More Than Meets the Eye

by J M Gregson

  Lambert waited so long that she felt an overwhelming desire to fill the pause with words. But she could think of nothing sensible to say; the reality was that she knew little or nothing of Peter’s background except that he was long divorced, wealthy and free to marry her. Eventually he said, ‘Do you know where he was on Sunday night?’

  ‘No. But he wasn’t here, killing Dennis.’

  ‘You’re almost certainly right. Mr Nayland employs other people to do his dirty work. If you are as ignorant as you claim to be about him, we know far more than you do about that.’

  ‘He’s a successful businessman.’ Alison bit her lip and twisted it between her teeth, realizing how futile that sounded, how little she could add to it.

  ‘We would prefer to say that he is successful in some very dubious businesses. He has been under investigation by the Serious Crime Division for some time now. Did he tell you about that?’

  ‘No. Perhaps he isn’t aware of it.’

  ‘He’s well aware of it. He takes pains to cover his tracks.’

  ‘Perhaps there aren’t tracks to be covered. You seem to be finding it very difficult to bring Peter to court.’

  ‘It will happen. People like him always overreach themselves. Maybe he has done that this time.’

  ‘Peter has nothing to do with this crime.’

  The clear grey eyes looked at her speculatively, seeming to Alison to be able to see much more than she would have wished. ‘You sound very sure of that. If you could convince us, it would help all of us.’

  It was tempting. She could say they had been together, give both of them an alibi. The police might not like that, but it would be difficult for them to disprove it. But at this very moment, Peter might be telling other officers a different tale. They were deep in this already – he had warned her that the spouse of a murder victim was always a leading suspect, and these men had pointed out how convenient this death was for her and her plans. She couldn’t afford to be caught out in a lie. She said as firmly as she could, ‘I’m quite sure Peter didn’t commit this crime, because I know the man I’ve agreed to marry. I don’t know where he was on Sunday night, but I’d be confident he was nowhere near here.’

  ‘You are almost certainly right. I’ve already indicated to you that he isn’t a man who does his own dirty work. He uses other people when he thinks violence is required. It’s expensive, but he can well afford it.’

  Lambert did not disguise his contempt. It was a shock to her, to hear the police talk about Peter like this, an unwelcome glimpse of that business world which he had never explained and which she had always been content to leave vague. She said boldly, ‘You would need to prove that. I am confident you will not be able to do so.’

  She waited for a comment on this from Lambert, but it was Hook who suddenly said, ‘We now know that you didn’t spend the night of the murder with Carrie North, as you claimed on Monday. Where were you on Sunday night, Mrs Cooper?’

  She felt her heart beating faster, though she had always known that this question must come. She looked round at the large, comfortable room, at the old-fashioned three-piece suite which Dennis had always said was too comfortable to replace, at the large black-and-white photograph of Westbourne around 1900, when there had been a house here but no real garden. The room seemed suddenly an alien place, full of danger, where once there had been only dullness. ‘I was here. I read a book for a while. Then I watched a little television.’

  She wondered if they would ask for an account of the programmes. But all Hook said was, ‘And where was Mr Cooper?’

  ‘He was here too.’

  ‘But not for the whole evening, obviously.’

  She stared at the Persian carpet she had never liked. She’d be rid of it when she moved out of here and in with Peter. Why was the mind always a maverick when you wanted it to concentrate hard on the questions of this seemingly sympathetic detective sergeant? ‘No. We’d had a bit of a row.’

  ‘About Peter Nayland?’

  ‘No. About life here. He liked it and I didn’t. We were very different people; it was coming here that made that more apparent to us. I suppose I was telling him that as well as not liking my life here I didn’t like him.’

  Hook was annoyingly slow with his note of this, so that she became conscious again of her heart thumping. Eventually the experienced but curiously innocent face looked up at her and said, ‘Did he know about your feelings for Peter Nayland?’

