Author: Kate Atkinson
Category: Literature
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/kate-atkinson/page,14,471439-big_sky.html
His phone rang. Stephen Mellors. Aka Mark Price. “Steve?”
“All still okay with Bumbum and Bambi?”
“Mr. Price,” Andy mouthed to the girls, indicating the phone. They smiled and nodded. “Jasmine and Maria?” he said to Steve. “Yeah. Good. I’m just settling them in for the night.” The girls had put the TV on and were watching Pointless. They seemed hypnotized, although surely they couldn’t understand a word of what was going on. “We’ve had a good day, eh, girls?” Andy said, raising his voice and giving them a thumbs-up and a big grin. They giggled and gave him exaggerated thumbs-up back. It was criminally easy to hoodwink them. They were innocents, like children or baby rabbits, he thought. Little lambs. He caught sight of himself in a mirror on the wall and felt a spasm of something. Guilt? It was a new emotion to him. Sometimes he wondered where his humanity had gone. Oh, yes, he remembered—he’d never had any.
“Talk to you later,” he said, pressing the Call End button. The phone lit up again almost immediately and the caller ID came up—a photo of Lottie. It wasn’t actually Lottie calling him, of course, it was the photo he used for Rhoda. He took the call in the narrow hallway.
“Hello, love,” he said, trying to keep the weariness out of his voice. It was no good looking to Rhoda for sympathy. She had the energy of a Japanese train.
“Are you going to be long, Andrew? Doing whatever it is you’re doing?”
Why had Rhoda started addressing him as Andrew instead of Andy? He associated “Andrew” with his mother, as previously she had been the only one to call him that, and then only when she was annoyed with him (although that was often), so now he felt as though Rhoda was always irritated with him about something. (Was she?)
“Is that Alexander Armstrong’s voice I can hear? Are you watching Pointless?” she asked suspiciously. “Where are you, Andrew?”
In a meaningless void, he thought. “On my way home,” he said brightly. “Do you want me to pick anything up on the way? How about an Indian? Or a Chinese?”
Paperwork
“I mean, what are the chances?” Reggie said to Ronnie after they had left Vincent Ives’s flat in Friargate. “That the man we were there to interview for Operation Villette would be the very same man who was married to our dead body. When she wasn’t a dead body.”
“I know—talk about a coincidence,” Ronnie agreed. “Weird. Very weird.” Vincent Ives wasn’t suspected of anything, at least not by Reggie and Ronnie. He was a tiny tick on their checklist, a dull piece in the jigsaw—featureless sky or grass—who had been mentioned by a barman at the Belvedere, and yet now he was the husband of a murdered woman. It certainly made you question his innocence in general.
The two uniforms who had come to Vincent Ives’s door had been confused by the presence of Ronnie and Reggie. At first they thought they were friends of Ives’s, and then they seemed to think they were social workers of some kind, and it was only when they produced their warrants and Reggie said “DC Reggie Chase and DC Ronnie Dibicki” that it clicked with the uniforms. “Have you informed him already?” one of them asked.
“Informed him what?” Ronnie puzzled.
“About his wife,” the other one said.
“What about his wife?”
“Yes, what about my wife?” Ives said.
“Ms. Easton,” one of the policewomen said gently to him. “Wendy Easton, or Ives—is that the name of your wife, Mr. Ives?”
“About-to-be-ex-wife,” he murmured.
“Would you like to sit down, sir?” one of the uniforms said to Vincent Ives. “I’m afraid we have some bad news about Ms. Easton.”
Murdered! Ronnie and Reggie stared at each other, communicating silently, eyes on stalks. For who was the person most likely to have murdered their lady on the lawn if not the about-to-be-ex-husband? The man who was sitting on a sofa right there in front of them! Reggie thought of the golf club lying in the garden border. “The Belvedere,” she murmured to Ronnie. “I know,” Ronnie murmured back.
Then the uniforms had taken Vince Ives away, saying they wanted him to accompany them to identify his wife. And, just like that, the murder of Wendy Easton slipped through their fingers again.
