An Untidy Death

by Simon Brett

She sounded so needy, it got me thinking about her relationship with Niall. He had a long history of neglecting his daughter. ‘I’ve never seen much of my father,’ as she’d said bleakly at our first meeting. Was it possible that Ingrid Richards’ death might bring them closer together? If it did, the impression I’d got of Niall Connor’s selfishness did not allow me to think the rapprochement would last for long.

  ‘Yes, your name came up, obviously.’

  ‘What did he say about me?’

  I wasn’t about to pass on his remark about her parents having got the family’s allocation of good looks. Nor his scepticism about her ability to help organize the memorial service. I said, ‘He asked if you knew about the memoir Ingrid was writing.’

  ‘And you said I did?’

  ‘Yes. There’s no secret about it, is there?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’ She didn’t sound sure.

  ‘He was also asking me whether you might have any of Ingrid’s research documents.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just that. I don’t know why he thought I might know anything about it.’

  ‘So, let me get this right, Ellen. Niall thought I might have taken some of Ingrid’s research papers? From her flat?’

  ‘I assume that’s what he meant, yes.’

  ‘I wonder what made him think that.’ But she sounded quite pleased.

  ‘Are you saying you do have some stuff?’

  ‘Yes, Ellen. I do.’

  ‘Ah. Well, I got the impression that Niall might be extremely interested in it.’

  ‘Hm … I wonder whether I should tell him what I’ve got.’ She sounded playful now, as if the documentation she had taken might give her some power over her neglectful father.

  ‘That’s up to you,’ I said. I didn’t want to get involved, though at the same time I was achingly curious as to what the papers might reveal.

  ‘Maybe you could advise me …?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you had a look at the stuff I’ve got, then you could tell me whether to show it to Niall or not.’

  Why me, I thought. But the urge to see the stuff was strong.

  ‘If you could come over to my place …’ Alexandra suggested.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Well, this evening. I’m out now, but I’ll be back home by six thirty or so.’

  Back home in Hastings, for God’s sake. I’d already done Chichester to Petworth and back. On the other hand, I was being offered more information about what I was increasingly thinking of as the mystery of Ingrid Richards’ death. And it was a mystery that needed solving. I wouldn’t rest until I knew what had actually happened.

  And if I spent the evening alone at home with a bottle of Merlot, all I’d do would be to worry about Ben.

  I said I’d go to Hastings.

  The satnav must have expected more traffic than there was because I arrived at the address Alexandra had given me soon after six. I managed to park directly outside. It was a small house in the Old Town, probably once owned by a fisherman but now considerably refurbished. And way out of a fisherman’s price range. Hastings had become something of a property hotspot. Still a bit louche, like Littlehampton, but increasingly popular with people in the creative industries.

  The front window had modern leaded panes, double-glazed ones perhaps echoing the outlines of the originals. As I unclicked my seatbelt, I looked through into the sitting room.

  At an open desk in the bay window, a man I’d never seen before was sitting, riffling through a pile of folders.

  THIRTEEN

  He was unremarkable-looking, fortyish, short, with a couple of tendrils of mousy hair trained across his bald cranium. His owl-like round glasses might have looked stylish on someone more prepossessing. He wore a T-shirt with a camouflage design in black, grey, and white.

  My mind was racing. Thinking, inevitably, of the documentation Niall Connor had mentioned. It appeared that he was not the only person interested in what Alexandra had taken from her mother’s flat. Or could the man going through Alexandra’s papers be acting on Niall’s instructions?

  I was undecided for a moment what to do. Almost as soon as we’d met, Alexandra had told me that she lived alone. She’d said she’d probably be out till six thirty. So, it wasn’t unreasonable to conclude that the man in her front room was an intruder.

  It would, however, be ridiculous to call the police straight away. I got out my mobile to ring Alexandra. If she didn’t know who the man was, then appropriate action could be taken.

  But before I found her number, through the window I saw her enter the front room. Her reaction showed that she did know the man who was checking through her papers but also that she was annoyed with him. Obviously, I couldn’t hear what was being said but the mime I was watching appeared to be of a row. Whether the cause of the row was his interest in her files, I couldn’t judge.

