by Joel Hames
Brooks-Powell didn’t seem to be in the biting-back mood.
“Is it, though?” he asked.
“Is it what?” said Lizzy.
“Is it important? I mean, I can see it’s got some personal value for you, for all of us, maybe, I get that. But really, what’s done is done.”
Lizzy mouth was hanging open. Brooks-Powell continued.
“Don’t get me wrong, Lizzy. Your mother was a great woman. An inspiration. But we knew her. We know all that. Her achievements are a matter of public record and those of us who had the privilege of working for her will remember that to our dying days. Why do we actually need to do this?”
She turned to me, a confused look on her face. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I shrugged. Looking down at the table, now, she addressed us both in a voice that failed to suppress a tremor.
“I can’t agree with you, David. Memories fade – even the strongest of memories. And it’s all very well saying it’s a matter of public record, but who’s going to look through that record? Who’s going to go through it all and put it in one place together with all those memories, if we don’t do it now?”
Brooks-Powell was watching her, head tilted slightly to one side, as though he were taking in her words, considering them with the seriousness she thought they deserved. She raised her voice, now, for the first time.
“Don’t you see, the pair of you? Don’t you see it? This is it. This is all there is left of her.”
Another pause.
“THIS IS IT!” she repeated, even louder, and I had a sudden flash of understanding. This is all there is left of her, she’d said, but who was that her? Was it Elizabeth Maurier, famous lawyer with a legacy that would live on long after her death? Or was it Lizzy Maurier, her daughter? I couldn’t put my finger on it, not precisely why, but something told me this was important not because Lizzy needed it for her mother but because it told her things about herself.
She was looking from one of us to the other, now, suddenly quiet, suddenly little Lizzy Maurier again. I shrugged and nodded and Brooks-Powell followed suit, and Lizzy seemed mollified. I couldn’t help being a little impressed by Brooks-Powell. He’d always been a political animal. Even fresh from university, he’d never taken a step without a clear view of where he it would take him. But here he was acting blunt and to the point and apart from making it clear he didn’t want to be here any more than I did, he had nothing to gain from his comments.
Perhaps this wouldn’t be as bad as I’d feared.
4: The Writing On The Wall
TEN MINUTES LATER, cups of tea in hand (I’d asked for sugar; there hadn’t been any), we were making our way through the house, pausing as Lizzy pointed out items of interest. The two doors I’d noticed earlier opened onto a morning room and a dining room, and as Lizzy gestured at the furniture I had an uncomfortable sense of dishonesty, as though I’d somehow tricked my way in here, as though I were being shown around a house I had no intention of buying by an earnest and unworldly estate agent.
There were portraits and family photographs on the walls, of course, among the fine art reproductions and (I assumed) the occasional original. Plenty of Elizabeth Maurier and her late husband, Reginald. Plenty of Lizzy, too: Lizzy’s graduation; Lizzy at a conference, Lizzy receiving an award. She’d clearly made a success of Renaissance Literature, and there was nothing embarrassing about the photographs, but I was sure I’d caught her frowning at one of them as she led us from the dining room. It showed her standing outdoors under a tree, in a small green surrounded by old buildings. She was smiling and shaking the hand of an older man, grey-haired, with a cane in his left hand. There was a caption underneath, in a slanting, understated font: Lizzy Maurier Becomes A Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. Smiling in the photograph, but frowning now, however briefly. I heard Claire’s voice in my head. She’s just lost her mum. Can’t imagine she’ll get over that in a hurry. It probably didn’t mean a thing.
As we turned the corner at the top of the first flight of stairs I heard voices ahead of us. I paused, and David Brooks-Powell, behind me, stumbled into my back. I turned and muttered “sorry”, and he flashed that smile at me. I’d been haunted by that smile far longer than was good for me, it had stabbed at me by night, on trains or long drives, sitting bored at my desk while my brain threw up images from the past, but seeing it here, now, in real life, it didn’t stab at all. It was just a man, smiling.
