Body Politic (19 page)

‘
You’re telling us that Christopher Hampson now takes over the whole of Gloucester Electronics, with no strings attached?’

‘
Exactly so. It’s unusual, as I say, but by no means—’

‘
Right.’ Lambert was already on his feet. ‘We’ve got what we require, for the moment. If we need anything else we’ll be in touch.’ He was through the door, passing across the outer office where a secretary typed, before he called back over his shoulder, ‘Thank you for your help!’

*

The old Vauxhall Senator moved quickly, more quickly than usual, towards the outskirts of the town. They overtook a bus as it moved away from the kerb, then had to stop with a screech of brakes as an elderly lady stepped late on to a zebra crossing.

Hook,
who had not spoken in the five minutes since they had left Arkwright’s office in the middle of Oldford, glanced sideways at the long, lined face beside him and said, ‘There’s no need for you to be working at all, John. Rushton and I could do this one, if you like. If you take us back to the station, I’ll—’

‘
No. No, there’s no need for that.’ Lambert’s eyes were fixed unblinkingly on the road ahead. Soon they passed from the small town into countryside. Bare hawthorn hedgerows flew past the windows, rooks rose in a noisy chorus as they passed beneath the leafless boughs of tall sycamores. Lambert relaxed the arms that were stiff upon the steering wheel with a deliberate effort and said, ‘I wouldn’t know what to do at home, Bert. I could only sit about, waiting for news and thinking of what she’s going through.’

‘
Christine won’t know anything about it. Not once they’ve given her the general anaesthetic.’

‘
No ... But I’m better working. The day will pass much more quickly for me that way.’ Lambert smiled, looked at the speedometer, and slowed a little. ‘And I promise I won’t let it affect me. I’ll be thoroughly professional when it comes to questioning Miss Yates and her brother.’

‘
Of course you will; I didn’t doubt it.’ Hook sank a little lower in the passenger seat, enjoying the January sun and the patchwork of ploughed fields and green hills, clear and sharp in the pale morning light. ‘We may need to go a little easy on Miss Yates, if she’s as ill as we’ve been led to believe.’ He was thinking of his chief’s summary dismissal of Alfred Arkwright’s pretensions.

‘
She may be perfectly all right physically,’ said Lambert. ‘The only other agoraphobic I’ve known got very overweight because she confined herself to the house and ate as much or more than she had done when she was taking much more exercise. The Yates woman may, of course, be unstable mentally. We’ll need to play things by ear. But presumably we can eliminate her from suspicion fairly quickly, by the very nature of her complaint. If she can’t leave the house, she can’t go around garrotting people.’

‘
There should be more helpful illnesses like that!’ said Hook. Then, wondering if flippant remarks about illness were in bad taste when his chief’s wife was undergoing surgery for cancer, he added clumsily, ‘If we have to have illnesses at all, that is.’

Lambert
smiled. ‘We shall need to check on her brother, though. If Moira was bitter when Keane elbowed her, her brother might easily have been enraged on her behalf. They must be very close, if she’s living in his house because of her illness.’

‘
Old Arkwright said Zoe Renwick had only been put into a new will as the major beneficiary quite recently. Do you think Moira Yates was cut out at the same time?’

‘
Must have been, I expect. We should have asked the old phoney about that, I suppose; we’ll check it out later. But I was thoroughly irritated with the old bugger by then. We’ve certainly found a strong motive for Zoe Renwick: she couldn’t have expected to remain in the will for very long, once she’d told Keane it was all over between them. And the news of what happens to Gloucester Electronics bowled me over. Hampson never told us he stood to benefit by Keane’s death in that way.’

Hook
was delighted to hear these thoughts pouring out. Lambert was certainly better working, as he said. They ran into a village which was now also an outer suburb of Gloucester, and he used his street map to guide Lambert expertly to the little cul-de-sac of modern houses where Dermot Yates kept anxious watch over the progress of his sister.

The
Irishman was waiting for them on the step of the house. ‘Moira saw you coming,’ he explained as he took them through the hall and into the comfortable, rather overheated lounge.

He
sat down protectively beside his smiling sister on the settee, having pulled the curtain a little across the window to ensure that the sun was not in her eyes. Hook almost expected him to take her hand in his as they talked, but he did not go so far, though he looked at her anxiously each time she spoke in the exchanges which followed.

The
smiling, confident woman who sat beside him seemed at first sight to need neither protection nor support from anyone. ‘I gave the two of you those chairs,’ she explained. ‘Left us facing the light. That’s how you like your suspects, isn’t it, with the light full upon their faces?’ She looked as though she was preparing to enjoy herself thoroughly over the next few minutes. Hook wondered what drugs they used for agoraphobia. Perhaps those who had lost the nerve to face people outside compensated by an excess of confidence in the home environment which was now their whole world.

There
was coffee on the table. The CID men wondered who had made it, what contributions were made to this strange household by the smiling hostess and her nervous brother. Moira poured the coffee, added milk and sugar as they requested them, proffered the plate of thin lemon-flavoured biscuits. ‘Dermot buys all these things,’ she said, as if anxious not to take praise she did not deserve. ‘He’s an excellent housekeeper. He’s had to be, these last few months.’

Dermot
showed impatience at her relaxation into this domestic mode. ‘What is it you wanted to know from us?’ he said to Lambert.

‘
A little background, to start with,’ said the superintendent. Hook thought he was deliberately slowing down, guarding against the impatience which had been his previous reaction to his own problems. ‘Miss Yates: I believe you had a close relationship at one time with the late Raymond Keane.’

‘
I was his mistress, yes. For a period of almost two years. We were talking about getting married. But Raymond was busy making his way in parliament, and at the time there seemed no hurry.’

