The inspector swiftly ran through Owen’s statement. Separation amicable … Not seen wife for about six weeks … Still on good terms … No financial hassle about the house they had lived in together … Gave names of friends who would have seen her more recently than he had … Here it was. Discussed a divorce about three months ago on the grounds of two years’ separation, but that would need Caroline’s agreement. She had refused, he had accepted. In reply to a specific question, said it had been no problem. Pointed out that after another three years, he would be able to arrange a divorce without his wife’s consent and he and Daphne Gillie were prepared to wait another three years before they married. Why not?
But … the inspector sorted out two other statements — one from Louella Sinclair, the second from another woman — and they insisted she had been angry that he had pressed her so hard. Not much, probably nothing, but worth looking into. It would certainly do no harm to find out where Ted Owen and Daphne Gillie were when Caroline Owen died on the Central Line.
*
Behind heavy black glass doors, Owen Graham Metcalf’s foyer was thick with taste and the invisible aura of money to express it. Successful advertising campaigns which had persuaded the public to buy products ranging from instant frozen meals to exclusive cars, chocolates to sanitary towels, life assurance to beauty creams that owed nothing to animal suffering, had been translated into pale grey and pink decor, luxurious crimson leather chairs, hidden lighting, muted music and a front-of-house receptionist lifted intact off a Harpers & Queen cover. Sergeant John Doyle, accustomed both professionally and privately to life at the end of an operation manipulated by copywriters, creative directors, artists and producers of television commercials, reflected that snappy slogans and hummable jingles paid better than he had imagined. The endless washed-strawberry carpet into which his shoes sank as he walked in must have cost about a year’s salary in the CID.
Welcoming smile switched on the moment he appeared through the door, the girl behind the desk gave the impression that he was suddenly the most important person in her life. An appointment with Mr Owen? What name, please? And from which company? Oh … Sergeant Doyle. I see. If you’d like to take a seat, I’ll let him know you’re here. Thank you. As he sat down, Doyle could almost feel himself plummet in her estimation from a possible major client to a tiresome policeman, the sort who put wheel clamps on Porsches outside wine bars. He was kept waiting a perfectly judged few minutes before a Madonna wannabee took him through to Ted Owen’s office, based on an idea by the designers of first-class cabins of the original Queen Elizabeth, with the immediate signs of a man surrounded by comprehensive support systems; matt finish ebony desktop bore a white telephone with a hands-free facility, a large diary with a company logo embossed in gold leaf on its cover and a virgin green blotter, but not a single piece of paper. Silver walls were covered with advertising awards framed in brushed aluminium and signed photographs of show business stars who had promoted products for OGM clients. Doyle noted the tasteful black Pierre Cardin tie and look of helpful concern.
“Good-morning, sergeant.” Owen did not stand up as he smiled and indicated a leather and tubular-steel chair. “Please sit down. I don’t know how I can help you further than I did in my statement, but if there’s anything at all … ” The sentence floated.
“You’ll appreciate we have to check everything, sir,” Doyle replied and received a graceful nod of acceptance. “It’s about your divorce. You said you and your wife did not have an argument over her refusal.”
“That’s correct.” Owen’s voice was as blank as his face.
“But other people have told us she was very upset because you pressed her for it.”
“I can’t be responsible for what other people say,” Owen commented. “What other people say my wife said in fact. We discussed it a couple of times, perhaps three, certainly no more. We ended up agreeing to disagree in a perfectly civilised manner. That’s all there was to it. This was all in my statement.”
“Yes, sir.” Doyle paused. “Where were you at the time of your wife’s death?”
“Why do you ask?” The chill in the atmosphere was fractional, but instantly there.
“I’d just like to know, sir.”
“You’re suggesting that I killed her.”
“I’m suggesting nothing. I’m just asking where you were.”
