Destroy Unopened Read online

  ‘I’ll take it away and destroy it,’ I said. ‘Better all round. That’s what he wanted. He didn’t want you to read them, obviously. He wanted to protect you.’

  She laughed, angrily. ‘Not enough to destroy them himself,’ she said. ‘Not enough not to keep them.’

  ‘And you want me to name the woman? Why?’

  ‘Not just name her. Name her quickly. Will a week be long enough?’

  ‘Should be. I can’t guarantee it. Why do you want to know?’ I repeated. ‘And why the urgency?’

  Pause. She looked at me, looked away, cleared her throat. She was deciding whether to lie. Perhaps she was inventing the lie.

  Finally she spoke. ‘Because next Friday is Robbie’s memorial service, at NCL. Chances are that woman will be there. I want to know who she is. I told you, I don’t want to look a fool.’

  I stepped out of Hilary Lucas’s warm, well-lit mansion block into the chill of November London and decided to take a bus home because the overnight bag I’d taken to Newcastle was heavy. I’d normally have walked. It’s only about a mile and a half north-west through Kensington Gardens.

  The bus took half an hour, partly because of the low visibility and greasy roads and partly because Kensington was full of tourists and they milled about in the streets ignoring crossing lights. Until quite recently London was for Londoners, except during the summer. Now tourism was a year-round thing.

  Not that I usually minded: tourists are better mannered than Londoners, but they do tend to stand in the middle of the pavement looking hopelessly at maps, and they sometimes ask for shopping advice, which I’m ill equipped to give. I almost never shop for pleasure. When forced to, I go out to buy a specific article.

  I was sitting right at the front of the bus. Just behind me were tourists, obviously American, a couple in their sixties. The woman tapped me on the shoulder and after polite preliminaries pointed at a child in the street collecting for his guy and asked me to explain.

  ‘It’s a British custom,’ I said. ‘In the seventeenth century a group of Catholics tried to blow up Parliament. They were all betrayed and executed, and one of them was Guy Fawkes. Every November 5th we have parties, with fireworks and a bonfire to burn Guy Fawkes in effigy. Children make the effigies – we call them “guys” – and collect money for the parties. There’s a rhyme that goes with it:

  Remember remember the Fifth of November, with gunpowder, treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot!

  She looked puzzled, understandably. ‘A charming custom,’ she said valiantly. We nodded and smiled at each other as long as either of us could stand it and then I turned away, reflecting that I’d done my bit for the Tourist Board, and hoping that next time I’d have to explain something that made more sense.

  It felt good, being back in town after a few days away up north, and the city looked terrific in the fog. Everything was softened and magical, with haloes of light around street lamps, already switched on though it was only half past three. The ill-assorted, mostly Victorian, buildings of Kensington Church Street blurred to beauty like Norma Desmond through a skilful cameraman’s soft filter.

  Then an Evening Standard placard screamed at me and dented my good humour. NOTTING HILL KILLER SHOCK! Newspaper placards always scream, of course, but this one caught my attention as if it had been my name. Notting Hill is where I live – well, nearly. Notting Hill itself is very smart and exclusive and expensive. My flat, my most precious possession, is on its fringes. When I earn money it’s to pay the mortgage and to put enough in the endowment fund finally to pay it off. Preferably before time. And my investment has been soaring up ever since I first chose the shabby flat in the shabby house in the shabby but improving street. I’m proud of it. Proud that I chose wisely, proud that I’ve managed to keep up the payments, even though in the early years when I was still a badly paid secretary with no access to expenses I’d sometimes lived on bread and bruised remaindered oranges and sardines for days to be able to afford it.

  And now I was afraid my investment’d be damaged by a serial killer. If you think I’ve got my priorities wrong, that isn’t true. Of course I was sorry for his victims. Of course I wanted him caught and punished and prevented from doing any further harm. But serial killers are a fact of life, aberrations that can pop up anywhere, and I wished he’d popped up in another district. Usually, Notting

  Hill was tabloided as exclusive area, playground of the famous, or home to the world-renowned Portobello Market. Now it was home to the Butcher of the Bella. Or stalking ground of the sadistic Killer.

