Quid Pro Quo

Chapter Twenty Two

I was in my office when my mobile phone rang. It vibrated in my pocket and chirped merrily like a polyphonic songbird. I screwed the top back on the bottle of water I had been drinking from and squeezed the device from my jeans.

It was Martha.

She seemed distracted when we spoke, but we arranged to meet for a drink. She had been shopping with the money Ty had provided. Although persuading her to take it had not been easy, she did concede that there were a lot of things she needed.

On the drive from Pebble Deeping that morning Martha and I had discussed who could have known about her father's work. She had given me a series of names; mostly academic colleagues and a journal editor or two. I had spent my morning phoning round these people and asking if they had been aware of what the professor had been working on before he died.

The results had not been promising; many of the academics poured scorn on everything Wimple had worked on, and derided his mental faculties in general. One even laughed out loud at the mention of his name.

It occurred to me that had I just spoken to a potential murderer, then he or she would have lied. However, I was less than convinced that a rival academic was masterminding a campaign of death and intimidation in order to be first to find treasure that the bulk of opinion thought to be a fairy tale.

I finished the brief phone call with Martha, she gave me directions to a trendy coffee shop and I said I'd be there soon.

I shuffled some notes into a buff folder, then dumped it on a pile on the floor. A small puff of dust rose from the impact like a mushroom-cloud testament to laziness; a sign of how little use my office had got in recent times.

I had become so entwined in Ty's life that my already pitiful standing in the firm was suffering, and if it went on much longer I thought I might find myself frozen out completely.

I balanced the possibility of losing my place in the business, and with it the last link to my past, against my inextricable ties to the Edge case. I included in this calculus the fact that I needed the money, and that I had been party to various illegalities.

Then there was Martha, of course. She required help, and the way my mind was at the moment I would have done anything to provide it.

I gathered my phone, donned my jacket, and patted my back pocket to check my wallet was there. I had to pick my way deliberately back out of the room, tip-toeing between the piles of files and old newspapers and magazine clippings. When all of this was over, I promised myself that I would tidy the cubby hole up and make it a little more professional.

"Off again so soon, Satchmo?" Joan inquired, her voice thick with sarcasm. "We were so enjoying your little stay. When can we expect to see you here again? Christmas?"

I wasn't in the mood to bandy barbed comments with her, so I smiled wanly and strode for the door before one of the Yeoman twins caught me.

"I hope you know what you're doing!" she called after me.

In that, at least, we were agreed. I hoped that I knew what I was doing too.

*

I sat in a deep black leather sofa; the seat low to the floor and the arm rests perturbingly high. I cradled a large mug of hot chocolate in both hands, the surface of which was pleasingly frothy and sported a single marshmallow that melted in the middle like an iceberg in the Caribbean.

I don't drink coffee, and the bewildering array of options chalked onto the board above the serving counter made me question the sanity of the world. What was the point of a mocha-choca-latte, with the option of any combination of seven flavoured syrups and a dusting of your choice?

I drink to survive not to display the depths of my pockets or the breadth of my erudition.

The place was all over-stuffed black leather furniture, low lighting and warm wood. Two bored-looking teenage girls offered service with a sneer from behind a polished black mock-marble counter.

The under-sprung seat of the sofa, combined with the proximity of an equally diminutive table, meant my knees rose high above the level of my lap, and I was forced to lie back on the considerable padded cushion to gain any comfort. The whole ambiance was a frightening mix of dolls' tea party furniture and high-fashion drinks.

The clientele of the shop was largely female, chiefly middle-aged, entirely middle-class and exclusively over made-up. I imagined that each deluded herself into believing they were in a gigi little place in New York, Rome or Paris, maybe on the set of Friends or Sex in the City, but certainly anywhere but the heart of the West Midlands.

This was not my idea of a watering hole, and I hoped it never would be.

Across the table from me Martha was curled in an enormous leather armchair like a cat.

Her shoes lay on the floor, and she had tucked her feet up under her behind. One elbow rested on her hip, the other on the arm rest, and her hands were clasped around a steaming mug, contents unknown, whilst she stared over the rim and out of the window behind me.

She pursed her lips and blew gently into the cup, rippling the surface, then she bowed her head and took a tentative sip, the now-familiar strand of chestnut hair escaping from behind her ear and coming to rest against her fingers.

I had filled her in on my morning of failed lead-chasing. She took it in silently until a raucous cackle arose from a coffee house coven by the door and snapped Martha out of her reverie.

"So ... I went to the bank with my father's will and a letter from our solicitor," she said, breaking her over-my-shoulder stare for the first time.

"It seems that the funeral provision my father had made emptied all of his accounts. Everything." She sounded calm and morose in equal measure.

"This is a surprise to you?" I asked a somewhat rhetorical question.

"My father always had money; cash, bonds and some shares. He planned. He was careful. Now, I have inherited a sizeable debt from a bank loan, plus an overdraft and a mortgage on Holly Corner." She was taking it very well, her tone remained flat and unnaturally calm.

"The bank are liaising with my solicitor, whom I can't afford to pay, about the possibility of releasing my father's last account statements." Her eyes began to dampen with the first signs of tears, a pink flush appeared on her cheeks, and she started to swallow and blink.

"I see..." I said, realizing that she was effectively bankrupt.

"Of course, this needn't have been a problem. I could have sold Holly Corner and used that money to clear the debt and mortgage. But it's not exactly in a saleable condition at the moment! That naturally wouldn't be so bad if I had the insurance pay-out to bring the house back into habitability, complete with period features ..." she sighed and resumed her stare through the steam rising from her drink.

"But there was no insurance, and now I am fucked," she concluded.

Her use of invective shocked me a little. It didn't suit her. Or it didn't suit my idea of her. Either way, it jarred.

Around Martha's chair were piled the products of her morning of shopping; A cluster of plastic bags from high street shops containing the simple paraphernalia of life which we forget we need until we no longer have it. She saw me looking at the collected purchases and reached for her purse, pushing a tightly folded wad of unspent notes across the table towards me. I struggled upright and returned it hurriedly back.

"Jesus! Don't wave that around in public. This isn't Pebble Deeping," I exclaimed, looking quickly around to see if any coffee-swilling ne'er-do-wells had seen the chunky clutch of notes. Her hand closed back around the money.

"Besides, I think you are meant to keep it. Give it to your solicitor, I continued in now-hushed tones.

"Yeah. It will just cover one of his letters and five minutes of the time he spends scratching his balls," Martha snarled bitterly.

"It's better than scratching his balls yourself," I quipped, regretting the words as soon as they were past my tongue. She tilted her head in agreement, but I didn't manage to bring a smile to her lips. Instead, she took another shallow sip of coffee.

"So, until we hear back about your father's financial comings and goings, we are none-the-wiser," I suggested.

"Satchmo... It seems to me that we have spent the bulk of our time together being none-the-wiser," she replied, and with that single comment she managed to sum up the duration of my stay upon God's Earth.

*

Tyrone Edge knelt on all fours over the patch of bare dirt near the cowshed. His shoulder blades were pronounced and moved like pistons every time he shifted his weight. His feet tapped a rhythm on the floor that seemed vaguely martial in nature.