Dying on Principle

by Judith Cutler

  Adrian, wearing a towelling bathrobe and quite clearly nothing else, opened Simon’s front door. I could have done without him; I was going to be in the awkward position of swearing Simon to secrecy even from his lover. Even more unpleasant for him, perhaps, especially in view of Adrian’s flounce when we asked to speak in private, and the prima-donna slam of the door when he’d shown us into the living room and gone off in search of Simon.

  Chris raised his eyes heavenwards. ‘I thought viola players were supposed to be the serious, reliable types of the orchestra.’

  ‘There’s a whole set of jokes about them on the Internet!’ Then I heard Simon’s voice in the hall outside.

  He hadn’t shaved but had pulled on jeans and an Oxfam T-shirt, a shade of green that didn’t suit him but with gaudy parrots, which did. He flicked his eyebrows when Chris repeated the need for absolute confidentiality, and wouldn’t sit down. But as Chris outlined the problem he stopped fiddling with an out-of-control spider plant and gave us more and more of his attention. Without speaking, he dug in a cupboard for some paper, and sat down at the table. Then he pushed away again, and hunted irritably before pouncing on a calculator.

  ‘There!’ he said at last, pushing the paper towards us.

  Chris and I stood shoulder to shoulder and read.

  I suppose with Chris’s background it meant more to him than to me. I got as far as F = 2,450 MHz before my interest wavered. But Chris dabbed his forefinger on one of the further equations. ‘Yes! And it would be conical, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘But how would you deliver it?’ asked Simon.

  ‘Would some ducting do? Because the headset cables were in ducting?’

  ‘Ideal.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. So if you assume a heat rise of, say, 20°C, then –’ His voice dropped, he took Simon’s pencil and started some equations of his own. ‘There! Less than ten seconds to kill a man.’

  ‘But from outside a window?’ I chimed in.

  ‘Remote control. Like on your telly,’ said Simon. ‘You’d need thoughtful preparation beforehand, but you wouldn’t be long doing it. And a couple of minutes afterwards to remove the evidence.’

  ‘With the victim sitting there plugged into his machine. Hey, Chris, was the computer still running?’

  ‘Fancy your not noticing! Yes, the screen was blank, but the computer was still switched on.’

  ‘Some sort of shutdown programme,’ said Simon. ‘What was this person watching, anyway?’

  ‘I wish I could tell you,’ Chris said, sounding genuinely regretful, ‘but it’s still confidential. Out of my hands, now, actually – it’s been taken over by another team. I’ll let you know when I’m allowed to.’

  The men smiled at each other.

  ‘It’s a bit unusual, isn’t it, someone in your position knowing this stuff?’ Simon said.

  ‘I could say the same of you. Playing a big wooden fiddle and this sort of knowledge …’ Chris shook his head. ‘My background’s no use at all to my job, but at least it got me accelerated promotion. I can’t see it whizzing you up to the front desk of the basses.’

  Simon bowed his head ironically at Chris’s use of the appropriate term. ‘Nor on to the coach for Cardiff. I’m sorry, but now you’ll have to excuse me.’

  Chris was in the driver’s seat of his Peugeot, staring at Simon’s calculations.

  ‘I’m not going to wait any longer,’ I said. ‘What’s this about the computer? What the hell was Blake watching?’

  He looked at me repressively and then laughed. ‘OK. So long as you promise—’

  I crossed my heart exaggeratedly and pressed a finger to my lips.

  ‘Commercial Vice are involved. Very high-class, very professional virtual-reality porn. The electrodes would be attached to, er, the parts you wanted stimulated.’

  ‘So much for Mr Blake’s being a pillar of the Methodist Church. So where would he have got the stuff?’

  Chris rubbed his forehead. ‘There’s no sort of identifying material, no warnings about copyright, no salacious trailers, nothing. Just straight in – as it were.’ He blushed, then started to laugh, but more, it seemed, with embarrassment.

  ‘Are you implying that it could be home-grown? Made at Muntz? I mean, doesn’t that sort of thing require an enormous amount of expertise – and resources, come to think of it?’

  He nodded. ‘I’m going to have to ask some interesting questions. Me and some Commercial Vice people. Any ideas?’

