by J M Gregson
He looked hard at her, then nodded. He looked round the familiar room. His eyes dwelt for a moment on the sofa she had stared at. Then he said, ‘Not here. I need to get out for a little while.’
She looked at him and assessed him. ‘We’ll walk through the woods and round the lakes. It will be quiet enough there at this time of day.’
He looked longingly at the dark blue Jaguar as they left their home. He’d rather have driven out of here and many miles away, with her beside him. He felt at home in the leather seats of the sleek luxury car, more confident of himself and his words when he was there. He needed her; he felt he might be able to convince her of his need, if they were in the car.
Instead, they walked around the perimeter of Twin Lakes, as if affording themselves a tour of its many attractions. They passed the spot where last Friday’s murder had taken place, each of them with an eye upon the other, each of them trying to behave as if the place had no significance. He took her hand as he moved on, gave it a squeeze, but received no answering pressure.
He said, trying to recall lost innocence, ‘This reminds me of my first girlfriend, walking through the woods in broad daylight and holding hands like this.’
Her voice seemed to come from a long way away as she said, ‘It’s too late for that,’ and detached her fingers gently from his.
‘It’s never too late, Vanessa.’ But he knew even as he said the words that it was. It was a long time since he had needed to plead, and the words came awkwardly to him. ‘I need you to help me in the next few days. I need you to say that you were with me at certain times. We can work out together what we were doing and what we’re going to say.’
‘That isn’t going to happen, Richard. It’s not that I can’t lie – I’ve done plenty of that in my time. It’s that I don’t want to. You’re not worth saving.’
He sought hard for a quotation, something which would remind both of them that he was an educated man. Nothing came. He said abjectly, ‘You know how to kick a man when he’s down.’
‘I’m not kicking, Richard. The law will do that eventually, despite all your money and all your contacts. I’m merely refusing to help you.’
They walked on. He looked across to the far side of the lake, where Geoff Tiler and Mike Norrington were drifting with only minimal rudder guidance from Tiler. Richard wished heartily that he’d remained the centre-pin of a small and successful business, like Tiler. He should never have struck out into the waters of the criminal unknown and the dark leviathans which lurked there. This was no more than self-indulgent nostalgia, and he knew it. He said, ‘You knew I was no angel when you took up with me. Don’t come the school head girl with me now. The moral high ground isn’t available.’
Vanessa was suddenly glad that she was out in the open, that a cry for help would be heard here. It was a long time since she had been frightened of a man. She said, ‘I’m no angel either, Richard. But what you’ve done is unspeakable. I won’t shop you, but I want no part in defending you.’
‘We could still be close.’
‘No. We could have been, once. That was before I knew about what you’ve done with these girls. The things you’ve set up with innocent kids, to gratify the sexual tastes of evil men. And all for money.’ She despised herself as much as him with the contempt she poured into that last phrase. She could be clear-sighted about herself and him now, when it was much too late. She’d been brought to him by a sense of danger, by the sense that he could outwit the forces of law and order. And yes, by his money. She’d kidded herself that it wasn’t so at the time, but she had accepted too easily the things he had lavished upon her. She thought the very worst of herself for that at this moment, but she knew that she was still worth more than this.
They had almost completed the circuit now. Vanessa was wondering what she would do when they got back to their unit. She wanted to pack her bag and leave. She’d hire a taxi, get it to take her all the way back home, if necessary. Home: she’d thought for a few crazy weeks that home might have been with this man. Now she was afraid even to go into this holiday home with him, fearful of what he might do to her when he finally accepted that she was not going to help him.
It was then that the police cars came. Three of them. Not with blaring sirens, nor the flashing lights which would announce their presence to all. They came almost silently between the units and their grassy surrounds, observing the ten-mile-an-hour limits of the site, creeping as inexorably as crocodiles towards their prey in shallow water. Or like Birnam Wood coming to Macbeth and Dunsinane, thought the horrified Richard Seagrave.
He was, after all, an educated villain.
