Die Happy

by J M Gregson

  ‘Mmmm!’

  ‘And you can stop that maternal stuff immediately.’ But she didn’t move.

  ‘Mmmm! It isn’t maternal.’

  ‘But you can stop it nonetheless. Work first, play later.’

  ‘Mmmm! Promise?’

  Kate scrambled hastily away from her partner and on to her feet. ‘Why does the young one always have to provide the work ethic round here?’

  ‘I suppose because I’ve always responded to discipline. When it comes in your shape, it’s positively irresistible. The more you accuse me of being an idle old trollop, the more I like it. I suppose I’m just a helpless decadent in my private life, the way all good artists are.’

  ‘Good artists who are idle never became successful ones. And I want you to be successful, Ros. Don’t ever have the illusion that I’m with you for your art. You need big money to keep me around and don’t you forget it.’

  She dodged a half-hearted attempt by Ros to recapture her kitten and they set about selecting which pictures should be among the privileged twenty to be displayed in the Barnard gallery at Cheltenham. Half an hour later it was Kate who said, ‘I think this one should go in, Ros. It’s different from the others.’

  It was a nude of Kate lying on the sofa on which they sat every day, but with a light blue drape beneath her. There was a window frame beside her, with a cat, which was not at all kittenish, looking in with bared fangs. A representative of the dangerous world outside, which always threatens the innocence that blooms in privacy, the blurb for the exhibition would explain.

  ‘You sure?’ It was one of Ros’s own favourites, but too personal for her to be able to say objectively whether or not it was one of her best. ‘People will recognize you, you know.’

  ‘You always said that wasn’t a consideration, that art comes first and overrides such petit bourgeois considerations.’

  ‘Did I?’ But of course she knew she had; she could almost hear her own voice saying it, in her most sententious vein. ‘Well, it seems different when it’s personal. It’s an invasion of intimacy. At least you should be consulted before being displayed in all your naked glory.’

  ‘How very petit bourgeois! When I was looking forward to all my teachers and the poor sods who used to try to be my boyfriends seeing me tits and all!’

  ‘Don’t be coarse, young Kate! Well, we’ll put it in if you really think we should. If you aren’t just being big and grown up when you don’t really feel it.’

  ‘We’re putting it in and that’s that! Preferably in a spot where it will get maximum attention from your admiring public.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’ve got a public, admiring or otherwise. And the prime spots have already been agreed with Harry Barnard. But I’m very happy to put it in. I suppose I had reservations partly because I like it myself. I always have reservations about putting what I think is the best of myself on display. It’s probably a fear of people being critical of it.’

  ‘Or even worse, of someone buying the painting. I remember you telling me about when you sold your first painting. You felt as though someone was carrying away a part of you and locking it away for ever.’

  ‘You remember far too much, young Kate.’

  ‘I remember that if you’re going to make a living you have to sell everything you possibly can, until you’re well established.’

  ‘Now you’re beginning to sound like Harry Barnard. I shall defer to your sordid money-grabbing instincts in all my selections. Anyway, I seem to remember the experts in these antiques programmes saying that nothing sells as well as an attractive nude lady.’

  ‘Thank you for declaring me an antique. I wonder which pervert’s pad I might end up in.’

  They selected the rest of the exhibits without argument and with ease, including a couple of extra ones so that Harry Barnard could make the final choice. By four o’clock they were ready for a cup of tea and Ros switched the television on.

  They were munching biscuits when the national news finished and the local news began. It did so with a picture of The Avenue and a reporter standing, microphone in hand and with a police car behind him, at the entrance to The Willows. ‘In this house last night a man died and foul play is suspected. Police have not yet released the name of the dead man or further details, but the victim is believed to be the well-known radio and television director, Peter Preston.’

  Ros Barker had always known it would be so. She looked at Kate Merrick and found her eyes filled with a wild surmise.

  Edwina Preston was younger than her husband. Around ten years younger, the experienced eyes of the two senior CID men told them. There was no hint of grey in her light brown hair, but neither of them knew how much of that was due to the hairdresser who had styled it. She looked calm, but so did many people who were riven with grief. Her complexion was good and her only cosmetic seemed to be a rose-pink lipstick. There was no hint of the puffiness that came with weeping around her watchful blue eyes.

  The Willows was still a crime scene, and in any case she could not face returning to the big house yet. It was Sue Charles who had convinced her that she needed to inform the police of her whereabouts and her immediate plans; they always spoke to the spouse of the victim as soon as they possibly could, the crime novelist told her confidently. She had rung the station at Oldford from Sue’s house. The calm voice of the policewoman had confirmed that they needed to interview her and had then said that the CID officers would meet her wherever she chose. Eventually, to their surprise and perhaps to her own, she had decided that she would come in to the station at Oldford and do it there.

  It was half past four on a bright May afternoon, with a gentle breeze and a few high white clouds moving softly across a blue sky that looked so clear that it might have been rinsed by the early morning rain. Lambert opened the window of his office wide, for the first time in the year, and had tea and biscuits brought in for his visitor. Someone must have divined his wish to treat the new widow sensitively, for on the tray there were china cups and saucers he had not known the station possessed. It was surprising what treasures lurked in the deepest recesses of the police canteen.

