by Tim Heald
‘I said it doesn’t matter.’ Ashley’s voice sounded unnaturally strained.
He sipped wine and made a visible effort to pull himself together.
‘Anyway, old chap. I’m awfully sorry. Failing in my duty as a host. All got a bit much for me.’
Tudor judged sympathy was called for though he wasn’t feeling much.
‘Care to talk about it?’ he offered, gingerly. ‘Not really, old man. Private, personal. Bit embarrassing to tell the truth. But it’s water under the bridge now.’
‘You and Lorraine?’
Ashley shot him a sharp, hostile glance.
‘What do you know about me and Lorraine?’
‘Only what everyone else seems to know. And what she told me herself.’
‘Nobody else knows anything. It’s a private matter. Was a private matter.’
Ashley’s voice had risen several octaves again. He poured himself more wine and more too for Tudor, though the level in Tudor’s glass had barely fallen.
Taken to drink, Tudor said to himself, recognizing as he did that the thought was prissy and based on nothing. Ashley had always liked a jar. Himself as well. But it was no more than social drinking. Well, wasn’t it? Always perfectly under control. Ashley’s hands were shaking. He was obviously stressed. ‘Cigarette?’ Ashley asked.
‘I didn’t think you smoked,’ said Tudor, trying to keep a critical note out of his voice. He wasn’t critical. If people wanted to kill themselves by kippering that was their affair. He knew he sounded censorious even though he didn’t mean to. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that he knew bloody well that Ashley never smoked. He never had. He was inclined to health freakishness in an old– fashioned Gaylord Hauser way. He had eaten yoghurt when no one knew what it was. Inclined towards organic foods before anyone used the word. He certainly never smoked.
‘Just shows how little you really know about me,’ said Ashley. He lit a full strength Marlboro and inhaled.
‘I suppose,’ said Tudor.
‘So what exactly did Lorraine tell you?’
‘Only that you and she had been having a relationship. That she was very fond of you. I was pleased. She seemed very nice.’
‘She had no right.’ Ashley sucked hard on the cigarette. ‘She had absolutely no business telling you about us. Not,’ he corrected himself quickly, ‘that there was anything to tell. But if there was she shouldn’t have said anything. It’s a betrayal.’
‘OK,’ said Tudor, ‘I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. But I’m sorry she’s dead.’
‘No it’s not,’ said Ashley, bitterly. ‘Absolutely none of your business. And I’m sorry too. What makes you think I wouldn’t be? Just because you and I spend our lives up to our elbows in sudden death doesn’t mean to say that we aren’t distressed by the real thing when it happens to us. Or to people we know. I don’t know what’s happened to you but I’ve not been desensitized. Prick me and I bleed.’
‘Quite.’
Ashley broke another uncomfortable silence by stubbing out his cigarette and saying, ‘So I apologize. Accepted?’
‘Of course,’ said Tudor, not meaning it. ‘But I’m still confused. What were all those e-mails about? I don’t get it.’
‘What e-mails, dear boy? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘The ones you sent, asking me to enter the mulled wine competition.’
Ashley laughed a harsh, mirthless bark of a laugh and Basil whined in sympathy.
T don’t know what you’re talking about. Honest injun.’ Ashley put a hand on his heart.
‘Oh, come on.’ This time Tudor did take a sizeable glug of shiraz. ‘Don’t be silly. You sent me several e-mails telling me to enter the competition and directing me towards your special ingredients which were in your desk drawer just as you said. I think you owe me an explanation.’
Ashley stared at him.
‘Are you serious?’
‘Never more so.’
‘Even supposing you did get e-mail messages to that effect, whatever makes you think they came from me?’
‘Are you calling me a liar?’ Tudor was uncomfortably aware of losing his cool. Not at all what he intended.
‘Oh Tudor, old friend,’ Ashley sighed, ‘surely you know me better than that? After all these years... where is trust? Where is comradeship? We go back a long way, you and I. Surely that counts for something?’
