Grief Encounters (3 page)

‘So what is it tonight?’ Richard Wentbridge, Teri’s husband, asked. ‘I’m absolutely starving.’ They were in the art deco sitting room, with dim lights and an invisible sound system that was working its way through several hours of golden classics.

‘Have you brought anything?’ Fiona wondered, facing up to him.

‘Ooh, I might have something for afterwards,’ he replied, pulling her closer.

‘We’re having a takeaway,’ Fiona said, Richard’s arm around her waist. ‘They should be here anytime.’ She gave an involuntary shudder as his fingers traced a circle on the small of her back.

‘Clifford and Pepe?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Good show.’

‘Come on,’ Fiona said, taking Richard’s arm and pulling him towards the door. ‘Help me finish laying the table.’

‘And make sure that’s the only thing you lay,’ Tristan called after them. As soon as they were alone he took his best friend’s wife in his arms and kissed her, long and deep. When he came up for air he said: ‘God, why do we have to go through all this rigmarole? Why can’t we just get on with it like grown-ups?’

Teri laughed. ‘It’s more romantic this way,’ she told him. ‘And man cannot live on sex alone.’

‘Maybe not,’ he argued, ‘but we could have the sex first and eat afterwards.’

‘You’re insatiable.’

‘And what about you, on Wednesday?’

She smiled and rubbed her nose against his. ‘It was rather good, wasn’t it?’

‘Did you tell Richard?’

‘I told him I met you, yes. I presume he guessed the rest.’

‘Same again, this Wednesday?’

She shook her head, slowly and solemnly. ‘No-o. I think not.’

‘Why not, Teri? You know what I feel about you.’

‘Because it would spoil things, don’t you see?’

‘It wouldn’t spoil things for me. I want you all to myself.’

‘No you don’t, Tristan. If you and I were an item, you’d be having this same conversation with Fiona and I’d be in the dining room with Richard’s podgy fingers feeling all my twiddly bits. Don’t you see that?’

‘Mmm,’ he said, breaking free from her. ‘You might be right.’

‘And then there’s the game,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget the game.’

‘Oh no,’ he replied. ‘Mustn’t forget the bloody game.’

The doorbell interrupted any further argument. ‘Here comes the takeaway,’ he said. ‘I’d better get that.’

Calling a meal by Clifford and Pepe a takeaway is a bit like saying that NASA occasionally sends up a firecracker. They started with oyster ravioli with
foie gras
and rhubarb vinaigrette, served by Clifford in his athletics shorts and striped apron; then wantons with ceps and porcini in
sauce mère
; followed by sea bass with a velouté of butter beans, truffle shavings and vermicelli; venison in jalousie with celeriac and carpaccio of broccoli in
jus natural
; and finished with cassata of summer fruits with mango and papaya custard. Only Richard tried the ice cream with beetroot and anchovy, and found it not to his liking. Pepe had recommended a simple Macon-Villages white burgundy, and they took four bottles.

‘Pepe! Clifford!’ Tristan shouted, slumped in the captain’s chair at the head of the table. ‘Get yourselves in here.’

The two chefs joined them, wiping their hands on their aprons. Tristan poured two extra glasses of wine and gestured for the two men to take them. ‘Your good health, boys,’ he said. ‘You’re bloody fantastic. Another culinary masterpiece.’ The others mumbled their agreement and raised their glasses.

Clifford said: ‘The dishwasher’s on, Mrs Foyle, and we’ll come back in the morning to clear all this up. Will about ten be OK?’

‘That’ll be fine, Clifford,’ she told him.

Clifford took a long envelope from the pocket of his apron, saying: ‘And this is for you, Mr Foyle.’ He delicately placed it on the table, leaning against a candleholder. Tristan gravely nodded an acknowledgement to the presentation of the bill and half raised his empty glass.

When the two chefs had gone Richard Wentbridge said: ‘Right, so who’s for a dab of sherbet to finish with? Do we have a mirror?’

