Plots and Errors

by Jill McGown

  Lloyd was more than a little impressed by the sum of money that would be going immediately to Paul, and if the fact that he, Josh, now stood to gain nothing whatever puzzled him, he was much too well-brought-up to show it. Josh thought it might be fun to let him see the will for himself. Lloyd moved on then to the odd lack of staff at the weekends in a house this size; he seemed quite unwilling to accept that Angela hadn’t wanted staff, though that was one of the few absolute truths he had been told all night.

  ‘She should be in bed, Josh,’ Elizabeth said, when the police left the room.

  Josh realized that somewhere along the line, Sandie had fallen asleep, her head on his shoulder.

  ‘The police have finished,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Take her to bed.’

  ‘He’s already done that, apparently,’ said Paul, with what he seemed to believe was a shaft of wit. ‘Just what clause were you protecting me from by not telling me you and Sandie were married, Josh?’

  Josh smiled coldly. ‘It’s all in the will, Paul,’ he said. ‘Believe me, it is.’

  ‘Are you really married?’ asked Elizabeth.

  Sandie opened her eyes with a little groan of pain, and Josh wanted to pick up the nearest heavy object and brain Paul with it, but he didn’t. ‘Yes,’ he said to Elizabeth. ‘We’re really married.’

  When the police reappeared, it was to ask Paul to accompany them to the station, and he was led off by the blond policeman, who had now divested himself of his plastic gloves. Josh watched him being taken out to a police car, then went round to his own part of the house to get his copy of the will for Chief Inspector Lloyd. When Lloyd and Inspector Hill left, only the people who were sealing off Angela’s study and the kitchen, and the uniformed inspector, remained.

  ‘Will you be all right to drive home, Mrs Esterbrook?’ the inspector asked Elizabeth.

  Such concern. Nothing to do with the money that was oozing out of the walls, of course, thought Josh. He was sure they treated gas-fitters and shop assistants with exactly the same polite concern for their finer feelings. But he had been pleasantly surprised by Lloyd and Hill; they were much more civilized police officers than the ones that he was used to.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Elizabeth, who had at least spared them all any pretence at deep grief, Josh thought. Just the odd shudder here and there.

  SCENE XXII – BARTONSHIRE.

  Sunday, September 28th, 12.45 a.m.

  Outside the House at Little Elmley.

  Elizabeth got into her car, her mind in a turmoil. She was having to do a complete rethink. Josh and Sandie, married? Josh would have to produce the marriage certificate before she would really believe it; Josh wasn’t interested in women. She couldn’t see why they would want to lie about it, but then, she had never heard so many people tell so many lies in so short a space of time in her life.

  For a start, Sandie hadn’t been mugged by anyone; Paul had done that to her, and Josh clearly knew he had; he had been glaring at him all night, and he had effectively tendered Sandie’s resignation. He’d done it to Elizabeth, just once, when, early in their marriage, she had vetoed a sexual suggestion of his, and had found out about his violent temper. The next day, she had gone straight to his father, and he had put a stop to it, had even made certain that it wouldn’t happen after he’d gone, with his divorce clause. Now she occasionally amused herself by trying to goad Paul into doing it again, but Paul wasn’t stupid.

  Sandie hadn’t had the protection of the will; Paul would have no hesitation in taking his anger out on her if she refused to comply with a request. But then, Sandie was with him precisely because she was prepared to do these things, so that particular situation wouldn’t have arisen. Then why had he done it? Had he found out that she and Josh were married? Was that what had made him angry? But if she was still seeing him despite her marriage, what difference would it make to him? Why was she still seeing him, anyway? If being Paul’s mistress was what she wanted, why on earth had she married Josh? And if she hadn’t married him, why would they lie about it?

  The questions took her round in a circle, which was broken only when she allowed herself to forget her preconceptions, her rigidly held belief that Sandie and Paul had been having an affair. He had always denied it, naturally, and she had set no store by that denial at all. As perhaps she had been meant to do.

