‘Is she? Right.’
Mortensen cleared his throat. ‘We are,’ he said, ‘uncertain what part she played in Sophie’s fall. She was at the castle at the time and offered no very convincing reason why.’
‘What reason did she give?’
‘That she took her granddaughter to the café at the castle for breakfast.’
‘Sounds reasonable,’ Scott said, aiming for casual detachment.
‘But she came first here to the police station to collect Asquith, who we had just released.’
‘Came to collect him?’ Scott pictured Gina on her bike. ‘In a cab?’
‘No. The students have a van. She came with Asquith’s friend in the van. And then she invited them to come for breakfast. Isn’t that strange, when she was taking her granddaughter to breakfast?’
Scott pondered for a moment the continuing mystery that was Gina. ‘Perhaps she felt sorry for him,’ he suggested lamely.
‘Perhaps. And then the gatekeeper had trouble with her – a story about a missing key which was a lie. And she was heard having an argument with Sophie, which she doesn’t explain well. Her account of her movements is full of inconsistencies.’
God, Gina, Scott thought, what the hell have you been doing?
He said, ‘But, as I understand it, she had her granddaughter with her, so she can hardly –’
‘Oh, we don’t think she pushed the girl herself, but we did wonder if she was part of the trap. Now that we have this text message, though, that looks less likely. The trap, it seems, was set without any help. But her behaviour is still puzzling. And it has been all along. She seems to be very attached to Asquith.’
‘Attached?’ Scott asked evenly.
‘Very ready to defend him. From the beginning, she argued that he was not responsible for Wagner’s death.’
‘What puts him in the frame for Wagner’s death? Apart from the blackmail story?’
‘He is the only person we can place near the car at the right time. We’ve been through the CCTV images and no-one approached the car in the course of that afternoon. Unfortunately, we don’t have complete images of the car during the morning when Wagner and Asquith were working on it. A –’ he sought for the word ‘– camping van with tall sides was parked next to it for a while and it obscured the picture.’
‘Was Asquith alone with the car at any time?’
‘He says not and the CCTV gives us no help on that. It may be that it was done under Wagner’s nose, so to speak.’
‘Not an easy thing to do.’
‘No.’
Mortensen shifted in his chair and Scott took is as a signal that he had been given as much time as professional courtesy demanded. ‘Just one last thing,’ he said. ‘Where did Asquith say he left his phone?’
‘On a table at the house where the students are living. We have tried to locate it but it is switched off, naturally. We have questioned the other students and made a search. We have also made a search in the grounds of the castle.’
‘How did Asquith arrange to be picked up from here that morning?’
‘He used the pay phone.’
‘Right.’ Scott stood up but didn’t move immediately to the door. ‘Thank you for being so open with me. What strikes me – and I’m sure it has struck you too – is that if Asquith is guilty, and if his motive was to silence anyone who knew why he was being blackmailed, then anyone else who might know about the blackmail – Gi – Virginia Gray, particularly, and whoever it was who overheard her conversation with Sophie –’
‘– An Armenian girl – Zada Petrosian.’
‘Right. Well, if he’s responsible then all the time he’s in custody, they’re safe. I take it you’re intending to keep him until you’ve been able to talk to Sophie Forrester?’
‘We are. But we have to play by the rules here, especially in this case. Asquith’s father is a former ambassador. We have already had representatives from the British embassy on the phone. We will have to charge him or release him in the next twenty-four hours. Excuse me for a moment. I have just thought of something.’
He went out giving Scott the opportunity he had feared he wouldn’t get of transcribing into his diary the words of the message to Sophie. No gift, he thought, could thrill Gina more.
Mortensen came back, apologising. ‘Talking of playing by the rules made me think that we might be able to return to Mrs Gray her mobile phone, since all the traffic on it appears quite innocent. I thought you might be able to return it to her if you are going to the students’ house at all, but it seems the laboratory is not quite finished with it yet. Tomorrow, perhaps.’ He shook hands with Scott and ushered him out.
A visit to the castle to view the crime scenes was next on Scott’s agenda. He parked in the car park and looked around it with interest, noting the positions of the CCTV cameras and how much of the area was visible from the gatehouse. He wondered whether the high-sided camper van had parked after Wagner had parked his car or whether he had chosen to park next to it, possibly at Asquith’s suggestion. Then he took the sweeping path into the castle, pausing on the bridge to look up at the ramparts and the length of the drop into the moat, He walked on up to the ramparts and looked down into the grey water below, wondering how deep it was, whether Sophie Forrester could swim and who knew whether she could or not. She had hit her head, of course, so the question was academic to some extent.
Driving back to the hotel, he considered what to tell Gina. He had hardly ridden to her rescue as she so uncharacteristically wanted him to, but he had the text message, a tomorrow perhaps for the return of her phone and a now that looks less likely about her involvement. A pretty good haul, he would have said, but her face this morning had suggested that complete vindication or nothing was what she had in mind. It was only twelve-thirty and he half expected to find her back in bed or still sitting gazing out to sea, but he found the room cleaned and empty. He reached for his phone and remembered that would be no use, so he wrote her a note on a sheet of the hotel’s crested paper – Not a bad morning’s work. Have a present for you. In the bar. Lunch? – and left it on the bed.
