Doldrums

11

Doldrums

    Monday morning. The sky was a clear, bright blue, the birds were singing, the cicadas were chirping and the case wasn’t going anywhere.

    “Whaddabout a grid search?” said Dave Short eagerly—and not for the first time.

    Mike sighed.

    Tony Harrod pointed out with an uneasy glance at the D.C.I. “It isn’t a bombing case, Dave.”

    “Quite,” said Mike heavily.

    “No, but I still reckon—”

    “Shut up,” said Mike heavily. “Unless you’re volunteering to crawl round every inch of that blasted loose muck in Carrano’s shrubbery?”

    “Hah, hah,” replied Dave, reddening.

    “We’ve been over it pretty good,” Tony pointed out uneasily.

    “Yes,” Mike agreed. “Though mind you, we could do a grid search of that sitting-room of Carrano’s.”—Dave’s protuberant blue eye brightened.—“We might even pick up a fibre or two, what’s more. Off the clothes of someone that had no right to be there. Like Mrs Green, for example. Or that Armitage bloke. Or even Carrano himself, if we’re very lucky. Of course, the fact that the Green woman’s only vacuumed it about fourteen times since—”

    “Very funny,” said Dave glumly. He had gone rather red, though. And Tony had gone very red. Mike wasn’t into bullying his subordinates, thick or not. He sighed a little. But on the other hand he wasn’t into apologizing to thick subordinates for showing up their thickness, either. So he didn’t apologize.

    “We’ve done Jack Banks,” noted Dave glumly after a while.

    “Eh?” said Mike dully.

    “His clothes, I mean. Sent ’em into the lab. And his sneakers.”

    “Yes. Though I suppose it’s possible he... Never mind.”

    “The Jablonski kid reckoned that was what he was wearing,” said Dave.

    “Yeah. The one point on which their stories more or less agree.”

    “I wouldn’t say that,” said Dave uncomfortably.

    “No,” agreed Tony, looking warily at Mike.

    “True. They also agree on the fact that Jablonski was wearing denim shorts and nothing on his feet that day. As of the time when young Banks went out.”

    “Well, we’ve done his sneakers, too,” said Dave, though not with marked optimism.

    “And his jandals,” said Tony, definitely glum.

    Mike manfully repressed a sigh and said: “He does actually admit they’re the jandals he wears to the Tepid Baths, we might have expected to find traces of chlorinated water on them.”

    The two young men looked at him gloomily. And not only because the D.C.I., unlike most of the community, had said “the Tepid Baths” instead of “the Teps.”

    Silence fell.

    Eventually Mike said on a tired note: “It’s no use looking at the door like that, Dave. The tooth fairy isn’t actually gonna walk in with our murderer on a plate, ya know.”

    “No, but if he stares at it long enough, Sergeant Baxter might walk in with a nice hot brekkie on a plate!” said Tony with a laugh.

    Dave Short was notorious in the Force for his inability to get out of his pit in the mornings. Tony Harrod, on the other hand, lived at home with his mum. Therefore simultaneously Mike sighed and Dave said loudly: “All right for some!”

    “Should’ve taken Ronnie Ngatea up on ’is offer to board with them. His mum woulda made sure ya didn’t leave home without a nice cooked brekkie!” said Tony with what was definitely a giggle, getting rather above himself.

    Dave glared.

    “Puha and pakeha, prob’ly!” suggested Tony, definitely above himself, with another giggle.

    Dave glanced at Mike and said sourly to the unfortunate young D.C.: “You wanna watch it, these days ya can be drummed out of the Force for them racist remarks.”

    The young man looked nervously at the D.C.I.

    “Yes,” agreed Mike, not smiling. Inwardly he groaned. Everybody—everybody—used the phrase. Hell, he’d heard old Mr Dawson, who had the farm next to the Mitchells’ down home, use it innumerable times. Be fair to say it was one of his favourite sayings, actually. And he was as black as the ace of spades. All this trendy liberal non-racist stuff was crap. Pure garbage. He didn’t say any of this to his two subordinates, however.

    “Sorry,” said Tony, red to the roots of the neat brown hair.

    “Look, just get on with interviewing those five hundred more clowns that think they mighta seen Carrano on his way home from the Priors’, or mighta given him a lift or— Anyway, whatever it was they thought, push off and get it out of them.”

