Told you so would have been vulgar, so I contented myself with, ‘And the trip?’
‘We decided it warranted an interview – not formal questioning, just an interview. She’s not at home, which isn’t suspicious in itself, but we managed to get hold of the receptionist who works for the Trust, and she says Stein took sudden leave last week. We were just wondering where she might be.’
I was interested to note that she’d become ‘Stein’, not ‘Celia’. ‘We know where she was for part of that leave of absence. On Wednesday she was at Frank’s funeral.’
‘I know, it’s a precaution, nothing more.’ But his voice was tight. He was irritated with himself for not having looked into her earlier.
I went back to the salad I’d been making, but I turned the information over as much as the leaves, maybe more. Denise’s reported conversation implied Celia hadn’t been scheduled to go on holiday, that on Friday she hadn’t said anything, just rung in on Monday to say she wouldn’t be in. She’d been at the funeral, but that was after, and nothing had happened on the weekend.
My hands stilled. I’d been knocked off my bike at the weekend. By someone who didn’t stop, which might happen at any time. In what several bystanders thought was a deliberate sideswipe, which didn’t. It’s true that I’m bolshie, and I have a bad habit of saying what I think without filtering it through my brain first, but up to now, no one’s tried to kill me.
I texted Jake. Did you ask neighbours/Denise/whoever if Celia drives a dark blue Volvo?
The answer was unhelpful. How do you know Denise?
Missing the point, you fool, I shouted at the phone. Then I politely and quietly tapped in, I met her when I went to interview Celia for the panel. Voice to bring grown men to their knees.
Yes. Married her this morning.
I obviously wasn’t going to get an answer. Jake had said he was on his way back. It would keep. I returned to the lettuce. Then I dried my hands. If I waited, I’d decide it was stupid. And Jake would be home, and he wouldn’t let me.
I narrowed my eyes. I didn’t like being ‘let’ do anything, and the fact that Jake had tried to prevent me only in my imagination was irrelevant. I grabbed my laptop off my desk, added my keys and wallet, and threw everything into my bicycle basket. If pressed, I could say that I was going to the market.
I went halfway, which was all I’d intended. Without even thinking about it, I passed the crossing where I’d been sideswiped and was off and had the bike chained up before I remembered and had time to be afraid. It didn’t matter if I couldn’t recognise Viv’s door again. Clutter accumulates at the bottom of my basket, and her note would still be there somewhere. If she was in, I’d ask my question. If not, I’d head for the market and try on the way back.
No problem on either front. I recognised her door, and she was in. As soon as I heard her footsteps I didn’t wait for her to tell me to bog off again, but called out, ‘Good morning, Viv! It’s Sam Clair. The one who got knocked off her cycle.’
She opened the door, but wasn’t prepared to let me in yet. I did the How-are-you-yes-my-goodness-my-face-still-looks-terrible-but-much-better-now-the-bruising-is-going-down first, and then the how-was-your-week in return.
There was no need to belabour it, though. Her manner made clear that if I said whatever it was I’d come to say and then let her get on with her day, it wouldn’t break her heart.
‘I have a question for the boy who saw the car registration.’
The shutters came down.
I put up a hand, Boy-Scout-oath style. ‘I promise that he won’t be asked by anyone except me. I will pass the information on, if it’s what I think it might be, but I won’t say how I know or where it came from. I promise,’ I repeated, radiating sincerity so hard I nearly buzzed.
She still didn’t say anything, but this time she was thinking, not rejecting the request out of hand.
‘There might be a possibility that I know who was driving. If it turns out that this is the person the boy saw, she will be wanted for much more than a hit-and-run where no one was badly hurt. If she’s not the person, then there’s no harm done, and I won’t mention it.’
Decision made. ‘I’ll see if the boy is about. And if he’s willing to talk to you. I don’t promise, but come back in half an hour.’
I was going to the market after all. Sometimes I turn out to be telling the truth even when I don’t have any plans to.
