by Janet Neel
She leant against his shoulder, comfortably. ‘Oh, nor do I, Matt. I did not think this through.’
‘Me neither.’ He suppressed what he had been going to say and she considered him, soberly.
‘I’m not unhappily married, Matt. He works too hard and I get cross, but that’s not why.’
‘Why you’re here, you mean?’
‘Mm.’
‘I’ve never myself been able to see why being married prevents you from fancying anyone else.’
‘It doesn’t, of course, but there’s an accepted trade-off.’ Which you breach at your peril, she thought, suddenly chilled.
‘Frannie. Relax. I’m not here to put pressure on you. Just see how it plays. And let me get you something to eat, OK? We can look at the stats at the same time.’
‘That’s why you asked me up, really.’
‘Of course. I need the audience.’
And deserved one, she conceded, as they looked together at a set of tables, sitting over coffee after an excellent omelette. Matt had stocked the fridge to some purpose and she was feeling very much better than when she had got up. He was a high quality article, Matt, she thought to herself, smugly; they were not peering at long incomprehensible columns of raw data, but a properly tabulated essay on the women dealt with by the Refuge. Nearly all of them had children, she understood, and she stared at the table which gave their mumbers and sexes, suddenly appreciating the size of the problem. As Matthew’s spare prose made clear, all of these children were potential aggressors, or victims, as they grew to man’s or woman’s estate. And, reading on, it was clear that, given the inevitable second-hand nature of the evidence, the current customers of the Refuge were themselves, or were fleeing from, people who had been battered as children. She rubbed her forehead where the headache still lingered. ‘It is the men, isn’t it? I mean, women don’t go round beating up men.’
‘There are some. But yes, the Domestic Violence Act was about men beating women. And as you say, it’s odd that you needed to enshrine in a new statute a principle unquestioned if it was men beating up men.’
‘So why aren’t you – aren’t we – working to convert men?’ She watched, undaunted, his jaw go tight with impatience.
‘If your house was on fire, would you rather have a fire engine or a team of investigators from the Home Office?’
‘I’d like both.’
He put an arm round her. ‘I’ll tell you why I’m a lawyer and not a social worker. Lawyers can do something specific and useful about a particular problem. They don’t struggle in a morass.’
‘With people feeling free to dump the whole of their lives on your laps,’ she agreed. ‘That’s why I’m a bureaucrat.’ She thought on. ‘Both of us must want people to keep their distance.’ She turned her cheek and he kissed her. ‘That can’t be right.’
‘I want to fix the problem I can see, so people can get on with their lives. Which they’re quite good at. Get women away from their blokes, most of them get their heads up and do fine.’
‘The Dyno-Rod school of legal advice.’
He grinned, undeflected. ‘It works. You wait and see. Take Annabelle. I know she’s still messing around with her bloke, but she isn’t living with him and he knows he’ll be in court if he lifts a finger to her. It’ll change, she’ll do something different and be a different girl.’
‘What about him? Won’t he find someone else and batter them?’
Matt looked suddenly tired, and she rubbed her cheek against his apologetically. ‘You’re probably right. I don’t think he’s learned anything yet, judging from what Annabelle tells me. But women are going to be less prepared to put up with him, and – well, it’s slow work.’
‘You think Annabelle is at risk?’
‘While she’s around him, yes. That’s why I keep an eye on her.’ The reply was prompt and definitive, and she was disconcerted to find herself jealous.
‘Antony’s father was a batterer, Annabelle says.’
‘Mm. Beat the boys’ mother and had a go at the current Mrs Price. We acted – it’s all right, the police know.’
‘One man can do a lot of damage, can’t he? People do kill them, of course – children or wives. I suppose that’s why John’s not having much luck with this case; he’s got a lot of suspects.’ Her voice tailed off as she remembered that one of them was destined to be Matt’s house guest for a week and she saw him remember it too.
‘I’m going to take you for a walk in the park, then we could come back here?’ He sounded suddenly uncertain, and she laughed at him, and said demurely that would be nice, and that they had another four hours before she had to go back.
11
Monday, 25 April
McLeish and Davidson sat in his office, both of them dispirited. It was now the third week after the murder, with little progress made. The day’s team meeting had been a useful occasion inasmuch as several unexplained avenues and unconfirmed pieces of evidence had been identified. It had, however, disintegrated at the end into a quarrelsome group speculation as to who might be guilty. It was unusual to be working on a murder case which had five suspects, none of whom had a sustainable alibi, and the conjectures had got wilder and wilder. McLeish had called a halt after twenty minutes, getting, he felt, the worst of both worlds; he had wasted twenty minutes and antagonised the team who would have gone on in exciting speculation for another hour in preference to doing any of the hard grind.
‘What about Mrs Price then?’ McLeish decided he must be tired, but he too could not stop himself speculating. In fairness to himself and the team it had to be said that traditional police investigative work was not getting them much further forward.
‘What do you think?’
‘Well, she was his wife.’ Davidson was characteristically not at all flustered by the banality of this statement. ‘And most murders are domestic – husbands murdering wives, sons murdering fathers, wives murdering husbands.’