    “Yes,” said Tony, trying to squint at the copy of the day’s duty sheet on Mike’s desk without letting it be apparent he was squinting.

    “You’re with Constable Macpherson,” said Mike wearily. “He’s in the front, swilling tea. And just make sure one of you’s got a tape in his recorder, this time.”

    “Yes, sir!” gulped Tony, very red. He shot out to the far side of the flimsy partition that separated Mike’s “office” from the rest of the Murder HQ in the small and very stuffy Pohutukawa Bay Community Hall. Thence he could be heard haranguing the unfortunate “Elle” Macpherson about his tape recorder. So now they knew who was the tit that had— Yes, well.

    “Pair of dills,” said Dave on a sour note.

    “True,” agreed Mike drily.

    Dave glanced at him dubiously.

    “Have you had anything to eat this morning?”

    Dave went very red.

    “More fool you. Get down the dairy and get yourself something, for God’s sake!”

    “No, I—”

     Mike looked at his watch. “It’s just gone eight. Are you planning to spend the next four hours or so sorting out the inconsistencies in Ma and Pa Jablonskis’ evidence on an empty stomach?”

    “Me?” he gulped.

    “You,” said Mike grimly. “In between doing that you can coordinate the stuff coming in from those idiots that are trying to track down witnesses to Ma Jablonski’s trip to the Bay in that old banger. And while you’re about it, try and correlate it with the eye-witness times for Banks’s taxi.”

    “But we’ve got definite—”

    “Coming and going,” said Mike grimly.

    Dave’s jaw dropped.

    “Taxi drivers are people,” said Mike grimly.

    “Yeah, but that old joker—”

    “Did he have a fare after that? –DID HE?” shouted Mike.

    “No. But—”

    “Look, we’ve got approximately half the population of the Coast that had a motive for bumping Banks off, as opposed to a handful of people who actually knew he was up at Carrano’s that evening. I’d quite like to eliminate one or TWO of them!”

    “Yeah. Righto, Mike,” said Dave glumly.

    Mike swallowed a sigh. “Look,” he said more quietly: “go and get yourself a sticky bun. And while you’re at it you can just run over the dairy bloke’s story again.”

    Dave looked slightly more cheerful, but pointed out: “He’ll’ve told it to millions of people by now.”

    “Never mind, check anyway.”

    The D.S. went over to the flimsy door in the flimsy partition wall. “Do you want anything?”

    “Mm? Well, you could get me a small pot of plain yoghurt for morning tea.”

    “They won’t have that Bulgarian one you like,” warned Dave.

    “No, I don’t suppose they will. Just whatever they’ve got.”

    “What if they’ve only got sweetened?”

    “Then don’t get it,” said Mike heavily, wishing he’d never mentioned the bloody stuff.

    “Righto.” He hesitated. “If I’m gonna be checking the Jablonskis’ stories, who are you gonna be doing?” he said in a cautious voice.

    Mike had opened a folder. “Mr and Mrs Prior,” he replied, not looking up.

    “Oh,” said Dave. Even though D.C.I. Collingwood’s voice had expressed not the slightest indication of excitement, eagerness, or even interest, he went out looking very thoughtful indeed. He knew what it meant when Mike started going over a witness’s evidence himself.

    Mike had decided the Pom must’ve got himself an expensive answering machine like the one Carrano had just bought Polly and gone out under the mistaken impression he’d turned it on, but he finally answered his phone. “Good, you are there,” he said grimly.

    “Hullo, Mike,” said Roger warily. “What can I do for you?”

    “I need to come up and talk to you about a few of the cast of characters. I’m not sure when I’ll make it, but it’ll be some time this evening.”

    It was only two-thirty; Roger had thought he meant he was coming immediately. He said in some relief: “This evening will be fine. Er, if it’s all right with you, I think I’ll leave the phone off the hook, I’ve simply got to get some work done. Just come when it suits.”

    “Righto. –What are you working on?” he asked curiously.

    The Pom replied with super-irritating vagueness: “Mm? Oh—just an article... I’ll see you later, Mike.”

    “See ya,” said Mike, hanging up rather abruptly. “Stuck-up Pommy git,” he muttered.

    Dave had come in during this conversation. “Was that that Browne type?”

    Mike grunted.

    Dave snapped open his Coke can. “He coulda done it, ya know.”

