Cop to Corpse

23

This morning I picked a moment to look through the invoice book. Every transaction is there, names and addresses of sender and recipient, the messages that go on the little cards, and how much the client paid and whether it was cash or card. Sally sometimes asks me to mind the shop while she slips out for ten minutes to buy two takeout cappuccinos at the shop up the street.

This was my opportunity.

It’s stuffed with famous names and intimate messages, that little book. You could sell it to one of the Sunday papers for a small fortune. ‘Forgive me, angel, the blonde bitch is history now.’ ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, Billy is hot and he’s lusting for you.’ ‘See you — all of you — in the penthouse tonight.’

I won’t reveal the senders’ names, but you’ll have heard of them, believe me. I was dying to read on, but if I got too interested, Sally would be back with the cappuccinos before I found what I wanted. I was looking for one delivery on a particular Saturday in June because I remembered it was my birthday and I had a date that evening and wanted to get the job done in time to get to the hairdresser’s.

I thumbed through the pages and found it. ‘26 June. Corsage, pink rose. Buttonhole, red car. To Mr. John Smith, 48 Blahblah Avenue.?5.50 paid cash. ’

John Smith?

The others were going to jump all over me.

I was so blown away that this was his real name that I still had the book open in my hands when Sally came back holding two coffees.

I froze.

She was like, ‘Have you taken an order?’

I snapped the book shut and felt myself go bright red. ‘No, I was trying to remember the name of one of our clients in Blahblah Avenue.’

‘John Smith?’

‘That’s him.’

Sally, bless her, was as calm as a midwife. ‘Nice man. Always buys his wife something to pin on her frock. Well, I assume they’re married. They act as if they are.’

And I’m, ‘You know them, then?’

‘Not really.’

‘Do they come in together?’

‘Not in the shop. I’ve seen them somewhere. Where was it? A Christmas concert in the Guildhall, I think. She’s rather gorgeous, tall, dark-haired, in her thirties.’

Sounds awfully like the go-between I watched in the pub, I was thinking.

And Sally went, ‘What’s your interest in them?’

I dug deep and made up an answer. ‘A friend happened to mention a charming couple she knows who live in Blahblah Avenue and I was curious to know if the man was our client. Stupid of me. I couldn’t remember his name.’

‘It’s forgettable, being so common.’

‘How right you are.’

‘If you’ve finished with the book, would you put it back in the drawer?’

This is as near as Sally has ever got to a rebuke.

‘Of course.’

My insides clenched with shame. I couldn’t wish for a sweeter, more considerate boss and I’d disappointed her.

And now I’ve fallen out with my friends as well. My shameful scene with the invoice book troubled me more than I can say. I spent most of today wrestling with my conscience, asking myself what could have possessed me to be so sneaky. It was like reading someone else’s diary.

When we met this evening in one of the city’s many pubs I bought the drinks and then told the other two I wanted out.

Anita was onto me at once. ‘Out from what?’

‘The sleuthing thing. It started as a game, but it’s got too serious for me. The fun has gone out of it.’

‘Because you recognized my picture of Heathrow man?’

‘Actually, yes.’

‘You know exactly who he is, don’t you?’ She was in my face and looked ready to scratch it. The jolliest people can turn into monsters very quickly. ‘That stuff about not knowing his name isn’t true.’

‘Hold on, Anita,’ I went. ‘I’m not dishonest. If I’d remembered the name I’d have told you at once. What I’m saying is that now I know he uses the shop I’m not willing to put my job at risk.’

‘Yet you were happy enough to go along with the game when it was my job on the line.’

‘You volunteered the story. We’d never have heard about city break man if you hadn’t told us.’

‘Yes, and I’ve got a whole lot more to lose than you have. I’m the branch manager. You’re only a van-driver, sunshine.’ With her Egyptian look she was like Cleopatra dealing with a Nubian slave.

