Читать книгу A Charlie Salter Omnibus - Eric Wright - Страница 12

He woke smiling from his first good dream in a year. He sat up and grabbed at the memory before it faded. He was in charge of a World Centre. People came to him with their problems. He was the World Centre for All Problems. Telephones rang. ‘World Centre here,’ he would say. ‘Can I help you?’ He solved them all. Salter shook Annie awake, ‘I’m the World Centre,’ he said. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Orange juice,’ she said, pulling her nightdress tight around her knees and turning away.

‘Right,’ he said, and jumped out of bed to fetch it.

He was not looking forward to interviewing Summers’s wife, and he had put if off as long as possible. Now she was the last one, and he had an appointment with her for ten o’clock that morning. Her house was on Stouffville Avenue, in an area known as Deer Park, no more than a mile from his own house, and he decided it would be pointless to travel down to the office first. He considered hanging about the house for another hour, but since this would certainly involve him in tying up newspapers for the weekly pickup, or washing out the garbage cans with disinfectant, or any of the other husbandly duties he did not usually mind, but did not want to be asked to do this morning, he said nothing, and left the house at his usual time, pointed virtuously towards the subway station.

He could go two ways. One way led him through upper-middle-class residential streets, across the park, and past his son’s school—a pleasant, leafy stroll on a fine spring morning. But Salter was a townie; he liked shops and people and a bit of life, so he headed for the local portion of Yonge Street (the longest street in the Commonwealth), and began his stroll by walking beside the morning rush-hour traffic. He bought a paper and a cup of coffee; and sat in the mall at the entrance to the subway, enjoying the sense of playing hookey as the morning crowds poured down the stairs. When he had had his fill, he threw the paper into a bin and crossed Eglinton Avenue to walk south. He particularly liked this bit of the street, with its Chinese greengrocers, delicatessen shops, and the hardware store run by six cheerful Australians (or were they New Zealanders?) He paused at each of the three sporting-goods stores and looked at the windows, pricing the squash racquets, and he wondered again how the seven unisex hairdressers made a living. One more gas station had disappeared to make way for a fast food outlet—that made the third in the last few years. Three more restaurants had opened since he last counted, along with a shop that sold only coffee, another that sold sexy underwear, and two travel agents. Hard times? thought Salter. This town stinks of money.

At Davisville subway he turned along Chaplin Crescent into Oriole Park. Here nothing had changed in ten years. The same young mothers were watching the same babies crawl about the sandpit; the same old people were sitting on the benches; the same air-hostesses and night-workers were lying about the grass, trying to get a start on their summer tans. It was all as it was when Salter used to bring Angus and Seth here to play when Annie managed to nail him for baby-sitting on his day off. And here were the same bloody dog-owners. Salter decided to do his duty. ‘You,’ he called to the swaggering owner of a Doberman pinscher which was bounding about the park, preparatory to savaging one of the children. ‘That your dog? Put it on a leash, and don’t let it wander here again out of control.’ He showed his card. ‘What’s its licence number?’ He made a show of entering the number in his notebook. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget.’ Across the park he saw another one, a German Shepherd, a breed he disliked and feared almost as much. He walked over to the owner, a middle-aged woman in a headscarf, standing under the trees, smoking. ‘Get that dog chained up, madam,’ he shouted from far enough away to justify shouting. ‘There are children here and it’s against the law to let your dog run wild.’

‘Go to hell,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’

‘Police Inspector,’ Salter said, showing his card. ‘We’ve had complaints. Get it under control.’

‘He is under control. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, unless I order him.’

The dog leaped up and took a bite at Salter’s hand. ‘Right,’ said Salter. ‘Your name, please, madam, and the dog’s licence number. I’ll send a man round with the charge.’

‘Goddam nosey-parker,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you clean up Yonge Street instead of bothering decent people?’

‘I’m not arguing, madam. Chain it up and keep it chained up.’

‘Interfering bastards,’ she said. ‘Here, Luba.’ She got the dog on a chain and allowed herself to be hauled away, cursing through the smoke. Salter looked around, but the word had spread. All the dogs were now on leads. He went on his way satisfied, telling himself, as always, that he didn’t mind the dogs, it was the owners he didn’t like.

He felt much more ready to meet Mrs Summers.

