He opened the front door and shooed the twins inside.
Joanna turned to him, wide-eyed, anxious.
‘Who are those people, Grandad?’ she asked.
‘Nobody you need worry about, kitten,’ Sam assured her, aware that nothing could be much further than the truth.
‘Grandad will make them go away,’ he continued. Another lie.
Amelia was standing in the hallway. To be more exact, she was cowering in the hallway.
‘Oh Sam, it’s started already,’ she cried. ‘I don’t think I can bear it.’
Sam went to her, put his arm around her and kissed the top of her head. He knew she liked that. Although he didn’t think it would help much that afternoon.
‘There, there,’ he murmured ineffectually. ‘I’m on the case now. And Trevor Hardwick is with Felix. We should hear from him soon—’
‘He’s already called, on the house phone,’ interrupted Amelia. ‘He says Felix has turned down his services, won’t see him. This is just all so awful, Sam. I mean, Felix has been arrested for murder, why on earth would he turn down legal help?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Sam, who actually thought he did have a fair idea of at least some of the reasoning behind his son’s behaviour.
TWENTY-THREE
At Barnstaple police station the interview with Felix Ferguson continued without offering up anything more of significant assistance to the investigation.
Felix continued to be unable to explain certain aspects of his behaviour, primarily his visit home during the yacht club dinner, to Vogel’s satisfaction. But he stubbornly persisted in proclaiming his innocence.
Vogel asked him again if he could suggest a single alternative suspect. Felix stared glumly at the DCI, his expression suggesting that was a question to which he had no answer. And in any case he had no time to give one.
There was a knock on the interview room door, and DC Perkins’ tousled dark head appeared. The young man looked even more worried than usual.
‘Sorry, boss,’ he began tentatively. ‘Could I have a word?’
Vogel’s first reaction was one of intense irritation. But he knew that no police officer would ever interrupt the interview of a man under arrest for murder except on a matter of extreme urgency. And he had asked Perkins to keep in touch with DI Peters and monitor any further developments.
The DCI announced formally for the benefit of the video recording that he was pausing the proceedings, gestured for Saslow to stay where she was, and left the room hard on Perkins’ heels.
‘Sorry, boss,’ said Perkins again. ‘DI Peters just had a call through from HQ at Exeter, they’ve had a report they thought we might be interested in—’
‘Get on with it, man,’ interrupted Vogel impatiently.
‘Yes, sir. It’s Gerry Barham, as in Gerry and Anne Barham, the couple who nearly drove into little Joanna Ferguson after she’d found her mother’s body. Apparently he’s gone missing, boss.’
‘Gone missing?’ queried Vogel. He and Saslow had interviewed the Barhams early the previous morning. And Gerry Barham was an adult as yet not under any sort of suspicion. The DCI was puzzled. He had yet to understand why this had been brought to his attention.
‘When did he go missing?’ the DCI asked.
‘Uh, well, his wife doesn’t know for sure.’
Perkins explained how Anne Barham had woken at seven to find her husband no longer in bed, and then gone back to sleep.
‘It was about half past eight when she went downstairs and realized he had left the house,’ said Perkins.
The DCI checked his watch. It was three twenty-five p.m.
‘So Gerry Barham’s precise whereabouts have been unknown to his wife for a maximum of between seven and eight-and-a-half daytime hours,’ he said. ‘How does that qualify for him to be described as missing?’
‘I’m sorry, sir. I should have said. He’s presumed missing at sea.’
‘Good God,’ said Vogel. ‘Right Perkins. You’d better tell me everything you know.’
Perkins did so. When he had finished Vogel was thoughtful.
‘So, a man who is at the most a very occasional amateur sailor took out his boat, generally considered to be inadequate at sea for anything except the fairest of fair-weather sailing, on a day like this.’
Vogel gestured through a window near where they were standing.
