Drown My Books

by Penny Freedman

  So this takes me to Simon Gates, and he is certainly worth an asterisk. That man is a bully: his children are scared of him and I happen to know, because I’m the kind of person people tell things to, that his first wife divorced him on the grounds of cruelty. Also he drinks in the pub with the old codgers and, no doubt, shares their attitudes. Horrid Harry, our neighbour, is one of the codgers and Simon is pretty thick with him – given to blokey chats over the fence. Simon doesn’t like the book group and it is just possible, I suppose, that he could have got himself involved with Kelly. Kelly was plain, dim and sour-tempered, while Alice Gates is pretty, bright and nice, so it seems improbable, but there’s no understanding men. I put an asterisk against Simon’s name.

  I had, in my mind, ruled out the old codgers because, although their stupid remarks irritate the hell out of me, I couldn’t think of them as ruthless killers. There are three of them, including Harry – the other two going by the inventive names of Chalky and Taff – and they are all in their seventies and not spry for their age, so they are unlikely candidates all round. There is George, though, I realise suddenly, as I visualise the corner where they hang out of an evening. George Mead is the landlord of the pub, the man who labelled us The Broomstick Brigade. He is a thick-set man, in his fifties, I suppose, with the ruined complexion of a drinker and a head of extraordinarily inauthentic black hair. I don’t know if he ever had a wife but he doesn’t have one now. The black hair suggests that he’s a vain man; could he have been seduced and then dumped by Kelly? Then another thought comes to me – one that is enough to produce a sort of nervous fizz in my brain. Lily died while she was cleaning the pub windows. Didn’t Jack say that George was there when he ran round to the back of the building after he heard the crash of the ladder falling? I write down George Mead and put a box round it. I haven’t lost sight of what Eva told us the other night: It was clear to me that Jack does not think that Lily’s death was an accident. Paula pooh-poohed the serial killer scenario on the grounds, partly, that anyone who hated the book group would pick me off first, as the most eminently infuriating member of the group, but it is a question of opportunity, isn’t it? I’m actually quite hard to get rid of because I generally have a dog with me – a mild-natured dog, in actual fact, but with a distinctly threatening demeanour. It is possible that someone killed both Lily and Kelly simply because they had the opportunity.

  Opportunity. Well, the killer obviously had to know about Kelly’s morning swim habit, but that doesn’t narrow the field much because nothing much goes unnoticed in our cosy hamlet. Matt obviously knew about it, and so did Simon Gates, presumably, since she jogged past our houses every morning, and he could well have told George and the codgers about it. On the other hand, Don Dering and Peter Harper are less likely to have known. They both live inland and though their wives knew about it, as everyone in the book group did, they aren’t gossipy types. And Farid knew about it, I’m pretty sure. He must have seen her sometimes when he returned my bike early in the morning. I’m not going to think about that yet.

  Knowing that Kelly would be there wasn’t enough, of course; you would need somewhere to wait and take her by surprise. This bit of thinking can’t be done from my armchair. I drag myself away from the seductive embrace of the woodburner, pull on my anorak and push open the front door into the gusty, darkening afternoon. I walk along to the end cottage – Jack Terry’s – and walk a little way up the passageway that runs beside it. This, I am sure, is the route Kelly used to take. It’s the way I always walked to the shop, the obvious route. I turn and walk back onto the pavement and across the road to the sea wall. I stop there, more or less exactly where Kelly must have gone over the wall, and I see a problem. Running out of the passageway and heading for the steps at the other end of the terrace, wouldn’t it have been natural to cross the road at slant, in the direction of the steps, especially at that hour of the morning when there would have been no traffic on the road? In that case, she wouldn’t have stood opposite the end of the passageway at all. Come to think of it, she wouldn’t have stood anywhere. She was jogging, wasn’t she? And pushing a moving target over that wall would have required strength, speed and surprise. Someone would have needed to hide and then take a rush at her. A male someone almost certainly. But she wouldn’t have ended up where she did; she would have been nearer the steps. And Caliban and I would have heard something. I have to rethink this.

  Did someone waylay her as she came out of the passageway? Someone she knew, who greeted her and then gave her a shove? I try to imagine it. From a standing start and facing her it would have been very difficult to push her over, wouldn’t it? She was strong from all that swimming; wouldn’t she have pushed back? Surely she must have been pushed from behind, but why would she have been standing there? I stand and look out to sea myself and a memory edges in. When the children were small, and Andrew was still around, we rented a cottage on the Sussex coast for a fortnight one summer. It was virtually on the beach. You opened a gate at the end of the garden and stepped straight onto the pebbles. It was great for swimming because you could get into swimming costumes in the house and then run down onto the beach. Except no one ever, I think, just ran out and straight down into the sea. You always stopped and took in the sea for a moment, assessed its roughness and the state of the tide and looked for other swimmers. Wouldn’t Kelly have done that, too, before turning and running to the steps?

