Beside a Narrow Stream

by Faith Martin

  By the end of the interview, Ray Benson looked almost to be enjoying himself, and his wife with almost glowing with civic pride. It was obvious that the important policewoman was pleased with them, and when they left, there was not a cross word between them.

  Hillary watched them go, then leaned back with a satisfied sigh. ‘Right then, let’s get Madge in,’ Hillary said softly. And smiled. ‘This just isn’t her day, is it?’ First her husband leaves her, now her neighbour drops her in the mire.

  Was getting arrested for murdering her lover going to top it all off nicely?

  chapter ten

  Madge Eaverson glanced around the Interview Room and smiled. ‘So, the telly has got it right. This room looks just like one I saw on The Bill once.’

  Hillary smiled. Beside her, Keith Barrington was thinking about Gavin Moreland. Or, to be precise, his father, Sir Reginald. Right now, he’d be sitting in an interview room similar to this one, with the London traffic churning away outside. Of course, he would be surrounded by top-class solicitors, all telling him what to answer and what not to answer, what to admit to, what to fudge, what to deny outright.

  But would they be enough? What if he really was going to be charged? What happened then?

  ‘Lots of the television companies have technical consultants and advisors, Mrs Eaverson. Mostly stage-struck retired old coppers.’ Hillary said with a short laugh.

  ‘Madge, please call me Madge. I told you before, when you visited last. Whenever I hear “Mrs Eaverson” I think of Tommy’s mother – or even worse, his old granny.’ She shuddered, then reached into her bag for a cigarette. Hillary coughed politely and she put it back.

  Barrington shifted on his chair again, and Hillary shot him a quick look. He was staring down at his notebook, but she could tell his thoughts were miles away. And she could guess where.

  His boyfriend was young and good-looking, and the last time she’d seen him, had been deeply miserable. Were they on the verge of splitting up? Whatever the problem was, it was time to bring her DC back to the here and now.

  ‘Keith, would you like to start?’ Hillary asked, and watched him jump.

  Barrington, after a startled glance at her, cleared his throat, and looked up at the woman opposite him. This was his first shot at a formal interview with a murder suspect. He knew that it meant Hillary Greene was beginning to trust him, and had decided to stretch him a little. Give him a little responsibility. Damn it, now was not the time to be distracted! He cast around for something to say, something to open the interview and set the right tone. To his dismay, his mind stayed blank. Beside him, he could feel his DI getting restive.

  ‘We understand your husband has left you, Mrs Eaverson,’ he said quickly, and then blinked, wondering if that had been too blunt. Maybe he should have eased into it? What if he’d just alienated the witness and made her clam up? Manfully, he resisted the urge to look across at his superior officer to gauge her reaction, or seek tacit instructions.

  Madge Eaverson laughed. She was wearing a pristine pale-lilac trouser suit with an electric blue raw silk shirt. Amethyst and diamond earrings glittered at her lobes, whilst a perfume that had probably come with a fierce price tag wafted around her. But her eyes looked tight, and she was obviously itching for a cigarette.

  ‘Yes, at last!’ she said with an exaggerated sigh of relief. ‘I’ve been hoping he’d push off for ages. Well, I’ve been giving him the hint for some time now, but some men just don’t get it do they? I think they wear blinkers half the time.’

  Keith nodded. Of course, whatever was happening now in London largely depended on what crime Sir Reginald was suspected of committing. If it was only straight forward avoidance of duty or … He cut off the thought and forced himself to listen to what his own suspect was saying.

  ‘Do you really expect us to believe that you’re not sorry, Mrs Eaverson?’ he asked, hoping he’d made his voice sound sceptical enough.

  ‘Of course I do, dear boy.’

  Keith smiled briefly. ‘But, if that was the case, why not leave him yourself? Just pack your bags and go?’

  Madge smiled pityingly. ‘Because that’s just it. I didn’t want to pack my bags and go. I wanted to stay in the house, thus keeping the moral high ground.’ Seeing that he still wasn’t getting it, she grinned widely. ‘I wanted to hold all the cards in the upcoming divorce settlement.’ She shot Hillary an amused look. ‘He’s so young and innocent, isn’t he, bless him?’

  Keith felt himself flush. Damn, he should have thought of all that himself.

