Lloyd got home, his virtually sleepless night beginning to catch up with him. Just driving was tiring in this weather, peering through the mist. He wanted to get in, have a night-cap, and fall asleep to an old film on video.
He listened to the sole message on his answering machine, and left the flat again, driving straight to Judy’s through the ever-thickening fog.
She opened the door a little guiltily. ‘You look tired,’ she said.
He smiled. ‘I’ll survive,’ he said. She looked worried, as he had known she would. She was smiling, trying to pretend that nothing was wrong, but she was hopeless at that, and the three-word message she had left him had merely confirmed what he had feared.
‘Have you eaten?’ he demanded, as he removed his coat and hung it up on the hooks which had suddenly made an appearance in her small hallway.
She shook her head. ‘I’m not hungry,’ she said.
‘Did you have lunch?’
‘No.’
‘Right.’ He went into the kitchen, snapping on the light. ‘I’ll do you an omelette. Have you any cheese?’
‘I couldn’t eat it, honestly, Lloyd.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘ Nonsense,’ he said, opening the fridge, and finding cheese, rather to his surprise. ‘Anyone can eat an omelette. I’ll share it with you.’ No need to inquire about eggs; there was always a plentiful supply. Judy was a bacon and eggs for breakfast woman, which was just as well, because she didn’t seem to eat anything else unless he fed her.
She grated cheese while he broke eggs into a bowl, salting and peppering them. Black pepper was always available now; his next task was to get her to buy a pepper-grinder instead of using the ready-ground stuff.
He had news for her which he was diffident about imparting, and she clearly had problems which she didn’t want to admit. The result was a very rare slightly awkward silence, which Judy broke just as he was about to take the plunge.
‘Did you go to see Drummond again?’ she asked.
A reprieve. He put two plates into the oven to warm up; he wasn’t sure he wanted a reprieve. In his book it was always better to get bad things over with. ‘I did,’ he said, finding a fork, and gently beating the eggs. ‘He is one very weird young man. And Finch is right. He is a cocky little bastard, when he isn’t frightened of being beaten up.’
He saw Judy’s back stiffen, and her grating hand stop for just a moment before continuing to attack the cheese. He couldn’t believe that he had said it. Freudian. It had to be. He wanted to get it over with, so he had introduced the topic without even thinking.
‘Someone superglued my car locks,’ she said. ‘And left me a note to explain why.’
So that was it. Lloyd sighed. ‘Forget it, Judy,’ he said. ‘It’s a piece of juvenile behaviour that you should just ignore.’
The cheese was on a hiding to nothing. Lloyd put the frying pan on the gas, and introduced an enormous knob of butter to it. He cleared his throat a little.
He hadn’t felt as bad as this since he was six, and he’d had to confess to his dad that he’d eaten all the strawberries out of the patch in the garden. He could still feel the soft earth, warm beneath his bare, scuffed knees, as he had had just one, and then another, and just one more, until they had all been gone.
‘Merrill will be ringing you tomorrow morning,’ he began, ‘ but I might as well tell you now.’
She turned to him, her face apprehensive. ‘ Ringing me about what?’
The butter began to sizzle, and Lloyd moved the pan, sliding the melting gold across its surface. He didn’t use a non-stick pan himself – he had inherited a cast-iron beauty that was coming up to its telegram from the Queen. But he supposed if they said they were non-stick, then they were. Modern cooking utensils were probably the only new-fangled things with which Lloyd did not hold.
Her question wasn’t repeated, but it was hanging about, waiting to be answered. He was often very grateful that he wasn’t a miscreant trying to pull the wool over Judy’s clear eyes. And he had brought the subject up, so he had no option but to answer.
‘Andrews thought we could do with beefing up the murder-room team,’ he said, turning the gas up full, and standing by with his bowl of eggs. ‘Barstow’s the incident office manager, so I can’t have him on the streets. Besides, if he gets this job he’s after, he’ll be whipped off to patrol a desk at headquarters any minute.’ The eggs hit the almost-burning butter, and they didn’t stick.
‘Finch is a good lad,’ he continued. ‘ He’s bright, and keen … but he doesn’t have the experience, or the rank.’ He reached across her for the plate of vanquished cheese. ‘Andrews thought we could do with another DI, and your name was suggested.’ He lifted the edges of the omelette, adjudged the moment right, and popped in the cheese. ‘Merrill has agreed to second you for the duration.’
