Kind of Cruel (9 page)

‘The four of us working together?’ Proust said tightly. ‘Is that what you’d call it? Not three of us trapped in an enclosed space with a delirious zealot?’

Simon forced himself to wait a few seconds before speaking. ‘Is it really all that unlikely that a woman who lives in Rawndesley might be connected in some way to a murder that happened in Spilling, twenty minutes away? Or that that woman would bump into Charlie in Great Holling, near where they both live?’

Nobody said anything. Nobody would. Whenever the Snowman pointedly refused to answer a direct question, it meant that everyone else present was forbidden to respond; it was one of the many unwritten rules they had all grown used to.

‘Amber Hewerdine saw the words “Kind” and “Cruel” in Charlie’s notebook, and she made a connection,’ Simon persisted. ‘She asked Charlie about it because it mattered to her. Something about those words bothered her. She wanted to look at the notebook. Charlie said no, but that wasn’t good enough for Hewerdine. Charlie left her car unlocked and the notebook on the passenger seat when she went in for her hypnosis appointment, wanting to test how determined Hewerdine was to get her hands on it. She soon found out: very. She came out a few minutes later, found Hewerdine sitting in her car reading it.’

‘Seriously?’ said Sellers. ‘Cheeky cow.’

‘Why did it matter to her so much to know if those words were in the notebook?’ Sam asked.

‘Ginny Saxon answered that question for me about twenty minutes ago on the phone,’ Simon told him. ‘During their session together, she asked Hewerdine for a memory . . .’

‘A
memory
?’ said Proust. ‘That’s how it works, is it? In a café, you ask for a serviette; in a hypnotherapy clinic, you ask for a memory?’

Simon couldn’t help noticing that the Snowman’s mood seemed to have improved. Did he enjoy watching Simon lose control and rant? Had he notched it up as a victory? ‘Hewerdine didn’t respond at first. Then, according to Saxon, she said “Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel”. Saxon asked her to repeat it because it sounded odd and she thought she might have misheard. It’s not the kind of thing her clients normally say when she asks them to describe the first memory that comes to mind.’

‘I hope they normally tell her to mind her own business,’ said Proust.

‘Here’s the strange part: Hewerdine repeated the phrase, then asked Saxon what it meant. Saxon said she had no idea and asked Hewerdine the same question, at which point Hewerdine denied that the phrase had originated with her. She claimed Saxon had said it first and asked her to repeat it. When Saxon denied this, Hewerdine threw a fit, called her a liar, refused to pay her for the session and stormed out.’

‘And bumped into Charlie?’ said Sam.

Simon nodded.

Sam chewed his lip, thinking. ‘So . . . Hewerdine thought Saxon had said the magic words
and
that Charlie had written them in her notebook?’ He frowned. ‘Why wouldn’t that seem as implausible to her as it does to me?’

‘Haven’t you been paying attention, Sergeant? Waterhouse has just explained to us the logical flaw in our finding anything implausible ever again. This evening heralds the dawning of a new era: the age of unqualified credulity.’

‘I can’t work out what Hewerdine was thinking,’ Simon told Sam. ‘That’s why I’m keen to talk to her.’ He gestured towards the door.

‘Is that your way of asking permission to leave?’ said Proust. ‘Leave away. Next time, save yourself the trouble by neither arriving in the first place nor arranging a meeting to arrive at. I know you’re opposed on principle to taking anything I say seriously, but on the off-chance that you might make an exception in this case: this Hewerdine person is a dead end. Until we know what the words mean, or what they are, we can’t know how many people they might mean something to. What if they’re a jingle from a well-known advert? What if they’re the catchphrase of a cartoon character from a children’s television programme?’

‘We’ve searched and searched and got nowhere – nothing on the internet, no one who’s heard of “Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel” in any context,’ Simon reminded him.

‘That doesn’t prove there aren’t ten thousand people for whom the phrase has significance,’ said Proust, in the sort of menacingly patient voice that was designed to make Simon wonder if he really wanted to go on giving his DI cause to be patient. ‘It proves only that we haven’t found any of them yet. You’re assuming our mystery words link only a handful of people: a murder victim, a killer, and your Hewerdine woman conveniently in the middle. I’m telling you – and being dismissed by your gargantuan arrogance – that those words might link a million people. Or they might link only fourteen people in a bland and harmless way that has nothing to do with murder.’

Proust walked up to Simon and knocked on his forehead as if it were a door. ‘We don’t know that the imprint of those words on the pad in Katharine Allen’s flat has anything to do with her death.’ The inspector looked to Sam and Sellers for support. ‘Well? Do we? We found other words at her flat too – the list on the fridge, to take one example: “Renew parking permit, Christmas Amazon order” and the rest. If Waterhouse had bumped into a woman this afternoon who’d told him she needed to renew her parking permit, would he have sent his homunculus Gibbs to wait outside her house with a lassoo in his hand and an evil glint in his eye?’ Proust snorted his appreciation of his own joke. ‘It’s laughable, Waterhouse – and by “it”, I mean “you”.’

‘I’m not going to argue with you, sir,’ said Simon wearily.
Sir?
Where had that come from? He hadn’t called Proust ‘sir’ for years. ‘I’m not going to argue with a position you’ve adopted just to piss me off. You know, I know, we all know: “Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel” is a sufficiently unusual collection of words for us to take this seriously.’

‘If you’re so keen to talk to the Hewerdine woman, why have Gibbs pick her up?’ Proust snapped. ‘Why have him start the interview on his own? Have you devised a special training programme for him that the rest of us aren’t privy to? The Simon Waterhouse Diploma in Self-Indulgent Coincidence-based Policing and General Mania?’

