Iliad to Passport to Pimlico, Reggie didn’t feel that any of it had done her much good. It certainly hadn’t helped to keep Sai.
‘Anyhoo,’ Ronnie said, ‘it says here that the buyer wasn’t informed about the flying freehold and the buyer’s solicitor is suing the seller’s solicitor. For misrepresentation or something. The buyer was Antonio Bassani, but that’s not what’s interesting. The solicitor representing him in court was Stephen Mellors. Remember that name?’
‘Vincent Ives’s solicitor,’ Reggie said. She reached for her notebook, flipped through the pages and read out loud, ‘He’s a solicitor, he’s handling my divorce, plays at the Belvedere with us sometimes.’
‘Also a school friend, remember,’ Ronnie said. ‘They go back a long way.’
‘There’s more old stuff like that in here,’ Reggie said, passing over a flimsy folder, the cardboard soft and furry now with age. ‘Just bits and pieces from Bassani’s property portfolio from the Seventies mostly. Caravan parks. A nursing home. Flats in Redcar, Saltburn, Scarborough. You can imagine him being the kind of landlord who gave Rachman a bad name.’
‘Who?’
‘Never mind. This stuff must have been raked over by forensic accountants at the time of the trial, don’t you think?’
‘Dunno. Do we need to open another bottle?’
There were two small bedrooms beneath the eaves, each containing a narrow bed, the kind a maiden aunt might have found herself relegated to. Or a nun.
‘Beguinage,’ Reggie said.
‘Eh?’
‘It’s like a lay convent for women, a religious community from medieval times. There’s one in Bruges. It’s beautiful. I mean, it’s not a thing now. It would be quite nice if it was.’ Reggie had been to Bruges with Sai, on an overnight ferry that rolled its way across the North Sea to Zeebrugge. She had been seasick all the way and he had held her hair back while she vomited into the stainless steel toilet in the tiny shower room in their cabin. ‘No greater love has a boyfriend,’ he’d laughed. After he left her to marry the girl his parents had chosen for him, Reggie went to the hairdresser and asked him to cut her hair short, a ritual women had undergone since time immemorial, or at least since the first man dumped the first woman. Adam and Eve, perhaps. Who knew how their union had gone after Adam had tattle-taled to God that Eve had been flirting with the tree of knowledge?
‘I mean – who wants a woman who knows anything?’ Reggie said crossly to Ronnie.
‘Dunno. Another woman?’
Tipping Point
Murdered? Vince had expected they would take him to a morgue or even the murder scene (or ‘my home’ as he still thought of it) and show him a corpse, but no, they took him to a police station and showed him a Polaroid. You would have thought that getting divorced from a woman would free you of the obligation to identify her corpse, but apparently not.
You couldn’t really see what was wrong with Wendy in the photograph. You might not have concluded that she was asleep, but given a multiple-choice questionnaire you wouldn’t necessarily have opted for ‘dead’. They said she had a head injury, but they must have posed her in a way that concealed whatever horror was there. They wouldn’t tell him how she had acquired this ‘head injury’. What they did say was that she had been found in the back garden and they thought she had been killed either late last night or in the early hours of this morning. They had to prompt him into identifying her as he just kept staring at the photograph. Was it Wendy? It struck him that she didn’t have particularly distinctive features. He’d never really noticed that before.
‘Mr Ives?’
‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘That’s her. That’s Wendy.’ Was it? He still felt doubtful. It looked like her, but the whole thing seemed so unlikely. Murdered. By who?
‘Do you know who did it?’ he asked the detective who said she was in charge of the investigation. ‘DI Marriot,’ she said when she introduced herself. She asked about ‘your daughter’ but Ashley was in the middle of a jungle somewhere with no phone signal. ‘Helping to protect orang-utans,’ she’d said before she went off-grid. You would think there were plenty of things closer to home that she could have found to protect. Her mother, for one. (Not that he was resentful. He loved her!)
‘We’ll contact the British consul in Sarawak.’
‘Thank you. She’ll be devastated,’ Vince said. ‘They were close.’
‘And you weren’t?’
‘Wendy was divorcing me. So, no, I think that means