by Peter Helton
“Half cash half cheque, or I wouldn’t have let the paintings out of my hands, Chris.”
“If their cheque’s no good the cash is mine,” I said flippantly.
“Don’t be impertinent. And their money has always been good before.”
“Who are they banking with?”
Simon sighed his disapproval but put on his spectacles and picked up the cheque from his desk. “Sainsbury’s,” he said, slightly startled. Even he had imagined a more glamorous arrangement.
Bonghy-bo in Upper Borough Walls, a queue-at-the-counter cafe that shares a sunny courtyard with Laura Ashley, Habitat and Zucci, was a first for me. Call me old-fashioned but I’d always thought that my reputation as a serious investigator might suffer if I suggested meeting clients at a place with a silly name. People are startled enough when I ask them if they’d like to join me for a chat in the Bathtub.
Gordon Hines was already there, sheltering under a sunshade and nursing an Earl Grey. He was sweating away in a lemon yellow shirt, sky blue tie and thick brown corduroy trousers. I knew corduroy was meant to be fashionable again but a summer fabric it wasn’t.
“It’s good of you to come, Chris,” he said as I joined him with my iced orange juice, still pursuing rehydration. He didn’t get up. I had always liked Gordon but was glad hugging had not become a permanent feature of our relationship. “I’ve had such a time. The police have interviewed me twice, wanting to know all sorts of things.”
“Like what?” I was curious to know what kind of lines Needham was pursuing.
“You name it, they asked it.” He ran a damp hand through his thinning hair, leaving it shiny and limp. “What was my relationship to Jenny. I ask you. Did we have a fight. What had I been doing at Somerset Lodge earlier that day. And when they found Dave dead as well they started on me all over again, as if they thought I personally killed both of them.”
“It’s what they laughably call keeping an open mind. So you saw Jenny earlier that day? Any particular reason? Did she seem okay?”
“Don’t you start, that’s exactly what they wanted to know. It was completely routine, we were arranging a date for the committee meeting, as we do every month. Everything was just normal. Jenny was fine and Dave didn’t seem any different either. But would they take my word for it? They went on and on at me. Especially that thin cadaverous one.”
“Deeks,” I supplied.
“That’s the one. Minute details of nothing.” He gulped some tea as if trying to wash down the memory of his interrogation. “I really appreciate you coming to do the cooking, we all do. We haven’t had a full committee meeting yet but I spoke to everyone concerned on the phone. The residents will be glad as well, I’ve been feeding them takeaways, Chinese and such. Not very healthy, too much salt apparently. All I can make is omelettes, I’m afraid.”
“Don’t knock it, making a good omelette is quite an art.”
“I didn’t say I made good omelettes.”
“Ah.”
All this talk of food reminded us we were here for lunch. Gordon went for lamb cutlets which he declared acceptable, I had the seafood tagliatelle (a risky order outside Italy), which was surprisingly good. I was warming to Bonghy-bo.
“This time you’ll have to do your own shopping, I’m afraid, I hope that won’t be a problem,” Gordon said through a mouthful of food. “The budget is three pounds per head per day, but I expect you knew that.” This was complete news to me. I added miracle worker to Jenny’s many virtues.
“Oh, we won’t shoot you if you go a bit over. Under the circumstances. We’re lucky to have you.”
Our bill, which Gordon had paid, came to three times the daily allowance for a full complement of residents. I half regretted having agreed to play housekeeper.
“There’ll only be Anne and Linda to cook for,” he said on our way out, “we’ll take a while before filling Dave’s place and of course Gavin is still missing.”
“What about Adrian? I thought he was back from hospital?”
“Oh, didn’t I say? He’s back inside. Got on to his skateboard, broken shoulder no object, and skated into the roadworks on Wells Road.” Gordon pulled his lip in thought for a moment. “He’s crazy as well as mad, if you know what I mean.”
I said I knew exactly what he meant.
