‘Yes. From a book I actually bought just this morning. Pretty cover, pretty good book, too, so far. Let me see. Yeah, The Tree of Pearls, someone called Louisa Young. And this is what she makes one of her characters say. The trouble with fucking is it leads to kissing. Not bad, eh? Because that’s what happens often enough. A bit of quick sex, and another and perhaps another, and then before you know it you’re in the coils of Aphrodite.’
Should I tell him now, she thought abruptly, that I’ve been struck down by his Eros, even if there’s been no fucking that could — yes, that’s a shrewd observation — that could lead to kissing. To Aphrodite wrapping all that down-to-her-vulva hair round me?
But, mercifully, John was bringing his fanciful theories down to reality.
‘You know, from what little I’ve gathered from the radio since first thing this morning, old Eros may very well be at the root of your current case.’
‘Well, yes,’ she said, sobering up. ‘Sex does seem likely to be there, and in every aspect of it. With the possible exception, actually, of poor dead Bubbles herself. From all I can make out, what she was obsessed by was tennis and nothing else.’
‘So ubiquitous old sex not the absolute key to it?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Far from it. But sex in some other head than Bubbles’.’
‘So you think she may have just walked into some sex maniac?’
‘Well, yes and no. She wasn’t raped, or I’m pretty certain she wasn’t. Should get confirmation at the p.m. But in every line of inquiry sex is there.’
‘No rape? You’ve probably got doubly big trouble in that case.’
‘Why’s that? I’d have thought I’d got trouble enough as it stands.’
‘Not if what’s at the heart of it is love, what I’ve just been talking about, Aphrodite’s amorous coils. That’s the one that can cause real danger. But, look, I must go. Didn’t you say you’d got to hold a briefing?’
You’ll need a moment or two to sort yourself out. Mustn’t keep you idly chatting. See you when I see you.’
‘Yes. ’fraid so.’
Real danger, she thought as John went, tramp-tramp-tramp, down the narrow uncarpeted stairs outside. He’s right, though. Think of all the great love tragedies, in life and literature, Romeo and Juliet, Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, Anna Karenina. Tragedies enough there.
But — But, more, was John in fact giving a veiled warning to me? Has he — we know each other that well — guessed something? From the tiniest wrong note in my voice? One word not quite right?
No telling.
*
Arriving for the briefing, Harriet found what had been the Parade Room in the days of the old Levenham Police had been transformed under DI Brent’s initiative into a full-scale Incident Room ready for all that a major inquiry might give rise to. Computer monitor screens lined the walls to send e-mail demands for information to any and every corner of the country. Twenty or more telephones were set at intervals all the way down a long central table, piled, too, with neat stacks of wide Action Sheets. A pair of fax machines stood in a corner, one already chattering with an incoming document. Cabinets full of new-looking box files seemed hungrily to be demanding the mass of papers they were bound to collect. Big pinboards stood blankly awaiting the sheets of information, the memory-jogging photos that would soon be placed on them. And clustered at the far end of the room were detectives she recognized from Birchester, glancing with hints of suspicion at a smaller band of Leven Vale detectives and a bunch of uniformed officers.
Good man, Anselm, she said to herself. I was right. Under that countrified exterior of yours there’s brains and determination. Something more, too, a quick ability to see the other side of the coin, as witnessed by that little story about what happened to my Join the Police autograph.
She stopped herself. No, he’s a good officer, and thank goodness for that. But that is absolutely all I’m going to think about DI Brent.
Swiftly she counted the officers standing there. Leven Vale and Greater Birchester. Forty-four. Good enough, at least to begin with.
She mounted the platform at her end of the room, and was pleased to see that merely stepping up on to it had secured her a hushed silence. Some benefit, then, from that absurd, media-donated label the Hard Detective.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘The murder of Bubbles Xingara, tennis star, media darling, known from one end of the world to the other. You and I are facing what may well become one of the biggest and most scrutinized murder inquiries any of us will ever see. And it’s going to be an inquiry that brings a result. It will bring a result because every one of us in this room, and every other officer it may be necessary for me to call in, is going to work flat out for however long it takes to get that result. Six months, a year, more than a year. You’re going to have that name Bubbles Xingara so branded on your minds that for the rest of your lives you’ll always remember this moment. You’re going to be able to think of nothing else until we can point the finger squarely at whoever it proves to be, man or woman, who killed that girl. You’ll be working every hour of the day, and as and when needed far into the night. You’re not going to see your loved ones for more than the shortest of times. You’re not going to have a minute to think of girlfriends or boyfriends. You’re going to work, work, work.’
