by Janet Neel
I have still not quite understood, she thought bleakly, how much he hates the restaurants, or how unwilling he is for me to go on working. And I am not ready to deal with all that this entails, not now. She felt the easy tears of exhaustion start, and it did the trick, he fussed over her and poured tea, and she agreed not to go anywhere near the restaurant, but to go instead and have a quiet dinner cooked by someone else at somewhere solid, exquisite and expensive like the Connaught.
‘Terrible thing. Poor Judith’s having a very bad time.’ Brian Rubin was sincere in his concern, McLeish saw, interested. It must be to his advantage that Judith Delves should be driven into a position where she had no option but to sell, but he was nonetheless distressed for her. Or perhaps he had given up his pursuit of the Café de la Paix and was now pursuing some other goal. He asked the question cautiously.
‘No, no, no, no. Which is why I’m very glad to see you. The police, I mean. I don’t know whether anyone’s told you, but Richard’s death means I own his shares. They were charged to me in return for a loan. And perhaps Selina’s too, the lawyers are looking at it.’
McLeish just managed not to gape at him. ‘Does Miss Delves know?’
‘I told her, and Michael. I wasn’t sure she’d quite taken it in, I know what it’s like when you’re doing an opening.’
‘Tell me why Mrs Marsh-Hayden’s shares are involved.’
‘Left to Richard in her will, you see, and the deed covers all shares owned by him. Mind, I wouldn’t push it and I wouldn’t try and get Selina’s shares for free, that wouldn’t be right, but well, how shall I put it, it’d be difficult for them to be sold to anyone else. If you see what I mean.’
McLeish did, and considered his man carefully. He was indeed looking less harassed, and he had had a haircut, in McLeish’s personal experience an important sign of personal organisation. But the signs of financial pressure were still there; he and Davidson had been admitted to the office only after scrutiny and the weary secretary on the switchboard was still telling all callers either that Mr Rubin had just stepped out, or that he was in a meeting.
‘In a way it doesn’t help,’ Rubin said, reading his mind disconcertingly. ‘Unless I can get everyone to agree I can’t go to the market and complete the deal.’
‘Everyone, including Miss Delves?’
‘Yeh. My financial advisers, so-called, say that because of all the publicity we can only do it if everyone is signed up and saying it’s the best thing to do. Before all this, see, we could perhaps have afforded to have Judith not too keen, but having to give up. Now she’s got to be keen. Which she isn’t.’
The man was still, however you looked at it, more cheerful despite this gloomily realistic recital. Presumably, despite his genuine concern for Judith Delves, he expected the loss of Tony Gallagher to be the final crushing blow, which would lead her to the endorsement of any sale.
‘We are, of course, asking everyone for a statement of where they were from eleven o’clock onwards last night.’
‘I thought you would be. Violence isn’t my style, Chief Superintendent, I thought you knew me better than that by now. Mind, although in theory I would willingly have killed Judith, or Selina, the problem always was I wouldn’t have been able to do it when push came to shove. And I certainly wouldn’t have taken on Tony Gallagher, he’s bigger than I am.’ He gazed, wide-eyed, at McLeish. ‘And, as I should have said first off, I was at a charity do last night, on a table with the mayor and the headmaster of the school my son’s going to. Left there just before one and got home about one thirty. In St Albans, this is.’
Given that Tony Gallagher had been coshed at 1.25 a.m. that was conclusive. But at the team meeting an hour earlier they had all agreed that the attack on Tony Gallagher was not necessarily linked to the murder of Selina Marsh-Hayden; it could well have been an intruder bent on theft who had felled Tony Gallagher. But another piece of evidence that most definitely linked the cheerful man in front of him to the late Selina Marsh- Hayden had also come to light that morning.
‘We’d also like to ask you about your relationship with Selina Marsh-Hayden, and I want you to consider your answers carefully.’ He had, as he had intended, changed the atmosphere in the room and Brian Rubin was suddenly very still.
‘What do you mean?’ It came out husky, and he cleared his throat.
‘Were you having an affair with her?’
