The Collected Short Stories - Jeffrey Archer [62]
I sat in the corner of my local pub, where I knew I couldn’t be seen from behind the bar. A tomato juice by my side, I began slowly to turn the pages of the paper.
She hadn’t made page one. She hadn’t made the second, third, or fourth page. And on page five she rated only a tiny paragraph. “Miss Carla Moorland, aged 31, was found dead at her home in Pimlico earlier this morning.” I remember thinking at the time they hadn’t even got her age right. “Detective Inspector Simmons, who has been put in charge of the case, said that an investigation was being carried out and they were awaiting the pathologist’s report but to date they had no reason to suspect foul play.”
After that piece of news I even managed a little soup and a roll. Once I had read the report a second time I made my way back to the office parking lot and sat in my car. I wound down the other front window to allow more fresh air in before turning on The World at One on the radio. Carla didn’t even get a mention. In the age of semiautomatics, drugs, AIDS, and gold bullion robberies the death of a thirty-two-year-old industrial personal assistant had passed unnoticed by the BBC.
I returned to my office to find on my desk a memo containing a series of questions that had been fired back by the managing director, leaving me in no doubt as to how he felt about my report. I was able to deal with nearly all his queries and return the answers to his secretary before I left the office that night, despite spending most of the afternoon trying to convince myself that whatever had caused Carla’s death must have happened after I left and could not possibly have been connected with my hitting her. But that red negligee kept returning to my thoughts. Was there any way they could trace it back to me? I had bought it at Harrods—an extravagance, but I felt certain it couldn’t be unique, and it was still the only serious present I’d ever given her. But the note that was attached—had Carla destroyed it? Would they discover who Casaneva was?
I drove directly home that evening, aware that I would never again be able to travel down the street Carla had lived on. I listened to the end of the PM program on my car radio, and as soon as I reached home switched on the six o’clock news. I turned to Channel Four at seven and back to the BBC at nine. I returned to ITV at ten and even ended up watching Newsnight.
Carla’s death, in their combined editorial opinion, must have been less important than a Third Division football result between Reading and Walsall. Elizabeth continued reading her latest library book, oblivious to my possible peril.
I slept fitfully that night, and as soon as I heard the papers pushed through the mail slot the next morning I ran downstairs to check the headlines.
DUKAKIS NOMINATED AS CANDIDATE stared up at me from the front page of The Times.
I found myself wondering, irrelevantly, if he would ever be president. “President Dukakis” didn’t sound quite right to me.
I picked up my wife’s Daily Express and the three-word headline filled the top of the page: LOVERS’ TIFF MURDER. My legs gave way, and I fell to my knees. I must have made a strange sight, crumpled up on the floor trying to read that opening paragraph. I couldn’t make out the words of the second paragraph without my glasses. I stumbled back upstairs with the papers and grabbed the glasses from the table on my side of the bed. Elizabeth was still sleeping soundly. Even so, I locked myself in the bathroom, where I could read the story slowly and without fear of interruption.
Police are now treating as murder the death of a beautiful Pimlico secretary, Carla Moorland, 32, who was found dead in her flat early yesterday morning. Detective Inspector Simmons of Scotland Yard, who is in charge of the case, initially considered Carla Moorland