No One Will Hear

by Joel Hames

  As for Claire, I tried, as I made myself a double-strength coffee, to remember the last time we’d had a normal conversation. I couldn’t. There were ups and downs, but nothing in the middle, and lately precious little up. Everything between us seemed fragile and tense and on the verge of breaking. Sod Claire, I decided. I’d tried to meet her halfway, and then I’d kept on walking until we were nose to nose. Even after that, she wouldn’t talk to me. Sod Claire. She could defrost when she was ready. I’d had enough of pushing the buttons. And sod Blennard. He was welcome to call back, but he wouldn’t be getting the politest reception from me if he did.

  As if on cue, the doorbell rang, and I leapt from the sofa, spilling coffee on my t-shirt in the process.

  “Who is it?” I asked, as I approached.

  “It’s the police. Please can you open the door?”

  The police? It was Colman’s voice, Vicky Colman, although not the way I’d have expected her to announce herself. As I turned the handle to open the door it occurred to me she might not be alone, she might have brought someone with her, she might have brought Martins with her, which would account for her formality. But when I pulled the door open she was standing alone, frowning.

  “Mr Williams?”

  “Yes,” I said, before I’d digested the question, and then “Yes, of course. You know who I am.”

  She ignored the latter part of my reply.

  “Mr Williams, we’ve received a complaint, and I’d like to come in and discuss it with you, if I might.”

  “A complaint?”

  “Please can I come in?”

  I stood aside and watched her walk into the living room and slump down onto the sofa, the frown suddenly gone and its place a sly grin. I closed the door.

  “What the hell was that about?”

  “Can’t risk the bitch finding out we’re working together. And I thought it would be funny. You should have seen your face.”

  I shook my head, slowly. “Funny. Yeah. Dead bloody funny.”

  “The thing about the complaint wasn’t a joke, though. We have had a complaint.”

  “Really?”

  “Yup.” She stood up and sauntered over to the kitchen. “Got anything to eat?”

  I pointed to the corner, where a collection of near-empty cereal packets appeared to have nested. “There’s a bowl with a couple of apples in it round there somewhere, too. Who’s complained?”

  Ignoring the apples, she reached into a packet of corn flakes and came out with a handful. “Trawden,” she said, chewing furiously. “Sorry. Haven’t eaten since yesterday lunchtime.”

  Frustration was beginning to eat through the surprise. “Will you stop eating for a minute and tell me what’s going on?”

  She shrugged in mock offence and returned to the sofa, still chewing.

  “Trawden spoke to his mate, Blennard. Blennard spoke to the bitch. The bitch told me to scare the living shit out of you. That’s it. Short story.”

  I sank into the sofa beside her, thinking. I knew nothing, but even knowing nothing seemed to have people running scared. And that made me all the more determined to find out something useful.

  Colman’s eyes had fallen to the coffee table. She reached forward and picked up a few pieces of paper.

  “These from the files? The ones you got from Hancocks?”

  I nodded. She was certainly well-informed.

  “You’re not supposed to have these, you know,” she said.

  “I know.” I turned to face her, uncertain where she was heading. “Gonna take them from me?”

  She smiled, finally, and shook her head.

  “Not bloody likely. I’m going to help you.”

  The following three hours were spent in silence, broken occasionally by a sigh of disappointment from Colman as yet another page was relegated to the cast-off pile with no great revelation found. Her day job would have involved just as many dead ends, if not more, but those dead ends were probably a sight more interesting than the minutiae of court reports, disclosure requests and complaints about the quality of legal representation. There was a smattering of background information, Trawden’s life and works distilled in black and white, but no smoking gun.

  Edward Trawden had been born in 1948, in a Staffordshire village neither of us had heard of. He’d shown early promise at primary school, breezed through grammar school, and arrived at Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1966 with the green fields and rolling hills of a brilliant destiny before him.

