Wield later expressed doubts about the wisdom of such a promise if the CPS decided Miss Lee had laid herself open to charges of obtaining money by false pretenses. Pascoe had laughed and said, “Come on, Wieldy! Either curing people by sticking needles into them is always false pretenses, or it’s not. Sticking needles into someone and killing them is murder and that’s all we need to be thinking about.”
The way Pascoe was dealing with the woman from Seaview Terrace was another cause for concern to Wield. By the time they finished with Godley, Mrs. Griffiths had been sitting around for the best part of an hour. Seymour had found her all packed up and ready to leave. Cleverly he’d insisted on bringing the luggage along, for security, he assured her. What it meant was it now had the same status as a handbag and was thus much easier to search than if it had remained in the house, in which case they’d have needed a fully sworn warrant.
Of course a personal search would require a significant change of status. At the moment she was there as a voluntary potential witness. Keeping her hanging around this long was a dangerous strategy. If she took it into her head to insist on leaving, only arrest could keep her there. But Pascoe still didn’t seem in any hurry. He’d opened a file that Wield recognized. There’d been no opportunity in the immediate aftermath of Ollie Hollis’s murder for the sergeant to write up his account of his interview with Franny Roote. He’d done it before he got his head down for the few hours’ sleep he’d managed last night. And he’d presented it along with Roote’s own statement to Pascoe first thing this morning.
Now, seeing the DCI so rapt in his reading, Wield saw his chance to restore an equilibrium he felt was in danger of being lost.
He said, “Tell you what, Peter, you’ll be wanting to see Roote yourself sometime. Why not shoot across there now and get it out of the way? I’ll deal with Griffiths, put her in the frame or out of it. If in, she’ll still be here when you get back. If out, then you’ve missed nowt.”
Pascoe raised his bright blue eyes and looked at his sergeant. For a moment Wield felt as if that unblinking gaze was tracking every last convolution of his thought. In the past, only Dalziel had ever managed to make him feel like this.
Then Pascoe grinned and said, “Think I’ll faint if she takes her glass eye out, is that it, Wieldy? You may be right. And I must admit I am starting to find it irritating the way my thoughts always drift back to Franny.”
“I honestly don’t see how he can be involved in any of this,” said Wield.
“Me neither, but I do need to check it out myself. And I want to see him anyway. Okay. She’s all yours.”
It had been that easy. Perhaps the distraction of Roote’s reappearance had been at the bottom of Pascoe’s slightly eccentric conduct of things so far. Time would tell.
He waited till he’d seen Pascoe drive away, then he said, “Right, Dennis, let’s go chat to Mrs. Griffiths.”
Wield’s strength as an interviewer was his face. It was as unreadable as a brick wall. Except, as Dalziel put it, a brick wall was a lot prettier. Abuse, accusation, dramatic revelation, subtle legal argument, full confession, passionate denial, all bounced off that unchanging visage. Silence was no weapon because he could return silence till it became a howling chorus. He never used verbal menace. His favorite strategy was to invite interviewees to talk about themselves, then concentrate on what they left out.
The moment he took his seat in front of Sandy Griffiths, he knew this wasn’t going to work.
She was reading a magazine called Animal Rights. She was wearing a T-shirt bearing the legend HEY HEY BMA HOW MANY RATS HAVE YOU TORTURED TODAY? And on the table in front of her was a bunch of keys that he didn’t doubt included the key to her suitcase.
Seymour started the recording machine and spoke the introductory ritual.
Wield said, “Rats?”
“Better with sweet cuddly kittens, you think? Our arguments are ethical, not sentimental, Sergeant. Rats have rights too.”
“Rights in defense of which you’ve broken the law on—how many is it?—five occasions, I think.”
“Lot more than that, but five where it came to prosecution. Six, if you include my very first demo here in Sandytown, back when I was a young girl. Except of course it wasn’t me who got prosecuted that time, but Lady Denham.”