I was back in half an hour on the dot. And so was Viv, waiting for me on her doorstep with what she had called the ‘boy’: late teens, hangdog look, trousers down around his bum – all the signs of a boy who had been in what Viv called ‘a bit of trouble’, and also all the signs of a boy who hadn’t. Basically, just the signs of being a teenaged boy.
I held out my hand. ‘Hi, I’m Sam. Thank you for agreeing to talk to me.’
He looked at my hand as if no one had ever offered to shake hands with him before. And maybe they hadn’t. He was young. But he took it and grinned. Terrific smile. ‘Hi, Sam. I’m Sam too.’ Viv clicked her tongue and he subsided. He wasn’t supposed to have told me that.
I grinned back. ‘So if I need to, I’ll say I was talking to myself.’ Even Viv smiled. I opened my laptop. I’d found some pictures of Celia and Delia at the press conference, and now I pulled up the page, with the first ten or so photos showing them and a dozen other people. ‘Do you recognise any of these people?’
He took the laptop and held it close. He had light-brown eyes surrounded by eyelashes of an indecent, giraffe-like length. I followed them as they moved carefully from one picture to the next. Then he handed the laptop back. He didn’t even say anything, just shrugged.
I was stunned. I was so sure he was going to say yes, I hadn’t prepared for the possibility of his saying no.
The hell with police procedure, or at least the hell with what I imagined police procedure to be, based on my extensive reading of crime fiction. I clicked on a picture of Celia by herself. ‘Her?’ I said bluntly.
He looked, and shook his head. ‘No.’ Not even ‘I don’t think so’. Just ‘No’.
‘Fuck.’ I said it without thinking. It made Sam laugh, but Viv glared. No more biscuits for you, her look said.
Story of my life.
‘So if that’s not her, what did she look like?’ He stared at me blankly. She looked like a woman.
‘Red-headed? Brown hair? Blonde? Pink?’
He grinned again, hangdog look entirely gone. ‘Not pink. The others?’ He shrugged. No idea.
‘Age?’
Nothing. He knew she was female, he didn’t know how he knew, and that was it. I pulled a couple of business cards from my wallet and scribbled on the backs. ‘This is my mobile. If you think of anything, will you give me a call?’
Both took one, Viv with the enthusiasm of an angler who, at the end of a long day’s fishing, has hooked up a tin can. Sam’s response was more curiosity than enthusiasm. It was like shaking hands with adults. Not something that had happened to him before, but not unpleasant now he’d tried it.
Jake was home by the time I got back, and was staring dubiously at the salad. ‘Lunch?’ he whined.
I waved my basket. ‘Saved by the market. I got you tough-guy grub to water down the wussiness of a salad.’
All the same, he ate his share of salad too. Talk is cheap.
He waited until we were washing up before he said casually, ‘You went to the market OK?’
‘OK? As in, you’re such a lunatic you might forget where the market is, and then how to get home? Or OK as in, I still think a madman will zoom out of a crossing and try to murder you if you venture out, even though I’ve stopped insisting on driving you to work?’ I stood with my hands on my hips. It was a savage reply to a fairly unloaded question – well, a fairly loaded question, but a fairly fair one, too. I couldn’t help it, though. I hated being reminded that someone might want to hurt me, and it made me want to hurt whoever reminded me of it. I rubbed my hands over my eyes.
‘Sorry. Yes, I went to the market with no problem. And then, on the way home …’
Jake’s back was to me, and he waited, standing with one arm raised halfway to putting the dishes in the cupboard. Finally, when I didn’t continue, he prompted, ‘And on the way back, what?’
‘I stopped to chat to the woman who’d helped me last week. When I fell?’
He didn’t move. ‘And?’
‘And the boy who said the car was a blue Volvo.’
He finished putting the plates away and turned around, rolling down his sleeves. ‘And he couldn’t identify Celia Stein.’
