Under a Silent Moon: A Novel (28 page)

“Mrs. Newman, I wanted to thank you for calling us,” Sam said. “I’m sure you might be able to help us build up a clearer picture of what Barbara was like, which will be of great help to the inquiry.”

“Which inquiry would that be?”

Sam looked up from her pad, where she had written the date and time but nothing else. “We need to gather evidence for the coroner’s inquest into Mrs. Fletcher-Norman’s death,” she said. “The inquest is due to be held next week. That will determine the cause of death, so it’s important we are able to present any evidence that might be relevant. Particularly if the evidence you have supports or refutes the theory that Mrs. Fletcher-Norman might have taken her own life.”

Lorna nodded. Looking directly at Sam, she added: “But you are working on the murder case, aren’t you? That Polly—what’s her name?”

“Polly Leuchars,” Ron said helpfully.

“Yes, Mrs. Newman,” Sam said. “We’re both working on that case. However, we also work on other unexplained deaths in the Briarstone area, one of which is that of Mrs. Fletcher-Norman.”

“So you’re not linking them, then?”

“We don’t have any direct evidence to support a link.”

Lorna was silent for a moment. “That’s good. I’d hate to think of Barbara mixed up in all that. She was a good girl, you know. We’ve been friends for years.”

“Can you tell me how you met?” Ron was having another go at conducting the interview.

“We were at school together. Kept in touch ever since, although there were long periods where we didn’t write. Not for any bad reason.”

“And you visited them recently, in Morden?”

“Beginning of August. Spent a week there.”

“What was your impression of Mrs. Fletcher-Norman at that time? Did she seem in good spirits?”

Lorna hesitated before replying. “I think so. There were a few times—we went out for dinner, and she’d had a few drinks. Got a bit overexcited, I think. On the last night we were there, she and Brian had a stinking row. We had gone to bed and you could hear them shouting from downstairs.”

“What was the argument about?”

She shook her head. “Couldn’t tell you. Just a lot of shouting and banging. She didn’t seem depressed, although I know she had been. The doctor had her on medication. She used to tell me about all the various pills she had to take.”

“I gather she was hospitalized in September?” Ron said.

“Yes. She took an overdose. I think she had had a particularly difficult week with Brian.”

“They argued often?”

She nodded. “Brian had had a number of affairs going back over the years, always with women he’d met through work, usually while overseas. Barbara tolerated those because she could pretend to herself that they weren’t really happening. A friend of mine—Andrea—her husband used to work with Brian, years ago. Apparently they got up to all sorts when they were on their overseas trips.”

Sam was scribbling furiously.

“She’d always been quite a jealous woman,” Lorna said. “She was quite nasty to Brian’s daughter, saw her as a threat, I believe.”

“So when Brian semiretired . . . ?”

“Barbara believed he was having affairs closer to home. First of all it was some physiotherapist woman at the health club they belong to. That was just after they moved to Morden. Then it was all about the stable girl, Polly Leuchars.”

“Mrs. Fletcher-Norman mentioned Polly in her letters to you?”

Lorna nodded. “Yes, and over the phone. At first it was just a suspicion, but Barbara has a way of latching on to an idea and going over it so many times in her head that it becomes the same thing as a truth. She said Brian was having an affair with Polly. Other women in the village had confirmed it to her.”

“Did she confront Brian?”

“Yes. He denied it, of course. Even stopped having riding lessons to appease her. I felt quite sorry for him, really. I think going riding had been doing him some good.”

“Do you know when it was that Barbara confronted her husband?”

“It was around the beginning of September. On the Monday before she was admitted to hospital she said he had denied it. She sounded very low about it. It was as though his denial made it worse—if he’d owned up to it, she might not have felt so bad. He’d admitted his foibles in the past, so it felt to Barbara as though he was really lying to her as well as cheating.”

“You seem doubtful that he was having an affair?”

She thought about this, and nodded slowly. “I just can’t see it somehow. I’ve seen pictures of that Polly on the television, what was she, twentysomething?”

“Twenty-seven,” Ron said.

“And pretty, too. Forgive me for saying so, but Brian’s not usually the sort to appeal to young girls. And I don’t think he would be so foolish as to do it right under Barbara’s nose like that. Far more likely he was seeing someone else and using Barbara’s suspicions about Polly to cover up the real mischief.”

