Beside a Narrow Stream

by Faith Martin

  Hillary, who loved gossiping neighbours, headed his way immediately. He was a small man, red-faced from the heat and the exertion, with a bald spot on the crown of his head and deep-set, twinkling blue eyes. Amoustache sat on his upper lip like a discouraged caterpillar.

  ‘If you’re here to talk to Mr Eaverson, I’m afraid he’s gone.’

  Hillary felt her heartbeat trip. Gone? Her first thought was that he’d done a runner. That somehow she’d slipped up and let him get away. Then, she took a calming breath.

  ‘Gone?’ she asked casually. Beside her, she could feel Gemma’s silent, watchful presence.

  ‘You know,’ the neighbour said, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Left her. Packed his bags and went. I heard them having a real barney last night, and this morning, when he got in his car, he had suitcases with him. And you’re not telling me he needed three big cases, plus two carry-ons, just to go on a business trip.’ He took a much needed breath, and nodded his head solemnly.

  ‘Funny, I thought their marriage was pretty steady,’ Hillary said, knowing that would open the floodgates. There was nothing human nature liked so much as to know more than the next man.

  ‘Oh no,’ the other man said at once. ‘Oh, on the surface, maybe,’ he waved a vague hand in the air. ‘But you should hear the arguments sometimes! He’s been spending more and more time at the office over the last few years, and my wife thought, once, that she saw him having dinner in that posh hotel near Chesterton with this attractive brunette. And as for her! Well, you know about that so called tenant of hers, don’t you? The one that got killed? Some sort of artist they tell me. Well, if he ever paid a pound in rent, I’m the tooth fairy.’

  Hillary managed to keep a straight face, in spite of the fact that she was suddenly picturing him with gossamer wings, and wearing a white tutu. Alook that, rather alarmingly, suited him – in her mind’s eye at least. ‘Do you know where he might have gone?’ she asked, shaking the image from her mind.

  ‘Can’t tell you, I’m afraid. But he’ll be at work right now though, won’t he?’ he added craftily.

  Hillary smiled brightly. ‘Yes he will, won’t he?’ she agreed softly.

  They brought Eaverson in. Hillary had already talked to him on his own territory, and now she wanted to shake him up a bit, and see how he liked it on hers. Besides, she wanted to make sure they got his new address, and could lay hands on him again in a hurry, and impressing on him the fact that he was in the middle of a police investigation might not be a bad thing. And if the split with his wife had been brought about by her relationship with Wayne Sutton, Hillary wanted to know about it. It went to proving motive, if nothing else. And his alibi was non-existent.

  Interview Room Two was identical to all the others – high placed windows, tiled floor, bolted-down table and chairs. A harsh, bright, overhead light illuminated the proceedings.

  Tommy Eaverson, dressed in a dark-blue suit and mint-green tie, looked both nervous and angry, upset and belligerent. The moment he saw her, he began to rant.

  ‘This is ridiculous! Pulling me away from my work in the middle of the day. And for what? It’ll be all over the place by now! My secretary could hardly meet my eye!’

  Hillary, sitting opposite him, turned to a fresh page on her notebook, totally unruffled. ‘I understand you’ve left your wife, Mr Eaverson?’

  ‘So? Is that a crime now?’ Tommy Eaverson tried to laugh, but didn’t quite pull it off, and looked sullen instead. ‘That’s been coming on for some time, anyway,’ he said flatly. ‘And I don’t see what that has to do with anything.’ He folded his arms defensively across his chest.

  ‘Was it her relationship with Wayne Sutton that was the catalyst?’ Hillary asked calmly.

  ‘Relationship?’ Tommy echoed, his voice rising a decibel. ‘Don’t make me laugh. They just had a roll in the hay in return for him not paying her any rent. You don’t call that a relationship do you? He had women fawning all over him. Silly cow, thought she was special.’

  ‘And that made you mad?’ Hillary asked quietly. ‘Seeing your wife make such a fool of herself? She became a laughing stock, didn’t she? But what was much worse, she made you one too, by association.’

  ‘Well, not any more,’ Tommy said flatly. ‘I’m seeing a solicitor. It’s time I got free of her, anyway.’

  ‘And did you want to get Wayne Sutton out of the way too? Is that why you killed him?’