  It hadn’t quite worked out like that, of course, and I thought I could see why. Even when I’d been at Oxford, Christ Church had a certain reputation: its students were the wealthiest, the best connected – clever, certainly, but intelligence wasn’t their defining characteristic. Lord Sebastian Flyte’s college, in Brideshead Revisited, and although times had moved on and Christ Church had moved with them, I couldn’t imagine its sixties incarnation being the most welcoming environment for a grammar school lad from the Potteries, even one as gifted at shifting his shape as Trawden seemed to be.

  There was a letter in the file from his tutor, regretting that “it has come, finally, to this” – couching his expulsion alternately in a wistful, elegiac sadness and the formal euphemism of the university.

  As we were poring over the Oxford correspondence, my phone rang. I recognised the number, but answered anyway.

  “Mr Williams,” he began, without preamble. “I’ve been hearing things that concern me gravely.”

  “Fascinating, Mr Willoughby,” I replied. So he’d reverted to Mr Williams, had he? This time, I decided, I wasn’t going to let him have it all his own way.

  “Yes,” he said, his tone very much that of a teacher berating an errant pupil; the very tone Trawden had no doubt been forced to endure during his brief spell at Oxford. “Yes, I understand you have gone well beyond your brief in this matter.”

  I snorted. I couldn’t help it. I had no intention of lying down and letting him walk over me, but I didn’t plan to rile him, either.

  “I’m sorry, Mr Willoughby, but I believe you’ve been misinformed.” I was, I realised, unconsciously adopting his own manner of speaking. That was fine by me. “All I have done is pursue areas of historical interest that will be germane to the memoirs.”

  “Now listen, Williams,” he replied, and the tone had changed. There was a seriousness there, a flaunting of his superior position, but underneath it a desperate powerlessness which made me all the surer of my position. “It has come to my attention that you are abusing your role as beneficiary, and in danger of abusing the bequest itself.”

  “Preposterous,” I began, but Willoughby was still talking.

  “And I must inform you that the Law Society would not look kindly upon your position should a complaint be made, Mr Williams. You would do well to act in such a manner as to avoid tarnishing your reputation.”

  I snorted again, and followed the snort with a full-blown laugh. “I’m sorry, Mr Willoughby, but you’re clearly not very familiar with my reputation if you think there’s much of it left to tarnish. And incidentally, Mr Willoughby, I’d steer clear of the Law Society if I were you, or they might take it upon themselves to find out how confidential information about a murdered woman’s bequests found its way into their own gossip column. Now, if you’ll leave me to get on with my work, I’ll be going now.”

  I killed the call. A threat from Willoughby was very different from the sinister machinations of Trawden and his friends. If he’d been intending to put me off, he’d miscalculated. I felt buoyed.

  That was a good thing, because Colman was becoming more deflated with each page. She’d continued leafing through the files as I sparred with Willoughby, her sighs getting louder and her frown broader. She was wearing a dark trouser suit, which didn’t suit her and didn’t strike me as the sort of thing she’d wear by choice, so I was guessing she’d come straight from work, or was on her way. Whichever it was, Trawden’s files weren’t doing anything to lift her mood.

>   We took a break, which meant Colman raiding the cereal again – I provided her with milk and a bowl and spoon this time – and me retreating to the shower to clean myself up. I’d been wearing yesterday’s clothes when Colman had arrived, and hadn’t seen the need to change if we stood a chance of making any sort of progress. That chance, unfortunately, was looking smaller by the minute.

  As I stepped out of the bathroom, clad only in a ragged blue towel, the door opened and Claire walked in. I watched her take in the scene, turning from me, shrouded in the steam escaping from the bathroom behind me, to Colman, sat on the sofa with a bowl of corn flakes in front of her and a quiet little smile on her face as she returned Claire’s gaze.

  “Hi,” I said, trying to project an air of normality into the situation. “Claire, this is Vicky Colman. Detective Sergeant Colman. Vicky, this is Claire. My girlfriend.”

