HOLLY HAD WATCHED THE ENCOUNTER BETWEEN Charlotte and Vera with interest. She’d arrived at this strange house unsure what she’d find. There had only been a short time to catch up with the geography of the building and its surroundings, and get a quick briefing from Joe on the residents, before this woman turned up. It struck Holly that Charlotte Thomas looked like some sort of minor film star, expecting admiration wherever she went.
Charlotte was the older woman but seemed much closer to Holly in age and outlook. Holly thought of herself as a feminist but could see how tempting it would be to have one’s skin stretched, and the years erased. It was more about being taken seriously than for reasons of vanity. Holly would never consider plastic surgery to make herself attractive to men, but might if it made her seem stronger, more powerful.
Vera nodded towards the door. The house was small enough for them to hear the conversation of the people in the hall below, the sound of boots being removed and coats being hung up.
‘Do you keep in touch with them all?’
‘Only Annie,’ Charlotte said. ‘She lives not far from me. I use her deli.’
‘Of course.’ Vera got to her feet, suddenly brusque, almost impatient. ‘I’d like you to give a statement to my colleague here. I’ll see you before you go.’ Then she’d left the room. For someone of her build the boss moved remarkably quickly, and Holly didn’t really see her disappear.
Holly felt a moment of panic. She was completely ill-prepared. What did Vera expect of her? Here she was, alone with the woman who’d once been married to their victim, unsure whether this should be considered a formal interview or one of Vera’s ‘chats’. It felt like a kind of test.
To give herself time, she sat at the dressing table turned desk, found the A4 notebook she always carried in her bag, and took up her pen.
‘When was the last time you saw Mr Kelsall?’ It seemed as good a place as any to start.
Charlotte was sitting on one of the other kitchen chairs in the room and she crossed her legs. There was a moment’s silence. She seemed to be weighing up her answer.
‘Thursday.’
‘This week?’ Holly was surprised. She’d thought that estranged couples would keep a distance.
‘Yes. Rick was driving up a day early for the reunion and he asked if he could stay.’
‘Was that normal?’ Holly paused. She didn’t want to sound unsophisticated about other people’s relationships. It might be perfectly possible for divorced people to maintain a friendship, or even more than that. But in her conversation with Vera, the woman had given no hint that she’d met Kelsall so recently.
‘No. Usually his trips north were flying visits. Literally. He’d get off the plane at Newcastle, hire a car and head here to Holy Island and his friends. Always too busy to make a detour to visit me, especially now that our kids have grown up.’
‘How old are your children?’
‘Oh, positively middle-aged. And ridiculously successful. Sam’s a photographer based in Hong Kong and Lily’s a lawyer in London. Rick meets her more often. I see pictures on Facebook of drinks outside bars in fashionable parts of London, delicious meals he’s obviously paid for.’
‘But this time he drove and he came to see you?’
‘Yes, I had a phone call from him on Wednesday lunchtime. I’d just finished leading a virtual meditation session. “You around, Lottie?” He always called me that.’ Charlotte looked sad and for a moment seemed almost her real age. ‘“Any chance I could have a bed for the night tomorrow? Before I connect with the others. It’d be good to catch up.”’
‘And you agreed?’ Holly wondered if perhaps, under the gloss and the sophistication, this woman was as lonely as Holly herself. Certainly, she didn’t seem to have the same strong friendship group as the people staying at the Pilgrims’ House. And what sort of support could her family, with their background of criminality, provide?
‘Of course. I always did what he asked. I even agreed to a divorce when he wanted to marry his new delicate flower of a girlfriend, though it was the last thing I wanted.’ The woman paused. ‘I’d seen the press of course. All the nasty rumours, which I’m sure were at least halfway true. He’d be struggling to see that he’d done anything wrong, and Rick always needed people to love him. I thought he’d be hurting.’
‘And was he?’
‘He was, a bit, I think. But he was … he was putting on a very good show.’
‘Could you take me through the evening?’
‘He turned up at about six, quite hyper because he’d been sitting in the car for hours. He was always worse than the children about travelling, having to sit still. He stood just inside the door, bouncing on the balls of his feet, fizzing. I could tell he’d be fidgety all evening if he didn’t get some exercise, so I suggested we go for a walk. We wandered down to the river at Kimmerston and stopped for a drink on the way home. He seemed a bit calmer by then. It was a lovely evening and we sat outside that new wine bar that opened just before the pandemic, not far from Annie’s deli. The whole area has become a bit bougie lately, with little stores and craft workshops. In the summer the place came to life again, even more buzzy than before. People preferring to shop local maybe, aware of food miles, the climate emergency.’
‘You didn’t call in to see Annie?’
‘No.’ Charlotte’s voice was cool. ‘The shop will have been closed, and even after all this time, I wanted him to myself. We had a couple of glasses of wine and we talked. Rick seemed actually quite upbeat, considering the fact that he’d been sacked. He brushed aside the allegations of harassment. He said that the whole scandal had been triggered by an intern he’d tried to be kind to. A dreadful misunderstanding, which had got out of hand. Then, more ambitious little creatures had come out of the woodwork with their twisted stories and their lies, wanting their moment of fame. His colleagues had refused to support him, because they were scared of the management.’
