Читать книгу Remain Silent - Susie Steiner - Страница 16

‘Do you know Lukas Balsys?’ Manon asks after the long beep has sounded on the recording machine and she has informed it that she is in the room with Davy and Edikas, who has not been offered a brief because he is not under arrest. Yet.

‘Yes,’ Edikas says.

‘What was your relationship with Lukas?’

‘I find him work. Agricultural job.’

‘He came over on the bus from Klaipeda, is that right?’

Edikas nods.

‘For the tape please.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it true you took away his passport and bank card when he first arrived?’

‘No! Why would I do this? I have no need of Lithuanian passport. I have my own. I just help my peoples. When guys come from Lithuania, I help them. That is all.’

‘Did you pay Lukas a wage?’

‘Of course.’

‘Can I see evidence of this wage?’

‘Yes, we have document showing payroll. And you can look in his bank account.’

‘If he had his passport and bank cards, why were these not among his possessions? We retrieved only a belt, some vitamins.’

Edikas shrugs.

Manon allows a silence to linger. Time for everyone to ponder this situation. Silences reveal much, she finds, if only you refuse to take responsibility for them. When she was younger, she was a frantic silence-filler, feeling the onus was on her to make the moment smooth out, no matter how socially inept her companion. This led to plenty of absurd situations in which she deployed sexuality to fill in the gaps. Sit a younger Manon next to some chilly, pinched-lipped, public school boy type and she’d prostrate herself to make it go well. Gabbling away, hot-faced, to put at ease someone she didn’t even like; often someone who palpably didn’t like her. Sometimes she’d get into a relationship with them that lasted years.

No more. These days, she has got in the habit of mentally briefing herself before any social event. Just hang back. Observe. Don’t fill the gaps. Let other people do the running. It’s not your responsibility.

And the power of this, the way it releases her, still helps to this day. She has learned that awkwardness no more belongs to her than does the weather. She can observe it, like an interested bystander, rather than frantically trying to make it shift.

Not so Davy, who is a mass of easily-pricked embarrassment.

‘Where were you on the evening of Monday May 14th, the night before last?’ Manon asks.

‘In my home,’ Edikas says.

‘With anyone?’

‘No, just me. And Skirta, my dog.’

‘When did you find out about Lukas’s death?’

‘Today. Yesterday was day off.’

‘And what was your reaction to his death?’

Edikas shrugs, turns his mouth down. ‘This was gloomy person. Very negatif. I’m not surprise he kill himself.’

‘What makes you think he killed himself?’ Manon asks, eyeballing him.

Edikas looks at her, shocked. ‘I thought … I thought he heng hisself.’

‘So?’

‘It is not easy to hang another person.’

‘You sound like you’ve tried it.’

Edikas doesn’t respond.

‘Who was Lukas closest to in the house?’

‘Matis. He come from Klaipeda with Matis.’

‘All right, we’d like to speak to Matis, then. Can you give us his number?’ Manon asks.

Once again, Edikas turns his mouth down. Pats his pockets. ‘I don’t have my mobile phone.’

Manon nods, while sliding her own mobile phone under the table. While Davy supplies some questions about Matis’s location, she locates Edikas’s mobile number from an internal email and calls it.

Edikas starts ringing.

‘That mobile phone, you mean?’ Manon asks, smiling.

Unruffled, Edikas scrolls through his mobile phone. ‘No, I don’t have Matis number.’

‘Well, perhaps you could locate it for us. Or him. It’s important we talk to him. Anything else about Lukas?’ Manon asks.

‘He was having sex with the neighbour. Mrs Tucker.’

‘Right,’ says Manon, clipping down her seat belt outside Wisbech police station. ‘Mr and Mrs Tucker then.’

They drive in silence, Manon reminded of the pleasure of being with Davy Walker – so comfortable, they know each other too well for pleasantries, though she is worried, she thinks, glancing at his pale face. He looks shattered.

‘D’you want to stop for a break?’ she asks him. ‘We could get a sandwich.’

He doesn’t say anything but pulls up to park so they can walk to Greggs in Wisbech’s pedestrianised shopping precinct.

Looking in the chiller cabinet, stomach growling, she peruses starchy baguettes filled with creamy mayonnaise-slathered chicken or tuna. This is exactly what I need to stop eating – a thought that makes her want it all the more. She takes a baguette as long as her forearm and an accompanying bag of ready salted crisps to the till. Because the combination is on offer in a ‘meal deal’.

‘What are you getting?’ she asks Davy.

