“Poor Richard? Huh!”
“Yes, poor Richard. Being a friend of yours, he loses out professionally.”
Kate raised her eyebrows. “Your logic defeats me sometimes, Felix. Elucidate.”
“I shouldn’t need to. Can’t you see that if it wasn’t for your friendship, Richard, as editor of the local paper, would be badgering you to death. Trying to trap you into making an unguarded comment and so on. As it is, he has to keep pussyfooting around you, hoping and praying that he won’t miss out on a big story.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“He didn’t have to tell me. It’s as plain as a pikestaff.”
“Listen,” Kate said crossly, “Richard Gower is first, second and third a journalist. Being a friend of mine comes somewhere around number thirty-three.”
“That’s what you think, is it, girl?”
* * * *
Fiona Chapman was waiting for Kate when she got back to the Incident Room after lunch. There was now a trace more colour in her thin face, as if she was beginning to come to terms with the shock of her brother’s death.
“Come on through, will you?” Kate invited, heading for her office.
“You said I was to let you know if I noticed anything strange at Gavin’s cottage,” Mrs. Chapman began, when they were seated. “I do hope I’m not bothering you about nothing, but ...” She hesitated, looking uncertain.
“You think there’s something missing, do you?”
“Well, no, it’s the other way round, something that doesn’t belong. It’s probably not important and I’m just being silly, but ... as you asked me to ...”
“You were quite right to come,” Kate assured her. “What was it you found?”
“It’s this,” she said, opening her handbag and taking out an audio tape in its plastic case. “I was sorting things out this morning, trying to decide what to keep and what to throw out or have sold, and I found this Tom Jones tape among Gavin’s collection.”
Kate took it from her and looked at the label thoughtfully. “What’s so special about this one?”
“Well, it just isn’t Gavin’s sort of thing at all.”
“It could have been a present from someone, couldn’t it? Someone who didn’t quite understand his taste in music.”
“That’s hard to imagine. After all, what friends did he have?”
“Not many, it seems.”
“Virtually none. My brother, as I expect you’ve already realized, was a snob. An intellectual snob. And his snobbery extended to music, I’m afraid. Popular music of any kind was something he just couldn’t stomach. He’d never have desecrated his personal library with a Tom Jones tape. It’s past belief.”
Kate pondered on how significant the find might be. “Could it have been a secret vice of your brother’s? People are sometimes addicted to the very thing they most vehemently deplore.”
“Not Gavin, I’m sure of it. The very lightest sort of music he could ever tolerate would be a Tchaikovsky piano concerto—something like that.”
“So what do you make of finding this tape?” Kate asked. “Have you any kind of explanation?”
“No, I’m totally mystified.”
“Let’s go back to the idea that it was a gift. A gift, perhaps, from someone he specially didn’t want to offend by refusing to accept it.”
“I can’t imagine who.”
“Someone,” Kate suggested, “with whom your brother was on intimate terms?”
Fiona Chapman gave a quick, nervous laugh. “Gavin?”
“It’s often difficult for people to imagine their close relatives in a romantic or sexual involvement.”
“I don’t think so. Not Gavin.”
Kate regarded her thoughtfully. She had no wish to distress Trent’s sister, who already had plenty to contend with, but she couldn’t let the chance go by of extracting a useful clue.
“Suppose,” she said slowly, in a level, non-judgmental voice, “it wasn’t a woman, but another man?”
Fiona Chapman looked up sharply. Not shocked, but deeply surprised. “You mean ... gay? Oh no, I don’t think so. In fact, I’m certain of it.”
“What makes you so sure?”
The worried eyes were shrewd and candid. “I don’t know, but I just am. After all, we spent our childhood together, and I think I knew Gavin better than anyone else could have done. No, Chief Inspector, I’ll never believe that. And not just because I don’t want to. If—and it’s a big if— there was any sexual relationship in Gavin’s life, it would have been with a woman. He’d have had to be really besotted if he actually managed to bring himself to listen to Tom Jones with her.” Again that unamused laugh at the very idea of such a thing.
