The Trawlerman Page 6

  ‘Just wondering, that’s all.’ She thought about Kenny Abel and his souls. If she explained why, she might sound madder than she already did. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘Come on, Alex. Why do you want to know?’

  Alex shrugged.

  ‘Actually, we might be in luck there.’

  ‘How?’ Forensics were increasingly reluctant to name precise times of death these days. Bodies decayed at different rates; temperatures fluctuated from place to place. What had been assumed to be an exact science had proved not to be. It was rare for anyone to hazard even an approximate time of death these days.

  ‘As it turns out, Mary Younis had a pacemaker. It’s gone for analysis. The pathologist says if we’re lucky, we will be able to discover the exact second it stopped working.’

  She drove Jill back, parking fifty metres from the house. A BBC news team was parked just outside the gate now, setting up a camera.

  ‘What are you doing now?’ asked Jill.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Perfect. Go home. Put your feet up. Get some rest.’

  Alex nodded. ‘Yes. Maybe that’s what I’ll do. Let me know if it was around seven minutes past ten.’

  ‘If what?’

  ‘The time when Mary Younis died.’

  ‘Seven minutes past ten. That’s just too weirdly specific.’

  ‘It won’t be, then, I promise. It’s . . . it’s too nuts. Just tell me if it is. OK?’

  Instead of turning around to head home, Alex returned to Littlestone. It took a little driving around before she found what she was looking for.

  The golf club’s main building was a huge Edwardian arts and crafts hulk, red brick, pebble-dash, black beams and white balustrades.

  Alex parked on the road close to the front of the clubhouse and walked past it onto the course. Her father had been a police officer in an era in which senior officers had all played golf. He had never played a round in his life; neither had she. But then, nor had he ever been diagnosed with PTSD.

  A golf course, she thought, should have rolling hills and trees. This one didn’t; like everything around here, it was flat. Today, in the midsummer sun, it was at its flattest.

  As she walked towards the first tee, three jolly-looking women strolled past her pulling trolleys, dressed up in loose pastel-coloured trousers and sporty hats. They were in their sixties or older.

  Alex retreated to a nearby white-painted bench and observed them as they peered at their watches, waiting for a fourth player.

  Eventually one, the shorter of the three called, ‘You don’t play, do you?’

  Alex snapped out of her thoughts. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Fancy a round? We’ve been stood up.’

  ‘I’m not a member.’

  They approached her.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that. We could sneak you on.’ They laughed like naughty schoolgirls.

  ‘I can’t actually play, either.’

  ‘Even better. Dawn here needs a handicap.’ More laughter.

  She looked up at them. ‘Can I ask you, did any of you know Ayman Younis?’

  The laughing stopped at once. ‘What are you? A journalist?’

  Alex shook her head. ‘Worse. I’m a police officer.’

  ‘Show me,’ said the shorter woman distrustfully.

  It was true, she was a police officer, but she had no right to be here flashing her warrant card; all the same, she dug into her shoulder bag, pulled out her purse and flipped it open.

  ‘New, I suppose,’ said the short woman, peering close. ‘I don’t recognise your name.’

  Alex, still seated, blinked up at her in the bright sunshine. ‘Why would you know my name?’

  ‘I was a superintendent. Thirty-one years’ service. I know most people from around here. You’re not local.’

  ‘No. I came down from the Met.’

  The woman made a face, then raised her eyebrows in a small flash of realisation. ‘Oh. You’re the one who sent poor Bill South to prison.’

  Alex knew she had not made herself popular among her colleagues. ‘Yes. I was.’

  To her surprise the woman said, ‘I don’t suppose that was very easy, having to do something like that.’

  ‘No. It wasn’t.’

  The woman stood, scrutinising her. Idly she pulled a wood from her trolley. ‘I rather admire you for doing it. It was a big shock to us, of course. Bill South is a good man, but it was the right thing. It must have taken some guts.’

  ‘I don’t think most people round here see it that way. William South, mostly.’

