by Jill McGown
‘Did he say why he thought that?’
‘No. He just kept saying that he’d found out that she’d had an abortion. Got rid of his son. And that he was going to kill her. I only knew about this baby because it was … collateral, I suppose, and that’s why I didn’t mention it before, because I was trying to keep my involvement in repaying his loan quiet.’ ‘I think we will take a formal statement, Mr Melville, if you wouldn’t mind waiting there.’
Rachel had got rid of Curtis because McQueen had told her to, and now, armed with her information, she was going to get rid of McQueen too, after going to such lengths to get him. But her mother had brought up seven kids on the road; she came from hardy stock, and she could survive without anyone’s help, if she had to.
Inspector Hill sat opposite her in the interview room; Lloyd stood looking out of the window as she explained the circumstances under which she had overheard McQueen’s conversation with Bernard, and her decision to abort the baby she had been carrying. She tried to sound unconcerned about that, but she didn’t. It had hurt her deeply, and it always would.
‘Shouldn’t’ve done that,’ she added. ‘ But I did. Too late now.’
Inspector Hill had been jotting down notes. Rachel saw her pen stop for a moment, then she carried on.
Lloyd was listening, despite his apparent absorption in what was going on outside. ‘I don’t think that really affects the investigation,’ he said.
‘Wasn’t no way I could go to my doctor, because she wouldn’t have let me do it without us speakin’ to Bernard first, so I had to get it done private. And I’d got no money. So I went to McQueen. Told him if I was having a boy there wasn’t no way he’d ever get Bernard’s land, because Bernard’d get millions from his grandfather’s will so long as he still owned it. Turned out he knew that already.’
Lloyd turned then, came to the table, and sat down.
‘I knew from how he’d talked to Bernard that he was desperate for him to sell him that land,’ Rachel said. ‘That’s why I went to him. And he never even thought twice. Sent me off to a clinic where they didn’t ask no questions, paid for the lot. Turned out it was a boy,’ she added. ‘And I didn’t ask them ’bout that. I didn’t want to know. But he did.’ She looked away. ‘He was glad.’
Lloyd had tipped his chair right back, and was rocking gently. Inspector Hill was looking thoughtful. ‘Why have you come here with this now, Rachel?’ she asked.
‘ ’Cos now I know somethin’ else ’ bout McQueen,’ she said. ‘Somethin’ I reckon you’ll want to know.’
Curtis hadn’t gone into work. He had rung in, said that he had caught this virus that was going round.
It was all happening on the work front, but right now he didn’t care about any of it. They wanted to get Mr Big out on the network next week, on the August edition of Monthly Factfile, in order to cash in on the publicity surrounding him. He should have been at a meeting about it right now, but he hadn’t been able to make himself go in.
He had been awake all night, thinking about what Rachel had done without a second thought, while he was locked up because of her, charged with murder because of her. He had thought that Rachel, beautiful though she was, fixated on the money though she was, sexy as she was, had been, in a way, unworldly. She would listen to him, and he had enjoyed explaining things to her. He had thought that she needed a champion, a knight in shining armour, a protector.
She had needed no explanations, no protection. He had offered himself up to her, told her that he was going to be in possession of a whole pharmacopoeia of drugs. She had seen her way out; she had come up with her ridiculous notion of slipping Bailey a lethal Mickey Finn, because she knew he would come up with something better, and that he would take all the risks for her.
And what had she been doing while he was taking those risks? He couldn’t bear to think of it, but he couldn’t get the image out of his mind. He hated McQueen. And he hated her.
Mike had just finished lunch when Lloyd and Inspector Hill had arrived. They knew, somehow, about the photograph, and Rachel was the only person who had ever been in the bedroom besides himself and Shirley. Shirley had never liked the idea of a cleaning lady; the one they had had to employ for this big house did what Shirley called the public rooms, as though they lived in the White House. Mike found it hard to believe that Bailey had kept a photograph of her, but perhaps he had, because Rachel must have recognized it somehow.
