Unfaithfully Yours (24 page)

I think I have already gone over the details of the evening with you and know you are already beavering away on my behalf. Did you know, by the way, that 82 per cent of all beavers in the Continental United States are homosexual?

But.

I have gone over and over that evening and I have thought of one detail I had overlooked that might, perhaps, help you in your search. I think I already told you that one of the things that seemed strange to me, when I found Pamela’s body, was that there was a half-empty bottle of red wine next to her. She very rarely drank red wine – and never, never on her own.

I think I also told you I was fairly sure that, although there was only one glass on the coffee table, one of the goblets in the cabinet where the glasses are kept had been moved. Someone, I thought, had been anxious to remove all trace of their presence in the house that night; but, now I think about it, what struck me about the position of the glasses in the cabinet was the precision with which they had been rearranged.

I don’t know why but I think I saw a woman’s hand in this. Maybe it is being gay and being very sensitive to how women feel. Maybe it is just that Gerald, if he is a murderer, is liable to be a clumsy murderer. In fact, a cushion over the face seems a little subtle for him. I am surprised he didn’t come at her with a pickaxe or blow her head off at short range with a double-barrelled shotgun. More importantly, if he was being so careful about moving the glass, why did he leave the cushion where it was?

My own theory – and I know private detectives do not like the general public to have theories – is that Gerald had an accomplice. I know we are all supposed to think that Elizabeth Price is a kind of saint, but I, personally, favour Elizabeth Price as the guilty party. She is very good at suggesting she is a nice person but, believe you me, Orlando, when you are locked up in a villa in Corsica with her for two weeks, you soon see the seamy side. She is a tremendous intellectual snob with very little feeling for animals.

And she worships the ground that bastard walks on. Excuse my French, but she would crawl down Putney High Street on broken glass for Gerald. If he was having an affair and he wanted the woman out of the way she’d be right behind him. She pretends she’s not interested in where he parks his penis but when we were
en Bretagne
she clocked every single move my late wife made in Gerald’s direction – and, believe you me, she made a few. She was utterly obsessed with where he was and what he was doing – and I do not imagine she’s changed, for all she pretends to be interested only in the Silver Age of Latin Poetry.

Mrs Goody Two Shoes, as Pam and I used to call her, was also very, very down on Milly, whom we sent to Dame Veronica’s. She and Pam had a most terrible bust-up about it and, though it was more than twenty years ago, I can still remember it with horrifying clarity. Pam pulled out some of her hair. Quite a lot of it, actually.

Well – that’s my tip for the day, Orlando. I must say I never thought that you and me and Sam and Mary Dimmock would all hit it off so well. I think the arrangement of Sam staying with me at weekends and visiting me for the odd night of passion (he’s an amazing lover, Orlando, with an intuitive understanding of what my body needs) seems to be working well. I am still trying to get him to come out to his patients. I suggested a sort of informal wine and cheese party at which I might make a short speech – but he seems opposed to this.

So looking forward to taking you and Mary out on the boat. Beware of Sam when he is skippering, however. He is gloriously dominating but it may not be to everyone’s taste. I rather like it but, then, as I may have said earlier in this letter, I am a gay man and have a totally different attitude to power and control than you will find in many straight males, obsessed as they are with the existing structures of a society that is, let’s face it, more or less committed to wiping homosexuals off the map!

I have got huge interest in my new documentary series from Holland, and a group of gay Dutch filmmakers are keen on collaborating with me on it. Jens and Burgwaal will be over in the next few weeks and I would love you to meet them. They want to visit the Lake District and, if possible, sleep naked on one of the mountains. I also want to tell you more about some very exciting developments on the Barnaby front. I came out to him via the British embassy and I think we are more or less reconciled. Milly and Leo have been terrific! Leo said, ‘I always knew you were a poof, Dad!’ Isn’t that marvellous?

Onwards and upwards!

Ever your

Mike

(Not Really Michaela – I Like My Dick Too Much!)

