Probably it went all the way back to university, when Noni had wondered what clever Phoebe saw in her, and the seed of doubt was planted. Perhaps the soil was already fertile: didn’t they say that all actors were insecure? That they became actors to escape from themselves into personae that they could control? And then Phoebe had to go on from strength to strength, winning fame and awards, while Noni never made it to the top, and had only her marriage to comfort herself with. And even in that one poor sphere of achievement, all she had to hug to herself, it seemed Phoebe outshone her. Josh liked Phoebe better, praised her to his wife. Naturally the wife came to think that a philandering stud like Prentiss must be having an affair with her. So the stage had been set for the action in which Anona Regan was sure she could play the leading role with conviction.
The tears were subsiding now. Swilley had found a box of tissues on the dresser, which she put down before Mrs Prentiss, and mopping up was now taking place.
‘Tell me what happened on Thursday,’ Slider said.
The story came out painfully. Despite Joanna’s caustic comments, Josh Prentiss hadn’t been wrong about Noni’s being at a difficult age. She had started to have menopausal symptoms and was feeling unhappy, unloved and unattractive, especially as she and Josh had fallen into a pattern of hardly noticing each other. He was busy with his career, and she had nothing much to do, with the children gone, her own career in ruins, and her husband away from home more and more of the time.
But on Thursday he had said he would be home all day – he hadn’t mentioned his intention to go out in the evening – and following the hallowed advice of women’s magazines through the ages, she had decided to try to make herself attractive to him. She began by taking an interest in his work and making bright conversation; but when he dismissed her rather testily, she had turned to plan B and concocted a delicious meal for him. It, or the wine that accompanied it, had done the trick, and she had been able to persuade him into bed, where they had engaged in the first sexual congress in many a long moon. So her chagrin and fury had been all the greater when he jumped out of bed and rushed away afterwards with what she thought was a lame excuse. She felt spurned.
Left alone, she had brooded on her wrongs and, as she had done more and more lately, blamed Phoebe for all of them.
‘So you went round to her flat. Oh, yes, I know that,’ Slider said. ‘You were seen going in. There’s no point in denying it.’
Mrs Prentiss sighed. ‘All right. I went to have it out with her,’ she agreed on a downward note.
‘You didn’t know your husband was going there that evening?’
‘He said he was going out on Government business. I knew that was a lie. I knew he was going to see a woman. But I didn’t think it was Phoebe. He never tried to hide it when he was going to see Phoebe – he just told me straight out.’
‘So what happened?’ Slider asked.
‘I walked round there, but when I got to the door I could hear voices inside. A man’s voice. She wasn’t alone.’
‘Did you recognise the voice?’
‘No, I couldn’t really hear well enough. I could just hear it was a man. So I—’ She paused for a long time, her eyes fixed on some internal horizon. ‘I gave it up and went home,’ she concluded feebly.
Slider leaned forward a little. ‘That’s not true,’ he said sternly. ‘I thought you were going to tell me the truth?’
‘I am,’ she said faintly.
‘You didn’t just go round there to talk to her, did you? You wouldn’t have needed the key for that.’
‘The key?’
‘The key to Phoebe Agnew’s flat.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said, but she was looking at him now. She seemed appalled and fascinated at the same time.
‘You took the key to her flat, which she had given your husband long ago, and which hung on the rack alongside those to your children’s flats. Did that seem like an insult to you? Anyway, you took the key so that you could slip in without her hearing. And what else did you take with you? A pair of tights, was it?’
Noni’s lips moved, but no sound came from them.
‘Phoebe never wore tights, did she? She always wore trousers, so the odds were she didn’t even possess a pair. Anyway, you could hardly have taken time out to search for them when you got there, so you took your own. You knew she’d been drinking heavily recently, and you thought that with luck she’d be pretty well out of it by half past eight, so if you let yourself in you could creep up on her and get something round her throat before she knew you were there.’
