Picture of Innocence

by Jill McGown

  Lloyd smiled. ‘You’ve changed your tune again.’

  ‘I know. Because while I don’t see how it could have been anyone else, I still can’t make sense of it. Not after putting up with it all her life. Why now? Like that? Concocting this story about a sheep. Going up there in cold blood to kill her father. I just can’t see it.’

  ‘It might not have been in cold blood,’ said Lloyd. ‘Perhaps there was a sheep, like she said. Perhaps her father did go out – we don’t know that he didn’t. He could have rung from anywhere. But we know the sheep was supposed to have been seen right beside his land. What if it was just … winded, or something? Just got up and went back through whatever gap it had come out of in the first place? She really wouldn’t have been able to find it, and all the sheep would have been present and correct next day. And what would she be doing when she failed to find it? She’d be going to the farm to find out where it was supposed to be, armed with the very things she would have taken to deal with an animal in pain. A fast-acting barbiturate. Morphine.’

  Maybe, maybe. Judy wasn’t sure what you took to deal with a badly injured sheep, and neither was Lloyd. But she always let him ramble on with his scenarios, because there was usually something useful in there.

  ‘So, supposing she’s the one he started knocking about?’ he said. ‘You said her husband shot out of the house as soon as Rachel mentioned bruises. What if that was because Nicola had come home with bruises after she’d gone to deal with this sheep? She had failed to find it, hadn’t she? I expect that was worth a hammering. And what if she decided that she had had enough? Bailey was very drunk. He would be far from alert, and she had the means of his disposal with her. A few minutes’ premeditation. Not planned. Not intended, when she went in there. Last straws exist. Worms do turn.’

  ‘Mm,’ said Judy, then laughed. ‘But I doubt if I’ve ever heard anything less likely than the winded-sheep theory.’

  Lloyd smiled. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘The sheep didn’t exist. But that means she presumably did go there to kill her father, because I can’t think why else she would make it up. And we know she didn’t see Rachel’s car, so …’ He shrugged again.

  At half past nine, they finally drove away from the hotel. Judy was still at the wheel, despite Lloyd’s protests that he felt perfectly all right, because she didn’t suppose he would be taking it very easy when they arrived, which they did, one hour fifty minutes and the odd complaint about her driving later, stopping only to confirm to their colleagues that they were back, before continuing north to Harmston, and Nicola Hutchins.

  Gus Hutchins was on reception; Nicola was with a patient, he said, and told her they were there. He showed them into the sitting room, waiting with them, making sporadic and unsuccessful attempts at conversation before Nicola joined them.

  ‘I don’t have much time,’ she said, apologetically. ‘I’ve got another appointment in ten minutes.’

  ‘This won’t take much time, Mrs Hutchins,’ said Lloyd, standing as she came into the room, remaining on his feet, as did she. ‘We have this morning spoken to a witness who saw Rachel Bailey at the hotel at eleven o’clock on Sunday night. We have further watched surveillance videos from the car park of the hotel in which Rachel Bailey’s car sat from Friday afternoon until Monday morning, without moving from the spot.’

  She frowned slightly.

  ‘Perhaps you can explain how you could have seen it leaving your father’s farm at ten to eleven on Sunday night?’

  She blinked a little. ‘I couldn’t have,’ she said interestedly, disconcertingly. ‘ Could I?’

  ‘Are you saying you lied to us, Mrs Hutchins?’

  ‘No,’ she said quickly. At least – not … not deliberately. I’m sorry. I must have been mistaken.’

  ‘Mistaken?’ said Lloyd. ‘And were you mistaken about anything else? About the house being empty, perhaps? About the alarms being off? About this sheep that no one has seen hide nor hair of before or after it was supposed to have been injured on the road? About this phone call that no one can trace?’

  ‘No.’ She stepped back a little. ‘ No. I don’t think so. I got the call. I … I thought the house was empty.’

  ‘Thought it was empty?’ said Judy, looking up from her notebook. ‘Do you mean you were wrong about that, too?’

  ‘No. No, it was empty. There was no one there. I waited for him, and when he didn’t come back—’

  ‘You left,’ Judy finished for her.