‘Her name was Margaret,’ he said, picking up a cigar, coming out on to the terrace, handing them the photograph. ‘She was fifteen years old when that was taken, and she was fifteen years old when Bernard Bailey got her pregnant for the first time. She was my stepdaughter.’
He sat down, took out matches, and lit the cigar. ‘She came to me and told me she was going to have a baby. I think she chose me in preference to her mother because I was always as soft as butter with her. And she was right; I wasn’t angry. Bailey was handsome, when he was young, and I think I understood. But she wanted to marry him, and her mother and I both said no. We didn’t want to separate them or anything – we just wanted her to wait. But that row was the last conversation we ever had with her. It was the last time we ever saw her.’
Chief Inspector Lloyd stood; Inspector Hill sat opposite him as Rachel had done last night. He didn’t suppose the same service was on offer, but he certainly wouldn’t turn it down if it was. She was a nice-looking woman; well dressed. Good clothes. Shirley had taught him to appreciate dress sense, and he had taught her about what made a match and what didn’t. He could have advised the inspector that those shoes didn’t quite go with the dress. The colours quarrelled a little. Not much, but Mike had noticed. Some people had an eye for shades and colours, some didn’t. He always had had. Shirley hadn’t. Rachel Bailey had.
‘Didn’t she keep in touch at all?’ asked Inspector Hill.
Mike shook his head. ‘She vanished,’ he said. ‘They vanished. We had no idea where she was, or what was happening to her. And we tried, believe me, we tried to trace her. But there was a slight problem.’
‘And what was that?’ Lloyd asked.
‘Bailey wasn’t called Bailey when we knew him,’ said Mike. ‘His name was Hawthorne. We spent years checking what must have been nearly every Hawthorne in the United Kingdom. Cost a fortune, and got us nowhere. In the end, we gave up.’ He drew on his cigar, and watched the smoke drift up into another golden day. ‘We only ever had Margaret,’ he said. ‘ Shirley lost one baby after we were married, and she couldn’t have any more. Well, she passed that particular problem on, didn’t she? So everything revolved round Margaret, and … and Hawthorne stole her. She was still a child.’ He inhaled some smoke. ‘She might just as well have been kidnapped.
Shirley … Shirley died a little with every month that passed, and we didn’t hear from her.’
‘Even kidnappers contact their victims,’ said Inspector Hill.
Mike nodded. ‘And you know that the hostage wants to be returned,’ he said. ‘Margaret didn’t want to come back to us, or even see us, or she would have got in touch. That was the hardest thing to take. And our marriage survived it, but it was never the same. We’d lost …’ He tried to think of a way to explain. ‘We’d lost the future, I suppose,’ he said. ‘ Seeing her grow up, having grandchildren …’ He shrugged. ‘But that wasn’t to be, anyway.’
He saw the inspector frown very slightly, but she didn’t speak.
‘Life’s very odd,’ he said. ‘I came here because there was a greenfield site to be developed. I looked at the plans, and I saw a stumbling block. The only possible routes to the development went through, in the one case, some very old and pretty woodland, and in the other, a farm called Bailey’s farm. So I did some asking around, and established that the woodland would meet with considerable opposition. But it was possible that the farmer might be prepared to part with his land, at a price, so I went to see him. That is, I, as the representative of MM Developments, went to see him. I doubt if t
he name seemed like anything other than coincidence to him. And I found myself looking at my son-in-law.’
Inspector Hill looked up from her notebook. ‘ Did you see your stepdaughter?’ she asked.
‘No. I asked to see her, but he said she didn’t want to see me. Physically barred my way. Got the shotgun when I tried getting physical back. I said that at least he could tell me how she was. And he said, ‘‘She’s never carried a live one full term yet’’ ’. Mike shook his head. He had thought he might manage this bit without feeling the impotent rage he had felt then, but back it came, just as strongly, just as overwhelmingly.
