by Rhys Bowen
“Jimmy Marshall? Oh yeah, I know him. He came to the house a couple of times. He lived not too far away—Manches—ter, wasn’t it?”
Watkins nodded. “When was the last time you saw him?”
She wrinkled her nose. “I dunno. Ages ago—at least a year.”
“And Stewart didn’t get a phone call from him recently?”
“I wouldn’t know, would I?” Her voice was sharp again. “He doesn’t like me to use the phone when he’s around. He says … he said that the phone was his business lifeline. He didn’t want me tying it up chatting with my friends. So when he was home I always used to let him get it.”
“And he didn’t mention meeting Jimmy last weekend?”
“I told you,” she snapped. “He didn’t tell me anything about where he was going or who he was meeting. What’s all this about anyway?”
Sergeant Watkins turned toward her. “Mrs. Potts, we’re fairly sure now that your husband’s death was no accident. That means that someone had to have a reason for wanting him dead.”
Evan noticed she registered genuine surprise. “And you suspect Jimmy Marshall?”
“Let’s put it this way, Mrs. Potts,” Watkins went on. “There were four buddies that we know of, back in basic training days. Three of them are dead and, as far as we know, Jimmy Marshall is still alive.”
She shook her head. “Not Jimmy. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Besides, why would he want to kill Stew? They were friends. They got along just great.”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out, Mrs. Potts,” Sergeant Watkins said. “Somebody wanted your husband and Tommy Hatcher dead. We need to know why. Can you think back and try to remember if there is anything at all he might have told you, any little incident from his army days, that might give us something to go on.”
She shook her head. “Nothing. Nothing at all. The only time he talked about the army was about the base in Germany where we met. He had a good time there—it was real cushy duty and lots of good beer to drink. But he never spoke about what he did before. He was two years in Northern Ireland but he never spoke about that. He saw a car full of people get blown up and I know that stayed with him, because he used to have nightmares about it, but he’d never talk about it.”
“Was Jimmy Marshall in Northern Ireland with him?” Watkins asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know where he knew Jimmy from. I got the feeling they were friends from way back.” She got to her feet, clutching the mop she had rested against the chair. “Look, I’m sorry I can’t help you more, but he’s dead, isn’t he? Talking isn’t going to bring him back.”
Evan got to his feet too. “You’re right, Mrs. Potts, and I know this must be painful for you, but it would help if we could find your husband’s killer, wouldn’t it?”
“I still think the silly bugger slipped,” Greta said. “I can’t think of anyone who would have wanted him dead.”
“He wasn’t at all worried or apprehensive when he left on Sunday?” Evan asked.
“I didn’t see him go,” Greta said, going to peer out of the bay window to check on the little girls. “Where are those bloody kids? Oh, there they are. You can’t be too careful these days, can you—not with so many lunatics around.”
Evan opened the folder. “Here,” he said. “This was the snapshot you gave us. I thought you might like to have it back.”
“Oh, thanks,” she said, taking it. “Sorry I couldn’t help you, but like I said, he never told me nothing. Once he left this house, I never had a clue what he was doing.”
“Is that why you decided to follow him that day?” Sergeant Watkins asked.
“What?” She stared at him as he she hadn’t heard correctly.
“Your husband,” Watkins said smoothly. “You followed him to Wales that day.”
“Don’t be so bloody daft,” Greta said. “Why would I want to do that?”
“You tell us, Greta,” Watkins said.
“You gave me the wrong photo, Greta love,” Evan said. “You were on it too, remember? I showed it around and someone recognized you.”
“Who?” she asked sharply.
“Ah, so you were there then?” Watkins demanded.
“I might have been,” she said defiantly, “but I never talked to anybody.”
“Except the man at the mountain railway station in Llanberis?”
He face flushed bright scarlet. “Oh, that rude bugger. Trust him.”
“So you admit you were there, do you?”
