Trick of the Mind

by Cassandra Chan

  And he was gone, sweeping out ahead of Bethancourt and Cerberus, who made their way more slowly toward the door.

  “James is a very good contact to have made,” Bethancourt told his dog. “I must remember to thank Becky specially for arranging the introduction. Flowers or something, I think.”

  When Carmichael arrived back at Scotland Yard, he had his temper under control although he made no secret of the fact that he was mightily displeased. Constable Lemmy apologized, but Carmichael had the distinct impression that the young man felt his superior was being unfair. That, of course, only infuriated Carmichael further, but he put that aside when he learned that not only had Gibbons rung Dawn Melton’s number that night, but that she had apparently rung him during the day but had not left a message.

  “Her number’s on the missed calls log, sir,” said Lemmy. “See, right here, at one sixteen P.M. But there’s no corresponding message on the voice mail.”

  Carmichael’s eyebrows began to bristle just a little less as he considered this. “Gibbons would have been at lunch with James at one fifteen,” he said. “No doubt he still had his mobile switched off. And when he turned it back on, he probably only checked his messages rather than the missed calls. The question is: did he happen to look at the missed call log later, when he rang the Melton woman back? Or did he think of her because he happened to be in Walworth?”

  “He probably checked his missed calls,” said Lemmy practically.

  Carmichael, who had been talking to himself, frowned at this interruption of his thought process. But another, less acceptable idea had occurred to him.

  “I wonder,” he said, “if Gibbons actually spoke to Dawn or not? And if not, whether or not he left a message.”

  Lemmy was thankfully silent.

  “I had better get a warrant for both her home phone and her mobile,” decided Carmichael. “Put her in an interview room when she arrives, Constable. It won’t do any harm for her to wait about a bit.”

  Carmichael leaned back a little in his chair and regarded Dawn Melton with distaste. He had never liked blubbery women and while many women who had sat in this room opposite him had cried over the years, they had not done so after merely being confronted with an inconsistency in their stories. In fact, Carmichael had usually found that women, far more than men, tended to declare that there was no inconsistency at all and feel that the matter was thus settled.

  He threw a wry glance at Woman Police Constable Willis, who stood impassively to one side. She merely arched an eyebrow at him in reply as if to say, “It’s your problem, you’re the one who made her cry.”

  This was no doubt true, but also unhelpful. And in any case, Carmichael hadn’t meant to make his suspect cry; he had merely pointed out to her that she had lied when she said she had not contacted her cousin in some time. He was willing to admit that his expression had probably been severe as he spoke, but that should hardly have been enough to provoke the waterfall currently before him.

  “Mrs. Melton?” he said, trying to sound gentler but only partially succeeding. “Is there a problem?”

  This merely produced fresh wails and an incomprehensible babble between sobs.

  “Are you sure, sir,” asked Willis in an undertone, “that she’s really related to DS Gibbons?”

  “Doesn’t seem very likely, does it?” snorted Carmichael.

  He waited a few moments, but Dawn showed no sign of pulling herself together. She had worked herself into hysterics and apparently meant to let it run its course.

  “Mrs. Melton,” he said again. “Have you got your mobile with you?”

  She nodded, watery blue eyes looking fearfully at him over her rumpled handkerchief.

  “May I see it, please?”

  Carmichael had decided against informing her of the warrant in his pocket unless he had to; he rather thought a warrant would merely be cause for more weeping. The second warrant for her home telephone had turned out to be unnecessary—she relied entirely on her mobile and did not have a phone at home.

  She fumbled in a capacious leather handbag, sniffling and dabbing at her eyes the while, and eventually produced a mobile phone which she handed across the table to him. He took it with a nod, surreptitiously wiping his fingers dry on his pants leg, and began to scroll through the numbers dialed.

  “Ah, there we are,” he said, and turned the phone so she might see the screen. “That, Mrs. Melton, is Sergeant Gibbons’s phone number. Yet you claim not to have spoken to him in weeks.”

