Saturday morning was so fine and sunny I wanted an excuse to be outdoors. First of all, however, I had to phone the garage, which didn’t wake up till about nine fifteen. When I finally got through, Paul could scarcely restrain a guffaw at the idea of such a small outfit making home visits, especially when the car in question was on their premises.
‘The good news, though,’ he said, ‘is that the insurance inspector came yesterday afternoon, and he’s given the go-ahead for all the repair work. We convinced him – and he didn’t take much convincing – that the brake-pipe had been vandalised, not worn out. So she’s up on the ramps now. All systems going.’
‘How much more active life would you say she’s got before she starts costing me money?’
‘Well, your clutch seems a bit notchy. And I’d like to get the timing chain changed soon – just to be on the safe side. One of the dampers – oh, nothing urgent. Why do you ask?’
If I bought a new car – one with a warranty, one that wouldn’t need frequent repairs – it would reduce his business, wouldn’t it?
‘I could have fallen in love,’ I said, ‘with my hired Fiesta.’
‘Come and talk to us before you commit yourself to any particular make,’ he said immediately. ‘And be sure to test-drive everything going. Even the less obvious ones.’
I promised I would. Knowing Paul’s absolute loathing of answerphones, I gave him my number at UWM, wished him a quiet weekend, and rang off.
The next thing on my list was to phone Chris: answerphone at home, of course, and no reply from his Smethwick extension. I tried the general switchboard without too many expectations, none of which would have been fulfilled anyway. At least I’d left a message.
Now for the rest of my day. An obvious thing to do was to cycle to the butcher’s to sort out the meat for the following Friday evening. After all, I’d spent a long night thinking about the menu – anything, I suppose, to keep the thoughts of poor Carla at bay. My answerphone was switched on: if Peter Kirby or Harvinder Mann wanted to reach me, they could leave a message.
Yes, it was a wonderful day; shame about the wind which must have come straight from Siberia. When I was a kid, I listened open-mouthed to local lore that if you stood on a particular Black Country hill – the one nearest to our house, as it happened – the next high outcrop would be the Urals. I’ve never checked it out, not even to see how high the Urals are, but it’s certainly true that the West Midlands plateau suffers in an east wind and we feel a peculiar pride that it’s come all the way from Russia. As I locked my bike outside Roger Brown’s I heard teeth being sucked. Shrewd eyes scanned the sky: ‘Too cold for snow,’ people were saying – and this was Harborne, remember, suburb of cosmopolitan Birmingham, not some Thomas Hardy village.
The meat order quickly and easily dealt with, I had to endure some ribbing from Roger and his lads about the performance of the English team – another overnight collapse, with even Mike managing no more than twenty-nine. I couldn’t resist buying some steak and chicken for this weekend. Then to the shop next door – like Roger’s, organic – to order vegetables, and thence to the deli to organise cheese. At both I found myself buying enough for the weekend as well as Tom Bowen’s dinner party. Next to the florist’s, where I agreed to trust Malcolm’s judgement as to the best value flowers when Friday dawned. But I was unable to resist some long-stemmed hot-house anemones, despite my strictures to myself about personal spending and waste of world resources.
Now what? Home, via the newsagent’s to pick up the Guardian. Since the Birmingham Post’s front page carried a paragraph about Carla’s death, I bought that too. The brevity of the item confirmed what I suspected – the police would be as cagey as possible. Nothing on the answerphone. No point in even thinking about the garden with a frost this hard. And so it dawned on me. The only displacement activity possible this weekend was the dreaded housework.
I was just dusting the first windowsill when I noticed Aggie struggling to hang out her washing. I was outside before you could say peg.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I yelled. ‘And without a coat too.’
She looked sheepish. ‘Only it seemed a lovely day for my whites. But I reckon they’re freezing in the basket.’
‘Go and let me in: I’ll do them for you.’
She obeyed with surprising – indeed, alarming – docility. The hand I squeezed as I went through her door was icy.
‘Why don’t you make us a cup of tea?’ I said.