“Very well.” Owen sounded like a man agreeing to be honest with a tax inspector. “You have a job to do, and frankly I thought this might be raised. From about five o’clock until shortly after seven I was in the conference room along the corridor with two of my colleagues and three representatives of a major bank. We were pitching for — sorry, that’s jargon — we were showing them the artwork for an advertising campaign with which we hope to win their advertising account. To save tedious questions and answers, sergeant, none of us left the room at any time.”
He looked at Doyle levelly. “The fact that these offices are only a few minutes’ walk from Tottenham Court Road station is academic. I was here. I can give you the names of the people who were with me if you wish to confirm that. Of course I didn’t kill my wife … and I happen to be able to prove it.”
Doyle was about to ask another question when Owen anticipated him.
“And the next thing you’re going to ask is about Miss Gillie, isn’t it? The lady I’m now living with. I’ll get her in here.” He picked up the telephone and rapidly punched three buttons. “Daphne? Sergeant Doyle from the CID is with me. Can you come through, please?”
Replacing the receiver, Owen folded his hands together beneath his chin. For a moment they looked at each other in silence then Owen spoke again. “It was quite obvious to both of us how you were going to think and we’ve talked about it. However, we’re not about to produce another conveniently perfect … Well, here she is. She can tell you herself.”
Doyle turned as the door opened and a brunette looking younger than he had expected came in. The outfit was power dressing, stiletto heels, black tights, close-fitting Joseph charcoal-grey suit setting off heavy gold necklace and bangle. The face would have been startlingly pretty when it smiled, but was now businesslike and severe, grey-green eyes serious, thin lips set in a straight line of deep scarlet.
“Sergeant Doyle wants to know where you were when Caroline died,” Owen said. “I could have explained, but it’s better that you tell it.”
Daphne Gillie showed no reaction as she sat in the chair next to Doyle. He wondered whether what he was going to hear had been rehearsed or simply made ready in advance to save time.
“I understand the critical time is about twenty to six.” She looked straight at him as he spoke. “I wish I could say exactly where I was, but I can’t. I left here about five fifteen, did some window shopping on Oxford Street, then went to the Groucho where Ted was going to meet me when he’d finished his meeting.”
“What time did you arrive at the club?” Doyle asked.
“I wish I knew.” Daphne Gillie emphasised her answer slightly. “Possibly somebody I met there or one of the girls on the desk might remember, but all I can say is that it was about six o’clock.”
“Which means, of course, that she was in the area of Tottenham Court Road station at the wrong time,” Owen put in. “Let’s get on with it, sergeant, we’re all busy people. It’s cards on the table time. Daphne did not murder my wife, but has no way of proving it. We can let you have a photograph to take round some of the shops she wandered in and out of and perhaps an assistant will remember seeing her and will be able to say what time it was. Somebody at the Groucho may be able to help. I don’t know. But I do know two things.”
He leaned forward, elbows on the desk and touched one forefinger against the other. “One. If Daphne and I had planned to kill my wife, then obviously we would have made bloody sure that each of us had an alibi. I have one, but only by chance. Daphne doesn’t, which suggests we’re either rather stupid or simply innocent.” The forefinger moved. “Two. Wh
y should we want to kill Caroline? There was no animosity between her and me, and don’t let the fact that I’m back at work so soon start you thinking that I’m not distressed at her death. We may have separated, but we were very happily married for a number of years. I regret her death and had no reason either to wish it or bring it about — and neither did Daphne.”
“I’d like to say something else,” Daphne Gillie put in. “Until Ted talked to me about it, I never thought for one moment that either of us could be suspected. When he persuaded me it was possible, I began to think of anything that could prove I’m innocent. But I didn’t spend the evening carefully making sure there were witnesses who would be able to account for my movements in case the police asked me about them later. People don’t live their lives like that.”
“Did you know Mrs Owen?” Doyle asked her.
“We’d never met, although Ted pointed her out to me in St Martin’s Lane when we were out one evening. I don’t think she saw us. She was with someone.”
