‘Hi,’ Kate said, sitting up.
‘Didn’t want to startle you with the key in the door, so thought I’d scare you with the bell,’ Gilchrist said.
They both smiled.
‘There’s some green tea,’ Kate said, indicating the teapot on the table.
Kate watched as Gilchrist went into the kitchen and returned with a mug. It had hit her with some force today that she had a major crush on Gilchrist.
‘Did you get any clothes today?’ Kate said.
‘Didn’t have time,’ Gilchrist said, pouring her cup of tea.
‘I bought you some underwear in M amp;S,’ Kate said. Gilchrist looked at her. Kate felt suddenly embarrassed.
‘There was a store right next to the Archives and I was buying myself some and thought that just in case you didn’t have time. I guessed your size and they’re probably not very flattering-’
Kate realized she was blushing.
‘Thanks,’ Gilchrist said, sounding distracted. ‘That was thoughtful of you. How was your day in Kew?’
‘Great,’ Kate said. ‘I’ve got a new suspect and my grandfather may be the mystery memoirist – or possibly Bob’s father.’
Gilchrist laughed.
‘You’re going to have to run all that by me again.’
‘I found a police report about the original discovery of the body and it listed the policemen who were in attendance. Our autobiographer described how he was there. One of the names is that of my grandfather. And another is called Donald Watts.’
‘Crikey. And who is the new suspect?’
Kate told her about Dr Massiah and the Dr M in the memoir.
‘But I don’t know what happened in the investigation,’ she ended. ‘There were no more documents about him.’
Gilchrist was paying more attention now. She sat in the armchair opposite the sofa, balancing the mug on her knee.
‘You’re thinking that the Frenchy referred to in the memoir may be the victim?’
Kate nodded.
‘That’s great.’
‘Maybe,’ Kate said, standing up. ‘But then there’s this.’
She went over to the table and brought back the fragment of memoir about the older woman who looked like Carole Lombard. Gilchrist read it.
‘I was wondering why the head was cut off,’ Kate said. ‘Was it because she would be instantly recognizable?’
‘That he cut the head off meant the killer was worried someone would recognize her. And looking like a movie star would make it more likely.’
‘I’d assumed Frenchy was young, but there’s no reason why she shouldn’t be this older woman. Especially if Tingley is right and Spilsbury got it wrong.’
Gilchrist studied the fragment again.
‘I don’t know – the tone of voice in this-’
Kate’s phone rang. It was the radio station manager wanting to change her next shift. When Kate turned back to the room, she saw that Gilchrist had put the sheets of the memoir down and was staring at Kate. Kate flushed again.
‘What?’ she said, panicked for a moment that Sarah could read her mind. ‘What?’
I’d parked in the public car park below the community hall in Ditchling. As I reached the bottom of the incline, I was aware of a figure to my left detaching from the shadows of the building. At almost the same moment I heard hurried footsteps behind me. I turned to see the man from the pub, face contorted, as he wielded a baseball bat above his head.
Wielding a weapon with accuracy whilst running isn’t easy. This man was running downhill with a couple of pints inside him. His momentum was leading him. As he reached me, I bent low and he went over my shoulder. I gave him extra propulsion as I straightened. He hit the ground with a terrible wet crunch. I heard that horrible, hollow sound as his head cracked against the tarmac. I turned to face the man who’d come out of the shadows. He was about five yards away, his bat ready to whack a ball – or my head.
‘Be proud to be British,’ I said. ‘At least use a bloody cricket bat.’
The second man didn’t respond either to my bravado or to the plight of his colleague. He just moved in a half-crouch two yards closer.
I was out at practice at this stuff. Which is why I wondered too late how many others were in the car park. A third man came up behind me and whacked me hard across the small of my back. I arched and grunted, and fell backwards. Knowing as I fell that, once I was on the floor, it was all over.
Kate was feeling strange and embarrassed about the evening. She really liked Gilchrist. OK, fancied her. But she was worried that Gilchrist had guessed and was put off by the thought. Gilchrist had gone to bed early, leaving Kate to ponder this and her notes on the Trunk Murder.
She wondered about her grandfather. He’d died long before she was born and her father had never really talked about him. Nor had she been curious until now. She wasn’t upset about this family link to the Trunk Murder, although she disliked intensely whoever the memoirist was.
She might not be so pleased if her grandfather turned out to be the murderer but, then again, doesn’t everybody hope for a villain when they research their family histories?
That brought her to her father. Part of her estrangement from him was because once he was in government she’d had to give up wondering about his involvement in anything. She was sure he’d been behind getting Watts fired. Now, of course, in light of the threat to her in the cemetery, she was wondering if he’d done far worse.
Gilchrist knew she’d blanked Kate for a moment and in the process freaked her a bit. She was sorry for that. It was simply that, though she was touched by Kate’s thoughtfulness and intrigued by what she had discovered about the Trunk Murder, her mind was elsewhere. She was almost entirely focused on the present. Specifically, what Philippa Franks had told her. It sort of made sense but Gilchrist was cautious. She was remembering how upset Franks had been on the night of the tragedy. Was that normal post-trauma emotion or was there something else?
Gilchrist excused herself from Kate and retreated to the spare room. She put the underwear in the chest of drawers. One of the top drawers was taken up with framed photographs placed face down. Family photos, she guessed, to be brought out when her parents were using this room.
Gilchrist was lying in bed but she couldn’t sleep. The room was hot, the duvet heavy. But it wasn’t really that. It was all this stuff going around in her head. And something else. In work today, in the canteen, she’d seen Jack Jones, the CSI officer who’d been involved in analyzing the Milldean crime scene. The man she’d once had a fling with. The man she’d confided in about her one-night stand with Bob Watts. The man who’d sold her to the press.
She should have confronted him but she didn’t. At the time she thought she was being mature, rising above it. Now she was wondering if she’d just been cowardly.
And that brought her on to Bob Watts. And what, for want of a better term, she’d been thinking of as their second-night stand. Neither of them had referred to it again. Both had retreated to a kind of default position. There was no intimacy between them when they were together. The passion when the lights went out had shrivelled in the glare of the day.
She finally dozed off thinking about Bob Watts. The room felt hotter.
I didn’t go down. The man who was close enough to whack me across my back was close enough for me to engage with. And because it was a hit right across my back, it didn’t do me serious injury, even though it did hurt like hell. If he’d rammed the bat into one of my kidneys, or across the back of my head, he would have been more effective. As it was, the main blow was to my spine. It jarred me, but he’d need a lot more force to snap it.
I twisted as I was falling, and grabbed first the bat, then his forearm. Pulling down on his arm, I swung my legs off the ground and drove one knee into his side, the other into his neck.
