by HRF Keating
But on this occasion the ruse failed. Jackson Edgeworth stood there just looking, exaggeratedly or not, drained of energy.
Which may mean he has simply given me the facts. Or, equally, could he be still preparing to present me with a complex lie?
‘So you dined at the Royal Society of Medicine …?’
‘Ah well, it may have been there. Or it may have been at one of my clubs. I belong to several, of course. I really was so bushed last night — my operation had been within an ace of going desperately wrong — that really I can’t tell you where it was I found myself sitting all alone at a table, wondering whether I had the strength to eat whatever I’d ordered.’
‘I understand,’ Harriet said, laying on the overt sympathy.
Or do I understand something quite different? That all this stuff means you’re looking for a nicely imprecise alibi?
‘But I’m afraid,’ she went on, ‘this will make checking your statement — something we have, of course, to do — fairly difficult. I mean, can you tell me, here and now, what clubs you actually belong to?’
A pale smile. The wounded warrior?
‘I’m sorry. But if I’m to do that without mistake, I will have to leave it to tomorrow. I really will.’
By which time, Harriet thought sourly, you’ll have been able to persuade a club waiter somewhere that you and he had a nice little chat last night at seven, or eight, or nine o’clock.
A wave of irritated weariness lapped over her.
Really, to have to catch hold of a slithering fellow like this, it’s too much. And he’ll be bloody hard to pin down, too. Happy to go on inventing reason after reason not to be explicit about just where he was. And, worse, isn’t it possible he has some other object altogether in not being willing to give me a simple answer. A woman? Very likely. Look at the way that female voice just now called out her goodnight to him.
Turn it in then? No. No, damn it, I’m a police officer, a detective, I don’t get weary. But, on the other hand, this ‘exhausted’ surgeon is obviously quite ready to go on and on with his little game. So, why not catch him out at another time? He won’t run away. Total admission of guilt if he were to.
‘Then I’ll expect to hear from you,’ she said. ‘Here’s my card, ring me as soon as you’ve sorted yourself out.’
She made her way off to the car.
Bolshy, she saw with irritation, had, once more, gone straight to the garden’s pretty little surrounding wall and crossed it in a single stride. He was standing impertinently holding the car’s door wide.
The slob, he’s quite wrong to go over the wall like that. If a wall’s there, however low it is, it’s meant to be an obstacle you don’t ignore. It’s a taboo.
‘Back to Birchester,’ she said.
And for all the journey she remained furiously silent.
Chapter Sixteen
Early though Harriet was at her office next morning, as she opened the door she heard her phone ring. It was the ACC.
‘Superintendent Martens, I’d be obliged if you would come over directly.’
Oho, Harriet thought, in ordinary circumstances he calls me simply Mrs Martens, technically incorrect though that is. But now Superintendent? And wanted in his office this early? Bad weather ahead.
Reluctantly she drove across to Headquarters.
‘Superintendent — at last,’ the ACC greeted her. ‘Now, will you tell me, please, why it was only thanks to the media, the media, that I learnt that Robert Roughouse, the victim of the bomb attack at Gralethorpe which I tasked you with investigating, has been murdered in his bed at the Masterton Clinic.’
Oh God, I never even thought to inform him. And I know why. It’s because I didn’t want him sticking his bloody finger into my pie.
She took a deep breath.
‘I learnt of Roughouse’s death barely twenty-four hours ago, sir. I went immediately to the Masterton where I was able to ascertain that the man who smothered him had made some inquiries there the evening before. Since I had come to the provisional conclusion that the attack in Gralethorpe may have been instigated by a secret group of ex-Zeal School pupils, I considered it imperative to ask, before news of the murder was broadcast, such members of the group whose names I knew where they had been at the time.’
‘Did you indeed? And could you not, despite that commendably rapid reaction, have picked up a telephone and kept me informed?’
Harriet chose to take that question, sharply put though it was, as being rhetorical.
Still, nothing for it now, she thought, but to produce everything I’ve discovered about the Cabal.
