by J M Gregson
So here, after the preliminary fencing, the question he had anticipated was abruptly upon him. He searched his brain for the phrases he had planned during the morning. ‘I told you, we weren’t close. We got on OK. He’s the grandfather of my children. He’s my wife’s father. We got on because we needed to. We weren’t enemies, but we didn’t talk to each other a lot.’
Peach wondered if there had been any racial prejudice in Geoffrey Aspin, whether he had resented this brown-skinned, dark-eyed, handsome, dangerous-looking man for carrying off his elder daughter. They had the perpetual problem of murder: the victim cannot speak for himself, cannot reveal his own thoughts on the people closest to him, cannot list the people he saw as friends and enemies. ‘Tell us about yesterday’s events, please.’
A shrug of those slim, muscular shoulders; a small smile which was wiped away as soon as it appeared. This at least he was prepared for. ‘Geoffrey had organized the whole thing. It went off well enough, I think. I am not so keen on your English celebrations.’ He pronounced the long word carefully, but a little of the contempt he had not meant to reveal came out on it. ‘There was a good meal and speeches at the end of it.’
‘How many people spoke?’
‘Just two. Steve - that’s Stephen Hawksworth, Geoffrey’s other son-in-law - proposed Mr Aspin’s health and congratulated him on reaching sixty. There were quite a few laughs and applause at the end. So it seemed fine. I have not much experience of these things.’
‘And the second speaker was Mr Aspin himself.’
‘Yes. He too got laughs. That seems to be the convention for these things.’
‘Indeed it is. And Detective Sergeant Blake here agrees with you that the speeches seemed to go well. She was present, you see: she is a friend of Mrs Hawksworth.’
He glanced swiftly at the woman with the very British style of beauty who sat alongside and slightly behind Peach. He realized for the first time that she was preparing to make notes on what he had to say. He could not prevent his anger showing as he said, ‘Why did you not tell me this? Why do you need me to tell you these things at all, when you had a policewoman at the event?’
Peach was at his most urbane. ‘We shall be asking a lot of people how they saw yesterday’s events, Mr Bilic. DS Blake saw them from afar. You were more intimately involved, as a member of the family on the top table. Different perspectives are always of interest, when one has to piece together events which ended with the brutal dispatch of the man at the centre of them.’
It sounded like a threat, and Percy was quite pleased about that. There was something feral and sinister about this Turkish man. He was already feeling hopeful that their killer might be sitting right in front of them. ‘Tell us a little more about the content of Mr Aspin’s speech, will you?’
Bilic glanced at Lucy Blake, cursing himself for not remembering her among yesterday’s throng of guests. He must have been too preoccupied with his own concerns. He’d better tell it pretty straight, if this woman had been there listening. ‘Geoffrey make jokes, the way I said.’ Again he heard his accent becoming more guttural, was obscurely aware that he had made a mistake with the tense. ‘Then he tells us at the end that he is going to marry this woman.’
‘Mrs Williams?’
‘Yes. The woman sitting beside him during the meal.’
‘You didn’t like that?’
The question came quietly from Peach’s round, innocent face. Jemal almost flared out that of course he didn’t like it. He was chafing in a situation that was controlled by others: he was used to directing his own conversations. He made himself pause and control his breathing. ‘It was a shock, that’s all. He hadn’t told us that he was going to do it.’
‘An unpleasant shock?’
‘No. Well, I don’t think my wife was happy about it. It didn’t matter to me. But you’ll need to speak to her about that.’
‘Which we shall do, in due course. Do you think everyone was as surprised as you by this announcement?’
‘I don’t know. I think so. I expect the woman knew. She would, wouldn’t she?’
‘I don’t know, Mr Bilic. We shall speak to her about it, in due course. At the moment, we are concerned with your impressions. I understand that the party broke up very quickly after the speeches. Did you speak to Mr Aspin at that time?’
‘No. Other people did. My wife did, I think.’