  ‘Tricky, since he made most of the engineers redundant last week. I suppose you could pursue a couple of lines – those who were disgruntled and those who were favoured enough to stay.’

  ‘Sophie, love, we shall be pursuing every line.’

  27

  ‘Better get you back to work,’ Chris said at last, starting the car.

  ‘Work? Hell! I never phoned in or anything!’

  He passed me his mobile phone and pulled into the traffic. ‘Never thought I’d see the day when you forgot to go to work,’ he said mildly, when I’d left a message with a secretary I didn’t know to say I was on my way.

  ‘Me and Mrs Cavendish both. Christ, she must be dying if she’s taken time off!’

  ‘I’m not sure you ought to mention the D-word in the context of George Muntz. And I may well have been joking – are you sure you ought to be going back?’

  ‘A-level class this afternoon. Only a couple of weeks to D-day. But I’m not convinced I want to sit in my office waiting for someone to come and get me. Chris, I just want to go and lose myself in Rackhams or somewhere and get some clothes and make-up and then go and have my hair done – like normal women do!’

  ‘You look all right as you are to me.’

  ‘Oh, reason not the need!’ I said, rather more passionately than he seemed to think necessary.

  He looked at me sideways, but probably did not dare speak, even to identify the quotation.

  We were halfway along Edgbaston Park Road before I condescended to speak to him again. ‘You’re not going to like this,’ I began, ‘but I want to find something out.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t quite know how to go about it.’

  ‘Try legally.’

  ‘Do you want to pull this lot together or not?’

  He checked his rear-view mirror and pulled sharply across the road into a shallow lay-by nibbled into the grounds of some of the university halls of residence. Without speaking, he got out. I followed. He turned long enough to zap his alarm, but then set off briskly towards the ornamental lake. I followed at my own pace, which, after the previous night, was slow. I rather thought that what would clear the air better than most things would be a nice friendly bonk, but still hesitated to suggest it. He looked so painfully vulnerable – something about the set of his neck, perhaps. At last he turned, dug his hands in his trouser pockets, and waited.

  As I got level with him, I shoved my arm through the crook of his. ‘You do jump to conclusions, Chris.’

  ‘Usually the right ones.’

  ‘OK. Try this for size. I think there’s something fishy about that little outpost of the Muntz empire out in Newtown. I’d like to know what it’s got planning permission for. I’d also like some idea of just how much would have to be spent before it became viable – as anything. I’m sure one of your people could easily find the former – is it the Land Registry where you can look things up? And I dare say it might be possible to get official access to the premises, but I’d guess that would take some time. All I wanted you to do was drive past and smell gas.’

  ‘Smell gas?’

  ‘So you can reasonably break in to check your suspicions,’ I said, smiling limpidly.

  ‘The old Ways and Means Act?’ He stopped and rubbed his feet against the grass, wiping some goose droppings off his shoes. I couldn’t blame him. He always had the most elegant shoes, which he kept immaculate. But I didn’t like the expression on his face. ‘OK,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll find out who can do wh
at there, check for planning applications—’

  ‘Including any that have been turned down!’

  He nodded. ‘But you are not, repeat not, to go diving into a dangerous derelict building. And neither am I. Sophie, don’t you realise the days of bending the rules are over? I have to play things by the book. I have to try to find the keyholder and get permission. And – and I don’t – please, please understand – I—’

  If ever a man needed a hug, it was Chris. I gave him one. After a moment he returned it. When we separated I reached up and kissed him lightly on the lips. But I didn’t make the promise he was hoping for.

  As Chris pulled into his slot in the police-station car park, another car drove in alongside him: Dave Clarke. He grinned and gave me an overintimate wave of the fingers, then got out and opened my door for me.

  ‘How about some of that excellent coffee of yours, Chris?’

  This time Dave sat on a chair like everyone else, and made no attempt to flirt. Chris filled him in on the affairs at Muntz, and then I chimed in.

  ‘I think the college finances may be in a mess. You see, colleges need lots of students to survive these days, and Muntz – as one of your lads, that ex-teacher, pointed out – is singularly lacking in that respect. There’s a project called ‘College without Walls’, I’ve seen the file – no, only the outside. And I had a phone call from Aberlene saying there was a Muntz outpost in Bradford, of all places, and there’s that warehouse I was telling you about in Newtown, Chris.’

