His leg hurt like the very blazes when he finally got back to the station. He limped through the procedure of releasing Miss Hall-Bridges and facing off her extremely intimidating solicitor and then collapsed behind his desk to complete the paperwork.
They had both hidden their surprise reasonably well when he told them Dr Marks was able to alibi Miss Hall-Bridges. Initially Miss Hall-Bridges hadn’t met his eyes. She’d allowed the solicitor to take charge of it all. But when he explained it was because of the meeting she’d had with Dr Marks in the upstairs hallway when Dr Marks was on her way back to bed after sitting in the kitchen for some time with a cup of tea, she’d raised her head and looked at him curiously. The solicitor had taken it in his stride. Presumably he was used to people bending the truth for the upper classes. He looked the type.
Simon’s lady clerk looked at him with concern. “Are you quite all right, sir?” she asked as she put the forms he’d requested down in front of him. “You look awfully pale if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“Yes, thank you, Miss Finch. Probably shouldn’t have driven myself,” he grimaced. “Just a bit of an ache in the old leg.”
She was a small, plump, middle-aged blonde woman with her hair coiled up in a knot at the back of her head and glasses that she wore on a chain around her neck when she wasn’t using them. She took them off her nose now and said, “I’ll make a cup of tea, shall I? And send out for a sandwich for you. You missed lunch, didn’t you?”
He nodded. “That would be very kind. But please don’t fuss, Miss Finch, I’m quite all right.”
She gave him a small smile and said, “Then you’ll be positively bouncing after a cup of tea. I’ll go and make it now, whilst you get started on those forms.”
They didn’t take long once he’d begun. There wasn’t anything to record. Simply adding to the arrest record and saying Miss Hall-Bridges had been released because a witness had come forward placing her in her home at the time in question. And to see the witness statement by Dr Sylvia Marks. He needed to get Miss Finch to type up something for her to sign, so he wrote a few lines out, perjuring them all so easily.
I was insomniac after the disturbance of the evening and having a cup of tea in the early hours in the kitchen…I saw Miss Hall-Bridges come out of her room for a glass of water as I was going back to bed. I was downstairs in the kitchen for a good two hours between about one-thirty and three-thirty in the morning and there is no possibility that Miss Hall-Bridges was out of the house during that time. She had clearly been heavily asleep when we met on the landing.
There, that should do it.
“Could you type that up first thing in the morning for the witness to sign please, Miss Finch?” he asked, poking it across the desk toward her with the other forms as she brought him in his tea.
“Certainly, sir. Here you go. Get that inside you and you’ll feel better. I sent Potter out for a sandwich from the ABC. He won’t be long.”
She was truly wonderful. She’d joined them a couple of years ago, not long after Simon had started the job again. They’d been very short of men and the Force had finally decided to recruit some lady clerks to manage the office work and take the pressure off the constables doing the actual police work. When there’d been talk last year of laying her off because there were enough men now to fill the jobs, he’d fought to keep her. She was a widow with no children and no interest in remarrying. Or at least, no interest in remarrying him, which suited him fine. They had an effective but slightly informal working relationship where she was consummately professional but also mothered him a tiny bit—although they were of similar ages—and he allowed it.
She disappeared with her forms, already replacing her spectacles on her nose as she headed for her typewriter.
Simon looked at the clock. It was nearly five o’clock. That sandwich would replace his supper at home if he wasn’t careful. The weight of the small brown book pressed against his chest inside his jacket. He couldn’t read it here, not if what Kennett had said about it was true.
He drank his tea and stared into space for a while. His sandwich came and he ate it. The pain in his leg was abating slightly, moving back to the usual dull throb he could ignore. What was he going to do if it turned out Kennett was telling the truth? It was a wild story. But…he thought about Kennett. He didn’t seem a man to make wild accusations or take off on whimsical flights of fancy. Not even to make a fool of a police officer he’d clashed with. And he’d let him go home with the book.
That was it. Simon pushed himself to his feet and grabbed his hat on the way out of the door. He’d go home and read the bloody thing, rather than sit here wondering about it.
Miss Finch had already gone, cover neatly tucked over her typewriter, stack of typing placed beside it in the tray ready for her to tackle in the morning. He muttered a good evening to the man on duty at the front desk and made his way home.
* * * *
Shirt-sleeved and with a brandy at hand he sat in his armchair in front of the unlit fire. He placed the book on the arm of the chair and stretched his leg out, rubbing his thigh. Maybe Kennett was right and he should let Dr Marks have a look at it. There was definitely something wrong with it. It should surely be fine by now. It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that there was still something stuck in there.