Kate had a thought, and rang for Boulter to come in. She introduced the two of them, then held up the tape.
“Sergeant, Mrs. Chapman found this Tom Jones tape at her brother’s cottage. It isn’t at all in line with his musical taste, and we’re wondering where it came from. Check the fingerprint records and find out what, if anything, was found on it.”
He was soon back, with some interesting information. “All the tapes in Dr. Trent’s collection carried his fingerprints. A couple of them carried prints of one of the cleaners—presumably he’d happened to leave them out and they’d been put away in the cabinet. Or maybe, they’d liked the idea of music while they worked. But that Tom Jones one, in addition to Dr. Trent’s prints, also carried prints of an as yet unidentified person.”
“Mmm! Mrs. Chapman, I’d like to hold on to this tape for the time being. Sergeant, put someone on checking every retail outlet in the district, and see if anything emerges about who might have bought it. We can be pretty confident that it wouldn’t have been Dr. Trent himself.”
* * * *
A couple more aspirins did nothing to subdue Kate’s headache. She stuck grimly at her desk, trying to cope with the swelling avalanche of reports pouring in from the squad ... routine interviews with each and every one who’d had any contact with either of the two dead men. From Frank Massey she already knew that nothing of import had come to light, but she still read each report meticulously in the hope of finding some hidden nugget.
By around eight-thirty even black coffee failed to keep her going, and she suddenly gave in and slammed the files shut. Her stomach rebelled at the thought of food. Bed beckoned urgently.
At Stonebank Cottage she dealt with Felix’s solicitations in short order, climbed the narrow stairs and shut her bedroom door. Half an hour later, lying down with the curtains drawn against a spectacular sunset, she knew to her infinite relief that the throbbing was at long last abating and sleep was in her grasp.
Downstairs, the telephone rang. Felix answered it after a couple of rings. Kate tensed, awaiting the summons to go down, but it didn’t come. She tried to settle back into the pre-sleep state, but realized from her aunt’s tone of voice that she was arguing with someone. So it probably was for her, after all, and Felix was being protective.
With a weary sigh Kate pushed aside the covers and stumped downstairs in her pyjamas.
“It’s Dr. Cheryl Miller,” said Felix, covering the mouthpiece. “I told her you’d gone to bed, but—”
“Hand it over,” Kate said. She was up now, so what the hell? “Chief Inspector Maddox here.”
“Oh, thank the lord. Listen, can I see you?”
“Now, you mean?”
“Well, yes. I have something to tell you, and the sooner the better. As you’re at home, shall I come to see you there?”
“No, I’ll come to you. I remember where it is you live. About half an hour, right?”
“People are so inconsiderate,” her aunt grumbled as she hung up. “Surely it could have waited till the morning, whatever it is? This won’t do your head any good at all.”
Kate laughed wonderingly. “The strange thing is, my headache seems to have gone.”
“Oh well, I suppose it’s no use arguing with you.”
Minutes later,
driving through the deepening twilight, Kate’s head was as clear as a bell. Things were moving and she scented a breakthrough. But her buoyant mood was deflated by envy when she clapped eyes on the Old Rectory at Lower Aston. Dating from the good old days when a congregation of some twenty souls was felt to justify a parsonage of as many bedrooms, it was now converted into perhaps eight flats. You’d imagine, Kate thought sourly, that with so many of these old country residences that were too large for modern life being divided up into smaller units, there’d be a nook somewhere for her.
Cheryl Miller’s flat was on the ground floor. The spacious living room must have once been the dining room. Long sash windows on either side of a central glazed door overlooked a paved terrace with an elegant stone balustrade and Grecian urns. Oh, Kate, how happy you’d be if only this were yours.
“Lovely place you have here,” she commented.
Cheryl Miller nodded vaguely. This evening there was an air of uncertainty about her, which diluted her high-voltage sexual aura.
“It must be important, for you to ask to see me at this time of night,” Kate went on.
“Yes, er ... sit down, won’t you? Drink?”
Kate sat, choosing for this formal occasion one of the two chairs at a small round table. “Nothing to drink, thanks.”