Simon saw Sellers trying not to laugh. ‘I asked Gibbs to bring her in to buy me a bit of time,’ he said. ‘I wanted to grill Charlie on the details, talk to Ginny Saxon, talk to you . . .’ He knew he had to take the plunge, but was putting it off as long as he could. ‘You need to know something about Gibbs. I’m going to tell him I told you, but . . . it’s easier for me to do it if he’s not here.’

‘You’ve made a star chart for him,’ Proust pre-empted. ‘Every time he stuffs his career prospects further down the pan by running errands for you instead of completing the tasks assigned to him by Sergeant Kombothekra, he’s awarded a gold star. Once he’s earned ten, he gets to drive your mother to church and—’

‘Making a lot of jokes, aren’t you?’ Simon cut him off. ‘Pity you’re too mean-spirited to acknowledge the cause of your new good mood: the lead I’ve brought you.’

‘The lead Sergeant Zailer brought you,’ the Snowman corrected him.

Simon sighed. Talking to Proust was like trying to force a car to start, over and over again, when that car had already been crushed to a metal cube. ‘It’s likely we’re going to be putting Charlie’s notebook into evidence,’ he directed his words at Sam. ‘
I
think it’s likely, anyway. So, you’re all going to end up seeing what else is in the notebook, besides those five words.’ Simon pointed to them. ‘Rather than have you stumble across it, I’ll tell you: it’s letters. From Charlie to her sister Olivia, not written to be sent.’ Simon stared down at the table. ‘Written to give her anger an outlet.’

Proust made for the notebook like a bird of prey.

‘Are they still at loggerheads?’ asked Sam, who believed that harmonious relationships were both desirable and possible.

Sellers was taking a sudden interest in the view from the window: the Guildhall across the road that was having work done to its exterior. It was covered in scaffolding and blue plastic sheeting.
He knows
, thought Simon.

‘Gibbs and Olivia are . . . having a thing. It’s been going on since the night of our wedding.’

Colin Sellers shook his head, looked angry. Simon had exposed a man who was cheating on his wife, and, in doing so, breached the only principle Sellers held dear.

‘Would this be the same Gibbs whose wife is expecting twins next April?’ The speed with which Proust asked convinced Simon he’d known too. Sam hadn’t; that much was obvious from his face. ‘Gibbs and Olivia Zailer. So my star chart guess wasn’t too far off the mark – he does your bidding and gets his very own Zailer sister. Can I refer to a booby prize without it being mistaken for smut?’

‘I’ve just told you the only thing you’d find out from reading the letters in Charlie’s notebook,’ said Simon. ‘So now you don’t need to read them, and I’d appreciate it, and Charlie would definitely appreciate it, if you didn’t.’

Sam Kombothekra nodded.

‘None of my business,’ said Sellers.

‘Theoretically, we might find out more than the bare facts from reading the notebook.’ Proust made a show of flicking through its pages. ‘We might find out, in great detail, how betrayed Sergeant Zailer feels, her reasons for feeling that way, and how good she is at holding a grudge. Among other things. I wonder if we’d find out anything about you, Waterhouse.’

‘I’m going to interview Amber Hewerdine,’ said Simon, on his way out of the room.

Proust’s voice came from behind him. ‘Not unsupervised. I’ll join you.’

‘You?’ Simon stopped. Turned. ‘You want to interview a witness?’

‘No. I couldn’t care less about your witness. She isn’t going to tell me anything useful.’ Proust dropped the notebook on the table with deliberate carelessness. ‘I want to watch you conduct an interview, Waterhouse. Do you know what I’d really like to do? I’d like to watch clips from all your filmed interviews, back to back: the frustrating ones, the dull ones, the half-hearted ones where you’re going through the motions. Nostalgia’s always been a weakness of mine, and today I’m feeling nostalgic about your career as a police detective. What say you treat us all to one final display of your investigative prowess and figure out why that might be?’

‘This is a photograph of Katharine at her graduation,’ Gibbs told the angry woman across the table from him. Her resentment of him was making him feel claustrophobic in the small interview room, with its custard-yellow walls and its window that offered a sick-joke view of an internal neon-lit corridor. Or perhaps it was his resentment of her. He’d decided he couldn’t stand her when she’d told him that he had to pretend to be a feather-duster salesman for the benefit of her children.
A fucking feather-duster salesman
. Why would anyone do something as stupid as that for a living? ‘Katharine was murdered in her flat in Spilling, on 2 November. She was twenty-six.’

‘How many times are you going to tell me that?’ Amber Hewerdine aimed her grey eyes at him like a weapon. ‘Surely I know everything I need to know about her by now? She was twenty-six, a primary school teacher, unmarried, lived alone, grew up in Norfolk . . .’

‘In a village called Pulham Market,’ Gibbs supplied a new piece of information.

‘Oh, well. That changes
every
thing,’ Amber extended her voice in a sarcastic drawl. ‘Katharine Allen from Pulham Market?
That
Katharine Allen? Why didn’t you say so? I’ve known
that
Katharine Allen for years. When you asked me if the name meant anything to me, I assumed you were asking if I knew a Katharine Allen who
wasn’t
from Pulham Market in Norfolk.’

‘The more I tell you about her, however irrelevant it seems, the more likely we are to find a connection between the two of you,’ said Gibbs.

‘I’ll ask you for the twenty-fourth time: what makes you so sure there is one?’

‘You know the flats in the Corn Exchange building? Katharine had one of those. A duplex – top floor and second floor down. She had part of the dome for her bedroom.’ Gibbs swung his legs round, put his feet up on the table. ‘I’m not sure I’d like to live right in the centre of town,’ he said. ‘Might be noisy.’

‘I doubt it. Haven’t they rolled out a nine o’clock bedtime across all of Spilling and Silsford and the villages in between? Or is that just what those of us who live in Rawndesley like to think?’