by J M Gregson
From somewhere away to her left, a man’s voice called softly, ‘Over here!’
She started a little, despite the fact that she had known there would have to be some form of contact. Then she turned and made her way towards the spot whence the words had come. At that moment, a light was switched on at last, high and brilliant, a long way above her in the elaborate patterned ceiling of the hall, but seeming to her harsh and dazzling after the darkness she had been negotiating for so long.
‘We’ll talk down here,’ said the man who had called to her. ‘You’re right that we have things we need to discuss, but I didn’t want my wife to hear any of this, and nor would you.’
Sally Cartwright nodded, not trusting herself to speak after being so long silent, and followed Neville Holloway into his office.
Seventeen
‘It’s six days now since the body of Neil Cartwright was discovered. We know a lot more now than we did then.’
DCI Peach made the simple statements sound like an ominous warning. James Naylor, the Marton Towers chef, who was intensely uncomfortable with words himself, shifted awkwardly on his hard upright chair. They were sitting in the Murder Room, which had been set up in an empty section of the stable block, the first one which had been unaffected by the fire. James, sitting isolated in the centre of the room, with no desk or table between him and the CID officers, felt already very exposed.
James should have kept quiet and waited for them to make the running. Instead, his nerves raced and drove him into speech. He looked hopefully at Lucy Blake and said nervously, ‘I expect you’ve been putting together what people have said to you, and getting a good picture of what goes on around here.’
She did not answer his smile. ‘Yes. As DCI Peach told you, we have a much fuller picture now. And as quite often happens, what people have left out is of much more interest than what they have told us.’
As James grinned weakly and decided not to trust his tongue any further, Peach followed up his partner’s parry with a more definite thrust of his own. ‘Almost amounts to lying, when people withhold information from the police, Mr Naylor. We take a very serious view of it.’ He looked as if it was now going to give him a great deal of pleasure to take a serious view of the conduct of James Naylor.
‘I can’t think that I withheld anything from you.’ The firmness James tried to give to his words was dissipated by the nervous laugh which followed hard upon them.
‘Relationships, Mr Naylor. It looks like they might well be the key to the unlocking of this crime. And various people have been trying to deceive us. Including you.’
He made it a statement of fact. James wanted to argue, would in fact have argued, if it had come at him as merely a suggestion. He said feebly, ‘If I deceived you, I didn’t mean to.’ He was even more conscious of his clumsiness with words. His evasions sounded like admissions.
Peach said calmly, ‘You didn’t like Neil Cartwright, did you? And he didn’t like you.’
‘That doesn’t mean that I killed him.’
‘I wasn’t aware that you’d been accused of that. Yet.’ Peach allowed himself a smile at this fascinating prospect.
‘You can’t say that because I know my way around the place I must have killed him.’
Peach merely nodded slowly to himself, as if weighing up that idea. Like many men who are unused to the shades which phrasing can give to ideas, Naylor gave more away than he intended to once he committed himself to words. He watched Peach’s bald head moving as if it was hypnotizing him and said unwisely, ‘Other people as well as me knew the room where the body was hidden before the fire.’ Peach, with his eyes closed, continued to nod, as if accepting this, and his man was lured into more speculation. ‘Surely Neil’s wife had more reason to hate him than I had.’
Peach’s eyes returned to his man’s face, widening like those of a lion which had spotted today’s meal. ‘And why would that be, Mr Naylor?’
James, like many men unused to Peach’s techniques, had concluded by now that the man knew far more than he actually did, that trying to deceive him further would only land him deeper into trouble. ‘Well, she was the one whose husband was playing away, wasn’t she?’
Both Peach and Blake were far too experienced in this game of cat and mouse to reveal by any flicker of their features that this was news to them. Peach relaxed a little and said, ‘You’d better tell us all about this, hadn’t you? In view of the fact that you concealed it when we spoke to you on Sunday, I should advise you to make every effort to be completely frank with us now. Then we shall be able to see how closely your account tallies with what other people have already told us, and with what they will tell us in the next day or two.’
