Authors: J.M. Gregson
‘
Why?’
‘
Because Raymond hadn’t rung back. Because I thought there might be something wrong with his phone. The answerphone still wasn’t on, so I presumed he must be there. And I wanted to have it out with him. To get that over with.’
‘
So you drove over there. At what time?’
‘
Quite early. By other people’s standards, not the hospital’s.’ She smiled nervously at that thought. ‘It must have been about half past nine when I got there, I suppose.’
Some
time in the last few seconds, she had ceased to look at them. They could see the tension in the drawn muscles of her long neck; a tress of the blonde hair had fallen unchecked over the top of her right cheekbone. Lambert, speaking more gently now, said, ‘Tell us what you found at the cottage that morning, please.’
‘
Raymond’s Jaguar was parked round the back: I could just see the end of the boot. I went inside—I have a key, you see. I called his name two or three times. There was no sign of him, and no heating on. If it hadn’t been for the car, I’d have thought he’d never arrived. I went to the answerphone to play the messages back. I thought there might have been some family emergency, you see, or some political thing needing attention. I couldn’t see why his car would still be there if he’d gone off somewhere, but he might have gone with someone else.’
‘
And did you find anything among the messages that might have explained things?’
‘
No. The answerphone tape had been cleared. I thought at the time that Raymond must have done that.’
‘B
ut now you’re not so sure.’
She
shook her head silently. They knew why she was so tense with that thought. If Keane had not cleared the tape, it had almost certainly been the murderer who had erased it. The two men watching her so closely knew that the tape had indeed been clear when the Scene-of-Crime team tried it. Sooner or later, they would have to know whether this latest story was the real one, or whether it was the cool Nordic figure before them who had cleared that tape and any evidence it held, after killing the owner of the cottage. She was staring now at the carpet between them as if hypnotized, as the key point of her story was at hand. Lambert, as if offering a stage cue to move forward the action, said, ‘Go on, please.’
Zoe
Renwick spoke slowly now, reluctantly almost, though she knew there was no turning away from the course she had decided upon. ‘I looked upstairs. The bed hadn’t been slept in. I went into the kitchen, to see if he had cooked anything. I found him there. In the old pantry. Underneath the fuse-box. He had already been dead for some time.’ Even with the last words, she did not look up. It was as if, in recounting an ill dream, it was important to her to get every detail correct.
It
was Hook who broke the spell as, looking up from his written record of this, he said, ‘You’re certain of that?’
She
looked at him with widening eyes, as if she had forgotten for a moment that he was there. ‘I am a hospital sister, Sergeant. We are not unfamiliar with death and its trappings.’
Lambert
said, ‘Quite. And your opinion is that Mr Keane had been dead for some hours at least?’
‘
My immediate thought was that he’d been killed on the previous night. He was cold, you see, when I felt for a pulse. But I’m afraid I didn’t think in professional terms for very long. I just wanted to get out of the place. And I did. I drove away as fast as I could.’
Like
a bat out of hell, Walsh had said. Their stories tallied in that, at any rate. ‘Did you lock the door behind you?’
‘
I can’t remember. I was in a panic. I’m sure I pulled the door to behind me: I was terrified that whoever killed Raymond might still be around somewhere, anxious to put any barrier between me and him. But I went out of the back door. It doesn’t have a Yale lock like the front one. So it may be that I left it open. Does it matter?’
‘
It may do. If you are telling us the full story this time.’ Lambert looked at her for a moment, assessing her credibility, without attempting to disguise the fact. Then he said quietly, ‘So you knew Mr Keane was dead for a week and more before his body was found. You realize this makes you an accessory to murder.’
There
it was, almost the phrase she had thought of for herself. But she didn’t care now. She was drained with the effort of what she had told them. She said dully, ‘I suppose it does. I hadn’t thought of it like that, until today. All I wanted to do at first was to get away from the place. And when I had done, I thought, “If I say anything, they’ll think it was me.” That seemed more likely the longer I left it, until after a day or so it became impossible. I was waiting all that week for someone to find him. I couldn’t understand why no one did.’
She
brushed the hair back from the pale flesh of her face now and looked straight into Lambert’s cool grey eyes as she said, ‘I hated Raymond by this time. I know that sounds a stupid reversal, within a week. But I hated what I’d seen of him with his business partner, and with his former mistress. So when I found him dead like that, I felt guilty anyway, even though I hadn’t done it. Because I wanted him out of my life, and I suppose there was a part of me which was glad to have him dead.’
Lambert
returned her gaze silently for a moment, then gave a curt nod. ‘And when did you go back to move him, Miss Renwick?’ he said.
‘
I didn’t. I haven’t been near the cottage from that day to this.’ She was alarmed now, earnest in her attempt to convince them.
‘
You realize that your earlier concealments have made it more difficult for us to believe you, of course. All right, if you didn’t move the corpse, who did?’
‘
I’ve no idea. I’ve thought about it, but I haven’t got any nearer. Do you—do you think the murderer was at the cottage when I went there?’
Lambert
ignored the question. To answer it would be tantamount to admitting he believed her story. Instead, he said, ‘Most innocent people who come upon a body think at first that there has been an accident of some kind. You immediately assumed murder. Can you explain that to us?’
‘
Yes. I felt for the pulse in the throat immediately to check that he was dead. The mark of the ligature was quite plain upon the throat. I touched it as I felt him.’
She
shuddered a little at the recollection, but she was happy with her answer, a professional woman giving a professional account of herself.