  ‘Yes.’ She looked back at Lloyd. ‘You do think I murdered him, don’t you?’ she said.

  Lloyd sighed. ‘Until some part of your story checks out, I have little alternative but to work on that assumption. I think you’ve been lying to us, Mrs Hutchins. I think you still are.’

  Gus Hutchins got up and left the room. Nicola looked after him, then turned back to Lloyd.

  ‘I didn’t mean to mislead you about Rachel’s car,’ she said, then smiled, a little tearfully. ‘ I really believed I’d seen it. It must be because she’s a gypsy.’

  Judy glanced at Lloyd, who was looking at her, his face as baffled as she felt.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ he said.

  Nicola’s hands clasped and unclasped as she spoke. ‘When I was five,’ she said, ‘there were gypsies on the farm. We had free-range hens, then, and I was allowed to collect up the eggs. And one day, I saw one of the gypsies stealing eggs. He dropped some when he ran away, and when my father saw them, he said I had broken them. I told him about the gypsy, and he stopped hitting me.’

  Judy glanced again at Lloyd. Once again, he was looking at her. Once again, his face mirrored her feelings.

  ‘For a while after that if I was being punished for something I didn’t understand, something I didn’t think I’d done, I’d tell him I’d seen the gypsies do it. And it wasn’t a lie. I believed it I made myself believe it, because I thought it would make him stop. But I’d just get punished twice. Once for what I’d done, and once for blaming the gypsies. But I really believed I had seen them, so that’s what I told him. I grew out of it,’ she said. ‘Or learned not to say it, even if I did believe it, because it meant getting two beatings, one after the other.’

  Her hands fell still.

  ‘But I think I must have done it again,’ she said. ‘Because Rachel’s a gypsy, and you were telling me I’d done something I hadn’t done, something I didn’t understand, and my mind must have played tricks on me. I’m sorry if I’ve caused you unnecessary work.’ A bell rang. ‘That’s my appointment,’ she said. ‘I really must go. Unless you’re arresting me.’

  Lloyd shook his head, looking bemused at her sudden change of manner. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’re not arresting you. We still have further enquiries to make. But I imagine we will want to speak to you again.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ said Nicola, and went back through to the surgery, leaving them to find their own way out.

  Neither of them spoke until they were in the car.

  ‘Well, now we know what Rachel meant about lasting damage,’ said Judy, fastening her seat belt. ‘What do you think?’

  Lloyd shrugged. ‘God knows. But I’m making damn sure of my facts before I arrest anyone else for this murder. You said you thought Jack Melville was lying to you about his visit to the farm, didn’t you?’

  ‘Well, yes, but I imagine he’s been taking too healthy an interest in Rachel Bailey,’ said Judy. ‘Like every other man who meets her,’ she added.

  Lloyd smiled. ‘And Tom’s convinced that McQueen’s not been straight with him,’ he said. ‘So we have further enquiries to make. We still don’t know why Bailey got drunk, do we? Maybe one of them had something to do with it.’

  Yes, thought Judy. That was a little puzzle that they had rather overlooked.

  Nicola’s appointment took less than five minutes; she went into the empty waiting room to find a message on her answering machine, asking her if she could oversee that afternoon the repossession of livestock at Bailey’s farm, as
an urgent favour for Willsden and Pearce, one of whom had gone down with some sort of bug. She frowned, then smiled. There had to have been a mistake.

  But when she rang, Rachel told her that there was no mistake. That her father had gone bust, that the bailiffs had just been waiting for the fortifications to come down so that they could descend, and they would be descending that afternoon.

  ‘Didn’t even wait till we buried him,’ she said.

  Nicola discovered that even the land was worth nothing, because McQueen had lent her rather the money on it in the first place, held the title deeds already, and was taking possession of it as soon as the creditors had taken everything away.

  ‘Isn’t there something about leaving you the tools of your trade?’ she asked.

  Rachel laughed. ‘I don’t have no trade, Nicola.’

  ‘But Rachel – what are you going to do?’

  ‘Mr McQueen’s lettin’ me keep the house,’ said Rachel. ‘And a bit of land. I’ll be rentin’ it from him.’

