by Joel Hames
“Of course she’s upset, Williams,” thundered Martins. “You’re talking about her dead mother. What did you expect? Confetti and fucking cake?”
Lizzy turned and fled up the corridor to the bedroom she hardly used. The door slammed shut behind her. I waited for a moment, and addressed Martins again.
“Look, Detective Inspector, it’s done now. I’m not going to say a word about it, so it’s not like it actually matters. Everyone’s on edge, Lizzy most of all, and it doesn’t help people screaming at each other in her house.”
“Not like it actually matters?” parroted Martins in a hideous, pompous parody which left me wincing. “I’m glad you think so, Mr Williams. I’m glad we’ve got an expert like you on board. I expect you’ll crack this one in minutes, what with your decades of experience solving difficult murders. I’ll be sure to take your opinion on board when I’m deciding what to do with Colman here.”
I gave up playing nice with DI Martins. There wasn’t any point.
“That’s fine,” I said. “You do what you have to. I assume you’re familiar with the clean-up stats when the police don’t even have a suspect a week after the murder? Guess you’ve got your work cut out for you, DI Martins. But no need to take it out on everyone else.”
Before she could say anything, I turned and walked away. I caught a glimpse of her face, cheeks flushed, mouth set. Behind her Brooks-Powell had returned his head to the vertical and was smiling. I wondered what Claire would have made of it, looked forward to telling her about it later and hearing her laugh, and then remembered we weren’t in a telling-and-laughing place right now.
I knocked on the door to Lizzy’s bedroom and waited for her quiet “come in” before I opened it and stepped inside. She was sat on the bed, her face dry, three crumpled tissues and an iPad beside her.
“Sorry,” I said, but she shook her head.
“It doesn’t matter. I knew about it, the police did tell me, in confidence, of course, but hearing about it all over again – well, it just hit me, all of a sudden, like I was hearing it for the first time.”
I sat down beside her as she went on.
“I was at home when they told me she was dead. They turned up at nine in the morning, two of them, a liaison officer and that woman, Martins. I thought it couldn’t be anything important, I didn’t realise the significance of the liaison officer. I was making tea when she suddenly came out with it, all of it, the blunt instrument and the knife and the writing and the tongue, and then there was tea and broken china all over the floor and I spent the next fifteen minutes staring at the floor and clearing it all up because I couldn’t face them. I didn’t want to see them in my house. I didn’t want to hear their voices. And they kept asking me questions, they didn’t understand that I didn’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care if they catch him. I don’t care if he kills again. That’s their job. My mother’s dead. That’s the only thing I care about.”
She’d seemed so together at Willoughby’s office, when that fat bastard had sprung Elizabeth Maurier’s last surprise on me. Only now did I see how hard that must have been.
“Is there anything I can do?” I asked. “I can make you some tea, if you want. Or coffee. I promise not to break anything.”
She smiled, weakly, and shook her head.
“It’s OK.” She pointed at the iPad. “I’m on with the grief circle. They’ll sort me out. They understand. They’ve been through the same thing and come out the other side. I don’t know what I’d do without them.”
I nodded, placed an arm on her shoulder and squeezed, and stood up from the bed.
“But Sam,” she said, as I turned to go. “Thank you. And please thank David for me too. I think this will really help me, working with the two of you.”
I nodded again. So this was the reason. This was the point of it all. Make Lizzy Maurier feel better. It was as good a reason as any.
“I think it would be nice if we could kick things off on Wednesday,” she continued. “Dinner at my place. Does that work for you?”
“Yes, sure,” I replied. “I look forward to it.”
That was a lie, of course. But not as much of a lie as it would have been a couple of hours earlier.
5: The Board
MARTINS’ WESTMINSTER CID team was based in a narrow grey office smeared like meat paste between a taxi firm and one of those places that sell tickets for West End shows at ten times face value to gullible tourists. It struck me that there was probably enough going on next door to keep Martins busy all year round, but fate had thrown her into my life, and I was the poorer for it.
