Beside a Narrow Stream

by Faith Martin

  Hillary shrugged. ‘You like him, Ms Wilson?’

  Felicity Wilson reached down to pick up a small bale of hay, which she took over to the rabbit pens. ‘He’s all right. Not interested in me, of course. Not got any dosh,’ she smiled wistfully. ‘But he’s OK. I’m into oil painting; abstracts. Most people think that artists who do abstracts, only do so because they can’t paint cows or sheep, or country cottages covered in roses. You know. “Proper” painting. But Wayne understood abstract art. He’s one of the few who did. Look, is he really in trouble?’

  ‘You’ve been away, Ms Wilson?’ Hillary asked softly.

  ‘Yes. A few days up north. There was a big exhibition of post-nihilism. I tend to take the odd two or three days here and there, rather than a long two- or three-week holiday in the summer. I get to see a lot of exhibitions that way, and get constant little breaks away from this place, which can be a madhouse, let me tell you. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you bad news, Ms Wilson, but Mr Sutton was murdered last Monday evening.’

  Felicity Wilson dropped the entire bale of hay into the pen and stared at Hillary for a long, shocked moment. Then she swallowed hard. ‘Look, why don’t we go to the coffee shop? I could do with a cup of tea. We can talk easier there.’

  Hillary agreed, although one look at the packed café changed their minds, and instead they went outside, finding a wooden bench in the shade near a display of wisterias.

  ‘What can you tell me about him?’ Hillary asked curiously. ‘You seem to be in a unique position to understand him.’

  Felicity smiled grimly. ‘Not one of his paying customers, you mean? No. Well, what can I say? He liked living well. Good wine, fast cars, designer gear. His mum and dad are strictly working-class, but Wayne was a Champagne Charlie if ever there was one. He let women provide for him, and in return … well, you know what he gave them in return. He lived for art, was sort of clever, but spiteful sometimes. I felt sorry for him, but I’m damned if I know why. He lived a lot better than I do.’ She suddenly broke off, as she realized that now, of course, he wasn’t living at all.

  ‘Did he have any enemies that you know of? I mean beside jealous women or cuckolded husbands?’

  Felicity sighed. ‘I wouldn’t know. We talked mostly about our art. You’ve seen some of his stuff?’ she asked eagerly.

  ‘Yes,’ Hillary said blandly. But not blandly enough, it seemed.

  ‘You didn’t like it?’ Felicity said, her voice hardening, becoming defensive.

  ‘It’s not that,’ Hillary said, trying to head her off. ‘What I saw seemed to me to be quite clever. And technically competent. I just felt, that, for me personally, it never really quite worked.’

  Felicity looked at her for a moment, then slowly looked away. Her shoulders slumped. ‘No. I always felt that way too, but of course, I never said so. And I think a lot of other people felt the same, to be honest. He was almost, but not quite, really good. It must be horrible to be like that. I’d rather be piss-bloody-poor awful, or an absolute genius. But I rather suspect I’m only merely pretty good too. Wayne was a bit more than merely good, but he wasn’t, somehow, top quality.’ She sounded ineffably sad. At last, someone truly mourning the dead man?

  Hillary nodded. ‘Do you think he knew himself?’ she asked, genuinely curious.

  ‘No,’ Flick said at once, and confidently, but then she hesitated. ‘At least, I’m not sure. There was this man at the club, Colin Blake. Now he was good. A“proper” painter, you understand, but good. And Wayne was jealous of him. Oh, he tried to disguise it, mostly by making fun of Colin’s upper-crust friends. I don’t think it helped that Wayne really wanted to swan around in that set himself – you know, the real old money, the aristos. Instead, he was stuck with the nouveau riche. And even then, only women who wanted to get into his trousers. It drove him wild that Colin, who was only a butcher, seemed to be able to sell canvases to “Right Hons”, when he couldn’t. I told him not to worry about it, that caring about that sort of thing diminished him. That always cheered him up, and we’d have a right spitefest, sticking knives into the traditionalists. But even so …’

  Hillary nodded. It was all very interesting, but not necessarily helpful. ‘What we look for in a murder case, Ms Wilson, are anomalies,’ she explained carefully. ‘Things in a victim’s life that don’t quite gel. Specific events that might start a catastrophic chain that results in murder. Can you think of anything in Wayne Sutton’s life that gave you cause for concern, or felt out of place, or just, for some reason, gave you a vague sense of “something being wrong”? Anything like that at all?’

