Ник Харкуэй: Edie Investigates

A wave slams into her, fills her mouth with salt water.

White fish girl, dies in the gurly swell.

Bugger.

Donny Caspian’s corded arm catches her before she can subside into the sea again, hauls her into his boat, which is somehow lashed to hers.

“I got it,” she says to him, holding out the geegaw.

Donny Caspian grins and nods, turns the boat.

“What are you doing here?”

“Had a hankering to see you,” he says, and this explanation it seems he will stick to however hard she presses, as if he has not noticed—while he hauls on the tiller and drags the boat around—that the last of the blue sky is giving way even now to a ripe, roaring grey, and thunderheads are sweeping in over the water.

“Storm coming,” Edie observes, as if this is news. Donny nods.

“It’s La Belle Dame . She comes on that way sometimes, hides behind the cape until the last minute.”

Edie determines, there and then, to make herself his lover, but somewhere between the beach and her room above Saul Caspian’s bar she falls asleep, and when she awakes the next morning Donny has been called away. Called, in fact, from the islands to active service in diverse secret wars, and thence by routes discreet if well-travelled to the banking houses of London’s Square Mile, and finally to his own assassination.

The investigating officer’s name was Bright, and he was kind enough to pretend that he had not identified the man who brushed past him in search of a place in which to be noisily sick. He went so far as to shake hands, albeit with some caution; to repeat that he had been told to extend Rice every courtesy; and to ask earnestly for any details or impressions Rice might have formed of the scene which could be of use. He pondered aloud the significance of a man from London coming down to quiet Shrewton for what was, yes, a grisly but probably not nationally significant death. He smiled benignly when Rice said that he couldn’t really talk about that, and agreed that that was for the best, in the grand scheme of things, and with respect to the big picture, but somehow from that point cooperated in an open and helpful way which nonetheless was completely obstructive.

“Do you have any suspects?” Rice asked.

“Well, we’ve always got a few, but I think the important thing here is to establish a timeline.”

“Oh, right. Of course. So what is the timeline?”

“Pretty clear, I think, though we’re awaiting corroboration. That’ll be easier if we can track down a few witnesses.”

Rice did not ask if there were any witnesses. He just nodded, and waited. Not for nothing his years as a civil servant: he knew how to make a silence stretch.

“Yes,” Bright said at last. “I mean, there’s a lad from the butcher who delivered last night, and another fellow who cuts the trees. Some domestic staff and so on.”

Rice let his eyebrows suggest that there must be more than that, that a man of Bright’s ability would have some idea, by now, of where to look for less mundane information.

“And…” Bright muttered unwillingly, “there’s word of a car seen leaving late. Very fast. Probably nothing.”

“Word from whom?” Rice asked.

“A lady in the town. Bit of a busybody, to be honest. Neighbourhood-Watch sort, you know, with that picture of the meerkats on the window.”

Rice did know: an orange sticker, designed some time in the last thirty years—probably after the BBC made meerkats famous, but long before an insurance website brought them to life in little dressing gowns as some sort of bizarre celebrity. The sticker came in a variety of flavours, and was supposed to let you know you were under the eye of the community. When he had first seen them, as a student, he had thought them a little Orwellian, but that was before Britain became the most surveilled and monitored nation on Earth. What’s a granny twitching at the curtain when every bank cash machine and every traffic light has a little eye which peers out at you?

“And she saw this car?” Rice asked encouragingly.

Bright gave a nod. “But she’s not what I look for in a witness.”

“Unreliable?”

“Not as such, no.”

“Fanciful? Or short-sighted?”

“She’s an enthusiast,” Bright said shortly. “Keen. It doesn’t look well in court, keen.”

Court, Rice reflected, was a long way away. He’d settle for a few facts. Or he would, if investigating this was his job. But he wasn’t sure that it was. “Natural causes,” the man from the Legacy Board had told him.

“It’s been very helpful talking to you,” Rice said neutrally, and saw Bright flush as he registered the careful phrasing.

Yes, well. Screw you very much , he thought, as he shook Bright’s hand and departed.

“This is Lizard,” Tom Rice said into his phone, “for Gravesend.”

“Gravesend,” the familiar voice replied. “How’s your wife?”

“Fine,” Rice said vaguely, because he was finding he had to concentrate quite hard not to mention or even imply food poisoning, and had a recurrent waking nightmare of tanks rolling down the main street of Shrewton blowing up whippets. The people of Shrewton seemed to be overly fond of whippets. Rice himself could take or leave them, but he did not wish to be responsible for a kind of doggy Culodden in which hundreds of innocent sighthounds were exploded by a battalion of armoured vehicles.

Gravesend gave a sort of sigh.

“Oh,” Rice said, remembering. “Yes, I mean, when I say she’s fine, I mean she’s not really fine at all, you know, got La Grippe, I’m afraid, still ailing somewhat. How are you? How’s that charming husband of yours?”

“Still in prison,” Gravesend replied quellingly. “What about the job in hand?”

“It’s not really in hand,” Rice said. “There was a definite thrust to my instructions, if you take my meaning, a will for simple resolutions implied if not actually stated.”

“Yes, there was.”

“Well, it’s reasonably clear that this isn’t that sort of job.”

“How clear?”

Tom Rice recalled the bits of head stuck in the wall.

“Pretty clear,” he said.

Gravesend seemed to ponder this. “Are the people on the ground taking it seriously?” Meaning, Rice assumed, the police.

“Yes, they are. They’re not happy to see me, either.”

“They wouldn’t be. All right, go and find somewhere to sit. I’m going to send you something.”

“Shall I call in and tell you where I am?”

“I know where you are.”

Rice was about to clarify that he had meant to ask whether he should call her and tell her where he was after he had found somewhere to sit, but realised in time that she understood that and was telling him that she knew, all the time, exactly where he was. He held the phone out in front of him and eyed it somewhat suspiciously. When he lifted it back to his ear, the line was dead.

He considered his surroundings. He could go back to his hotel, but if she’d meant that she’d have said, so there was an implicit instruction not to. Or possibly there wasn’t, and he was reading too much into it all, but given the choice of disobeying a sort-of instruction and appearing too willing to obey an imagined instruction, he chose the latter. Which left him with a small list of possible places to sit: a municipal bench in a bus shelter; a small local library; a pub called the Witch & Frog which he suspected had recently been modernised to provide a place for the young of Shrewton to spawn; and a tea shop called the Copper Kettle. He dismissed the bench out of hand—it was starting to rain—and considered the library before deciding that he would almost certainly draw the attention of the librarian in what was supposed to be a covert handover. The pub was not the sort of pub where a youngish man in a serious suit and shoes by Ducker’s of Oxford would go unremarked, leaving the tea shop, which had the added benefits that a) he could have tea and b) it was a place so appallingly quaint he was reasonably sure any actual spy would be prevented from crossing the threshold by pure, aching shame.