by Lorna Gray
Jim leaned in. His manner was more friendly now. “This whole thing, the suicide, the trail that led to the former Mrs Williams; it was all because it was the only way to conceal the new Mrs Williams. You weren’t afraid for your own life.” It was tinged, inexplicably, with respect.
I stared. I’d expected Jim to rise on the point of injustice where Rhys decided it was a good idea to send Clarke and Reed after me. I expected him to demand to know how Rhys had known to do that if he had no idea what it was that Black had found. And I certainly didn’t expect Jim to persist in referring to Christi and me as the new Mrs Williams and the former Mrs Williams like it was important that he adhered to the form of our legal names. All I knew was that it credited neither me nor Christi with much of an identity to set us apart. It reminded me that he’d never played the part of my friend except when it was needed to placate Adam.
Only, at the same time, I was recalling that the policeman was very much in the habit of harnessing the foibles of others for his own ends.
He was using us; he was using us all as tools to unlock his investigation. At least I desperately hoped he was. Adam was staring at my face. His brows had furrowed while my heart raced. He could see the distrust.
Jim was now saying coolly, “My second question, Mr Williams, is how, having been so terribly afraid for your wife’s welfare, did you subsequently decide it was safe for you both to come out of hiding?”
Across the room I heard a sharply drawn intake of breath followed by a soft note of realisation, “So that’s what it is.”
It was Adam. He caught Jim’s flickering glance. “He saw me take her.”
His comprehension was relayed across the room to me on a note of nauseated disbelief. He told Jim incredulously, “He saw me take her from the harbour that last night in Aberystwyth. That’s how he decided it was safe to come back.”
Jim sat back in his chair. I’d seen the brief glint of excitement but now his expression was inscrutable. He asked Rhys, “Did you?”
“What? No, of course not!” Rhys sounded appalled. His swift sideways glance implied otherwise, deliberately I think.
Adam’s voice still held that slow note of incredulity. He’d seen my anxious fidget that was curbed as he spoke. His eyes were on me, doubting, as he told Jim, “He saw me take her. He was there that day in Aberystwyth. He confessed as much just now when he admitted that he bumped into Kate as she passed before his mother’s house on her final gasp. He knew what she was facing and he let her go without a word. Then he saw me close in and he thought he’d just witnessed the villain of this piece fixing his claws on the ex-wife at last. And he didn’t call the police. He didn’t raise the alarm. He went quietly into his mother’s house and waited. He waited until the coast was clear and then he came here today to see what Black might have found on me. And he’s been leading you into this story, not because he’s a liar and it’s a convenient way to justify his own cowardice, but because he actually believes I’m guilty.”
He rounded on Rhys and asked with sudden curiosity, “Haven’t you noticed that I like Kate?”
Rhys only stared. I suppose he was seeing a capable-looking man whose posture bore none of the uninteresting reserve that had coloured all their previous encounters. Rhys was now seeing a stranger who abruptly really did rank amongst all the Sirs and Titles of his acquaintance, whereas I was only myself.
If the sight puzzled Rhys, it absolutely shook his wife. I saw her eyelashes lift and the stealthy glance that swept upwards to Adam’s face only to retreat as soon as she caught his eye. Now the eyelashes dipped to fix her gaze upon hands where they lay clasped in her lap. Then her gaze drifted left, wide-eyed to her husband. Something had changed for her. He didn’t see because someone was saying with quiet certainty:
“Rhys has proof.”
The certainty belonged to Gregory. He had his diary in his hands, checking the details of his missed doctor’s appointment. He grew braver when he saw that he had Jim’s attention. He slipped his diary back into his blazer pocket. He asked, “How else would Rhys be so sure? He saw Mr Hitchen in Aberystwyth and came back here armed with a name to see if he couldn’t uncover whatever had been found by your missing policeman. And he did. Rhys found it. I just think he didn’t quite know how to use it.” A brief glimmer of a humourless smile followed, weightily, by, “Needless to say, I don’t think my trusted friend was expecting to be interviewed here today.”
