Dead Line

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 a son gout,’ 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