  She’d prepared an answer for this, but she hadn’t expected it to come up in the context of her row with Dennis. She forced herself to speak slowly. ‘I don’t think he did. I can’t be certain. Dennis was a man who gathered information and enjoyed it. He liked to know all about his employees, whether his information was relevant to their work here or not. A lot of the time it wasn’t, but he said you never knew when knowledge might come in useful. He said you could never have too much of it.’ Her contempt for the dead man came leaping out as she curled her lips over these last phrases.

  Hook again irritated her by making a detailed note of this. Then he said, ‘Were you aware that he kept some of this information in the notebook Superintendent Lambert mentioned earlier?’

  She wanted to deny any knowledge of it. But that would hardly be convincing. She said carefully, ‘A small black notebook?’

  ‘That would be the one.’

  ‘I saw him with it. I even saw him write something in it, on one occasion. But I never read anything he wrote. I wasn’t very interested, to tell you the truth – as I’ve told you, we were growing apart. I think he usually kept that little book under lock and key at work.’

  Hook knew that they hadn’t found it there, and he didn’t believe that she’d never been interested in its contents, but there was no point in pursuing that now – she would merely repeat what she’d stated. He said calmly, ‘You said you argued with each other on Sunday evening. What happened after that?’

  This was the key point. She felt curiously calm, glad that they had at last arrived at it. ‘I’ve told you what I did. Dennis went away into his study, as he often did when we’d had words. After a while, he came and said he was going out.’

  ‘At what time?’

  ‘It must have been somewhere around nine o’clock. Perhaps a little later. It was still daylight, but pretty gloomy after the storm.’

  ‘Did he say where he was going?’

  ‘No. And I didn’t ask. Neither of us was inclined to say more than the minimum.’ She felt a sudden stab of emotion that she should have treated him coldly during their final contact, but she tried not to show it, lest they thought her a hypocrite or a deliberate dissembler.

  Hook looked her steadily in the face, his brown eyes seeming now larger and more observant. ‘So Mr Cooper went out and never came back. Yet you saw fit to inform no one that he had disappeared.’

  She had her answer ready. It was curious how assured she felt as she delivered it. ‘That’s because I didn’t know he hadn’t come back. He hadn’t told me where he was going. I thought perhaps he’d met one of the other residents and been invited into their quarters. Or that he’d gone off to the pub in the village – anything to get away from me. I was mildly surprised when he wasn’t back by eleven, but no more than that. I went to bed and went to sleep. I wasn’t aware that he hadn’t returned until early the next morning, when someone hammered on my door to tell me what had happened.’

  Hook nodded as he wrote, then looked hard into her face again. ‘Who do you think killed Mr Cooper?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I’ve thought hard about it, as no doubt everyone else has.’ She paused. ‘As I told you, my late husband was fond of gathering up information about people. Perhaps someone resented that.’

  She accompanied them to the door, then said with cool challenge, ‘I hope you arrest someone for this soon. That will allow Peter Nayland and me to get on with the rest of our lives together.’

  FIFTEEN

  Lorna Green was clearing the house of the rubb
ish which accumulates over the years. Rubbish was the word she had chosen to use, to make herself more ruthless. Much of this stuff had once been precious; some of it had been useful; a little of it had been merely interesting. But yesterday’s pleasures were today’s detritus, she told herself firmly.

  Some day, perhaps much sooner than she anticipated, Barbara Green would either die or need more care than her daughter could give her. When that happened, Lorna wouldn’t stay in the family home any longer. She would move into a small modern house or flat. You had to face up to these things and make your preparations for them. If it also seemed a good thing to get rid of anything which might connect her with Dennis Cooper, that of course was quite incidental.

  This afternoon, she had settled her mother down for her nap and was clearing out old photographs. She would keep the three albums of pictures she had carefully mounted over the years, but get rid of all the loose snaps; if they had been of any real and lasting interest she would have put them in the albums at the time, wouldn’t she? Nevertheless, Lorna found as most of us do that she lingered over the task.

  There is something very evocative about visual images from our past. Half-forgotten faces and the places from which they smile conjure up whole episodes, which are part of our past and thus part of us. When we know that we are discarding them for ever, we spend longer than we planned to do before ejecting a part of ourselves. And so it was with Lorna Green.

