Play Dead

by Bill James

  In other words, more or less total bureaucratic, self-serving bollocks and obfuscation, but you couldn’t expect an appointed spokesperson to admit their outfit stank and would be doing everything it could to conceal all rottenness and blight from those two professionally intrusive, virtue-touting, integrity-boasting Cowslip fuckers. And, of course, also from that other professionally intrusive fucker, David Lee Cass, who, however, knew the politesse wrinkles and came in to act sweet and obsequious, pretending that neither he nor the Press officer regarded the meeting as a farce though, in fact, both did. Investigative had its seemly, diplomatic rituals, its creepy arabesques.

  Before seeing anyone, though, he hired a car and went out to take an update look at 14 Davant on Elms. Of course, he’d been here several times during the previous visit. He needed to get, or re-get, what he thought of as the ‘ambience’ of the spot. If he did ever find out enough to write about the present situation for the Epoch he’d want his wholesome prose to evoke the dismal, stark murder setting, most likely alongside a picture of it. Louise would probably admit he did dismal very well, and might agree to stark also, if it was put to her.

  He stood again at the spot on what should some day be a flagstone pavement where Tom Mallen, known as Tom Parry, had lurched when shot, had fallen, had somehow got back to his feet, staggered a few more steps, then took another bullet, had fallen once more and died. It was mud and rubble now, with an occasional small, brave flourish of weeds, just as it had been previously. He bent to look more closely at their leaves. If they’d been there on the night of the killing, might they show some blood stains? That would make a good line in any article he wrote: the classic, observant eye of the reporter fixed on a telling factor; the taint of human villainy on innocent Nature.

  He realized, though, that the idea was mad. Would they be the same growth of leaves now as then? A botanist might be able to tell him, but he had no idea himself about the life cycle of weed leaves in harsh terrain. And, if the leaves had caught some of Tom’s blood, it would have been noticed at the time and the plant dug out, perhaps as a possible exhibit to help prove the detail of his final tumble.

  But then - good God! - he saw a gleam on one of the leaves, a wetness, a bright red streak. Incredible? The leaf was part of a small clump. When he tried to separate it from the rest with his fingers for a better view, he found his hand was smeared not just from the targeted leaf but some of the others in the clump. The plant sort of closed matily on his whole fist and lower arm, like one of those machines to self-measure blood pressure, as if it wanted to declare all-round comradeship - and what did a bit of blood matter; wouldn’t it lubricate the cheery, fellowship gesture? And could this really be Mallen’s blood, out here decorating low-grade foliage for months - unwashed off by rain, untrampled into the ground, still liquid? Had he, Cass, got right through to the, as it were, heart of the murder?

  Cass remembered that, when killed, Mallen had been wearing an ‘I Love Torremolinos’ T-shirt as part of his assumed identity, with the ‘love’ not spelled out but represented by a picture, a picture of a red heart - a picture for the gunman to draw a bead on with his final shot, that coup de grace: a virtual heart but real cascading blood.

  ‘Excuse me, sir, what is it?’

  When Cass stood straight again he saw a woman and a man watching him. It was the woman who had spoken. Cass said, ‘Nothing, really. The leaves, you know.’

  ‘No, I don’t know. What about them?’ she asked.

  She was blunt and commanding. ‘How they survive in such ground,’ Cass said.

  ‘You’ve hurt your hand, sir,’ the man said. ‘We have a first-aid kit in the car. Shall I go and get some antiseptic and a bandage?’

  ‘I think I’ll be all right,’ Cass said. ‘But thanks. It’s not much. A thorn.’

  ‘That kind of thing interests you, does it?’ she said. ‘You’re into flowers and weeds?’

  ‘Environmental matters can be fascinating,’ he replied. He gave this thought some lavishness. ‘So fascinating.’

  She said: ‘I’m Detective Inspector Laverick.’ She had on a dark woollen suit, the skirt to calf length, a navy blouse, tan half-heel shoes. She’d be mid-thirties. She gave a little wave towards the man. ‘This is Detective Constable Ure.’ He was younger - early twenties, maybe. He also wore a suit, grey, two-piece, single-breasted, with a county style, bold, crimson, yellow and tan check shirt and mottled, mauve tie with black lace-up shoes. She said, ‘There was an incident here last night. We’re keeping an eye, hoping to run into witnesses who might be using the estate short-cut today.’