From:

Orlando Gibbons

Detectives Are Us

12 The Alley

Putney

21 November

To:

Micky Larner

‘Chez Toi’

24 Lawson Crescent

Putney

Dear Mike,

How nice to hear from you. I am totally with you on the issue of confronting prejudice against those who have different sexual tastes from our own. I have very different sexual priorities from, say, Sam. I like going to bed with his wife for a start! But this does not mean I do not respect him as a man – in fact, he is one of the most masculine men I know and I have often admired his physique, stamina and ability to stay at sea for long periods.

This does not mean, by the way, that I am in any way attracted to him sexually.

My rates, as I think I said when we met in the pub, are £200 a day – but, as I think of you as a personal friend, on this occasion I would offer an ‘all-in’ price of £1,500 – 40 per cent of which is refundable if I do not come to a credible conclusion. I have known ‘private eyes’ who wander around for a few weeks and then, rather like the police, say they are ‘baffled’. You do not pay me to be baffled. You want to know what happened to your wife, to the mother of your children. It was not, as you have made clear, a good relationship. You are much happier now you are living, on a part-time basis, with a man for whom I have the highest regard purely as a friend and dentist; but you need to know how Pamela died. She was not an easy woman. She was widely disliked. She obviously did something terrible to Barnaby and he took his revenge in his own way but, even if she lied about the number of children she had brought into the world, the university she had attended and, clearly, was financially dishonest in quite a major way, she was a person. She had a right to live. Well, a right not to be brutally murdered, anyway. If I can ‘track down’ her killer, I will, it seems to me, be doing the world a service. And also learning something. I have never done a murder inquiry before and am not in any way qualified to begin one. I can only say I am deeply grateful for your confidence in me and will try to justify it even though that seems, at the moment, unlikely.

I did have the chance to speak with Gerald Price, as it happens, and learned much of interest in regard to the death of your late wife. It was about a week ago and he seemed slightly more communicative than usual. When I asked him whether he was on his way to ‘chambers’, he said, ‘Fucking chambers can fucking whistle for me!’ Which is not typical behaviour for him at all.

I was not surprised to find him changed. I had heard from Mrs Price that he has recently left her and is no longer living at the marital home. I thought I would try to find out where he was living, and, if possible, with whom. Although he has told Mrs Price that there is no ‘other woman’, in my experience there generally is. In his case there are probably two or three, with a few young Malaysian boys thrown in for good measure.

I hope you did not find that remark in ‘bad taste’. It is simply that Gerald Price is a man whose sexuality knows no bounds whatsoever and his urge to have intercourse is not, in my view, sex or even species specific. There is, obviously, nothing wrong with having sex with young Malaysian boys, provided the boys are old enough to have sex legally and provided, of course, they are consenting adults and not simply ‘doing it for money’, although that, too, is obviously, in many cases, not a bad thing since we all need to earn money and I understand there is much poverty in Malaysia and, you know, why not?

He was not dressed, as he usually is, in a conservative dark suit but in stonewashed jeans and a bright red cardigan, which would have suggested to me, even if I did not already know it, that he is going through some life-changing emotional experience. His shirt, too, seemed to be a ‘cry for help’. It was dark blue with spots on it and had a very large collar. When I asked him what he was ‘up to’, he said he was ‘going away’. I asked where he was going. He said he did not know but wherever it was it would be ‘for a very long time’.

I then asked after his wife, without letting him know that I had talked to her and knew of his situation. He said, ‘She is probably lurking behind a pillar somewhere in the vicinity.’ I asked him what exactly he meant by that and he went on to say that he thought Mrs Price was following him. ‘She is always following me,’ he said, looking around him in a somewhat hunted fashion. ‘She always thinks I have got my dick into some other woman. Which is ridiculous. I keep my dick in my trousers, Mr Gibbons, as I am sure do you!’

I was familiar with his way of talking, and, in our time rehearsing
Hamlet
, had almost got used to it, but I must say I was shocked by the deliberate crudity of his language. Partly to change the subject and partly because I wanted to see how he would react, I said I had recently taken instruction from you to investigate the death of Pamela Larner and would welcome the chance to come and talk to him about the case. I said I was now aware he had been having an affair with her and that he had ended it around the time of her death.