He sounded to James Naylor like a man who knew everything that had gone on at Marton Towers in the days before the fire and the discovery of the body. James fought a rising sense of panic as he said, ‘All I meant was that Sally Cartwright had every reason to hate Neil. She might well have killed her husband. I’m not saying she did, mind, but it happens, doesn’t it? People lose their tempers when sex is involved. Sometimes they don’t even mean to kill, but anger takes over.’ His brow furrowed with the effort of so many words. ‘There’s a phrase for it, isn’t there?’
Peach looked at the uncertain face in front of him. ‘Crime passionnel, the French call it. You’re probably thinking of that. Crime of passion. It’s an idea which British law doesn’t recognize, as yet. No doubt some bloody idiot will introduce it, before long.’ He shook his head sadly at the decadence of British jurisprudence, then looked eagerly at Naylor and said, ‘So your suggestion is that Sally Cartwright did her old man in?’
‘No! I’m not suggesting that. All I said was that she was bound to hate Neil, in the circumstances.’
DS Lucy Blake looked up from her notes. ‘You said “She might well have killed her husband”, Mr Naylor. Are you now withdrawing that suggestion?’
‘Yes. Well, no, not really. I’m just saying she might have done it, I suppose.’ James had a familiar sensation of things passing out of control, once he had to put thoughts into words and venture beyond monosyllabic replies. It had all seemed very clear to him before they came: he had planned to divert suspicion away from himself by calmly pointing out that other people had better motives than him for this crime. Now he had no idea exactly how much these persistent, professional questioners knew, and they were saying things which he had never anticipated.
Peach pursed his lips and looked very serious indeed. He studied the fresh face beneath the tousled fair hair for a moment before he said, ‘We’ll need to re-examine Sally Cartwright’s movements on the Sunday in question very carefully indeed, in the light of what you say, Mr Naylor. In view of the fact that you seem to think her guilty of murder, you’d better give us the details of the reasons she had to hate her husband, hadn’t you?’
James Naylor shut his eyes, trying to summon the concentration which would allow him to speak the sentences which would divert attention away from him rather than towards him. You had to be fiendishly careful, when these things did not come naturally to you. ‘All I’m saying is that Neil Cartwright and my wife weren’t exactly discreet about their affair. Well, I suppose they were at first. I don’t know how long it had been going on before I heard about it, do I?’
For an instant pain and passion flashed into the fresh face. Then he shut his eyes again and clasped his thick arms across his chest, as if they were the staves on a barrel, containing and disguising whatever forces lay within the powerful torso behind them. ‘Sally must have found out at about the same time as I did – or perhaps a week or two earlier, for all I know. She’s a clever woman, Sally. Not much passes her by.’
So the affair had been not between this man and Sally Cartwright, but between the dead man and the slim, pretty, very contained Michelle Naylor. The uneasy being who sat like a writhing schoolboy on the chair in front of them had been cuckolded, and was now pouring out information he thought they already possess
ed.
Peach controlled his elation as he said quietly and unemotionally, ‘This is a powerful motive, Mr Naylor. One you should have revealed to us at the time of our first meeting on Sunday.’
‘I didn’t know how to tell you about it. I – I didn’t know how to find the right words. I thought you’d get it all from Sally Cartwright. I didn’t think it was up to me to lead you to her.’
For a moment, his shiftiness, his assumption that you gave the police nothing that you could deny to them, reminded them of his past. This was a man who had been involved in an affray, who had offered serious, instinctive violence. Peach said slowly, ‘What you’re really telling us is that you think Sally Cartwright killed her husband. You’ve given us a motive. Do you have any real evidence to support it?’
‘No. I’m not even saying she did it.’
‘Just as well, that. Because the motive you’ve given to Mrs Cartwright applies just as strongly to you. In my experience, not too many men react calmly to the idea of their wives playing away.’
