The old man laughed. ‘Then she will have used another word – perhaps one not quite so stark. What was it? Doolally?’
Crane joined in with his laughter. ‘Yes, it was,’ he admitted.
‘She’s a good girl, but she can’t tell the difference between a loony and an eccentric,’ Wicks said. ‘I myself am an eccentric.’
‘I gathered that,’ Crane said.
‘I see the world differently to the way most people see it,’ Wicks told him, ‘and sometimes, if it doesn’t make sense, I retell it, so it does. My world is a much more exciting one, but also, I like to think, a much kinder one.’ He paused. ‘Perhaps I was being unfair to June, earlier. There is a very narrow line between loony and eccentric, you see, and sometimes I topple over and fall on the wrong side of it.’
‘You’re a poet,’ Crane said, with genuine admiration.
‘Am I?’ the old man asked. ‘I must admit, I don’t recall ever writing any poetry.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Crane said dismissively. ‘It’s what you are, and you can’t do anything about it.’
And what you’re supposed to be, said a voice in his head, is a policeman.
He cleared his throat. There was no real need to, but it made him feel more official.
‘Could you tell me about your next-door neighbours?’ he asked.
Mr Wicks nodded. ‘Arthur Wheatstone didn’t speak to other people, unless they spoke to him first, and even then, he’d only grunt. I used to think he was angry with life in general, and then I learned that was not so.’
‘How did you learn it?’
‘I needed new glasses, and June took me into Whitebridge. We went to a pub, and he was sitting at a table at the other end of the room. He was with a group of people, and he was laughing and joking. So, you see, it wasn’t life he hated, it was life in this village.’
‘So why did he live here?’
‘I don’t know.’ Wicks looked around him. ‘Some people say he was murdered and some people say he killed himself. Which was it?’
‘He was murdered.’
‘I thought so.’
‘Why?’
‘Because through suicide, he would be robbing the world of a most wonderful person.’
‘You don’t have a very high opinion of him yourself, do you?’ Crane asked.
The old man shrugged. ‘How could I possibly have a high opinion of pond scum?’
‘So tell me about Mrs Wheatstone,’ Crane suggested.
‘She changes form,’ Wicks said, ‘though whether that is through her own power or because of some spell he cast on her, I cannot say.’
‘What forms does she take?’
‘She has been a cat, and once she was an owl, but mostly she takes the form of her own kind.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I have seen her transformed into a tall, dark woman, a short blonde woman, and a woman who was neither tall nor short and had red hair.’
‘When do these transformations occur?’
‘At night, when everyone is asleep.’
Crane smiled. ‘So if everyone is asleep, how do you know about them?’
‘Everyone but me, I should have said! June will not let me out on my own, because she is worried that I’d wander off or fall into a river and drown. And maybe she’s right. So I always have her with me when I leave the house in the daytime.’
‘But at night … when everyone is asleep?’
‘I have a key that June does not know about. I do not go far. Some nights I will walk a little way up the street, other nights I will stay in the back garden. It is being able to go out when I want to that is important.’
‘I understand that,’ Crane said.
‘It is when I am in the garden that I see her in a new shape. When she is the owl, she perches on a tree at the end of the garden and hoots. When she is the cat, she prowls the garden. Once, to show me just how confident she was, she brushed up against my leg.’
‘What about when she takes the form of another woman?’ Crane wondered.
‘She always does that in the house. And sometimes – though this is never my intention – I see her naked flesh.’
‘Must there be certain conditions in order for these transformations to take place?’ Crane asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, must there be a full moon, or is it always when the moon is new?’
‘It has nothing to do with the moon.’
‘Then it must just be random.’
The old man shook his head. ‘It cannot be random because life is patterns and patterns are life,’ he said. ‘We talk of the circle of life … the circle of life … life in a circle …’
‘Don’t upset yourself,’ said Crane, feeling an uneasy combination of guilt and alarm. ‘It’s not important. It really doesn’t matter.’
‘Yes, there is a pattern,’ the old man said triumphantly. ‘Of course there is a pattern. I was a fool not to see it earlier.’
‘What is it?’ Crane asked.
‘The transformation cannot take place while her car is in the village!’ the old man told him.
FOURTEEN
There were two armchairs in John Horrocks’ living room, but no sofa. One of the armchairs was occupied by Philip Jennings. He did not look entirely comfortable in it, but that was hardly surprising, Meadows thought, because he was probably around six feet five tall – and a lot of that was leg. He was wearing lemon-coloured trousers and a lemon V-neck sweater, with nothing on underneath it.
‘Well, don’t both you boys look smart – and on a Saturday morning, too,’ she said, once Horrocks had performed the introductions.
Many middle-aged men would have taken umbrage at the comment, but Meadows had guessed they’d be pleased, rather than annoyed, and she could see that she was right.
‘Why don’t you sit in John’s chair, Kate,’ Jennings suggested.
‘Yes, why not,’ Horrocks countered. ‘I can always sit cross-legged on the floor, can’t I?’
Jennings laughed. ‘Or you could fetch a straight-backed chair from the dining room, while you’re waiting for the coffee to percolate.’
