‘Who the devil are you?’ she demanded.
One person the news hadn’t reached. I smiled. Nothing false in this welcome. ‘I’m Cliff Summers. Used to work here.’
Then she got to her feet and smiled and stuck out her hand. ‘I’ve heard about you.’
She’d have been in her mid-twenties, nearly as tall as me, which put her at around five-eight, a gangling, awkward young woman, all angles and corners, with a square, attractive face and a large jaw. Her mouth was wide, the teeth prominent when she smiled, and her eyes were that deep, innocent cornflower blue that make it difficult to look away from.
‘I’m Nickie,’ she said. ‘Short for Nicola.’
I said I was pleased to meet her, and asked how long she’d been doing the job (a year) and whether she liked it (not this bit, with a gesture to the paperwork). Clearly, she was my type of Inspector. She sat down again and I drew up a chair, feeling relaxed and comfortable.
‘I’ve just been reading one of your minutes,’ she told me. ‘You didn’t mince words, did you?’
‘Which one’s that?’
‘Two years ago. The Cartwright case. You had to go round to the accountant’s office to get a sight of the books.’
I shrugged. ‘He’d been playing hard to meet for a fortnight. An old friend of mine.’
‘You put here: “Watch this man, I think he’s a crook.” I mean, it was risky, putting that in writing.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Not libel, I wouldn’t think, because the files are confidential.’
‘It’s an interesting legal point,’ she admitted seriously.
‘And anyway, at that time my marriage was breaking up.’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘He was one of the reasons. He’s now married to my ex-wife. At the time, it amused me to write that.’
Her nose wrinkled. ‘Amused?’
‘And anyway, he was a crook. Still is, I wouldn’t be surprised.’
She laughed. She’d held it too long and it burst out as an unrestricted bark that had me grinning.
‘You shouldn’t take me too seriously,’ I told her.
‘I’m not doing that.’
‘If you happen to come across him you’ll probably find him helpful and charming.’
She tapped the back of my hand in emphasis. ‘Charming, you mean, because I’m a woman?’ she asked shrewdly.
‘Well, he didn’t try to charm me.’ And suddenly I realised that I’d been remembering all this with ease, so naturally I smiled.
We looked at each other, and for a few moments there was no need for words. Then she pounced into the silence, jabbering away on a high pitch of excitement, or perhaps embarrassment. She was a gesturer, her hands flying, hair flying, shoulders moving with every emphasis, even her legs involved, stretched out, brought back, crossed. She was wearing a dark roll-neck sweater and a tartan skirt, with low-heeled, practical shoes.
‘You can’t imagine the fuss there was,’ she said, taking a breath. ‘Police all over the place, taking statements, getting the picture right. Poor Maureen was in the middle, because she was the one who’d spoken to you last, and that nice, calm police sergeant going through your records to get a picture of what you’d done that day, and everybody hanging on the line because nobody thought you were going to live, and digging, digging, because it wasn’t clear why you’d gone to Pool Street Motors. No file on it, you see. And what you could have come across to justify...’
She stopped abruptly, grimacing. She had the sort of mouth that manages a very expressive grimace.
‘Justify what?’ I asked. ‘The assault?’
She shook her head. ‘Maureen was the one, you see, who told them you’d phoned in to see whether we had anything on Pool Street Motors.’
‘And there wasn’t anything?’
‘No.’ She smiled, because she thought she’d distracted me neatly. But she hadn’t.
‘So there was nothing to justify...what, exactly?’
‘The money.’ She made flapping gesture with her hands, exasperated slaps in the air to reprove her loose tongue. ‘Nearly six hundred.’
‘Money? Pounds?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well obviously, I must have checked the books and collected arrears...’
‘No.’ She shook her head, her mid-blond hair bouncing, her pout definite in its rejection. ‘There was nothing in your receipt book.’
‘Then I hadn’t collected any money.’
