Ian Rankin - Westwind

‘Thank you,’ Hepton said, ringing off. He felt actual relief: it would be something of an anticlimax if Vincent’s Dr McGill were to exist outside of the young man’s imagination. He called the other two numbers with the same negative result.

So there was no Dr McGill. Had Paul Vincent ever even been taken to hospital in the first place? Or had he been at the Alfred de Lyon all the time? It was a question Hepton couldn’t yet answer. He took his pen and wrote the name VILLIERS in his diary. Another figment of Vincent’s imagination? A second visit to the nursing home was becoming absolutely necessary.

Two hours later, Hepton was playing pool with Nick Christopher when the internal note arrived. He read it out aloud.

‘“Leave can begin at once. Send us a postcard. Henry.”’

Christopher came to see. ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘he really signed himself Henry. Fagin never uses his Christian name. Never.’

Hepton wafted the note in Christopher’s face. ‘Now will you believe that something’s going on?’ he said.

He had spent the past half-hour trying to make sense of his suspicions to Nick Christopher, but it seemed that the more he talked, the flimsier everything became. But now this. The granting of an immediate holiday, courtesy of Fagin.

Courtesy of Henry.

Christopher returned to the table and played a shot, but it went wide of the pocket and he sighed, putting down his cue.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Run through it again for me, starting at the beginning.’ And this time he was concentrating as Hepton told his story.

Hepton went to his dorm, pulled a suitcase out from beneath one of the bunks and started packing. Nine months ago, he’d taken out a year’s rental on a small flat in the market town of Louth, plumb in the middle of the town’s market area and not far from Binbrook. He’d reckoned it would make a little love nest for Jilly and him, whenever they could find a couple of days or more free to spend together. But then she’d taken the London job, forsaking her own local paper, where she had been something of a star. There had been a murder, made to look like suicide, and Jilly had investigated. She hadn’t exactly been able to prove anything substantial, but she had goaded the police into taking another look, and from there they had pronounced the suicide a murder. From where it was a short step to declaring the murderer (the dead woman’s son) found and guilty (twelve years).

Jilly’s story had found its way into the national press, and then the London Herald had jumped in with the offer of a job. Of course she’d been right to take it. It was the perfect career move at the right time. So the flat had gone unused and unloved, but Hepton had kept it on, using it for the occasional tryst, more or less unsatisfactorily.

He didn’t pack much, just enough to make people think he really was going to take a holiday. Then he waved farewell to Nick Christopher, who waved back, and made for his car.

At the security barrier, the guard came out of his hut.

‘Off again, are you?’

‘That’s right, Bert,’ said Hepton, smiling.

‘I don’t know, some people...’ Bert went back to his post.

Hepton waved at him, too, as he drove underneath the rising barrier and took a right turn onto the main road. Louth was less than twenty minutes away.

There had been a market that day, but the only signs in the town centre were scraps of vegetables in the gutter outside the entrance to Hepton’s flat. He lifted his suitcase out of the car and unlocked the main door. There were three flats in the house: one on the ground floor, one on the first floor and another in the attic. His was the first-floor flat, and he took the winding stairwell with accustomed awkwardness, manoeuvring the suitcase around the twists of the climb.

There was no mail waiting for him on the matting that covered his hall floor. The neighbour downstairs, Mrs Kennedy-Hall, had a key to the flat and sent the mail — bills always — on to him at the base. He unlocked the door. The flat smelt musty. He hadn’t been here in over a fortnight, and then only to play the gigolo in a failed seduction.

The place looked tidier than he remembered it. They had drunk a lot of wine that night, and rather a lot of neat gin (there being no tonic water to hand). None of it had helped. He couldn’t remember clearing up afterwards, though. Perhaps Mrs Kennedy-Hall... But no, it would be more her style to hire someone to tidy.

Then he heard the sounds, at first placing them in the street below. The sounds of running water, of things being moved, breakable things. There was someone in his kitchen...

He ran towards the source of the noise and stood in the kitchen doorway, dumbstruck. At the sink stood a tall, attractive woman, perhaps a year or two younger than him. She had rolled up the sleeves of her white blouse and was up to her elbows in soapy water. Clean dishes stood on the draining board, the worktops shone, the whole place was sparkling. The woman turned, saw him and smiled.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You must be Martin.’

‘That’s right,’ Hepton said at last. ‘And who the hell are you?’

‘Harriet,’ she answered, letting the water out of the sink. ‘My friends usually just call me Harry.’ She dried her hands on a dish towel, then held out the left one towards him. There were no rings on her water-reddened fingers. ‘How do you do?’

Hepton shook her hand awkwardly, right-handed himself, and she noticed his hesitation.

‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘I’m always doing that — shaking with the wrong hand, I mean. Sorry.’

‘Not at all,’ said Hepton. The shock of finding a stranger in his flat, a breaking-and-entering charlady, was ebbing. Questions filled the space. ‘But who are you?’ he asked. ‘How did you get in?’

‘Care for some tea?’ Harry had turned her back on him and begun to fuss with the kettle.

Hepton stared down at her legs, supple, slim legs wrapped in thin black stockings. She wore a blue pinstripe skirt to just below the knee. It was half of a suit, the jacket of which he now saw was hanging over one of the chairs beneath the freshly wiped foldaway table.

‘There’s today’s milk in your fridge,’ she was saying, ‘and some Assam tea in the cupboard. The place was quite barren. I hope you don’t mind. I went to that little shop on the corner.’ She turned to smile at him, and despite himself, he smiled back.

‘I think you should know—’ he started.

‘Oh,’ she interrupted, sniffing the interior of the teapot speculatively, ‘but there’s very little I don’t know, Martin. Very little indeed. That’s why I’ve been sent along here. Do you take milk?’

‘Who sent you here?’

She smiled again, with her unblemished English rose of a face, then waved an expansive arm around the kitchen.

‘All neat and tidy,’ she said. ‘That’s how I like things. I can’t remember, did you say you took milk?’

‘Yes,’ he said, beginning to feel distinctly uneasy. It was difficult to find an order for all the questions welling up within him. ‘How did you get in?’

‘Didn’t I say?’ She began pouring water from the kettle into the teapot. ‘Your door was open.’

‘Open?’

‘Wide open. No breaking and entering necessary. Well, no breaking at any rate. So I suppose the worst I can be accused of is cleaning with intent.’ She had placed everything on a tray, which she now double-checked. Satisfied, she lifted it. ‘Shall we go through to the living room?’

There was little Hepton could do but follow her, knowing that he needed answers but knowing also that she seemed determined to give them in her own way and in her own time. Well, he had lots of time, didn’t he? He was on holiday. All he needed was patience.