A Ghost at the Door (24 page)

As DCI Edwards had warned, they summoned Harry back in for another session. Arrested him all over again, cautioned him once more, bundled him into a car. Same interview room,
same veneer, except there was no veneer left on Hughie Edwards. He walked in, grim-faced, clutching a file that was considerably thicker than the last time Harry had seen it. The DCI dropped it on
the table, there was much scraping of chairs, the sergeant switched on the tape recorder and read out the formalities. It began.

‘Morning,’ Edwards began. His voice was as dull and as flat as an iron. It wasn’t a greeting, merely a statement of fact.

‘I want the record to show,’ Theo van Buren began, anxious to land the first blow, ‘that my client has always been willing to attend on the police voluntarily and to help them
with your investigation in every way he can. There wasn’t any need to arrest him or to harass him.’

Edwards’s gaze didn’t flicker; his eyes fixed upon Harry’s face were like thin slices of pomegranate, bleeding from exhaustion. He ignored the solicitor. ‘She was
murdered. There were no bite marks, see. Couldn’t have been a bloody snake after all. Poisoned. That thick-as-treacle waitress was certain they were drinking, Inspector Hope and her murderer.
The till receipts suggest that someone bought two glasses of Pimm’s at around half past noon. In cash, of course. We think whatever killed her was in the drink.’

The solicitor was about to intervene once more but held back, wanting to hear more.

‘She was murdered, Harry,’ Edwards continued. ‘The woman you say was your friend was murdered. After you arranged to meet her. Then she was gone. Hell of a coincidence, that,
don’t you think? Or no coincidence at all. You want to tell me how you poisoned her?’ He held up a palm to silence the inevitable objection from van Buren. ‘A young woman has been
murdered in broad daylight, a young policewoman at that, and for doing nothing but her job. And your client’s got his fingerprints and name all over that case file, so, yes, I’ll harass
your client, Mr van Buren, I’ll hassle the entire population of London in order to get to the bottom of this one.’ He opened his file. ‘She had a young boy – did you know
that, Harry?’

Harry’s expression turned to one of intense pain.

‘Twelve years old, he is. That’s all. Brilliant sprinter, so I’m told, plenty of prospects. An education. Income. Now he’s on his own. Totally buggered.’

‘Chief Inspector, I must—’

But the policeman cut him off. ‘It’s a technical expression, Mr van Buren. You understand, don’t you, Harry?’

Harry nodded sadly.

‘You say she was poisoned,’ the solicitor began again.

‘In a drink.’

‘You’ve checked the glasses for fingerprints?’

‘There were no glasses.’

‘But you said—’

‘The murderer removed them, didn’t he, so we couldn’t find any fingerprints. Isn’t that right, Harry?’

‘So what evidence did you find at the table?’

‘Nothing but bird crap. And Inspector Hope’s body.’

‘No CCTV?’

‘Not in the restaurant. We’re still checking the cameras around the park but it was crawling with tourists. That’s what gets me, Harry. Hundreds of people watched Inspector
Hope die. She was sitting right there in front of the crowds, yet nobody remembers seeing a damned thing.’

‘So what evidence do you have against my client?’ the solicitor demanded, his voice rising in exasperation.

‘That’s what we’re here to find out, isn’t it?’

‘But there’s something I don’t understand,’ Harry intervened. ‘You said earlier that it was snake poison.’

‘And so it was, as good as. Synthetic. Made in a lab. That’s what took forensics so much time, they couldn’t identify it at first. Don’t ask me to explain all the
molecular bollocks but it’s based on cobra venom.’ He sniffed. ‘You travelled a bit, didn’t you, Harry, in your earlier life? Even spent some time in Africa.’

‘Sierra Leone.’

‘They have cobras in Africa.’

‘They also had cobras in Afghanistan when I was there.’

‘I’ve got snakes in my compost heap in Sussex,’ the lawyer said scornfully.

‘And in Colombia. You can add that to the list, too, Chief Inspector. I served there.’

‘Doesn’t show up on your military record,’ Edwards muttered, glancing at the file.

‘That’s because it wasn’t supposed to.’

‘Just checking.’ He was playing a game. He might sound clumsy at times but that was only to encourage the witness into being equally so. It was astonishing what suspects would blurt
out when they took you for granted.

‘This is ridiculous,’ van Buren snorted in contempt. ‘You said it was synthetic. Made in a lab.’