‘I have no desire to keep any of that secret!’ he said. ‘I don’t care what the old rat thinks any more!’

I took him to be referring to Mrs Price. He started to peer about him again. We were in the Putney Shopping Centre, just at the bottom of the escalators, opposite to Waterstone’s Bookshop. A woman with a black beret was coming out of that shop. I thought for a moment it was his wife and so, obviously, did he. He began to twitch like Fagin in the condemned cell.

‘Yes, I was having an affair with Mike’s wife,’ he said, as soon as he was sure it was not Mrs Price. ‘I don’t mind saying that. It’s the truth. If he doesn’t like it he can come and thump me. Or, rather, try to thump me. I’d like to see the little tosser try.’ He then went on make some very ill-informed remarks about your sexuality – which I will not repeat here. Then he grabbed me by the lapels and stared deep into my eyes. ‘I like you, Gibbo!’ he said. ‘You’re a funny little bloke. The jodhpurs were a fucking disaster. But I like you. I know people think I’m some kind of monster but I’m not. I know Larner’s been telling people I killed her but I certainly do not go around killing women – even women as unpleasant and boring as Pamela Larner.’

I stood very still. A fat man waddled towards us wheeling a Waitrose trolley. A woman stood listlessly by the flower stall, the only sign of real life in the place. The impartially white light of the mall illuminated Gerald’s face in a way I had never seen before. He was a man, Michael, in the grip of something, and I did not know what it was.

‘I had a row with her and told her it was over and buggered off. I did not want to fuck her any more. It was a nightmare. It was like dipping it into a knife sharpener. She screamed at me and did all those girly things they do. But when I was walking away from her house, I had this weird feeling. I’d had it all night in fact.’

I kept my eyes on his face. I knew it was important not to break the line of communication between us. He grabbed my arm and I realized, once again, how extraordinarily strong he is. If medical-negligence cases ever dry up he could almost certainly find work as a circus strong-man.

‘I was being followed, Gibbo!’ he said. ‘Someone was following me. They had been following me for days. They followed me to Pam’s house and they were watching me when I came out. I know they were.’

He looked around him again. ‘People think she’s nice,’ he said, ‘but she isn’t. I’m sure it was a woman following me. You get a feeling about these things.’

‘How,’ I said slowly, ‘do you know there was someone following you that night?’

‘A kind of prickling in the back of the neck!’ said Gerald.

I did not like to point out that this was not really going to count as evidence in a court of law. I asked him if he had heard footsteps or turned to see anyone flitting behind a lamppost immediately his gaze switched in their direction. As a private detective I think I can claim to be something of an expert in the field of following people.

‘It was just a feeling,’ he said, ‘but I know she was there!’

‘Who was there?’ I said.

‘The wife, of course,’ he replied. ‘I’m leaving her so as I can say what I like now, and I’m telling you she makes the Stasi look like the Putney Sea Scouts after they’ve been buggered senseless by the Dodgy Dentist.’ I am sorry to have to report these offensive remarks but I think it important to give the ‘flavour’ of the speech of a man who is, after all, our principal suspect. ‘If you ask me,’ he went on, ‘the old rat did her in if she was done in. I would look no further. Do not, for God’s sake, tell her you’ve seen me. I’m not here. I’ve left her by the way. I have had enough of her perverted little ways!’

I will never cease to wonder at human beings and how they view each other. I do not think I have ever met anyone less likely to have acquired ‘perverted little ways’ than Mrs Elizabeth Price, but Mr Price clearly saw her very differently from me. Perhaps you and he are steering me in a direction in which I am ‘become blind’ and I must take Mrs Price more seriously as a possible suspect.

‘Pamela took pills, didn’t she?’ went on Gerald. ‘Isn’t that what happened? Maybe the old rat forced them down her throat after getting her drunk.’

This, without in any way being planned, was turning into a very useful interview. Detective work is like this, Michael. I have been accused of getting ‘too close’ to my subjects; on one occasion I actually became engaged to a woman who, it subsequently turned out, had poisoned thirteen people in Raynes Park, but I do not regret it. I am now as deeply involved in the group I like to call, privately, the Puerto Banús Eight.