by Rebecca Tope
It would be interesting to see him again, and find out how the questioning had been conducted. His seemingly impeccable alibi must have stood up, after all. The Cirencester clergy must carry enough status to satisfy any detective, and if Clarke had turned up to the post-dinner get-together clean and calm and devout, then this alone would weigh in his favour. Hard to imagine that someone who had just come from committing an act of such intense violence could disguise the fact. Unless he was a real Jekyll and Hyde, a skilled master of concealment and suppressor of emotion.
It was possible, of course. Case histories abounded of men and women who had recently savagely killed a close relative, only to appear convincingly innocent on the television, appealing for the killer to give himself up. People were very clever at dissembling. The trick, she supposed, was that they could first convince themselves. If they could believe their own lies, then anything was possible.
She thought again of Mike Lister, the wiry little man who was at ease with raw meat and large dogs and guns. A man who could kill an animal without flinching – would he be able to stamp down on a man’s skull, hard enough to shatter it? He’d probably done it enough times to rats and even perhaps foxes – but a human victim was something altogether different. With a foolish feeling of regret, she dismissed him as a suspect. That would be too great a coincidence, even if he did live barely a mile away, and had dumped the dead dogs almost on the very spot where the murder had taken place. Besides, there was Sharon speaking up for him, trying to explain that he had no sinister motives for what he had done. Thea had not been entirely convinced, but she no longer regarded him with quite such revulsion as before.
The thread running behind all her musings was one she persistently tried to ignore. Phil had said things on Sunday morning that she had not examined at all in the ensuing days. Emily, he had suggested, could have known both the victim and the perpetrator, in the ghastly scene she had witnessed. Thea had assured herself that her sister had not recognised Webster in the rain, with his head impossibly mangled. The horror in her voice when she phoned on Monday could not have been an act. With what Bruce had said of her condition since the phone call, she had created a theory in which Emily blamed herself for not successfully saving Sam from his fate, for not being braver or quicker in some way.
But there were also discrepancies in Emily’s explanation of where she had parked the car, and Bruce’s account of her sounding the horn to scare away the attacker had not come up in the version Thea had heard on Saturday night. It would be a sensible thing to do, effective and safe – a very Emily thing to do. And it ought to be quite easy to verify. People in surrounding houses would have heard it, even though they’d be unlikely to go out in the rain to investigate.
She gave it up. What she needed was another person to talk it through with, and the only candidate for that role was Phil Hollis, who was no longer prepared to sit cosily with her in a strange house discussing the details of violent deaths and suspicious characters. He was talking it through with Detective Inspector Jeremy Higgins, and other colleagues. A team of officers would be calling on all the houses in the area, asking whether they had heard or seen anything; did they remember a bloodstained man running through the rain, and if so what time was this sighting?
Not a very promising investigation, then. Random, irrational, frenzied – the sort of killing where careful assessment of motive, means and opportunity meant nothing. If Emily had not been there, it would have been no more difficult to resolve. Emily added almost nothing to their knowledge of what had taken place, apart from a fairly accurate idea of the time it all happened. She blinked – there was something wrong with that thought, some odd logic, that she couldn’t identify. She shook her head and forced her thoughts onto something else.
Men. Peter Clarke, Henry Galton and Phil Hollis provided plenty of material for fantasy, ample opportunity for comparisons and wry might-have-beens. She sat at the kitchen table, sorting out jigsaw pieces into different heaps, and indulged in half an hour of these and similar thoughts.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Friday had continued to be far too quiet and uneventful. Much too much thinking time had led to sentimental memories of her father, a painful acceptance that he was gone for ever, gloomy musings on the inexorable passage of time, which brought only oblivion and pointlessness. She had gone to bed early only to find the thoughts impossible to turn off. She finally fell asleep past midnight, wishing she had some excitingly energetic plan prepared for the next morning.