Outside, I was glad of the jacket I’d slipped on. My hands too were blue when I’d finished. I’d had to repeg some of the towels: either her eyes or her grip weren’t up to it. I bit my lip; the thought of Aggie becoming really old, not just the kind old lady who’d kept an eye on me ever since I’d moved in, was appalling. Hell, she was the nearest I’d got to a family. Steph wasn’t really part of my life and my father absolutely not part of it.
‘You all right, me love?’ she demanded when I dived back into the warmth of her kitchen.
‘This wind,’ I said. ‘It whips the tears from your eyes.’ I scrubbed my cheeks.
She nodded. ‘They was saying on the radio that this here wind-chill factor would make it more like minus five this morning. And goodness knows what it’ll be down to tonight. I thought I’d better put the paraffin light on in my shed tonight. Don’t want to lose all my fuchsias, now.’
‘You knock on the wall to remind me and I’ll come and do it. Come on, Aggie. Imagine if that hip of yours let you down outside in that sort of temperature.’
‘Wouldn’t last five minutes, would I?’ She sounded remarkably cheerful about it. ‘They say as you just feel very tired and your heart slows down and—’
‘And all this time you’re in excruciating pain from that hip.’ I edged to her living room and sat down. Often I had to make my excuses and dash, but there was no way I’d budge today. But how was I to be tactful? I didn’t want to sound as if I wanted to be rid of her.
The heat enveloped me. ‘Oh, you’ve got it nice and cosy in here.’ I slipped off my jacket. The jumper would come off next.
‘Nice and cosy. That’s it.’ She sat opposite me, on her favourite chair. ‘My granddaughter always says it’s baking hot, and how she can’t breathe. And her place – she likes the windows open all the time. Even in winter. All them draughts!’ She shuddered. Her place was virtually hermetically sealed, with secure secondary glazing fitted by the friend who’d transformed my home into Fortress Sophie. Then she leant closer, as if there were unkind ears to hear. ‘Trouble is, the heating bills. The government’s supposed to give us all this extra money if it’s cold, aren’t they? But they always seem to wriggle out of it. I suppose …’ She plucked at the crocheted blanket which made a nest of her chair. ‘I suppose you and Chris couldn’t move my bed down here, could you? Only it’d save having to heat upstairs all night. I could use my little gasfire.’
Her gasfire was a museum piece.
‘When did you last have it checked?’ I asked dubiously.
‘This gas isn’t poisonous, not like the old sort.’
‘No, but carbon monoxide can poison you. If the flue’s not working properly.’ I took a deep breath. ‘You wouldn’t have any of these problems in a nice bungalow, would you? And you always talked of going into a sheltered home. Down near your granddaughters.’
‘Move to Evesham? But when all’s said and done, this is my home. All my stuff …’ She gestured.
‘You could take most of it. The things that really matter. Come on, you’d have a grand old time sorting it out.’
There was a long silence. Had I gone too far?
‘I’d have to have some new glasses for that,’ she said at last. ‘And that new young man, the one that took over from that nice Mr Plumley, he’s not a scrap of good. He says these are as strong as he can give me, and I can’t even read my paper with them.’
‘Did he think you might need some drops or something?’
‘What do you know about my eyes?’
I’d better be straight with her. ‘When you were talking about that man who came looking for me, you told me about his smell, nothing else.’
She shifted in her chair. ‘I don’t want no operation, Sophie, and that’s the truth. Them lasers – they’re what they use to kill people, aren’t they?’
‘And to cure them. Didn’t they use one to fix Mrs Thatcher’s retina?’
She cackled. ‘See, I told you as they were killers!’
I didn’t point out that Thatcher was still alive.
She chewed her lip. ‘You reckon I ought to go and see them at the eye clinic?’
‘I’ll take you myself if I’m free. Or talk Chris into it if I’m not.’
‘No, he’ll be too busy. There’s always that nice Ian, the one who had me to his retirement party.’
There was indeed. And I suspected there was a certain cachet about being escorted by a personable male, albeit one in his fifties.
She smacked her hand on her thigh. ‘That’s who he reminded me of. That man. He reminded me of young Ian.’
Who was thickening about the waist, but still maintained, despite its visible retreat, a reasonable head of hair.
‘Except his voice: that was more like Chris or you.’
Not much Brummie accent then. You could still just detect a note of Scotland in Chris’s, if you listened hard enough.
