Dead Line (11 page)

‘I saw the photo in the next room.’

‘Ah,’ he said, looking slightly embarrassed. ‘I brought it down to show your mother. She insisted on seeing a picture of me in uniform.’

‘Were you with the Gurkhas for long?’

‘Thirty years,’ he said, with a touch of pride. ‘Very fine soldiers,’ he added quietly.

‘You must have got around a bit,’ said Liz, sipping her wine, which was deliciously dry and cold. Here we go, thought Liz: tales of Aden and derring-do. She wished her mother would hurry up.

‘A bit,’ he said. ‘The Falklands, the first Gulf War, six months in Kosovo I’d sooner forget.’

But that was all he said. Liz gratefully noted how adroitly he changed the subject, asking her where she lived in London. Within minutes Liz found to her surprise that she was telling him all about her flat in Kentish Town, when she’d bought it, how she’d done it up, what she still had to do to it. He was a sympathetic listener, interjecting only occasionally, though at one point he made Liz laugh out loud with an account of living in a leaky tent while on manoeuvres in a Belize rainforest.

The ice was broken, and though Liz sternly reminded herself to reserve judgement, they continued to talk about all sorts of things, including music, and she saw Edward’s face light up as he described a Barenboim concert he’d been to recently at the Barbican. They were talking about acoustics, of all things, when Susan Carlyle came through the back door, a bunch of freshly cut flowers in her arms and a look of relief on her face to find the two of them chatting.

They had supper in the kitchen, then sat together in the sitting room, reading and listening to Mozart. By ten, Liz found herself stifling a yawn. ‘I’m for bed,’ she declared. ‘Is there much to do tomorrow to get ready for the party?’

Susan shook her head. ‘All in hand, dear. Thanks to Edward.’

Upstairs Liz fell quickly into a light sleep, then woke up as her mother and Edward came up the stairs. Doors closed, another opened; Liz gave up trying to decipher what was going on, and this time fell soundly asleep.

In the morning she drove into Stockbridge, having established that there really wasn’t anything she could do to help. When she came back her mother was at the nursery, but Edward was busy - the wine had arrived, and he’d put a clean tablecloth on the dining-room table, vacuumed the sitting room and dusted. My God, thought Liz, instead of the Colonel Blimp she’d been expecting, Edward was turning out to be a New Man.

The party was a success, full of long-standing friends of her mother’s, most of whom seemed to know Edward already. There had been a few new faces, and even someone Liz’s age - Simon Lawrence, who owned an organic farm nearby. They’d been at school together, but Liz hadn’t seen him in almost twenty years. He’d grown immensely tall, but still had the apple-cheeked fresh face she remembered.

‘Hello Liz,’ he’d said shyly. ‘Do you remember me?’

‘How could I forget you, Simon?’ she declared with a laugh. ‘You pushed me into Skinner’s pond the summer I turned fourteen.’

They’d chatted for half an hour, and when he’d left Simon asked for her number in London. ‘I try and avoid the place as a rule,’ he confessed cheerfully, ‘but it would be lovely to see you again.’

On Sunday, for once Liz slept very late, and realised work had been taking a physical toll. When she came down to the kitchen Edward was just starting to fix lunch, and declined all offers of help, giving her a welcome cup of coffee and a hot croissant instead. He explained Susan had popped over to the nursery garden for a minute; Sunday was its busiest day.

Liz sat and read papers, noticing a column about the Gleneagles peace conference.
Breakthrough or Breakdown?
was the headline, and Liz thought again how fragile were the prospects of peace and how important it was for the conference to be a success.

After lunch she and her mother walked up the hill at one end of the Bowerbridge estate. Edward stayed behind; he seemed to sense that Liz wanted some time alone with her mother.

At the top, they paused to look down at the Nadder Valley stretching below them. The long, dry summer meant the trees were turning early, and the oaks down in the valley were already a palette of orange and gold.

‘I’m so glad you could come down,’ her mother said. ‘Edward’s been wanting to meet you.’

‘Likewise,’ said Liz. She could not resist adding, ‘He seems quite perfect.’

‘Perfect?’
Her mother looked at Liz sharply. ‘He’s not perfect. Far from it.’ She paused, as if considering his faults. ‘He’s sometimes very vague - you know what men are like.’ She paused. ‘And sometimes he gets awfully sad.’

