Authors: Peter Tickler
She went to the fridge, extricated a bottle of white wine — there was always a bottle of white wine chilling in Janice’s fridge — and poured herself a large glass. She would probably regret it later, but she didn’t care. She deserved it. The die was cast. She had crossed the Rubicon. She imagined Paul at work on Monday, opening the envelope, his jaw dropping when he realised what the contents were, his Adam’s apple bobbing crazily in his throat. Or suppose it wasn’t him who opened his post? She had a sudden ghastly thought. Suppose the dragon lady Doreen opened his post for him? Perhaps she should have written ‘confidential’ on the envelope? What would Doreen say or think? She tried to picture the moment as Doreen, all pursed lips and tasteless fashion sense, handed over the offending article to Paul, thumb and forefinger holding it by the corner as if she might infect herself.
Then Janice began to laugh hysterically. It was a great picture.
* * *
Mullen staggered down the seven steps to the pavement and heaved the box unceremoniously into the boot. This one contained a significant part of his worldly goods, though few of them had any financial or emotional value. A small selection of cutlery, three tasteless mugs, two saucepans, a tray, a small LED desk lamp, a tin decorated with a Dickensian Christmas scene (and containing just four tea bags), cling film, refuse bags and so on. The rear section of his tired old Peugeot was already jam-packed with two cases, two other boxes and several plastic bags. He believed in minimal possessions, and it was ridiculous how much clobber he had collected since his return to the UK. There were a few more bags still waiting to be shifted out of his miserable flat, but that would then be that.
“Excuse me.”
Mullen turned and found himself faced by a woman.
Cute! That was his first thought, though he wasn’t stupid enough to say so. She had dark curly hair, a round face, a single mole on her right cheek and grey-green eyes that looked right into his — and maybe beyond. She was, he reckoned, about thirty. Maybe this was his lucky day.
“Are you Doug Mullen?”
“I am.”
“This Doug Mullen?” She held up one of his business cards.
He nodded. He was wondering how she knew to find him here when his card carried only a website, email address and mobile number.
“Janice recommended you,” she said, still giving him the deep-stare treatment. Janice. Whom he had last seen in the Cricketers Arms, misery personified, with the photos of her husband in one hand and an empty glass in the other. To whom he had made his excuses and left for a pressing job that wasn’t pressing at all. In point of fact, there hadn’t been any job, pressing or otherwise, since then, but Mullen was barely admitting that to himself, let alone to the woman who stood in front of him, appraising him. He wondered how many marks out of ten she was giving him.
“I’m Rose Wilby.” She held out her hand. Mullen took it, holding on for slightly longer than was necessary. She glanced at the car. “Are you doing a runner?”
“Moving house.”
“So you’re not doing a bunk before some unhappy husband comes to get you?”
Mullen gave his default shrug. “Somewhere cheaper — and larger.”
“Larger? It can’t be Oxford then. Where on earth is it? Outer Mongolia?”
“Boars Hill.” Mullen watched her eyes widen. Was it surprise or disbelief? Or both? Not that it was a big deal what she thought, he told himself. But not for the first time in his messy life Mullen was telling himself one thing and believing another. The truth was that attractive women never accosted him in the street, and he wanted it to last for a bit longer. “I’m house-sitting,” he said. “For a professor.”
Rose gave a curious smile, one side of her mouth slightly higher than the other, as she assessed his excuse-cum-explanation for the fact that he was moving to Oxford’s poshest postcode.
“It’s ridiculous really. He pays me to live in his large house while he takes a sabbatical with his wife in the States. Mind you, there’s a lot of garden to look after and some DIY he wants me to do as part of the deal, but frankly . . .”
She smiled again, this time as if genuinely amused. Mullen dribbled to a halt.
“Any nice wardrobes to explore?”
Mullen was puzzled. Was she flirting?
“C S Lewis? Narnia?”
Mullen could see he had disappointed her. He was suddenly back at school, standing up in front of the class, having failed some critical test.
Rose persisted. “
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
. It’s a book. The house is owned by a professor.”
He finally got the reference. “I’ve seen the film.” He had watched it on TV with his niece Florence. He had rather liked it, except for the bit where Father Christmas appeared. That had seemed odd to him.
Mullen could see that having watched the film was clearly not, as far as Rose Wilby was concerned, in the same league as having read the book. “It’s my favourite book ever,” she said. There was a pause as each of them considered the chasm that lay between them. “I know!” Her earnest face brightened. “I’ll lend you my copy, as long as you promise to return it. Everyone should read it.”
