by Oliver Tidy
He was not a fool with his money. He did not engage in dangerous sports activities. He was able to learn new things. He was good in situations. He was socially adept. He had good spatial awareness. He managed to comprehend new technology. He was environmentally conscious and conscientious. And he wasn’t remotely daft enough to have adopted a religious belief. In short, Romney did not consider himself to be stupid. However, he behaved with a particular stupidity where women and his own ultimate self-interest were concerned.
This self-knowledge arose from the sure-fire certainty of how things would inevitably turn out in a future relationship given time. He had no wish to settle down again. He’d been there done it and then had a recent near miss and he understood now with absolute clarity that it wouldn’t be for him again. He enjoyed his own life and space too much to sacrifice or have to justify or curtail aspects of it for a woman and the baggage, opinions and expectations that they all trailed around with them.
He had considered whether perhaps his outlook created something of a self-fulfilling prophesy about the inevitability of relationship breakdown but remained unconvinced it was that simple. He reconciled his helpless feelings on the subject by laying the blame for the way he was at the door of his genes. He was a man. Men were programmed by nature to behave in certain similar and predictable ways throughout their life-spans. Not biological programming it was impossible to fight and rebel against, but often it was easier to obey nature’s laws, enjoy the perks and deal with the fall-out later. It brought some excitement into his personal life now and again and it could certainly be fun, if ultimately stupid.
Skirting the ring road of the town on the way to the restaurant, he realised he would pass by the top of the road in which Edy Vitriol had lived. With the recent loss of one of his signed books still rankling him, he decided to call in and ask if he might have another, for the purposes of the investigation.
Mrs Vitriol opened the door to him looking haggard and miserable and Romney instantly regretted his decision and motives. The woman was obviously suffering her loss keenly. She looked up at him as he imagined a believer would look up at a holy man from whom one sought answers to life’s great questions. And he felt a little wave of shame wash over him.
‘Hello, Mrs Vitriol. Is it inconvenient for me to call?’ Suddenly, Romney did not want to make the acquisition of the book look like his sole purpose for being there. Not just for her, but also for himself. Sometimes he could kick himself for his idiocy. As he stood on her doorstep pitying her and feeling awkward the memory of his chat with Sammy Coker gave him an idea to fall back on.
‘It’s not inconvenient, Inspector,’ she replied. ‘Are you going to tell me you’ve arrested someone for killing my Edy?’
Romney shook his head. ‘No. Sorry. Not yet. But we have several officers involved in the investigation. I wanted to ask you about something, actually.’
‘You’d better come in then.’ She showed him to the sitting room. ‘You want something to drink?’ He declined. Lowering herself with some effort into her chair, she said, ‘What is it you want to know?’
For the first time, Romney was conscious of the idea that she must be around her seventies. He said, ‘Edy was a crew member aboard the Herald of Joint Enterprise, wasn’t he?’
Her face darkened with a rinse of unpleasantness. ‘Yes. What’s that got to do with his death? It was twenty-five years ago.’
‘Probably absolutely nothing. But as well as Edy’s murderer we’re still looking for a motive. We have to consider anything and everything in your son’s life and to be honest there seems precious little for us to get excited about at the moment.’ Romney flinched at the way this could sound to the mother, but she appeared not to have felt the same. Quickly, he said, ‘Did Edy ever receive threats because of what happened?’
‘It was twenty-five years ago,’ she repeated, as though to a deaf person or an idiot. Then she sighed and said, ‘It haunted him constantly. He had regular night terrors about it. Yes, there were threats. But they were all a long time ago. Some of them went on for longer than others. Some people were persistent. He was physically attacked in the street a few times, but he’d never report people to the police. Edy said it was understandable. It bothered him at first. But he became better about them. He told me we had to be understanding. He tried to encourage me to understand how the relatives must have felt, how I would have felt if I’d been one of them. His psychiatrist helped him a lot to deal with it. I think all that was her talking.’
‘He saw a psychiatrist? When did that stop?’
‘It didn’t. He was still seeing Doctor Puchta once a month. He had to to get his medication. Doctor Puchta prescribed it for him.’
‘What sort of medication?’
‘Anti-depressants.’
‘He’d been on anti-depressants for twenty-five years?’ Romney was unable to keep the surprise out of his voice.
‘They worked for him. Without them he was all at sea in life.’
‘How old was Edy when he was on the boats?’
‘He started straight from school at sixteen. He was twenty-two when the Herald capsized.’
Romney did a quick mental calculation. ‘Edy never married?’ She shook her head. ‘Girlfriend?’
‘Not for a long time. And there was no boyfriend either before you ask.’
Romney hadn’t been about to. ‘I’d like contact details for this Doctor Puchta if you’ve got them,’ he said, thinking that if Edy Vitriol had been pouring out his heart, serving up his conscience and divulging his secrets to a psychiatrist for twenty-five years the good Doctor Puchta might have something that could help the investigation. He’d worry about the inevitable hurdle of the client-confidentiality aspect later.
