‘Hi! Wait!’
He turns. He’s tall with a beaky nose, heavy brows and horn-rimmed glasses. He looks slightly as if the nose, glasses and brows might all have come in a set but otherwise he’s rather attractive. Older than Natalka first thought, though. Mid-forties, maybe even fifty.
‘You were in the library,’ says Natalka, panting slightly despite her twice-weekly kick-boxing. ‘You asked the question about Peggy Smith.’
‘Who are you?’ says the man, which seems like the wrong question.
‘I’m Natalka Kolisnyk. I’m investigating Peggy’s death.’
‘Are you a police officer then?’ Something is flickering in the man’s face. Not fear, something more subtle, maybe even amusement.
‘No. I was a friend of Peggy’s. We’re private investigators.’ That sounds good, she’s rather proud of it.
‘We?’
‘I’m here with two friends. We think Peggy’s death is mixed up with this.’ She waves her hand towards Education, Salvation and Damnation, towering above the perimeter of the park. ‘With the crime-writing world.’
‘I don’t want to be rude,’ says the man, though he probably does, ‘but I think you’ve been reading too many crime novels.’
‘What about you?’ says Natalka. ‘You asked the question and then you walked out. Maybe you’ve been reading too many judgy things.’
‘Judgy things? Do you mean courtroom dramas? Where are you from anyway?’
‘Ukraine. How do you know Peggy?’
The man sighs and pushes his glasses further up his nose.
‘It’s complicated but, basically, she advised me on a book.’
‘Are you a crime writer then?’
‘Not exactly. I’m a literary author. My novel took certain elements from the crime genre though.’
Thinking that these were probably the best bits in the book, Natalka asks his name.
‘Lance Foster. I wrote a book called Laocoön that some people seemed to rather like.’
‘I know. The Times said it was a masterpiece.’
Lance raises his eyebrows. ‘You’ve heard of it?’
‘I came across it when I was clearing Peggy Smith’s flat. There was a dedication in it to her.’
‘“Peggy Smith, sine quibus.” That means . . .’
‘I know what it means,’ says Natalka. Although she hadn’t until Benedict translated. ‘Why did you ask J. D. Monroe if she knew who killed Peggy?’
‘I was looking in one of her books. I saw the line in the acknowledgements. PS: for PS. Then she actually mentioned Peggy on the panel. I couldn’t help myself.’
‘Why do you think that Peggy was murdered?’
Lance gives her that half-amused look again. ‘You do say what you think, don’t you?’
‘You’re the one who said it. You said, “Who do you think killed Peggy Smith?” ’
Lance shrugs. ‘It was just a joke.’
‘I don’t think so.’
Lance is silent while a woman passes them, pushing a buggy containing a wailing baby. Two children in school uniform trail behind her. It must be about six o’clock, thinks Natalka. The skies are already darkening. Evening comes quicker here than it does in Sussex.
‘I didn’t think anything about it at first,’ says Lance at last. ‘I didn’t even know that Peggy was dead until I saw Dex Challoner at a festival. And then Dex was killed in that awful way and I got this postcard. It was in an envelope and the only message was—’
‘“We are coming for you.”’
Now he really does stare. ‘How did you know?’
‘J. D. Monroe had one too.’ Natalka’s phone buzzes. She consults it briefly. ‘Let’s go and have a talk with her,’ she says.
* * *
LANCE DOESN’T WANT to come at first. Strangely, it seems to be the presence of his fellow writer that’s putting him off. ‘One does rather try to avoid the social side of these festivals.’ Natalka has never heard any English person use the indefinite pronoun before.
‘You need to come,’ she says. ‘We have to solve the mystery.’ And, in the end, curiosity prevails. They set off to find the pub, an old-fashioned building on a street corner. It’s very crowded inside but, in a cosy high-sided booth, JD, Edwin and Benedict are talking about Italy. In fact, it’s Benedict who’s talking. ‘. . . the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie,’ he is saying. ‘At dawn prayers the only sounds are the cries of eagles and falcons, you can see the River Tiber far below, dark green against the purple rocks . . .’ His face is glowing and he looks quite transformed. Natalka finds herself oddly unwilling to interrupt. But JD has looked up and registered their presence. Edwin, too, turns round.
