‘You wouldn’t have heard the shot from there?’
He shook his head. ‘Too far away It’s a ten-minute walk at least from the school.’
‘Of course.’ Mayo suddenly asked Hannah, ‘Do you – or did your husband – have a gun, Mrs Wetherby?’
‘A
gun?
’ She almost laughed, as if the idea was absurd. ‘Of course not!’
Sam Leadbetter intervened. ‘What are you implying?’
‘Sam.’ It was Hannah who was being protective now. She put a hand on his arm, and then stated, almost as if convincing herself, ‘You’re saying Charles shot himself, aren’t you, Mr Mayo?’
‘I’m afraid that’s not possible. Not when he was shot in the back of the head.’
A silence fell. ‘So he did have an enemy, after all,’ she said at last.
‘So it would seem. Or someone who needed him out of the way.’ He watched her take this without a flicker of emotion. ‘And what about you, Mr Leadbetter? Do you have a gun?’
‘No,’ Sam said shortly.
Mayo paused before getting into the car as they left, looking back at the house. A brick-built 1950s detached, one of about a dozen similar ones on the steep, once-quiet Vanson Hill, off Tilbourne Road. Reasonably quiet, at least, before the hospital further down had been extended. Square and unadorned, postwar austerity style, built at a time when satisfying housing shortages was a first requirement, and imagination wasn’t, they’d nevertheless been desirable residences then, and still were, since most of them had good-sized gardens at the back, which allowed for extensions and improvements. They were set well back from the road at the front, the gardens endowed with now mature trees which gave them a spurious graciousness. The prices they fetched when one came on the market were astronomical, in view of their original cost. The Wetherbys had been lucky; the school had presumably bought this one years ago.
He sat beside Abigail and she put the key in the ignition and waited. He seemed preoccupied and she knew better than to interrupt at such times.
He was thinking of the room they had just left. For an artistic woman, said to be so apt with her needle, Hannah Wetherby had done little to enhance what was an exceptionally dull room, despite its being stuffed with expensive objects, unrelated and haphazard, as if a high price tag automatically guaranteed taste. Money had been spent, as if this were the prime objective, rather than comfort, or attractiveness, and it showed. Compulsive shopping? Compensating activity, who could tell?
‘Let’s go,’ he said at last.
Abigail said nothing until she’d nudged the car out into the main road and into the stream of traffic. ‘She’s very nervous. Did you notice her fiddling all the time with that scarf she was wearing? And the long sleeves, the high neck?’
‘It’s a cold day.’
‘I’ll bet she wears them in summer, too.’ He looked at her. ‘I got used to noticing that sort of thing when I was with the DVU.’
‘You think Wetherby knocked her about?’
‘It’s not confined to the beer-swilling working classes you know!’
‘Yes, Abigail, I’m aware of that.’ Her unthinking, too-sharp
retort earned her a raised-eyebrow glance, a warning not to go too far, not to take his tolerance too much for granted.
She made an apologetic gesture, and sighed. ‘Yes, well. We all know about that, don’t we?’
The first thing Abigail had noticed about Hannah Wetherby had been the wariness, like an animal who has learned not to trust human beings. The trapped look in her eyes that was all too familiar, one she’d learned to recognise from her stint with the Domestic Violence Unit, a few years ago.
Why some men found it necessary to hit, or even torture, their wives, why women stayed with them until they were half-killed, or ran away then went back for more, was something to which Abigail, with her robust self-sufficiency, had never found an answer. It was one of the reasons she’d been glad to leave the unit behind, upset at the lack of understanding she’d felt in herself, at being unable to empathise with that sort of mentality. It demanded more of her than she was able to give: she could offer sympathy, and practical advice, but she could no more imagine what made these women endure a life of unremitting pain, violence and degradation than she could have endured it herself for one minute. If any man with whom she was in a relationship had raised his hand to her, just once, she’d have left him for good. She felt bad about her failure to comprehend, not only as a police officer, but as a human being, as another woman. They deserved more from her than she was able to give.
Sometimes, of course, women did rebel. Picked up the bread knife and used it when a man slammed his fist, or his boot, into their stomach, or broke their jaw, or worse, much worse. Occasionally, they simply walked out. Or took a whole bottleful of sleeping pills and never woke up. Everyone has their cut-off point, for one reason or another. Even Hannah Wetherby? She’d denied that anybody at all could have hated her husband enough to shoot him dead. But for a moment there, Abigail had glimpsed something beneath the surface.
She knew Mayo was thinking along the same lines, when he said, ‘She had a lot to lose by leaving him. Easy lifestyle. Nice house, status. Money.’
