Never Go Back

by Robert Goddard

  ‘What exactly do you do at the University, Erica?’

  ‘Teaching and research. In the Psychology Department. My specialism’s the effect of extreme environments on mental states, short- and long-term. Aberdeen’s a good base for it, what with the offshore oil and gas industries and the fishing fleet.’

  Harry suspected the rig workers and fishermen would be duly grateful for her ministrations. But all he said was, ‘There was nothing extreme about the environment here, I can tell you.’

  ‘No. But it was unusual, wasn’t it? Very unusual, I’d say.’ She laughed. ‘That counts as extreme for my purposes.’

  ‘I’m afraid we didn’t learn much, despite Professor Mac’s best endeavours.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I think so. Well, I’m sure I didn’t.’

  ‘What about Barry Chipchase? Johnny tells me you and he stayed friends over the years. Do you mind me calling you Harry, by the way? I can’t get the hang of these nicknames you’ve all been throwing around.’

  ‘Harry’s fine.’

  ‘Great. So, Harry, do you think your friend Barry Chipchase got much out of his time here?’

  ‘Same as me, I’d say.’

  ‘Zilch?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘You see, I don’t buy that. I’ve checked the facts as best I can. A surprisingly large proportion of you have gone on to achieve success in your own fields. You may not have learned much that was tangible or examinable, but what you may have acquired … is a certain way of thinking.’

  ‘Kind of you to say so, Erica, but—’

  ‘Did life seem clearer after you left here? More manageable? Did you feel, however slightly, different?’

  Harry thought for a moment, but the instinctive reply did not change. He felt obliged, though, to dress it up a little. ‘I knew a few more Shakespearean quotes. And I thought I understood relativity. That was about it. Mind you, I’ve forgotten most of the quotes since. And I’ve had second thoughts about understanding relativity.’

  Erica laughed. ‘I get the feeling you’re underselling yourself, Harry.’

  ‘Impossible.’

  She laughed again. ‘Come on. Johnny said you were over from Canada, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘Vancouver.’

  ‘What took you there?’

  ‘Er, my wife … works at the University of British Columbia.’

  ‘Really? So she’s an academic – like me?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘Small world, hey? But hold on. Barnett. She’s not Donna Trangam-Barnett, is she?’

  Harry could not have looked more surprised than he felt. ‘Yes. How did—’

  ‘I read her piece on disconnection syndromes in one of the neuroscience journals a few months back. Impressive stuff. You’re married to her?’

  Harry shrugged. ‘I am.’

  ‘Amazing. And it rather proves my point, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Well, we’ve Johnny here, the affluent oilman. Plus a merchant banker and an art dealer across the table. Then there’s you, husband of an eminent neuro-scientist. Given the position you were all in before coming here, isn’t that quite something?’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘And mightn’t it be partly because of what you learned while you were here?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not.’ Harry was confused. There was something about Erica’s line of reasoning he did not trust. He was not sure, in fact, that he trusted her at all. He had the disquieting impression that she knew more about him than she logically should. ‘I got lucky. Several of us did. But several of us didn’t. That’s life.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Wiseman cut in. Harry looked up, unaware till then that anyone had been listening to their conversation. Clearly Wiseman had for one, though for how long was hard to guess. His hooded gaze was fixed on Erica. ‘Harry’s quite right, my dear.’ He had dropped Harry’s nickname, as if some contexts were too important for its use. ‘I’m afraid the idea that the three months we spent here fifty years ago had a significant effect – or any effect at all – on our lives is, well, I won’t say absurd, but …’

  ‘Wide of the mark?’ suggested Erica, with a self-deprecating smile.

  Wiseman returned the smile. ‘I’m afraid so. Ask any of us. It really didn’t amount to anything.’

  ‘That you’re aware of.’

  ‘Well, obviously.’ Wiseman sighed and sat back in his chair. He sipped some wine. ‘That goes without saying.’

  ‘Not planning to psychoanalyse us this weekend, are you, Erica?’ Harry asked, seeking to lighten the mood.

  ‘Absolutely not.’ She turned to look at him. ‘Unless you want me to.’

