Quick off the Mark

by Moody, Susan

  ‘OK, but I still have things to do elsewhere. I’ll come when I’m done and get in touch.’ When Todd finally pushed back from our table, I got up too.

  Once out of earshot, I said, ‘How about a coffee, Mr DuBois? Unless you’re pressed for time.’

  He laughed. ‘Honey, I’m not pressed for anything right now.’

  Across the road was Willoughbys Bookshop. Sam Willoughby was staring out of the window as Todd and I walked along the pavement. Seeing me and Todd together, he looked like a man whose crest had just fallen. For a moment I considered going in with Todd and having coffee in the bookshop, but Sam might have felt even worse if I’d sat laughing and joking with someone who wasn’t him. He had the hots for me in a big way. Sadly, I didn’t feel the same about him. Anyway, what I did was my concern, not his. He didn’t own me, for heaven’s sake. So why did I feel so mean? I pretended I hadn’t seen him.

  I turned into the Coffee Bean, further along the street. We ordered lattes, mine with a splash of hazelnut syrup, Todd’s straight up. We sat down opposite each other in a booth near the back.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘Tell me why you’re here. It’s rather off the beaten track for tourists.’

  ‘I already said: unfinished business.’

  ‘Which you’ve now concluded?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Any chance of telling me what it was?’

  ‘None whatsoever.’ He was no longer smiling.

  The two of us stared at each other. Got the measure of each other. Recognized that we were cut from the same fabric. Weapons drawn. Swords unsheathed. Showing the steel beneath the smooth façade. ‘So how much longer shall you be staying here?’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘I’ll be hightailing out of town this afternoon, as it happens. People to see, places to go, you know how it is. But if the Major’s really serious about this possible place in France …’

  ‘The Major is a very good friend of mine,’ I said. Not really a warning. Merely something for his files.

  ‘I’m just thrilled to hear it.’

  I stuck out my chin. ‘Mess with the Major and you mess with me.’

  ‘Oh jeez. I’m trembling so hard I’m gonna shake the hair right off of my scalp.’

  ‘I believe you said you didn’t know Tristan Huber.’

  ‘That’s right. So I got no motive for doing the guy in, if that’s what you’re trying to imply.’

  ‘I’m not trying to imply anything.’ I sipped from my mug of coffee, thinking he was pretty quick to recognize the name from nothing more than a newspaper report.

  ‘Wouldn’t mind saying Hi to Miss Dimsie before I leave.’

  ‘Walk along the High Street, turn left at the traffic lights, and go into the fifth shop along on the right. Drayton Studios. Whether she’d be there is another matter. She’s often not.’

  ‘It’s worth a try.’ He grinned his grin.

  The trouble with Todd DuBois was that he was immensely likeable. That boyish smile. That cowlick of hair. Those clear blue eyes. But likeability is the first prerequisite for a conman – if that’s what he was.

  ‘Why don’t we do dinner sometime soon?’ he said.

  I thought rapidly. Saw no objections. Unless underneath the charm he was a psychopath about to dive straight in, rather than passing, as the Major had already asserted. But it was a risk I was prepared to take, since I might just find out a little bit more from the guy. ‘OK. You’re on.’

  ‘How about next week? I’m kinda tied up for the next few days.’

  ‘It’s a deal.’

  ‘I’ll find you.’ He winked. Grinned. Bussed my cheek. And very nice too. I watched him walk away, feet striking the pavement with an almost audible jingle of non-existent spurs, thighs wide, like a cowboy. Or a gunslinger.

  SIX

  Who doesn’t have regrets? About love. Loss. About things done. Things not done. In my case, my most profound regrets were about the things which could not be done. Such as me becoming an artist. A painter. Trouble was, I had absolutely no talent. I could see pictures so clearly in my head, but somewhere between brain and paper aptitude failed. I was like someone who had always wanted to become a singer but was thwarted by the inability to hold a tune. Or even to find one in the first place. Such as poor Sam Willoughby, who longed to be a C&W star but had no singing voice.

