Tip Off

by John Francome

A couple of minutes later, we were standing in the pillared portico of the handsome, Neo-Gothic building that contained Toby’s lavishly appointed London apartment.

  I pushed the bell button labelled ‘T. Brown, Esq.’, gazed into a CCTV lens, smiled for the videotape and waited. When there was no answering squawk from the small speaker set in the wall, I tried again, twice. Still nothing.

  Matt had stepped back on to the cobbled street and was looking up at the windows of Toby’s second-floor flat. ‘All the curtains are drawn,’ he said. He flipped out his mobile and dialled Toby’s number.

  I watched his face while he listened, until he shook his head. ‘Not even an answerphone.’

  I pushed the button marked ‘Porter’.

  This time, with a gruff, resentful edge, we were answered. ‘Hello. Who is it?’

  ‘Simon Jeffries and Matt James. We came a couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘Morning, sir.’ The change in tone reflected, no doubt, his appreciation of the fifty-pound note Matt had pressed into his hand when he’d come to bug the phones. ‘I’ll open the door and come up to meet you.’

  A long blast on a buzzer indicated that the door’s lock had been released remotely and I pushed it open. Matt and I stepped into a lavishly furnished hall, rich with the woollen scent of new-laid Wilton and bright with gleaming brass door fittings.

  The porter, unshaven and tieless, appeared through an arch at the back of the hall.

  ‘Morning, gentlemen. What can I do for you?’

  Matt curtly put a finger to his lips. The man grinned back obsequiously and gestured at the door through which he had come. I nodded. He led us into the stale tobacco ambience of his small panelled office, and closed the door.

  I remembered the man’s name. ‘Good morning, Mr Tilbury. We were wondering if you’d seen or heard Mr Brown this morning?’

  ‘It’s not yet eight. I’ve not been up long, there’s not much call to be on Sunday.’

  ‘All right, but Mr Brown’s not answering his door now and we had an appointment with him. We need to see if he’s okay.’

  Tilbury looked worried. ‘Have you tried ringing him?’

  ‘We tried, but there was no answer.’

  ‘I can’t just let people into my clients’ apartments without their say-so . . .’

  I was already pulling a wallet from my pocket. ‘Mr Brown wouldn’t have asked me to come if he didn’t think it was urgent.’

  ‘No, sir, I suppose not,’ Tilbury said with half an eye on the fifty-pound note I was fingering.

  ‘And if you can’t let us in,’ I advised, ‘we’ll have to call the police.’

  ‘That won’t be necessary, sir,’ Tilbury said quickly. I guessed a combination of the money and the possibility that his precious clients might be disrupted by police sirens wailing in the mews had convinced him that letting us into Toby’s flat was his best option.

  We followed him up the broad shallow stairs to the second floor and a tall, dark oak-panelled entrance with oversized architrave and a carved tympanum above. He unlocked and swung open the heavy door. He stood back while I went in first, followed by Matt.

  I stopped a moment to listen. Matt moved up silently beside me, sharp as a fox. I tried to catch his eye but it was occupied.

  We were in a small, hexagonal ante-chamber, along with a pair of throne-like oak chairs and a large oriental carved wooden tiger on a gilt plinth. There were five other doors, all closed except the largest, opposite us.

  The only sound came from Tilbury’s heavy breathing. I advanced a few steps across a Chinese silk rug until I was standing in the open doorway. It gave into the biggest room in the flat, a room on a grand scale with the proportions and feel of a Tudor banqueting hall. A vaulted ceiling of moulded plaster was supported by three pairs of ornate double hammer beams.

  From the farthest beam dangled something long and bulky wrapped in a robe of figured silk which fluttered as it swung gently in the draught from the open door.

  I didn’t want to focus but gazed with horrified fascination until I knew beyond any doubt what we’d found. Unlike Matt, I wasn’t used to such sights. I had to swallow back the vomit welling up from my tightening guts.

  I looked away, ashamed and unexpectedly saddened. I glanced at Matt who offered a characteristic display of zero emotion.