Those vivid eyes were expressive. This was not a woman who believed in hiding her feelings; she was probably incapable of doing so. She drew in her lower lip and bit on it, watching me anxiously. Then she said:
‘You did, you know. Somebody must’ve seen the attack and phoned the police, and a police car drew in round the back and caught him at it. That man...’ She hesitated.
‘Clayton. Tony Clayton.’
‘Yes, him. He’d got the briefcase at his feet and all your papers scattered around, and they found an envelope of money in his pocket when the headlights got him.’
‘It was dark?’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘I don’t know. There’s not much of that day I can remember. Oh, they told me he’d been caught, in the office car park here, and they got him to admit the attack. But I had the impression that I’d impounded his books and was bringing ‘em back here. Books...not money.’
I was saying all this in a flat voice, as though I was making a statement in court, no emotion in it, none of the trepidation that I was feeling. Money? We seemed to be talking about a third person, not me.
‘There was money in an envelope,’ she said quietly, and now it was her lack of gesture, of movement at all, that was so telling. ‘He told the police it was a bribe his wife had slipped you, and he’d wanted it back.’
‘A bribe.’
I listened to myself saying that. The terrible thing was that I didn’t know that I was not the sort of person who would have accepted bribes. On the face of it, an Inspector in Social Services might have many opportunities to accept bribes. I used to come across no end of legal infringements. But in practice there was not much an Inspector could offer in response to a bribe. His work was too involved with other authorities, too much overseen, cross-checked and supervised. At the most, he could offer assistance in straightening out someone’s financial difficulties, which might attract thanks. Once, I was given a dozen eggs in gratitude. I did remember that. But there’s a bit of difference between a dozen eggs and...
‘How much did you say?’
‘Nearly six hundred pounds.’
‘That’s ridiculous. If I’d collected that...ah yes, I see.’ She smiled, pleased that I saw, relieved perhaps that I hadn’t gone wild and shouted at her.
‘It was after office hours,’ she said. ‘Nearly six-thirty. If you’d collected money officially, you’d have issued a receipt, which you hadn’t, and paid it into the official Giro account. If the Post Offices were closed, you’d have kept it safe until the morning.’
‘You mean, I’d have taken it back to my digs?’
‘If that’s where you were living.’
‘Still am. Same digs. Yes, I see your point. But I came here, to this office...’ I stopped. How had I come back here? If my car was at Pool Street Motors, had I left it there? If so, why?
‘So it was accepted that I’d taken a bribe?’
‘Eventually.’
‘But you weren’t here,’ I suddenly realised. ‘How d’you know this much about it?’
She seemed relieved that I was taking it calmly, though perhaps a little disappointed that I wasn’t denying the charge. ‘Oh...I was up for promotion, and they offered me this posting. Well...I jumped at it, but I didn’t know why it’d become vacant all of a sudden till I got here.’
‘So at least, you’ve got an open mind.’
She frowned. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘My friends here – the ones I thought were friends – a
nd the Manager and Welfare Officer, they seem to’ve been convinced I accepted bribes. And you, who’ve never met me before...I don’t see any contempt in those lovely eyes of yours.’
She waved the eyes away as irrelevant. ‘Oh...well...I dropped right in it. For the first month here I was doing nothing else but back-checking on your old files.’
‘Looking for bribes?’
‘Looking for anything that hinted at a possibility of bribes, going back to see the people you’d seen, and trying to make judgements…’
‘You’d enjoy that.’
‘It was all experience. I was working with a man from Headquarters, so I was in the background, rather. You were remembered, everywhere we went. My friend from HQ wasn’t particularly pleased with the way you’d been handling the job, but we came across nothing, absolutely nothing...well, wrong. Poor man, he was so disappointed.’
‘And you?’
‘I’d read your files, everything I could find that you’d handled. I listened to the way people spoke about you, around the town. I’d made up my mind.’
She was very solemn now, her eyes searching my face. I said nothing, willing her to reveal, without prompting, some fresh secret corner of my personality.
