Faithful unto Death

by Caroline Graham

  “Just general background.”

  “I don’t see, if he committed suicide, what difference—”

  But he was talking to space. A further courteous murmur of thanks and the Chief Inspector had departed.

  Down the lane things were now a bit more orderly. SOCO were working entirely inside so there was not a lot to see. Quite a few people had given up and those that were left looked as if they were in half a mind to.

  Perrot, his face grey with misery which he was plainly only just managing to control, stood just inside the wrought-iron gates. He sprang to open them as the Chief Inspector approached. Glancing at the constable’s frozen features, Barnaby was surprised to see such absolute despair. If Perrot had taken a minor dressing down this much to heart, how the hell was he ever going to cope if he found himself in real trouble?

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing, sir. Thank you.”

  “You look like a dying duck in a thunderstorm.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Out with it, man.” Silence. “D’you think I’ve got all bloody day to hang about?”

  “No, Chief Inspector.” Perrot came out with it. How Hollingsworth had been alive all the time he, the not merely foolish but criminally negligent Perrot, had been standing on the front doorstep. How the man’s life might have been saved if only.

  “You’ve been misinformed Constable.” No need to ask who had delivered the good news. “He died Monday night.”

  “Ohhh!” cried Perrot. “But . . .”

  An expression of utter disbelief rinsed the misery from the policeman’s features. Disbelief, Barnaby suspected, not so much at this new piece of information but at the discovery that such deliberate malice could be directed against him by one supposedly on his own side. It was a wicked old life, thought the Chief Inspector, and no mistake.

  Troy was standing just outside the newly secured French windows, smoking. Inside, two people wearing transparent overalls and boots were about their business. The boots were like old-fashioned galoshes, the front flap folded over and fastened with poppers down the side. The air was close and smelt rather metallic.

  One of the officers, a woman, was new to Barnaby. She was tweezering something from the rug where Hollingsworth had, presumably, breathed his last. As Barnaby watched, she slipped it into a clear plastic sachet with a tag already attached.

  Aubrey Marine, twenty years in the business, having run a hand-held Hoover up and down every fold of the apricot velvet curtains, was now starting on the lining. He called out, “Hullo, Tom. Here we are again.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “No startling surprises, as yet. We looking for anything special?”

  “One or perhaps two small prescription bottles labelled Simone Hollingsworth, probably empty. And thirty or so turquoise and yellow capsule casings, also empty.”

  “How do you . . .” Aubrey pondered briefly then said, “Ah, with you. Those torpedo-shaped things you can pull apart.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Not like you to invite us to a suicide’s party.”

  “I’m not at all sure it is.”

  “Farewell note says you’re wrong.”

  “What?”

  “Goodbye, cruel world,” moaned Aubrey. “First on the left on the landing.”

  “Bugger!”

  Barnaby jerked his thumb at Sergeant Troy. The two ascended the stairs avoiding the banister which was already thickly coated with aluminium powder. Troy, neurotically averse to the slightest smudge or stain either on his person or raiment, was excessively painstaking.

  The room in question was small, awash with bright white light and crammed with electronic equipment. All the machinery was plugged in and gently humming to itself. Every screen but one was blank. On this, even beneath the silvery bloom of SOCO’s dust, emerald letters gleamed. The photographer from yesterday, now wearing a Blur/ Parklife T-shirt, tattered white shorts and the same filthy shoes, bent over the keyboard. A middle-aged woman, removing soft brushes from a steel case, addressed Barnaby.

  “We’re having to settle for pictures here, as you can see.” She sounded cheerful and friendly and appeared to think such information would be a delightful surprise. “Blow them up nice and big and we should get some good results.”

  “Not much use in evidence.” Barnaby was surly and morose.

  “Best we can do, I’m afraid. The computer keys are quite deeply indented so there’s no way we could lift a clear print with tape. It would just pleat and tucker.”

  “I have attended a scenes of crime investigation before, thank you.”

  The woman flushed, snapped her case shut and left, calling over her shoulder, “I’ll come back later, Barry. When the room is free.”

