Dying to Know (15 page)

Dad's head was securely bound in crêpe bandages and he had a drip running into each forearm, a catheter running out from under the bedclothes. His face seemed just as pale, just as uncaring of life as it had before the operation; someone had combed his beard and I should imagine had regretted ever starting such a gargantuan task, since to my knowledge, Dad had never bothered. It hadn't done much for him, making him look as if he had been spruced up to meet someone, and I could only think that this someone might be God.

I sat next to the bed, opposite Percy who was in the far corner by the door. For a long time a cardiac monitor was the only thing that filled the space between us. I suspect that Percy could have kept going like this until the trumpets blew at the round earth's imagined corners, but eventually, I broke.

‘You don't think he's guilty, do you?'

Official caution gripped him. ‘Well . . .'

‘Oh, come on, Percy. Do you really think he decided to rearrange Doris Lightoller's skull bones with a hammer?'

A deep breath and then: ‘No. No, I don't.'

I felt that I had won a small victory, chipped away at a stone in the official wall. ‘Have you talked with Inspector Masson about it?'

He shook his head with a sad grin. ‘You don't understand. The inspector isn't interested in what I think about it; he's got your father with means, motive and opportunity, so he's happy.'

I sighed. It was as I had feared. A gap ensued during which the cardiac monitor did its best to serenade us.

I said, ‘The inspector said that Lightoller was a bit of a naughty boy himself.'

He nodded warily. ‘So they say.'

‘Stolen goods?'

Another nod. For a moment, that was it, and then he said, ‘And, way back, something else, it was rumoured.'

I pricked up my ears.
Come on, Percy. Don't be shy.

‘Something else?' I tried to pitch my voice somewhere between unconcerned and gossipy.

He looked around, just to make sure that Masson wasn't charging down the ward corridor, waving his truncheon menacingly. ‘It was in the early sixties, I think. I remember it because it was on my beat, so I was involved from the start.'

‘Remember what?'

‘Annie Sage.'

‘What about her?'

But Percy, for the moment, was lost in recollection; I suspected that this was sad recollection, but it was difficult to tell because the bag-topped jowls leant a sad air to everything about him. Eventually he sighed and came to. I repeated my question.

‘She killed herself. She was a lovely woman, was Annie. Had three children and a husband who was a printer in Fleet Street, so she was never short of a bob or two. She lived in Mayday Road, I recall.'

This amount of detail proved that he would have made a good fist as a troubadour, but I found it slightly aggravating. ‘What's all this to do with Lightoller?'

‘There were rumours,' he said obliquely.

I jumped to conclusions; the wrong ones, as it turned out. ‘They were having an affair?'

While his head moved slowly and deliberately from side to side, there began a sort of generalized shaking about his amply proportioned frame and a deep rumbling made its way into the room. He was laughing, I realized, and this conclusion was proved correct when he said, ‘Gor blimey, no.'

I waited for the tremors to play themselves out before: ‘Then what?'

He leaned forward, voice down. ‘There had always been rumours, you see, but no one had any proof and, as I say, she was such a nice girl, no one could quite believe them.'

I felt giddy, as if on a merry-go-round. ‘But what were the rumours about?'

‘That she was having an affair,' he said, apparently contradicting himself.

I wondered what he was like in the witness box; presumably they added a couple of days on to the estimated duration of the trial when Percy Bailey was due to appear. I shook my head, deciding that asking questions did not seem to elicit much useful information, and said merely, ‘I don't understand.'

‘Poor Annie was having an affair with one of the neighbours. Chap called Bill who lived round the corner in the crescent. He was a travelling salesman.'

‘Where does Lightoller come in?'

‘Bill's mother died, see?' I did not see, but remained taciturn. ‘Bill used to live with her, but after the funeral, he decided to move to a smaller place somewhere in Headcorn Road, I think. He got Lightoller in to do the house clearance, clear out all of his mother's stuff that he didn't want.'

