‘Murky rather than deep this time,’ Gilchrist said. She dialled Bilson’s mobile number.
‘You still in muddy water, Frank?’ she said when he answered.
‘Definition of my work, Sarah, until my magnificent brain clicks into gear.’
‘And magnificent it is,’ Gilchrist said. ‘So what have you got so far?’
‘Dead man. Throat cut.’
‘That’s the cause of death?’
‘I don’t believe I said that, Sarah.’
Gilchrist groaned. ‘Not again,’ she muttered.
‘You are referring back to the last one,’ Bilson said. ‘I understand that. But, no, not in this instance. Not water anyway. He was badly beaten before his throat was cut. Couple of broken ribs. Bruising.’
‘All there at the lake?’
‘Well, SOCO is looking around the entire lake. They’re going to have to call in a dredger, of course.’
‘And those white containers – could they somehow be involved?’
‘White containers?’ There was silence on the other end of the line.
‘Are you still there?’ Gilchrist said.
‘Sure – covered in carp slime. I can see something white on the other side of the lake. You want me to send SOCO over? Oh, wait. I can see one of them has just arrived there.’
‘See if the containers are linked somehow to the death,’ Gilchrist said.
The silence was so long, Gilchrist thought the signal had gone.
‘Bilson? Frank? Are you still there?’
‘I’m here but I’m trying to figure out how on earth I’m supposed to make that link within my narrow parameters. Isn’t that your job?’
Gilchrist sighed.
‘You’re right, Frank. I’m sorry. It’s been a long day.’
There was another silence then Bilson said: ‘Let’s talk this evening. I’ll bring you up to date with what I’ve figured out.’
Gilchrist looked at Heap. ‘I keep thinking about those white containers and whether they are significant or not. How do you feel about going back to talk to Ms Grace about them.’
‘I feel fine about it, ma’am.’
Francis let them in on the buzzer and as they drove up the drive they saw Nimue Grace plucking apples from one of the trees in her orchard. Gilchrist was surprised she wasn’t wearing something wafty and diaphanous with a big brimmed hat – she’d seen the movies – but Grace was still in jeans and a work shirt and what looked like biker boots.
‘Pull up here, Bellamy,’ Gilchrist said and Heap drew in at a shallow lay-by beside a half completed wall.
Grace noticed them as they got out of the car and called out:
‘Be careful there – the ground is very uneven.’ She started towards them as they picked their way up a small mound with broken bricks sticking out of it. Gilchrist saw Grace brush her upraised hand against a low hanging branch of one of the trees. Several apples fell and, without even looking at them, she caught two, one in each hand.
They met beside what looked like a pear tree.
‘Good catch,’ Gilchrist said as Grace handed her and Heap the apples she’d caught.
‘Did a juggling course at drama school,’ Grace said. ‘These are the best eaters I’ve got. It’s been a good year. Go on – take a bite.’
Gilchrist and Heap both did. The apples were sweet and fragrant. A mobile phone rang back in the car. Heap patted his pockets then excused himself and went back to the car.
‘Nice – thank you,’ Gilchrist said.
‘Take some, if you have time to pick some – I can give you trays.’
‘I don’t think we’ll have time,’ Gilchrist said.
‘Lunch was very nice, by the way,’ Grace said. ‘Interesting, decent man, that Bob Watts. Therefore, not my type. Why would I want anyone like that when I can get a shit who will treat me like shit?’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Pathetic, eh?’
‘I couldn’t claim to have any insight into relationships, Ms Grace,’ Gilchrist said, feeling awkward. Then, not believing she was being so revealing: ‘Mine have all been disasters.’
‘Including the one with Bob Watts?’ Grace saw the look on Gilchrist’s face. ‘You think he told me? Are you kidding? A man with that much probity? I guessed it. If you don’t mind me saying, Sarah, I’m sure you’re a good copper but I can’t imagine you’re any good at interrogation because you can’t keep stuff off your face. You might as well be the one writing the confession.’