I paused on that thought and tried to rewind it. I was here to apologise. It was her investigation. It was her job. I had a reputation for sticking my nose in and I could see why she might not want that nose on her patch. She’d wound me up the previous day, and I’d let loose, because she’d been rude to me from the start and treated her DC like something she’d just scraped off the bottom of her shoe. But this was CID, not kindergarten. If Colman couldn’t handle a bit of abuse from her boss she wouldn’t last very long in the job, however smart she might be. And I was used to people being rude to me, police officers in particular, Detective Inspectors pretty much invariably. It came with the territory.
And, I realised, I’d made a mistake. I hadn’t spotted that mistake until I’d gone straight home from Holland Park and told Claire what had happened. I told her about Brooks-Powell, who was only human after all, she’d been right about that (or at least Adrian had); I told her about my run-in with Martins, I even told her about the writing and the tongue after she agreed not to write about it. And I told her about little Lizzy Maurier, poor Lizzy Maurier, crying into her iPad and worshipping her mother’s memory like the High Priestess of Elizabeth Maurier.
Claire listened, nodded, and when I finished, she turned to me with half a frown and said “So it sounds like you’re going to do it, then? You’re working with Lizzy and Brooks-Powell?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, and then I realised I was sure and it was done. I’d argued with the DI and then gone and said yes to dinner and Elizabeth’s bequest out of pity and because I didn’t know what else to say. It was too late, and there was nothing I could do about it. I gave myself a mental kick, and then returned my focus to Claire, who’d said more to me in those two questions than she’d managed for the last two days.
“It’s probably the right thing, you know,” she continued. Maybe everything was better. Maybe I’d been forgiven whatever unknown sin I’d committed.
“Maybe it is,” I replied. “Maybe it’ll do some good.” I couldn’t imagine what good it might do, but imagination had never been my strong point anyway.
She nodded. “Oh, by the way. Jonathan mentioned something.”
“Yes?”
“He was wondering whether you might be able to say anything. On the record. About Elizabeth.”
“Why would I do that?” I asked, with a touch more aggression than I’d intended.
“Well, it’s already out there. Look.”
She picked up her laptop and brought it over to me. There was a photo – Lizzy and I, stood outside Willoughby’s office, talking; another of the same scene with the vultures rushing past, Lizzy and I obscured among their dark coats and golfing umbrellas. A further two shots, David Brooks-Powell’s back as he rang the doorbell at Elizabeth’s townhouse; mine, too, my face half-turned towards the camera. Hanover must have been ready with the camera the moment I responded to his shout.
The text was fairly innocuous. Hanover had written it himself; Real World News was “alternative media”, disruptive (by which they meant deliberately controversial), not the sort of outfit that would foot the bill for a journalist and a photographer. I wasn’t named and neither was Brooks-Powell. Lizzy was, but as the victim’s daughter she’d hardly have been difficult to identify. There had been a murder; there had been a will; these people were involved. A hint that one of the bequests had been a little out of the ordinary;
a reference to Tulkinghorn, the gossip column from the Law Society Gazette I hadn’t looked at in fifteen years. Not a great deal to say, not a lot to speculate on, either. Hanover hadn’t even tried.
I looked up Tulkinghorn, scanned through the last few columns, found the one I was looking for. No more in there than there’d been in Hanover’s piece. Still, it gave me something. I had an idea who’d been talking to the press.
“I don’t think so,” I said, finally, when I’d finished reading through the three short paragraphs a second time. “It just doesn’t seem in very good taste.”
Claire grinned. “Think you’re some kind of expert in good taste?”
“Well, I picked you, didn’t I?”
“Everyone gets lucky once in a while, Sam Williams.”
She was whistling – actually whistling – as she strolled to the bedroom, for a nap, she said, and for a moment I found myself thinking everything really was OK. She didn’t really care whether I obliged her editor or not, she was just passing on a request. And it wasn’t like anything I had to say would stop the press. Everything was fine, I thought, everything was normal, and then I remembered Lizzy Maurier’s dinner and her mother’s bequest and the fact that there was nothing I could do about it.
I spent the next fifteen minutes conjuring up ideas, escape routes, running halfway down them and then crossing them off as another impossibility or implausibility hit home. Fifteen increasingly depressing minutes, and then I gave up and called Maloney. I explained the situation, and listened to him clicking his tongue against his cheek for thirty seconds before I said “Well? Any ideas?”
