Trick of the Mind

by Cassandra Chan

  “Excellent,” said Bethancourt, smiling as he flipped through the pages. “Just the thing for a rainy November night. Whoa, Cerberus—not that way. It’s the bathroom for you until I’ve got you dried off.”

  He herded his dog into the bathroom, stripping off his own wet things as he went, and spent some fifteen minutes rubbing the borzoi’s long coat dry. He repeated the procedure on himself with a fresh towel and then headed to the kitchen to take care of man and dog’s bodily needs.

  It was not until after he had eaten his omelette and salad that he settled himself in one corner of the sofa, a glass of cognac on the table and his dog curled at his feet, and at last opened the tract in which Miranda had traced her great-grandmother’s affairs and the jewels that had resulted from them.

  9

  A Pint After Work

  Bethancourt was awakened the next morning, as he had been the morning before, by the persistent ringing of the telephone. In the normal way of things, he ignored such importunate intrusions, but with his sleep haunted by visions of a dying Gibbons, he found himself reaching to answer the phone before he was even truly aware.

  His groping hand found the telephone receiver, and he cleared his throat loudly before saying, “Hullo?” in a groggy tone of voice.

  “Bethancourt?”

  He knew the voice, but in its present context he was unable to identify it.

  “Yes?” he mumbled.

  “It’s DCI Carmichael here.”

  “Oh!” Bethancourt’s eyes sprang open and he struggled into a sitting position. “Good to hear from you, sir,” he said, recovering. “Is Jack all right?”

  “He’s no worse,” Carmichael reassured him. “Still running a fever, but I gather they had expected that. No, I had another reason for ringing you. I was wondering if you might stop by the Yard this morning. There’s a report I’d like your opinion on.”

  Bethancourt could not have been more surprised, but he jumped at the opportunity to have any kind of involvement in the police investigation.

  “I’d be delighted to, sir,” he said. “I could be there in an hour or so, if that would be convenient.”

  “Brilliant,” said Carmichael. “I’ll see you shortly, then.”

  Bethancourt rang off and lay blinking in the bed for a moment, trying to assimilate this sudden occurrence. He reached for his glasses and squinted at the bedside clock, letting out a long groan when he saw the time. It was 8:15.

  Cerberus, standing at the edge of the bed, wagged his tail and Bethancourt regarded him severely.

  “It is far too early,” he announced. “Particularly for someone who sat up till two reading a tract on antique jewelry. Oh, dear,” he added, yawning as he swung his legs out of the bed and reached for his dressing gown.

  The day outside was not very inspiring to one who had not got his usual quota of sleep. The view from the windows of the Chelsea flat, when its owner eventually looked out, was gray and bleak, with light splatterings of rain blown against the panes by intermittent gusts of wind. It was against this background that Bethancourt hastily showered, shaved, and dressed, gulping down strong black coffee the while. Despite all the caffeine, he was still not feeling particularly alert when he arrived at Scotland Yard, a fact he tried very hard to hide as he and Cerberus emerged from the lift and made their way to Carmichael’s office.

  The chief inspector was at his desk with a pair of reading glasses perched on his nose and a paper cup of coffee by his hand. He looked up as Bethancourt appeared in the doorway and motioned the young man in.

  “Good morning,” said Bethancourt, as cheerfully as he could manage. He moved to take one of the chairs positioned opposite Carmichael’s desk, and Cerberus, after a friendly tail wag in the chief inspector’s direction, laid down at his master’s feet.

  “Good morning,” replied Carmichael, laying aside the paper he had been reading. “I’m hoping you can help me with something.”

  “Anything you like,” responded Bethancourt. “I’d be grateful for the chance to do something to help with Jack’s case.”

  Carmichael nodded understanding of this sentiment. “It’s been a shock to us all,” he said. “The more so as he’d just begun his stint in Arts Theft—traditionally one of the less violent divisions at Scotland Yard.”

  “It had never occurred to me that Jack might be hurt in the performance of his duties,” admitted Bethancourt. “I knew, of course, that you often dealt with violent people, but the corollary never came to mind.”

