‘Right. If you don’t mind using the phone in here for your calls, as you know the way … I must get back to my wife. This has all been rather a shock for her, of course, and I can’t imagine how she’ll react when she hears …’
Thanet would have liked to watch young Mrs Fairleigh’s reaction himself, but he really had to get someone on the gate as soon as possible, just in case. ‘As soon as I’ve got things organised I’ll want to talk to the rest of the family. I’ll need to find out if anyone saw anything.’
‘Right. We’ll be in my mother’s sitting room. It’s the room next door to this.’
‘I’ll fetch my bag, and tell Helen not to wait,’ said Mallard in Thanet’s ear as they followed Fairleigh out of the room. ‘She can take the car, no doubt someone will give me a lift home. What about Joan?’
‘Ditto. Tell her I’ll get Lineham to drop me at her mother’s house. If I’m later than 10.30, I’ll go straight home.’
There was a buzz of excited conversation after the announcement as people speculated as to the nature of the accident. Then Thanet returned to Mrs Fairleigh’s bedroom. It wasn’t the place he would have chosen to make his phone calls, with the old lady’s body lying there awaiting the indignities to which it would shortly be subjected, but Fairleigh had given him no choice. Spreading a clean handkerchief across his palm before picking up the receiver he rang Lineham first. Fortunately the sergeant was on duty this weekend.
Lineham’s whistle down the phone when he heard the news made Thanet’s ear ring.
‘No need to deafen me, Mike.’
‘But Mr Fairleigh’s mother! Is this going to cause a stink! Does the Super know yet?’
‘No. I’m just going to ring him.’
‘Isn’t he in London again this weekend?’
Angharad Draco was undergoing treatment for leukaemia, which involved regular trips to a London hospital. Draco always drove her up and fetched her and, whenever possible, stayed there. He adored his wife and the change in the dynamic little Welshman since the diagnosis had been dramatic. The man who had once said that he wanted to know if anyone so much as sneezed in his patch now merely kept things ticking over, an automaton whose attention was more or less permanently engaged elsewhere. More or less, Thanet reminded himself. With the Fairleighs involved this might well be a case of less rather than more.
‘I’d forgotten. Yes. I’ll give him a ring at the hospital.’
‘I’ll just get the SOCOs organised, rustle up some reinforcements, and I’ll be on my way.’
‘Right. Oh, Mike, just one more thing. Could you make time to call in at your house on the way to pick up some clothes for me?’
Lineham understood at once. ‘Yes, sure. What would you like?’
‘A shirt, a tie, and a lightweight jacket.’
‘Trousers OK?’
‘They’ll do.’
‘What colour are they?’
‘What does it matter? Fawn.’
‘Just wanted to make sure the jacket matched.’
‘Mike, I’m not taking part in a fashion parade. Just bring me something more suitable, that’s all.’
‘OK, sir. I’ll see what I can do.’
Thanet tried the hospital but Draco had gone out. He left a message and then went along the corridor to the sitting room. Here he found Mallard, Fairleigh and a third person, a woman. It wasn’t Fairleigh’s wife, Thanet knew Grace Fairleigh by sight. This was a stranger.
THREE
‘Ah, Inspector,’ said Fairleigh. ‘This is my aunt, Miss Ransome. She and my mother share – shared – this flat. Letty, this is Inspector Thanet.’
No one would ever have taken them for sisters, thought Thanet. Apart from the age difference – Miss Ransome, he guessed, was a good five years younger than Mrs Fairleigh, in her late sixties, probably – this woman would have faded into the background anywhere. She was slight, dowdily dressed in a long-sleeved limp summer dress in floral pastels. She wore no make-up and her straight brown thinning hair streaked with grey was scraped back into a bun, untidy wisps escaping around the sides and at the back of the neck. She was clutching the wooden arms of the chair in which she sat as if to prevent the foundations of her world from rocking. As she glanced up at Thanet and murmured an acknowledgement to the introduction she kept her head down and raised only her eyes, as if expecting to be browbeaten or reprimanded. Had this been her habitual reaction to the woman who lay dead in the next room? Thanet remembered the arrogance of that profile and wondered: had Mrs Fairleigh put down her younger sister once too often?
