Time and Tide: A DC Smith Investigation

by Peter Grainger

  Williams had to say something, of course, in the end.

  ‘No point getting emotional about it, is there? Shit happens, as they say, sometimes. You has to get on with it is what I say.’

  ‘You were a little emotional when we came into the bar yesterday lunchtime, Mr Williams. But we need to get on. Those lists, please – anyone you can name who was drinking in the bar last night. Am I right in thinking that you also had guests in the rooms? Good – full details of those, which Detective Constable Waters can get from the register, assuming that you do keep it up to date and accurate. I’m sure you know your obligations under the law as far as that is concerned. And finally, you were here when the fire broke out – which other members of staff or family were also upstairs?’

  ‘You want to speak to everyone?’

  ‘Every single one, Mr Williams, and alone. Is there a more private room we can use for that?’

  Marjorie Harris had worked at The Queens Arms for more than fifteen years, she told them, long before Miss Shapiro’s nephew became the manager. She’d started off as a barmaid, that was all, and she still could do some of that if and when they got busy, but she had always been able to cook a bit, and now she spent most of her time in the kitchen. They had had trained chefs over the years but they come and go – ‘A bit like detective inspectors’, Smith had added for Waters’ benefit, with an encouraging smile towards Marjorie – but the people who come out here aren’t looking for fine dining, just wholesome pub food. Smith told her that the crab salad they had enjoyed yesterday was about as wholesome as food gets, and again she blushed with the praise.

  Smith said, ‘So you were not behind the bar yourself last night?’

  No, she said, there were a few orders for sandwiches late on, and Mr Williams, Mark, he had managed the bar himself. Smith remarked in a general way that the pub didn’t seem to have a lot of staff, and she told him that there were some casual employees who did a few shifts at the height of the season; but there was something concealed in that answer that Waters detected for himself, something that made sense when you looked around at the pub; it was all a little down-at-heel. Money was tight at The Queens Arms, and had been for quite a while.

  ‘Tell us what happened last night, then. You have a permanent room here, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I get free board and lodging as well as a wage – Miss Shapiro is very kind in that way. When my marriage… Well, when it broke down a few years ago, Miss Shapiro let me move in for a while, and then it worked out, so I’ve just stayed on.’

  ‘That was kind of her, wasn’t it? Good employers are scarcer than hen’s teeth these days…’

  Marjorie Harris was agreeing and Smith was smiling, shaking his head a little sorrowfully at the dreadful shortage of decent employers, and Waters was thinking once more that Smith’s entire demeanour had changed in the few minutes between their interview with Williams and the cook; there was no shadow of doubt in Waters’ mind that Smith was the best listener and therefore the best interviewer at Kings Lake Central. And here he was, conducting what might be his final interviews in a case of any importance.

  Smith said, ‘So, Marjorie – last night?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry! Don’t let me prattle on! I heard the alarm, that’s the fire alarm, go off. It was half past twelve. Do you know what my first thought was? You think the daftest things – I thought, thank goodness I’d just replaced the batteries in the smoke alarms. Only last week I did that. And I don’t think they were all working before, so there you are.’

  Smith looked at Waters, and Waters would have bet the keys to his car what the next question would be.

  ‘Well done. A stitch in time, as they say. Is that something you do on a regular basis, replacing the batteries in the smoke alarms?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t say I do it regularly. Mr Williams did it last time, I think.’

  ‘Did Mr Williams ask you to do it this time?’

  Waters watched her closely, saw the little frown as she went through her memory, and concluded that she was perfectly genuine, that she had not understood the reason for Smith’s question when she answered that no, he hadn’t told her to do it – it was just one of those fortunate coincidences.

  ‘Right. So what happened next, after you heard the alarm?’

  ‘I came downstairs. The smell was everywhere, awful black fumes, but Mr Williams, Mark, he was already there at the door. He had one of the fire extinguishers, putting it out but every time it kept flaring up again. So I said I’d call the fire brigade and he said no, we can deal with it… I went and got buckets of water from the kitchen just in case, then.’

