False Alarm (21 page)

Bea nodded. ‘We all do, at times. You can do penance tomorrow.'

He tried to smile. ‘We frightened Harvey to death. No, I don't mean “to death”, of course I don't. But I keep seeing his face when he fell back over the settee. I ought to have stopped things right there.'

‘Uh-huh. You should. But he'll forgive you if you spend some time listening to his stories tomorrow. You can call it your community service. I'd advise spreading it over several days or you'll never get anything else done.'

CJ was not amused. ‘What are you talking about? What penance?'

Oliver winced, but faced him. ‘I'm sorry, CJ. I let you down. I let you both down. I was so taken up by the thought of Sir Lucas wanting me to work for him that I got carried away. Mother Hen did warn me. Maggie told me I was overstepping the mark, too. But all I could see was . . .' He wiped his face with his hands. ‘All I could see was . . .'

‘A ladder to the stars,' said Bea. ‘You were so preoccupied with your task for Sir Lucas that you overlooked what else was happening at the flats.'

CJ stared. ‘Sir Lucas has found the traitor at Vicori House. So what else is there to worry about?'

‘Well,' said Bea, ‘I suppose we can put the keying of Sir Lucas's car down to Tariq in revenge for the confiscation of his music equipment, but what about the rest of the odd happenings there? For starters; who poisoned Lady Ossett's supper; who arranged the tripwire which caused Sir Lucas to fall down the stairs; and above all, who pushed the caretaker over the edge?'

‘What!'

‘Then,' said Bea, warming to the task, ‘there's the small matter of the call-girl cards; which is not such a small matter really, since it led to that nasty fight in the foyer. Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind knowing more about the death of the old lady on the ground floor, as that seems to be the first of the unhappy events which hit the building. So, shall we get a pizza on the way, or shall I make you an omelette when we get back home?'

B
ea woke early and lay in bed, allowing the events of the last few days to filter through into her consciousness.

Maggie was sleeping over at her mother's.

Oliver was asleep upstairs in his own bed.

Sir Lucas had unmasked the traitor in his camp but had not returned to his wife's side.

Lady Ossett continued to be on good terms with the Professor. Long might that last.

Bea decided that she would have a leisurely breakfast and go to church for a spiritual refill. She'd heard that going to church wasn't supposed to be like filling up a car with petrol but that's how it appeared to her. She liked to hear God's word interpreted and to join in songs of praise. She cherished the time of peace and quiet in which to worship God away from the stress of her busy life.

She didn't think she was a particularly good Christian. Her dear dead husband had encouraged her to believe that if she talked to God, He would listen and respond. Well, she did find it a comfort to talk to Him and tell Him all her troubles, but she was the first to admit she wasn't particularly good at listening to His replies.

Except . . . just occasionally it seemed that God did tell her things. A thought would pop into her mind from somewhere, she wasn't sure where, and it would lead to her taking such and such an action. Or into holding her tongue about . . . whatever. She'd spoken to the minister at church about it one day, and he'd said she must be sure that these thoughts chimed with Jesus's instructions for living.

She sighed. It wasn't always easy to know what did or didn't, was it? Except that just lately He'd been banging on at her not to have any dealings with the devil . . .

She giggled. She didn't think Sir Lucas would normally be considered a devil. Or, would he?

She dressed and, as she'd plenty of time before the service, took a cup of coffee downstairs to make sure that nothing alarming had been left for her to deal with when the agency closed at lunchtime the previous day.

Oliver found her there, an hour later, looking ragged.

She put down the phone with a long sigh. ‘Lucky I caught that. Someone left a message on the answerphone yesterday, saying they'd been taken ill and couldn't run a dinner party at one of the Consulates this evening. I must have tried everyone but the chef at Claridges, but I've finally managed to track down someone who could fill in. What a morning.'

‘We used to switch the phone upstairs when the agency closed at weekends.'

Bea lifted her empty cup, grimaced, put it down again. ‘We've got a recorded message which says that if the matter is urgent, to ring my mobile phone number. My phone got smashed at the flats, remember? I've re-recorded the message so they can contact me on my old phone, but in future I think we'd better have someone else taking back-up calls over the weekend. One of the office girls might be happy to do it for a consideration.'