    “So could my old aunty’s cat,” replied Mike, very coldly.

    “Did we do his fingernails?” asked Dave idly.

    On the Wednesday they’d taken scrapings from the fingernails of everyone they’d placed anywhere near the scene, even before the scratches on Banks’s head had been identified as almost definitely having been caused by human fingernails.

    “YES!” shouted Mike.

    “Aw. Yeah,” agreed Dave, unmoved. “Wasn’t it him that asked us if we hadda have a warrant to do that?”

    “YES!” shouted Mike.

    “Thought so,” he agreed, unmoved.

    Mike took a deep breath and got up. He marched over to the bleared little window and peered out at a view of the old wooden bungalow next-door and the scraggy hedge that separated the two buildings.

    “Those scrapings yielded, you may remember,” he said acidly, “the interesting facts—amongst others—that Browne uses Pears soap and a fountain pen that leaks, that Rod Jablonski had peeled an orange not long since, that Jack Banks had used lavender-scented soap that never came from that cabin him and Jablonski are sharing and had had his finger somewhere unmentionable in the bloody recent past”—Dave looked sick; on the other hand Mike didn’t know that he blamed him—“that Old Man Jablonski hasn’t cleaned his fingernails within living memory and that Ma Jablonski had just had a fit of washing every net curtain in the house in bleach by hand. That morning.”

    Dave didn’t react to the tone. “Ye-ah...” he said thoughtfully.

    “What?” asked Mike tiredly.

    “I rung Mum about that,” he admitted.

    “WHAT?”

    “It’s all right, I never said it had anything to do with the case!” he said hurriedly.—Truthfully or not, registered Mike.—“No, well, I thought it sounded a bit funny, ya see.” He glanced at Mike’s face. “Anyway,” he said hurriedly: “Mum reckons that ya don’t do net curtains in bleach: it ruins them, they’re nylon, ya see. They go all yellow.”

    “Ma Jablonski’s net curtains are yellow, all right,” agreed Mike.

    Dave looked at him plaintively.

    “Look,” he said tiredly, “she’s batty, okay? Type that would bleach her net curtains, just to spite ’em. But fair enough, it’s an inconsistency, you can include it with all the five hundred others.”

    “Five million, ya mean.”

    “Yeah. –Well, go on, write it down,” said Mike wearily.

    “I have,” he said, going very red.

    “I’ll say this for you, Dave,” conceded Mike; “you’re thorough.”

    Dave looked at him dubiously.

    “Yes, it was the right thing to do—and checking up with your mum was a good idea,” said Mike, a trifle tiredly.

    Dave brightened.

    “If Ma Jablonski’s our bird, we’ll call your mum as an expert witness,” added Mike meanly.

    Dave went very red and glared at him.

    “Get on with it,” he said heavily.

    Dave sat down obediently at his untidy desk. Mike turned and stared glumly out the window again.

    After some time a young uniformed constable came in and placed a folder reverently on Mike’s desk.

    “What?” said Mike, turning from the window with a frown.

    “It’s that report you wanted on the Carrano Group, sir. And D.I. Kingsford rung back and he said you could give him a bell any time, only Jake Carrano’s solider than the Bank of England.”

    “Is that Murray Kingsford from Fraud?” asked Dave, looking up.

    “Yeah,” admitted the young man, glancing at Mike.

    “I know him,” conceded the D.S., returning to his work.

    “Uh—yeah. Um—Sergeant Baxter rung through, sir, he says they’ve had three more old ladies claiming they’ve seen prowlers and two more old nutters claiming it was them that done it on the phone today, sir,” he added uneasily to Mike.

    Dave looked up again. “This’d be a need-to-know, would it?”

    The constable gulped.

    “I asked Jim Baxter to keep me posted,” said Mike mildly, strolling over to his desk. He picked up the report, looked inside it, and winced. “Thanks, Constable, that’ll be all.”

    “Yessir!” The boy went out.

    “Unfledged,” muttered Mike into the report.

    “Wet behind the ears, more like,” muttered Dave, not looking up.

    Mike sat down, sighing. After a while he admitted: “I need an executive summary of this.”

    Dave looked up cautiously. “Executive summary” was a brand-new phrase round the C.I.B. But not so brand-new that he hadn’t heard Mike Collingwood’s pithy opinion of it. However, Mike’s face looked merely tired and hot. So he said: “Get one of Murray Kingsford’s boys onto it?”

