The Telling Error

by Hannah, Sophie

  ‘You asked before if we could imagine Damon being a consistently kind, loving husband,’ said Verity. ‘Is that how Hannah described him?’

  Sam saw no reason why he shouldn’t answer honestly. ‘Yes, it was.’

  ‘Well, then either she’s lying or …’ Verity broke off.

  ‘Or what?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Or Damon was planning something,’ said Abigail. ‘If I were you, I’d be wondering pretty hard about what that something was, and who might have found out about it and decided to stop him.’

  ‘It sounds whiny to say, “Why me?” but I have wondered why me, many times,’ Keiran Holland told Sellers. ‘I’d never written a word against Damon, never even mentioned him. Yes, I’d expressed opinions he disagreed with, and I know bullies like him need targets, and anyone will do, but he did seem to have a special antipathy towards me in particular.’

  They were in a room Holland had described without cracking a smile as ‘the drawing room’ in the journalist’s home in Wandsworth. Holland’s wife, Iona Dennis, sat in a wing-backed armchair in the corner, apparently happy to let her husband do all the talking. She hadn’t spoken yet, and had greeted Sellers, when Holland had introduced him, with a silent smile. She had a book on her knee with her own name on the spine. Sellers assumed it was either by her or about her. The former seemed more likely.

  ‘And Paula Riddiough,’ he said. ‘Damon Blundy attacked her as often as he attacked you.’ Seconds after mentioning Riddiough’s name, he regretted it. Holland looked stricken, and Iona turned her face away, as if the former MP’s name were a rock Sellers had lobbed at her.

  This is what cheating does to people. This is the reality. Say the wrong name in the wrong house and the whole house falls down.

  Sellers banished the disturbing thought from his mind.

  ‘Oh no he didn’t,’ said Holland, once he’d recovered. ‘He didn’t savage her nearly as often – I’ve actually compiled the statistics: I can prove it to you. And even when he did go for Paula, it wasn’t with quite the same loathing that he reserved only for me. With most of Damon’s attacks on people, there was a sort of affection about them that you could just about detect around the edges of his hostility, but not with me. He unequivocally hated me – and, as I say, I have no idea why. I mean, it can’t have been snobbery – yes, I grew up on a northern council estate and my parents were a drain on the state, but …’

  Sellers waited for him to say, ‘… but I now have a drawing room.’ Holland didn’t sound as if he grew up on a northern council estate. Sellers came from exactly that background himself and had the accent to match, even after twenty years in the Culver Valley.

  ‘No, I don’t think it was that,’ Holland went on. ‘Damon was extremely right wing, but he wasn’t a social-class snob. He didn’t care where anyone came from. And, all right I’ve got a column in The Times and he’s stuck at the Herald, but he’d certainly have regarded that as a win for him, not me. He’d have cited the Herald’s huge readership in comparison with the Times’s, as if that were what mattered.’

  Sellers kept his mouth shut, sipped his tea and wondered what did matter about a newspaper if not how many people read it. Perhaps that it should be read by the right people – was that what Holland was implying?

  Listening to Holland eliminate reason after reason why Damon Blundy chose to persecute him, Sellers started to feel irritated. The focus of this conversation so far was all wrong. An alien beamed down from a spaceship into this room and told only that a policeman was here to investigate a terrible crime could be forgiven for thinking that Keiran Holland was the victim and Damon Blundy the perpetrator.

  Rather than the other way round?

  ‘Mr Holland,’ Sellers cut into the ongoing monologue, ‘I need to ask you some questions about Monday morning. That’s when Damon was killed. You’re not under any suspicion, and this is just a routine question, but …’

  ‘Where was I? Walking. Thinking. I often go for long walks when I’ve got a piece to write. It clears my mind.’

  ‘Where did you walk?’

  Holland’s forehead creased as he considered the question. ‘Um … I can’t say I remember exactly. Around and about. On the common, round the streets. I tend to just amble about.’

  ‘Where were you, Mrs Holland?’

  ‘Ms Dennis,’ Iona corrected him. ‘I was at my publisher’s offices. I’ll give you my editor’s email, if you like.’

  ‘That would be helpful.’