  I understood his frustration. I was lucky in that a love of art in general and a supportive art teacher at school had led me to take a degree in art history, and after six years in the police, and by now armed with a certain amount of knowledge, to turn it into a means of making a living of sorts. Which I was trying to do at this very moment. After the loss of my collaborator and close friend, Dr Helena Drummond, I still had contracts which would carry me through the next two or three years, if I was careful. But the work no longer seemed as compelling. I’d lost the exciting frisson of discovery which had motivated me before Helena was murdered last year. And Tristan’s murder was even more debilitating.

  Shortly, I would walk into town to see how Dimsie was. I knew from Fliss Fairlight that despite encouraging bulletins from the police, they still weren’t much further forward in the hunt for Tristan Huber’s killer than the day his body had been found. Meanwhile, I sat gazing at reproductions of paintings, choosing which to include in my next anthology: Eat, Drink and be Merry. In one hand I held a painting by Pedro de Camprobín, Still Life with Sweets, and the other a picture by the same artist, another still life, this time with chestnuts, olives and wine. I loved them both. So much more relaxed and intimate than Zurbarán’s work. Which would Helena have gone for? In the end, I opted for the still life of sweets, with its tazza of sugary cakes and turrón. It was more exuberant than the roasted chestnuts and prim olives. She’d been such an exuberant woman herself. It was definitely the one she would have chosen.

  I went out. The sea was calm. Poison-green in patches, blue elsewhere. For once there was no wind. Flags drooped defeatedly from their poles. Seagulls hung around looking bored, or crapping on the unwary below. The High Street was somnolent except for the mix of regulars and tourists drinking half-pints under umbrellas outside the pubs.

  In her showroom just off the High Street, I found Dimsie seated at a faux-neo-classical writing table placed slantwise across one corner. She was wearing a pair of over sized black-framed specs, intended to emphasize both her serious attitude to her job and her (non-existent) fragility. They were making a damn good fist of it.

  She stood up and took them off when I came in. ‘Find anything?’ she demanded.

  I explained about the police and the grass crushing. ‘I don’t know what you were hoping for, but the scene of crime has been trampled to shreds. There’s nothing for a freelance like me to find. If there had been, the police would long ago have discovered it.’

  ‘And your cop friends aren’t feeding you information?’

  ‘Right. Mostly because they haven’t got much info to feed.’ My friend DI Fairlight had told me that there were no clues at all to be found where the body had been lying. ‘Just about all we know at the moment is the fact that he – Tristan – was tortured elsewhere and …’ I hesitated.

  ‘And what?’

  ‘… and as you already know, simply chucked out behind a hedge when they’d finished with him.’ I didn’t mention the pathologist’s opinion that he’d still been alive at that point.

  ‘It’s been ages,’ she said. ‘Surely by now …’ Tears welled up in her eyes. And mine.

  ‘Whoever dumped him in Honeypot Lane left no traces at all for the forensics to find,’ I said gently. ‘And I’m also sure you’re aware that it looks like he was hosed down after his chest was … um … carved up and before he was loaded into a car.’

  ‘The man who discovered the corpse was right, wasn’t he, when he said that the letters on the chest spelled out cheat?’

  ‘According to the police, yes.’

  ‘I can’t imagine m-my darling brother ch-cheating on anyone.’ Dimsie
looked at me pitifully at me, her tiny hands clasped to her heart. ‘But you’ll go on looking, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  If you were looking for phony, I reckoned she and the heir to the lost cotton-fields of Louisiana would be a good match for each other. Two bullshitters going head to head. I don’t mean her grief over her brother wasn’t real and heartfelt. Just that she had always been a bit of a poseur, too cute for her own good. What am I saying, a bit of a poseur? Or should that be poseuse? ‘I need to know a lot more about Tristan than I actually do,’ I said.

  ‘But you’ve known him all your life.’

