by Jill McGown
Treadwell reached for the whisky, and poured two this time, handing Lloyd a glass whether he wanted one or not. He took it; no nonsense about not drinking on duty. ‘I walked around,’ he said.
‘In a downpour?’
Treadwell nodded. ‘I walked around, thinking what a god-awful night it had been, and how I didn’t want to go back in to the chairman and his wife and Hamlyn being so . . .’ He took a deep swallow. ‘But I did.’
Lloyd sipped his drink, and didn’t speak. The wind huffed and puffed, but it couldn’t blow Treadwell’s house down, because it was in ruins anyway.
‘I didn’t ring Caroline back because it still wasn’t eleven, and Diana was on her way home,’ he said.
‘Or perhaps,’ said Lloyd slowly, ‘perhaps when you followed her to the door, you picked up the first thing that came to hand. The golf-club.’
Treadwell felt once again as though he had turned over two pages at once. ‘The golf-club? But it wasn’t there any more and, even if it had been, why—?’
‘You say it wasn’t there,’ Lloyd said, interrupting him. ‘But I don’t know that. It might not have gone missing in December. We only have your word for that. As far as we know, it could have gone missing on Friday night, and been put on the list on Saturday. Perhaps you picked up the golf-club, caught up with her as she crossed the playing-field, and killed her.’
Treadwell almost choked on his drink. ‘Why in the world would I do that?’ he asked.
‘Because you were having an affair with her.’
‘An affair? Me?’
‘That’s what Mr Hamlyn seems to have thought,’ said Lloyd.
Treadwell almost laughed. ‘I feel flattered, in a way,’ he said. ‘If Hamlyn thought that I could ever have coped with Diana.’
Dancing wildly with Diana. It was a nice thought, but he couldn’t even talk about Diana’s wild dancing, never mind take part in it. He put down his drink. He really shouldn’t drink this fast.
‘He thought that was why he was promoted. He said he felt like a wife whose husband suddenly buys her flowers. He thought you had a guilty conscience, Mr Treadwell.’
‘If he thought that, he was quite wrong. I pushed for his promotion because he had already been passed over twice, and it wasn’t fair. And, as I’ve already told you, I thought that Diana would have been an asset in that particular situation.’
‘He thought that that was why you sacked Lacey. And you went looking for her, Mr Treadwell. Where you’d found her last time.’
‘I went into the Barn for the reason I have given you,’ said Treadwell. ‘Yes, I did find her again.’ He finished his whisky, his two-minute-old promise forgotten. ‘Only last time it was a summer’s day,’ he said. ‘And I could see all too clearly what they were up to.’
He looked at Lloyd, the whisky deadening the embarrassment he still felt when he thought of it.
‘She couldn’t have cared less,’ he said. ‘She laughed. She actually laughed. Said something about having been caught in the act, and laughed, Mr Lloyd. And there was I, shocked, embarrassed, looking as if I had been caught in the act.’ Chance, he thought, would have been a fine thing. ‘And that’s why I sacked Lacey. It was something I could do. To prove that I was in charge of the situation.’ He smiled. ‘But I wasn’t,’ he said. ‘Diana was.’
Lloyd nodded slightly. ‘Have you any idea who she was with this time?’ he asked.
‘I presumed it was Newby.’
Lloyd shook his head. ‘We know it wasn’t Mr Newby,’ he said.
‘Diana was in his car with someone else?’
‘She must have been,’ said Lloyd. ‘Do you have any idea who it was, Mr Treadwell?’
‘I suppose it must have been Sam,’ said Treadwell. ‘Hamlyn was right.’
‘Did you touch the car when you were in the Barn?’ he asked.
Treadwell shook his head.
‘You won’t mind letting us have your fingerprints? Just so that we can make sure?’
‘If you think it’s really necessary.’
Lloyd put down his glass. ‘If I think it’s really necessary,’ he said, ‘I will fingerprint everyone who was here on Friday night. At the moment, I think it would merely be helpful, Mr Treadwell. And I’m sure you want to be helpful.’
‘I don’t mind,’ said Treadwell, resigned. ‘I think, to be perfectly truthful, that I am past caring.’