‘You’re suggesting that I’ve invented a story about your sending me e-mails.’
Ashley sighed and exhaled cigarette smoke. ‘Don’t be silly. I’m simply suggesting that you may have misread some signals. You thought you were getting e-mails from me but you were mistaken.’
Tudor frowned.
‘What exactly do you mean?’
‘Look,’ said Ashley, ‘we’re neither of us enormously computer-literate. No one older than about twelve really is. Not unless they’re Bill Gates or a seriously committed anorak.’ Tudor was still frowning.
‘Go on,’ he said, ‘I get by with computers. I’ve passed my driving test: I’m as good on my laptop as I am with my car. Keyboard, dashboard... all the same to me.’
‘You know perfectly well you’d be pushed to change a wheel let alone a faulty radiator or a rear axle. It’s the same with the computer.’
‘So?’
‘So you couldn’t detect a computer fraud in a month of Sundays. All you can really do is basic word-processing, send and receive e-mail and access information through sites like Google. How do you know it was me who sent those messages?’
‘They sounded like you. And they were signed by you.’
‘Well any half-baked forger would make sure the text sounded tolerably like me. And you can forge an electronic signature as easily as a handwritten one. How did you know it was my signature?’
Tudor was embarrassed. It was true. He was computer literate by the standards of his profession and according to his needs. But in real terms he was doing little more than talk pidgin.
‘Well, first, the messages were signed by you. Second, the instructions about where to find the ingredients for the mull turned out to be accurate. And thirdly the electronic stuff was yours.’
‘You mean it said the message had been sent by [email protected]?’
‘Absolutely.’
And you think that constitutes proof?’
‘Well...’ Tudor recognized that he had been gullible. It was not just that he was a relative novice when it came to technology, it was also that this whole business of trust and friendship had fogged his natural scepticism. If it had been someone trying to sell him double-glazing or life insurance he wouldn’t have believed.
Nevertheless...
‘But why in God’s name would anyone want to do that? Forge your signature on idiotic e-mails about the St Petroc’s mulled wine competition?’
‘That,’ said Ashley, betraying his age, ‘is the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Who wishes me harm? Do I have any enemies?’
Tudor remembered Jazz Trethewey’s confession and the rivalry for the Dame’s job. He took a risk.
‘Jazz Trethewey suggested that you’d staged this vanishing trick simply to take me down a peg. That you’d decided I was a pompous Pom, an arrogant English bastard, and this was your way of deflating me.’
Ashley stubbed out another cigarette and poured more Rymills.
‘Did she just? Well, that’s not exactly an act of friendship.’
‘Are you suggesting that Jazz Trethewey sent the e-mails?’
‘She doesn’t like me. We have conflicting ambitions in certain areas. She’s gay, of course, which complicates matters. And it would have been a doddle for her to send e-mails in my name. The university system is completely insecure. Any half-baked hacker could turn it to their advantage but it would help if you were part of it already.’
‘I don’t get it,’ he said eventually. ‘But are you saying that you definitely didn’t send those e-mails?’
‘Sco
ut’s honour old bean.’
‘Shit,’ said Tudor uncharacteristically. A week or so ago he would have accepted Ashley’s anachronistic Baden-Powell assertion without a qualm. Now he had plenty of qualms but he was also hopelessly uncertain and disoriented.
‘Do you think it was an accident?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘Lorraine Montagu’s death?’
‘It sounds like it. What else are you suggesting?’
‘Well,’ Tudor tried to rally, ‘suppose she was poisoned. Suppose she drank my – our – mulled wine first – and that there was something in it which killed her. That there was a poison in the ingredients which I had been instructed to use by those e-mail messages. So whoever sent the e-mails committed murder by proxy.’
