No such luck. We located it quickly – only had to ask directions once. It was on the outskirts of a pretty country village called Gringley-on-the-Hill. It was a bungalow which had taken a sideways growth pill and then erupted into decorative classical columns. There were plenty of lights on, glowing into the dusk from wide uncurtained windows. She answered the doorbell on my first ring, and after only the briefest of introductions Nick and I were swept inside for a sweet sherry and a chat.
The living-room was over-furnished and expensive: sofas and chairs of white leather, masses of pastel cushions, plenty of little tables, carpet cream-coloured and thick, ornaments, dried-flower arrangements heavily scented with pot-pourri oil. There was a bar with high stools across a corner of the room and she’d fetched our sherry from a tall padded floor-to-ceiling pink leather cupboard behind it with a built-in fridge at the bottom.
The pale pink wallpaper had a stippled effect, and most of the pictures were lush sentimental landscapes, vaguely Mediterranean – olive-groves or medieval streets leading steeply down to an improbably blue sea dotted with bright fishing-boats.
The temperature was Mediterranean too. The central heating was full on and superfluous gas flames licked at the imitation logs in the fireplace. The large mantelpiece was mock-marble, and above it hung the only portrait in the room. It was flattering, slightly misty, possibly done from a photograph. The subject was a distinctly attractive youngish woman with fluffy blonde hair and big wide-set blue eyes and clear white skin with a faint pink tinge about the high cheekbones, and a warm, sympathetic, understanding smile.
Sandra, the original of the portrait, was sitting opposite us – older, mid-forties at a guess, but still smiling warmly, still attractive in well-cut black wool slacks, an expensive-looking cream sweater with patterns of gold thread, and almost enough chunky gold jewellery to buy the bungalow.
‘Quite comfy?’ she said in a rich Yorkshire accent which must have been partly affectation because sometimes she didn’t sound regional. ‘More sherry?’
‘We’re fine, thanks,’ I said, conscious of the turkish-bath sweat beginning to break out all over me and the sticky sherry sweetness coating my teeth. That was the first thing either Nick or I had said since my opening line, ‘I’m a private investigator and I’d like to speak to you about Jacob Stone.’ Our hostess had chattered non-stop ever since, all of it to do with our comfort, none of it to do with Jacob. I had to get on top of this or I’d fall asleep.
I switched on the tape recorder in my bag, and said, cutting across her, ‘About Jacob – he’s your nephew, isn’t he?’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ she said. ‘And you’re a private investigator? Bit of excitement for me, meeting you. Now if I had to imagine a private investigator it would be a man sitting there in a mac with a whisky bottle sticking out of a torn pocket, coughing and flicking ash on the carpet.’
‘Do you mind ash on the carpet?’ said Nick, and I looked at her, surprised that she’d volunteered small-talk to a stranger.
‘Not really, my dear, though maybe I have got a mite fussy, living alone. Men have their little ways, don’t they, and the cream isn’t a practical colour and it’d have taken time to get the marks out, but then what’s time for, when you come to think of it?’
She looked round the immaculate room. I looked with her, and saw time hanging heavy as cigarette smoke. There were no photographs, no books, no writing materials, no magazines, not even a television on display. If she lived alone, why choose what must be a five-bedroomed, five-bathroomed house? Did she sleep in a different room each night, and bathe in a different bath each morning, and use fresh towels each day so she could put them through the washing-machine? She could hardly be more different to her sister, I thought, remembering the graduation photograph, and this house was light-years from the starkness of Ormskirk Drive.
‘About Jacob,’ I said again. ‘My client has hired me to find him. He’s dropped out of his graduate course at Chicago and he hasn’t been seen since last September.’
‘And your client is?’
‘A woman friend.’
‘Name of?’ said Sandra warmly, picking up the sherry bottle. ‘Sure I can’t tempt you?’
‘No, thanks,’ I said firmly.
‘Yes, please,’ said Nick. I glared at her, and she backed down.
‘The boss doesn’t approve,’ she said, nodding at me. ‘Better not.’
