Gilgamesh

by Jo Bannister

  If there’s one thing being a novelist equips you for, it’s lying. I let a look of weary despair wash over my face. “Oh God, not you too?”

  That threw her. She blinked rapidly, the dramatic dark eyes startled and confused. “What?”

  I sighed. “They’ve got Scenes of Crime specialists, forensic scientists, fingerprint experts, even a mounted division. Why can’t the police force train itself some Asking Questions Tactfully officers?”

  She didn’t know what I was talking about, but I’d succeeded in knocking all the impetus out of her attack. “Er—sorry?”

  “Harry,” I said by way of explanation. “He’s managed to offend half the population of The Brink—who, it will not have escaped your notice, are our neighbours—by asking what they were doing on Tuesday night in his best canny, gruff policeman voice. It’s not answering his questions that people resent; it’s his ‘You can’t fool me, chummy, I’ve got a Black Maria outside’manner.”

  The time had come when she had to say something. Her mind must have been in turmoil, wondering if she’d over-reacted to a routine, if irritating, consequence of a crime in the locality and whether I had noticed if she had. Finally, wisely, she elected to play it straight.

  She shrugged and grinned. “That’s a relief. Hell, I thought he was for real.”

  “Oh, it was for real, all right,” I said. “He really needs to know where everyone was and who can vouch for who else. Finding that picture threw everything at the fan: if it wasn’t robbery, then it was personal, and that means someone David knows. Quite possibly someone we all know. Ellen and I ruled one another out, otherwise he’d have grilled us too. I suppose you and your father vouched for each other.”

  She started to relax. “Better than that actually. We had the Maudsleys and Jan and Bobby Parker round for dinner. Just as well really; if I’d been home alone, I’d have been rather uneasy, at least until …” She let the sentence peter out.

  I finished it for her. “Until they get her.”

  Sally Fane jumped out of her rose-tan skin. “Her?”

  “Her, him—whoever. It could have been a woman: it was a gunshot, after all, not manual strangulation.” I said it quite negligently, without import.

  “I thought you saw him.”

  “I saw someone. It could have been the Archbishop of Canterbury or Dame Edna Everage for all I can say. I suppose the odds favour it being a man, but not by all that much. Women have passions, too, and grudges, and ambitions.”

  And with that, I gave her a friendly nod and let myself into Ellen’s kitchen, and left Sally on the mat wondering if I knew or if it was just so much coincidence. Which was how I meant to leave her. I went to find Ellen and ask after David.

  The Maudsleys were old India hands who had retired to England fifteen years before and never quite come to terms with the servant problem. They had a single frustrated peacock called Nabob, whose shrieks of torment were heard just rarely enough to go on disturbing. Mr. Maudsley tended to refer to Mrs. Maudsley as “the mem.” But they were a decent enough pair of old sticks, even if Mr. Maudsley once tried to buy a punkah in Woolworths and it was rumoured they still slept under mosquito nets. I was quite sure they’d want to sign the get-well card I’d bought for David. I wouldn’t have bought it otherwise.

  The other people I was sure would want to sign it were Jan Parker and her brother, Bobby. Jan was a financial executive with a PR firm in Coventry. Bobby was a professional cricketer and author of the most exquisite hand embroidery you ever saw. He did it on TV once, in the background while somebody interviewed Ian Botham in the foreground. He said it relaxed him and did great things for his grasp and co-ordination. Actually I think he just liked doing it. When I showed him the card, he grinned, fetched a needle and silk, and stitched out his signature. After that we talked.

  And after that Harry and I had one of our all-time, all-star, all-seats-sold, standing-room-only rows, which sent the cat scuttling for cover and knocked thousands off property values on The Brink because of the noisy neighbours.

  Harry began, “How dare you—” and went on to accuse me of obstructing police efforts, wasting police time, subverting the cause of justice and harassment, partly of Sally but mostly of him.

