‘Oh, no. That was the whole point. She didn’t want one. After the festival she said she wouldn’t have any use for one. And they’re not cheap, you know,’ he informed me gravely, ‘not cheap at all.’
‘Would you have any of the bills I could look at?’
‘The statements, you mean? Well, no. You see I forwarded them unopened to Grace. No point in my checking them myself, no point at all. I wouldn’t have known if they were correct, would I?’ The thought of not being correct struck deep at his accountant’s soul. ‘No—Grace said not to bother with them. Just forward them to me, she said. She’d check them herself.’
‘I need to get a copy of the last statement, Mr Makim. Could you call Cellnet and ask them to fax you a copy of the last statement as a matter of urgency?’
‘I don’t have a fax here. But I suppose…if they’d agree to send it to the office. But what reason should I give them, do you think? Should I tell them the full story?’
‘Perhaps not. Just say it’s urgent. Offer to pay if necessary.’
‘Urgent, yes…’ He clasped his neat white hands, he looked a little uncertain. ‘And the phone itself…what shall I say? Shall I say it’s lost?’
‘It is lost, I’m afraid. So far, anyway.’
‘I could report it missing, then, couldn’t I? I could say that’s why I needed the statement.’ He looked happier with this solution, a man for whom veracity was everything. ‘But I don’t quite understand why the police haven’t followed this up. They never even asked for the number, you know. They never asked for any details at all.’
‘They’ll probably get round to it in time.’ Far more likely they had overlooked it, but I didn’t mention that in case Stephen Makim should take it on himself to remind them.
He asked politely, ‘How’s the family coping?’
‘Well…you can imagine.’
‘And Charlie? Poor lad. He’s at school with our son, you know.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘Smashing chap. Good with his hands, artistic. He’s been here for tea once or twice.’
‘A happy boy?’
The question caused him a moment’s pause. ‘Well…you’d have to ask my wife. A bit quiet, I’d say. Shy with strangers. But then they often are at that age, aren’t they?’
As if to contradict him, a child shouted furiously in the hall. He sighed ruefully, ‘Well, some are.’
A woman’s voice issued a reprimand, feet thundered up the stairs.
With a start, Stephen Makim sprang to his feet. ‘I’ll need to move my car. I’m usually gone by now.’ He moved purposefully towards the door where he cocked an ear towards the movements upstairs. Relaxing a little, he turned back. ‘She was amazing with Charlie, you know,’ he offered solemnly. ‘He’s dyslexic, quite badly so. Did you know? But she was so patient with him, read to him for hours, encouraged him no end. She’d got him into this special school. World famous, apparently, with an enormous waiting list. Places like gold dust. But Grace, she fought tooth and nail to get him accepted, wouldn’t take no for an answer—’ His emotions threatened him again, he swallowed rapidly. ‘She was a fine woman.’
I followed him to the front door, we looked out over the daffodils at a departing BMW.
I said, ‘I hadn’t realized Charlie had got a place.’
‘Oh, yes, in the autumn. It was all set. Charlie was thrilled.’
I took the long way back, along narrow lanes with no markings and blind bends. A morning mist lay low over the land in a damp haze. Cresting the last rise, the ground sloped away in a sweep of undulating fields towards the marshlands, lying in thin ribbons under the margin of the sea. A short distance to the east, I could see the corner of Upper Farm, with fields of cereal and beet and, tucked into the corner of a turnip fields two large barns set at right angles to each other with a silage store on the third side, and beyond them, a railed paddock with a small stable block. A short track led to the barns, but if Will was there then the Range Rover was out of view.
The lane descended between tall hedgerows that offered no further view of the barns until, rounding a bend, their angular roofs rose above the hedges, some twenty yards ahead. The entrance appeared suddenly, a sharp turning through an open gate.
The track was compressed shale, smooth and soundless. I saw the Range Rover almost immediately, parked on the wide concrete apron in the angle of the barns. I accelerated a little, only to slow again.
