The Swap (13 page)

'No,' he said blandly, after a fleeting but heavy pause. 'But one question we are asking everyone is where they were at the time of the murder. So I suppose I must ask you . . .' He looked again into those deep green eyes that so matched his own, bringing back moments from long forgotten teenage years when he had propped his head against the mirror and looked deeply into what he imagined was his soul. And his soul had been green.

'I don't know. What time was that?'

'We are estimating the time of death at around 11a.m. on Sunday.'

'OK. I don't know. I think we were just out, Jeff and I. We went for a walk, I think, though not together. He went into town for a drink and I went up onto the clifftop and had a look at the sea. I got back about half twelve. We met for lunch in some dingy pub that seemed to carry some memories for Jeff but I didn't ask what they were. We were already at the point where it was better for me not to know. So I suppose I was alone in the morning . . .' She looked for a moment at him with genuine surprise. 'Does that mean I'm a suspect?'

'No.' This time his smile was reassuring, making her feel like a child. 'You are not a suspect. You have no motive and there is nothing to link you to the crime. But . . .' He left it hanging like a peg on a line and she took it down.

'But?'

'But I wonder if you are telling me everything about Mr Briscow and your conversation. I wish you would, Mrs Cooper.'

This was said so emphatically that for a second Maisie was taken by surprise and he saw it, in the corners of her eyes, like motes of possibility. But she shook her head at once. 'I don't know what you mean . . . But . . .' She tried one on the line also, next to his, but he did not react so she took it down herself. 'But, I do think you are rather good at what you do.'

'I'm fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking fucked.'

'I don't think so, Harvey . . . Look, they're not fools.'

'I'm fucked and I might as well face it and just cut my own fucking throat the way they think I cut hers.' Harvey dragged deeply on his third cigarette in ten minutes and grappled with his home telephone, which was large and made of bright pink plastic.

'No, I don't think they think that, Harvey. They just have to make enquiries. It's routine . . . Jesus, I sound like a policeman myself. But it is. They are interviewing everyone.'

'Yes, but everyone didn't spend the weekend clogging up their mum's washing machine with blood, did they? Everyone didn't come home in their dad's car covered in old Mrs Odd's blood. Everyone has a clear conscience. Or almost everyone. I could feel that bastard, that utter bastard, looking into my soul. It was as if he could read my guilt written across my intestines. You know what I mean?'

Is your soul in your intestines? Maisie didn't ask. Instead she said: 'No. He was clever, I admit that. But he can't read your thoughts. I found him rather nice.' She thought again of the mirror effect of those deep green eyes. 'Very fair. And of course if you told him the truth he would know that you were innocent of anything other than breaking a window and being a bloody fool, wouldn't he?'

'Oh balls.' Self-pity had always been one of the more ready options in Harvey's repertoire. He had returned to it now like a migrating bird to the gathering tree. 'He'll just see deceit and lies and he'll guess the rest. I should have gone to them straight away, straight to Truro, straight to the police station, and this would be over now. Jesus fucking wept.' He gave a sort of fake sob and Maisie sighed.

'You could still go to them now.'

'Oh yeah, right.' For Harvey sarcasm was also a familiar recourse in times of trouble. He often used it on himself and found himself walking home from failed romantic evenings saying: Yeah right, of course you didn't really fancy her, Harvey, sure thing, inside his head.

'Why not? Nothing has changed. You could tell them everything. I think Chief Inspector Jarvin would appreciate honesty, however belated.'

'Don't say that name! I never want to hear that name again. Cunt. Constable Cunt, coming to my shop and fucking asking me questions. I've a good mind to tell him to fuck right off if he comes again. Go and get a fucking warrant, you fucking, fucking, fucking . . .'

'Yeah, well, if that's all you have to say, Harvey . . .'

'Sorry.'

'You need to stop panicking. Chief Inspector Jarvin will do the investigation, and they will find out who did this awful thing and you will get on with your life. And so will I . . .' It suddenly came to Maisie just how little she knew of what that meant. It also occurred to her that the man at the end of the phone might think that his life and her life were going to get on together. That didn't seem as alien a concept as she had expected.

'Well, I hope you're right. But I could be about to be arrested. I could spend the rest of my life in a prison cell.' Harvey wanted to add 'and I hope you'll be satisfied' but couldn't really think of any reason to justify it.

'OK, so what are you going to do?'

'What is there to do?' Harvey stubbed out his cigarette on a plastic ashtray in the shape of a woman's breast. It had been a thirtieth birthday present from a very poor friend. He looked at it now with new eyes. 'Jesus Christ.'

'What?' she asked with what sounded like real tenderness in her voice and he shook his head foolishly.

