Common Murder

“I’m happy to take your word for it,” Lindsay flattered. “Now, if I might see those papers?” She got to her feet.

“Of course, of course,” he said, rising and bustling her out of the room. They climbed two flights of stairs, Mallard chatting continuously about the property market and the deplorable effect the peace camp was having on house prices in the neighborhood of the common.

“But houses at Brownlow seem about the same price as similar houses near by,” Lindsay commented.

“Oh yes, but they used to be the most highly sought after in the area, and the most expensive. Now it takes a lot of persuasion to shift them. Well, here we are.”

They entered a small office containing a battered desk, several upright chairs and a filing cabinet. “Here you are, m’dear,” Mallard waved vaguely around him. He unlocked the filing cabinet. “Chairman’s files and my files in the top drawers. Minutes in the second. Correspondence in the third and stationery in the bottom drawer. Look at anything you please, we’ve no guilty secrets.”

“Will you be in your office for a while? I might come across some things I want to clarify.”

“Of course, of course. I shall be there till half past twelve. I’m sure you’ll be finished by then. I’m at your disposal.” He twinkled another seemingly sincere smile at her and vanished downstairs.

Lindsay sighed deeply and extracted two bulging manila folders from the top drawer of the filing cabinet. They were both labelled “Ratepayers Against Brownlow’s Destruction. Chairman’s File.” In red pen, the same hand had written “ 1” and “ 2” on them. She sat down at the desk and opened her briefcase. She took out a large notepad, pen and her Walkman. She slotted in a Django Reinhardt tape and started to plough through the papers.

The first file yielded nothing that Lindsay could see. She stuffed the papers back into it and opened the second file. As she pulled the documents out, a cassette tape clattered on to the desk. Curious, she picked it up. The handwritten label, not in Crabtree’s by now familiar script, said, “Sting: The Dream of The Blue Turtles”. Surprised, Lindsay put it to one side and carried on working. When her own tape reached the end, she decided to have a change and inserted the Sting tape. But instead of the familiar opening chords she heard an alien sequence of hisses, bleeps, and sounds like radio interference. Lindsay knew very little about information technology. But she knew enough to realize that although this tape was mislabelled, it was actually a computer program on tape. And fed into the right computer, it might explain precisely what it was doing in Rupert Crabtree’s RABD file. She remembered the computers she had seen downstairs and wondered if that was where Mallard stored the real information about RABD’s finances.

She worked her way quickly through the financial records, making a few notes as she went. It seemed to be in order, though the book-keeping system seemed unnecessarily complex. Finally she skimmed through the minutes and correspondence. “Waste of bloody time,” she muttered to herself as she neatly replaced everything. The cassette tape caught her eye, and she wondered again if it might hold the key to the questions Crabtree had been asking about money. She threw the computer tape into her briefcase along with her own bits and pieces and headed downstairs for the confrontation she’d been geared up to since breakfast. As she rounded the corner of the stairs, she noticed a man coming out of Mallard’s office. From above, she could see little except the top of his head of greying, gingery hair and the shoulders of his tweed jacket. By the time she reached the bottom of the stairs, he had gone.

Mallard’s office door was ajar and she stuck her head round. “Can I come in?” she asked.

“Of course, of course, m’dear,” he answered her, beaming. “I expect you’ve had a very boring morning with our papers.”

“It has been hard work,” Lindsay admitted. “I’m surprised you haven’t got the lot on computer, with Simon Crabtree being in that line of business.”

Mallard nodded. “Couldn’t agree more, m’dear. But Rupert wouldn’t hear of it. Lawyers, you see. Very conservative in their methods. Not like us. Our front office may look very traditional. But all the work gets done in the big office at the back-where our computers are. The latest thing-IBM-compatible hard-disk drives. I actually bought them on Simon’s advice. But Rupert didn’t trust them. He said you could lose all your work at the touch of a button, and he felt happier with bits of paper that didn’t vanish into thin air. Typical lawyer-wanted everything in black and white.”

“There was one other thing I wanted to ask you about.”

“Ask away, m’dear, ask away.”

“Why was Rupert Crabtree going to raise your handling of RABD funds at the next meeting?”

Mallard flushed but managed to freeze his smile in place as he replied, “Was he?”

“You know he was. The two of you had a row about it, and he said the association should decide.”