No Kiss For The Devil

9

Long Cottage stood at the end of a neat terrace on the edge of Cotton Hill, a hamlet barely six miles from Basingstoke. Other than a tiny pub, a whitewashed village hall and a scattering of other houses set behind hedges and trees, there couldn’t have been more than a dozen buildings in sight, as if progress had passed them by, leaving a remnant of a time long gone.

Palmer parked his Saab and climbed out. The air was cool after the inside of the car, and he eyed the darkening sky with suspicion. The journey down the M3 from London had been a stop-start series of road works, and it was a relief to be out in the open.

He eyed the cottage. It had a small, crumbling brick wall surrounding a neat front garden of herb borders and shrubs. An elderly woman in a baggy grey jumper was bent over a large terracotta urn, stabbing energetically with a hand fork at the contents as if giving the coup de grace to some unseen enemy.

Palmer strolled across the road and smiled genially when the woman looked up. ‘Mrs Demelzer?’

She straightened her back with a grunt and dropped the fork into the urn as if relieved to be done with it. She had silver hair swept back into a tidy bun, round cheeks and a pleasant face, and laughter lines around keen eyes. Palmer was never good with women’s ages, but he guessed she was somewhere in her seventies.

‘You don’t know anything about slugs, do you?’ the woman said chattily. ‘All my years gardening, and the buggers still keep coming. I’ve tried pellets and stuff, but none of them work.’

‘Have you tried copper?’ Palmer said easily, recalling a fragment of a gardening programme, courtesy of a lengthy surveillance job in his car. ‘I’ve heard that works.’

She gave him a pitying look. ‘Is that right? Well, someone had better tell the local slugs, because they haven’t caught on yet.’ She brushed her hands together and used her wrist to push a stray hank of hair off her forehead. ‘So, what can I do for you, young man?’

‘I’m a friend of Helen’s. She talked about you, and I said I’d drop by if ever I was passing.’ He told her his name and wondered if the approach was as lame as it sounded. But short of telling her the shocking truth, which he had no right to do, he hadn’t been able to come up with a better reason for being there.

The woman tilted her head to one side and smiled, eyes assessing and accepting him all in one look. ‘Helen? Oh, that’s nice. What’s she been up to, then?’ She didn’t wait for an answer, but turned towards the front door of the cottage. ‘You’d better come in,’ she said. ‘Do you fancy a cup of tea?’

‘Helen’s a sweet girl. Her mum was my best friend — ever since school days. She died ten years ago, but Helen always kept in touch, bless her.’

They were seated in the warmth of the cottage’s tiny front room, with a tray of tea and biscuits on a footstool between them. The room was like an antique shop, with ornaments of every kind packed on to every bit of shelving and flat surface, even overflowing on to the floor. It was clear that Mrs Demelzer had never thrown away a single souvenir she’d been given or collected, no matter how kitsch. Figurines, pots, plates and statuettes, most of them bearing a place name in gaudy script, all jostled each other in a mad fight for space. And Palmer had never seen so many heavy crystal ashtrays in one place before. Maybe the old lady was a heavy smoker.

Mrs Demelzer stared into her cup as if reading something meaningful in the depths and gave a vague half-smile. ‘I’m not sure why she bothers, to be honest. We’re hardly related, and it’s only because of my friendship with Margaret, her mother, that we ever met. But we sort of rub along, which is nice.’ Her smile broadened. ‘She keeps me in touch with the modern world, I suppose.’

‘Did you see her often?’ Palmer could have bitten his tongue at his use of the past tense, but she hadn’t appeared to notice.

‘Not really. She comes down three or four times a year, just for a short visit. I keep a room ready for her, just in case. The last time was a fortnight ago. I think she needs some quiet time down here every now and then when life in London gets too much for her.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s always lovely to see her, though, to hear about what she’s doing. She’s forever on the go, looking for the next story. But that’s the thing with young people, isn’t it? You have to keep on top of things, otherwise they find someone else to take your place.’

‘They?’

‘Well, your employers. It’s all so cut-throat, these days.’ She sighed regretfully. ‘Still, Helen seems to manage. Although…’ She paused and gave him an uncertain look.

‘Although?’ Palmer waited.

‘Well, when she was here before, about a month ago, she was really excited. She’d picked up an assignment to do a story — an exclusive, she said. Nobody else had got a sniff of it. I asked her what it was about, but she wouldn’t say. It was all hush-hush, apparently, and she wasn’t allowed to divulge anything. I thought it was silly — I mean, it’s not as if I’d know anything about it, living down here. I don’t exactly trot off down the pub every evening and gossip, do I?’

Palmer forced himself to be patient. Was this something important she was about to reveal, or had it been one of Helen’s other normal jobs she was excited about? ‘But that sounds good, doesn’t it? Exclusives are hard to come by.’ Even as he spoke, he began to feel a trickle of unease. Knowing the nature of Riley’s work, he was aware that one of the big problems about so-called exclusives was that by their nature, they often entailed risk. Had Helen taken on too big a risk for the chance of a headline story?

