[Inspector Peach 13] - Wild Justice

by J M Gregson

  ‘DCI Peach and DS Blake,’ said Clare, attempting a smile as she led the CID into their sitting room. Somehow both of them had known who it would be at their door.

  Peach didn’t apologize for calling at this hour. He sat down on the very edge of the seat they offered to him, as did Lucy Blake. It was left to Clare Thompson to say resentfully, ‘I don’t know why you should come here at the weekend. I said everything I had to say yesterday.’

  ‘And I did likewise on Tuesday,’ said Jason, taking his cue from his wife.

  ‘Neither of you was completely honest with us. Hence our presence here tonight. This could all have been settled earlier if you had chosen to tell us the truth.’

  The words had an ominous ring to Jason. He blinked a little behind the thick-lensed glasses. ‘I told you everything I could.’

  ‘No. You told us everything you wanted to, Mr Thompson. Perhaps, indeed, you told us a little more than you could.’

  Jason shook the fiery red hair as if trying to clear his head. ‘I told you that I’d held things back on Sunday. But I put that right on Tuesday. I told you then that although I’d originally left the hotel when I said, I’d taken out my own car from the garage here and gone back again. That I’d looked round for Clare and been unable to find her, and left about midnight.’ He recited the facts as if checking them off on a list, assuring himself that he had left nothing out.

  ‘That’s where it begins to go wrong, isn’t it?’

  Clare tried to help a husband who was looking very apprehensive. ‘Jason went back there to look for me.’

  ‘And didn’t find you.’

  ‘That wasn’t his fault.’

  ‘No. Had you been where you told us you were, he’d have found you immediately. You told us yesterday that, “I sat at a table at one end of the main bar whilst Tim Hayes talked to people who had been at the dinner. Waited until I was sure that my employer wouldn’t need me again that evening.” Had you been in that bar, your husband would certainly have found you there - he searched the hotel thoroughly enough.’

  ‘I must have left before he searched there.’

  ‘No. You insisted yesterday that you left the hotel only just before him. He began his search of the premises in that bar when he returned to the hotel.’

  Jason Thompson’s voice was full of panic now as he said.

  'But we were both back here at the time of the murder. I told you on Tuesday: Clare drove into the garage just before me.’

  ‘You did indeed tell us that. That is what I meant when I said that you told us a little more than you could. There was no meeting between you and your wife in the garage here as you claimed.’

  A brief, terrified glance at his wife was more revealing than any words. He repeated slowly, as if trying to convince himself as well as his visitors, ‘I saw the garage door still open and the lights of Clare’s car still on as I turned into the drive.’

  ‘No. Your wife did not return here until much later.’ Peach was as calm as a man reading out a train timetable. ‘She claimed on Wednesday that she was back here “before Hayes was killed”, but that was a lie. Incidentally, no one except Hayes’s killer knows exactly when he died.’

  It was at this point that Clare Thompson’s voice came in, as calm and resigned as her husband’s had been uncertain. ‘It’s all right, Jason. You’ve done your best for me.’ She turned for a moment to look directly into his face. ‘You’ve always done your best for me. I know that.’

  Peach gave the slightest of nods to Blake, who stood up and pronounced the formal words of arrest. He then said quietly, ‘I think it’s now time for you to tell us exactly what happened last Friday night. Don’t you, Mrs Thompson?’

  A long sigh of resignation, a pause whilst she organized her thoughts. Apart from this one wildness which had destroyed her life, Clare Thompson was, after all, a very organized woman. ‘I watched Tim Hayes for a couple of minutes, deciding how long it was likely to be before he left. Then I went and locked myself away in the ladies’ cloakroom. But that didn’t work: I couldn’t rest and I was frightened of missing Hayes as he left. So I wrapped myself up in coat and gloves and went straight out to Tim’s car. Most people had left by then and the car was on its own. I still had a key to the BMW from the days when we had been together.’ If she felt the sudden tremor in her husband beside her, she did not react to it. ‘It was cold in there. Other people left in ones and twos, but it seemed a long time before he came out.’

  ‘And by that time you’d found the weapon.’

  She spoke directly now to Blake, as if it were important to her that her story was recorded accurately in the younger woman’s notes. ‘I knew about the pistol. I knew he’d taken to carrying it about with him in the car over the last few weeks. He said his wife had been behaving very oddly towards him.’ She gave a sudden, startling smile, as if the irony of Hayes’s fears about Tamsin had suddenly struck her for the first time. ‘I’ve never handled a pistol before. I don’t suppose I ever will again. But I had plenty of time to get used to the feel of it in my hands before he finally came out to the car.’

  ‘Did you have a conversation with him?’

  She looked at Peach as if he was very naive to ask such a question. ‘I crouched down in the back of the car when I saw him coming. I’m not really a very big person, am I, Jason?’ She gave her husband a glance and a smile, but the appalled man beside her could give her no answering reaction. ‘He never saw me. I simply put the pistol against the side of his head and pressed the trigger. It was quite easy, really: much easier than I had imagined it would be.’

  She walked like one in trance as they took her out to the police car in the drive. She sat very upright between Brendan Murphy and his female colleague in the back seat as it eased out and turned towards Brunton.

  They had told Jason Thompson he could accompany his wife to the station if he wished. He sat staring straight ahead of him beside Peach as Blake drove behind the car containing his wife. His tousled red hair was unheeded now and those mobile hands were quiet in his lap. He blinked away the tears behind the thick lenses, an unlikely figure to be clothed in a terrible, tragic dignity.