by Simon Parke
‘Obviously.’
‘I mean, I presume he has his own key to Model Service, which made things easier, and Blessings’ supply of stickers to hand. Katrina assumed it was her client, but it didn’t have to be and always seemed unlikely to me. Why would a client do that? It just needed someone with a motive, a key and access to the stickers. Francisco.’
‘So perhaps he went a little further to stop the business?’ ventured Tamsin.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, like murdering the owner, for instance. He wouldn’t have known that everything was left to Tara. And he’s an ex-con, remember.’
‘He is. But there’s a more pressing matter,’ said the abbot firmly.
‘Allow me to be the judge of that.’
‘I won’t allow you to be a bad judge, Tamsin. There is a more pressing matter.’
‘What?’
‘Are you ready?’
‘Oh, for goodness sake.’
‘Rosemary wrote the report that closed down the Bybuckle Asylum.’
Peter sat back and Tamsin took this in as best she could, though frustration made a blur of it. This was huge. Why hadn’t she known?
‘Rosemary wrote it? How do you know?’
‘Tara told me.’
‘Oh, it’s Tara again, is it? She’s feeding you a lot of information all of a sudden. Was she drunk or something?’ He wouldn’t tell her the nature of their meeting. It would become something it wasn’t. ‘What, she was drunk?’
‘No.’
‘Then where were you?’ Tamsin could sense some hesitation, some weakness in her uncle.
‘She was giving me a massage.’
‘She was what?’
‘It was just that.’
‘A massage? She was giving you a massage?’
His fears proved prophetic. He’d have to see out the storm. ‘She gave me a massage. She’s a qualified masseuse.’
‘I’m sure she is.’
‘And we talked. It helps a case to talk with people where they’re in charge; helps them to relax.’
Tamsin shook her head in disbelief. ‘And yourself?’
‘Believe me, I wasn’t at all relaxed.’
‘So this massage with an attractive forty-something – it was all for the good of the cause, was it?’
‘It was, yes. And means we now know Rosemary wrote—’
‘Some big sacrifice?’ Her tone was layered with the thick slush of sarcasm. ‘And was it a massage with happy endings?’
Peter got up from the table; he couldn’t stay seated. There was a window out on to a car park. He could take in the view, though there was no view to take in beyond Tamsin’s insecure reactions.
‘Tamsin, you’re making an idiot of yourself.’
‘Oh, I’m making an idiot of myself?’ She could hardly believe she was hearing this. ‘I thought you were taking the lead in that.’
Peter looked at her and felt a moment of compassion. ‘I’m going to pause, Tamsin, count to ten, sit down and then attempt an adult conversation with you . . . rather than try to talk to an insecure five-year-old.’
‘You’ve got a nerve!’
‘I have great sympathy for the five-year-old, believe me, but right now, I need someone displaying less baggage in this investigation . . . as you might say.’
They lived the silence in the room.
‘That’s so pathetic!’ interrupted Tamsin.
Peter stayed silent, starting the quiet count again. Tamsin felt rage at the final accusation, rage with it all; though she needed the abbot, foolish as he was. She needed him, and that was worst of all.
‘Just who is the professional here? Answer me that.’
Again Peter stayed silent, starting the quiet count again.
‘She thought we knew,’ he said quietly.
‘About what?’
‘About Rosemary writing the report that closed the place; and perhaps we should have.’
‘Speak for yourself.’
‘But it doesn’t matter. We do now and nothing is lost. The report that brought down Bybuckle was written by Rosemary.’
‘I don’t see this is really so pressing.’
‘You don’t?’
‘This information may be of no consequence at all, Abbot.’
‘That’s possible. But it was your question when we were at the asylum yesterday: why there?’
‘And you think you’ve answered it by having a massage with Tara?’
‘Maybe. I have an idea, certainly. We’re checking some records; someone was very angry about that closure, I think.’
But Tamsin wasn’t interested in the records. In fact, she wasn’t listening. Hearing but not listening. It was time she took charge and had the information to do that.
‘We heard from the Health Authority this afternoon.’