If Foyle was old money, Wentbridge was new. His father was a carpet salesman who made a decent living when the fashion for fitted carpets started to blossom. But a decent living isn’t enough for men like him, and soon he was selling inferior imports from a disused cinema, while all around him the local carpet industry was curling up and dying. Young Richard was put in boarding school while he and his wife wintered in Tenerife and that’s where he came across the timeshare industry, with all its traps, temptations and opportunities. He started with a thirty-bedroomed hotel and grossly oversold it. That gave him cash to expand and soon he had a complex network of businesses all down the Costas and throughout the Canary Islands, all paid for from the life savings of countless, trusting holidaymakers. The sun was shining, he was such a nice man and it would be theirs forever. ‘Where do I sign?’ they asked.

In 1977, whilst under investigation by the British and Spanish fraud squads, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He began to systematically convert everything he had into cash. Two years later he died and left almost everything to his fourteen-year-old son.

That son, Richard, was now enjoying cashing in on his father’s enterprise and other people’s thrift and hard work. He’d met Tristan Foyle at public school, and had narrowly escaped expulsion for the same misdemeanour that had ended Tristan’s formal education. He did a year at university before working briefly in his mother’s fashionware business, modelling and sweeping up, and the two sons met again at the 1998 International Motor Show at Birmingham NEC, drooling over the latest Ferrari. They were both with their new wives and the attraction all round was mutual and intense. Since then they had done most things together.

‘I’ll fetch one,’ Fiona said, and dashed out of the room. Seconds later she returned holding a hand mirror with a mother-of-pearl back, and a
double-edged
razor blade. She handed both items to Richard. He tipped the contents of a small zip-lock bag onto the mirror and used the blade to gather the powder into a pile. The other three leant forward, watching intently. With an unnecessary flourish he divided the line into two and then into quarters.

‘Who’s first?’ he asked.

‘Me,’ Tristan said. His wife handed him a bendy straw. ‘Is this from your courier friend?’ he wondered as he fitted one end of the straw into his nose and directed the other end towards the line of cocaine.

‘Mmm,’ Richard replied. ‘But this could be the last he can do. He reckons it’s not as easy to get hold of as the papers would have you believe, unless he’s just kite-flying to put the price up.’

‘Probably.’

‘And too much isn’t good for you,’ Fiona added. ‘It can make your nostrils join up into one, like it did that stupid actress woman.’

Tristan pressed a finger against his spare nostril and inhaled slowly and deeply. The coke vanished up the straw.

‘Ziggy-zaggy wowee-wonker!’ he exclaimed. ‘Struth! That’s good stuff.’ He shook his head to clear it and the others laughed. Richard snorted the next line, and then it was Fiona’s turn.

Teri shook her head when offered a straw for her line. ‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘It makes me sneeze. And I don’t want one big nose-hole. Besides,’ she went on, ‘we know a different way of applying it, don’t we, Tristan?’ She put her arm around his neck and pulled him closer. Tristan looked momentarily embarrassed but nodded his agreement.

Her husband said: ‘Well, it can do the same damage down there, you know.’

Teri looked puzzled, not sure what he meant, then exclaimed: ‘Richard! That’s grotesque!’

Tristan stood up and pulled Teri to her feet. ‘I say, old man,’ he began, ‘do you mind if I take your wife upstairs? We’ve had the decorators in and I’d like to show her the magnificent job they’ve made of the master bedroom ceiling.’

‘A touch of the Sistine Chapel, is it?’ Richard enquired.

‘No. Just a rather fine shade of magnolia emulsion.’

‘Ooh! I can hardly wait,’ Teri enthused.

‘Oh, go on then,’ Richard replied. ‘Fiona and I will finish the washing up –
again
.’

Tristan gathered up two glasses and a half-full bottle of wine, and followed Teri out of the dining room. ‘Be nice to each other,’ were his parting words.

As soon as they were alone Richard and Fiona embraced. ‘God, I thought they’d never go,’ Fiona said, breaking away. ‘Upstairs or the other room?’

‘The other room,’ Richard decided, without hesitation. ‘It’s warm, the lights are dim, soft music is playing, and there are no stairs to climb. What more do we need?’

‘The settee’s not very comfortable.’

‘No, but the fireside rug is deep and soft.’

‘You’ve convinced me. Come on.’

The settee in question was in the style of the room, all wrought iron and black leather, with infills of real zebra skin. The newspaper that Teri had brought with her hung over one arm, where she had discarded it. ‘Did you manage to get some?’ Fiona asked.

‘Yes, here.’ They sat on the settee and Richard produced a twist of silver paper from a pocket. There were three small blue pills in it. ‘Two for me, one for you,’ he said. He’d carried a glass of wine in with him and they washed them down with it.