‘Were there any arguments as a result of what Mr Aspin had said?’
‘No. If they were, I did not hear. I talk to some people I do business with, before they drove away.’
You are washing your hands like Pilate of any involvement, thought Percy. But this watchful, restless man was a rather unlikely Pilate. ‘Who do you think killed Mr Aspin?’
This was more sudden and direct than Jemal had expected. ‘I don’t know, do I? Perhaps some business associate of his.’
‘Not a member of his family, you think?’
‘No. I don’t think that is likely.’
No, you wouldn’t. Peach thought as they left the house. ‘He must have known about this major row Aspin had with someone not long before he was killed,’ he said to Lucy. ‘Even if Bilic wasn’t around at the time, which I doubt, his wife would have told him about it. I wonder why he’s lying about that.’
Ten
The man who had met Geoffrey Aspin in secret at his printing works some weeks earlier was without the shabby anorak which he wore almost as a badge of office. He was on holiday. His wife had insisted upon it. Even private detectives had to take holidays, she had told him.
All through the winter she had said it.
‘I know,’ he had replied. ‘You’re right, I know you are.’ And then he had gone on ignoring her. Spring came, and nothing changed. When they reached the beginning of June and still nothing had been done, his hitherto meek wife took the matter into her own hands. She walked into a travel agent, spent nearly an hour thumbing through the brochures they gave her, and then walked determinedly to the desk with her queries.
Twenty minutes later, she had booked a holiday in Italy for two. You can please yourself whether you come or not, she told her husband: I’ll find someone else if you don’t want to go. She didn’t say whether this companion would be male or female, and her husband didn’t enquire about the gender.
‘This is not like you,’ he said mildly.
‘This is the twenty-first century,’ his suddenly sparkly wife told him, ‘in case you hadn’t noticed. I’m behaving like a modern woman.’ She was surprised how much satisfaction that gave her, surprised how much she enjoyed the look of an ill-treated spaniel upon her husband’s face.
And so John Kirkby, ex-copper and now private detective, found himself on the first day of July staring out over the still blue waters of Lake Garda. It was a pleasant scene, and he was sure that when he’d unwound over another day or two he would quite enjoy it. Habit had made him speculate on the previous night about which couples at the adjoining tables were married, but his wife had put a swift embargo on such conjecture.
If he was honest, which in domestic matters he usually was, it was as good a time as any for a private detective to take a holiday. The lighter nights meant that there was less of the pursuing of co-respondents which formed the main body of his work. People preferred the winter months for their extramaritals; it was almost as if the cold encouraged them into new beds, whilst sixteen hours of darkness encouraged them to think they could keep such things secret from their spouses.
John Kirkby wasn’t without work, far from it. But he had presented his latest reports to his clients and left the number of his mobile with four of them who might consider consultation necessary as things moved along. He was secretly rather disappointed that none of them had found it necessary to contact him in the two days he had so far spent in Italy.
His wife was taking advantage of the hairdressing facility offered by the hotel, amazed and delighted that in a totally un-English way it was available even on a Sunday morning. John
Kirkby strolled along the promenade by the lake, watched the passing crowds of tourists, and tried not to wonder about their relationships with each other. He bought himself a coffee and watched the boats on the lake. They looked very attractive, but he had always distrusted water.
He picked up the English newspaper which the couple at the next table left behind them when they left, only to find that it was three days old and told him nothing he did not know: even the cricket scores were the ones he had already seen. He had walked conscientiously past the newspaper kiosk; his wife had forbidden English papers, not only on the grounds of their high cost abroad but because she and John were here to ‘get away from it all’.
One of the people to whom he had confided his mobile number was Geoffrey Aspin, who had assured him that he would ring him on this Sunday morning, after he had digested the import of Kirkby’s latest report. There had been no call from Aspin. John knew enough of the reliability of the public at large not to be disappointed by this omission. And yet he was a little surprised: he would have put Aspin down as a meticulous man, who would observe any arrangement he made. Well, he who paid the piper called the tune, John Kirkby told himself glumly.
