‘Did you search the garden to confirm what she had told you?’
‘At night, with the rain? And the way she spoke? I was certain she had to be telling the truth.’
‘But she was not.’
‘There had been so much hatred in her voice.’
‘If Melanie asked you to carry the ape through customs because there was something valuable in it and she might have her luggage searched, what would you have done?’
‘She didn’t say that.’
‘You are unwilling to answer my question?’
‘To answer a hypothetical one.’
‘I suggest you have been lying throughout this interview.’
‘I’ve told you the truth.’
‘You have admitted you lied to us during a previous interview.’
‘I explained why.’
‘Few liars limit their lies. You are lying when you say your wife told you she had burned the ape.’
‘I am not.’
‘I believe that a loose word, perhaps even a hint, on Melanie’s part, convinced you she was using the ape to carry something valuable and illegal. That is why, when she asked you to carry it ashore and through customs, you agreed. You passed through customs without your luggage being searched. Had it been, had the ape been found, you would have pleaded ignorance and named her. Later, you deposited Georgie in your bank, convinced you were providing yourself with a generous financial future.
‘We gained permission to open your strongbox. Inside, wrapped up in sheets of a British national newspaper dated after your arrival in England, was a material Barbary ape, bought in Gibraltar. Do you still deny you put Georgie in your strongbox in the bank?’
‘I haven’t put anything in the box since returning from the cruise.’
‘There were seven uncut, illegally mined diamonds in the ape. An expert has determined these came from Sierra Leone. It can be proved Melanie Caine was in possession of them when she returned to the Helios after meeting a man in a café in Beirut, that she was not carrying them when she arrived back here. You have admitted she gave you the ape to take ashore, that you did not later hand it to her; that when she phoned to say she desperately needed it to save her life, you falsely told her it had been burned by your wife.’
‘Eileen told me what she’d done,’ Ansell shouted. ‘In God’s name, how can you believe I wouldn’t have got Georgie to Melanie to save her, even if the devil had been in the way? Why won’t you believe me?’
‘It is not easy to believe someone who has been forced to admit he has previously lied over a considerable time. I am arresting you, David Hugh Ansell, on suspicion of having reason to have caused the death of your wife.’
On instructions, Ansell followed Glover down to the charge room.
Police bail was granted.
TWENTY-ONE
Frick called Belinda into his room. ‘The guv’nor’s arrested Ansell.’
‘I’ve heard.’
‘You are to understand you will have no further contact with him, either in a professional position or socially.’
‘Since when has he the right to tell me what to do in my own time?’
‘You wouldn’t catch a lifebelt if you were swimming for your life in the middle of the North Sea. He’s trying to prevent you cocking up your career.’
‘Or afraid I could prove he’s made a mistake?’
‘I’m buggered if I understand you, always making your life difficult for yourself.’
‘There’s no need for me to do that, other people manage it perfectly well enough.’
‘You’ve been given his orders, so make of them what you will. Right now, get to this address and find out what the woman’s been up to for the husband to beat the hell out of her.’ He held out a sheet of paper.
‘Is it a law in your life that a husband always has reason to beat up his wife?’
She left, went into the CID room to collect her jacket which was hanging behind her desk.
Trent, who was working at his computer, looked up at her and said, ‘You look like you’ve just lost your knickers and can’t remember where.’
‘You make nonsense of the theory that men only think of sex ten times a day.’
‘Those statistics are for men over seventy. Why the sniping? Have you been hauled over the coals for something?’
‘I’ve been told whom I’m not allowed to talk to.’
‘Never speak to royalty until they speak to you unless they’re about to fall down a manhole. Who’s trying to educate you?’
‘The guv’nor.’
‘He’s only looking after your morals.’
‘Get stuffed.’
‘Is the subject of the embargo Ansell? He needs sympathy, not silence, since having bumped off his wife, he’s a widower.’
‘You’re slightly more bearable going on about sex than trying to be humorous. Where’s Britling Road, south Frithton?’
‘Why go there?’
‘To advise a wife to buy a baseball bat and knock the hell out of her husband.’
She left the inharmonious home in Britling Road after a wasted interview with a now contrite husband and forgiving wife, crossed the pavement and climbed into her car. If her parents had not shown her what was a happy marriage, work might have convinced her they were as rare as penguins in the Antarctic. Her bitterness at the range of matrimonial discords caused her to engage the wrong gear and the engine stalled. Further annoyance – at her incompetence – caused her to restart the engine and drive away without consulting the mirrors and collision with a passing car was only just avoided. The remainder of the drive was without incident. In her rash state of mind, she didn’t think twice about where she was now headed.
Ansell opened the front door of number thirty-four, regarded her first with surprise, then reserve. ‘The same old questions to find out which answers differ from the forty-ninth time?’
‘No.’
‘Fresh ones, then?’
‘No.’
‘Then what brings you here?’
‘Being told not to have any further contact with you.’