James felt the blood flooding into his fresh, too-revealing face, felt his fingers pressing hard into the muscles at the top of his arms as he strove to stay still. ‘I didn’t kill Cartwright.’
Peach gave the chef an affable smile. ‘We’ll need to be convinced of that. Especially since you chose to refrain from all mention of your wife’s affair with the murder victim, when we spoke on Sunday.’
‘I told you all about my movements on the day of the killing.’
‘You told us something about them, yes. You also told us that you got on quite well with Neil Cartwright. “Well enough”, you said, I think. You then added that although you both lived on the site, you “didn’t live in each other’s pockets”. Whereas what we now find is that the man had taken your wife into his bed and you hated his guts. Bit of a difference there, you’ll agree. So we’ll need to review what you said about your movements on the day of the murder with newly enlightened eyes and a degree of scepticism, won’t we?’
James was bewildered and scared by this stocky, aggressive man with eyes like gimlets and a torrent of words at his disposal. It was disconcerting to find him quoting back at him the things he had said on Sunday. He kept his arms firmly folded and determined to say as little as possible. ‘I told you what I was doing on that Sunday. I’ve nothing to add to it. I didn’t even see Neil Cartwright on the day of his death.’
Peach nodded to Lucy Blake, who flicked back several pages in her neat notebook, though she knew well enough what she was going to say. It was dull stuff, but very necessary. ‘Mr Naylor told us that he went to Tesco’s with his wife in the morning. She has since confirmed that. The visit occupied them for no more than an hour. Mr Naylor went across to the mansion at around midday to discuss with Mr Holloway menus and times of meals for the guests who would be staying at Marton Towers in the middle of the week. According to the statement of Neville Holloway, this occupied them for no more than forty minutes. According to Mr Naylor’s statement, he then spent the rest of the day on the site. There are so far no witnesses to that until seven o’clock in the evening. Mrs Naylor was away visiting her parents during the afternoon, but says that from seven o’clock onwards she was with her husband.’
‘As she was,’ said James, firmly but unnecessarily.
Peach smiled at him. ‘Convenient, that. Spouses are always convenient, when they’re providing alibis for each other. When we discover that one of them had been playing away and they’re at daggers drawn with each other, we tend to be a little sceptical about quiet domestic evenings with no third party present and no other confirmation.’
‘Make what you like of it. It’s what happened.’ James looked past his tormentor at the distant wall. They could go at this as hard as they liked, but they wouldn’t shake it apart, if he and Michelle both held firmly to what they’d agreed.
Peach nodded slowly, evidently agreeing with this thought. Then he said, ‘Leaves the hours between one and seven unaccounted for, that does. Unfortunate, from your point of view.’
It was on the tip of James’s tongue to produce the cliché about being innocent until proved guilty. Then he remembered that he’d used it at the last meeting with this man, and had it kicked firmly into touch by this damned Detective Chief Inspector. He said as sternly as he could, ‘You won’t prove that I killed Cartwright. That’s because I didn’t do it.’
Peach stood up as suddenly as he seemed to do everything else and moved towards the door. It was left to DS Blake to say to James Naylor, ‘If you think of anyone else who can confirm where you were and what you were doing in the time between one o’clock and seven o’clock on that Sunday, it will be in your own interest to let us know of it immediately. Meanwhile, you shouldn’t leave the area without letting us have the details of your intended movements. Good day to you, Mr Naylor.’
At one thirty on the same day, a young police constable made his way reluctantly towards the office of Chief Inspector Peach.
Peach was much respected in the station, as thief-taker and scourge of Lancashire villains. He was also much feared, especially by newer and less experienced members of the Brunton constabulary. This hapless constable had been told with some relish that Peach gave more fearsome bollockings than anyone else in the county. And this was certainly the occasion for a right royal bollocking.
