A Ghost at the Door

by Michael Dobbs

  ‘But presumably you’ve established the time of death.’

  ‘There, or thereabouts. The path-lab people are still working on that.’

  ‘What? Still?’

  ‘There are some unusual circumstances surrounding this death that we’re trying to get to the bottom of.’

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ the solicitor said, sensing a weakness. ‘You can establish no motive for my client being involved in the death. And you can’t even show he was at the scene and so establish he had opportunity.’

  ‘We’ve got a hell of a lot of circumstantial and even more questions that need answering.’

  ‘But it’s up to you to answer the questions. You can’t keep my client on the grounds that he was having a cup of tea half a mile away.’

  ‘A mug. It was a mug of tea.’

  Suddenly van Buren understood. Edwards was flapping like a torn sail. ‘Chief Inspector, can you confirm the cause of death?’

  There was a pause. His face was frozen, no more chewing. He glanced sideways at his sergeant, then looked slowly back at the solicitor, trying to muster every ounce of authority that twenty-eight years in the police service had given him. ‘I can tell you that she didn’t die of natural causes.’

  ‘Come on, you can do better than that. Was she murdered?’

  ‘Our tests aren’t finished.’

  ‘You don’t know? Then you can’t even be sure that a crime’s been committed.’

  The DCI flushed in discomfort. ‘The initial autopsy suggested that Inspector Hope died from snake poison.’

  Van Buren threw his hands up in disbelief. ‘Snake poison?’ he said, every syllable soaked in ridicule. ‘You can’t be serious.’

  ‘A cobra,’ the policeman replied doggedly.

  The absurdity of the statement stunned them all into silence.

  ‘That’s why we’re still doing tests,’ Edwards eventually said. ‘And, until they’re done, your client is going nowhere.’ He glanced across at Harry for the first time in a while, his eyes fixed and determined, yet flecked with discomfort.

  ‘You said there were dragons out there, Hughie,’ Harry said. ‘You didn’t mention anything about bloody snakes.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  It was the first mutterings of Saturday evening, a full thirty hours after Harry had been arrested. In a few more hours the police either had to ask a magistrate for more time and give him good reason, or let their prisoner go. This way, by releasing him early, they could drag Harry back in and still get a few more hours at him before any magistrate started getting sticky. Keys jangled, the lock moved back with a dull thud and the cell door swung open. Edwards was standing in the doorway, the custody sergeant at his shoulder.

  ‘You’re out of here, Harry.’

  Harry rubbed his eyes; they were sore from staring at walls. ‘I’m free to fly?’ he asked.

  ‘Police bail,’ Edwards said. ‘We’re going to want you back in. A few more questions,’he added with emphasis. He didn’t appear happy with the situation.

  ‘Hughie?’ Harry’s voice was loaded with exasperation, leaning on their past acquaintance.

  The DCI glanced over his shoulder and the custody sergeant clanked his keys and withdrew, leaving them alone.

  ‘We believe she was probably murdered,’ the policeman said, ‘and you’re the closest thing I’ve got to a suspect.’

  ‘You know me, you can’t think I did it.’

  ‘No one else in my book right now. And it’s because I know you that I’ve got to do this by the bloody book.’ The DCI came and sat his large frame beside Harry. His body language said he was tired. The plastic mattress didn’t even flinch. ‘We cell-traced your phone, Harry. Now I’m not telling you anything your solicitor won’t find out inside five minutes. But your phone says you were never in the park. Says you were checking the cricket scores at the time the inspector died.’

  ‘Second day of a test match, what the hell do you expect a man to be doing?’

  ‘That’s not proof,’ the policeman snapped. ‘Only shows what your phone was doing, and we don’t have any current plans to press charges against your sodding phone.’ Then he heaved a sigh, seemed to relent, just a little. ‘But.’

  ‘That sounds like a big bloody “but”, Hughie.’