Looking down, she saw that what she had said had brought about the reaction she had hoped for. Faces were tense, thoughtful, even here and there a little hostile.
And myself? Have I taken to heart the words I have been speaking? Not a minute to think of girlfriends or boyfriends. Of the ubiquitous sex that John talks about. Will I stamp out those thoughts I have had? But, John himself, how much am I actually going to be able to be with him during this spell of his in Birchester before bloody world-spanning Majestic Insurance sends him off somewhere else?
I’ll have to see. I’ll have to see. And as for Anselm, that must be over. Over now, over for ever.
Leaving no time for the impression that she hoped she had made on her team to fade, she went on to the details of how the investigation was to be conducted.
With a jab of irony she found herself, when it came to allocating someone to make inquiries back at Adam and Eve House into Bubbles Xingara’s love life — ‘We know precious little about it, but did she really not ever have any boyfriends?’ — thinking that Anselm seemed to be the obvious choice for the task. Had the apparently notorious DI Anderson, Handy Andy, been available she might have seen him as better able to deal with this aspect of the inquiry. But the task needed an officer of some seniority if his questions were to get full answers. So Anselm it has to be.
*
Then began a long period of sheer slog. Harriet divided her time between the Incident Room, where messages and reports had begun to pour in, and her top-floor office. At some point in the long day Anselm came up to report on his inquiries about Bubbles’ possible sexual entanglements.
She found, to her inward relief, that he was being strictly formal.
Can I keep it that way? Can I from this moment on begin to forget, to push aside, all those thoughts banging at me since ... that calloused hand. Oh, God.
‘Ma’am, I’ve spoken to the mother, the stepfather and that secretary of hers, who’s an old friend so she said, as well as to both Betty Fairley — I can’t see how she can be the killer, not in a million years — and Arthur Fairley, hoping I might get something from them the family didn’t know about.’
‘Good thinking. Any result?’
‘Can’t say there really was, ma’am. Both the Fairleys had nothing but good to say about Miss Bubbles, as they call her. She can do no wrong, far as they’re concerned.’
‘And having boyfriends is doing wrong?’ she asked, stepping into possibly dangerous ground before she could stop herself.
He looked embarrassed. Delightfully embarrassed, she thought.
‘No. No, ma’am. I didn’t mean that. I meant ... Well, p’raps the Fairleys, or Mrs Fairley anyhow, mig
ht think sleeping with a boy was wrong. That’s all.’
And — the idea stealthily crept into her head — you, Anselm, don’t believe, as you very well might have done, that it’s wrong to sleep with someone of the opposite sex when you’re not married to them.
But, no. Think of the investigation. Get on with the job.
‘Well, I can understand that,’ she said briskly. ‘So, what else did you learn? The stepfather. Anything from him? He hasn’t been playing around with his stepdaughter, has he?’
‘No, ma’am. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t, actually.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘I reckon he’s playing around with the secretary, Fiona Diplock. There was something he sort of stopped himself saying.’
‘Yes, good. Talking to her briefly, I got a hint of that, too. And, if we’re right, that would put Peter Renshaw almost certainly out of account, together with all the negative evidence about him. How about the mother? You make anything of Mrs Aimée Renshaw?’
Anselm pulled a face.
‘You’re right,’ Harriet said. ‘She’s a terrible woman. I can quite understand why Xingara ran off all those years ago.’
‘You’re dead right about terrible, ma’am.’
His shy smile flashed up.
What’s this?
‘She was all set to take me to bed. Honestly. Well, not to bed, I suppose, but to the chair she was sitting in, or the rug on the floor.’
