by J M Gregson
Steve was surprised at the curtness, even though by now he knew he should expect it from this man. ‘I haven’t even thought about that. I can’t see that anyone will.’
‘Someone must. Let me put it another way. Who would have been most affected if Mr Aspin had gone ahead and married Mrs Williams?’
‘All of us. All of the family, I mean. None of us really wanted it to happen. But that doesn’t mean we thought it would affect us in some material way.’
‘Come, Mr Hawksworth. You’re an accountant, and accountants are not in my experience naive. There are obvious financial implications in a second marriage like this. People with financial expectations would no doubt see a second Mrs Aspin as a threat to those.’
‘I suppose so. But I’m sure none of us would have felt strongly enough to kill Geoff because of money.’
‘Are you really? Our job makes us see the worst in human nature, I’m afraid. We tend to suspect people with financial motives, don’t we, DS Blake?’
Blake allowed herself a thin smile. ‘Someone did kill Mr Aspin, Steve. Very probably someone in or around the family.’
‘It could have been a business associate, I suppose. Someone quite outside the family.’ Steve was pleased with himself for this late defiance.
Peach gave him a broad, totally unexpected smile. ‘Indeed it could. Constructive thinking, Mr Hawksworth, and something we shall need to investigate. Go on thinking about this death, please, and see what else you can produce for us. Good day to you.’
He swept out of the boss’s elegant office, leaving Steve Hawksworth feeling bludgeoned but relieved.
Twelve
Denis Oakley would have been considerably perturbed if he had heard Steve Hawksworth mention Geoffrey Aspin’s business associates as possible killers or hirers of killers.
Oakley was the dead man’s partner in the printing business which had made them both rich men. He had been the first man up to the top table at the end of Geoff’s speech on that fateful Saturday, pumping his hand and congratulating him and Pam Williams on the marriage decision which had just been announced. It had been an instinctive response. It had also been the best way of concealing the turmoil which had beset his mind with this news.
Denis was a handsome man, a little shorter than Geoff, but with a plentiful head of hair, silvering impressively at his temples, a crinkly smile, humorous blue eyes, and the sort of profile which fascinated women. He had acquired ample evidence of this over the years; indeed, he was still collecting it. He was the sort of man who felt a continual need to test the fact that his ability to charm the other sex had not faded.
Denis had been married to his third wife for two years and was still paying generous marriage settlements to the first two. Three times he had declared to the world that he had found true love, whilst never mastering the elusive virtue of fidelity. Denis Oakley led himself and the women with whom he associated through a high-tariff emotional life.
Financially, he found himself perpetually walking a tightrope, despite the success of the printing business founded and developed by himself and his long-time business partner.
He and Geoff Aspin had become close friends on their history degree course at Liverpool University, and once they had found that an arts degree gave you direct access to few careers beyond teaching, they set up in business together. They had chosen printing simply because Geoff had secured a student holiday job in a lithographic and printing works in Liverpool and thought he saw ways of making money from a modest local enterprise in that field.
It had all begun as something of a lark, but the harsh realities of commerce had quickly asserted themselves. Slightly to their own surprise, the two young men had proved themselves equal to these demands. In the early years, they had often worked twelve or fourteen hours a day to get their business off the ground. They were surprised as well as delighted to find how successful they were. What had begun as a modest enterprise in a single large, chaotic room behind a shop was from the outset a sturdy earner. Eventually it grew into one of the most successful businesses in Brunton, with nationwide clientele.
As the firm grew and flexed its wings, the two men who had been so close as twenty-one-year-olds moved steadily apart. Geoff was happy with his first wife Jill and his two daughters, so much so that Denis Oakley used to describe him as ‘my tediously uxorious friend’ to his succession of women friends. As the years advanced, Denis in contrast continued to play the female field with undiminished vigour and scant regard for bruising experiences, so that Geoff regarded him privately and tolerantly as ‘my Labrador who escaped the op’.
In the first decade of the new century, the now affluent pair continued to work efficiently enough together, even though their social lives had long since diverged. They showed the sort of tolerance towards each other’s lifestyles which derives from friendships made in the formative years of adolescence. But there was another, more concrete reason why the partnership survived; ergonomically, the two men’s skills complemented each other.
Geoff Aspin was an excellent manager. He was continually conscious of the new skills he needed to bring in as the business grew. He was always ready to explore the new possibilities opened up by the revolutionary advances in printing over the last thirty years. He was also constantly aware of the needs and aspirations of his staff. Aspin and Oakley’s company acquired the reputation of being a good place to work, which in turn ensured that the firm attracted talented and reliable staff.
Denis Oakley had proved to his own youthful surprise to be a natural salesman. Intensely aware of what the equipment in the factory could do and could not do, he had toured the country ceaselessly in search of orders. He was the chief agent in securing the contracts which gained the firm its first successes and then provided the profits to generate growth. It had been an exhilarating ride and Denis had enjoyed every minute of it. Sales had also fitted perfectly with the lifestyle he desired. His work demanded that he was constantly away from home, constantly meeting a succession of new people.
