Scene of Crime

by Jill McGown

  “Pass.”

  “And when did he tie her hands? She struggled to free herself, didn’t she?”

  “Pass. But let’s forget theories and look at the facts. He wasn’t happily married, his wife was having an affair, his car was seen in Eliot Way when the window was broken, two people were heard having a row before the window was broken, the burglary seems to have been staged and the proceeds dumped, and this all happened when he says he was ‘driving around.’ I think that’s more than enough grounds for bringing him in for questioning, don’t you?”

  Judy nodded. “Does this mean you won’t be coming with me to the clinic?” she asked.

  “Not necessarily,” he said, immediately on the defensive, as he always was when pretending he didn’t use every excuse in the book to get out of this particular duty. “When’s the appointment?”

  “Half past five.”

  Lloyd looked at his watch. “Half past five,” he said, setting its alarm. “There.” He patted the watch. “I’ll be home by quarter past.”

  Oh, sure he would, thought Judy. She had handed him the excuse on a plate this time.

  Carl sat in the interview room, waiting for the tape to be set up. He hadn’t been surprised when he was asked to come in and answer questions. He knew that driving around was not going to impress them as an alibi, and he knew that Lloyd was already suspicious of him, and would want more detail about that drive, which he couldn’t give. Because he had left the house and had just driven around. Anywhere. Everywhere. He had no idea where exactly.

  He’d been cautioned, told that he wasn’t under arrest, asked if he wanted a solicitor. He didn’t. The first question startled him.

  “What size shoe do you wear, Dr. Bignall?” asked Finch.

  “Ten,” he said.

  “Thank you.” Sergeant Finch put a familiar-looking book down on the desk. “Do you know what this is?” he asked.

  He knew he’d seen it somewhere before, but he wasn’t sure if he did know what it was. Oh, of course, yes, he did. He frowned. “Yes,” he said. “It’s Estelle’s journal. Where did you get it?”

  “It was handed in to us by Marianne Mackintosh,” Lloyd said from over by the window set high in the wall, apparently anxious to catch a glimpse of something, standing practically on tiptoe in order to look out. “She found it when she went to your house this morning. She thought we ought to see it.” He turned as he spoke.

  Carl frowned, puzzled, and looked back at Finch. “Why didn’t she just leave it where it was?”

  “She thought we’d be interested in the contents,” said Finch. “She was right. Have you read it?”

  “No, of course not. It’s private.” He’d had no desire to read it. “She started keeping it when she joined the writer’s group—the others suggested it. Keeping a journal helps you learn how to put things down on paper.”

  “I think perhaps you should read it now.” Lloyd left the window and pushed the book across the table to him. “If you don’t mind.”

  Carl picked it up and opened it where someone had thoughtfully provided a Bartonshire Constabulary bookmark. He was startled, to say the least, by what he found himself reading. He leafed back through it; the previous entries were her thoughts on current affairs, on the weather. This announcement that she had taken a lover just suddenly appeared, and then there was nothing but weekly accounts of this apparent love affair. He looked up, shaking his head. “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “Seems clear enough to me,” said Finch. “Did you find it? Read it? Decide to face her with it?”

  Carl stared at him. “I’ve never read it,” he said. “This is the first time I’ve ever opened it.”

  “Did you go back home to catch her? Have a fight with her?”

  Carl felt as though he was in a play that he had failed to rehearse. None of this was making any sense. “I’ve told you—whoever had that row, it wasn’t me and Estelle.”

  “Then what were you doing between half past seven and twenty-five to nine?” demanded Finch.

  “I drove round to clear my head.” He appealed to Lloyd. “I told you all this last night.”

  “You said something happened that you had to think about,” Lloyd said. “But you wouldn’t tell me what. I think you found that diary, left the house, drove round, then turned back and went home again.”