“Thank you.” He didn’t know what else he could say.
“It will appeal to the child in you.”
“What makes you think there is a child in me?” He grinned. This was him flirting back.
But it didn’t have the desired effect. The crooked smile on her face faded into invisibility. “You’re a man, aren’t you? And so by definition you’re a little boy at heart.”
“If you say so.”
“Oh I do.”
They stood facing each other for several seconds, this time in an enforced conversational silence as an ambulance tore past, siren blaring.
“I’d ask you in for a coffee,” he said trying to put things right, “but it’s all packed and I really need to get this car moved before the traffic warden comes calling.”
“I need to talk to you about a job.”
“Your husband, is it?”
She laughed. She held up her left hand, showing him her fingers. Not a ring in sight. “What sort of private investigator are you?”
* * *
Professor Thompson’s house was all you might expect of Boars Hill — and more. A sweeping gravel entrance and an honour guard of trees accompanied visitors — in this case Doug Mullen and Rose Wilby — right up to an imposing Edwardian edifice. Rose ran a curious eye over the façade. She looked up to the third storey, where large latticed windows peered out from under the steeply pitched roofs. It was easy to imagine that there might be a wardrobe inside which offered a secret entrance to another world. Not that C.S. Lewis had lived in Boars Hill. She knew that because she had visited his house in Risinghurst. Lewis’s home was an altogether much less imposing structure than this one. In some ways she had found it rather disappointing, not least because so much of the original three acres of garden had long since been sold off for development.
“Do you mind if I have a snoop around?” she asked as soon as he had unlocked the oak front door.
She didn’t wait for his answer, heading straight up the stairs to the bedrooms, where she took in each room like an estate agent assessing a house for a quick valuation. Downstairs again, as Mullen began to bring his boxes and bags in, she admired the sitting room, the dining room, another sitting room and finally the spacious kitchen with walk-in larder.
The professor — or rather, she suspected, the professor’s wife — had left a considerable supply of tinned and dry goods in the larder. She wondered if Mullen was free to raid their supplies as he liked. Returning to the kitchen, she filled and switched on the kettle, located tea bags and mugs and found a fresh pint of milk sitting unopened in the fridge.
Two minutes later they were sitting down in the kitchen at either end of a long oak table.
“Janice was full of praise for you,” she said. It wasn’t entirely true. Janice had said he was very good at tracking her husband, though she had only admitted this after she had got her to promise on the Bible not to reveal this to anyone. But Janice had been much less complimentary about other aspects of Mullen. “Morally unreliable if you ask me,” had been one of her comments. And, “I bet he looks at himself in the mirror every morning.” Which had only caused Rose to wonder whether Janice had made a pass at him and been rebuffed.
“This is a slightly different job from tracking an errant husband,” she continued. “I want you to find out what happened to a friend of mine called Chris.” Her grey-green eyes saw his blue ones blink in surprise.
“They found him floating face down in the River Thames. Bloodstream full of alcohol. Fell in drunk and drowned.” She paused again, wondering if Mullen would admit to knowing Chris. This was a test. Pass or fail. Right or wrong.
“It was me who found him,” Mullen said. He had passed.
“I know.”
“Who told you?”
She nearly said. It wouldn’t matter if he knew. But she didn’t want to spoon feed the man. Make him work for it.
She unzipped her handbag, removed a small white envelope and placed it on the table. “£300 to show my goodwill. Or rather our goodwill. It’s a group effort.”
Mullen didn’t even pick up the envelope. That was a plus mark as far as she was concerned. Instead he said, “You haven’t exactly given me a lot to go on.”
“I only knew Chris after he started coming to our church a couple of months ago. Sunday mornings and Thursday lunchtimes. I liked him. Lots of us did. Good with the old. Good with the young. He rubbed some people in St Mark’s up the wrong way, but I liked him.”
She shivered. It was colder in the house than it was outside. She wished she’d brought a cardigan or jacket.
Mullen rose from his chair. He ran his fingers through what little hair hadn’t been removed by the barber. “So you think his death is suspicious?”
She nodded, though in her head she was saying ‘stupid question.’ Of course she did. Why would she be here otherwise? “Chris didn’t drink,” she said. “He told me he’d been on the wagon for three years. I believed him.” She fixed Mullen with her eyes.
“Why don’t you tell the police all this?”
