Yallop yielded. “I’ll get one of our technical people to help you.”
“Thank you.” Margaret gave him a beaming smile like he was a kindly young gentleman who’d offered to help her cross the road.
Just as he was leaving, Carol chipped in: “Actually,” she said, “come to think of it, there’s one more person’s file we’d like a look at. If that’s okay?”
Sir Jeremy rolled his eyes, accepting his fate as a man destined to do whatever these two ladies asked of him.
Forty-Two
Geoffrey looked downat his pubic hair and considered his own mortality. He’d always shaved his face, had a haircut once a fortnight, but hair from the shoulders down just grew as it grew, like an undisturbed patch of woodland on the edge of town. In old age it had grown into a white, cloud-like mound, like a small sheep. It was just another part of his body, like an elbow. It was what it was. The men of today, they apparently trimmed, shaped, and some of them—he’d learned—even shaved. The idea that there was some kind of cosmetic choice to be made had never occurred to him. Tampering with his pubes crossed some moral line he couldn’t articulate. Geoffrey was a strong advocate of the greenbelt, but maybe this wasn’t like the greenbelt. Maybe pubes were a brownfield site.
He’d never felt so old.
And now Carol and Margaret had gone off on some secret mission and excluded him. Hewasthe ex-detective, wasn’t he? Shouldn’t he be at the center of things? But they didn’t see himlike that, did they? No one did. Geoffrey Standing wasn’t a copper anymore. He was just an old man. There was no place for him, no need for him. Is there anything more redundant than an old man? Old ladies, at least they were still in charge of the grandchildren’s birthday cards. Old men? Once they were no longer DIY-fit, what were they for? Geoffrey Standing was irrelevant. He took the nail scissors from his bathroom counter and carefully set about trimming.
—
Catherine hadn’t complainedwhen Carol and Margaret had left, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t hurt. This case was as much hers as it was theirs. What gave them the right to take ownership of it? She and Geoffrey had been instructed to sit tight.Instructed.
Were they chasing Shep? Were they in danger? Did Carol and Margaret disapprove of the burgeoning “romance”—if you could call it that—between her and Geoffrey? Had they been sidelined as punishment?
Catherine placed her book, some vacuous mystery that made little sense to her, on the coffee table. There was no point in pretending she could read it. Beside the book was the phone, Giles’s phone. Really, she should have handed it in when the police took the body, but she hadn’t been ready to let go. While she had that phone, Catherine was still an investigator, working the case, so she’d pocketed it. Once they’d got into it using his dead face, she’d changed the settings so that it didn’t automatically lock. Now she could nose around Giles’s phone as much as she liked, as long asshe was willing to cross the moral boundary of invading a dead man’s privacy.
“Morality,” for Catherine, was grayer than ever before. She’d read through the hellish diaries of a serial killer and chosen, after a brief pause, to remain friends with her. Nobody ever really changes: That was the cliché. But here was Catherine, well into her eighth decade, and shewaschanging.
Either she was maturing, growing to appreciate nuance—that there was no good and evil, no black and white, only gray—orshe was simply becoming a bad person. Whichever it was, she had no time to wallow in self-analysis. Catherine had to see what was in that phone, but first she would need a coconspirator.
—
“Catherine, I’m afraidI’m currently not available for sex.” Geoffrey looked at his feet in shame. “I’ve injured my penis.”
Catherine closed Geoffrey’s front door behind her. She didn’t want to ask but had to know. “How?”
“Not with another woman, you understand,” he said hastily. “I had an accident with some nail scissors. I think it should be out of action for at least a fortnight, but I’d be very happy to provide you with oral pleasure if you think that will tide you over.”
Catherine slammed down her handbag on Geoffrey’s kitchen table, hoping the shock would move the conversation on. “I think we should explore Giles’s phone,” she said.
There was no moral struggle for Geoffrey, and they immediately set about trawling through the dead man’s life. At first, they found little—hardly any text messages, plenty of unansweredemails from his accountant. A health app stored tracks of each of his daily runs; the notes app contained terrible moneymaking ideas—“Write a novel?” It was Catherine who saw the WhatsApp logo. Geoffrey hadn’t heard of it, so Catherine explained it was an encrypted messaging service. Her family had insisted she join a group on the app so that they could arrange Christmas. Quite why their Christmas plans had to be encrypted she was never sure, but all her children now messaged her on WhatsApp rather than via text message. Sure enough, this turned out to be where all the action was on Giles’s phone.
His most frequent interlocutor by far? Shep Newsom.
They scrolled up, as far back as they could go in the conversation, and read it chronologically, in search of as full a picture as possible. The first thing to become clear was that Giles and Shep had indeed gone to Eton together and shared the same dorm. Beyond the banter, the GIFs, and the tasteless jokes about old school friends, Catherine and Geoffrey were able gradually to piece together some kind of story. The young men were both obsessed with becoming great business titans, egging each other on, like a shit Gates and Jobs, into bigger and bigger failures. Giles, they discovered, had invested in a number of Shep’s doomed schemes:No problem bud. I got u.Then, suddenly, about a year ago, Giles had started to ask about returns.Got a bit of a cash flow probleramo here buddy. How are the old balance sheeteroos looking? Hate to ask but I could do with some profiteroles.Shep had obfuscated. In the unlikely event that there were any profit-eroles, he didn’t appear especially keen to share them.
Then, very recently, just a few days ago, Giles had sent a picture with a caption—Got a new little businesserami if you want apiece of the action jackson bud?The picture was of a greenhouse filled with plants. Geoffrey recognized them immediately. “That’s cannabis.”
Catherine took the phone from him. He was right. She thought of a university boyfriend and the cannabis plants he grew on the windowsill in his filthy bedroom. What had become of him? she wondered. Just another old person now, like they all were, she supposed. She inspected the picture closely and spotted that behind the greenhouse was a blue sky and the tops of some trees. The greenhouse wasn’t on the ground.
“That’s on the roof,” she said, pointing upward. “Ourroof.”
Geoffrey looked at the ceiling.
Catherine kept reading the messages between Giles and Shep. “Oh, wow,” she said. “Look at this.”
She handed him the phone.
“Well, now, thatisinteresting,” said Geoffrey.
“Let’s call the others and tell them,” said Catherine.