He took a moment to get himself together. ‘He might just as well have been talking about a sheepdog, and I – I just went for him. The shotgun went off, and people came running, dragged me off him, and kicked me out.’ He relit his cigar, inhaling some more of the strong smoke. ‘Margaret was just upstairs,’ he said. ‘ But she didn’t come down to see me, not even to ask about her mother. There was plenty of time when she could have come down, before it got heated, but she didn’t. And that hurt. It hurt me, and you can imagine what it did to Shirley.’
Again, a little frown. But the inspector didn’t speak.
‘She was sure that Margaret would come round, given time, that Hawthorne or Bailey or whatever he called himself had poisoned her mind against us because she was just a child when he took her away. She insisted that we move here to be close to her, but by the time we had arranged it, and sold our house, bought one here, Margaret had died. He hadn’t told me she was pregnant again. I’d had no idea that she was still trying. She was nearly forty.’
The inspector and Lloyd exchanged glances.
‘Do you blame the money?’ he said. ‘It wasn’t the money’s fault. It was Bailey’s greed for it that caused Margaret’s death.’
Lloyd looked round at the opulence of his surroundings, and nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m not much of a man for the Bible, but I think that the love of money is probably the root of all evil, as it says.’
‘I use it, Chief Inspector. I don’t worship it. Anyway, I didn’t realize any of that at the time. And Bailey seemed to go into some sort of mourning after Margaret died – he even made a suicide attempt. He didn’t plant the fields, he sold off a lot of his stock and machinery, he went into a sort of semi-retirement. I made a formal, written approach to him for his land, but I had no heart for the development project by then – I almost dropped out. Shirley and I went back north, and we were going to put this place on the market.’
Lloyd sat down beside the inspector, his elbows on the table, his chin on his clasped hands, and watched him as he spoke.
Mike tried not to feel self-conscious. ‘Meanwhile, I had had a private investigator on to him, to find out why he’d changed his name, and it turned out that it was required under his grandfather’s will. Bailey was his maternal grandfather, and Bailey’s mother had married some Yorkshire farmer that she’d met at a Young Farmers conference, and gone off to his place. The grandfather had wanted to found a dynasty, and had left everything to his grandson, providing he changed his name, farmed the land here, had a son of his own, made the same provision for him, and so on. That was when I realized why Margaret had died.’
Lloyd sighed. ‘I think I actually hate money,’ he said. ‘Maybe that’s why I spend it whenever I’ve got it.’
‘And she hadn’t been dead six months when we heard that Bailey had a new wife, and he was back on course to becoming a multimillionaire. I wasn’t going to let that happen if I could help it.’
Lloyd looked faintly baffled. Mike smiled briefly. ‘ Back to the Bible,’ he said. ‘An eye for an eye. He took Margaret from Shirley, and I was going to get that land off him if I could. So I made sure of the woodland, and met stern opposition from one Mrs Melville. I told her I’d made an offer to Bailey, sat back, and let the sparks fly.’
Inspector Hill smiled. ‘I hope you retired to a safe distance.’
‘You’ve met the lady? Well, then I learned that Bailey’s suicide attempt had not been because Margaret had died. His semi-retirement wasn’t because he had lost the will to carry on. It was because he had speculated and had lost every penny he had, and it had all come crashing down round his head on the day of her funeral. And I learned that he’d borrowed on a loan that made the land forfeit if he missed one payment.’
‘I’m glad I’m just a simple copper,’ said Lloyd.
Mike doubted that he was simple. He’d watched that programme about him, but it hadn’t convinced him of Lloyd’s stupidity, just of Curtis Law’s callow approach to life, which was infinitely more complex than Law gave it credit for.
‘I found out who had financed him, and one of my companies bought the loan. But he kept paying up,’ he went on, ‘in cash, paid into the company’s account, every month without fail. So I went to see him again, and I took some pleasure in telling him that it was me he was in hock to, that I was the one who would be repossessing his precious land the day he failed to make a payment.’
Again a look passed between his visitors. A faintly puzzled look this time. Mike thought that Lloyd was going to ask a question, but he didn’t, so he ploughed on.
‘But since he had shown no sign of failing to make the payments, I made him an offer that I really did believe he couldn’t refuse. Enough to clear his debts to me and everyone else, and still have money in the bank. Nothing like he would get from his grandfather’s will, of course, but a whole lot better than repossession. I thought he would have to sell to me. So did his new wife.’