  Their conversation drifted onto other, blander topics as the meal progressed. Mellowing with each glass of wine, Wiseman reeled off a few entertaining anecdotes about the art world. Dangerfield chipped in with some less rarefied recollections of the oil business. Starkie said little, as had always been his wont, but watched Erica closely throughout. Harry tried not to wonder why. His own attempts to draw Erica out on the subject of her career were deftly deflected and he was too fuddled by alcohol and fatigue to sustain them. He kept reminding himself to drink plenty of water, as Donna was forever encouraging him to do, but somehow found himself picking up the wineglass more often than not. The evening took a woozy turn. Dangerfield made an impromptu speech. There was a lot of laughter, then an adjournment to the bar, where Harry was persuaded to sample one of the hotel’s malts. He was going to regret drinking it, he knew. Dawn was going to be a painful experience. But it tasted very, very good.

  Halfway through his second whisky, Harry became aware of Dangerfield waving to him through the doorway from the corridor leading to reception. He managed a quizzical gesture of raised eyebrows and hands, but Dangerfield went on waving, if anything more frantically. Harry had thought he was on the other side of the bar, puffing at a cigar, and so he had been at one point. But no longer. There was no sign of Lloyd either, who had surely been with him. Harry registered this much during his unsteady progress across the room.

  ‘What’s up, Danger?’ he asked on reaching the corridor.

  ‘Jabber and I are in the conference room,’ Dangerfield replied in a whisper. ‘With the police.’

  ‘The … what?’

  ‘The police. They want to talk to you.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Not what. Who. Peter Askew. He’s dead.’

  Chapter Nine

  SHOCK SOBERED HARRY up faster than any amount of strong black coffee. His brain might not have snapped into top gear at Dangerfield’s words, but it was at least a forward gear. He listened hard as Dangerfield gave him the few facts he knew on their way to the conference room.

  ‘Crooked’s body was found on the railway line near Carnoustie late this afternoon. That’s about halfway between Dundee and Arbroath. They traced him here from the copy of my letter he had in his pocket. We’ve got an inspector and a sergeant here from the Tayside Police. Jabber mentioned you were the last to speak to Crooked, so they insisted I wheel you in. Be careful what you say, Ossie. I’m not sure exactly what they’re after.’

  ‘Are you telling me Peter killed himself, Danger?’

  ‘Sounds like it.’

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘Neither can I. But he’s dead all right. We have no choice about believing that.’

  The conference room was a bare, starkly lit space, the chairs that normally filled it stacked at one end. At the other end, by a broad-topped table positioned in front of a projector screen, stood the inspector and sergeant, who introduced themselves as Geddes and Crawford. Lloyd, who had been supplied with a chair, looked up at Harry with wide-eyed bemusement and stroked his chin fretfully.

  Geddes was a short, barrel-chested, shaven-headed man in early middle age, with a stubbly beard and a darting gaze. Crawford was a taller, younger man running to f
at, with greasy hair and a conspicuous plaster over one eyebrow. They looked tired and bored and faintly hostile.

  ‘Take a seat, Mr Barnett,’ said Crawford, pushing a chair into position alongside Lloyd’s. ‘Sorry to be the bearers of bad news about your old comrade. You want to sit down yourself, Mr Dangerfield?’

  ‘I’ll stand, thanks.’

  Harry might have preferred to stand as well, but he could not be sure if further shocks were on the way, so he lowered himself cautiously onto the proffered chair.

  ‘We gather you had a conversation with Mr Askew at Waverley station, Mr Barnett,’ said Geddes, stifling a smoker’s cough. ‘The last conversation anyone seems to have had with him.’

  ‘It was a brief chat. Nothing more.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘The reunion. Has Danger—’

  ‘Aye, aye. We’re in the picture about your fiftieth anniversary get-together. Did Mr Askew say he was looking forward to it?’

  ‘Not entirely. He told me he was, well, beginning to regret agreeing to come.’

  ‘That’s really why we assumed he’d got off the train and gone back to London,’ said Dangerfield.

  ‘Oh, he got off the train, sir,’ said Crawford. ‘No doubt about that.’