He is holding a sandwich (half the size of hers) and she takes it off him and pays for it along with her own, while he wanders outside. The smallness of his lunch compared to hers reminds her of the time she’d employed a nutritionist to assist her in the battle of the bulge.

‘And do you eat the same as your partner at meals?’ the nutritionist had asked.

‘I’ll say!’ Manon had replied, appalled at the idea she should have less.

Back in the car, she says, ‘So why wasn’t Edikas at work as usual yesterday? Busy night murdering Lukas?’

‘Might just be his day off,’ Davy says, yawning.

‘Time for him to do his Ocado shop and put a wash on, you mean? I don’t think Edikas looks the type to take days off.’

They pull up outside two adjoined red-brick homes – identical, though the contrast couldn’t be more arresting.

‘These could be before and after photos,’ she says to Davy.

‘I know, poor bastards,’ Davy says.

On one side, the Tuckers’ side, the window frames are newly painted bright white. The lower bay window gleams. The path is creamy York stone slabs that look newly laid. Not a crack, not a weed. They are so clean Manon wonders if she should remove her shoes before walking up the path.

The front door is grey-blue with a stainless steel oversized door knob and matching house numbers. Window film with a tiny star design frosts the front door’s glass panels, where she can see a figure approaching to answer the bell. These are the sort to hoover their garden with one of those deafening leaf blowers. The sort to file a bill the minute it comes in. No ‘storing’ their coats on the floor for these two.

Next door, the lower windows have been closed up with particle board. The frames are rotting and grey. The rubbish in the front garden is so high that it reaches the sill of the bay window. The front door is uPVC with rippled glass. On the step is a collection of tottering beer cans.

The bags of rubbish that have been tossed out front have been raided by foxes so that debris – crisp packets, banana skins, fag ash, ready meal trays, teabags – spill over the path. It smells. Stinks, in fact, like the open back end of a bin truck.

As the front door opens, Manon and Davy raise their badges.

Both at home during the day, Manon thinks, stepping over the threshold into an immaculate hallway with pale beech laminate flooring. Wonder how that’s going. The house smells of polish and Glade.

‘Come through,’ says Mrs Tucker. ‘Can I make you a tea or coffee?’

‘I’m all right, thanks,’ Manon says, following her into a gleaming white gloss kitchen while Davy and Mr Tucker disappear into the front lounge. ‘No work today?’

‘I work from home. Jim lost his job recently.’ Mrs Tucker gives Manon a weary smile as if she is tolerating a great deal. ‘A husband is for life but not for lunch! It’s driving me mad, to be honest.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘He didn’t much like his job, to be fair. But now …’

‘What did he do, for work I mean?’

‘Housing officer, Fenland Council. Cuts to local authority budgets are beyond savage at the moment, well, as I’m sure you know. They must be cutting police budgets.’

‘They are, yes. It’s a very thin blue line right now.’

They wait in silence for the kettle to boil.

‘Right,’ Mrs Tucker says, holding a laden tray, ‘let’s go through.’

In the lounge, Mr Tucker is telling Davy about his predicament. He has an intense look on his face, as if he can’t unburden himself quickly enough.

‘I put everything into this house, every penny I had. I wanted to leave it to the kids. We were going to be mortgage free in about ten years except since they moved in, it’s worth nothing at all. Nothing! Who’d buy this off us with that going on next door? We can’t fucking leave.’ At the word ‘fucking’ he kicks the skirting close to where he stands.

‘Jim!’ says his wife. ‘Calm down.’

‘I won’t calm down. Don’t fucking tell me to fucking calm down!’

Mr Tucker clenches and unclenches his fists, his jaw protruding.

Manon glances at Davy, who is ashen, as if frightened. Perhaps he fears Mr Tucker might turn the fists outwards, there is that much pent-up aggression in the room.

Mr Tucker continues, not quite shouting, but spitting out the words, ‘This house, it’s like a stone around our necks. Who’d take this house off us? All that rubbish out front, the noise, the smell. They come in at all hours, banging about, arguing, fighting. The drinking! Everything was all right before that lot came. We’ve complained that many times to the fella in charge over there, Edikas or something, he doesn’t pick up my calls any more. I’m at my wits’ end, I really am.’

While Mr Tucker talks, Manon takes the couple in. Mrs Tucker wears a billowing shirt dress, black, and weighty black-rimmed spectacles. She has a look – makeup free, her hair short and practical, statement earrings. Knows how to shop, Manon thinks admiringly. Mr Tucker wears old jeans and a half-zip sweatshirt. He is not fat, but has the classic male shape – round belly, pipe-cleaner legs. He has lost his hair. On his wrist is a Fitbit, and Manon wonders if he is a man beset by resolutions: to be better. At which he fails.

