by Roy Lewis
She didn’t believe it; it was too glib, and too nonsensical. Respect her judgment Crow might, but he would have other reasons for further questions, reasons other than those given by Wilson. She nodded carefully.
‘How can I help?’
Wilson put his hands on the folder in front of him, and watched Cathy with careful eyes. ‘We think that Lendon was meeting some woman, regularly, and in a rather clandestine fashion. We think that he saw her on the days when his presence in the office or elsewhere is unrecorded. The problem that’s exercised us, obviously, is who is that woman? You did say that you had no idea?’
‘None whatsoever. I suppose it’s possible he was seeing someone, but I certainly don’t know who it might be.’
‘What about this Charlton business?’
Cathy shrugged non-committally.
‘I can’t help you on that matter. I met Mr Charlton, but I don’t really know why he was employed by Mr Lendon.’
‘Well, we now know why. A certain Mr Kent was interested in instituting divorce proceedings against his wife. He needed proof of adultery, so he consulted Mr Lendon about how he should go about it. Mr Lendon obtained the services of Mr Charlton in this connection and told Mr Kent that he’d be in touch in due course. Mr Charlton then proceeded to follow Mrs Kent, discreetly, and it would seem that he obtained some evidence that could have been useful to Kent. But . . . the information was never transmitted to Mr Kent. We wonder why.’
Cathy shook her head. She was puzzled. She could not understand why Wilson was telling her all this.
‘I’m afraid I can’t offer any explanation.’
‘Can’t you? We just wondered whether the name of Mrs Kent rang any bell for you.’
‘It doesn’t. I never heard Mr Lendon discuss her.’
Wilson looked doubtful.
‘So you can’t support the theory we have that Mrs Kent might be somehow involved in his murder.’
Cathy stared at Wilson’s hands, fiat on the folder. She felt cold, suddenly. ‘I don’t understand.’
Wilson shrugged in an off-hand manner.
‘Well, if Lendon suppressed the information he had from Charlton, could it not be that he might have got . . . er . . . rather interested in her? And could he not have met her during those afternoons? And could he not have gone to the Old Mill to meet her? It is after all a lovers’ meeting place, isn’t it? And if he did go there, couldn’t she have killed him, or arranged to meet him there in order that someone else could kill him?’
‘But I don’t see why you-—’
‘You got the drift of all this, surely, from the Barstow file!’
‘Barstow file?’
The genuine puzzlement in her tone must have been communicated to him, for there was a slight softening of his features. When she saw it she realized what was happening, in part. Wilson had told her all this because he guessed that she already knew what was in Lendon’s files. The thought raised a swift query in her mind.
‘If you’re implying that I worked closely with Mr Lendon, why tell me all this now? I can assure you I know nothing about the Charlton-Kent affair, and I can also assure you that Mr Lendon was not the man to take me into his confidence.’
‘In which case, you’ll treat all I said as strictly between us, of course. After all, we’ve yet to follow up these enquiries. We just hoped that you might possibly be able to confirm our suspicions. Now then, another matter . . . we understand you’re friendly with a Mr Michael Enson?’
She nodded unable to trust herself to speak. His sudden change in topic confused her, and the half-formed ideas about his motive for talking to her remained incapable of definition.
‘Can you let us have his address?’ Wilson asked. ‘We have an address at the station, but we are under the impression that he’s moved recently.’
‘He’s . . . he’s now living over at Fenley, in a flat.’ Cathy stumbled somewhat over the address as she gave it to Wilson. ‘What do you want to see him for?’
‘Just checking, that’s all. You know, we have to follow up all lines of enquiry, and all possible enemies of Charles Lendon have to be interviewed.’
‘Enemies?’
Wilson’s eyes held hers steadily. They gave nothing away, conveyed no information. ‘That’s right, miss. We shall want to see Mr Enson tomorrow morning. I’ll call this evening to tell him, unless you’d like to tell him. We’ll want to see you, too, if you don’t mind.’
In a daze, Cathy shook her head.