  ‘I’m sure there are wives who’d murder anyone who said a bad word about their husbands, but I’m not one of them,’ Iona added with a smile.

  ‘Though you’ve been very supportive whenever Damon’s attacked me,’ said Holland, speaking to his wife but looking at Sellers to make sure he got the point. ‘No, as I say, I’ve no idea why he zeroed in on me and set about proving I was the worst human being who’s ever lived. The first time he devoted a column to attacking me was late April 2011, during the AV debate – you know, the alternative voting system? Remember that?’

  Sellers nodded and tried not to groan. Were they back to this again? He thought he’d successfully changed the subject.

  ‘Damon was against AV – called it the most nonsensical voting system ever to be created – and I was passionately in favour. That was when we first locked horns, but then he dug up other columns I’d written, some from years ago. He attacked me retrospectively for my stance on the euro, for having supported the Iraq War – I still say there was a case for removing Saddam—’

  ‘Mr Holland, if we could get back to Monday morning,’ Sellers spoke over him. ‘While you were out walking, did you see anyone you knew?’

  Holland laughed. ‘Are you serious? I need an alibi? You think I killed Damon?’

  ‘Not at all. I’m sure you can appreciate, Damon Blundy being who he was, that we’re asking a lot of people where they were on Monday morning.’

  ‘No, I didn’t see anyone I knew,’ Holland said impatiently. ‘I sometimes do, and I sometimes don’t. Maybe you should put up a poster on Wandsworth Common with my mugshot: “Did anyone see this man here on Monday morning, or is this the face of a murderer?” Ridiculous.’

  ‘DC Sellers has to ask,’ said Iona. ‘Even though it’s you.’

  ‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’ Holland snapped at her.

  She seemed to find his anger amusing. ‘It means, darling, that even though you know and I know you didn’t kill Damon Blundy, DC Sellers doesn’t. I assume you don’t want a police force that takes everybody’s word for everything?’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Holland after a few seconds. ‘I apologise, DC Sellers. But I’m afraid I can’t help you. I went for a walk. I didn’t go to … wherever it is and stab Damon Blundy.’

  ‘Why do you say “stab”?’ asked Sellers.

  Holland frowned. ‘No reason. I mean … well, he was killed in his house, wasn’t he? I assumed …’ He broke off and laughed. ‘All right, I’m going to sound like an idiot when I admit this, but no doubt I deserve the attendant embarrassment: in my mind, shootings happen outside and stabbings happen inside. Daft, illogical, but there we are.’

  ‘What about stranglings, poisonings?’ Sellers asked him. ‘Couldn’t they happen inside too?’

  ‘Of course, but … aren’t they more rare?’ Holland lost interest in his question before it was answered. ‘Look, if you’re trying to suggest that I knew Damon was stabbed because I stabbed him, you’re way off the mark. I just said it without thinking.’

  ‘Damon Blundy wasn’t stabbed,’ Sellers told him.

  ‘What?’ Holland looked confused. ‘But then why …?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘If he wasn’t stabbed, what on earth does it matter that I assumed he was? It’s not relevant to anything.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ Sellers said, thinking, We’ll see. His kids hated it when he said, ‘We’ll see,’ in response to their various requests. ‘Just say no if you’re going to say n
o!’ they often snarled at him.

  ‘They say people hate anyone who’s too similar to them, don’t they?’ Holland mused. ‘I’m nothing like Damon Blundy, thank God. I’ve wondered if it was almost the opposite syndrome, though. Damon was obsessed with what I thought about every issue, and with attacking my opinion. Maybe he couldn’t cope with the idea of my thoughts because they were the opposite of his, almost always. I mean, it must be a somewhat disconcerting experience, coming up against someone who’s undeniably intelligent but cancels you out on every point, when you believe yourself to be intelligent. A bit like seeing your own mind in a mirror – it would make you wonder what your mind really looks like, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I think DC Sellers might like another cup of tea,’ said Iona, swallowing a yawn. ‘I would, anyway.’

  ‘That would be great, thanks,’ Sellers said.

  Iona didn’t move.

  Holland stood up. ‘Right, I’ll go and put the kettle on,’ he said.

  When he’d left the room, Iona said, ‘My husband is many things, but he’s not a murderer. And I’m not just saying that because I’m his wife.’