  He asked Edwina to sit in the single easy chair the room possessed. She glanced at his preparations as she took her seat and said, ‘Thank you. I don’t know what I was expecting. I suppose one of your tight little interview rooms and a grilling.’

  A woman already aware of her surroundings and in control of her emotions. That didn’t necessarily mean she wasn’t feeling grief. Death, especially sudden death, hit the bereaved in all sorts of ways. A collapse into helpless weeping might be delayed, or it might not occur at all. The mind and the body found all sorts of ways of coping, and in the end most of them worked. It was part of the CID task to study all reactions with ruthless objectivity.

  Lambert took in her inspection of the room and the preparations made for her, then watched her listening with her head a little on one side to the unexpected song of a blackbird from the tree below the open window. He said, ‘I don’t spend much time in here myself. I’m afraid I’m not a modern superintendent, supervising an investigation from my desk. I like to be out and about and meeting people.’

  ‘I don’t see why you should apologize for that. It sounds good to me.’

  He smiled. ‘I should begin by telling you how sorry we are about your loss, and assuring you of our very best efforts to bring to justice the person who killed Mr Preston.’

  ‘Thank you. Perhaps I should respond with an assurance that I was not that person.’ He must have looked disconcerted at such directness, because she was driven to add, ‘That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? To clear myself of suspicion.’

  Lambert smiled. ‘It’s part of the reason. You are also here to give us all the information you can about a man who has died. We know very little as yet about Mr Preston, about the way he thought and the way he lived and the sorts of enemies he might have had. Murder victims cannot speak for themselves, as the victims of other crimes usually can.’ />
  She thought about that for a moment, then said with a rueful smile, ‘It seems strange, Peter not being able to speak for himself. He always had plenty to say.’ She looked up for a reaction, but Lambert was too professional to show how heartily he agreed with that. ‘He had rather a lot of enemies, you know.’

  She looked at them again. It was Hook who said, ‘We didn’t know. That’s not going to make our job easier, but it’s an example of the way we need the thoughts of those closest to him to build up the sort of picture my colleague referred to. If it’s not too painful for you at this moment, could you tell us about your own relationship with Mr Preston?’

  ‘We’d been married for twenty-four years. I suppose I knew Peter better than anyone.’ She spoke as if the thought came as a surprise to her. ‘He was a complex man. I’m sorry – that tells you nothing, does it.’

  Hook smiled. ‘It tells us how the person closest to him saw him. It would be useful if you could give us some examples of his complexity.’

  ‘Yes.’ She paused for so long that it seemed she might say nothing further. But these men were used to silences; they had taught themselves to be unembarrassed by them, to wait as long as it took for people to translate flying thoughts into words. ‘He had a self-image which was very important to him. He’d produced programmes for the BBC and the odd one for ITV in the past. One or two important ones. Documentaries on poets and dramatists, things like that. Sometimes, especially with the later ones, they only used snippets of them amid someone else’s filming or recording. He didn’t like that, but he had to take it. He was quite well paid for his work, in those days.’

  ‘Which would be when, Mrs Preston?’

  ‘When?’ She looked for a moment as if Hook had dragged her back from a private reverie. ‘Oh, up to about ten years ago, I suppose. I couldn’t be precise, but it was about then that the work began to dry up.’

  ‘I see. We have a few press cuttings about him. He usually seems to be described as a freelance producer in the later ones.’

  ‘That’s what he took to calling himself, in the last few years. It meant that he wasn’t getting the commissions he used to get and didn’t have the influence he used to have. The world of the arts is just as cut-throat as any other world, DS Hook. When the people who make the decisions stop thinking of you for work, the work usually ceases. Peter didn’t admit that that was what was happening to him, even to me. I think that he was aware of it, but his self-image wouldn’t allow him to acknowledge it.’

  They had a glimpse in that moment of a more tragic figure lurking beneath the garrulous exterior of the man who had so irritated them a couple of days ago. Hook said, ‘Excuse me for probing into private matters at a time like this, but I’m afraid that in a situation such as this privacy is the first casualty. What were the financial effects of this reduction in work for you and Mr Preston?’

  She looked shaken for a moment by the question; finance is a far more sensitive area to probe than sex, with most members of the British middle class. Then she said with a tiny shrug of the shoulders, ‘Peter refused to confront things like that. We still lived in a big house, still pretended we could carry on as in the palmy days. That was part of his image, you see. But we were living off capital, not income. Peter had inherited money of his own and I got the money from my mother’s house plus the rest of her savings when she died. It wouldn’t have lasted for ever. We needed to move to a smaller house, but he wouldn’t face that. It would have meant a loss of face.’ For the first time, she allowed an edge of contempt into this last phrase. She had previously maintained an even, emotionless tone for her account of her husband and the glimpses into her married life.

  Lambert let her words hang in the room for a moment before he said quietly, ‘Where were you last night, Mrs Preston?’

  ‘I was staying with my daughter. She lives in Oxford.’ Her clipped tone showed that she had expected the question.