  Barry winked at the two policemen then hefted himself and his tripod to one side so they could read Alan Hollingsworth’s final message.

  To whom it may concern. I can no longer bear to go on living and plan to take my own life. I am of sound mind and fully aware of my actions.

  Alan Hollingsworth.

  Staring uncertainly at the screen, Barnaby silently ran through every expletive and curse with which he was familiar then invented several more.

  Troy, well experienced in assessing his chief’s moods, saw that matters were presently in a state of flux. Could swing either way, as the man said when asked for his views on capital punishment.

  “What’s wrong with a pen and notepad all of a sudden?”

  “They don’t agree with paper. Cyber freaks.” Troy spoke with feeling and some distaste. His cousin Colin, who jeered at everything the police held most dear, was heavily into what he called “Surfing the Net, flamming and spamming.” Tactically excluded by such specialist lingo, Troy reacted by murmuring “Pathetic,” sighing with boredom, looking constantly at his watch and telling Col to get a life.

  Barnaby was likewise computer ignorant. Like a lot of middle-aged people, every time he came across the word modem in a newspaper or magazine, he assumed it to be a misprint for modern. He had picked up as much as he needed to file, bring up and cross-reference information. Anything more complicated and someone else took over.

  Still, you didn’t need to be a compugenius to see that tapping out a death note, complete with what by no stretch of the imagination could be called a signature, was an absolute doddle compared to forging a man’s handwriting. And even if his sergeant was right and cyber freaks despised the use of paper, surely, in such extreme circumstances, Hollingsworth would have at least printed out his last message and signed it, if only to authenticate matters for his executors.

  The more he thought about this, the more cheerful did the Chief Inspector become. The words on the screen now had the air to him not of bleak, resigned finality but of hasty improvisation. Mustn’t get too cocky though. Best to wait till the pictures came out. They would show if Hollingsworth was the last person to use the keyboard.

  “My daughter’s learning to read with one of these. At playgroup,” Troy remarked.

  “Good grief. Haven’t they got any books?”

  “Oh yeah. But the kids prefer this.”

  Leaving, Barnaby looked back. The machine squatted there, passive, self-contained and, to his irritated fancy, with a will of its own. Running with this humanoid notion, he wondered how long it would be before they cut humans right out. Machine calling to machine, ripe with mechanical malice. Organising—or, more likely, disorganising—their owners’ lives.

  “Well, you won’t get the better of me,” he muttered, closing the door behind him. “You boss-eyed little Cyclops.”

  The unhinged gate of Bay Tree Cottage had been pushed to one side leaving a narrow gap. Sergeant Troy, slim as a shark’s fin but minus that creature’s affectionate nature, slid through with ease.

  He lifted the gate, put it to one side so that his chief could follow and knocked on the front door.

  “Do with a new coat, this,” said Troy. He had given it five and was
now rapping much more firmly on the narrow wooden panels, dislodging several flakes of Della Robbia blue.

  Barnaby moved to the nearest window, the type with lots of small panes framed in white painted zinc. He glanced inside. No sign of human habitation.

  There was no garage but on a roughish piece of grass next to the house were tyre marks and a small puddle of oil. Presumably Sarah Lawson’s parking space. The drumming on the door had intensified.

  “For God’s sake, Gavin! Anyone’d think we were on a drug bust.” Barnaby watched as his sergeant reluctantly lowered his fists. The trouble with Troy was that he could never observe and assess a situation simply for what it was worth. If drama was naturally absent, it had to be created, an opportunity made for him to play the toughie. It got rather tiresome at times.

  “Back to the ranch is it then, chief?”

  “No. It’s half twelve and I’m parched. Let’s get a bite to eat.”

  This time they sat in the garden at the Goat and Whistle. Geraniums blazed in window boxes. There was a sandpit with some buckets and spades and a Rockabilly giraffe which would agitate itself for up to five minutes on receipt of a fifty pence piece. Mercifully, at the moment there were no takers.