And a lot to gain by having him dead. No more physical abuse, for one thing. And if there was money coming, an added reason. And she’d be free for a life with someone else.
‘Is there something going on there, do you think?’ he added, picking up her own thoughts again. ‘With Leadbetter?’
‘I’d be surprised if there wasri You could cut the vibes between them with a knife.’
‘Then we can assume they knew each other before he went away, unless it’s a relationship that’s developed bloody fast over the last few days.’
‘More likely one that’s flared up again since he came home – and Wetherby just got in the way.’
‘I wondered when we’d get round to that, the age-old motive rearing its ugly head. Sex. Or money Ten to one there’s private money there, too. Unless the Bursar of Lavenstock College is paid more than I think he is, she’s hardly likely to have murdered him for his pension. Though the real question is whether she hated him enough to kill him at all.’
‘Wouldn’t you feel like killing someone who’d been knocking you around for years?’
‘Probably. But I might have restrained myself. Besides, we don’t
know
that he had.’
Abigail’s look said it all.
‘And probably verbal abuse, too,’ she added after a moment. ‘If it’s true that he had a nasty tongue. That can be just as bad, or worse, in a different way.’
They drove in silence for a while, until Mayo said, ‘And what about Riach? Did I detect some nuance there, too? Is she the sort of woman who’d play one against the other?’
If she was, that posed another question: was Wetherby entirely to blame for what had patently, in spite of the caution Mayo had just voiced about assuming physical cruelty, been an unhappy marriage?
‘None of them have an alibi worth considering. Covering for each other doesn’t constitute that, in my book – nor does it account for the time. But unless she’s lying about how long that fitting took, she didn’t have time to get to the school. On the other hand, Riach had plenty of time to get there, and as yet no alibi. And Leadbetter has none at all.’
‘If you’re guilty, you go to some trouble to provide one.’
‘Well, just now was hardly the time to press the point, but we’d better see to it we talk to Riach, and the other two again, separately. They’re the best suspects we have so far.’
Abigail said, after a moment, ‘How about if she went from the back of the house and cut diagonally across the playing fields? That would cut the time down to ten minutes maximum, I’d say.’
‘Can you get into the playing fields that way?’
‘I walked across the rugger pitch and had a look. There’s a gate with a lock leading directly into a passageway between their back garden and the next door’s,’ said Abigail, stealing a march on him yet again.
If anyone had told Cleo that Daphne would be proved right and that very soon she’d be admitting that working for Maid to Order was a mistake of the first water, she wouldn’t have listened. But after that first day, she’d known guiltily how true it was, it was definitely out of her league. Not that it was a league she any longer wanted to be in. Getting the brasses to come up a treat without leaving a trace of polish in the crevices, chasing innocent spiders out of corners, vacuuming under the rugs – talk about life being too short to stuff a mushroom! She’d have packed it in there and then, only she’d promised Val to stay on until the staff-shortage crisis was over.
The one bright spot on the horizon was that she hadn’t committed herself to anything long term. Meanwhile, she was to be fitted in when any team was short of an extra body, which at the moment seemed to be most of every day. Tone, who worked for Maids on an ad hoc basis, had made himself unavailable to them for the time being, presumably to concentrate on her decorating. She felt guilty about that, too.
It wasn’t the hard work that she objected to so much as the mind-numbing boredom. Mostly, it wasn’t hard work anyway, just repetitive, tedious chores. The clients fell into two distinct types: those who tidied up before the cleaners arrived, so that you wondered what could possibly need to be done; and those whose houses looked as though a bomb had struck and, defeated by the mess they’d created around themselves, called in other people to sort them out. On the whole it was the latter category who used Maid to Order; the tidiers usually had their own regular cleaning women. Cleo couldn’t yet expect to be sent to the more covetable jobs such as office or surgery cleaning.
Mrs Osborne had told Val that the team she’d sent had done such a good job at Wych Cottage there would be no need for another visit to finish off, so there’d be no opportunity to take another peep into that drawer – though fat chance remained of the gun still being there. After telling her father of the incident,
which had seemed to her the best thing she could do, she’d tried to forget it. She’d had enough of looking into the grubby corners of other people’s lives. But obscurely, it worried her. Just as the newspaper item of that woman who had been found dead in the Kyne haunted her. Perhaps it was the juxtaposition of the two things: the dead woman, who’d turned out to have been shot, found so near Wych Cottage, and that rather horrifying glimpse of what she was sure had been a gun, the last object one would have expected Mrs Osborne to possess. She was glad she’d mentioned it to her dad, she knew she ought to tell someone but she’d have felt embarrassed approaching the police over something which might be put down to her imagination. But George hadn’t pooh-poohed her concern. It was possible, he pointed out, that the gun was owned quite legitimately by Mrs Osborne, but this in itself seemed unlikely, especially in view of the old lady’s consternation when it had been exposed. She could understand Mrs O being persuaded that she might be safer with a weapon in the house against intruders, but unless she knew how to handle it, wasn’t it terribly dangerous? Anyway, George had promised to see it was looked into, and she’d had to be satisfied with that.