Barnstaple, like Bideford, is an estuary town, on a tidal river, but further inland and therefore protected to a certain extent from the extremes of coastal weather. Nonetheless driving rain was hammering into the glass, and it was clear that a gale was blowing. A stubby tree on a patch of grass outside had been bent almost horizontal by the wind. The sky was leaden.
‘Why on earth would anyone take any sort of boat out in this weather?’ he asked.
‘Well it wasn’t like this first thing,’ said Perkins. ‘It was a bright sunny morning, wasn’t it, sir? Just like yesterday.’
‘For a while, yes,’ agreed Vogel. ‘But by mid-morning the weather was already beginning to change. In Bideford the wind was blowing right up the estuary. You didn’t need a forecast to know what was coming.’
‘Mr Barham did tell his wife he didn’t plan to be long,’ said Perkins.
‘Yep. But what was he planning?’ asked Vogel, more of himself than anyone else.
He re-entered the interview room, formally ended proceedings, told Felix that the interview would be resumed later, and, once they were alone together, gave Saslow the rundown on what he had just learned from DC Perkins.
‘Barham could just have got things wrong,’ suggested Saslow who could already tell the way her superior officer’s mind was going. ‘I mean, as he wasn’t much of a sailor, he could just have made a terrible mistake. It might not be significant to our investigation at all …’
‘Saslow,’ said Vogel. ‘You don’t need to be a sailor to check the bloody weather forecast. A man who is central to a murder investigation has inexplicably taken a small and inadequate boat out to sea in highly questionable weather within a day or so of the event. It seems quite likely, does it not, that he is at the very least in serious trouble at sea? He could well be dead. That would make him the second person living in a small secluded close to have died a violent death within less than two days. And the other was his closest neighbour. When conducting a murder investigation, I do not believe in those kinds of coincidences.
‘Come on Saslow. We’re going to Instow to see what Gerry Barham’s wife has to tell us about all this.’
Anne Barham answered the door before either Saslow or Vogel had rung the bell. She must have heard or seen them arrive outside her house.
Vogel could see that she had been crying. She recognized him and Saslow at once, of course. Her hand went to her mouth and she gave a little gasp.
‘Gerry, is it Gerry?’ she asked, her voice little more than a whisper.
Clearly she feared that Vogel and Saslow were bringing the news she had no doubt been fearing for some hours now.
‘We don’t have any further news, Mrs Barham,’ said Vogel quickly. ‘We just wanted to talk to you again, about the events of yesterday and your husband’s disappearance.’
‘Uh yes, of course. I don’t know what it’s got to do with yesterday though. Except, well, I think Gerry was a lot more upset by what happened than I realized.’
Anne Barham led the way into the same sitting room where she had fetched coffee for Vogel and Saslow early the previous morning. This time she offered no such hospitality. The woman was clearly quite distraught. She did not even bid them to sit. The two officers did so anyway, and it was Vogel who suggested that Mrs Barham should join them.
She lowered herself abruptly, and with a bit of a bump, onto a hard chair by the door.
‘I just don’t know what’s happening any more,’ she said. ‘My Gerry, this isn’t like him. He’s … he’s such an orderly man. He used to be a civil servant, you know. Caught the seven a.m. train into central London
every morning, and the five p.m. one home. Regular as clockwork. He’s always punctual. Even now he’s retired he has his routine in everything. Never wavers. I don’t think he’s surprised me, not really, in thirty-seven years of marriage … until now—’
Vogel interrupted her. The woman was in danger of being gripped by verbal diarrhoea. It happened in these situations. Vogel had seen it before.
‘Mrs Barham, what I would like you to do is take me through everything that has happened in the period since DC Saslow and I left you yesterday morning until now. Particularly I need to know specifically anything about your husband’s behaviour that was odd or out of character.’
‘Everything about Gerry’s behaviour was odd,’ Anne Barham replied straight away. ‘He wasn’t like my Gerry at all. Not at all.’
She then gave a quite precisely detailed account, perhaps surprisingly so under the circumstances, of Gerry’s unlikely absences, the questionable phone calls, and her own growing sense of concern and anxiety.