The bar was in the interior of the hotel, without access to the brilliant light of sun on sea; it seemed to be furnished and lit for a moody evening ambience but he bought a pint of Carlsberg and settled down on a leather sofa at the far end of the room with a view of the foyer and re-ran the morning’s conversation in his head. What he came up with was a list of unasked questions, which he made a note of, wondering whether he could somehow claim a second session with Mortensen. Only if he had something to give in return, he thought, and that would depend on Gina.
He had finished his lager and was thinking of ordering lunch when Gina appeared. He watched her warily as she scanned the room; you just never knew with her what you were going to get. This morning he’d got wounded and tragic; now cats and cream came to mind. She had changed something about her appearance, he thought as she sashayed across to him, so this was a test – not just noticing the change but approving it in the right terms. It didn’t do to refer to the mechanism of the change; women could say to one another you’ve changed your hair colour or I like that lipstick, but men were supposed to be impressed by the effect without knowing how it was achieved. And if you were dealing with Gina then you had the additional challenge of steering clear of anything banal as well.
‘You look –’ he said, and was momentarily blank as unusable clichés flooded his mind. ‘– dazzling,’ he managed.
It was good enough. ‘Good,’ she said, kissing him. ‘I aim to dazzle.’
‘Lunch?’ he asked.
‘Absolutely.’
He watched her as she picked up the menu from the table and studied it. It was the hair mainly, he decided. Shorter, maybe blonder, definitely smoother. Very good, in fact. And she was wearing a dress he hadn’t seen before, dark green and sleeveless, that looked good against her skin. And she had had her nails done. He saw a pink, polished forefinger running down the men
u and almost laughed aloud. He had never before seen her with painted nails. What was going on?
‘What are you drinking?’ she asked. ‘Carlsberg? I’ll have a half then. And gravad lax with dill sauce, please.’
‘Your present,’ he said, handing over his copy of the text message to Sophie before he went to the bar to order.
When he came back with their drinks, she laid the sheet of paper on the table and tapped it with a pink nail. ‘This,’ she said, ‘makes no sense at all.’
‘Well Mortensen seems to think that it lets you off the hook so I wouldn’t be too quick to rubbish it.’
‘I can’t help that. This text lets James off the hook too.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s the wrong dress.’
‘Wrong in what sense?’
‘The text says, wear the white dress to get us in the mood – i.e. in the mood for rehearsing their big scene. Only that’s not the dress Ophelia wears in that scene. The white dress is a beaten up wedding dress – a bit Miss Havisham. When Ophelia goes mad she is obsessed with sex and the faithlessness of men. One of her songs has the lines:
‘Quoth she “Before you tumbled me
You promised me to wed.”
“So would I ha’ done by yonder sun
Hadst thou not come to my bed.”’
‘So I had the idea that she could be in a wedding dress – maybe her dead mother’s – but it’s too long for her, especially as she’s got bare feet, and it’s all muddy and bedraggled round the bottom and –’
‘Could we come to the point, do you think?’
‘That is the point. It’s her mad scene dress and it’s the last thing we see her wearing, so when the queen comes in later and describes how she drowned, and how her draperies spread out on the water and held her up for a while, that’s what we imagine she was wearing. And it is what Sophie was wearing when she went into the moat, which made me think that she might have thrown herself in, turning herself into drowned Ophelia for dramatic effect.’
‘Why would she?’
‘She was depressed – more than depressed, distraught. She was pregnant and the baby’s father not only didn’t want the child but didn’t want her either.’
‘Quite a lot of women find themselves in that situation. They don’t kill themselves.’
‘I know they don’t but you don’t know Sophie. You’ve met Susan, though. You can see what she’s like and Sophie’s cut from the same cloth. She’s used to being cosseted and doing what’s expected of her. She’s used to being a good girl, a nice girl, her mother’s pride and joy. I don’t think she would have any idea how to set about life as a single mother.’
‘An abortion then.’
‘Well, that’s the thing. I don’t think she could face that on her own either.’ She fished in her pocket, brought out a square of card and laid it on the table. ‘I found this among her things when I packed them up. You can see it’s one of Conrad’s pretentious cards and I wouldn’t mind betting that it’s the number of an abortion clinic in Copenhagen. I looked up Ro i Sindet and it means peace of mind.’
‘You didn’t try ringing the number to find out?’
‘David!’
‘You haven’t got a phone.’
‘Exactly. Anyway, I think Conrad was going to help her. Possibly pay for it. Certainly take her there. They went off together to hire the car and Sophie was transformed when they came back – on top of the world. I thought it was a ploy to make James jealous, but now I think Conrad was her rescuer and then suddenly he was dead.’
‘It was a possibility,’ Scott said as their food arrived, ‘but this text rules out suicide, doesn’t it?’
