Orchestrated Death (36 page)

‘Hullo?’

‘Hullo, Joanna.’

‘Bill! I didn’t think I’d be hearing from you again.’

‘Didn’t you?’ He sounded genuinely surprised.

‘It’s been a long time,’ she said.

‘I did phone once or twice before, but I got your answering machine, and I didn’t want to talk to that.’

‘I wish you had. At least I’d have known –’

‘Known what?’

‘That you – that you were still around.’

‘I’m not really. Around, I mean. I’m away.’

‘Oh.’ She was determined not to ask questions. For three weeks she had waited with diminishing hope, feeling only that she
must not be the one to ask.

After a silence he said, ‘You aren’t angry with me, are you?’

‘No, not angry. Why should I be?’

‘Did Atherton phone you?’

‘He told me that you were in hospital but that it wasn’t serious.’

‘Is that all? Nothing else?’

‘No. Was he supposed to?’

‘I asked him to let you know what was going on. I suppose he forgot. There must have been a hell of a lot to do, especially
with me away and Raisbrook not coming back.’

Forgot my arse! Joanna thought. She said, ‘Where are you, then?’

‘I’m staying with my father in Essex. They gave me long leave.’

‘Upper Hawksey,’ she remembered.

That’s where I’m calling from now. The thing is – I wondered if you were going to have any time off in the next couple of
days? I wondered if you’d like to come out here for the day? It’s quite nice – country and all that.’

‘Wouldn’t your father mind?’ She meant, ‘what about your wife’, and he understood that and answered all parts of the question.

‘Irene’s not here. She’s at home with the children. I didn’t want them to miss school. In any case, I’m supposed to be having
peace and quiet. I’ve told Dad about you.’

Joanna’s heart gave an unruly, unreasonable leap. ‘Oh?’

‘He’s a good bloke.’ He said it like a justification. ‘I value his advice. I told him I wanted to ask you to come out, and
he said he didn’t mind. I think he wants to meet you, though he didn’t say so out loud. Well, it’s his generation, you know.’

‘Yes.’

‘Joanna, you’re not saying much.’

‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m not sure. I feel as if I’ve been going through a nightmare.’

‘Yes, me too.’ Understatement of the decade, she thought. ‘Will you come, then? I’d like to have a chance to talk to you.
But if you don’t feel like coming out I shall quite understand.’

No you won’t understand, you diffident bastard, she thought. ‘Yes, I’ll come, if you want me to. I could come tomorrow.’

‘That would be perfect.’

‘You’d better give me instructions, then.’

He was waiting for her at the end of the lane, and signalled for her to pull over onto the mud-strip lay-by. She obeyed and
got out and stood looking at him, her heart in her mouth. His eyebrows had gone, and his front hair was
stubbly, and across the top of his forehead the skin had a shiny, plastic look. His hands were still bandaged. Otherwise,
there was no sign of what he had gone through.

But he had a skinned look, as though he had had too close a haircut. His face seemed to have lost flesh, so that his nose
and ears were too prominent, and it made him look curiously young. He was wearing a shabby sweater, a pair of baggy cords,
and Wellingtons too big for him, and she saw how these suited him much better than town clothes. He was a country boy by birth
and blood, and he looked at home here against the bare hedges and the wide, flat, soggy brown fields.

The lack of eyebrows made him look surprised, and his smile was hesitant and shy. She loved him consumingly, and didn’t know
what to say, how to approach him, even if it were permitted to cross the gap between them.

He said, ‘I think it would be best if you were to leave it here. It’ll be quite safe, but with mine and Dad’s down there already,
the lane’s getting a bit churned up. Dad’s out at the moment. He’s usually out all day. We’ve got the place to ourselves until
teatime. Shall we go and have a drink and some lunch? I wasn’t sure if you’d be hungry or not.’

He was talking too much, he knew, but he couldn’t stop himself, and her silence was unnerving him. He had been thinking about
her for so long, and it had made her unreal in his mind. Now seeing her again he didn’t know what he was feeling, what he
was going to do, whether asking her here had been brave or stupid or right or selfish. They stared at each other awkwardly,
out of reach.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked at last, and nodded towards his bandages. ‘Those look a bit fearsome.’

