The Telling Error (18 page)

‘Lying was so important to her,’ said Proust. ‘She’s a compulsive liar.’

‘I think that conclusion’s unavoidable,’ Sam agreed. ‘She refused a lift home on the grounds that she had chores to do in town. Simon followed her out of the building once the interview was finished – she didn’t head for town. She ran – literally ran – out of town, in the direction of Bartholomew Gardens, where she lives. She couldn’t risk us turning up at her house at the same time as her. That wouldn’t have given her the chance to smash off her wing mirror before we arrived to check.’

‘You can stop,’ said Proust. ‘You had me at “compulsive liar”. Bring Nicki Clements in again. Put the fear of me into her. Find the connection between her and Blundy, and find out why she took a suspicious interest in Elmhirst Road on the day of his murder.’

‘
You
said “compulsive liar”, sir,’ Gibbs pointed out.

‘I have to praise Sergeant Kombothekra for something, Gibbs. No one can work effectively without positive reinforcement, or so I’m told.’

Charlie was watching Simon watching his phone. It lay on the red tablecloth between them, next to the breadbasket, and had yet to earn the attention it had been getting since the beginning of lunch. They were in the Little Lamp, a new and mostly underground café-cum-second-hand-bookshop on Spilling’s Market Square that Charlie had wanted to try for ages. Simon normally insisted on going to the Pocket and Pound, a dismal pub that he either loved for no good reason or pretended to love because he was a contrary sod and no one else liked it at all. Today, he’d been too preoccupied by the Blundy case to argue and Charlie had got her way.

Now, with scraps of other customers’ conversations echoing around her head, she wished she’d picked somewhere less eccentric that offered more privacy. It was an odd place, the Little Lamp. For a bookshop, it didn’t contain enough books. Charlie estimated that there were fewer than fifty. She’d seen two already that she thought she might want to buy – one a psychology book that she’d have to hide from Simon – but still, forty-six books was a long holiday for two people, surely, not a commercial proposition.

The not-enough theme wasn’t confined to the books. There were only six tables in a space that could have taken twelve, and only three main courses on the menu, which would have been fine if it were a menu of the day, but this one had a stiff, laminated permanence about it. On the floor beside Charlie and Simon’s table was a small lamp with a square pottery base, a plain green fabric shade and a long white lead that was grubby grey in places. From a lighting point of view, there was no need for the lamp, and indeed it wasn’t switched on. Charlie suspected it was there so that customers could see it and think, Aha! I get it: a little lamp! Everything about this place suggested that the owners were indulging in a fantasy of running a business rather than actually running one. Charlie gave the café less than six months.

Simon had eaten no more than a mouthful of his lasagne, and his appetite for conversation appeared to be equally absent. Several times Charlie had asked him whose call he was hoping to extract from his phone using the sheer force of his glare, and the same number of times she had been ignored as if she hadn’t spoken. There probably wasn’t much point in bringing it up again. Except if she adopted that attitude consistently, to all aspects of her life with Simon, there might be nothing but silence and inactivity between them forevermore. When he sunk into moods like this – his walled-in phases, as she privately thought of them – Charlie found it hard to believe that he was ever otherwise; her memories of good conversations they’d had, times when he’d included her in his thoughts, no longer seemed trustworthy.

‘Simon?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Who are you hoping will ring?’

‘Paula Riddiough’s personal assistant.’

‘Paula Riddiough our MP?’ So he didn’t mind her knowing, then; he mustn’t have been listening when she asked before.

‘Ex-MP. She resigned in January last year. She wasn’t ours, anyway. She was Culver Valley East.’

‘Yes, I’ve always suspected she resigned mainly because she couldn’t bear to slum it in Combingham any more with the proles. No offence, but why would anyone associated with Paula Privilege, the UK’s most glamorous champagne socialist, ring the likes of you?’

Simon dragged his eyes away from his phone, looked up. ‘You know her as Paula Privilege?’

‘I don’t know her at all, but that’s her nickname, or it was. Lots of politicians have nicknames, usually snide ones: Red Ed, Tony Bliar …’

‘Do you know where the name Paula Privilege came from?’

