Come Clean (1989) (28 page)

Harpur said: ‘I don’t think –’

‘I’m only asking about the general area,’ Hazel told him.

‘She’s been trying to get it out of her already,’ Jill said.

‘Mouth,’ Hazel snarled.

Harpur made them leave. At once the girl said: ‘Justin Paynter and I were, are, well –’

‘Yes. I’ve been trying to get in touch.’

‘How did you know about me?’

He could not say that her name was on a favoured numbers directory at Justin’s flat, along with his mother’s, Jack Lamb’s and Benny Loxton’s, because Harpur should never
have gone into his flat. ‘I picked up some gossip that you were his girl friend.’

For a moment, she gazed at him and her dark eyes tightened and became too sharp and disbelieving to be at all Pre-Raphaelite any longer. ‘All right, if that’s what you say.’
She paused, obviously scared to ask the question that came next, the one he knew was on the way and which he had dreaded from the moment he saw her. ‘Mr Harpur, the body taken from the dock?
It’s Justin?’

So, he withdrew deftly into officialese. ‘We’ve no positive identification yet.’

Again she gazed at him. ‘No, but is it? You don’t have to treat me like a simpleton.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t go further just now.’

‘Oh, Jesus, what sort of language is that?’

‘It’s the best I can do. At this stage.’

‘At this stage.’

‘We’re waiting for information.’

She nodded a bit and her jaw twitched. ‘What you mean is, you thought it might be Justin when you called up the crane and nothing about the body has made you change your mind?’

That was spot on, but he said: ‘We’ve no positive identification, Amanda.’

‘You want me to look at him, so you won’t have to bother his mother? Is that why you’ve been trying to get in touch?’

Yes, they would like her to look at him, though he did not feel like telling her so yet. She might not find him easy to recognize. ‘I was trying to make contact with you before any of this
at the dock. I needed to ask you a few things.’

‘What things?’

‘Well, we wanted to trace Justin.’

‘And I might be the route. How did you know?’

Again he held back.

‘Oh, yes, gossip,’ she said.

‘That’s it. We live on that.’

‘Why did you want to trace him?’

‘Well, we’d heard he had dropped out of sight.’

‘More gossip?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who does all this gossiping?’

‘All sorts.’

‘And you don’t say which all sorts?’

‘If we did, the gossip would stop.’

She sat with her hands clasped in her lap, head bent forward, almost like somebody in prayer, or someone trying to sweet-talk a social security clerk. ‘But why would it bother you that
Justin wasn’t around? He’s grown up, entitled to move off.’

‘Of course, but some people we like to keep in sight.’

‘Why Justin?’

He ignored that. ‘How did you get on to me, Amanda? My address?’

She spoke towards her feet. The words came hesitantly, and not very loud. ‘Justin told me, if anything tricky happened, you know, if anything went badly wrong with him, to get hold of you
because you were straight. Straightish. Exactly what he said was that you were the best around – that’s to say, the best copper around.’

She added the last words as if this limiting of the field made all the difference: the best of a shady lot. He was glad he had sent the children out. Otherwise, there would have been some
sniggers.

‘It was Justin who said see you at your house, not the nick. Privacy for both parties. He gave me the address. I didn’t want to disturb your home. I almost came to the station this
afternoon, regardless.’

‘It’s okay. The kids are used to it.’ He would not have been at his office because it had been one of his afternoons with Ruth Cotton in a side-street hotel, out of sight, out
of line, out of clothes for a few hours. As happened now and then or oftener, she had been saying they must finish, and he felt half-exhausted from arguing, or perhaps it was pleading. Maybe he had
managed to patch things again. He was not sure. Often lately he was not sure.

Amanda seemed to have grown more tense. She would need time before they spoke again. ‘So, how about some tea for me?’ he called to the girls.

‘I thought we’d been kicked out?’ Hazel shouted from the other room.

‘You have. I want tea, not your company.’

‘You’ve been up to my place?’ Amanda asked.

‘A few times. Neighbours said you’d gone abroad to the sun. Marbella?’

She managed a laugh. ‘Some hope. I told them Spain and let them think it was with another guy – to make it look as if I wasn’t simply Justin’s girl. Suddenly it seemed to
me that had become a very dangerous role. But the Mediterranean? So, where’s the tan? I just got out of sight as soon as Justin disappeared – not far away, but not visible.’

