Pleasure and a Calling (23 page)

‘In a disagreement with her husband, she said. The evening before. I think she said she threw a cup at him. Perhaps more than one. She had been to the hospital.’

It seemed helpful to tell them what she had told me, which I guessed was what they wanted to hear. Wendy brought coffee, shot a worried look at the two men in what looked like matching suits, one with a tattoo on his hand, and closed my door gently behind her. The younger of the officers made notes and watched as I answered, occasionally coming up with
questions of his own. Had I ever met Mr Sharp previously?

‘Not that I’m aware of.’

‘Do you know a Mr Graham Buxton?’

‘I don’t think so. Is he on television?’

The officer eyed me for signs of impertinence. ‘He works for one of your rivals – Worde & Hulme? He visited the Sharps on the Friday night and said that you were waiting outside, and that he spoke to you.’

‘Ah, that would be correct. I didn’t know his name. But, yes, it was he who told me the Sharps were in some disagreement.’

‘Do you mean a fight?’

‘A row, certainly. So I decided to call and suggest that we postpone till the next morning. I left a message on their answering machine. I imagine it’s still there if you check with Mrs Sharp.’

The two men looked at each other, as if to conclude their business here, but the senior man had another question. ‘I gather you’re also handling the sale at number one Eastfield Lane – the Cooksons’ house?’

‘That’s true. Are you in the market, Inspector?’

He smiled thinly. ‘It’s Sergeant, sir. Detective Sergeant. And I’m afraid it’s out of my league. Do you happen to have keys to the property?’

I buzzed Wendy. ‘Could you ask Katya to pop in, please?’

Katya arrived.

‘Katya, do we have keys to the Cooksons’ place?’

She looked uncomfortably at the two men and then at me. ‘I’m afraid not, Mr Heming.’

‘And can you tell these gentlemen why that is?’

‘Because they prefer not to. Some clients don’t mind, others do. The Cooksons have resisted so far.’

The two men paused, as if deciding on the trustworthiness of
her accent. ‘Do you think they’re afraid the keys might fall into the wrong hands?’ asked the younger officer.

Katya frowned. ‘I hope not. You’ll have to ask the Cooksons.’

They made to go, and I followed them out into the street. ‘Has this case become a murder inquiry?’ I asked. ‘The papers seem unsure.’

‘You can’t always rely on the papers,’ said the senior man curtly and thanked me for my help. The younger man, less eager to leave, craned his neck to inspect the dusty windows of our unoccupied upper rooms, presumably not so much in the hope of finding an answer there as to give the impression of diligence – omniscience even. Even so, I didn’t like it. I joined him in his upward gazing and disguised my unease with a smile.

It was not especially hard to follow the strands of the police investigation. The story had surfaced in some of the national tabloids, which had done some digging on Sharp and soon discovered that he wasn’t a Cambridge professor and that he had been eight years younger than his wife.

Meanwhile Katya had begun to deal in earnest with the Cookson sale, which is to say she had been out three times to see Mrs Cookson, who in common with all concerned had been advised not to speak to reporters but had found a sympathetic ear in Katya (a surprise to those of us who had always found Katya’s personal warmth a distant second to her efficiency and suspicion of life’s touchers and feelers). Mrs Cookson related how she’d had to be sedated on finding the body, but said the biggest shock (which was news to Katya) was that the intruder had had the keys to their house. The police had questioned Mrs Cookson with some intensity – had as much as suggested that she
knew
the intruder, perhaps even intimately. And now the
Sentinel
was carrying insinuations that this Sharp had been something of a womanizer as well as a gold-digger. They also mentioned that the white car that had been cited in earlier reports was Sharp’s own car, but that it had been repossessed and towed away.

‘The Cooksons are divorcing,’ Katya said.

‘It’s probably what they needed,’ I said. ‘Maybe Mr Sharp did them a favour.’

Katya switched on her doubtful Lithuanian frown and said that Mrs Cookson – whose biggest fear was being unable to sell the house now that someone had been so publicly found dead there – was of the opinion that the man had managed to fall and kill himself in a freak accident. She also suspected her husband’s involvement.

‘Because how else would the man have got keys to the house?’ said Katya. ‘Don’t forget, your Mr Sharp was one of Mr Cookson’s patients. He had money problems. Maybe he couldn’t pay his dental bill. Maybe Mr Cookson thought up this plan to rob his wife. She has valuables – gold and jewellery. Mrs Cookson said it was only bad luck that prevented him coming into the house.’

