She Died Young (15 page)

It was excitingly illicit to look through a person’s belongings in this way. Charles warmed to his task. He no longer felt uneasy. His feverishness, which came and went in waves, had lent him a brittle kind of energy. A desk stood to the side of the table. He opened the shallow top drawer. It contained pens, pencils and stamps. Below it were deeper drawers to the left and right. He opened the drawer on the right. It took him a second’s disbelief before he understood that he was staring at bundles of used banknotes, each wad secured with a rubber band.

Andras had said the Quinaults were always quarrelling about money. And here was tons of it …

‘Well, well, well. Look at this.’

Andras wasn’t interested. ‘I think we go now. It’s – somehow horrible in here.’

‘You must see this.’

Andras stared at the stash of notes. ‘We go,’ he repeated. ‘If someone find us …’

Charles laughed. ‘There’s no-one here. We’ve got the place to ourselves.’

The doorbell rang.

‘Oh, God.’ Charles closed the drawer. He was suddenly sweating, although the room was freezing.

They reached the hall. As they did so, the front door opened. Andras must have left it unlocked. The man who stood there was tall and quite imposing in his overcoat and plaid scarf. He removed his hat. ‘Good morning. I’m looking for Gyorgy Meszarov. I believe he’s staying here?’

Charles glanced at Andras, who was staring speechlessly at the stranger. Charles could tell he was scared, and there was something rather too authoritative about the tall man. Charles felt certain he was a policeman. He had that particular kind of presence that couldn’t be mistaken: a certainty about his right to be there.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, sounding bolder than he felt.

‘I’m checking on the welfare of the recent Hungarian arrivals. It’s a routine visit.’ He produced some kind of identification card, but it had disappeared again before Charles could read it.

The stranger looked at Andras. ‘Gyorgy Meszarov? Settled in all right? Everything satisfactory?’

Andras nodded. Charles couldn’t understand why he didn’t tell the policeman that he wasn’t Gyorgy. ‘Everything is fine. We have to go now.’

He made a move in the direction of the front door, but the stranger put up a hand in an attempt to stay him.

‘We’re on our way out,’ echoed Charles. He was suddenly very anxious to get away. He wasn’t supposed to be here. There was something about finding all that money that made him feel guilty, which was absurd, as if merely looking at it was some kind of theft.

The policeman gazed thoughtfully at Charles. ‘And you are …?’

As if it was any of his business; but Charles said: ‘I’m Professor Quinault’s research student. I came to see him about my work, but he’s out.’

‘That’s a pity. I was hoping to have a word with him too.’

Before Charles could stop them, the words flew out of his mouth. ‘Is it because of all the cash lying around in his library? You’re a policeman, aren’t you? I hope Professor Quinault hasn’t been breaking the law.’

What mad impulse had made him say that? Was it to cause trouble?

The stranger focused on Charles with increased interest. Andras looked from one to the other. He pulled at Charles’ sleeve. ‘I think we go.’

‘Yes.’ Charles now wanted to get away even more than Andras did.

‘Wait a moment. What’s this about cash?’

Charles had to put a bold face on it. ‘I just thought you ought to know.’

‘Are you implying there’s something suspicious about it?’

Seizing the opportunity, Andras shifted past the policeman and made a bolt for the front door, slamming it behind him.

‘I’d better have your name.’

‘Do I have to tell you? Look, I’ve got to go. My friend’s upset.’

The policeman continued to stare at Charles. ‘You’ve volunteered information about something you seem to find suspicious.’

‘I’m sorry – I have to …’ Charles gestured in the direction of the departed Andras.

‘Are you making an allegation about the Professor?’

‘No, it’s just that – I don’t know why I said that …’

‘I might need to talk to you again about this. Where can I find you?’

The policeman spoke in such a way that Charles couldn’t stop himself from replying. ‘Charles Hallam. Magdalen College.’ He moved determinedly towards the door. ‘I have to see he’s all right.’

‘I may be in touch, Mr Hallam.’