Brian Rubin opened his mouth, looked at them, and understood it was too late. ‘Fuck.’ He scrubbed his face with his hands, trying for composure, the policemen sitting absolutely still. ‘I suppose it was the letter. I thought at the time, never write, but … but, well, she liked that, see.’
He looked over at McLeish, who kept his face straight, but only just. None of the four letters from three different men found in the red file was in Brian Rubin’s handwriting. This had surprised the team not a little, since admirably thorough investigation work had turned up Rubin’s credit card records for the last four months and established that most of them related to purchases at Harvey Nichols, or Gucci, or Harrods. The next bit had been easy, the detective sergeant who had done the work assured the team, everyone at Harvey Nichols knew Mrs Marsh-Hayden, didn’t they? And doubt-less derived both profit and amusement over the years from the men she had brought in to buy her clothes, the team had agreed.
‘Does your wife know about her?’
Davidson had decided his boss was winded, evidently.
‘Now she does. She guessed. But she doesn’t know I wrote a letter.’ He looked at McLeish pleadingly. ‘Will they … I mean, will they … well I expect you’ve seen it all before.’
McLeish agreed mentally that those letters he had read were indeed not outside his experience, but graphic written descriptions of intended sexual activity are not that unusual in a policeman’s life. Unless Brian Rubin’s as yet undiscovered letter contained something very different, of course.
‘Yeh, but look.’ Brian Rubin, though chagrined, was recovering strongly. ‘I didn’t kill her. Never lifted a hand to a woman, ever. It was just a bit of fun.’ He looked at them. ‘I mean, she wasn’t threatening me.’ His voice changed on the sentence, and McLeish looked in enquiry. ‘Yeh, well, no, I mean …’ He stopped. ‘I want to talk to my solicitor.’
‘By all means. Ring him up now.’
Brian Rubin made to get up, then sat down again. ‘Oh shit,’ he said, from the heart, and they watched him struggle with himself. ‘She wanted a better deal for herself,’ he said, finally, looking at the table, hands clenched. ‘She’d agreed to the sale, but she wanted to get some little extras out of it. She was pissed off with Richard, because he was broke and always telling her she couldn’t have things. And that rang a bell, and all, I’ve had a bit of that from Janice. My wife. So I gave Selina what I could, clothes, meals out and, well, one thing led to another, as they say. Then it turns out that she wants a directorship in the Group – my company – with a three-year rolling contract. That means she’d always get three years’ notice, and I promised her that. In what circumstances I would think you could imagine.’
McLeish just stopped himself from nodding sympathetically.
‘But I couldn’t deliver, could I? The brokers who are doing the float said no contracts, there’s all these committees, Greenbury, Cadbury, Banbury – no, that can’t be right, can it? – but threeyear rolling contracts are out of order apparently. I mean, even I couldn’t have one and it’s my group. Neither the institutions nor the non-executive directors would have it.’
McLeish nodded; he was on familiar ground here. It had been Francesca’s employers, the Department of Trade and Industry who had initially been responsible for organising the Cadbury Committee on Corporate Covenance. In order, she had explained, to keep corporate snouts out of the trough, or at least to achieve a situation where shareholders could shoulder their way in alongside. Ironic that the very feminine Selina Marsh-Hayden should have run into a heavy-duty structure designed to corral the wor
st excesses of senior Corporate Man.
‘So I had to tell her no. She thought I was bullshitting her and she told me she wouldn’t sell. So I lost my temper. I told her she was a bloody fool and couldn’t run a business, and I told her Gallagher was ripping them off. Which he was, by the way, and I can make a pretty good guess how and where. There could be a few people wanted to hit him over the head, I tell you. Anyway.’
He fell silent, lost in some disagreeable memory, so that finally McLeish had to prompt him.
‘Yeh, right. Sorry. So then she flounces out, leaving me in a right state and with £8000 of bills on the plastic, but I don’t see her again until we have that meeting the day of the night she went missing. And you know about that.’
One of the things they knew, of course, McLeish reflected, was that Brian Rubin had no alibi for the hours between eleven thirty and about seven o’clock the next day, when he had bought a paper on his way to work, Mrs Rubin being absent with her mother at the time.
