And nothing else.
No junk, old bicycles, partially disassembled motorbikes, manacles, Perspex cells or clever rope rigs for strangling Daniel Craig.
“This is a bit bare,” I said.
Geoffrey Toobin shrugged.
“It was like this when I bought it,” he said.
“When was that?”
“Two years ago,” he said. “I didn’t want to fill it up with junk because it’s a useful space, but even so it’s not exactly somewhere you want to spend a lot of time.”
“You don’t have any hobbies?” I asked. There was a faint whiff of bleach. Now, my mum’s attitude to bleach is that if you haven’t used up the entire bottle of Domestos equivalent, then you probably haven’t cleaned the surfaces properly. So I’ve had a lot of experience with this smell, and someone had used a lot of bleach in the basement, but a while back. A week ago, maybe more—it was hard to tell in such an enclosed space.
“Tennis,” said Geoffrey Toobin. “Not really a basement sport.”
There was a restless ringing sound like glass wind chimes and the smell of salt sea and rum and molasses—that was vestigia.
“Have you finished? Because I really have some work that needs finishing up.”
“You’re working from home today?”
“I…” he said and hesitated. “I often work from home. As you probably know, my job’s nearly all paperwork.”
It had been hard to tell through a thick layer of white paint, but the bricks in the far wall were laid in a different bond from the rest of basement. All of them were of a non-standard size, flatter and smaller than modern bricks—probably seventeenth or eighteenth century—but they’d definitely been re-laid again and definitely no earlier than the mid-nineteenth.
“Given the size of the house, this basement seems a bit small,” I said. “There isn’t another area? Maybe accessed from outside or through a trap door?”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “Sorry.”
Again he was giving me fuck-all in the way of a response—either he was unnaturally calm or my gut was wrong.
Or, rare but horrible, some other entity had sequestrated him and was either puppeting him right now or had left him with no memories of his actions.
Or my gut was wrong.
Confirmation bias has put more innocent people in prison than malice.
“Well, thank you for your time,” I said and made sure I went up the stairs ahead of him.
Inconveniently, the stretch of the A416 outside the parsonage was a dual carriageway with no parking. I’d left the Asbo outside the Chesham Cottage Chinese restaurant across the way—it was the one place I could park where I could maintain a good view of the front door. If anything kicked off I’d have to run across four lanes of heavy traffic and vault, in a suitably dynamic fashion, the fence that ran along the central reservation.
Its only advantage as a location was that, should the stakeout become protracted, we wouldn’t have to go far for refs.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” said Abigail as I got in.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”
I handed Abigail a twenty and told her that she could either find a café in the High Street to wait in or catch a train back to the Folly.
“You think he’s the bad man?” asked Abigail when she saw the twenty.
“If it is him, I’m not comfortable with you being this close,” I said. At least not until I had a sprinter full of backup and/or Nightingale had arrived.
“There’s a Greggs up by the station road,” she said. “I’ll wait there.”
“You sure?” I asked. “It could be a long time.”
She held up a tatty hardback copy of Tacitus: Histories I & II in the original Latin. Judging from the dust jacket, a photograph of the Colosseum, it was post-war and hadn’t come from the Folly’s library. Plus I had the Folly’s only copy on a shelf in my room.
“Where did you get that?”
“Secondhand shop,” said Abigail.
“You spent your own money on it?”
“Might have done,” said Abigail. And, when I didn’t say anything, “Miss Margot gave it to me.”
“What, Margot the Maggot?” I said. Miss Margot had been a teacher when I was at school. She’d taught RE 6 and I don’t remember her as being all that encouraging.
“She’s the one organising the GCSE for me.”
“You never said.”
“You never asked.”
“So how long has she been teaching you Latin?”
“You know when I asked whether you’d teach me magic?” said Abigail. “And you said you would when I passed my GCSE?”
“Since then?” I said.
“Believe it.”
Oh, shit.
But at least it explained why she’d picked up it up so fast.
“So you going to keep your promise?” she asked.
“We’ll talk about it after,” I said.
“After what?”
“After we’re done here,” I said.
Abigail nodded.
“Laters,” she said.
And the moral of that story is, think before you open your gob.
Which left Geoffrey Toobin who, had I not suspected he was either holding or had already murdered Brené McClaren, I would have regarded as the least of my current problems.
I had a good view of his front door, but there were windows around the back at ground level and our friend Geoffrey could have been hopscotching his way to freedom even as me and Abigail were saying goodbye.
Luckily Jaget turned up not five minutes later.
“Thames Valley have got a person of interest,” he said as he got in.
And it’s obviously not Geoffrey Toobin, I thought, so I asked who.
“A Polish barista,” said Jaget. “Janusz Zdunowski.”
I asked why TVP liked him in particular and Jaget said that their canvass had led them to the Costa on the High Street where Brené McClaren was known to pop in on her way to work each morning.
“Wait,” I said. “That’s not on her way to the station.”
“No,” said Jaget and explained that Brené only started turning up for tea three months earlier—just a week or so after Janusz started work there. Not a coincidence, according to Janusz’s fellow baristas, who had been taking bets as to how long it would be before Brené plucked up enough courage to ask him out.
“And Thames Valley like him for the abduction?” I asked.
“They like that they have CCTV footage of him and Brené chatting in the car park the morning she disappeared,” said Jaget.
The car park filled the space between the A416, which I was currently parked the other side of, and the pedestrianised High Street where the Costa was located. I asked how much CCTV they had and what it showed, but Jaget said that was all DS Transcombe had told him.
I said that whatever else, we needed to cover Geoffrey Toobin’s back door and we settled who was going to leave the nice comfy car and loiter suspiciously around outside with a quick game of rock, paper, scissors—best out of three. Jaget always favours paper, but he hasn’t figured out I know that yet.