A Scandalous Man - Gavin Esler

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of her scent. He ran towards the elevators, but they were silent. Nothing moved. The emergency stairs, he decided. She must have used the emergency stairs. But where were they? Where was the fire escape? Where was the sign?

      He ran to the other end of the hall, his bare feet pounding on the trampoline of a carpet. The fire escape was marked and he pulled at the door. He could make out the sound of footsteps below and ran after them, the balls of his bare feet thumping on the concrete of the fire stairs. He hit the jade coloured floor of the main entrance hall as the front door clicked shut. The young woman was running down the hill towards the heath. The faun had escaped into the woodland. Gone. Barefoot in the dark Harry had no chance of catching her. He stood panting in the hallway and checked his watch. It was three o’clock in the morning.

      ‘Jesus,’ he hissed under his breath. He wondered why he had not heard the girl breaking in, but then immediately understood. She had used keys. She had crept past him, and had almost managed to leave without rousing him. She knew exactly where she was going. She had been there before. Harry pressed the elevator button and returned to the apartment. He checked the front door. As he had guessed, there was no sign of forced entry. He went from room to room trying to decide what had gone missing. His own wallet was lying undisturbed on the table. But the computer was definitely gone. And the photograph of his father with Leila. Some papers. Nothing else, he decided. He thought about calling the police immediately, then he hesitated. Finally he decided to leave it until daybreak. The girl was long gone. There was nothing the police could do for him, except give him a long, sleepless night. After a while he wondered whether he had dreamed about the burglary, whether it had really happened.

      He rubbed his face in his hands and then tried to decide whether the real dream was the love he had seen in his father’s eyes for someone called Leila Rajar, in a photograph which had now disappeared, and which, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, had never existed.

      The two Metropolitan Police detectives finally arrived at the Hampstead apartment at eleven in the morning, an hour late, or a day late, depending on how you calculated it. Sidney Pearl told them to go up to the flat, and he then called Harry to warn him they were on their way.

      ‘The traffic,’ one of the detectives apologized, as he shook Harry’s hand and stepped through the door of the apartment. ‘Plus the election. And we had a terror alert. And then a couple of shootings in south London. Busy day yesterday, all in all.’

      The detective was a few years older than Harry, in his early thirties, white, fleshy, rubicund. He introduced himself as Detective Constable Steven Harpenden.

      ‘Even this morning, took us an hour to get five miles from Scotland Yard. We were going to blue light it, but thought we’d sit through it. Nothing works in London except the traffic lights.’

      ‘And us,’ his colleague interrupted. ‘We work, yes?’

      Harry looked at the second detective. He was around 40, black, skin the colour of milky coffee, slim, in a well cut brown suit.

      ‘Detective Sergeant Donald Sylvester,’ he said, shaking hands. ‘We talked on the telephone yesterday. I’m so very sorry we’re a day late.’

      ‘Not a problem,’ Harry said. ‘I was here anyway. I just thought what with it being an attempted murder inquiry, you’d be here last night.’

      DS Sylvester eyed him closely.

      ‘Who told you it’s an attempted murder inquiry?’

      ‘I just thought …’

      ‘Most likely attempted suicide,’ Harpenden interrupted. ‘That’s what we’re hearing from Gloucester. No signs of breaking and entry. No signs of a struggle. No evidence to the contrary. But we’re keeping an open mind, know what I mean?’

      Harry said nothing. The whisky and the early wake-up call from the spiky-haired girl had got to him. He wasn’t sure exactly when it was that he decided not to trust the detectives. It was simply a matter of instinct. He would tell them as little as possible. A line of Seamus Heaney poetry kept buzzing in Harry’s head.

      ‘Whatever you say,’ Heaney wrote, ‘say nothing.’

      He was not going to mention the girl, the laptop or the photograph with Leila Rajar. Say nothing.

      ‘Shall we – um – get on, then, Mr Burnett?’ Detective Sergeant Sylvester said, still looking him over as if he sensed that Harry was about to lie to him.

      ‘Of course. How can I help?’

      ‘Maybe just answer a few questions and let us poke around a bit?’

      ‘Of course,’ Harry repeated. ‘But I don’t understand what we’re all doing here exactly.’ Harry turned to Donald Sylvester. ‘I mean, if it’s not attempted murder, then is there a crime? And if there’s no crime, why is there an investigation?’

      ‘Well, we – um,’ Sylvester hesitated. ‘Like Steve said, we don’t think there’s a crime, but we have to tick all the boxes.’

      Harry smiled.

      ‘So you’re not going to charge my father with wasting police time if he lives?’

      ‘Just a precaution really, sir,’ Sylvester began to explain. ‘Bearing in mind your father’s – um – high visibility. We need to be seen to cover the ground. Your father attracted … a lot of attention … some of it – um – undesirable.’

      ‘But you really don’t think that someone tried to …’

      His voice trailed away as he gestured round the apartment with his hand.

      ‘Did you know of anyone with a grudge against your father?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Did you know of anyone who would want to harm your father?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Did you know of any threats to your father of any kind?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Do you know of any reason why he would kill himself?’

      Harry shook his head.

      ‘And do you think he is capable of committing suicide?’

      ‘I have no idea what he might be capable of,’ Harry said. ‘He was a stranger to me, as I told you on the phone. Was there a suicide note?’

      Sylvester looked back at him.

      ‘No. Or at least, no one has found one. Did you find anything here?’

      ‘No.’

      The detective was just over six feet tall but Harry was even taller. They stared at each other.

      ‘What are the police in Gloucestershire saying?’

      ‘Things point to a – um – self-induced drugs overdose and self-inflicted wrist wounds,’ Sylvester said flatly. ‘The cuts were at the correct angle for self-harm. Was your father left or right handed?’

      That caused Harry to pause.

      ‘Right handed,’ he replied. ‘I think.’

      Sylvester nodded.

      ‘You don’t sound so sure.’

      ‘I haven’t seen him in years.’

      Detective Sergeant Sylvester couldn’t read the emotions in Harry’s eyes, but he knew what he was not seeing. Grief.

      ‘Are you in the politics business yourself then, Mr Burnett?’ Harpenden wondered.

      ‘Politics? No,’ Harry protested and then grinned. ‘Well, not really.’

      ‘Not really?’

      ‘I work as a volunteer for my constituency Labour party in Fulham, if you consider that the politics business. We have a local joke: Are you a member of an organized

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