  ‘But with Tommy leaving me, just walking out like he has, I get everything I want,’ Madge said smugly. ‘I’ve already got a call in to the locksmith to change the locks, I can tell you.’

  Keith nodded. Had Gavin gone back to London? When he returned home tonight, would he find him waiting for him at the bedsit, criticizing the floor space, ordering Chinese and taunting him about a hard day at the office. Or would the place be quiet. Cold. Tidy. As it had been before he came? The thought made a hard knot form in his stomach. No matter how much trouble his relationship with Gavin could cause him, the thought of being left on his own again made him feel cold.

  Acknowledging this, he then looked flatly across at Mrs Eaverson. ‘I find it hard to believe that you’re as relaxed about all this as you seem, Mrs Eaverson,’ he said softly.

  Madge blinked, and looked away. For a moment, she looked as if she was going to cry. Then she shrugged. ‘I’m a tough old bird. When you hit forty you develop a skin like a rhino. You need it.’ She glanced across at Hillary. ‘Well, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Men can skin you alive if you let them.’

  Hillary thought briefly of Mike Regis. Mike who hated her boat and wanted her to move in with him. Mike who made her laugh, and worry at the same time. Mike whom she had no idea what to do with.

  She glanced across at Keith, silently giving him permission to carry on.

  ‘Did Wayne Sutton get under your skin, Mrs Eaverson?’ Keith asked, quite pleased with that. It sounded clever, and it had obviously upset her.

  ‘Wayne?’ Madge said sharply, then gave another graphic shrug. ‘Oh, well, Wayne was just a bit of fun. A distraction from life’s boredom. You simply didn’t take Wayne seriously.’

  Keith nodded. ‘But that’s not strictly true, is it? I mean, you took him seriously enough to threaten to evict him because of all his other affairs.’

  Madge paled slightly. This time she reached for her bag and lit a cigarette, shooting a defiant glance at Hillary as she did so. ‘You can arrest me for smoking in a no smoking area if you like,’ she offered with a laugh.

  Keith, seeing his witness was distracted, found his thoughts going once again to London. If Sir Reginald was charged, that would mean a trial. And Gavin would have to return home then, right?

  ‘Oh, I don’t think I’ll arrest you for that, Madge,’ Hillary said softly, emphasizing the ‘that’ just enough for the other woman to pale even more.

  And if Sir Reginald was found guilty, Keith thought, with a growing sense of desperation, might not Gavin feel forced to take over the chairmanship of his father’s company? With no more tennis games, he’d have no more excuses to be away from the capital. No more visits to Oxford. No more …

  He saw Hillary’s head turn sharply in his direction, and he licked his lips. Damn it, he had to concentrate!

  ‘We know you argued, fiercely, with the victim shortly before he was murdered, Mrs Eaverson,’ he said, trying to sound menacing, whilst at the same time, keeping his voice even and flat, for the benefit of the tape recorder revolving slowly and silently on the table before them. Never let it be said, by any defence barrister, that the police had intimidated a witness.

  ‘How in the hell did you know that?’ Madge asked, drawing from the cigarette deeply and trying for nonchalant devil-may-care, but sounding just a shade too surprised. Then, seeing it was no use denying it, she gave another bark of laughter.

  ‘Oh well, might a
s well come clean, I suppose,’ she drawled. ‘Yes, Wayne and me did have a bit of a barney. But I quickly cooled off. I’m not one who holds a grudge, or lets things fester inside them. Ask anyone who knows me.’

  Keith smiled briefly. ‘What, exactly, was this argument about, Mrs Eaverson?’

  ‘Apparently you already know,’ Madge said, a shade testily, then sighed, and took another drag of her cigarette. ‘It was about his other women, of course. I mean, I didn’t mind all those old dears who flattered him and bought his paintings and cooed all over them to their equally daft friends. And that young girl of his – Monica. Well, she was just a lightweight. But he’d got someone else … someone he was being very secretive about. And that wasn’t like him,’ Madge said softly, her voice becoming reflective now. ‘It wasn’t like him at all.’

  Hillary decided it was time to take over. This was beginning to get interesting and it was obvious Barrington’s heart wasn’t really in it.

