Shape of Snakes

*16*

Jock kept me standing on the step for several minutes before he opened the door, and I took the time to catch my breath after my hike from Graham Road to the rather grander street between Queen's Road and Richmond Hill where he was now living. The area had been developed in the wake of rail travel when the middle classes first began to exploit the benefits of living at a distance from their workplaces in noisy city centers; and the houses, though still in terraces, were more substantial than their humbler counterparts in Mortlake, with a third story to accommodate servants. A hundred years ago, each house would have had a walled front garden with trees and shrubs for privacy, but since the advent of the two-car family the gardens had been opened and paved to provide off-street parking.

To one side of Jock's frontage was an elderly black Mercedes with worn leather seats, and I was peering through the windscreen wondering if it was his when the door to the house snapped open and he appeared at my side. "You're half an hour early," he said irritably. "I thought we agreed two o'clock."

I had expected age, divorce and thwarted ambition to have mellowed him a little, but attack, I saw, was still his favored form of defense. I was surprised by the sense of pleasurable recognition I felt, as of an old friend, and offered my cheek for a kiss. "Hello, Jock," I said. "How are you?"

He gave me a quick peck. "Where's Sam?"

"Didn't he phone you?"

"No."

"He got tied up at the last minute and couldn't make it," I lied with convincing regret, "so I'm on my own." There was a beat of time while I pretended not to see the swift look of relief that crossed Jock's face. "I didn't know you were into classic cars," I said mischievously, patting the Mercedes's hood. "You always hankered after the newest model in the old days. I remember how rude you were when Sam and I bought that secondhand Allegro estate."

He made a dismissive gesture. "I keep the Merc as a runabout. The Jag's in a lockup garage down the road."

"A Jag!" I exclaimed. "My God! Sam will be green with envy. He's been wanting an XK8 since they came out." I looked past him into the shadows of the hall where a coin-operated telephone hung off the wall. "Don't let me stop you if I've interrupted something," I said. "I'm in no hurry."

He pulled the door to. "I've some e-mails to answer."

"I can wait." I hitched a buttock onto the bonnet of the Mercedes and lifted my head to look at the house. It was an attractive building with sandstone bays containing the high, wide windows of which Victorian architects were so fond. According to Libby the house had cost him Ł70,000 in 1979 and, according to a local real estate agent, it was now worth upward of three-quarters of a million. "Nice place," I murmured when he made no move to return inside.

He nodded. "I like it."

"So what was wrong with it when you bought it? Sitting tenants? Subsidence? Dry rot?"

He looked surprised. "Nothing."

"You're joking! How on earth did you afford it? I thought you got a pittance out of the divorce settlement."

He recoiled slightly as if I'd just revealed teeth. "Who told you that?"

"Libby."

"I didn't know you were still in touch."

"On and off."

"Well, she's wrong," he said warily. "She thought she could clobber me by hiring an expensive solicitor but he never came close to finding the investments that mattered."

It is odd, I thought, how the memory plays tricks. In my mind, I had likened him for so long to a weasel that his rather charming face surprised me. "It must have been a first then," I said with a small laugh. "You never managed to hide anything else from your wife."

"What else has she told you?"

"That you moved a blonde in here before the ink was dry on the divorce. 'Young enough to be his daughter,' she said, 'but old enough to recognize a sucker when she sees one.' "

Another flash of relief. "That's her jealousy talking," he scoffed.

I laughed again, amused by his cocky expression. "You always were a hopeless liar, Jock. It used to irritate me ... now it amuses me ... probably because I know so much more about your business affairs than Sam does."

His expression soured. "Like what?"

"Like you have an outstanding loan on this place of Ł500,000 which you took out to keep Systel afloat and now can't repay."

There was a short silence while he considered his response. "Is this something else Libby told you?"

I nodded.

"Well, it's a lie," he said curtly. "She doesn't know a damn thing about my finances. Hell, she didn't even know what they were twenty years ago, so she certainly wouldn't know now. I haven't spoken to her since the divorce." He waited for me to say something and, when I didn't, he ratcheted up his aggression. "I could sue you both for slander if you repeat it to anyone else. You can't go 'round destroying people's reputations just because you hold a grudge against them."