Saturday was almost sunny. The clouds were semitransparent, the blue sky behind them a reminder that fine weather was still a possibility. A morning for being outside, where she might have romped with Freddy and Basil – she couldn’t think of them as Ben and Jack – if an alternative destiny had permitted them to live. As it was, their demise continued to cast a pall over the whole property; the grave, though out of sight, impossible to forget.
She deferred for a third time the phonecall to Hong Kong. What would she say? The more she thought about it, the more unnecessary it seemed to spoil a holiday with unhappy news. There was nothing Cedric or Babs could do from such a distance, no sense in upsetting them. Undoubtedly she ought to tell them, in her capacity as paid house-sitter. But she was more and more sure that the humane thing to do was to leave it until they got back.
The chores were conscientiously performed, including cleaning out the ferret cage and giving them a generous layer of fresh wood shavings from a large bale in their shed. The ferrets were the aristocrats of the Angell household, she suspected. Ignatius was a novelty, the cats employed for their rodent-catching skills, but the ferrets probably earned money and status for Cedric. Quite where the dogs had fitted into the picture, she was resigned to never fully understanding.
Shopping was becoming an urgent priority, with the milk all gone and no fresh food in the cupboard. She would get a salad, some good bread and cheese – and a bottle of wine. Perhaps two bottles, in the hope that someone would eventually come to visit her, and she could offer them some decent hospitality when that happened.
There was a reasonable choice of good food shops in Stow, and by eleven she and Hepzibah were in the car heading north.
Phil saw her before she saw him. She supposed he was trained to recognise cars at a glance, but even after he flashed his lights at her, and tooted the horn, she was still asking herself what was going on. This was embarrassing, she knew, after seeing his car about two hundred times over the past year. It ought to have registered on her memory as quickly as hers clearly had on his. She drew up by the side of the road, waiting for him to run back to her. They were on a straight section, but not especially wide; traffic had to slow down and skirt round her in a way many drivers obviously found irritating.
‘Don’t stop there!’ Phil shouted, as she put her head out of the window to greet him. ‘Drive on to the next layby and I’ll come and find you.’
The next layby was nearly two miles away, as it turned out. What a drama, she grumbled to herself. What annoying things cars could be, not to mention the men who drove them. What did he want that was so important, anyway?
He was behind her almost before she’d switched the engine off. His face looked red and she could feel rumblings of confused emotions in her belly: a repeat of the uncertainty as to how to behave with him, sadness at their changed relationship and worry about what he might have to say. She had completely forgotten how it felt to meet an ex, how all that shared history got in the way and prevented you from just being two normal people together, ever again.
‘Thea – I was coming to see you,’ he began, superfluously.
‘Get in the car,’ she invited, before heaving the spaniel over into the back seat. The passenger seat was only slightly muddy, she noted. Anything that got onto Phil’s trousers would soon brush off again.
He wasted no time in coming to the point. ‘We haven’t given up on Peter Clarke,’ he began. ‘Jeremy’s done more checking up on him, and frankly, he’
s little more than a conman. I’d like to warn Mary—’
‘You mean Ariadne,’ Thea corrected him automatically.
‘Yes, whatever. The thing is, she might well be in danger from him. We think that’s what could have happened with his brother – he threatened to expose him for what he was, and got killed for his trouble.’
‘So why have you let him go?’
‘Lack of evidence, as usual.’
‘Oh, no.’ She leant away from him as if he’d waved something horrible under her nose. ‘I’m not going to act as a decoy for you. You want me to do something sneaky, I can hear it in your voice.’
‘Not at all. When have I ever asked anything like that of you?’ His tone was injured, reproachful.
‘What, then?’
‘Just try and spend some time with them. Try to get Mary – Ariadne – to see him for what he is. And be there for her, when she finally gets the message. She doesn’t deserve a bastard like him.’
‘Phil—’ Her face was pinched with utter resistance to what he was saying. ‘Are you sure you’ve got this right? He seems so nice. And why would he go to the trouble of seducing Ariadne if he doesn’t really like her? It doesn’t make any sense.’
