by J M Gregson
‘No. There are no children resident on site.’
Lucy had expected that from the tasteful, uncluttered decor of this room. ‘Another part of the employment policy, is that? Like employing people who will be grateful for the work and not ask too many questions about what their employer is up to?’
It was the first time they had stated these ideas openly to her. Sally Cartwright decided not to contest them. ‘I think now that it might be deliberate policy not to have young children around, yes. It was only when I found that no one else on the site had them that I considered the notion.’
‘And why would that be?’
‘I’ve no idea.’ The answer came a little too quickly and curtly, signifying that she was shutting the door on any further speculations in the area.
Lucy Blake made a note, allowing the moment to stretch, before she looked round the elegant, established room and said, ‘You didn’t need to be rehoused, after the fire?’
‘No. I was evacuated, along with everyone else, but this end cottage wasn’t damaged at all. I’ve had the windows open for two days, trying to get rid of the smells of the smoke and the firemen’s foam. But we were very lucky.’
It was the first time she had spoken in the plural, as if her husband was still alive, as newly bereaved people often did. Lucy Blake rose from her seat and walked across to the wedding photograph on top of the television. ‘I presume this is your husband.’
‘Yes. It was taken sixteen years ago. As you would no doubt have deduced, from the look of the woman standing beside him.’
Lucy had never met a woman who could make wry jokes against herself in such tragic circumstances. She found herself admiring Sally Cartwright’s self-control, but feeling that they had so far peeled away only her surface layers. She examined the man in the photograph. He was a slim, erect figure of around six feet tall; dark-haired; holding himself straight but a little self-conscious for this formal picture; handsome, in a thin-faced, diffident way; sporting one of the droopy Edwardian-style moustaches which had been fashionable for a brief period around the time of this wedding. She found herself totally unable to relate this good-looking, uncertain-looking young man to the blackened remains they had looked at eighty yards from here two days earlier.
She tried to keep her voice steady as she said, ‘Do you have a more recent likeness?’
‘I expect so, yes. I’ll unearth a later picture before you go, if you like.’ Sally Cartwright enjoyed the feeling of being more in control of herself than the pretty young woman with the striking chestnut hair who was questioning her.
‘What exactly did your husband do at Marton Towers?’
‘He was in charge of the estate. I suppose in the old days he’d have been called the head gardener. He did more than that, though, he looked after the woodlands as well. He called in outsiders for major jobs: things like tree surgery and drainage work. Mr Holloway says it always pays to use specialists for things like that.’
‘Even so, Neil couldn’t run the whole estate on his own.’ It was the first time Lucy Blake had used the dead man’s first name; she could discern no reaction in his widow.
‘No. Neil was the only resident outdoor worker on the site, but he had one man who worked full-time for him. Ben Freeman. He comes in on a bike from the village down the road, about three miles away, though I haven’t seen him this week. There are two older men who come in part-time. Their hours vary; they work about twice as long in the summer as in the winter.’
‘Head gardener is quite a responsible job in a place like this, even if he didn’t have the title.’
‘Yes, it is. Neil’s job rather evolved over the years, the way mine has. He was a good carpenter, and he did a lot of work in the main house when we came here. But he had always been interested in gardening, and he went on a couple of courses to learn more. Mr Holloway is good at spotting potential and rewarding it. Sorry, that doesn’t sound very modest, does it?’ For the first time since they had come into her house, she looked a little embarrassed. But it was for herself, not because of anything concerning her husband.
Peach was by now a little nettled by her composure. He had been grateful for it, at first. But he had come here prepared to be full of consideration for a woman riven by grief, and now felt that there was a danger that she rather than he was controlling their exchanges. He said abruptly, ‘It seems probable that your husband never left Marton Towers before he was killed.’
‘He did.’ Sally found that she felt curiously calm, now that the moment she had waited for had come.
‘You know that?’
‘Yes. He drove out of here last Sunday at about one o’clock. Almost exactly six days ago.’ She looked at her watch as she spoke, as if the confirmation of this symmetry appealed to her.
