Dying to Know (27 page)

‘They smoke the baddy out.'

Baddy
. In the use of that word, Max told me an awful lot of how she saw the world. ‘You decided to ‘smoke' the killer out?' I asked, just on the off chance that I was panicking unnecessarily.

I wasn't.

‘I hope you don't mind.'

‘How have you tried to smoke him out, Max?'

‘I rang Mr Holversum and I told him that we had gone back into the Lightollers' house and found the stolen diamonds.'

I couldn't speak for a moment; it was an odd feeling but one I was used to given the fact that I had been brought up by my father. Max kindly left me alone for a few moments until I once more had the sacred gift of speech. ‘What did he say?'

‘He went quiet for a while, then asked why I was telling him.'

‘To which, of course, you replied . . .?'

‘I said that we thought it was something he might like to know . . .'

That didn't sound too bad, I thought. Then she went on: ‘And that unless he contacted us within the next twenty-four hours, we would go to the police and share with them what we knew.'

At which my legs – until then doing their best but feeling distinctly under the weather and very definitely on the wobbly side – buckled completely and I sat down heavily on the stool by the telephone table. She began to say something. ‘And there's one more thing—'

I, though, was in the middle of exploding. ‘You do realize what you've done, don't you?'

A longish gap followed before Max said somewhat plaintively, ‘It seemed like a good idea.'

‘Max, if Holversum's killed two people because of those diamonds, he's not going to stop at killing a couple more, is he?'

‘He might not be the killer,' she pointed out. Her voice was slightly strangled as if she were holding back a sneeze or something.

‘He might be, and his idea of coming to some arrangement might involve one or both of us getting very dead.'

‘No, I'm sure . . .'

‘Are you?' I asked. ‘Are you absolutely sure, Max?'

To which she said, ‘No,' and then burst into tears. I felt immediately awful and tried to stop her but it was to no avail. She howled down the phone at me and every second made me feel more and more like a pig. I ended up assuring her that she had done exactly the right thing and that I had been totally unreasonable in getting in a stew about it.

And all the time I was wondering what she had done. Maybe we were wrong and the stolen diamonds had nothing to do with the affair, and maybe Holversum wasn't a killer – Tom Lightoller, was a distinct possibility, too – and neither Max nor I was in the firing line, but what if we weren't? What if Max had just told a man who was willing to kill to get his hands on the diamonds that I had them and that she knew I had them?

‘I'm coming over to get you, Max. Don't answer the door to anyone else but me.'

The fog had grown a lot thicker; whereas before it had been patchy, now it was intensely thick and claustrophobic. It reached into the house as soon as I opened the door five minutes later; immediately I was wondering what was hiding in it, who was watching me, who was thinking of killing me. I had tried to phone Masson but had been told that he had been in conference at Croydon police station all day and couldn't be disturbed.

A journey that should have taken less than ten minutes took twenty but at least in the car I felt reasonably safe, once I had checked underneath it for bombs and the ignition had started the car and not triggered a detonator. Max was waiting for me and we were back at my house in another twenty minutes. Her face was tear-stained, her eyes large, possibly with fear, possibly with remorse. She kept looking around us in the fog. There were a few people walking along the pavements, one or two with a dog on a lead, others with no obvious purpose, but who they were was impossible to say.

Back safely inside, the atmosphere lightened and I began to think that I had been unnecessarily spooked by the fog and my fears. I said to Max, ‘I'm sure nothing's going to happen, but it's just as well to take precautions.'

She nodded. She still wasn't talking much. I asked, ‘Have you eaten?'

A shake of her head.

‘Well, the menu's changed, but I expect I can make an omelette.'

‘Fine,' she said.

In the kitchen she stood and watched me beating eggs in a glass bowl. I said conversationally, ‘I expect even now Holversum's sitting at home wondering what you were talking about.'

‘Lance . . .?'

