The Happier Dead (6 page)

“Ah! Another oversight.”

Oates was annoyed to find the PR man leaning over his shoulder. He was wearing plastic slippers, latex gloves and a hairnet like the other men in the room.

“Who the hell let you in here?”

“One of your chaps said you had done your reconstruction thingy – amazing machine! – and I might come in. He’s a City fan apparently but I won’t damn a man for that.” Charles grinned broadly, and scooped the album from Oates’s hands. “This should really have been checked and removed at induction.”

“Someone got one photo,” Oates said, and indicated the missing picture. “Do you know where this is?”

“Well, not personally, no. But someone in our welcome team undoubtedly will. We confiscate any little anachronisms the guests might try to bring in and keep them safe for the duration of their stay. This picture is dated after the freeze date, so they will have taken it. They should have taken the whole album. Prudence and Capability… dear me, I would have sued my parents.”

“I want to know if your people have that photo.”

“Of course, Inspector! Your wish is my command and all that.”

“That knife, you let the guests bring weapons into the spa with them?”

“Only period appropriate ones.”

Oates took a last look around the room, trying not to be rattled by his companion’s impermeable good humour. He asked him to wait outside whilst he completed his inspection of the crime scene, and Charles left with a salute. Prudence Egwu had had time to unpack. His clothes hung in the wardrobe, sweatshirts and jeans in the style of over fifty years before.

His packing case, an unusual item bound in the skin of some kind of reptile with his initials stamped on it in gold, was stashed neatly at the end of his bed. He had been looking at the photograph album before the arrival of his assailant – the light blood misting on the cover indicated it had been lying on the bed when the first blow was struck, and there was a corresponding blood-free patch on the coverlet.

He had also been drinking whisky, though not a lot. A seventy year old Islay was stoppered on the sideboard. It would have been a recent vintage, by the strange logic of St Margaret’s. A single glass, still half way full, stood undisturbed on the lid of the trunk. Oates looked at it, and wondered if the stuff tasted worse for being stripped of its years. It was the kind of booze a man shared, if only to impress. Had Prudence Egwu expected visitors? He came back onto the tiny landing to find Bhupinder flicking the underside of his throat.

“We’re never going to get him down these stairs,” Bhupinder said.

“He’s a big bugger. Still you know what they say. Take your time, he’s not going anywhere.”

Some of the men chuckled in recognition of the familiar joke. A constable brought Oates a pack of cigarettes in a brand he had never seen from the tobacconist on the high street which ran away from the gates of the school. Bhupinder went ahead to find Charles. Oates waited until he was outside to light up, which was a good thing, because the first puff had him clutching his knees in a coughing fit. Through watering eyes he stared at the packet: ‘Pall Mall, Famous Cigarettes’. No wonder they were famous, they blew the back of your throat off. The filter was about a quarter the length of any cigarette he had ever seen. He took another drag, ready for it this time, and enjoyed the unaccustomed rush. Some things really were better in the old days.

The little crowd around the police tape had disappeared, and the court at the bottom of the stairs was empty. Night proper had settled on St Margaret’s, and the students were in bed. Voices carried from the open window above. With their superior out of the room, the men spoke more freely as they began to move the body.

“Maybe this isn’t the time to tell you, but this is my first.”

“You’ve never done a body before?”

“On traffic I have, loads. Just never like this.”

“Hey lads, we’ve got a virgin!”

“Bloody hell, he’s heavy.”

“What did you reckon of that Miranda?”

“Lovely lady.”

“Are you joking? She gave me the willies. The tide wouldn’t take her out.”

The sound of laughter came behind him down the stairs. Oates was torn between storming back up the stairs and telling them to shut up, and a nostalgic wish to be able to go and join them. There was no one about to hear, and the good feel of the cigarette tipped his mood to indulgence. Charles and Bhupinder were waiting outside in the street, and he followed them to the maintenance rooms where they were holding Ali Farooz.