‘Is that how you saw it?’
Charlotte shrugged. ‘Who knows? Rick could always tell a good story, put on a brave face. But, yeah, I believed him at the time.’
‘He’d been asked to resign,’ Holly said. ‘He’d lost his income and his reputation. He didn’t seem at all upset?’ She found that hard to believe. She wouldn’t have been able to bear the humiliation.
‘It was obviously a shock. He hated the fact that people would see him as a sordid abuser of women, but he seemed confident that he’d be able to restore his reputation in the end. It would never have been about the money. He’s always made far more from his lectures and after-dinner speaking than he did from his salary. I’d guess that most of his audience would have been older businessmen who applauded his attitude to women. He validated their own dinosaur views.’
‘And did he hold those dinosaur views?’
Charlotte took a while to answer. ‘He loved women. Not as sexual objects necessarily, though I think the possibility that he might sleep with them was always close to the forefront of his mind. But he saw them as interesting beings to explore; they sparked his curiosity. He had this energy that made him reach out to them physically and emotionally. He wanted their attention. It would have been quite scary for younger women, I think. All the personal questions, the hand on the shoulder, somehow pulling them in, charming them of course, but intimidating them too.’ A pause. ‘He wasn’t just the groper and the lecher the press has made him out to be, but I can see how he could make junior female colleagues uncomfortable, how they might feel he was making demands on them.’ She paused. ‘Really, Rick should have stuck with me. I understood him, and, actually, I bored him less than the others did. But he had this need for change, for excitement. He always believed that there was something much more interesting just around the corner.’
‘Was there one complainant? Someone who prompted the production company to take action at last?’
There was a pause. Charlotte closed her eyes for a moment. Again, Holly thought, she was wondering how much to reveal. This time, it seemed, the woman had decided to keep the information to herself.
‘I presume there was, but I can’t tell you anything about her, I’m afraid. Rick didn’t go into details, and the young woman has a right of privacy, don’t you think?’
You know, Holly thought. Why won’t you tell? She stared at the woman, but Charlotte remained silent. ‘What did you do after your drink outside the wine bar?’
‘We went back to my house.’ Charlotte gave her address in a swanky street close to the river. ‘I’d left a casserole in the oven. Veggie, which he turned his nose up at – he was always such a carnivore – but he ate it. We drank too much wine. Rick did that to excess too. Nothing in moderation. That was his motto.’
‘Did he give any indication that he was scared, anxious?’
‘No. We did what we always did when we got together. We remembered the old times.’
‘When you were married?’
‘No.’ Charlotte smiled. ‘There was nothing so good about those days. Things were already starting to fall apart. Before that. When we were still at school. He loved talking about those times. His glory days, I suppose, when everyone really did love him.’ A pause. ‘I’d heard most of the anecdotes before, of course, but he seemed even more fixated on the past than usual. He told me that he was writing a novel. He was very excited about it. The idea had been sparked, he said, by things that had happened when we were all very young. He was looking forward to going back to Holy Island, because that was where it had all started. He was like the old Rick, excited, buzzing, full of ideas. “Just you see, Lottie,” he said. “You’ll understand everything in a new light.”’
‘What did he mean?’
Charlotte shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I was just surprised, I suppose, that he was taking all the bad press so well.’
Holly couldn’t see that stories of fifty years ago could have triggered the violent death of an elderly man, but she jotted that down anyway. Just in case. Vera liked the detail of an investigation. It was the boss’s strength, but also her weakness. She could dig away at the tiny details, losing sight of the overall picture. The past was her territory. She always said it explained the tensions and stresses of the present. Holly had learned more about Vera’s past during the recent Brockburn investigation, and perhaps it had made more sense of the woman.
‘He wanted to sleep with me.’ Charlotte was talking again. ‘At least he said he did. He knew I’d say no. I’ve got a bit more pride these days. And I’m not sure he’d have asked if he thought I’d say yes.’ A pause. ‘So, it was just a goodnight kiss in front of the fire. Very chaste. Rather romantic.’ She looked up. ‘We were in bed by about one. That’s quite early for Rick. I suspect he stayed awake for a while checking his phone for the news. He was a news junkie.’
Holly nodded. ‘And the next day?’
‘I didn’t have any work commitments until the afternoon, so we had a late breakfast. Halfway through his phone rang. He seemed pleased to get the call and went into the other room to take it. Sorry, darling. Confidential. Turning it into a drama, though it was probably routine.’
Holly wrote that down too. They’d be able to check the identity of the caller.
‘Soon after that he said he should head off. There was someone he had to see, before meeting the others here at the Pilgrims’ House. Being mysterious all over again, just for show. He asked me if I wanted to join the group for the weekend. I told him I had work to do, and anyway, I’d rather stick pins in my eyes. I’d had quite enough of Rick’s reminiscences the night before. So, there was the obligatory farewell kiss and off he went.’ Charlotte sat back in the uncomfortable chair.
