‘I can’t see how it matters,’ Mrs Lamy said. ‘And I really can’t remember what George said, because it was only half a conversation, so it wouldn’t make sense to me anyway. I don’t think he said very much, actually – he was listening more. But I do remember he seemed a bit upset, or concerned at one point, and he said “Why?” and then, “But why me?” And then I suppose he saw me listening – not that I was, but perhaps I’d looked at him – and he turned away and lowered his voice, and he said, “Yes, all right,” and then “I’ll think of something.”’
‘And when he said that, you think he was upset?’
‘Well – worried, perhaps, or anxious. As if Mr Marler was asking him to do something and he wasn’t very happy about it.’
‘What did you think it might be?’
‘How could I possibly know?’
‘Of course not – but you’ve obviously been wondering. What sort of thing did you think it was?’
She thought for a long time. ‘George was a good man. He’d never do anything he knew to be really wrong. But suppose Mr Marler had asked him to be friendly to a bad person for the sake of getting a donation – that might be something he’d agree to do, but feel bad about, though it was for a good cause. I’m not saying that’s what it was,’ she added hastily. ‘I’m just saying, that would be the sort of dilemma that might make him anxious.’
Swilley digested that for a moment, and into her silence Mrs Lamy said, ‘You don’t think … He didn’t kill himself because of something Mr Marler said in that conversation?’
Swilley shook her head. ‘Without knowing what was said, how could I say?’
‘Because I was right there,’ said Mrs Lamy. ‘I could have asked him what was wrong. Got him to open up to me. If he could have talked to me about it, perhaps he wouldn’t have felt the need to—’
‘Whatever happened, it wasn’t your fault,’ Swilley said, more kindly than she felt. ‘If it was bothering him that much, he probably wouldn’t have told you anyway.’
Lamy gave Swilley a clear look. ‘The detective who came yesterday, he said he thought George might have known someone who was mixed up in something you were investigating. Is that person Mr Marler?’
‘Would it surprise you if it was?’ Swilley countered.
‘Yes, very much. He’s a good person, a good local MP, and a tireless worker for our trust.’
And it doesn’t hurt that he’s good-looking and charming, Swilley thought. ‘I know absolutely nothing against Mr Marler,’ she said reassuringly. ‘Can I ask you just one more thing? Do you recognize this phone number?’
She showed her the unregistered mobile number. Mrs Lamy shook her head. She checked on the office’s directory, but found no match. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know whose that is. I suppose the day may come when we recognize mobile numbers the way we used to recognize landline numbers, but we’re not there yet.’
THIRTEEN
End of the Line
‘Cope Castle,’ said Atherton in the car. ‘I missed that one. And Georgie’s secret file was labelled Cope. I wonder if he had some dirt on Marler he was keeping in it?’
‘Wonder all you like. Until we can get a look …’ said Slider.
‘You mean “unless”. But I’m starting to think you may be right, guv,’ Atherton admitted. ‘You always thought there was a connection between Georgie and Marler, and that it had something to do with Kaylee. How’s this? Georgie takes her to Marler’s party—’
‘In Marler’s car?’
‘If it was Marler’s car. We can’t be sure yet. But Georgie didn’t have wheels, so say he borrowed Marler’s. Or Marler had them both picked up.’ He waved that away. ‘Georgie gets a bit tanked, kills Kaylee, probably by accident—’
‘How? And where?’
‘Somehow. Somewhere. Are you going to keep interrupting my story?’
‘When it needs interrupting.’
‘Anyway – Georgie’s scared stiff, asks Marler for help. Marler doesn’t want bad publicity, so he helps Georgie dispose of the body. Then Georgie’s overcome with remorse and tops himself, and Marler thinks the best way to distance himself is to pretend he’s never heard of Georgie. Which ought to have worked. Except for phone records and number plate recognition, it would have.’
‘Even when criminals plan crimes, they can’t think of everything,’ said Slider, ‘and this has the hallmarks of the unplanned. After all, who could want deliberately to kill a nobody like Kaylee?’ He was silent a moment. ‘You don’t want me to point out the holes in your theory, do you?’
