He sat down on my unmade bed. “Don’t say that, Izzy. We’ve come so far.”
“Have we though? Sure, we know more stuff. But I don’t feel like we’re any closer to identifying the murderer and I haven’t the first idea who would shell out to kill me.”
“Don’t be so pessimistic.” He looked miserable all of a sudden.
“I’m realistic, not pessimistic. We’re not police officers, we’re not private detectives, we’re just two idiots who got carried away with a game.”
“You’re wrong. We’re good at this… Well, you are.”
I wasn’t in the mood to argue and let out a long, tired huff. “Come off it, Ramesh.”
“I mean it. You see things that I don’t. I bet that you’ll work out how everything fits together before anyone else does. The letter opener, the champagne, the drugs and the hitman. There’s a thread that links them all up and I know you can find it.”
I put my book back on the shelf. “I think you’re overestimating me.”
“You’re wrong, Izzy.” He made the face that told me he was about to go off on a rant about something (it was normally related to Cher). “I don’t know if you know this, but I’m good at my job. Ever since I was a kid, I understood how computers worked without really trying. When I’m dealing with the networks in the office, it’s like they’re all laid out in my head and I can walk my way through them. I’m not that great with people and I’m not some amazing thinker but I’m a good head of I.T.”
He put his hand on the arm of my chair. “You and I are different. You chose a job that demands nothing of you because it means you don’t have anything to prove. The truth is that you found what you were good at years ago but I reckon you thought everyone would laugh at you so you let the idea die. This is what you should be doing, Izzy. Figuring out puzzles, putting together clues, deciding who’s good and who’s bad.”
“That’s really nice of you, Ramesh, but–”
He ploughed on regardless. “I remember when we first met and you told me why you loved crime fiction. I saw how passionate you were and I’ll never forget what you said. You told me it wasn’t just because they were fun to read but because you were good at solving the mystery. You weren’t boasting, in fact you sounded pretty surprised yourself, but you said that nine out of ten times you could work out who the killer was.”
“In books, Ra. Books – not the real world.”
Ignoring my bad mood, Ramesh suddenly brightened. “Tell you what. How about I go through some of my ideas on the case and you say what you think of them?”
“How about you go away and let me read?”
“Number one: What if Wendy and Amara were in the midst of a secret love affair and Wendy had Bob killed so Amara could be the only deputy director.”
“Please stop!”
“Then Wendy paid for the hit because she was jealous that you and Amara had gone for a drink?” He watched me, desperately hoping I might agree with him.
“That’s absolute drivel.”
“Ha ha! But I’ve got you interested now.” He jumped to his feet and began to gesture about as he continued with his presentation. “Number two: What if Bob was trying to blackmail Jack?”
“Go on.” I have to admit, he’d hooked me back in.
“Perhaps Jack was stealing from the company and Bob found out.”
“It’s plausible, I suppose. Except for the lack of any evidence. And it’s not as if we keep piles of money at Porter & Porter. What was Jack stealing? Printer paper?”
“Fine, but I think you’re going to like this next one. Number three.” He held both hands up to make a box in the hope I’d picture whatever nonsense he was about to spout. “Imagine that Bob had a dark past none of us knew about. Let’s say he was a messenger for the mob or he forged fine jewellery. He took a job in finance to escape but, three decades later, his criminal associates caught up with him.”
The more he said, the more I wanted to hear. “Okay. Keep going.”
“Right, so they track him down and say, ‘If you don’t come back to work for us, we’ll kill someone close to you.’ Bob’s torn. He loves his family but he can’t fall back into the shadowy world he’d escaped from. So what does he do?”
“I don’t know but I really want to find out.”
Ramesh was one giant emoji by this point, bobbing about as his tale unfolded. “He plots to take down the boss of the crime syndicate, but before he can tell the police, the mob get him and silence him for good.”
“Yes!”
“Then you got too close and they decided they had to kill you too.”