Doyle hesitated. The inspector who had sent him had admitted it was a long shot and the police had no reason to start pushing it. As he paused, Owen opened a drawer in his desk.
“A photograph of Daphne.” He thrust it across the desk with a page from an OGM memo pad. “Perhaps you’ll find someone who’ll remember her. She’s written down what shops she can remember going into.”
“Thank you.” Doyle picked up the photograph. “You seem to have anticipated everything, sir.”
Owen shrugged. “Common sense, sergeant. Nothing suspicious. Looking at all the options is part of my job — even the unlikely ones. Is there anything else?”
There wasn’t and Doyle was taken back to reception. Owen and Daphne Gillie stood at the window, watching him consult the list of shops before walking away towards Oxford Street.
“PC Plod’s off to check your story,” he remarked. “Wouldn’t it be nice if someone came up with something?”
“Don’t count on it,” she said. “There’s as much chance of that as of someone coming up with a motive.”
Doyle reported back to the station two hours later. One assistant had vaguely recognised the picture, but could not say if Daphne Gillie had been in the shop at any time on the evening Caroline Owen died. The girls at the Groucho remembered her arriving … sometime after five thirty? Members signed the book at reception, but did not put the time. When did Frank Muir arrive? It was after that. Or was it before? Perhaps six o’clock? Or … sorry. The inspector was philosophical.
“I’d have been a sight more suspicious if they’d both had cast-iron alibis,” he remarked. “Owen’s not the type to commit murder unless he had one hell of a reason and there’s damn all that I can see. Let the coroner sort it out.”
Which the coroner subsequently did. He heard evidence that Caroline Owen was not suicidal and that police inquiries had produced nothing suspicious. It had all the hallmarks of an accident, but nobody had come forward, guiltily confessing they must have pushed too hard on the crowded platform in their anxiety to get on the train. It lay on the file as an open verdict and the police lost interest. Murder? Forget it. That sort of thinking was for fiction.
*
Vincent Mulchrone, one of the most gifted writers ever to adorn the columns of the Daily Mail, once remarked that journalism must be the only human endeavour where the orgasm comes at the beginning. Constantly rewording the first paragraph of his interview, Maltravers struggled for more than half an hour before he was satisfied with his intro, the critical hook with which to catch the readers’ attention.
*
Mop-headed and ridiculously young, the Beatles grin out of a silver-framed photograph on the mantelpiece, the message “We love you, Jenni, yeah, yeah, yeah!” scrawled by John Lennon above the four signatures. There are no other indications in the room that the beautiful 44-year-old woman with a son at Exeter University was once a pop singer, actress and star. When I comment on the picture, Jenni Hilton smiles ruefully. “It reminds me how old I am. Ringo’s a grandfather now for God’s sake.”
*
After that it flowed and an instinct born of years in journalism ended it within fifty words of the required two thousand.
*
Why did she disappear and give up so much? However discreetly the question is asked, the barriers come down, the seal of privacy is carefully protected. Part of Jenni Hilton was never public property and never will be. The moves towards a comeback are cautious and will be on her terms.
*
The last paragraph was rewritten as often as the first before Maltravers let it go. It was as near as he could get to capturing her but, as he read through the piece, he was aware of the moments when he had failed to bypass the act, when Jenni Hilton had taken control of the interview and deflected him. It had been a game which both had known they were playing and each had silently acknowledged the other’s victories. But at lunch, when her defences had been down and he had unexpectedly thrown Barry Kershaw at her, she had been unprepared and responded with a clumsy lie. So now he had baited the piece with a brief mention of Kershaw — nothing contentious, just the indisputable facts of his death and her presence at the inquest. Mike Fraser had assured him she would only be able to correct what she could prove were errors of fact; Maltravers felt convinced she would object to any mention of Kershaw. If she did want it removing, he could ask for a reason, but did not expect to be given one. That was academic, anyway. The mere fact that she asked would show that what happened more than twenty years ago still mattered to Jenni Hilton in some way. And she had not forgotten it.