‘What was the nature of your relationship with the deceased?’ Edwards asked, keen to change course.

‘I first met her when I was in hospital a couple of weeks ago in Bermuda. And, before you ask, I have no idea whether there are cobras in Bermuda.’

Edwards smiled thinly at the sarcasm. ‘You were in Bermuda for what purpose?’

‘To talk with Susannah Ranelagh.’

‘A woman you had never met before in your life, so you claim.’

‘Correct.’

‘Yet you travelled halfway around the world to meet her.’

‘Yes.’

‘And who is now missing.’ He paused, like a boxer, watching Harry to see if he flinched. ‘Susannah Ranelagh is missing. And Inspector Hope is dead. You’re a very
dangerous man to be around, Harry.’

Van Buren reached out to grasp Harry’s sleeve; such loaded comments weren’t worthy of a reply.

‘OK, Miss Ranelagh was a lifelong friend of your father, so you’ve claimed, but you had never met her,’ Edwards began again.

‘That’s right.’

‘How strange. You see, she came back to this country frequently after she moved to Bermuda.’ He browsed through his paperwork. ‘The fact is she used to come back in October
every year, regular as rain in the valley, so she did, until . . .’ His thick forefinger traced through a series of dates. ‘Until 2001, it was. After that, not so frequent, not so
regular, but there were still the odd visits. And yet you say you never met her, not even the once.’

‘If I’d met her or known much about her I’d never have needed to ask for your help in finding her, would I?’

It was meant to be a shot across the bows and van Buren shook himself in both alarm and interest, but the policeman simply stared back at Harry, his pomegranate eyes dripping distrust.
‘Yes, that’s right. You called me asking me to check into the whereabouts of Miss Ranelagh. Claiming you had no idea what had happened to her. I think that was no more than a sordid
attempt to cover your backside and throw around a little confusion. I seem to remember telling you to go to hell.’

‘Actually, for the record, you used rather more robust language. Another technical expression. Anyway, Inspector Hope made a formal request only a few days later. I was simply ahead of the
game.’

‘And my client’s been trying to help your investigation ever since,’ van Buren added.

‘I even offered you a photograph of Miss Ranelagh and my father, which I thought might be of some use, but you weren’t interested.’

‘It was an informal conversation and I remember it very differently,’ Edwards replied evasively.

‘I’m still happy to let you have a copy,’ Harry declared, wanting to press home his advantage, ‘but you’ve taken my phone.’

‘That happens, when you get yourself arrested.’

‘No problem,’ van Buren said, sensing the DCI wasn’t half as confident as he sounded. ‘Harry sent me a copy, too. I’ve got it on my phone. We’re always happy
to help, Chief Inspector.’ He dug into his pocket and, after a couple of taps, the image appeared. He pushed the phone across the table; the DCI and sergeant bent over to peer at it.

‘Susannah Ranelagh’s in the middle, my father’s sitting to her right,’ Harry explained. ‘Members of the Oxford University Junior Croquet Club. Called the Aunt
Emmas.’

‘This is useless,’ Edwards muttered. ‘You told me it was fifty years old.’

‘I can’t help that,’ Harry replied, ‘but the fact is that at least two other people in that photo have died before their time. Violently. Croquet’s not supposed to
be like that.’

‘Fifty years,’ Edwards repeated doggedly. ‘That would make them seventy, or thereabouts. Nothing so surprising in that.’

And Harry knew there was no point. The DCI was interested in Delicious and in Harry and in murder in one of his parks, not in ancient riddles. Yet the sergeant sitting next to Edwards had
dragged the phone across the table so it was closer to him. He was staring intently, increasing the size of part of the image, licking his lips. ‘It may not be quite as simple as that,
sir.’

‘What the hell do you mean?’ Edwards snapped.

‘That one,’ the sergeant said, pointing. ‘The one on the left. I know he’s much younger but I’d swear a week’s pay it’s him.’

‘Who?’

‘Findlay Francis. The guy who writes celebrity biographies – you know, about minor royals and that sort of thing. Pretty salacious stuff. Landed himself in court a few years ago, and
up against a wall in a dark alleyway once in a while, too.’

‘You can’t be sure,’ Edwards bit back, deeply unimpressed. ‘Not even the facial-recognition boys could work on that.’

‘No, but . . . I’ve been looking at some of this guy’s books. Like politicians, aren’t they? Writers always use much younger photos on their covers. And I’m sure
that’s him.’

