The Company

by Sally Spencer

  Back in my seat, I tried to concentrate on Ibsen’s dialogue, but to no avail. It was crazy to feel these sudden, unexpected flutterings in my heart, I told myself. I wasn’t a kid any more – so I should stop behaving like one. Yet I caught myself looking around the audience, hoping to see that mane of red hair.

  She wasn’t there. Maybe she had found the first half as tediously overdone as I had and decided to call it a night.

  I felt bitterly disappointed. In many ways academic Oxford is little more than a village, yet it is possible to go for months – or even years – without bumping into someone you know quite well.

  So what were my chances of bumping into her again? She might not even live in Oxford – might, already, be on the train to London.

  Or Bristol.

  Or wherever else she’d come from.

  It was only when I heard the audience applauding that I realized the play had come to an end. I joined in the applause half-heartedly, then rose heavily to my feet. The girl had unsettled me, had opened old wounds which I’d convinced myself were healed forever. I decided that, instead of going back to my flat, I would call in at the office and catch up with some work.

  It was as I got to the main gate that I saw her again. She was leaning against the wall, a fresh cigarette in her hand, and looking towards the Banbury Road.

  Waiting for someone? I wondered.

  Very probably, I answered myself.

  I had determined not to bother her and was already heading down St Giles’ when I heard a voice behind me, with just the hint of an Irish accent in it, say, ‘Goodnight, Mr Conroy.’

  I turned around. She was smiling at me again.

  ‘Do I know you?’ I asked.

  She shook her head, and her hair cascaded enticingly. ‘No, you don’t,’ she said. ‘But then I’m not a famous publisher, am I?’

  I laughed, self-deprecatingly. ‘Famous? Is that what I am?’

  ‘Maybe famous is too strong a word,’ she admitted. ‘But you’re certainly well-known. You’re the sort of person other people point out. “That’s Robert Conroy,” they say. “He’s the one who discovered that new author everyone’s talking about”.’

  I felt my heart sink. So that was what this was all about – another would-be author with a manuscript to peddle.

  ‘You don’t happen to be a writer yourself, do you?’ I asked – expecting the almost-inevitable reply.

  ‘A writer!’ Marie repeated. ‘Not a chance. I tried being chained to a desk for a while, and it’s not an experience I ever want to repeat.’

  I breathed a sigh of relief, then just stood there – like a fool – saying absolutely nothing.

  Marie glanced at her watch. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better be going.’

  ‘You’re not meeting anyone, then?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  Here’s your chance, I told myself. Grab it while it’s there.

  ‘You wouldn’t let me buy you a drink, would you?’ I asked.

  ‘I never drink on an empty stomach,’ she told me. ‘But if you’re game for a meal, I wouldn’t say no. But you don’t get to buy it – we split the bill right down the middle.’

  ‘Whatever you say,’ I agreed.

  I took her to the Italian restaurant just across the road from the college – and tried not to look too pleased with myself when the waiters greeted me warmly.

  It was ridiculous, I thought, to find myself trying to impress this woman I’d only just met.

  Yet I really wanted to.

  When the menu arrived, she brushed it aside. ‘What’s the house speciality?’ she asked me.

  ‘The clams are very good.’

  ‘Then I’ll have them.’

  As the waiter left us, she reached into her handbag and took out her cigarettes.

  ‘You smoke a lot,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she agreed unapologetically. She lit the cigarette and blew the smoke out through her nose. ‘Now, bearing in mind that I haven’t got a book I’m trying to con you into publishing, why don’t you tell me about your work?’

  ‘It’s not very interesting,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ she said evenly. ‘You aren’t the sort of man to waste his time doing something that isn’t interesting.’

  Perhaps it was her words or perhaps it was her tone, but it opened the floodgates. I told her about my battles with the bookshop chains. I outlined the difficulties of getting my authors on television arts programmes. I described how I’d felt when I read the first exercise book full of Andy McBride’s wonderful prose. I talked and talked, and it was not until we had reached the dessert that I really paused for breath.

