Body Politic

by J M Gregson

  Hook was back surprisingly quickly with four steaming mugs. He pushed the largest across the table to Walsh. ‘Hot and sweet, lad. Standard police issue,’ he said, not unkindly.

  Walsh nodded absently, folded his fingers around the beaker, lifted it with two unsteady hands, took a cautious sip. He watched Rushton’s hand move to set the tape in motion again, then, without waiting to be prompted, said, ‘I was there on the Sunday as well, you know. Christmas Day. In the morning.’

  They didn’t know. No one had seen him. A bonus for them, at last. Lambert said, like a man floating a fly past a nervous trout, ‘And what did you see, Joe?’

  ‘I saw the blonde woman come, didn’t I? Come and go, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Miss Renwick, Joe. That’s her name. Do you know what car she drives?’

  ‘Yes. A Fiesta Sport. A black one. That’s how I knew it was her, when she came. But I saw her get out and go into the house, as well.’

  ‘What time was this, Joe?’

  ‘Quite early. There was no traffic about, on Christmas morning, when I drove there. She must have arrived at about half past nine, I think.’

  ‘And how long was she in there, Joe?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not very long, though. Perhaps ten minutes or quarter of an hour. She came out in a hell of a hurry, I can tell you!’ He took a long, reminiscent pull at his tea, seeing that moment with the distraught woman fleeing from the cottage, thinking she was unobserved.

  ‘You thought she was upset, did you, Joe?’

  ‘She came out of there like a bat out of hell.’ For once, the cliché seemed an appropriate one, considering what Zoe Renwick must have left behind her in the cottage.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Zoe Renwick’s Cheltenham flat was within four hundred yards of the hospital where she was a sister. When Hook rang her on the ward, she showed no surprise that the CID should want to see her again. She said, ‘I shall be off duty at two. I think it better that we meet away from here this time. I’ll see you at home.’

  She had sounded composed and in control on the phone, as she had meant to do. As she walked through the tree-lined streets to her flat, huddled in her thick coat against the rawness of the January day, she felt much less assured. How much did these quiet, relentless men know now? How long could one woman stand up against the massive, impersonal police machine that was operating in pursuit of Raymond’s killer?

  Zoe felt very much alone. She was used to that, but she felt her isolation more keenly than she ever had before. Despite the cold, she walked slowly, trying unsuccessfully to prepare her thoughts and her tactics for the meeting ahead. How could you prepare for a battle when you had no idea of the enemy’s strength?

  From behind the double glazing of her first-floor apartment, she watched the blue Senator turn silently into the car park and come to rest beside her own Fiesta Sport. The superintendent, whose name she could not remember, levered himself a little stiffly from the driver’s seat. Sergeant Hook checked the number plate of her car, then studied the interior curiously for an instant before he turned towards the communal entrance doors of the flats. In that moment, she realized somehow that they knew she had lied to them.

  She had hoped that things might be more relaxed if they saw her at home. And if it came to an arrest, at least she wouldn’t be ushered past the curious eyes of the hospital’s corridors and reception areas. An arrest? Was she being melodramatic? But didn’t deceiving the police in an enquiry make you something called an accessory after the fact? She realized how ignorant she was of the law and of her rights.

  Lambert was brisk, even abrupt. This woman had now forsaken her right to the courtesy he had afforded her in his previous interview at the hospital. He said, ‘We have heard statements from others involved which conflict with your earlier account of events, Miss Renwick. We are here to establish the truth in these matters. I should warn you that any further attempts to deceive us would be very ill advised.’

  She had been intending to offer them tea or coffee. Now she knew that it would be refused; they barely accepted her invitation to sit down in the elegant lounge. With its Georgian silver tea service on top of the china cabinet, its gold-framed etchings of Bath and old Bristol on the high walls, its period armchairs upon the Persian carpet, this room seemed to her as well as to them a curious setting for what must now transpire.

  She said, more calmly than she felt, ‘I told you. I had nothing to do with the murder of Raymond Keane.’

  It was the first time she had produced the full name of the man she had once intended to marry, as if she sought by the use to distance herself from the events of his death. With her blonde hair dropping almost to her shoulders, her bright blue eyes trained observantly upon their faces, her slim form perched gracefully on the edge of her tapestried armchair, she presented a much changed appearance from the efficient professional they had seen in her sister’s uniform at the hospital.

  Yet she was just as careful, just as intelligent, thought Lambert. Only her clothes were different. He stared back at her for a moment before he said, ‘You had more to do with it than you pretended when we saw you two days ago, Miss Renwick.’

  ‘In what way?’

  He was suddenly impatient with her prevarications. ‘I could take you through your statement line by line and expose its falsehoods. But we haven’t time for that. You told us earlier that you hadn’t been near the cottage since a week before Christmas, that you did not go to meet Mr Keane as you had arranged to do. But we know now that your car has been there, on one or more occasions.’

  ‘On one. Only on one!’ There was fear in the way she spat the words from between her pale lips. In that one moment of vehemence, she had admitted her earlier lies. Lambert, who had backed the tale of the dishevelled, half-crazy Joe Walsh against the account of this cool-looking woman, breathed a huge but entirely inward sigh of relief.