‘I think that you’d better get in touch with him yourself. But what—’
‘Well, if you can call around at the station tomorrow morning about eleven, we’d be very grateful, Miss Tennant. Just routine, you know.’
After Wilson had gone Cathy sat in her room for a long time, staring blankly at the papers on her desk. A vast confusion of mind prevented any focusing upon decision. She could see only a whirling kaleidoscope: Brian Philips, Mrs Kent, Mike, the letter in her handbag, Inspector Crow, Sergeant Wilson, her own guilt, her own conscience. And lying centrally in the kaleidoscope one clearly defined figure, the inert form of the dead Charles Lendon. Puzzled, confused, frightened and conscience-stricken, she could not think straight.
But Catherine Tennant wasn’t a fool. She had a logical mind, a trained mind. Gradually she began to see things more clearly, began to understand the conduct of the man who had been with her. And she knew why he had come.
By the time she had grasped the significance of Wilson’s visit the detective-sergeant had rejoined Crow at headquarters. Crow raised bushy eyebrows but Wilson gave his characteristic shrug, and shook his head.
‘Mostly negative, I’m afraid. First, it’s pretty obvious that she didn’t know the contents of Lendon’s files and she knows nothing about the Kent affair.’
Crow ran one hand over his bony skull and pursed his lips. ‘I’d have been a little surprised, and somewhat disappointed too, If It had been otherwise.’
There was a disapproving note in Wilson’s voice, when he added: ‘In which case, sir, do you think it was wise to tell her of this line of enquiry?’
‘I don’t know. You see, as I explained to you, I’m convinced she knows more than she is yet prepared to tell. I hoped that if we showed her that we had someone under suspicion, this might jolt her conscience sufficiently to make her reveal what she does know, particularly if we seem to be implicating people who are innocent.’
‘Well, she didn’t come up with anything at all,’ Wilson said with a dissatisfied grunt. ‘And if I may say so, sir, if you think she has something she’s holding back, I feel what we should do is have a go and get it out of her.’
Crow stood up and paced round the room with his hands behind his back. There was obvious sense in what Wilson said, and perhaps he was treating Cathy Tennant with kid gloves, using an unjustifiably psychological approach, and yet. . .
‘I still feel we’d get no result that way. Did she respond satisfactorily to the statement that we wanted her and Enson in tomorrow?’
‘I suppose she did. She went rather pale, and she was obviously frightened about something, and confused.’
Crow stared out of the window. There was a blackbird on the tree out there . . . blackbirds, crows, birds of ill-omen. He grunted unhappily.
‘I’m sure she knows more than she tells us. I’m sure she’s protecting someone. It could be Enson. And yet . . . I believe she’s innately honest.’
It was a feeling only; Crow knew Wilson would be sceptical of that for supposition and ‘feelings’ could be fatal for a police officer on a murder case. No involvement; that was the rule.
‘We’ll see her and Enson tomorrow. Maybe the lid will blow off once they’re both here.’ Wilson watched impassively as Crow put on his raincoat. ‘What about Barstow and Mrs Kent?’
‘Get the dossier together and I’ll look through it with you tonight. We’ll have them both here tomorrow morning for questioning. Now, I’ve two calls to make.’
First, Mr
s Alexandra Bell.
She was physically attractive but that was beside the point: he wanted her character, motivations, her will. She had used her body to buy security. That was a measure of her determination, but it didn’t define its limits.
When he arrived at Lendon’s house half an hour later there was no other car in the drive. Mrs Bell greeted him at the door; her smile was confident and friendly. She invited him in, her bearing displaying no trace of anxiety.
In the sitting-room she took a chair, folded her hands in her lap and sat with her back to the window. Her dark eyes were fixed on his. Crow looked at her and the thought of Charles Lendon came to him; the man could have done a lot worse than marry this woman. Crow brushed the thought aside: it was a triviality that only confused matters.
‘I’m sorry to bother you again, Mrs Bell, but I’d really like to talk to you about a few points that we mentioned before. You told me that you came here as Lendon’s housekeeper about seven years ago.’