  He picked up the phone. ‘Thanks for reminding me. I’ll get someone on to that now. Now what’s this about Bradford?’

  ‘I tried to phone her, left a message on her machine, but she hasn’t called me back. Bradford already have a college – I had an interview there once. I can’t see why Muntz should want to muscle in on their territory. I don’t suppose you’ve got any contacts up there?’ I paused while Chris spoke into the phone. ‘There was also a file about Provence.’

  ‘I think I ought to go out and investigate that myself,’ said Dave. ‘When you’ve got a couple of weeks free, Sophie.’

  I didn’t need to make much effort to ignore him. I had a genuine idea to divert me. ‘Hey, I’ll tell you who might know – my boss at William Murdock. James Worrall.’

  ‘That stuffed shirt,’ said Chris. ‘Ex-navy.’

  ‘That’s right. But he’s been very helpful to me recently, when Muntz tried to pull the plug on our project. Insisted we kept it going.’

  ‘At Muntz or at William Murdock?’ Chris asked delicately.

  ‘Bastard!’

  ‘Ah, at Muntz.’ He laughed. ‘Have you spoken to him about this?’

  ‘On a bugged phone?’

  Dave Clarke whistled. ‘Bugs? What the hell do you know, Sophie?’

  ‘I wish I knew. But tell you what, that morning you came leaping into my house yelling about fraud – I bet they heard that.’

  Chris looked up sharply. Had someone suppressed that bit of information?

  ‘When we had that lovely breakfast date?’ Dave smiled lecherously.

  I raised a cooling eyebrow; he had the grace to look a touch ashamed. ‘It was the day Fairfax took me on the river, the day Aggie was duffed up, two days before all that graffiti and Blake’s death. The long arm of coincidence, maybe. But it’s worth thinking about.’

  ‘Money makes people do weird things,’ said Dave. ‘There was this guy we took to court in Leicester—’

  The phone rang; Chris pounced. Then he got up wearily and gathered up his jacket. ‘Got to go and tell them upstairs why I’ve been spending our precious budget. I may be gone, to coin a phrase, some time. Sophie, I—’

  Dave and I stood up too.

  ‘Dave – any chance of a lift back to college?’ I preferred to ask in front of Chris. ‘I had a bit of a fall last night and I’m—’

  ‘Afraid for her life,’ said Chris grimly. ‘You’d better feed her too, Dave. And watch it – she’s got hollow legs, that woman.’

  ‘And very lovely they are too,’ Dave added, as if on cue.

  Once in his car, however, he made no attempt to flirt. ‘Tell me about this warehouse place.’

  ‘I could show it you – it’s not all that far from Lloyd House. Get us into the city and I’ll give you directions from there.’

  ‘Only if you let me buy you some lunch.’

  ‘Of course. But it may have to be another day; I’m teaching this afternoon.’

  ‘And you think this is important enough to miss lunch for?’ His profile was serious and alert.

  ‘Yes,’ I said baldly.

  Nothing about the premises had changed, except the number of cars outside. Dave had to snake round several unsavoury streets before he could find a slot, in which he made rather a pig’s ear of parking.

  ‘OK,’ he said, hitching round to face me and laying his arm across the back of my seat, ‘what next?’

  ‘Follow me,’ I said.

  We stared at the locked gates, the corrugated iron over the windows, the locked front door. He peered through the gaps in the gates, and then at the Muntz logo. The sun warmed the pigeon droppings. I swear it was he who said it: ‘You know, I’m sure I can smell gas. Hey, what’s so funny about that?’

  I cackled, but forbore to tell him.

  It was easy enough to slip through one of the loose panels in the gates. Dave took my arm to steady me as I followed him. The willowherb promised to be magnificent later in the year, but there was nothing else exciting. Stacks of very rusty drums near the building, some cables the size of hawsers over to our left, and beyond the building itself, as we picked our way over what might once have been a tarmac road, a huge expanse of very little indeed except tussocks of grass and odd piles of old bricks.

