Betrayal (43 page)

‘Yes, Mary.’

‘And Hugh? I think you’re amazing, you know that? Absolutely totally amazing.’

I said goodbye before she could explain what she meant by that.

George sat with his back to the study window. Even allowing for the gloom of the rain-swept day, his complexion had an unhealthy grey cast, the pallor of exhaustion and worry, and watching him talk his way through the latest sales figures it occurred to me that with his straining belly, exercise-free lifestyle and rocketing stress levels he was prime heart attack material. Even now he was wading into the chocolate biscuits, washed down by a second cup of Ginny’s powerful French coffee.

I interrupted him in mid-sentence. ‘What will you do if we find ourselves out of a job, George?’

‘Do?’ He tried to look surprised at the question, but I could see he’d given it some thought. ‘Well, Dorothy fancies a cruise. The
Oriana
, she’s keen on the
Oriana
. And me, I fancy some golf. After that . . .’ He made a wry face. ‘Fifty-five isn’t the sort of age when they beat on your door, is it?’

‘Retirement, then?’

‘I suppose. But I might do the odd thing. I thought – a small garden ornament business.’

‘Ornaments?’ I couldn’t suppress a smile. ‘Not gnomes, George?’

‘Yes,’ he said with perfect seriousness. ‘But mainly birdbaths, larger statuary. They’ve developed this composite that looks like the finest stone but comes in at half the weight. I think there’s a market. At the right price.’ And we exchanged a smile. ‘At the right price’ had been a catchphrase of my father’s.

‘And you?’ George asked.

‘Me? Ahh. Well, I used to paint. I wouldn’t mind having another go at it. Oh, I don’t mean professionally – too late for that – but for my own amusement. Watercolours, I expect. Landscapes, like every other amateur.’

‘And work?’

In the garden a rain squall was flailing the leaves from the rose bushes and ripping the petals from the last spindly blooms. Grasping at a half-considered thought, I said, ‘Something hands-on. Something
impractical
. A vineyard. A small farm.’

‘Abroad?’

‘Probably.’ I let the thought expand and settle. ‘Won’t make me rich, of course.’

‘You wouldn’t want something more challenging?’

‘More challenging? You mean, more stressful, more time-consuming? No.’ And I was surprised and reassured by my own certainty. ‘No, I wouldn’t want all that again. I’ve been on the roller coaster too long, George. I want out for a while. I want time to dawdle a bit. To remember each day. To notice its passing.’

George considered this with slight puzzlement before returning his weary gaze to the sales figures. ‘Not off the roller coaster yet.’

I almost said: More’s the pity.

As we came to the monthly financial summary the phone buzzed and Ginny said, ‘There’s someone on the direct line. Joe somebody. You asked him to call you, so he says.’

My stomach clenched. I said with false calm, ‘Put him on, would you?’ I took the phone across the room to the length of its cord.

‘Joe?’

A curt ‘Yeah’.

‘Thanks for calling. I was wondering if I could come and see you.’ Silence. I felt a momentary panic. ‘Joe?’ I said into the silence.

‘Yeah.’

I repeated, ‘I need to see you.’

‘Gimme one good reason.’

‘Jean-Paul must have told you—’ Aware of George, I lowered my voice still further. ‘They’ve got it all wrong. My wife is not the person.’

‘Yeah, well. You would say that, wouldn’t you?’

‘Maybe,’ I said carefully. ‘But that doesn’t stop it being true. And I can tell you why.’

‘Yeah?’ The scorn again. ‘And why should I listen?’

I sighed, ‘Because we both want the same thing. I assume. We want the person who killed Sylvie.’

He exhaled grudgingly into the phone. ‘Yeah, well . . . But if you’re windin’ me up, I’ll fuckin’ kill you. Okay?’

Heavy rain and Saturday night theatre traffic had reduced the western approach roads to a crawl, and by the time I had battled my way along the Marylebone Road and into the dripping labyrinths of Camden Town I was half an hour late. In the glimmer of the tawdry shop lights the
A to Z
offered obscure advice, and after negotiating the one-way system twice, I worked my way onto the Camden Road and, more by chance than design, found the right street.

Joe’s place stood at the end of a terrace of identical Victorian houses with blackened brickwork and sullen windows with unshaded light bulbs and drooping curtains. The porch was unlit and if there were names against the cluster of bells I couldn’t see them in the feeble glow of the streetlamps. I began to press each bell in turn and, reaching the third, the door sprang open with a loud buzz.