  ‘The waitress is Polish, accent you can slice with a spade. She was busy, run off her feet. Distracted. Says she can’t remember anyone in a sling.’ He sniffed. ‘That doesn’t mean a damned thing, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I did warn you, Harry!’ The policeman’s mood had swung once again, his patience had disappeared and he levered himself wearily back to his feet. ‘I told you there were dragons out there but you had to go and poke a stick in its eye, didn’t you? Always were an awkward Welsh sod.’

  ‘Half-Welsh. An awkward half-Welsh sod.’

  Edwards shook his head. ‘Puts us both in a difficult position.’

  ‘You know something, Hughie? From this side of the bars it hasn’t looked like that.’

  ‘I’m that close to making superintendent,’ Edwards said, holding up a thumb and forefinger with barely room for a cigarette paper between them. ‘Then I can finish my thirty years and bog off with a pension. But now this. I should never have talked to you about Susannah Ranelagh.’

  ‘She’s connected, I know she is,’ Harry insisted, growing irritated with a man he realized he could no longer consider his friend.

  ‘You’ll need a better alibi than that.’

  ‘I don’t need any sort of alibi! I didn’t kill Delicious, for Christ’s sake. She was a friend. You’re screwing with me, Hughie.’

  ‘You want a complaint form?’

  ‘No. But for old times’ sake maybe a favour.’

  ‘It was doing you a bloody favour what got us started on all this in the first place, remember?’

  ‘Look, I’ve got a photograph of Susannah Ranelagh. She’s with my father and some others. I can’t prove it’s connected to anything, but there’s a large number of people who knew Miss Ranelagh and who somehow ended up dead. Now Delicious. It’s an old photo, taken fifty years ago, and there are two people in it I can’t identify. I don’t know, there might be something in it and I was wondering, with your facial-recognition software, could you—’

  ‘Not a bloody chance.’

  ‘Come on, Hughie, don’t disappear up your own arse.’

  ‘Listen. The software requires high-resolution images, something like sixty pixels between the eyes. Your image is fifty years old, you say. Waste of time. Bit like trying to read my own bloody handwriting.’

  Harry’s head fell in disappointment. He knew the policeman’s handwriting. It resembled iron railings hit by a car.

  ‘So you can go and play with the fairies,’ the policeman said, turning towards the door. ‘For the moment.’

  Harry suspected it was going to be tempestuous, an evening that both of them would prefer had never happened. When his key turned in the lock it felt stiff, reluctant to let him in. He found Jemma in a T-shirt and shorts. She had turned the apartment into a laundry: everywhere there were freshly washed sheets, pillowcases, duvet covers, but most of all underwear. It seemed as though every item she owned was being set out to dry, spreading from the bathroom across the rest of the apartment, where it sat like a fall of fresh snow down the back and on the seat of every available chair. When he walked in she stood near an open window testing a pair of knickers, holding them to her cheek to see if they were dry. She looked up but it was almost as though it had been seconds rather than three days since they’d last seen each other.

  ‘They made me feel dirty,’ she said slowly.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your friends. The police.’

  A silence.

  ‘I tried to call,’ he said.

  ‘I know. My phone was off.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I didn’t want to speak to you.’

  He entered the apartment cautiousl
y, uncertain of what was waiting for him. ‘I got myself arrested. They thought I’d murdered someone.’ He tried to make light of it.

  ‘Another good reason for turning my phone off.’

  Battle lines were being drawn.

  ‘They made me feel violated, Harry. My home, ransacked by the bloody police. They went through everything. Bathroom, bedroom, my underwear drawer. Everything that was private. To me. They even know what brand of tampon I use. Thanks for that.’

  ‘It was a mistake,’ he protested. ‘I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who were you supposed to have murdered?’

  Another silence before, ‘Delicious. Delicious Hope. The Bermudan—’

  ‘Yes. I remember.’ The knickers she was holding were now crumpled into a tight ball inside her fist. ‘So she was in London?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That I didn’t know. Perhaps because you didn’t tell me, Harry. Like you forgot to tell me about your son, Ruari.’