Charles was panicking as he ran towards the gate. He stepped out onto the pavement and with relief saw Andras loitering further along the road. When the Hungarian saw him, he slowly walked back.

‘Why you say that about money?’ Andras was shaking. ‘Now will be trouble. He was policeman, no?’

‘Why didn’t you tell him you’re not Gyorgy?’

‘I don’t like he come asking questions.’

‘I’m sure it’s only some routine check.’ But he cursed himself for having mentioned the money. He had felt so odd all day. It was as if nothing was quite real. A crazy impulse – and now Jesus Christ knew what trouble it was going to cause. But he said carelessly: ‘He seemed more interested in the Professor than you.’

That would be something to report back to Reggie. If only he hadn’t given the man his name. One should avoid the police at all costs. Charles’ sexual adventures had led him into plenty of dubious situations and he now regretted drawing attention to himself in that stupid way. Nothing to be done about it now, though.

‘Are we going on this walk, then?’ he said. ‘I’ll wheel my bike part of the way. Or no – I’ll leave it. I can get it later.’

‘Someone will take it.’

‘If they do I’ll borrow someone else’s. It’s like that here, kind of group ownership, sort of.’

The cold bit into him. ‘It is the year’s midnight and the day’s,’ he muttered.

‘What?’

‘It’s a poem.’ His voice sank to an inaudible murmur: ‘The world’s whole sap is sunk … I am every dead thing in whom love wrought new alchemy.’

chapter
18

T
HE QUEEN’S HEAD WAS
even emptier than usual, a single solitary drinker leaning against the bar. Blackstone read the
Evening News
from cover to cover. Twenty minutes had passed before Jarrell, hatless and with raincoat flapping about him, strode into the bar. He greeted Blackstone, ordered lemonade and brought it to the table. Before he even sat down he said: ‘There’s been a development. I found her handbag. In the hotel. It was hidden up a chimney. We took the couple in for questioning. And now, believe it or not, he’s admitted it.’

‘Admitted what?’

‘Admitted he pushed her and that’s why she fell down the stairs.’

‘He’s
confessed
? Camenzuli?’

Jarrell nodded.

‘What were they doing at the top of the stairs?’

Jarrell sat down. His movements, always jerky and angular, agitated still further Blackstone’s now-disturbed state. Jarrell seemed always impatient and in a hurry. That, Blackstone felt, was not how detectives should be. They should be methodical, their every move considered, which was more McGovern’s style.

‘I thought the wife would crack. We split them up, obviously, when we hauled them in. She was beside herself. Hysterical. Terrified. I thought she’d tell us everything, I thought it would all come pouring out. I didn’t think there’d be a problem. But nothing doing. Couldn’t get anything out of her. Nothing coherent anyway. Just floods of tears and she knew nothing about anything. I think she was more frightened of him than us – her husband, I mean. And there wasn’t much to go on. The handbag seemed incriminating at first, when we found it, but anyone could have hidden it.’

‘The very fact that it was hidden, though—’ began Blackstone.

‘Well, yes. Was there a reason it wasn’t in the ambulance when the body was removed? I began to think it might have been a deliberate attempt to make sure she wasn’t identified – or not identified quickly. But then I also suspected it might have been hidden on purpose to incriminate the couple. A plant. It wasn’t that carefully hidden. There was soot in the grate – that was what drew my attention in the first place.’

‘A policeman would notice that, I suppose,’ said Blackstone, ‘but perhaps not a layman.’

‘Well, eventually we decided to let her go. We released her on police bail. We concentrated on Camenzuli. A tough nut to crack. And we didn’t crack him. He was rock solid. He stuck to his story. The girl arrived on her own. She said she’d be joined by someone. She asked for a room, she went upstairs. She went into the room. Later she came out again, tripped and fell down the stairs. He even suggested she’d hidden the bag herself. We held him in the cells overnight. In the morning his wife came to see him with some cigarettes and a change of underwear. Later that morning we started in on him again. I wasn’t hopeful at all. But blow me down, he said he had something to tell us. Quite calm. Just said he wanted to make a statement.’

‘And his story?’