She shrugged. “Doesn’t seem any point in denying it now, does there? Okay, so I followed him. I just about had enough of him and his women. Some woman called him that Friday night. I overheard him talking to her and then he caught sight of me and went into some phony stuff about delivering orders. So I was sure that’s where he was going on Sunday. I thought I’d finally catch him red-handed. I left the kids with a neighbor and I borrowed her car and followed him. You could have knocked me down with a feather when he drove to Wales. I watched him get on the mountain railway, and it looked like he was alone. I couldn’t think of any woman who’d be silly enough to want to meet him on top of a bloody freezing mountain!”
“So what did you do after that, Greta?” Watkins asked.
“I hung around for a while to see if he came back down, but he didn’t. So I drove home.”
“You’re sure about that—you came straight home? You didn’t decide to follow him up the mountain on the next train?”
Her eyes became suddenly suspicious, darting around nervously. “Here, hold on a minute. You don’t think I had anything to do with it, do yer?”
“You were one of the last people to see him alive, Greta. You’ve said yourself he was not the best of husbands,” Watkins said.
“Oh, now look here.” She was definitely flustered. “He drove me round the bend sometimes, but that doesn’t mean I wanted him dead, does it? Use your head—why would I want Stew dead? Look at me now. I’m a widow with two little kids and no money coming in. I tried to talk him into taking out life insurance, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He liked spending his money too much. So now what do I have to look forward to? We’ve got the payments due on the house and the car and the furniture. How am I going to make them—you tell me that.”
“She does have a point,” Evan said to Watkins as they drove away. “She’s worse off without him than with him, even if he did fool around. What’s she going to live on now?”
“Unless she’s got a secret boyfriend she’s not telling us about. She’ll wait until the fuss has died down and then she’ll quietly marry someone richer and nicer.”
“How about if that was Jimmy Marshall?” Evan asked. “She was definitely fond of him. You could hear it in her voice when she spoke about him.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice and tidy?” Watkins agreed. “She followed her husband to make sure he went up the mountain, called in Marshall, and he did the dirty work.” He glanced at Evan. “You shouldn’t have given her back that photo. We might need it as evidence.”
“I made a copy first,” Evan said, with a satisfied smile.
“Not as stupid as you look, are you?” Watkins said. “Now I’m going to be very curious to hear what Mr. Marshall has to say for himself.”
Chapter 16
They found Jimmy Marshall in his back garden, mowing the lawn. A toddler scooted around him on a tiny bike making race car noises over the drone of the lawn mower. Jimmy stopped mowing as his wife led the two men out through French doors and yelled his name. Evan noted the pretty back garden with its blooming flower beds and manicured lawn. What he had seen of the house had been attractive too. Jimmy Marshall had definitely done better for himself than the others since leaving the army.
He came over to them—an amiable-looking man with sandy hair and freckles.
“Coppers, are you?” he asked, the smile fading as his wife introduced them. “Looking into Stew and Tommy’s deaths?”
“You heard about them then?” Watkins asked.
Jimmy Marshall nodded. “Yeah. I couldn’t believe it when I read it in the paper. What a shock! I suppose the silly buggers tried their hand at a spot of rock climbing when they were up there and pulled each other down, eh?”
“Does that sound like the kind of thing they would do?” Evan asked him.
Jimmy thought for a moment. “It sounds like the kind of thing Stew might have done. He was a right lad—always ready for a dare when we were in the army. You should have seen the scrapes we got into because of him. We were always on KP duty peeling bloody potatoes. But it was good for a laugh, I suppose. You needed to break the monotony somehow.”
“You don’t sound like you liked the army too much,” Watkins said.
Jimmy Marshall shook his head. “I couldn’t wait to get out. I only went in because my dad said I wouldn’t be able to hack it. I’d have done anything to prove him wrong back in those days. But I hated it from day one. I’d never have survived if I hadn’t made friends with …” His words drifted away and he shook his head. “I still can’t believe it,” he said.
