by J M Gregson
‘I’m afraid it had gone much further than that. Mr Nayland had made a verbal agreement. Terms had been agreed. The formal documents for the takeover are with European Fairways, who were expecting Mr Nayland as sole owner to sign them this week.’
‘I knew nothing about this.’ He repeated it stupidly. It seemed at this moment more important than anything to convince them of that.
‘And was Mrs Nayland equally ignorant of the approach from European Fairways?’
‘Yes. She wouldn’t have offered me a partnership otherwise, would she?’ Suddenly, he saw the chance of a way out. If Liza knew nothing about the sell-out, as she didn’t, then perhaps he could convince them that he was equally ignorant. ‘I doubt whether we shall wish to sell out now. We shall have to discuss any approach together, as partners. You must see that.’
He felt like a crab wriggling sideways, trying to make deep water and obscurity, to escape from the calm, unblinking gaze of this policeman who suddenly seemed so much older and more knowledgeable than he was.
Instead, he was pinned squirming to the hot sand, as Lambert said, ‘When did Mr Nayland tell you that he intended to accept the bid from European Fairways, Mr Pearson?’
‘I just told you, he didn’t! I knew nothing about this!’
Lambert studied him for a moment, estimating his state of mind as calmly as if he were some biological specimen. ‘Tell us about the row you had with Mr Nayland on the day before he died.’
‘Row? What row was that?’ He felt his pulses racing again; that seemed to deny him the capacity for rational thought, so that he had no means of devising a reasonable reply. ‘Pat and I didn’t row. We discussed policy, even had occasional disagreements, but—’
‘You were heard shouting at Mr Nayland, in this very room.’ Lambert looked round at the walls, with their charts and photographs, as if they could bear witness to that fateful exchange. ‘He shouted back at you and things became more heated. The shouting went on for a good ten minutes. I’d call that a row.’
Chris tried desperately to think of a logical explanation, but all he could see was Patrick Nayland, yelling at him that he was going to sell, that it was good business, that he couldn’t guarantee the future of his General Manager or anyone else at Camellia Park. He said, ‘All right. We were arguing about this bloody takeover bid. But everything else I’ve told you is true. He had promised me a partnership. That had been our understanding from the start. It’s why I took a smaller salary to do the job. It’s why I stayed here when I had offers to go to bigger jobs.’
‘And you didn’t think it right to tell Mrs Nayland that there was a takeover bid on the table when you talked to her on Monday?’
Chris shrugged his shoulders hopelessly. ‘I was amazed she didn’t know. And I was only claiming what was my due. What was best for everyone. I’d have taken Camellia Park on from strength to strength, made it eighteen holes. I’d have made it one of the best golf clubs in the area.’
He stopped, not because his enthusiasm had run out, but because he realized that he was speaking for the first time of what might have been rather than what was going to happen.
Lambert said quietly, ‘And Patrick Nayland was stabbed to death on the day after you had been told that all these hopes had been dashed. Were you holding that knife, Mr Pearson?’
‘No.’ He couldn’t get out more than the monosyllable, and that in a voice so low that it would not have been heard if there had not been such absolute quiet in the room. Out on the course, a man yelled in triumph as a putt dropped on the last green, and there followed the sound of banter with his companions, an ironic accompaniment to the deadly serious events within the clubhouse.
Lambert said, ‘You were seen re-entering the restaurant just before the body was discovered.’
It was quiet, almost matter-of-fact, and it took the shaken Chris Pearson a moment to appreciate the full implications. ‘Yes. I expect Michelle Nayland told you that, because I remember her looking at me as I came back into the room. But it was quite a while before the body was discovered, as I remember it. Patrick wasn’t down there when I was in the gents’ cloakroom.’
‘This is information you didn’t offer to us in two previous meetings.’
‘No. It would have implicated Michelle, wouldn’t it, and I didn’t wish to do that.’ Even he was not sure as he said it if it was true.
Lambert ignored it. ‘You had the opportunity to kill Patrick Nayland. And you have just outlined for us a very strong motive for murder. A motive you had resolutely concealed from us throughout our investigation.’
‘I know. But I didn’t kill him. And I don’t know who did.’ He felt tired now, incapable of any further prevarication to save his skin. He was waiting for the words of arrest.
Instead, Lambert said briskly, ‘Don’t leave the area without informing us of your movements, please, Mr Pearson. If you think of anything else which may have a connection with this killing, you should get in touch with us immediately. It is plainly now in your own interest to do so.’
Twenty-One
The Christmas lights were on in Gloucester. They winked cheerfully in streets both ancient and modern.
The shops were open late on the night of Friday the twenty-second of December, anxious to make the most of the great commercial festival that is the modern Christmas. Seasonal songs blared, hideously distorted, through speakers hastily rigged over the shopping malls. In the brightly lit caves of commerce, shop assistants with permanently painted smiles strove desperately to be helpful and cheerful at the end of their most exhausting day of the year.
