I plodded back up the hill and past the Winking Frog, to where I could get a bus back into town. It was time I made a courtesy call at my former office, past time. The visit to the garage had at least aroused an interest in my existence.
They had built us a new office a few years before, just on the edge of town and facing the park. By built, I mean they’d laid out a concrete patch and placed the pre-fab building on it with cranes. The result was bright enough and almost convenient to the public, but the large expanses of glass meant lowered shades against the draughts in winter and lowered shades against the sun in summer, so that the staff worked almost permanently by artificial light. Not that this affected the Inspector, who was supposed to be out and about most of his working day, though to the others the old Victorian dump we’d been in before became suddenly attractive in retrospect. But I’d liked the new place, with my office right next to the canteen, and therefore close to innumerable cups of tea. And, thinking of canteens, I realised I still hadn’t had any lunch. Oh well, maybe I’d qualify, as an ex-member of the staff, to a meal at my old office.
I used the main entrance, straight into Reception. There were two short queues, and two clerks at the counter, one of whom I knew. I turned sideways to the door marked Private, and at once a voice was raised. ‘Not that door, please.’
I turned. It was Maureen. ‘It’s only me,’ I said, and she wiggled her fingers, grimacing a smile at me and reaching for the phone with her other hand. I slid through the door and into the corridor at the foot of the stairs. Downstairs were the two main benefit sections, upstairs the senior staff and contributions section, my own territory. I took my time up the stairs. In the corner at their head was the canteen, not very big, catering for a staff in the forties. Next to it, my old office, marked Inspector. Then the Deputy Manager, Local Insurance Officer, and Manager.
Claud Martin. As managers go, not too bad, but humourless. That was how I remembered him, a strictly-by-the-book man, but you could trust him to support you if you found yourself in trouble with headquarters. Not a friend, but a firm colleague.
I tapped on his door and put my head in. He was just replacing his phone.
‘Cliff! How splendid to see you.’
He was round his desk in a flash, right hand extended, left one raised to grip my shoulder. He was taller than I remembered, and I realised I’d normally seen him seated behind that desk. His grip was firm, and then he stood back, eyeing me.
‘You’ve put on weight, but you look well.’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
‘We thought you’d forgotten us.’
‘You knew I was back in town, then?’
‘We knew they’d let you out on an unsuspecting world,’ he said, beaming. Then he gave a little bark of what could have been laughter.
It was a strange thing to say. He was positively skittish. I wondered whether I’d unsettled him, but couldn’t see how. ‘That was nearly a month ago,’ I said.
‘But we didn’t know you’d come back to this district.’ Then, possibly feeling exposed out there on his bit of SEO carpet, he retreated back to his swivel chair.
I didn’t know whether he expected me to take a seat, but he was making me feel uneasy, so I didn’t. ‘Well...it’s my home town,’ I reminded him.
‘Yes. Of course. But still...’
Surely he wasn’t embarrassed about the divorce. ‘All my friends are here.’
He was silent, spreading his hands on the desk and counting his fingers. True, I’d have difficulty chasing up a close friend, but he didn’t have to appear so dubious. I edged towards the door.
‘Thought I’d have a word with the ones here,’ I said.
‘You do that, Cliff. Go the rounds.’
‘And if you don’t mind...have a bite of lunch.’
He laughed again, so emptily and with such effort! ‘And make sure you don’t pay. I’ll see to that. It’s the least we can do.’
I nodded, grimaced, and got out into the corridor all of a sweat, because that was another funny thing for him to have said. Did he mean that a free lunch cancelled out the loss of my job? I shrugged it off, and walked along the corridor into Contributions Section. Here were the ones I knew best, Ben Thomas still supervisor, Jennie and Coral and the rest. The word had gone ahead of me. They crowded round, shook hands, grinned in bemused embarrassment. It was all very formal, and somehow cool. I left there, put my head into the Deputy Manager’s office, which was empty, and said hello to Frank, who was the present Local Insurance Officer.
‘I hate this bloody job,’ he said, as though I’d volunteer to take it over. But of course he’d hate it. Frank had always been a fine supervisor, but as LIO he had to make legal decisions. It would terrify him.
Downstairs, in the main benefits sections, it was noisier, and there were a few faces I didn’t know. There was a new woman supervisor on A-K. She didn’t know me, but knew of me, and pouted in my direction, possibly because I was distracting her section. But there was sympathy in the concerted reaction, and I didn’t want that. Not many Inspectors were brutally assaulted, and it was this distinction they welcomed. Not Cliff Summers, who’d worked with them a number of years.
I had left the Inspector’s office until last, partly, I think, because I was afraid of it. It had been mine, and its ambience had become part of my life. But in the end I had to look in. No doubt it would be empty, the present Inspector out on the job. So I didn’t tap on the door, just walked in.
A woman was working at my desk, files spread around her, her left hand supporting her head, the fingers mangling her hair. She turned as she heard me.
‘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 – and 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 y
ou 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?
Stone Cold Dead Page 27