‘Whatever you say,’ said Sandra to me, with a cosy we’re-theadults conspiratorial smile. ‘I always think a nice drop of sherry never did anyone any harm, but you’re the boss.’
I felt unlike the boss of anything. Sandra’s fluffiness screened a very un-fluffy determination, and I was beginning to think I’d get nowhere with her. ‘My client is Emily Treliving,’ I said. ‘The woman he was going to marry.’
‘The girl he met on the plane,’ said Sandra.‘She would be worried, I can see that. Men! They play fast and loose, so often, don’t they? Trample all over our feelings.’
‘Mrs Balmer—’
‘Call me Sandra, do.’
‘Sandra, have you seen Jacob since last September?’
She topped up her own glass and put the bottle down. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course I have. And I spoke to him only last week.’
Chapter Thirteen
Now I’m pushing thirty, I must be getting sentimental. My first thought was, poor Jams. Poor, poor Jams. She’d been so sure. So sure he loved her, so sure the only reason for not hearing from him was that he was dead.
Whereas it was just a dragged-out version of the old, old story. Boy meets girl. Boy lies to girl. Girl sits by silent telephone.
My second thought was more characteristic. Let’s get to the bottom of this. OK, maybe Jams had considerably overestimated the seriousness of his intentions towards her. But dropping out of his graduate course? Not the Jacob I thought I knew. ‘Kinda close with his money,’ Carl had said. But he paid fees in advance for a term he didn’t turn up for, and he hadn’t, as far as I knew, applied for a refund.
Plus, before that, he’d worked four years in a job he hated to earn enough money to make the life he wanted as a university teacher. Why would he just blow that away? A methodical man, a planner. I could see his precise, tiny writing, and hear Carl saying Jacob was, ‘Very clear, very directed.’ If he had changed direction, it would have been for a powerful reason.
I looked at Sandra who was smiling sympathetically, and thought irritably, if she’s such a warm human being, how come she needs the heating up so high? I said, ‘So Jacob’s all right, is he?’
‘It depends what you mean by “all right”,’ she said. ‘He was very, very upset by his mother’s death. They were close. Too close, I reckon.’
‘Which could have been why he fell in love with my client,’ I said, fighting the rear-guard action Jams was paying me for.
‘I don’t know about that, my dear,’ she said. ‘I think Jams Treliving is part of his problem. I’m interested – how did she find you?’
‘Through a friend,’ I said. ‘And I happened to be in Chicago earlier in the week, so she met me there.’
‘In Chicago! Really! How long were you there for?’
‘I went over on Sunday and came back today.’
‘All that way! For three days! With jet-lag! What a strong girl you must be!’
She’d be feeling my muscles next. I smiled politely, and said, ‘So what exactly is his problem?’
‘Too much strain. Emotional strain. Losing his mother and then making a commitment, much too quickly, to someone he’d known only a very short time.’
‘Sandra, forgive me, but you’ve only known him a very short time as well, haven’t you?’
She was taken aback. Her smile flickered and came back again with increased wattage. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘I understood that you and your sister had lost touch quite a while ago. On her marriage, when she joined the Church of the Fountain of the Water of Life. You did
n’t know Jacob when he was growing up, did you?’
She hesitated. ‘Not as such,’ she said. ‘I heard about him, naturally, through mutual friends. But then when he was left alone, of course he came to me.’
It didn’t seem ‘of course’ to me at all. Jacob was twenty-six, developing his chosen career in another country. His mother dies, OK, but that would just liberate him to go back to America and carry on with his life. And if he was specially close to his mother and presumably loyal to her, he wouldn’t seek out a sister she’d broken off contact with years before. ‘I need to speak to him. Where is he now?’ I said.
‘Why do you need to speak to him?’ she said.
Because I don’t believe you, I thought. She’d met Jacob all right, since he came back to England – she knew two things I hadn’t told her, Jams’s nickname, and that Jacob had met her on a plane – but I didn’t buy the rest of her story. ‘I owe it to my client,’ I said briskly, wiped the central-heating sweat from my writing hand on the side of my jeans and sat with pen poised over my notebook.