‘If only I could see better.’ She rubbed the offending eyes. ‘You really think I should go, don’t you?’
‘I said, I’ll take you.’
‘No, into a little flat. With a warder.’
‘You know as well as I do it’s a warden.’ I leant over and squeezed her hand. ‘I’d like to say no, Aggie, because I love you and you’re better than any gran in the world to me. But if I were you, I’d want to choose where I was going to live, not have someone else do it for me. Why don’t I give your granddaughters a buzz and get them to fix an appointment for you to go round one?’
‘There are two lots I could try. One bungalows, one flats.’
‘Maybe you could stay down there a couple of nights.’
She nodded. ‘So long as you tell them to shut the windows. I don’t want no draughts, remember.’
This time there were a couple of calls waiting for me. The first was from Ian, offering me his satellite and his spare bed, just in case there was an Australian collapse and Mike should be batting again. I accepted for Sunday and promised to fill him in on Aggie: he’d always liked her and would no doubt do everything he could. The other was from Harvinder Mann. My business with him would have to wait till I’d spoken to Lucy, Aggie’s favourite granddaughter.
‘I’m on duty tomorrow morning,’ she said. ‘And I’ve got something booked for the evening. But if you could pack a case for her, I could make a flying visit after lunch and collect her. She could stay here while we looked for a more permanent place. That is,’ she added, ‘if she doesn’t want to live here. Oh, Sophie, I’d no idea things were so bad. Why didn’t she tell me?’
‘Why didn’t she tell any of us? I only found out by chance. And when she started talking about having her bed brought downstairs, I was really worried, believe me. The thing is, Lucy, I don’t think she wants to do more than visit you: I really think she’d be happier in her own place.’
‘So she can build up a nice thick fug,’ she laughed. ‘I bet she told you to tell me to keep all the windows closed! Yes, she’d be better off somewhere warden-controlled with emergency buttons and things. After all, I couldn’t give up work to look after her.’
‘Can you imagine her letting you? Oh, I shall really miss her, you know …’
When I got round to it, it wasn’t easy to return Harvinder’s call. He wasn’t on his direct-call extension, and when I tried to penetrate the general switchboard to leave a message I was tempted to give up in despair. At last my phone started its little double chirrup. Someone was hearing this BT voice telling them she was trying to connect them and that I knew they were waiting. A live caller beat a dead switchboard any day.
It took me a second to place the caller: I never heard the tiny Asian sing-song in Harvinder’s voice when he was face to face.
‘Hey! What a coincidence! I was just trying to phone you back!’
He sounded stressed. ‘Really – look, I hope I’m not interrupting your lunch?’
Was it that time already?
‘Not even thought about it yet,’ I said.
‘I wonder, then, if you could spare time to join me in a quick pub lunch? We could meet halfway between here and Smethwick? I’m afraid there aren’t too many places of gastronomic excellence round here.’
‘Don’t believe all Chris tells you about me and food,’ I said. ‘You name the pub and I’ll be there. Oh, and not too close to the Hawthorns – I think the Albion are playing at home this afternoon.’
We settled on the Pheasant, a thirties place opposite Warley Woods, largely because despite the cold I fancied a brisk after-lunch walk in an open space with plenty of folk within yelling distance. The sandwiches were fresh and the mild good. Harvinder was quiet and anxious.
I munched and waited. He’d asked me, after all, and perhaps he was having second thoughts.
‘It’s these coincidences,’ he said, chasing a fragment of someone else’s crisp round a beer mat. ‘I don’t like coincidences.’ He looked up at me and grinned. ‘Even when it’s just a matter of people trying to phone each other at the same time.’
I laughed. And waited.
‘Three canal deaths,’ he said. ‘Well, one was near enough. Peter says it’s all nonsense. No connection between the two Asian deaths; no connection between the two canal deaths. Just coincidence. But …’ He shook his head and sipped his bitter. ‘And the budget’s so tight, Sophie: they want us to fight crime with no resources. All this fuss about people being falsely imprisoned! What about those guilty ones still roaming the streets free to kill again?’
I didn’t think the word fuss appropriate if you’d been banged up for years for a crime you hadn’t committed. But the important thing was the cases now in hand. Carla’s especially.