‘You found him, I see,’ he says.
‘Yes, this is Lance Foster,’ says Natalka. ‘He was the man who asked the question. He’s a writer. He also knew Peggy. He’s going to help us.’ If she says this upfront, she thinks, Lance can hardly disagree.
‘Hi,’ says JD. ‘I’m Julie Monroe. I think we’ve got the same publisher.’
‘Really?’ says Lance, raising his eyebrows as if doubting this.
‘Yes,’ says Julie. ‘Seventh Seal. I’ve seen your book in my editor’s office. Why did you say the thing about Peggy? Do you really think that she was killed?’
Natalka is rather impressed by such plain speaking. She begins to suspect that Julie is not as mild-mannered as she appeared on the panel.
Lance looks discomforted by the direct question and deflects matters by offering to buy drinks. Natalka asks for a large glass of red. Benedict says that he’s fine. He’s only halfway down his pint. JD says it’s her round and the two writers argue their way to the bar. Edwin has gone to the loo. Natalka and Benedict find themselves alone, sitting side by side on the high-backed bench.
Maybe it was hearing him talk so lyrically about the monastery in Rome but Natalka thinks that Benedict looks slightly different. He’s silent for a few minutes, drumming his fingers on the table and then he says, ‘We’re getting somewhere.’ It’s a few minutes before she realises that he’s talking about the case. Benedict loves murder mysteries, she knows. She thinks that he’s enjoying this one, even though it started with the death of a friend.
‘Lance also had one of those notes,’ she says. ‘He didn’t want to come here at first but I persuaded him.’
And then it happens. It’s as if the car radio has suddenly tuned in to a new wavelength. The mutterings on the other side of the sofa become words and those words are in a language that doesn’t need the internal translation that has become second nature to her.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’d know that face anywhere.’
‘Be careful.’
‘Don’t worry about me. I’m not the one who’s going to get hurt.’
Natalka grasps Benedict’s arm. She hardly knows what she’s saying. ‘Those men. I think they’ve come to kill me.’
‘What? Where?’
He gets up to look over the partition but she pulls him down. ‘No! I don’t want them to see me. I’ve got to go. Now!’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘All right,’ says Natalka. And, pulling up her hood to cover most of her face, she weaves her way through the pub, just as Lance and Julie finally manage to attract the attention of the barman.
* * *
WITHOUT REALLY KNOWING where she’s going, Natalka leads Benedict through the streets of the granite city. She looks round a few times but the men don’t seem to be following her. Could she have been mistaken? But they were definitely speaking Ukrainian and how many Ukrainians do you get in north-east Scotland? Are they the men who were waiting outside her house in Shoreham? The ones Peggy saw outside her apartment? Natalka hurries on, pulling Benedict after her.
More by luck than judgement, they reach the place where she has parked the car. They get in but Natalka doesn’t start the engine. They sit looking out at the streetlights reflecting unfamiliar buildings. Natalka is wonderin
g how much to tell Benedict. She doesn’t want to terrify him and she’s not even sure she understands it all herself.
‘What’s going on?’ says Benedict. But his voice isn’t querulous or frightened. It’s kind and surprisingly calm.
‘Those men,’ she says. ‘I think they’re after me.’ She twists her ring, the silver ring that Dmytro gave her for her sixteenth birthday.
‘Why are they after you?’ says Benedict.
Natalka takes a deep breath. ‘Back home in Ukraine, I got involved with something. A cryptocurrency. I went into it with two friends from university. We made a lot of money. But we also borrowed money from some . . . some bad men. I wanted to get away, to go to England, so I took some of the money.’ She waits for Benedict to exclaim in horror but he stays silent. ‘Not all of it, obviously,’ she says, ‘but enough to pay for my fare and my tuition. I meant to pay it back but then war broke out and my brother went missing. My mother’s on her own. I need to send her money.’ She realises that she’s crying.
Benedict reaches out and touches her shoulder. ‘It’s OK.’
