Bitter End Part 36

'Would you?' Fizz lavished a smile on him and stood up.

'You're very kind.'

Buchanan got his feet under him to follow them from the room but Fizz, in pa.s.sing his chair, put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him back down. At the door, she paused and, in a complicated mime, instructed him either to lie on the floor and eat something, or to stay where he was and keep talking, neither of which seemed to make any sense. 221. However, he had underestimated her talent for manipulation.

Rudyard returned to his seat behind the desk within a couple of minutes, so Buchanan went for the second option, asking every question he could think of that would keep him out of Fizz's hair. There came a time, however, when neither of them could pretend not to notice that Fizz was taking an eternity. Finally, Rudyard looked, for the third time, at his watch and said he really ought to be moving along, leaving Buchanan with no option but to agree.

As they stepped out into the corridor he could see Fizz, through an open doorway, still frowning at a computer.

'Sorry ... am I holding you back? Only, I'm not very good at spreadsheets and I kept on getting shunted back to the desktop. I guess I'll have to leave it for now.'

She hitched her jacket closed and slung her bag over her shoulder while Rudyard sped them on their way with woebegone predictions of traffic jams all his way home.

Buchanan was never so glad to get out of anywhere.

Bad enough to be stuck in a small dirty room with a crime against society like Rudyard, without knowing, beyond a shadow of doubt, that Fizz was doing something grossly immoral, if not illegal, a matter of feet away. The fact that Rudyard had given her permission to look at a specific spreadsheet was small comfort to anyone who knew Fizz, and there was something in the way she had slung that bag over her shoulder that had turned Buchanan's blood to ice.

'You went through the desk drawers,' he said to her as they emerged into Nicholson Street, and she laughed like an innocent child.

'Yer on to me, guv. It's a fair cop. I won't give yer no trouble.'

'For G.o.d's sake, Fizz. Don't you ever worry that you might get caught? If I'd guessed you'd do a thing like that I'd never have come with you.'

Fizz grabbed his arm and dragged him to a halt, standing in the middle of the pavement with a solid flow of 222. people swirling by on each side of them. 'Listen, Buchanan.

In a couple of days we'll both be dead, as far as our careers are concerned, and I've no intention of sitting around on my tush waiting for Gra.s.sick to do a hatchet job on us. Over this weekend I'll be fighting for my life. It's our last chance and I don't want any interference from you, okay? If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.'

And off she went, striding down the hill towards the High Street like an invading horde of one. Buchanan followed her and caught her up. He had little option because, whatever she did, he wanted to know about it.

Even if his role was merely that of damage limitation, he had no intention of letting her go it alone.

'So, what's in the shoulder bag?' he asked, taking her arm to slow her down.

'I don't know. I didn't have time to look. It's only the rubbish that was in her waste-paper basket.' She glanced up at him with her eyes full of mischief. 'The place was practically unlived-in. Obviously, she spent most of her working day on the road and only used the office as a way station. There was nothing in the desk drawers except business stuff and the computer was just as sterile so, when I heard you coming, I just tipped the rubbish into my bag. Rubbish can be very illuminating, you know. I'll sort through it when I get home. Want to help me?'

Her flat was only a couple of blocks away so they left the car round the corner from Rudyard's studio, where Buchanan had managed to find a parking place, and walked.

Buchanan had been in Fizz's flat on only half a dozen occasions in the two years he'd known her and he still felt inexplicably flattered to be allowed to cross her threshold.

As far as he knew, he was the only person she had invited in, with the single exception of his cousin, Mark, who had st.i.tched up her eyebrow last summer.

Fizz didn't like just anyone to know too much about her, and her fiat, basic as it was, told Buchanan quite a 223. lot, and possibly more than he wanted to know. There was little comfort in the two rooms that she rented: a bed, a built-in wardrobe and dressing-table, a kitchen table and three chairs and a few kitchen appliances like a fridge and cooker. Of Fizz herself there was virtually nothing, and what there was -her course books, an irreducible amount of clothing, and the scatter of photographs on the mantelpiece -could, at the drop of a hat, either be thrown away or packed into a rucksack should she decide to return to her roving ways. The place was, as ever, scrupulously neat, but then, how could she make a mess from so few ingredients?

She threw off her jacket and made a couple of mugs of coffee before she did anything else and Buchanan took the opportunity to look at her gallery of snapshots in case there were any of Giles. There weren't: just the usual selection of Grampa and Auntie Duff, one of her pal, Rowena, with her husband and baby, and a couple of views of Loch Tay showing Am Bealach's five houses and the inn. He wondered if there were other photographs somewhere that showed scenes from her life abroad and whether, if there were, he would ever be allowed to see them.

'OK, compadre, let's get on with it.'

