Тимоти Уилльямз - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

Today, however, Gina’s heart sank rather than lifted as the unexpected visitor climbed to the office door. So close to five o’clock... Gina’s plan had been to close the office ten minutes early. The plan was to catch her son, David, before he went to his Monday after-school class in Web-site design. David had things to tell, Gina was sure. And the best time to extract the information was when he badly wanted to be elsewhere. He would be thinking, “I’ve got to get out of here. How can I get out of here?”

How? By telling his mother what she wanted to know, of course.

What Gina wanted to know was everything David knew about his sister Marie’s latest source of money. Marie refused to say anything more than that it was legal and that it wasn’t dangerous. Pushed, she would throw a teen tantrum and stomp to her room. It had already happened twice.

There were, of course, steps that Gina and Angelo could take as her parents. But Gina much preferred to get information without invoking the iron fist. One of the sources of information about Marie was David.

The children went to the same school. And David often trailed around with his sister and her gang of girlfriends. Marie complained about it at family dinners, although it seemed to Gina that she was also rather proud of her little brother and his accomplishments, however geeky. After a lifetime of sniping at each other, this new mutual admiration between the two children was a pleasure — and relief.

But a corollary of their new mateyness was that it was now harder than it used to be to get David to rat out his sister. Marie continued to sail close to the wind — constantly taking risks — and this was certainly not David’s style. But the fact was that many of Marie’s friends had younger sisters, girls, not far from David’s age. David was now so hungry for a real girlfriend that he almost drooled. He certainly viewed staying in Marie’s good books in an entirely new light.

To break David down about Marie, Gina would need to make him feel that he was at risk of losing his other current passion — the Web-site design class. He would have spent all weekend looking forward to it.

Between the energy David put into fantasies about girls and the time he spent in front of a computer, it was amazing that he was still doing so well at school. Certainly Marie wasn’t. How well she did or didn’t do at school was getting serious.

Who’d be a kid again, eh?

Certainly the man who knocked lightly on the door at the top of the stairs and then entered the office was no kid. He was forty if he was a day: bald, short, and dumpy.

Once inside the office he stopped. He held on to the door handle as if to make sure no one was going to prevent his escape if he decided to run for it.

A nervous Nellie. Gina sighed inwardly. Bound to take time. Could cornering David wait till the slot before Wednesday’s class? Perhaps Angelo would be finished with his surveillance job by then, and able to cover for her in the office. Ah, well.

With a smile Gina stepped out from behind her desk and said, “Hello. I’m Gina Lunghi. Would you care for a cup of tea? I’m just making one.”

Angelo and Marie spotted each other on Walcot Street as they headed for home from opposite directions. Marie was coming from the town center and called, “Hi, Daddy.” She waited at the door to the flat as he approached.

Angelo would have called back, but he was very tired. So he just waved. However, he wasn’t too tired to recognize that his moody daughter must be “up.” She could just as easily have gone into the flat and slammed the door behind her. But Angelo’s fatigue was too great for him to remember what new problem with Marie he was supposed to have been thinking about during the dreary hours he’d spent sitting in a car outside 43 Camden Green Close. And nothing is drearier and more tiring than a whole day spent watching for something that doesn’t happen, unless it’s an eighth consecutive day watching for something that doesn’t happen.

Ah, well, it was what the client wanted.

What was it about Marie? Something at school? No. Something else. But it just wouldn’t come back.

Then, just before Angelo got to his elder child, the door to the office opened. The doors to home and office stood side by side, facing the street, the original buildings having been united only internally. And from the office a man emerged.

The man was short and a bit chunky. He stood for a moment staring directly ahead, oblivious to the teenage girl standing beside him within arm’s reach. The man then took a deep breath, perhaps to mark the end of a stressful episode, and he walked straight ahead, crossing the street. Both Angelo and Marie looked after him until he disappeared up the tunnel of steps that led to the Paragon.

“What was that?” Marie asked her father. She moved toward the street, aping the man’s odd gait. At the curb she turned back, expecting her father to be amused.

Well, she’d certainly caught the man’s funny walk. Was that what they taught them to do in the drama classes she liked so much?

“Go on and laugh, Daddy,” Marie said. “You know you want to.”

“Good day at school?”

“School finished hours ago. Duh.” Marie pushed into the entryway that led up to the flat. But she didn’t slam the door.

Definitely one of her better moods. And what the hey, Angelo thought. Maybe Marie would grow up into a sensitive, caring adult one day. It could happen, right?

Dinner, as was often the case on Mondays, comprised a diverse collection of leftovers. There was Italian fare from Sunday dinner, of course, as well as kai phad phed from Saturday’s takeaway from Sukothai. There was also a little of the curry Rosetta, Angelo’s sister and the children’s aunt, made for the family the previous Thursday. But Marie was not satisfied with any of it.

“What’s the point of living so close to Schwartz’s and never using it? You know, don’t you, that Venue has rated them the best burgers in Bath for six, s-i-x straight years.” She held up six fingers and flashed them at her parents and at Rosetta.

“If you’re not happy with what we feed you, young lady,” Angelo said, “then buy your own damn food.”

“Okay,” Marie said lightly. She was out of her chair and out of the kitchen door before Angelo could work out that he had fallen into a trap.

“Great,” Gina said with a sigh.

What Marie was doing for her newfound money... Angelo remembered now. That’s what he was supposed to have been thinking about. “Phooey,” he said.

“Phooey indeed.” Gina began eating.

Rosetta, who lived in the family flat but worked in the business only as a bookkeeper and accountant, turned from her brother to her sister-in-law and back again. “Anything interesting happen today?”

“No,” Angelo said.

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Gina said.

The bald dumpy man accepted Gina’s offer of tea quickly. “Biscuit?” Gina asked as she waited for the kettle to boil. She held out the tin.

He took two, but sat holding them in silence, waiting for the tea.

Most people nibble, Gina thought. This was, perhaps, a man who knew exactly how he liked to do things.

When the tea was in the pot and brewing, Gina took down preliminary details. Among them that Colin Cottard was an accountant who worked and lived locally, although he’d been brought up all around the world as the child of a career soldier.

“So,” Gina said once the tea was poured, “what might we be able to do for you, Mr. Cottard?”

“I’m a single man.”

After a moment spent waiting for him to continue without a prompt, Gina said, “Yes?”