‘No, let me bathe in the glow of achievement for a minute. This isn’t the way home,’ he noticed. ‘Where are we going?’
‘The local police station. I want to find out why nobody ever progressed Mrs Havelock’s complaints.’
They got passed to the uniform superintendent, Geddes, who was the most senior person on duty. He looked lofty, to begin with. ‘Noise nuisance is a local government problem. We don’t go out unless there’s a danger of public disorder.’
Tell your grandmother, Slider thought. ‘Oh, quite,’ he said. ‘I’m more interested in why no record was made of the complaints. There were many of them, and over a considerable length of time.’
‘That’s just it. This dotty old woman keeps complaining about nothing, you stop paying attention, don’t you? I mean, you know the type – some old girl rattling around in a house too big for her, lonely, craves attention. All she wants is someone to talk to, but we haven’t got the time to be nursemaids.’
‘All that may be true,’ Slider said, ‘but still I’d have thought there would be something on record, just in case something happened further down the line. Suppose drugs were involved, and it came out later. I don’t think she’d be the sort of person not to say I told you so – and to the press.’
Loftiness segued into annoyance. ‘Oh, she’s a troublemaker all right. There’s plenty of them in this borough, I can tell you. Living in the past. Don’t know the Empire’s dead and gone. Think if they cock their little finger, you’ll come running. Look down their noses at you and call you officer.’
‘Yes, they can be a pain,’ Slider said sympathetically.
‘A royal pain,’ the super amplified, apparently without irony.
‘All the more reason,’ said Slider, ‘to keep your guard up against them.’
Now wariness took over from annoyance. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘don’t you realize who lives in that house? Holland Lodge, I mean?’
‘Yes,’ said Slider. ‘Gideon Marler, MP.’
‘Exactly! He’s a VIP. Not just an MP, he’s the chair of the Police Select Committee.’
‘I know,’ said Slider.
The superintendent placed both hands on the table and leaned forward slightly. ‘I’ll level with you, but this goes no further, do you understand? I’m only telling you because I don’t want you trampling around and making trouble. We had orders not to record the complaints. Orders from a very high place indeed.’
‘Why?’ Slider asked.
If this had been a pub discussion, he probably would have got his nose punched at that point. The super breathed hard through flared nostrils. ‘Ours not to reason why,’ he said. With an obvious effort to be pleasant, he went on, ‘There are matters of high strategy that don’t concern those further down the chain of command. All you need to know is that Holland Lodge is not to be disturbed. It’s off the radar. It doesn’t exist. Got me?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Slider. ‘That’s very clear. Thank you.’
Outside, Atherton said, ‘New theory. The parties are just a cover. It’s high-level MI5 stroke MI6 work – top secret and radically sensitive. It’d be just the place for it – virtually no neighbours.’
‘And Peloponnos and Kaylee?’ Slider said.
‘That was not the party they went to. It can’t have been the only party happening in London on Saturday night.’
‘Marler’s car?’
‘Not Marler’s car. We don’t have the fu
ll index. Georgie’s connection with Marler is purely incidental, nothing to do with our case. Which, officially, is not a case.’
‘Not a case, and not our problem for much longer. On Monday we’ll have to drop it, and then we’ll be perfectly justified in forgetting it, and going back to our proper work.’
‘I wish you didn’t care so much,’ Atherton complained. ‘You’ll shorten your life, you know. Where now?’
‘Back to the factory. I need a cup of tea.’
‘I have ceased to resist your whacky theories,’ Atherton said, when he came into the room later.
‘I don’t have any theories,’ Slider said patiently.
‘Never theorize ahead of your data, I know, Sherlock,’ said Atherton, ‘but you’ve been working all along on a connection between Georgie and Marler, and though for the life of me I can’t see where Kaylee comes into it, meek submission to the idea has freed my mighty mind to roam over the available evidence.’
‘And has anything emerged from the primordial swamp,’ Slider enquired a little sourly, ‘apart from gas?’
