I'm a bloody stranger, you filthy bitch! Pitchley had roared, if only in his head. You didn't think twice about letting me know what you like to get up to when you're panting for it.
She'd seemed to know what he was thinking, though, despite the fact that he didn't communicate it on the screen. She'd written They'd want my name, you see. I can't have that, Tongue. Not my name. Not with tabloids being what they are. I'm sorry, but you understand that, don't you?
Which was how he'd come to realise that she wasn't divorced. She wasn't a woman in her declining years who was desperate for a man to prove she still had It. She was a woman in her declining years who was looking for a thrill to balance against the tedium of marriage.
That marriage had to be a longtime covenant, one made not with an Everyman or an Anyman but with a Somebody, an important Somebody, a politician, perhaps, or an entertainer, or a successful and well-known entrepreneur. And if she gave her name to DCI Leach, it would quickly leak through the porous substance that was the hierarchy of power at the police station. Having leaked through that, it would find its way to the ears of an informant from within, a snout who accepted cash from a journalist eager to make his name by outing someone on the front page of his filthy scream sheet.
Bitch, Pitchley thought. Bitch, bitch, bitch. She might have thought of that before she'd met him at the Valley of Kings, Mrs. Butter-Wouldn't-Melt-If-You-Put-It-On-Coals. She might have thought of all the potential consequences before she walked in, dressed to be seen as Mrs. Demure, Mrs. Out-Of-Style, Mrs. I've-Got-No-Experience-With-Men, Mrs. Please-Please-Show-Me-I'm-Still-Desirable-Because-I've-Been-So-Low-On-Myself-For-So-Long. She might have thought it could actually come to having to say Okay, I was there in the Valley of Kings, having drinks and then dinner with an utter stranger whom I met on-line in a chat room where people hide their identities while sharing their fantasies about wild, wet, and lubricious sex. She might have thought she could be asked to admit to hours lying splayed on a thin-mattressed bed above the South Kensington traffic, naked on that bed with a man whose name she didn't know, didn't ask to know, and didn't want to know. She might have thought, the rotten little cow.
Pitchley pushed away from his computer and sank his elbows onto his knees. He took his forehead into his hands and dug into it with his fingertips. She could have helped. She wouldn't have been the complete solution to his problem—there was still that long period between the Comfort Inn and his arrival in Crediton Hill to be accounted for—but she would have been a bloody good start. As it was, he had only his story, his willingness to stick to his story, the unlikely possibility that the evening clerk at the Comfort Inn would confirm his presence two nights ago without confusing that night with the dozens of other nights he'd passed the requisite cash across the counter, and the hope that his face was guileless enough to convince the police to believe his story.
It didn't help matters that he knew the woman who'd died in his street in possession of his address. And it truly didn't help matters one iota that he'd once been involved—no matter how peripherally—with a heinous crime that had taken place when he'd lived under her roof.
He'd heard the shrieking that evening and he'd come running because he'd recognised who was crying out. When he'd got there, everyone else was there as well: the child's father and mother, the grandparents, the brother, Sarah-Jane Beckett, and Katja Wolff. “I do not leave her for more than a minute,” she shrieked, frantically laying this information in front of everyone milling round the closed bathroom door. “I swear. I do not leave her for more than a minute!” And then looming behind her was Robson, the violin master, who grasped her by the shoulders and pulled her away. “You must believe me,” she cried, and continued to cry as he pulled her with him down the stairs and out of sight.
He hadn't known at first what was going on. He hadn't wanted to know and couldn't afford to know. He'd heard the argument between her and the parents, she'd told him she'd been sacked, and the last thing he wanted to consider was whether the argument, the sacking, and the reason for the sacking—which he suspected but could not bear to contemplate—were in any way related to what lay behind that bathroom door.
“James, what's going on?” Sarah-Jane Beckett's hand had slipped into his, clutching at him as she breathed the whisper. “Oh God, something hasn't happened to Sonia, has it?”
He'd looked at her and saw that her eyes were glittering despite her sombre tone. But he hadn't wondered what that glitter meant. He'd only wondered how he could manage to get away from her and go to Katja.
“Take the boy,” Richard Davies had instructed Sarah-Jane. “For God's sake, get Gideon out of here, Sarah.”
She'd done as he commanded, taking the little white-faced boy into his bedroom, where music was playing, issuing blithely forth as if nothing terrible was going on in the house.
He himself went seeking Katja and he found her in the kitchen, where Robson was forcing a glass of brandy on her. She was trying to refuse, crying, “No. No. I cannot drink it,” looking wild-haired, wild-eyed, and completely wrong for the part of loving, protective nanny to a child who was … what? He was afraid to ask, afraid because he already knew but didn't want to face because of what it might mean in his own life if what he thought and dreaded proved to be true.
“Drink this,” Robson was saying. “Katja. For the love of God, pull yourself together. The paramedics will be here in a moment and you can't afford to be seen like this.”
“I did not, I did not!” She swung round in her chair and grabbed onto his shirt, the collar of which she grasped and twisted. “You must say, Raphael! Say to them that I did not leave her.”
