Altered Life
Page 6
CHAPTER FIVE
WE WALKED BACK to the office, each of us playing back in our mind’s eye what we’d seen and heard that morning.
‘So what do we do now?’ she said. Her voice was small against the traffic. ‘I guess we should leave it to the police, shouldn’t we? There’s even less point you being involved now than there was before.’
‘You’re right. I can’t do anything the police can’t do.’
‘So I should just pay you for your time and we call it quits.’
I stopped and, sensing this, she turned and looked at me. Her face was strained and unhappy but I was finding it hard to understand what she wanted. After all, she was the one who called me at home and had recently spent half an hour telling me exactly what had happened at the murder scene.
I said, ‘If you want me to go away you only have to say so. You’re the boss here.’
‘Then why do I feel like you’re criticising my judgement?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe you’re feeling guilty. I know I am. I didn’t particularly like Rory and I don’t like this place and I’ve even got some doubts about you, but I could have treated him with a bit more respect.’
‘I suppose I should thank you for your honesty,’ she said grimly. ‘I’m not used to that from people I’m buying from.’
‘I haven’t decided yet whether I’m selling.’
‘I was forgetting you had a choice.’ She blew into her hands and thrust them back in her pockets. For a moment her upward-turned, hard-eyed gaze under the blue beret, and her attitude of forced hostility, made her appear like a schoolgirl putting on a front of sophisticated cool to impress the un-cool adults. It was a disarming look but I armed myself against it.
‘I’ll go then,’ I said.
‘I think it would be best …unless you felt there was something you could add to the police investigation.’
‘I wouldn’t want to raise your expectations.’
‘Believe me, they’re low.’
‘I could ask some questions, check out one or two things.’
‘I don’t want to trouble you.’
‘No trouble,’ I said. ‘It’s my job.’
She turned away abruptly and we continued walking to the office.
‘I want to go home,’ she said. She suddenly seemed depleted and shrunken inside her skin, as though she could no longer maintain the outsized version of herself that she used to deal with the world. After all, she was still a young woman who’d experienced a traumatic event. At one level, she was a poised and professional business woman, but I saw now that much of her behaviour was a well-managed front. The air practically vibrated as she strained to keep herself together.
I said, ‘I’m sure the police will let you go home, as long as you tell them where you are.’
She nodded. ‘They say it’s going to be the middle of next week before we can get back into the office. I’m going to have to make a lot of phone calls.’ Then she stopped again, and looked at me with the still, focused gaze she summoned from time to time. She said, ‘When I find out where the funeral is, will you come?’
‘I don’t like funerals.’
‘You’ll see Rory’s friends and family. It’ll give you the bigger picture. Where he came from, where he got to. That kind of thing.’
‘Won’t the guest list be Mrs Brand’s decision?’
‘I doubt she’ll be up to much. Besides, anyone can come to a funeral. Just don’t badger the guests in the church.’
‘I do my best work in churches. I’d have to rein myself in.’
‘See that you do,’ she said. ‘I’m still not clear about your role in all this. I worry that you’ll be wasting your time and our money. But maybe we owe it to him to do something.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Mr Dyke, this is one of the saddest days I’ve ever lived through. I’m on the point of bursting into tears all the time. But deep down I feel angry. I want to find out who did this, who murdered him.’
‘Would it surprise you if I said I’d like to help?’
‘Quite frankly, nothing you said would surprise me. But who knows, perhaps you’ll shock yourself, and me, and catch the murderer. Whoever killed Rory shouldn’t think they can get away with it.’
‘Despite my obvious limitations, I’ll do my best.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ she said, without a trace of humour.
She did up the buttons on her coat and walked on. We appeared to have struck a deal. I shook my head and followed her down the street, still wondering how she managed to appear human and warm one minute and as cold as a mortuary slab the next.
BY THE TIME I reached Crewe the flow of traffic was against me as commuters escaped for home, crawling in a slow evacuation past the railway station and down the hill towards countryside that was getting darker every minute. For an hour or so in the evening of every working day, Crewe wakes up and gives the appearance of being alive and vital, but it’s only the excitement created by people glad to be going home. Their pink faces glow in windscreens and against bus windows and over bicycle handlebars as they hurriedly leave the bleak architectural muddle in which they work and head for their commuter homes out in the green Cheshire landscape.
But at least Crewe knew what it was for and had no pretensions. Returning from Waverley, I felt I was coming back to a place that was firmly planted – the metal and steel that underpinned Crewe’s life as a centre for the railway and for the production of Rolls-Royce cars gave it a ballast that Waverley, floating free on a tide of new money, simply couldn’t match.
In the centre of town only McDonalds was busy, with packs of teenagers standing around dipping into bags of fries and shouting insults at other packs. It was like a mating ritual from White Fang. Kids trying to find their place.
My office is a room on the first floor that I let from the furniture shop below. I have a separate entrance from the outside and a key to the kitchen from the inside, so I can share tea, coffee or toast with the staff. By now the shop was closed. Only a faint security light was illuminated, tipping a faint brown glaze over the sad sofas and chairs that the owner imports from Croatia at a knock-down price and sells to people who can’t afford to even walk through the doors of World of Leather.
