‘Can you think of a reason he might have written the address down?’
‘Maybe he was annoyed at missing out. Or maybe he wrote it before he got the brief.’
‘Thank you, Mrs P. Oh, one last thing.’
‘Go on.’
‘Did Mr Harcourt know anyone who was about six foot five, totally bald, and rather unpleasant-looking? Maybe someone from the firm?’
‘We tend to hire more carefully than that.’
‘Might someone like that work for Mr Wallace?’
‘I don’t think so. He’s quite unpleasant enough on his own. And as for David, there was nobody in his life like that, as far as I know. Knew.’
Oh, Mrs P. Davy clearly had a rather busier life than met the eye, hence him currently lying in a police morgue somewhere. ‘Thank you again. Really.’
‘Good luck with your project, dear. And,’ here her voice lowers, ‘be extremely cautious if you come to see Mr Wallace again.’ Then there’s a click, and the line goes dead.
I wonder why Mrs P is so willing to share the details of Davy’s life. She made that last call rather easy. Is it just because she thinks she’s the only one in that place who really knew and loved him?
She might be right about that. She certainly seems to hateWallace, for reasons unknown. I have a horrible feeling I’ll have to see Wallace again before the end of this, and I don’t like the prospect. When I met him, he seemed somehow like a polite version of the bowling-ball thug. Maybe they’re cousins.
‘So what now?’ says Em.
‘We have a lunch booking,’ I say. ‘215, St Francis, on Down Lane.’
‘No,’ says Jonny, who is standing before four bowls of almost totally cemented porridge. ‘Now we have breakfast.’
19
The rest of the morning is a blur of inactivity.
There’s little to do for four hours, and I’m a bit cagey about going out onto the street without good reason. As we clear up the breakfast things, I spend a little while attempting to flirt with Em, but I’m clearly out of practice, because everything I think of saying would come out either too boring or arrestably lecherous. This is my punishment for being single for eight years, barring the odd drunken clinch.
The others revert to type. Jonny plots all the properties in Davy’s book on a home-built web map, which he’s assured us is ‘operationally secure’, and creates a complicated spreadsheet with all their details to see if any patterns sing out. Elle does a bit of background reading about Davy’s life, once Jonny’s boosted her over all the newspaper paywalls, because shethinks the psychological angle is bound to yield results and because she wants to ‘get toknowhim a bit better’. Em ostentatiously lies back, puts her copy ofEmmaon her chest and her hand behinds her head, and naps.
And me? I stare at my phone, trying to work out every possible angle of approach to St Francis, every possible risk, and every way this late lunch could end up with me being arrested, captured or knocked off. This is the sort of preparatory work that distinguishes a merely good interloper from a great one. From time to time, I look at Em, sleeping without a care in the world, and feel faintly annoyed that she seems to be just as good at this stuff as me without putting in half the effort.
Eventually, I snap and suggest a walk in the garden to the room at large.
‘No,’ says Jonny. ‘Spring pollen is worse than white asbestos.’
‘That would be lovely,’ says Elle. ‘Just let me finish these few articles.’
‘Yeah, OK.’ I didn’t think Em was awake, but she was clearly just resting her eyes, because she’s already sitting upright and stretching.
The garden at Balfour Villas is how you can tell the owners are properly posh. Down the green-slimed steps from the house there’s a broad but shallow lawn, and then a few paths lead off into the scrubby undergrowth. Somewhere in there is a fountain with a naked bronze statuette, which contains such stagnant water that even London’s birds – not hygiene sticklers – don’t wash in it any more.
In other words, it’s the garden equivalent of the genuinearistos who go everywhere in the same twenty-year-old coat and the same battered Land Rover, and who would treat the suggestion of home renovation as an appalling breach of etiquette. Anyone even slightly middle class would never dream of letting such a beautiful garden get this bad. But that’s how you can tell people of true quality. They let things go to the dogs and everyone else still tells them they’re marvellous. My pet theory is that that’s why some people like rewilding so much: they can pretend to be scruffy poshos.
Em and I walk gingerly down the deathtrap steps, holding the rusted rail, and then take one of the wooded paths.
‘So …’
‘So.’ Em’s not giving me anything here.
‘Who do you think killed Davy?’
