Late afternoon, and she could have gone home, but she had another route to explore. She hated the fact that all she kept turning down was one dead end after another, so she made her decision and went for her car. It was no great distance from Camden Lock to Wood Lane. And she could always go from there to the Holmes Street police station to see what more she could rattle out of Barry Minshall if things came to that.
She made her way north to Highgate Hill, doing a bit of rat-running in order to avoid the rush hour. It took her less time than she’d anticipated, and from there it was easy enough to negotiate the route to Archway Road.
She made one stop prior to taking herself to Wood Lane. A call to the incident room gleaned her the name of the estate agent who was selling the vacant flat in Walden Lodge that she’d heard about from one of the murder squad’s meetings. In the no-stone-left-unturned category, she knew that he was probably a pebble with nothing beneath it, but she went there anyway and had a word with the bloke, waving her e-fits in his direction for good measure. Sod bloody all on a toasted tea cake was what she got for the effort. She felt like a Girl Guide selling biscuits in front of a Weight Watchers’ meeting. There wasn’t a taker anywhere.
She went on to Wood Lane. There, she found the street crowded with cars parked its entire length. These would be the vehicles of commuters who drove in to town from the northern counties and parked to take the underground for the rest of the journey. Among them, the police were still searching for someone who had seen something in the early morning hours of the day that Davey Benton’s body had been found. Beneath the windscreen wiper of each car, a handout was tucked, and Barbara assumed it was this that asked for additional information from the daily commuters. For what it was worth. Perhaps a lot. Perhaps nothing at all.
At Walden Lodge, a descending drive led in the direction of an underground carpark. Barbara pulled her Mini into this drive. She was blocking access, but that couldn’t be helped.
When she climbed the front steps of the squat brick structure-so out of place in a street of otherwise historical buildings-she found that the front door was propped open. A yellow bucket of water held it so, and “The Moppits” was printed in red upon this. So much for security, Barbara thought. She entered the building and called out a hello.
A young man popped his head round the first corner. He had a mop in hand, and he wore a tool belt from which cleaning implements dangled officially. One of the Moppits, Barbara concluded, as above her in the building someone began hoovering.
“Help you?” the young man inquired, hitching up his tool belt. “Not s’posed to let anyone in.”
Barbara showed him her identification. She was working on the Queen’s Wood murder, she told him.
He told her hastily that he knew nothing about that. He and his wife were merely a mobile cleaning service. They didn’t live here. They came in once a week to do the sweeping, mopping, hoovering, and dusting of the common areas. And the windows as well, but only four times a year and today wasn’t one of those days.
It was too much information, but Barbara put that down to nerves: A cop pops up on someone’s horizon and suddenly everything can be open to interpretation. Best explain your life down to the minutest detail.
She had the flat number of the gent who’d seen the light flashing in the woods in the early morning hours when Davey’s body had been found. She had his name as welclass="underline" Berkeley Pears, which sounded like a brand of tinned fruit to her. She told the Moppit where she was heading and went for the stairs to seek him out.
When she knocked on his door, a dog began yapping behind it. It was the kind of yapping she associated with a terrier in need of discipline, and she wasn’t disabused of this notion when four different locks were released and the opening door allowed a Jack Russell to charge forward, intent upon her ankles. She pulled back and raised her bag to club the animal off, but Mr. Pears appeared in the terrier’s wake. He blew on something that made no noise, but the dog apparently heard it. He-or was it she?-dropped to the floor at once, panting happily, as if a job had been well done.
“Excellent, Pearl,” Pears told the loathsome beast. “Good dog. Treaties?” Pearl wagged her tail.
“She’s supposed to do that?” Barbara said.
“It’s the startle factor,” the dog’s owner replied.
“I could’ve clubbed her. She could’ve been hurt.”
“She’s fast. She’d’ve had you before you had her.” He widened the door and said, “Bowl, Pearl. Now.” The dog dashed inside, presumably to wait by her dish for a reward. “C’n I help you?” Berkeley Pears then asked Barbara. “How did you get into the building? I thought you were management. We’re set to fight a legal battle over this, and she’s trying to intimidate us out of it.”
“Police.” Barbara showed him her ID. “DC Barbara Havers. Could I have a word?”
“This’s about the boy in the woods? I’ve already told them what little I know.”
“Yeah. Got it. But another set of ears…? You never know what’s going to turn up.”
“Very well,” he said. “Come in if you must. Pearlie?”-this in the direction of the kitchen-“Come, darling.”
The dog trotted out, bright eyed and friendly, as if she hadn’t been a nasty little killing machine only moments before. She jumped into her master’s arms and stuck her nose in the breast pocket of his tattersall shirt. He chuckled and dug in another pocket for her treat, which she swallowed without chewing.
Berkeley Pears was a type, there was no doubt of it, Barbara thought. He probably wore patent-leather shoes and an overcoat with a velvet collar when he left his digs. You saw his kind occasionally on the tube. They carried furled umbrellas, which they used as walking sticks, they read the Financial Times as if it meant something to them, and they never looked up till they reached their destination.
He showed her into his sitting room: three-piece suite in position, coffee table arranged with copies of Country Life and a Treasures of the Uffizi art book, modern lamps with metal shades at precise angles suitable for reading. Nothing was out of place in here, and Barbara assumed nothing dared to be…although three noticeable yellowish stains on the carpet gave testimony to at least one of Pearl’s less than salubrious canine activities.
Pears said, “I wouldn’t’ve seen a thing, you understand, if it hadn’t been for Pearl. And you’d think I’d get a thank-you for that, but all I’ve heard is, ‘The dog must go.’ As if cats are less of a bother”-he said cats the way others said cockroaches-“when all the time that creature in number five howls morning and night like it’s being skewered. Siamese. Well. What else would you expect? She leaves the little beast for weeks, while I’ve never left Pearl for so much as an hour. Not an hour, mind you, but does that count? No. One night when she barks and I can’t quieten her quick enough and that is it. Someone complains-as if they don’t all have contraband animals, the lot of them-and I get a visit from management. No animals allowed. The dog must go. Well, we intend to fight them to the very death, I tell you. Pearl goes, I go.”
That, Barbara thought, might have been the master plan. She wedged her way into the conversation. “What did you see that night, Mr. Pears? What happened?”
Pears took the sofa, where he cradled the terrier like a baby and scratched her chest. He indicated the chair for Barbara. He said, “I assumed it was a break-in at first. Pearl began…One can only describe it as hysterical. She was simply hysterical. She woke me from a perfectly sound sleep and frightened me to bits. She was flinging herself-believe me, there is no other word for it-at the balcony doors and barking like nothing I’ve ever heard from her before or since. So you can see why…”