  She smiled quietly at black-and-white pictures of her father, with a full head of hair and that mischievous grin which turned up the left-hand side of his mouth – he was much younger here than she was now. It was good to see him looking so vigorous, so full of anticipation of the rest of his life. And here was another one with her mother beside him, alert and humorous in a way she would never be again. But Lorna told herself firmly that there were better ones in the albums, and resolutely flung the fading images into the bin bag she had brought to the task.

  And here was Dennis Cooper, in vivid colour, smiling and masterful, with his arm round her waist and a look of proud possession upon his face. She hadn’t been through these loose photographs for ages and she was surprised how many she had of Dennis. There was one of them leaning on their bikes somewhere in the country – she couldn’t remember exactly where, and there was only a hedge and a stand of beech trees behind them. She wondered who had taken that. She’d never been a great cyclist and it was a long time now since she had ridden a bike – not since the days of Dennis, in fact.

  ‘You should have married him!’

  Lorna started violently at her mother’s voice. She had been so immersed in her memories that she hadn’t heard her come into the room. She said automatically, ‘Did you have a nice rest, Mum?’

  Barbara Green picked up another photograph of Dennis Cooper, taken when he was leaning back hard on the oars of a rowing boat on the river, revelling in his exertion and his expertise. He’d rowed at school and at university, and he’d enjoyed surprising Lorna with his skills. Lorna said in surprise, ‘You think I should have married Dennis Cooper? You didn’t say that at the time.’

  ‘You were right for each other, you two. I thought you realized that, but you must have thought you could do better.’ Barbara sniffed derisively and picked up a snapshot of her dead husband, leaning on a five-barred gate with his pipe in his hand. ‘Who’s that? Another of your men, is it?’

  Lorna took her mother’s hand and detached the picture gently from it. ‘That’s my Dad. That’s your husband, Mum. Wally. You must remember.’

  She caught the desperation in her own voice. Barbara repeated ‘Husband?’ as if it were an alien word. She put down the picture without another glance and picked up a dog-eared one of a young Lorna and her sister Debbie. ‘They look nice children. Children used to be nicer, you know, in the old days.’

  Lorna put the picture down with the others, on top of all the ones of Dennis Cooper. She slid the complete collection determinedly into the black rubbish bag. ‘Yes, Mum. A lot of things used to be nicer, in the old days.’

  ‘Come in and sit down, Mr Wilkinson. We have things to discuss.’ Lambert’s words sounded ominous. He waved an arm at the single upright chair in front of the desk in the murder room.

  Hugo reacted with a characteristic aggression. ‘You Sherlocks found who killed Cooper yet?’

  ‘We know a lot more than when we last spoke with you.’

  The chef curled his lip at this evasion. ‘Observation and deduction, you know. Those were Holmes’s principles.’

  ‘And very sound they were. Conan Doyle derived them from the best detective practices of his day. But there may still be room for the gifted amateur, if you fancy the role, Mr Wilkinson. No doubt you have been busy observing. Have you brought us any useful deductions?’

  ‘Not my place, is it? I’ve deduced that the police are baffled. But not a lot beyond that.’

  ‘Not quite baffled. We are moving nearer to an arrest. We have been able to eliminate most of the people on site from suspicion. Unfortunately that number does not include you.’

  Hugo was beginning to regret his aggressive stance. He’d had a hectic lunch hour in the restaurant, when two people had sent meals back into his kitchen with adverse comments; he’d had to go out among the tables and be publicly apologetic. No chef enjoys that; it is the nadir of his professional life. But he shouldn’t have brought his resentment into this quiet room, where his opponents held most of the cards. He said, ‘I didn’t kill Cooper, so I’ve nothing to fear.’