‘So what did your last slave die of?’ Horrocks asked, and gave a little chuckle himself.
Meadows sat down in the proffered chair. ‘What can you tell me about Arthur Wheatstone?’ she asked Jennings.
‘Very little,’ Jennings said. ‘You see, we may all have worked on the same Project with a capital P, but there were different projects within it, so we didn’t overlap.’
‘Oh come on!’ Horrocks called from the kitchen. ‘You can surely do better than that!’
‘I don’t like to speak ill of the dead,’ Jennings mumbled.
‘I didn’t hear that,’ Horrocks said. ‘Would you mind repeating it?’
‘I said, I don’t like to speak ill of the dead,’ Jennings said loudly.
‘There’s no need to shout,’ Horrocks told him. He walked back into the lounge carrying a tray. ‘You don’t like to speak ill of the living, either – and have you any idea how infuriating that can be?’ He placed the tray down on the coffee table next to Meadows. ‘Help yourself to cream and sugar.’
Meadows poured herself a black coffee and took a sip. Some of her colleagues (I’m looking at you, Colin Beresford! she thought) would expect any coffee John Horrocks made to be weak and feeble, but they’d be wrong.
‘Excellent coffee, John,’ she said. ‘And am I right in thinking that if I’d asked you the question I asked Philip, I’d have got a different answer?’
‘You are,’ Horrocks agreed. ‘Arthur Wheatstone was a complete prick.’
‘In what way was he a prick?’
‘In what way wasn’t he?’ Horrocks asked. ‘He was as unpleasant as he could be to everyone he came into contact with—’
‘To every man he came into contact with,’ Jennings interrupted.
‘I stand corrected – to every man he came into contact with. It was as if he always
needed to show them who was top dog.’
‘It was calculated unpleasantness,’ Jennings said. ‘He’d work out where you were weakest, and go for it.’
‘How was he unpleasant to you?’
‘He said I was so tall I was a freak – and there was no other word to describe me. He said that all John’s friends had already noticed it, and that when he noticed it himself –’ he buried his head in his hands – ‘he would leave me.’
Horrocks put his hand on Jennings’ shoulder. ‘There, there,’ he cooed softly, ‘we both know that is never going to happen.’
‘What did he say to you?’ Meadows asked Horrocks.
‘He used a variation on the same theme. He said gay relationships never lasted, so I could look forward to dying alone.’
‘But he was different with women?’
‘Oh yes,’ Horrocks said. ‘While he was chasing them, he treated them like goddesses.’
‘But once he’d finished with them, they didn’t really exist as far as he was concerned. He couldn’t even make the effort to be nasty to them.’
So there was plenty of motive there, Meadows thought – the only problem was that this just didn’t feel like a woman’s crime.
‘Anything else?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know what his work on the project is like – it’s presumably all right, or he’d have been fired by now – but we have an allotment, you see, and—’
‘Wait a minute,’ Meadows said, ‘you two have an allotment?’
Horrocks frowned, and then the frown changed into something closer to regret.
‘I had great expectations of you, Kate,’ he said, ‘but when push comes to shove, you’ll go with all the old clichés, won’t you?’
Shit, shit, shit! Meadows thought.
‘It was a temporary slip,’ she told him. ‘Please give me another chance.’
Horrocks nodded. ‘You were nice about my coffee, so why not? Some people think it’s strange that people who design the weapons of war should have an allotment, but we don’t. You can’t do any harm with a radish, and all a spring onion can do is bring you pleasure.’
‘You were going to tell Kate about Arthur Wheatstone’s allotment,’ Philip Jennings said.
‘Yes, that’s right. If somebody reports that your allotment isn’t up to standard, then you’re called to appear before the committee …’
‘The secretary of which happens to be …’ Jennings said with a smile and a sweeping gesture of his arm.
‘The secretary of which happens to be me,’ Horrocks said, in a voice beloved of self-martyrs since the dawn of time. ‘All right, I know. If there’s a committee anywhere, I’m probably on it.’ He paused to draw breath. ‘Anyway, Arthur Wheatstone came up before the committee, and he was as awkward as you might have expected him to be. It’s my allotment, he said, I can do what I want with it. No, you can’t, we told him. If your allotment’s deemed to fall below standard, we can take it off you. Well, he said, we could try, and he laughed in our faces. But he stopped laughing when I showed him the Act of Parliament that gives us the power to do just that.’
‘But did he pull his socks up?’ Jennings asked rhetorically. ‘Did he buggery. What he did do instead was hire a team of landscape gardeners to do it for him. Can you imagine that – paying someone to tend an allotment?’
‘The other allotment holders were furious,’ Horrocks said. ‘You see, there’s a waiting list for allotments, yet here was a man who clearly didn’t want the one he’d got. So I checked through all the regulations and the Act of Parliament, and came to the reluctant conclusion that there was nothing we could do about it.’
‘So what is his game?’ Meadows asked, although she already had her own theory.
‘If he didn’t want the allotment for growing things on, he must have wanted it for the shed,’ Horrocks said.
‘Any idea what’s in that shed?’
