Quick and the Dead

by Susan Moody

  The phone shrilled yet again in my hand. I was so startled that I nearly dropped it. ‘It’s Mark Sheridan here,’ said a cultured young voice. No beer round the edges now.

  Sheridan the Shelf-stacker. ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘When you were here the other day, did you … uh … take anything?’

  ‘You mean steal something?’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose I do.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because I think someone has been in the house. You may have noticed that I was a bit the worse for wear when you were last here. Drinking too much, that sort of thing. I’m not normally like that. It was the shock of hearing about Amy being murdered.’

  ‘The General would not have been happy.’

  ‘Tell me about it. The thing is, I’ve straightened myself out now. But it’s more than possible that during that time, I could have left the front door open, or unlocked, and someone got in.’

  ‘So what’s missing?’

  ‘I’m not quite sure.’

  ‘Anything valuable?’

  ‘Not that I would recognize.’

  ‘Have you called the police about it?’

  ‘Uh, not yet. Mostly because maybe I’m just imagining it.’

  ‘What are you imagining might have gone?’

  ‘The odd item here and there.’

  ‘Which you wouldn’t recognize?’

  ‘Yeah. Or no.’

  ‘And that’s all?’

  ‘Uh … yes.’

  I sensed a reluctance on his part to discuss it over the phone. ‘Want me to come up and take a look round?’

  ‘Would you? You’re the only person who’s been in the house since the police searched it, shortly after Amy was … discovered. And seeing as you’re a trained observer and all …’

  It would give me an opportunity to nose around a bit more. Or even a lot more. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll come. Should get there just after lunch.’

  Since my last visit, the little front garden of Amy’s house had been swept clean of dead leaves, the straggly box-hedges had been trimmed. The curtains at the front were open and now hung demurely straight on either side of the windows.

  Inside, the sitting room had been cleared of takeaway debris, there was a scent of lavender furniture polish in the air, and some fresh flowers sat on a side table in a cut-glass vase. Mark Sheridan looked very different from our last meeting: hair brushed, cheeks shaved, in a clean shirt under a smart navy-blue sweater. On a coffee table was a brochure about flights to South America.

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Please.’

  He brought me a mug on a small oblong dish, with what looked like a home-made chocolate-chip cookie set to one side. He sat down opposite me.

  I sipped my coffee, broke off a piece of cookie, chewed it, and said: ‘So tell me about this possible home-invasion.’

  He looked around the room. ‘It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what I mean.’

  ‘And you don’t really know what’s missing?’

  ‘If anything. As I said on the phone, I’m not really sure. I don’t take much notice of things. I just have this general feel that things are gone.’

  I carefully scanned the room, taking my time. ‘I’d say some of the books are gone,’ I said eventually, waving at the bookcases along one wall. I could see gaps, books leaning slant-wise against other books, which I was sure had been filled on my previous visit. ‘Any idea what kind of books she kept on the shelves?’ I asked, continuing to survey the room as I spoke.

  ‘Art books, I think. She had a lot of those. I remember some of them because they were texts I’d used at university. And when I wrote my thesis for my PhD.’

  I nodded. So he had a doctorate, as well as a General for a father. Very interesting. Very un-Amy. ‘What was your thesis on?’

  ‘The Correspondences between Art and Music during the Renaissance.’ He sounded proud – and so he should be: it was a big subject.

  ‘Right,’ I said. One thing I did notice was the space in the display of expensive little enamelled snuff-boxes. The plain silver box, no more than three centimetres square, which had been there on my last visit, was gone. I pointed its absence out to Mark. ‘Odd,’ I added. ‘It was modern, and therefore would be worth considerably less than some of the others.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘And there was a leather-covered volume on the shelves last time I was here,’ I said. ‘Looked like a presentation copy.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. Her publishers gave her that after the Masaccio book came out. She was really chuffed. Said she was on her way at last.’