  ‘And that sounded the alarm bells, didn’t it Madge?’ she said softly. ‘The others were probably something of a running joke between you, right? The woman who let him have the car, Denise Collier, the Ale and Arty crowd. They weren’t anything to worry about, right?’

  ‘Right,’ Madge said with a smile, totally oblivious to the fact that that was what all of ‘them’ thought about ‘the others’ as well – including Madge Eaverson. ‘That Denise was a bit of a pain in the arse though. Too possessive by half,’ she mused grimly.

  ‘But Wayne found that funny, I bet.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Madge said, relaxing a bit, smiling slightly in remembrance.

  ‘Yeah, he did.’

  ‘But this new girl was different,’ Hillary said softly. ‘How, exactly?’

  Beside her, Keith listened with half an ear. He could ring Gavin’s mobile the minute he was out of here, find out where he was. And then what? If he was on his way to London could he really ask him to come back? And come back to what? A lousy bedsit in a backwater city?

  ‘I’m not sure I can describe it, not really,’ Madge said, looking at Hillary helplessly. ‘He started hiding things from me. Not telling me stuff. He was up to something, and with Wayne that could only mean one thing. I got the feeling she was rich. I mean, seriously rich. I began to get the impression that he thought he was soon going to be able to give all the others the heave-ho. He was beginning to be less cautious around them. Less charming. He’d even allow himself the odd snipe around them. Oh, nothing too bad, nothing to cut off the supply of money. But I noticed it. It was as if he was expecting to be able to do without them soon.’

  Hillary nodded. ‘It sounds to me as if he was planning on getting married.’

  Madge paled even further.

  ‘I mean, how else could he be sure of her?’ she pressed on inexorably. ‘Unless they had some sort of legal bond, she could have cut off his “allowance” at any time. But a legal husband – well now, he’d have rights.’

  Madge stabbed out her cigarette viciously. ‘That’s what I was thinking, too. That’s why I asked him about her that night. Teased him a bit. Tried to figure out how far things had gone. He got uppity, at first, then downright mad. Told me to leave it alone.’

  ‘Was her name Annie?’ Hillary asked abruptly.

  ‘Huh?’ Madge looked up from her bag, and the temptingly open packet of cigarettes, and her eyes narrowed. ‘No. I don’t know. Why? Do you know who she is? Has the bitch come forward?’

  Hillary hid her disappointment behind a non-committal smile. Still no confirmation that Annie existed. Sutton must have been really keen to keep her in the shadows. But then, if she was rich, and he had been in with a chance of marrying all that cash, he would have been extra careful to keep his current lifestyle a secret from her. No wonder he didn’t want any of his paying fan club to know about her. They might just have paid her a visit and dropped a few home truths in her ear.

  Who knows, perhaps one of them already had. Could Annie have found out that her fiancé was nothing more than a gigolo? Had she lured him to that meadow and killed him, leaving behind a taunting red paper heart to show just what she thought of handsome young men who tried to marry her for her money?

  ‘So who’s this Annie then?’ Madge asked querulously, and Hillary shrugged.

  ‘It’s just a name that’s come up in our inquiries, that’s all,’ she said vaguely.

  ‘Well, I don’t know if that was the name of his new woman or not,’ Madge said slowly. ‘But I know she lives in Heyford bloody Sudbury.’

  Heyford Sudbury again, Hillary thought. The name of that pretty near-Cotswold village kept right on popping up. ‘Oh? How do you know that?’ she asked curiously.

  And Madge Eaverson flushed. Then she reached for another cigarette and lit up. Hillary, who was slightly allergic to cigarette smoke, bit her lip and leaned back in her chair. The smoke, in the airless room, drifted almost straight up, but she could begin to feel the back of her throat tickle.

  ‘Madge,’ Hillary prompted. ‘How do you know where she lives?’

  Madge Eaverson’s eyes drifted around the walls of the room, to the window – which was too high to see out of – ricocheted off the constable standing stolid and silent in the corner and then back to Hillary.

  She sighed heavily. ‘Look, this is going to sound worse than it is. I mean, it’s going to sound bad. But it’s not like I’m some sort of loony-tunes or anything. I’m not a stalker. I mean, I’m not that desperate, it’s just that …’ She took a drag helplessly, and Hillary suddenly twigged.

  ‘You followed him,’ she guessed flatly.

