‘Is that your way of asking permission to leave?’ said Proust. ‘Leave away. Next time, save yourself the trouble by neither arriving in the first place nor arranging a meeting to arrive at. I know you’re opposed on principle to taking anything I say seriously, but on the off-chance that you might make an exception in this case: this Hewerdine person is a dead end. Until we know what the words mean, or what they are, we can’t know how many people they might mean something to. What if they’re a jingle from a well-known advert? What if they’re the catchphrase of a cartoon character from a children’s television programme?’
‘We’ve searched and searched and got nowhere – nothing on the internet, no one who’s heard of “Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel” in any context,’ Simon reminded him.
‘That doesn’t prove there aren’t ten thousand people for whom the phrase has significance,’ said Proust, in the sort of menacingly patient voice that was designed to make Simon wonder if he really wanted to go on giving his DI cause to be patient. ‘It proves only that we haven’t found any of them yet. You’re assuming our mystery words link only a handful of people: a murder victim, a killer, and your Hewerdine woman conveniently in the middle. I’m telling you – and being dismissed by your gargantuan arrogance – that those words might link a million people. Or they might link only fourteen people in a bland and harmless way that has nothing to do with murder.’
Proust walked up to Simon and knocked on his forehead as if it were a door. ‘We don’t know that the imprint of those words on the pad in Katharine Allen’s flat has anything to do with her death.’ The inspector looked to Sam and Sellers for support. ‘Well? Do we? We found other words at her flat too – the list on the fridge, to take one example: “Renew parking permit, Christmas Amazon order” and the rest. If Waterhouse had bumped into a woman this afternoon who’d told him she needed to renew her parking permit, would he have sent his homunculus Gibbs to wait outside her house with a lassoo in his hand and an evil glint in his eye?’ Proust snorted his appreciation of his own joke. ‘It’s laughable, Waterhouse – and by “it”, I mean “you”.’
‘I’m not going to argue with you, sir,’ said Simon wearily. Sir? Where had that come from? He hadn’t called Proust ‘sir’ for years. ‘I’m not going to argue with a position you’ve adopted just to piss me off. You know, I know, we all know: “Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel” is a sufficiently unusual collection of words for us to take this seriously.’
‘If you’re so keen to talk to the Hewerdine woman, why have Gibbs pick her up?’ Proust snapped. ‘Why have him start the interview on his own? Have you devised a special training programme for him that the rest of us aren’t privy to? The Simon Waterhouse Diploma in Self-Indulgent Coincidence-based Policing and General Mania?’
Simon saw Sellers trying not to laugh. ‘I asked Gibbs to bring her in to buy me a bit of time,’ he said. ‘I wanted to grill Charlie on the details, talk to Ginny Saxon, talk to you . . .’ He knew he had to take the plunge, but was putting it off as long as he could. ‘You need to know something about Gibbs. I’m going to tell him I told you, but . . . it’s easier for me to do it if he’s not here.’
‘You’ve made a star chart for him,’ Proust pre-empted. ‘Every time he stuffs his career prospects further down the pan by running errands for you instead of completing the tasks assigned to him by Sergeant Kombothekra, he’s awarded a gold star. Once he’s earned ten, he gets to drive your mother to church and—’
‘Making a lot of jokes, aren’t you?’ Simon cut him off. ‘Pity you’re too mean-spirited to acknowledge the cause of your new good mood: the lead I’ve brought you.’
‘The lead Sergeant Zailer brought you,’ the Snowman corrected him.
Simon sighed. Talking to Proust was like trying to force a car to start, over and over again, when that car had already been crushed to a metal cube. ‘It’s likely we’re going to be putting Charlie’s notebook into evidence,’ he directed his words at Sam. ‘I think it’s likely, anyway. So, you’re all going to end up seeing what else is in the notebook, besides those five words.’ Simon pointed to them. ‘Rather than have you stumble across it, I’ll tell you: it’s letters. From Charlie to her sister Olivia, not written to be sent.’ Simon stared down at the table. ‘Written to give her anger an outlet.’
Proust made for the notebook like a bird of prey.
‘Are they still at loggerheads?’ asked Sam, who believed that harmonious relationships were both desirable and possible.
