Picture of Innocence

by Jill McGown

  Lloyd had rarely heard Freddie so definite about anything. He’d had Curtis Law up a dark alley quite legitimately, and now he was going to wriggle out of his grasp before he could deal with him, or his feelings about him. ‘So what did happen, and when?’ he asked.

  ‘Well,’ said Freddie. ‘The victim had consumed a considerable amount of alcohol. Then he was given a fast-acting barbiturate, and an overdose of morphine. I would suggest that the first was to facilitate the administering of the second – it was the sort of dosage that your dentist might use for a tricky wisdom tooth. Put you out for twenty minutes or so. I imagine it was the one injected in the jugular, in order to induce immediate unconsciousness.’

  Lloyd nodded.

  ‘It was done clumsily,’ Freddie went on, ‘thus producing the bruising that became evident when we were doing the preliminaries. He was injected subcutaneously with the morphine. The puncture mark is quite close to a vein, but if that was the intended target, it missed.’ He smiled broadly. ‘Then Mr Law came and stabbed him,’ he said. ‘Not exactly a popular chap, I take it?’

  ‘Does that make sense with what people have told us about his condition?’

  ‘I don’t know what everyone’s told you. He would come round from the first injection, still far from sober, obviously, and fairly relaxed from the drug. Probably just lay wherever he was for ten or fifteen minutes, enjoying the sensation. As soon as that was wearing off, the morphine would begin to kick in, and he would appear to be very drunk indeed. He may have had a few minutes, no more, of something approaching whatever lucidity he had had to start with, given that he was drunk, but for the most part I don’t suppose he knew what had hit him.’

  ‘Can you tell me when these injections would have been given, taking the time of death as, say, four o’clock?’ asked Lloyd, and gave Freddie a run-down on the picture that had emerged.

  Between eight-fifteen, when McQueen left him, and half past nine, when Melville saw him, Bailey had had a great deal to drink. He had then apparently rung his daughter at ten-thirty or so, and had sounded very drunk. She had called on him twenty minutes after that, but he had apparently gone out, and had not returned when she left an hour and ten minutes later. Curtis Law had called on him around two and a half hours after that, had found him falling-down drunk, and had stabbed him after he had passed out on the sofa.

  ‘Assuming the accounts are all accurate and truthful,’ said Freddie, ‘then I’d say he’d been given the drugs between eleven o’clock and midnight, and went into a coma about three hours later, and died about two hours after that. If someone else isn’t telling the gospel truth, which seems possible if one of them killed him, then it could well be, say, a couple of hours or so earlier than that, but not later, I don’t think.’

  In other words, it happened when Curtis Law was on a train. They had issued a press release; Law was a media man, however obscurely regional, and the media had leaped on it. The press officer hadn’t had time to blink. She had done interviews with all the news channels, issued statements to all the nationals. The idea of someone who had been reporting on a murder being charged with it had had considerable charm for the media.

  Now, it would be POLICE IN MURDER CHARGE U-TURN, and they would waste no time in pointing out that the policeman in question had been the subject of a hard-hitting documentary made by none other than Curtis Law. He would have the top brass demanding explanations, he would have more embarrassing encounters with the press, if he was allowed to speak to them at all, and no chance of keeping his job come Judy’s triumphant return to Stansfield as a DCI.

  And he wondered if that was why, deep down inside, he had been so horrible to her last night. He had wondered that as he had sat up drinking, telling himself how selfish she was. She was, but he wasn’t sure that was what had made him say those things. He wished he’d stayed in bed this morning. He wished he hadn’t been so eager to charge Law and get home last night. He stepped out into the corridor, and used his new toy to tell Case the current situation prior to Law’s intended magistrates’ court appearance, and to cancel the warrant for Rachel Bailey’s arrest. Then, his ears still ringing with Case’s colourful reaction to the news, he went back in to Freddie.

  ‘If Mr Bailey was given these injections somewhere other than in his own house, it surprises me that he found his way back again,’ said Freddie.