So, yes. Yes, you’re ready to envisage the possibility of love-making with someone — with anyone — with — with ––
‘Go on, DI.’
‘Well, it was all I could do to freeze her off, ma’am. But in the end, in a way, I did get something out of her. Or I think I did.’
‘Let’s hear it.’
‘Put it like this then. She’s so wound up about sex and all that — her two husbands and the devil knows how many lovers, from all I could make out — that she’d have liked nothing better than for Bubbles to be the same. She was sore at her for not being like it, when it comes down to it. So I reckon that if young Bubbles did have any affairs, her Mum would’ve made it her business to find out. And have told me about them, every last detail like as not.’
‘Yes. Yes, I think we can say in view of that, coupled with what we knew about Bubbles already from the gossip in the papers, that the thwarted-boyfriend line can at least be put on hold.’
Then something occurred to her. If Peter Renshaw was out of account, wouldn’t the young woman who had been, in all probability, sharing his bed until just before six be equally out of account? Some careful checking of times needed, but it looks as if one tentative line of inquiry has petered out.
She told Anselm to go over to Adam and Eve House in the morning and find out, dotting the last i, just when it had been that Peter Renshaw had got up to go to take Bubbles’ blood pressure, and what time Fiona Diplock believed she had left her bed, if it was her own bed she had left. Then she made herself dismiss him.
On and on she sat at her desk, reading her copies of every message that came in, every report made. At some point she realized that outside the office’s sole little window it was beginning to get dark, and got herself sent up a canteen meal, though five minutes after the last mouthful she was unable to say what it was she had been eating.
Late into the night, when she found she was hardly taking in what had been put in front of her, she decided to snatch a quick sleep in her chair. Only to be woken by the insistent ringing of the phone.
Good God, it’s John, she thought, shaking the sleep out of her head. I never let him know — No. No, of course, he came over here, when I was glad he left before I blurted out ––
But it was not John.
‘Superintendent Martens, I’m glad I managed to get hold of you. Sam Porter here.’
A half-second of incomprehension. Then the name clicked into place. Sam Porter, crime reporter of the paper she always privately called the Daily Dirt. How the hell ... ?
‘Listen, we’ve just had something from one of our stringers in France.’
‘Mr Porter, I don’t want to know. It’s the middle of the night, I was just catching a few moments’ sleep. Nobody should have let you get through to me.’
She was aiming, in the three-quarters dark of the room, to slam the receiver back on to its base when one more brief sentence squawked out.
‘ ... said Bubbles was linked with a French gangster.’
She jerked back the handset.
Groping for the switch on her desk lamp, she thought rapidly.
Is this some sort of try-on? We’ve blocked every press inquiry till now, but perhaps Sam Porter’s hit on this way to get some sort of quote out of me. Yet it could be true, this titbit from France. Not actually all that likely as an invention.
‘All right,’ she said into the phone. ‘Tell me what you know.’
Was it a chuckle at the far end, or a throat-clearing?
‘I hope you’ll remember who was helpful to you, Super. The Hard Detective has never been too kind to us poor gentlemen of the press.’
“Tell me what you know.’
‘All right, all right. Now, you ever heard of a man called Pierre le Fou?’
‘Frankly, Mr Porter, that sounds like a name you’ve made up on the spur of the moment.’
A laugh.
‘Wish I’d thought of it two or three hours ago, when I’d have had time to catch the last edition. But I didn’t. No, Pierre le Fou exists all right. It’s not his real name, of course. That’s something like Carbonato, Pierre Carbonato. But Pierre le Fou — Peter the Mad — is what everyone in France calls him. Well, all the people who read their equivalent of our paper. He’s got quite a reputation. For personally disposing of people he doesn’t like.’
‘And ... ?’
And, according to our stringer in Marseilles, when Bubbles was playing an exhibition match somewhere in the South of France shortly before the French Open, which she won as you know, our friend Pierre was present and said something about going to bed with her. And little Bubbles turned him down — in good round French, so our chap said — in front of a whole crowd of tennis writers and God knows who else. So, was P le Fou pissed off? Well, a mobster like that doesn’t forget that sort of thing. And, you know, mad’s mad in any language. So what d’you think? He your best bet?’
