by Braven
“Yes.” Jennifer Roth’s response was brief at first, then she seemed unable to stop herself saying more. “Ricky made a lot of money on a property he owned in London,” she said defensively. “Anyway, it’s not one of the flats at the front…”
Her voice tailed off. Cooper raised his eyebrows and studied her appraisingly, wondering why she had felt it necessary to explain Marshall’s ability to own an expensive apartment, because even the ones which didn’t actually have a harbour view would still be worth a great deal of money in this highly sought-after location. Maybe she knew all too well that whatever funds Marshall had used to buy the apartment had not come his way through totally honest means. Cooper himself would happily have bet a month’s salary on that.
“So how long have you known Richard Marshall, and how did you meet him?” he persisted.
Jennifer Roth’s face creased into an angry frown. For a moment Cooper thought she was going to tell him again that Marshall was now Ricky Maxwell. But she didn’t, although there was an edge of irritation to her reply.
“We were introduced by friends. It was quite a while ago, I can’t remember when, and in any case I don’t see what it’s got to do with anything. We became closer over the years, and eventually it just seemed to happen that I came here to live with him.”
Cooper appraised her, allowed himself a little self-indulgence for a moment.
“You’re a great deal younger than him, Miss Roth. Perhaps you could tell me what attracted you so much to him?”
“I could, Detective Sergeant, but I won’t. It’s none of your business.”
Cooper was aware of the until-now impassive DC Smiley struggling to suppress a laugh, and didn’t entirely blame him.
Fairly swiftly after that Cooper concluded the interview. He had learned at least one fact, although he did not know what importance it might have, which was that Marshall and Jennifer Roth were having a relationship. But he did not see much chance of learning anything else. Not with her attitude, he didn’t—an attitude which would need to be dealt with if she was to be of any further use at all in the investigation, Cooper reckoned. So he decided at least to fire a final salvo before beating a tactical retreat.
“We will be talking again, Miss Roth,” he told her solemnly. “It may not be me, it may be some of my colleagues, but we will be talking to you again. And, if I were you, I would really think about how you are going to handle this. For your own good, Miss Roth, I would strongly advise you to decide to be as helpful as you possibly can in future. This is a murder enquiry. You have been living with a man whom we believe has committed the most foul and brutal kind of murder.”
Jennifer Roth stood up then, and with surprising speed moved around her desk towards Cooper so that she was standing just a few inches from his chair, looking down at him. Cooper didn’t like that. He quickly stood up too. Jennifer Roth really was tall, though. A little over six foot, he thought, certainly taller than him. Cooper was a broad shouldered, well-muscled man, a sportsman, a rugby player. However, he stood a bare five foot eleven, and Jennifer Roth was still looking down on him.
“But he didn’t do it, you ridiculous pompous man,” she said. “Don’t you understand? Ricky has never hurt anyone in his life. He couldn’t. He’s a lovely gentle man. For almost thirty years he’s been chased around the country by you people. He had to change his name because of the mud that’s stuck to him.”
She paused. And when she continued her voice had risen several octaves.
“He didn’t do it, you bastards,” she shouted. “He didn’t do anything. He loved his wife, and he loved his children. He didn’t do it.”
And with that she slumped to her knees on the floor of the marina office, and buried her head in her hands. Her shoulders began to shake and she started to weep loudly, her whole body contorted with sobbing convulsions.
When Karen Meadows arrived back at Torquay Police Station Sean MacDonald was sitting in reception. Waiting for her.
Karen was up to her eyes in work. Her adrenalin was on overtime. But she invited him into her office at once. Sean MacDonald, like her, like all of them, had waited a long time for this day.
The Scotsman looked pale and tired, but he was fit and well-preserved for his age. A neat white beard complemented his full head of white hair. His eyes were still sparkling bright and yet so dark that the irises seemed almost black against his pale papery skin.
He gave Karen a small smile as he sat down in one of the armchairs in her office and she took the other one next to him.
“You’ve been to get him, haven’t you?” he began quietly.
She nodded. But she was mildly surprised. Marshall had been safely delivered to the custody suite at the back of the building, driven straight into the private yard there and smartly escorted in by PCs Brownlow and Richardson. Mac couldn’t have seen him. And she was sure nobody at the station would have told Mac about the arrest. She’d have them keelhauled if they had. But she had total confidence in her team not to do anything that might jeopardize this case, and in any event the front office clerks would probably not even be aware yet of what was going on.
“How do you know?” she enquired, genuinely interested.
Mac’s smile widened. He still had a lovely smile, warm and gentle. But you could see the pain in his eyes: it was etched into the little lines at their corners and ran away from the sides of his mouth, too.
“I’ve longed for this moment for nearly thirty years,” he said quietly, enunciating each word in that precise way he had, his cut-glass Scottish accent pure and sharp as the first fall of snow on the mountains of his beloved Highlands.
“Night and day, ever since she went…” The voice trailed off. There was a catch in it. His smile faded away, slipping into the folds of skin around his mouth, disappearing into the leathery contours of a face that in itself told so much of the tragedy that had overshadowed his long life. He seemed to be struggling to regain control before continuing.
