Play Dead (11 page)

‘With a concern about weeds,' Ure said. ‘And weed?'

‘We know you're under the same roof as the two scrutineers - by a slice of good luck, we hear,' she said.

‘Yes,' Cass said.

‘What we still don't know is
why
you're around again,' she said. ‘Harpur or Iles told you they were coming?'

I'm here following a tip from Daisy Fenton that Maud Clatworthy of the HO wanted to reopen the inquiry.
But Cass didn't say this. ‘Things elsewhere were quiet. The paper doesn't like me idle,' he replied.

‘Quiet?' she said. ‘A banking crisis. Terrorism frights because of the Games. Hacking and bribing scandals.'

‘The
Epoch
has specialists to deal with each of those,' he said.

‘What's
your
speciality, then?' she asked.

‘He's investigative,' Ure said.

‘Investigative of what, though?' she said.

‘In general,' Ure said. He bent down to the leaves. ‘You've lost quite a bit of blood from that thorn puncture. The weed is soaked. Are you sure you don't need a bandage?'

‘It's all right,' Cass said. ‘But thanks again for the offer.'

Back in the hotel, Cass checked both bars but didn't see Harpur or Iles. He asked at Reception if they'd been about and the girl said no. She thought Mr Iles might still be recuperating.

‘In what sense?' Cass said.

She said that the night before when Mr Harpur and Mr Iles came in, Mr Iles seemed to have been injured. ‘How injured?' Cass asked. The girl said possibly something to the side of his face. ‘What to the side of his face?' Cass said.

‘An incision,' she said. ‘He was holding a handkerchief to it, so I'm not certain.'

Blood?
But again he only thought this; didn't say it aloud. He'd sound ghoulish. ‘Did he or Mr Harpur mention an incident?' Cass asked.

‘What kind of incident?' she said.

‘Any kind of incident,' Cass said.

‘I don't think so,' she said.

‘Did either of them speak at all about what had been happening?' Cass said.

‘Mr Harpur saw I was concerned about Mr Iles's wound. Mr Harpur said Mr Iles believed in confronting troubles personally and was a leader who led.'

Or bled.
But Cass didn't say that, either. He rang home, to tell Louise he'd arrived and was installed at the Mayfield. ‘I get a feeling the police here don't much like me,' he said.

‘Never mind, Dave, the children and I do,' she said. ‘You'll go carefully, won't you?'

H
elga Ormond, the
Epoch'
s stringer here, was in her early to mid seventies. Cass had met her several times before and during Jaminel's trial. There was much more to her than emphatic jewellery, but she did go for emphatic jewellery: big circular ear rings like doubloons, hefty medallions on stout hawsers around her neck, notable brooches, usually representing musical instruments - say a four-centimetre-long piano, or tiny helicon tuba in gleaming mock-brass, for a Lilliput band.

Today, she wore a green tam-style hat on her dyed
auburn-to-vermilion hair, and a yellow silk suit, the skirt with five parallel golden lines around the base, as if to calibrate progressive grope limits. The matching yellow jacket had a kind of halter at the back, like a naval rating's, but deeper, and embroidered with what on a quick count Cass reckoned as half a dozen parallel golden lines, similar to the skirt's, though on a comparatively neutral part of the body. She had a sharp, slightly masculine face, a straight nose and no-nonsense chin. Cass stood her lunch in The Platter, a fish restaurant alongside the River Vaze, and not far from the handsome Vaze Upper stone bridge, famous for those drownings in the so-called Midsummer Riots of 1817, forerunners of the Peterloo massacre further north two years later.

Cass agreed with Kingsley Amis that some of the most depressing words in the language were, ‘Let's go straight in, shall we?' They downed a couple of double vodkas and tonic in the bar before tackling the meals. Helga took the tam-'o-shanter off. She had a fish soup starter and main course halibut. Cass never found restaurant fish soup fishy enough and chose whitebait instead, then crab. They drank a New Zealand Chardonnay, solid and aggressive, like the country's All Blacks rugby team.