With scarcely any pause for breath she embarked on her account, finishing at last with what yesterday’s inquiries in London had brought to light.
‘So, sir, I am left with two people whose alibis for that night are, you may say, open to doubt. There’s Valentine Drummond, who told me he was at a large coming-of-age party down in Kent, something difficult to check on, and there’s Jackson Edgeworth, the surgeon, who went so far as to claim he was unable to tell me exactly where he ate dinner that evening.’
She took a deep breath.
Something more she had to say.
‘And, sir, there is, as well, someone also known to me as a member of the Cabal, perhaps even its head, whom I have not yet been able to contact. Sir, he is Sir Marcus Fledge, the chairman of Pettifer’s.’
Now the ACC, who had settled down to hear her account with at least his full attention, jack-in-a-boxed up in his chair.
‘Sir Marcus Fledge? Superintendent, are you telling me you have taken it into your head to think that the chairman of a firm of the repute of Pettifer’s — good God, it accounts on its own for a substantial part of the country’s exports — to think that a man of his standing can be involved in some petty, just possibly illegal, activity of some sort. An activity about which you have given me no details whatsoever?’
Yes, I do think he could be involved, Harriet said to herself. Nothing I’ve heard about the man has told me he’s incapable of being an active participant in whatever it is the Cabal is planning. Once someone gathers up as many millions as they can possibly want, all too often they come to think they have a right — yes, a positive right — to acquire more and more and more. There are examples enough, for God’s sake.
The expression on the ACC’s face was growing more disapproving by the second.
‘Superintendent,’ he said at last, ‘I am not going to order you no longer to pursue this line of inquiry. If you have even the slightest reason to think that one member or another of this group is involved in a conspiracy that has led to murder, then you must at least do what you can to see that each member accounts for where they were when Roughouse was killed. But, as for your claiming Sir Marcus Fledge is involved, at that I will draw the line.’
‘But, sir,’ Harriet felt bound to answer, ‘if, as I understand is the case, Sir Marcus is a member of this group, the Cabal, possibly at the head of it, and I am to question all the other members, how can I leave him out?’
The ACC’s eyes glittered like those of an enraged cat.
Harriet well knew that he was a man whose bad books it was easy to get into, and very hard to get out of. But she could not stop herself now.
‘Sir,’ she repeated, ‘you must see that if you insist on me obeying your instruction, I will have no other course open to me other than to abandon the inquiry and state my reasons for doing so.’
‘Superintendent, are you threatening me?’
‘No, sir. No. I am just attempting to put to you the logic of the matter.’
A long pause.
‘Very well, Superintendent, then do as you think fit. And I hope for your sake, and for the sake of your career in the Greater Birchester Police, that you are not making an utter fool of yourself.’
And so I may be, she thought. All very well for me to be determined to go down to London again and interview the chairman of Pettifer’s, to question him about where he was a
nd who was with him at the time an unknown man came to the door of the Masterton and asked ridiculous questions. Yet, when all’s said and done, have I really got all that much to go on? All right, Charity told me Rob Roughouse had been so deeply disturbed by some demand Sir Marcus, apparently, had made to him that he had woken, almost gibbering, from a nightmare.
But, understandably the ACC will hardly want to hear that I am relying on the evidence of a young athlete from distant Kenya when I claim Sir Marcus Fledge, prominent industrialist, is involved in some business that has eventually made Roughouse’s death imperative. But it’s what I’ve come to believe, damn it, and I’m going to test that belief to the end.
*
Pettifer House, Harriet saw as Bolshy brought their car to a halt outside it, was one of the many toweringly triumphal buildings put up in the City during the last quarter of the twentieth century. But now, looking up at it, she saw it as doing no more than reflect ‘rather dull’ Sir Marcus Fledge. Big-built and indefinably menacing.
