A Murder of Magpies

by Flanders, Judith

  His walls were shaking with the noise from downstairs. I nodded toward them. “Does it bother you?”

  He smiled and spread his hands: “They’re young, they’re having a good time. What harm can it do?” He was so benevolent. “Have you been at the party? You’re young, too—you should go out and enjoy yourself more.”

  “I do enjoy myself.” Why was I defending my social life to a man who never left his flat? “I just don’t like shouting. Also—” I broke off.

  If Mr. Rudiger had pushed me, I would have probably shut up. As it was he busied himself with coffee, getting me a napkin, making sure the pastries were within easy reach.

  “There was someone there who I’d seen at the London School of Design last week. It was just a coincidence.…” I trailed away. Mr. Rudiger looked pleasantly interested, but not curious, and that impelled me to go on. “I’m getting crazed now. I keep thinking he’s following me.” I gave a short laugh, encouraging him to agree with me on how silly I’d been. He didn’t, which made me determined to convince him, and me, that this had been nothing but a chance meeting. “I’d gone for a meeting with the rector. It had nothing to do with this boy, who I only met in the corridor for a minute. I’m spooked, but it’s nothing.”

  To change the subject, I filled him in on my trip to Ireland. It was a good neutral topic, and he didn’t seem to mind my change of subject, which relieved my mind. He quizzed me on Breda’s books, and I confessed to our sense of humor failure over her newest, which made him laugh delightedly. “That’s the problem with professionals. They never see what’s under their feet.”

  I wasn’t sure if that was a comment on publishers, or on architects. Or whether it was something else entirely. What were we supposed to be seeing, did he think? Was he seeing a bigger picture, and if so, how? More importantly, why? The comfortable mood that had overtaken me evaporated instantly. Mr. Rudiger looked concerned, like a worried uncle, and said, “I’ve seen the papers.”

  I’d refused to look at them that morning, or put on the radio. I didn’t want to know what they were saying about Kit. On Monday it would be all over the office, and that was soon enough. I didn’t reply, and he went on hesitantly, in formal, old-fashioned phrases. “I know he was a good friend to you. You must feel his loss.”

  The finality of his words washed over me, and I burst into tears. I managed to gulp, “Excuse me,” before I ran back down the stairs.

  12

  I closed the front door behind me and sank down on the floor and cried. After ten minutes I had to stop. No one can cry wholeheartedly for longer. It’s just too tiring. I went into the bathroom and ran a basin of cold water. My face was swollen and pale, and my eyes and nose were red. I looked like the White Rabbit.

  After I splashed water on my face for a few minutes I was more in control of myself, and I stared at my reflection in the mirror, wondering what to do next. How could this be happening to me? I’d always been conservative, cautious. When I was young everything had frightened me. I’d felt as if life was like a play, and I’d come in at the interval. The rest of the audience knew what was going on, while I was the only one who was mystified by the dialogue. As I got older I worked out that that’s what everyone thought. We were all watching the second act of a play, usually one performed in a foreign language. Knowing that made me more confident, but I never became particularly adventurous. I had a quiet, placid life, and I’d enjoyed it that way. Now I was mixed up with organized crime, money laundering, and murder. The reflection that stared back at me was the same ordinary, forty-year-old face. It didn’t look like it had anything more on its mind than work, home, and family—the average cares of average people.

  Maybe that was an advantage. No one had talked to Jonathan Davies’ landlady—or ex-landlady, depending on whose story you believed—since the harassment case a year ago. If she had anything to hide, she wasn’t going to share it with the police investigating an accusation against her ex-lodger. But if an ordinary middle-aged woman arrived, would she let slip something? It would at least be interesting to meet her, and talk to her about Davies. If she truly hadn’t seen him for years, maybe she’d have some ideas.

  I thought about calling Jake, but dismissed it. He’d just sound patient, that would make me cross, and he had enough to worry about at the moment. I googled the address and printed out the map, grabbed my jacket, and headed out for the Tube before I changed my mind.