There. He’d got it out, and had made the omelette, all in one go. Now Judy was looking at him, her dark eyes resting on his for a long time before she spoke.
‘Who suggested it?’
‘What?’ he asked, playing for time, as he flipped the omelette over, and took the plates from the oven, neatly producing two halves of omelette, and putting them down at the table.
‘My name was suggested,’ she said patiently, opening the drawer. ‘Who suggested it?’ she asked, holding out his knife and fork to him.
Lloyd wanted to look away from the steady brown gaze, but he didn’t. ‘ I did,’ he said, taking his cutlery. ‘One thing about our beloved chief constable throwing everyone up and seeing where they land is that the gossip hasn’t got to the current top brass at Stansfield. I thought I could get away with it, so I just—’ He shrugged a little and sat down.
‘Why?’ she demanded, joining him.
‘Why what?’ he asked.
‘Why did you suggest my name?’
He could tell her that he missed the totally unimaginative logic which she possessed, and which provided checks and balances for his own inspirational (as Andrews had rather nicely called it) guess-work, keeping him off the carpet on more than one occasion. He could tell her that Finch wasn’t, for the moment, at any rate, a suitable sounding board for his theories; he would either act on them, which would be disastrous, or think that Lloyd was off his head. He could tell her that neither living with her nor working with her was getting him down, and he had seized the chance of having her around. It would all have been true, but it was for none of those reasons, and Judy knew it.
‘Because I knew your life would be made hell at work,’ he said, and began to eat.
She looked away then.
Well, Lloyd thought stoutly, he could weather it. He’d done it now, so she would just have to put up with it. Maybe he was a chauvinistic pig who thought that all he had to do was ride up on his charger and rescue the damsel in distress whether she wanted to be rescued or not. Maybe he did have a nerve thinking that he could interfere in her business, in her professional relationships with her colleagues. But he wasn’t going to stand by and watch her …
He shouldn’t have been eating the strawberries at all, never mind all of them. But he had seen them just lying there, red and plump, and he had crawled under the netting, just to taste one. It had been delicious. Sweet and juicy and slightly warm; he could taste it now. They had all been delicious.
‘Thank you,’ she said, turning back, and smiled.
He stared at her. ‘I’m not in trouble?’ he asked.
He hadn’t been last time either; his dad had laughed. ‘Never mind,’ he had said. ‘Were they good?’
‘You had no right to interfere,’ she said. ‘But I wasn’t looking forward to next week.’ She paused. ‘And you didn’t lie to me,’ she added.
Was that why his dad had forgiven him too?
Lloyd smiled back at her, but already she was fixing him with a stern eye. ‘Was it honestly Andrews’ opinion that you needed another DI?’ she asked.
‘Cross my heart. Ask him.’ After a little subtle prompting, perhaps. But the actual suggestion had issued from Andrews’ lips, and he had thought it was his opinion, at least.
‘Then you’d better fill me in on Sharon Smith,’ she said.
‘We’re supposed to be off-duty,’ he reminded her.
‘We can be off-duty when we’ve eaten,’ she said.
As they ate, he told her what they knew; no more. No half-baked theorising, not yet. Not so soon after being proved wrong about Drummond. By Judy, of course. It would be good to have her back in harness with him.
‘The lab have confirmed that there were traces of sawdust on her clothes, and SOCOs will be at the site tomorrow to see where it might have come from,’ he finished.
She nodded, and got up from the table, switching the kettle on. ‘Tea or instant coffee?’ she asked.
And a coffee-grinder. He’d civilise her if it was the last thing he did. ‘Tea,’ he said. It would be tea bags, of course, but that wasn’t as bad as instant coffee.
‘So there you are,’ he said. ‘Two little puzzles. The sawdust – and this key that no one knows anything about. Any observations?’ he asked, when she had made the tea.
‘Just one,’ she said. ‘A leisure suit and trainers are very sensible things to wear at a football match, but I’d like to know if that’s what she was wearing at work.’
Lloyd beamed, and stood up, putting his arms round her as she closed the teapot lid. ‘That’s my girl,’ he said, and got smacked on the hand.
