Death in Dulwich

by Alice Castle

  ‘Gorgeous? You’re kidding,’ said Beth, fresh from that afternoon’s humiliating ticking off in the Bursar’s chair. Inspector York was not her favourite person at the moment, by a long way. And the fact that she knew his strictures about the dangers of meddling had been well deserved, made her even crosser. She was poking a rogue bit of carrot peel crossly with her knife when her phone rang.

  ‘Talk of the devil,’ she said, blushing a little as York’s name came up on the screen. ‘It’s the police. I’d better get it.’ She slipped off the bar stool and wandered out in into the hall.

  ‘You can use the drawing room,’ Katie called with a hastily concealed smile, and Beth opened the door and slipped into the room, which had an air of quiet disuse. The furniture was dramatic, modern and luxurious. She found herself sitting on the extreme edge of one of the mauve silk sofas, hoping fervently there wasn’t any archive dust still on her jeans. This was a room which did not have small boys running around in it on a regular basis.

  ‘Is this a good time? Where are you?’ asked York.

  She could hear a conversation in the background. It didn’t sound like an office, though. There was the repetitive click of a camera flash and a strange rustle as someone moved about behind him. Maybe it was one of those forensic space suits? Beth wondered where he was. Maybe at the scene of another horrible crime.

  ‘Yes, this is fine, I can talk. How can I help?’ Beth knew that York couldn’t possibly guess that they’d just been discussing his sex appeal – or lack of it – but she still felt unaccountably awkward talking to him.

  ‘Do you know what they were after? Whoever broke into your office?’ York said abruptly.

  ‘What? I thought we went over this earlier. I thought you’d decided it was the bank statements?’ said Beth, jerked out of bashfulness, and not sure why they were going over old ground. ‘That’s why you insisted on picking them up from my house earlier, isn’t it?’

  There was a long silence from York. Beth was suddenly scared. ‘Has something happened? Something else?’

  ‘When you took the bank statements home, was there anything else with them?’ As usual, York was not answering her question. But there was something about the tangent he’d taken that alarmed her.

  ‘Look, what’s going on? Can’t you just tell me?’

  ‘So, there was nothing with the bank statements, nothing else, is that what you’re saying?’ York was curiously insistent. She could still hear rustling in the background.

  It was time for her to come clean. Yes, the police had already picked up the bank statements, and no doubt had forensic financial experts poring over them already. But she still had a pile of Jenkins’ Moleskine notebooks stashed at her house which she hadn’t even started looking at yet. She was beginning to feel, with a sinking heart, that maybe she should just turn them over to York, as Katie suggested. She didn’t want any of this to get any closer to home. She was just about to confess when York broke in.

  ‘The reason I’m asking is I’m standing in your kitchen. There’s been a burglary. You might want to get round here straight away.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Katie had been magnificent, as usual, giving her shocked friend a hug and, most importantly, reassuring her that Ben would be in good hands. Beth had wondered for a second whether she should ring her brother. Josh would be delighted to have Ben over, but then she realised she didn’t even know if he was still in the country. His job as a photographer meant he had to drop everything and take off for the latest trouble spot on the double, and he wouldn’t think to let his little sister know. Even if he were around, there was the whole problem of the lovely Marlene. Did she want Ben to get close to another of Josh’s short-lived girlfriends?

  Beth’s mother also lived close by, but again that was problematic. Any sudden movements threw her into a bit of a tizz these days, and an unexpected overnight with her grandson, much though she loved him, would count as a major blow to her placid routine. Beth’s father was long dead and her mother lived according to so rigorous a schedule that, unless Beth had pencilled in her burglary several weeks ago, there was no possibility at all that her mother could accommodate it in her life. It was a no-brainer, really. Ben would stay over with Charlie tonight – it was easier on all fronts.

  ‘Don’t say a word to him. Let him think it’s just a normal sleepover,’ said Katie sensibly. ‘No point worrying him if we don’t have to. I’ll get the homework done and drop him at school tomorrow, if you’re still tied up. Don’t worry about a thing, he’ll be absolutely fine here.’