    “Yeah.” Mike sighed. “Someone with a degree in economics, preferably.”

    Dave had stretched out a hand to the phone. He paused, looking at him uncertainly.

    “I mean it. Brightest boy he’s got. This”—he tapped it, looking rather grim—“has got what appear to be the cold, hard facts. I want a report that says if they’re the facts and if so how they relate to reality.”

    “Uh—yeah.”

    “Well, go on, they’ll all be sitting on their bums doing sod-all in Fraud, as per usual,” said Mike irritably and not particularly felicitously. “Give ’im a bell. And make sure he does put his best man onto it.”

    “Ye-ah...” Dave looked uncertainly at the report.

    “Fax it,” said Mike tiredly.

    Dave adored using the fax machine. His face lit up.

    “I mean,” said Mike heavily, returning to his work, “get a constable to fax it.”—Dave’s face fell.—“Get on with it.”

    Dave got on with it.

    Browne was on his verandah. Mike peered at his watch in the gloom. “It’s nearly nine. The mozzies’ll be out, you don’t want to go on sitting there, do you?”

    “No,” said Roger with a sigh. “I don’t want to go on sitting here.” He got up, stretching and grimacing. “So much for ‘le pays parfumé que le soleil caresse’,” he muttered sourly to himself. “Mosquitoes and humidity, more like.”

    “Is that my cue to say ‘Eh, wot?’” replied Mike sourly.

    “What?” he said vaguely. “Oh—no, sorry, I did but speak a thought aloud... Come along in, Mike.”

    In the sitting-room he said: “I thought you might bring your—er—offsider.”

    Mike thought for a fleeting moment of telling the Pom not to even try speaking the vernacular, not to even try. But he didn’t. In the first place he couldn’t be blowed and in the second place Browne’d probably never recover from the shock of hearing him, dumb cop, use a four-syllable word. “No. I won’t say this is off the record,” he said, setting his recorder on the coffee table, “but I just want more background, really. About some of the personalities.”

    “I see.”

    “Seeing as how we haven’t bloody well got any evidence to speak of!” he added irritably.

    “No-o... What about all that earnest fingerprinting and fingernail-scraping your men did? Not to mention the crawling business in the shrubbery.”

    Mike replied coldly: “All the physical evidence has been thoroughly examined.”

    To his complete mystification the Pom replied: “Ah, yes. Forensically. By the forensic experts. Later to be presented in court as forensic evidence.”

    “If it bears on the case, yes.”

    “Only if it bears on the case forensically, I presume,” he said, looking down his nose at him.

    “YES! Look, what is this?” shouted Mike.

    “Sorry,” said Roger with a sigh. “It must be the shock of finding the ‘pays parfumé que le soleil caresse’ infested with mozzies and—er—”

    “Dumb cops,” said Mike sourly before he could stop himself.

    “No,” the joker said, going red. “I was intending to refer to the humidity but I couldn’t find a euphonious plural to be coupled gracefully with ‘mosquitoes’.”

    “Thought mosquitoes only did that with other mosquitoes?”

    Roger gave a stratled laugh. “Yes!”

    “Let’s see... What about these mates of Carrano’s that might just have been involved in some way with Don Banks? That old guy, Ron Carewe. Didn’t he have it in for Banks over that Puriri senior citizens’ development? And—uh—let’s see... Mr and Mrs Prior, Count Jablonski and that wife of his?”

    “I hardly know most of those people.”

    “Maybe. But according to Polly you’re pretty pally with Margaret Prior. –What’s Prior think of that, by the way?”

    Roger stared at him. “I’ve no idea.”

    Mike gave up on that one. “Well, come on, give us your impressions.”

    “What, give you my opinion as to whether old Ron Carewe could have murdered Don Banks? Leaping over the pool fence, perhaps? He must be sixteen stone.”

    “No, I don’t want your opinion, I want your observations. I admit that none of your observations so far have thrown blinding light on anything much, but…”

    “Then why are you here, Mike?”

    Ouch. Mike sighed. “Because I’ve run out of—” He rubbed his straight nose. “Out of leads, if you like. Out of loose ends to unravel, out of ideas.”