‘That seems a little far-fetched,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if Mr Cookson is short of money. And anyway, how do you know Mrs Cookson
wasn’t
having an affair with this man? She might have sent him in to rob Mr Cookson of
his
valuables. And, if you don’t mind, he’s not
my
Mr Sharp. I’ve never set eyes on the man.’

Zoe, who liked gossip and could be relied upon to enhance any drama in our novelty-starved town, perversely asked for a fortnight’s leave. To do some decorating, Wendy told me when I arrived in on the Monday.

‘Why now?’ I asked.

‘She has to take her holiday some time, Mr Heming. And we are fully staffed.’

I myself was back and forth to Mrs Sharp, who wore the same dazed expression she had worn on our first encounter. Katya had visited in the interim but Mrs Sharp – who I thought may have been too distressed to occupy herself with selling a house – had asked for me personally. She kept me busy with small queries about fixtures and fittings, damp-proofing worries and various financial matters. It wasn’t a bad idea to revisit. It gave me an opportunity to undertake a slow tour of the house with Mrs Sharp, generously leaving my prints on anything I might have touched in my previous uninvited wanderings. I arranged appointments for prospective buyers to be shown round to further muddy the waters.

Mrs Sharp had received my initial shocked offer of condolence with a long silent look out of the window. Eventually she was forthcoming, though still as tearful, vague, and given to angry outbursts as previously.

‘I don’t know what he was doing but I can’t forgive him. Not yet. And now the police think I had something to do with it!’

I mustered a sympathetic look. She obviously wanted to talk, probably felt alone in this, needed a sounding board. We sat knee to knee in the kitchen drinking coffee while she smoked and expressed indignation about the detectives’ hostile questioning and asked me to call her Judith.

‘Why would I report him missing? As far as I knew, he’d gone scurrying off to his new girlfriend. I was at my sister’s. How the hell could I know he was lying dead in someone’s garden on the other side of town?’

‘Did you tell them about this woman?’

‘I showed them the picture of the two of them together. They
said, with all due respect, it could be anybody. Mind you, they took it away with them. It’s her they should be looking for.’

I dearly hoped not.

When I got back to the office the two police officers were talking to Katya and Wendy. ‘Mr Heming, just in time,’ said the senior one.

We went into the back room, where they asked about the day I saw Mrs Sharp on her return from the hospital. I pointed out that, strictly speaking, I couldn’t say for certain that Mrs Sharp
had
returned from hospital that morning. After all she was already there when I arrived. The senior man nodded wearily and asked about the state of the house, and I told them that the place was littered with crockery and glass, and that there was blood on the floor.

They glanced at each other.

‘And you didn’t think to mention this before?’

‘I assumed you knew. Did Mrs Sharp not think to mention it?’

The younger officer, who had been perched on the windowsill, now mysteriously closed his notebook. ‘Is there anything else you’d like to tell us that you’ve assumed we already knew, sir?’

‘I don’t think so. I assume you know about the dog?’

The day after, two uniformed officers arrived and asked that Katya and I give our fingerprints for elimination purposes, using a portable scanner. ‘Does this mean it’s a murder inquiry?’ I asked.

My hands, I realized, were shaking.

‘You seem nervous, sir,’ said the officer, spreading my fingers.

‘This gives me the creeps,’ said Katya, whose grandfather –
she had once told Zoe, over Christmas drinks – was a Roman Catholic bishop who had been arrested and tortured by the secret police. ‘Why do they now think the man died in Boselle Avenue?’

‘It’s all part of the inquiry, madam.’

Wherever I went that day I felt that their eyes could be on me. I checked up and down the hill before going into my flat.

Mrs Sharp, when I saw her next, was suffering too, having had what she called the long arm of the law crawling all over the house – a warrant to search which, as far as she could tell, had yielded nothing. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘why
wouldn’t
I have scrubbed the kitchen floor and cleared all the mess up after our fight? And with my hand in a bandage!’

‘Indeed, Mrs Sharp.’