  Angela had told her over and over again that it was Josh and Sandie who were the couple. She had taken that for at best, wishful thinking, and at worst, deliberate falsehood. Even though she had seen it for herself on the boat that weekend, and that same evening at dinner, she had simply chosen to overlook it. But she had seen it again tonight; there was a chemistry, a bond between Josh and Sandie which was obvious even when they were at opposite sides of the room, and unmistakable when they were together, as they had been when Sandie had fallen into an exhausted sleep in his arms.

  And Josh had told her that Sandie was his girlfriend, not Paul’s, but she had thought that was just the skewed Esterbrook family loyalty. That they had been closing ranks on her, the outsider, so that she couldn’t relieve them of some of their millions, and cheat Paul of his great prize. She had never seen Josh so much as take a girl to the cinema since his marriage had broken up, and though Paul had said that Billy was just a stopgap, it had blinded her to what she had to accept had been the truth. Sandie really had turned Josh round, just as Angela had hoped she would.

  And, of course, Sandie had been at the house almost every time she had had occasion to go there in the last few weeks, but she had apparently been there at Angela’s invitation, which Elizabeth had taken for a desperate attempt to get Josh’s life sorted out.

  Her private detective had told her it was Josh and Sandie who were the couple, and she had told him he was being misled. And she herself had thought, on that humiliating day on the boat, that Sandie might be a deliberate red herring being drawn across the trail, but she had dismissed that thought after Paul’s lewd behaviour with her.

  That, of course, had also been a deliberate diversionary tactic. Josh was in on it, and Sandie was part of the conspiracy. And her marriage to Josh meant that her red-herring status was irrevocably compromised; that would certainly make Paul angry enough to do that to her, since it would mess up all his carefully laid strategy.

  But it really didn’t matter, she told herself tiredly. It had been a wrong assumption, that was all. Nothing else had changed.

  SCENE XXIII – BARTONSHIRE.

  Sunday, September 28th, 12.50 a.m.

  Stansfield Police Station.

  Paul looked at the small tape, encased in a plastic bag, marked TF1, like the lady said. He was in an interview room with Detective Inspector Hill and Detective Sergeant Finch; they were taping the interview. He wasn’t under arrest, they had said, but he had been cautioned as though he was, and he didn’t really understand why. They had asked him about going to Little Elmley that evening, asked if he’d noticed anything suspicious, anything out of the ordinary. What he had said, what his mother had said. How long he’d been there, when he had got home to Barton, and what he’d done when he got there.

  He had fallen asleep, his whisky untouched, not long after Elizabeth had left for dinner with his mother. The day had been too long, too stressful, too difficult and dangerous for him to remain conscious once he had reached a plateau. Risk-taking might be in the Esterbrook blood, he had thought, as he had practically fallen into the armchair, but he liked his risks to be calculated, not thrown at him as today’s had been. He had been tired and shell-shocked, and he hadn’t been able to summon up the energy to drink the whisky, or the brain-power to work out whether or not he really had got away with it.

  When he had opened his eyes, he had wondered, briefly, if he had dreamed it all. But he hadn’t; it had all really happened, and he had realized that all he could do was wait and see if there was to be a reckoning. He had got up, his body stiff with tension, when the phone had rung, and had answered it to Elizabeth telling him that his mother w
as dead.

  And now he was here, and they seemed to think he had rung his mother from the cottage. He had lied to them, said that he hadn’t even been at the cottage. But he certainly hadn’t made a phone-call to his mother from there, and now they had produced this tape from the answering machine. He had no idea what was likely to be on it, but he had a bad feeling about it. Was this the reckoning? Were his chickens coming home to roost? He smiled, a little tiredly, a little bitterly. One chicken in particular would cost him dear if it came strolling home.

  ‘A copy has been made of that tape. I am now going to play it to you.’

  Paul heard his own voice, strained and gruff and unnatural.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing? Are you trying to get me fucking disinherited? Jesus! I’m at the cottage, I’ve got your letter, and I’m on my way back right now.’