‘It’s not OK, Benny. I think those men are criminals, from the Ukrainian mafia. I think they want to kill me. And if I die my mother will have no one.’
‘Why do you think they were the men?’
‘I heard them talking in Ukrainian.’
‘Did you recognise them?’
‘I didn’t get a proper look at them. I panicked.’
‘I managed to take a quick photo as I was leaving,’ says Benedict. ‘It may not have come out too well.’
‘You took a photo?’ Benedict is becoming cooler by the second.
He proffers his phone. The picture is dark but Natalka goes into Edit and lightens it. She sees two men sitting at a pub table. They look youngish, probably both in their thirties. Both are wearing Harrington jackets and have cropped hair. It’s too dark to read their expressions.
‘They’re not drinking alcohol,’ says Benedict. ‘I thought that was a bit suspicious. In Scotland anyway.’
Sure enough, there are several empty bottles of Coke on the table.
‘Short hair,’ says Natalka. ‘They could be military.’
‘What do you want to do now?’ asks Benedict.
Natalka can only think of one thing she wants to do. And she wants to do it very badly.
‘Eat,’ she says. ‘And have some more wine.’
‘Let’s find a restaurant then,’ says Benedict.
* * *
THEY TAKE THE car back to the Travelodge first then look for somewhere to eat nearby, ‘So I can drink,’ says Natalka. They find an old-fashioned Italian restaurant in a basement, reached by steps down from the pavement. Inside, it’s dark and conspiratorial, with candles in Chianti bottles and oil paintings of Vesuvius and the Colosseum. The waiter, who has a strong Scots accent, tells them that there’s a big Italian community in Aberdeen.
‘Lots of Italians who were prisoners of war in Scotland stayed. My nonno was one of them.’
‘Do you get many Ukrainians here?’ asks Natalka.
‘I don’t know about Ukrainians,’ says the waiter, ‘but you get a few Russians. The Russian department at Aberdeen University is famous. I’m studying there too. Modern history.’
‘Could your men have been from the university?’ says Benedict, after the waiter has gone. ‘They could be mature students.’
‘I don’t know,’ says Natalka. They’ve ordered red wine and she takes a gulp. ‘Benny! Have you told Edwin that we left the pub?’
‘Gosh. No.’ Benedict types out a text message. ‘Shall I tell him where we are?’
Natalka hesitates. ‘Sure.’
But a few minutes later Benedict gets a message back that Edwin has gone to get a pizza with ‘Julie’.
Natalka is surprised how pleased she feels to have a meal alone with Benedict. It’s because she’s feeling stressed, she tells herself. It’s a strain being with too many people.
‘Edwin is obviously getting on well with Julie Monroe,’ she says.
‘Yes,’ says Benedict. ‘He gets on with most people, though. You should have seen him at church. I’ve been going there for two years and I’ve never spoken to anyone. Edwin was the life and soul of the party.’
Natalka discovers that her glass is empty and fills them both up again.
‘Why did you become a monk?’ she asks.
Benedict looks surprised but he answers readily enough. ‘I fell in love. That was what it was like. I used to go to mass without telling anyone. God was like my secret relationship. Then I went to the seminary and I struggled a bit; it was all so rational and logical. We had to do something called apologetics, refuting arguments against Catholicism. I just wanted to say, “You can’t prove it, you just have to feel it.” ’
‘That’s how I feel about maths,’ says Natalka. ‘I know maths is meant to be all about logic and proof but for me it was more about the feeling. I love the way numbers work. It’s as if they exist on a higher sphere.’
‘Like God,’ says Benedict. He too seems to be drinking his wine very fast. ‘I suppose that’s why I went into the monastery. Unlike the seminary it was all about experiencing the love of God.’
There’s a silence broken only by the waiter bringing their plates of pasta. Natalka adds cheese to her ragu and says, ‘Why did you leave then?’
‘I fell out of love,’ says Benedict. He looks, momentarily, so stricken that Natalka doesn’t feel like she can ask him any more. They move on, with what feels like mutual relief, to murder.
