Take My Breath Away

by Martin Edwards

  ‘All I want is a few answers.’

  ‘Bollocks. You just like asking questions.’

  He laughed. ‘Are you going to give me her number or not?’

  ‘All right, you win, she works at Broadcasting House. Ask the switchboard for Caron Isley and they’ll put you through.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He paused. ‘I’ve split up with Phil.’

  ‘Thought so.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘You look great. Like a weight’s been taken off your shoulders. So what are you going to do after you’ve interrogated poor Caron?’

  ‘Find somewhere to stay, I guess.’

  She fished inside a desk drawer, took out a fat bunch of keys and tossed them over to him.

  He caught them one-handed, nonchalant as an Australian slip fielder.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re taking in lodgers now?’

  She shook her head. ‘Don’t get excited. When I said I almost fancied you, I was just being nice. Those are Dylan’s keys to our place in Narrow Court. We bought it through the firm a couple of years ago. Part investment, part somewhere to put up candidates coming down to London for interview. Dylan decided he liked it better than that poky hole he used to live in at St John’s Wood, but I didn’t want to sell my share to him. Property prices in Limehouse were going through the roof and it made sense for me to hang on. In the end he pestered so much that I let him move in and pay market rent into the business. We went back to putting candidates up in hotels. Of course, if you’re spooked about living where Dylan…’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s perfect. Perfect.’

  At first Caron refused to meet him. She was alarmed that Lea had told him about her visit to Narrow Court. The police hadn’t been to see her, she said. They must not know what she’d done.

  ‘It was a mistake, okay?’ Her voice conjured up images of long sandy beaches and the Pacific Ocean. ‘I’d had too much to drink, that’s all, and it seemed like a good idea. Just deserts. Of course I never dreamed anything was going to happen to him…’

  ‘I’m only asking for a few minutes of your time,’ he said, soothing as an agony aunt.

  ‘What is there to talk about?’

  ‘It won’t take long,’ he said. ‘Lunch? We can meet at the Langham Hilton, if you like. Then you can forget all about me. And Dylan Rees.’

  ‘I only wish I could,’ she said. ‘All right, I’ll see you at twelve. Twenty minutes. No more.’

  Caron was waiting for him in the lobby when he arrived at the hotel, a skinny figure perched on the edge of a chair, rigid with tension. He recognised her by the Sydney Harbour sweatshirt; she hadn’t mentioned the deep tan or curly shoulder-length hair. A loiter of businessmen by the check-in desk could not keep their eyes off her.

  ‘I’m Nic Gabriel.’

  She said hello in a small voice as she fiddled with a hank of her hair. Nic ordered coffee, but when he suggested a bite of lunch, she said she didn’t want any food.

  ‘I’m not in the mood for eating. Since I heard about Dylan’s murder, I’ve scarcely been able to keep anything down.’

  ‘You cared for him, then.’

  ‘I did once. In a funny sort of way I still do. Despite the way he shat on me.’

  ‘He had that effect on people,’ Nic said. ‘They kept on forgiving him.’

  ‘I’m not saying I forgave him,’ Caron said. ‘At least I didn’t hate him the way that girl did. You know, Amy Vinton.’

  ‘Seems like she never forgave him for causing the death of her sister.’

  ‘Lea Valentine told me about Ella,’ Caron said. She stretched out her legs, starting to calm down. ‘Nice woman, she was kind to me. Surprise, surprise, Dylan and I were seeing each other for months, but he never mentioned Ella at all. He was good at amnesia, right?’

  ‘To him, she was history,’ Nic said. ‘He didn’t believe in regrets.’

  ‘Not all of us find it so easy to turn our backs on the past.’

  ‘At least when you decided on retribution, you didn’t hurt anyone.’

  ‘Except myself,’ she said. ‘I thought it would do me good. Catharsis, right? Instead, the night I took my petty revenge on him, someone else was cutting his throat.’

  ‘What took you back to his flat that night?’

  ‘You haven’t told me yet why you want to know.’

