No One Will Hear

by Joel Hames

  Rich Hanover had followed me halfway out of London, earlier. Before that, he’d followed me to the Reform Club. But outside Lizzy’s, outside Brooks-Powell’s – he’d been waiting for me there.

  I closed my eyes and saw him, in the café down the street from Martins’ station. I saw him watching me, and I knew. I smiled to myself and opened the door.

  There was a hint of a hill or two here, and I left the car in the layby with the occasional lorry blasting by, and set off on foot, following a footpath veering gently upwards and disappearing into a copse that blocked any further view. It had been warm in Shapiro’s snug when we’d entered, stifling by the time I left, and I’d jumped straight into the car with hot air blasting the windows to wipe away the mist. I wanted to see Claire – her apathy was nudging at me more than it had done this morning – but I needed cold fresh air more.

  The path was surprisingly steep, and I was panting by the time I reached the first of the trees. What had promised to be a shady grove proved little more than a handful of stunted oak and dogwood, huddled at the top of the slope. I glanced behind me – the road was hidden by the contour of the hill – and walked on through the trees.

  The wood was over almost before it began, and as I cleared the final oak the land dropped away before me and a vast plain appeared. Field after field, every shade of green and brown, flat as far as the eye could see. A village or two, spires scattered among the fields; a town in the distance, a grey blur squatting on the earth.

  The view could hardly have been more different, but I found myself thinking, again, about Elizabeth Maurier’s country house. I’d made a habit, when I was driving there alone, which I usually was, of stopping on the way, heading off the main road at Burford and driving deep into the Cotswolds. I’d drive for ten minutes, twenty, once as long as half an hour, and find a spot, stop, and walk until I could no longer see the road.

  It wasn’t like I was even that keen on walking, or the countryside. But something about those drives and that destination compelled me to stop and get out of the car and push my feet against something softer than tarmac and less forgiving than carpet. There was one particular spot I’d frequented several times – not by design, because I couldn’t have found it on a map if I’d tried to. But I’d driven until the perfect location presented itself, the site most suited to my mood, a layby for the car and some decent trees to wander into, a hill just steep enough to obscure the road but not steep enough to leave me tired and stained with sweat. I’d climb that hill, and stop, and a feeling would come over me that try as I might I could never explain. Everything, suddenly, had made sense. Everything could fit into my mind, at once, my car and my shirt and my job and my flat, Elizabeth Maurier and David Brooks-Powell and whichever girl I happened to be seeing at the time, my friends and my family, my hunger or thirst, my past and my future, all those things that took a lifetime to see and more than that to comprehend, they were all there, clear and tangible in the glow of the beech leaves and the slow descent of the willow.

  For a moment, looking out at the East Anglian flats, I remembered it again. I didn’t feel it; I didn’t even come close. But I remembered it. I hadn’t thought about those drives for a long time, hadn’t been near the Cotswolds in years. A different place, different trees, but the same silence broken by the same wind. I’d forgotten that feeling.

  I stood looking into the brown and green until a cloud passed overhead and I realised that it was the middle of December and I was standing on top of a hill. I’d left my coat in the car. I trotted back through the trees and down the slope to the road to London.

  15: A Lonely Death

  THE FLAT WAS empty when I returned. I drove round the block twice before I parked, but there was no sign of Hanover. I’d left Shapiro’s house at eleven and made it back for half past one, hoping I’d be able to get something out of Claire. I didn’t really care what that something was, anything from a fuck to a fight would do. But even as I turned the key in the lock I could tell there was no one behind it.

  There was no note, either. Not, I reminded myself, that there was any rule saying she had to leave one. Claire was a big girl. She could go where she wanted. She didn’t have to tell me. But I couldn’t shake the feeling something was badly wrong, something more than just her and her story, more than just me and her mother. Maybe she was right. Maybe I was so self-absorbed I couldn’t see anything that didn’t hit me directly. Maybe Serena Hawkes wasn’t just bad luck. And if that was the case, could I blame Claire if she was sick of being hooked up to a man so obsessed with his own little world that you had to shoot yourself in the head just to get him to see things your way?

