?
Various bizarre explanations flashed through Thanet’s mind. This diminutive old woman was a receiver of stolen goods, a fence? In which case she would scarcely invite the police into the flat, surely? A pawnbroker, then? Or perhaps she simply collected empty cardboard boxes?
As if she had read his mind she cast a mischievous glance at him over her shoulder. ‘They’re full all right. Sit yourselves down and I’ll tell you all about them in a minute.’ She switched off the radio and cleared a couple of boxes from the settee. ‘Shan’t be a tick,’ she said, heading off along the cardboard corridor to what was presumably the kitchen. ‘The kettle’s not long boiled, I’d just made me elevenses when I heard the lift.’ She nodded at a mug on the only table, which was covered with a mess of newspapers, magazines, and scraps of paper, along with a jampot containing a number of ballpoint pens and a couple of pairs of scissors. A chair in front of it had been pushed back askew as if she had been interrupted in her task. It was obviously the hub of the room’s activity. What on earth was she up to?
Thanet was longing to go and take a good look but he and Lineham obediently sat down on the space she had cleared and a few moments later she returned.
‘There you are.’ She handed them mugs of tea and offered them sugar, which they both refused.
She picked up her own mug and sat down at the table, swivelling to face them. ‘Competitions,’ she said. ‘All this,’ she explained, waving a hand at the boxes, the papers. ‘I win them.’ She looked smug. ‘Got the knack, you see.’
‘Competitions,’ said Lineham. ‘You mean when you have to tick the right answers and then write a sentence summing up why such and such is the best product in the world?’
‘Got it in one!’ she said.
‘All this?’ said Lineham. He looked slightly dazed.
‘All this.’
‘But how? I mean, the questions are usually easy enough to answer, but it’s always the sentence that’s the deciding factor, I imagine.’
‘I told you. I got the knack. I just put myself into their position and tell them what they want to hear. And I’m a dab hand at jingles, I can tell you.’
‘I’m amazed!’ said Lineham. ‘I don’t know a single person who’s ever actually won anything in that way.’
‘That’s because they don’t take it serious enough. I really work at it, I can tell you. Spend hours at it, every day. It might take a week to come up with a really good sentence or slogan or whatever.’
‘I’ve even wondered if these competitions are genuine.’
She smiled and her eyes lit up. ‘Oh, they’re genuine, all right. I’ve had some really lovely holidays, cruises and that. You name it, I’ve won it.’ Her face fell. ‘No, I tell a lie. I still haven’t won a car. Or the big one.’
‘The big one?’ said Thanet. He knew this conversation was a waste of time but he was enjoying it immensely. Such interludes were one of the unexpected joys of his work.
‘A house,’ she said. ‘You know, cottage in the country, with roses round the door.’
‘But,’ said Lineham, ‘why bother to duplicate like this? I mean, who wants more than one microwave, for example.’
‘Oh I don’t keep them,’ she said scornfully. ‘They’re me income. Me old-age pension, if you like, me hedge against inflation. I win ’em, then when I need money I sell ’em.’
‘You don’t get much for second-hand goods, surely?’ said Lineham.
‘You’d be surprised. If people know they’re brand new, still in the box and have never been opened . . . And I always tell them, if you’re not satisfied, bring it back within fourteen days and I’ll give yer yer money back. They hardly ever do. I run one or two ads in the local paper every week. Never fails.’
She was really enjoying this, Thanet realised. If she lived alone, opportunities to talk about her somewhat unique talent must be rare. And Lineham was the perfect audience.
Once again she tuned in to his thoughts. ‘Nice to have a bit of company for a change,’ she said. ‘I sometimes feel I’m the only person left alive in this dump, during the day. They all go off to work and the place is like a morgue.’ She pulled a face. ‘If you’ll pardon the expression, in the circs. I heard about the poor lad across the way on the wireless.’
‘Did you know him well?’ said Thanet.
‘Nah . . . Scarcely passed the time of day with him. He was always polite enough, mind, not like some, these days. But he was away so much and when he was here he just shut himself up in there for hours on end. Never seemed to go out to work.’
‘He worked at home, I expect,’ said Lineham. ‘He was a writer.’
‘Really? What did he write about?’
‘He’d only written one book so far,’ said Thanet. ‘A travel book, about China.’
‘Ah . . .’ Comprehension dawned. ‘So that was why he was away such a lot.’
It didn’t look as though she could tell them anything useful. ‘So you don’t know anything that might help us?’
‘Ah well now, I didn’t say that, did I!’
Thanet waited. Clearly she was enjoying her moment of suspense. She put down her mug and leaned forward, lowering her voice as if someone might be able to hear if she spoke too loudly. ‘There was a girl, come around asking for him.’
‘When was this?’ said Lineham.
‘Night before last. About seven.’
Saturday, then, the night Jeopard died. ‘You hadn’t seen her before?’
She shook her head. ‘She was a foreigner. You know. Darkish.’
‘Black, you mean?’
‘More like sort of olive. I should think she was Italian or Spanish, something like that. Her English was hopeless, I could hardly make out what she was saying.’
‘What was the gist of it?’