T
HE ROOM IN
question was just behind the carpark. Oates knew he would only have one chance to decide whether or not Ali Farooz was an Eddy, and he stood in the shadow of the arch to smoke a cigarette and collect his thoughts. He had memorised the facts spat out by the Oracle, and he had spoken to Charles and the head porter about Ali. Bhupinder had already searched Ali’s quarters, and the only item of any interest was a diary in several volumes. These had been brought to the schoolroom in the headmaster’s lodge, turned into an ops room for the night. Bhupinder’s dismay as each fresh item of physical evidence was brought in and set out on the desks was so comical that by comparison Oates felt himself positively cheery about their prospects.

A constable was thumbing the first volume of the diary, others were interviewing guests and checking registers and CCTV (almost non-existent inside the Great Spa, for reasons of period fidelity), but so far there was nothing either to implicate or exonerate the cleaner beyond the testimony of the head groundsman and Ali’s own confession. He was an immigrant from Kenya who had come to the country stuck between two fridges in the back of a truck. The amnesty had brought him back into the white market, and he had been working at Avalon for about three years. He kept himself to himself and had no family or friends, so far as anyone knew. The SOCOs had found no traces of Prudence Egwu’s blood on his clothes or his skin, but he claimed to have washed before he was caught.

In theory, of course, there would be many opportunities to interview the suspect, right up to the point at which the decision was made whether or not to charge him. In practice, you only got one shot.

In part, it was the fault of the press. Once the name of a suspect started to appear on the net, events began to gravitate towards the named individual. In part, it was the fault of the Met’s reaction to the press. Once that name was out there, the pressure was on for a conviction, and any subsequent attempt to move the investigation in another direction would invoke the intense skepticism of senior colleagues. Oates had even heard of investigations involving alleged Eddies where evidence contradicting the initial line had been concealed to avoid embarrassment, the logic being that it was less of a crime to fit up an innocent man if he connived at his own incarceration.

More dangerous to Oates than this conscious corruption was the unconscious drive to confirm a cherished hypothesis, and it was amazing how, after the initial interview and the first solid decision on the credibility of a confession, the facts that militated against the suspect’s guilt moved meekly to the edge of the mind, whilst those which supported it clamoured for attention. In part it was the simple fact that if a confession was thought to be genuine, effort and attention drained away from the case through a thousand little channels, official and unofficial, as man hours were scaled back and corners cut, and as the next unsolved crime obtruded.

But none of these factors alone could explain the overwhelming significance of the initial decision. It was the pull of the explicable that sealed the deal. The commission of a crime created a gap in the narrative logic of the world, which could only be filled by the apprehension of the criminal. Computer games, TV shows, films and comics had trudged over and over along the same path, wearing the psychic groove so deep that real events were now expected to flow down those channels as naturally as rain water finding its way from the rooftops into the sewers. A believable confession fulfilled that need. If you got the first interview wrong, it was a big thing to derail the train of a moving narrative.

Oates had one superstition, brought back with him from the desert. He didn’t like to think of himself as a credulous man, and he told himself that he believed in it only as a fate placebo. Still, he had never gone into battle without performing it first.

When Mike was born, and the doctor with his controlled urgency demanded a c-section, he had to sneak off to the toilets to perform the ritual, because the sight of it drove Lori mad. She was jealous of it because it predated her knowledge of him. She was jealous of the man he had been before she met him, as if the younger version of himself had been her love rival. In a sense, Oates knew, she was right. He cherished that earlier incarnation of himself, the young man with a flat stomach and a good left hook who had felt the rush of battle in the desert. The taste of the old cigarette, so different from its modern incarnation, brought it back. Sometimes, he even thought about stealing away, doing a bunk with his former self, the two of them running off to some foreign warzone.

Lori was the same with his army buddies. She was always hospitable, bringing them beers from the fridge when they had their poker nights, but some time after they had gone home he would find himself quarrelling with her about something apparently unconnected, about his leaving the scum of his stubble in the sink, or the cash he spent on booze, or the hours he worked.