‘He claims she arrived with a man. They went upstairs. The girl seemed reluctant, but she went. Quite soon they heard raised voices, the girl was almost screaming. She came out onto the landing. The man was in the bedroom doorway. The Maltese went up and told them to keep quiet or else leave, both of them. The bloke ran downstairs and left. The girl was hysterical, became abusive. Camenzuli tried to restrain her, she reacted violently, there was a struggle and she fell down the stairs.’

Blackstone frowned. He pulled out his cigarettes. ‘Manslaughter? He’ll argue it was an accident, surely.’

‘He made no bones about it. He hit her deliberately to shut her up. He pushed her as well and that’s how she fell down the stairs. There’s to be another autopsy anyway now. We confronted his wife with the story. She corroborated it.’

‘What did he have to say about the handbag?’

Jarrell shrugged. ‘He claimed the girl must have put it there herself. That’s obviously nonsense. We didn’t get to the bottom of that.’

Blackstone thought the whole thing very fishy. ‘Are you happy with the confession?’

Jarrell shook his head. ‘They shouldn’t have let the wife in to see him. They were only together for a few minutes and an officer was present. But of course they spoke their own language. All I can think of is someone got to her overnight and told her to tell him that that’s his story. He’ll be paid. Besides, it’s a weak case. He’ll probably get off anyway. Might not even get to court.’

‘So who benefits?’

‘Whoever he’s covering up for.’

‘What’s Moules’s view?’

Jarrell frowned. ‘Not sure. It means the case is reopened. I think he was hoping I’d turn up some stuff about the police. Other than that, I don’t think he’s that interested.’

Blackstone stamped his cigarette on the floor and fumbled for his packet. ‘Yes. Didn’t McGovern sell it to him on the basis that it might open up the wider question of police methods?’

‘That’s right. The police weren’t called to the scene originally. But that was down to the Maltese. He didn’t inform them.’

‘The hospital must have told them – when her body arrived. And there was an inquest, so …’

Jarrell smiled. ‘There’s better ways of opening up that particular can of worms than this case. But I’m working on it. Keeping my ear to the ground.’

The handbag puzzled Blackstone. ‘Why did they hang on to the handbag and then hide it? It would have made more sense just to get rid of it.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Jarrell. ‘You’d have thought they’d throw it away – get rid of it completely instead of hiding it. Or why not just send it along with the girl’s body? What was the point of concealing her identity?’

‘You think it could have been left by someone else? Incriminating evidence planted deliberately?’

Jarrell sipped his drink. ‘Possibly … I really don’t know. Maybe. It sort of corroborates the confession. Actually, it gave us the pretext for taking him for questioning in the first place. There was no guarantee we’d find it, though …’ His sentence faded away into a shrug.

‘You don’t believe his confession?’

‘I don’t know. It’s semi-plausible. But his story changed so suddenly after his wife had been there.’

‘There’s also the doctor’s story,’ Blackstone reminded him. ‘You haven’t forgotten that, have you? That she was already a corpse when she arrived at the hotel.’

Jarrell hunched forward over his lemonade. ‘Yes – the doctor. You go round to see him – he’s quite friendly to begin with, you say. He drops this big hint about how she was dead on arrival. Then he goes off and gives himself some magic medicine and doesn’t want to talk any more. He actually
said
she was dead on arrival.’

’Yes. I’m sure those were his words.’

‘Seems unambiguous. But there’s something else you don’t know. He’s dead too.’

‘I hadn’t heard that.’ Blackstone’s hand shook slightly as he twitched the ash off his cigarette. ‘That’s … God … the implications of it! That has to be … he was murdered.’

‘That’s the thing. It’s gone down as an overdose. But I looked very carefully at the old man. There he was, his sleeve unbuttoned, needle marks, the syringe on the floor where he’d let it drop from his nerveless fingers, as they say.’ Jarrell was now talking with a kind of impatient humour. ‘I thought it seemed a little staged. I had another look at him in the mortuary. I looked at his hands. And I think he was left-handed. The middle finger of his left hand was calloused and ink-stained, suggesting that was the hand he wrote with.’ He gestured at Blackstone, whose cigarette was glued to his right-hand fingers when it wasn’t stuck between his lips. ‘But it was his left shirt sleeve that was unbuttoned and the syringe lay to the right of his chair – all as if he’d injected himself with his right hand. That would cast doubts on suicide, as well as on an overdose. There wasn’t a suicide note, either.’