‘Have you done this with Teri?’

‘No. She has to be careful, what with the other medication she takes.’

‘Of course. I’d forgotten that. How long does it take to work?’

‘The Viagra? About an hour. I’ll probably be needing it by then.’

They embraced hungrily and started undressing each other. She threw his shirt over the chair arm, knocking the newspaper onto the floor. In seconds they were naked and he was pulling her towards the fireside rug. The newspaper had landed with the front page facing upwards. The lead story was the one that had created so much delight when they all met at the front door. There was a photograph of a man with an avuncular face, hair neatly combed, smiling modestly as he gazed into the distance above the photographer’s head. The headline above the picture, in bold black print, read:

‘MP Found Hanged.’

‘And you expect us to believe that?’ Superintendent Gilbert Wood said after I’d told him about Friday’s meeting, finishing with Magdalena.

I threw up my arms in frustration. ‘It’s the truth. What more can I say?’

‘Come on, Charlie. We’re both grown up; you’re a single man. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in having a lover with
Property of the Pope
tattooed across her backside.’

‘I’m not ashamed. Or I wouldn’t be. I was an art student, she was an artist’s model.’

‘Is that what they called you – the Pope? Did your fellow students elevate you to the Vatican?’

‘No, and we weren’t lovers.’

‘So it was a professional relationship. What’s wrong with that?’

‘Nothing, except it wasn’t any sort of relationship. We used to go to Leeds College of Art for life classes. That’s drawing and painting nudes, to you. Usually female, sometimes male. Magdalena was one of the regular models. To be fair, she was just about the only one any of us fancied. There was a touch of the exotic about her. The others were bored housewives who posed for a couple of hours before going to pick up the kids from school. Magdalena always reminded me of a belly dancer, or a gypsy queen. I could imagine her telling fortunes or making silver jewellery by the light of a campfire. We were all about nineteen and she was much older. At least twenty-five, I’d say. Some of the drawings we did were a bit shaky.’

Gilbert lifted one of the photographs I’d brought from the meeting and said: ‘Well she doesn’t look exotic now, Charlie. Somebody really did for her.’

‘They certainly did.’

‘Was her hair this long back then?’

‘Yes.’

He was silent for a few seconds, then asked: ‘Were any of these women connected, if you see what I mean, with the, um, sex trade, or anything like that?’

I shook my head. ‘No, Gilbert, it was all relatively innocent, and they were probably paid about fifty pence per hour. It wasn’t exactly a nice little earner by any standards. There wasn’t a drug scene, although some of them, like Magdalena, may have moved in what you might call bohemian circles. There was pot about, but you had to know where to find it.’

‘Did you know where to find it?’

‘Pot? No.’

‘Did you ever try it?’

‘I had the odd puff of a joint at parties. It never did anything for me. I suspect they’d never seen any marijuana.’

‘We’ll strike that admission from the record. So the chief super has handed the case to you, in your role as divisional head of HMET?’

‘’Fraid so, boss.’

‘And you reckon the chief super will be asked to resign, later this morning?’

‘His words, not mine.’

‘What’s it all about?’

‘No idea.’

‘There could be something in the air. Did you see where old Ted Goss had topped himself?’

‘Mmm. No suspicious circumstances, they said.’

Gilbert looked at me over his half moon spectacles. ‘That’s what they said. Something will come to light, mark my words. He’ll have had his fingers in one pie or another.’

‘You’re a cynic, Gilbert,’ I said. ‘His wife is an invalid and he was in a thankless job. For an MP he was a decent old cove. Last of the old-time socialists, but everything he believed in had gone out of the window. Perhaps he just ran out of the will to live.’

‘And pigs’ll fly. So what about Swainby? What was he? Last of the old-time coppers?’

‘I don’t know. We’ll just have to wait for the jungle drums to start rolling.’

‘Keep me informed, please.’

‘Will do.’ I went downstairs to the CID office and gave a collective wave to the gathered troops. I hung my jacket in my little enclave, checked for messages and joined them. Someone brought me a mug of tea. I went through the weekend’s reports of crimes and allocated them to the sergeants and told them we had taken over the murder investigation they’d all read about. They updated me on on-going cases and I told them to go to it. The gift of delegation eases many burdens.