Mixing With Murder Read online

  ‘It’s me, Fran,’ I said in a subdued tone.

  ‘Oh, hello, Fran,’ said Ganesh, ‘everything all right?’ He sounded a whole lot calmer than he had the previous evening and I guessed he also regretted the spat.

  ‘So far,’ I said. ‘Give it time. It’s early yet.’

  ‘Are you coming home today?’

  ‘Well, I’ve still got something to do . . .’ Vera had appeared from the kitchen carrying two plates of eggs and bacon. She rushed past me into the breakfast room. ‘You know,’ I said to Ganesh when she had gone, ‘I’ve still got to carry out my original assignment.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ he said stubbornly.

  ‘Yes, I do. I won’t get Bonnie back otherwise.’

  ‘Allerton can’t expect you just to carry on as if nothing has happened!’ Ganesh was outraged and the emotion was building up in his voice again.

  ‘Yes, he does. I’ve spoken to him on the phone.’

  ‘That man is unreasonable.’

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know. Tell him.’

  ‘I think I shall!’ snapped Ganesh.

  That panicked me and I spent the next couple of minutes making him promise he’d go nowhere near the Silver Circle.

  ‘This call is costing me a fortune,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to hang up and go and have my breakfast.’

  I drifted into the breakfast room. Mr Filigrew was sitting in his usual seat and shaking pills from a little tube on to the tablecloth. He looked up at me and radiated displeasure.

  ‘Good morning,’ I bid him politely.

  ‘Good morning to you,’ he retorted icily. He lined his little white pills up on the cloth, counted them, and screwed the cap back on the tube.

  ‘Indigestion?’ I asked sympathetically. ‘I expect it’s the fried food. Perhaps you ought to stick to cornflakes and toast.’

  He looked as if he was going to choke so I left him and found my own table. Next door sat Tom and Maryann. Tom greeted me with a friendly, ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ Maryann looked baffled as if she couldn’t understand why I wasn’t in gaol.

  ‘I’m doing all right in the circumstances,’ I told him. ‘How are you, Maryann?’

  ‘We made a statement to a police officer,’ she said.

  ‘It’s interesting to see how those guys work in this country,’ said Tom, a man who always took a practical view.

  Vera appeared by my table. ‘Full English?’

  I was surprised that I felt hungry but I did and said, yes, please. Maryann looked as if my healthy appetite merely confirmed her worst fears that I was a hard-boiled emissary from the criminal underworld.

  ‘Like you said,’ I told her. ‘It comes with the room and it’s a pity to waste it.’

  Mickey had told me to carry on trying to contact Lisa but he’d also advised me to wait a day. I didn’t think delay was a particularly good idea. If I were Lisa, I’d be planning to leave, or even have left already. I wouldn’t wait around for me. I decided I’d first go back to the scene of Ivo’s unexpected demise and snoop around, hoping to find some clue to the mystery, and then take the bus up to Summertown and try and see Lisa again. I didn’t relish the prospect of either task. I had another reason for returning to the scene of the drowning. I didn’t want to spend a second night imagining Ivo in the river. I needed to see the place without him and looking normal. I wanted my last sight of it to be picture-postcard perfect, all the horrors gone.

  Christ Church Meadow was restored to calm and nearly deserted. I looked to see if the two joggers, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who’d been here the previous day, were here again but there was no sign of anyone resembling them. I walked down the river path until I came to the submerged steps. Access was now barred by a strand of blue and white police tape. A notice had been tacked to a tree requesting passers-by who might have been in the area on the given date and noticed anything unusual to contact the local police station, the address and phone number of which were displayed. In particular the police were anxious to talk to anyone who might have noticed a white male of about six feet in height, fair-haired and well built, in red running shorts and white running vest, jogging along the riverside track.

  I didn’t know when they’d been down here to tack up the notice but this tangible sign of an investigation in progress unsettled me even further. I wondered if they already realised they would have difficulty identifying the corpse. My longing for a picture-postcard scene was foiled. When I’d first come here, yesterday, I’d been struck by how peaceful and pleasant the place was, before I found Ivo. Now on another just as quiet sunny morning the location seemed eerie. The water, murmuring softly as it rippled past the stone steps, held sinister secrets. I was jumpy not only because of the memory the scene provoked, and the thought of the police ferreting about, but because this place could be dangerous for me. Like it or not, I was connected with the Silver Circle, too. I should have heeded Ganesh’s wise words telling me I had little idea what was really going on here, but I knew I needed to find out. I’d no wish to join Ivo in the river and the best way to avoid that was to put myself fully in the picture. No more unpleasant surprises. If I wanted to uncover the real story, this was the logical place to start. But what should I be looking for? The river whispered and chuckled at me. I tried to make out in which direction it flowed but that proved unexpectedly difficult. Here, at the point where the two branches met, it seemed to eddy round. Could Ivo’s body have drifted? He hadn’t looked as if he’d been in the water that long. But was I an expert? The river knew but I couldn’t make it disgorge its secrets.

