Gone to Ground (15 page)

"And did he say anything about it? Who it was? What it was about?"

"No, nothing."

"And you didn't ask?"

"No."

Will leaned back; he and Helen shared a quick glance.

"Do you think you'd be able to recognize the voice if you heard it again?" Will said.

"I'm not sure. I think I might." He smiled, nervously. "Not being a great deal of help, am I?"

"You're doing fine," Helen said.

Johnson repeated the gesture of running finger and thumb over his lip, obscuring his mouth. "I've thought about it a lot. Since, you know, what happened. It really upset me. He was nice. Genuine. And fun. He was fun."

There was a quiver in his voice as he spoke.

"I wonder," Helen said, "why you didn't come forward sooner?"

Distress showed on Johnson's face. "I should have done, I know. I feel really guilty about that. It's just ... it was just ... I didn't want to get involved, if I didn't have to. Be a witness, I suppose that's what I mean." He squeezed his hands between his knees. "My parents, they don't know. About me being gay. Well, they do. I'm sure they do. It's just that we've never talked about it, you know? And if it came out, into the open, like this ... they wouldn't understand. Not properly. Me and Stephen..." He faltered into silence.

"If you think of anything else," Will said, "however trivial it might seem, you'll let us know?"

"Of course."

"And if we want to get in touch with you, we've got your details?"

"Yes."

Helen showed him from the building, stayed to light a cigarette, Will joining her moments later. The sky was a mottled gray, unbroken, no scrap or edge of blue. No glimmer of sun. Another drab winter's day, the temperature low.

"The tape from the answer phone..." Will began.

"Wiped."

"You're sure?"

Helen nodded. "Yes. We can get it checked, of course. But it's got one of those options, when you finish listening, press delete."

"And that's what Bryan must have done."

"Unless somebody else did it for him."

"Whoever killed him."

"It's a possibility." Helen drew deep on her cigarette. "Especially if they knew their voice was on the tape."

Will looked at her. "That's a leap."

"We haven't got a great deal else."

"If it was the murderer, why not simply take the tape? Destroy it?"

She shrugged. "This way it doesn't draw attention to itself. If Johnson hadn't told us about the call we'd have had no idea."

She released a stream of smoke and Will wafted it away from his face.

"Whoever did this," he said, "he was careful. We know that. No prints anywhere. A few stray hairs which might or might not be his, and that's all. Almost no physical evidence at all. And that's at odds with the attack itself. Violence that extreme, it suggests real anger, doesn't it? Rage."

"Maybe once that was spent," Helen said, "calm is what he was."

"A bit like making love."

Helen smiled. "Poor Lorraine."

"You know what I mean."

"I think I can just about remember."

"I'm pleased."

"Our man climaxes, as it were, and then, in a spell of post-tumescent clarity, goes round wiping anything he might have touched."

"Something like that."

"There is one other possibility," Helen said.

"What's that?"

"I was thinking—I'm not sure why—about the awful story McKusick told, the time Bryan was raped. You remember, two men. I just wondered, maybe, if something similar had happened here. Not in the same way, but two instead of one. One person who killed him and another who neutralized the scene."

Will raised an eyebrow. "Neutralized the scene? You're going to have to stop watching so much
CSI.
You're getting to sound like—what's her name?—that woman with the strange name. Marge something."

"Helgenberger."

"That's it. You're getting to sound more like her every day."

Helen shook her head. "I wasn't born on a ranch in Nebraska. Nor do I have an ex-rock-star boyfriend. And I certainly don't wear my T-shirts that tight. If I did, I'd probably be escorted from the building."

Will grinned at the thought.

"The voice," Helen said. "On the tape. South Yorkshire, maybe. Close to middle age. Unless he's putting it on, that's not McKusick." Dropping her cigarette to the ground, she squashed it beneath her shoe.