‘And?’
‘They are going to sell to the syndicate you mentioned. I knew all that.’
‘Of course.’
‘And yes, Geoff Berry is involved. But here’s the thing: he’s not fronting the consortium.’
‘Rosemary spoke of “a snake”.’
‘And I know who the snake is, Abbot. And that’s what I call a pressing matter.’
‘I want you to leave,’
said Blessings firmly. ‘You’ll be gone by six. That gives you an hour to pack.’
Francisco was quite thrown. He hadn’t expected this. He’d sensed a cooling of the atmosphere, but the judge had always been cool. A few degrees lower was neither here nor there.
‘But Blessings – Judge!’ He’d never known what to call her and he didn’t now. When you live alone with someone, you don’t have to call them anything, which had been a relief.
‘You’ll find two hundred pounds in an envelope in the hall. Don’t take anything else.’
The bitch, thought Fran. ‘I burned down a church hall. I’m not a thief!’
The two were not the same and it was so unfair to link them. But that was what prison did, tarred you with a very large and indiscriminate brush. Not that Blessings cared, not when she felt so betrayed. Fran was a disgrace, an embarrassment, that’s all she knew.
‘It’s to help you with lodgings until you get sorted.’ And then she sniffed a little. ‘But perhaps that won’t be a problem with your new-found friend.’
‘I don’t have anywhere to go, your honour.’
‘Then learn to tell the truth.’ She wouldn’t look at him, making herself busy with kitchen tasks, cleaning up and putting away. ‘Learn to tell the truth. And then you might find a bed easier to come by.’
‘I do tell the truth,’ said the plaintiff.
‘Well, you behave in an odd manner for a gay man, Francisco, that’s all I can say; a very odd manner.’ So that was her issue. ‘You did tell me you were gay, do you remember?’
‘I mentioned it.’
‘You made quite a thing of it.’
‘I’m attracted to men and women.’
‘Oh, please!’ Blessings found this very distasteful. ‘You say whatever you need to say to get whatever you want. I found you in prison, remember.’
‘After putting me there.’
‘No, you put yourself there, Francisco. I didn’t burn down the church hall.’
‘I burned down a memory and I’ve said sorry. I just want a normal life now. I want to take back control.’
‘Odd way of showing it.’
So much was welling up inside Francisco . . . this was a mystifying life, which always caught him out, left him in the wrong. He was always left in the wrong. He wanted to hurt the judge.
‘A prison record – it’s like walking round with a corpse tied to your leg. Do you understand that when you send people down? And when they finally let you out, you’re free from your cell, but never free from the prison of people’s assumptions. I’m learning that.’
Now Blessings swung round and faced him. ‘Try being a black woman in the legal profession.’ She had no interest in the boy’s self-pitying drivel.<
br />
‘Then you understand,’ said Fran, chastened by her fury. ‘Understand how I feel.’ There was a moment of connection between the two, but it didn’t last.
‘No, I don’t understand, Fran, because I can’t change what I am. I’m black and I’m a woman. Neither of these states will disappear with soap. But you can change what you do, that’s the difference. You want my advice? Don’t burn down a church hall and don’t hang around brothels. Is that really going to help how people perceive you?’
‘I – met – a – girl.’ Each word with the emphasis of the desperate. ‘That’s all I did.’
‘I’m sure you’ve met plenty of girls there and you may even know the name of one or two.’
‘It’s not like that. I didn’t know she was a prostitute. We didn’t meet there.’
‘You didn’t meet at the whorehouse?’
‘No.’
‘But you’re still seeing her.’
‘Yes.’
‘Still lapping her up despite what you know?’
Silence. Blessings didn’t understand . . . but what was there to say? She’d never hear.
‘The police have got you on camera,’ she said. ‘You’re aware of that? They’ve got you on film entering the premises. And do you really think that someone in my position can have someone like you in my house? Someone dating a slut, a pornographer – whatever!’
Francisco breathed deeply, shamed, confused and now raging himself. ‘A pornographer?’
