He was taught that speaking to strange children or even trying to share his sweets would get him into trouble, as would bringing friends home or going to their houses. Cheeking grown-ups, especially those with even the slightest shred of authority, would, more than any other misdemeanour, bring disaster on them all. Brian cursed their cringing servility from the bottom of his heart. They had eviscerated him. Taken out his guts and left him defenceless.
‘You are aware, sir, that this is a murder investigation?’
‘Oh yes, yes. And anything I can do to help. Anything at all.’
Troy was standing very still, one arm lying across his notebook on the stone window shelf, the other resting at his side. Behind him the sun caught his hair, which glowed, an aureole of fiery quills. There was something concealed behind his blank expression that hinted at great determination. He looked like a rigorously disciplined monk. Or enthusiastic inquisitor.
Brian could, with no trouble at all, see him applying some troublemaker’s face to a hotplate.
‘So. The other night. He may be correct, your witness. Or she of course. If it was a she. I don’t know.’ Hyuf, hyuf.
‘Go on, sir.’ Troy clicked his Biro and smoothed out the paper.
‘Possibly I walked into the village. In fact, now you come to mention it, I remember passing the letter box, so I must have done. Walked into the village that is.’ Pause. ‘I can’t imagine why I said I’d gone round the Green. I can only assume that, as you’d only just that minute told me about Gerald, I was picturing Plover’s Rest and had sort of tangled the two things up in my mind.’
‘Perfectly understandable, Mr Clapton.’
‘Yes, it is. Isn’t it?’ A wisp of colour returned to Brian’s cheeks.
‘See anyone on your walk?’
‘Not a soul. It was a filthy night.’
‘So I understand. I’d’ve wanted a jolly good reason to go out on a night like that, myself.’
‘I did explain—’
‘I would have thought a couple of minutes in the back yard would have been quite long enough to blow a whole lorryload of cobwebs away. Myself.’
Troy wrote for a moment then said, ‘How long would you say you were out, sir? Altogether?’
‘Ohh . . . about an hour.’
‘In that weather?’
‘Yes.’
‘For no reason?’
The sergeant lowered his head and the sun hit Brian full in the face. He clambered down from his stool, caught his foot on a low cross strut and stumbled away from the blinding light, dragging the stool with him.
‘You weren’t perhaps,’ continued Troy, ‘on your way to some sort of tryst?’ He was glad of a chance to use this word, which he had picked up from a chocolate commercial on the telly.
‘
Tryst?
’ The faint blush of colour on Brian’s cheeks deepened and spread like an ugly naevus. A tic doloreux danced beneath his left eye. He croaked, ‘Of course not.’
‘In that case, Mr Clapton, let me put my own theory on the table. I think you left the house intending to turn right - which was how you came to make the slip in your earlier statement - but saw that someone nearby had observed you. So you turned left and walked off, returning later when the coast was clear.’
‘Clear? Clear for what?’
‘For you to re-enter Plover’s Rest of course.’
‘Talk about Jemima Puddleduck,’ said Sergeant Troy, who had recently taken on the sweet pleasures of reading to his daughter. ‘Another five minutes I’d’ve had to mop the floor.’
He was sitting in the incident room rejigging the scene in the science cupboard for Barnaby’s benefit, twirling with satisfaction on a tweedy swivel chair and nicely relaxed after a spaghetti bolognese, double chips, Bakewell tart and custard and several cups of tea in the staff canteen. All this consumed in time unofficially included in the visit to Causton Comprehensive.
‘He admitted he’d gone in the opposite direction from what he’d told us. Gave me some rigmarole about getting confused. Still insists he just went for a walk to clear his mind. I suggested that he had in fact left his house intending to return to Plover’s Rest, seen someone hanging around and been forced to depart elsewhere until they’d gone, whereupon he made his way back there, presumably to get on with the dirty deed.’
‘Did you now?’ said Barnaby, entertaining himself by fleshing out the scene. ‘And how did he react?’
‘Nearly passed out.’
‘You must have enjoyed that, sergeant.’
‘Just doing my job, sir.’
‘Quite. Did you believe him?’
