Trick of the Mind

by Cassandra Chan

  “Good grief,” said Gibbons faintly. “She’s made quite a mess of things, hasn’t she? Don’t worry, sir, I’ll find out what it’s all about. And if she won’t tell me, I guarantee my mother will have it out of her in no time.”

  Carmichael nodded in satisfaction. “I rather thought that might be the case,” he said.

  “But, sir,” said O’Leary, “do you really think she had anything to do with what happened to Jack?”

  “I don’t know, do I?” replied Carmichael. “Come, you know better than that, O’Leary. Dawn Melton has behaved suspiciously and it’s got to be cleared up. The fact that I don’t believe she could hit the side of a barn with a pistol has nothing to do with it.”

  “She wouldn’t need to,” put in Bethancourt. “She could merely have been the bait to lure Jack to the place where he was shot. Although,” he added ruefully, “if my family is anything to go by, it’s far more likely she’s hiding some piece of monumental stupidity than a crime.”

  O’Leary grinned at him. “It couldn’t be stupider than some of the things my cousins have done,” he said.

  “Why is it,” asked Bethancourt, “that family members are so often people you would rather have nothing to do with?”

  Carmichael chuckled. “So true, isn’t it? I remember one time my sister attacked her own husband with a cricket bat, all because he came home a day early from a business trip to surprise her. She was red as a brick trying to explain that to the people at the hospital.”

  They all laughed quietly at this, and Bethancourt glanced at Gibbons, concerned that there might be a repeat of the earlier incident when he had tried to laugh. But Gibbons was no longer listening; his eyelids were drooping and he had curled up awkwardly on one side, his arms wrapped protectively about his belly.

  “Well,” said Bethancourt, rising at once, “I’ve got to be going.”

  “Sorry,” mumbled Gibbons sleepily. “I’m all in, I think.”

  Carmichael and O’Leary, with a single glance at him, also rose to leave, bidding him good night while they collected their belongings and then all three men made their way quietly out.

  It was dark when Gibbons woke, and from the hushed atmosphere he deduced the night was well advanced. His parents had been in to visit sometime after the others had left, and various medical people had come in and out, checking his bodily functions for all the good it did him, but he had been half asleep through most of it.

  The blinds were drawn on the window, but the streetlights below crept through the slats, striping the bed. Gibbons focused on the pattern idly while he tried to remember what he had been dreaming. It had not been a comfortable dream, of that he was sure, but he could not bring it clearly into focus and so could not determine if it was a memory of his attack or merely his current discomfort that had inspired it.

  And then a new idea came to him as he lay there in the dark, still curled around the pain that never seemed to quite go away, no matter how drugged his senses were. He had spent most of his waking hours striving to remember, or at least waiting to remember, what he had done on Tuesday. Now for the first time it occurred to him that his memory might never return, that in fact he was wasting time in the effort to remember. After all, he had investigated dozens of crimes, none of which he had known anything about before the case file landed on his desk. What had happened to him was just another case, whatever his personal involvement, and should be investigated as such. What did it matter that he could not remember the day? Was that truly any different, from an investigative point of view, than a witness who lied about their actions? At least there was nothing deliberately misleading about his situation. It was just a matter of paring down the possibilities, one by one, until they were left with the truth. And then he would know what he had done, and who had shot him.

  It would not be the same, of course. Knowing what had happened and remembering it were two very different things. He would never, for instance, know what he had been thinking that day. He might posit the connections his mind had made that led to his actions, but he would never know for sure. But there were worse things in life. After all, he had narrowly escaped death, and that was no small thing.

  It was past one o’clock in the morning and the forensics laboratory was darkened and quiet except for the area where Ian Hodges and his protégé, Guy Delford, worked. That space was brilliant with light, a white blazing pool in the midst of the black.

  Neither Hodges nor Delford were looking particularly well; both men were red-eyed, their hair unkempt, their clothes and lab coats rumpled. Hodges had taken a moment that morning to shave, but Delford had not bothered and dark stubble grew in patches on his youthful face. Both of them had been at the lab continuously since Tuesday night, taking turns sleeping on the leather couch in Hodges’s office.

  But now, at last, they were done. Hodges lifted the photograph and displayed it for Delford’s perusal.

  “Oh, that’s beautiful,” breathed Delford. “I didn’t think we’d be able to get it that clear.”

  Ian Hodges smiled with satisfaction. Delford might be his latest forensics genius, but he was still the master.

  “Yes, I think Chief Inspector Carmichael should be pleased with this,” he said, carefully laying the page of the notebook aside. “It’s been quite a challenge, recovering all the pages. This one was the worst.”

  Delford nodded, leaning over to peer at the page, on which virtually nothing could be read. His eyes tracked to the photo, where various chemicals and lighting had combined to produce a good facsimile of the page’s original, pristine state, and he sighed with pleasure.

  “That’s really a wonderful job,” he said.

  “That’s forty years’ experience there,” said Hodges. “It bloody well ought to be wonderful. What do you say to a dram to celebrate, Guy? Just a wee one before we head for home.”

