by John Harvey
“Fifty-seven.”
“Ah. And this poor woman...”
“Claire Meecham.”
“Claire Meecham, she was the same?”
“As I said, they were of a similar age.”
“Yes, yes. And I can tell from your voice I’ve asked a question too many. After all, it was you who came here to question me.” Leaning forward, he reached toward Elder’s cup. “Let me freshen this up before we continue.”
“I’d rather get on, if you don’t mind.”
“Very well.” Blaine released the cup and settled back.
“I wonder how well,” Elder said, “you can recall the statement you made at the time?”
“Eight years ago—I can remember the basic facts, of course, but what I said in detail, I’m afraid very little.”
“You haven’t thought about the evening a great deal then? Since it happened. Run it over in your mind?”
“Yes. I suppose I have. From time to time.”
Elder took a small notebook from his pocket; more for show than anything. “Perhaps you could go over for me what you remember. Yourself and Irene Fowler, that evening. The sequence of events.”
“If you think it might help, of course, though as I say...”
“Please.”
“Very well.” Blaine had removed his glasses and now he tapped them against his leg. “I’d come into the city for a concert, that lunchtime. An organ recital at St. Mary’s. Bach. In the afternoon I wandered a little around the city, went to the bookshop almost certainly. Waterstone’s. Then, in the early evening I saw a film at Broadway. Tavernier, I remember. Un Dimanche a la Campagne. That was in the days when they showed such films as a matter of course. Nowadays, more often than not, it’s the same American rubbish you’ll find everywhere else.” He looked at Elder apologetically. “I’m sorry, forgive me, a pet gripe of mine.”
“Go on.”
“After the film I bumped into a friend. Brian Warren. An accountant. At least he was till he retired. He used to look after my affairs. We chatted for a while and then he suggested going somewhere quiet for a drink. Quite coincidentally, he chose the hotel where Irene Fowler was staying.
“The bar was quite busy and we were forced to share a table with several others. Three or four at first, and then just two. Two women. Irene Fowler and a friend. A colleague. They were attending the conference together.” Blaine shifted position slightly on his chair. “It was pleasant enough, if not what we’d intended. After a while Brian decided he had to go.”
“You weren’t tempted to leave with him?”
“By that time I was feeling quite hungry. I thought I’d stay and have something to eat. I asked the women sitting with us if they’d care to join me. Out of politeness as much as anything else. One demurred, the other agreed.”
“And that was Irene Fowler?”
“Exactly.”
The occasional flurry of birdsong from the garden aside, it was quiet in the room. A hiccup of water shifting in the pipes, the far-off churning of a tractor.
“How did she strike you?” Elder asked. “What kind of person was she?”
Blaine weighed his words before replying. “We were able to talk easily enough—her job, family, the conference she was attending, things of that nature. She was quite intelligent, I’d have to say; perhaps surprisingly so.”
“You didn’t talk about yourself?”
“I think I may have mentioned something about photography, but it wasn’t really a topic she could pursue.”
“All in all, though, you’d say it was a pleasant experience.”
“Not unpleasant, certainly.”
“Pleasant enough for you to arrange to see her again?”
Something flickered fast across Blaine’s eyes. “Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know,” Elder said, offhandedly. “A man and a woman spend time together, get along, maybe they’re both unattached—I should have thought it was the natural thing to do.”
“Natural? I don’t know. For some people, perhaps it is.”
“But not for you?”
“Relationships are more than casual where I am concerned. Not something to be entered into lightly.”
“You did find her attractive, nonetheless.”
Blaine started to speak, but the words caught on his tongue. “She was perfectly pleasant, yes.”
“No more than that?”
“No more.”
“After dinner,” Elder said, “you had a drink in the bar?”
“A nightcap, yes. Her idea.”
“You’d been drinking with dinner?”
“We shared a bottle of wine.”
“And before that?”
“I’d had a gin and tonic, that was all.”