  Ben had taken the news that he was staying at Charles’s, on a weeknight, with incredulous delight. He gave his mother one questioning glance, but evidently her poker face was impressive enough for him not to guess there was calamity behind this unprecedented turn of events. Even ordinary playdates on school nights had become a rarity, particularly since Charles’s tutoring regime had been ramped up this year. Sleepovers were verboten until the weekend. But he decided it was not in his best interests to question his good fortune.

  Charles was thrilled, too, because piano was on the back burner for once and both boys got the huge treat of extra time on the PlayStation.

  As soon as the boys were sorted and they had run off to the playroom, where the PlayStation was installed on a dais like the god it was to them, Beth’s face dropped and Katie hugged her again.

  ‘Tell me if it’s too awful. As soon as Michael gets home, I can leave and come and be with you. Or you can come back here, no probs at all.’

  Tears sprang to Beth’s eyes at her friend’s kindness, but she blinked them back and just hugged harder. There was no time to break down. ‘Thanks for everything. I’ll ring you.’

  With that, she rushed up the path, then instantly doubled back. She’d forgotten her handbag, phone, and jacket. Katie ran back to the kitchen to scoop them up, then handed them over. ‘Don’t worry too much. The police will sort it out,’ she said.

  Beth’s heart started to hammer as she walked the familiar route back home. It was only a few minutes’ away, even with Ben at his most wayward. Tonight, although she didn’t really want to see what had happened, she still did it in double-quick time.

  At first, she’d decided she wouldn’t run. She was passing the redbrick façade of North Dulwich station, with its pretty white wooden Victorian trim, and saw that it was exactly 6.30pm. Immediately, commuters started pouring out of the station onto the street, disgorged from the Cannon Street and London Bridge trains. They were City workers – neatly dressed, professional, though probably yet not at the top of their fields or they’d still be working long into the night. Most were silent. It was the easiest way to endure the commute. Packed twice a day into shabby, often-delayed trains, your best bet was to pretend as hard as you could that you weren’t there. Mobile phones had made this easier, and many spent the journeys watching TV, listening to music, or Twittering away, each in their own bubble, avoiding eye contact even though their bodies might be pressed up against strangers in the crowded carriages.

  Now liberated, they moved in all directions, occasionally stopping to light up much-needed cigarettes or to stare yet more closely at their phones. A few unavoidable conversations were even struck up. Though right in the middle of a crisis, Beth instinctively decided she didn’t want to draw attention to herself by running like an idiot through this throng. She walked as briskly as she could through the thick of the crowd and then, as she edged off the main street and got closer to home, she thought sod that, and broke into a jog, which became a sprint. By the time she made it up her garden path, she was out of breath and her hair was all over her face.

  There was a PC at the door, which would already have been drawing attention in the quiet street, even if there hadn’t been a police car double-parked right outside with its blue light flashing coldly. Already this was causing havoc with the traffic. The street was narrow and there was never a place to park, at the best of times. As a resident, she’d come to ac
cept that. The evening rush hour was not the moment to plant an obstruction in the road. But the police car was most definitely just that, and there was a line of impatient vehicles forming behind it already.

  Another PC was in the road now, gesturing at the drivers to turn around. There was no room for most of them to pass, as the cars were universally the great big 4x4 beasts that were originally designed for farmers to drive up mountains in, but which Dulwich mums had somehow settled on as the perfect conveyance for suburban life. And, as well as being home-time for commuters, 6.30pm in Dulwich was also the moment when ballet schools, karate clubs, and tennis coaches disgorged the last of their little prodigies, and the mothers all desperately needed to get their precious offspring back for supper and bed. Now, if not sooner.

