To Die For

by Janet Neel

  What needed doing, fully as urgently as a cooker hood or ventilation system, was the documentation of an insurance claim. Mac Troughton was still, grittily, refusing to discuss a timescale or a cost estimate for his part of the repair work, observing that it depended on what else they found, but it looked like weeks rather than days, and would cost what it cost. The only bit of it she could do, here and now, apart from opening a ledger on the computer for rebuilding, was to sort out how much profit the Caff could be postulated to have made in the four weeks before the fire, in the hope that the insurance company would be prepared to make an interim payment. This was, she knew, unlikely, but she could not leave the site, a steady stream of decisions, large and small, would be required of her throughout the day, and she might as well do something to bring order out of this painful chaos.

  It was slow, iterative work, and she was in the depths of it when the office door opened, cautiously.

  ‘Richard.’ She looked at him, carefully, sheltering behind her PC. He looked ill, thin and red-eyed, but he had shaved, she saw, and combed his hair. There was much to be said for a military training; the prescribed shave, shit and shower, as Michael said, did put you on course for the day, even if, like Richard, you had spent the day before sodden with drink. ‘Come in,’ she invited, trying not to sound unwelcoming. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

  She had bought three electric kettles first thing that morning, one for the office and two for the toilers on the floor below. And several boxes of tea bags and three jars of coffee, and milk and bread, butter and jam, which were reposing in the bar fridge. The army below, like any other, marched on its stomach and they would get a shock if they started to forage for provender in high-rent Covent Garden, where workmen’s cafés were in notably short supply. She cleared a chair for her erstwhile partner’s husband, and made him a black coffee as he had asked, and retired behind her desk prepared to repel boarders. He was having difficulty formulating whatever he had come to ask, and she was not going to help. Her neck was painful with tension and she shifted her shoulders to ease it.

  ‘You and Selina.’ He took a gulp of coffee while she waited, unmoving. ‘You sometimes bought clothes – to wear for when you were working here, I mean.’ He was digging in the light leather briefcase he carried when he was trying to impress bank managers.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, impatient, as he went through the contents a second time.

  ‘I’ve got a bill here. Harvey Nicks.’

  He handed it across the table and she looked down without touching it; she was quick at figures and picked out at once that this was a long-running account, off which amounts had been paid, irregularly, succeeded almost at once by a further purchase which had only increased the amount due. Some of that, to be fair, was interest at twenty-three per cent. The whole now stood at £7306, the credit limit being £8000. At one shop, she thought, incredulously; her Visa card limit, on which she bought everything, was £2000, the whole bill paid off automatically every month. She looked at Richard enquiringly; he was watching her over his coffee cup, simultaneously hangdog and anxious. She felt slightly sick.

  ‘I’m afraid that we can’t pay that from here. We used occasionally to buy a suit each through the restaurant accounts. You know, something we actually did wear to work here. But we had to stop doing that – the Inland Revenue got very strict about the definition of workwear and we couldn’t persuade them that Nicole Farhi or Yves St Laurent fell within it.’ She tried a smile but it died in the face of Richard Marsh-Hayden’s hostility. ‘So we haven’t done any of that for, oh, the last year. I’m sorry.’

  He was still looking at her with that peculiar mix of hangdog pleading and simmering rage, and she wished that the office were not so effectively insulated from the ground floor. ‘Selina said quite a lot of clothes found their way on to the accounts.’

  ‘Did she?’ she asked, feebly. She stared at the PC, rage threatening to choke her. Where had Selina managed to hide payments for expensive suits? What was a trained book-keeper like Mary thinking of to allow it? She took a deep breath and her mind cleared. There was no way. She had been analysing accounts for the last three weeks, the suppliers were all names known to her as well as her own family and none of them were dress shops, they really were supplying meat, olive oil, paper napkins, glasses, spaghetti, greengrocery, and all the myriad requirements of a large restaurant. And Mary was a good book-keeper, limited though her capacity for analysis might be. It hadn’t happened, just as she had told Richard.

  She paused to think, and her mind cleared. ‘That’s not your problem, surely, Richard. You don’t have to worry about it, you just send it to the lawyers. It’s a debt of the estate.’ She had missed the point, she saw, in a flash of revelation, just as he put his coffee cup back in the saucer, with the overprecise movement of rage.

