An Untidy Death

by Simon Brett

  ‘I know, but …’

  ‘I’ll text you,’ he conceded. ‘Ma, I’ll be OK.’

  I wished I could believe him. And then he was gone.

  I felt as if part of my body had been wrenched away.

  I couldn’t settle to anything that morning. There were things I felt I should be doing, like going to see Minnie, checking up on Dodge and Mary Griffin. I also needed to check through the clothes I’d taken from Edward Finch’s bungalow and see which should be chucked and which should go to the charity shops. But everything seemed like too much effort. I kept trying to think what more I could have done for Ben. I felt inadequate as a mother, as a person.

  And my mood wasn’t lifted by a call from my mother.

  ‘Ellen, I’ve just had a call from Kenneth.’ Her husband. ‘As he was driving into Chichester just now, he was sure he saw Ben.’

  No point in denying it. ‘Yes. He was down at the weekend.’

  I knew what she was going to say so well that I could have joined in. ‘You didn’t tell me.’

  ‘No, Fleur. It was spur of the moment on his part. I didn’t know he was coming until he arrived.’

  ‘Some crisis?’

  That, too, was predictable. I’d never openly discussed Ben’s mental health with my mother, but she’d somehow got an inkling of it. As she had with Oliver when I started seeing him. Back then she had thought my new boyfriend was ‘unstable’ and that I had taken a risk in marrying him. The wisdom of that opinion was, to her mind, vindicated by Oliver’s suicide. These things were never said aloud between us, but the implication was always there. Perhaps it was part of her acting skill that made Fleur such a mistress of implication.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ I lied. ‘Just fancied seeing his old mum.’

  ‘Didn’t fancy seeing his grandmother,’ she said, piqued. And absolutely in character for her not to repeat the word ‘old’.

  ‘He’s under pressure with an animation project he has to deliver.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ she almost snorted. ‘Well, fortunately, his sister is not so remiss in making contact. Have you heard from her recently?’

  ‘Not for a while.’

  ‘No, I thought not,’ said Fleur with satisfaction. ‘We had quite a long call on Sunday.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Nothing important. Just girlie chat, you know.’

  ‘Mm. And she’s all right?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely fine. So busy. How she manages to cram in so many fashion shows and brand launches and … I just don’t know. And her work as an influencer seems to be expanding too.’

  ‘Good for her.’

  ‘Oh yes. Funny, once we two get chatting, we could go on for hours. It’s often the case, though, isn’t it? That closeness in family relationships can skip a generation.’

  This was deliberately offensive, but I was practised in not rising to such remarks. I let it pass.

  ‘And of course, Jools reiterated her invitation for me to stay with her if I was up in London. Did I mention that to you?’

  ‘You did, yes.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you fancy a spot of lunch at Goodwood …?’

  ‘Thanks for the thought, Fleur, but I do have things to do. I am quite busy at the moment.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘A cleaner’s work is never done, eh?’

  As I said, the call did not improve my mood.

  And it did get me thinking about mother/daughter relationships. Which, of course, took me back to Ingrid and Alexandra. And, nearer home, my relationship with my own daughter.

  ‘Hello?’ Jools’s voice sounded warm and welcoming.

  ‘Hi, it’s Ellen.’ I don’t know when I got into the habit of using my first name with my daughter, rather as I had with Fleur. I’d rather be ‘Mum’, but Jools somehow doesn’t seem to like that. And she’d never called me ‘Ma’. That was a kind of private joke between me and Ben.

  ‘Oh.’ The instant disappointment in her tone was not encouraging.

  ‘Just rang to see how you are.’

  ‘Fine. Fine.’ Sounded reluctant to be talking to me. Rather be doing something else.

  ‘Still busy in the fashion world?’ As I said it, that sounded archaic to me. I wish I could share more up-to-date jargon with my daughter.

  ‘Yeah, all going fine there too,’ she said.

  ‘Fleur told me you’re becoming an influencer.’ I tried to bleach the unfamiliar word of any intonation.