‘If Drummond’s telling the truth,’ he said, instantly forgetting his resolution not to theorise, ‘ I think Sharon had a married man tucked away somewhere. Arranged to meet him at the match, and he didn’t turn up. But she spoke to Barnes, and Parker got the wrong idea.’
Judy nodded, and reached past him to pluck two mugs from the tree on the worktop.
‘Then the boyfriend saw her, picked her up, and they went back to the ground, because it was deserted, and they wanted privacy. They didn’t know they had a voyeur taking notes.’
‘It’s possible,’ said Judy. ‘I suppose. But why did this married man kill her?’
Lloyd shrugged. ‘Search me,’ he said, with a grin.
They took their tea into the living room, and Lloyd looked round the flat. He hadn’t been here very often; the last time, the walls had had the previous tenant’s wallpaper still decorating them, the paintwork had been a dingy pink, the floor had been partially covered with a large rug of an indeterminate colour, a brownish reddish darkish sort of colour. He had been told that that didn’t matter because she wasn’t going to be in the flat that long.
Now, the walls were newly painted in white with a peach tinge, the paintwork was sparklingly new and brilliant white, the rug had been replaced by several smaller scatter rugs on floorboards which had been sanded and varnished.
‘When did all this happen?’ he asked.
She looked round. ‘Oh – I just did things here and there,’ she said.
Without mentioning it to him, he thought. ‘You varnished the floorboards?’ he asked, disbelievingly.
‘Well, no – I got a man in to do that. He was very good – he only took a couple of days.’
Lloyd drank some tea before he spoke. ‘You don’t mean to leave here, do you?’ he asked.
She sighed. ‘Lloyd,’ she said. ‘Do you think we could discuss this some night when we don’t have a whole extra hour to do it in?’
‘Do the clocks go back tonight?’ His impromptu night-shift had disoriented him.
She nodded.
‘But you don’t, do you?’ he persisted.
‘I think I’ve got a book somewhere about coping with rape,’ she said. ‘From when I did that course – I think I should take it in to Bobbie Chalmers, if she won’t have counselling.’
‘Fine.’ Lloyd put down his mug. ‘But I thought we could be off-duty once we’d eaten? I have no desire at all to discuss work.’
‘It’s better than discussing us,’ she said. ‘We don’t have rows about work.’
Oh, God. He didn’t want a row. He was much too tired to have a row, for one thing. He joined her on the sofa. ‘Sorry,’ he said, putting his arm round her. She smelt of bath-oil; her hair was soft against his face.
He woke up at four in the morning to find himself covered with Judy’s spare duvet. She had left a little lamp on for him. He smiled, and got up stiffly from the sofa, feeling his back, switched off the lamp, then tip-toed in the darkness out into the hallway and crept into the bedroom.
He undressed and got into bed beside the sleeping Judy, which was something he always found very reassuring, and just one more thing that he missed now that she didn’t live with him.
Mac lay on the bed, headphones on, listening again to Sharon Smith’s words.
Melissa had carried that tape around with her after the interview. Had she gone home? Had she told Simon what his girlfriend had done? Had she perhaps even played it to him? It was no honest mistake on Sharon’s part, Mac was certain – she knew who she was talking to, all right.
Mac took off the headphones and thought for a moment. He could hear the lies; he’d noticed it before. A kind of rehearsed precision in her answers that you didn’t get when people were really baring their souls. But why would she lie?
Could it all have been some sort of fantasy? Some sort of revenge for a slight? Like sending someone a Valentine to get them into trouble, only much, much worse?
He looked at the tape, and he wondered. If there was no truth, in it, then Simon might have felt like killing her, but he wouldn’t have. He might have sacked her, but he wouldn’t have killed her.
He ran the tape back, and listened again, his face growing sombre. Sharon Smith was telling lies; he was sure of it.
But Melissa had believed her.
Judy blinked as the morning sun came through the thin curtains, waking her as it had all week, and found Lloyd beside her. Good, she thought sleepily.
She hadn’t thought twice about what to do when she had left Melissa Whitworth’s car and run up to the sanctuary of her flat; she hadn’t thought at all. Instinct rather than conscious decision had prompted her to reach for the phone and dial Lloyd’s number. His latest gadget had answered, saying that he couldn’t come to the phone, but he’d be home sooner or later. She had waited impatiently for the tone, and said ‘Please come over,’ before she had given herself up to the tears.
