by J M Gregson
He had a bottle of New Zealand chardonnay and two glasses on the table, across which he had spread an immaculate white napkin. ‘I don’t do tablecloths,’ he said, as he indicated where she should sit.
‘That’s the most original chat-up line I’ve heard for some time,’ said Jane. She’d put a skirt on for him. She tugged it modestly towards her knees as she sat down. She knew now that this was going to be more complicated than she’d expected. Good thing she’d allotted plenty of time to it. She accepted the glass of wine and was glad to see that he’d given himself a generous one. Wine always helped things along and sometimes it accelerated them agreeably. He was quite a personable young man and she was going to enjoy this.
Jane sought desperately for words which wouldn’t sound entirely false. She was used to men making the running. She was used to having to hold men back, to slow things down so that she could keep control of the situation. She was glad to see that Jamie Norris sat down on the sofa where he had installed her, not on the small armchair beside it. But he sat as far away as he could, almost comically so. ‘You’ll fall off the end there if you’re not careful!’ she said, sliding her thigh as far towards him as she judged a well-brought-up girl could safely do.
He grinned but could not speak. Instead he took a hasty gulp of his wine and moved two inches away from his end of the sofa. She crossed her legs, exposing a decent portion of her lower thigh. His sudden intake of breath was probably quite flattering, she thought. But she mustn’t force things. This was definitely going to take longer than she’d thought. She took his right hand in her left one as she raised her wine glass with her right. ‘Glad you told me you weren’t involved sexually with Alfred,’ she said happily. ‘We wouldn’t have known quite where we were, if you hadn’t said that, would we?’
‘There was nothing sexual between me and Alfred and there never would have been,’ said Jamie Norris firmly. ‘I made that absolutely clear to him.’ He squeezed her small hand a little. How delicate and feminine and desirable it seemed, within his larger and coarser one! He moved his fingers on to her slim, smooth wrist, left them there for a few seconds, and then stroked her forearm daringly.
Jane put her wine glass down carefully on the table, turned her clear blue eyes directly upon Jamie’s brown ones and let her mouth slide softly into a smile. Then she kissed him, full upon the lips, but chastely. No tongues; not yet. She moved both hands around his back and felt his shoulder blades, sharp and desirable beneath the smooth cotton shirt. She held the kiss for a full twenty seconds, then released him slowly, reluctantly. ‘That was nice!’ she murmured in his ear.
Jamie was not quite sure that this was happening. He kept his arm round her shoulders and said the only thing that came into his head. ‘The pigs asked me about Alfred. I told them I was definitely not gay!’
It was scarcely a chat-up line, but she giggled at it and stroked the inside of his thigh. She thought of handling the bit that would prove he wasn’t gay, but then decided she’d better not push things along too quickly. This was exactly the opposite of the way it normally was with men, when they went straight for what they wanted and she had to put the brakes on. Rather nice, really, even if a little disconcerting. She’d have found this really enjoyable, if she hadn’t had her other agenda.
But even that was under way. He’d introduced the police, when she’d been wondering how she was going to do that herself. She eased away from him a little and said, ‘Did it go all right when the fuzz came to see you again? Tell me all about it. I might not shake quite so much with fear about them then!’
‘I’m sure you’ve nothing to fear at all!’ said Jamie stoutly. ‘They came to see me at work this time. It was a bit embarrassing, because the manager wanted to know what it was all about and everything they’d said.’
‘Everyone’s like that. Murder has a sickly glamour, and this one’s all over the papers and the telly. You become a minor celebrity and a source of interest just by being close to it. You should probably be pleased to be involved, really – unless you killed poor old Alfred, of course!’
Her laugh tinkled round the room and Jamie tried to join in. He didn’t get beyond what he was sure was a rather sickly grin. ‘I didn’t do it. And neither did you. We should try to forget about it.’
