Troy moved on light, quick feet. Spring-heeled Jack. Exciting times were in the offing. The case was opening up and, whichever way the next few hours crumbled, they seemed to be fairly full of Eastern promise and relatively short on paperwork. Then he spotted the boss and wiped the pleasure from his countenance. Just to be on the safe side.
‘I’d like some coffee with this.’ Holding up the cellophane packet. Walking away.
‘Right, chief.’
When Troy produced the coffee, Barnaby was on the blower. The sergeant put the cup down, less warily this time, for he could see things were looking up. And he was actually thanked. Just one raised finger. Which made a nice change.
Barnaby listened, relishing the voice. Cigar rich. Garrick Club fruity. Port and nuts and Armagnac. The brazen clash of money, with a wheeler-dealer edge.
‘The only things Max Jennings signs are contracts,’ rumbled Talent Levine. ‘Why exactly do you want to speak to him?’
‘We are investigating a sudden death. Mr Jennings was one of several people who spent time with the deceased yesterday evening.’ Barnaby explained the circumstances in some detail.
‘Talking to some scribbling amateurs in the back of beyond? I don’t believe it.’
Barnaby gave assurances that such was indeed the case even as he wondered how the inhabitants of Midsomer Worthy would regard being reassigned to the polar ice caps.
‘He wouldn’t even talk to Lynn Barbour,’ continued Talent. ‘Mind you, that was on my advice.’
‘We’re fairly sure that Mr Jennings knew the man who issued the invitation quite well. Did he ever mention the name Gerald Hadleigh to you?’
‘Not that I recall.’
‘It would be going back a few years.’
‘No. Sorry.’
‘We’re getting some background material on Mr Jennings from his publishers—’
‘Why?’ Barnaby was momentarily silenced. ‘I want to know much more than you’re telling me, chief inspector, before I start answering questions about my client without his permission.’
‘Very well. The facts are these. Mr Hadleigh was murdered late last night. As far as we know your client was the last person to see him alive. Now Mr Jennings, after giving false information about his destination, seems to have disappeared.’
There are pauses and pauses. You would have needed a wrecker’s ball to dent this one. Eventually Max’s agent said, ‘Christ almighty.’
‘Do you have any idea at all where he might be?’
‘Absolutely none.’
‘If he gets in touch—’
‘I need to take advice on this one, chief inspector. I’ll get back to you. Perhaps later today.’
‘I’d appreciate that, Mr Levine.’ An interruptive growl. ‘Oh, I beg your pardon. Ms Levine.’
He hung up, murmuring to himself, ‘Curiouser and curiouser.’
Troy remained silent. Even if he had the chutzpah this was no time to correct the chief’s grammar. Barnaby once more turned his attention to the pastry. The cherries, so glossy and seductive under wraps, proved to be as hard as wine gums. He took a bite, felt a savage twinge in his tooth and flung the remains down in disgust.
‘There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark, Gavin.’
‘It’s the same everywhere.’ Troy removed the empty, coffee-stained polystyrene beaker and dropped it, together with the pastry, in the bin. ‘Maureen’s stopped putting the news on.’
He produced a snowy handkerchief, smoothed the rest of the crumbs into his hand and disposed of them. Then he wiped his palms and fingers carefully.
‘When you’ve finished dusting,’ said Barnaby, long familiar with his sergeant’s obsessively meticulous behaviour but still capable of being entertained, ‘I want you to go and see Clapton again. Lean a bit. Find out just what he was up to on Tuesday night when he was supposed to be taking this quick turn round the Green.’
‘I’m so glad you could come round.’
‘We were lucky. Me with a break. You on afternoons.’
Sue dunked tea bags in stone mugs. Camomile for herself, Sainsbury’s Red Label for Amy. There was a home-made oat and carob slice each, too. All on a tray balanced on the cracked old Rexine pouffe in front of the fire.
Amy took her tea, murmuring, and by no means for the first time, ‘A terrible day.’
‘Oh, yes - terrible. Terrible.’
They had talked about it and talked about it. Amy starting even before she had taken her coat off.
