Play Dead

by Peter Dickinson

  ‘Way I look at it is this. Remember what I was saying to you last time, about that being a nice little set-up for blackmail you got there in the play-group, all those girls gossiping round about what they know? And one of them just listening and passing it all on? Now suppose it was Laura doing just that, and telling this young fellow she’s fond of. And suppose she puts him on to the kind of thing that really matters to someone, the kind of thing they’d kill to keep quiet. Right?’

  ‘Well … as a matter of fact I had noticed that she’d become much less stand-offish since … oh, just about since the time when he first tried to follow me.’

  ‘There you are, then. Now she’s not stupid, Laura. She knows what she’s told the young man. Maybe he’s talked to her about how he’s getting on. Whoever killed him has tried to make it look like suicide, but from what you’re telling me she’s not going to wear that …’

  ‘The morning after he was found she was trying to tell Mr Firth that it was the people at Sabina Road who’d killed him. I think they just moved him because they didn’t want a police enquiry at the squat. They knew about him coming to the play centre before, from Nell. And the one called Mark would have thought of the freesias. I saw him at my daughter-in-law’s adoption meeting. He sounded like that kind of joker. But they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of faking a suicide, and then drawn attention to it by moving him, would they?’

  ‘Not unless they were pie-eyed at the time. No. I’m with you there.’

  ‘I’m afraid I told the girls about all that. I thought they had a right to know. Laura was there too. She could have worked it out.’

  ‘And then she starts thinking about who else might’ve killed her friend. She’s told him things and he’s told her things which there’s several people wouldn’t want known about, supposing they’re true. And she’s not going to the cops, is she? They wouldn’t listen to her, time before.’

  ‘She was a bit paranoid about them anyway, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Silly cow. No off … I didn’t say it! I didn’t say it!’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘So she starts ringing round, accusing them all of this and that. And with one of them she hits the fellow as actually did the young man in. Right? And somehow—don’t ask me how—he knows who it is, making these calls. What does he do? He goes round to Barnsley Square. And she lets him in.’

  ‘I suppose he could have had a key. I mean Laura could have told Simon about something in that family, a brother or someone. What about the husband—if you can imagine anyone doing that to his own son?’

  ‘Mr Lewis. He’s in San Francisco or somewhere, setting up a film. That’s cast iron. They’re checking on the keys, of course, and if the mum’s got a boyfriend on the side—there’s nothing you or me can help with there.’

  ‘Well, I can’t think of anyone, assuming we’re talking about a man. The only people I know that Laura knew at all were the girls at the play centre, and I simply can’t imagine any of them … They’ve mostly got boyfriends, of course, and I know quite a bit about them. There’s one who’s had a spot of trouble with the police, but even he … Honestly, no, Jim. I don’t believe it. All right, there you are, greedy-guts.’

  She put her plate on the floor, for Elias to finish off the sardine tails and backbones and a few other fish-smelling scraps. Of course he pulled them on to the carpet before eating them—some cats would do that if you gave them a dish the size of a cartwheel. Normally she’d have spread a bit of newspaper under the plate, but she was too tired to bother. All she wanted now was bed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have to ask you to go. I’ll be asleep in about three minutes.’

  ‘OK, OK. Just a thought though. Suppose he came round with someone she did know, someone she’d open the door for. Suppose, for instance, there was a husband having it off with one of the girls, and neither of them wanted the mum knowing …’

  ‘No, Jim. Absolutely not. No.’

  6

  This time there was no waiting. Sergeant Caesar was already at the counter. He watched while she was booked in and took her straight round. The WPC she’d asked for was in the corridor, ready to look after Toby. It was Vi, and he recognised her so there was no trouble about the hand-over. Poppy was sure Mr Firth had remembered and deliberately sent for Vi. It would be typical of him.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said. ‘Please sit down. I’m afraid that was a very nasty experience you had yesterday.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ lied Poppy.

