‘Fine,’ she said. ‘The towpath will be fine. They’ll like the locks and barges, won’t they? Better than boring old countryside.’
She did not add that she was still curious about the shabby man and was hoping to see him again. And when she did she would nonchalantly point him out, and only then might she relate the story of Sunday night’s little adventure. Andrew might, if she could pull his attention away from the Takahashi murder for a minute, be interested.
They had started at Bathampton Lock under a subdued sky which affected everyone’s mood. Kicking along and saying little, every few yards stepping over the long fishing rods of the silent anglers who slumped at the canal side next to their horrifying tins of maggots, they had ended up, round about lunchtime and just as it looked as if it might rain, at the far side of the viaduct on the edge of Limpley Stoke. The anglers were now all behind them. Presumably the fish did not bite this close to the landing stages near the viaduct, where the traffic of tourist barges coming and going from their moorings kept the water churning in a dirty brown swirl. They were alone on the path, most other strollers and cyclists, Sara supposed, having taken themselves off to do something sensible such as have lunch in pub gardens.
Sara and Natalie stopped and turned to wait for the others to catch up. Andrew was still a long way down the path with Benji, and Dan, who seemed rather withdrawn for a birthday boy, trailed farther behind still. Sara put down the basket she was carrying and Natalie, freeing her hand from Sara’s, danced off to the hedge to find unripe blackberries. She didn’t much like blackberries, ripe or
not, but she had to pick as many as possible in order to stop her brothers from getting them. Sara breathed in the sour green smell of crushed nettles and gazed past Natalie. Just on the far side of the hedge that Natalie was trying to reach, tramping down all the long grass in her path, and across a stretch of bramble scrub, lay the railway line. Down a steep slope on the far side of the tracks and across another narrow stretch of scrub was the start of the Golightlys’ land. A sprinkler waved slowly, raining softly over some bright green plants, possibly lettuces. Compost heaps, polytunnels and various sheds were set at points among the rows of vegetables and brown bare squares, which stretched up to the back garden of the modern, rather ugly brick house. Another identical house stood some hundred yards off down a lane that connected the houses on the far side. A whirligig for drying clothes sprouted from the grass of the perfunctory back garden which sat between the house and the vegetables, where washing of nondescript colours lifted listlessly in the slight wind. The place was deserted.
‘Don’t bother ’cos I’ve picked all the best ones!’ Natalie crowed in a sing-song, as the others reached them. ‘There’s only little ones left now!’
‘Aw that’s not fair,’ Benji whined. ‘Da-ad, that’s not fair.’
‘They’re not ripe anyway, so they probably wouldn’t taste very nice,’ Sara said, as if that were the point.
‘I’ve got tons,’ Natalie said, defiantly.
‘So? We’ll get our own. They’re not all yours you know. There’s
loads
further up. C’mon, Benji.’
Dan pushed roughly past Andrew and trotted further on up the path, looking intently up and down the hedge
for more blackberry bushes. Benji, thrilled to be summoned by his brother, followed. After a few moments, there was a happy shout and wave from Dan and a squeal from Benji, and then they almost disappeared into the hedge, delving for berries.
Andrew, just as Sara had done, had stopped and was now staring past the top of the hedge down to the smallholding on the other side of the railway.
‘It’s a big place, isn’t it? They must grow lots more than they need at the Sulis,’ she murmured.
‘Hmm? Oh, yes. Yes, I think they said they’re part of an organic box scheme. And I think they used to supply a couple of restaurants but the deliveries took so long they gave that up.’ He carried on staring. As Sara watched him, a loose memory of something from Sunday night was beginning to flap in her mind, something in the shabby man’s frightened voice as he had spoken blindly into the dark came back to her.
‘Didn’t you tell me the night after Mrs Takahashi was killed that the Golightly man was called Ivan? Ivan Golightly?’
‘Ivan and Hilary Golightly. That’s right. Why?’
‘And your other suspects—yes, I know you say the husband did it, but you checked out other people who’d had a connection with her, didn’t you? Like the Golightlys?’
Andrew hesitated and spoke slowly. ‘Yes, of course. There’s Ivan Golightly.’ He began to count them off on his fingers. ‘Ivan Golightly was working here all Saturday morning. He was seen by the woman who lives in the other house over there, Mrs Heffer.’
