Hilary Bonner

by Braven

  Not that she really needed any reminding. Richard Marshall’s face was engraved upon her soul. She continued to stare at him levelly. He returned the stare without blinking. He had always been a cool customer, she thought.

  She knew that he must by now be well into his mid-sixties, but he still looked good, she reflected grudgingly. His hair was iron-grey but remained thick and curly, his skin tanned and healthy, his tall broad physique trim and well-preserved. His face, although generally regarded as handsome, had always been jowly, but had altered remarkably little with the passing of the years. Nothing about him suggested that he had ever been troubled much by guilt or remorse, but Karen was well enough aware that this was a man who had never displayed any kind of conscience.

  Marshall even had about him still that self-satisfied expression she had always found so infuriating. It was more than self-satisfied. It was smug. Even at that moment, surely already aware that the small group confronting him were police officers, he contrived to look smug. It was unbelievable. More than anything Karen wanted to wipe that smug look off his face. By God, she did.

  “Call yourself what you like,” she responded sharply. “I’m Detective Superintendent Karen Meadows of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary. You will always be Richard Marshall in my nick, and I’m arresting you on suspicion of murder.”

  To her immense satisfaction the Marshall mask slipped. Finally. And Karen knew from Bill Talbot, and indeed from her own childhood memories, just how unusual that was. For once, he no longer looked smug at all. It occurred to her that watching his facial expression change that way might well be the only good moment experienced by any police officer in the whole Marshall investigation, spanning almost thirty years. Obliquely Karen thought that she would quite like to meet up with Bill Talbot now. She couldn’t wait to tell Bill about this moment.

  A look of panic began to spread across Marshall’s face, which Karen found even more gratifying. He took another step up from the engine compartment, still holding the battery in both hands. He was towering above Karen now. Suddenly he lifted the heavy battery so that it was almost level with his chin. Involuntarily Karen flinched. It seemed that he might be about to throw the thing at her.

  She sensed Phil Cooper moving forward to her right, while PC Richardson, on her left, leaned forward and grabbed hold of the railing around the boat. Karen realized that Richardson was about to attempt to jump aboard. In spite of her initial sense of fear concerning what Marshall might do, she used both hands to indicate to the men that she wanted them to hold back.

  Then, her eyes never leaving Richard Marshall’s face, she began to caution him. “You don’t have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be used in evidence.”

  Marshall stared right back at her. His eyes remained as unusual as she remembered them; clear, very pale blue, and just like those of his two little daughters. Suddenly an image of those two small frightened faces all those years ago flashed unwelcomely before her. She still believed that she, and she personally, had let those children down. She knew she was not alone in that. It didn’t help. She could feel tears pricking—and that certainly would not help. She had a job to do. There was so much that could never be put right, but at least she could do her best to seek some sort of justice for Lorraine and Janine and their mother. She made herself concentrate all her intentions on what was happening now. On Richard Marshall.

  He no longer looked panic-stricken, but rather more as if he were calculating the odds against him. She told herself again that it wasn’t Marshall’s style to do a runner or to resist arrest. As a natural conman he was far more the sort to bluff, to rely on his wits to get him out of trouble. Karen got the feeling he was quite methodically working out which course of action to take next.

  Still holding the battery at chin level, still staring directly at Karen, Marshall took a further step up onto the deck of Wessex Lady until he was standing in full view in the cockpit, towering above her.

  Fleetingly it occurred to Karen what a strong man he still must be. And at the same time she thought, not for the first time, how terrifying it must have been for his wife, so much smaller than him, and his little children, to have been faced with him in a violent mood.

  Marshall took a pace forward as Karen finished the caution. She had to motion again for the officers accompanying her not to react. Her eyes never left Marshall’s face. Eventually she was rewarded with a look of resignation. Very slowly, and in a totally controlled manner, Marshall began to lower the battery onto the deck in front of him. He did not speak.

  “In lay terms, you’re nicked,” said Karen, in the same laconic voice Marshall had used earlier. Marshall did not reply.

  “I want you to move very slowly off the boat,” Karen instructed.

  Marshall did so, still without comment. His face was very slightly flushed, his eyes downcast now. He looked sullen more than anything else. Karen quite liked that. This was, after all, a man whom she was quite sure had literally got away with murder for twenty-eight years.

  When he was eventually standing on the walkway alongside her, pointedly avoiding her gaze now, she half-turned to Phil Cooper.

  “Right, cuff ’im,” she instructed. And she could do nothing to prevent the slight note of triumph which crept into her voice.

  Chapter Seven

  As the handcuffed Marshall was led to the waiting cars the young woman from the marina office, looking quite distraught, ran after him, calling out: “Ricky, Ricky, what’s going on?”

  Marshall glanced at her only briefly, then looked away. He said nothing. But maybe there was something in that glance that the girl recognized. Certainly she backed off straight away.

  Phil Cooper, standing alongside DC Smiley, watched her with interest until, with one last anguished look at Marshall over her shoulder, she retreated out of sight into her little office. He returned his gaze then to Marshall as, in the custody of Karen Meadows and the other three police officers, he was loaded into one of the two waiting cars. The detective superintendent sat in the front of the blue saloon alongside DC Tompkins, the driver, while Marshall was sandwiched between the two uniformed men, PCs Brownlow and Richardson, in the back.