  “I didn’t,” she sobbed. “He didn’t answer.”

  This answer was much obscured by both her weeping and the handkerchief, and it took Carmichael a moment to work it out. When he had, he sighed.

  “Mrs. Melton,” he tried again, “do you mean to tell me that when we spoke yesterday, you did not intend to give me the impression that you had not attempted to contact your cousin in some weeks, and that he had not attempted to get hold of you either?”

  “We didn’t,” she wailed, but what precisely she meant by it was, in Carmichael’s mind, open to question.

  He returned his attention to the phone, moving on to the Caller ID list, on which he easily found Gibbons’s number listed. This, too, he showed to Dawn.

  “And here is evidence that he rang you,” he said.

  She actually paused for a moment, blinking furiously in an effort to clear her eyes enough to see the small screen.

  “He did?” she hiccuped.

  “Apparently so,” said Carmichael.

  “Well, I never knew it,” she declared. “I thought he’d be such a help when I first moved here, but he’s always busy and out of town half the time, and I don’t know anything about the city or living here …”

  Carmichael lost the rest of this in the fit of weeping that overcame her, but he didn’t think it sounded interesting in any case.

  “Excuse me a moment,” he murmured, pushing his chair back. “I’m just going to step out and hand this over to forensics,” he added to Willis, who nodded. He paused, looking back at his tearful witness, and said, “If you think you can get anything out of her, by all means give it a go.”

  Outside, one of Ian Hodges’s minions was waiting impatiently for the phone.

  “The numbers are on it,” Carmichael told him, handing the mobile over. “I’m most interested in those, but you might as well run everything.”

  The forensics man looked disdainful. “Of course, sir,” he said. “We always run everything.”

  Carmichael decided that this simply was not going to be his day.

  “As you say,” he replied, waving a dismissal as he turned away.

  Then he paused, considering. In his opinion, there was absolutely no point in his returning to the interview room; he was convinced his presence was merely exacerbating the situation. So he strolled back to his office. He would have a cigar, he thought, and relax for a few moments. Perhaps by the time he was done, Dawn Melton would have stopped crying.

  He had forgotten about the Melton children, who had perforce been brought along with their mother as there was no one else to care for them, and lodged in his office with Constable Lemmy to watch them. The unmistakable squeals issuing from his office reminded him of their presence just as he was about to open the door, and he immediately turned away, cursing under his breath. He had really wanted that cigar.

  But he stopped only a step or two away as the sound of the squeals penetrated his consciousness. Carmichael had raised two daughters of his own, and had recently been graced with a grandchild, and so was well acquainted with the various noises children made. This was not a sound of distress. This was the sound of little girls playing happily.

  Carmichael turned back, curious, since when the children had come in they had been anything but happy. They had, as one would expect, been fearful and upset at this sudden disruption of their routine, and he had not supposed that half an hour in his office with Lemmy would cure this condition.

  The scene when he opened the door
was certainly unusual: his constable was down on all fours with a two-year-old perched on his back, bouncing up and down, while Lemmy pretended to menace the five-year-old, who in turn beat him back with a sheet of rolled up paper. The baby of the group was installed in one of the chairs, looking on and gurgling happily.

  Lemmy looked up as the door opened, craning his neck to see who it was.

  “Oh, hello, sir,” he said. “Did you need me?”

  “No, no, lad, you carry on,” said Carmichael, thinking he had finally found a use for his constable, even if it was not one that was likely to be required often. “I just wanted to fetch something.”

  He stepped to his desk, smiling at the suddenly silent children, and drew a cigar out of the drawer where he kept a box handy.

  “Your mother and I will be done with our chat in a little bit,” he told them, and they nodded solemnly at him.

