Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6

“Drink this,” he insisted, pushing a cognac into my hand, having personally escorted me down to his office.

“How kind,” I sniffed, thinking, good, I can sneak away now, but compassion, it seems, has no bounds at plush hotels. He left a desk clerk as a deposit, and you wouldn’t believe how fast the police can move, either. When they try.

So there I was, surrounded on all sides by red velvet and gilt while the piano in the foyer tinkled Gershwin, computing a multitude of likely stories. I pictured Mrs Cuthbertson, fiddling with her handbag, fiddling with her pearls, and realized that I couldn’t maintain the pretence of being her. Her marriage might be failing, but her husband had been willing to put his upper-crust reputation on the line for her, and in any case, a murder investigation would quickly reveal that I wasn’t the genuine article. No, I’d have to be someone else who’d gone out without her damn room key. I warmed the cognac in my hand and sipped. Ultra smooth, but what else would one expect of the Belle Vue. And the more I thought about it, the better this scenario played out. If I was a woman who was stupid enough to forget her room key, I was certainly stupid enough to get the numbers muddled up. I finished off the brandy and pasted on my coy-but-nonetheless-ravishing smile for the benefit of the desk clerk. After all, who better to probe about the current guest list?

Within ten minutes, I was Mrs Henry Martin, newlywed bride, because if honeymoons don’t make a girl jittery, what the hell does? Not the sex. The fact that she’s committing to a lifetime with someone, bearing his children, washing his socks. That would scare the pants off me, I can tell you. So. Providing the police didn’t interrogate me in the presence of the desk clerk (300-1), there was no way of being caught out on my story, especially since the Martins had gone sightseeing in Eastbourne and would not be back before supper (7:30 onwards, dinner jackets only). Yes, indeed. Between the mink and the cognac, my confidence was restored and while the desk clerk answered the director’s phone, I whipped the film from my camera and stuffed it behind my suspender.

“Inspector Sullivan is on his way down to see you,” he announced, but even before he’d finished, the door had opened and the entire gap was filled by a man with a mop of unruly dark hair and a face that looked like it had come second in a fight with a brick wall.

I stood up, though if I wasn’t to be at a height disadvantage, I’d really need to stand on a chair. Still, I was ready, and I ran through the key points in my head. Mrs Martin. Just married. Nervous. Excited. Definitely light-headed. Then-

“Don’t I know you?” Inspector Sullivan asked, and his voice was rough from too many cigarettes, too little sleep. “Mrs Hepburn, right?” I hate conscientious policemen.

“Miss.”

“You run Hepburn Investigations?”

No point in stalling. I brought out my card. “Clients with confidence,” I said with none.

“Hm.” He chewed his lip, rubbed his jaw, ran his hand through his hair. And all the time his eyes were fixed on my camera.

My thoughts were of Susan. Growing up with her aunt. Visiting her mother in jail. Rapidly becoming estranged…

“If I didn’t know better,” Sullivan said at length, “I’d say you were fixing up one of those phoney divorce cases.”

I said nothing for the simple reason that the next person I intended talking to was my lawyer.

“Only the problem there,” he said, “is that Mr Hall wasn’t married.”

Mr Who? Then the penny dropped. I may have booked room two-twenty-three for Mr Cuthbertson and the lovely Mavis, but now I started to think about something other than covering my own backside, I realized that Mr Cuthbertson wouldn’t have been seen dead (pardon the pun) in a pale blue check suit. Relief made my knees tremble.

“So do you mind telling me why you burst in on an unmarried commercial traveller to take his photograph, Miss Hepburn?”

In fact I was so overcome with relief that I nearly blurted out the truth.

“That new road-safety officer came to the school again today.”

Susan was sitting on my lap braiding my hair, and although she’s a little too old and (dare I say it) a little too heavy, such moments are rare. For this reason alone, they are precious.

“He’s a scream,” she gushed. “Ever so funny.”

I really, really didn’t want to talk about policemen right then, but children can be immeasurably cruel.

“Do you know what happens if you don’t look right?” she persisted, using my spiky, mismatched plaits as handlebars. I shook my head as best I could. “You go wrong,” she squealed.

Maybe I would also have found this excruciatingly funny if I’d been nine years old. Somehow I doubted it.

“Do you have a crush on this teacher of yours?” Because suddenly there was me just turned seventeen, Mr Rolands my old maths master, and the only good thing to come out of that affair weighed seven and a half pounds and has his beautiful, soft golden hair.

“Oh, Mum!” Susan rolled her eyes. “The road-safety man’s not a teacher, and anyway he’s old.”

What constitutes old to a nine-year-old? Mr Rolands turned out to be thirty-six, and even now, I still wonder how I fell for that old I’ll-leave-my-wife line.

“So’s Rock Hudson,” I pointed out, “but his face is plastered all over your bedroom wall.”

“That’s different, he’s a film star.” She stopped braiding and sighed. “If I had a daddy, I’d like him to be like the road-safety man. He’s ever so handsome.”

If I had a daddy. ..? Next she’d be pulling out my fingernails with pliers.

“More handsome than Elvis?” I asked, because all good mothers know how to change the subject, and within no time we were jiving round the living room to “Jailhouse Rock”, “Blue Suede Shoes”, and generally getting “All Shook Up”.

It was only later, with Susan tucked up in bed and me patiently untangling the knots in my hair, that the enormity of what I’d risked today hit me. I could have lost everything, and I do mean everything, on the turn of a door key. I needed to think seriously about the future. When the next solicitor telephoned, asking could I help out, would I? Would I risk it? I let Elvis run through “Don’t Be Cruel” and thought, damn right I would. My daughter is not going to end up an unmarried mother at the age of seventeen. Susan’s a bright kid, on course for the grammar school, and what’s more, she’s desperate to go. But. I reached for as wide a toothed comb as I could find. Grammar schools are expensive. There’s the uniforms, the tennis racquets, the hockey sticks, the music lessons, not forgetting innumerable bus trips and a million other extra hidden costs. Truly, though, I do not care. My daughter will never be forced to earn her living grubbing through dustbins, following faithless husbands down lover’s lanes, or tracing children who’ve run away because their home life’s so damned wretched. Never. I will do whatever it takes to keep Susan from violent men and abusive women, and she will never need to take covert shots of homosexuals or men with prostitutes simply to pay the rent. Maybe, once she starts attending the grammar school, she’ll be ashamed of me. Of what I do and what I am. I hope not, I really, really do. But that’s another risk I am prepared to take.

All the same, I don’t sleep well. I worry.

“Miss Hepburn.”

I recognized that distinctive gravel without needing to look up. “Inspector.”

He lumbered into the inner office where I was typing up a perfectly legitimate infidelity assignment, but did not sit down. I wished to God I’d locked the filing cabinets, or even closed that open drawer, but Sullivan didn’t glance at them. To be honest, I would have rifled through every last one, had I been in his shoes.