  There were no voicemails on my mobile, but the answerphone on the landline was flashing. I pressed play and heard, for the first time, the voice of Adrian, the life coach. He was asking whether Claire was OK. He hadn’t heard from her in a while. There was something about that voice I didn’t like, something I’d almost expected, a hint of grease, a drop of oil smothering the words. Someone like that could say anything and it would always sound the same. My index finger hovered over the delete button, but in the end I withdrew it and dialled Claire’s mobile number instead. It went straight through to voicemail. I killed the call before the beep came. I wanted to leave a message, I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t think of the right words.

  So instead I sat down on the sofa with the files I’d plundered from Lizzy’s study on the table in front of me, and tried to work out if anything Shapiro had told me could shed any light on Elizabeth Maurier’s dream.

  I stopped after twenty seconds. It was too obvious. Shapiro had thought of Trawden as a master of manipulation; in her dream, someone had been pulling Elizabeth Maurier’s strings. And not pulling them figuratively. If Trawden was the faceless man, then where had he drawn her to? Had he drawn her at all? Had the idea merely been planted in her mind by Shapiro’s warning, a set of ideas no more grounded in reality than Trawden’s conviction had been, waiting to be recalled in a moment of vulnerability? Awake, Elizabeth would have given little credence to any of it. I do feel a little guilty about ignoring Dr Shapiro. Nothing more than that. She’d ignored him, recalled him, and continued to ignore him. She had the facts at her disposal. Evans was the killer.

  Elizabeth Maurier was dead and Trawden himself had spent so much time under the microscope there wasn’t a part of him that hadn’t been identified, labelled and filed away. I turned my attention to the others. Evans had been killed in prison, stabbed with a makeshift knife in the showers by another prisoner who’d decided that Evans’ particular crimes rendered him unfit to breathe the same air as the rest of them. Evans’ own killer was hardly a model citizen himself – it wasn’t easy to find a model citizen in Pentonville – but in the hierarchy of evil, the murder of a child trumped a gangland killing.

  And Evans wasn’t particularly interesting, either. A Welsh paedophile with one death under his belt before he’d popped up in Trawden’s life, the only thing that had brought him to our attention was his claim to have murdered Maxine Grimshaw, a claim no one bar his cellmate had ever heard him make.

  I recalled the cellmate. Hussein Akadi. A vile little man who was serving his own time for manslaughter. The man he’d killed had been his best friend, he’d insisted at his trial. He’d grabbed the knife in self-defence, never intended to do more than frighten. The jury bought the best friend line, but not the self-defence; there were drugs involved, after all. With Akadi there had always been drugs involved. I’d never liked to make snap judgments on people, because when I did the wrong things tended to get snapped up. But in Akadi’s case, those tiny shrewd eyes and that horrible, ingratiating smile, it was difficult not to. The man he’d killed might well have been his best friend. I doubted Akadi would have cared.

  It had been Akadi’s repetition of Evans’ claim, a few weeks after the Welshman’s own demise, that had reopened the Grimshaw investigation. It had snapped shut again when it looked like Evans had been a hundr
ed miles away from Warrington on the day of the murder, and it had taken my own diligent investigation of the facts to prise it wide enough for Trawden to crawl to freedom. Akadi, I realised, would be out by now, would have been out for a few years if he hadn’t done something stupid, and I didn’t see Akadi as the type to do anything stupid. He hadn’t been enjoying his time inside. Once out, he’d have wanted to stay there.

  I opened up my laptop and clicked on the browser, realising as I began to search that I was logged in as Claire. She must have been using my laptop. Hers was temperamental these days, slow and bad-tempered, prone to shut down without warning. She’d been looking for answers around words like trial and witness, and it hit me that she hadn’t given up on her girls entirely, and that not giving up was fine. Work was fine. It was obsession that wasn’t. I wondered, briefly, whether that might apply to me, too, and then I shook my head and typed in Hussein Akadi. I narrowed the search with Trawden when half a million hits came up, and filtered again for English language. The first few items were news stories from back in 2005, the BBC and a couple of the national dailies. There was nothing new there – I’d read all these at the time, anyway – but I flicked through them anyway in the hope of finding my own name. I did, eventually, a “Ms. Maurier, assisted by Sam Williams” buried deep in the penultimate rambling paragraph of a poorly written Warrington Gazette feature from the week after the trial. I shut down the page and moved onto the next.

