The Whole World (17 page)

Still Richard didn’t say anything, so I repeated it: “Richard, we’ve got him. It’s done.”

He just covered his face. I couldn’t get anything out of him.

Finally, he wrote something on a piece of paper from the pad next to the phone. Alice’s paper. Alice’s pen. I’d never had special paper for the phone before I was married, and neither had he.

He wrote something on the paper and asked me to bring it to the kid. It said, “I forgive you.”

I wouldn’t take it. I held my hands up out of reach. “What the hell is that?” I said.

“Please.” He pushed it at me.

I shook my head. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I said. “What the fuck is wrong with you? You don’t deserve her. If anyone tried to hurt Gwen I’d fucking kill him.”

He covered his face again. When I left, he was pressing the note against his closed eyes.

That’s what I remember whenever he says “please” to me, like he was saying now.

I grabbed the front of his shirt to bring his face close. “Don’t repeat this, all right? Not even to Alice.”

He nodded.

“Nick’s all right. He’s back. All right? That’s all I can tell you. Don’t breathe a word.”

I let him go and he stumbled backward. “Thank you,” he said.

“Thank you,” he said again. His face shone. He was happy.

Alice came to find me. “Dora’s fine,” she said. I knew she was; the last I looked one of the servers was lending her a change of clothes.

“Thanks,” I said. Richard was still radiant. I wanted to kick him.

Alice wound an arm around one of his. “You look happy,” she said.

He stuttered. He looked at me with guilt. Christ, he was terrible at secrets.

“He’s happy he has you,” I said, trying to lead him with the obvious.

He caught on. He kissed her hand. But she looked suspiciously at me.

“Morris …” she said. “Is this about Nick Frey?”

“No,” I said, showing Richard how it’s done. But he looked at his shoes. Alice would know by morning.

I rubbed my forehead. I needed to tell Gwen myself that I had to leave.

I opened the door back to the tearoom, but that entrance was filled with Mother, apparently on her way out to me. “I was looking for you. Working again, Morris?” she said.

There wasn’t any point to arguing.

“Dora was in a punt with that boy,” she continued. “She said they were
talking.”
She twisted that last word sarcastically.

“Dora’s all right, Mother,” I said.

“Dora’s a teenager, Morris. She needs a father who pays attention to her.”

“Look how great we turned out without a father paying attention to us,” I said through a fake, bright grin. Richard was so shocked he backed up a step.

Mother pushed back. “Your father—”

It’s all the same conversation. It’s all we ever really say to each other, over and over again.

She kept talking as I walked away.

CHAPTER 7

D
etective Sergeant Chloe Frohmann picked me up in front of Grantchester’s old church. I would normally be paired with a Detective Inspector on a murder case, but she’d worked with me on the missing person, so I asked to keep her on. “How was the wedding?” she wanted to know. I wasn’t in the mood to answer. It would only encourage her. She was planning her own wedding for next year.

She didn’t need encouragement. “I ask because my cousin got married last year and she wore a suit. She said that any woman over thirty can’t get away with wearing a real dress, but I think that’s crap. Alice is in her thirties, right? Did she wear a suit or a dress?”

There was no getting away from it. “A dress,” I said. Then she asked me this crazy thing: Was it a tea dress or a cocktail dress? I said, “It was a dress.”

“That’s exactly my point,” she said, punctuating “exactly” with a vigorous swerve onto the roundabout.

I leaned my head back and tried to focus. Someone was found. Someone else was dead. There would be two family visits to make.

“Shall I take the parents? Or the husband?” Frohmann does read my mind sometimes.

“We’ll do them together.”

I’d never been up Cantelupe Road. It was a strange road to be on if you didn’t live there. What were both of them doing there?

The crime scene was easy to find: Just follow the bright lights set up for the forensic team and pathologist.

Rose Cottage was a homely scene inside: soft, threadbare furniture, lit yellow by standing lamps with fussy shades. Nick, or rather his friend, had called the police from here. It wasn’t until the paramedics arrived that Nick admitted his name, to a flurry of piqued interest and scepticism. Now he sipped hot chocolate at the kitchen table, his left leg propped up on the chair opposite. Two women stood apart from him next to an Aga, one of those huge country ovens.

“Nicholas Frey?” I asked, to be official. I recognised him.

He nodded and pushed his cup away. “Yes, sir.”

I needed to caution him, in relation to the death outside, but something else bubbled up as more important first. “Richard Keene’s my brother. He’s been very worried.”

He blanched. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

This was murky. The caution had to come out. “Nick. You don’t have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you fail to mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say will be given in evidence. All right?”

He nodded again.

“Do you understand, Nick? You have to say that you understand.”