  There was also an old tyre suspended by chains from a walnut tree. On it Troy, munching on pork scratchings, swung idly back and forth, a lager and black on the grass beside him.

  Barnaby was struggling to finish his sausage roll. The pastry was hard and the filling, which in no way resembled sausage, tasted faintly of soap. He decided to leave the pickled egg, a strange shade of greenish fawn. Bravely, the Chief Inspector took a sip of his drink.

  Last year his daughter and her husband had toured Eastern Europe with an Arts Council production of Much Ado About Nothing. Cully had sent her parents a copy of a Polish menu, woefully mistranslated. Joyce’s favourite line had been: “Our wines leave you nothing to hope for.” Barnaby had thought this merely an interpretive hiccup until he tasted Fawcett Green’s Liebfraumilch.

  “If this is going to run,” he said, “we’ll have to find somewhere else to eat.”

  “Oh yes?” Troy was puzzled. A bag of crisps was a bag of crisps was a bag of . . . “Do you want the rest of that roll, chief?” He got off his tyre and wandered over.

  “God, no.”

  “What’s the plonk like?”

  “Indescribable.” He pushed the nearly full glass, the roll and the egg across.

  “Brilliant.” Troy sat down and tucked in. Then, with a mouth full of mumble, “Thank you.”

  “Your insides must be made of galvanised steel.”

  “He knows how to make pastry, this bloke. I’ll give him that.”

  Troy munched happily while keeping an ear cocked should any input be needed. But the gaffer was silent. He wore his folded-in expression. Inscrutable, like those Oriental masters who train the heroes of comic books to be Masters of the Universe. Presently he produced a silver foil strip of antacid tablets, popped two into his mouth and crunched them up.

  Eventually Troy said, “You’re very quiet, guv.”

  “I’m thinking.”

  Fair enough. Troy’s egg vanished in two bites. A dirty job but someone had to do it.

  “About this hair appointment,” continued the Chief Inspector, “Mrs. Hollingsworth had on the day she disappeared.”

  “Right.”

  “Made for round about the same time Sarah Lawson was invited for tea. Don’t you think it’s an odd thing to do?”

  “No, no.” Sergeant Troy masticated, swallowed then said, with confident authority, “They’re like that, women.”

  Women, like foreigners, the pigmentally challenged or differentially abled, like anyone in fact who did not fall into the lower middle to working class white male aggressively heterosexual brotherhood were diminished, in Troy’s categorisation, to “they.”

  “Came home one night last week,” he expanded. “Maureen’s mate was giving her a home perm. Plus all her sisters were there. Everybody sitting round the kitchen table with their feet up guzzling chips and swigging Coke. Screaming, laughing, telling mucky jokes. Whole place stank of fag smoke and vinegar.”

  Barnaby somehow did not feel that Simone Hollingsworth’s sessions with the girl Mrs. Molfrey had described as Maison Becky would follow a similar pattern but it seemed a touch snobbish to say so.

  “When you talk to the hairdresser, find out if it’s happened before. Someone else being around, I mean, when she’s had to work on Mrs. Hollingsworth.”

  “Okey doke.”

  “I wonder,” mused the Chief Inspector, “why she didn’t cancel when she realised she wouldn’t be there.”

  “They don’t bother, rich people,” said Troy. “They couldn’t care less about putting you out.”

  Barnaby felt his sergeant was probably right, in a general sense. And maybe it was as simple as that. But what he had heard so far of Simone did not tie in with that particular sort of arrogance. Quite the contrary.

  “We going back to the house now?” Troy asked.

  “No. Aubrey said it might be another couple of hours before they’re through. I’d like to visit Hollingsworth’s office or factory unit—or whatever these industrial set-ups are called. See what the background really is to this Gray Patterson fracas.”

  “He’s number one in the frame though, chief, wouldn’t you say? Hates Hollingsworth, already known to be violent.” Troy hesitated before adding, “Perhaps we should nip round to his place first? Before he has a chance to scarper.”