He’d been right. She wasn’t going to leave him any aces in the hole.
He said, “Tell me about that.”
“I was spraying this antiscent stuff onto the hounds’ noses. She took a swipe at me with her riding crop, laid my face open along the cheekbone and over the right eye. She said I was aiming the spray at her horse and she was just trying to knock it out of my hand, but the horse reared in fear as she swung, so the crop caught my face by mistake.”
“But that wasn’t true?”
“Why would I want to spray a horse? They don’t scent the fox out! No, she knew exactly what she was doing.”
“And she was found guilty?”
“Sight of me in the witness box with twenty-seven stitches and my face like an explosion in a paint factory did the trick. That sentimentality I was talking about.”
“Did you feel the sentence was severe enough?”
“For assault on me?” She shrugged. “Couple of weeks in a dirty cell would have been nearer the mark, but at least it was a conviction.
For the more serious crime of inflicting pain on innocent animals she should have gone down for life.”
“But she wasn’t accused of that.”
“Not by you lot, she wasn’t.”
“Meaning there’s some other tribunal in which she may have been accused, tried, and condemned?”
“Depends if you’re a religious man, Sergeant.”
“I were talking this life, not the next. So, as far as the actual assault on you went, you felt justice had been done, more or less?”
“I suppose.”
“Despite the fact that you later lost the use of your eye?”
“No connection, the doctors said.”
“These same doctors whose knowledge is based on cruelty to rats?” he said, glancing at her T-shirt.
“They’re the ones.”
“But you didn’t agree, I presume, else you wouldn’t have wanted to sue Lady Denham in the first place?”
She smiled and said, “No, not my idea at all. A lawyer in our group—we get all kinds, Sergeant; I’ve even known some policemen who were sympathetic—this lawyer saw a chance for some publicity, good for us, bad for the huntin’ and shootin’ fraternity. But when they couldn’t find a medical expert willing to connect the assault and the loss of sight, they had to give it up.”
“How did you feel about that?”
“Relieved. I didn’t fancy going to court.”
“No? Doesn’t seem to have bothered you much those other five times.”
“I was there as a protester standing up for my beliefs, not a victim playing on a jury’s feelings.”
“So what are you doing in Sandytown, Mrs. Griffiths?”
“Holiday,” she said. “With my young nieces.”
“How young are they?”
“Late teens. Eighteen, nineteen.”
“Not so young then.”
“By comparison with you and me, Sergeant, mere children.”
“Brother’s kids? Or sister’s?”
For the first time he scored a hit.
“Sister’s,” she said after a hesitation.
“That would be sister in what kind of sense? Religious? Feminist?”
“I don’t follow.”
“Your file says you were an only child, Mrs. Griffiths.”
She smiled and nodded.
“So I was. Am. I should have said, sister-in-law’s. Sorry.”
That might check out. Probably not. Didn’t matter.
Wield said, “I gather one of your nieces hurt her leg and had to go home. Dog bite, was it?”
“A fall.”
“Dog bite, fall, I’m sure she could hav
e been treated in Sandytown.”
“You know what young people are like. She felt she’d rather be at home in Leeds.”
“Less chance of attracting attention there than here, I suppose. Get treated for a dog bite here in Sandytown and I expect Sergeant Whitby would learn about it in a couple of hours.”
She didn’t reply, just smiled at him as if to say, Where’s this all leading?
He said, “Why did you choose Sandytown? Lots of unhappy memories.”
“It’s the coming place, Sergeant, haven’t you heard? The healthiest place on earth, according to the publicity handouts. If I stayed here long enough, who knows, I might even get the sight of my eye back!”
A bitter note. But bitter enough to lead to murder?
He said, “Had you ever been on the grounds of the hall before you went to the hog roast?”
“It’s possible,” she said. “I’m fond of walking. I may have strayed onto the grounds during one of my strolls.”
“Surely you’d have known?”