‘A large bubble. If Georgie had become so depressed about something he wanted to kill himself, why didn’t he use the pills? He had a good supply of downers and sleepers from his doctor tucked away in his medicine cabinet, and wouldn’t an overdose appeal more to a – let’s say – timid and unathletic type than being mangled – and possibly not killed but only painfully crippled – by a tube train?’
‘How do you know he was timid and unathletic?’ Slider objected.
‘He still lived with his mummy at the age of forty-eight.’
‘Perhaps he didn’t want said mummy to be the one to find him dead.’
‘He could have gone to an hotel room.’
‘All right,’ said Slider, ‘supposing it is a surprising choice of suicide method, what then?’
‘I’m wondering,’ Atherton said, ‘whether his suicidal feelings only came over him on Monday morning after he’d left for work – leaving, of course, the pills in the house. And if said feelings came over him so violently that he threw himself under a train, did something happen to him between the house and the station?’
‘Such as?’
‘Well, it occurred to me that he might have bought a paper at the station, or on the way, and seen something in it. Or the post came just as he was leaving and he took it with him and opened it on the way, and received a poisonous communication.’
‘The post doesn’t arrive before people leave for work any more,’ Slider reminded him.
‘Post office deliveries are so erratic, anything is possible. I’m going to find out, anyway.’
‘Do,’ said Slider cordially.
Mrs Peloponnos seemed to have shrunk – not only vertically, but as if she had collapsed together like a deflating balloon. She peered up at Atherton with an eye devoid of hope, even of interest, the expression newsreel cameras record on the faces of women in refugee camps. The anger that had sustained her was gone. Whether or not her good son had committed suicide, he had left her, and she was on her own, completely, and for ever. She shuffled before him into the kitchen with all the self-determination of a robotic vacuum cleaner, and none of the vim.
There was a film of dust visible on the wooden surfaces, and unwashed crockery in the sink. Not much of it – it looked as though she had subsisted for the past two days on toast – but it had an abandoned air, as if no one was ever going to wash it and put it away. When she ran out of clean plates, she would cease eating, and/or die, thought Atherton.
She didn’t offer him anything, but sat in a chair at the kitchen table, folding her hands on it, and staring at nothing. Atherton walked past her to sit down facing her, catching a sour whiff from her of unwashed hair and body odour. Had she even undressed and gone to bed since it happened? he wondered. He had an image of her wandering about the house like a dust bunny blown hither and yon by random drafts, purposeless now that Yorkos would not be coming back. He had a further image of her dying here at the kitchen table, just collapsing forward one day over her hands. No one would miss her. Owing nothing, she would not be visited by bailiffs. No doorstep deliveries of milk any more. The services would be cut off when the red bills were not paid, but no one would come to check if she’d gone. She would lie there pretty much for ever, until she either mummified or rotted down to a skeleton.
He shook the thoughts away. He was turning into his boss. For one of them to be over-sensitive was a misfortune; two would look like carelessness.
‘Mrs Peloponnos,’ he said firmly, ‘I want to talk to you about your son. You told us before that he had been worried and anxious for some time. About his work, you said.’ She looked at him blankly. ‘Now, last Sunday, did he seem more worried than usual?’ She continued to stare. ‘I want you to think back. Was he very upset about something – so upset he might have thought about killing himself?’
‘He did not kill himself. It was accident,’ she said, but it sounded automatic. There was no passion in it.
‘So, how was he on Sunday?’
‘Same,’ she said listlessly. ‘Quiet, a bit, maybe. But just the same he has been for weeks. Was in his study all morning, on his computer. Then I call him for lunch.’
‘What did you have?’ he asked. Perhaps the detail would pull her back.
‘Lamb,’ she said. She pronounced it ‘Lemm’. ‘I make lamb. Is Yorkos favourite – like his father. Roast, with plenty garlic. And rosemary potatoes.’
It worked. Just a hint of animation came into her voice. It was easier to talk about food.
‘That sounds good,’ Atherton said. ‘I expect he tucked in to that.’
‘He eat good,’ she said. ‘Always have good appetite, my Yorkos. You would not think to look at him, so tall and thin, but he eats well.’
