An Untidy Death Read online

  ‘She didn’t, no. She was very clear on that point.’

  ‘Good. I can assure you that all of my marbles are firmly in place. And will be so long as I keep working. But, so long as I have my work and my health …’

  ‘How is your health?’

  ‘Much better than it has any right to be.’ To emphasize the point, she took a long swallow of whiskey, nearly draining the glass, stubbed out the remains of her Gauloise and lit another one. ‘I’ve been kippering myself with the fags and the Jameson’s for a long time now. One day I’ll get cancer or have a stroke. Then, if I have the misfortune to survive, I’ll probably have to make adjustments to my lifestyle. Till then, I will continue to live tamely in Brighton … or Hove, to be strictly accurate. “Hove, actually”, as everyone round here rather waggishly puts it. Not quite the heady days of the eighties and the Groucho Club. But on the plus side – or is it a minus – no bombs in Brighton since the biggie that nearly put paid to Thatcher in 1984, no shellfire, and the only invasions are by day-trippers.’

  Of course! How stupid I’d been not to recognize the name. Now I knew exactly who Ingrid Richards was. I should have recognized her from the distinctive scar. She had been a fixture on our television screens for decades. Not so much in the last ten years, but up until then, wherever the wars were fiercest, that’s where Ingrid Richards was to be found. Jokes used to float around, as some new international crisis emerged. ‘Oh, it must be serious. They’ve sent Ingrid Richards out there.’

  And I remembered the outline details of how she got the scar. It was a war wound, a badge of honour, sustained in some hellhole. Beirut, I think it was. Ingrid Richards had been out there sometime in the 1980s, which of course would have been when she got together with Niall Connor. They were both in Lebanon covering a civil war, was it …? I’m sorry, I’m not very good on the history of the Middle East. But I seem to recall that Ingrid was with a cameraman, covering the conflict for the BBC, and they were too near to a car bomb which was detonated …? Something like that. Both of them were hit by shrapnel – that’s when she got the head injury. Then I think Ingrid Richards was brought back to the UK and hospitalized for quite a while …

  What I do know for certain is that the dent in her forehead became part of her image, a constant reminder to the nation’s viewers of the dangers she had survived.

  I couldn’t remember details of her private life, but I seemed to remember it was fairly rackety. A couple of marriages, as she’d just confirmed. Certainly, a few high-profile lovers. Amongst them, I now knew, Niall Connor, to whom she owed the dubious gift of Alexandra. What else? Even more, I wished I’d at least read the Wikipedia entry.

  ‘We need more whiskey,’ Ingrid announced, reaching out for my glass. Her own was empty.

  I downed the remaining contents and handed mine across. I’m not the sort to get into competitive drinking but I knew refusal might threaten the atmosphere of intimate chat that was building up between us.

  ‘You’ve never smoked?’ she called across from where she was pouring the drinks.

  ‘No. Didn’t like the taste, while all my contemporaries were looking dead sophisticated with fags drooping out of their mouths. I looked even less confident with a cigarette than I did without one.’ I didn’t add that I was grateful that I’d never started. Didn’t want to sound pious.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re missing,’ said Ingrid, handing me a nearly full tumbler of Jameson’s. ‘People often ask me what it feels like waking up in a war zone, not knowing if I’ll still be alive at the end of the day. And I tell them, “It’s all right, so long as I can get a cigarette first thing.”’

  The words would have sounded boastful from most people but, coming from her, they didn’t. She had lived that life and was justified in talking about it.

  ‘Anyway,’ she moved on, ‘I agreed to see you because Alexandra wanted me to. Now we’ve met – what?’ She answered her own question before I had the chance. ‘You’re going to tell me that this place is a fire hazard – right?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘And I’m going to say, “Thank you very much for your opinion, Ellen Curtis, but I have no intention of making any changes.” The fact is that, in spite of my daughter’s solicitude and conviction that I’m losing my marbles, I’m extremely careful about my personal safety. My experience of war zones has taught me how to avoid avoidable risks. There are no doubt people out there who’d like to kill me – I’ve rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way in the course of my career – but there’s no way I’ll die by accident.