She inclined her head gracefully.
‘Now after you . . . after you became lovers, did Lendon continue in his . . . er . . . amorous wanderings?’
She smiled.
‘I appreciate the delicacy of your phrasing, Inspector Crow, and I think I already know what’s at the back of your mind. Perhaps I can put it like this. Although I said to you, perhaps in a weak moment, that I think Charles Lendon should have married me, we never really had the kind of relationship where I could be led to expect fidelity of him. I had certain expectations: I told you that he promised to look after me financially should he die before me, but marriage was not one of them. We became lovers, Charles and I, but this placed no chains on him. I was aware very shortly after we started our affair that he was seeing other women as well. He had a . . . well, a thing about it, really: every pretty woman he met presented a challenge to him and I think now that he was constitutionally incapable of letting an opportunity pass. In a word, he was a womanizer.’
‘And this state continued?’
‘You mean, did he continue to see other women? Oh yes. I wasn’t his wife, I had no claims, no ties on him. He came and went as he pleased.’
‘And you were not jealous.’
Alex Bell smiled again, warmly. She shook her dark head.
‘I didn’t say that. Of course I was jealous — at first. But I had the sense to say nothing and do nothing at the time, and later jealousy was an emotion I could not afford. So I discarded it. In a way, I suppose Charles was right, at the end, when he said that I knew my place.’
‘So you had no strong feelings about the fact that he was conducting an affair just before he died with a woman from Canthorpe?’
‘No,’ she replied calmly, ‘I did not. After all, nothing had changed. There was nothing new in the situation.’
‘So you knew he was recently meeting some woman?’
‘There was never a time when Charles was not involved in some affair or other! All right, you raise your eyebrows, so perhaps I do exaggerate. Nevertheless, there was nothing new in the situation.’
Crow studied his bony hands for a moment and then looked up to her dark, proud eyes. ‘Did you know who the woman was?’
Alex Bell hesitated, then made a little moué and shrugged her shoulders helplessly. ‘I didn’t know . . . but I suspected that it might be .. a certain lady.’
‘Would you care to give me her name?’
Alex Bell stared at him for a moment, as though considering whether her suspicions justified discussion.
‘It makes little difference, I suppose, though I should emphasize that I only suspected a liaison, I didn’t know for sure. There’s a woman called Kent living in Canthorpe. . .’
‘Mrs Gillian Kent.’
‘That’s right. I think it might have been her.’
‘How did you come to think it was her?’
‘One of Charles’s less lovable characteristics was that he liked to talk about his women. Usually, this occurred after he had been with them; only occasionally, before he had managed to . . . to sleep with them. As far as Mrs Kent is concerned I only know that he had become interested in her. Then he stopped talking about her, which meant he could have achieved what he was after, or that his interests had moved in other directions. Towards that girl Tennant, for instance.’
‘Cathy Tennant?’
The surprise in his tone made her look at him keenly. She shrugged.
‘He talked about her a lot at one time. I wondered about it. I asked John . . . no matter. It came to nothing.’
Crow linked his fingers together, squeezed them, watched the fingers turn white as the pressure drove out the blood.
‘We have to look for a woman in a case like this. Lendon went to the Old Mill, which is a lovers’ trysting-place. He walked there, to meet someone? Knowing his predilections it was probably a woman. So he went there to meet a woman or to catch one in an activity of which he disapproved. The woman might have been his mistress, but meeting another man at the mill. Lendon was killed at that mill. The woman might have killed him; the man his mistress was meeting could have killed him. Who knows? Either is a possibility. You . . . you, of course, were asleep on your bed when Charles Lendon was walking up to the mill.’
There was an ironic gleam in her eyes when she answered him.
‘As I told you, Inspector. But I fear there is no one who can verify that statement.’
‘Then perhaps it was another woman . . . perhaps the . . . the woman he was interested in, or another. We’ll find out in the long run. But there’s one thing that doesn’t seem to fit the theory that he was meeting a woman. You said he seemed preoccupied, nervy. Was that consonant with the excitement of a meeting?’