‘What? How did you—?’ I felt like a lab-rat in a cage, my movements monitored, even predicted. ‘Being with you is creepy.’ I saw the look on his face. ‘No! That’s not what I meant. Being with you isn’t creepy, but what you just did is creepy. How did you do that?’
He pointed to my laptop, still at the bottom of my bicycle basket. ‘You don’t take your laptop anywhere much, and never to the market. So you wanted it for something, and if you spoke to the boy, that must have been what you wanted it for.’ He held up his hands, palms out – See, nothing up my sleeves.
Most men don’t notice anything ever. Which can be infuriating to live with. But I wasn’t sure that men – or a man – who noticed everything were any easier to live with. Maybe I’d give up on men and get a dog. They only noticed dog food and other dogs’ bottoms. Neither of which mattered to me. I went back to what Jake had said. ‘All right, that was how you knew that I’d been asking. How did you know that he said it wasn’t her?’
He started to answer the question, then was diverted. ‘He was sure it wasn’t her? That’s interesting.’ Then he went back. ‘There are always three possibilities.’ He pointed, lecturing. ‘The witness positively identifies the person of interest; the witness says it was definitely not the person of interest; or the witness is not certain.’ He left the textbook behind and returned to Celia. ‘If I’d guessed, I would have said he wouldn’t be able to say one way or the other.’
‘He was sure. It wasn’t her.’
‘Were the photographs good? What did you show him?’
I pulled up the page again. And then I also admitted to pointing out Celia when the boy hadn’t recognised any of the photos on his own. Jake looked disapproving, but I could see he was trying not to laugh. What I’d done was probably what the police wanted to do all the time, jabbing at a photo and shouting, ‘Her! Her, for God’s sake.’
He agreed that the photos were good enough for identification, just adding mildly that it was lucky the boy hadn’t recognised anybody, as my pointing her out would have made his evidence inadmissible. I shrugged. He hadn’t recognised anybody, so it was moot, and anyway, I’d promised not to identify him, so at least that was a battle I now wouldn’t have to have.
But I still didn’t know how Jake had known that the boy hadn’t recognised her. He was dismissive. ‘Nothing very clever. You wanted it to be her. If he’d said yes, you would have told me first thing.’
That simple. I closed down the page. Behind it, I saw a new batch of emails had appeared, including one from Lucy. I clicked on it. Aidan had asked her to send me photos of the Stevensons with book jackets in them. And she attached eleven JPEGS. I turned the screen toward Jake. ‘Do you want to send this on to your office?’
He looked at it and nodded, forwarding it on.
‘Is that it, then? Are you finished for the weekend?’
He looked smugly pleased. ‘Barring emergencies, yes. And just in time. The football begins in half an hour.’
Be still, my fast-beating heart.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ILIKE TO IMAGINE that I subscribe to the never-do-today-what-you-can-put-off-until-tomorrow school of thought. In reality, I’m methodical and plodding. So while Jake watched the match, I opened up the JPEGS Lucy had sent, zoomed in on the colophons and printed them off. The pictures were all dated, three in a cluster from the late 1960s, which included the puppy/Kafka one I’d already got. Then there was another series of four that had been made in the early 1970s. After that, Stevenson must have stopped using book jackets until the 1990s. The final four were from just before he vanished.
I stood in front of my bookshelves, scanning for Tetrarch spines, then checking each one for a date. I pulled examples from the 1950s through to this year, and then carefully went through each one, checking the reprint dates inside, setting them down spine upwards on the floor, in groups for each decade, with smaller groups within the decades, whenever the publisher had had the colophons redesigned. This was why cop shows always got an audience, right? The glamour.
Jake kept his eyes on the television, but he was watching me all the same.
I was working at a glacial pace. This wasn’t the kind of situation where ‘close enough’ was going to fly. It took me nearly an hour to find enough examples from each date. I wanted at least one example for every five-year span, but the early years, before I had been buying books, were thin on my shelves. In two cases, however, I had copies of the books Stevenson had used – he was not exactly a literary maverick, and his taste ran to counterculture-mainstream, if such a category exists, and I think it does. One was the Kerouac. Mine was a later reprinting, from 2000, so I moved that to the 2000s decade group. The other was a William Burroughs novel.