I approached Somerset Lodge, as on the day I found Jenny, from the back and through the garden, carrying the shopping. The lawn was yellowing and many blooms in the borders had succumbed to the heat. The back door, normally wide open on a fine day like this, was firmly bolted from the inside. Nearby, the old zinc watering can lay on its side, a cobweb already spanning its shadowy opening.
Letting myself in through the front door instead I stepped into a silence as thick and dark as molasses. No voices, no burbling television, no sounds at all. And of course no inviting cooking smells. The curtains were still closed in the dining room. Somerset Lodge had once more drawn around itself the leaden cloak of mental institution Jenny had worked so hard to strip away from it.
I set the bags down in the kitchen, feeling weighted down by the palpable air of depression in the house. As I sorted fish, cheese and milk into the fridge, vegetables into the poignantly empty rack by the freezer, I realized that I had managed to walk past the living room without even glancing inside, automatically avoiding the place where Jenny had been beaten to death with her own sharpening steel. I stopped what I was doing and marched straight back through the dining room and hall and went inside. Here the wine red curtains were also drawn, allowing a trickle of pink-filtered light into the room. The cream carpet that had soaked up so much of Jenny’s blood had been ripped out and replaced with a fake Persian rug. The bespattered sofa covers were missing. I opened the curtains and the window, letting in light and air and birdsong, then kicked on the television which came to life with a children’s news programme. Then I made myself walk across the spot where I had found Jenny, to destroy the shrine-like quality the room had tried to take on while my back was turned. I was already living with a ghost, I’d be damned if I was going to cook with one as well.
In the kitchen I tuned the crumb-covered radio by the battered toaster to the awesomely awful Radio Bristol and turned the volume up loud enough to be heard throughout the house. Opening curtains and windows as I went I unbolted the door to the garden with as much banging as I could manage. The spider got chased out of the watering can, then I filled it with water, ready to be used. It all felt satisfyingly like playing football in church.
With the whistling-kettle filled and on the stove I clattered upstairs to Jenny’s office. It had recently been lovingly ransacked by Needham’s boys and put together again. If it ever held a clue to Jenny’s or Dave’s death the police would probably have found it. They were awfully good at things like that.
Yet it was the first place I made myself look, saving her room for later.
Jenny had had no current lover or boyfriend I knew of. She had lived over the shop in an attic room and having overnight visitors was not encouraged by the Trust, on the grounds that it created jealousies and confusion for the residents, as well as being an unnecessary risk to their mental stability. What this had done for Jenny’s stability I could only guess. I tried to remember when I’d last seen her outside this house and drew a blank. Her social life had been so restricted, having to be present at the house each night without fail, except during her holidays, when a sleepover was arranged with a local agency and someone stepped in to cook the meals. The sleepover staff were usually young nursing assistants with just enough training to scream down the phone for a psychiatric nurse if anything went wrong, the cooks were ill-tempered housekeepers who came briefly out of retirement to supplement their exiguous pensions. Somerset Lodge was not a popular assignment.
To give them their due the officers had left no visible trace of their search. The place looked as tidy as ever. Jenny’s big phone book was on her desk, her electric typewriter on a separate little table to the right of the window, a wall chart of t
he month of June above it, with her handwritten notes of residents’ appointments with psychiatrists and social workers neatly written into the square of the day.
I had no idea what I was looking for. Both Gavin’s and Dave’s notes were still with the police. I pulled out the remaining three. Being used to sticking my nose into people’s affairs I felt only vaguely guilty about invading the privacy of the residents that Jenny had so fiercely sought to protect. I skimmed each file, looking for anything out of the ordinary, finding only the depressingly familiar.
Anne Gosling had cracked under the strain of her law studies and begun to hear voices urging her to walk naked in nature to let the tree spirits suck the evil from her body. She had been found, clad only in dried mud, building a nest of leaves in a stretch of woodland near the university. That was eleven years ago. The voices still came back on her bad days but the medication helped her to cope better.