  He escaped and went down to the garage to have his cigar. The sight of the children playing had put him in a better mood and he considered his interview while he smoked. Dawn Melton had lied to him, and lied deliberately; of that he was sure. Why she had lied was open to question: on the one hand it might have nothing at all to do with what had befallen Gibbons, or on the other hand he might have been following someone on her behalf that night. His first instinct said that she had not shot him herself, largely because he did not think her capable of aiming and shooting a pistol, though he was willing to admit he could be wrong about that. Whatever her reason for lying, some kind of explanation would have to come out, and if handled in the right way, she would eventually provide it. Whether it would be the truth or not was something else altogether.

  But he needed to put aside his anger and his dislike of this woman in order to step up and do his job. He had thought that giving her a bit of a scare would do the trick, but it was absurd of him not to have changed tactics when the expected result did not ensue; he knew better than that. He had been doing this for decades.

  He put out his cigar, carefully preserving the rest of it, and then returned to the attack in the interview room.

  Dawn Melton was sniffling rather than outright sobbing when he entered, though the fearful look she gave him portended more tears. Carmichael smiled at her.

  “I’ve just been to check on the children,” he said, shutting the door behind him and coming to take his place opposite her at the table. “They’ve got my constable giving them piggyback rides and seem to be enjoying themselves.” He smiled and shook his head. “I’d forgotten what they’re like at that age,” he told her, settling his bulk into the chair. “Mine are all grown now.”

  Dawn eyed him warily, but did venture to answer him.

  “How many children do you have?” she asked, her voice a little hoarse from all the crying.

  “Two,” answered Carmichael. “Two girls. The eldest is a mother herself now, so you can see their days of piggybacks are long over.”

  Dawn actually managed a smile at this sally.

  “Well,” said Carmichael, “yours will be wanting their supper soon I don’t doubt, so we best wrap this up. Are you feeling better now?”

  She nodded very tentatively and glanced at Willis.

  “The constable got me some water,” she said.

  “Good, good,” said Carmichael. “Let’s see if we can’t get on a little better, then. Now, why did you say you hadn’t rung Jack in a fortnight?”

  “I hadn’t,” she said. “At least, I thought I hadn’t. Honestly, Chief Inspector, I didn’t remember that call. I do now,” she added hastily. “But I’d forgotten I’d rung Jack that day. I’d been meaning to ring him—I told you that—but the days get so busy what with the girls and my job. I remember now, I had a few minutes free at lunch that day, and rang him from the teachers’ lounge at work. But he didn’t answer and I didn’t have anything specific to tell him, so I didn’t leave a message.”

  This was said with great earnestness, punctuated with sniffles, and Carmichael did not believe a word of it. He kept his face neutral with an effort, and said, “And when he rang you back that night?”

  “I must have had my mobile turned off,” she answered. “I often do after the girls are in bed.”

  “I see,” said Carmichael, forcing a smile onto his face. “Now that wasn’t so bad, was it? All we needed was a little clarification.” He paused for a moment, reviewing his options. Any suggestion that she was lying would merely start the waterworks again, so he said carefully, “Can you tell me if you’ve checked your messages since Tuesday night?”

  Dawn looked merely confused—which Carmichael was beginning to think was her normal state of mind—but at last managed to come up with an answer.

  “I don’t think so,” she said earnestly. “You see, I don’t get many calls, and I always have the phone with me, so there’s no need for anyone to leave a message.”

  Since she had earlier claimed that she often turned the phone off in the evenings, one or the other statement was patently untrue. Carmichael hesitated, on the verge of pointing this out to her, when it suddenly occurred to him that with this particular witness he had an ace in the hole.

  “I see,” he said, almost genially. “Well, I’d best return you to your children, then. Willis here will show you where they are.”

  Willis looked considerably surprised at this instruction, but nodded and stepped forward at once.

  “Pick up the kids and escort her out,” he told Willis in an undertone. He was still too angry to offer Dawn a ride home, or even to call a taxi.

