23

I stayed nearly an hour at Alfie’s, doing what little good I thought I could: just sitting there listening as he praised Anna’s many virtues, which to be honest, wasn’t easy. I left promising to pitch in with walking Georgina where needed. He didn’t seem to have any better idea than I did where the police were in their investigation.

I thought Oscar Mayhew, my old colleague, might have ways of finding out. That evening I shot him a test email. Oscar changed jobs often and there was no guarantee he’d be in the place where I’d left him. I soon received a reply with one of those paranoid legal disclaimers four inches long at the end, as happens whenever you communicate with any corporate email account, demanding that I delete any messages received in error and notify the authorities, or something. I thought it rather sweet that they imagined I was going to trash any juicy emails from my system just because they asked. But given the level of distrust under which news organizations operated, email didn’t seem the best forum to discuss a murder investigation. So I simply asked Oscar if he could meet me over drinks or lunch as soon as possible. He knew I lived in Weycombe; I figured he’d know what it was about.

We arranged to meet at Murano’s near St. Bride’s Church—known as the journalists’ church. If that isn’t an oxymoron, I don’t know what is. Anyway, the restaurant was hidden in a ganglia of lanes behind Fleet Street, where Oscar was now plying his trade alongside the other ink-stained wretches. He gave me good directions, saying he wanted to meet close to his offices to allow us time to talk. Not that it mattered: Oscar was the kind of reporter who set his own rules, seldom bothering to tell anyone where he was. He was known for turning off his mobile when he didn’t want to be disturbed. He might be out chasing a lead or getting blind drunk. With Oscar, the result might be the same—he’d get the breaking story no one sitting at their desk had even heard about until they saw the words running under his byline. He was a legend in the business, as much for his personal life as for his nose for news.

He’d run through three wives already. I’d asked him once why he bothered to get married and he’d said they all looked like different types before the marriage, and had all turned out to be the same woman afterward. This confession would have been more appealing had a couple of the previous wives not told me the hair-raising stories of life with Oscar, when he was seldom home and seldom sober—or alone—when he was. Still, he arrived on time for our meeting and as he politely pulled out a chair for me, he signaled the owner to bring the wine he’d already ordered. He’d not drunk a drop, awaiting my arrival, but I knew from experience we’d make up for lost time quickly. I was fine with that. Over drinks was always the best way to tease things out of Oscar.

The kitchen at Murano’s sounded like a construction site. Bam bam bam! Someone was making veal scaloppini. I took advantage of the distraction to study my former colleague across the starchy white tablecloth.

Oscar was the kind of guy who looked like he might have taught surfing or TM somewhere in his checkered past. He wore his hair long, often pulled into a Samurai-type folded ponytail at the nape of his neck. He was thirty-four years old but looked about twice that age—Philip Seymour Hoffmanesque, with everything about him as rumpled as a used paper bag. His shirt today looked slept-in; when he hugged me in greeting, I caught the faint smell of whiskey and cigarette smoke. He wore a tie in a concession to the occasion, loosely knotted. The jacket I’d seen on him many times, an old houndstooth check with what I imagined were real and necessary patches to keep the lower halves of the sleeves from falling off. It was pockmarked with burns from cigarette ash. More than once during our meal he excused himself from the table to stand outside the nonsmoking restaurant for a cigarette. If he’d taken advantage of the break to snort a line or two I wouldn’t have been surprised. He always looked a little too lively on his return.

He seemed to be emerging from one of his recurring bouts of catatonic stupor, which were interspersed with fits of manic hyperactivity. He had been totally out of place at the BBC, which, despite its finger-on-the-pulse pretensions to the contrary, is conservative to its core.

Oscar’s brief bursts of genius were the only reason the BBC had continued to employ him long past the date when saner heads would have had him committed. Just as they might be getting ready to give him the heave-ho, he would bring home the scoop every other news outlet had missed, for Oscar could find a story the way a dog can find a cadaver. He knew who to talk to, and who could get him in to talk to the source—the real source. God alone knows why, but people trusted him. It was said he’d been responsible for putting more than one criminal behind bars, and that there was a price on his head as a result. I guess I’d drink, too, if I had to live like that. And do coke: Oscar’s all-nighters were not possible without it, and he was not alone among his colleagues who had discovered better living through chemistry. But truth to tell, if it weren’t for people like Oscar we’d all end our days in some frozen gulag.

He’d come to the BBC from a rival program that had refused to air one of his documentaries charging corruption in Parliament. I gathered his whole career had been like that: once upper management bowed to pressure from an advertiser or anyone with deep pockets, he’d be gone. It was what I liked about him, of course. What everyone in the trade liked about him, even though the paranoia that stoked his personality could be trying to deal with. He claimed he’d been threatened, which I believed, and that he’d been wiretapped by Buckingham Palace, which I did not. At least, not entirely. His specialty was the time-consuming investigation and he had the patience of a spider, spinning an invisible web and sitting beside it for months or years, awaiting his prey. He’d been barred from more than one news conference for being disruptive—a code word for asking the questions nobody wanted to answer.