‘You saw him go?’
‘Yes. I watched him put his case on to the back seat of the car, then waved him off as he drove away.’
‘So at some time after that, he came back here.’
‘Possibly. But his car never came back, as far as I’m aware. It’s possible that he was killed somewhere else, and his body brought back to be dumped here and destroyed in the fire.’
Peach smiled grimly. ‘Perhaps you should have been a detective rather than a housekeeper, Mrs Cartwright. We have to be careful to take all possibilities into account.’
She allowed herself a faint smile. ‘I’ve had a lot of time to think about these possibilities, since we heard on Thursday about the discovery of the body.’
‘But you didn’t know it was Neil then.’
She was not at all discomforted. ‘I suspected it. I rang his sister in Dundee. Neil had never arrived there, and she hadn’t heard anything from him.’
For the first time, she seemed a little on edge, but that was understandable enough. Peach said, ‘You will understand that in the case of a suspicious death, we have to ask some embarrassing questions. How would you describe your own relationship with Neil?’
Despite his brief preamble, the question she had been waiting for hit her like a stone. ‘We had the normal ups and downs that most married couples have. But not serious ones. We’d have liked children, but we’d got used to being without them years ago. We hadn’t any financial worries: we were both doing well here. I think both of us had doubled the monthly wage we had when we were first appointed. I’d say that on balance we got on at least as well as the average married couple – perhaps even rather better than that.’
He’d let her deliver all the phrases she’d rehearsed, when she’d expected him to punctuate them with his questions. She wondered if it now sounded too much like a statement she had prepared. She said impulsively, ‘The wife is always a suspect, in cases like this, isn’t she? Well, I didn’t kill Neil!’ and then wished that she hadn’t made that assertion.
Peach studied her for a moment, with his head tilted a little to one side, like an intelligent but not necessarily friendly dog. ‘And who else do you think might have killed him, Mrs Cartwright?’
‘I’ve no idea.’ She wondered again if her denial had come a little too quickly, right on the heels of his question, as if she had given it no thought. She said, ‘I’ve considered the matter over the last forty-eight hours, and I can’t think of anyone. Certainly no one on the site.’
‘Had Neil no enemies?’
‘No. None who would want to kill him, anyway. He was a popular man. Everyone seemed to like him. It’s inconceivable to me that anyone would want to kill him.’ She looked down into the empty coffee cup beside her, and seemed for the first time to be near tears.
‘Nevertheless, someone did kill him, Mrs Cartwright. Maybe in cold blood, maybe in a sudden fit of anger. You say you can’t think of anyone who would have wished him dead. Can you tell us of anyone who stood to gain by his death?’
‘No. No one. Except me, I suppose, and I’ve already told you that I didn’t kill him.’
‘Indeed you have. Well, please do go on thinking about it, and contact me immediately
at this number if anything occurs to you. I’ll remind you once again that no one should try to keep secrets during the course of a murder enquiry.’
They took down the details and registration number of his car, then waited a moment whilst she found the more recent photograph she had promised them. It had been taken a year earlier, on the estate, Sally Cartwright said. It showed a smiling man leaning upon a small tractor. He looked if anything more handsome than in the wedding photograph, with the confidence which maturity had brought to his face. The years were often kinder to men than to women, Lucy Blake reflected, as she put the picture carefully into her document case.
Sally Cartwright stood in the doorway of the cottage to watch them climb into the police car. Lucy Blake looked back as Peach turned the car carefully over the gravel at the corner of the big house, a hundred and fifty yards from the far end of the stable block. The widow was still standing motionless in the open doorway of her cottage.
Eleven
‘They say they can’t release the body for burial yet. We’ll have to wait for the funeral. Doesn’t seem natural, somehow. They tried to explain the reasons to me, but I wasn’t really listening.’ Brenda Simmons stared steadily ahead of her as she sat at the table, but she saw nothing.
