The Start of Everything (36 page)

I rub my head. Maybe he doesn’t want me to know.

Then, just like that, without any fumbling, I’m out of the car. I’d reached across with my left hand, popping the door handle. I reach
across the door to press the bell. The window in the door looks straight through into the lounge, and three heads pop up at the noise. Richard, Alice … and Chloe. No,
Frohmann
.

For an instant it looks to me like an interview. Frohmann’s notebook is on the table. But,
They’re friends now, Keene. Get used to it
.

Richard opens the door. I say, “Thank you for the car. Sorry I was a bastard about it. Sorry about … Alice.”

The apologies are like a password. Richard nods, and steps back to let me in. I follow him through the kitchen to the lounge.

“Hello, Alice,” I say. “Is everything …?” I didn’t mean to move my hands like that, in the “pregnant belly” motion. Frohmann stops me with a curt head wag. The miscarriage completed, then. “This is a beautiful home,” I say instead, with inappropriate heartiness. This is every kind of visit in one. Condolences! Apology! Thanks! And, housewarming!
Dial it down, Keene
, I kick myself.

Richard turns back around to the kitchen. I follow him. “Beer or tea?” he asks. “Tea,” I say. I don’t need alcohol. I’m making an idiot of myself without it. He fills a mug from the tap and puts it in the microwave.

“Gwen miscarried once,” I say, like we’re peers here. Except mine was a decade ago. And we already had a kid.

“I’m sorry to hear that.” The microwave finishes. He drops a teabag in and hands it over. I go for it with my left hand. Smoothly, no last minute mix-up. It’s like my hands have figured it out: The right one’s stepped aside; the left one’s stepped up. I feel cocky. I feel good. I feel like I could juggle one-handed.

“I didn’t expect you to come,” Richard says.

I hadn’t given him any reason to. “I really am sorry,” I say. “For everything.” My physio says I delude myself that other people have perfect lives and that I’m just playing catch-up. She says imaginarily perfect people make good punching bags. She says I have to accept that nobody’s life is perfect. We’re all playing catch-up together.

He finishes a second mug in the microwave. This one, he dunks the teabag in and pushes it around with a spoon and scoops it out and drops it in the bin. He adds milk and sugar. I follow him back to the lounge, and he hands the cup to Alice. We sit around the coffee table.
No one says anything.
Where’s a board game when you need one, right?
I almost laugh. I think it’s almost, but Richard is staring at me.
I didn’t laugh, did I?

“I should have come sooner,” I say. I should have come round for a hello weeks ago. Gwen wanted to. I put it off.

“You’ve had a break in the case. I get that.”

Tonight? Did he mean I should have come sooner tonight? “Yes,” I say cautiously. “It’s been a tough one.”

“But I need to know that you’ll take this on.” He’s looking up now. He’s looking right at me.

I frown, and shoot my eyes over to Frohmann.

“He doesn’t have his phone,” she says. “He probably doesn’t know,” she says.

I look around. Nothing is familiar. “Know what?”

Alice says “Someone broke in—”

But then Richard overrides her: “No. No, you don’t have to tell it again.”

“I can tell it again.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to! I want to say it as many times as I need to! Morris can help.”

Richard stands up. He says, louder than Alice: “I don’t want to hear it again.” He pauses in between every word: “
I
—don’t—want—to—hear—it.”

He turns on me. “Chloe can take you home. I’m keeping the car. When Alice phoned today, I had to get home on the bus. It stopped everywhere. It took over an hour.”

I fish the keys out of my pocket. I put them in his hand.

Chloe’s parked across the road. I walk right up to the passenger door without the usual swear and swerve away from the driver’s side. I open it up. Frohmann’s looking at me. “I’m learning,” I say. The seatbelt is a struggle again, because I’m thinking about it. Then, it just clicks.

She tells me what happened. The break-in, the attack. Alice nailed
him with the boiled kettle, then barricaded herself in the downstairs loo.

“She got him with the kettle?” Bloody amazing.
That’s why Richard microwaved the tea
, is the first thing I think. Then,
That’s why he married her
, is the second thing. A strong woman. I miss Gwen.

Alice reported it to the local police. They took it seriously, but it’s not getting bumped to us at Major Investigations.
Well, now it will be
. We’ll see to it.

“Was Alice able to describe him?” I ask. “Did he take anything?” Not that any taking matters in comparison to what he did and could have done, but it would give insight into his motives and, possibly, identity.

“He was in the study. Probably looking for computer equipment. We’re guessing he didn’t think anyone was home, and was surprised when Alice got out of bed. Nothing is missing, Richard says. There was a mess in the study from an overturned box of school memorabilia.”

Why would Richard have school mementoes?
Our unremarkable childhood didn’t warrant many souvenirs.

“What school?” I ask, which seems to exasperate her.

“Does it matter?”

“I’m asking.”

She throws up her hands. “Someplace in Bristol.”

“Richard didn’t go to …”
The watch
.

“What?”

“The watch I found with Grace’s things. George Hart-Fraser’s watch. It was from a school in Bristol.”

