by Joel Hames
“Well?”
“Well, he wants to get in my pants, doesn’t he? So we’ve got ten minutes.” She glanced at her watch. “Eight now. What are you going to do, loose cannon?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. Larkin’s intervention had made me all the surer that getting out was the right move. “But the only reason I’m involved at all – the only reason you’ve even met me – is this bloody memoir. I’m not exactly thrilled to be working on that, either, but it looks like I’m stuck with it. This serial killer thing is different, though. I don’t want anything to do with it. You heard Martins. I might have cracked the case up in Manchester, but it wasn’t wine and roses. Roarkes won’t be putting that one down on his list of favourite jobs, believe me. Listen to your DI Martins. Listen to your DS Larkin.”
A frown appeared. Shrewd was gone, disappointed was back. I hated to let her down, but the last thing I wanted was to get dragged into this Maurier mess and make an enemy of Martins. DC Colman had played her cards and lost.
“You surprise me, Sam. After what you’ve just seen. Four bodies, Sam. Three more families, going through what Lizzy Maurier is going through right now. Don’t you want to help?”
“I’ve already told you, DC Colman. I don’t help the police. When I try, people die. Forget what I said to Martins, inside. She just got my back up. Believe me, you don’t want my help.”
She shrugged. “That’s a shame. And it’s Vicky, by the way.”
“I’m sorry, Vicky.”
A sigh, and another shrug. “OK. Never mind. I’ll get back to looking at Elizabeth Maurier’s diary on my own.”
I gave her my best shot at a rueful grin, stood up and extended my hand. I was already through the door when it hit me. I turned, walked back in and sat down at the table. Colman hadn’t moved. She was watching me, expressionless, but somehow slightly smug.
“What diary?”
She tapped her chin, squinting at something invisible on the table between us, and made a play of thinking about it.
“I thought you weren’t interested, Sam.”
“Don’t play games, Colman. Vicky, I mean. What diary? I’m supposed to be working on a memoir. We were supposed to have all her papers. No one mentioned a diary. So what are you talking about?”
“Does this mean you’re going to help?”
“No. It means I’m here about the memoirs, and I need Elizabeth Maurier’s diary if I’m going to do my job.”
She nodded, slowly.
“I’ll see what I can do about getting you a copy. It’s evidence, see. And you’ve seen what Martins is like. Doesn’t like you, doesn’t like the press, doesn’t like anyone she can’t put a gag and a lead on. She’d cut out everyone’s tongues herself if they let her. You want a definition of “control freak”? Look under M.”
She smiled at me and continued.
“Thing is, Sam,” and here she dropped her voice so I had to lean in to hear her words, “thing is, there was an appointment in her diary. For the night she was killed. Just one word.”
I waited. She was watching me, silent, waiting herself. She needed me to ask.
“And?”
“Connor.”
“Who the hell’s Connor?”
“Beats me, Sam. Not mentioned anywhere else. No one’s got a clue.”
I sat back and searched my brain. I’d known Connors, first names and last, I’d been at school with one, I’d dated another, there was a sergeant in South West London with the same name who liked me about as much as Martins did. But none of them had anything to do with Elizabeth Maurier. Colman was watching me, expressionless again. I felt a weight settle on me, a sense of foreboding, the certainty that I was being manipulated just as Serena Hawkes had manipulated me one month earlier. I’d missed the signals back then, and people had died. I didn’t want the same thing happening here. I didn’t want anything to do with Maurier or Connor and I certainly didn’t want anything more to do with DI Martins.
But along with the weight, there was a tingle. This Elizabeth Maurier business was messy and unpleasant and wouldn’t pay enough to keep me in coffee. I’d gone to Martins that morning with the intention of digging myself out of it. But now, with Colman, with the board, with the elusive diary and the mysterious Connor involved, it was turning into something else entirely. Something interesting.
“So what do you say, Sam?” she asked, after an age. “You in?”
I breathed out, heavily, and nodded.
