Under a Silent Moon: A Novel (44 page)

She seemed perfectly at ease with this idea. “Would you like a coffee?” she asked brightly. “It’s a bit early for wine, I think.”

“Coffee would be nice.”

“Are you here for sex, Inspector Hamilton? Or are we just going to talk today?”

She was clearly amused by his expression. He should know her well enough by now to realize that she took delight in wrong-footing him.

“Well. I—er—I don’t think I would turn it down. If it’s on offer.”

Suzanne laughed, ran her fingers through her hair. “Very well, then. Let’s have coffee first, shall we?”

He followed her into the kitchen, where he leaned against the kitchen table and watched her as she busied herself with an expensive-looking coffee machine, retrieved two plain white cups from the cupboard, and added tablet sweetener to one of them. Just a couple of days ago she had felt him up in here, left him shocked and breathless. It felt like years ago.

He moved up behind her and placed a hand in the small of her back. She flinched slightly. Behind her, then, sliding his hands around her waist and holding her against him while the coffee machine made a loud churning noise and dribbled dark liquid into the two cups.

“Not yet,” she said, removing his hands firmly and stepping to the side, turning to face him.

“Sorry,” he said, unsure of what he was apologizing for. “I thought—”

“You may touch me only when given permission. That’s one of the first things you’re going to have to learn, if we are going to enjoy this regularly. Do you understand?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy the way you do things, but I’ve never tried this—whatever it is—before.”

“Then I shall have to teach you. That’s all part of the pleasure of it, learning what you enjoy. And the same goes for me. I have particularly enjoyed making you wait for it, seeing your face when you think I’m going to reject you. And then seeing your expression change when you realize what’s coming. You give a lot away, did you know that?”

“It’s all a game to you, isn’t it?”

“Not at all. I am deadly serious about it.”

Andy gave a short, ironic laugh. “Deadly. That’s an interesting choice of word.”

She smiled at him. “You’re right. But this is all part of why I became a nurse. I’ve always enjoyed breathplay, but only within the boundaries of safety. I know what a high it gives you if you’re being fucked just at the moment of losing consciousness. There is no orgasm on earth as powerful, unless you’re using drugs, and that’s something else entirely. But there is a risk—and at least with me you know you’re safe. You’re always in control, you can stop at any moment. And if you choose not to stop, and you lose consciousness, then you know I can resuscitate you if need be.”

“That’s very reassuring. Where is it you work?”

She stared at him, crossing her legs at the knee. The coffee machine had stopped whirring. “Milk and sugar?”

“Yes, please.”

She pushed one of the cups and a sugar bowl toward him, getting a spoon out of the drawer. “Help yourself.”

While he stirred in some sugar—two spoons, he had a feeling he was going to need the energy—she got a carton of milk out of the fridge and passed it over to him.

“I’m doing agency nursing at the moment,” she said. “I was working overseas until two months ago.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Oh, all over the world. I was in Dubai for most of this year.”

“Sounds great. Why did you come back?”

Suzanne laughed. “Even sunshine gets boring after a while. Shall we go and sit down?”

She carried both cups into the living room, put them on the low table, and eased herself onto the sofa.

“I can’t believe how calm you are,” he said.

“I’m a good actress, Inspector Hamilton. You’ll get to appreciate that when we have more time to play together.”

Play? Such an odd word to use. There wasn’t anything casual or recreational about it. What she did was focused, determined, meticulous.

“I wish you’d call me Andy.”

“If I do that it will change the dynamic of the relationship,” she said. “I like things the way they are.”

He picked up the coffee and tasted it. One of those fancy ones, flavored with something—hazelnuts? Caramel? It wasn’t bad, anyway. Maybe needed another sugar. He was aware of her eyes watching his movements closely, unblinking, and for a moment, despite how relaxed she appeared, he had the impression of being stalked by a big cat, relaxed, purring, waiting to pounce.

“How did your colleagues take the news about Brian?”

“I’m on a rest day today. So I haven’t told them. It might be that I don’t need to.”

“That would be good for both of us, wouldn’t it?”

