Five minutes later, while Carter was printing the letter, Healey noticed that the child’s drawing that had been pinned to the notice board the day before was no longer there. ‘Has anyone been in this room since I was here yesterday?’ he asked.
‘Not to my knowledge. But why don’t we ask Hannah.’
‘Hannah?’
‘Our secretary.’
But the secretary didn’t know of anyone who had been in the room. ‘Could have been one of the cleaners, of course,’ she said.
There was no sign of life in the Crouches’ house but behind the frosted glass of the door of the house next door, Healey thought he saw a movement. By the time he reached the door, he could make out a human form just a few feet from him, on the other side of the glass. He rang the bell, the form immediately grew larger and the door opened. He found himself face to face with the Crouches’ observant neighbour. Her dyed blond hair, grey at the roots, was pinned on top of her head. Her large bust was covered only by a lime green singlet through which her nipples protruded. She was sweating.
‘Oh, hello,’ she said, brushing back wisps of hair that had escaped the pins and fallen onto her forehead. ‘I was expecting someone else.’
‘Good morning,’ said Healey. He produced his warrant card.
‘Yes, I know. Teresa told me.’
‘Could I ask you a couple of questions?’
‘Please do.’
‘Last Friday evening. Can you remember where you were between nine o’clock and eleven?’
The lady pouted and frowned, as if to indicate intense concentration. ‘Yes, I can, actually. I was watching television until the news came on at nine, and then I came out into the garden.’
‘This garden? The front?’
‘Yes. And I stayed out until it went dark. I was weeding.’ She gestured towards the beds that edged the tiny lawn, which did indeed seem to be weed free.
‘While you were here, did anyone come to Mrs Crouch’s house?’
‘No.’ The reply was instant and unequivocal.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Absolutely. And after that I was in the front room watching telly again. Nobody would have got in without me seeing them.’
‘And the next morning, did you see anyone other than Mrs Crouch and her daughter leave the house?’
‘No, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t. I always go to Waitrose on Saturday mornings. Somebody could have left while I was out.’
Healey nodded sagely. ‘Thank you, erm, Mrs …’
‘Parker. Miss.’
Healey couldn’t resist the urge to ask for an initial, just to see if it might possibly be N. It wasn’t, but it was close. It was M. ‘For Mildred.’
‘Well, thank you, Miss Parker. That’s all I wanted to know.’
‘If there’s anything else,’ she offered.
‘If there is, I’ll be in touch.’ Healey made his way to Miss Parker’s gate, closing it carefully behind him, then down the Crouches’ path to the door. As he rang the bell, Miss Parker, arms folded, watched with undisguised interest. She saw the door open and Healey disappear inside.
Except for the moment when he had told her that her husband was dead, Healey seemed never to hold the initiative with Teresa Crouch. This time, he had no sooner entered the house than she said that he looked hot and needed a cup of tea. Watching her go into the kitchen, barefoot and dressed in just a pale blue T-shirt and cut-off jeans, he thought she looked smaller and younger than she had before. But she was still beautiful. He wondered how old she was.
A few minutes later, perched on the edge of an armchair, holding a cup of tea too hot to drink, he found himself answering her questions, mostly about the inquest, which she had learned was to be held on Friday. Healey explained that he would be asking for an adjournment, which the coroner would certainly grant, and that he would oppose any request she made for Neville’s body to be released for burial. He also admitted that they were now treating his death as murder.
Eventually, as the tea grew cooler and Teresa had no more questions for him, he asked about her husband’s friends. She said that his only friends were in the Department: Peter Farrell and Chris Carter. Without pressing her on this, Healey then asked her if she was able to tell him about money her husband earned other than his salary. She could only think of the royalties which he received from the book he had written with Carter and which amounted to no more than about a thousand pounds a year. These were paid into their joint current account and went immediately towards paying off their credit card balance, which tended to accumulate between royalty payments.