I suddenly noticed that Percy seemed to be using the cardiac monitor as a sort of metronome, waiting three beeps between each sentence. I idly wondered if by tickling my father's feet, I could get him to hurry up a bit.

‘They say . . .' He paused for dramatic effect; three beeps passed and then: ‘That Lightoller found some letters she'd written to him. They say . . .' Another pause of similar duration before: ‘That Lightoller blackmailed her.'

He nodded his head slowly, pleased with the expression on my face, for what he said had excited me. ‘Lightoller was a blackmailer?'

Apparently I sounded too excited, for Percy began to retract at once; he speeded up, too, a climactic speech. ‘There was no proof, though. It was only that Annie wrote this note in which she confessed to the affair and how Lightoller had driven her to suicide. Lightoller admitted that he had found the letters but said that he had only had a Christian chat with her. He denied taking money off her, although her husband, Tony, said that there was a thousand pounds missing from their savings. Whatever the case, it couldn't be found in any of Lightoller's accounts and there was no evidence that he had been spending a lot of late, so the matter was dropped.'

My mind was hurrying through the implications of this news. Blackmail seemed an eminently plausible reason to kill someone; much more likely than a missing watch and the loss of two feet of garden. I asked casually, ‘And there was never any other suggestion that he was a blackmailer?'

Percy was definite. ‘Nope.'

I did my own counting of the beat, waited for five beeps before: ‘Did he do a lot of house clearance work?'

‘It was how he kept going.'

‘What about his son?'

‘What about him?'

‘Has he ever been involved in anything criminal?'

Percy delved deep into his stores of memory. ‘Not really.'

‘What does that mean?'

Percy thought some more. ‘When he was young he was a bit of a lad, I recall. Had problems keeping his temper.'

Which fitted in with what Masson had said. ‘Nothing criminal?'

More dredging in the same deep places. ‘Nothing that he was charged over.'

‘But there were suspicions?'

But before he could speak, there came a faint low moan from Dad. It was almost a gurgle, but it was the first noise I had heard him make and I was up at once and leaning over him, hoping to see some signs of animation, my whole attention on him.

TWENTY

P
ercy watched me and said gently, ‘He does that sometimes.'

I looked at Dad intensely for thirty, forty, fifty seconds that were counted out by the heart monitor then, when no further sound came and there was no trace of consciousness in his face, I subsided into my chair, feeling even flatter and more depressed than I had before.

Calmly and imperturbably, Percy went on with his tale. ‘Young Tom fell in with some “undesirables”.' Only Percy and people of Percy's ilk used words like that and then put them in quotation marks.

‘In what way “undesirable”?'

‘Extortion, mostly.'

‘Oh, dear.'

‘Yes. Tom got a lowly position as a messenger boy for a gentleman by the name of Frankie Maybery. Frankie wasn't nice, not nice at all. Not long after Tom went to work for him, Frankie died in some sort of altercation with a motor car. Hit and run; no one was ever convicted, but no one was too bothered, if you know what I mean.'

I knew what he meant; I didn't like it, though.

‘What happened to Tom?'

‘All of Frankie's associates were questioned and quite a few of them were charged, but Tom was relatively new and very young, so he was never really thought to be a major player. That and the help of Alexander Holversum, and he was let go. As far as I understand it, his father took him on as an apprentice.'

‘Alexander Holversum?'

‘The very same.'

I remembered Holversum's words regarding Tom's father:
I had had the pleasure of working for him on the odd occasion.

‘I'd gathered the inspector doesn't take kindly to him.'

‘Absolutely hates him.'

‘But why? He's only doing his job.'

‘Alexander Holversum keeps the wrong company. Most of his clients are hardened nasty men; it doesn't help your dad's cause to be represented by him.'

‘But surely, if he's a defence solicitor, a lot of his clients will be criminals.'

Percy shook his head with a sad smile at my ignorance. ‘He's
chummy
with some of them. A little too close, if you get my drift.'

