Two hours later, Judith and Constance sat in the Magpie and Stump, with two glasses of lager in front of them on the table. In the light of Nick’s revelations, the judge had stopped the trial and dismissed the jury, so that the CPS could decide how best it wanted to proceed.
‘Poor Nick,’ Constance said.
Judith clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Don’t say that. I know how he dressed it up, like he was the victim, but you know as well as I that if you want to hurt someone and they end up dead, you may as well have planned their murder.’
Constance had known Judith would disagree. ‘He was stuck in the middle, though,’ she insisted. ‘He loved his sister and she blamed him, when he’d tried so hard to do the right thing.’
‘He could have confronted Brett, not killed him.’
‘I bet Lisa encouraged him. It was obvious she knew.’
‘I agree she knew about it afterwards,’ Judith said. ‘That much was clear. And how cleverly she played the part of the concerned spouse. She had us fooled. I bet she even speaks Greek. But her outburst about Maria; the bitterness. That was real. He never shared with her what he was planning. Or with Maria. Of course, Maria must also have known, once Brett died, that her beloved brother was responsible. So both women found themselves aligned in a pact of silence. Whether the police want to look into that too is really up to them.’
‘What a mess.’
‘Diana must blame herself now,’ Judith said.
Constance thought that an unusual leap. ‘How do you mean?’
‘She chose the venue. And Nick came with it.’
‘She couldn’t have known about what happened to the boy, though. She’s only been working for Brett for five years.’
‘I’m not saying she was to blame,’ Judith gulped down her beer. ‘Just that she might regret her decision. But the CFO knew, and probably a few others in senior positions at Heart Foods.’
‘Was that how you worked it out? You talked to the CFO?’
‘That was the last piece of the puzzle. The first was Lisa’s jewellery.’
‘What?’
‘One of the things which bothered me was Lisa’s jewellery, the lavish necklace she wore every day to the trial. Actually, Andy tipped me off, inadvertently, of course. He saw it as a sign of Nick’s cavalier attitude to work, that he must be sourcing food on the cheap, if he never made much profit but indulged his wife’s expensive tastes. Apart from that being stupid, chauvinistic nonsense, it still resonated with me – but differently. It just seemed so flippant for Lisa to be wearing that shimmering necklace if she truly felt bad about what had happened.’
‘Is that really what made you suspect Nick?’ The sun was streaming in through the window and Constance put one hand up to shield her eyes.
‘You think I should keep that one to myself, do you?’ Judith laughed, ‘if I’m ever asked to share the secrets of my success?’
‘I think it’s one to bury in a deep hole.’
‘You’re right. She probably just liked wearing it, hadn’t had many opportunities to bring it out during lockdown. And I mean it’s not every day your husband goes on trial for gross negligence manslaughter, is it?’
‘What else? You said the jewellery was first.’
‘The waitress, Eleni. You weren’t there this morning. Nick had told us very little with any conviction, if you remember, but he insisted that he had spoken to her in Greek, when he asked her to leave. If he was right, then Zoe’s evidence, that he ordered Eleni out, to enable him to race around and destroy all the incriminating evidence, was, at least to a small degree, discredited.’
‘So?’
‘Eleni kept looking at Nick when she was speaking. I couldn’t be sure, but my instinct told me she was suspicious of how Nick behaved that day too, but she was too loyal to say. She certainly didn’t remember what language Nick spoke in and I could see she might not. The very fact that Nick was so certain made me think he was making it all up. And she’d insinuated that Nick was no help serving the guests – she had to do things alone. That made me think he might have been preoccupied with his plans. And then there was the Tupperware.’
‘The Tupperware?’
‘Eleni said that they usually kept leftover food – that she’d packaged it up – but this time Nick threw it all away. That suggested more cover-up, but I had no idea why Nick would want to hurt Brett. Then came the CFO.’
‘Simon Fogarty?’