What was really peculiar, they were agreed on afterward, was that when they told him that his wife had been murdered, the first thing Vincent Ives said was “Is the dog okay?”
They drove back to the Seashell.
“See if we can catch our Mr. Bragg in this time,” Ronnie said.
The sun was beginning to set, streaking across the sky. “‘See where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament,’” Reggie said.
“Eh?” Ronnie said.
Hello again, Mrs. Bragg. Is Mr. Bragg home now?”
“No.”
“Are you expecting him home soon?”
“No.”
“I’ll leave you my card, then. Could you ask him to give us a call?”
They seek him here, they seek him there,’” Reggie said when they were back in the car. They shared a packet of nuts and raisins. “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” she added. “He was known for being elusive. Like our Mr. Bragg.”
“Perhaps we should check in as guests,” Ronnie said. “We might be able to catch hold of him then.”
They finished the nuts and raisins. Ronnie folded up the packet and put it in the little plastic bag they kept for rubbish. Even their rubbish was neat.
“We should go home, I suppose,” Ronnie sighed. “Make a start on the boxes.”
“Yeah.” Reggie was beginning to really like the way they called it “home” without thinking twice.
They had loaded the boxes of paperwork onto the back seat of the car—in fact they took up the whole car, apart from the space Reggie and Ronnie had carved out for themselves. The boxes, unwanted back-seat passengers, were beginning to feel oppressive. Reggie and Ronnie had done their homework, they knew the Bassani and Carmody case inside out, not to mention backward and forward and up and down, and it seemed unlikely they could find anything in the boxes that hadn’t been raked over already, and most of the important stuff was computerized anyway.
“Well, I never,” Ronnie said. “Speak of the devil.”
“What?”
“Over there, sitting on that bench. That’s none other than our old friend Mr. Ives, isn’t it?”
“He’s a long way from home. What’s he doing here, do you suppose?” Reggie puzzled.
“Odd, isn’t it? Perhaps he’s looking for Andy Bragg as well? Of course, they’re not friend friends,” Ronnie laughed.
“Maybe he’s come to tell him that we were asking questions about him. Or tell him about his wife’s murder. I wonder if he’s being treated as a suspect.”
“Hey up,” Ronnie said. “He’s on the move.”
They watched as Vincent Ives went into the car park behind the seawall, craning their necks to see where he was heading. He plodded up the set of steps that led from the car park to the cliff path.
“Evening stroll,” Ronnie said. “He might be wanting some peace to mourn the soon-to-be-ex–Mrs. Ives.”
“No longer soon-to-be,” Reggie said. “Now completely ex.”
They decided to hang around a bit longer in case Andy Bragg came home or Vincent Ives came back and did something interesting. They got out of the car and leaned on the seawall to get some air and appreciate the remains of the sunset and the vastness of the North Sea. The tide was fully in now, swelling and heaving against the seawall and the promenade. “It makes you wonder what it must be like in winter,” Ronnie said.
“Pretty dramatic, I expect,” Reggie said. She thought she might go mad living in a place like this. A runner caught her eye, jogging through the car park. A middle-aged man, headphones clamped to his head. She gave a little gasp of surprise.
“What?” Ronnie said.
“That guy,” Reggie said.
“The one running up the cliff?”
“Yeah. That one. I know him.”
“It’s a
day for coincidences, all right.”
“You know what they say,” Reggie said.
“No, what do they say?”
“A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.” Or at any rate, Reggie thought, that was what the man who was running up the cliff always said.
Have you seen this?” Ronnie said.
They were truffling through the dross in the bottomless evidence boxes, the task mollified a little by the extra-large pizza and the bottle of Rioja they had picked up in the Co-op in Whitby. It wasn’t cold enough for a fire, but Reggie had lit one anyway and it was crackling away fiercely in the little hearth. It seemed the right thing to do when you were in a seaside cottage. She’d never made a fire before and had to google how, but was quite proud of the end result.
“Seen what?” she asked.
Ronnie held up a creased and worn piece of paper. “It’s a record of a court case in 1998. It looks like a conveyancing thing, about a flat in Filey. Something about a ‘flying freehold’—what’s that?”