For a moment the only sound was Sam’s pen moving across the notebook. Ron seemed lost in thought.

“More tea?”

The mugs were duly topped up and Sam paid a visit to the bathroom. It was light and airy and she washed her hands with a purple soap that smelled of lavender, and dried them on a white fluffy towel. The bathroom was spotless. She wondered whether they employed a cleaner or whether Lorna did the housework herself.

Ron seemed to have found a way in. When she found her way back to the living room, both of them were chortling with laughter. She wondered what it was that had got him into Lorna’s good books, but it seemed the joke wasn’t going to be shared.

“Right,” he said with a deep breath. “Where were we?”

Sam retrieved her notebook and flexed her right hand which had started to ache.

“You mentioned a phone conversation with Mrs. Fletcher-Norman on Monday last week. Did you phone her, or was it the other way round?”

“She called me,” Lorna said. “It was about Liam O’Toole.”

Ron said, “This was the man she was seeing? The tennis coach?”

“Yes. She’d written me a few letters about him, and the last one had indicated that they were planning to run away together. She’d been saving up money for years, money Brian knew nothing about. She called it her Rainy Day Fund.”

“Do you have any idea how much money we’re talking about?”

Lorna gave a little shrug. “Thousands. Every time Brian had an affair she used to get jewelry from him—keep her sweet, I suppose. She sold it all, as well as creaming money off the housekeeping allowance he gave her.”

She took a drink of her tea, then went on. “I’d written a letter to Barbara in which I’d asked her to be careful. I asked her if she knew everything about this Liam, whether she was certain he could be trusted. She phoned me to give me a telling off.”

“You thought he was going to do a runner?”

She nodded. “It just always seemed too good to be true.” She gave a rueful smile. “You must think me terribly critical of my friends to not see them as attractive to younger people. But I’m afraid the same thing applies. He was only about twenty-eight, I believe. Handsome, fit, reasonably intelligent. And yet he falls in love with a fifty-nine-year-old housewife? I don’t think so.”

Sam couldn’t decide if Lorna was just a straightforward person who didn’t believe in glossing over the issues, or if she was somehow slightly jealous of what Barbara had had. In either case, she looked defiant, as though challenging the officers to disagree.

“Mrs. Fletcher-Norman was angry with you, when she phoned?”

Lorna softened a little. “Not angry, exactly. She was just trying to persuade me that I was wrong about Liam. She was utterly convinced he was genuine. In fact, she said when they did make their escape, as she called it, she would bring him here for a visit so that I could see for myself.”

“What did you make of that?”

“I told her she’d be welcome.”

“So you parted on good terms?”

“Yes. Although I did post a letter to her on Wednesday morning to tell her not to rush into anything and obviously she hadn’t got it by the time she rang me that night.”

Ron nodded. “What time did she ring you on Wednesday?”

“It was about half past nine. I was just putting the dinner plates in the dishwasher. Andrew was watching some documentary on BBC Three. I had to take the phone upstairs because I couldn’t hear what she was saying properly.”

“She was incoherent?”

“She was drunk.” She said it with an edge to her voice that suggested disapproval.

“When I eventually got her to make sense, it seemed that Liam had run off with all her money. She said she had given him access to her savings account so that he could get some money for a deposit on a flat. I don’t know where. She’d gone to the bedsit he had in the village, an annex off one of the bigger houses. The place was cleared out. She had been trying his mobile, but it was turned off.”

“What did you say?”

“Well, I certainly didn’t say ‘I told you so,’ although perhaps I should have. I asked her where Brian was. She said he’d gone out with his fancy woman.”

“‘His fancy woman’?” Ron repeated.

“I assume she meant Polly Leuchars. I suggested she should phone him and ask him to come home. She was beside herself. I was concerned for her state of mind, particularly given her setback just over a month before. I thought she might try to harm herself.”

“And what did she say?”

“She calmed down a bit when I mentioned Brian. Seemed to bring her back to her senses. She said she was going to phone him. I promised I would call her in the morning to see how she was, and then we said goodbye. By that time she seemed to have cheered up a bit. I thought she was going to be all right.”