  But he must surely have realised that this stiffening vessel of a spent human life meant we had comprehensively failed to grasp the seriousness of our Jockey Club brief.

  Hanging from a hempen noose looped around his neck, a look of puzzled disbelief on his once handsome face, was Toby Brown.

  I tried not to retch as I stared with horror into eyes that were wide open and quite inert in waxy lifeless features.

  A few paces behind me, I heard an ugly spluttering sound. Tilbury was being sick.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ Matt hissed in disgust.

  ‘I know how he feels,’ I admitted. ‘I wonder what the hell’s happened here?’

  ‘He’s topped himself by the look of it,’ Matt said, nodding at a small ornate chair which lay on its side, with one leg splintered, below the velvet-slippered feet of the dangling corpse.

  ‘But, Matt, he can’t have done. He rang me last night. He sounded a bit worried but . . .’

  ‘People do this kind of thing when they’re worried.’

  ‘But why did he ring me?’ I couldn’t reconcile Toby’s normal abrasive self-confidence with this ultimate act of despair.

  ‘Simon, don’t you think he might have wanted to be found fairly quickly? Or maybe he didn’t even want to succeed. Or maybe he was a gasper, and lost that chair by mistake.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Matt! Don’t joke about it, the guy’s dead.’

  ‘Well, it happens,’ he justified. ‘Or he might have had pressures we don’t even know about. For some people, the smallest problem can grow out of all proportion – so they take their own lives while the balance of their mind is impaired. That’s how they put it, isn’t it?’

  This didn’t seem to me to be the right time to be arguing about the cause of death. I guessed we might do better by leaving that to the experts.

  I pulled my mobile phone from my pocket. ‘I’m calling the police. In the meantime we’d better not touch anything.’

  ‘I think,’ Matt said, producing a handkerchief, ‘I’ll just remove our bugs first.’

  He carefully extracted the two miniature microphones secreted by the phones in the drawing room and bedroom. I picked up the phone to dial 999 and turned away from the mortal remains of Toby Brown to see Tilbury hunched in a chair, his head between his knees. ‘Look, Mr Tilbury, you’d better get to the door and make sure no one wanders in. I’m just calling the police.’

  Tilbury didn’t move; the emergency services exchange answered after six rings. I told them I wanted the police. When I heard the emotionless, efficient tones of a police switchboard operator I told her what we had found, and where.

  Within two minutes, sirens were echoing up the narrow cobbled street. Tilbury, still groaning, was spurred into action by a hammering on the main door of the building. He lolloped out of the flat and down the stairs to open it before it was knocked down.

  Two uniformed men, a sergeant and a constable, came into the room and took in the scene at a glance.

  I’d seen them arrive out of the window and was watching a second car slither noisily to a halt in the mews outside. Matt was sitting, almost languidly, in a gilt and brocade Empire chair.

  ‘Right, gentlemen,’ the sergeant rasped. ‘Which of you found him?’

  ‘We both did,’ I replied.

  ‘How did you get in here?’

  ‘The caretaker – the man who opened the door to you – brought us up and let us in.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘Toby . . .’ I stopped and nodded awkwardly at the swaying body ‘. . . rang me last night and asked me to come here this morning. When I arrived and couldn’t get an answer, I asked the caretaker
to help.’

  The younger man was walking round Toby’s oscillating corpse, taking conspicuous care not to touch or disturb anything while he murmured in jargon and acronyms over his radio.

  Outside, the mews was already filling up with ancillary vehicles. I guessed that sudden deaths in wealthy areas always attracted more press and professional nosy-parkers than in council estates.

  Within minutes, it seemed, the large flat was full of pathologists, scene-of-crime investigators, doctors, ambulance men, and two detectives in conspicuously casual clothing. One, in jeans, a brown suede jacket and a crew-cut, came over to me, flashed a warrant-card and put it back in his pocket before I’d had a chance to read a word on it. ‘DI Wyndham,’ he said. ‘I understand you found the deceased?’

  ‘Yes, with my colleague, Major James.’

