‘Thank you,’ Barbara said, taking her drink. ‘What have you been doing to Annie?’
‘Why?’ Harry sat down, looking aggrieved. ‘What’s she been saying?’
‘Nothing much. I just get the impression that you’re in rather bad odour there.’
‘That’s par for the course,’ he said.
‘I take it that is she? The one you were saving yourself for?’
‘Are you jealous?’ he asked with a grin.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I find a little touch of Harry goes a long way.’
Harry couldn’t think of a rejoinder, so he abandoned the conversation. ‘You’ve been a right little clever Dick, haven’t you?’ he said with a grin. ‘Finding out all about Mrs Wright – I don’t suppose you’ve also worked out what Culver could have given her?’
‘Given her?’
‘It seems, according to your mate Mrs Thomas, that she said “He gave me”, and never finished her sentence.’
‘How irritating,’ Barbara said.
‘She got interrupted, and the conversation was forgotten,’ Harry explained.
‘But that could be anything,’ Barbara said. ‘He gave me a bunch of flowers, he gave me a headache.’
Harry nodded. ‘He’s given me one or two,’ he said.
‘He gave me to understand that he was single,’ Barbara said.
‘That’s not impossible, either.’
Barbara thought. ‘A funny look,’ she said.
‘Change of a fiver,’ Harry suggested.
‘A rosy glow.’
‘A cold in the head.’
‘His undivided attention,’ said Barbara proudly.
‘The impression that he might be Welsh,’ Harry said, triumphantly, and they both laughed.
They stopped laughing rather self-consciously as Annie came over, carrying the evening paper.
‘Room 223,’ she said, handing Barbara her key. ‘I hope you enjoy your stay.’
‘I’m not sure enjoy is the right word,’ Barbara said. ‘I’m sure it will be interesting.’
Harry put his beer down. ‘Culver could have been in the taxi when it had its accident,’ he said. ‘He had a black eye when he got home that he didn’t have leaving here.’
‘Well, it’s more likely than Tom Webb taking a swipe at him,’ Annie said. ‘But Gerald couldn’t have been in the taxi.’
‘Why not?’ A chorus from Harry and Barbara.
‘Because Tom says the accident happened on the other side of the road. By the building site – he had to have been coming from Harmouth. He thinks it must have happened earlier.’
Harry picked up his pint, momentarily happy with that. ‘No!’ he exclaimed, with a vehemence that sent his beer over the side of his mug on to the table. ‘Why would Fowler go about with a smashed indicator – risk a fine? If it had happened earlier, he’d have changed his vehicle. There were plenty of cars. Hardly any of them drive on Sundays.’
‘Tom would have checked all that,’ Annie said.
‘He wouldn’t,’ Harry said, stubbing out a barely smoked cigarette in his eagerness to get hold of the idea that was forming. ‘As far as he’s concerned, the accident has nothing to do with it.’
Annie picked up her drink. ‘Are you so sure it has?’ she asked.
‘I think it’s got everything to do with it,’ he said.
‘Perhaps he skidded over to the wrong side of the road, and—’
Barbara said.
But Harry was discounting that before she had time to finish the sentence.
‘Webb would have known if he’d skidded,’ he said, making skid marks in the spilled beer, remembering the building site.
He picked up his beer and sat back, smiling happily. He wasn’t sure where it got him, but he was pretty sure that he knew what Culver had given Rosemary Wright.
‘Would you excuse me a moment?’ Barbara said.
It had had to come. The moment when he was alone with Annie. He had not been looking forward to it. ‘Hurry back,’ he said, as Barbara made her way to the ladies’ room. He felt rather like a schoolboy outside the headmaster’s study.
‘All right,’ Annie said, as soon as Barbara was out of earshot. ‘What surprise do you have up your sleeve for tomorrow?’
Harry held up a hand. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I did a sort of deal with her.’
‘A sort of deal,’ she said. ‘Well – why didn’t you say? A deal’s a deal, isn’t it, Harry?’
‘She can help out – she can talk to Webb for us. I can hardly do that, ‘he said.
‘She’s a reporter.’
‘So? You like her, don’t you?’
‘That’s not the point!’ she whispered fiercely. ‘I’m only in this mess because I was avoiding reporters,’ she said. ‘And you invite one to stay.’
‘She’s only interested in who murdered these people and why,’ he said. ‘She’s not interested—’
‘I know what she’s not interested in. You told me.’ She picked up the newspaper and thrust it into his hands. ‘Read it,’ she said. ‘See how uninterested they are in – what did you call it? Unimaginative extramural activities?’
Harry grinned.