  The next was an article from Maurier’s own website, again from 2005, which gave me a little more prominence, but still, I felt, not quite enough. I hadn’t really noticed any of this at the time. I’d been content to bask in Elizabeth Maurier’s reflected glory and my own certainty that it had been me that had cracked the case, me, not Elizabeth Maurier or Trawden himself, and (most gratifyingly) not David Brooks-Powell in any way at all. I’d assumed that Elizabeth felt the same way, that this was just the way things were done, the partner taking all the credit and the junior associate getting a word or two in the dregs of the more detailed press releases no one would ever read. I was wondering whether I’d been right about that when my phone rang and I picked it up and answered and said “Claire?” before I’d had a chance to register the number on the display.

  “Nope,” said a voice I recognised but couldn’t place for a moment. “Interesting that you don’t know your girlfriend’s number,” it continued, and the name and face slotted home.

  “Hello Colman,” I replied. “How’s Don Juan?”

  She laughed. “It’s Vicky. I told you. And Don Juan’s been sent packing. Not man enough for me.”

  I wondered how dumping a superior officer would play out for her at work, and decided to let it go. I wasn’t going to pry into Colman’s love life, however clear the invitation.

  “So, Vicky, what can I do for you on this bright and shiny Saturday?” I asked, throwing her own style back at her.

  “Got anywhere?” she asked, and for a moment I wondered what she was talking about. It hit me half a second later, the bodies on the board. How soon we forget.

  “No, not really. I’m looking into Trawden, but I don’t think there’s anything there. And I’ve already been through the files I got from Lizzy Maurier. I’ve got to be honest, Vicky, I don’t think I’m going to be much help.”

  I paused, expecting a denial, but she said nothing, so I went on.

  “Any luck getting me that diary?”

  “No,” she shot back, sure and fast, like I’d just asked for a date with her mother. “No, and I reckon we can wave goodbye to that. Martins is on the warpath. I think someone saw us in that café, Sam. Someone who wasn’t Tommy Larkin. She’s told me I’m not to speak to you under any circumstances.”

  “Good to see you’re following orders again.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, well, that’s why I wanted to call, really. To warn you. She’ll be in touch.”

  I shivered at the prospect. Dealings with DI Martins were the last thing I wanted. A call from her ranked right up there with dental surgery.

  “Thanks for the heads up,” I said, flat and weary, thinking maybe it was Tommy Larkin who’d told Martins about Colman and I. A simple enough step, if he was feeling bitter. I kept my mouth shut on that one, and listened to Colman trying to tell me everything would be just fine.

  “Don’t worry, Sam. She may be a dog with a bone, but she’s easy enough to throw off the scent. Don’t tell her anything, and keep digging, right? And let me know if you do come up with anything interesting.”

  “Yeah,” I replied. Yeah was how I felt right now, with a healthy portion of Whatever thrown in. I remembered, just as I was about to end the call, my theory about the tongue, the notion that Elizabeth Maurier had died leaving something unsaid. I set it out for Colman.

  “Hmmm,” she replied.

  “You’re not convinced?”

  “Well, I’m not unconvinced. I said something similar to Martins myself, before your little showdown with her in the house. She told me to keep my stupid ideas to myself.”

  “But it’s not stupid, is it?”

  She paused, and her reply, when it came, was slow and considered.

  “No. No, I think it’s a decent idea, and it makes more sense than the theories Martins is looking at.”

  “Which are?”

  She sighed. “Anatomy fetishist. Someone with some kind of sensory condition. Burglaries gone wrong.”

  “Burglaries gone wrong?” I parroted, stunned.

  “Yeah. Even Martins had to admit that was stretching it a bit. But Elizabeth Maurier having some kind of message herself, yes, I could buy that. That was one of the reasons I thought you could help. If she’s the key, then the more we know about her, the better.”

