Gone to Ground (18 page)

Anstruther made the introductions and then sat back, upright and alert. Howard Prince shook Will's hand and then Helen's, letting his eyes rest on Helen a fraction more than necessary, before relaxing back into the chair beside Anstruther's desk.

Prince was in his mid-fifties, Helen thought, possibly older, but could have passed for less. His hair was full and neatly, recently cut; it was graying a little at the temples but that only served to add a certain gravitas. His eyes were brown, chestnut almost, alive. She felt them pass across her body again, appraisingly. The light gray suit he was wearing sat easily on a body that suggested little weakness, no appreciable slack.

"Quentin says there are some questions you want to ask," Prince said. He was looking at Will now, nailing him with his stare.

"Stephen Bryan," Will said, businesslike, "I believe he contacted you a number of times about a book he was working on? A biography of Stella Leonard, your wife's aunt."

"This is police business?"

"Since Mr. Bryan died."

"I heard about that. I'm sorry." No change in his expression. "It still doesn't explain why we're here."

This is a man, Helen thought, who would throw anyone out of his own funeral for crying.

"You didn't comply with Mr. Bryan's requests for an interview."

"That's a crime now? An offense?"

"Certainly not."

Prince angled his head toward Anstruther and smiled. "The way they change the law so often these days, I'd not be surprised. Forbidden this, forbidden that. So desperate to be politically correct, bend over much farther backwards they'd be looking up their own arses."

"When Mr. Bryan persevered," Will said, persevering himself, "you had Mr. Anstruther here send him a solicitor's letter."

"A shot across his bows," Prince said.

"And when it didn't work?"

"Didn't it work?"

"It didn't appear to stop him from doing his research."

"Researching my family, it did."

"And that was the point?" Helen asked.

"What do you think? Some fag academic upsetting people, asking questions, foraging in your drawers. Who'd want that?"

There was no doubting the nature of his look, the lascivious ease of his eyes. Helen held his gaze a moment longer, before looking away.

"What makes you think," Will asked, "people would be upset?"

"What kind of a stupid question is that?"

"I don't know. Tell me."

"Listen." Prince jabbed his arm forward, finger pointing. "You want to know what's wrong with this world? Our world? I don't mean drugs, I don't mean binge drinking, underage sex. I mean privacy. The lack of fucking privacy. A man's right to the sanctity of his own life, his own home. Cameras everywhere. Newspaper exposés. CCTV.
Big Brother.
" He snorted. "Big fucking Brother! Not that I've got any time for the bloke who thought that one up—Orwell—Sunday afternoon kind of socialist who lived in poncey Hampstead and took his laundry home to his mum at weekends. Never did a day's real work in his life. But I tell you, if he was alive today and saw what had happened to this country he'd have a fucking fit."

He threw back his head and laughed.

"There," he said to Helen, "I'm doing it again. Swearing like the proverbial. Too much time out on building sites. Getting stuck in. No offense meant."

"None fucking taken," Helen said, straight faced.

Prince laughed some more. "What I like, a woman with some balls. What do the Yanks call it? Spunk. Not afraid to speak her mind."

"I'd just like to be clear," Will said, hauling back the conversation, "when Bryan didn't respond positively to your warning letter, what other steps you took?"

"Steps? What steps? I don't get what you're driving at."

"Maybe you phoned?"

"Like buggery!" Prince said, with a firm shake of the head. "Last thing I'd want to do, that."

"Had someone make contact for you, then? Phone on your behalf?"

"Look, look." Prince spread his hands. "He pestered me, letters, phone calls, faxes, e-mails, got up my arse and no mistake. So I blocked him out, shut him off. Which was all I ever wanted. Beginning and end. Since then, okay, the poor bastard's died. Been murdered. Nobody wants that, nobody applauds. But nothing's going to bring him back. None of this talk. Best that can happen, you know this better'n me, whoever did it gets caught. Your job, right? Not sitting here badgering me."

With a nod toward Anstruther, Prince got to his feet.

"What is it about your family, your wife's family," Will said, "that you feel the need to protect it to this degree?"