  ‘And if Alexandra has told you that I fall into bed every night, smashed out of my skull, she is wrong. I remain in control and sleep well. One thing my life has trained me for is the ability to sleep anywhere and to sleep instantly. I’ve never had any need of sleeping pills.

  ‘The trouble is that Alexandra doesn’t realize how inured I have become to the effects of alcohol. It doesn’t affect my faculties and I don’t get hangovers. Drinking late into the night – vodka in Chechnya, arak in Syria, whiskey more or less anywhere – has been part of my professional way of life. I’ve elicited more useful information over booze than I ever would have done over cups of tea – and still been able to file perfect copy in the morning. So, Alexandra doesn’t need to worry on that score.’

  She gestured around the paper-filled room. ‘This is how I live. This is how I want to live. And it suits me.’

  She looked at me defiantly, expecting counter-arguments, but I produced none. She grinned.

  ‘Right, Ellen. So, our business is concluded. Were you the kind of person I thought you’d be when Alexandra said she’d arranged for you to visit, I would now be saying, “Piss off out of here!”’

  ‘Right,’ I said, reaching for my handbag.

  She raised her hand to stop me. ‘Since, however, you turn out to be intelligent and congenial, I’m very happy to continue sitting here drinking with you until you need to get back home … wherever your home may be.’

  ‘Chichester.’

  ‘Right.’ She looked at me, almost appealing, vulnerable for the first time in our encounter. ‘So …?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘since you have just filled my glass to the brim with Jameson’s, I think it would be a waste for me to leave the rest of it and go straight away.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Ingrid with a crooked smile. ‘I will happily finish up your leftovers.’

  ‘Very generous of you, but I think I’d rather finish them up myself.’

  ‘Excellent.’ The crooked grin turned into a broad smile. ‘So, tell me how you got into the decluttering? Bit of a niche business, isn’t it?’

  It struck me, as I described the genesis of SpaceWoman, what a good interviewer Ingrid Richards was. Of course, that had been part of her job, one of the most important parts of her job, right through her career. It was her business to get people to reveal the truth. Under her gentle prompting, I found I was giving out much more detail – much more personal detail – than I would when normally asked about my work.

  Also, she sounded genuinely interested. I remember somebody famous – I can’t remember who it was – saying that the first essential for a journalist is curiosity. And Ingrid Richards was profoundly curious. She wanted to know about everything she didn’t already know about. Unlike most people, who only ask me about my work as a bridge to the next thing they want to talk about.

  I even found myself telling Ingrid the circumstances of Oliver’s death. Which is an event whose details I very rarely confide to anyone, certainly not on a first meeting. But – as I’m sure many people had done before – I felt real empathy with Ingrid Richards.

  Then we got on to her work, and what she was currently doing.

  ‘I get asked occasionally to comment on some new disaster in the Middle East. Television sometimes, more often in print these days. Back where I started, writing copy, as a cub reporter on the Liverpool Daily Echo … which no longer exists, like so ma
ny regional newspapers. But I can still meet a deadline and, unlike most so-called journalists these days, I have actually been to the places I write about. I don’t do it all from behind a keyboard in an office in Wapping.’

  Her voice carried a heavy load of contempt for the current state of the Press. ‘And then of course,’ she went on, ‘there’s the magnum opus.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’m writing a memoir of my life.’

  ‘Warts and all?’

  ‘Most of the warts I encountered are now dead.’ She chuckled at her little joke. ‘But yes, it’ll cover the whole gamut – professional and personal.’

  ‘Is it commissioned?’ I asked, knowing a bit about such matters from Oliver’s dealings with publishers.

  ‘Of course it bloody is!’ she snapped, angry for the first time. ‘I’m a professional. I stopped doing stuff on spec in the 1970s. And all this’ – she gestured to the piles of papers and notebooks on her desk – ‘is taking me back to those places where I worked. I’ve spent the last two weeks trying to remind myself of all the militia groups there were in Beirut during the hostage crisis. God, it was so complicated. I had a handle on it at the time but wow, trying to put together all the details now in a way which the average reader’s going to understand … my brain hurts.