She yawned and stretched. Shot upright. ‘Look at the time. I was going to go to church this morning.'

‘You've got other work to do.' Oliver was steady-eyed. Serious.

She put her hands in her lap and swivelled her chair to look out of the window, across the paved garden and up through the bare branches of the sycamore tree to the spire of the church beyond. The words ‘important' and ‘urgent' came into her mind. Was it more important to go to church, or to deal with the problems at the flats? She could argue both ways.

Oliver said, ‘People don't say “sorry” much nowadays, do they? But I need to get it out of my system. I'm sorry. You were right and I was wrong about Sir Lucas. I did know I was stepping over the line yesterday, but I got caught up in the excitement and . . . No excuses. I knew I was doing wrong. Then he dropped me, just like that. You'll say, “What did you expect?”' He tried to smile. ‘I've been naive, haven't I?'

‘Don't beat yourself up too much. Sir Lucas saw a bright young mind and made use of you for a while. No great harm done. Now, suppose we pool what we've both learned. For a start, can you fill me in on why you thought Harvey was scheming to kill Sir Lucas?'

He washed his face with his hands. ‘Looking back, I can't think how I came to be so stupid. I got caught up in the excitement of the chase. I started at the top of the building and—'

‘Wait a minute. Did you start in the penthouse?'

‘Well, no. There's no point suspecting Lady Ossett, was there?'

Bea gave him a grim smile. ‘Possibly not. I'll fill you in on that complication later. Right; so you started with the Professor—'

‘Maggie had said his cat was missing, so I used that as an excuse to call on him. You know about his cat?'

‘Of course. You were amused by the Professor's apps and decided he wasn't the person you were looking for. Then you went down to see Tariq? He said he was poorly and you let him off the hook. What you didn't know was that he'd already tried to leave that day, been fielded by the caretaker and knocked out for his pains. No wonder he was feeling off colour.'

‘I wasn't to know that, was I?'

Bea refrained, just, from saying that if he'd listened to her, he'd have known all about it. ‘So next on your list was—'

‘Mrs Kempton. Carrie. Fluffy bunny. I made the excuse about looking for the cat, and I think she was glad to have someone to talk to and invited me in. I spotted her computer, an old one, not much cop, and she let me play with it because she said it was acting up and I discovered that somehow or other she'd got all the formatting marks to show, would you believe? So I put that right for her, and she was duly grateful. I whizzed through her files and there was nothing there which shouldn't be, so I crossed her off the list. She said it was a bit late by then to be calling on other people so I stopped for the night.'

‘Then this morning you went back to Tariq's flat.'

‘He opened the door in his pyjamas. He said he was feeling better but hadn't seen the cat. He suggested that if I went and had a talk to the caretaker, in private, before he started on his usual work, he might take me around and help me look for the cat. I'd been thinking it would be a good idea to have the man at my side, anyway, so I took the lift down to where the caretaker was working in the foyer, and I asked if we could have a word in private and we went down to his flat which is in the sub-basement and—'

‘And Tariq slipped down the stairs and out of the building while you talked to the caretaker. Tariq used you as a decoy.'

Oliver flushed. ‘Well, I wasn't to know, was I? I told the caretaker what I was doing, that I was acting on Sir Lucas's orders, and he said we should go straight up and talk to Tariq about it. So we went up and, as you say, Tariq had gone. The caretaker threw a total strop. The mess in the flat, you wouldn't believe! There were the remains of takeaway meals, discarded clothes, surfaces scratched, a curtain torn. It was only natural the caretaker was angry. He said Sir Lucas would have to get some contract cleaners in to clear the place out and redecorate. He went out on to the balcony, and there was another pile of junk there. He said he'd try to deal with it later. Which I suppose is what he was doing when he fell over the edge. He said Tariq had a laptop and a PC. There was no laptop – he must have taken it with him. I looked at the PC but there was nothing incriminating on it.'

