‘We let him go,’ Slider said. ‘And keep an eye on him. Release him later tonight, when it’s quieter around the house.’
‘Ironic, isn’t it?’ Atherton said. ‘Fortunately we’ve got another suspect to take attention away from him. Unfortunately, they both live in the same house.’
‘There’ll be plenty in the papers tomorrow about Hibbert. They’ll have had time to do their homework. Let’s hope all the attention will flush him out,’ Slider said. ‘Meanwhile, we keep our eye on Fitton. And there’s going to be a fingertip search of the woods as soon as it gets light tomorrow, in the hope that, if she wasn’t killed at home, she was killed there, and there’s something to find.’
‘And what about Wiseman, boss?’ Connolly asked.
‘We bring him in and ask him some questions. I’ll talk to Mr Porson about it now. I think it would be nice to take him late tonight, give him a night in the cells to unsettle him, and have a go at him in the morning when he’s had time to think about the error of his ways. And while he’s in here, one of you can go and offer his wife a shoulder to cry on, see what comes out.’
‘And the kid,’ Connolly added. ‘Bethany. That one’d have you mortified, the language on her, but she has a useful habit of eavesdropping. You never know what she’s found out about her dad.’
It turned out to be an exciting night, not only with the arrest of Ian Wiseman, who was not pleased about it and made his feelings known as vocally as a cat on the way to the vet’s, but because late that evening the Bournemouth police found Scott Hibbert.
‘What was it, a tip-off?’ Slider asked. He had not been home yet. He was downstairs talking to Paxman about the treatment of Wiseman when the news came in, and hurried upstairs to find Mr Porson in the office, along with Atherton, and Hollis, who was night duty officer and the only one of them who was actually supposed to be there.
‘Better than that,’ Porson said. ‘The woman he was lying low with gave him up. She sneaked in the kitchen while he was watching telly and told ’em to come and get him. They went straight round there. Found him in his underpants.’
‘I wonder why they didn’t think of looking there first?’ Slider murmured. Atherton shot him a look. He shouldn’t, he really shouldn’t.
Fortunately Porson didn’t catch it. He was too full of the wonder of Hibbert. ‘He was watching himself on telly, the dipstick. On the twenty-four-hour news. No wonder she wanted rid of him. He burst into tears, apparently, when the Bournemouth plod came in. Anyway, they’re wrapping him up and sending him over to us right away. They’ve got the woman in, giving her statement, pending our decision whether we want her banged up for obstruction or not.’
‘We’ll want to question her, won’t we?’ Slider said.
‘Got to think of the practicosities,’ Porson said. ‘We can’t clutter up our cells with all these bodies at the same time. You’ve already got Wiseman, Hibbert’s coming, Fitton’s going – it’s getting like a murderers’ convention in there. Anyway, I want you to have a crack at Hibbert tonight, while he’s off balance.’
‘Yes, sir, but I’d still like to get the woman’s side of it while it’s fresh.’ He turned to Atherton. ‘You’d better get down there and interview her first thing tomorrow.’
‘I’ll have to have a word with Bournemouth, then, grease the whales,’ Porson said, and stumped off to his own room.
‘Why are you here, anyway?’ Slider asked Atherton when they were alone. ‘Haven’t you got a home to go to?’
‘Emily’s in Ireland, covering the euro crisis,’ he admitted. ‘I didn’t fancy going home to an empty house.’
Blimey, he did have it bad, Slider thought. Atherton had always been the cat who walked alone; now he was so much a part of the Jim-and-Emily combo, the house didn’t feel right without her. ‘I wouldn’t have thought the house would feel empty with those hooligan cats of yours,’ he said.
‘Not the same,’ Atherton replied. ‘A cat doesn’t keep you warm at night. Well, it does, but – you can’t cuddle a cat. Well, you can, but—’
‘I get the picture,’ Slider said hastily. He didn’t like to think where that litany was going. ‘Hadn’t you better go back for a bit of shut-eye before Bournemouth?’
‘I’d sooner see how Hibbert turns out,’ said Atherton.