Two years ago Linda Kelly had been cramming for her A levels when she went for a blow-out at a club in Bristol with her friends. It appeared she mixed a couple of E’s with alcohol and at least one other drug and had woken up screaming in hospital the following Monday. When the screaming stopped and the medication took hold
Linda became very quiet, very withdrawn. Periodically she got worse, then seemed to even out again. Without medication the banshee she had acquired that Saturday night would instantly make herself heard again.
I only briefly skipped through Adrian Febry’s notes. He had been in hospital at the time of the murder, so all I needed was to make sure I didn’t miss anything glaringly obvious. Adrian also periodically heard accusing voices that seemed to start far away and come closer over time. His symbolic way of coping was to keep moving, on in-line skates or skateboards, hoping to keep one step ahead of his accusers. He had recently added a skip and a set of roadworks to his other full stops, which included a car bonnet and a pond in Victoria Park. He was on first-name terms with most of the staff at A&E.
Searching through the rest of the desk drawers and the big built-in cupboard in the niche next to the fireplace yielded nothing obvious. Stationery piles of meticulous accounts, a thick roll of old wall charts, the odd medical book and brochures for courses and workshops on anything from stress management to personal development and accountancy. Not that Jenny had ever been given enough time off to take any of them. Her struggles with the management committee about pay, her working conditions and improving the residents’ lot had been long and fruitless. The Culver-house Trust, which ran similar houses in London and Brighton, was a fossilized and bureaucratic organization which resisted change with zeal. Or as Jenny used to put it, was composed of a bunch of anal, tight-fisted bastards.
The kettle had started wailing on the stove a couple of minutes earlier and I let it scream, willing it to call forth Anne and Linda from wherever they had dug themselves in. When nothing seemed to happen I stuck my head out of the open door and yelled, “Will someone get that, please!” to the house in general. If anyone, I had expected Anne to appear but it was Linda who after a short while unglued herself from her room and ventured out. She appeared soundlessly in the door frame, her eyes rimmed red, her mud-coloured hair scraped back into a ponytail held together by a black scrunchy. Despite the heat she wore jeans, heavy purple boots and a thick red Mickey Mouse sweater, which accentuated rather than disguised her skimpy frame. She kept her arms folded tightly inside it, no hands showing, hugging herself.
“Gordon gone?” she squeezed out.
“Yup, I’m gonna be looking after you lot from now on until the new housekeeper arrives,” I announced from behind the desk. “Mine’s a black coffee, no sugar.”
Linda blinked a couple of times and the ghost of a smile appeared around her eyes. Suddenly her hands shot out from her sleeves, she whirled around and ran down the stairs squeaking “blacknosugarblacknosugarblacknosugar” as she went.
Perhaps Gordon had been right about his omelettes.
My search was going nowhere fast, and despite my determination to inject a livelier note into this decimated household a fluttering unease had taken hold of me. I took down the wall chart and spread it on the desk, trying to get a feeling of how the slow, inward-focused lives at Somerset, as everyone but the Culverhouse Trust functionaries called it, were punctuated and divided by the sometimes eagerly awaited, sometimes dreaded visits of mental health workers.
Linda reappeared with a tray of coffees, mine, her own and presumably Anne’s. Before I could prevent her she set mine down on the wall chart, smack on the Friday of Jenny’s murder. I swiftly picked it up and thanked her. Her dark eyes blinked twice before she turned and balanced her tray up the stairs. The coffee turned out, as I had known it would, to be a vile-smelling brown liquid, electric-coloured bubbles of badly rinsed-off Fairy Liquid floating on its surface. It would have been easy to pour it down a sink so as not to offend Linda but I had already decided to make myself drink it as a kind of penance for being so useless. The mug was a cheerful sunflower yellow. The print on it read I’M A MUG. Thanks, Linda. Going for all-out pollution I sat sipping the stuff and smoked a succession of Jenny’s Camels, of which I’d found several unopened packets in a desk drawer. She had smoked thirty of these every day. Over the coming weeks I would find out just how heroic an undertaking that had been.
Gently I turned the office inside out again, checked every single phone book entry for a clue that anything out of the ordinary had been happening here. I dived into the cupboard for a third time, flicked through every book and brochure (just like the police had no doubt done before me) looking for concealed bits of paper, letters, scribbled notes, anything at all. I came up empty.