‘It wasn't a bad idea, in its way. It could have been a quick way to get at the truth, but Holversum's probably got nothing to do with it. I mean, thinking about it, Tom Lightoller's a far likelier bet. I wouldn't put it past him to murder his parents for money.'

‘Lance . . .?' This was said more loudly.

I stopped beating. ‘What is it?'

Her eyes were even larger as she looked at me.

Then . . .

‘I rang Tom Lightoller, too.'

At which point a baseball bat came through the glass in the back door of the kitchen.

THIRTY-EIGHT

I
n the next thirty seconds, an awful lot happened. I dropped the bowl and four half-whisked eggs, Max first squeaked, then screamed, and Igor, then Igor's friend (whom I had last seen helping with Doris Lightoller's body) and lastly Tom were in the room. Aforementioned small psychopath looked down at the egg and broken glass mess at my feet and tutted. ‘Oh, dear. You've made a mess.'

The fact that he had done serious damage to my back door and was now standing in quite a bit of broken glass of his own direct making seemed to have passed him by. Igor's friend laughed at his boss's witticism but perhaps it passed Igor by because he had to concentrate on breathing regularly and standing upright. My heart was beating so fast and so loudly that I swear I could feel a slight pain as it thudded against my chest wall; Max had scurried to my side and was hiding partly behind me. I thought briefly about outrage, then remembered the last time I had made a nuisance of myself with Igor in the room and abandoned that thought.

It was with a slightly tremulous voice that I said, ‘Hello, Tom.'

He nodded, looked around. ‘Nice kitchen. Nicer than your old man's.'

‘It was,' I said.

At that he looked back at the door and said, ‘Sorry about that.'

Max shivered and I'm sure that it wasn't just because of the cold dampness that was seeping into the room. I put my arm around her and squeezed gently. ‘What can we do for you, Tom?'

He frowned. I realized then that Tom had two frowns; one was the slightly quizzical version he used when he suspected that someone was ‘taking the mickey'; the other was the one that he used when he
knew
that someone was ‘taking the mickey'. It was the latter one he used now.

‘You what?'

‘What can we do for you?' I repeated. Max squeezed my arm again, although I'm not sure why.

‘Are you taking the mickey?'

‘No.' I wasn't; I was sure of that.

He opened his mouth, deepened his frown a little, looked first to his left at Igor, then to his right at Igor's little helper, then back to me. ‘DO FOR ME?'

It made both of us jump and in the course of which Max tightened her grip on my arm so much that tears came to my eyes. I sighed. ‘Point taken.'

And immediately he was happy again; he took in some breath, flexed his neck a little and then said in something that might have been relief, ‘Good man.' Another sigh, then: ‘Shall we go and sit somewhere a little more comfortable?'

I took them into the living room where we sat in a rather incongruous party: Tom, Max and I on the comfy chairs, with Tom's chums on the two dining chairs that I couldn't fit around the table in the dining room. It was a motley crew, all right, and it could only have been more surreal if we had offered to serve up tea and chocolate fancies to them while discussing the hymns for next Sunday's sermon.

‘I'm glad you saw sense,' said Tom. He sat back in his seat, perfectly relaxed, perfectly at ease, although all three of them had made dirty wet footprints on the carpet which Max had seen and might even have told them about had I not strenuously shaken my head whilst making wild-eyed expressions at her.

‘You see, Tom . . .'

‘I thought you were taking the mickey when you gave me that crap about the baker's love life.'

I smiled. ‘Merely a misunderstanding.'

He nodded. ‘I see that now. Mind you, you were a bit near the knuckle sending the inspector round to have a chat.'

‘Terribly sorry.'

He pondered for a moment. ‘I see what you was up to now, though. In fact, I like your style. Like it a lot.'

This had me a trifle perplexed. ‘Do you?'

‘Oh, yes. When I got to think about it, I realized you were playing a clever game. Very subtle, I thought. We all did, didn't we?'