But in the end, they didn’t get to have a crack at Hibbert, because he was in too bad a state when he arrived. He had been in tears all the way up, according to the stone-faced Dorset coppers accompanying him; and as soon as he walked in from the dark to the brightly-lit station he started shaking, and rapidly got so bad they had to get the surgeon in to give him a tranquillizer. After that he got a lot happier but it was impossible to interview him properly – his responses had slowed down so much it was going to take them most of the night to process him – so Slider gave it up until the morning. ‘Get the woman’s end of it first, then we can tackle him tomorrow from a position of strength.’
‘Tomorrow’s getting to be quite a day,’ Atherton said as they trod out into the darkness.
‘Today, now,’ Slider said.
‘So between Hibbert and Wiseman, which do you fancy more?’ Atherton asked. ‘Or is it still Fitton?’
‘I don’t know. There’s something to be said for all of them.’
‘All of them? You mean some kind of Murder on the Orient Express scenario?’
‘Each of them, then, if you must be pedantic.’
‘Why are people who are just trying to be accurate always called pedantic?’
‘Beats me. God, I’m hungry.’
‘Fancy going for a curry?’ Atherton suggested. ‘I know one that’s still open.’
‘At this time of night? You’re so young.’
‘All right for you,’ Atherton grumbled. ‘You’ve got a nice warm wife at home, who’ll probably leap out of bed and cook you bacon and eggs. All I’ve got is the sound of my own broken sobbing.’
‘Oh, go on then,’ Slider said. As it happened, he felt wide awake and didn’t want to go home yet. And it was ages since he’d had a curry. This marriage lark certainly put paid to a lot of the old social habits. ‘We can talk some things through.’
‘Good. There’s a question that’s really been bugging me,’ Atherton said as they turned towards the Uxbridge Road.
‘What?’
‘Who on earth thought of putting an “s” in the word “lisp”?’
In the end, Atherton didn’t go to bed: it probably wasn’t a good idea to try to sleep on a substantial curry anyway, and he thought he might as well get the journey down to Bournemouth done in the early hours when the roads were quiet. So he had a shower, shave and change of clothes, played for half an hour with the cats, who were querulous about not having seen anyone All Day, and was down in Bournemouth well before breakfast time.
The first thing he learned at the station was that the woman, Valerie Proctor, was no longer there.
‘She insisted on going home,’ said the duty officer, one Kevin Bone. ‘She’d come in voluntarily so we couldn’t stop her unless we arrested her, and we didn’t want to do that, because she’d have clammed up right away and asked for a brief. She’s a bit of a stroppy cow, and I reckon you’ll get more out of her if you don’t rile her.’
‘She’s at home now?’ Atherton asked. ‘How do you know she won’t do a runner?’
‘In her mind she’s got nothing to run from. She’s turned him in, she’s the good guy,’ said Bone. ‘Anyway, we’ve got a uniform on her door. To protect her from the press, we told her, but it cuts both ways, o’ course.’
‘Excellent,’ said Atherton. ‘Well, if she’s safely confined, I’ve got time to read the reports and have breakfast before I go over.’
‘We do a cracking bacon sarnie up in the canteen,’ said Bone.
A female uniformed officer, Hewlitt, drove Atherton to the house and would sit in with him at the interview. ‘You don’t want to take chances with this one,’ Bone had said.
‘You
think she’ll jump me?’ Atherton had asked. ‘I know I’m generally considered irresistible, but . . .’
Bone, of course, did not know Atherton, and his way of talking was evidently unfamiliar down in Dorset. He had given him a very odd look, cleared his throat, and said carefully, ‘She’s the sort who might make an accusation against you, so you’d better have a woman PC with you, for safety’s sake.’
‘Thanks,’ Atherton had said, chastened. No more jokes for you, my boy, he had ordered his overactive brain.
But in the car, Hewlitt, who was evidently a brighter spark, wafted her hand about in the air after driving for a few minutes and said, ‘Phew! Are you planning to gas her and get her to confess while she’s under the influence? Cos I have to tell you, that’s against the rules.’