Stouffville Avenue is several blocks south of the park, and Salter still had some time in hand when he arrived at Summers’s house, so he strolled by it at first on the other side of the street. It seemed to him a genuine old house that had been tarted up, like so many in a district which was festooned with the signs of building renovators and architects. It was a small white house, and from the front it looked like an old cottage with a single bedroom under the roof. From the side, Salter could see that there was a new bit stuck on behind, adding at least two more rooms, one on top of the other. The front yard had been dug out and bricked in to make room for a car, even though a driveway led past the house to the back. Salter recognized the marks of a white-painter, someone who saw a perfectly good house as an opportunity to take it apart and make it into something else. He had suffered from this himself as Annie had called for more (or less) light, another bathroom, a new kitchen, and much else. Salter refused to lift a finger to help on the grounds that he was a policeman, not a carpenter, and he objected to the cost, but Annie had found the money anyway, and no longer asked him to lend a hand. The results were always pleasant, but he still fought each new suggestion bitterly.

He wondered how much Summers had done of all this, and how much he had had to put up with. Salter crossed the street and walked down the drive to the white picket fence enclosing the back yard. A woman was kneeling with her back to him, fiddling with a plant. The yard would have met with Annie’s approval. Around a central grass plot were a lot of different coloured flowers, several of which looked familiar from his own back yard, a surprising number of them in bloom considering that frost was still hanging about the suburbs. The grass was littered with gardening tools. A lot of work here, thought Salter. Against the house a small patch was sown with vegetables—tomatoes and lettuce—which would ripen at the same time that they could be bought in the markets for next to nothing, the reason Salter always gave for not planting any himself.

He coughed and the woman looked up. She was thin, in early middle-age, with pretty silver hair.

‘Inspector Salter,’ he said.

‘Yes, I know. Come in,’ she said, pointing to the gate. She threw her trowel on the grass with the rest of the tools, tossed her gloves after it, and let him in through the back door, into a kind of sunroom furnished with white wicker.

‘In here,’ she said. ‘Do you want coffee or anything?’ It was not an offer, but a request to know if it was now his coffee-hour, and was it her duty to make some.

‘No, thanks,’ Salter said. He waited for her to sit down before sitting opposite her.

‘Would you mind if I asked you some questions about your husband?’ he began.

‘Ask the questions, and I’ll tell you. I don’t know who killed David, or why, and I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me.’

This is not going to be much fun either, thought Salter. He said, ‘The Montreal police have asked us to help them, and we have nothing to go on.’ Salter paused. Should it be ‘nothing to go on with? What did ‘nothing to go on’ mean? Would the fat chairman be interested?

Mrs Summers was waiting. Salter continued, ‘He was found in a hotel room with a fractured skull, after, apparently, a good night out with his colleagues.’

‘A perfect murder, then. How can I help? I was here in bed.’ She was not so much hostile as indifferent, continually looking out at her garden.

‘There was one clue, ma’am.’

‘The killer dropped his Esso card?’

‘Not quite. But there was a glass with lipstick on it in the room.’

She said nothing, as if this was no news to her, and stared at her garden.

Salter decided to give her time to respond, and he looked around, taking in the details of the room. It was agreeable and untidy: a tin of shoe-polish seemed at home on an end-table, the top of the television was a storage space for a pile of magazines, and a tea-towel hung over the back of an armchair. House and garden had the air of being left in mid-task, like the Marie Celeste.

Eventually she said, ‘So he had a woman in his room. Who was she, do you know?’

‘We don’t know, ma’am.’

‘Nor do I.’

‘It doesn’t surprise you, ma’am?’

‘He was a big boy. Your age. You guess.’

‘I’m trying to. Did he have any women friends you knew about?’

‘Marika Tils. He was fond of her, all right.’

‘Anyone else.’

‘Not that I know of, Inspector. Last week I’d have been certain, but now I don’t know. You people come across all kinds of secrets, don’t you? As far as I know, or knew, David didn’t have a mistress, nor did he hire prostitutes to do things I wouldn’t do for him. That help?’

‘That’s very helpful.’

‘Good. We had a fair sex life, and he had me often enough to make me pretty sure he had no one else on the side. But at your age you guys get funny, I hear. So, if you are searching for a woman, let me see, how can I help, yes, look for one with teeth marks on her.’

Salter said nothing.