  ‘That’s the plan. I’ve done a few Instagram videos and stuff, but it takes a long time to build up the number of followers you need to make money from it.’

  ‘I’m sure it does,’ I said, already feeling a bit lost, even more detached from my daughter’s world.

  There was a silence, very brief but uncomfortably telling, before I said, ‘And still going to lots of fashion shows and product launches?’

  ‘Oh yes. Actually, I’ve got to be off for one shortly.’

  My fault. I had given her a cue to duck out of the conversation. ‘Oh, before you go, Jools.’ Even now, my instinct was to say ‘Juliet’. ‘Have you heard anything from Ben?’

  ‘No.’ The tone of her reply made the question sound incongruous. How likely was it that she and her brother would be in touch? I still felt guilty about that. You keep reading and hearing of these families where siblings bond instinctively and never do anything without telling each other about it. Juliet and Ben got on fine when they were tiny but, come the teenage years … They were always totally different. Juliet very practical, a problem-solver, more like me, I suppose. She’s got my colouring too. But Ben was always the dreamer. More like his father.

  And when that father commits suicide … well, perhaps it’s not the ideal scenario for family bonding.

  ‘It’s just,’ I said, ‘Ben was down for the weekend.’

  ‘Oh yes. Was he throwing another wobbly?’

  That was how Jools saw it, his mental illness. How she’d always seen it. Or claimed she’d always seen it. I think somewhere, deep down inside my daughter, there’s an empathetic person fighting to get out, but she’d built such a hard shell around herself that it’s a tough struggle.

  ‘No, Ben was fine,’ I lied. ‘Did you know that he’d got a girlfriend?’ I put it in the present tense, though I was rather afraid it might not be.

  ‘Yes, I heard that.’

  ‘From Ben?’

  ‘From Fleur.’

  That was predictable. ‘Incidentally,’ I said, ‘Fleur’s very chuffed that you’ve invited her to stay in the flat when she’s in London.’

  ‘Well, it’s not a problem for me. There’s plenty of space.’ Realizing she’d inadvertently given herself a cue, Jools said, ‘And, of course, if you were ever up in London and needed a bed …’

  Rarely had an invitation sounded more reluctant. I contented myself with saying that the demands of SpaceWoman meant I was not often in London.

  ‘All well with the flat?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Fine. And yes, Ellen,’ she said wearily, as if by rote, ‘I am very grateful to you for putting up the deposit so I could buy the place.’

  Of course, that wasn’t why I’d mentioned it. But Juliet always had been hypersensitive to anything she might interpret as criticism.

  I knew I wasn’t going to get any further in terms of rapprochement. That day. One day maybe …? I wasn’t holding my breath.

  ‘Anyway, you’d better get off to your fashion show or whatever it is.’

  ‘Sure. Good to hear you, Ellen.’

  ‘You too, Jools.’

  I had cut out and kept the Ingrid Richards obituaries. I went back through them. I don’t know what I was looking for but had the nagging feeling I was missing something.

  The post-mortem findings showed that Ingrid Richards had ingested Zopiclone. Having lived with someone who was a suicide risk, I couldn’t put her in the same category. Like me, Ingrid didn’t have a self-harming bone in her body. Her energy and, yes, lust for life made such a
n outcome impossible. Which meant her death must have been murder.

  Since I had first reached that conclusion, her daughter had been shaping up as the prime suspect. But now Alexandra herself had turned the spotlight on to her ‘new man’, Walt Rainbird.

  His presence in Brunswick Square on the night of Ingrid’s death was, at the very least, surprising. From what Alexandra had said, she had not even mentioned her mother’s existence to him. So, he must either have done some research through his girlfriend’s papers, or possibly followed her car that evening from Hastings to Hove.

  Walt was an arrogant little tick who prided himself on being able to sort out Alexandra’s problems for her. But would he have gone as far as eradicating what he saw as her main problem, her mother? Did he perhaps have murderous bones in his body?

  Before I pursued that line of enquiry, though, I wanted to find out more about Ingrid Richards’ life and career. Hence the obituaries.