  ‘So she was paying for all those clothes herself then?’ he asked, the voice tight.

  ‘Well, the restaurant wasn’t.’ She was suddenly furiously angry herself at being hassled by a man who was uselessly, self-indulgently unable to control his financial affairs and yet in a position to control her life, with his substantial shareholding in her restaurant. She watched, grimly, as he absorbed that message, and wondered how to get him out of the office. ‘I see it’s ten thirty,’ she said, crisply, ‘and I am expecting an electrician.’ There were three of them, or had been when she last looked, gloomily applying their testers to various parts of the walls downstairs.

  ‘I’ll sit here a minute, have some more coffee.’ He had gone white, she saw through her own rage.

  ‘Right,’ she said, bad-temperedly, and switched off the computer and moved the piles of bills into the big safe that stood open beside her. ‘Damn,’ she said, involuntarily.

  ‘What?’ Richard Marsh-Hayden looked up dully, but he could not have missed the bundles of notes, cheques and chits cascading on to the floor.

  ‘Saturday night’s take,’ she said, furiously, picking up notes. ‘We don’t bank on Saturday nights, we wait to put it into the night safe on Sunday morning when there are people about. Not the first thing I thought of yesterday, but I should have.’ She looked at the big safe and hesitated, very conscious of Richard’s eyes on the cash; he looked like a starving man outside a bakery. And the combination of the safe had not been changed in eighteen months. Mary was totally unmechanical and had refused to try, and she herself had kept forgetting, and she was not prepared to leave cash, even in a safe, anywhere near Richard Marsh-Hayden. She looked at the note on the top bundle; in fact there was only £1400-odd, the rest were cheques and credit card receipts. And cash would be needed on site, there was no point banking that, she would only have to get it out again. If she was allowed, indeed, given the state of the overdraft. She hesitated.

  ‘You’ll need cash for that lot,’ Richard Marsh-Hayden said, jabbing a thumb at the floor, in echo of her own calculations.

  ‘I will,’ she said, putting the cheques and credit slips back and banging the big safe shut and twisting the combination.

  ‘Don’t carry that much cash about, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to. I’ll put it in the little safe in the inner office, save it falling out every time I want to get at the accounts.’ No need to alienate Richard even further by making it clear she would not leave cash in a safe to which he might know the combination. She waited for him to go, but he was filling the kettle at the little sink, staring drearily out of the window, so she retired, crossly, to the inner office and, glancing over her shoulder, pushed the cash inside the old, out-of-date safe, which they had never thrown away when the big new one had replaced it.

  Brian Rubin glanced anxiously across a lunch table at his wife. It was still warm enough to eat outside, on the terrace, and even to haul up a sun umbrella. She had arrived, unexpectedly, at ten that morning, having left her mother’s place at 7 a.m., the car loaded to well beyond the Plimsoll line, with two children and their accoutrements. He had indicated, feebly, t
hat he ought to be at his office, but she was having none of that, and had lumbered him with both children while she got the house straight. His five-year-old son was fidgeting to leave the table while his three-year- old daughter was, infinitely slowly, finishing her melting ice-cream.

  ‘All right, Annabelle, that’s enough. Eat it, or leave it. Joshua, you can get down too.’

  Janice had firm standards about behaviour at meal times and most other things too, which he mostly found a deeply reassuring nuisance. He waited, apprehensively; she was working to a timetable and he wasn’t going to be allowed to interfere with it. She watched as the children flashed away to rescue an interrupted game involving mud and water at the bottom of the big suburban garden.

  ‘Right,’ she said, pouring him coffee. ‘Now you can tell me what’s going on.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he temporised, anxiously.

  ‘I had to pay cash at the garage for petrol. Lucky I had some, or you’d have had to come down to Ashford.’

  ‘Ah, well. See, what with the delay on the sale going through I had to pay some of the business bills on the Visa, didn’t I? I didn’t realise I’d got so close to the credit. The business is paying some of it off this morning. Or would,’ he added, inspired, ‘if I was there to sign the cheque.’

