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CHAPTER 3

Quaid followed the doctor up the stairs, with Trave and Ava bringing up the rear. Brive climbed quickly, taking the stairs two at a time, and when the two policemen arrived in Albert Morrison’s book-lined sitting room a minute later, they found the doctor on his hands and knees, picking up the papers that were strewn across the floor – the same heap of documents that Trave had drawn Quaid’s attention to earlier.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Quaid demanded, taking hold of Brive’s arm with one hand and removing the papers that the doctor was holding with the other.

‘What do you think? I’m clearing up the mess,’ said Brive, pulling away.

‘No, you’re bloody well not. You’re interfering with the evidence. That’s what you’re doing. And if you carry on, I’ll put you in handcuffs. Do you hear me?’

Brive didn’t answer but instead turned away with a surly expression on his face, nursing his arm as his wife came past him into the room. Quaid kept his eyes on Brive, noting how he kept shifting from one foot to the other, unable to keep still, and how he couldn’t stop nervously rubbing his hands together all the time, as if he were unconsciously trying to wash away the evidence of some recent transgression, while his eyes kept darting back towards the documents on the floor as if he were considering another move in their direction.

Quaid prided himself on being able to tell if a man was lying or hiding something from him, and this medicine man with the funny foreign-sounding name was doing both. Quaid was sure of it. From the moment he’d clapped eyes on him, the inspector had taken an instant dislike to the victim’s son-in-law. He distrusted the fussy triple knot in Brive’s navy-blue bow tie, and it worried him that half of what the doctor said just didn’t add up. Brive said he’d come over because he was concerned about his wife’s safety during the air raid, but then he’d shown no interest in going to her side when he’d discovered that she’d been a witness to her father’s murder. Instead his priority had been to get up the stairs and start interfering with the evidence. And then there was the way that Brive had shown up at the crime scene minutes after the police, even though by his own admission no one had telephoned him or asked for his assistance. He said he was looking for his wife, but why had he been so certain that she was going to be at her father’s?

It was a damned shame that the dead man’s daughter hadn’t got a look at the man who’d pushed her father – too dark, apparently, like everything else in the damned blackout.

‘You say your father was saying “no”. Is that all? Did you hear anything else?’ Quaid asked, turning to the dead man’s daughter. Ava, she was called – a pretty woman with a pretty name. God knows how she’d ended up married to this creepy doctor, Quaid thought, shaking his head.

‘He said: “No; no, I won’t. No, I tell you.” I could tell he was frightened – he kept saying “No”. And there was someone else saying something, but his voice was soft. I couldn’t hear any of the words.’

‘His – so it was a man?’

‘I don’t know. I assume so,’ she said, turning away. He could see that she’d started crying again. Perhaps he shouldn’t have started out with asking her about the murder, but where the hell else was he supposed to start?

‘Okay,’ he said, frowning. ‘I understand. Let me ask you this: Do you normally come over here when there’s a raid?’

‘Sometimes,’ she said in a barely audible voice. ‘It depends.’

‘On what?’

She opened her mouth to speak, but the words didn’t come. Instead she bit her lip and looked away, out of the window towards the wandering beam of a lone searchlight still operating out of the park opposite, despite the sounding of the all clear. The woman was in a bad way. That much was obvious. Quaid felt sorry for her. Her husband, standing morosely over by the door with a sullen look on his face, wasn’t giving her any support at all. The only person who was trying to help was the old lady from downstairs, who’d followed them up the stairs with a cup of tea, which now sat untouched on the low table beside Ava’s chair.

The kind thing would have been to allow the poor woman to go home and sleep, but Quaid resisted the temptation to let her go. He needed to get her version of events while it was still fresh in her mind.

‘Look, have some of this tea,’ he said in a kindly, fatherly voice, picking up the cup and wrapping the woman’s shaking hand around the handle. ‘It’ll make you feel better.’

‘We don’t drink tea. We never have,’ said Bertram, talking over Quaid’s shoulder.

Quaid couldn’t believe what he was hearing; he almost dropped the cup. Everyone drank tea. It’s what British people did to get them through the horrors – make it, distribute it, drink it. It was downright unpatriotic not to like it.

But Bertram’s intervention seemed to revitalize his wife in a way that nothing else could. She glanced over at him and then, as if making a conscious decision, began to drink the tea. Quaid made a mental note – there was no way these two lovebirds were happily married.