  Felicity Wilson thought for a while, then shrugged. ‘The only thing that stays in my mind is something he said a few weeks ago. We’d all met up at this pub near, oh hell, where was it. The Rock of Gibraltar. That was it, the name of the pub. Anyway, me and Wayne were the last to leave, and he’d had a little more to drink than I thought he should have had, given that he was driving. I offered to drive him home, but he wouldn’t have it. You know how men are. Anyway, I tried to keep him chatting, you know, hoping the cold night air would clear his head a bit, and we got to talking about selling paintings. I’d just had what was for me a big sale – one of the big racing car outfits near Enstone had bought a giant canvas off me to put in their new showroom. Anyway, Wayne made some typical smart-mouth reply about selling one of his canvases to some matron or other, then he laughed and tapped the side of his nose, and said he wouldn’t be selling many more of his masterpieces to fat dozy cows who couldn’t appreciate them. He was off tomorrow to Heyford Sudbury to make his fortune.’

  Hillary felt herself tense. Blackmail? It sounded possible. ‘Did he say how he was going to make this fortune?’

  Felicity smiled and shrugged. ‘No. But how else did Wayne make his money? I just assumed he’d found another woman, but this time, one with really deep pockets.’

  One called Annie, maybe, Hillary mused. ‘Did he go, do you know? To Heyford Sudbury, I mean?’ Hillary asked.

  Felicity shrugged. ‘Beats me,’ she waved away a bee, that had droned drunkenly close to her face, before flying on. ‘He never mentioned it again. Mind you, like I said, he was a bit tipsy. It could just have been the wine talking.’

  Hillary nodded. But doubted it. Doubted it very much. At last, she felt as if she was on to a tangible lead. ‘And nothing else springs to mind?’

  The other woman shook her head.

  ‘Do you know anyone called Annie? Or Anne, or something like that, someone that Wayne would have known too?’ she persisted.

  Again, Felicity Wilson shook her head. ‘No. Sorry.’

  Hillary sighed, thanked her, and left.

  Gemma was on a roll. Armed with a whole sheaf of pictures of open-topped cars from the twenties and thirties era, she’d managed to track down the car.

  Only to find it led to a dead end.

  On the afternoon of the murder, the occupant of the last cottage on the farm track, had had an old friend over for tea, something already mentioned in the notes of the interviewing constable. The dark-blue Morgan, that had been parked outside, belonged to this visitor. A fact that the PC had failed to make note of. Gemma would give him a right rollicking when she got back to HQ.

  The owner of the car currently resided in Liverpool. She doubted that Hillary would want her to go all the way up there to question him, so she got his phone number instead, and headed back to HQ.

  There was only parking to be had towards the back, and as she crossed the car park, making her way to the entrance, she was unaware that she was being watched.

  DS George Davies was only five weeks away from retiring. His allotment beckoned, along with long summer days spent sunbathing in an old deck chair and drinking his home-made rhubarb wine. No more hooligans who’d just as soon sink a knife into you as look at you. No more endless paper-pushing, and saying ‘yes, sir’ to so called superiors who knew nothing about walking a beat or proper community poli
cing.

  He was returning to HQ after sorting out a domestic, and something about the tall blonde woman, walking parallel to him about fifty feet away, struck a bell.

  He swivelled his head to watch her. Nice. Bit on the skinny side for his taste, and he preferred long hair on a woman, but nice, nonetheless. He found himself admiring the way she moved – like an athlete, all economical grace. It was the walk that he remembered most.

  His memory twanged. A nice young bit, walking alongside … who was it now? Somebody else. Someone he hadn’t liked much.

  George walked a bit faster, and got to the door just ahead of her. He went in first and turned to keep the door open. She smiled vaguely as she went past. Sharp, bony face, but somehow attractive. Yes, he’d definitely seen her before, but a long, long time ago. The features had been softer, the hair longer. Young. Yes, he’d thought at the time how young she was for … whoever the hell it was she’d been with.