  “He’ll have scarpered by now if that’s his intention.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “And we’ll only get one version of the truth there. I’d like to have something to compare it with.” Barnaby heaved himself up from the much stained wooden bench. It was one of two bolted to either side of the table and he had to scramble awkwardly backwards, being unable to move it aside. His temper was not improved by the discovery that he had a piece of chewing gum stuck to his trousers.

  Sergeant Troy climbed into the driving seat and opened all the windows. “It’ll cool down once we get going.”

  “God, I hope so.” Barnaby got Directory Enquiries on his mobile and asked for Penstemon’s number. He rang it and told reception he would like to come over and talk to someone about Alan Hollingsworth.

  “I’m afraid Mr. Hollingsworth isn’t in at the moment.” The young, slightly shrill female voice added, with breathtaking understatement, “He’s not very well.”

  Though the police had, as yet, given out no official statement regarding the tragedy at Nightingales, Barnaby was surprised no one at Fawcett Green had thought to inform his office.

  Speaking as he thought gently, he informed the girl in reception just how very unwell Alan Hollingsworth presently was. There was a lengthy pause, a sharp cry then a thud, as of a heavy object hitting something soft.

  Listening, the Chief Inspector heard a confused hum of sound. Questioning voices were raised. Someone started to laugh in a high-pitched manner. The line went dead.

  The company turned out to be based on one of those very large industrial estates which spawn on the outskirts of country towns. This one was about seven miles from Amersham.

  Although, eventually, someone had given them precise instructions which Troy had carefully written down, he now found himself passing Texas Homecare and Allied Carpets for the third time. Previously he had come to a dead end in a builders’ merchant’s timber yard. There had been no verbal rebuke but the chief had started to drum his fingers on the rim of the wound-down window and glare about him.

  Troy drove slowly, leaning into the windscreen, looking from left to right. It wasn’t like finding MFI or Do It All which were not only hugely visible but had their own flags. Penstemon would no doubt be some little prefabricated Portakabin well off the main circuit. The heat from the windscreen was burning his forehead.

  “Stop!”

  “Sir?”

  “There’s a signpost.�
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  Troy, who had already spotted the signpost, murmured, “Well, I never,” and drove as close to it as he was able. Penstemon was back the way they’d just come. Barnaby sighed and rapped rather more firmly. Troy reversed and a few minutes later spotted the long, low building. It, too, was displaying an emblem. An azure blue flower on a yellow background. The flag was flying at half mast.

  The reception area was boringly conventional. Tubular steel furniture, low tables holding neat stacks of technical journals and a great many artificial plants emerging from pots of simulated earth. On the hessian walls were mounted several brilliantly luminous computer graphics in brushed aluminium frames.

  As Troy closed the glass entrance door a young man wearing a pale, stylishly crumpled linen suit came forward to greet them.

  “You’re the police?” He barely glanced at the warrant cards. “What absolutely terrible news. Verity’s lying down,” he added, as if they had asked for her by name. “She’s the person usually on reception. I’m Clive Merriman.”

  “I’m sorry to be the bearer of such bad news, Mr. Merriman.” Barnaby undid his jacket the better to revel in the air conditioning. “Do you think we might have a word with whoever has been in charge during Alan Hollingsworth’s absence?”

  “That’s our accountant, Ted Burbage. I told him you’d be coming.”

  Mr. Burbage’s office was not far. In fact nothing was. They passed only three other rooms. One held several people sitting at keyboards. The second held several monitors and had Alan Hollingsworth’s name in gilded letters on the door. The third was labelled “loos, mail® femail.”

  “Causton CID?” Mr. Burbage, a man not so much deeply tanned as caramelised, was giving Barnaby’s card a much closer inspection. “What on earth’s going on? Is it something to do with Alan?”

  “That’s right, Mr. Burbage.”

  “Sorry, please sit down.” Then, as the two policemen did so, “Will this take long?”

  “Hard to say, sir.”

  “Better sort out some tea, Clive. Or,” he looked inquiringly across the room, “perhaps you’d rather have something cooler? We have a Coke machine.”