A Good Way to Go

by Peter Helton

  ‘So you gave your brother the keys to your car,’ McLusky said. ‘When was that?’

  ‘Early this morning. We argued over breakfast.’

  ‘Did your brother have any money at all? We’re trying to establish where he has been, how far he may have driven the car.’

  ‘I gave him the odd fifty now and then. The car had a full tank.’

  ‘We’ll check. You don’t keep track of mileage?’

  ‘Life’s too short.’

  McLusky silently agreed. ‘Would your brother have offered a lift to a hitchhiker?’

  ‘Here, that’s a thought. Almost certainly, being charitable.’

  McLusky let a pause develop, then said: ‘We have to entertain the possibility that your brother was abducted. I want to arrange for a police officer to stay here. In case you are contacted.’

  Leslie looked at him hard. ‘Do you really think it could be a kidnapping?’

  ‘It is best to be prepared for all eventualities.’

  ‘Michael getting himself kidnapped!’ Pauline scoffed. ‘That would be the last straw. If we’d have to pay to get him back! Now I really do need another drink, darling,’ she said as though they had discussed it earlier. She held out her empty glass and her husband stood up and took it absentmindedly.

  As they were being let out at the front door Austin asked: ‘And your brother has no friends in the area?’

  ‘None that he mentioned. We didn’t grow up around here, we grew up in Swindon.’

  ‘We’ll keep you informed, obviously,’ McLusky said, just as DC French arrived in her grey Polo to stay overnight with the Leslies in case they were contacted. After a short briefing they let her go inside.

  ‘Do you believe in abduction and ransom?’ Austin asked.

  McLusky looked over his shoulder to check the door had closed before saying: ‘No. I believe in abduction and murder.’

  ‘Then God help Michael Leslie.’

  Christine Rainer thought that hoping for a lot of things and being full of hope were such different states of being that they ought to invent separate words for it. She hoped the education secretary would fall down a manhole. She hoped her teenage students, many of whom she had occasion to berate about smoking, never found out that she herself smoked fifteen a day when at home. She blew smoke from her filterless Egyptian cigarette into the pool of light from her brass desk lamp that provided the only illumination to the room apart from the dimming glow of the fire. Christine Rainer hoped spring would get a move on so she could leave the French windows open in the study. It was this room that had sold the house to her; she had seen it immediately: the French windows into the garden wide open, a desk to work on with the little Edwardian fireplace at her back and a comfortable armchair and reading lamp by the bookcases. Being a spinster schoolmistress really did have its compensations. But tonight her French windows remained closed against the cold April night and she yearned for milder evenings when they would stay open late and her cat, Mackerel, could wander in at will and release half-dead mice into her study which she would then spend hours trying to recapture. Happy days.

