‘Seems to me they’re all faking it. Nobody seems to have sold anything.’
‘I suppose we ought to be grateful they’re not writing detective fiction. Remember Lucy Bellringer?’
‘Who?’
‘That old woman at Badger’s Drift whose friend was murdered.’
‘God, yes.’ Troy laughed. ‘Totally looped she was.’
‘What is it, Owen?’ This was addressed to a uniformed constable coming up to the desk.
‘I’m afraid we’ve had a negative result for 1979 on the trace for Hadleigh’s marriage, sir.’ He paused, then, noting Barnaby’s dismay, said, ‘Do you want us to try 1978 or 1980?’
‘Not at the moment.’
Dismissed, the man returned to his machine. Barnaby sat back and closed his eyes. Troy watched in silence, thinking how tired his boss looked. His eyelids were droopy and wizened, and the skin on his face looked stiff and pale. Eventually the sergeant said, ‘I shouldn’t be too cast down, chief. After all we didn’t know for certain it was ’79. Just worked it out from what Hadleigh put about. Why don’t you give the year before a whirl?’
‘We’re not wasting more time and money following up what I’m beginning to suspect is a load of false information. We already know he was far from being the heartbroken celibate he pretended. And that when he was supposed to have a place in Kent he was actually shacked up in Victoria.’ Barnaby got up and turned to face the map on the wall behind him. A blown-up aerial plan of Midsomer Worthy.
‘I’m afraid all the people we’re currently interviewing only know what Hadleigh wanted them to know. To find out anything really useful we need to talk to someone from the past.’
Barnaby rested the tip of his index finger on the headed pins marking Plover’s Rest and thought of the visiting celebrity roaring away, to use Mrs Clapton’s term, on the night of the murder. Where was he now?
Although there had been no official call put out, the author’s newsworthy presence on the fatal evening had been well reported. It struck the chief inspector as highly unlikely that Jennings had neither seen these reports nor had them drawn to his attention.
In which case, why had he not got in touch? The answer ‘because he was guilty’ was obvious enough. Yet there was also a deeply disturbing alternative. Might it not be the case that Jennings had not come forward because he was unable to do so? In other words were they all looking, not for a prime suspect, but for a second victim?
Sue sat, biting her nails, in the cramped untidy sitting room whose glowing terracotta walls still vibrated from the violent slamming of the front door. She was left alone, consumed with a need to talk to someone, anyone, anyone at all, about her visit to Rex’s house and their subsequent extraordinary conversation.
She had made innumerable attempts to tell Brian, but he had been behaving so oddly from the moment he arrived home that eventually, out of sheer exasperation, she had given up.
Shouting, ‘Ah, tea - tea!’ he had dashed to sit down, only to push and pull his food vigorously about without eating it. He kept looking at the clock and flicking the end of the table with his nails.
After eating he cleaned his teeth then, half an hour later, Sue heard him scrubbing at them again, swilling and spitting in seemingly endless repetition. He emerged blowing into his cupped hands and inhaling with a deeply suspicious frown.
He disappeared upstairs and she heard drawers open and close and the forceful clack and rattle of manipulated coat hangers. Coming down, he vanished once more into the bathroom, carrying a pile of shirts over his arm. This time his reappearance was marked by soaking wet hair hanging in a skinny plait and a complexion rosy from friction. Then, after checking the clock yet again, he sat down on the sofa with his bulldog-clipped sheets and began to peruse his play.
All this time Sue had been hovering around submitting conversational openings along ‘you’ll never guess . . . the most amazing thing . . .’ lines that she herself would have found instantly irresistible.
Brian behaved as if she wasn’t there apart from once, at the moment of his departure, when, reaching for his scarf, he moved her, none too carefully, out of the way.
When she asked what all this hustle and bustle was in aid of he had said brusquely, ‘I’ve had to call an extra rehearsal. We’ve barely a fortnight to go.’
Time was when Sue would have extracted comfort from such a statement. Seized upon it as an excuse for her husband’s boorish behaviour. It’s not his fault. He’s tired, worried, under pressure. Now she not only scorned these false consolations but was even beginning to recognise, in this process of rejection, a certain flinty satisfaction. It would not have occurred to her to define this growing awareness as the beginnings of self-respect. But that was what it was.