I was tempted to say such considerations hadn't stopped him twenty years ago from helping Sam to destroy my reputation. Instead I said mildly: "I'm always happy to be put straight, Jock. So which is the lie? That you don't have an outstanding loan, that you didn't plow it into Systel and lose it or that you can't repay it?"

He didn't answer.

"Perhaps you should have been a little more selective in your girlfriends," I suggested. "According to Libby, the blond bimbette was the first of many, and none of them knew how to keep her mouth shut."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Libby's been prying information out of them for years while you were out at work, and even she couldn't believe how indiscreet some of them were. All she had to say was that she was conducting research for a hosiery manufacturer, then offer them a dozen free packs of luxury tights in return for twenty minutes of their time answering lifestyle questions, and the floodgates would open."

He frowned. "Why the hell would she do a thing like that?"

It was a good question, but not one I was ready to answer. I needed him off balance if I was ever to get at the truth. "She wanted to know how much you ripped her off in the divorce settlement."

"None of my exes could have told her that," he said confidently.

"No," I agreed, "but she never asked anything so direct. She was far more subtle"-I smiled-"and very patient. She built on what she already knew about you." I thought of the regular lists Libby had sent me with updated information on Jock. "Do you or your partner own the house? Was the value of the house more or less than Ł50,000 at the time of purchase? Is the present value of the house more or less than Ł100,000 ... Ł200,000, et cetera? Is your partner self-employed? Does he earn more or less than Ł50,000 . . . Ł100,000, et cetera? Does he have a mortgage? Is it more or less than Ł50,000, et cetera, et cetera?" I laughed unkindly. "She never got a straightforward yes or no. One of your girlfriends even fished out your bank statements so that the figures would be accurate."

"That's illegal."

"Undoubtedly."

"You're lying," he said with more certainty than his expression suggested he felt. "Why would she keep on with something like that? It doesn't make sense."

I smiled ruefully as if I agreed with him.

"What answers did she get?"

"That your mortgage went from Ł20,000 to Ł500,000 in fifteen years, and you worked your way through seven girlfriends in the process. Two of your start-up businesses failed and the half million you made on the one you sold last year went straight into staving off bankruptcy. The only reason you're still here"-I nodded toward his front door-"is because the capital value of the house exceeds the loan and the bank's allowing you to make interest-only repayments while you look for a job with a six-figure salary. You're not having much success because you're almost fifty and your track record is far from impressive. You're fighting the bank's pressure to sell the house because you're afraid you'll only walk away with Ł200,000 once the bills have been paid, and that's barely enough to buy back your old place in Graham Road."

He looked devastated, as if I'd just torn his life apart and tossed the pieces to the winds. I felt no remorse. In a small way he was beginning to understand what he had once done to me.

"If it's any consolation," I went on amiably, "Sam's been just as economical with the truth. We didn't make a killing in Hong Kong, there's no eight-bedroom mansion on the horizon, and the farmhouse we're renting is falling down. In fact we're not much better off than you are, so it seems rather pointless to spend the next half-hour trying to impress each other with our nonexistent fortunes."

He sighed-more in resignation than anger, I thought-and gestured toward the door. "You'd better come in, though I warn you I'm pretty much confined to my study these days. The rest of the house is let out to foreign students as the only way to cover the bills. Matter of fact, I was planning to take you to the pub so you wouldn't find out, but it's a hell of a sight easier this way." He led me across the hall toward a room at the back. "Have you told Sam any of this?" he asked, opening the door and ushering me in.

"No. He still believes everything you tell him." I took stock of the room, which had barely enough space to maneuver. It was packed to the scuppers with sealed boxes, piles of books and pictures hung in tiers on every wall, and if anything of Annie's was in here, it was stubbornly invisible. "My God!" I said, unbuckling my rucksack and dropping it to the floor. "Where the hell did all this come from? You haven't taken to burglary, have you?"

"Don't be an idiot," he said tetchily. "It's the stuff I'm keeping from the lodgers. If they don't steal it they'll break it. You know what they're like."

"No," I assured him. "I haven't met them."

"I meant foreigners in general."