It was more than an hour after she had marched past the two — two — heavily uniformed commissionaires outside and reached an immensely long reception desk, dead on the dot for her appointment, that she got confirmation, of a sort, for her picture of Pettifer House’s owner. From the moment she had reached the long desk she had experienced, simply, unexplained and inexplicable delays. Shunted from one more-than-smartly dressed receptionist to another, her sense of being seen as an irritating chip of something or other interfering with the mighty stream of Pettifer business grew and grew.
Am I, she asked herself, to sit here on my own, sunk into this long, soft, grey leather sofa, looking at those huge wall-to-wall photographs of giant earth-moving machines, unmatched world over — words not just displayed but inscribed above them — until at last I am spat out into the world of little people going about their little businesses and am seen no more?
At last, however, her presence reached, apparently, the sole receptionist empowered to have contact with Pettifer’s mighty chairman.
A marble smile was directed towards her.
‘Sir Marcus is still at lunch, Superintendent. But, no doubt, he will be able to see you as soon as he returns.’
A stream of sarcastic answers entered Harriet’s head. Does Sir Marcus always give appointments he has no intention of honouring? Yes, of course, I realise that the chairman of Pettifer’s cannot see a Detective Superintendent of Police until he has fortified himself …
She suppressed them. What would be the use? It’s Power, infinity: Police nil.
And even after the generous allowance of time she gave the lunching giant, and the several inquiries she had made to the marble figure of the receptionist at Sir Marcus’s sole disposal she still had a long wait on her barge of a sofa, staring ever more glassily at the huge photographs on the walls beside her. But at last she got her signal. A mere inclination of a queenly head.
A speed-lift, entirely dedicated she saw to the firm’s chairman, shot her up twenty or more floors. Only for her to have to wait another ‘few minutes’ since, his secretary said, Sir Marcus ‘is taking a call from the States’.
Then at last a discreet buzz, and it was ‘Sir Marcus will see you now’.
She found him seated at the far side of a bare glass-topped desk, so big it made her think of a never-swum-in pool in some huge garden. There he was, a bulky shape in businessman’s standard dark suit, and de rigueur white shirt, with, implacable across it, a richly silk necktie in broad red-and-white stripes. The Zealots tie.
From two small, red-rimmed eyes she received an unblinking stare, fully justifying Charity’s pig-faced. And not a word uttered.
Ignoring that, Harriet went straight in.
‘Sir Marcus, I am making inquiries in connection with the murder of Mr Robert Roughouse at the Masterton Clinic in Birrshire between the hours of 10 p.m. and 8.30 a.m. the night before last. I understand Mr Roughouse was an associate of yours in an informal group of ex-Zeal School pupils called the Cabal, and I would —’
Sir Marcus exploded, one feather-light touch setting off a devastating magnetic mine.
‘What do you know about any so-called Cabal? Who told you anything about it? A purely private affair. You have no business whatsoever to call to account anyone who is, or might be, a member.’
Harriet made herself pay no attention to the illogical farrago.
‘I would like, Sir Marcus,’ she said, ‘to be told where you were at the time in question.’
‘You have no right — Listen to me, a man in my position does not have to answer questions from any police officer whatsoever, unless he has, if he so wishes, the protection of his legal advisers.’
‘Very good, sir. Can we, here and now, make an appointment for me to interview you in the presence of your solicitor, at whatever time in the immediate future is convenient to us both?’
‘No,’ came the single cannon-shot from the weight-heavy figure on the far side of the desk’s glassy pool.
‘Then I must tell you, Sir Marcus, that if you are adamant in failing to respond to a request from a police officer conducting an investigation into a serious crime — the most serious crime on the statute book — it may become my duty to arrest you and take you into custody.’
A long glowering silence spread out to fill the softly carpeted room like an oppressive, nose-pricking mist of gas. At last to be broken.
‘Very well, if only to put an end to all this bureaucratic nonsense, I was — let me see — yes, I was at home that evening. My house, Cherrytrees Court, is in Surrey, just outside Chertsey, more than a hundred miles from Birrshire, as you can easily ascertain if you are able to consult a map. I was there from about half-past six, and all that night. Most of it in bed, if you must know, beside my wife of twelve years.’
