“Oh, she’s doing fine. Sitting up and making her presence felt. Have our two chummies arrived here yet?”
“They have. Berger’s as truculent as hell, and Pascoe’s shaking in his natty shoes. I was able to tell them, with hand on heart, that I hadn’t a clue what they were here for. What’s it all about, guv?”
Even the cold clear light of morning hadn’t shaken Kate’s conviction that she was on the right track concerning Berger. She told Boulter about the inspiration that had come to her during the night. The sergeant, though, looked far from impressed.
“Sounds a bit of a long shot to me, guv.”
“Take my word for it, Tim, giving the man a nickname like that is exactly the sort of thing that Corinne Saxon would have done. Always a sexy innuendo with her.”
“Always? Which other men did she dub with a sexy nickname that we know about?”
You’ve brought this on yourself, Kate.
Dammit, she wasn’t about to reveal Richard’s nickname to anyone. What mileage her male colleagues would get out of that juicy little item. Big Dick. She shuddered.
“Well, James Arliss, for one,” she said crisply.
“Oh?” Boulter was immediately alert. “What did she call him?”
“Well, you see, his middle name happens to be Andrew, so she called him Randy Andy.”
Boulter chortled. “He admitted that to you? I didn’t notice it in your report.”
“Well . . , Arliss didn’t actually tell me. I figured it out for myself.”
The sergeant tilted his head musingly. “A guy wouldn’t really mind, would he? I mean, it’s dead flattering. What put you on to it, guv ... the connection between Ram and Berger, I mean? You know French, do you?”
“Not according to my school reports. But Corinne Saxon spoke French fluently. She was born half-French, remember, and lived over there for several years. It suddenly struck me that the name Berger could be pronounced in a French way ...
Bear-zhay.
So I looked it up in a French dictionary, and ... bingo!”
From Boulter’s expression she could see he was miles from being convinced.
“Tim, if we can bust Berger’s alibi, then we’ve got him. So I want to hammer him and Pascoe, keep on at them until one or the other breaks. Neither is aware that the other is here, I take it?”
“No, guv. They’re being held separately.”
She went first to see Vincent Pascoe, who was being kept waiting in one of the stark interview rooms on the ground floor. He was a tall, slenderly built young man with intelligent brown eyes. He was trying to put on a bold front, but failing sadly.
Kate introduced herself, then sat down across from him at the small table. Pascoe watched nervously as the sergeant went through the motions of setting up the tape-recorder, breaking the seals on the twin cassettes and explaining the regulation procedure. Kate waited in silence, ostensibly glancing through the file of reports she’d brought in with her. Boulter identified time and place and those present. Kate allowed a brief interval, then commenced briskly.
“Mr. Pascoe, you informed one of my officers in a previous interview that you spent the whole of last Wednesday afternoon at Yew Tree Cottage, in Larkhill, working on some architectural plans for its conversion.”
“That’s right,” he concurred. “I was there ... all the afternoon. There were lots of measurements to be taken, and sketches to be made.”
“I’m not disputing your presence there,” Kate said. “But you also stated that Mr. Adrian Berger was with you during that time.”
“Well ... he was.”
“All of that time?”
Pascoe swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Mr. Berger joined me there a few minutes after I arrived.”
“A few minutes after? How many minutes, exactly?”
“Oh ... about five, I should think. We’d arranged to meet at the cottage at two o’clock, which was when I arrived.”
“So Mr. Berger got there not later than about five past two? Let’s say ten past at the latest. Is that what you’re telling me?”
He nodded confirmation. Boulter gestured towards the tape-recorder, and Pascoe enunciated faintly, “Yes, that’s correct?”
“And you both remained at the cottage until ... what time?”
“It must have been about a quarter to six, or a bit after. Mr. Berger said he wanted to look in at the office, but I drove straight home.”
“Was it raining then?” asked Boulter.
Pascoe looked lost for a moment, then his face cleared. “On my way home it started to come down quite heavily. I had to dash round from the garage to the front door, not having a mac.”
The last couple of answers had the ring of truth. But it wasn’t so much Pascoe’s movements she was interested in. The big question was whether or not Berger had been with him for any or all of that afternoon.
