by John Harvey
“Okay,” Elder said, grudgingly. He had hoped for more.
“Before you go, Maureen,” Young said, “this investigation of Reardon’s, the torn out amongst the cabbages, what the fuck’s going on?”
“Not my case, sir,” Prior said.
“Stop being so prissy,” Young said. “You’ve got your ear to the ground. Coming apart at the seams, isn’t it? Close to. The whole bloody shooting match.”
“I think all he’s got now’s the confession and even if he can persuade the CPS to go ahead on that, I’d be doubtful if it’d stand up as safe.”
Young scowled and shook his head. “One-trick fucking pony, that’s Reardon. Can’t see past the fucking blinkers.”
“I think there might be another angle,” Prior said. “Frank here had an idea.”
“What’s this, then, Frank? Some other bit of Freudian soothsaying? Another touch of the Melanie Kleins?”
“Not exactly,” Elder said, without knowing who on earth Melanie Klein was.
“You want me to have a word with Reardon, sir?” Prior asked. “See if I can’t steer him in another direction?”
“Not yet. Let him stew in his own juices a bit longer. Learn the hard way but at least he might learn.” Young slapped both hands down hard on his desk. “Let me know how it goes with Blaine. Keep me informed.”
PRIOR WENT OVER IT ALL WITH ELDER BEFORE THE interview, making sure she was fully briefed. Elder himself would be watching, listening, unable to directly intervene.
After some deliberation, she had decided to take Anil Khan in with her; Khan was a detective sergeant who’d moved across from Charlie Resnick’s squad at Canning Circus, and, to Prior’s eyes, would have been a better candidate for promotion than Lewis Reardon, though she was sure his time would come.
Khan ushered Blaine into an interview room and then they left him there for close on twenty minutes, watching him fume.
“Mr. Blaine,” Prior said when she finally entered. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”
“If you’re going to drag me along here for neither rhyme nor reason and then abandon me without cause or explanation, you might at least have the good grace to apologize.”
“I just did.”
Blaine looked back at her sharply, but for once held his tongue.
“What it is,” Prior said, “there are one or two points from previous statements you’ve made that we’d like you to clarify.”
“Before we do that,” Blaine said, “just to be clear, it is the case that I am under no obligation to answer any question, should I choose not to?”
“None at all.”
“And I can leave at any time?”
“Absolutely.” Prior angled her head invitingly toward the door; other than that, nobody moved. The air in the windowless room was stale, the faint smell of disinfectant seeping from the corners.
“I believe,” Prior said, “when you were asked if you knew a Claire Meecham, you said that you did not?”
“That’s correct.”
“Despite her being a student of yours last year?”
“Was she, indeed?”
“A continuing education course in photography.”
“Well, if you say so, of course I’m happy to take your word.”
“This course, Mr. Blaine, it would have lasted how long?”
“Eight weeks would have been the normal time.”
“And how long would each session have been?”
“Two hours.”
“A dozen students? More?”
Blaine shook his head. “No more. A dozen at most.”
“And yet you still claim not to know Claire Meecham?”
Blaine smiled with his eyes. “The brain, it’s a funny thing. Attention. Memory. What, without willing it, we focus on and what we don’t.”
Prior nodded at Khan, who took out a photograph of Claire Meecham and pushed it across the desk.
Blaine looked at it carefully. “There,” he said, “you see, now that I look at it I do have at least a vague sense of having seen this person before, of knowing that face, but I would still never have been able to say for certain where from or when it might have been.”
With a last glance at the photo, he pushed it back toward Khan. “I’m sorry I can’t be of more help.”
Prior shrugged as if to say never mind and watched Khan sliding the photograph back into its envelope. “There’s one other little thing you can perhaps help me with,” she said, making it seem like an afterthought.
“If I can.”
“Your friend, Anna, why d’you suppose she lied?”