  ‘Do you have family?’ Marie asked.

  ‘You mean a wife?’

  She shook her head. ‘If I thought you were married, we wouldn’t be sitting here now. No, I mean blood relatives. Brothers and sisters? Uncles and aunts?’

  ‘I have a brother …’ I began, then stopped myself. ‘I’ve been monopolizing the conversation. Why don’t you tell me a little about yourself?’

  ‘Oh, I’m very boring,’ she said.

  ‘I’m quite sure you’re not,’ I told her, returning her earlier compliment.

  She shrugged. ‘All right then. I’m the original foundling, adopted when I was a baby by a big-hearted farming family deep in the Irish countryside.’ She paused and looked vaguely annoyed with herself. ‘I always start like that, you know. As if where I come from is far more important than who I am. And it isn’t. Not at all.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ I agreed.

  ‘Anyway I was brought up on the farm, like I said, and attended the local primary school’ – she grinned – ‘where I shone like the brightest star in the firmament. The headmaster told my parents that it would be a sorry waste if I didn’t go to university, so’ – another shrug – ‘when I was old enough, off I went to Trinity College Dublin.’

  ‘And what did you read?’

  ‘Law.’

  ‘So you’re a lawyer now?’

  ‘No. I tried working in a solicitor’s office for a couple of years, but it bored me. I’m an outdoors girl – even if the outdoors is only the mean streets of Oxford.’

  ‘Then what do you do?’ I asked.

  ‘I keep the town clean,’ she said, affecting a New York accent on top of her Irish lilt.

  ‘You mean you’re with the cleaning department?’

  She laughed. ‘No, I’m a private investigator.’

  Though I didn’t mean it to, my mouth must have fallen open. ‘A private investigator?’ I repeated.

  ‘It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it,’ she said, still in character.

  ‘You must be the first female private eye in Britain,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing like,’ she replied. ‘I’m not even the first female private eye in Oxford. There was one here a few years ago, an ex-policewoman who had her office on the Iffley Road, and, by coincidence, she also had red hair.’

  (I checked up on it later and found Marie was quite right – so on that matter, at least, she hadn’t been lying to me.)

  ‘Don’t run away with the idea that what I do is either dangerous or glamorous,’ she told me. ‘I’m the one who people call on to chase up bad debts and do background credit checks. It’s really a long way from the stuff you see on television.’

  ‘Do you enjoy it?’

  She gave the matter some thought.

  ‘Most of the time,’ she said finally, ‘which is probably as much as anyone can say about their work.’

  The bill arrived. I paid it with my credit card, and – without any sign of embarrassment – Marie slid some notes across the table.

  ‘That’s not necessary,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes, it is,’ Marie replied firmly. ‘You agreed I could pay half, and a deal is a deal.’

  We stood up, climbed the stairs, and were out on the street. It was cooler than it had been earlier, but it was still a pleasant early-summer evening. I
stood on the pavement, uncertain of what to do or say next.

  ‘I enjoyed that,’ Marie said. ‘I really did.’

  ‘Could we do it again, sometime?’ I asked tentatively.

  She took her time lighting a cigarette and inhaling.

  ‘I think we could become good friends, Robert,’ she said finally.

  ‘But …?’

  ‘But you have to understand from the outset that friendship is all I want. I’m not looking for any deeper relationship. Not right now.’

  ‘Fine with me,’ I said, not quite sure whether I was lying or not.

  She reached into her purse and took out a business card. ‘You can reach me here,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t have a home number?’ I asked, feeling somewhat snubbed.

  She shook her head wonderingly. ‘Do you think with the kind of operation I run I can afford a home and an office?’ she said. ‘I work out of the front room of my flat, and when I need to see a client, it’s in his office we meet.’ She reached up and kissed me lightly on the cheek. ‘Ring me. I mean it.’

  And then she was gone, striding rapidly and confidently down St Giles’.