Next, I climbed the two flights of stairs into the attic where a large room with an en suite bathroom had been carved out for the housekeeper. The door was ajar so I pushed it open further. The room had been emptied of all but the furniture. There was white, impersonal bedding for the sleepover person who was due to start working today and that was all. Listlessly I opened a drawer here and there, turning up nothing but hairpins, rubber bands and dust. It had never occurred to me that Jenny’s ageing parents, who had retired to a village somewhere near Marlborough, could already have been and gone, taking all their daughter’s possessions with them. I had met them only once, very briefly; a quiet couple making polite conversation at a garden party, with all the committee members and residents mingling uneasily around the barbecue. Now I wondered whether it was appropriate or even at all helpful to contact them. At least they had been spared the painful experience of identifying Jenny’s body. I had done it for them and fervently hoped they hadn’t insisted on viewing their daughter’s remains.
This had been a cheerful room once, with prints of those bright Expressionist paintings she had loved. There had often been flowers, bought for herself or picked in the garden, arranged in simple yellow vases that sparked off the deep cobalt of the walls. Those same walls now gave off a wintry chill which I knew lived purely in my mind, the attic being the hottest place in the house.
Next I tried Dave’s room on the floor below. Here a similar transformation had taken place, except that all his belongings had been packed into cardboard boxes or slung into bin liners. All of them had little squares of paper taped to them, reading TO
OXFAM. I untied one of the bags. It contained Dave’s awkward, faded clothes. I was pretty certain they were on their way back to where they had come from.
Was this really what I should be doing right now? First things first. I preheated the oven to 180C, plonked the fresh cod and smoked haddock into a roasting tin of milk and shoved that into the oven; next I set potatoes to boil and topped and tailed some French beans, grated the Gruyere and ran upstairs again.
Behind the office desk I choked my way through another Camel. The smoke seemed to help me think, in a coughing, spluttering kind of way. It was important to get my priorities straight or I might as well leave this thing to Needham and his slow but thorough style. By now I didn’t
think I could, for one simple reason: another murder might be on the menu. Jenny was dead. Dave was dead. If Dave had killed Jenny and afterwards thrown himself in the lock or died by accident, then it would all stop here. And if Gavin had killed one or both of them then I definitely wanted him. But if neither of those scenarios held true, if Dave had been pushed, then a third killing was the most likely thing to happen next. Whether he was guilty or innocent, I had to go after Gavin Backhaus.
Mrs Backhaus answered the phone just when I was about to hang up. I explained who I was. Could I come and speak to her in person?
Her voice came across as strained and harassed. “We’ve told the police everything we could think of, Mr Honeysett, I really don’t see what good it would do to go over it all again with you. It really is quite a strain on us and we just don’t know anything that could help, I’m sure. This is the first day we’ve dared answer the phone again, the press have been pestering us so. And the police practically suggested that our son murdered that housekeeper and the other chap and we’ve rather had enough of it.”
“Did the police also suggest that Gavin’s life might be in danger if he didn’t commit the murders?”
There was a pause of several heartbeats before she answered. “Mr Honeysett, to us our son has been dead for years. You can have no idea what it was like having him here. We have learned to live without him. Our lives have returned to a semblance of normality since they took him in at that place. Before, he was in and out of hospital and we dreaded his return every time. He never managed to live independently. So if you find my son — good. If you don’t…I’m not sure I care. Please excuse me now.” I heard Mrs Backhaus breathe for a second or two before she broke the connection.
Was I surprised? I had no access to Gavin’s notes so had no way of knowing what exactly had occurred in the past or what he was like without heavy medication.
After I’d lifted out the fish I used the milk to make a white sauce, stirred in the cheese, sprinkled in capers and green peppercorns plus the flaked fish and poured the mix into an oven dish; piped the mashed potato over it and slid it under the grill. Then I dropped the beans into boiling water and gave the Chinese dinner gong a good workout.