  The man sitting on the other front seat of the bus was reading the Standard. I rubbernecked. The SHOCK! turned out to be – yet again – that the killer hadn’t kept to his time table. Usually there was a victim every two months. There hadn’t been one for getting on for four months, Good news, I’d have thought, but not on planet tabloid.

  Firmly, I forced myself to think about something else. After an internal struggle, I focused on the envelope in my bag. I thought about what it would feel like, after his death, to find your husband had a mistress, and I wondered about the callousness, or thoughtlessness, or malice, of a husband who would leave such a time bomb.

  But most of all I thought about Hilary Lucas herself, and the deadline she’d set me; the memorial service next week. If there was a memorial service

  I’d felt she was lying at the time and it didn’t surprise me. Clients nearly always lie, mostly I suppose because, apart from commercial espionage or property research or credit referencing, you only hire a private detective when you’re driven to it by intimate and powerful pressures. Not facing the painful issue straight on makes it more tolerable.

  Come to that I’d been lying, or at any rate suppressing the truth. I hadn’t given Hilary Lucas a full description of my detective agency, a one-woman firm which had taken a growth pill in the form of my assistant Nick, who had then started hiring casual labourers part time. The Revenue didn’t know about those. One-off hirings, paid in cash. This temporary expansion would contract next year, I hoped, because Nick was due to start at medical school next September. I’d agreed to let her stay and work her year off with me, to save up some money to live on during her course.

  By that time, theoretically, I’d be married. I’ve sort of agreed to marry Barty because I like him a great deal – more than anyone else I’d ever met. He’s quick, competent, intelligent and funny, and he doesn’t cling. He’s older than me, in his mid-forties: not a bad thing. Men my own age seem puppyish compared to him. He’s also better bred and better educated, which I used to resent, but am growing to like, and it’ll be useful for our children. And it’s well time I had children, if I’m going to.

  Chapter Three

  Lost in rambling reflections, I nearly missed the Ladbroke Grove bus stop and had to hurl myself down the stairs and bully the driver into opening the doors again for me. From there I had to walk back along the Grove a hundred yards or so to my flat, which took me past my office and the two peevish-looking people – clients? – standing shivering outside, glaring at the CLOSED sign on the door and ignoring Lil, a local character who was standing a few feet away from them, talking loudly. She had to talk loudly to be heard over the barking of her cocker spaniel, and she was using her quotation voice, a well-projected resonant plummy bellow.

  ‘Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, fog down the river, fog on the Scrubs marshes, fog on the Notting Hill heights. Fog creeping into the steamy kitchens of Chinese takeaways, fog lying on the video shops and hovering in the ceilings of banks . . .’

  ‘Dickens?’ I interrupted.

  ‘Of course, my dear, but somewhat adapted. Bleak House. You have clients, as you see. Benbow’s taken I against them, I’m afraid.’ She jerked on Benbow’s lead and choked his barks, briefly. ‘Hadn’t you better attend to them?’

  I never man the office. Nick does that. It was her idea in the first place. I’d been quite happy working from home. But s
he’d built up my missing persons business enough to pay her salary, her PAYE tax with the Revenue, and a decent little profit for me which all went straight into my pension fund. So when she showed me we could afford an office and offered to run it, what could I say? It was basically her perk, because she lived there. Illegally, because it wasn’t residential. Business purposes only. But she had the office, with a sofa as well as the desk, she had a toilet and washbasin, and that beat the streets, which was where she normally lived; where she’d come to me for work experience from, and now where she didn’t live, because she lived in my office.

  I fished keys out of the back pocket of my jeans and opened the door.

  ‘So I should hope,’ said the peevish man, pushing into the office behind me. ‘Do you realize what time it is?’

  I disregarded this, and looked round. No Nick. No sign of Nick. No bedclothes on the sofa, a tidy desk.

  ‘On the sign outside, the office hours are given as one thirty to four, or by appointment, Monday to Friday. It is three forty-five now, on a Thursday.’

  The windows were closed, the air stagnant. The place felt dead. It wouldn’t have been dead long, though, because Nick had rung me from there the day before.