“How long had you been on the phone, roughly?”

“I’d say about twenty minutes or so. Afterward I tried to phone Brian’s mobile, but it was engaged. I assumed Barbara had got hold of him.”

“And the next thing you heard was the news?”

Lorna looked down at her lap. Her voice trembled slightly. “Yes. I couldn’t believe it.” She paused. “Well, no, that’s not true. Of course I believed it, especially after our conversation on Wednesday. I just thought to myself, what a terrible business. I said as much to Andrew—what a terrible thing, to take one’s own life.”

Sam stopped writing for a moment. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Newman.” Her voice was low, tender. “It must have been awful for you, losing such a dear friend in such dreadful circumstances.”

Lorna gave her a weak smile. “Thank you, my dear. Yes, it was awful. You’re kind.”

Ron drank the last of his tea. He cleared his throat. “You mentioned the letters, Mrs. Newman?”

“Oh, of course. I’ll get them.” She stood, bustled off down the corridor.

“Get all that, Sarge?” Ron asked Sam.

“Yep.”

They sat in silence until Lorna returned, carrying a thick brown A4 envelope. “I think this is all of them.”

Ron took the package and looked inside. About twenty envelopes, opened. “Thank you. I need to evidence these and give you a receipt.”

“Oh, are you taking them away?”

“I’m afraid I’ll need to, Mrs. Newman. They will become property of the coroner until after the inquest, as evidence into Mrs. Fletcher-Norman’s state of mind. Once the inquest is finished you can ask to have them returned to you.”

She looked a little crestfallen. “I suppose that’s all right.”

They bagged the package in a clear plastic evidence wallet and Ron wrote out a receipt and handed it to Mrs. Newman.

“I need you to have a read of my notes, Mrs. Newman, if that’s all right,” Sam said gently. “If you agree that everything I’ve written is accurate, I’ll ask you to sign my notebook. If there’s anything in there you want me to amend, please say. Then I’ll ask you to give me a written statement based on what you’ve told us. We need to have a bit in there to show that you’ve provided the letters as an exhibit for the coroner.”

They spent a few minutes in silence, broken only by the sound of the notebook pages turning. From time to time, Lorna nodded. Ron went to the bathroom, and was gone for an inordinate amount of time. Sam hoped he wasn’t snooping. Or at least, not in an obvious way.

“You have very neat writing, my dear,” Lorna Newman said at last.

Sam laughed. “It’s a struggle, writing that fast, and trying to keep it legible.”

“I can imagine.”

Taking the statement took a little longer. Once it was done, Lorna Newman offered them sandwiches to take with them for the journey, but they managed to refuse gracefully. Ron was desperate for a McDonald’s.

“You were gone a long time,” Sam said, when they got back in the car.

“You thought I was having a poke round,” he accused.

“I did wonder.”

“I was having a dump. All right?”

“Well, I hope you opened a window.”

“Bastard dreadnought couldn’t fit round the U-bend. Had to beat it to death with the toilet brush, in the end.”

Lorna Newman was watching them from the doorway. Ron gave her a wave.

“Well, what did you think?” he asked as they did up their seat belts.

“I think we need to get the telephone records from Hayselden Barn,” Sam said. “So much of this case is going to come down to the phones. It’s a good job we’ve got a good analyst.”

“Just as long as he doesn’t get distracted by the boss,” Ron said with a smirk.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, come on. You must have noticed. He can’t keep his eyes off her. Completely besotted.”

Sam considered it. “He’ll have to join the queue, then, won’t he?”

“Judging by the rest of her options, I’d say he’s in with more of a shout than the rest of us.”

“Give over. She’s far too sensible. Especially . . .”

“Go on.”

“No. It’s nothing.”

Ron was smiling at her now. It was his turn to drive, but even so he was glancing across at her, enjoying the way the conversation was heading. “You were going to say ‘especially now she’s learned her lesson,’ weren’t you? Talking about Mr. Hamilton?”

“It’s gossip, Ron. Not very nice when it’s about someone you get on well with. You driving, or dancing?”

He corrected the steering and brought the car back to the right side of the road, thankful it was clear ahead. “Les has got a book running. Her and the DI is fifty to one, the analyst only gets eight to one.”