No, I thought. He meant to slip in, plant this supposed proof and slip away to his own personal hiding place and then quietly, distantly, give the police an anonymous tip that would direct them to search in just the right spot. He would have done this happily, confidently, patiently; knowing that his freedom was waiting only for the day that the case against Adam was concluded.
Across the room, Gregory was adding bemusedly, “Did it matter, Rhys, that all the while you both were leisurely pursuing this plan, for all you knew Kate was still in the clutches of a villain?”
There was something very odd in this last little defence of me. Like the deep moral loathing was merely there for the sake of form while excitement and a profound curiosity about what had been found bubbled beneath. In a way I thought he was finding all this thoroughly enjoyable.
Whatever the feeling was, the policeman was experiencing something similar. Only Jim was hiding it better and the only clue was that his manner wasn’t remotely easy any more. The policeman was a big man in an ordinary-sized chair. “Is this true, Mr Williams? You’ve found what Black found?” A pause. “Mr Williams?”
Rhys turned his head and blinked at him. For a moment I thought my former husband was actually scared, but only for a moment. Then I saw he had the wide eyes of triumph. “No.” It was a firm denial. It left an emphatic silence in its wake.
And Christi broke it. For a long time now she’d been content to simply sit silently in her seat beside her husband. The way she did it now had the air of being a pre-arranged entrance. A point marked in a script. But judging from the way Rhys paled like he’d been tipped headfirst back into the horror that had stalked his past weeks, he hadn’t expected her to say this.
Christi turned to Adam. She remarked huskily, “I haven’t asked you how your daughter is, by the way. How is she now?”
Rhys was startled and, unsurprisingly, Adam wasn’t happy to hear this mention of his daughter at such a time. His head jerked up and he demanded curtly, “What do you mean by that?”
I saw her eyelids flutter. It was an innocent expression. Wherever this impulse had come from, it was not meant in the same tone as Rhys’s contributions. Rhys stared while her honeyed voice conceded, “When we met last you were puzzling out how to satisfy her interest in zoology.”
“I told you that?”
The hard disbelief in Adam’s voice was dangerous in its way. It had the depth of a parent’s protective instincts.
With an effort to rein in his temper, Adam curtly informed Jim, “Rhys wasn’t lying when he said Black took his suspicions with him. But all the same everything he’s said has been very carefully scripted to make you disbelieve him. He wants you to decide to search. Presumably you’ll find something and discover that it incriminates me. And he’ll pretend that it’s purely coincidental that he’s spent all these past minutes getting increasingly frustrated because you wouldn’t notice the hints he’s been dropping that this thief must know the gallery personally. Only the truth is he’s the author of this piece of nonsense about me and he’s hidden something that will prove it. Haven’t you, Rhys?”
His anger bit. I don’t think he knew that Christi’s deviation from her script into ill-placed pleasantries about his daughter had been for his own sake; that she hadn’t been remotely considering how he would feel to hear his daughter mentioned here. That in truth she’d only spoken like that at all because she needed to convey a coded warning to her husband. She’d guessed the scope of her husband’s mistake as soon as Adam had spoken about his friendship for me.
I wasn
’t sure Rhys quite knew what to do. The strong, independent, arrogant artist stared mutely at his wife as she turned her head.
There was an emphasis in the widening of her eyes. Suddenly, he understood. And somewhere in him there was the beginning of fresh fear.
Behind the desk, Jim’s posture had never changed. This was what he had been working us all towards. This was why he’d let this trail follow its course. He knew Rhys’s nature. He knew that without the lure of feeling powerful, Rhys might never have been brought to the point of sharing all his findings. The policeman was confident now and yet all he did was ask calmly, “And where is this ‘something’ now, Mr Williams?”
Then, when Rhys looked a little sick and failed to admit there was anything to share at all, Jim said to me, “Anything to add, Mrs Williams?”