  ‘What kind of incident?’ Cass said.

  ‘We’re not sure. It’s why we’re here. May I ask who are you, sir?’

  ‘Cass,’ he said. ‘David Lee Cass.’

  ‘The journalist?’ Ure said. ‘I’ve seen some of your reports, haven’t I? Investigative? Some just after the death of Tom Mallen?’

  ‘Were you here last night?’ Laverick asked.

  ‘Because of the leaves, or anything else?’ Ure said.

  ‘What happened?’ Cass replied.

  ‘You’re saying, are you, that you weren’t here - if you didn’t know of the incident?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I wasn’t,’ Cass said.

  ‘You weren’t here?’ Ure said.

  ‘What happened?’ he replied.

  ‘An incident,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I got that,’ Cass said. Might this explain the blood? Perhaps, after all, it didn’t date back to Mallen. How the hell could it, idiot?

  ‘Possibly some sort of violence. A member of the public made an emergency call,’ she said.

  ‘You weren’t in time to deal with the incident, whatever it was?’ Cass asked.

  ‘The people concerned had run off, scared by the two-tone, probably. We’re looking for them,’ Ure said.

  ‘You say you were definitely not here last night?’ she asked.

  ‘Definitely,’ he said. ‘I’d remember.’

  ‘Please don’t get smart,’ she said.

  ‘But we don’t know why you’re here now,’ Ure said.

  ‘The house might be an important element if I write something for my paper,’ Cass said.

  ‘Number fourteen as murder house?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s how it’s branded, yes,’ Cass said.

  ‘Because of operators like you,’ she replied. ‘Continually feeding people with references to it.’

  ‘But all that’s old, isn’t it?’ Ure said. ‘People have heard everything there is to be said about the house.’

  ‘It’s germane still,’ Cass said.

  ‘Germane to what?’ she asked.

  ‘The current scene,’ he said.

  ‘Which?’ Ure said.

  ‘He means the two visitors,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, them,’ Ure said.

  ‘But this doesn’t explain you and the weeds,’ she said.

  ‘When you mention “some sort of violence”, what, exactly?’ he replied.

  ‘Possibly fighting - fighting on the floor, where we’re standing,’ she said. ‘Two men. One on top of the other. Almost certainly not sexual. Fully dressed. Not particularly young. One wielding what looked from a distance to be some sort of small weapon.’

  ‘The weapon not really glimpsed at all, but deduced from the arcing movement of the attacker’s arm,’ Ure said. ‘Probably too miniature to be a dagger.’

  ‘Just the same, there might have been injuries,’ she said.

  Blood? ‘But they were able to run off,’ Cass said.

  ‘We’ll take your address, please, in case further inquiries are needed,’ she said.

  ‘I’m at the Mayfield,’ Cass said.

  ‘Oh, like those two,’ Ure said.

  ‘Have you got them under surveillance, then?’ Cass said.

  ‘Are you in cahoots with the pair?’ she replied.

  ‘Cahoots?’ he said.

  ‘Looking after one another,’ she sai
d.

  ‘Looking after?’ Cass said.

  ‘Do you have to echo?’ she asked.

  ‘But they’re police officers. I’m a reporter. We don’t look after each other.’

  ‘Sometimes there are relationships. You have nice chats with them, do you?’ she said.

  ‘What sort of relationships?’ Cass asked.

  ‘Mutuality,’ she said.

  ‘Mutuality?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, hell,’ she hissed. ‘Like, you put only favourable stuff in the paper about them - Harpur, Iles - to help with their careers, and they’ll favour you, on the quiet, with information they’ve collected, which will help your career. Looking after each other, you see.’

  ‘There’s a proper procedure for information given to the Press and media,’ Cass replied. ‘Every police force has an official Press officer.’

  ‘Wow!’ she said.

  ‘You probably have a Press officer,’ Cass said.