  They glared at each other for a moment, realizing the implications of her words, each of them measuring the strength of the adversary. Then Lambert said, ‘If you expect us to believe you this time, you had better not try to hold anything back.’

  She nodded. It was almost a relief to have it out, without further attempts to disguise it. She had known from the moment she received Hook’s phone call that it must come to this, she told herself, so she had lost nothing so far. She said carefully, ‘I didn’t go there on Christmas Eve. What I told you was correct, apart from one omission.’

  ‘A very important omission.’

  She frowned impatiently at him. The comment was a distraction, a mere underlining of what she had already admitted. If the wretched man would only shut up, she would tell him. ‘I rang on Christmas Eve, to tell Raymond I wasn’t going to arrive as he expected. I put off the call until about eight o’clock, because I wasn’t looking forward to it. I thought he’d have rung me by then, but he hadn’t, so I had to take the initiative. When I’d screwed myself up to tell him we were finished, there was no reply.’

  She paused, allowing them to picture the scene she was now putting to them, with the phone ringing in the silent cottage and the man it was intended for lying dead a few yards away. They said nothing, and she found their silence chilling: even a question would have been somehow a comfort, an assurance that at least they were taking her latest story seriously. She said, ‘I was deflated. I’d expected to have to give an account of myself, to confess that I wasn’t going to marry him anymore. I expected an argument; I was going to suggest that he came over to discuss things with me on the next day. Instead, there was nothing. I couldn’t even leave a message on his answerphone, telling him to ring me; it wasn’t switched on. I didn’t go there.’

  ‘But you went on the next day. Christmas Day.’

  ‘Yes. I drove over there in the morning.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Raymond hadn’t rung back. Because I thought there might be something wrong with his phone. The answerphone still wasn’t on, so I presumed he must be ther
e. And I wanted to have it out with him. To get that over with.’

  ‘So you drove over there. At what time?’

  ‘Quite early. By other people’s standards, not the hospital’s.’ She smiled nervously at that thought. ‘It must have been about half past nine when I got there, I suppose.’

  Sometime in the last few seconds, she had ceased to look at them. They could see the tension in the drawn muscles of her long neck; a tress of the blonde hair had fallen unchecked over the top of her right cheekbone. Lambert, speaking more gently now, said, ‘Tell us what you found at the cottage that morning, please.’

  ‘Raymond’s Jaguar was parked round the back: I could just see the end of the boot. I went inside—I have a key, you see. I called his name two or three times. There was no sign of him, and no heating on. If it hadn’t been for the car, I’d have thought he’d never arrived. I went to the answerphone to play the messages back. I thought there might have been some family emergency, you see, or some political thing needing attention. I couldn’t see why his car would still be there if he’d gone off somewhere, but he might have gone with someone else.’

  ‘And did you find anything among the messages that might have explained things?’

  ‘No. The answerphone tape had been cleared. I thought at the time that Raymond must have done that.’

  ‘But now you’re not so sure.’

  She shook her head silently. They knew why she was so tense with that thought. If Keane had not cleared the tape, it had almost certainly been the murderer who had erased it. The two men watching her so closely knew that the tape had indeed been clear when the Scene-of-Crime team tried it. Sooner or later, they would have to know whether this latest story was the real one, or whether it was the cool Nordic figure before them who had cleared that tape and any evidence it held, after killing the owner of the cottage. She was staring now at the carpet between them as if hypnotized, as the key point of her story was at hand. Lambert, as if offering a stage cue to move forward the action, said, ‘Go on, please.’

  Zoe Renwick spoke slowly now, reluctantly almost, though she knew there was no turning away from the course she had decided upon. ‘I looked upstairs. The bed hadn’t been slept in. I went into the kitchen, to see if he had cooked anything. I found him there. In the old pantry. Underneath the fuse-box. He had already been dead for some time.’ Even with the last words, she did not look up. It was as if, in recounting an ill dream, it was important to her to get every detail correct.

  It was Hook who broke the spell as, looking up from his written record of this, he said, ‘You’re certain of that?’

  She looked at him with widening eyes, as if she had forgotten for a moment that he was there. ‘I am a hospital sister, Sergeant. We are not unfamiliar with death and its trappings.’

  Lambert said, ‘Quite. And your opinion is that Mr Keane had been dead for some hours at least?’

  ‘My immediate thought was that he’d been killed on the previous night. He was cold, you see, when I felt for a pulse. But I’m afraid I didn’t think in professional terms for very long. I just wanted to get out of the place. And I did. I drove away as fast as I could.’

  Like a bat out of hell, Walsh had said. Their stories tallied in that, at any rate. ‘Did you lock the door behind you?’

  ‘I can’t remember. I was in a panic. I’m sure I pulled the door to behind me: I was terrified that whoever killed Raymond might still be around somewhere, anxious to put any barrier between me and him. But I went out of the back door. It doesn’t have a Yale lock like the front one. So it may be that I left it open. Does it matter?’

