Stephen Booth - The kill call

Finally the agent let them into the house. The interior seemed incongruous, hardly fitting for a house worth half a million pounds on the open market. No one was taking much care about cleaning and maintenance. That might be common for a rented property, but the feeling of the place didn’t fit the image of Michael Clay, the businessman and certified accountant.

In the sitting room, a pile of celebrity gossip magazines lay on the table by an armchair. They all seemed to have headlines like Chanelle spills the beanz. Not what he would have imagined as Mr Clay’s choice of reading.

‘Perhaps I was right about there being a woman involved,’ said Fry. ‘But I just had the wrong man.’

‘You think Michael Clay might have been the one having an affair?’

‘This looks like a kind of love nest to me, Ben.’

‘A love nest on the cheap, though.’

‘Well, yes.’

‘Clay’s wife died five years ago,’ said Cooper. ‘Why would he go to such lengths to conceal a relationship? Who was he hiding it from?’

Fry shrugged. ‘His children? I bet Erin Lacey doesn’t know about this place. Or maybe his business colleagues? Perhaps he was ashamed of his relationship. Ashamed of her, whoever she is.’

The kitchen seemed to contain a microwave and not much else. Cooper opened a cupboard. No, he was wrong. Half a jar of coffee and a tin of powdered milk.

‘I can’t imagine that Michael Clay spent much time here himself.’

In a corner were black plastic bin liners bursting with rubbish. Amazing how often he saw that. As if it was too much trouble to put the stuff out for the binmen once a week. Or maybe the household had got on the wrong side of the garbage police and been penalized for putting the wrong stuff in their recycling bin. You could get your collections suspended for failing to distinguish between tin foil and plastic these days. Some authorities were really cracking down on bin crime.

One wall of the main bedroom was decorated with a poster containing the famous peace symbol, a circle surrounding a cross with its horizontal arms inclined downwards. Cooper had once read that the designer of that symbol had based it on the representation of an individual with palms stretched outwards and downwards. The gesture of despair, associated with the death of Man. And the circle, an unborn child. But the symbol was also said to incorporate the semaphore letters ‘N’ and ‘D’ for ‘nuclear disarmament’. It was best known as the official logo of the CND.

‘Did Michael Clay strike you as an old hippie?’ he called to Fry.

‘No. But how can you tell? Lots of hippies turn into accountants and bank managers when they grow up, don’t they?’

‘I’ve heard there are even some in the police.’

One of the top drawers of the dressing table was very stiff. At first, Cooper thought it was locked, but with a good tug it moved slightly, and he realized it was just jammed. Probably the wood had warped over the years, so that the drawer no longer slid straight on its runners.

With a bit of manoeuvring, he managed to get the drawer straight, and it finally squealed open. Inside was just one item — an old-fashioned, velvet-covered jewellery box with metal clasps. Quite a large box, too. It had filled the drawer completely. When Cooper gently prised the box open, it was like looking down at a miniature dragon’s hoard. A tangled mass of silver chains lay on the velvet, with the occasional glint of a solid band or the glitter of a gemstone. Blue stones, translucent stones like diamonds — and one that was jet black. Was that onyx? He couldn’t quite remember. Then Cooper smiled. He should have been thinking gold and silver-coloured. Because surely these items were all imitation. They would have been worth a fortune otherwise.

Something at the bottom of the heap caught Cooper’s eye. A glint of gold, but an unusual shape. He pushed the chains aside and drew it out. He found himself holding a small badge. A crown and a wreath around a curious little figure he couldn’t quite make out. The left hand seemed to be raised to the eyes, and the right hand was holding a flaming torch. And the figure was wearing — what? A breast plate? Armour? The only help was the motto etched on a scroll at the bottom of the badge. It said: Forewarned is forearmed.

‘What the heck does that mean?’

At that moment, Fry called him to join her in the other bedroom. She had opened a case containing a laptop computer and some papers.

‘Michael Clay’s?’ asked Cooper.

‘Yes, it seems to be. He must have been here at some time since he left home on Tuesday. Unfortunately, the laptop is password protected, so we’ll have to hand it over to the experts if we want to get anything off it. Did you notice that both bedrooms have been occupied?’

‘Yes. That’s interesting.’

‘And what do you make of this?’

Fry shook out the contents of a large buff envelope on to the bed. Cooper saw an old colour photograph of about a dozen men and one woman, all dressed in identical outfits, a sort of blue tunic and trousers, with berets worn at various rakish angles. They looked cheerful, a group of mates enjoying their work. He guessed their ages must have ranged from about seventy down to seventeen or so. A motley bunch, definitely.

But when was it taken? Most snaps had been in black and white until the early sixties, if the Cooper family album was a typical example. The earliest colour photo he could remember was of his parents on holiday in Wales with some friends, back before they were married — 1962, or around that time. In this photo, the subjects were standing in front of a small brick tower with a set of steps leading up the outside wall. There appeared to be no roof to the tower — he could see the sky through a doorway at the top of the steps. There also seemed to be an old-fashioned striped canvas deckchair leaning against the wall up there.

Automatically, Cooper turned the print over. Many people did what his mother had always done, and recorded all kinds of information on the back of a photograph. Date, place, the names of everyone shown in the picture. You never knew your luck.

But this one was infuriatingly sparse in its caption. It said simply 4 Romeo.

He pointed out the inscription to Fry.

‘Which one is Romeo, then?’ she said.

‘Number four? The fourth one from the left?’

They both looked closely at the line-up faces. The fourth man from the left was a fat character with a jowly chin. An unlikely Romeo. Cooper counted four from the right instead, and came up with a weedy-looking youth peering at the camera through round, wire-rimmed glasses. TinTin maybe, but not Romeo.

Fry placed a finger on another face. ‘I think this one could be Michael Clay, though,’ she said. ‘A lot younger, of course. But there’s something about the shape of the face that’s very distinctive.’

‘What else is in the envelope, Diane?’

‘Just these — ’

Fry held out a tie with a small logo on it, and a badge identical to the one Cooper had seen in the drawer in the other bedroom.

‘“Forewarned is forearmed” — but what does it mean?’

Before Fry could reply, the front door of the house opened cautiously. They heard a nervous voice downstairs.

‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’

Her name was Pauline Outram, and she seemed to be permanently on the verge of bursting into laughter. What Fry had at first taken for a nervous cough was actually a sort of constant half-snigger, as if she didn’t want to be considered lacking in a sense of humour if someone made a joke that she didn’t understand. Fry wanted to tell her to stop it, that she wasn’t about to make any jokes.

‘We’re here because we’re looking for Michael Clay,’ said Fry.