  A short, high laugh. ‘He has hidden depths, that man. I’m sure he respects your decision too. He’s up here all the time, you know. He came to do an ecological survey of the course last year. He still comes here bird-spotting sometimes, with that girl. His niece, I think.’

  A murmur of agreement from the other woman.

  ‘His niece?’

  ‘I think she must be a relative. She doesn’t seem to go to school or anything. I think he looks after her. Trouble at home or something, I expect. He’s a very good man.’

  Alex bristled, but said nothing. She imagined all these golf women fussing around Bill and her daughter. Zoë led a life she barely understood. ‘What about the Younises?’

  ‘Poor Mary wasn’t a member. She didn’t really do golf, did she?’

  ‘Mary Younis?’

  ‘Yes. You probably know that already.’ The woman squinted at her, trying to puzzle her out. If she had been working on the case, she would have known these details.

  ‘And Ayman Younis?’ Alex said.

  ‘You’d do better talking to Terry over there.’

  An athletic-looking man was putting on the eighteenth hole nearby. He wore a dark-blue polo shirt, white shoes, and baseball cap.

  ‘Go carefully. Terry Neill has been very upset by the whole thing. He usually partnered with Ayman.’

  ‘Neill, you say?’

  While the women teed off, Alex watched the man playing alone, tapping the ball towards the hole, missing it, and watching it roll to the other side of the green. She waited until he’d finished and was tugging his trolley towards the clubhouse, then stood. ‘Mr Neill,’ she called.

  The man stopped, peered at her, took off his baseball cap. He had a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair.

  She came closer. ‘You were a friend of Ayman Younis’s.’

  From where she stood she saw him raise the white gloved hand that held his cap to his tanned face. He was crying, she realised.

  Eleven

  His eyes were bluer for their red rims.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m quite the crier.’ They sat together on the bench in the warm afternoon sun. ‘It’s very raw, though. Last thing in the world you’d expect around here. The whole thing is so strange.’

  He was in his late forties, she guessed, which made him younger than most of the other golfers she had seen on the course this morning.

  ‘I can’t actually imagine him not being here,’ Terry Neill said, looking around him at the course, flat and empty. ‘I’ve just been playing a round without him. Saturday mornings, every one for the last couple of years, we’re out here. Every time I sliced the ball or knocked it close to the rough, I wait for him to say something, to take the piss, but he’s not there. I can’t imagine him not being up in the bar now suggesting we have a drink.’

  Alex handed him another paper hankie from her bag.

  ‘The thing about men is they don’t make friends easily. Me, at least. It’s a physical thing, grief, you know? Statistically, it’s known that some spouses die within a few months of each other. Loss alters us in significant ways.’

  She looked at him cautiously. ‘You’re not, by any chance, a counsellor are you?’

  He broke into a laugh. ‘God forbid. A
n academic. A biochemist. Former biochemist. Mostly retired now, obviously. Why? Are you looking for one? This doesn’t seem like the obvious place to start.’

  ‘No. I seem to have one already. You believe that grief is just a chemical imbalance, then?’

  He picked off his gloves. ‘That would be a very arrogant thing to say. Grief is huge. But one way to look at it might be neurology. There’s a thing called Broken Heart Syndrome, did you know that? Extreme emotions have a physical effect on heart function. You can actually die from a broken heart.’

  Alex’s mother had not died after her father had passed away. Far from it. She had prospered. Alex, who had loved her father in the way an only daughter could, had resented that.

  ‘You’re having counselling?’ he asked, wiping the underside of his eyes. ‘How are you finding the experience?’

  ‘Good, actually. It’s useful to talk. You don’t think it’s all mumbo-jumbo then?’

  ‘Not in the slightest. I’ve done a ton of it. Counsellors tend to be a bit sniffy about what we biochemists say, but if it works, it works . . . even if they don’t always understand why.’

  ‘What sort of people were the Younises?’

