She wanted to be at work by eight on Monday morning, so Hazel left the house at a quarter to. There was still a hole in the road where she liked to park, so she walked quickly round the corner – the rain had more than a hint of sleet in it – straight into what might have been described as a man-mountain if he’d been six inches taller.
John Carson had been the shortest boy in his year at school. It hadn’t stopped him being a demon on the football field. He’d been the shortest recruit in his intake when he joined the Army. It hadn’t stopped him wiping the floor with anyone who commented on the fact, or becoming the go-to guy when there was something tough, dirty and important to do.
It was now some years since his return to civvy street, but he still looked like a soldier. His well-made suits barely disguised the bulk not of middle-age spread but muscle, hard, densely packed, ready for action.
This morning he was standing beside Hazel’s new car with an open umbrella. ‘Morning, miss.’
Hazel recognised him immediately – not from the previous occasion when she’d caught only a fleeting glimpse of him, but from the photographs on Gorman’s desk. She bounced back – the sleet seeming more attractive than any shelter she might have to share with him – and straightened up, making herself look as big and strong and unafraid as possible. She was in fact taller than Carson. But one out of three ain’t great.
‘What do you want?’
‘I don’t want anything, miss,’ he said mildly. ‘My employer’ – he glanced past her – ‘wonders if you could spare him a quick word.’
The third thing people noticed about John Carson, after his lack of inches and excess of muscles, was that he spoke like a civilised man. People who knew who and what he was, and what he did and who he did it for, expected him to talk like a thug, and he didn’t. His might have been a bog-standard inner-city state education, but – like everything else – he’d learned how to make it work for him. He spoke with a generic East End accent. But what he said was careful and courteous.
Hazel darted a quick look across the road, where a long pale-grey saloon was taking up most of the kerb. There was someone in the back seat. She didn’t have to be able to see him to know who it was. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said shortly.
Carson didn’t move, except that he extended the umbrella a little in her direction. ‘Please, miss. We won’t detain you long.’
‘You won’t detain me at all,’ retorted Hazel. ‘Lay a finger on me and you’ll be parting with your belt and your shoelaces before the hour’s out.’
Carson liked that. He grinned. Then Hazel heard the car door open and close, and Leo Harte joined them under the umbrella. ‘We’d have been so much more comfortable in my car,’ he said reproachfully.
Hazel made an effort to breathe herself calm. She was in a residential street where most of the inhabitants had yet to leave for work – if she started shouting, people would come. Admittedly, some of them would take one look at John Carson and leave again, but someone would either help or summon help. Safe is a comparative term. But she didn’t think she was in any immediate danger.
‘What is it you want?’
This wasn’t the first time she had met Leo Harte, but it was the first time she’d met him knowing who he was, and the first time therefore that she’d taken the trouble to study him. He was a younger man than she had supposed. He might have been Ash’s age or a little more, around his mid-forties. She supposed he was good-looking, although her mother had impressed on her the rule that handsome is as handsome does and that put Leo Harte at something of a disadvantage. He reminded her of a fox – not just his colouring, which was more russet than red, but the cunning in his expression, the sly amusement in his eye. A sophisticated urban fox, the master of his environment, confident in his ability either to bite or to run very fast, and to know instantly which would serve him best.
‘When we met the other day,’ he began, ‘I didn’t know who you were.’
‘And now you do?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Which is to say, I know you by reputation.’
Hazel caught his eye and held it. ‘What a coincidence.’
Harte smiled briefly. It was like someone had flicked a light-switch on and then off. ‘You’re working on Gillian Mitchell’s computer.’
‘Now, how would you know a thing like that?’ She kept her tone even because she didn’t want him to know that he’d rattled her. But she was disturbed. It wasn’t public information. The only way he should have known that was if he had contacts inside Meadowvale, and that would be very bad news indeed.
Harte shrugged. ‘The only thing that leaks worse than a police station is a colander. Speaking of which’ – he switched his gaze to John Carson – ‘are you actually trying to drip rainwater down the back of my neck?’
‘Sorry, Mr Harte,’ said Carson, dutifully adjusting the angle of his umbrella.
‘That’s all right, Mr Carson,’ said Leo Harte. ‘So by now, Miss Best, you will be aware that Miss Mitchell started to write a book about me.’
‘That’s right. And then she stopped. What happened? Did you frighten her off?’
‘Ah.’ It was a mere breath of a sigh. ‘You didn’t know Gillian Mitchell, did you? If you had, you wouldn’t be considering that as a possibility. She did not react well to threats. I am not a timid man, Miss Best, but I would only have risked frightening her off by phone, from a long way away and preferably behind a blast wall.’ He did the smile again. ‘I have heard similar things said of you, Miss Best.’
Hazel didn’t rise to that. ‘Are you telling me that you didn’t threaten her? That she got some juicy stuff on you, stuff that even a well-paid brief might have struggled to explain, but on mature reflection she decided not to write the book after all? What – seduced by your charms, was she?’
Harte’s eyes were an unusual shade somewhere between blue and green. But that wasn’t what startled Hazel. It was the look in them that she glimpsed before he looked away. The sorrow – no, the grief. Hurt and grief.
‘She was?’
Harte didn’t deign to answer. ‘I engineered this meeting,’ he said stiffly, ‘for two reasons. To tell you, and through you Detective Chief Inspector Gorman, that if you think I had anything to do with Gillian Mitchell’s death you are mistaken, and while you’re trying to prove something which isn’t true you are not looking for the person who actually killed her.