  ‘Mr Williams told you not to call the fire brigade?’

  ‘At first he said that, yes, but as I said, the plastic door kept catching alight, even after he’d used the fire extinguisher, so then he shouted at me to call nine, nine, nine, so that’s when I did.’

  ‘They came from Hunston, obviously. When they arrived, what was happening?’

  ‘There was still a lot of smoke and fumes. They told us it was safe to open doors and windows to clear it then. They sprayed everywhere with different stuff to the extinguisher, but that didn’t smell much better.’

  Smith asked whether the firemen had said anything about how it might have started but Marjorie Harris understood him well enough that time; yes, she said, it was obvious to anyone that the fire had begun on the inside of the door, and that there was nothing there that would normally catch light. It was the man in charge of the firefighters who said that he would be reporting it straight away as deliberate. After that, they spent a long time going over the whole of The Queens Arms, checking for anything smouldering and anything else suspicious. They didn’t leave until daylight.

  Smith said, ‘So Mr Williams was there, and you were there. What about Miss Shapiro?’

  ‘She heard the noise of course, and she came down. While Mark was using the fire extinguisher, that was. He told her that everything was under control, and she went back upstairs until the morning.’

  Smith was quiet for a few moments, making no attempt to conceal the surprise on his face.

  ‘She just went back upstairs? Back to her bedroom, while all this was going on?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Marjorie Harris didn’t seem to share in his surprise, or even see the reason for it.

  ‘And where is Miss Shapiro’s room?’

  ‘Oh, she has her own apartment, the rooms across the back of the pub, overlooking the marshes.’

  Sometimes, in fact almost invariably these days, Smith would invite Waters to ask questions of his own, but not on this occasion. He thanked Marjorie for her assistance, said that it had been invaluable, and asked her to tell Miss Shapiro that they would like a few words with her now – would she mind fetching her down?

  Marjorie stood up from her chair then, and said, ‘Well, no, she’s already said that she will see you in her sitting room upstairs. I’m to take you up, if you’re ready, sergeant.’

  Chapter Twenty Two

  When Marjorie knocked on the door, there was a pause long enough to make one uncertain whether the room on the other side was empty or whether its occupant had decided not to receive visitors today after all. Marjorie looked around at the detectives, a little apologetically perhaps but not particularly surprised, and then a voice came, saying ‘Do come in.’

  Marjorie opened the door for them but then stood aside – she closed it once they had entered, and played no further part in the proceedings. The odd little scene, Waters decided, had the air of their being introduced to minor royalty. But the apartment itself was unexpected, to say the least. Here, in contrast to the pub downstairs, someone had spent money. What struck one first was the expanse of windows that overlooked the marshes all the way from here to Deepford. The window in the sitting room was almost wall to wall and floor to ceiling; where they were standing now, near midday, was half in shadow but later in the day the entire space would be bathed in afternoon sunshine, and when
the sun was setting, it would be placed centrally in this panorama of grazing marshes, endless reedbeds and infinite skies. The land here is flat. Only a little height is required to transform it into something extraordinary.

  Julie Shapiro was standing to the side, in a doorway into an adjacent room, as if she was making certain that she would not spoil that first, breath-taking view. Waters looked at her and then past her – there was a writing table with papers and folders, and beyond that was a wall of fitted shelves with books and box files. An Apple desktop sat at the back of the table, and on it was a screensaver that seemed to mirror exactly the view from the window; it took only a second for Waters to realise that the view was live, that somewhere a camera was mounted to show the marshes even when the blinds were drawn.

  ‘I hope they have offered you some sort of refreshment, gentlemen.’

  Smith stepped further into the room, and Waters followed.

  Smith said, ‘Not yet, Miss Shapiro, but it’s early for us. Suns and yardarms, and all that. It is Miss Shapiro, isn’t it?’