Ashley stared at his old friend over the top of his glass. ‘You’ve been reading too many books,’ he said, eventually. ‘That’s pure Father Brown.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
Greg Sanders’ office was as plain and neat as any Tudor had ever encountered. It contained a desk, two filing cabinets, a table with half-a-dozen chairs round it. There were no pictures on the walls. On the desk there was a laptop computer on to which, Tudor guessed, all the files from the cabinets would long ago have been transferred. The only deviation from clear, spare lines in not particularly varied shades of grey was an unusually large window looking out across Hobart City to the slopes of the Wurlitzer.
Today the view from the window was as grey as the room itself. It was a louring, drizzly day which drained all colour from the townscape and the mountain slopes. The summit itself was shrouded in a swirl of cloud.
The mood of the meeting was as subdued and monotone as the room and the view. It was Tudor’s idea but the policeman had acquiesced with alacrity. They both had things to tell each other.
‘You don’t mind if Karen sits in on this?’
DCI Sanders nodded at WPC White who was looking pert, pretty and uniformed. Though phrased as a question it was actually a statement of fact. ‘You don’t mind if Karen sits in on this because I need a witness. If you say you mind you’ll be over-ruled and although I’m not actually arresting you on a charge of anything and although you have come voluntarily and of your own accord I can, under Tasmanian law, detain you for just about as long as I like as a material witness in a case of sudden and hitherto unexplained death. This may or may not be Tasmanian law, but even though you are a world authority on criminal affairs this is such an out of the way place that I very much doubt whether you know that much about Tasmanian law and even if you do I shall produce any number of loopholes and precedents with which to confuse you. In any case you are anxious to assist the police in their enquiries, are you not?’
Sanders, naturally, said none of these things. They were best left unsaid and were so comprehensively understood by all three present that there was no need. Nonetheless the unsaid sentences hung in the air as tangible and enervating as the grey walls, carpet, fixtures and fittings within and the grey mist without.
‘Fine,’ said Tudor smiling and nodding. ‘Fine, that’s absolutely fine with me.’
‘You don’t mind if Karen takes a note,’ said Sanders. Again a statement not a question and then, as if he had read Tudor’s mind, Sanders said, ‘Karen has immaculate shorthand and I have an old-fashioned aversion to tape recorders. More trouble than they’re worth. Unreliable too. We may seem old-fashioned down here but in some respects the old and tested are, well, old and tested.’
Tudor smiled and nodded. He had some sympathy with this view.
Sanders was seated at the desk, Karen and Tudor at the table. The atmosphere was curiously ambivalent, not formal nor informal, not friendly nor cold. It wasn’t even neutral enough to be neutral.
‘Before you tell us why you wanted to talk to us,’ said Greg, ‘I should tell you that we’ve had the first reports of the autopsy and she was pregnant.’
Tudor found, to his surprise, that he was not surprised. He said nothing.
‘Somewhere between six and eight weeks we think,’ he continued, answering the question Tudor had not asked.
‘And you’re assuming it was Ashley’s?’ said Tudor. Another statement masquerading as a question.
‘I don’t make assumptions while I’m waiting for proof positive. DNA testing will tell us for certain.’
‘But the only DNA samples you’ll take will be from Professor Carpenter?’ Yet another faux-question.
Sanders nodded. ‘We have the same presumption of innocence until proven guilty that you do in the UK,’ he said. ‘So even while I might harbour a suspicion I would never allow it to become an assumption until it was properly tested.’
Tudor nodded in turn. Fair enough. If the dead woman had been carrying Ashley’s child it proved nothing beyond the fact that he was the father. Did it give him a motive for murder? Possibly. But just as possibly the reverse. What kind of man would murder his own unborn child? Didn’t bear thinking about. You couldn’t be sane, surely? Tudor had always had enormous difficulty with legal definitions of insanity. It seemed to him that some crimes were so barbaric and disgusting that their commission alone was evidence of insanity. But he knew this wasn’t the case.
‘What about cause of death?’ he asked. ‘Are we any further on?’
DCI Sanders said nothing for a while. Finally he seemed to make up his mind.