  I know where the most likely hiding place would be for a waiting killer. There is a side gate into Jack’s garden from the passageway and I don’t think it is ever locked. I don’t think Jack and Lily locked anything; friends and band members seemed to let themselves in and out at will. You could lurk there, listen for Kelly running by, rush across the road and surprise her with a hard shove. And, I have to admit, a woman could have done it.

  In theory, at any rate, though when I consider the members of the book group – who have to be considered first because of the book connection – they seem most unlikely candidates. Eva can certainly be ruled out as too frail, and Lesley and Lorna, though fit and healthy, are women in their fifties and no match for a strong young woman, even with the advantage of surprise. Which leaves, Dora, who had a motive of sorts but is tiny, and Alice, who seems, suddenly, alarmingly possible. She would certainly have been aware of Kelly’s morning routine and could have watched her out of one of those angled front windows any time. And she would have known about the open gate from the passageway. If Kelly had threatened her marriage, could she have done it? She is quite a steely young woman, and now she has disappeared. Keeping out of the way while the police blunder off in another direction? I go indoors, add her name to my list of suspects and put a box round it. Then I make another pot of tea and think some more.

  The books. Those are what Paula and her crew seem to have forgotten about now they have found a stellar suspect in a dodgy asylum seeker who was heard to threaten the victim just days before she was killed. What possible reason would Farid have had for leaving a copy of The World’s Wife beside her body? His grudge against her was specific – she had informed on him and Dora – so the turning-men-to-stone theme was irrelevant for him. And where would he have got the book from, since Dora’s book was still safely in her briefcase? Well, I know what Paula’s answer will be to that: she will say that it was my book. Borrowing my bike, popping in for cups of tea, generally making himself at home, she will say, he had opportunities galore to pinch my book. You will notice that my musings have moved from the conditional to the indicative; I am considering what Paula will say. You are right. I am going to have to ring Paula and get her to look at this. Has she even taken the surviving copies of the book to be examined? I didn’t go in to the library while Freda was with me, so I don’t know. I pick up the phone. It is Lesley who answers.

  ‘Lesley,’ I say, after the usual preliminaries, ‘have the police taken the copies of The World’s Wife away?’

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘but
Lorna has put a DO NOT TOUCH notice on the box.’

  ‘Right,’ I say. ‘I’m going to make a phone call. If I get arrested, will you make sure Caliban and Ariel are all right?’

  She laughs. ‘Who’s going to arrest you, Gina?’

  ‘Detective Inspector Powell. She has warned me off interfering in her case.’

  ‘Then don’t interfere.’

  ‘It’s not so easy. Young lives depend on me and I am beset by guilt.’

  There is a brief silence. ‘Have you been doing a bit of daytime tippling?’ she asks. ‘The dark winter afternoons getting to you?’

  ‘Sober as a judge. Soberer than many, I imagine. They’ve put Farid Khalil in the IRC.’

  ‘Dora’s secret boyfriend?’

  ‘Yes. They took him in for questioning about Kelly, and then spirited him off to the IRC. I think they’re determined to pin her death on him.’

  ‘It’s a terrible place, the IRC. I used to go in there sometimes for work.’

  ‘Lesley,’ I say. ‘That’s brilliant.’

  ‘Brilliant how, exactly?’ she asks.

  ‘I need to get to see Farid and I don’t know how to do it. But you know the ropes.’

  ‘I’m not a social worker any more, Gina. I don’t —’

  ‘Yes, you do. Come for coffee tomorrow and we can talk. If DI Powell hasn’t taken me into custody. In which case you’ll find a hungry cat and dog and the key in the hanging basket by the front door.’

  I ring off and, without giving myself time for second thoughts, I pick up Paula’s card from beside the phone and dial. She is about as unfriendly as I expect her to be. She recognises my voice immediately and says, ‘What do you want, Gina?’

  I had intended to be emollient, to win her by a combination of reason and tact to see the error of her ways and come round to my way of thinking, but I hear myself say, instead, ‘The books, Paula. Why aren’t forensics onto them? Why are they sitting in the library office getting contaminated?’

  ‘Gina, have you actually got any information for me or have you just rung to harass me, because I have to tell you –’

  ‘Yes, I have got information for you. You are way off track. You think you can pin the murder on Farid Khalil because he’s an asylum seeker and defenceless, but you won’t find the real killer unless you find out whose book it was that was left on the beach.’

  ‘Well, we don’t actually think the book is of much importance, Gina, but we know whose book it was, anyway. It was yours, wasn’t it? Khalil had several opportunities to take it from your house. Or did you give it to him?’

  What did I tell you?

  ‘And the other books?’ I ask. ‘How did he get hold of those? Eva Majoros’s, Lesley Harper’s, Alice Gates’s? We don’t even know whose books we’ve got in the box, do we? We don’t know what kind of game has been going on. I don’t understand why you haven’t taken all our fingerprints and checked them out. We’re all willing to have our prints taken if it will help to find the actual killer rather than a convenient scapegoat.’