Mrs Tucker, seemingly unable to take any more of her husband’s tub thumping, leaves the room.

Manon says, ‘It’s all right, Mr Tucker. I can see what a difficult situation this is. Have you talked to the police or the council about what’s happening? An antisocial behaviour order—’

‘No one’s listening,’ Mr Tucker says, sitting at last. ‘I’m powerless.’

Mrs Tucker re-enters and sits on the sofa next to her husband. She’s sick to the back teeth of him, Manon thinks. He needs a job. He needs to go out each day to a job and come back tired in the evening and watch some telly. We all need that. Or perhaps he needs to rent, instead of own property. We used to be a nation of renters like the Germans; more mobile, less vulnerable to this kind of hurt.

‘Lukas Balsys,’ Manon says.

She watches the name settle between Mr and Mrs Tucker on the sofa; watches the discomfort that name causes the married couple. What do you tell yourselves about Lukas Balsys? she wonders. Fucking hell, I thought my relationship was shaky. We’re the Waltons compared with these two.

‘Yes,’ says Mrs Tucker. ‘What about him?’

‘Are you aware that he has died?’

‘Yes,’ says Mrs Tucker. ‘Very sad.’

‘Did you know him well?’ asks Manon.

Davy shifts – with discomfort, Manon thinks – in his seat.

Mrs Tucker looks at Mr Tucker, who doesn’t return her gaze.

‘Um … not well,’ Mrs Tucker says, ‘I wouldn’t say well. He came here to fix some things – some plumbing. He was good at plumbing and we’d complained that many times to next door’s landlord, Edikas was it?’

‘He’s not the landlord, but he is their boss.’

‘Right, well I think he felt he owed us a favour. Perhaps he thought we’d stop complaining. So he sent Lukas around to look at our boiler because the pilot light kept going out.’

Edikas, Manon recalls, hadn’t put it so delicately.

‘Banging the wife,’ was how he’d described it. ‘Everyone know she very into it. Very. Lukas could not force her, not that kind of man. Maybe Lukas kill himself for love. Anyway, we hear them through the wall.’ Edikas gave a filthy chuckle at this, then a bad impression of female orgasm, ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ Then another phlegm-bubbling dirty laugh. ‘They always complain, this neighbour, so I think, I send Lukas round – Lukas plumb her hole!’ Edikas had shouted, laughing.

‘Yes, all right. I get the picture,’ Manon had said. ‘That was fast work from the two of them.’

‘Ask me, this wife would do it with anyone I send. Even Dimitri.’

‘What’s up with Dimitri?’

Edikas had screwed his face up and tapped his temple with a finger. ‘Mental problems.’

Manon had looked at Davy, without having to say ‘we should look into this Dimitri fella’, because Davy was already writing it in his pad.

She looks now at Mrs Do-It-With-Anyone Tucker, sitting next to Mr Probably-Hasn’t-Done-It-In-Years Tucker.

‘Got any outhouses – shed or garage, that kind of thing?’

‘A shed, in the garden,’ says Mr Tucker.

‘Mind if I take a look?’

She follows him out to a garden with an oval lawn surrounded by flower beds, bisected by a washing line fashioned from blue plastic rope, the same kind that tightened around Lukas Balsys’s neck.

Manon stands beneath the washing line. The pegs are rusted onto it. The coils at the house end, around a post, are webbed with mud or spiders’ webs or algae, or whatever it is that welds things together, brownly, outdoors. Bits of the rope have faded to yellow. It doesn’t fit with the immaculate nature of the rest of the house.

‘Were you planning to replace this?’ she asks, one hand hanging from the line.

‘Oh,’ says Mr Tucker, ‘at one point we were. Can’t see the point now. I’m not putting a penny into this house, not now. Been up donkey’s years, that. It’s not very clean to put clothes on.’

‘So, did you buy the rope to replace it?’

She glances into the shed while Mr Tucker holds the door open. No spare coils of new blue rope.

‘Not yet, no.’

The sky is impossibly bright, and they squint, though the day isn’t warm. Neither of them makes to move inside.

‘Look, sorry about in there,’ he says. He seems calmer, sadder, away from his wife.

‘You don’t like immigrants,’ she says to him.

‘Is that a question?’ His tone right up to punch level again. ‘I couldn’t hear a question. Do I like the migrants next door? No, I don’t. Do I hate all migrants? No, though I think we could do with less of them. We’re being flooded.’

‘So you’re anti-immigration?’

‘Isn’t everyone?’

‘Certainly feels that way,’ Manon says. ‘If we can go in, I just have a couple more questions for you and your wife.’ And she heads indoors.