When Healey asked about other bank accounts that she and her husband held, singly or jointly, she said there was only one, their deposit account, in which they had tried in vain to save money. Its present balance, she thought, was less than a hundred pounds. ‘Lecturers are not well paid,’ she informed Healey.
‘Then what do you think about these?’ he asked, leaning forward and handing her the statements he had found in the filing cabinet.
She looked at the first statement and appeared dumbfounded. ‘I have no idea,’ she responded at last, as she turned to the second statement. ‘Where did you find them?’
‘In your husband’s office.’ He watched her as she looked at each of the statements in turn, slowly shaking her head. ‘You see they go back more than five years. Can you remember anything happening at that time, anything unusual? Did your husband travel anywhere, for example?’
She shook her head.
Healey continued, ‘As far as you are aware, after you left the Philippines, did he have any dealings with people out there? Of any kind at all.’
Again she shook her head.
‘Please think carefully, Mrs Crouch. This could be important.’
When she still said nothing, Healey asked if the name Reyes meant anything to her.
‘I know a family with that name, yes. In Manila.’
‘And Ricardo Reyes?’
‘If you mean the teacher Neville worked with in Manila, yes.’
‘That’s who I mean. Is he a member of the family you mentioned?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you tell me something about the family?’
‘It’s a large family, well known. They are rich. They own land. They have a business, import-export. I’m not sure what you want to know.’
‘That’s enough for now.’ Healey looked her directly in the eyes. ‘So, Ricardo Reyes, when is the last time you saw him?’
‘I haven’t seen him since we left the Philippines.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘You haven’t been back since you came to England?’
‘I’ve been back twice but I didn’t see Ricardo.’
‘Did your husband go with you on either occasion?’
‘No. We couldn’t afford for us both to go. The second time I went with Gia.’
‘Has your husband been back at all?’
‘No.’
‘So, as far as you know, your husband has had no contact with Ricardo Reyes.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You said he had no dealings with anyone in the Philippines.’
‘He didn’t have dealings with Ricardo.’
‘What then?’
‘Ricardo wrote to say that he was coming to the summer school.’
‘So he’s here now?’
Mrs Crouch hesitated before answering. ‘No, in the end he didn’t come.’
‘Do you know why?’
‘No.’
‘Did anyone come in his place?’
‘I don’t know.’
Healey closed the notebook in which he had in fact written no more than half a dozen words while Mrs Crouch had been talking. From his pocket he took the tiny tape recorder he had found in Crouch’s room in the Hall and which he had brought with him from the incident room. ‘Do you recognise this?’ he asked.
She took it from him and turned it over in her hand. ‘Where was it
?’ she asked.
‘In your husband’s briefcase in the Hall.’ To his alarm, Healey saw tears begin to form in her eyes.
‘It was a present. I gave it to him for his birthday.’ Tears now rolled down her cheeks.
Healey swallowed hard. Now he had the advantage, he would press on. ‘So this was some time ago?’
‘Some time ago?’ she repeated.
‘Before he began to be violent with you.’
Her eyes flashed at him in anger. Without a word, she stood up and walked out of the room. A minute later she returned, dabbing her cheeks with what looked like a piece of screwed up kitchen roll. ‘Is there anything else you want?’ she asked.
‘Yes, there is actually. Do you know where your husband kept the recordings he made with that tape recorder?’
That evening, after supper, Healey sat at his desk at home, browsing through the part-time course information that Farrell had given him. He looked first at the brochure for Farrell’s own department. The modules they offered included some, such as grammatical theory and semantics, that made more or less sense to him, and others, like psycholinguistics and semiotics, that, despite the simple descriptions provided, seemed more mysterious and rather forbidding. Sociolinguistics, which ‘explores the relationship between linguistic variation and social variation (class, age, etc)’ was more attractive to him.