‘You didn’t go back in,’ said Lloyd. ‘Didn’t you feel the urge to sack anyone this time?’
Treadwell shook his head. ‘Do you know the play An Inspector Calls?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Lloyd, a little puzzled.
‘We don’t know what the consequences of our actions will be,’ Treadwell said. ‘I sacked Lacey. Lacey was a driver. I needed a driver, because I had been banned.’ He raised his glass in a salute to the constabulary, and realised it was empty. ‘And he came in handy, running errands to the town, picking people up, that sort of thing. He picked Newby up from the station when he came for his interview.’
Lloyd picked up his drink again, and sipped it. ‘And he should have taken him back?’
Treadwell sighed. ‘But he didn’t, because I dismissed him. Told him to get off the premises. Newby missed his train as a result, and Andrew drove him back to London.’ He shook his head. ‘If I hadn’t sacked Lacey, the accident couldn’t have happened.’ He poured himself another. ‘I’ve felt responsible ever since. For Knight’s death, for Caroline’s illness – because she was ill, Mr Lloyd, even if stealing wasn’t, as it turns out, one of the symptoms. I feel responsible for Newby’s disability – for everything.’
Lloyd covered his glass with his hand, as Treadwell advanced with the bottle.
‘So I didn’t want to go back into the Barn, and face anyone. Finding her in almost exactly the same circumstances had brought it all back, and I didn’t want to do anything about it at all. And I thought, then, that everything with Caroline was going according to plan, despite that. So I didn’t ring her back.’
‘And when you found it hadn’t?’ Lloyd hadn’t forgotten his original question. ‘Why did you tell no one about this?’
Treadwell gave a deep sigh. ‘Robert said he’d had enough at about ten to one or so,’ he said. ‘And then, the next thing I knew, he was back. He came up to me at the table, and he said, “Diana’s dead”, just like that. “Diana’s dead. Someone’s killed her.”’ He stopped speaking, as he remembered the moment.
‘Go on,’ said Lloyd.
‘But I thought he’d been home. I thought he had found her with Newby, and . . . well, flipped. After the way he had been behaving at dinner . . . Anyway, when I found out what had actually happened to her, it was such a shock that I wasn’t thinking at all. It wasn’t until Marcia asked me who was minding the juniors that I realised that Diana had never got home. I said I’d have to go and tell Caroline what had happened, but Simon Allison suggested I send someone else. Quite right. I’d had – I’d been . . . I was drunk,’ he finished defiantly. ‘And because I was drunk I wasn’t capable of sorting it all out.’
‘When were you capable?’
‘When I woke up next morning, with a thick head. Simon had said that someone was coming to see me, so I was going to tell him. But it wasn’t a him! I didn’t expect a woman, for God’s sake! I couldn’t tell a woman what I’d heard, what had happened!’
‘That was two days ago. Why didn’t you tell me? Or Mr Allison?’
‘I was going to. But then there was Hamlyn, and Matthew, and I didn’t know whether I was coming or going. Then you arrested Newby, and I thought it was all over. I thought that was who she had been with, and now you had got him.’
Lloyd sat back, nursing his drink, deep in thought. Then he spoke. ‘Why should I believe any of that, Mr Treadwell?’ he asked.
Treadwell shrugged a little.
‘How do I know you didn’t follow her on to the playing-field and kill her?’ he asked.
Treadwell looked at him. ‘If Mrs H
amlyn was killed with the golf-club,’ he said, his voice quiet, ‘then . . .’ He paused. ‘Then you should ask Caroline Knight. She was with me when we found it. She’ll confirm that it was stolen that day.’
Lloyd listened; but Treadwell still couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
Caroline watched as Philip’s eyelids began to flicker, and smiled at him as he opened his eyes.
‘Have you stopped being cross with me yet?’ he asked.
Caroline buried her head in his shoulder. ‘I was cross with us,’ she said. ‘For letting the accident hurt us more than it had to. I haven’t pulled myself together any more than you have.’
He kissed her, and she smiled. ‘I told you you could do it,’ she said.
‘Not very well,’ he said.
She laughed. ‘Oh, Philip! It’ll get better. Yesterday you were practically suicidal because you thought you couldn’t do it at all. Are you never satisfied?’