  But this was nonsense. Nonsense. What on earth would make them think that? They couldn’t just accuse people out of the blue, could they? He had never read her diary, he didn’t believe for one moment that she had a lover, he had not had an argument with her, and he had not come back for any reason at all. He had driven around, and then gone to the theater. He told them that for the umpteenth time.

  “Did anyone see you driving round?”

  Carl looked back at the uncompromising Finch. He doubted very much that anyone had seen him. Driving around was driving around—people didn’t see you. You were doing it because you didn’t want to see people. That was kind of the point of it. “No,” he said. “Not as far as I’m aware.”

  Lloyd leaned forward. “You do see our problem, don’t you, Dr. Bignall? We find your wife was having an affair—meeting her lover on the nights that you were at rehearsal. You turn up at that rehearsal thirty-five minutes late, you can’t—or won’t—account for your movements during the missing time, and we have reason to believe that you returned to your house last night at about ten past eight.”

  This wasn’t happening. He hadn’t been anywhere near his house at ten past eight. He had left at half past seven, and returned, with Lloyd himself, two hours later. “What reason?” he asked.

  “Your car was seen parked in Eliot Way.”

  But that simply couldn’t be true. Not for the first time, he felt as though Lloyd was lying, but surely he wouldn’t do that. So who was telling him all this about quarrels and cars? It wasn’t true.

  “It couldn’t have been seen there,” he said, “because I was driving it, and I didn’t go back home. And anyway, you don’t understand—Estelle wasn’t having an affair.”

  “She made it all up, did she?” said Finch, tapping the journal.

  “Yes,” said Carl. Of course she had. It was the only way it made sense.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “She probably thought her own life wasn’t exciting enough for a journal. So she began making something up. That’s what it is—she was in the writer’s group partly so she would learn how to write. It’s fiction.”

  “Fiction? What—some sort of project for her group?”

  “Yes,” said Carl. “That must be what it is. Look,” he said, pushing the book across the table. “She only wrote in it on Mondays. She probably wrote it at the writer’s group.”

  “Except that she hadn’t been going to the writer’s group.”

  “What?” Carl blinked at Finch. “What do you mean, she hadn’t been going?”

  “I mean she hadn’t been going in the sense that the writer’s group didn’t see her after the first three weeks.”

  Carl tried to take that in. He couldn’t believe she hadn’t told him, but he supposed since communication between them had reached an all-time low, she probably hadn’t felt obliged to. But it was strange.

  “All right,” he said. “All right. If you say she wasn’t going there, then she wasn’t. But she wasn’t having an affair. She was making all that up.”

  “What makes you so sure about that?”

  “Because she didn’t know anyone but other women, for a start. Christine, Marianne. She didn’t go anywhere else without me except to this writing group—and now you’re saying she didn’t even go there.”

  “Who’s Christine?” asked Lloyd.

  “Christine Jones, our neighbor,” said Carl. “Her husband Geoffrey called the police last night.” He nodded as he realized who had been telling them all this nonsense about overhearing some sort of argument. “He’s the one who’s supposed to have heard this quarrel, isn’t he?”

  Two poker
faces looked back at him.

  Carl sighed. “And I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me who says my car was there, are you?”

  “No,” said Finch.

  “Oh, what does it matter? The whole thing’s fiction. Estelle and I didn’t have a fight, my car wasn’t there, and this—” He waved a hand at the journal. “This is fiction, too.”

  “If it’s fiction, why does she use your name?” asked Finch. “Don’t people writing stories usually make up names?”

  “She did. Papa and Nicole—they’re from an advertisement, in case you don’t know.”

  “Oh, I know,” said Finch. “But Carl isn’t. And Carl is mentioned over and over again. Why would she do that if she was just writing a story?”

  “I don’t know. Except—” Carl looked up at Lloyd, who was now leafing through a booklet hanging from a pin on the wall. Perhaps he could make him understand—he didn’t think Sergeant Finch would ever be able to grasp something as utterly perplexing as Estelle. “—it might not have been fiction in the sense of actually writing a story. I know she didn’t have a lover, but—she might have believed she had,” he said.

