Quick off the Mark

by Moody, Susan

  Kearns married the girl who lived next door. Moved into a flat. Undertook various menial jobs, none of which he was very good at. I realized I’d already been given a potted version of this over the Indian dinner, when he’d come over to talk to the am-dram group. He worked the men’s clubs, the comedy workshops, made promotional videos for anyone who asked, contributed material to other more successful comedians’ TV shows, his name one of those in the lines which whizzed past at the end of the programme. He voiced a disagreeable beetle in a Pixar production. He had an ability to make his life sound like a series of comic sketches, which in a way it was.

  He began to get better known on the circuits and in panto. He played the nervous fiancé in a popular radio series, and did the voiceover for a series of ads. An old mate gave him a chance. Success beckoned. Children arrived. The youngest died of cot death at ten days old. His wife began to drink. He started—

  Hang about … what was I thinking? I’d been reading this rubbish for over an hour now.

  Except, much as I hated to admit it, it wasn’t rubbish.

  There were more photos. Kearns’ wedding day. His children: Damian and Zoe. A publicity release of him horsing around on a Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special. I read more of the narrative, but it became increasingly beset by heartbreak. I decided to leave the rest for another day.

  I was tucked up in bed with Bertie Wooster when the phone rang. ‘Quick,’ I said.

  ‘Fliss here. Tell me, does this sound familiar to you, seeing as how you know the Huber-Draytons so well?’

  There was silence. ‘Does what?’ I said, after a moment.

  ‘Oh sorry. It’s just we’ve had that woman, Tristan Huber’s mother, down here at the station, or telephoning, complaining that someone’s trying to spook her. Sending notes or making phone calls, saying “this is what it feels like”.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘This …’

  ‘Wonder what that means.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Presumably it has something to do with Tristan’s murder.’

  ‘Just what I thought. So I wondered if – unless it’s unconnected to her son – it might be some childhood catchphrase you used in the days of your youth. Or a game you all used to play together.’

  ‘Not that I remember,’ I said. ‘Though even if it was, I can’t see what it would have to do with Dorcas. She wasn’t exactly the kind of mother you sat down to play Monopoly with. Have you asked Dimsie Drayton? She’d be more likely to know than I would.’

  ‘It was her who suggested we call you, since it meant bugger all to her.’

  ‘“This is what it feels like”?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  I shook my head. ‘No, doesn’t mean a thing.’

  Having ended the call, I lay back on my pillows, P. G. Wodehouse abandoned on the duvet. I’d denied any remembrance of the phrase … and yet the more I considered it, the more it had a faint ring of familiarity about it.

  Don’t sweat it. Go to sleep. The memory would come back to me eventually, I was sure.

  Some berk on a motorbike whose exhaust pipe was in serious need of attention – like its bloody owner – woke me at half-past four. I lay fuming. It was too early to get up, too late to go back to sleep. Why are people so inconsiderate? Restless, I turned over, bashed my pillows, cursed all owners of motorcycles. And felt my mind clear …

  This is what it feels like … I was immediately twelve years old again. Sitting by a lake or pond somewhere, with Dimsie and Tristan and the Chinese boy for whom Dorcas acted as guardian during term-time, while he was at boarding school. What was his real name? Cheng or Wing, I think, but bizarrely, he preferred to be called Albert. None of us liked him. He was a big lad, eyes like raisins in the suet of his face, and a real bully.

  Dimsie was screaming as Albert, laughing, inflicted what we called a Chinese burn on her, gripping her wrist with both hands then rotating them painfully in opposite directions. Suddenly Tristan jumped up and grabbed Albert’s own arm. Thin-lipped and ferocious, he twisted the boy’s wrist until he howled and struggled.

  ‘This is what it feels like,’ he kept saying, through gritted teeth. ‘OK? Like this. It hurts, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?’

  ‘I’ll get you for this,’ Albert said, when Tristan finally released his arm. ‘Just you wait, you bastard. You’ll be sorry.’

  ‘So will you, if you don’t leave my sister alone.’

