The Cousin

The man from Bishopsgate came to the flat in Pimlico at ten past eleven on the Saturday morning.

His name was Detective Inspector Conor Halligan, of the Metropolitan Police. He was perhaps forty-eight. He was the son of Mr Stephen Halligan, the driver of the old dark-green Bentley taxi who had been waiting forty-three years at the kerb of Eaton Square, and he was — Maeve worked out in the small precise way Maeve had been working things out for three days — Tessa's nephew, and so, by the small precise arithmetic of the typed paragraph, Maeve's first cousin once removed.

He was, Maeve noted in the small particular way of women who had been raised on the kindness of strangers in the houses of Lewisham, the first person in the morning room of the Pimlico flat who had not, in three weeks, been thinking about Tessa for fifty years.

He had been thinking about Tessa, he told Mrs Wakeham, very gently, in the green-leather armchair, since the autumn of 1981, when he had been ten years old, and his father had sat him down at the kitchen table of their small terrace in Dagenham, and his father had told him — once, in nine sentences, the way his father had said only the things that mattered — what he believed had happened, on the second of April 1975, to the older sister his father had not been able to find a single trace of in six years of looking.

He had been a detective inspector, Conor Halligan said in the careful neutral voice of a man who had been waiting forty-three years to be in this room, on the express understanding that should ever the question reopen, he would be the officer to whom the file came.

The file had, by ten past ten on the Saturday morning, come to him.

—

He sat in the dove-grey wool armchair, in the morning light of the Pimlico flat, with a cup of tea on the small walnut side table that Maeve had made for him with milk and one sugar lump because his father had — at the kerb on the corner of Eaton Square half an hour earlier, in the soft Sicilian-Long-Island accent of a man who had been driving a black Bentley taxi in Belgravia for nine years — told her that his son took it that way.

Mr Stephen Halligan was, this morning, downstairs at the kitchen of the Pimlico flat, in the small wooden chair by the back window, making, very quietly, in the unhurried way of a man who had been making it for forty-three Saturday mornings, a soup he had been intending to bring to the upstairs room only when the conversation upstairs was finished.

Mrs Wakeham, in the green-leather armchair, with the small green silk pouch from inside the cabinet of the Knibb mantel clock on the small walnut side table beside her, said in the small careful voice she had used at her dressmaker for fifty years —

'Conor, my dear. I am going to give you four documents, this morning. I am going to tell you, on each of them, who in the household has known its provenance for how long, so you can be the man at Bishopsgate who, on Monday, knows which witness to compel and which witness has, in the small ways the law accepts, already volunteered. I am going to be very tedious, my dear. You will forgive me. I have arranged the order. May I.'

DI Conor Halligan said, 'Mrs Wakeham. You may.'

He took out a small leather notebook, the same kind, Maeve noticed in the part of her brain that was still cataloguing, that DI Halligan's father had been carrying in the inside pocket of his coat at the kerb of Eaton Square.

He uncapped a fountain pen.

He looked, very steadily, across the small walnut side table, at Mrs Wakeham — who had married his great-aunt's killer in 1981, who had carried that fact for forty-two years in the small careful voice of her own dressmaker, who would be dead by Christmas — and DI Conor Halligan said, very quietly —

'Go on, then, Eleanor.'

She went on.

* * *