Jayne, Donald, and I joined the commuting hordes the following morning. Over dinner last night, I’d told Jayne she didn’t need to come with me, and she should take advantage of the opportunity for a lie-in. She’d shaken her head firmly. “Ryan told me I’m to look after you.”
I rolled my eyes. “Are you going to be my close protection officer? I don’t know if you’re quite up to the part, Jayne.”
“Jayne might not be,” Donald interrupted as he twirled long strands of pasta onto his fork, “therefore I will assume the role. You may remember whom it was who brought down the miscreant when we were last in this fair city.” He glanced lovingly at the umbrella he’d been carrying all day, even though the expected rain had vanished from the weather forecast.
“He’s got you there.” Jayne speared a scallop.
“I don’t know if I care for this talk about bodyguards and fighting with criminals,” my mother said. “I found it difficult enough when your father was on active duty, particularly in the early days.”
“I’m asking questions,” I said. “Nothing more. In pleasant surroundings of higher learning.”
My mother hadn’t looked entirely mollified but she turned the conversation to other topics.
“I need you two to sit at another table,” I said to Jayne and Donald the next morning as we approached the café Tamara suggested for our meeting.
“Why?” Jayne said.
“So it won’t look like three against one.” I had to admit my companions didn’t look at all imposing. Jayne, all bouncy and blonde; Donald, balding and nearsighted, wearing Harris tweed and swirling his brolly like Patrick Macnee in The Avengers. I had no doubt Tamara could hold her own, conversationally speaking, against us, but I didn’t want her to feel as though she were being interrogated.
Fortunately, this meeting wasn’t going to amount to another attack on my credit card. We were meeting in a typical London workers’ café. Pleasant, clean surroundings, long line waiting for takeaway drinks. Plain wooden tables and chairs. Men in construction vests and heavy boots, others in business suits. The welcome scents of hot grease and strong tea.
Donald rubbed his hands together in glee. “Exactly like Speedy’s Café,” he said, referring to a location from the Benedict Cumberbatch show Sherlock. “Don’t know if I mentioned we went there yesterday as part of the tour.”
“More than once,” I said. “You two take a table, and I’ll sit there, by the window.”
We separated. I took a seat at a table for two, facing the door. I drummed my fingers on the table top.
“What can I get you, love?” the waitress asked me. She was in her late fifties, and at five to eight in the morning, she looked as though she’d already put in a long, hard day.
“Tea for now, please. I’m waiting for a friend.”
She left and next called on Jayne and Donald. Donald asked a lot of questions as the waitress shifted her tired feet. He eventually settled on a bacon buttie and tea. Jayne asked for poached eggs, toast, and coffee.
I stared out the window, watching the passing traffic. I’d called Ryan last night when we got back from dinner, and we talked for a long time. I’d been pleased at the pleasure in his voice as he described his day. I told him, truthfully, that all I’d been doing, aside from unnecessary shopping, was talking to people who’d known Paul. I had come to no conclusions, and the police had not issued a warrant for my arrest for interfering in their investigation. Not yet anyway.
It was too early in West London to call Ashleigh or Uncle Arthur for an update on the dogs and the shop. As for the plumbing situation, I preferred not to know.
I was starting to get restless by eight fifteen, worried this was going to be a wasted trip, when I saw Tamara O’Riordan hurrying down the street. She looked harried. Hair uncombed, shirt half untucked, the laces of one black boot trailing behind her. She came into the café, saw me, and dropped into the chair opposite with a sharp exhale. “Sorry I’m late. My mum called as I was leaving, and I unadvisedly answered. She can be hard to get off the phone.”
“Did you get your seminar prep finished?”
“Yeah. Finally. Those silly students don’t know what’s going to hit them. They seem to get younger every year.”
The waitress appeared. Tamara ordered tea and the full English, and I asked for one poached egg and toast.
“How’s your dissertation going?” I’ve been told on more than one occasion (thank you, Jayne) that I can sometimes be too direct, so I attempted to open the conversation on a friendly, informal note. Across the room, Donald was almost falling out of his chair as he tried to listen in. Unfortunately for him, the table between us had been taken by four men wearing construction overalls, safety vests, and steel-toed boots, all of whom talked a great deal and in booming voices. Every time the door opened, a wave of sound washed in from the busy street.
“It’s up. It’s down,” Tamara said. “Some days are better than others. I’m thirty-five and my parents are constantly on my case about when I’m going to get a proper job and get married and have kids and all the rest. Such was the topic of our conversation this morning. Bad enough I’m working on a PhD, but Mum wonders why I can’t study something more useful than Victorian literature.”