  ‘Colleague? Were you here on some kind of business or are you a friend of the deceased?’

  ‘Toby,’ I said. ‘His name was Toby Brown, and I suppose I was a friend.’

  ‘Known him long?’

  ‘About twenty-five years.’

  ‘I see. I wonder if you’d mind coming into another room with me where we can get a bit of privacy?’

  And not be overheard by Matt so that we could make our stories tally, I thought.

  ‘By all means,’ I agreed calmly.

  He led me into the hexagonal hall and opened three of the doors that gave off it before he pushed one wider and went in to what I guessed was Toby’s bedroom – very opulently furnished with a vast French half-tester draped in maroon velvet and topped with a carved gilt coronet.

  DI Wyndham forgot himself enough to open his eyes in doubtful and faintly censorious wonder before he sharply brought his facial features under control. ‘Right, it’s a bit of a tart’s parlour but it’ll do,’ he said, closing the door behind me. He waved me expansively at a deep-buttoned chaise-longue while he pulled a notebook and Biro from his pocket.

  ‘So,’ he said, setting his jaw, ‘you came to see the deceased, your friend Toby, this morning. Why was that?’

  ‘He rang me and asked me to.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Just after ten last night.’

  ‘Do you know why he wanted to see you?’

  I shook my head. ‘Not for sure. You may have heard of him – he was a very successful racing tipster. Until the other day he was fronting a telephone service which had been having a fantastic winning run.’

  Recognition dawned on the policeman’s face. ‘Right,’ he said, nodding his head. ‘I’ve read about him – just recently. Are you in that business too?’ he asked with sudden sharpness.

  ‘Not on the tipping side, no. I own a couple of horses and occasionally I ride them, as an amateur.’

  ‘And what reason might he have had for asking you to come here?’

  I opened my hands, palms up, in a gesture of bewilderment. ‘I don’t know. He’d just done a deal with a consortium of bookmakers to supply information exclusively to them, and I dare say they were expecting him to carry on in the same spectacular way.’ I shook my head again. ‘I don’t know what you know about racing, but you can take it from me – statistically, there was no way he could have kept up for long what he’d been doing for the last few weeks.’

  ‘So he was under pressure, you think?’

  ‘I don’t know that for sure, but it’s possible. He didn’t tell me what the trouble was when he rang – just that he wanted to see me. He sounded agitated about something, but that was all. If I’d known he was in such a state, I’d have driven up last night.’

  Wyndham looked at me for a while, either making a shrewd assessment of my qualities as a witness or at least giving a good impression that he was.

  ‘Do they know how long he’s been dead?’ I went on.

  ‘About an hour, maybe a little longer. What time did you get here?’

  I shrugged. ‘Seven forty-five?’

  The detective looked at me sharply, sensing evasion. ‘Come on, you can do better than that.’

  ‘It was about three minutes before I dialled 999.’

  ‘Right.’ He nodded and scribbled in his notebook. ‘Now, I’ll need a few details and we’ll be in touch to get a full statement.’

  ‘Has anyone been in touch with Toby’s family yet?’ I asked.

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘I know his mother very well. I think it might be best if I broke the news to her first.’

  The policeman nodded. ‘Yes, that would be better, but I must ask you at this stage to inform her only that her son has met with a fatal accident.’

  ‘I’m not going to lie to her.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to, sir. But as we haven’t ascertained precisely the circumstances of his death . . .’

  ‘All right,’ I interrupted. ‘I’ll go right away. How can I get in touch with you if I need to know more?’

  ‘Here’s my number.’ He scribbled in his notebook, tore out a sheet and thrust it at me.

  I took it. ‘How long will all these people be here, then?’

  The Detective Inspector glanced around. ‘Not much longer. But before you go,’ he held up a hand in the time-honoured way, ‘your details, please. And I must ask you to give a set of fingerprints to forensics – just so that you can be eliminated.’

  We walked through to the drawing room where I introduced him to Matt, and they disappeared back into the bedroom.

