A Bed of Scorpions (4 page)

I tried to look like those dewy-eyed ingénues everyone wants to help when they have a flat tyre. Or, at least, that’s the way it works in black-and-white movies. It’s not my best look. ‘I’m not really sure,’ I admitted. ‘I was shanghaied into sitting on an Arts Council panel on subsidies, and since you’re the only people I ever deal with on the subsidies front, I thought I’d come and pick your brains.’

She gave a small, controlled smile. I suspected everything she did was controlled. ‘I can tell you about our own funding,’ she said, ‘and I can give you our guidelines for selecting projects to support. I’ve also put together the figures we release annually on our charitable allocations. Does that help? What more can I tell you?’

It was a good question, because I hadn’t a clue. And what she had done could have been emailed over to me. She hadn’t needed to allow me to break into her day for that, and she didn’t strike me as the sort who went out of her way to have any of her days disrupted against her will.

‘One area I’d like to explore is the future of
reproductions in books. Given the spread of images online, and the costs of printing, the question, why illustrate books at all, is an obvious one. If the author can say, “Vermeer’s
Music Lesson
”, and the reader can look at it online, spending money printing it, or spending money paying a permission fee to the owner of the picture, is surely becoming pointless. Just what is the future of this kind of publishing?’

‘It’s a good question, but my job here deals almost entirely with works of art that are still in copyright, and protecting those rights,’ she said.

That didn’t sound like a charitable activity.

She must have read my face, because she went on, as if I’d argued, ‘We give funds to publishers who want to use these works, who might otherwise not use them, or use them without clearing the legal hurdles. This promotes the spread of modern art, as well as protecting the rights for the artists and their descendants.’

It still didn’t sound like charity to me, but it was none of my business. I nodded as though she’d made valid points, and went through the questions I’d thought up on the way over, about funding and resource allocation. I was going to have to talk for twenty minutes, so the more concrete examples I could gather, the better. Celia, whatever her job was, had plenty of experience.

After half an hour, she made it plain without actually saying anything that we were finished, and I had to agree. I took her cool hand, held out as if she were dropping a charitable donation of her own into my indigent palm, and left. On the way down, I paused to say goodbye to Denise, just so I could hear her velvet purr again. It was just
‘Goodbye’, but it made me smile as I left, and I was halfway across the park and only twenty minutes from home before I thought to check and see if Jake had replied to my text.

He had.
You know you’re seeing me tonight. You had
lunch with Merriam.

Eek.

Jake arrived a couple of hours later. I heard the front door close, and the thunk as he dropped his bag. A few weeks before I’d been having a drink with my upstairs neighbour, Kay, when we heard him come in.

‘He’s got keys already?’ she said, aiming for a neutral expression.

‘Does it bother you?’ We did share a front door, so it wasn’t an unreasonable worry. I hadn’t known him long.

‘It’s just, well …’ she looked embarrassed. I waited. ‘It’s fast. You’ve only been seeing him a couple of months.’

I was amused. ‘I didn’t realise we were discussing my relationship. I thought you were worrying about safety, and I was going to tell you that if things went horribly wrong and I ended up raped and murdered in my bed, at least the police had the keys.’

She snickered, and then hastily covered, ‘I didn’t mean to imply—’

I waved it away. ‘I know. It’s fine. He has my keys because he works strange hours, and I don’t want to have to get up at midnight to let him in.’

I didn’t call out when I heard the door. My bag was at the front and Jake would know I was in and come down the hall to find me. As I went up on tiptoe to kiss him hello, one corner of his mouth lifted in a small smile. A finger
gently flicked my collar. ‘Battledress?’ he said mildly, but his smile widened.

He was right, damn it. Unless I’ve had to wear what I think of as my posh suit to work, for a lunch, or an author event, my office clothes are casual enough that I don’t bother to change when I get home. Since I hadn’t known about my meeting with Celia, and lunch with Aidan never rates the posh suit, I hadn’t been dressed up. But I’d had a bath and changed that evening when I got home, as some sort of unconscious preparation.

I bit back a sigh, which he also noticed. Dating a detective, I had discovered, could be a royal pain. All the stuff that most people remain serenely unaware of, he picked up on right away. Once or twice he’d tried to persuade me this was a good thing – ‘energy efficient’ was the phrase he’d used.

