The Cradle in the Grave Read Free Page A

Tamsin.
    â€˜I need you in here now,’ he says. ‘What are you doing? Are you busy?’
    Move your head ninety degrees to the right and you’ll see what I’m doing, you weirdo. I’m sitting here staring at you, in all your weirdness.
    I have an inspired idea. The numbers on the card I’m holding make no sense to me. Laurie makes no sense to me. ‘Did you send me these numbers?’ I ask him.
    â€˜What numbers?’
    â€˜Sixteen numbers on a card. Four rows of four.’
    â€˜What numbers?’ he asks more abruptly than last time.
    Does he want me to recite them? ‘Two, one, four, nine . . .’
    â€˜I didn’t send you any numbers.’
    As so often when I’m talking to Laurie, I’m stumped. He has a habit of saying one thing while leaving you with exactly the opposite impression. This is why, even though he’s said he didn’t send me any numbers, I have the sense that if I’d said, ‘Three, six, eight, seven’ instead of ‘Two, one, four, nine’, he might have said, ‘Oh, yeah, that was me.’
    â€˜Bin it, whatever it is, and get in here, soon as you can.’ He cuts me off before I have a chance to reply.
    I swing my chair from side to side and watch him. At this point, surely, anyone halfway normal would glance across the courtyard to see if I was obeying orders, which I’m not: I’m not binning the card, I’m not leaping to my feet. All of which Laurie would see if he turned his head in my direction, but he doesn’t. Instead, he pulls at the open collar of his shirt as if he can’t breathe, and stares at his closed office door, waiting for me to walk through it. That’s what he wants to happen, and so he expects it to happen.
    I can’t take my eyes off him, though on the physical evidence alone, I really should be able to. As Tamsin once said, it’s all too easy to imagine him with a bolt through his neck. Laurie’s attractiveness has little to do with his looks and everything to do with his being a legend in human form. Imagine touching a legend. Imagine . . .
    I sigh, stand up, and bump into Tamsin on my way out of my office. She’s wearing a black polo-neck, a tiny white corduroy skirt, black tights and knee-high white boots. If something isn’t either white or black, Tamsin won’t wear it. She once wore a blue patterned dress to work, and felt insecure all day. The experiment was never repeated. ‘Laurie wants you,’ she tells me, looking nervous. ‘Now, he says. And Raffi wants me. I don’t like the atmosphere today. There’s something not right.’
    I hadn’t noticed. There are a lot of things I don’t notice when I’m in the office these days, and only one thing that I do.
    â€˜I reckon it’s something to do with Helen Yardley’s death,’ says Tamsin. ‘I think she was murdered. No one’s told me anything, but two detectives came to see Laurie this morning. CID, not your regular bobbies.’
    â€˜Murdered?’ Automatically, I feel guilty, then angry with myself. I didn’t kill her. She’s nothing to do with me; her death’s nothing to do with me.
    I met her once, a few months ago. I spoke to her briefly, made her a coffee. She’d come in to see Laurie and he’d done his usual trick of vanishing without trace, having confused Monday with Wednesday, or May with June – I can’ t remember why he wasn’t there when he ought to have been. It’s an uncomfortable thought, that a woman I met and spoke to might have been murdered. At the time I thought it was strange to meet somebody who’d been in prison for murder, especially someone who looked and seemed so friendly and normal. ‘She’s just a woman called Helen,’ I thought, and for some reason it made me feel so awful that I had to leave the office immediately. I cried all the way home.
    Please let her death