‘I come in the mornings to make my dad his lunch, and then, when I go, I leave him his supper – on a tray,’ said Ava, putting down the cup with a shaking hand. She spoke slowly, and there was a faint lilting cadence in her voice that Quaid couldn’t place at first, but then he realized that it was the remnants of an Irish accent. Which was where she must have got her bright green eyes from as well, he thought to himself. ‘And to begin with, I didn’t come back when the raids started because I thought he’d be sensible and go down in the basement with the neighbours. But then Mrs Graves – the woman you met, she was here a minute ago – she told me he was staying up here, refusing to come down. Like he’d got a death wish or something …’

‘There’s no need to exaggerate, my dear,’ Bertram said primly.

‘Please let the lady answer the questions,’ said Quaid, shooting him a venomous look.

‘He’s obstinate and pig-headed, always thinks he knows best,’ Ava went on. It was as if she were unaware of the interruption, and Quaid noticed her continued use of the present tense in relation to her father, as if some part of her were still in denial that he was dead. ‘I asked him to come and stay with us, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Oh no, he’s got to be here with his stupid books.’

Ava’s resentment was obvious as she gazed up at the overflowing shelves on all sides. It couldn’t have been easy being her father’s daughter, Quaid thought. Not that being married to Dr Bertram Brive looked much fun, either, for that matter.

‘So you started to come over here to see if he was all right?’ asked the inspector, prompting her to continue.

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘A few days ago.’

‘And did he go down to the shelter?’

‘Yes. But I knew that he wouldn’t have done without me being here.’

‘And your husband – has he been over here before in the evenings, like tonight?’

‘No.’

‘Even when there have been air raids?’

Ava shook her head.

‘I fail to see the relevance,’ said Bertram, whose face had turned an even brighter shade of red than before, although whether from anger or anxiety it was difficult to say. He was going to say more, but a cry from his wife silenced him.

‘All he had to do was go downstairs—’ She broke off again, covering her face with her hands as if in a vain effort to recall her words – ‘go downstairs’ – because instead her father had taken a quicker way down, falling through the air like one of Hitler’s bombs, landing with that unforgettable crunching thud at her feet. She shut her eyes, trying to block out the vision of his tangled broken body. But it did no good – it was imprinted on her mind’s eye forever by the shock.

‘I should never have let him go out without me,’ she said.

‘Out?’ repeated Quaid, surprised. It was the first he’d heard about the dead man having gone anywhere that day.

‘Yes, he insisted. It was after we came back from the park. I take him there after lunch most days. He likes to go and look at the ack-ack guns, “inspect the damage” he calls it, and poke his walking stick in people’s vegetable patches. They’ve got the whole west side divided up into allotments now,’ she added irrelevantly. ‘Digging for victory. I remember him making a joke about that, turning over some measly potato with his foot. Laughing in that way he has with his lip curling up, and now, now—’ She broke off again, looking absently over towards the fireplace, where a walnut-cased clock ticked away on the oak mantelpiece, impervious to the death of its owner two floors below.

The same glassy-eyed look had come over Ava’s eyes that had been there earlier, and this time Quaid glanced impatiently over at his assistant standing in the corner. Trave hadn’t said anything since they’d got upstairs, but now, as if accepting a cue, he went over and squatted beside the grieving woman.

‘Look, I know this is hard,’ he said, putting his hand over hers for a moment as he looked into her eyes, speaking slowly, quietly. ‘People dying – it’s not supposed to be this way, is it? Bombing makes no sense. But this is different. Somebody killed your father for a reason, pushed him over the balustrade out there. We can’t pretend it didn’t happen. You saw it. And maybe you can help us find out who did that to him. If you tell us everything you know. Can you do that, Ava? Can you?’

Ava looked down at the long-limbed young man in his ill-fitting suit and nodded. She was surprised by him, touched at the way he’d chosen instinctively to make himself lower than her, treating her as if she were in command of the situation. And he made her feel calm for some reason. Mrs Graves had told her that he was the one who’d caught her from falling when they were downstairs, and then there was the way his pale blue eyes looked into hers with a natural sympathy, as if he instinctively understood how she felt.

Not like Bertram. Behind Trave’s shoulder, Ava’s husband shifted his weight from one foot to the other, making no effort to conceal his mounting irritation.

‘I’m not happy with this, Inspector,’ he said, turning to Quaid. ‘Your boy’s badgering my wife. Can’t you see what she’s been through? In my professional opinion—’

‘I don’t need your professional opinion,’ said Quaid, cutting him off. ‘If I want it, I’ll ask for it. Carry on, Mrs Brive,’ he added, turning to Ava. ‘Tell us what happened today.’