Sellers was taking a sudden interest in the view from the window: the Guildhall across the road that was having work done to its exterior. It was covered in scaffolding and blue plastic sheeting. He knows, thought Simon.
‘Gibbs and Olivia are . . . having a thing. It’s been going on since the night of our wedding.’
Colin Sellers shook his head, looked angry. Simon had exposed a man who was cheating on his wife, and, in doing so, breached the only principle Sellers held dear.
‘Would this be the same Gibbs whose wife is expecting twins next April?’ The speed with which Proust asked convinced Simon he’d known too. Sam hadn’t; that much was obvious from his face. ‘Gibbs and Olivia Zailer. So my star chart guess wasn’t too far off the mark – he does your bidding and gets his very own Zailer sister. Can I refer to a booby prize without it being mistaken for smut?’
‘I’ve just told you the only thing you’d find out from reading the letters in Charlie’s notebook,’ said Simon. ‘So now you don’t need to read them, and I’d appreciate it, and Charlie would definitely appreciate it, if you didn’t.’
Sam Kombothekra nodded.
‘None of my business,’ said Sellers.
‘Theoretically, we might find out more than the bare facts from reading the notebook.’ Proust made a show of flicking through its pages. ‘We might find out, in great detail, how betrayed Sergeant Zailer feels, her reasons for feeling that way, and how good she is at holding a grudge. Among other things. I wonder if we’d find out anything about you, Waterhouse.’
‘I’m going to interview Amber Hewerdine,’ said Simon, on his way out of the room.
Proust’s voice came from behind him. ‘Not unsupervised. I’ll join you.’
‘You?’ Simon stopped. Turned. ‘You want to interview a witness?’
‘No. I couldn’t care less about your witness. She isn’t going to tell me anything useful.’ Proust dropped the notebook on the table with deliberate carelessness. ‘I want to watch you conduct an interview, Waterhouse. Do you know what I’d really like to do? I’d like to watch clips from all your filmed interviews, back to back: the frustrating ones, the dull ones, the half-hearted ones where you’re going through the motions. Nostalgia’s always been a weakness of mine, and today I’m feeling nostalgic about your career as a police detective. What say you treat us all to one final display of your investigative prowess and figure out why that might be?’
‘This is a photograph of Katharine at her graduation,’ Gibbs told the angry woman across the table from him. Her resentment of him was making him feel claustrophobic in the small interview room, with its custard-yellow walls and its window that offered a sick-joke view of an internal neon-lit corridor. Or perhaps it was his resentment of her. He’d decided he couldn’t stand her when she’d told him that he had to pretend to be a feather-duster salesman for the benefit of her children. A fucking feather-duster salesman. Why would anyone do something as stupid as that for a living? ‘Katharine was murdered in her flat in Spilling, on 2 November. She was twenty-six.’
‘How many times are you going to tell me that?’ Amber Hewerdine aimed her grey eyes at him like a weapon. ‘Surely I know everything I need to know about her by now? She was twenty-six, a primary school teacher, unmarried, lived alone, grew up in Norfolk . . .’
‘In a village called Pulham Market,’ Gibbs supplied a new piece of information.
‘Oh, well. That changes everything,’ Amber extended her voice in a sarcastic drawl. ‘Katharine Allen f
rom Pulham Market? That Katharine Allen? Why didn’t you say so? I’ve known that Katharine Allen for years. When you asked me if the name meant anything to me, I assumed you were asking if I knew a Katharine Allen who wasn’t from Pulham Market in Norfolk.’
‘The more I tell you about her, however irrelevant it seems, the more likely we are to find a connection between the two of you,’ said Gibbs.
‘I’ll ask you for the twenty-fourth time: what makes you so sure there is one?’
‘You know the flats in the Corn Exchange building? Katharine had one of those. A duplex – top floor and second floor down. She had part of the dome for her bedroom.’ Gibbs swung his legs round, put his feet up on the table. ‘I’m not sure I’d like to live right in the centre of town,’ he said. ‘Might be noisy.’
