FIFTEEN

‘He died shortly after we got him to Casualty.’

I was cooking. For my A-levels I had done chemistry, biology and physics, and got A grades in all of them, much to the delight of my father. It had always seemed to me that cooking was just the practical application of these three academic subjects and, moreover, most cooks, no matter how bright, were not particularly academic. The logical corollary of this was that I should have been a brilliant cook, since I was both bright and knew the theory.

How wrong I was.

My father had had occasion in the past to pass adverse comment on some of the products of my culinary experiments that had passed the frontier of his false upper-plate gnashers. The first time that this had occurred, I had laughed it off as mere envy, but the years had gone by and he had been joined in adverse commentary by most of the people who had summoned the courage to partake of my cuisine. One of my early girlfriends had once left the table while I was dishing up the dessert only to be heard throwing up in the toilet.

Max’s problem, though, was that she was completely incapable of any kind of cooking at all. Until she met me, I think she was quite cheerful about it, not seeing it as a particularly major problem; she had a career as a vet and, presumably, she thought she would either meet a man who could cook any matter of delicious repast at her whim, or she would soon be earning enough to live her entire gustatory life in restaurants. Unfortunately, she ended up with me. She had yet to regurgitate my attempts (at least within my earshot or eye line), but there had been times when even I, a man with the social sensibilities of a rhinoceros, could see that things were proving a strain.

On this particular Sunday, I was preparing roast beef. I would say ‘with all the trimmings’ but all I had been able to manage was roast potatoes, carrots and cabbage. I had just opened the oven door to discover that the cookery book had lied yet again and what should have been a nicely browned rolled silverside looked more like an incinerated dinosaur turd; thankfully, all I could smell was charcoal. Add to that the fact that I had previously over-boiled the spuds and now they were rapidly becoming over-roasted potato sludge, the carrots had been on for nearly an hour and were still slightly less hard than my grandmother’s wooden leg and the cabbage had turned to soup as soon as it had hit the water, and all in all I could sense that I was building to a repast of climactic awesomeness.

Max was sitting in the garden, unaware of what delights were heading her way, enjoying the arid, waterless delights of my own personal slice of desert, whilst drinking deeply of a glass of Black Tower. She said, ‘That poor man. What a horrible place to spend his last hours on earth.’

She could have been talking about the casualty department of Mayday Hospital, but I guessed she was referring to Croydon Central nick. ‘It certainly isn’t my favourite place to spend Saturday evening,’ I agreed.

‘Why do you think he died?’

‘I would say his heart.’

‘So it was natural?’

‘I think so, but there’ll still have to be a post-mortem.’

‘Why?’

I poured myself some Riesling. ‘Because he died in police custody.’

‘What difference does that make?’

‘People get skittish when suspects die in the cells. It’s just to reassure the public.’

She was astonished. ‘Why would the public need to be reassured?’

This innocence was part of Max’s attractiveness (and it was the same part that made her the most irritating person I have ever met); she lived in a world parallel to the one that housed the rest of the human race, one in which the police were incapable of wrongdoing for no better reason than they were the police and in which, unbelievably, my father was a sane and rational human being (and not one of the most irksome entities that has ever bothered the universe).

‘Because it has been known for the police to treat people in their cells without due care.’

‘Really?’

In reply to this I said only, ‘Sometimes, yes.’

I got up and went back into the kitchen, having become aware of a strange odour emanating thence: it was the carrots that were the perpetrators of this; having silently suffered total dehydration, they were beginning to turn into carrot caramel on the bottom of the saucepan. ‘Is everything all right?’ called Max through the kitchen doorway.

‘No problems,’ was my response, with quite breathtaking mendacity as I furiously scraped sweet brown toffee off the bottom of a copper-bottomed saucepan that had once been a wedding gift for a marriage that had lasted only one tenth of the period of the pan’s guarantee.

Max’s expressions told the story, although she said not a word of criticism. I have to admit that it was a curious culinary experience; the vegetables had the texture of partially digested seaweed and the smell of inspissated mucus, while the meat (I always like to create different textures in my cooking efforts) defied any attempt at mastication; nor did it have much flavour, although I did on rare occasions detect the tang of sweat-soaked lederhosen. The only way it could be ingested was by cutting extremely small pieces, and even that took a great deal of effort. This was a cow that had clearly decided that, dead though it might be, it was not going to go gentle into that good night; conversation died as we struggled to overcome this curiously obstinate foodstuff. Eventually I gave up, and although I was only halfway through the meal, put my knife and fork down; my right arm was tired and the exertion combined with the heat was making me sweat rather uncomfortably. Max took my surrender as a cue that she could do likewise; there was, I think, an air of relief as she did this.

The doorbell rang and a few moments later I opened the door to Inspector Masson. He had his jacket over his shoulder and his tie was at half-mast. ‘May I come in?’

I stood aside and showed him through to the back patio where we had been eating. He nodded at Max. ‘Miss Christy.’

‘Hello, Inspector.’

‘Something to drink?’ I asked him.