He put his arms round her, a little clumsily, taking the initiative for the first time. The embrace grew more confident as he took control, scarcely believing that this wonderful woman was assisting, not resisting. The nagging thought that he was out of his class here was thrust to the back of his brain now, almost gone. He slid his hand cautiously under the green sweater, felt the smooth skin there. His brain told him that this must be simply skin as other skin, flesh as other flesh, but his heart told him that this was more special flesh than any he had stroked before. And then he was stroking those breasts which, when he had first seen them a week ago, had been so magnificent, so unattainable, feeling the nipples harden beneath his fingers. She murmured ‘Jamie!’ urgently into his ear and sought out his member with those slim, feminine, surprisingly confident fingers.
He wasn’t sure how many seconds passed before they separated gently, reluctantly. He looked into those very blue eyes from no more than a few inches for a long time, conscious of nothing but their sparkle and the soft smile beneath them. He wasn’t sure how many more seconds passed before she pulled a little further away from him and said, ‘I wasn’t expecting this.’
‘Neither was I.’ He grinned involuntarily: she couldn’t know how absolutely true that was.
‘You must think I’m an easy lay!’
He was silent at that. He knew he should say something to refute it, but the words wouldn’t come. His mind was reeling with the future delights which the phrase had promised him. He must do nothing, absolutely nothing, to affect the progress of this wonderful and unlikely happening. Take it easy, his mind said. Force nothing. It’s all going wonderfully well without your assistance. Just let it happen spontaneously, as it’s been happening so far. Play along. It’s going to happen, so long as you don’t say anything to derail this train of passion. Say anything you like so long as you think it’s what Jane will welcome. He said breathlessly, ‘They weren’t bad. The fuzz, I mean. They seemed quite understanding, really, compared with the pigs I’ve met in the past.’
He shouldn’t have said that. He didn’t want her to know about the past. But she didn’t take it up as he feared she would. Instead, she crossed those legs he had lately been stroking, picked up her glass, and said, ‘Tell me about it, Jamie.’
He’d nothing to lose by telling her almost all of it, he reckoned. It would only reinforce how strongly he felt about her. ‘They pressed me very strongly about my relationship with Alfred, especially in the week before his death. I told them that I didn’t particularly like being paraded as his protégé, but I had to be fair to Alfred. He’d been very good to me, very generous. He’d helped me with my writing. He didn’t pull any punches, when he thought something was trite or second-hand. But it’s no use being thin-skinned if you want to improve as a writer.’ He could hear Alfred saying that. The dead man seemed uncannily close at this moment, and that stopped Jamie’s tongue.
Jane said softly, ‘You’re a very fair-minded man, Jamie. You sound to me very generous yourself, in your assessment of Alfred and what he did for you.’
‘I hope I am, because he genuinely helped me. I might show you something I’ve written, in a little while. I’ve been trying to write something about you.’
‘How flattering! I’d love to see it and I’d feel privileged. But you must take the decision, when you feel that the moment is right for you to show it to me. What else did you tell them about Alfred?’
‘Well, they questioned me very hard about whether there’d been any sexual relationship, and how much pressure for that there’d been from him. I said emphatically that there’d never been any question of a sexual relationship as far as I was concerned. But you should be very cautious with that DCI Pe
ach if he comes back to question you again. He’s a shrewd bugger and he doesn’t let you get away with anything. But he did seem to accept that I was strictly heterosexual.’ Jamie stopped for a moment and risked a soft stroke of her breast from outside the sweater. He received a reassuring smile. ‘But Peach pressed me very hard about Alfred and what he wanted from me. I had to admit that it seemed he wanted to bed me and that I’d had to tell him in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t up for that.’
‘And did the two of them accept that?’
‘I think they did.’ He leaned over and stroked the softness at the top of her arm.
Jane kissed him softly. ‘You don’t have to convince me you’re straight! But did they believe you?’
‘Who knows? They’re paid to believe everyone’s lying to them, aren’t they? I think they accepted what I said. But they made me admit I’d lied to them when I spoke to them the first time, last Thursday.’
She frowned. Jamie thought it was quite the most beguiling creasing of the forehead he had ever seen. ‘That’s not a good thing, is it? What did you have to put right with them?’