“Come for a drink,” he replied.
The Mitre was more Maloney’s sort of pub than mine, dirty grey walls and a carpet so old the cigarette burns hid most of the pattern. I wondered how a place like this could survive on the fringes of Islington, with its Lebanese restaurants and Brazilian bars, and then I saw the paltry handful of change I’d got back from a twenty for two pints of lager, and I figured they didn’t need more than me and Maloney to break even for the night.
Maloney had been a client, back when I’d set up on my own. He’d been a gangster, of sorts, a local crime lord of the Robin Hood variety, if Robin Hood had run a drugs operation on the side. I’d done the job he’d hired me for, and I’d thrown in a little extra, too: the news that someone he trusted was running dirty drugs and underage girls and generally soiling an operation that Maloney had been trying to clean up. We’d become friends since. Maloney was a mine of information; if he didn’t know something he could usually find it out soon enough. And he’d got me out of trouble more than once – his sort of trouble, not mine, the sort that needs false documents or untraceable phones and maybe a tough guy or two.
I’d been waiting ten minutes when he showed up, and he didn’t apologise, just grabbed his drink and sat down and fixed me with a look that said I owed him that drink and I’d be buying him plenty more before the night was out. He was a heavily-built guy with a heavily-built face and a nose that had knees and fists written all over it; he looked like what he was, or at least, what he had been. Maloney had gone straight, he was at constant pains to remind me. A bona fide businessman, not that he’d ever specified what the business was. He finished the drink before he said a word, holding up a hand to stop me when I opened my mouth to start talking. He slid the glass towards me and pointed to the bar, and I got up and paid for a second, knowing he was watching me for signs of resentment, anything he could mock me for later. I made sure I gave him nothing.
“So, your old mate Brooks-Powell,” he said, when I returned. He wore a smile nearly as big as his face. He knew my history with Brooks-Powell. He’d been one of my first clients after Mauriers.
“Yep,” I said, and told him everything, the same story I’d given him on the phone, with a little more flesh on the bones. He stopped me when I got to Martins.
“This the DI?”
I nodded.
“She’s your way out, Sam. She doesn’t want you getting in the way, right?”
“Yeah, she made that clear enough.”
He took a long drink. He was close to finishing his second pint. I got up to for a third but he held out a hand, waved a finger at me. “So you make sure you don’t get in her way. You play nice. Let her set the rules. You see what I’m saying?”
I shook my head. I didn’t. He continued.
“Remember that bloke? What was he called? You told me about him. Barrister. You know.”
“I’ve worked with a lot of barristers, Maloney. I’ll need a bit more than that.”
“Then I’ll need another drink, smart arse. Off you go.”
This time, at least, he handed me a fiver before I got up. It wasn’t enough, but it was something,
“Steelforth or Greyforth or something like that,” he said, before I’d set the drinks back down.
I laughed. “You mean Wentworth, right?”
He nodded, his face deep in his glass.
“What about him?”
“Do what you did there.”
I started to ask why and how and what on earth he was talking about, and then I remembered. And I smiled. Maloney was worth the drinks.
It had been before I’d left Mauriers, something I must have told Maloney about years later. A case – a dull one, and there were more than enough of them to go round. For every framed murderer or high-profile whistle-blower there were a dozen idiots and crooks with enough money to get Elizabeth Maurier batting for them. She needed the money – the high profile cases didn’t tend to pay. The details of the case were fuzzy, but I remembered I hadn’t wanted it, even more than I usually didn’t want dull work, probably because there was something tasty in the offing and I needed to be free if I had a chance of swiping it from Brooks-Powell’s gaping jaw. I couldn’t just go to Elizabeth and tell her; she’d have handed me the next half dozen rich idiots as punishment for trying to beat the system. So I went about it a different way.