  I prowled around the area which was now pretty well trampled, still unaware what I was looking for. If there had been anything significant to be found, as I told myself crossly, the police would have done so by now. The fallen branch which had tripped me when I’d started back on first seeing Ivo’s body in the water still lay to one side of the path. As I stepped over it my toe snagged in it and that annoyed me. It was stupid to be angry with an inanimate object but I grabbed the branch and shook it violently to relieve my feelings. Then I stopped and studied it. Was it possible he had been jogging along the path and had also tripped over this innocent-looking piece of debris, resulting in a loss of balance and a fall into the river? It was highly unlikely. Even if he had fallen in, he’d have struggled out, as I’d done. If he was conscious, that was. But he could have struck his head on the steps and been knocked out. It was an outside chance but freak accidents happened.

  However, supposing he wasn’t conscious when he went in, then someone had rendered him unconscious. How? I considered the branch. It was long, thin and pliable. The thicker end fitted neatly into my palm and then it became progressively more spindly until it forked at the other end into two even spindlier arms. It didn’t have enough weight to be an adequate weapon and I thought it would be too unwieldy at that length. If you want to cosh someone, you need some short, heavy implement especially if you mean to attack a physical specimen like Ivo. A piece of wood could do it; but not this piece of wood. I tossed it aside with a sigh.

  What had brought Ivo here in the first place? And was I going to tell Lisa the identity of the dead man? I could imagine her reaction.

  ‘Fran?’

  The voice was quiet but it made me jump and my heart leap into my mouth. I whirled round and saw Hayley Pereira a short distance away, standing with her hands in her jacket pockets, watching me. I had no idea how long she’d been there. I cursed my bad luck. She probably thought I was returning to the scene of the crime as all good assassins are supposed to do. To me it sounds a daft thing to do and perhaps murderers only do it in books.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, because there wasn’t much else I could say.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  It was a simple enough question but I needed to take care how I answered it. ‘I was thinking about it all last night,’ I said. ‘I kept imagining the man in the water. I thought, if I came back, and saw the river like this, normal, with no b
ody floating in it, it would help.’

  She nodded. ‘You’ve had a bad shock.’

  ‘Do you know who he was?’ I held my breath. Had I sounded normal as I asked the question?

  ‘No, not yet.’ She shook her head.

  I wonder how far I could push asking questions before she became suspicious of the amount of interest I was showing. I decided to act dumb. ‘What happens in a case like this? Will there be a post-mortem?’

  ‘Oh, that’s been done already,’ she replied. ‘Last night.’

  I was taken aback at this news. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Tom, the American, thought he might have had a heart attack.’

  ‘There was no sign of that.’

  ‘And Maryann, Tom’s girlfriend, thought he’d been mugged, stabbed or something.’ Tom and Maryann were proving unexpectedly useful to me.

  Pereira almost smiled. ‘No, at least, there’s no sign of any injury consistent with a mugging, nothing violent.’

  ‘Nobody bashed him on the head with a baseball bat, then,’ I said.

  She looked startled and I remembered I’d been talking of Tom’s heart-attack theory. Quickly I moved to reestablish my naïve persona. ‘Sorry. I live in London. We hear a lot about that sort of thing.’

  ‘I see.’ She nodded. ‘No. The cause of death was drowning.’

  ‘Poor chap,’ I said, hoping the relief I felt hadn’t escaped into my voice. I knew now he had no head wound, the obvious injury I’d have looked for. Floating in the water as he’d been when I found him, any blood would have washed away but post-mortem examination would have revealed any cranial injury immediately. Yet at the same time the mystery deepened. He had entered the water alive. How could a young fit man like Ivo drown in a relatively placid river? We weren’t talking foaming rapids here. Had he gone in willingly? It was difficult to imagine an assailant powerful enough to force him.

  But there was one person who could have done it. Ned, Lisa’s white knight: young, fit, strong. He’d issued threats when we’d last met. He’d do anything to protect her. Anything? Even murder?

  Pereira spoke, interrupting my line of thought. ‘I agree, it’s a very sad incident but also a puzzling one. We are keen to know just how he came to fall in. It’s not very deep by the bank. Even if he wasn’t a good swimmer, he’d only need to keep afloat and scramble out either on this side or over there, up that slipway.’

  I saw now that opposite the steps on the further bank was a concrete ramp. Lisa had mentioned some sort of ferry. Pereira had turned away and I found myself walking back with her towards the rear of the botanical gardens and the gate out into Rose Lane.

  ‘This is a beautiful spot,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry you have to associate it with a nightmare.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I mumbled. ‘I had nightmares all right.’ I glanced at her. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Me?’ She looked startled. ‘Did I dream about the dead man?’

  ‘Well, not him specifically. But you must see some bad sights. Do they haunt you?’

  ‘The ones that haunt me,’ she said, ‘are the things which happen to the innocent and helpless or those who should be innocent: battered babies, mugged old people, eight-year-old girls passed round as sex objects.’ She glanced at me. ‘And we get the odd baseball bat attack here in Oxford, too. London hasn’t got a monopoly on these things.’

  ‘I guess so,’ I said. ‘I thought I’d go back to London tomorrow if that’s all right with you.’