  Then the man stood up. He was almost a head shorter than Alexandra. He put his arms round her and kissed her on the lips.

  ‘Ellen, this is Walt.’

  He was once again sitting in front of Alexandra’s desk, with her papers scattered over its surface. I was struck by how in control he seemed in her house. Knees literally under the table. There was about Walt an air of entitlement, even pomposity, at odds with his rather nerdish appearance.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said.

  Walt inclined his head condescendingly towards me.

  Alexandra seemed unrelaxed, anxious perhaps about how I would react to her friend. ‘I didn’t know Walt was going to be here when I fixed for you to come over.’

  ‘Well, it’s not a problem, is it?’ he said. ‘I have a key. I can come and go as I please, can’t I?’

  ‘Yes, of course you can,’ she hastened to assure him.

  ‘That’s what happens when you’re’ – he did that annoying thing of miming inverted commas for the words – ‘an item.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Alexandra.

  ‘Well, congratulations,’ I said, ‘on being’ – I felt an unaccountable urge to send Walt up by doing the same mime myself, but I resisted it – ‘an item.’

  ‘Yes, we’re incredibly lucky,’ said Alexandra. ‘It just happened. We met when Walt came to fix my laptop.’

  That fitted. A casting director looking for someone to play a computer repair man would probably have rejected Walt as too obvious.

  ‘Less than two months ago,’ he said serenely. ‘And we just clicked. Didn’t we, lovie?’

  ‘Yes, we did, lovie,’ said Alexandra.

  This grated on me. What they called each in private was up to them, but I didn’t warm to this public winsomeness. I had very quickly got the feeling that Walt defined the parameters of their relationship. He seemed controlling. Maybe Alexandra was so unused to having someone in her life that she just went along with whatever he wanted.

  Time to move things on. ‘Look, I don’t want to keep you, Alexandra, since you’ve got company. Maybe you could show me the papers you took from Ingrid’s flat …?’

  ‘Yes, I—’

  ‘Just a minute,’ said Walt, addressing Alexandra rather than me. ‘What right has she got to look at your stuff?’

  ‘She’s got as much right as you have!’ Alexandra snapped back, confirming that the disagreement I’d witnessed through the window was about his going through her papers. But as soon as the words were spoken, she backtracked. ‘I’m sorry, Walt, that came out wrong.’

  ‘Yes, it did rather,’ he chided her, ‘but don’t worry. The reason it’s all right for me to look through your stuff, lovie, is because we’re an item.’ He seemed to be fixated on the word. ‘It’s only natural at the beginning of a new and exciting relationship to want to know as much as you can about the other person. There shouldn’t be any secrets between us. That’s why we need to know the passcodes for each other’s mobile phones. What’s yours is mine, lovie.’

  ‘Yes, of course, lovie,’ said a meek Alexandra.

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nbsp; ‘But,’ Walt went on, looking contemptuously at me, ‘that doesn’t apply to her.’

  I’d had enough of this. Looking him straight in the eye, I said, ‘I am here because Alexandra asked me to come and look at some papers from her late mother’s flat. I am a professional declutterer. I know Alexandra because she contacted me about Ingrid Richards’ hoarding habit and the potential fire risk in her flat.’ I turned to look straight at Alexandra. ‘So, either you show me the stuff you wanted me to look at or I will leave.’

  ‘No, of course you must see it … having come so far.’ She reached over Walt’s shoulders to the piles of paper on the desk, and produced a file, once red now faded pink. Then she announced, ‘I feel in need of a drink.’

  ‘Budweiser,’ said Walt.

  ‘Can I get you something, Ellen?’

  ‘No, thanks.’ I’d wait for a large Merlot when I got back to Chichester. I felt a pang. Because, of course, when I got back to Chichester, there’d be nothing to stop me agonizing about Ben.

  Alexandra had drifted through to the kitchen. Walt sat back in the desk chair, appraising me. ‘I suppose it would be easier for you to read that if you sat here,’ he said.

  ‘It might.’