Jesus, how had Gilchrist got herself having a relatively intimate conversation with someone who may prove central to a murder investigation? She glanced back at Heap, who was talking into his phone in the car. Well, maybe because she didn’t think Nimue Grace was a suspect. So, in for a penny … ‘I wrecked Bob’s career,’ Gilchrist said quietly.
‘Bullshit. He wrecked his own career. Don’t take that on yourself, whatever happened – and I’ve no idea what happened. He doesn’t seem like the kind of man who can be easily led.’
Gilchrist didn’t say anything, just kind of nodded. Grace pointed at the pear tree. ‘These look beautiful but they’re as hard as rocks. They need cooking for about an hour then … deliciosa …’
‘We wondered about the lake,’ Gilchrist said abruptly, trying to get the conversation back on track. ‘Those white containers on the opposite side to the island.’
Grace frowned. ‘I don’t know about any white containers. Probably somebody dumping stuff. They do it all the time. I don’t understand people. They go to such a beautiful place and despoil it.’
‘They were tied in place. We wondered if they contained some kind of chemicals for your lake.’
Grace shook her head. ‘I have it tested every so often to ensure I’m not swimming in sewage but there’s no regular treatment. Tied together, do you say?’
‘When you drained the lake they weren’t tied to rotting wooden struts on the far side of the lake?’
‘That was once a small boathouse, I understand. No, they definitely were not.’
‘And nobody working for you would have put them there to do with upkeep of the lake or anything?’
‘I told you – I do hardly any upkeep of the lake. Why, what was in these containers? How many were there?’
‘We’re not exactly sure of the number,’ Gilchrist said. ‘And we’re still investigating what might have been in them.’
‘What is in the ones that are still there?’ Grace said.
‘Nothing as far as we can tell,’ Heap said as he joined them.
‘But they didn’t float? I don’t understand.’
‘Neither do we at the moment,’ Gilchrist said. ‘With your permission we’d like to get them moved and analysed.’
Gilchrist was still puzzling over how unusually frank she was being. Was this what star power was or some kind of movie star effect? Or was it just that she was repaying Grace’s frankness with her own?
Grace frowned again. ‘You think they are somehow connected to the death at my lake?’
Gilchrist showed her palms. ‘In a murder investigation we have to spread the net wide.’
‘Really? I thought most murders were committed by people very close to the victim.’
‘Except those that aren’t,’ Heap said.
Grace looked at him with her big clear eyes and raised one of her famous eyebrows. ‘I can’t decide if that is quite profound or stating the obvious, DS Heap.’
He flushed. ‘I often have the same problem, Ms Grace,’ Heap said. ‘It seems as if several of the containers have been removed. Not by you though, from what you say.’
‘That’s right. I’m not guilty.’
‘Mr Kermode, perhaps?’
‘You’d have to ask him.’
‘Indeed, Ms Grace. You said you didn’t like Major Rabbitt. Was that just because he was bothering you or was there more?’
‘Bothering me. Haven’t heard that expression for a long time. Well, men have been bothering me and pestering me for sex from the age of about twelve. And then i
n Hollywood, of course, I was immediately chased by all those infamous creeps and womanizers.
‘There were these two major male movie stars. Top of the pile. Known as much for their womanizing as their acting. Great friends. They wanted to do a film together. A Howard Hughes project – it never happened. It bore no relation to the Marty/Leo collaboration that came out about Howard Hughes many years later. So I go to the house of one of them on Mulholland for a meeting/audition for one of the female leads and I’m directed by the butler down to the tennis court. The two men are in their whites playing in the heat of a Los Angeles afternoon. And that’s hot.
‘“Take a seat,” one of them yells when he sees me coming. “We won’t be long.”
‘Except they are long because these are two competitive men. And it’s really hot and there’s no shade and I don’t have a hat. They finish after about half an hour and come off the court towelling the sweat off them. The one whose house I’m at points to these cabin changing rooms. “We’re going to shower this sweat off,” he says. He looks me up and down and that glint comes into his eye and he gives me his famous shit-eating grin. “You’re hot,” he drawls, the double meaning hanging in the air. “Why don’t you join us?”