‘You seem very dismissive of Mr Kelsall’s nostalgia for your schooldays, yet you named your business after the time you spent here as teenagers, the weekend when you all became close friends.’
Charlotte briefly closed her eyes again. ‘Only Connect? There is nothing nostalgic about that, Constable. It is, I suppose, a mission statement for the company. Our whole ethos is about bringing together the mind and the body, connecting our clients with their real ambitions and helping them to realize them in reality.’
A phrase of Vera’s came, unbidden, into Holly’s head. What a load of bollocks! ‘You seem very passionate about the business.’
‘Oh I am.’
‘So, you have no plans to retire?’
Charlotte smiled. ‘Absolutely not! I suppose I’m of an age when I should be thinking of retirement, but I can think of nothing worse. I’m terrified of boredom. I need something to get up for every morning. I’m really not a good works and coffee morning sort of woman.’ She paused. ‘My father was still running his own business into his seventies.’
‘You never considered working with your family?’
There was a pause before Charlotte gave a wintry smile. ‘I did for a while, when I first came back to the North-East, but it didn’t quite work out.’
‘Why was that? Perhaps you didn’t approve of your father’s business practices?’
‘I’m not quite sure what you’re implying, Constable.’ Charlotte’s voice was sharp. ‘And I can’t see how my family’s companies can have any relevance at all to my ex-husband’s murder.’
‘Your father and your uncle had a reputation for violence.’ Holly tried to keep her tone even. ‘You can understand why I’m exploring the matter. If Mr Kelsall treated you badly, perhaps one of your family members felt he had a score to settle.’
‘None of my relatives has ever been convicted of a criminal offence.’ The voice was firm. If Charlotte was rattled, she wasn’t showing it. ‘And while my father might well have wanted to kill Rick when he ditched me for another woman, that was a very long time ago. He considers now that I’m much better off without the man.’ She paused. ‘Besides, Dad’s very elderly, very frail. He moved in with my sister nearly a year ago and he seldom leaves the house.’
‘You don’t have any idea where Mr Kelsall might have gone yesterday morning?’ Because, Holly thought, the woman would have wanted to know, even if she couldn’t bring herself to ask. Her love for Rick Kelsall was a scab that needed scratching. Though they might have been divorced for years, she still seemed to be jealous, and to want to be a part of his life.
‘No.’ Charlotte paused. ‘It could have had nothing at all to do with the phone call. He might have gone to Kimmerston cemetery. He sometimes did that if he had time when he was home. It had become a morbid kind of sanctuary for him. He said it brought him peace, though I think there was more to it than that. The idea of all those bodies under his feet gave him an odd thrill. I told the inspector. It seemed as if he was obsessed with death.’
Holly didn’t know what to say. For an uneasy moment she seemed to have lost her way in the interview. To cover her confusion, she returned to the easy formula.
‘What were you doing yesterday night and early this morning?’
Charlotte must have been expecting the question because she gave another little smile. ‘You’re asking if I have an alibi for the time Rick was killed? I’m afraid I can’t help you. I had a number of online meetings in the afternoon and then I went home. I ate the remains of the casserole and I had an early night. I always find Rick’s energy exhausting.’
‘You didn’t make any phone calls or send any emails overnight?’
‘To prove that I was at home? Certainly not, Constable. I’m a great believer in proper sleep hygiene. All screens are switched off an hour before bedtime. If you look at the Only Connect website you’ll see it’s what we tell our clients, and I have to practise what I preach.’
‘And early this morning?’
‘I went for a run before breakfast. Just as it was getting light. It was rather a beautiful dawn, if a little icy under foot. One of my neighbours might have seen me.’
Now Holly did set down her pen and she got to her feet. ‘Thank you, Miss Thomas. We know where to find you if we have more questions.’
Charlotte stood up slowly, making it clear she was in no hurry to leave, that in no sense at all was she running away.
‘Was Mr Kelsall visiting any specific grave in the cemetery?’ The thought had come into Holly’s head very suddenly. Her flat overlooked a big cemetery in Newcastle, but she’d chosen it for the peace and quiet. She couldn’t imagine wandering around it to get a thrill from being so close to the dead. ‘His mother and father perhaps?’
‘No.’ Charlotte paused for a moment. ‘A friend. Isobel Hall. She died on the island too. At least on her way back from here. I was working in the South, so I only heard about the accident second hand, but the others will be able to give you the details. It happened at the first five-year reunion. She was one of my best friends. It’s one of the reasons why I never come back to the Pilgrims’ House with the others. It seems in such very poor taste to be celebrating when she’s not here.’
Again, Holly was left floundering for something to say. Charlotte walked out through the door and Holly heard her footsteps, firm on the stairs. She wondered if the woman would make some attempt to see the residents, the close friends of her former husband. A gentle buzz of conversation was coming from the common room. But Charlotte left by the front door, and walked straight to her car. Perhaps she was in a hurry, anxious about being stranded on the island as the tide came in. Perhaps, for some reason, she wanted to avoid them.