‘He was fine this morning,’ she said, keeping her eyes on the younger policeman as she spoke even though she was answering the older one’s question. ‘I got here about half past one and made him his lunch just like I always do. He read The Times and did the crossword, and then, like I said, we went over to the park, and he was in a good mood – a really good mood for him. It was when we came back here that the trouble started.’

‘Trouble?’ repeated Quaid.

‘Yes, there was a note …’

‘What kind of note?’

‘Just a folded-over piece of paper. I didn’t get to read it. Someone had called while we were out and left it with Mrs Graves downstairs. She brought it to him up here, and he read it a couple of times. He seemed agitated, walking up and down, and then he went over to his desk and he was looking at papers, even a couple of books, acting like I wasn’t there, like he usually does. I went into the kitchen and I’d just started to wash up the lunch things when he called me, shouted, rather, telling me I had to phone him a taxi, that he needed one straight away—’

‘Why didn’t he call one himself?’ asked Quaid, interrupting.

‘Because he could ask me to do it,’ said Ava. Again Quaid picked up on the anger in the woman’s voice and thought, not for the first time, how strange it was the way the newly bereaved could feel so many contradictory emotions all at the same time. Part of Ava was obviously still struggling with her constant irritation at the unreasonable demands of her living father, while another part of her was trying to absorb the reality of his death; trying to come to terms with the impossible experience of seeing him smashed to pieces on the floor at her feet.

But above all, she was clearly terrified of losing control of herself again. Quaid was quietly impressed at the way she bit her lip, gripped hard onto the arms of her father’s chair to steady herself, and forced herself to resume her narrative of the day’s events. ‘The telephone doesn’t work sometimes,’ she went on, ‘and then sometimes the cab company doesn’t answer and I have to try another one. There’s no point trying to hail a taxi outside – it’s too far off their main routes. My dad doesn’t have the patience for any of that, but this time I got straight through and one showed up outside about twenty minutes later.’

‘Where was he taking it? You must have had to give a destination when you made the booking,’ asked Trave, putting in a question as he took out a battered red notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket and balanced it on his knee.

‘He told me St James’s Park. I asked him for an address, but he wouldn’t be more specific.’

‘And the cab service – who did you call?’

‘The local one. Chelsea Cars. Their office is just over Albert Bridge, at the bottom of Oakley Street.’

‘I know it. Thank you,’ said Trave, putting away his pen.

Ava nodded. ‘And that was that,’ she said. ‘I went and waited with him outside, made sure he had his coat and scarf, tried to make conversation, but he wasn’t interested. Just kept looking at his watch, jumping about from one foot to the other, like every minute mattered. And then when the cab came he got in without saying goodbye, and that was the last time I ever saw him—’

Ava broke off, putting her hand up to her eyes as if trying to ward off the pain. Trave tried to get her to drink her tea, but she waved it away.

‘About what time was this – when he left?’ asked Quaid.

‘About half past four, maybe later. I’m not really sure.’

‘And was he carrying anything? A briefcase? Anything like that?’

‘No,’ said Ava, shaking her head.

‘What about this?’ asked Trave, showing Ava the piece of paper he’d taken from the dead man’s pocket downstairs – ‘Provide detailed written report. What are the chances of success? C,’ and the name written underneath with a question mark, Hayrich or Hayrick. ‘Have you seen this before?’

Ava shook her head.

‘Do you have any idea what it means?’

‘No.’

‘But it’s your father’s handwriting, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she said, looking at the piece of paper again.

‘So it can’t be the note that was left for him while you were out, not if he wrote it himself,’ said Trave, thinking aloud. ‘Do you know what happened to that note?’ he asked, ignoring Quaid’s look of irritation. He knew how the inspector liked to control the flow of an interview, bringing in his assistant only when it suited him, like when Ava had got upset and stopped answering his questions.

‘No,’ said Ava, shaking her head. ‘As I said, I saw him reading it when we got back from the park, and then I went in the kitchen. He was upset and I didn’t want him taking it out on me. I think he threw something on the fire at one point. I don’t know if it was the note.’

‘He had one burning – this afternoon?’

‘Yes, a few coals. It’s died out now.’

There was a pause in the conversation. The dead ashes in the fireplace added to the atmosphere of forlorn emptiness in the flat.

‘And these documents – were they there this afternoon?’ Quaid asked, pointing to the mess of papers on the floor by the desk that Brive had tried to pick up earlier, the ones that Trave had pointed out as being out of place when they first came into the room.

