by J M Gregson
‘And why was that, do you think?’
‘I think they found that he was what my mother used to call “too big for his boots”. Intellectually, I mean. He could be rather overbearing, you know.’
‘No, I don’t, Mr Norris. I never met Mr Norbury, and here I am in a situation where I need to know all about him. Which means that your explanation of what you mean by “overbearing” will be most welcome.’ He gave Jamie a wide beam which the young man found more disturbing than the fiercest of frowns.
‘Well, Alfred could be quite patronising when the mood took him. Without actually insulting anyone on Monday night, he behaved as if he knew all about literature and the other people there knew very little.’
‘I know the type. Very annoying.’
‘In fairness, I should say that Alfred did know a hell of a lot. And he was generous with his knowledge and his time, so long as … so long as …’
‘So long as he felt in control and it was quite clear that you were his intellectual inferior?’
‘I suppose so. On Monday night, he seemed to be trying to take over a group which other people had set up, and I think they resented that.’
‘Not unnaturally. Thank you for being so frank. I’m beginning to get the picture.’
‘I feel bad talking about him like this, especially now that he’s dead.’
‘Yes. But I asked you to be frank, and presumably you’ve done your best to be that. His death must be particularly sad for you, as his protégé.’
‘I’m not sure I ever accepted that description. I think I said I hadn’t known him long enough to feel that I was that.’
‘So tell us about your relationship with Alfred Norbury. We need all the detail you can supply.’
Peach looked as eager as a schoolboy, and Jamie was conscious of the other man’s black hands beside him, manipulating a notebook which seemed far too small. He gulped. The best way to lie was to incorporate as much of the truth as you could, so long as it was harmless to you. A young lawyer had told him that when he was seventeen and he’d always remembered it. ‘He was interested in my ambition to become a professional writer. He gave me tips and he examined most of the things I did and made suggestions.’
‘And did you find this helpful?’
‘Yes. I think Alfred regarded it as a teaching process and me as a writing apprentice rather than the finished article. But I didn’t mind that. I was prepared to learn and I felt I was doing that, under Alfred’s regime.’
‘And what did this regime involve?’
‘Well, he took me back to the beginning as far as my poetry was concerned. He got me to use iambic pentameters, which sound complicated but are actually quite a simple form. Shakespeare used them, so you couldn’t have a better model, could you? What I was doing was undertaking exercises in writing, rather than aiming for the finished product, but that was part of the learning process.’
‘And you didn’t mind it? Didn’t mind going back to school, so to speak?’
‘No. Don’t forget I left school before I’d completed a term in the sixth form. What I’d learned about verse before I met Alfred, apart from one book on writing I bought for myself, had come almost completely by trial and error. Alfred said that if I was prepared to go back to the beginning, he’d teach me the mechanics of writing. What I made of them then would be up to me. He said he could teach me the craft, but the art would be up to me.’
‘And you were quite happy to go along with that?’
‘I’d have been a fool not to. He knew a hell of a lot and he’d done quite a bit of teaching, at different times. And he’d written himself: articles about novelists and poets. It would have cost me many hundreds of pounds to get what Alfred was offering me free of charge.’
‘Did he point that out to you?’
Jamie wondered if he was blushing. He looked down at the low, scratched table between them, wondering how long it would be before they picked up the school exercise book which lay there and examined his efforts within it. ‘I suppose he did, a couple of times. As I said, he liked to be in control. But that was fair enough: he was very generous with his time and his criticisms made sense. He’d made me much more self-critical, which is one of the things you need to be to become an effective writer. And he had a terrific library, to provide examples of what he meant. He let me borrow anything I wanted to read and he made his own suggestions. He was very generous.’
‘I see. I must say you sound very like a protégé.’
Jamie smiled. ‘I suppose I might have become one, given time. Alfred said he’d introduce me to useful people, when he felt the time was right. I suppose Monday night was perhaps the first instance of that.’ He felt more relaxed now. Talking about writing had brought out his enthusiasm; he’d even forgotten for a moment or two that these two were police.
