by J M Gregson
Peach did not trouble to argue. This might make her an accessory to a carefully planned murder, if it was accepted as an attempt to divert suspicion from Barnes. Or it might be what she said, no more than an attempt to embarrass her husband when a different woman found the clutch of dark hairs in the BMW. Leave that for the competing counsels to argue out months from now in court. It was Northcott, deep-voiced and quietly persuasive, who now said, ‘You were at home for the whole of that evening, weren’t you, Mrs Cassidy?’
‘Jane had nothing to do with this!’ Barnes could restrain himself no longer, and the words sprang out harsh and raw in the quiet room.
Jane’s hand stole across the sofa and gripped the top of his. When he felt her touch, Barnes uncurled his clenched fist and clasped her fingers in his. Her voice was almost a whisper as she said, ‘Leave it, Paul.’
‘Jane was trying to save me on Wednesday, by giving me an alibi. But I killed Cassidy, not her. Jane knew nothing about it.’
Peach said calmly, ‘In my view, Mrs Cassidy is what our bright lawyers would call an accessory after the fact. But we’ll let them argue about that, in due course. You should tell us how you killed him.’
‘I didn’t plan it, you know. I didn’t go up there with the intention of killing Cassidy.’
‘If that’s a plea for Manslaughter rather than Murder, you should make it at the proper time, with the proper legal support. I’m here to arrest you as the instrument of the law, not its arbiter.’
‘I rang Adam on his mobile, on Thursday. Said I needed to speak to him. He asked if it was about Jane and me. That was the first time I knew that he was aware of us and it shook me a bit. But I thought that only made it more urgent for me to see him.’
He stopped. This conversation now seemed to him a long time ago, in a vanished, more innocent world. Clyde Northcott prompted him gently. ‘And you arranged to meet him by the A666.’
‘Yes. He didn’t want to meet me at all, at first. He said he was busy on Friday and was then going to be away for a shooting weekend. I shoot on the moors near here myself, far more regularly than Cassidy ever did, and I sensed immediately that this was a lie. He was off somewhere with a woman for the weekend and I let him know that I’d twigged that. He suggested that lay-by by the A666 himself. I wasn’t happy to meet him there, but he said it was that or nothing. I eventually agreed to it, because I was so anxious to have it out with him about Jane and me.’
The lover’s need for action, for moving on his suit, whatever the cost. The lover’s pressing need to have things decided and his prize securely in his arms. How often did the thrust of passion towards action at any price lead to disaster? They could argue later, when it came to a formal statement, about whether Barnes or Cassidy had determined the place of that lonely assignation; the Crown Prosecution Service would no doubt see it as a key issue in a murder charge. Peach glanced briefly at the distraught woman beside Barnes and then said softly, ‘We need your full account of what happened, Paul.’
There was no resistance now. Barnes stared past them, as though seeing the events he was recounting being played out on some invisible screen. ‘I’d been there about five minutes when he drove in and parked behind me. It was a freezing night and we were the only two cars there. But he said we should move away a little, so that we could talk without being disturbed. Then he reached into the back of his sports BMW and pulled out his new shotgun.’
‘Did that alarm you?’
‘It did a little, at first. But it was a Purdey. The finest shotgun you can buy. He seemed genuinely anxious to show off his expensive new toy to me, because he realized that I knew a little about these things and would appreciate it. Perhaps he was trying to convince me that he was really going shooting at the weekend.’
‘So you didn’t feel threatened?’
Barnes paused for a moment, as if this were important in fixing the reality of his story. ‘I don’t think I did, really. I was anxious to say what I had to say about Jane, to tell him that we were serious, that she was going to leave him and come to me permanently.’
‘Even in that bizarre setting?’
‘Even there. The setting didn’t seem important. All I could think of was that I’d finally pinned him down and got him to myself, so that I needed to say what I had to say whilst I had the chance. He showed me his magnificent new shotgun in the car park and I expressed the envy he seemed to feel appropriate.’ A smile of contempt flashed briefly across Barnes’s fresh-skinned, countryman’s face. ‘I said I had important things to say to him. That’s when he led me away from the car park and through those scrubby bushes. I suppose we’d gone fifty yards or so when I called to him from behind that this was far enough.’
‘Were you afraid of what he was going to do?’
‘I don’t think so. I suppose I was apprehensive about how he’d react to what I had to say about Jane and me, but I just wanted to say it and get it over with, I think.’
‘And how did he react to it?’
‘He laughed in my face. Told me to get lost. He said I wasn’t in his league and that I shouldn’t try to compete. I told him he should ask Jane how she felt about it.’