Chapter Eight
Haphazard genetic chance had given Terry Kershaw a level of intelligence alien to that of his family. Barry had been street-smart, matching his mother’s shrewd cunning. Their father could calculate the combination of darts to achieve any given score faster than a computer, but it was an idiot savant ability; otherwise, he could barely spell his own name. A cuckoo in a nest of sparrows, Terry had found his difference disorientating and it had been exaggerated by the influence of a schoolteacher, who, recognising unexpected potential, had opened his mind to codes of behaviour different to those of his home. Then, when he was fifteen and becoming aware of an inexpressible dissatisfaction, Barry had died and his mother had begun to suffocate him, first with her grief, then with her anger, finally with her constant insistence that somehow he owed it to her to avenge Barry. The teacher left his school around the same time and Terry lost a critical counterbalancing compensation as Maureen Kershaw relentlessly manipulated his confused loyalty. He was all she had left. She would never stand in his way and he must be successful like Barry had been, but there had been endless twists of emotional blackmail, confusing and caging him.
For ten years he and Maureen had lived together, her bitterness over Barry’s death coagulating into a resentment that dominated her life. Terry’s realisation that he had not particularly liked his brother had driven him into a turmoil of private guilt at what his conditioned conscience told him was a betrayal of the love he ought to feel for his mother. By his mid-twenties, he had come to terms with it by splitting his personality. At home with Maureen he was still the East End son, supportive and faithful; in town, as he built up his car retail business, he created another life more subtle and sophisticated, into which he could escape. Night-school classes which he explained away as a business course were actually elocution lessons to teach him to speak the language of his alternative existence. That deception produced the unbreachable split in him; he found he was unable to belong wholly in two worlds and had to choose one for reality and one for pretence. From then on, Maureen Kershaw only received the act, although he continued to make it appear the truth.
He met Stephanie when her father’s company bought out his four profitable showrooms. The initial negotiations took place in Bernard Driffield’s home, and it was a measure of the distance Terry Kershaw had travelled that he was more comfortable in The Bishop’s Avenue, Hampstead than in Etru
ria Street, Wapping. Driffield remarked to his wife and daughter afterwards how impressed he was that a man in his twenties could have built up his own business so successfully and the proposed buyout would add a valuable new member to the board of Insignia Motors. Three months and a quarter of a million pounds later, Terry Kershaw became national sales director. Intrigued by someone who had reached her level from nothing, Stephanie Driffield began to include him in her social life and eventually coolly decided she would marry him. Being the chairman’s daughter gave her everything her sense of snobbery wanted; being the wife of the man who would almost certainly be her father’s successor offered the reassurance that the situation would continue. Flattered by her attention and captivated by blonde, sensual beauty, Terry Kershaw never perceived her real motives and by the time he realised she was a bitch it was too late. From then on he was torn between two powerful women.
Stephanie and Maureen Kershaw had recognised each other for what they were the moment they met; mutual contempt, smooth on one side, savage on the other, simmered under a veneer of tolerance. Terry constantly tried and repeatedly failed as a peacemaker throughout several years of battles and finally gave up over the Highgate house. His suggestion that it was big enough for his mother to live with them precipitated a row in which Stephanie ruthlessly used every weapon in her considerable armoury. The uneasy peace that eventually came was based on Maureen’s apparent retreat, but she clung on to one part of her son, a defeated general maintaining a guerrilla resistance in the mountains. Every week he visited her — ignoring Stephanie’s caustic scorn about running home to his Mum — and Maureen used the dripfeed of what she believed was their shared private hatred for Barry’s killer, still because she wanted revenge, but also because it meant she and Terry had something which kept them together. He never disillusioned her as the litany of hate became increasingly meaningless because he knew it was all she had left. It didn’t matter anyway; it was something that would never be activated. Then one morning, Maureen telephoned him at the office.
Murder in Waiting (Augustus Maltravers Mystery Book 5) Page 8