Miss Ransome had now taken a wisp of lace handkerchief from the pocket of her dress and was dabbing at the tears which had begun to trickle down her cheeks.
‘I just can’t believe it. Such a terrible shock. We were half expecting her to go, but to think that someone …’ She shook her head, looked in despair at the useless scrap of material in her hand and accepted with gratitude the immaculately folded white handkerchief which Fairleigh now took from his breast pocket and handed to her.
‘Thank you, dear.’
‘Miss Ransome,’ said Thanet gently, ‘I’m afraid I shall need to talk to you at some point, but I can see that you’re very upset at the moment. A little later on, perhaps?’
She blew her nose and nodded. ‘Yes, of course.’ She glanced up at her nephew. ‘Perhaps it would be better if I joined Grace?’
‘A good idea. My wife,’ he explained to Thanet. ‘She has gone to wait in our own drawing room, away from …’ His eyes flickered in the direction of his mother’s bedroom. ‘I thought it would be best. Understandably, she is very upset. A friend of hers is with her.’ He bent solicitously over his aunt. ‘Caroline is with Grace, Letty.’ He put a hand under her elbow to help her up. ‘Let me take you down to join them.’
‘You’ll come back up, sir?’ said Thanet.
Fairleigh nodded. ‘I’ll only be a few minutes.’ He put an arm around his aunt’s shoulders and ushered her gently from the room.
Thanet used the time to fill Mallard in on the arrangements he had made and to look around the room, which was comfortably furnished with faded oriental rugs, curtains and loose covers in floral chintz. There was rather too much furniture for his taste, though, all of it antique and polished to a mirror-like gloss, each piece cluttered with ornaments, pieces of porcelain, photographs in silver frames and table lamps.
The room was on the side of the house and Thanet crossed to look out. The crowds had thinned considerably and one or two of the stallholders were beginning to pack up. Mallard had ensconced himself in an armchair beside the fireplace and seemed quite content to wait, tapping his fingers on the arm of the chair in time to a tune he was whistling softly between his teeth. Thanet had just worked out that it was ‘The Skye Boat Song’ when Fairleigh returned.
‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘What a day! I still can’t believe this is happening.’ He sat down and waved Thanet to follow suit. He took out a packet of low-tar cigarettes and offered it around before lighting one. He inhaled deeply. ‘Now, what did you want to ask me?’
‘If you could just give me a general picture of what’s been happening here today? I imagine it’s been fairly hectic.’
Fairleigh took another drag at his cigarette and groaned, the smoke issuing from his mouth in a thin stream. ‘I don’t know why we do this every year, I really don’t. We must be mad.’
Thanet thought he knew why. It was because it was good for Fairleigh’s public image, to be seen to be prepared to put himself to considerable effort and inconvenience for the sake of charity.
Fairleigh contemplated the glowing tip of his cigarette. ‘Well, let me see. It got off to a bad start with the day nurse ringing to say that she was sick and wouldn’t be in today. The night nurse had just gone home and the agency couldn’t supply another at such short notice so we decided we’d somehow have to manage to look after Mother ourselves.’
‘That was at what time?’
‘Around 8.15, I should thi
nk.’
‘And “we” being …?’
‘Well it had to be my wife, chiefly, as far as this afternoon was concerned. The rest of us – my aunt and I, that is – would be fully occupied. I had to be present at the opening to introduce Jill Cochrane and then to escort her around the stalls and so on, and my aunt was helping to run one of the stalls. We had deliberately left my wife free to deal with any last-minute emergencies that came up, there’s always something on an occasion like this. And whereas we’d normally be able to get someone from the village in to help, everyone was involved with the fête. We did manage to find someone to sit with Mother this morning, fortunately, a Mrs Brent, but she was helping with the teas this afternoon, so my wife said she’d take over after lunch. She couldn’t stay with Mother all the time, but we decided that if she looked in on her every half an hour or so that should be sufficient. It wasn’t as though she needed constant attention.’