  ‘Good people,’ he said. ‘Mary was sweet. Quite shy. Very smart in a bookish kind of way. I was closer to Ayman. He was the archetypal Englishman.’ He laughed sadly. ‘Immigrant grandparents. All he wanted was to be part of all this.’ He waved his hand at the land around him. ‘Have a nice house. A nice family. Dogs. Golf club. More English than you and me, really. Every time he beat me at golf he apologised, for God’s sake.’ He smiled thinly, as if grateful for the chance to talk about his friend. ‘His father had an electronics engineering business. Ayman sold it about twenty years ago so he could be here with his wife and his son . . .’ He paused, took a breath. Alex saw his eyes begin to shine with tears again.

  She left it a moment before asking, ‘Can I just ask, had Ayman Younis ever been threatened by anyone?’

  ‘Your colleague asked the same. The young woman.’

  ‘The better-looking one?’

  ‘Younger. Not better-looking.’

  ‘Liar.’

  He smiled.

  Jill had interviewed him. She was already putting what pieces there might be together. ‘Was there ever a threat to his life?’

  ‘No. Like I said to her, he was liked. Respected.’

  The three ladies had not waited for their fourth partner. They were already on the second green.

  ‘You don’t mind talking like this, do you?’

  ‘God, no. To be honest, I was heading to the clubhouse, but it’s like a church in there right now after the news. Everyone’s talking in whispers. People are afraid to talk about this kind of thing.’ He tucked the tissue into a trouser pocket. He stood. ‘Do you mind going there with me?’

  She stood too, and the two walked slowly to the nearby clubhouse. ‘What were the things Ayman cared about?’

  ‘Mary, obviously. And Callum.’

  ‘Callum?’

  ‘His son. He is devoted to him. Was devoted to him. Callum is disabled. Cerebral palsy and other complications. He was born very prematurely. It’s no life at all, is it?’

  Alex thought for a while. ‘Who looked after him?’

  ‘Well, Ayman did. Financially, obviously. He was too much for them to look after on their own. He has spastic quadriplegia and cerebral visual impairment. He’s functionally blind. They tried for a while but he needs specialist care around the clock.’

  He held the door open, and led her through to a bar, where the curtains were William Morris fabric, the chairs were upholstered in leather, and silver cups sat in rows behind mahogany and glass. ‘It was what drove Ayman, I think. He had to earn enough money to keep Callum in the best conditions he could. It’s why he befriended me, in some ways. He wanted to talk about it. He always hoped that science would be able to help in some way.’

  ‘Did you ever meet Callum?’

  ‘Just the once. We went up to the nursing home in Tunbridge Wells for his twenty-first. Ayman and Mary held a party for him at Loftingswood Grange not so long ago.’ Alex must have looked puzzled, because he added, ‘The nursing home. It’s why they moved to Kent, so they could be close to him. They kind of organised their life around him. Ayman was one of those people who just wanted everything to be right, do you know what I mean? Excuse me. I’ve just got to change my shoes,’ he said. ‘You OK for a minute?’

  The bar was quiet. The man who had tried to pick her up in his Qashqai outside the Younises’ house put his head round the door, spotted her, frowned in puzzlement. Alex smiled and gave him a little wave. He retreated in embarrassment. After that, she sat on a chair and flicked through a copy of a magazine that promised three quick ways to sharpen her short game, feeling a little out of place, until Terry returned. He had replaced his golf shoes for a pair of trainers and had washed his face so that it was not so obvious he had been crying.

  There was a small oak table by the door full of leaflets. He paused at it, lifted out his wallet and put a ten-pound note into a yellow collection box marked Action CP, then turned towards her, and she noticed that the tears were back.

  Alex realised that the initials CP would stand for Cerebral Palsy and realised that Ayman Younis had probably put the box there.

  Terry sat down opposite her and gave a small smile, then apologised and wiped his face again with the back of his hand. ‘Was there anything else?’

  ‘Was Ayman Younis bitter about what happened to his son? Did he blame anyone for his condition?’

