Kind of Cruel (41 page)

‘I might have lied before without meaning to,’ Ritchie said matter-of-factly, as if he didn’t mind either way. ‘Someone might be able to confirm I was here all last night: the woman in the flat below. If you’re lucky, she might have been kept awake by me flushing the loo every half hour. I think her bed’s directly underneath my bathroom.’

‘If
you’re
lucky, you mean.’ Now that Ritchie had mentioned her, Sam would have to follow up on it.
Excuse me, madam, can you verify that your upstairs neighbour spent most of last night emptying his bowels?

‘While we’re on the subject of whens and wheres, I don’t suppose you’d be able to tell me what you were doing on 22 November 2008?’ Sam asked.

‘No idea. Sorry.’

‘A woman called Sharon Lendrim was killed that night, not too far from here. Did you hear about it?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘You didn’t know her, then?’

‘No.’

‘The name doesn’t ring any bells?’

‘Nope.’

‘What about Katharine Allen?’

Ritchie shook his head. ‘Sorry. No.’

‘Do the words “Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel” mean anything to you?’

‘You mean apart from kind meaning nice, and cruel meaning—’

‘That’s right.’ Sam cut him off more forcefully than he’d meant to. ‘Apart from that.’

‘Then no,’ said Ritchie. ‘Sorry I’m not being much use to you.’

Either he was politely concealing his curiosity, or he had none.

‘What about Tuesday 2 November. Do you remember what you were doing then, between eleven and one?’
Were you beating a primary school teacher to death with a metal pole?
Sam wished he knew why he was asking these questions of this particular man. Ritchie was related to Amber Hewerdine, sort of; he was one of the few people who had known yesterday that Amber had been interviewed by the police on Tuesday. Was that a good enough reason to be asking him about Kat Allen?

If you’d already asked everyone in Kat’s life everything you could think of to ask, then, yes, Sam supposed it was.

‘Sorry,’ Ritchie said again. ‘I don’t really need to remember much, so I tend not to. I probably couldn’t tell you what I did yesterday. I was ill yesterday, so I remember it for that reason, but if I wasn’t, I mean.’

‘What about checking your diary?’ Sam suggested. Normally, he’d have assumed the person he was talking to would think of this on their own. He believed that Ritchie was doing his best, and that was the problem. A more imaginative person deliberately trying to mislead him would almost certainly have been more help. ‘And if you’ve kept your diary from two years ago . . .’

‘I don’t have one. Never have. I don’t work, and I don’t see that many people – if I go out, I tend to go to Jo’s. Or Mum’s, sometimes, but usually Jo’s.’

In other words, you don’t have a life
. Sam wondered if this alone was grounds for suspicion. ‘You’ve never had any kind of diary, not even for appointments?’
You and your loved ones don’t spend your evenings cross-checking to make sure that anything that’s written in one person’s diary is written in everybody’s?
There were as many ways of living as there were people, Sam concluded, and his own wasn’t necessarily the best.

‘I tend not to prearrange things,’ Ritchie said. ‘I do what I feel like doing, as the mood takes me.’

All right, don’t rub it in
. ‘What do you do when you stay in?’ Sam asked, then regretted it. An image of Ritchie sitting on the lavatory with his black jeans round his skinny ankles had to be hastily banished. ‘What are your interests? Are you looking for a job at the moment?’ There were no books in the flat that Sam could see, no magazines, no CDs, music system, radio – nothing to indicate that Ritchie had much enthusiasm for anything. Or maybe everything was on his computer: films, music, even friends.

‘There aren’t that many jobs I’d want to do,’ Ritchie said. ‘I don’t see any point in doing a job just for the sake of it, if I’m not passionate about it.’

‘For money?’ Sam suggested.

Ritchie looked vaguely confused, as if this was a consideration that would never have entered his head if Sam hadn’t mentioned it. ‘I’m lucky, I suppose. Jo and Neil kind of support me. Jo’s brilliant. She sticks up for me when Mum has a go about me being lazy. I feel bad, because she and Neil haven’t got much themselves, but Jo says they’ve got all they need and that’s what family’s for. Says she’d rather I took my time to decide what I want to do with my life than have me rush into the wrong kind of work and get trapped. That’s happened to loads of people she knows.’ Ritchie pushed his hair out of his eyes. ‘It’s too easy to carry on doing what you’re doing, even if you don’t like it.’

‘Your mum disagrees with Jo?’ Sam asked.

‘Yeah.’ Ritchie smiled. ‘Mum’s a typical mum, really. She wants me to achieve something so that it can count as an achievement for her, by proxy – that’s what Jo reckons. Mum never had the chance to do anything much because of looking after Kirsty. I think she finds it hard seeing me having what looks to her like . . . well, like a pretty easy time of it, I guess. Jo’s more like Mum in that sense: putting other people first, looking after them. Mum doesn’t resent Jo like she does me. It’s stupid, really. We all end up going round in circles: Mum sticking up for Jo, Jo sticking up for me . . .’

‘Does your mother think you’re exploiting Jo by letting her support you?’ Sam asked, thinking that it would be understandable if she did. He wondered how Jo’s husband Neil felt. Were there rows?

‘Yeah.’ Ritchie nodded. ‘Some years back, Jo asked Mum to change her will, asked her to leave the house just to me, said she was more than happy to give up her share. She had a house already, she said. I’m the one who needs Mum’s house when she dies, if I’m not going to be renting this dump forever.’

