Chapter Nineteen

The Heat Is On

Liz ordered a chicken makhani, and Sandra ordered a vindaloo. She wasn’t normally into something so pants-burningly hot, but she was feeling the need to go out on a limb. The restaurant was quiet for a Thursday, but it was still early. They had asked for a table in the window, as close to the street as possible. They knew they were being followed now. They had to be. They had found themselves in the middle of something bigger than they had bothered to consider. They had spent so much time wondering how they fit in, that they hadn’t considered what it was they were fitting into.

After they’d recovered in the car they’d gone for a walk in the park to find a toilet. Desperate times called for public toilets, and by that point they were getting pretty desperate. It also gave them time to think, and they’d walked and peed silently. Afterwards they both knew what to do without speaking it.

Liz had her laptop in the car and the battery was full. Something in Sebastian’s phone was worth killing for, and the time had come to find out what that was.

Sandra and Liz sat on a park bench in the sun. They could hear the birds, the water running in the river. The constant hum of traffic from... somewhere. Sandra cradled Sebastian’s phone in her hand. It was turned on, having been charged again when they had backed it up last night. But the cracked screen rendered it impossible to read.

Somebody had called that phone at precisely the worst time possible. There was no way she couldn’t tell who it was without sitting through another backup and they didn’t have time for that.

They took the sim card out of Sebastian’s phone and placed it into the phone Richard had given her. Liz then plugged it into her computer, told it to wipe everything and restore Sebastian’s settings. It would take a while, but the sun was nice.

“Do you think he would have killed us?” Liz asked, putting the computer aside and lighting up a cigarette. Sandra reached over, and helped herself to one too.

“No, actually I don’t. I think he was worked up. I think he was emotional. I think he cared a lot for Sebastian actually.”

She lit her cigarette, and felt the smoke pour into her lungs. It reminded her that her body existed, and the rush of nicotine to her head distracted her. It gave her something to focus on. Focus on avoiding the distraction. A split second later, she knew what she needed to do. She reached into Liz’s bag, and pulled out the third phone, the one Sebastian had given her. There was no time to stop and think about it, and she found the number, Daniel Cameron, and dialled it.

A familiar voice answered.

“How did you get this phone?”

“I’m asking the questions this time. Is your name Stephen Pohler?”

“It used to be.”

“So you go by Daniel Cameron now. Why?”

He sighed.

“I think you know why. I don’t want anything to do with them.”

“So what about Sebastian then?”

“Listen, you’ve got something that’s very important to me. I need you to give it back to me.”

“Give it back? Was it yours to start with?”

“Sebastian was supposed to give me that phone. I would like you to hand it over to me.”

“Yesterday, when I called you. Why did you react so strangely?”

“You were calling me from a dead man’s phone. Why do you think?”

“Dead man’s phone?”

“The phone you are calling me on belonged to my nephew, Richard.”

“Why do you have his number? I thought you had nothing to do with them.”

“Give me Sebastian’s phone. Give me that phone and I promise to tell you everything.”

“We’ll be in touch”, and Sandra hung up. She waited a second, but it didn’t ring back. She would have rejected the call anyway, but she was pleased that he understood her position. He didn’t seem so bad now, just desperate. Which may make him more dangerous, if TV was to be believed. Jesus Sandra, if you’ve learned anything in the past weeks it’s that TV is more bullshit that you’d ever imagined. How would you cope with TV if you were a cop? Would you just get aggravated at the simplicity of it all?

“What was that about?” Liz asked. Sandra waved the phone at her.

“This phone is - was Richard Junior’s phone. For some reason Little Richard & Stephen were in touch.”

Liz smiled at ‘little Richard.’

“Seriously, who’d do that? Who’d name their son after themselves? How weird.”

“I’m sure it’s not normally that big of an issue. Only when there’s corporate espionage and dead people involved.”

“Still. It’s a big egotistical. Just call ‘em something different. Simon. Francis. Lucius even, whatever. Fucking Tiger Lily, just give them a different name.”