“I hear you questioned George Jessop again this morning,” Cheryl Miller said, pulling out the other chair for herself.
Kate didn’t reply, keeping her expression neutral.
“It’s about that I want to speak to you. You claim to know that there was a woman at George’s cottage on Wednesday night, so there isn’t much point in his going on denying it. Obviously you’ll never leave him alone until you dig out the truth.”
Good God, Cheryl Miller and George Jessop! Kate could hardly believe it. She said carefully, “I wish he could appreciate that fact.”
“I’ve tried to make him see sense, but he can be so damned stubborn. I can understand his point of view, of course. A man with a record like his is scared to death of tangling with the police.”
Where were the surprises going to end? “You know about all that?”
“Yes, I know.”
“Let us get this quite straight, Dr. Miller, so there’s no possibility of misunderstanding. You’re saying that the woman with Jessop at his cottage on Wednesday night was yourself?”
“Yes.”
“You and he are lovers?”
“No, we are not lovers.” Some of her old spark returned. She said, ironically, “You find it hard to believe, don’t you, Mrs. Maddox, that I could have any sort of non-sexual relationship with a man?”
“Jessop doesn’t strike me as a man with whom a highly intelligent woman like you would find an intellectual rapport.”
“George—or rather, Keith—wasn’t always a caretaker. But then you know that.”
“I understand he was formerly a schoolteacher. Is that sufficient to account for your interest in him? Or is it just that you like helping lame dogs? Incidentally, I’d be interested to hear how you came to know about Jessop’s past. Who told you?”
“I didn’t need to be told.”
“You remembered the case, you mean, and somehow connected Jessop with it when he came here?”
“You could say that.”
“Please, Dr. Miller, don’t fence with me. You wanted to see me this evening because you had something to impart. So I suggest you get on with it.”
Cheryl Miller’s hands lay on the polished table top. She made no effort to conceal the fact that her fingers were clutching convulsively. “I told you that I was the woman with Keith that night. Surely that’s enough?”
“It isn’t nearly enough. I have to know why.”
In the silence could be heard, faintly, the sound of television from another flat. Kate waited, looking at her very directly. Ten seconds, twenty ... then Cheryl Miller stood up in such a hasty movement that her chair toppled and fell to the carpet with a thump. She took no notice, but went to the empty fireplace and stood with her back to Kate, leaning her hands on the high marble mantelpiece. Then she suddenly swung round, and her eyes were bright with bitterness.
“All right, then, you’ll find out in the end, so why not now? Keith Jessop is my husband.”
Chapter Ten
Kate concealed her astonishment at this revelation. She said evenly,
“Come and sit down and tell me all about it.”
Dr. Miller hesitated a moment, then grimaced. “It’ll be a relief in a way to talk, after keeping it dark for so long. Er ... are you sure you won’t have a drink?”
“Not for me, thanks. But you go ahead if you feel you could use one.” Kate’s brain, after the fuzz of the day, was now needle sharp; she didn’t want to blunt it with alcohol. She watched while Cheryl Miller went to a small cabinet and brought out a bottle of gin and a twist-stem glass.
Pouring a stiff measure, she swallowed it neat, then came back to sit at the table.
“Keith and I split up ages ago,” she said. “We never bothered to get a divorce, though. Neither of us relished the publicity, for one thing, after that awful court case.”
“Was that what caused the separation, his arrest and imprisonment?”
“Oh no, it happened a couple of years before that.”
“How did you come to marry him in the first place?”
“You find it odd?” The wry laugh held a thread of sadness. “Keith didn’t always look the no-hoper he does now. When we were at university together he was rather dishy. But then so were plenty of other men I knew, and I’d already had several flings. None of them serious. No way was I planning to get married at the tender age of twenty-two ... there was far too much I wanted to do first. But with Keith there was something more than just physical attraction between us. Not love, exactly ... not really. The point about Keith was—and still is, come to that—that he wasn’t too strong on self-confidence. Not like I was. He needed someone to prop him up, to build his self-esteem, and the prospect of being the person to do that appealed to me. You see, all my growing up years I’d been unwanted. My mother died when I was only three, and my father remarried and started a new family. I was just a leftover, an encumbrance. Nobody ever needed me, not until Keith came along. It gave me a really great feeling to be important in somebody’s life. That’s why I married him.”