I searched for the right response. I didn’t know what to do either. I’d never known Rhys unable to bluster his way out of a mistake before.
“Kate?”
All of a sudden Jim considered me the owner of my name again. It made me jump. It forced my eyes to travel from Rhys’s averted profile to the policeman’s face.
“The paintings.” The words seemed to drag themselves kicking and screaming from the back of my mind.
I caught Adam’s glance. He sensed the unease in me. He added uncertainly, “She’s right, isn’t she, Rhys … Christi? You never would have hung them otherwise. You always hated them.”
“What do you know about it?” Rhys couldn’t help the sneer. It slipped in with desperation.
Adam returned his stare. Abruptly for him, it made perfect sense. The placement of my paintings on the wall had been yet another convenient alteration to the order of this place designed to act as a lure. The recent cut on Rhys’s hand that I’d worried had been a mark of pursuit merely belonged to the discarded screwdriver. Hanging works of that size always was a fiddly job.
Across the room, blindly, stubbornly, honesty won. Adam told Jim, “It’s hidden behind one of Kate’s paintings in the exhibition room.”
Chapter 32
My paintings were attached by mirror plates to the much-patched boarding that lined the walls. The frames were perhaps an inch deep with a little recess at the back to support the tightly stretched canvas and the first one when it was unscrewed from the wall was perfectly empty. Behind me, Christi was lounging against the open door from the office, replicating the pose she had adopted some hours before. Adam was standing just in front of the doorframe on her other side with a clear view past me where I stood against the wall. Behind all of us was Gregory. Rhys, typically, was at the heart of things, acting as though he was concerned they might damage my precious paintings.
PC Downe carefully set the first portrait down on the floor before moving to support the next. It dropped a little as the last screw released, only a short jerk before his hands secured the weight, and it was followed by a decisive little flutter.
In the seconds that followed, everybody moved at once. First of all I looked down at the paper that had landed by my feet. It shone in the electric light. At the same time, PC Downe set the painting upon the floor and naturally reached to retrieve the other fallen sheet. And thirdly, Jim suddenly saw that I had moved.
“Let that paper alone!”
I froze in the act of bending with my fingers still inches from the floor. Then, when the caution was repeated, I withdrew my hand. I straightened and took a step back. I turned my head. I saw the moment that Adam’s gaze ran from my wide eyes to Jim’s face and lingered there.
Jim reached out his own hand, gingerly, taking care to preserve what fingerprints there might be. It was a photograph. It was a black and white image of that launch event for Rhys’s comeback exhibition in October last year. It had been taken by Christi and it was of Adam in the midst of a crowd.
The second sheet was the unexpected addition. Detective Constable Black had left something for Rhys after all. He’d written a note on the last Saturday before he had disappeared – signed under his cover name as Steven Leicester – telling Rhys simply that he’d taken a handful of Christi’s event images away to study at home and he hoped Rhys didn’t mind.
It wasn’t a declaration of his suspicions and it certainly didn’t conveniently name his attacker but I thought it thoroughly vindicated Rhys’s belief that Christi’s life would have been in desperate danger if he hadn’t taken a great deal of care.
Jim’s gaze flicked up across the brim of the photograph to ask Rhys, “Detective Constable Black left you both of these together?”
He had to know Black hadn’t. Gregory stirred in the doorway. He’d been longingly staring at the office telephone, or perhaps the inviting rectangle of the courtyard door, making a quiet but insistent point about his missed doctor’s appointment.
Jim ignored him. He asked Rhys, “Did you find this note when you returned today?”
The note was being carefully eased into a waiting brown envelope by a willing constable. Satisfied that it was safe, Jim lifted his head and fixed Rhys with an interrogative glare. “Well?”
Rhys looked sulky, which was hardly surprising given that he wasn’t exactly in the habit of giving way to authority quietly.