  She looked at him, unimpressed. ‘I’ll need cash then. Now.’ She held out her hand and he stood up, crouched awkwardly, to get cash out of his back pocket where he always carried a reserve.

  ‘A hundred do?’

  ‘For today. I’ll need to get some food in. And tomorrow I need to put down a term’s fees, or we don’t get Joshua in to Stonefield. That’s £1700. And I don’t want any yes, no or maybe, Brian. We agreed.’

  ‘We did. It’s just this hitch that’s left me a bit short. But you’ll be able to use the Visa tomorrow … well, perhaps not tomorrow,’ he said, reluctantly. ‘Day after, anyway.’ He expected an explosion but she simply poured herself some coffee.

  ‘Explain it to me, Brian. You were buying these restaurants and we were going on the market, so there’d be a lot of extra cash, and you could take more salary. Then this Selina changes her mind, and next thing I hear she’s dead. Then there’s a fire. So what’s going to happen now? You aren’t going to buy a burnt-out place, are you?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not that bad,’ he assured her, grateful that he could offer honest reassurance. ‘And it means the whole place’ll be redecorated and look fresh. No, that’s all right, in fact it may work out better.’

  His daughter came rushing up to show her mother a mud-covered treasure, which she gravely admired, and Brian sat admiring them both, particularly the curve of Janice’s neck above her cotton dress, the blonde hair neatly tied back. She dispatched the child back to the orchard and he watched her with love.

  ‘You and she had something going, didn’t you?’

  He dropped his coffee cup, smashing the saucer, and looked at her, seeing his own shock reflected in her face, understanding that she had not really seriously suspected him. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said, far too late, and she burst into tears of combined rage and shock.

  ‘Pet, I’m sorry.’ He cast around wildly. ‘It was everything got to me, stress, I suppose.’ He looked at her, hopefully, but her face twisted again and he lunged to take her in his arms.

  ‘Bugger off, Brian. You don’t get out of it like that.’ She pushed him away, the rejection absolutely unmistakable, and scrubbed at her eyes. ‘Now, let’s have it, full strength. Do the police know?’

  She was staring at him, as if he were a mess the dog had made.

  ‘You don’t need to look like that, I’m not the first bloke to make an idiot of himself.’

  ‘The other idiots aren’t married to me. I knew there was something wrong, only I never really thought of …’

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything, honestly. She was making difficulties about the sale and I was just trying to jolly her along.’

  ‘And one thing led to another, I suppose,’ she flashed, furiously, and he fell silent; the noise of his children playing seemed to be coming from hundreds of yards away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, humbly, when he thought she might hear him. ‘Even if … well, even if she was still around, I’d have stopped it, soon as you came back.’

  ‘Oh, so now it’s my fault for taking the kids to see my mother?’ She started to cry again, angrily, and he looked desperately towards the children who were still contentedly playing.

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I meant she didn’t matter. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You ought to be ashamed.’

  ‘I am.’

  She looked at him, sharply, and he just managed not to say anything more, biting back anything he might have been going to explain about the tensions of living from day to day, trying to keep all the fucking balls in the air, to keep his business life from crashing around them. She had stopped crying, he saw with relief.

  ‘Who else knows? About her and you?’

  ‘No one. I promise.’ He felt an uneasy pang. ‘Diana may have wondered.’

  ‘But she isn’t going to tell the police. She thinks the sun shines out of your backside.’ The vulgarity was unlike her, but this was not the moment to object.

  ‘They won’t be talking to her, anyway – I mean, she’s nothing to do with Café de la Paix, and they haven’t asked to see her. But Jan, I never lifted a finger to her, though I felt like it sometimes, I can tell you.’ He laughed uneasily, but she was stone-faced.

  ‘The police don’t need to hear anything about it, then.’ She looked across at the garden, alerted by a cry of rage; Annabelle had hit Joshua with a spade and he was retaliating. ‘You go and sort that out, while I wash my face, then you can have them for a change while I go off and do the shopping and get my hair done.’

  ‘So he wasn’t anywhere between, what, 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. on that night?’