‘I told them on Thursday that I hadn’t seen Alfred after our book club meeting on Monday night. Today I had to confess that I’d been round to see him on Tuesday afternoon after I’d finished work at Tesco. Someone had seen me, I think.’
She frowned again, looking very concerned for him. ‘I don’t like that. Probably makes you the last person known to have seen Alfred alive.’
Jamie gave her a bleak little smile. ‘That’s what they said. I’d gone round to Alfred’s place because I wanted to make it absolutely clear to him that I was straight and he’d no chance of bedding me.’
‘And did the police believe that?’
‘I don’t know. They don’t give much away, those two. Still, it doesn’t seem to matter much, now that you’re here.’
He reached out for her and she kissed him and held him tight for a long moment. She let go of him reluctantly, holding his face close to hers still. ‘Perhaps we could help each other.’
‘How could we do that?’ Any sort of alliance with this enchanting creature must surely be a fine thing. It would prolong their association and bring them even closer.
‘I’m not sure. I’ll have to give it some thought. You’re distracting me at the moment. You’re making me think of more urgent and much more desirable things!’ She seized his manhood, making him gasp with pleasure and anticipation. He had not thought that such an ethereal creature could be so uncomplicated and so direct. He would amend his sonnet now – put in some reference to carnal joys, which he had not dared to include earlier. She slid her hands under the yellow shirt and up his back and whispered into his ear, ‘I’m a shameless hussy, aren’t I? I don’t seem able to help myself, with you!’
He was glad he’d put clean sheets on his bed today. They were in it ten minutes later. There was an hour of uninhibited joy and then she told him that, what the hell, she would stay the night. There wasn’t much sleep during the next few hours, but it had never been more worth the forfeit.
It was when they lay on their backs, exhausted, with her head resting upon his arm, that Jane came up with her suggestion. ‘I don’t like you being in the frame for this killing, Jamie. Especially not now, when we’re as close as this.’ They both smiled at the ceiling on that thought. ‘You need an alibi for the time of the murder. It wouldn’t do me any harm to have one, either. I don’t think they see me as a serious suspect, but it would be nice to be finished with them and their questioning and free to get on with the rest of my life.’
‘What are you thinking of? I don’t want anything that would put you in any danger.’
‘Oh, I don’t see why it would do that. I was thinking that we could simply say that we were together in the early evening of last Tuesday. That would give us both an alibi for the time of the death and get you off the hook. I don’t like you being the last person known to have seen the victim alive.’
‘I don’t think I could let you do that, Jane. Not on my behalf.’
‘Oh, I don’t think there’d be much risk in it. And it’s not just on your behalf. There’d be advantages for me, too, as I said.’
He didn’t say a word, but turned on to his side and held her softly against him, hoping that she could feel gratitude seeping through his very skin. Jane Preston was altogether the most fascinating person he had ever met.
EIGHTEEN
Most people wouldn’t have noticed the difference, but CID officers are trained and encouraged to observe all sorts of things. The places where people live are of special interest, for they sometimes reveal things which the occupants wish to conceal. When they had been here on Friday afternoon, Dick Fosdyke’s three-year-old flat had struck them as warm, comfortable, and completely characterless.
Now, less than four days later, it had significant additions. There was a framed colour print of Malham Cove on the wall; Dick had cycled and walked there as an adolescent. There were two different pictures of his children. In the one on top of the television, they were scarcely more than toddlers. In the later one on the sideboard, when they were ten and eight, they were smiling cheerfully at his camera. Small additions, but significant. Despite his divorce, Fosdyke was trying to give the image of the family man, dull but unthreatening, above all conventional – the last person who would get himself involved in the hatred and violence which went with murder.
He ushered them in, installed them upon his sofa, tried very hard to seem casual and unthreatened by this second CID visit. ‘I want to help, of course, even though Alfred Norbury was no great friend of mine. But I don’t think I’ll be able to offer you anything that’s useful.’ Fosdyke was the picture of concerned citizenship. Or a caricature of it, depending on your view of him.