  She had been flung into wakefulness at about three that morning, as if by some violent thought propelling her up out of the ocean of sleep on to this terrible but inevitable course, a thinking missile, aware in advance of the ruin of its impact. She had sat till dawn at the kitchen table making notes of what she needed to say, and then writing it in the form of a statement, like the one she’d signed earlier. She had managed to eat some breakfast, but it lay like gravel in her stomach, undigested. Her blood had no heat in it at all. She changed her specs, unfolded the sheets of paper and began to read.

  ‘I’m going to tell you everything I know,’ she said, ‘because I don’t know how much of it is relevant. As you’ll see, there are things I’d much rather keep quiet about, but it can’t be helped. I can only hope you’ll treat anything you don’t need as confidential. I have recently started having an affair with John Capstone. It had not in fact begun on the evening when I reported that someone had been watching my flat. We had merely met at a concert, by accident—I had already met him briefly at his home—and he had then had supper with me. Next morning he telephoned me, speaking very urgently, and told me to go out to a call-box and ring him from there. He then said he had been followed away from my house by someone who had been watching it. When I said I would have to report it to the police he insisted that I did so in a manner which made it seem that the man had been interested in me, or perhaps my grandson Toby, and not in him. Later …’

  She kept her voice dry and level, filling in everything she’d left out, for John’s sake or Nell’s or her own, in her previous statement—things he’d told her himself about his activities; things she’d realised, such as the fact that he expected them to come to a crisis in the near future, and the nature of Constantin’s work; Constantin’s apparent relationship with Peony; and then things she hadn’t realised earlier might be relevant, mainly to do with Laura, such as her sudden unbending and efforts at friendship with the girls in the last few weeks; what Nell had told her about the commune—briefly, since presumably they’d already got all that from Nell herself; Big Sue’s anger when Simon had first come to the park; and so on. She put no construction on any of the facts, apart from the implied one of their possible relevance. The only real guess she allowed herself was about the nature of Nick’s terror.

  ‘… we’d arranged that he should visit me the night before last, but he didn’t come. Nell told me he rang next morning when I was at Barnsley Square, saying he was in Geneva. I don’t know whether he had Constantin with him. There was a blank call on my daughter-in-law’s answerphone when I got back yesterday evening, but otherwise I haven’t heard.’

  She looked up. She had been aware of Mr Firth making notes while she spoke. He was studying them now.

  ‘Get someone to check the Geneva passenger-lists, will you, Bob,’ he said without looking up. ‘He most likely went sudden, or he’d have let Mrs Tasker know.’

  He waited for Sergeant Caesar to leave the room, then turned and smiled at her.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ he said. ‘That’s all extremely interesting. What made you decide to tell me?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just woke up, knowing I had to. Because it’s a murder, I suppose. Because of what I think happened to Nick, even more. Of course I’ve asked myself whether it’s really subconscious resentment at John letting me down like that. Honestly I don’t think so.’
>
  ‘This man Constantin … ?’

  ‘I think he’s there to keep an eye on John. John good as told me he was in the Romanian secret police. John does some sort of financial work for the Romanian government—I don’t mean for the official government. It sounds like some sort of currency fiddle. He said it meant President … oh, Ceausescu, isn’t it? … his nephews could afford to buy Gucci shoes. There used to be someone he really cared about in Romania, but she died—early last year, it would have been, so they lost their hold over him. At one point he had to go to Trieste in a hurry and insisted that Constantin went with him, which upset Mrs Capstone’s arrangements. She wasn’t at all pleased.’

  He made another note and looked at her again. He was about to speak when the door opened.

  ‘Hang on a moment, Bob,’ he said.

  The door closed.

  ‘I think you are still not being quite open with me,’ he said. ‘You’ve come to a conclusion, which you don’t want to tell me. Right? You don’t want to accuse someone, so you’re leaving it to me to work it out. It’s my job, isn’t it?’

  He waited, but Poppy said nothing.