‘You’d been sticking your neck out, Cliff. Half a dozen cases that would have made sound prosecutions, and somehow you wangled time, and cleared them. Two or three injury benefit claims I’m sure I wouldn’t have recommended, and you did. And who’d risk putting a comment on a Minister’s file – who but you – I can remember the exact words – “I cannot decide which action was the more stupid”, you wrote, “the claimant’s for trying this on, or his MP’s for referring it.” ’
‘It was how I felt. A complete waste of half a day.’
‘All the same...’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Good heavens, look at the time. It’s well into second lunch break. Let’s go and eat. It’s shepherd’s pie this morning.’
I didn’t move. ‘You’d made up your mind,’ I reminded her.
‘Yes.’ She got to her feet, fumbling around in her purse. ‘Anybody on the take wouldn’t have drawn attention to himself, as you did.’ She stood beside me and poked me in the chest with a bony finger. ‘I came across an old file – oh, six years old. That same accountant...’
‘I told you, an old friend.’
‘You actually wrote – didn’t you ever use official language? – that he’d tried to stall you off by suggesting you should take his secretary to lunch, so you checked the books first, and then took her to lunch. After that, I didn’t need to get a look at your lovely eyes.’
I laughed. ‘It was quite true. That was the same secretary I married. Let’s go and risk the shepherd’s pie.’
I stood back and allowed her to lead the way, all old-fashioned, not even giving it a thought that she’d resent it. She gave me a grin, and went ahead. I hadn’t allowed my true thoughts much chance to get working, but deep down there was a tremor of concern. They’d accepted that I’d been taking bribes. The Welfare Officer had carefully edged me into applying for early retirement on health grounds. It would have saved him a lot of trouble, by quietly getting me out of the way. Just nobody had raised a voice and cried out: ‘Let’s wait until he can answer for himself.’ No, they’d made the judgement, and were perhaps, now, worried that I might challenge it. Yet I felt no anger, only that tremor, which was no more than a warning not to give way to anger, in case there were worse things yet to uncover.
I told the cook the Manager was paying for mine – she was not the woman I might have remembered – and we took our trays to a far table. Sideways glances followed us. Nicola appeared to be quite unconcerned. It seemed that with eating implements in her hands her volubility increased. I had the opportunity to do no more than smile and nod, keeping things going.
She had come to a strange town with only a week’s notice to take up this appointment, at first living in digs but now in a small flat, which she shared with a friend. I did not ask which sex. The district did not excite her, though she was beginning to form a firm basis for her life. But there was no theatre, and the stage was her passion, and no local orchestra. She played the clarinet. However, she’d recently discovered an amateur string quartet, which quite contentedly could become a clarinet quintet. So life wasn’t too harsh, she admitted. You accepted what there was, and made the best of it. And maybe I played an instrument?
I grimaced and shrugged. Not exactly tone deaf, but I’d never tried to play an instrument. She considered me with concern, a lost soul in the wilderness.
‘But you’ll be staying around?’ she asked.
‘Seems like I’ve got no choice. I’ll have to find out what happened, that day.’
‘If it takes long enough, I’ll have time to teach you the guitar.’
This was over the pudding, a sponge with hot jam on it. I said I hoped it wouldn’t take that long, and: ‘Anyway, I bet there’s no music written for clarinet and guitar.’
‘Then we’d have to write our own,’ she declared, and damn it, she wasn’t joking.
She was a woman who’d cheerfully take on anything, never daunted, accepting life as it came at her, in her case headlong.
With lunch over, I couldn’t find much excuse for hanging around any more, and she had her work to do. Awkwardly, I drifted back into her office, aware that I’d probably not enter that building again.
‘Well, I’ll be off.’ I thrust my hands into my slacks pockets. ‘Leave you to it. Maybe we’ll meet again.’
‘Oh, don’t rush off. There’s some stuff of yours you’d better take. I’ve been keeping it for you.’