FOR LESLEY, IT HAD BEEN ANOTHER BUSY DAY. SEVERAL sets of background interviews made out at Bestwood had to be downloaded, edited, and made available. Bulletins had to be prepared. And just when it was the last thing she wanted, there was another call from James Crawford. When he had returned from doing a little food shopping in Bingham, it was to find his house had been broken into; all of the photographs of the suspected CIA plane were missing, prints as well as negatives; not only that, but his notebooks had been taken, along with the files he had been compiling and, almost more serious, his computer, together with assorted back-up discs and CDs.

"You've reported it to the police?" Lesley asked.

Crawford laughed. "For all the good it will do me."

At the end of the conversation, Lesley caught herself wondering, perhaps unfairly, whether some of things Crawford had been telling her were happening in his imagination. What had Pike said? Every crank and crazy? Was that what Crawford was? Lesley hadn't thought so, but now...

There were two bulletins still to finish. Not to mention the scribbled Post-it notes which surrounded her computer screen like the petals of a demented sunflower and demanded her attention.

Neither Will Grayson nor Helen Walker had ever returned her call, and she thought she would give them one more try. This time, to her surprise, she was put through to Helen Walker without difficulty.

"Hello," Lesley said, "this is Lesley Scarman. I'm..."

"You're Stephen Bryan's sister."

"That's right."

"And a reporter."

"Yes, but that's not why I'm phoning."

There was a slight pause at the other end of the line. "How can I help you, Ms. Scarman?"

Lesley liked the Ms. "My brother's papers. Things he was working on. I understand they're in your possession."

"We needed to see if there was anything there that would help us with our investigation."

"And was there?"

"Not as far as I know."

"So you'll be releasing them."

"Eventually, yes."

"But if you've no further use..."

"You realize, the investigation is still ongoing."

"Look," Lesley said, "I'd like a chance to see what's there. Apart from anything else, there's a book my brother was working on. I'd like to see how far he'd got. You never know, it might even be publishable."

Helen hesitated.

"I could come over there," Lesley said. "You could shut me up with everything in a little room."

Another pause. "Let me get back to you."

That hadn't happened by the time Lesley left work. She was standing at the London Road roundabout, waiting for the lights to change, when her mobile sounded. She had difficulty hearing Helen Walker over the noise from four lanes of traffic.

"I'm sorry, could you..."

"I said, as long as you're prepared to come here and look at your brother's stuff under controlled conditions, there doesn't seem to be a problem."

"Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow would be fine."

Closing the phone, Lesley smiled. She would persuade Alan Pike to let her go off diary, on the excuse maybe of following up Crawford's claim that he had been burgled. That would give her the time she needed.

Helen was waiting for Lesley on the second floor, just by the stairs, wearing black trousers and a loose cotton jacket over a pale green T-shirt, and looking younger somehow than Lesley had remembered.

Holding out her hand, Helen dismissed the uniformed constable who had escorted Lesley thus far with a nod. "I'm sorry about your brother," she said.

"Thank you."

Helen turned and pushed through a door that led into a long corridor, Lesley following.

"We've put everything along here; everything we removed from the house. Papers, files. Some of it seems to be in order, but not all."

Helen stopped and unlocked a door, standing aside to let Lesley through. There was a bare table and a single chair; storage boxes stacked three deep on the floor.

"Your bag," Helen said.

"They checked it downstairs."

"I'd like to check it again."

Lesley swung the red and gray bag round from her shoulder onto the table and stood back.

"Open it for me, if you would."

Lesley undipped the two catches and pulled back the Vel-ero. In one padded section was her laptop; in another were her mini disc recorder and microphone, notebook, and pens. Her mobile phone was in a small pocket at the side.

Helen examined the contents briefly then stepped away. "Nice bag, by the way," she said. "Funky. Where d'you get it, if you don't mind me asking?"

Lesley smiled. "Australia. Sydney. But I think you can get them here now. There's a shop in Nottingham stocks them, I think. Or, at least, it did. St. James Street."

"Thanks for the tip." Helen moved back toward the door. "I'll leave you alone. What? A couple of hours? You won't be disturbed."