“Irene Fowler? How about her?”
“I don’t really know. A couple of drinks perhaps. But she wasn’t drunk, if that’s where you’re leading. A little merry. In good spirits, nothing more.”
“And the invitation to join her for a nightcap, you didn’t take this as a prelude to something more?”
“Not at all.”
“Some men might have chosen to see it as exactly that.”
Blaine bridled slightly. “Do I strike you, Mr. Elder, as the predatory kind?”
“One thing this job has taught me,” Elder said, “where sex is concerned, most people are rarely what they seem.”
“Sex? Is that what this is all about?”
“I think so, don’t you?” Elder drank the last of his coffee. “One way or another, it usually is.”
“You and Lawrence would have had a great deal in common,” Blaine said, amused. “A phallocentric view of the world.”
“You don’t think sex is important then?”
“I think in our culture, its importance is exaggerated. And the shame is that sometimes it should lead to this. What happened in that room.”
Both men paused as a light aircraft passed low overhead, trailing silence in its wake.
“According to your statement,” Elder said, “you left Irene Fowler in the hotel bar.”
“That’s correct. She seemed in no hurry to go up and by then I was eager to get home.”
“The time would have been...?”
“Eleven-thirty, possibly a little later.”
“Were there many people, can you remember, still in the bar?”
“Not so many. Possibly a dozen in all. Several more in the lobby, as I recall.”
“And when you left her, she was alone?”
“Quite alone.”
“And you drove yourself home.”
“As you know.”
“You weren’t worried about the amount you’d had to drink?”
Blaine brought the tips of his fingers together. “It was not, shall we say, the most sensible thing to have done. I believe I acknowledged that at the time and I do so again now. What I should have done was to leave my car parked where it was and take a taxi home; come back and collect the car the next day. As it happened, I was fortunate, nothing amiss occurred.” He gave Elder a small, tight-lipped smile. “A lesson learned.”
Elder flicked his notebook closed and Blaine rose to his feet.
“I hope what I’ve told you has been of some assistance,” Blaine said. “I’m only sorry I had nothing new to add. No startling revelations.”
“Due process,” Elder said, rising. “Procedure. That’s what most police work is. For me now, it’s much the same.” He smiled. “Startling revelations, they only usually happen in books.”
They were walking toward the door.
“My friend Anna,” Blaine said, “Anna Ingram. She was at my talk the other evening. She reads quite a lot of detective fiction. Amongst more serious things, of course. Paradoxically, she claims it helps her to relax. She even persuaded me to read one once. Ian Rankin—she seems to like him especially. His policeman—Rebus, is that his name?—a cantankerous sort. At odds with the world. Not like you at all.”
Elder di
dn’t know Rebus, but about himself he wasn’t sure.
On the threshold they shook hands. Overhead, the sun was still faltering between the clouds. A pair of blue tits balanced restlessly on the telephone wire that stretched toward the house and then were gone. There were at least two tractors now, out of sight, turning the earth.
“Good luck with your inquiries,” Blaine said, as Elder stepped toward his car. “As far as Irene Fowler is concerned, especially. What happened to her, it was terrible. I hope you catch whoever was responsible.”
Elder raised a hand, slid behind the wheel and buckled his seat belt, reversed back down the drive, changed gear, and drove away. Vincent Blaine stood motionless in the doorway, watching him out of sight and then continuing to stand, long after the sound of Elder’s car had faded clear away.
Chapter 17
WHILE THEY WERE WAITING FOR THE NECESSARY LEGAL process to be worked through and for the computer geeks to then uncover Claire Meecham’s audit trail, Maureen Prior’s team prioritized three areas: a check of holiday companies, both local and national, for any booking in Claire’s name during the weekend in question; a canvass of her neighbours for information about any strange or unusual vehicles that had been seen close to the bungalow in the early hours of the Sunday the body was found; and a search through records for the names of any serious offenders with a record of violent or sexual crimes who had been imprisoned during most or all of the past eight years.