‘Where was my letter, can I ask?’ Rubin was watching him carefully and he looked back expressionless. Rubin sighed. ‘I was hoping, see, that Richard hadn’t … well, hadn’t found it. I liked him. He was a complete bloody fool with money – yeh, well, I know what you’re thinking’ – McLeish was not aware his face had moved – ‘but I’ll get through this patch, you’ll see, and he wasn’t going to get through. Even if the sale had gone through he’d have been broke again in six months.’ He broke off and visibly recalled where he had started the speech and what he had meant to say. ‘But he was a nice bloke and I felt fucking terrible when he topped himself. I’d just … well I’d be happier if it couldn’t have been because of … well, a letter I wrote.’
He looked at them pleadingly, but they both gazed back stone-faced. The truth was that his worst fears were probably justified even if it was not his letter that had been involved. The most likely scenario was that Richard, encamped with a bottle in the office on Monday, with everyone too busy, or too exasperated, to go near him, had found the red file of letters that his wife had been keeping and made himself thoroughly wretched. Bruce Davidson and a Special Branch sergeant had stood over Forensic, chivvying them. The man from the Special Branch had been carrying a file with specimens of his royal client’s eccentric and sprawling handwriting and it had not taken long to establish that he had not written any of the four. ‘At least he’s got that much sense,’ the man had observed dourly. Analysis of the file’s contents revealed that they were all letters to Selina Marsh-Hayden, but only four spoke of love or assignation. The rest were ordinary correspondence going back to the date of her marriage: letters from girlfriends, from her mother, and notes from her brothers. But the four would have made unhappy reading for her husband; as Brian Rubin had observed, the letters were recent and all described very varied sexual activities, though mercifully very little to suggest a particular interest in sado-masochism. While two of them they had been able to identify quickly, two correspondents remained mysteries, but they matched none of the specimens of shareholders’ handwriting collected from documents at the Café de la Paix – neither Tony Gallagher, nor Michael Owens, were the authors. Brian Rubin had also at that earlier stage been eliminated; a specimen of his handwriting was available in a note to Judith. Specimens of handwriting were now being sought from every man employed in the group, their style and content rendering it clear that the authorship had to be male. McLeish had wondered how he would have felt stumbling on a similar file after the death of his wife, but imagination had failed to sustain Francesca urging on a series of lovers to such essays of fancy. Or indeed, he had reminded himself, of him actually getting to the point of strangling her no matter how furious he was.
The best theory, the one which covered most of the known facts and made emotional sense, was that Richard Marsh-Hayden had murdered his wife, whether out of rage at her sexual peccadilloes – and he could well have found the red file at an earlier stage, read its contents and left it there to come back to – or fury at her refusal to sell, or a combination of both. And then, suffering from grief, regret and guilt, had either found these letters, or rubbed salt into his wounds by disinterring and rereading them, it didn’t much matter which, and decided to end his own life.
‘How many letters did you write in all, Mr Rubin?’
‘Just the one.’
Well, one might have got lost but equally it was possible that there were more letters they had not yet found, more recent than the four they had.
‘And when did you write it?’
‘What – two months ago. Then I remembered, didn’t I, that writing is dangerous. So I never wrote another. She didn’t mind that much, she liked getting the letter, but a trip to Harvey Nicks did just as well, really.’
McLeish looked sideways at Davidson and was reassured to see that he was finding this explanation convincing. He sat and thought, ignoring Rubin’s fidgeting; at least one letter was missing and must for the case’s sake be found. The team would need to go back to Café de la Paix and take the place apart if necessary. His conscience was clear about not telling Brian Rubin immediately that his letter had not been found; the secondary evidence from the credit cards would have been good enough, and in any case the man had not sought to deny an affair.
They got the formal statement organised and he left Bruce to deal with the typing and the signatures. He had a driver waiting and was intending to get home for family supper when he got a call from St Thomas’s, which caused him to collect Bruce and abandon all intention of going home.
‘I gather we’re lucky to be able to talk to you at all, but thank you for seeing us.’