After Brian had left Sue made a quick call to his parents to say goodnight to her daughter, who was staying over. Mandy did this quite frequently, sleeping an exhausted sleep in her constantly redecorated room after staying up as long as she liked, watching whatever she liked on the box.
Mrs Clapton greeted Sue frigidly and called Amanda to the phone. There was a certain amount of wrangling to get her to do so. Mrs Clapton, who had not covered the mouthpiece as people usually do on such occasions, said happily:
‘We’re being a naughty girl, mummy, I’m afraid. A very naughty girl indeed. But we’re not going to be allowed to get away with it.’
The receiver was laid on its side and Mrs Clapton’s sensible Cuban heels stomped off. Sue heard the sound of jovial conversation and Amanda laughing. Now the heels were stomping, triumphantly unaccompanied, on their way back. Before Mrs Clapton had a chance to speak Sue hung up.
Unable to settle she wandered around tidying up after Brian. Clothes were strewn all over the bedroom floor and there was a jumble of sweaters on the bed. She untangled them and folded each one quickly in a beautifully precise way. She had had a weekend job in a haberdasher’s when she was fifteen and had never lost the knack.
Downstairs she mopped up the bathroom, which reeked of Brian’s Christmas cologne and aftershave, and flung three sopping towels in the washing machine. Then she swished the clippings from his beard down the plughole and cleaned the toothpaste-streaked spittle from the basin. A rub over the tiles and glass shelf, which were also liberally spattered with water, a quick squirt from the Toilet Duck, and Sue was back in the kitchen looking vaguely round for something else to do.
This was totally unlike her. Usually, whenever she had the house to herself, she whipped out her paints and portfolio and got to grips with Hector, but tonight she knew she would not be able to concentrate. The events of the day crowded her mind to the exclusion of all else.
It was at times like this that she missed Amy most, for there was no one else in the village whom she could really call a friend. True, she knew all the play-group mums fairly well but these relationships were purely of a domestic nature. There was not one that she could contact to discuss what was now weighing so heavily on her mind. They would think it most odd.
Momentarily Sue was tempted to ring up Amy anyway, on some pretext or other, and just pour it out. But that would be very unfair. She had done this once or twice just after they first met, but Honoria had either interrupted, demanding that Amy find or fetch something or other ‘at once’, or been coldly critical at great length when Sue had hung up.
But, sooner or later, the opportunity would arise and, to have her thoughts in order for when it did, Sue closed her eyes and went over the events of the afternoon, starting from the moment when she had gone flying back through Rex’s door on the end of Montcalm’s lead.
She found Rex in the kitchen, slumped wretchedly in exactly the same position as when she left. To her great distress, as she approached she realised he had been weeping. The thin, fragile skin on his face was wet through and looked about to dissolve. Before she had a chance to speak he cried out, ‘I killed him, Sue! It was me. I did it . . .
I did it
. . .’
Sue had sat down carefully and calmly. She knew, of course, just what he meant - knew that he was not describing an imaginary confrontation in one of his war games or re-running, in his disturbed fancy, an historically famous fight to the death.
It did not occur to her to be frightened, largely because she was quite sure there had been some barmy mistake. For this was Rex, who carried an encyclopaedic knowledge of the world’s most devastating weapons of destruction in his head and could not bring himself to swat a fly. But that he believed this wild declaration was obvious, for lines of agony were carved deeply across his brow and his eyes brimmed with hot, fresh tears.
‘I don’t understand, Rex,’ said Sue quietly. ‘Please tell me what all this is about.’
He told her, starting with Gerald’s visit and finishing with a description of his own shameful conduct.
Sue listened and found herself, despite the seriousness of the occasion, enthralled. Her imagination fleshed out the narrative. She saw Gerald, red-faced and awkward, perched on the study window-sill and Rex, alight with a willingness to help, waving his hands about in gestures of reassurance. She heard the wind in the dark trees at the death of the day and felt, crawling down her spine, the eyes of an unseen observer.
After a rather garbled conclusion, punitively laced with such phrases as ‘court martial’ and ‘shot at dawn’, there arose a miserable interval during which Rex gazed wretchedly at his shabby tartan slippers.