  Getting from Camden to Shepherd’s Bush by public transport takes determination and ingenuity. It’s almost as if the two Tube lines were designed by sworn enemies, who built the system with the express intention of staying as far away from each other as possible. But then, that holds true for most of public transport in London, and I’ve just learned to go with it. Normally I have a book—a long book—to cover the endless delays, but today I’d forgotten, so unwillingly I bought a paper at the station. I told myself I didn’t have to read it, but when I got to the platform and saw that there were no trains for another twenty minutes, I didn’t really have a choice. I couldn’t stare endlessly at a poster advertising a radio station I wasn’t going to listen to, fronted by a celebrity I had never heard of, parodying a program I had never seen.

  I turned to the front page, and there it was, a picture of Kit taken after a show, chatting to a couple of barely clothed models, and looking like he was having a wonderful time. It was one of the nicest things about Kit—whatever he was doing, he was always sure that at that moment it was the most fun anyone could possibly have. I quickly scanned the story, but there wasn’t anything I didn’t know—police would be grateful for any information leading to etc. etc., and then a rundown of Kit’s career. Nothing about the LSD, nothing about the sexual harassment charge. I didn’t think that would last another day. Blaming the victim, insinuating that he was responsible for everything that had happened to him, always makes a journalist’s day. I folded the page back, and tucked the section under my arm. It was too distressing to read, and I turned to the book reviews so I could get irritated over other people’s authors getting more coverage than mine. I’m better equipped to deal with that kind of thing.

  As we approached Shepherd’s Bush I took out the printout. The entire area is lined with red-brick terraced houses, all built at the same time, to more or less the same plan, row after row, reaching, it sometimes feels, to the end of the world. Roxfield Road was a mirror image of the street before and the street after it. I didn’t see how I was going to find out anything here in this endless procession of anonymity. I couldn’t remember what street number Ian Childs had said the day we met at the LSD, but if there were still JESUS SAVES posters in the window, that would narrow down the possibilities. I walked the length of the street, which was fairly short, and there was just the one house with any posters at all in the window, much less JESUS SAVES: number 9.

  I hadn’t yet thought of an approach when the front window opened and a woman leaned out and said, aggressively, “Yes?”

  I had, I realized, seen her in the window as I’d walked up the other side of the road, so she’d watched me pass by twice. I couldn’t pretend to be lost. I smiled, as though I were pleased to see her, and said, “Are you Gloria Ramsay?”

  She stiffened. She hadn’t liked a stranger looking at the house. She liked someone knowing her name even less. “Who are you? What do you want?”

  She was probably in her late fifties or early sixties. She was top-heavy, solid, and packed into a matching Argyll polyester skirt and waistcoat, with a white, high-necked polyester blouse underneath. I was quite certain there was not a single natural fiber in her entire wardrobe. Her graying hair was cut in a 1950s bubble cut, which she had carefully blow-dried that morning. She looked like a librarian from a movie. A bad movie. No one dressed like that.

  I pretended not to notice her hostility. I looked at my watch. “Gosh, isn’t Ian here yet? Ian Childs,” I added helpfully, looking around vaguely, as though I expected to see him nestled under the sad little excuse for a
lavender bush she had outside her front door.

  It’s hard to say what she did, but she relaxed slightly, as if she’d taken off a mental girdle. “Are you a friend of Ian’s?”

  “Yes.” I held out my hand. “I’m—” Damn. I should have thought about this. Who the hell was I? “I’m Miranda Nicholls.” Miranda wouldn’t mind. She’d think it was a great joke. I hoped. “I was telling Ian yesterday that I’d suddenly had to move—a flood from upstairs, you know—” I had no idea what that meant, but figured neither would she—“and he said that he’d loved living with you. He said he’d spoken to you recently, and you didn’t have a lodger at the moment, so I decided not to waste any time, but to rush right over.” I smiled as winningly as I knew how.