‘It’s all the same, the consequences are the same – men doing abnormal things, debased activity.’
What was going on here? What the fuck was going on? And then Fran was remembering. Something stirred in him, it was the word that did it, ‘pornographer’. The conversation he’d overheard, one night after the meeting of the Etiquette Society. Yes, he remembered now. All the others had gone home – the Three Strange Men, as he called them. Blessings was left talking with Rosemary, the charity woman, in the hallway. She was just taking her coat from the hook, when she turned to Blessings.
‘I want you to know that I’m very sorry about your father,’ Rosemary said in her matter-of-fact sort of way. The prison psychologist, who’d worked with Francisco, would have called it a door-handle statement. You say the most awkward things, the most difficult things, when you’re about to leave and your escape route is clear.
‘What about my father?’ Blessings had asked. There had been such a hard tone to the judge’s voice.
‘With the pornography.’ That’s what Rosemary had said. ‘With the pornography.’ Francisco had seen nothing, standing there on the stairs, but had felt the shock of his landlady. ‘I’m aware of how he died, Blessings.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, well aware. But you must never think less of him or of yourself,’ continued Rosemary confidently, as if this was a palliative, as if she was somehow leaving things better than she’d found them. ‘Many men enjoy pornography, wherever they look at it, and heart attacks in the circumstances are not uncommon. But they don’t have to be defined by it when they’re gone. You’re not to let the death of your father in that toilet destroy his life or his memory. He’s worth more than that.’
Francisco remembered the difficult hallway silence. He then heard the front door open and close without a word spoken. Fran had walked into the kitchen attempting nonchalance as if he’d just come down from his room. Blessings came in and went out, saying nothing. She could not believe what she’d just heard and Francisco never mentioned it . . . until now, because he was desperate.
‘I heard the conversation, you know.’
‘What conversation?’
‘The heart to heart with Rosemary . . . in the hallway.’ He was nervous as he spoke. How far to go with this?
‘I’ve spoken often with Rosemary in the hallway,’ said Blessings, coldly.
‘The one about your father, the toilet . . . and the pornography.’ He didn’t really know what he was saying, but she did and the embarrassment was clear. A shameful family secret.
‘Are you blackmailing me?’
‘No! I’m just saying.’ This wasn’t blackmail, he didn’t want anything. Well, he did want something – he wanted to stay, but that wasn’t going to happen now, was it? And then it just came out, unnoticed in his psyche until now: ‘Is that why you killed Rosemary?’
‘You’ll be gone by five and forget the two hundred pounds,’ she said, walking towards the door. ‘You’re trash, I’m afraid. But they tell me there are still free beds in the Bybuckle Asylum. It’s about all you’re fit for.’
She’d deal with Francisco.
Tamsin would see him alone.
She didn’t have time for the banter between Martin and the abbot. It was not productive and rather exclusive. It didn’t include her, and as she didn’t feel included it wouldn’t be happening. Martin had suggested they meet at Costa Coffee in Lewes, rather than the Silt’s riverside office, and this was fine by her. If he wanted the humiliation to be public, then so be it.
‘I don’t like mixing business with pleasure,’ he’d said on the phone, explaining the venue.
‘I’ll keep the pleasure to an absolute minimum,’ replied Tamsin.
Martin ordered a flat white, Tamsin a sparkling citrus drink.
‘I trust you’re paying,’ he said. ‘If it isn’t a date – and I sense that may be the case – then the one who most needs the meeting should pay. And that would certainly be you in this instance.’ He smiled.
‘The Bybuckle Asylum,’ said Tamsin, waiting to see the fear in his face. But Martin merely took a sip of his coffee.
‘What of the dismal place?’ he asked.
‘A good site, I’d imagine – for someone with vision.’
Martin put down his coffee. ‘The selling of the Bybuckle land has been rather on and off down the years. More off than on, obviously, which is why it still sits there in all its bleak and disintegrating glory. I think the sane have all but given up on it.’
‘Leaving just you and the ChanBerry consortium. Why didn’t you mention that?’
