‘I’ve quite gone off Earl Grey,’ he said meekly.
Melanie Poole found an upright chair in the corner. One of those requiring a new seat? She banged it down in front of him. I sat on the padded arm of his leather recliner and got out my pipe. There were no ashtrays around, so all I could do was play with it in my fingers.
‘Now,’ she said, getting down to it. ‘I hear you’ve been naughty again, Harvey.’
4
I had had the impression that she was going to introduce us, then leave the rest to me. It was my interview, wasn’t it? Apparently not. But I said nothing. My turn would come.
He was looking at her with wide eyes, all innocence. ‘How could you say such a thing!’ he complained.
‘A month ago,’ she said briskly, ‘around then, a house was entered. It was your style, Harvey. We have three used Earl Grey tea bags. Your MO, too. What d’you say to that?’
‘Where was this?’
She didn’t know the answer to that, and tossed a glance at me. I shrugged. It was my secret for now.
Harvey said: ‘Well then...’ He smiled blandly.
But already the message had been put across. I was the one who knew, and I hadn’t told Inspector Poole. Therefore — I was not police.
‘I’m asking the questions,’ she told him. ‘Something very valuable was taken —’
He was missing nothing. ‘Valuable? How valuable? What was it?’
‘You tell me.’
‘How could I possibly know that, Miss Poole, if I wasn’t there?’
‘You were there. There’s nobody else in the county — probably in the whole country — who works as neatly and cleanly as you.’
‘Flattery, now!’
‘Nor anybody who’s got such a smooth tongue. It was your method of entry, and your careful attention to leaving every-thing exactly as it was. You were inside quite a while. A whole day on it, and probably you stayed the night. That’s you, Harvey. The tea bags are you. Earl Grey. Your signature.’
His hands were resting relaxed on his knees. Always watch hands. His expressed only innocence, his fingers together. Nothing twitched.
‘Tea bags!’ he complained. ‘I’m always getting that thrown at me. If I’ve used them in the past — and I’m not about to admit that — then somebody else has picked on it. They’re trying to set me up.’
She flung herself out of the chair. I thought it a little too theatrical. There was also too much anger in her voice.
‘You make me mad, Harvey. Here you are, all comfy with your cottage and your expensive car, and probably with a nice portfolio of gilt-edged, and you play games that could land you inside. You’ve never been to prison, have you?’ He shook his head mutely, lips pursed. ‘You wouldn’t like it. There’s always a last job; you don’t seem to realize that. The last one before we put you away. You told me you’d retired, and now this!’
‘You mustn’t upset yourself, Miss Poole,’ he begged her unhappily.
‘Parkhurst instead of the Caribbean, or wherever you swan off to on your holidays.’
‘I prefer a nice, quiet cruise.’
‘Oh...you’re hopeless.’ She turned to me. ‘You’ll get no-where with him, Richard. I know him. He can keep this up for hours.’
I got to my feet, smiled at her, and said: ‘Reckon I wouldn’t.’
‘I’ll see you to the door,’ Harvey offered, but making no move.
‘We’ll see ourselves out.’ Melanie marched out of the room and into the hall. I caught the door as it swung, and glanced back. I raised my eyebrows — his nod was minimal. I closed the door behind me and marched towards the wind outside.
We got in the car. He waved to us through the window, a needle dangling silk in his fingers.
‘Well?’ she asked, as I started the engine.
‘I didn’t get to say much, did I? You went a bit over the top, I thought.’
She grimaced. ‘It wasn’t all an act. He really infuriates me. I like him, Richard. I’d hate to have to arrest him. And you?’
‘I got the signal. He’ll see me alone.’
‘When?’
‘No words were exchanged. A raised eyebrow and a nod. But he spread his fingers on his knees. Eight fingers.’
‘Ah!’ she smiled. I put the car into gear, and we headed back into the wind. ‘So it was fairly successful, I’d say.’ She sounded complacent.
‘It achieved what we came for. He knows I’m not police. He knows I’ve told you next to nothing.’