Judith nodded. ‘It had bothered me, from the start, that there was no one obviously at the trial for Brett. I couldn’t work out why that might have been. I mean, I know Brett had no immediate family, but you’d have thought the company would have sent a representative, or found a more distant relative, made a public statement or something. I wondered if they had something to hide. Then I thought I was over-thinking; maybe they felt it was inappropriate to comment while the trial was ongoing. Afterwards, they’d make a statement. You get the picture.
‘And then I had noticed two men in court, on day one. They seemed pretty interested, were talking a lot to each other, but they didn’t come back. They might have been nobodies. I checked those photos you sent me early on, the ones the press published, with Lisa and other family members and some of Brett, but neither of the men featured. Then, as soon as you got his name – Simon Fogarty – from Diana, I Googled him and his photo is on the company website.’
‘Simon Fogarty, the CFO, was in court on the first day?’
‘With some underling.’
‘And when you called him, he told you everything?
‘At first, no. Then I said I would subpoena him to give his evidence in court.’
‘Oh.’
‘He was a bit chattier then. He told me that a “Giorgios Doukas” had died at the factory in 2008 and an agreement had been reached with the mother, Maria Doukas, and that he had passed that information to Brett on the call. I asked about the circumstances of the boy’s death and he refused to say. I decided I’d pushed my luck and left it there. I had my suspicions, of course, given the names, but I had to be sure. Greg did the necessary checks on the names – mother and son, the address, confirmed Maria was Nick’s sister. He came to court in the break this morning and told me.’
‘So you knew it was Nick?’
‘I was pretty sure. And then you arrived, of course, and filled in most of the gaps.’
‘Wow. I can’t believe you worked it out like that. You are truly brilliant.’
‘Hardly.’
‘No, I mean, I got there, but only because Sue told me. She’s still very affected by it. Says that she tried to forget it for so long, push it out of her mind. I think she truly buried the memory. And then it happened a second time, with Brett, and it all came flooding back.’
‘Did she not make the connection with Nick?’
‘Different names, years apart. And she never met any of George’s family. She just knew it was the same nightmare happening again.’
‘Shall we toast Susan Mills, then?’ Judith said. ‘One of those people who try to do the right thing but whom life tends to overlook.’
Constance obliged and they drank a toast to Sue, clinking their glasses together.
‘If Simon Fogarty knew about George,’ Constance asked, holding up her glass to the light, ‘then he must have known about Nick. Why didn’t he say anything?’
‘Like I say, I asked all that was necessary for our purposes and the rest remained unsaid. But I suspect he preferred to keep anything which happened with George twelve years ago out of the public eye. The company had rebranded, and the unfortunate episode had been forgotten. And he certainly would not have wanted the payment to Maria to become public knowledge – or his role in it. No. I think he came to court and was satisfied there was a good team prosecuting Nick. Maybe if it had looked like Nick would be acquitted, he would have found a way of helping out behind the scenes. We’ll never know.’
Constance shook her head. ‘Out of all of this, what surprises me most, I think, is that Brett tried to cover up George’s death. It doesn’t sound like the kind of thing he would do.’
Judith knocked her glass against Constance’s a second time. ‘That’s because you have such a trusting nature,’ she said. ‘You see the best in people. Don’t ever lose that. But you might be right this time. I have a little theory of my own.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s hardly more than a hypothesis. And I warn you, it could be defamatory.’
‘Just tell me. I’m not going to tell anyone else.’
‘All right. Who, out of all the panellists, do we dislike the most?’
‘Well, that’s an easy one. What, you think Adrian did it – the cover-up?’
‘In 2008, he’d just invested £100,000 of family money in his best friend’s business. You can see why he might have wanted to persuade Brett to keep things quiet.’
Constance mulled things over in her mind. ‘You think that’s why Brett stayed friendly with him over the years, humoured him over his new idea – because Adrian knew about what happened with George Doukas?’