‘It wasn’t Edy’s fault, you know? What happened. He was working on the car deck but it wasn’t his responsibility to shut the bow doors. It was some Frenchman’s. The courts never convicted him of a crime, so that proved it, didn’t it? Did I say it tormented him all his life? The bloody man whose job it was was asleep somewhere and the captain couldn’t even tell whether the doors were open or closed from the bridge. He just assumed they were shut and put to sea. It was the company that was to blame. Everyone knew that. If they’d had proper policies and working practice in place it wouldn’t have happened. But don’t think that they were punished. Big business and the system all close ranks when trouble’s brewing.
‘Edy kept scrapbooks of everything – newspaper cuttings, court documents, letters from people, hate mail, all sorts of stuff. He said it helped him and he didn’t want to forget it. He said that one day he’d use it all to write a book about what happened. It always seemed an odd thing to do to me, but I think it was another of his psychiatrist’s ideas. Do you want to see them?’ Romney thought that he would. ‘They’re in his room. You can take them with you. You’d be doing me a favour. They might have been a help to Edy, but they upset me. They’ve sat there like an accusing finger for twenty odd years. I’ll be glad to get rid of them.’
Romney was pleased with this. He changed the subject. ‘What do you know of the book that Edy wrote?’
‘I know the title and that’s enough for me. I didn’t like it, of course. I’m a woman and I’m not a prostitute I can assure you and I never have been. He told me it wasn’t like that, but I’m not a great one for books at the best of times. I was happy that it made him happy and that’s as far as it went for me. I never read it and I don’t want to now he’s dead. That box of books is something else I’m going to have to dispose of.’ She looked like she might be about to cry.
Romney took his cue, ‘Last time I was here you let me take a couple away so that officers working on the investigation could see if there was anything in Edy’s book that might be pertinent to his death. Would I be able to trouble you for another?’ He didn’t expand further on his false-hood as his skin prickled with his motive.
‘Take the box of them if you want. Like I said, I don’t want them. I didn’t
like the idea and they’re just a reminder of my boy that I don’t want to associate with him.’
Romney had to do two trips from the house to his car. One for the complimentary box of books from Vitriol’s publisher and the second for a bigger box that contained several thick scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings, documents and ephemera related to the sinking of the Herald of Joint Enterprise.
*
The little diversion in his evening, which had for an awkward moment on the Vitriol’s doorstep seemed a foolish enterprise, gave Romney food for thought as he headed for food for his stomach. He would get Grimes or Spicer to go through the box of documents relating to the sinking of the boat, just in case. The box of Vitriol’s books could join the rest of his considerable library that was in boxes awaiting the completion of his study room that he had promised himself he would have when his renovation project was completed.
Romney allowed the discovery that Edy Vitriol had been seeing a psychiatrist give him some small hope he might find out something useful. If Vitriol was murdered by someone who’d had it in for him for some time and Vitriol had been aware of the threat he may well have confided in his medical help. He didn’t know how client-confidentiality worked for the dead, but he could only try.
He was properly hungry when he walked into The Olive Tree. Being the middle of the week it was not particularly busy, which Romney always preferred. Quieter restaurants, in his experience, usually guaranteed better, quicker service and hotter food. He was disappointed not to see the Greek woman in evidence. Still, he’d brought a copy of Vitriol’s book in with him to browse with his meal so he’d be occupied.
Romney was not a newspaper reader. He’d tried it but felt that regular digestion of the problems of the world just dragged his spirit down. And ultimately he had ceased to care. People were always killing each other all over the place. They always had and they always would. The only things that had changed were the methods. And there was enough doom and gloom in his daily life being a policeman without going looking for more. If he was going to read he’d rather slip away from reality and into someone else’s virtual world – a good story that provided some escapism through wonderful manipulation of the English language.
It had taken Romney a while to work up the nerve to go into a restaurant or a pub and sit at a table with only a book for company. Even at his age and level of maturity and with the confidence borne of his work the idea of the practice had made him uncomfortable. He was as vain as the next person. He imagined that others would look at him and whisper to each other what a pretentious poseur he was, or, worse, that he was an anti-social-billy-no-mates. Either way, pitiful and pitiable. But once he’d taken the plunge and got used to it he’d realised it was certainly preferable to sitting in a pub or restaurant on his own and staring at the wallpaper, or reading the notices on the walls, conscious of others stealing the occasional glance in his direction with their feeling that he was just another sad, lonely, man looking for company, again pitiful and pitiable. Damned if he did. Damned if he didn’t.
He could, of course, have stayed out of pubs and restaurants, but he liked them and didn’t see why he should just because he was alone. Besides, when he was into a good read, he often became blissfully unaware of any judgemental looks aimed in his direction.