  Carmichael sat on in the interview room once they had left, allowing them time to collect the children and vacate his office before he himself returned. He produced his cigar and relit it, using the metal wastepaper bin as an ashtray. With that inducement, he was able to contain himself and wait the necessary minutes, but then he was up and striding out, having stubbed out the cigar and left the remainder in the bin. But he was only halfway back to his office when he came upon Constable Lemmy hurrying in the opposite direction.

  “There you are, sir,” he said, drawing up short, and then executing a clumsy about-face when Carmichael did not stop. “I thought I’d better come and find you.”

  “Ah? And why was that, Constable?”

  “Because of what the children told me, sir,” answered Lemmy. “You did say you wanted to hear about anything I found out right away.”

  Carmichael’s stride paused in surprise and he turned to stare at his subordinate. Lemmy, it seemed, had actually learned something.

  “Yes, indeed, Constable,” he said in a more encouraging tone. “What did the children tell you?”

  “It was actually the oldest one, Mandy,” said Lemmy. “She said her mother went out on Tuesday night, after Mandy and the other girls were in bed.”

  Carmichael stopped cold. “She said what?” he demanded.

  Lemmy obligingly repeated himself.

  “And how did Mandy come to know this?” asked Carmichael.

  “Well, according to the girls,” said Lemmy, “their neighbor, Mrs. Carlson, sometimes comes to sit with them if their mum has to run out for something. If Mrs. Melton goes out for the evening, there’s another babysitter, but if she’s just forgotten something at the store, it’s Mrs. Carlson who comes round. And on Tuesday night, Mandy couldn’t sleep and came out to ask for a glass of water, and found Mrs. Carlson in the sitting room watching the telly. She gave Mandy her water and let her sit up with her for a few minutes and then sent her back to bed. Mandy went to sleep then, so she doesn’t know when her mother came back.”

  Carmichael absorbed this in silence for a moment. “And how sure do you think Mandy is about the day?” he asked.

  “Oh, pretty sure,” answered Lemmy. “It all came out when they were asking me what you wanted with their mum. I told them you just wanted a bit of a chat about something that had happened on Tuesday night. And Mandy said, ‘Oh, the night Mummy went out.’”

  “Right, then,” said Carmichael. “We’re o
ff to Walworth, lad. I think we should beat the Meltons home if we drive—we’ve got just enough time before rush hour starts.”

  13

  Meeting of the Minds

  Gibbons was reading O’Leary’s report over for the fifth time, desperately hoping it would jog his memory, when O’Leary himself appeared. He tapped on the doorjamb to announce himself and said, “They told me I could just come in.”

  “Yes, by all means,” said Gibbons, beckoning. “It’s good to see you, Chris. I’m just reading your report.”

  “Report?” echoed O’Leary, drawing one of the chairs up to the bedside and dropping into it. “Oh, about our conversation at the pub? Does it ring any bells?”

  Gibbons shook his head, frustrated. “No, I wish it did,” he said. “This murder you’re working on—you seem to have told me about it in some detail.”

  “That’s right,” agreed O’Leary. “We spent most of the time talking about jewels and the Arts Theft Division, but you wanted to hear about the Pennycook case, and I gave you a pretty good summary of it.”

  “And I don’t remember it at all,” sighed Gibbons. “When I first saw this report, it came as a complete surprise. What do you think, Chris? Do you think I went down to Walworth on a hunch about the Pennycook murder?”

  “Well, no, I don’t,” said O’Leary, almost apologetically. “I know what Carmichael always says about coincidences, but I just can’t see it, myself. You’d put in a long day investigating a robbery and were looking forward to your dinner, and it was an uncommonly nasty night out. If Walworth had been on your way home, I would have said it was barely possible you had stopped to check something out. But as it is, no. If you’d had a thought about the case, you’d have rung me, or left a message at the Yard.”

  “That’s the way it seems to me, too,” said Gibbons, making a face at this conclusion. “Oh, never mind—I’m tired to death of trying to remember. Tell me about something else. How was your date with Brenda?”