“You're getting hysterical. It may be nothing.”
But that did not prove to be the case.
He should have gone to her then, but he hadn't because he'd been afraid. The mere thought that something might have happened to that child, might have happened to any child within a house in which he was a resident, had paralysed him. And then later, when he could have talked to her and when he tried to talk to her, in order to declare himself the friend she needed and clearly did not have, she would not speak to him. It was as if the subtle flaying she was taking in the press in the immediate aftermath of Sonia's death had driven her into a corner and the only way she could survive was to become tiny and silent, like a pebble on a path. Every story about the unfolding drama in Kensington Square began with the reminder that Sonia Davies' nanny was the German whose famed escape from East Germany—previously considered laudable and miraculous—had cost a vital young man his life, and that the luxurious environment in which she found herself in England was a dire and bleak contrast to the situation to which her ostentatious asylum-seeking had condemned the rest of her family. Everything about her that was remotely questionable or potentially interpretable was dug up by the press. And anyone close to her was liable to the same treatment. So he'd kept his distance, till it was too late.
When she was finally charged and brought to trial, the van that had taken her from Holloway to the Old Bailey had been pelted with eggs and rotten fruit, and shouts of “baby killer” greeted her when that same van returned her to the prison at night and she had to make the few yards' walk to the prison's door. Public passion was aroused by the crime she had allegedly committed: because the victim was a child, because the child was handicapped, and because—although no one would say it directly—her putative killer was German.
And now he was back in it all, Pitchley thought as he rubbed his forehead. He was mixed up in it as effectively as if he'd never managed to put twenty years between himself and what had happened in that miserable house. He'd changed his name, he'd switched jobs five times, but all his best efforts to remake himself were going to be brought to nothing if he couldn't get CreamPants to see that her statement was crucial to his survival.
Not that CreamPants' statement was the only thing he needed to put his house in order. He also needed to deal with Robbie and Brent, those two loose cannons who w
ere about to fire.
He'd assumed they wanted money again when they'd shown up a second time in Crediton Hill. No matter that he'd already given them a cheque, he knew them well enough to realise there was a decent possibility that Robbie had been inspired by the sight of a Ladbrokes to deposit those funds not in a bank account but on the head of a horse whose name he rather fancied. This assumption on Pitchley's part was ratified when Robbie said, “Show 'im, Brent,” not five minutes after the two of them had hulked through his front door, carrying with them the stench of their poor bathing habits. Accepting the instruction, Brent brought forth from his jacket a copy of The Source, which he opened like someone shaking out bed sheets.
“Look who it was got mashed on your doorstep, Jay,” Brent said with a grin as he showed the scabrous paper's front page. And of course it would be The Source, Pitchley thought. God forbid that either Brent or Robbie would elevate their taste to something less sensational.
He couldn't avoid seeing what Brent dangled in front of him: the garish headline, the photograph of Eugenie Davies, the inset photograph of the street in which he himself lived, and the second inset photograph of the boy no longer a boy but a man now and a celebrity. It was all down to him that this death was taking up newsprint at all, Pitchley thought bitterly. If Gideon Davies hadn't achieved fame, fortune, and success in a world that increasingly valued those accomplishments, then the papers wouldn't even be covering this situation. It would simply be an unfortunate hit-and-run that the police were in the process of investigating. Full stop and end of story.
Robbie said, “'Course, we di'n't know when we 'as here yesterday. Mind 'f I unload this, Jay?” And he'd shrugged his way out of his heavy waxed jacket and lobbed it onto the back of a chair. He made a circuit of the room and a point of examining everything in it. He said, “Nice gaff, this. You done good for yourself, Jay. I expect you got a big name in the City, least 'mong the people who count. That right, Jay? You massage their money and presto amazo, it makes more money and they trust you to do that, don't they?”
Pitchley said, “Just say what you want. I'm rather pressed for time.”
“Don't see why,” Robbie said. “Shoot. In New York …” He snapped his fingers in the direction of his companion. “Brent. Time in New York?”
Brent looked at his watch obediently. His lips moved as he did the maths. He frowned and employed the fingers of one hand. He finally said, “Early.”
Robbie said, “Right. Early, Jay. Th' market's not closed yet in New York. You got plenty of time to make a few more quid before the day's over. Even with this little confab of ours.”
Pitchley sighed. The only way to get rid of the two men would be to make it look as though he was playing Rob's game. He said, “You're right, of course,” and nothing more. He merely walked to a bureau near the window that overlooked the street, and from inside he brought out his chequebook and a biro that he clicked open officially. He carried the chequebook into the dining room, where he pulled out a chair, sat, and began to write. He started with the amount: three thousand pounds. He couldn't imagine that Rob would ask for less.
Rob strode into the dining room. Brent, as always, followed his brother. Rob said, “That's what you think, is it, Jay? Us two show up and it's all about money?”
“What else?” Pitchley filled in the date and began to write the other man's name.