  Oh great, Beth thought, traffic would soon be backed up all along the high street. Though most of her mind was taken up with dreading what she would find at home, unfortunately she still had enough capacity to worry about explaining this kerfuffle to the neighbours. The families on either side were lovely, but there were others in the street who would see the police cars and would not care for one second about what had happened to her. They would think only of the noughts dropping off the price of their properties. The equation was simple: police equals crime, resulting in buyers looking elsewhere.

  Meanwhile, all the mothers in the 4x4s were now backing perilously down the street, like a camel train swaying into ungainly reverse. Despite their phalanxes of urgently beeping motion sensors, not all were great drivers and the street’s wing mirrors were in serious jeopardy. These mothers, thought Beth, would hate her unreservedly for causing their children to be up late, which would lead inexorably to reduced performance at school tomorrow. This meant, as night follows day, that they would fail their entrance exams/GCSEs/A Levels and end up as dustmen instead of hedge fund managers.

  She was doing her best not to look at the cars too closely. There were bound to be mothers she knew at those wheels, and she could imagine all too well the compressed mouths and knotted brows that would be focused on her little house as the cause of all the trouble. At least the village’s beauty parlour would be in work for months to come, smoothing out the lines caused this evening, and even injecting a few of the tougher wrinkles with a discreet, soothing syringe of Botox. Beth almost wished she could afford it herself – and that she was vain enough to want it. She could already feel her forehead doing origami with the stress of her run home, and she hadn’t even seen what lay in store yet.

  Beth was just beginning to explain breathlessly, ‘I live here,’ to the impassive PC on sentry duty outside her house, when the door swung open and York gestured her inside.

  ‘It’s not too bad,’ he said, taking a look at her stricken face and flushed cheeks.

  It was worse.

  The whole of the ground floor had been ransacked. Everything that could be thrown on the floor had been; anything that could be broken was. It was spiteful, and thorough.

  ‘Who could have done this? And why?’ Beth didn’t mean to, but she was shouting. It was such a desecration of her space and, worse than that, of Ben’s safe home. She hated whoever had done this.

  ‘I was rather hoping you’d have the answers to that,’ said York.

  ‘How did they even get in?’ she asked.

  ‘Looks like they had a key,’ said York.

  She was aghast. ‘A key? How?’

  York shrugged. ‘If you don’t know, then I certainly don’t,’ he said sharply.

  Beth realised she’d been pretty much screaming in his face. But she wasn’t really yelling at him; she was shocked and angry, that was all. She perched uncomfortably on the arm of the sofa, utterly deflated. It didn’t even feel like her sofa any more, she couldn’t relax back into it as she would have done at any other time. While her possessions were heaped around her, destroyed, she could not be at home, even in her own space.

  ‘I just don’t understand this,’ she managed to croak before, to her horror, a single, heaving sob overtook her. It was hard enough to be alone, to be all in all to Ben, to have created a home and a refuge. To have it wrecked with such overt meanness was too much.

  York hesitated, then sat down next to her. She saw him reach out a hand, then let it fall, as though he felt helpless. No doubt there was protocol and guidelines. There would be appropriate behaviour.

  ‘All I can say is, we’ll get whoever did this. Don’t you worry,’ he said gruffly.

  They were both aware that, with the Metropolitan Police’s abysmal clear-up rates, it sounded hollow. But Beth appreciated that he was trying to reassure her.

  She took some deep breaths and tried to get herself under control, searching in vain for a tissue in her jeans pocket, or from the box on the sofa table – but of course that was long gone, hurled into the heap of mess in front of her. She tried not to let that thought set her off again, and concentrated instead on York’s declaration. It was like a bedtime story. The words themselves might mean little, but the delivery was curiously reassuring. York then handed over a pack of Kleenex, which was even better.

  He sat in silence as her symphony of sniffles petered out. Beth found his reassuringly large presence a surprising comfort. When the sniffs were only occasional, he asked again, ‘Any ideas?’