Whether or not modem sailors still have a girl in every port, the debonair and increasingly experienced Denis Oakley had women in most of the industrial centres of northern and midland England. Over the years, this was the source of much pleasure and much anguish both to them and to him.
On the morning after the revelation of Geoff Aspin’s untimely death, the dead man’s partner drove his big BMW through the drab industrial streets of Brunton to the new industrial estate, where the new Aspin and Oakley printing factory had been operating for the last two years. The staff there normally saw little of him, but today it was necessary to show the flag, rally the troops, and implement all the other energizing cliches which Denis had produced, as he had talked to his third wife over breakfast and nerved himself to the task.
The staff had never seen him look so solemn as when he came into the works in dark suit and tie and with head bowed. He accepted their commiserations on Aspin’s death, then offered his own comfort and reassurance, particularly to the older employees, some of whom had known Geoff almost as long as he had. Denis was good with people, especially in passing encounters, and he knew it. Within an hour of his arrival, the staff knew that no one’s job was at stake, that the business would be continued on the same lines as always, that any employee who wished to attend it would in due course be welcome at Geoffrey Aspin’s funeral. Denis Oakley exuded confidence; those who came into contact with him found it both infectious and uplifting.
No one either on the shop floor or in the office divined that he was in fact extremely worried about his own future.
Denis encouraged all the senior office personnel to call him by his first name. It was modem industrial practice, he assured them expansively. If it had made the ways of the late and much respected Geoff Aspin seem slightly old-fashioned, that was certainly not his intention.
He was in Aspin’s office when his former partner’s PA put through the call to him. The bank manager expressed his condolences, probed a l
ittle about the circumstances of Aspin’s death, received suitably conventional replies from Oakley. Then he moved on to more personal matters and began to ask searching questions. Denis’s replies to his queries were delivered for the most part in uncharacteristic monosyllables.
At the end of the conversation, the bank manager’s tone hardened to the one he used only rarely, when it was important that he should not be denied. ‘I think you had better come in and see me, Mr Oakley. Bring any documents you think may be relevant. It had better be in the near future, please. I suggest some time later this week.’
* * *
Carol Bilic was very composed, for a daughter who had been informed of the death of her father only twenty-four hours earlier.
She was seven years older than her sister Louise. Lucy Blake, who had first met her as a mature twenty-two-year-old when she was herself a gawky schoolgirl of fifteen, had always found her intimidating. That hadn’t mattered much, for during the next few years, when she and Louise had been very close, she had scarcely seen Carol, who had been determined to marry the darkly glamorous Jemal Bilic and leave the Aspin home. Now she thought for a moment that Carol was not even going to acknowledge any previous acquaintance. But, when Peach attempted to introduce her, Carol Bilic nodded and said curtly, ‘DS Blake and I already know each other.’
Mrs Bilic was striking rather than beautiful, with very dark hair and eyes and a nose which was a little too large for perfection above a wide mouth. In her teenage years, Lucy had always thought of her as that favourite schoolgirl word ‘sophisticated’ and did so still. She was surprised to see the first crow’s feet around Carol’s eyes, and quickly divined that beneath the outward composure there was strain. Well, Lucy had seen enough of bereavement now to know that grief presented itself in many different ways.
If it was indeed grief that was responsible for this stress, she thought to herself bitchily.
Carol Bilic said, ‘I understand that you have to ask these questions, but I shall be able to add nothing to what you already know.’
Peach nodded a few times, as if this opening scepticism was no more than he would have expected. Then he said suddenly, ‘Why was your father left alone at the end of his party?’ Carol was shocked by the manner as well as the nature of the question. It was certainly not what she had expected as an opening. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t realize that he had been, at the time.’
‘It’s an obvious question, isn’t it? He was left at the mercy of whoever decided to kill him. You’d have expected other people to be with him, at the end of a day like that.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Members of his immediate family in particular.’
‘I suppose we all thought someone else would be with Dad. None of us was very pleased with what he’d just said in his speech.’
‘Ah! I wasn’t there, so you’ll need to enlighten me. Was there any particular part of what Mr Aspin said which gave offence?’
She looked at him coldly. She wondered if this man was testing her, seeking to catch her out. ‘He said he was going to marry that woman, didn’t he? The two of them sprang it upon us in public, where they thought we’d not be able to do anything about it.’
‘Perhaps someone did do something about it. Perhaps someone killed your father as a result of that sudden announcement. Do you think that is what happened?’
‘I don’t know, do I?’ She heard her querulous tone, realized that she was losing her temper with this man and his quiet insolence. She looked straight at him and said slowly and emphatically, ‘Let me make it clear that I’ve no idea why my father was killed. Nor have I any notion who might have killed him.’
Peach nodded slowly again, irritating her with the idea that she had said exactly what he expected her to say. ‘How would you describe your own relationship with your father, Mrs Bilic?’
‘We were affectionate towards each other, as you might expect a father and his eldest daughter to be.’
Peach gave her the smallest and most mirthless of his many smiles. ‘That is hardly an answer, is it?’