She reached over and drew open the second drawer down of her desk, and came up with a large manilla envelope, fastened with a metal clip. She held it out to me.
‘Your personal stuff from the briefcase, and a few oddments from the drawers. Maybe they’ll help. You know, the memory.’
And in her eyes I saw she understood that this was the critical point. Not the money, not the visit to Pool Street Motors that day, not the disappearance of Clayton’s wife, but my memory. It was my mind we were talking about, and that was where I lived.
3
I slid it all out on to the surface of her desk, as she thrust her files aside to make room. It seemed a natural thing, to share it with her.
What there was to share. It didn’t look much.
From the briefcase had come my pocket calculator, which in practice I’d rarely used because I had the sort of mind that did mental arithmetic just as fast. Had had, rather. I hadn’t dared to try it out lately. The calculator battery was dead. Perhaps my mental arithmetic was, too. There was my bit of card on which I’d copied the warnings I might have to give, from the Judge’s Rules on evidence. There was my fountain pen, my gold Parker with the oblique nib.
‘My wife gave me that,’ I said, showing Nicola the engraved initials, C.W.S., on the side. ‘For my birthday.’
‘Looks like a souvenir from a Co-op convention,’ she remarked. ‘What’s the W?’
‘Wilfred.’
‘Ah.’ She nodded.
And my wallet. I’d wondered where that had got to. There was my credit card, now out of date, and three Access counterfoils, some private addresses on a bit of paper, and tucked in a pocket a couple of spare keys for the car. No money. That would have been formally, and via a lot of red tape, sent on to my aunt.
I fingered the rest, the loose stuff from the drawers. Old erasers, a few pencils, a six-inch steel rule, and a folded sheet of paper. I opened it out. It was one of the record sheets that we had to complete every week to show what work had been done. It was my last one, uncompleted.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘This looks interesting. Didn’t it occur to anybody that...’
‘Of course it did,’ she cut in. ‘It was the first thing we looked at.
It was my rough copy, from which I’d have made a fair copy if I’d been around to do it. The idea was that you listed the files on hand at the beginni
ng of the accounting week, adding files as they came in and signing out files as you cleared them. Lower down was a list of visits made, where to, file number involved, and when completed. From this you could see the movement pattern of the files. From it, too, it would have been possible to decide which files I’d had with me that day, and from that, decide why I’d found it necessary to phone in to ask what we had on Pool Street Motors, and why, without a case file to send me, I had gone round there and spent half the day, finally impounding records and apparently walking away with nearly six hundred pounds in cash.
‘From this...’ I began.
‘From it, we decided you’d gone out on that file.’ She put a blunt forefinger on a specific file number. ‘But it got us nowhere.’
‘You’re sure?’ I looked up into her face.
‘I’m very sure.’
‘You wouldn’t care to dig it out, so that I can see?’
She pouted, then smiled. ‘If it’ll help.’ Then she was out of the door and clattering along to Contributions Section.
I sat and stared at my work sheet. I’d had seven files on hand that morning, but clearly I’d only taken out the one. George Peters. That was the name on the file. It was an individual file, not a business. No apparent connection with Pool Street Motors. Nicola wouldn’t have been so certain about it unless they’d found the other six back here in the office. But on that morning, apparently visiting George Peters, I must have come across something that had required a visit to Pool Street Motors. So I’d phoned in, just in case there’d been trouble in the past with them, and then gone along there. So far, straightforward.
Nicola’s briefcase stood beside her chair. It had been my briefcase; I recognised its patches of wear and tear. We used the official black case with the gold ERR on it. I couldn’t remember even carrying it that day.
She returned, banging in through the door with enthusiasm. ‘Here it is. In the PA run.’
A cleared file, put away. George Peters, 17C Rock Street. I didn’t at once open it, but called from my memory a picture of Rock Street, a dreary run of dying terraces, either boarded emptily or broken into bed-sitters. But there was no memory of a visit there. I opened it.
A Death to Remember Page 3