Merely Players

by J M Gregson

  ‘I’m not here to take any particular moral stance, Ms Davies. I’m interested in facts, and how those facts relate to the death of Adam Cassidy.’

  ‘And I’ve been very frank about those facts. Now I’ll give you another one: I had nothing to do with Adam’s death.’

  Peach merely nodded. ‘You’ve told me that you were lovers. Which I presume means that you had sex with him. I have to ask you how far beyond the sexual act your term “lovers” extends. How deeply were you emotionally involved?’

  Michelle felt her fingernails digging into her palms. She wasn’t going to let this man see how much he was annoying her. It was, she decided reluctantly, a reasonable question, if you put yourself in his place. She said evenly, ‘I don’t leap in and out of bed with people all the time. For some reason, I’d like you to know that, even if you’re not planning to adopt any particular moral stance.’

  Peach ignored the ring of sarcasm in her repetition of his phrase. ‘So how did you feel about Adam Cassidy – before you heard the news that he was cutting you out of his next series, I mean?’

  ‘We were attracted to each other. I didn’t see it as long-term and I don’t suppose he did – he had a fair trail of deserted females behind him, as well as a wife and family. And I’m not a marriage-wrecker by nature. All right, we were playing with fire, but we both knew the score. We worked very closely together in the Alec Dawson episode and we both knew that not everything was simulated in the clinches we enjoyed there. It seemed natural to take it a little further off-screen. I’m sure you’d understand that if you’d ever worked in the theatre.’

  ‘I’m sure I would, yes,’ said Peach dryly. ‘When did you find out that your lover had vetoed further clinches in another series?’

  ‘Last Thursday morning. James Walton told me; he also made it very clear that it was none of his doing. It was all down to Adam.’

  ‘Why do you think Adam did it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was planning to ask him that myself. He wouldn’t have enjoyed the meeting.’

  ‘You must have given some thought to this. Do you think that he merely wished to be rid of a liaison with you which might have complicated life for him?’

  ‘No, I don’t. We weren’t in deep with each other. Either of us could have said we didn’t want to take things any further at any time. There wouldn’t have been any recriminations.’

  ‘Then why dispense with you? Have you any other theory?’

  ‘Yes. I rather think James Walton might be right about this. He says people like Adam just get too far too quickly. They can’t really believe that they’re stars, despite all the money and all the attention. An inferiority complex, if you like. It makes them throw tantrums and assert themselves every so often, just to prove to themselves and others that they really are stars.’

  This was very close to what Dean Morley had said about Cassidy. But Peach had the policeman’s habitual distrust of psychology and its practitioners, who too often were recruited by unscrupulous lawyers to enable villains to escape justice. He said tersely, ‘Do you buy that?’

  Unexpectedly, the woman he had been trying to rile was as sceptical as he was. Michelle Davies gave a rueful smile and said, ‘At that moment, I wasn’t interested in Adam’s psyche. I wanted to know why the bastard was snatching away a part which was made for me and which I thought I’d already secured.’

  Peach answered her smile with a grim one of his own. ‘So you decided the bastard in question deserved to be killed.’

  ‘I probably did, yes. But that doesn’t mean I made any plans to kill him. I didn’t shed too many tears when I heard the news, but it wasn’t me who killed Adam.’

  Peach looked round again at the comfortable, unrevealing room. He brought his dark eyes back to the pale, determined face, which looked like that of an old-masters’ Madonna in this very modern setting. ‘He died within ten miles of here. You live nearer to the spot than anyone else we’re interviewing about this.’

  ‘Does that make me the leading suspect? These days everyone has a car, DCI Peach. If you’re saying the proximity of my home to the place where he died makes me the leading suspect, you must be pretty desperate!’

  Peach nodded calmly. There was no way this spirited woman was going to discover from him whether he was desperate or otherwise. ‘Probably Cassidy arranged to meet someone up there. I’m merely suggesting it would have been a very convenient point for the two of you to meet, whatever the purpose of such a meeting.’

