Falling Sideways (11 page)

‘Anyway,' she went on, ‘thanks for all your help. It was very kind of you.'

‘Not at all,' David grunted into his torte shrapnel.

‘And I think it'd be really, really nice if you'd be Alex's best man at the wedding,' she went on, remorseless as a slender, golden-haired young Sherman tank. ‘I'll have a word with him as soon as I see him and remind him to ask you. You will do it, won't you?'

‘Oh, sure.'

‘That's splendid. Would you mind awfully if we got a taxi back? Only, we might be late for meeting Alex if we wait for the bus.'

Before he could point out that her chances of finding a taxi at this time of day were on a par with stumbling on the secret of the philosophers' stone on a wet Thursday in Stockport, she'd skipped to the door and hailed one, and it was waiting outside, its door obligingly open. There was just enough room for him in it, along with all the shopping.

All this fancy food. The insight came down on PFLDP headed notepaper. The Normandy butter and quails' eggs and ricotta cheese. It's not for her, it's for him. Alex. You know what a pig he is about food. David closed his eyes and managed not to make a groaning noise.

‘Would it be all right if I used your kitchen when we get back?' she was saying. ‘Only, I did tell Alex I'd fix him some lunch.'

Bloody hell, David thought. ‘Fine,' he said. ‘Please, go ahead. I won't be joining you, I'm afraid. Got some work I really should be getting on with.'

‘All right.'

All right? Is that all you've got to say for yourself, all right? ‘That's fine, then,' he said. ‘Oh, good, we're here.'

He'd never previously thought of his flat as excessively small; quite the opposite, in fact, since he had to clean it himself. It had a fair-sized bedroom, a modest but adequate living room, more than enough kitchen for someone whose philosophy of cooking was centred around a holy trinity of microwave, tin-opener and electric kettle, and a functional bathroom with deceptively good acoustics. Plenty big enough for one hermit geek; too small to accommodate two people trying to keep out of each other's way (though of course the same could be said of the Albert Hall or the Mojave Desert). All the computer stuff was in the living room, so he couldn't get any work done. He was tempted to go out and not come back till she'd gone, but he couldn't quite bring himself to do that. So he took a laptop into the bedroom, shut the door and played
Blood Frenzy III
in a listless manner, hoping that Alex wouldn't want to see him when he arrived.

So enthralling was the game that he fell asleep. When he woke up, his watch said four-thirty. He closed down the laptop, tiptoed over to the door and opened it cautiously. Nobody to be seen in the living room, just a scatter of dirty plates and glasses on the table. (That figures, he thought bitterly.) He checked the kitchen and, being thorough, the bathroom. Nobody there. She'd gone. No note, or anything like that. Never mind, he said to himself, it's undoubtedly just as well. He made a start on clearing up the abandoned crockery, asking himself as he did so whether his experiences over the last twenty-four hours could be considered as coming under the heading of getting a life, as everybody had kept urging him to do for years and years; if so, at least it had proved to his satisfaction that he was far better off without one, and that at least was a comfort.

The phone rang as he was carrying plates into the kitchen. He had one of those hands-free phones, the ones you can wedge between collarbone and ear and talk into while walking about and doing useful stuff. ‘Hello?' he said.

‘David Perkins?'

‘That's me.' He dumped one consignment of plates and went back for another. ‘Who's this?'

‘You don't know me,' said the voice, ‘but I believe you've met my brother John. Possibly my brothers Bill and Oliver, too.'

Bloody hell, he thought,
four
of them. ‘John as in Honest John?'

‘That's right. My name's Arkwright. Jason Arkwright.'

A likely story, David said to himself, lifting a plate and noting with disgust a spreading pool of ketchup on the table top. He'd need to get a wet cloth on that, before it made everything sticky and yuck. ‘Fine,' he said. ‘So, what can I do for you?'

‘Can you tell me, have you by any chance come across a young woman, possibly calling herself Pippa Levens and claiming to be my niece? Or John's niece, or Ollie's, or Bill's?'

‘Yes, of course,' David replied, absent-mindedly wiping ketchup off onto his trousers as he lugged the next stackful of china through the doorway. How on earth had two people managed to use so many plates? At the very least, it was a staggering tribute to their ingenuity and resourcefulness. ‘She was here earlier, but she's gone.'