The next questions brought him swiftly back to earth. Peach said abruptly, ‘Was there a sexual relationship between the two of you?’
‘No. I’m not gay. Alfred offered me advice about writing and access to his library. That’s as far as it went.’ His mouth set in a thin, determined line.
Peach looked at him for seconds in silence, then said, ‘So who do you think killed your mentor, Jamie?’
It was the first time the DCI had used his forename. He hadn’t time to dwell on the significance of that; his mind was reeling before the challenge of the query. ‘I don’t know. Someone from outside, I expect, not someone I know. I’m sure he had a lot of enemies.’
‘Are you? Why is that?’
‘He could be very caustic. Even painful. He didn’t trouble to disguise his feelings. That upset a lot of people.’
‘You seem very definite about that.’
Jamie smiled wryly. ‘It’s what he said himself. I’m almost quoting him.’
Clyde Northcott’s pen twitched over his page. ‘We need the names of his enemies, for obvious reasons.’
‘I can’t give you any, I’m afraid. I know very little about his past life, apart from odd things he let drop. No names.’
Northcott stared at him steadily for a moment. His deep-set brown eyes seemed laser-like to Jamie; he wouldn’t want to make an enemy of this man. ‘Where were you on Tuesday night, Mr Norris? We need an account of your movements from late afternoon onwards.’
For a moment, Jamie was tempted to say he had been at work until late in the evening. But that would be madness. They would check at Tesco, and then he’d be in trouble with Mr Jordan and, much more seriously, with this formidable pair. ‘I was on early shift on Tuesday, six to two. I did two hours’ overtime and then came back here. I was pretty knackered, as you can imagine.’ He glanced automatically at the curtain which concealed his tiny kitchen area, where he microwaved the meals for one he bought cheaply at work.
‘You didn’t see Mr Norbury on that night?’
‘No. I came back here and ate. I worked for a while on a poem I was writing. I watched a little television. Then I went to bed.’
The phrases poured out rapidly, with scarcely a pause. It sounded like a prepared statement. But it would be understandable if he’d anticipated having to account for his movements. He’d undergone police questioning before: they weren’t sure how many times. Clyde made a show of recording what he said exactly, then asked, ‘Is there anyone who can confirm this for us? Should we speak to your landlady?’
‘No. Mrs Jackson wouldn’t know when I came in. We all have our own keys.’
‘When was the last time you saw Alfred Norbury?’
‘On Monday night. At Enid Frott’s flat, at the first meeting of the book club.’
‘Did Mr Norbury keep a pistol in his car?’
‘Yes, apparently he did. I didn’t know until he told us on Monday. Even then I wasn’t quite sure how serious he was about it. I thought it might be just a bit of bravado.’
They left him then. Jamie Norris was surprised how exhausted he felt. He’d been on edge throughout and they’d been two senior men, so that was unde
rstandable, he supposed. But it had gone reasonably well, he thought. He thought he’d handled the bit about the pistol rather well. And he hadn’t told them more than he’d intended to.
It was an hour after the CID men had left that Jamie’s mobile phone shrilled on the table beside him. It made him jump. He’d been immersed in an episode of Silent Witness, guiltily fascinated by the gory details of the dismemberment of a body found in a burnt-out building.
The voice which spoke to him was female and nervous. ‘Hello! Is that James Norris?’
‘This is Jamie, yes. Who is that, please?’
‘Hello, Jamie. Sorry to ring so late. It’s Jane Preston here. Is it all right to speak?’
For a moment, he couldn’t remember who Jane Preston was. Then it came to him and he was pleased. ‘Jane Preston from the book club? Yes, it’s perfectly all right to speak.’ He pressed the mute button on his remote control; the blackened stomach looked even more ghoulish when it was lifted from the corpse and brandished without sound. ‘What can I do for you, Jane?’
