The Whole World (18 page)

I turned around inside my seatbelt and faced him in the back. “Susan Madison. Do you know that name? Has Gretchen ever talked about her?”

“Of course,” he said. “Is that a trick question?”

I held back a nasty retort. “No.” I glared. “Why would it be?”

He smiled. He was lighter and lighter the closer we got to home. “That’s her mother’s character. Susan Maud Madison. She wrote five books about her. Well, Linda Paul did. Gretchen was looking for anyone who’d named her child after the character. You know, been influenced by the books. Looks like she found one.”

Looks like she did.

Nick’s family lived in a white modernist box from the 1930s: all stacked and protruding rectangles, with a long, thin window striping across the whole thing. Tall trees spiked in silhouette behind it, filling the sky over the flat roof.

It was now ten o’clock. There were lights illuminating the ground floor, so we wouldn’t be waking them up. Frohmann pressed the bell. I suppose Nick might have had his key, but he hung back obediently.

Mrs. Frey called out “Alexandra?” as she came down the stairs, and, again, “Alexandra?” while unlocking the door. She saw me and Frohmann first, and recoiled.

We parted to display Nick between us. She pitched forward to embrace him.

Frohmann backed the car out onto the road and we were tossed in our seats by the ruts beneath the wheels. “Damn private roads,” she muttered.

The private segment emptied out onto a proper city-kept street, and shortly thereafter onto a main road that eventually linked with the M11. We took the direction away from the motorway.

“Is it just a husband?” she asked. I think she dreaded facing suddenly motherless children.

“Just a husband,” I assured her.

“Did you know her?”

“Not really.” Richard knew her, but they weren’t close. I knew Gretchen Paul more from this case. She’d paid for Miranda Bailey’s solicitor but, from what I understand, didn’t actually know her. It was odd. I hoped the husband could tell me why. I looked in my notebook for his name. “Harry Reed,” I said. Frohmann nodded.

She turned down Grange Road, driving past Robinson, Selwyn, and Newnham colleges. Grand Victorian houses filled in the gaps between them. Frohmann turned left off Grange Road onto Barton and then almost immediately right onto Millington. The change was immediate: Orbs of gaslight glowed white in the fog.

“What did they do to rate the special effects?” she asked.

“Another private road. So the city didn’t include them in the electric upgrade.” Millington Road has about thirty houses on it. The gas lamps don’t shine much beyond themselves; they’re just dots tracing the right angle of the street.

The house we wanted was typical of the area: brick, gabled, big. I’d not been here during Nick’s investigation; I’d interviewed Dr. Paul in her office.

Our feet crunched down on the thick scattering of pebbles acting as a pavement. It was like walking on the bottom of a dry fish tank.

The bell control was a thin iron rod with a small handle at the bottom. Frohmann twisted it, and we were rewarded with a sound like scraping a butter knife over a glockenspiel.

We waited. She twisted the bell pull again.

“No one’s home. Perhaps he’s out looking for her,” she suggested.

“He’s the husband. He’s a suspect.” I pulled out my mobile and punched in their number. Some people keep a phone by the bed. “Or a sound sleeper,” I said.

The phones inside rang with different bells: one a trill, one a buzz. And then another sound. Some kind of … coo? chirp? Whatever it is that birds do, coming from inside the house.

“Look at this,” Frohmann called. She’d walked around to the side of the house. I joined her.

She shone a torch on a parked car. It had a cracked headlamp and dented front.

“Call for forensics,” I told her.

A sudden light hit my face. Someone else’s torch. “Police,” I barked. “Lower it.”

A smallish man came out from behind the shrubs. “Pardon me,” he said, stepping closer, “you looked suspicious.” He wore a heavy jacket over a dressing gown over pajama bottoms. “I’d like to see some I.D., please.”

We accommodated his request. “Harry Reed?” I asked.

He frowned. “No, I’m not.” He looked back and forth between my I.D. and my face. “I’m the neighbourhood watch coordinator,” he said proudly. I’m surprised he didn’t proffer identification of his own. He added as an afterthought, “I’m his next-door neighbour.”

“Really?” I asked. “Seen anything interesting lately?”

He pointed up.

