by John Eider
Ludmila Mars met them at the hotel before they could get out of the car, she emerging from the reception’s glass doors behind which she must have been waiting. The men got out to load her belongings, which were only what she’d brought off the train.
‘I need somewhere to stay,’ she began once in the car.
‘Of course. Another hotel can be arranged…’
The obvious other option was the Havahostel, that though reassuringly out-of-town, was hardly comforting in its joyless fittings.
‘No, no,’ she insisted. ‘Somewhere with a guard. You tell me he killed his mother, and then you want me to be left alone with him on the loose?’
Back in their seats, the Sergeant leant into the Inspector’s shoulder, ‘Sir, we’ve hardly the men to cover routine patrols with all this going on, let alone for guarding hotel rooms.’ Grey considered this, the man whispering, ‘I’m afraid it’s one of the offices upstairs at the station, or a night in the cells.’
Her protests at this overheard proposal could barely begin however, before Grey said,
‘I know somewhere you can stay, somewhere that’s already under guard.’
‘Hello, I’m Rachel. I’m the Duty Manager.’
‘Ludmila.’ the lady introduced herself, shaking the offered hand.
‘And this is Christopher.’ Grey introduced the Constable in high-visibility tabard emerging from a patrol around the grounds. ‘And he’ll be on duty all night.’
‘I don’t have a change of clothes, for the morning.’ said Ludmila suddenly. ‘Everything’s dirty from London.’
But the Duty manager smiled, ‘That’s okay, we look about the same size. I’ll see what I can find, though I can’t promise mine will be as stylish. Now you look like you could use a hot drink. Inspector, you too?’
He saw no harm in joining them, dropping back to say to Rachel,
‘Thank you for doing this.’
‘Not a problem: it does me good to have people to look after. She can’t go home tonight, you said on the phone?’
‘Indeed.’
‘I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me any more than that?’
He smiled wanly; she knowingly, before instructing, ‘The door on the left,’ to the lady walking ahead of them. They entered the dimmed elegance of the dayroom for Grey to find Rachel had set up the same arrangement of bedding as she had for him the previous evening.
‘I’ve put some pyjamas out for you; they’re quite thin but I don’t think it will be a cold night.’
‘Thank you. I don’t feel the cold.’
‘I hope you don’t mind sleeping in such a large room.’
‘Back home we used to sleep on the plains in the summer, following the animals. No room could be as big as that sky.’
Grey noticed her accent was returning too, the fake English housewife finding her way back to a girlhood on the Steppes.
‘My room’s just next door if you fancy a nightcap,’ offered Rachel.
‘Perhaps a glass of water?’ asked Ludmila.
‘Of course, I’ll be right back. Oh, it’s you.’
Grey turned also to see Derek Waldron standing at the door to the dayroom; Rachel introducing,
‘Derek, this is Ludmila: she’ll be staying here with us tonight. Now, come on you pair, give a lady a chance to change. Call if you want anything,’ she instructed before leading the men from the dayroom and to the door to her own quarters,
‘Do you have to go, Inspector? We were going to have a last drink?’
He followed them into the flat whose layout, he realised now he had become more familiar with the building, eerily echoed that of Stella’s rooms two floors up,
‘Like all of them I suppose,’ he murmured.
‘Sorry?’
‘The layout of the rooms, like Stella’s.’ From the lounge he saw their hostess filling a glass at the sink, while Derek already had a pan of milk heating on the small stove, his familiarity with her arrangements evidently betraying a common arrangement between them.
‘The architects didn’t waste time on such frivolities as individuality,’ chuckled Rachel as she poured the glass of water.
‘They were Modernists, Inspector, from the Nineteen-thirties.’ Derek Waldron took up what was evidently a favourite theme, ‘You’ll have noticed the clean lines, the lack of ornament, the light brought into every room.’
‘Too much light sometimes: those corridors can be baking,’ said Rachel as she left to take Ludmila her water.
‘As with Regency terraces, there is a consistency of design throughout that the Post-Modernists cannot, indeed do not, hope to equal.’
‘Post-Modernist?’
The man needed little prompting to continue, as he was waiting for the milk to warm, ‘It means that the simplicity of the steel and concrete frames they use nowadays mean the architects can dress up the outside of a building any way they like, often garishly so.’ The milk must already have been near boiling for Derek was now tilting it from the pan and into mugs.
