Play Dead (33 page)

‘Maud thinks new car purchase has to be allowed, because it would probably take place even if forbidden. People are sort of conditioned: a windfall equals a better model. But the need for some moderation would be stressed - no Porsche, no Bentley. The money probably wouldn't run to that level anyway. (Four) Bonus provision: officers on a salary and pension from the firm could be granted an extra one-off payment for some especially useful piece of cooperation, say, getting another firm's chief executive sent down for at least ten years. Officers enjoying the other reward system - fees as and when - could receive an especially raised extra in the same circumstances, possibly doubling or trebling the customary amount.'

‘But why are you telling us this?' Emily said.

Once more, Harpur reckoned it not a reproach but a request for guidance on how it could affect her and Leo.

‘I thought it might interest you to know the kind of sophisticated operation Harpur and I - and, of course, Maud Clatworthy - are up against,' Iles said.

‘I think I see what Mr Iles is getting at. He's talking about a very tricky task, Em,' Young said. ‘He would appreciate help with it - help from you and me as responsible, alert citizens, committed to aiding the community in every way possible. All citizens have such a responsibility, it's true, but us maybe more than most, owing to distinction in that community, such as the museum committee and the property here. This help will definitely not be easy, but I have already said we would provide all of it that we can. I stand by this, Mr Iles, Mr Harpur.'

‘Thanks, Leo,' Iles replied.

‘Are you saying the Maud woman is responsible on her own for this grand survey of corrupt forces?' Emily asked.

‘Who else?' Iles said.

‘Well, yes,' she replied.

As Harpur had suspected all along, Emily Young's acumen didn't stop at putting a date on old millstones. She and Leo came to the front door with Iles and Harpur when they left. Iles went and had a close-up look at the Mini Cooper. ‘Lovely little vehicle,' he said. He peered at the windscreen. ‘And it's all right, Col, you needn't fret. It's licensed until March.' He turned with a kindly chuckle towards Emily and Leo. ‘Show Col a vehicle he's not familiar with and he has to check the road tax disc. It's a sort of twitch picked up when he was in the Traffic Division.'

W
hen Harpur and Iles had gone, Emily did what she termed ‘a bit of mulling' over things said in the drawing room get-together just now. Or, to use another term, she tried to ‘deconstruct' some of the talk. She'd heard this word used a couple of times by a local, undiffident Eng Lit prof on the museum committee. As far as she could make out, it involved searching for all the possible meanings hidden in what had seemed at first sight a simple, clear statement, spoken or written. Most likely you always had to do that for anything said by the police.

She returned to the drawing room and squeezed another half cup of tea from the pot. Leo went to look at repairs being done on one of the outhouses. She felt he wanted to salvage some of his aura and calm. He must have exhausted himself concocting so much likeability for Iles and Harpur. Inspecting the stonework he'd be reminded he was Leo Young of Midhurst, a property with grounds and outhouses, one of them converted to take an indoor heated swimming pool; another stabling the family's horses. He was all backbone and reliability, wasn't he? Well, wasn't he one of those responsible, alert citizens keen to aid the community, whom he'd mentioned with a true boom to his voice when promising help to those dangerous visitors?

She'd asked Iles why he said so many of the ideas and analyses came from Maud - ‘Maud says this', ‘Maud says that'. He hadn't really explained though. Nowhere near explained. But she thought she could possibly see an answer. He wanted to keep Leo relaxed and ready to chat. If Iles had said, ‘This is what I believe, Leo,' or ‘This is what Harpur believes,' it would show they'd been really doing a hard scrutiny of Leo's companies and that could scare him, make him super-cautious. She felt Iles wanted plenty of friendly discussion so he and Harpur could fix on some of it and find what they wanted to find there. If Iles successfully pretended it was London Maud who'd been doing the thinking, she'd get blamed for all the long-distance nosiness and dirty hints, and Iles and Harpur could go on being chummy, encouraging the wordy word flow, not always grammatical, but that wouldn't bother Leo. God, all the chunter about ‘trends' and ‘scenario' and ‘appropriate'!