“I went to school with a John Lennon. He was the fifth in a line of John Lennons. What do you do? Do you be the one to break the chain that your great great grandfather started?”

“Yes. Fuck yes. Especially if it’s John Lennon. Jesus, give your kid some shit to deal with? Everybody will be reacting to it. It’d become a thing all the way through school, just let them make their own identity, don’t lump them with yours or somebody else’s.”

“Wow, you really have an issue with that.”

“My mother’s name was Elizabeth.”

“I never knew that. Why didn’t I know that?”

“Because she’s dead and I don’t talk about her. She died when I was 1 and Dad changed my name from Heather to Elizabeth. To honour her memory. It just meant I didn’t do anything the way she did, you know? Oh, you have your mother’s eyes, I can’t believe you did that, your mother would be horrified, bla bla bla. On it goes.”

Sandra blinked in the sunlight. The effort of not noticing the cigarette and not noticing Liz was setting her head on fire. Her brain had gone into overdrive, her body stiffened. She heard every word Liz was saying but it went straight past her consciousness and injected itself into the subconscious processes that were dominating command of her system, and hit exactly the right spot. Inside her head was a little game of Tetris, and she’d just cleaned up half a dozen rows.

“Are you even listening to me?” Liz asked, at precisely the right time. Sandra’s eyes shot wide open.

“Holy. Fuckballs. Batman.”

“What? What is it?”

“How long is that backup going to take?”

“A couple of hours. Why?”

“I think I’m onto something Liz.”

“Are you going to share it?”

She turned to Liz, and flashed a knowing smile that reeked of Pohler bastardry. It was a smile that said ‘I know something. And I’m not going to share it until it suits me.’

“Now where would be the fun in the Liz?”

Truth was, it seemed just a little too outlandish, and a little too simple. But it made sense. At least, it made sense to her. But she wanted to know a little more before she let on.

Since Sebastian had given her that phone she’d added two numbers into it. One belonged to Liz. The other was the only number in the other phone that Richard had given her that morning, and she rang it, very deliberately aware that receiving a call from Little Richard’s phone would put him on edge.

“Who is this?” Short, sharp. Shocked. Shexcellent.

“Mr Pohler”, Sandra delivered very professionally into the phone, “This is Sandra Walker.”

“How did you get this phone?”

“I think you should know that we’ve made some progress in the case Mr Pohler”, she replied.

“Yes. In half a day. I’m stunned.”

“Oh, don’t be too surprised. We’ve been at it since Monday.” She gave Liz a side glanced who matched her smug ‘we so clever’ look.

“Do you have something to report then?”

“Not just yet. I need to ask you a question. And I need you to answer it.”

“I can’t guarantee that until I know the question.”

“What happened to your wife? What happened to Richard and Sebastian’s mother?”

There was no pause, no moment of silence down the phone. He answered directly and without hesitation.

“She died in a car accident when Sebastian was a year old.”

Sandra allowed a respectable pause, and then asked, “What happened?”

He sighed, and yet somehow still sounded inhuman whilst revealing a hidden part of himself. It would normally be off-putting, but for Sandra it made it easier to treat it as a puzzle, and not as people.

“I was in Europe on business. The family had made a large donation to a charity and they were holding a function to raise funds, say thankyou, that sort of thing. I didn’t care about these things but my wife did, and I asked Stephen to take her. Even though he’d refused his inheritance, he was still a part of the family. He was so determined to prove he was his own man that he turned down the car and insisted he drive himself. He couldn’t afford a taxi, and wouldn’t take any money.”

Sandra filled in the gaps herself. He got drunk, drove home, car accident, family torn apart.

“You don’t have to continue”, she said. “I think I know what happened.”

“You don’t”, he replied. “Unless he has told you himself, nobody knows what happened.”

“What do you mean?”

“They never made it to the function. Apparently someone in a stolen car ran a red light, ploughed into the side of them, killing her instantly. No witnesses, nothing, just a car out of nowhere. Completely random. The other driver survived, ran off and was never caught. Stephen survived with a few broken bones. He never spoke about it, I never forgave him.”

“But… It wasn’t his fault.”