When she had finished, Anne Barham began to cry. Which was always Vogel’s worst nightmare. He didn’t know why he couldn’t cope with other people’s tears, but he never had been able to. He sometimes thought that was the main reason he had always tried to be a good husband. He’d only seen his wife Mary cry a handful of times in their twenty years of marriage. And every time it tore his heart out. So he did his utmost to ensure, as much as was humanly possible, that Mary had no cause to cry.
Saslow, however, was thankfully rather more able to deal with displays of emotion. She got up, walked across the room, crouched down next to Anne, and took one of the woman’s hands in hers.
‘We know that the coastguards are doing all they can, and the RNLI,’ she said. ‘There’s still a good chance they’ll find Mr Barham and bring him safely home.’
Vogel had already begun to think that wasn’t very likely, and was pretty sure Saslow didn’t really believe what she’d said. But, for the moment, he was glad that she had said it. Anne Barham stopped crying, dabbed ineffectually at her eyes with a paper tissue, and smiled weakly at Saslow.
Vogel then felt able to continue.
‘Thank you, Mrs Barham, for giving us such a full account,’ he said. ‘I have just one or two questions, if you could bear with me. Did you really have absolutely no idea who your husband was talking to on the phone during those calls which you found … well, you found them rather mysterious, didn’t you?’
‘I did. Yes. He dodged my questions every time I asked him about the calls. And then there were those little walks. Nothing little about them, either.’
‘Could he have been meeting someone, perhaps?’
‘I don’t know. But why? Why would he be meeting someone, and not tell me? Gerry and I don’t have any secrets from each other, Mr Vogel. I know married people often say that when it’s not true at all, but I know it’s true of us.’ She paused. ‘Or at least, I certainly knew it until yesterday,’ she added.
‘Look, Mrs Barham, I am very sorry to ask you this,’ continued Vogel. ‘But has there ever been a time during your marriage when you suspected Gerry may have been unfaithful to you, that there might be someone else in his life?’
‘No. Never. Not for a moment. He’s never been that kind of man, really he hasn’t.’
Vogel did not quite subscribe to the theory that every red-blooded male was ‘that kind of man’ – after all, he was not – but more than twenty years of policing had certainly taught him that most were. However, Anne Barham had answered his highly provocative question with quiet certainty, and totally calmly – indeed much more calmly than Vogel might have expected. This line of questioning not infrequently provoked an emotional outburst from interviewees.
Nonetheless, he persisted a little further.
‘I apologize again, Mrs Barham, but unexplained absences and mysterious phone calls are often indicative of some kind of extra-marital liaison,’ he said. ‘I am sure you realize that. You say, however, that you had never been aware of that sort of behaviour in your husband before yesterday?’
‘No. Never. We have always been very close, and since Gerry retired, well, we are hardly ever apart. I mean, don’t misunderstand me. We don’t live in each other’s pockets. He has his interests, things he does without me. But we’re not apart a lot. Once a year he goes up to London for a reunion dinner with old work colleagues. Only the once, you understand. And it would be a pretty understanding mistress who put up with meeting her lover at an annual event, wouldn’t it?’
Anne Barham smiled a tight strained little smile. Saslow was no longer holding her hand. Instead Anne Barham was twiddling her fingers, literally, around damp strands of paper tissue.
‘Then there’s the yacht club, his drinking pals there and in The Boathouse, not that he’s a heavy drinker, you understand,’ she continued. ‘And he’s on the parish council and the Bideford regatta committee. He’s good at that sort of thing. He plays golf occasionally. And I have my interests too. I’m a collector, Mr Vogel. Rare books and unusual clocks, in particular.’
She gestured towards a bookcase packed with intriguing looking volumes and a glass cabinet containing a selection of specimen clocks.
‘I have a little group of friends I go browsing antique fairs with. We occasionally meet for coffee or lunch. That sort of thing. But, quite frankly, Mr Vogel, I don’t see how my Gerry would have time for a bit on the side without me knowing, even if he had the inclination.’