He said exactly that: “I do. I understand.”

“Where have you been?” I asked.

He told me about Dovecote. He gestured toward one of the women, who nodded to affirm that she was indeed a family friend who had long ago given him a key. He claimed that she hadn’t been home until today. If so, it wasn’t an affair of some kind.

He explained something complicated and very, very young about letting people down, and trying to fix things, and only making everything worse: for Polly Bailey and Liv Dahl, and for the dead woman outside.

I’d interviewed Gretchen Paul about him. She’d said only that Nick had assisted with a research project that was now ended, and was “competent” and “thorough.” Normally I’d take bland adjectives like that to be avoidance, but from her I think they were praise. Her formal neutrality didn’t mesh with the hysteria he insisted he’d caused.

“Were you having an intimate relationship with Dr. Paul?” I had to ask.

He looked offended. “No, sir,” he said, wagging his head hard.

“What do you think her problem was?”

“I don’t know.” He let out a pent-up breath. “It had something to do with her family, I think. Her mother and her aunt. I’d been helping with some organisation for her. She’s blind, did you know that?” I nodded. I knew. “I’d helped to organise photos for her mother’s biography. She was distressed by the result. I—honestly, sir, I don’t know what was in her mind.”

“Can you guess?” I persisted. I’ve found that people who don’t “know” anything for certain often have interesting suppositions that come out when they’re given permission to muse.

He sat up straighter, as if I had called his name in class and he was ready to deliver the right answer. “Well. I’ve been thinking about it. I think maybe her mother isn’t who she thought she was. She said her mother was Linda Paul, the writer. Linda Paul wrote something a long time ago. And then she gave it all up, to raise Gretchen. But I think … I think that’s what she told Gretchen but that that’s not who she really was.”

“Really.” That was strange. “So … who was she?”

“The nanny. I think. Except there wouldn’t have been a nanny at all if the nanny was the mother…. Look. There were three women, all right? Linda Paul, her sister Ginny, and this other woman. Gretchen calls her the nanny. They were in Brussels together, for a World’s Fair. It was one of the last things Gretchen saw.

“I think the woman she calls the nanny was her real mother. A friend of Linda Paul, maybe a hanger-on. Maybe Linda said she couldn’t stay around them anymore, with the baby. She was cut off, and made up this story to herself about how she was Linda Paul, and gave up that life. Fantasised that she was the one making choices, not the one being pushed out. That would make sense of the photos.”

I made him repeat much of that, and drew a diagram in my notebook. He leaned over it to check my work, ever the good little helper. I shut it so fast that the pages fluttered against his chin. “That’s not your place, Nick.”

He swallowed. “No, sir.”

I rapped the closed notebook against the table. “What were you doing on this road?” I demanded. “It doesn’t go anywhere.”

He shook his head again. He opened his hands. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I was following the
A to Z
. We’d mapped out a route, and I followed signs…. We were in Haslingfield. The High Street. Lesley had fallen asleep and I couldn’t well look at the map and drive….”

“Why didn’t you just stop?”

He didn’t answer right away. “I’m not very good with the clutch,” he admitted. “I didn’t want to stop and start.” He shifted position. “I was following signs and all the names were running together in my mind. One said ‘Cantelupe Road.’ I knew that name. So I took it. I figured it for part of the directions. It’s not a name you’d think to follow if you hadn’t planned to, is it? I recognised it, so I took it.”

I leaned back and thought about how we’d just come. “It’s not the way to Cambridge.” I let the accusation remain implicit. He’s a clever boy. He knew what I meant.

“I’ve never been here in my life, sir. I didn’t expect to be here, I didn’t know Gretchen would be here. Honestly, sir …”

“But you knew the name.”

“I knew the name of the street. I don’t know from where. I thought it was part of the route we’d looked at. I don’t know where else …” He stopped himself. He slapped his hand on the table. “It was the box. At Gretchen’s house. The box of photographs. It was an old packing box. Something had come shipped in it. The address label on top had been for where Gretchen lived years ago. In Brighton. Underneath that was the address for the place the box had been first. That was Cantelupe. Here, in Haslingfield. I noticed it. I suppose it stuck in my head….”

“And this box is in Dr. Paul’s house?”

“No … not anymore. She asked me to destroy it. I threw it in the pond behind my house. My family’s house.”

I nodded, but not as if I necessarily believed or approved. I didn’t trust any of this.

“The constable tells me you were driving without a licence,” I said.

“Yes, sir.”

“And you claim you didn’t see her at all? You—”

“I felt her, sir,” he said. He shook his head again. “I felt her under the car. I’d been looking down at the map. I didn’t see anything until I got out of the car and looked at her face.”