“I think it’s when you don’t actually own the ground beneath your property. If you had a room above a passage or some kind of void.”
“How do you even know that?”
“I’m a repository of useless knowledge,” Reggie said. “A hundred years ago I’d have been treading the boards of a music hall. Like Mr. Memory in The Thirty-Nine Steps.”
“The what?”
“The Thirty-Nine Steps. It’s a Hitchcock film. It’s famous.” Reggie sometimes wondered if Ronnie had ever opened a book or watched a film or a play. She was a total philistine. Reggie didn’t hold it against her, in fact she rather admired it. As someone who had read and seen everything from the Iliad to Passport to Pimlico, Reggie didn’t feel that any of it had done her much good. It certainly hadn’t helped to keep Sai.
“Anyhoo,” Ronnie said, “it says here that the buyer wasn’t informed about the flying freehold and the buyer’s solicitor is suing the seller’s solicitor. For misrepresentation or something. The buyer was Antonio Bassani, but that’s not what’s interesting. The solicitor representing him in court was Stephen Mellors. Remember that name?”
“Vincent Ives’s solicitor,” Reggie said. She reached for her notebook, flipped through the pages, and read out loud, “‘He’s a solicitor, he’s handling my divorce, plays at the Belvedere with us sometimes.’”
“Also a school friend, remember,” Ronnie said. “They go back a long way.”
“There’s more old stuff like that in here,” Reggie said, passing over a flimsy folder, the cardboard soft and furry now with age. “Just bits and pieces from Bassani’s property portfolio from the seventies, mostly. Trailer parks. A nursing home. Flats in Redcar, Saltburn, Scarborough. You can imagine him being the kind of landlord who gave Rachman a bad name.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. This stuff must have been raked over by forensic accountants at the time of the trial, don’t you think?”
“Dunno. Do we need to open another bottle?”
There were two small bedrooms beneath the eaves, each containing a narrow bed, the kind a maiden aunt might have found herself relegated to. Or a nun.
“Beguinage,” Reggie said.
“Eh?”
“It’s like a lay convent for women, a religious community from medieval times. There’s one in Bruges. It’s beautiful. I mean, it’s not a thing now. It would be quite nice if it was.” Reggie had been to Bruges with Sai, on an overnight ferry that rolled its way across the North Sea to Zeebrugge. She had been seasick all the way and he had held her hair back while she vomited into the stainless steel toilet in the tiny shower room in their cabin. “No greater love has a boyfriend,” he’d laughed. After he left her to marry the girl his parents had chosen for him, Reggie went to the hairdresser and asked him to cut her hair short, a ritual women had undergone since time immemorial, or at least since the first man dumped the first woman. Adam and Eve, perhaps. Who knew how their union had gone after Adam had tattletaled to God that Eve had been flirting with the tree of knowledge?
“I mean—who wants a woman who knows anything?” Reggie said crossly to Ronnie.
“Dunno. Another woman?”
Tipping Point
Murdered? Vince had expected they would take him to a morgue or even the murder scene (or “my home,” as he still thought of it) and show him a corpse, but no, they took him to a police station and showed him a Polaroid. You would have thought that getting divorced from a woman would free you of the obligation to identify her corpse, but apparently not.
You couldn’t really see what was wrong with Wendy in the photograph. You might not have concluded that she was asleep, but given a multiple-choice questionnaire you wouldn’t necessarily have opted for “dead.” They said she had a head injury, but they must have posed her in a way that concealed whatever horror was there. They wouldn’t tell him how she had acquired this “head injury.” What they did say was that she had been found in the back garden and they thought she had been killed either late last night or in the early hours of this morning. They had to prompt him into identifying her as he just kept staring at the photograph. Was it Wendy? It struck him that she didn’t have particularly distinctive features. He’d never really noticed that before.
“Mr. Ives?”
“Yes,” he said eventually. “That’s her. That’s Wendy.” Was it? He still felt doubtful. It looked like her, but the whole thing seemed so unlikely. Murdered. By who?