Lizzy had stopped, too, and was looking at us.
“Sorry. I should have said. The police are here.”
So we were taking a tour through a crime scene. The murder had taken place fifteen days ago, but the police still hadn’t finished. They hadn’t arrested anyone, either.
The voices were coming from a room to the left of the landing; we veered right and into a wood-floored, white-walled space with a huge window looking over the communal garden which nestled at the centre of the crescent. There was a large oak desk right in the middle of the room, and oak shelves full of legal text books and legal biographies on all the walls.
“The study,” announced Lizzy, somewhat superfluously.
“Are there any useful documents here?” I asked. If we were going to do this, we might as well start getting our information together. Lizzy shook her head.
“No. There was a fire, see.” She pointed to the wall beside the door through which we had entered. A black stain spread from floor to ceiling. The police had mentioned it, in the press reports: a small fire in the study. Lizzy continued.
“It doesn’t matter, as it happens. A few papers got burned, a few books, but nothing important. She’d given me everything significant a week earlier.”
“She had?” Brooks-Powell turned to her, surprised. She nodded.
“Yes. I know it’s all come as a shock, it is a shock, of course, but this work, this is something she wanted me to do while she was still alive. She gave me the documents to get started and a list of names to contact should I need any help. Yours were at the top of the list.”
I bet they were, I thought, but Brooks-Powell, as usual, was thinking several steps ahead of me.
“So,” he said, walking over to the window and carefully running a finger along the sill, “if there aren’t any documents here, there isn’t really much point in our being here at all, is there?”
Lizzy sighed again. She was doing a lot of sighing. She took two steps towards the window and stood there facing him.
“I thought it would be a good idea for you to see where she lived. Get a feeling for her. Get an idea of what she was really like. And I thought it would be a good idea to meet and establish an idea of how we could work together before we actually started working.”
“I see,” replied Brooks-Powell, looking at his finger and nodding at the absence of dust. “Does that mean we’ll be taking a look at the Oxfordshire house, too? And the gîte? I mean –”
He stopped, suddenly pale, staring horror-struck at the tip of his finger.
“What’s wrong, Brooks-Powell?” I asked. “Not up to your standards?”
He ignored me, still staring at the finger, and stammered out a question to Lizzy.
“The police. They’ve dusted, haven’t they? They’ve taken all the prints they needed?”
She nodded and I stifled a laugh. That would have been priceless. Brooks-Powell arrested for murder, and all thanks to one of his superior gestures. He relaxed and Lizzy answered his original question as though there had been no interruption at all.
“If you want I’m sure we can arrange for you to visit the other homes. I mean it. It might well be helpful. If you can spare the time. But I don’t think you need to see them before you actually get started. Now let’s move on to the rest of the house.”
There were more portraits on the landing, including a black-and-white shot of a young boy in long shorts and a huge smile standing by a river. “Gone but not forgotten,” said the inscription, and below it, the date, the seventeenth of May, 1949. I remembe
red Elizabeth Maurier’s brother, dead at nine, a grief and an inspiration to the bereft. Opposite it hung an enormous photograph of Lizzy sitting at what appeared to be the high table at a formal college dinner. Beside her sat the man I’d seen in the picture downstairs, the man with the cane. A waiter hovered at the edge of the shot, a large dish in two white-gloved hands. Lizzy had a glass of red wine in one hand and wore a white blouse and a black gown over it. She was turning towards her neighbour, an earnest expression on her face as he held forth.
Lizzy was leading us towards a room at the far end of the landing, but it took us past what looked like the master bedroom, and as I looked in I saw two figures bent over, looking at something on the floor. The wall behind them was marked, black and red smudges on the cream background.
“Was there a fire in here, too?” I asked as we walked past. The figures straightened up and turned towards me as I spoke.
I recognised one of them. Detective Inspector Martins. DI Olivia Martins, of Westminster CID, was in charge of the investigation into the murder of Elizabeth Maurier.
