‘We’ll miss Peggy,’ says Patricia. ‘She was a one-off.’
‘She always asked about my family,’ says Maria. ‘She knew such a lot about Poland. Unlike most British people,’ she adds darkly.
‘I know,’ says Sally. ‘Nigel studied modern history at Cambridge but I’m frightfully ignorant.’
Harbinder’s friend Clare says that people who went to Cambridge always mention it in the first ten minutes of conversation. Sally is true to this rule, even if only vicariously.
‘Did Peggy go to university?’ says Harbinder. ‘She never told me.’ This is true, because Harbinder never met her.
‘No,’ says Sally. ‘She was born in 1929 and not many women went then. She was really clever though. She read so many books.’ She gestures at the empty shelves.
‘Where are the books?’ asks Patricia.
At this moment, Nigel appears, a bottle in each hand. ‘Who’s for a top-up?’
Harbinder is about to ask for a glass of red when a voice in her ear says, ‘Time to go.’
Harbinder turns to see Natalka, Glasses and Pink Bow Tie looking at her expectantly. ‘Summit meeting,’ explains Natalka. ‘The Coffee Shack. Five minutes.’
It’s about ten minutes before she can escape but, after saying all the right things to Sally and Nigel, Harbinder heads down to the beach. The Shack, Natalka said, and there’s only one place it can be. A wooden hut on the coast road, right on the beach itself. It’s directly in front of the flats and must, Harbinder thinks, have been directly in Peggy Smith’s eyeline as she looked down from her window.
The Shack turns out to belong to Glasses, whose name is Benedict. Pink Bow Tie is, as she suspected, Peggy’s friend Edwin. They sit at a picnic table and drink excellent coffee and watch as the seagulls swoop low over the waves. It’s five o’clock and the seafront is quiet, just a few dog-walkers enjoying the last of the sun.
‘Harbinder is a detective,’ says Natalka. ‘She’s going to help us find out who murdered Peggy.’
‘We’ve no evidence that she was murdered,’ says Harbinder. ‘That’s quite an assumption.’ She senses that it’s important to remind Natalka of little things like this.
‘No evidence?’ says Natalka. She’s sitting on the picnic table and smoking a cigarette, making a half-hearted effort to blow the smoke away from them. Benedict flaps his hands apologetically but Harbinder has to admit that Natalka makes smoking seem cool, like the girls behind the gymnasium, all those years ago at Talgarth High. ‘Tell her, Edwin,’ says Natalka.
‘Sally said that I could have a memento,’ says Edwin. He has a nice voice, thinks Harbinder, posh without sounding patronising. ‘She’d kindly selected a few things for me, an ornament or two, a photograph of Peggy on Brighton Pier. But I thought I’d take one of her books. We always talked about books, Peggy and me. Besides, I was slightly annoyed that Nigel had already boxed them up, as though they were just objects to be thrown away. So I opened one of the boxes and took out this.’
Edwin is carrying something that’s a cross between a briefcase and a manbag. From its leather depths he produces a hardback. The cover shows a grainy shot of a tower block with the name Dex Challoner in gold foil across a stormy sky. The title is in smaller type below. High Rise Murder: A Tod France Mystery.
‘I’m not a Challoner fan,’ says Edwin. ‘But Peggy liked his books. This is the latest, an advance copy. ‘
‘It was the book Peggy was reading when she died,’ says Natalka. ‘It was open on the table beside her.’
‘Yes,’ says Edwin. ‘You told me. That’s partly why I chose it. I thought it would bring me closer to Peggy somehow. Anyway, when I opened it, this fell out.’
It’s a plain postcard and on it are the words: We are coming for you.
Chapter 6
Natalka: PS: for PS
It’s all very well sitting around drinking coffee, thinks Natalka, but we need some action. She’d thought that the detective, Harbinder, would provide some momentum but she seems as cautious as Benedict. That’s quite an assumption. Natalka likes Harbinder though. There’s something watchful and ironical about her, as if she thinks before speaking, something Natalka admires in others but can rarely manage to achieve herself.
‘Where are you from?’ Natalka had asked that first evening, when they were sitting in that untidy office with the weird baby calendar.
‘Sussex,’ Harbinder had answered. But then, relenting a little, she’d said that her parents had been born in India. ‘I’m a second-generation immigrant,’ she said, ‘the sort that’s meant to be mad keen to assimilate.’
‘And are you?’ asked Natalka, ‘mad keen?’
Harbinder shrugged. ‘Not really. I do get a bit fed up with people telling me to go back home when I only live in Shoreham though.’
Natalka came to England in 2013 to study Business Studies at Bournemouth University. While she was still getting her head round statistics and British sexual mores (the latter much harder to understand) war broke out in her home region of Donbass. Her brother Dmytro joined the Ukrainian Army fighting the so-called separatists. Despite an official ceasefire in 2014, the fighting continued with one Ukrainian solder being killed every three days. Natalka hasn’t heard from Dmytro since a text in 2015 wishing her a happy birthday. The official story, as far as there is one, is that Dmytro is missing in action. Natalka has managed to track down some of his comrades, all of whom believe that he’s dead. Natalka’s mother refuses to accept this and spends all her time and dwindling resources on searching for her son.
Natalka’s father left the family home when she was twelve and, for all she knows, might as well be dead. Natalka veers between grieving for her brother and a stubborn conviction that Dmytro is still out there somewhere. She misses her mother but nothing will make her go back to a war-ravaged country. After university, Natalka solved the visa issue by marrying another student and swiftly divorcing him. Now she works as a carer by day and, at night, buys and sells bitcoin. Most of what she earns goes in a fund named, in a moment of mordant humour, Motherland.
She’s not looking for a mother figure, she tells people, because she has a perfectly good one waiting for her at home. Her father is another story. But she likes some of the old people she visits, their fortitude and understatement. ‘I’m a little wobbly on my pins’, when they need a Zimmer frame to get across the room. ‘The old ticker’s a bit dodgy’, when they practically go into cardiac arrest after climbing the stairs. In contrast, Natalka’s own generation seems whiny and self-obsessed. All those pictures of their lunch on Instagram, all those selfies at weird angles with eyebrows raised and lips pursed, all those status updates #whothehellcares. Natalka has learned the value of keeping a low profile, which is why she doesn’t have Facebook or Twitter. The old people understand this. Mrs Smith once told her that she made a point of never giving strangers her real name.