‘Iced water,’ he said, without appending the usual niceties. He sounded even more exasperated and tired than usual. When I returned with his libation, he was seated at the garden table eyeing the remains of our recent repast with something that I can only describe as a jaundiced eye, while Max attempted the impossible and tried to make small talk with him; I could see from her expression that he was proving as sociable as ever. He grunted something – possibly thanks, possibly not – and took a deep draught. Then he put an empty glass down and, gesturing with his chin at the half-eaten meal, said acidly, ‘What the hell is that muck?’

‘Roast beef,’ I responded, and I think I did so in a voice that told him he had overstepped the mark.

‘It was very nice,’ added Max loyally.

Masson curled his lip. ‘It looks it,’ was his only comment. His fingers were fidgeting with each other, with the edge of the table, with everything and nothing; anyone who didn’t know him might have assumed that he was nervous, but I knew that the reason for this unconscious finger-jiving was indicated by patchy yellow-brown stains on this fore and middle fingers, and by the ever-present odour of stale tobacco smoke that he moved around in, as if he were an alien creature who required his own atmosphere. Since we were (in theory at least) still eating, I reckoned he could wait a while longer to knock another seven minutes off his life.

‘Aside from your part-time role as visiting food critic for the Croydon Advertiser, what brings you to my house, Inspector?’

‘I need a statement from you.’ He actually sounded as if he needed nothing less.

‘What about?’

‘Your part in the death of George Cotterill.’

Well, there we were. I’d played a part in his death, apparently; and there I had been thinking that I’d played a part in trying to save his life. Presumably the good Inspector suspected me of slipping him a capsule full of potassium cyanide during the twenty minutes I had been in the cell giving him mouth to mouth (I could still remember the taste of that particular experience); I had, after all, been on my own for most of that time. ‘I beg your pardon?’

He was preoccupied, staring at the green plastic surface of the table, whilst Max did a bit of her own staring at me, hers with some shock, clearly seeing me with new eyes. ‘Inspector?’ I prompted.

He came to. ‘You were there in the cell and thereafter accompanied him to hospital where he died. All deaths in custody have to be investigated; all the witnesses have to be interviewed and statements taken.’

Did Max look disappointed that I was not suspected of manslaughter? I fancy she did.

Whilst Masson consumed a second glass of iced water, and Max and I had some Riesling, I recounted what had happened; he did not take notes. Eventually, I ran out of things to say and he ran out of questions to ask, and everyone ran out of things to drink. I asked, ‘Do you know what George died of yet?’

‘The post-mortem examination was done this morning by Dr Bentham. Pending further investigations, he’s fairly certain it was heart disease.’

Max asked, ‘What about the murder?’

‘What about it?’

‘Are you satisfied that George Cotterill did it?’

He laughed, as ever, sourly. ‘Oh, I am. Trouble is, I doubt I’ll be given the time and money to prove it now. Even if I was, I doubt whether I could, he was too clever.’

‘Was he really?’ Max had a knack of asking such questions; the words said one thing, the tone of voice another entirely. She sounded even to my ears to be entirely genuine; for all I knew, she was.

Masson’s face told me that he was unsure of whether she was being authentic. Momentarily bereft of speech, he soon came back with, ‘Yes.’ I thought that, as a witticism, it probably wouldn’t even have made Oscar Wilde’s discard pile.

Before she could say any more, I intervened. ‘You can chalk up another successful case, though.’ I don’t know what it was, but whenever I was around Inspector Masson, I felt this irresistible desire to try to cheer him up. I think it was the medical training; the Hippocratic oath probably had a word or two to say on the subject of bringing cheer to misanthropic members of the police force.

‘Can I?’ he enquired, demonstrating that my bedside manner could have been improved.

‘Well, nobody can prove he didn’t do it.’

‘The point, Dr Elliot,’ he said tiredly, ‘is that I can’t prove he did. That’s the important thing. There’ll always be a doubt now.’

I wondered why that mattered to him but didn’t dare ask. There was then a pause, the like of which I can only recall when I was a small child and barged in on my Auntie Barbara when she was doing number twos in the downstairs cloakroom; inevitably it was Max who broke it. ‘Maybe he didn’t do it,’ she suggested. ‘Maybe he was innocent.’

And, thankfully, the phone rang inside the house; it stopped what I feared would be a fit of apoplexy that would see the end of my good friend Inspector Masson. I said, ‘Max, could you answer that whilst I fetch another glass of water for our guest?’

She opened her mouth but shut it again when I looked at her warningly. Masson, meanwhile, was doing an ace impression of a boiled lobster being inflated by an air pump, although he said nothing. I deliberately took my time finding the ice tray in the freezer, not wanting to go back out to our guest alone; Max came into the kitchen and said, ‘It’s your father. He wants to talk to you.’

Part of me was asking silently, What now? Another part was highly delighted that I could delay returning to Masson and thus give him a little time to calm down a bit. The heavy Bakelite of the handset was, for a moment at least, a small pool of coolness in an otherwise sweltering world. ‘Dad?’