‘I wouldn’t really have done it,’ Noni whispered, her face drawn with horror. ‘You can’t, can you? Not how ever angry you are, you can’t kill a person – not unless you’re mad.’
‘But you were mad,’ said Slider. ‘Mad with jealousy. This woman who had been your friend had outshone you all your life, and now you thought she’d stolen your husband from you. So killing Phoebe Agnew wasn’t enough. You wanted to punish your husband as well – your husband who had made love to you that afternoon, and then left you to go to his other woman. You had to kill her, and make it look as though he had done it. You had to make it absolutely certain that he would be charged with the murder. When did you hatch your monstrous plot, Mrs Prentiss? And how did you get hold of the condom full of your husband’s semen?’
Mrs Prentiss stared at Slider as if he were the hangman approaching with the noose. ‘I didn’t—’
‘And then, when we came to question you, to make absolutely sure we’d suspect him, you told lies about where he was, so that when we found out they were lies we’d think you were trying to protect him. Everything you said to us, that sounded so innocent, was meant to incriminate him. A very long game you’ve been playing, Mrs Prentiss, and it almost worked. But you were careless. You left your fingerprints behind. We’ve found your fingerprints – in a flat you say you’ve never been in.’
She went cheese-coloured and doubled up, and Swilley came round the table to take hold of her neck and push her head down between her knees. ‘Take it easy. Don’t try to sit up. Breathe slowly and deeply – that’s right.’
When she had recovered enough to speak, she said falteringly, ‘You’re wrong, so wrong—’
‘I don’t think so. That’s how you hurt your back, shifting her body to the bed. You had no old back injury. And you told your husband you’d slipped down the stairs.’
‘That’s true, I did say that. But I didn’t kill her! Listen,’ she said desperately, ‘and I’ll tell you.’
It was like a madness that had taken hold of her, she said. When Josh got out of bed, saying he was going out, she had felt as though he had slapped her face. After making love as they had, she had thought he would spend the evening with her. She asked where he was going, and he said it was Government business. She screamed that that was a lie, he was going to see some woman. He lost his temper and yelled back. Then, apparently realising that arguing was only slowing him down, he calmed down and repeated that it was Government business, and added that the only woman he ever saw apart from her was her best friend Phoebe. Presumably he thought that would allay her jealous fears. Instead it had convinced her that Phoebe was at the bottom of all her troubles.
‘He went into the bathroom to shower, and he threw the used condom into the waste-paper basket in there,’ she recited tonelessly. ‘I saw him do it before he shut the door. He never put them down the lavatory. He said it blocked it up. The basket has a bin-liner in it. When he’d washed and changed he went downstairs without a word, and I lay there in bed, looking at that bin. I could just see it, inside the bathroom door.’
‘So you went and got the condom out again.’
She nodded slowly. ‘It came to me all at once, the whole plan. I thought I’d kill her and then put his semen in her so that there was no way he could deny he’d been with her. I had a little plastic syringe I’d got from the vet years ago for giving the cat his medicine. I used
that to get the semen out. I put a pair of tights in my pocket, and took the key and walked round there.’
‘Go on. What time did you get there?’
‘About half past eight, I suppose. I don’t know exactly. I went to the door first and listened, and heard the voices inside. So I knew he was still there. I went and stood across the road where I could see the house and waited. It was then I started to calm down. I realised I couldn’t do it. You can think of killing someone, you can want to, but when you actually face them alive – you can’t really, can you? I wanted her dead, but I’m not that ruthless. So I was going to give it up and go home, when the door opened and I saw him come out.’
‘Saw who come out?’ Slider asked quickly.
‘Josh, of course.’ Her voice hardened. ‘Seeing him come out started it all up again. I imagined them in there together, talking, laughing, making love. I wondered how many other times he must have gone to her without telling me. I could just see them, laughing about me and how easy I was to fool. I hated him then.’ She stopped abruptly.