    “I still think you’d do better to go back to crawling round the oleanders with a magnifying glass, but— Hold on.” He got up and went out.

    “A diary?” said Mike limply as he came back with a good-sized exercise book in his fist.

    “Yes.” Roger sat down and pulled a face. “I more or less kept it up during the winter—”

    “Seeing as how your life was one frantic social whirl,” agreed Mike, smiling a little.

    “Precisely. Er… that dinner party of Joanie’s came first, I think… Yes. It was mainly Baptist friends of Tom’s and Joanie’s. The Priors were there,” he admitted glumly.

    “Go on,” said Mike neutrally.

    Roger gave him a reluctant look, but went on. Quite soon Mike found himself wondering how other eyes might have seen this social whirl that he’d apparently got himself involved in last winter. Like somebody normal, or even halfway normal!

    We find, already seated on the pink and grey striped Indian cotton of Joanie’s neat suite when we arrive, that Derek and Margaret Prior whom we encountered at Jake’s barbecue last summer. This seems an odd juxtaposition of personalities: Margaret’s brittle, nervous intelligence and Derek’s unctuous self-satisfaction can surely have little in common with the simple, open manners of Tom and Joanie. But soon I realize that the connection is a Baptist one.

    Mike repressed a sigh. Not to say, a strong impulse to tell the verbose tit to cut the cackle.

    Margaret seems rather more relaxed than she did at Jake’s—perhaps because the company here makes fewer demands on her social skills. She asks me how I’m settling in. The cool, English voice is like a draught of cold water.

    Roger looked up with a grimace. “Infelicitous.”

    Good word for it. Mind you, it did explain why Browne, who wasn’t yet thirty, seemed to have chummed up with Mrs Prior, who must be forty-five if a day. Expatriate Brits together, see?

    “Um—the next bit’s just about the men talking cars while I was chatting to Margaret... Oh, yes, Joanie’s dips!” he said, with a little smile.

    “Dips?” said Mike foggily.

    “Correct middle-class party fare.”

    “Oh—those dips!” Mike was about to tell him he could skip them, but he was already going on:

    I ask Margaret whether this dip is avocado, not fearing to display my ignorance before a fellow expatriate. She scoops up a minute portion from the bowl before us on the coffee table and agrees it may be. She eats no more of it, and when Joanie resurfaces with a tray of tiny hot things on sticks she displays no interest in them, either. Is this innate good taste? Or merely that she is slimming? Or is she one of those women—Mother being a case in point—who seem immune to sensual pleasures?

    Well, yeah. Mike’s money would definitely have been on the last choice, there. Explained why Prior played away from home so much, that was for sure. Mind you, at the same time the woman was clearly dotty about him.

    “Prior make a pass at anyone?” he asked.

    Roger replied without hesitation: “No, he generally restrains himself in front of Margaret. The punch was non-alcoholic, too.”

    Right, well, that made it pretty plain that blasted Browne knew that Prior cheated on his wife and that when he was out of the Baptists’ orbit he drank like a fish! Mike took a deep breath. “He ever had a go at Polly?”

    That stopped him in his tracks. He went very red. “You’d better ask her, hadn’t you?”

    “I might do that. That it for the dippy affluent middle classes?”

    “Mm. More or less. I’ve got something here about Prior’s bulgy pale blue eyes.”

     Mike winced. “I’ve seen them, ta. Anything more up-to-date?”

    “Yes, but possibly not more helpful. Hold on, I’ll make some coffee.”

    When he came back with it he flicked through the diary, making faces, but admitted: “There were several evenings that were more enjoyable: one at Hans and Babs’s, and a couple at Jill Davis’s. –People from the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics.”

    “I suppose those ones were very intellectual,” replied Mike on a sour note.

    “Not particularly; we talked about music and books, mainly.”

    “Cripes, us jokers that just get together for a few beers and chew the fat over the rugby yarns’d call that intellectual, mate! I meanta say: books!”

    “I know all about the rugby yarns, thanks, so don’t bother,” he said, sipping his coffee.

    Mike sighed a little and sipped his. As usual, it was perfect; was the secret in not being mean with the coffee, or getting it ground just right, or what? “How come you know about the rugby yarns?” he asked finally.

    Wincing, Roger replied: “Rod and Jack took me on a pub crawl. Towards the end of the term, that would have been.” He turned over a few pages. “The horribly Baptist party at the Priors’ was before that.”