‘As soon as the Camenzuli woman let slip his name someone paid him a visit. But how did that someone know I’d talked to him?’

‘You look a bit shaken,’ observed Jarrell. ‘Take it easy.’

‘It’s a shock. It’s almost as if it was somehow my fault. I get wind of his name. I pay him a visit. Next thing – he’s dead.’

‘I was shocked too. Believe me. I found the body. Went round to question him. And there he was. Dead. Someone must have found out that the Maltese woman had passed on his name.’

‘Possibly. But hardly anyone knew. I knew …’

‘Well, someone was worried about him. After you’d seen him, it could be he got in touch with someone – perhaps he was alarmed, perhaps he was hoping for help of some kind – and that person, we don’t know who, got scared too, went round and shut him up. That’s my theory. He could have been a witness. Once we’d arrested the Maltese, someone must have got the wind up so they eliminated him. They could only have known you’d talked to him if he told them – that must have been what happened. And they wanted to be on the safe side. They were afraid he’d talk.’

‘He wasn’t that forthcoming when I saw him.’

‘He mightn’t have stood up to sustained pressure, though.’

‘Who benefited by Valerie’s death? That’s the real question,’ ruminated Blackstone. Perhaps no-one did. Perhaps it was, as the Maltese now admitted, essentially an accident, the unintended outcome of a stupid quarrel, the girl’s death pointless.

That, however, wouldn’t have made it necessary to get rid of Dr Swann – if Jarrell was right and that was not just another unrelated accident, a coincidence that it had happened when it had.

‘There’s something else,’ said Blackstone. ‘The girl wrote her mother a postcard to say she’d met a man and was getting married. Her mother said she was hopelessly romantic, always expecting a knight in shining armour to come along.’

Jarrell clasped his bony hands together. They made an unpleasant cracking noise. ‘A man in the case. That’s no surprise. She might have been deluded about the marriage part, but why get in touch with her mother if none of it was true?’

Blackstone nodded. Hadn’t the postcard been a way of sending a message? See, I didn’t go to the bad after all. At last I’m going to be the respectable girl you always wanted. You can be proud of me now. The sadness of it caught him unawares. ‘We need to track down this boyfriend,’ he said. ‘I should have made that a priority, I should have been on to it as soon as I got back from the south coast, but …’ He’d done nothing about it, had given in to his reluctance. He didn’t want to know about her love life, the men she’d known. His sentimentality had got the better of him.

‘The problem is, we’ve charged a suspect, he’s remanded in custody, though he could get bail at some point. Things will roll along for a bit. I’ve got other crimes to investigate. Bloody Moules keeps us at it. I’m not sure how much more manpower he’ll want to devote to the girl.’

Blackstone looked at his companion. Jarrell’s faded carroty hair and pallid, unhealthy complexion belied the energy he brought to his work. His greenish watery eyes and sharp nose, and his hunched, thin shoulders gave him the look of a rather peculiar bird. He reminded Blackstone of a heron that at the moment appeared to be looking into the middle distance and dreaming of fish. ‘If you tell him about the syringe and being left-handed… That’s good detective work. He’ll listen to that.’

Jarrell stood up suddenly. ‘You’re right. The case against the Maltese is weak. I don’t want to look like an idiot when they throw the case out or Camenzuli retracts his confession. I’ll get him to let me widen the investigation.’

There seemed little more to say. Blackstone eked out the silence with his cigarette, smoking it down until it burnt his finger. ‘Valerie was working at some dive in Soho, the California Club. I ought to go and have a look at it. Should have been there already, as soon as I got back from Eastbourne,’ he repeated. But he’d put off going. He’d dreaded what he might discover, how sordid her life had been.