by J M Gregson
“Well – well, it seemed to me that anything I had to tell you couldn’t possibly be of much interest. That a perfectly innocent association such as I had enjoyed with Mrs Hume couldn’t have anything to do with her death…’”
Pearson’s words tailed helplessly away. Just when you expected this man to interrupt you again, he let you go on, tying yourself up, sounding increasingly feeble even to your own ears. Hugh was used to being in control of things, to ordering other people about. It was too long since he had been an employee and had been put on the spot like this, for him to cope with it.
For his part, Peach was reflecting that he thoroughly disliked Pearson; that it was eminently satisfying to him that he did not have to conceal that dislike.
“Do you wish to see the person who murdered Mrs Hume apprehended?”
“Well, yes, of course I do, but—”
“Then you have a very strange way of going about it. Surely you see that it could only help our investigation forward to have your statement? To hear what you can tell us of the victim? To eliminate you from our inquiries? If that is what we are able to do, of course.”
“Now, look here. If you’re saying I’m—”
“I’m not saying anything, Mr Pearson. Not yet. The trouble is, neither are you. But in police thinking, your conduct is suspicious. The behaviour, wouldn’t you say, DS Blake, of someone who has something to hide?”
He turned his round face abruptly upon Lucy, and she had to conceal her surprise.
“Yes, sir. Highly suspicious.” She had not removed her disturbing eyes from Hugh Pearson’s face. “The name ‘Hugh’ has appeared in various places.” She was proud of her vagueness here; almost Peachian she thought. It made it sound as if the name had been springing out at them from everywhere, instead of being picked up from the dead woman’s diary and from Barbara Harris. “And yet, despite appeals in the press and on the radio, you have not come forward. Bound to seem suspicious, that.” She picked up Peach’s word and used it like a recurring chorus.
Even the bloody woman was getting at him now, Hugh thought bitterly; probably a dyke, to be doing a job like this. He said sullenly, “There was no appeal to me by name. Just a general demand for anyone who had known Verna to come forward.”
Peach looked his disgust, studying Pearson for several seconds with practised, silent distaste. It had its effect. It was the man behind the desk who broke the silence. He said weakly, “Well, I’m here now, anyway.”
“Yes. We’ve ferreted you out.” Peach looked round at the high, ornate ceiling of the Georgian room, at the prints of Chester and York in their neat gold frames on the walls, at the decanters of port and whisky on the Pembroke table beside the window, at the mahogany desk and the ornate inkstand which was never used. And finally at the anxious face above that inkstand, at the man who normally controlled events in this elegant room. “Time to make up for lost time, Mr Pearson. What was your relationship with Verna Hume?”
Hugh had planned to dissimulate, to pretend that he had not known Verna very well, that their meetings had been random and sporadic, their friendship rather casual. He comprehended now that he would not get away with that; that this Rottweiler of a man would take him and shake him until he gave up his secrets.
Or most of them. He must revise his assessment of the filth if he was to keep the most vital facts of all to himself. These two were not as stupid as he had expected them to be.
“Verna and I were lovers. I expect that’s what you wanted to hear.”
“The truth is what I wanted to hear. Rather earlier than this, for preference. How long had this association been going on?”
“Well, I’d known Verna for about six months. I suppose we’d been going to bed together for most of that time. But you mustn’t assume that our relationship was all that close. Verna’s marriage wasn’t a happy one. I didn’t think I was treading on any toes when I slept with her. And – and as I say, we weren’t really all that close. Verna liked a good time. I wasn’t the first lover she’d had, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have been the last.”
Hugh stumbled on, repeating himself, wanting to be stopped, finding that now, when he expected to be interrupted, this awful man let him gabble on, going he knew not where, revealing, he was sure, far more than he intended. When he finally forced himself to stop, he felt Peach’s black pupils boring like gimlets into his mind; they seemed the only things alive in the Inspector’s stony face. Hugh thought he would be able to see this round white face long after their meeting was over, looking down on him during the night like a Francis Bacon portrait. Outside, a heavy lorry passed along the street. The sounds of its ponderous progress were louder through the double glazing than he would have thought possible; its passage seemed impossibly slow as the noise of it faded and died.
Peach said, “How often did you see her?”
Pearson’s shrug of the shoulders, exaggerated because of his tension, made Lucy Blake suddenly hate him. He was trying to shrug away this dead woman whom he had bedded and caressed, who had surely been tender with him, who had brought him intimacy and delight. Detective Sergeant Blake, who should have been professional and objective, hated him for that.
“I met Verna once a week. Sometimes twice. Probably more often than twice in the last few weeks.”
“Where?”
“At my flat, mostly. We had a weekend away, once. About five weeks ago, that would be.”
“When did you last see Verna Hume, Mr Pearson?”
Hugh licked his lips, gathering himself like a highjumper for the biggest leap of all. He had rehearsed the answer to this question, because he had known it was inevitable; now he found the words he had chosen would not come when he needed them. “On the Tuesday. The one before the Saturday when she died.”
Peach’s features, previously so immobile, sprang now into vivid animation. “You seem very certain about the exact time of the lady’s death. It is information we haven’t yet released.” He smiled upon Pearson like a cartoon cat upon a cornered mouse.