She was silent for a while. Spray hit us a quarter of a mile from the coast road, and the wipers flapped madly. The car was heavy, and seemed to lack power.
‘You’ll show me what you get?’ she asked at last.
‘That’s what I promised.’
She was silent again. I turned north on the coast road. It was just as bad driving north as south.
‘I want to make it quite clear,’ she said, ‘that everything I’ve done up to now is unofficial. On my own time.’
‘No report?’
‘Nothing on paper. But if this thing, or whatever, that he’s stolen in any way relates to a crime —’
‘Other than the fact that it’d be proof of his own crime?’
‘You’re making that a condition?’ she asked sharply. ‘It’s a bit late to throw in new conditions.’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to touch him, and you know it. And yes, I realize that if a serious crime is revealed, then you’ll have to go all efficient and official on me.’
‘As long as you understand that.’
‘Of course. I was ahead of you.’
We said nothing more, each of us considering how best to play it. There was no more discussion. I drove into the courtyard of the inn, and she got straight out of the car, heading for her own.
‘Say goodbye to your wife for me,’ she shouted into the wind.
I nodded, reached over to lock her door, and got out to watch her drive away. A gust seemed to catch her car and twitch it, but she had control at once.
Amelia was waiting for me in the lobby, quietly and patiently.
‘How was your walk?’
‘Richard, I couldn’t stand. It look my breath away.’
‘I’m told you get used to it.’
‘I’ll bet. And how did it go?’
We were mounting the stairs. After the wind noise outside, the silence was like a blanket.
‘We made contact. He’s got something to offer, or to say. I’m seeing him later, at eight.’
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘What a pity. Dinner’s served at eight.’
‘I didn’t think of that.’ I stood aside for her to enter the room. ‘Oh well, I’ll have to miss it, I suppose. In the interests of justice and peace of mind —’
‘We’ll have to miss it, Richard. We.’
‘You want to come?’
‘Well...just consider. You’re in your role as an interested citizen. All unofficial. Wouldn’t it look better if you take your wife along? And besides, I hate being left on my own, and out of it.’
I kissed her. Held her back and grinned at her. ‘Then by all means come along. We can get fish and chips somewhere on the way back.’
‘I doubt that. I did get a bit of the way along the sea front, and everywhere is dead. Not just closed. Shuttered.’
‘Ah!’ I thought about it. ‘We’ll ring down for sandwiches.’
At five o’clock we did that. We got them, plus a tray of tea, at five-thirty. Delicate, frilly sandwiches. They left me still hungry.
We set out at seven-thirty. The wind had blown itself away. The sea whispered and the stars were bright. On the east coast, the night sky is black. The still air felt much more cold than the wind had.
I now drove the journey with confidence, knowing I only had to keep an eye open for the lighthouse. If there’s one thing you can’t miss at night it’s a lighthouse. We were watching the flicks of light, every five seconds, from over a mile away.
When I dr
ew up in front of it, the cottage was welcoming, lights all on at the front and the grey smoke from his chimney just visible against the sky. He had a brass pixie for his knocker. I tapped, and he opened.
‘Ah, here you are. Oh...I wasn’t expecting...’
‘My wife, Harvey. Amelia, this is Harvey Cope.’
‘Come in. Come in. I’m pleased to meet you, Mrs...Patton, wasn’t it? My memory...’ He squeezed his brow.
‘Yes,’ she said, smiling, at once captivated by him. ‘You don’t look a bit like a burglar, I must say.’
He laughed out loud, throwing his head back. ‘I am glad you came. The Inspector’s a friend, but you can’t have a laugh with her.’
‘That’s true,’ I agreed. ‘Amelia wasn’t keen on being left on her own.’
This time he was showing us into the room on the left. It was his dining-room.
‘My wife didn’t either. She would get worried, and in the end I had to take her along. She’d sit in the car or van, or whatever I was using. Behind the wheel. For a quick getaway, she always said. But of course, that never arose.’
‘You must miss her terribly,’ Amelia murmured.