  ‘Sure,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll be seeking an interview with him, or her,’ Cass said.

  ‘Her. About the indomitable leaves?’ she asked.

  ‘One can rely on the material from a Press officer,’ Cass replied.

  ‘The horse’s mouth. But this horse can only give you and the other Press folk what has been OK’d by the management. And everyone gets the same. No scoops,’ she said.

  ‘Accuracy is more important than the hunt for scoops,’ Cass said.

  ‘Wow!’ she replied. ‘But just in case there might be something exclusive flying about, you get into the same hotel as those two, right?’

  ‘A coincidence,’ he said.

  ‘Wow!’ she said. ‘If you should change hotels - so unlikely, but just in case - you’ll let us know, won’t you? You’ll have the number of the nick - same as for the Press officer. I’m on extension three-four-one, Inspector Belinda Laverick. Or Detective Constable Gwyn Ure.’

  ‘I might get pulled off the story, of course,’ he said.

  ‘I doubt it. Not now you’ve got yourself close to Harpur and Iles. No boss is going to waste that. And anyway, which story?

  ‘Whatever develops,’ he said.

  ‘This story could cause terrible damage to a good police force,’ she said. ‘Do you ever think what harm you might be doing when you’re chasing your story, and then writing it up in a style to dish out as much harm and injury as you can?’

  ‘I hope your wait’s not fruitless and you get some leads to the people who were scrapping here last night,’ Cass replied.

  ‘The wait hasn’t been fruitless,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’ he said.

  ‘No, we’ve learned you’re here, in the city, doing one of your trawls again,’ she said.

  ‘With a concern about weeds,’ Ure said. ‘And weed?’

  ‘We know you’re under the same roof as the two scrutineers - by a slice of good luck, we hear,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ Cass said.

  ‘What we still don’t know is why you’re around again,’ she said. ‘Harpur or Iles told you they were coming?’

  I’m here following a tip from Daisy Fenton that Maud Clatworthy of the HO wanted to reopen the inquiry. But Cass didn’t say this. ‘Things elsewhere were quiet. The paper doesn’t like me idle,’ he replied.

  ‘Quiet?’ she said. ‘A banking crisis. Terrorism frights because of the Games. Hacking and bribing scandals.’

  ‘The Epoch has specialists to deal with each of those,’ he said.

  ‘What’s your speciality, then?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s investigative,’ Ure said.

  ‘Investigative of what, though?’ she said.

  ‘In general,’ Ure said. He bent down to the leaves. ‘You’ve lost quite a bit of blood from that thorn puncture. The weed is soaked. Are you sure you don’t need a bandage?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Cass said. ‘But thanks again for the offer.’

  Back in the hotel, Cass checked both bars but didn’t see Harpur or Iles. He asked at Reception if they’d been about and the girl said no. She thought Mr Iles might still be recuperating.

  ‘In what sense?’ Cass said.

  She said that the night before when Mr Harpur and Mr Iles came in, Mr Iles seemed to have been injured. ‘How injured?’ Cass asked. The girl said possibly something to the side of his face. ‘What to the side of his face?’ Cass said.

  ‘An incision,’ she said. ‘He was holding a handkerchief to it, so I’m not certain.’

  Blood? But again he only thought this; didn’t say it aloud. He’d sound ghoulish. ‘Did he or Mr Harpur mention an incident?’ Cass asked.

  ‘What kind of incident?’ she said.

  ‘Any kind of incident,’ Cass said.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

  ‘Did either of them speak at all about what had been happening?’ Cass said.

  ‘Mr Harpur saw I was concerned about Mr Iles’s wound. Mr Harpur said Mr Iles believed in confronting troubles personally and was a leader who led.’

  Or bled. But Cass didn’t say that, either. He rang home, to tell Louise he’d arrived and was installed at the Mayfield. ‘I get a feeling the police here don’t much like me,’ he said.

  ‘Never mind, Dave, the children and I do,’ she said. ‘You’ll go carefully, won’t you?’