  ‘If you could encourage him to try and remember if he saw anyone he knew, anyone at all—’

  ‘No,’ said Iona. ‘Sorry. You encourage him if you want to.’ She smiled.

  Strange woman. My husband is many things …

  ‘I’ve spent years encouraging him to see the stark staring obvious about why Damon Blundy kept targeting him in a way that he targeted no one else. Keiran’s right about that, Blundy did do that. I try to tell him why and he doesn’t hear me. It goes in one ear and out the other. He speculates endlessly – cancelling out, mind in a mirror – it’s all crap! Overblown crap.’

  ‘Then what was it?’ Sellers asked. Jealousy, because Holland had slept with Paula Riddiough and Damon wanted to?

  ‘Damon loved to argue and scrap,’ Iona said. ‘There are many people one can argue with about individual issues, but …’ She stopped talking as Keiran reappeared.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ he said. ‘Milk and sugar?’

  Sellers opened his mouth to answer, but Iona spoke too quickly. ‘There are very few people who are wrong about everything,’ she told Sellers, as if her husband weren’t there. ‘That was Keiran’s unique appeal from Damon Blundy’s point of view: that he was wrong about absolutely everything.’

  ‘It’s on her ignorant head, and no amount of denying’s going to change that,’ the schoolgirl with the stubby blonde plaits shouted at her two friends, who looked as if they were ready to agree with her whatever she said. Gibbs guessed they were around sixteen – sixth-formers, maybe. Did sixth-formers wear uniform? At Gibbs’s school they hadn’t, but perhaps different rules applied in King’s Lynn, a town Gibbs had never visited before.

  The girl who had spoken had obviously been crying; she’d also removed her tie and fastened it round her leg like a garter, with the ends trailing. Her shirt was unbuttoned, revealing the top of a red lacy bra. ‘She might not have meant it to happen, whatever, I don’t care! It’s still on her head. Like a big fucking fat … hat, man. I swear to God!’ Much giggling from all three girls followed this conclusion.

  They swept past Gibbs in exactly the way that, a few moments earlier, they’d swept past the square black dustbin embedded in the pavement. Anything that wasn’t part of their all-consuming drama was invisible to them; Gibbs could remember girls in his class like that; they’d never looked in his direction either. He found himself wishing he’d known Liv as a teenager, that she’d been in his class at school. Stupid. What was the point of wishing that?

  After the three girls came a few more clumps of uniformed bodies, all traipsing along unenthusiastically in the direction of the open gates to Gibbs’s left; their lunch hour was over and they had no choice but to return to their prison.

  Keen to get away from the pupil procession, Gibbs crossed the wide main road again and tried Reuben Tasker’s doorbell for the fourth time. Still no answer. Gibbs had been certain someone was in – he could have sworn he’d heard movement from inside the first time he’d rung the bell – but he was starting to wonder if he’d imagined it. It seemed plausible that a man who had no landline or mobile phone, was addicted to cannabis and had failed to respond to six emails marked ‘urgent’ might ignore his own doorbell, but that didn’t make it impossible that Tasker was out. Weedheads who worked from home needed to visit their dealers, after all.

  Gibbs looked up at the tall red-brick three-storey house. He was too close to see into the windows on the top two levels. A white ceramic sign screwed to the brickwork beside the front door told him that this was 76 Gaywood Road. The numbers and letters were fussy and old-fashioned. Chosen by a woman, thought Gibbs.

  On the phone this morning, Tasker’s literary agent had used words like ‘dedicated’ and ‘committed’ to describe Jane Tasker. He’d made Reuben Tasker sound more like a good cause than a man.

  Gibbs turned round to see what was happening on the other side of Gaywood Road. It was nowhere near as busy. That was where he needed to be, to get a better view of the top part of the house. He decided to give it a couple more minutes, then cross over again once the last of the uniformed stragglers had slouched through the school gates to be penned up for the afternoon. If Tasker was in and not opening the door, he wouldn’t be able to resist looking out of a window eventually to see if all was clear, and he was more likely to pick one on a higher floor to avoid a face-to-face encounter.