‘Gone. Damn.' Short pause. ‘When was this?'

‘Not sure,' David said. ‘I was asleep when she left.' A very brief moment later, about as long as it takes light to travel two yards, he realised what that last remark could have sounded like. ‘She was having lunch with a friend,' he added quickly. ‘I was in the next room, all the time, and I sort of nodded off.'

‘A friend.'

‘Yes. Well, her fiancé, actually.' As he was saying the words, a thought nudged him.
Possibly
calling herself Pippa Levens.
Claiming
to be my niece. Note the emphases. ‘Excuse me, but are you saying—?'

‘Fiancé,' the voice repeated, with palpable distaste. ‘Sorry to interrupt. Do you happen to know this man's name?'

‘Sure,' David replied. ‘He's my cousin. Alex Snaithe.'

A sharp intake of breath from the other end of the line, like an imploding heavy breather. ‘You're sure about that? The name.'

‘Well, yes, of course. I've known him all my life. Is there—?'

The phone went dead. David took it out from under his chin and scowled at it, then turned it off and put it back in its cradle.
Four
of these crazy brothers. Jason Arkwright. Claiming to be my niece.

Ah, well; all gone now, and good riddance. Somehow he had the feeling that once the raucous clatter of the wedding bells had faded away, cousin Alex was going to be getting the kind of family Christmases with the in-laws that he deserved. Best man? Not if he had anything to do with it.

There was a knock at the door, and David winced. Spoke too soon, he muttered to himself; what's the betting that that's Alex and his
bird
, his
paramour
, returned to collect something they'd negligently left behind? That'd be so typical.

As it turned out, he was being unduly pessimistic. It wasn't Alex, or Philippa Levens. Nor was it Uncle Oliver, Uncle Bill or even Uncle Honest John.

It was the police.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘
H
onestly,' David said, ‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

The policeman leaned back in his chair and looked at him as if he'd just found him crawling about in his salad. ‘Really,' he said. ‘You know what time it is?'

David looked up at the clock on the wall behind the policeman's head. ‘It's a quarter past seven,' he said.

‘A quarter past seven,' the policeman repeated. ‘In other words, I'm missing the end of the snooker. The final, Wayne Digley versus Snapping Dan Melznic, best of fifteen frames. I've been following it since the start of the tournament. And instead, I'm in here with you. Lucky me.'

David shrugged. ‘I'm sorry,' he said.

‘You're sorry.' The policeman sighed. ‘Of course, I asked her to tape it for me, but will she? Will she hell as like, not if it clashes with her soaps. Obsessed with her bloody soaps, she is. She watches the BBC one and tapes the ITV, so I might as well have saved my breath. What's so bloody fascinating about a load of randy Australian teenagers I really couldn't say. I like
Brookside
, mind. You watch
Brookside
?'

David admitted that he didn't.

‘Thought not,' the policeman said. ‘All right, let's try again. First, may I remind you that you have a right to have your solicitor present. You have chosen not to avail yourself of that right. Right?'

David nodded. His solicitor was Alex Snaithe.

‘Fine,' the policeman went on. ‘It's bad enough being stuck in here without one of them sarky buggers looking down his nose and being difficult.' The policeman lit a cigarette. ‘Mind if I smoke?'

David coughed. ‘Go ahead,' he said.

‘Now then,' said the policeman. ‘Do you admit that at some time between ten and eleven a.m. yesterday morning, you were in the National Gallery standing looking at a painting, Portrait of Philippa Levens by—' He looked down at his notes. ‘By William de Stevens or something like that, can't read my own writing. Anyway, that one.'

‘Yes,' David said.

‘All right. But you claim that you know nothing about the break-in between one and one-thirty a.m. or the disappearance of the said picture, even though you were stood there like a prune gawping at it and making funny noises for over an hour.'

‘That's right.'

‘Do you admit that after leaving the gallery you proceeded to meet with one Oliver Dean, a professional criminal with several convictions for fine-art theft, in a pub round the corner?'

