A Detective in Love

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘But you didn’t. You went running back here and you went over and over what he’d done to you till you could think of nothing but getting your revenge.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes. And you thought you could get that revenge not by meeting Peter Renshaw in fair fight. You’re too much of a damn coward for that. But you thought you would kill the girl who, if you’d been man enough not to give way to your lust, would have brought you fame and respect as the coach who made her World Number One. Yes? Yes?’

  Then tears came. The big misty brown eyes suddenly filled with a watery gloss. There was a crudely noisy sniff. And down the black-haired cheeks there rolled two glutinous rivulets.

  For a moment Harriet began to doubt that this was the murderer of Bubbles, there in front of her on the other side of the long, gleamingly polished bar. But she thrust the thought away. Questioning a suspect should leave no room for even a flicker of doubt.

  ‘No. No, I never,’ the big ex-coach snorted.

  ‘You never what?’

  ‘I never went near that place. Yeah, I read in the paper she lived in some house called Adam and Something, but I never found out where it was. And I never had no intention of going there. I went over to England when I heard there was a chance of getting to coach some other English girl who was playing her first Wimbledon. And that was all. When she wouldn’t have nothing to do with me, I quit.’

  ‘You expect me to believe that? You expect me to believe you didn’t go down to Adam and Eve House on June the twentieth last very early in the morning carrying an athletics javelin, and that with that weapon you didn’t kill Bubbles Xingara?’

  ‘I didn’t. I didn’t. I was never near the place.’

  More tears, or sweat perhaps.

  ‘All right, prove to me you weren’t.’

  ‘How can I? How can I prove — hey, wait. June twenty, you said.’

  ‘You know very well when Bubbles was killed.’

  ‘But I wasn’t there. June twenty, I was in Paris, France. That’s where I heard Bubbles had been killed, murdered. I remember now. See, there’s this guy I was buddies with, and I thought he could maybe fix me up with some work. French guy, I hired once to be Bubbles’ hitting partner in California. You gotta have a guy for that with a girl who knows how to hit like Bubbles did. Make her even tougher. That’s what.’

  ‘Never mind all that. You’re saying that on June the twentieth last you were in Paris meeting with Bubbles Xingara’s former practice partner. Are you going to give me his name?’

  ‘Too right I am. Henri Jouve, that’s what he’s called. You go to France, talk to him. He’ll tell you where and when we met that day, and the day before. We talked about Bubbles then, natch we did. Lady, I could not of been in England then, and I never was at that Adam House. You’ll see.’

  Harriet turned round.

  ‘Agent Fernandez, can you detain this man while I make inquiries by phone to Paris?’

  ‘Sure can. Ask me, he’s dreamt up all that stuff. You sure had him running then, ma’am. Guess I know now why, when I was assigned to assist, they told me you were called the Hard Detective back there in England.’

  *

  It was not easy to make contact with Michael Cacoyannis’ buddy, Henri Jouve. First, Harriet had to phone Greater Birchester Police to talk to Inspector Franklin, expert in things French. Then she had to wait while Franklin made his own inquiries with his friends in the Paris police. Then Franklin had to wait while they made their inquiries about Jouve, whose address Cacoyannis had said he did not know, or would not give.

  But Harriet, despite having nothing to do for a week and more — she never did visit the International Tennis Hall of Fame — found she had begun to manage wholly to avoid evoking the image of Anselm, trouser-less or trousered. Perhaps, she allowed herself to think once or twice, the whole thing had been some sort of hallucination. Perhaps she had never really been struck down by love, but only under the terrible power of Eros had tricked herself into feeling caught in Aphrodite’s net.

  Whatever the reason she was at least grateful that no haunting image came to her, awake or asleep.

  Then, when she was beginning to think her time in her characterless motel must be brought to an end, the phone in her room rang just after two a.m. She was not asleep. A day doing almost nothing had left her all too wakeful. But she was half-dozing and the sharp sound of the phone sent her shooting upright on the much too big bed.

  ‘Yes? Yes?’

  ‘Is that you, Miss Martens?’