Just for a moment, behind his glasses, there was a look in Blaine’s eyes that didn’t show there often: the look of surprise.
“I’m afraid I don’t know,” he said, “what you’re referring to.”
“What I’m referring to is the weekend of April ninth and tenth, when, according to Anna Ingram, the two of you were at your family cottage in Dorset?”
Blaine sighed theatrically. “Dorset, yes. What of it?”
“Miss Ingram has changed her tale. She now says, rather than going with you to Dorset, she stayed here, in the city, and you went on your own.”
Blaine held his breath: two seconds, three. “I see.”
“So which version is true? Did you go together or, as Miss Ingram now says, did you go alone?”
Blaine removed his glasses and set them deliberately down.
“I went alone.”
“If that’s so, why did you want us to believe otherwise?”
“I didn’t.”
“You said...”
“No, no. Listen to me. Anna told me that, in a moment of confusion when she was being questioned, she said the pair of us had travelled down to Dorset together, as we more usually did. I knew she would be deeply embarrassed if I turned around and said something else. So I went along with her story. I couldn’t see that it was doing any harm.” He paused. “If I lied, I lied for her.”
“If you lied...”
“As I said, I didn’t think it really mattered, one way or another.”
“A woman was murdered.”
“And whether I was in Dorset with Anna or on my own bears no relevance to that whatsoever.” When he repositioned his glasses, they almost slid out of his hand.
“Let me ask you again,” Prior said, “why do you think Anna Ingram felt it necessary to lie about that weekend?”
“And I’ve told you, it was a mistake, natural confusion, a slip of the tongue.”
“I think she did it because she wanted to give you an alibi.”
“An alibi? What on earth for?”
“That weekend is the weekend Claire Meecham disappeared, the weekend she was murdered. And for some reason, I believe, your friend Miss Ingram thinks you were involved. She lied to protect you.”
Blaine laughed theatrically. “This is preposterous.”
“I’m sorry you think so.”
“A farrago of half-truths and false accusations.” He pushed back his chair. “You said I could go at any time?”
“That’s your right.”
“Very well. I shall exercise it.” Pushing the chair back further, Blaine got to his feet and, without looking at either Prior or Khan directly again, walked out of the room, out of the police station and out onto the street.
“What do you think?” Prior asked Elder moments later, when he came into the room.
“I think he was with Claire Meecham that weekend. I’m sure of it.”
“In Dorset?”
“I’d say so, wouldn’t you?”
“I think we should go back to Bernard Young,” Prior said. “See if we can’t talk him into changing his mind.”
BLAINE WENT STRAIGHT TO THE CASTLE AND SAID HE was there to see Anna; the man at the desk, recognizing him, phoned up to her office.
“She’s on her way down,” he told Blaine and smiled.
Blaine met her on the first landing, Anna’s expression changing when she saw the set of his face.
>
“Vincent, is something wrong?”
“You stupid, stupid woman. You stupid bitch!”
“Vincent!”
He struck her with the back of his hand and then again with the palm, the force of the blows so strong that, off balance and taken by surprise, she was spun around and, losing her footing, fell hard against the banister and then down half the flight of stairs.
Chapter 40
WITHOUT KNOWING WHY, ELDER HAD BEEN EXPECTING something a little more roses-round-the-door. Beech Cottage was more a house to his eyes than a cottage, though the name was engraved on a stone lintel above the door. Standing on its own on perhaps a quarter acre of land, within sight of the coast path leading out of Lyme, it was square, brick, the upper half of the front and side walls painted white. There were white curtains at the windows. Presumably, someone local was paid to keep the garden under control; shrubs, hardy perennials, a few late-flowering daffodils; the single beech tree at the farthest corner would block some of the sea view when it was in full leaf.
When they’d mentioned Dorset to Anil Khan, he had looked blank, and Prior had vowed to take him along; herself and Elder, two crime-scene officers, and now Khan.
Gaining access was a breeze.
