They went downstairs and Mayo stood in front of the table that separated them from Voss, leaning forward, his hands flat on the surface. He spoke to the man he’d once thought of as a pleasant acquaintance, with whom he’d shared social congress. ‘OK, we’re ready to start, and I want it straight. Don’t give me any bull on this. You’ve already wasted enough of our time as it is.’
Dermot Voss lolled in the opposite chair, smoking, a faint amusement on his face, unperturbed by the presence of a detective superintendent, a detective inspector, a sergeant and a constable. ‘Do I have the impression you’re about to interrogate me?’ he asked, his smile deepening.
‘I don’t know why else you think we’ve brought you down here. And I don’t much care what impression you have. What matters is that you answer my questions.’
‘Dear me. Well, fire ahead.’
Mayo settled himself into the chair next to Abigail, taking his time, spreading his papers out on the table in front of him. Voss had totally dismissed the idea of being represented by a solicitor.
‘Interview commences eleven thirty. Those present are Superintendent Mayo, DI Moon, DS Kite and WDC Platt.’ He nodded to Jenny Platt, ready to take back-up notes, then turned back to Voss. ‘First of all, I’d like you to explain to me what you were doing between seven thirty a.m. and five past eight on Monday, eleventh September.’
‘I told you, I stopped at Patel’s to get cigarettes. There was a queue, and God knows how long it took me to get served. When I came out again my car had gone. Disappeared. Vanished. Into thin air.’
‘What were you doing between that time and arriving back at Edwina Lodge at five past eight?’
‘Well, I cast around for a bit, looking for the car. It took me some time to grasp what had happened. At first, I thought I must have left it down that street, what’s it called? – Allegar Street – and forgotten – you know, the one that turns off Albert Road just past Patel’s. Sometimes, if there’s no parking space outside the shop, I do leave it there.’
‘Must’ve taken you all of two minutes to find out you hadn’t.’
‘Plus more time, wandering a bit further, wondering if someone had moved it for a joke. It has happened to me before, you know,’ he added, as their faces said what they thought of this as an excuse. ‘It must have been about ten to eight when I got back to the house.’
‘Mrs Baverstock has stated that it was five past eight when you arrived back at Edwina Lodge.’
‘And who’s to prove her word against mine? That nosy bitch would say anything against me.’
‘Your sister-in-law, Sarah Wilmot, didn’t leave the house until after eight o’clock.’
‘All right, so I arrived a bit later than I thought. I wasn’t checking my watch every five minutes! Now, suppose you tell me something – this is all to do with that girl, Patti, being killed, right?’ His good humour was slipping a bit. ‘So give me one good reason why you think I should be concerned in that?’
‘We’ll come to that. First I’m going to put forward what we believe happened, then you can tell me where you think we’re wrong. I think you called for cigarettes, yes, but I also think you intended to waylay Patti, which you did – you followed her into Ellington Close and then into the wood, and killed her there.’
‘You lot – you really are something else!’
‘I haven’t finished yet. You must have had one hell of a shock when you came back and found your car missing. If it had still been there, you’d have been away and nobody the wiser. So you did the best you could – got out of sight as quick as possible, back to Edwina Lodge, where everyone would be out, as you thought. I don’t suppose you knew Tina Baverstock was at home on Mondays.’ He saw by the flicker of Voss’s eyes that he’d hit the nail on the head.
‘Well, naturally I came back – I had to sort myself out, report the car missing, get picked up and all that. And all right, I did see Patti. We met at the entrance to the Close, as a matter of fact, as I was going back to the house. She asked me if I could hear a noise. It sounded like an animal in pain, and it was coming from the direction of the wood. She ran in and I followed. I found her in tears, crouched beside a dead cat. It had been mutilated and she was terribly upset, she said she’d have to tell the owners. I offered to do it for her but she wouldn’t have that. In the end, I had to leave her and go home. I was due on an important assignment that morning, and I had to report my car missing and arrange for another to pick me up.’