Maureen Prior, sometimes with another officer in tow, sometimes alone, interviewed Claire Meecham’s sister, Jennie, and her daughter, Jane. She had several long conversations with Claire’s son, James, in Australia.
A five-day, all-inclusive package to Lanzarote, booked in the name of G. R. Meecham, raised hopes briefly, before it was discovered C stood for Clarice and not Claire.
Tales of a white van driving around the area eventually yielded two likely lads who were buying fish in quantities in their local Asda, sticking it in the back of a refrigerated 5 cwt. van, and passing it off as fresh fish from Grimsby.
Little else caused antennae to quiver or quickened the blood.
With the names of other possible contacts still locked in the ether, Prior’s team made a start on what they had. Norman Prentiss, from Northampton, turned out to be wheelchair bound and severely overweight; Roy James, from Leicester, was a bespectacled thirteen-year-old with permanently sticky palms; Gary Grange, the widower from Kettering, had found true happiness with a special-needs teacher from nearby Corby, and on the weekend that Claire Meecham’s body was discovered, they were together on an activity holiday in Aviemore, gorge-walking and canoeing.
Maureen Prior went down to London to talk to Stephen Singer, though without too much enthusiasm. She had spoken to several senior members of the university where he had lectured, but any hopes she might have had that Singer had been guilty of inappropriate behaviour with either fellow staff or students were soon set aside. All the other checks they ran on him had ended up clean.
Singer was polite and courteous, correctly distressed by Claire Meecham’s death, eager to be as helpful as he could. A citizen beyond reproach.
Why then, when he pressed a CD of Biber’s Rosary Sonatas into her hands as she left, a result of a chance remark she had made about the music he’d been playing, did Prior feel a jolt of insincerity in his voice, his manner, his eagerness to please?
She was unable, quite, to shake that feeling from her mind.
ELDER, MEANWHILE, AND NOT WITHOUT DIFFICULTY, HAD contacted Christine Dulverton, the woman who had been sitting with Irene Fowler in the hotel bar on the evening that she was killed. Dulverton had moved three times since Elder had last interviewed her eight years before. Taunton, then Dawlish, and currently, St. Albans. She agreed to meet Elder in a branch of the ubiquitous Starbucks, close to the town centre.
Instead of aging since Elder had last seen her, Christine Dulverton seemed, perversely, to have become younger. Diet and callisthenics had slimmed down her figure; Botox or something similar had banished the lines from her face. The rest, maybe, was an attitude of mind. Certainly, she recognized Elder long before he recognized her.
She was wearing blue jeans, low on her hips, a long green and purple open cardigan over a tight white T-shirt that left a good couple of inches of flat stomach exposed. Her hair, which Elder remembered as being of a standard length and cut, was now short and dark and highlighted red and silver. A pair of earrings, shaped like sickle moons, danced a little each time she moved her head. Fifty going on twenty-four.
“You weren’t easy to find,” Elder said.
“That was the idea,” Christine Dulverton replied.
Elder looked at her questioningly and she smiled.
“One divorced husband, one serious ex-boyfriend, both desperate to make do and mend. Neither of them quite to the point where I felt like getting a restraining order, but it came close. Never any children, touch wood, nothing to stop me doing a bunk. I was pretty fed up with my job, anyway. Cold meats and prepacked ham, they can only keep your enthusiasm up for just so long. So I went down to Devon, did nothing for a while, lazed around, eventually bumped into this woman who was making jewellery. Bracelets, necklaces, earrings, that kind of thing. Not expensive. A bit knick-knacky, I suppose. Hippyish, even. I worked with her for a while and then struck out on my own.”
“And that’s what you’re doing now?”
“Even so.”
“Those earrings you’re wearing...”
“All my own work.” She gave her head a lively shake. “They say it pays to advertise.”