  ‘I didn’t arrange to meet Adam up there on Friday night and I don’t know who did.’

  Clyde Northcott said quietly, ‘When did you last see Adam Cassidy, Ms Davies?’

  She switched her attention to the man taking notes. At least she had established some sort of contact with Peach as he had sparked her antagonism. This dark, unyielding face could have belonged to an automaton. ‘At the beginning of last week. Tuesday. Certainly before he had announced any intention of ditching me from the next series.’

  ‘Where were you last Friday night, please?’

  ‘Here.’ She watched his pen move over the page like the quill of a recording angel. ‘I can give you the details of the television programmes I watched, if you like.’

  ‘I’m sure you could do that. Were you alone throughout the evening?’

  ‘I was, yes.’ She resisted the impulse to give him some reason why that might have been.

  ‘And have you any thoughts on who might have killed Mr Cassidy?’

  That title rang oddly in her ears. She couldn’t remember Adam ever having been referred to as ‘Mister’ before. ‘No. I’ve already told you that I don’t. I’ve thought about it since I heard. Of course I have – I assume that’s only natural.’ She glanced at Peach and contrived a final barb. ‘But at the moment I’m as baffled about who did this as you seem to be.’

  FOURTEEN

  ‘When’s the funeral?’ Harry Cassidy spoke for the first time in many minutes.

  ‘Not yet, Dad. The police can’t release the body yet.’

  ‘And why’s that?’

  Luke knew from his father’s tone that he didn’t trust him. When you were old and confused, you felt that the whole world was likely to lie to you, even the son who tried to shield you from the worst of it. He tried not to resent it, fought against the idea that a dying man was distrusting the one person in the world who still loved him. He couldn’t tell him what the policeman had explained to him, that they had to retain the body because at some future stage a murderer’s defending counsel might demand a second post-mortem examination with a different pathologist. So he said limply, ‘Murder isn’t like other deaths, Dad. They just don’t allow immediate funerals.’

  The old man’s face was the pallid grey it had been ever since he heard the news. The features were set like a death mask and just about as responsive. There was no method of knowing whether he had understood what you said to him. It was a long time before Harry said, ‘They used to lay them out in the front parlour, you know.’

  ‘Yes, Dad. That’s a long time ago, though.’

  ‘Don’t seem long. Not to me. I saw my granddad laid out like that. On two trestles, they had the coffin. For two days. Everyone came in to see him. In the front parlour.’

  ‘They were simpler days, Dad.’

  ‘That they were. Simpler and better days. You didn’t meet wogs round every corner then.’

  ‘You shouldn’t call them that, Dad. They’re men and women, like the rest of us.’

  But the old man had switched off, had retreated thankfully into the days of his boyhood, when the last clogs were still clattering to the mills and King Cotton had ruled over a simpler world. It was five minutes before Luke said, ‘You’ve let your dinner go cold again, Dad.’

  ‘Don’t want it. Don’t need it. Not hungry.’

  ‘You must eat, Dad. You’ve had practically nothing since . . .since this happened.’

  ‘Not hungry. Don’t want it.’

  And why, i
ndeed, should Luke struggle each night to get him to take the food his wife had so assiduously prepared? To preserve what life was in the old body, of course. But what sort of life was it? What was left for Harry Cassidy, now that the son he doted on was gone? A world which he hated because it was so changed; a town he could no longer move about in even had he wished to do so. It was the love in his own heart which made the pain of his father’s plight so sharp to him.

  He was clearing away the waste of the uneaten dinner when the phone shrilled unexpectedly by his father’s chair. The old man started, but made no attempt to answer it. When his son picked it up, the voice was official, slightly apologetic. ‘Luke Cassidy? Sorry to disturb you, but your wife said we’d get you at this number. Detective Chief Inspector Peach and his sergeant need to see you, in connection with your brother’s death. Could we fix a time tomorrow, please?’