‘And he had a good lunch on Sunday?’
‘Like I say. His favourite lamb. And apple pie afterwards. I make with raisins and cinnamon in the apple, and Greek yoghurt on top.’
‘That does sound good. So there was nothing wrong with his appetite. And what did he do afterwards?’
She frowned. ‘Cup of coffee. We talk a little. Then I say, Yorkos, you have jobs. Small jobs but a man must do man’s work, like I do women’s work.’
‘What jobs?’ Atherton asked.
‘Fix hinge on kitchen cupboard. Fix tap that drips. Door to water tank upstairs does not close properly. Man’s jobs.’
‘So he didn’t mind doing those things?’
‘Why should he mind? Later I bring him cup of tea, piece of cake.’ She almost smiled. ‘Tell him to stop whistling. He is my good son, but he cannot whistle. Sounds like kettle.’
‘And what did you do in the evening? Did he go out?’
‘No, we watch TV, he does his knitting. I fall asleep, maybe, a little,’ she admitted.
‘He did knitting?’ Atherton asked.
She gave him a look. ‘Yes, knitting. Is not bad thing. In Greece all mens knit. Since he was little boy he made things. Made scarf for his poppa when he was six. He was making me sweater for my birthday.’ Suddenly the realisation came back to her, her lips trembled, her eyes filled shockingly with tears. He would never finish that sweater now. In small things death is biggest.
Atherton pushed in the next question before she disintegrated. ‘Did he have a newspaper delivered to the house?’
She shook her head, looking dolefully at him, like a dog unjustly punished. ‘No newspaper. Why you ask?’
‘On Monday, did the post arrive before he left?’
‘What post?’
‘The mail. Letters.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘All rubbish in post – junk mail, he calls it. But it never come before afternoon.’
‘Did he have a telephone call before he left for work?’
‘No, no telephone.’ She looked away from him now, the hopelessness sinking over her like a blanket of fog. ‘Phone never ring any more.’
Another prime image to add to his unwanted
collection, Atherton thought as he went away. The undisturbed dust gathering over the telephone – the telephone at which the skull of the skeleton at the kitchen table seems to be staring in entreaty.
I need to get out more, he thought.
Jason Conroy had a miniscule but private office in the back set of Shepherd’s Bush Station, whose comforts included a proper coffee maker. He put it on and invited Atherton to sit down.
‘I’ve got quite a collection now,’ he said, indicating the DVD cases lined up along a shelf.
‘A bit of a gruesome hobby,’ Atherton observed.
‘Well, everyone’s got to have one,’ Conroy said imperturbably. ‘Anyway, you never know who might come back asking, as, for instance, yourself, on this present occasion. So, what’s on your mind? You’re not thinking it wasn’t suicide, are you? Because I’ve watched that tape a dozen times, and I promise you he jumps. No one was near enough to push him.’
‘It wasn’t that. But there’s something not right about it. He was perfectly all right on the Sunday night, and he didn’t receive a letter on Monday morning before he left the house—’
‘Who gets letters before they leave home?’ said Conroy.
‘Quite. Nor a phone call. So what suddenly came over him? And that woman, what was her name? Parkinson?’
‘Carole Parkinson.’
‘With an “e”,’ they said both together.
‘She said that she just missed a train, but she also said Peloponnos was already on the platform. So that must mean he let the train go – he could have got on it, but didn’t.’
‘That’s right,’ said Conroy. ‘I saw that on the tape. That’s not unusual, though. They often have to think about it for a bit, gee themselves up for the effort. One bloke – that was before the refurbishment – he stood there and let train after train go. Eventually someone saw him on a monitor and went down and copped hold of him.’
‘Stopped him doing it?’
‘That day, yes. He came back another day, though, and went under.’ Conroy shrugged. ‘They might hesitate, but when they’re determined, they do it eventually. Seems to be a fascination with the loco. It’s almost …’ He hesitated, and looked at Atherton to see if he would laugh at him for being fanciful. Atherton tried to look receptive and unsatirical. ‘It’s almost a sexual thing, you know? They want that loco like … like—’
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