She continued. ‘Yes, he liked to bite—ears and neck, mostly, but he would take a nibble anywhere. Otherwise it was pretty conventional—missionary position except for Father’s Day, when I got on top. I expect we had a sex life much like yours, Inspector.’

Salter said patiently, ‘Did he have any enemies?’

‘Nothing fierce. He sometimes called this or that colleague an asshole, to me, in private, but I expect you do that, too, eh, Inspector? He wasn’t very tactful to them, either, so a lot of people were wary of him. How about you, Inspector? Are you careful of your tongue?’

‘His colleagues have mentioned a feud with Professor Dunkley.’

‘Oh no.’ She broke her pose and sat forward. ‘Oh no. Don’t go off on that track. He and Dunkley were poles apart, and Dunkley is an asshole, but he wouldn’t kill anyone. He’s nasty enough to, but he couldn’t justify it within his moral system or his political ethos, or whatever. Oh no. Dunkley doesn’t believe in violence.’

‘Then why did they dislike each other?’

She looked round the room. Then she said, ‘Maybe I should make some coffee after all. I’d like some. Then I’ll tell you David’s life story, or the bit that matters, including the “affaire Dunkley”. I feel a bit better now. I’m sorry to be rude, but this all seemed such a waste of time. David’s dead and I’m trying to tell myself it was like a traffic accident. What do I care who killed him? But I can’t stop thinking about him.’ She got up and led the way into the kitchen which occupied the old back room of the house. Another renovation, thought Salter, noting the clear pine, the quarry tile, and the butcher’s block table—all the staples of the Toronto renovated kitchen. She heated water and poured it through a filter, occupying the time while they waited for it by putting a lot of dishes in the sink and clearing the counter. Salter perched on a stool at the table and waited. She served two cups of coffee and pushed one over to him with a carton of cream and a wet spoon she fished out of the sink. She’s a bit of a slob, he thought, delighted. I wonder if Summers minded? They sipped the coffee in silence for a few minutes. Then she began.

‘David was nearly fifty and he was just getting used to the idea. For the last few years he had thought of himself as a failure, but he was just about through that.’

‘Why a failure? He was a good enough teacher, according to one of his students, anyway.’

‘Until lately he thought of himself as more than a teacher. He was chairman of the department for a while, and after that ended he felt—what do you call it?—unfulfilled. But in the last year he had become more at home with himself. His teaching was better than ever, and he didn’t care about it so much. In the past he had cared too much—a bad class could ruin his weekend and a good one would leave him flying, but he’d achieved a bit of detachment lately. He was still obsessional about it, though, preparing stuff he’d been teaching for years.’

‘Was he fired as chairman?’

‘Oh no. They rotate the job every three or six years. But he’d started to live and breathe it, and it was hard on him when it ended. He expected to be offered a job in the administration, and when that didn’t happen he started to feel like’a failure.’

‘Why? Why did he expect it, and why didn’t it happen?’

‘His mentor quit. The vice-president David was gung-ho for took a job somewhere else, and the new one didn’t like David. Simple as that. David went back to teaching, but he’s only lately got used to it again.’

Salter listened, uncomfortably aware of the parallels with his own life. This, he thought, is the bloody Conrad story. I must tell that fat chairman one day. Thinking this brought him around to his task.

‘Was it while he was chairman that he fell out with Professor Dunkley?’

‘I told you, Inspector, don’t bother with that one. Dunkley wouldn’t hurt a fly, on principle, although he made a principle out of hating. They were opposed, of course. Those were the days of the end of the student revolution. David had a few confrontations, and dug down deep in his heart and discovered he was a wishy-washy liberal who believed the students were entitled to run everything except the classroom. Dunkley was involved in all of the sit-ins and supported the students’ right to decide everything—including what they should be taught. There was an incident almost every day and those two were always on opposite sides.’ She paused, and looked as though she were gathering energy for the rest of it. ‘But that wasn’t the whole of it. You see—oh, shit—about that time Dunkley became separated from his wife, and just shortly thereafter David and Dunkley’s wife became lovers, and Dunkley found out, and they didn’t talk to each other after that, even though, according to Dunkley’s principles, his wife was free to do what she liked. OK? Now you know it all.’

‘How did you hear of it?’

‘David is a poor liar. Sorry, “was”, so I would have found out soon enough, but in this case Dunkley’s wife told him, to spite him, I think—poor Dunkley, no one likes him—and Dunkley told me.’