Kate held out the top sheet of paper from her file. “Mr. Pascoe, this is the statement you gave the other day to one of my officers. Please read it through, and consider carefully. If you want to change it in any small detail, I suggest you do so now before it’s too late.”
She watched him go pale as he read, but he braved it out. “Why should I want to change anything? I’ve told the truth.”
“If you are trying to protect Mr. Berger, you’d be well advised to stop right now. Otherwise, I shall be forced to consider whether you and he were implicated together in the death of Miss Corinne Saxon.”
Pascoe’s hands came up in a protesting gesture, as if to ward off her attack. “No, that’s not true. Neither of us had anything to do with her death. Absolutely not, we’re completely innocent. I swear it. You’ve got to believe me.”
“How can you be so certain of Mr. Berger’s innocence?”
His reply to this challenge—to Kate’s intense interest—wasn’t an indignant protest that Berger couldn’t possibly have committed murder that afternoon because the two of them had been together at the relevant time. Instead, after a gap of several tense seconds, he muttered, “It’s ridiculous to suspect Adrian. He ... he
couldn’t
do a terrible thing like that.”
“I suggest,” said Kate, “that the reason for your certainty is that Mr. Berger somehow persuaded you that he’d had nothing whatever to do with the murder.”
Pascoe stared back at her, wide-eyed, obviously fearful about what he was getting himself into.
“Why should he have done that ... persuaded me? I ... I mean, he didn’t need to. It stands to reason.”
“I agree that he wouldn’t have needed to persuade you of his innocence if he’d been with you while the murder was taking place. The question is,
was
he with you?”
“Of course he was. I ... I’ve already told you.”
“Indeed you have, Mr. Pascoe. But were you telling the truth?” While he was stammering his way out of that, Kate decided to let him sweat for a while. Signalling to Boulter to make a break in the recording, she said, “I’m going to have a talk with Mr. Berger now, to see what he’s got to say about all this.”
“You mean,” said Pascoe, looking startled, “that he’s here, too?”
“Oh yes, he’s here helping us with our enquiries, just as you are.” Kate deliberately took a moment to shuffle the papers back into the file. As she rose and turned to leave, Pascoe asked, “How long are you going to keep me here?”
“As long as it takes to get at the truth, Mr. Pascoe.” A uniformed officer came to stand just inside the door. Kate and Boulter walked along the corridor to a second interview room. Berger, seated at the small table, sprang to his feet as they went in.
“At last! I really must protest, Chief Inspector. It’s bad enough to be brought here in this peremptory way, but to be kept kicking my heels like this is quite disgraceful. I’ve a damned good mind to make a formal complaint.”
“That is your right, of course, if you wish to do so.” Once again, Kate waited while Boulter went through the preliminaries of taping the interview. Then she said, “Mr. Berger, I’d be interested to know why Miss Corinne Saxon called you Ram.”
As she’d intended, that stopped him in his blustering tracks. If Berger suspected the truth ... that it was only inspired guesswork on her part that identified him as the Ram who’d talked to Corinne on the phone in James Arliss’s hearing, he might have denied it. And she had no kind of proof, nor ever would have. As it was, by great good fortune, he assumed she must somehow know it for certain fact. All the same, Kate had to admire the man’s coolness.
“Oh, that!” He shrugged elaborately. “It was something to do with the meaning of my name in French, I think. Corinne spoke French fluently, of course.”
Kate felt a frisson of excitement. She was convinced now that she’d found her murderer.
But proving it is going to be something else, Kate.
She didn’t pursue the nickname aspect. It had served its purpose.
“How did you persuade your junior partner, Vincent Pascoe, to provide you with an alibi for the afternoon Miss Saxon was killed?”
Berger was again badly shaken. She could read his speeding mind ... Just how much did this woman know? What might Pascoe have let slip? Then his expression changed. He’d decided to continue with his bluff.
“What the devil are you talking about? As I told you before, I spent the afternoon at a cottage at Larkhill, with Vincent.”
Kate glanced at Boulter. “Sergeant, is Pascoe still sticking to that story? Has he been made to understand the seriousness of perjury?”
Boulter picked up his cue. “Perhaps I’d better just go along the corridor and make sure he fully understands the consequences, ma’am.”