Sara gazed at the two houses. ‘It’s a long way. And
there’s so much growing in between. Was she telling the truth?’
‘You have such a suspicious mind. She’s a damn good witness actually. She said the Golightlys are quiet neighbours, they mind their own business. She saw Ivan that Saturday and she even told us the almost exact time because she saw him coming down from the embankment just after the 9.23 went past. He waved.’
‘She’s on her own, is she?’
Andrew nodded. ‘Widow, works in Waitrose. One son. She was in her own garden on the Friday afternoon and met Mrs Takahashi. They talked over the fence about cats. Mrs Heffer’s son works for Dyson doing service calls, he stays with his mother quite often but he lives in Chippenham, and yes, we checked him out too. He was working.’
‘What about the others?’
‘Hilary Golightly? She gave Mrs Takahashi a lift into town on the Saturday morning, dropped her at a quarter to nine at the Abbey, nipped in to Abbey News for a paper. Then she drove on to the Sulis, where she arrived less than ten minutes later. All stories checked out and corroborated.’
‘But there’s another man. What was he doing? What about the shabby man, the man with the beard who hangs out round here? He’s often round here. I’ve spoken to him. He mentioned Ivan.’
‘
You
spoke to him? Why? Sara, what have you been up to? If I find you’ve been meddling in police business, I’ll—’
‘Yes? You’ll what?’
Andrew grabbed her suddenly and kissed her. In a silly
voice he said, with his arms locked round her neck, ‘I’ll have you deported. To an uninhabited island.’
‘If it’s tropical and you’re there,’ she said back, ‘I’ll go quietly. And as long as it hasn’t got a concert hall. No, but listen,’ she pulled herself away, ‘listen, the shabby man. I met him when I was out running, er … last week some time, I think it was. He said something about staying with Ivan. I spoke to him and I think he was saying he stayed over there somewhere, with Ivan. Who is he? I bet Bridger doesn’t even know he exists. I bet he hasn’t checked him out.
Have
you checked him out?’
In a voice that Sara recognised as one he used for the benefit of people not very clever, Andrew said, ‘Police officers, Sara, are not entirely stupid. Even Bridger has his moments. Of course we’ve interviewed all the regulars along here. I am quite sure, if I go and check, that your shabby man’s among them. And none of the barge-owners, anglers, dog-walkers or cyclists remember seeing anything that either corroborates or disproves what we think happened to Mrs Takahashi. Oh, and by the way, your shabby man has been known to us and to Julian House for years.’
‘Oh.’
‘He’s been more or less homeless since the late eighties. He’s never been in trouble. He’s harmless.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘I’m not a social worker. Why would I know?’
Sara curled herself in under his arm. Whether it was the smell of his warm skin through the old cotton shirt or his growling pretence not to care about people like the shabby man that stabbed her suddenly with the knowledge
that she loved him and, simultaneously, that she did not deserve him, she was not sure.
‘You know all right. What?’
Andrew’s arms tightened round her as they stood looking across towards the Golightly house.
‘He’s called Leech. He comes from Bristol. Had a car accident in his teens and suffered brain damage. He did live with his mother but she died young, in her early sixties. He had a place in a sheltered hostel until the funding was stopped and it closed. Hasn’t settled since.’
‘Poor Leech. Poor shabby man. Can’t anyone help him?’
‘There’s nowhere for him to go permanently, not now. He’s been sleeping rough round Limpley Stoke for a year at least. He goes to Julian House in the winter, when it’s really cold. He gets by.’
‘You make it sound as if it’s all right.’
Andrew was still gazing at the smallholding across the railway. ‘There are worse cases,’ he said.
He had spent most of the evening before at Manvers Street police station, almost alone in the Incident Room, examining everything they had in the Takahashi investigation. Not that there hadn’t been a development. The team had come up with two members of the public who were just about certain enough that they had seen a middle-aged Japanese male in Bath before nine o’clock on that Saturday morning. Certain enough to have a shot at an ID parade, which Bridger was now setting up. One of the witnesses, however, seemed to want to insist that his Japanese male had been wearing jeans. The other’s had possibly been in shorts. Still, it was something, and meanwhile the question of the first wife remained interesting.
Bridger was digging, albeit with his usual snouty lack of finesse.