It was twenty-four hours now since the police had called at Gresham House. After their visit, and the dreadful revelations they had left behind, Amy had naturally expected that she and Honoria would sit down and slacken their disbelief together. Absorb the shock (as she and Sue were doing now) over a warm, comforting drink. But Honoria had appeared satisfied merely to deliver a run-of-the-mill diatribe describing the sociological forces that had combined to bring the criminal element so firmly into their midst. These, though varied, were neither wide ranging nor original.
Ignorant and indulgent parents, lax teachers, spoon-feedings by the state from the cradle to the grave and easy access to the depravities of television. Contempt for authority came next, closely followed by the abandonment of corporal and capital punishment and the deliberately malicious council policy of siting municipal dwellings a mere thieving’s distance from the homes of decent, tax-paying citizens. All or any of these heinous components could, it seemed, be permed any which way to produce the thing that had killed Gerald Hadleigh - for that he came from the dregs of society went without saying. Foolishly, Amy had argued.
‘Aristocrats killed people. Elizabeth the first was always chopping heads off.’
‘Royalty is different.’ Honoria had stared at Amy with her round, hard pebbly eyes. ‘If you’re so interested you should have asked that turnip-faced hobnail of a policeman if you could go over and have a look.’
‘Honoria! What an awful—As if I would ever—
Ohhhh
.’
Amy’s fingers trembled anew as she broke off a piece of her carob slice. To be made to feel like a morbid snooper, like those awful people parked on the Green. She didn’t want to see anything. Indeed felt quite ill at the thought. But surely (and she had said so) it was no more than human to wish to discuss such an appalling incident on one’s own doorstep.
‘In that case,’ Honoria had replied, ‘I’m glad I’m not human.’
‘Tell us something we don’t know,’ said Sue, as Amy passed this on.
They had cried a little together, as they had separately the previous day. Sue had wept when the news hawks had finally left her in peace, Amy during the brief moments she had spent in St Chad’s after visiting Ralph’s grave.
Not knowing if Gerald had been religious, and not being especially religious herself, she had kept her prayer simple, merely asking that his soul should be accepted in heaven and there find peace. Of course all this sort of thing would be properly and officially attended to at the funeral, but Amy had a vague notion that time was thought to be relevant in these matters and that there should not be too much delay.
Sue spooned thick meadow-flower honey into her tea. ‘I got in touch with Laura and Rex,’ she said,‘when I knew you were coming, in case they wanted to join us. She was really short with me and Rex seemed to be out when I went round.’
‘Oh well.’ Amy was not really disappointed. She loved sitting in this room with Sue, the fire crackling, throwing shadows on the dark red walls. It was like being in a snug cave.
They had become friends almost by default - drawn together as two English people might be if marooned in a foreign country, reaching out in their isolation, sensing immediately a kindred spirit. Without words each understood the other’s situation. They never needed to ask, as outsiders might (and frequently did), why on earth do you put up with it?
Instead they offered comfort, encouragement and advice. Sometimes they would let off steam, angrily berating their oppressor’s behaviour. But, in the main, they struggled to remain humorous and detached. What else could you do?
Neither allowed the other to slide into self-pity, or take unnecessary blame. When they had first started meeting Sue had done a lot of that, explaining that Brian only acted the way he did because she was slow and not very bright. Amy had knocked that notion severely on the head.
They had an escape plan, of course. Sue was to become a famous illustrator of children’s books and buy a little cottage with room for just herself and Mandy, if she wanted to come. There would be a garden with space for ducks and chickens. Amy would sell her block-buster and get a house not too far away. It would be spacious, airy and modern, for she had had enough of clanking radiators and stone floors and smelly, mildewed cupboards.
And when they met they would have slow, thoughtful conversations with breathing spaces. Not like now, when they talked and laughed and interrupted each other non-stop but always with one eye on the clock. Amy said they were like two nuns from a silent order vouchsafed a once-a-year speaking day.
‘I keep wishing,’ said Sue - they were still discussing the murder - ‘that I’d looked at my clock when I heard Max drive away.’
‘How were you to know? Anyway I don’t see that it would help the police that much.’
‘It would give them a time when Gerald was still alive.’
‘I thought post-mortems sorted all that out.’
The phrase struck them both with a deep chill and they looked at each other in some distress.
‘I expect they’ll have to talk to him - Max I mean. It’s so embarrassing. Us mixing him up in something like this.’