‘She was looking for Mr Jeopard.’ Ellie Ransome shrugged. ‘I couldn’t help her. I didn’t have the foggiest where he was. So I suggested she came back next morning, yesterday.’
‘And did she?’
‘Yes. I was late getting up, I always have a lie-in on Sundays, so I hadn’t heard then that he was dead, or I might have told her. I dunno. I might not’ve. It’s not very nice breaking news like that, is it? Anyway, she obviously didn’t know. Her English was so bad I shouldn’t think she’d bother to turn the radio or telly on. I just told her I thought he must be away for the weekend and she ought to leave coming back until today. I said she ought not to come too early, so as to give him a chance to get home if he’d stayed over until this morning.’
‘And has she?’
‘Not yet, no.’
Thanet left his card in case the girl turned up later.
‘Someone he met in South America?’ said Lineham as they crossed the landing.
‘Sounds likely.’
‘Must be pretty keen, if she’s followed him over here.’
Jeopard’s flat was smaller than Ellie Ransome’s and a far cry from the sophisticated bachelor apartment with which Thanet’s imagination had endowed him, consisting of a cramped sitting room, a shoebox of a bedroom, a galley kitchen and a bathroom so tiny that there was barely room for the door to close when one was standing inside.
‘This shouldn’t take long,’ said Lineham, after they had taken a quick look around. The place was minimally furnished, could almost have been any impersonal hotel room had it not been for the outsize desk, which was set at a right angle to the window and took pride of place. On it were ranged computer, printer, telephone, fax machine, neatly stacked sheaves of papers and all the other accoutrements of a writer’s life.
‘Looks as though he used this place chiefly for work,’ said Thanet, picking up a pile of typescript and flicking through it. A cursory glance was sufficient to tell him that this was Jeopard’s current oeuvre, on his experiences in South America. He had completed about 120 pages. ‘I suppose he wouldn’t have wanted anywhere too big, with the sort of life he led, not while he was still a bachelor, anyway. It would just have bee
n an encumbrance.’
The wastepaper basket was overflowing and there were crumpled sheets of paper all over the floor around it. Thanet up-ended it. Most of the rubbish was discarded sheets of typescript and perforated strips torn off the edges of computer paper, but there was one interesting item, an airmail letter with a Brazilian stamp.
‘Look at this, Mike,’ he said, holding it up. It had been torn through, unopened. The sender’s name was on the back and Thanet held the two pieces of envelope together to decipher it. ‘It’s from a Rosinha Gomes, with an address in somewhere called Manaus. The girl who called yesterday, no doubt. And he didn’t even bother to read it.’ He extracted one of the torn sheets of writing paper and peered at it. ‘Don’t suppose you speak Portuguese, by any chance?’
Lineham shook his head. He was working his way through the drawers of the desk.
Thanet put the letter in his pocket. He could get it translated later. ‘Found anything interesting?’
‘Only this.’ Lineham held up an address/telephone book.
‘Is his agent’s number in it?’ said Thanet.
Earlier attempts to ring Jeopard’s publishers in order to get hold of this had been unproductive and they had decided that the offices probably didn’t open until ten. It was Jeopard’s agent rather than his publishers that Thanet was anxious to talk to. He suspected that he – or she, for he’d heard somewhere that the majority of literary agents were women – would have had rather more contact with Jeopard than his editor.
Lineham found several possible names with 071 telephone numbers, but it was impossible to tell which, if any, was the one they wanted. A brief session at the telephone quickly yielded results, however, and they were able to arrange an appointment for half an hour’s time.
‘She’s called Carol Marsh,’ said Lineham as they went down in the lift. ‘Of Marsh and Walters Literary Agency. It’s in Golden Square, just off Piccadilly.’
Thanet had never met a literary agent before and wasn’t quite sure what he expected. Someone rather brash, perhaps, certainly sophisticated and probably somewhat intimidating, wearing the kind of clothes normally dubbed ‘power dressing’ – short skirt, silk shirt, tailored jacket. Carol Marsh was therefore a surprise, a plump woman in her forties wearing a rather drab ankle-length dress. She was carefully made-up, however, and her very short blonde hair had been expertly styled. She welcomed them with a smile appropriately tinged with sadness, ‘I’ve never been interviewed by detectives before. It’ll be a new experience. Though I could wish that it had been under pleasanter circumstances. It was such a shock, to hear of Max’s death on the news yesterday.’
Her assistant was despatched for coffee and they all sat down. It was a pleasant place in which to work, thought Thanet. The sash windows overlooked the square and there were two whole walls of books.
He waved a hand at them. ‘Are these all by your clients?’
She smiled and nodded. ‘For my sins.’
‘It must be very satisfying, to see the fruit of your labours set out before you like this.’
‘Oh it is. Not a satisfaction granted to your profession, I imagine. I love my work. Most literary agents do.’
‘I can imagine. To discover a new talent, foster it, see it succeed . . .’
She grimaced. ‘Like poor Max, you mean. Yes. It’s such a tragedy.’
Her assistant arrived with the coffee and she waited until the cups had been handed out before saying, ‘He had a brilliant future before him, everyone said so.’