‘Are you involved in the investigations into Carla’s death?’
‘I want to be. I went along to her long boat yesterday.’
‘Narrow boat,’ I said. Funny how I can never resist making factual corrections. ‘Long boats are what the Norse invaders came in.’
He looked puzzled. ‘But I thought the canals were nineteenth century?’
‘Eighteenth, anyway.’
His expression, hitherto one of gloom to the point of depression, suddenly lightened. ‘Are you sure? Wouldn’t it explain a lot if these Norse invaders had had to pull their sails down to get through the tunnels – a sort of getting-a-ship-into-a-bottle routine?’
‘In that case, the horns on the invaders’ helmets must have struck sparks from the tunnel roofs and set fire to the sails! That must be the true explanation for the funeral pyre ships!’
He didn’t look convinced. ‘But perhaps that’s why they did all that raping and looting: because their sails caught fire.’
‘That’s right! Really pissed off they’d be – coming all this way only to lose their sails!’ I was laughing so much my sides hurt.
He was wiping his eyes. ‘Oh, if only history at school could have been like this. I might have remembered some of it. We had all this project work for GCSE and I know a great deal about a very little. Oh dear.’ One last giggle and he was serious again.
Reluctantly, I took my cue from him. ‘But to get back to our narrow boat. Chris says there was evidence to suggest Carla was a heavy drinker. And this Geordie neighbour says the same.’
‘With due respect to Chris, the Geordie neighbour – Eric … er, Eric—’
‘Eric Bloodaxe!’ I started to giggle again and choked on my mild.
‘Or Eric the Red!’
‘Discovering America!’
‘A bit late. And it’d have to land on him, not him on it, the way he is!’ He slapped me on the back, before saying, with a great effort at seriousness, ‘Eric Conrad says it sounded as if she was having a great party—’ he looked at me with concern ‘—one night this week. Tuesday or Wednesday. He can’t quite remember which.’
I coughed hard and managed to ask, ‘Too pissed himself?’
‘Probably. And probably in denial: he claims half the bottles in the bin were hers. But if we got Fingerprints on to them we’d probably find otherwise. In any case, there were plenty of bottles on her boat. All tidied up into a kitchen bin, as it happens.’
‘It might be interesting to fingerprint them. Resources permitting,’ I added primly.
‘What might you expect to find?’ His eyes started to twinkle in response.
I shrugged. ‘Someone else’s. God knows whose. Just someone else’s.’
‘You still cling to what she said about not drinking.’
‘She specifically said she was an alcoholic and didn’t touch the stuff. Ever. The bottle of Perrier I took to her boat – she’d said I could take booze but it didn’t seem fair – is still in the car. Just Perrier. No flowers, no chocs. A rather ungracious guest.’
‘Did you expect her not to be there?’
I took him through an account of my attempts to run her to earth.
‘So you weren’t really hopeful of seeing her?’
‘Some time on Friday, a word-processed note appeared on her door, telling us students that she was unavailable because she was doing research. The funny thing is, her research record doesn’t appear to be very … strong.’ I told him what Mike had found. Or not found.
‘Another of these strange coincidences. Sophie, you know Chris well. What do I have to do to persuade him to change his mind? To let me have resources … manpower?’
Was this what he’d been wanting to ask, all through lunch? It could be. He’d offered no other explanation. I’d give him an honest answer. ‘Easy,’ I said. ‘Find something the SOCOs may come up with. Hard evidence. By the way, if you see him, tell him there’s a message for him on his answerphone at home. Aggie – did you ever meet my neighbour? – intercepted a visitor yesterday. He said he’d come from my garage. He hadn’t.’
He was just setting down his empty glass. ‘Do we have another coincidence here?’
‘You tell me.’
He shook his head, looking at his watch. ‘I don’t know, either. I must be getting back, I’m afraid.’
We stood up, and headed for the door. As we stepped into the bitter wind, he pulled his collar round his ears. ‘What are you doing this afternoon, Sophie?’
‘I had planned to go for a walk through the woods.’
‘Well, just remember,’ he said, kissing my cheek, ‘if you don’t want a big surprise, you’d better go in disguise.’