‘This is a substantially different version of your first story.’
‘Since she was alive and well when I left her, I didn’t see the need to complicate matters.’
‘It complicates things a good deal more when people take it on themselves to lie to us.’ Dermot looked pained. And that was the last you saw of her?’
‘It was.’
Like all good liars, he was keeping to the truth as much as he could, but there wasn’t enough of it to support his story. ‘What you haven’t given me,’ he complained, ‘is one plausible reason why I should have killed that girl?
‘It might become clearer to you if we went a bit further back, then – to the Saturday night Ensor was killed.’
Dermot frowned, puzzled. ‘Ah yes, the man on the allotments.’
‘The man who was your very good friend, Philip Ensor,’ Mayo reminded him sharply.
‘Oh, Philip Ensor,’ he said, as though there were other Ensors who had met with the same unfortunate end.
‘Don’t pussyfoot around, Mr Voss, we’ve already established how far your acquaintance with him went.’
‘I knew him at one time, yes. Slightly.’
‘Rather more than that, I believe.’
Abigail bent over the briefcase which stood on the floor to extract a bundle of what looked like letters. She put them on the table, without saying what they were. Creamy yellow paper, brown ink. Dermot rocked back in his chair and stared at the ceiling.
‘You were in fact very good friends,’ she said.
‘At one time, maybe. Not of late.’
‘Why was that? Did you quarrel?’
‘They moved house, we lost touch, you know how it is, it’s the women who keep these things going, and Lisa didn’t bother.’
‘But the friendship was mainly between you and Philip Ensor, wasn’t it? You’d known each other for several years, I think.’ Her hand went out absently and touched the creamy yellow bundle. She slid out one of the letters and laid it flat, facing herself.
‘Can I have another cigarette?’ Voss asked, lowering the chair and leaning forward while it was lit for him.
‘That’s true,’ he said eventually, ‘to a point. I met Ensor when we were marooned in an airport – Athens, I think. We got talking and struck up a rapport. Then a few weeks later, by an amazing coincidence, we found ourselves in adjoining seats on another flight home from Germany. Discovered we lived not far from each other, liked golf. One thing led to another ...’ He shrugged.
‘And you did, in fact, become close friends.’
‘We used to see quite a bit of each other. Our wives weren’t all that keen. But they went along with it. I think Judith was inclined to be jealous of Lisa – she couldn’t have a child, and we had two.’
‘And maybe she began to have further cause for jealousy. Especially when your wife became pregnant again.’
Dermot raised an eyebrow, apparently not seeing fit to reply to that, so Mayo went on.
‘By that time, they’d moved from Milton Keynes – at Mrs Ensor’s insistence, since she didn’t like the association that was growing between her husband and your wife.’
‘I don’t know anything about that.’
‘That’s not exactly true, is it?’ Mayo tapped the letters. ‘It’s all here – what was going on between them, your reactions when you found out.’ He let that sink in for a while, then suddenly changed tack. ‘The night Ensor was killed, you were staying at the Saracen’s Head, here in Lavenstock. You gave it out you had food poisoni
ng.’
‘I did have food poisoning.’
‘If you say so. But your sister-in-law ate the same food and wasn’t affected. It was nothing but a ploy to slip out and meet Ensor, wasn’t it? At a place you’d sussed out when you’d previously stayed at the Saracen’s, when you were house-hunting.’
‘That’s a load of rubbish. And I repeat, I did not go out and meet Ensor.’
‘I must tell you that we have a witness who saw you.’
‘Probably when I slipped out for a breath of air for a few minutes, after I’d thrown up.’
‘The witness recognized you and will swear he saw you and Ensor fighting.’
‘You can’t witness something that didn’t happen,’ Voss said, but with much less conviction.
‘There were, in fact, two separate witnesses. Perhaps you were too occupied to remember the car that drove away – but you did remember Patti, when you met her later, as being the girl who’d walked through the allotments when you and Ensor were fighting, which is why you killed her.’