‘Sad? What about?’

‘I imagine it’s his wife. She was killed, you see, just after he retired. In a car accident in Germany.’

‘Oh, I am sorry,’ said Liz, regretting her slight sarcasm. ‘It must have been awful.’

‘I’m sure it was, but he doesn’t talk about it. In the same way, I don’t talk to him about your father. There doesn’t seem much point. We enjoy each other’s company, and that’s what seems important now.’

‘Of course. I didn’t mean to sound unkind. He seems very nice. I do mean that.’

‘I’m glad,’ Susan said simply.

‘And mother, one other thing.’ Liz hesitated for a moment, feeling slightly embarrassed. ‘I don’t want you to feel that Edward has to be exiled to the spare room when I’m around.’

Her mother gave a small smile. ‘Thank you. I told him it was perfectly ridiculous, but he insisted. He said it was your house, too, and that he didn’t want you to think he was invading.’

‘That’s very tactful of him,’ said Liz with surprise, though she was becoming increasingly aware that there was rather more to Edward Treglown than she had supposed.

‘He
is
very tactful. That’s one of the things I particularly like about him.’

‘He said he does some work for a charity.’

‘He
runs
the charity. I didn’t discover that until I’d known him for months. He’s very modest; you’d never know he won the DSO.’

Her obvious pride in her new
beau
started to nettle Liz, but she stopped herself. Why shouldn’t Susan be proud of him? It wasn’t as if Edward were the boastful type - far from it. And he obviously made her mother happy. That was the important thing.

And when she left for London, Liz found herself saying to Edward not only that she had enjoyed meeting him, but that she looked forward to seeing him again soon.

‘Perhaps you and Mother could come for supper sometime,’ she said, thinking of all the clearing up she’d have to do in her flat if they were to visit.

‘You let us take you out first,’ he said gently. ‘From what I gather you work awfully hard. The last thing you need to worry about is entertaining. I’ll let your mother make a date.’

She drove back to London in a more cheerful mood than she’d been in driving down. Edward had turned out to be rather a good thing, actually, and her mother seemed happier and surer of herself than she’d been in ages. It was funny to think that she didn’t have to worry so much about Susan now, not with Edward in loyal attendance. Funny, but why wasn’t it more of a relief? In a flash of self-knowledge that made her shift uneasily in the driving seat, Liz admitted that now she would have no excuse not to sort out her own personal life. She’d already resolved that it was time to move on from her fruitless hankering after Charles Wetherby, but could she do it? And move on where, she asked herself, move on to whom? She wondered if Simon Lawrence would actually use the phone number she’d given him. She wasn’t going to worry about it, but it would be nice if he did.

She opened her front door to the usual muddle of last week’s newspapers and letters spread all over the table and the faint air of dusty unlovedness that the flat always had after she’d been away for a weekend. The light on the answer machine was blinking.

‘Hi Liz,’ the voice said. It was American but polished, and sounded slightly familiar. ‘It’s Miles here, Miles Brookhaven. It’s Sunday morning, and you must be away for the weekend. I was wondering if you’d like to get together for lunch sometime this week. Give me a call at the embassy if you get a chance. Hope to hear from you.’

Liz stood by the machine, quite taken aback. How did he get my number? she thought. Was this work-related? The call had been oddly ambiguous. No, she decided, he wouldn’t have called her at home if this was just professional, much less rung on a Sunday, not unless it was something extremely urgent. She suddenly remembered that she’d given him her home number after it had been decided that he would be her contact on the Syrian case, and immediately, in a quick change of mood, she began to feel flattered, rather than suspicious.

SEVENTEEN

‘Chacun à son goût,’
said Constable Debby Morgan. DI Cullen scowled at her, wondering whether to admit he hadn’t a clue what this meant. She liked using foreign phrases, but then she had a degree, like so many of today’s recruits, and he supposed they couldn’t help showing off a bit.

Not that he really minded with young Morgan, for he had a soft spot for her. He got a bit of stick from some of his colleagues on the subject, and it was true that Debby Morgan was an attractive girl, with big blue eyes, cute features, and an athletic figure. But DI Cullen had been married twenty years and had three daughters of his own, one almost as old as Debby. He was fond of his junior colleague, but in a completely avuncular way.