‘I did actually,’ said Troy. ‘I shouldn’t think he’s got the guts to crack a flea let alone do a bloke’s head in. He looked dead guilty but he’s the sort who’d look guilty if a copper asked him for a light.’
‘He took the trouble to lie though, which means he wasn’t simply out for a constitutional.’
‘My bet is he was hanging around Quarry Cottages.’
‘The Carters’ place?’
Troy nodded. ‘Came over all hot and bothered talking about them. And he’s just the sort of pathetic sod to peer through bedroom windows jerking off.’
‘I agree,’ said the chief inspector, for Brian had struck him as a sad case - the sort of man whose personality was out of print before the ink was dry on his birth certificate. ‘He’d be well advised to keep his distance. They’ll have his balls in the shredder.’
‘Got to find them first,’ said Troy, recalling Brian’s limp cords. Hard to believe they held as much as a tin whistle let alone two fun bags and a hot dog.
‘But what really made his day,’ continued the sergeant, chortling happily, ‘was when I said I thought his wife’s paintings were so good I’d decided to commission one. That did for him good and proper.’
‘So now we know of two people at the meeting who went out again that night. St John I feel has been honest with us. Certainly his remorse strikes me as totally genuine. Clapton’s something else. You might well be right about the Carters but I don’t want to leave it there. Give him a breathing space to get nice and comfy then try again. We got his prints yet?’
‘Coming in today on his way home.’ Troy laughed. ‘Couldn’t wait to oblige. Much arrive this end while I was out?’
‘Several things. Ms Levine rang back unable to help us further, which didn’t surprise me. Uxbridge had a call from Hadleigh at ten thirty p.m. the night before the murder reporting his car stolen. It had been parked in Silver Street. No luck tracing it so far. The inquest on Hadleigh is convened for next Tuesday. His GP has agreed to identify the body. And the PM report’s come in. Unfortunately there’s nothing unexpected or revelatory. He was killed, as George Bullard suggested, by a single massive blow to the forehead, probably the first one struck. Whether the murderer knew this and couldn’t stop, or didn’t and thought he was making sure, we can only guess at this stage. Hadleigh had eaten next to nothing but drunk quite a lot of whisky, which bears out what we were told. He was killed between eleven at night and two a.m. and, mingled with the blood and mucous, were found heavy traces of lachrymal fluid.’
‘Come again?’
‘He was crying, sergeant.’
‘What - you mean as he . . .’
‘Then or directly before.’
Troy took this in, staring firmly out of the window. He had no brief for men who cried. Men were supposed to die bravely, not weeping and begging for mercy. Wasn’t that what it was all about? Why hadn’t Hadleigh put up a fight? I would, thought Troy. God - I’d murder the fucker. Yet, for some reason, he could not bring himself wholeheartedly to despise the dead man. Always uncomfortable with ambiguity of feeling he shifted awkwardly on his seat.
Like Troy, Barnaby had been touched at reading this detail, so clinically described in two lines of type. Strange as it may seem, more touched than by the incident room’s gallery of hideous photographs now facing him. Unlike Troy he had no trouble accommodating this, or in recognising and accepting the feelings of pity and anger that prompted such a response.
Barnaby was not afraid of emotion and would say, without hesitation, what was in his heart as well as what was in his mind if he thought the occasion warranted it. But, like all policemen, he tried not to get personally involved in an investigation, recognising the need for a clear and disinterested viewpoint. Sometimes (when the victim was a child, for instance) you couldn’t help it. None of them could.
The phone rang and Barnaby saw his sergeant, who had briefly disappeared into some shadowy inner space, become engaged again.
‘DCI Barnaby.’ He listened. ‘Yes, put them on.’
‘Are you the gentleman in charge of poor Mr Hadleigh?’
‘That’s right, sir. I understand you have some information for us. Perhaps I could start by taking your name?’
Troy snatched up a pad and started writing, for the phone was the hands-off variety and the speaker clearly audible.
‘I wasn’t sure whether to bother you because when they came to the door they only wanted to know about the Monday and this was the night before but I talked it over with Elsie, that’s my wife, and she said, “If you don’t go, Harold, you’ll be dwelling and dwelling and end up with one of your heads.” So here I am.’
‘Very good of you, Mr Lilley.’