Turning the pages, he came to brief pen portraits of the staff, amongst whom he recognised Farrell, Carter and, of course, Crouch. Seeing the name ‘El Alaoui-Carter’ made him realise that he had not seen Carter’s wife and knew nothing about her except that she had been a student in the Department. He read now that she specialised in Arabic-English contrastive studies and had recently published a book ‘comparing the expression of modality in the two languages’. Modality, what could that mean, he wondered, and reached for his dictionary. The most relevant definition he found there was ‘classification of propositions as to whether true, false, necessary, possible or impossible’. Sounded a lot like what he did for a living.
Putting aside the Communications Department brochure, he began to look at others: English literature, History, Philosophy, Classics. As he did so, however, his mind went back to thoughts of Mrs Carter. He wondered what kind of woman she was that would choose to live with – what had Farrell called him? – a monster of nature. An intellectual, presumably. But after that, what was she like? What did she look like? These questions, and imaginings about the lady led Healey imperceptibly to thoughts about another departmental wife. Departmental widow rather.
That morning, after her brief but obvious show of anger, Teresa Crouch had been polite but distant. She had taken him again to her husband’s study, where she had remained standing in the doorway, as he looked through the desk, on shelves, and in various cardboard boxes on the floor, which turned out to contain only stationery. Healey took his time and was, for him, very thorough. The cassettes were small, and one of them by itself could easily be overlooked, especially if it had been deliberately put somewhere where it would be unlikely to be found by accident. Eventually, Healey had to conclude that there were no cassettes in the room except the more normal-sized ones that were lined up on a shelf. ‘Where else do you think they might be?’ he asked.
She had shrugged and turned away from the door. Healey followed her out onto the landing, where she stopped and stood against the banister opposite a bedroom door. ‘You can look in there,’ she said. Healey went in, uncomfortably aware of the dirt he was probably depositing on the cream-coloured fitted carpet. This was not the time, though, or the place, he thought, to offer to take off his shoes. The room was south-facing and oppressively hot. Loosening his tie and undoing the top button of his shirt, Healey moved to the window and glanced down to the road below. A van was parked outside Miss Parker’s and she was in the garden talking animatedly to a man, presumably the driver. The man turned and looked up at the window where Healey was standing, then turned quickly away again.
Healey himself turned to survey the room. All the furniture was pine. On the dressing-table was a black and white photograph of Crouch in whites, cricket pads on, gloves in one hand and a bat in the other. Healey looked back to where Teresa was standing in the doorway.
‘I don’t suppose you know what colour the handle of your husband’s bat was, do you?’
She shook her head. ‘No, unless it was red.’ She paused. ‘Or maybe it was black.’
Healey continued to look around the room. There was a double bed, a dressing table, a chest of drawers, a wardrobe, and, at each side of the bed, a small cupboard. ‘Which side …’ he began. Before he could finish, with a single finger she indicated the side of the bed farthest from her. Healey went there and knelt down in front of the cupboard and opened it. Inside, in neat piles, were perhaps thirty or more of the mini-cassettes in their cases. Still on his knees, he looked across at Mrs Crouch in the doorway. ‘They’re here,’ he said. She didn’t seem surprised. He took them out of the cupboard and put them on the bed. He was about to ask her if she could give him something to put them in when he realised she was no longer there. A moment later she was back with a plastic shopping bag. She stood beside him and held the bag open while he put in the cassettes.
As she gave him the bag, her hand brushed against his. Healey felt sure it was deliberate but before he could even think of responding in any way, she was already walking to the door. When he got downstairs, the front door was open and she was standing outside, waiting for him to leave. He thanked her as he passed her. She said nothing. By the time he had got in his car and fastened his seat belt, she had already gone inside and closed the door. Driving away, looking in his mirror, Healey saw Miss Parker and her visitor come out of her house and stand in the garden.
Healey woke with a start and looked around him. It was still light. As he got slowly from his chair, the brochure that he’d been looking at when he fell asleep dropped to the floor. He bent to pick it up, groaned at the twinge in his back, then saw his wife standing in the door, smiling. ‘Poor old man,’ she said. ‘Did you hear me call?’