  ‘Did you leave that message for your mother, Mr Esterbrook?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He knew that his face had reddened as he realized that his mother must have heard all that. He was barely listening to the question. Then he understood what they thought. ‘But I didn’t make it today,’ he added hurriedly.

  ‘When did you make it?’ Finch asked.

  ‘A month ago. The last time we all went to Josh’s boat.’

  Naturally, they wanted the number of his mobile, and he had to say that he hadn’t used his own. Naturally, they wanted to know whose phone he had used, and naturally, he wasn’t going to tell them. ‘I can’t remember,’ he said, lamely. It occurred to him that Sandie, who could lie with total conviction, would be handling this a lot better than he was.

  ‘You can’t remember?’ It was Finch who had spoken. The aggressiveness and naked disbelief was even more threatening after the mild-mannered Inspector Hill. Paul thought double-acts belonged in old films, but here they were, Finch and Hill. Nasty cop and nice cop.

  ‘No,’ he said, beginning to feel a little more in control now that it had become confrontational. ‘I can’t remember. I’d borrowed one. Everyone I know has a mobile phone.’

  Inspector Hill smiled. ‘Well, don’t worry about that just now, Mr Esterbrook. You might remember when you’ve had a chance to get over the shock of your mother’s death.’

  Oh, Jesus. Not so nice cop, maybe. But he couldn’t do everything at once. Grief had had to be put on the back-burner. He looked down at the table-top.

  ‘Were you at your mother’s cottage today?’ she asked again.

  It wasn’t his mother’s cottage any more, he thought. It would be Josh’s now; his mother had made it clear to all of them that Josh wouldn’t find himself homeless if he lost his right to occupancy of Little Elmley. He would get Lazy Sunday, and the cottage.

  But he had lost his right of occupancy, and that great barn of a place was going on the market as soon as the lawyers said it could, as far as Paul was concerned; he would take great pleasure in kicking his brother out. He might donate it and its upkeep to some charitable institution; a convalescent home, or a hospice, or something. That would be good for a CBE, maybe. His father had turned down a knighthood, for some reason; Paul wouldn’t.

  They still wouldn’t believe him about the call. Since it was one of the few true statements he had made since he had got here, you would think they would do him the courtesy of believing it.

  DI Hill looked as though she really wanted to believe him, but just couldn’t bring herself to. ‘It’s a strange call, Mr Esterbrook,’ she said. ‘A little threatening, I would have thought. Would you like to explain it?’

  No, he would not. ‘I didn’t make it this afternoon,’ he repeated.

  They seemed to be under the misapprehension that his mother had written a letter to him and left it at the cottage, and DI Hill quoted his apparent greeting to his mother. The word that Paul used almost constantly, without conscious thought, sounded shocking to him when it issued from her mouth, and he could feel himself flush with embarrassment again.

  ‘That seems an odd way to talk to your mother,’ she said.

  He hadn’t been speaking to his mother. He had been speaking to Sandie, who had begun making free with his body while he was waiting for his mother’s answering machine message to play; he had laid the phone down on his chest as he remonstrated with her, and had realized too late that it had started recording. The phone had picked up every word. Bloody hell, they would have to find that call, of all calls. His mother, of course, had never mentioned it, on her famous least-said-soonest-mended principle.

  Now the inspector was saying that someone had made a call from the cottage this afternoon, about six hours before he got to Little Elmley. There was something very odd going on here.

  She smiled. ‘Were you at your mother’s cottage today?’ she asked again.

  ‘No.’ What the hell was going on?

  ‘Do you know who else might have been there?’

  Yes, he had a very good idea who else was there, but he wasn’t going to tell them, and risk giving Elizabeth ammunition. Paul’s brain was numb with all the lies, all the confusion. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But everyone’s got keys.’

  ‘Does the cottage belong to the Trust too?’

  ‘No. No, it was my mother’s. But she thought we all ought to be able to use it.’

  ‘All?’