  ‘What does this have to do with the murders?’

  At the bar, a man cleaning glasses turned his head towards them. ‘Nothing, probably,’ said Alex.

  ‘It’s a nutcase, isn’t it? That’s what they’re saying.’

  ‘An odd thing for an academic to say.’

  ‘I don’t mind calling whoever killed Ayman a nutcase. I keep thinking, what must it have been like to have a madman in your house, to know you were probably going to die? It’s awful, isn’t it? I wish I had been able to talk to Ayman before he died. Just to . . . I don’t know.’ He tailed off. ‘You will find him, won’t you?’

  ‘I should tell you, I’m not part of the investigation team,’ she said. ‘I was just here.’

  ‘Oh. So why are you talking to me?’ he asked, puzzled.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have. I should go. I’m just in the area. I was curious. I had no right to be.’

  He looked at her for a minute, then said, ‘I don’t mind. I really don’t. When something like this happens, you just want someone to talk to about it, don’t you? You have to process it. It’s why you’re doing counselling. It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened around here, and look. People are carrying on with their Saturday as if nothing happened. Or avoiding the conversation at the club bar.’ He looked around. ‘Everyone should be crying, not just me. Weird, isn’t it? How people go to such lengths to avoid talking about some stuff. I mean, death and violence happen, but we only want to hear about it in stories.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘So I don’t mind at all. In fact, I should probably thank you.’

  ‘Really,’ she said, standing. ‘I should go.’

  ‘I’m here most days if you want to talk some more. In all weathers. Out there or here at the bar.’ He stood and shook hands, rather formally. When Alex was at the door she looked back. He had sat down again, alone at the table.

  She found Loftingswood Grange easily. It was a red brick Victorian house set in its own grounds, about fifteen miles north of the Younises’ house. A discreet sign on the road announced it simply as a ‘Private Nursing Home’.

  Here, above the marsh, the landscape was softer, more obviously English. A giant cedar sat in the middle of sweet-smelling newly cut lawns.

&nb
sp; The countryside was criss-crossed with ancient footpaths. She took one that ran alongside a hedgerow, parallel to an iron fence at the side of the grounds that skirted the house. Tortoiseshells and painted ladies fluttered around the hedgerow. Somewhere close, a grouse cried, then flapped into clumsy flight.

  Pausing at a gap in the hedge, she looked down the slope towards a new wing, built onto the side of the house; it was low and flat, with large French windows that stood open onto the lawn so that residents in their wheelchairs could navigate their way out into the garden with ease, or be led there. There were three people sitting outside in their electric chairs. Two seemed to be asleep. The third sat fidgeting. Alex wondered if one of them was Callum, but it was too far away to see clearly.

  It looked calm and placid; not the worst place to be. A young man dressed in a blue nurse’s uniform held a bottle to one patient’s mouth, giving him something to drink.

  A crack of a stick ahead of her. Alex looked up. Coming towards her was a young woman, dressed like a serious birdwatcher, in jeans, a T-shirt and a utility waistcoat, carrying an SLR camera around her neck. The camera was dwarfed by its lens. ‘Afternoon,’ the woman muttered as she approached.

  Instead of moving aside, Alex stepped into the middle of the narrow path, blocking her way. ‘Get anything?’

  The woman stopped. ‘What you mean?’

  ‘Out looking for anything in particular?’

  The woman smiled. ‘No. Just seeing what’s around.’ A small gap in her teeth lent her face an unexpected charm.

  ‘I hear there are some lesser spotted wood pigeons around,’ said Alex.

  Twelve

  ‘Lesser spotted wood pigeons?’ said Alex again.

  The woman put one hand over her camera, as if protecting it. ‘Didn’t manage to see any,’ said the woman eventually. ‘Just my luck. You?’ She stepped forward, expecting Alex to move aside, but Alex stood her ground.

  ‘What about a great booby?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘A little bustard?’

  The woman seemed to consider this for a second, then said, ‘Are you actually taking the piss?’