  I couldn’t help thinking that was all very well if you weren’t the one digging fruitlessly through Elizabeth Maurier’s files, revisiting a life you’d hoped to forget. Colman, I reflected, had mastered the art of delegation early. She’d make a good DI. I didn’t say any of that out loud. Instead, I remembered what had come to me that morning and realised that Colman would be perfect.

  “Can you make a call for me?” I asked.

  “Sure. Who am I calling?”

  I explained what I wanted her to do. Timing was everything. I didn’t want to be out when Claire got home, but I didn’t know where she was or when that would be. In the end I went for that evening. Colman said I shouldn’t worry, she’d do it, and she hoped I wasn’t going to give up on helping her.

  “Sure,” I said, muttered a quiet goodbye and turned back to the screen. My phone rang two minutes later. I glanced at the number and let it go through to my voicemail.

  The next hit on Akadi was from a website called Miscarriages of Justice! That title sat at the top of every page, blood-red, bold, with the exclamation mark tacked on the end like a knife. According to the site’s author, the investigation into the murder of Maxine Grimshaw had been littered with errors from the beginning, and whilst I found the tone irritating, I could hardly disagree, at first. Trawden was not guilty, the unnamed writer asserted, could never have been guilty, should never even have been a suspect. But – and this was where the crusader and I would have to differ – Evans wasn’t guilty either. Evans’ conviction was merely an attempt to distract from the failings of the initial investigation by placing the blame on a man no longer alive to protest.

  I’d seen all this before. Back in the day there had been hundreds making the same outlandish claims. There was something about a particularly nasty murder that brought all the lunatics and conspiracy theorists out from under their rocks.

  My phone rang again. This time I checked the number before answering, but I didn’t recognise it.

  “Sam Williams,” I said.

  “Oh, hello, Sam. How are you, my dear fellow?”

  I sighed, inwardly. After DI Martins, Christian Willoughby, probate lawyer, was the last person I wanted to talk to.

  “Very well thank you. Busy, as ever.”

&nb
sp; I wondered if he’d buy it. Half of London seemed to know I didn’t have more than an hour’s paying work to fill each day. No reason Willoughby should be one of the ignorant.

  “Delighted to hear it, Sam. Delighted. But I do hope, with all this important work you have, that you’ve been able to spare an hour or two on Elizabeth Maurier’s bequest.”

  I tried to work out if there was a timbre there, a sarcastic tone to that important work. I couldn’t tell. Every word he spoke came out in that same rich roll.

  “Because,” he continued, “it has been a week. I wonder if you’ve managed to make a start. I see you’ve been making the news, meeting old friends at the Reform Club, Sam. I do hope you’re not getting distracted.”

  I was torn. Willoughby had my edge up – I could feel my jaw tightening even as he spoke, with his continued insistence that this was a bequest, that I should be somehow grateful for being thrown back ten, fifteen years into a past I’d rather have forgotten, that what I did with my life was anything to do with him at all. I wanted to let him know precisely how I felt, and I wanted to challenge him about the leak to the Law Society Gazette, because I was convinced he was behind it, and that if it hadn’t been for the Law Society Gazette there would have been no Rich Hanover dogging my every step and no photographs of me outside the Reform Club for Willoughby to spot. But at the same time I wanted him off my phone and out of my life, and the easiest way to achieve that was to give him what he wanted.

  “Oh, things are going very well, Christian. Very well indeed. I’ve had several meetings with the other beneficiaries.” I looked around for a drink to wash away the taste of the word on my lips, but there was nothing within reach. “We’re making good progress. It’s a significant task, of course, I’m sure you appreciate that. But we’ve made an excellent start.”

  I was surprised how smoothly I’d lied, how easily I’d fallen into Willoughby’s own patterns of speech. He seemed somewhat taken aback himself, if the haste with which he extricated himself was anything to go by, winding up the call with an Excellent, don’t hesitate to call if you need anything and a couple of Jolly good’s that felt a little like a verbal security blanket.