‘So what did you do?’ Slider prompted.
‘I waited a long time to make sure he’d really gone, then I went across and let myself in quietly. Crept into the sitting room. And there she was, sitting in the chair, dead. It was so horrible! I can’t tell you.’
She stopped for a bit, trembling, leaking tears, while she wound herself up for the rest. Slider waited, patient as nemesis, the awful sympathy that invites confession.
‘I realised, you see, that I’d been living with a murderer. I’ve been living with him ever since. Can you imagine what that’s been like? Every day, wondering whether he’d come home and do the same thing to me. I kept seeing her in my mind’s eye – her face all swollen, that mark round her neck … If he did that to her, what might he do to me? When I heard you coming just now, I thought it was him, come to get me.’
‘I see,’ Slider said.
‘That’s why in the end I went through with the rest of the plan. I thought if I just left her like that he’d never be caught. I knew he was clever. He’d get out of it somehow.’
‘You could have told us what you knew,’ Swilley said.
Noni had forgotten she was there. She looked at her blankly and then said, ‘How could I? He’d have found out and killed me. And what if you hadn’t believed me? It would be just my word against his. So I did the rest of it, to make sure he got caught. It was horrible, horrible – I can’t tell you! And now you’ve let him go! Why did you arrest him and then let him go?’
‘Go on with your story,’ Slider said. ‘What happened next?’
She hunched her shoulders, pressing her clenched fists against her breastbone in a defensive pose. ‘I thought I should die. In that room with her, looking like that. He must have done it with his tie, I suppose. And she was still warm.’ She closed her eyes and swallowed, and her throat clicked. ‘He’d done it only minutes before. She’d been alive only minutes before, and now she was dead. I’d never seen a dead body before. I think it made me a little bit mad. Otherwise I couldn’t have—’ She shuddered.
‘Tell me,’ said Slider.
‘I dragged her over to the bed. She was so heavy, I had a terrible job getting her up onto it. That must be when I hurt my back. Then I took her clothes off – just the bottom ones. Tied her arms to the bed rail. And put – put the semen in her with the syringe.’ She met Swilley’s gaze. ‘I had to make sure he was caught – and it didn’t matter to her any more. And I threw the condom into the loo. No-one but me would know he didn’t do that. I almost flushed it away – reflex reaction – before I stopped myself. Stupid.’ She shook her head.
Slider’s mind was reeling. ‘That’s when you left the fingermark,’ he said. All the brain-ache this woman had given them! ‘But don’t you realise, if he had done it using a condom, there wouldn’t be any semen in her?’
She looked blank. ‘No,’ she said faintly. ‘I never even thought of that. Stupid of me.’
‘I suppose you didn’t do badly for a first attempt,’ said a grim Swilley. ‘Did you wipe your finger-marks off everything else before you left?’
‘I didn’t touch anything else. I was very careful. I pulled my sleeve over my hand to open the door on the way out.’
Slider pulled himself together. ‘Is this the truth you’ve told me now?’
‘The truth,’ she said, out of the blackness where she watched the endless reel of her own private X film: the appalling thing she had found; horror and guilt at what she had been prepared to do; horror and fear at discovering her husband had done it; the week she had spent living with it, with him, and wondering what was going to happen next.
‘Do you wear contact lenses, Mrs Prentiss?’ Slider asked.
She lifted her eyes to him, faintly surprised. ‘No. I have glasses for driving, but I don’t wear them otherwise.’
‘You’re short-sighted, then?’
‘Only a little.’
‘You were watching the house from across the road, and it was dark, and the street lamps aren’t very bright in Eltham Road. You saw a man come out of the house that you thought was your husband, but it wasn’t. No, I mean it. By the time you reached the house your husband was some distance away, in someone else’s house. We have witnesses.’
‘It was him. I saw him.’