  ‘Oh. Well – I suppose that’s quite good of him, really.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Rachel. ‘Providin’ I can pay the rent,’ she added, with commendable cheerfulness.

  Oh, God. Rachel had no money. She had nothing at all. Nicola hadn’t known that this was going to happen. ‘But how can you pay the rent?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll manage.’

  Nicola felt terrible. This was all her fault. And she ought to set Rachel’s mind at rest about her car, now that she knew she couldn’t really have seen it.

  ‘Rachel, I’m sorry I told the police I saw your car,’ she said. ‘ I couldn’t have, because it was in the hotel car park all weekend. They’ve just told me. And someone saw you there, too. But I didn’t lie,’ she said anxiously. ‘I don’t think I did. Not on purpose. They think I said it to get you into trouble, but I didn’t. I think it’s just because you’re a gypsy. I tried to explain. I really thought I saw it. They think I murdered him. I don’t think I did, but I’m not sure now. Do you think I did? Gus does.’

  ‘The bastard,’ Rachel said, her voice just a whisper.

  Nicola frowned. ‘Who?’ she asked. ‘Gus?’

  ‘No. No one. Nothin’. Don’t, worry ’bout it. Don’t worry ’bout nothin’, Nicola. You just come over here this afternoon, and we’ll talk. I got to go out for a little while, but I’ll be here later. If I’m not here, you wait for me. All right?’

  ‘All right.’ Nicola put the phone down, and walked slowly out of the waiting room, into the house. She was going to come out of all this with nothing, not even Gus, she discovered, when she found the note on the kitchen table. He had gone home to his parents, and didn’t, as far as she could see, intend coming back. She barely registered that, throwing the folded paper down again, and went through to the dining room, pulling the shoebox out of the sideboard. Four thousand six hundred pounds. She had counted it as she had taken it from her surgical bag and put it in the shoebox. But then she hadn’t known what to do with it; she couldn’t put it in the bank without Gus finding out, and Gus was almost painfully honest. She supposed that was why he hadn’t been a terrific success as an accountant. She could use it now he’d gone.

  But it wasn’t her money. It was Rachel’s. And Rachel needed it desperately. Much more desperately than she did. No one was taking her furniture away, or her car. No one was going to repossess her house, or the surgery, not yet, anyway. And they wouldn’t, because she had a job. A trade. Something that brought money in, that kept the wolf from the door, that stopped the debts getting out of hand. Rachel hadn’t. And they weren’t even her debts.

  She would take the money back.

  ‘Could I see Detective Inspector Hill?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said the girl on the desk. ‘I’m afraid she’s at lunch at the moment.’

  That was a good start. ‘I believe you’ve been making enquiries about money that went missing from the safe at Bailey’s farm,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I could speak to whoever’s dealing with that?’ That was probably who he should be talking to anyway.

  The girl had a consultation with someone else, then invited him to take a seat. In a few moments, a man with riotous blond curls appeared.

  ‘Sergeant Finch,’ he said. ‘ I believe you wanted to talk to me?’

  Not really, thought Jack. I don’t really want to do this at all. He had told Terri last night, but he hadn’t had to sleep in the spare room. Because she had walked out, saying she couldn’t live with a man she couldn’t trust. She had spent the night with one of her SOWS buddies. He wasn’t sure if it was what he had actually done, or the lies he had told about Rachel, that had been the clincher. He suspected it was the latter, and that this was the first recorded instance of a woman leaving her husband because he hadn’t had an affair with the woman next door.

  He followed Sergeant Finch into the interview room, and they sat down amid a small electrical storm.

  ‘It’s on-the blink,’ explained Finch. ‘It’ll settle down in a minute.’

  Jack waited until it had, being unable to talk to someone who looked as though he was in a stage representation of a silent movie. ‘I believe you’re looking into the disappearance of some money from Bernard Bailey’s safe,’ he said, when the light came on and stayed on.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Finch. ‘ Do you know something about it, then?’

  Jack almost laughed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know something about it. I took four thousand six hundred pounds in cash to Bernard Bailey on Sunday evening.’