  ‘Do you know … what exactly happened, Inspector?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Not exactly, no, sir. That’s what we’re trying to establish. Mr Askew’s body was spotted a mile or so north-east of Carnoustie station, lying between the tracks, by the driver of an Aberdeen to Glasgow train a little after half past four this afternoon. There’d been no report of a previous train hitting a pedestrian and his injuries were more consistent with falling from one, rather than walking into it.’

  ‘What … sort of injuries were they?’

  ‘Oh, the fatal sort. Mostly to the head. Mr Lloyd’s generously agreed to come down to Dundee tomorrow morning to identify the body, but judging by the photograph in his passport …’

  ‘He had his passport on him?’

  ‘You’d be surprised how many Englishmen think they need one to travel to Scotland. Not that we’re complaining. It makes our job a lot easier. No next of kin, you tell me, Mr Lloyd?’

  Lloyd shook his head. ‘He said all his family were gone.’

  ‘So, we come back to his state of mind. Did he seem depressed while you were with him?’

  ‘Crooked – Peter – was never what you’d call a barrel of laughs, Inspector. But depressed? No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Mr Barnett?’

  ‘He was a bit down. Probably a bit drunk. We all were. It could have turned him maudlin. You know how it takes some people that way.’

  ‘Aye, I do,’ said Geddes with feeling.

  ‘But that’s a long way from being … suicidal.’

  ‘Oh, a very long way indeed.’ Geddes pushed himself away from the desk, against which he had been leaning, and paced out a slow, deliberative circle. ‘And there are other problems with the suicide theory. Practical problems. Throwing yourself from a high-speed train is no easy matter these days. The doors are centrally locked. They can’t be opened when the train’s moving. That leaves us with the windows. The only ones that open are in the doors. But it’d be quite a scramble to climb out. You’d need to be determined as well as desperate. Is that how Mr Askew seemed to you this afternoon, Mr Barnett?’

  ‘No. He didn’t. But I suppose …’ Harry shrugged. ‘He must have been.’

  ‘Aye. Him … or someone else.’

  ‘Someone else?’

  ‘The inspector means he might have had help,’ said Crawford.

  ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘We’ll know more after the post mortem,’ said Geddes. ‘For the present, I’m just turning possibilities over in my mind. Aside from getting cold feet about your carry-on here, did he … do anything strange during the journey?’

  ‘He got het up at one point,’ Lloyd responded. ‘For the life of me, I can’t remember what about. Oh, and, er, didn’t you say he seemed out of sorts after taking a phone call during lunch, Ossie?’

  Harry nodded. ‘A little, yes.’

  ‘He had a mobile?’ put in Crawford.

  ‘Yes. He did.’

  ‘Interesting,’ murmured Geddes.

  ‘What is?’ asked Dangerfield.

  ‘None found on the body, sir,’ said Crawford.

  ‘Perhaps it dropped out of his pocket while he was, er …’ Dangerfield’s line of reasoning petered out. Then he said, ‘Or he could have left it in his bag. I forgot to tell you, Inspector. We took his bag with us when we left the train. We expected to hear from him, you see, and—’

  ‘Where is it?’ snapped Geddes.

  ‘Er, in the minibus.’

  Geddes smiled tolerantly. ‘Well, perhaps we could go and take a look at it.’

  They took the rear exit to the car park. The night was cold and still, though Harry suspected he was shivering for other reasons than the temperature. Dangerfield opened the minibus, turned on the internal light and pulled Askew’s bag out from under the seat where he had left it.

  It was a small and clearly very old leather suitcase, much scuffed and scratched around the edges. And it was not locked. Dangerfield released the catches and raised the lid. Inside was a humdrum assortment of clothes and toiletries, including the neatly folded suit Askew had presumably been planning to wear that evening. But no mobile phone.

  ‘It doesn’t seem to be here, does it?’ growled Geddes.

  ‘Perhaps it did fall out of his pocket after all,’ said Dangerfield. ‘Like you said, it must have been a struggle to climb out of the window.’