TWENTY
John Lambert watched the procession of police cars drive out of Twin Lakes. Richard Seagrave was in the back seat of the middle one of the three, handcuffed to a uniformed constable and staring grimly ahead of him. Lambert didn’t think that he’d ever been more satisfied to see a man arrested, even though the capture by the Serious Crime Unit had had nothing to do with him. Was there a crime worse than murder? Certainly, in his experienced view, and Seagrave by his callous disregard of human suffering was the man who had been guilty of it.
Now it was time to arrest the murderer of Walter Keane, control freak turned blackmailer. He turned with a sigh into the murder room and called, ‘Bert, are you ready?’
They’d agreed tactics beforehand. He knew he could prove this, if he had to, but a confession would certainly ease the process.
From their vantage point near the entrance to the leisure park, Chris Rushton and Bert Hook had seen Matthew Potts drive back grim-faced on to the site thirty minutes earlier. They’d agreed with the chief that they would allow him time to talk to his wife and have a snack, but they’d have stopped him if he had attempted to leave Twin Lakes again. Chris Rushton filed the details of Tessa Jones’ report on Potts’s Friday-night excursion with some satisfaction. It looked to Chris as if he’d have a clear weekend, with the case concluded and the killer in custody. He said to Hook as they munched their sandwiches, ‘Allowing the condemned man to eat a hearty lunch rather than a hearty breakfast, are we?’
Hook gave him no more than a patient smile by way of reply. He was wondering what sort of exchanges were taking place between the Potts in their home with the view over the largest lake and the neatly cut grass around it. The mower had worked its way carefully around this section of the site during the morning, and the smell of new-mown grass, one of the most evocative scents for a countryman like Bert, wafted pleasantly into their nostrils as they walked back to the place where they had so recently spoken with Freda Potts.
She had obviously been awaiting their arrival, as was to be expected after their earlier exchanges, and she had the door open and was looking down at them whilst they were passing her bright blue Peugeot and still ten yards from the steps of the unit. ‘Matt’s back. I’ve told him that I had to tell you the truth about Friday night this morning. He’s quite willing to talk to you.’
He doesn’t have a choice about that, thought Bert Hook grimly. And Matthew Potts when they saw him looked exactly like a man who didn’t have a choice. He sat with a stony face in an armchair. Like many powerful men, Potts didn’t sit easily. His hands were clenched tightly upon the arms of his chair and he looked as if he might spring out of it at any moment.
Lambert said, ‘I think you know why we want to talk to you.’
‘Friday night. I understand that. I should have told you the truth at first.’
‘You should indeed. We might have arrived at the solution to this crime earlier if you’d done so.’
Hook didn’t bother with his notebook. There was no need for notes now; no need to use the silent intimidation of making exact records of times and places. He said only, ‘You’d better give us your account of exactly where you went and what you did last Friday night.’
Matt Potts noted that ‘your account’ with a grim smile. It was an indication that he could no longer expect to have what he said accepted, th
at his earlier deceit meant that he had forfeited any right to have what he said believed without it being checked. He wasn’t used to that. He was a straight-talking man who had gained respect in the harsh world of the oil rigs. He had grown used to any facts he delivered being instantly accepted. He was surprised how diminished he felt with the realization that this was not so here. Matt was accustomed to being a strong man in a man’s world. Perhaps that was his natural metier, however those poncey schoolteacher colleagues of Freda’s might mock it as sexist.
He looked at the carpet. He found it easier to concentrate upon his words when he was not looking into the attentive faces of these men who had caught him out in his lying. ‘I went to the White Hart in Chardon. I had a pint there. I don’t think I spoke with anyone, except the man who served me at the bar. I didn’t go there for conversation.’
‘How long were you there?’
‘I don’t know. I was thinking.’ Matt was an intelligent man, but he made thinking sound a difficult process. As indeed it had been for him, on that fatal Friday night. ‘I drank slowly and stared at the wall. I remember feeling surprised when I saw that my glass was empty. I left when the pub was getting noisier, when the seats round me were filling up. I suppose I was there for about half an hour – certainly not for a full hour.’