At first, when she had seen the note under her windscreen she had thought that they had come and painted more double yellow lines when she hadn’t been looking. Then, when she had unfolded and read it, she had been unable to see how its unpleasant contents could refer to her. The anonymous writer, she had thought, must have got the wrong car. But then she had realised, with a stab of guilt, what it was all about.
Her confidential chat with Merrill had got round with the usual staggering speed of station rumour, and this was her first taste of retribution. She hoped she hadn’t made too much of a fool of herself with Melissa Fletcher. At least she hadn’t burst into tears then, which was all she had felt like doing.
What made it all so much worse was that she couldn’t imagine a single one of the dozens of male colleagues with whom she had worked over the years being reduced to tears by a malicious trick and a few unlovely adjectives. But it wasn’t so much the manner in which the message had been delivered that was upsetting her, she knew that. It was what it had said, and she hadn’t told Lloyd that, because it was that that had made her feel guilty.
Six forty-five. She frowned. This was too early, she thought. On the other days, it had been time to get up when the sun had invaded her sleep. Gradually, her brain stirred itself. The hour. It was really seven forty-five. She should be up, she thought, pushing back the covers, then another few brain-cells kicked in. No. It was Sunday, of course. She relaxed back on to the pillow, then sat up again. Lloyd had said that Merrill would be ringing; she had better get ready to go in to work and sort things out, if she was joining the murder team. And there would be no day off today. She pushed back the covers again, and got as far as swinging her legs out of bed. No, no. It was really six forty-five.
‘Mm? What? What’s wrong?’ Lloyd opened one reluctant eye.
She smiled. ‘Nothing,’ she said, lying back down, pulling the cover back.
He opened both eyes. ‘What time is it?’ he asked.
‘The extra hour,’ she said, snuggling up to him.
‘If you want that sort of thing first thing in the morning, you’ll have to go elsewhere for it,’ he mumbled.
She did, rather. But Lloyd was not a morning person in that respect or in any other. He had conquered his desire to stay in bed until noon by waking up as late as possible, getting shaved and showered and dressed as quickly as possible, swallowing coffee, and getting to the car. Then, and only then, did his system adjust to the new day, which it did with startling, and usually irritating, rapidity.
She liked mornings, though until her inherited ultra-thin curtains she had usually slept until the alarm woke her. But she liked watching the dawn touch the sky, and hearing the birds call, and listening to the sounds of the world waking up. She enjoyed the semi-reality of early morning, the slow adjustment.
‘You don’t want to leave here, do you?’ Lloyd said.
She sat up. ‘If you’re awake enough to start a row, you’re awake enough to—’
‘I don’t want a row. I want an answer. Please, Judy.’
She thought about her answer before she gave it. He didn’t hurry her; he wouldn’t like it, and he knew it. He would probably rather she didn’t answer. But she did. ‘I’ve never lived on my own before,’ she said. ‘I’m thirty-eight years old, and I’ve never lived on my own.’
A flick of his eyebrows indicated that that wasn’t so unusual. She knew it wasn’t. People lived at home, then married and set up home with someone else. But it hadn’t been quite like that with her. She had met Lloyd, complete with wife and children, and her story might have been more like Sharon Smith’s, if she hadn’t been afraid to have an affair. Lloyd’s theory of the married man seemed likely to her; hence no discernible boyfriend. But there she went again, thinking about work because it was easier than thinking about them.
‘I lived with my parents,’ she said, at last. ‘Then I met Michael, and I wished all the time that I was with him. Then I met you, and that was hopeless, so I married Michael, and wished all the time that I was with you.’ She paused. ‘I know what I’m like, Lloyd,’ she said. ‘And I’d rather be on my own, wishing I was with you, than with you and wishing I was on my own.’
His blue eyes looked directly into hers, daring her to deviate one centimetre from the truth. ‘And when you were with me?’ he asked. ‘Did you wish you were on your own?’
She shook her head. ‘ But I’d never been on my own then,’ she said. ‘ Not properly. Not somewhere that was mine, and no one else’s.’ She took his hand. ‘And we weren’t together long enough for the bloom to wear off,’ she said.