7: Lonely Den
I’D FORGOTTEN THE golden rule of dinner engagements: always find out who else is going. “Dinner at my place,” she’d said, to “kick things off”, and fool that I was, I’d thought she meant the three of us. Not that Brooks-Powell’s presence would have brought a golden lustre to the evening, but it might have helped.
There was no Brooks-Powell.
I’d arrived fifteen minutes late: no Brooks-Powell. Still, I thought, he swims in the kind of circle where half an hour’s nothing and even an hour’s not worth apologising for. But now there were cold starters on the table with glasses of expensive white wine beside them, seventy minutes had gone by, and there was no sign of the bastard. She hadn’t invited him. He wasn’t coming.
Lizzy had called me that afternoon; I’d recognised the number and let the call go straight through to voicemail. If I’d answered maybe I’d have realised it was going to be just her and me. Maybe she’d have let something slip. But I didn’t, and all she said was her address, which I already knew, and the time I was expected, which was burned into my brain like an execution date, and not to bring anything with. I hadn’t planned on bringing anything with. She spoke with a light, breathy voice that reminded me of Elizabeth, and I wondered as I listened whether that was a conscious affectation or just something she’d absorbed without knowing it.
She lived three streets away from her late mother’s Holland Park residence, on the fringes of Notting Hill. The flat was a smaller version of Elizabeth’s house, cream on the walls, oak in the kitchen, which was where we were sitting down to quails’ eggs wrapped in smoked salmon, two tiny nests of them perched in the centre of two huge white plates. Two glasses. Two plates. Definitely no Brooks-Powell.
She’d opened the front door with a big fake smile, panting like she’d run from the other side of London at the call of the bell, but I’d heard the slow footsteps and the long pause while she steeled herself to let me in. I’d assumed she was bracing herself for a repeat of my feud with Brooks-Powell, but she didn’t need Brooks-Powell to make the occasion any more awkward than it already was.
As well as the cream and the oak there were boxes, I noticed, as she led me past her open bedroom door to the living room. There were boxes in the corridor, boxes in the bedroom, too, perched around the unmade bed like stepping stones for a midget tenant. I picked my way down the corridor past a couple of boxes beside the armchair to which she’d directed me, and asked the obvious question.
“So what’s with all the boxes, Lizzy? Are these related to the memoirs we’re working on?”
She’d shaken her head and pointed to a black folder resting on a coffee table in the middle of the room.
“That’s it.”
It was a thin folder. Forty, fifty pages inside, maximum. I could hardly believe my luck. I could get through that in a couple of days, write it up in one more, and wash my hands of the whole thing.
Lizzy must have seen the look on my face, because she was shaking her head and smiling.
“That’s not everything. That’s just the list. A directory, you could call it.”
I tried to smile back at her, as though I were relishing the prospect of a long-term, in-depth analysis of her mother. I couldn’t be certain I’d pulled it off.
“I’ll show it to you in due course,” she said. “And the actual documents, most of which I’ve got round here. But I want to flick through them first and make sure there’s nothing too…”
I waited for her to complete the sentence, and eventually
she did.
“Controversial.”
She flashed an awkward little grin. I couldn’t imagine what she was worried about. Elizabeth Maurier had lived ninety-nine per cent of her life in the public eye, and from what I knew of her, the other one per cent would be a model of propriety. I doubted there were any whips and chains hiding in the Maurier files.
Lizzy was still talking.
“Once I’ve had a first look at everything we can start work in earnest. I’d suggest working here. We can make my flat the centre of operations. Keep all the records here. You won’t have a problem with that, will you?”
I nodded, obligingly, but I didn’t like it. There was something claustrophobic about Lizzy’s flat, for all the cream and high ceilings. Something narrow and dark. No Christmas decorations up, no tree, not that we had anything particularly eye-catching back at our place. Perhaps things would improve when the boxes were cleared away. Perhaps the boxes weren’t going to be cleared away. Perhaps they were a permanent fixture.
She offered me a gin and tonic and I gratefully accepted. Sat back down in our armchairs, she opened with a new theme.