I smiled at her. “I quite understand.” My father had been a senior police officer. My mother’s a barrister. My sister … I don’t quite know what my sister does except that she seems to run the British government single-handedly. When I announced that, rather than climbing the ladder in the civil service job my sister found for me, I was planning to marry Paul and we were opening a bookshop, the parental disapproval had been obvious. Perhaps not expressed as forthrightly as by Tamara’s mother, but it had been there, nonetheless.
“Enough of my problems. You want to ask me about Paul and the shop. Shoot.” She leaned back to allow the waitress to put our plates in front of us.
“You said you worked at the bookshop for—”
“Don’t look now,” Tamara said, “but that man over there. The guy in the silly jacket with the umbrella. He’s paying a lot of attention to us.”
I didn’t need to “not look” to know who she was talking about. Donald and Jayne had finished their breakfasts and were trying to delay their departure by asking for more tea and coffee.
“MI5,” I said.
Tamara’s eyes opened wide. “You’re kidding. The woman with him looks like she might have popped in for breakfast after dropping the kids at school, but he stands out as much as if he were wearing a clown suit and carrying a bunch of balloons.”
“I am kidding,” I said. “They’re my American friends. Trying to look unobtrusive while you and I chat.”
“Weird.” She dug eagerly into her black pudding. “I recognize the guy now. He was with you on Sunday. What do you want to know?”
“I can’t truly say. I’m fishing, if you want to put it like that. You worked at the shop. I suspect business wasn’t all that brisk.”
“That’s an understatement. I don’t know how Paul managed to pay the rent.”
Judging by the increasingly strident note of the bills I’d found stuffed into a cardboard box, he hadn’t paid the rent for a long time. “You’re smart, you’re observant.” I added a drop of jam to my toast and took a nibble.
“Flattery will get you everywhere. Feel free to lay it on.”
“You likely bore easily, which leads me to conclude you spent much of the working day watching everything that went on in the shop.”
“I managed to get a lot of work done in my head, which I can remember and transmit to print when I get to a computer, so I didn’t spend as much time listening at office doors as you might expect. Occasionally a book would come in along with a pile of the regular used junk, one I’d been looking for or I realized I could use. But yeah, I did some watching and listening.”
“And?”
“And, I started there about eighteen months ago. At first, it was a regular bookshop struggling to stay alive. Paul was always coming up with bright ideas as to how to make the shop a success, but I soon learned to ignore him. Either the idea was impractical, or he didn’t have the commitment to see it through.”
“You’re aware Paul and I divorced because he began seeing a shop clerk. Did he have any entanglements while you worked there?”
“No. He didn’t try anything on me. Not his type maybe.” She laughed. “Or he knew that would be a waste of time. When Faye first started there, she dropped not very subtle suggestions about her unmarried daughter. She eventually got the hint and said no more. I never met her daughter, but I felt sorry for her. As far as Faye’s concerned, the sun orbits around her son and grandchild and the daughter’s pretty much an afterthought. If that. She never stops talking about the fancy school her son went to and his degree from Oxford. Anyway, Paul didn’t talk about his private life. Not at all. I didn’t know if he was seeing anyone or not. As for the other staff at the store. I can’t say for sure, but I can say for sure I never noticed anything between them.”
She dragged a piece of toast through a smear of the runny yoke, all that remained of her two fried eggs.
“You said at first it was a regular bookshop. Does that mean that later things happened?”
She popped the last of her toast into her mouth, put down her fork, and looked at me. “I only worked there, right? Three days a week, and not once did I ever give the place another thought once I’d walked out the door. But I’ll admit I’ve been thinking about it, considering what happened to Paul. Recently, a couple of times over the last few weeks, two men came in and asked for Paul. They didn’t look like the sort to be in search of a good book, if you take my meaning.”
Faye had told me much the same. About tough faces and East End accents.
“Not,” Tamara said, “that I ever want to judge anyone by the way they look. But these blokes didn’t even glance at the books. They barely glanced at me either, and I don’t think I’m a total dog. If Paul wasn’t in, they came back. If he was in, they went into his office, without asking if he could see them, and shut the door. I heard nothing like screams or threats being made. They came out, politely said goodbye, and left.”
“The same men every time?”
“Yes. Two of them. Big blokes, short hair, thick necks. Not shabbily dressed, but you got the feeling they weren’t … people you wanted to cross.”
“You have no idea why they were interested in Paul?”
“I totally have an idea. He owed money to people he shouldn’t have borrowed from. In my limited spare time, I read police novels. Don’t you?”
“That would seem the most obvious conclusion. Did you tell the police this?”
“I did. They sat me down to help them make one of those sketches like I’ve seen on telly. They do it on a computer these days, but it’s still fun. I don’t think my description was worth much. They wore caps and loose jackets and didn’t have anything out of the ordinary to help identify them like eye patches or scars on their faces.”