David bit his lip. ‘I met a man in a pub, yes. And he said his name was Oliver Dean.'

‘So you'd never met him before?'

‘No.'

‘All right. Do you agree that after leaving the pub, you took a train to Ravenscourt Park and visited premises owned by a John Spooner, otherwise known as Honest John, a dealer in stolen artworks well known to the police, and Dean's stepbrother?'

David winced. ‘I— Yes, that's right.'

The policeman nodded. ‘Fair enough. Furthermore, do you admit that you live in the same block of flats as one William Van Oppen, alias William Oppenheimer, alias Bill the Shiv and something else in German I'm not even going to try and pronounce, also a notorious fine-art thief and Spooner and Dean's stepbrother?'

‘I suppose so.'

‘Thank you so much.' The policeman sighed. ‘Let's just run through all that one more time, shall we? You spent yesterday morning closely examining a certain priceless art object – fifteen photographs of which, by the way, we found in your flat – and the rest of the day hanging out with three brothers who make their living nicking old paintings. Late last night, somebody breaks into the gallery, bypasses all the alarms, steals the priceless art object and buggers off. And you had nothing at all to do with it.'

‘That's about the shape of it, yes.'

‘Listen, sunbeam.' The policeman leaned across the table at him. ‘For two pins I'd arrest you right now on charges of attempting to murder an Old Bailey jury by inducing them to laugh themselves to death.' He shook his head. ‘Go on, then,' he said. ‘You tell me your version, and we'll see what it sounds like. I mean, maybe you've got a perfectly reasonable explanation, and as soon as I hear it I'll be doing Homer Simpson impressions and wondering why the hell I didn't spot something so pathetically bloody obvious. Try me.'

David took a deep breath. ‘Well,' he said.

‘Hang on.' The policeman was staring at David's leg. ‘What's that on your trousers?'

‘Excuse me?'

‘There's a sort of reddish-brown mark on your trouser leg, just above the right knee. You care to tell me what it is?'

David glanced down. ‘Oh, that,' he said. ‘That's just tomato ketchup.'

‘You're sure about that?'

‘Absolutely. There was some – I mean, I spilled some ketchup and I got a bit on my hands, so I wiped it off on my trouser leg.'

‘Fine. It looks more like dried blood to me.'

As the policeman said that, David suddenly remembered that there wasn't any tomato ketchup left in his flat; he'd used up the last dregs of the bottle on Saturday's chips. Nor had anything so mundane as ketchup featured on the list of stuff he'd been given to buy at Sainsbury's. So, if the puddle on the table
was
ketchup, where had it come from?

‘Does it?' he mumbled.

The policeman inclined his head gravely. ‘And I know what dried blood looks like,' he added. ‘It looks like that. As opposed to, say, tomato sauce, which doesn't look like that at all.'

‘Oh.'

‘But we'll soon know for sure once forensic's taken a look. Could I trouble you to take off your trousers? I'll get you a receipt for them from the desk sergeant.'

Earlier, David would have defined abject misery as sitting in a police interview room being asked questions to which the only possible answer was yes. After he'd been debagged and issued with his receipt, he made a small but significant amendment to the definition. If ever they send an expedition to Hell, down in the nethermost circle they'll find all the worst evildoers from history, sitting in a police interview room saying yes to awkward questions while wearing nothing below the waist except bright blue boxer shorts and paisley socks. And serve them right for doing all that bad stuff. What David had done to merit such treatment, on the other hand, he had no idea.

‘Maybe I forgot to mention,' the policeman went on, ‘but about ten minutes after we arrested you, someone fished the dead body of William Van Oppen, alias all those other blokes, out of a skip in Hillingdon. Nasty bash on the head, loads of red stuff down his shirt front – haven't heard back from forensic, but it's probably not tomato ketchup – and a bit of paper in his top pocket with your phone number written on it. Not that I'm suggesting you had anything to do with it. Just making conversation, really.'

Tellingly, the first mental image that flashed across David's synapses when he heard this was the look of utter disdain and contempt on his mother's face as she scowled at him through one of those plate-glass windows they have in prison visiting rooms. It only went to show what he'd always suspected. When the going gets really tough, a boy's worst nightmare is his mother.