  ‘You do this regularly?’

  ‘Not in the sense that I go there at set intervals. But yes, I stay with Dell quite often.’

  Hook made a note. ‘Your daughter’s name is Dell? Could you give me a home number for her, please?’

  ‘Her real name is Cordelia. That was Peter, as you might imagine. She doesn’t like it. She was Delia for a while, but that was associated with the woman who writes the cookery books, so she calls herself Dell now.’ The tone of affection gave them a glimpse of the mother behind the composed, mid-forties face. She had obviously given this explanation many times before, but her eyes lit up for a moment when she repeated it here.

  ‘And what time did you leave home yesterday?’

  ‘About three o’clock yesterday afternoon, I think. The exact time wasn’t important to me, at the time.’

  Lambert was studying her as she spoke, his grey eyes steady, his head a little on one side. ‘I’m sorry you had to find out about your husband’s death as you did.’

  ‘There was no way that could have been avoided. You weren’t to know where I was.’ She spoke evenly again now, as if she were re-living that moment when she had driven up to the gates of The Willows and found the police scene of crime tapes barring her entrance.

  Lambert nodded. ‘You said a few minutes ago that your husband had a lot of enemies. We obviously need to know about them.’

  ‘Peter gave himself airs and graces, which is irritating. He patronised people, which is worse. People resent that.’

  ‘Indeed they do. But it’s a big step, probably several big steps, from resentment to killing a man.’

  ‘Of course it is. And I can’t immediately think of anyone who might have taken those steps. He wasn’t good with young people – no, that isn’t strong enough. He despised most new ideas and most young people. I’m sorry to have to say it, but he did. And they won’t take it, these days. They don’t just accept it meekly when older people are unfair to them. He knew that, but there were times when it only seemed to make him more determined to insult them.’

  ‘Can you think of any particular young people?’

  ‘It’s a long way from feeling insulted to shooting a man, as you said.’

  ‘It is, and we are well aware of that. Nevertheless, we need somewhere to start and at present you are the person who can offer us the most useful initial pointers.’

  ‘I suppose so. But you should bear in mind that I kept away from Peter and what he was up to, particularly in these last few years.’ She looked for a moment as if she would enlarge on this, but apparently thought better of it. ‘I do know that he’s been much occupied with the Oldford festival of literature and that he didn’t care for the programme that has been set up.’

  ‘Yes. My wife is on the committee and I gathered that.’ Lambert judged that Preston was the sort of man who wouldn’t approve of much that he hadn’t initiated himself.

  Almost as if she read his thoughts, Edwina Preston said, ‘Peter hadn’t much time for anything he hadn’t suggested himself. He liked to be in charge of things. I’m sure he felt he should have been chairman of that committee, controlling the programme for the whole ten days. I would say that he regarded most things which came from younger people to be dumbing down.’

  It was said not with real regret but with a sort of relish, as if she enjoyed telling these home truths about him now that he was no longer there to ridicule her thoughts. It was undoubtedly sad, but the men in the room with her were detectives; they considered it significant. This was the woman best placed to plot the removal of a difficult spouse; she was hardly troubling to hide her distaste for him. As she had just almost reminded them, it was a long way from distaste to murder, but marriage wasn’t the best environment for fostering a sense of proportion.

  Lambert said, ‘You are confirming the impression we formed when we spoke to Mr Preston on Monday that he hadn’t much time for the younger people on the festival committee.’

  ‘You’re right there. I’d almost forgotten that you’d spoken to him so recently. Did you find out who�
��d sent him that threatening letter?’

  ‘No. And now we’ve been overtaken by a murder investigation.’

  ‘But surely the two will be connected? Isn’t the person who threatened him with death going to be the one most likely to have killed him?’

  ‘Perhaps. And I can assure you that we are still investigating the origin of those letters. I should perhaps tell you that other people on the committee as well as Mr Preston have received identical messages.’

  ‘I see. Then are others also at risk? Are we going to have a series of murders?’

  Lambert couldn’t be sure of it, but he thought he caught a certain relish in her tone as she made the suggestions. ‘I do hope not. I should perhaps point out that such a train of events is far more common in Agatha Christie than in real life. We haven’t ruled out the possibility, but we cannot be certain that the person who sent those letters is also the person who shot Mr Preston.’

  ‘Peter would assume that it was one of the youngsters who was threatening him.’

  ‘He did just that. He pointed us towards one of the younger members of the committee. We were still investigating the letters when we discovered his death. Have you any reason yourself to suspect anyone?’

  ‘No. As I say, I kept out of his affairs as much as possible. We didn’t talk as much as we used to. I’m afraid I found his ideas rather repetitive and he was aware of that. And he thought that I was such a philistine that I couldn’t understand aesthetic matters.’

  She sounded as if she had made him aware of her own thoughts in very direct language. But John Lambert sympathized. From his single contact with Peter Preston, he judged that he was the sort of tiresome bore who justified trenchant rejection. ‘I must ask you if you have any thoughts yourself on who might have committed this crime. I’m not talking about evidence, just opinion. Your opinions will be treated in the strictest confidence.’