  She recognized Inspector Franklin’s incurably formal voice.

  ‘Yes, it’s me.’

  ‘Inspector Franklin here, ma’am.’

  ‘Yes, yes. What is it? You’ve heard from the Paris police?’

  ‘I have indeed, ma’am. And they’ve been most helpful.’

  ‘Inspector, what did they say?’

  ‘Ah, well, yes. Not good news, I’m afraid.’

  ‘What sort of not good news?’

  She was managing, just, not to shout.

  ‘Well, it seems, ma’am, that this fellow Jouve does corroborate what your fellow, Cacoyannis, has claimed. Apparently Cacoyannis was in Paris on the date in question. My friends in Paris tell me that they pressed Jouve very hard and he couldn’t be budged. He even produced some supporting witnesses. I don’t know if you’ll want to go over there and check for yourself when you get back here from America, ma’am. But, if you want my opinion, I’d say it wouldn’t really be worth your while.’

  ‘No,’ she managed to say. ‘No. I don’t think it would be. And thank you, Inspector. It all must have caused you a lot of trouble.’

  Why am I going to these lengths to thank the pompous idiot, she asked herself.

  ‘No, no, ma’am. It was a pleasure, a pleasure indeed. I always welcome the opportunity to speak my little bit of French, you know.’

  ‘Yes. Well, thank you again.’

  End of my stay in safe-from-love America. Safe for me at least.

  But what will happen back in Levenham, where Anselm should have returned from the leave I sent him on before eventually I was able to set off for America? What will happen when I set eyes on him again? Or, no, not on Anselm. When I set eyes on Detective Inspector Brent again, will he be no more than Detective Inspector Brent? Or will he be what he was before I left?

  Chapter Sixteen

  Back to Square One. Harriet had always hated that much-used cliché. Clichés in general she distrusted for their woolly masking of the truth, and she did her best not to succumb to them. But Back to Square One, with its unthinking acceptance of defeat, was her real bête noire.

  So it was all the more bitterly ironic that, as after a quick check in her office she entered the Incident Room on the morning after her return from America, and saw Anselm Brent, standing looking over WDC Johnson’s shoulder at whatever was on her monitor, those words should at once come slap into her mind.

  And, cliché or no cliché, the fact was that for her at that instant the words were absolutely true. At the mere sight of Anselm she had in a single mind-altering flash reverted to the state that had begun to set in when she had stared down at his muscular palm with its blotches of puffy yellowy-white calluses that now distant June morning. Back to Square One.

  She forced herself to take a deep inward breath.

  ‘Well,’ she said loudly for the benefit of the whole room, I’ve got some bad news for you.’

  At once Anselm turned to face her, a look of drowning apprehension on his broad face, manifesting itself in a sudden withdrawing of his forget-me-not eyes.

  Good God, she thought, he cannot be thinking I am about to tell him, in front of all the people here, that I am going to end the affair between us?

  But that’s what it looks like. Thank Christ, the poor devil’s standing where no one else can see that expression.

  Quickly as she could she made the announcement she had begun with her some bad news.

  ‘As you know, I wen
t over to Newport hoping to bounce that man Cacoyannis into telling me the truth about what happened there by the river at Adam and Eve House. And I failed. Or, rather, I found he had a solid alibi — one or two details still to check — for the twentieth of June. He was far away from Adam and Eve House. In Paris.’

  Mercifully the general outbreak of disappointed groans and murmured curses created enough noise for Anselm’s look of stony incomprehension to pass unnoticed.

  Harriet thought for a moment.

  ‘So we must redouble our efforts in every other direction,’ she said loudly. ‘I’ll be holding a briefing —’ she glanced at her watch — ‘at ten, sharp. But first I’d like to hear about something that was nagging at me all the way on the flight back. Wasn’t there a man who suddenly left a job in Birchester just after the murder? Working on a roof, was it? Mr Brent, will you come up and tell me where that particular inquiry’s got to? If anywhere?’

