A Grave Waiting

by Jill Downie

  “If you mean because of the neighbours, I don’t give a tinker’s damn about any of them, but come in anyway.”

  Having blown Ed Moretti’s character assessment out of the water in about one minute flat, Melissa Machin stood back and motioned to Liz Falla to come through. She was a taller than average woman, about forty years old, perhaps late thirties, with the pale skin, dark hair, and eyes of someone of Irish descent. The black track suit she was wearing emphasized her translucent skin tone, and her only pieces of jewellery were her wedding and engagement ring, the latter a colossal sapphire surrounded by diamonds, almost as spectacular as the ring worn by a late, lamented princess. Liz noted that her earlobes were pierced, but she had not bothered to put on earrings — as if, when she got out of bed that morning, the track suit had been close at hand, and the rings already on her fingers.

  “Come on through. I’m having a coffee, so please don’t say you don’t even drink coffee on duty. I could do with some company.”

  “I’d love a coffee. You’ve had a difficult twenty-four hours, I know.”

  The interior of the Machins’ house bore no resemblance to that of their neighbours, the Amsterdams. There was no gilt, no gewgaws, not a frou-frou in sight. Not that it was spare, like Ludo Ross’s. The rooms opened into each other, warm with panelling of various woods in golden-brown tones, and the paintings on the walls were extraordinary. Abstracts, all of them, the colours so vivid they could kick-start a comatose camel, as dissonant and startling as the music.

  “God, would that it were twenty-four hours! It’s not so much having a shoulder to cry on I need, officer. Or to lean on for that matter. I’ve done a hell of a lot of leaning over the past little while, and I’m sick to death of it. I have, as you can see with your sharp policewoman’s eyes, been on a crying jag without benefit of shoulder, and it’s the best thing I could have done. Here we are.”

  They were in the kitchen of the house. Melissa Machin went over to a small and expensive-looking piece of stereo equipment on one of the counters and switched it off.

  “Sit down, Sergeant. I hope you like your coffee strong.”

  “That’s just how I like it. Thanks.”

  Liz watched as Melissa Machin poured coffee from a vacuum jug into an earthenware mug and handed it to her. The kitchen was just the kind of kitchen she would have chosen, if her husband were a high-powered banker. There was a huge window overlooking the back garden, terracotta floor, an open hearth around a massive fireplace, dark-veined marble countertops, a long table of what looked like pine, on it a splendid pottery bowl in oranges and reds splintered with deep blue.

  “What was the music you were playing? I didn’t recognize it.”

  “Stravinsky, the Violin Concerto in D Major.”

  “Beyond me, I think. Difficult to understand.”

  “Not really, not when you listen to it a few times. Then it lets you in.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  Careful, Liz thought, you are feeling sympathetic because she’s been crying and because you like her taste in decoration. Disarming you with coffee and tears could be just as effective as Ludo’s shock tactics. Don’t let your guard down.

  Which reminded Liz Falla of the little shit.

  “Forgive me if I ask you questions you have already answered, but did you know the deceased?”

  “Bruiser? That’s what his shirt said, wasn’t it? No, never seen him before, and he’s not someone you’d forget in a hurry, is he? Was he, I suppose I should say.” Melissa Machin changed direction abruptly. “I felt sorry for the officer yesterday. I lost it.”

  “Hardly surprising in the circumstances, Mrs. Machin. The victim was not a pretty sight at the best of times.”

  “Oh.” Melissa Machin’s reddened eyes looked sharply at Liz. “So you had spoken to him already?”

  There you go, thought Liz Falla, who’s interviewing who here? “We had spoken to him in the course of our enquiries about the murder on the yacht. He was an employee of the murder victim.”

  “God.”

  Liz waited to see if Melissa Machin would add anything to her call on the divinity, of either invective or invocation, but she simply closed her eyes and took a mouthful of coffee.

  “When I said you’d had a difficult twenty-four hours, Mrs. Machin, you said it had been longer than that. What did you mean?”

  In response, Melissa Machin asked another question of her own. “Do you know Ed Moretti?”