“It was his fault. If he hadn’t have been so insistent on his independence they would have taken a driver, they would have taken a different route, so many things would have been different. But he didn’t. The last time I saw him was at her funeral. After that I wanted nothing to do with him.”

“When was that?”

“Twenty-seven years ago next week. Is that what you needed to know?”

“Where was Sebastian?”

“Both Sebastian and Richard were with the nanny. Sebastian has no memory of his mother at all.”

Sandra pondered this for a brief moment, before speaking.

“Thankyou Richard. You’ve told me what I needed to know.”

“You still haven’t answered my question. How did you get this phone?”

“Can I come and see you? Say, first thing tomorrow morning? I think there’s some things we need to discuss in person.”

“I’ll send a car.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll get the train.” And she hung up. She took a few moment to consider this, as a number of afternoon joggers went by. She turned to Liz.

“I need to make one more call, then I think we need to spend that afternoon in the park. I think we need to wind down a bit, before getting some Indian for dinner. What do you think?”

“I think that’s awesome. Who are you calling now?”

“Our dinner date.”

…..

The entrée plates had been taken away, and Liz and Sandra were already feeling stuffed. The problem with Indian is that every course is filling, every course is delicious and if there’s just one little bit left, it still has to be eaten. Sandra hated watching food go to waste. She deliberately avoided places that served up huge courses because if it didn’t get eaten, it just go thrown away. Then she thought about how many restaurants were doing that, how much food was being thrown away, how far the food had come, how many people in the world were going hungry, and she would end up forcing herself to eat it all. And then there were the rest of the plates on the table – is it rude to eat someone else’s left overs when there’s a principle at stake?

Turns out there was, and she never really got invited out to dinner anymore. Which was fine, but she didn’t have the money and wasn’t that fond of most people anyway.

But this was the best Indian restaurant in town, it was horrendously expensive, and they had just devoured two entrees each because they couldn’t decide. They drank some lassi and patiently waited for both the mains and their guest. The former could wait. But it would be preferable if the latter got here sooner.

He did.

Stephen Pohler saw them was we walked past the window, and he came in and sat down at the third seat. Sandra poured him some wine from the carafe they hadn’t touched. He didn’t speak, just took a sip.

“Thank you for coming at such short notice”, Sandra said.

He put his glass down.

“It’s not the easiest thing in the world telling your wife you have to go have dinner with the two women who assaulted you earlier that day.”

“I’m sorry about that. I think the whole thing was a big misunderstanding.”

“I don’t care. I don’t know what your part is in this but –“

“We took the liberty of ordering for you”, Liz interrupted as the mains arrived. Liz got her makhani, Sandra got her vindaloo, and Stephen was presented with a hot plate, covered with sizzling tandoori meats. Rice was placed in the middle, and the girls started to casually serve themselves.

“I hope you’re not vegetarian”, Sandra said as she gooped her plate with vindaloo. “It didn’t actually occur to me until after we ordered. But since we’re paying, we figured you’d have to eat what we ordered for you.”

Stephen was uncomfortable. Excellent. Sandra stuffed a mouthful of super hot food in, and enjoyed it immensely. It burnt in such a satisfying way. She chewed and smiled at Stephen as her nose threated to run and her eyes watered. You’re on our turf now baby.

“Did you bring Sebastian’s phone?” he asked.

“You haven’t touched your food”, Liz said, gesturing with her fork.

He turned to her.

“I’m not in the mood to play games. You don’t understand how important this is.”

Sandra swallowed.

“I, on the other hand, am in the mood for games”, she said, and reached over to Stephen’s plate and took a large lump of tandoori chicken off it and bit into it. She continued to talk as she chewed. “So, let’s play a game of Hannibal Lecter. Quid pro quo. We give you the phone, but first you tell us what we need to know.”

He shifted uncomfortably. These women had appalling table manners.

“Fine. What do you want to know?”

Sandra smiled as she chewed.

“I want you to tell me about your son. You first son. Sebastian Pohler. You tell me all about it, and I’ll give you your son’s phone back.