‘I smile nervously, as if he’s my granddad – which he’s old enough to be. “I’m fine right here.”’ She shrugged. ‘I didn’t get the part. I’ve never gone for threesomes. I disagree with Woody Allen on that. Oh, not in the way everyone is disagreeing with him about something else these days. I mean his gag: “Sex between two people is great; sex between three is fantastic.” And, actually, despite what the press used to say, when I was young and a bit of a blabbermouth, I’ve been very choosy about simple twosomes too. In that I’ve only ever chosen badly.’
Her Woody Allen impersonation wasn’t half bad.
‘So, no. I’ve been bothered by professionals, so to speak, therefore the Major’s unwelcome advances just needed a fly swat. It was the fact he had delusions of grandeur about being the lord of the manor that was the problem.’
‘To you personally or generally?’
‘Well, certainly to me because I have the jewel in the crown of his estate – the lake. I bought the lake fifteen years before he got here but when he got here and bought the estate he decided it could never be complete without the lake, the watercress beds and the woods right in its centre. But I have never had any intention of selling. It’s for me and my children and their children and so on.’
‘And this peeved him?’ Gilchrist asked.
‘I should say,’ Grace said. ‘Especially as I have no children and am unlikely to have them now unless I adopt. I’ve got an email from him saying that as long as I own the lake and wood there will always be antagonism between us. So he tried to put the kibosh on everything I tried to do. He would threaten to go to the redtops with stories about how this famous movie star and supposed environmentalist was wrecking an area of outstanding beauty. Which was bollocks, of course.’
‘Do you know Liesl Rabbitt?’
‘The harpy? Yes, I have that misfortune. A hard-faced, nasty piece of work. I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of her – though I probably already have.’
Gilchrist responded only by saying: ‘Do you know if there’s anyone in Rabbitt’s life now?’
‘I would imagine so. He’s rich. It’s surprising what character flaws women will overlook for money. Have you not been up to the Big House yet?’
‘Yes, but his sister was not very forthcoming.’
‘Tallulah? I always think of her as Mrs Danvers. Seething passions underneath a cold exterior.’
Gilchrist didn’t respond except to give a little nod. ‘Thanks again for the offer of the apples,’ she said, getting back into the car. Grace watched them go, then walked back into her orchard.
Gilchrist looked at Heap as they drove carefully along the winding lane. ‘Home, James.’
TWO
Bob Watts, Brighton Police Commissioner, had enjoyed his encounter with the movie star. Lovely woman, in every sense. He’d won morning coffee with her at a raffle for some charity at a dinner at the Royal Pavilion. He’d had no idea who she was – he wasn’t a film-goer and she wasn’t actually at the dinner – but he wanted to support the cause. The meeting had been sorted out by email through the charity.
He’d googled her before their appointment – he thought of it as an appointment – but at the end of his reading he was not much wiser. She’d made a lot of big and small films but he hadn’t seen any of them. More recently she’d done theatre, often in Chichester. She was anti-fracking in Sussex. She supported a number of charities, some eminently worthwhile, some, he thought, a little cranky. The link between liberal actors and half-baked movements usually had a certain mathematical correlation but not in her case.
He could see that she had been stupidly frank in interviews. She was now stuck with her openness and indiscreet words for ever on the web. The one thing she’d kept shtum about was her reason for leaving Hollywood so abruptly at the height of her fame to go into seclusion.
When they’d parted she’d repeated her offer for him to swim at the lake whenever he wanted, as long as he alerted her to the fact in case there were other things going on there. She had given him her phone number.
He was attracted to her, there was no doubt about that – but then who wouldn’t be? He’d pulled the plug on his last romantic entanglement before there was, in fact, any entanglement. Nice enough woman but too young for him and a coldness to her. Nimue Grace was more his age. And totally out of his class, of course. Yet a part of him wondered if she’d really given him her phone number only so that he could visit the lake. He’d have to phone and find out.