  ‘You’d think a civil war would be between two sides, wouldn’t you? And maybe the Lebanese one started off that way, basically Maronite forces against the Palestinian Liberation Organization, but in Lebanon nothing is that simple. You’ve got conflict between Sunnis and Shias, Christians and Muslims. Then Syria and Israel get involved, while all the time strings are being pulled by the Ayatollahs in Iran and Reagan in the States.

  ‘Of course, in the Middle East, hostage-taking has always been a popular political pastime, and suddenly the militias think there might be mileage in capturing a few foreigners. They start with Americans, obviously, but that soon spreads to other nationalities. And in the slums of south Beirut you’ve got poor buggers chained to radiators in God knows how many basements. And some seriously stupid things happen – particularly when that idiot, that sententious scoutmaster Terry Waite parades himself asking to be captured and …’

  She stopped herself and looked at me with a crooked grin. ‘Sorry. You didn’t come here for a history lesson, did you, Ellen?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It just all comes back to me so vividly. It was completely lawless on the streets of Beirut. Thing that stays with me is that you were always walking on broken glass. Never forget that sound of crunching underfoot. Everywhere you went, there had just been some atrocity. Mind you, the lawlessness on the streets was matched by the lawlessness in the place where the foreign correspondents hung out. The Commodore Hotel, of course, just near the Hamra shopping centre. And then some people liked to drink in the Pickwick Bar at the Mayflower Hotel. God, that was a bizarre place, an English country pub with imported keg beer, stuck in the middle of Beirut. Run by that former Spitfire pilot Jackie Mann, who, later, of course, in 1989, became a hostage himself and was held for two years in …’

  Again, she curbed her tongue. ‘Sorry. From the glaze in your eyes, Ellen, I detect that I need to work harder to make my account riveting to the average reader.’

  ‘I apologize,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. Sad fact of life – or perhaps actually a rather encouraging fact of life – one cannot simulate interest in something that doesn’t interest one.’

  ‘No,’ I said honestly. ‘I’m afraid not. I have to confess, if I were reading the book, I’d be much more interested in the personal than the professional side of your life.’

  ‘Ah. Maybe that’s a gender thing.’

  ‘I don’t know. Do you think it is?’

  ‘Yes. It’s like women enjoy reading romances, because they actually care who ends up with who. Men don’t give a shit.’

  ‘Easier being a man, do you think?’

  ‘Not sure. I just know I never wanted to be one. All that tedious conversation you have to have with other men, talking about football and Formula One, rather than saying what you’re really feeling. God, it must be boring. I’ve loved being a woman.’

  ‘Me too.’

  There was a silence. We both sipped our Jameson’s. Then Ingrid said, ‘You’ll still have to buy a copy of my memoir when it comes out, Ellen. You can skip the political bits. I promise you there’ll be plenty of personal stuff to keep you interested.’

  ‘I look forward to it.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Ingrid Richards, a roguish smile developing around her lips. ‘When the memoir’s published, it won’t only be from my cupboard that the skeletons come rattling out!’

  SEVEN

  As we lifted it down from the back of his van, Dodge looked at the piece of furniture doubtfully. It was one of those old-fashioned cupboards designed to contain a television, back in the days when people didn’t like to have their screens vulgarly on display but, at non-viewing times, kept them shut away in genteel invisibility.

  Dodge’s was not the doubtful look of a junk merchant, about to say that nobody wanted to buy stuff like that these days. It was the doubtful look of an avid recycler, who just hadn’t yet worked out what he was going to turn the piece into. But who would soon come up with an idea. With Dodge, nothing was wasted.