‘No. Your husband didn’t kill Phoebe Agnew. He has an alibi. The person you saw come out of the flat was only someone who looked like him,’ said Slider with awful pity.
She was silent a long moment as it sank in. ‘Oh, dear God, what have I done?’
‘What you’ve done’, Slider said, ‘is to interfere with the scene of a crime and seriously impede our investigation, while attempting to incriminate your husband for something he didn’t do. Perverting the course of justice is a grave criminal offence for which the maximum penalty is ten years’ imprisonment.’
Mrs Prentiss stared as another layer of desperate realisation was uncovered in her mind. ‘I was so sure it was him,’ she whispered. And then, ‘What happens now?’
‘You’ll have to come with us to the station and make a complete statement. After that we’ll decide whether charges will be laid against you,’ Slider said. Swilley glanced at him, noting his distracted tone of voice. He was going through the motions here, but his mind was already galloping off, trying to work out the next step. If it wasn’t Prentiss and it wasn’t Mrs Prentiss, who the hell was it? They weren’t just back at square one, they hadn’t even got the board out of the toy cupboard yet.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
First among equines
‘Damn and blast,’ said the Syrup, quite mildly, all things considered. ‘That’s what comes of working weekends.’
‘Swilley’s taking her statement now,’ Slider said. ‘As far as charging her’s concerned, I think she’s pretty near the edge already—’
‘Yes, well, that’s not your decision to make,’ Porson said sharply. ‘Perverting the course is a very serious matter indeed, and not something to exercise leniency over. Besides, we’ve already got the Home Secretary in a right two-and-eight about Josh Prentiss and Giles Freeman. And this is a government that likes to be seen as above repute. Caesar’s wife and all that. They don’t want any more scandal.’
‘I doubt whether charging Prentiss’s wife with trying to stick him with the murder will absolutely kill all scandal stone dead, sir.’
‘Don’t be satirical, Slider. In your position, you can’t afford it. We’re a week into the investigation and what have we got to show for it? You’ve gone at Prentiss like a bull at a china gate, and now we’re left with egg all over the carpet and a hostile press praying for our blood! We’ve got off lightly so far, but the Sundays have had all week to sharpen their pens, and they’ll have the knives out for us all right. So you’d better have some plan of action up your sleeve, or there’s going to be some pretty derisory comments made higher up the echelon, I can tell you.’
Slider tried not to shrug. W
hat else could he have done but follow up the obvious leads? But bosses had to yell at you: they had bigger bosses upon their backs to bite ’em. ‘Well, we know that there was someone else there on the Thursday,’ he began, ‘because of the finger-marks—’
‘Oh, thank you very much!’ Porson barked. ‘An insightive comment, given that we know she didn’t strangle herself! Is that what I gave up my afternoon’s golf for?’
Porson played golf? Slider stared at him absently, wondering whether he wore a cap, and how he kept the rug on on windy days. Porson, fortunately, did not note the direction of the stare, only that it was blank. ‘Yes, well, you look as if you could do with a bit of time off yourself,’ he said more kindly. ‘You’re played out, laddie. When you’ve finished with Mrs Prentiss, you’d better go home. Give the old grey matter a rest. Have a shit, a shave and a shower and come up with some new lines to follow up.’ His eyes followed Slider to the door, and he added, ‘We can still hope for something on Wordley. I’d really enjoy nailing that sod.’
‘I’ll see what I can do, sir,’ Slider promised.
Joanna had a rehearsal and concert at Milton Keynes on the Sunday, which was almost just as well, since he had some heavy-duty thinking to do. He was a long way down when the phone rang, and it took him a while to surface and get out to the hall to answer it.
‘Bill? Chrise me, laddie, I thought you weren’t going to answer. Asleep over the Sundays, were you?’
‘Oh, hello, Nutty.’ It was Nicholls, the uniform sergeant on duty. ‘No, I was thinking, that’s all. Took me a while to realise the phone was ringing. What’s up?’
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