‘So that you left at about nine o’clock?’
‘It must have been about that time, yes. There was still daylight, but the sun was well gone.’ Sunsets at sea flashed before him. He had watched many times as the sun sank beneath the waves in the west, sometimes with icicles forming on the metalwork of the ship above him. That fierce and isolated world seemed now much cleaner and less complicated than this green and pleasant one.
‘And what time did you return here?’
Freda willed him to look at her. He surely must do that now, in recognition of what she had said to them before he came. She had told him exactly what she had said to the CID visitors; he had sat like a statue and accepted it, sat so still that she had not been certain how much he had comprehended. Surely Matt must look at her now, as a confirmation that he remembered what she had said. But he did not. It seemed that he had shut her out of his world and had no plans to re-admit her. Matt stared at the carpet as he said, ‘It was about eleven o’clock when I got back here. I believe Freda has already told you that.’
Hook said with surprising gentleness, as if teasing out the truth from a child who had lied rather than from this toughest of men, ‘And what did you do during those two hours, Matt?’
Now at last he looked up, not at Lambert but at Hook. ‘I walked around and thought. First in the village and then around Twin Lakes. I walked all round the golf course. There was a moon, and it was quite easy to see where you were going, so long as you kept to the middle of the fairways.’
‘Do you do this sort of thing often?’
‘No, not often. It’s the first time I’ve done it here.’ He paused, waiting for the question he felt was obvious. It did not come because Hook sensed that it was not needed. ‘I was thinking about Freda and what Wally Keane had said to me.’
There was a start from the woman sitting in the armchair beside him. Freda was perhaps three feet away from him. She reached out a hand towards him, then let her arm collapse hopelessly beside her when she realized he was not going to take it.
Hook said quietly, relentlessly, ‘Did you take the path through the woods? Did you pass the spot where Keane died?’
‘I went there at first. There was still daylight then, but it was pretty dark among the trees. I didn’t see anyone. And I didn’t go back there. I spent the rest of the time on the golf course and around the small lake at the other end of the site. I didn’t see anyone, apart from a few shadowy figures leaving the bar and the restaurant. I didn’t talk to anyone.’ Matt Potts spoke as if he did not much care whether they believed him or not.
‘So there’s no one who can vouch for your whereabouts at the time Walter Keane was killed.’
The powerful shoulders lifted a fraction, then fell. It wasn’t a large enough movement to be called a shrug. ‘No. I’m telling you the truth, but I can’t expect you to believe it, when I lied to you in my original statement.’
‘Matt didn’t kill Wally Keane!’
It was insistent, with the tone rising towards hysteria. It came from Freda Potts.
Lambert’s voice cut through the silence which followed like a freshly sharpened blade. ‘And you can prove that, can’t you, Mrs Potts?’
It sounded more accusation than question, and that indeed is what it was. She said, ‘Matt was back here by eleven, as I told you this morning. He didn’t know anything about what had happened to Wally. He didn’t know until the next day, when everyone found out about it.’
‘But you knew, didn’t you, Freda?’ Where Hook had spoken to Matthew Potts almost like a therapist, allowing him to voice facts which it felt a relief to deliver, Lambert was now aggressive and challenging. He made his quarry feel that he knew exactly what had happened, so that further prevarication would be useless.
She said evenly, ‘I hadn’t been back here long myself when Matt came in.’
Matt looked at her at last, for the first time since they had sat down for this final scene, and his dark eyes widened with a dawning horror. He felt now that he had known this for the last five days, but refused to acknowledge it to himself. He said dully, ‘Don’t, Freda. You shouldn’t do this.’
But the woman who had been willing him to speak to her through most of those five days now ignored his words. ‘I didn’t mean to kill him when I went there. Even when I hit him, I don’t think I meant to kill him.’
Lambert nodded and spoke as calmly as if she were giving an account of a shopping expedition. ‘Tell us how it happened, please.’
