The Next to Die, page 26
“Yes! Exactly. That’s how I feel.”
“Snoop and be proud.” As I say this, the driver of a car we’re overtaking turns and stares long and hard at me, as if encouraged by my words, though he couldn’t possibly have heard them. He grins and waves. I turn away pointedly. “I think I just saw Kim Tribbeck,” he’ll be saying to his passengers now, and they’ll be asking him if he’s sure, or saying, “So what?” or “Who’s she?”
“The one thing I can’t see a way to do is get into Liv’s Gmail account,” says Charlie. “That’s really all I’d need. Whatever’s going on, she’ll be corresponding with someone about it—Nikhil and Natalie, probably. I can’t risk it, though. It’s unambiguously illegal. I’d need to enlist someone at work to help me, and then we’re talking criminal conspiracy.”
“You can’t guess her password?”
“I’ve tried more than a hundred guesses.”
“So you only mind the illegal part if there’s a witness? It’s okay, I get it. I’d be the same.”
“Shit. I shouldn’t have told you that.” Charlie looks at me out of the corner of her eye. “If Simon knew I’d even tried . . . He’s not Liv’s greatest fan, but Gibbs is the closest thing he has to a best friend.”
“I need to tell you something I haven’t told Gibbs or Simon,” I say. “About the night the man gave me the white book.”
I don’t need to, though, do I? It’ll make no difference to anything. That means I must want to. I hadn’t planned to confess this part but now that I’ve started, I’d better see it through. “I told Gibbs that my husband, Gabe, was with me on the night that I was given the white book—that he came to my gig, then drove back home afterward because he had an early start at work the next day.”
“And it’s not true?”
“True about work but not about the specially early start. If I’d wanted Gabe to stay over, he’d have stayed. I lied to him: told him I wasn’t staying overnight in that town, wherever it was. Sometimes I have a driver when I’m on tour: Dmitri. He often picks me up after a gig and drives me on to the next town. That’s what I told Gabe was happening that night. It’s why he drove home. Otherwise he’d have stayed with me at the Narrow Bed Hotel, got up at five or six A.M. and driven back to Rawndesley then.”
“You didn’t want him with you overnight?” says Charlie.
“No.” I take a deep breath. “Also in the audience that night was Liam Sturridge, the man I was seeing behind Gabe’s back.”
“I see—and Liam was the one you wanted to take to the hotel?”
I nod. “By pure chance, Liam was in the area for a work away-day. He wanted to come along. I warned him Gabe would be there. Any normal man would have said, “No problem, I’ll stay away,” but Liam had already decided he and I would be having sex in my hotel that night.”
“You remember Liam saying he was going to be in the area but not which area?”
“I remember everything visually—the feel and the look of the hotel, our room, what we did that night, how I felt . . . but the town? No. Names of towns are pretty much interchangeable at this point in my touring career. There are some places on the list that I’m almost certain it wasn’t—though even there I’m not positive. And I had a policy of instant deletion when it came to emails and texts from Liam, so I’ve got no record of where it was.”
“Hang on—surely Liam would remember where the two of you stayed in a hotel? He doesn’t spend every night in a different city, does he?”
“No, he doesn’t. And yes, I’m absolutely convinced he remembers and even more convinced he’ll never part with the information. Soon as I made the connection between the book I was given at a gig and the murder investigation on the news, I rang Liam—from my car, on my way to get the other white book, the one I’d seen on the hospital noticeboard. I asked him where we spent our one and only night in a hotel together. He said, ‘Don’t you remember?’ I told him I wouldn’t have needed to ask him if I remembered, would I? He said, ‘I see. In that case, I don’t remember either.’ Bastard went out of his way to be unhelpful. I told him why I needed to know, but he said Billy and the murders had nothing to do with him.”