‘Less common.’
‘Well, he had beaten her, hadn’t he? And he was making a hash of the business. He was going to leave her nothing but debts, as Catherine – DI Crane – told us, even if we didn’t already know.’
‘That’s true. Never walk past the obvious suspect. But what about the sons?’
‘Well, you know Antony’s my nominee for the job.’
‘Antony doesn’t benefit, that’s my problem.’ This ground had been covered at the meeting, but McLeish had spoken very little and he wanted now to hear himself think. ‘His father seems to have spent his late wife’s cash, but Antony knew that cash was gone. Bill Price was – or had been – a violent husband and he was steadily ruining the business, and that makes Mrs P, or his partner, Mr Fleming, the better bet.’
‘You remember I said I thought Mrs P would be getting it somewhere if not from her old man?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’ll be Mr Fleming. I hadn’t seen him before last Friday. Something about the way he watches her.’
McLeish waited, but that appeared to be Davidson’s thought for the day. He was, however, likely to be right. He was a sort of sexual Geiger counter; if you wanted to know what was going on and with whom in any group, just point Davidson at it.
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Yes, I think so.’
‘That’d be interesting if it’s right. I’ve got to have a chat with the other bit of the firm. Miles Arnold. Went conveniently off last week on a fact-finding mission to Zimbabwe.’
‘What facts would those be, John?’
‘Is it really hot there in April?’ The rain was sheeting down outside the windows and McLeish had a cold. ‘Are all the women beautiful, whether black or white? Is the sea truly warm? Are the beaches golden like it says?’
The beach at Soller was certainly golden, but the sea was only just not very cold on Catherine Crane’s bare feet. April was early for Majorca, and at nine in the morning she was none too warm in a cotton sweater, jeans and a jacket. She had been particularly glad o
f the sweater, and a thermal vest under her nightdress last night in a bare, modern hotel room with light, thin curtains and even lighter, thinner bed coverings. It might all have been delightful in a temperature 20 degrees higher; at the same temperature as an English spring night, it had been a less than cheering experience. The thermal vest she owed to Francesca McLeish who reportedly never journeyed anywhere strange and foreign without one in her case. Catherine had been amused when Francesca’s husband had told her this, en passant, but she had put one in at the last minute, telling herself it weighed nothing and took up very little space.
But the golden sun was out, higher in the sky than in England, as Catherine turned to trudge back to the line of hotels that fringed the beach. She passed groups of tourists variously attired, square women in cotton frocks and cardigans, several others dressed as she was and a group of hugely tall young men in bathing suits and T-shirts, calling boastfully to each other in Dutch. She walked through the chill hotel reception rooms, tiled and airy against the summer heat, observing fellow guests huddled into sweaters on the hard sofas, and stopped at the reception desk. The squat young man behind the desk blinked, rang for the taxi then detained her with conversation in laboured English, getting round to wondering if she would be interested in going to the island’s finest night-club. She said kindly that she was here with friends and turned to greet the taxi driver, who was giving an inoffensively open impression of a man to whom an angel had appeared. It was being blonde, she reminded herself, in a country where most of the women were black-haired, that was making her quite so much of a success. She fended off another invitation, delivered in excellent English this time, to the island’s most famous barbecue, and asked if her driver knew of the English company who had been building the apartments to which he was taking her.
‘My brother was working for them,’ he said, no longer so keen to impress.
‘How very interesting. And were they good to work for?’
No, she was unsurprised to learn. Luiz’s brother, Paco, who was a skilled carpenter with his own business, had done much of the fitting out – the doors, the cupboards, and so on – for Mr Fleming on two other apartment blocks, over there – he nodded towards the sea – but had waited a very long time for his money, which had caused much difficulty at home. Catherine agreed it would have caused problems in anybody’s household. Paco, it transpired, had not in the event been paid all he was owed, but he had been promised, absolutely, the fitting-out work on these new apartment blocks. It was as well that, warned by his previous experience, Paco had not depended on this promise but had taken another job when offered, fitting out a villa for a German developer. This, alas, was only a small piece of work and after that Paco had nothing else for the summer yet, but the German was a reliable payer. Not, as the Senora would appreciate, that the English were normally perceived as less than trustworthy, it was this one particular representative of the race who had not reached the high standards set by his fellow countrymen. Catherine commiserated, mentally contrasting this courteous recital with the earful she would have received from a London cabbie in the same situation.
‘And here are the apartments.’ He waved a hand to his right and stopped the cab. They both gazed out at a large site, full of holes and steelwork. She got out of the cab and walked round considering it, Luiz beside her. The foundation work for three blocks looked to be complete, but she appealed to Luiz who was glad to give her an expert tour, regretting only that brother Paco was not here.
‘So work could start again quite easily?’ Luiz hesitated, drawing back into himself, and she offered him her cover story. ‘I work for a bank, and we are considering a loan. It is not my decision, or not mine alone – I am just here to see the work and what the place is like.’ She waved an arm, comprehending the pitted dusty road and the silent site. ‘We are told that building could be very quick.’