And like a cartoon smile, this one seemed to Hugh to stretch and stretch, until it threatened to fill the whole of this familiar room. He said, “You said four days ago, yourself, just now. I’m sure you did.”
“I said several days ago, Mr Pearson. Quite deliberately.”
“Oh. Well, I – I suppose I just assumed…”
“Hmmm. You’re sure you didn’t see Mrs Hume after Tuesday?”
“No. We spoke a couple of times on the phone, but I didn’t see her after Tuesday.” He repeated the day again, like a man anxious to convince himself of an unlikely fact. Searching desperately for some detail which might make it convincing, he said, “Verna rang me at the office, at least once. On the Friday, I think. My secretary could confirm that for you.”
“Yes. Secretaries are often able to corroborate things. Bit like wives, really.” Peach contrived to imply that even confirmation of facts was highly suspect, in his view. “So we’ve established that you were bedding the lady. Regularly. How close would you say the relationship was, then?” Again, Percy produced the only phrase he had accepted from the social workers who were such anathema to him.
Again, the shrug from Pearson. This time Hugh managed to transfer some of the physical relaxation it brought into his own voice, and Lucy Blake hated him a little more for that as he said,
“Difficult to say, really. She was available, and I’m single. As I say, I wasn’t the only man she slept with, by any means.”
Lucy, looking up from her notes, said acidly, “Easy lay, was she, Mr Pearson?”
Hugh, taken by surprise because he had almost forgotten her in his contest with Peach, was more than ever convinced that this was a dyke. He said peevishly, “I didn’t say that, did I? She liked sex, and her marriage was a disappointment to her. I didn’t kid myself I was the only one to enjoy her favors.”
“So she meant very little to you?”
“I didn’t say that either, did I?” Hugh felt suddenly more
confident, even truculent, with this younger, female adversary, who clearly knew nothing about the delights of life between the sheets with a man like him. “We knew the score, both of us. I wasn’t ready to settle down, and Verna was taking pleasure where she found it.” The look on the open features beneath the dark yellow hair said that Hugh Pearson didn’t think Verna would have found any greater pleasure than with him.
“We found your name in Mrs Hume’s diary,” said Peach. “Why would she bother to write it down, do you think, when there were so few other names there?”
For a moment, Pearson fought with his vanity, as Percy had intended he should. But he was enough aware of his danger to resist. “I couldn’t say, I’m sure.”
He wondered what Verna had written there; whether there had been any indication of the pressures she was putting upon him to shack up with her. That was one of the troubles with these CID people: they gave nothing away. They could trap you into lies, if you weren’t careful. Probably the less he said, the better.
“Perhaps she just wanted to make a note of when we were due to meet. She was very methodical, you know.”
“No, I don’t know. We’re still building up a picture of our murder victim, you see. Were you expecting to meet her at the weekend?”
The abruptness of the question almost caught him off guard, even as he told himself that he should have been prepared for it.
“No. Well, not definitely. I was expecting her to ring me, to make some arrangement.”
“And yet you didn’t ring her, when you heard nothing from her?”
“No.”
“Didn’t you find her silence even a little worrying? You say you were expecting to be in contact with her.”
“Puzzling, rather than worrying. I might have rung her, I suppose. But I had plenty of other things to do at the weekend.” Belatedly, he tried to recover a little of his swagger, to imply that he was confident enough of his appeal not to have to chase after women.
Peach studied him for a moment as if he disbelieved every word of this. Then he said, “You say there were other men in her life, as well as you. Do you think one of them might have been responsible for this death?”
It was a chance to throw them a red herring, to divert the hunt from his own trail, which these two seemed to find so attractive. But, despite all Peach’s implications, Hugh Pearson was not stupid. This pair he had planned to treat so lightly had won a reluctant respect from him, and he hesitated to lie to them more than he needed.
Taking care this time to leave the day of the killing open, he said, “I doubt whether Verna made any move to contact another man on Saturday or Sunday. She’d become rather attached to me, if you must know. And to be honest, we were rather closer than I implied earlier. She – she’d told me she was going to divorce Martin and marry me.”
“Really.” Peach’s eyebrows shot alarmingly towards the ceiling. “And that pleased you, did it?”
Hugh fought fiercely to ignore the contempt in Peach’s voice, forcing himself to think about what his reaction to this should be, about how he could best get himself off the police hook. Verna wasn’t around any more to dispute anything, thank God, and he didn’t think anyone else would know much about this.
He said carefully, “I wasn’t averse to the idea. Quite attracted to it, in fact. Perhaps I’ve played the field for long enough. Perhaps it’s time I settled down. And she was a good-looking woman, you know.” Even in his own danger, his vanity came out in that last phrase, as if he needed to defend his choice, to preserve his reputation as a womanizer.
“And of course she had her own business,” said Peach, his tone this time carefully neutral.
Before he saw the trap, Pearson had nodded his serious agreement. Then he said hastily, “But that wasn’t a consideration.”
“Of course not.” Again, the man behind the desk was accorded that long, disconcerting moment of estimation from Peach’s dark eyes. “Who do you think killed Verna Hume, Mr Pearson?”