He’d hardly spoken to her on Monday night. Not because he didn’t want to, mind; she was blonde and very attractive and the only person there in his age range. He’d been rather over-awed by her beauty and even more so by her learning. He hadn’t wanted to risk any sort of public brush-off in front of those older people, but he’d been determined to get to know Jane better at future meetings.
She said, ‘You’ve heard about your friend Alfred Norbury?’
‘Yes.’ For some reason, he wanted to say that he wasn’t really a friend, or at least to define and modify the term, but that seemed unfair to Alfred. And it might make him seem petty to Jane if he denied being friendly with the man who had introduced him to the book club. ‘The police have already been to see me about it, actually. It’s not long since they left.’
‘Really? I expect they’ll want to see all of us, won’t they?’
He sensed that she wanted him to deny that and reassure her, but he rather enjoyed the image of her apprehensive and looking to him for support. ‘I expect they will, yes. But I can’t think that you’ll have anything to fear from them. It will just be routine, you know.’
‘Do you think they regard us as suspects?’
Now that she had put him on the spot, he realized how little they had revealed about the crime and what they thought about it. ‘They don’t give much away, the police. They played it very close to their chests.’ Two clichés already, when he wanted to impress this bright and willowy woman. ‘They seem pretty sure Alfred was murdered.’
‘Yes. We’d hardly be suspects otherwise, would we?’ A little tinkle of nervous laughter in his ear. ‘Sorry. You were trying to tell me what you could about the police.’
‘There isn’t much I can tell you, really. They seemed to be top brass, the people who came here. The detective chief inspector in charge of the case and a detective sergeant who was his sidekick. You might get someone further down the line, someone who is just part of the team.’
‘Yes. I expect it would have to be someone very important like you to get the man in charge of the case. I’ll probably get some probationary girl who’s just out of school.’
She was teasing him. He could see that small, ironic smile on her face which had so intrigued him on Monday night. He tried not to sound too serious as he said, ‘I just meant that they couldn’t possibly think that you had any connection with Alfred’s death. That’s why they’d just allot a more junior member of the team to you. It wouldn’t be anyone wet behind the ears, though. It will almost certainly be CID, and to be CID you have to have served for years in uniform first.’
‘I didn’t know you were such an expert on the police.’
‘Oh, I’m not an expert!’ said Jamie hastily. ‘I’ve picked up the odd bit of knowledge, I suppose. I’m not sure where from, though. Books I’ve read, or crime series on the box, I expect.’
There was a silence. He wondered what she was assessing. Was it him, or something else entirely? Then she said, ‘I’m a bit nervous about the police, actually. I’ve never been involved in anything like this before.’
‘Like all of us,’ said Jamie hastily.
‘Yes, like all of us. Like you and me, anyway. We don’t know what these older people have been up to in their earlier lives, do we?’ She giggled again and this time Jamie, knowing that it was nothing to do with him, found her amusement quite delightful.
‘You’re right. There’s no knowing what Mrs Burgess and Miss Frott have been up to, is there? Probably a pair of serial killers!’ This time they laughed together, and he thought he could hear her relaxing.
Then she said, ‘Do you think we could meet? Fairly quickly, if possible – before the fuzz come round and put the bracelets on me. You could give me some idea of how I should behave with them.’
Jamie was about to deny his expertise when he realized how asinine that would be. He’d be risking turning down a meeting with this creature he’d thought exotic and unattainable until a few minutes ago. ‘I don’t start until twelve tomorrow. We’re always busy on Friday evening and the manager likes to have me around then. He says I’m good with the public.’
He regretted that crass little boast immediately. But she said, ‘I’m sure you are, Jamie. Just as you’ll be good with me. Could we meet in Booth’s café for coffee? Say ten fifteen? I’m sure I’ll feel much more fitted to face the fuzz after a session with you.’