‘Ripe, is it?’ Atherton said with a grin.
‘Eight hundred on a Geiger counter, at least,’ she said. ‘Evacuate the reactor building without delay.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I don’t mind. I love curry. But she might claim it was cruel and unusual. There’s some Trebors in the glove in front of you. Better suck a couple.’
Mrs Proctor lived in Winton, which Hewlitt explained was a bit of a mixed area, on the edge of the classier Talbot Woods, and with some nice houses, but some not so nice.
‘And what’s she like?’
Hewlitt flung him a sidelong look. ‘I don’t want to sound bitchy.’
‘Oh go on – treat yourself.’
‘You’re funny, you are,’ she said, almost in wonder. ‘Well, she’s not Talbot Woods, I’ll say that. And if I hadn’t sworn never to be mean about other women, I’d say she was mutton dressed as lamb.’
‘Good job you did swear, then,’ said Atherton. ‘Nobody likes catty females.’
The house, when they came to it, was a meanly proportioned, yellow-brick modern one in a small estate of identical raw new buildings, each functionally square, with the sort of porch tacked on that was a flat concrete canopy supported at the front by two metal poles from which the paint was already peeling. Each house stood at the back of a small unfenced front garden which was half unsuccessful grass and half hardstanding for a car. Each house owed its upward-mobility credentials to having a garage, and a three-foot-wide strip of separation on either side between it and its neighbours. Atherton couldn’t help thinking that an extra six feet of room inside would have been a better use of the space, but for reasons no one could explain the word ‘detached’ had mysterious magical powers over the asking price of a house.
There was a car on the hardstanding in front of the garage, a sporty-looking red Zetec S-Max.
‘Menopause car,’ said Hewlitt, who seemed to have forgotten her pledge.
Atherton made a note of the number and made a quick call to Hollis, to have it ANPR’d. Then they went in.
Atherton’s first thought was that if Mrs Proctor hadn’t turned Hibbert in, he probably would have surrendered himself in a short time. The inside of the house was decorated with so much exuberant bad taste he thought for a minute he had wandered into a traveller wedding. Mirrors, chandeliers, ornaments, pelmets; gilt, onyx, Dralon; huge vases of artificial peonies and roses; reproductions of classic paintings in gaudy gold-coloured frames crammed together in the spaces between the tassel-shaded wall-lights; a life-size china greyhound sitting in the hearth of the modern gas fire which, on this chilly day, was alight behind its glass panel and showed realistic flames licking up, inexplicably, from a heap of pebbles. There was so much bling and so many conflicting patterns, within seconds he was getting an ice-cream headache.
Atherton’s second thought, which arrived on seeing Valerie Proctor, was almost as unallowable as Hewlitt’s. Though nowhere near menopausal, she was obviously quite a bit older than Hibbert, at least in her late-thirties, more likely early forties. She was trim and well corseted, and had evidently redone her make-up and hair as a priority when she got back from the station, for both were impeccable. She must have changed, too, for she was wearing a smart suit. Though more subdued than her decor, it was still bright yellow trimmed with black and rather shorter in the skirt than was strictly necessary; and she was wearing very high heels, and a great deal of costume jewellery. But despite the effort she must have put in, she looked worn underneath the maquillage and somehow – to Atherton almost touchingly – even mumsy.
His momentary softness passed as she tottered towards him like an infuriated giraffe. ‘I want to make a complaint, a serious complaint, about the way I’ve been treated,’ she snapped, skewering him with a look you could have barbecued king prawns on. ‘I went to the police voluntarily, doing my civic duty, and I’ve been held at a police station all night answering questions and now I’ve got you bursting in to harass me all over again. It’s no wonder everyone hates the police when you treat honest citizens the way you do. You ought to try getting out and catching a few criminals for a change, instead of persecuting people who are trying to help, hanging about motorways stopping people who just accidentally creep a couple of miles over the speed limit, when the road was practically empty, there was no one else about, it wasn’t doing the slightest bit of harm to a soul. It’s a disgrace the way you persecute motorists, just because you can, and particularly women because you know they won’t cause trouble. It’s all about the money, just like the cameras. You’re not really interested in road safety, you just want the fines.’