‘I never said he didn’t like her. That part might even be genuine. But he won’t stay.’
‘No, because you’ll have him locked away for thirty years, convicted of murder.’
‘I hope so,’ he nodded emphatically. ‘I don’t mind admitting that’s my best case scenario.’
‘So are you going to tell me what awful things Jeremy discovered about him? Worse than what you told me last time, which I’m pretty sure turned out to be not even halfway true? Did it?’
He shifted awkwardly, trying to look at her face, but afraid to twist his back too far. ‘It’s not a matter of provable facts, true or otherwise. There’s no single revelation, just a long list of small deceptions and lies. Absolutely not what you’d expect from a clergyman.’
‘But he is a real vicar, is he?’
‘So it seems. He’s in Crockford.’
‘And he hasn’t been abusing small children?’
‘Not as far as we know.’
‘And he really did spend ten years or so in Africa?’
‘Yes, yes – those things are true. They’re too big to lie about. But we’ve interviewed former neighbours and colleagues. Nobody likes him or trusts him. Obviously they didn’t want to slander him, but they’ve said enough to ring any number of bells.’
Thea shook her head. ‘It sounds very feeble to me. Lots of people these days don’t like vicars. And when they look like him, you can just imagine what high emotions might be raging.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Phil, the man is beautiful. Those eyes are fantastic. I agree with you that he shouldn’t be a vicar, but not for the same reasons. Temptation must have been a constant hassle for him, women throwing themselves at his feet. I think it was very clever of him to go to Africa, where white skin and blue eyes probably don’t arouse the same passions.’
‘Well, it all adds up to a picture of a man nobody trusts. Combined with his connection to Webster, we’d be negligent to leave him to his own devices.’
‘But you arrested him and questioned him for two days. It sounds as if you’re at risk of persecuting the poor man.’
Phil heaved a sigh. ‘I can see you’re not going to be of much help, if you feel like that. Think of your sister, for God’s sake. The trauma of what she saw has sent her into a real spin – doesn’t she deserve for the killer to be caught?’
‘Don’t give me that. Of course the killer must be caught. And I haven’t said I won’t help you. I’m just exercising my rights to express an opinion based on what I’ve seen of Peter Clarke.’
He gave a mock shudder at her severity. ‘OK, then, thanks,’ he said. ‘Well, that’s not actually the main thing I wanted to talk about.’
‘Oh?’
‘We think it might help to stage a reconstruction of the killing – this evening. It’s exactly a week since it happened.’
‘But – you’ll need Emily. Has she said she’ll do it?’
‘That’s the problem. Her husband won’t even let us speak to her. He says she’s still too ill. So—’
‘Oh no! I know where this is going. For heaven’s sake, Phil, I don’t look anything like her.’
‘That doesn’t matter. It’s just to jog people’s memories. All we need is a woman in a car in that gateway, two men skirmishing in the layby, and the woman walking along to see what’s going on.’
‘Doesn’t seem worth the bother, if you ask me. Won’t you have to keep doing it over and over, because you’re not sure of the time?’
‘Two or three times, maybe. I thought you’d be keen to get involved, actually.’
She laughed scornfully at this. ‘I might if I thought it would help. But you’re assuming there’ll be people who pass by that same spot at the same time every Saturday. Besides, the weather’s completely different today.’
‘You’d be surprised how many people live by a rigid routine. Hotel staff coming and going, for a start. They’ve been totally unable to come up with anything useful so far. It’s as if they’re ashamed that something so unpleasant could happen practically on their grounds. And Saturday has its own routines. We’re not terribly hopeful, I admit, but it’s worth a try.’
‘Aren’t there any other witnesses at all? At that time in the evening, people must have been out and about.’
‘Nobody heard anything or saw anything until the flashing blue lights appeared at the layby. That in itself is odd. Webster walked through the foyer of the hotel at seven fifty-five, a few minutes after his brother left, and went out of the main door. They think he was going for a smoke. He had cigarettes in his pocket.’