  ‘What did I say to you, Gina?’ she asks. ‘Didn’t I warn you about involving yourself in this investigation? You are treading on such thin ice, you really —’

  ‘You threatened to prosecute me for tampering with evidence because I brought the book in off the beach. Now you’re saying the book isn’t important. You can’t have it both bloody ways, Paula.’

  There is a short silence. ‘Oh yes I can,’ she says.

  Chapter Twelve

  THE BLIND ASSASSIN

  Wednesday 19th February and Thursday 20th February 2014

  Eva

  Eva Majoros drove sedately into the designated parking space in front of the library and came to a halt. She gave the handbrake an extra tug for safety’s sake and climbed carefully out of her car. She locked the car and walked circumspectly across the few icy yards to the library doors, taking short steps in her high-heeled, fur-trimmed boots. They were unwise footwear for these conditions, she knew, and her bossier friends – Gina and Lesley, in particular – would tell her off if they could see her, but they were really only small heels and if she had to start plodding about in clumpy flats then she might as well just give up – throw in the towel, give up the ghost, call it a day – she liked those English expressions.

  Safely at the door, she turned and flashed her key at her car to be certain that she really had locked it, then put away the car key and drew out the library keys from their designated pocket in her handbag. This – just these few moments – were what she didn’t like about doing this evening duty at the library. Otherwise, she quite enjoyed it. It was just on Wednesdays that they opened in the evening and she and Gina were happy to manage these evenings between them; people with families were not so keen. She turned the key in the lock, forcing it through the point where it always stuck, and then, as the door swung inwards, she groped to her left, found the light switch, and flicked it down. As light flooded the room, she let out a breath. Done. All well. She turned the notice on the door to Open and closed it behind her.

  Walking through to the issues desk, she considered taking off her coat but decided it was not warm enough yet. She went into the office, where she took off her hat, examined herself in the small mirror on the wall and tidied her hair. She looked round the room, noticed that the box of copies of The World’s Wife was still there, considered looking inside to see if any more books had turned up, decided to heed Lorna’s DO NOT TOUCH message on the lid, switched off the light and went out.

  She looked at the clock on the wall – a traditional school clock with Roman numerals. It was just seven o’clock. Seven-thirty to eight-thirty was the time most people came – half a dozen of them at most, probably. She checked the pile of reserved books and saw that a couple of them were for Wednesday evening regulars. Then she turned her attention to the returned books trolley. She organised the books into Dewey Decimal order and proceeded round the room, returning them to their places. This was always a pleasure. She liked to think about people reading the books and she liked the orderliness of putting them in their allotted places. There was nowhere as comforting as a library if you were a person who liked order.

  When she got to the far end of the room, she decided she would have to go to the lavatory. Cold weather and old age, she thought irritably. A fatal combination. It would be better to go now, before anyone arrived, but it was such a performance. Berating herself in Hungarian, she took the bunch of library keys out of her bag, unlocked the door at the back of the room, waited for the security light to come on and crossed the corner of the school playground to unlock a side door of the school and use the staff lavatory. Then, locking doors carefully behind her, she returned to the library.

  It was still empty but there was something in the atmosphere – a hint of cold, fresh air – that made her pause and listen. Nothing. She took up her trolley from where she had left it and proceeded on her way round the room. It was when she got back to the desk that she saw that the office door was open and light spilling out of it. Had she not turned it off? They were as careful as they could be about the lighting and heating; as it was the electricity bill ate up most of their small grant. She felt certain that she had turned the light off but she was getting frighteningly forgetful – a stupid old woman. ‘Buta öregasszony,’ she muttered as she trotted to the office door and pushed it open.

  She was never able to describe properly what happened after that. She caught just the briefest glimpse of scattered books, and then ‘Like a whirlwind‘ was all she could say. ‘Not even like a person. Just a force. And down I went. Pouff!’ But it was a person, of course, she knew that. She caught a whiff of something familiar and human, heard him run out and the library door slam behind him, felt the blast of cold air from outside as she lay with her head under the desk, feeling no pain as yet, only the roughness of the cheap carpet o
n her cheek.

  The pain came as soon as she tried to move. It was a deep wrenching pain in her arm that made her gasp and brought on an alarming loosening of her bowels. ‘Not that,’ she prayed. ‘Dear God, not that.’

  It was, surprisingly, Jack Terry who found her and he was, as she told the police officer later, very kind. He phoned for an ambulance, took his jacket off and put it over her because she was shivering, turned the notice on the door to Closed and dispatched a couple of people, who tried to come in all the same, with ‘Piss off. There’s been an accident here.’ Then he sat down on the floor beside her, lifted her head in its awkward position under the desk so that she could take a few sips of water and talked to her, quietly, until the ambulance arrived. He told her he had come in looking for one of the graphic novels he liked. He wasn’t much of a reader, he said, and he didn’t have a library ticket of his own, but Lily used to get one out for him on her ticket sometimes, and he’d hoped he could get one this evening because he wasn’t sleeping much and it would help to pass the time. ‘Better than the bottle,’ he said. ‘Been doing too much of that. Lily’d be furious.’