‘No. If he had been meeting a mistress he would have been quite calm, and deliberate, and self-possessed. He was,’ she added drily, ‘a confident and very transparent man on such occasions.’
‘Which means that the more probable theory is the one which suggests he was trying to catch someone out, or was meeting someone on a quite different matter?’
‘The choice is yours, Inspector.’
He nodded, and rose suddenly, towering over her. She looked up at him with brilliant eyes, and again he was aware of the deliberate sexuality that she exuded. He returned her glance and with equal deliberation coldly phrased his words so as to strip away the affectation and the façade. ‘Mrs Bell . . . when you came to Lendon, seven years ago, what exactly did he promise you?’
Something flickered in the depths of her dark eyes. It was gone before he could define the emotion it presented, but in a sense it confirmed his suspicions as to her cold control.
‘He said that he would look after my financial problems while he lived and while we were together, and he said that if he died before me he would leave this house to me, together with an annuity which would leave me reasonably well situated.’
‘Did he make these last promises freely, or did you pressure him into them?’ There was a hint of mockery in her voice when she replied.
‘Let’s say that I used such powers of persuasion as were available to me at the time, bearing in mind that we had yet to become lovers.’
Crow did not return her smile. Seriously, he said: ‘Did you know that he had made a will?’
‘I did. He deposited it at the bank, I understand. I’ve been expecting them to arrive any day, as executors—’
‘He didn’t leave the will at the bank. His will was here, among his papers. The bank officials are not acting as his executors.’
Again something moved, deep in her eyes. He caught it now, an animal glint, a sense of danger. She was sitting very still.
‘You found his will, then?’
‘We did.’
They were both silent. It was the fact of his silence which finally drove her into the open.
‘And?’ There was a harshness in her voice now, and the warm full tones had gone. Crow regarded her steadily: her deliberate sexuality had evaporated. She was a hard, resou
rceful woman, strong of mind and will and body, and he caught a hint of her ruthlessness in the passionately fierce gaze she directed at him.
‘You must understand my position, Mrs Bell. When we came across that will I was in a difficult situation. I had no right to look at it, and it should have been handed immediately to the executors. Indeed, I shall do that now, as soon as possible. Today, in fact. Nevertheless, I am also conducting a murder investigation, and I felt it necessary that I should look at the contents of the will, in case it gave me any further lines of enquiry to follow. So I looked, and I found something very surprising. But you will appreciate that I cannot give you the details . . . that will be for the executor obtaining probate.’
‘You’ve read his will,’ she said in a gritty voice, ‘but you are not prepared to tell me what it contains?’
‘That’s right. On the other hand, I see no reason why I should not inform you that in spite of your expectations you are not the main beneficiary under that will!’
Chapter 14
‘I don’t really see how I can help you.’
Arthur Tennant was thickset and ruddy. He wore a grey shirt, tweed jacket and grey flannel trousers. From the width of the turn-ups Crow supposed the trousers to have been bought quite a few years previously. He slumped now in an easy chair in the sitting-room of the small bungalow where he lived, and he clenched an old briar pipe between his teeth, tamping at the tobacco with a yellow-stained finger as he watched Crow carefully with heavy pouched eyes. There was little of him in Cathy, physically, thought Crow, not her sharpness, nor her quick perception. There was a peasant quality about Tennant’s hands, broad and thick-nailed, and the stolidity of his features was matched by the heavy complacency of his body. He was a comfortable man, and yet there was an edge of nervousness about him that put Crow in mind of an old, wary pike, watching the bait swim into vision. For the moment, Tennant was holding back, awaiting developments.
‘Well,’ the inspector said, ‘you’ll appreciate that when a murder investigation of this kind starts we have to follow up all sorts of avenues of enquiry. One of the most tiresome chores, and one which has to be done in spite of the largely negative results it produces, is the general interviewing of all who might have some connection with the dead man.’