  Carmichael nodded again, thinking to himself that he, too, had once been that young, that inexperienced, and had the same belief in his own omnipotence.

  “It’s not something one does think about,” he agreed. “But it does sometimes happen, and it’s up to me to sort it out when it does.”

  Bethancourt looked sympathetic, while Carmichael leaned forward to sift through the various papers and folders spread out across his desk.

  “I wanted your input on this report of O’Leary’s,” he said, frowning a little as the said report did not immediately come to light. “He had a drink with Gibbons after work that evening, you know.”

  “No, sir, I didn’t,” said Bethancourt. “I don’t think,” he added, a little hesitantly, “that was anything out of the ordinary, though—Jack has often mentioned having a pint with Chris O’Leary.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Carmichael absently, his attention taken up with burrowing to a deeper level in the piles on his desk. “Ah, there it is! I was beginning to think I’d lost it.”

  Bethancourt, viewing the chaos on the desk, privately agreed that this was a possibility, but kept the thought to himself.

  “The thing is,” continued Carmichael, turning back to his guest, “O’Leary is currently working a murder in Walworth. It’s just possible that something he said about the case might have been the reason Gibbons went down to Walworth on Tuesday night in the first place.”

  “But surely,” objected Bethancourt, “if Jack had an idea about the Walworth murder, he would have told O’Leary?”

  Carmichael nodded, pleased to have his own estimation of his sergeant’s character confirmed. “So I would have thought,” he agreed. “But I suppose it’s just possible his idea was so extraordinary he felt the need to check it out a bit before mentioning it. Gibbons does sometimes come up with quite, er, unique views of a case. I was thinking that perhaps he had rung you up to see what you thought of it. His call to you was placed not long after he left the pub where he and O’Leary had been drinking.”

  “I see,” said Bethancourt. “Yes, I expect that might have been what he wanted.” In truth, he was thinking that most of the ideas Carmichael found so unique were probably his own. It was Bethancourt, not Gibbons, who was prone to flights of fancy, and every once in a while one of those flights would lead somewhere. But he could hardly tell Carmichael that.

  “In any case,” said Carmichael, “I dropped off a copy of O’Leary’s report on their conversation for Gibbons to look at, but he was so under the weather last night, I doubt he’s even seen it yet.”

  “You thought if he read a transcript of the conversation, the same notion—whatever it was—might occur to him,” said Bethancourt.

  “Just so,” answered Carmichael. “Always assuming that was indeed what took him to Walworth Tuesday night. But as I say, Gibbons isn’t up to much at the moment, and then I thought of you. You know him better, I think, than anyone else. I imagine he’s more open with you about his thought processes than he is with me or with another colleague.”

  Carmichael looked at Bethancourt hopefully.

  “We do sometimes brainstorm together,” admitted Bethancourt. “I don’t know that reading over a conversation of his would give me the same ideas as he had, though. I could try, I suppose.”

  “That’s all anyone could ask,” said Carmichael. He proffered the manila envelope he had dug out of the pile on his desk. “Let me know what you think,” he said. “I’m afraid I must ask you for the re
port back once you’ve finished with it. And, mind you, no one else is to see it.”

  It was clear Carmichael had some qualms about bringing a civilian in on the police side of an investigation, and Bethancourt did his best to reassure him.

  “I understand completely, sir,” he said, taking the envelope. “I’ll have it back to you as soon as I’ve digested the information. To tell the truth, this is the first I’d heard of any other case being involved in the attack on Jack.”

  Carmichael sighed and leaned back in his chair, polishing his glasses absently on his shirtfront. “It’s probably not,” he said. “Still, the fact remains that Gibbons had a conversation about a crime in Walworth and then popped up there some three hours later. And there doesn’t seem to be another reason for him to have been in that neighborhood.”

  Bethancourt nodded.