‘That won’t be possible,’ she said, her voice sweetly frosted like the icing on a package-mix cake. ‘He needs to be alone.’
‘That’s fine by me,’ I said. ‘He can be alone twenty-four hours a day and double time on weekends. Five minutes is all I need. Where is he?’
‘In Kyrgyzstan,’ she said.
‘How are you spelling that?’ I said, in what was probably a vain attempt to disguise the fact that I’d no idea what she’d said. Was it a country, a city, a bed and breakfast in Doncaster? Was it a well-known local dialect word for cloud-cuckoo-land?
She spelt it for me, then went on: ‘I’d never heard of it, and I certainly couldn’t spell it until I looked it up on a map. It’s near China. He rang me from the capital a week ago. He’s been travelling in the east since December. He said he needed to have time to think.’
Truth, or diversionary tactic? I didn’t know. It was an unlikely invention, for her. She didn’t look to me as if she’d been much further east than Marbella, nor as if she spent her over-heated evenings poring over off-the-beaten-track travel brochures. Kyrgyzstan wasn’t a place that would leap to her lips, if she had to make a story up as she went along.
‘And he was all right when you spoke to him?’
‘More at peace, yes.’
‘So why hasn’t he got in touch with Jams? If he could ring you, then he could ring her.’
‘He felt very badly about her As if he’d let her down.’
‘Which he had,’ I said.
‘Ah well. Men. They’re weak, but you have to love them, don’t you?’ She was smiling again, like a conspirator, all-girls-together.
I didn’t smile back. ‘Some of them, possibly,’ I said, and Nick made a ‘count-me-out’ face even from that. ‘So you haven’t seen Jacob since last December?’
‘No. But I’ve spoken to him every so often since, and he was all right last week. Not perfectly happy in himself, but all right.
Drawing tranquillity from the high snows. That’s what he said.’
‘And he’s just abandoned his graduate studies?’
‘I wouldn’t know what his plans are. So perhaps,’ she said draining her sherry glass and setting it down like a punctuation mark, ‘you can tell Jams what I’ve told you, and set her mind at rest. Sure I can’t press you to more sherry?’
Should I tell her about Jams’s baby? That news would flush Jacob out, surely, and give me leverage. But I didn’t trust Sandra, I didn’t understand her agenda, and I could always come back to her. So I was just about to say thanks and escape to the fresh air, when she started up again.
‘How old are you, my dear?’
‘Nearly thirty.’
‘And you’ve worked since . . .?’
‘Since I left school at eighteen.’
‘How did you start? In the police?’
‘No,’ I said unexpansively.
‘Do you work for a big company?’
She had my card. No point in lying. ‘No.’
‘So it’s just you two?’
‘Yes.’
‘Aren’t you brave!’ she said. ‘I was a career woman.’
‘Oh. Early retirement?’ I fished. I had no idea what she could have done. She wasn’t stupid, at all. But neither was she a professional type – not a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant. Maybe a kindergarten teacher. And her manner had the all-embracing, cosy reassurance of an old-fashioned nurse. But no nurse or teacher ever earned enough to take early retirement in this kind of style.
‘Not very early,’ she said. ‘I’d done my bit.’
Perhaps she’d been a hairdresser, or beautician. I could see her running a chain of shops. ‘Were you in business?’
‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘Are you married?’
‘No,’ I said. I must have spoken more sharply than I’d intended, because she stepped up the sympathy.
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘Mr Right will come along any day.’
‘I’m sure,’ I said, smiling blandly in my turn. I wasn’t going to tell her that Mr Right probably had come along; the problem was that I was Ms Wrong.
‘And you’ll be wanting to get on the road, won’t you. It’s a long way to London.’ She picked up my card from the table in front of her. ‘And don’t worry, Alex Tanner, I’ve got your number.’
Friday, 1 April
Chapter Fourteen
We stayed overnight in Doncaster at a cheapish chain hotel near the racecourse. I was too knackered to drive back to London.
