Page 80 of Copper Script
Joel did his best.Challice was a sharply intelligent listener, and swiftly grasped the situation as he presented it.He didn’t know if she’d also grasped the parts he wasn’t admitting.
“So Sabini wanted to you make indecency allegations, and you refused,” she mused.“But the DDI nevertheless said you’d made them.That’s quite a bluff.”
“Is the DDI saying it because he thinks he can scare Aaron—Mr.Fowler—with the mere accusation, or because he thinks he can make me say it?”Joel asked.“Because if it was the latter, I’d have thought Darby Sabini might have had another word with me already, to let me know what I was obliged to do.”
“And he hasn’t?”
“No,” Joel said thoughtfully.“This Colthorne chap: nice as pie until he doesn’t get what he wants, and then the temper comes out?”
“Very much so.Where are you going with this?”
Joel thought back on the conversation with Sabini, the various hands he’d read.“Sabini likes to be a man who does favours.Once I started appealing to him for help, he was generosity itself.But he doesn’t like taking orders.I’m just wondering, if Colthorne told him to get an accusation of indecency out of me, and all Sabini brought him was an accusation of inappropriate graphology, would that have gone down badly?Would Colthorne maybe sayGo back and do it properly, sort of thing?They both need to be the big man in the room, can’t be challenged—”
“Have you met DDI Colthorne?”she demanded.
“I read his hand.”
“Hmm.DS Fowler told me about that.It sounds plausible knowing the DDI, but does it get us anywhere?”
“Only that if Sabini took the hump, Colthorne might have done himself out of an ally,” Joel suggested.“Temporarily, at least.So perhaps he decided to bluff his way through, and hope Mr.Fowler wouldn’t care to fight a whole barrage of accusations.”Especially if Paul Napier-Fox had blabbed about Aaron’s school indiscretion.Joel didn’t propose to bring that up.“You wouldn’t do that if you felt certain you could frame someone up properly.But you might do it if you were on shaky ground and didn’t want to give them leisure to counter-attack.”
She nodded slowly.“So we should do that, then.DS Fowler still thinks the answer is in Marks’s notebooks.”
“Or papers.Colthorne mentioned papers.And I told Sabini that DS Fowler had showed me letters from an ongoing investigation—”
“Whereupon Colthorne launched the attack.Hmm.”She drummed her fingers on her knee.“We searched Marks’s office and rooms very thoroughly.I can’t think he had another place; he was barely able to afford the life we saw.If he stashed them somewhere, we haven’t found it.”
“If he was afraid enough to move his files, he surely would have wanted to put them somewhere they’d be found if anything happened to him,” Joel said.“Or, perhaps, with someone who’d act if he turned up dead?”
“Nobody has contacted us to my knowledge.He wasn’t married, no family.”She frowned.“I might visit his landlady again.She clearly cared about him; I wonder if he’d have confided in her.She didn’t want to talk to me, though, and was very distrustful of the police.I wonder—”
“If Marks told her not to trust the fuzz,” Joel said breathlessly.“With Colthorne involved, wouldn’t that be something Marks would say?”
“Yes, it might.Which creates a problem for me, of course.”
Their eyes met.Joel swallowed.“Suppose—not that I want to tread on your toes or insert myself into official business or any such—but suppose I talk to her?”
Challice considered that for what felt like a very long time, then said, “Yes.Suppose you do.”