‘Please – Judith.’ She poured more coffee. ‘And in any case, I told them, the blood was mine. If they found someone else’s blood, I said, it would be poor Barney’s. Who of course they insisted on digging up to make sure.’ She lit a cigarette. Most upsetting, she said, was being questioned about Barney, whether it had made her feel angry. ‘Of course I was angry, I told them. Who wouldn’t be? Frankly, I wish I
had
bloody killed him. Douglas, I mean, not the dog.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t mean that.’

My head throbbed with the effort of processing all that Mrs Sharp knew, or thought she knew – or had told the police – and bedding these things down with the facts as I knew them and what I had told the police. It seemed inevitable that I would be sent sprawling over a sharp protruding detail into the arms of these unforgiving crime fighters.

But, then, weren’t the police confusing themselves too? Why, for example, were they obsessed with blood when Sharp had lost no blood?

One revelation was reassuring. For days I had been haunted
by thoughts of the golf club that had been the end of both dog and master. Now it turned out that Mrs Sharp had taken his clubs, along with much else belonging to her husband when he had left, to the dump, or one of the town’s many charity shops.

‘Because why wouldn’t I?’ she cried. ‘And I was happy to tell the police. I’ve nothing to hide – here’s a man who had sponged off me and cheated and spent God knows how much of my money on having his teeth laser-whitened to flash at other women. And yes, in case we forget, he killed my dog! Of course I’m going to throw his things out. I hate him!’

I had to remain positive. There should have been enough in addition to Mrs Sharp to occupy the police, who according to the
Sentinel
(interest among the national papers seemed to have waned) still hadn’t formally managed to get their boots out of the mire of suspicious death and on to the firmer ground of murder, which would doubtless release more funds for scientists and detectives. It suggested that hard evidence was in short supply. It suggested they couldn’t be certain yet that Sharp’s head injury hadn’t been caused by one of the hand-dressed stones bordering the Cooksons’ handsome patio. The blizzard of so much baffling circumstantial evidence would, I hoped, continue to blind them to the entire who, where, what and why of this absurd-looking case.

It seemed to me still likely that they would look elsewhere, though it was hard to know exactly what to hope for. I was surprised there had been no mention of the first-year Asian student Sharp had made pregnant. If anyone had a grudge against Sharp it would surely be the family of armed Glaswegian Muslims who had turned up looking for him in Cambridge. Perhaps the police were keeping that to themselves – and if so, what were the repercussions for me? It wasn’t beyond reason that already they
had a description of the man who walked into Warninck’s only a few weeks ago making enquiries about the charming Dr Sharp and had followed the trail to Cambridge.

But would the woman I spoke to have even remembered what I looked like – the busy manager of a busy shop dealing with enquiries all day? Certainly if matters were reversed I doubted I’d be able to describe her with anything remotely close to exactness.

The police continued to circle Mrs Sharp, which inevitably drew me towards the vortex. Again the two detectives arrived at the office. Zoe was back now, batteries recharged, her eyes burning with especial vivacity. ‘Can I offer you gentlemen tea or coffee?’ she asked, curiosity shimmering off her like a desert mirage. She left the door ajar while she busied herself in our kitchenette, which meant I had to be careful in my choice of words. The officers wanted to know, with more precision than before, the sequence of events. I ran through the story again: that I had been there the night before, left a message on the answerphone, arrived next morning to speak about the sale of the house. ‘In fact,’ I said, ‘Mrs Sharp was on the phone to my secretary here when I knocked on the door. Or rather – in the interests of precision – when I rang the doorbell.’

‘And did you see Mr Sharp’s car there when you arrived?’

I folded my arms to stop my hands shaking. ‘I really couldn’t say. As I may have told you, I’ve never actually seen Mr Sharp. So I’m not familiar with his car.’

‘And Mrs Sharp?’

‘Her car?’

‘Had you met Mrs Sharp before?’

‘Not that I know of. Though this is a small town. I can’t guarantee I haven’t run into her at the supermarket.’

The younger man looked at his notebook. ‘A white Audi four-by-four identified as Mr Sharp’s was seen by two employees of a repossession company leaving the premises on Boselle Road on the morning of Saturday the fourth. It was later recovered by those employees close to the spot where Mr Sharp was found dead. Someone purporting to be Mr Sharp called the repossession company, advising them where the car could be found. Now why would Mr Sharp drive all the way to the Cooksons’ house, ask for his car to be picked up by his creditors, only to wind up dead?’