Watts was bored. He liked to think he was a man of action, although the last action he’d done hadn’t worked out so well. Swimming alongside his niece, Kate Simpson, to support her in her Channel swim attempt had seemed doable. And indeed it would have been had an unfortunate coalescence of bad things not prevented the swim’s completion. For one, the scars from the jellyfish stings would probably never disappear.
Mostly it was the weather – it had been terrible once they started. Even then he felt she could have made it but it was the pilot who was in control because he was in touch with the coastguard services of both England and France. It had been tough going for her anyway but she was a tough-minded young woman and, all else being equal, would never have given up until she stepped onto the beach at Cap Gris.
But the pilot had decided to stop them three miles off France. The tide was changing, the current would be running counter to their progress for the next eight hours; the weather was already scooping up the water into huge, rebellious waves.
So – she didn’t achieve her ambition. Kate, he knew, had been planning to try again. Then her mother committed suicide.
Watts hadn’t seen her mother, Lizzy Simpson, for years but when he was close to her husband, William Simpson, he saw her a lot. He found her frosty, aloof and ambitious. He had no idea why she had left Simpson, aside from the obvious fact he was a total shit. But, with hindsight, Watts recognized that she would know Simpson had always been a total shit and she had accepted that from the start of their marriage.
Watts had not really expected Lizzy to be on board the Channel swim support boat – he would have been astonished if she had been – but nor did he expect her to kill herself. She had never struck him as the suicidal type. But it was some years since he’d seen her and she had changed dramatically around the time of the Milldean Massacre. She had always put up a front but around that time she added fortifications and a drawbridge.
Leaving her husband, Watts’s erstwhile friend, William Simpson, was a positive act, he’d thought, as indeed was divorcing that corrupt man. But it hadn’t seemed to make her any happier; it had just given her an excuse to withdraw even more.
He thought about his own wife, Molly, living in Canada with another man. He’d treated her badly but it still seemed extreme th
at she wouldn’t have anything more to do with him, but there it was. His relationship with his two children was equally disastrous. Not so much the elder of them, his son. It was just that, like most young men with anything about them, he was on his own trajectory. And that involved living on the other side of the world and rarely keeping in touch.
It was his daughter he felt he had lost. She was married to a fundamentalist Christian and was following a path he couldn’t approve of but couldn’t do anything about. She seemed happy but in that false smile, false cheerfulness, Polly-Anna way cults gave all their followers. She too lived in Canada now but on the opposite side of the country to her mother in some religious camp that sounded horribly like a cult.
Watts sighed and poured himself a glass of wine. He walked to the window and called over his shoulder: ‘Alexa? Madeleine Peyroux, please.’
Sarah Gilchrist’s phone rang just as she was hurrying through the Lanes to the Hotel du Vin to meet Kate Simpson.
‘Those white containers, Sarah,’ Bilson said.
‘Yes, what have you got for me, Mr Bilson?’
‘Nothing to report, I’m afraid. Nothing in them. I can only assume they were used as some kind of ballast.’
‘Well, except Ms Grace says she didn’t put them there. And I thought ballast was supposed to make things float not sink.’
‘Good point,’ Bilson said. ‘But another one: you believe the delectable Ms Grace? Is she delectable in person, by the way?’
‘Down, Frank. For the moment I do.’
‘OK, then – they were there before she bought the lake maybe?’ Bilson said.
‘She had it dredged when she first bought it. They weren’t there. Somebody has anchored them there since. Secured them pretty efficiently. But why?’
‘If I were to hazard a guess I’d say drugs. Or drug money.’
‘We’ve just been discussing county line drug trafficking with Haywards Heath district and I thought it might be linked with that.’
‘But the containers were sealed so this is not a regular drop. But this actually is outside my area of expertise, Sarah. You think Ms Grace might be involved?’
The Lady of the Lake Page 5