‘No. I’d as little reason to kill her as I had to kill Ensor.’
Mayo began sifting through the papers on the table and soon found what he was looking for. ‘Do you recognize this?’ He held up the polythene-encased photograph of Ensor that Sarah had found, then turned it over so that Voss could read what was written on the back, explaining what he was doing for the benefit of the tape recording.
Voss stared at it. ‘Where the hell did you get this?’
‘It was found in the bottom of your wife’s jewel box, by Sarah Wilmot.’
‘Sarah?’ He sounded as though he’d had a blow, right where it hurt.
‘She found it a couple of days ago but she’d never met Philip Ensor and knew nothing about him. She only connected it yesterday with the E-fit picture we’d issued of him – which wasn’t all that good a likeness, but as near as we could get. Show him the other exhibit, Inspector Moon, if you will.’
Abigail held up the drawing that Allie had done. The colour drained from his face. ‘What are you trying to do to me? Who drew that?’
‘It’s one of your daughter’s drawings – Allie.’
For once he was silenced.
‘The night your wife died, you took an earlier flight from Belgrade and arrived home a day sooner than you were expected. We’ve checked with the airline, and we’ve found a taxi that left you at your home at ten o’clock in the evening. The driver remembered you very well, on account of your photographic gear. I believe a quarrel blew up almost immediately between you and your wife about her association with Ensor, which ended with you pushing her down the stairs.’
‘Your imagination’s in overdrive, Mayo,’ Voss said, stubbing out his cigarette. But his hand had begun to shake, and he avoided looking at anyone.
‘But that’s a substantially correct account of what happened, isn’t it? You must have woken your daughter with the noise, and she saw it happen. She’s pushed it to the back of her mind, as children – and not only children – do with traumatic events that are too terrible to deal with. But it’s been there in her subconscious ever since, manifesting itself in sleepwalking, drawings like this ...’
‘Stop it!’
Voss put his folded arms on the table, laid his head on them and began to weep. ‘I didn’t kill Lisa. And I never meant to kill the others,’ he mumbled indistinctly.
‘Will you raise your head, Mr Voss, and say that clearly for the benefit of the tape?’
There was no response, except for the sound of his weeping. Eventually he raised his congested face and after being prompted again, repeated what he’d said.
‘Why don’t you tell us exactly what happened?’
‘What’ll happen to me if I do?’ he asked abjectly.
Mayo looked at him as he swiped the tears away with his hands. ‘That’s not for me to say. I’ve already cautioned you, and I must warn you that we have enough evidence to support a charge against you of murdering Patti Ryman.’
‘What evidence?’
‘We found this pen at the scene of the crime. Do you identify it as one belonging to your wife, which you’d occasionally used since her death?’
‘It looks like the one I bought for Lisa, yes.’
‘We’ve also found traces of burnt, bloodstained clothing in your garden incinerator, fibres of which match those found on Patti’s school blazer, and –’
‘I didn’t push Lisa down the stairs! She tripped over that damned belt – she’d been warned often enough about leaving it unfastened. I did come home early, and yes, we did have a row – she’d been asking me for a divorce, she was pregnant, and I knew the child wasn’t mine. The children were asleep, and she was already undressed, ready for bed. She said she wasn’t going to argue any more and was going downstairs to make some tea. I followed her and grabbed at her at the top of the steps, but she twisted away from me and fell. I swear I didn’t push her downstairs. If – if Allie saw it, it may have looked like that to her, but it was an accident. I tried to grab her but her dressing gown was satiny stuff and it slipped through my fingers ... She was dead when I got to the bottom of the stairs. I didn’t know what to do, so I just left, walked to the station and took a train to London, came back next day as if I’d just arrived. Nobody ever questioned me.’
There was a long silence.
‘And on Monday the eleventh of September?’