  ‘That’s right. He didn’t get to the Turkish baths until three. They put the time on, see, when people come in. And the doorman at the club says he left at one, or one fifteen at the latest. No, he didn’t sneak back in again. He left.’

  ‘He must have known we would check on him,’ John McLeish said, incredulously. ‘Good work, Willis, but it wasn’t that difficult to find the gap.’

  ‘No,’ Detective Sergeant Willis agreed, amicably. ‘Not at all.’

  They all gazed at their copies of Richard Marsh-Hayden’s original statement in which he had claimed to have been at a gambling club until ‘about two’, then gone to the Turkish baths.

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t notice that they write the time down there?’

  ‘Or perhaps he was in a panic and thought he’d just get through,’ McLeish said, grimly. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Try the Caff. Miss Delves will be there, or thereabouts.’

  Davidson reached for a phone and made his enquiry, holding the phone at a little distance from his ear. ‘Mr Marsh-Hayden is with you? In the office?’ He covered the phone. ‘Bring him in?’ McLeish shook his head. ‘Could you, or someone, tell him Detective Chief Superintendent McLeish will be passing the Café shortly and would like a word? Pardon, sorry, Miss Delves, I missed that.’ He winced as he listened, and they could all hear a crash, echoing from the phone. ‘Oh, well, I daresay Mr McLeish will manage. Thank you.’ He put the phone down, pulling at his ear. ‘Out of it. Pissed. Holed up in the office with a bottle. She can’t get him out. Very grateful if we can, she says.’

  John McLeish was outside the Café de la Paix ten minutes later, having told the driver to use the siren to get them through the rush-hour traffic. They pulled up behind a chauffeur-driven Jaguar, which was disgorging Michael Owens, bad temper and anxiety in every line of him. McLeish caught up with him and explained his presence.

  ‘Oh. Well, I’m here because Judith asked for my help in getting Richard out of the office before he smashes it up, or sets it on fire. Fuck. If I’d known you were here and wanted to see him I’d have finished a coup
le of things up before I came. I’m meeting Rubin here, but not till seven thirty.’

  He stood irresolute, hands clenched, and McLeish was reminded that this was a big, powerful man, only a couple of inches short of his own six foot four inches and in much better physical nick, with the controlled restlessness of the fit and well exercised.

  ‘In any case, there’s enough people on site, including Tony Gallagher. I can’t think why Judith couldn’t just … oh, well, yes, I suppose I can, bit tasteless, given that Selina … Sorry, Chief Super-intendent, go ahead – if you need a hand sobering him up, I’m here.’

  They walked through the long room, stepping gingerly to avoid the workers and the piles of material, to be greeted by Judith Delves and Tony Gallagher.

  ‘He’s in the office. I took coffee in but I’m not sure he’s drinking it. He’s got a bottle of whisky with him – I tried to take it, but he snatched it back.’ Judith was sounding harassed.

  ‘You should have asked me, Judy,’ Tony Gallagher said, crossly.

  ‘Well, I didn’t want a fight.’

  This argument had obviously been going on for some time, McLeish noted. ‘May I use the office to talk to Mr Marsh-Hayden?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m not sure how much you’ll get out of him, but you’re welcome. The rest of us are here, using the kitchen phone, if you need us.’

  Richard Marsh-Hayden was sitting, one hand on the bottle, gazing blearily out of the window and was indeed on the edge of sleep, or collapse. McLeish considered him uneasily, and changed his plans; this was the murdered woman’s husband, and an unexplained hour and a half on the night she had disappeared was the stuff of which murder convictions were made, that, and the fact of his access to the key. But any mistakes in handling would leave a loophole big enough for a good barrister to leap into.

  So he cautioned him, and offered him the chance to acquire a solicitor before answering, and Marsh-Hayden waved him away.

  ‘No. I’ll tell you. Been thinking I ought to. I came back here that night. Yeh, one thirty or so, if you say so. Thereabouts. I’ve got a key. Selina’s key.’ He dug in the pockets of his jacket while they sat, unbreathing. He produced two grubby handkerchiefs, a silver hip flask with the top dangling from its chain, a wallet and a Banham key. ‘The door was locked, so I got myself in. No one there. No one in the office.’