Since he had begun to speak, it was Jane Cassidy who had looked increasingly horrified, whilst confession seemed to be bringing him a kind of release. She slid a little nearer to him on the leather settee, sliding her arm beneath his as she kept their fingers intertwined. ‘You shouldn’t do this, Paul. You shouldn’t make any statements now without a lawyer at your side.’
He glanced at her and looked bemused, as if he had for a moment forgotten her, as he relived so vividly the events of a week earlier. Then he turned back from her and stared straight ahead again, past the detectives who had brought him to this, past the thick stone walls and through the long window to the fields beyond, to the land which he and his family had farmed for two hundred years.
He resumed as if there had been no pause. ‘He said I shouldn’t confuse an easy shag with a lonely woman with anything more permanent. He said he’d be back to assert his rights and I should piss off out of it, if I knew what was good for me.’
The woman beside him winced a little at the coarseness of these phrases, which he had not recounted to her before, but Barnes now seemed beyond such emotion. ‘I think I made a move towards him when he said these things, but I’m not sure of that. I know he raised the shotgun and I think I believed in that moment that he was going to turn it upon me. I grabbed it and the next thing I knew, he was lying at my feet with half his chest shot away.’
There was an involuntary gasp from Jane Cassidy, who had hitherto been shielded from the detail of the death. She stilled a scream in her throat, clasping both hands to her mouth. And this time Paul Barnes did see her and was concerned for her. ‘I’m sorry, my darling. That’s how it was. I took his phone from his car and left as quickly as I could.’
There was material here for a plea of self-defence, or at least for a nervous, unthinking reaction from a man who had thought he was threatened. But again it would be up to the lawyers to argue this out. Someone else would take these bricks and build them into a wall, whilst the prosecutors would argue how much preplanning was implied by arranging to meet in such a lonely place and how much Jane Cassidy’s placing of a clutch of female hairs in the BMW was an attempt to divert suspicion from Barnes.
At a nod from Peach, DS Northcott stepped forward and pronounced the formal words of arrest with his hand on Paul Barnes’s unresisting shoulder. It was at this point that Jane Cassidy, her bright blue eyes glittering with horror, said abruptly, ‘Can I go to the children? They need me.’
Peach hesitated. ‘All right. Don’t leave your house without informing us at Brunton CID. There will probably be formal charges for you later and you should take account of that fact and make preparations for it.’
She stood up, then flung her arms suddenly round her lover. It was intense but not prolonged. As she detached herself, she said, ‘I’ll look after Thomas. He can
stay with us as long as you want him to.’
Of all the passions, the one of parting is at once the most intense and the most bitter, thought Peach. Then, as if ashamed of such sentiments, he said gruffly, ‘Mr Barnes will travel in the back of the police car which has just arrived. Formal charges will be preferred at the station. If you offer us a guarantee that you will not attempt to escape, I see no need for handcuffs on this occasion.’
Paul Barnes stood and looked at the Christmas wrapping paper strewn on the floor at the other end of the big room, at the half-decorated Christmas tree, at the children’s presents, which appeared pathetically naked as they awaited their wrappings. He knew now what he was going to miss, the months and maybe the years of his son’s growth which he would never see. He wanted to express the enormity of it all, to assert that one unthinking moment could surely not lead to this tremendous penance. But all he said, evenly and conventionally, was: ‘I can’t believe this is happening to me.’
Peach and Northcott drove close behind the car in which Barnes sat rigidly upright between two uniformed constables. They passed over the Ribble, running high and dark against its winter banks, and on through a countryside with leafless trees still as sculptures against the low December sun. And then into the town. Brunton was bright with Christmas lights and crowded with Christmas shoppers. Small children, newly released from nursery and infant schools, were crowding into the town-centre stores to meet Father Christmas. As far as the men who had brought him to justice could see, Paul Barnes’s head moved neither right nor left throughout his journey.
In that fine new house near the Trough of Bowland, an unnaturally calm Jane Cassidy was talking earnestly to a wide-eyed Ingrid Lundberg. A nanny’s duties might need to be redefined and extended, but she would be amply rewarded. If Jane herself was shut away for a time, it was important that Damon and Kate should think the best of their mummy.
Jane gave the startled young woman a strange, abstracted smile. If it was meant to reassure Ingrid, it failed dismally. You couldn’t always expect everything to make sense, Jane told her. Sometimes events took you over. Sometimes you became merely players upon life’s strange and wonderful stage.