  “Today’s great thought,” agreed Delford, stripping off his lab coat as he came round the counter. Together they passed out of the door, shutting the lights behind them as they left in search of whisky.

  14

  Stained Evidence

  There was no question but that the police would be working all weekend. Carmichael was at his desk at eight that morning, having had a decent night’s sleep for the first time since Monday night. He was rather surprised to find the light on his desk phone blinking rapidly, indicating an urgent message. He could not imagine what anyone could consider urgent, yet not important enough to ring him at home for.

  Frowning, he punched the button and in a moment the mystery was solved when he heard the raspy voice of Ian Hodges.

  “Hodges here,” he said. “I’ve got your lad’s notebook done. You’d better send one of your myrmidons over to collect it in the morning. I’m going home to bed now, but Natalie will have it waiting for you.”

  “Hodges, I could kiss you,” said Carmichael to the phone. “Bother the myrmidons, I’ll go myself.”

  As usual, Gibbons was awakened early by the morning shift coming in and checking him over, presumably to ensure that the night shift had not let him die during the night. He was not certain that death would not have been preferable. He glared in a surly manner at Nurse Pipp when she came in to inspect his dressings.

  “I’ve got some good news for you this morning,” she said, checking off things on a handheld computer. “The doctor will be in soon, and if he’s happy with you, he’ll take that tube out of your nose.”

  Gibbons gazed up at her, gone from surly to worshipful in an instant.

  “Really?” he asked.

  She smiled. “Really,” she promised.

  The removal of the tube was more uncomfortable than Gibbons would have believed possible, but it was a huge relief to have it gone. He swore he felt almost himself, aside from a very sore throat. And abdomen. And some general aches and pains from his atrophying muscles, not to mention the muzzy-headedness caused by the morphine.

  Still, he was much cheered by this small improvement in his situation,
taking it as evidence that the rest would follow in its wake. When the orderly who regularly came to take his blood pressure appeared, he asked for the phone and had it placed conveniently on his tray table.

  His mother sounded surprised to hear from him, and anxiously asked if anything was wrong.

  “Just the opposite,” Gibbons told her. “They took the tube out of my nose—it feels ever so much better without it.”

  “Oh, Jack, I’m so glad. Did you hear that, dear? Jack says they’ve got rid of the tube.”

  “And I’m to have a liquid diet,” added Gibbons proudly, as if this were a personal accomplishment.

  “That’s wonderful, darling. Such good news.”

  To his ears, his mother’s voice sounded suspiciously weepy.

  “It is good news, Mum,” he assured her. “I’m healing very well, they say.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad to hear that, dear, so very glad.” His mother drew a deep breath. “We’ve been very worried, you know. We’ll be over to see you directly after breakfast and you can give us all the details then.”

  “Yes, but, Mum, I rang to ask you something,” said Gibbons. “I wanted to know if you were planning to see Dawn anytime today.”

  “Why, yes,” she answered. “We were going to take her and the children to lunch and then come by the hospital. She’s sorry she hasn’t been able to get over more often, you know.”

  “That’s all right,” said Gibbons impatiently. “I want a word with her, Mum. When you get here, do you think you could take the kiddies and give us a moment alone?”

  “Alone?” she said. “With Dawn? Whatever for, Jack?”

  “Just something I want to ask her about,” he said evasively. “I’d rather keep it between the two of us, if you don’t mind,” he added, knowing nothing less blunt would satisfy his mother.

  “Very well, if you insist,” she said a little doubtfully. “Oh, dear heavens, she’s not involved with that man again, is she?”

  “What man?” asked Gibbons.

  “Oh. Oh, never mind. I expect I spoke out of turn,” she said. “Dear, your father wants his breakfast, so I’ll ring off now and see you soon.”

  Gibbons rang off wondering if his mother had just solved the mystery of what Dawn had been doing on Tuesday night.

  Carmichael sat in the lab’s car park, pouring over the replica of Gibbons’s notebook, large glossy facsimiles of each side of every page, all of which Hodges had enlarged to make it more readily readable. The opening pages were unremarkable, merely looking a bit rumpled from having got damp, the pencil marks on them still clear to be seen. It appeared that Gibbons had started this notebook upon his transfer to the Arts Theft Division, and the first pages dealt with his orientation to the new job. Or at least Carmichael assumed they did; Gibbons, like all detectives, used his own special brand of shorthand when taking notes and there was a good deal of it of which Carmichael could make nothing. What, for example, did a triangle mean?

  “Well,” he muttered to himself, turning over a page, “it doesn’t matter—it’s far too late for me to start learning the Arts Theft business in any case.”

  Eager to reach the notes pertaining to the Haverford case, Carmichael shuffled through the glossy pages, periodically stopping to peer at one in more detail to see if he had got far enough yet.

  There was no change in the smooth texture or the perfect clarity of the sheets, but the images on them began to be more disturbing. What had started out as photos of carelessly handled papers, the writing on them brought into sharp relief with artful lighting, began gradually to exhibit the signs of violence. The pink tinge was almost unnoticeable at first, particularly to one who was in a hurry to get on, but it gradually deepened, occluding more and more of each successive page, until the photographs were of nothing so much as a scarlet smear.