    “Who was there?” Mike asked in what he hoped sounded like a casual voice.

    “Oh… Joanie and Tom. And your favourite suspect, of course!”

    Mike managed to get out: “Who?”

    “Old Ron Carewe.”

    Mike sagged a bit. “Aw—yeah: our latest theory is he pole-vaulted over Carrano’s fence. Well, go on, then.”

    “Um, let me see… This bit’s just about the doe-eyed Avril. –Married, very Baptist, and not for me,” he explained sourly.

    “There’s a fair bit of it about,” conceded Mike.

    “Yes!” said Roger with a sudden laugh. “Er—well, this is when I first met Mrs Jablonski.”

    Mike tried to look neutral as he read out:

    It is one of those parties where one is inevitably bailed up in a corner by the person with whom one least wishes to spend an evening. Clutching a delicate china plate in one hand and a glass of bright orange punch in the other, I wish silently and desperately that Esmé Jablonski would go away and leave me in peace. But having trapped her audience, she seems determined it will not now escape her. Her hoarse voice goes on and on; spittle appears at the corners of her mouth and her beaky head bobs emphatically at me. With that long, scraggy neck she resembles nothing so much as a demented emu.

    “Cripes. Well, yeah, that’s her, all right,” Mike admitted with a shudder.

    “Mm. Margaret eventually rescued me, and gave me an involved account of why Mrs Jablonski goes to their church rather than the one in Brown’s Bay. –Sorry, Mike, that’s the Puriri Baptist Church. The Priors live in Kowhai Bay, of course, but it’s too small for a church. Then she told me about the woman’s sad, sad life.”

    “Hang on: why did she switch churches?”

    “A row about nothing with the local minister,” he said heavily.

    “Right—of course. And the sad, sad life?”

    “Margaret didn’t precisely narrate,” said Roger heavily.—Unlike some, acknowledged Mike silently.—“It was more a series of sad, soft phrases. I did write them down, as best I could; at that point I was fancying myself as a front runner in the telling social document stakes. –Here you are.” He held the diary open at the page for him.

    “Um, lessee. ‘Her little boy... That was when she was married to Jake, of course. A terrible tragedy… Incurable... And then he died; it was for the best, I suppose, but…’ I see,” said Mike, not commenting on the flaming dots. Though it had been one Helluva struggle not to read them out as “dot, dot, dot.”

    “She did say that it was such a pity that Esmé doesn’t get on better with Rod, because he’s such a nice boy, but at that point I couldn’t take any more and slid off towards the punch. Non-alcoholic, again,” he added drily. Mike swallowed in spite of himself. “That was even better: bloody Derek Prior was in charge of it and told me I must find all this a bit unsophisticated compared to what I was used to, not neglecting to add with a conspiratorial smile as I lodged a feeble protest: ‘Oh, come on, old man! They’re frightfully good people, of course—but not varsity types!’”

    “Right: and the rest of the evening he’d’ve been sucking up to them like nobody’s business, I suppose?”

    “Exactly.”

    “Um, anyone else there that knew Don Banks?”

    Roger gave him a dry look. “Yes, old Ron Carewe, as I said.”

    “Yeah—um, sorry. We’ve eliminated him. Him and the wife were with one of the sons, the grandkids, and the son’s in-laws until just on eleven. Way down in Pakuranga, so unless they flew up here in a jet-propelled helicopter— Sorry. He’s definitely out. Never seriously suspected him anyway, even if he must’ve wanted to ring Banks’s neck after that business in the council chamber.”

    “I see. Well, I’m glad you’ve eliminated someone. Would you like a whisky, Mike?”

    Mike sighed. “Better not, thanks; I’ve got to drive all the way back to town.”

    “Oh? I thought you were staying up here?”

    “Mm. Got a meeting in town tomorrow, first thing, though.” He grimaced. “With the Chief Super.”

    “I see. You live in town, do you?”

    “Yeah.” Mike’s small flat was in Sandringham—about as boring a suburb as you could imagine. Oldish, far enough out not to be inner-city, wrong side of the tracks to be Grammar Zone, lot of ageing brick houses dating from the Fifties, lot of concrete-block flats dating from the Seventies, and as it never had been very up-market, only a scattering of nice old wooden villas like the suburbs closer to Grammar were still crammed with. He owned the flat, nominally; actually the bank owned almost all of it: Christine had practically cleaned him out at the divorce. Somehow, even though the law was supposed to be fair to both parties these days, she’d ended up with the house and most of the furniture— Oh, well.