“I – I’ve really no idea. You can’t expect—”
“Someone did, you see. Suffocated her, quite deliberately and cold-bloodedly, with a pillow. If you’ve any ideas on the matter, you’d better let us have them now.”
“No. No. I haven’t.”
Hugh felt again that he was being offered a chance to divert them, to set them on a scent other than his own. But he could think of nothing other than getting them out of this room, where he was normally in command. He wanted only to be alone, away from these four inquisitorial eyes and their unflinching scrutiny.
Peach rose to his feet with apparent reluctance. “Don’t leave the area without informing us of your movements, Mr Pearson. And when you think of other information which might be of interest to us, get in touch immediately, please.”
‘When’, not ‘if, thought Hugh. But he was too relieved by the prospect of their departure to raise any objection.
*
Pearson’s tormentors had driven half a mile away from Pearson Electronics before either of them spoke. Then Lucy Blake said, “I didn’t like him.”
“I realized that. I make it a practice not to like many of them: you might have noticed. But you mustn’t let it affect your judgment.”
“No. But I still don’t like the turd. From what we’ve learned of Verna Hume so far, he seems a fitting mate for her. I shall make him my leading suspect. Is he yours?”
Percy knew that he should have told her immediately that she should proceed from facts, that she should beware of pre-judging certain issues, and that there were suspects they had not even seen yet. Instead, he was silent, for as long as he had been in some of the intervals which had so unnerved Hugh Pearson. But this time, he was genuinely weighing a proposition.
Eventually, he said, “I thought a man should be more upset by the death of his lover than our Mr Pearson appeared to be. Especially when he claims that he was intending to marry her.”
Seventeen
Martin Hume discovered his wife’s body on the night of Sunday, 19th May. The news broke in the press and on radio on Monday May 20th.
Richard Johnson watched the brief local television announcement of the news on the evening of that Monday. On Tuesday, he worked through his day at the hospital as usual. If he wondered whether and when the call from the police would come, he gave no sign of his apprehension to the series of anxious faces he sought to reassure during his ward round and his out-patients’ clinic. And there was no contact from the police, though the hours seemed to stretch endlessly as he waited to find out if his connection with Verna Hume would be brought to light.
There was no need to ring home; his wife would contact him immediately if there was any enquiry there from the police. He knew that: he could almost hear her bewildered and troubled voice in his ear. Yet he still had to resist the urge to pick up the phone whenever he had a moment between patients, to confirm to himself that Carmen had heard nothing.
When he eventually arrived home at five-thirty, he knew from a glance at his wife’s placid face that nothing untoward had broken the tenor of her day. Carmen had a serene, unlined, black face which had been one of her chief attractions when he had first met her and they had been students. It had filled out a little, and that serenity which had been so attractive in a teenage countenance now seemed dull, even bovine, when he was in his least charitable moods.
“I thought we’d have tea in the conservatory,” she said. “It’s only quiche and salad. I let the boys have theirs, because we didn’t know how late you’d be.”
She’d ask him presently how his day had been, he thought, and he’d give his standard reply. They would watch television later. And then, at the end of the evening, they would make love, if he required it. There would never be a rejection for him, never a complaint if he did not feel amorous. He knew he was being unfair, that the dullness he complained of was as much of his making as of hers. Yet, as he watched her carefully cutting the portions of quiche and sliding them on to the plates in the mo
dern, aseptic kitchen, Richard Johnson wondered whether he now hated his wife.
And that name, Carmen! You couldn’t get much further from Bizet’s passionate and tempestuous heroine than this woman he had tied himself to. So long as the children were happy at school and she had enough money for her modest housekeeping needs, she was contented enough. Certainly, she would never complain.
You could not have a much greater contrast to the sensual and impulsive Verna Hume.
Like many a selfish man, Richard Johnson required those qualities in his wife, which would have made her an excellent mistress for someone else. And like many an intelligent, educated, professional man, he was totally incapable of applying the objectivity, which was a habit of his working life to his own private emotions. He was a good surgeon: he knew that. And he was a considerate and humane practitioner, bringing comfort as well as expert treatment to those he saw each day. Yet in more intimate and personal relationships, his life was in a turmoil.
*
Wednesday was one of his operating days. He found himself looking forward to it. In the closed, sterile world of the hospital theater, there was no room for anything but absolute concentration upon the task in hand. He had always enjoyed that absorption, and on this day, it was a positive support for him. He found his involvement in his work, his determination to do it well, were factors which eased the tensions of another long day of waiting and watching.
In the latter part of the afternoon, when he had finished operating, he saw three patients and discussed the results of their X-rays with them. He saved the easiest one, the one where he could offer welcome news, to the end of the day; keeping the best until the last was a habit he had cultivated as a schoolboy and had never rejected.
On that Wednesday, it meant that the last person he saw was a woman of sixty-eight, who had been suffering from stomach pains. Audrey Capstick came into his consulting room white-faced with pain and anxiety. She was disciplined by her background to be polite to medical specialists, even in the extreme fear which now clutched at her throat and made her voice husky as she tried to keep it even.