"Ah!" I gave a snort of laughter, enjoying the irony of Jock sharing his house with strangers. "Are we talking black foreigners, Jock?"

"Arabs," he said crossly. "They're the only ones with any money these days."

"Is that why you're sleeping in here?" I asked, looking at the bed in the corner. "To guard your possessions from dusky predators?"

"Ha-bloody-ha!" He took the swivel seat in front of his desk, leaving the armchair for me. "Only when the other rooms are full. It's a bit hand-to-mouth but it's tiding me over."

He had grown a beard since the last time I saw him and his dark hair was going gray, but it suited him and I decided he must thrive on adversity because he had none of the worry lines that characterized Sam's face. "You look good," I said, settling myself in the chair. "Sam's lost most of his hair and is very sensitive about it. He'll be upset to hear you've kept all yours."

"Poor bugger," he said with surprising sympathy. "He was always paranoid about going bald ... used to count the hairs in his comb every day."

"He still does." I transferred my attention to a tortoiseshell cat that was curled up on a padded footstool in the corner of the room. "I didn't know you liked cats."

He followed my gaze. "This fellow's grown on me. One of the exes stormed out when I refused to pay her credit-card bill and poor old Boozey got abandoned in the rush ... Either that, or he went to ground the minute the estrogen started to fly. He's more interested in me than my wallet so we rub along pretty well together."

"Do you have a girlfriend now?"

"You mean Libby hasn't told you?" he asked sarcastically. "I thought she knew everything."

"She gave up calling when foreigners started answering the phone."

"Why wasn't she worried about me picking it up?"

"You did," I told him, "several times. She always pretended to be an old lady phoning the doctor's surgery. You were very patient with her. Kept telling her to correct the number in her book so she wouldn't get it wrong again."

"Godammit! Was that Libby? It didn't sound like her." He looked impressed, as if I'd just said something laudable about a nonexistent daughter instead of the wife who'd cast him aside nearly a quarter of a century before.

"She's good at putting a tremble in her voice." I paused. "Do you miss her?"

It was a question he hadn't expected and he stroked his beard pensively while he considered his answer. "Sometimes," he admitted. "Where is she now? I know she remarried because one of her friends told me, but I've no idea where she went."

"Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire. She did a postgraduate course in Southampton after you and she split up and now she's head of the history department at a comprehensive in Leicester. Her husband's a bank manager called Jim Garth. They have three daughters. The eldest is thirteen and the youngest seven."

His lips twisted in a regretful smile. "She always said she could do better without me."

"She wanted an identity of her own, Jock"-I leaned forward, clamping my hands between my knees-"and if you'd encouraged her to train as a teacher while you were still married ... who knows? Maybe you'd still be together."

He didn't believe that any more than I did. "Hardly. We weren't even on speaking terms by the end." His eyes narrowed as he looked at me, and I guessed he had as much pent-up distrust of me as I had of him. "I've always blamed you for the divorce, you know. Libby didn't have a problem till you came along, all she wanted was babies ... then you move into the street and, suddenly, babies aren't good enough. She has to have a career, and it has to be teaching."

"I didn't know she was so easily influenced."

"Oh, come on! Every idea she had was recycled from the last person she spoke to. That's probably why she became a history teacher," he said sarcastically. "You don't have to think so much when your subject's been chewed over for centuries by other people."

"That's rubbish. Jock. Libby knew exactly what she wanted out of life ... also what she didn't want."

"Yes, well, I could always tell when she'd been with you. She was a hell of a sight more belligerent about her rights when she'd had a dose of Ranelagh left-wing feminism."

"Maybe it's a good thing you never introduced her to Sharon then," I said dryly. "Or you'd have had a prostitute for a wife."

He wouldn't look at me-afraid, I think, of what I might read in his eyes-but his neck flushed an angry red. "That's a stupid thing to say."

"No more stupid than you trying to blame me for your divorce," I said evenly. "Nothing I said or didn't say could alter the fact that Libby was sick to death of your gambling. She wanted some stability in her life, not a roller-coaster ride of wins one day and losses the next. It was bad enough when it was just the stock market, but when you admitted to losing three thousand quid on a poker game..." I shook my head. "What did you expect her to do? Pat you on the back?"

