Down Cemetery Road (6 page)

‘The door was open.’

‘You looking for Joe?’

‘Is there any of him left?’

The woman laughed, without a trace of humour. ‘It bites. Let me guess. You’ve got a husband, he’s got a secretary. Am I getting warm?’

‘Actually, I want him to kill someone for me.’

‘Joe doesn’t do that. What he does is, he pines away in front of you. Bleeding hearts haemorrhage to death at the sight.’

‘You’re a big fan of his, then,’ Sarah said.

‘I’ve known him twenty years, man and boy. In that order. And the fact is, dear, Joe’s a bit of a case.’ She plucked a handbag from behind the desk and pulled a packet of cigarettes from it. ‘Zoë Boehm,’ she said. ‘By the way.’

‘Sarah Tucker.’

‘Delighted. Joe’s what you might call a hopeless romantic. He’s hopeless at everything, in fact. But I don’t mean to put you off. He’s a sucker for the right client, and you look his type.’

‘Which is?’

‘God, you know. Sort of doe-eyed and a bit helpless.’ She lit her cigarette with a disposable lighter. ‘You want one of these?’

‘No. And I’m not helpless.’

‘Good for you. Won’t help telling Joe, though. He tends to believe what he wants to believe.’

‘Some detective.’

‘He has his moments. Same as a puppy does. You keep throwing sticks long enough, he’s bound to bring one back eventually. Probably have hold of the wrong end, though.’ She opened the connecting door. ‘Incoming, Joe!’ Then she turned back to Sarah. ‘He’s all yours. But don’t be too hard on the silly sod. When he acts hurt, he’s usually not acting.’

‘Are you his secretary or his nanny?’

But Zoë Boehm had left.

For a moment, maybe two, Sarah was on the point of following. The signs indicated that Joe Silvermann was more in need of help than in any position to dispense it, and a new lame duck in her life she could do without. But backing out now would mean learning to live with unanswered questions, so of the available doors, she took the one leading into the office.

Most fictional private eyes Sarah had encountered were politically correct women who specialized in investigating crimes their friends and family members were wrongly accused of. The pages Joseph Silvermann had sprung from were the Yellow ones, and she assumed he’d be a little less witty, a little less fit, a lot less ethical and wholly unarmed. That said, she hadn’t known what to expect, so Joe in the flesh was neither a disappointment nor a relief. He was sitting behind a desk, and had greying, curly hair doing its best to surround a bald spot covering about half his head, and large features arranged in the usual way, but producing a face maybe kinder than you usually get. All told, that first sight of him awoke a nagging memory she couldn’t pin down for weeks: Joe Silvermann looked like the actor Judd Hirsch, who’d been in that old American show
Taxi
; not a dead ringer, but near enough. Part of it was the kindness.

After about maybe four seconds he looked up. He hadn’t been reading; just studying his desktop. ‘Has she gone?’

‘She’s, um, left. Yes.’

‘Think she’ll be back?’

‘It was hard to tell.’

‘She’ll be back.’ He looked down at his desk again, or at his hand, rather, which lay palm down on top of it. Maybe it was his fingernails he was studying. ‘Once every eight months she’s got it down to. It is July, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right. Eight months, give or take. That’s how often she flips her wig. Reads me the riot act then buggers off to London for a fortnight. She thinks I don’t know that’s where she goes. She wants me to think she’s got a lover stashed somewhere.’

‘Maybe there’s a lover stashed in London,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s a big place.’

‘She goes to shows,’ he said mournfully. ‘Les Miz. Buddy. She’s seen those five times each.’

‘You’d rather she had a lover?’

‘I’d rather she had taste. Pinter. Early Stoppard. Though I suppose she’d not have to pretend in that case.’ He stood suddenly and extended the hand he’d been perusing, as if deciding it had passed some kind of test. ‘Joseph Silvermann,’ he said. ‘You’d probably guessed that.’

She shook his hand. ‘Sarah Tucker.’

He was tall, it turned out, and bordering on heavy; possibly he still got away with people thinking it was muscle, but it was only a matter of time before they knew it was flab. ‘There’s a seat,’ he said, waving his hand at it. She took this as an invitation, and they both sat.

He relapsed into silence, this time studying Sarah instead of part of himself. It felt pretty phony; the Sherlock Holmes approach. Soon he’d tell her she’d been brought up in the North, bit her nails as a child, and had never been fond of dogs. Her expectations weren’t altogether dashed when he spoke.

‘You’re a graduate, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

He looked pleased. ‘Which college?’

‘Birmingham University.’

