One could imagine George, in a rage, leaning over Glenda’s suitcase to pull things out of it... and one could also imagine Glenda, snatching up a heavy object...
‘What did she hit him with?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. Hell, Perry, what does it matter? I’ve hardly ever been in their bedroom... they have a heavy brass clock... modern...’ Her voice was cracking, and Jett would have reckoned she needed a tranquilliser, or better, a hug.
‘Is Kris with you now?’ I asked.
‘He went to get some food.’
‘Then eat it.’
‘Glenda!’ she said miserably. ‘And George!’
Disbelief racked her, and she felt more pain for them dead than she’d felt affection for them while they lived.
It would be no use telling her not to think about them. She had known them for most of her life.
I thought of them myself as I had seen them first at Caspar Harvey’s lunch, no odder than many a bickering married couple, and I thought how their central cores had slowly begun a melt-down after that, until the bedrock character had clarified in each.
George’s innate villainy had taken over from the still-respected racehorse trainer until he was ready to try killing with blinding oil. Glenda with her foolish unfounded sexual suspicions had uncovered not the lover but the traitor in her house, and in shame and disillusion had both killed and died.
I thought of the manifest instinct to destroy that had throbbed between the pair of them in that kitchen. There had been, that Wednesday morning, the basic bloody urge of nature — all red teeth and claws.
Did a murderer, I wondered, live deep within us all?
Chapter 11
At around noon I ran dear dishevelled Melanie to the other end of the wire and asked if I could speak to my ghost writer about my book on storms. ‘Sure,’ she blithely replied and in a moment Ghost himself was saying, ‘I thought you’d come out in spots.’
‘Spots don’t gag you.’
‘So I gather you want to talk.’
‘There are storms present and future,’ I said. ‘There are things you should know.’
‘On our way.’
They both came, long John Rupert and insubstantial Ghost.
I invited them to sit down, and apologised for the imitation measles I could well have done without. Ravi Chand expected the rash would fade by Sunday, but Sunday seemed a long way off. I looked a mess.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ John Rupert asked.
‘Mycobacterium paratuberculosis variant X.’
‘Ah,’ one said and ‘Yes, of course,’ said the other. Neither had ever seen it before, but then, nor had anyone else.
‘Last night,’ I said, trying not to make it sound too theatrical, ‘Glenda Loricroft, wife of George, jumped in front of an underground train.’ Their mouths opened speechlessly. ‘On Wednesday morning in Newmarket it seems she had bashed in her husband’s skull. He lay undiscovered in his bedroom until the police found him this morning, when they went to tell him his wife had killed herself.’
John Rupert and Ghost started breathing again, and I said, ‘Before you ask, he had not been unduly missed by the staff of his racing stable, because he constantly travelled overseas without saying where he was going. He supervised a schooling session early on Wednesday morning — I was there myself. So was Belladonna Harvey, his assistant, but when neither she nor George, nor George’s wife appeared yesterday morning, or today, the head lad simply carried on with the stable routine as he’d done several times before.’
They listened intently while I told them about Glenda, the filly, the alpha-particle powder and the lead container. I asked them, after that, if they had any authority to search Loricroft’s world? The answer seemed to be somewhere between ‘No’ and ‘It depends’, and ‘It’s up to the Newmarket police’. There was no simple ‘Yes’.
‘Of all the possible Traders,’ I remarked, ‘George Loricroft might have been the one most likely to handle and keep orders from foreign sources, but he’s been dead two days...’
John Rupert nodded, ‘His Trader colleagues will have picked the body clean. But what would you have hoped to find? He would have been too careful. They always are. The real question now is, who will take his place?’
A thoughtful silence ensued. Glenda’s spurious snowfalls, Ghost said, had put more than a husband out of action. There would be a pause for regrouping. A vulnerable period, he thought, for the Traders.
John Rupert asked me again, ‘What would you have hoped to find at Loricroft’s place?’
‘I suppose names and addresses would have been too much to hope for,’ I said. ‘Glenda herself might have got rid of anything obviously damaging. She had time. But how about a dipstick in the boot of his car, say, with smears of oil matching that in the crunched aeroplane? How about bank statements, phone bills... a paper trail?’
They shook their heads, thoughtful and depressed. John Rupert said, ‘Even though the Traders aren’t a hundred per cent professional, Loricroft will have known better than to leave damning paperwork lying around.’
Ghost agreed. ‘Do you know what I think?’ he said. ‘I really do think we may have them undecided at this moment and not knowing what to do next, but it won’t last long. So what we need now are some good sound ideas. Fruitful ideas. It’s time for genius.’
John Rupert smiled lopsidedly. ‘We need someone they would never expect to be actively working against them.’
I found both visitors turning their heads until their eyes focused on my face, and I thought that if they expected fruitful ideas from me, they had come to a dry well.
‘I,’ I pointed out, ‘originally sought you out for help. My province is as a forecaster of wind and rain and sunshine, not as an ideas man in anti-terrorist country. You must know better than I do how to profit from a Trader’s death.’
I waited for a good while during which they unhelpfully offered no suggestions even in the fruitful category, never mind genius, and with disquiet I realised that they had begun to rely on me for direction, not the other way round.
‘I need a few answers,’ I said reluctantly. I had to be crazy, I thought, even to begin on such a journey, but unless I knew where I was going, I would no longer agree to go anywhere at all. Only an idiot would set out without a map.
I said, ‘The chief question I want answered is what exactly do you expect from me? Then... are you two part of a large organisation? Do you pass on to others what I tell you? Who is “Us”? Am I useful, or shall I just nurse my myco-dots and forget about the Unified Traders?’
I watched their changing expressions and realised I was in effect facing them with their most difficult of decisions, the question of what did and what did not fall into the category of ‘need to know’.
John Rupert glanced at Ghost and uncoiled slowly to his feet. Ghost followed him silently to the door.
‘We’ll consult,’ they said. ‘We’ll be back.’
Life would be simpler, I thought, if they stayed away. Much simpler if I disentangled myself altogether. Much simpler if I’d never gone to Kensington in the first place. What did I now want to do? Extricate or dive in?
I walked over to the window and looked down into the street that ran along the side of the building. Taxis often decanted and picked up fares there, but I was unprepared for John Rupert and Ghost to run across the pavement, flag down the first taxi to come along and set off to realms unknown. Ghost’s white hair, three storeys down, had been unmistakable, and John Rupert’s long legs exaggerated from above his stork-like stride.
Their taxi had barely cleared the first corner before Jett arrived in my room, saying, ‘Have you heard?’ and with eyes stretched wide, in disbelief, ‘George Loricroft was actually dead upstairs...’