There was another car, parked just inside the open doors of the larger barn. I slowed further, I looked again, feeling disorientated. It was a little blue Golf. Jilly’s. I corrected myself: a car like Jilly’s.
I stopped and parked beside the silage store. Walking across the apron, the lowing of the cattle was raucous, magnified by the metal walls of the barn. The interior appeared very dark until, reaching the doors, pausing by the Golf, I looked down the aisle and in the cones of light from the roof panels saw clearly the cattle in their pens, the trolley with its load of feed, and at the far end. Will leaning back against a railing, arms folded, in conversation with a woman who was unmistakably Jilly.
I stood motionless, held in the trance of an unwitting observer. I watched as Will dropped his chin onto his chest and spoke, as Jilly listened and, gliding closer, raised a hand and rested it on his shoulder. A solicitous hand? An affectionate hand? A hand that touched a shoulder.
She turned her face a little towards me, and still I couldn’t move, as though by staring long enough the scene might yet turn out to be a trick of the imagination.
Jilly bent her head forward. From where I was standing, their heads could have been touching. Her hand still lay on his shoulder, heavy with meaning. I watched with a blend of curiosity and desperate foreboding, as one watches two friends enacting a disturbing event one is powerless to prevent.
Above the braying and shuffling of the cattle, a hoof kicked against metal with a sudden clatter. I drew back furtively, I turned away and walked quickly to my car. I drove down the track and into the lane, the worm of suspicion twisting in my stomach.
The press crows had settled around Marsh House again. One was sitting inside his car, another lounging against the car door chatting through the open window. I hadn’t seen them before but I recognized the breed all right, the rapacious eyes, the sly gestures, the smooth advance like two crabs sidling up a slope.
‘Mrs O’Neill?’ the first called—they always knew one’s name. ‘Wondered if Mr Dearden was thinking of a new media appeal…
‘…a piece about bereavement, how he’s coping…’
‘…how he feels about her killer…’
Killer. They almost had me there; the temptation to ask what they knew was very strong. ‘Killer’ suggested that the police had decided on murder, that the investigation was shifting into a different gear. The press were often the most reliable source of this kind of news; just as they were experts at using half-truths and distortions to inveigle people into talking when it wasn’t in their interests to do so.
As I closed the gate behind me and started up the path, their tone became more strident. ‘Is it true that Mrs Dearden was considering divorce?’
‘Is it true that Mrs Dearden’s life was heavily insured?’
‘No comment at all,’ I threw back, wondering what had brought them here so conveniently close to Ramsey’s arrival, thinking darkly of a tip-off.
The kitchen door was as I had left it at seven: latched against intruders. Putting my face to the window I saw Charlie at the table eating break-fast, and rapped softly on the glass.
His head came up a little, he stopped eating, but didn’t look round.
I called, ‘It’s me, Charlie. Could you let me in?’
With infinite slowness he turned his head, only to pause in profile, as though his mind were on something else altogether. I tapped on the glass again. Seeming to hear at last, he turned towards me, though when his eyes found their way slowly to my face there was no flicker of recognition.
&
nbsp; ‘Charlie?’ I called through the glass.
Eyes down, he rose slowly to his feet and came towards the door. I stationed myself in front of it, ready for the sound of the lock, but there was nothing. With my mouth close to the jamb, choosing my most reassuring tone, I called again.
The catch sprang back at last.
‘Thank you, Charlie.’
As I went in he was already heading back to the table where he resumed his breakfast, spooning cereal mechanically into his mouth.
I paused close by, searching for something to say. ‘Dad’s up at the barn, is he?’
He didn’t reply, and I was acutely aware of being an unwanted visitor in his house, a stranger who must seem to bring nothing but bad news. Since his mother’s body had been found I had been careful to keep my distance from Charlie, careful not to impose. In the last five or six days I probably hadn’t exchanged more than a couple of words with him.
I said rather too brightly, ‘You don’t mind if I have a coffee while I’m waiting?’
His expression had the quality of registering little, of feeling even less, as though he were existing in a dream.