“You knew about this weekend get-together then?” Watkins asked.
“Yeah, I was invited too,” Jimmy Marshall said. “At least, I got this postcard with a picture of Mount Snowdon on it saying we were all going to meet for a memorial on the day Danny died.”
“But you didn’t go?”
Jimmy shook his head. “Nah. Too busy. I had to attend a conference in Chester all weekend for my firm. We got taken over by an American company last year and now we’re into all this effectiveness and productivity training. We have to go to a couple of sessions a year. Retreats, they call them. Waste of time, I call them, but they’re mandatory.”
“And they can verify you were there all weekend?” Watkins asked.
“Oh yeah. They make sure you attend. We had to sign in for each session,” Jimmy said. “I was there all right, sitting on one of those hard chairs and suffering.”
“Do you know who sent the invitation, Jimmy?” Watkins asked.
“I assumed it had to be Tommy Hatcher, because it had a London postmark.”
“Did that seem the sort of thing you’d expect him to do?”
“I guess so,” Jimmy said. “Tommy was the soft-hearted one. We used to tease him about it. But I never realized Danny’s death had affected him so deeply. We never talked about it much, of course, but it was an accident after all, and accidents happen, especially in the army.”
“Did you stay in touch with Hatcher or any of your other buddies after you left the army?” Sergeant Watkins asked.
“I saw Stew Potts a couple of times because he lived close by,” Jimmy Marshall said. “In fact I’ve got a sympathy card on the table in there. I was in the middle of writing it to his wife, but I couldn’t think what to say. What can you say?”
“And Tommy Hatcher?” Watkins asked. “Did you keep in touch with him?”
“No, I’d lost touch with him completely. That’s why I was surprised he had my address.”
“Any other mates from army days that you think might have been invited to the reunion?”
Jimmy Marshall thought for a moment, leaning on his lawn mower and staring out across the line of back gardens. Then he shook his head. “It was the four of us, really. I can’t think who else would have been there … unless it was a bigger thing all together and they’d invited the whole intake, or even the whole hut.”
“Who might have done that?”
“I’ve no idea. If it came from the army, it would have been at an army establishment, wouldn’t it? Besides, why would they want to hold a memorial for him? Half the top brass from the base got in trouble over it. They’d wouldn’t want it raked up again.”
“How about you,” Evan asked. “Would you have gone if you could?”
Jimmy shook his head right away. “Nah. Not me. I don’t go in for this sentimental stuff. I felt sorry for poor Danny, but what’s the sense in dragging it all up again? It couldn’t bring him back. It didn’t make sense to me. It wasn’t like he’d died a hero or anything.”
“Tell me about that night on the mountain,” Evan said. “The night Danny died. Anything you can remember.”
“There’s not much to tell,” Jimmy said. “It was bloody horrible. We all had to get from point A to point B, across the mountain and down again. We’d only just started when a storm came in. It was blowing a gale, we were soaked through, and we could hardly see our hands in front of our faces.”
“Wasn’t it rather stupid to take people over the top of a mountain in weather like that?” Evan asked.
“We weren’t supposed to go over the top. That was the funny thing,” Jimmy Marshall said. “More like round the foothills. Danny must have got off course somehow, although he must have known that he was climbing higher and higher.”
He glanced around. “Look, would you like to sit down? How about a beer, or a cup of tea?”
“Tea would be nice,” Watkins said.
“I suppose you have to say no to the beer when you’re on duty,” Jimmy Marshall said with a grin. “Helen,” he called. “Can you make us a pot of tea, love?”
“I made one, just in case,” came the answering shout from the house, and Jimmy’s wife appeared with a tray. There were china tea cups on a lace cloth and a plate of assorted biscuits. “Here you are. You can pour for yourselves,” she said, putting the tray on a small table.
