‘Boss?’
DS Gardner stood in front of Garibaldi’s desk.
‘We’ve just had a call from a Beth Austin.’
Garibaldi raised his eyebrows. The name meant nothing.
‘She was Giles Gallen’s girlfriend for a while. They broke up earlier this year.’
Shit. He remembered now. Gallen’s grief-stricken parents had told them about her. Why hadn’t they followed it up?
‘What is it?’
‘She didn’t say. She lives in Chiswick and I said we’d call round this evening.’
‘OK. So—’
‘And I’ve been thinking …’
Garibaldi looked at his sergeant, suppressing the instinct to make a joke.
‘I’ve been thinking about how unlikely the whole Rivetti thing is. If he killed Gallen then why would he only warn Sam Bannister? Why not kill her as well? And why would he attack and threaten the others? I mean, Emily Francis hasn’t got any connection to them, has she? Nor has Simon Prest.’
‘Whereas they do work for Forum.’ 304
‘Exactly. There is one other possibility, though.’
‘What’s that?’
‘We keep thinking Luigi Rivetti, but what about his wife? She’s the volatile one, the one with the temper, the one who was arguing with Antonella Bruno. What if she’d found out that Bruno was having an affair with her husband? Maybe that’s what the row was about. Maybe that’s why …’
‘But why would that make her kill Gallen? How would she know he heard them and saw them?’
‘Maybe Luigi told her.’
‘Why would he do that?’ Garibaldi scratched his head. ‘Not getting any easier, is it? You know what we need?’
‘Yeah. Some kind of breakthrough.’
‘I was thinking more of a stop-off at Gail’s on our way to Beth Austin’s.’
Gardner smiled. ‘You’re on.’
Beth Austin’s Chiswick flat reminded Garibaldi of his own first rented property, the one-bed flat in North Kensington he had been so keen to make his own. He could still remember the hours he had spent selecting the prints for the walls and arranging his bookshelves and CDs in an attempt to give the impression that he may have been a policeman but he wasn’t without a brain or immune to good taste. Glancing round the bookless room, Garibaldi sensed Beth Austin hadn’t felt the need to try quite so hard.
‘Thanks for getting in touch,’ he said as he sat down with Gardner. ‘We’d very much like to hear anything you think might be of relevance.’
‘Look,’ said Beth, ‘I still can’t believe this has happened to Giles. I can’t imagine it happening to anyone I know, but Giles? The thing is, I went out with Giles for about eight months. We were at Cambridge together. Our paths crossed 305a few times because we had some friends in common but we didn’t know each other well there. Then, about a year ago, we met at a party and started seeing each other. He was tutoring and I was working for a PR firm. Look, I have no idea whether this is of any relevance, but I thought I should get in touch. I was devastated when I heard the news about Giles. It made me think about our time together and whenever I did I kept coming back to the same thing. It may be completely unimportant, but I …’
‘You did the right thing,’ said Garibaldi. ‘Sometimes the tiniest detail, something that seems insignificant, can turn out to be the most important.’
Beth Austin smiled and nodded, as if reassured. ‘The thing is Giles seemed to change during the time I was going out with him.’
‘In what way?’ said Gardner.
‘It’s difficult to describe, but I guess the best word I can think of is troubled. Yeah, that’s probably it. He was troubled, as if something was preying on his mind.’
‘When did this change happen?’ said Garibaldi.
‘It was a gradual thing. I don’t think it happened suddenly, but looking back on it I think it may have started when he got this job tutoring an Italian kid and he went abroad with them. When he came back from that first trip abroad he seemed, I don’t know, much less sure about things. It’s difficult to be specific but one thing he started talking about was the whole tutoring thing. I think being exposed to the super-rich made him question what he was doing. We spoke about it and I can remember him saying that maybe it wasn’t the kind of thing he wanted to do, maybe he should be doing a bit more good.’