‘Oh, Birmingham. Yes, I’ve heard that’s very . . . Eng lit, was it?’

In Glit
.

‘Yes.’

He looked pleased again. ‘I can usually tell.’ He got up to close the window. On the street below, work was starting up: two men with a jackhammer ripping a stretch of pavement, presumably for a very good reason. ‘I was at Oriel,’ he announced. ‘English, yes. Taught by Morris. You know him at all?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Retired now, of course. Well, dead actually. He wrote the book on the Romantics.
Furious Lethargy
. Wonderful man.’

‘Mr Silvermann, I –’

‘You probably don’t need the small talk. A lot of people need putting at ease, they come into my office. They’re gearing up to tell me things they can’t tell their closest friends, and it makes them nervous, so there I go with the small talk. But you don’t need it.’

‘Are you good at your job?’

‘Am I good at it?’ He turned to look at her. In the light from the window he looked younger. ‘I won’t lie. Philip Marlow, I’m not. But who is? Most of what I’m hired to do, I manage. I suppose that makes me good enough.’

‘And what’s that exactly?’

‘Wandering husbands, missing kids. I do some process serving. But I’ll be honest, a lot of it’s running credit checks, you do most of it over the phone. I might as well be selling insurance half the time. There’s days when it’s like watching wood warp. You haven’t made your mind up yet, have you?’

‘I’m thinking about it.’

‘You’ll find better if you look around. But that might mean Reading or Bicester. I’m handy.’

‘And you’ve an Oxford degree.’

‘It helps the networking.’ He produced from his pocket something which for an absurd moment she took to be a rape alarm, and triggered it into his mouth. ‘Pollution,’ he apologized. ‘The air here, I find it hard to breathe. Would you like to tell me your problem, Ms Tucker?’

‘I want to find somebody.’

‘I can do that. It’s difficult to go missing, you know. Really completely missing. There’s so many records these days, you’re under surveillance wherever you go. Credit cards, traffic control. You’d need to be an expert.’

‘This is a four-year-old girl.’

‘Probably not ex-SAS then.’ He came back from the window and sat behind his desk again. ‘I’m sorry, that was in poor taste. The girl’s name?’

‘Dinah Singleton.’

‘She’s not your daughter.’

‘You sound sure of that.’

‘Daughters do go missing, even very small ones. But mothers don’t usually look to private investigators to find them.’

‘She’s a friend. A neighbour.’

He said, ‘Singleton.’

‘Not an immediate neighbour, actually. She lives up the road.’

‘I’ve read that name recently.’

‘Their house exploded.’

‘Of course. The house in South Oxford, yes? The adults present were killed. They must have been friends of yours. I’m sorry.’

‘I didn’t know them. That is, I didn’t know her. Nobody knows who he was.’

‘But you know the little girl.’

‘Yes,’ Sarah said. ‘Sort of,’ she amended.

Silvermann nodded. ‘A friend of your own children, perhaps?’

‘I don’t have children.’

‘And wish you did?’

‘What on earth –’

‘I apologize. I’m simply trying to get a grasp on the situation, Ms Tucker. A little girl is involved in a tragic incident. She has since, I take it, vanished from view. You wish to find her. I’m curious about your motives, that’s all. You say you
sort of
know her. You don’t really know her at all, do you?’

‘No.’

‘But it’s important to you that she be found.’

‘Of course it is.’

‘That hardly follows. Children vanish every day. Sometimes their own parents don’t care.’

‘Her parents are dead.’

‘And you? Are you the Good Samaritan, Ms Tucker?’

‘I don’t think you get Good Samaritans any more.’

‘This is true. We’re too afraid of malpractice suits. How did the little girl come to vanish?’

This, too, she found phony; the way he jumped from one subject to another, placing his questions where they were least expected. Perhaps, in addition to his wonderful degree, he’d spent a few years watching
Columbo
. But she told him anyway about the hospital and the long-haired stranger in the car park. When she finished he nodded as if it were all too familiar a tale. ‘You realize,’ he said, ‘there’s no reason to think anything untoward has happened?’

‘The woman in the hospital,’ Sarah said. ‘She didn’t know where the child had gone. She was furious.’

‘She works in the NHS,’ Silvermann said. ‘She could have been furious for any number of reasons.’

‘What about the man in the car park?’

‘A family friend. A concerned family friend. My first guess would be grandparents. The grandparents have taken the child.’

‘There are no grandparents,’ Sarah said, with a certainty belying her complete ignorance on the matter.