  Had it meant nothing to her – that first encounter and what followed it – I asked as I lay in my hospital bed. Was I no more to her than a convenience – someone to be used while he was around, and quickly forgotten when he wasn’t? I couldn’t believe that of Marie. Yet why hadn’t she bloody phoned?

  The receptionist at the Mountjoy Hotel was young, pretty and much less guarded than the garage supervisor.

  ‘Yes, I was on the graveyard shift the night before last,’ she told Flint.

  ‘The graveyard shift?’

  ‘That’s what we call the shift between ten at night and six in the morning.’

  ‘Do you call it that because it’s so boring?’

  ‘Exactly! Only the night before last it wasn’t boring at all, because there was a big party in the Grosvenor Room, so I was kept rather busy.’

  ‘There must have been lots of people in the lobby, then?’ Flint said, disappointedly.

  The girl smiled. ‘At times, there seemed to be literally hundreds of them.’

  ‘But nobody who looked out of place?’

  ‘Out of place?’ the receptionist asked, puzzled.

  Yes, Flint thought – somebody, for example, carrying a tool kit, and looking as if he were intending to sabotage a BMW’s braking system.

  ‘What I mean by out of place is a person who was dressed in a way which suggested he didn’t really belong here,’ he said aloud.

  ‘Oh, that’s so sweet and old-fashioned,’ the receptionist said, laughing. ‘There is no proper way to dress any more. Some of our clients wear designer suits, and some walk around in old jeans with holes in them. As long as they have enough money to pay their bills, nobody cares how they look.’

  ‘Did you notice anyone taking the lift down to the garage?’ Flint asked, changing tack.

  ‘You can’t see it from the reception desk,’ the girl pointed out. ‘I must have heard it running a number of times, but I couldn’t honestly tell you whether the guests who passed by the desk were going to the lift or to the loo.’

  Of course she couldn’t, Flint thought. And whoever had used the confusion created by the party as an opportunity to slip down to the garage would have been well aware of that.

  The pub was a few doors down from the Mountjoy Hotel. It was called the Crown and Anchor, and the walls were decorated with fishermen’s nets and lobster pots.

  Flint was at the bar, ordering the drinks, when the call on his mobile phone came through. He listened to what the man on the other end of the line had to say, and then asked a couple of questions. Once the call was over, he paid for the drinks and carried the pint pots across to the table where his sergeant was sitting.

  ‘That was the forensics department of the local constabulary, Sergeant Matthews,’ he said, as he placed the glasses on the table. ‘The lads at their garage have been over the Jag with a fine-toothed comb. They’ve come to the conclusion that the reason it wouldn’t start yesterday morning was because of a failure in the electrical system.’

  ‘So before he sabotaged the Beemer’s brakes, the killer had also worked on the Jag,’ Matthews said.

  ‘No, that’s the point – he didn’t,’ Flint told him. ‘They’re convinced it was a genuine honest-to-goodness breakdown.’ He paused. ‘And that raises some very interesting possibilities, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Does it?’ Matthews asked.

  ‘Of course. Look, boyo, we have to assume that the killer knew the whole set-up. He knew where the Conroys had come from, how long they’d be staying in Bristol, and where they were going after that.’

  ‘Why should we assume that?’

  ‘Because if the Conroys had been intending to do nothing more than tootle around the city of Bristol for a couple of days, he’d have found another way to get at them. Do you see where I’m going with this? If the brakes had failed in the city centre, there’d have been a minor collision, and nothing more. But he didn’t want them bruised – he wanted them dead – so he had to be aware that the next morning they’d be making a high-speed journey.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Matthews admitted.

  ‘And we can take it even further than that. If the killer knew where they were going, he also knew who would be in each car, which means—’

  ‘Which means that Tony Conroy and Bill Harper were never intended to be victims, because they were supposed to be in the Jag,’ Matthews interrupted.

  ‘And …?’

  ‘And the real intended victim might still be alive!’

  ‘That’s right,’ Flint agreed. ‘The murderer might have wanted to kill John or Edward Conroy, but it’s equally possible that his target was Rob Conroy.’