  ‘Dylan phoned me the night before he died. He mentioned the woman he’d slept with at Oxford. I told you, I’m a writer. She’d told him a story he thought would interest me. A story about dead lawyers. Does that mean anything to you?’

  Her face was blank. ‘No.’

  ‘He was going to explain after the party at the House of Lords, but he never got the chance. I want to talk to her, but I don’t know where to find her.’

  She cast an elaborate glance to the Heavens. ‘Surely I’m the last person to be asking? I didn’t interrogate Dylan, didn’t want to be told the gory details. All I knew was that he’d screwed someone else. That was a no-no as far as I was concerned. You were a friend of his, you’ll tell me I was an idiot and he was never going to be faithful to me. Well, for a while I thought different.’

  ‘How did you meet?’

  ‘When he took part in a programme about the recruitment business. I never thought anyone would ever sweep me off my feet, but Dylan did it. He had this knack of making me think I was the only thing in the world that really mattered to him. Bullshit, of course, but I fell for it. I still can’t believe I was so stupid.’

  She moistened her lips and Nic guessed she was on the verge of tears. He knew he ought to stop asking questions that would hurt her, but he couldn’t help himself. He had to find out more.

  ‘Tell me about Oxford – he went on his own, presumably?’

  ‘Sure, for a whole weekend. He said it was a business thing. A meeting, a conference, I haven’t a clue what he was up to. I thought it might be nice to have a look at the dreaming spires, but he told me we’d hardly have any time together. He had to schmooze. That was the word he used.’ As her voice hardened, Nic could hear the bitterness rising to the surface. ‘He was so open and casual about it, I never dreamed he had any intention of fucking the first woman whose path he crossed. The bastard. The utter bastard.’

  She fumbled in her bag for a tissue. As she wiped her cheeks, Nic said, ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘It was a couple of days after he came back. He seemed distracted. I could tell there was something on his mind. I asked him about it, but he fobbed me off. I started wondering what he might have got up to at the conference. When he was asleep, I checked his wallet. On the back of one of his own business cards was a woman’s name and an Oxford phone number. Purple ink, a woman’s handwriting.’

  She lapsed into silence and took a sip of coffee. He said, ‘It might have been perfectly innocent.’

  A pitying look. ‘With two big kisses under her name? I think I was entitled to be a tad suspicious, don’t you?’

  ‘So you confronted him?’

  ‘At least he didn’t insult my intelligence by denying it. He said it was a one-off. You know something? If I’d believed that, I might, I just might, have given him another chance. But like I said, he’d not been himself after Oxford. I could tell she’d made an impact. Why keep a note of her number otherwise?’

  ‘What did he tell you about her?’

  ‘Not much. He said they’d both got pissed together and started doing what came naturally. He tried to say that he needed to keep in touch with her because of some information she’d given him. According to Dylan, she was a basket case. She’d tried to kill herself more than once. I didn’t need to worry, he said, she was crazy about someone else, crazy to the point of obsession.’

  ‘Did he say who she was crazy about?’

  ‘No, and I didn’t ask. I said we were through. He pleaded for another chance. He was so well-rehearsed, it obviously wasn’t the first time he’d said that sort of thing. I wonder sometimes why it took me so l
ong to wake up to what he was really like.’

  ‘So you walked out on him?’

  ‘Yes. I’d been staying over regularly at Narrow Court. Still kept my own bedsit, though. Just as well. After I went back there, Dylan called me several times. I used to keep playing his voice back on the answering machine, listening to him saying that I didn’t understand. Stupid bastard. I understood, all right. Too bloody well.’

  Her voice had risen and a spotty young delivery man who had been eyeing her up from the concierge’s desk glanced hurriedly away. Nic poured out more coffee.

  ‘You never saw him again?’

  Her face creased in self-disgust. ‘I made a mistake, right? He called me, asked if we could have a truce, offered me dinner. Afterwards he asked me back to his flat and like a fool I said yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I was too suspicious for my own good. Early the next morning, while he was still in bed. I checked the last number he’d dialled. Guess what? It belonged to the lady from Oxford. This time I didn’t bother to wake him up. I just scrawled a message on the steamed-up bathroom window. I’ll spare your blushes, I won’t repeat what I said. Not too lady-like, I’m afraid. Then I walked out. Out of his life forever, as far as I was concerned.’