DCI Peach was in no doubt what his view was. ‘You’ll need to prove to us that you wish to help, Mr Fosdyke. So far you have been obstructive. We’re cynical men: the job makes us like that. You have reinforced our scepticism.’
Dick looked shocked. In fact, he wasn’t surprised by this uncompromising beginning. Ernie Ainsworth had rung him and told him about the visit of DS Northcott and DC Murphy and what he’d had to tell them at his house in Bolton. Dick looked at Clyde Northcott now, but found those ebony features as unrevealing as ever.
Percy Peach caught the hint of nervousness and seized upon it immediately. ‘You weren’t in the restaurant at the White Hart at the time of Mr Norbury’s murder.’
‘Apparently not, no. I made a mistake about the time.’
‘You didn’t make a mistake, Mr Fosdyke. You deliberately attempted to deceive us. You persuaded Mr Ernest Ainsworth to lie on your behalf. That is a very serious offence. It may make him an accessory after the fact, if we choose to bring a charge of murder against you.’
‘You won’t be doing that. I didn’t kill Alfred Norbury.’ He flicked a hand quickly back over his straight, very black hair.
‘Then why did you lie to us so consistently when you spoke to us on Friday?’
‘I wouldn’t say I lied. I may have concealed a few things.’
‘You told us direct lies, Mr Fosdyke. You claimed that you and Alfred Norbury “didn’t know each other well enough to be friends or enemies”. You said that you “knew of him” because of his reputation as a local character, and when asked exactly how well you knew him, you told us “not well at all”. I consider this direct lying; I think a jury in a criminal court would do so, if we finish this case by putting that issue before them.’
‘All right. It’s a fair cop – that seems the appropriate expression. I had previous with Alfred Norbury and I didn’t want you to know about it. I should have thought it was obvious why.’
‘I think you’d better tell us now why you consider it so obvious that you should give us pretty well the direct opposite of the truth when we are investigating murder. You’re an intelligent man, Mr Fosdyke. Which suggests to me that you wouldn’t feed us a string of porkies with
out having something very serious to conceal from us. DS Northcott and I have been discussing exactly what that might be.’
‘Surely it’s obvious, as I said?’
‘Not to us, it isn’t. DS Northcott and I are just unimaginative coppers who tend to go for the facts. The facts look very unpromising for you, Mr Fosdyke.’
‘I pretended I’d hardly known Norbury before that Monday night because I knew it would look bad if I gave you a detailed history and you realized that we’d had a serious falling-out. With the man lying dead in the morgue, it would have given me an obvious motive for putting him there. I looked at who else had been at that book club meeting and found that there were three women. I thought you wouldn’t rate them likely candidates for shooting a man through the head. Why hand the police a ready-made arrest on a plate, I thought.’
‘Because you’d settled the score with your old enemy? Because it was inevitable that even slow-witted plods like us would eventually unearth your past history and nail the crime on you?’
Fosdyke gave a grisly smile. ‘I was the slow-witted one, I suppose, to think I could get away with telling you that I hardly knew Norbury. I realized after we’d spoken on Friday that you were bound to go away and check what I’d said. Perhaps I realized even when you were with me that I wouldn’t get away with it. That’s why I came up with the Ernie Ainsworth story – I knew he owed me a favour and I thought this was the time to call it in.’
Northcott looked up from his notes. ‘People tend to back off pretty quickly, when they realize that they’re likely to be asked to perjure themselves during a murder investigation. It’s a big frightener, murder.’
‘Yes. I don’t blame Ernie for backing down. Especially with you leaning on him.’ He ran his eyes from top to toe over Clyde’s formidable frame and nodded quietly, in what was presumably some sort of compliment. ‘We did actually eat together at the White Hart last Tuesday night, you know. It was just not at the time when Norbury was being killed. I think Ernie might actually have been there at that time, but I wasn’t. I brought my presence forward a bit, to give myself an alibi. I should have known it wouldn’t work.’