  I began, “Who the hell do you think you are—” and went on to remind him of the rights of the citizen, the freedom of the individual, the dangers of the police state, and the fact that my taxes paid his salary. (Actually, of course, the vagaries of the British tax system meant that the tax on my income was paid by my husband, a satisfactory situation from my point of view but hardly in the spirit of the Equal Opportunities legislation. Also, to be honest, whichever of us paid, my taxes wouldn’t have kept him in crumpled shirts.)

  When in due course we got past the mindless yelling stage and down to what was actually worrying him, it was not so much that I might be completely wrong, upset people, and reflect badly on him, but that I might possibly be partially right and my enthusiastic but undisciplined questing might alert the culprit in time to evade methodical police enquiries.

  Anger had already faded; now my sense of righteous indignation began to wax pale as well. I was undoubtedly in the right, the police are society’s weapon for dealing with crime and not a closed-shop warrior elite with first claim on anything interesting, but it wasn’t wholly as a police officer that Harry was reacting. Dear love him, the man was my husband and he was afraid I could get hurt. Since he wasn’t going to put his anxiety into words, I did it for him.

  From the look of genuine amazement on his face, it was clear that no such concern had troubled him. He shook his head, ponderous and patronising. “Clio, it’s like this: there’s no point putting in a highly trained, highly sensitive police dog after the scene has been trampled by an elephant.”

  He was not, however, so scornful of the elephant that he wasn’t interested in what it had found out.

  “She spilled coffee down her dress.”

  His expression didn’t flicker; his voice remained flat. “Sally did?”

  I nodded. “She had to go up and change.”

  “Well, she would,” he said, “wouldn’t she?”

  “Bobby Parker reckons it took her half an hour.”

  He’d have died rather than admit it but that snippet of information struck a chord with him. “Does he now?”

  Admittedly, Mrs. Maudsley thought it was nearer twenty minutes and didn’t find it surprising, since the full cup that up-ended itself down her front must have soaked not only her dress but everything underneath it; and after she’d stripped, washed, and dressed afresh, her make-up would need serious attention too. Mrs. Maudsley plainly thought twenty minutes the equivalent of a two under par.

  But even at twenty minutes, it was just possible. If they were the right twenty minutes.

  Harry said, “About what time was this?”

  I tried not to gloat. “‘About’be damned; it was exactly five to ten. The Colonel, it seems, always watches the ten o’clock news, even when he’s entertaining. It’s a kind of ritual. So at five to ten they got up from the table to take their coffee into the sitting-room, where the TV is, and Sally caught her sleeve on the door handle and baptised herself with best-ground Colombian, none of your instant rubbish.”

  “And how do they know what time she got back?”

  “It was between the interval and the weather. Mrs. Maudsley thought it was just after the interval; Bobby thinks it was just before the end. Jan Parker didn’t notice her come in, and I don’t think Mr. Maudsley missed her.”

  Harry frowned, groping for facts in his memory like a small boy delving for sweets in a fairground lucky dip. “Your call was logged at ten-ten. You reckoned David was shot maybe five minutes before that, and you saw the gunman running away three or four minutes later. She’d have had to get from Standings to David’s French window in under ten minutes, and back in about the same or a little less.”

  “It’s about three miles. Even at thirty miles an hour, you’d do
it in six minutes.”

  He looked out from under his eyebrows at me. “You reckon?”

  So we tried it. We tried it with his car, which was big and powerful, and mine, which was little and nippy. We tried it in full daylight, and we tried it again when dusk was blurring the corners and sending the neighbours to their beds. He even posted constables at strategic points to stop the traffic—two of them found no one to stop, the third caught only Jan Parker on her way home from a meeting and Miss Withinshaw taking her Sealyham for his constitutional—so that we could do it without fear for the consequences, as if our freedom depended on it.

  The fastest I managed it was eight and a half minutes down the hill and nine up it. The fastest times Harry recorded were a shade under and over eight minutes. The bends kept him from encroaching much on my time, although he had three times the power at his disposal. Jackie Stewart might have shaved a bit more off, but he’d still have found it hard going if Mrs. Maudsley’s twenty minutes was accurate.