‘I’m glad you think it’s funny!’ She jumped up. ‘I’m expecting the police to come walking in here any minute, and you think it’s funny!’
‘Did he say he was going to the police?’ Harry asked. ‘Did he?’
‘Not in so many words,’ Annie admitted. ‘But he hinted. “Do the police know Mr Culver was in the habit of visiting you, Mrs Maddox?”’ She mimicked Grant’s precise, too-English accent.
‘He was just trying to frighten you.’
‘He’s succeeded,’ she said.
‘Look, he thinks because he took you to dinner that you’re his property, and it’s hands off everyone else. He was just trying to get rid of me.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Annie said. ‘I don’t think he’s interested in me – he’s taken up with Sandra. That’s who was in London with him.’
‘He doesn’t like the police,’ Harry persisted. ‘He won’t tell them anything he doesn’t have to.’
‘Like the rest of us,’ Annie said bitterly. ‘It must be contagious.’
‘We’ve all got our reasons,’ Harry said.
‘Oh, sure.’
Barbara came back, much to Harry’s relief.
‘I’d like you to see Webb as soon as possible,’ he said. ‘You might catch him in here tonight, if you’re lucky.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Do I mention your name?’
Harry smiled. ‘Not if you’re fond of your front teeth,’ he said. ‘Oh – and while you’re at it, ask him how whoever it was got into Grant’s car.’
‘How am I supposed to drag that in?’
‘You can say that you’re wondering if the sudden rise in the Amblesea crime rate is connected,’ Harry said. ‘Even Webb must be wondering that by this time.’
‘His car wasn’t locked,’ said Annie. ‘And he’d left the key in it. Tom had a few choice words to say about that.’
‘Grant says it wasn’t locked,’ Harry said.
‘I’m sure it wasn’t,’ Annie said. ‘I even had to close his boot for him – that’s how I know it was there at quarter past three.’
Eagerly, Harry leant forward. ‘You closed his boot? Did you get a look inside?’
‘No,’ Annie said. ‘But I think I’d have noticed if there had been a body in there, Harry.’
Harry got up and switched the television off as the drum roll began. Barbara had indeed collared Webb when he came in for his evening snifter; they must have hit it off, because they had gone off somewhere together.
‘Do you think they’re going to arrest Grant?’ Annie asked.
‘Not enough to go on.’ Harry flopped back down on to the sofa. ‘They need evidence. And with a bit of luck, I’ll find it before Webb does.’
A sigh was Annie’s rejoinder.
‘Where’s Grant decided to sleep tonight?’ Harry asked.
‘I think he’s staying here,’ said Annie. She waited a moment before going on. ‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘Where were you thinking of sleeping?’
Harry leant back, and folded his arms. ‘With you,’ he said.
Her dark eyes rested on his face. ‘I don’t think I want you to,’ she said.
‘I don’t care,’ he answered. ‘I love you, Annie, and I’d rather be with you, but I’ll sleep on the sofa, or the floor, or a chair outside the door, if you like. Because until this gets sorted out, I’m not leaving you alone.’
Her gaze fell away from his. ‘I can’t be sure whether you think I’ve murdered everyone else, or that everyone else wants to murder me,’ she said.
‘That’s the way it is,’ Harry argued. ‘You said so yourself. You’re the connection.’
‘Oh, sleep where you like!’ she snapped, defeated.
Webb dropped Barbara at the hotel, and drove home.
He’d been glad of the diversion; she was a nice girl. He’d tried to be the friendly neighbourhood copper for her, but he wasn’t sure he had succeeded.
She had had to leave some time; he couldn’t delay going back to his lonely flat any longer.
If only Karen had come with him, when he had asked her to. But no, she was going to tell James. It was only right, she had said, and Grant’s crack about the woman’s magazine came back to him.
If only she had just come with him. It needn’t have ended like this.
Where Harry liked to sleep was beside Annie, who, despite what she had said, now lay drowsily in his arms. Her lips touched his shoulder, and he smiled. He had never felt like this about anyone, and he had felt just the same during her brief inclusion on his list of suspects. He had discovered that he didn’t care what she had done.
But, he reasoned, if she had done it – been capable of it – she wouldn’t be the Annie who inspired the Sir Galahad in him. She wouldn’t be the Annie whose belief that she owed the world some sort of explanation made him so angry that he would be insufferably rude to her. She wouldn’t be the Annie with whom, in Barbara’s words, he had been smitten from the moment that he had read those letters to Culver.
Annie wouldn’t want to know that, and he would never tell her. But that was when it had started, before he’d even met her. And Harry wasn’t there because his top-drawer wife got too much for him now and then, because he wanted somewhere to watch Grandstand and eat fish and chips. He was there because he wanted Annie.