  She was pleased to see then that her summoning Anselm to her office had not produced any exchanges of grinning, behind-the-hand looks. So Handy Andy Anderson, not present in the room, must have decided to refrain from telling everyone about what he had seen when he had flung open the office door that day, two weeks and more ago.

  Nevertheless it was with a forced bravado that she ushered Anselm into the office in front of her and then firmly closed the door behind them.

  She went across towards her desk, feeling, to her fury, her legs actually seeming weak beneath her. Anselm, Anselm.

  She pulled back her chair, sank down on to it.

  What to say?

  To come straight out with, Anselm, my darling, my darling? Or make one more effort, useless though it must be, to get back to the calm unthinking state of those nights in the faceless motel in Newport? Deny what I feel, now at this instant pulsing and pulsing through me, take up that excuse for bringing him up here and ask about — who was it? — yes, that missing roofer?

  She found she was gripping, with sweat-sticky hands, the edge of the desk in front of her.

  One deep breath.

  ‘Your leave go all right?’

  Neither one thing nor the other. But perhaps the best way to do it.

  ‘No.’

  Anselm shot out the word as if it was a gobbet of filth he was flinging at her.

  ‘Anselm. What — What is it?’

  ‘What is it? You can ask that? It’s love. Fucking love, that’s what it is. I’m in love with you, Harriet. In love, in love. Did my leave go all right? Of course it didn’t. What did I do, all day and half the bloody night too? I thought about you, thought about you. I couldn’t think of anything else. I still can’t think of anything else. Christ, I’m a grown man and I can’t do anything but — but behave like some stupid mooning teenage girl.’

  She jumped to her feet. The chair behind went rocking back till it struck the wall. She ran — or was it tottered? — round to where he was. Folded him in her arms, hugged him with all her force.

  But then, as she stood bent awkwardly forward, up on her toes an inch or so, painfully reaching to his greater height, there came to her like the slow tolling of a death-bell the thought that she must give him up.

  She must give him up. She hardly knew why the decision had come to her, when as soon as she had seen Anselm she had realized that her time away in America had not in any way had the effect she had both hoped for and hoped against. Two minutes, three minutes ago she felt absence had done nothing to break the hold the thunderbolt of Eros and the clinging toils of Aphrodite had caught her in. And now, still wrapped in those soft clamping tentacles, she was thinking with all the force she could summon up that, clamped, caught, or not, she must give Anselm up.

  He was a decent man. A good police officer, doing his job in the proper way. He had a solid future ahead of him, keeping the Queen’s peace as they said, making the world about him a better, safer place for those in it. But Eros, bloody, bloody Eros, had ruined it all. The infection that he had caught from her. Yes, she began to see, it was because through her, through her absurd love for this man in so many ways different from herself, so much more simple in his outlook, so unstrivingly better, he had become as much in thrall as she was herself. She could not let someone she felt for so intensely, so intimately, endure such crippling punishment.

  No, if by telling him I no longer love him, by telling him that monstrous, unbelievable lie, I free him, then I must do it. I must do it even if I have to endure that punishment myself for all the days, the weeks, the months, even the years, to come.

  Oh, John, John, she thought, how right you were. Yes, everywhere around us, everywhere all over the world, Eros waits, ready at any moment to poison anyone he chooses. Oh, yes, there are, here and there, people guarded somehow from those bolts of lust, the love-atheists, the truly chaste. But for all the rest of us, for me, for Anselm, Eros is there and when he has struck, there waiting, too, is Aphrodite and her encircling miasma.

  And her coils must be broken. Or, if they can’t be, and in me they cannot be, they must somehow be ignored, blotted out, expunged from the stricken mind.

  She released Anselm, took a step backwards.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, forcing dryness and hardness into her voice. ‘The inquiry, Bubbles’ murder. What I told everybody down in the Incident Room just now is a fact. Now that Cacoyannis is out of it, the inquiry is bogged down, going nowhere. And it’s got to move on. I asked you about that man, that roofer, whatever he is. Has there been any progress there while I’ve been away? Do you know?’

  ‘What — What?’