Several small, colourful birds perched on the roofline. Two more were on the sill of an open window.

He sighed in disappointment at our incomprehension. “They’re cage birds. Norwich canaries.”

I started to get it. “They’re not in a cage.”

The neighbour had noticed the open windows and free birds when he’d come home for lunch. A plump orange bird flew in as a fluffy black-speckled one flew out.

“What time was this?” I asked again.

“As I said, lunchtime. One-fifteen. I always get home at one-fifteen for half an hour.”

“Anything else happen in that time?”

He frowned in thought. “My wife made a proper cooked meal for once,” he said nastily. “That’s notable.” He shrugged again. Then: “You want to get in? I’ve got a key.”

He had many more than one; it looked like every household on the street fell under his protection. He flicked through them, recognising the right one by some obscure system. He held it up and nodded, but when I reached for it he walked past me to the door. I shared a look with Frohmann, who shrugged in response.

The interior of the house was full of art and colour, in contrast to Gretchen Paul’s stark office, where I’d spoken with her about Nick. I’d taken her lack of decoration there as a natural consequence of her blindness. Maybe it was, and this was her husband’s taste. Or maybe she drew a thick line between personal and work.

Some of the birds had stayed inside; one perched on the back of a dining chair. Mindful of forensics, who were on their way, we separated to make a casual check of the home. I jumped when Frohmann called out upstairs. I bounded up to what turned out to be the study. There was another voice, droning. It sounded bizarre. “Police!” I called out.

“You’ve scared it to death.” Frohmann laughed, leaning over the computer.

I leaned over her to see. “It talks,” she said. “This must be Dr. Paul’s computer.”

It was reading out the webpage that was up on the screen. “I jiggled the mouse,” Frohmann confessed. “The screen saver disappeared and it started talking.”

It read from a maps page, telling us how to get to Cantelupe Road from here.

Things were not looking good for Mr. Reed.

The neighbour’s voice came from down the corridor, an urgent bark. He must have followed us in. “What is he doing in the house?” I muttered, ready to be stern with him.

My lecture stalled in me as I joined him at the bottom of the attic ladder. A streak of seeds, droppings, and feathers dribbled down the steps, culminating in a man’s body at the neighbour’s feet. “Get back,” I ordered, kneeling by the head. “Is this Harry Reed?”

The neighbour only made some noises. Frohmann called it in. I felt the neck for a pulse, finding none.

“Is this Harry Reed?” I pressed, looking at the neighbour for a nod. He finally gave it to me, and Frohmann led him out.

Frohmann tugged on latex gloves she’d retrieved from the cache in the car boot. I did the same, and paper shoe covers. I wanted to eyeball the scene in the bird room.

The robot voice from the computer pulled me back into the study. “Quote I love him completely comma quote she said full stop she pulled on her socks and trainers comma girlishly tying the laces in double knots full stop she’s my sister but completely unlike me full stop she dreams about men comma but why should a fish dream about water question mark she’s—”

Frohmann shook her head. “I wouldn’t be able to take that for a whole book….”

“Is that what it is?”

“A book excerpt.”

“Note the URL for me, all right?” I said, escaping the monotone recitation. Behind me I heard it switch to reading out an email header.

The steps had no visible footprints on them. I kept to the far left edge of the steps, and crept up, careful not to use my hands. Someone else might have held on. I just wanted to get my eyes to floor level and get an overview of the scene. More seed, droppings, and feathers, small broccoli florets, and splashes from overturned plastic birdbath bowls.

Flapping and urgent twittering alerted me to a bird with a foot trapped in the door of an overturned cage. A whole wall of wire cages had been pulled down. The central aviary had been bashed down on one side, perhaps by the chair lying on its side across the room. The aviary’s corner was bent in, which would have taken repeated blows, if the wire frame was as strong as it looked. About half a dozen birds were still in it, not having taken advantage of the open door. One flew from one perch to another, back and forth. Two others pressed together in a corner.

The bird with its leg in a cage door was too far to reach from here. I didn’t want to compromise the scene, but I couldn’t leave the animal in distress. I entered the room completely, stepping over debris, and freed the fluffy orange creature. I let it go. It flew up to the top of a wall of cages still standing on the other side of the room, and perched next to a red prize ribbon.

