The Price of Love and Other Stories (22 page)

“That’s absurd.”

“No, it’s not. I’ve been doing a bit of research this afternoon, and I’ve discovered that your precious agency is in serious financial
trouble. You’re in debt up to your eyeballs, second mortgages, the lot, and you can’t afford to lose the Cherub contract. When you thought that was in jeopardy, you knew you had to get rid of Valerie. Maybe you planned on killing them both and making it look as if there’d been an intruder, but when you saw Tony wasn’t there, you changed your plan.”

“It’s an interesting theory,” said Scott, “but that’s all it is.”

I knew he was right. What I’d discovered, and what Jacqui had told me, might point the police in Scott’s direction, but they’d need much more if Tony was to be exonerated.

“You know what the sad thing is?” I said. “You did it all for nothing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Jacqui was upset. All she said was that Valerie had threatened to ruin her. What she didn’t tell you was that Valerie no longer had the means to do it. You killed Valerie Pascale for nothing, Scott.”

Ginny turned pale. “What did you say?”

“Don’t, Ginny!” Scott warned her.

But it was too late. Ginny glanced at her husband, turned back to me, and said, “Do you think for a moment I would let her destroy everything we’d worked for?”

She looked over tenderly at Scott, who was gnawing on a fingernail. All his deepest fears had now come true. If he wasn’t an accomplice and had indeed passed out after drinking too much, he must at least have suspected, and worried that the truth would come out.

“She deserved to die,” Ginny went on. “She was going to ruin all of us just because of a stupid adolescent affair. And now you tell us it was all for nothing.” Her laugh sounded like a harsh bark.

“You still have no evidence,” Scott said. “Ginny will deny everything. I’ll say she was with me the whole time. Do you realize what you’re doing? You could ruin all of us – Jacqui, Tony, Ray included.”

I stood up to leave. “Jacqui will survive. And so will Tony and Ray. The one thing neither of you seem to have given a moment’s
thought to,” I said as I headed for the door, “is that Tony Caldwell is awaiting trial on a murder charge. A murder he didn’t commit. Think about that when you lament your business losses.”

After I’d shut the door behind me, I slid my hand in my inside pocket and turned off the tiny digital recorder that had been on the whole time I’d been with Scott and Ginny. Maybe it wouldn’t stand up in court, but it would be enough to convince Enamoretto, get Tony off the hook and reopen the case. And, who knows, perhaps Susan Caldwell would be grateful enough to have dinner with me. We could talk about Darwin’s influence on Wordsworth.

T
ommy found the badge on the third day of his summer holiday at Blackpool, the first holiday without his father. The sun had come out that morning, and he was playing on the crowded beach while his mother sat in her striped deck chair, smoking Consulates and reading her
Nova
magazine, and kept an eye on him. Not that he needed an eye kept on him. Tommy was thirteen now and quite capable of amusing himself. But his mother had a thing about water, so she never let him near the sea alone. Uncle Arthur had gone to the amusements on the Central Pier, where he liked to play the one-armed bandits.

The breeze from the grey Irish Sea was chilly, but Tommy bravely wore his new swimming trunks. He even dipped his toes in the water before running back to warm them in the sand. It was then that he felt something sharp prick his big toe. Treasure? He scooped away the sand carefully while no one was looking. Slowly, he pulled out the object by its edge and dusted it off with his free hand. It was shaped like a silver shield. At its centre was a circle with
METROPOLITAN POLICE
curved around the top and bottom of the initials ER. Above this were a crown and a tiny cross. The silver glinted in the sunlight.

Tommy’s breath caught in his throat. This was exactly the sign he had been waiting for ever since his father died. It was the same type of badge he had worn on his uniform. Tommy remembered how proud his dad had sounded when he spoke of it. He had even let Tommy touch it, and told him what ER meant:
Elizabeth Regina
. It was Latin, his father had explained, for Queen Elizabeth. “That’s our Queen, Tommy,” he had said proudly. And the cross on top, he went on, symbolized the Church of England. When Tommy held the warm badge there on the beach, he could feel his father’s presence in it.