‘Paco was going to work with other friends, who are also carpenters, as soon as the walls were up. It was to be a contract for six weeks, for all three. You think it could now be?’
She looked at the clever face, the brown eyes level with her own, the dark head outlined against an acid yellow mimosa bush, dazzling in the sun, and tried to find a formula. ‘It is for those senior to me to decide. But people are thinking about this site and after all the foundations are there. Someone should want to build.’
‘And that will be good for us here,’ he said, straight-backed and dignified, so that she felt ashamed of the whole deception. He hesitated. ‘If it were that you found yourself with time to have a drink with us – with Paco also – we should be pleased. But you want now to go back to your hotel?’
‘Yes,’ she said, regretting that the drink would be impossible, it would be unprofessional to involve herself further with these men. The site was there with the foundations done, as Luke Fleming had said, and she found herself hoping that it would be possible, somehow, to build on them.
‘He is in London now. The big boss, Mr Fleming.’
‘Yes, so I understand,’ she said, cautiously.
‘My colleague, Jaime, took him to the airport – he said he had to go and talk to people. We hoped then it would be to get money.’
‘Two weeks ago, was it not?’
‘Yes, on the Friday. It was a feast day, but Jaime went off with him. You understand that early in the season there is less work so we all take the jobs whatever is happening.’
And late on that Friday Bill Price had dressed himself in ladies’ silk knickers and a pair of sheer stockings, climbed on a table and put a thin rope round his neck, leaving himself vulnerable to someone who had pulled the table from under him.
‘The Friday?’ she said, casually, thinking hard. ‘Have you a card? I am with friends but we may need a driver again.’
‘It will be a pleasure.’ He was disappointed but courteous. ‘And I wish you good luck with your bank.’
The route back to the potential witness secured, she rushed up to her room to call the Yard and organise Bruce Davidson into rechecking the flight manifests on the Friday. ‘It may be a red herring,’ she warned. ‘It’s not my case so I didn’t want to trample all over the ground.’
‘Ye’re a good lass. And mebbe I’ll need to come down and ask a few questions myself in the sunshine. Don’t you come back till I’ve found out a bittie more here.’
It would take him at least a couple of hours, during which she could usefully get on with what she had come to do, which was to talk to her Spanish opposite number. He, like every other male Spaniard she had met, was more than keen to help in any way, and she decided to accept his invitation to lunch, too used to being a living trophy to be much bothered by it.
‘Mr Fleming,’ her escort, a stocky detective inspector, said, all too obviously ready to spread thinly the three facts that they seemed to have. ‘He is here now for five years, working for Wimpey. But before that he worked for a small firm which he owned, or he had many shares in. It failed and people here lost money.’
‘But he started again in a firm.’
‘Yes, but he had worked with Wimpey, for whom we all have respect. And he told people here that this new firm was only in a small way his. That the money was in England and there were big investors and a Member of your Parliament also as part of it.’
‘Ah.’
‘This was not true?’
‘It is true that he owns only twenty per cent of the company and it is true also that an MP is working for them as a consultant.’
‘But he is not a director?’
‘No.’
By mutual consent they took a break to eat sardines grilled on charcoal, immaculately fresh, washed down with a sharp white wine.
‘It would be most unhappy – unfortunate – if Mr Fleming were again to cause people here to lose money,’ he said, wiping his mouth.
The man was a colleague and she needed his co-operation, so she told him about the complaints the Squad had received about the uncompleted flats. ‘With money the
y could be quickly finished. He has the foundations.’
The Spaniard nodded and finished his wine.
‘But Catherine – I may call you so? – this has happened to us before, many times, with developers from other countries. This is not a big site, it is not like the trouble we have had with hotels which are not finished and no one is paid and tourists make demonstrations. That is a great nuisance. This, well … it is a small company so we have not paid much attention. I could find out more, I am sure.’
If Luke Fleming were to be arrested for murder the condition of the company’s affairs in Spain was probably going to be irrelevant, and she did not want to waste a colleague’s time.
‘It has always seemed to us that the root problem is in London,’ she said. ‘You have been most helpful and I would not want you yet to do anything specific.’
‘We know also a little of Mr Fleming himself, as well as in his business,’ he said, carefully, sipping coffee.
‘Please tell me.’
‘He has several women friends here. Not of course Spanish but from the many visitors – no, not visitors, that is not quite right – the women who work here for the main season, from the travel agencies. Last year he has been with a German woman – not young – who comes several times a year. She has six villas here, and occupies herself with the lettings.’ He paused to order a cigar, courteously asking her whether she minded him smoking. ‘She is widow, so we all expected that she would, well, perhaps marry him – he is, you understand married before, but then she is not – not Catholic.’ He had, she thought, been going to say ‘not Spanish’, but had changed it in deference to her. Plainly however a totally different code of conduct was expected of Spanish womanhood.
‘But that didn’t happen?’ she prompted, carefully.
‘No. There was also another woman – English – who came often here and she was a director of the company for whom he works. He said to one of my colleagues that it was necessary to attend on her and to be very polite because she was married to his boss. She stays, of course, in one of the apartments, but when there is not space, in a hotel. And Mr Fleming is always with her.’