  Lloyd looked just as skeptical as Finch. “I think you’re going to have to explain that, Dr. Bignall,” he said, and sat down at last.

  Explain Estelle. Carl nodded, at something of a loss. An Italian friend of his had once sat down expectantly and said, “Explain me cricket,” and he felt a little like he had then. “It isn’t easy,” he said. “I have to go back a long way if you’re to understand.”

  “Take all the time you need.”

  Where to start, though? Carl steepled his fingers and tapped them against his lips, trying to formulate his opening sentence, then began at what for him had been the beginning.

  “I met Estelle at the Malworth Amateur Dramatic Society. She was fifteen when I met her, and eighteen when we first went out together. We married within the year. She was lovely, and sexy, and full of personality, and I thought I’d won the jackpot. But—as I’ve told you, she was far from easy to live with.” He caught the look on Finch’s face. “I know how that must sound, but it’s true.” He paused. “And if you’ve been talking to the neighbors, I’m sure they’ve told you something of the sort.”

  “They mentioned rows,” he said.

  “Yes, we argued. I told you she was a hypochondriac. Sometimes I would lose my patience with her.” Estelle had believed she had everything from anthrax to yellow fever, it seemed to him. He sometimes thought that was why she had married a doctor; it gave her more immediate access to the medical profession. He sighed. “And she imagined other things, besides illnesses.”

  “Like she was having an affair?” said the ever-doubting Finch.

  “No,” said Carl. “That I was having affairs, or that people were watching her, or following her—she had delusions of conspiracies against her, and deep depressions when she felt she was worthless and might as well end it all. But when she wasn’t like that, she was gregarious, funny—she was full of confidence, she was great fun to be with. You never knew which way she was going to be, or how long it would last.”

  “Did you ever seek psychiatric help?” Lloyd asked.

  “Oh, yes. She was diagnosed manic-depressive, and for a while she was on drugs that controlled it, but she wouldn’t take them. She stopped going eventually. To start with it was very difficult, but things settled down a bit, thanks to Denis, mainly. He helped her a lot—the mood swings weren’t so wild, or so unpredictable. She was still suspicious of everyone she didn’t know, and she still wouldn’t go anywhere without me or Marianne, but she was better than she had been. She got friendly with Christine Jones, as I said. She would never have done that at the beginning. Until this year, it was just about livable with her.”

  “Was she like that before you married her?” asked Finch.

  “Well, the warning signs were there, if you knew to look for them, I suppose, but I didn’t know to look for them. It wasn’t until we were married that I found out she was pathologically possessive and jealous—needed constant attention, constant reassurance that I loved her.”

  “And did you?”

  Finch got straight to the point. It was commendable, Carl supposed. A nice, direct, simple question. But he wasn’t entirely sure of the answer. “I think so,” he said. “I thought she was wonderful—I’m not sure if that’s the same thing. And I quite enjoyed someone feeling that jealous of me, someone who needed me to prove to her how much I loved her, being the only man in the world that she wanted, the only man who could make her feel really good about herself—discovering you’re that important to someone gives you an ego boost, I suppose. And of course, when you’re first married you’re wrapped up in one another, so I didn’t really acknowledge that there was a problem at all. I couldn’t wait to get home and be made to feel like a god.”

  “So what changed?”

  “You can’t live at that pace forever,” Carl said. “Eventually I … well, it was a turn-off, to be honest. Having someone worship you might sound wonderful, but believe me, it isn’t. It’s exhausting, and you can’t ever live up to it.” He thought then, of how he had concocted reasons not to go home until later and later, hoping she would have retired for the night and be asleep by the time he got to bed. But that hadn’t been the answer; that had confirmed her belief that he no longer loved her, that he had other women. “And it was when I cooled off that the paranoia and the hypochondria and everything really came out,” he said. “And after a couple of years of that I was ready to walk out, but I didn’t.”

