A Murder of Magpies

by Flanders, Judith

  “Altered about Lambert-Lorraine, and your courier. Not about Kit, though. If we believe Conway, he knows nothing about Kit’s disappearance.” I bit my tongue. For the first time, I’d almost used a much more final word about Kit. I realized, suddenly, that he wasn’t coming back. I turned my head and stared out the window again.

  Jake was smart enough not to try and soothe me with false hope. He drove without speaking, and after a few minutes I pulled myself together. Weeping wasn’t going to help. Instead I ran over the possibilities, more as a way of clarifying the situation for myself than anything else. “We have someone who is washing money in two ways: through Eastern European companies, and through property here in the UK. Those may be two separate groups of people, or maybe just one. We don’t know who either is—that is, how high up the chain it goes, or how institutionalized. Is it a rogue employee, or employees, or does it come from the top, run by the companies themselves?” I stopped to think about that for a moment. “Are those the only possibilities? Could it be at a local level?”

  “I don’t see why not, for the property at any rate. The person dealing with the UK market, whether here or in France, could easily arrange for the deals to fall through, whether it’s because the survey shows flaws, or the contract’s not right. According to Nell, that’s all it takes. Whether the invoicing for goods through dummy companies can be done locally depends on whether the buying for Vernet is centralized or not. If every country does its own buying, then that could be a local scam, too. If every store does its own buying, or the complete opposite, if all the buying is centralized in Paris, then things probably become less straightforward.”

  “Which means we don’t know whether we’re looking for people based in Paris or here. Speaking of which, did you ever get any responses to your request for the fingerprints in my flat?”

  “We got responses. France, Spain, and Italy all came through. No matches. Which means either the prints belonged to your friends, or they’re people we haven’t come across before. As you know, I think it’s the former.”

  A thought struck me. “Do you know where in my flat the prints came from?”

  “I don’t, but they will have been logged. Why?”

  “If it’s a door, or the loo, or the kitchen, then it could be anyone. But if it was my desk, or the computer keyboard, then it was me or the burglars. No one except me goes into my office at all. Well, my cleaning lady. But you took her prints, didn’t you?”

  He nodded. “Not standard procedure in the case of burglaries, but it wasn’t a standard burglary. It’s a good point. I’ll get it checked.” We’d reached the flat, and he waited until we were inside before phoning his office. “They’ll dig out the notes, and I’ll have it in the morning.”

  “I’m glad to know you have colleagues.” He raised his eyebrows in query. “Well, except the night I was burgled, I’ve never seen anyone else on this case, and you’re always at the end of the phone. I was beginning to wonder if you were the only officer the CID had.”

  He reached out and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear. “I thought it was a good idea for me to focus on you.”

  “Oh.” I tried not to look shifty. “Are you staying tonight?”

  “I hoped I’d be asked.”

  “I’d love you to, but…” I tried to look fragile and wan. Not my most successful look. “I know we need to talk, but can it wait until the morning? I’m exhausted.”

  “The talking part can wait. As long as you don’t pretend to be asleep tomorrow, too.”

  My eyes widened.

  He smiled. “I’m a detective, remember?”

  If he winked at me, I was going to thump him one.

  * * *

  I slipped out of bed early and went for a run—the first time I’d been out in the morning since my break-in. My running was even less accomplished than usual, but it gave me time to prepare what I wanted to say.

  As I came in the door, Jake was going down the hall to the kitchen. He looked at my red face and said, “My God.”

  “It’s what I look like in the morning.” My tone said, Back off the jokes, buster. I slipped past him to the shower.

  By the time I was out he had the coffee made, and I was as ready as I was ever going to be.

  He said, mildly, “It’s not a firing squad, you know.”

  I concentrated on finding a banana of just the right level of ripeness. “Are you sure?”

  He sighed. “I suppose we have to do this?”

  “If you can see a way for us to continue for any length of time without ever having talked to each other, I’d be interested to hear.”

  He was silent.

  “Me neither. So let’s get this over with. From my side, the situation is like this: I like you, or, at least what I know of you so far. It’s just that I hate your job.” There. It was out.

  He nodded. “Of course you do.”

  “What? You knew?”

  “Sure. Everyone like you does. You want your crimes solved, your cities kept safe, you just don’t want us cluttering up your sitting rooms.”

  “No, wait, that’s unfair. That’s not what I mean. It’s just that the police…” I trailed off. I couldn’t really bring myself to say it.

  He finished for me: “… are corrupt, and violent, and fit up innocent people. Have I left anything out?”

  I was apologetic, but I couldn’t leave it alone. “Apart from the odd death from using illegal choke holds, and shooting people taking their tables to be repaired, and some all-around general brutality, no, I think you’ve covered just about everything.”

  He flushed, but didn’t lose his temper. “And do you think any of these things refer to me?” he asked levelly.

  I didn’t need to hesitate about that. “No. Absolutely not.”