Jimmy led them over and unfolded some plastic garden chairs. The toddler propelled himself over to them and immediately climbed onto Jimmy’s knee. “Can I have a biscuit, daddy?” he asked.
“You’ll spoil your lunch,” Jimmy said, smoothing back the boy’s unruly hair, “and mummy will be mad at me.”
“Please?” the little boy draped his arms around the man’s neck.
“Just one then,” Jimmy said, giving him the only chocolate-covered one. The boy slid down and went running back to his bike.
“You’ve got a fine-looking little boy there,” Evan commented.
Jimmy smiled, never taking his eyes off the boy. “He’s a grand little chap,” he said. “It’s worth working your guts out for someone like him.”
“They make you work hard then at your firm, do they?” Evan asked.
Jimmy nodded. “They want blood. It’s like you’re married to the bloody company. Helen gets right teed off about it. I’m away so much, you see.”
“What kind of business are you in?”
“Computer marketing. I learned computer skills in the army and they’ve come in very useful, I must say. I got a job right out of the army, which is unusual up here. Twenty percent unemployment, we’ve got in these parts.”
“It looks like you’ve done very well for yourself,” Watkins commented.
“I can’t complain,” Jimmy Marshall said. He poured tea and handed each of them a cup.
“You were telling us about that night on the mountain,” Evan said, taking the cup from him. “Were you supposed to be all together?”
“No. It was survival training. They sent us off at one-minute intervals. We were supposed to be using our compass and map-reading skills. Danny went ahead of me. I never saw him again. We didn’t even know he was missing until the next day.”
“Tell me about Danny,” Evan said. “What was he like?”
“He was a nice kid,” Jimmy Marshall said. “He was younger than the rest of us, but a real nice kid. He came from a rotten home, but he was determined to make something of himself. He used to tease us and say, ‘When I get to be commander of this bloody camp, you’re going to be sorry.’ He was always joking that he’d be a general some day. I think he might have made it too. He certainly tried hard. The sergeants could never catch Danny slacking off. That’s why I was surprised that it was him when they said a man was missing. I would have thought Danny had the smarts to get himself safely down again.”
“So he got along well with everyone, did he?” Evan asked.
“It’s funny you should say that,
” Jimmy Marshall said. “Normally he was always good for a laugh, but right before we went to Wales, he got all moody and he got into a fight with Stew one night.”
“Over what?” Watkins asked.
“Stew made some joke about his family, I think. Usually Danny would have laughed it off, but he leaped on Stew like a wild thing. We had to drag them apart. It wasn’t like him at all.”
“And you say it was right before you went on the training exercises?”
Marshall nodded. “Funny, that. Almost as if he had a premonition of what was going to happen to him. He was that jumpy on the way there too. I remember the driver got really annoyed because Danny had to stop at God knows how many bathrooms. We were late in because of it.” He paused, looking down at his tea cup. “Poor Danny. Now I think of it, maybe he wasn’t well and he was hiding it. Maybe he should never have gone to Wales in the first place. Still, what good is it talking about that now? He’s gone and nothing will bring him back.”
Sergeant Watkins drained his tea cup and got to his feet. “Nice cup of tea, that,” he said. “Thanks for all the information. You’ve been very helpful, Mr. Marshall. If you’d just give us the address of the place where you had this weekend seminar, we’d be grateful.” He started to head back into the house. Evan followed him, his brain racing desperately to think if there was any other question they should have asked.
“Checking up on me, are you?” Jimmy Marshall looked half-amused. “I don’t see what my being at a seminar has to do with a couple of blokes falling off a mountain.” He stopped and Evan could almost see his mind making connections. “Hey, you suspect their deaths weren’t accidents, don’t you?”
“We’re examining that possibility,” Sergeant Watkins said.
“But who’d want to—” He broke off, then shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “They were both nice blokes.”
“So you can’t think of anybody who might want to give them a little shove off a cliff?” Evan asked. “No old enemies from army days?”