“I must say, I was quite taken aback by David’s comments the other day.”
I tried to remember what she meant. Not the dust and the fingerprints; that was just plain funny. No, it was what he’d said before we’d even begun, sat round that oak table. Why do we actually need to do this? I’d been taken aback, too, but I doubted it was for the same reasons. I’d been surprised and impressed by how honest and straightforward the guy was being. Of course, there was probably something else underneath it, some longer game I wouldn’t understand until I came crawling out from the ruins of what I’d missed. I looked down at my own hands, took a sip of my drink, and glanced back up to find Lizzy watching me, waiting.
I might have agreed with Brooks-Powell, in this instance, but I didn’t owe him a thing. I nodded.
“You’re right,” I said. “I was surprised, too. Not just the indelicacy, but the fact that he didn’t see it the way you and I do.”
I smiled as I wound up the sentence, and fought back a creeping sickness at the back of my throat. The way you and I do. I didn’t like the person I was pretending to be, but worse than that was the realisation that I might have more in common with Brooks-Powell that I’d suspected.
The smile stayed on and the bile stayed down. I might not be fooling myself, but at least Lizzy was buying it. She took a long, deep drink, nearly half her gin and tonic in one gulp, and smiled back at me.
“Because I am right, aren’t I, Sam? This is important. The woman she was. It has to be remembered, and remembered properly, not just in a bunch of obituaries and court records.”
It hit me again, while she was talking. The way she’d put it, back at Elizabeth’s house. This is all there is left of her. I’d wondered then whether she was talking about herself as much as she was her mother, and I felt it again now, clearer still.
Somehow we got through another two gin and tonics each, without seeming to talk about much at all, and then we were in the kitchen and the quails’ eggs were coming out of the fridge. I’d last eaten them in the nineties, and even then they’d been retro. Lizzy Maurier didn’t seem to have left the twentieth century, but it wasn’t time that was pulling her back. She’d chosen to live three streets away from her mother’s London home. She’d chosen to work in Oxford, fifteen miles from her mother’s country house. Her mother’s name reflected onto her the whole time, in small. It was as if Elizabeth had always intended to leave behind nothing more than a faint imprint of herself. Lizzy Maurier, I realised, had never really left home.
The eggs and the sauvignon blanc were followed by a beef stew and some expensive-looking red wine. The food was surprisingly good and the wine tasted fine, but neither did much to improve the company. Lizzy was drinking hard, matching me two glasses to one, and when the bottle was empty she simply opened another. The wine did something strange to her. It opened her up, but only as far as she let it. I could see some pretty choice insults going Brooks-Powell’s way, and I wouldn’t have minded hearing them, but each time she bit them back half-formed.
Somewhere towards the end of the stew she fell silent and I realised that she’d been steering the conversation the whole time, with my contribution limited to the occasional tell me about it or you’re not wrong there. The tinkle of cutlery and the crunch and splash of tooth and saliva seemed horribly magnified now she’d finally stopped talking, and I could only bear so much of it. After thirty seconds or so I snapped.
“So Lizzy, tell me about the poetry? I know you’re a professor and that’s serious work, but I can’t believe you’ve given up writing your own stuff.”
She put down her knife and stared at me, chewing furiously and swallowing down a lump that wasn’t ready for it. Her face went pale, and I expected a fit of coughing and tried to remember if I’d ever actually seen the Heimlich manoeuvre, but instead she just shook her head at me.
“No, no, put all that behind me a long time ago. I mean, childish things, right? It wasn’t important and it didn’t earn any money, and let’s face it, it wasn’t exactly Milton, was it?”
I cast my mind back. She’d shown me some of her poems, sat beside me waiting while I read them and tried to work out what the hell she was talking about and what I could say to her when I’d finished. Just words, I remembered, long words and too many of them in each line, like she was trying to make a point, like she was trying to fill up the space for the sake of it. And all the names, Greeks and Romans I’d never heard of, talking trees and fiery chariots, a million things happening at once that seemed to have nothing to do with one another. I was no expert on poetry, and I hadn’t been back then, either, but even I could tell this was amateur hour.