‘And you refuse to be told what not to do as enthusiastically as what to do?’
‘I suppose. I’m getting cold in the wind. Are you going to ask me in?’
He stepped aside so that she could enter. She unbuttoned her coat and he helped her out of it, hung it on an old-fashioned stand. ‘If you’d like to go into the sitting room, I’ll make coffee in the kitchen.’
‘I’m not allowed in there?’
‘Your presence would be appreciated.’
They went in. She watched him pour beans into an elaborate machine.
‘I hope I get things right,’ he said, ‘but there are so many dials I usually turn the wrong one or the right one in the wrong direction.’
‘For someone professing incompetence, you seem to have a natural ability to know what to do!’
He laughed. ‘Reserve your comments until you taste what’s in the cup ... I’d ask you to sit, but there aren’t any chairs in here.’
She’d noticed the lack of any dining area.
He walked across to one of the wall cupboards above the work surfaces. ‘Would you like some chocolate digestives?’
‘Please.’
He opened the first cupboard’s doors, searched. ‘I thought they were in here, but it must be in one of the others.’
A second cupboard was equally empty of biscuits.
‘Would I be correct,’ she said, ‘to think you don’t spend much time in here except to make coffee?’
‘You promised no questions.’
He found the biscuits in a third cupboard, as the coffee machine hissed. He set out cups, saucers, sugar, plates with biscuits on one, looked for and quickly found a tray.
‘Can’t we drink and eat in here?’ she asked.
‘Standing up?’
‘You never eat or drink in here?’
‘Eileen doesn’t ...’ He stopped.
She move
d until she could put a hand on his arm. ‘Sorry, David. Let’s go and be comfortable.’
They sat, facing the blocked fireplace and television set to the side of it. Their conversation was unforced, light, and sometimes amusing until she suddenly said, ‘David, I want to ask one question.’
‘Now the true reason for your coming here?’
‘I told you what that was.’
‘Who said you weren’t to have contact with me?’
‘The inspector; Glover.’
‘D’you know why?’
‘Because of what the sergeant had said to him.’
‘Which was what?’
‘Best left unsaid.’
‘Presumably that I’d threatened Eileen in an effort to save Melanie?’
She said nothing.
‘I’ve a confession to make ...’
‘Better not!’ she answered quickly, her heart beating.
He continued regardless, determined to get it off his chest. ‘With you having listened to me being questioned, learning I’d been targeted by a prostitute because she had judged me so bloody weak I’d do what she wanted, I felt and feel small enough, I could walk under an ant. I daren’t think what kind of man you must now reckon me to be.’
‘I’ll tell you. Someone who made a fool of himself, but that doesn’t make him any different from a hell of a lot of others; someone betrayed by circumstances, not character. Your home life hadn’t been happy, had it?’
‘No.’
‘Would you have responded to Melanie if it had been?’
‘She would not have chosen me.’
‘You’re not answering the question.’
‘I should like to think I would not have done, but ...’
‘You are honest enough to admit doubt.’
‘When one meets someone who recalls one’s juvenile, erotic fantasies ...’
‘Imagination becomes dangerous.’
‘Deadly ... Belinda, I asked Eileen what she had done with Georgie because I was desperate to get him to Melanie to save her. I didn’t have to threaten Eileen to make her answer, she rejoiced in telling me she’d burned the ape. She was so exultant that I had to believe her, as desperate as I was not to. I never thought she could have been viciously lying and had put him in the bank. I didn’t realize how much Eileen had begun to want to hurt me ... Our marriage soon became unhappy after our wedding, but I thought we’d learned how to live together.’
‘Wouldn’t it be better to leave the subject?’
‘I want you to understand how things were, that she regarded intimacy as an unnecessary necessity ...’
‘Intimate details are best kept intimate’
‘I’m trying to explain why I was so easily hoodwinked by Melanie.’
‘David, unfortunately I remain a police officer. Tell me in detail why your marriage was unhappy, that Melanie had offered what you so missed, it must become more likely that you did threaten your wife when you were so desperate to know where the ape was in order to save Melanie.’
‘You are going to report what I have just been saying?’
‘Having been forbidden to have any communication with you, that would be to admit I was in your house, drinking coffee, eating biscuits.’
‘Then whether or not I’ve dropped myself into the shit depends on where your loyalties lie and you’re not certain what is the answer?’
She stood. ‘I must go.’ She hurried into the hall and by the time he reached her there, she had opened the front door and stepped outside. He watched her walk to her car, parked in front of the garage, climb into it and drive away.
He returned inside, sat. Sometimes, innocence seemed to become a weakness.
The front-door bell rang. He swore. Babs, come to reproach him for turning down her invitation and, in her inimitable style, leaving him even more defeated than when she had arrived. There was a second, prolonged ring. He returned to the hall, opened the door.
‘Is your twelve bore loaded?’ Belinda asked.
Surprise delayed his reply. ‘Not even unholstered.’