  ‘Did he contact you again?’

  ‘Sure, there were more calls. I never answered. I kept the machine on all the time. I couldn’t bring myself to have a conversation with him. He was the original two-timing creep and I didn’t want to think about him any more, but somehow I couldn’t help it. Each time he rang, it made me angrier. He kept saying it wasn’t the way I thought. As if I was born yesterday.’

  ‘You decided to teach him a lesson.’

  ‘Yeah, well. It seemed like a good idea at the time. You remember that leather coat of his? He cared for it more than he ever cared for me, that’s for sure. Same goes for his bloody laptop. I had this awful worry. What if he kept details of his conquests on there? It made my flesh creep even to think about it. I could just picture him, tapping in the data. Dates, times, places. Positions. Scores. Christ, he could be slimy. When it was over between us, I realised just what a sleazeball he was. I came to my senses. Shame it didn’t happen earlier.’

  ‘So you decided to dump the laptop?’

  ‘Sure. It had to go. I couldn’t bear to think of our time together being reduced to entries in some sort of love rat’s league table. So I went back to his place. It was too easy. I still had the key. The moment I started cutting up his coat, I began to feel better. Then I found his laptop, locked away in a drawer. I could have hugged myself. I thought to myself: this is payback time.’

  Her eyes gleamed at the recollection. Nic could picture her, prowling from room to room, planning what havoc to wreak.

  ‘I took a hammer from his kitchen cupboard and wrecked the bloody thing. When it was useless, I went out on to the balcony and chucked it into the Thames. It was a beautiful evening and I felt as though I had my life back. I could start afresh. Dylan was done for.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘I hate myself now. It’s as if I wished for what happened to him.’

  ‘You couldn’t have known.’

  ‘It was childish of me. I wish I’d been able to put my relationship with Dylan down to experience instead of bearing a grudge. It isn’t healthy.’

  ‘Thanks for talking to me.’

  ‘Sorry I can’t help you any more. I don’t know anything about this woman you’re interested in. Not what she did, not anything.’

  ‘You could tell me her name.’

  ‘Didn’t I mention it? It was Jasmine. Dylan called her Jazz, for short.’

  ‘Why not Jazz?’ Nic asked himself as he paused outside Hamley’s shop window. Inside, toy trains travelled in an endless circuit around a make-believe landscape of carefully painted paper mache. ‘Why not Jasmine?’

  The question fizzed around in his mind throughout the long walk to Limehouse and his new home. Another scorching day in the city and tempers were fraying. Taxi drivers leaned out of their cab windows to bellow abuse at jaywalkers, queuing cars hooted as cyclists freewheeled past them, dossers swore when camera-laden tourists ignored their pleas for loose change. Behind the dark glasses, his eyes were sore and the sun was burning his forehead. He felt sticky and overdressed in his tracksuit.

  The house in Narrow Court provided a strictly functional contrast to the converted Clerkenwell schoolhouse. The decor was chainstore-bland, the solitary design flourish a small wrought-iron balcony overlooking the river. Dylan had made little effort to impress his personality upon the place. According to Lea, his older sister had come down from Porthmadog to collect his personal possessions. She had not left much: a hairy soap cake here, a tin of digestive biscuits there. Presumably she wasn’t much of reader: Dylan’s dog-eared paperback novels remained untouched, along with, improbably, a complete Shakespeare, book-marked with a taxi receipt at the end of the first act of Othello.

  Traces of someone’s existence soon faded after they were dead. From a cursory look in cupboards and drawers, it seemed that Dylan had left nothing which would cast light on his relationship with Jazz or the tale she had told him. The laptop had been his life-support. With that gone, there were no clues.