Customers at other tables greeted her. Helga had been in local journalism a long time and knew a lot of people. That's what stringers were for: their established strings to the citizenry about them, and especially to the important and/or notorious citizenry around them. Her bling-boosted outfits and her hair announced there was nothing sneaky or furtive about journalism. You couldn't imagine someone so uproariously flashy secretly hacking into voicemails, a solitary vice. The waitress called her ‘Helge' and seemed to know what food she would order.

‘You discovered Harpur and Iles were returning before I did, Dave,' Helga said. ‘Don't care for that, not a bit. Makes me look switched-off and indolent. I'm outflanked. Vibeless. You got a Home Office tip, did you? Do I recall there was someone called Maud, much concerned with the situation here on the last investigation? She breathes into your ear still? Or perhaps she has a secretary or clerk who does. They're worried about their pensions up there, aren't they? You can contribute a little extra for them, I imagine, to go into a private, back-up pot. They're pleased to be on the
Epoch
's
“special contact” pay roll, despite all the hoo-hah lately about bribery by the Press.'

‘The feeling in
Epoch
from right after the guilty verdict was that it didn't count for much - except to Jaminel and his family.'

Helga broke some bread into fragments and scattered them on the soup, like feed for goldfish. ‘I heard you were out at fourteen Davant again on Elms and ran into Belinda Laverick and young Gwyn, one of her very fit sidekicks,' Helga replied. ‘Or, rather,
she
ran into
you
.'

‘I gather there'd been an incident the previous night,' Cass said.

‘Yes, an incident.'

‘A call to the emergency services. Violence.'

‘And then twenty-four hours later Gwyn says you'd done yourself an injury.'

‘Nothing.'

‘No, I've been studying your hands. Undamaged.'

‘A bit of blood, that's all.'

‘It
was
yours, was it?'

‘Who else's?' Cass said.

‘Exactly,' she replied. ‘Someone hurt during the “incident”?'

Yes, probably. He didn't answer, though. Did the blood come from Iles? But, of course, Cass hadn't known enough to suspect this at the time. It was the hotel receptionist's words that started the idea. And it remained only speculation. Because Iles had a face wound, it didn't necessarily follow that he got it on Elms. Who on Elms would stab him, and why? It was a journalistic habit to keep findings private until they could be put into a piece for publication, and so Cass had pretended the blood was his. Gwyn Ure seemed to have accepted this. Had he really? Had his boss, Belinda Laverick? At any rate, for the moment, Cass would continue to abide by his trade's practice of hoarding and non-disclosure.

‘Isn't it just like police?' Helga said. ‘They have what they call “an incident” one night. They don't get to it fast enough, so put a patrol out at the same spot as if they think it's going to happen again. They're ruled by the past. I understand you were into a leaf-hunting forage, as almost anyone might be on a standstill building site at night. “I'm popping down to Elms, dear, to bag a leaf.”'

‘Just looking closely - amazed at the weed's power to grow, to survive, on such terrain. Some seed fell on stony ground, but never mind, it makes the best of the situation.'

‘Nature's quite a thing, isn't it? A lesson to all of us. Adaptability.'

‘Well, yes.'

‘There are people in and out of the house, you know.'

‘Which people?'

‘Dossers. Crime scene tourists. Jaminel.' She finished her bread-stiffened soup. ‘As to “the incident” it could be crime nuts - people fascinated by murder locations and acting out the death. They get off on the recollection and imitation of lethal rough stuff.'

‘But these two fought on the ground, according to Belinda Laverick. Mallen was shot,' Cass said.

‘The floor-level wrestling, if that's what it was, might have been a bonus. Dickheads get taken over by their dreams and need to ginger up the brutalities. It starts as charade but can turn real.'

Did Helge mind, but there was no broccoli today, so would asparagus tips do? the waitress came over to ask. Asparagus tips would do, though they were difficult to pronounce without spitting, after the vodkas and wine.

‘Belinda believes there might have been some sort of weapon in the incident, according to a witness - but a witness quite a way off,' Helga said.

‘Yes,' Cass said.

‘A dirk? Are dirks in fashion? A Stanley knife? We're all guessing. That's why I queried the blood,' Helga replied.

‘Queried it in which sense?' Cass asked.

‘Whose was it?' she said.

‘Mine. I explained: a thorn,' Cass said. ‘Not worth making a major issue of, but mine.'

‘Yes, you explained, but not how your hands are unmarked.'