He set off back towards the hotel, walking slowly to make the exercise fill as much time as he could.
* * *
True to his word, Peach returned to the house of Pamela Williams in the early evening.
Her son immediately said, ‘My mother’s coming over to Leeds with me for a day or two as soon as you’ve finished with her. I shall be out in the drive packing the car, if you want me.’
His mother still looked in shock. Her eyes were swollen with weeping. She had applied some make-up in preparation for the ordeal of this meeting, but it would have taken more than cosmetics to disguise the lines which seemed to have deepened so suddenly upon her face. Lucy Blake scarcely recognized her as the attractive, slightly diffident woman whom Geoffrey Aspin had been introducing to all his friends before the formal part of the proceedings at Marton Towers not much more than twenty-four hours earlier.
She took them into the front room of her semi-detached 1954 house. It was also her dining room; she sat herself on one side of the table and her two visitors on the other, as though they were about to conduct a formal meeting. Peach was ushering them through the opening politenesses when she cut through his words. ‘You think I killed him, don’t you? The wife or the mistress is always the first suspect.’
Peach smiled as though he were trying to settle a disturbed child. ‘Do you read detective novels, Mrs Williams?’
‘I do a little, yes. Well, quite a lot, actually. Why do you ask?’
He smiled, so gently that Lucy Blake at his side wondered anew how her DCI could be so different from the man she had seen in the day’s earlier interview with Jemal Bilic. ‘We always speak to people in your position as early in an investigation as we can, yes. That is because they are likely to know more about the deceased and his habits than any other person available to us. I know nothing about you as yet, but I shall be surprised if we do not get a fuller and more balanced picture of Mr Aspin’s likes and dislikes from you than from anyone else we see.’
She nodded slowly, as if trying to make herself accept a difficult idea against her better judgement. ‘I suppose I have seen more of Geoff in the last few months than anyone else.’
‘There you are, then. You can be very useful to us. We may depend quite a lot on what you can tell us, as we try to find who did this awful thing.’
Pam found to her surprise that she was pleased to hear this. Even in the midst of grief, it was good to be told that she could be useful. She remembered that Justin had told her to be careful with these people, not to take them at face value. She said cautiously, ‘But you still think I might have killed Geoff, don’t you?’
Lucy Blake said, ‘We’re here to get information, Mrs Williams. People who are innocent have nothing to fear from us.’
Pam looked at her properly for the first time. If she had had a daughter, she might have been about this age. She might even have had a bright, intelligent, sympathetic face like this one. She wondered inconsequentially what it would have been like if she’d had a daughter, instead of sons who seemed only to distance themselves from her as they got older. She managed her first small smile of the day as she said to DS Blake, ‘I’m still a suspect, though, aren’t I?’
‘We don’t like to consider people suspects unless they give us a reason to think of them like that. DCI Peach was quite right when he said that we are here to gather information. As much information as you can give us. That may enable us to eliminate some people - perhaps including you - from any suspicion at all. By far the best thing you can do is to be totally honest with us.’
‘The family didn’t like me.’ She hadn’t the energy left to be diplomatic. She came straight out with it, without any of the polite preliminaries.
She had expected this nice young woman to say that she was sure that it wasn’t so, that Pam had probably been oversensitive to some unguarded remarks. Instead, it was Peach who came back in at this point. He said encouragingly, ‘This is the kind of thing we need to know, Mrs Williams. But perhaps we should begin a little earlier. How long had you known Mr Aspin?’
She noted his change of tense. When she’d spoken about being with Geoff during the last few months, she’d spoken about him as if he was still with them, but they hadn’t corrected her. She supposed they must be used to such banalities from people in shock. ‘Four and a half months ago.’ She heard her own precision and wondered what they would make of it. Like a young girl smitten with her first boyfriend, she’d have said herself. ‘I suppose you want to know how we met.’
