The Complaints

Kaye offered a shrug. ‘Not your problem, Foxy.’ He was opening the car door. ‘Minter’s later? Friday night, remember…’

‘I doubt I’ll be in the mood.’

Kaye was halfway out of the car when he paused and stuck his head back in. ‘By the way, Joe wanted me to remind you – you’re three weeks behind with the coffee kitty.’

‘Tell him the debt’s transferred to the new boy.’

‘I like your style, Inspector Fox,’ Kaye said with a grin. ‘Always have…’

Instead of going straight home, Fox stopped outside Jude’s house. There was no sign of any activity – no vans or officers. He rang her bell and she answered with a shout from the other side of the door.

‘Who is it?’

‘Your brother.’

She opened the door and let him in. ‘Had reporters round?’ he guessed.

‘They wanted to know why your lot had been excavating my garden.’ She accepted his peck on the cheek and led him into the living room. She’d been smoking: a stub was still smouldering in the ashtray. But there was no evidence that she’d had a drink, other than coffee. A fresh jar of instant sat on the breakfast bar, alongside the kettle and a mug and spoon.

‘Want one?’ she asked, but he shook his head.

‘That cast looks different,’ he commented.

She lifted her arm a fraction. ‘Brand new this lunchtime. Bit less cumbersome, and at least I got to have a good scratch when they took off the old one.’

He smiled at this. ‘Didn’t you break your other arm once?’

‘Wrist,’ she corrected him. ‘I wondered if you’d remember.’

‘Mum took me along when you went to the hospital to have the cast removed.’

Jude was nodding. She had returned to her favoured armchair and was preparing to light a fresh cigarette.

‘You’ve just put one out,’ Fox reminded her.

‘Meaning it must be time for another. Didn’t you used to smoke?’

‘Not since leaving school.’ He settled himself on the sofa across from her. The TV was playing with the sound turned down – looked like a nature documentary.

‘Seems a lifetime ago,’ Jude was saying.

‘It was a lifetime ago.’

She nodded, growing solemn, and Fox knew she was thinking of Vince. ‘They still can’t tell me when they’ll release the body,’ she said in an undertone.

‘I was wondering something,’ Fox began, leaning forward a little. ‘I’m not sure you’ve ever told me how the two of you met.’

She stared at him. ‘I didn’t think you were interested.’

‘I am now.’

Jude drew on her cigarette, screwing shut her eyes against the smoke. She had slid around in the armchair so that her legs hung over one of its arms. Fox was reminded that his sister had a good figure. The jeans she was wearing were tight, showing the lines of her slender thighs and hips. Just the begi

‘Vince,’ Jude was saying, drawing the name out beyond its natural length. ‘Vince was drinking with some of his friends in the West End. It was a Sunday night and I was out with this girl, Melissa, from the office. It was her birthday and, tell the truth, she was called the Frumpster behind her back. She’d asked half a dozen of us to go out that night, and I’d said yes before realising that everybody else had made some excuse.’ Jude sighed. ‘So there were just the two of us, and that had its compensations.’

‘How so?’

‘Being out with the Frumpster meant I got all the attention.’

‘Beauty and the Beast?’

‘She wasn’t that bad, Malcolm.’ But the putdown was half-hearted at best. ‘Anyway, we ended up in a pub on St Martin’s Lane or somewhere… You don’t know London, do you?’ She watched Fox shake his head. ‘You’d hate it – too big, too full of itself…’ She seemed to be drifting away, but managed to stop herself. ‘Vince was in a crowd of half a dozen. There’d been a football game that lunchtime and it looked like they’d been celebrating ever since. They insisted on buying us drinks…’ She paused again, lost in thought. ‘Vince was the same as them but different. He didn’t seem to have put as much away as his pals. He was quieter, almost shy. He wrote his mobile number on the back of my hand, said he’d leave the rest to me.’

‘It was up to you to take the initiative?’

‘I suppose…’

‘And it turns out you did.’

But Jude was shaking her head. ‘I had a shower the next morning, and the number was gone. Far as I was concerned, he was just a fella in a Sunday-night boozer. But Melissa had hooked up with one of the guys. Week later, he turned up to fetch her from the office…’

‘Vince was with him?’

She smiled. ‘Wanted to know why I hadn’t called.’

‘The four of you went out together?’

‘The four of us went out together,’ she confirmed. ‘Melissa broke up with Gareth after about a fortnight.’ Her eyes were glassy with tears, but she blinked them back. ‘I never expected us to last.’

Fox watched his sister rub her eyes against either shoulder of her T-shirt. There was writing on the front of the shirt, along with an illustration. It was from a rock tour, and Fox remembered that Vince Faulkner had often taken Jude to concerts. They’d travelled as far afield as Paris and Amsterdam for certain bands.

‘You never really knew him,’ Jude was saying. ‘You never made the effort.’

All Fox could do was nod his agreement.

‘He wasn’t all candyfloss and ice cream, Jude.’

‘Because he’d been in trouble with the law?’ Her eyes were fixing on his. ‘That’s the thing, though – people like you can’t see past that. It was ancient history, yet that man Giles kept harping on about it, and the papers keep saying it.’

‘And he kept it from you, Jude. He didn’t want you to know.’

‘Because it wasn’t him any more!’ Her voice was rising. ‘And don’t start saying he was beating me up – I don’t want to hear it! The papers have got hold of that, too, and who is it’s been feeding them all this crap if not your lot?’

‘They’re not my lot,’ Fox said under his breath. ‘Not any more.’

He spent much of the evening lifting books from the bookshelves in his living room and placing them on the coffee table. His intention was to put them in alphabetical order, maybe with a split into two categories – ones he’d read; ones he hadn’t. But then he wondered if maybe some of them couldn’t go to a charity shop. And of the ones left for reshelving, should he initiate a further subdivision into fiction and non-fiction? He’d eaten chicken curry for his supper, using up the ingredients bought from Asda when he’d gone there to talk to Sandra Hendry. The chicken had come from a Co-op on the way back from Jude’s. He was now suffering from discomfort, having eaten too much.

‘Maybe they could all go,’ he told himself, staring at the piles of books. That would mean he could dispense with the shelving, creating more space. But space for what, exactly? A bigger TV, one of those home cinema systems? He would just end up watching more rubbish than ever. When his mobile trilled, he was happy to answer it. It was a text message from A

OK?

Fox ran his fingers through his hair and found that he was sweating from his work with the books. Never the world’s most expert texter, it took him three trial runs before he decided he was happy with his reply. Only then did he press the ‘send’ button. His message had been a succinct OK, no question mark required.