‘I doubt it. Haven’t they rolled out a nine o’clock bedtime across all of Spilling and Silsford and the villages in between? Or is that just what those of us who live in Rawndesley like to think?’
‘The reason I mention Katharine’s bedroom, in the dome, is because that’s where she was killed. Multiple blows to the back of the head. With this.’ Gibbs pushed another photograph across the table.
Seeing that a response was expected, Amber said flatly, ‘It’s a metal pole.’
‘Katharine used it to open and close her bedroom window. It was too high to reach. The pole hung from a hook on the wall.’
Amber swallowed a yawn, allowed her eyes to close for a second.
‘Sorry if I’m boring you.’ Gibbs shoved another photograph at her, one he’d taken care to conceal until now. ‘Someone took the pole off its hook when Katharine had her back turned, came up behind Katharine, and attacked her with it. Savagely. This is what Katharine’s head looked like afterwards. She was hit more than twenty times.’
Amber recoiled. ‘Do I need to know all this? Or see that? Can you put it away?’ Her skin looked paler, blotchy. She covered her mouth with her hand.
‘I was starting to wonder if murder’s maybe no big deal to you,’ said Gibbs.
‘Why?’ she said angrily. ‘Because I’m tired? Because I’m not crying, like sensitive women are supposed to? I haven’t slept properly for eighteen months. I’m likely to fall asleep at any time, unless I’m in bed with hours of night stretching out in front of me, in which case I’m guaranteed to stay awake. And, yes, the murder of a woman I don’t know is less of a big deal to me than the murder of someone I know and care about would be. And, just so’s you know, you can say the name “Katharine” five hundred times if you want to, but it’s not going to make me feel any closer to her than I would if you called her “Ms Allen” or “the victim”.’
‘She was known as Kat,’ said Gibbs. ‘That’s what her mates called her, and her colleagues.’
Amber took a deep breath, closed her eyes again. ‘Obviously I care that a woman’s been murdered, in the abstract way that people care about the deaths of strangers. Obviously I think it’s not ideal that there’s someone out there who thinks it’s okay to . . . do that to somebody else’s head.’
‘I don’t expect you to cry,’ said Gibbs. ‘I expect you to be scared. Most people, guilty or innocent, would be scared to be threatened with arrest in connection with a murder.’
Amber looked at him as if he was an idiot. ‘Why would I be scared? I had nothing to do with it and I know nothing about it.’
‘Sometimes, if the police think a witness is lying, that person ends up facing charges.’
‘Usually only if they are lying. Or if it’s the seventies and they’re Irish.’
The fear had to be there, under the bravado. ‘I can tell you one thing for nothing,’ said Gibbs. ‘If the press find out we’re even talking to you, unless you make some adjustments to your manner and your attitude, the whole country’s going to decide you’re guilty before it gets as far as formal charges – even if it never does. You’re the sort of woman public opinion loves to hate.’
She laughed at this. ‘What – skinny, gobby and defensive? With a difference, though, you’ve got to admit.’ What was this? Was she flirting with him? Still smiling, she said, ‘I have an irresistible abrasive charm that wins people over pretty much whenever I want it to. The only reason you don’t like me is because I don’t care whether you like me or not. Ask me why I don’t care.’
Gibbs said nothing. Waited.
‘I don’t care because I think you’re an idiot,’ Amber told him, enunciating the words carefully. ‘You want to know who killed Katharine Allen. I’m trying to give you what little help I can. Listen, and I’ll try again. I don’t know, but I’m guessing that she was killed by someone who knew her and either disliked her, or stood to gain in some way from her death. In case you’re too dense to recognise it, that’s a description of someone who isn’t me. And yet, weirdly, you seem to think I can help you beyond pointing out those obvious facts, which has to mean you know something I don’t. I’ve worked out, because I have a higher than average IQ, that it must be something to do with that fucking woman and her notebook.’ She sighed heavily. ‘Can’t you see that the only way forward is for you to tell me whatever it is you’re not telling me?’
It was a funny thing Gibbs had noticed about women: they really wanted you to talk to them, yet did everything in their power to make you not want to.
‘Oh, what, end of conversation?’ Amber’s voice vibrated with scorn. ‘Good idea. Great idea. If you’re not going to say anything else, then neither am I – because there’s nothing else I can say until something changes, until I’m given some new information that I don’t have.’