‘Thank you, sir, for your cooperation. I will, of course, have to confirm your statement, but I can assure you I will be completely tactful when speaking to your wife.’
She turned away — she had never been asked to take a chair — and began to walk towards the distant door.
Almost there, she turned and, by no means wholly satisfied with the extent of her victory, tried a last shot.
‘Oh, and by the way, Sir Marcus, may I ask, do you own racehorses? Do you go to race meetings on occasion?’
For a moment she tried to picture his big, plainly balding head under the sort of brown felt hat worn by so many people in the paddock, the kind Tonelle had said her inquisitive six o’clock visitor had drawn down over the upper part of his face.
‘Superintendent, or whatever you call yourself, let me tell you that you have asked me the last impertinent question I am prepared to hear.’
*
Down at the car Bolshy asked his own impertinent question. ‘You were a hell of a long time, guv. Get nowhere, did you?’
Harriet decided she would reply, little though she was inclined to.
‘Get anywhere with Sir Marcus Fledge, chairman of Pettifer’s? Well, yes, I did get somewhere. In the end. He produced an alibi for the time of Roughouse’s murder. One culminating in his being in bed beside his loving wife.’
‘As per usual with alibis. I’ll believe his when we’ve seen the lady. And probably not then.’
‘You’re right, DS. But we can be quicker about it than that. Just use your mobile to get on to the police in Chertsey, Surrey. My compliments, and could they send, as soon as possible, an officer of some seniority to Sir Marcus Fledge’s house, Cherrytrees Court, somewhere in their area, and ask his wife whether he was there last night? And from what time onwards. With luck they’ll get to her before Fledge thinks of ringing the lady and telling her what to say.’
*
OK, she thought, anything more to do now that I’m down in London again? There’s Matthew Jessop, of course. Should ask his whereabouts like all the rest, and I haven’t yet managed to find out why he told Charity without any explanation not to visit Robert Roughouse at the Masterton. But … but I do
n’t know. Think of what he was like crouching over the horribly wounded body of the man who was his best friend. I thought then, when the light of my torch shone on his face for an instant, that I glimpsed the diamond sparkle of a tear. Is it conceivable that he was the man who held a pillow over Roughouse’s head? All right, I will see him eventually, but not until I’ve exhausted every other possibility.
So what now?
Yes, Tigger Drummond’s hardly perfect alibi. Time to make a check, I think. Get him dealt with one way or another.
She set Bolshy to finding a number for Lady Margaret Tredannick. A call to her wherever it is down in Kent that she has her big house and I may learn she spent half the evening actually talking with Tigger or I may get the name of a reliable witness who did that.
It took Bolshy more than a little time to do what she had asked. But when at last he pushed his mobile away he had good news.
‘You know what? Turns out Lady Whatsit’s got a little pad right here in the Smoke. Belgrave Square. And she’s there now.’
‘Is she indeed? Then I think I’ll pay a call straightaway. If you can find Belgrave Square.’
‘Dare say I can manage,’ he said, flipping at the pages of his A-Z guide. ‘Anybody’s lived in London knows where that is.’
‘Then go.’
But it was almost four o’clock when, after a swing round Belsize Square somewhere north of Swiss Cottage, Bolshy pulled the car up outside Lady Margaret Tredannick’s house. And, no sooner had he done so — squeal of brakes — than the mobile in the pocket of his appalling jacket sang out its little tune, one that Harriet immediately recognised, the ribald Roll me over in the clover. Roll me over; lay me down and do it again, all too familiar from her nights of patrolling as a constable.
And now, she thought, it will repeat and repeat itself in my head for the rest of the day. Damn the man.
‘For you, boss,’ Bolshy said, holding out the mobile with an ironic sketch of a bow.
It was the Surrey Police DI who had gone out to Sir Marcus Fledge’s Cherrytrees Court. Mrs Fledge — ‘bit of a stunner, actually’ — had precisely confirmed what her husband had said. ‘Got the impression, though, that the lady might have had a chat with hubby on the mobile.’