  ‘Yeah, so he likes peanut butter sandwiches and sailing and French cuisine and New York and Rembrandt,’ I said, skating over the fact that for a while there, I had known quite lot more about his likes, especially since so many of them had coincided with mine. ‘That doesn’t mean a thing. I’ve never seen him angry or depressed, but he wouldn’t be human if he wasn’t. I know he’s terrified of your mother, but who isn’t? Other than that, I know very little about him as an adult. You’ll have to give me some more background. What needs to be established as soon as possible is who might have wanted to get rid of him. Who was angry enough to take the time to carve words on his chest? And why?’

  ‘I told you, he was the sweetest, kindest …’ Her voice cracked. ‘Loved by all.’

  ‘Not by all. Someone didn’t love him so much that they killed him.’ I probably sounded harsh. ‘Who might that be?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She looked so bereft that I wanted to hold her tight and murmur soothingly. Except I didn’t entirely buy her act. Don’t get me wrong. I loved Dimsie. We had had some wonderful times together over the years. But somehow I couldn’t avoid noticing the gleam of calculation on her pretty face. ‘If you want me to help, you’re going to have to come clean about him,’ I said briskly. ‘The police will ask you the same questions, if they haven’t already.’

  She laid a slender white hand against her throat, a gesture designed to emphasize how frail and vulnerable she was. ‘Not yet, they haven’t,’ she said faintly.

  ‘They will. So you can look at this as a dress rehearsal. And if there’s embarrassing stuff, you can rely on me to keep it to myself … unless it really has a bearing on his death.’

  ‘His murder,’ she said harshly. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘This word cheat. Who has Tristan cheated? Did he owe money? And if so, to whom?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You must do, Dim. You ran your businesses more or less in tandem.’ I turned a stern eye on her. ‘Does the name Harkness mean anything to you?’

  ‘Harkness?’

  ‘Is he one of your suppliers? Or one of Tristan’s?’

  ‘He might have been. What does he produce?’ Her violet eyes slid away from mine. ‘Michael Compton, our accountant and business manager, might be able to help you better than I can.’

  I leaned across her desk and took her chin in my hand, wrenched it round, forced her to look at me. ‘Dim, I’ve known you since you were in nappies. Don’t lie to me. Don’t pretend you don’t know what your brother was doing.’

  ‘You make it sound as though he was up to something.’

  ‘Quite clearly he was. Otherwise he wouldn’t have ended up in a field, tortured to death. The guy or guys responsible must have been trying to make him tell them something. Any idea what it could have been?’

  She started to shake her head, looking so pathetic that if I hadn’t seen her two or three times in professional mode, I might have swallowed it. I reminded myself that she was Dorcas Huber-Gordon’s daughter. No one could have emerged unscathed.

  ‘Dimsie,’ I said warningly. ‘If there’s someone out there who feels he or she’s been swindled in some way, and Tristan didn’t give any satisfaction, you might be next on their list.’

  ‘What?’ She sat up now, in full Iron Lady form, ready to chew iron filings as an hors d’oeuvre to a plateful of rusty drawing pins, all shreds of pathos suddenly consigned to the dressing-up box. ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you.’

  ‘You can’t be serious.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘But what am I going to do?’

  ‘First of all, you’re going to spill all of yours and Tristan’s little secrets.’

  ‘We haven’t got—’ she began when saw my dead-eye stare.

  ‘Everybody has secrets,’ I said. ‘Including Tristan, it seems.’

  She heaved a big sigh. ‘I honestly don’t know what they might have been. He was just about to fly off to Connecticut, actually. We’ve got several clients in that area and Tristan had been planning this trip for a while – we’ve been talking about opening up a branch of the business in Manhattan.’

  ‘What exactly does “just about to” mean?’

  ‘A few days before he was found.’

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘Must have been a week before that.’ I could see her beautiful eyes scanning their evening together to see what and what not to say. ‘We had dinner at my mother’s.’

  ‘Have you spoken to her about Tristan’s death?’

  ‘I have her on the phone nearly every day. Sobbing and carrying on. Poor old bat. If she’d had to lose one of us, she’d far rather it was me.’

  This, unfortunately, was true.