  SEVEN

  Helga Ormond, the Epoch’s stringer here, was in her early to mid seventies. Cass had met her several times before and during Jaminel’s trial. There was much more to her than emphatic jewellery, but she did go for emphatic jewellery: big circular ear rings like doubloons, hefty medallions on stout hawsers around her neck, notable brooches, usually representing musical instruments - say a four-centimetre-long piano, or tiny helicon tuba in gleaming mock-brass, for a Lilliput band.

  Today, she wore a green tam-style hat on her dyed

  auburn-to-vermilion hair, and a yellow silk suit, the skirt with five parallel golden lines around the base, as if to calibrate progressive grope limits. The matching yellow jacket had a kind of halter at the back, like a naval rating’s, but deeper, and embroidered with what on a quick count Cass reckoned as half a dozen parallel golden lines, similar to the skirt’s, though on a comparatively neutral part of the body. She had a sharp, slightly masculine face, a straight nose and no-nonsense chin. Cass stood her lunch in The Platter, a fish restaurant alongside the River Vaze, and not far from the handsome Vaze Upper stone bridge, famous for those drownings in the so-called Midsummer Riots of 1817, forerunners of the Peterloo massacre further north two years later.

  Cass agreed with Kingsley Amis that some of the most depressing words in the language were, ‘Let’s go straight in, shall we?’ They downed a couple of double vodkas and tonic in the bar before tackling the meals. Helga took the tam-’o-shanter off. She had a fish soup starter and main course halibut. Cass never found restaurant fish soup fishy enough and chose whitebait instead, then crab. They drank a New Zealand Chardonnay, solid and aggressive, like the country’s All Blacks rugby team.

  Customers at other tables greeted her. Helga had been in local journalism a long time and knew a lot of people. That’s what stringers were for: their established strings to the citizenry about them, and especially to the important and/or notorious citizenry around them. Her bling-boosted outfits and her hair announced there was nothing sneaky or furtive about journalism. You couldn’t imagine someone so uproariously flashy secretly hacking into voicemails, a solitary vice. The waitress called her ‘Helge’ and seemed to know what food she would order.

  ‘You discovered Harpur and Iles were returning before I did, Dave,’ Helga said. ‘Don’t care for that, not a bit. Makes me look switched-off and indolent. I’m outflanked. Vibeless. You got a Home Office tip, did you? Do I recall there was someone called Maud, much concerned with the situation here on the last investigation? She breathes into your ear still? Or perhaps she has a secretary or clerk who does. They’re worried about their pensions up there, aren’t they? You can contribute a
little extra for them, I imagine, to go into a private, back-up pot. They’re pleased to be on the Epoch’s “special contact” pay roll, despite all the hoo-hah lately about bribery by the Press.’

  ‘The feeling in Epoch from right after the guilty verdict was that it didn’t count for much - except to Jaminel and his family.’

  Helga broke some bread into fragments and scattered them on the soup, like feed for goldfish. ‘I heard you were out at fourteen Davant again on Elms and ran into Belinda Laverick and young Gwyn, one of her very fit sidekicks,’ Helga replied. ‘Or, rather, she ran into you.’

  ‘I gather there’d been an incident the previous night,’ Cass said.

  ‘Yes, an incident.’

  ‘A call to the emergency services. Violence.’

  ‘And then twenty-four hours later Gwyn says you’d done yourself an injury.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘No, I’ve been studying your hands. Undamaged.’

  ‘A bit of blood, that’s all.’

  ‘It was yours, was it?’

  ‘Who else’s?’ Cass said.

  ‘Exactly,’ she replied. ‘Someone hurt during the “incident”?’

  Yes, probably. He didn’t answer, though. Did the blood come from Iles? But, of course, Cass hadn’t known enough to suspect this at the time. It was the hotel receptionist’s words that started the idea. And it remained only speculation. Because Iles had a face wound, it didn’t necessarily follow that he got it on Elms. Who on Elms would stab him, and why? It was a journalistic habit to keep findings private until they could be put into a piece for publication, and so Cass had pretended the blood was his. Gwyn Ure seemed to have accepted this. Had he really? Had his boss, Belinda Laverick? At any rate, for the moment, Cass would continue to abide by his trade’s practice of hoarding and non-disclosure.