“Sir,” Frohmann called.

“Here.”

“Jensen’s pulled up. Forensics won’t like you in their scene.”

“I know,” I said, descending. I filled her in as we headed downstairs to let Jensen in. “… It’s been savaged up there, especially the aviary and one wall. Maybe means something, or maybe the other cages are just better secured….”

I stuck with forensics until they left at two. Then someone from the RSPCA came to rescue what were left of the birds. I left them to it with a constable to keep an eye out. I slept on a couch at the station and woke with a rotten headache.

She could have killed him, and then been the victim of a random hit-and-run. Except that it was his car that killed her.

He could have killed her, and then returned home to die in an accidental fall down those steep stairs. Except for the condition of the bird room. No accident there.

They were both murdered. Even if one of them did kill the other, there was a third party involved in at least one of the cases.

I spent the morning on a computer, re-creating Gretchen’s web history and branching off into some investigations of my own. She’d taken a taxi to Rose Cottage: A page with the car company’s phone number had been in her browser history, and she’d used a map website to print out directions for the driver.

I drove there myself. Susan Madison was expecting me.

“You can make yourself tea if you want to,” she announced when I arrived. I declined and followed her into the lounge. She sat down in a well-worn club chair and put her feet up onto a footstool.

There was no other seat in that room. Who has a lounge with only one chair? “May I?” I asked, and she nodded. I carried a chair from the kitchen table and squeezed it into the lounge, which was crowded with small tables and chests. She was older than I thought she would be. I had expected fifties. She was seventies.

“You have a beautiful home,” I said, choosing charming.

“Why don’t you ask what you came here for so I can get back to work?”

Work. Ms. Madison is a writer. She was already demonstrating to me a mastery of directness and brevity.

“Where were you last night?” I asked, sitting down in the hard chair.

“I was with a friend. He lives in Great Shelford.” She gave his contact information.

“What time did you arrive there?”

“Around four. My ex-husband’s daughter had announced to me her intentions of leaving her partner and coming to stay with me. I preferred to be elsewhere.”

“And you were with him till morning?”

She smiled. “Yes.”

I tilted my head to one side. “If you didn’t want your stepdaughter to come stay with you, why didn’t you just say so?” Sideways questions sometimes lead interesting places.

“I didn’t want to talk about it,” she said simply. “I didn’t see any reason to engage it at all.”

I uncrossed my legs and leaned forward. “Did you see Gretchen Paul here yesterday?”

“Yes,” she admitted.

I nodded to myself. “I understand she was tracking down people who’d been named after a book character her mother had created …”

“… But I’m too old,” she finished for me. “Yes, I am. As was evident to her immediately. I told her it was merely a coincidence.”

“Is Susan Madison a pen name?” I asked. “That would have been of interest to her. A writer having named herself after this character.”

She mouthed “no.” I think she was unhappy with my jovial persistence.

“Are you sure? Because the publication of your first book in 1963 was also the first year that you paid any tax. Ever. There doesn’t seem to be a record of you before then. And ‘S. M. Madison’ has had a steady, low-key career since then….”

She looked straight ahead, not at me.

I pushed. “Ms. Madison? Was that your name before 1963?”

From Nick I knew the theory about the woman Gretchen called the nanny, Gretchen’s actual mother, admiring her friend Linda Paul too much. She could have made life hell for her idol, enough that Linda had made a drastic escape. And a pretty obvious one, to be honest.

“All right,” she said. “Don’t gloat.”

“You’re Linda Paul.”

She lifted her shoulders and waved her hands in little circles. “I was, and now I’m Susan Maud Madison. It doesn’t matter.”

“Why did you change your name?”

“It’s not illegal to use a new name.”

Maybe. “But why bother? Was Gretchen’s mother harassing you?”

She closed her eyes, retreating.

“Ms. Madison. Please answer.”

“Fine, fine, all right. It was easier to walk away.”

“Your writing career?”

She waved a hand dramatically. “I write. I write.”

“I’m sorry …?”

Her hands balled into fists. She shook them on either side of her head. She didn’t like explaining herself. “I like my own company. I like being in charge of my own small world. I write. And then I let it go.”