He waved them. ‘Oh, they’re not as bad as they look. They’re nearly healed now, but I wear the bandages to keep them clean.
Practically everything I do here seems to involve getting filthy. It’s very enjoyable.’ He smiled tentatively, but she was
still studying him.

‘You look thinner. Or is it just the haircut?’

‘Both. I had to have the haircut because I’d got singed in a couple of places. You see the old eyebrows are gone. They’ll
grow back, of course, probably thicker than before. I’ll end
up looking like Dennis Healey.’ She didn’t smile at his attempted joke, and he grew serious in his turn. ‘Atherton got me
out just in time. If it hadn’t been for him – and you, raising the alarm … You saved my life between you.’

She turned her head away. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘For God’s sake, no gratitude. I couldn’t stand that.’ She was suddenly nervous.
‘That isn’t what you asked me here for?’

‘No. I – No. I wanted to see you. I had to talk to you.’ He bit his lip. ‘Let’s get comfortable first. Come on, there’s no
sense standing about here.’

She fell in beside him and they walked up the muddy, rutted lane to the house. He led her into the kitchen where they shed
their muddied footwear and he sat her at the table– wooden, and scrubbed, like a children’s story, she thought– and gave her
a gin and tonic.

‘I had to send out for supplies for this,’ he said, bringing her glass to her between bandaged palms. ‘Dad only drinks beer,
and homemade wine, and I wouldn’t inflict that on you.’

‘You didn’t have to go to all that trouble. I could have drunk beer,’ she said.

‘I wanted you to have what you like.’ He put the glass down in front of her, and their eyes met. He wanted to touch her, but
he didn’t know how to cross the space between them. He didn’t know what she was thinking. She might not welcome the gesture.
But she had come here, hadn’t she? Or was that just curiosity?

The silence had gone on too long now. He turned away and fetched his own drink.

‘Dad likes to have his tea when he gets in,’ he said, ‘so I thought we’d just have a light lunch, if that’s all right?’

‘Anything you like. Yes, that’s fine.’

‘Can you eat mushrooms on toast? I do them rather nicely.’

‘That would be lovely. Can you manage, with your hands?’

‘Oh yes. They don’t hurt. Don’t you do anything – just sit there. I’ve never had the chance to cook for you yet.’

The words pleased and pained her with their innocence. It was tender, and rather gauche, and she loved him all over
again, and was afraid she was going to be asked to pay a second time. She watched him as he moved with assurance around the
kitchen where he had grown up. He looked so much younger here, and it wasn’t just the effect of the haircut. It was something
to do with being back in the parental home. She had noticed before that people shed years when they were once more in the
situation of being child to a father or mother.

As the gin eased the tension, he began to talk more naturally, about neutral subjects, and she listened, her eyes following
him, her body relaxed. It was when they were sitting opposite each other with food to occupy their hands that he finally turned
to the case.

‘It seems incredible that I haven’t spoken to you since the night Ronnie Brenner was killed. I don’t really know how much
you know. What made you ring the station, anyway?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, looking inward, her eyes dark. ‘I just had a bad feeling about it: you seemed so strange. So I stopped
at the first phone box and rang the station and asked to speak to your friend O’Flaherty, and when he said you weren’t there,
I told him everything. Of course, you might have gone home, but I couldn’t check up on that. I expected him to tell me there
was nothing to worry about, but he took it seriously, thank God. He told me he’d find out where you were and ring me straight
back.’

She looked to see if he knew all this, but he nodded and said, ‘Go on.’

‘Well, apparently he sent a radio car round to whatsis-name’s house, Brenner, and then of course it was red alert. O’Flaherty
and Atherton put their heads together and decided the most likely thing was that you’d gone off to see the bogus vet, and
Atherton just got in his car and drove like a mad thing.’ She looked at him. ‘He does care about you, you know.’

‘Yes,’ Slider said, looking at his plate. ‘And did O’Flaherty phone you back? It must have been hell for you.’

‘Not that time, but later. He called back in about ten minutes to tell me what they were doing to find you. But then I had
to go on to work, and that was the longest evening of my life. God knows what I played like. It wasn’t until I got
home that I was able to find out what had happened. That was when Atherton phoned to tell me you were in hospital with shock
and minor burns.’

