His worst fears were confirmed when, pushing his way upriver against the bodies streaming out into the lobby, he saw Superintendent Yates and Charles standing in conference behind the trestles. The Superintendent was dressed in his normal uniform from the waist up, but on his lower half, which would have been below the level of the trestle during the press conference, he was wearing a pair of bell-bottoms.
Charles saw him first, and beamed.
“The prodigal returns!” Charles said. “I’m so glad to see you’ve taken to your suit.”
“There you are, Inspector,” John said, “Good of you to join us. I believe you know Charles.”
“What’s going on? There’s a tailback outside the gates all the way to the motorway.”
“It seems we underestimated the interest our little incident would generate,” Charles replied cheerfully.
“A few press, alright,” Oates said, “but there must be four hundred people…”
“We had some senior bods from some of our competitors staying at the spa. I advised against it, of course, but Miranda rather likes to rub their noses in our success, and to be fair to her they’d get their spies in through the back door if you didn’t welcome them through the front. You can’t make calls or send messages from inside as you know, but some of them cut their stays short this morning. Very odd, as our guests are generally extremely reluctant to leave. I’d say they’ve been calling in favours, wouldn’t you?”
Charles waved to someone standing behind them, and made to move off, the smile of a fresh greeting filling his sails. Oates took his arm and held him.
“You and I need to talk.”
“Of course, Inspector, of course, but you wouldn’t begrudge me a few minutes in the service of order.”
Charles looked not at Oates but at the Superintendent. The Superintendent gestured with his hand for the PR man to pass freely, and Oates released his arm. As Oates watched him go, he realised that alongside his mounting consternation as he passed the ranks of massed humanity outside Avalon’s gates, there had been a compensatory schadenfreude at the thought of Charles’s smooth manner being engulfed by the chaos. In this, Oates was mightily disappointed.
Not only did Charles seem undisturbed by the crisis, he had actually supped from the febrile atmosphere around him and stored it as raw energy. Perhaps he had lived for too long in Miranda’s shadow, and the public relations nightmare engulfing Avalon was allowing him to make his own bid for power. Certainly her absence from the conference room felt significant. Miranda was the queen of the spa as it was, but Charles was the master of the spa as it appeared, and the balance in the relative importance of these two states had shifted radically in the few hours since Oates’s departure.
Had he been alone he might have grabbed Charles by the collar and pushed him up against the wall, but with John there he felt he had to keep his cool. It was a bad thing, to think of his superior as a protection for the Great Spa rather than an ally in his investigation.
“Thanks for keeping control here, sir,” Oates said when the two of them stood alone, “I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but what are you doing here?”
“I received a call from the senior management of Nottingham Biosciences informing me that you had given orders for the entirety of the guests to be removed from their… therapy in the new buildings,” John said, “Is that correct?”
“I wanted all possible witnesses interviewed.”
“For Christ’s sake. I told you this was delicate.”
“Have you been in there?”
“Why do you think I’m wearing these ridiculous trousers? I have also seen the guest list. There are three current members of the House of Lords and an unobtrusive gentleman listed as a businessman whom MI5 informs me is a member of the Standing Committee of the People’s Republic of China. I have of course informed the management here that we will not be disturbing any guests who were unconscious during the crime.”
“What do you want me to do, John? Do I investigate or am I an errand boy come to pick up the suspect?”
“I should very much like you to investigate, only I understand from Bhupinder that you felt it was more important to return to London than to attend to matters here. A casual observer might think that an odd choice, though I myself have no doubt that you had the best reasons, both for being absent and incommunicado. Please don’t think it any more than a formality if I ask to know what they were.”
“Prudence Egwu’s brother disappeared a few years ago. Minor worked the case. You might remember it, sir, he was working under you at the time.”
“I am aware, Detective Chief Inspector, of the details of my own career. You found him in the pub, presumably.”
“I did.”
“And did you join him for a drink?”
Oates looked up at him quickly to see whether he was joking. John was one of those men with whom jokes and deadly seriousness jostled along in the same crowd, and if you got them mixed up the consequences could be dire. He was not looking at Oates, but smiling rigidly at someone on the other side of the room.