  The question was deliberately ambiguous, but if she felt that, it never showed.

  ‘I am Julie Shapiro. And you are?’

  Smith introduced them both and then fell silent; the not-speaking and not-explaining was another ploy that Waters had seen plenty of times, now. People react to it in a variety of ways. A few will try to out-wait the one who waits, but most will feel obliged to fill the void, and what they say in order to do so can be as revealing as the answers to the questions that one has not yet asked.

  The woman was looking at Smith with an openly puzzled expression now, but it was not his silence that troubled her – she squinted a little as if she ought to be wearing spectacles and said, ‘Sergeant Smith, you say. Have we met before, sergeant? Your face is somewhat familiar.’

  Smith said, ‘“Met” is perhaps the wrong word. My wife and I visited The Queens Arms a few times, but I don’t see why you would remember me from that long ago, to be honest.’

  Julie Shapiro smiled indulgently, as if he had said something unintentionally foolish.

  ‘I never work in the bar – it would be unlikely.’

  ‘Quite. And the only other time was in the dunes two days ago.’

  Waters saw the tiny start of surprise.

  She said, ‘Oh, really? I don’t… Did we speak? If so, I do apologise.’

  Smith dismissed it, saying that he had only passed the time of day – on such a long walk maybe a dozen other people had done the same.

  ‘A long walk…?’

  It was troubling her in some way, that Smith had the advantage of her, and she would not let it go. She moved into the sitting room now, waving them towards armchairs that were arranged so that occupants would see the glory beyond the glass.

  ‘Please do sit down, forgive my manners. A long walk, you say, two days ago…’

  As she searched her memory, Waters was able to search her face properly for the first time. The lines of age were there in all the usual places but they seemed impermanent, not fixed but fluid somehow, as if inside, under the skin, a struggle was taking place second by second to hold back their advance. She was looking down at Smith as she tried to place him, smiling tentatively for the first time as if the risk to a fragile mouth might be too great, and there were split seconds of sunlight and momentary angles when she was winning – when she was, Waters realised, really was the girl in the photograph, leaning provocatively against the wall, fifty years ago. And then, in another instant and from another angle, the girl was gone, and an elderly woman was trying to remember where she had seen the policeman before.

  Smith said, ‘It isn’t important, Miss Shapiro,’ but he knew that it was, to her, and another silence followed. Like Waters, he had looked around and taken in the apartment – the stylish if outdated choices of furniture, the carefully coordinated colours – natural beiges, browns and russets - that seemed to reflect and connect with the landscape beyond, as if the inner and outer worlds flowed into and out of each other, as the tides come and go in the numberless hidden creeks of the saltmarshes. It was not accidental – it was the effect that someone had intended, a vision that someone had manipulated, an artifice.

  Though the two men were now seated, the woman herself remained standing in the timeless light, wearing a blouse of the palest orange, some sort of loose-sleeved chiffon because the light seemed to be caught and absorbed by it, unable to entirely escape it, and close-fitting, primrose yellow jeans held around her narrow waist by a thin, golden belt. Where would one buy such clothes, Smith wondered; not here in Overy, not within a hundred miles of Overy.

  ‘The Staithe,’ she said at last. ‘Barnham Staithe. You were sitting on the upturned dinghy, both of you. You said good morning as I passed by.’

  Smith complimented her on her memory, and she looked directly at Waters, as if he too should make some acknowledgement, but then her pale eyes that were neither blue nor green went back to Smith, and she said, ‘And now you are here in my apartment. How odd!’

  There was no trace of Welshness in the voice. It was neutral in colour and tone, and if one did not know her story and her origins, one would never have guessed at them; but when one did know, of course, the effect was subtly different from what she might, once, have intended when she began to speak that way. Questions formed – when, where and why? Had she climbed aboard that train in Swansea speaking like a girl from the valleys and got off at St Pancras sounding like someone entirely new? What else had she left behind?