Lesley lifted the lid from the first of the boxes and sat down. Surrounded by four recently painted walls, she had only the one GGTV camera, high in the corner, for company.

It soon became clear that whereas some of her brother's papers were still more or less together, others had become seriously shuffled around, adjacent pages bearing little or no apparent relationship to one another. Lesley's first task was to sort through the miscellaneous material and impose, where she could, a sense of order.

By the end of the first hour, she had made significant progress—enough to realize she was never going to be able to read every word, not in the time available. She would have to prioritize as best she could.

There were lecture notes for the courses Stephen had been teaching, reading lists attached, plus drafts of articles he had written for a variety of journals, often several versions of each, printed out and then annotated and corrected by hand.

From "Holiday Camp" to "Hollyoaks": Representations of British Life, a Survey.

Images of the Working Class: Ken Loach to Martin Parr.

"
Z-Cars" and The Wednesday Play to "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels": The British Crime Film and the Documentary Tradition.

Victim of Life's Circumstances: Homosexuality in British Cinema.

Case Studies from The Rank Charm School and the Company of Youth: From Diana Fluck to Diana Dors and Patsy Sloot to Susan Shaw.

Her brother wrote with a light, slightly caustic style, leavening what was clearly an encyclopedic knowledge with humour and anecdote, and keeping critical theory to a minimum.

There were also detailed notes on individual films, a large number of these, illustrated here and there with drawings in which the characters were rendered as little more than matchstick figures; some of those had been transcribed, others were still in the same scribbled hand Stephen had used while watching.
Dance Hall. Johnny Frenchman. The Singer Not the Song. The Pool of London. Peeping Tom.
When she first saw, and recognized, his quite distinctive writing, Lesley had to lean back and take a deep breath before continuing.

Apart from a few creased pages from what could have been an early draft, however, Lesley could find little direct reference to the promised biography of Stella Leonard. Bits and pieces, stops and starts. But no clear outline, no chapter-by-chapter breakdown, no detailed research notes, no plan. All of these, she presumed, had been kept on the hard drive of his computer, backed up, possibly, on discs which were also missing.

Checking back, she found Leonard herself mentioned in the articles on both the Rank Charm School and the British Crime Film, and in the latter there was a section devoted to
Shattered Glass,
comparing it favourably with various examples of American
film noir
from the nineteen forties, such as
The Dark Mirror
and
Double Indemnity.
Lesley remembered seeing
Double Indemnity,
Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray plotting in the aisles of their local supermarket to murder Stanwyck's husband for his insurance money. So unlike Lesley's own experiences when out shopping.

By now, her eyes were tired and she could feel a dull headache developing; according to her watch it was almost time. Just a few minutes later than she'd said, Helen Walker knocked on the door and pushed it open.

"How we doing?"

Lesley smiled. "About to get an RSI from turning all these pages."

"Let me help you box it all up again. Then I'll walk you out."

As soon as they had stepped through into daylight, Helen started reaching for her cigarettes. "You might have thought I was being overly polite, or making sure you didn't leave the building with a bit of police property in your pocket, but what this is really, is an excuse to smoke."

She offered the pack to Lesley, who shook her head.

"You give it up?"

"Never started."

"Never?"

"Never."

Helen's thumb snapped down on her lighter. "How could you not?"

"I just never fancied it. Something about the smell, I don't know. My mother, for one thing, was quite a heavy smoker when she was younger. Around the house, you know. I think that helped to put me off."

"But all your friends at school, weren't they sneaking out for ciggies, nicking them from their parents, lighting up on the way home?"

"Yes, of course."

"Well," Helen said, drawing smoke down into her lungs, "you've saved yourself a small fortune, if nothing else."

"Sweets," Lesley said, with a shamefaced grin. "Chocolate especially. That was what my pocket money went on. What I'd be lifting from the corner shop if I got the chance. Malteesers. Rolos. Twix. You know one of the saddest days of my life? When I heard this rumour there were going to be no more Terry's chocolate oranges."