Berger started. “Have you got Vincent here, too?”
“Indeed we have,” Kate confirmed.
His eyes narrowed and he adopted a reproachful tone. “Chief Inspector, Vincent is only a young chap. It simply isn’t ethical to use threatening tactics with him. If you convey to him that by telling lies he can in some way save himself from trouble with the police, he might well be tempted.”
“Don’t worry, Mr. Berger, our intentions are the exact opposite of that,” Kate told him. “Sergeant, I think I’ll come with you and talk to Mr. Pascoe myself.”
Vincent Pascoe had certainly been sweating during their absence. Kate felt a fleeting pity for the young man as the two of them entered. He was wild-eyed, on the verge of breaking down. Kate took a seat, and Boulter re-opened the proceedings on the tape-recorder.
“Mr. Pascoe,” she began, “I want you to listen carefully while I spell out a few things to you. The enquiry on which I’m currently engaged is not a trivial matter, but a case of murder. A particularly horrifying murder, too. Now, I have reason to believe that you gave the police a false version of events on the afternoon of Wednesday last. That in itself is a serious matter. But if you persist in the falsehood, you’ll put yourself in an even worse position. And you won’t in the end help Mr. Berger—if that is indeed what you’re trying to do. Because, believe me, the truth is eventually going to emerge.”
Pascoe burst out in a fever of urgency, “Adrian didn’t do it. I know you think he might have done, and that’s exactly why he asked me to ...” He trailed off as the realisation hit him that he’d said the wrong thing.
“Tell me about it,” Kate urged him gently, and gave him time to gather his courage together.
At length, Pascoe said in a low voice, “He really didn’t do it, I swear he didn’t. But he knew things might have looked bad for him, if he wasn’t able to give you a proper alibi for the time it ... it happened.”
“Where
was
Mr. Berger, then, if not at the cottage with you?”
“I don’t know where. But he wasn’t ... well, not where you seem to think. He didn’t commit that murder and make it look like rape and everything. It can’t have been him, not possibly. Adrian just isn’t that sort of man.”
“Tell me about it,” Kate said again. “All of it. From the beginning.”
“Well, on Friday evening, after ... after the body was discovered, Adrian phoned me at home and asked me to meet him. He was very upset, and he said that the police were certain to question him because he’d had such a lot to do with Miss Saxon over the conversion of Streatfield Park.”
He’d suddenly dried up, and Kate prompted him. “Why should that have bothered him, if all he had to do was to explain where he was at the time of her death?”
“Because he
couldn’t
explain. Don’t you see, he’d have been compromising someone else.”
“And what made you agree to perjure yourself for his sake?”
“I felt I had to. Adrian told me—he was completely frank about it —that he’d been very foolish and indiscreet in having an affair with a married woman. But he said that if it were all to come out there’d be a nasty scandal which could have serious repercussions on the firm, so that all of us on the staff would suffer. So he asked for my help. I’d been at Yew Tree Cottage all Wednesday afternoon, alone, and he explained that all I had to do was to say that he’d spent the afternoon there with me. It didn’t seem much to ask, I mean, Mr. Berger’s always been very good to me, and it would save him a lot of trouble and embarrassment ... and everyone else at the firm ...” Pascoe gave her a forlorn look. “I didn’t realise it was going to get out of hand like this.”
“People seldom do when they start lying to the police.”
“What’s going to happen now?”
“That depends. Did Mr. Berger tell you who the woman was he claims to have been with?”
“No, he said it was best that I didn’t know.”
You bet it was best, Kate.
“Now, Mr. Pascoe, I shall want you to give one of my officers a full and detailed statement about what you have outlined to me. Meanwhile, I’m going to talk to Mr. Berger again.”
“Are you going to ... I mean, will you have to tell him that I’ve told you?”
“Obviously.” She stood up. “I hope you realise, Mr. Pascoe, that you have seriously hampered the police in their enquiries and wasted a great deal of our time.”
Out in the corridor, Boulter said with a hint of admiration, “It didn’t take you long to get him spilling the beans, guv.”
Kate smiled inwardly. Compliments from her sergeant came but rarely. “Berger made the mistake of thinking that Pascoe would be as accomplished a liar as he is himself.”
“So it looks like the end of the road?”