And there
were
dirty hints, weren't there? What was it Maud said about the corrupt get-together of police and dealers - according to Iles? Something like, ‘She thinks one of the drugs firms has a business alliance with police officers, and that's why Mallen and the journalist had to die. They'd been poking about and had started to get somewhere.'

Why tell Leo about this supposed theory of Maud's? That's what Emily meant by dirty hints. But maybe ‘hints' was a feeble word for these tactics, though ‘dirty' would do. Emily felt a disgustingly blatant suggestion had been made - that the firm Maud and/or Iles and Harpur meant was Leo's firm. Iles had spoken of Jaminel's silence, enforced by the need to keep the family support cash coming from its shady source while he remained locked up; and by terror of what might happen to him even in jail, if he coughed all to detectives. Was Iles saying, without actually saying, that he thought Leo provided the hush handouts, and the terror? Did Harpur and Iles want to see how Leo reacted to difficult parts of the signal from Maud; allegedly from Maud?

Might they even have wanted to see how
Emily
reacted? Well, she'd asked for more information, hadn't she? That had been her main response. She'd questioned how Leo, the eternally straight businessman, could possibly have heard about a crooked pact between a drugs baron and some police. She'd wondered aloud why Iles was telling them about all this organizational stuff. And, of course, she'd let them know that the tricky way Iles had presented all this material hadn't worked. Her last query had been along the lines of: ‘Are you really telling us that Maud of Whitehall produced this great slab of analysis on her own?' Iles had replied, ‘Who else?' And she'd said: ‘Well, yes.' Enigmatic Em! Ironic Em! But he'd pick up, wouldn't he, that she thought the frank answer to his ‘Who else?' was ‘Iles' or ‘Iles and Harpur'. They weren't the only ones able to get subtle and oblique.

But, yes, those two, Iles and Harpur, could also do some. They'd wonder what lurked behind her questions and occasional bits of near enmity. Emily knew what lurked behind, naturally. It was the half-belief, the fear, the dread, that the firm Maud suspected of a crooked partnership with police officers really
was
Leo's firm. Or, to put it more accurately, Harpur and Iles suspected this, but for tact and trap reasons, and to lull Leo, they spoke as if they were only messengers from Maud, bringing her ‘ideas' and ‘imaginings'.

Now and then during the meeting with those two she'd allowed some of her deeper anxieties to show themselves. She'd accused Iles of talking ‘bullshit' when he claimed that placing an undercover officer in a firm - in Leo's firm - was a neutral ploy, with no presumption of guilt. She'd called it ‘a judgemental act', and she believed she had that right. Police put someone in undercover, with all the risks and rigmarole that meant, only when they felt sure the undercover officer, by persistence, clever duplicity, crafty integration, luck, would find something criminal that could be brought to trial.

Despite such moments of aggression from her, though, would they have sensed she was agonizingly uncertain about Leo's business life and that the uncertainty had begun to deepen? It had shaken her when Iles spoke about the possible symbolic status of the house on Elms. She'd dismissed that notion as flimflam, but, of course, it was exactly the notion that had taken her there the other night. She'd wanted reassurance that it was just a part-finished house, nothing mystical or fantastic. And she'd wanted the reassurance because at times she
had
stupidly, childishly, come to regard the house as something more than itself: something radiating an evil, lingering, perilous influence which might one day bring Leo down - Leo and therefore herself. Today, the appalling suspicion had come that Iles somehow knew she had been down to Elms and the house, and was teasing her. Could he even have guessed Emily's motive - the acute longing to dispel her doubts about Leo? But that had to be impossible, didn't it? Didn't it? Iles might be brilliant, but he wasn't psychic.

She heard Leo's footsteps approaching on the gravel driveway and felt almost ashamed, as if, sitting alone, having her private mull, she had been not just idiotic but disloyal in her thinking. He came into the drawing room and sat down. She decided now that, if he really had hoped to lift his morale by inspecting the outhouse work, it had failed. He appeared uneasy. He appeared hunted. Now and then during their marriage she'd seen this hunted look on his small face before. It still shocked her. ‘Are they making a good job of things?' she asked.