  She was cross, but not worried anymore. I wondered what I’d said that had relieved her mind. “He shouldn’t have given out my name and address without speaking to me first,” she said, grudgingly.

  “Of course he shouldn’t.” I looked righteously indignant, on her behalf. “He said he was going to ring you, but I guess he forgot—and it looks like he forgot our appointment. He was going to introduce us.”

  “I don’t have a room, so it doesn’t matter. It’s let.”

  “What a pity. I was walking up and down the street while I waited for Ian, and I was just thinking what a nice neighborhood this is. I don’t suppose your lodger would mind if I saw the room? It would give me an idea of what was around in this neighborhood. And then if he left, maybe you could call me.”

  She was on guard again. I’d said something that disturbed her. Asking to see the room? Was Jonathan Davies living there after all?

  She didn’t bother to deal with the details of my request. “It’s let, I said,” she said, and shut the window smartly in my face, leaving me to stare at the blank face of the curtains.

  Now what?

  There was a small, gloomy, gray stone church at the corner, with a bench behind a hedge, overlooking a tiny patch where once local residents had been buried, and that now served as a repository for the remains of fast-food meals. I didn’t think that anyone in the house could see me if I sat there. I didn’t know what I could learn by watching, but it was better than going back to Camden with nothing. I tucked myself into the corner, almost sure I was invisible from the road. And then I sat. And nothing happened. Being a detective was fantastically boring, I discovered. I read the newspaper from cover to cover, from the story about Kit, through the competition to win a Blu-ray player, to the ads for denture fixative. Then I stared into space. Nothing happened. I stared some more. I’d been there about an hour and a half, and it was cold. No one had come in or gone out of number 9; hardly anyone had walked along Roxfield Road, and none had stopped; no cars had stopped there, either. In fact, so little had happened that I was beginning to think that was suspicious, too. Slowly, lights were going on along the street, and I could see through the windows of the houses on either side of Gloria Ramsay’s, to families that were eating dinner, watching television, talking on the phone. No lights went on in number 9. If Gloria was sitting in a backroom, I’d expect to see some reflected light spilling out into the hall and through the fanlight above the door. There was none. The house looked empty. Interesting. If you stretched the meaning of interesting. A lot.

  I tilted my wrist toward the streetlight to check the time for the tenth time in ten minutes. I weighed up staying out in the cold and watching a dark house where nothing was happening and which had no known connection with any part of the problems facing me, or going home and having something hot to eat. It began to drizzle. Tough call.

  By the time I got home it was pelting down, and I switched on all the lights and closed the shutters against the dull misery outside before I listened to my messages. There was one from Helena, saying that she’d set up an appointment for us in the morning, and would I please be ready at seven. Irritatingly, she didn’t say what it was. With her, it might be the unmasking of a murderer, or it might be a visit to an art gallery. If I thought she’d be home on a Saturday night, I would have phoned her and yelled. Instead I deleted the message with a particularly vicious jab of my finger. That would show her.

  There was also a message from Jake, saying that he was working that night, and if I had expected him, I should stop; if I hadn’t expected him, he was sorry for presuming. I resolved never to start a relationship during a murder investigation again. It was too complicated.

  * * *

  It was still raining the next morning, in that deadly London way, solidly, unremittingly. There was no sign of letup, and the sky was a flat, low gray. I was looking out the front window, waiting for Helena when she drove up a quarter of an hour early. Luckily, I inherited her time-keeping genes, and I had been ready twenty minutes early myself, so I ran out of the house before she began looking at her watch and drumming her fingers on the steering wheel.

  I kissed her cheek and said, “I hope this is good.”

  “Me, too,” she said, as sourly as I’d ever heard her. “Otherwise I’m going to be struck off.”

  I stared at her with my mouth open. My mother puts being a solicitor—being a good solicitor—before almost everything.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said irritably.

  “How else can I look at you? What do you mean, you’re going to be struck off?”