21
Edwin
Footsteps in the Dark
IT TAKES A while for Edwin to realise he’s been abandoned; he’s been enjoying his second G and T and listening to Lance and Julie talk. It’s nice to be out for the evening in a new city, to be in the company of attractive young people (his definition of young is rather elastic), to be talking about books. Julie and Lance seem to be getting on well but Edwin can tell that they’re not attracted to each other. He tries to work out why. Maybe Lance is gay? But Edwin has become good at spotting closeted gay men. It’s self-preservation, really, and Lance is not giving off the vibes. Maybe they’re both happily married to other people, but that would be very dull.
Lance and Julie are discussing Peggy, her encyclopaedic knowledge of crime fiction and how she always knew what was wrong with a plot.
‘Of course, plot is overrated,’ says Lance. ‘I try to get beyond describing what happens next.’
Edwin reminds himself never to read Lance’s book.
‘Surely your readers want to know what happens next,’ says Julie. ‘It keeps them turning the pages.’
‘Oh, readers,’ says Lance. ‘I never worry about them.’
‘I worry about readers all the time,’ says Julie. ‘I worry whether they’ll like my new book as much as they liked the last one. I worry whether there’s too much sex and violence then I worry that there’s not enough. Sometimes I’m so paralysed with worry that I can’t write at all.’
‘You should free yourself,’ says Lance. ‘For me there’s nothing but the author and the page.’
But Lance has written one book to Julie’s four, thinks Edwin. And Dex Challoner had written more than twenty. He tries to remember the J. D. Monroe titles. They all seem to involve ‘Me’ and ‘You’. He realises that Lance is addressing him.
‘Where’s Natalka?’ Lance is saying.
Edwin looks round as he if might be able to spot her hiding behind a pot plant. The pub has thinned out slightly. There are two foreign-looking men at the next table, a group of people who could be crime writers milling around the bar, and a couple of elderly drinkers by the pool table. No sign of Natalka or Benedict.
‘Is that Miles over there?’ says Julie. ‘I wonder who he’s talking to?’
Lance ignores this. ‘Natalka insisted that I come here,’ he says, ‘and now she’s vanished.’
‘Perhaps she went for a meal with Benedict,’ says Jul
ie. ‘He was lovely, I thought.’
‘They were with me,’ says Edwin, trying not to sound hurt. Then he thinks of checking his phone. He prides himself on his computer skills but he can’t get used to having his phone switched on all the time, much less displayed on the table like the youngsters do. At present Julie’s pink sparkly case sits cosily beside Lance’s battered but expensive-looking model. It’s almost like foreplay.
Sure enough, he has a message from Benedict.
Natalka feeling a bit faint. Better now. We’ve gone for a meal. Romano’s. Car at Travelodge. 5 min walk from pub. Have left your suitcase at reception. Bx
There’s one of those location thingies attached. Edwin is initially irritated and only slightly mollified by the kiss. But then he thinks: maybe this is his chance to leave Benedict and Natalka alone together. If there is a possibility of Eros’s arrow striking, Edwin wants to give him room to take aim.
‘Feeling faint?’ says Lance. ‘She was fine earlier.’ He sounds rather possessive, thinks Edwin, considering that he’s only just met Natalka.
‘Speaking of meals,’ says Julie, ‘I could do with mopping up some alcohol.’ She looks expectantly at Lance.
‘I’m going back to my hotel,’ says Lance, with what Edwin considers spectacular lack of gallantry. ‘I’ve got some writing to do.’
So Edwin ends up having a pizza with the author of You Made Me Do It.
* * *
IT’S A SURPRISINGLY pleasant evening. Julie is a good companion, chatty without being overbearing, and a good listener too. She tells Edwin that she’s single, lives in Brighton, and worked as a nurse before becoming a teacher.
‘That was all the careers advice we got at school. Become a nurse or a teacher. Well I did both.’
‘I wanted to study music at university,’ says Edwin, ‘but my father said there was no money in it. I was lucky though. I got a job at the BBC in the days when all you needed to do was make teas and run errands. I started as an errand boy and never left.’
The Postscript Murders Page 16