  ‘Well, at least we know how much is missing now,’ said Finch. ‘And the thing is, Mr Melville, normally it wouldn’t be any of my business what you did with your money, but Bernard Bailey has been murdered. Did anyone else know about this money changing hands?’

  Jack smiled at the expression, redolent with skulduggery and dirty work at the crossroads. Which it was, he supposed, but it wasn’t illegal, which was clearly what Finch was assuming. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No one knew. No one but me, and Bernard Bailey.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Finch, in a winding-up tone. ‘We might want a statement from you – it depends really, on what happened to the money, and why.’

  ‘That isn’t all,’ said Jack. ‘Your Inspector Hill told me that I should allow you to decide what is and isn’t relevant to your murder enquiry. And I have some information which I suspect I should have given to her before now.’

  ‘Fire away,’ said Finch.

  ‘I am the director and major shareholder of a company called Harmston Estates,’ he said. ‘My wife is the other director, but she didn’t actually know that until last night. I asked her to sign something a long time ago, and she did, without even looking at it, because she trusts me. At that time, I had no intention of compromising her,’ he added. ‘It was just routine. And I’ve done nothing illegal, you understand.’ Finch nodded.

  ‘But Harmston Estates wholly owns another company called Excelsior Holdings. And Excelsior Holdings owns the woodland through which the road to the so-called Rookery would have to pass if Bernard Bailey had refused to sell his land.’

  Finch started making notes.

  ‘Bernard Bailey and I both took a considerable knock-back about two years ago,’ Jack went on. ‘A risky speculation that failed. He lost just about everything, and I lost very much more than I was prepared to admit. McQueen was offering enough money for the woodland for me to recoup my losses, and make a profit, but his real intention was to take the road through Bailey’s farm. The route through my land was just back-up if Bailey refused to sell.’

  Finch looked a little lost, as he tried to keep up.

  ‘Bailey was in desperate financial difficulties, and he was going to lose the farm if he defaulted on the loan he had taken out on it, so he approached me with a deal. He asked me to pay his loan instalments, and his farmhands’ wages. He showed me proof that he would come into a very large inheritance if and when his wife produced a son, and he would have been able to repay
me with interest, provided he could hang on to his farm, and his wife did her bit. I could afford to take the gamble, providing the road did go through the wood as a result, so it was in my interests to help him, and I gave him the money in cash every month.’

  Finch looked up from the notebook over which his hand had been a positive blur. ‘So Mrs Bailey might have known about the arrangement?’

  ‘Only if Bailey told her, and I think that most unlikely.’

  ‘Thing is,’ Finch said. ‘ We’ve reason to believe that Mrs Bailey quite often overheard business transactions.’

  ‘She didn’t overhear this one,’ said Jack. ‘ She wasn’t there.’

  ‘But there had obviously been previous transactions.’

  ‘Yes, every last Sunday in the month. But Bailey had always come to me before. The day was chosen because my wife chairs her committee meetings on Sundays, so I’m alone in the house. The repayments had to be made by the last Monday in the month. But Bailey wouldn’t leave the house for anything or anyone last Sunday, so I went to him.’

  ‘Why did you lie to Inspector Hill about what you were doing at Bailey’s farm?’ said Finch.

  He was direct, thought Jack. It made it easier, somehow, if you called a spade a spade. ‘I lied about it because the committee my wife chairs is the Save Our Woodland Sites committee, and if my plan had worked out, she would have been, in effect, selling the very woodland she was pledged to save. I really didn’t want her to know that. That was what I meant by compromising her’

  ‘Yes,’ said Finch. ‘I can see that it would.’

  ‘I also financed Mrs Bailey’s trip to London,’ Jack went on. ‘Bailey was anxious that his wife shouldn’t be there if there was to be a demonstration of any sort, because she was at last expecting a baby, and he rang me to see if I could let him have some cash. I saw him on Thursday, with the money for the trip, and he was, for him, almost cheerful. But on Sunday night, he had had a lot to drink, and he was threatening her. I did tell Inspector Hill that,’ he said. ‘What I didn’t tell her was that he seemed to think she had gone away, not to avoid the demonstration, but to have an abortion.’