At the lower end of the town, the medieval cathedral was floodlit, its massive elevations soaring in majestic permanence towards a navy sky which had not changed since man lurched upright from the primeval forests. The cathedral choir was singing the 500-year-old ‘Coventry Carol’, the lofty, almost unworldly acoustics preserving the existence of a minority Christmas until the world should return to it.
All this Lambert and Hook saw and yet did not see as they drove through the city. Their minds were concentrated fiercely on the interview which was to come.
Joanne Moss brewed the tea as she heard the bell ring at the door of the flat. She brought the tray in as she invited the two big men to sit on her sofa. ‘You’ve probably eaten, but I’ve put some of my home-made parkin on, in case you fancy a piece. The golfers at the club put away a lot of it each week, but they’re hungry men when they’ve played!’
She appeared perfectly at her ease, her hands steady as she poured the tea into the china cups. She noted that and was pleased with her own performance. It was surely important that she remained calm now. It was the third time she had spoken to them and she felt that all might be safely over after this.
For they had surely discovered nothing. In all probability, this would be the last time she had to deal with these two. Today, for the first time since Pat’s death, she had found herself looking forward to a new year and a new period in her life. After what she had achieved, she would go forward with confidence.
She was conscious of the CID men studying her, waiting for her to settle, She put a small table beside each of them and placed the cups and saucers and the plates with the parkin upon them. She felt herself acting a part, playing the wholesome middle-class female she had never been, as she ministered unhurriedly to the needs of these strange visitors.
When they still did not speak, she said cheerfully, ‘Well, what progress have you made? Are you anywhere near to an arrest?’
‘Very near.’ Lambert had not moved a muscle since he sat down. The steam rose unheeded beside him from the tea he would never touch.
She hadn’t expected to hear that. She said lamely, ‘That’s good, then, isn’t it? Get things all tied up before Christmas, perhaps.’
‘Sometimes the most obvious solution is the correct one. That’s why we’re always interested in the last person who saw a murder victim alive.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard that. But in th
is case—’
‘In this case we had to be interested in the first person seen with the body.’
She tried not to react, forced herself to complete the sip of her tea she had already begun. ‘But that was me, in this case, wasn’t it? Or have you discovered some other—’
‘When did Patrick Nayland tell you that your affair was over, Mrs Moss?’
The formality of the title sat oddly upon the brutality of the question. She said, ‘He didn’t. And you’ve got it wrong, it wasn’t just an affair. Pat and I were going to be married.’ She gazed past him, towards the point on the wall where the picture of she and Pat together had once hung.
‘Other people had told you that he wasn’t to be trusted. When did you find that they were right and you were wrong?’
He was making it sound as if everything was already decided. She knew she must cling to her version of events if she was to get away with it now. She forced a smile, made herself look from the blank wall into those all-seeing grey eyes. ‘I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but they’ve given you the wrong idea. Pat and I were going to be married.’
‘When?’
She hadn’t expected that. She didn’t have an answer ready for it, and she found herself suddenly without the energy to go on dreaming up lies. ‘We hadn’t decided when, exactly. It would have been after he’d told Liza. We couldn’t make definite plans until then. Pat had to let her down gently.’ Her voice almost broke on the last phrase, as she quoted her dead lover so exactly.
‘You told us about the argument that Chris Pearson had with Nayland. Told us how their voices were raised against each other in what became a blazing full-scale row.’
‘Yes.’ For a moment, hope sang within her. ‘I never told you that Chris killed him, though, did I? It wouldn’t be fair of you to presume—’
‘I think you discovered what that row was about, didn’t you, Mrs Moss?’
‘No. I heard the two of them shouting at each other, that was all. I knew it must be serious, because I’d never heard them so worked up about anything before.’ Her lips set sullenly on that contention.
It was Hook who now said softly, ‘He let you down, didn’t he, Joanne? There’s no need to protect him any longer, now that we know what happened. You pressed him about what was happening, and he told you that he was selling Camellia Park to a big company.’
His voice was beguiling with its soft Herefordshire accent, luring her towards agreement with every phrase. She had protected the bastard’s memory for long enough. It would be a relief to tell them just how badly he had behaved. Her voice seemed to come from a long way away as she said, ‘He wasn’t just selling the golf course. He was selling out on me.’
Hook nodded sympathetically. ‘He told you that, when you asked him about the row with Mr Pearson, didn’t he?’
He seemed very concerned for her. This must be what counselling was like, she supposed. ‘I couldn’t help hearing what the two of them said at the end of the row. So when I got Pat on his own, I asked him whether it was true that he was selling up. He said yes, it was an offer too good to refuse. He couldn’t guarantee anyone’s future, but he couldn’t turn down the price he was getting. He was going to wash his hands of the whole project and move away. I thought at first that he meant with me.’
