Twenty-four
ONE OF THE REASONS WHY I NEVER GET UP-TO-DATE with my paperwork is that I can’t seem to find the kind of job where you can sign off and say it’s all done. Maybe it’s just me. Everything in my life has a more ragged shape than that, tapering off at the end into bathos, bullshit, and bittersweet absurdity.
The headlines were all variations on a theme, the
That was a disturbing thought. I’d had no idea up until then that McClennan had ever married, let alone bred. There ought to be licensing laws that stop that sort of thing happening, but since there weren’t, I’d just torpedoed—along with the unregenerate bastard himself—an entire family unit. I considered blagging an address from Dodson, or more likely from Nicky, and going round to see them, but what the hell would I have said? I killed your husband, your dad, but it’s okay, because he deserved it? I chickened out. That was one last reckoning I wasn’t ready for just yet.
But leaving all the imponderables off to one side, there was a certain pleasure to be had in dumping the whole day’s papers down on Alice’s desk and telling her she could add them to the Bonnington collection. It was Alice’s desk, because Peele was already on secondment to the Guggenheim, who were so keen to get their hands on him that they were paying the Bonnington to let him work out his notice in their employ. And Alice was where she’d wanted to be all along—a happy ending that, by Cheryl’s account, had left hardly a dry eye in the place.
“This changes nothing,” Alice told me coldly. “The fact that nobody has seen the ghost since last Sunday doesn’t prove that she’s gone, or if she’s gone, that you exorcised her. By my reckoning, you still owe us three hundred pounds—and you can be grateful that I didn’t involve the police over the theft of my keys.”
I didn’t let any of this spoil my sunny disposition. “You’re right,” I said. “When you’re right, you’re right. I can’t prove I did the job. No witnesses. No physical evidence. That’s the nature of the beast, I suppose. Most of what I do doesn’t leave a trail.”
She was waiting for me to leave, with barely concealed impatience.
“No,” I went on, musing aloud. “For a good, solid trail, you need a good, solid crime. Now I know you caught up with Tiler because I made it my business to find out. You turned up on his doorstep with two solicitors and a gent from the cop shop, and you took possession of twenty-seven boxes full of miscellaneous documents, with no fuss and no charges brought. Then the next day, he gave his notice in.”
Alice was still looking like someone with a lot of better places to be. “And what’s your point?” she demanded.
I shrugged disarmingly. “Far be it from me to have a point. It’s best to do these things discreetly. Nothing gained by making a big noise about it. Okay, the screwy little fucker tried to kill me, but I know as well as anyone that there’s a greater good. Tell me, Alice, did you do what I asked you to? Did you go next door and have a look in that basement?”
She just stared at me for a moment or two.
“Yes,” she said at last—and I could hear the strain under the neutral tone she held so well. “I did.”
“Come to any conclusions about it?”
She nodded slowly. Very slowly. Again she took her time answering, making sure every word did what it was supposed to. “I took legal advice. Those premises never came into the possession of the archive in the first place. They remained with the Department of Social Security when the rest of the building was made over to us in the 1980s. So I let the police know that the rooms had been broken into and left it at that.”
“Of course you did. Was that you as in Acting-Chief-Administrator-of-the-Bonnington-Archive you, or private- citizen-cooperating-with-the-police-out-of-disinterested-sense-of-civic-duty you? I mean, did you leave a name or just ring them anonymously from a call box?”
She opened her mouth for an angry reply, but I hurried on. “Whichever,” I said, “I’m sure you made the point that you, Jeffrey, and Rich were in possession of keys to that door, and that therefore, any inquiries about possible unlawful imprisonment, rape, and/or murder ought to start with the three of you.”
There was a very long, very painful silence.
“I’ve checked my own and Jeffrey’s keys very thoroughly,” said Alice. “There are no keys to that door on either ring.”
“That’s interesting,” I said. “I mean, I saw Rich letting himself into those rooms with his Bonnington key ring only a few short nights ago. It stands out in my mind because of the very vivid events it’s associated with. Now obviously, Rich is in a secure ward in the West Middlesex right now, sedated up to his eyeballs and consequently unable to speak up for himself. But I could maybe point the police in his direction in case he ever gets better.”
Alice’s conscience might have been bothering her, but she wasn’t in the mood to be pushed around. “Then maybe you should,” she said. “What you do is your own affair, Castor. Good-bye and good luck.”
“How about the Gug? Do you think we should put them in the loop, too?”
No answer at all. Alice had the slapped-in-the-face look of a little kid who’s just been told that there isn’t any Father Christmas. I laid my cards on the table. This wasn’t sadism, it was just business.
“Apart from you,” I said, “Peele made three appointments during his time here. Cheryl’s solid gold, but out of the other two, one was stealing from the archive on an industrial scale, and the other has only managed to escape a murder investigation by going conveniently insane at the eleventh hour. That’s a great record, isn’t it? Something you might definitely expect to come up at the recruitment interview when the Guggenheim board formalize this temporary appointment of his.”
Alice still hadn’t found anything to say, so I just kept on going.
“Now I figure it this way. There was no reason not to throw the book at Tiler except a desire to let sleeping dogs lie. And you’ve tried to keep at least an arm’s length, if not a barge pole’s distance, between the Bonnington and the Snezhna Alanovich murder investigation, although you must be very well aware that it’s going on right next door to you. I believe the police even dropped in to ask you a few questions, but obviously I wasn’t privy to that conversation, so I can’t possibly tell what they asked you and what came up in the general chitchat.
“Probably you’ve come to the conclusion that whatever happened in that basement is none of your business. Possibly you’ve decided that Rich has already been punished for whatever he did and would never stand trial anyway, in the state he’s in. Maybe you’ve also reflected on the potential embarrassment to Jeffrey if he was dragged into not one but two criminal trials at a time when he’s anxious to build on his capital in the art history world and make a big forward move in an already impressive career.
“It would be a shame to have to drag him back, really. It’s impossible to tell when another opportunity like this one would come up again. For either of you. And on the other hand, I kept Rich’s set of keys—which ought to make an interesting contrast with yours and Jeffrey’s. Just a thought, Alice. Perjury being a crime, and all that.”
I gave her all the time she needed to think that speech over. I’d worked on it for a long time and practiced the delivery on Pen, and we both thought it had a lot of dramatic highlights. Alice got up and crossed to the door, which was just a little open. She closed it firmly. We looked at each other across the length of the room.
“You’re a real bastard, aren’t you?” Alice said, but with less rancor than I would have expected.
“I did the job,” I reminded her. “All coy bullshit aside, I did the job, and I almost got killed doing it. You owe me. I’m sorry I had to remind you about that.”
We haggled some, but it was pretty much plain sailing from then on. Alice agreed to give me the seven hundred that was owing on the original exorcism and another grand and a half as a finder’s fee for the stuff that Tiler had stolen. Under the circumstances, I didn’t think it was exorbitant. It was more or less exactly what Pen needed to pay off the debts on the house, so all I was doing was keeping a roof over my head. Business is business.