“I have. But they’ve already come to the conclusion that he relapsed, got drunk and fell in. Pure and simple. A detective came round to the church this morning. Detective Inspector Dorkin according to his ID. Said they weren’t likely to spend too much time on an open-and-shut case like this.”
Mullen, who had moved across to the sink, twisted his head round and nodded. She got the sense that he was getting interested finally, but not (curiously) so much in the envelope of cash on the table or indeed in her — though he had run an appraising pair of eyes up and down her in the Iffley Road — but in Chris. She wondered why.
“Chris is a nobody as far as they are concerned,” she continued. “Why waste valuable police resources on a nobody?”
Mullen nodded again, like one of those ridiculous dogs that drivers sometimes put in the back window of their cars. She looked at her watch. “So are you taking the case, or what?” It was time for Mullen to make a decision.
He opened his mouth, but said nothing. She could see the uncertainty in his face. Was he thinking of a polite way to say ‘No’?
“I appreciate it’s a long shot,” she said, “so my colleagues and I will not expect you to hand back the £300 if you fail in your assignment.”
“That’s kind.”
“Is that a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’?”
“Yes.”
“In that case, I suggest you come to church tomorrow and meet people who knew Chris. I’ve written the details on the back of the envelope.”
With that, Rose Wilby hoisted her bag over her shoulder and made her exit.
Mullen didn’t hate churches. That was too strong a word. He merely disliked them. Cornered at a party and asked for his reasons he would very likely have trotted out the words ‘irrelevance’ and ‘hypocrisy.’ If pressed further and the drink had been talking, he might well have embarked on a diatribe about the dangers of all types of extreme religious belief. When you’ve seen people blown up by a suicide bomber, all in the name of someone’s God, it’s impossible not to have strong feelings.
He was sitting in a pew in St Mark’s next to Rose Wilby. It was, by his reckoning, thirty seconds after the official start time of the ten-thirty service, but the vicar — low key in blue clerical blouse and collar, plus darker blue skirt with matching sandals — was showing no sign of getting things started. Glancing behind him Mullen saw punters still drifting in. He turned back. Rose was whispering to her other neighbour, a middle-aged man with a goatee and glasses. Two old ladies sitting at the front had turned round and were looking at Mullen as if he was the major attraction in a zoo. He stared back and they turned quickly away. Mullen tried not to mind. Everyone seemed to be wanting to get a look at him. Was that because he was new or because word had got round about who he was? He turned his own gaze back to the vicar and, as if reading his mind, she stood up. Mullen checked his watch. It was what his RSM at the training barracks would have called relaxed time-keeping. Whatever else St Mark’s was, it hardly emanated vibes of wild fundamentalism.
Mullen wasn’t sure what to make of the service. Several hymns or songs that he didn’t recognise, a sermon that involved overhead images and three main points, some intercessions from a man in a wheelchair (including a reference to the death of Chris — no surname provided), all polished off with a blessing from the vicar and an invitation to stay for coffee and tea. So far, so pleasant and harmless.
Rose leant close to him as the congregation sat down and the vicar made her way towards the back of the church. “I’ll introduce you to one or two people, but feel free to mingle and ask about Chris.” Mullen didn’t know a thing about perfumes, but he liked Rose’s smell. He wondered momentarily about the etiquette of saying so in church, but by the time he had come to a decision she had risen to her feet and was waving at a woman dressed in bright purple.
Mullen decided he might as well go and get himself a coffee and mingle. He joined the queue at the back of the church. He felt the tap of a hand on his upper arm and turned.
“I don’t think we’ve met,” the woman said. Which was a lie, of course, because they had done so on two separate occasions. “My name is Janice and I think you must be Rose’s private investigator. Mr Mullen, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
She held two coffees and offered him one of them.
“So nice to meet you.”
Her left hand pressed against his elbow as she eased him away from the crowd and into the south aisle. He moved compliantly enough, though he was trying to recall the Christian teachings on praising and praying to God one minute and lying through your teeth the next.
“And so glad you have taken on Chris’s case.”
Janice had been talking loudly, establishing her innocence with a will. Now she turned the volume down to little more than a whisper. “A few of us in St Mark’s have clubbed together, so I hope you’re going to give us good value for money.”
Mullen glanced around. A hexagonal column separated them from the rest of the congregation, allowing them a surprising degree of privacy considering the number of people milling around.