  ‘Josh and me and my wife.’ And of course, Josh had a wife too, now, he remembered, still finding that hard to believe. Why would he marry Sandie, for God’s sake? He knew what she was. ‘I don’t know about Sandie,’ he added. ‘Look – this is just a coincidence. My mother obviously put in an old tape when the machine went on the blink, whether she has arthritis or not, whether you’ve found a discarded one or not. I don’t know who made the call today, but it wasn’t me. I made that call the last time I was in Penhallin.’ But it didn’t make sense. He knew it didn’t. His mother couldn’t have changed the tape.

  Finch started in on him then, and she just sat back and let him. Paul didn’t have time to answer one question before the next one was asked, all accusing him of lying, and sometimes, yes, he had been lying, but sometimes he had been telling the truth, and he didn’t know which was which, because the questions came so quickly.

  But the pieces began to fall into place. He was being set up. He was being set up. And the only way he could prove that he hadn’t made that call today would give Elizabeth the evidence she needed to divorce him. He could feel his face reddening as he realized that he had walked right into some trap. He was between a rock and a hard place, and it wasn’t happening by accident. Josh – it had to be Josh. He had known, known from the moment he’d realized that Josh would never be so stupid as to ram the boat into the harbour wall by mistake, that he was plotting something. But why this? What good would it do him?

  And he could prove, as far as the police were concerned, that he had been nowhere near the cottage today, which was something Josh didn’t know he could do. He could make them believe a lie, in time. But they wouldn’t believe the truth right now, that he had made that call a month ago. Everything he said got him in deeper; it even sounded to him as though he was making it up as it he went along, but it was the truth. It was the truth. The only person who could prove his story was Josh, and it was Josh who was doing this to him. He might not get out of here at this rate, and if he was a suspect for murder, then he couldn’t even be certain of his alibi.

  He forced himself to think straight. If he had been captured, if he were being tortured by some enemy’s secret service, he would be giving his name, rank and number. There was a drill like that in this situation too.

  ‘I think if you intend to continue questioning me, I would like my solicitor to be present after all,’ he said.

  But she was saying that he was free to go, that she had no more questions, and Paul stood up, dazed. Please God, let this be a dream. Still a dream. He had dreamed everything. Dreamed he had woken from a dream, found it wasn’t a dream, but it was still a dream. Except that it wasn’t.

  He left the station
, and hailed a cab. ‘Little Elmley,’ he said, still in a fog of confusion. That was where his car was, and he didn’t want to leave it there and have to get it in broad daylight. He hoped he could just sneak in and pick it up without Josh seeing him; Josh was going to be less than pleased by what he’d done to Sandie, in view of the fuss he’d made when all he’d done was slap her around a bit, and in view of the fact that he’d married her. Why, for God’s sake? And anyway, he didn’t want to see either of them until he’d had a chance to think.

  Either he had been set up, or the whole thing was a ghastly coincidence, and he had to work out which, because if Josh was behind this, then there would be more to come. He hadn’t gone to all this trouble just to inconvenience him; he must have something worse up his sleeve. But he couldn’t see how Josh would gain by any of it; it made no sense at all. So perhaps, perhaps, it was just a coincidence.

  SCENE XXIV – BARTONSHIRE.

  Sunday, September 28th, 2.10 a.m.

  Outside the House at Little Elmley.

  The taxi drove through the grounds of Little Elmley, and Paul stopped it as soon as he got within walking distance of his car. The front of the house, he noted with relief, was in darkness. He paid the taxi-driver, waving away the change, and walked slowly, carefully, quietly, on the grass rather than the gravel driveway, to his own car, closing the door as quietly as he could.

  There was a slight incline all the way back down to the wood; it was possible that he could put the car in reverse and coast down, not starting the engine until he was far enough away not to produce any sort of confrontation. He found reverse, let off the handbrake, and held his breath while the car’s wheels crunched on the driveway, turning in his seat to see by the light of the moon where he was going.

  And that was when he realized that he was not alone.

  SCENE XXV – BARTONSHIRE.

  Sunday, September 28th, 6.25 a.m.

  The House at Little Elmley.