And that was the end of that, thought Salter. But it gave Dunkley all the motive in the world. He returned to pick at his own new-found relationship with Summers. The parallel fascinated him.

‘Why did he seem better lately?’ he asked. ‘What made the difference?’

‘You probably know the answer, Inspector, or you will. How old are you?’

Startled, Salter told her.

‘David was nearly fifty. We have some money now, and we were beginning to get around more. Travel. There was no need for him to spend all his time upstairs at his desk, though he still did, most of the winter. But we went away at Christmas, and for a few weeks during the summer.’ She looked at him calmly. ‘Our sex life improved, and he started to have some fun. He even began to write poetry—no good, but nice. He took up the bits of adolescence he never had, and finished off growing up.’

Salter got annoyed. ‘Why does it have to be adolescent? Maybe he just enjoyed playing squash.’

‘Don’t get uptight about it, Inspector. You didn’t even know him. I think everyone walks around with every age inside him, especially adolescence, but some people get a chance to let the other ages out—the lucky ones.’

This sounded to Salter like one of those conversations that end up discussing whether we are all faggots, really, if only we would relax, and he cut her off.

‘You had no money worries?’ he asked.

‘Nope.’ She pointed to the ceiling. ‘The house is paid for. Our daughter is nearly through college, and I’m making money. I work for an agency. We find new jobs for executives who. have been fired or want to quit. I’m good at it and I make a lot of money. I wanted to help David—I could have slotted him into a new career without any trouble, but he wouldn’t allow me near him on that one.’

Bloody right, thought Salter.

‘And David was making money himself, on the side,’ she added.

‘How?’

‘On the futures market. It was another thing Dunkley didn’t like about him. He called David a capitalist. Silly prick. David was a gambler in a modest sort of way. He was watching TV one day and saw a commodities broker who impressed him as a man who knew where it was at. The next day he phoned the broker and opened an account. It’s a kind of betting on the future prices of things. David had tried the stock market, but that’s rigged in favour of the brokers and the insiders, he said. He had spent a year playing the stock market and earned ten thousand in commissions for the broker and five hundred for himself. This commodities thing was different. He had a good trader—a woman, by the way—and she made him some money. He took back his original stake in six months—I think he put fifteen thousand in originally—and he’s been playing with his winnings ever since. Right now he was in cotton, copper and the Swiss franc.

‘But Dunkley didn’t understand anything about it. He thought that if you made a bet on the future price of pork bellies you were playing with the food of the poor. Even if you lost your shirt. I warn you, Inspector, if you ever get into the futures market, don’t tell anyone. They’ll be jealous and righteous if you win, and bloody happy if you lose. Which reminds me. I should find out what is happening to us. It’s a joint account and all our accounts were frozen until the will is probated, but the positions can still change. Excuse me.’ She went to the phone and dialled a number which she read off a list pasted above the receiver. ‘Leslie Stone, please. This is Mrs Summers, David’s wife. Thank you. I just wondered how we were doing. Good. Thanks. I’ll be in touch as soon as they unfreeze things.’ She hung up and came back to the table. ‘David trusted her totally,’ she said. ‘Apparently we are making money today.’

Salter was struck with an idea. ‘Would you call her again,’ he asked, ‘and authorize her to speak to me?’

‘Why?’

I’ll tell you if I’m right. I just had an idea.’

‘OK. Hang on.’ She dialled and spoke once more to the broker, and handed the phone to Salter. The broker’s voice was cheery with a touch of metal in it ‘Hi there, Inspector,’ she said. ‘What’s up?’

‘Probably nothing, ma’am. There are some questions around Mr Summers’s death, that’s all.’

‘I won’t be much good. I never even knew what he looked like.’

‘You never saw him, ever?

‘Nope. I’ll miss him, though. He was an easy client.’

‘How so?’

‘He never cried when he lost. Some of my clients cry the house down every time they lose a thousand dollars.’

Christ, so would I, lady. ‘Can you remember the last time you talked to him?’

‘Sure, last Friday when he called from Montreal.’

‘Did you do any business then?’

‘No. We didn’t buy anything or sell anything. I had some good news for him, though. He made two thousand dollars that day.’

‘How?’

‘On the sovereignty referendum. He bought two Canadian dollars, and when the sovereignty results came in he had made a full cent.’

‘Two cents?’

‘A thousand dollars a cent. A hundred points.’