  There was a muffled thump upstairs which could only mean that the cat was up to no good in her bedroom. She thought she had closed the door earlier but sometimes she suspected that Mackerel had somehow learnt to turn doorknobs. She yawned, drained her cup of Lapsang Souchong; it had gone cold and hadn’t had the desired effect. She was just too tired to keep writing endless polite variations of ‘could do better’. She shut down her laptop and stubbed out her cigarette, then emptied the entire ashtray into the fireplace. As she raked the embers to make the cigarette butts disappear, Mackerel turned up by her side. ‘There you are, what have you been up to? If you’ve knocked the big yucca over again then you’ll be banned from the bedroom forever. I mean it,’ she said, not meaning it. She petted him affectionately, knowing that exhortations were entirely wasted on cats, then went and closed the curtains. With the desk lamp switched off she crossed the dark room by the light of the tiny glow left in the fireplace and walked into the hall where she stopped. It was really quite cold here as though she had left a window open somewhere, and there was an odd smell, like WD 40 or something like that. Mackerel followed her into the kitchen where Christine switched on the downlights above the worktop, less bright than the ceiling lights, and squeezed slippery cat food from a pouch into Mackerel’s bowl; still the best insurance against being woken by him mewling in front of the bedroom door in the middle of the night. She turned off the lights while the cat approached her food bowl unhurriedly. Christine went upstairs yawning, then stopped and frowned. There was that smell again; very faint. More like deodorant, she decided. Strange. Had the cat knocked something over in the bathroom? She walked on to the top of the stairs then halted again, surprised: the bedroom door was closed. She wondered what could have fallen over to have made the earlier noise. She opened the door wide. No, the yucca Mackerel enjoyed pushing over was standing on its tripod stool and nothing else seemed to be out of order. There was a draught somewhere; Christine pushed the bedroom door closed and began to undress by the pinkish glow of the bedside lamp, dropping her tights and knickers into the decorative laundry basket beside the built-in wardrobe with the louvered doors, then put on her pyjamas. What she really enjoyed was to read in bed but she had left writing the reports to the last minute and was now too tired. And she had forgotten to get her glass of water. Kitchen water of course, never bathroom water. She took the empty glass from the bedside cabinet and went to fetch water from downstairs. She would do it without the benefit of lights or it would convince Mackerel that it was not yet time for bed after all. The cat was nowhere to be seen. It was definitely draughty down here; she felt it on her bare feet as she padded across the vinyl floor. Water glass recharged, she concentrated hard on not spilling anything from the brimful glass on to the carpeted stairs. She knew she always stuck her tongue out a tiny bit when she concentrated and was doing it now; it made her smile but she did not retract it. That’s the way I am, she thought, a silly woman who can’t drink bathroom water and must carry kitchen water with her tongue sticking out. The silhouette of the man at the top of the stairs loomed over her like a malevolent shadow from a fairy tale, backlit by the feeble glow coming from the bedroom, and he advanced on her. She threw the glass at him in a feeble attempt to fight him off but it did not stop him. He slammed into her on the narrow stairs and she fell backwards with nothing to hold on to as he barged past her down the stairs. Christine tumbled head first, arms flailing, rolling over until her head smashed against the newel post at the bottom and everything went black.

  ‘I told you this sort of thing always escalates,’ Fairfield said to Sorbie. ‘Now we have a woman in hospital. It was only a matter of time.’ They had visited Christine Rainer in hospital. She had suffered concussion, a broken collarbone, and she was traumatized.

  ‘We don’t know that it has escalated yet,’ Sorbie said flatly. He could barely manage his anger. DS Austin was working with McLusky on the murder investigation while he was hunting the great underpants thief with Fairfield. ‘Could have been an accident.’

  ‘He wasn’t in her house by accident though. I think he started off by pinching underwear off the line and now he breaks into people’s houses. It’s only a matter of time before something much worse happens. He hid in her wardrobe, Jack,’ Fairfield said as they drove off. ‘He watched her undress, then stole the underwear she had just put into the laundry basket. If that isn’t escalation then what more do you require?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s quite creepy, I admit.’ He thought for a moment. ‘The peeping Tom thing I understand. Who doesn’t enjoy watching women undress? But stealing underwear that’s the weirdo bit. Do you think he wears them to work?’

  FOURTEEN

  ‘It’ll be a complete waste of time of course,’ McLusky said without even looking up from the mess on his desk.

  Austin, who was standing just inside the door had come to tell him that DNA
samples had been taken from absolutely anyone who had ever been inside the abandoned Jaguar. ‘Apparently the Leslies were not at all happy about giving DNA samples.’

  ‘Why on earth not? Their DNA will be all over the bloody car, I’m sure even they can make out that we need to eliminate them.’

  ‘Mr Leslie thought that someone scraping around in his mouth with a cotton bud invaded his privacy.’

  ‘Yeah? I’d like to go round there and invade his privacy with a six foot cotton bud sometime,’ McLusky growled.

  ‘Yeah, like they used on Gladiators.’

  ‘If you say so, Jane,’ McLusky said irritably. He was still picking up bits of paper, scribbled notes and chocolate wrappers and dropping them again with a look of disgust on his face. McLusky frequently felt disgusted by the mess in his life, from the chaos in his office to the daily palaver of hunting for underwear and matching socks in the morning. Which reminded him: a bin liner full of dirty laundry had been sitting in the boot of his car for a couple of days now; if he didn’t get it done today he would have to go commando tomorrow.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ Austin asked.