He looked like he was going to be sick. It was time to get him home. I could talk to him again after the pathologist’s report. Frohmann offered to help him walk to the car, but he insisted on hobbling. He said to his friend, “I apologise for taking advantage of your hospitality in this way.”

She said, “I won’t intrude on your homecoming, but call if there’s anything I can do.”

“I understand. Tomorrow …”

“Nick. I think your family would prefer I didn’t.”

“I don’t care what they—”

She laid her hand on his cheek. He held perfectly still.

“I’ll be in touch,” she promised.

He glowered. His hands made tight fists for a moment, then he opened them up and slapped his thighs.

Interesting.

She went into the lounge to call a taxi, as we had to keep her car. He watched her. If eyeballs were hands it would have been indecent.

Nick spun back to me. “May I please go home now?” he said.

I sent Frohmann to take him to her car, and wait for me. I wouldn’t be long with the other woman. She looked impatient to get rid of us.

“And you are …?” I asked.

She spelled her name for me: “Melisma Cantor. An M instead of a second S. It isn’t Melissa. It’s like when you slide around on a note of music, dress it up, right? Melisma.”

I wrote down her name, correctly spelled. I omitted the explanation.

All the time I’d been talking with Nick, she’d been putting away kitchen things from a cardboard box. Coffee. Tea towels. Dish soap, but it wasn’t new. It was half-full. She looked to be in her late twenties.

“I got here a couple hours ago. Susan wasn’t home. I’m her stepdaughter.”

“Susan is the owner here?”

“Yes.”

“Was anything out of the ordinary when you arrived?”

“No. No.”

“Did you hear the accident?”

“I heard—something. It must have been the accident. They rang the bell not long after. They asked me to call the police.”

“Had you ever seen them before?”

She shook her head.

“Do you know what Dr. Paul was doing here?”

She shook her head.

“Did you know she was here?”

She bowed her head, and shook it, staring at the tabletop.

“Is something wrong, Ms. Cantor?” She repeated no. “Where’s your stepmother?” She shrugged.

“I don’t know. She’s an adult, you know. She doesn’t always stay here every night.”

“Do you?”

She shook her head, again. “I broke up with my boyfriend, and I’ll be staying here for a little while. I just brought all my stuff from his place.” She held up the half-used Fairy liquid. “I was the only one who washed the fucking dishes. Sorry,” she quickly added. Suddenly she looked as if she’d been left out in the rain. Her long hair appeared limp, her face stretched down. It was the streak of a headlamp through the front window changing the shadows. In a moment she was restored.

“Have you ever seen Dr. Paul with your stepmother before?”

“I don’t know the name.”

All right. “Where’s your father?”

“He’s in Bangalore. He works there. They’re divorced. Look, I’m really tired. I’d like to go to bed.”

I got the father’s name and address in India, and made a move to the cottage door. I fiddled with the handle. It had a proper lock. “Do you have a key, Ms. Cantor?”

“Yes, of course. We used to live here. When they were married.”

“Did your stepmother—what’s her full name, please? Susan …”

“Susan Madison.”

“Was she expecting you today?”

“I’d called earlier. She didn’t pick up, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t know. She screens.”

“Ah.” I nodded. That seemed sufficient for now.

Dr. Jensen stood up from his crouch beside the body. “Two sets of injuries,” he said, plunging right in. “She was hit once, in the vicinity of four hours ago. Likely thrown. There’s damage to the back of her head that matches with a stone underneath it. Lividity suggests that she’s lying where she died. The other injuries occurred post-mortem. She was run over and nearly cut in two by the weight of the vehicle. That’s preliminary. I’ll have more for you tomorrow.”

I stood back to take in the scene. Hit twice on a road so little-used as this? Her body was on the part of the road well past the drive. If it had been dark when Melisma arrived, she wouldn’t have seen the body.

I turned around to head for the car and bumped nose to nose into Nick, who’d been standing right behind me. “Why the hell aren’t you in the car?” I said.

“I was just—if it was going to be much longer I wanted to ask permission to phone … Is it true? Did she really die four hours ago?”

I rubbed the back of my neck and held in several expletives. Frohmann appeared over his shoulder. “Greene asked me to look at something….” she explained, sounding guilty. It was hard to know whether to treat Nick like a suspect or a found missing person.

“That finding is not yet official,” I told Nick, as to the time of death. But he sagged with relief.

In the car, Nick said, “Look, I’m really sorry for the trouble I’ve caused you. I have no doubt there were long hours put in on my behalf, and I’m not surprised that you’re angry with me. I can only apologise.”

Who talks like that? What a perfect little gentleman he is.