  They offered to come to the house, but he arranged it for lunchtime at the school. He didn’t want the police coming into the house and speaking to Hazel or the children. He didn’t want bloody Adam soiling his life even now.

  Detective Constable Brendan Murphy didn’t want his companion to see that he was nervous about this meeting. She wasn’t to know that this was the first time he’d been trusted to lead in an interview. It was her first month as a DC, so she would be grateful for any guidance she could get. She was also very attractive, with soft blonde hair and what he thought remarkable blue eyes. But that of course was irrelevant.

  The farmer was only in his mid-thirties, but he seemed very mature and experienced to twenty-three-year-old Brendan Murphy. He said stiffly, ‘Are you Mr Paul Barnes, sir?’

  ‘Indeed I am. I was told to expect you. You’d better come inside.’

  ‘I’m DC Brendan Murphy and this is DC Alison Freeman.’ They followed the farmer through the wide, low hall of a two-hundred-year-old stone farmhouse, into a room with a huge Turkish carpet with a deep-red ground. They were invited to sit on a leather three-piece suite, which was large, old and seemingly indestructible, the way Alison’s grandfather told her that leather furniture always used to be. She said conventionally, ‘Nice building, this.’

  Barnes glanced round the room as if appraising its comfortable opulence anew. ‘This was always the best farm in the area. On the rich floor of the valley, you see. There used to be a lot of small farms around us, with poor tenants striving desperately to make a living. As most of them failed, my father and grandfather took them over and absorbed the land into ours. We’re one of the few mixed farms left in the county. It’s a big building for two adults – only I, my sister and my eight-year-old boy live here now. At least Liz and I are able to have completely self-contained sections in the place.’

  At other times, the history of the farmhouse would have interested Brendan. At this moment, he was impatient to get on with the interview, to show Alison how brisk and efficient he could be. ‘You will appreciate that in a murder interview, we take statements from all sorts of people, even those on the periphery of the case.’

  ‘I do. I was interviewed along with other parents because I met Adam Cassidy very occasionally outside the gates when I delivered my boy to the school. Usually it was their mother or the children’s nanny who delivered and collected his two, but I recall Adam being there once or twice.’

  ‘I understand from your statement that you met the deceased also at weekend shooting parties,’ said Brendan tersely. Don’t let them get away with anything. Keep them on the back foot whenever you could. Percy Peach’s mantra for interviews rang insistently at the back of Murphy’s brain. ‘Perhaps you got to know him rather better there.’

  Paul Barnes smiled in the face of this earnestness. ‘Yes. I’ve never thought of our weekend meetings as “shooting parties”, but I suppose that is exactly what they are. Sounds very Edwardian, somehow. I’ve shot woodcock and grouse up on the moor since I was a lad – it just seems like part of the rural life to me. I did chat to Adam a little up there, but other people seemed anxious to monopolize him at lunch – they like to chat to show-business people.’ He’d almost said that that was the only reason why Cassidy had been invited along, which would have sounded petty rather than the neutral he was aiming at. ‘Adam was quite new to shooting, but he seemed enthusiastic about it.’

  Murphy felt as though he was being outgunned with words, in which this confident, fresh-faced man with the slightly unruly brown hair seemed so much more proficient than he was. Somehow you didn’t expect a man with a Lancashire accent to be so adept with the language. Brendan flicked a look at Alison Freeman, who said, ‘You seem to be telling us that you didn’t know Adam very well.’

  ‘Exactly. I’m a bit shy in those circumstances – I didn’t want it to seem as if I was cultivating him just because he was a celebrity. No doubt I’d have got to know him better in the next year or two, but that pleasure will now be denied to me.’

  ‘Perhaps you got to know Mrs Cassidy rather better than her husband.’

  Paul took his time. He’d known when the CID wanted to see him again that he should expect this. The more lightly he could handle it, the better. He smiled. ‘That sounds quite sinister, when you phrase it like that. Well, it’s a plain fact that I do know Jane better than I knew Adam, because of meetings outside the village school. I deliver and collect Thomas whenever I can, and Jane is there far more often than Adam ever was with Damon and Kate.’