  Gibbs walked round his car, which was parked on the paved area that would once have been number 76’s front garden, and waited for a gap in the traffic. There wasn’t one, so he crossed anyway, raising his middle finger at a driver who used his horn to protest. Seconds later, he regretted his overreaction. He ought to buy a punchbag – set it up in the spare room at home. Maybe it would help to sort his head out if he could spend an hour a day beating the crap out of something he couldn’t hurt.

  On the pavement opposite Reuben Tasker’s house, he looked up and made an involuntary noise as he saw a face framed in the single dormer window at the top. It was Tasker: gaunt, black-haired, bare-chested. Gibbs recognised him from the photograph on his website, and waited for him to pull back from the window, fearing he’d been spotted. Tasker stayed where he was. Staring.

  So he’d been in all along. And wanted it known that he could have come to the door but had chosen not to.

  Tasker’s gaze was neutral rather than actively defiant, but Gibbs felt the defiance all the same. There was something chillingly arrogant – no, something more chilling than arrogance – about looking at someone so expressionlessly, as if nothing they could do or say could have any effect on you, positive or negative. Tasker was watching the world in the way that a ghost separated from the living would watch.

  He did it. He killed Damon Blundy. And he thinks he can get away with it.

  Gibbs shook his head and swore under his breath. Who did he think he was, Simon Waterhouse? Most people’s hunches were worthless, and Gibbs was realistic enough to include his own in that category. Tasker was a weirdo, but that didn’t make him a killer. ‘Not the easiest man in the world to deal with,’ the literary agent had said. Neither was Gibbs, so the two of them were well matched.

  Gibbs pointed in the direction of Tasker’s front door and mouthed, ‘Come down and let me in?’ He pulled his ID out of his pocket and held it up.

  Tasker disappeared from the window. Gibbs wove his way through the heavy traffic of Gaywood Road again. Why did the detective cross the road? To talk to a weed-addicted horror writer. It wasn’t much of a punchline.

  He didn’t see the point of ringing the bell again, so he waited, listening for the sound of feet on the stairs.

  Nothing. Once he was certain he’d waited long enough, he knocked loudly on the door, then opened the letterbox and shouted, ‘Mr Tasker! DC Chris Gibbs, Culver Valley CID. I’ve sent you several emails. Can you open up? I’d like to talk to you.’


  The bastard wasn’t coming to the door. Gibbs pressed his finger down on the doorbell and kept it there for a good minute and a half. Then, too angry to stay where he was, he marched back out into the traffic, attracting multiple horn beeps. This time he managed to resist making any obscene gestures.

  He’s going to be back in the window again, staring blankly out as if nothing’s happened.

  On the pavement opposite, Gibbs looked up and got a shock. Tasker had reappeared, but only partially. His hairless bare chest was visible, and the bottom of his neck, but not his face. Tasker had stuck a large square of black paper to the window – with Blu-Tack by the look of it; Gibbs could see four pale dots, one at each corner – and was standing behind it.

  ‘What the fuck …?’ Gibbs murmured.

  He watched as Tasker did the same with a second square of black, fixing it beneath the first so that the edges lined up. Now hardly any of him was visible – only his right arm.

  ‘Detective Gibbs?’ A woman who looked somewhere between thirty and forty was standing beside him.

  ‘Detective Constable. DC Gibbs.’

  ‘I’m Jane Tasker, Reuben’s wife.’ She was holding the handle of a black, waist-high shopping trolley on wheels. A loaf of bread and a packet of raspberry-flavoured ice lollies poked out of the top. Didn’t she drive? Or use the Internet? She seemed to have been to the supermarket on foot with what was effectively an open-topped suitcase to wheel her groceries home in. Bizarre.

  Her face, free of make-up, had a raw, pink, peeled look – as if it had been scrubbed vigorously over and over again. She was wearing jeans that bunched at the bottom, around the tops of her scuffed black ankle boots, and a bulky red padded anorak in spite of the warm weather.

  ‘Your husband doesn’t seem to want to talk to me,’ Gibbs told her.

  ‘No, he does. He rang me as soon as you arrived. That’s why I hurried back, to let you in. He doesn’t like having people in the house unless I’m there too, and he hates to have to interrupt his writing to come downstairs. Shall we …?’ She made a gesture that suggested crossing the road.