“If Claire Meecham was here that weekend,” Prior told them, “there’ll be some sign. Even after all this time. Doesn’t matter how small.”
With infinite patience and painstaking care, whoever had been responsible for the deaths of both Irene Fowler and Claire Meecham had managed to remove or erase every trace of himself from their bodies or their clothes: But this was a whole house, where, they believed, Meecham had sat and walked, washed and slept.
“The bathroom,” Prior said to the scene of crime officers, “why don’t you start there? The bedroom next.”
“You got it,” one said. The bathroom first, what else did she expect?
They set to work.
Elder walked slowly through the downstairs rooms. At some point, he thought, much of the furniture from when it had been a family home had been removed. What remained was simple and plain, echoing the pale colours of the walls. Living room, kitchen, dining room; the dining room, at the back, was shaded from the light.
Instead of the walls being plentifully hung with photographs, as in Blaine’s Vale of Belvoir home, there were only three, arranged in a triangular pattern on the living-room wall opposite the door. Three photographs of Blaine’s mother, Margaret, he had little doubt: the resemblance was there. And not only that between mother and son. The longer he stood in front of the photos, taking in aspects of the mother’s appearance—her features, the set of her head—the more he noticed—no, it was not his imagination, not entirely—a resemblance between her and the first victim, Irene Fowler, a resemblance he had not noticed at first glance.
Elder was certain Blaine had taken the larger, central photograph himself, it was so deliberately posed: The similarity to the Stieglitz photograph of the woman in a cotton dress he had made a point of showing to Elder could be no mere coincidence.
And she is beautiful, of course, there’s no gainsaying that. Very beautiful.
Blaine’s words echoed inside his head.
He looked more closely at the photograph on the left, unusually in colour: Blaine’s mother when she was younger. She was wearing a plain blouse with a full, rounded collar, open to show off her necklace, a simple silver chain with a single pendant, a ruby stone in the shape of a teardrop.
The last time Elder had seen it, it had been around Claire Meecham’s neck.
AFTER LITTLE MORE THAN AN HOUR, THE scene-of-crime officers had found three hairs, darker than Vincent Blaine’s gray, in the U-bend beneath the bathroom sink. And then, almost an hour later, another, snagged on the hinge of the wardrobe in the main bedroom.
“All we need now,” Khan said, “is a match in the DNA...”
Prior scowled. “A DNA match places Meecham here at best; it doesn’t prove anything more; it doesn’t prove Blaine caused her death. All right, he can say, I admit it, I lied. I was slipping around, a little extracurricular activity on the side. A score of reasons for trying to keep it quiet.”
“How about the necklace?” Elder said.
“The necklace?”
“If I’m right.”
“If you’re right,” Prior said, “maybe there are hundreds of them, thousands, all made in Taiwan; the kind you get on the shopping channel, Ideal World or Bid TV, a bargain at nineteen ninety-nine.”
Elder had a momentary vision of Maureen Prior at home on the settee, just her and the remote.
“Okay,” he said, “and maybe they gave them away free inside packets of Shredded Wheat. But I don’t think so, do you?”
Prior grinned.
“Tell me honestly,” Elder said, “what we know, what we’ve seen, what we can surmise—you still don’t think Blaine’s guilty?”
“What I think doesn’t matter.”
“It’s your investigation, I’d say it does.”
“I’m not Lewis Reardon,” Prior said.
“Thank the Lord for that.”
“I’m thinking ahead: What we’ve got, is it enough to satisfy the CPS? If it is, then what happens next? What’s Blaine’s barrister going to do to us in court?”
“Maybe that’s not our concern.”
“Frank...”
“All right, okay, but we’re going to bring him in again for questioning, that at least?”
“We?”
Elder’s turn to smile. “You know what I mean.”
“You’re a civilian, Frank, remember? If there’s any bringing in to do, Anil and I will do it. Right, Anil? If he’s good, we’ll let Frank come along and watch.”
