Ottey and Cross set off for Dorset immediately with two uniformed officers in a separate car, just in case. The door was opened by Reynolds, who invited them in. Moreton appeared at the top of the staircase and welcomed them with a superior condescension.
‘Good morning, or is it afternoon?’ he began and looked at his watch. He arrived at the bottom of the stairs. ‘I don’t remember your names, I’m afraid,’ he said to Cross.
‘Alexander Moreton, I am arresting you on suspicion of murder,’ began Cross.
‘What?’ laughed Moreton in disbelief. Cross then read him his rights. ‘Is this some sort of joke?’ He turned to see Reynolds was already on the phone. ‘The murder of who?’
‘Whom,’ Cross corrected him. ‘Your father, Alistair Moreton.’
‘What? This is crazy. Is this some kind of act of desperation because you’ve already charged the wrong bloody man?’
Reynolds was now talking to someone on the phone. He turned to them.
‘Where are you taking him?’ he asked calmly.
‘The MCU in Bristol,’ replied Ottey, giving him a card.
He went back to the call.
‘I’ll have your badges for this, it’s outrageous,’ said Moreton.
‘In that case you’ll be needing my name. DS George Cross,’ said Cross as Ottey took the MP by the elbow and led him out. She had decided cuffs weren’t necessary.
‘Reynolds, call the chief constable and tell him what’s happened,’ Moreton barked over his shoulder.
Reynolds waited a moment, then put the phone back in his pocket. He was about to close the front door when one of the uniformed policemen asked if they could have a quick word with him before they left. He took them into the kitchen, made them a pot of tea and gave them some biscuits. He seemed most hospitable and calm for someone whose employer had just been arrested for murder.
*
Moreton’s outrage had in no way abated when they sat in the interview room a few hours later, after his solicitor had arrived. He had the attitude of a man who has been slighted and affronted in the most egregious way.
‘Mr Moreton, where were you on the evening of the seventeenth of September?’ Cross began by asking.
‘I have no bloody idea,’ came the angry response.
‘That seems very peculiar. That you cannot remember what you were doing or where you were on the night of your father’s murder,’ Cross observed.
Moreton thought for a moment. ‘Of course I remember. It was the date that slipped my mind.’
‘Were you in court for the Cotterell trial?’ asked Cross.
‘You know very well that I was.’
‘I don’t, actually.’
‘I was on the news every night. Do you not watch the television?’
‘I don’t. I prefer the radio. Generally, Radio Three or Four, depending on my mood when I return from work. Do you watch the news, DS Ottey?’
‘I do.’
‘What’s your point?’ asked Moreton.
‘The date. September the seventeenth must’ve been mentioned dozens, if not hundreds, of times, during that trial and yet it didn’t stick in your mind,’ Cross said. Moreton just sat there. ‘Where were you on the night of September the seventeenth?’
‘I was at home.’
‘In London or Dorset?’
‘At the country house.’
‘Were you alone that evening or did you have company?’
‘I was alone. Except for the staff of course.’
‘By “staff” do you mean Mr Reynolds?’
‘That’s correct.’
‘And he can corroborate that?’
‘Yes. Absolutely,’ he said confidently, and with an arrogant dismissal that it should have been obvious to this dullard of a police detective.
Cross paused for a long time as he read a piece of paper carefully. He knew what it said already but was making absolutely sure. He looked back at Moreton.
‘Mr Moreton, where were you on the night of September the seventeenth?’ he asked again.
‘Is he stupid or just being deliberately obtuse?’
‘Neither. He’s just giving you the opportunity to answer the question truthfully,’ replied Ottey.
‘I’d like to see your senior officer. The one I met before. Immediately.’
‘Mr Moreton, this isn’t a department store or a restaurant where you can ask for the manager if you are dissatisfied with the service,’ said Cross.
‘I am a former member of His Majesty’s government,’ he replied as if this should still count for something.
‘That may be so. But in here you are a suspect in a case of murder, and you would do well in the next few hours to remember that. Where were you on the night of September the seventeenth?’
‘At home in the country.’
‘Did you go out that night?’
‘I did not.’
‘Mr Moreton, who is Mr Reynolds?’
‘He is my butler.’
‘How would you describe him?’
‘An absolute stalwart. A diamond. I couldn’t manage my life without him.’
‘Is he trustworthy and honest?’ asked Cross.
‘Of course. I wouldn’t employ him otherwise.’
‘This is a statement taken from Mr Reynolds this morning after we left. He was asked about the night of the seventeenth, which of course he remembers well. He told our officers that you left the house shortly after seven and didn’t return till just before eleven. Where were you?’
Moreton was obviously flummoxed by this development and was momentarily silenced.
‘Mr Reynolds also said that you seemed very agitated on your return. Quite upset. You went directly to your room. He fixed you a drink and took it to your room, where he found you in tears. Why was that?’
‘I don’t recall,’ Moreton mumbled.
‘Kwekwe,’ Cross stated out of the blue.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Do you recollect Kwekwe?’
‘Of course. A rescue dog. Lots of problems with that one.’