Tonight, Annie had wanted him, and for a while life had seemed beautifully simple. All they had had to do was please one another, and that was what they had done.
Harry had felt triumphant, exalted, as if instinct’s temporary eclipse of intellect had been some sort of achievement, and perhaps it had. But now the euphoria was wearing off, and Annie, cradled in his arms, was still at the centre of something he did not understand. He closed his eyes, but he didn’t sleep, though his thoughts began to merge together, to become irrational, and he tried to pluck himself back from the edge of dreaming.
A gold key swung from a piece of string around Annie’s waist. She undid the string, swinging the key just out of his reach. Opening a box, she dropped the key into it, then held the box out to him. But as he got closer, Annie got further away. She was wearing the coat she had worn when he met her on the beach, but Harry knew that it wasn’t her coat at all. It was Karen Grant’s coat, and when she took it off, she wasn’t Annie any more, but Christine. Christine gave him the box, but the key had gone, and the string was now rope, still fuzzily new. And Christine was dead.
He sat up, wide awake.
‘Sorry,’ Annie murmured. ‘Did I wake you?’
Harry frowned. ‘I wasn’t asleep.’
Annie moved deliciously in his arms, and kissed him, a long slow gentle kiss that should have taken his mind off his half-dream. But it remained with him, because it hadn’t been a dream, not really. He must have been thinking something to trigger it off. His conscious mind had been taking a back seat, allowing his thoughts to flow and fuse and become a sequence that he so nearly understood. Perhaps it was something he’d noticed, something someone had said.
He told Annie the dream, and she listened. But he didn’t tell her the end, and that was the bit that was tugging away at his mind. In a vague, superstitious way, he wished it was morning, so that he could see that Christine was alive and well.
He pulled Annie closer to him, suddenly afraid of losing her.
‘What are you doing here so early?’ Sandra asked.
‘I just came to see if you needed anything. I didn’t like to think of you all alone, not well.’
The truth was that Grant had needed something to do, something to take his mind off everything. He hadn’t slept, and he had left the hotel early before anyone could ask him any questions. Sandra was the only person he knew who wouldn’t be asking questions.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, her larynx failing her.
‘I’ve spoken to my solicitor,’ he began. ‘He’ll come to see you if—’
‘Why would I need a solicitor?’
‘No reason – I just thought you might feel better if—’
‘It’s not a solicitor I need – it’s a doctor.’
‘Do you want me to phone your doctor?’
She sighed. ‘No. It’s just a cold. Why are you really here?’ she asked.
‘Because I don’t want to see people,’ he said, dropping the pretence. ‘I needed somewhere to go. And you said you didn’t want to be alone, so I thought you’d like some company.’
‘I told you,’ she said. ‘I’d rather you didn’t come here. Please.’
So he drove around, because he didn’t want to go back to the hotel, and people. And he didn’t want to go home, to where the police had been into everything. Everything private.
If only he had kept Karen’s note – he could still see it, propped up on the mantelpiece, and feel the contempt with which he had torn it in two and let it fall on to the flames. Contempt, and relief, perhaps, that she had gone.
Sometimes, when she was being particularly irritating, when the very things that had attracted him to her were driving him to distraction, he had felt like murdering her. But he hadn’t.
He hadn’t.
‘Good morning!’ Christine, alive and well.
Harry beamed as he went up to the desk. ‘I’m very pleased to see you,’ he said.
‘Oh? Why?’
‘Never mind. Isn’t Linda usually on in the mornings?’
‘It’s her day off. I’ll be working for ever if Sandra doesn’t come in. She’s got a terrible cold.’
‘Why did you lie to the police, Christine?’ Harry asked, killing her smile with the verbal slap in the face.
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Of course you do,’ he said impatiently. ‘You said Pete was with you when Fowler was killed.’
‘He was!’
‘No, Christine, he wasn’t. Because you thought he’d stolen Grant’s car, and that was at the same time.’
The defiance evaporated. ‘I thought you were drunk,’ she said. ‘I’d hoped you hadn’t noticed.’
‘I’m quite often drunk,’ Harry said. ‘I always notice.’
The switchboard buzzed, and she ignored it. ‘I didn’t see Pete until about half past five,’ she said. ‘I said he was with me because he’d been on his own and he couldn’t prove it.’
‘What made him think he’d have to?’ Harry asked.
‘They’d already questioned him about another taxi driver,’ Christine said hotly. ‘Just because he’s been in trouble – no other reason. The man said it wasn’t Pete, and they had to let him go. But when he heard about Fowler, he knew they’d be after him again. It’s not fair!’