Robbie's hand smacked down on the dining room table. “Hey! You stop that and look at me.” And for good measure, he knocked the biro from Pitchley's hand. “You think this is about money, Jay? Me and Brent trot round—all this way up to Hampstead, mind you—with business waiting to be tended to out there”—this with a jerk of his head back in the direction of the sitting room, by which Pitchley took that he meant the street—“with us losing dosh by the bucketful just to stand here and bunny with you for ten minutes and you think we come about money? Hell, man.” And to the other, “What d'you think of that, Brent?”
Brent joined them at the table, The Source still dangling from his fingers. He wouldn't know what to do with the paper till Robbie gave him his next set of instructions. As for now, it gave him something to occupy his hands.
The poor oaf was pathetic, Pitchley thought. It was a wonder he'd ever learned to tie his shoes. He said, “All right. Fine,” and sat back in his chair. “So why don't you tell me why you've come, Rob?”
“Can't just be a friendly visit, that it?”
“That's not exactly our history.”
“Yeah? Well, you think about history. 'Cause it's ripe to come back and pay a call on you, Jay.” Robbie flicked his thumb at The Source. Cooperatively, Brent held it higher, like a schoolboy displaying his primitive art work. “Slow going on the news front last few days. No Royals misbehaving, no MP getting caught with his dick in a schoolgirl's hole. The papers're going to start digging, Jay. And me and Brent come to see you to lay our plans.”
“Plans.” Pitchley repeated the word with a great deal of care.
“Sure. We took care of things once. We c'n do it again. Situation's bound to heat up fast once the coppers suss out who you really are and when they give the word to the press like they always do—”
“They know,” Pitchley said, in the hope that he could head Robbie off, that he could bluff him with a partial truth that the man might take as a full admission. “I've already told them.”
But Rob wasn't swallowing that tale. He said, “No way, Jay. 'Cause if you did, they'd feed you to the sharks soon 's they need something to make it look like they been working hard. You know that. So I 'xpect you told them something, true. But 'f I know you, you didn't tell them all.” He eyed Pitchley shrewdly and seemed to like what he read on his face. He said, “Right. Good. So me and Brent here figger we got to lay some plans. You'll be wanting protection and we know how to give it.”
And then I'll owe you forever, Pitchley thought. Double what I already owe you because it'll be twice in my life that you've played at keeping the hounds at bay.
“You need us, Jay,” Robbie told him. “And me and Brent? We don't turn our backs when we know we're needed. Some people do, but that's not our way.”
Pitchley could only imagine how it would play out: Robbie and Brent doing battle for him, strong-arming the press in the same ineffectual manner that they'd employed in the past.
He was about to tell them to go home to their wives, to their failing inadequate ill-managed business washing waxing buffing the cars of the rich among whom they would never be able to mix. He was about to tell them to piss off permanently because he was tired of being drained like a bathtub and played like a badly tuned piano. Indeed, he opened his mouth to say all of it, but that was when the doorbell rang, when he walked to the window and saw who it was, when he said, “Stay here,” to Robbie and Brent and closed the dining room doors upon them.
And now, he thought miserably as he sat at his computer and tried and failed to come up with a way to bend the will of CreamPants to his own, he would owe them more. He would owe them more for Rob's quick thinking, the thinking that got him and Brent out of the house and into the park before the dumpy female detective constable was able to put her mitts on them when they'd hidden in the kitchen. No matter that what they might have told her would have added nothing harmful in his present situation. Robbie and Brent would not see it that way. They would see their actions as protecting him, and they would come calling when they thought it was time for him to pay.
Lynley made the drive to London in fairly good time after paying a visit to the Audi dealership that was working on the car owned by Ian Staines. He'd taken Staines with him as a safeguard against the man making any phone calls in an attempt to direct the course of Lynley's enquiries, and once they'd pulled to a stop in front of the auto showroom, he'd told the man to wait in the Bentley while he went inside for a chat.
There, he corroborated much of what Eugenie Davies' brother had told him. The car was indeed being serviced; it had been brought in at eight that morning. An a
ppointment for the work had been scheduled on the previous Thursday, and nothing irregular—like a request for body work—had been noted in the computer when the service secretary had taken the call.
When Lynley asked to see the car, that presented no problem either. The service representative walked him out to it, chatting away about the great strides that Audi had made in craftsmanship, manoeuvrability, and design. If he was curious as to why a policeman had come round asking about a particular car, he gave no evidence of this. A potential customer was, after all, a potential customer.
The Audi in question stood in one of the service bays, raised some six feet on a hydraulic lift. Its position gave Lynley the opportunity to examine its undercarriage as well as the chance to scrutinise its front end and both of its wings for damage. The front end was fine, but there were scratches and a dent on the car's left wing that looked intriguing. They looked fresh as well.
“Any chance a smashed bumper was replaced before you got the car?” Lynley asked the mechanic who was working on it.
“Always a chance of that, mate,” the man replied. “Bloke don't need to drop money at the dealership if he knows how to shop.”
So despite the verification provided by the Audi's general condition and its presence just where Staines said it would be, there was still the chance that those scratches and that small dent meant something more than poor driving skills. Staines couldn't be crossed off the list despite his claim that the scratches and dent were a mystery to him, that “bloody Lydia uses the car as well, Inspector.”