This last was addressed to the rest of the team, who nodded, albeit without obvious sign of comprehension. He then turned back to us. ‘And then your girlie's call. I like that, too.'

I had the feeling he was talking across me, at an oblique angle, so that the meaning of his sentences only appeared to head in my direction while missing me completely. I hazarded my response: ‘I thought you would.'

He liked the fact that I agreed with him, seemed to want everyone to. ‘Nice touch.'

‘One does one's best.' I shot a glance at Max who was looking at the two of us as if we were both mad and, who knows, perhaps we both were.

One final nod before he smacked his hands together and said, ‘And now, to business.'

‘Yes,' I said nervously. ‘To business.'

‘You have something I want, I think.'

‘Yes, well, I wanted to speak to you about that . . .' I began.

But then Max joined in. ‘There's been a bit of a misunderstanding.'

For a second he was perplexed, then angry, then he broke into a wide grin. ‘Oh, that!' he said. ‘You've no need to worry about that.'

Once again I had the feeling that Tom and I were out of phase somewhere. I would have probed a little more deeply had he not continued: ‘I fully understand. Business is business. The ends justify the means. You can't make an omelette without cracking eggs.'

It could have been a reference to our aborted supper, but I don't think Tom's mind worked along such lines. Whatever this gibberish meant, we had no need to worry, since he had embarked on something of a soliloquy. ‘In my line, you tend not to be squeamish, else you don't last long. You never saw an undertaker who didn't want to touch a bit of cold flesh and, once you lose that inhibition, well, things take on a different perspective.'

Were all undertakers like this? Was it a side effect of the business of embalming – a process that I knew involved inserting pointed pipes into various body cavities and flushing out as much blood as possible – that you became certifiably bonkers? My covert look at Max told me that she, too, was considering the same imponderables.

‘I've done a really nice job on Mum and Dad,' he said at this juncture and I thought at once, A confession!

He was lost in thought for a moment and I wondered what horrors he was recalling. It was clear that he was a 100 per cent, unalloyed, true-blue and gold-certified psychopath. Surely, only a beast such as this could so cold-bloodedly consider the murder of his parents.

‘Nothing but the best, of course,' he said.

Which was odd, even for a madman. Max asked tentatively, ‘What do you mean?'

‘English oak coffins, silk linings, real brass fittings. I'm quite looking forward to the cremation tomorrow.'

‘You're talking about the funeral?' I asked.

He was surprised. ‘Of course. It's tomorrow at two p.m.' He paused. ‘What else would I be talking about?'

‘Not the murders?'

This was met with frown number one. ‘No. You did those.'

‘No, we didn't,' I said firmly.

Max followed up with: ‘We thought you did.'

‘Me?'

Max, who hadn't worked out the signals vis-à-vis frowning and therefore did not notice that we were in danger of moving on to number two, nodded. ‘Yes, you.'

There was the proverbial calm and then: ‘ME?'

Max jumped, but only a little. The rest of us were clearly more inured and didn't even do any eyelid batting. I tried to explain, ‘You're after the diamonds. We thought that you had killed your parents to get them.'

His expression was comical: open-mouthed and wide-eyed, he had stopped breathing, and behind him, although Igor was staring straight ahead as per normal, his colleague was shaking his head slowly.

I said as gently as I could, ‘I see you didn't.'

‘You thought I had done Mum and Dad in?' He couldn't believe it, as his tone – one of stupefied wonder – told us.

‘Sorry,' I said, just in case he was taking umbrage.

‘But you did it,' he pointed out.

‘No, we didn't.'

‘But you've got the diamonds.'

‘No, we haven't.'

Bit by bit I was dismantling his belief system. He indicated Max. ‘But she said you did.'

‘I said that to smoke you out,' Max explained.

‘What the bloody hell does that mean?'

Max had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘Well, we thought that whoever killed your parents had done so for the diamonds. You were after the diamonds, so we thought that you were the murderer.'