  Cooper felt as if his eyes were riveted to the car as it moved slowly across the marina car park and then turned left out on to the main drag. He didn’t have the personal long-term involvement of his superintendent, but like almost everybody in the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, certainly everybody in Torquay, this case really mattered to him, as Karen had realized at once. Cooper had two little girls he doted on. Ever since the skeleton of Clara Marshall’s body had been discovered, Cooper had found that when he thought about Marshall’s children, which he could not help doing a lot, he pictured them inside his head with his own daughter’s faces. It was not pleasant, not pleasant at all.

  Phil Cooper, like all his colleagues, was also very aware of how important this one was to the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary. It was pretty devastating for police officers to have been sure for all this time that a man was guilty of treble murder and to have been unable to do anything about it.

  Well, they’d got him now. And it was all their jobs to make sure that Richard Marshall remained well and truly got, as it were.

  The detective superintendent had asked Phil and DC Ronald Smiley to stay behind and make some check calls around the marina and in the Poole and Bournemouth area. Phil Cooper knew well enough what was required. He and Smiley needed to build a profile of Marshall as he was today.

  They needed to talk to people who knew Marshall, particularly anyone who might have any kind of new take on the man. And the obvious place to start was with that girl in the marina office.

  Any kind of invasion by a team of half a dozen police officers is likely to be disruptive and distressing, at home or in the workplace, but Cooper had taken careful note of the girl’s reaction as Marshall had been le
d away. She had looked both shocked and upset. And considerably more so, Cooper somehow suspected, than would have been the case had Richard Marshall merely been her employer.

  Cooper knew well enough of Marshall’s reputation as an inveterate womanizer. And by all accounts a highly successful one, reflected the detective, the very thought of which made him uneasy. The young woman looked to be in her early to mid-thirties, certainly a good thirty years younger than Marshall but that, Cooper reckoned, would not stop a man like him.

  Gesturing for Smiley to accompany him he led the way back into the marina office. The young woman was standing just inside, by the window. Cooper had been unable to see her but he guessed that she too had watched the unmarked police car containing Richard Marshall leave the marina complex and turn onto the main drag en route for Dorchester, and then on past Honiton and Exeter to Torquay.

  As Cooper and Smiley entered the office she quickly turned away, walked over to her desk and sat down, sweeping back her long bright chestnut hair with one hand. She was unusually tall, but she had quite a small tight-lipped face, Cooper observed. She also had a slightly sulky look about her, without which, the detective sergeant thought, she would have been rather pretty. The young woman contrived to stare straight ahead while ensuring that she did not look directly at either of the two police officers.

  “If you’ll excuse me, miss, I think we’d better have a word,” began Cooper, in the deceptively deferential manner he was inclined to adopt at the beginning of an interview. As he spoke he pulled up the one other chair in the little room, leaving Smiley to perch against a box of what seemed to be engine parts.

  Cooper at first merely checked details, like the young woman’s name and the precise nature of her job. And as he questioned her an intriguing, but not entirely unexpected, scenario began to emerge.

  “My name is Jennifer Roth and I’m Ricky’s personal assistant,” she said.

  Cooper resisted the temptation bluntly to ask straight away if that was all she was. Instead he stuck to the gentle approach. He was that sort of policeman. He believed that softly softly got the best results. It certainly seemed to work for him, anyway.

  “And perhaps you could explain to me exactly what that entails.”

  She nodded. “Ricky runs the marina and I run the office, answer the phone, do all the paperwork, send out invoices, pay the bills.”

  Jennifer Roth had a very educated voice. Definitely public school, and with more than a little of the inborn sense of superiority which came with the territory, Cooper suspected, despite its having been shaken somewhat that day. He wondered fleetingly about her background.

  “I see. And how long have you known Ricky and worked for him?”

  “I’ve worked here for about four years now. I got the job quite soon after Ricky took over here.”

  “Did you know him before that?”

  Jennifer looked uncertain and said nothing.

  “Did you know him before that?”

  “No,” she said.

  “So how did you get hired?”

  “I answered a newspaper advertisement,” Jennifer replied quickly enough, but she still seemed unwilling to meet Cooper’s eye and her face was distinctly flushed.

  Cooper studied her for a moment or two.

  “You seem a little upset,” he said gently. Jennifer looked up, meeting his gaze at last. She looked as if she didn’t know how to respond. She opened her mouth as if she were about to say something and then closed it again, remaining sullenly silent.

  “Are you upset?” he asked, a little more firmly.

  She shook her head.

  “I think you are,” Cooper persisted.

  “Well, a bit, maybe. But wouldn’t you be if your boss had just been taken away in handcuffs?”

  Cooper bowed his head slightly, acknowledging her point. He was pretty sure it was more than that. But Jennifer Roth seemed to be warming to her theme, or perhaps she just felt this was ground that she could safely explore.

