by J M Gregson
She gave them a wide smile and said, ‘I thought I’d drop the mourning weeds. Not my style, I thought. No point in moping over what can’t be changed.’
There was something brittle about her gaiety - for gaiety it was, Lucy Blake decided. Tamsin Hayes wasn’t merely putting a brave face on things, she was genuinely looking forward to the months ahead. And genuinely glad to be rid of her husband? Percy Peach also saw these things and was reminded of Dr Davies’s description of her patient’s current state: ‘She had an abstracted air: the air of someone carrying a secret, a secret that she was very happy about.’ It was an exact description of how she now appeared to them.
Peach said, ‘We’ve talked to a lot of people since we saw you last, Mrs Hayes. We’ve found out a lot more about your husband and the way he lived.’
‘That’s good. Have you also found out a lot more about the way he died?’
She was edgy but bright, teasing him a little without there being any personal animosity in it. Percy had talked to many newly bereaved widows over the years, including three who had dispatched their husbands. He had never spoken to one like Tamsin Hayes. He said bluntly, discarding any subtlety he had planned, ‘Your marriage was on the rocks by the time your husband died, wasn’t it?’
She nodded vigorously, then poured the coffee she had prepared for their visit and handed round a plate of shortbread. She made quite a ritual of it, demonstrating to each of them in turn how steady her hands were, how unruffled she was by this revelation. ‘I’m well rid of Tim. If you’ve found out as much about his life as you say you have, you’ll understand why.’
‘Other women?’
She frowned a little, concentrating upon her reply, as if it was important to her to explain herself and her hatred. ‘That’s an oversimplification. Other women were part of it. More radical was the fact that he behaved as if I didn’t exist at all. Tim never asked for an opinion from me: if I volunteered one, he ignored it.’
She did not seem to feel at all threatened.
Peach said harshly, ‘You’re telling us that the mourning you put on for us on the day after his death was play-acting.’
An apologetic smile: she became a child who had been caught out in some minor offence but knew she was going to be indulged by a fond father. ‘I’m afraid it was, yes. It seemed to be the thing to do at the time. I quite enjoyed it, actually.’
‘It was also a deception. An attempt to mislead CID officers beginning a murder enquiry.’
It seemed a trivial rebuke: the woman was luring him into her own mysterious, amoral world by the self-confidence she exuded.
‘I suppose it was. I apologize, then. But I don’t think my little charade did any harm. And I'm being completely honest now, aren’t I?’
Lucy Blake sensed an unusual uncertainty in her mentor; she was having to work hard not to smile. She said sternly, ‘How honest, Mrs Hayes? You’ve just told us that you had ceased to have any feelings of affection for your husband.’
‘That’s rather neutral, dear. Let me be completely honest and say that I detested the man and that I am very happy that he is no longer on the scene. Is that honest enough for you?’
She looked at Lucy affectionately, her head a little on one side, transformed for this new interrogator from child to elderly aunt advising a favourite niece.
‘Put yourself in our position, Mrs Hayes. You say you detested a man who was shot through the head on Friday night. You furnish us with an excellent motive for murder. You almost invite us to consider you as a murder suspect. In our extensive enquiries among staff and guests at Friday’s function, we have as yet found no one who can substantiate your claim that you were not in the car park at the time of this killing.’
Tamsin smiled at her, then at the man beside her. ‘You think I wanted to revenge myself on him for the way he’d treated me? “Revenge is a kind of wild justice.” Francis Bacon said that, you know. Well, it’s an intriguing little scenario for you to work out, when you put it like that. I left after the speeches, along with quite a lot of other people. Quite a long time before Tim was killed, apparently.’ She repeated the mantra she had mouthed so happily to herself in the four days since she had seen them last.
Peach came back in impatiently. ‘So you tell us. Yet no one saw you leave the hotel at the time you claim and no one saw you arrive here. This morning you’ve told us that you’re delighted to be a widow and that you deliberately deceived us about that on Saturday. It doesn’t look good for you, does it?’