I’d met DI Martins. I’d had a highly unsatisfactory interview with her immediately after my return from Manchester, during which she’d pestered me for details of my relationship with the late Elizabeth Maurier and repeatedly demanded to know why Elizabeth Maurier had called me so many times in the week prior to her death. She’d called me in a day later for a second interview, during which she’d asked me exactly the same questions in a slightly different order. I had little to offer on either occasion; I hadn’t answered Elizabeth’s calls. And DI Martins had been reluctant in the extreme to answer any of my questions about the murder and her investigation. She knew my reputation, she told me. I interfered with police investigations. She didn’t want me interfering with hers.
“What the hell are you doing here?” she asked, that sharpness in her voice that never seemed to leave it. She emphasised the hell, as if it had been paradise before I’d shown up and turned everything infernal. I shrugged and gestured ahead of me, towards Lizzy, who’d stopped outside the room she’d been intending to show us and turned in my direction.
“I’m sorry, DI Martins,” she said, one eyebrow raised, one arm angled pertly between shoulder and hip. “But you did say I could use the house. So I’m using it. Mr Williams and Mr Brooks-Powell are my colleagues.”
I happened to be looking towards Brooks-Powell as she said the word “colleagues”, and from the lines that briefly creased his forehead I could have sworn he was fighting the same battle I was to hold back an expression of absolute incredulity. I hoped I was doing a better job of it.
The other officer walked towards me, her hand outstretched. She was young – very young, I thought, early twenties, which meant she must have been good at her job to be out of uniform already.
“Detective Constable Colman,” she said. “Like the mustard.”
“Sam Williams.”
I shook her hand. Her boss had turned back to whatever she’d been looking at on the floor. Lizzy and Brooks-Powell had disappeared, presumably into the room at the end of the landing, and it was just me and the two officers. Those scars on the wall intrigued me. Martins had been as unfriendly as I’d come to expect, but this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.
“So was there? A fire, I mean. In here.”
Martins ignored me. I could almost feel the hostility radiating from her back. Detective Constable Colman shrugged and bent down alongside her boss. I gave it five seconds and went to join Lizzy and Brooks-Powell.
They were in a second bedroom – Lizzy’s own bedroom, when she stayed, which was infrequently enough before her mother’s death and not once since, she told us, with a gentle shudder. There was nothing of interest at all; no photographs, no childhood memorabilia, nothing to set it apart from a good clean uninhabited room anywhere else. Lizzy proceeded to take us into the lounge, the drawing room and, on the second floor, three further guest bedrooms, all clean and blank and entirely uninteresting.
On the way back past the master bedroom I noticed that DC Colman was alone. I could hear a voice from downstairs – DI Martins, on the phone, and not happy, from what I could hear. I tried to remember whether I’d seen her happy even once, even for a moment, and realised I hadn’t. I stood in the doorway and coughed, and DC Colman turned and smiled at me.
“This is where she died, you know,” she said.
I nodded. It had all been in the press reports, the fire in the study and the death in the bedroom. Something struck me, suddenly, and I spoke quietly. I didn’t want Lizzy to hear.
“There wasn’t a sexual element to the crime, was there?”
Colman stared at me, and shook her head.
“No,” she said. She glanced at the damaged wall, and then back at me, her eyes narrowed, appraising. She had short blonde hair and a little button nose that didn’t go with those serious eyes. She was cute, I decided. But young. Far too young.
“No,” she repeated. “This is where the writing was.”
I hadn’t heard about any writing. The press had kept that quiet, if they even knew. I nodded, casually, but Detective Constable Colman wasn’t buying it.
“You didn’t know about the writing.”
It wasn’t a question. For a second or two I considered lying, but Colman had me pegged, I was sure of it. I went for a sheepish smile, instead, the one Claire had told me was the reason I got away with being mostly useless most of the time. Colman muttered something under her breath, something unclear that definitely opened with an “f”, and stared at the floor. Apparently the sheepish smile wasn’t good enough for the Detective Constable.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You don’t have to say anything else. I’ll go and join the others.”