  He nodded, making no effort to move.

  ‘But I could do it perfectly adequately on the sofa,’ I said, gliding in that direction.

  ‘No, no, it’s all right.’ He stood up, gesturing overelaborately towards the vacated chair. ‘You did hear about Ally’s Mum, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course I did.’

  ‘I didn’t meet her. In fact, Ally didn’t mention her until after the news of her death was all over everything.’

  ‘Really?’ That sounded odd to me.

  ‘She said she wanted our relationship to be uncluttered.’

  There, of course, was a word that resonated with me. And I thought, not for the first time, how much of the emotional clutter which surrounded people was caused by other family members.

  ‘I could see her point,’ Walt went on, ‘but I’d have to have found out about her mother sooner or later.’

  ‘Did Alexandra say why she didn’t mention Ingrid to you?’

  ‘Ally didn’t think we’d hit it off.’

  I didn’t say so, but I reckoned ‘Ally’s’ assessment was spot on. The image of Walt swapping badinage with Ingrid Richards was too incongruous to contemplate. I wondered if another reason for keeping them apart was that Alexandra was slightly ashamed of him. Walt was way out of the league of her mother’s high-profile lovers. And Ingrid, I felt pretty sure, was not a woman to suffer fools gladly.

  Another possibility, of course, was that Alexandra was afraid of Walt being attracted to her mother. Even in her seventies, Ingrid Richards still exuded sexual charisma. Did her daughter fear being upstaged yet again?

  ‘From all accounts,’ Walt went on, ‘by not having met her, I’m not missing much.’

  I thought he was missing quite a lot. Ingrid Richards was one of the most impressive women I’d ever encountered. But again, I passed no comment.

  ‘Apparently, she made Ally’s life hell.’

  That was less arguable. Ingrid’s track record on the maternal front had not been impressive.

  ‘Total lack of interest in her. Everything Ally’s achieved she’s had to achieve for herself.’

  It would have been cruel to ask what Alexandra actually had achieved. Working for free for a donkey sanctuary?

  He went on, ‘She was very damaged by having a mother like that. It was deeply harmful to her mental health. When we first met, Ally was totally dependent on anti-depressants and sleeping pills. Her bathroom cabinet was full of Zopiclone. I’ve seen it as part of my role in the relationship to wean her off those. And to undo some of the damage inflicted by her mother.’

  God, the pomposity of the little tick. Seeing things as part of his ‘role in the relationship’. I squirmed inwardly.

  ‘I think Ally’s lack of self-esteem is all down to her mother. That’s why she never had any successful relationships with men – the thought of Ingrid Richards peering over her shoulder all the time. No wonder Ally was still a virgin in her thirties.’

  This was more information than I required – and more than he should have been sharing. But I was surprised about her age. For me, her dowdiness had put her firmly into her forties, if not older. ‘How old is she actually?’ I asked.

  ‘Thirty-six,’ Walt went on. ‘And who knows how much longer she might have continued with her miserable existence of anti-depressants and sleeping pills. It’s just incredibly fortunate for her that she met me, someone who could sort out her problems with her mother, once and for all – a caring man with an understanding of women. I do have experience of women, you know.’

  Yuck. What must he be like in bed? The unwanted image came to me of him tutoring Alexandra in the best ways of bringing him sexual gratification.

  ‘I think,’ he went on, ‘it was destiny that brought us together. I was put on this earth to heal, Ally. It’s still a work-in-progress, but we’ll get there.’

  My inward squirm was now almost physically painful.

  ‘I was much more fortunate with my parents,’ Walt volunteered. ‘They supported me in all of my ambitions. I wouldn’t have set up Walter Rainbird Computing Solutions without their backing. My parents helped me achieve everything that I have achieved.’

  An unworthy cynical voice inside me asked how much of an achievement becoming a computer repairman was. I’m normally more generous than that. Walt brought out the worst in me. And I didn’t mind at all. I had discovered he was someone I was fully prepared to loathe.

  ‘Sadly,’ he went on, ‘both my parents have passed.’

  Another one using the expression I hate. I mumbled some appropriate condolence.