I decided not to engage, or at least, not right away. ‘Drink?’ I said, and turned automatically to get the glasses.

‘Not for me. I’m probably going to have to go back to work later.’

That made me pause, but I didn’t turn around. After a second I moved over to the sink, where I’d been washing spinach for dinner, and continued where I’d left off. ‘Oh?’

Jake put his arms around me from behind. ‘“Oh?” yourself. We’re going to have to talk about this, you know.’

‘Fun!’ I said in an idiot-child voice. ‘Our best thing, talking.’ I hadn’t planned on quarrelling, but I found myself well on the way.

Jake pulled me away from the sink and gently pushed me into a chair before moving over to the glasses I’d abandoned. He opened a bottle of wine and poured me a
glass without speaking. Then, ‘No, not our best thing, but we’re smart, and we can get better at it.’

I snorted. ‘A learning experience. It’s the only thing my week has been lacking.’ Until the words came out of my mouth, I hadn’t realised how angry I was. Or maybe I was frightened? I regrouped. ‘I’m sorry. Yes, I had lunch with Aidan, who told me you were at the gallery. I’m worried.’ I looked away, and then back. ‘Are you … that is, why are … I don’t even know the words to use.’

Jake took the glass from my hand and took a swig. In England it doesn’t count as drinking if you don’t have your own glass. Everyone knows that. He leant against the counter. His usual work dress was khakis and a white shirt, so, glass in hand, sleeves rolled up over his forearms, he looked like a colleague I’d met for a drink after work. Or he did until his next sentence, which shattered that illusion, had I held it.

‘Am I investigating a murder?’ he paraphrased for me.

I nodded mutely.

‘We don’t think that way. At the moment, we have an unexplained death.’ He paused. ‘I thought about this on the way home. My job has issues of confidentiality, but all jobs have those. That’s not why I don’t talk to you about my work. Not because I can’t, but because I don’t want to. You’re a clean space in my life, a place where I don’t have to think about the things we wade through every day.’

I nodded again, this time feeling some of my hostility, or fear, or whatever it was, dying away. Although not talking about what preoccupied him for two-thirds of his waking life was also a problem. For another time. I pushed it away.

Jake drank some more of what had now become his wine, so I got up to get myself a glass.

‘There’s nothing I can’t disclose at the moment, but that’s mostly because we know almost nothing. Given the situation, if you want to hear what we know so far, I’m happy to lay it out.’

Wanted? I was absolutely sure I didn’t want to know. But did I need to know? Yes. More than a little reluctantly, I nodded to him to go ahead.

He had obviously prepared it in his head, and it came out in tidy little bullet points. ‘We were called in yesterday morning, after the divisional detectives had been alerted to an unexplained death.’

I would like to believe that I didn’t smile at Jake dropping into policeman-ese – he really didn’t speak like that normally – but either I must have, or he just knew me well enough to recognise that it was the use of language I would concentrate on. He tapped me gently on the nose, the way you do to tell a puppy to behave. So I behaved.

‘There are several possibilities.’ Jake began to tick them off on his fingers. ‘That Frank Compton had an accident, which can almost certainly be discounted. That Frank Compton killed himself for personal reasons; or because he was of unsound mind; or for work-related reasons. Or that Frank Compton did not kill himself, and it was staged to look as if he did, for unknown reasons.

‘At the moment, we are asking questions. His partner, Toby Stafford, knew of no health problems, but we are checking to see if Compton had physical or mental health issues he had kept to himself. Stafford also says that they had a good relationship, but others suggest it was volatile,
and we are looking at that, as well as making preliminary enquiries to see if there was anyone else in the picture. The final area is business issues, and we are therefore looking at his finances, personal and business, to see if there are any irregularities that mean we should continue to investigate while we wait for the coroner’s report.’

‘Irregularities,’ I said carefully.

He was looking at the floor, not me. ‘There was GSR on his right hand.’

‘GSR?’

He looked up and smiled apologetically. ‘Gunshot residue – the traces left behind when a firearm discharges.’

I read crime novels, I knew about this. ‘Surely that’s what you would expect? Why is that an irregularity? Was he left-handed?’