That sorry was real enough. Young Colman had the misfortune of working for a DI who I was convinced, from my limited experience, was a cast-iron bitch. She was at the start of her career, maybe on her first case, and she’d already blown sensitive police information to the four winds. I hoped she wouldn’t pay for it. I flashed her a smile, turned and walked away, and I’d made it halfway down the corridor when she called me back.
She had that narrow-eyed look on her again, but there was a grin perched underneath.
“Here it is, Mr Williams,” she said. “What I tell you goes no further than this room, OK?”
“OK,” I replied. It wasn’t like I had a team of eager colleagues ready to share the news with, whatever it was. My girlfriend was a journalist, and Colman probably didn’t know that, but my girlfriend was wrapped up in other things and hardly talking to me, so she wasn’t the threat she might have been. Colman was standing beside me, looking at the damaged wall at the far end of the room.
“She was killed right here. Smashed on the head in the study, where the fire was, dragged in here and stabbed to death. And then whoever did it used her blood to write on the wall.”
Blood. Elizabeth Maurier’s blood on her own cream walls.
“What did he write?”
“He? You seem pretty sure it’s a guy.”
“Fair point. What did they write, then?”
“They wrote no one will hear.”
“No one will hear?”
She nodded.
“Anything else?”
“No. No more words. But there was one other thing.”
Colman was frowning now, and the grin was long gone. Whatever she was about to tell me, she wasn’t sure I should know. But it didn’t stop her.
“They cut out her tongue. It was found on the floor next to her. They wrote no one will hear, and then they used the same knife they’d stabbed the poor woman with to cut out her tongue and leave it lying beside her body. While she was still alive. What kind of a sick bastard does that, Mr Williams?”
I wondered, for a moment, whether she was accusing me, but only a moment. She wasn’t accusing me. She wasn’t really asking a question at all. She was just making the kind of observation she couldn’t make at Westmin
ster CID, because she didn’t want to look green or stupid or anything else that would have her back in uniform by the end of the shift. I opened my mouth to say something sympathetic, and stopped.
There was someone in the corridor. Just outside the room. I turned and walked out, Colman half a step behind me, and there was Lizzy Maurier shaking her head, the tears rolling down her face, and beside her DI Martins wearing the look of someone who’s just had a bag of shit thrown at them. Behind them both was Brooks-Powell, head tilted to one side, inscrutable as ever.
There was a silence, Lizzy sobbing mutely and staring at me, me looking between Lizzy and Martins and wondering whether Lizzy had known all these details before she’d overheard them, Colman looking at me, blank-faced, like she was expecting me to come up with a solution there and then, and Martins staring at Colman and looking very much as though she’d decided what she was going to do about that bag of shit and Colman wasn’t going to like it.
“I’m sorry,” I began, but Martins raised a hand and stopped me in my tracks.
“What are you playing at, Constable?” she asked. It was like I wasn’t there, me or Lizzy or Brooks-Powell, just the DI and the DC, only she hadn’t said “Detective”. Just “Constable.” Colman took up where I’d left off.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I didn’t realise. I thought he knew.”
I didn’t know Martins well, but I knew her well enough to be sure that wouldn’t wash.
“You thought he knew? You thought he FUCKING KNEW?” she shouted. I wondered whether she realised it was a lie, whether she understood Colman had been well aware of my ignorance. I wondered, too, why the young DC had chosen to enlighten me, why she had chosen then and there, and me, and then my attention was drawn to Lizzy, still crying, louder now. I took a step towards her, but as I approached she edged back and seemed to shrivel still further. I turned instead to Martins. This might have been our mess, mine and Colman’s, but the DI was only making things worse.
“Ease off a bit, will you? This woman’s just lost her mother! Can’t you see she’s upset?” I said. It was the wrong thing to say.