  “So, you think you might not want to have a relationship with me—you might not want to even think of perhaps having a relationship with me—because of the way some, and I emphasize, some, of my colleagues operate?” He paused to let me think about that, and then went on. “I don’t deny that these things happen. I would be an idiot, and I would be complicit, if I did. But power corrupts, and opportunity is a very seductive thing. The people I work with have power, and they have opportunity. If you and your colleagues had this kind of power, how would you all behave?”

  I opened my mouth to reject the idea that a gaggle of editors would ever want to baton charge protest marchers, but he stopped me. “I’m not suggesting violence, because that doesn’t crop up much in your line of work. But if your colleagues were offered bribes, would they all refuse them?”

  I reviewed the people I worked with. He watched me run through the list in my head and nodded. “Yet you work with them. They aren’t necessarily decent because they’re decent people; they’re decent because the opportunity to behave otherwise hasn’t cropped up in their lives. Those opportunities have been presented to some—” he slapped his hand on the table, the only sign he’d given of how angry he was—“to some of my colleagues, and they have succumbed. Are you to blame if one of the editors in your office takes a bribe to publish a bad book?”

  “No, but I am to blame if I don’t do anything about it.”

  “And what does that consist of? Reporting it? That happens. Physically preventing officers you are with from violence? That happens, too. What doesn’t happen is that I leap into a phone booth and rush out in my red underpants to prevent all corruption, all racism, all brutality, everywhere in the force. Is that something you can’t live with?”

  I sat staring at the table. What I wasn’t sure I could live with was that Jake was a reasonable man, with thoughtful, measured responses, and that I would lose most of our arguments. Wild exaggeration and sarcasm, my weapons of choice, weren’t going to be much use.

  I relaxed back in my chair for the first time since I’d come into the kitchen. “I really hate it when you’re right.” I smiled tentatively.

  I hadn’t realized how tense he’d been until he smiled
, too. “I see your problem, but you’ll have to learn to live with it. I’m right a lot.”

  “That’s really come-hitherish.”

  “You want come-hitherish?” He reached across the table.

  “No. Absolutely not. At least, not now.” I jumped up and put the chair between us. “I’m late for work already. OK, what’s the deal? I’m happy to see where things go, but a few details would be good. Boring stuff, like where do you live? Oh, and are you married? We women like to have that kind of information about the men we fall into bed with.”

  “You’re a fussy lot, aren’t you? I live in Hammersmith, and I’ve been there since my divorce ten years ago.” He answered the next question before I had a chance to ask. “One child. My son, Tonio—Antonio. He’s fourteen. He lives with his mother in Lisbon. She’s Portuguese and she went back after we divorced.”

  I made a meaningless motion with my hand. “I’m sorry.”

  He looked away. “I see him once a year. Twice if we can work it out. It’s not what I want, but it’s what I’ve got.” He changed the subject. “I don’t need to ask all this stuff about you, because I know already: single, no children, ex who is an academic, childhood in Canada. You’ve been at Timmins and Ross five years, at Tetrarch before that.”

  I stared at him, outraged. “How many fillings have I got in my teeth?”

  “None.”

  “What? You unmitigated creep! Who have you been talking to?”

  “Who else? Helena. She saw all this—” he waved his arm around, taking in the intangible domesticity of early-morning coffee together—“when she brought you back from the hospital after the break-in.”

  “So she gave you my dental records? What’s the matter with you—what’s the matter with both of you?”

  Jake smothered a laugh. “No, sweetheart, funnily enough we didn’t discuss your teeth at all. That was a guess, that and a knowledge of North American dentistry. Nell just said you used to live with an academic, and she told me about her job in Canada when you were a child. The rest, including the dental work, I figured out for myself.”

  “I’m getting less and less sure about the benefits of being with someone who makes deductions for a living.”

  “Look on the bright side. With most men, you can be in a white rage with them for days, and they don’t even notice.”

  I rolled my eyes, he grinned, and we both went to work.

  * * *

  I had made a lunch date with Kath. If I was going to be known for sleeping with Hot Young Authors, I figured I’d better get as many books as I could before the news got back to the Hot Young Etcs. and my cover was blown. I took her to a very new, very trendy place in Notting Hill called Les Deux. It was so trendy it felt no need to tell us Les Deux What. It wasn’t convenient for her or for me, but we trendy people are willing to be inconvenienced for fashion. I also figured it would be noisy enough that any evasions about my (non-)relationship with Charles Pool could be put down to not wanting to be overheard.

  I’d reread the story in Granta, which had triggered off all the interest in Shapurji Mehta, Kath’s author. It was very good, even better than I’d remembered. The first three chapters of his novel, which Kath had e-mailed over while I was in Paris, were really exciting. Whoever got this book would be lucky, and I was prepared to barter my supposed private life for a chance at it.

  I knocked on David’s door before I left. He was on his way out, too, so I suggested we share a cab. Once in it, I told him that I was meeting Kath to discuss Mehta’s book. He looked amazed, which was downright rude. “I think Ben was expecting to be offered that,” he said.

  “Was he?” I tried not to appear too pleased with myself. “She sent it to me exclusively. If we want it, we need to discuss our offer. I know she’ll want something definite today.”