Prince glared. "I'll tell you. For one, that's what it is—my family. Old-fashioned, if you like, but that's the way I think. The way I was brought up. And for another—I don't know why I'm telling you this, but I will—my wife, Lily, she's not always as strong as she might be. Has what's called, layman's terms, a fragile personality. Spent a lot of time under medical care. I don't want anything that might upset her, make her more disturbed. I don't want people writing about her either, her condition." He had been leaning toward Will and now he straightened up. "All right? Satisfied? Now, it's time I went. Time's money, eh?"

Sprightly for a man of middle years, he was already on his feet. A quick shake of Anstruther's hand, a nod toward Will and Helen, and he was gone.

"I don't imagine you'll be needing to talk to my client again," Anstruther said pleasantly.

"If we do," Will said, "we'll let you know."

The moment they got outside, Helen reached for her cigarettes. "So, what did you think?" she said. "You believe what he said?"

"About protecting his family, yes."

"And the rest?"

"I'm happy to give him the benefit of the doubt. For now."

"Where does that leave us?" Helen asked. "Somewhere unpleasant without the proverbial paddle?"

"Not exactly. I'll see if we can't draft in a few uniforms, canvas Bryan's neighbours again. Might stir up a few memories, you never know."

Together, they set off along Petty Gury, the sky above them a pale egg shell that augured neither good nor ill.

WHEN UNIFORMED CONSTABLES BARRIE SLATER AND Ashley Milne were shuffled out onto the streets surrounding the late Stephen Bryan's home, neither of them viewed the prospect of the coming hours with enthusiasm. Both men, after all, had taken part in the initial house-to-house enquiries and had little faith that knocking on the same doors and asking the same questions would result in much more than perplexed stares coupled with annoyance at being dragged away from that day's
Countdown
.

Added to which, Milne was nursing a bruised toe after turning out for his local pub team on the previous Sunday morning, his injury the result of a last-ditch blocking tackle in which he was adjudged to have missed the ball but not the man and promptly shown a red card for his pains.

Slater, for whom football was a game largely played by overpaid underachievers more interested in personal adornment than genuine physical effort or athleticism, was a coach for the East of England under-sixteen swimming team, and was often to be found poolside at some ungodly hour of the morning, urging one or other of his charges to even greater efforts at backstroke or butterfly.

Both men, coincidentally, were engaged to members of the nursing staff at Addenbrookes Hospital and, although any conversation about sport was bound to be short and adversarial, they could find common ground discussing starter mortgages and the best venues for the inevitable stag night, Milne currently favouring Dublin while Slater was torn between Tallinn and Barcelona.

"You ever feel," Milne said, stopping at the corner to rest his foot, "all we're doing is going through the motions?"

"So someone can save face, you mean?"

"Will bloody Grayson, lost the plot on this one, no mistake."

"Takin' a bit of hammer from above, bound to be. Got to show he's doing something."

"What I reckon," Milne said, easing off his shoe, "blokes like him ought to be judged by results like bloody football managers. Lose too many and you're out. Like Souness at Newcastle, Megson at Forest. Saw it coming, mind, pair of 'em. Faces like a couple of sour oranges. Grayson's the same. Difference is, 'stead of gettin' the heave-ho, likely he'll get kicked upstairs out of harm's way."

Slater disagreed. "I don't reckon he's a bad bloke, Grayson. Give you the time of day, more than some. And far as results go, last couple he's worked—student's body in the river and that car park thing—two arrests, two convictions. Not a lot wrong there."

"Yeah, maybe." Milne's toe, not the littlest but the one alongside, was swollen to more than twice its normal size.

"Ought to get yourself off to A&E," Slater said. "Might be broken."

Milne shook his head. "Jennie took a look at it this morning. Bruising, she reckons, that's all. Keep taking the ibuprofen. Stick a bag of frozen peas on it when I get home."

Slater looked at his watch. "Let's get this next couple of streets done. Then we can take a break."

Milne winced as he slowly maneuvered his shoe back into place.

The first three they spoke to hadn't seen or heard a thing, regular three wise monkeys as Milne called them; two houses next with no one answering, and then a couple who'd moved in just a few days before and seemed to have a wardrobe wedged halfway up the stairs.