  When Smith said to her that though it seemed odd, it was simply a coincidence, Waters had to restrain a smile; that was a word for which Smith had genuine professional contempt. It was a word that he viewed as a suspect, and whenever it appeared in a conversational street, he would stop it and search it thoroughly. Now, here, Smith was using the word as casually and carelessly as anybody else – or so it seemed, until Waters took a step back and considered. They, he and Smith, had been sitting on that dinghy waiting for the tide to flood so that Sam Cole could take them out to the open sea, where they collected the water samples to match to those found in the lungs of Bernard Sokoloff. This woman had walked by, Smith had said good morning or whatever, and Smith had known vaguely who she was. Then a waitress had told them that Sokoloff told her that he had stayed in a pub in Overy earlier in the summer, and now they were sitting in the lounge of the woman who owned that pub, because someone had set fire to it last night. And it was the same woman…

  Waters had a good mind, he believed that now, and more than once Smith had told him that he had a very good mind for this sort of thing, or he would have, as long as he trained it properly. You have to get it to walk to heel – you can’t have it pulling every time it sees the cat called coincidence, but now Smith himself had brought that very beast into the room. Waters blinked. He had lost focus, and though Smith and Julie Shapiro were talking again, he had no idea what it was about.

  She was saying, ‘…yes, Mark handles everything here, even the putting out of fires! I wasn’t afraid. I could see that he had it under control. I think they only called the fire brigade as a precaution. When they got here they didn’t evacuate the building or anything, so I went back to my room. There was nothing I could have done. I would only have been in the way.’

  In the pause that followed, she looked as if she wanted someone to object to that, to say, you, how could you ever have been in anyone’s way? Waters had re-focused quickly and that was the first thing he saw, that need in her.

  Smith was looking expectantly at Waters then – thank goodness he had stepped out of the daydream, if that’s what it was, just in time.

  Waters said to Julie Shapiro, ‘I noticed the live-view of the marshes on your screen. I wondered whether it records and whether there are any other cameras on the back of the building.’

  The careful smile again but in the eyes what seemed to be genuine amusement as she glanced from Waters to Smith and back.

  ‘Oh my goodness,
how observant! I feel like I’m under investigation! There is only the one camera. I can move it around with a little joy-stick thing but it doesn’t record. I wish it did. Can you get them that record?’

  Waters said yes, he was sure that you could, and then Smith said, ‘We won’t detain you much longer, Miss Shapiro, but a couple of days ago two gentlemen caused a bit of a scene in the bar downstairs. It was lunchtime. Were you aware of that at all?’

  Both detectives in their different ways had realised by now that this was a performance of some sort – and by ‘this’ both might have told you that they meant her life here in this room at the very least. Possibly her entire life here on the Norfolk coast ever since she retired or retreated here was on a stage of her own imagining, in front of an audience of two or three, or just one, or maybe none; sometimes perhaps she performed in front of the images of her past self that adorned the walls, for from where he was sitting Smith could see more of them inside the adjoining room that was her study or her office.

  She had turned and lifted her head a little at Smith’s question, as if there was a spotlight stage right.

  ‘I was not, but as I say, Mark deals with the business. I dare say it isn’t unusual – a scene in the bar.’

  Smith was watching her too, and Waters thought that it was impossible not to do so; there was something alight inside her, a kind of intensity, a conviction. And she was aware of them watching, all the time, each gesture and pause composed and measured to perfection, as it might be in a song sung in front of a thousand fans, which seems heartfelt and touching though it has been rehearsed a hundred times to achieve that very end.

  ‘But are you suggesting there is some connection with this fire, sergeant? Surely not. That would be disturbing, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, if that was the case, it would be disturbing. As I said to Mr Williams, we have to explore all possibilities. There might be no connection whatsoever. But we don’t need to trouble you about it any longer, Miss Shapiro. Thank you for talking to us.’