‘I see. He bought two hundred thousand dollars the day before and now they were worth two hundred and two thousand. Right?’

‘That’s right, Inspector. More or less.’

‘That’s a lot of money, isn’t it?’

‘It’s two contracts.’

‘He must have had over two hundred thousand dollars on deposit with you?’ Salter saw Mrs Summers smiling to herself.

‘Inspector, I’m very busy, but I’ll give you a short course in commodity trading. To buy a hundred thousand Canadian dollars you only have to put up thirty-five hundred, the amount you might lose in a bad week, say. David used seven thousand, or about half of his equity on those two contracts. He was one of our teeny-weeny accounts. If everything went bad he could lose the lot in three days.’

‘Could he, by Christ. But this time he won?’

‘That’s right. And you know why he was so happy? He did it himself. I advised against it and he always took our advice, but this time he wanted to make a bet on his own. I can’t get it up for the Canadian dollar, but he was sure of this one. He was happy as hell when he won. I’ll miss him.’

‘Thank you very much, Miss Stone.’

‘OK, Boss.’

Salter had a thought. ‘By the way, if I wanted to get in on this, would you take me on?’

‘Sure. We’ve upped the ante, though. You’d need a bit more cash.’

‘How much?’

‘Seventy-five thousand would get you started. A hundred would be better.’

‘Thanks.’ Salter hung up, and returned to his chair. ‘That clears up David’s lucky day,’ he said. David? Since when did the corpse have a first name? This was all getting a shade cosy.

Mrs Summers said, ‘He’s won that much before. I wonder why he made such a big deal of it? Still, that’s it, then. End of mystery. Would you like some lunch, Inspector? I could make some scrambled eggs.’

Salter shook himself. ‘No, thanks, ma’am. I have work to do. I know now about his lucky day, and I also know about one of the phone calls—it was to her, the broker.’ He felt the wallet in his pocket, and handed it to her. ‘Your husband’s wallet, Mrs Summers. Would you check it, and give me a receipt for it? We’ve photostated everything in it.’

She took it gingerly, and turned it over. Then she laid out the contents on the table and checked them against the itemized list that formed the receipt. ‘Money, credit cards, driver’s licence, charge slips, receipts, lottery tickets—I’ll have to check those, I suppose—library cards, squash club membership. Here you go, Inspector,’ she scribbled her name, and put the wallet in a wicker basket full of bills and unanswered mail. ‘I’ll look at it all later.’ There was a pause. The interview seemed over, but Salter did not feel like going immediately.

She sensed this, and asked, ‘More coffee? Might as well finish it.’

Salter put out his cup. ‘Was your husband reading a paper in Montreal?’ he asked, by way of keeping things going.

‘Oh no. He didn’t go to Montreal to read papers. I don’t think many of them do. David just wanted to see if there was anything left of Baghdad there.’

‘Baghdad?’

‘A family joke. David coined it with a friend one day when they were talking about travel. His friend said that he had never wasted a dollar he spent on travel, and David felt the same way. But he was always looking for a Baghdad to travel to. Baghdad was the place, the mysterious city—always a city—where things were new and strange, the place where something interesting could happen to you. Paris was Baghdad. David had been several times and it turned him on so much he hardly went to bed. He used to wander round meeting people, finding himself in places, letting things happen to him. New York was Baghdad, so was San Francisco. Some places stopped being Baghdads before you got around to them—Dublin was one of those. He wanted to go to Dublin for years, and then he didn’t. Other places were Baghdads once, but not the second or third time. London was one of those. Well, Montreal used to be a Baghdad and he wondered if there was anything left of it.’

Salter asked delicately, ‘Did you go with him to these Baghdads?’

‘Yes and no. We went to New York together— I have to go sometimes on business, but though we had a great time, it wasn’t Baghdad when I was around. I think he got a bit of it in the daytime when I was busy. The only place I know of that was Baghdad when I was with him was Corfu.’

‘So part of Baghdad is being alone?’

‘Sure. Some part of it was the lovely dark-haired lady who beckoned from the doorway. That’s why he liked to take a trip by himself once a year, even to an academic conference. You could always keep your eyes open for Baghdad.’

‘Mrs Summers, are you telling me that he might have found a bit of Baghdad in Montreal, and she killed him?’

