Close to Death

She shuddered. ‘Don’t call me that! I lost the title along with everything else.’ She took one last look at me. ‘Thank you for the book. I would ask you not to return here. I really want nothing more to do with you. Now, I’ll wish you a good day.’

Maria showed me out of the house. When I got to the end of the street, I turned round and looked back. She was still there, watching me, making sure I wasn’t going to come back.

4

I’m not sure what I was expecting from Fenchurch International, but I walked past the drab three-storey building twice before I noticed it was there and even then I wasn’t sure I was right: it didn’t have any signage and one of the numbers had fallen off. The area was prestigious enough – this was, after all, the financial district of the City of London – but the office had all the charm of a civic building put up on the cheap back in the seventies. The architecture was strikingly utilitarian, all concrete and glass, with four rows of identical windows and a nasty revolving door. This led into a cramped reception area with a single woman working on her nails, a headset connecting her to an old-fashioned console on a faux-marble desk.

‘Hello. Can I help you?’ She brightened up when she saw me. I got the impression that despite her job description, this was a receptionist who didn’t have that many guests to receive.

‘I’m here to see Mr Morton.’

‘And you are?’

‘Anthony Green.’ It was probably stupid of me to use my wife’s name. I’d be found out eventually. But it had occurred to me that if I had gone in as myself, they would almost certainly have known my connection with Hawthorne and might have refused to see me.

‘Fourth floor. Room five. You can use the lift.’

The lift was as out of date as the rest of the building, with solid aluminium doors and chunky buttons that sprang back when they were pushed. It moved slowly. The fourth-floor corridor was equally disappointing: not shabby or cheap – despite everything, the rent on this place must have been astronomical – but almost deliberately unimpressive. It must have been years since I had last walked on parquet flooring. A woman with spectacles and her hair tied in a bun hurried past me, nervous and unsmiling, clutching a bundle of papers. I walked past Rooms 1 to 4 and knocked at the one at the end of the corridor.

‘Come!’

Why do some people use that construction? Why do they drop the ‘in’? The voice had come from the other side of the door and I opened it to find myself in a small, square room with a window looking out over railway lines branching out from Fenchurch Street Station, which was about five minutes’ walk away. A man was sitting behind the sort of desk a child or a cartoonist might draw. He had been typing on a laptop computer, but he closed the lid as I came in and looked up affably.

‘Mr Green?’

‘Mr Morton?’

‘Alastair Morton. Please . . .’ He gestured me towards the two identical armchairs that faced each other across an ugly glass coffee table with a couple of files on top.

I examined him as we sat down. He was not an attractive man; somewhere in his forties, out of shape, with a sprouting of hair on his chin that was too scrappy to be a beard, but which nonetheless must have been grown by design. His eyes were tired and his skin was not good. He was wearing a dark jacket and jeans with an open-neck shirt – the same uniform as those Californian tech entrepreneurs who are worth billions and are brilliant enough to have invented some new algorithm or sent tourists into space, but who work on their appearance to suggest the opposite. He had difficulty breathing. Even the short journey from the desk to the chair had tired him. I wondered if he was ill.

Certainly, it was hard to believe that this was the man who employed Hawthorne, his adoptive brother, Roland, and quite possibly John Dudley too. Nothing about him fitted what Lady Barraclough had told me – her sense of being victimised and humiliated. Perhaps she’d met someone else.

‘So you’re looking for a missing person,’ he began. His voice was throaty. He licked his lips at the end of the sentence.

‘Yes.’

‘And you were recommended to us by Lady Barraclough.’

‘That’s right. She spoke very highly of you.’

‘That’s very good of her. How is she?’

‘Not terribly well, I’m afraid.’

‘Well, it was an unpleasant business.’ He sniffed apologetically, took out a paper tissue and wiped his nose. ‘Who is it you want to find?’

‘His name is John Dudley. He used to be a police officer. I know very little about him. He may have worked in Bristol. When I met him, he was working as a private detective and it occurred to me that he might be employed by you.’

‘There’s no John Dudley working here as far as I know. Why do you need to find him?’

‘I can’t really explain. There’s something I want to ask him.’

Morton considered this. ‘What else can you tell me?’