“And why exactly would a few of you good people of St Mark’s be so interested in Chris?” If Janice was going to speak her mind, then so would he. “And why indeed are you willing to spend money on me when the police will be running a case file on his death? The coroner will expect a detailed report from them.”
“A report that says an unknown down-and-out got drunk, fell into the river and drowned. No sign of foul play. Death by misadventure. Next case please.”
“I’m not convinced.” And he wasn’t. Not convinced that there was anything suspicious to uncover, not convinced as to the motivation of the do-gooders of St Mark’s, not convinced about anything except the £300 that he still had safely tucked away inside his wallet.
“Darling!” It was a man’s voice. Mullen turned. He recognised both the voice and the face. Not that he had ever spoken to the guy or even met him, except via the lens of a camera. It was Paul Atkinson.
“This is Mr Mullen, Rose’s private detective.”
She made him sound like a favoured pet.
“Pleased to meet you.” Paul Atkinson thrust out a hand. “Found any clues yet, then? Plenty of dodgy characters here if you ask me.” He laughed.
Mullen wasn’t asking. Merely observing and wondering. Wondering, for instance, if Paul Atkinson was putting on an act just as much as his wife had been a few moments earlier? What did he know? Had she confronted him with the photos? Or had she stored them away as insurance for the future? If the former, did Paul Atkinson know that it was he, Mullen, who had taken them?
“If you’re looking for sinners, what better place to start than a church?” Atkinson was clearly the sort of man who didn’t merely make a point. He battered it half to death. “Christians are obsessed with sin. ‘We have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God,’ wrote St Paul. And don’t we get reminded of it every Sunday.”
“Paul!” Janice hissed. “That’s a gross caricature.”
There was another laugh and a tossing of the head. “Nice to meet you, Mulligatawny,” he said. “Things to do and places to go.” And then he was gone, off to irritate some other sap.
In another place and in other circumstances, Mullen would have succumbed to his instinctive desire to knock the man’s block off. It had been Dorkin the other day, hiding behind his detective’s badge, and now it was Paul Atkinson hiding behind the church and the fact that there were a hundred pious witnesses who would back him up. Mullen clenched his left hand into a fist and thumped himself on the thigh. It was the only way he could express his frustration. He wasn’t a man who had grown up learning to turn the other cheek and let prats get off scot free.
Janice didn’t follow her husband. She did, however, emit a noise like a frustrated parakeet. She moved half a step forward. “Par for the course I’m afraid, Doug,” she whispered. “God only knows why I don’t throw him out.” She looked at him in appeal. “I could do now, couldn’t I?” She reached across, her hand gripping his upper arm for two or three seconds.
Mullen flinched. He felt like he had stepped out of the shallows straight into deep water, his feet suddenly unable to touch the bottom. He took a slug of coffee while he tried to think of something appropriate to say. Whatever he had thought spying on people’s spouses might lead to, this sort of emotional complication wasn’t one of them.
“Look, Janice,” he said, trying to extricate himself without being too brutal. “I need your help. I need to know who in the church knew Chris.”
“We all did, pretty much.” She paused. “Not biblically of course.” She laughed. “But Chris was one of those people you couldn’t not notice. His ponytail, his insistence on wearing camouflage clothes, dare I mention his smell — not exactly a typical member of St Mark’s.”
Mullen tried another angle. “So who in the church is funding me?”
“I am, for one. After all, you were my idea.” She rolled her eyes. She was flirting again.
“Jesus!” Mullen said, and then realised his
faux pas
.
Janice grinned. “Naughty, naughty!”
Mullen drained his coffee. He had had enough messing around. “You’re not exactly helping here, Janice.”
He turned to move away, but this time her hand touched his shoulder. “Sorry, Doug,” she said, suddenly serious. “Just follow me. I’ll introduce you to Derek Stanley.”
Derek Stanley was the guy with the goatee to whom Rose had failed to introduce him. Nattily dressed in electric blue chinos, pale yellow shirt and stone-coloured linen jacket, he peered at Mullen over his glasses. Janice made the introductions and then withdrew, removing Mullen’s coffee mug from his hand as she did so. He felt her nail scratch the inside of his wrist and then she was gone, leaving behind both the smell of her perfume and a host of confused thoughts.
Stanley plunged straight in. “Chris was a nice chap. Chatty, easy-going and helpful. Sorted out the disabled loo when it got blocked one Thursday. He’ll be missed.”
“Do you remember when he first came to the church?”