  ‘And the neighbourhood is most unsavoury. We were subjected to the demented ramblings of that old woman for some time.’

  ‘She’s not demented. She was quoting Dickens,’ I said. ‘A fine prose stylist. Educational, really.’

  ‘In the street?’

  ‘She spends a lot of time on the street. Her old people’s home doesn’t allow dogs, so she had to give him away, but she walks him every day.’

  ‘And the appalling noise that dog makes. All most unsatisfactory. What have you to say for yourself?’ demanded the peevish man, peevishly.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ I said, dumping my overnight bag and sitting down in the swivel chair behind the desk, deciding against telling him that Lil was one of Nick’s most reliable missing person operatives. ‘I’m Alex Tanner. And you are?’

  ‘I’m Pauline Eyre,’ said the woman. ‘This is my husband, Dr Eyre.’

  ‘How do you do,’ I said. ‘Please sit down.’

  The woman sat on the sofa. After a pause, so did the man.

  I supposed I owed them an apology. I certainly couldn’t provide an explanation. And if they had in fact waited anything approaching two hours, no wonder they were peevish.

  ‘I’m sorry the office was closed,’ I said. ‘Staffing problems. Have you waited long?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the man.

  ‘Half an hour,’ said the woman.

  ‘And how can I help you?’

  ‘You can explain exactly what services you are providing for the extortionate sum of money you charged my wife,’ said the man.

  ‘Perhaps if we could speak to Nick,’ said the woman. She looked about, bewildered, as if expecting Nick to emerge from the walls.

  It’s a basic office, very bare. Apart from two large radiators which pumped out suffocating heat, it contained a filing cabinet, a desk and a swivel chair, all from a bottom-of-the-market secondhand office supplier, and a sofa from the furniture dealer immediately opposite (house clearances, rubbish carted away). The sofa had certainly been part of the rubbish carted away, though somebody had probably been proud of it once, buying it new when lime green synthetic covers, spindly black metal legs and sharp corners were all the rage. The walls, painted by Nick in white emulsion which hadn’t quite covered the previous peacock blue, held only some cork display boards, all of which were occupied by charts, lists and maps. Some of them even related to our business. Others had been scavenged by Nick from nearby skips, and included a map of Cambodia which would doubtless be very useful when Tanner Associates went Far Eastern.

  Dr Eyre, looking round, didn’t seem convinced by the office. Neither was I.

  ‘I’m afraid Nick’s unavailable,’ I said. ‘When did you speak to her, Mrs Eyre?’

  ‘Monday,’ she said. ‘And I found her very businesslike and trustworthy.’ She looked straight at me as she spoke, willing me to do or say, or not to do or say, something.

  Chances were that she didn’t want her husband to know that Nick was a half-Asian eighteen-year-old with bald patches on her head where she tugged her hair out in times of stress and who wore a baseball cap to cover them. Looking at Dr Eyre, I thought he might have considered the baseball cap the worse option. I was surprised Mrs Eyre had found Nick acceptable at all.

  They were both in their forties and formal dressers. He was average height, but looked taller because he was so thin. His legs were long for his body and planted spider-wide apart. He had short greying sandy-coloured hair, sharp features and pale blue eyes with paler sandy lashes, and he wore a heavy tweed suit, white shirt, anonymous stripy tie and highly polished brogues.

  She was also thin, about my height, very carefully made up, with smallish brown eyes and probably dyed dark hair in a feathery cut. She wore a navy-blue Marks and Spencer suit with a shortish skirt which revealed her knobbly knees, a white silk blouse and high-heeled navy-blue shoes. Her long nails were painted a bright coral pink which matched her lipstick, her earrings and her brooch.

  Maybe I should pop over to my flat and accessorize, I thought. Then they would both stop staring at my boots.

  ‘Nick’s my associate, and she handles missing persons,’ I said. ‘Her notes on your case will be on the computer, but it’d save time if you tell me what I need to know to answer whatever questions you have.’

  ‘Our girl had been missing for five weeks,’ said Mrs Eyre.