“I did what I felt was appropriate in the circumstances to get the necessary information.”
“This was information necessary for the understanding of a high profile murder investigation of which Minor has no possible knowledge, taking place in a different part of the country, for which you were responsible and which you left to the care of a Sergeant?”
He was not joking. Oates elected to stay silent. John knew perfectly well why Minor’s involvement would have been worth a look, and why the very fact that the murder was high profile made it more important to discover the nature of that involvement, but if he was pretending not to there was nothing Oates could do. He could hardly accuse his superior point blank of having overseen a case involving potential impropriety. He began to feel claustrophobic as John’s enquires surrounded him. The room was hot with the packed bodies of the recent conference.
“And what information did you glean?”
“Minor said there was nothing odd in the original investigation, but he did mention that a number of accusations were made against Nottingham by Prudence Egwu with respect to the disappearance of his brother, a fact neither Charles nor Miranda thought worth mentioning.”
“I was also aware of those particular accusations, and I did not consider them worth mentioning either. Is there anything you learnt in London of any actual relevance to the case?”
“I stopped off at the victim’s house on the way back out here. There’s been a break-in. Someone lifted some papers from his office. I think they might have been related to his own investigations into his brother’s disappearance.”
“Ah yes, Mr Egwu’s house. I have been speaking to the tech team who arrived, and they tell me they found the place in a bit of a state. They had hoped the security tapes might shed some light on the events, but apparently they have some unfortunate omissions.”
“That was me, sir. I was trying to retrieve the whole period from when I came in and I accidentally stopped the thing.”
“Really? Apparently you may also have accidentally wiped the back up. Quite extraordinarily clumsy. I think perhaps when this case is a little more settled I would be interested to hear more about the circumstances of that particular mishap.”
“Yes sir.”
“They also tell me that they discovered a glass of whisky on the desk in Mr Egwu’s office. Tell me, do you think we should have it tested for DNA in an effort to catch the perpetrator of the break-in? Or might that be a waste of time and resources?”
Oates had conducted enough interviews himself to know that if the only thing you could say was incriminating, it was best to stay silent. It was a testament to how badly the discussion had gone that he was grateful when Charles bounded back into view.
“I’m so sorry, Inspector. Now what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”
Oates looked at John, who raised an eyebrow and smiled tolerantly. Oates felt utterly disarmed. It would be difficult to pursue a line of questioning in front of John which John had just declared irrelevant. But if he missed the opportunity now, the fact that Charles and Miranda had concealed their knowledge would stale.
“I wanted to ask if you had ever come across Mr Egwu or his family prior to his stay at St Margaret’s,” Oates said.
“Ah, you’re referring to our little falling out over his brother’s disappearance? Well, John can tell you all about that. We’d buried the hatchet some time ago, if that’s not an unfortunate expression in the circumstances. One of the benefits of being a monopoly. You can be as cross with us as you like, but if you don’t want to die you still have to make nice and give us your money. I thought that was common knowledge. Besides, between you and me if you add up all the people in the world with an axe to grind against Miranda, Nottingham wouldn’t have a single customer left!”
“How long ago did you ‘bury the hatchet’?”
“Well, I can’t speak for Mr Egwu, and since he can’t speak for himself I suspect his own views on the matter will forever remain a mystery. But we have never borne him any ill will, not even at the time he was making his unfortunate allegations. Capability was a great colleague and friend to all of us, and Prudence having lost his brother, the stress he was under, it was quite understandable he might lash out. It was all some time ago…”
“But Prudence only had the treatment very recently. In the last month or so. Isn’t that true?”
For the first time, Oates sensed a brittleness at the edges of Charles’s bonhomie. He smiled tightly. “I’m afraid I really can’t tell you. As you know, Inspector, I am a humble PR man, and my kingdom stretches only as far as the carpark you see outside. If you want to check Nottingham’s clinical records I suggest you speak to her majesty. Now I don’t wish to be unfriendly, but as you can see the barbarians are still very much at the gates.”