“Why? Like yourself, Sergeant, I’m a stranger here.”
Like an expert dancing partner, she was moving exactly in time with him.
He said, “How did you feel about Lady Denham?”
“Some distant personal resentment, naturally.”
“Enough to make you target her in your capacity as an animal rights activist?”
“Certainly not,” she said. “Her ownership of the Hollis pig business is enough to earn her that privilege without anything personal coming into it. Conditions on that site are a disgrace. I have some photographs in my case if you would like to see for yourself.”
There it was, an invitation to look in her case. Could be a double bluff, of course, in the hope of putting him off.
He said, “Thank you. Yes, we’d like to search your luggage, if you don’t mind.”
She pushed the key ring toward him.
“Be my guest.”
He didn’t touch the key but said, “Is there anything you’d like to add to the account you gave DC Seymour here of your attendance at the hog roast yesterday?”
She said, “Only that after a good night’s sleep, I woke this morning feeling I’d walked into someone else’s drama and the best thing for me to do was head off home.”
There was a tap at the door and Bowler stuck his head in and mouthed, “Got a mo, Sarge?”
“Interview suspended,” said Wield. “Dennis, why don’t you take a look through Mrs. Griffiths’s case while I’m gone?”
He stood up and went out of the room without even glancing at the woman.
He would have liked to think he was getting on top here, but the best an honest assessment could give him was a score draw so far. His gut feeling was that Lady Denham’s death had nothing to do with animal rights, but gut feelings weren’t for sergeants. His job was to advance cautiously through the darkness, step after blind step.
The old proverb popped into his mind—In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Make that woman and queen.
3
Hat Bowler greeted him with a smile too bright to be genuine.
Wield said, “Right, Hat. What’s so important?”
“Nothing important, really, Sarge,” said Bowler. “It’s that Miss Brereton. She’s at the Hall. Says she wants to collect some of her clothes and other personal belongings.”
Wield, in both his personal and his professional life, had developed a sensitive ear for an evasion. He said, “You mean Miss Brereton’s being detained outside the Hall by PC Scroggs who is under strict instructions to admit no one without contacting me?”
“Not exactly,” said Bowler.
“Then let’s start again, this time exactly,” said Wield.
It turned out that Bowler had glimpsed a figure passing behind an upstairs window and when he asked Mick Scroggs who he’d let in, he received the answer, “No bugger.” Investigation revealed Clara Brereton. She said she’d entered by a rear door to which she had a key. In Bowler’s eyes this cleared Scroggs of any blame, but the fearful constable, in unsolicited testimony to Wield’s reputation as Pascoe’s enforcer, had said, “Doesn’t matter, yon ugly bastard will kill me!”
Bowler had a kind heart and Scroggs was a likable youngster and the DC might have been tempted simply to approve the young woman’s request to pick up her clothes, then escort her off the premises, but for one thing.
“Thing is, Sarge, it wasn’t her room she was in, it was Lady Denham’s.”
“How do you know?” asked Wield.
“Didn’t look like the kind of room I’d have expected someone like Miss Brereton to have,” said Bowler. “Too fussy. And the wrong stuff lying around.”
“Mebbe she’s an old-fashioned girl.”
“No. I got Scroggsy to take her downstairs and I had a poke around. It was definitely the old lass’s.”
“You ask Brereton what she was doing there?”
“No. Thought if she was looking for something, it was best not to alert her we knew, not without talking to you first.”
“The room’s been searched, you know that? DCI was very particular about that. Nothing found that seemed relevant, so what could Brereton have been after?”
“Maybe these,” said Bowler.
He produced a manila A5 envelope from which he spilled four photographs onto a table. The color wasn’t great and they’d been printed on ordinary cartridge paper, but the images were clear enough. Taken from above they showed a middle-aged man lying on top of a young woman. They were both naked. The shadows suggested the sun was high in the sky. The ground beneath them looked sandy, possibly a beach.
