Dying to Know (24 page)

Not everyone accepted that explanation, though. A passing motorist claimed to have seen someone sprinting down the road just after the incident, although no one else had seen this phantom and all enquiries regarding it had proved subsequently fruitless. The house and grounds had been thoroughly searched but no jewels found. Inspector Masson was quoted prominently as saying that the case was now officially classified as ‘solved'.

What caught my eye was in the last paragraph.

I put the paper down and stared into space as Max burst into delighted giggles over some story about an unfortunate encounter between me and a farmyard cesspit. I thought I could guess who had done the house clearance.

THIRTY-THREE

‘
I
t's not blackmail, it's diamonds!' I said to Max as soon as we were out of the hospital and in the car park.

‘What?' We were hurrying – I was hurrying – and she was having trouble keeping up.

‘Someone's looking for the diamonds, not the file on Hocking's affair with the grocer's wife.'

‘How do you know?'

‘I just know.'

We had reached the car and I was unlocking her side. As I went around the back she said to me, ‘Is that why you were in such a rush to get out of there?'

It was true that I had been impatient to leave but I had thought that I had hidden it well. I had withstood Dad's inexhaustible supply of oh-so-funny stories regarding little Lance and his juvenile idiocy for over half an hour before saying as tactfully as I could, ‘I think it's time we got going, Dad.'

He had looked disappointed but in a way only he could manage; it was disappointment cooked in a sauce of disapproval. ‘Oh. Are you?'

‘Well . . . You know.' His face told me quite plainly that he didn't, but I was experienced enough when dealing with him just to plough straight on. ‘Come on, Max.'

With which – and a promise that we would be back that evening – I had hustled her out.

‘There are things we need to do.'

I got in and she did likewise. ‘Like what?'

‘Go to the library.'

‘Lance, it's Sunday.'

‘Is it?' I'd forgotten.

‘What do you want to go for?'

‘I want to read the last few weeks' copies of the
Croydon Advertiser.
In particular their coverage of the Greyhound Lane killings.'

‘Oh, I've got back copies of that, if you want.'

‘You have?'

She nodded. ‘For Twinkle.'

‘What for?'

‘Bedding, of course, silly.'

Max took the
Daily Mail
and the
Mail on Sunday
as well as the
Croydon Advertiser
, old copies of which she kept in a pile by the back door of her house; the rabbit hutch was outside, also by the back door. Sod's law was in full operation and of all the back copies of the
Croydon Advertiser
that were available to us, the one that I wanted was under Twinkle's paws and had suffered grievously.

‘I need to clean him out, anyway. The neighbours' children are very good about feeding him, but I can't ask them to do the dirty jobs.'

Thus Twinkle, clearly feeling somewhat aggrieved at being turfed out of his cosy cubbyhole, was put into his run and sat in a hunched posture, wrinkling his nose and managing to look like one angry bunny. I let Max handle him, which she did with great aplomb and much cooing and stroking; Twinkle took it all with great disdain and I wondered if the basic source of his dyspeptic attitude to life in general was being saddled with such a bloody awful name.

I stood back, too, when it came to removing said pet's bedding. An aroma of sweet, dusty hay and ammonia flowed out of the hutch and into our nostrils as Max put the old bedding into an old plastic shopping bag to expose the
Croydon Advertiser
on the floor.

It was damp and variably stained in a huge range of shades of brown. I took the paper from her and, holding it by my fingertips, took it into the house.

‘Put some fresh paper on the table before you lay that thing on it,' advised Max. ‘I eat at that table.'

Since this was the edition on the Friday after the shootings, the story took up the whole front page and most of the following four. There were brief biographies of the dead men, eyewitness reports (including that of Jessie Trout), diagrams of the house, background stories on the rising level of gun crime in the borough of Croydon, and a thundering leading article demanding increased police presence on the streets.

I started reading with great enthusiasm, sure that the information I was seeking would be easy to find, but soon became disillusioned; it was undoubtedly informative – if somewhat repetitive – but I found little that was new and certainly not what I was after: the name of Ricky Baines' wife.

Max came back inside, washing and peeling off her rubber gloves in the sink. ‘Any luck?'

‘Not really.'

She came over and sat next to me, reading through the various articles. With the logic that only women know, it was only after a while that she asked, ‘What are we looking for?'

I explained and she returned to her reading. She was a quick reader and after only ten minutes was at the bottom of page three and waiting for me to catch up. When I eventually did, she turned the page over and almost immediately said, ‘There.'

She pointed to a small photograph of a late middle-aged woman with blonde hair and sharp features. Nadia Baines was quoted as knowing nothing about her husband, that she had been separated from him for six years and, as far as she was concerned, he could ‘rot in hell'.

‘Charming,' remarked Max.

‘I'm not sure we should judge her too harshly. I suspect that the late Mr Baines was not a kind and attentive partner.'

At the end of the piece, though, there was a surprise.

It did not, as I had hoped, give any indication of where she lived, but it did mention where she worked. At the Wimpy Bar, St George Street, Croydon.

I looked again at her photograph. It was the pinch-faced woman behind the counter.

THIRTY-FOUR

I
was not looking forward to interviewing Mrs Baines. I suspected that she would not take kindly to anyone taking an interest in her affairs and that dislike would have been honed to a pitch by the fact that we would not be the first. The police and press had got there before us and I knew from my own experience how aggravating these two groups could be when they were doing their jobs. We had driven straight into the centre of Croydon and were now parked just down the street from the Wimpy Bar. As it was Sunday, Croydon took on a different aspect, but one that, to me, was even more forbidding and unwelcoming.