‘It’s because of the suspicious circumstances, love. When they eventually arrest someone for killing Neil, the solicitors for the defence may ask for a second, independent, post-mortem examination, in case they want to contest the findings of the original one.’
Derek Simmons wondered whether he should have volunteered this detail to her. He’d been glad to find anything to say, but perhaps it was insensitive. It couldn’t be easy, when your son had been burnt beyond all recognition. At least he’d managed to avoid mention of the word murder.
Nothing had been easy over the last few days. Brenda had been devastated by grief for the son who had been so cruelly and unnaturally snatched away from her. Derek had offered her what comfort he could. But all the time a still, steady voice within him had been telling him that he was a hypocrite, that a man whose heart was shouting with relief over the death of Neil Cartwright should not be uttering the platitudes of consolation to a suffering woman.
Perhaps in time Brenda would understand a little of his relief, but it was far too early for that. He must be sure to conceal it for a long time yet, but it wasn’t going to be easy. He had grown used to sharing confidences with this woman who was his second and much more suitable wife. They hadn’t had secrets from each other over the last few years. They hadn’t had many differences at all, in fact.
Apart, that is, from Neil. The son who had held resolutely to his departed father’s name, who had never tried either to modify or to conceal his contempt for his stepfather.
He was sorry for Brenda: he understood her grief, was even pained a little on her behalf, when he saw her suffering. But he couldn’t disguise from himself the fact that he was delighted to be rid of that sullen, hostile presence, that steady irritant in the peaceful world that he had set up for himself in his second marriage. Despite all Brenda’s efforts, he and Neil had never got on with each other, never would have got on. He was delighted that his difficult stepson was gone, whatever the circumstances of that going: his only difficulty was concealing that delight from his wife.
He went into the kitchen and checked on the progress of the new potatoes he had bought to try to tempt Brenda into eating a proper meal. Almost ready. He put on the sprouts and gave the sausages a final turn as they spat quietly under the grill. He wasn’t a great cook, and he hadn’t done much in the kitchen in the years with Brenda, but he could get by. You didn’t reach the age of sixty-six and live the varied kind of life Derek Simmons had lived without being able to get by.
‘Varied’. He liked that word. Covered a multitude of sins, ‘varied’ did. He put the plates to warm and called through to his wife that the meal would be ready in eight minutes. Might prise a smile out of Brenda, the idea that he could be as precise as that in his culinary skills.
She tried to eat, to please him, tried to keep up her end of the conversation he struggled so conscientiously to create. But it was no good. She eventually pushed her plate aside and said, ‘I’m sorry, Derek. I know you’ve worked hard with the meal, and it’s really very nice, but I just can’t eat at the moment. Leave the washing up to me and go and watch the football. I’ll be better doing something.’
At seven o’clock on a Saturday evening, there was no football on the television, of course. That just showed how out of touch Brenda was at the moment. There was the usual Saturday night drivel, but he did not switch the set off. Silence would put yet more strain on his conversational skills and his powers of dissimulation.
Brenda came in after twenty minutes or so, glanced at the television set, and sat down with the paper. Derek watched her staring at the crossword; twenty minutes later, she had put in but a single answer. He said tentatively, ‘I know this is very hard for you, love, but you need to pull yourself together, somehow. You’re going to be ill, at this rate.’
Brenda Simmons said with a sudden touch of venom in her voice, ‘Whereas you’re going to be fine. You never liked Neil. You must be glad he’s gone. I expect it’s made your week.’
He tried to reassure her that it wasn’t so, but he couldn’t find the words to be convincing, and he shut up after a couple of sentences. Another ten minutes went by with them stealing surreptitious glances at each other whilst pretending to be involved with their own concerns. Then Brenda Simmons sighed and said, ‘I’m no company for anyone, at the moment, Derek, am I? Why don’t you go down to the club and get yourself a game and a bit of cheerful company?’