‘You thought you might be next?’

‘Does it sound far-fetched? I didn’t know what to think, but I wasn’t going to hang about wondering. All I knew, Justin runs with Benny Loxton, yes? Or ran. If he’s
crossed them, everybody close to him has crossed them. Would you take chances? Have you met that Macey? I’m told technically he’s sane.’ Hazel brought in a mug of tea for him.

‘Where’s Mum?’ he asked.

She shrugged: ‘At Louise Ettinger’s discussing the PLO or the snooker final or the NHS or
The Bonfire of the Vanities
with the rest of the intellectual cream?’ She left
again.

Amanda lifted her head and looked at him blank-faced. ‘Say, then. Would you like me to give an identification? You’re sure it’s him, aren’t you? I’d be a formality.
Or does it have to be family?’

‘We’re –’

She made her voice flat, matter-of-fact: ‘Were there wounds on him, Mr Harpur?’

‘At this stage, we’re not saying anything at all. There has to be a proper examination.’ He tried to turn her from these questions. ‘I was looking for you to ask whether
Justin had said anything to show he was troubled – worried?’

She gave another pained laugh, as if dealing with someone hopelessly naïve. ‘You couldn’t work for Benny Loxton and not feel worried some time. Maybe Justin didn’t
appreciate what he’d let himself in for.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Look, I don’t know what their business is, and Justin would never have told me. I didn’t ask, and I knew he wouldn’t have said, even if I had. Probably, I didn’t
want to know. All right, I admit that. But I had the idea there were bits of it that might not smell too sweet. Perhaps there are bits in most businesses like that, though. These stories about the
City. After all, Loxton was running whatever it was without being pulled in by you and yours, and he’s very high profile yet apparently socially acceptable – charity dances and what not
– so I assumed it had to be just about all right. Not production of gospel tracts, but okay. As far as Justin was concerned, though, there was a hell of a lot of strain, I could see that.
That’s what I mean: he was out of his depth.’ He watched her wince at the words she had picked.

‘What strain, Amanda?’

‘I didn’t see him all that often, you know. He wasn’t crying on my shoulder every day.’

‘But some days?’

‘Yes, some days.’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘Look, it is him, isn’t it?’ She began to cry suddenly as if it had all been locked in for too long. Even now, she covered her face with her hands, clearly ashamed to have
given way, and he saw that she wore a garnet ring on her engagement finger. ‘Christ, this is my bloke, chucked into mud and filth by a crew of bloody thugs and zombies. What am I doing,
sitting here, discussing his way of life when his way of life is over? This is a sort of betrayal, you know that? Mr Harpur, there were some good things about him, but those people just wanted to
pull him down and down. Maybe he wouldn’t go any further, and that’s why what happened happened.’ Her voice had become hoarse and loud and when Harpur looked up Hazel and Jill
were standing in the doorway staring at her, Hazel almost weeping herself.

‘Daddy, what’s wrong with her?’ Jill said. ‘What are you saying to upset her so much?’

‘Is there someone dead?’ Hazel asked. ‘His job’s almost always about the dead.’

Amanda wiped her face and tried to smile at them. ‘No, it’s not because of your Daddy, Jill. Something’s gone a bit wrong. Somebody I know. It’s just for now. I’ll
be all right soon.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Hazel said. ‘You don’t believe it.’

‘Yes, I promise,’ Amanda told her. She stood up and walked to the girls, then crouched down on bent knees, her face at their level. ‘Your Dad’s trying to help me,’
she said.

‘Are you sure?’ Jill replied. ‘Sometimes when he seems to be trying to help people he’s really only smarming them along, pretending to be a friend, and aiming to land
them in it deeper. That’s police. It’s called interrogation skills. They have books about it. Worse than selling double-glazing around the doors.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ Amanda said.

‘Will she, Dad?’ Hazel asked.

He could not really give a yes to that. ‘We’re trying to work things out,’ he said.

‘You’ll never get a straight answer out of him,’ Hazel told Amanda.

‘Why don’t you really help her, Dad?’

‘I would if I could.’

‘Why don’t you tell her what it is she wants to know?’ Jill asked.

‘Because I don’t know it myself.’