‘No, Inspector. It’s possible, but unlikely. I’m just saying that Baghdad was a romantic fantasy, and at the right age it includes sex. But it didn’t have to, and for the last twenty years it probably didn’t. To come down to earth, David would not have found anything interesting or mysterious about a Montreal whore. Anyway the idea of David in bed with a prostitute anywhere is absurd, unless he had spent the previous six months in the Arctic, and not even then, probably. He would never have been happy in bed except with someone who liked him. It’s just—well, there are no whores in Baghdad. Am I making sense?’

Too much, thought Salter.

‘Thank you, Mrs Summers,’ he said formally. ‘You have been very helpful.’ He finished his coffee and stood up. ‘One last thing. One of his colleagues told me your husband kept a journal, a diary. I didn’t find it in the office. Have you come across it? If so, may I look at it? There’s always the chance that he may have been involved in something he told no one else about, not even you. But he might have put something in a diary.’

She laughed and got up. ‘I read it last night.’ She took a thick notebook from the wicker basket where she had put the wallet. It seemed to be her filing system. ‘Here. Nothing very scandalous or embarrassing in it. Maybe it will give you some ideas of him. Have a look at it, but bring it back, please.’

He put it in his pocket and moved to shake hands as he left, but suddenly overcome, she shook her head and pushed him through the door without, speaking. He left the house and headed for the Kensington Market, where he was meeting Molly for lunch. Baghdad.

She was waiting for him, seated at an outside table of a café specializing in health foods. She had on the same jeans and T-shirt as before.

‘Hi, Charlie,’ she called when he was fifty yards away, making him slightly self-conscious. He habitually wore a tweed jacket and grey flannel trousers, even in summer—these were the casual clothes of his youth, and he was stuck in them—and on this day he had added an open-necked sports shirt instead of a shirt and tie because he wanted to change easily at the squash club. He had felt very informal talking to Mrs Summers, but in these surroundings he felt like a banker. All round them the counter-culture was on display; most of the people were under thirty, dressed in blankets and sacking. At one table a boy sat with his eyes closed and his hands in the air, making two circles with thumbs and forefingers. Meditating? At another, two young mothers tented in curtains were demonstrating the joys of breast-feeding to the passers-by.

‘Have a fellafel burger,’ Molly suggested.

Salter looked at the menu but could recognize nothing, and he shrugged and nodded. When it arrived it turned out to be a giant sesame-seed bun filled with weeds and roots. Salter found it tasty.

‘I’m having mint tea,’ Molly said. ‘They do have coffee for addicts,’ she said.

‘That’s me. Coffee with extra caffein, please, and two spoonfuls of white, cancer-inducing sugar.’ You’ve got to stand up for your own, he thought.

After the food she sat looking expectant, like a good student. Salter began, ‘I’d like to know about the other teachers at Douglas. How did Summers compare, as a teacher, with the others in the department that you had?’

‘I only had two others. Dunkley taught me Canadian Literature, and a man named Philpott, an Englishman, taught American Lit. He’s not there now.’

‘What happened to him? What are you smiling about?’

‘He left in mid-term and Professor Browne, the chairman, finished the course.’ She laughed. ‘Philpott never turned up much and we complained about him. A lot. We called him the Great Canadian Doctor.’

‘Why?’

‘It turned out he was a fake, no degree, nothing. By rights, according to the proper rules of fiction, he should have been brilliant, but he was a joke. When he did come to class, about once a week, he used to read book reviews to us that he’d got from the library. Browne hushed it up and everybody passed the course.’

‘And Dunkley?’

‘He’s OK. He is supposed to be very left-wing and he wears all the gear, but he’s really an old-fashioned schoolmaster. He made us work. In theory you could choose your own way of passing his course, but by the time you had finished discussing it with him you had already done more work than you would have done in a conventional course. He made you do your own course outline, and to do that properly you had to know all the material before you started.’

Salter had run out of questions.

‘Anything else?’ she asked brightly.

‘I guess not. I don’t suppose I’ll have to bother you again.’

‘Hardly worth meeting for, was it? Or was it just an excuse?’

‘It was just an excuse. I wanted to see you,’ he said nervously.

‘That’s nice. Do you want to see me again?’

Salter floundered. She rescued him. ‘I’m not propositioning you, Charlie. But we can get together if you like.’