"It was my money," he said sulkily.

"It was also your money when you won," I pointed out, "but you never shared your winnings with her, only your losses. You put Libby through hell every time you lost and used your winnings to buy blow jobs off Sharon."

It began to dawn on him just how much Libby had told me and he retreated into an offended silence, punctuated only by the regular ticking of a pendulum clock on the mantelpiece. I made no effort to break it. Instead I glanced about the study, trying to imprint what I could see on my memory. It was an impossible task, so I looked for what wasn't there: silhouette pictures of Annie's grandparents, mosaics of Quetzalcoatl, items of jade, artillery shells and peacock feathers...

There was a fine seascape in a gilded frame on the wall opposite showing a ship under full sail battling with a storm-tossed sea, and I could just make out the words on the small plaque screwed to the bottom of the frame. Spanish Privateer in Great Storm off Kingston, Jamaica, 1823. I was so absorbed in trying to decide whether the date represented the year the storm happened or the year the picture was painted, that it was a while before I realized Jock was watching me.

"What the hell's going on?" he asked suspiciously, following my gaze. "Has Libby got some crazy idea that she can get more money out of me?"

I shook my head. "I came to ask you about the night Annie Butts died."

He gave an exasperated sigh. "So why drag Libby into it? Why not be upfront at the beginning?"

It was an obtuse remark from a man who always attacked first and asked questions later. "Sorry," I said apologetically.

"You could have talked to me on the phone," he said, warming to his grievance. "I've always answered your questions in the past. I even drove round to St. Mark's Church the other day to find out the vicar's name for you."

"That was kind," I agreed.

"Then what's the big deal?"

I pulled a wry expression. "Nothing really. I'm just not very good at this. I was afraid you'd clam up if I dived straight in with questions about where you were and who you were with that night."

He looked surprised. "You already know all that. It was in my statement. I was with Sam at your place. We had a couple of beers and then I went home."

"Except it was a Tuesday," I reminded him, "and Libby told me Tuesday was your fellatio day."

"God almighty," he growled angrily, hating the whole subject, "I went to Sharon first. Okay? I came out at about half-seven, bumped into Sam and went back to his place for a beer."

"Sam said you bumped into each other at the tube station."

He shifted uncomfortably. "It was twenty years ago. You can't expect me to remember every wretched detail."

"Why would you be at the tube if you'd just left Sharon? I thought you had sex in her house."

"What the hell difference does it make? Annie was alive and well when we passed her in the street."

I shrugged. "The reason Sam knows he met you at the station is because you were on your way home from a poker game."

He was taken by surprise. "A poker game?" he echoed. "Where on earth did that spring from?

"It's what Sam said."

"Not in his statement, he didn't."

"No, it was the explanation he gave me afterward," I lied. "He said he took you home for a drink because you were in a blue funk about how to tell Libby you'd lost another fortune."

Surprise was abruptly replaced by irritation. "You didn't pass that on to Libby, did you?"

"No. I didn't hear about it until after we'd left England."

He pondered for a moment. "Maybe Sam didn't want to say I'd been with Sharon."

"Did he know about her?"

He gave a halfhearted nod.

"But who could have told him, Jock? You?" I said in amazement when he didn't answer. "God! I'd have put money on you keeping that a secret. It wasn't something to be proud of, was it?"

His mouth thinned. "Give it a rest, all right? None of this has anything to do with Annie's death."

I shook my head. "It has everything to do with it, Jock. She died because she was beaten half to death some hours before she managed to drag herself down to our end of the street for me to find, yet you just said she was alive and well when you came out of Sharon's house at a quarter to eight." I lifted copies of the autopsy photographs from the front pocket of the rucksack and spread them on my lap. "Look at the bruising. It's too extensive to have come from injuries inflicted fifteen to thirty minutes before she died." I isolated a close-up of Annie's right arm. "This is a classic picture of a multitude of defense wounds sustained hours before death. The probability is that she curled herself in a ball to try to protect her head and, instead of a few individual bruises, which is what you would expect to see if a truck had flung her against a lamppost minutes before she died, all the bruises have merged over a period of hours to produce one massive hematoma from shoulder to wrist."