‘I was,’ he said. ‘But I don’t suppose you were.’ His arm tightened round her.
‘I just wanted to be with you,’ she said. ‘I wanted to prove to you that you weren’t a wreck, and . . . I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t Andrew’s widow any more.’
‘But you are Andrew’s widow,’ he pointed out, showing the same literal turn of mind as Andrew himself.
‘I was ill,’ she said. ‘After Andrew died. Really ill.’ She smiled. ‘I was seeing a psychiatrist, too,’ she said. ‘You’re not the only one.’
He nodded. ‘I know,’ he said.
‘But it wasn’t helping. And one day I realised that I had to stop being Andrew’s widow,’ she said. ‘I had to live my own life again, and I had to do it without the help of medicine men.’
‘Perhaps you should have moved away from here,’ Philip said.
She nodded. ‘I wasn’t thinking logically. I just wanted to prove to myself that I was still me. I needed to put some sort of full stop to widowhood.’
She stiffened as she heard the front door to the building open, relaxing when someone knocked at the flat door.
‘I thought it was Sam,’ she said. She wasn’t looking forward to seeing Sam. ‘Shouldn’t you see who it is?’
Philip smiled. ‘I don’t feel like entertaining visitors,’ he said. ‘I don’t know about you.’
Another knock; louder, going on for a little longer.
‘It could be important.’
‘Then they’ll come back.’
A third knock. She and Philip stopped speaking, and listened as the footsteps went, and the front door banged shut. A woman’s footsteps. Whoever it was, she had gone.
‘What were you going to do?’ Philip asked.
‘What?’
‘About stopping being Andrew’s widow.’
She lay on her back, no longer looking at Philip, but still close, still touching him. ‘I was going to sleep with Sam,’ she said.
‘Wasn’t that a bit drastic?’
She laughed. Drastic hardly covered it.
‘Why Sam?’ he asked. ‘Of all people?’
‘Because he was a sitting duck,’ she said. ‘Always so keen to prove how macho he is. I knew it wouldn’t be difficult to interest him in the project.’
‘I got the impression that was his project,’ said Philip. ‘He put the idea into your head in the first place.’
No, she thought. It was the other way round. Sam had embraced the idea that a night with him would cure everything, but it had been her idea. But sex wasn’t important. It had seemed to be before, but it wasn’t. It had been important to Philip; that was why she had come to him. Because she could do something for him that his psychiatrist couldn’t; it was as simple as that.
She turned, and kissed him again. ‘It was my idea,’ she said. ‘Sam just tried to convince me that I was right, and he almost succeeded. I went out with him a couple of times, but I couldn’t make myself get involved with him. So, I planned it all. For weeks. Friday night,’ she said. ‘That’s when I was officially going to stop being a widow. We were going to a film, we’d be back late, he’d ask if he could stay, and I would say yes.’
‘Simple as that?’
‘I thought so.’ She sighed. ‘But when it came to it I couldn’t.’ She sat up and looked at Philip. ‘I really did treat him very badly,’ she said.
‘You still think you caused it all, don’t you?’ said Philip.
She didn’t answer.
‘You didn’t, Caroline. Sam might have gone with her, but he didn’t rape her. They were in my car, for God’s sake! I don’t know why the police thought it was rape.’
Caroline shivered slightly. ‘I do,’ she said. ‘Sam isn’t what you’d call gentle.’
‘Is that why you didn’t go through with it?’
She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t go through with it because I had already stopped being Andrew’s widow,’ she said. ‘I’d met you.’
‘Are you waiting for someone, miss?’
The loud voice startled Judy, who was having a cigarette in Lloyd’s car, and had opened the window in the vain hope that he wouldn’t know.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Des. ‘You’re the policewoman, aren’t you?’
‘That’s right.’ She pitched her own voice at his level.
‘It’s cold out here,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to do the boiler – would you like a cup of tea and a warm?’
Waters wasn’t in his flat, so she had been unable to put into practice Lloyd’s last minute instruction to be polite at all costs. She couldn’t go back to Treadwell’s, and Judy, crossly waiting in the car for Lloyd like a child outside a pub, couldn’t think of anything much nicer than a cup of tea and a warm. She walked with Des back to the school, and the wonderfully cosy boiler room. She sat at a little table while Des filled the kettle, then watched, transported, as he opened up the bottom of the boiler, and removed the hot ashes.