I jumped to my feet. “YES!”
“Really? Do you think I’m on to something?” He was rocking on his heels like a kid who’d drunk all the lemonade.
“No! It’s absolute trash, but you made me think of something.”
Unable to hold it in anymore, he jumped into the air with excitement. “Brilliant, that’s just what I wanted.”
“Okay, calm down. Sit down. It’s my turn.” We swapped places so that I could ponce about in front of my wardrobe and he could sit in the chair. “The only thing you got right was that you left the suspects to one side for a moment and focussed on Bob. I’ve been trying to do that but it’s difficult. So, tell me this, what is the most important thing we know about Robert Harold Thomas?”
“He was the worst human being that we’ve ever met?”
“No. We keep getting hung up on that but I don’t think it’s very helpful. The most important thing about Bob was that he knew he was going to die. Not because of the murder, but the lung cancer. He’d known how bad it was since late last year. He didn’t want to suffer through treatment – no doubt hating the thought of anyone pitying him – so he went on as if nothing had changed.
“But something had changed, something very important. He had no interest in his job anymore and said exactly what he thought of people so that – even by his standards – he became intolerable in the office. He was morose, self-indulgent, offensive and massively hedonistic. He didn’t care about his health, kept a crate of champagne beneath his desk and do you remember the huge food deliveries he used to order in?”
“Urgh, it was disgusting. I saw him order the whole menu from Le Sheek once and scoff it all down in half an hour.”
“There’s something else as well. Remember those Russian pills Bob had in his coat? I managed to find them online. They were an experimental cancer treatment, not licensed over here yet. I’m guessing Bob was self-medicating in the hope he might find a cure. Perhaps he started out buying illegal medicine and then thought, well I might as well get some fun stuff while I’m shopping.”
“The cocaine you mean?”
“Exactly. And tell me this; where does a middle-aged man who’d done nothing exciting or exceptional with his life go to buy illegal drugs?”
Ramesh thought for a second. “I dunno, some bloke in a pub?”
“I doubt some block in a pub would offer coke and specialist cancer medication. Bob was on his own private quest of depravity. He’d upped his bullying game, he’d been sleeping around and he’d even tried his hand at theft. If he was going to get high, he’d want something secure and reliable. I reckon he bought them online.”
My friend face palmed himself to show that he should have thought of it first. “Of course. That’s exactly what he’d do. He was super lazy, he probably had them delivered straight up to the office.”
“He had packages coming all the time this year. There’s an email Wendy sent him where she complains about how much money he was spending, so she must have noticed them too. But no one’s going to imagine that brown-suit/brown-tie, middle-management Bob is having coke delivered. Computer gadgets, sure. Office stationary, perhaps, but who’d have guessed they were class A drugs?”
“That sneaky old man.”
I paused to consider where to go next. “Ra, how do we get onto the dark web?”
He looked at me like I’d just confessed t
o murdering Bob myself. “Izzy, in case the name isn’t clear, that is not something you want to get involved with. Unless you’re in the market for weapons, narcotics or illegal pornography, I’d recommend staying away. It’s risky even taking a look.”
I came to kneel next to him so that our eyes were at the same level. “We’re not going to do anything illegal. All I want is to see how you do it. D.I. Irons said that the bloke who tried to kill me was advertising on the dark web and this is the only connection I can think of between Bob’s death and the hit.”
He thought about it for a few moments, his teeth chewing at the inside of his mouth and his eyes flicking nervously. “Fine, but not here. I’ll show you at work on Monday.”
It was right then that my mum burst into the room in a panic.
“Darling, what were you thinking?” I had no idea what she was talking about.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” See.
“Danny, darling! I’m talking about Danny. He’s out in the garden in a right state, he can barely light his campfire for lunch.”
“I didn’t do anything to him.” I tried to sound innocent but I knew Mum wouldn’t believe me.