  ‘Two months,’ said Dr Eyre. ‘Samantha’s been missing for two months.’

  ‘Actually she hasn’t been missing for the last three weeks, because we had the letter, you see. She was missing before that, as far as we were concerned, because we didn’t know where she was or what had happened to her.’

  ‘We did receive a letter from her, couched in very vague terms, but she didn’t tell us precisely where she is, so she’s still missing,’ said Dr Eyre.

  ‘She said she was looking forward to the Carnival. The Notting Hill Carnival, you know. She said she’d be very near it. She likes carnivals and fairs,’ said Mrs Eyre.

  ‘The Carnival’s held in the summer,’ I said blankly.

  ‘She likes to plan ahead,’ said Mrs Eyre. ‘She looks forward to treats.’

  ‘And what I would like to know is, what the devil do you think you’re doing, taking my wife’s money?’ said Eyre.

  They were sitting with a fair old space between them, which took some doing since the sofa’s a two-seater. They were both bolt upright, perched on the edge each talking to me as if we were alone.

  I was annoyed with Nick for skiving off, wherever it was she’d gone. I didn’t like this pair much, and I wanted to get home and get on with Hilary Lucas’s job.

  ‘Tell me what you paid and I’ll refund it,’ I said.

  Eyre’s pale blue eyes were also sharp, and combative. They flicked at me, and then away again, but not towards his wife. Towards the wall.

  ‘What’s all this. Miss Tanner?’ he asked the wall. ‘Are you, or are you not, the proprietor of a detective agency?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Do you, or do you not, undertake missing persons cases?’

  ‘That was why I came to you,’ his wife cut across him. ‘At the police station, they called Samantha the misper.’

  ‘That’s what they call them,’ I said.

  ‘It sounded final. It sounded . . .’ she paused.

  ‘Dismissive,’ said Dr Eyre. ‘My wife means “dismissive”, but she has a limited vocabulary. She was only a secretary before our marriage.’

  It was obviously intended as an insult and delivered like a playground taunt. It also sounded well worn, as if the spontaneity of it had gone but the sourness remained. She looked at me, expressionless, and said nothing.

  I felt sweat beginning to form on my back. I got up, opened the window and sucked in the
foggy air. I wanted to get out of my DMs into a pair of spads. Better still, I wanted to get out of my jeans and into a shower. But most of all, I wanted rid of the Eyres.

  The open window, besides air, was letting in Lil’s monologue.

  ‘Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this Town Hall of Kensington and Chelsea, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds, this day, in the sight of heaven and earth.’

  ‘Lay off, Lil,’ I said. ‘What has the council ever done to you?’

  ‘Put me in an old folks’ home. Pee and teeth.’

  ‘Pee and teeth is never Dickens,’ I said.

  ‘Alan Bennett. “A Cream Cracker under the Settee.” Adapted,’ said Lil. Benbow barked.

  I shut the window and turned back to the Eyres. ‘I don’t really think . . .’ I started.

  ‘The police aren’t doing anything,’ said Mrs Eyre urgently. ‘I know they’re not. She’s just another misper, to them. But she’s my daughter. Look. Look.’ She took a navy-blue leather wallet out of her navy-blue leather handbag with gilt clasps. She flipped it open and showed me a photograph.

  A head-and-shoulders snapshot of a pretty, blonde, vacant-blue-eyed girl in her late teens or early twenties.

  ‘Mrs Eyre—’

  ‘She’s in danger,’ said the woman desperately. ‘I know she is. She’s – she’s –’

  ‘Stupid,’ said her father.

  ‘A slow developer,’ said her mother. ‘She has learning difficulties.’

  ‘She’s a moron,’ said Eyre bitterly. ‘Like her mother.’

  Nothing changed in the atmosphere. They didn’t look at each other, but only at me. Mrs Eyre didn’t change her manner, not by one iota, in response to what I would have taken as a challenge to open battle. Clearly what we had here was a permanent state of declared hostilities. The Hundred Eyres War, I thought uncomfortably.

  ‘So she’s definitely at risk,’ said the mother. ‘It’s not like a normal girl leaving home. She can’t really – look after herself.’