Fizz handed him his coffee and tipped out her bag on the kitchen table, displaying such interesting objects as a toothbrush, a diary, a pair of socks, a neatly coiled piece of string, a pair of sungla.s.ses, a penknife, a silk scarf, a hair bobble, an Elastoplast dressing, a ta.s.sel of safety pins and a packet of tissues. These all went back into the bag leaving behind a good sized heap of sc.r.a.p paper and other trash.

Fizz picked out a twisted-up sheet of foolscap, spread it out on the table, scanned it, and pushed it aside without comment. Buchanan, overcoming his shame and distaste, followed her example and, steadily, they worked through the heap. 224. No matter how you looked at it, there really was nothing worth a second glance. The sum total of Buchanan's findings at the end of his perusal amounted to little more than the discovery that Vanessa got through a lot of emery boards, was a member of the RSPB, ate Wispa bars and, judging by the postmarks on most of the discarded envelopes, didn't empty her waste-paper basket very often.

'Well, it was a long shot anyway,' Fizz admitted, scooping the junk into a plastic bin bag. 'But if we don't get a break in the next couple of days I wouldn't mind having a look at what's in Lawrence's wheelie bin.'

The idea of rummaging in someone else's garbage -even

his own, for that matter -made Buchanan feel sick. But that was typical of Fizz, he thought. If she wanted something she went for it, straight on past where any sensible person would have had enough, no matter if her monumental effort gained her only half an inch of headway.

He said, 'We haven't had many breaks in the past two weeks. If we get one over the weekend it'll be a miracle.'

'From now on, like I said, we make our own breaks. I've got an idea that might work. First thing tomorrow we pay a visit to the . . .'

Buchanan looked up from the litter of paper clips and elastic bands which he was sweeping into the bin bag to see her examining a narrow strip of cardboard no more than a couple of inches long. 'What's that?'

She narrowed her eyes, scowling at the sc.r.a.p as though commanding it to give up its secrets. 'I don't know . . . but I recognise those colours. That sickly pink and turquoise blue. I could be totally off beam on this, Buchanan. I mean it could be anything

'Yes?' said Buchanan, tiring of all this justification.

'I'm just saying ... I'd have to check, of course, but. . .

it reminds me of the packaging from a pregnancy test kit.' 225.

Chapter Nineteen.

It was impossible for Fizz to check out her pregnancy-test

theory immediately because the chemists' shops were

closed. She had to leave it till nine o'clock the following

morning when Buchanan came to pick her up and drive

her to their next nefarious project. Luckily, there was a pharmacy right next door to her flat and it only took a moment to check it out while Buchanan sat, double-parked and choleric, outside.

'Well?' he asked, as he pulled away virtually under the nose of a traffic warden. 'Were you right?'

'Am I ever wrong, muchacho?'

Fizz really liked it when things went well first thing in the morning. You could be almost certain it would continue to be a good day: a day when everything you set your hand to would go the way you wanted it to and random chance would operate in your favour. A day that started off badly was doomed to be one in which even inanimate objects turned against you, but today she had a feeling that they were going to see some action.

'Does that mean . . .?' Buchanan asked, as they waited at the roundabout at Holyrood House. 'Does that mean we can be reasonably sure that the cardboard came from a pregnancy test kit, or are there other packages with the same colour scheme? You know . . . some Pharmaceuticals have a livery of colours that all their products come in.'

'No, not this one,' Fizz a.s.sured him. 'I had a good look around the shelves for anything similar -and, anyway, no 227. two companies would pick such vile colours. I'd stake my ranch in Texas on it.'

G.o.d knows, she thought, I've seen enough of those packets to recognise one when I see it. She wondered briefly about the flatmate she'd lived with in Manchester.

Linda Something. She used to make out that she was so cool, so streetwise, yet every other month there was a pink-and-turquoise packet in the bathroom bin. Poor fat- headed Linda. She'd probably have acquired six kids, chronic depression, and no future by this time.

'We don't even know when Vanessa bought the thing, do we?' Buchanan was saying. 'Could have been months ago.'

'No, I don't think so. None of her rubbish was that old.

Didn't you look at the dates on the letters and the postmarks on the envelopes? They only went back to about six weeks before she died.' Fizz did a little mental arithmetic.

'I reckon she bought that test around about the last week in January at the earliest. Any earlier than that and it wouldn't have been in the bin.'

Buchanan slid her a funny look as one who would say, and anyway, how come you're such an expert on pregnancy tests? but Fizz didn't feel she had to explain herself to him.

After a while he said, 'We're making rather a lot of unfounded a.s.sumptions, of course. The test may not have been Vanessa's, or it could have been left behind in the waste bin accidentally -maybe months ago -when she last emptied it, and anyway, we've no way of telling whether the actual test turned out positive or negative.'