‘He was with you on the night of the seventeenth.’
‘That’s right. That’s what I was doing. Walking the bloody thing. Trying to grind him down. Bully the bugger into submission,’ he laughed unconvincingly.
‘But you went in the car. Your Land Rover,’ Cross observed.
‘Yes. So?’
‘How much land is your house situated in? How much land do you own?’
‘About thirty acres.’
‘So why on a Sunday night drive anywhere to walk the dog? Surely that’s enough land for any dog?’ Cross asked.
‘A change of scenery.’
‘What breed was Kwekwe?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Really? Not at all curious?’
‘No.’
‘He’s a Rhodesian Ridgeback.’
‘Was.’
‘What do you mean “was”?’ asked Cross.
‘He was uncontrollable. I couldn’t do anything with him. So, he was put down,’ said Moreton with obvious satisfaction.
Cross didn’t react. He simply made a note and passed it to Ottey, who read it and left the room.
This seemed to please Moreton, who suddenly looked a little more assured.
‘Why did you choose to foster Kwekwe?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘Really? Meghan Bairstow says that when you discovered they had a Rhodesian Ridgeback at the kennels you were immediately interested and wanted to see him. She warned you that he had behavioural problems. But despite that, you insisted on fostering him. She thought it was quite odd at the time. That was a couple of days before your father’s murder. But it made complete sense to me. You’d met your father’s neighbours, the Cotterells, and one of their dogs went for you. You were remarkably good about it, they said, and very keen to know the breed.’
Moreton said nothing.
‘You knew that the Cotterells, engaged in a now public dispute with your father, owned two Rhodesian Ridgebacks. I thought they’re not too common in this country but do you know there are over eleven thousand? There were only seven hundred when they were registered as a breed with the Kennel Club in 1954. But when you saw the dog at the kennels a plan formed in your mind. You went there that night intending to kill your father.’
‘I did not.’
‘Which? Kill him? Or intend to kill him?’ Cross pushed.
Moreton looked at him for a moment and then launched into a diatribe about his father.
‘You have no idea what it was like to be brought up by that man. Right from the beginning. All the way through school. Nothing was ever good enough for him,’ he began.
‘It must’ve been hard for you to be at the same school where he was headmaster,’ Cross commented.
‘Are you kidding me? It was awful. Everyone hated me because of it. I couldn’t make any friends. No one wanted to be my friend. He beat them so badly. I got away with it a bit. But he beat me as well. Then he tried to get me to beat them, when he made me head boy. When I wouldn’t he was furious and beat me instead. I begged him not to make me head boy. Pleaded with him. Even my mother, bless her soul, told him it was a dreadful idea. But oh no, he knew best. I wanted to go to Exeter university, but he insisted I went to Oxford and tortured me when I resat my A levels.’
‘This was at the crammer?’ asked Cross.
‘Yes. He’d been thrown out of All Saints by then. But he never accepted it. If anything, it made him worse.’
‘But he got results,’ Cross pointed out.
‘But at what cost? It was a miserable place. It worked on misery. Studying was a way of taking your mind off the abject misery that surrounded you. He still treated us like eleven-year-olds, but we were seventeen, eighteen.’
‘And then there was Adam Brook,’ Cross added.
Moreton said nothing, then shook his head slowly.
‘Adam Brook. Poor old Adey. What am I talking about? Old? He was so young. That’s the truth about me and Richard. He could never forgive my father for Adey’s suicide and maybe took it out on me. Who could blame him?’
He sat there lost in thought.
‘All of this anger, all of this lifelong resentment resulted in you killing your father,’ said Cross.
‘No comment.’
Ottey came back into the room. Cross looked at her and gave her a cue that was invisible to everyone else in the room. She reached down into her briefcase and brought out a plastic evidence bag in which was Cotterell’s chisel.
‘Do you recognise this?’ she asked him.
‘I do not.’
‘It’s Barnaby Cotterell’s chisel. The one that was used to stab your father in the chest, fatally wounding him.’
Moreton didn’t look at it but just stared at her.
‘Did you use this chisel to stab your father?’ she asked.
‘No comment.’
‘We found two sources of DNA on the chisel. Barnaby Cotterell’s and your father’s. But there was also an unidentified fingerprint on the handle. Unidentified until you arrived here. It’s yours. How can you explain that? Your fingerprint on the handle?’ she asked.
‘He could have picked that chisel up on any visit to his father’s house. Maybe helping him with some DIY. You have nothing. No eyewitnesses. You cannot place him at the scene of the crime,’ insisted Moreton’s lawyer.
‘Maybe we can’t, but Kwekwe can. Not only the breed of dog can be determined from its hair but the DNA within that hair can identify an individual dog.’
‘Like I said, poor old Kwekwe is no longer with us, so you’ll have nothing to compare it with,’ replied Moreton.
‘So that’s two deaths you’re responsible for,’ observed Ottey.
‘We have a forensic investigator at your house right now who is even more patiently persistent than me. He can find the most amazingly small, microscopic pieces of evidence invisible to us mere mortals. I think Kwekwe may well have the last word in all of this.’