She was due down at MO at nine. She’d been up since five, eager to write. For days, she’d felt the creative spirit was not so much stirring again as clamouring to be heard. And now, she could hardly wait to start, get her thoughts on paper, get the book up and running. But this morning, she’d worked on it for three hours and the more she did, the less clearly defined her ideas seemed to become, refusing to be transferred from what she saw so clearly in her mind into words on paper. At eight, defeated, she gave it up, wondering despondently if she really had the stamina to be a writer, or if she only liked the idea of being one. With a sigh, she switched off her PC and slipped down to the corner shop for bread and milk for her breakfast.
Walking home, she decided it was time to see how Michelangelo was getting on with painting her ceiling. She hadn’t actually seen Tone since the day she’d agreed to let him do the job, though there was evidence of his activities in the smell of paint issuing from under her front room doors – both of which were kept locked, on Tone’s insistence. After gaining her approval of the colour he’d suggested for the paint, he’d said he
preferred her not to see the intermediate stages, and she’d agreed to his artistic needs. She never wanted anyone to see anything but the finished product, either. But she was getting fed up with living in the kitchen. Not to mention having to leave by the back door and re-enter via the front whenever she wanted to go upstairs.
She found him in the kitchen, making himself a coffee when she returned. ‘Finished, apart from the woodwork,’ he remarked laconically. ‘Want to come and look?’
Finished? Already? Crikey, that was quick! What sort of a cowboy job had he made of it? She followed him and he threw open the front room door. ‘Ta-da!’
She was speechless for a while, then finally found her voice. ‘Tone, it’s brilliant!’
‘Glad you appreciate it, ma’am.’ His tone was throwaway, but his ears glowed red and his lips twitched at the corners in the effort not to grin like a Cheshire cat.
He hadn’t, in the end, had time to strip off all the paper, and it had to be admitted that he’d slapped the paint on, but why worry when the total effect was so amazing? The walls were a subtle apricot, and the whole room was suffused with a golden light, transforming it. But that wasn’t all – most of his time had been spent painting, right into one fireplace alcove, a mock window with a view of sky and the tops of trees visible through it. At right angles to this, on either side, he’d screwed to the walls two large pieces of mirror glass he said he’d acquired – no, don’t ask! – which trebled the effect of looking out into a garden, pushing out the walls of the little room and adding even more light. It didn’t seem to matter now that the other, real window, looked out on to the high rise flats.
When the furniture was back in place, the silver-paper Spanish tango dancers on their black velvet swaying together above the fireplace, and Phoebe’s skein of ducks flying ever-optimistically upwards on the opposite wall … well, at a stretch, you could nearly imagine it was meant to be like that. She might almost come to believe it in time.
Meanwhile, a table for her word processor, provision to play the sort of music she liked without being nagged … Belatedly, she thought of what Daphne called ‘the finishing touches’. A trip down to the market for material for new curtains, cushions for
the chairs and settee? ‘What colours should I choose, Tone?’ she asked humbly, wondering how on earth she’d live up to all this, keep it neat and tidy. ‘I’d be afraid of spoiling anything, getting the wrong thing.’
‘I’ll come with you and make sure you don’t.’ The livid scar twisted his face up as he grinned, but she could sense his jubilation at her appreciation and once more she wondered about Tone. That
trompe l’oeil
window was the work of someone with more to give to life than cleaning people’s houses – or even doing a quick-fix decorating job on them.
And there was something else she’d noticed about Tone. His broad Black Country accent occasionally slipped. It was almost as though he were – not putting it on, it was too natural for that – but as though he’d once been accustomed to using received pronunciation as well, and now wasn’t quite sure of himself in either form.
Cleo found she was working with Sue again, and she’d no complaints about that. She liked Sue, who always had a smile on her pretty, dimpled face, never got into a flap, and managed to get through incredible amounts of work. Cleo thought she might even be learning something from her.
Val had today fitted in number 16 Kelsey Road, at short notice, in place of Mrs Osborne and as a special favour to the owner, whose cleaning lady was in hospital.