“Oh, yes. That’s an easy one. Good Friday. Of course we had a service that day, 10.30 start like today, but very different in tone: quiet and reflective. Actually I didn’t notice him until the end. That was because he was sitting at the back of the church. My first thoughts were, I fear, rather unchristian.” He frowned as if not quite sure how to express his feelings. “I found his camouflage clothes rather . . .” He took off his glasses and allowed them to hang from his neck on their chain. He rubbed at his eyes. They were moist. “Sorry. Perhaps I should explain. My sister Sarah moved to Hungerford in July 1987. A lovely little Berkshire town — or so she thought. Six weeks later Michael Ryan ran amok there and killed fourteen people before shooting himself. Perhaps you remember it? The first person he killed was a mother he came across in Savernake Forest. He let the children go, but he shot her in the back. Thirteen times. ”
He fell silent. Mullen waited, conscious Stanley was nowhere near finished.
“Sarah was at home that day. She was sitting in her front room when Ryan passed by, oblivious of everything that was going on outside. Ryan fired four shots through the windows. One of the bullets grazed her temple. She recovered physically, but not emotionally or mentally. One year later to the day, she hanged herself.”
There was another long pause. For the second time Mullen felt he wasn’t just in deep water, but was in danger of drowning in it. He knew he had to say something. “I’m sorry to have brought it all up again.”
Stanley shrugged. “Not your fault. But I suppose the first time I saw Chris standing there at the back of the church, I thought he was Michael Ryan reincarnated. A ghost.” He fell silent, and then a half-smile spread across his face. “Don’t tell the vicar. She might give me a theological telling off.” He leant forward and gripped Mullen’s forearm. Mullen tried not to wince. Was this grabbing of arms and patting of shoulders something that all the members of St Mark’s did when they got intense and serious?
Stanley, as if sensing his discomfort, released him. “Actually, it has been very good to talk about it. Therapeutic I guess. Not that I’m into stuff like that, but . . .” He shrugged, unable to finish saying whatever it was that he was thinking. A child dressed as an angel danced past and for a moment or two both of them were distracted by the girl.
“But the reality was that Chris was altogether different. Cheerful, sociable, chatty. Not at all like your average mass murderer.”
Mullen took the opportunity to move the conversation on. “So when did you last see him?”
“On the Sunday before his death. He came to the morning service and then stayed for the bring-and-share meal. Not that he would have brought any food, I dare say. But that didn’t matter. I remember he helped put away the tables at the end.”
“What else can you tell me about Chris?”
Stanley seemed surprised by the question. His eyes, unprotected by his glasses, blinked — a mole emerging from darkness. “Not a lot, I suppose. We passed the time of day most Sundays, but how much do you get to know someone from a few chats in church?”
Mullen considered this. It seemed very reasonable. Friendly, but hardly a deep relationship. If so, then why was Stanley one of those paying for him to make a private investigation? Was this an example of Stanley’s ‘Christian charity’? Or, the cynic inside Mullen said, was this more to do with good old-fashioned guilt that they had somehow failed Chris? Mullen had no immediate answers, but he didn’t mind.
He tried another angle. “Do you know where Chris lived?”
Stanley shook his head. “I’m ashamed to say I never asked him. I assumed he had a tent somewhere. There’s quite a few people that do that round here, pitch camp somewhere along the river near where the railway crosses it. Especially at this time of the year.”
“Did he ever talk about family, where he grew up, jobs he’d done?”
Again there was a shake of the head.
Over Stanley’s shoulder Mullen noticed Rose making her way through a scrum of small children who had materialised from somewhere in the parish centre. He took it as a sign and pulled a business card out of his wallet. “In case you think of anything else,” he said, handing it to Stanley.
* * *
“How is it all going?” Rose engulfed him with her smile. “Not too much of an ordeal, I hope?”
Mullen wasn’t sure if she was referring to Derek Stanley in particular or the whole experience of coming to church.
“Your Chris seems to be a bit of a blank canvas,” he said. “Mr Stanley claims to have spoken to him several times, yet he can’t really tell me anything substantial, not even where he lived.”
Rose frowned as she considered this. The corners of her mouth puckered. Mullen found this absurdly distracting. She was wearing a summer jersey dress, white with yellow and blue flowers, a navy blue linen jacket and a silver chain with a cross round her neck, altogether smarter than when they had met the previous day. He wondered if she had plans for lunch. He wondered too how much — or how little — she knew about Chris. “Do you know where he lived?”