Page 13 of Pressure Head
I shrugged and slid into the Golf’s passenger seat. “False alarm. I didn’t have to do any actual work.”
Phil laughed, and I tried not to do an obvious double take. I hadn’t known he could do that. He was dressed a lot more casually than the last time I’d seen him. I liked the more relaxed look. The body warmer was getting another outing, this time over a thick padded shirt that looked like something I might have worn, only a lot more expensive. “Easy money, then.”
“Nah, I waived the call-out fee. I’m not going to charge seventy-five quid when I didn’t even do anything.”
“Too soft for your own good, you are. You were in Harpenden, right? They’re loaded, people who live there. Seventy-five quid’s small change to that lot. Wouldn’t even cover the weekly wine bill at Waitrose.”
“Listen, you live by your moral code, I’ll live by mine.”
“Nice to know you believe I’ve got one,” Phil said, his tone wry.
I gave him a sidelong look, treating myself to the view of his square-jawed profile. “Well . . . I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt, at any rate.”
My house is on the east side of St. Albans, and Graham’s flat was at the south end of Brock’s Hollow, so it was only about ten minutes or so before we pulled up outside. We cut across the communal front lawn to the main door, and Phil rang the bell. “Graham? It’s Phil.”
There was no answer, but the door buzzed open. We clattered up the stairs, our steps echoing from the concrete walls of the stairwell. It was fairly grim, but at least it smelled clean. Phil rapped on the door of 14c.
It turned out that when he’d said Graham was a mess, it’d been like saying the Ice Age was a wee bit nippy. Graham looked wrecked. No two ways about it. Granted, I hadn’t seen him for over a decade, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t just the passage of time that had done this to him. His face looked like a skull, with sunken eyes peering out from under his greasy fringe. He opened the door warily, as if worried there might be a lynch mob on his doorstep, and let us in without a word. Phil stepped straight up to give him a hug, while I looked on in amazement with maybe an undertone of jealousy. I hadn’t known Phil could do that either.
We trooped into the tiny, cluttered living room, where Graham perched uneasily on the sofa he’d shared with Melanie. Poor sod. The flat smelled stale and unsavoury, like unwashed laundry and overfilled bins. Phil sat next to him, and I shifted a stack of papers so I could make use of an armchair.
“I didn’t do it,” Graham said, looking directly at me, as if he thought me believing him would have any influence whatsoever on whether he went down for the murder.
“Course you didn’t, mate,” I said, my voice cringingly hearty. As if I was trying to jolly him out of his bereavement. “I’m really sorry about Melanie,” I added in a more sympathetic tone. It felt weird, talking to him as if it hadn’t been twelve years since the last time—but then, asking him how he’d been and what he’d been up to would have been completely ludicrous. And I couldn’t blame him for having more on his mind than what had happened in my boring little life since last we’d met.
“How . . . how did she look, when you found her?”
Oh God. Dead. She’d looked dead, and when the police shone their torches on her, I could see the back of her head was a broken, bloody mess . . . “Peaceful,” I said and had to clear my throat. “Like she was asleep.”
“Thank you,” he said and reached out a hand to grip mine. It was cold and clammy. It felt exactly like Melanie’s hand had felt. My stomach clenched, but I managed not to wrest my hand from his grip.
Phil’s voice rumbled from beside him. “Tell us again what happened that night. The last time you saw her.”
Graham’s grip lessened on me, thank God, and I was able to pull my hand away without it seeming unnatural. He looked at Phil and swallowed.
“I’ll make a cup of tea,” I suggested, my voice sounding way too loud.
Phil made an impatient noise, but I ignored him and strode on into the kitchen. The decor was outdated, but it looked basically clean and cheerful, just a stack of takeaway containers by the bin giving a clue that things weren’t exactly normal around here. I wondered how many meals Graham had bothered to cook since Melanie’s disappearance. The tea bags were in a vintage-style caddy next to the kettle, and the milk in the fridge was still just in date. I made three mugs, added two sugars to Graham’s on general principles, and carried them back through.
Phil accepted his tea with a nod. Graham clung to his as if it were the only thing holding him back from the abyss. One knee had started jiggling, but he didn’t seem to have noticed. Despite the clutter, despite the smallness of the room, it felt empty and cold.
“Right,” Phil said with an annoyed glance my way. “Tell us what happened.”
Graham took a gulp of his tea. He didn’t complain about the sugar, so I reckoned either he usually drank it sweet, or he just didn’t have the energy to complain about it. “We were going to watch a DVD. She’d been working late a lot in the last few months, so we hadn’t had an evening together for ages. That was why . . .” He trailed off and stared into space.
“That was why you had the argument,” Phil prompted.
He drank another mouthful of tea and nodded. “I didn’t want her to go. I said it wasn’t reasonable, she should tell him she couldn’t make it. But she said it’d only take half an hour.”
“Did she say what it was about?”
Graham frowned. “You asked me this. Before. I told you—”
“This is for Tom’s benefit, Graham,” Phil interrupted, a lot more patiently than he’d have done if it’d been me, I was sure. And anyway, why did Phil want me to hear all this from Graham? Couldn’t he just have told me himself and saved Graham a bit of grief?
“All right.” He drank some more of his tea and stared out of the window. “All she said was, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to go out for a bit. It’s the boss.’ She said we could start the film when she got back. Like she wasn’t going to be gone for long, you know?”
“Did she take anything with her?”
