Free Fedora by John Harvey Page B

item?’
    ‘Jack …’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Don’t prejudge. And stop repeating everything I say.’
    Kiley chased a last mouthful of spinach around his plate. The waitress with the tattoos stopped by their table to ask if there was anything else they wanted and Kate sent her on her way.
    ‘He’s afraid of her,’ Kate said. ‘Afraid she’ll go to the police herself.’
    ‘Why now?’
    ‘It’s in the air, Jack. You read the papers, watch the news. Cleaning out the Augean stables doesn’t come into it.’
    Kiley was tempted to look at his watch: ten minutes without Kate making a reference he failed to understand. Maybe fifteen. ‘A proper relationship, isn’t that what you said?’
    ‘It ended badly. She didn’t want to accept things had run their course. Made it difficult. When it became clear he wasn’t going to change his mind, she attempted suicide.’
    ‘Pills?’
    Kate nodded. ‘It was all hushed up at the time. Back then, that was still possible.’
    ‘And now he’s terrified it’ll all come out …’
    ‘Go and talk to him, Jack. Do that at least. I think you’ll like him.’
    Liking him, Kiley knew, would be neither here nor there, a hindrance at best.
    There was a bookshop specialising in fashion and photography on Charing Cross Road. Claire de Rouen. Kiley had walked past there a hundred times without ever going in. Two narrow flights of stairs and then an interior slightly larger than the average bathroom. Books floor to ceiling, wall to wall. There was a catalogue from Fisher’s show at Victoria Miro, alongside a fat retrospective, several inches thick. Most of the photographs, the early ones, were in glossy black and white. Beautiful young women slumming in fashionable clothes: standing, arms aloft, in a bomb site, dripping with costume jewellery and furs; laughing outside Tubby Isaac’s Jellied Eel Stall at Spitalfields; stretched out along a coster’s barrow, legs kicking high in the air. One picture that Kiley kept flicking back to, a thin-hipped, almost waif-like girl standing, marooned, in an empty swimming pool, naked save for a pair of skimpy pants and gold bangles snaking up both arms, a gold necklace hanging down between her breasts. Lisa Arnold. Kate had told him her name. Lisa. He wondered if this were her.
    The house was between Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill, not so far from the Portobello Road. Flat fronted, once grand, paint beginning to flake away round the windows on the upper floors. Slabs of York Stone leading, uneven, to the front door. Three bells. Graeme Fisher lived on the ground floor.
    He took his time responding.
    White hair fell in wisps around his ears; several days since he’d shaved. Corduroy trousers, collarless shirt, cardigan wrongly buttoned, slippers on his feet.
    ‘You’ll be Kate’s friend.’
    Kiley nodded and held out his hand.
    The grip was firm enough, though when he walked it was slow, more of a shuffle, with a pronounced tilt to one side.
    ‘Better come through here.’
    Here was a large room towards the back of the house, now dining room and kitchen combined. A short line of servants’ bells, polished brass, was still attached to the wall close by the door.
    Fisher sat at the scrubbed oak table and waited for Kiley to do the same.
    ‘Bought this place for a song in sixty-four. All divided up since then, rented out. Investment banker and his lady friend on the top floor – when they’re not down at his place in Dorset. Bloke above us, something in the social media.’ He said it as if it were a particularly nasty disease. ‘Keeps the bailiffs from the sodding door.’
    There were photographs, framed, on the far wall. A street scene, deserted, muted colours, late afternoon light. An open-top truck, its sides bright red, driving away up a dusty road, fields to either side. Café tables in bright sunshine, crowded, lively, in the corner of a square; then the same tables, towards evening, empty save for an old man, head down, sleeping. Set a