  Was it possible that this Chang or Wing, aka Albert, was involved in Tristan’s murder? Could he be a member of a Triad? I knew all about revenge being a dish best served cold, but twenty-five years or more was a heck of a long time to wait for anger or hurt to cool. You’d think the dish had gone off by now. Been chucked in the garbage long ago.

  Nonetheless, I would have to pass this on to Fliss, see if she could make anything of it, whether indeed it even had any bearing on the case.

  SEVENTEEN

  The man in the green Jag was parked on the seafront again. This was the fourth time I’d seen him out there. He sat in his car, gazing out of the window at my apartment block, occasionally speaking into a phone or lighting up a fag. The sight of him annoyed me. What the hell did he want? Normally I tried to ignore his irritating presence in front of my windows. Today, I went downstairs, crossed the road and rapped sharply on the half-closed window.

  He jumped, then wound it down fully. Stale cigarette smoke drooled from the car’s interior, together with an unpleasant smell like male underpants well overdue for a wash. He looked at me from heavy-lidded eyes.

  ‘Yeah?’ It wasn’t just the lids: everything about him was heavy, from his jowly face to his bookmaker-check jacket and denim-covered thighs. Plus what I could see of all the bits in between.

  ‘Can I help you?’ My tone was not exactly friendly.

  He looked me up and down. He was at a definite disadvantage, since he was sitting down inside a car and had to squint up and sideways, just to see my face. No way did I intend to squat down to his level.

  ‘Maybe.’ He sounded stroppy, twice as unfriendly as me. ‘And maybe not. What’s it to you, anyway?’

  ‘I’ve noticed you parked out here a lot. Not doing anything, just staring out to sea.’

  ‘How d’ you know I’m not a creative artist, replenishing my … uh … aesthetic impulses?’

  ‘Oh pleeeze …’ A more unlikely creative artist of any sort would be hard to find. Unless he was an accountant.

  ‘How do you know, eh? Or a man simply hoping against hope that his ship will come in?’

  ‘Mostly because you don’t look like it. In fact, to tell the truth, you look as if you’re up to no good.’

  ‘If you really wanna know, I’m keeping an eye on someone who lives in that block of flats.’

  ‘Staking the place out, you mean.’

  ‘Since you just came out of there, maybe you know her. Name of Quick,’ he said. He stared at me truculently, fiddling with the handle of the car door in an effort to open it and climb out. He wasn’t going to be able to unless he pushed really hard, or I stepped back a bit.

  ‘Why not go over and check out the mailboxes?’ I said. ‘Ring the woman’s doorbell? How’re you going to identify her if you just sit on your tod all day? And why do you want to catch up with her, anyway?’

  ‘Got a few questions to ask, that’s all. I’m not trying to cause trouble, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘Oh, no?’ The voice had been teasingly familiar from the moment he first opened his mouth. Now I recognized those faintly whiny accents. ‘It’s Mr Maurice Colby, isn’t it?’ I said, chirpy as a chipmunk. ‘We spoke on the phone not long ago.’

  ‘What the …’ His face flushed red with fury. ‘You fucking bitch. You’re the bloody cow I’m trying to get hold of, aren’t you?’ Pressing down the handle, he slammed against the door as hard as he could. Once and then again. The third time, I moved away and he tumbled out on to the pavement in an undignified sprawl.


  I looked both ways along the seafront. Plenty of people were walking up and down. I needn’t fear sudden death unless he pulled out an AK-47, gunned me down and sped off down the road before anyone could react. Bending over him, I said, ‘Come on, Mr Colby. What do you really want?’

  He got himself on to his hands and knees, hooked his fingers over the door of his car and clumsily climbed to his feet. ‘What’s your bleeding game?’ he demanded. ‘Ringing me up under false pretences. Assaulting me. I could have you for that.’

  ‘I doubt it. Meanwhile, maybe I should be asking you what your game is. Because it’s obviously nothing to do with interior design. Probably more,’ I added, taking a shot at random, ‘to do with expensive watch rip-offs and the like.’