  ‘Eh?’ Tommy looked genuinely surprised. ‘No. Hey, wait a minute, no!’ he sounded genuinely frightened now. ‘I wouldn’t kill someone. I’m not like that!’

  Hillary smiled wryly and glanced across at Gemma, sitting beside her. ‘The number of times we’ve heard that, hey, Sergeant?’

  ‘If I had a pound, guv,’ Gemma smiled wearily. ‘I could retire by now.’

  They kept at him for a while, but he was adamant. On the night Wayne Sutton had died, he’d been working, alone, at the office. In the end, Hillary was inclined – provisionally – to believe him. ‘All right, Mr Eaverson, you can go now,’ she said eventually. ‘But make sure we can find you at that address you gave us. Oh, and by the way, do you know anyone called Annie?’

  It was her stock question by now, asked of anyone with anything to do with the inquiry, and she hadn’t really expected anything to come of it. But Tommy Eaverson, in the act of rising, suddenly went still. The next instant, he was on his feet. His eyes when they met hers were as innocent as a lamb’s.

  ‘Annie? No, it doesn’t ring any bells, Inspector,’ he said pleasantly.

  Hillary, having no other option, had to let him go. When he was gone, Gemma stirred.

  ‘Find out who the Annie is in his life, guv?’ she asked quietly, and Hillary smiled. She really was quick on the uptake, never missed a thing, and had an uncanny knack of anticipating her every need and order.

  If she didn’t have some private agenda of her own, she’d be a godsend.

  Hillary nodded. When her DS had gone, she stayed on in the quiet room, thinking. When she finally rose, about ten minutes later, she headed, not back upstairs, but outside to the car park. There she opened all the Volkswagen’s doors and windows to let the baking air out, then climbed in and drove north.

  She was just pulling up to a set of traffic lights, when she saw them. Keith Barrington’s dark chestnut hair was eye-catching enough to attract her attention, and as she braked for the red light, she saw the young man he was with, lean over the table and say something to him.

  He was a good-looking youth, early twenties, with a fit, lean body. He looked to be wearing expensive clothes too, and she caught a glimpse of gold on his wrist. Probably a fancy watch. From his salon-style hair cut to his two-hundred pound trainers, he screamed money. His face, however, looked tight and miserable, and was fixed on her DC.

  It was his eyes that told her the story.

  So, she thought, nodding her head gently. That was the way of it.

  Barrington didn’t look over his shoulder, so didn’t see his boss driving away. He did, however, look at his watch, and let out a yelp. ‘Shit, I’m so late.’

  Gavin threw himself backwards in his chair. ‘Oh, of course, we mustn’t be late for Detective Inspector Greene, must we?’ he snarled.

  Keith stood up and looked down at him helplessly. The truth was, he never knew how to handle his lover when he was like this. It only made things worse that, underneath, he could sense Gavin’s very real fear and need.

  ‘Look, I’ll try to get back early tonight,’ he promised gently. ‘I’m sure you’ll have heard from your dad or Perkins by then. It’ll probably all have blown over.’

  ‘Much you care,’ Gavin muttered, then shook his head angrily. ‘Oh go on, PC Plod, just piss off.’

  Colin Blake looked surprised to see another police officer, especially since this one was calling at his home. Thursdays were his day off, along with Sundays, and he always spent both days painting.

  Hillary sensed he was not too pleased to be
interrupted, but he was polite enough not to let it show too obviously.

  The butcher, and shining light of the Ale and Arty Club, lived in a fairly large, new-build house on the outskirts of Banbury, with an unexpectedly spectacular view across open countryside. Blake had turned the conservatory into a studio, and in one corner an air-conditioning unit hummed steadily and to good effect. Obviously the side-line in painting paid well. She’d looked around curiously when he’d shown her through the hall and main living-room; all the canvases on the walls had been landscapes, and all had pleased her eye.

  ‘Yours?’ she asked now, pausing beside a river scene. There was something about the colour and the rendition of the willow trees that reminded her of something.

  ‘Yes, they’re all mine. Ones I couldn’t sell, actually,’ he said, with a modest smile. Hillary, like Gemma, found him pleasantly good-looking, urbane and likeable. She could understand why Wayne Sutton would have hated him.

  Hillary nodded at the landscape. ‘It reminds me of something,’ she said, and Colin Blake smiled.

