The light coming through the cracks in the curtains woke me. It wasn’t seven yet. I’m sensitive to light and my head was particularly sensitive to that morning’s light. It bored into my eyeballs with all the delicacy of a corkscrew.
Jools was still curled up like a woodlouse in her armchair, apparently not having moved all night. Ben was draped on his back over the sofa with one arm drooping on to the floor, rather in the manner of The Death of Chatterton. It was an unsettling comparison. The young poet in the painting had just killed himself with arsenic. I was reminded of the night before, not the drunken confessionals, but the image which had greeted me when I entered the house. The blue nylon noose tied to the banisters. I shuddered.
The sitting room smelled of adolescence.
Hot, strong coffee was called for. Next, out of the night-before’s glad rags for a hot, strong shower. After that, jeans and a baggy T-shirt. Then work out what to do with our Sunday.
That thought reminded me of one thing the day would not contain – an encounter with Fleur. Even through my hangover, I couldn’t repress a feeling of glee when I remembered what my daughter had said to my mother.
I decided that, when my children woke, we would all have a large, kill-or-cure fry-up brunch.
My offspring came back to life slowly that Sunday morning. Just like when they were adolescents. With, of course, the added burden of thumping hangovers. Jools was grumpy and monosyllabic. Also, in pain. She’d somehow slept in a position that put pressure on her recently stitched nose. I wondered how soon she’d be able to get that appointment with the surgeon at St Richard’s.
She shuffled off bad-temperedly to shower and put some clothes on.
I had to wait longer for Ben. I was going through sensations that I hadn’t experienced since the unmourned ‘ladette’ days of my early twenties. Not to put too fine a point on it, I desperately wanted another drink. To dilute the pain in my head. The buzz of more alcohol. It was a very long time since I’d felt that urgency. God, what a sedate, middle-aged woman I had become.
I resisted the temptation and made more coffee.
As I drank it, an unwelcome thought came into my head. About Ben and the timing of his suicidal gesture the night before. Although I had kept my relationship with Tim very low-key, hardly mentioned it, in fact, had my son intuited that something was going on? Had the thought of a new man in his mother’s life made him jealous?
Oh God, I’d got quite enough on my plate without having to deal with an Oedipus Complex.
But, as I had that thought, I wondered whether I was being paranoid about Ben. And whether part of my reaction to the wrecking of the previous evening’s plans had been relief.
When Ben finally emerged from the sitting room, he looked terrible. His breath smelt like a blocked drain in a distillery. And he was very surly.
Which was good. ‘Surly’ may be unpleasant to live with, but it isn’t ‘depressed’. I’d been around Oliver enough to know the difference.
As soon as he left the sitting room, I opened the windows to fumigate the space. Ran the vacuum over the carpet. And plumped up the sofa cushions where Ben had been lying. (Why is the concept of plumping up cushions so alien to men?)
Another entry in my Bad Parenting Guide: A Hair of the Dog really helps a hangover.
When I finally got my green-faced son and daughter round the kitchen table, before I even embarked on the frying, I opened a bottle of Merlot. I’m afraid I took an immediate slurp from my glass and felt vindicated when Ben and Jools did the same. And again I had the unworthy thought: Thank God Fleur isn’t here.
As I started cooking, something happened which again reminded me of my boozy early twenties. With the hydration of more alcohol, we all quickly got drunk again. Some of the hilarity of the previous evening returned.
Jools started fantasizing about how her botched nose-job would eventually turn out. Obviously, this was a potential worrying conjecture but at that moment it seemed hysterical to her.
And Ben, tension draining from him with each swallow of wine, started to express his dreams for the effect his TOCA Award might have on his career. He was quite funny about that too. Got into a great routine about the actors he’d like to voice his animated characters – and the ones he’d particularly like to be in the recording studio with. Quite a revelation for a mother to hear about her son’s taste in women.
Though I say it myself, I do do a good fry-up. I’m particularly proud of the oily crunchiness I get into my fried bread. And I always include black pudding. Some kids don’t like it, particularly once they’ve heard it called ‘blood sausage’, but it had been part of our family diet for so long that Ben and Jools absolutely love it.
When the hilarity died down, we all started to behave more soberly. I guess we’d reached the ‘maintenance dose’ level which keeps serious alcoholics functioning. And the conversation moved on to other subjects.
Particularly Dodge.
Ben had been in such a bad state the day before that we hadn’t really had a chance to debrief about our unsuccessful mission to Portsmouth. But as we talked around the kitchen table, I realized I’d have to tell Ben and Jools more about Dodge’s disappearance than I might have wanted to. Explaining why he’d done a runner meant mentioning his distrust of the police. Then Ben wanted to know why the police were involved, which meant I had to tell them about the suspicions surrounding Cedric Waites’s death. It was more information than I really liked to disclose about my work.