  ‘One of the girls at the play centre, it’s got to be. Someone you mind about, someone Laura knew. Someone she’d let into the house, right? This Peony, for instance. She’d do what Constantin told her, you think?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘She’d been round at Barnsley Square, you say, when Mrs Capstone said she didn’t want Deborah having any more to do with the people from the play centre?’

  ‘That’s only an impression I got, and Laura and Peony had both been taking the children to the Holland Park play centre. Anyway, Barnsley Square’s different, isn’t it?’

  ‘Honorary Kensington? Who asked who, do you happen to know?’

  ‘They went to Barnsley Square, so it must have been Laura asked Peony.’

  ‘You’d have expected that?’

  ‘Not really. Neither way round, actually.’

  ‘But if Laura wanted to talk to Peony about Capstone. Venable would have told her about trying to follow him from your house. And you say he would have recognised him, so he may have made contact later. When you met Capstone after Venable’s death he was playing the episode down, right?’

  Poppy nodded, miserable. She had travelled this path, to and fro, to and fro, in the small hours.

  ‘Then Peony tells Constantin,’ said Mr Firth. ‘Or perhaps Laura herself begins to make accusations. You won’t have been the only one getting anonymous telephone calls, and Peony would know about the parents being away … It’s all right, Mrs Tasker. He wouldn’t have told her what he was going to do. He’d have sent her away the moment she’d got Laura to let him in …’

  ‘Do you think it’s true?’

  ‘It shouldn’t be hard to find out.’

  ‘Be gentle with her.’

  ‘Even fairly simple-minded people have to take the responsibility for their actions in the end, you know. Yes … ?’

  It was the WPC, Vi, pink-faced, pushing Toby in front of her.

  ‘He’s asking for his granny,’ she whispered.

  Sergeant Caesar appeared behind her, amused, self-pleased, making it instantly apparent that Toby’s demand for Poppy had arisen from Vi not being able to give him her full attention.

  ‘Hello, Toby,’ said Mr Firth. ‘Have you still got your book? Any joy, Bob?’

  A tiny, warning shake of the head. John had not been on the passenger-lists to Geneva.

  Sergeant Caesar slid a sheet of paper, a fax by the look of it, on to Mr Firth’s desk. He started to look through it but was distracted by Toby trying to open the drawers of his desk.

  ‘Not in there, young man,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got in here. Suppose we tie this bit of string on to …’

  ‘My do it.’

  ‘OK, but I’ll help you. Have a look through there, Mrs Tasker, and see if any of the names ring a bell.’

  She took the page. A letterhead and a list of names and dates. She gazed at it, not registering. If he hadn’t been in Geneva … He hadn’t come round … Oh, God …

  She forced herself to read.

  MRS HORTON’S

  Quality Nursery Staff Confidential

  Re: Miss Laura Evans. Previous Employers:

  1967–1974 Hon. Mrs David Ogham-Ferrars

  1974–1979 Mrs Wabeloff

  1979–1986 Mrs Gally

  1988– Ms Mary Pitalski

  ‘My do it! My do it!’

  Toby’s voice of unquestionable command. Mr Firth had found a magnet, tied it to a length of string (how had he intuited Toby’s fascination with anything that could be looped or threaded?), pulled a drawer right out of the desk and set it to project from the top so that the string could then be run over the drawer-knobs and used as a crane to raise and lower key-rings, chains of paperclips, file-tags and so on. He handed the apparatus over and looked at Poppy.

  ‘He may well have gone out via Paris, or some other way,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Yes, it could be true, but probably wasn’t. She passed the sheet back.

  ‘Stupid names people have,’ she said. ‘Not that I can talk. I wonder what she was doing in 1987.’

  ‘Getting him off heroin, maybe. He seems to have broken the habit once, and by all accounts he wouldn’t have done that without a lot of help. That reminds me. Heroin. There’s a fair amount about, but it isn’t something you can just go out and buy on a one-off basis. You’ve got to have contacts. You might think if you’ve picked up any hint of that anywhere.’