Tommy decided not to tell anyone. They might make him hand it in somewhere, or just take it off him. Uncle Arthur was always doing that. When Tommy found an old tennis ball in the street, Uncle Arthur said it might have been chewed by a dog and got germs on it, so he threw it in the fire. Then there was the toy cap gun with the broken hammer he found on the recreation ground. “It’s no good if it’s broken, is it?” Uncle Arthur said, and out it went. But this time, Uncle Arthur wasn’t going to get his hands on Tommy’s treasure. While his mother was reading her magazine, Tommy went over to his small pile of clothes and slipped the badge in his trouser pocket.

“What are you doing, Tommy?”

He started. It was his mother. “Just looking for my handkerchief,” he said, the first thing he could think of.

“What do you want a handkerchief for?”

“The water was cold,” Tommy said. “I’m sniffling.” He managed to fake a sniffle to prove it.

But his mother’s attention had already wandered back to her magazine. She never did talk to him for very long these days, didn’t seem much interested in how he was doing at school (badly), or how he was feeling in general (awful). Sometimes it was a blessing, because it made it easier for Tommy to live undisturbed in his own elaborate secret world, but sometimes he felt he would like it if she just smiled at him, touched his arm, and asked him how he was doing. He’d say he was fine. He wouldn’t even tell her the truth, because she
would get bored if she had to listen to his catalogue of woes. His mother had always got bored easily.

This time, her lack of interest was a blessing. He managed to get the badge in his pocket without her or anyone else seeing it. He felt official now. No longer was he just playing at being a special agent. Now that he had his badge, he had serious standards to uphold, like his father had always said. And he would start fulfilling his new role by keeping a close eye on Uncle Arthur.

Uncle Arthur wasn’t his real uncle. Tommy’s mother was an only child, like Tommy himself. It was three months after his father’s funeral when she had first introduced them. She said that Uncle Arthur was an old friend she had known many years ago, and they had just met again by chance in Kensington High Street. Wasn’t that a wonderful coincidence? She had been so lonely since his father had died. Uncle Arthur was fun and made her laugh again. She was sure that Tommy would like him. But Tommy didn’t. And he was certain he had seen Uncle Arthur before, while his father was still alive, but he didn’t say anything.

It was also because of Uncle Arthur that they moved from London to Leeds, although Tommy’s mother said it was because London was becoming too expensive. Tommy had never found it easy to make friends, and up north it was even worse. People made fun of his accent, picked fights with him in the schoolyard, and a lot of the time he couldn’t even understand what they were saying. He couldn’t understand the teachers either, which was why the standard of his school work slipped.

Once they had moved, Uncle Arthur, who travelled a lot for his job but lived in Leeds, became a fixture at their new house whenever he was in town, and some evenings, he and Tommy’s mother would go off dancing, to the pictures, or to the pub, and leave Tommy
home alone. He liked that, because he could play his records and smoke a cigarette in the back garden. Once, he had even drunk some of Uncle Arthur’s vodka and replaced it with water. He didn’t know if Uncle Arthur ever guessed, but he never said anything. Uncle Arthur had just bought his mother a brand new television, too, so Tommy sometimes just sat eating cheese and onion crisps, drinking pop, and watching
Danger Man
or
The Saint
.

What he didn’t like was when they stopped in. Then they were always whispering or going up to his mother’s room to talk so he couldn’t hear what they were saying. But they were still in the house, and even though they were ignoring him, he couldn’t do whatever he wanted, or even watch what he wanted on television. Uncle Arthur never hit him or anything – his mother wouldn’t stand for that – but Tommy could tell sometimes that he wanted to. Mostly, he took no interest whatsoever. For all Uncle Arthur cared, Tommy might as well not have existed. But he did.