But, Salter thought, you are twenty years old and I am forty-six and you cannot have any idea of how foolish I feel. Summers may have liked your essays as well, but he must have enjoyed you as much as I do.

‘I may need your help later on,’ he said, dodging.

‘You don’t have to need my help. Just call me. Or I’ll call you—for a beer.’

‘No, don’t do that.’

‘I see. Your wife would mind?’

That didn’t take much thought. ‘Yes.’

‘Don’t worry. I won’t let you do anything silly.’

The middle-aged police inspector who had seen everything smiled shyly. ‘AH right,’ he said. ‘It’s nice to see how the rest of the world lives.’

‘Isn’t it? Now I have to go. Are you buying my lunch? You won’t feel compromised?’

‘No. I’ll put it on expenses, then I’ll know it was business. I’m still conducting an investigation.’

‘Good.’ She touched his hand. ‘Finish your coffee.’ She walked away, threading between the tables, waving at him as she reached the kerb. Salter hunched happily over the dregs of his coffee.

Salter changed into his old tennis clothes, and wondered what to do. with his valuables. The attendant showed him a row of little wooden cubby-holes with locks, and Salter chose one and deposited his wallet and watch, putting the elastic wristlet with the key in his pocket in preference to wearing it. The pro was waiting for him on the court.

‘Like this,’ the pro said. He dropped the ball on to his racquet and hit it against the front wall of the court. Salter swung at it and missed. ‘And again,’ the pro said. Swing and hit, with the handle. ‘And again.’ Swing and hit, straight up to the ceiling. ‘That’s it,’ the pro said. ‘I can see you’ve played a lot of tennis.’ Salter smirked. They kept at it for ten minutes, sometimes keeping the ball in play for as much as four successive hits. Then the pro suggested a rally. Just keep the ball in play,’ he said. Ten minutes later Salter thought it was all up with him. His lungs were heaving, his heart pounded in his ears, and he could barely see for the sweat. ‘How’s your condition?’ the pro asked. He had gooseflesh from the chilly court.

Salter took a deep breath. ‘And again,’ he sobbed, and hit the ball hard, and properly.

‘Terrific,’ said the pro, and returned it from behind his back without looking.

At the end Salter said, ‘I want another lesson tomorrow.’ They left the court and Salter walked down the corridor to the changing-room which was now crowded. He took his clothes off, feeling ill at ease among a lot of nude lawyers, self-conscious about his varicose veins and his old gall-bladder scar. But under the shower, and then, in the whirlpool, he forgot himself in the pleasure of having stretched his body.

He dressed and waited in the lounge, and soon Bailey appeared for his game with Cranmer, the accountant. He dropped his eyes when he noticed Salter, then looked up very quickly and greeted the inspector with a lot of noise. ‘How’s it going, chief?’ was one of the things he said.

‘I’ve just had my first lesson,’ Salter said. ‘I think I’ll join.’

‘Really? Maybe we’ll have a game, sometime.’

‘When I’ve had a couple more lessons.’

They sat quiet then, waiting for each other to speak. Bailey broke first. ‘Any news on Old Dave?’ he asked.

‘None. I’ll tell you, Mr Bailey, we are baffled. It looks as though it must have been a casual set-up.’

‘He got rolled, you think?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Poor old Dave, eh? Well, I’d better change. Percy is always on time.’ He bustled about with his racquet and bag.

‘One thing, Mr Bailey. I was just checking on a few odds and ends. Summers made a’ couple of calls from Montreal on Friday afternoon . . .’

‘That’s right, Inspector, I forgot to tell you. One of them was to me, to tell me he couldn’t play squash the next Monday. He’d forgotten to tell me when I saw him on Thursday that he was going to Montreal for this conference.’

‘I see. That was all, was it? Did he sound very excited?’

Bailey considered this. ‘Excited? No, I wouldn’t say he sounded any different from his usual self. No.’

‘Why would he phone to cancel a game if you hadn’t arranged it?’

‘Oh, it was a standard arrangement we had. We only got in touch when we couldn’t make it. Otherwise my secretary booked the courts for us every day.’

‘I see. It must have been an exciting game on that Thursday to make him forget.’

‘Yeah. We always went at it pretty hard. That it, then? Here’s Percy now.’

Bailey and Cranmer went off to the changing-rooms and Salter went in search of the manager to make preliminary enquiries about joining the club. Once he had started the process, he decided to go ahead and become a member there and then.