PC Jeffries knocked tentatively at the Chief Inspector’s door and tried not to flinch at the peremptory command to enter. He drew himself up to his full height and stood painfully to attention in front of the great man’s desk. He’d been hoping DS Lucy Blake might be around, but there was no sign of the female presence which might have mollified the great man’s wrath. ‘PC Jeffries,’ he said tentatively.
‘I know who you are, lad,’ said Percy. ‘PC Nigel Jeffries, if I remember right, which I do. Bit of a poncey name, to my mind, but I suppose we can’t blame you for that. You’d better sit down: you make me uneasy, standing there like a dopey stick of Blackpool rock.’
‘I’d prefer not to, sir, if you don’t mind. This won’t take long.’
‘You hope it won’t, you mean. Well, at least stop standing as if the chief constable’s rammed a poker up your arse. What can I do for you? Or, more to the point, what can you do for me?’
Jeffries felt his knees trembling as he tried to relax; he feared for a moment that he might collapse into a heap before the great man, like a boneless circus acrobat. ‘Well, sir, it’s about the scene-of-crime supervision at Marton Towers. After that body was discovered up there, before the SOCO team got to work on the place.’ He poured out the phrases in quick succession, as if he feared that he might be hit over the head if he ceased to speak.
‘Ay. Simple enough task, keeping an eye on a crime scene. We tend to give it to lads who are still wet behind the ears, so that they can get a bit of confidence out of something it’s difficult to get wrong.’
Nigel Jeffries shut his eyes. ‘I think I got it wrong, sir. A bit.’
There was such a long pause that Nigel opened his eyes again to see what was happening. The man was staring at him as if he was something he had just scraped off his shoe. DCI Peach said slowly, ominously, ‘You don’t get this sort of thing a bit wrong, lad. It’s like getting a woman a bit pregnant.’
‘I missed something out of my report, sir.’ The syllables fell out as if they were all part of one word, like that long Welsh place name he could never remember.
Percy Peach waited until the man in front of him looked again into his face. It took a long time, but eventually the hapless constable’s eyes returned tremulously to base, like those of a monkey hypnotized by the cobra which is going to kill it. In contrast to the way the man in uniform had spoken, every syllable was distinct as Peach said, ‘Let’s hope it’s not something important, shall we, Constable Jeffries? I’m not quite sure what will happen to you if you’ve omitted something vital, but I don’t think there is much call for eunuchs in the modern police service.’
Jeffrie
s tittered, an involuntary, nervous sound, which rang round the small room and took a long time to disappear.
Peach did not join in this graveyard hilarity. He said, ‘I’m not laughing, lad. And I hope some murderer isn’t laughing at Brunton CID because of you.’
‘All it is, sir, is that I forgot to mention something in my report. It’s probably not important at all. Probably has no bearing at all on the killing that you’re investigating.’
‘Perhaps you’d better let more experienced officers be the judge of that, Constable Jeffries,’ said Peach with ominous control.
‘Yes, sir. Of course I should, sir. Well, it’s just that a man came and looked at the crime site, sir. Came over the back wall of Marton Towers, I think. That’s certainly the way he left, anyway. I started to follow him, but decided I couldn’t leave the crime scene unattended. I was on my own up there at the time.’
Peach gave him a withering look. Nigel Jeffries duly withered.
He said desperately, ‘I acted according to the book, sir, which says that a crime scene should not be left unattended.’ He glanced fearfully at the DCI, then ended tremulously on a dying fall. ‘But I did forget to include this man’s appearance in my report.’
‘So you noted the precious facts of the times of your attendance at the scene, and the names of the officers from whom you took over and to whom in due course you handed over this onerous task. And forgot to record the appearance and departure of a man who may in due course prove to be an arsonist and a murderer.’
‘Yes, sir. That’s about it, sir. Sorry, sir.’
Peach regarded him steadily for several seconds, then said, ‘You’re a bog-roll, PC Jeffries. A wet, useless, disintegrating bog-roll. Let’s have your description of this man.’