  His oystery eyes stared into mine, while the skin crinkled around them. ‘What you on about?’ he demanded indignantly, though even to himself his righteous anger sounded as phoney as the Patek-Philippes back in the murder-scene warehouse.

  Keeping an eye on him, I gazed out across the restlessly heaving water. A tanker drifted along the horizon. Nearer to shore, little sailboats flocked like marine sheep. ‘Know this area, do you?’ I asked. Direct questions often take people unawares.

  ‘As it happens – though I can’t see what business it is of yours.’

  ‘So that’s a yes?’

  ‘My Gran used to have a smallholding …’ He waved vaguely behind us. ‘Somewhere out in the country. Used to come down with my mum and brothers in the school holidays. Explore. Make camps in the woods. Little boy stuff.’

  Which made it quite likely that he knew all about that warehouse which had been stacked with rip-off luxury goods. Probably even stashed them there himself. ‘And why were you trying to trace me?’

  ‘Wanted to know why you gave me a bell the other day.’ He lifted his shoulders. ‘Perfectly natural thing to want to find out.’

  A suspicion struck me. ‘You have heard about Tristan Huber, haven’t you?’

  ‘Heard what about him?’

  ‘That he’s dead?’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Murdered.’

  ‘What?’ He went pale, the blood draining dramatically from his face, leaving it a waxy beige. ‘Murdered?’

  I explained the circumstances. Watched as the meanings and options of this news computed in his head. I could almost deduce the permutations he was evaluating. If this had happened to Tristan, might it happen to him too? Was he next in line? What should or could he do about it? Did he have time to get out of whatever shady business it was that he was engaged in?

  ‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of such bad news,’ I said. ‘You and he were obviously close.’ God, I could be nasty. On the other hand, I was fairly sure that Maurice Colby wasn’t above some fairly despicable behaviour himself, though not so despicable that he could have murdered Tristan. If for no other reason than that nobody could fake the way he had gone pale at hearing of the murder. A crook, yes, but a relatively civilized one.

  ‘No,’ he said forcefully. ‘No, we weren’t.’ He turned away from me, distancing himself from the news he had just heard and everything connected with it. ‘Not close at all. Just … just former business colleagues.’ He bent his arm at the elbow and gazed at his knock-off watch then edged towards his car. ‘Look, I have to be going.’

  ‘And there’s nothing more you want from me?’

  ‘Nah. Tell the truth, I thought you were Crime Squad or something similar.’

  He opened his car door and hoisted himself into the driver’s seat. Turned on the ignition. Gunned the motor.

  ‘An easy misunderstanding,’ I said. ‘But if you haven’t already done so, I’d shift the merchandise PDQ, if I were you.’ As parting shot, I asked, ‘Do you know the Landises?’ and watched his knuckles whiten as he gripped the steering wheel. He didn’t answer, just drove off. Watching his tail lights fade away into the distance, I took that as an affirmative.

  After that, I telephoned DCI Fliss Fairlight and learned that there had been little or no movement on the murder of Tristan Huber, though the police were actively pursuing a number of significant lines of enquiry.

  Oh yeah?

  And incidentally, that my friends the Landises were being questioned by the locals.

  Huh …

  And after that, I walked into the High Street, turned left halfway down and pushed open the door of Dimsie’s showroom. The girl behind the faux Louis VI writing desk tried to get up when she saw me come in but I was on her before she could push back her chair. ‘I just want to speak to Dimsie,’ I said soothingly, pressing her down in her seat. ‘No need to panic.’

  ‘She’s upstairs, looking at some new fabrics.’ Looking round for the nearest exit, she rolled her eyes, showing the whites, like a startled mare. ‘Why don’t you just, like, go on up?’

  I did, and found Dimsie, in a yellow cotton dress with her hair piled into an overflowing top-knot, sitting surrounded by spreads of luxurious upholstery materials. She seemed pensive as she held up a swatch of gold-infused red silk brocade and compared it with a gorgeous strip of grey-patterned damask. I was strongly reminded of Watteau’s The Pleasures of Love.

  She brightened when she saw me. ‘Alex! Any news?’