When I started in business for myself I had no capital and no loan potential, so I was glad to get even these humble premises. Two years on, I liked the privacy and the sense of being in the middle of town. What’s more, I had my name and profession engraved in a semi-circle on the outside window, visible from the road. My dad had always said that you didn’t make any money until your name was over the door. He was a repository of sayings that he’d harvested over the years as examples of the world’s predictability. As I got older I was beginning to see that his reliance on these truisms was a kind of defence mechanism, a way of explaining his reluctance to have adventures or change his way of life. The sayings explained the rules by which the rest of the world lived. And however much he might have wanted to try, he couldn’t change the rules, could he, so he couldn’t live the life he wanted. In that way, it wasn’t his fault. It was a problem with society.
From my computer I could access the Internet and claim the phone bill as a business expense. I turned it on, and when at the desktop ran a Google search on Brands. There were the usual several thousand hits, though only a dozen for the management consultancy based in Waverley. These were mostly press items that were obviously PR releases worked up with a minimum of effort into small pieces in the local newspapers; a couple of them were linked to journal articles written by consultants in the company.
One of the newspaper items described the investment group who had put three million pounds into the company for the development of a specialised IT wing. They called themselves Champion. I printed the article and kept reading. Two further hits were interviews with Rory Brand in management magazines. Even at second-hand, the strength of his personality hit you between the eyes.
There were also several link
s to Brands’ web-site, which described the kind of work they did, offered case studies of clients they’d helped and included a page outlining the company’s vision: ‘To be the best management consultancy in any discipline in which we operate.’ It sounded exactly like the man I’d met.
I navigated to the web-site for Companies House and looked at Brands’ entry there. It told me nothing except that their accounts were up to date.
I exited and switched off the computer, then sat and read the article about Champion, the investment group. They were a well-established London company with a track record of investing in young IT start-ups. I recognised the names of some of the companies they were associated with. They had an expensive address in a well-heeled part of London. I thought it unlikely that they’d murdered Rory in a crude attempt to recoup their investment before it matured.
Then I thought back to what Laura Marshall had told me about Rory Brand’s computer screen. The words Mal O’Donovan had seen there seemed to make no sense. She’d taken a breath before telling me, as if she needed fortifying before committing the words to the air. But her tone had been level and matter-of-fact. ‘It was an open Word document,’ she said. ‘Someone had typed a phrase using letters that filled the whole screen. The message read, “Who’s the daddy now?”’
We’d talked about this for a while but couldn’t make sense of it. Brand had no children and, apparently, rarely saw his own family. It sounded more like a bragging statement than a meaningful clue.
I thought about Rory Brand and Laura Marshall and Betty Parsons and Eddie Hampshire—the world they operated in was far removed from the world in which I’d worked for most of my adult life. In Customs and Excise you walked through drab corridors, where bulbs hung naked from ceilings; where the tables and chairs were broken from the legs up; where the walls were covered with cork boards or flyers or government notices; where the people were cynical, tired and contemptuous of most other people they met. Only the adrenaline and the politics kept you going. When was the next hit. Who was screwing whom. Who was brown-nosing for promotion and who was likely to get it.
I’d worked for two years now in the commercial world and I was having to change my outlook. I still saw cynicism and contempt. But I also saw energy and optimism and a willingness to try. A belief that a positive outcome was possible. A recognition that human actions could have monetary value—that it wasn’t only cigarettes and booze and pornography, concrete objects, that could be traded. But it was possible for skill, conviction and confidence to be bought and sold. I disliked Waverley as a place and Brands for the kind of business it was, fattening itself on the failure of companies to understand what they were doing. And once I’d got out of C & E I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t get involved again in corporate politics and big company disputes – after all, there were plenty of worthy individuals who needed the services of an upright, experienced and honest investigator, weren’t there?
But it wasn’t as simple as that. To eat you had to go where the money was. And because I turned up my nose at divorce work, I had slashed my potential client list in half.
So I had to work in the business environment. It was not only churlish, but foolish, to spurn the corporate coin. I’d learned to suck up my pride and live with it. Sam Dyke, practical detective.
And then a strange thing had happened. Working on a case involving deceit and fraud by a company director in central Manchester, I suddenly found that I understood how business worked. That it was built on relationships between people, not on the value of a commercial transaction. And in a development that I didn’t see coming, it reminded me of the culture that I came from, the northern mining towns where a man’s value was seen in what he did, not what he owned or where he took his holidays. I’d never had that experience—the sense that what you did as a profession could give dignity and pride by itself. I’d been a gatekeeper for most of my life, preventing the illegal passage of goods that were without any value except that given to them by society. Finally I’d realised that I’d become a private detective for two reasons: first, there was nothing else I could do after C&E.
Secondly, and most importantly, I had to do it if I was to look myself in the eye each time I shaved.