  It left Carmichael shaken. He was forced to set the sheets aside and refocus his eyes on the car park around him, though he did not take in much of his surroundings. His mind’s eye was turned inward as he reflected on how much had changed since the long-ago days when he had first become a detective constable. It was not that there was no violence connected with criminal investigation in those days, but the idea that you could be gunned down in the streets of London as if you were in some bad American television program was unthinkable. Back in those days, your chances of being seriously injured sprang from the danger of IRA bombs, the same as any Londoner. And even the murders he had investigated back then usually had far less to do with gunshots and a great deal more to do with poisons, beatings, or stabbings. He could not recall, in his early days, any of the detectives he worked with receiving a life-threatening injury. Though Canfield had been run over by a car that time …

  He had not expected, back then, to ever be exposed to much blood that did not belong to a murder victim.

  He shook his head to clear away the memories, and not quite ready yet to expose himself to more of Gibbons’s blood, he let down the window a bit and lit up a cigar.

  The tobacco had a calming effect on him and he puffed quietly for a few moments before summoning up the courage to return to the notebook facsimile.

  He tried to look at it analytically, strictly as evidence. As such—and also to avoid coming unexpectedly on anything else so disturbing—he quickly riffled through the thick sheaf of photos.

  He had assumed, from the bulk of the facsimiles, that Gibbons’s notebook had been almost full, but in fact it had hardly been half used up. The first set of pages was a record of the notebook as forensics had received it. Hodges had not bothered reprinting the early sheets after that, as they were readable as they were without further work on his part. The last pages, however, had many incarnations, ranging from utterly obscured to almost total clarity. It was, unfortunately, these pages that referred to the Haverford case.

  “I might have known,” muttered Carmichael.

  Still, most of it was legible and Carmichael thought that if he had written it himself, he would be able to make it all out with the possible exception of one or two jottings in the margins. Unfortunately, he hadn’t written it, and he was hesitant to exhibit such evidence of the violence done to him to Gibbons’s own eyes. Surely, thought Carmichael, looking at this would be overly traumatic for a man who had only been removed from the critical list three days ago.

  And yet, he saw no alternative. From what he could read, there was a lot here that hadn’t gone into Gibbons’s official reports. That was typical of a good detective’s notebook; one was not supposed to include one’s hunches and guesses in official reports.

  Still puffing thoughtfully on his cigar, Carmichael started up the car and eased out of the parking space. He would stop at the Yard and see what he could make out from the notebook on his own before he showed any of it to Gibbons. Constable Lemmy could help; if nothing else, he possessed a pair of younger eyes and a better acquaintance with current slang.

  The phone was ringing again. Bethancourt had lost count of the number of days he had been wakened by it, but he knew he was growing very tired of the phenomenon.

  “Oh, really, Phillip,” said Marla.

  She thrust herself up in the bed and then climbed half over him to reach the telephone on the nightstand. The ringing silenced, Bethancourt gave a little contented grunt and snuggled more deeply into the pillows.

  “Here,” said Marla, collapsing back beside him and clapping something hard and cold to the side of his face.

  Bethancourt perforce freed a hand from the blankets and fumbled the telephone receiver over his ear.

  “Mmm,” he said in a vaguely interrogatory way.

  There was startled silence at the other end, and then a woman’s contralto voice said, “Is Mr. Phillip Bethancourt there?”

  Bethancourt yawned. “Got it in one,” he said. He couldn’t place the voice, but at the moment he didn’t care very much.

  “This is Vivian Entwhistle, Colin James’s secretary,” said the voice. “Mr. James had asked me to arrange for y
ou to meet with Mr. Grenshaw. As this is Saturday, Mr. Grenshaw would not normally be in his office, as you can imagine.”

  In his half-asleep state, Bethancourt was still groping after the elusive memory of who Mr. Grenshaw might be.

  “Of course not,” he replied automatically. “Why should he be?”

  “I have, however, contacted him at home,” continued Vivian, “and he has agreed to meet you this afternoon, if that would be convenient.”

  “It would be a sight more convenient than this morning,” mumbled Bethancourt. “Oh, hell,” he added as his brain finally jerked into wakefulness. “You’re talking about the solicitor chap, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, Mr. Bethancourt.” Vivian’s voice, though still professional, took on the slight extra clarity of someone speaking to the mentally impaired. “That would be Charles Grenshaw, Esq., the late Miranda Haverford’s man of business.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Bethancourt. “You must think I’m an idiot. I’m afraid I’m terrible in the morning until I get my first coffee. It’s very good of you to spend your Saturday setting up appointments for me.”

  He was fumbling on the nightstand for his glasses as he spoke. “Not at all, Mr. Bethancourt,” said Vivian graciously, but with the faintest hint of reproof in her tone. She was rapidly beginning to remind Bethancourt of a particularly difficult teacher he had had in the fourth form.

  “Where and when am I to meet the illustrious Mr. Grenshaw?” asked Bethancourt, having found his glasses as well as a pencil and a notepad in the bedside drawer.

  “He’ll be at his office at three o’clock,” replied Vivian. “Do you have the address?”