I hadn’t seen him since early summer, when I had called him out of the blue for a lunch date and been surprised to find him available—his assignments often took him overseas. The Monroes had been renovating their patio—Anna had designed, all by herself, an Italian Renaissance addition to her Tudor-style house, which as it turned out required jackhammers to be deployed round the clock. By week two of construction the noise had reduced me to a gibbering mass of creative profanities, most of them suggesting what Anna could do with her jackhammers. The resulting addition to her palazzo was lovely if incongruous, and more than one fence had needed mending once it was done. So Anna had thrown a huge party for the neighborhood. She was like that: do first, apologize later. She always thought she could charm her way out of anything. But by the time her invitation arrived, I’d had enough: I told her I was coming down with the flu, and Will went in my stead. He reported later that Anna had got very drunk on wine—Italian, of course—and that a few people had jumped into the pool in their underwear. I had mixed feelings about having missed that.

Anyway, because of the construction noise I’d taken to calling up old friends at random, seeing who was available to get me out of the village for a day before Anna came to grievous harm.

The waiter came to offer a tasting of the wine, and the cork, both of which Oscar waved away. “Just pour,” he said. He turned his attention to me and said, “Weycombe has its own hashtag on social media these days.”

I waited for the waiter to take himself off.

“It’s been … unreal,” I said.

“First tell me, how goes it with his lordship?” he asked. “Are you still finding it worthwhile, selling your soul to the peerage?”

Oscar did not like Will, and, as I think I mentioned, it was mutual. It wasn’t jealousy, as far as I could tell, even though Oscar had made it clear a few times he would be there to pick up the pieces if I needed someone. It was more a working man’s outlook, a class-hatred thing. Then again, Oscar hadn’t liked Ken, either, my boyfriend just before Will came along.

“He’s doing well,” I said. “He’s being groomed for promotion. Which is good. We could use the money. I did a lousy job selling my soul, you see. Will is only land-rich.”

This was true, as it happened. Will had inherited almost nothing when his father passed, apart from a few hand-me-down war souvenirs. I gathered there had been a bit of a sell-off of property to pay death taxes.

“Yeah. I’m sorry. About the job thing—sod the peerage’s land-rich problems. Anyway, I’ve got one ear to the ground for you, job-wise, but nothing has come open. You know I think you got a raw deal.”

“Thanks.” I took a long sip of wine. It was awkward, because I didn’t much want Oscar championing my cause. A referral from him, in many circles, was more of a condemnation.

We turned our attention to the lunch menu, both ordering the leek soup served with fresh-baked rosemary bread and topped with a slick of olive oil. We shared a soft buratina tied up like a bag of money with strands of celery. I chose pasta; Oscar ordered the veal.

It was the kind of place where the service was so unobtrusive you never saw a waiter unless you wanted one, and plates seemed to magically appear and disappear. A reviewer recently had called the place the best Italian restaurant outside of Sicily, and it was jumping with customers.

I’d told Oscar at the time about Anna and the jackhammers. Now he said, “So. I hear the jackhammer problem has been solved for good.”

I paused for a moment in spreading about a million calories of cheese on half a million calories of bread. The bread had seeds and nuts embedded in the crust and if I’d been smart, I’d have stopped with one slice. But Murano’s was the kind of indulgence I didn’t allow myself often. Weycombe, for all its five-star foodie posturing, still had a way to go to match London. I’d just walk further and faster the next day.

Settling my bread knife, I answered him. “You laugh, but you should see the village—hashtag Weycombe. People are terrified.”

“Why? From everything I know, and a few things you’ve told me, they’re better off without her.”

“They think they could be next.”

“Oh, not the serial killer theory. She was a thoroughly selfish woman who deserved to be shot. You said so yourself during the jackhammer jamboree.”

“I did not,” I mumbled through a mouthful of bread. I paused to wash it down with wine, a red from Palermo, plush with tannins. “I said someone should shoot her. I didn’t offer to do it for them.”

“No matter. She was strangled. And stabbed.”

I stopped the glass midway to my lips. “That’s certain, is it?”

“I thought you were the one who found her.”

“Yes, but I didn’t, you know, do an autopsy. At a glance she’d been strangled, yes. But she was stabbed?”

“Maybe they used a jackhammer.”

“Please. Would you be serious? Anyway, who is your source? Not the guy who runs the local paper, for sure. He’s still figuring out how to spell her name.”

Oscar smiled, a slight twist to his cupid’s-bow lips. “You know, you do have a bit of a wicked streak.”

I nodded, acknowledging the compliment. Coming from Oscar, it was a compliment. “You have someone in the police you’re talking with?” I asked.

“Yeah. And someone at the coroner’s. An acquaintance from school days.”

That absolutely figured. Oscar really did know everyone. He told me he had once dated the woman who measured the Queen for her bra size.

“And?”

“You think I’m going to tell you which way the wind blows? No way. At least, not yet. My sources will dry up the second they think I’m talking with anyone in the village. I don’t have to tell you that.”

“Yes. I see that,” I said obligingly, nodding. I’d get it out of him eventually. That and more.

“Besides, I saw loads of people murdered in Bosnia that no one gave a shit about. I’m not particularly interested that a village socialite got herself murdered, probably for leaving someone off her dinner party list.”

“But your readers will be interested.”

He shrugged. “Which is why I may do a little snooping around. But you really should stay out of it, Jill.”

This was like talking with Rashima. “Who says I’m into it?”

That earned me a “come on” look while he paused for a sip of water. He saved his hardest drinking for after hours, but the preliminary rounds started early.

In spite of which, Oscar was going to be a hard nut to crack.