The smell made her six again. Six, in her grandmother’s cottage which her father had tried, without success, to make his mother modernise. He would tell her of the joys of electricity, how clean the cooker would be, how easy it would be to heat the house, how she wouldn’t have to rake out ashes and heave coal about. He would offer to pay for all the work to be done. And she would say that she had always done it, and always would. And she always did.
Des’s boiler was much bigger, even more trouble, even hotter, and more awkward. But, like her grandmother, Des expertly shovelled up the ash and deposited it in a metal container. ‘Bloody nuisance, these days,’ he bellowed, as he carried it to the door, and put it outside.
‘Plastic bins,’ he explained, as he came back and spooned tea into the pot. ‘You can’t put the ashes straight in any more. Got to let them cool down first.’
Perhaps, she thought, Des was a reincarnation of her grandmother, as he sat beside her, leaving the tea to brew. No tea-bags for Des or Gran.
‘How long have you worked here?’ she asked.
‘Thirty years near enough. Since it was a real school.’
She smiled. ‘Isn’t it a real school?’
‘That lot? You ought to know by now – you’ve been asking enough questions.’
Judy decided that being non-committal was the wisest course when everything you said had to be shouted at the top of your voice.
Des handed her a mug of tea, and indicated the milk-bottle and the bag of sugar, which had a soup-spoon in it.
‘Des,’ she said. ‘Was Mrs Hamlyn involved with anyone at the school?’
Des laughed.
‘I mean recently,’ said Judy.
‘I don’t know about that bloke with the stick,’ said Des. ‘She might have been, but I don’t think so. She went about with that artist for a while. She wasn’t too fussy.’ He drank some tea. ‘Mainly, it was people outside,’ he said. ‘I’d see her driving off in the evenings. I think since the business with Jim she didn’t want to cause any more trouble here.’
Judy didn’t think she had the strength to go checking up
on Diana’s outside contacts. She could feel the increased heat on her face before Des began to shovel coal in on top of the fiercely glowing embers, banking it up for the night.
‘Hard work,’ she observed.
‘No,’ he said scornfully. ‘I’m used to it. Antiquated, though – you’d think they’d spend some money and get a new one, at least.’
‘How often do you have to do it?’ Judy knew that on a cold Monday morning she would hate it, but right now it seemed like a lovely job, full of warmth, and the sights and sounds and smells of her childhood.
‘Night and morning,’ he said. ‘Every day but Saturday. Let it out Saturday, and clear it out proper on Sunday morning.’
Judy smiled. ‘So why were you raking it out on Saturday at lunchtime?’ she asked. ‘Don’t forget, you’re talking to a detective here, Des.’
Des’s face was blank.
She laughed. ‘Just a joke,’ she said.
‘But I wasn’t,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t here on Saturday. It’s my day off. Always has been. I’m at home with my feet up on a Saturday.’
‘You don’t live in?’
‘Not me. Never take a tied house. If you lose your job, you lose your home.’ He frowned. ‘Your lot used to have to have police houses, didn’t you?’
‘Mm.’ Judy wasn’t really listening. ‘Someone was in here on Saturday,’ she said. ‘Raking out the boiler. I heard them. Myself.’
‘Well, I’d like to know who was messing about with my boiler,’ said Des.
Judy nodded. ‘So would I,’ she said, putting down her mug. They had searched all the bins; it was the first thing they did after the playing-field. ‘Des – that container that you put out the back door – how often do you empty it?’
‘When it’s full,’ he said.
‘Do you have something I could use to poke around in it?’ she asked.
Des walked slowly over to the boiler. ‘A poker works best,’ he said.
Judy smiled, and held out her hand, but Des pulled the poker back. ‘No,’ he said. ‘These ashes are red hot. I’ll look for whatever it is.’
And he looked, and they found it. The metal head, which wasn’t going to burn up, and the murderer knew it. The metal head which someone had had to come back for, to rake out of the ashes before Des found it. Which couldn’t be put into a dustbin, because the police were emptying them all.