‘You always know it. You act dumb,’ Hazel said. She reached out and straightened a sheaf of Amanda’s hair, which had fallen across her forehead. Then the two girls turned and
left again. Amanda shut the door and remained standing near it, tall, thin and very tense, but she had stopped weeping.

‘Justin’s a pointer to something else, is he?’ she asked.

‘I don’t follow.’

‘You, a chief superintendent, up at my place looking for him because he’s not around? Justin was never that important. You go personally to investigate every missing person, and this
one not even reported? It doesn’t make sense.’

‘What could he point to?’ Harpur asked.

‘He worked for Loxton.’

‘Come and sit down again.’ She made a show of refusal, briefly, as though he were trying to seduce her, and then did as he suggested. There did not seem much fight left in her, or
much hope. ‘I still don’t get it,’ Harpur said. ‘He worked for Loxton. So?’

‘So, were you trying to reach Loxton through him?’ Once more the conversation suddenly seemed to strike her as wrong, monstrous. She began to yell again. ‘I get the idea that a
kind of bargain is under way here, you know that? It goes like this – if I answer your questions, you might eventually tell me if Justin’s dead. But I’ve got nothing to bargain
with, Harpur. Justin never told me anything.’

‘Were you surprised when he disappeared?’

As if afraid of disturbing the children again she glanced towards the door of the other room and when she resumed talking it was in not much more than a whisper. ‘He didn’t phone. I
rang him, eventually, and no answer.’

‘He was supposed to phone?’

‘Most days he would ring. We were close.’ She fingered the ring. It seemed modest, almost poverty-stricken, for someone working with Benny. Perhaps Justin had still not been making
very much, or perhaps neither of them liked the flash. ‘Mr Harpur, was Justin – all right, was the body in the car, whoever it is, was he alive when it went into the water? They can
tell, can’t they?’

‘Yes, they can tell. We don’t know yet.’ Probably, she would want to hear he was not, though that would lead back to agonizing questions and answers about how he died, and
whether there were injuries on the body. There were injuries and it looked to him as if they might have been enough. ‘The last time you saw him, or spoke to him, Amanda, did he seem
especially troubled? All right, you say he was always troubled working for Loxton, but was it worse?’

‘We just talk across each other, don’t we?’ she said. ‘I want to know about Justin, you want to know about Loxton. That’s what I mean, a sort of deal, but I
don’t seem to be getting much out of it. I suppose the question is, can I ever win? I’m sick if you don’t tell me, and I’m sick if you do.’ Again she glanced towards
the door, seemingly to make sure the children were not there. ‘You’ve got women in your life, Mr Harpur – what I hear. Well, obviously, your wife, but the other, as well, which
Justin mentioned. So you know how I feel, don’t you? Don’t you?’

As a sudden kick in the crutch this was not bad. It always shook him when someone talked about Ruth and him like that, even though Harpur knew he was crazy to imagine he could keep her a secret:
after all, they used local hotels and his picture appeared on local television and in the papers reasonably often. Although nobody at the hotels ever showed they knew him, and never queried the
false names he used, that did not stop them spreading the story. He could not blame Amanda. She was desperate enough to pull any trick, try any pressure.

In any case, even before she chose to launch that one, he had come to feel it must be hellishly worse for her not to know the truth on Justin, and he felt, too, that he could not bear to keep
her in this state any longer. Now he had seen how deep her despair went he decided to talk. ‘Okay. Amanda, we’re pretty certain it’s him. I’ve never seen Justin, nor my
colleagues, but the circumstantial stuff is strong, I’m very sorry to tell you. We think he was probably killed by a couple of knife wounds before the car went into the water.’ In fact,
there had been a lot of argument: he and Iles said yes, Garland, as well as the sergeant diver no. The doctors might be able to settle it, ultimately. But he had nothing else to offer as comfort,
and she needed it now.

She resumed that very still, head-bent attitude again opposite him, staring down at her shoes. If anything, she had grown paler, even more beautiful and defeated-looking. In a while she said:
‘He really was a nobody. For me he was great, but in the outfit, a nobody. Perhaps you know that already. I can’t see why he had to be killed. He wasn’t big enough.’

‘Why I was asking whether he’d said anything. We’re puzzled, too.’

‘You think Loxton, or his people?’