‘I gather she had a stroke around ten days ago.’
‘That’s right. On 30 June.’
‘Was it serious?’
‘Pretty severe, yes. Which was why I wasn’t surprised when I looked in this afternoon and found her dead.’ He compressed his lips and stubbed out his cigarette with more force than was necessary. ‘I never dreamed … Anyway, yes, the stroke left her paralysed down one side and unable to make anything but unintelligible noises. She seemed to understand what was said to her, but she had to be fed, washed, looked after like a baby, really. She must have hated the indignity of it all.’
‘Did she go into hospital?’
‘Oh yes, for the first week. But when there had been no noticeable change in her condition by then, it seemed that it was likely to be a long slow process and she had made me promise that if anything like this ever happened to her, that I would make sure she was nursed at home. She wanted to die in her own bed, she said.’ He grimaced. ‘Well, she did, didn’t she? It would have been better if I’d disregarded her wishes and left her in the hospital. At least there she would have been safe.’
‘Had her condition improved, since coming home?’
‘A slight improvement only. Over the last day or two she had begun to regain a little movement in her fingers.’
‘What about the side that was not paralysed? Was she able to move her arm?’
‘Yes. But she didn’t, much.’ He frowned. ‘She just lay there.’
‘So she wouldn’t have been able to put up much of a struggle, you think.’
The muscles at the side of Fairleigh’s jaw tightened as he clenched his teeth and shook his head. ‘I shouldn’t think so, no.’
Mallard cleared his throat and crossed his legs and Thanet glanced at him, raising his eyebrows in case the doctor had something to say, but Mallard shook his head.
‘Perhaps we could go back to this morning, then. What happened after the nurse rang?’
Fairleigh shrugged. ‘My wife and I had breakfast, then she went up to see to my mother, I believe my aunt helped her. Mrs Brent arrived at about 9.30 and took over. We had a pretty busy morning, as you can imagine, getting ready for the fête, and I was outside most of the time. Around one we all had a sandwich lunch.’
‘All?’
‘My wife and I, my aunt, Mrs Brent and Sam.’
‘Sam?’
‘Samantha Young, our housekeeper. She’d been working outside most of the morning too, she mucks in with everything, she’s practically one of the family. Perhaps I should explain that although we all live under the same roof, we run two entirely separate establishments here. My mother and my aunt have their own entrance, their own housekeeper, and take all their meals here in their own wing. We used to see each other, of course, but not much more than if we’d been next-door neighbours.’
‘Are there any internal connecting doors?’
‘Yes, two, one upstairs and one down, but they are very rarely used … Look, is all this relevant, Inspector?’
‘I’m just trying to get the general picture. It’s important for me to understand how one gains access to your mother’s room.’
‘Yes, I see. Well as far as this afternoon’s concerned, there was only one way.’
Thanet raised his eyebrows.
‘Through the door by which you came in, downstairs near the kitchen. For security reasons we always lock the front and back doors of the main house on occasions such as this, and shut the downstairs windows and draw the curtains. It makes sense, don’t you agree?’
‘Very sensible.’ But members of the family would presumably have keys, Thanet thought, and if there was a connecting door upstairs it would have been easy to slip through and into old Mrs Fairleigh’s room with none of the women coming and going in the corridor downstairs any the wiser.
‘So, you all had lunch at around one. Then what?’
‘I went back outside for a last-minute check before going up to change. A few minutes before two Jill Cochrane arrived. At two she opened the fête and after that I was with her most of the time until I came in for a pee.’
Fairleigh was rubbing the side of his nose. Thanet was instantly alerted. This was an unconscious gesture frequently indulged in by someone who was being evasive or, more importantly, lying. And yes, Fairleigh was looking directly at him, holding his gaze as if to demonstrate how transparently truthful he was being.
If they were trying to hide the truth, rogues and villains would often become defiant at this point, as if challenging the interviewer to disprove what they were saying, or else they would find themselves unable to meet his eyes and would look shifty. But many people believed that direct eye contact was tantamount to proof of innocence, unaware that there were other ways in which they were simultaneously betraying themselves. Also, of course, the experienced policeman learned over the years to trust his instinct. Yes, he would certainly have to go into that ‘most of the time’ in more detail later, thought Thanet. But for the moment he let it pass.