Now he said, ‘Goo is the word for this one.’ He pointed to the open file on his desk, with the photos of the corpse that had been found in a box in one of the City’s churches. ‘This bloke met a sticky end all right.’

‘Weird to think he did it to himself.’

‘I’ve seen weirder.’ Which was true - he’d worked vice for six months once in Soho, and had never got over what some people got up to. He looked at young Morgan, thinking she had a lot to learn about life. ‘So what are you thinking?’

She shrugged. ‘The obvious, I guess. Who put him in the box?’

DI Cullen nodded. ‘There’s that, of course, but does anything else strike you?’ She looked blank, so he supplied the answer. ‘Someone else put him in the box, but the death was self-inflicted. So why didn’t this other person help the victim? The pathologist said death wasn’t instantaneous at all - the poor bugger took several minutes to go. Where was our good Samaritan then?’

‘Maybe they didn’t know the victim,’ she offered hopefully.

‘If you found a dead stranger in a church, what would you do? Call the police? Run for help? Try the kiss of life? Or would you cram him in a box and walk away?’

‘I see what you mean.’

There was a knock and the door to Cullen’s office opened a foot. A young sergeant stuck his head in.

‘Excuse me guv, but I thought you’d want to know.’ The sergeant looked at Constable Morgan with frank admiration.

‘What is it?’ demanded Cullen shortly.

‘We had an anonymous call giving a name for the man in the box.’

‘And?’

The sergeant looked at his pad. ‘Alexander Ledingham.’

‘Who is?’

The sergeant shrugged and looked at Cullen helplessly, as if to say ‘beats me’. ‘Lives in Clerkenwell, according to the caller.’

‘What else?’

‘That’s it. They hung up.’

‘Write down everything you can remember about the caller,’ said Cullen, standing up abruptly, and the young sergeant nodded and withdrew. Cullen looked out the window, where the sky was turning a threatening shade of grey. ‘Grab your coat,’ he said to Morgan. ‘It looks like rain.’

They ended up going to Clerkenwell twice, the second time with a search warrant and a locksmith. The previous afternoon, with the help of the local police station, they had located the residence of one A. Ledingham, in a brick warehouse that had been converted into new flats. No one answered the buzzer, which made sense if Ledingham was indeed the man in the box. Two neighbours said they hadn’t seen him for a couple of days. He was a new tenant, who kept himself to himself. Neither recalled ever seeing any visitors to Ledingham’s flat.

This time DI Cullen and Constable Morgan went straight to the flat on the third floor. They waited impatiently while the locksmith went to work; five minutes later the flat’s front door sprang wide open.

A powerful odour greeted them as they stepped into the small hall. ‘Phew,’ said Debby Morgan, holding her nose and stepping into the blue haze that filled the flat. Straight ahead of them was a large, wooden-floored open area that seemed to be dining room and sitting room combined. It was sparsely furnished, a sofa and two wooden armchairs at one end, a cheap-looking dining table and four chairs at the other. On the walls, just visible through the haze, were framed posters, bright Op Art geometric constructions.

DI Cullen screwed up his eyes and stepped forward into the small kitchen, which seemed to be the source of the smell. He saw with alarm that the electric cooker was on, and opening the oven door he was greeted by a cloud of black smoke. Once he’d stopped coughing he looked again. There seemed to be something in a roasting tin.

‘Let me,’ said Debby, turning off the cooker at the wall. Holding her handkerchief in front of her face and grabbing a pair of oven gloves, she reached carefully into the oven and pulled out the tin, which contained the remains of some unidentifiable roast, now shrunken to a smouldering black heap. She dumped the entire pan without ceremony into the sink and turned on the cold tap. A loud hissing noise resulted and clouds of steam rose up and gradually began to disperse as Cullen switched on an extractor fan.

‘What do you think that tells us?’ asked Cullen.

‘That he’s not much of a cook?’

DI Cullen shook his head. ‘It means he was planning on coming back here. Whatever he was getting up to wasn’t meant to take very long.’

‘This is one of those ovens with a time delay,’ said Morgan, who was examining the controls. ‘So he could have set it to come on at a certain time.’

‘Whatever. He was expecting to come home and eat it.’ He was looking round. A book case on one wall held a row of paperback novels, and several larger books on computer graphics. That must be his work, thought Cullen, and he noticed a laptop open on a small desk in one corner.