  ‘’Fraid not.’

  ‘But why not? It’s ages since … since Tristan was … since he died.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Surely somebody, somewhere, must be able to find out what happened and who’s responsible.’

  ‘You’d think so. But so far they’ve found no traces at the scene of the crime – that warehouse-cum-storage shed in the woods round Honeypot Lane – and no evidence of anything that could prove to be an identifier. Normally you can pick up all kinds of trace … skin particles, hair, soil from shoe-soles, minute bits or this and that … which could be significant. But according to my police contact there’s nothing. It seems that the perpetrator was very, very careful.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’ Tears filled her beautiful eyes as she spread her hands in a dramatic gesture of despair.

  ‘Nor do I, Dim. Which is why I’ve come to tell you that for the moment I have to quit any involvement.’

  ‘But you can’t! You were Tris’s friend. Close friend.’ She nodded meaningfully.

  So she knew about that, did she? Tristan and I had tried to keep it quiet. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but I’m not a police officer any more. And I’m finding the investigation very distressing. And on top of that, I’ve got work to finish, Dim. Perhaps the cops will do better than I can. Best to leave it to them. To be honest, I don’t believe I’m being given all the facts and I’m not sure who is holding out on me.’

  I wasn’t certain that she herself wasn’t one of the holder-outers. I gave her my death-ray look but she didn’t flinch. Proof in itself, I’d say. I had seen her gazing in this same steadfast manner in the past, to prove that she was innocent of whatever sin she was being accused of, from stealing money from her mother’s handbag to stealing other women’s boyfriends. In fact, now I thought about it, she was a bit of a hard case herself, just like her brother, as I had belatedly been discovering.

  ‘Have you seen my poor mother recently?’ she demanded.

  ‘Not in the past few—’

  ‘She looks like a ghost, poor old cow. She’s lost a huge amount of weight. She’s not sleeping. Not eating. And now some nutter is tormenting her, telephoning all the time.’

  ‘Threats?’

  ‘No. Just this voice, sounding like the person’s speaking from the bottom of a mineshaft, saying “it’s like this”.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nor does she. It’s a nightmare. You know as well as I do, Alex, that she and I haven’t always got on, but losing her adored son was enough torture for the poor old girl, without having to endure this kind of harassment on top. Why are people so cruel?’

  ‘Is it a man or a woman making these calls?’

  ‘A woman, she thinks. But could possibly be
a man disguising his voice. The police are on to it, and the telephone company. But as soon as they installed a device to try and record him, he stopped. Texts her, instead. It’s truly horrendous.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear this. Can’t they trace texts?’

  ‘No idea. But you’ll stay on the case, yeah?’

  ‘It’s pointless, Dim. I’m not achieving anything. Much better at this stage to leave it to the cops.’

  ‘No, Alex. Please. Promise me you won’t give up, please.’

  ‘But I’m not—’

  ‘Please, Alex.’

  I flatter myself that I am firm, cynical, able to hold my own, not taking any shit from anyone. But Dimsie, with her violet eyes, her peaches-and-cream complexion, could beat me at my own game any time she chose. I mentally cursed and sort of nodded. What a sucker I was, when it came right down to it. ‘Oh all right, I guess.’ If she heard the reluctance in my voice, she ignored it.

  ‘Thank you, Alex. I knew you wouldn’t let me – us – down.’

  ‘By the way, I met your former sister-in-law the other day.’

  ‘What did you think of her?’

  ‘I liked her.’

  ‘Did she have anything useful to say?’

  ‘Not really. Just some confirmation of a couple of points. But she did make me wonder about your former spouse.’

  ‘Mine?’

  ‘Yes, yours, Dim. I’ve known you all these years, and I know absolutely nothing about your husband.’

  ‘Which is exactly how I want it,’ she said sharply.

  ‘Which is exactly why I don’t to be involved any more. You’re withholding what could be crucial evidence. How do you expect me to operate when I’m not in full possession of the facts? And how do you know that he isn’t the person responsible for Tristan’s death?’