‘No, he was right-handed all right, but the scatter is not entirely consistent with how he must have held the pistol, based on the angle of the wound, which was, in addition, much further to the back of the skull than is common in self-inflicted wounds.’ He shrugged. ‘He could have held the pistol awkwardly, or it could have slipped, but it is an anomaly. More than that, though, is the weapon.’ He rubbed his hand through his hair, as though the problem itself could be rubbed out. ‘It’s a 9mm Makarov semi-automatic.’

I raised my hands to pause him. ‘I know nothing about guns. In the vaguest possible way I know the difference between a machine gun and a pistol, but that’s it.’ I revised that. ‘Truth be told, whatever I know probably comes from World War I movies – I think I’m visualising Erich von Stroheim carrying one – so it is unlikely to
have any relationship to something used this century.’

For a moment, the ‘unexplained death’ vanished. He laughed, happy to be with someone who thought anything that went ‘bang’ was an all-purpose ‘gun’. ‘All you really have to know is that handguns have been illegal in this country since 1996, after Dunblane. So we have an illegal handgun, which even before 1996 was never registered in the UK. It’s a Soviet make, and it has a fixed sight.’ He saw my incomprehension. ‘Makarovs with fixed sights were only sold in the Soviet bloc; Makarovs manufactured for export had adjustable sights. The feature itself doesn’t matter, it’s just an indication as to where it came from.’

‘You say “Soviet”. Do you mean that the gun is old? From Soviet Union days? Or is it just a way of speaking?’

‘Old. Our people say the serial number dates it to the early 1960s, which means there are a lot of years to account for.’

He returned to the present. ‘Frank Compton has never had any sort of firearm registered to him, he is not known to have ever had any interest in firearms, and as far as both his partner and his colleagues are aware, he never travelled in the Eastern bloc. So where he came by a semi-automatic is an open question.’

‘Isn’t that what the serial number will tell you?’

‘We’ve sent a request to our Russian counterparts. But the handgun was Soviet Army issue. There’s not much point in finding out the name of the soldier it was registered to in 1962. It’s not going to clarify how it got from there to here. We’ll try.’ He didn’t look like he expected much. ‘Then there’s the note.’ He rubbed his face again. This part was
troubling him. ‘The note is … It’s not in his handwriting, and it’s not addressed to anyone. He may have typed it, but even if he did, it may have been the beginning of a note to say he couldn’t attend a meeting, for all we know. IT have confirmed the time the page was opened, and that and the time the automatic save was first generated are both consistent with the estimated time of death from the scene, but that adds very little. And opening a computer document to write two words is unusual.

‘So.’ He was summarising, although I wasn’t sure if it was for me, or for him. ‘On one side, the GSR, the weapon’s provenance, the unusual nature of the note. We’ll get a report later today confirming time of death and letting us know if there are any other anomalies. Forensics are looking at the splatter pattern’ – he saw the expression on my face and put his hand on mine, but continued – ‘and we’ll know more about that in a couple of days. We’re auditing the books and looking at Compton’s financial situation. We’ll speak to Stafford again. And to his friends.’

I hesitated. ‘I understand why you would automatically concentrate on Toby. But what did you mean when you said Frank and Toby’s relationship was volatile?’

He was in interview mode again in an eye-blink. ‘What did you think of it?’

‘I didn’t. Think of it, I mean. I don’t think I ever saw them on their own.’ I considered. ‘No, I’m certain I’ve never ever seen them on their own. It’s always been at a party, or at least a group of friends for dinner.’

‘And they’ve never fought?’

‘Fought? Seriously?’

‘So you’ve never seen it?’

‘Never. Do you mean physically?’

He nodded, watching, but there was nothing for him to see. I’d had no idea.

‘According to neighbours, they fought a lot. Lots of shouting and raised voices, according to the people on either side of them, some violence. And a spectacular row two days ago. Even neighbours across the road heard that one, including Compton walking out before dawn, shouting at Stafford that he’d have to clear his things out of the house in the next twenty-four hours. We’ve had a look. It was Compton’s house, and Stafford’s salary as a civil servant wouldn’t begin to support him the way he lived there. He inherits the house and any cash.’