‘Oh.'

‘I mean, only recently, he's been making a lot of trouble for the inspector.'

‘Not Dad's case, surely?'

Percy laughed. ‘No, don't worry. It was the Baines and Perry killings. He accused the inspector of exceeding his authority; even got a judicial review. It eventually failed but it didn't half make the inspector mad.'

Not that this struck me as a task beyond the wit of most men. I, for one, seemed able to make Inspector Masson mad with distressing ease. In a strangely compelling way, knowledge of this made me rather admire Alexander Holversum and I decided that he was perhaps the man for me.

The conversation moved on to less intriguing matters, such as Percy's thoughts on the result of England's match against Portugal, and how he reckoned Kevin Keegan was overrated, and had I heard that bloody awful racket that they kept playing on the radio? The one about Galileo, whoever he was.

I looked at my watch and saw that I had been there over an hour and a half. When I stood up, I felt guilty about leaving, though, and tried to tell myself that by going I was not abandoning him.

I thanked Percy for his company and walked away, forcing myself not to look back.

TWENTY-ONE

W
hen I got back to Dad's house, it was well and truly dark and Max was in a state of high excitement. I wasn't even out of the car before she had the front door open and was beckoning to me while crouching down, the hall lights off. In the dim illumination of the street lamp her face sported a look that was three parts thrilled, two parts anxious and finished with a dash of anger. She mouthed something at me, her lips working in a caricature of speech that I could not recognize as words that I had ever known, but it was clear that she wanted me to get inside quickly and that she didn't want me to look over at the Lightollers' house.

I walked as naturally as I could towards her, thinking to myself, She's been possessed by the spirit of Dad. It's the only explanation.

She closed the door gently behind me and before I could speak said in an urgent whisper, ‘Someone's been poking around the house at the back.' With which she beckoned me upstairs. Because it was so dark, it was not easy to climb without stumbling.

I said in a deliberately loud voice, ‘Are you sure?'

She stopped in her advance up the stairs and swung round, almost losing her footing. ‘Shhh!'

‘Max, there's no way we can be heard outside.'

A pause. ‘Are you sure?'

‘Positive.'

She straightened up. ‘OK, but don't put on any lights.'

She led me into the back bedroom which had windows on two sides, a large one looking out over the back gardens, a smaller one to its right looking out over the rear of the Lightollers' house.

‘Look.'

She was crouched down in front of the smaller one so that her eyes were just above the level of the wooden windowsill; I noticed that it could do with a new coat of paint and there was a faint smell of dry rot as I joined her. While mentally noting to remind Dad to get it seen to, I looked out into the gloom. There was a hint of fog in the air, condensing from the lightest of fine drizzles that had started as I'd reached the house. The back of the Lightollers' house was in almost complete darkness but there was just enough light to make out movement on the small patio. I could see that it was a big shape, but beyond that no detail came to my eye.

Max took to whispering again. ‘He turned up about ten minutes before you did. Two policemen had just been looking around, making sure that everything was all right, then, as soon as they'd gone, he appeared; I should think he was keeping an eye on them and waiting for his moment. He must have parked up the road and then come on foot. He went straight around the back and began snooping around, trying the doors and windows.'

‘He? You're sure it was a he?'

‘I saw him quite clearly under the street lamps.'

‘What did he look like?'

The shape was now crouching down on the ground, but doing so in a peculiarly hesitant manner, as Max said after a pause, and in direct contradiction of her previous statement, ‘I'm not sure . . .'

I thought it best to say nothing. The shape stood up slowly and, as it approached the French windows, there was suddenly a torch beam illuminating a cone of space before it; the bulb and reflector suddenly appearing in the glass of the doors. Light was cast back upon the figure and, although there were more shadows than elucidation, I thought I recognized something of the figure. Even from this distance and in almost complete blindness, this figure was unmistakably baker-shaped.