I’d noticed several CCTV cameras in the vicinity of the shop, but I hadn’t seen anything pointed directly at the door so as to observe who entered the bookshop and when. The police would have gone through the available footage looking for these men. Difficult to match thousands of images with a vague description such as provided by Tamara. If they were professionals, they would know how to avoid the cameras, such as wearing caps pulled low and loose jackets with high collars.
“Saturday night, Paul told me he’d come into possession of a rare book he wanted me to see. Do you have any idea what it might have been?”
Tamara shook her head. “Not a clue. We didn’t deal in rare books. We got fifty or seventy-five quid now and again for something someone wanted to add to their collection, but nothing of any real value. Not that I knew of anyway, and there’s no reason I should if he was dealing in that stuff without going through the front of the shop. Your friend is tapping his watch. I think he’s trying to tell you he wants to go.”
I avoided looking at Donald. Some undercover agent he’d make.
Tamara pushed back her chair. “I have to go. Thanks for the breakfast. If you hear anything about funeral arrangements, can you let me know? I didn’t know Paul all that well on a personal level, but he was nice enough to me.”
“I will. Thanks for meeting me.”
She left. I poured myself a fresh cup of tea, added a splash of milk, and stirred. Did I believe Tamara? It’s possible she killed Paul and stole the rare book, but I didn’t think so. It’s possible she killed him for other reasons and the book simply couldn’t be found, but again, I didn’t think so. She was a university student, struggling to get her PhD before she reached retirement age. As I’ve learned, almost anyone can be a killer, if the stakes are high enough, but in this case, unless she was an actress of considerable skill, I didn’t think she held any strong feelings toward her late employer, certainly nothing to bring her to murder. She did, however, work with books and she studied literature so she was in a position to know what might be of value if it accidentally crossed her path. She was short of money, but judging by the way she dressed and the bag she carried, she wasn’t destitute. Just a normal, thirtysomething PhD candidate picking up odd jobs to get by. I’d done a quick internet search on her last night, and nothing raised any alarm bells for me. Lived in London most of her life. Bachelor of Arts from University College London, master’s from Northumbria, back to UCL for her PhD. O’Riordan is not an uncommon name in London, and without the names of her parents, I couldn’t do much to trace her family connections. Maybe they were heavily into organized crime.
Unlikely, but if that was the case, the police would find the link.
Leaving me to concentrate on more personal angles.
I stood up. “Are we done here?” I called to Jayne and Donald. They gathered their things and scrambled to their feet.
“Learn anything?” Jayne asked as we left the café.
“I learned a negative, which is sometimes almost as valuable as a positive.”
“Huh?”
“Tamara herself had little to nothing to do with Paul. Either his life or his death. I did learn one thing that was not entirely surprising but still of interest. He may have borrowed from people who wanted their money back.”
“As in criminal gangs?” Donald asked.
“As in. If he came into possession of a rare or otherwise valuable book, he might have borrowed against it in expectation of paying the money back after making a good sale. If, for some reason, that sale didn’t happen …”
“He was up the creek without a paddle,” Jayne said.
“Precisely.”
We stood at the entrance to the tube station as a river of people flowed around us.
“I’m meeting Grant at quarter to eleven,” I said. “Donald, you have your lunch with the Sherlock group. Do you know the way?”
He tapped his jacket pocket. “I have detailed directions right here and the address is in the map on my phone, should the directions fail. Which, considering they were given to me by devoted Sherlockians, in his very city, I do not expect they will.”
“Jayne, do you have anything planned for the rest of the day?”
I’d phoned Sir John Saint-Jean last night and arranged a time for Grant and me to call on him this morning. I didn’t want to show up with an entourage. Not that Sir John was likely to be intimidated by Jayne. Unlikely he was ever intimidated by anyone.
“If you don’t mind, Gemma, if you’ll be with Grant, and if it’s okay, I’d like to see some of the things I missed the other time we were here. Like the Victoria and Albert or the London Museum. Your mom told me she’s in her chambers today. That means the office, right?”
I nodded.
“She’s in all day, so she suggested that if I was free in the afternoon I give her a call and we’d meet for tea. If you need me though …” her voice trailed off.
“You go and enjoy yourself. You are supposed to be on vacation. Grant can assume the role of my bodyguard.”
Jayne tried not to look too pleased. I felt a pang of guilt. My friends, Jayne most of all, were so loyal to me, and on more than one occasion, I’d dragged them unwittingly into situations that verged on the dangerous. I gave her a spontaneous hug. Donald joined in. A most un-English display.
I pulled away and the three of us entered the tube station together before going our separate ways.