They wouldn’t have pressed her, but they realized she must think it was important. Blake said gently, ‘We want every bit of information you can give us, Mrs Williams. You can leave it to us to decide what’s important, when we’ve spoken to a lot of other people and have a fuller picture.’
‘He advertised. I answered.’ Pam was too shocked and too exhausted to feel the embarrassment she would normally have done. She wanted this out of the way at the beginning. The family were sure to tell them about it, to make out that the two of them had been desperate. Or probably, worse still, that Geoff had picked up a designing woman when he was lonely and at his most vulnerable.
‘Mr Aspin advertised for a housekeeper?’
Pam Williams gave them a wan smile, in spite of herself. ‘He put a little description of himself in DATING POINT.’ She saw that this pretty woman who was still in her twenties and had no need of such devices was puzzled by the title. For a moment she was bitter about that lustrous chestnut hair and that naivety. Then she took pity on her and explained. ‘It’s a dating page in the newspaper which allows lonely people to get in touch with each other.’
‘And you met through this?’
‘Yes. On the sixteenth of February. In Starbucks coffee house in Brunton.’ She glanced up, saw the woman recording the date and the place in her notes with a gold-cased ballpoint pen, wondered what she made of such adolescent precision about the details. ‘You meet somewhere neutral at first. You don’t give away any details about yourself, in case you don’t wish to go any further when you see what turns up.’ She piled on the details, thinking bitchily that one day in the distant future this buxom young filly might have need of them.
Lucy gave Pam a smile which she hoped would encourage her to go on being so frank. ‘And obviously on this occasion you both decided that you would like to proceed. Had you much experience of this sort of meeting at the time?’
‘I had. Geoff hadn’t.’ She smiled at the thought of how innocent he had been at that first meeting, how she had needed to educate him in the rules of the elaborate rite of middle-aged encounters. Then her face twisted in pain as she realized anew that all of this was gone, that Geoff was gone, that she had to face the rest of her life without him. ‘He didn’t know anything about the pitfalls. I’d had one or two bad e
xperiences before. I never advertised myself, but I responded to other people’s entries. Geoff was the first person I met whom I felt I wanted to see more than a couple of times. We went to the theatre in Manchester for our first outing. Then later I gave him my address and we began to meet regularly.’
Blake was beset by a new sympathy for this woman left alone in the world, as she fought back the tears which threatened her anew. Blonde hair was the worst for grief, Lucy thought inconsequentially; it always seemed to become more easily dishevelled, and the fair colouring which went with it made it more difficult to disguise the ravages which anguish brought to a face. She reminded herself that Pam Williams was at present still a murder suspect, as she herself had reminded them at the outset.
DS Blake prompted encouragingly, ‘Things obviously went well, because you were planning to get married.’
Pam glanced at her with a sudden fierceness, which was accentuated because her eyes, puffed with grief, were unnaturally narrowed. ‘No. We hadn’t got as far as that. I wanted to take it more slowly.’
Lucy Blake said gently, ‘But he announced to everyone that you were getting married in his speech yesterday. I thought he must have discussed all that with you beforehand.’
Pam Williams shook her head with a surprising vigour.
‘No. He hadn’t done that. I wasn’t pleased with him when he suddenly told all of you like that. I wanted more time to make sure that it was really the right thing to do. I wanted more time for the family to get used to me.’
It was Peach who took up that. ‘The family didn’t like the idea?’
‘They didn’t like me. They were suspicious of me. They found me threatening.’
She was plainly almost at the end of her resources. They could hear movements from her son, who was back in the hall beyond the closed door of this room. They couldn’t prolong this much longer. Peach said quickly, ‘One thing puzzles me, Mrs Williams. Mr Aspin’s body wasn’t discovered until this morning. That seems odd. I should have expected him to leave Marton Towers with you or one of his daughters, after yesterday’s celebration was over.’