“I was hoping,” Khan said, “while we’re here, I’d get a chance to go down to the—what’s it called? the Cob?—some bit of harbour Meryl Streep walks along in that old movie, it was on TV...”
“Dream on,” Prior said.
ELDER WATCHED WHILE PRIOR AND KHAN KNOCKED AND rang and all three of them waited for Blaine to answer his door. It was late in the afternoon by the time they arrived back at the Vale, early evening almost, the sun, what remained, darkening like a blood blister over the horizon. High above the fields, the faint skeleton of the moon was visible in the sky.
“What do you think, Frank?”
Elder shook his head. “In town having a meal? Lecturing somewhere? Who’s to say?”
“That woman...”
“Anna?”
“He could be with her?”
“It’s possible.”
But when Elder rang Anna Ingram’s number there was no reply other than her recorded voice asking him to leave a message.
“So what do we do?” Prior said.
Elder shrugged. “Leave somebody here in case he comes back?”
They were both looking at Anil Khan.
“Oh, great!” Khan said. “Stuck out here without any transport while it gets darker and darker.”
“Not afraid of the dark, are you?” Prior said.
“Rumour is,” Elder said, “there are still wolves in the Vale of Belvoir.”
“Bollocks!”
“No, it’s true. Been a while since they attacked anyone, though. A few sheep, but no humans. Not recently, anyway.”
“I’ll send someone out,” Prior said, smiling. “Keep you company.”
“Get them to bring a pizza, yeah? Anything with anchovies. And a can of Lilt or Seven-Up.”
“Sweet, isn’t he?” Prior said.
Elder laughed.
WHEN ANNA INGRAM GAME, CAUTIOUSLY, TO HER FRONT door, it was immediately clear why she hadn’t answered the telephone. The lower half of her jaw, dislocated when she had been sent headlong against the iron banister at the Castle, had been reset and was now partly encased in plaster and wire. Her left elbow had been chipped and badly bruised when she was sent reeling down the stairs and her forearm now rested in a sling. There were other bruises to her face, the foremost of which
, a vivid purplish yellow, surrounded the lump above her right eye.
“Jesus!” Elder muttered, below his breath.
Anna Ingram’s hearing was unimpaired. “It will be a while,” she said, “before I can get around to turning the other cheek.”
The words sounded as if they were having to squeeze past a large stone in the centre of her mouth, and Elder could only just make out what she had said.
He followed her as she gingerly climbed the stairs. In the living room, she had arranged several cushions on the settee and she lowered herself carefully onto those.
“I’d like to think this was an accident,” Elder said.
Though it pained her to do so, Anna shook her head.
“It was Vincent,” Elder said.
This time it was a nod.
“I should have warned you. I’m sorry.”
Anna blinked.
“You’ll press charges?”
“What for?” It came out as “got gor.”
Elder nodded, understanding. “I don’t suppose he said anything?”
Anna tried to force her face into a rueful smile. “He said, ‘You stupid bitch!’”
“We’re looking for him,” Elder said. “He’s not at his house. There’s somebody there, waiting to intercept him, but they haven’t called.” He waited, watching her. “I don’t suppose you’ve any idea where he might be?”
She looked back at him with bruised eyes.
“His mother’s address,” Elder said, “you know what it is?”
After a moment, Anna Ingram stretched out her good arm and pointed to a pencil and a pad of paper on the table.
Chapter 41
SQUAT AND SOLID, THE HOUSE HAD BEEN BUILT FROM local stone that had blackened and weathered with wind and time. Turned away from the other houses and facing into the valley, it was at the farthest end of the village, the hills of Dark Peak massing at its back.
Once he had made up his mind what to do, what was necessary, Blaine had decided there was little need to rush. At Buxton he stopped for coffee before sauntering along to the opera house, where he spent some twenty minutes checking through the programme for the forthcoming season.