When the man suggested Milne and Slater might like to come in and give them a hand, they looked back at him in disbelief.

"Waste of time, this," Milne grumbled, back on the sidewalk.

Without wanting to say so, Slater thought he was probably right.

The next house had fresh green paint around the windows and blue paint on the door, snowdrops and a few green shoots of daffodil coming up in the small front garden.
No hawkers, no circulars, no free papers
clearly on display.

Slater rang the bell and knocked for good measure.

No reply.

No sounds of television or radio.

They were turning away when they heard footsteps on the stairs.

Two bolts and a chain: better safe than sorry.

The man in the doorway was wearing brown overalls with oil stains down one side; he was five eight or nine, late fifties at best, round faced with a thinning head of red hair. "Didn't hear you at first, fixing the lagging on some pipes up in the loft. What can I do to help?"

Will, as to his regret seemed increasingly the case, was in a meeting. New Home Office directives with regard to clear-up rates and detection. More bum-fodder and folderol. Window dressing. Coffee but no biscuits.

Helen listened to Milne and Slater with interest.

"And why," she said, "hadn't he reported any of this before?"

"Been away," Milne said. "Since before it happened. Austrian Tyrol, Rhine Gorge, and Bavaria. Train, apparently. Did everything but show us the timetable."

"He's downstairs?"

Milne nodded.

"Fenwick? That's his name?"

"Richard Fenwick," Slater said.

"Best bring him up. And listen, good work the pair of you."

Both men had smiles on their faces as they walked away.

Helen had appropriated Will's empty office, and Fenwick looked around with a mixture of curiosity and slight apprehension. "It's the first time," he said, "I've ever been inside a police station."

He had changed from his work-stained overalls into a pair of dark trousers and a gray tweed jacket that added another five years to his age.

Helen smiled. "There are times when I wish I could say the same."

Fenwick nodded wisely. "It must be difficult, doing your job. Nowadays especially."

"I think it's always been difficult," Helen said defensively. "It's the issues that change."

Fenwick would not be put off. "You go to other countries, and I do, especially since ... well, especially since I've been on my own ... and they don't seem to have the problems we do. All this binge drinking. Drugs. Muggings."

"I don't know," Helen said. "Take the average group of tourists who come here. From Japan say. Germany. What do they see? Buildings going back to the twelfth century. Dreaming spires. They don't see down-at-heel housing estates or kids copping ten-pound deals outside shopping centres. They see what they want to see."

"I suppose that's true. But even so..."

Helen decided to head the remainder of the all-too-familiar diatribe off at the pass. "You told the officers, Mr. Fenwick, that you saw someone hanging around close to Stephen Bryan's house. Acting suspiciously."

"Yes, that's right. On the Tuesday. Tuesday afternoon."

"What time?"

"Oh, four o'clock, it must have been. No later than four-thirty, certainly."

"And Stephen Bryan—you knew him well?"

"Not well. I wouldn't say that. First name terms, just about. Neighbours, you know? His house, it more or less backs onto mine. The gardens. We'd exchange the occasional few words if we were both out there at the same time." Fenwick leaned in toward the desk. "Once or twice recently I couldn't help but notice him paying a lot of attention to the drain, at the rear of his place, so I asked him one day what was wrong. Thinking I might be able to help, you know? It seemed there was a blockage farther back. In the main drain. All this sewage had backed up and was close to overflowing. There was a smell, I can tell you. Quite oppressive."

Why am I hearing this? Helen asked herself.

"Apparently," Fenwick continued, oblivious, "he'd been on to the water company, and although they'd accepted responsibility, getting them to actually come and deal with it, well, you can imagine. They keep you on hold the best part of an hour, listening to a very bad recording of 'The Four Seasons' and then, when you do get through, you're speaking to someone in Bombay or Mumbai, who, with the best will in the world, hasn't got a clue how to help."

Helen screwed up her face into a quick, sympathetic smile. Get on with it, man.

"A couple of days after we spoke," Fenwick said, "Stephen came round. Said the water people had promised to send someone that morning, but he had to go out and could he leave the key with me? He'd put a note on the door telling them where to call. So, naturally, I said, yes, that would be fine."