The strained smile fleeted across her face once more.
‘You mentioned your husband’s work,’ commented Vogel. ‘I think you said earlier that he was a civil servant?’
‘That’s right, yes. Went into it right after university. Only job he ever had. In the civil service for nearly thirty-five years. Then they offered him an early retirement deal he couldn’t refuse. He’d had enough by then, so he took it like a shot. And we came here. Never regretted it for a second.’ Anne Barham paused. ‘Until now, maybe,’ she murmured.
‘What branch of the civil service was he in?’ enquired Vogel.
Anne Barham frowned.
‘Mr Vogel, I really don’t see why you’re asking all these questions. That’s all in the past. I want to know what’s happened to my husband today? I am worried sick about him. I want him found.’
Vogel nodded sympathetically.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘And believe me, every possible effort is being made to find him and bring him home. I am just trying to build a picture of Gerry, so that maybe I can understand what has caused him to behave in this out-of-character way.’
‘Well, if you can understand it, I take my hat off to you, Mr Vogel,’ replied Anne Barham. ‘Because I don’t understand any of it. But of course, if you think it will help in any way, I will answer any questions you have. Gerry worked in a number of different departments over the years, he was a—’
Anne Barham was interrupted by the strident ring of Vogel’s phone. He’d meant to put it on vibrate, but he would in any case have to check who was calling, as he now not only had Felix under arrest for murder, but also a missing person case upon which there could be news at any moment.
He took his phone from his pocket and studied the screen. The caller was young DC Perkins.
‘I’m sorry Mrs Barham, you will have to excuse me, I need to take this call,’ said Vogel, stopping Anne Barham in mid-sentence.
He stood up and left the room.
‘You were saying, Mrs Barham?’ said Saslow, continuing the conversation more out of courtesy than anything else. She thought it likely Vogel might at that very second be receiving significant news. Certainly, he would not have left the room if he hadn’t half expected that.
Anne looked as if she was already thinking what Saslow was thinking.
‘Uh, what? Um, yes, Gerry worked in various different departments, commuting in and out of central London every day, he’d certainly had enough of it in the end and …’
She stopped abruptly. This time of her
own accord.
‘Look, detective sergeant, I’m sorry, I can’t concentrate. Can we wait until Mr Vogel returns? I need to know if he has any news.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Saslow.
Anne got up from her chair and walked to the window where she stood looking out. The weather more or less blotted out the view, but Saslow doubted Anne Barham was taking much notice of that. The acting DS didn’t even attempt to make any further conversation.
Vogel didn’t keep them waiting long. He returned to the room within less than five minutes. Saslow was sitting opposite the door. It was she who saw Vogel’s face first. And she knew at once that he had news, all right. And it wasn’t good.
As soon as she heard the door open Anne Barham turned around. She too seemed aware just from looking at Vogel of what he was about to tell her. Or the crux of it, anyway.
She didn’t speak, just stood stock still, staring at the DCI. Her face was already ashen.
‘Mrs Barham, I am afraid I have some very grave news,’ said Vogel.
Anne still didn’t move a muscle. She continued to stare at the detective.
‘Perhaps you would like to sit down, Mrs Barham,’ he suggested.
Anne responded with an almost imperceptible shake of her head, still staring at him.
‘As you wish,’ Vogel continued. ‘I am afraid the wreckage of a boat has been found off Hartland Point. We have reason to believe that the boat was your husband’s.’
Anne Barham remained silent and quite still. Fleetingly Vogel wondered if she had grasped the import of what he was saying. Then her knees began to buckle, although she seemed to be quite unaware of it.
Saslow was at her side in a thrice. The young DS was small but strong. She wrapped a supportive arm around the other woman and half coaxed, half pushed and pulled her into the nearest armchair.
Anne gave the impression of being in a kind of trance. Vogel wondered if he should give her a moment or two to compose herself before continuing. Suddenly she sat bolt upright. Her eyes blazing.
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