Martin was only momentarily surprised. ‘Because it has nothing to do with anything.’
‘Nothing to do with the murder there?’
‘I see no possible connection.’
‘I can imagine some might disagree. I might even include myself among them.’
Martin smiled. ‘What possible benefit would there be for me and my backers in a murder on a property we’d like to buy?’
‘Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?’
‘It is, yes.’
‘The obvious reading is that you simply wanted revenge, maybe to get even, after Rosemary pulled out of the consortium. Perhaps she knew things about you all.’
‘Revenge does have its delights, I grant you, and I can’t say I’m above it, not at all. But there are better ways than physical murder, believe me. A few well-chosen words at a vulnerable moment can cause infinite and perhaps more satisfying hurt to someone. Bring hell to them on earth, I say! And anyway, the situation you describe simply didn’t exist. The vision for the place changed, nothing more. And dear Rosemary had to have her say, as she always did. But that’s business.’
Tamsin was struggling. Rosemary had likened him to a snake, but an eel would be a smoother fit, slipping through the questions. She’d sat down with a strong hand, or thought she had, with a fine ace to play. But the ace had achieved nothing, had been trumped with ease. She now looked vainly for her next move.
‘I suppose a murder lowers the asking price,’ she said. ‘Who wants a property where there was a killing?’ It sounded pathetic.
‘Oh dear, Detective Inspector, you really are missing your abbot.’
And the trouble was, he was right. She was missing Peter. He gave her space in interviews to think, while he prodded and probed in his own particular way. And now she had no space; she felt as one beneath a stampede, crushed mercilessly.
‘Stay with the question,’ she said
.
‘Really?’ said Martin, shaking his head. ‘Because we’re in the Land of the Laughable here. Do you not follow the property market? Mr Berry will tell you. A house in Newhaven was recently sold. Nothing remarkable there, you say. But this particular house, six months previously, had hosted a most grisly killing, involving a coffee grinder, an axe and the loss of three pints of blood over the kitchen floor. Following an open day, they had three offers, all above the asking price, one of which they accepted.’
‘Proving what?’ She knew exactly what it proved. She just hated his easy confidence.
‘Proving that death – apart from the Dallas killing of JFK – is a temporary interest, Detective Inspector, to you and everybody else. A brief headline at best. But if you want some help with this investigation – and you do seem to need it – why not ask Blessings why she so disliked Rosemary?’
‘What makes you think she did?’
Martin leant forward and Tamsin pulled back slightly.
‘I never told you this, but Blessings was very keen for her to be removed from the Etiquette Society; very keen indeed. Not at first. They seemed quite amicable initially, but, well, who knows what happened? I’m not sure that Rosemary was too keen when the Welsh toy boy arrived on the scene, skulking around in the kitchen or on the stairs, always slightly out of view. Perhaps she didn’t trust what was going on. It was none of her business, of course, but she may have said something, I don’t know. Rosemary did tend to say something.’
Tamsin hadn’t yet touched her drink. ‘On the subject of Rosemary,’ she countered, ‘I’m told Geoff made a pass at her at one of the Etiquette Society meetings. Is that true?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘A good source.’
‘Geoff makes passes at everyone, Detective Inspector. He makes more passes than Lionel Messi.’
He was the one footballer Channing had heard of, but clearly Tamsin hadn’t, so he continued.
‘The fact is, Geoff can’t help himself. He’s always trying his luck. Well, he hasn’t tried it with me yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me.’
‘That’s all sounding pretty seedy.’
‘When is a pass not a pass? When it’s a confusion, Detective Inspector, which is Geoff through and through, bless him. He has no boundaries at all, so it’s all a bit of a blur.’ Tamsin’s disdain was evident. ‘He could be married to three different people at the same time and not notice the problem. It’s why he likes acting. At least he knows who he is for a moment – a cliché but true.’ Martin paused and sipped at his coffee. ‘Now, I really feel like I’m doing your job, and I’m acutely aware I’m not being paid for it – so did you have anything else to discuss? My print deadline is quite merciless in its demands!’