  ‘You’re reading too much into it.’

  ‘You and her? I wonder.’

  ‘I had a cup of tea with her. That’s all.’

  ‘And now she’s dead.’

  Christ, she was as suspicious as the police. It was still almost eighty outside; the air inside was stifling.

  ‘There was nothing between us, Jem.’

  ‘And yet.’

  More silence. Their eyes tangled, told of pain, sadness, mixed with wisps of suspicion.

  She bit her lip, took a deep breath, her T-shirt heaved as she came to the main and most difficult point. ‘I want this to stop, Harry.’

  ‘What exactly?’

  ‘What you’re doing. With your father. It’s got completely out of hand; it isn’t reasonable any more. You’re pushing me away.’

  ‘I love you, Jem.’

  ‘But there are other things that are even more important to you than love.’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘Then give this up.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  Her bottom lip was trembling now, no matter how hard she bit on it. ‘I know you can’t. But I had to try.’ There was an air of finality about her words that made him feel suddenly scared.

  ‘He’s my father, Jem. I can’t just forget him.’

  ‘You managed to do that perfectly well for twenty-odd years.’

  They were still standing feet apart, where they had started, on opposite sides of the apartment, like gunslingers. He was covered in beads of sweat, and so was she, or were they tears?

  ‘There are too many questions,’ he said. ‘There’s something wrong about it all. My father. Susannah Ranelagh. Now Delicious. Somehow I feel like it’s all my fault.’

  ‘Don’t give me this childhood guilt crap. It’s not your fault. And it’s certainly not and in no way ever been bloody mine!’ She flinched in pain, her fingers flexed, her underwear fluttered to the floor like a dead bird falling from the sky.

  ‘Nothing has been your fault, Jem.’

  He took a step forward but she recoiled, in guilt. It had been only a couple of hours since she’d showered off the last traces of Steve Kaminski.

  ‘Jem, I want to spend the rest of our lives together, you and me. But we’re all prisoners of our pasts, no one starts with a clean sheet. You understand that, don’t you?’

  ‘And how!’ she whispered.

  ‘I have to find some way of breaking away from that, from my father. I need time. Give me a little time. Please, Jem, that’s all I ask.’

  She turned away, looking blindly out of the window, trying to hide the turmoil inside. When she turned back, her face was a picture of misery. ‘Don’t you want to know where I’ve been these last couple of days?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ he said, very slowly.

  ‘Why not?’

  For the first time he began to sense that this wasn’t just about him, or Ruari, or Delicious, that she’d done something he desperately wouldn’t like. He didn’t want to think what. But he couldn’t forget that Delicious had died and it was his fault. That choked his soul, so that right now he didn’t have any room left inside to be angry with Jem, too.

  ‘Why not?’ he said, repeating her question. ‘You know why, stupid.’

  There were tears now, of that he was in no doubt.

  ‘Neither of us are teenagers, Jem. We’ve both got enough previous to ask for any number of additional offences to be taken into consideration, but so what? We both know we can live without each other. I just don’t want to. Ever.’

  She didn’t reply. Her lips trembled as though trying to speak but not a word emerged. Instead she stripped off her T-shirt and dropped it alongside the discarded laundry. Her body swayed as she crossed to him, naked from the waist up. She took him in her arms, made sure he felt both her body and her tongue against his. Then she led him to the sofa. He was wearing a shirt that was sticking to him in the heat; her fingers tugged and twisted until they had undone every button, not hurried, as if they had all the time in the world. She stripped the shirt from his back like the peel of an orange, pulling it over the cast on his arm, then kissed him again. A breeze had begun to waft through the window, spilling over their bodies, joining in with them, and he could feel that her breasts had caught fire. She stripped him of the rest of his clothes, her fingers deftly manipulating every belt and button, falling to her knees in order to free his feet from the tangle of clothes and leave him naked. She looked up, wide-eyed, like a penitent. She kissed both his knees, then worked her way up, slowly, deliberately, lingering at every stopping place, until their eyes met once again. She pushed him down onto the sofa. She had taken complete control.