‘And secondly, to offer any help I can give, any information that may come my way, that will assist in apprehending the actual murderer. I know there are rumours spreading. I know that Gillian Mitchell and Trucker Watts appear to have been killed in the same way, and that I am one of the few acquaintances they had in common. Couple that with the strange misapprehension in police circles that I am involved in illegal activities, and it is sadly inevitable that I should be considered a suspect.
‘I’m telling you now, as clearly as I can, that would be a mistake. Not because I can’t deal with unfounded allegations – I’m sure that, as my social secretary, Mr Carson here can provide you with an exact account of my whereabouts at any material time – but because, while you’re busy barking up the wrong tree, the cat is sneaking away into the undergrowth and covering his tracks. None of us wants that – not you, and certainly not me.’
As the initial surge of alarm subsided – for though she knew this was a dangerous man, Hazel didn’t feel that he was a danger to her, at least not here and now – she recognised that Harte had inadvertently afforded her an opportunity she could hardly have hoped for: the chance to probe his involvement, face to face, in the absence of his highly paid solicitor and without any tapes running. Nor could he object to conditions he had himself created. He didn’t have to answer her questions. But if he wanted her to believe what he’d already said, he might find it hard to walk away.
She said, ‘What were you doing at Maggie Watts’s house last week?’
The thoughts that had flashed through Hazel’s mind flashed through Leo Harte’s, and he reached the same conclusion: that refusing to answer would look as if he had something to hide. ‘I went to offer my condolences. I wanted to assure her that, even though I hadn’t been able to offer Trucker a job, I bore him no ill will. And I wanted to be sure that she had enough money to manage.’
‘You mean, you bribed her not to tell us that Trucker had been to see you.’
Harte gave a wintry smile. ‘Why on earth would I want to do that, Miss Best?’
Hazel shrugged. ‘It was an unfortunate coincidence that you were one of the last people to see him alive. In view of this misapprehension in police circles, I mean.’
‘And the last person to see someone alive is the first person to see him dead? Not this time, Miss Best.’ He nodded at John Carson and turned back to his car. ‘I’d be grateful if you’d relay this conversation to Detective Chief Inspector Gorman.’
‘Of course I shall,’ said Hazel, left standing out in the rain. ‘He’ll be most interested. Whether he’ll be convinced is something else.’
Leo Harte lowered his window a couple of inches. ‘It was good to meet you, Miss Best. I feel sure we’ll see one another again.’
Hazel bridled. ‘Is that meant to be a threat?’
Harte looked momentarily nonplussed. ‘No.’ Then he smiled. ‘I was just trying to seduce you with my charm.’
‘Five minutes.’ DCI Gorman was only just not shouting. ‘You’ve been back in town five minutes, and already you’ve conducted an unregulated interview with a prime suspect in a murder case!’
‘It wasn’t my idea,’ Hazel objected. ‘He cornered me. I was just trying to get something in return.’
‘Was he threatening you?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. I mean, he’s a bit intimidating even when he’s just standing there breathing in and out, but I don’t think he meant me any harm. He wanted to send you a message without going through official channels.’
‘The message that he had nothing to do with this. Did you believe him?’
Hazel retreated behind the wooden expression they taught her in Basic Training. ‘It’s not my job to believe or disbelieve, only to gather evidence and then to test it.’
‘Yeah, yeah. But did you believe him?’
Hazel was cornered again. ‘On the whole, I think I did. If he was responsible for Trucker’s death, he just might have gone to pay blood-money to his mother. But I don’t think he took a wheel-brace to Gillian Mitchell’s head. I think he wants you to find out who did. I think – I think – they were an item.’
Gorman’s eyebrows did their disappearing trick again. ‘Gillian Mitchell and Leo Harte? The investigative journalist and the crime boss? Pull the other one, it has bells on.’
‘I know it seems unlikely. But he didn’t tell me that. I threw it out as bait. But his expression … Dave, I think I caught a fish.’
She paused for a moment, marshalling her thoughts. ‘It might explain some of the things we don’t understand. Like why, having started this book and got together some incendiary material, she suddenly stopped writing it four months before she died. Her research brought her into contact with Harte. He knew how much of a danger she represented. Maybe he intended to scare her off, or maybe he hoped to seduce her, shut her up that way. But events overtook them. The more they saw of each other, the more they found they really liked one another.
‘And then, Gillian hadn’t been commissioned to write about Harte, it was a personal project – she could put it aside without letting anyone down or having to answer any awkward questions. She just stopped writing the book and moved on to other stories. The assistance dog, the Spitfire girls and the mad monk.’
‘We need to know for sure. Try to find something in her files. A letter, maybe, to a friend or relative, talking about him. We’ll access her e-mail account, see if there’s anything there. And social media.’
‘By “we”,’ guessed Hazel, ‘I suppose you mean me.’
He had the grace to look uncomfortable. ‘You’re so much better with this electronic stuff than I am – and even I’m better than Tom Presley. And if I ask Scotland Yard for help, they’ll end up taking over.’
‘You get the authority, I’ll do the donkey-work,’ said Hazel. She grinned, impishly. ‘Five minutes I’ve been in CID, and already you can’t manage without me.’