Bea nodded, non-committal. ‘Then . . . Lucy Emerson?'

‘Fluffy bunny with a steel core. The caretaker didn't bother to accompany me when I knocked on her door, but as luck would have it Carrie Kempton came down the stairs just at that moment – apparently they always have coffee together in the mornings – so she introduced me to Lucy. Carrie said how clever I'd been, putting her computer right, and we had a nice cuppa and a chat. Lucy Emerson does have a laptop but doesn't use it much. She let me see it and there wasn't anything on it which shouldn't have been there. I can't see her plotting with a vice-chairman of Vicori to bring Sir Lucas down, can you?'

‘No, I can't. So, what about the Muslim family opposite her?'

‘No surprise, they wouldn't open the door. The caretaker said they didn't talk to anyone in the flats and didn't know Sir Lucas, so it wouldn't be them. We didn't bother with Carmela either because, well, Sir Lucas said it wasn't necessary. So we got to Harvey.'

Oliver sighed. ‘He opened the door wearing silk pyjamas – it was well into the afternoon by that time. I thought he looked like a petulant cockatoo. He said he was just about to go out so we couldn't come in. The caretaker asked if he'd seen the cat Momi, and the dear man shrieked and clapped his hands to his cheeks, defying any cat to enter his territory. We asked if we might look for ourselves, and he didn't want to let us in, saying we'd disturb all his “Top Secret” papers, but we insisted that we had to look and there wasn't any cat, of course. But his second bedroom is set up as an office, with a computer and printer and fax machine, and some rather nifty cameras.

‘Also, pinned up on a notice board were photos of various young men which he seems to have taken with a long-range lens. All young, some of them in school uniform. He said he was taking the pictures for a story he was writing, which I didn't believe for one minute. His computer was on a screen saver. He tried to stop me, but I wanted to see what he'd got there and I found folders on a whole lot of people. I saw there was one marked “Camellia”, which I thought might be his way of disguising “Carmela”, and I was right. He'd snapped her as she'd let a number of different men out of her flat. Very clear photos of the men concerned. And one of them was—'

‘Sir Lucas. Of course. Anyone else you recognized?'

‘There's a photo montage of executives on the wall in the foyer at Vicori House. I recognized one of Carmela's visitors from that, though I can't recall his name. The closest I can get to it is that he's a vice president of one of the Vicori companies, third row down on the left on the board.'

‘So, on the basis of a photograph showing this man outside Carmela's door, you assumed he was the traitor Sir Lucas was looking for? That he was using Harvey as a go-between, or perhaps trying to obtain information from Sir Lucas through Carmela? There might be another explanation, you know.'

‘Why else would he be taking those photographs?'

Bea sighed. Oliver had not just jumped, but leaped to the wrong conclusion.

Oliver said, ‘Harvey was burbling away about Carmela being a naughty girl, inviting me to laugh with him. I said I thought he'd been rather naughty, too, that I'd have to report him, and that he must know what the consequences were. He giggled and he said . . .' Oliver washed his face with his hands again. ‘He said, “Oh yes, please!” and pinched my bottom.'

Bea tried not to laugh. ‘Er, you've had advances made to you before now?'

‘Well, yes; once or twice. But I hadn't seen this one coming. The caretaker was horrified, too. He started shouting at Harvey, saying he was a reptile and worse, and that Sir Lucas would deal with him and he was not to leave the apartment until further notice. Harvey took umbrage, said he didn't believe what he was hearing, that he had to go out on important government business and that MI5 would be watching. The caretaker lifted Harvey's keys which were on his hall table. Then he went into the kitchen and locked the back door, and took that bunch of keys, too. Apparently the bunch in the back door was Harvey's spare set. He became hysterical, shouting that he had claustrophobia and that we'd no right to lock him in.

‘I wasn't thinking straight. I thought it served him right. He tried to rush the caretaker and got thrown back across the settee. I started to laugh. It wasn't till much later that I . . . Harvey really was frightened, you know. He was perspiring, and . . . flapping about in a way which I thought at the time was funny. But it wasn't funny, really. Was it?'