‘You’re a witness, maybe a suspect,’ Gibbs told her. ‘We’re not two detectives working together.’
‘Right.’ She shook her head, stood up. ‘That’s right. You’re one detective, getting nowhere. And I’m a pissed off, knackered, under-used resource that wants to go home now, if that’s okay with you?’
‘Under-used resource?’
‘If you’d tell me what’s going on, I might actually be able to help you. Have you thought of that? Have you thought that maybe you want power more than you want help?’
The door opened. Waterhouse. And Proust. What the fuck was he doing in an interview room?
‘Thank God,’ Amber said, as if she’d radioed for back-up and it had arrived. Was she a nutter who got a kick out of pretending to be a detective? The more she said, the less Gibbs trusted her. He had no trouble imagining her taking a pole to someone else’s head and loving every second of it.
‘I’m DC Simon Waterhouse. This is DI Giles Proust.’
‘I’m Amber Hewerdine, and I’m on my way home unless I can talk to somebody who isn’t him.’ She pointed at Gibbs.
‘Why’s that?’ Waterhouse asked.
‘We’re getting nowhere. All he’s done is tell me he hates me and so do all his friends.’
‘He hasn’t said that,’ Waterhouse contradicted her.
‘He’s said the official police equivalent.’ Without waiting for anyone to ask her a question, Amber launched into a description of her interview with Gibbs so far. The level of detail was incredible. Did she have a photographic memory? Gibbs gave Waterhouse a nod to indicate that what she’d said was accurate: an almost exact verbal transcript.
‘I think there’s been a bit of a misunderstanding,’ Waterhouse said.
‘No, there hasn’t!’ Amber snapped at him. ‘I gave him every chance to understand . . .’
‘Give me a chance to explain what I mean.’ A polite order. ‘If you’re willing to stick around for a bit, I think we might get somewhere.’ He indicated that she should sit.
She remained standing, turned to Proust. ‘What the fuck’s your problem?’ she demanded.
‘Do you want to calm down?’ said Gibbs. ‘DI Proust didn’t say or do anything.’
‘Apart from stare at me with his radioactive eyes, as if he thinks I’m subhuman.’
‘He doesn’t think that,’ said Waterhouse. ‘He always looks like
that. I could wheel Mother Teresa of Calcutta into the room, and he’d look at her in exactly the same way.’
Gibbs wondered if he and Waterhouse were going to lose their jobs over this. Waterhouse seemed keen to be shot of his. Either that or he’d turned psychotic. Gibbs was sure his wife Debbie would kick him out if he got himself sacked through his own stupidity; her mother wanted her to leave him anyway, and Debbie usually listened to her mother. Gibbs was nearly sure that Debbie leaving him was what he wanted.
Didn’t Mother Teresa die years ago?
‘Are you familiar with the concept of percentiles?’ Waterhouse asked Amber.
She nodded.
‘I talk to a lot of people – suspects, witnesses, victims and perpetrators of crimes. Civilians, other police officers. Without wanting to do them down, most of them haven’t got very good communication skills. You’d be surprised how poor even most intelligent people’s communication skills are.’
‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Amber told him. She went back to her chair, sat down.
‘One fact leaps out from what you’ve just told us about what you and DC Gibbs have said to one another so far: you’re an unusually good communicator. I’d put you in the top 0.1 per cent. Because you’re an excellent communicator, you believe in the power of communication to resolve things. If only everyone would rise to your high level, there’s nothing that can’t be sorted out. Right?’ Waterhouse sat on the edge of the table, blocking Amber’s view of Gibbs, and his of her.
‘Depends on the circumstances,’ she said. ‘In the case of two strangers trying to fill in factual gaps, yes. If it’s something emotionally complicated, sometimes it’s better not to communicate too effectively, in case people get hurt, but that doesn’t apply here. I’m happy to upset DC Gibbs in the good cause of finding out what the hell’s going on, and I’m sure he feels the same way about me.’
‘So let’s give it a try, your way,’ said Waterhouse.
Kind of Cruel Page 7
