“If I didn’t know better,” Sullivan said at length, “I’d say you were fixing up one of those phoney divorce cases.”
I said nothing for the simple reason that the next person I intended talking to was my lawyer.
“Only the problem there,” he said, “is that Mr Hall wasn’t married.”
Mr Who? Then the penny dropped. I may have booked room two-twenty-three for Mr Cuthbertson and the lovely Mavis, but now I started to think about something other than covering my own backside, I realized that Mr Cuthbertson wouldn’t have been seen dead (pardon the pun) in a pale blue check suit. Relief made my knees tremble.
“So do you mind telling me why you burst in on an unmarried commercial traveller to take his photograph, Miss Hepburn?”
In fact I was so overcome with relief that I nearly blurted out the truth.
“That new road-safety officer came to the school again today.”
Susan was sitting on my lap braiding my hair, and although she’s a little too old and (dare I say it) a little too heavy, such moments are rare. For this reason alone, they are precious.
“He’s a scream,” she gushed. “Ever so funny.”
I really, really didn’t want to talk about policemen right then, but children can be immeasurably cruel.
“Do you know what happens if you don’t look right?” she persisted, using my spiky, mismatched plaits as handlebars. I shook my head as best I could. “You go wrong,” she squealed.
Maybe I would also have found this excruciatingly funny if I’d been nine years old. Somehow I doubted it.
“Do you have a crush on this teacher of yours?” Because suddenly there was me just turned seventeen, Mr Rolands my old maths master, and the only good thing to come out of that affair weighed seven and a half pounds and has his beautiful, soft golden hair.
“Oh, Mum!” Susan rolled her eyes. “The road-safety man’s not a teacher, and anyway he’s old.”
What constitutes old to a nine-year-old? Mr Rolands turned out to be thirty-six, and even now, I still wonder how I fell for that old I’ll-leave-my-wife line.
“So’s Rock Hudson,” I pointed out, “but his face is plastered all over your bedroom wall.”
“That’s different, he’s a film star.” She stopped braiding and sighed. “If I had a daddy, I’d like him to be like the road-safety man. He’s ever so handsome.”
If I had a daddy...? Next she’d be pulling out my fingernails with pliers.
“More handsome than Elvis?” I asked, because all good mothers know how to change the subject, and within no time we were jiving round the living room to “Jailhouse Rock”, “Blue Suede Shoes”, and generally getting “All Shook Up”.
It was only later, with Susan tucked up in bed and me patiently untangling the knots in my hair, that the enormity of what I’d risked today hit me. I could have lost everything, and I do mean everything, on the turn of a door key. I needed to think seriously about the future. When the next solicitor telephoned, asking could I help out, would I? Would I risk it? I let Elvis run through “Don’t Be Cruel” and thought, damn right I would. My daughter is not going to end up an unmarried mother at the age of seventeen. Susan’s a bright kid, on course for the grammar school, and what’s more, she’s desperate to go. But. I reached for as wide a toothed comb as I could find. Grammar schools are expensive. There’s the uniforms, the tennis racquets, the hockey sticks, the music lessons, not forgetting innumerable bus trips and a million other extra hidden costs. Truly, though, I do not care. My daughter will never be forced to earn her living grubbing through dustbins, following faithless husbands down lover’s lanes, or tracing children who’ve run away because their home life’s so damned wretched. Never. I will do whatever it takes to keep Susan from violent men and abusive women, and she will never need to take covert shots of homosexuals or men with prostitutes simply to pay the rent. Maybe, once she starts attending the grammar school, she’ll be ashamed of me. Of what I do and what I am. I hope not, I really, really do. But that’s another risk I am prepared to take.
All the same, I don’t sleep well. I worry.
“Miss Hepburn.”
I recognized that distinctive gravel without needing to look up. “Inspector.”
He lumbered into the inner office where I was typing up a perfectly legitimate infidelity assignment, but did not sit down. I wished to God I’d locked the filing cabinets, or even closed that open drawer, but Sullivan didn’t glance at them. To be honest, I would have rifled through every last one, had I been in his shoes.
“Room two-two-three,” he said, leaning with his back against the wall and folding his arms over his chest. “Rented one night to Stanley Hall, aged twenty-six, commercial rep in motor oil.”
I didn’t know Stanley Hall, had never heard of Stanley Hall, could swear on a stack of Bibles that I was not involved with anything connected to Stanley Hall, and with great enthusiasm, I imparted this knowledge. “I know sod all about motor oil, too,” I added with gusto.
“Hm.” Sullivan scratched his cheek and stared at the sparrows pecking at the crumbs along the windowsill. “What about a Mr and Mrs Cuthbertson?” he asked, still not bothering to look at me. “Know anything about them?”
At times like this there’s nothing else a girl can do but drop her file on the floor. “Name doesn’t ring a bell,” I said, although my voice was a tad muffled, seeing as how my head was stuck under the desk.
“No?” His suddenly appeared on the other side, and for large hands, they were surprisingly deft at picking up foolscap. “Only Mrs Cuthbertson made a reservation yesterday morning, specifically asking for that particular room.”
I like that room, I wanted to say. It faces the sea front, and from the bandstand you can, if you stand on the furthestmost bench to the right, get a half-decent snap of anyone in the bay window. The courts liked that sort of thing, especially when they were presented with photos of the clients closing the curtains. Furtive always goes down well with a judge.
“Really?” I scrabbled for an imaginary paper clip.
“It probably doesn’t mean anything,” he said, actually finding one. “Maybe they’d stayed there on their honeymoon, maybe she just liked the view.”
“Maybe,” I said and, still on my knees, pretended to arrange the scattered papers, even though I knew I’d never find anything in this damned file again.
“Who knows?” If he wasn’t craggy when he smiled, how come the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood suddenly sprang to mind? “But it seems they were so disappointed that the guest in two-twenty-three hadn’t booked out as expected that when the Cuthbertsons were given three-one-seven, they hardly stayed more than a couple of hours.”
“Oh?” I murmured, rubbing the bump where I’d brought up my head sharply.
“I expect it’s a class thing,” he said, straightening up and brushing the dust off his trousers. “All the same, though.” He paused. “Don’t you think it’s strange they didn’t check in until two-thirty-five, yet were gone by the time I went to question them at half-past four?”
Was that squeak as noncommittal a squeak as I’d hoped? Because here’s the thing. I’d agreed to supply the Cuthbertsons with evidence for a quick divorce. Their deposit was already earning interest in Susan’s trust fund. So the minute Sullivan had finished questioning me the day before, I’d flown upstairs to three-one-seven, stuffed a new film in the camera, and grabbed the nearest chambermaid.
At this point, I want to tell you about Mavis. She’s nowhere near as common as her name suggests, and very pretty with it, in a busty sort of way. But her husband left her for a bus conductress last September and… well, to cut a long story short, Mavis gets what I suppose you’d call lonely. I guess Mr Cuthbertson got bored waiting for my knock.