  While I was rolling my prints on to a card, Mr Tilbury was brought up by the uniformed constable and sat, upright now but ashen-faced, on one of Toby’s baronial chairs.

  The other plain-clothes man was rifling through the bookshelves and the contents of a writing desk, while Toby’s body was lowered from where it hung and placed on a stretcher by two ambulance men. One of them covered the silk-gowned body with a grey blanket, from which the velvet monogrammed slippers protruded bizarrely.

  Matt emerged from a brief interview with Wyndham as Toby’s body was carried from his exotic home for the final time. We went out behind the corpse and sat in my car and watched while it was loaded into an ambulance.

  As the official vehicles began to disperse, I picked up the phone and dialled the number at Wetherdown.

  ‘Morning, Jane. How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said in her usual breezy manner. ‘What on earth are you doing ringing at this time on a Sunday morning?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Jane, I’ve got some bad news.’

  There was a brief pause. In an entirely different voice she asked, ‘Toby?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid he’s been in an accident.’

  ‘Accident?’ she whispered. ‘How bad?’

  I knew she wouldn’t forgive me for prevaricating.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jane. He’s dead.’

  I heard her gasp. ‘Oh my God!’ Then I could almost hear her trying to pull herself together. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The police haven’t said yet.’

  ‘But, I mean, was it a car crash or what?’

  I couldn’t believe how measured her tones were. I guessed something in the human body just takes over in times of such immense shock.

  ‘No,’ I answered quickly, ‘no, it was some kind of domestic accident. But, Jane, I’m coming down to see you.’

  I heard a few dry sobs. ‘You’re in London now – at Toby’s?’

  ‘Yes. He rang me late last night and asked me to meet him here. Matt and I found him, but I’ll tell you all about that when I come. I’m only ringing you now because I wanted to let you know before the press find out.’

  ‘The press? Oh, God,’ she moaned.

  ‘Look, Jane, they’re bound to be interested.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ She sniffed. ‘Thanks so much for ringing. Come as soon as you can, please, Simon.’

  ‘I will.’

  On our way out of London, I called Emma. She was just waking up at my house. As concisely as possible, I tol
d her what had happened.

  ‘I’ll go and see Jane now,’ she offered without hesitation.

  ‘That would be really kind. I should think she’ll need some support.’

  ‘It’s no problem. I certainly don’t feel like going back to Ivydene now.’

  ‘You should be careful,’ Matt said when I’d rung off. ‘Emma’ll have moved in to your place before you know it.’

  ‘So?’ I said. ‘That could save me a lot of time and petrol.’

  As we turned off the M4 on to the Oxford Road, fifteen minutes from Wetherdown, I started to worry.

  ‘What on earth are we going to tell Jane?’

  ‘I’ll ring that detective and see if they’ve got a result yet,’ Matt suggested.

  ‘They won’t know any more by now.’

  ‘They might,’ he insisted.

  I handed him the piece of paper on which the policeman had written his number, and he dialled it.

  ‘DI Wyndham? It’s Matthew James here. We’ll be seeing Mrs Brown shortly. Can you tell us yet what you think happened?’

  He listened for a few moments, nodding his head. ‘I see . . . And you’re sure about that? . . . Okay, thank you. We’ll tell her.’

  He clicked off the phone, turned to me and pulled a gloomy face. ‘They’re convinced it was suicide, but they won’t be releasing a statement for the time being. It seems the press haven’t picked it up yet.’

  ‘I was really hoping it wasn’t suicide,’ I said, disappointed and not at all looking forward to telling this to Jane.

  ‘They found no sign that anyone else had been in the flat.’

  ‘But how did Toby get up to that beam?’

  ‘He only had to stand on the chair and chuck the rope over, didn’t he?’

  I thought about Toby, tormented to the point where his life seemed intolerable, and wondered what any of us could have done to help him.

  Nothing was going to make it any easier to tell his mother, I thought, as I turned through the gates of Wetherdown.

  ‘No,’ Jane said firmly. ‘No way.’ She looked at me defiantly.

  I turned and walked across her drawing room to take refuge in staring at the view through the bay window.