She rocked herself backwards and forwards on her chair, as if inwardly debating an intriguing proposition, then calmly refilled their coffee cups. ‘As you say, it doesn’t look too good, does it? I should have been honest with you from the start, I see that now. But I couldn’t resist playing the heartbroken widow for an hour or two. Overplaying her, I fancy.’ She grinned and shook her head a little, as if her proficiency in amateur dramatics was at that moment the most important consideration in her life. ‘But I don’t really want you to catch the person who rid me of Tim, you see. I thought anything which helped to muddy the pool would be a good thing.’
Peach didn’t waste time on tedious reminders of the necessity for justice if anarchy was to be avoided. This woman seemed to have successfully suspended all the normal moral canons for herself, and she was in danger of drawing him into her mysterious ethical world. He knew by now that Tim Hayes was a human being whose death possibly represented a moral gain in the world, but policemen could not afford to be beguiled by such dangerous considerations.
‘You should consider your position, Mrs Hayes. Consider what you have told us and where that leaves you. Consider the fact that you will make a massive financial gain by this death. If you were in fact the person holding that pistol on Friday night, would it not be better to tell us now?’
She paused before she replied, showing him how calm and unthreatened she felt. ‘I’m sure it would, Chief Inspector Peach. I’ll even tell you now that I’d considered how I might kill Tim in the weeks before his death. But someone else relieved me of that task - I almost said of that pleasure, but that would have been an exaggeration. I didn’t kill him and I put my faith in British justice. Innocent until proven guilty.’ She beamed at him, an eminently respectable middle-class housewife mouthing the words he usually heard from desperate old lags.
Peach said gruffly, ‘You remain in the frame, Mrs Hayes. If you should recall anything which will enable us to determine who committed this crime, it is your duty to get in touch with me immediately.’
He got out as quickly as he could, refusing to wave to the beige-clad, elegant figure who stood smiling on the wide doorstep until their car was out of sight. They had gone a mile before he said irritably, ‘Dr Davies was right. That woman isn’t of sound mind, if you ask me.’
DS Blake guided the police Mondeo expertly through a long, attractive bend on the deserted road. ‘That doesn’t mean she didn’t see her old man off, though, does it?’
Chapter Twenty-One
Jason Thompson picked up the two glasses of white wine from the bar and took them over to the table in the alcove. ‘What would you like to eat?’
‘I don’t want anything to eat. I don’t know why you wanted me to come out for a pub lunch. You must realize that things are hectic at work this week.’ Clare knew that she was being churlish, but she had too much on her mind to be generous.
‘You’re my wife, Clare. There’s nothing wrong with us having lunch together occasionally, is there? We should enjoy it.’ Jason gave her a weak smile whilst his brain raced towards nowhere, trying to find a way of saying what he had to say. He’d thought it would be easier to speak here than in those silent rooms at home. But he hadn’t expected the place to be as crowded as this at lunchtime. That was making it even more difficult to speak privately. Or was this just another excuse he was offering himself? He said desperately, ‘It’s about the CID interview I had yesterday.’
‘You could have talked to me last night
about it. You chose not to.’ She made herself take a drink of wine, aware that she wasn’t helping him, just as she hadn’t helped him last night. She knew now that she was afraid of what he was going to say.
‘I know. I wanted to talk at home, but I just didn’t know how to begin. I’m a wimp, aren’t I? But I love you, Clare.’ He took her hand in his, held it firmly, trying to let his passion flow like an electric current between them. He shouldn’t be doing this here. He should have her to himself in the privacy of their bedroom, where he could run his hands over that familiar, responsive flesh. He should be able to whisper into her ear that she still excited him as much as she had done all those years ago when they were twenty. No, not as much as that: much more than that. This passion did not stale; it grew with the years.
Instead of any of this, he said limply, ‘They know, Clare. You need to be aware of that, when they see you again.’
She let go of his hand abruptly, her eyes widening with horror. ‘What do they know?’
‘They know about you and Tim Hayes.’