“Of course, Charles. Thank you for your time.”
“Don’t mention it, Superintendent! Inspector Oates, I’m sure this is merely au revoir.”
The two policemen stood in silence. Oates felt the blood heating his cheeks. His hand was still sore from hitting the wall in Prudence Egwu’s house, and he flexed his fingers, using pain to bring himself back under control. Charles had interrupted their conversation before he could give a full account of the afternoon’s events. He had said nothing to John of his visit to Hector’s place, or the subsequent shootout at One New Change. As the two of them stood together, he decided he wasn’t going to say anything more. Partly he knew that if John found out about the shooting, he would take him off the case. He would take his gun and send him home to wait for internal investigations. That wasn’t going to happen – he had made that decision when he had left the scene. He would pay for it later, of course, but that didn’t matter now.
But there was something more, something for which the simple practical point of wishing to continue the investigation could not account. He had told John enough already to make a clever cop suspicious, and John was a clever cop. He was actively resisting any line of enquiry which led away from Ali, and the simple explanation which had been proffered by the authorities at the spa.
“I want to interview Ali Farooz again,” Oates said.
“Of course. Do you mind at all if I sit in?”
“I’ve formed a rapport with Farooz. I’ll get more out of him if I speak to him alone.”
“Fair enough. Presumably you won’t object if I observe from outside the room. Or is Mr Farooz camera shy? I wouldn’t want to upset what is clearly a delicate relationship.”
“Of course not, sir.”
“Good. Well, we’ve set something up in one of the cabins in the maintenance complex.”
“Ali’s been moved? I specifically asked Bhupinder not to move him and not to let anyone in to see him.”
“I’ll tell you an amazing thing about orders, Detective Chief Inspector. The closer one is to one’s inferiors, the more likely they are to be obeyed. A pity you had such pressing business in London.”
19:00 HOURS
FRIDAY 19 JULY
1976 (THE GREAT SPA)
T
HEY MET
B
HUPINDER
inside, and Oates found his subordinate couldn’t look him in the eye when he gave them an update. Seeing Bhupinder’s glum look, Oates stopped being cross with him and started being cross with himself. There was nothing Bhupinder could have done to resist John’s orders once he was in the spa. He should never have left him alone. He told them that Ali had been transported out of the main part of St Margaret’s entirely, down to the maintenance complex that Oates had seen clustered along the tunnels at the spa’s edge. The easiest way to reach these rooms was from the outside of the dome, but given the chaos at the gates it would probably be preferable to approach from within. Because of the Great Spa’s unique geography, the journey was quicker by river than by road.
A blue-suited groundsman took Oates and the Superintendent down one of the side streets that wound around the walls of St Margaret’s to a small dock, shady beneath the trees. When Oates had departed that morning the first classes of the day were beginning, but the double-time in the spa had pulled its weird trick, conjuring a long sunny evening from the domed sky. A bleached beer can floated in the water beside the punts, and Oates could see the glint of fish in the water. Among the wooden boats was a small launch. Oates and the Superintendent climbed into the bow, and he was gratified to see that even John’s dignity couldn’t survive the rocking of a skiff on the water. When the porter hopped in by the engine, the shift in gravity almost threw the Superintendent into the river. He sat down heavily, and looked around to see who had noticed.
As they pulled away from the shore, the chug of the engine sounded outrageous in the still twilight. They moved off upriver under the stares of the students lolling in their punts, or sunbathing along the banks. They headed in the opposite direction to the one Oates and Miranda had taken along the towpath that morning.
On his first arrival in the spa, Oates had wondered how anyone could enter into the self-deception demanded by the project without feeling ridiculous. He felt that for himself it would have tripped embarrassment in him like a circuit-breaker, shorting the suspension of disbelief. As they moved down the river in the light of the setting sun however, he found that the challenge was not to suspend his disbelief, but rather to keep reminding himself that what he felt and saw was not real. On an intellectual level, he still thought the entire idea of so many powerful people taking a month to play make-believe would have been merely ridiculous, had the expenditure of money and effort required not rendered it obscene.