  Sadly, she had been on her way to nothing more than a violent and early death. ‘Well, it’s gone now. Should I look at her office, while I’m here?’

  ‘That would be great.’

  ‘Though I may not be of much use.’

  ‘You’ll be better than I would.’ He gave another of his vague waves, this time towards the door of the room. ‘Help yourself.’

  I climbed the stairs to the landing. I hesitated. Then, with a cautious backward glance down the stairs, to make sure Mark wasn’t keeping an eye on me, I walked softly into the bigger bedroom which Mark had shared with Amy. Like her office, it was almost a parody, the sort of woman’s bedroom that might have featured in a 1950s Doris Day or Bette Davis movie. Scent-bottles, silver-backed hairbrush with matching hand-mirror, jewellery casket of mother-of-pearl inlaid wood, an ivory-and-leather box containing – I flipped up the lid to check – various make-up brushes and eyebrow pencils.

  Quietly I opened the jewellery box. There wasn’t anything of great value inside, and most of it was silver. No diamond rings or ruby earrings, no cabochon emerald bracelets or expensive amethyst necklaces. I knew Amy had possessed real sparklers because I remembered her fingers flashing as she girlishly clasped her hands together at her launch party, but they weren’t here. Such as she had she obviously kept somewhere else, unless the notional intruder had taken them.

  I conducted a quick trawl of the drawers and wardrobe, checked under the bed and in the bedside tables, found nothing that seemed significant. Left the room.

  Further down the short passage was the office I had checked out last time I was here. The only thing to have changed since then was the thickness of the dust layer which lay over everything. I stood at Amy’s desk and could see nothing which looked as though it had been moved since then. Except … hang about!

  I tapped into my inner Inspector Morse. There was a quite definite line in the dust, where the box of printer paper had obviously been moved and then carefully, but not carefully enough, been returned to its original position. Why would someone want to do that, especially if they were hoping to avoid suspicion? Unless they wanted to print something out. But even from my position in the middle of the room, I could see from the dust layers that the neat plastic cover over the printer could not have been removed in the recent past. It made me wonder just how much Amy had used it: this amount of dust could surely not have been distributed in the ten days or so since her death.

  I walked across the room and lifted the box, placed it on the table where Amy presumably had worked. I lifted the lid and saw, as before, the stack of virgin paper. I riffled through it. And riffled again, taking a larger wedge the second time. This time, I saw that there were printed sheets underneath the clean paper. Lots of them. There was no title page, but it was clearly the manuscript of Amy’s book. I did some more riffling and it became clear that at least half a chapter was missing. I lifted the whole lot out of the box and lightly fanned it across the table.

  Pages 69 to 87 – a whole chapter and some extra pages – were no longer there. Again, the printing had the same quality of not-quite-sharpness which the pages found in her body had possessed. The only reason I could come up with as to why Amy would have stored the typescript of her book at the bottom of a box of paper was in order to keep it hidden. Perhaps she was afraid of a rival art historian
breaking in to steal the fruits of her hard work and research. I replaced the papers, hesitated, lifted them out again and took page 88 (what difference would one more make?), folded it into my wallet, and after doing some further cursory searching and finding nothing more, went back downstairs, carrying the box.

  Mark was in the smart little kitchen, making himself another coffee. When I came in he turned. ‘I remembered something which seems to have gone missing,’ he said. ‘I was looking for the spare car key, which Amy kept in that jewellery box on her dressing table. There’s a golden chain thing she quite often wore which is definitely no longer there.’

  ‘Was it valuable?’

  ‘She always said it only had sentimental value, but I think it was worth a lot more than she let on. There was a really old French coin set in gold hanging from it. There were matching earrings, too, little gold coins. I’ve always assumed that Number Two or Number Three gave them to her.’

  I guessed he was referring to Judo Jason or Super Seamus. If the hand-beaten gold link I had lifted at the scene of Amy’s murder came from the necklace he was referring to, it seemed very unlikely that either of them would have bought it for her, since antique gold francs didn’t come cheap. ‘What about Number One?’