‘He was certainly talented. I was glancing through his book last night. His mother lent it to me.’
‘It did very well. I was looking forward to his next. It was on South America. He had some amazing experiences out there.’
‘So I understand.’
‘They would have made fascinating reading.’ She sighed. ‘Now it will never be finished. Such a shame. He was well on with the writing of it, I believe.’
‘Yes, he was. We’ve just come from his flat.’
A calculating gleam came into her eyes. ‘You’ve seen the typescript?’ she said eagerly. ‘How much of it was there?’
‘About 120 pages.’
‘I wonder if there was any more on disc.’
‘I’ve no idea.’ Thanet’s tone was dismissive. A certain amount of conversation was allowable, to break the ice, but he hadn’t come here to discuss Jeopard’s work in progress.
She picked up his disapproval at once and echoed his thought in words. ‘But you haven’t come here to talk about Max’s work.’
‘It was obviously an important part of his life and we can’t just ignore it. Had he made any enemies in his professional life, do you know?’
‘Someone who hated him enough to kill him, you mean? Good grief, no! In any case, in literary circles any back-stabbing is likely to be verbal rather than physical.’
‘You really cannot think of any reason why anyone should wish to harm him, or any issue over which someone would have been likely to quarrel with him?’
She shook her head. ‘No. Definitely not. Max could be irritating, true. He was rather big-headed, and the fact that he had good reason to be wasn’t enough to stop him getting on your nerves, sometimes. Though . . .’
‘What?’
She was hesitating. ‘It’s just that he did rather have an eye for the opposite sex.’
‘You have someone specific in mind?’
‘Well, to put it bluntly, he found women irresistible. And as he was a very attractive man, on the whole it worked both ways. Put Max in a room with a woman and he couldn’t help making a pass at her. To be frank, I felt rather sorry for that fiancée of his. So far as I could see, she’d have had nothing but heartache ahead. And she’s such a beautiful girl, too, she could have had anyone she chose.’
‘So what are you suggesting? That there’s a jealous husband somewhere in the background?’
‘I’m not thinking of anyone in particular. It’s just that with Max it’s something that’s bound to spring to mind.’
And that was really all she could tell them. To her knowledge Max had no close friendships in connection with his work and had bought his flat because he found it easier to work there than at home in Kent. He had, she said, intended keeping it on after his marriage, for this purpose.
‘Complete waste of time,’ said Lineham gloomily, on their way back to Victoria.
But Thanet didn’t agree. Little by little he was building up a picture of Max Jeopard and the life he had led. Somewhere in that tangled web of relationships lay the solution to the mystery of his death.
Thanet was determined to leave no stone unturned until he found it.
FIFTEEN
As soon as Thanet and Lineham walked through the door at Headquarters the constable on desk duty pounced.
‘Inspector! The Super wants to see you the minute you get back.’
‘Oh? What about? Do you know?’
‘I’m not sure. It could be something to do with the phone calls from Mrs Jeopard. She’s been ringing all morning, wanting to speak to you, and in the end she asked to be put through to him. Anyway, whatever it is he’s pretty worked up about it.’
‘Better go straight in, then. Mike, send someone off to collect that notepad, will you? And see if you can find someone to translate this.’ Thanet handed over the letter from Brazil found in Jeopard’s wastepaper basket.
He hesitated for a moment before knocking on Draco’s door, bracing himself. Draco in one of his moods could be pretty overwhelming.
‘Come!’
Thanet had heard that tone of voice before. No doubt about it, Draco was definitely on the warpath about something. What could Mrs Jeopard have been saying to him?
‘Ah, Thanet. About time too. Where the hell have you been?’ Draco’s dark eyes were snapping and he raked his fingers through his short curly hair – not for the first time, by the look of it; it was standing on end like a bottle brush.
‘To London, sir. I did tell y
ou I was going, at the morning meeting –’
‘Yes, yes.’ Draco waved an impatient hand. ‘But what the devil took you so long?’
‘Well it does in fact take quite some time to –’
‘Oh never mind, never mind. The point is, how often have I given instructions that the families of victims are to be kept informed about what is going on?’
So that was what this was all about. Mrs Jeopard must have been complaining that she wasn’t being kept up to date. This was one of Draco’s current hobby-horses and on the whole Thanet was inclined to agree with him. In this instance, however, he felt somewhat aggrieved. It was only twenty-four hours since he had seen Jeopard’s mother and there had been nothing as yet to report. He opened his mouth to say so, but wasn’t given the chance.
Draco had jumped up and begun to pace about in front of the window: three steps to the right, pause for speech, three paces to the left. ‘You know how I feel about this. It’s an absolute scandal that sometimes victims’ families are left completely in the dark, that cases even reach court without their being informed!’
‘I agree, sir. And we never allow –’
‘Mrs Jeopard has been trying to get hold of you all morning, without success. Just think what she must be going through!’
‘But we –’
‘How would you like it, if you were in that situation, tell me that?’
‘Well naturally I’d –’
‘Exactly! So the very least you could have done is get someone to ring her in your absence.’
Day for Dying Page 15