‘She’s already in bed; can hardly keep her eyes open, poor pet,’ said Rachel returning. ‘What have you put her through, Inspector?’
But Derek was on a charge and wouldn’t be interrupted, ‘Buildings no longer have to look like what they’re made of or what they do.’
‘Don’t get him started, Inspector, or we’ll be hearing of Gothic arches and Doric columns all night. Let me rescue you. Come into the lounge, where you can talk to us of love and the law.’
So that was why she’d asked him here, for another grilling over the raid on Sophia’s. Yet even that discussion was over quick enough, she not disputing as he asked her, once both sat down around her coffee table with their mugs,
‘You know we’ve already a folder full of complaints?’
‘Yes, and little enough done about them.’
‘I have some experience of how these things work, and I’d have to tell you that if you keep pushing then something will be done; though you’d have to be prepared for everything that goes on there being gone over in public.’
Grey remembered talking to Derek Waldron in this room before, though on that occasion sat at the table in the window. How different the room had seemed in daylight, barely the same place in fact. Suffering the curse of the groundfloor flat, Grey knew the curtains would have had to have been pulled-to before the lights could come on, otherwise anything going on here could be seen across the front lawn and beyond. Even now, with the room bathed only in the warm glow of a standard lamp on one side of the chairs and on the other by an arrangement of spotlights attached to a central pole and pointing at odd angles, Grey knew that without drapes they would have been perfectly visible from the pavement.
Derek joined them, and reaching behind him from Rachel’s sideboard brought out a bottle of whisky he used to top up each mug. Grey, comfy in his chair, acceded. Derek broke the silence as he poured,
‘It’s not the same though,’
‘No, not without Stella and Charlie,’ concurred Rachel.
‘They used to join you?’
‘Off and on. Sometimes Stella just didn’t want to go to bed early, but she couldn’t manage much past eleven.’ She smiled at the reminiscence. ‘Though you’ve reminded me Derek, talking about the flats back there: she didn’t used to like you talking about your old buildings, did she. It used to needle her for some reason.’
‘Well it would do, wouldn’t it,’ said Grey, before remembering Rachel’s own comment on that first day: that in Stella’s life “there are decades unaccounted for”, and so even Rachel might not have known of her friend’s earlier days spent opposing redevelopment.
She hadn’t heard him though, continuing, ‘“No talking shop”, she’d say; not that she – ever the English teacher – could stop correcting our grammar or sourcing our quotations.’
‘And Charlie? What did he like to talk about?’
She sighed, seeming to sink even further into the soft chair, ‘You couldn’t really rely on Charlie for con
versation. Deep within himself I think some decision had been made that there were things he wasn’t ever going to deal with before he died, and this left a kind of resignation; but a happy one, the man was happy here. I think he loved us. Wow, Derek, how much whisky have you put in my mug?’
‘No more than normal. Sorry, a bit too much?’
Grey felt it too, though not the more usual sensation for him of one too many ales.
Rachel raised her glass, ‘Well, as we have a drink let’s toast them, our lost friends. You too, Inspector. They’re your friends now, you’re their final friend,’ she repeated from Tuesday, ‘the one who solves their mystery.’
They leaned in to clunk their earthenware mugs before falling back into the chairs,
‘I like this,’ she said, ‘I like remembering them…’ then after something of a pause, ‘I miss them,’ before, ‘Oh, look at me, how daft. I’m crying.’ She went to lift herself up and fell back in the chair. This might have struck Grey as odd, she having drank so little, had his own mind not been a bit under-speed itself.
‘Time to get someone to bed,’ said Derek, taking Rachel’s unemptied cup from her hands and putting it on the table. He lifted her beneath the arms up from the chair, and carried her the short distance to her bedroom. Grey attempted to lift himself to assist.
‘No, no, don’t trouble yourself, I’ve got her.’
As he fell back enervated against the warm leather, the Inspector’s mind struggled against its shackles, recognising what wasn’t right here even as his powers weakened. The last thing Grey saw before he blacked out was the figure of Derek Waldron, returned from the bedroom and standing over him.
Chapter 21 – Wake-up Call
Thursday