“Huh! ‘I didn’t do anything,’ she says. Didn’t break his heart no doubt. The poor little lamb is in tears. You know how he gets around you, darling. Couldn’t you have let him down a little more gently?”
I didn’t know what to say. Until about an hour before, I’d thought that handsome, charming, medically competent Danny Fields was in a different galaxy from sarcastic antelope Izzy Palmer. It turned out I was the harlot who’d been stringing him along for years.
“But I had no idea he liked me.”
Mum looked at me like I’d just put a lampshade on my head and suck three fingers in a socket. “How could you not? He’s been hanging on your every word since you were five years old. Why do you think he still comes to stay? It’s not to visit your fathers, I can tell you that.”
Hearing it out loud, it was pretty hard for me to get my head around.
“Izzy, you little minx.” Until this point, Ramesh had been still and quiet like he thought we might forget he was there – which I suppose I had. “Now you’ve got two sexy, scrumptious men to choose from.”
“Really, Ramesh, and yet you wonder why people think you’re gay.”
Mum hadn’t finished telling me off. “Darling, you must be more careful with your feminine wiles. There’s only so much that men can take.” And with that, she was gone. Off to comfort the son she never had.
I ran after her and flung the door open. “If I ever had any feminine wiles, mother, I’m pretty sure I’d used them all up by high school.”
I was beginning to wonder if I was on drugs myself because nothing I’d just heard made the slightest bit of sense.
Ramesh looked impressed as he made a cat noise in my direction. “Miaow! You tiger.”
Chapter Twenty
Though I’d promised to continue our amateur investigation, I couldn’t think about any new leads because, wherever I went in the house, I could hear the sound of sobbing. Lunch was excruciating; Danny stayed out in the garden, Mum would no longer speak and even Greg looked at me like I was a heartless wench.
There was nothing else for it. I couldn’t spend the whole weekend at home, so I rang David to beg him to save me from my family.
“I know we didn’t plan to hang out. I don’t want to be pushy or demanding or anything and I respect that, sometimes, you might want time to yourself to do what–”
“Izzy?” His voice was calm, confident, reassuring. “Just tell me what it is you want.”
I took a deep breath. “I was wondering if we could hang out tomorrow.”
I could hear him smile down the line. “That would be great.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really. I would have asked you myself but I thought you might need some time to recover after Thursday.”
My heart skipped a little in my chest. “No, David. Thursday couldn’t have been sweeter. It was genuinely one of the best dates I’ve ever been on.”
“Someone tried to kill you.”
Oops!
“Oh, yeah. Not that bit. That bit was horrible. But the part before – the part when it was just the two of us – that was perfect.”
We fell silent for a moment and the muscles in my stomach got all tense from missing him.
“I’m afraid it won’t be just the two of us tomorrow. We’ll be taking my aunt for lunch and my niece will be there too. But you already know her so you’ll fit in fine.”
I made a sound like I’d swallowed my tongue.
“Don’t worry though. I’ve told Chloe about us and she can’t quite remember but she thinks she really liked you when she was at the office that time.”
“Uhuh.”
“We’re going up to London as a special treat for Auntie Val’s birthday.”
“Uhuh.”
“Shall we say twelve thirty at East Croydon?”
I didn’t answer immediately. I couldn’t think what to say, so I eventually went with, “Uhuh.”
“Great. I’ll see you then…”
He stayed on the line for a moment, presumably expecting a bit of lovey-dovey back and forth. Sadly I’d forgotten how to speak again so he hung up without me saying anything.
Izzy, you moron!
How had I ended up getting myself invited to a family outing on our third ever date? I’d been with my previous boyfriend for two years and never met so much as a second cousin from his family. In general, I liked to keep as far away from my partner’s families as is geographically possible. The ideal scenario, was when I had a long distance boyfriend who lived in Leeds. We used to meet up at weekends in exotic places like Kettering and Wolverhampton. It only lasted a couple of months, but that time was spent safe in the knowledge that I’d never bump into his mum in the supermarket.