  “By the way,” said Carmichael, “were you aware that a distant relation of Gibbons had recently moved into the Walworth area? A woman,” he added as Bethancourt frowned, “named Dawn Melton.”

  “Oh, yes.” The frown cleared from Bethancourt’s brow. “I’d forgotten. Jack has mentioned her occasionally. I believe she’s a first cousin of his, though I don’t recollect which side of the family she’s from. He wasn’t best pleased that she ignored his advice and moved into Walworth. But I don’t think he sees much of her—I take it she wasn’t the reason Jack went down there that night?”

  “Apparently not,” answered Carmichael, in the manner of a policeman who never rules anything out until the whole solution is bare before him. “I just wondered if you knew her.”

  “No, we’ve never met,” said Bethancourt. “I only know about her because of remarks Jack’s made. I gather he didn’t think much of being given the job of looking after the lamb in London, but couldn’t tell his mother so.”

  This coincided exactly with the impression Carmichael had formed, but he was happy to have the confirmation from Gibbons’s best friend.

  Bethancourt was hesitating. “I did wonder, sir,” he said, “if you’d discovered anything about Jack’s movements that night.”

  “Not very much.” Carmichael sighed. “It’s rather unusual, having this blank slate to fill. Normally, we’re checking a statement given to us and when we find a deviation, we look into it and one thing leads to another, so to speak. With this, we have no idea what direction to take. The only thing we know for certain is that Gibbons didn’t go straight home. Was he thinking about the Haverford case? About the Pennycook murder? About something else altogether? Did his conversation with O’Leary remind him of his familial responsibilities and send him off to check on his cousin?” Carmichael threw up his hands.

  “I see,” murmured Bethancourt pensively. “I hadn’t thought of it in that way before. Jack thinks,” he added, a little tenuously, “that his call to me referred to the Haverford case.”

  Carmichael nodded. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that were true,” he said. “I know myself, when I’m on a case, it’s always there in the back of my mind, waiting to come out the moment I’m not occupied with something else.”

  That was an interesting take on the mindset of a professional detective, something Bethancourt tucked away to mull over later. It was certainly quite different from the way he personally approached things and he couldn’t help but wonder if that reflected his lack of professionalism, or merely a characteristic eccentricity.

  They were interrupted by the telephone, which Carmichael reached to answer, holding up a finger to tell Bethancourt to wait. He listened for a moment, frowned, and then asked the caller to excuse him for a second.

  “I’ve got to take this,” he said, returning his attention to Bethancourt. “You’ll look at the report and let me know?”

  “I will, sir,” said Bethancourt, tucking the envelope under his arm as he rose. “You’ll hear from me by tonight.”

  He clucked at Cerberus to bring the dog to heel and retreated from the office. He was greatly tempted to linger within earshot of the chief inspector’s conversation, but the penalties for being caught outweighed the possible benefits.

  So he went back out into the cold drizzle. There was a café just down the street and he turned into it gratefully, ordering a large latte and settling into a corner at the back where there was room for Cerberus to lie down. Thus fortified, he lit a cigarette and opened the manila envelope.

  Unlike Carmichael, Bethancourt was unaccustomed to reading police reports and found the style stolid. He skimmed quickly over it, only slowing when he came to the depiction of the conversation. He read that section over twice, and then leant back to let his thoughts roam.

  He was rather glad no one had mentioned the Pennycook case to him before this, since clearly Gibbons had heard of it for the first time that night.

  “So,” he said to himself, “here I am, sitting in a public place, having a drink of something, knowing quite a lot about the Haverford robbery and having just heard about the murder of an old-time fence. Just like Jack that night. Only the wretched Pennycook case seems to have shifted his train of thought about his own case onto a different track, and it’s not doing a single thing for me. Damn.”

  This last was said aloud and Cerberus raised his head, looking a question at his master.

  “Well, is it doing anything for you?” demanded Bethancourt of his dog. “No, I thought not. Still,” he added thoughtfully, “stolen jewels must be fenced—could Jack have gone down to Walworth to look at a pawnshop? Well, let’s go and ask him, shall we, lad?”