She’d already appointed counsel – our barrister, our client’s barrister. I didn’t remember the client’s name or the crime he’d been accused of, but the barrister was a tall floppy-haired man called Wentworth who wore bow-ties in the pub and had a laugh like a horse. I’d seen him at the White Hart, a stone’s throw from the office, him and his friends. I’d seen Brooks-Powell wander over to him, serious, ingratiating, seen Brooks-Powell offer to buy him a drink, seen Brooks-Powell remind him that they’d been at school together, that Wentworth had been head boy in Brooks-Powell’s first year. The guy hadn’t remembered him; of course he hadn’t. He’d probably spent that year buggering every last one of the thirteen-year-olds. No reason one should stick in his mind any more than the others.
I’d tracked him down one night – it hadn’t been hard, there were three or four places they drank, his crowd, and I’d found him in the second. I’d sat and listened to them talk, and tried to hate him, but despite the laugh and the tone of the voice I’d found myself thinking he was a relatively normal man, after all, even warming to him, which made what I was about to do all the harder.
Didn’t stop me doing it.
As he’d stepped away from the bar clutching three full glasses I’d turned, as if I hadn’t noticed him, and caught him in the kidneys with my elbow. The drinks had gone. The pub had fallen silent. He’d turned to me, a look in his eyes not so much of anger as of exasperation, and shaken his head. No doubt he’d been expecting an apology and three fresh drinks. No doubt that’s what I’d have given him, in normal circumstances. But these circumstances weren’t normal.
Instead I’d shaken my head right back at him, looked him square in the eyes – which was difficult, since he was a good four inches taller than me, but I did as well as I could – and told him he was an ignorant fucker and if he couldn’t carry his drinks he shouldn’t be allowed to drink them. I’d made sure he got a good look at my face, and then I’d turned and walked out of the pub.
Elizabeth had arranged the case conferen
ce for the following morning. I had half an hour with the files, and then I was to meet the client. And the barrister. He’d walked in, Wentworth, laughing at something Elizabeth had said, he’d greeted the client, who he’d already met, and then he’d turned and seen me and his face had been a picture of shock and disdain.
We managed the next twenty minutes as well as could be expected. Efficiently enough, I supposed, although I made sure there were enough awkward silences that Elizabeth wouldn’t fail to notice the atmosphere. I gave it five minutes after they’d gone, and then I went to see Elizabeth and apologised.
“Sorry about that,” I’d said. “Hope it doesn’t make things too difficult.”
“What’s the problem between you and Wentworth?” she’d asked, which made me smile, since she’d never bothered asking the same question about me and Brooks-Powell. Maybe we just hid it better.
“He doesn’t like me. That’s all. Had a little run-in the other day. My fault as much as his, probably,” I lied. “If it does make things difficult – ”
“Get out,” she’d interrupted. “I’ll speak to Wentworth.”
An hour later she’d called me back in and kicked me off the case. Wentworth had, apparently, been gracious and said he’d be more than happy to work with me if I could work with him. But the case was too important to let personal matters intervene.
The case meant fuck all. But the client was rich. I got thrown onto the next case, the one I’d wanted all along. When I bumped into Wentworth a few weeks later I apologised and bought him a drink, and during the course of the next half hour he confided in me that he did remember Brooks-Powell from school, because all the boys had called him Dolly. He didn’t remember why.
I didn’t think I’d be buying Martins any drinks, but I owed Maloney a few right now. I could see what I had to do. Because we were getting in the way, me and Brooks-Powell and little Lizzy Maurier. We didn’t want to cause any trouble, but we were stepping on Martins’ shiny steel-capped toes. I didn’t want to step on Martins’ toes, and I didn’t want to work with Brooks-Powell, and if I played humble enough with the DI, she might order us to back off. I’d make the suggestion myself, if it came to it, I’m sorry for breathing, ma’am, if it helps you can order me and the nasty blond man to steer clear and I’ll be more than happy to comply. The mere idea of it left a bitter taste in my mouth, but not as bitter as the prospect of weeks, maybe months cheek-by-jowl with Brooks-Powell. I bought Maloney another drink, and we chatted about this and that, and when I got home Claire was asleep and I was drunk and breezily confident I wouldn’t have to worry about Elizabeth Maurier’s memoirs any longer. And first thing next morning I was standing outside Westminster CID practicing my apologetic face and trying to push back every angry thought about DI Martins.