He gripped her hand tightly. ‘Who says it has to wear off?’ he demanded.
‘Oh, Lloyd. It always wears off. It has to.’
He sat up. ‘You married Michael because you wanted to pretend that I didn’t exist,’ he said. ‘Of course the bloom wore off!’
Judy stood her ground. ‘And you and Barbara?’ she asked.
He looked down.
‘I’m sorry, Lloyd. But it’s true. You married Barbara because you really wanted to – not as a substitute for what you couldn’t have. It was fine to start with – right?’
‘Yes,’ he said, looking up again. ‘But there were children, and money worries, and my peculiar working hours – this wouldn’t be the same!’
The sun inched up the sky; a patch of light shone through the thinnest patch of material in a hazy splash on the duvet. Judy looked at it as she spoke. ‘ It would be,’ she said. ‘There would be different causes, but it would be the same effect.’
‘No!’ He pulled her round to face him. ‘You and I have meant this much to one another for seventeen years, Judy – don’t try to pretend that we haven’t.’
‘I’m not,’ she said, alarmed that he might think that, even for a moment. ‘I … I just think that that’s because we haven’t lived together. I don’t want to spoil what we’ve got.’
He flopped down on to the pillow. ‘ For God’s sake,’ he said.
She looked down at him. ‘Lloyd,’ she said, ‘I love you. I know I don’t say it very often. Do you need to be told?’
He shook his head, with a little smile.
‘You mustn’t ever doubt that. It’s not like I felt about Michael – that was to do with him being the first. This is real. And nothing’s going to change it.’
He looked exasperated. ‘But you’ve just said that living with me would change it.’
‘I wouldn’t stop loving you. But you—’
‘That’s crazy!’ He shouted to stop her finishing the sentence, and sat up again. ‘ It’s nonsense.’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘You’re a romantic. You think it’ll be roses all the way, and it won’t.’
He gasped. ‘ Why would I think that? It isn’t roses all the way now!’
‘But you think that my marrying you would end all the rows and the hassle – and it wouldn’t! They’d just be different rows – and the only difference would be that I couldn’t just get up and walk out on them!’
He stared at her. ‘You’re wrong,’ he said. She wasn’t making a very good job of explaining. She had avoided
this conversation for weeks because she knew she would never
make him understand. ‘I like things the way they are,’ she said.
‘I don’t.’
She smiled at him. ‘But you’re the unselfish one,’ she said.
He held her close to him. ‘All this is a smokescreen,’ he said.
‘You always do it. Give yourself good reasons for what is simply
a fear of committing yourself to anything that might alter whatever
nice cosy rut you’ve—’
She kissed him. ‘You’re awake now,’ she said.
Sunday. Colin got up, and risked shaving now that his lip had gone down a little. It hurt, but he looked rather better than he had.
His mother hadn’t stopped; Colin would swear she had been going on all night, full of righteous indignation about what they had done to her Colin. His father, on the other hand, was deeply suspicious of the whole business; he inclined to the chief inspector’s belief that Colin had been involved with Sharon Smith in the first place.
Colin was glad that they had been away on the actual night; they may have been given a report by their ever-vigilant next-door neighbour, but at least they had missed him staggering home, using the bike like some sort of Zimmer frame as he had pushed his battered body along.
If his mother had seen that, she would have been camped out on the chief constable’s doorstep. She hadn’t asked him or herself why the police officers had done it, but his father had, obliquely. Colin had shrugged. He wouldn’t be able to shrug when it came to a court hearing, but he would think of something.
He wished, almost with a smile, that he was black. Racists, he could say. All police are racist. And they would have swallowed that. As it was, he was white, middle-class, late teens, in gainful employment in one of his father’s shops, and hardly what a court of law would see as a natural target for corrupt coppers.
And he almost wished that his father would do more than simply look sceptical and grunt the odd question to which he did not expect an answer, and even that only out of his mother’s earshot. He should stand up for himself, not let himself be brow-beaten by her into agreeing with her every word. Colin didn’t. But then again, if his father suddenly found some backbone at this stage it would be very awkward all round, so it was possibly just as well.
He went out, opening the garage door, smiling at the bike which gleamed in the sun that had already broken through the mist. He still felt stiff, but he thought he could ride her now.
