by J M Gregson
‘Neil set it up, not me. He was going off to see his sister in Scotland, leaving the Towers at about one. He said the easiest thing was for me to follow him out a little later. He’d wait for me at the place we arranged: it was out on the slopes of Pendle Hill. He said he knew a lane off the road which was only used by farm traffic; we wouldn’t be disturbed there, even on a Sunday, Neil said.’
She wondered if Cartwright had been out there with his lover, if he knew it was private because he had taken this man’s wife there in the past. James Naylor was broken now, and all of them knew it. Her role was merely to keep him talking. She said gently, ‘So you followed Cartwright in your own car.’
He nodded. ‘About twenty minutes later. So that no one would think I was following Neil. But I don’t think anyone even saw me go.’
He was probably right. Certainly no one had reported it. Lucy already had a feeling that the cool and thoughtful Michelle Naylor might turn out to be an accessory after the fact, but that might be difficult to prove, if this man chose to protect her. ‘And what happened at the meeting, James?’
‘I said I wanted to be sure that it was all over between him and Michelle. I said I’d forgiven Michelle, and I hoped that Sally had forgiven Neil. I pointed out that all of us needed our jobs at Marton Towers, so I wanted to discuss how we were going to recover from this and go on living and working together.’
There was a naivety about this man that was quite touching. Lucy thought as she had done before that it is not always the most evil or naturally vicious people who commit murder. She said, ‘But your meeting didn’t go as you planned it, did it, James?’
‘No. Neil said that Michelle had been mistaken if she’d ever thought it was anything very serious. He said she’d never been anything more than an easy screw for him.’ His face twisted in pain as he brought out the coarse phrase.
‘So you quarrelled.’
‘He said he wasn’t the first she’d had and he wouldn’t be the last. Said I’d need to watch her in the future, if she wasn’t to go over the wall again. I hit him then.’
His fair-skinned face was just for an instant as proud as a boasting schoolboy’s. Then it clouded again with the thought of his present situation. Lucy Blake offered the latest of her prompts. ‘And it got out of hand, I suppose.’
She seemed to understand. James felt absurdly, disproportionately grateful to her for that. ‘I thought he’d be sorry for what he’d done; that he’d be anxious to wipe the slate clean and get on with the rest of our lives. I thought I was being generous, when I told him I was willing to forget what had happened between him and Michelle.’ He stopped, looked from one to the other of the two very different faces in front of him, and said with an air of wonder, ‘I love my wife, you know. We were going to be all right, until I did this.’
Lucy Blake spoke into the silence. ‘You were saying that Neil Cartwright just wouldn’t let it go.’
‘He taunted me. Said I was a loser, that I’d asked for it. It was when he said that it would happen again that I lost it. He’d broken a young shoot off a tree before I got there. A willow, he said it was: Neil knew about these things, even when the trees weren’t in leaf.’ He paused for a moment; in that instant, precision about which tree was involved seemed of supreme importance to him. ‘Neil had been swishing the tops off weeds with this whippy shoot whilst he waited for me. He threw it away when he turned to go to his car. I grabbed it and threw it round his neck from behind, pulled it against his throat until he stopped struggling. I just wanted to stop him using those words. He didn’t have a chance. I’m pretty strong, you know, when I lose my temper.’
It was half a boast, half an apology. For a moment, he was a callow, overgrown schoolboy who is proud of his new-found strength, even as he apologizes for a minor breakage. They had to remind themselves that this fresh-faced, awkward, seemingly gauche creature was a killer who had just confessed to garrotting the man who had taken his wife to bed.
It was Peach who now growled, ‘I think you had better tell us what happened next, Mr Naylor.’
‘I put the shoot of wood into my car – I flung it over the hedge on my way home, when I was miles away from where Neil had died. Well, it was a murder weapon, wasn’t it?’ He smiled a little at his cleverness, seemingly prepared to ignore the irony that he was now giving them every detail they needed of his crime.