“It’s been with me, all of it, all this time, at the back of my mind all day long regardless of what I am doing, and in my dreams every night. And I mean every night. It’s always there.”
He looked at her. His eyes were even brighter now. She thought a tear or two might be forming.
“But you know that, lass, don’t you?” he said gently.
She nodded. Mac lowered his eyes. But she could see that he was blinking rapidly. She had never seen Sean MacDonald break down, not at any stage since Clara had disappeared. He was a tough dour Scotsman, unaccustomed to showing his feelings. She did know just a little of what he had gone through for all those years. She really did. He was right about that.
“It’s like an instinct with me, all of this,” Mac went on. “When I got here and they said you were out, I just thought: ‘Yes, they’ve gone to get him. At last they’ve gone to get him.’ And I was right, wasn’t I?”
Karen nodded again. “Yes, Mac. You were right.”
“And he’s here now? He’s in this building?”
“Yes. He’s here. In one of our cells by now, probably. Locked up where he belongs at last.”
Mac took a deep breath, drawing in a big gulp of air very slowly, almost as if it hurt him to do so. His voice was even softer when he began to speak again.
“I can feel him here,” he said. “I can feel his presence. I knew he was here.”
He reached out, touched her hand with his.
“Can you keep him locked up? Can you do that, Karen lassie? Is he going to go down? Is there going to be justice for my lovely girls at last?”
“Oh, I do hope so, Mac. By God I do.”
“You’re a good person, Karen Meadows, and a very fine police officer,” Mac said suddenly.
She was totally taken aback.
“I know a whole lot of people who would disagree with you on both counts,” she remarked wryly.
“And they’d be wrong. You’re special, Karen. You’re special because you care.”
Karen was
afraid she was going to blush. This conversation continued to take her by surprise. She decided not to be clever or flippant. Mac had, after all, opened his heart to her, and she knew that wouldn’t have come easily to him. Strange how when you got a result you had longed for, when something you really wanted finally happened or something you hated finally stopped, that was when you weakened. That was when the cracks began to show. It certainly seemed to be that way, and she thought it might be that way for her too—which was why she had to be so careful. She still felt a certain guilt, a certain responsibility. Still felt there were things she could have said, told the police all those years ago that may just have made a difference.
She forced herself to concentrate on the present again. She had, after all, been only a child when it had all happened. Now she was a senior police officer, and she was also in charge of the entire operation. She could not afford to allow any cracks to show. Not today. Not ever. That was her lot. But she could not stop herself sharing at least some of her feelings with this man whose life had been more or less destroyed, she knew, by what had happened to his family.
“Well, I do care about this case, that’s for certain,” she admitted.
“I know, lassie. Be watchful, though, won’t you. He’s like an eel, that man. You grab hold of him, take him in your grasp, and he just slips away. He’s done it all his life. A catalogue of crimes, some small, one truly terrible, and he’s always got away with it. I know he went to jail once, but that was a light sentence. He should have got at least six years, not six months, for ruining all those people’s lives, stealing their life’s savings.”
Sean MacDonald spat the words out. His grip on Karen’s hand had tightened so much now that it hurt. Obliquely she thought how strong he still was for his age.
“He mustn’t be allowed to get away with it again, lassie,” he said. “Not now. Not when we are so close after all this time. He mustn’t be allowed to get off…” Mac’s voice trailed off again. “To have him arrested at last, just when I’d almost stopped hoping. If he got off now, well, I don’t think I could take it, Karen, I really don’t think I could.”
Karen understood exactly how he felt. The Scotsman was not alone.
“I don’t think I could either, Mac,” she responded softly.
Mac stayed for just under half an hour. He would remain in Torquay until after Marshall was charged, he told Karen, and when he left the station she was even more determined than ever that Richard Marshall would be charged and brought to justice.
There were, however, one or two hurdles to be jumped. Notably the Chief Constable and the Crown Prosecution Service. Both had to be convinced that this time the case was a goer—that at last Marshall could be charged with murder, and that the charge could be made to stick.
However, the evidence, although damning, remained circumstantial, and Karen felt that it was vital to continue to press the investigation and make every possible effort to strengthen the case against Marshall. Anything which could be gleaned from the man himself might prove of immense importance. So even though Marshall’s coolness under questioning was legend, Karen decided that she would interview him herself. At least she would have nobody but herself to blame if no progress was made, she thought caustically.
Also, she somehow felt that she knew the man, knew what made him tick, knew how he would react. And she couldn’t help hoping, although aware that this was an extremely long shot with Richard Marshall, that she might be the one to make him break. She felt so close to it all and had been involved, albeit peripherally, with the case for so long that it seemed strange to her, almost hard to believe, that she had never previously questioned Marshall. So strong was her sense of involvement that it seemed even more difficult to believe that, until earlier that day in Poole, she had never actually met Richard Marshall since she had lived next door to him as a child.