  ‘Funny,’ said Dave, as we headed back to the road. ‘I can still smell gas. I really think, as a responsible citizen, I ought to find the source. What do you think?’

  I nodded, but then blurted, ‘Chris won’t like it! He’s trying to get access officially.’

  ‘That could take hours. Look, Sophie, Chris won’t know. And you won’t be doing anything to upset him, either. You, sweetheart, are going to sit here in the sun – sorry about the pong, but there you are – and give a little whistle if anyone comes. Oke? Come on, kid, with that knee you could be a real liability.’

  I grimaced, but sat on a drum. ‘Any particular choice of tune?’

  ‘Tone deaf, sweetheart, that’s me.’ And with that he dragged a couple of drums to a flattish spot by a window, stacked one on the other, and swung himself up on them. It took him seconds to pull the corrugated iron away.

  I expected a long and boring wait, and was mentally planning what I’d do with a site like this, when a door a few feet from me opened slowly but noisily outwards. Dave! He gestured with his head, and I got off the drum and joined him. As soon as I was safely in, he closed the door behind me.

  ‘Never seen anything like this, sweetheart.’ He dropped his voice as if in church. ‘No, there’s no one here, but college this isn’t. Look!’

  I had never seen cobwebs like these, skeining from floor to ceiling. Swarf glistened in great tubs beside milling and grinding machines. Half-finished work awaited the end of a long-gone lunch break. Like children we stared and, in silence, tiptoed onwards over dusty floors. Other people had been here recently enough to have left tracks, but already the dust was smudging them. In one corner was an office; the typewriter still had a sheet of paper in it. The boss’s tray stood on a cupboard, green and silver-spotted cups stacked on saucers that must have matched, though from where we stood we could see only grime.

  ‘It’s magic,’ Dave breathed at last. ‘Fucking magic!’

  I nodded but did not speak.

  Silently we explored: storerooms; the time clock; the lavatories, even.

  ‘So it wasn’t gas, but them.’ Dave pointed at encrusted urinals, and laughed. The sound echoed uneasily, and with one accord we turned away.

  We w
ere in the main workshop area when we heard it. The scrape and slam of our escape door. And then a cough, and a slowish shuffle of footsteps towards us. I pressed my hand across my mouth to hold back my scream. Dave, under blurs of dust, was greenish pale. He, like me, was scanning for escape routes. But we’d left footprints in all that dust, of course, and further prints would betray us wherever we tried to hide. Dave took my arm, gripping firmly just above the wrist.

  Though I was sure I could hear nothing else except the beating of my heart and the whooshing of blood in my ears, it occurred to me that those footsteps had stopped. Well, they would. Someone out there was as scared as we were. There was no click from a safety catch being released – but then, he might be carrying a knife, not a gun. Then the steps started to recede – he was backing off! At last we heard the door slam, and then a dreadful scream.

  Dave moved before I did, pushing me aside as he pelted out.

  ‘Take care, you silly sod,’ I hissed, but nonetheless I followed him.

  I pushed open the door to find a pool of blood. Dave was half crouched over a frighteningly still shape. I knelt.

  ‘Don’t touch him, you silly bitch! Get the fuck out of here. Here, take my keys. Get my first-aid kit. Get!’ He was already talking into his mobile phone as I stood up.

  As I hurtled through the streets, I tried to make sense of it. The blood. A bottle. The figure, male, any age between thirty and sixty, emaciated. Was the bottle broken? Did that explain the blood?

  I snatched up the first-aid box and started back. But my chest was tight from all that dust, and I had to slow down and fish out my inhaler. So the ambulance and a panda car were already there when I pushed back through the gap in the gates. They set up a drip – he must be alive, then – and were ready to lift him on to a stretcher. The WPC seemed to know Dave, but I wasn’t sure whether in the circumstances that was a good thing. And I wasn’t sure how welcome any contributions from me might be. I watched while he shepherded her inside, and then decided to tag along. The more feet messing up evidence that Chris wouldn’t like, the better. Dave seemed to have much the same idea. He was veritably dancing with enthusiasm where my tracks were clearest, and encouraged my carefully feigned cries of shock and amazement.