‘Can I ask where you were the night before last?’ Manon says, sitting in the living room again. The Tuckers are on the sofa. Davy is taking notes in a corner chair.

‘Here,’ says Mrs Tucker. ‘Trying to watch telly over the din.’

‘The din?’

‘Well there was a lot of disturbance next door. There was that anti-immigration gathering. I hesitate to call it a march because there weren’t that many of them. One Wisbech, Dean’s lot.’

‘Dean?’

‘Dean Singlehurst, he’s their main guy. They came past here with their placards and banners, very noisy, and there was a kerfuffle with the people next door.’

‘Kerfuffle?’

‘Yes. There was the usual banging about next door, we’re used to that. Then the marchers came up the street, chanting. There weren’t that many of them – maybe two dozen – but they were trying to be loud about it.’

‘Wait, the One Wisbech march came up a small cul-de-sac like Prospect Place?’ Manon asks.

‘Yes, we thought it was strange,’ Mrs Tucker says.

‘What sort of thing were they chanting?’

‘Oh, you know, English jobs for English people. Stop the flood. Foreigners go home. They stopped outside here. We didn’t see what actually happened – we had the shutters closed.’

‘How did you see how many marchers there were then?’

‘When they first started coming up the road, I went and opened the front door to see who it was. Shane Farquharson was with them, at the front. Then I came inside to the living room, where we couldn’t see anything, but we could hear everything,’ Mrs Tucker continues. ‘Some marchers came up the path next door. Then there was shouting.’

‘English or Lithuanian?’

‘Both. We don’t know if they went in or not, or if the migrants came out. The noise just receded eventually.’

‘What could you hear being shouted in English?’

‘Well, one of the marchers said, “Wanna ask you something!” and then “Oi! Oi!”’

‘What time was this?’

Mrs Tucker turns her mouth down. ‘Ten, ten thirty? The news was on, not that we could hear it.’

‘You didn’t think of calling the police?’

Manon eyes up the tea tray to see if any biscuits are on offer. She is crestfallen to see an empty, crumbed saucer. Davy has snaffled the custard creams, damn him.

‘There wasn’t anything to call the police about. Just people gathering, a bit of shouting. We didn’t know about Lukas, of course.’

Manon glances at Davy, but he’s way ahead of her, writing it all down. He stops, mid-scrawl, and says, ‘So it’s Jim Tucker? That’s your full name?’

‘Actually, it’s Jerome Wilberforce Tucker.’

‘Wow,’ says Manon. ‘Shall we just call you Wilberforce – keep it nice and informal?’

‘You can call me Jim. I know it’s a ridiculous name. My mother had … pretensions.’

‘Ambitions,’ interjects Mrs Tucker.

‘Look, I’m called Manon, so I’m in no position to judge.’

‘Not that that’s ever stopped you,’ mutters Davy. ‘And your name?’ he asks Mrs Tucker.

The best names, Manon is thinking, have rhythm. Maxim de Winter. Engelbert Humperdinck. Dante de Blasio. Fly is currently mooning over a girl at school called Temperance. ‘I already love her,’ Manon told him, ‘for her name.’ Perhaps she should change hers to Manon de Bradshaw.

‘Elspeth. Elspeth Tucker.’

Outside, in the car, Davy is overcome.

‘It’s shit for him,’ he says. ‘What’s he s’posed to do? He’s paid for that house, blood sweat and tears, and now it’s worth nothing because of them. I don’t blame him, coming over all UKIP. I’d want shot of them, too.’

‘Yes, but did he do anything, that’s the question? Or her? There’s no rope lying around.’

‘And he’s got an alibi. Both have.’

‘Yeah, but their alibi is each other. So we have to view that with some scepticism. Lukas got around, didn’t he? We need to chat to the residents next door.’

‘Trouble is, they clam up if Edikas is about. Aren’t you going to ask Mrs Tucker about humping our victim?’

‘I will, but not yet. There’s nothing that puts her in Hinchingbrooke on the night Lukas died, even if she had the strength to get him into a tree, which I doubt. We need to go back into the migrant house now that we have powers to search and seize – question everyone in isolation. It’s part of the crime scene. Doesn’t matter what Edikas wants, or his dog. Can you call in an interpreter? Also, we need to chat to these One Wisbech marchers. And we need to catch up with Demented Dimitri. Also, Davy?’ She wonders if that’s a tiny eye roll she sees, as he pulls away from the kerb. ‘Have we tried to match the handwriting on the note? Might be something in the house that matches it. So that should be a priority in the search – anything with handwriting on it.’