London Calling - James Craig [109]
‘That’s the stereotype, that they always get suckered into paying tourist prices. In reality, they’re very smart; very smart indeed. They tend not to overpay and they now own large chunks of London lock, stock and barrel.’
Carlyle could not care less about that, one way or another. What he needed now was to get this conversation back on track. ‘I’ll need the precise dates of your business trips.’
‘Of course. Call me at my office in the morning and I can give you a full list.’
‘I’ll do that.’ Carlyle slipped the card into his jacket pocket. Enough of the preliminaries, he thought. ‘Tell me about Robert Ashton.’
This time she kept her eyes directly on him, as she took a large mouthful of wine. ‘What exactly do you want to know?’
‘Just let me hear your version of it.’
‘Well,’ she put her glass down on the floor, ‘I assume you know that Robert was my boyfriend at Cambridge.’
Carlyle said nothing.
‘We had been going out for a couple of years before he killed himself.’ She said it quietly but calmly, without any emotion in her voice.
Very controlled, thought Carlyle, but, then again, it’s been a long while.
‘We were going to get married.’ She snatched up the glass and took another slug of wine.
Fuck! Carlyle thought. It’s soap-opera time.
‘I was pregnant.’
Fuck! Fuck! He quickly scanned the room. There were no photographs. No sign of any children. No sign of any family at all.
‘It was not a good time.’
‘I can imagine,’ said Carlyle gently. The reality was that he couldn’t begin to imagine, but what else could he say? He watched her drain her glass and fill it up immediately with the remainder of the bottle. Keep on drinking, he thought, the more the better. He waited to let her take another sip.
‘Why did he kill himself?’
A look of genuine surprise crossed her face. ‘Don’t you know by now?’ She put her glass back on the floor, next to the now-empty bottle. ‘I thought that’s why you were here.’
Me? I don’t have a clue, he thought. ‘I want to hear it in your own words.’
‘They killed him.’
‘Who?’
‘The Merrion Club.’
Here we go, thought Carlyle. He placed his coffee cup carefully on the arm of the sofa, trying not to look too keen to hear her story. ‘How?’
Suddenly, Susy Ahl looked quite pale, as if she was going to be violently sick. ‘Excuse me a minute,’ she said, standing up. ‘I just need to use the bathroom.’
As his hostess went up the stairs, Carlyle counted to five and quickly slipped into the kitchen. A quick look around showed it to be cramped and unremarkable, not much bigger than his own kitchen in Winter Garden House. The knife that Ahl had been brandishing when he arrived was now slotted in a glass and metal knife block, alongside four others. The brand on the blade read ‘evolution’, which was different from the ones that they had found at the murder scenes. A quick look through various drawers didn’t offer up anything else of interest. Face it, he thought, if she’s smart enough to get this far, she’s not going to make it that easy for me. He stepped in front of half a dozen photographs stuck to the fridge door. Curiously, only one of them included Susy Ahl herself – Ahl from maybe ten or so years ago, posing in front of a pyramid alongside a young boy. Was that her son? Maybe, but it was impossible to tell.
The toilet flushed upstairs. Carlyle quickly retreated to the sofa. Less than a minute later, Susy Ahl was back in the armchair in front of him, looking more composed now. ‘So …where were we?’
‘You were explaining Robert Ashton’s involvement with the Merrion Club.’
‘Ah, yes,’ she said, trying to inject a little levity into her tone. ‘Robert, he was a brilliant student. A lovely, gentle boy but a little shy.’
Carlyle said nothing. He looked her directly in the eye, but didn’t move a muscle. It was now or never.
She picked up her wine glass, but didn’t drink from it. ‘We took a first-year philosophy class together. I had to almost force him out on our first date. If I’d waited for him to make the first move, it never would have happened.’
For a nanosecond, he felt acutely jealous