“I need to ask you some more questions,” he said. “There are still some things that don’t make sense.”

“Such as?”

Andy took a deep breath in. “Polly Leuchars. Her phone called your number the night she died.”

“She was just phoning to see how I was. We were friends, of course.”

“But she came over to see you. The cellsite showed the phone was in this area.”

“She called me. If they ever ask me about it officially, I will tell them she was probably visiting Flora and that they should ask her, not me. Poor Flora. I would imagine she’s taken it very badly.”

“But she wasn’t visiting Flora, was she?”

Suzanne smiled. “I’m so tired of all this, you know. I wish life could hurry up and get back to normal. It’s wonderfully exciting, but really rather tiresome.”

“What happened, Suzanne? You met Polly in town earlier that day, didn’t you?”

She drank her coffee. “She wouldn’t seem to get the message that things were over between us. I was with Brian and I couldn’t deal with her, too. I’m quite monogamous, you know, Inspector. I only have enough attention for one sub at a time. And, besides, Polly was such hard work. She liked bondage in particular, you know, she liked to be restrained, and I find rope play an unnecessary chore. To do it properly, safely, takes a long time. Brian was turning out to be much more fun. So I told her quite plainly that she should move aside, but she kept on and on, phoning me, asking to meet, pretending it was to be simply as friends. So I met her in town and asked her to stop calling. She said she would if I would come for one last drink with her, in the Lemon Tree. I agreed, to get rid of her.”

“But you didn’t turn up?”

“Brian came over. We were busy.” As if that explained everything.

“So she drove over to Briarstone to find you?”

“Walked in through the back door. It was unlocked. Honestly, Brian’s face. I asked if she wanted to join in, but she simply stood there over the bed, sobbing as if she was unhinged. She was absolutely distraught. Brian and I didn’t know what to do with her. In the end, I told Brian to put his bike in Polly’s car and drive her home.”

“He did that. They had an argument when they got to the Barn.”

“Yes, he phoned to tell me. The first of his many calls that evening. Polly was trying to persuade him to leave me, so that I would go back to her.”

“Then what happened?”

“You know the rest. Polly drove her car back across the road to the farm. Brian went home, but Barbara had seen him pull up in Polly’s car and had assumed he’d been out shagging her. They had a lengthy argument about it, lots of shouting and yelling and long miserable silences. Quite funny, really, when you think about it. Then, eventually, she got all mad and went over to confront her.”

“And Brian followed her? He killed Polly while Barbara was there?”

She didn’t reply, finished off her coffee instead.

Hamilton could feel the pressure building behind his eyes, the beginnings of a sore throat. He was probably run-down, coming down with the flu. He felt overwhelmingly tired by the nightmarish situation that he had managed to get himself tangled up in and the knowledge that it would get worse, much worse, unless he stopped it now, called a halt to it.

“I can’t see you, Suzanne, you know. I have to steer clear.”

She laughed, quite casually. “Oh, I don’t think so.”

“It’s for your own security more than mine. They’ll realize there’s something going on. The more time I spend here the more risky it is.”

“There’s no risk. Not if you do as you’re told. I said the same thing to Brian.”

He didn’t answer straightaway, let his head rest heavily back on the sofa cushions. He almost missed it, that last comment, thrown in so casually. And yet there it was, and as exhausting as it was he would have to ask: “What do you mean, you said the same thing to Brian?”

“You’re as bad as he was, Inspector Hamilton. When things start to get a little fragile in your personal lives you go to pieces. He rang me to ask me what he should do. And he would have been fine, except he just forgot the shot put. If it hadn’t been for the shot put I wouldn’t have even left the house that night.”

Andy Hamilton felt the blood draining from his face and hands.

He dreamed of moments like this, of suspects who were intelligent and lucid and not actually psychotic on drugs telling him exactly, truthfully, what had happened when someone had been murdered. He dreamed of it happening in an incident room, the action being neatly recorded on DVD for generations of trainee detectives, and maybe a true-life TV show. He dreamed of a confession coming in response to one particularly pertinent, insightful observation, or a question he’d placed before the suspect that was so perfect they could not help but raise their hands a little in mock surrender, before uttering whatever the nonclichéd equivalent of “It’s a fair cop, guv” was these days.

