Orders from Berlin. Simon Tolkien
asked Quaid, ignoring the newcomer’s question.
‘Dr Brive, Bertram Brive – I’m his son-in-law.’
‘And what brings you here, Doctor? Nobody’s called for medical assistance as far as I know.’
‘I was worried about my wife. I called home when I heard the siren and she didn’t answer, so naturally I assumed she was over here.’
‘Where were you?’
‘At work. My surgery’s near here – in Battersea High Street. Why are you asking me all these questions?’
‘Because I’m a police officer investigating a murder. It’s my job to ask them.’
‘A murder! Why do you say that?’ asked Brive. He sounded panicked suddenly, and his hands had begun to shake.
‘Your father-in-law was pushed. It was your wife who saw it happen, as a matter of fact.’
‘Did she see who did it?’
‘No, more’s the pity. It was too dark, apparently, but we’ll find the person responsible. You can count on that.’ The urgency with which Brive had asked his last question hadn’t escaped Quaid’s attention.
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Brive, sounding anything but glad. ‘Where’s my wife? Is she still here?’
‘Yes, in there,’ said Quaid, pointing to the open door of the ground-floor flat through which Trave was just now emerging with a sheet to cover up the corpse. ‘We were just going to ask her to go upstairs and see if anything’s missing. Perhaps you’d like to come too.’ It was framed as an invitation, but Quaid made it sound more like an order.
But it evidently wasn’t one that the doctor was reluctant to obey. Instead of going to find his wife, he started up the stairs until Quaid barked at him to stop. Trave went back to fetch the dead man’s daughter.
Brive took a step towards his wife when she came out into the hall, then stopped abruptly, reacting to the way she seemed instinctively to draw back away from him.
‘Ava,’ he said, clasping his hands in front of his chest as if he were about to make a speech. ‘I’m very sorry about what’s happened here. Do you have any idea who might have done this terrible thing?’
Ava shook her head, staring mutely at her husband with a half-sullen, half-defiant expression that Quaid couldn’t quite decipher, but he was even more struck by the stilted, almost formal way the doctor spoke to his wife. He would have liked to see more of the interaction or lack of it between them, but Brive turned away and began to go up the stairs.
Quaid followed the doctor up the stairs, with Trave and Ava bringing up the rear. Brive climbed quickly, taking the stairs two at a time, and when the two policemen arrived in Albert Morrison’s book-lined sitting room a minute later, they found the doctor on his hands and knees, picking up the papers that were strewn across the floor – the same heap of documents that Trave had drawn Quaid’s attention to earlier.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Quaid demanded, taking hold of Brive’s arm with one hand and removing the papers that the doctor was holding with the other.
‘What do you think? I’m clearing up the mess,’ said Brive, pulling away.
‘No, you’re bloody well not. You’re interfering with the evidence. That’s what you’re doing. And if you carry on, I’ll put you in handcuffs. Do you hear me?’
Brive didn’t answer but instead turned away with a surly expression on his face, nursing his arm as his wife came past him into the room. Quaid kept his eyes on Brive, noting how he kept shifting from one foot to the other, unable to keep still, and how he couldn’t stop nervously rubbing his hands together all the time, as if he were unconsciously trying to wash away the evidence of some recent transgression, while his eyes kept darting back towards the documents on the floor as if he were considering another move in their direction.
Quaid prided himself on being able to tell if a man was lying or hiding something from him, and this medicine man with the funny foreign-sounding name was doing both. Quaid was sure of it. From the moment he’d clapped eyes on him, the inspector had taken an instant dislike to the victim’s son-in-law. He distrusted the fussy triple knot in Brive’s navy-blue bow tie, and it worried him that half of what the doctor said just didn’t add up. Brive said he’d come over because he was concerned about his wife’s safety during the air raid, but then he’d shown no interest in going to her side when he’d discovered that she’d been a witness to her father’s murder. Instead his priority had been to get up the stairs and start interfering with the evidence. And then there was the way that Brive had shown up at the crime scene minutes after the police, even though by his own admission no one had telephoned him or asked for his assistance. He said he was looking for his wife, but why had he been so certain that she was going to be at her father’s?
It was a damned shame that the dead man’s daughter hadn’t got a look at the man who’d pushed her father – too dark, apparently, like everything else in the damned blackout.
‘You say your father was saying “no”. Is that all? Did you hear anything else?’ Quaid asked, turning to the dead man’s daughter. Ava, she was called – a pretty woman with a pretty name. God knows how she’d ended up married to this creepy doctor, Quaid thought, shaking his head.
‘He said: “No; no, I won’t. No, I tell you.” I could tell he was frightened – he kept saying “No”. And there was someone else saying something, but his voice was soft. I couldn’t hear any of the words.’
‘His – so it was a man?’
‘I don’t know. I assume so,’ she said, turning away. He could see that she’d started crying again. Perhaps he shouldn’t have started out with asking her about the murder, but where the hell else was he supposed to start?
‘Okay,’ he said, frowning. ‘I understand. Let me ask you this: Do you normally come over here when there’s a raid?’
‘Sometimes,’ she said in a barely audible voice. ‘It depends.’
‘On what?’
She opened her mouth to speak, but the words didn’t come. Instead she bit her lip and looked away, out of the window towards the wandering beam of a lone searchlight still operating out of the park opposite, despite the sounding of the all clear. The woman was in a bad way. That much was obvious. Quaid felt sorry for her. Her husband, standing morosely over by the door with a sullen look on his face, wasn’t giving her any support at all. The only person who was trying to help was the old lady from downstairs, who’d followed them up the stairs with a cup of tea, which now sat untouched on the low table beside Ava’s chair.
The kind thing would have been to allow the poor woman to go home and sleep, but Quaid resisted the temptation to let her go. He needed to get her version of events while it was still fresh in her mind.
‘Look, have some of this tea,’ he said in a kindly, fatherly voice, picking up the cup and wrapping the woman’s shaking hand around the handle. ‘It’ll make you feel better.’
‘We don’t drink tea. We never have,’ said Bertram, talking over Quaid’s shoulder.
Quaid couldn’t believe what he was hearing; he almost dropped the cup. Everyone drank tea. It’s what British people did to get them through the horrors – make it, distribute it, drink it. It was downright unpatriotic not to like it.
But Bertram’s intervention seemed to revitalize his wife in a way that nothing else could. She glanced over at him and then, as if making a conscious decision, began to drink the tea. Quaid made a mental note – there was no way these two lovebirds were happily married.
‘I