  Of course. Liz remembered that she hadn’t seen them together or been interviewed by either of them. “Yes, I do. He’s my superior officer, I work with him. He’d be doing this interview himself, but the case has taken him away for the moment. He asked me to speak to you.”

  In my second banana capacity, thought Liz.

  “I have begged Garth, pleaded with him, to talk to Ed — the band, you know, the Fénions?”

  “Yes. They play in it together, I understand. You mean, before the incident yesterday?”

  “Yes, oh, for a few months now.” Melissa Machin put down her coffee mug and wrapped her arms around her body, rocking on the high stool. She might be denying she needed a shoulder to cry on, but her body language said something quite different. “Ed came to see him at the office yesterday, Garth told me that.”

  “Yes. Your husband was unable to help in any way. He says this has nothing to do with you, or with him.”

  “I wish I could be sure of that.”

  The rocking had stopped and, her arms still hugging her rigid body, Melissa Machin sat quite motionless.

  So did Liz Falla. Quietly, as if talking someone down from a parapet high above a busy street, she asked, “Are you saying that your husband knows something that might help us in our enquiries?”

  “That’s just it, I don’t know. But something has been bothering Garth for a while now, something new. See —” Melissa Machin swung round on the stool and looked directly at Liz “— are you married, officer, or do you have a partner, a significant other in your life?”

  Just as she thought she was getting somewhere …

  “Mrs. Machin, I don’t see what —” she began.

  “Sorry, what I meant was do you know the feeling when something’s changed?”

  “Oh,” said Liz, “that I can answer. That feeling I know well.”

  Did she ever.

  “Then you’ll understand what I mean. I am married to a man who should never have been a banker, and that’s a constant in our life together. I have begged him to throw it all over, but he likes the good life too much. We’re not always here, you see, we have other homes, back in London and in France. Being what he doesn’t want to be is the price Garth pays for them. Me, I’d be happy with a brush and some paints and a nice piece of canvas.”

  “Are those your paintings — the abstracts?” Liz reached across for the jug and poured herself some more coffee. She couldn’t wait to tell first banana how wrong he had got Melissa Machin. “I love your colours, even though I don’t understand what you are doing with them.”

  This brought a warm, deep-throated laugh from the Stepford wife. “Thank you, Sergeant. That’s really a great compliment, because I’m not sure I want you to read them too easily. But, like the Stravinsky, they would eventually let you in.”

  “So —” Liz drank some of her coffee, taking her time “— you’re saying that whatever is bothering your husband is not the usual.”

  “Exactly. I know the signs when he’s fed up to the back teeth with Northlands and all it represents, but over the past few months there’s been something else going on.”

  “Is this just the feeling you talked about, or has anything specific happened to make you uneasy?”

  Melissa Machin got down from the stool and crossed to the window. She pointed toward the garden beyond it. “See that? A sanctuary it is, or should be, although I’m not so sure sanctuaries should be protected by a wall like something out of a gulag. About a couple of months ago, last autumn, I came back to th
e island after taking my two children to their boarding schools.” She looked toward two framed photographs on one of the counters, of a boy and a girl around ten and twelve years old. “I came back earlier than Garth expected, because I curtailed my shopping expedition in London. I hate parting with the children, and I just wasn’t in the mood. On a whim, I decided to surprise him, and to cheer myself up. I knew Garth would be home, because it was the weekend.”

  Suddenly, Melissa Machin looked embarrassed. “It’s — it’s a turn-on for Garth and me, you see, the stranger walking in the door. It’s a game we play.” For a moment, her expression lightened and she giggled.

  Liz Falla grinned. “Okay. Just tell me what happened next.”

  “Well, I have a key to the gate at the bottom of the garden on my keychain. It opens on to the cliff path above Soldiers Bay, as do the other properties. I left my luggage in the left-luggage office on Albert Pier, put on my track shoes, and walked from the harbour, taking the cliff path. It’s a bit of a distance, but I’m in good shape and I needed the exercise after sitting in the plane. I let myself in the gate, which was surprisingly easy — that was the first unusual thing. The hinges had obviously been oiled recently. As I came up to the house, I saw through this window that there was someone in the kitchen. Damn, I thought, he’s got company. Then I heard raised voices.”