“Why would Richard have—?” she says at the same time I ask “What did the man look like?”

“Alice said about the same size as Richard, dark hair, cut short, clean shaven. She said he had thin lips. And thick eyebrows. Black wool coat. Green scarf. Black gloves.” She closes her notebook.

“That’s George Hart-Fraser,” I say, remembering the photo on his departmental Web page.
Well, “consistent with” George Hart-Fraser
.

“And hundreds of other men in Cambridgeshire.”

“Did you talk to him?” I’d told Chloe to go see him.

“I talked to his girlfriend. He wasn’t home.”

“When?”

She refers to her notes. “When Alice was being attacked,” she admits.

I smack my side of the dashboard to punctuate the coincidence. I hit so hard the glove box pops open.

“Easy, Keene. Most people aren’t at home in the middle of the day, even a weekend day. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

“What did she say? The girlfriend?”

“I said we may have found his watch. She said George had never mentioned the watch and would be home after five.”

“And when you went back?”

“Keene …”

“You didn’t go back?”

“Morris, it’s over. I’d got the witness statement from Dru. There was no reason to go back.”

“There’s reason now.”

She’s not starting the car.

“Please, Chloe,” I say. Once I sprained both my ankles playing mandatory school rugby. For one humiliating month I rolled around in a wheelchair. It was meant to be propelled by me pushing the wheels with my hands, but my “friends” were always grabbing the handles that stuck out from the back behind my shoulder blades. There was nothing I could do when they did. They rolled me around, snorting with laughs. I want to tell Frohmann to let go and just let me steer.

“No,” she says.

It’s not the word that surprises me; it’s the nothing after. Sure, we contradict and challenge one another, but we don’t just say no, full stop. “And …?” I prompt.

“I didn’t want to have to say this,” she says, “not to Cole or to you.”

“What the hell does Cole have to do with anything?”

“Morris,” she says. Not “Keene.” It sounds motherly. It sounds pitying. It sounds like we’re not equals on the job anymore. She wants to get personal.

It’s my turn to say no, see how she likes it.

“You’re not ready,” she says. “You want to be but you’re not. Maybe if you took some more time—”

“To do what? What, exactly?” Staying home doesn’t exercise what needs to be exercised. “I’ve apologised for my hand—”

“Nobody wants an apology.”

She’s making me raise my voice: “It doesn’t matter. I’ve apologised anyway, because I know I’ve been a drag on you. But that’s changing now. I’m changing. It’s reaching with my right hand that’s been the problem. It’s the trying and failing and dropping. But I know that now. I’m letting it go. I’m letting my left hand step up. I’m—”

“It’s not your hand.”

I sputter. I open the car door and slam it shut behind me, all in one motion, left-handed, smooth. Loud.

I cross the road. Their door’s locked. Of course it is, after what happened this afternoon. No one’s in the living room. I ring the bell. Richard takes his damn time. He turns the bolt and slides the chain with exaggerated gestures. Chloe catches up.

“Alice is trying to sleep,” he hisses.

“I’ve got to show her something.” I have the printout of George Hart-Fraser’s University Web page. It’s been crammed in my pocket; the fold lines cross, framing his photo in the corner. “Ask her if this is him.”

Richard takes it upstairs, leaving us outside. Frohmann and I don’t speak. The tumble dryer thuds and whooshes, in its own continuous conversation.

Richard pounds down the uneven stairs, calling as he does. “Yes. It’s him.” He rushes at the door, catching himself on the jamb. “Go!” he says, breathing hard, listing.

We run across the street. Into the car, onto the road. I lean as Chloe takes a corner. She reads my mind, accelerating even more. I don’t recognise the feeling inside me at first; I worry I’m going to be sick. Then it comes back to me: It’s that intensity that coils up at the climax of a case, waiting for the moment to spring. It used to be familiar. It used to be my high. It’s been a while, but it’s back.

CHAPTER 32

CHLOE FROHMANN

I
keep my eyes aimed out the windscreen. Hands on the wheel, foot to the pedal. There’s no room for any part of me to deal with Keene on a personal level now.

We turn off Trumpington Road into Brookside and park in front of the girls’ school near the end. Most of the street is private terraced homes, but they’re bookended by four school buildings. Cambridge is made of schools.

I reach for George’s doorbell. Keene throws his right hand over my arm, batting it out of the way.

“Stop! Do you smell that?” Keene says. I hold short of the buzzer.

He lifts the flap on the mail slot. A foul odour comes at us. He drops the flap and we scramble backwards. I punch 999 into my phone.

Gas
. The house is full of it. Even the click of an electric doorbell could set it off. The flick of a light switch. If someone is sleeping in there, and we rouse them …

I request an ambulance, fire fighters, and the Gas Emergency Service.
“You take that side,” I say, pointing. I run down these steps and mount those on the other flank.

Keene hesitates. He’s still at George’s door, staring. “Keene!” I call from the steps beside.

He flinches, jumps, really. He shakes his head like a wet dog. Down the steps, up the other side. He pounds on that door. We’ve got to get the neighbours out.