For a moment he seemed baffled by the question. Soon, though, he got his mind working properly again and said: ‘Oh, yes, fine, fine.'

She left it at that for a minute and then said: ‘What's wrong, Leo, love?'

He kept the pause going for a few more seconds. He seemed to be wondering whether he could tell her what troubled him. ‘Your car,' he said.

‘What about it?'

‘Iles playing about like that - checking the licence.'

‘It was OK, up-to-date.'

‘Of course it was OK. Not the point, Em.'

‘What
is
the point?'

He went quiet again. But then seemed to decide he had to say what troubled him. She saw that a big change in their relationship might be under way. This pleased her - and scared her. ‘Look, Em, for quite ordinary business reasons I have an arrangement with someone running the national police computer that holds reg numbers,' he said.

‘An
arrangement
to get classified information from the police computer?'

‘It can be important to check someone's ID, or get the history of a used vehicle we might want to buy. We wouldn't like to become accessories to a theft, would we, not even accidentally?' He put a sort of jokey spin on this.

Yes, sort of, she thought. ‘You have an arrangement with a police officer running the national computer?' Emily said.

‘Yes, as a business facility, like I said.'

‘It's illegal, isn't it? You pay him or her to give you confidential, stored information. You bribe him or her?'

‘There has to be payment. I'm asking the officer to do extra work on my behalf.'

‘And to risk his or her job on your behalf, and possibly go to jail on your behalf.'

‘There's a word for this kind of payment, Em, which means it's not wages, and it's like there's no payment at all, just a . . . well, just a simple “thank you”. I expect you know this word, Em.'

‘Backhander?'

‘No, a sweeter word than that; much sweeter.'

‘A sweetener?'

‘No, again.' He shut his eyes to think better. ‘It got like honour in it. It shows there's nothing too bad about it.'

‘An honorarium,' she said.

‘That's it!' He grinned, eyes open again. She saw he was delighted with her skill and speed at coming up with the answer
,
and delighted English had a word that made a bung sound like a medal. He said, ‘It's a minor thing and doesn't happen very often.'

‘But you keep paying the retainer, do you?'

‘There's got to be what is referred to in commercial things as continuity. I never know when I might need this service, you see, Em. It's like insurance.'

‘Yes, I see. So there's a sort of non-stop standby fee?'

‘That sort of deal, yes.'

‘Paid how? Brown envelopes in the post?'

He ignored this. ‘The car,' he replied.

‘What of it?'

‘This lad on the computer - he got a similar sort of arrangement going with Iles,' Leo said. ‘Well, no, not totally similar. Obviously, a high officer like Iles can ask for info about a reg any time he likes, and he's entitled. But
his
arrangement is round the other way, like. Iles wants to be told by the computer lad about any queries he gets that might be useful to the Assistant Chief.'

‘Iles is paying him, too?'

‘It's an extra facility, isn't it? This is not just Iles starting something with a request to him, which is, like, positive and part of the normal police use. The computer officer's got to be what's known in the business scene as proactive in this special role for Iles. The officer is the one who got to get things going.'

‘So, another honorarium? Extra boodle from all directions. How do you know he operates for Iles like that?'

‘He told me, didn't he?'

‘Did he? And will he tell Iles he operates for you?'

‘No, never that. He'd be admitting an offence. He knows I'm always interested in any requests he gets from Iles, or from Harpur, while they're here on the investigation.'

‘But
why
are you interested, Leo?'

Of course, she thought she could see why: Leo must know he was a target for Harpur and Iles. That's why they'd been out here today. Naturally, she'd suspected this, and felt certain of it now. It was part of that changed relationship she'd sensed earlier. Leo seemed to have decided to tell her more or less outright that some of his life was crooked and complicated. Maybe he thought she must be half aware of this already, and so secrecy had become absurd. Whatever he meant about her car might have pushed him a bit further on with his frankness and disclosures. But what was it with her car?