  ‘He’d be the one, wouldn’t he? He was super-rich. Even though she didn’t end up with all his loot, thanks to his children by earlier marriages, she got a sizeable settlement. Perhaps she bought it for herself.’

  ‘Was she wearing it when she left here last week?’

  ‘Could be …’ He moved his head up and down. ‘Yeah, she was. That’s probably where it went. She must have taken it off and forgotten about it.’

  My turn to nod. ‘Probably.’ I didn’t like to say that it hadn’t been round her neck when I found her body. ‘What about this?’ I showed him the box of typing paper. Opened it. Delved under the blank sheets. ‘This looks like the manuscript of her Masaccio book,’ I said, holding out the typescript.

  He nodded yet again. ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘But there are some pages missing.’ I wasn’t sure that the police had told him details such as the papers pushed into his dead wife’s intimate crevices, so said nothing.

  ‘Strange.’ He sounded indifferent, so much so that I wondered if it was an act. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Probably not.’ I gave him my dead-eye stare. Was he the one who had removed the pages from the box? ‘But I wonder why anyone would go to the trouble of breaking in to your house, stealing a small silver box, a book and some pages of a not-yet-published typescript.’

  He shrugged. I guessed his thoughts were mainly in Guatemala rather than north London.

  ‘You said that you might have left the door unlocked, or even open. If you didn’t, how else might anyone have got into the house?’

  Again he shrugged. ‘The side entrance, maybe. There’s a narrow little alley up the side of the house, though Amy and I never used it.’

  ‘I’ll go and inspect it.’

  Outside, I turned to the right. Yes, a gate led to the back of the house, which I hadn’t noticed before. It was a tall gate, maybe six and a half feet high, and offered no glimpse of what lay behind it. It had an old-fashioned latch and a shiny-looking Yale lock. Mark was behind me and put a key into the lock, while I flipped up the latch. Together we pushed, but it wouldn’t budge. We pushed again, harder this time. Examining it more closely, I said, ‘This isn’t stuck, Mark. It’s actually painted shut. When was the house last done up?’

  ‘Must have been back in September,’ he said. ‘I knew Amy was a bit paranoid about security, but I hadn’t realized you couldn’t actually open it. I always come in through the front door.’

  I peered more closely at the clean white paint job. ‘There are no marks on here,’ I said. ‘If someone had climbed over, there’d have been scuff marks.’ I turned to him as he peered over my shoulder. ‘Let’s have a look at the front door.’

  But again, there were no signs of a break-in. The same with the windows. Besides, given the cheek-by-jowl nature of the terraced street, if someone had attempted to climb into the house via the windows, they stood a strong chance of being noticed.

  ‘Amy would have been carrying a set of house keys, wouldn’t she?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, of course. In that big Must-Have handbag she was so proud of.’ He gave a well-bred sort of snort. ‘Made of Italian leather – cost enough to feed a village for a month. Bloody obscene, in my opinion. She was always buying them – some of them cost thousands.’

  ‘That might be the explanation. Her murderer must have taken the bag, because there certainly wasn’t one around when I found her,’ I said, hoping it hadn’t been one of the bags produced by my brother-in-law Leonardo. ‘That must be the answer. The person who killed her was also the person who entered this house and stole stuff.’

  There was only one problem: the break-in took place after Amy was killed, when her bag had been stolen, so where did the manuscript pages appear from? And how had the murderer obtained them?

  TWELVE

  Back home, I poured myself a glass of red and looked through the mail I had brought in from my postbox in the lobby. It was the usual mixture of junk and bills, plus a few letters and cards from friends. I checked out an envelope of the very best quality hand-made stationery, so heavy I could hardly lift it off the mat. It was addressed to Mesdames Drummond & Quick in a fine finishing-school hand, using a fountain pen filled with royal-blue ink. Unusual in these days of email, tweeting and texting.