He pushed the bike out on to the street, and started her up. He’d told the chief inspector what he had seen. Twice. And he still didn’t believe him. He didn’t like having his word doubted. And Chief Inspector Lloyd had seen him scared; Colin didn’t like that, either. And he’d thought he could scare him again, turning up without warning. Coming round to the house like that, coming into the garage. How dare he come into the garage? It was private. It was Colin’s space, where he could get away and work on the bike and think. His father used it to put the car away and take it out again, but for nothing else. How dare Lloyd invade his privacy like that?
He drove, mindful of speed limits and lights, into the centre of town, and had turned into a deserted High Street when he saw Lloyd and some woman coming out of one of the alleys which ran along the side of the shops. He slowed to a stop before they saw him, his foot on the kerb, revving the bike gently, as he watched them get into a car.
His curiosity overcame his desire to get out on to the open road and drive to where he could open the bike up and put her through her paces; instead, he followed them at a discreet distance, using what sparse traffic there was to keep out of sight, to find out where they were off to so early on a Sunday morning.
Malworth police station, as it turned out. She didn’t look as though she was going to help with their inquiries. Then he saw her wave to a couple of policemen who were going on duty. She obviously worked there, and he was dropping her off.
He liked the idea of spying on Lloyd going about his private business, just as he had probed into his. Have you got a girlfriend, Colin? What business is it of yours, Chief Inspector Lloyd? He continued to follow Lloyd’s car as he headed towards the river. At the lights, he took the Stansfield turn, and Colin went the opposite way, out into the countryside, to the disused airfield where he could let the bike go.
It was dangerous; the concreted wartime runways were crazed and broken, and high, strong weeds pushed up through the cracks, making the surface uneven, with sometimes as much as six inches between paving slabs. The old huts had been all but destroyed by wind and weather and vandals, and sheets of rusted corrugated iron lay unseen just beneath the grass. The bike would buck and rear like an untamed horse, threatening to throw him. But it wasn’t enough, not now.
He sat on the bike, looking round at the desolation. This morning wisps of mist still hung almost motionless in the air, giving the derelict buildings a ghostly air. It was easy to imagine it busy and full of suppressed excitement, as the pilots waited for the next mission. He’d have liked to have been a wartime pilot. The airfield would have been blacked out when they got the call to scramble; he imagined himself climbing into the cockpit, in charge of a machine that would take him soaring into the air to join a skyful of others on a night raid. No lights; just menacing dark shapes moving against the stars, droning steadily through the night to rain their deadly cargo on the enemy.
He worked in one of his father’s clothes shops.
Sometimes he would pretend, on the bike. He had never got caught before. Once, they had chased him, but he had lost them, weaving through Malworth’s lanes and alleys where the car couldn’t follow, back to the garage and safety. Engaged by enemy fire, but mission successful. This time he had been shot down in enemy territory, but that had happened to the best of them. And he had escaped, like the best of them. He was ready for another sortie.
His father had two shops; one in Malworth, and one in Barton. He hated his job; he hated the customers, hated his father for the calm way in which he had accepted his son’s being turned down by the air force. You can always work in the shop until you know what you want to do, he had said.
He had longed to be out there in the heat and dust of the Gulf, flying low-level precision-bombing raids, banking away from the explosion which would light up the night sky behind him as he flew back to base over white moonlit sands to a desert runway and a hero’s welcome.
You wouldn’t have been out there, his father had said. These men have trained for years. They’re not eighteen-year-old kids. He hated his father.
And the police. He felt again the helplessness when the policemen stood over him as he lay on the pavement. Not doing enough to hospitalise him, and have people asking questions. Just enough to hurt. Then the dread when two more of them arrived at the house. The day-long fear at the police station, and Lloyd, tricking answers out of him, asking personal questions, coming into his garage without asking, without waiting for an invitation that he would never have got.
And it had been early, he realised. Very early, when Lloyd and that woman had come out of that alley, talking and laughing together. Perhaps she was his wife. Colin smiled to himself, and started the bike again. But then, perhaps she wasn’t. Have you got a girlfriend, Chief Inspector Lloyd? He got on to the road, and drove back into Malworth.
Perhaps it would be worth finding out a little more about her.