'Nothing. Sorry. I just realised I need to sort my life out.' He looked round the room: the little flat in Deptford that he had bought when housing prices were low – a good investment, a starter flat, before he moved onward and upward. That was fifteen years ago and Deptford remained defiantly cheap and cheerful and the flat remained his. However, the sense that it was just a temporary dwelling before he moved into the house he was meant to live in – a flat-fronted terrace in Camden, or a glass and steel monstrosity overlooking the river, or perhaps that cottage up in Hampstead; he couldn't make up his mind – had never left him. For this reason he had never really bothered to do anything to it. It remained dimly lit by the bare overhead light, with the sickly yellow Ikea shelves and grey fitted carpeting that it had when he moved in. He had added a veneer of himself to it, most of which originated from smoking: burn marks on the shelves, ash ingrained into the carpet, yellow patches on the ceiling. He looked now at the television set that balanced flatly on top of the video machine on the floor. In front of it was a large, green revolving armchair that he had found in a skip. He sighed and reached for another cigarette.

'You don't need to change your life, Harvey, don't be so melodramatic.' He could hear the patient smile in her voice. 'You just need to sort this out. Make sure that the police are clear about what happened, where you were on Sunday morning. What did you say when they asked you that?'

'I don't think they did . . .' Harvey was thinking hard. 'No, they didn't . . . Hey, hang on, did they ask you?'

'Yes. They said they were asking everyone.'

'But they didn't ask me. Well, fine. Perfect. Dandy-diddlydee. They didn't ask me because they didn't need to. They already know I was up at Bleeder's house murdering his mother. I'm fucking, fucking, fucking . . .'

'No you're not. They must have just forgotten. They'll probably ring you tomorrow and ask. Stop panicking . . . They'll want to hear your alibi. Do you have one, by the way?'

'One what?' Harvey's voice was still mortified.

'An alibi for Sunday morning?'

'Shit, I don't know. What did I do? I can't remember. I probably fought with my parents and then went out for a walk or something. I don't know. What do you do on Sundays in Smallville? I put on my cape and flew away. I just killed time, I guess . . .'

'Hmm. Well, I'm not sure I'd give that answer to the police if I was you.' Maisie sounded doubtful. 'They might think you killed someone else instead.'

When the phones had been put down, with suitable, and in his case at least, heartfelt endearments, Harvey sat in his green revolving armchair. The flat looked different to him tonight. It was the first time he'd been in it and not asleep or drunk since his trip away and a lot had changed. I'm different, he thought, I am no longer the man I was. He inspected his younger self 's living quarters with a certain measured disdain. There really was so little here. Take away the superhero posters and the record and DVD collections and you had anybody's room, anywhere in the western world. A generic, meaningless ragbag of mainstream ugliness. He sighed without rancour. He was saving the big sigh for later. Maybe he wouldn't even do it. Maybe he'd just go to sleep and not worry at all. But that would break the habit of a lifetime. So he sat for a while in the green revolving armchair and thought about what Maisie had said. And then he walked through into the bedroom and sat and looked at the only view from the flat, which looked over the rooftops to St Alfege church tower in Greenwich. Was this a life change? He seemed to have had so many false starts, so many moments that at the time appeared seminal but which turned out only to be passing possibilities leading nowhere. His view often made him philosophical, and it happened now. Did anything ever lead anywhere really? In the end, whatever you did you ended up dead. Like Mrs Odd, that twisted grey face, that terrible stillness. That's where you end up, and all the pretend revelations of life can't spare you. He did the sigh after all. It felt good to do it about something as ordinary as death, it pulled him back into the majority for a second.

The bedclothes were all on the floor where he had flung them that morning. So he picked them up and for the first time for a while, he made his bed properly. Then, to his own surprise, he did not light a cigarette, or go to the off-licence, he had a shower – washing off a grime that seemed ingrained – and went to bed. There, he lay naked in the dark, awake for a while, something rendered rare by alcohol, and he thought about Maisie, and, across all the multiplicity of roads and rooftops and people's lives that lay between Deptford and Croydon, he wondered if she was thinking about him and whether her thoughts were as warm and wistful as his own.

In the morning the rare pleasure of sober rest had done its job, as if the sleeping Harvey had been waiting a long time for a chance to speak and had a lot to say. Alongside the images of randy horses chasing young maidens up trees, which Harvey found filling his dream recollection over breakfast, was the knowledge that he could not just sit and do nothing. His restful self had made a call to arms. Up, up, it said, and be doing. Which, Harvey reflected, was easy for him to say. It had been a while since Harvey had felt driven. He had wanted an iPod quite a lot when they first came out, and had queued up for the premiere of
A Scanner Darkly
, but that was about it in the last few years. So this felt different, new and yet familiar. It was, he realised, the call of a younger and more physically fit Harvey. Jesus, if one night of sobriety did this to him what would a week or a month be like? He pictured a slimmer, gym-toned figure running to work, eating a salad and getting a decent haircut. Worried at the turn of his thoughts he sat and smoked the second cigarette of the day: always his favourite, the after-breakfast one, slower, more sensual, less desperate than the wake-up choker. And then he went to work.