‘No.’
‘I just wondered if you wanted me to make coffee. Were you asleep?’
He nodded and yawned.
‘So you do?’
‘Please.’
They drank their coffee at the table on the terrace. ‘Gosh,’ said his wife, ‘isn’t the mock orange strong? Did I tell you, you know how it’s planted on next-door’s side of the fence, even though all the blossom is on our side. I was talking to Christina, yesterday I think it was, and mentioned it and she didn’t even know it existed. It was so funny.’ Christina was their next-door neighbour.
‘It won’t be so funny if that husband of hers decides to cut it down. You know what an idiot he is.’
‘Oh I’m sure he won’t. Don’t worry about it. I told you just because I thought it was funny that we have this beautiful plant which is theirs really and they didn’t know about it.’ She came round the table, put her hand on his shoulder and gave him a kiss on the cheek. ‘What are those?’ she asked.
Healey had brought the brochures out with him. He told her that he wanted to find out what possibilities there were for him to take a degree.
‘I think you should. You need something like that to stretch you. The police has become your whole life and it’s not enough.’ Healey smiled.
‘Really, Dick, I’m being serious. If you found something completely different to do, you’d be happier. Less cynical. Even if you stayed in the police.’
‘Less cynical? I don’t think you can blame the police for that. The first time you met me you called me a cynic.’
‘But I was joking then.’
Before Healey could respond, there was a banging at the French window. ‘Dad,’ shouted Jamie, ‘there’s someone at the front door.’
The person at the door was Peter Farrell. He was persuaded to come and join them on the terrace for coffee, even though he had at first protested that he only wanted
a quick word with Healey. While Jill made more coffee, Farrell explained to Healey that he felt bad about what happened that morning. ‘I know I shouldn’t have let Tim go off like that. But it wasn’t that I wasn’t taking your case seriously, I just wasn’t thinking. I’ve got a lot on my mind at the moment. I even got mixed up about that lecture I said I had to prepare for yesterday morning. Turned out I didn’t have to at all. We swapped it for one on Othello but I hadn’t changed it in my diary.’ He paused.
‘You see, I’ve got the chance of going to Spain for two years, to work on a child language project there, in Madrid. Looking at children brought up bilingually. Spanish and English. I’d jump at it, it’s just the kind of work I want to do, and I need to get away from Reading for a bit. Trouble is, Pam doesn’t like the idea. She’d have to give up her job at the hospital with no certainty of getting it back again. And she thinks it would be bad for the kids’ education. I think the opposite. It would do them the world of good to live in a different culture for two years. I’ve actually applied for a grant. Oh, thanks.’ Healey’s wife had put down a mug of coffee in front of him.
The three of them talked at length about the narrowness of a British education system which seemed likely to grow narrower if the present government had its way. Eventually, Farrell stood up, saying he had jobs to do, but if Healey was going over to the Hall to meet the coach when it got back from Stratford, he would come along with him, if that was all right. It was, said Healey and they agreed to leave at twelve in Healey’s car. As Healey stood in the door and watched Farrell walk up the road back to his house, he thought that the story about the lecture didn’t ring true. He wondered why Farrell had gone to the Hall so early. He also wondered whether Farrell had a reason to keep the Reyes form from him.
As they walked into reception, they were greeted by Mr Bird from behind his desk. ‘Good evening, Dr Farrell. Good evening, Chief Inspector. Or should I say good morning?’ He raised his arm, turned his wrist and studied his watch, now in front of his nose. ‘I’ve been here exactly twelve hours, seventeen minutes, and forty-five seconds, and I still don’t know when I’m going to finish. That bloody Welshman didn’t turn up, did he?’ Seeing Healey’s obvious incomprehension, he added, ‘Flynn, he’s the night porter. So the Warden says, Oh I’ll see you right, Mr Bird. See me to my grave most like.’ Farrell touched Healey’s arm and made off, leaving him in the company of Mr Bird.
The Pursuit of Truth Page 13