‘It’s still my job and there’s trust involved in it.’ I dredged up a smile in spite of all the mean stuff being said. ‘I don’t want to stop being friends or meeting you. I’m pulling out of the sleuthing, that’s all.’

‘Quite a turnaround after we all agreed it gives us a cause to take on together. What do you say, Vicky?’

Vicky shrugged. ‘It’s up to Ishtar, I guess.’

Anita wasn’t letting her off with a wishy-washy answer like that. ‘Don’t you cop out as well. We’re all involved. From what I understood, it’s given you a new lease of life. When you get a bit low — as we all do from time to time — this is a whole different project to get stuck into.’

‘That’s true,’ Vicky went. ‘I need something outside myself.’

‘Nicely put.’ Anita was pleased to have won a point.

‘But it doesn’t affect my job. I can understand where Ishy is coming from.’ Poor Vicky, she was trying so hard to keep the peace.

‘Why should it affect her job?’ Anita went. ‘She doesn’t work with the guy. She only delivers a bloody buttonhole once in a while. That’s no big deal.’

‘Excuse me,’ I put in. ‘I’ll be the judge of that. Loyalty matters to me.’

‘What about loyalty to Vicky and me, your sleuthing sisters? Doesn’t that count for anything?’

I could see this ending in a catfight and I didn’t want that. ‘It was a bit of fun. It’s come to an end for me. That’s all.’

Anita refused to let go. ‘Let me tell you something about this bit of fun, as you call it. This bit of fun is making a difference to someone’s life, someone not a million miles from here. Vicky, why don’t you tell Ishtar what you told me?’

Vicky swayed back as if she’d been hit.

‘Go on,’ Anita commanded her. ‘She’s your friend. She’s not going to broadcast it all over town.’

Vicky swallowed hard and suddenly it was like a tap had been turned on. ‘Things are not going well with Tim,’ she went in a low voice, looking down, avoiding eye contact. ‘It’s been difficult for some time. I try and talk to him and he ignores me. He can look straight through me. I don’t know if anyone close to you has ever done that. It’s chilling, like you’ve become a ghost. Over the last three months there’s been a massive change in him. He never smiles and jokes like he used to. We sleep in separate rooms. Well, we have for some time. Originally it was because he was working late and wanted to sleep on in the mornings and we were disturbing each other. We both needed our seven or eight hours of sleep so we came to this arrangement. But he doesn’t have a job any more and he still sleeps alone. He uses his room like a bed-sit. He’s got a computer in there and a portable TV. He’ll go in there of an evening and I don’t see him at all. He’s put a lock on the door and I have to knock if I want to speak to him and sometimes he doesn’t bother to open it. He’ll talk to me through the closed door. It makes life very hard.’

‘I’m sure,’ I told her, my heart going out to her. ‘What about meals?’

‘He doesn’t want me to cook for him. He lives out of tins mostly and eats in his room.’

‘It sounds as if he needs help.’

‘Not from his own wife,’ she went and was close to tears.

‘How do you manage for money?’

‘He pays the rent and the main bills. Well, you pay them, in a way, as taxpayers. He’s unemployed now, on the social. I buy the food and my clothes. It works out about right.’

‘You buy his tins?’

‘I know what he eats and drinks.’

‘Speaking of drink …’

‘He’s not alcoholic. He doesn’t touch it at all, or drugs. And there isn’t another woman, I feel sure of that. He’s never been one for playing around.’ She paused and glanced away. ‘Actually he has quite a low sex drive.’

I remembered her wish to have children. Will she ever have any now?

‘Could it be gambling behind this? You can do that alone on the computer.’

‘It crossed my mind, but he pays the bills on time. We don’t get the red ones. There’s something else,’ she added. ‘Sometimes he’ll go out at night. I hear him creep out and lock his bedroom after him. He’s back before dawn. I don’t know what he’s doing.’

‘Have you asked him?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t like to.’

‘Forgive me, Vicky, but are you totally sure there isn’t another woman?’