  He continued pontificating, ‘But, even though her mother was such a cow to her, this is still a difficult time for Ally.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. Though I didn’t see much evidence of it. Alexandra’s predominant reaction to Ingrid’s death seemed to have been relief.

  ‘Fortunate that she’s got me to keep an eye on her,’ said Walt, as he too drifted through to the kitchen. Leaving me with the thought that it was a long time since anyone had managed to get up my nose so quickly. Normally, I’m more charitable with people, waiting, giving them a chance to display their approachable side. With Walt, though, I was prepared to make an exception.

  I looked at the faded file. One corner was folded down. When I bent it back, a title was revealed in once blue, now brown felt pen. ‘Alexandra.’

  The contents were pitifully meagre. A birth certificate with a blank where the father’s name could be. A sheet of four machine-taken passport photographs of a spotty early teenage Alexandra, from which one had been scissored off. A tasteless birthday card of cake and balloons bearing the legend ‘To the Best Mum in the World’, inscribed inside with childish letters reading, ‘LOVE ALEXANDRA’. A couple of school reports.

  And that was it. Nothing there to cause Niall Connor any anxiety.

  I looked up from the desk to see Alexandra approaching from the kitchen, gulping from a large glass of white wine.

  ‘You see?’ she said, her eyes sparkling needily. ‘So, Ingrid did really care about me, didn’t she?’

  I put on music in the car on the way back to Chichester. Billie Holiday. One of Oliver’s favourites. I used to joke with him, however bad you’re feeling, listen to some Billie Holiday and you’ll realize that there’s someone worse off than you. Slit-your-wrists music, he called it. Which, as things turned out, was ironic, really.

  The music didn’t distract me as much as I’d hoped, though. Take more than Billie Holiday to stop me thinking. So, trying to keep my thoughts away from Ben, I focused on Alexandra and Walt.

  I was glad for her sake that she had at least got someone. I could not pretend the someone she’d got was to my liking. Horses for courses, though. I knew lots of remarkably successful relationsh
ips between people, neither of whom scored high on the accepted attractiveness scale. But in this case, Walt’s manner rang warning bells. I hoped that Alexandra, who perhaps hadn’t a lot of experience of relationships, knew what she was getting herself into. Being the object of affection for someone like Walt could come at a cost. He was definitely controlling.

  I wondered, though, whether it was Walt’s presence in her life that seemed to have made Alexandra more cheerful. Or was that down to renewed contact from her absent father? Or possibly both?

  And had her improved mood maybe given Alexandra the confidence to confront what she had come to regard as a blight on her life, the existence of her mother? Even to the extent of suggesting an extreme way of solving that problem once and for all …?

  But no. I was going too fast. I was overreacting to the suspicions of Alexandra that Niall Connor had sown in my mind.

  As soon as I got back home, I poured the large glass of Merlot I’d been promising myself all the way from Hastings. Maybe I could distract myself with one of my medical soaps now?

  My mobile rang. I recognized the number as Mary Griffin’s.

  ‘It’s Dodge,’ she said. ‘I think he’s dead.’

  FOURTEEN

  I could see that Dodge wasn’t dead but he was in a bad way. It was by then after ten on the Saturday evening, which meant the streets of Ferring were totally deserted. Buttoned-up and sniffy, the village wasn’t one of the late-night hotspots of the Costa Geriatrica.

  Dodge lay on the pavement between Mary Griffin’s front door and his Morris Tipper. There was blood everywhere.

  Mary had been hysterical when she rang me. She was unable to give a coherent account of what happened. I couldn’t even gather whether she’d witnessed the attack. Whether she’d phoned the police or called for an ambulance. Basically, she was terrified. I’d told her to wait indoors till I joined her there.

  I’d parked the Yeti next to the van and left the headlights on, so that I could see the scene of the crime. And, as soon as I looked at Dodge, I knew that a crime had been committed.

  He had suffered a severe beating. I think most of the blood spattered over his sweatshirt had dripped down from his head wounds. Whether there were open cuts on other parts of his body, I couldn’t see.