He tried to conceal the way that his heart leapt at the suggestion. She couldn’t know that he had been wondering how to propose just this. And she surely couldn’t know that he had other reasons than a bit of banter with his friends to take him there.
Derek said carefully, ‘I don’t want to leave you, at a time like this.’
‘You’re serving no purpose here, are you? We’ll only get irritated with each other, eventually. And I’ll be all right – I’ll probably be better on my own for a bit, in fact. I might have a little weep, when I don’t feel the need to keep up appearances for your sake. And you need a change. That’s if you’re not too tired, after everything you’ve been doing in the house.’
‘No. No, I’m all right. I’ve not done much, you know. Been round with the vacuum and made a simple meal: just the sort of thing you dash off in a couple of hours without noticing.’
She smiled at him, trying to show that she appreciated his efforts, trying to conceal the fact that at this moment he was an irritant, that she wanted him out of the way, so that she could have the house to herself and her sorrow. ‘Get off with you, Derek Simmons. And remember you’re driving home, and don’t drink too many pints!’
She knew that he wouldn’t risk being caught over the limit; it was just her way of dismissing him, and both of them understood it. He said, ‘I’ll go for an hour or two, then. Give myself a change, and you a bit of space.’
He tried not to sound too eager, and yet he found himself out of the house and in the driving seat of the car in three minutes. He reversed the car carefully out of the garage, looked hard at the light behind the curtains as he drove away into the cool March darkness. She wasn’t watching. He turned left rather than right at the end of the road, away from the snooker club, towards the other end of the town.
At the same time that Derek was escaping from the Simmons house, Percy Peach was feeling at a bit of a loss. He did not see Derek Simmons’ car drive past him in the opposite direction as he drove along the Preston road, but there was no reason why he should. Percy had no knowledge as yet of what the stepfather of Neil Cartwright looked like, let alone whether he had any connection with the crime.
Percy was at a loss because Lucy Blake, who nowadays kept him company on most of his Saturday nights, had gone to a school reunion, despite all h
is frivolous suggestions that she’d be kept in detention or made to write essays. The devil finds work for idle hands, moralizers say. Percy wouldn’t have put it as strongly as that. But as he passed the end of Tommy Bloody Tucker’s road, he scented a little harmless mischief.
DCI Peach’s definition of ‘harmless’ was not quite the same as that of other and kinder people. He turned the silver Mondeo round at the next junction and drove thoughtfully back towards the residence of the Head of Brunton CID.
It was an impressive house, Edwardian and detached, with rhododendrons arching over the gates and a magnolia heavy with buds near the front door. Barbara Tucker opened the door when he rang and peered down two steps at the cheerful round face of her husband’s bête noire. ‘Oh, it’s you!’ she said. Her disapproval was deafening.
With the light behind her, Barbara’s formidable bulk at the top of the steps made her an even more impressive Brünnhilde. ‘You’re looking radiant tonight, Mrs T!’ Percy said. ‘Regrettably, though, it’s your husband that I need to see.’
‘It’s not convenient. We’re going out. It’s Saturday night, you know, and he’s off duty.’
Percy decided that Tommy Bloody Tucker’s talent for the blindin’ bleedin’ obvious had probably been refined by marriage. ‘We policemen are never off duty, Mrs Tucker. Your husband has often had occasion to remind me of that.’
She said with unconcealed distaste, ‘I suppose you’d better come in.’ Then she went to the bottom of the staircase and yelled into the upper regions of the house, ‘Thomas! That Chief Inspector of yours is here to see you. On Saturday night.’
He’s going to get a bollocking for this, when I’m gone, thought Percy happily.
Thomas Bulstrode Tucker had been trying and failing to tie on a black bow tie, so he was already irritated. He took Peach into a dining room without heat and said, ‘You’ll have to be quick. We’re going out. We’re off to a dinner with the Chairman of the Brunton Police Authority,’ he said self-importantly. He couldn’t resist the opportunity to impress, despite his impatience to be rid of this annoying subordinate.