Ramesh was really good with other people’s parents. He wooed his girlfriend Patricia’s folks before she particularly liked him. I was the opposite. I’d get all nervous when I knew I had to make a good impression. On the one occasion I’d agreed to go to an ex’s house, I ended up accidentally flirting with his mother and trying to convince his dad I knew everything about football. It was a proper car-crash, so-painful-you-can’t-look-away, don’t-know-whether-to-laugh-or-vomit moment.
I didn’t want to make David’s aunt think that I was only using David for his body, or challenge Chloe to an arm-wrestling match, but that was exactly the kind of stupid thing I’d do as soon as I met them.
At half past twelve the next day I was standing in East Croydon Station, dressed in my most conservative summer dress (it looked like a tablecloth from the seventies, which I guess made me look like a table from the seventies.)
“Auntie Valerie, I’d like you to meet my friend Isobel.”
David’s aunt looked a lot older than she had in his family photo. She was small and grey, but had the smile of a cheeky teenager.
“Ooh, fancy. Isobel,” I said, inappropriately loudly as if I thought she was hard of hearing. “No one’s called me Isobel since my German teacher Frau Schmidt caught me and Gary Flint behind the north block with his hand down my top.”
David looked at me like I’d just tried to bite her. I didn’t blame him.
For some reason, Auntie Val started laughing. “You told me she was funny, Dai. That’s brilliant.” She took my arm, as is the right of anyone over the age of sixty-five. “You know, darling. I’ve always been a bit of an eccentric myself. Life’s too short to be bored or boring, that’s what I say.”
We went through the ticket barriers and she chatted with me the whole way to the platform. She borrowed my wrist after that to see how long there was before the train arrived and then snuck off to buy herself a treat.
“I’ve never put much stock in clocks and watches, my lovely,” she called down the platform to me. “But I do love a nice bar of chocolate.”
“I knew sh
e’d like you,” David told me while she was busy charming the shopkeeper. “And it was nice of you to speak so clearly. How did you know that she was hard of hearing?”
Once on board, Val gave me a full run down of the Hughes-Lewis family history. She took me on a trip to the mining valleys of the Rhondda, along the coast to the golden beaches of Swansea and way up north to Snowdonia.
“Of course, I came down to London myself when I was still just a girl. I was a teacher you see and there wasn’t much work back home in the valleys so a lot of my friends moved away.”
“Oooooh, that must have been an adventure.” I was still talk-shouting in a slightly camp manner. I’d failed to get it under control and a few people further along the carriage had craned their heads to see what was wrong with me.
If only we knew.
“I lived with Val when I first came to Croydon.” David looked lovingly at his aunt. “It was the most fun I’ve ever had.”
“You would say that. You’re a charmer.” Val beamed at her nephew before continuing with her story. “Then Chloe came to live with me a few years ago. She’s moved up to the city now, but she still comes to see me most weeks. I’m lucky to have such a close family.”
“Ahhh, that’s nice. I’m pretty sure my mother’s a nudist.”
I continued to spout awful bilge like this all the way to Victoria Station and Val continued to find me amusing. We were meeting Chloe at a restaurant boat moored opposite the London Eye. The sun had come out for Val’s birthday and London looked beautiful as we walked along the river bank.
“Happy Birthday, Auntie Valerie!” Chloe shouted as soon as she spotted us, before running to embrace her great-aunt with all the bubbly charm I remembered her having. “I’ve got a little surprise for you inside.”
She gave me a quick hug but was clearly desperate to get the birthday girl onto the boat.
“You’re going to love this place.” David led me down the gangway into the restaurant. “Beautiful views.”
“I can’t believe it,” Val said when the waiter showed us over to a large table that appeared to already be occupied. “I can’t believe you all came.”
A Corpse Called Bob Page 16