  “I mean, what do I do? There are checks here that need signing. It’s Friday. Half the world will descend on us tonight wanting to go out on their boats for the weekend. Ricky does all the basic maintenance work, he’s not a qualified mechanic but he’s very knowledgeable and he gets the boats ready for most of the owners. Makes sure everything’s in working order, and calls in extra help if needed. That’s his big Friday job. What am I going to say to them?”

  “That’s up to you,” responded Cooper. “We are investigating a very serious matter here, you do realize that, don’t you?”

  Again Jennifer Roth looked as if she didn’t know what to say. Cooper waited until she eventually spoke. He had learned over his years of questioning people that if you presented them with silences which lasted long enough, the vast majority would say something as if somehow compelled to fill the vacuum. And very often he found it a most effective technique.

  “Well, I assumed so,” said Jennifer Roth. “You wouldn’t have taken him away in handcuffs if that wasn’t so, would you?”

  “Absolutely right. And have you any idea what this serious matter is?”

  Yet again Jennifer Roth hesitated.

  “No,” she said eventually.

  “Are you quite sure of that?”

  “Quite sure, I’ve just told you,” Jennifer snapped the reply. She looked petulant more than anything else now. Petulant and sulky.

  “We have just arrested the man you know as Ricky Maxwell on suspicion of the murder of his wife and children.”

  “Oh.” Jennifer Roth closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair.

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  Jennifer opened her eyes. Small, vaguely blue eyes, matching the size of her features. Cooper thought he could see panic in them. He wasn’t quite sure. Hers was a very strange reaction, not easy to assess.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You don’t seem surprised.”

  “Of course I’m surprised. Shocked is more the word. I’m shocked.”

  Cooper studied her appraisingly again.

  Her face was even more flushed. But if that was panic he had seen in those small, now veiled, eyes she gave no further sign of it. She seemed quite calm. Cooper waited to see if she would say any more, ask him any questions, even.

  “Is there nothing you want to know about this?” he said after a bit. “Aren’t you curious?”

  She half-shook her head, half-nodded. She was confused, you could see that clearly enough.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You haven’t even asked when this happened, have you?”

  “No. No.” She leaned back in her chair, tipping the two front legs slightly. She looked even more sulky and petulant. Certainly unwilling to cooperate. Then she sighed, in a resigned sort of way.

  “OK. When did it happen?” she asked, her voice heavy with exaggerated weariness.

  “Twenty-eight years ago,” Cooper replied, and he could not have explained why he was so sure that she already knew the answer. But he was sure. Quite sure, even though she responded only with a slight nod and said nothing more at all.

  Abruptly he swung on to another tack.

  “So how well do you know Ricky?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, really. Quite well, I suppose.”

  Cooper sighed. His patience was running out. He wasn’t sure whether Jennifer Roth was being deliberately obtuse, or whether, perhaps, she wasn’t the brightest young woman he had ever encountered.

  He took an oblique approach.

  “Could you give me your address please, Miss Roth.”

  The young woman hesitated just for a moment.

  “Flat 5, Heron View Court, Poole,” she said eventually.

  Cooper studied her thoughtfully. This was really a result. It was not only the address of one of the luxury apartments in the marina complex, it also had another significance. Cooper had somehow already suspected it, had a gut feeling, but he knew better than to rely on gut feel
ings and hunches, indeed always thought that hunches were at best a policing myth and at worst a dangerous alternative to a properly conducted investigation.

  Somewhat ostentatiously he took his notebook from his pocket and flicked through it, as if checking something. He actually had no need to check anything. But it was several seconds before he looked up and spoke again. Several seconds which he hoped had been at least a little uncomfortable for Jennifer Roth.

  “Same address as Richard Marshall,” he remarked expressionlessly.

  She glowered at him then, suddenly displaying a flash of raw defiance.

  “Ricky. Ricky Maxwell. That’s his name.”

  “That’s the name he chooses to use in order to put his past behind him. A past that involves the murder of three people.”

  “I don’t believe it,” she said. “It’s just not true. I’ve never believed it.”

  “A moment ago you said you knew nothing about it.”

  “I’m in shock. I didn’t know what to say. I was trying to think what would be best to say.”

  “I’ll tell you what it’s best to say, always best. The truth. And my advice to you is to stick to it rigidly, Miss Roth.”

  There was still defiance in her. She was, he thought, tougher than she looked. She rounded on him indignantly.

  “Why are you speaking to me like that? You don’t have any right. I’m not being accused of anything. I’ve never committed any sort of crime in my life. I just know that Ricky is innocent and I don’t want to say anything to make things worse for him. That’s all.”

  Cooper more or less ignored the outburst. “How long have you been living with Ricky?” he said, putting lightly ironic emphasis on the assumed name.

  “Almost four years,” she answered quickly enough.

  “So, more or less ever since you’ve been working here.”

  “Yes. Right from the start. I came here to live with Ricky. That’s why I moved here.”

  “And a very nice address too, if I might say so. Marshall owns the place, does he?” Cooper glanced through the window at the apartment blocks alongside the marina. In this area, one of the most expensive in the UK, the flats with views out across Poole Harbour must be worth a cool half million, he reckoned.