‘Do you think something happened when he was away?’ said Garibaldi. 306
‘He didn’t mention anything and as I say the change wasn’t dramatic. And when I say do good I don’t think it was some kind of road to Damascus moment. Something was niggling away at him. The thing is, this all happened at a time when we’d been sort of drifting apart and it had come to the point where I thought it would be best if we stopped seeing each other. And when I told him I wanted to finish with him he said a few things which I didn’t think much of at the time, but now … I mean, I was mainly concerned with ending it all in as friendly a way as I could. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I was treading carefully, maybe not taking in all of what he was saying. But when I heard the news I thought of what he said again and …’
Garibaldi leaned forward. ‘What did he say, Beth?’
‘I’d expected him to put up some kind of resistance, or to argue a case for us carrying on, but he didn’t. What he said was that I was right to stop going out with him. “I’m not a good person, Beth. You’re better off without me”. That’s what he said. As break-ups go, it was pretty close to “it’s not you, it’s me” but that’s usually the line of the one who’s doing the dumping. But it was weird that he came out with it because the thing about Giles was how nice he was, how decent. But he said he wasn’t a good person and he followed it up with something else. He said “I’ve done a terrible thing and I need to come clean. I can’t live with it any longer.” Looking back on it, I should have asked him what it was, but I was so relieved that I’d told him and that he’d accepted it I didn’t ask. Then when I heard the news I just wondered if it was significant …’
‘So,’ said Garibaldi, ‘he gave no hint at all about the terrible thing he’d done?’
Beth Austin shook her head. 307
‘Do you think,’ said Gardner, ‘that it might have been something to do with his work as a tutor?’
‘He didn’t say. All he said was that he thought tutoring might not be the thing for him, or at least not the type of tutoring he was doing.’
Garibaldi thought of Devon Furlong and Gallen’s pro bono work at Hillside.
‘And let’s get this straight,’ said Gardner. ‘He said that after his first stint abroad with the Rivettis?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So could it be,’ said Garibaldi, ‘that the terrible thing he did and his disillusionment with working as a private tutor might be connected to something that happened then?’
‘As I said, I didn’t ask. It could be, I suppose. I mean, that’s when he first started talking about it but he didn’t mention this terrible thing until I broke up with him.’
‘You’ve definitely done the right thing,’ said Garibaldi. ‘But I’m a bit puzzled as to why it’s taken you so long?’
‘I’ve been away on holiday and didn’t find out until I got back.’
‘Nobody let you know?’
Beth shook her head. ‘Maybe everyone thought I would have found out. Maybe some who knew thought they didn’t want to ruin my holiday. I mean we went out together and everything, but—’
‘None of his friends got in touch?’
‘His friends? No. It was funny, but I never really got to know any of his friends.’
‘Why was that?’
‘I don’t know. There were one or two from Cambridge he saw now and then but he mostly seemed to hang out with his schoolmates. I found it a bit weird. I mean, he’d been to uni and everything and started working – or whatever 308version of working you call being a tutor – but it was his school friends he saw most of. I don’t know if that’s usual – it’s certainly not the case with me– or whether it’s a public school thing. They all seem a bit like that, as if they’re clinging on to it in a funny kind of way.’
Garibaldi had seen it himself, right down to the way they still called each other by ridiculous names. Stonker. Biffy. Todge.
‘Any friends in particular he saw a lot of?’
‘There were two in particular. Simon and Hugo.’
‘That would be Simon Prest. He was also working as a tutor. Stand-up comedian as well, apparently.’
‘That’s the one. And I can’t remember what Hugo does. I think he’s in the City.’
‘And did you get to meet them at all?’
‘No, never. Whenever Giles met up with them it seemed very much boys only. You know the kind of thing.’
Garibaldi nodded. He knew it only too well.
‘They seemed very close. I even heard him give them a nickname.’
‘A nickname?’
‘Yeah. The Three Musketeers. I mean, fucking ridiculous, right?’
Stonker. Biffy. Todge.
‘Yeah,’ said Garibaldi. ‘Totally.’