Everyone said that Tommy’s mother was pretty. Tommy couldn’t really see it himself, because she was his mother, after all. He thought that Denise Clark at school was pretty. He wanted to go out with her. And Marianne Faithfull, whom he’d seen on
Top of the Pops
. But she was too old for him, and she was famous. People said he was young for his years and knew nothing about girls. All he knew was that he definitely
liked
girls. He felt something funny happen to him when he saw Denise Clark walking down the street in her little grey school skirt, white blouse, and maroon V-neck jumper, but he didn’t know what it was; and apart from kissing, which he knew about, and touching breasts, which someone had told him about at school, he didn’t really know what you were supposed to do with a girl when she was charitable enough to let you go out with her.

Tommy’s mother didn’t look at all like Denise Clark or Marianne Faithfull, but she wore more modern and more fashionable clothes than the other women on the street. She had beautiful long blond
hair over her shoulders and pale, flawless skin, and she put on her pink lipstick, black mascara, and blue eyeshadow every day, even if she was only stopping in or going to the shops. Tommy thought some of the women in the street were jealous because she was so pretty and nicely dressed.

Not long after they had moved, he overheard two of their neighbours saying that his mother was full of “London airs and graces” and “no better than she ought to be.” He didn’t know what that meant, but he could tell by the way they said it that it wasn’t meant as a compliment. Then they said something else he didn’t understand, about a dress she had worn when his father was only four months in his grave, and made tut-tutting sounds. That made Tommy angry. He came out of his hiding place and stood in front of them, red-faced, and told them they shouldn’t talk like that about his mother and father. That took the wind out of their sails.

Every night, before he went to sleep, Tommy prayed that Uncle Arthur would go away and never come back again. But he always did. He seemed to stop at the house late every night, and sometimes Tommy didn’t hear him leave until it was almost time to get up for school. What they found to talk about all night he had no idea, though he knew that Uncle Arthur had a bed made up in the spare room, so he could sleep there if he wanted. Even when Uncle Arthur wasn’t around, Tommy’s mother seemed distant and distracted, and she lost her patience with him very quickly.

One thing Tommy noticed within a few weeks of Uncle Arthur’s first visits to the new house was that his father’s photograph – the one in full uniform he was so proud to wear – went mysteriously missing from the mantelpiece. He asked his mother about it, but all she said was that it was time to move on and leave her widow’s weeds behind. Sometimes, he thought he would never understand the things grown-ups said.

—

When Tommy got back to his room at the boarding house, he took the badge out of his pocket and held it in his palm. Yes, he could feel his father’s power in it. Then he took out the creased newspaper cutting he always carried with him and read it for the hundredth time:

Tommy knew the whole thing off by heart, of course, about the police looking for five men and thinking it must have been an inside job, but he always read the end over and over again: “PC Burford leaves behind a wife and a young son.”
Leaves behind.
They made it sound as if it was his father’s fault, when he had just been doing his job. “‘It is one of the saddest burdens of the badge of office to break the news that a police officer has been killed in the line of duty,’ said Deputy Chief Constable Graham Brown. ‘Thank God this burden remains such a rarity in our country.’”

Tommy fingered his badge again.
Burdens of the badge of office.
Well, he knew what that felt like now. He made sure no one was around and went to the toilet. There, he took some toilet paper, wet it under the tap and used it to clean off his badge, drying it carefully with a towel. There were still a few grains of sand caught in the pattern of lines that radiated outwards, and it looked as if it was
tarnished a bit around the edges. He decided that he needed some sort of wallet to keep it in, and he had enough pocket money to buy one. Uncle Arthur was still at the pier, and his mother was having a lie-down, having “caught too much sun,” so he told her he was going for a walk and headed for the shops.

Tommy went into the first gift shop he saw and found a plastic wallet just the right size. He could keep his badge safe in there, and when he opened it, people would be able to see it. That would be important if he had to make an arrest or take someone in for questioning. He counted out the coins and paid the shopkeeper, then he put the wallet in his back pocket and walked outside.