  One detail which hadn’t registered with me before was that Ingrid had come from a very wealthy family. Her father had made a great deal of money in property, buying cheap during World War II, and watching the profits accumulate thereafter. He’d died in the 1970s, though Ingrid’s mother had survived till 2016. Ingrid was an only child, so presumably the legacy which Alexandra received was a considerable one. Why the money had skipped a generation and not gone to Ingrid herself, I don’t know. Perhaps she had disapproved of how her father made his money and wanted nothing to do with it? Too independent to be funded by inheritance? She’d wanted everything she possessed to be the product of her own efforts?

  Or maybe she had persuaded her mother to draw up a will that would fund her granddaughter for life? Thus freeing Ingrid to wash her hands of that responsibility? As she had, it must be said, washed her hands of many of her other maternal obligations.

  No means of knowing. Pure speculation on my part.

  The other thing that struck me for the first time from the obituaries was a coincidence of dates. Nineteen eighty-six. A lot of things seemed to have happened in 1986. It was then that Ingrid Richards and her cameraman Phil Dickie had been injured by shrapnel from the car bomb. It was also in 1986 that Niall Connor had achieved the career-changing coup of rescuing Paul McClennan from Hezbollah. Which placed both of Alexandra’s parents in Beirut at the same time.

  Was it stretching conjecture too far to think that might have been when their daughter had been conceived?

  Alexandra herself might be able to confirm that but I didn’t feel inclined to ring her. I hadn’t yet sorted out in my head where she and Walt stood in the suspect stakes.

  But, of course, there was one other person who had maybe witnessed events in Beirut in 1986. The cameraman, Phil Dickie.

  I had no idea even whether he was still alive. None of Ingrid Richards’ obituaries confirmed that, though the implication was that he’d certainly survived the injuries received from the car bomb. But there was no other reference to him. Phil Dickie seemed to have vanished off the radar. Though sharing the same risks, cameramen don’t have the kind of profile that reporters do.

  When it comes to tracking people down, there’s probably never been a better time in human history. I started with social media. I’m not very keen on it as a concept, but I need a presence on Facebook and LinkedIn for professional reasons. SpaceWoman gets quite a lot of enquiries and bookings that way. Mind you, I’ve never posted anything personal. I only share my life with people I want to share it with. And, though I’m far from reclusive, there are few of those.

  Several Philip Dickies listed on Facebook, but none fitted the profile. Though it was entirely possible that the cameraman had moved to Cincinnati or Rolleston, New Zealand, those two candidates were far too young to have been filming in Beirut in 1986.

  So, I moved on from social media to a general search. As is so often the case when you go online, the initial results were not promising. The juxtaposition of the two words ‘Philip’ and ‘Dickie’ yielded a surprising number of the results about Lord ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten of Burma, uncle of Prince Philip.

  Then I got entangled in a stream of references to the science-fiction writer, Philip K. Dick.

  After a good few more false leads, I did eventually find something. ‘Philip Dickie Family Films’ said the website. It gave a studio address in Dorking, Surrey. The company offered a service converting cine film to DVD and other media. ‘Preserve Those Memories and Play Them Back at Will with the Latest Technology.’ They did editing, too. ‘Package your Past into a Professional Standard Documentary to Delight Family and Friends.’

  It wasn’t a lot to go on, but at least it was related to film. Presumably, the technology had changed considerably from what a cameraman might have been using in 1986, but it was the kind of work that someone invalided out of more active filming might be able to do. It was worth a punt.

  On the ‘Contact’ page of the website there was an email address and a mobile number. In my experience, people are much more likely to answer texts than emails. I sent one, reading: ‘Please ring me about Ingrid Richards’ death. I am not a journalist.’ I gave my name but no reason for my interest in the case. If I was contacting the right Philip Dickie, he would either be intrigued and want to talk to me. Or, more likely, he wouldn’t.

  My little online excursion had only lasted half an hour. But at least it was half an hour when I wasn’t worrying about Ben.