  ‘Ah. An art lover. Actually, that’s my homage to Constable. No pun intended, officer.’

  Hillary smiled. ‘Of course. Those Anglian sketches.’

  ‘Thank you for not mentioning The Hay Wain.’

  They walked on through into the conservatory itself, and a more exotic landscape caught her eye. ‘Homage to Gaugin?’ she asked, and got a laugh in return.

  ‘Sometimes I do it for fun,’ Colin Blake said, lowering his voice as if he was admitting to something scandalous. ‘You know, just to see how I measure up to the masters. Of course, copying their style doesn’t make you anything more than a good copyist. But at least it does reassure you that you’re not wasting good paint.’

  Hillary paused beside a painting of a meadow, just before a storm was due to hit, and found herself gazing into the incredibly lovely dark velvet eyes of a cow. ‘Oh, you’re not wasting paint, Mr Blake,’ she said. She would quite happily have hung any of Colin Blake’s canvases on her walls – if the Mollern had had a wall big enough to accommodate one, that is.

  ‘Thank you, Inspector Greene. Something cold to drink?’

  Hillary accepted a glass of real lemonade, mouth-wateringly swimming in ice-cubes, and took a seat. The easel he was working on was standing in the middle of the room, uncovered, and Hillary could see that he was currently painting a cottage scene, one frothing with flowering wisteria. In the foreground, a rusty iron railing fence was awash with a pale pink clematis. A child’s bike lay abandoned on a somewhat scruffy lawn.

  ‘Wayne would have called it chocolate box naff,’ Colin said, catching the direction of her eye. The painting was almost finished, and Hillary could quite clearly see the peeling white paint on the rotting wooden window frames, the odd missing tile on the roof, the weeds growing through the path. In spite of its loveliness, the sense she got from it was one of acceptable poverty. A novel concept. And, for some reason she couldn’t fathom, it aroused a vague, not unpleasant sense of nostalgia in her.

  ‘He was jealous of you,’ she said, making it a statement.

  Colin Blake looked at her, sighed a little, and shrugged. ‘Nothing I could do about it. He just didn’t like me.’

  ‘And you didn’t like him?’

  Colin smiled. ‘It’s hard to like someone who doesn’t like you back, isn’t it? Who has no respect for your art or talent, who despises your friends and ridicules your lifestyle and way of living. Unless you’re a saint of course. No,’ he took a seat in a padded swinging garden chair, and sipped from his own glass of lemonade. ‘I didn’t like him. But I didn’t kill him.’

  Hillary nodded. She knew from reading Gemma’s notes on their interview, that he was here at the time of the killing, painting this very same canvas, and that his wife, Bernice, could vouch for him.

  Not that that meant anything. Wives and mothers made notoriously bad character witnesses and alibi-providers.

  But why would Colin Blake kill Wayne Sutton anyway? If anything, it should be the other way around. It was Sutton who was jealous and bitter. Now if Blake had been found dead, Sutton would have been in the hot seat for sure.

  ‘Do you know anyone called Annie, Mr Blake?’

  ‘Annie Coulson – she lives next door,’ he said at once, then smiled, puzzled. ‘Why?’

  Hillary smiled back. ‘Does Mrs Coulson know Wayne Sutton?’

  ‘It’s Ms. Our Annie is a feminist. And gay. She’d have a fit if you called her Mrs,’ Colin said with a wide grin. ‘And no, I don’t suppose for a minute she knew Wayne. Why should she?’

  ‘Did Wayne ever mention anyone called Annie to you?’

  Colin thought for a moment, then shook his head. ‘Wayne and I didn’t talk much, though. You should ask his friends. The woman who paints abstracts for instance.’

  Hillary nodded glumly, thanked him for the lemonade, gave the unfinished painting a last, regretful look, and took her leave.

  On the way out, she passed an exquisite pen and wash drawing of a woman with long, auburn hair. She looked at it and nodded.

  ‘Augustus John. With a hint of Burne-Jones.’

  Colin Blake gave an ironic bow.

  When she got back to HQ, the desk sergeant beckoned her over.

  ‘Hill, got a live one for you. Man and woman just come in. Wanted to talk to whoever was in charge of the Wayne Sutton inquiry. Husband and wife outfit, wife wears the trousers. Hubby didn’t want to be here. I put them in Five.’

  Hillary thanked him. ‘Call upstairs and send Barrington down will you?’