Only when I’d chosen all the books did I let myself pick up the copies from the printer in the next room. I had cropped each image so that only the colophon showed, not the title above it on the spine, with no other identifying features visible. I didn’t want to be guided by what I thought the dates ought to be, based on when I knew the books were published, or the collages created.
Then I sat on the floor moving the photocopies from group to group. Small children can be kept quiet for hours with a pack of cards turned face down on the carpet: turn up two that match, you encourage them. The level of difficulty was the same with this task. The answers were as immediately and screamingly obvious as two aces would be to a six-year-old. Anyone who had ever worked in publishing or design could have seen what I saw right away. But I pretended I didn’t, and went through each one slowly and carefully.
When I’d paired up each photocopied colophon to a book with a matching colophon, I got my laptop out and opened up the JPEGS again. Then I went back to the photocopies, checking the collages’ titles and dates, copying them down onto their respective photocopies.
I sat back.
Jake had given up all pretence of television half an hour before. ‘Well?’
‘Two.’ I said, talking to the floorboards in front of me. I’d just proved that my ex-lover’s gallery had been selling forgeries. ‘The one that I knew about, with Kafka and the puppy – which is, by the way, with dazzling originality entitled Kafka’s Puppy. And one more, a late one, from 1992.’
He whistled. ‘Two out of eleven.’
‘That’s what it looks like.’ I didn’t look up. ‘What now?’
‘May I take the books?’
What did he think, I was going to withhold the evidence? At this stage? I got up wearily, and started to re-shelve all the books except the eleven from the dates of the pictures. It was good to have something mechanical to do. I stared at the title of each book carefully, as if the alphabet were a new concept that had only just been explained to me, and I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions about whether Dostoyevsky came before or after Asimov.
Finally nothing but the eleven books and their photocopies sat accusingly on the floor. I tucked each photocopy into the book whose colophon it matched, and piled them up on the table by the door.
Jake looked at me sympathetically as he stood and picked up his phone. ‘Mark each sheet, and its partner book 1a, 1b; 2a, 2b; and so on. Then sign and date both the books and the sheets under the numbers. Someone will come and collect them.’ He stopped. ‘I’m sorry, you won’t get the books back.’
My voice sounded swollen, as if I had a cold. ‘I never want to see the bloody
things ever again.’
And I went into the bedroom and closed the door behind me firmly. It wasn’t Jake’s fault, but I didn’t want to talk to him, and I didn’t want to listen to him explain to whoever he spoke to on the phone, or see the person who came to get the books. I wanted to go to bed and pull the duvet over my head. But that was stupid and melodramatic, so I sorted the laundry I’d done that morning. At least Sam Spade regretted losing Brigid O’Shaughnessy, I thought. I was sitting on the bed trying not to cry over a lost sock. And my poor lost friend Aidan.
After half an hour I’d heard the front door open and close, and I went back to the sitting room. The football had ended, and some sort of historical adaptation was on, the kind television companies think are improving. Cultural Weetabix. But Jake wasn’t watching, he was staring out the window, waiting for me. I went and sat down beside him, leaning into him.
‘I hate this a lot,’ I confided.
‘Me too.’
I knew he hated it only because it touched my life. That made me feel better. So I scrubbed at my face and sat up. ‘Can we forget it for the rest of the weekend?’
‘We can try.’
And so we did. I sent Helena an email telling her about the colophons, but that was as far as I thought I needed to go. She would tell Aidan. Jake’s office didn’t call him in, I didn’t have anything terribly urgent to read, and instead we spent the time together without any of the scratchiness that had been hovering around so many of our conversations in the past weeks. So much so that we silently decided not to break the harmony by discussing any of those things we’d postponed to ‘later’. Later was, by mutual agreement, not now.
A Bed of Scorpions Page 20