‘I can guess. I’ve heard her plummy voice often enough.’

‘Damon Blundy.’ Simon sounded satisfied. He loved knowing things that other people didn’t. ‘Paula Privilege was an abbreviation. In the first column he wrote about her, he called her Saint Paula of Privilege. He cut it down later, made it snappier. It stuck.’

‘Right.’ Charlie tried not to sound too grateful that he’d finally tossed her a few scraps of information. ‘So you’re waiting for Paula Priv to ring in connection with the Blundy case? That’s my even-more-abbreviated abbreviation.’

‘Already,’ Simon said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Hmm?’

‘You said, “Already.”’

‘No, I didn’t,’ said Simon.

Deep breaths, Charlie. In, out. In, out.

‘You—’

‘I said, “Or Riddy.” Someone with the surname Riddiough might be nicknamed Riddy, mightn’t they?’

‘They might,’ Charlie said doubtfully. ‘Why?’

Simon waved her question aside to make way for another of his own. ‘Could you fall in love with someone you’d only met once or twice?’ he asked. ‘Even if they weren’t good-looking at all?’

Charlie considered it. She’d felt a strong attraction towards Simon the first time they’d been introduced. He’d looked at her with eyes full of warning:
You won’t talk to me for longer than necessary if you know what’s good for you
. He wasn’t conventionally handsome, despite being big, broad-shouldered and strong-jawed, but for Charlie, it had never been about his looks. He radiated a force that she found irresistible. Love, though? Not that soon. But certainly the recognisable beginning of something that could – and did – turn into love, and a feeling, as soon as she saw him, that she knew him already and always had.

She felt no closer to him at this moment, and no more distant from him, than she had then.

‘I probably could,’ she said after a few seconds. ‘If the person in question gave off the right aura or … vibe. Why?’

‘Damon Blundy,’ Simon muttered.

Charlie sighed. ‘You mean, “It’s something to do with the Blundy case, but I don’t want to share it with you at the moment”?’

Simon’s phone buzzed. He grabbed it, grimaced when he saw the screen. ‘Text from Liv, for you,’ he said. ‘Where’s your phone?’

‘In my bag. I thought I’d have lunch with my husband, not my phone.’

‘Look at your messages, she says.’

Nothing annoyed Charlie more than remote-control ordering-around by her younger sister. She’d have liked to ignore the demand, but knew she couldn’t afford to. A text from Liv could be anything from ‘You MUST read Book X by Writer Y – it is SO good, you will love me FOREVER’ to ‘Gibbs and I are running away together tomorrow and joining a travelling circus.’

What an apt metaphor, Charlie thought as she reached into her handbag for her phone; Liv and Gibbs had been walking the precarious tightrope of secret infidelity for several years now. How long before they fell off and got found out by one or other of their spouses? Perhaps this was the ‘Oh my God, we’ve been rumbled’ text that Charlie was always, on some level, expecting to arrive.

Thankfully, it wasn’t. The message said, ‘Can’t make drinks later, sorry! Can we rearrange? I’ll send other dates! xxx!’

Fine. Good, in fact. Though rather odd – Liv had almost insisted on meeting this evening, so why the sudden blasé cancellation? Charlie couldn’t summon the energy to send a reply. The crisis that Liv would one day inflict on her had been staved off for the time being, but the pattern of breath-holding followed by postponement was growing ever more draining. Charlie resented the small bursts of relief she felt every time a message arrived from Liv that wasn’t notification of a state of emergency; she hated the idea that her sister could at any moment become a disaster area that she would have to drop everything in order to attend to.

Like when she had life-threatening cancer.
Except that hadn’t been Liv’s fault. Falling in love with Chris Gibbs was.

‘Has Gibbs been different with you lately?’ Charlie asked Simon. ‘Ingratiating himself more than usual?’

That caught Simon’s attention. ‘Now you mention it … yes. He’s put himself out for me a few times recently when there was no need.’

‘He’s been sucking up to me too. Then yesterday Liv rang and said she wanted to take me out for cocktails, her treat – that’s what she’s just cancelled. They’re up to something. Whatever it is, they need us buttered up and onside. They want something from us.’