I was supposed to provide Liam with hassle-free sex, not involve him in a murder investigation. Having screwed up in this respect, I was stupid to give him the chance to punish me for it. When I told DC Gibbs my secret—a lover who visited at night, while my husband was asleep upstairs—I made it sound daring, maybe even glamorous. I was too ashamed to add, “Oh, by the way: my ex-lover’s now refusing to tell me where it was that we spent that night together—he’d rather make me search the entire country for the hotel room we shared.” Even thinking about saying it makes me shudder. I don’t mind people thinking of me as immoral, but I’d rather no one knew I’d been made a fool of.
So why tell Charlie all this? You didn’t have to.
“You didn’t suggest to your husband that he miss that gig and come to the next one instead?” asks Charlie. “It must have been stressful having them both in the same room.”
“It wasn’t great. I hoped Gabe’d change his mind about coming with me that night, but . . . we were trying to save our marriage at the time. Well, Gabe was trying. I’m not sure what I was doing. Gabe’s got a drug . . . issue. I call it a problem; he doesn’t. He’s a committed weed-head. I’d been telling him for years that I’d leave if he didn’t give it up, and he’d tried to wriggle out of it a million different ways. His latest line was, ‘Well, you’re away all the time on tour—what am I supposed to do when I’m bored and lonely?’ So I said, ‘Okay then, come on the road with me.’ I didn’t really want him there, moaning about having to watch the same set over and over, but if the only way to stop him smoking that crap was not letting him out of my sight . . .” I sigh. “It didn’t work. Nothing worked apart from leaving him. Now I don’t give a shit how much he smokes. It’s his problem. Non-problem, I should say, since it’s now his alone to define.”
Charlie’s signaling to come off the motorway.
“Where are we going?”
“I’m stopping to ring Simon. He needs to know this. Liam didn’t mind coming along to an event where you were with your husband?”
“God, no. Liam knew he was getting laid that night, knew Gabe was going home after the gig. That was all he cared about.”
“I bet he was pleased to be the chosen one,” Charlie says.
“I wouldn’t count on it. I’m not sure Liam’s ever happy, sad, angry, guilty. He doesn’t show any emotion at all. I called him the sex robot.”
Charlie smiles as we pull into the parking lot of a disused Little Chef with boarded-up windows and part of its sign missing.
She says a quick hello to Simon when he picks up, then passes her phone to me. “Tell him exactly what you’ve just told me.”
I assume she doesn’t want me to include the sex robot part, so I stick to the facts.
“You’re saying Liam Sturridge was with you the night you were given a white book by a man you didn’t recognize?” Simon asks.
“Yes.”
“The night you told Gibbs about—the room you described, but didn’t remember where it was. You’re saying that as well as your husband, Liam Sturridge, your . . . boyfriend at the time, was in that room?”
Haven’t I just answered that question? “That’s right.”
“Your husband went home after the gig, correct?”
“Yes. I’ve already told you that.”
“I’m asking again. Your story’s changed, so I need to start from scratch.”
“No, you don’t. Everything I told you before still stands. Just make one addition: Liam Sturridge, there that night.”
“Who left the venue first, Liam or your husband?”
“Gabe, obviously. Liam stayed there because he knew he and I would be going on to the hotel.”
“Which hotel?”
“I don’t know its name. Or where it was. You know this! That’s why I told Charlie about Liam, so that you could ask him. He remembers, and he wouldn’t tell me, but he might tell you.”
“Can you tell me anything about the hotel at all?”
“Are you serious? I’ve already—”
“What can you tell me about that hotel?”
“The bed in my room was too narrow! Not a proper double. As you already know.”
“Did Liam Sturridge share that narrow bed with you?”
“Yes.”
“All night?”
“Yes.”
“Until what time in the morning?”
“I don’t know. Maybe . . . eight, eight thirty?”
“Didn’t he have work the next morning?”
“I don’t remember. He’d been at a work team-building thing that day . . . I’m not sure about the day after. Why don’t you ask him?”
“I will.”
Beside me, Charlie lights a cigarette.
“The white book you’d been given—where was it at this point?” Waterhouse continues with his grilling. “In your bag at the hotel?”
“No. I’ve told you, and I’ve told Gibbs: I either left it at the venue on the table or I chucked it in a bin there.”