The sense of anticipation developed into nervous excitement as she gave instructions for Marshall to be taken to an interview room. DC Tompkins and PC Brownlow were already there when she arrived.
Marshall didn’t look up, didn’t speak, and in no way acknowledged her entry into the room. She studied him in silence for at least two minutes. Two could play at that game, she thought. Marshall looked sullen more than anything else. If he was nervous or afraid he gave little sign of it. In fact, Karen was afraid that she might be experiencing more nerves than he was. Either that or he was an extremely good actor. Karen hoped that it was the latter. At least that would give her an outside chance of making a breakthrough of some sort, she thought.
With one hand Marshall was playing with a wayward strand of his curly hair. With the other he drummed a silent rhythm on the table. He looked bored. Disinterested. He watched her as she watched him and eventually he gave a little tired sigh and said: “Can we get on with it then?”
His voice was clear and controlled. He really was hard to fathom, she thought, and it was disconcerting. Particularly when you considered his Houdini-like history in his dealings with the law. The expression in his eyes gave little away. His fleshy but still handsome features displayed mild irritation more than anything else.
He was still wearing the blue overalls he’d had on when they’d arrested him. Apart from what looked like a freshly acquired oil stain they were very clean. He sat in as relaxed a way as it was possible to sit in an upright wooden chair, which he had turned slightly away from the table so that he could stretch out his long legs.
Karen noticed that his blue canvas boat shoes were also pristine. She looked at his hands. They too were clean and well cared for, the nails clipped short, but in a very manicured kind of way. His fingers were long and sinewy. They were strong hands. Hands which may have strangled a woman and two little girls. Or maybe he smothered them. Could he have used a weapon? A blunt instrument to batter them to death with, a knife to plunge into them? Karen shivered. She still feared that the truth would never be known. She tried to feel confident about this impending interview. But she didn’t. Not anymore. Just looking at Marshall had made her doubt her ability to get through to him at all. She tried to put that out of her mind, but it wasn’t easy.
Bill Talbot had always said that Richard Marshall was inhuman, that the man did not feel and think the way most human beings did. Talbot had once told her that he thought Marshall experienced no guilt because his whole morality was different from that of the vast majority of the human race. He had been able to live with his terrible crime because he was so easily able to justify his own behaviour to himself, able to justify everything. Bill Talbot reckoned that Marshall believed he was the centre of the universe and that his own survival was all that really mattered, that he was the most important person in the world, and probably the cleverest. Marshall had a pretty low opinion of the police and their investigatory efforts, that was for certain; Karen could see that clearly enough in every aspect of his demeanour as he sat opposite her in the interview room.
And in view of their complete lack of success so far, twenty-eight years after the event, Karen had to agree that he had a point.
Bill Talbot also reckoned that Richard Marshall was completely unbreakable. Karen hoped that he wasn’t right. She tried to make herself believe, really believe, that she was the one who could make him talk. She was so aware, in spite of the new evidence, how much still rested on this interview.
“We’ll start when I say. And we’ll stop when I say,” she told Marshall sharply. “You are no longer in control of anything, Mr. Marshall, so let’s get that straight from the start, shall we?”
“Maxwell.”
“No. You have been arrested as Richard Marshall. That was your name when you committed the crime we have arrested you for, it is still your legal name and it is the name you will be charged under. I’ve just told you, you no longer call the shots, and you may as well get used to it.”
Marshall shrugged, held out both hands palms upwards.
“What’s in a name, anyway?” he enquired.
The
re again was that laconic note in his voice that she had first noticed in Poole. His lips curled in a mocking smile. She had an almost overwhelming urge to slap his face and wipe the smirk off it.
“Right,” she said, briskly motioning to PC Brownlow to switch on the double tape recorder—an extremely neat state-of-the-art digital affair now, very different from the big clumsy machines which had been in operation when Marshall had last been arrested.
“Interview with Richard Marshall, present DC Tompkins, PC Brownlow and Detective Superintendent Karen Meadows.” She glanced down at her watch. “Interview begins 5.15 P. M.”
Then she looked up at Marshall, squared her shoulders, and dived straight in, going for the shock approach.
“You should know that the remains of a body almost certainly identifiable as your wife Clara have been found,” she announced.
If Marshall was shocked he gave no sign of it at all. Instead he leaned further back in his chair and the smile widened.
“Really?” he remarked almost lazily. “I saw something in the paper, actually. Pure speculation. You don’t believe what you read in the papers if you’ve got any sense, do you?”
He looked and sounded extraordinarily sure of himself. But then, Karen reminded herself, if Marshall had killed his little family, as she was so sure that he had, then he would know full well where he had dumped their bodies, and he would be as certain as anyone could be that no body was likely to be found after all that time in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.
He was, however, wrong about that, which was Karen’s trump card. Freak circumstances had preserved at least one of those bodies, trapped it and kept it to some extent intact. Freak circumstances had also thrown up from the ocean bed that Rolex watch which could be traced beyond any reasonable doubt to Clara Marshall. Freak circumstances had at last presented the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary with that stroke of luck John Kelly had said was their due at last.