A half-closed suspicious eye was slanted at them from underneath a sizeable bandage which covered Tony Gallagher’s head and his left eye. ‘Well, I knew you wasn’t going to go away, didn’t I? But I don’t remember a fucking thing, not after I come into the Caff. What day is it now?’
‘Friday evening,’ McLeish said, watching his man carefully. He sat on a chair on one side of the bed, his view severely obstructed by a set of tubes and wires plugged into Gallagher’s head, chest and arm. Davidson was arranged uncomfortably just behind him, and Matthew Sutherland, who appeared to have been woken from a deep sleep, was seated on the other side of the bed, trying not to scratch.
McLeish and Davidson had been forbidden to stay more than twenty minutes, or to press their witness. Tony Gallagher’s swift recovery from unconsciousness had surprised his doctors. It had been, as a member of the surgical team had explained, one hell of a clout – a technical term, no doubt, as Davidson had observed – but a thick skull and a strong constitution combined with the latest medical technology looked like ensuring that Gallagher would be fine if carefully nursed and watched for complications. He was severely bruised, his right eye was closed but the swelling under the skull was dissipating nicely.
‘No matter,’ McLeish said, calmly. ‘Anything you remember now or later could be useful, but don’t struggle. You had a young woman with you, who raised the alarm.’
‘I don’t remember her.’ The other eye had closed, definitively, and McLeish sighed inwardly. If Gallagher had really forgotten the girl he had been with then he was worse off than all had feared. He looked thoughtfully at Matthew Sutherland who was watching his client.
‘Tony,’ Matt said, suppressing a huge yawn, ‘can I just tell you Jean-Pierre resigned this morning and went back to France. Took Maria with him.’
The eye opened again and fixed itself on his lawyer. ‘Oh. Right. Well, yeh, it was Maria with me, we’d been having a drink.’ He hesitated, looked sideways at McLeish. ‘We came in,’ he continued, finding a formula, ‘didn’t we, just to see everything was all right. Then I heard a noise and told her to stay where she was and I started up the stairs and that really is the last thing I remember.’
‘Nothing after that?’ McLeish asked, carefully.
‘No. Honest. I lie here trying to think and it’s all gone.’ A tear escaped from the eye they
could see, and he coughed while they watched him anxiously. ‘Christ, that hurt.’ He was moving fretfully, and Matthew Sutherland put a large hand gently on his arm.
‘S’all right, Tony, don’t sweat it. It’ll come back.’
‘Yeh. Can you get the nurse back? She said if it hurt to call her.’
Matthew reached for the buzzer on the bedhead and McLeish noticed how neatly he avoided the tubes and wires while still gently holding Gallagher’s arm.
‘We’ll go,’ McLeish said, quietly. He had seen enough head injuries to know that the man wasn’t faking it and that any strain risked destabilising him. He backed out, avoiding tubes, and he and Davidson made for the door, standing aside for the incoming nurse. He glanced back; Tony Gallagher was even paler than when they had arrived, tossing uneasily, but Matthew Sutherland was steady as a rock, matter-of-factly helping the nurse with the drip while talking soothingly to his client. They repaired to the hospital canteen, an enormous, fundamentally inhospitable room done out in shades of green and yellow, with three heavily overweight women behind the counter. But the tea was strong and hot and the Danish pastries fresh, and they found themselves a quiet corner.
‘Not much joy there,’ Bruce Davidson observed.
‘No. Sorry to have kept you.’
He stirred his tea. ‘Nae bother. Now, Wednesday evening, we reckoned that the perpetrator was dead. You were a wee bit doubtful but that was the general view. Mine too,’ he added, stolidly.
‘But then we found those letters. Which could widen the field, if she – Selina – was using them. As she was with Mr Rubin.’
‘It wasna the letters she was using there,’ Davidson objected. ‘It was herself, by his account. I mean they were in full swing. He couldn’t get enough of it.’ He took a huge bite of his pastry.
‘That’s true. But those four letters – I had them typed up to make life a bit easier.’ He reached inside the old climbing jacket, which Francesca didn’t like him to wear in London, and handed over several folded bits of paper. ‘Look at the dates.’