Elder sipped his coffee; when Christine Dulverton offered him a piece of her skinny blueberry muffin he refused, and the hollow grumbling of his stomach that followed made him wish that he’d accepted instead.
She laughed and, breaking off a piece of the muffin, offered it to him with her fingers. “This is about the murder,” she said. “At least, I assume that’s what it is.”
Mouth full, Elder could only nod.
“You never caught anybody, did you?”
“That’s right.”
“And now you’re looking at it all again?”
“Yes.”
“Like one of those—what do they call them?—cold cases. There’s that programme on the television, isn’t there? A bit far-fetched sometimes, but fun. You know the one I mean?”
“Not really, no.”
“I suppose not. Why would you? The last thing you’d want to watch, I imagine.” She took another sip at her coffee. “I used to have this friend, worked as a nurse, all these programmes about hospitals and nursing used to drive her up the wall. Couldn’t stand them. She’d be there, you know, really long hours, bloody hard work, saving lives, and all these glammed-up nurses on the TV were interested in was shagging some doctor on a trolley. I expect you feel the same.” She laughed. “About the programmes I mean, not the trolley.”
She offered him the last of her muffin and he shook his head.
Someone was singing, “I don’t wanna know ’bout evil,” in a quite wavery, high-pitched voice over heavy bass and drums. The same words over and over, the same rhythm: the effect, even on Elder, was quite hypnotic.
“One of the things I wanted to ask you,” Elder said. “Irene Fowler’s mood that evening, in the hotel—I know it’s asking for you to go back a long time—but could you characterize it in any way?”
“Happy, sad, that kind of thing?”
“That kind of thing.”
“Happy, I think. Well, maybe not that exactly. But certainly not miserable. Relaxed, I’d say.” She laughed. “It’s wonderful what a couple of G and Ts will do after a day listening to people droning on about export licenses and VAT.”
“And when the two men, Vincent Blaine and his friend, joined you, she was okay about that?”
“Yes, of course. Why not? The place was busy, we were both winding down at the end of the day.”
“She welcomed it then, the idea of some male com
pany?”
Christine Dulverton laughed, “Was she on the pull, is that what you’re asking?”
“I suppose I am.”
“Horrible phrase. Always makes me think of cows being milked. But that regardless, no, I don’t think so. I’m not sure whether you can talk of women who are comfortably in their fifties being on the pull, anyway. Having said that, I did get the impression that she might have taken a bit of a shine to one of them.”
“Vincent Blaine, you mean?”
“Good God, no,” Christine said. “Not him, the other one. Brian, was that his name?”
“Brian Warren. Yes.”
“Well, I couldn’t quite see it myself, but Irene and him, they really seemed to hit it off.”
“Yet she ended up going to dinner with Vincent Blaine,” Elder said.
“I know. Brian had gone by then, something about having to get off early the next day I think it was, and this Vincent, he suggested getting something in the restaurant.”
“You didn’t fancy that?”
“No way. Too full of himself for my taste. One of those men with opinions on everything, you know what I mean? Stuck up, too. I said I was tired, wanted to turn in, and I thought Irene would take that as an excuse, come with me, but instead she stayed.”
“You were surprised?”
“Yes, I was.” She shook her head. “If only she’d left then, it might never have happened. Or if I’d stayed. I think about that, you know. If I hadn’t gone prancing off, how she might still have been alive.”
“You don’t know that. Neither do we. We still don’t know exactly what happened.”
For a moment, her hand rested on his sleeve. “Doesn’t stop me thinking, does it?”
“I suppose not.”
“Blaine,” she said, “he was never arrested or anything? For the murder, I mean.”
“No.”
“You did suspect him, though, you had to.”
Elder nodded. “Maybe for a while.”
Despite Vincent Blaine’s alibi, every inch of the hotel room had been scrupulously searched, hoping for a print, a hair, a thread, anything that would prove he had been inside. Irene Fowler’s body and the clothes in which she had been dressed had been examined and reexamined to no avail.