Jake had never felt helpless in his life; he had always been the boy the other kids were afraid of at school. He had always had an answer – he had even had an answer to Sharon’s little bombshell. There was always a way out – helplessness was for people like Lionel Evans, born losers; it wasn’t for him. But he felt helpless now.
Marilyn had rung him against Bobbie’s express wishes, and had told him as much as she knew. Bobbie wouldn’t see him last night, and he had eventually taken the nurse’s advice, and gone home to get some sleep, though he would hardly classify the guilt-ridden night of tossing and turning as sleep.
She had finally agreed to see him that morning. To start with she had been almost businesslike, apologising for not being available when Dennis called, explaining that she had been unable to fulfil her commitments, as though she had been caught up in a traffic jam. She was trying desperately, heart-breakingly, to build a wall of indifference to what had happened, her eyes bright with anger and pain.
But the wall thankfully crumbled; she started telling him, speaking in a low monotone, and he listened, his helplessness growing. He didn’t know how long it would be before she could travel; he didn’t, he realised, even know if she still wanted to go. He could never make it up to her; he could never take the memories away. He had made promises he could no longer keep, but he could still give her a better life than she had had, if she would let him.
He said he was sorry, over and over again. He tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away. Bobbie, who didn’t quite accord with the image he had been creating for himself in Stansfield, was the only woman for whom he had ever given a damn, and it was his fault that this terrible thing had happened to her.
She wouldn’t let him touch her, and he didn’t have the words to tell her how he felt about her.
‘Do … do you still want to come away with me?’ he asked eventually.
She nodded; he was relieved, but it wouldn’t help in the short term. He had to sort that out for himself. Everything had changed yet again, and the plan would just have to change with it. He knew how to sway with the punches, but this was below the belt.
There was a brisk knock, and a woman of about his own age came in. The kind that would have suited his image, the kind that would find him vulgar, and would bore him stiff.
‘Who are you?’ he asked suspiciously.
She glanced at the bed, and smiled briefly. ‘My name’s Judy,’ she said. ‘I’m a friend of Bobbie’s.’
He looked at Bobbie for confirmation, she nodded slightly.
‘I’ll go, then,’ he said, feeling awkward. He supposed a woman friend was a better idea, in the circumstances. He stood up, and bent down to kiss Bobbie’s cheek, but she stiffened as he got close to her. He picked up the keys that she had left for him on the cabinet by her bed, and tried to smile, but he wanted to cry.
He walked from the room, and tried to remember that he was Jake Parker, and Jake Parker was never helpless.
Simon Whitworth was shown into an interview room, where two men already sat. One of them he recognised as Sergeant Finch.
‘Mr Whitworth – thank you for coming in,’ said the other man. ‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Lloyd – I believe you’ve met Sergeant Finch. I met your wife briefly, yesterday.’
Oh. Melissa hadn’t said. She had seen Sergeant Finch, like he had. She hadn’t mentioned any other visits from the police.
‘It may be nothing,’ he said. ‘ But Sharon told me that she was meeting someone on Friday evening.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me that?’ Finch demanded to know.
Whitworth tried to excuse himself, but they were lame excuses, and the chief inspector indicated as much. He hadn’t thought it was important, he had forgotten, he had meant to mention it, but somehow …
He gave up, worried about the impression he was giving. He was more worried by the time Lloyd had finished with him; if he had any more information that could help the police and was keeping it to himself, it would give him sleepless nights from now on. It would; but for the moment, it was information that he still had no intention of imparting.
‘Did Sharon ever mention someone called Colin Drummond to you?’ Lloyd asked.
‘No,’ said Simon. That must be the one they’d been holding.
‘And she gave no indication of who she intended meeting? Or where?’
‘No. She just said she had to meet someone.’
Finch looked slightly bored. ‘So that’s it, is it? She was meeting someone? And she left at six?’
‘Yes,’ said Simon.
‘What was she wearing to the office, Mr Whitworth?’ asked Lloyd, suddenly.
Simon knew precisely. But he didn’t suppose that bosses usually knew. He’d never noticed what his secretary in his previous job had been wearing.
‘I couldn’t be sure,’ he lied.
‘Dress, skirt, trousers – thank, please, Mr Whitworth.’
He swallowed. ‘Skirt,’ he said. ‘And a blue blouse. Yes. A skirt with a sort of blue check, and a blue blouse.’