He sighed, sipping the brandy, and moving the book onto his knee. Now he was here, he was postponing opening it. He didn’t want Kennett to have been making a fool of him. He liked the little man and was sure he’d picked up some glimmers of liking returned. He didn’t want to know he’d been mistaken. He didn’t much bother with people these days. He got up and did his job and went home and had his tea and slept. Saw his sister every now and then, watched his nephew at football. Finding someone interesting whom he also found attractive was unusual. Not that he was going to do anything about it, obviously. Too much bother. And he was in the middle of a murder investigation.
In the old days, maybe after…But these days he didn’t need the complications a personal relationship would bring. Although, he wouldn’t mind getting to know Kennett better…He drifted off again, letting his mind wander just a little. Kennett’s lips looked soft and inviting.
Simon didn’t often like to kiss, but he thought he might like it with Kennett. There was something about his mouth that made Simon want to try. Perhaps because it was so constantly filled with sarcasm. What would he be like to kiss, Simon wondered? Would he be assertive and sharp edged, pushing Simon around where he wanted him, as on guard as he seemed to be normally? Or would he let his defences down and be soft and a little bit tender and let Simon gentle him?
He came back to himself with a jump and the start of an embarrassing erection under the book in his lap, and quashed himself thoroughly. No need for that sort of thing, not with someone involved in a case. Maybe afterwards though…Kennett had said he went to the pub, hadn’t he? Perhaps he’d come for a drink with Simon.
He sighed and finally opened the small brown journal.
He regretted doing so almost immediately. He couldn’t believe it was true. He leafed through page after page of what purported to be a diary from someone travelling in northern India a hundred and fifty years ago. Monsters, caves, a man searching for the thing that had killed his wife. It was fiction, surely? Kennett was having a joke with him.
But…why would he do that? Kennett didn’t seem the sort of man who’d muck around like this. He realised the severity of the situation. A woman was dead. His friend had been accused of the murder.
And…Simon had put his reputation on the line fabricating a statement for no really good reason except empathy, shielding them from the social consequences of being lovers.
He winced, shutting his eyes and leaning his head on the back of the armchair. Shit. He shouldn’t have done it. What had possessed him? His mouth twisted. Now, by following the spirit rather than the letter of the law, he’d put himself in a position where these people, whom he barely knew…he winced at the realisation…could ruin him by telling the truth.
And…Kennett was surely trying to manipulate him by showing him this book. Kennett could have taken it off him. Not let him see it.
He stopped himself. That was unfair. He’d waltzed off with the book. Kennett had tried to prevent him. The other man could have told him it was fiction, if he’d wanted to discredit its provenance. But he hadn’t.
Simon sighed again. He’d done what he’d done because he liked Kennett and Dr Marks and Miss Hall-Bridges. The whole peculiar household. Why should their lives be ruined because of whatever was going on here? Reluctantly he opened the book and began at the beginning.
Some of the writing was difficult to read. It was very old and the writer had used a variety of different inks, some of which had faded more than others. It began as a travel journal, an educated eighteenth-century man’s observations on natural history, people, and his surroundings in the Himalayas. But after the death of his wife, killed by bandits at some point during their travels with their young child, the journal took a different, more sinister tone.
Simon pushed his glasses up onto the top of his head. That was the supper bell. The rest of it would have to wait until later.
He sat down with it again for half an hour before bed and it got more and more like a diary from an adventure novel as he progressed with it late into the night. Drawings of cave systems and a kind of code on some of the pages that someone had clearly made an effort to translate, right at the back. Then he noticed that the hand in the back half of the book was different to that of the beginning. He began to read more fully rather than skimming.
When he got to the end he sighed and closed the back cover carefully. It made sense, as a story. Creatures that took on the form of humans and animals, hollowing them out from inside or absorbing their bodies and taking on their form; portals into another place…just up his jigger as a keen fan of Verne and Wells. But to insist it was real as Kennett had done…
Well.
He thought it over as he cleaned his teeth and readied himself for bed. It might explain why Mrs Leamington and Miss Royce were convinced they’d heard Miss Hall-Bridges return to the house, though. If one were living in a fantastical eighteenth-century story, not modern England.
He was still mulling it over as he fell asleep. That may have been the reason his dreams were turgid and peculiar. Kennett made an approach toward him and when Simon reached out and grasped the other man, he began to morph into a gelatinous creature whose touch burned Simon’s hands. He woke up at first light sweating, disturbed, and achingly aroused.
He needed to talk to the inhabitants of Courtfield House again if he was to make sense of the book. Or was he simply looking for a reason to see Kennett? He didn’t honestly know. For some reason his usual pragmatic approach to life had deserted him.