Reginald Hill - Blood Sympathy

Her eyes were running over his clothes, his car and his cat like a VAT man’s over a ledger. They then turned to the building which belonged to the nineteen-sixties Prince-Charles-hates-it school of architecture.

‘Cherry said I shouldn’t judge by appearances,’ she murmured half to herself, but only half.

‘Cherry?’ said Joe.

‘Cheryl Butcher,’ she said.

‘Oh, that Cherry. Would you like to come inside?’ said Joe.

In the tiny dark foyer, he automatically checked his mailbox. As he opened it he felt those assessing eyes watching him and prayed it wouldn’t be revealingly empty. He was in luck. There was a Security Trade Fair opening at the National Exhibition Centre the following week and various electronic firms were bombarding him with invitations to come along and check out their bugs.

Clutching the sheaf of envelopes ostentatiously, he ushered the woman into the lift. Whitey howled. He didn’t trust the lift and usually they walked up the stairs together. When he realized that good client relations were going to be put before good cat relations he jumped down from Joe’s shoulder and set off up the stairs with his tail at a disgusted angle.

‘Sorry, I didn’t get your name,’ said Joe as the lift laboured up three storeys.

‘Baker,’ she said. ‘Gwen Baker.’

It sounded as if it meant something, or perhaps it was just the way she said it.

‘And have you known, er, Cherry long?’

‘We were at school together.’

‘Old friends, then.’

‘You could say so. We were thrown together by linguistic affinity. Little girls like that sort of thing.’

This was like one of those crossword clues, the ones which obliged him to invent his own answers. He worked at it and was delighted to have a sudden revelation as the lift shuddered to a halt.

‘Butcher and Baker!’ he said.

She looked at him sharply as if suspecting she was making a very large mistake. The doors opened to reveal Whitey yawning on the landing as if he’d been waiting for ages.

Inside the office she did her audit act again. He felt like asking her what he was worth. But when he offered her a chair he noticed that she sat down rather stiffly and also that the bruising on the left hand side of her face was accentuated by the pallor of the right.

‘You OK?’ he asked in concern. ‘Anything I can get you?’

‘Like all the best private eyes, you have a bottle in your desk, I suppose,’ she said.

‘Well, no. I was thinking, more a cup of sweet tea, like.’

She smiled for the first time.

‘It’s kind of you, but no, thanks. Let me put you in the picture then we can decide if we’re wasting each other’s time.’

It was, he had decided, a wife-battering case. His heart sank. A man who could batter a woman would probably have little qualms about battering a middle-aged balding PI.

But no harm in showing her he was no slouch, deduction-wise.

He said, ‘Go ahead. You want to tell me about your husband, I presume.’

He took her by surprise.

She said, ‘Yes, but …’

Then he saw those sharp eyes backtracking his line of reasoning, and a twitch of the right-hand corner of her mouth told him he’d got it wrong.

‘Perhaps I should begin by explaining I suffered my injuries in a plane crash …’

Of course! That was why her name was familiar.

He jumped in eagerly. ‘Yes, Gwendoline Baker. The A505 crash yesterday. You’re the secretary.’

‘The what?’

‘The secretary. To Mr what’s it. Verity. Mr Verity.’ He could see that he was still failing to impress. ‘That’s what it said in the paper.’

Her eyes touched the tabloid sticking out of his pocket.

‘I hope you don’t base all your appreciation of objective reality on what you read in that rag. Let me see.’

He handed it over, feeling like a small boy caught reading a comic under his desk.

A snarl of fury animated her features as she glanced at the back page.

‘So you’re not Mr Verity’s secretary?’ said Sixsmith tentatively.

‘No, I am not. Au contraire , as they say. He is my secretary. He was accompanying me to a business conference in Manchester. I should be giving a paper there at this very moment.’

‘You could send it by special messenger, it won’t get there too late,’ suggested Sixsmith.

She rolled her eyes upward and said, ‘I’m beginning to have serious doubts about this, Mr Sixsmith. One thing is certain. We will get on much more speedily if you refrain from further interruption.’

Sixsmith, relieved that the spectre of the battering husband had receded, nodded agreement. Things were beginning to sound much more interesting. His second guess was that she was going to tell him the plane crash wasn’t an accident, but had been arranged by some business rival to get rid of her or at the least keep her away from the Manchester conference.

She said, ‘The first thing to understand is that the plane crash wasn’t an accident. I’m sorry?’

Sixsmith’s inner triumph and regret at letting himself be browbeaten out of a chance of showing her he wasn’t an erk, had expressed itself in a plosive grunt. He turned it into a cough and smiled apologetically.

She went on.

‘The pilot’s illness was induced deliberately with the sole purpose of bringing the plane down and causing my death. Does that cat always stare like that?’

Whitey hadn’t followed his usual practice of opening the lowest desk drawer and climbing in, but was sitting upright as an Egyptian artefact, apparently rapt by Ms Baker’s speech. Sixsmith felt the direct question entitled him to speak.

‘I’m sorry. Is he bothering you? Whitey, get in your drawer. You can listen just as well there.’

‘What do you mean, he can listen just as well there?’ demanded the woman in some agitation, her hand at her throat.

‘Just a manner of speaking,’ said Sixsmith. ‘You know cats. Sometimes I get the feeling Whitey thinks he runs the business!’

‘And you find that remarkable?’

‘Not so remarkable as you’d find it if I put him on your case,’ laughed Sixsmith.

She smiled thinly, but the answer seemed to reassure her and she let go of the pink brooch which she’d been clutching like a talisman and took a thin gold cigarette case out of her purse.

‘Do you mind?’ she said, lighting up.

No, but the cat does, thought Sixsmith. He nudged the drawer shut with his knee. Whitey would have to suffer a little discomfort in the interests of business. A potential paying customer was entitled to a bit of atmospheric pollution.

Talking of paying, he speculated how high he dared pitch his fee. Depended what her line of business was. She dressed expensive. Maybe she was in ladies’ fashions, nice little earner at the class end of the market, he guessed. One way to find out—the subtle questioning.

He said brightly, ‘Why don’t you tell me about your business, Ms Baker?’

She said, ‘What on earth for? I run an automotive electronics firm, if you must know. But that has nothing to do with the case.’

‘It’s why you were in the plane, isn’t it?’ said Joe defensively.

‘Yes, of course. But she didn’t need access to my company records to know my schedule, did she? No, I’ve no doubt Gerald told her.’

‘Gerald?’

‘My husband, Gerald Collister-Cook.’

Sixsmith sighed. He knew he was delaying the dénouement , but he also knew that if he didn’t get things straight as he went along, you could dénoue all you liked and it would still be French to him.

‘So Baker is your maiden name?’

‘And my professional name. I saw no reason to lumber myself with that double barrelled monstrosity in business. I’ve just about got the bastards conditioned to dealing with Gwen Baker on level terms. They’d need another decade to come to terms with Gwendoline Collister-Cook, and I can’t say I blame them. Can we get on, Mr Sixsmith?’