From the seamless segue from the general to the particular and back, Atherton surmised she had recently been stopped for speeding in her sporty red car and hadn’t managed to talk her way out of it. He dialled the charm up to blatant, smiled at her admiringly, and said, ‘I think it’s wonderful the way you’ve come forward to help us, at considerable inconvenience to yourself, and I’m sorry I have to ask you to go through it all again for me, but from my own point of view I can only say it’s a privilege to have the chance to visit you in your lovely home. If you wouldn’t mind me just asking a few more questions, I can take myself out of your hair as soon as possible. Where did you get those beautiful flowers at this time of year?’
The needle was quivering on the edge of the red zone, and he could sense Hewlitt staring at him with her mental mouth hanging open like a door. For a breathless moment of silence he thought he had gone too far; but then Mrs Proctor almost visibly dismounted from her high horse and said with something close to a dimple, ‘They’re artificial. You can’t get peonies like that in April, silly. But they’re very good, aren’t they?’ A little laugh. ‘I sometimes think they’re real myself, for a moment, when I catch sight of them out of the corner of my eye.’
And so it was all right. Tea and ‘something stronger’ were offered and refused, and in short order Atherton found himself sitting on the sofa, with please-call-me-Valerie in the armchair almost knee to knee with him and ready to tell him whatever he wanted. He was glad of the presence of Hewlitt, who sensibly removed herself out of Valerie’s line of sight, but remained on hand in case of trouble. He had a feeling he was in for the long haul, and was only glad, from the way Valerie leaned forward as she spoke, that either she had no sense of smell or was particularly fond of curry and peppermint.
Wiseman knew about his rights and insisted on them, refusing to answer any questions until he had seen his solicitor, and since the one he requested couldn’t at first be contacted and then took some time to arrive, a good part of the morning had worn away before Slider actually faced him over the table in the tape-room.
The solicitor, Drobcek, a small and swarthy man with an amazing crop of black curly hair, turned out to be one who had advised some pupils at Wiseman’s school who had got into trouble with the law. He had a substantial criminal practice in Hayes and Southall, but he specialized in juvenile, and seemed a little puzzled that Wiseman had called on him. But he was prepared to do his best and got the first punch in, complaining that there had been no call to drag Wiseman in in the middle of the night.
‘My client had made no attempt to ab
scond, and he is a pillar of his local community. You could just as easily have asked him to come in voluntarily to answer questions, which he would have agreed to do. Or if you had to arrest him, you could have done it at a more reasonable time, not dragged him from his bed in that ridiculous, melodramatic way, upsetting his wife and child.’
‘Your objection has been noted,’ Slider said, studying Wiseman’s face. He looked more drawn than he had on Tuesday, as if he had not had much sleep between then and now; but the suppressed rage in him seemed to have been turned down a notch, as though some of it had been replaced with some other emotion. Apprehension, perhaps? But he still had enough anger for two normal people, and his fists – which looked very hard, on the end of extremely whippy arms – kept clenching and unclenching, as though he’d really like to smack his way out of the trouble he had found himself in.
‘But as you are here now,’ he went on to Wiseman, ‘perhaps we should get the questions over with as quickly as possible, for everyone’s sake.’
‘I’ve nothing to say to you,’ he snapped. ‘You came to my house, I talked to you then, openly and freely, and nothing has changed. Don’t you realize the effect arresting me is going to have on my career? There are always people who say things like “there’s no smoke without fire”. Isn’t it bad enough that we’ve lost our beloved daughter, without you ruining my livelihood as well?’
‘She was your stepdaughter, not your daughter,’ Slider said, the better to goad him.
He was goaded. ‘Oh, is that what this is about? You’ve been reading too many fairy stories about wicked stepmothers. I always looked upon Melanie as being as much my own daughter as Bethany.’
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