‘In both of these examples,’ Pilbeam wrote in his article for Police magazine, ‘traditional lines of enquiry proved inadequate. The criminal does not act in a political vacuum. To understand motive, one must understand what motivates: and this involves taking into account the effect of economics and environment, culture and capital, landscape and cityscape, the politics of identity and the politics of party. To solve an English crime, committed by an English criminal, one must contemplate the condition of England itself.’
It was this final sentence, read aloud by one of his colleagues, in tones half sarcastic, half admiring, to a bemused audience in the canteen one lunchtime, that had earned Nathan Pilbeam his own nickname: ‘Nate of the Station’.
*
PC Pilbeam was in the middle of a few days’ annual leave, but he was not exactly taking a break from police work. He had no wish to relax, in the sense in which most people would have understood the word. After sending his message to Scotland Yard in the morning, he made a brief visit to the local supermarket, to buy ingredients for the dinner he intended to cook that evening for his inamorata. After that, he opened the package from Amazon which his overworked postman had delivered earlier.
It contained two DVDs, which bore a striking resemblance to one another. The cover of the first showed a young, tousled, slightly overweight white man wearing a loose brightly coloured shirt, untucked at the trouser. He was talking into a microphone. The DVD was entitled Mickey Parr — Would You Credit It? — On Stage and On Fire. The cover of the second showed another young, tousled, slightly overweight white man wearing a loose brightly coloured shirt untucked at the trouser. He too was talking into a microphone, and his DVD was entitled Ray Turnbull — Last in the Queue — Live and Outrageous. Nathan could remember seeing both of these releases advertised on posters on the London Underground in the run-up to Christmas last year, along with about half a dozen other posters all advertising DVDs by young, tousled, slightly overweight white men wearing loose brightly coloured shirts untucked at the trouser. For the purposes of these posters, all of these men had adopted the same slightly quizzical expressions; they had also, it seemed, all been on tour earlier in the year, and had recorded their performances for use on these Christmas DVDs.
It had struck Nathan, even then, as being an interesting phenomenon. His understanding was that none of these men were regarded as world experts in any field of human endeavour, or public thinkers possessed of radical new insight. Nonetheless, they were able to command generous sums of money and attract large audiences for their ability to comment in a casual, sometimes humorous way on various aspects of contemporary life. Occasional cutaways during the DVDs would reveal well-dressed and seemingly affluent young audience members roaring with laughter at a series of unremarkable observations about gender roles or the minutiae of everyday social interaction. In the new A5 Moleskin notebook which he had recently bought and labelled ‘STAND-UP COMEDY’ PC Pilbeam copied down an observation from Hermann Hesse:
‘How people love to laugh! They flock from the suburbs in the bitter cold, they stand in line, pay money, and stay out until past midnight, only in order to laugh a while.’ — Reflections
Both DVDs were about eighty minutes long. He had been watching the second one for almost an hour when the breakthrough came. He had been certain, all along, that there would turn out to be some connection between the two men, something more than the generic similarity between their acts. And now he had the proof.
*
Like many great men — and most great detectives, for that matter — Nathan Pilbeam had a weakness. A fatal chink in his armour.
It was not alcohol, or drug addiction. He was too young to have a broken marriage behind him, or a teenage daughter with whom to have a fraught and problematic relationship. His flaw, in fact, was much simpler than that. It was an unrequited passion.
The object of his infatuation was called Lucinda — Lucinda Givings. It was an antiquated name, and Lucinda was, in many ways, an antiquated person. This might even have been the very reason he was attracted to her. Brought up on a diet of Miss Marple and Lord Peter Wimsey, he could not believe his luck (or misfortune, depending on how he looked at it) in having stumbled upon someone whose natural home seemed to be in one of their stories, rather than the Guildford of 2013. Her speech was formal and demure, as was her manner of dress. One of her few concessions to modernity was that she sometimes used the branch of Starbucks where Nathan himself liked to call in at the end of a long shift. She was usually to be found there late in the afternoon, marking her pupils’ homework. After a few occasions when they had made shy eye-contact and nothing more, Nathan had finally summoned the courage to strike up a tentative conversation.
Like Nathan, she was in her mid-twenties. She was extremely pretty, and determined not to show it. She wore baggy trousers and shapeless jumpers which gave away nothing about her figure (thereby allowing Nathan to imagine it all the more freely). She wore her hair pulled back and tightly tied behind her head, thereby encouraging Nathan to picture, during his fevered nocturnal fantasies, the moment when she would untie it, shake it loose and remove her horn-rimmed glasses, which would be his cue to utter the traditional words, ‘Why, Lucinda — but you’re beautiful.’ She was a strict devotee of the Catholic faith. She taught chemistry at the local private girls’ secondary school, where she was famous for her abhorrence of indiscipline and her unquestioning respect for the school rules, prompting students and fellow teachers alike to refer to her, behind her (long, shapely) back, as ‘Severe Miss Givings’.
‘I had Severe Miss Givings last night.’ That was the joke which was passed around the staff room at least once a week. But a joke was what it remained: for nobody had ever had, or was likely to have, Severe Miss Givings. Least of all Nathan Pilbeam.
Never mind. PC Pilbeam’s passion was not of the base, physical sort. Nothing would have delighted him more than to gain admittance to Lucinda Givings’s bed, or to welcome her into his, but he realized that this was but a distant goal, and in the meantime, to spend time in her presence was enough. Which was why he proposed to entice her into his flat that evening with the prospect of penne alla puttanesca and a bottle of Marks and Spencer’s finest Chilean Rosé. It would be their third date, but the first time he had cooked for her; and he was hoping that it would precipitate a degree of thawing in her habitual froideur.
However, when she arrived, at 7.30 precisely, clutching a bottle of wine in her hand, she did not seem in the calmest of moods.