‘You put me in a very difficult position,’ he said. Then, looking across at the girl, he said, ‘This had better be off the record Karen.’ Outside, the whole of the mountain had vanished in mist and cloud and a thin rain was sliding into the window and running down the glass. They needed the strip lighting.
‘Technically, I need hardly say, I shouldn’t be confiding in you at all. On the other hand you have an international reputation as an expert in criminal affairs and especially criminal history in fact and fiction. I know and respect your work and it would be stupid of me not to avail myself of your assistance.’ He seemed to be partly thinking out loud. ‘Even if I can only do so informally and certainly without telling my bosses. As far as they are concerned a large part of these conversations have not taken place. Is that a problem?’
‘Not in the least,’ said Tudor. ‘I’m grateful for your confidence.’
‘Very well,’ said Sanders. ‘On that basis I can tell you that the pathologist hasn’t come up with anything positive. On the other hand, the negatives are already pointing in a particular direction.’
Tudor wished he wouldn’t speak in riddles but put it down to genuine confusion. He didn’t blame him for that. He was confused too.
‘Lorraine Montagu was asthmatic,’ said Sanders, ‘which meant that she occasionally suffered breathing difficulties. These were sometimes severe enough to be described as “attacks” and she had an inhaler prescribed by her doctor. She used it from time to time to ease discomfort and make her breathing easier, but it was never designed or used as a lifesaver. Her condition wasn’t regarded as life-threatening.’
‘Could the doctor have been wrong?’ In Tudor’s experience medical misdiagnosis was as common as not.
‘You know as well as I do that doctors can make mistakes,’ said Sanders, ‘but in this case it seems unlikely. Montagu’s doctor was a top woman. Is a top woman. She and the pathologist both agree that death was unlikely to have been caused by a more than usually severe attack of her asthma.’
‘But it’s possible?’
‘Everything’s possible. But it’s improbable. What is definite is that there was no physical obstruction. She didn’t choke on a fishbone. Or its equivalent.’
‘So your people are suggesting that her asphyxia was caused by something in what she drank which triggered her condition. And because, according to Sammy, she only drank from my concoction it would have to be one of the ingredients in my brew.’
‘Got it in one.’
‘But it can’t have been a poison in the conventional sense or everyone would have choked to death.’
&
nbsp; ‘I’m with you,’ said Sanders. Karen was scribbling frantically, her tongue touching her teeth as she concentrated.
‘So there was something in my brew which killed her?’
‘Mmmmhuh.’
This was agreement.
‘Which either means it was a terrible mistake, or someone deliberately introduced a killer element into the drink.’
‘Well, excuse me.’ Sanders was very serious. ‘But the only person who could have introduced such a killer element was you yourself. The system was foolproof.’
‘Except for Sammy,’ said Tudor.
‘Except, possibly, for Sammy. But it would have been tricky. He was in full view of all the competing parties. You, on the other hand, were able to mix your drink in private without being seen.’
‘Look,’ said Tudor, realizing as he said it that his position was extremely weak, ‘It’s not as simple as that.’
‘How not? It seems horribly straightforward to me.’
Tudor swallowed hard and told him the story of the e-mails. It took time and he didn’t enjoy it.
When he had finished there was a long and awkward silence punctuated only by a few felt-tip-pen strokes from WPC White.
‘What do you think, Karen?’ asked the DCI eventually.
She sucked on her pen and finally said, ‘It’s so odd I guess I think it’s likely true.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’
‘To be honest, you never seemed that interested in Ashley’s disappearance, if that’s how we’re going to describe it. It’s only since Lorraine died that it seems particularly important. Until then it could hardly have been more trivial. Just some menopausal failed academic playing silly buggers.’
‘Is that what you really think?’
‘I don’t know what I really think.’ Tudor spoke more sharply than he intended. Not for the first time he wished he had more control over the impression he created. Still, it was true. He was confused. Hopelessly so. He felt almost as if he’d found his wife in bed with his best friend.