Sam avoided eye contact, concentrated on writing in his notebook. Was this the information Simon wanted? It certainly sounded as if it might be. Sam had given up asking himself how Simon was able to sniff out the presence of an as-yet-unheard story where no one else could. It wasn’t one of Sam’s strengths, but he had others. He was already feeling better about Olivia Zailer than he’d expected to. He’d yelled at her, but she’d asked for it. And so what if he didn’t have the benefit of her ideas about Kat Allen’s murder? Was he really going to start worrying that he wasn’t privy to the speculations of every civilian who had nothing to do with his case? No. His strength, one Simon lacked, was the ability to look at a situation in a balanced way.

‘Mum said her will was her business and she wasn’t changing it,’ Ritchie went on. ‘She came out with some spiel about fairness: how parents have to treat all their children equally, no matter the circumstances, even if one’s loaded and one’s skint. Not that Jo’s loaded, but . . . she’s comfortable.’

‘You disagree?’ Sam asked. The more he heard about Ritchie Baker’s mother, the more he approved of her.

‘I wouldn’t, normally,’ said Ritchie. ‘I always assumed Mum’d divide things equally between all of us. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to want the house for myself if Jo hadn’t had the idea. But she suggested it, she said it was what she wanted, and Mum still wouldn’t. That’s just pig-headed, isn’t it? That’s trying to make a point.’

Perhaps one that needed making, Sam thought. Never having met Jo Utting, he was finding Ritchie’s version of her difficult to believe in. ‘Your sister’s really that selfless that she’d gift you her share of your mother’s house?’

Ritchie smiled. ‘Ask Jo if she’s selfless,’ he said. ‘She’ll piss herself laughing. She’s got everything she could possibly want, she says. Nice husband with a successful business, nice house that they own outright, two beautiful kids, Sabina to help her with day-to-day stuff . . . All Jo wants is for me to be in as fortunate a position as she is. She says to me all the time, “Don’t sell yourself short and get any old job just to please Mum. Hold out for something that matters.”’ Ritchie chuckled to himself. ‘Tell you the truth, I think she likes it that I don’t work. She likes it that she can ring me or pop round any time and I’m always here.’

He was genuinely fond of his sister, Sam thought, and not only for materialistic reasons. ‘So your mother didn’t change her will?’

‘As far as I know she hasn’t,’ said Ritchie. ‘We haven’t discussed it again, for obvious . . . Oh.’ He stopped. ‘I guess the reasons won’t be obvious to you, if you don’t know.’

Sam waited.

‘The day after Jo and Mum rowed about it the first time – the only time – something weird happened. Jo . . . kind of disappeared without telling anyone where she was going or why. With Neil and the boys. Oh, she came back, but only after they’d missed the whole of Christmas Day. No one’s ever said anything, but I think Mum’s always thought that their vanishing act had something to do with that argument on Christmas Eve about the will and the house. Actually, it wouldn’t surprise me if Mum
did
change her will after that, without saying anything to anyone. She was pretty frightened when Jo disappeared. We all were.’

Was Sam missing something here? Everything about this story sounded wrong to him. ‘But – Jo came back, you said. Didn’t she tell you where she’d been and why?’

‘No. It was clear she didn’t want to talk about it.’

‘But if your mother subsequently changed her mind and altered her will to leave her house only to you, why wouldn’t she have told Jo? Jo would have been pleased, presumably, to have got what she wanted.’

‘I don’t know that Mum ever did change her mind,’ said Ritchie. ‘I was just speculating.’

‘If she did, though. Hypothetically.’ It was the lack of communication, and Ritchie’s presentation of it as normal, that interested Sam most. ‘Why do you think she wouldn’t tell Jo straight out?’

Ritchie considered the question. ‘Hard to put into words,’ he said eventually. ‘I guess . . . if Mum thought the row about the will had upset Jo enough to make her do that, she’d have been afraid to raise the subject again, no matter what she had to say about it. When Jo decides a subject’s closed, it’s closed. If she doesn’t want to talk about something . . .’ He left the sentence hanging in the air.

‘And you haven’t asked your mum about the will since, when Jo’s not been around?’

‘No. It’s not my place, is it?’

‘You and Jo haven’t discussed it between yourselves?’

‘No way. She disappeared for the whole of Christmas Day,’ Ritchie emphasised, as if Sam might have missed the point the first time. In his mind there was a causal link, clearly. Sam had yet to be convinced that it wasn’t a coincidence. Often, when one thing followed another, people assumed a cause and effect relationship between the two that didn’t exist.

‘No way I’m bringing that subject up again.’ Ritchie looked upset suddenly. ‘The whole family was together, Jo had hired this mansion place in Surrey . . . we were supposed to be having a nice time.’

‘Instead, you spent the day worrying,’ said Sam.

‘Yeah, and trying to persuade the police to give a toss. Not you. Surrey police. Whatever dealings I’ve ever had with local police, they’ve been great.’

Sam nodded, appreciating the concern for his finer feelings, wondering why he didn’t disapprove of Ritchie as much as he imagined most people would, as much as he felt he ought to. He made a note to remind himself to check if Ritchie’s details were on any of the police databases.

‘I love Jo to bits and I see her all the time, like I said, but I learned my lesson after Surrey, however many years ago it was. Five or six, maybe? No, Barney was a baby, so more like seven years.’

Timekeeping for people without diaries, Sam thought. It sounded like the title of a novel his wife Kate might read for her book group. ‘Learned your lesson how?’ he asked.

‘They still all get together every year, but I don’t. I make an excuse, usually a pretty lame one. I don’t think anyone ever believes me.’

‘Excuse for what?’ Sam asked.

‘I’ve spent Christmas Day on my own, every year since then,’ Ritchie said proudly.

Simon pushed Charlie out of his way when she tried to kiss him. ‘This stops right here and now,’ he said.

Don’t follow him
. Charlie stayed where she was, in the hall. She heard his coat hit the floor, the fridge door open and slam shut. ‘Is that shorthand for “I want a divorce”?’