He dropped his cigar on to the terrace, and stepped on it, smearing tobacco shreds and leaves over the pale pink stone.
‘I presume it’s Rachel who told you about Margaret, and I imagine she’s told you that I paid for her to abort the baby she was carrying.’
Lloyd nodded.
‘But he did refuse it. And he still managed to come up with the repayments. So then I tried to scare him out, give him cash-flow problems. Anything that might work. I even had his machinery vandalized.’
This time the look that passed between them was the baffled look he’d seen before, when he had been hunting through Hawthornes for Margaret. Perhaps he was as much of an obsessive as Bailey himself. Other people certainly seemed to think so. Even Shirley. But he had been doing it for her It had all been for her
‘So he put up his alarmed fences. And that’s when Rachel suggested the death threats.’
Lloyd’s eyebrows rose.
‘I thought she might not have told you that,’ said Mike.
‘What did she hope to accomplish by them?’ asked Lloyd.
‘She said it would frighten him to think that someone could get past his security, and that my offer might begin to seem more attractive to him if he thought his life was at risk. But …’ Mike shrugged. ‘ You tell me,’ he said. ‘ I think she was laying the groundwork for murder. Because she thought she would get even more money if Bailey was dead than if she gave him his son. But she was wrong, as she discovered.’
Lloyd looked even more puzzled. He got up from the table, and walked to the edge of the terrace, looking out at the immaculate garden. ‘Would it surprise you to know, Mr McQueen, that Rachel Bailey heard every word of that conversation you had with her husband?’ he asked.
Mike frowned. ‘But she was still trying to sell me that land yesterday morning,’ he said. ‘Why would she do that if she knew that it was already mine?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Lloyd, turning. ‘Perhaps she hoped to salvage something.’
And she had salvaged something, thought Mike. She had still been manipulating him, God damn it. He had been congratulating himself on putting one over on her, when all the time …
‘Why did you go to see Bernard Bailey on Sunday night, Mr McQueen?’ Lloyd asked.
‘It was over,’ said Mike. ‘Somehow, the payments kept coming, and unless I could make him sell to me right then, I was going to have to go through the wood. I wanted to h
ave one last go. I was just going to up the offer, that’s all.’
‘Why did he let you in?’
‘He’d won. As soon as he saw it was me, he opened the gate. He wanted to tell me to my face that he had won. That he had hung on to the land. He said he would eventually get his grandfather’s money, too, because this one could give him a son, unlike that useless bitch he’d had off me. Those were his words, Chief Inspector. And I felt just as I had the day he wouldn’t let me see her. But I didn’t hit him this time. I told him that Rachel had no intention of giving him a son. That she had been colluding with me to send the death threats. That she had aborted the son she had been carrying. That he had been that close to his millions, and she had snatched them away.’
Inspector Hill stood up, walked a little way away.
‘I felt very guilty afterwards,’ said Mike, when she turned to look at him. ‘He was threatening to kill her, and I believed him. But as it turned out, I needn’t have worried. Rachel can take care of herself.’
‘Can she?’ she asked.
Mike shrugged. ‘She’s alive. He isn’t. Who else do you suppose killed him?’
‘How does this sound?’ asked Lloyd. ‘You go to Bailey, not to up the offer, but to kill him before he can make this month’s payment.’
Mike shook his head. ‘If Rachel Bailey overheard that conversation I had with her husband, then she can tell you that once Bailey was dead, I had no more interest in his land.’
Lloyd looked a little baffled again.
‘I didn’t want Bailey dead,’ said Mike. An eye for an eye, Chief Inspector. I wanted to concrete that place over in front of his greedy eyes. Bury it. Without remorse. Just like he buried Margaret. Rachel Bailey may not have known why I wanted to do that, but she knew that that was all I wanted to do. And I can never do it now, because he’s dead. I was the last person who wanted that, Chief Inspector. The very last. And Rachel Bailey knows it.’
