Luscombe nodded to Fiona Brodie’s brief, received a blank expression in return.
OK, pal. We all know what your job is…
Fiona Brodie herself seemed composed, if a little irritated by DC Jenny Armitage’s earlier summons. Luscombe kicked off with the customary caution, then handed over to Jenny.
‘Do you have any idea why we’ve asked to speak to you this morning, Mrs Brodie?’
‘Something to do with my husband, I expect. You’re aware that he has been hospitalised?’
‘We are, Mrs Brodie. You’ll be anxious to visit, I’m sure, but this won’t take long.’
Mrs Brodie sighed. ‘I’m not rushing down to Crawley, if that’s what you mean. I have a home to run, and by all accounts Duncan is stable and out of danger.’
Jenny frowned. ‘You don’t seem that concerned. It was a particularly violent attack. He could have lost his life.’
‘Well, he didn’t, and for that I’m grateful. Can we get on, please?’
The brief shot his client a sideways glance which Luscombe interpreted as less than empathetic.
‘Of course. You’re a busy woman, as you say.’ Jenny smiled sweetly.
Sugar before the castor oil, Luscombe chuckled to himself. That’s my Jenny…
‘So, can I start by going back to something you mentioned a wee while ago, in our previous interview?’
‘Yes, if you think it’s at all relevant.’ Mrs Brodie looked at her watch.
‘The psychiatric hospital, where you caught up with Duncan after leaving Eagle Court? That would be the Hawkhurst Infirmary, correct?’
‘I don’t recall the name of the place precisely – it was a very long time ago.’
‘Yes, it was,’ Jenny agreed. ‘But you gave us the name of the consultant, a Mr Frederick Marsh? And the only hospital of that discipline he would have been involved with at that time was the Hawkhurst.’
‘Very well, then. There’s your answer.’
‘The thing is,’ Jenny tapped her pencil on her cheek, ‘I didn’t find a Duncan Brodie on the in-patient records for the year you specified.’
‘Wrong year, probably,’ Fiona Brodie said. ‘Try the one after. My memory…’ another shrug. ‘You know how it is when you get older.’
‘I expect I will do, when the time comes.’ Jenny reprised her smile.
Luscombe covered his mouth to hide his expression.
‘Well, as it happens, Mrs Brodie, we did check the next year, and the one after that. In fact, we checked the records over an entire ten-year period. And we still couldn’t find Duncan Brodie.’
‘An oversight, I expect. It takes a certain discipline to keep an accurate records system.’
‘That would be one of your top skills, Mrs Brodie?’
The brief leaned forward, ‘Is this strictly relevant? My client’s skills regarding record-keeping are neither here nor there.’
‘We’ll move on,’ Jenny said.
The brief sat back in his chair, satisfied.
‘I’ll tell you what we did find, though, Mrs Brodie.’
A resigned sigh. ‘I’m sure you will.’
‘We found your name in the records for 1979. Miss Fiona Campbell. Campbell is your maiden name, is that correct?’
Mrs Brodie’s brow furrowed. She turned to her brief but received only an impartial expression in return.
‘For the benefit of the tape, please, Mrs Brodie?’
‘Yes. That is my maiden name.’
‘And what would your name be doing on the in-patient list, I wonder?’
‘Just an error, a stupid clerical error. They probably confused the visitors’ book with the in-patients register. Or something. I don’t know.’
‘Well, I don’t think that’s the case, Mrs Brodie, because I spoke to Mr Marsh, your consultant.’
‘My–’
‘Yes, that’s right, Mrs Brodie, your consultant. He’s long retired now, of course, but we had a nice wee chat on the phone. He remembers you very well. Sends his best wishes, and hopes you’ve made great progress since your stay in Hawkhurst.’
Mrs Brodie examined the tabletop, ran a manicured finger across a fine crack in the varnish.
Jenny pressed on. ‘You were the in-patient, Mrs Brodie, not Duncan.’
‘I don’t see what on earth this has to do with anything. May I ask what point you’re trying to make?’
‘My point is, Mrs Brodie, that you were the one who suffered abuse at Eagle Court, not Duncan. He might have had a rough time, sure – it was no picnic for the pupils, by all accounts. But what happened to you was of a different order, wasn’t it? I mean, there you were, a young, vulnerable female living in a predominantly male environment–’
‘This is ridiculous,’ Mrs Brodie interrupted. ‘Totally irrelevant.’
‘But I have to disagree, Mrs Brodie,’ Luscombe broke in. ‘It’s highly pertinent. If you’d be kind enough to continue to answer DS Armitage’s questions, I’d be grateful.’
Mrs Brodie glared at her brief, a silent instruction to challenge Luscombe’s interjection, but the solicitor was busy scribbling something on his pad and her entreaty went unnoticed.
Jenny continued. ‘You were friendly with some of the boys, of course. That’s only to be expected. I imagine they rather enjoyed having an attractive young girl living among them.’
‘We had our own accommodation,’ Mrs Brodie said, stiffly. ‘The school cottage. It was called ‘Old House’. We were entirely separate from the boarders. There was nothing inappropriate about our situation or location.’
‘I’m sure there wasn’t, Mrs Brodie. But although it might have been out of bounds for the boys, that wasn’t the case for staff members. They would have been able to pop in and out on school business – fairly regularly, I would imagine, your mother being the matron.’
‘Of course.’
Jenny joined her hands together, leaned forward. ‘And that would have included Mr Daintree, wouldn’t it, Fiona?’
Silence.
‘Please answer the question, Mrs Brodie,’ Luscombe said quietly.
A nod.
‘For the tape, please, Mrs Brodie,’ Jenny prompted.
‘Yes.’