She
was on the surface a model interview subject, articulate, unembarrassed about highly personal revelations, precise about times and circumstances. She wore a little discreetly applied make-up on her open, smiling face; her forehead furrowed a little in thought as she supplied them with the detail she thought appropriate; her very black hair was of medium length, tidily arranged in large waves about her very still head.

Hook
wanted to ask the questions they could not ask, such as whether she normally wore make-up or had prepared specially for this occasion, what trouble she had taken over her appearance in the months of her illness, whether she was normally as voluble and as welcoming to strangers as she appeared to be to them. How much of this was a performance, a front put up for their benefit?

Lambert
said, ‘And when did this association come to an end?’

Dermot
Yates began to reply, but she stilled him with an imperious lift of her hand. ‘Four months and two weeks ago. You will want to know how it ended, no doubt. Well, it was Raymond who ended it. Rather abruptly, as a matter of fact. He rang me from Westminster. I suppose that was to prepare me. He didn’t say much on the phone, but I knew from that moment what was coming.’

Hook
looked up from his notes: so far it had been almost like taking dictation. He said, ‘Where were you living at this time, Miss Yates?’

She
gave him a broad, friendly smile, as if to congratulate him on his percipience. ‘I was living in Raymond’s cottage, seven miles from here. It’s a nice old place. But then you’ll have seen it, I expect. I understand that he may have been killed there.’

‘
We think so, yes,’ said Bert stiffly. He wished the press didn’t reveal things so quickly; he had an old-fashioned feeling that the CID were not on top of the job if they were not running well ahead of the information which the crime reporters fed to their papers. But the modern idea was that you prevented speculation by revealing all that you could that did not help the criminal.

Lambert
said, ‘So you were at the cottage for most of the time, and Mr Keane only came down at weekends.’

‘
Yes. I have a flat of my own near Stroud, but that is let at present.’ She looked gratefully at Dermot. It was the first time she had taken her attention from the police faces in their conversation, and it lasted only for a second. ‘There were the parliamentary recesses as well, of course, which as you are no doubt aware are quite lengthy. Raymond and I were together for those, though not always in Gloucestershire.’

Lambert
was irritated by her composure, when he should have been grateful to her for providing the answers they needed so readily, rather than retreating behind her invalid status. She gave the impression of conducting this interview on her own terms, when he was used to laying out the ground rules himself. Senior CID men are happier to see people a little disconcerted when they question them: it is an unfortunate effect their work has upon them. He said gruffly, ‘So Mr Keane came down here and told you that he wanted to end your relationship.’

She
smiled, taking her time, determined to stay calm now that the point she had known would come had arrived. ‘Yes. That is a fair way to put it, I suppose.’ Dermot’s hand strayed towards hers again, and this time she allowed it to rest on top of her small, lightly clenched fist. ‘He said that he didn’t think it was working any more between us, that it would be better if we broke up quickly. So I moved out.’

‘
Forgive me. I know this must be painful to you, but I need to know when Miss Zoe Ren—’

‘
No. It’s not painful! Why should it be, at this distance?’ She almost shouted her interruption. The smile came back to her face slowly, as if it was being applied by invisible hands. ‘I found that Miss Renwick had been installed in my place within a week. There are always people who are only too anxious to tell you these things.’

Dermot
said, ‘Is this really necessary, Superintendent? We don’t know and don’t wish to know anything about this new woman who supplanted Moira in Keane’s affections.’

‘
I appreciate that, Mr Yates. We merely wished to check Miss Renwick’s version of the length of her association with the deceased, you see.’ And to check the strength of feeling here about Keane and his new woman, thought Hook. Crafty old devil, John Lambert, and fully concentrated on the work in hand.

Yates
appeared pacified by the hint that they were regarding Zoe Renwick with suspicion. He said grudgingly, ‘We’ve no knowledge of how much she knew about Keane’s previous life with Moira. Perhaps he didn’t tell her how close he had been to my sister.’ He glanced at her, then back at the policemen, getting no reaction in either quarter. He said a little desperately, ‘She came here with him, you know, on that Sunday before Christmas.’

‘
It was the first time I’d seen her. And the last time I saw Raymond,’ said Moira. ‘She didn’t say very much though, did she, Dermot?’ Her smile seemed to have taken on genuine pleasure again now.

Dermot
said, ‘No one seemed to say a great deal that day, apart from you, sis!’ For a revealing moment, his pride in her, in the way that despite her illness she had dominated the man who had treated her so badly, shone through. Then, as if to explain away this display of affection, he said, ‘Moira’s had a bad time of it, you know, since they split up.’

‘
Yes. I understand you’ve not felt able to leave the house very much in the last few months, Miss Yates.’

For
the first time, she seemed prepared to let her brother answer for her, it was as if once her relationship with Keane had been dealt with, she had no energy for lesser questions. Dermot said, ‘Moira came here in great distress when Keane threw her out.’ He glanced at her apprehensively, expecting her to challenge the violence of the phrase, but she was looking listlessly at her spotless blue leather court shoes. ‘She recovered physically within a day or two, but she’s not been able to go out for months now.’

‘
Mr Yates, what do you do for a living?’

If
Lambert had hoped to disconcert him by the suddenness of this switch, he did not succeed. Yates said, ‘I’m a freelance writer, working from home. I write specialist books on horses, on the history of different breeds, on point-to-point and national hunt racing. I write articles for
Horse
and
Hound
and review books on horses, horseracing and tennis.’ The answer tripped readily off his tongue, but no doubt he had offered it to the curious many times before.

‘
So you’ve been able to look after Miss Yates during her illness?’