  Melissa Machin was crying quietly again, the tears rolling down her cheeks. Liz Falla hesitated, not wanting to break the mood, or the frame of mind that had led this woman to open up to her.

  “Raised voices,” she repeated. “Could you hear what they were saying?”

  “Some of it. It was a warm day, the window was open, but I knew if they saw me they’d stop, and I felt sure that, whatever this was, it had something to do with the change in Garth. I could only get so near because, as you can see, there’s a patio outside the window with no trees or shrubs, so I kept close to the wall on one side. I could see Garth quite clearly, he was closest to the window, but the people he was speaking to —”

  “People?” Liz Falla interrupted. “How many were there?”

  “Three, I think. Garth and one man were doing most of the talking, but someone else was interrupting from time to time. A man definitely, but I couldn’t see him. He was speaking softly, as if he was nervous, or as if he was threatening Garth. I really wasn’t sure which it was, because I couldn’t hear what he was saying.”

  “What about the other man? Did you see him? Was he anyone you knew, or recognized?”

  “I saw him, but no, I’d never seen him before. He was impressive. In his mid-forties I’d say, spoke in an almost stagy manner — like someone used to speaking in public was what struck me. Powerfully built. Black.”

  “Black as in West Indian, or African? Or American? Did he speak with an accent?” Liz asked. She was beginning to wish she’d taken out her notebook earlier on, but she didn’t want to risk interrupting Melissa Machin’s confidences.

  “Oh, he certainly spoke with an accent. One that I couldn’t place. They were speaking in French.”

  “French?”

  Melissa Machin nodded. “Yes, French. Both Garth and I speak fairly fluently. I studied in Paris, and Garth’s father was in the diplomatic service, so he spoke French as a child.”

  “Could the accent have been French Canadian? Or from, say, French-speaking Africa?”

  “Definitely not French Canadian. And if he was a French-speaking African, he must have spent considerable time in France, and probably Paris. I am told that, when I speak French, I have a Parisian accent, and so did this man. But it was still different, although his French was elegant, and his vocabulary was that of an educated man. Sorry, I’m not being very precise.”

  “Actually, that’s just what you are being. You say you heard some of the conversation?”

  “Yes. It was about the need for a meeting before things got underway — ‘get underway’ was what the hidden man actually said at one point. That, I heard. The man I could see, the African — if that’s what he was — apparently agreed with this, and Garth did not. ‘It’s too risky,’ he was saying, over and over. And the man I could see said, ‘Nothing ventured, Garth, this will cut you loose forever.’ Then the third man said something I didn’t catch, but whatever it was frightened the hell out of my husband. I saw his face.” Melissa Machin’s knuckles against her coffee mug were white. “I wanted to rush in and scream at them, stop them, anything, but I knew I might trigger something more terrible.”

  “Such as?”

  “I thought they might kill both Garth and me.” Melissa Machin gave a deep sigh.

  “What did you do next?”

  “I went back the way I came, picked up my luggage, took a taxi, and came in the front door. By that time Garth was on his own, but he couldn’t hide what he was feeling. He said it was Northlands, I said I don’t believe you, he walked out, and came home in the small hours. I presumed he was at the club.”

  Now she had to use not just her sharp policewoman’s eyes, but her copper’s nose, or the pricking of her thumbs. Use that witch blood of yours, as Moretti once said to her. Should she tell her, or not tell her, about the scene she walked in on at Ludo’s house?

  Nothing ventured, like the man said.

  “Mrs. Machin, do you know a man called Ludovic Ross?”

  If Melissa Machin was surprised by the change in direction she didn’t show it. She smiled and answered, “Well, I’ve met Ludo Ross, but he was more a friend of Garth’s than mine. He’s a jazz lover, and he’s what we used to call ‘a man’s man.’ Do people say that much anymore?”

  Her assessment of Ludo Ross’s character took Liz by surprise.