  I slit it open carefully with a paper knife, in order to preserve the integrity of the envelope. Inside was a thick invitation card, written on cream-coloured paper, with a complicated embossment in blue of various capital letters which included both L and M. The sort of monogrammed stationery that privileged Americans tend to use. Possibly the English do too, but I obviously don’t know the right sort of people. Mrs Lamont was asking Helena and me to attend a private function at the Eaton Square address of Robert and Mercy Lamont. 7:00pm. Black tie. Wow! Professionally, this could only be good news. Personally, it would be a lot less fun if Helena were not there to share it with me.

  I put the thought behind me, and picked up the piece of paper which had gotten itself half-stuck to the underside of one of the bills. A page torn from a small lined notebook, one of those with a spiral of wire down the side. In lower-case letters, the message ran imok. What the hell did that mean? imok. Some obscure West African artist? A reminder of something I was supposed to do? A character in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi? But who did I know who would write in such an illiterate way? Was it worth Googling? I studied it again. Not imok, but IMOK? I was none the wiser.

  And then, making coffee in the kitchen and staring out at the turbulent sea, I got it. I am OK. What else could it mean? And who else could have written it but Helena? My spirits rose like bubbles in a glass of champagne. It had to be Helena. And she was all right. Somewhere hiding out of sight, but all right! And maybe even in the vicinity, if she was able to hand-deliver a message. I thought of Sherlock Holmes’ crew of raggedy barefoot urchins, always ready to run errands for him, but these days there weren’t all that many barefoot urchins around, especially in winter. Helena must have delivered it herself, but since I had been away most of the day, she was unlikely to still be hanging around outside.

  A burden of doubt and depression lifted from my shoulders. If she was all right, then I could get on with some work. Sign and send back the contracts which had arrived from Cliff Nichols, forging Helena’s signature, if necessary. Pictures and images to research for the first of the three books he had commissioned, the fruit and flowers one, Ripe For the Picking.

  And then the phone rang and I forgot everything. It was Fliss Fairfield. ‘They’re issuing a warrant for Doctor Drummond’s arrest,’ she said.

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Has Garside lost his mind?’

  ‘Which mind would that be?�
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  ‘And what evidence does he have?’ I felt as though I was going to choke. ‘You know she didn’t do it, Fliss! You know that!’

  ‘I may – though it’s only based on your assurances – but the rest of the force doesn’t know her, and as I said last week, it’s looking extremely bad for her.’

  ‘This is ridiculous.’

  ‘Maybe. But as far as they can tell, she had the means and the opportunity – and it wouldn’t be hard to come up with a motive. Garside is looking jubilant.’

  ‘I can’t see how he can make charges stick. Any evidence he’s got must be purely circumstantial.’

  ‘That’s a different matter.’

  ‘And I know Helena doesn’t have the money to hire a top-class defence barrister.’

  ‘Maybe the CPS will advise them that they haven’t got a case.’

  ‘Hmmm …’ I said. ‘So we’re back to square one.’ The news of the warrant was absurd, based on such a flimsy premise that I refused to let it bug me. Meanwhile, I had to get on with my professional life, until Helena showed up again and we could continue our partnership.

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘Crap.’

  There was a big article on the arts pages the following morning. The fabulously wealthy Lamonts had just purchased another painting, for a whole heap of money. A Léopold Survage, this time. As an ex-copper, I wondered how wise it was to be proclaiming to the world the fact that all these prime canvasses were hanging on the walls of their Eaton Square place. I knew for a fact that there were specialized art thieves who not only targeted victims like the Lamonts, but also stole to order, people who made it their business to study the papers in order to read about the latest news from salesrooms and auction houses. They would be well aware that a private home would be much easier to break into than a gallery or museum, however good the security systems in place. The same people were equally assiduous in reading the gossip columns, checking out who would be on vacation or attending a wedding or funeral, making their homes that much more vulnerable.