  David looked hangdog, one of his favorite modes. “Well, Ben…”

  What, I was suddenly in a meeting with an editorial board? With editors who weren’t present, and hadn’t been offered the book? I briefly wondered what you called a group of editors—a chatter of editors? I thought about Ben and revised: a pompous of publishers, definitely.

  “Ben what? Ben hasn’t been offered this book. I have. So let’s forget Ben, because for whatever reason, Kath didn’t think it was right for him.” All my submerged irritation with Ben was in my tone, and David backed off.

  Apart from the interoffice relationships, David knew perfectly well that if I passed on the book it wouldn’t necessarily go to Ben. It would most likely go to another publisher entirely, so he accepted the inevitable. He had read the Granta story as well, and knew how good Mehta was. I had run some figures on projected sales, I’d talked to marketing and publicity, and I knew they thought they could do a lot with it. It could, as Ben would have said if only he’d had the chance, be mega. So David and I discussed how far he thought I should go on my offer. It was big money, much bigger than I paid for anyone except Breda, and with her we knew to the last copy exactly how much each book would sell. Mehta’s was a first novel. It could, we thought, be huge, but it could also fail. In my new guise as literary hotshot I harped on the “huge” side, and steered away from the “fail” part. David and I agreed a sum, and I walked into lunch looking, I hoped, confident and ready to buy.

  First I had to parry Kath’s seemingly idle chat about T&R’s new literary fiction, all designed to let her head oh-so-casually to questions about Charles Pool. Whom I had still never seen. Looking shifty was fine—she thought I was avoiding the subject because I was embarrassed, whereas I was really avoiding it because I hadn’t made up the answers yet. We ordered and then I said, “Let’s get the business out of the way. Then we can have a nice long gossip.” After that she would have sold me her sister.

  I didn’t want her sister, but I did want Mehta. In ten minutes the thing was tied up. There were formalities—she needed to put my offer to Mehta for his agreement, we had to meet, but I could see that the money was what she had been expecting, and she thought the book was mine. Not only that, but we ran through a couple of other things she was going to offer in the next few months, and I got a chance to tell her what I was interested in. Usually with Kath I got the stuff that the bigger spenders had already rejected. It was fun being a big spender myself. Even if it was because I was a baby snatcher.

  Eventually we had to discuss my new tendencies toward adolescents. Fair was fair after all. Kath was direct. She put down her coffee cup and said, “Have you known Charles for long?”

  I looked as shocked as I could manage. “Who told you?” I lowered my voice. “We don’t really want to talk about it yet.”

  Kath was prim. “I won’t say a word. Promise.” Yeah, right. She wouldn’t say a word, she’d say about a million. She egged me on: “I heard Peter was very upset.”

  I tried not to look puzzled. Peter? What the hell had he got to do with it? Then I remembered that in the Gospel According to Miranda he’d broken into my flat in a state of thwarted rage. I tried to sound like I was lying, which was easy, because I was. “Well, we don’t know that it was Peter.”

  Kath was skeptical, so I moved on quickly. “At least, it might have been, but it might have been … Well, it’s just that after Peter I’d been seeing two other guys. One after the other,” I added virtuously. I didn’t want her to think I was a total slut.

  Kath’s eyes bulged. If I didn’t control myself, I’d be telling her that the All Blacks stopped by regularly whenever they played Twickenham, forming an orderly queue down the garden path. I looked at my watch. I really did have to get back to the office, and anyway, I couldn’t keep this up for much longer. Kath had enough to keep the phone lines white-hot for weeks, and I might even get a couple more books out of her. It had been a worthwhile lunch all around.

  As we got our coats she said, “Is the one keeping tabs on you now one of them?”

  “Keeping tabs? What do you mean?”

  She thought I was trying to bluff her. “Come on, the guy near
the door, sitting at the bar. The one who arrived just after you did, who has been looking over here the whole meal, and who asked for his bill as we stood up.”

  I whipped around. It was the thin boy from the LSD. I pulled Kath around so she was between him and me. “Can you just stand there, as if we’re talking, so he can’t see me for a minute?”

  I was going to get books from Kath for life. If she’d had doubts about the Pool thing before, she didn’t now. Here was another man barely into his twenties following me around. Granted, he wasn’t particularly attractive, but no one was following her around. I was a little more concerned.

  I rang Jake, and as usual he answered on the first ring. “Me. Hi.”

  “What’s wrong?” he said immediately. He was right, there were pluses to seeing a detective.

  “I’m in Les Deux in Notting Hill. That guy from the LSD, the one who was in Timmins and Ross yesterday, has followed me to lunch. The friend I’m with spotted him. What shall I do?”

  “Does he know you’ve seen him?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m phoning out of his sight.”

  “I’m in the middle of something and I can’t get away. Go back to your office, by bus if you can so he can follow you easily. Wait there.”

  “I really want to talk to him.”

  “Me, too, but you’re not—not—to approach him on your own. Do you hear?”

  I disconnected.

  I hooked my arm through Kath’s, who was enthralled. I said, “As you can see, there’s a bit of a situation. I don’t think he’ll do anything, but can we just walk past chatting about publishing? I don’t want him to know I’ve seen him.”