‘It does in a way but it can’t be from James,’ she said, dolloping dill sauce onto her salmon. ‘James would never have suggested that she wore that dress to rehearse their scene. Her dress for their scene is a neat little thing, short but not too short – the kind of thing the Duchess of Cambridge used to wear when she was waity Katy – young but respectable enough for a girl who thinks she might be going to marry the heir to the throne. And she wears it with high heels. She rehearsed in it the other day because we needed to see how much James could throw her around in that scene without it becoming indecent, so James would never –’
Scott put down his sandwich and reached out a hand to stop her. ‘I hate to say it,’ he said, ‘but you’re losing the plot. If James was making an arrangement to kill her rather than rehearse with her, it didn’t matter if she was wearing the wrong dress, did it?’
‘But why tell her to put that dress on?’
‘Maybe so people like you would draw the same conclusion that you did – that she put the dress on to drown herself in it.’
‘All right. But there are other things wrong with that text. Stylistic things. I’ll need more time on it, but I’ll nail them.’
‘Hunches won’t do. It will need to be hard evidence.’
‘It will be.’ She picked up her knife and fork and addressed herself again to her lunch.
They ate in silence until she had finished and then she pushed her plate away, leaned back in her seat and said, ‘The thing is, if James had sent that text, wouldn’t he have known that the police would find it on Sophie’s phone?’
‘I’m not clear about where they found her phone. Maybe he expected she would have it with her and he could sling it in the moat, but she’d left it somewhere.’
‘With her clothes in the wine cellar, probably.’
‘Where?’
‘The king’s wine cellar – it’s our wardrobe. And no-one except the police could have got it from there because I’d locked it. They ought to ask the gatekeeper whether anyone asked him to unlock it, though.’
‘OK.’
She reached for her drink and drained the last of it. ‘I need a break from this,’ she said. ‘I propose we devote the afternoon to pleasure – a walk along the beach and any other pleasures we can devise. Then I’ve got some stuff on my laptop to show you – useful background information. We can go through it with our pre-dinner drinks.’
‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘Who needs peanuts?’
*
‘Prosecco?’ he asked soon after six that evening, looking into the minibar.
‘Save that for when we’ve nailed this thing. What else is there?’
‘More Carlsberg.’
‘Fine.’
When he took the two bottles out onto the balcony she had her laptop open.
‘What is this exactly that you’ve got to show me?’ he asked.
‘A slew of emails. Annie forwarded them to me as background info so I could get a purchase on the group when I started on the costumes. They cover the assembling of the cast and crew. A bit like the opening of The Magnificent Seven – getting the posse together. Though not so exciting, of course.’
‘I imagine not,’ he said, pulling a chair round to sit beside her.
‘Annie sent them to me but most of them were forwarded to her by Adam. He seems to have sent her everything. Keeping her in the loop he calls it.’ Her eyes were on the screen as she scrolled down. Then she turned to him. ‘And who is Adam?’ she quizzed him.
‘Can’t remember.’
‘Yes, you can, David.’
‘Yes, I can. He’s the director. Why don’t you assume that since I read and digested your email summary and I listened to Mortensen this morning, I know who people are, unless I tell you otherwise?’
‘OK. Just don’t be too proud to ask.’ She turned back to the screen. ‘Here’s my inbox. I’ve grouped the messages by sender so all Annie’s messages are together.’
Scott looked at the screen and saw a collection of a dozen or so messages dated between 3rd and 12th May, all forwarding other messages. These were followed by six messages, all with the subject ‘Hamlet’, which appeared to be correspondence just between Annie and Gina.
‘Start with that one,’ she said, pointing. ‘The earlier ones aren’t important really, but you c
an look at them later if you like.’
He pulled the laptop towards him and edged his chair away in a vain attempt to suggest that he would like to do his reading unprompted and without commentary, but he started on the one she had pointed out.
– – – original message – – –
From: Adam Barrie
To Marianne Gray
Sent 5th May 2011 23. 28
Subject Fw; Another chance
Hi Gorgeous
It occurred to me that I ought to keep you in the loop with negotiations over cast and crew. After this week’s auditions the wires will be buzzing and here, predictably, is the first. I’m about to email James and do whatever it takes. If I can’t get him I’ll have to think again but IT WILL NOT BE CONRAD. You were there at his audition, I don’t have to tell you. More to come. Watch this space
Grateful beyond words for your support.
xxA
– – – original message – – –
From: Conrad Wagner
To: Adam Barrie
Sent: 3rd May 2011 20.32
Subject: Another chance
Hi Adam
I have the feeling that I didn’t do myself justice this afternoon. Auditions are such deadly things, aren’t they? Could you bear to hear me again, do you think? The truth is, I really feel that Hamlet is my part and I would put my heart and soul into it.
All right if I drop in tomorrow evening after dinner?
Thanks
Conrad
Scott moved on through the messages. He was not sure what he was supposed to be looking for or noticing and he thought Gina wasn’t sure either, but he surfed on through.
‘Then you get Adam desperate to recruit James before he gets backed into a corner by Conrad,’ Gina prompted. ‘There’s a reply, so you have to scroll to the bottom for the original message.’ Then she seemed to notice the expression on his face and added, ‘Obviously.’
‘Obviously,’ he said.
– – – original message – – –
From: Adam Barrie
To: James Asquith
Sent: 5th May 2011 23.35
Subject: Playing the Prince
Hi James
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