‘Is that you, Lance?’

It was my father’s habit to ask questions such as this, questions that invited acidic sarcasm, that required the forbearance of a saint not to answer through painfully gritted teeth. Through long practice, I enquired of him, ‘Is everything all right?’

‘Slight hitch in the plans, that’s all.’

Which could have meant anything, everything or nothing. ‘What’s happened?’

‘The car’s broken down, just outside Crawley.’

‘What’s the problem?’

‘Have you ever been to Crawley? Dreadful place. Absolutely horrid. I remember visiting it just after the war with your mother and it was delightful little village. Now they’ve turned it into a giant concrete necropolis; it’s got about as much soul as a prefabricated garage.’

‘Dad, what’s wrong with the car?’

‘I think the water pump’s gone west.’

‘Have you phoned the AA?’

‘They said they might be some time; a lot of calls because of overheating.’

‘Are you and Ada all right?’

‘Oh, yes. Don’t worry about us. We’ve found a very agreeable pub, but that’s not the point . . .’ And here, I knew, was coming the crux of the issue; I knew also that, as it was my father talking, I was probably in for at the least perplexity, quite possibly embarrassment, conceivably some pain. ‘I was wondering if you were going to be in tonight.’

‘What time?’ I asked this not because I was going out, but because my father would have been quite capable of turning up at one in the morning, completely oblivious of the fact that he was waking not only me but also, because of his car, most of the neighbourhood.

‘Well, that rather depends on the AA. Do you know, I’m paying them fifteen pounds a year, and for what? They don’t even salute any more . . .’

‘Why don’t you let us know when you’re on the road again? Then you’ll be able to give us a better idea of when you’re likely to get here.’

‘Will Max be there?’ He asked this in a tone that was difficult for me to read; Dad had mixed feelings about my girlfriend, sometimes succumbing to her charms, at other times . . .

‘Probably.’

‘Good,’ he said at once, and put the phone down.

It was not unusual for me to emerge from a conversation with my father feeling slightly winded, as if I had been exposed to a weakly hallucinogenic gas, but I had a guest to take care of and could not bother about such things. Accordingly, I strove to overcome the slight dyspnoea that was sometimes an inevitable consequence of contact with my father; conversations with him could on occasion prove to be similar to being punched in the stomach.

Masson had abandoned his rather pained survey of my cooking and, now upright, was looking intently at the wilting hydrangea bush, wreathed in the grey, sinuous tendrils of cigarette smoke. The airless, still heat not only allowed them existence but seemed almost to animate them. His back was to the house and behind him Max had cleared the table. She looked at me and raised her eyebrows, to which I shrugged. I went back into the kitchen and brought out from the oven the dessert. Putting it on the table, I called to him, ‘Would you care for some pudding, Inspector?’

He turned, then spotted my creation. ‘What is that?’ he asked, and sounded partly genuinely puzzled, partly wary and partly horrified.

‘It’s rice pudding,’ was Max’s stout and rather touching defence. I could see his point, though; I had put all the ingredients in that the recipe promised would turn into rice pudding but, somehow, somewhere along the line, it had become something that looked as though it had been born in the slime pits of the Jurassic period and survived undisturbed in my oven until the present day. There was a dark brown, focally burned skin on the top that strange ripples and bubbles from the depths occasionally disturbed. It hinted at things from beyond the great abyss, as Lovecraft might have put it.

Masson continued to stare at the pudding. ‘No, thanks. I have to get going.’

He stepped on his cigarette and started forward, then paused. He resumed progress after a moment but appeared to want to keep as far away from the table as possible as he moved back into the house. As I showed him out, he said, ‘Sergeant Abelson will be in contact to take a formal statement.’

When I returned to the garden, Max had dished up the rice pudding. Even before I started to eat it, I could see that it possessed interesting properties, possibly ones previously unknown to science. It flowed slowly, but for all its torpor, it seemed to possess a curious animus, as if it were slowly disassembling itself and exploring its environment. I hesitated before plunging my spoon in, half expecting it to react badly to such an indignity. As I put it slowly in my mouth my eyes met Max’s; she was watching me, her own spoonful poised at about chin level, her eyes filled with curiosity. The taste was interesting, being almost like rice pudding, which was good. What wasn’t so good was that it had the adhesive properties of wallpaper paste, which made speech impossible for some little time, and made swallowing an exercise in suppression of the gag reflex.

By mutual agreement we soon abandoned any attempt at mastication and ingurgitation, and finished the wine instead. ‘What did your father want?’

‘The Red Hornet’s broken down in Crawley.’

‘Are they all right?’

‘They’re fine. All he wanted to tell me was that he doesn’t like Crawley New Town. Apparently they’ve taken a delightful village and turned it into a blot on England’s green and pleasant face.’

She smiled. ‘He’s on good form, then.’

‘He’s calling in when they finally get back.’

‘That’s nice.’

I had to wonder about that; if I knew my father, he was up to something.