  I emphasised the girlfriend, hoping it would buy me points with Claire and encourage Colman to play ball, and then I remembered what I’d decided that morning. I’d done as much as I could. It was up to Claire to straighten things out.

  “Hi Vicky,” she said, walked over to the sofa and extended a hand. She smiled as they shook. She turned, walked to me, gave me a peck on the cheek and said “Hello, darling. I’ve just come back to pick up some papers. Busy busy busy!”

  She disappeared into the bedroom, but before I had a chance to figure out what was going on she was back again, some scraps of paper in her left hand, another kiss on the cheek, a “Nice to meet you, Vicky” – and she was gone. I turned back to Colman, who was watching me patiently, as though I was about to come up with an explanation for what had just happened.

  I had no explanation.

  Instead I picked up the nearest sheet of paper from the Hancocks files. Trawden had encountered little difficulty in the years after leaving Oxford, in the short term, at least. He’d moved to London and drifted into journalism, working for a variety of local newspapers with moderate success for around a decade. He’d started as a generalist, but moved into entertainment reviews and then, more specifically, theatre, before a sudden departure from the London Evening Standard. No explanation was offered for that departure, and nobody seemed to have sought one, but as I glimpsed into the years that followed, I thought I could sense the outline of a reason.

  After the Standard, he’d continued to glide naturally into theatreland. A fixture in the bars of the West End, a regular at the backstage parties and the opening nights. Nobody seemed to know quite what Edward Trawden – Eddie, as he styled himself at the time – was doing, but there he was, knowing everybody worth knowing, introducing them to one another, making ill-defined arrangements to the mutual benefit of all involved. The perfect environment, I thought, for someone like him, first one thing, and then another, always ready to play to his audience.

  Drugs, I assumed. If he’d been supplying drugs to the cast or crew of the plays he was supposed to be reviewing, the London Evening Standard would have wanted shot of him as quickly and as quietly as possible. But the files were shy, drugs weren’t mentioned, nothing was mentioned. A few years in theatreland and then a sudden departure from there, too, first to Stoke-on-Trent, not far from where he’d been born, and finally to Warrington, where he’d set up as an antiques dealer, operating from home, spotting deals at auction, usually from estate sales run by clueless beneficiaries who had no idea the pot or painting they were selling for a few pounds might be worth thousands. I could see him talking his way round them, the grief-stricken widows he’d have plied with tea and cake, the adult children lumbered with a skipload of useless junk that Trawden would be happy to take off their hands and allow them to return to the rest of their lives.

  Trawden had enjoyed a level of success in the antiques business. Nothing stellar, but enough to earn him a semi-detached house in a quiet suburb and keep him in food and drink until Her Majesty’s Prison Service took over that particular role. Less than a year after he’d moved into his new home, he was arrested and charged with the murder of Maxine Grimshaw, and there was nothing in the files that followed I hadn’t seen before. I hoped Brooks-Powell was having more luck with his share of the loot.

  My phone rang. I didn’t recognise the number. I answered warily, expecting yet another warning from someone who thought they were entitled to tell me what to do.

  “Sam Williams?” said a voice I’d thought I wouldn’t be hearing again.

  “Hanover? What does it take to get rid of you? What do you want now?”

  “Don’t hang up. I’m not calling to give you any grief. Really. I just wanted to pass on something I’ve heard.”

  I sighed. It couldn’t hurt, I supposed, although I very much doubted it would help.

  “Go on.”

  “Word is you’ve been rubbing the police up the wrong way. Word is, they’re this close to pulling you in.” I imagined him pressing his thumb and forefinger together to illustrate the point. “Want a chance to put your side?”

  I thought about it, for a minute, silent.

  “Sam?”

  “Hang on.”

  It was tempting, certainly. Use the press, flush some secrets out. Piss off Martins, who liked everything so tightly controlled she could sit back and let things run themselves. But I didn’t trust Hanover. And even if I did, what could I say? The only thing I really had was the board and the other victims, and if I told Hanover about all that Martins would pull me in for sure. I wouldn’t even blame her.