  One of these people was there between eleven o’clock and midnight, and would have had the means, Lloyd supposed, though he knew very little about animal doctoring, the opportunity, if Bailey had been there, and a motive going back to infancy. And she was the only one who said he hadn’t been at home, which Freddie was now indicating in a Freddie-like fashion was probably untrue. She was the one who had told a story about an injured sheep that no one knew anything about.

  ‘Would someone used to handling a hypodermic have made a botch of giving the injections?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s possible. I don’t imagine Mr Bailey wanted to be knocked unconscious, so he may well have caused the bruising to the vein himself with his reaction to what was happening. And just a shaking hand could have caused the needle to miss the vein with the next one. Or someone could have wanted it to look amateurish, of course. Or possibly it just was an amateur.’

  Very good. Very decisive. Thank you, Freddie. But Nicola Hutchins had some questions to answer. Her father had not called her from the farm, and according to everyone they had spoken to, he didn’t seem likely to have called her from anywhere else, because he had refused to leave the house on Sunday, for fear that someone would be waiting to get him. Which didn’t sit well with her contention that he was out and the alarms were off when she went there. Why would he have gone out? Why would he have put the alarms off if he was leaving the house unattended, even if he was drunk? And when would he have put them on again if he was drugged up to the eyeballs into the bargain? He asked Freddie his opinion on that.

  ‘I can’t see him having much interest in alarms,’ said Freddie. ‘But what I can tell you is that his keys were in his shirt pocket when he was stabbed, and stayed there. The blood was entirely undisturbed. Since the alarms were set when we got there, then they were set when Bailey was stabbed.’

  ‘Doesn’t that mean they must have been set all along?’ asked Lloyd.

  ‘Well, in theory, what his daughter says is possible. That he switched the alarms off, went looking for the sheep, came back, switched them on again, and only then was given the overdose. Or his assailant switched them on again before he or she left. But whoever killed him would have had to get in without either Bailey or his daughter or any of the cameras seeing them.’

  ‘And once the alarms were on, would have had to leave by the gate and would have been recorded doing so on the video,’ said Lloyd. ‘And she’s the one we’ve got doing that at the material time. I don’t think the alarms were ever off. That was just to explain how this sheep had got out without waking everyone in northern Europe. And if it did, the alarms would have had to be off in the first place, which I’m sure they weren’t.’

  They had been looking at all the wrong things. Checking on all the wrong times. They were going to have to start all over again, and Lloyd didn’t think he could, in his hung-over condition.

  Freddie cleaned up, removed his protective clothing. ‘ It’s almost lunchtime,’ he said. ‘Fancy a hair of the dog at the Dog and Hare?’

  ‘The Dog and Hare?’ Lloyd said. ‘Is that for real?’

  ‘One of these new-fangled pubs with pseudo, would be witty, old-fashioned names,’ Freddie said. ‘I’ll bet it took them months to decide which way to spell hare. They settled for the animal in the end – makes for easier graphics on the pub sign. But they do reasonable bar snacks.’

  Lloyd didn’t think he could face a bar snack, however reasonable it was. Or a hair of the dog. But he didn’t want to go back to the station either. He still didn’t want to speak to Judy and he wasn’t sure if it was because he was still angry with her, or because he fe
lt ashamed. And if he felt ashamed, that was just her all over, wasn’t it? It was always his fault. He always ended up apologizing, and why should he? She had had no right not to tell him. None.

  ‘Yes, why not?’ he said, and rubbed his temple. Any chance of some aspirin?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, God, there’s a six-week waiting list for aspirin in hospitals,’ said Freddie. ‘Have a snifter. Much better for you.’

  The walk to the Dog and Hare cleared his head a little; he ordered lager for Freddie, and a malt whisky, which he stared into while Freddie ate his reasonable bar snack.

  ‘It’s not this investigation that’s got you like this,’ said Freddie. ‘Or that ridiculous programme the other night. Or your hangover. My guess – wild though it might be – is that poor Judy’s in the doghouse again, and you feel guilty for putting her there.’

  Lloyd looked at him coldly, unable to admire the accuracy of his diagnosis. ‘I know you think the sun rises and sets on her,’ he said. ‘But she—’

  ‘So do you,’ Freddie pointed out, interrupting him.