‘It was quite late, coming up to midnight I’d say, and I was taking Buffy, that’s our collie cross, out for his final trot. Passing Plover’s Rest I saw someone in the front garden.’
‘What - you mean hiding?’
‘No. That bright light he’s got were on and she was standing right close up to the window. Looking in.’
‘She?’
‘That antique woman. Lives down by the Old Dun Cow.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’d know that hair anywhere. She didn’t seem to notice me. After I’d walked by I turned and had another look. It was her all right.’
Barnaby waited, but Mr Lilley seemed to have had his say. The chief inspector thanked him and hung up.
‘You’re not surprised, chief,’ said Troy.
‘I can’t say I am entirely. It was obvious from her reaction yesterday that she’s passionately involved with him on some level or other.’
‘Ah,’ said Troy, tapping his nose with his finger, ‘but was he involved with her?’
‘The general opinion seems to be not. And unrequited love . . .’
‘Can turn extremely nasty.’
‘If, as looks to be the case, she was spying on him, was it simply because he was the object of her adoration? Or was she hoping to catch him out?’
‘Maybe she’s already caught him out. There was that crack about the grieving widower.’
‘Do you remember what St John said?’ Troy frowned. ‘That, on the night of the murder, there was someone in the trees behind the garden watching him.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘If that was not imaginative fright but a true perception it opens matters up somewhat.’
‘You mean, it could have been Laura Hutton?’
‘Indeed. And if so, did she wait there till Jennings left? And then approach the cottage?’
‘And if she didn’t she might perhaps have seen who did.’
‘Just so.’ Barnaby heaved himself up and made his way towards the curly-pegged hat stand. ‘We’ll talk to her again this afternoon.’
‘Shall I ring first?’
‘I think not. Well, I’m for lunch. Coming?’
‘No, that’s all right.’ Troy straightened his shoulders in a self-sacrificing sort of way. ‘I’ll stay here. See what comes in.’
The chief inspector, buttoning his black and white herringbone, stared disbelieving at his bag carrier. ‘You’ve been skiving off down there already, haven’t you?’
‘Me?’ Troy stared back, the picture of puzzlement.
‘Yes, you. You bloody gannet.’ He pulled on his gloves. ‘I shall ask them.’
He would too. The mean old devil. ‘Just a quick sarnie.’
Barnaby closed the door behind him, saying, ‘And the rest.’
Laura bent her head forward and blew her nose gently. Her sinuses were raw and her throat ached. Give or take the briefest of intervals she felt she had been weeping for days. First in anguish at Gerald’s perfidy then with grief at his demise. And whoever said tears were healing was talking through their hat. She felt worse now than when she’d started.
She swung her legs to the side of the bed and stood up, stroking smooth the bright woollen Aztec cover. All her bones ached as if they had been broken by a hammer and clumsily reassembled. The knowledge that she would not see him again flared anew.
Never again. Not buying oranges in the village shop. Or stumbling through his instantly forgettable stories. Or smiling as he crossed her path, murmuring a greeting, tilting his grey trilby with the peacock feather. She said the words aloud, ‘Never, ever again’ and felt the flesh on her face shrink as if in anticipation of a wound.
The doorbell. Laura cursed, remembering that she had left her car outside. She had actually driven to Causton that morning, stupidly thinking she would be able to do some work, if it meant only getting off a few catalogues. She had been home within the hour, back in bed with a sleeping tablet. Pilled days now as well as nights. Another imperious ring.
Laura crossed to the window. Although it was almost dusk she could still make out a strange blue car parked between the gate posts of the drive. She dragged herself downstairs, put the chain on the door and opened it.
‘Good afternoon, Mrs Hutton.’
‘Oh. It’s you.’
‘I wonder if I might take up a little more of your time? Something’s come up which I think you might be able to clarify for us.’
‘I suppose you’d better come in.’
Barnaby entered first, looking round him. The cottage was exquisite, like a jewel box. All the doors, skirting boards and banisters gleamed with thick, white paint. Deep-piled carpets covered the floors and stairs. She showed them into a tiny sitting room with rich yellow silk-covered walls and switched on a lamp in the form of a Chinese dragon with a coolie shade.