“But it didn’t last, that feeling?”
“In a certain way it did—and it’s still there, even now. The problem was, Keith’s sexuality was always somewhat ambivalent. I knew that he’d had a couple of homosexual experiments at university, but so had a number of other chaps. It didn’t shock me. But when we’d been married about three years I discovered that he was fooling around with adolescent boys— kids he was teaching. We had a blazing row and Keith begged me to forgive him and swore that it wouldn’t ever happen again. But then it did. Apart from feeling bitterly hurt—betrayed—I tried to argue him out of it for his own sake. I pointed out that he was playing with fire and that he’d lose his job if it ever came to light. Not to mention the potential for blackmail. But it wasn’t long before I found that I’d been wasting my breath. That’s when I decided I wanted out. Keith begged me not to leave him. He actually cried when I refused to change my mind.”
“You didn’t divorce him, though.”
“One way and another I just never got around to it. I was in no mood to get married again. And I very much doubt that I shall ever want to now.” She made a face at Kate. “You must have gathered my opinion of men.”
“You’ve made that fairly clear.”
“Would I be right in thinking you feel much the same way?”
“You’d be wrong. I was very happily married., some years back now, but my husband was killed.” Kate forebore to mention that her three-year-old daughter had been killed at the same time; she wasn’t looking for sympathy.
“Oh, I see. Tough luck! But you’re on your own now, aren’t you? There’s been a lot of talk around here about you
—that strange beast, a female Detective Chief Inspector.”
“Being talked about is the price one has to pay for getting anywhere as a professional woman. You must know that.”
“Don’t I just! But you don’t seem to mind.”
“I mind like hell,” Kate said, with feeling. “But there’s not a lot I can do about it.”
“No? I’ve found a few effective ways of cutting men down to size. They have such sensitive egos.”
“You’re an odd mixture, Dr. Miller. Contemptuous of men in general, yet protective towards one particular man.”
“Must be a stray mother-hen gene in me, eh?”
“You haven’t explained how it came about that Keith ... that George Jessop came to work at Croptech.”
Cheryl Miller’s face clouded. “He’d had a rough time, poor devil. That boy who got killed ... it was a pure accident, as Keith insisted in his defence. Of that I’m convinced. I’m not making excuses for him, Keith was a bloody fool. But that’s all he was. He just isn’t capable of deliberately killing someone to save his own skin—even though that boy was holding him to ransom. Yet the public was baying for Keith’s blood as if he were a murderer. When he came out of gaol, he found that he hadn’t a hope in hell of getting a job. No job of any kind. His reputation followed him around. I’d kept vaguely in touch with him while he was inside. There was never any question of our getting back together again, but neither could I abandon Keith completely. Anyway, when the caretaker at Croptech left, I jumped in and recommended Keith for the vacancy. I was totally straight with old Kimberley, and to do him justice he took it in his stride. I was able to guarantee Keith’s honesty, and I pointed out that he had a practical bent when it came to doing odd jobs and repairs. Kimberley and I agreed that the truth had to be kept strictly under wraps. If it were to emerge, Keith would have been hounded out of his job by local public opinion. And very likely so would I.”
“And you’ve managed to keep your relationship secret all this time? You must have taken a lot of care.”
“And then some! Whenever we meet up at work, we never do more than just acknowledge one another, but we get together quite often. You may think that strange, but we always did get along on an intellectual level. Keith’s got a good brain, a keen mind, and we enjoy talking things over. Besides, it’s a relief to us both to be able to drop the pretence and just be ourselves. I always go to Keith’s place, rather than have him come here, as there aren’t so many people around. And I always go late in the evening, to be on the safe side. But it seems our luck ran out. Who was it who bloody saw us?”
Cold Coffin Page 15