  ‘It must have been the same person who turned over the archive office. They can’t have found what they were looking for there. They must have taken my spare keys from the desk drawer. Then there was my letter confirming the job in the in-tray – with my address on it,’ said Beth, her voice wavering but gradually getting clearer. ‘I think they were probably after the bank statements – but you took them away earlier, of course. Either that, or the notebooks. I brought them home with me to study. I’d looked at the bank statements, as you know, but I hadn’t got round to looking through the books. God, I’ve been so stupid.’

  ‘Well, you should certainly have told me about these notebooks before—’ York started.

  ‘Not about that,’ Beth broke in. ‘About bringing any of the stuff here in the first place. I should have known… particularly after the break-in at work. It was so reckless. I’ve been an idiot. I’ve put Ben in danger. How could I do that, when I’m all he has?’

  ‘Ben’s fine. He’s come to no harm. He’s at a friend’s, I take it? Or at your mum’s?’

  ‘No, at a friend’s.’ Beth shook her head at the idea of involving her mother. It had been unthinkable before she’d seen the chaos. Now that she was sitting in the wreckage, she knew for certain that her mother couldn’t cope with this at all. It would have been great if she’d been the tower-of-strength type – but she just wasn’t, and that was that. They saw each other often, and were on cordial terms, and Beth had got used to not expecting more. But on nights like this one, that seemed a small tragedy in itself. Still, there was no changing things now.

  ‘So, there we are. He’s probably having a whale of a time. You’ve got the rest of the evening to get this tidied up. There are no fingerprints, again, and the door wasn’t forced. It was just left open, which is how I got in. You should thank your neighbours. They saw the door swinging and thought it was odd, rang the bell and got no answer, then called us out. The SOCOs have done their bit, so they’ll be out of your hair once they’ve packed up. Now, have you had a look around, seen if anything has been taken? Apart from the notebooks. I’m assuming they are long gone?’

  Beth nodded. The pile of books had not been hidden away, it had just been camouflaged, again, in plain sight on the well-stocked bookshelves, with several of her own notebooks. She was a habitual note-taker – a hangover from uni days, she supposed, when she’d compulsively taken down everything said by lecturers on a just-in-case basis. She could see that her notebooks, which had been dead ringers for Jenkins’ own, were now lying contemptuously torn and trampled on the floor. Whoever had done this had not been fooled for an instant.

  Was anything else missing? She cast an eye around the now sad and battered roo
m. There was nothing valuable in here, apart from the telly, and even that was years old and not nearly big enough to satisfy most tastes. The kitchen, she could see from here, was an horrific mess but again, there was nothing there worth stealing, unless you were very keen on pasta. It was Ben’s favourite. She wasn’t about to count the bags but the ones strewn across the floor, some split with the force of their impact, looked as though they roughly tallied with her last big shop at Sainsbury’s.

  ‘Have you looked upstairs?’ said Beth, hesitating now with her hand on the bannisters, afraid for a moment that whoever did this might be lurking in the dark at the top of the landing, waiting for the police to go.

  York nodded, looking a little embarrassed. Beth didn’t stop to wonder at his hesitation, but ran lightly up the stairs, opening the door to Ben’s room first and seeing with relief that things were just as they had been that morning. That is, a terrible mess – but one created by Ben, not by the unseen hand of an enemy.

  Her own small room seemed untouched, too. She realised it would have looked incredibly girly to York – the walls painted a pale pink, the duvet cover a Cath Kidston explosion in a flower shop that she adored. Knowing that he’d been here, looking around, scrutinising all her private things, she couldn’t help seeing it with his eyes. Though the bed was neatly made, the bedside table on the right was empty, while there was a novel, splayed face-down, on the left-hand side, together with a drained cup of tea, some hand cream, ear plugs, and one of those eye masks they gave you on long haul flights. The thought struck her that York wouldn’t have had to be a detective to deduce a single woman with insomniac tendencies. She felt a little embarrassed, but shrugged it off. There was no law against trashy paperbacks and florals, was there? And anyone in the thick of a murder investigation could be excused the odd bout of wakefulness.