  DC Murphy decided that it was time to assert himself. ‘There has been a suggestion that your friendship extended beyond that of fellow-parents meeting at the school gates.’

  For the first time, Barnes’s fresh features registered annoyance. ‘Has there, indeed? Well that sort of tittle-tattle is inevitable, I suppose, when people have drab lives and too much time for gossip.’

  ‘I’m sure you will understand that we cannot reveal our sources,’ said Murphy stiffly.

  ‘Not very reliable sources, I’m afraid. Look, I’m thirty-five, divorced, with a prosperous farm which I own myself. In terms of the rural life, that makes me highly eligible, I suppose. And thus a candidate for gossip. And Jane is an attractive woman of about the same age and also a successful professional actress. But she is – was – married and happily settled, with two children and a very rich and famous husband. I couldn’t have competed with that, even if I’d wanted to.’

  ‘You’re saying that there is nothing between you and Mrs Cassidy?’

  ‘There is what I’d describe as an easy friendship. Nothing more.’

  ‘Do you know anything else about either Mr or Mrs Cassidy which might have a bearing on his death?’

  ‘No. I don’t indulge in gossip at the school gates. I’m a working farmer, with a full life to fit in around my eight-year-old son.’

  Alison Freeman spoke as calmly as she could, not wishing to reveal that this was the first time she’d asked this question in a murder case. ‘Where were you last Friday night, Mr Barnes?’

  In other circumstances, he would have smiled at her earnestness. But this was too serious for that. ‘I was here. Throughout the evening and throughout the night.’

  ‘Is there anyone who can confirm that for us?’

  ‘My sister could. But as I say, we have self-contained accommodation within this rambling building. She probably wouldn’t know if I’d gone out, as I wouldn’t know if she had. We lead separate lives; we find that is much the best way to exist together.’

  ‘Thank you for being so frank, Mr Barnes. If you hear or think of anything which might be relevant to this case, please ring this number immediately.’

  Paul waited impatiently with his hand on the phone until the police car turned into the lane and disappeared. It rang only twice before it was answered. He said without preamble, ‘It was two youngsters, not the big man in charge and his sidekick, who spoke to you. The very fact that they were sent here might be significant, but I think I stonewalled quite effectively.’

  The man wore a charcoal-grey suit and an immaculate white shirt.
He examined the chair offered to him and brushed the seat of it before smoothly piloting his elegant backside on to it. He plucked each of his cuffs half an inch forward and announced, ‘This is a delicate matter, Detective Chief Inspector Peach.’

  ‘It had better be a speedy one also,’ said Percy, who had observed these preliminaries with diminishing patience.

  ‘I see. Well, my name is Percival Spencer. I am the manager and principal partner in the Ghyllside Hotel, Grasmere. A particularly beautiful village in the English Lakes.’

  ‘I know Grasmere. Very pretty, as you say. Gets very overcrowded in the tourist season. I don’t know your hotel.’

  Spencer’s patronizing smile said that it would be quite unthinkable for an oik like this to defile the rooms of the Ghyllside. ‘As an exclusive hotel, we are a little off the beaten track. Away from those vulgar throngs of tourists who crowd the village at weekends, as you say.’

  ‘Mr Spencer, you asked to see the man in charge of the Cassidy murder investigation. I am he. But unless you can come to the point very quickly, I shall have to pass you on to one of my sergeants.’

  Percival Spencer’s shocked countenance was worthy of Lady Bracknell. ‘I see. Well, it’s a delicate matter, as I said. We don’t normally disclose bookings, but—’

  ‘But you think you should tell me about one booking in particular.’

  Spencer looked as crestfallen as an actor whose best speech has been cut. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would this booking have been for last Friday night, by any chance?’

  ‘It would, yes. A double room for Friday and Saturday nights. With dinner on Saturday and full English breakfast on Saturday and Sunday.’

  ‘In whose name?’