That had been the beginning of the long wait and the slow decline of hope. She could not go and visit, in case Irene was there.
She had tried ringing, but the hospital wouldn’t give out information except to relatives. And then she had decided that if
he wanted her, he would get in contact with her, and that if he didn’t, she mustn’t make it hard for him. So she had done
nothing, and the silence had extended itself, and she had thought that that was her answer.

Now he said, ‘They weren’t pleased with me, you know. With Hildyard dead, they had to have some sort of investigation into
him, and he turned out to be a pretty unsatisfactory customer. He was German by birth – his real name was Hildebrand. He studied
veterinary surgery at Nuremburg until the outbreak of the war, and then he joined the Luftwaffe – Intelligence Corps.’

‘So that’s where he got the “Captain”, was it?’

‘I suppose so. Anyway, when the German army occupied Italy, he was seconded and given a sort of undercover job liaising with
the pro-Nazi Italians, trying to crack the Italian Resistance. And apparently it was at that time that he made contact with
the Mafia, and did himself quite a lot of good with under-the-counter deals. At all events, he got very rich, and when the
Allies took over he was rich and powerful enough to disappear completely, even though he was a very wanted man.’

‘Yes, I should think he was. Everybody would have been after his blood.’

‘His only friends were the Mafia, and it looks as though they helped him to escape to England and establish himself. At all
events, he disappeared for a while and when he resurfaced, there he was in Stourton-on-Fosse as respectable as you like, following
his old trade of veterinary surgeon and digging himself into the local community.’

‘And all that time being a sleeper? Or active? Or what?’

‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. There’s so much we don’t know – like who killed Brenner, or Mrs Gostyn. Hildyard more or
less admitted killing Thompson, or at least
he didn’t deny it. And Anne-Marie.’ He was silent a moment, and then said, ‘Anyway, they aren’t going to follow it up. The shop in Tutman Street’s closed, and the man I saw there has disappeared. We’ve
evidently disturbed them enough to close down that particular network, and that means I’m not exactly flavour of the month
up at the Yard. We’ll be watching Saloman from now on, but I don’t suppose they’ll ever use him again.’

One thing I’ve been wondering is how Anne-Marie actually passed the money on.’

‘I’ve been thinking about that, too, and I think it must have been something idiotically simple. I think it was the olive
oil tins. I can’t account for ’em otherwise. She had two in each of her flats, and Atherton noticed they were quite clean
and dry inside, as if they’d never been used. I think maybe she just shoved rolls of bank notes into them and carried them
along to the shop, and was given another empty tin in exchange.’

‘Surely it can’t have been as simple as that?’

‘Sometimes the simplest ideas work the best,’ he said, and lapsed into silence.

‘Well, at least Anne-Marie’s murderer got his just deserts,’ she said at last, trying to comfort him.

‘You sound like Dickson. But it isn’t a matter of that. That’s just revenge.’ He looked at her carefully. ‘I want you to understand.’
Then he changed his emphasis. ‘I want
you
to understand.’

‘Go on then. I’m listening.’

It took him a while to begin. ‘It’s not the way it is in books, you see, where the detective solves the problem and then goes
home to tea. In real life, even if you solve the problem, that’s only the beginning. You have to assemble all the evidence,
construct the case, take it to court, and even then the villain might not go down. He might get off entirely, or he might
get a suspended sentence and be straight back out on the street. It’s a gamble. And all the time you’re constructing the case
against him, there’s all the other crime going on, and you can’t be in two places at once. You never win. You can’t win. You
never even finish anything. It’s like grandmother’s steps, only the villains keep just a nose ahead
of you, always. And if you get one sent down, there’s all the others still in business, you can’t stop them all, and in a
couple of years the one you got sent down comes out again and picks up where he left off. You never seem to get anywhere,
and in the end it drives you crazy. If you let it.’

He looked to see if she was following, and she nodded.

‘People have different ways of coping with the frustration. Of course there are some lucky enough or stupid enough not to
feel it – like Hunt. And Beevers, too, in a way. Atherton copes by just switching off as soon as he leaves his desk, and concentrating
on his social life, food and books and music and so on.’