  ‘Yes, all right! But she is the most monumentally selfish—’ He broke off when he saw Freddie smile. ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘I trained as an ordinary, regular, everyday physician, you know,’ said Freddie. ‘I was even in general practice for a while.’

  Lloyd was a little surprised at the sudden apparent change of subject, which wouldn’t, of course, be a change of subject at all. ‘So I believe,’ he said. ‘Until you discovered the joys of forensic medicine. What’s that got to do with the price of fish?’

  Freddie smiled. ‘And at one point I went on a psychology course,’ he said. ‘Designed to make us better GPs.’

  Lloyd grunted, unsure of where this conversation was going.

  ‘I’ve forgotten most of it,’ Freddie said. ‘My patients these days tend to need very little psychoanalysis.’ He smiled again. ‘But part of it was about two-person relationships. Father-son, mother-daughter, brother-sister …’ He paused. ‘Couples,’ he said.

  ‘I hope you’re not thinking of psychoanalysing me,’ said Lloyd.

  ‘No. Couldn’t if I wanted to. But – one thing they told us stuck in my mind. They said that in every close relationship there was the lover, and the beloved.’

  Lloyd looked at him suspiciously, not sure if he was being serious.

  ‘The lovers,’ Freddie said, ‘pack their bags and go to Australia whether they want to or not, because their beloveds want to go.’ He drained his glass. ‘The lovers turn down fantastic jobs in Australia because the beloved doesn’t want to go.’

  That sounded familiar enough. He was being psychoanalysed. Or being set up for some unfunny Freddie-type humour. Lloyd looked away.

  ‘You’re the lover, Lloyd,’ said Freddie. ‘Judy is the beloved. You fall in with her wishes, just like Anthea falls in with mine.’

  Lloyd had never heard Freddie utter his wife’s name before. My wife, the wife, the missus, my better half, ’ er indoors – that was how he had always referred to Anthea as long as Lloyd had known him. Freddie was being serious. He looked back, a little reluctantly.

  ‘She’s put up with me doing this job for twenty years,’ Freddie said. ‘And she hates it. Oh, she grumbles, like you. Says I’m selfish, I only think about myself – all that. Says she’s got a good mind to leave me – nearly did, last year. Well, you know that.’

  ‘But she didn’t,’ said Lloyd, picking up his whisky, tossing it back, in true hair-of-the-dog style. ‘Did she?’

  ‘No.’ Freddie stood up, picked up the empty glasses, and went to the bar, getting a second round.

  ‘Not for me. To tell you the truth, I’m a bit thirsty. I’ll have a mineral water.’ Lloyd thought about what Freddie had said as he watched him automatically flirt with the barmaid. That, presumably, was something else Anthea put up with, he thought, as Freddie returned with the drinks. ‘And you knew she wouldn’t leave you,’ he said, taking a deep, refreshing draught.

  Freddie shook his head as he sat down. ‘I didn’t know anything of the sort,’ he said. ‘That’s the problem. I don’t know where the line’s drawn.’

  ‘What makes you think she does?’ asked Lloyd. He had no idea what Judy would have to do to make him sever the relationship.

  ‘I don’t think she does. I think she’ll only know if I ever overstep it. And by then, it’ll be too late.’ He smiled. ‘We beloveds don’t really have it all our own way. We spend a great deal of the time worrying about whether what we’ve just done, more often than not in all innocence, is going to spell the end.’

  Judy had said once that she felt as if she were walking a tightrope, Lloyd reflected, then smiled at himself for taking Freddie’s bargain-basement psychology seriously. ‘What happens if you get two lovers?’ he asked. ‘Or two beloveds?’ Freddie was always chatting up Judy – where did that fit into his theory?

  ‘You don’t,’ he said. ‘It’s not like star signs. The beloved in one relationship might be the lover in another. Or it changes as we develop. Children tend to be beloveds, the parents lovers. Then that can turn on its head as the children become adults and the parents become old.’ He picked up his drink. ‘Lover and beloved,’ he said, and grinned. ‘That’s what leads to granny flats and golden weddings.’ His face became serious again. ‘Or old folks’ homes and murder,’ he added. ‘It depends where the lover draws the line.’