  “Why not?” Finch again.

  “We came to … an accommodation, I suppose. And I’d gone into partnership with Denis by then—he worked wonders with her, as I said. So Estelle and I talked things out, and held the marriage together, more or less.”

  Lloyd nodded, and Carl got the impression that holding a marriage together was something that Lloyd knew a little bit about. He knew that Lloyd had grown-up children from a previous marriage; perhaps Judy had been an extramarital affair. He hadn’t had affairs; he had never been unfaithful to Estelle, but his fidelity had been prompted more by self-preservation than by morality, because he hadn’t needed to complicate that area of his life any more than it was already complicated.

  Then Lloyd asked the question Carl had been expecting ever since he’d been brought in. “Was it important to you—holding the marriage together?”

  Someone had told him about Estelle’s money. He had known someone would; Marianne, Christine Jones—one of the women Estelle had unburdened herself to. And it would be much more acceptable to say that he had promised to take her in sickness and in health than to tell the truth, but he wasn’t going to lie about that.

  “It was important to Estelle,” he said. “And the unromantic, ungallant fact is that I couldn’t honestly afford to leave her.”

  Lloyd’s eyebrows rose inquiringly; Carl elaborated on that.

  “I’m extravagant by nature—I’ve always spent more than I earn. That was partly why my first marriage failed. Estelle had an income from a trust fund, and she encouraged me from the day we married to spend the money—part of her expansiveness when she was up rather than down. I bought cars, watches, jewelry, had my clothes tailored—I still do. We gave huge parties. Everything you can spend money on, I do spend money on. You name it, I’ve got it, or more probably, I haven’t got it anymore, because I give away things once they bore me and buy new ones.” He shrugged. “Classic retail therapy, I suppose, but it didn’t start out like that. It was all part of what seemed like the fun of being married to Estelle, until being married to her stopped being fun, and I realized I couldn’t just leave her. It’s my name on the credit cards, but it’s Estelle’s money that pays them each month—I could never hope to pay what I owe. So I needed her just as much as she needed me.”

  “That was the accommodation you came to?” asked Lloyd.

  “More or less. It wasn’t just as cold-blooded as that, but that
was the effect. She didn’t mind financing my lifestyle if it meant I stayed with her. She would beg me not to leave her even after we stopped having any relations of any sort.”

  “So that bit’s true?” said Finch. “She says in her diary that you weren’t interested in her anymore. That isn’t fiction?”

  Carl shook his head. “No, it’s true. She got much worse when Watson moved in next door,” he said. “Accusing him of taking photographs of her, saying he was spying on her.” He could stop worrying about Dexter, he realized. If she had fantasized meetings with a lover, she had doubtless fantasized the story about Watson. “She started saying crazy things about him—I don’t want to repeat them.”

  “No need,” murmured Lloyd.

  “She got so as she didn’t want me to go out, even, and the more demanding she got, the less responsive I got. She began thinking she wasn’t good enough for MADS—she wouldn’t perform in any of the productions anymore, but she still came, and as long as I was there, she was all right while we were out, more or less. When we got home it was a different story.”

  “Why did she leave the dramatic society?”

  “Denis suggested trying to make her more independent. He persuaded her to leave, and I think it was his idea to try writing as therapy.”

  What he was telling them barely scratched the surface; the bald facts didn’t begin to convey the tears, the tantrums, the suicide threats, the sheer hell of it all, but perhaps they would understand that they couldn’t take what she had written in this journal as gospel. Estelle didn’t think other men existed; she had wanted him, and no one else, and surely this fiction that she had concocted proved that.

  “She joined this group and began the journal, but I don’t think it was supposed to be a blow-by-blow account of her day. It was supposed to be anything that came into her head, anything she wanted to write. By the time she wrote that—” He nodded toward the journal. “—she and I hadn’t had any physical relations for almost a year, and very little in the way of normal conversation even. It’s fiction. It made her feel better, that’s all.”