Nick was delighted. She’d never stayed in a hotel as a paying guest before, though, when she could, she slipped in to big Paddington hotels to crash a night in an empty room. She enjoyed swaggering openly through the lobby, signing in and taking the key. She even enjoyed the almost inedible steak they produced in the hotel coffee-shop.
I was too tired to eat, and just sat watching her, sipping water and thinking about Jams. I didn’t know what to tell her because I didn’t know what was true. Luckily I didn’t have to tell her anything until she got back tomorrow. Maybe I’d know more by then, though I couldn’t see how.
A night’s heavy, jet-lagged sleep didn’t help. At breakfast, which I still wasn’t able to eat, Nick said, ‘What do we do now?’
‘Go back to London.’
‘Ring Maggie Whittaker before we go,’ she said.
‘What do you mean? I don’t even have her phone number,’ I said blankly. ‘And what should I ring her for?’
Nick sighed with elaborate patience. ‘The sooner you come back on line, the better. Since America you’ve been as thick as a brick.’
‘Explain,’ I said.
‘First, I’ve got Maggie’s number. It was on her telephone. Second, you don’t know how much of Sandra Balmer to believe, right?’
‘Right.’
‘You thought Jacob was dead soon after he left the hotel, right?’
‘Right.’
‘And if only Sandra says he’s alive since, maybe she’s lying, right?’
‘Right.’
‘When we saw Maggie Whittaker, she said something you didn’t pick up. She said she hadn’t seen Jacob to talk to since his mother’s funeral.’
My brain kicked in. ‘You’re right, she did.’
‘And I didn’t say anything because you always tell me to shut up and let you handle it,’ said Nick smugly.
‘I’ve never told you to shut up in public,’ I said.
‘You would if I ever spoke,’ she said.
‘Mrs Whittaker? Maggie? Alex Tanner here.’
Excited greetings. Could she help?
‘I hope so. You said you hadn’t seen Jacob “to talk to” since the funeral, last September.’
‘I did.’
‘But have you seen him and not talked, since?’
‘Aye. Once or twice, he’s been in and out of the house.’
‘When was that?’
‘Mebbe six weeks later. End of October
time, early November. I noticed because I thought he was in America, but there he was next door. I’d have spoken if he would – I smiled at him – but he made out not to see me, so I didn’t push it. He always kept himself to himself.’
We went straight down the motorway with no stops, despite the lingering glances and hinting coughs Nick produced every time a Services sign flashed by.
I drove and thought. Nick was going through my Chicago notes on Jacob, again, and jotting down ideas of her own.
We were south of Northampton – nearly back to civilization – when she spoke.
‘D’you want some input on this?’
Unusual tact, for her. ‘Go ahead,’ I said.
‘Known haunts and associates,’ she said.
‘Done those. Waiting to talk to Abraham Master.’
She sighed. ‘That’s the Doncaster end. But he didn’t go straight back to Doncaster, he stayed in London. Not just overnight. And although he was seen by Maggie Whittaker once or twice, he wasn’t living at that house. So where was he?’
‘At Sandra’s?’
‘Could be. But we don’t believe Sandra much, and you didn’t ask her for details, anyway.’
‘She wouldn’t have given them,’ I said defensively.
‘She might. Anyway, you could have asked.’
‘OK, I could have asked. Get to the point.’
‘The point is that for three years before he went to Chicago he was working for a merchant bank. He must have lived somewhere. He must have known people, even if he didn’t like them. It’s an angle, anyway. Want me to suss it out?’
‘How?’
‘Start with Grace, get her to find the bank. His college must know. They give you references, Mary keeps telling me that, that’s why I had to be nice to my teachers at college so the medical schools would take me. His references’ll be on file there: Grace can get us the info. Then we go to the bank, follow it up. Colleagues, addresses and all that.’
When I got back to London the first thing I had to do was see Eddy. Nick might as well get straight to work on an angle I certainly should have thought of myself. I wasn’t pleased, but Jams wasn’t paying me to keep a good self-image.
The Loop Page 8