  The desk sergeant cheerfully agreed, and Hillary made her way to Interview Room Five. It looked exactly as Interview Room Two had looked. Inside, a short, dumpy woman sat grimly staring forward. She was wearing a bright, flower-patterned summer dress, tights and sandals, and clutched a handbag as if her life depended on it. Beside her, tall and thin, and casting apprehensive looks at the PC standing in one corner, was a man wearing a pair of creased summer shorts and a faded T-shirt. He had wispy grey hair and long, bony hands. He looked as if a breeze could blow him off his seat.

  Hillary smiled at them as she took a seat, and introduced herself. ‘And you are?’ She looked to the woman first.

  ‘Celia Benson. This is my husband Raymond. Please forgive him, I had to drag him away from the garden.’ She sniffed, eyeing her husband’s casual apparel with an angry eye. Her husband stiffened, but his mouth firmed into a stubborn line. Hillary suspected a long-running argument, and bit her lip.

  Barrington came in, and Hillary introduced him. ‘DC Barrington will take notes,’ she said softly. ‘Now, I understand you have something for us concerning the Wayne Sutton murder inquiry?’

  ‘Yes, we do,’ Celia said at once, then nudged her spouse with her elbow. ‘Tell her Ray.’

  ‘You tell her,’ Ray shot back, his voice surprisingly deep for one who looked so insubstantial. ‘You’re the one who wanted to come down here.’

  ‘That’s because I’ve got a brain in my head, and a civic bone in my body. But you’re the one who heard ’em. Now just tell the lady. The sooner you do, the sooner you can get back to that bloody compost heap and your precious tomato plants.’

  Her husband heaved a long suffering sigh, and looked, finally, at Hillary. ‘It’s like this. I was out just before dark – the best time to water tomatoes is after the sun goes down – it can’t burn the leaves, then, see?’

  His wife rolled her eyes.

  Hillary bit her lip again.

  ‘So I don’t expect they saw me. They wouldn’t have been arguing so loud if they had known I was there. Madge likes to pretend she’s such a lady.’

  Celia Benson snorted inelegantly.

  ‘Madge? We’re talking about Madge Eaverson, yes?’ Hillary interrupted, just to make sure.

  ‘That’s right. We live next door to where she used to live. Used to be her Mum and Dad’s place,’ Celia broke in, as if unable to bear being silent any longer. ‘Her poor m
other would turn in her grave if she knew what she’d been getting up to with that young man.’

  ‘Wayne Sutton?’

  ‘Am I telling this or are you?’ Ray Benson asked, turning to look at his wife, and sounding aggrieved. ‘Only if you want to tell it, what did you drag me down here for anyway?’

  ‘Oh, get on with it!’ Celia huffed.

  Ray turned, with ostentatious patience, back to Hillary. ‘It’s like I said. It was just getting dark, and my tomatoes are against the wall connecting our gardens. Anyways, I heard Madge and that artist chap arguing.’

  ‘You’re talking about Wayne Sutton now?’ Hillary clarified.

  ‘That’s him. Him that rented her place. Well …’ he added, when his wife snorted again. ‘Well, whatever. It’s none of my business,’ he cast his wife a telling look. ‘But that night they were going at it hammer and tongs, and I couldn’t help but hear. I mean, they must have been right the other side of the wall.’

  ‘When was this, Mr Benson?’

  ‘Ah. Now you got me.’

  ‘He’s hopeless with time,’ his wife chipped in, smugly. As if it was something to be proud of. ‘But I can tell you it must have been a few days before Wayne got killed.’

  ‘Ah, sounds about right,’ Ray chipped in. ‘They were just beginning to flower. My tomato plants,’ he added, when everyone looked at him blankly.

  Hillary nodded. ‘And what was the argument about, Mr Benson, could you tell?’

  ‘Oh yerse,’ Ray said, nodding sagely. ‘Couldn’t help but hear every word.’ Then, when everyone again stared at him patiently, he coloured slightly, and said in a rush, ‘she were threatening to throw him out. Said she’d had enough, and this latest floozy of his was the last straw.’

  Hillary drew in a quick breath. The latest floozy.

  The mysterious Annie maybe?

  Hillary took him through it, meticulously coaxing out every detail he could remember, but there had been no mention of the name Annie, by either Madge or their victim.