  ‘Mr Brent.’ She forced herself to use the name, though it was like pouring down her rejecting throat a black, bitter dose. ‘Mr Brent, I asked you what you know about that roofer who disappeared so suddenly from his job within hours of Bubbles’ death.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He shook his head, as if he was casting off some thick enshrouding wrapping.

  ‘Well? Well?’

  ‘He ... He’s just been identified. Ma’am.’

  ‘Identified? Then who is he? Speak up, man.’

  ‘Name of Brewer, ma’am. Grant Brewer. WDC Johnson was telling me when you came into —’

  A blank, wall-hit stop.

  She knew at once that into his head there had come the sight of herself coming into the Incident Room, light grey suit with calf-length skirt, plain white shirt buttoned to the neck, her customary working clothes in the cooler months of the year. What she sometimes called to herself her go-thither outfit. And into his head that sight had lodged itself.

  But it must not be allowed to stay. He must, Anselm must, go thither.

  ‘Well, DI, what was it Johnson was telling you? Are you going to let me in on the great secret?’

  The brute sarcasm did the trick.

  ‘Sorry. Sorry, ma’am. I was — no, this is what Johnson said. She said they’d learnt that this Grant Brewer had worked at Adam and Eve House. Not recently, but shortly after the Renshaws, or Bubbles, bought the place. It needed a lot of repairs, especially to the roof. But that had come to an end and this fellow Brewer got other work. In Birchester. And then — it was his foreman there who eventually thought it was odd enough to be worth reporting — when at their meal-break up on the roof they were working on they heard the news of Bubbles’ death on the radio Brewer suddenly scrambled down to the ground and never came back.’

  ‘And has he been seen again now? Anywhere? Or is he totally lost to sight?’

  ‘I — I was asking Gilly Johnson, ma’am, when you came —’

  Once more Anselm came to a full halt.

  She could almost see what he must be seeing again in his mind. Herself. The woman who had so often kissed him, who had in the end suddenly torn down his trousers, been on the point of making ferocious love to him. The woman, it seemed, for whom he was now deep drowned in love.

  She pulled herself into a rigidly upright stance.

  ‘Then you’d better get down to the Incident Room and find out
what else Johnson’s got hold of, hadn’t you? I’ll be down again for my briefing at ten, when I’ve had a look at all this stuff on my desk, and I’ll expect a full report.’

  The Hard Detective issuing orders.

  *

  When Harriet went down again to the Incident Room for her briefing Handy Andy was there. But she got from him, she saw with a lifting of relief, no look of amused complicity.

  Well and good.

  Up on the platform at the top of the room, she gave her team, noticeably smaller now than it had been at the beginning, a rapid review of the current situation.

  ‘And eliminating Michael Cacoyannis,’ she concluded, ‘was not the only setback I ran into in the States. The FBI had also found Bubbles’ former practice partner, Jo-Ann Parash, and established an impregnable alibi for her. Well, not sure that impregnable is the best word. The wretched girl had got herself pregnant by someone or other, had tried to get an abortion and on June the twentieth was in hospital. Nor has the FBI had any success in locating Bubbles’ father, the mysterious Mr Xingara. They couldn’t even tell me whether he was in America or had slipped over the border into Mexico, or gone almost anywhere else.’

  She looked round the room. The faces that a month before had still been hunters’ faces were, for the most part, no longer so. They were the faces of the dulled. No wonder inquiries into the roofer had been pursued so half-heartedly.

  ‘Christ,’ she barked, ‘somebody come up with something. Oh, I know there are more than a few still to check from all those thousands of e-mails Bubbles got. But unless something a bit harder turns up we shall all still be here at Christmas. Or, in fact, I may not be. I’ve just had a memo from Mr Tarlington saying he wants to discuss with me how practical it would be if from now on I ran the inquiry partly from Birchester. So it may come to you sending me Christmas cards. Try one of those terrible, multiple-signature teenager cat-picture cards we’ve filed away saying We love you, Bubbles.’

  She got her laugh with that. Well, a laugh’s better than the apathy sucking them all down.