‘No. My father never has papers on the floor like that – everywhere else, but never there. I know the flat looks a mess, but really he knew where everything was. Do you think …?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid we do. Whoever killed your father was looking for something. I wonder whether he found it,’ said Quaid, leaning down to pick up a thick-looking legal document from underneath the other documents. ‘The last will and testament of Albert James Morrison of 7 Gloucester Mansions, Prince of Wales Drive, London SW11—’ he began to read once he’d opened the folded vellum. But then he broke off, running his eyes silently over the contents before he looked back over at Ava, frowning.

‘Did your father talk about his will with you?’ he asked. ‘About whom he was leaving his money to?’

‘No, we didn’t have those kinds of conversations. He didn’t think it was a woman’s place to talk about money, to be involved in those kinds of decisions. But I assumed …’

‘What did you assume?’ Quaid pressed.

‘Well, that he would leave his property to me, I suppose. I’m his daughter and he has no other relatives as far as I know. At least none that are alive. He had a brother, but he died in the last war. On the Somme,’ she added irrelevantly.

‘Except he has a son-in-law, doesn’t he?’ said Quaid, looking grimly over at Ava’s husband, who had now retreated to a position just inside the door of the room, as if to enable him to beat a fast retreat at a moment’s notice.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Ava, clearly not understanding.

‘I mean that your father’s will provides for you and your husband, Dr Bertram John Brive, to inherit the estate jointly, and names your husband as the sole executor. There’s no mistake – it’s quite clear. Here, you can read it yourself if you want,’ said Quaid, passing the vellum pages over to Ava.

‘What about you? Is this news to you too, or did you know about your good fortune already?’ asked Quaid, turning his attention back to Bertram. The doctor seemed to be having competing reactions judging from the look on his face. He was certainly embarrassed, that much was obvious – a scarlet flush had spread across the expanse of his fat cheeks – but there was something else as well. Relief, maybe. Perhaps the will was what he’d been looking for when he’d raced up the stairs earlier; perhaps he’d been worried that it had disappeared.

‘I knew about it. Why shouldn’t I?’ Brive said defiantly. ‘Albert wanted it that way. It was his decision. Ava and I are married, and he thought that a husband should direct his wife’s affairs. I can’t see anything wrong with that.’

‘No, of course you can’t. Anything’s justified as long as the money ends up in your pocket,’ Ava burst out angrily, getting to her feet. ‘God damn you, Bertie. Now I understand why you’ve been spending so much time over here this last year, ministering to his hypochondria, writing him prescriptions for drugs he didn’t need, and filling them yourself at the pharmacy. It wasn’t him you cared about, was it? It was his stupid money.’

Trave put his hand on Ava’s arm, anxious that she might rush forward and physically attack her husband, but he needn’t have worried. Her angry outburst exhausted her and she collapsed back into her chair, sobbing.

Downstairs, Quaid paused in the hallway, drawing a deep breath of what appeared to be satisfaction as he pulled on his black leather driving gloves. Albert’s corpse had been removed, replaced by a chalk outline of where his body had lain.

‘Good work,’ he said, smiling benignly at his assistant. ‘We’ll let the medicine man stew in his juices tonight and see what we can find out about him tomorrow. Can I give you a lift home?’

‘No thanks. I’d like the walk. I don’t live too far from here,’ said Trave.

‘All right, suit yourself.’

Trave watched from the doorstep as the inspector got into his car and drove away, then waited until the Wolseley had turned the corner at the end of the street into Albert Bridge Road before he went back inside and knocked on the door of the ground-floor flat.

Quaid might be focused on the dead man’s son-in-law, but Trave was curious to know more about the victim and the mysterious visitor who’d left the note with the old lady downstairs – the note that had made Albert Morrison so agitated when he got back from the park. A fireside chat with Mrs Graves wasn’t on the list of Quaid’s instructions, but Trave didn’t feel he needed the inspector’s permission to ask her a few questions. The time to make a report would be after he’d found something out, not before.

As he’d hoped, Mrs Graves was still awake. The only change was that she had exchanged her black widow’s weeds for a floral dressing gown and curlers in her hair. Mourning was clearly not a night-time occupation. And instead of tea, she offered the young policeman something a little stronger from a bottle that she stood on a chair to get down from a high cupboard in her kitchen.

‘I think we need a little pick-me-up after all that’s happened,’ she said. ‘There’s not been a murder in this house before – at least not in my time.’

‘Well, I’d like to thank you for your kindness to Ava. I don’t think she’d have been able to answer the inspector’s questions if you hadn’t helped her out to begin with,’ said Trave.