  The woman went on up the stairs towards the CID offices, and George sighed. That was the trouble with getting old. The bloody memory began to let you down. But he knew it would come back to him. Things like that tended to niggle away at his subconscious.

  He sighed and made his way over to the desk sergeant for a bit of a gossip. Everyone knew that desk sergeants always made the best cups of tea going, and more often than not, had a plateful of biscuits they were willing to share. And it was still lunch-time.

  Just.

  chapter nine

  Keith Barrington stared at Gavin Moreland, and could actually feel the colour leaving his face. His cheeks felt suddenly cold, but that was nothing compared to the clammy hand that was twisting around inside his stomach.

  Gavin, a 22-year-old recent graduate from the London School of Economics, twisted his square-faced visage into a spiteful grin. ‘Yeah, I thought that might get a reaction. At last. Ever since I found you in that disgusting fleatpit you call a bedsit, you’ve been about as responsive as an old tabby cat on Prozac.’ His striking hazel eyes, slightly up-tilted at the end, suddenly shimmered with unshed tears. His voice, upper-crust and just slightly on the nasal side, trembled with tension. ‘Anybody else would be flattered to be chased. But oh no, not you. It’s been nothing but moan, moan, moan, ever since I got here.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ Keith mumbled, glancing around nervously. The café was a cross between an old-fashioned tea shop and a health food bar, and most of its clientele were young, working, upwardly mobile types, who were taking no notice of the two young men at all. They’d taken a pavement table, but the striped blue and white awning kept the sun off, and if everybody wanted to pretend they were on a street café in Paris, Keith didn’t feel like arguing. Besides he had his back to the street and the worst of the petrol fumes.

  Gavin, seeing his unease, smiled grimly again. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said bitterly – and quietly. ‘I know enough not to embarrass you in public. I won’t suddenly reach across and squeeze your hand.’

  Keith flushed at the palpable hit. His being in the closet was something they were never going to agree on. Back in the capital it hadn’t been so much of an issue, in their social life at least. They’d been together for nearly three years now, and had always been able to find out-of-the-way pubs, clubs and meeting places.

  At first, Gavin, the son of a wealthy businessman, had found the red-haired, working-class copper something of an amusement. It had made him laugh, especially when Keith came home in uniform, to tease and taunt. But he’d never expected the entertainment to last for long though. His previous boyfriends had lasted anywhere from a month to, at a real pinch, six. So he’d been frankly astonished when he’d found himself unable to give up his painfully prosaic, working-class, repressed PC Plod. Worse was to follow. Gavin found himself actually in love.

  It was embarrassing.

  All his friends were ‘out’ and being with someone so firmly in the closet gave him a headache. He loathed Keith’s job, and was always taking pot shots at his so-called ‘superior’ officers, and sniping whenever he had to arrest a black shoplifter or stop an Asian for speeding. The fact that Keith wasn’t in the least a racist only made his vitriol more vicious.

  Keith’s final falling out with his sergeant, which had led to him almost being dismissed, threatened to be the final straw. Oh, if Keith had been made to leave the force, Gavin would have cracked open the champagne at the speed of light. No, it was the fact that he’d been transferred to Oxfordshire that had sent Gavin stamping out of Keith’s life like the prima donna he could sometimes be.

  But it hadn’t lasted.

  For nearly six months, Gavin had sweated it out, pretending he was doing fine. But now here he was, in Oxford, putting up at the Randolf Hotel for the most part, and trying to pretend that Keith was going to take him back. In his more hopeful moods, he imagined Keith coming out of the closet, thus enabling them to become a proper, serious couple at last. All of this, in spite of the fact that he’d hardly been welcomed back with open arms. Gavin was nothing if not an optimist.

  But now, this latest catastrophe.

  Keith leaned forward on the table, his voice little more than a whisper. ‘What exactly did they say when they took him in?’

  Gavin took a long, deep, breath. He wasn’t as tall as Keith, but had a slender, wiry strength that came from playing near-professional tennis. He’d gone to LSE to please his father, but his dream was to be a tennis pro. ‘They said they wanted him for questioning in connection with a shipment of Greek crockery.’