‘I can’t be a hundred per cent certain, but I think I’d get an inkling and I don’t. All I can feel is the unhappiness coming from him. Bitterness. Not towards me. He ignores me.’

Anita folded her arms and turned to me. ‘You see now why she needs something else to take her out of herself? The sleuthing sisters does it nicely.’

I wasn’t really listening. I knew she wanted to press home how inconsiderate I am, and how Vicky’s situation was heaps worse than my own. That’s Anita’s steam-rollering style, and I don’t blame her for it. No, I was still coming to terms with what I’d been hearing, this sad, dysfunctional marriage and what could lie at the root of such misery.

I probed gently. ‘What was his job?’

Vicky didn’t seem to mind talking now. ‘Originally he was in the army. Ten or eleven years. He got to be a sergeant.’

‘You were an army wife?’

‘Yes, and it worked quite well until he got posted to Iraq. I stayed home, of course. The war changed his feelings about the army. Instead of signing on again, he resigned. With his savings he bought a second-hand car and started up as a taxi-driver in (she mentions another city twenty miles from here), but he lost his licence.’

‘Why? Why did he lose his licence?’

She sighed. ‘It was such a shame. He was doing really well with the taxi business. Working hard and making good money. Then one night he got a call to pick up a group of teenagers from a party at a house somewhere out in the country. When he got there and saw the state of them, he refused. They’d obviously been drinking heavily and were rowdy and abusive and two of them were vomiting. A driver isn’t forced to take people. Tim took a pride in his car and always kept it spotless. He drove off and left them. But something dreadful happened. The sick ones got worse and the others called an ambulance and they were taken to hospital, but one of them died.’

‘Died? How ghastly.’

‘It turned out that the two who were sick had eaten some seafood that caused acute food poisoning. Tim had to give evidence at the inquest and a doctor said they could have saved the girl if she’d been taken to the hospital earlier.’

Anita went, ‘Meaning if Tim had picked them up as planned?’

And I was like, ‘He wasn’t to know that. He wasn’t supposed to be taking them to the hospital.’

‘That’s right,’ Vicky went, ‘but the way it was reported in the press, he was the villain in all this, not the people who served up toxic food or the friends who behaved so unpleasantly. Tim was the scapegoat, the cabdriver who refused to pick up a critically ill young girl. It was written up in the local paper three weeks running on some pretext or another. There was a lot of bad feeling in the city. You see, the girl who died was a policeman’s daughter, only fifteen.’

You’d think the policeman would have picked her up.’

‘He was on duty. Anyway, soon after the inquest was in the papers, Tim started getting stopped by the police for things they never usually check, tyres, emissions, a dodgy brake light, mud covering the number-plate, so-called speeding when he was just on the limit. It became obvious it was a campaign to get his licence taken away. And that’s what happened in quite a short time. We can’t say for certain that some of the things that went wrong — like low tyre pressures — were caused deliberately, but we’re very suspicious. He got in trouble several times over and in the end he lost his licence to drive a taxi.’

‘That’s so unfair. Him an ex-soldier, too.’

‘And people treated us like shit — neighbours, shopkeepers. They’d all read the papers. The only ones who were sympathetic were other cabdrivers. They know it could easily have been them. But they couldn’t do anything to help. We decided to leave. That’s why we moved here.’

‘And he’s been unemployed since?’

‘He had to sell the car, so he can’t do taxi work. He rides a motorbike now.’

Anita gave me a Mother Superior look. ‘Hearing what Vicky goes through puts our little enterprise into perspective.’ She turned back to Vicky. ‘It’s light relief, isn’t it, my pet?’

There was no response from Vicky. I could see it had been a huge effort for her to talk about her problem.

The tension between us was unbearable. I felt it was up to me to end it and I knew how. ‘All right, I’ll tell you the name of Heathrow man. It’s John Smith. And now you know as much as I do.’

Anita began to laugh. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘I checked the invoice book this morning.’

Vicky blinked several times, as if snapping out of a trance. ‘John Smith? That’s amazing. So what are we going to do about him?’