“Do you know who did it?” he asked the detective who said she was in charge of the investigation. “DI Marriot,” she said when she introduced herself. She asked about “your daughter” but Ashley was in the middle of a jungle somewhere with no phone signal. “Helping to protect orangutans,” she’d said before she went off grid. You would think there were plenty of things closer to home that she could have found to protect. Her mother, for one. (Not that he was resentful. He loved her!)
“We’ll contact the British consul in Sarawak.”
“Thank you. She’ll be devastated,” Vince said. “They were close.”
“And you weren’t?”
“Wendy was divorcing me. So, no, I think that means we weren’t close, don’t you?”
The uniformed WPCs (were they still called that?) had taken him to a police station, where he had been asked a lot of questions. He had already been interrogated once that morning, twice in one day seemed unfair. He had been surrounded all day by women with odd names asking him questions, although he had begun to think almost fondly of the two bird-like detectives and their fascination with the Belvedere. In retrospect their questions seemed almost innocuous, and at least they hadn’t suspected him of murder. Just golfing, apparently.
DI Marriot was interested in golf too, she kept asking him about his golf clubs. They were kept at the Belvedere, he told her. They had a (costly) storage facility for members, which was just as well as there was no room in the flat. No room for anything, hardly any room for Vince himself. Certainly not enough room for Vince and four policewomen, no matter how small they were. He had felt as if he was suffocating. I’m afraid we have some bad news about Ms. Easton.
“Attacked,” they said at first, as if working their way up to the really bad word. Murdered. The house had been quiet when he’d gone there last night. Was she already dead? If he’d gone around to the back, looked in the garden, would he have found her? That was where she’d been discovered this morning, apparently. He thought of all that internet dating Wendy had been doing. Was it some stranger she had picked up and brought back to the marital bed? Was she in the middle of being murdered when he had been peering through the living-room curtains? Could he have stopped it? But then wouldn’t Sparky have been barking his head off? He was a good guard dog, it would have been curious for him not to react to a stranger.
“Mr. Ives? Sir?”
“Yes, sorry.”
It had taken a while for it to dawn on Vince that he might be a suspect. When it did
dawn, it seemed such an astonishing idea that he tripped up in the middle of the answer to one of their questions (“And is there someone, Mr. Ives, who can verify where you were last night? Or in the early hours of this morning?”) and he started to babble nonsense. “Asleep, I was asleep, I’d only just dropped off, because the amusement arcade is so noisy. I sleep alone, so no, no one can verify my alibi.” Oh, God—I sleep alone. It sounded so pathetic.
“Alibi?” the inspector said placidly. “No one’s talking about alibis, Mr. Ives. Only you.”
He felt a fleeting frisson of fear, as if he perhaps had murdered Wendy and then somehow forgotten all about it, his usually good memory failing in the face of trauma.
“The Belvedere,” he said. “I was in the clubhouse, drinking with friends. Tommy Holroyd and Andy Bragg.”
He didn’t mention to DI Marriot that he’d been there, at the house. It was stupid of him, he realized now. He’d been seen, after all, he’d talked to Benny next door, there was probably CCTV everywhere that he hadn’t noticed. Unfortunately, by the time he thought to correct his mistake they had moved on and Inspector Marriot was asking for his DNA, “for elimination.” His fingerprints too. “While you’re here,” she said, as if it was for his convenience.
That used to be a joke between him and Wendy. They’d be sitting on the sofa together watching TV and she’d say, “While you’re up, love, can you make me a cup of tea?,” somehow managing to make it sound as if she was the one doing him a favor. He used to respond like one of Pavlov’s dogs, jumping up and putting the kettle on before he’d even realized he had been no more “up” than Wendy had been. He could hear her laughing (fondly, or so he’d thought at the time) as he dutifully got the tea bags out of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee commemoration caddy that she had sent off for. She was a faithful monarchist. She did bonsai. She went to a twice-weekly Callanetics class and liked television programs about women seeking revenge. And she was dead. She would never sit on the sofa again.