  “She had to change,” said Harry, “at least out of the dress into trousers. Then she had to get to her car. Let’s be generous and assume that she came up the hill in eight minutes. She’s already at least eleven minutes away from the incident with the coffee, and even if David was ready to be shot the moment she reached Foxford, she’s still behind schedule. The lane to the wood is about the closest she could park, and she wouldn’t get through the hedge and come up the field in under a minute. It had to take her a minimum of twelve minutes from leaving her guests to arriving at David’s window. That’s a couple of minutes after you and Ellen heard the shot.”

  “A couple of minutes!” It was a tiny discrepancy, a leeway that would vanish entirely if we’d allowed just a few extra seconds at each juncture or if the dinner party had risen just two minutes earlier than estimated.

  “But those timings are already shaved to the bone; you can’t take even seconds off them. In all likelihood, the thing would actually take three or four minutes longer than that. Accept it, Clio. Unless you know of some way she could have done that journey in under six minutes, she didn’t do it at all.”

  But suppose it wasn’t Jackie Stewart we had to contend but Barry Sheen? “I’ll tell you one thing we haven’t tried,” I said. “A motorbike.”

  “Oh God,” Harry said wearily as the day ended.

  But the next day we were up there again, with a two-wheel hotshot from Traffic Branch. He did it four times each way, hugging the hedges and scraping the verges with alternate kneecaps. The first time he got up the hill in eight minutes. The fourth time he did it in six minutes and nine seconds.

  “Nine seconds, Harry!” I heard both triumph and desperation in my voice. “You’re not going to tell me I’m wrong for the sake of nine seconds?”

  He put his arm round my shoulders and walked me away, like a child that was getting over-excited. To put his arm round me like that he had to stoop slightly. “The nine seconds isn’t really the point. Suppose he’d done it in six minutes flat. He would have proved it was possible. He would also have established, to my satisfaction, if not to yours, that only a motorcycle ace with everything in his favour could have done it Maybe Sally Fane can ride a bike. Maybe she has a bike or access to one. But neither you nor I could have done what you’re suggesting she did, and even young Parrott there on the Skipley Flier probably couldn’t have done it. We’d be flying in the face of the evidence not to accept that what we’ve done here this morning and last night is virtually eliminate Sally Fane as a suspect.”

  I bit my lip. It or something tasted bitter. In my own mind I had been sure, but Harry was right: if it couldn’t be done, then it wasn’t done, and if it could only just be done, it probably wasn’t done either.

  I sighed. “I’m sorry, love. I thought I had the answer.”

  Harry’s fond, forgiving squeeze almost lifted me off the ground. “It isn’t always necessary to have the answer, just some questions you need answers to. It was worth the try.” He grinned. “If nothing else, we’ve made young Parrott’s day.”

  “What will you do now?”

  He stuck out his lower lip and blew thoughtfully up his nose. “I suppose, having got this far, I’d better talk to Bobby Parker and the Maudsleys. If they actually got up from the table five minutes earlier, the thing becomes possible again. Otherwise, we do what we always do—plug away until something gives. If it wasn’t Sally, it was someone else; just knowing that is a help. You may even be right about the horse, just wrong about the rider.”

  I shook my head, despondent. “No one else could be sure to gain by putting David out of action.”

  “Could Sally?”

  “No,” I conceded slowly. “But she was. She is.”

  “So maybe someone else thought the odds were good enough to be worth the gamble.”

  “No one else had the opportunity.”

  “Sally didn’t have the opportunity,” he reminded me pointedly. “So someone else must have.”

  “And who hit me on the head?”

  “The hatch-cover slipped. It was always the most likely explanation.”

  “Things don’t always happen the most likely way.”

  “No. But it’s most likely that they do.”

  Chapter Two

  Bobby was quite sure about the time. They’d missed the start of the Colonel’s news through mopping up after Sally.

  And Miss Withinshaw, when asked, said that she always took Podgy for his walk at ten and had neither seen nor heard a vehicle in the lanes at that time. She was out for about a quarter of an hour. She conceded that she might not have noticed a car going quietly about its business, but she didn’t believe she could have failed to hear anyone making the kind of row we had made up and down The Brink the previous evening.