‘Not a clue,’ Jennings said. ‘Most people leave their shed doors open if the weather’s half decent, but his is always firmly closed. And it’s a big shed – the biggest that’s allowed.’
Meadows stood up. ‘Thanks for your time,’ she said.
‘It’s been our pleasure,’ both men said, simultaneously.
At the door, Meadows stopped and turned around.
‘Actually, there is one more question I’d like to ask you,’ she said, ‘but it’s more for my own curiosity than any other reason, so you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.’
‘Go on,’ Jennings said.
‘It’s obvious from the way Philip acts that this is his flat as much as it’s yours,’ Meadows said to Horrocks. ‘In fact, I’d be willing to bet that you don’t even use the flat that’s in his name.’
‘Oh, you’d be surprised how often it comes in useful,’ Horrocks said, unconvincingly.
‘Oh, come on, fellers, trust me,’ Meadows said.
‘Why should we?’ Horrocks asked.
‘Because I’m not as straight as I seem.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means that on my nights off, I go by the name of Zelda and wear a rubber mask,’ Meadows said.
The two men looked at each other, then grinned.
‘If virtually anyone else had told me that, I don’t think I’d have believed them,’ Jennings said.
‘So?’
‘You’re quite right. We don’t use that flat at all.’
‘So why do you have it? You surely don’t think it fools anybody, do you?’
‘It fools those who need and want to be fooled,’ Horrocks said.
‘And what does that mean?’
‘The people who watch us know the government doesn’t like homosexuals working in the defence industry.’
‘It doesn’t?’
‘No. It thinks they are too unstable and too open to blackmail.’
‘But homosexuality is legal. It has been since 1967.’
‘And there’s nothing to stop Roman Catholics becoming prime minister – but we haven’t had one yet, have we?’
‘At the same time, while they might not trust us, they need us,’ Jennings said. ‘The defence industry – which has very little to do with defence, as you’ll appreciate – is one of the treasury’s biggest earners.’
‘So the local spooks are on the horns of a dilemma,’ Horrocks said. ‘If they say we’re unreliable, the government will remove us, and then, later, blame them for the loss of revenue. If they say nothing, and one of us blurts out secrets one night to a drunken Russian sailor who’s giving him a seeing to – and said sailor turns out to be neither a mariner nor drunk – then the government will accuse our minders of incompetence.’
‘The second flat gives the spooks an excuse,’ Jennings added. ‘They can say we had our own individual flats, so there was absolutely no indication that we were gay.’
‘Why would you do that for them?’ Meadows asked.
‘It’s not for them, it’s for us. We want to stay here, and as long as we give them this fallback position, they’re likely to let us.’
‘How many spooks are there in Whitebridge?’ Meadows asked.
‘How long is a piece of string?’ Jennings countered.
The man who had probably killed Arthur Wheatstone had been exceptionally tall, Meadows thought as she was walking back to her car. Philip Jennings was also exceptionally tall, and hated Arthur Wheatstone. Most police officers would have been delighted to put these two things together.
But she was not most police officers. She did not believe for a moment that Philip would have been capable of hauling a paralysed Wheatstone up to his garage ceiling and then stand watching while he died.
Even so, it was clear that she should go straight to her boss, and present her with all the facts, alongside her own reservations.
But if she did that, Paniatowski would want to interview Philip herself, or at least get Colin Beresford to do it. And, to be fair to her, she would be quite right, because that would be i
n line with standard procedures.
So there it was – tell the boss, cover her own back.
It was the only sensible course – and she knew she was not going to do it.
FIFTEEN
Half an hour before the first press conference of the investigation was due to take place, Paniatowski got a phone call from the chief constable.
‘I’ll be there when you have your little battle with the media,’ he said. ‘In fact, I’ll be taking the lead. Do you have any objections to that, Chief Inspector?’
‘No objections, sir,’ Paniatowski replied, giving the only answer possible. ‘It’s just that I don’t really see the need to—’
‘Fine,’ Baxter interrupted. ‘Have you checked through the widow’s statement?’
‘The widow won’t be at the press conference, sir.’
‘She won’t?’
‘No, sir.’
‘The press will find that very strange.’
‘I realize that, sir,’
‘So why won’t she be there?’
‘DC Crane has advised me that having her there would be very counter-productive.’
‘Is that what he said? Counter-productive?’
‘No, what he actually said was, “It’s not that Mrs Wheatstone doesn’t want her husband’s killer caught. She does – but only so that she can give him a big wet kiss”.’
‘I see,’ the chief constable said. ‘And you trust Crane’s judgement?’
‘I trust the judgement of everyone on my team, sir. They wouldn’t be working for me if I didn’t.’
‘You’ve always been an absolutist, haven’t you, Monika?’ Baxter said. He sighed. ‘I’ll see you in half an hour.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Paniatowski put down the phone, and sighed herself.
She’d met George Baxter when she’d been on secondment in Yorkshire, and had instantly thought of him as a huge ginger teddy bear. She’d been broken hearted at the time, and allowed herself to drift into an affair with him. The affair had ended long before Baxter had applied for the Whitebridge job – it had been his decision, taken when he had finally acknowledged that however hard she tried, she could not make herself love him in the same way as he loved her.
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