‘Well...no.’ He ran his fingers through her hair. ‘I’m afraid I gave you the wrong impression. She’s at our place on the Cote d’Azure. We always winter there. Now...I was doing a cheese omelette with chives and a side salad, followed by strawberries and ice cream. It’s nearly ready. All I’ll need to do is pop in two more eggs. If you’ll just excuse me. Make yourselves at home. There’s sherry on the side, there.’
He slipped out of the room. We looked at each other. ‘Not look like a burglar!’ I said.
‘It slipped out. He’s nothing like I expected.’
I went over and poured us sherries. It was a fine madeira, I thought, not a sherry. The room was beautifully furnished. The four chairs, for which he must have been doing the seat covers, were surely Hepplewhite.
Nothing about this evening was what I’d expected, either. I’d imagined a short, crisp discussion, and a rapid departure. But, without his wife, the poor chap was lonely. He wanted company. He’d even put on a white shirt, black slacks and a dark jacket.
‘Here we are!’ he cried, sliding into the room.
We sat down to dinner. The food was excellent. The strawberries, he told us, had been sent to him by his wife. He was a born conversationalist, picking up a new subject at the barest hint of silence, his agile mind ranging in all directions.
We finished with brandy, then we sat on, amongst the scattered plates and dishes, and got down to business.
From his inside pocket he produced a yellow envelope, the sort of thing you get your prints in from the developers. For a moment my heart sank. Surely he hadn’t uncovered a secret horde of porno photographs!
‘What’ve you got there?’ I asked tentatively. His hand was still on the envelope. It lay flat on the table surface. There couldn’t have been much in it.
‘First,’ he said, ‘I’d like to know more about your interest in this. I don’t think you’re a private investigator...’
‘No,’ cut in Amelia. ‘Of course not. The house — Mansfield Park — where I assume you found that envelope, is the home of a college friend of mine, Olivia Dean.’ He nodded and she went on: ‘She was worried. They’d had a burglary, but she told us nothing had been taken.’
‘Did she now!’
Amelia gestured, and I took it on from there.
‘I’m ex-police. Mrs Dean thought I could help, though you’ll understand it wasn’t clear how. I’d better tell you now that if what you’ve got there is evidence of a serious crime, I’ll have to hand it over to Inspector Poole.’
He thought about that. ‘I wouldn’t like that to happen. The evidence would point straight back to me. But...’ He shook his head. ‘For the life of me, I can’t see that it can be evidence of anything. I’ll tell you what we’ll do. A bargain. You can look at what I’ve got here, and if you think you ought to hand it over to the police, then there’s no deal. You’re friends who’ve visited, and that’ll be the end of it. You’ll simply walk away from here with nothing.’
‘No deal?’ I asked. ‘I never suggested there could be a deal.’
‘I think you might. Agreed?’
How could I refuse? I nodded. He slid the envelope across to me. Slowly, because I didn’t know what might be in there, I slipped out the contents.
My first impression was a sense of anticlimax. There were two glossy coloured photographs, apparently identical, and taken by someone used to handling a camera. They were sharp and crisp, and in complete detail.
The detail was not pleasant. In the left foreground was a sloping, muddy bank, on which the photographer must have been standing. Or maybe just in the water. There were reeds and algae. Lying amongst it was the body of a woman. I say woman, because the blond hair was spread and distributed across the algae, and seemed too fine and luxuriant to belong to a man. It was not possible to see her face, which was down in the water. She was turned with her left shoulder beneath the surface and her right shoulder protruding, the right half of a green anorak or combat jacket clear of the water, and she was wearing blue jeans. Short heels of black boots were just visible.
I stared at them side by side, eyes flicking from one to the other, and it was some time before I spotted the difference between them. High on the breast of the right side of the jacket was a round, yellow disc. It was there in the one picture, not there in the other.
Silently, I turned them round and slid them across to Amelia. I heard her sharp intake of breath, but blessedly she said nothing. I was marshalling my thoughts. What I now said would be of importance, and I had to assemble it in the correct order.
‘Harvey,’ I said, ‘I’m going to try to set out a scenario on this. If I go wrong, I’m sure you’ll correct me.’