Oddly enough, Romney’s decision to start taking books out for a drink now and again had coincided with the emergence of the acceptance and integration of technology into the social scene. While Romney was struggling with his discomfort at coming out from the closet as a public reader, other single people around him – invariably younger – with seemingly rapidly increasing frequency, were sitting at their tables engrossed in fondling their smart-phones, their net-books, their tablets and their laptops. Despite the newness of these tools of introverted interaction, it seemed to Romney that these accessories for the single socialite instantly appeared to leap-frog the old-fashioned book in the acceptability stakes. While he was aware of pitying looks for being a reader of books, he was equally aware of the techno-generation receiving looks of admiration, respect and jealousy from those who envied their savvy and confidence; their Internet social networking circles where it was perceived they must be constantly in demand, even if they weren’t. It was about perceptions and image. Technology hinted at interaction, access to others, a busy life and books quite the opposite.
He took a table in a corner. He ordered wine, soup and mezes from a young man, little more than a boy really, with the tell-tale Mediterranean skin and dark eyes who spoke heavily accented English and seemed pleasant enough.
Now that he had a box of Vitriol’s books, Romney saw no harm in reading one of them. He might end up being one of the few people that actually did and he supposed that, as he was investigating the man’s murder, and he had no leads as yet, then it might just make sense for him to familiarise himself with the deceased’s creative output. He might learn something to his advantage.
The soup arrived and he spooned it up greedily as he read. Vitriol’s prose was not to his liking. It seemed clunky and constipated and then flowery and verbose – uneven. The subject matter had not grabbed him either. A shadow fell over his table and he was aware of small dishes being distributed and his soup bowl being removed. He didn’t look up, but muttered a thank you.
‘You are welcome,’ said a woman’s voice that he instantly recognised.
Romney jerked his head up and smiled at the familiar face of the Greek woman. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Sorry. I didn’t realise it was you. I thought that it was the boy.’
‘It is good to see you back at our restaurant,’ she said. ‘You must like Greek food.’
‘I do now. It’s very nice to see you again, too,’ slimed Romney. He wanted to say something witty, or erudite, something that perhaps a woman of Greek descent might appreciate, but nothing sprang to mind and he inwardly cursed himself for not having had the foresight to have looked up something on the Internet earlier that would make him look clever.
She looked down at the book he had let fall shut. He saw her reading the title and she raised her eyebrows at him before she was hailed by a colleague and trotted away. She did move very nicely, Romney reminded himself, but he was less pleased and a little more concerned at what she would think of him for sitting in her restaurant reading a book with such a provocative and misogynistic title.
She didn’t bring his main course, but he noticed her flitting between tables elsewhere. In fact he found his attention wandering more and more from the unengaging text that was in front of him to search out any sign of her presence. He felt a little foolish for it but took some comfort in being the only one who would know it.
He tried again with the book, dipping into random chapters managing half a page here and there. To himself he was able to admit that it wasn’t the content that defeated him but the writing. Opinions and arguments were not well expressed. The language and style did not flow for him. It was heavily descriptive where Romney had a preference for tight, economical dialogue, sparingly written. But as a man who had suffered at the hands, whims and lawyers of the female of the species, he would have to agree with much of what he read. Naturally, this would not be something that he would be able to share with anyone.
‘How is your book?’ she said, once again catching him by surprise.
‘Not really my sort of thing,’ he answered, meeting her stare and holding it. ‘Actually, it’s a bit of homework and like most homework I remember from my school days I’m not particularly enjoying it.’ For something to say, he said, ‘Do you know it?’
‘I heard the author talking about it on the radio. I thought that the woman was very good.’
‘The woman who works at the radio station who was asking the questions?’
‘Yes. You heard it too?’
‘Yes.’
‘I liked her. She put him in his place. Maybe someone should put him in his place a bit more permanently for what he’s written.’
‘Have you read it?
’ said Romney.
‘I wouldn’t want to. I trust the woman from the radio station though.’
‘Someone has put him in his place, actually,’ said Romney.
‘Oh good. Where’s that?’
‘The mortuary. He’s dead.’
She looked like she thought he might be having fun with her. When she could see he wasn’t, she bit her lip and said, ‘Oh. Because of the book?’
‘That’s what I’m trying to find out.’
‘You’re a policeman?’ Romney nodded. She straightened and her clear forehead wrinkled a little. ‘I’m sorry that he’s dead,’ she said, awkwardly. ‘It’s not what I meant when I said that I hoped someone would put him in his place. Will you be having dessert?’
He shook his head. ‘Full-up, but if you have filter coffee, I’d like one, please.’
She hesitated a second before saying, ‘He was wrong?’
‘Who was?’ said Romney, wondering if he’d missed something.
‘The man that wrote your book. We’re not all prostitutes.’
She turned away before he could lie that he’d never suspected it for a moment. He reflected on their little exchange. In his experience female waitresses didn’t often stop to chew the fat with male clientele that they didn’t know. She had been very friendly with it. Was she trying to give him the idea that she could be interested? Why would she do that? She didn’t know him from Adam. Did she think that maybe he had money? It was his third visit inside a month and it wasn’t exactly a cheap evening. She couldn’t earn much, waitressing. Did she view him as possibly someone to cultivate? Maybe she was looking for a ticket out of her long hours and low paid job. Maybe he’d just read too much of Edy Vitriol for one night.
