NINETEEN

‘We have a visitor.’

In all the time I’d known Max, I’d never heard her speak like that; she hissed this at me, sibilance lurking just behind her teeth, where it held hands with anger. I had just come in, and was feeling the effects of the heat, a day’s work and a couple of pints of bitter and, perhaps because of this, wasn’t feeling totally up to pace. ‘Do we?’

Looking back on it, this might not have stood up well amongst the great ripostes of history and, in retrospect, it was a fair way inferior to, ‘You will, Oscar, you will’ or ‘My dear, I don’t give a damn’ (with, as is de rigueur, emphasis on the wrong word). Certainly, Max was unimpressed. ‘Yes.’

‘Who?’

‘Your Sergeant Abelson.’

I was unaware that I had come into possession of a police person, so this came as something of a surprise. ‘What does she want?’ I enquired, making my way into the kitchen to pour a beer.

‘She said it was to take a statement from you.’

I couldn’t see why Max seemed to be so worked up about things; after all, Masson had said that I would have to give a formal statement regarding George Cotterill’s death, yet Max’s implication was that the comely Sergeant was here with an ulterior motive. ‘Fair enough,’ I said, in what I thought was a placatory tone; oddly, Max snorted, glared at me and then snarled, ‘Well, I’m going for a bath,’ as if this were the ultimate weapon to deploy.

In the sitting room, Sergeant Abelson was standing in the bay window, looking out at the comings and goings. ‘Something to drink?’ I asked her, realizing that Max had inexplicably failed in her duties as a hostess.

She turned and smiled. ‘Some water would be nice.’

I fetched it for her, then we sat down and got to the business at hand. It only took fifteen minutes, at the end of which I asked, ‘What are the results of the post-mortem?’

She nodded. ‘It was his heart, as you suspected.’

It was quite nice to be proved right by an autopsy for once; it didn’t always happen, which could sometimes be a blow to the professional ego. ‘A natural death, then.’

‘Whatever the cause, it doesn’t look good when people die in custody. People tend to talk.’

I couldn’t resist pointing out, ‘And he wasn’t even guilty, was he?’

It was quite interesting to see how she went into standard constabulary defensive mode. ‘We have yet to determine that.’

I did a bit of gaping at this brazen bit of stonewalling, before asking, ‘Do you know something I don’t?’ Looking back on it, this was a question that was not one of the most perceptive that has ever been asked; it was highly likely that she knew something about the case that was at that moment hidden from my not-quite-all-seeing gaze.

‘Probably,’ was her quite reasonable reply and which left me slightly bereft of where to go next.

I decided not to argue. ‘Just who was Yvette Mangon?’

Without any hint of irony, she answered. ‘She was a maths teacher at Bensham Manor.’

I must admit that I lapsed into a little bit more gaping. ‘You are kidding, aren’t you? First Marlene Jeffries, then Yvette Mangon? Two women who worked together, lived together and . . .’

She smiled despite herself. ‘Played together?’

‘You could put it like that.’

‘And their deaths aren’t connected?’ My question had gone into a slightly higher register than normal.

For a moment, I think she was going to argue, but all she said was, ‘Officially, George Cotterill is still a suspect in the murder of Marlene Jeffries.’

‘Two murderers? Is that likely?’

‘No,’ she admitted. ‘But then, statistically speaking, murder is a very unlikely occurrence, anyway.’

I knew enough statistical theory not to try arguing, even though it sounded slightly on the side of sophistry to me. ‘Is that the theory that Masson’s working on?’

Her smile said it all; her only vocal response wasn’t one at all. ‘I don’t think Inspector Masson would appreciate me discussing the lines of enquiry concerning the murders. I just came here to take your statement regarding the death of George Cotterill.’

‘Has she gone?’ Max, no less frosty than before, came down from her bath, dressed only a towelling bath robe.

‘She has.’ I was laying the table for our supper, which was to be a cheese salad; I hoped this would not overtax my culinary abilities, but was prepared to be disappointed. She might have snorted, might not have done; it was difficult for me to tell. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’ She said this too quickly, too flatly.

‘Yes, there is.’

‘No, there isn’t.’