‘If Liv’s cancelled, though …’ Simon shrugged. ‘Maybe they’ve decided they don’t want it, whatever it is.’

‘Liv never decides she doesn’t want something,’ said Charlie. ‘She always decides she wants even more.’

‘Six ones.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Six ones, in a row,’ Simon said. ‘What does that mean to you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Anything.’

‘One hundred and eleven thousand, one hundred and eleven?’ Charlie suggested. It was bound to be the wrong answer: too obvious.

‘Riddy one hundred and eleven thousand, one hundred and eleven.’

‘What’s—’

‘Here’s the important question,’ Simon talked over her. ‘Did the killer turn up at Blundy’s house intending to stab him, sharpen the knife and then change his mind for some reason, or was there never going to be a stabbing? Was it never part of the plan?’

At last, a question Charlie understood. Simon had described the murder scene to her within minutes of seeing it himself, which made it all the more frustrating that he was now keeping things back. ‘If he changed his mind, why did he?’ she asked. ‘And if he didn’t, if he was never going to stab Blundy …’

‘Go on,’ Simon urged. ‘What you’re about to say could be important. I’m thinking the same thing, but I need to hear someone else put it into words.’

‘That’s what I’m struggling to do, because it’s so … odd,’ Charlie said. ‘If he never intended to stab Blundy, then he must have brought a knife and knife sharpener to the scene for some
other
reason. What could that reason be?’

‘Go on.’

Charlie doubted she’d get a favourable response if she said, ‘Er … that’s it.’

‘Also, he could have murdered Blundy in any number of ways, if he’d decided against stabbing,’ she said. ‘Once he’d taped him into his chair, he could have strangled him, or clocked him over the head several times with the knife sharpener. If he’d wanted to suffocate him, he could have just taped over his mouth and nose – with tape! Why tape a sharp knife against his mouth and suffocate him in an unnecessarily convoluted way? It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard.’

Simon was nodding. ‘At a rough guess, it would have been maybe five times quicker to shatter Blundy’s skull with the knife sharpener. Hannah, Blundy’s wife, was two floors down in the basement kitchen. She could have come up at any time. Killing Blundy as quickly and efficiently as possible would have increased the killer’s chances of getting in and out without being seen. Instead, he did the opposite.’

‘You’re assuming the wife didn’t do it?’

Simon looked caught out. ‘You’re right.’ He sighed heavily. ‘I shouldn’t assume that.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Charlie. ‘If she didn’t kill him, that means someone else gained access to the house without either breaking in or ringing the doorbell, created a theatre set of a murder scene at his leisure, offed Blundy, then escaped undetected. How likely is that? Though I suppose if we apply Occam’s Beard …’

These last two words made Simon wince whenever he heard them, including now. Occam’s Beard was Charlie’s pet name for the law that seemed to apply to nearly all of his cases: the simplest explanation is never the correct one. It was the opposite of Occam’s Razor. Charlie thought it was one of her greatest inventions, and was secretly hurt that Simon refused to recognise it or mention it by name.

‘I don’t think Hannah Blundy did it,’ he said. ‘Having said that, I reckon I’ve never been more likely to be wrong. She’s very … intense.’

Charlie smiled. ‘So are you. That’s why she makes you feel uneasy. You prefer people who are nothing like you – and you trust them more.’

‘Even if Hannah did it, that doesn’t answer the main question,’ said Simon. ‘Why do it in such an elaborate, counter-intuitive way? Everyone knows knives are for stabbing, not for suffocating.’

‘Shh,’ said Charlie, paranoid that the other lunchers in the café had abandoned their own conversations in order to listen to a more interesting one. ‘I don’t know. I can’t see the logic behind it.’

‘Unless?’ Simon prompted.

‘Unless it was symbolic. Making some kind of point.’ Charlie cut another small piece off her spinach and goat’s cheese tart. She was too full to eat any more, but it was there. What she really wanted to do was squash it with the back of her fork and make green and white gunge ooze through the tines. She reminded herself that she was a grown-up and resisted the urge.