  Geddes gave a sceptical grunt. ‘Or it could have been taken. From his pocket. Or, later, from this unlocked case.’

  ‘Now, hold on,’ Dangerfield bridled. ‘If you’re suggesting—’

  ‘I’m suggesting nothing.’ Geddes sighed and flicked the lid of the case shut. ‘I must thank you all for your co-operation. I may need you to make formal statements about what you know of the circumstances leading up to Mr Askew’s death, but that can wait. First things first. I’ll send a car for you at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, Mr Lloyd. Is that too early for you?’

  ‘Well …’ Lloyd shrugged. ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Good. Let’s go, Sergeant. Give Mr Dangerfield a receipt for the bag. Then we can leave these gentlemen to get some sleep. I’m sure they need it.’

  They watched Geddes and Crawford climb into their car and drive away. The noise of the engine receded into the night and was swallowed by the prevailing silence. None of them said a word for a minute or more. Then Lloyd coughed, his breath pluming in the still, cold air.

  ‘Bloody hell, Danger. What do we do now?’

  ‘Go in and tell the others.’

  ‘Tell them what, exactly? That Crooked’s topped himself?’

  ‘Well, he has, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Geddes isn’t sure,’ said Harry with bleak conviction.

  Lloyd stared at him incredulously. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying Geddes doesn’t buy the idea of Peter Askew crawling through a window and jumping to his death from the train. And the missing phone’s made him doubly suspicious. It would have revealed where that call Peter took came from. There might have been messages on it as well. Who knows?’

  ‘No one,’ said Dangerfield. ‘Now.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘You’re the only one who saw the bloody thing, Ossie,’ Lloyd said irritably.

  ‘Think I imagined it?’

  ‘No. ’Course not. But … it’s bloody odd he never used it while he was with me all yesterday and this morning.’

  ‘You can’t have been with him the whole time.’

  ‘No. Obviously. But most of it. Apart from when he was asleep. And, er … a few hours yesterday afternoon and evening.’

  Despite lingering shock and the onset of bone-deep fatigue, Harry’s curiosity was aroused. ‘How’d that come about?’
/>
  ‘Oh, well, when we got to Paddington, after leaving you in Swindon, Crooked said he was going to meet a friend and would join me at my daughter’s in Neasden later. He got to her house … about eight o’clock.’

  ‘What friend was this?’

  ‘Somebody he’d worked with at London Zoo, he said.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘If he told me, I don’t remember.’

  ‘And where were they meeting?’

  ‘Somewhere in the centre. I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you mention this to Geddes, Jabber?’ asked Dangerfield.

  ‘No. I … never thought to.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s just as well. Some reunion, hey? This is going to knock them all for six. Do you think I should let Barry know what’s happened?’ (Chipchase’s nickname had evidently deserted Dangerfield at this time of stress.)

  ‘Have you got a number for him?’ Harry was more than slightly interested in the answer to that question.

  ‘No. He left in such a rush. I … forgot to ask. But I thought you might …’

  ‘’Fraid not.’

  A few wordless seconds expanded in the darkness around them. Then Lloyd said, ‘He did have a sister in Manchester, didn’t he, Ossie?’

  Harry weighed his answer as carefully as he could. ‘I don’t know. For sure.’

  ‘A sister anywhere?’

  ‘If you’d asked me before today … I’d have said no.’

  ‘Oh, great. Bloody great.’

  Dangerfield cleared his throat. ‘Let’s go in.’

  And in they went.

  Chapter Ten

  DONNA’S WAKE-UP CALL the following morning was literally that, rousing Harry from seldom-plumbed depths of unconsciousness. No one had hurried to bed after Dangerfield’s announcement of Askew’s death. Reactions had varied from the numb to the disbelieving, but all had taken time to be articulated. Harry had finally reached his room around two o’clock and had been unable to sleep for another hour or so after that.

  For reasons he did not completely understand, he failed to pass the news on to Donna. Sparing her unnecessary worry was no longer the point. Now it was necessary worry he was determined not to inflict. She seemed to blame his lack of obvious jollity on a hangover, which strangely he did not have. But he was happy to let her believe he did.