  ‘Or he could have wanted to kill all three of them,’ Matthews pointed out.

  ‘True,’ Flint agreed. ‘But how often is it that a … that a …’

  ‘Is something wrong, sir?’ Matthews asked.

  ‘Keep talking,’ Flint said. ‘Say anything – it doesn’t matter what.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand, sir.’

  ‘Tell me about your Uncle Blodwyn’s prize leeks. Or where you went for your summer holidays. Anything at all – as long as it leaves me free to concentrate on something else.’

  ‘I did have an Uncle Blodwyn as a matter of fact,’ Matthews said, catching on. ‘I don’t think he grew leeks, though. He was more of a fisherman, and—’

  ‘She knows she’s been spotted, and she’s leaving,’ Flint interrupted.

  ‘Who’s leaving?’

  ‘Going through the door now.’

  Matthews swivelled round just in time to catch sight of the woman. The most striking thing about her was her mane of red, curly hair. But her figure was worth some attention, too. It was, perhaps, a little too full, but it was definitely very feminine.

  ‘Come on,’ Flint said, rising to his feet.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To have a talk with that young lady.’

  Once she had the pub door between herself and them, the woman had obviously put on a spurt, and by the time the two detectives had reached the pavement, she was already climbing into the driver’s seat of a black Volkswagen GTI, some distance down the street.

  ‘Damn!’ Flint said, as the car fired and pulled away from the kerb. ‘Well, at least I’ve got her licence plate number.’

  ‘I still don’t know what’s going on, sir,’ Matthews told him.

  ‘I thought I was imagining it at first,’ Flint said. ‘She wasn’t in the pub when we arrived, so she must have entered just after us. She was sitting at the bar, and she was watching us.’

  ‘Maybe she’s on the game,’ Matthews suggested.

  Flint shook his head. ‘She wasn’t that blatant. In fact, she was so subtle I almost didn’t notice her. But now I’m sure she’s been following us.’

  ‘Why would anyone want to
do that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Flint admitted. ‘But once we’ve checked with the licensing authorities in Swansea we might have a better idea.’

  If Owen had thought to ring me, of course, I could have told him exactly who his mystery woman was. But I would have had no explanation to offer for her presence in Bristol.

  It was to be quite a time before either of us would gain an understanding of that.

  FOUR

  The knock on the door of my hospital room was tentative – perhaps almost timid.

  ‘Come in,’ I said.

  The door swung open. I had been expecting to see yet another figure clad in white, come to dispense sympathy and tranquillizers, but instead it was Bill Harper.

  ‘The doctor said it would be all right for me to come and see you,’ he said, his voice as tentative as his knock. ‘But if you think it would be too much of a strain on you …?’

  ‘I’m not all that damaged,’ I said more gruffly than I’d intended. ‘Take a seat.’

  Harper walked slowly across the room, as if he were still in some pain.

  ‘The hospital’s just discharged me,’ he said, as he lowered himself gingerly on to the chair. ‘I’m going back to Cheshire for your grandfather’s funeral.’

  ‘What about my …?’

  ‘The others can’t be buried until the post-mortems have been completed.’

  I had a nightmare vision of the doctors cutting my brother open. Then I told myself I was being foolish – the damage had already been done, and the scalpel wasn’t going to make it any worse.

  ‘Will you be there for the funeral yourself?’ Harper asked.

  I shook my head. ‘They’ve insisted I stay here for a couple more days.’

  ‘Probably wise,’ Harper said awkwardly. ‘You don’t want to take any unnecessary chances.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘The thing is,’ he continued in a sudden rush, ‘there’s something I think you should know before I go. About the crash, I mean.’

  ‘Don’t I know enough already?’ I asked.

  ‘The thing is,’ he repeated, ‘I gather you were unconscious for most of it, but I think that if I told you what happened, it might make your grief a little easier to bear.’

  ‘A little easier to bear!’ I repeated angrily. ‘Do you realize I’ve just lost almost my entire family?’