  The piece was maybe four foot high. Beneath the double doors, which hid the offensive screen, were a row of four narrow drawers. The whole thing was veneered in light oak, not in bad condition but just desperately old-fashioned. It had belonged to Minnie, one of the many people whose hoarding habit had started following the death of a spouse. Brought in by the social services, I had helped her tackle the problem and she, like a good few of my elderly clients, had become one of those on whom I still kept an eye. A visit every week or so, for which she was always excessively grateful. Another whose underlying problem was loneliness.

  Minnie had been a London tour guide and retained an insatiable curiosity about the capital’s history. The clutter had started with her buying too many books on the subject and then, when her husband died, it had escalated into the accumulation of all kinds of stuff she was incapable of throwing away.

  Having spent her entire professional life talking to people about London, it remained the basis of her conversation, and I would always leave our decluttering sessions full of new information. For instance, she’d tell me that a ‘Desmond’ was a ‘jacket’, Cockney Rhyming Slang based on the name of Desmond Hackett, a Daily Express football reporter from the 1950s. Or that the place name ‘Ealing’ derived from the seventh-century Old English ‘Gillingas’, meaning ‘the settlement of Gilla’s family’. Amazing, the stuff you learn as a declutterer.

  A recent stroke, however, had made it impossible for Minnie to continue living on her own and condemned her to one of the local authority’s care homes. That meant emptying her house for sale to contribute to the costs. I don’t normally do basic clearance, but Minnie was so anxious about what was going to happen to her precious possessions that I said I would find good homes for them. And there couldn’t be a better home for anything than with Dodge.

  ‘Do you fancy a cup of tea?’

  I did. I felt better than I had any right to after the amount of Jameson’s I’d put away the night before. But a cup of Dodge’s nettle tea would be just the thing to ease my residual dehydration. I followed him through into his living quarters.

  Dodge lived outside the village of Walberton, near Arundel, in what I think must once have been a farm, all of whose fields had been sold off for development. (There are a lot of properties like that in West Sussex.) The main house he used for the meticulous storage of all the materials he would use in his recycling. Then there were two substantial outbuildings with corrugated-iron roofs. One was his workshop, the other where he lived and slept, in conditions of enviable minimalism.

  It was there that he put a battered kettle on the salvaged cast-iron range to make the nettle tea. Norma
lly the space only contained Dodge’s bed and a table with one chair, so I was surprised to see more furniture there. A couple of cupboards, a child’s desk and chair. I was about to comment, then realized that he probably moved completed pieces away from the dust and paint spills of his workshop.

  I looked more closely at them. As ever, perfectly finished. I had given up trying to guess what Dodge’s furniture had been in its former life, his craft was so meticulous.

  ‘Lovely stuff,’ I commented.

  ‘They’re for Mary Griffin,’ he confided awkwardly. ‘Well, that is, for her little girl. I’m going to put on more Frozen stickers.’

  ‘Amy’ll love them,’ I said. ‘She and Mary’ll be over the moon.’

  ‘I feel very protective towards them,’ said Dodge. ‘Mary and Amy.’

  Which was, when I thought about it, rather a strange thing for him to say.

  Then it was back to the bloody invoices, whose processing had been interrupted when I’d realized the previous evening that I was nearly going to be late for Ingrid Richards. The mobile rang as soon as I started on them (having made do with toasted cheese by way of lunch). The display said: ‘Fleur’. I connected, as ever, with a slight feeling of foreboding.

  ‘Ellen dahling … just ringing for a little chatette …’ She knew full well how much her using words like that irritated me.

  ‘Maybe I could call you back this evening, Fleur …? I am working and I—’

  As ever, she steamrolled her way through this. She’d never regarded my work as important. ‘I was just wondering, dahling, whether you’d heard anything from my chum Jools recently …?’

  ‘No,’ I replied through gritted teeth. Though perhaps ‘chum’ was better than the other word she often used, ‘girlfriend’.

  ‘I thought you might not have done,’ said Fleur, as ever digging away. ‘Anyway, she’s made me a very generous offer. You know she’s got that lovely flat in Herne Hill …?’

  Of course, I bloody did. If I hadn’t stumped up the deposit, she wouldn’t have been able to buy it. But I said nothing.