The hall smelled of old frying and new damp and mouldering carpet. Unclaimed letters and circulars littered the floor and a scribbled message on one wall informed the world that Jake and Janey had moved to another address.

I made my way up to the top of the house but no doors opened. Turning back, I followed loud music to a door on the first floor and knocked. A Rastafarian with a knitted hat gave a wide shrug at the name of Joe and waved me doubtfully up the house again. Climbing the last flight of stairs once more, I looked up and saw Joe standing on the landing above.

Through the crack of the open door behind him I glimpsed shabby wallpaper and a Monet exhibition poster, but he didn’t invite me inside. Instead he leant against the doorframe with one arm folded and a cigarette held dart fashion in the other. His hair fell in lank waves over his shoulders while a dark stubble crawled unevenly over a thin jowl and scraggy neck. He didn’t give the impression of having washed too recently.

‘I wanted to ask you about the people Sylvie knew,’ I began haltingly. ‘Whether there was anyone who might have had reason to harm her.’

‘You goin’ to crack the case all on yer own, are yer?’ he scoffed with an ugly laugh.

‘Maybe not,’ I admitted. ‘But at least I’ll have tried.’

‘The fuzz been through all this a thousand times, asked loadsa questions. So why should they be wrong all of a sudden?’

‘Well, they damn well are,’ I said. ‘My wife just . . . Well, she found the body, that was all.’

He pitched me a do-me-a-favour look and, drawing on his cigarette, funnelled the smoke expertly out of the side of his mouth. ‘And I suppose you don’t know nothing about it either.’

‘I’d hardly be here otherwise.’

‘You’d hardly be here,’ he echoed in a mocking imitation of my accent.

Ignoring this, I said, ‘I wondered about the drugs. Who Sylvie dealt with, whether she’d got on the wrong side of anyone. A dealer, perhaps.’

Suddenly he was still, his eyes wary behind the wafting smoke. ‘A
dealer
?’ He shook his head. ‘She never got on the wrong side of any dealer. She hadn’t been near a dealer.’

‘Who did she get it from then?’ I added: ‘And who did she pass it on to?’

He searched my face as though he suspected me of laying some elaborate trap. ‘Pass it on?’

‘She collected some stuff in France. Enough for an army.’

He took a last drag of his cigarette before dropping it onto the pockmarked carpet and grinding it in with his heel. ‘That wasn’t any big deal.’

‘It was a large packet.’

‘So she got stuff for everyone. So.’

‘Everyone?’

‘People. Friends. We all forked out for it. It was like a co-op. She made the collection.’

I took a long breath and tried another tack. ‘The man she got it from, the man in Cherbourg, was he a regular –
supplier
?’

‘Nah. Friend. Doing us a favour.’ Now he was watching me with lazy curiosity, wondering how far I would take this, and perhaps also wondering how far he would let me go.

‘What about Hayden?’

‘What about him?’

‘Do you know where I can find him?’

‘Why d’yer wanna know?’

I mustered my patience. ‘To ask him the same questions.’

‘Yeah?’ he shrugged. ‘Well, he’s abroad some place, isn’t ’e? Greece. Turkey. On some fat-cat yacht.’ Taking some pity on me he added, ‘Listen, he can’t tell you anything.’ I noticed that Joe’s grammar, like his accent, came and went, that occasionally the politically correct yoof mumble slipped to reveal the unmistakable education beneath. Minor public school, I guessed. Home counties upbringing.

I said with a small gesture of defeat, ‘So if he can’t help me, who can?’

Through bleary eyes he gazed at me appraisingly and, with a long lumbering sigh, seemed to come to some kind of decision. ‘Look . . . We got stuff in France, okay. Elk knew this geezer in Cherbourg—’

‘Elk?’

‘Charlie Hayden – Elk. The stuff came from Paris. But it was only, like, twice. A favour, that was all. No big deal.’

Putting a casual note into my voice, I asked, ‘What was it, the stuff?’

He looked away crossly, he wasn’t certain he wanted to answer that. ‘Coke,’ he admitted finally. ‘And some junk, too.’

Some instinct told me. ‘Sylvie was on heroin.’

He raised his eyebrows slightly in agreement. ‘She was clean when she went down to Dittisham, she’d done the treatment, the full bit. NA, therapy sessions. But then . . .’ He raised a dismissive shoulder and pulled a battered pack of Lucky Strikes from his shirt pocket. I waited silently while he found a light and coughed over his first pull. He tucked one arm under the other and settled into his bird-like stance. ‘Then someone started giving her stuff again.’