But this particular confession made everything much, much worse.

What he should do, of course, was arrest her right now. She’d made a confession to him. He should cuff her and take her down and book her in, because that was what he was trained to do, and to do anything else was to take him even further down the path that led away from his police pension and now, probably, toward some sort of serious misconduct charge and possibly even imprisonment. And yet he was so shattered, so tired, he doubted he could even manage to restrain her if he had to.

“Don’t you want to hear about it?”

Not really, no
was what he wanted to say.
No, what I want to do is run away and hide from my wreck of a life.
What he actually said was: “Go on, then.”

She took a deep breath in, looked at the ceiling for inspiration. “Where to start? Well, Brian phoned me in a panic on Wednesday night. Barbara had gone over to Yonder Cottage to confront Polly, and when she came back she was hysterical and covered in blood. Brian was trying to calm her down, trying to get her to make sense, when she slipped over on something—I guess she was drunk, that’s how she was most of the time—and she hit her head on the side of the kitchen worktop and passed out. That was when he phoned me.”

“You said—last night—you told me that Brian had planned it all. He was setting her up.”

“I think you misunderstood. He saw the opportunity to pass the blame on to Barbara.”

“So if that’s the case, why did he ring you? What was it he thought you could do?”

Suzanne smiled at him. “I’m surprised you even have to ask. What is it you all want, Inspector? All of you men who think you are brave and strong and manly, but in fact are completely clueless and helpless the moment you’re confronted with a problem? He wanted me to sort it out for him.”

“Why didn’t he just call an ambulance?”

“Why indeed. I wondered that myself.”

“Why didn’t you tell him to call an ambulance, then?”

She didn’t answer for a moment.

“Because I saw the opportunity it presented. For Brian, and for myself.”

“The opportunity?”

“He had said himself. It was his idea. He was going to kill her somehow and make it look as though she committed suicide. Then she’d be out of the way and he’d be free to be with me.”

“Is that what you wanted?”

Suzanne laughed out loud, tilting her head back. “Good grief. Of course not,” she said. “I never thought for one minute he’d actually do it. He had no idea who had actually killed Polly, even though Barbara was raving about death and murder and blood everywhere. Brian thought she’d been in a fight, something like that. And now she’d hit her head, it made it all rather awkward. Brian knew she’d try to implicate him, try to get him to take the blame for it. It was so much easier to reverse the situation, to make her take responsibility for being permanently drunk, and a nasty bitch as well.”

“You spoke to him when it happened,” Andy said. His stomach was churning in a way that made him wish the bathroom wasn’t so far away, even though it was just across the hall from where he sat.

“He kept phoning me for advice. Honestly, it’s like he couldn’t manage to make a single decision on his own. He put Barbara in her car and then he put his bike in the boot. He wanted me to meet him at the quarry and give him a lift home—as if I’d do that! I wanted to be nowhere near him, or her, or any of it. In the end I had to give him a bloody list of instructions of things to do, things not to forget. Put her seat belt on. Make sure you don’t adjust her driving position in the car, even if it’s difficult to drive it like that. Check the boot of the car before you push it over the edge. Take clean clothes with you to change into and get rid of the clothes you were wearing when you did it. Have a bath when you get home. Don’t clean Polly’s blood out of the kitchen. It was quite simple, really. Assume Barbara had done something horrible to poor Polly, let her take responsibility for it.”

“And he rang you when he was done?”

“He told me he’d found the suitcase with her clothes in it in the boot of the car.”

“Why couldn’t Brian simply have phoned the police instead of killing her? She would have ended up getting the blame anyway.”

Suzanne looked at him as if he was dense. “She had a head wound. He’d pushed her against the side of the worktop and she was unconscious. I believe he also told me that she’d wet herself, which was a detail more than I really needed, but it served to tell me that she was quite badly hurt. We couldn’t risk Brian being charged with her murder, or GBH, or whatever it would have been.”