  ‘I should think so. We have an address for you. We found your mobile phone, by the way. You seemed worried about that. I should say we found a phone belonging to a Mr Ganesh Patel. The Metropolitan Police contacted Mr Patel and he confirms he lent the phone to you.’ ‘I know,’ I confessed. ‘I spoke to him last night. He’s mad at me for losing the phone and because his uncle, whom he lives with, is upset. His uncle’s a very nervous man.’

  ‘He should be glad it wasn’t you in the river,’ Pereira said.

  He probably was, and so was I, but I didn’t say so to her.

  Pereira’s car was parked just over the bridge. She offered me a lift to the top of the High Street but I declined it, saying I’d rather walk.

  ‘Let me give you a number to reach me on,’ she said, ‘just in case you remember something else. You’re still in shock, but when it wears off you might recall seeing something or someone around before you found the body.’

  She pulled out her notebook, scribbled out a phone number, tore off the sheet and handed it to me. I glanced at it. It was for a mobile. She wanted me to speak to her, if I remembered some detail, and not to one of her colleagues. Detectives work as part of a team but it seemed Pereira was keen to make her mark. If I told her anything, she’d have to pass it on, but she wanted to be the one to come up with the new evidence. I understood this. It was a human enough failing. But it put me in the position of being her private information source. Where I come from, that sort of thing is viewed with extreme disfavour by the populace at large.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said briefly and stuck the noted number in my pocket. I doubted I’d be calling it. When I left her she was standing by her car watching me as I marched away.

  In the centre I caught a bus to Summertown and went to the Stallards’ house. Jennifer answered the door. She looked harassed and said she was sorry, but Lisa had gone out early.

  She sounded fretful as if she could have done with Lisa being there. Suddenly she blurted out, ‘Do come in for coffee!’

  ‘Really,’ I said, ‘that’s all right. I just wanted to speak to Lisa. Do you know where she’s gone?’ I held my breath, hoping the answer wouldn’t be that she’d left Oxford.

  Jennifer shook her head. ‘To see a friend, perhaps? I got that impression . . .’ She bit her lip. ‘Won’t you come in for coffee? Are you sure? Just come and say hello to my husband.’

  I recognised an appeal for help and it was difficult to refuse. I sidled unhappily indoors after her.

  Paul was in the back room, reading the morning paper. I was again struck by the dark cluttered ambience of the place and its stuffy air of defeat. There was another atmosphere, too, which had nothing to do with stale air. Paul looked frail this morning but beneath the frailty he simmered with frustration and hopeless rage. I could sense it coming off him in waves. Before he saw me, he asked petulantly, ‘Who was that?’

  Invalids aren’t saints. Who would be, stuck in a chair like this, surrounded by the same four walls day in and day out? Frustrations boil over. They can make life hell for devoted carers. Probably, now his daughter was at home, Paul had perked up a bit. But she’d gone out and this morning things weren’t going well. No wonder Jennifer had welcomed the sight of me as a possible diversion.

  Certainly Paul brightened as soon as he saw me. Jennifer bustled away to make the coffee and I settled down to make small talk, mostly about the theatre and my ambitions. It was a difficult and strained occasion and the longer it went on the clearer it became to me that his life was so completely empty that he latched vicariously on to any evidence of a ‘real life’ outside the four walls of this house. While, owing to my own lack of starring roles, my experience of working in the theatre has been limited, I do at least have a good idea of how it goes. Paul didn’t. His ideas were drawn entirely from reading about famous actors. He leaned heavily for information on the autobiographies of elderly stars of stage and screen, some of whom had turned up their toes years ago. It was clear to me that his idea of theatrical life was impossibly glamorous, all showbiz parties and wealthy upper-class stage-door johnnies panting to drink champagne from satin slippers. I got the impression he saw a future for Lisa in which some wealthy admirer showered her with flowers and diamonds before carrying her off to marriage and possibly even a title.

  I tried hard to get the conversation away from his fantasies, from myself and from his accounts of his daughter’s (entirely fictional, did he but know it) success on the London musical stage. I asked about his collection of books. We discussed old films we’
d both seen on television. I even, in desperation, asked how Arthur was that day.

  ‘I called in on him earlier this morning,’ said Paul. ‘But he wasn’t at home. He’s probably out shopping for slugs and worms.’

  I realised this last reference was a joke, but it didn’t stop it being dismally and embarrassingly revealing of the emptiness of his existence. For him Arthur was as good as a human neighbour. I wondered they didn’t get themselves a livelier pet, like a cat. But perhaps cats and grass snakes didn’t mix.

  Eventually I managed to get away, feeling that I was abandoning them but knowing there was nothing I could do except help keep Lisa’s secret. No wonder she depended on Ned as a shoulder to cry on. She could never bring any problem home. Home was a nest of inbuilt problems already.

  ‘I’m sorry you’ve missed Lisa,’ said Jennifer at the front door. ‘I’ll tell her you were here.’ She reached out and took my hand. ‘Thank you so much for giving us a little of your time,’ she said quietly.