TWELVE
Everything in Alfred Norbury’s flat was impeccably tidy. In the kitchen and dining area, there was no sign of his last meal, no Marie Celeste remnants of a life so abruptly terminated.
The sitting room was quite dark on this gloomy January morning, despite the long window at the end of it. The fact that one wall was completely lined with books seemed to accentuate the dimness. The shelves of volumes had a further, rather strange effect. Books are such personal things that something of the occupant seemed to be still here. It felt to the CID men investigating his death as if Norbury was observing their movements and preparing to pass his sardonic commentary on their conduct.
This was an alien environment for Clyde Northcott. He had never in his life been in a room quite like this. A scholar’s room, he supposed, whatever other virtues and vices the occupant had exhibited. He was quite relieved when Percy Peach said to him, ‘You take the desk and I’ll make a start on the books.’ Clyde wondered what he meant by a start. It could take you days to thumb through that lot, he reckoned, and he wasn’t even sure what you’d be looking for. DCI Peach would be the right man for that task: he knew a lot more about books than he ever admitted at the station. Funny bugger, Percy: you never knew what depths he had and he didn’t encourage you to plumb them.
Peach was already finding interesting things on those packed shelves, though he wasn’t sure if they were going to have any connection with the case. There was a neatly printed inscription above one of the higher shelves which was obviously a fragment of verse:
Change in a trice
The lilies and languors of virtue
For the raptures and roses of vice.
That was Swinburne. He wouldn’t have known that, but the poet’s name was helpfully appended at the end of the quotation. He wondered if that had been Norbury’s motto for life. An exciting but dangerous approach – but from the material about him which they were beginning to assemble, that might have been the sort of existence he craved and counselled to others.
There was a complete collection of Swinburne on the shelf below the quotation. One of the great Victorians now much neglected, thought Percy. But lately a source of much interest for intellectual gays, if he remembered it rightly – which he probably didn’t.
He moved along to the shelf housing the novels of E.M. Forster, where the newest one, Maurice, seemed to protrude a fraction, as if it had recently been returned to its place there. There were slips of paper at two points in the book. He wondered if Norbury had been using it to demonstrate something
about the craft of writing to Jamie Norris. Protégé, or something more than that?
His conjecture was overtaken by something more concrete from his bagman. Two of the drawers of the desk were locked, but the key was in the top one; evidence perhaps that at the time of his death Norbury had felt in no danger and not threatened by any intrusion here. Clyde Northcott was investigating the drawers methodically, moving carefully through a world which was totally new to him.
It was when he turned the key and opened the bottom drawer on the right-hand side of the desk that he found something more familiar in his world. It was a packet scarcely bigger than a large matchbox, but with contents which were much more sinister. Bullets: short, low-calibre and neatly packaged, looking as innocent as small electric batteries. But suggesting, as these two experienced men looked down at them, violence and death.
‘Spare ammunition for the pistol that killed him, the one he kept in the car,’ said Peach thoughtfully. ‘Shows he thought he might have occasion to use it, I presume. We should check whether he was a member of a gun club, I suppose. See whether he kept himself in practice.’ He didn’t think a man who was already emerging as secretive would have cared for anything so public.
Twenty minutes later, DS Northcott was examining the deep double drawer which was the bottom one on the left-hand side of the desk. It was there that he found something much more interesting than bullets. This drawer was a built-in filing system and he found within these a slim file which particularly interested him. It was one devoted to Enid Frott, and it went back twelve years.
Ms Frott had claimed when they interviewed her that she had little previous association with Alfred Norbury.
Jamie Norris had passed Booth’s café often enough before, but he had never before set foot inside it.
It was much plusher than anything he was used to. There were carpeted floors and a waitress who showed him to the table for two he asked for and took his order for coffee. She didn’t curl her lip in contempt at this awkward young man, or even show surprise that he was here. He supposed they were trained to do that. He told himself firmly that his money was as good as anyone else’s and that he had as much right to be here as anyone else; he didn’t manage to convince himself of those things.