I made myself a strong coffee and, placing myself carefully at the other end of the table, worked on my notes for the day.
Charlie finished his cereal and stared at the empty dish. After a time he picked up the carton of fruit juice and poured it into his glass. His movements were slow, his eyes unfocused. Again, I had the sense of a trance-like state. Over the years I’d seen people in trauma, I’d seen kids in shock, but this was different, more elusive. A realization floated just out of reach, tantalizing, unformed, but important in some way I couldn’t quite identify.
A lock turned, a door opened at the front of the house. Going into the hall, I found Maggie closing the front door with a firm thud.
She rolled her eyes furiously and jerked her head towards the reporters. ‘Those people! I have told them they had no right to be here! I have told them to leave!’
‘They’re not breaking any law, unfortunately.’
‘But how dare they say these things to me! They ask me about Grace wanting a divorce, about big life insurance! How dare they!’
‘Just trying their luck, I’m afraid.’
She was more upset than she’d first appeared. Her mouth trembled, her eyelids fluttered in distress. ‘But how do they know these things, Alex? Tell me.’
‘They don’t know.’
‘But they do! They do!’ Then, seeming to grasp what I was saying, she retreated with an odd glance. ‘You’re right. Of course. Yes…They don’t know…’ The glance again, the pulling up short, as though she’d remembered something perfectly obvious. With a thin nervous smile she lifted a birdlike wrist to her face and looked at her watch. ‘What time are the police coming—nine thirty?’
‘Ten.’
‘Well, Charlie and I must be off. We’re going to Norwich for the day. A hamburger, you know. Ice cream. A film!’ Caught up in a whirlwind of her own creation, she made for the kitchen.
‘Maggie?’
She paused unwillingly.
I said in a voice that wouldn’t carry, ‘Charlie seems rather…low this morning.’
Her eyes sparked briefly. ‘Why do you say this? Did he say something?’
‘No, no. Just the way he looks.’ I chose a neutral word. ‘Exhausted.’
‘Ah! Don’t tell me,’ she agreed lavishly. ‘He has bad dreams, poor baby. He is so frightened in the night. And Will! He doesn’t hear him, he doesn’t get up! I know he doesn’t!’
‘Why don’t you move in, Maggie? Why don’t you take care of them for a while?’
She said casually, ‘Because Will does not want me here.’
I frowned my disbelief. ‘But why on earth not?’
‘He’s angry with me.’ She gave a shrugs as if these trials, though unfathomable, were to be endured stoically.
‘But this is mad, Maggie. Can’t you sort it out?’
She made a gesture suggesting that, if left to her, the whole business would be instantly for-gotten, before swinging resolutely away and hurrying into the kitchen.
Following, I found her stooped over Charlie, whispering in his ear. Charlie was listening with desperate attention, struggling to emerge from whatever constrained him. Watching him closely, I saw again the clouded gaze, the dreaminess, the disconnection from the world. The realization, when it finally came to me, was so striking and so obvious that I couldn’t think why I hadn’t thought of it before. Charlie was under sedation.
I remembered that Julian Hampton had come to the house several times in the hours and days immediately after Grace had been found. He could easily have prescribed something then, though I would have thought sedation rather a drastic remedy for a child.
I looked at him again, I wondered if I was wrong; and all my instincts told me I wasn’t.
After Maggie had led Charlie to her car and driven away, I watched the pressmen at the gate with grooving unease. Pressmen did not usually wait around unless they were expecting what they liked to call ‘developments’.
When at nine fifty-two more cars drew up and disgorged heavily equipped photographers, my fears finally raced away with me. I snatched up the phone and dialled Will’s mobile, hoping against hope that he would have it with him and would answer, that he wasn’t even now approaching the house.
He answered at the fifth ring.
‘Where are you?’
‘At the barn,’ he answered flatly. ‘Just packing up.’
‘Stay there. Don’t move till I tell you.’
‘What’s happened? What’s wrong?’
‘Trust me. Just do as I say.’