Yes, Harriet thought, perhaps my best bet so far. If all this is kosher.
A French gangster, evidently with a certain amount of public profile, possibly having some link with Bubbles ... Her well-concealed boyfriend, after all? Then, if things turned sour, a public put-down. And ... Yes, he might have come all the way to England ... To Adam and Eve House, intent on revenge. Perhaps.
She managed to have the sense before ringing off merely to thank Sam Porter in as neutral a way as she could. It would do no good at all for the Daily Dirt to spread all over its front page next day that the Hard Detective was targeting French gangster Pierre le Fou. As she might be. As she very well might be.
Chapter Six
At seven next morning, a little over twenty-four hours after that bedside phone call saying Bubbles Xingara had been murdered, Harriet was at her desk once more, showered and breakfasted, and dealing with the remaining overnight messages. But then she found herself thinking of something else.
God, if in an hour or so when Anselm comes on duty I catch sight of that calloused hand, it’ll all start up again. I know it will.
But, one thing. Anselm Brent isn’t going to have time for tennis for many weeks to come. Not with a murderer that the whole world wants to be hunted down. Or not unless, perhaps, inquiries in France about Pierre le Fou lead to a quick breakthrough.
Interpol must put them in the picture. And the police in Marseilles. Must get old French-speaking Inspector Franklin back in Birchester to contact them as soon as he’s at his desk. Could try him before the p.m. at nine, otherwise leave him a message. And I arranged the next team briefing for ten. Hell of a lot to
be got through. And, no doubt, I’ll have to deal with the bloody media again at some stage. Murder of world’s-darling tennis star. With a sex angle like that, they’re not going to let go.
But, another thing, even if I get maximum co-operation from the Marseilles police, I’ll almost certainly need to send someone to France. One of the DIs on my team, it should be. So which? Anderson sounds as if he’d be able to deal with things there. Experience in the Met and all that. But till I’ve seen something of him, I’ve no idea what he’s really like. Except that he’s rumoured to fancy himself as a stud. I suppose I could make an instant decision when he turns up some time today. But if I can’t, what about Anselm? Wonder if he speaks any French. He could have learnt it at Levenham Grammar as well as anywhere. Bright as it turns out he is.
Oh, God, I so like that in him. That sort of — what to call it? — ex-directory intelligence of his.
Christ, I mustn’t — I must not ...
But, wait, if I send him off to France, won’t that make my life that much easier? Away for a week in Marseilles, out of my sight. Or longer even, if extradition proceedings come into it. That’s always provided this whole Pierre le Fou thing doesn’t turn out to be some sort of bloody mare’s nest. But if it doesn’t, if this is the beginning of the end of the trail, then with any luck I won’t need to see much more of Anselm Brent ever.
If I mean luck.
*
For the hundredth time in her life, Harriet found herself once again in attendance at a post-mortem. She could have passed on the duty of being the police presence at it to someone else, to DI Brent perhaps. But, when she could, she had always made this task her own. She felt now it should be doubly so. The more she had learnt about puppy-happy, tennis-dedicated Bubbles Xingara, the more she had felt her murder as a brutal act that should never have been.
So in the mortuary at the edge of Levenham Police Station car park, next-door to the added-on women’s toilets — Sarge Musgrove’s only got one ball AND THAT’S MADE OF RUBBER — she rapidly hauled on dulled green protective jerkin and dulled green voluminous trousers. Soon Professor Polk, the Birchester pathologist, was descending on his task with all the relishing zeal she had so often witnessed. And, as the smells and the sounds she had long become inured to followed in their accustomed way, there came his detached voice stating what he was doing to Bubbles Xingara, female, aged nineteen, of Adam and Eve House, near Levenham. Soon there followed the intermittent click-clicking of the technician’s camera as each stage of the intrusive revelation was laid bare, and eventually the screech of the rotating trepan cutting through the skull. While unceasingly — somehow yet more of a strain on the nerves — there was the sound of the steady trickling of water washing away blood from the white ceramic slab.
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