Judith’s eyes were shining now. ‘That would be an even better motive to keep Adrian’s mouth well and truly shut than the one we attributed to Simon Fogarty. And, if that’s right, then you could say that Adrian was responsible for the death of his friend, after all.’
‘Oh come on.’
Judith shook her head. ‘You know, as well as I, that these things all begin somewhere with something small and then they grow, just like Nick’s resentment. Adrian prevailed upon his friend to clean up the production line and pay off Maria, and it came back to bite him in the worst way possible. Anyway, sounds like you don’t want to hear my crazy theories any more. I’m interested in the gene-editing research you uncovered at the Sumners. Now we have a little more time, you can spill the beans.’
Constance placed her glass down in the centre of her beer mat. Now, finally, she could tell Judith about Mark and Rachel’s secret. ‘It’s revolutionary,’ she said.
‘I’ve heard that before, somewhere.’
‘No, really. It could change everything. There’s this special technique they use to cut out bits of DNA they don’t want from plants. Then the plant takes over and replicates the change in all its cells. Like magic really. Suddenly, your tomato plant grows eight branches instead of three and it only needs half the water.’
‘And why so hush-hush?’
‘It’s all the stuff associated with genetically modified food which everyone got excited about a few years back. Concern that it’s just not safe. Interfering with nature. Causing irreversible changes.’
‘Playing God. And you were worried about Brett making his employees smell bread. This went so much further. Although that’s what they said about the first test-tube baby, as I recall, and now it’s completely normal. I suppose that’s why the Ambrosia tag was such sublime marketing. Gene-edited food: the perfect product. It may not make you immortal, but it’s still ambrosia: food fit for the gods. It sweetens today’s bitter pill, just a tad. To know that something good may be coming soon that will help us feed everyone in a cleaner, more efficient way, whatever you choose to eat.’
‘Diana knew,’ Constance said. ‘She just strung me along. She didn’t volunteer anything on Ambrosia at the beginning. Then she only told us about the junk food aspect when she had to. She did give me hints about Mark, but even that was right at the end. Something secret going on at the Sumners farm kind of thing.’
‘But why should she offer us anything? It was all a massive sideshow,’ Judith said. ‘Diana was completely right. And I was the one who encouraged you, encouraged us to be so monumentally diverted by it all. I’m the one to blame for all this. Not you. Or Diana. Me. The queen of the red herring. I could hear Andy laughing even before we knew Nick was guilty.’
‘Don’t say that. You were brilliant, Judith, really. The way you took apart the pathologist’s evidence was just…sublime.’
‘Well, yes, that’s one way of describing it, I suppose.’
Constance thought hard. ‘Oh,’ she leaned forward in her seat. ‘I can’t believe I forgot to tell you. I saw Sergeant Thomas, out at Mark’s farm.’
‘Really?’
Constance eyed Judith suspiciously. ‘You knew?’
Judith finished her drink and waved at the barman for two more.
‘Let’s say that after our joint session with the illustrious Dr Edge, I tipped her off that something nasty might happen at the farm and it may have something to do with this investigation.’
‘Our session with Dr Edge?’
‘And I was right about her, she is the most diligent police officer. I cannot even begin to imagine how many hoops she had to leap through to ensure that some obsolete cameras were back up and rolling, within hours, in an area completely outside her own jurisdiction. I suspect the process wasn’t entirely authorised in the way it should have been, but no matter.’
‘And what happened? Did they catch…whoever did it – let the cows out?’
‘I think we’ll have to wait and see. I have another question for you now. I was meaning to ask and then everything else happened.’
‘Is it the last one? I’m not sure I can do this for much longer, today.’
‘You said Zoe helped you out. What did you mean?’
‘Zoe?’
‘When you told me you knew Nick was guilty. You mentioned Zoe had helped, as well as Sue.’
Constance took her second beer from the barman and ran her index finger around its rim. Maybe, after all, some things were better left unsaid. ‘I don’t know why I said that,’ she said. ‘Unless I meant the video. No, there was nothing else important from Zoe.’