He shrugged. ‘Then I’d be forced to move on to my second guess.’

‘Which is?’

He shrugged again. ‘Strange things happen. The little girl is no longer an ordinary little girl, you know? She is part of a story. A miracle girl, a child who survived an explosion. So, possibly a newspaper has taken her up. This happens, you know. Sort of a corporate takeover. They remove her to a private facility, where they’ll pay for her treatment and photograph her at leisure.’

‘That can’t be legal. She’s four years old!’

‘Many things become legal when you can afford them, Ms Tucker. We live in a culture of expediency.’

‘I wasn’t expecting a lecture in civics.’

‘I talk too much. People . . . have said so. All I’m trying to point out is, if you hire me to find Dinah for you, I will in all likelihood discover her safe and well. But this will cost you quite a lot of money.’

‘How much?’

‘One hundred and fifty pounds a day.’

She nodded, as if she’d been expecting that, but felt the sum like a slap in the face.

‘Or any part thereof,’ he added.

‘And what do I get for that?’ Sarah asked.

‘My undivided attention.’

‘The advert said hi-tech.’

‘We’ve got a computer.’

‘We?’

‘Zoë – Ms Boehm is a partner.’

‘She doesn’t get her name on the door.’

He looked away. ‘There was a mistake. The painter misheard his instructions.’

Sarah nodded again, for something to do. Her mind was ticking off sums of money: current account, savings. The joint account was obviously out. ‘How long a job do you think it would be?’

‘You know the adage? If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.’

‘I can afford it.’

‘Believe me, Ms Tucker, I’m not in the business of turning work away. But nor do I wish to take advantage.’ He hesitated. ‘Sometimes people bring me problems they know can be solved. It’s a way of dealing with the ones they can’t do anything about.’

Sort of doe-eyed and helpless
. ‘Have you a couch I can lie on?’

‘I don’t mean to be intrusive. But all I can do, if I find the girl, is tell you where she is. I can’t deliver her to you. I can’t bring her mother back, either.’

‘If I thought you could raise the dead, Mr Silvermann, I’d have found your rates very reasonable.’

‘Perhaps there are cheaper ways of solving your problem, Ms Tucker. Perhaps there are cheaper problems you could find to solve.’

‘I don’t want analysis, Mr Silvermann. I want to find Dinah Singleton.’

‘Of course you do.’ He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a form. ‘This is a standard contract. I’ll need one day’s pay as a retainer. If I don’t find the child within two days, we can discuss the matter further.’

Sarah filled in dotted lines: name, address. Her current unemployment. ‘For a partner in the firm,’ she said, ‘Ms Boehm didn’t sound too keen on your line of business.’

‘She thinks we should alter course,’ he said. ‘Head hunting. She likes the sound of head hunting.’

‘But you don’t?’

‘I am a confirmed vegetarian, Ms Tucker. Also, I like being a detective.’

She couldn’t resist it. ‘Sometimes solving other people’s problems is a way of avoiding dealing with your own.’

‘Touché, Ms Tucker. I take all major credit cards,’ he said.

She was still smiling about that at the bottom of the stairs.

The two men churning up the pavement had stopped again: exhausted by their fifteen-minute stint, they were leaning against a wall, smoking. As she stepped from the doorway into the sunshine, she felt vulnerable under their scrutiny. Private detective translated to extramarital sex. They were wondering whether she was sinned against or sinning, she thought; scarlet woman or vindictive wife. Maybe their philosophies were wider than this, but the way they stared didn’t hold much hope of that.

Her immediate problem, though, was what to do next. Overheating in a woollen jacket, she couldn’t face the trip home yet, so stopped in the pub next door and sat in the courtyard with a half of bitter, worrying about what she’d done. One hundred and fifty pounds was a lot to spend on a whim; especially with another hundred and fifty following it. Mark had never complained about her expenditure, but she’d never hired a private detective before either. Nor had she told him she was going to. She wasn’t wholly sure why.

It was not that she didn’t love him. Odd that this had to be stated, even to herself. But he had changed during their marriage, and if he’d hardly been happy-go-lucky at the outset, she sometimes had difficulty recognizing the man he’d become. Targeted, he called it: jargon he’d have choked on five years back was his major mode of expression these days. He worked for a City firm, a merchant bank so professionally discreet nobody had ever heard of it. And being targeted, she’d recently decided, translated to job-obsessed; not wholly fair perhaps, but all the self-help books in the world couldn’t convince her that making lists of career goals was an endearing character trait. On the other hand, he’d always had a tendency to catalogue his record collection. This should have been a clue.