Her eyes brimmed for a moment with tears at the memory of that awful moment when the scales were stripped from her eyes, but she dashed them angrily away with the back of her hand. ‘He said he was staying with Liza, that I should have known all along that it would work out like that, that I was a fool to imagine that it could ever have been any different.’
‘And so you decided to kill him.’
Hook’s soft tones made it a statement, not a question. There seemed no point in denying him. Joanne found that she only wanted to put her own case, not to deceive them any more. ‘Not at that moment, I didn’t. But Alan Fitch came in the next morning and saw that I was upset. He’d been trying to warn me about Pat for months, but I wouldn’t listen. Now he saw that I would listen to him, and he told me about some of the other women that Pat had had a go at. Then I asked Michelle Nayland to meet me in a pub, because I knew that she hated him. She told me what he’d tried to do to her.’
‘So you decided to be rid of him once and for all.’ Hook made it sound to her the most natural, the most logical way to react. Confession was a relief, really. It seemed to Joanne now that the most important thing was to get the facts absolutely right. ‘Not at that moment, I didn’t.’
‘But you took a knife with you to Soutters that night. You must have been thinking about it.’
Joanne nodded slowly. She seemed almost to be discussing the actions of someone else, now: someone very close to her, but not herself. ‘I suppose perhaps I must have been. I put a knife into my handbag when I left the kitchen at Camellia Park. But I’ve often brought utensils home if I wanted to use them here. I’ve only a small kitchen here, you see, and we’re very well equipped at the golf clubhouse.’
She nodded, a suburban housewife explaining the boring business of food preparation. Hook thought how carefully a defence counsel would explore this in due course, as he sought desperately to show a jury that this was an impulsive crime of passion, not a premeditated act. He said gently, ‘Will you tell us exactly what happened in the basement of Soutters Restaurant, please?’
Her brow furrowed with concentration beneath the neat black hair, and she suddenly looked quite young, like a schoolgirl determined to give an accurate account of an incident which had happened nine days earlier. ‘I saw Pat leave his seat at the middle of the table and go downstairs. I followed him down a couple of minutes later, on impulse. I met him coming out of the Gents. He looked so smug that I screamed at him. I was so furious that he stepped back a pace or two. I liked that. Liked the shocked look on his face.’
A small, unnerving smile crept over her features as she remembered the moment.
‘And what happened next, Joanne?’ Hook was as quietly persuasive as if he had been handling a difficult child.
Her face darkened. ‘He said it was no dice. This dinner had now become not just a celebration of the first ten years, but a way of saying farewell to everyone. I said what about all our plans for the future. Why had he paid me more than the job was worth if he hadn’t been serious about our future together? He laughed and said he reckoned it was money well spent. And I should reckon myself lucky; I’d been well paid for all the services I’d offered. Especially the ones in bed. That’s when I stabbed him.’
With that last chilling simplicity, the smile came back to her lips.
‘So you’d taken the knife down there with you.’
‘I’d taken my handbag. I don’t know when I took the knife out, but it was there in my hand when I needed it.’
‘What happened next, Joanne?’
‘I don’t remember anything else very clearly. I think I screamed at him about his other women and about Michelle as I went on stabbing him. I must have put the knife away in my handbag. But I don’t think I realized I’d killed him then.’
‘But you screamed, and brought the others.’
‘Not then, I didn’t. I heard someone coming, so I shut myself in one of the cubicles. A couple of people came in, one after the other. I don’t know who they were, because I was keeping very quiet and planning what to do.’
Hook knew. Alan Fitch, who’d merely checked that Nayland was dead, and then Barry Hooper, who had removed the dead man’s watch. He said gently, ‘So what did you do, after you’d had this time to think, Joanne?’
‘I came out of the cubicle, gave it a couple of minutes, and then screamed. Pretended I’d just found him, you see.’ A smile of content at her cunning suffused her features. ‘I almost got away with it, didn’t I?’
She let Hook put the cups and the parkin back on the tray and carry it away into the kitchen whilst she sat staring past Lambert at the wall, still with that knowing half-smile upon her face. She made no attemp
t at resistance as Lambert pronounced the formal words of arrest and they took her out to the car.
Joanne Moss scarcely glanced at the handcuffs on her slim wrists as she sat in the back of the car with the silent Hook. She looked unseeing through the windows of the police Mondeo as Lambert drove slowly through the Christmas shopping crowds in Gloucester. The only movement of her head came as she raised her eyes to look towards the floodlit tower of the cathedral, as they passed it and moved into the darkness beyond the city. Bert Hook was happy that her last image of the outside world should be this unchanging one.
The choir was singing unaccompanied, its tones pure, almost ethereal. The sound of ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ followed them into the night.