  “Anyway, why do you ask?” She seemed mildly curious rather than anything else, certainly not like a woman who was concealing some dark secret.

  “Because I know him, a bit.” Tame, but true. “Once when I went to his house in St. Martin your husband was there. He appeared to be having a serious discussion of some sort with Ludovic Ross and seemed quite disturbed. He left when I arrived. This would be about last autumn, as a matter of fact.”

  “Perhaps that’s where he went that day. Given Ludo Ross’s past history, that makes me even more sure that Garth has got himself mixed up in something, God knows what.”

  “With the murder victim’s past record, we wondered if he might have been coming here to try blackmail. Perhaps there is something in your husband’s past —”

  “Sergeant,” Melissa Machin’s tone was peremptory, her irritation barely concealed, “don’t you see? Don’t you understand what makes Garth vulnerable to a risky, get-rich-quick scheme of some kind? As the man said, something, anything, that will cut him loose? It’s not my husband’s past that’s responsible for — whatever this is. It’s his present.”

  The atmosphere in the room had changed. It didn’t take a pricking thumb or a copper’s nose to sense that all confidences were now over and that, for some reason, Melissa Machin had moved in a moment from vulnerability to something close to hostility. Liz Falla gave the woman her extension at Hospital Lane, and her mobile number, and made her exit.

  She was still in the car when her mobile rang. It was Melissa Machin.

  “Sergeant Falla, I’ve remembered something else I overheard. The man I could see said something like, ‘We have to because we cannot trust the bastard.’ Perhaps he meant the man on Mrs. Amsterdam’s lawn, the bruiser.”

  “Perhaps. Thank you, Mrs. Machin.”

  Perhaps. But it was far more likely he meant the Baby Mothball.

  Boule à mite. Petit salaud. A roomful of books, in French. Montreal French, African French, Paris French.

  Merde, but there was a lot of French in this case, thought Liz Falla as she headed back to Hospital Lane. But the sun had indeed gleamed, just for a moment.

  Day Five

  “Ask me anything, any question you want to know about the sodding Folies Bergère and I can give you the answer. Want to know the depth of the stage? Tw
enty feet. Want to know how many seats? Sixteen hundred. Want to know how many people it takes to feather a costume —?” A fed-up, worn-out PC Le Marchant sat slumped in the chair opposite Liz Falla and groaned loudly, lengthily.

  “I want to know everything.” Liz Falla broke into his noisy exhalations. “Stop bleating, Le Marchant. You’ve been hanging out with a star, and you are just a person of little talent, did you know that?”

  “That’s what she said, but I didn’t expect to hear it from you, Sergeant Falla.”

  “Don’t feel bad. You’re a nobody, and I’m just a second banana.”

  “That what she called you?” PC Le Marchant cheered up. “Mind you, the food was good. Pity about the booze — having to say no, I mean.”

  “The food? Who cooks for her?”

  “She’s got a service that brings stuff in, and a cleaning lady comes in every day. Mrs. Evans.”

  “Did the cleaning lady have anything interesting to say?”

  “Not a sausage. She says she tuned out years ago, she’s been coming since the husband was around. She’s going to stay overnight with Lady Fellowes for the next while. It’s been on the cards, she says, and she gets a good laugh. Some of the stories she tells — well, talk about spicy. She could write a book, Mrs. Evans says.”

  “I thought you said she tuned out. Sounds like she stays awake for the naughty bits, doesn’t it.”

  PC Brouard put his head around the office door. Liz had moved into Moretti’s office while he was away. “You wanted to know about the do at the Amsterdams’.”

  “Right. Come in, Jeff. Who was going to eat off the pink Spode?”

  “Eat off the what? Oh. Well, the cook told me it was her Scrabble club.”

  “Her Scrabble club?” Liz Falla and PC Le Marchant responded in chorus.

  “Yes. It’s a regular get-together. Not quite like it sounds, apparently. It can become quite rowdy, according to the cook, with extra points for, you know, certain words — like, rude ones — and they always have their meetings when Mr. Amsterdam is away on business.”