Wield examined them. Bowler’s awkwardness was explained now. He’d done well to unearth these, but claiming the credit meant dropping Scroggs in it.
“It’s not Brereton,” said the sergeant.
“No. She looks Asian to me. You know the man, Sarge?”
“No. Where were these?”
“In this antique writing desk.”
“So why weren’t they found during the search?” asked Wield in some irritation. “Some bugger’s been careless.”
“Don’t think so, Sarge,” said Bowler. “There’s a drawer hidden beneath a drawer. My granddad was a cabinetmaker and I used to enjoy helping him when I was a kid and he taught me all about this kind of secret drawer. Everyone thought I’d probably go into the business, but it wasn’t the woodwork that fascinated me, it was the business of hiding things and finding them out. Sorry…”
He tailed off, thinking this was more than the sergeant probably wanted to hear, but Wield nodded as if he understood, and said, “Good work. So what would Lady Denham be doing with mucky pictures?”
“And why would Miss Brereton want them?” said Bowler.
“If that’s what she were after,” said Wield. “Did she have a bag?”
“No.”
“What’s she wearing?”
“Sun top, loose cotton jacket, lightweight fatigues, the kind with the big pockets down the front.”
“You had a good look at her then?”
Hat flushed, then grinned.
“Close observation, that’s what you taught us, Sarge.”
“That’s right. So you go back and closely observe Miss Brereton till I finish up here. I shouldn’t be long.”
He went back into the interview room. On the table were spread the contents of Sandy Griffiths’s case, clothes, toiletries, a notebook, a couple of paperbacks, and a laptop that was switched on.
He looked questioningly at the woman, who said, “I told Mr. Seymour it was all right to look.”
She kept a tidy machine. Her address book was minimal, the recycle bin was empty, and her documents contained only a single folder entitled Hollis.
He opened it. There were photographs of pigs, close crowded in metal pens. His mind registered distaste though his face showed nothing. He didn’t know if any welfare regulations were being broken here, but this was not a
sight anyone who enjoyed a pork chop wanted to see. Some of the pictures showed dead piglets, lying in filth.
“Did you take these?”
She shrugged.
“Is this why you came to Sandytown, so you could do a raid on the pig farm?”
“Has there been a raid?”
“Someone defaced the sign at the main gate, I understand. The night of your arrival, I think it was.”
“There you go. We’re not alone,” she said, smiling.
“So you’re denying it was you and your nieces.”
“Of course. We want to use the law against these people. Why should we alienate it by committing criminal damage?”
He said, “Mebbe because the law is slow and messy and you get your kicks out of direct action.”
“Is that how you feel about your job, Sergeant?”
“No,” said Wield. “I like slow and messy. Dennis? Anything you want to ask Mrs. Griffiths?”
Seymour, knowing the tape was off and the interview had not been formally resumed, took this as an invitation to sign off. He closed the notebook he’d been studying and set it on the table.
“No, Sarge,” he said.
“Good. Thank you for being so helpful, Mrs. Griffiths.”
“I’m free to go?”
“Of course. Like a hand repacking your case?”
“No. Men can manage unpacking all right, but putting stuff together again is best left to a woman.”
“I think you’re right. Each to his own, eh?”
“Indeed. Which is why it strikes me as odd—during our little chat, you didn’t once refer directly to the fact that Lady Denham was murdered yesterday.”
For the first time a flicker of what his close friends and associates might recognize as a smile ran over Wield’s face.
“No,” he said. “What’s really odd is neither did you. Let DC Seymour know when you’ve finished repacking and he’ll drive you back to Seaview Terrace.”
With the door closed behind them he said to Seymour, “So what do you think, Dennis?”
The DC’s answer was typically prompt and direct.
“Almost certainly responsible for the spray job on the pig farm notice. She probably drove the car, let the youngsters do the climbing. And I’m pretty sure she wrote the letters Lady Denham got. Noticed you didn’t mention them, Sarge.”
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