  ‘Unless we prove as inefficient as the police inspectors portrayed in the Sherlock Holmes stories.’ Lambert bestowed a grim smile on the man isolated on his upright chair. ‘I said we knew a lot more than when we last spoke to you. Did you ever see a small black notebook in Mr Cooper’s hands?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He was a secretive man. You indicated as much to us when we last spoke. I think you said that he liked to gather information about the people who worked for him. You will not be surprised to find that you were included.’

  ‘No. I’m not surprised that Cooper kept notes on people. Nevertheless, what you say comes as something of a shock, because you don’t think of yourself as a subject for busybodies. I can only think he must have found me a very dull subject for his curiosity.’

  ‘On the contrary, you were one of the most interesting of all to him. There are several entries about you, with dates carefully recorded. Nor do I believe that this comes as the shock you claim it is.’

  Hugo had been watching Lambert’s face ever since he sat down. Now he saw real challenge in the grey, unblinking eyes. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never seen this blasted black notebook and I can’t believe he recorded anything significant about me in it.’

  ‘Child pornography, Mr Wilkinson.’

  Hugo felt the blood draining from his face. ‘You must have me confused with someone else. I tell you again that I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Oh, but you have, Mr Wilkinson.’ The repetition of the surname rang like an accusing note across the desk. Lambert was not a conventional policeman, but in this respect he was typical. He had nothing but revulsion for the increasing number of men and the surprising number of women who used helpless children for their sexual gratification. He did not even pretend neutrality now. ‘The group which you regularly attend is currently under investigation. There is as yet no national computer register of those engaged in this criminal practice, a deplorable situation which is now receiving attention. The details recorded in Mr Cooper’s notebook have been passed to the officers investigating the indecent videos distributed to you and to others.’

  Hugo thought of the material in his room. He felt the acute need of a lawyer at his elbow. He had been transformed from truculent interviewee with nothing to fear to abject offender within a few minutes. He scratched at his brain for the words the group leader had told them to use if accusations were levelled. He said dully, ‘I deny all of this. I
have no further comment to make.’

  ‘Which is no doubt very wise. Fortunately for all of us, child pornography is not our business here. Except in so far as it affects the investigation of the murder of Dennis Cooper.’

  ‘Which is not at all. Dennis was a nosy sod and I won’t pretend that I’m sorry someone’s got rid of him. But these outrageous allegations – and that is all they are – have nothing to do with his death.’

  ‘You won’t expect us to take your word for that, especially in view of what we now know about you. What did Mr Cooper say to you about your paedophile activities?’

  ‘He didn’t say anything. What you have told me this afternoon is the first intimation I have had that he even knew I had been to these meetings. Perfectly innocent meetings of our photographic group, incidentally.’ Belatedly, he remembered the cover story they had agreed against the possibility of questioning.

  ‘We believe Mr Cooper spoke to you about paedophilia, Mr Wilkinson. On the Wednesday before he died.’

  Lambert was chancing his arm. There had been merely an asterisk against the name and the date June 29th beside it. But the detail convinced Hugo Wilkinson that the man on the other side of the desk knew everything. He nodded hopelessly, then said abjectly, ‘He said he knew all about me. That he wouldn’t be able to keep me on here unless I could convince him this was perfectly innocent. He reminded me again about the racialism incident in my kitchens and said there’d be no question of the Trust continuing to employ a paedophile.’

  ‘And you assured him that these were merely the innocent meetings of men with a common interest in photography.’ Lambert didn’t trouble to disguise the irony. It fell into a heavy silence, which he waited in vain for Wilkinson to break. ‘Did you arrange to meet Dennis Cooper on Sunday night or did you meet him by chance as you walked in the grounds?’

  There was real fear now in the face which had earlier been so combative. ‘Neither of those. I didn’t meet him and I didn’t kill him.’

  Bert Hook made a note of this, then looked at their quarry with a face which was determinedly neutral. ‘Mr Wilkinson, don’t leave Westbourne Park without informing us of any intended destination. You may in due course receive a visit from officers in connection with a quite different investigation. You would be most unwise to communicate with other members of your group; an attempt to warn them might well be construed as an admission of guilt. Do you understand?’