‘Well, if you say so, dear. But the next time I spoke to her, she sounded a bit down. She’d been away for a brief holiday, but it didn’t seem to have done her much good. I asked what was the matter, but she just said it was pressure of work. It was so unlike her. The last time I’d seen her down like that was almost a year ago, I think it was, when she broke up with her boyfriend.’ She smiled at the memory. ‘I was hoping it would go the distance, that one. But Helen… well, she’s not the sort to settle down. Not yet, anyway. A bit like her mother, I suppose: footloose and fancy free.’

Palmer shifted uneasily, disturbed by a flush of sadness. It was a mere flicker, but Mrs Demelzer caught it and eyed him in surprise, as if a switch had been thrown.

‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ she exclaimed, then nodded without waiting for his reply. Reassured, she rattled on. ‘God, I must be having a senior moment. Frank. Of course. She lost her old briefcase…it got damaged. That’s right — and the new one you bought her had a shoulder strap and nice gold buckles. It was very smart.’ She squeezed her shoulders upwards in a gesture of enjoyment, eyes shining. ‘She was so pleased with that briefcase, you’ve no idea. She uses it all the time, cramming it with all sorts of stuff. Well, she loves being busy, doesn’t she — although I’ve no idea what she’s doing at the moment.’

Palmer waited, desperate to push the questions and get away from here. This suddenly didn’t look as if it would lead anywhere useful. Whatever Helen did when she was down here was unconnected with her work. And if she had sent money to her friend, so what?

Then the old lady gave him a lead in. ‘Still, I suppose you’d know more about that than me, wouldn’t you?’

Palmer thought his hold on the cup would snap the handle. ‘Why do you say that?’ he asked casually.

‘You mean you haven’t seen your post?’

Palmer shook his head. ‘I’ve been abroad.’

‘Oh. Well, that explains it. She rang me a few days ago. Said I’d be getting some money, and not to bank it but spend it on something nice. It was so kind of her.’ She frowned. ‘I didn’t want to take it, to be honest, but Helen can be very obstinate when she wants to — just like her mother used to be. I’ll probably use it to decorate her room, which will be honours even, don’t you think?’

Palmer nodded. ‘You weren’t a diplomat by profession, were you?’

She laughed outright. ‘Good gracious, no. I’m far too blunt. Anyway, the cheque came — from a place in London. She also asked me to bundle up any bits of paper she’d left in her room from her last visit. Doodles, they looked like to me — the sort people do when they’re on the phone a lot, like Helen always is, even when she comes down here. So I did what she asked: I went through her room and put everything in an envelope. Even the scraps in her wastebasket. Well, they were no good to the dustman and I didn’t want to throw out anything important by mistake.’

Palmer went still. ‘Did she say why she wanted them?’

‘Not really. I assumed she’d mislaid a jotting or something, and needed to find it. She was always making notes of one thing or another.’

‘What did you do with them?’

The old lady gave him a wary look, as if he was simple. ‘Well, I did what Helen asked: I put them in an envelope and sent them to you.’

‘Me?’ Palmer was stunned.

‘Yes. You should have received it by now.’ She picked up the teapot. ‘Would you like more tea?’

By the time Palmer drove away from the cottage, his mind was in a spin. He felt guilty at not having told Mrs Demelzer about Helen’s death. But to have done so would have set off a train of action and reaction he would not have been able to explain. It was best to leave it to the police family liaison people. They were trained for it.

He thought about the briefcase, which the old lady said Helen had been so pleased with. Helen was the complete journalist and writer, virtually living by what she could carry: notepad, digital recorder, mobile phone — actually, ditch that, he remembered; she’d had a new Blackberry which did all of those things. She’d shown it to him one evening, when they’d been out for dinner. Later, as they were saying goodnight — Palmer had a late-night surveillance job on — Helen had placed her briefcase on the ground by his car. He’d forgotten about it and driven off, mashing one corner with a rear tyre. Fortunately, nothing else had been damaged, and buying her a replacement was the least he could do. He knew she liked black, but all he could find of a similar make was burgundy. It was lightweight leather with gold fittings, and she’d been thrilled with it. He could still recall her comment afterwards.

‘Frank,’ she’d teased him with a gentle hint of sarcasm. ‘Where on God’s earth did a man like you find a leather briefcase light enough not to pull a woman’s arm out of its socket?’ She had followed it with a comment about his idea of luggage being an army issue kitbag made of canvas with a rope handle.

‘Actually,’ he’d replied, feigning wounded pride, ‘I got it in a little place off Bond Street. I’m not a complete Philistine.’

By the time he was back on the M3 heading towards London, Palmer was wrestling with two major questions. The answer to one could be in the large brown envelope sitting among the junk mail on his desk. The envelope Helen had asked Mrs Demelzer to send him, even though it was months since they’d seen each other. Exactly why she’d done that was a mystery.

The other question was less likely to be answered so quickly. It concerned Helen’s burgundy briefcase with the gold fittings; the portable office that held every detail of her day-to-day work. If it had been in the car with her, the police would have known everything about her within minutes. There would have been no need to call Riley out in the hopes of an early identification.

So if it wasn’t in the car, where was it?