Dead Point Read Online Free PDF Page B

the last refuge of the scoundrel: home.
    ‘My God,’ he said, ‘where are you, what’s that ghastly noise?’
    I turned down the volume. ‘The person. There’s room for speculation here.’
    ‘Matter’s closed. You’ve been remunerated.’ The clipped military tone was blurred by a long day of duplicity and substance abuse.
    ‘Time on the meter, as you well know. Tell the client your information is that the official explanation doesn’t hold up.’
    I could hear him suck his teeth.
    ‘Get back to you, old fruit,’ he said.
    Back was five minutes. ‘The client would like a meeting. Maximum discretion is required.’
    ‘And who,’ I said, ‘is better equipped to provide that?’
    Then I rang Cam’s latest number. A woman answered, light voice, not a voice I knew. ‘I’ll see if Mr Delray is in the mood for callers,’ she said.
    Cam came on. ‘Jack.’ He’d been close enough to hear my voice. What did that mean? Silly question.
    ‘I’d cross Cyril off the list,’ I said. ‘There are things you can’t fake.’
    ‘Glad to hear it. Monday morning, free early? Eight-fifteen? We could eat.’
    ‘What meal is that, your time?’
    ‘Too soon to know yet. Pick you up where?’
    ‘Charlie’s. He’s away. I’ve been slacking. Bring something.’
    I ate in front of the television, watching the first part of a British drama about a middle-aged artist with an unsympathetic wife, a doctor. The man hit the singing sauce closer to breakfast than lunch, rooted the nanny in the mid-afternoon lull and, before dinner, wine glass in hand, delivered a withering attack on bureaucrats, multinationals, cultural imperialists, and people he didn’t like much.
    I identified strongly. Not much later, I went to bed and succumbed to the arms of Milo. One day thesecrumbly grains will be a listed substance, prescription only, traded on cold streets, the price floating on the surging sea of supply and demand.

‘Do you know who I am?’ the man in the perfect dark suit asked.
    I nodded. My inclination on seeing him had been to leave and, later, to chastise Wootton severely for not warning me. ‘What would you like me to call you?’
    He hesitated for an instant. ‘Colin will be fine.’
    The waiter arrived, a plump young woman in black, not fully alert yet. In that condition, we were companions.
    ‘Weak latte for me, please,’ said Mr Justice Colin Loder.
    ‘Short black.’
    The judge was short and trim. His curly dark hair was razor-cut, parted at the left with the aid of a ruler. He looked as if he’d gone to sleep before 9 p.m. the night before, and come to our meeting fresh from swimming five kilometres followed by a full-body massage. I envied that in a man.
    We were sitting at the window table in a cafe called Zanouff’s in Kensington, in Bellair Street,across the road from the station. You could see the trains taking the condemned into the city.
    ‘Don’t judges have flunkeys they send out on business like this?’
    ‘Good flunkeys are hard to find these days,’ he said.
    Colin Loder put his elbows on the table, put his fingertips together. Steepling they called it in the body-language trade. ‘You have something to tell me about Robert’s death.’
    ‘I don’t think it was an accidental overdose.’
    A deadpan look. ‘Why would you know better than the police?’
    I gave him a dose of steepling. He noticed. ‘It’s hard to know what the police know,’ I said. ‘You can’t find out from what they say.’
    He unsteepled, moved his mouth, almost a smile. ‘Like politicians. What do
you
know?’
    ‘I don’t like the proposition that someone doesn’t come home for days and when he does, he accidentally overdoses in his garage.’
    Colin Loder’s black eyes were on me. ‘But it’s possible, isn’t it?’
    I said, ‘Yesterday I was told that the police were interested in Robbie before his death.’
    He touched his chin with a finger, brushed the blue cleft. ‘Told by?’
    I looked at him,