  ‘It may do. If you are telling us the full story this time.’ Lambert looked at her for a moment, assessing her credibility, without attempting to disguise the fact. Then he said quietly, ‘So you knew Mr Keane was dead for a week and more before his body was found. You realize this makes you an accessory to murder.’

  There it was, almost the phrase she had thought of for herself. But she didn’t care now. She was drained with the effort of what she had told them. She said dully, ‘I suppose it does. I hadn’t thought of it like that, until today. All I wanted to do at first was to get away from the place. And when I had done, I thought, “If I say anything, they’ll think it was me.” That seemed more likely the longer I left it, until after a day or so it became impossible. I was waiting all that week for someone to find him. I couldn’t understand why no one did.’

  She brushed the hair back from the pale flesh of her face now and looked straight into Lambert’s cool grey eyes as she said, ‘I hated Raymond by this time. I know that sounds a stupid reversal, within a week. But I hated what I’d seen of him with his business partner, and with his former mistress. So when I found him dead like that, I felt guilty anyway, even though I hadn’t done it. Because I wanted him out of my life, and I suppose there was a part of me which was glad to have him dead.’

  Lambert returned her gaze silently for a moment, then gave a curt nod. ‘And when did you go back to move him, Miss Renwick?’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t. I haven’t been near the cottage from that day to this.’ She was alarmed now, earnest in her attempt to convince them.

  ‘You realize that your earlier concealments have made it more difficult for us to believe you, of course. All right, if you didn’t move the corpse, who did?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I’ve thought about it, but I haven’t got any nearer. Do you—do you think the murderer was at the cottage when I went there?’

  Lambert ignored the question. To answer it would be tantamount to admitting he believed her story. Instead, he said, ‘Most innocent people who come upon a body think at first that there has been an accident of some kind. You immediately assumed murder. Can you explain that to us?’

  ‘Yes. I felt for the pulse in the throat immediately to check that he was dead. The mark of the ligature was quite plain upon the throat. I touched it as I felt him.’

  She shuddered a little at the recollection, but she was happy with her answer, a professional woman giving a professional account of herself.

  *

  Moira Yates had worked for almost an hour in the garden of her brother’s house. It was the first time in four months that she had declared herself happy to move even this far from the security of the interior. Dermot had worked with her in the raw north-east wind, keeping a discreet but watchful eye upon her, trying to ensure that she became absorbed in the work, ready to desist as soon as she suggested it.

  They had cleared the dead tops of perennials that had been waiting since the autumn, collected the myriad small branches blown from the oak and the beech at the end of the plot by the winter gales, assembled the debris into a conical heap which they would fire on the following day. Dermot would have liked to light the fire immediately, moving close to its crackling flames on the raw afternoon, but he thought that Moira had been outside the house for long enough.

  She declared that she had enjoyed the unaccustomed physical work, and her cheeks were indeed warm from the exertion and the fresh air. Dermot sent her for a shower to warm herself up after the unaccustomed cold. When he stood in the hall and heard the water running above him, he made his phone call, his hand sheltering the mouthpiece, his eyes cast apprehensively up the flight of stairs, his voice low and terse with the trepidation he felt.

  When she came down, relaxed and smiling in dark-green cashmere, he said, ‘I have to go out, sis.’

  She looked the question he had expected about his destination, but he did not volunteer an answer. He had a story ready about meeting a writing friend in a pub, which did not sound very convincing, even to him as he rehearsed it. But she did not press him, so he did not offer it. When he reached the end of their cul-de-sac, he set off in the opposite direction from the one which would take him directly to his goal, in case Moira was watching, as she often did, from the lounge window.

  He drove the Cavalier swiftly through the familiar lanes, beneath scudding clouds which ranged from the ne
ar white to the almost black. He watched his rear mirror more closely than usual. It was only after three miles that he realized that he had been checking for police pursuit. Had it come to this then, now? Had he been expecting his own house to be watched, his vehicle to be followed?

  Perhaps he was too imaginative. Certainly there was no sign of police surveillance. As he took the circular route to his goal, he had the roads almost to himself, on one of those January days which seem to be little more than breaks between nights. He saw seagulls, wheeling in wide, swift arcs on the wild wind above the Cotswold rises, but no cars until he was near his destination.

  The courtyard where Dermot Yates parked was deserted. He went swiftly through the empty communal hall and up to the heavy mahogany door. It opened as he prepared to ring: this man at any rate had noted his expected arrival. He went swiftly into the elegant apartment and turned to face its owner.

  ‘We need to talk,’ was all he said to Gerald Sangster.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  ‘Do you think she did it?’ said Chris Rushton, He was feeding the timing of Zoe Renwick’s amended story into his computer, pondering the best way to cross-reference it with the other information he had collected from so many sources.

  Lambert watched him with interest as the green print flashed on and off the monitor and the earnest DI operator switched to different computer files. ‘That machine doesn’t reveal who is telling the truth and who is lying,’ the superintendent said. ‘Still less does it show what is true and what is false within a single statement.’