She stared at him for a long, horrified moment before she dropped her eyes to the table and the glasses of wine. ‘Who told them?’
‘I let it out. But I think they might have already known. They’ve been questioning a lot of people since—’
‘You knew?’
He nodded, unable to find the words for this awful truth. ‘How long have you known?’
‘Not long.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Yes.’
‘The badminton story wasn’t convincing.’ He didn’t want to elaborate, to remind her about opening her sports bag, examining her kit, finding it had never been worn. Didn’t want to descend into tragic farce and hysteria in this busy, impersonal place, where people chatted over their drinks and broke into the occasional peal of laughter.
‘I’m sorry, Jason. I never meant to hurt you.’ The old clichés, the phrases she would have flung back contemptuously at anyone who offered them to her. Jason didn’t do that. He looked down at his still untouched glass with a small, painful smile. She reached out for his hand and held it tight, waiting for the answering squeeze which would tell her that they were going to get through this.
He said, ‘I couldn’t tell you that I’d found out. I didn’t know how to tackle it. We’ve never had to talk about anything like that.’
‘I know. And we never will again. For what it’s worth, it was all over with Tim. It was finished well before he died.’
Still Jason did not look at her. He said dully, ‘You gave him up?’ She should have left it at that, should have left him with at least that shred of comfort. But a desire for honesty, a wish to confess which was entirely selfish, made her say, ‘No, love, he told me to go. But it couldn’t have lasted. It was always a madness. A fling I needed to have because I’m worthless. It wasn’t love. You’re the one I love.’ She yearned to convince him, but the words felt as trite and worthless as her behaviour had been.
Jason gave her hand a belated response and then set it aside. ‘It’s important that you know what I told the police.’
‘Yes. It would be.’ Clare was trying to see how this would affect what she should say herself when she saw the CID again, but her mind was racing with too much emotion to reason anything out.
‘I left the Gisburn Hotel at about eleven.’
‘I know that. I saw you go.’ She was suddenly impatient. Now at last Jason drank from his glass, savoured the sharp taste of the wine in his mouth. Now that he had told Clare that he knew about her and Hayes, he could return to the real world. He felt suddenly calm. ‘What you don’t know is that I didn't stay in the house when I got home. I was there for perhaps ten minutes after the Johnsons dropped me off. Then I got out my car and went back to the hotel.’
‘Why was that?’ Her mouth was suddenly dry, wanting water, not wine.
‘I went to look for you and Hayes. I didn’t know it was finished and I couldn’t stand the thought of your being with him.’
‘But you didn’t find me.’
‘No, and when I didn’t, I eventually went home again.’
‘And you’ve told the police this?’
‘Yes. But only yesterday. I didn’t tell them on Sunday that I’d gone out again after I got home.’
‘They must have asked you about me.’
‘Yes. I told them yesterday that I’d looked for you and not found you at the hotel. That I’d looked in the car park and found that your car was gone, and realized then that you must have gone home. I told them that you’d got home just before I returned, that you were still in the garage when I got there.’
There was silence for many seconds. They emptied their glasses, held them for a moment and stared into their emptiness before putting them down. She reached out her hand again towards his. Clare wanted to tell him again that it had all been over with Hayes, that it had been a tawdry episode which meant nothing, that she would make it up to him in the years which stretched ahead of them.
Instead, she said quietly, ‘That’s how it was, then.’
* * *
Jane Martin took them into the room she had arranged to use at the Brunton Casino. ‘We won’t be disturbed here. It’s quiet in the afternoons.’
Peach looked round this office, wondering who it was who usually occupied it. A variety of people, probably. There were chairs and a desk with a computer on it, filing cabinets, no pictures or ornaments to personalize the room and assert rights here.
He turned his attention to the nervous girl who sat opposite them on the upright chair, as if she was being interviewed for a job. She was a looker all right, the sort of female who could rouse passions and cause trouble without any effort on her part. He didn’t waste any time on the preliminaries. ‘What is it you’ve been hiding from us, Jane Martin?’