The cumulative effect of this over the years had been the slow separation of Oates from his old comrades, as Lori levied these scenes of domestic disharmony as the cost of every reunion. The strange thing was that Lori was not a nag, there was nothing further from her nature, and he could see that she loathed herself during these arguments, and cast about in vain for the cause of her frustration. If you’d asked her whether she wanted Oates to keep up with his army mates, she would say yes, of course, and she would mean it too. But every time the occasion arose, she would make it more difficult, and hate herself all the while.

He couldn’t help her because he felt no equivalent. She was ten years younger than him, and he didn’t get the sense with her that she had ever been a different person from the one she was today. Perhaps he had taken her too young; the thought had nipped his heels right up to the day of his wedding, but he had resolved when he made his vows to compensate by never making her regret her choice. And he didn’t think she ever had, with the possible exception of that single night when they got the call about Anna. He recoiled from the thought, and set about his ritual.

There had been nothing in the pockets of the suit they gave him, and he had borrowed an old-fashioned fifty pence piece from one of the groundskeepers. He flipped it until he got three heads in a row. It took him thirty tries. It was a good thing he didn’t believe in luck, because the last time it had taken that many the Mastiff he was travelling in had been ambushed in a narrow alley with adobe walls outside Damascus, and one of his friends had gone home flag-wrapped in the Hercules’s hold.

A
LI
F
AROOZ WAS
staring at the floor. He stood up and retreated from the table when Oates entered the room, and Oates judged he was the right height and weight for the murderer. He was heavy set, with the same big build as the victim. He was wearing a white t-shirt and a pair of blue trousers in a pared down version of the groundsmen’s uniform, and there were dark patches under his arms. He had been in the room long enough for the air to carry the smell of his unwashed body. Oates did not look at him, but instead set out his papers and a Dictaphone on the desk.

They had offered Ali a lawyer, but he had refused. The clichéd pattern for an Eddy was the nervous black teenager and the ageing white lawyer with a hand on his shoulder, some experienced criminal brief employed by the same man as the Eddy to keep an eye on him, cautioning him not to speak when he risked revealing his ignorance of the details of the crime.

“Smoke?” Oates asked him.

Ali was now standing by the barred window. “I don’t smoke.”

Oates shrugged, and went to put the packet back in his pocket, leaving an unlit cigarette pursed between his lips.

“And I would prefer it also if you did not smoke, Inspector,” Farooz blurted out.

When he heard this Oates was ready to show him who was in charge, but looking at Ali changed his mind. His expression was proud, but hopeless. The man was not trying to cheek him. He was simply trying to keep his dignity in this barred place, where he had been waiting for hours. Oates shrugged, and put the cigarette back in the packet. He gestured for Ali to sit down.

Oates had over the years built a shrewd estimation of his own effect on people, and he knew that his silent presence was a powerful lever on closed lips. He sat in front of Ali Farooz waiting for him to speak, to ask what would happen next or whether they were going to charge him. They sat like that without exchanging a word for almost a minute until the policeman himself became uncomfortable with the silence. It wasn’t that Ali was playing the hard man, or staring him out. He simply had the look of a man who doubted that speaking could do him any good.

His failure to ask anything about the case seemed to Oates to betoken a simple lack of interest. It was something he had seen on the faces of black mercenaries in Arab Africa. You would never see it on the face of a man raised in the UK, black or white – the British had too much faith in their rights to be truly terrified of the police, and too much of a conviction of their own significance to accept that their feelings and actions might have no effect. The Nigerians and Somalis Oates had captured in the desert had, through the sheer hardship of their lives, gained an indifference to their fate that made them fierce fighters and docile captives.

It was this realisation which made him say, not unkindly, “You’re a long way from home, eh?”

“I live in the staff accommodation just outside River Tunnel 1.”