‘Hand guns are holstered, shot guns are cased. Am I allowed in again?’
He stepped back to let her enter.
‘I had to come back because ... I feared you could believe I’d entrapped you and would rush to pass on to the sarge or the DI what you told me. You were right. My loyalties have become divided and made me all confused ... But I would not have passed on what you said about your private life.’
‘It was contemptible of me to believe you might.’ He thought she was going to speak again, but she did not. ‘I’ve just poured myself another drink. Will you have a refill?’
‘The liquid pipe of peace?’
She went into the sitting room, he into the kitchen. When he joined her, she was seated, her short, red skirt across her knees. Her head was turned so that she was partially in profile and he noted her chin was slightly too pronounced for her other features, an indication of her stubbornness, her readiness to face what she considered to be wrong or unjust.
‘David, will you trust me?’ she said, as he handed her a glass.
‘Do you need the assurance?’
‘I want to hear it because it means much to me.’
‘I trust you, full stop.’
She was hardly the perfect police officer, she thought bitterly, accepting that her loyalty to the force was not absolute. ‘Did you put the ape in your strongbox in the bank?’
‘No.’
‘How could it have got there?’
‘Eileen.’
‘She told you she had burned it, knowing or guessing what that would mean to you. Did she have a very vindictive nature?’
He drank. ‘Difficult to answer. She was quick to find fault, blame, criticize, but I never did or said anything to have caused her to hate me.’
‘You underestimate how a wife can feel when she believes her husband has had an affair. She saw it as a rejection of herself.’
There was a silence.
‘Did you ever closely examine the ape?’
‘No.’
‘There are several cuts in the fabric of the body. If one disbelieves you, the assumption is you used a knife to try to learn if there was something solid inside. If one believes you, since she did not know about the diamonds, there is only one explanation for the cuts.’
‘You’re saying she “attacked” Georgie?’
‘A childish gesture but adults under deep emotional stress often display them.’
‘I have denied I was in any way responsible for Eileen’s death; I never once struck her, I never once threatened her. But, as it must have done, my affair with Melanie so emotionally hurt her, that I provoked her into falsely saying she’d burned Georgie. That makes me in part responsible for her death as well as Melanie’s.’
‘You may have started the sequence of events, your wife had completed it when she told you she had burned the ape.’
‘If I’d never allowed myself to become tied up with Melanie ...’
‘Ifs never alter anything. What might eventually help you to accept the past is if the man or men who broke into this house that night are identified, tried and convicted. Victims can often accept their tragedy has been brought to an end when those who were guilty are convicted.’
‘What chance of that is there when everyone but you thinks no one broke in, but that I tried to make it seem they had in order to cover myself?’
‘They believe you guilty; I believe you innocent. There has to be someone out there to identify. Did your wife give any indication of someone who was threatening her?’
‘No.’
‘Previously had she ever said she had cause to worry?’
‘No.’
‘Was there anyone on the Helios apart from the bar steward who could have noticed you were unusually friendly with Melanie?’
‘I can only think of the man who shared the cabin. He remarked on it more than once.’
‘What was his name?’
‘I only remember him as “Call me Bert”. He couldn’t have had anything to do with what’s happened.’
Never judge by appearance, she almost said, then silently asked herself, What in the hell am I doing when I accept his innocence? ‘What was your cabin number?’
‘Two six six.’
‘Did he see the ape?’
‘He was in the cabin when I packed it before going ashore and returning home.’
‘Have you any idea where he lives?’
‘None whatsoever.’
‘When you were in Oxford the night your wife died, did you phone her?’
‘I told one of your lot I didn’t and he regarded that as highly suspicious.’
‘A misunderstanding. Did you drive to Oxford?’
‘Yes..’
‘And parked at the hotel?’
‘Yes, underground.’
‘Was there a security man on watch?’
‘No. There’s the kind of automatic barrier one sees in public car parks – it needs a ticket issued by the hotel.’
‘Is there a chance you may have kept that?’
‘No.’
‘So there’s no way of proving you were there at the pertinent time unless someone saw you around – perhaps at the bar.’
‘What are the odds of anyone remembering me when I can’t remember anyone?’
‘Poor.’
‘Is that the end of your “one” question?’
‘Yes, so I’ll be on my way.’
‘Would a rough supper tempt you to stay awhile?’
‘How rough?’
‘Lamb chops and trimmings. But no guarantee how things will turn out.’
‘With your lack of knowing what goes on in the kitchen, I think tough might be an alternative description to rough. I’ll don the apron.’
TWENTY-TWO
Belinda dialled. The connection was made and she was told to press one for this, two for that, three for something else.
Eventually, the ‘Four Seasons’ ceased. ‘Rex Cruising Company. Can I help you?’
‘Constable Draper, county police. I want to speak to someone about the passenger list of the Helios when—’
She was interrupted. ‘You need Reservations.’
The ‘Four Seasons’ recommenced. Would she have to wait until Spring returned?
Damned by Logic Page 16