‘It was the least I could do. She’s not had a very happy life, the poor girl, and now this …’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, should we, but her father wasn’t an easy man, you know. More often than not he looked daggers drawn if you so much as wished him good morning, and he didn’t like anyone except Ava going into his flat. Apart from her husband, of course – the doctor. He was always round here with his bag of tricks, ministering to Albert. Much good all that medicine did him, God rest his soul,’ said Mrs Graves, crossing herself before pouring Trave and herself two more generous measures from the half-empty whisky bottle on the table.

‘So he didn’t have any other visitors?’

‘No, like I said, he liked to keep himself to himself.’

‘But there was someone today, wasn’t there?’ asked Trave. ‘The man who left the note that you took up to Albert after he got back from the park. Ava told us about it.’

‘Oh, him. Yes, he’s been here before a few times, but not for a while now. Not until today.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘I don’t know … middle-aged, in his early fifties, maybe, with fair-coloured hair going bald at the top – a bit of grey in it, if I remember rightly. Not thin, not fat, average looking, I suppose. No glasses. He’d got yellow fingers like people do when they smoke all the time, and his suit was crumpled up like he’d slept in it – that I do remember. I doubt he’s married or got anyone taking care of him, looking like that.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Nice-sounding voice. I might remember his name if you give me a minute. He didn’t tell me it this time, but we had a chat once when he was here before and he wasn’t in such a hurry. Briars, maybe … no, something else that hurts – on plants.’ Mrs Graves scratched her head, searching for the word, and then abruptly found it. ‘Thorn – that’s it,’ she said, snapping her fingers. ‘I remember because it wasn’t the right name for him. He wasn’t prickly or up on his high horse like Ava’s husband. She’d have done a lot better marrying this bloke if she was going to go for someone older, if you ask me—’

‘You said he was in a hurry today,’ interrupted Trave, trying to get the widow back on track.

‘Yes, a real hurry. Couldn’t wait for Albert to get back, and so I got him a piece of scrap paper and he scribbled something on it, leaning over on the ledge in the hall where we leave the letters, so I couldn’t see what he was writing even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t, of course. It was none of my business. And then when he’d finished, he folded it up and made me promise to give it to Albert personally when he got back, which I did just as soon as he came in. I hope I did the right thing,’ she said anxiously, looking up at Trave for reassurance. ‘I hope that note didn’t have anything to do with what happened – you know, afterwards.’

‘I’m sure it didn’t,’ said Trave, injecting a note of certainty into his voice that he was far from feeling. ‘We just need to get the whole picture, that’s all. You understand.’

Trave sensed that he’d got everything from Mrs Graves that was worth getting and stood up to leave. But the widow wouldn’t hear of it, keeping him prisoner for half an hour longer while she plied him with more whisky and memories of her late lamented husband, who’d died of something unspecified at the time of the General Strike. And in retrospect, Trave didn’t know how he would have got out of her flat at all if it hadn’t been for the air raid siren that came to his rescue on the stroke of eight o’clock, sending Mrs Graves scurrying to the basement with the other surviving tenants of Gloucester Mansions.

This time it was no false alarm, as less than ten minutes later, just as he was approaching Albert Bridge, Trave began to hear the sound of distant explosions. There was no one in sight, and he felt for a moment as if he were looking at a surrealist painting of an inhuman world – the pale metal girders holding up the bridge on either side appeared in the moonlight like the carcass of some monstrous prehistoric ship, while up in the sky above Battersea Park, a second silver barrage balloon had been winched up to join its mate, so that now they floated over the trees like gigantic headless creatures, inhabitants of another planet.

Further up the river towards Lambeth, a red-white glow began to suffuse the eastern skyline, and Trave felt a stab of pity for the poor people who were being bombed, defenceless against the rain of incendiaries and high explosives pouring down on them from up above. Try as he might, Trave could see no sense in this indiscriminate bombing of families in their homes. He wondered where it would end or if it ever would.

A memory came unbidden into his mind of an old man in Oxford before the war who used to stand by the Martyrs’ Memorial in St Giles, shouting at passers-by to prepare for the end of the world. Trave sighed as he remembered how he and his wife, Vanessa, had laughed at the crazy old fool back then, not understanding that he’d been quite right in his predictions. They’d been living in a fool’s paradise, with no idea of how little time they had left.

Trave shivered and turned his collar up against the cold as he stepped off the bridge and began to walk home along the deserted embankment, while behind him the bombs continued to fall.