‘A pregnant Japanese tourist is staying down there in that crummy little B&B. Six days after she arrives, she is murdered in the middle of Bath, early in the morning of one of the busiest days of the year. She was quickly overpowered, suggesting that her attacker was considerably bigger and stronger than she was. But,’ Andrew exhaled dramatically, ‘since the victim was under five foot and weighed less than a hundred pounds, that’s most people. Man or woman. No sign of a sexual motive, and nothing taken.’
‘Perhaps they were trying to rob her and were disturbed.’
‘Doubt it. There was time to hide the body, and if robbery was the motive, you’d do that before you bundled the body in a cupboard. At the very least you’d take the camera, which was superb.’
‘Film. You had the film that was in the camera developed, didn’t you? What about others?’
‘There were some new films back in her room, nothing more.’
‘But—’ Sara hesitated. Andrew seldom liked her flashes of insight. ‘But she was a
photographer
. She’d been in Bath for six days. It’s inconceivable that she didn’t take pictures, isn’t it? Where are the films?’
Andrew stared at her. ‘She might have left film for developing somewhere. There might be films sitting somewhere, in Bath, uncollected.’
‘She might even have left them at Photo-Kwik at the end of the alley, mightn’t she? Or they might have been stolen from her bag, of course.’
Andrew looked dubious. ‘We-ell … Look, thanks, I’ll have all the developing places checked out. Might just work, might tell us more about where she was, when. Thanks. You have your uses, my darling.’
They stood in silence, listening to the plash of ducks on the canal behind them and the children’s bantering commentary to one another among the bushes.
‘And it might tell us nothing,’ he added. ‘That’s the way this enquiry’s going. And I wonder what the motive for stealing the film would be. Quite apart from the motive for killing, of course.’
Sara said, ‘But you can’t wait until you think you’ve got a motive, can you? You’ve got to start somewhere.’
Andrew shook his head and thought. ‘Right. Suppose for a minute we forget motive. The suspects, apart from the husband who remains the prime one, are Joyce, Hilary and Ivan Golightly. You. Me. Everybody at the Snake and Ladder, that’s the landlord, his wife, the waitresses, the kitchen porter, the chefs, all the punters. Any and every person Mrs Takahashi spoke to in Bath. And of course the entire conference in Bristol. Anyone. Just about anyone.’
‘So where
do
you start?’
Andrew was not listening. ‘That, of course, is how you tackle it if you make a very big assumption, which is that the murderer actually had a motive.’
‘I thought you said we forget about motive.’
‘I meant we don’t concern ourselves for the moment with what the motive is. But we’ve still made the assumption there is one. Suppose there isn’t?’
Sara frowned. ‘You mean somebody just killing for no reason? Just somebody off their head? I thought you once told me that was the most unlikely thing of all.’
‘It is. Category A murder—an unknown killer striking at random, for no apparent reason. They’re unbelievably rare. And I have my doubts that that’s what we’ve got here. To start with, there was an attempt to hide the body. No signs of uncontrolled frenzied violence, no sexual assault. That’s why,’ he looked with concern at her, ‘I feel absolutely certain it was her husband.’
Sara nodded. ‘You said it didn’t seem right, her choosing to stay here. It’s hardly the place you’d pick if you could afford better.’
‘Which she could. The husband’s an eminent academic, high status in Japan. Good salary.’
‘So she was hiding. She ran away from him in Bristol and she was hiding out down there.’ Sara nodded in the direction of the house. ‘Perhaps he wanted her to go back to him and have the baby and she wanted out. He lost his temper, hit her and then strangled her.’
‘Something like that. Although he hasn’t once mentioned the pregnancy so it’s possible he didn’t even know she was pregnant. And one reason for that might be that the baby wasn’t his.’
‘What? You haven’t told him? That his wife was pregnant? That’s so cruel!’
Andrew looked surprised. ‘It could be a material point in building a case, so of course we haven’t told him, and we won’t, as long as he’s a suspect. If we don’t charge him, of course he’s entitled to see the PM report and he’ll find out then.’
Sara’s eyes had filled with tears. So the very existence of the small, dead, almost-baby was now a ‘material point’ for the purposes of convicting its putative father. It was not to be remembered for its own lost life’s sake.