The polite, muted buzz continued.
‘Do you still think he nicked the car?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s told me where he was now.’
Harry waited.
‘It was Lesley,’ she said. ‘She’d told him she’d see him. He waited for her at the flat, but she didn’t turn up.’
She finally answered the switchboard. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s here, as it happens. Yes, I’ll tell him.’ She hung up. ‘Barbara,’ she said. ‘She says to go up in about twenty minutes.’
‘Thank you,’ Harry said. ‘How come Sandra didn’t see Pete when he finally did get here?’ he asked.
‘It was half past five,’ Christine explained. ‘It was Linda who was on the desk. And no one asked her.’ She paused. ‘Are you going to tell Tom Webb about me?’ she asked.
‘Who, me?’ Harry answered, and wandered off to kill twenty minutes.
In the games room, he idly threw darts while he thought.
The dream that wasn’t really a dream had been running through his mind while he had been talking to Christine, and he was trying to analyse its parts.
A key, a box, Annie, a coat (Karen Grant’s coat?), Christine, dead.
Karen Grant was thought to be the body, because someone, perhaps Webb, had recognised the clothes, and Grant had confirmed that they were his wife’s.
Annie took off Karen Grant’s coat, and turned into Christine.
Take the coat off, and it isn’t who you thought it was.
Christine dead. Christine was the body.
Why Christine? Why, in that half-conscious state, had he produced Christine?
Karen Grant’s clothes, Christine’s face.
His dart hit the wall beside the board. Of course. That was his mental image of her, the only information his mind had had to go on.
And Harry knew that he was beginning, at last, to see the answer. There was some more work to be done, but it was there.
‘Wetherill’s,’ he said, handing Barbara a piece of paper with the address.
‘Don’t you want to know what Webb told me?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Well, to be honest, nothing very much. The body was on the pier for between eight and ten weeks. There is evidence of stab wounds, but they can’t say for certain yet that that’s what killed her. In the absence of any other apparent injuries, they’re assuming that it is. They found some bits of old rope beside the body which—’
‘Were cut off the pier gates, which the murderer then tied up with new stuff,’ Harry said.
‘Very good,’ Barbara said approvingly. ‘They think she was dumped there after she was dead. They haven’t ruled out a connection with Fowler’s murder. Tom says they’ve still got some tests to do, and think they’ll get a positive ID at the end of them.’
‘Tom, eh? Where did you two slope off to?’
Barbara winked, then laughed. ‘Nowhere very romantic. He took me to the police station, so that I could see some other people. We were there for ages – I thought he was going to arrest me.’
‘Good. Keep him sweet, pet – we might need him. That place—’ He indicated the piece of paper. ‘– is a clothing factory in Harmouth. Find someone who knows a Lesley Osborne. She used to work there, and she must have had friends.’
Barbara glanced at the paper. ‘Whereabouts is it?’ she asked.
‘The docks. It used to be a bonded warehouse.’
‘And who is Lesley Osborne? Do you think she can help?’
Harry nodded. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I think she can. Say you’re an old friend – I want to find out where she went when she left Amblesea. Any sort of lead you can get. They’re more likely to tell a girlfriend where to find her than a man, or I’d have gone myself.’
‘I bet you would,’ she said.
‘Get going, then.’
‘One condition.’
Harry’s eyebrows twitched upwards.
‘I get to come with you wherever it is.’
He could hardly refuse. If he did, she’d go by herself.
‘Is it a deal?’ she asked.
‘It’s a deal.’
Barbara hurried off, and Harry stayed for a moment in her room. He’d been right. The images his mind had conjured up hadn’t been a dream. They were the thoughts tucked away at the back of his mind, the information in his data banks. And he had the uncomfortable feeling that the important part remained in there.
The key was the lift key, the string was the new rope on the pier gates. No mystery about that. But the box – Annie put the key in the box, and closed it.
He locked Barbara’s door, and handed the key to Christine just as Annie appeared, seeing her auditor off the premises.
‘I’ve had a thought,’ he began, but as he spoke, Annie’s face suddenly went quite blank, and she stood completely still, as though someone had switched her off.
Harry glanced at Christine, who stared behind him, and he turned to see a woman in the foyer. She was tall, auburn-haired, and good-looking. As good a pair of legs as he’d seen. And she was wearing a fur that would buy a good-sized semi, but even so, she wasn’t striking enough to cause that effect.
He smiled. ‘My name’s Lambert,’ he said, his hand outstretched. ‘And you must be Karen Grant.’