  He didn’t give up without a fight, it wasn’t in his nature. Caron had told him which weekend Dylan had spent in Oxford and when he rang Lea, she confirmed that her partner had booked in on a conference at Balliol on careers in the law. A check with the college confirmed that Dylan had registered there but they had no record of a female delegate called Jasmine. She must have been a casual pick-up. In the end he had to admit defeat – at least for the moment. Oxford might be a fraction the size of London, but to go there in the hope of tracking down an unknown woman, about whom he knew nothing but her first name, would be the ultimate fool’s errand.

  He stretched out on a sun lounger, sipping from a can of Stella Artois as the sun sank over the spiky skyline. Why not Jazz? Well, Jazz was no stranger to violent death. She had killed a lover years ago, but the guilt had crucified her and she’d confided in Dylan. Later, she’d made him swear not to tell another soul about her crime – or how it was connected with the rich man who burned in Paradise, the giant chopped in half, and the boy who died of shock.

  He wiped his mouth and started leafing through his battered contacts book, punching numbers into his mobile. Time to acquaint himself with the dead. Thanks to Joel Anthony, he had a little more to go on. He hadn’t expected such startling frankness, but maybe it made sense. Joel was smart enough to be aware that something was wrong, without knowing what it might be. Something that threatened the firm in which he’d recently been elevated to partnership. Something, he’d hinted, that might destroy everything he’d worked for – unless someone on the outside started digging.

  Matt Creed, Nic soon discovered, had left no family; his wife had died six months after him and they’d had no children. But Alice Wythenshawe had gone back to her roots and lived with her mother in Scarborough. A few short miles from the town that never was.

  Time for a shower. He closed his eyes and let cold water jets hose away the city grime. Afterwards he put on a fresh pair of boxer shorts and stretched out on the Ikea sofa in the living room. He lay there for a long time, gazing across the curving river. He’d ferried his things here before meeting Caron Isley, but had not had time to unpack. It made sense to keep most of the stuff in cases. He did not intend to stay long. Lea had announced her intention to put the place on the market and she was happy for him to stay until it was sold, but he meant to move on as soon as he had worked out what to do with the rest of his life.

  One option was to quit London, quit city life for good. In fresh surroundings he might even find a subject he wanted to turn into another book. He’d spent most of his earnings from Crippen as well as the proceeds of the sale of his houseboat, but he didn’t need much to live on and he could still make a bit of money from odds and ends of journalism until inspiration struck. If it ever did. Come what
may, he would survive. To start again might be the best thing he could do.

  Nothing bound him to the city except his hunger to learn what Dylan had meant to tell him about the dead lawyers. Why not Jazz? Dylan’s last words had revealed bewilderment as he stared into the face of the woman who would kill him. He had believed Jazz was the one at risk. She had shared a secret with him and she was frightened. Frightened of the man she was supposed to be crazy about? Dylan had seen himself as her saviour. To him it had started as a game, but he’d found himself believing that everything she’d said was true. Poor self-centred Dylan. He’d thought Jazz was in danger, had never dreamed that he would be the next to die.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Roxanne met the postman coming down the path as she set off for work. He handed her a thin bundle of letters which she stuffed inside her bag before breaking into a run for the station. Usually she missed the morning mail, but she’d overslept and was twenty minutes late. She’d fallen asleep the previous evening on the train home and missed her stop. It wasn’t as if she’d had much to drink at Sigmund’s, but so much had happened in such a short time. On arriving home at last, she had kicked off her shoes and flopped on the bed. Next thing she knew, it was ten to eight and she was lying sprawled over the duvet, still wearing crumpled office clothes.

  She’d swallowed a mouthful of coffee, but there was no time for breakfast. On the train, she wondered if it was a mistake. The pangs in her stomach were familiar. They reminded her of what had happened all those years before. Hunger could be a sweet sensation. Seductive. She forced herself not to think about food, or starving herself. Things hadn’t reached that stage, not by a long way.

  At Charing Cross she took a couple of minutes to go to the wash room and give her hair another comb. Dark rings were under the eyes gazing at her from the mirror. She splashed her face with cold water. She must keep her wits about her.

  Hurrying down the corridor to her office, she came face to face with Chloe.