‘Who?’

‘Dunno. I wasn’t around then. But whoever it was kept it coming.’

‘A
dealer
, then?’

He shook his head. ‘Nah. Not a dealer. A friend.’

‘What sort of friend?’ But perhaps that was a stupid question. ‘A lover?’

‘Maybe.’

‘She had a lover?’ And the thought sent a sudden tension into my belly.

‘I guess. But like I said, I wasn’t around then.’

‘When did you get down there?’

He blew out his cheeks with the effort of memory. ‘Jeese . . . Umm, June? Yeah, some time then.’

I wasn’t sure where this was leading, or how best to pursue it. ‘Who would know?’ I asked eventually. ‘Who was around before you got down there?’

He chased something round his teeth with his tongue while he thought about that. ‘Yeah – Elk. Elk might know. Yeah. He was around then.’

‘But Elk wasn’t the guy?’

‘What? Nah. Not Elk. Elk never did junk.’

‘Was he her lover, though?’

He guffawed, a coarse braying sound. ‘Nah. He and Sylvie, they didn’t get on. I mean, like they hung out together but they fought. Nah,’ he said adamantly, ‘not Elk.’

‘What about the woman who worked in the pottery shop? Would she have known about Sylvie’s friends?’

‘Doubt it.’

‘What was her name?’

‘Liz.’ He waved his cigarette vaguely. ‘Never knew ’er second name.’

I was drained of ideas. I murmured, ‘And there was no one else you can think of . . .’

‘What, that mighta killed her? Nah.’ His expression grew sly. ‘Only you.’

‘Don’t be bloody stupid,’ I said in sudden anger. ‘You know it wasn’t me.’

He snorted, ‘I dunno that! Why should I know that?’

‘Because I hadn’t seen her in weeks. Because she wasn’t coming to see me that afternoon.’

‘She said she was goin’ out to the boat.’

So that was what he had told the police. ‘Not quite the same thing,’ I pointed out.

Suddenly he was in no mood to concede this or anything else. ‘Yeah, well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?’

The place was lovely, a sturdy farmhouse in grey stone with a sheltered garden and views of Dartmoor. It wasn’t too large, hardly more than a substantial cottage, and it had a tranquil comforting air, the sort of place where you could imagine yourself hidden from the world.

It seemed promising to me. Mary thought so too because she kept extolling its virtues in ever more extravagant terms, but as David and I followed the women into the garden a certain futility seemed to settle over the expedition. I sensed that Ginny had taken a dislike to the place and that nothing any of us could say was likely to change her mind.

‘How do you think she looks?’ I asked David quietly.

‘Ginny? Oh . . . Surprisingly well, really. Getting on with Jones all right, is she?’

We paused by a weathered sundial. I hesitated, caught between loyalty and a painful need for reassurance. ‘He thinks she’s suffering from some sort of delusion.’

‘Christ, aren’t we all?’

‘You don’t think it’s serious then?’

‘Look, I’m not the right person to ask,’ he protested. ‘Doctors know damn-all about psychiatry. We just shove patients towards the men in white coats and breathe a sigh of relief when they’re willing to take them on. And then again, most of us are a bit worried about being found lacking in the mental department ourselves.’ He gave a dry bark of a laugh. ‘You know how the statistics go – doctors sky-high in the suicide league, not to mention the alcohol stakes.’

‘It’s just that I find it hard to judge how good he is.’

‘You and me both. There’s not one of them that ever agrees. They argue like crazy between themselves. I can only say that Jones seems to be the best around.’

‘He thinks she might find the strain too much.’

‘Well, I
would
take notice of that. Psychiatric claptrap aside, it’s the one thing he’s likely to get right.’

Absorbing this as best I could, we strolled on through an arch into a paved herb garden. The women were a long way ahead, disappearing around the back of the house.

‘How’s the case coming along?’ David asked with sudden awkwardness. ‘Anything I can help with?’

‘Not really. Everything’s on hold until the prosecution present their evidence.’ We came to a halt again. ‘There was something though . . .’ I framed the question with care. ‘I know you said that you only saw Sylvie a couple of times, and there was no way of telling she was on drugs, but what about heroin? Can’t you tell with that?’

David looked away towards the rise of the moor. ‘In women they say the skin gets a luminous look – quite beautiful, apparently – but unless you know the person . . .’ A dismissive lift of the shoulders. ‘Otherwise needle marks, of course. But you would have to
see
them.’