The Convenience of Lies by Geoffrey Seed Read Free Book Online Page B

carrying.’
    ‘You’re mistaken, old man.’
    ‘If it’s a phone, tell me the number.’
    He gave him a tipsy grin and reeled it off. Hoare wrote it down, still shaking his head. Benwick opened a wall cupboard and found two glasses which he rinsed in the sink below then half filled each with Scotch.
    ‘A toast,’ he said. ‘To a good long walk down Felony Lane together.’
    Hoare, too sober for his own good, knew he was in for an unforgiving session. If he thought Benwick would let his guard slip and reveal some personal secrets, he was mistaken. But as the night wore on, he learned Etta Ross had answers for everything. She kept cash in the flat because she didn’t trust banks and was saving up to pay the fees at a special school for Ruby. Any suggestion of prostitution offended her. The men - and some women - neighbours saw coming to her flat were punters paying for tarot card readings or sharing her harmless fascination with the occult.
    ‘What about all those French letters she had?’
    ‘She’s a single mother, thirty-eight years old,’ Benwick said. ‘Doesn’t want to get pregnant at her time of life.’
    ‘And the tart’s nursing outfit?’
    ‘Left over from a fancy dress party two years back.’
    ‘That means you’re no nearer to proving anything against her.’
    ‘Nope.’
    ‘So what are you planning next?’
    ‘We drag that reservoir.’
    ‘So you do think Ruby’s dead?’
    ‘Look, if she’d only fallen in, she would’ve floated to the surface by now but if she’s been weighted down - ’
    ‘God almighty. You can’t think that of any mother.’
    ‘That’s what cops do, Mr Hoare… think bad of people. Talking of which, how did the meet with your reptile friend go?’
    ‘McCall? Fine, but you’ll need to size him up yourself.’
    ‘I’ll be doing that, all right.’
    ‘OK, but a word to the wise - he’ll not buy any old nonsense. He’ll scratch away till he gets the story he wants.’
    They finished the whisky. Benwick dozed in the flat’s only easy chair. Hoare saw inside his open jacket. It definitely wasn’t a phone in his pocket. But why would a policeman need a gun on a no-mark job like this? No doubt McCall would ask the same question. Hoare barely slept. Ruby’s disquieting little face swam in the darkness of his night. She seemed to be struggling for breath though the lungs of London rose and fell to the rhythm of the dawning day. Its clamour would soon begin again and all her cries for help be drowned out.

 
    Ten
     
    Nothing ever quite stays the same on a beach. Dunes move, sand shifts and cliffs fall into the sea. Yet Staithe End cottage had remained unaltered in all the years since Lexie and McCall last stayed there, a doll’s house set under an artist’s sky and remembered from days they thought gone forever. Now they walked the wind-blown beach they’d known so well, solitary figures under shelving grey clouds which might yet bring rain.
    Within each was an unspoken desire to recover what time steals and seldom, if ever, returns. For them, words were not necessary. Memories were enough.
    *
    McCall is smoking on the empty upper deck of a bus butting its cautious way through a North Sea gale. They pass a derelict windmill, its sails gone, iron innards exposed within a domed wooden cap rotting in the salt sea air. A farmer on a blue tractor is ploughing a field. The soil glistens cold and damp as it peels before the blade and the tumbling white gulls which follow.
    The bus reaches its turn-round stop by a granite war memorial in the coastal Lincolnshire village where Lexie and her troupe will stage their final show early that afternoon. They have performed at ten schools in two weeks. Eight young hopeful actors in a tin box of a Bedford van she has hired filled with props and costumes till there is no space for a passenger.
    So McCall has followed on, hitch-hiking across the farmlands of East Anglia to stay close to Lexie. Not all the strolling players approve