But what I told them seemed to get Ben and Jools excited. They responded to the unsolved crime element in the situation. Jools revealed to me that she’d ‘always loved whodunits’, something which, to my shame, I had not been aware of. Mind you, getting any insight about interests and feelings from the teenage Jools had always made marathons look like strolls in the park.
Ben was equally enthused, particularly interested in the cause of Cedric’s death. I found myself going through the list of people who might have supplied the poisoned meal, just as I had with Tim the evening before.
‘Dodge does have pots of oleander around the place,’ he observed. ‘He’s shown them to me. Trying to get me as obsessed with all his foraging and herbal remedies as he is.’ He smiled wryly. ‘Unsuccessfully. I’m afraid I can’t get very excited about that stuff.’
‘No,’ said Jools, ‘but if he has got plants like oleander around and he’s doing all this vegetarian cooking, then surely there’s a chance that the poison got into the food by mistake?’
‘I have considered that possibility.’ I sighed. ‘I’m really starting to get quite worried about Dodge.’
‘He’s got a phone, has he?’ asked Jools.
‘Oh yes. But you can’t make someone pick up, can you? I’ve tried a good few times, but I reckon, as soon as he saw it was me, he decided not to answer. And, God knows, if he has gone feral and is living out in the wild somewhere, will he even be able to charge a mobile?’
‘I think he’ll do his best to,’ said Ben.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘In case of emergency calls from … you know, the people he helps … People like Pat. Dodge is their lifeline.’
Ben had to explain to his sister about the missing man’s work with drug charities. Jools looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, ‘I think we’re in a position which occurs quite often in the crime fiction I enjoy reading.’
‘Oh yes?’ I said. ‘And what position is that?’
‘It’s the one where the only way of stopping someone being the police’s prime suspect is by proving that they didn’t commit the crime. And the only way of achieving that is by finding out who actually did do it.’
‘Thank you very much, Jools,’ I said wearily. ‘That’s a real help.’
But I had a nasty feeling she was right.
And I felt even more stupid for having destroyed the one piece of evidence which might have revealed the perpetrator.
I had noticed, while we were eating, Ben’s mobile kept pinging. What he saw on the screen annoyed him and he didn’t respond to any of the attempted contacts. After a while he switched the phone off and put it firmly in his pocket.
I couldn’t help wondering whether the calls or texts were from Pippa. Her name had not been mentioned since Ben had lost his temper and shouted at me. Did she even know that he had won the TOCA Award she had kept ‘going on about’?
I didn’t dare indulge my fantasy that the split between them might be permanent. Oh dear, was I making my own contribution to the Oedipus scenario?
When we had finished the brunch and opened a second bottle of Merlot, we took our calorie-stuffed bodies back to the sitting room, slumping into the same chairs we had only vacated a few hours earlier. Ben’s subsidence on to the sofa cushions instantly undid my efforts at plumping them. He had the wine with him and kept topping up his glass. Jools and I didn’t feel the immediate need for more.
A not-unpleasant torpor settled over us. I reflected how bizarre it was that a family rapprochement had been engineered by a botched nose job and an attempted suicide. Life has never been predictable.
We might well have all drifted back to sleep again if Jools hadn’t suddenly shouted, ‘The laptop!’
‘What?’
‘Cedric’s laptop! I’d completely forgotten, but we may have in the house the evidence that will solve everything!’
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘By the way, you never did tell me where you found it.’
‘I didn’t.’ Jools grinned. Somehow, with the dressing still covering her nose, it made her look comical. ‘Well, like I said, I tried to think inside Cedric’s mind.’
I nodded approval. That’s my girl.
‘And I thought … Why does a man who never lets anyone inside his home bother about hiding his laptop … particularly when, as you told me, he makes no attempt to hide a briefcase containing a large amount of money?
‘And that made me think that perhaps the need to keep his laptop hidden pre-dated his wife’s death – and that it was her he wanted to hide it from.’
I liked the way my daughter’s mind was working, but her theory didn’t seem to fit the facts. Everyone who knew them seemed to have regarded the Waiteses’ marriage as perfect. Yes, Flick was more outgoing than her husband, but that was just how the relationship worked. Surely he wouldn’t need to have secrets from such a wife?
On the other hand, past experiences – and particularly instances I have encountered in my SpaceWoman work – tell me that there are secrets in every marriage. And no outsider can ever really know what’s going on inside. I waited while Jools developed her theory.