“So it wasn’t among your possessions at the hotel?”
“I’ve just answered that question.”
“Could it have been among Liam’s possessions? What if he picked it up at the gig after you discarded it? Is that possible?”
“I don’t know!”
Charlie takes the phone from my hand. “Enough, Simon,” she says. “Calm down. We’ll ring you from the hotel in a bit.”
I watch her press the end-call button. Thank God for that.
“Sorry,” she says. “It’s the buzz of an influx of new information. There’s been a lot today. He gets like that, I’m afraid.”
“Please don’t say I have to speak to him again today. Please.”
She laughs.
* * *
Let me say up front that I approve of Simon Waterhouse. He’s a frighteningly intelligent force for good, and I’m glad he exists. I’ve also never had such a powerful feeling of escape successfully achieved as I did when he declared our second telephone conversation of the day—much longer and more laborious than the first—to be over. There was a catch, however: what had struggled free from his sustained interrogation was not the richly complex person I’d been beforehand but a squinting husk whose brain matter had largely been sucked out through an invisible straw.
I lay down on the bed in my room at the Bradley Park Hotel in Milton Keynes—a place with nice big beds and therefore not the One but simply the one for tonight—and stared at the ceiling, allowing myself to drift into a welcome trance state. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t close my eyes. I needed an urgent transfusion of everything it was possible to transfuse.
Charlie laughed as if it were the funniest thing ever and told me that conversations with Simon were often like that and I shouldn’t take it personally. Other times, she said, he clammed up and could hardly be persuaded to say a word. It depended on how close he was to an answer: very close and he’d go quiet, too busy thinking. Endlessly browbeating people with questions was what he did when he was angry about getting closer but still not being close enough.
As I lay there listening to this, I thought to myself, This is the man who called his wife obsessive for wanting to know what her sister’s lying about, who says it’s none of their business and they should be content to remain blissfully ignorant.
If that’s what he thinks, then why wasn’t it his attitude from the start? Why had he agreed to follow Liv and Gibbs to Cambridge? Charlie said he seemed to want to solve the mystery as much as she did at that stage. And then he changed his mind, for no apparent reason?
I didn’t believe it. The man I’d just been grilled by on the phone would never decide he didn’t want to know the answer. Never. Whether it was a professional matter or a personal one.
The most likely explanation for his change of heart seemed so obvious to me, I couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to Charlie: whatever was going on with Liv and Gibbs and this other couple, Simon already knew.
He knew, and he’d decided it was best if Charlie never found out.
Loyalty
from Stories of Enlightenment
There were three friends who lived on the same street: Amelia, Pearl and Jasmine. They met for coffee every morning, jogged around the local park together every weekend and went out for cocktails together on Friday nights.
One morning, Amelia arrived at Pearl’s house for coffee (they took turns to host, and it was Pearl’s turn) and was shocked to find both Pearl and Jasmine in tears. “What on earth is wrong?” Amelia asked.
Pearl and Jasmine told Amelia that a new neighbor, Tara, had sent them each a poison pen letter full of horrible insults.
“Why did she do that?” asked Amelia. “And how do you know the letters were from her?”
Apparently another neighbor had seen Tara putting the notes in Pearl’s and Jasmine’s mailboxes.
“She thought no one was looking,” said Pearl.
“She did it because she’s jealous,” said Jasmine. “She’s got a thing about you, Amelia. She knows we’re your best friends, which is what she wants to be. She hasn’t got any friends at all.”
“Oh dear! How awful,” said Amelia. Then she said, “Wait! I’ve got a fantastic idea.” She ran back to her house and made a few secret phone calls.
The next morning, when Jasmine and Pearl arrived at Amelia’s house for coffee, Amelia presented each of them with a gorgeous puppy. Pearl’s was a miniature English bull terrier: white with a black circle around one eye, and one black ear. Jasmine’s was a lilac horse-coat shar-pei. Both women squealed with delight and rushed over to give Amelia a hug. They forgot all about the poison pen letters Tara had sent them and cheered up immediately.