Meanwhile his face betrayed none of his suspicions. ‘What time was that?’
Fairleigh thought for a moment. ‘It must have been …’
There was a knock at the door.
Fairleigh turned his head. ‘Come in!’
It was Lineham, Thanet was glad to see, carrying a small suitcase which presumably contained the promised change of clothes. Thanet wished the sergeant could have arrived just a few minutes earlier, to confirm his impression that Fairleigh was lying. He and Lineham had worked together for so long that without the sergeant he felt as though he were operating on three cylinders. Lineham was his extra eyes and ears when his own had too much to assimilate, his second pair of hands in times of crisis, the sounding board against which theories were tested, the stimulation he needed to see possibilities unthought of.
He introduced Lineham to Fairleigh. ‘Mr Fairleigh was just telling me what happened this afternoon. You were saying you came in at …?’
‘About half past three, I suppose, or a little later.’
The blue eyes still held Thanet’s, unwavering. If he were lying, was it because he wanted to cover up what had happened before half past three, or after?
‘I could have used the downstairs cloakroom, but to be honest I was glad to get away from the crowds for a bit, so I deliberately spun out my time inside by going up to our own bathroom. Then I thought, while I was in I might as well look in on Mother. So I came in through the connecting door and found her’ – he shook his head grimly and waved his hand in the direction of the bedroom – ‘as you saw her.’
‘That would have been, what? Around twenty to four, then?’
‘Something like that, yes.’
‘During the time that you were in the house, did you see anyone else?’
Fairleigh shook his head.
‘Any sign of disturbance, anything in the least unusual?’
‘No.’ Fairleigh suddenly stood up and took a few agitated steps towards the window before turning. ‘I just don’t understand it! I suppose he was making for my mother’s d
ressing table, where she kept her jewellery, when he realised she was there. But why do what he did? I mean, it was obvious she was helpless, for God’s sake. And with all that din going on outside no one would have been able to hear her if she did call for help.’ He took his cigarettes out and lit one with angry puffs. ‘The whole thing is my fault, my responsibility. I should have made damned sure that someone was with her all the time.’
If Fairleigh were innocent this was something he would always reproach himself with, Thanet knew. But if not, well, he was putting on a fine show.
‘Or if I’d been just a few minutes earlier … My wife says she came up to check on Mother at ten past three, and everything was all right then.’
If that were true, the period during which the murder had been committed had now become reduced to half an hour.
‘Later on, after the Scenes-of-Crime officers have finished, we’ll ask you to check whether or not anything is missing.’ Thanet glanced at Lineham. ‘I imagine they’ll be here soon?’
‘Any minute, now, sir, I should think.’
Fairleigh nodded. ‘Right.’
‘There’s just one other point, then. Is there anyone who perhaps had a grudge against your mother? An ex-employee, for example, who might consider himself unfairly treated? Someone whom she might have antagonised in the past?’
Fairleigh looked horrified. ‘You’re not suggesting this might have been planned, deliberate? Good God, Inspector, she was a helpless old woman. Who could possibly have had any reason to wish her harm?’
Who indeed? Cui bono? thought Thanet. Who benefits? The old lady might well have been a wealthy woman, and Fairleigh, to his knowledge, her only son and heir – a point he would have to check. And then, however much Fairleigh pooh-poohed the idea, there was another classic motive, revenge. Who knew what harm or injury the old woman might have committed in the past? If someone had long held a grudge against her, what better time would there have been to execute vengeance than now, when she was helpless to defend herself and there was no nurse on duty to act as watch-dog? Sooner or later it was going to dawn on Fairleigh that the police investigation was concentrating on the family, and Thanet had no doubt that that was when the storm would break. But for the moment it would be easier all round if he allowed the MP to go on thinking that his suggestion of an intruder was accepted by the police as the most likely possibility.
Wake the Dead Page 3