  She shook her head. John? This scheme which was coming to its crisis? A consignment of drugs in Romanian diplomatic baggage? That man on the trade delegation, who couldn’t be met till after midnight? It didn’t feel like that, and anyway Mr Firth would already have thought of it. Big Sue’s Trevor … reluctantly she explained about the imbroglio at the transport café.

  ‘Better look into it, Bob,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t sound the type for this, though. It’s all too fancy.’

  ‘Please …’ said Poppy, and stopped. What was the point? Trevor would get aggressive, bluster, lie … but the missile had already struck, detonated. Now it was only a question of how far, into what innocent lives, the destruction would spread.

  ‘It’s got to be done, I’m afraid,’ said Mr Firth. ‘Well, I think that’s all for the moment, and thank you very much. You may have saved us a lot of messing around. Do you want me to have your notes? If you’ll just sign them they’ll do as a statement. Save you hanging around.’

  ‘I’ve done that already,’ said Poppy and slid the pages she had read from on to the desk.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘And no doubt you’d like to keep the magnet, young man.’

  ‘Oh, no, you mustn’t,’ said Poppy. ‘We don’t want him getting the idea he can have anything he fancies.’

  ‘Mine?’ said Toby, vainly trying to slide the magnet and string into a non-existent pocket in the bib of his overalls.

  ‘Then I’ll lend it to you,’ said Mr Firth. ‘But I’ll need it back. It’s an essential piece of investigative equipment, Toby.’

  ‘Just a few days,’ said Poppy.

  ‘Few days,’ said Toby, getting the tone dead right, his word his bond, though his grasp of time and number was still non-existent. Sergeant Caesar accompanied them out. In the lift he grinned at Poppy.

  ‘Thanks for looking in,’ he said.

  ‘I hope it was all right. I mean …’

  ‘What d’you mean, all right? If you’d seen how the boss perked up when he heard it was you.’

  ‘I expect he misses his daughters, so he enjoys playing with Toby.’

  ‘If that’s what you want to think …’

  They had reached the lobby. He held the door.


  ‘All right now? Be good. See you soon,’ he said.

  Poppy pushed home through the wintry streets. The threat of Christmas hung in the air, visible already, to Poppy’s eye, in the fretful look of passers-by as they readied themselves for the meaningless but necessary rites of false jovialities and ill-considered gifts. She detested Christmas. It was one of the few things on which she saw eye to eye with her mother. They had reduced it to a minimum. You gave, say, a pair of slipper-socks and received a jumper. You lunched off roast chicken and Lyons mince pies, and shared half a bottle of cheap white wine. You listened to the Queen, and then it was over and you could go out and feed the pigs. How had she come to marry a man with Pharaonic expectations of the festival, demanding, even in middle-age, a full stocking of carefully selected knick-knacks, all wrapped in different papers, with gold-papered chocolate coins spilling out at the top and a tangerine in the toe, and then a camel train of larger gifts (yes, he would really have loved it if she’d hired a few camels and had them come jingling down the street to their door, though he’d have expected her somehow to do it out of the housekeeping money), and a monster turkey and flaming pudding and bloody holly everywhere? The one faint lightening of her inner misery was the thought that she would no longer have to worry about a Christmas present for John.

  There was a message on Janet’s answering machine, the harsh voice unmistakable.

  ‘I will call on you at nine this evening. Please be in.’

  7

  Do you offer food to one whom you’ve betrayed? The question bulked ridiculously larger than the rationally more important one of whether she should have rung Mr Firth and told him John was coming. It was, she knew, possible that John had killed two people, in order to close their mouths. It was therefore possible that he would do the same to her. She was certain that the moment he came through the door he would smell her treachery. She was going to have to tell him in any case; she couldn’t keep up a whole evening of pretence. She had felt compelled, out of a kind of duty to others—to Nick, to Laura, to the dead young man, to the whole community to which she belonged—to betray him. But now that public necessity was over. Whatever happened between them now was private, their own affair. She had the right to choose, so she chose to trust him. That was that.