He hung up, and drew the curtains open and stared thoughtfully down into the street. Then he turned his gaze round the living room. He might as well make a start with the flat. It took him less than half an hour to go through it room by room, drawer by drawer. There were extraordinarily few personal things. The safe was locked, and most of the drawers were empty. It was not until he had begun his search that he noticed just how tidy the flat was. Slater had not struck him as being such a fastidious man. Of course the place would have gone over by the police, and when a good policeman does his job properly he almost always leaves the searched place tidier than he found it. But still, it was more than just tidy. It was as though the flat had not been lived in. Even the child’s room seemed naked, except for the rag doll lying on the armchair where Bannerman had dropped it the night before. Here, too, the drawers were empty. Bannerman opened the wardrobe. A dozen coat hangers rattled and swung freely. Bannerman frowned as a suspicion grew in his mind. He went through to the kitchen and found the food cupboard. There were a few cans of soup, a tin of spaghetti and a nearly empty coffee jar. The refrigerator had been switched off, and its shelves were bare. Then into Slater’s bedroom, again to find an empty wardrobe, empty drawers in the bedside cabinet.
Bannerman sat on the bed and lit a cigar, letting his eyes wander about the room. They came to rest on three suitcases piled on top of the wardrobe. He took a chair from under the window and placed it below the wardrobe, climbed onto it, cigar clenched between his teeth, and reached up. The cases were heavy and he lifted them carefully, one by one, down to the floor, raising a dusty stoor from the top of the wardrobe. He climbed down and opened each case in turn. Two of them were filled with men’s clothing, underwear, socks, personal odds and ends. A photograph in a frame lay on top of the child’s clothing in the third case. Bannerman turned it over and found himself looking at the face of an attractive young woman. It was a black-and-white photograph. The woman looked to be in her mid-twenties. Bannerman knew the face. He had met her once, not long before she died. She was a good-looking woman, and had a look of her daughter about her. Slater had taken it badly when his wife died, but still Bannerman was surprised to find her photograph packed away for the departure that Slater had obviously planned. Perhaps, even after three years, he had still been taking it badly.
He closed up the cases and pushed them against the wall. Now, at least, he knew why Slater had been so agitated by Bannerman’s arrival. If he had been planning to take his daughter and slip quietly out of the country on the Sunday night or even the Monday morning, after his meeting with Gryffe, then the presence of Bannerman must have made things difficult for him. But why? What did Slater and Gryffe have going? It seemed like such an unlikely alliance. And du Maurier? He must have known about the packed suitcases. Why, when he had told Bannerman so much, had he not spoken of this? Bannerman shook his head, confused, and sat again on the bed, drawing deeply on his cigar.
At length he went through to his own room, lifted his coat and left the flat. In the street he checked his watch. It was a little after midday. He pulled up his collar against the drizzle and brushed past a small, sallow-faced man in a shabby raincoat. He thought nothing of the brief glimpse he got of the mean, dark eyes that turned to watch him after he had passed.
He stopped at the café in the Boulevard Charlemagne where the German pressmen drink, and had a coffee and a couple of croissants before walking across the street to the International Press Centre. A pretty girl at the reception counter smiled at him as he went past to the lift and rode up to the sixth floor.
Mademoiselle Ricain looked up as he walked into the office shared by the Post and the London Herald.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked.
‘Neil Bannerman. We spoke on the phone a few days ago and met briefly the other night.’ He saw that her face was pale and she may have been crying.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘A pity we couldn’t have met under happier circumstances.’
‘Quite.’ He crossed to Slater’s filing cabinet. It was locked. ‘Keys?’
She hesitated. ‘I don’t know if I...’
‘I’ll be working from here for the next few days,’ Bannerman said. ‘I take it the police have already been?’
‘Yes. They called me out yesterday... I... they said not to re-open the filing cabinet or touch any of Tim’s stuff.’
‘Well, that’s all right,’ Bannerman said. ‘I’ll take full responsibility.’ She had long, fair hair and a thin unattractive face with muddy brown eyes. Again she hesitated, then reluctantly she opened a drawer in her desk and lifted out a small square key.
‘How about the rest of the keys? The door, the desk? As I said, I’ll be working out of here...’
She looked at him icily. ‘Pity,’ she said. It was an effort for her to match his bad manners and he relented a little.
‘Look, I’m sorry if I’m a bit abrupt. It’s the way I feel right now. I didn’t particularly like Slater, but I saw no reason for anyone to kill him. Someone cracked me on the head yesterday and played footsie with my ribs while I couldn’t do anything about it, and I don’t see much reason for that either. An austistic girl who saw murder committed is shut away in some institution somewhere and no-one really gives a damn about her. There’s been a lot of mud slung around in the last couple of days and I’ve got the feeling that the powers that be are planning a whitewash job. There’s no reason why I should give a damn about any of it, but I do, and I don’t know why. So maybe I’d like to find out.’ Bannerman stopped to take stock. He had not meant to say any of this; he had not even known he had felt that way. But the words, without his thinking about them, had given shape and direction to all the muzziness that had been in his head since the phone woke him that morning. He saw that the girl was watching him curiously. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
She smiled weakly and took out another two keys from her desk drawer and held them out for him. ‘And I’m sorry, too,’ she said. ‘Maybe we’ll get on okay. Though I think we’re going to disagree about Tim. You didn’t like him. I did.’ She choked a little on that. Bannerman turned to the filing cabinet and unlocked it.
‘What did you like about him?’ he asked.
‘Oh,’ she got up and turned towards the window. ‘He was just a nice sort of man. He was considerate about a lot of the little things that men don’t usually think about. It’s difficult to say what exactly. It’s just the way a man behaves with you. I liked him. I knew him, I think, better than a lot of people did. People are never just what they seem when you only know them a little. Of course he could be irritable or tetchy, and sometimes he would get really down. You know, withdrawn, morose. He had a lot to be down about. You’ve got to understand people.’ She glanced at Bannerman, suddenly self-conscious and a bit of colour rose on her cheeks.
‘Yes,’ Bannerman said lamely, and he thought, she must have loved him. The sadness of it touched him. All those years, working for him, loving him, without ever saying, without ever wanting it to be known. These were the saddest people. The unattractive people, the people with nothing to offer except the love they are afraid to admit, knowing it will not be returned. In a way they had both, Bannerman and the girl, opened their souls a little to one another, without knowing why, without bonds or reason. Sometimes it was easier that way, with strangers. There could be no retributions. The girl knew it too. She came away from the window and lifted her bag from the desk.
‘Excuse me,’ she said and she left the office.
Bannerman leaned for some moments on the cabinet and lit a cigar. He always regretted getting involved, but there was never any way you could avoid it. You had to be involved. He crouched down on his hunkers and pulled open the bottom drawer. There were about a dozen files. He lifted them out and carried them over to Slater’s desk and sat down. Mostly they contained cuttings of stories Slater had done on the EEC, a back reference divided into different groups — agriculture, fisheries, transport, taxation and so on. Two of the folders were unmarked. One of them held the cuttings on Gryffe. Bannerman went through them carefully.