Was it all about this? Once Harvey had passed the shocked Josh, who had been appalled by this new, clean-shaven, polished, on-time man in his life, Harvey had repaired once more to the back room and slipped the comic from the bottom drawer. Then he had looked at it for a long time.

Was this really enough for an old woman to die for? Harvey's was not a sentimental soul. He could understand killing someone for a comic, the problem was how anyone could ever reap the profits. It would be big news on the internet already. The comic world would share his lack of sentiment. A missing, mint-condition
Superman One
, that was the story. One dead old woman more or less would not excite the internet obsessives. Gingerly and with great caution he opened the plastic sheath in which the comic was wrapped. He recognised the seal on the package that was stuck as he had stuck it in 1982. It had never been broken. Bleeder had never read it. The comic was old then, of course, not as valuable as it was now, but old. Forty years old. He remembered the job lot he'd bought from the Conservative Club Christmas Bazaar: toys, various. Twelve action figures, including a Spider-Man with racer, a whole lot of worthless plastic bits and pieces and the pile of comics, all untouched, stored at the bottom of an old crate in someone's loft. He hadn't liked comics. He'd wanted the figures and the lumps of plastic: Lego bits and other rubbish. He almost threw the comics away. Random
Fantastic Four
s and
Silver Surfer
s
.
But instead he read them. Lying around in his room with nothing else to do, he read them one after another and got lost there somewhere, in that world of strength and goodness, of grace and beauty and perfectly turned humour.
Silver Surfer
was his first love: so beautiful, so tragic. He too yearned across the wastes of infinity for the woman he once loved and could never know again as a mortal man. He too looked cool on a surfboard, although in fact it was bloody cold surfing in Cornwall and he'd tended to prefer sitting on the sand watching the girls walk past.

From there he discovered
Spider-Man
and found his true alter ego. Silver Surfer was too damaged, too unreachable in the end. Spidey was human: secretive, wistful, passionate and sarcastic. As human as any adolescent might hope for, more really than anyone he had known. Spider-Man had so much power and yet he could never use it in any way to help himself. All that potential and he ended up alone. He was also in love with Mary-Jane. And Harvey was just discovering Penny Trayland who wore skin-tight jeans with a flower stencilled on the left buttock. Flowers played a big part in Harvey's dreams at that time. So he discovered comics from that first encounter. And those early purchases formed the beginnings of the collection that would one day be the basis for this shop and in many ways for the whole life that he had constructed on those rather flimsy foundations. The only one of that first historic haul that didn't interest him was the
Superman One
. It was for kids, you could see that. 'The daring exploits of the one and only Superman': it sounded ridiculous. The artwork was tired. The story was petty: nothing like the complex, angst-ridden, existential explorations of the
Silver Surfer
, or even the homey but tragic sufferings of the
Fantastic Four
. So he'd given it away, swapped it for a bit of nothing, as an act of kindness to a bullied child. St Briscow, St Harvey of fucking St Ives.

He flicked through the pages disconsolately, although he did so with instinctive care not to damage the paper. This was worthless now, completely valueless. He knew that. He could never sell it without being accused of murder and even if the murder was solved it wasn't his to sell. It belonged to Bleeder. He should destroy it, chuck it in a skip or something on the way home. All this promise, all this power that he held in his hands and all it could possibly represent was trouble, tragedy and ruin.

Just like Spider-Man, in fact.

'And back again and back, ever decreasing circles of likelihood.' Sigvard Jarvin was in poetic frame of mind and Allen allowed his own mental inclinations to follow his leader.

'We are getting rather stuck with Mr Briscow, aren't we, sir?'

'Yes we are and I don't like it. I can't see him as a murderer somehow and nor could Ms Cooper.'

'Yes, sir. And are we attaching a lot of significance to Ms Cooper's opinion?'

Jarvin gave him a look. 'No more than to anyone else's, Allen. But I always find intuitions like that interesting.'

'Yes, sir. A very attractive woman Ms Cooper.' Allen took a swig of tea and waited to be put in his place.

'You can drop that tone of voice right now, Allen,' Jarvin duly obliged. 'I take every view as it comes. Ms Cooper's is just as valid as anyone else's.' He nodded emphatically once with a sharp jolt of the head, a characteristic and bullish motion. Allen nodded too, but more slowly and gently.

'So back to Briscow,' he said.