  Madge shrugged, smiled, then laughed. ‘Yeah. I followed him. Pretty pathetic, huh?’ She sighed and rubbed her eyes tiredly. ‘One afternoon, about two weeks ago, I heard him on the phone as I was coming to collect the rent.’ She blushed delicately, and glanced quickly at Keith Barrington, knowing that he must know what she meant by that.

  But Keith Barrington looked back at her blankly. She might have been comforted to know that his thoughts were far away from contemplating her afternoon sex sessions with a murder victim.

  Hillary wouldn’t have been. She’d have given him a lecture that would blister his ears.

  ‘Yes, go on,’ Hillary said crisply, not wanting sudden embarrassment on the witness’s part to hold up the flow of her evidence.

  ‘Well, I knew he must be talking to her. He was usually so open and loud on the phone. You know, he always had a larger than life personality. But this time he was almost whispering. And when he saw me, he muttered something and hung up at once. He’d never done that before. And all that afternoon he was distracted. I could feel it. Well, a woman can, can’t she?’

  Madge took another angry puff on her cigarette. ‘I wasn’t best pleased, I can tell you. Well, when I left, I just drove around the corner and waited. Sure enough, about ten minutes later, he goes out and I followed him.’

  Hillary’s eyes gleamed. ‘To Heyford Sudbury?’ she said softly.

  Madge nodded. ‘Yeah. Well, to the outskirts of it anyway,’ she qualified. ‘I didn’t realize he’d spotted me, but he pulled up on to the side of the road and got out and waved me down.’ She laughed. ‘I wouldn’t be any good as a private investigator, I can tell you. Still, I was daft to try it really, especially in my own car. I managed to keep traffic between us for most of the way, but once we turned off the main roads on to the country lanes, I suppose I stuck out like a sore thumb.’

  ‘What did he say? When he pulled you over I mean?’ Hillary asked curiously.

  Madge Eaverson flushed an ugly red. ‘He was really nasty. I’ve never heard him so mean. I just drove off. That’s when I decided to evict him from the cottage. I was being spiteful I know but … well, there’s a limit to what I’m prepared to take.’

  Hillary sighed. ‘So you didn’t see where in Heyford Sudbury he went?’

  ‘No.’

  Hillary leaned forward slowly. ‘All right, Mrs Eaverson. But please, don’t leave Deddington for
any length of time without letting us know.’

  Madge Eaverson nodded, but she looked relieved. Hillary watched her go, then said flatly, for the tape, ‘Mrs Eaverson has left the interview room.’ She turned off the recorder and looked over her shoulder at the uniform. She nodded her head, and the man silently left.

  If he promised Gavin that they’d get a bigger place, Keith Barrington was thinking, maybe even rent a house somewhere, he could probably persuade Gavin to stay. But it would have to be out in the sticks somewhere. He couldn’t risk anyone he knew figuring out he was sharing a house with another man. If …

  ‘Constable Barrington.’

  The voice, cold and hard, instantly recognizable and yet in an awful way, totally unfamiliar, made his blood suddenly run cold.

  His head came up and around in a jerk.

  Hillary got up slowly from the chair and walked around to the side of the table to face him. Once there, she leaned forward, resting her weight on her fists and bringing her face close to his. ‘If I can’t have your undivided attention in an interview room, when questioning a prime suspect on a murder case, exactly when can I have it?’

  Keith swallowed hard. ‘Sorry, guv.’

  ‘Not good enough. I already have one piece of dead weight on this team that I’m obliged to carry – as you’ve no doubt already guessed, his name is Frank Ross. But I don’t have to carry two. Do you understand me?’

  Keith swallowed again. ‘Yes, guv.’

  ‘I gave you a shot at interviewing Madge Eaverson because I’ve been pleased with your progress so far. I thought you were ready.’

  Keith felt himself cringe inside his clothes. Back at Blacklock Green, his old nick, he’d been used to being dressed down by his sergeant. The man had it in for him, and getting a right rollicking was almost a daily event. Keith had despised and loathed him, and felt not a shred of respect for the man.

  But so far, since coming to Thames Valley, he’d never been on the carpet. And getting a reprimand from Hillary Greene hurt. It hurt because he knew, this time, he deserved it. And he’d let her down. He’d let himself down.