It was the way schoolteachers used to use your full name when they suspected you’d been up to mischief, and she was disconcerted in the way she had been years ago. ‘I haven’t been hiding anything.’
‘Not what my water tells me. Miss Martin, and my water is reliable nine times out of ten. DC Murphy here thought you were holding something back when he spoke to you on Monday. You may think he’s a big daft gobbins, and I’d have to agree with you there most of the time, but he knows when someone’s withholding information. Even your mum noticed that you were holding something back, in the days before Timothy Hayes died.'
‘You’ve seen my mum?’ The huge dark brown eyes widened in consternation.
‘Last night. We go back a long way, me and your mum. Back to the days when I pinched her for shoplifting and she decided to give up the drugs and go straight.’ Peach gave her the understanding, persuasive smile which said that she had much better come clean quickly than waste everyone’s time with further prevarication.
‘I couldn’t tell Mum. She wouldn’t have understood. I’m still not sure that I understand it myself.’
‘Try us, then. DC Murphy and I understand lots of things. We don’t always approve, but it’s better that we know.’
‘It was Tim Hayes.’ She sat perfectly still, watching her lingers twining on her lap. She knew now that she was going to tell them. She had an overwhelming feeling of relief. ‘It was on a Thursday night. Four weeks ago.’ She nodded slowly, as if she could scarcely believe that it was now that long ago.
Brendan Murphy said softly, ‘So tell us about it, Jane.’
She looked into the fresh, open face above his denim shirt and could scarcely believe he was a copper. ‘I’d never seen Tim Hayes before. He came in here, into the staff room, and introduced himself to me as my boss. We chatted for a while - we were the only ones in there. He seemed nice at first. Friendly. But I couldn’t understand how I went out to his car with him. Leroy says he gave me drugs.’
‘Leroy Moore?’ Murphy was studiously low-key, careful to avoid any glance at his chief.
‘Yes.’
‘He
’s your boyfriend, isn’t he?’
‘Yes.’ She was so preoccupied with her explanation, with telling them about the monster Hayes, that she didn’t realize immediately that the simple monosyllable had given Leroy Moore the motive for this crime which he had lacked until now. ‘Leroy said it was a date-rape drug.’
‘Rohypnol, probably. You should have come to us immediately, Jane. There are tests, but they have to be done quickly.’
‘I didn’t know what had happened myself, until I talked to Leroy. Apparently Hayes had done the same thing with other girls.’
‘I’m sure he had, from what we know about Timothy Hayes now. Why didn’t you tell me about this when I saw you on Monday, Jane?’
‘I wanted to. But Leroy said we mustn’t say anything. Not in view of what happened on Friday night. He said it would make us both murder suspects.’
‘So what did you do about it?’
‘Nothing. I told Leroy what had happened the day afterwards. He said to leave it to him.’
‘I see. And what did Leroy do about it, Jane?’
‘Nothing! I’m sure he did nothing!’ But the panic in the huge brown eyes told them that she was not sure at all.
* * *
He was a strange combination of old-fashioned gentility and human frailty. His grey hair was slicked back very sternly against his head and he was one of the few men Lucy Blake had interviewed who still wore a three-piece suit. But the hair was now very thin, so that the brown moles on the scalp showed through it, and one of the buttons of the waistcoat was missing.
Lucy Blake said, ‘Can I just confirm that you are Mr Robert White?’
‘You may indeed. Formerly of Sandersons Solicitors, in King Street, Bolton, where I practised for forty years.’ He gave her the smile he had offered to clients across the old leather-covered desk for most of those forty years. She was far too pretty to be a copper, he thought, with her deep chestnut hair, her fair, faintly freckled complexion and her remarkable green-blue eyes. He was glad he’d taken himself off for a haircut after he’d heard the police were coming to see him. In the far-off days of his youth, when he had attended magistrates’ courts, coppers had been large, powerful young men with very short hair and the occasional battle scar. This was one of the few developments of modem life to which he could give his unqualified approval. ‘And you now work for the Citizens’ Advice Bureau.’