Finch got up and left the room. Simon looked at Lloyd, convinced that he knew, that he was only making matters worse by trying to keep it quiet. He just hadn’t had time; he hadn’t had time to sort out his feelings. He didn’t think he could cope with Melissa’s hurt on top of everything else.
Finch returned with a sort of jogging suit in a clear plastic bag. ‘Have you ever seen Sharon wearing this?’ he asked.
Simon shook his head.
‘And she was wearing the skirt and blouse when she left the office at six?’
He nodded. His face was growing pink; he could feel it.
‘Do you remember what shoes she wore?’
Blue leather court shoes that matched the blouse, with a tiny little fabric bow of darker blue. ‘ Sorry,’ he said, miserably. ‘ Why are you … was she wearing this when you found her?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Finch. ‘She must have changed her clothes at some point, and she didn’t go home – would you know where she might have gone?’
No. Simon was beginning to think that he didn’t know her at all. ‘Wherever her appointment was, I suppose,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Lloyd. ‘Thank you for coming in, Mr Whitworth.’
Was that it? Simon looked at Lloyd, but he seemed to have lost interest in him. He was looking thoughtfully at the plastic bag.
‘I’ll … er … go, then.’ He left the room, and the police station, and found himself almost running in his desire to put as much space as possible between it and him.
Melissa put down the phone, her heart heavy. She had no option but to do what Mac had asked. Simon had gone off somewhere without saying where he was going, probably just to get out of the house, where the atmosphere was becoming unbearable, so thankfully she had been alone when Mac had rung.
He was at the garage, he said. He wanted to see her. She saw him waiting on the forecourt, looking out for her as she drove through the business park, and she viewed him with an odd mixture of pleasure and anger. She could have driven past, but she didn’t care for the possible consequences, so she pulled in.
‘I can’t stay long,’ she warned him. ‘I have to get Sunday lunch.’ How she could tell such a lie without blushing, she didn’t know. Simon had had his last Sunday lunch when he married her.
‘I’ll bet,’ he said.
She smiled. ‘Why am I here?’ she asked, walking with him into the showroom.
‘Because hardly anyone comes in on a Sunday, and I wanted to see you again,’ he said. ‘I run to coffee and biscuits.’
She sat down, resigned to being at Mac’s beck and call as long as he had the tape. And it was a lot easier than being with Simon, when all was said and done.
‘Why don’t you have a game of golf?’
Lionel raised his eyes to heaven. ‘I don’t want a game of golf!’ he said.
‘You should do something,’ said Frances. ‘Take your mind off it.’
Oh, sure. Hitting a golf ball would take his mind off it.
‘Why don’t you tell me?’ she asked.
‘Tell you what?’ He felt the alarm seizing his throat, making his voice sound odd.
‘Whatever it is that’s bothering you.’
‘Sharon Smith has been killed!’
Frances sat down with her cup of tea. She never ate the huge, late Sunday breakfast that she always cooked for him. He had eaten; worry increased rather than decreased his appetite.
‘But that’s not it,’ she said. ‘You’ve been like it ever since you came back from that do at the football club.’
Lionel stared at her. He couldn’t remember this many words passing between them since they had stood at the altar. But it didn’t surprise him that she could tell the difference between normal long silences and worried long silences. Frances always knew.
‘I trust you’re not going to say that sort of thing if the police come here,’ he said.
She frowned. ‘Why should the police come here?’ she asked.
‘You’ve heard that announcement!’ Frances always had Radio Barton on from the moment she got up until the moment that she switched on the television for the early evening news; they had heard the police appeal for witnesses about six times already.
‘But you didn’t see Sharon there, did you?’ she asked.
Lionel closed his eyes. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Well, then. You can’t tell them anything.’
Frances never asked questions. She would snoop and pry, and she found things out, but she never asked questions. Why now? Why in God’s name now?
‘They know I was there,’ he said. ‘I was on the guest list.’ Even Frances couldn’t find out that he hadn’t been on the guest list, surely. But he had to account for the fact that the police would be coming here; they had said so, when they had given him his wallet. Someone would call, they said. He hadn’t told her about his wallet, because he never told her anything much. After his visit to the police station, he hadn’t wanted to tell her.
He had to worry about the police, and Parker. He didn’t need to start worrying about Frances as well.