Mrs Higgins Knows Everything

If there was one person in the whole of Wellington Court with a fuller picture of events than my board, covered as it was in red exclamation marks, it was Mrs Higgins — the concierge, enthroned at the front desk with the dignity of a queen mother and the intelligence-gathering capacity of an entire agency.

Officially, her duties were limited to accepting parcels, handing out spare keys to forgetful residents, and keeping the vase of artificial tulips on the desk in a permanent state of freshness. Unofficially, Mrs Higgins knew exactly who came and went, when, with whom, who'd quarrelled with whom and made up again, and who was getting a suspicious number of letters from debt collectors.

I dropped by under what I considered a foolproof pretext: asking whether she'd mind if I left a parcel with her for my neighbour, who, by happy coincidence, also happened to be named Nigel.

"Oh, Dave dear, of course," she said, setting down her knitting — something shapeless and multicoloured she'd been working on for, by my count, six months, and which I sincerely doubted would ever take a recognisable shape. "How is our mysterious Mr Fitzgerald getting on?"

This was such a promising opening that I very nearly dropped the imaginary parcel I was holding as a prop.

"Mysterious?" I repeated, with the carefully rehearsed nonchalance I'd practised in front of the mirror the night before, though I had no intention of admitting that out loud.

"Well, of course," Mrs Higgins leaned forward, dropping her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, even though there wasn't another soul in the lobby besides the two of us. "He gets visitors at the oddest hours. Last week, on the Tuesday, around midnight — can you imagine! — a man came by, said he was a courier, but he didn't have a single box on him, dear. Just an envelope."

"Maybe he was delivering documents," I suggested, though my inner detective was already drafting a new card for the board.

"At midnight?" Mrs Higgins shook her head, with the air of a woman who'd seen enough not to believe in innocent explanations for midnight couriers without boxes. "And that's not all. Parcels. He gets parcels with no return address. Regularly. I always log the return address — it's part of my duties — and his parcels just have a dash in that column. I asked the post office about it last time, and they told me it might be parcels sent from abroad through a private courier, bypassing the official postal system."

She said this with such an air that "private courier bypassing the official postal system" might as well have been a synonym for "smuggler," though, I admit, for my current purposes it sounded almost as useful.

"And the phone calls," she went on, thoroughly warmed to her subject now, setting down a cup of tea in front of me that I hadn't ordered but felt, from her expression, was practically compulsory to drink if I wanted the conversation to continue. "He gets calls at the strangest hours. I hear it when I pass his door with the post — the phone rings, and he always answers in a whisper. Who whispers when their mother calls, Dave? Only people with something to hide."

I took a sip of tea, trying to hide how neatly this was slotting into my existing theory, while also trying not to look too eager, because Mrs Higgins, for all her chattiness, was far from a foolish woman, and open enthusiasm on my part might well have prompted some uncomfortable questions in return about why exactly I wanted all this detail.

"You probably think I'm just a nosy old gossip," she said suddenly, patting her hair with a touch of embarrassment. "But I've kept order in this building for twenty-three years, dear. I know every resident, know all their habits, and when something changes — I notice. And a great deal has changed about Mr Fitzgerald this past year."

"Such as?" I asked, trying to sound like an interested listener rather than the one person in the world for whom this question was a matter of urgent importance.

"Well, for one, he's become much more fit," Mrs Higgins said thoughtfully, casting her mind back over the past year. "Used to be an ordinary clerk, a bit stooped, walked slowly. Now — straight-backed, moves quickly, like he's always rushing somewhere. And his clothes have changed too. Used to wear ordinary suits from Marks and Spencer, and now — coats. Lots of coats. Grey ones, nearly identical, like he's got a whole wardrobe of them."

I very nearly choked on my tea.

"Coats," I repeated.

"A whole collection, dear. I see them through the launderette window when he hangs them up to dry. Grey, long, always with some new damage — a seam split here, a button gone there. The young man's either remarkably careless, or leads a very active life he'd rather not discuss."

She said this with such innocent directness that I found myself, for a moment, wondering whether Mrs Higgins might actually be a good deal more perceptive than she let on, and whether some part of her was secretly enjoying how closely I was hanging on every word.

"You know, Mrs Higgins," I said, setting down my empty cup, "you've been rather more help than you realise."

"Really?" she beamed with the genuine delight of someone who rarely got the chance to feel useful for something more significant than the parcel log. "How so, if you don't mind my asking?"

"Recipes," I said, because a cover story, once chosen, demands consistency to the bitter end. "I needed some detail for a rather complicated dish."

She looked at me with that particular expression I'd already learned to recognise from my dealings with Poppy — the look of someone who plainly doesn't believe a single word, but decides, out of politeness, not to push it — and went back to her shapeless knitting, while I headed back upstairs to my board, carrying with me a whole new set of cards: a midnight courier with no boxes, parcels with no return address, whispers on the phone, and, most significantly of all, an entire wardrobe of identical grey coats, all requiring frequent repair.

By the end of that evening, the board in my cupboard-office could barely fit any more notes, and I, stepping back to take in the whole picture at once, felt for the first time in this entire investigation not simply curiosity, but something rather more unsettling: certainty.

Just before I turned in that night, I got a message from Nigel — not the usual dutiful apology, but a simple "how are you? We haven't spoken properly in ages" — and I sat for a minute looking at it with the same intensity Mrs Higgins had apparently been giving his parcels with no return address.

On the one hand, it was exactly the sort of message an ordinary, entirely innocent neighbour would send, missing a shared pint. On the other hand, having spent the last two weeks collecting evidence to the contrary, I couldn't help wondering whether the message was a way of testing the water — gauging how deep I'd already dug before deciding on his next move.

I replied as neutrally as I could: "All good! Let's finally get that drink this week, like we said."

He replied quickly: "Deal. Thursday?"

I agreed, put my phone down, and looked at the board once more before switching off the light. Somewhere between the wardrobe of identical grey coats and the midnight courier without boxes hung a line I'd written that evening under the influence of my conversation with Mrs Higgins, and which now, in the dark of the room, read almost like the headline of the final chapter of my own little investigation: "He isn't just hiding something. He's gearing up for something."

What exactly he was gearing up for, I didn't yet know. But I firmly resolved to find out — ideally before Thursday, so I'd have something to talk about over that long-promised pint, assuming it actually happened this time.