‘It’s basically true what I told you. I stopped the car outside Patel’s to get some cigarettes and saw Patti coming along with the papers. I’d recognized her a few days earlier, when that Baverstock bitch was bawling her out about leaving her bike outside the house. I went out to tell her it was my house and the paper girl could leave her bike where she damn well liked. God, I got a shock when I saw who the girl was! That hair, you know, impossible to mistake.’ He was speaking fast, his words tumbling over each other, anxious to justify himself. ‘I was pretty certain she’d recognized me, too, but I couldn’t be sure. It happened as I told you on the Monday morning, I went with her into the wood, we saw the cat and all that, but then, as we were leaving, she suddenly burst out, “It was you, wasn’t it, the other night by the allotments? You were fighting – I shall have to tell the police, but it’ll be all right, Mr Voss. I looked back but he was standing up, so it couldn’t have been you who killed him, could it?” She was so innocent, so naive. But if she’d told you what she’d seen, it would’ve been all up with me. She walked away and
I hardly remember how or why – I picked a piece of iron up that was lying around and hit her with it. Then I went back to pick my car up and found it had gone.’
He’d walked away, just as he’d walked away from Ensor and his own wife. He’d gone into the wood with Patti, and emerged a few minutes later, without a soul having witnessed his entry or exit from the wood.
‘I’m sorry I did it, I never would have killed her if I’d thought about it,’ he said, beginning to weep again.
‘And you wouldn’t have killed Philip Ensor either, if you’d thought about it?’
‘That was different. We were fighting. I knocked him down once and he got up. I picked a stone up and hit him with it. I left him lying in a puddle – I thought it would cool him off. How was I to know he’d die?’
‘Tell me exactly what you were fighting about – how he came to be in Lavenstock that night.’
‘He’d been threatening me. I’d had a letter from his wife, Judith, telling me what was going on. I found it hard to believe – I’d always thought Philip a decent sort, we’d always got on well, but he was hardly the sort a woman would die for.’ Seeming not to have noticed his unfortunate choice of words, he went on, ‘We’d been going through a bad patch, Lisa and I ... she wanted me to get another job where I could spend more time with her and the children, for one thing. But I never thought things were that bad. It was hard to stomach the idea of her and Philip. I wrote her some rather strong letters, telling her she must give him up.’
‘You me
an threatening letters, don’t you?’
‘What do you think? She’d been playing around while I was in the thick of it in Bosnia. I wasn’t exactly happy about that. I told her she’d better come to her senses, or else. She wrote and told Ensor – those letters, I suppose,’ he said, gesturing to the pile on the table, ‘telling him that I’d threatened to kill her. The baby was his, you know. He was abroad when she died, but when he came back and heard about it, he threatened to take the letters to the police, unless ...’ He couldn’t finish the sentence but Mayo finished it for him.
‘Unless you paid him back the money you owed him. Your wife mentioned the debt, several times, in her letters.’
‘Yes, she would. She didn’t like me not paying it back. I don’t think he was bothered about it, he had a good job and never squandered his money – but I’d have paid it back if I could. Wouldn’t you hate the idea of owing money to a man who’d been sleeping with your wife? When he began to pester me, I paid some of it back, but eventually I told him that was it. I’d no more to give him.’
‘What was his reaction to that?’
‘He said he had a proposition to put to me. He’d found out about my move to Lavenstock and demanded I met him that night, which I did.’
‘Where?’
‘Where? Oh, I didn’t want him inside the hotel where Sarah might see us, so I arranged to meet him outside, in the car park. He was late.’
‘He didn’t park in the hotel car park.’
‘No, it’s not very big and there was a function on that night, and all the spaces round about were taken up, too. He said he’d had to shove his car up some back alley. He wasn’t the sort to let things upset him, usually, but I think it had annoyed him that he couldn’t find anywhere. At any rate, he became abusive with me over – over Lisa’s death. I thought he meant to kill me, but I pushed him down and ran off – anywhere, I didn’t know that road led to the allotments – but he followed me and – well, I’ve told you what happened then.’
There was silence when he’d finished.
A Species of Revenge Page 21