    He waited while Roger got himself a whisky, idly scanning the page he’d left the book open at. It was still about the Priors’ Goddawful do, he seemed to have written screeds about it.

    “This whole Colonial experience musta been a real shock to your system, Roger,” he noted when he came back.

    Roger looked him in the eye. “Precisely. I suggested to Polly once that it was certainly Erewhon, but she said wasn’t it more like Alice in Wonderland?”

    “Eh?”

    “Down the rabbit hole,” said Roger on a dry note

    “Eh?”

    “Don’t you remember? Alice at first assumes she’s landed in the Antipodes. Where people walk with their heads downwards.”

    Mike choked suddenly.

    Roger’s eyes twinkled. “Mm.” He took the diary back and flipped through its pages. “Verbiage, verbiage and more verbiage,” he said heavily.

    Mike wasn’t gonna contradict him.

    “I more or less gave it up at the beginning of the spring term—too busy.”

    “Uh-huh. What about that pub crawl you mentioned?”

    “Oh,” he said lamely. “That.”

    Mike looked at him hard. The Pom squirmed. “May I?” He stretched out his hand for the diary.

    Roger sighed. “Very well, we did catch sight of Mr Banks and Derek Prior at the Carter’s Bay pub. Not together.”

    Mike didn’t ask, he just started to read. There was a whole page raving on about the old pub’s “putatively nineteen-sixties” décor. He skipped that. Um… Here.

    Being on the banquette against the wall I have a good view of the big room. A small, grey-suited, middle-aged man has just come in, accompanied by a tall, ruddy man in a heavy checked woollen shirt, who looks like a farmer. Rod notes that it’s “a bit far off the beaten track” for Mr Banks, and Jack explains unwillingly that his father must be up here on business: he owns land nearby. It’s my round and, gathering up glassware, I cross to the bar. It takes some time to get served and when I turn for our table again my way is blocked by a large group of loudly talking men. Balancing the drinks with the utmost care—it would never do to disgrace myself by dropping them: no-one else seems to have the slightest difficulty in handling half a dozen drinks at a time!—I edge my way out into the middle of the room, taking a circuitous but relatively clear route back. This takes me past Mr Banks’s table, where my progress is momentarily halted by the great surging upheaval of a party of eight at an adjacent table. I hover immediately behind Banks’s chair, waiting my chance to slip past.     The little man is staring over towards the far corner of the room, towards the end booth, which is half hidden by potted plants. “Well, well, well,” he says softly. “I don’t believe it!” His voice holds a note of spiteful enjoyment. The farmer asks what’s up. “Over there,” says Banks, still staring.

    “What—the bloke with the blonde?”

    Banks makes an affirmative noise and the farmer turns round and stares at the booth, asking him if it is someone he knows. I stare, too. A coarse-looking young woman with brassy hair in an elaborate style and over-emphatic makeup— Banks purrs maliciously that the man is one of the pillars of the local Baptist Church, and I see incredulously that it is Derek Prior. My hand shakes, and Mr Banks has a narrow escape from a beery shower. Derek is smiling and talking animatedly. The crowd between us and the end booth shifts slightly. I can see Derek take the woman’s hand. She is pouting and giggling, wriggling her ample bust. Then the crowd shifts again, and my view is abruptly cut off. The farmer has obviously been deeply impressed—whether favourably or not it is difficult to tell. My God, poor Margaret!

    Fortunately the prolonged and elaborate departure rituals at the adjacent table are winding to a close, and I am past at last. A gesticulating fat man screens me from my own booth. Derek and the woman are too engrossed to notice me: giggles and protestations come from that direction. I edge back to my booth with my back to them, giving what I hope is a convincing imitation of a thin man concentrating on preventing a gesticulating fat man from knocking three full glasses from his hands.

    Mike looked up with a grimace. “Nasty, eh?”

    “Mm.”

    “We know all about Derek Prior’s little goings-on, don’t you worry.”

    “Oh,” he said weakly, very red.