‘And what relevance do your reading habits have to our enquiries?’

‘That’s why I had some of his books, you see. He’s missing, too. His daughter reported it last Christmas.’

‘I think that’s enough for the moment,’ Edwards said through gritted teeth, snapping his file shut.

Harry sat out on the sundeck of his houseboat taking the neck off the third beer. It had been a bloody day. He couldn’t help but reflect that at one time, and not so long
ago, he’d been a soldier, an officer in the British Army and part of the finest support group he could ever hope to find. Even after that, when he’d been a politician, people had queued
up to persuade him he was important, special, wouldn’t leave him alone. Presidents and prime ministers had competed for his company. Now the world treated him like an open sewer. It would
take more than a few bottles of beer to wash away the taste of failure.

The fierce orange sun had sunk lower in the sky and was bouncing off the water, dazzling him even through the sunshades, so he closed his eyes and allowed the warmth of the evening to massage
away the weariness he was feeling inside, yet no sooner had he settled back in his chair than his ear began screaming at him, as painful as if it had just been ripped from his skull once more,
telling him that he’d screwed up. Again. In the farthest corner of Hell, Johnnie would be laughing.

Harry wanted Jemma, badly, but even more than that he needed to settle with Johnnie. Ever since men had picked up sticks and started using them as tools and weapons, they’d found a need to
know their origins, to understand where they came from, what made them different. Harry needed to know his father in order to know himself. Only then could he go back to Jemma, if she was still
around. He’d lost too many women in his life to give up on her but because he’d lost so many women he knew he ran a huge risk. She might not still be there. He growled at the sun,
sipped his beer, and hurt.

The wail of a police siren from Battersea Bridge away to his left brought back memories of his morning interview with Hughie Edwards. Harry had misjudged him, thought him a friend, but the man
had gone sour, and that had made him sloppy. He’d lost control of the interview, told Harry more about Susannah Ranelagh than Harry had been able to tell him, of her constant visits back to
Britain. What was that about? And Findlay Francis. That made five of the seven in the photo either dead or mysteriously missing, so screw coincidence. He beat at the cast on his arm in frustration.
With his good arm he reached for another beer.

The bishop was still around, of course, or so he’d been told, yet although Harry had gone about it like a ferret down a rabbit warren he’d still been unable to trace him.
Crockford’s Clerical Directory
offered no contact details, only that he’d retired from the episcopate two years previously. Harry had Googled and
Wiki
-ed but had found
nothing of use, he’d called the Bishop’s House in Burton, where a secretary had patiently explained that it was strictly forbidden to give out Bishop Randall’s private details,
although she offered to forward any letter that Harry might care to send. He’d even tried Helen in the Steward’s Office in Christ Church and got a fulsome expression of regret, but much
the same answer. In the end he had no choice. In a mood of deep frustration Harry had written the letters and asked for them to be forwarded.

His mood grew darker as the beer evaporated and a helicopter flew overhead, jarring the air as it made for the heliport upriver. Just a couple of miles on the other side Jemma would be fixing a
solitary supper – or would she? There were no agreed rules for their separation, nothing more than the understanding that Jemma needed space and time ‘to make sure that what we’re
about to do is the right thing’. It had sounded almost reasonable, particularly after she’d finished shagging his brains out on the sofa, but, as the days passed and he became all too
familiar with the eccentricities of living on the water, his world began to grow ever more lonely. How much longer? he’d asked on the phone. But she couldn’t, wouldn’t, say.
He’d suggested a drink at their favourite pub but she’d turned him down. It wouldn’t help, she’d said. Would they end the evening with a chaste goodbye or making up for lost
time behind some park bush? ‘This is the biggest step I’ll ever take in my life, Harry. Just give me time.’

Time to rip off the top of a fifth bottle, or was it the seventh?

He tried to banish thoughts of Jemma from his mind. Instead, he latched on to the memory of Delicious standing in her shower, but, even as the memory inspired that special sensation of warmth
inside, the image changed to the wrinkled face of Susannah Ranelagh. Why had she kept coming back, year after year? Not to celebrate any parent’s birthday: they were both probably long gone
from this world. And not simply for a holiday, not during the encroaching greyness of October. Harry felt more than a little lost. He sat back, closed his eyes, tried to empty his mind and listen
to the music of the old river while its current carried his cares away downstream.