  Cerberus, who had rather been hoping for a piece of any of the foodstuffs he could so clearly smell, abandoned hope and resignedly got to his feet as Bethancourt pulled on his gloves.

  Remembering his promise of yesterday, Bethancourt stopped at a stationery shop to buy one of the notebooks Gibbons favored, as well as a couple of the inexpensive mechanical pencils he knew his friend habitually used. But as he was paying for his purchases, another thought came to him.

  He had, on the occasion of Gibbons’s promotion to detective sergeant a few years ago, presented his friend with a monogrammed leather cover for his notebooks. It was no doubt now in the possession of the forensics laboratory, but the thought that gave Bethancourt pause was whether the cover would ever be fit to be used again. He had a very vivid picture in his mind of Gibbons lying bleeding in a Walworth street, and he knew from Carmichael that he had been found facedown in the rain. Now that he thought of it, it seemed very unlikely that the leather would have survived the experience, at least not in any shape to resume its former duties.

  Outside, both the rain and the wind had picked up. It was as nasty a November morning as Bethancourt could remember, and he promptly abandoned the idea of walking Cerberus across St. James Park and instead sought out a taxi to take him to New Bond Street and Smythson’s, where he could order a new leather cover.

  Gibbons cracked open one eye to confirm that it was indeed sunlight coming through the window, and then closed his lid again immediately. He felt some relief that apparently the long night was over, but he wasn’t much looking forward to another day.

  He was unspeakably tired, but rest seemed out of the question. The constant pain made it difficult to sleep, and when he did manage to drop off, he was invariably awakened by someone checking his blood pressure, or temperature, or whatever other bits of him they were monitoring. He was beginning to feel that if only he could get a solid night’s sleep, he would really be quite all right.

  There was someone in the room with him now, moving about very quietly, from which he deduced that it was probably his mother, settling herself in to wait till he woke up. He decided nothing much would be gained for either of them by his advancing this moment; there was not much to talk about between parent and child when the child in question had been shot, felt quite horrible, and was in hospital running a fever, and the long silences were beginning to get on Gibbons’s nerves. At the same time, he took comfort from his parents’ presence and had not been able to s
ummon the fortitude to tell them that he would be all right and they should go home. Quite irrationally, he wanted them here, even if their hovering got on his nerves, and that made him feel guilty.

  So he lay quietly, trying to rest despite the pain, listening to the sound of his mother turning the pages of a magazine. She was not much of a reader—his father was the one for that—but she liked to look through a magazine occasionally. Since her arrival, he thought glumly, she had probably been through every magazine ever published twice over. This, too, made him feel guilty, and he sighed.

  Some time had passed when he was roused by the unexpected sound of a dog’s nails clicking on the linoleum floor. That this heralded Bethancourt’s arrival was obvious, but Gibbons felt immediately disoriented, believing the day must be much further advanced than he had thought, as his friend was seldom out and about before late morning. Yet, when he opened his eyes, the clock on the wall proclaimed it to be only 9:15.

  “There, you’re awake,” said his mother, closing the magazine in her lap at once.

  “Oh, dear,” said Bethancourt, halting just inside the doorway. “Did I wake him? Sorry, old man. I thought they’d have you up at dawn in this place.”

  “They did,” grunted Gibbons, cautiously moving. “They’re always waking me up.”

  “Here,” said his mother, “let me put the bed up for you.”

  Behind his glasses, Bethancourt’s hazel eyes were full of concern as he watched the agonizing process of Gibbons shifting to a sitting position in the bed.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” gasped Gibbons as he made a last adjustment.

  “I’m sure it’s bad enough,” replied Bethancourt. “I’m awfully sorry you’ve come in for this, Jack.”

  “So am I,” retorted Gibbons.

  He laid his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes for a moment, needing to recover from his efforts. Bethancourt had brought a coffee in with him, and the smell was driving Gibbons wild, both attracting and repelling him at the same time. He swallowed uneasily past the tube in his throat.