  “No,” I said, reluctant but certain this was the sensible move.

  “Come on.”

  “Look, Hanover, I can see you’re doing the right thing here, so well done you, but I haven’t really got anything I can tell you. If I did have, I would.”

  “Call me if you change your mind.”

  “Does this mean you’re going to rip me apart in your next story?”

  He laughed. “No. Not me. Not us. Someone probably will, though, sooner or later. You’ll regret not having got your own side in first when that happens.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said, and ended the call. I turned to Colman. “Looks like your boss has gone to the press after all.”

  “Really?” She looked surprised.

  “Not about the case. About me. Wants me muzzled.”

  She nodded. “Makes sense. She hates the press. She hates you. She’s using one enemy against the other and keeping herself in the clear. Got to admire her, really, haven’t you?”

  “No I fucking don’t,” I muttered, and went back to the files.

  An hour or so later, as I was setting down the final sheet of paper, she sighed and turned to me and said “There’s nothing here, is there?”

  I shook my head. I explained my theory, about the Evening Standard and the drugs, but even I knew it wasn’t provable, even if it were true, and it probably wasn’t useful even if it were provable.

  “Right,” she said, and stood. “I’m on late tonight. Gonna go home, grab some food, grab some sleep, get myself into work so Martins can string me up because I’ve forgotten to read her mind. Let me know if anything comes up.”

  I hadn’t asked, I realised. I hadn’t even asked the all-important question.

  “Any luck catching our killer?”

  She shook her head. “Nope. Not looking likely, unless someone does something to shake things up. My guess is we’ll get a deathbed confession in fifty years’ time from someone we could have caught last week if we’d opened this up to the public. But Martins doesn’t like the public. Too messy.”

  I noticed the time, as she left. Five, and I hadn’t eaten a thing all day. Colman hadn’t left much cereal behind, but there was a giant sirloin steak in the fridge we’d been saving for a special occasion. There hadn’t been a special occasion, the steak was a day away from turning bad, and there was no sign of Claire, so I threw it in the pan, finished it in the oven, and ate the whole thing in five minutes, no vegetables, no bread, just steak and mustard and a glass of cold water.
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br />   I was washing the pan when the phone rang. It was Brooks-Powell, and he was excited.

  “I’ve got something,” he said, before I could get a word out.

  “What?”

  “Did you know there was a link, between Akadi and Trawden?”

  I thought about it, for a second. We’d asked them both, of course; Akadi was the one who’d brought the case back to life, and it was important his motives be clean. There was no connection between them.

  “No,” I said. “There was no link. We asked.”

  “Did you check?”

  Again, I took a moment to cast my mind back twelve years. Had we checked? Or had we just asked them both, assumed they were telling the truth, forgotten about the details in the excitement of putting Evans on the spot on the day of the murder.

  “No,” I said.

  “I’m emailing it through. Take a look and call me back,” he said, and hung up.

  I woke the laptop and sat there waiting for it to gather itself together. The email appeared two minutes later, no message, just a picture attached. I clicked.

  The image on my screen was a photograph. An old photograph, judging by the graininess and wash of the colour, and by the clothes the people in it were wearing.

  The photograph showed a group of people standing in front of a bar. There was a caption, over the top, neat handwriting in thick, dark ink. “Coach and Horses, April 21st, 1981. Opening night for Life, Death and Everything in the Middle.”

  I’d never heard of the play, but that didn’t matter. What mattered were the people. There were seven of them, five men and two women, and it was the two men standing next to one another at the back of the group that drew my eye. The photograph had been taken decades before I’d laid eyes on either of them, but I knew them. I was sure of it.

  Akadi and Trawden.

  At the bottom of the photograph was another line of writing, in biro. A distinctive leaning scrawl, very different from the careful script above. A scrawl I’d seen a lot of, over the last few days. Six words in the unique handwriting of Elizabeth Maurier.