‘Charlie—?’ he asked in sudden agitation.
‘Gone with Maggie. No, it’s—I just don’t want you around, that’s all.’
‘But if it’s the police, I’d rather get it over with.’
‘Not now, Will. Trust me.’
‘But I know why they’ve come, Ali.’
‘Never mind that—’
‘They know I was there on the Gun, they know Grace went to stop me—’
‘We’ll talk about this later,’ I snapped fiercely.
‘But—’
‘Don,t argue with me.’
A pause, and he yielded with a harsh sigh. ‘I’ll stay here, then, shall I?’
‘Until I call. Until I find you.’
Ramsey arrived on time at ten. There were four of them in two cars: another indication of intent.
‘Urgent business?’ Ramsey repeated with quiet fury when I told him Will wasn’t available. ‘Business he wasn’t aware of yesterday?’
I said, ‘That’s right.’
Ramsey regarded me with the cold eye of scepticism. At his shoulder, Wilson and Barbara Smith stood impassively.
‘And you can’t say where he’s gone?’ Ramsey asked again.
‘No.’
‘Meaning—do I understand correctly—that you don’t know where he’s gone?’
‘I’m not actually sure, no.’ Inside the barn, outside the barn, in the paddock.
The officers were standing just inside the hall. I wasn’t going to ask them to sit down.
And you don’t know how long this urgent business is going to take?’
‘No.’
He asked sourly, ‘Are we talking hours here, do you think? Or days?’
‘Oh, hours, I’m sure.’
In the grey light from the fanlight Ramsey’s skin had the pasty malleable look that comes from a diet of junk food and sweet drinks, but now his cheeks were livid with silent anger.
‘The boy’s at home, is he?’ Ramsey cast around as if to catch sight of him.
I had a good idea of why he was asking, and I didn’t care for the implication. ‘I’m sorry?’ I asked ingenuously. ‘I don’t quite see what that has to do with this.’
Ramsey didn’t mind putting it more bluntly. ‘Did Mr Dearden take his son with him?’
‘As a matter of f
act Charlie’s spending the day with his grandmother.’
Ramsey pulled down the corners of his little mouth. ‘It’s unfortunate that Mr Dearden is not available.’ He made a gesture, supposedly of regret but actually of annoyance. ‘We would have preferred to inform him of the latest developments ourselves rather than have him hear about it elsewhere.’
I asked calmly, ‘And what are the latest developments?’
Ramsey shifted his considerable bulk more evenly onto both feet and pulled in his chin. ‘It is my duty to inform you that we are now treating the death of Mrs Grace Dearden as murder, and that we have stepped up the investigation accordingly.’
So it was true. I dropped my head to hide my disappointment, a disappointment made more acute by having allowed myself to believe that things might not get this far. When I looked up again it was to show the appropriate dismay. ‘This is terrible news,’ I said.
‘Terrible indeed,’ Ramsey agreed pedantically.
Professionally, I was still regaining my breath. ‘So what’s happened, Inspector? What’s brought you to this conclusion?’
‘I cannot reveal that at the present time.’
‘But in general terms what are we talking about? The forensic results? Or new information of some sort?’
He gave me an obdurate look. I was well aware of his problem. I was representing the family; but I was also representing Will. As the family’s solicitor, I had the right to be kept informed of progress on the case, but as Will’s lawyer I was another animal altogether, a person to be kept as much as possible in the dark. It was a dilemma, but not one I was going to help him with.
‘Not the forensic results alone,’ he ventured.
‘You’re saying there is something in the forensic tests, then?’ When he didn’t reply, I pressed on, ‘And something else besides?’
‘New information,’ he admitted at last.
‘A witness?’
‘It would not be appropriate for me to say.’
‘Do you have a suspect?’
He managed to hold his expression. ‘That is unanswerable at the present time.’
‘Well…is an arrest imminent?’
He gave himself away then: I caught the glint of anticipation in his eye. ‘I can make no comment on the progress of the case.’
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