'I suppose . . .' Jarvin looked round the café in which they were taking lunch. It was a favourite of Allen's, which Jarvin had long given up complaining about. Red Formica tables along each wall with half-hearted booth-effects around them; black-and-white pictures of boxers, one per booth; and, unaccountably, red flock wallpaper. The day's specials were written in flamboyant if inaccurate hand on a large sandwich board placed in the middle of the aisle. Jarvin did not need to look to know what his order would be. Or his colleague's. Lamb chops and mash for Allen, spaghetti carbonara for him. Some people said a partnership was like a marriage, but he disagreed. He would long since have tired of any romantic relationship as predictable as theirs. He was, he felt, in many ways an adventurous man, he had even been called brave at times over the course of an eventful career in the army and now in the force. But he did not require surprises from Allen. Nor did he find it sad to provide so few himself.

'Fancy a chop?' he said and his colleague nodded ruminatively without comment. 'Yes, back to Briscow. Literally I think. We'll go and pay him another visit. I want to know how he fitted together with Charles Odd. I wish we could interview him again too.'

'Mr Odd is planning to stay in Cornwall?'

'Well yes, apparently, for the time being. Now the inquest is over there'll be the funeral on Wednesday. Inspector Roberts down there seems happy enough with him. What he told us the other day still holds: he was at church first thing Sunday, plenty of witnesses to that, and then he walked down into the town to get the Sunday papers and read them in a coffee shop. Nobody remembers that bit so far, but why should they really? Then he took the long way home, having a look round the town. He stopped off for a drink in the pub at lunchtime where he was seen by most of the reunionists, bar Harvey Briscow, who wasn't with them. He then returned home and assumed that his mother had gone out. He came in by the front door and so didn't notice the broken window in the kitchen until later on. So he sat in the sitting room and read the paper, then went for a bit of wander round the old neighbourhood, exploring his roots . . . up onto the headland for a breath of air . . . Lot of walking these people do. Half of them seem to have been out on hikes that Sunday. It's very inconvenient.'

'Yes, Ms Cooper was walking too, wasn't she?'

'Yes she was. She was on the cliffs too. I suppose it's what you do at the seaside in the winter but I do wish they'd all stayed put where people could see them.' He shook his head and smiled. 'Nobody considers us policemen.'

'No.' Allen smiled too. 'And where was Mr Briscow, I wonder?'

'Yes, that is a good question, Allen. Where was Mr Briscow?'

'I notice you didn't ask when we visited him.'

'No I didn't.' Jarvin shook his head thoughtfully. 'But perhaps I will, eh? Perhaps Mr Briscow was surrounded by twenty people at eleven that morning. Perhaps we can cross him off our list and forget all about him. What do you think?'

'I think he was probably out for a walk,' said Allen mournfully and then brightened visibly. 'Chops,' he said and fair beamed at the arriving waitress.

Once their orders were placed, the two men sat in silence until the waitress returned with their meals. Jarvin was grimacing at the familiar flavour of a sauce he had long since had to accept as the best available, when Allen unexpectedly asked: 'What about this comic business? I've been thinking about that a bit and I can't say as I've ever heard of anyone being killed for a comic before. It might be a whole new motive for murder. What do you think, is there anything in it?'

'I don't know.' Jarvin enjoyed the excuse momentarily to spare his tastebuds another mouthful. 'It is certainly worth a lot of money. I had a look on the internet last night and the collectors are willing to pay four hundred thousand dollars for a 1939first edition of
Superman Comic
. It seems an incredible amount of money but it's still a bit behind an
Action Comics Number One
, which is worth nearly a million dollars. A million dollars for a comic, Allen, doesn't that make you shudder?
Action Comics
is where Superman started, of course.'

'Yes indeed.' Allen nodded as if this was the most obvious piece of information. 'It's not what I'd spend two hundred grand on.'

'No.' Jarvin didn't ask what Allen would spend it on. Visions of extended decking areas and enlarged sheds swam briefly through his mind – he did know his subordinate's tastes rather well. 'But I don't think it could really be called a new motive. Greed is, after all, as old as history, isn't it?'

'True, sir. That is true.' Allen filled his face with a laden fork, which bore all the food groups at once, and then champed happily for a moment or two. 'But it's the only motive that could make any sense for Mr Briscow, isn't it, sir?' he went on after a noisy moment. 'I mean, why else would a man go and kill an old lady? He doesn't seem like a pervert or a weirdo or anything. So . . .' He left it open and refilled his mouth. The chops came with almost liquid spinach as well as the mash and he had made a nice green goo by mixing the two together. Jarvin looked elsewhere.

'I don't know,' he said. 'But killing her seems excessive anyway, don't you think, even if the comic is relevant? I mean, if the mother of an old school acquaintance discovered you in her house one day would you cut her throat with a knife? Or would you blush and say something about dropping in to see Charles and apologise for accidentally breaking a window . . . something like that? I mean, it might be a bit embarrassing . . . I don't know.'

Allen could, on occasion, become biblical and he did so now. 'But what if the lust was upon him, sir? What if he had just found the comic and she tried to take it from him . . .'