  I cooked an omelette for lunch and in the afternoon forced myself to be more positive. The clothes which had belonged to Pauline Finch were still in the back of the Yeti. I got the boxes into my front room and went through them. One pile for recycling, the other for hardly worn stuff that could go to the charity shops.

  There’s quite a broad range of charity shops in a city like Chichester. It has more than its fair share of wealthy, well-meaning older women to staff them. Local prosperity also ensures that the quality of second-hand clothes available is remarkably high. Designer labels at knockdown prices. They do good business.

  And, though I would never have told Edward Finch, his late wife’s wardrobe wouldn’t be of interest to the snootiest of the charity shops. Too much Marks & Spencer, Next and Country Casuals. Which is not my style either, though for different reasons. When I’m not wearing my blue SpaceWoman livery, I just slop around in jeans and T-shirts (much to the disgust of Fleur and, when she’s around, my fashion-conscious daughter Jools).

  Anyway, I’m an expert on the local charity shops. I have a lot of dealings with them and I know exactly what they will accept or reject. So, after a quick visit to the recycling bins, I targeted the right shops and offloaded the rest of the late Pauline Finch’s wardrobe.

  I was nearly home when the mobile pinged. I didn’t check it till I was in the house, imagining Ben sending me up again about my unwillingness to use the phone in the car. It was a text from him, saying he was back in Nottingham. That’s all it said, though.

  I had one call that evening. I was hoping it would be Phil Dickie. It wasn’t. The voice at the other end of the phone identified herself as ‘Cara Reece, Eddie Finch’s friend.’

  I thought that, bar sending the invoice, my duty in that area was all done, but Cara said, ‘I’m afraid Eddie’s in trouble again.’

  TWENTY

  I didn’t sleep well and faced the Wednesday morning blearily. Yes, it was mostly worry about Ben. But also trying to impose a pattern on the shattered jigsaw of ideas about Ingrid Richards’ death and the possible involvement of Alexandra and Walt. The one person I didn’t worry about in my wakefulness was Edward Finch.

  But when I got up, though, I realized his was the one area of my troubled life where I could take some positive action. Cara’s phone call had left me in no doubt that, like it or not, I had to pay another visit to the Lancing bungalow.

  I have a kind of rule that, except in special circumstances, I don’t make work calls until after nine thirty. I’m not interested in other people’s morning routines, but I reckon that gives the
m long enough to have completed them. I’d call Edward later.

  I found I was sitting in the kitchen over my second cup of coffee and feeling sorry for myself. Having witnessed depression first-hand from husband and son, I know I’m not a depressive. But that doesn’t stop me from getting down. Non-depressives have a right to feel down too. The only difference is that when we feel down it’s for a reason.

  And I know, for me, the only way to get up again is to do something. Preferably something that involves helping someone else. It may sound pious but it’s true – the best way to stop thinking about yourself is to think about others. Maybe I should embroider that on a sampler and hang it on a wall somewhere …?

  I rang the care home and said I’d visit Minnie at ten.

  She was getting weaker. It was sad to observe, every time I saw her, how much closer the skin was to the bone. And the sequence of strokes had left Minnie’s movement severely impaired.

  But she was remarkable. She still somehow managed to read. The local library was good at keeping her supplied with books – one of the librarians delivered them to the care home personally. And it went without saying, they were all about London.

  As I had intended, the visit did have a therapeutic effect on me. On Minnie too, I hope. She made me think, as I sometimes do, of the randomness of death. Here was an old woman I didn’t know very well, but whose company I enjoyed. And, probably within a few months, she would no longer be around. I wouldn’t feel exactly grief or bereavement, as I would with a close friend or a family member, just a sense of absence. Why did Minnie have to die?

  On the plus side, I left the care home that day knowing that ‘to walk penniless in Mark Lane’ meant to have been swindled. That ‘bunny’ once meant ‘talk’ in Cockney rhyming slang, apparently from ‘rabbit and pork’. Which sounded pretty dubious to me, but then I would never argue with Minnie’s sources. I also discovered that a ‘kingsman’ was an outsized coloured handkerchief worn by costermongers. Though I couldn’t think there’d be many occasions when that would come up in conversation.