Sue did not make the mistake of underestimating the depths of his despair. He had been lying in a pit of it for days and would be crouched there still if she had not happened to drop by. She felt the burden of her responsibility and found herself wishing, but only briefly, that she had called in the Social Services after all and handed things over to them.
She turned over various responses in her mind, but each seemed less adequate than the one before. Her normal response to the crises which happened, with exuberant regularity, in the play-group was one of kind, mildly bossy nannyism. Worse than useless here. Inadvertently Sue sighed, exasperated by her own inadequacy, and her heart quickened with the fear of making a mistake, of choosing words so hopelessly inept that instead of effecting a rescue they would push Rex even deeper into the shadows. But speak she must, for it looked as if, any minute now, he was going to start crying again. She said, with great determination, ‘Rex - I am absolutely sure you have got this absolutely wrong.’
The forcefulness of this approach certainly seemed to impress. Rex sat up on the old kitchen chair looking almost alarmed. ‘Wrong?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why are you so sure?’
‘Because it’s quite impossible.’ Why was she so sure? Heaven send me a reason. Please. Any reason. Oh - if only Rex didn’t looked so pitifully hopeful. ‘Because . . . Because he’s a famous writer.’
‘I don’t see—’
‘Famous writers don’t murder people. They simply don’t.’
‘. . . Well . . .’
‘Name one. Name me one famous murdering writer.’ Sue waited, but not too long. No point in tempting fate. ‘You can’t, can you?’
‘Not off the top of my head,’ admitted Rex.
‘That’s because murderers are always nobodies. That’s why they do them. So they can get in the papers and be somebodies.’
‘But everything that happened. Gerald—’
‘I’m not saying you’ve got that wrong. Where your mistake lies is in the conclusions you’ve drawn.’
‘Oh?’
‘Which you have come to not for logical reasons but because you’re consumed with guilt.’
‘God, I am. Yes. God, yes.’
‘So you’re not thinking straight. For instance, haven’t you asked yourself why someone should be in the woods at that hour of the night, in such appalling weather, watching Gerald’s house?’
‘You mean . . . that person could have been the murderer?’
‘I’m convinced of it. And what’s more (out of sight Sue crossed her fingers tightly) the police are too. In fact only yesterday they were back there. Testing for footprints and . . . um . . . measuring. If you hadn’t been shut away here being so silly you’d have seen them.’
She hoped this wasn’t too bracing. Rex was looking infinitesimally less crumbly but still far from convinced, as his next words underlined.
‘But there’s no escaping the fact that Gerald was afraid to be left alone with Jennings.’
‘I’ve some ideas on that situation as well,’ said Sue, thinking on her toes and lying in her teeth. ‘I’ve been wondering if we haven’t been in danger of taking Gerald’s words too literally.’
‘I don’t quite understand.’
‘Not wanting to be left alone with someone doesn’t necessarily mean physical fear of that person. Gerald could have wanted to avoid Max’s company for all sorts of reasons.’
‘Such as?’
He was beginning to sound genuinely interested. Sue cast frantically around for sensible-sounding reasons whilst her face remained calm behind a smile of quiet optimism. Finally one of the more florid convolutions in
Rompers
came to her rescue.
‘I would like to suggest,’ she began, with a trace of the swagger that lawyers assume preparatory to hooking their thumbs in their waistcoats and uttering the words ‘your honour’, ‘an intelligence connection. I think we should be asking ourselves why Gerald was so secretive about his past.’
‘But he wasn’t—’
‘Pardon me, Rex,’ (objection overruled) ‘but he most certainly was. How on earth do you think a low-grade clerk in the Ministry of Agriculture could retire in his early forties, buy a house like Plover’s Rest and an expensive car and live, apparently in comfort, without ever doing a stroke of work again?’
‘Good heavens!’ Rex stared hard at Sue, his mouth hanging slightly open. ‘He couldn’t possibly.’
‘I put it to you that the section of the Civil Service that Gerald worked for was not Agriculture but MI5. And that Max was either a fellow conspirator or, more likely, Gerald’s control. They went through hell together - maybe saved each other’s lives - but eventually Gerald just couldn’t take any more. He became a burnt-out case. No further use to the government. So they cast him aside.’