‘He’d said he wanted to see me. Edge of dark, he said. I went up there at about half past nine. It was already pretty dark under the trees. Wally was already there. He said he wanted more money. I said I couldn’t give him any more. I tried to brazen it out. I told him I hadn’t the money to buy him off and that I was going to take the same attitude as the Duke of Wellington: “Publish and be damned!”’
‘And what did he say to that?’
He laughed in my face. He said I wasn’t in the same position as the Iron Duke, who was the most powerful man in England. He said he wished to remind me that I was Head of History in a comprehensive school, with a whole career at stake. He said if he went to the tabloids with what he knew about me and Wayne Briggs I’d never teach again and I might well be sent to prison for the rape of a minor. He had a bottle of wine and he’d been drinking from it. He was laughing at me, enjoying my misery. I’d never seen him like that before.’
‘And how long did all this take?’
‘I’ve no idea. Longer than it’s taken me to describe it to you. Much longer, I suppose, because it was quite dark eventually and he was still flinging his filth at me. He said I’d better tell Matt about it and get the money from him, because he must be making plenty on the rigs. All I could see of Wally by this time was his mouth and his teeth. He kept laughing. I’d never seen him drink before and I’d never seen him really laugh before. It was horrible.’
‘So tell us what you did about it.’
She spoke quickly, almost eagerly, as if she wished to make them understand this. ‘He said he was sure Matt would be pleased to hear all the details of how I’d opened my legs to an eager young stallion who’d delighted in fucking the arse off me.’ She stopped wonderingly; it was important to her to get the recital of the man’s obscenities exactly right. ‘I think it was a sexual thing with him: I think talking about what I’d done and painting the pictures of it excited him. He said I was a strong young woman and I must have enjoyed girls on top.’
There was a long pause. Lambert and Hook both knew that there was no need to hurry now. It was Hook who eventually prompted her. ‘Do you think Wally spied on you, when you were here with Wayne?’
She g
lanced for the first time in many minutes at her husband, but Matt Potts sat as if turned to stone, staring steadily through the window at the innocent world outside. ‘I think he must have done. He kept telling me how much he would enjoy telling Matt about what he called my “sexual athleticism” and how fast I could get my pants off, unless I came up with the money he wanted. And each time he taunted me, he laughed and took another drink.’
‘So eventually you stopped him doing that.’
‘Yes. I’d no intention of killing him, none at all. I just wanted to shut his filthy mouth and stop him laughing at me and taunting me about Matt. Eventually he said I could have a drink with him. He’d give me a glass and we would drink a toast to my future. When he turned away from me I grabbed the bottle and hit him on the back of the head with it. I hit him as hard as I possibly could. I only wanted to hit him the once. I just wanted to shut that filthy mouth of his. He didn’t even shout or grunt. He fell on his face on the ground in front of me.’
She stopped again, staring out of the window alongside her husband, watching the Martindale boys, Nicky and Tommy, going past with their golf clubs in small bags on their shoulders, the epitome of excited childish innocence. She said like one in a trance, ‘I like children, you know. I’m quite good with them: I get them to enjoy history. I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t teach.’
‘Did you think he was dead?’
‘I thought he might be, yes. I didn’t want to touch him. I know that you should check the carotid artery, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch him. Matt would have known what to do, but I didn’t.’ This time she didn’t look at her husband, but spoke as if he wasn’t there.
It was left to Hook to prod her forward. ‘But you knew where there was some rope.’
‘Yes. In the boatshed which was almost beside us. I think that it was because Wally had talked about Wayne and me in there that I got the idea. I thought if I could throw the rope over the branch of the oak tree and make a noose, people might think he’d hanged himself. I can see now that that was never going to work, but I couldn’t think straight then. I just kept staring down at the blood seeping from the back of his head. Matt would have done something much better, but I didn’t want him involved. I put the noose I’d made round Wally’s neck as he lay on the ground, then hauled him up and fastened the rope around the tree. It was easy. He didn’t weigh more than a child. And I’m a strong, fit woman – an athlete, as Wally had said.’