    Silly tit, why hadn’t he just told him straight out? Should he put the pressure on about just how much he knew about his mate Margaret’s troubles? But in the first place they knew the lot anyway, from Carrano and Prior; and in the second place at the moment Prior’s alibi was as solid as a rock.

    “Look, the fact that we already know about it doesn’t excuse you not spilling the beans earlier. You’re a witness to the fact that Don Banks could have had a hold over Prior!”

    “I saw Banks notice him sitting with a woman, that’s all,” said Roger flatly.

    “It’s more than anybody else has admitted to seeing!” replied Mike angrily.

    “Mike, you’ve never indicated to me before tonight that you’re interested in Prior as a possible suspect.”

    Mike’s mouth opened and shut.

    “I realize he quite probably looms so large in your mind that it feels as if everyone else must be aware of the fact,”—Mike had now reddened angrily—“but no, you’ve never mentioned it to me.”

    “I’m bloody sure I’ve mentioned Don Banks, though!” he retorted angrily. “You told me you didn’t know any more, in fact less, than all the idiots on the Coast that’ve fed us the local gossip!” He paused, and looked at the Pom’s face. “All right, words to that effect.”

    “Yes. Well, I’m sorry. Perhaps I should have mentioned it. But I’m not a witness to any kind of threat, or even an actual encounter. I repeat, I merely observed Mr Banks noticing two people sitting together,” he replied firmly.

    Mike got up. “Don’t try your Oxford University precise wording out here, ta, it won’t cut any ice at all—and if you imagine you can trot out that sort of garbage in the witness box and get away with it in a New Zealand court, you’ve got another imagine coming! And don’t bother to point out you were doing your best not to drop your mate Margaret’s husband right in it up to his nasty neck: that has already dawned on the thick local cops, thanks!”

    To his extreme annoyance, Roger’s mouth merely tightened obstinately.

    Mike picked up his cassette recorder and strode over to the door. “Someone’ll be in touch. And don’t try the Oxford exactitude on with any of my blokes, thanks!”

    “It’d be a waste of breath: they appear to be incapable of rendering what one’s said into a recognisable facsimile of one’s speech patterns in any case.”

    Jesus! Did he imagine he was the only one in the entire world to have realized that? Mike went out before he could really lose his temper with him.

    Next day old Jim Baxter said to him cautiously: “Get any joy out of Browne?”

    Mike replied with a sour grimace: “Not much. The stupid tit saw Banks spotting Prior in a pub with his blonde bint but doesn’t seem to have found it worth mentioning before. His statement’s over on Dave’s desk, if you want to read it, Jim, but there’s no new facts. Well, if Prior does turn out to be our man he can be a witness, though I pity the prosecutor that tries to make him speak out!”

    “Thought he was a verbose tit?” said Jim, glancing at the statement Browne had signed.

    “Not when he’s an actual eye witness of anything,” said Mike sourly. “He gave me the exact English-language run-around and then some. –Varsity type,” he clarified. “I heard all about his highly intellectual social life last winter, too.”

    “Eh?”

    Drily Mike told him a bit about Browne’s gruesome social whirl.

    Jim looked at him weakly and said: “S’pose it doesn’t sound all that exciting, no. Uh—what’d you expect?”

    “Dunno. Lee intellectual high-life or something.”

    Jim grinned. “Aw, yeah. Well, wasn’t that it?”

    Mike admittedly tiredly: “Yeah, I suppose it was.”

    Jim then quite obviously decided maybe he hadn’t been joking after all and looked at him dubiously.

    Mike didn’t attempt to convey the absurd picture that had been floating around at the back of his head: it involved anchovy toast—Mike could not have said accurately what that was; roast chestnuts—Mike had never laid eyes on a chestnut, much less a roast one—and cosy confabs round crackling study fires on all sorts of philosophical topics under the sun. Short bursts of rowing on the river were in there, too, and varsity scarves and— God knew where he’d absorbed all this garbage from. Once upon a time he’d been a great reader, back in the days when he had the time for it. Got it out of some English book or other, no doubt.

    “Well, so much for the Pommy tit and his social whirl,” he said with an effort. “Pass us that file on Jack Banks, wouldja, Jim?”

    Jim’s plump face relaxed. He passed him the file.

    That evening, going over the files again, Mike found himself wishing there was someone he could tell that “walking with their heads downwards” crack to that’d really appreciate it. There wasn’t, though.