  ‘The super sent me a self-assessment thing to fill out. As though I didn’t have enough to do.’

  ‘Ah.’

  McLusky stopped abruptly and looked up. ‘I know that “ah”. It always means you are going to disappoint me. Not personally of course. Just in general.’

  ‘Oh, aye, you’re going to absolutely love this one.’

  McLusky recognized all the warning signs of procedural nuisance and called: ‘Wait!’ He fumbled a cigarette from his pack, lit it and leant back in his chair with his arms crossed in front of his chest. ‘OK, I’m calm,’ he said, the cigarette dancing on his lips as he spoke.

  ‘You’ve been cordially invited to attend a day of seminars, held at Trinity Road.’

  ‘On …?’

  ‘All sorts. Appraisal systems and personal development review for one.’

  ‘Personally I think I’m coming along fine so I think I’ll skip it, if it’s all the same to you.’

  ‘To me, yes, to Denkhaus, no. Compulsory from DCI downwards. We’re all going, and the message from Denkhaus is that only hospitalization will be accepted as an excuse.’

  ‘OK, can you arrange that for me, please? Something less painful than a bloody seminar, of course, say a broken pelvis.’

  ‘And do you know what the whole thing is called?’

  McLusky had resumed his haphazard search among the office chaos. ‘How to waste a day in the life of DI McLusky?’ he growled.

  ‘Meeting the Challenges of the New Performance Landscape.’

  McLusky could practically hear the capital letters. ‘Marvellous. Look forward to it. Any more cheery news, Jane?’

  For a while after Austin had left he sat, smoked and stared morosely at the mountainous landscape on and around his desk. His office was so small that a lot of files and reports ended up in piles on the floor where he frequently sent them skidding or tumbling trying to get past. His eyes had slid from the disorder on his desk to the metal wastepaper bin, which was in need of emptying, when he espied the corner of a thick wad of A4 paper with the Avon and Somerset Constabulary crest at the top sticking out from the rubbish. With difficulty he dislodged it from the bin, then proceeded to free it from an encrustation of dried-on teabags and black, shrivelled banana skins. So that’s where the self-assessment forms were hiding. He flopped the damp and curling forms on top of the mess on his desk. ‘Result!’

  McLusky spent half an hour looking through the questionnaire, then put it aside to do more paperwork, then pulled it towards him again with a stony heart and scribbled down a few ideas on a notepad. McLusky hated the convoluted police speak they had all been taught to use. It was meant to be precise and elevate their speech from the conversational but it grated on him. He was quite good at it, though he had to constantly check that he did not drift into parody; his superiors were not big on irony and he needed to appear as normal as possible for a while. McLusky was pretty convinced that he wasn’t, or at least that he was not really ideal DI material. Only grown-ups should be allowed to do this job and he had long admitted to himself that he possessed a wide, ineradicable juvenile streak. It had driven Laura to distraction and together with the erosion of his private life by the demands of his job it had cost him that relationship. From time to time he could give quite a good imitation of a mature thirty-something, enough for his employers to give him the benefit of the doubt, but it was threadbare and would inevitably come apart at the seams sooner or later.

  He caught up with all the emails and updated reports on the system, checked the time on his immaculately performing Rolex and logged off. They were now awaiting forensics reports on almost everything to do with the killings and now the abandoned Jaguar too. There had been no news about Michael Leslie’s disappearance; no contact had been made, no demands. McLusky was pretty sure there never would be; sooner or later someone would stumble over the man’s body. So far there was nothing to connect the disappearance of the devout brother with the killings but as soon as he had seen the car in the lane McLusky had known there was one, only none of them could see it yet and that, sadly, included himself.