‘Poor chap – having to go out in the rain to satisfy his habit.’
Phil ignored this opening onto one of their perennial arguments, in which Thea, a lifelong non-smoker, defended the right of people to do what they liked with their own bodies. Instead, he stuck to his account. ‘Somehow, for some reason, he walked down to the road, and turned left into the layby. In the rain.’
‘Was he wearing a mac?’
‘Not a mac, but a light anorak. With a hood.’
She gave him a thoughtful look. ‘Was it up?’
‘Pardon?’
‘The hood – was it over his head when he was attacked?’
‘Um—’ he narrowed his eyes and stared at the dashboard. ‘I don’t know.’ A thought visibly occurred. ‘It was covered with blood and brain tissue. It had filled up, like a bag. I don’t think it’s possible to know for sure where it was at the time of the attack.’
‘It would have marks all over it,’ she argued. ‘Footprints.’
He sighed. ‘Thea, everything was covered with mud and blood – it was a hopeless mess. Besides, I can’t see why it matters whether the hood was up or down.’
‘Surely it makes some sort of difference, don’t you think? It changes the image of him as victim. Not a middle-aged professor, but a type of hoodie. A faceless male person, that’s all.’
‘He was a don, not a professor,’ he corrected her pedantically. She resisted the urge to challenge him to explain the difference.
‘Well, if you ask me the killer is bound to be someone from out of the area, with no reason to choose Sam Webster, and who’s five hundred miles away by now.’
‘Possibly,’ he nodded irritably. ‘But you know as well as I do that such bogeymen are pretty rare. There’s always got to be a reason, especially for such a level of violence.’
‘Maybe. Emily did say he was shouting as he kicked poor Sam. A lot of bad language, she said.’
‘Did she?’ He frowned. ‘I don’t remember that.’
‘Did she tell you the bit about honking the car horn to frighten the man away?’ As soon as she’d spoken, Thea wondered why she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. Phil was suspicious enough witho
ut adding more discrepancies to the story.
‘Oh yes,’ he said, to her great relief. ‘She made quite a thing of that. We couldn’t work out where the car had been, but she cleared that up. When she got out to inspect the scratch, she heard the attack—’
‘And the shouting,’ Thea supplied.
‘Maybe. Anyway, she says she sounded the horn as a way of driving him off. Though it’s a bit funny that nobody remembers hearing it. Then she left the car where it was and walked the thirty yards or so to where it was all happening in the layby.’
‘Right. And the car was still in the gateway when the police and the ambulance arrived.’
‘Yes, it was. They offered to help her push it free, before we took her to Cirencester to be interviewed, but it wasn’t stuck, as it turned out.’
‘Did she ever say it was?’
He scratched his head. ‘I don’t think she did. We just somehow assumed it was, from the odd angle, and all the mud everywhere.’
They lapsed into a silent contemplation of the increasing complexities of the death of Sam Webster. Then Thea remembered what she had promised to do that evening. ‘We should at least have a car the same as Emily’s,’ she said. ‘For the re-enactment or whatever you call it.’
‘No problem.’
‘I can’t really refuse to do it, can I? What time do you want me?’
‘We’ll collect you at seven thirty.’
‘It’ll pass the time, I suppose,’ she said grudgingly.
‘Thanks,’ he nodded. She expected him to make a move, but instead he still seemed to be working down a mental list of things he had to say. ‘Now, what about those dogs? Are we still meant to be helping you to find them?’
‘Not necessary. They’re buried in the garden at Hawkhill, poor things.’
‘Oh? What happened?’
She gave a quick account of the final stages of the story, surprised at the way he went tense at the mention of Galton. ‘And you believed him?’ he blurted, incredulously. ‘Good God, Thea, that’s the oldest trick in the book. There’s no evidence at all against Lister, is there? Don’t you think it’s all a bit neat, the way Galton explains it?’