‘Could be worse.’
‘I don’t see how.’
‘Could have been Alan Bennett.’
They burst into nervous giggles, ashamed at such levity yet also knowing relief. Then, acknowledging that the time had come to put their reflections on death aside, Sue said, ‘Something nice happened yesterday. Did you have the policeman with red hair?’
‘Yes.’
‘“Fox” I called him at first,’ said Sue, for she anthropomorphised everyone. ‘But then I had second thoughts. His lips were so thin and his teeth so sharp that I decided he should be “Ferret”. And the bulky one’s “Badger”.’
‘Oh yes, I agree with “Badger”,’ said Amy. She agreed with ‘Ferret’ as well, for she hadn’t liked Troy much at all. ‘What about him?’
‘He wants to buy a painting of Hector. For his little girl.’
‘That’s brilliant! How much will you ask?’
‘Heavens, I don’t know.’
‘Twenty pounds.’ Sue squealed her disbelief. ‘At least. He’s getting an original Clapton. Tell him one day it’ll be worth a fortune.’
Amy knew she was wasting her breath. Sue would probably just mumble, ‘Oh, that’s all right’ when the time came. Or shake her Greenpeace collecting tin, with soft timidity, in Ferret’s general direction. She was saying something else.
‘I still haven’t heard from Methuen.’
‘But that’s good news.’ Sue had submitted some paintings and a story nearly three months ago. ‘If they hadn’t wanted your book they’d have sent it back straight away.’
‘Would they?’
‘Of course. It’s being passed round to get lots of opinions. Depend upon it.’
‘Amy.’ Sue smiled across at her friend. ‘What would I do without you?’
‘Likewise.’
‘How is
Rompers
?’ asked Sue. ‘Have you managed to do any more?’
She did not ask out of mere politeness. The immensely baroque structure of Amy’s book impressed Sue enormously and she followed every twist and turn of the narrative with the deepest interest. It seemed to her wonderfully gripping and she was sure that, should Amy ever snatch enough secret moments to finish it,
Rompers
would be a great success.
‘Well, believe it or not, after such shattering news, I did six pages last night.’
Amy had been quite perturbed on their completion unsure whether writing under such circumstances meant she was a true professional or an amateur with a heart of stone.
‘Has Rokesby,’ Sue was continuing eagerly, ‘discovered that Araminta has the same surname as the Duke of Molina because she is his sister and not, as Rokesby believed when he rejected her, his wife?’
‘He has, yes.’
‘Well?’
‘Too late. Hurt almost beyond human endurance she has fled to the Corsican Riviera with Black Rufus.’
‘The notorious drug baron!’
‘She believes him to be a Save the Children representative.’
‘And Burgo?’ Burgoyne was Sue’s favourite. Ebony-haired and pantherine, he spoke twelve languages, often simultaneously. He had violet eyes, an olive skin the beauty of which was enhanced rather than disfigured by a zigger zagger duelling scar, and a name respected and feared on the world’s international espionage circuit.
‘Suspended from his heels in a rat-infested bauxite mill somewhere on the Caymans.’
‘Ohhh . . .’ Sue’s eyes shone and she clapped her hands at the sheer extravagance of it all. ‘How absolutely wonderful!’
‘It’s not at all wonderful. That isn’t supposed to happen till page three hundred and something.’
‘Where are you now, then?’
‘Forty-two. I’ve got a riot of plot and nothing else.’
‘But Amy, that’s what bestsellers are.’
‘Really?’
‘You won’t give up?’
‘Good heavens, no. And neither must you.’
Amy got up and looked out of the window, something she had done several times since her arrival. Honoria had gone to the post office to collect a parcel of books from the London Library. She had gone in person this time as the need to harangue Mr and Mrs Sandell had yet again become paramount. A letter was recently delivered to Gresham House with a slight tear in the envelope and the flap barely secure. This could mean a ten-minute trounce or a lecture lasting half an hour and the length of the queue behind Honoria would have no bearing on the matter.
Even as she watched, Amy told herself what nonsense this surveillance was. After all she was not, technically, a prisoner. On the contrary she seemed to be out of the house as often as she was in. Running errands, delivering messages (or rather edicts), fetching and carrying. But always conscious that the time used was not her own.