While Sue rang the bell, Cleo peered over a hedge and saw a totally unexpected sight: a sunken area running the length of the house, back to front, secret and enclosed. Clouds reflected in a pool bubbling with frogspawn, at its verge reeds and last year’s prickly teasel that had persisted through the winter. The flickering sunlight revealed a splash of gold, a corner studded with aconites, the emerging spears of bluebell leaves, a kind of greening over of the whole plot. Beside the rocky steps were hellebores – bell-shaped lime-green flowers tipped with plum-purple – and here and there the broad arrow leaves of lords and ladies were pushing through. A spiky blackthorn hedge was just about to burst into flower, and a cherry plum grew in one corner.
Cleo was enchanted. A wild flower garden, here in Kelsey Road, where in every other garden, not even a buttercup was
allowed to flourish! It couldn’t just have happened, it must have been planted. She looked with quickened interest at the house, a faded Victorian charmer with a neglected air, its paintwork peeling and the Virginia creeper on the façade grown out of hand: the bare tendrils clung tenaciously to the brickwork, you could see them curling over the spouting, ready to thrust under the roof tiles and prise them off. She couldn’t help wondering what the owner would be like, not to mention the interior.
But despite its size, the house wasn’t going to pose any problems, even Cleo could see that immediately. The small, plump, eccentric-looking person who in fact turned out to be Miss Lockett herself told them vaguely that many of the rooms were shut off, and the few in use were kept clean and in good order by her regular lady, at present in hospital for a hip replacement. It was soon obvious that she spoke the truth. As Sue pointed out, it wasn’t going to take the time allocated to have the place spick and span. Miss Lockett merely smiled very sweetly and said good, then that would give them time for a cup of coffee before they started, perhaps a slice of chocolate cake and a chat, so that they could get to know one another. She liked to know all about people she met, she said, who they were and where they came from, and within minutes had managed to obtain this information, despite appearing, not to put too fine a point on it, like a woozy-minded Miss Havisham on a bad day, her hair falling down, and dressed as she was in a collection of garments which would have been more at home heaped on a church jumble sale stall. She smiled vaguely and showed them into the warm, comfortable kitchen and when the coffee was made, asked Cleo if she’d mind slipping outside to ask Sam, who was working in the garden, if he’d like one, too.
Cleo walked up the path in a back garden that made the unstructured wild garden at the side of the house seem organised, though there seemed to have been recent attempts to tidy it up. She approached the gardener, a large young man in corduroys and stout boots who had seemingly been digging over a patch of ground elder. A pile of the thick fleshy roots sat obscenely on the path beside him.
Sam swore luridly as yet another root he was tracing back to its
source snapped off. He stamped his fork down into the moist earth, his boot shoving it down so hard the tines disappeared. He leaned on the handle, breathing hard. He’d picked the wrong job on which to vent his worry and frustration. Should have had more sense – rooting out ground elder was a slow, fiddling job, requiring the patience of a saint, and patience was something in short supply with him this morning. Not when the events of yesterday were tumbling over and over in his mind, any clear thought about the situation obscured by doubts, like frost smoke above the Antarctic ice.
Could he ever be sure of Hannah?
He was sure of nothing since his return, and meeting her again.
In his book, you played it straight. Life, or whatever. If it didn’t work out, you either put up with it, or packed it in, or did something decisive, even ruthless, if necessary, and refused to have regrets. As he had done, when it became obvious their ill-matched affair was going nowhere. He had wanted to rescue her then, the young Lochinvar riding out of the west, and he had an uncomfortable feeling now that she had never really wanted to be rescued. And that bothered him.
There was something dark about it that Sam didn’t understand, or want to understand. She could have escaped, if she had wanted. That she hadn’t even tried, had stayed with the bastard until somebody had removed him for her, disturbed him more than Wetherby’s murder, which seemed almost incidental. At the back of his mind, unacknowledged because Sam was Sam, and not in any sort of way imaginative, was the thought that this sort of attitude was – well, sick … Oh,
screw it!
‘Are you Sam?’
He turned to see a small girl of about seventeen with a scarlet MO emblazoned on the front of her black sweatshirt standing beside him, little and dark and quick, her hair raggedly cut like a street urchin’s, apparently with a knife and fork. Big, greenishblue eyes in a small, serious face. She was frowning and momentarily he wondered if she’d overheard him cussing and was offended. If so, she was the first girl he’d come across of that age who was likely to be shocked at bad language – most of them could teach drunken sailors a thing or two about swearing. He
apologised with as much grace as he could muster all the same.
‘That’s OK,’ Cleo said, passing on the message from Miss Lockett.
‘You’re from the agency.’
‘Right. And you’d better take your wellies off before you come into the kitchen, otherwise Miss Lockett’ll be paying for us to be here all day. Does she always invite the hired help to share coffee and chocolate cake?’
‘My Aunt Dorrie,’ he said solemnly, ‘never does what you expect.’
Aunt!