I was about to repeat my insistence, but I had been in this situation before and decided to be discretionary rather than valorous. ‘Do you want beetroot?’ She made a face which I took as a negative. ‘You’re going to have to admit soon to my father that you don’t like it. Judging from the amount he’s been growing at the school, in his garden and on his allotment, I expect we’ll soon be receiving at least ten a week to boil and pickle.’

Max thought that she was equal to this. ‘We’ll just throw them out when he’s gone.’

Such naivety. I felt slightly sad for her. Shaking my head slowly I explained, ‘He’ll want to see what we’ve done with them. He’ll be looking forward to tasting them. He’ll keep on about them; the strain of lying will eventually prove too much and you’ll find yourself crumbling.’

The implications made her pause, think, pause, then think again. Her expression told me that she had got the message. ‘Oh . . .’

‘Exactly,’ I said grimly. At least I had transformed her mood from one of inexplicable irritability to one of entirely explicable gloom. I cast around for something to distract her and the only thing I could find was the news about the latest poor soul to find that living in Thornton Heath was not always good for the health. It worked, though, as was obvious from her widening eyes as my tale unfolded.

‘A compass?’

I nodded. ‘No pencil, though.’

The table laid, we were by now sitting down and eating, the jar of beetroot sitting between us untouched, an air of reproachful isolation seeping from it. I may have to say so myself but, all in all, it was a pretty decent salad, with or without roots of the beet variety. ‘And she shared a house with the dead PE teacher?’

‘She did.’

She snorted triumphantly, which is a pretty impressive feat, especially since she remained just as pretty whilst doing it. ‘I told you.’

‘Did you?’ I own to a degree of nonplussedness at this assertion.

‘Yes. At the open evening. I said that all PE teachers are lesbians.’

I found something in the lettuce that didn’t taste entirely lettuce-like, in that it was soft and slimy and possibly slugoid. I tried my best not to show any emotion. ‘Just because they shared a house doesn’t mean they were . . . like that.’

She snorted again, this time giving it a veneer of incredulity; incredulity, I surmised, at my ingenuousness. She replied in a tone that one might use to a small boy who had just asked why girls didn’t have willies. ‘Oh, come on, Lance. With a dungeon where the front bedroom should be?’ was her not unreasonable enquiry. ‘And a nice cosy double bedroom at the back?’

She had a point, I conceded. ‘So you think they were killed because of their proclivities?’ I asked.

‘Maybe.’ She sounded as if she didn’t think so.

‘Have you got another theory?’

‘They were both teachers.’

‘And?’

‘Marlene Jeffries, a PE teacher, was battered to death with some lifting weights, and Yvette Mangon, who taught maths, had a compass stuck in her eye. They’ve both been killed with things that they use in their jobs.’

Well, it was a theory, I had to admit. ‘We don’t know that Yvette Mangon was killed with the compass,’ I pointed out, rather hoping that she hadn’t been. ‘In fact it’s more likely that she was killed by the stab wounds.’

‘It’s symbolic, Lance,’ she insisted.

‘So who’s the killer? Some deranged pupil? One who hated cross-country running and failed mathematics O-level?’

‘Possibly,’ she said, somewhat defensively.

It was my turn to snort, although I did it quietly and a long, long way under my breath. ‘That would apply to ninety-seven per cent of people in the country.’

‘It doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be true.’

‘No,’ I agreed, but only because I didn’t want to upset her.

At that moment she did the female thing of completely contradicting herself; Dad once explained to me that it’s evolved over the millennia to disorientate men and make them feel stupid and, my God, it works. ‘Or, of course, it could be someone who doesn’t like lesbians.’

‘I’ve always known that maths teachers were weird, but not like that,’ I said thoughtfully.

She agreed thoughtfully; the concept that Yvette Mangon might be archetypal of all maths teachers was mesmerizing. The idea that instead of going home of an evening with a worn leather briefcase to eat a tea of sardines on toast, then watch the nine o’clock news followed by the Open University, they routinely retired to an epicurean feast of swan stuffed with goose stuffed with duck, followed by a couple of hours with the anal beads and the stirrups filled my head to bursting. Indeed, I think it filled Max’s. There was a look on her face that spoke of strange visions.

She suddenly stopped chewing, then made a face. ‘Did you wash this lettuce?’