‘What I'd like to focus on is the Leo Young side,' Cass replied.

The main courses arrived. Cass asked for another bottle of Chardonnay. He'd come by taxi and didn't have to worry about driving. Helga lived just over the Vaze Upper bridge with her partner and had walked. Cass might have to walk her back. They ate and drank for a while in silence. The asparagus tips looked to be right up Helga's street, an excellent piece of luck. She asked the waitress for another portion. The waitress seemed troubled. This would be two changes and would require substantial reprogramming in her memory for the future: asparagus tips instead of broccoli and not just that: a doubler of the asparagus.

‘The museum committee,' Helga said and stopped. She spoke as if, because of booze, she needed the firmness of a general topic heading first, and she could then, possibly, move into a detail or two, gently incremental, each point leading on to the next by small, negotiable advances. Rome wasn't built in a day and neither were items of chit-chat. ‘Yes, the museum committee.' She sounded triumphant. She'd picked a parameter and, as parameters went, it was a comely and robust parameter, deserving repetition. She said: ‘This is an aspect that will repay attention.'

‘Right,' Cass said.

‘I'm well in with quite a few people around the museum. They want a bit of publicity now and then for this and that. They pick up the phone to Helga. I've even got stuff about the museum into The
Times
for them, and the
Guardian
, not just locals. So, they're grateful. So, I'm owed. So, some recip . . . so some recip—'

That was too big a step.
‘
Reciprocity,' Cass said. Drink hit women harder and more quickly than men. Nothing to crow about: just a gender difference. Advantages equalled out. For example, Cass thought women better than men at taking offence.

‘Recip . . . Yes, that exactly,' she said. ‘This committee - there's some know-all, straight-talking people on it. They have an eye for conditions around, conditions now,
prelavent . . .
I mean, not just ancient, as you'd expect, it being a museum.' They both ordered sticky toffee pudding for dessert, and as finale, coffee and Tia Maria.

‘With Emily Young, Leo's missus in the chair,' Helga said.

‘Quite. I remember that from before.'

‘You say, “Quite,” as though that's normal. But think about it, Dave. There's members of that committee with gongs - up to and including CBEs. These are people of what could reasonably be called discernerment.'

‘Discernment.'

‘Yes, yes, discernerment.'

‘Yes, discernerment,' Cass replied. He'd come to feel it was wrong, cruel, snooty to correct her, had already let ‘prelavent' go. Surely someone of her age, in that kind of gear, and three-quarters pissed, should be entitled to temporary dyslexia. Bevies could liberate one from the tyranny of faultless vocab. In any case, he was beginning to be undermined by the alcohol himself and if put to it would agree with Helga that ‘discernerment', though longer, was easier to say than the rather terse and unrelaxed ‘discernment'. Then he had a couple of panic moments when he realized he didn't know any longer which was correct, ‘discernment' or ‘discernerment', ‘prelavent' or ‘prevalent'.

He found himself craving the Tia Maria, which hadn't been served yet. He reckoned he needed something stronger than white fucking wine to clear his brain, though his unclear brain was clear enough and platitudinous enough to advise him that Tia Maria on top of the rest of it would most likely super-fog his brain, not clear it, and possibly end in an abrupt puke.

He sorted out, fairly efficiently, he thought, the quickest way to the gents' lavs, or to any lavs, in case of emergency. If he got this wrong there might be a bit of an eventuality at the post-liqueur stage. The route he charted should cut the risk to others' clothes and/or meals and, if he did throw up, it would be on to vacant tables - easy for staff to get into rubber gloves and change the cloth, cutlery and condiment jars. He'd put the tip up to 20 per cent, from his own cash, or the paper's expenses people would kick. As it was, they might query the double asparagus on the bill.

‘When I say conditions prelavent, what do I mean, Dave?'

‘Contemporary. Of the moment.'

‘Contemporary. Of the moment. Correct. So, what conditions of the moment have I got in mind?'

Cass felt unsure whether this showed she'd forgotten what she was talking about, or, like a good teacher, wanted to prompt a pupil into providing the answer. He said: ‘Emily Young.' This answer seemed to cover both, and he was proud of it. These were names easy to say and, at the same time, appropriate.