He stared at the photographs with shocked fascination but instead of expressing revulsion over Annie's bludgeoned face, he offered a poignant non sequitur. "I'd forgotten how young she was."

"Younger than you are now," I agreed, "and very strong, which is why she took so much punishment before she passed out. This bruising at the top of her thighs"-I turned a picture of Annie's torso toward him-"suggests massive internal injuries from being kicked or beaten around her abdomen, causing blood to seep into the tissue of her legs. It's what's usually described as a 'frenzied attack' and it almost certainly happened in her own house because anywhere else would have been too public."

He took time to assimilate what I was saying. "I thought she was wearing her coat. Why would she wear a coat in the house?"

It was a question I'd asked myself many times because she certainly wouldn't have been in any condition to put it on after she'd been attacked. "I can only guess that someone pushed in behind her when she came home from the pub and attacked her before she had time to remove it."

He began to look worried. "The police would have found some evidence," he protested. "There'd have been blood on the walls."

"Not if most of her injuries were internal. In any case, there was evidence. The police recorded it themselves. Broken furniture which suggested a fight ... absent floor coverings which suggested she did bleed and the rugs were removed ... human waste in the hall, which is a classic fear response from intruders. She stank of urine when I found her, Jock, which suggests they pissed on her as well."

He turned away to fiddle with the pens on his desk. "That's disgusting."

"Yes." I gave a tired shrug. "And if you and Sam hadn't lied about seeing her at a quarter to eight, then maybe the police would have interpreted the evidence properly instead of condemning her as a tramp."

He licked his lips nervously. "Does Sam say we lied?"

I nodded, carefully squaring the photographs in my lap. "He was feeling homesick one night in Hong Kong and started blaming me for the fact that we'd had to leave England. It all came out at about three o'clock in the morning ... how you'd phoned him and begged him to give you an alibi ... how I'd made his life impossible by telling the police it was murder ... how the choice between supporting me or his closest friend had been one of the hardest he'd ever had to make." I shrugged. "I've not had much sympathy for you since. You put me through hell and I've never forgiven you for it."

"I'm sorry," he said awkwardly.

I couldn't help admiring his loyalty. It was more than Sam deserved but it said much for their friendship, which had stayed healthy through their regular exchange of phone calls, faxes and e-mails. "It's only a matter of time before the police reopen the case," I told him, "and the first thing they're going to look at is where people were in the hours before Annie's death. She died shortly after 9:30," I reminded him. "So if you spent thirty to forty minutes in Sharon's house and left at half-seven, then you were there within the timespan that bruises like this"-I tapped the photographs-"need to develop."

His eyes flicked toward my lap.

"And that means you must have heard what was going on next door," I went on matter-of-factly, "or you joined Sharon shortly after she heard it. Either way you'd have noticed something. You don't get good sex off a woman who's just listened to her neighbor being clubbed into unconsciousness." I eyed him curiously. "But Sharon's bound to claim your story's bullshit anyway because, according to her inquest testimony, she was in the pub from 6 till 9:15."

"This is crazy," he said, his eyes straying toward the telephone on his desk. "What does Sam say?"

"Nothing much ... except that he's adamant he didn't know about Sharon and refuses to take the blame if you lied to him about why you needed an alibi."

It was the accusation of lying to Sam that seemed to goad him toward honesty. Either that or his resentment at being made everybody's scapegoat finally boiled over. "Sam knew better than anyone that I didn't have the bottle to go near another card game," he said bitterly. "I may be a risk taker but I'm not a bloody fool. I was taken to the cleaners by some pros the first time and I wasn't going to give them a second chance." He squeezed the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb. "And there's no way Sharon was an issue. I could have paraded half the whores in London in front of Libby without her turning a hair. The marriage had been dead for months ... it was just a question of which one of us was going to pack our bags first."

"Then why did you lie in your statement?"

He saw in my eyes that I knew the answer. "Do you really want it spelled out? It was dead and buried before you even left England."

"For Sam maybe," I said. "Not for me. That's why I'm here. I've waited a long time to find out who he was with that night ... and what they were doing..."