  When he was stretched out there, his head cushioned, she discarded what was left of her own clothes, throwing them carelessly to one side. She knelt beside his head, kissed his brow, each eye, very softly, the merest brush of her lips, then the tip of his nose, his cheeks, chin, in a ritual that finally led once more to his lips.

  Many months before, when they had first started sleeping with each other, they had spent an evening when she had gone over every inch of his body, examining the scars, the marks of his previous life, and he had told her a little of their history. The severed ear, the scars of bullets, and knife blades, and burns, the stitch marks left after a tumble from a motorbike in the Indian Himalayas had opened up a six-inch wound on his outer thigh, the creases of skin left by the passage of shrapnel, and some marks he simply couldn’t remember how they had been caused. She had marvelled how they had healed in different ways, the surgical scars that had faded almost to memory, the new flap of ear that was totally without sensation, the wicked purple mound of flesh on his back left by a bullet of the Iraqi Republican Guard that would have killed him had it been a finger’s width closer to his spine. The flesh around that wound still seemed angry, refusing to settle. These marks were Harry – not all of him of course, but she had realized from the very start that he was not and never could be like any other man she had known. Now she went to every one of his old wounds, brushing them with the gentlest of touches, smoothing away their creases with her lips and her fingertips, as though to heal them and chase away any lingering pain.

  Then she climbed astride him. Settled herself on him, and made love to him with a tenderness they hadn’t shared for months. Not a single word. A rivulet of sweat trickled down between her breasts, through the blonde downy hair of her navel and onto his, binding them as one. Then she brought her feet forward alongside his chest, leaned her own body back, rocked to and fro, and moments later gave a small cry. They were done.

  They didn’t hurry, not even their parting. But as soon as she got to her feet she scooped up her clothes and began climbing back into them, struggling with the damp, clinging T-shirt. When she spoke the tenderness was gone, the voice very practical, stripped of emotion.

  ‘I’d like you to pack a bag, Harry.’

  ‘What?’

&nbs
p; ‘I want you to go.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Like you, I need some time.’

  ‘Come on, Jem, what for?’

  ‘To think.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Us, of course.’

  ‘And how long do you think this might take?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ she shouted, her composure slipping. Then she added, very softly, ‘Fuck you, Harry.’

  ‘But we just—’

  ‘That . . .’ She waved an animated finger at the wreckage of the sofa. ‘That was to see if we still had it, if we had something to build on. It’s been so long, I needed to be reminded. I was. And now I need to be by myself. You can phone me, if you like. But not too often.’

  ‘Are you sure about this?’

  ‘Very.’

  He felt cheated, almost deceived, but he didn’t argue. He knew it would have no purpose, that he could never badger her into changing her mind. He’d asked for time, so now she demanded her share of it, too. He took a shower, trying to scrub away his feelings of resentment along with the lingering reminders of sex, then packed a few things while Jemma began tidying her apartment, filling the time with mindless activity, retrieving underwear and bed linen and folding them into neat piles. There was no anger, no hostility on her part, just emotional blankness as she struggled to keep her knees from shaking.

  Harry was being thrown out. Yet, as much as he might want to rage against the powerlessness of it all, there was also a considerable chunk of sense in it. He knew what he was doing was hurting Jemma. He also knew he couldn’t stop. He had to carry on. That was what Harry Jones always did, which was why he had so many bloody holes in him. He couldn’t stop now. He owed that not only to himself but even more to Delicious. His fault, no one could tell him otherwise. Yet too many people connected to Susannah Ranelagh had died and he knew there was every chance he might be next in line, which meant that anybody standing beside him was in danger, too, let alone anyone sleeping with him. Jemma. It was right to get away. For her sake.

  ‘I love you,’ he said, hovering at the door.