legs out of bed to intercept her as she went past him to her dressing-table, and cuddled her to him.
‘You should have waited. I wanted to have a shower with you.’
‘Another day, Luke, yes, I too will want. But I am not easy here today. I know we will have many visitors. The police again, I am sure.’ She had removed herself firmly from his arms and was putting on foundation in careful small circles, concentrating on the task. He sighed, recognising that she could be right, and padded into the bathroom, finding a huge white towel, just the sort he liked, laid out for him. Sylvia knew – had always known – how to make a man feel comfortable, though he could have done without the small bits of china and little brightly coloured bottles of bath oil, skin cream, and shampoo, arranged decoratively on every surface. He thought without regret of his ex-wife, and their permanently untidy farmhouse on the cold side of a Yorkshire hill. Not at all what he had wanted, and he was paying out a lot of money to keep the place in being. He gritted his teeth against an old bitterness, but there was nothing to be done, or not yet.
‘Luke? I will be in the living-room. I hear the phone.’
It took him not more than fifteen minutes to shower and dress again. He was glad to see a slice of cake waiting with fresh coffee; it was like Sylvia to acknowledge that a man might need a little sustenance afterwards, rather than a plaintive request to fix whatever had last fallen off the house. He hauled a solid pile of paper out of his briefcase, in earnest of his good intentions, and ate the cake, cleaning his fingers on the immaculate lace-edged napkin provided, watching Sylvia as she made little adjustments to the various objects on the sidetables.
‘Sylvia? Look, I went to see the Nat West yesterday.’
‘That man Mr Rawling?’
‘Rawlings, yes. I brought him up to speed with where the police were, i.e. not very far but inclined to think that … that it was an intruder – someone breaking in – who killed Bill.’
‘I, too, think this.’
‘Yes.’ He looked at her under his eyelashes. They had been lovers for a year; it had been clear to him that she hadn’t been getting what she needed sexually from Bill, but she had seemed to get on well enough with him from day to day. And while the situation had not exactly been what he wanted, it hadn’t not suited him either. It left him free to live as he wanted in Majorca, having another girl every now and then. He had been coasting along in this relationship, he recognised, but the business out there had needed all his attention. ‘Anyway, he’d reread the insurance policy – he’d got it in the bank’s safe – and he was quite pleased. It had a suicide clause, but even if there had been any question of that with Bill it would have been OK. From their point of view, I mean. It only applied for a year after the policy was taken out, or increased.’
‘And it is more than a year since we raised the amounts. This I looked at. So we have £2m.’
He had never known how much Sylvia was involved in the business, but he suspected she had always had a sound understanding of the essentials. ‘Well, not necessarily. We have an overdraft of nearly £1.5m and we owe £15m in loans. Nat West are the lead bank, but there are others. If he wanted all his overdraft back that would leave us only £500,000 to play with.’
‘C
an you get twenty new units for this summer?’
‘With just that?’ He fished out three pieces of paper stapled together, and made some rapid calculations. ‘We got out of the ground, just, on all of the Soller blocks.’ He looked at his figures again. ‘But I couldn’t do all three, not at once. If I did two, it’d be end of June before they were finished and fitted out. I’ve lost the contractor, you see. Couldn’t pay him, so he went on somewhere else. But if I could write a cheque for £500,000 on condition he started back on site now, he’d come back.’ He looked up at her to find her gazing at him with the trusting-little-woman look he liked so much.
‘I think Bill has said that it is twenty units at least that we need. Otherwise we will have too much problems here, at this end.’
‘He’d oversold?’
‘I believe, yes.’
He sat back, thinking how much easier it was to deal with her than with Bill, who would have gone off on a long speech, full of metaphor, refusing to acknowledge that he had taken money for a product he was not going to be able to deliver when it was wanted.
‘If there were more cash would the work be able to go faster?’ she asked, frowning, and he put an arm round her.
‘You mean is there a way I could be sure of twenty units in … what … three months?’ He looked down to think and when he raised his head saw that she was watching him expectantly. ‘I wasn’t expecting the question – that’s why I’m slow,’ he said bluntly. ‘I didn’t know how much Bill had sold, nor how much cash I might get, so I haven’t worked this out.’
‘What was originally planned?’
‘Ah. To have these three blocks – that’s thirty-three units – at Soller ready for the end of May. I’d have done it too with a start last September, only that got delayed. I’d still have been there for the end of June, but we had to stop again, in January.’
‘But you have surely had some money from Bill since then?’