  He was talking about Curtis Law. And he had murdered for Rachel Bailey, or thought he had, which was the same thing. Lloyd thought about that. Would he murder for Judy? Where did he draw the line? Freddie was right. He had no idea, so how could she? He supposed he would draw the line at murder, unlike Law. But not because she hadn’t told him she was pregnant, certainly not. That wouldn’t make him leave her. She wouldn’t be thinking that, would she? That he would end it because of that?

  He was beginning to think that it had perhaps not been entirely selfish anyway. She was worried. Frightened. She hated anything being different from the way she was used to. She was just being Judy, and he had overreacted. He always did. But he didn’t want her doing anything rash because she thought he had taken terminal offence.

  He stood up, and finished his water. ‘Thanks,’ he said, putting down the empty glass. ‘For everything.’

  He had thanked Freddie for giving him unasked-for advice on his relationship with Judy. This had to be the weirdest week he had ever lived through.

  Mike had done it right second time around. Then he had slept for twelve solid hours, opening his eyes to discover Rachel looking down at him, smiling. He smiled back, and reached out a hand, touched her golden hair.

  ‘We got to talk,’ she said.

  ‘You were talking, pet. All the time.’

  ‘What was I sayin’?’

  ‘As if you didn’t know.’ He had been a young man again with her. He had wondered, during the months of longing for her, if Rachel could really deliver all that she promised. And when he had decided to find out, it had been going to be a one-night stand. But now that she had fulfilled that promise and more, he fully intended taking her up on her huskily whispered offers to make it a more permanent arrangement if that was what he wanted. ‘You suggested I might want more of this,’ he said.

  ‘And do you?’ She knelt astride him, smiled down at him.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘But I think you hope you can up the price,’ he said.

  She shook her head. ‘I’ll settle for what you were offerin’Bernard.’

  ‘You’ll settle for the market value.’

  ‘You were offerin’ Bernard four times that much for it,’ she said, bending to kiss his lips briefly, tantalizingly.

  He put his hands on her thighs. ‘‘That was when it was Bernard’s land,’ he said. ‘It’s yours now.’

  She nodded. ‘Reckon it’s a seller’s market now,’ she said, her mouth on his again. ‘You want to haggle, is that it? Gypsies are good at hagglin’. Start m
e off.’

  ‘The market value,’ he repeated.

  ‘If you had to go through that wood it’d cost you a lot more’n that.’ She pulled her head back, and smiled at him. ‘You’ll have to up your offer,’ she said. ‘ Or how can we bargain?’

  He shook his head.

  She sat back. ‘You go through that wood and you’d get protesters and I don’t know what all down here. Lyin’ down in front of the excavators. Vandalizin’ the equipment, holdin’ up the work. Whole village’d turn on you. Wouldn’t’ve been so bad when you’d no option, but now …’ She shrugged. ‘ The protesters might even get the road stopped, if I’m willin’ to sell my land for the same price you were offerin’ Bernard,’ she said, smiling. ‘ Not like I’ve doubled the stakes nor nothin’ So you goin’ to make me an offer?’

  He shook his head again.

  The smile grew a little uncertain. ‘Aren’t you supposed to haggle too?’ she asked. ‘ You’re not offerin’ nothin’. So how can I?’

  ‘I’ve made my offer.’

  ‘But the market value’s no good to me. Loan company’d have it all, and I’d still owe them money. Wouldn’t be able to pay off nothin’ else. I’d lose every-thin’ I got.’ She looked thoughtful. ‘I’ll settle for three-quarters of what you were offerin’ Bernard.’

  ‘No deal.’

  ‘Two-thirds.’

  ‘No deal.’

  ‘Can’t go no lower than that. Lower’n that, and you can’t have no more of this.’

  ‘Oh, I think I can have more,’ Mike said. ‘But you can’t. It’s the market value, take it or leave it’