‘All right, we weren’t as close as we used to be. Is that what you wanted to hear?’
‘I want to hear the truth, Mrs Bilic.’ He knew he was annoying her and was happy to do so. People who lost control revealed far more than those who remained calm.
She knew what he was doing as well as he did, but still she felt the anger welling within her. She could play the bereaved daughter and fall back on the sympathy that would bring, but that wasn’t her way.
‘Louise was always Dad’s favourite.’ She glanced at Lucy Blake with a flash of resentment. ‘You should know that, from the old days. I don’t think Dad ever really reconciled himself to my marrying Jemal. He opposed it at the time. He appeared to come to terms with it and they were civil enough with each other, but I don’t believe Dad ever really accepted the situation.’
Carol wondered for a moment what her husband had said when he met this man who was so good at getting under your skin. Jemal wasn’t good with people like this, wasn’t used to coping with opposition. Well, Jemal would have to look after himself.
‘Dad and I got on. He was a good grandfather to my two children. We didn’t see as much of him as we’d have liked to in the last few years. And scarcely at all in the last three months, since he took up with this woman.’
‘You obviously don’t like Mrs Williams.’
It was her turn for a smile which had not an iota of humour. ‘You divine things correctly. Chief Inspector.’
‘And yet by your own account you scarcely knew her.’
‘I knew enough. I knew she was after Dad’s money.’
‘How did you know that, Mrs Bilic?’
‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? An older man, lured into a second marriage at sixty. A woman coming from nowhere and lining up a marriage within a couple of months. Don’t be naive.’
‘I hope I am not that, Mrs Bilic. It is not a good quality for a CID officer. Do you think that Mrs Williams was aware that your father was going to announce his wedding plans in his speech on Saturday?’ asked Peach.
‘I’m sure she was. Whatever she pretended then, whatever she tells you now, I can’t believe that she didn’t know all about it. I’m sure that she was delighted to hear the news being thrown into our faces.’
‘Give us a detailed account of your own movements at the end of Saturday afternoon, please.’
He was telling her that she was a suspect for her own father’s murder. That was no more than she had expected, but she still felt the blood pulsing in her temple at the thought. ‘There was a lot of confusion at the end of the speeches. A crowd of people from the other tables gathered round Dad. They were shaking his hand and congratulating him; him and that woman together.’ Carol still couldn’t bring herself to call Pam Williams by her name; she knew that she was presenting herself in a bad light by this little shaft of spite, but she couldn’t help it.
‘Did these people include any of his immediate family?’
‘No. None of us was pleased and we weren’t going to pretend that we were. They were mostly his friends and business acquaintances.’ People who knew nothing about the real situation and its implications, she found herself wanting to say. ‘I remember Denis Oakley, Dad’s business partner of many years, pushing his way through the crowd to him.’
‘Did you speak to your father or to Mrs Williams?’
‘No. It wasn’t the moment for that. It was too public.’
Lucy Blake said gently, ‘We need an account of your movements, Carol.’
Carol Bilic shot a swift, unguarded, molten look at the woman with her gold pen poised over her notebook, then composed her face into something more neutral. This was important and needed her full concentration. ‘I watched the melee going on around Dad and the Williams woman for a couple of minutes. Then I looked for Jemal. I wanted to compare notes about what Dad had said, discuss what we were going to do about it.’
‘And what did y
ou decide?’
‘Nothing. I didn’t find my husband. I wandered about the cloakrooms, trying not to get too involved with all the people who wanted to speak to me, wanted to thank me for the day. But I couldn’t find my husband. When I went out to the car park, I found that he’d gone.’
They might need to investigate this marriage if a prime suspect didn’t emerge quickly. At the moment, they needed a clear account of the actions of the dead man’s eldest daughter in the hours surrounding his death. Lucy prompted in her most neutral professional voice. ‘That must have been inconvenient, to say the least.’
‘It wasn’t a problem. There were several friends going near to my house. I watched Dad for a few more minutes, decided I wasn’t going to get near to him, and accepted a lift with one of them.’ She looked at the rich chestnut hair bent over the notebook and said peevishly, ‘I can give you her name and address, if you like.’
Lucy enjoyed giving her a bland smile. ‘Please do.’ She recorded the details unhurriedly and then said, ‘So how long after the end of the speeches did you leave Marton Towers?’
‘Twenty minutes, I should think. Perhaps twenty-five. After I’d heard Dad and his new woman having a shouting match with each other.’ She hadn’t wanted to introduce this herself, but she didn’t want to let it go by.
It didn’t produce the reaction she had hoped for. Peach merely continued studying her and the Blake woman did not even look up from her notes as she said, ‘And what was this dispute about?’
‘I don’t know, do I? I didn’t want any involvement in their sordid affair or their petty disputes.’ She sensed they weren’t going to believe that, but she delivered it vehemently and followed it with, ‘My friends were waiting for me and I found I was anxious to be away from the place.’
Peach said abruptly, ‘Who do you think killed your father, Mrs Bilic?’
‘I don’t know. If I have any useful thoughts on the matter. I’ll be in touch. Don’t hold your breath.’