  This kind of morose speculation did not require him to sit in his claustrophobic office, he could just as well do it sitting in the launderette. At the newsagent’s in Albany Road he stocked up on cigarettes, checked his change, then tried to sweet-talk the woman behind the counter into giving him some twenty-pence pieces he would need for the washing machine and dryer. She told him that they never had enough as it was and that the banks charged them for providing bags of change. He bought a couple of chocolate bars with a ten-pound note and she shook her head, sighed and let him have a few twenty-pence pieces in the change because she had decided he had nice eyes.

  At the launderette McLusky stuffed all of his washing unsorted straight into the machine, chose ‘hot’, fed the coin slot and watched the machine start. He would now have forty minutes to fill and since he’d had enough of sitting under humming neon lights he went outside. It was pretty cold again and his own place would be unheated and badly stocked. Picton Street was only a few minutes’ walk away and at the top of it was the excellent Bristolian, one of his favourite cafés in town for two reasons: it was the first café he had entered when he came to Bristol and the name seemed appropriate then. It also happened to be the only café he knew Laura frequented. He was not sure whether he went there because he knew he might see Laura or whether Laura went there because she knew she might see him but whatever the truth, both continued to go there. Laura, admittedly, was usually accompanied by one or more of her college friends.

  Even though he had been hoping she might be there or drop in, when he entered the café and was immediately faced with her sitting there and smiling up at him it felt like a physical blow to his body. She was with the chap he had last seen her with, a young Canadian whose name he would pretend to have forgotten.

  ‘It’s Ethan,’ Laura said when he expressed regret about not remembering.

  ‘I’m not usually good with names either,’ said Ethan, ‘but I never forget a policeman.’ Ethan made room so he could get to a chair.

  McLusky immediately had to get up again to order at the counter. He asked for a cappuccino, which he knew would be excellent but was told he was too late for the all-day breakfast. He opened his mouth to say something pithy but ordered a burger with everything instead. When he had balanced his cup of coffee back to the table his arrival extinguished a conversation between Laura and Ethan. McLusky decided he hated young men with long hair, especially when it suited them. ‘I can sit somewhere else if I’m interrupting something,’ he said as he sat down.

  ‘No, don’t be silly. We’ll have to go in a minute anyway. We’ve already eaten. We had the tapas. The patatas bravas here are excellent, you should try them.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ethan, ‘they’re triple cooked. Very authentic.’


  ‘I’ve ordered a burger.’

  ‘You old adventurer,’ said Laura.

  ‘How was your dig?’ McLusky asked. ‘Stonehenge, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was good. Close to Stonehenge. We think it’s the site where the actual workmen who built it were housed. Of course it tipped down for the last two days. I ended up kipping in Ethan’s van.’

  ‘Ah, the handy van.’ McLusky immediately suspected that Ethan had only bought it so he could entice female first-year students to shelter in it.

  ‘It’s all right, I had Val with me to protect my modesty.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  Ethan drained his orange juice and rose. ‘Look, I’ll leave you two to catch up. I’ll be in the library,’ he said to Laura, nodded at Liam and left the café.

  Laura had made no polite attempt to stop Ethan and didn’t seem to be in a hurry to rush off herself. McLusky sniffed after Ethan like a rabbit. ‘Does he wear perfume?’

  Laura gave a Gallic shrug and pulled a face. ‘Body spray. I did mention to him that if you can smell it from across the room you’re overdoing it but it’s his signature smell. Minx Fatal Attraction for men. I seem to remember you were using some foul deodorant when we first met.’

  ‘Oh, but mine was nice.’

  ‘Yeh, right.’

  ‘So, archaeology one-oh-one. Is it all you dreamt it would be?’

  ‘It is. It’s frightening, everything about it is brilliant. Everything I did before archaeology was a waste of time.’

  ‘I see.’ McLusky was tempted to ask if that included their relationship but stopped himself in time.

  ‘I was prepared for a lot of stuff I would find hard or boring but I love all of it, the science, the history, the endless grid-drawings, the computer stuff, the surveying, finds recording, the lot. This really is what I want to be doing for the rest of my life. Problem is I’ll be competing with thousands for a job at the end of it. It’s the bloody telly, everyone wants to be a field archaeologist and because we’re queuing up to do it they can afford to pay us next to nothing if they do give us a job.’