‘Yes…?’
‘Yes, Mr Daintree did visit. From time to time.’
‘From time to time,’ Jenny repeated. ‘And these visits became quite troublesome, didn’t they, Fiona?’
Mrs Brodie’s lips were compressed into a thin line. Her face had paled beneath the foundation.
‘And in those days it wasn’t so easy to object, was it, Fiona? Mr Daintree was respected in the school. Feared, even. An old-school disciplinarian, his daughter called him. No one would dare question his integrity, his motives, his … predilections?’
Jenny’s voice went on relentlessly. ‘You tried to tell your mother, but she had her job to consider; it was her living, her calling – a lifestyle choice. She’d given everything to the school. It was her home.’
Fiona Brodie’s eyes were lowered now. No eye contact.
‘Eventually,’ Jenny continued, ‘your mother conceded that the only way out of the situation was to resign from her position as matron, just to get you to a place of safety. But by then, the damage had been done. Your mother was ill by then, too, but she had the good sense to understand that you needed help, some serious counselling to help you come to terms with what had happened.’
Luscombe realised that he had been holding his breath. The atmosphere in the small interview room seemed to have contracted, sucked in upon itself, like a star being swallowed by a black hole.
‘But Mr Daintree was never charged, was he, Fiona? In fact, he was never even accused of any misdemeanour. You didn’t make a formal complaint. Maybe it was just too much to bear, after what had happened. Maybe you just couldn’t face the questions, interrogations, court appearances?’
‘It was a long time ago,’ Mrs Brodie repeated, a dry, hopeless statement.
‘But then, out of the blue, Chapelfields receive an application from one Mrs Fowler. Her elderly father has moved to Scotland – but he’s not managing so well on his own any more. She wants him in Chapelfields, where he’ll be cared for. Mrs Fowler is a busy woman, runs her own business. Hasn’t got the time to be a full-time carer. You remember speaking to Mrs Fowler, Fiona?’
‘For the tape, please,’ Luscombe reminded her.
‘Yes. I remember.’
‘So, here’s the name again, after all these years, popping up like a Halloween monster. You must have had a bit of a shock when you realised who Mrs Fowler’s father was, Fiona? When the name ‘Daintree’ was spelled out for you?’
Mrs Brodie moistened her lips.
‘But then … goodness me, a change of plan! Mrs Fowler decides that a better idea would be to move her dad down south. After all, she lives in Berkshire, so it makes sense to apply to a home in her own county. And lo and behold, there’s another Chapelfields in the town of Reading. Perfect.’
Mrs Brodie’s brief shuffled his papers, crossed one leg over the other.
‘But not so perfect for you, Fiona, because you’ve already hatched a plan. You’ve already figured out what Isaiah Marley and his exotic girlfriend have been up to. You’ve already been bold enough to make Connie Chan an offer – one she can’t really refuse, because you’ve told her that if she doesn’t help you you’ll go to the police with the evidence you’ve collected. And as record-keeping, attention to detail and so on is something of a primary skill, Fiona, I imagine you managed to collect a fair bit – photographs, times of Isaiah’s deliveries, whatever. What matters is that you figured out what they’d been up to. And you offered her money, didn’t you, Fiona? An extra carrot, to get a little job done for you.’
‘DC Armitage is showing the suspect evidence folder P1A, item 1,’ Luscombe said.
Jenny pushed the bank statement across the table. ‘A large sum of money was debited from your account ten days ago. We’ve traced the recipient to an account in France. Account holder is one Ms Z Binti. Can you explain the purpose of the transaction, Mrs Brodie?’
‘I … I can’t recall–’
‘You can’t recall? Let me help you, Fiona. You paid a woman, known to you as Connie Chan, to murder Mr Daintree after he’d relocated to Reading. Unfortunately, it all went wrong after the deed, and Isaiah was accidentally killed. Chan wasn’t happy about that. She blames you, and she decides to take it out on your nearest and dearest. Only, perhaps, Duncan can’t really be described in those terms any more, Fiona, can he? Has everything gone a bit stale? Was he thinking about leaving you?’ Jenny raised her voice by the merest sliver of a decibel. ‘And I wonder, were you hoping that Chan would finish him off properly, so you could play the innocent, blame Duncan for Daintree’s murder?’
Fiona Brodie was staring fixedly ahead. Her mouth was open a fraction but nothing was coming out.
‘You spun us a heart-rending story about Duncan, how he was abused at Eagle Court. That incident at the rugby match, the damage to his ear. Needed quite a few stitches, didn’t it? Well, let me tell you, Fiona, that a colleague of ours has had a good look at Duncan’s ear. An injury such as the one you describe would have left a scar, for sure. Guess what? Not a dicky.’
Mrs Brodie’s brief leaned back and closed his eyes.
‘DC Armitage is showing the suspect evidence folder P1A, item 2,’ Luscombe said.
‘A mobile phone, Fiona. What we call a burner. Cheap, disposable. We found this in a room at the Swan Hotel in Petworth. The call history is interesting. There’s a number of missed calls from one particular mobile – yours. We found the burner in Connie Chan’s room, Fiona.’
There was a short silence, broken only by the tick of the radiator as water was pumped through from some unknown cistern elsewhere in the building.
‘What did you expect me to do?’ Mrs Brodie said eventually, her voice barely a whisper. ‘You don’t know Daintree. You can’t know what he did to me. No one will ever understand.’ She shook her head. ‘No one can ever understand how alone I felt. How dirty. How used.’ She looked up and now her mouth twisted into a sad little smile. ‘I’d do it again, you know. I hope he burns in hell.’
‘I think that will do,’ Luscombe said. ‘Interview terminated at eleven-twenty-six.’