He inclined his head. There was no sign of his smile now, and his eyes were fastened on me unblinkingly. Intense. He was a clever man, sharp. I had to try not to insult his intelligence.
‘You’re retired,’ I said. ‘Miss Poole wasn’t wrong about that. But I know what it’s like. At first you relax. There’s all the time you could wish for in which to enjoy your retirement, and all the world left to explore. But after a while you get a bit itchy. You miss it, and there’s all that experience and expertise going to waste. You feel you’re not keeping up with developments. So you allow yourself to become involved again.’
‘A fellow sufferer,’ he murmured.
‘Yes. You see, I know. You allowed yourself to become involved with the odd little job, provided it seemed to offer interest. And this one did. Someone asked you to get into Mansfield Park and recover this envelope with these photographs.’
‘Go on. I’m admitting nothing.’
‘Then I’ll guess. You’d think about it before you’d take it on. There was just the hint of a smell of blackmail about it. There’s a lot of it about, I expect, that we never hear of. Minor stuff, perhaps psychological, perhaps financial. Bigger stuff, as big as murder, perhaps. But if murder’s involved, it’s not a very good idea to try blackmailing the murderer. He might be prepare to do it again. Or he might take the easier course of resorting to an expert to recover the evidence. Am I making sense, Harvey?’
‘You make a reasonable case.’ He was not conceding one iota.
‘And this, to you, would sound like just that sort of situation. Recovering photographs. What photographs, you’d ask your-self. It would certainly offer a hint of interest. And yet — and you may not have thought of this, Harvey — if a murder happened to be involved, and there was no likelihood of the murderer getting the chop, then maybe it would serve the bugger right to be blackmailed. I don’t get the impression you’d have any sympathy for a crime of violence.’
‘I have always,’ he admitted, ‘had a hatred of any form of violence.’
I smiled at the brandy in my glass. ‘D’you mind if I make a guess at what happened?’
‘H
elp yourself. I’m not saying anything for now.’
‘Of course not. Right. So you got into the house. What you were looking for was slim and easily hidden, but therefore more difficult to find, I’d guess. But the information was that you had a clear week. No doubt that information came from the client?’
He smiled, but said nothing.
‘So you took your time, and you eventually found it. Taped under a drawer somewhere perhaps...’ With raised eyebrows, I made that a question, but he didn’t fall for it, sliding adroitly round it.
‘I’d have thought,’ he suggested, ‘more likely in one of the books, with pages cut out of the middle.’
‘That sounds likely. And she’d have a complete collection of her own books, which would certainly be there for show, not for opening.’
‘You’d make a very good burglar, Richard,’ he conceded. It was an accolade, though he spoilt it a little. ‘If you weren’t so bulky.’
‘A drawback,’ I admitted. ‘In any event, you found the photos. And what would they mean to you? I’m still guessing, Harvey. Care to help me out?’
‘Not really. I’m enjoying this.’
‘All right. I’d say you realized you had nothing particularly sinister. The photograph of a young girl — apparently young, apparently female — who had drowned. From the picture, it would be impossible to say that murder was involved. Accident. Suicide. Both possible. So — how can this picture be used for blackmail? Someone found the body, and before reporting it took a photograph. A bit sordid, but not criminal. Perhaps there was some intention to sell it to a newspaper. That sounds unlikely. I suggest you sat there, in that house, and puzzled over it. Drank a mug or two of tea, and gave it some consideration.’
All through this I had been using the word ‘photograph’. Singular. There must, though, have been two separate ones taken. I was testing him out, but he didn’t react.
‘You make me out to be quite a thinker, Richard. What did I decide? I’d like to know.’
‘It was a month ago this happened, but you’ve still got the envelope. You decided you’d like a second opinion. If you deliberately left your trademark, the Earl Grey tea bags, you could reckon on somebody coming along in due course, somebody like me, feeling their way. You haven’t delivered the goods to the client. There was a chance that you would find out more, and then decide whether or not to hand the whole thing over. It could be better to allow it all to go back to where it came from.’
Death of an Innocent (Richard and Amelia Patton) Page 5