  Keith blinked. Gavin’s father, Sir Reginald Moreland (the knighthood had been bestowed eight years ago for services to industry, and wasn’t hereditary) ran a large import/export company, as well as owning several vineyards in France and Italy. Sir Reginald was prosperous, hard-working, high-living, and Keith had never heard of anything dodgy about him. He wasn’t even divorced, and his wife of the past twenty-eight years ran her own chain of beauty salons.

  ‘It sounds as if they’re fishing,’ Keith said hopefully. ‘Perhaps Customs and Excise got a tip-off about one of your father’s containers.’

  Gavin’s face paled. ‘Drugs?’

  Keith felt that coldness wash over him again. It was the most obvious thing to think of. But of course, as any copper knew, smuggling could cover anything – from the old favourites like booze and tobacco, to human trafficking.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Gavin said tightly, shaking his head. But he knew more than most how his father, raised in tower blocks in Hackney, was ferocious about money. Earning it, spending it, keeping it. And, most of all, never, ever, being poor again.

  And drugs were very lucrative business.

  Keith looked across at Gavin’s unhappy, uncertain face, and fought back the urge to reach across and give him a cuddle. ‘Look, they haven’t arrested him – that’s a good sign. It means they don’t have a case yet, or the evidence. He asked for a lawyer right away, yeah?’

  Gavin snorted. ‘Naturally. You don’t think there are any flies on my old man, do you?’

  Keith shrugged. ‘Look, there’s not much I can do. It’s not as if I’ve got the clout to pull a few strings and find out what’s going on. Your dad probably has his own cronies who are doing that anyway.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ Gavin sighed heavily, running his thin, strong, shaking hands through a thatch of thick, dark hair. ‘I don’t expect you to be able to help. Not in any professional way. It’s just that when I got the phone call from Frank, my first thought was to see you. I needed to hear your voice and know everything would be all right. Daft, right?’ his voice trembled again. Keith nudged Gavin’s knee with his own, under the table, and got a brief smile in response.

  Frank Perkins was one of Moreland’s vice-presidents. Since Gavin was supposed, nominally at least, to work for Moreland Exports as a young executive, Frank was laughably called his boss. In reality, Gavin was hardly ever in the office. Normally he could be found playing somewhere on the top amateur tennis circuit. Lately, of course
, he’d been in Oxford. Keith wondered how much Frank Perkins, or even Sir Reginald himself for that matter, knew about Gavin’s private life. And what they thought of Keith.

  It made him nervous.

  Worse, if Sir Reginald did turn out to have criminal tendencies, what would the likes of Hillary Greene, Mel Mallow and Detective Chief Superintendent Marcus Donleavy, all back at HQ, think about a certain DC Barrington being such good friends with a villain’s son?

  Hillary listened as Gemma Fordham told her about the Morgan sports car, and its owner, now resident in Liverpool.

  ‘Better ring him up and check him out. But we’re just being thorough,’ Hillary mused. ‘I take it the cottage owner he was visiting confirmed that they were with each other the whole time?’

  ‘Guv,’ Gemma confirmed flatly, and reached for the phone. Hillary, still feeling restless, stared out the window. From what she could overhear of Gemma’s side of the conversation with the man in Liverpool, the results were turning out to be pretty much as they’d guessed.

  When she’d finished, Hillary grabbed her bag. ‘Come on, let’s have another word with Tommy Eaverson.’ She had no special reason for wanting to see him again, but she liked to interview people more than once, and the office walls were closing in on her.

  Gemma grabbed her own gear and followed silently. She noticed Hillary glance across at Barrington’s empty desk, and wondered where the ginger nut was today. Frank Ross was still absent, but Gemma was beginning to learn that that was normal. Nobody complained, obviously, because nobody liked working with the poisonous little git.

  No wonder Ronnie had found him so useful.

  Back at the Eaverson place, Hillary was just climbing out of her car when a neighbour, mowing a pocket-handkerchief-sized front lawn, turned off his Hovermower, and watched them approach curiously. When they were nearest to his hedge, he made a small head-bob, indicating he wanted to chat.