‘So, I thought … where would Cedric Waites have put something he didn’t want his wife to find? And I remembered you telling me that Flick … was that her name?’ I nodded ‘… wasn’t interested in books. And I found at the bottom of Cedric’s bookcase, there was a very shallow drawer that pulled out. You’d never notice unless you were looking for it. And in that drawer,’ she concluded with quiet satisfaction, ‘was the laptop.’
‘Well done, Jools,’ I said.
Ben clapped his hands twice and said, in a crusty colonel voice, ‘Excellent sleuthing, Holmes.’
Jools grinned, said, ‘I’ll get it,’ and rushed up to her bedroom.
It wasn’t the latest model of laptop but it wasn’t laughably old-fashioned either. Probably bought within the last ten years. So he’d had it while Flick was still alive.
The battery had been completely dead but fortunately Jools had found a charging cable in the hidden drawer. She put the laptop on a low table in the sitting room and switched it on.
The screen came to life but, needless to say, a password was needed to access any data.
‘Any bright ideas?’ Jools asked Ben, who was peering over her shoulder at the screen.
‘Oh yes.’ Her brother grinned. ‘“Password-protected” is a relative term these days. I reckon the laptop has yet to be invented that I can’t get into.’
‘I know a few ways of doing it too,’ said Jools, with a matching grin.
There was a complicity between them, born of their shared technological knowledge. I felt excluded, a Luddite, a dinosaur.
‘Be simplest,’ said Ben, ‘if I get my laptop. I can do it from there.’
‘Just a minute,’ I said. ‘Can we just try it the old-fashioned way?’
They exchanged puzzled glances. ‘What “old-fashioned way”?’
‘Guessing the right password.’
The looks they exchanged now were frankly incredulous, unable to believe that there was anyone left in the world who was so naïve.
‘Try putting in “Flick”,’ I said to Jools.
Wearily, humouring me, she did as instructed. And there was no disguising the glee on her face when the laptop refused to yield up its secrets.
‘Try “Flick1”,’ I said.
More elaborate eye-rolling as she did that. Impudent glee when that too failed.
‘“Flick1-2”,’ I said firmly.
Jools keyed it in. The laptop unlocked.
I got treated to one of Ben’s ironic double-hand claps. ‘Well done, Ma. Intuitive or what?’
I was impervious to being sent up by my own flesh and blood. Too interested in what the laptop’s contents might reveal about the secret life of Cedric Waites.
We had no trouble getting into his email account. Hotmail. Old-fashioned. That figured.
He clearly didn’t use email much and, of course, he’d only had the router reconnected relatively recently. There were no exchanges with Roy and Michelle. Ocado shopping orders. And intermittent correspondence about potential book purchases with Augustus Mintzen. That seemed to be it. Except for junk mail, of course, some of which infiltrated his Inbox.
The laptop didn’t provide the instant revelations I’d been hoping for.
Still, maybe there’d be something in his Word documents.
But I was prevented from further investigation by my landline ringing.
‘Hello?’
‘Is that you, Ellen dear? It’s Vi Spelling.’
‘Oh, nice to hear you.’
I was about to ask, politely of course, what she wanted, but the old woman needed no prompt.
‘You remember. Ellen, when I come to your place yesterday …?’ God, was it only yesterday? Several lifetimes seemed to have passed in the interim.
‘Yes.’
‘… you said if I remembered seeing anyone else going to Cedric’s house, I should tell you.’
‘Mm.’
‘Well, it come back to me. Someone did come round, months back it was, before Christmas, I think. I’d forgotten all about it, but it was a day when I was taking a prepared meal round for Cedric … and you know, he’d left a fiver for me on the back doorstep, like I said. And when I come round the front of the house, there’s this woman knocking on the front door. And I tell her she’s wasting her time, Cedric doesn’t open his door to anyone, and she asks me why, has he got hoarding problems? I say yes, he has, and she says maybe she could help him. And I say he won’t take help from anyone, not if it involves letting them into his house.
‘Anyway, she’s quite persistent and says I should tell Cedric she called. And she gave me her business card, so’s he could get in touch. “Make sure you tell him,” she said. “I’m sure I can help sort out his problems.”’
‘And did you tell him?’
‘Yes, of course I did. And just like I’d told her he would, Cedric said he wasn’t interested. Didn’t want to know about it.’
‘And do you still have the business card?’ I asked tentatively.
‘Yes, I kept it.’
Feeling pretty certain that I knew the answer, I asked what the woman’s name was.
And, sure enough, Vi Spelling said that the company was called BrightHome and the woman’s name was Rosemary Findlay.
I felt even more as if she was stalking me.