At least during the week and on Saturdays, commuters and shoppers added a dimension of humanity to the grey concrete world that post-war planners had envisaged and built for the delight of the teeming masses. It was as though the powers that be had decided to forgo architectural evolution and plump for revolution. Thus, what had at first seemed like the coming thing – the
Jetsons
and
Flash Gordon
with a hint of
Brave New World
, perhaps – had too quickly become yesterday's bad idea.

The Wimpy Bar was open and the familiar tableau in place: a group of youths looking seriously disaffected, some sort of tramp looking wild-eyed and seriously insane, a gentleman of Mediterranean aspect with the kind of cigarette addiction that suggested his colouring was actually a mix of sun exposure and nicotine staining, and Nadia Baines. Previously unaware of her identity, I had seen her perhaps thirty times before, and on none of those occasions had I been lucky enough to witness her smile. We soon saw that today was to be no exception.

As it was approaching lunchtime, Max and I decided that it would be a wise move to buy something and thereby engineer an introduction; it struck me as an approach fraught with difficulty, but we could think of none other. Accordingly, we entered the smoky atmosphere of the Wimpy and bathed ourselves in the familiar ambience of hostility, grease and grubbiness. The wild-eyed man did his thing, adding for good measure, a bit of wordless talking as if he were going through some sort of incantation; the youth section pretended to ignore us while in actuality talking about us; Mrs Baines and her colleague busied themselves doing nothing.

‘Two cheeseburgers, please,' I announced. I was aiming for commanding and insouciant; managed only loud and timorous.

Nadia asked, ‘Chips?' I could not detect any real interest in this enquiry.

I looked at Max; we had not discussed this option beforehand. She shook her head and I turned back to our quarry. ‘No, thanks.'

‘Something to drink?'

Max said, ‘Coffee, please.'

I duly reported, ‘Two coffees.'

She looked around to her colleague and said tiredly, ‘Two cheese.' I felt that communication without verbs might, under certain circumstances, become confusing, but she showed remarkable versatility by then asking of me, ‘Eat in or eat out?' Her command, then, of auxiliary verbs was intact.

‘We'll eat in here.'

She raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips, possibly surprised at our judgement; was that a shrug I saw?

‘That'll be one pound, thirty-eight pence.'

‘And one pound thirty-eight pence well spent,' I said as I handed over two pound notes. It sounded, I think because I was uncommonly nervous, a trifle sarcastic. It at least had the advantage of catching her attention, albeit hostile.

She paused, pound notes in hand, till drawer open. ‘You what?'

I found that I had no plans for further verbal engagement and therefore stood there, mouth slightly open, staring into her belligerent gaze. Beside me, Max rode to the rescue. ‘Mrs Baines?'

Her eyes jerked quickly to the left, narrowing as they did so. ‘Who's asking?'

Max's smile was as sweet as it could possibly have been, but I feared it would have no effect on the incarnation of sourness at which it was aimed. ‘You are Mrs Baines, aren't you?'

I glanced around and realized that I shouldn't have. The knowledge that everyone was staring at us did not improve the constitutional crisis my innards were experiencing; even the wild-eyed man was caught up in the action, although he was twitching regularly like a silent metronome. The chef was doing wonders with his spatula, periodically flipping the burgers, then pressing down on them, making them sizzle loudly on the hot plate. The eyes of Nadia Baines were by now slit-like. I suspect she was going to give us some advice regarding where we could go and how we could get there but Max seemed to have less problem with stage fright than I did and forestalled her.

‘We're not press and we're not the police.'

The pound notes descended into the cash drawer, held there by a clip that Mrs Baines snapped down with a loud crack. As she slammed the drawer shut, she said, ‘I can see that.' There was a distinct tone of derision.

‘Can we talk?'

She handed the change back to me. ‘I've got nothing to say.'

I decided to join in. ‘I'm a doctor, Mrs Baines. I know that you've recently been bereaved, but it's quite important that I ask you a few questions about your husband's death.'

She added a frown to her face. ‘What's it got to do with a doctor? Ricky was shot.'

‘It's a long story. Can we sit down?'

It took her a long time to decide and I think it would have been against us, except that Max said, ‘My father used to beat my mother, Mrs Baines. I know how you feel . . .'

I looked at Max, once again staggered by the size of her audacity, the breadth of her conviction, the depth of her deceit. She was looking at Nadia Baines, eyes as wide as marbles, the merest trace of moisture brimming the lower lids.

The burgers arrived on plastic plates. As she handed them over, Nadia Baines said tersely, ‘Five minutes, no more.'

She called over her shoulder, ‘I'm taking a break, Manny.'

She did not wait for assent and, indeed, would have waited a long time, because Manny, having scraped the hot plate more or less clean, had retreated behind the
News of the World
with the only movement coming from a curling tendril of smoke that rose from behind it.

We sat around a table just by the till, Nadia opting to do her bit for air pollution with a Players No. 10 while we tucked into our cheeseburgers liberally garnished with tomato ketchup.

‘So what's all this about?'

I had been wondering what to say and had decided that honesty was probably best; even if Max's grasp of this rare and precious commodity was somewhat lax, I felt that one of us should remain on the straight and narrow path to salvation. ‘My father's under suspicion of murder.'

She was surprised. ‘Is he?'

I nodded. ‘The police think he killed Oliver and Doris Lightoller.' I watched for a reaction and got one, of sorts.

‘The Lightollers? Your old man's the bloke they found in the house, is he? The one in hospital?'

‘That's right.'

‘I read about that.' She considered things and then asked, ‘Why did he do it?'

‘He didn't.'

Something that I can only describe as a smirk appeared. ‘Yeah, right.'