  “Breaking and entering is generally frowned upon in the profession.”

  “Breaking and entering? You’re going to burgle someone? What are you talking about?”

  “Well,” she modified absently, as she backed down my one-way street the wrong way, “you’re actually going to be the one doing the breaking. I’m only going to enter. As an accessory I might get away with a reprimand.”

  “And I get to go to jail? Excuse me, but what are we talking about?”

  “You won’t go to jail, because I’ll make sure you don’t. We’re talking about looking at Kenneth Wright’s offices.”

  I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t. I was speechless. My mother scribbles over stamps that the post office has forgotten to cancel. She returns 10p to the bank if they balance her account in her favor. She pays back to her firm a percentage for any office supplies she might have used for personal business. Now she was setting out to burgle someone’s office. One of us had lost her mind. “Mother, please. From the beginning, slowly.”

  “It’s very simple,” she said, suspiciously bright and cheery. “I can’t get anything more on Kenneth Wright, and the only way to do so is to have a quick look at his office and his computer. If there’s nothing there, I know enough about computer systems that I can put a cookie in place to track his e-mail and Internet use.”

  I was momentarily diverted. “You do? Where did you learn that?”

  She looked inscrutable. “So we’ll just slip into his office—Philip Mount has an office on the same floor, and I’ve told him I’m dropping by this morning—and see what we need to see.”

  “While your friend Philip Mount holds the door for us?”

  “Darling, don’t be silly.” Silly. I bit my lip. “I told him I’d be there at ten, so you can talk to him about doing freelance libel reading for Timmins and Ross. He’s just starting out, and can use the money. By nine thirty we’ll be standing outside his door, waiting.”

  “And if he’s there already?” I didn’t really care, I just wanted to argue. Burgling someone’s office? What was she thinking?

  “He won’t be. He was at a dinner party last night, and it didn’t break up until after two.”

  Her intelligence was usually good, but this was ridiculous. “How do you know?”

  She looked luminous, as though she’d had at least eight hours’ sleep every night for a year. “Because I was there, too, of course.”

  Of course. I sat back. I was going to burgle someone’s office because my mother told me to. I wondered if the judge would consider that a mitigating circumstance.

  When we got to the office building, Helena signed in,
her usually precise handwriting becoming a little untidy when it came to the time. She smiled at the elderly security guard, addressed him by name, and asked him about his children—remembering their names, too, their school histories, and the sporting prowess of the youngest. Normally I would have begun to wonder about aliens again, but I was numb. With a final, “Good to see you again, Arnie,” she broke away and we rode up in the lift in silence and dropped our wet coats and umbrellas by Philip Mount’s door. Helena thought for a moment and slipped off her shoes, and I followed. If Mount arrived early, he was in for a surprise.

  As we walked down the corridor, I said, “Isn’t Wright going to be suspicious when he sees a broken lock? If he’s as dishonest as we think, won’t that make him check his computer and files?”

  Helena looked at me as if I were mad. “Why would the lock be broken?” She opened her bag and pulled out two pairs of latex gloves and a ring of keys. “One of these should fit. I checked the lock the other day. Put the gloves on first.” My mother could not only recognize different makes of lock, but knew where to get skeleton keys to open them. I didn’t want to know any more. She handed them to me, and repeated, “One of these will fit.”

  I put on the gloves and did as I was told. She was right. The third one opened the door and we went in, Helena locking up behind us, flicking the snib up. “We don’t want any nasty surprises.”

  I couldn’t resist. “Don’t you have Wright’s schedule for the day?”

  She looked at me pityingly. She knew it was an attempt at sarcasm, so she said very gently, “He’s supposed to be going to his son’s sports day. But plans change.” She didn’t wait for a response, and went over to the computer in the inner office. “Try the filing cabinets,” she said. “Look for ones that are locked. Anything in the open is probably not interesting. One of the smaller keys will work. Filing cabinet locks are not very sophisticated.”