Later that day, Amelia took a bassett hound puppy around to Tara’s house. “You’re obviously feeling miserable if you’re sending poison pen letters,” she said. “Here’s a gift for you: a lovely dog. He will give you lots of love and cheer you up!”
Tara was incredibly touched. “Thank you,” she said, cuddling the puppy against her body. Amelia left feeling happy. She was sure that Tara would never again send a poison pen letter. The basset hound would be her new best friend, and he’d enable her to make other friends too while she was out walking him.
The next day, over coffee, Amelia told Pearl and Jasmine about Tara and the bassett hound. Their reactions could not have been more different. “That’s such a neat idea,” said Pearl. “I know how much I already love my puppy after only one day. No one with this much love inside them could sit down and write a vicious letter. Let’s hope you’ve solved all Tara’s problems, and all of ours, too.”
Jasmine, meanwhile, had a face like a thundercloud. “How could you?” she raged at Amelia. “You bought a present for the bitch who wrote me a nasty anonymous letter? You’re supposed to be my friend! Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t throw you out of my house right now, you disloyal bitch!”
“But I bought a puppy for you, too,” Amelia pointed out. “I demonstrated my loyalty to you by trying to make you happy when I saw that you were sad.”
“But . . . then you also bought one for that bitch Tara! If you were my loyal friend, you’d spit at her in the street, snub her, shun her.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” Amelia explained. “I would never spit at, snub or shun anyone. To behave that way would make me feel terrible.”
“Get out!” screamed Jasmine. “Betrayer! Judas!”
“I’ll leave if you really want me to,” said Amelia, “but I think you’ve misunderstood my actions.”
Jasmine turned to Pearl. “What do you think?” she demanded.
“I . . . I . . .” Pearl stammered, sensing that anything but complete agreement would be treated by Jasmine as treachery. Still, she wanted to speak up for Amelia. “I think Amelia’s a loyal friend to both of us,” she plucked up the courage to say finally. “After all, she’s been kind to us for as long as we’ve known her. That’s how we should judge her loyalty.”
“But her kindness is worth nothing if she’s also kind to that bitch Tara,” Jasmine wailed.
“Why?” asked Pearl. “I don’t think that’s true. Her kindness to Tara means that hopefully Tara won’t attack us now.”
“She’s refused to denounce someone who hurt us, therefore she’s disloyal,” Jasmine insisted. “And now you’re refusing to condemn her for her betrayal of us—which makes you disloyal, too! Get out, both of you!”
That night, in the back gardens of the street on which the four women lived, the three new puppies whispered over garden fences to one another in a dog language that humans couldn’t understand. One of the puppies declared herself happy because her owner was truly enlightened. Another said he was cautiously optimistic: his owner was a bit screwed up but had very recently resolved to be less of a disaster area in future (thanks to him, he couldn’t help thinking, rather immodestly). The third puppy sighed and confessed to a feeling of deep despair. His owner had a shockingly unhealthy belief system, and he saw no hope of her ever changing or learning. She had completely misunderstood what loyalty truly meant.
15
1/15/2015
“Anyone heard from Dunning? Or the eye-rolling DC Wing?” Proust looked around the table. He, Simon, Sellers, Gibbs and Sam were at the Brown Cow. It was shallow breathing room only again today. Every table had been taken when they’d arrived. They’d only got the one they were sitting at because the Snowman had glared its occupants out of the building. His talent for making strangers feel they’d rather be a thousand miles away, even if that meant abandoning a perfectly decent pudding, was useful at times.
“Wing, Dunning, they’ve all gone quiet,” said Gibbs. “It’s Marion Hopwood—third Culver Valley murder and the others are all breathing a sigh of relief. Hopwood’s death makes it squarely our problem, far as they can see. That and what they know about Waterhouse’s reputation as a legend . . . They’re all sitting tight, hoping we’ll have a solve in hours or days. Then they’ll be front and center, sharing the credit.”