*
Moira Yates had worked for almost an hour in the garden of her brother’s house. It was the first time in four months that she had declared herself happy to move even this far from the security of the interior. Dermot had worked with her in the raw north-east wind, keeping a discreet but watchful eye upon her, trying to ensure that she became absorbed in the work, ready to desist as soon as she suggested it.
They
had cleared the dead tops of perennials that had been waiting since the autumn, collected the myriad small branches blown from the oak and the beech at the end of the plot by the winter gales, assembled the debris into a conical heap which they would fire on the following day. Dermot would have liked to light the fire immediately, moving close to its crackling flames on the raw afternoon, but he thought that Moira had been outside the house for long enough.
She
declared that she had enjoyed the unaccustomed physical work, and her cheeks were indeed warm from the exertion and the fresh air. Dermot sent her for a shower to warm herself up after the unaccustomed cold. When he stood in the hall and heard the water running above him, he made his phone call, his hand sheltering the mouthpiece, his eyes cast apprehensively up the flight of stairs, his voice low and terse with the trepidation he felt.
When
she came down, relaxed and smiling in dark-green cashmere, he said, ‘I have to go out, sis.’
She
looked the question he had expected about his destination, but he did not volunteer an answer. He had a story ready about meeting a writing friend in a pub, which did not sound very convincing, even to him as he rehearsed it. But she did not press him, so he did not offer it. When he reached the end of their cul-de-sac, he set off in the opposite direction from the one which would take him directly to his goal, in case Moira was watching, as she often did, from the lounge window.
He
drove the Cavalier swiftly through the familiar lanes, beneath scudding clouds which ranged from the near white to the almost black. He watched his rear mirror more closely than usual. It was only after three miles that he realized that he had been checking for police pursuit. Had it come to this then, now? Had he been expecting his own house to be watched, his vehicle to be followed?
Perhaps
he was too imaginative. Certainly there was no sign of police surveillance. As he took the circular route to his goal, he had the roads almost to himself, on one of those January days which seem to be little more than breaks between nights. He saw seagulls, wheeling in wide, swift arcs on the wild wind above the Cotswold rises, but no cars until he was near his destination.
The
courtyard where Dermot Yates parked was deserted. He went swiftly through the empty communal hall and up to the heavy mahogany door. It opened as he prepared to ring: this man at any rate had noted his expected arrival. He went swiftly into the elegant apartment and turned to face its owner.
‘
We need to talk,’ was all he said to Gerald Sangster.
‘Do you think she did it?’ said Chris Rushton, He was feeding the timing of Zoe Renwick’s amended story into his computer, pondering the best way to cross-reference it with the other information he had collected from so many sources.
Lambert
watched him with interest as the green print flashed on and off the monitor and the earnest DI operator switched to different computer files. ‘That machine doesn’t reveal who is telling the truth and who is lying,’ the superintendent said. ‘Still less does it show what is true and what is false within a single statement.’
‘
If it could do that, we wouldn’t need superintendents,’ said Rushton daringly. ‘And you still haven’t answered my question.’
‘
Zoe Renwick? She could have done it. I’m keeping an open mind. She’s well organized, and in the right circumstances, she could be ruthless. She changed from being prepared to marry Keane to hating him within a week. Women who have their eyes opened like that tend to be bitter, even unbalanced.’
‘
Only women?’ said Bert Hook with a smile.
‘
These liberal attitudes will get you into trouble, Bert. Unbecoming in the police force in any rank below Assistant Chief Constable, they are. Sexist and homophobic, we’re supposed to be, certainly up to the rank of detective sergeant. All right, let’s say, as a generalization, no more, that women, being finer creatures, tend to feel these things more deeply than men. Therefore their reactions may be more extreme. Will that do?’
‘
Could Zoe Renwick have moved the body?’
‘
Yes. With difficulty. Nurses are trained in lifting techniques, for the sake of patients. Keane wasn’t a big man: a hundred and fifty-six pounds, the PM says. She’s strong enough, even though we all know that dead weight is a bugger to move. It seems that there was no heating on in the cottage in that bitterly cold weather, so rigor mortis would be delayed. Keane’s corpse probably hadn’t stiffened up by the time he was collected for disposal.’
Experience
of death and its consequences made them as dispassionate as surgeons about human remains. Rushton said, ‘The computer hasn’t thrown up any new leads. Nor has it ruled out any of our leading suspects yet. Have you?’
Lambert
grinned, glad to be absorbed in the intellectual puzzle, despite its grim theme. ‘I should be surprised if it was Chris Hampson. Because this death will probably save the business which is at the centre of his life, he has gained more than anyone from it, but nothing anyone else has said has suggested him. Unless of course someone is deliberately protecting him—but none of the others seems close enough to him to take the risk of shielding him like that.’
Hook
said, almost reluctantly, ‘Zoe Renwick had plenty to gain. She inherits almost everything from Keane except that business and some family heirlooms. Once he’d found out everything was over between them, he’d have been down to old Alfred Arkwright to change that will pretty smartly.’
Lambert
nodded. ‘But don’t rule out the three musketeers over at the Yates household. I include Gerald Sangster with the other two, because in the matter of Raymond Keane at least they become a trio. Moira Yates is seen as a woman scorned and the other two are close enough to her to want revenge on her behalf. They’ve scarcely troubled to disguise it.’
Rushton
said, ‘Well, we know Moira Yates couldn’t have done it, because she’s been confined to the house with agoraphobia for months. She could have alibied one of the other two, I suppose.’