She was waiting. For a few seconds I tried to work out why, and then the fog of wine cleared and I realised she’d asked me a question. It wasn’t one I could really answer. No meant her poetry was worthless. Yes was telling her she was wrong, and an evening listening to her views on Brooks-Powell’s dissent had reminded me that Lizzy Maurier wasn’t a woman who took contradiction well.
I tried a shrug. I wasn’t sure it would be enough, but she gave a short, tight smile and carried on talking.
“And look, if I’d dedicated myself to writing poems I’d hardly be able to do the stuff I’m doing now. I’ve spoken all over Europe and the States, I’ve got forewords in the definitive editions of Spenser and Sidney, I’m a professor at the most prestigious university in the world. I hardly think a few lines of doggerel would be worth sacrificing all that for.”
I’d swallowed the mouthful I was on already, but I went on chewing to give myself time to think. I’d seen her, at her mother’s house, glaring at those portraits of herself like she was her own worst enemy. I’d got the distinct impression she wasn’t happy about her career. And here she was singing its praises.
And the words. The most prestigious university in the world. A few lines of doggerel. I didn’t know Lizzy that well, but already I had a feel for the way she spoke, and this wasn’t it. It was someone else.
Of course.
It hit me so hard and so suddenly that I had to reach for my glass and take a slow, measured drink just to keep from blurting it out.
Elizabeth Maurier had always belittled her daughter’s verse. From what I’d read, she’d probably been right to, but she might have been gentler in her critique. Lizzy was an intellectual who loved all the Greek and the Shakespeare and the names no one else had ever heard of, she’d been like that years ago and it was clear she was still like that now, but back then she’d had something else, too. An urge to write, an urge to create, a need to get something down on paper that wasn’t just her take on something someone else had written centuries ago. She’d bowed to her mother’s pressure, and resented it, and now that mother was dead and Lizzy Maurier was free.
Only she wasn’t.
She’d never be able to admit it, I realised. To ad
mit that she’d silenced that urge and spent a decade doing work she didn’t really care for after all. That her mother’s view of her life had become her life. That she could go back, now, and start again, if she wanted to, but that would mean rewriting the past. It was easier to pretend that everything was fine, that her mother was right, had been right all along. That dancing to Elizabeth Maurier’s tune, living and working in her shadow, had been the right call.
And for all that to work, for the gargantuan self-deception to take hold, Elizabeth Maurier had to loom larger than anything real, had to be nobler and greater and more perfect than she’d ever been in real life. If the idol that was Elizabeth Maurier fell from its perch, Lizzy Maurier would have to take a long hard look at herself, and I didn’t think she’d like what she’d see. So the memoirs had to be completed and Lizzy had to be in complete control, had to filter out any impurities that might endanger her sterile, make-believe world.
I felt air where there should have been wine, coughed, and realised I’d drained the glass. Lizzy was looking at me curiously. I’d been down in that glass too long. I tried to think back to what we’d been talking about before I’d gone silent. Her poetry. Dangerous ground. I changed the subject.
“So tell me the truth, Lizzy. Why did your mother want me working on these memoirs? You, I can understand, even Brooks-Powell, although I still think it was a strange choice. But me? We hadn’t spoken in ten years.”
She gave a short, serious nod, stood and walked around to my side of the table. She leaned in towards me, and for one horrible moment I thought she was about to kiss me. Instead she reached for my empty plate. She spoke as she cleared the table, slowly on both counts, which might have been because she was thinking about what she was doing and saying but was probably because she’d drunk three gins and the best part of two bottles of wine.
“She liked you, Sam. She admired you. She always admired you.” She paused, for a moment, set down the plates in the sink, turned to me and smiled. “She thought you and she would end up working together again, one day. Hoped you would, at least. She had the greatest respect for your ability, even after the trouble. I never heard her speak about you any way other than kindly.”