‘You had a corpse on your hands.’
‘Yes. I thought about leaving Neil’s body in his car, hoping you’d think it had been a random killing.’ Now that he had given up and the tension was broken, he felt almost unnaturally calm. ‘But I knew you’d come back to the people who’d worked with him at Marton Towers, and I didn’t want that. I – I didn’t want people to find out about what had been going on between him and Michelle.’ He was suddenly blushing over his desire to protect his wife’s reputation, despite the desperate nature of his own situation.
Peach thought that other people at the Towers had probably known all about the relationship between Neil Cartwright and Michelle Naylor: lovers were usually absurdly optimistic about their liaisons remaining secret. ‘So you took him back to Marton Towers.’
‘Yes. I had Neil’s keys. I thought I could put his body in his office and lock the door on it. It’s not much more than a box room, but he kept his bits of paperwork and a few bags of fertilizer in there. No one else but Neil and Ben Freeman ever went into that room, and Freeman didn’t have a key. I had the idea that if I waited for a day or two, I’d be able to take him out and dump him somewhere where he would never be found; in the sea perhaps, or in a lake somewhere, with weights on the corpse. So I put his body into the boot of my car. I moved Neil’s car on to an unpaved road leading to an old quarry, so that it wouldn’t be easily found. Then I locked it up and took the keys away with me. It was still quiet when I got back to the Towers. I left him in the boot for an hour or so, until it was dark. Then I transferred him to his office, locked the door and took the key away. That gave me time to think.’
‘But the body was still there three days later.’
‘Yes. We were too busy at the beginning of the week for me to get away for any lengthy period, because of the guests who were coming in on the Wednesday. I was busy ordering food and preparing menus, and I had to be around for Mr Holloway to consult me.’ For a second, he was proud of his importance in that vanished system, of the Head Chef status which was now gone for ever.
‘The police raid on Wednesday night must have come as a shock to you.’
‘Yes. It was a shock to all of us, but to me more than anyone else. The place was suddenly swarming with police. I thought it was only a matter of time before they went through the stable block and found the body. I don’t know much about fingerprints – about what surfaces you can take them from and so forth – but mine must have been all over him. I was panicking when I saw Mr Crouch and the others being taken away in handcuffs.’
‘So you set the place on fire.’
‘Yes. I knew that there were cans of petrol for the estate machines in Neil Cartwright’s shed. I still had his keys. Once Ben Freeman had left, no one needed to get into that shed. So I got a couple of cans from there and set up the fire under Neil’s office, where the body was.’ He paused for a minute, as if the pleasing irony of raiding the dead man’s province to destroy his remains had just struck him for the first time.
Then he ran his fingers vigorously through his tousled fair hair, as if the gesture was necessary to his concentration. ‘I made sure that no one was in the area at the time before I threw a match into the room and set things going. All the residents were in the main house, discussing the arrest of Mr Crouch and his visitors and being questioned by the police. The flames had got a good hold before some passing motorist set up the alarm.’
Peach nodded to his colleague, and Lucy Blake stepped forward and pronounced the formal words of arrest. James Naylor smiled at her, trying to catch her eye as she spoke the words carefully and clearly, as if
he was glad that it was DS Blake and not that grimmer dark-eyed presence beneath the bald pate which was ending his freedom.
He said only, ‘Michelle had nothing to do with this, you know. I want you to record that. Whatever she might say to you, I want you to remember that I did this on my own.’
As DS Blake drove slowly over the gravel and on to the now familiar drive between the twin lakes of Marton Towers, Peach sat beside the passive handcuffed figure of James Naylor in the back of the vehicle. The DCI looked up the steps and at the window of Neville Holloway’s office beside the impressive stone entrance to the mansion, where faces at the window were following every yard of their exit.
A single white-faced figure stood between the pillars at the top of the stone steps to the entrance. Michelle Naylor was as motionless as a marble statue as she watched her husband’s departure.