Chapter Thirty-Six
On the first floor of Edward’s house was a long room with no furniture and a smell of damp. The windows faced the sea. The carpet was white-stained-grey. The setting sun made the interior glow orange.
‘Beautiful view,’ said Kim. ‘You could do a lot with this.’ The garden was visible below, thirty feet of lawn and then the cliff edge and the black sea.
‘Ever the estate agent,’ said Edward affectionately, and touched her hand with his. ‘I love you.’ Stevie rolled her eyes.
Edward dropped the Venetian blinds, pulled the slats vertical to close off the sun and turned on a big spotlight resting on the floor which illuminated the wall to their right.
‘Where did you get that?’ Kim asked.
‘The antiques shop in Newton Poppleford,’ he said. ‘Old movie light. It’s great with the slats closed, but look,’ he bent down and moved the slider on the side. For a second the metal slats opened. The room was filled with blinding white light.
‘Turn it down, you lemon!’ shouted Stevie.
‘Sorry.’
‘Sensitive eyes.’
‘Ah, sorry Stevie.’
He slid the slats almost closed and twisted the light to face the wall.
The surface had been peeled back to plaster.
It was covered with Post-it notes, thirty or more.
The women moved left to see better. The shadows cast upwards by the spotlight elongated the corners of the notes, creating an optical illusion, as if a square wall had been pulled outwards into the shape of a trapezium.
On the floor opposite was a beanbag and a shoebox with notepads, biros and markers, and unused blocks of different-coloured sticky notes.
‘What are these?’ asked Stevie, fishing in the box. ‘They look like laser pointers.’
‘I bought a couple off to help me concentrate.’
‘Concentrate?’ Kim repeated. ‘Do you shine them in your ears or something?’
‘No. Watch,’ he said. He shut down the spotlight so the room was almost dark.
He went to a pile of boxes in the far corner, which turned out to be amps and speakers connected to an old portable CD player.
He pulled the player, trailing wires, over to the beanbag, sat it on the floor and pressed play.
The speakers blared ‘Big Balls’ by AC/DC.
‘Sorry, that’s a bit random. I have heavy metal CDs.’ He turned the volume down and skipped the track. Metallica came on. He took one of the laser pointers from Stevie.
‘This is what I do sometimes.’
In the near dark, he pressed the button on the end of the laser pointer and plumped himself into the beanbag.
‘You can focus like this.’
He picked out words on the Post-its from the other side of the room as a guitar solo screeched.
Kim and Stevie looked at each other and shook their heads. But he had their complete attention – each time the red laser dot fell onto a square of notepaper, Stevie read the word it highlighted.
‘Nuclear. Nina. Actinium. Lev. Rental.’
Kim chimed in. ‘Hurst, Hurst, Zircher.’
‘Wendy Wrigley’s mates, doctors,’ Edward explained. ‘You can forget that side of the wall.’
Stevie stepped back. ‘Wait. Are you saying these two cases are connected?’
‘Not at all!’ Edward exclaimed. ‘I only had one wall.’
‘Forest. Doctor. Spoolie. Marvel. Crime Scene Pix.’ Kim turned. ‘What’s a spoolie?’
It broke the spell. He turned off the music, dropped the laser pen and turned on the spotlight.
At the top of the wall a marker pen had been used to write WRIGLEY.
But it was crossed out. Feeling a little irritated at the confusion he had himself caused, Edward pointed.
‘You can ignore the ones on the left – Marvel, Forest, Spoolie, Firework, Hurst, Hurst, et cetera. Zircher. They’re for the Wendy Wrigley case, gone now. ’
‘I do actually love this,’ said Stevie. ‘Metal plus laser. Total concentration. Was that Metallica you just played?’
‘Good spot.’
Kim put in, ‘Can’t believe I haven’t seen it before.’
‘It’s my private place.’
‘At least you’re not watching porn in here.’
‘We can’t be sure of that,’ said Stevie.
Edward barely heard the ribbing. ‘It’s a tangle. It helps, then it doesn’t,’ he said, absorbed in reading the square notes. He picked up a thick black marker from the floor and added an ‘S’ to the word TOPPING, also written on the upper edge of the wall. ‘They’re not the tidiest.’
‘They don’t have to be,’ said Stevie. ‘And what’s the microphone for?’
‘Oh, nothing.’
Kim laughed. ‘That’s not an ordinary stereo, is it?’
‘Yes it is.’
‘No it’s not!’ said Stevie, approaching it. ‘You’ve got yourself a karaoke machine here.’
‘Okay, it’s a fair cop. Sometimes I might sing along to Black Sabbath.’
Kim and Stevie laughed, and then, as one, moved closer to the Post-its.
Edward stood with his back to the blinds.
He saw his shadow cast faintly across them, broad and tall with unkempt hair.
There must be a foot of difference in the height of the two women.
Stevie was on tiptoe. She read the words on the notes.
‘Cammell-Curzon. Ukraine. Empty flat … Empty flat?’
‘There was nothing in Lev Malnyk’s flat except for the tubes, found under the sofa, and a hidden passport, like he’d never lived there, or stripped it bare just before the crash. I always thought it was weird. I’ll have to write “Nettles and Hearts” up there.’
‘It sounds like some sort of vegetarian moussaka,’ said Kim, thumbing at one of the notes. ‘Here we go – “Drug tubes”.’
Stevie said, ‘I like that you wrote down “Fat Cops”. The pair who beat you up?’
‘The very same.’
Kim added, ‘Who you are not going to visit without at least one minder.’
‘Fancy it?’ Edward asked.
Ignoring him, Kim said, ‘I also like the fact that the last ten Post-its down the bottom there just say the same thing,’ said Kim.
‘Why? Why, why, why, why, why?’ Edward recited, almost as if the words were a poem.
‘Why did Lev do it?’ Kim asked.
‘No,’ said Edward. ‘Why was the flat empty?’