I said in a hard little voice, “How can he have found it today? He’s had it from the start and carried it with him all this time. He knew that Black had found his clue in some images from a launch event. How else could he have guessed that a few old exhibition catalogues would serve as the key connection between someone who knew me and how to find me, and the identity of the man who used this place to meet your dead letter-writing, gallery-visiting middleman to a thief?”
I caught Adam staring at me. A brief flicker of comfort tried to form at one corner of my mouth before it sobered when beyond me, Jim remarked, “As a point of interest, Mr Williams; when you laid your little decoy, did you tell Clarke where to find Miss Ward? Did you tell him precisely where she lived; where she worked?”
“No, of course not. Just her name.”
Just my name. Adam made an impatient gesture. It occurred to me then that Rhys was still deliberately goading him. I might have thought that Rhys was working a way to extricate himself from this but actually it felt like he was simply being blindly antagonistic because he couldn’t quite think what else to do. Concern spurred me into saying hotly, “It doesn’t mean anything. Clarke might have asked anyone for the other details. The shopkeeper next door knew I’d moved back to my northern home. He might have mentioned something. Or Gregory might—” There was an outraged splutter that might have been Gregory’s and might have been Rhys’s. I told Jim, “Gregory’s still working here, you know … At least, Rhys mentioned the end of this latest collaboration just now and the way he did it implies that Gregory too might have reason to regret its passing. And Gregory certainly still has a key. Christi complained that he let himself in today.”
“Now listen here—” This was Christi.
“Oh, don’t worry that she’s accusing your friend,” snapped Adam curtly. I suppose for him too it was the pent-up stress of discovering that Rhys had spent three days working out how to affix proof to his name. “Look at Rhys’s face. He knows Kate has seen through his fiction. The photographs were of his launch party. Black disappeared from his gallery. Now Rhys is wondering whether Kate will think next to wonder if this note meant to implicate him as this thief all along.”
Only as soon as he said it I thought: No. I won’t think that.
Something had changed. Rhys’s familiar features always did tend towards the dramatic but now I could see that it really was terror that had driven him to hide Black’s evidence, and it was the relief of discovering Adam’s guilt that had made him feel safe enough to reveal it. And now, instead of despising Rhys, I had to wonder what should have the power to suddenly fling him so desperately back into fear again at the very moment he learned Adam was innocent.
I looked to Jim. He didn’t encourage me to explain. From the expression on his face my recent outburs
t might as well have been chattering nonsense about my sketchbook again. With one look he discouraged me from speaking again.
Now Gregory moved restlessly in the doorway beside Christi. She turned her head and acknowledged him with a thin-lipped smile. And then, with a lurch so sudden that it was almost a mark of hysteria, Rhys abruptly reverted to his ridiculous story that Black himself had hidden these pages and this was the first he’d heard of Adam’s guilt.
Rhys turned to Adam and his lip curled. “Something that Clarke said made me think it must be one of my more prestigious clients. I truly never thought he could have meant you.”
Rhys enjoyed the expression that built on Adam’s face. For me, the sudden kick of realisation was so intense that it hurt. No one noticed my flinch. They were all waiting for Jim to dominate the scene. Adam was expecting the policeman to begin interrogating Rhys about the lunatic decision he’d made to play dead when he could have simply handed in Black’s letter at the time and let the authorities handle Clarke and Reed. But he didn’t.
And when I didn’t step in either, Adam was forced to make his own retort. “No?” he asked unpleasantly. “Did he tell you that by way of an exchange when you were cheerfully offering Kate’s life as a bargaining chip?”
It made Rhys smile. Not a happy smile. He said in an off-hand way, “Oh, she’s all right. I knew no one would get to her as they did me.” I thought his dismissal weak. But he wasn’t finished yet. The other man’s defence of me was obliterated in the instant that Rhys twisted round, sliding nearer to me, emphatically blocking me against the wall and away from Adam. He said, by way of a private aside between old friends, “By the way, Kate, you’ve regained your Northern accent. You always did like to blend in wherever you were, didn’t you?”