  ‘Any idea what happened to that wife of his? What was her name: Coralie? Caroline?’

  ‘Christie.’

  ‘Right. So where is she?’

  ‘Last seen heading to France and points south.’

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Three or four years or so.’

  ‘And she’s not been heard from since.’

  Dimsie shook her head. ‘Well, barely.’

  Food for thought? ‘What was she like?’

  ‘She was OK.’ Dimsie looked off into the middle distance. ‘A bit … eccentric.’

  ‘I guess that means you hated her.’

  She frowned at me. ‘Why are you asking me all these questions? You not trying to suggest that Christie was responsible for murdering Tristan, are you?’

  ‘I’m not trying to suggest anything. But you might as well look at all the options. I would have heard if there’d been any children, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Of course. You’d probably have been asked to be a godmother.’

  ‘So what were you and Tristan currently working on?’

  ‘He was commissioned on his own. An old school-friend with an estate near Ashford, with an American wife, a loaded one, from Texas, or Tennessee, if I remember rightly.’ Which I was quite sure she did.

  ‘Name?’

  She shrugged. ‘As I said, it was Tristan’s project, not mine. We do sometimes work independently.’

  ‘Presumably we can go through his records and find out what this person’s called.’

  ‘If the police let us.’

  ‘You’re family, as well as business colleagues. They can’t keep you out of his offices or home for very long.’ I stood. ‘Come on, Dim. Let’s go.’

  ‘Go where.’

  ‘To wherever he – or you – keep your business records.’ My spirits sank at the thought of dealing with someone else’s financial paperwork. I can barely keep track of my own. ‘What about getting this Michael Compton person to come along too?’

  ‘If he’s free. He’s a busy man.’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ I motioned towards her cell phone. ‘Give him a call.’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘It’s as good a time as any.’

  She gave a phoney little start. Slapped her forehead. Said, ‘Paramore! Piper Paramore!’

  I recognized delaying tactics when I saw them. ‘And he, she or it is?’

  ‘Tristan’s clients. The one way over the other side of Ashford, near Tunbridge Wells. The rich person. You ought to go and interview them. See if they know anything.’

  ‘Got an address?’


  ‘I can find one, I’m sure. We copy most things to …’ She stopped, stricken. ‘… copied most things to each other.’ She busied herself at her computer for a few minutes then turned to me. ‘Here we are … Piper Paramore. Rollins Park, near Tunbridge Wells.’ She scribbled on a piece of paper and handed it to me. ‘Here …’

  ‘Piper … male, female or transgender?’

  ‘Female.’

  ‘I’ll drive over and see if she has any insights. Anything I should know before I meet her?’

  She shook her head. ‘I know almost nothing about the woman. I think Tristan liked her. There’s a husband. Got a title of some kind, I think.’

  ‘I’ll see if I can find out anything helpful. Though I should imagine by now that someone from the Thames Valley police will have been to see them.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s the point. That’s exactly why I want you on my side. Like I said, you’ll tell me what you find out, and they won’t.’

  ‘Fine.’

  It didn’t seem likely that the husband of the Major’s next-door neighbour’s cousin could be connected to Tristan, as yet, but too much information is way better than too little.

  The drive across south-east Kent was reasonably traffic-free, for a change. Once off the motorway, I was in green countryside, driving past meadows and trees. Lush, as always. Pretty. But already showing faint signs of the coming autumn. And that blight which turns chestnut-tree leaves brown long before their time.

  Why had Dimsie not wanted me to talk to her business manager? Were the businesses in financial trouble? Michael Compton … someone I would definitely pay a call on very soon. Without informing Dimsie.

  I’d arranged to stay the night with a friend from my university days. Clarissa Ridgeway, queen of her year, tennis star, judo champ and acclaimed jazz singer, had received a starred First in Mediaeval History, married an engineer called Mark, travelled round the world with him for several years before she returned to a large house in the middle of nowhere to rear babies and write well-received crime novels set in the Middle Ages, featuring a travelling jongleur called Rondel.