  Ellen dropped in on her way back from the hospital. Her face was radiant. “Someone stuck a pin in his toe and he felt it!”

  “Ellen, that’s great news.” I sat her down, and we celebrated with a bottle of elderflower wine I had from David’s last foray into vintnery. It was every bit as bad as the one we’d been drinking before he was shot.

  “That’s what the doctor said,” she said, a little calmer now. “But I wondered if I was reading too much into it.”

  I shook my head firmly. “No. Short of him leaping out of bed and tap-dancing his way down to X-ray, it’s simply the best sign you could hope for. It means the nerve-chains of the central nervous system are intact all the way from that toe to his brain, and if one kind of message, the pain of the pinprick, can get through, there’s every reason to hope that full two-way communications will be restored. Hell, I can’t give you a guarantee, but if it was my husband’s toe that was complaining about being pricked, I’d hold off signing the cheque for the wheelchair.”

  We enthused a little more about David’s progress; then I enquired if she had replaced the truant groom yet. An idea was already stirring at the back of my mind, languourous and unfocused, a bit like blue-green algae wondering whether this sex thing was worth pursuing. Without encouragement they and I would probably have given up.

  I don’t know what did it for the blue-green algae. For me, it was Ellen rolling her eyes skyward and mouthing imprecations she wouldn’t dream of saying aloud. “You have no idea the difficulty getting reliable stable-hands. Trouble is, it looks like fun. It appeals to young girls who think they’ll spend the day galloping in slow motion along one skyline after another. They can’t imagine the sheer hard labour that goes into keeping competition horses fit and well. Or how difficult fit horses are: just because they haven’t fallen off at the riding school for three weeks they think they could cope. But if I put the best of the ones I’ve seen this week on the easiest of our horses, I’d probably never see either of them again.

  “And if you take away the riding, they don’t want the work—except for one or two who look about twelve, clearly think looking after horses is the natural development from playing with dolls, and would be steamrollered the first tim
e they got between Lucy and her dinner. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Without Sally we couldn’t manage at all, but even with her we’re barely scraping by. It’s not fair to Karen, and it’s not fair to the owners to skimp on their horses the way we’re having to. The first attack of azoturia and I’m going to have a very displeased client and probably some empty stables.”

  I said, bunking, “Azo—”

  “Azoturia,” she said, and grimaced. “It’s a cramping attack which occurs when fit horses miss exercise. It’s a dead giveaway that you’re not giving them enough work.”

  “Listen,” I said. “I know nothing about horses. But I’m not twelve, I never liked dolls, I don’t want to ride, and anything that tries to walk over me will lose its front teeth. I can’t offer you any expertise, but I can offer you a few hours’labour every day to tide you over until you get someone better. I mean, how difficult can shovelling horse-shit be? If I take some of the load off Karen and she takes some of the load off Sally, that’ll leave her a bit more time to prepare Gillyflower for Brand’s Hatch. Yes?”

  “Are you serious?”

  And of course I was, because I liked Ellen and wanted to help her out and because, whatever happened to David’s business in the future, I didn’t want to think it might have survived if I’d weighed in with a bit of time and effort when it mattered. And because with a reason to be working round Sally Fane day and daily I might find out how it was she’d done the seemingly impossible. “Absolutely.”

  “What will Harry say?”

  Harry would do his nut. “He won’t mind. I can do a part-time job and still function as a wife.”

  “He won’t mind you developing muscles like a navvy and smelling like a drayman?”

  Passionately. “I don’t expect so.”

  “One of these days,” said Ellen, “when David’s home and things are getting back to normal, I’m going to take time to thank all the people who’ve seen us through this, and you and Sally and Karen are going to be pretty high up the list.” Well, one out of three ain’t bad. “In the meantime, all I can say is, yes, it would be an enormous help, and yes, I’ll keep looking for someone to do it on a permanent basis; and for God’s sake don’t forget you have other things to do besides helping me. Even an hour each day would take the pressure off; two hours would be a God-send. Mornings are the worst, if you could manage that.”