‘Still, if you’d rather not talk about it …’ I said.
‘I don’t mind. Really! My parents are dead.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’
Lydia shook her head. ‘No need to be. They died when I was very young. It was a plane crash – their first holiday alone together for years. I was brought up by a maiden aunt. Then, when I was eighteen, she died too. And I moved to Warrington to work in a building society.’
‘I see,’ I said, unable to think of a more appropriate response. ‘And do you like your work?’
‘Hate it,’ Lydia said, matter-of-factly. ‘But we all have to do something to put food on the table, don’t we? Actually, if my father had managed his money better, I wouldn’t have had to work at all. He was quite well off when he got married – and Mother brought something into the marriage, too – but it seems that he had this terrible weakness for the horses.’ She paused. ‘Anyway, you were asking me about the fête.’
‘So I was,’ I agreed.
‘I hadn’t been there for more than a few minutes when I saw John,’ Lydia said. She looked up affectionately at my brother’s square jaw. ‘Saw him – and knew that he was the man for me.’
John laughed uncomfortably. ‘It wasn’t like that at all,’ he said. ‘Once I’d seen you, you didn’t have a chance.’
Lydia squeezed his arm. ‘If that’s what you want to believe, you go right on believing it,’ she said. She winked at me. ‘It’s always wise to leave your man with a few of his illusions, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose it must be,’ I agreed. ‘Shall we order the wine?’
Later that night, lying in the same bed I had occupied as a child, I did my best to put the evening in perspective.
My brother, it seemed to me, was absolutely besotted with Lydia – but how did she feel about him?
I wasn’t sure. She certainly acted as if she were in love with him, but was it any more than an act?
Wasn’t there a danger, I asked myself, that I might fall into the same trap as Martin Barnes – the man who should have become my father-in-law – had? He had hated me initially, and it was only later – when it became obvious to him that I really did love Jill – that his attitude started to change. Wasn’t it possible, therefore, that because I was so fond of my brother, I would automatically become suspicious of any woman he became attached to? And wasn’t there a further danger that I was comparing Lydia to Jill – a comparison in which any other woman in the world would come second?
I heard the church clock strike two, and realized that though it seemed only minutes since I’d got into bed, I must have been lying there for well over an hour – which could only mean that the problem of my brother had been bothering me more than I was prepared to admit.
Why was I worrying? I asked myself.
The relationship might well be over in six months.
It could be over tomorrow.
But what if it wasn’t? What if John decided to marry the girl?
Well, for all I knew, she might turn out to be an excellent wife. And if she didn’t, it wasn’t as if we were still living in the 1950s – divorces were both quick and clean now.
Of course, a failed marriage would hurt a sensitive soul like John, but then, I thought with an uncharacteristic edge of brutality in my mind, we all have to take knocks in this life.
The old church clock stuck three, and I finally began to feel sleepy. I plumped up my pillows and settled down for the night.
John wouldn’t marry her, I told myself as I closed my eyes. Though for very different reasons, he was as much a confirmed bachelor as I was.
I was still half-telling myself that as I drove up north for his wedding, twelve months later.
TWELVE
It was just after nine o’clock in the morning when Owen Flint dropped in on the village store for his morning’s ration of sugared sweets. After some thought, he chose a bag of Nuttall’s Mintos (with two tubes of Spangles as back-up), then set off up the High Street in the general direction of my brother’s house.
As he walked, he turned his mind to thoughts of Paul Taylor. There might be a perfectly simple explanation for the executive assistant’s disappearance, he told himself, but he distrusted coincidences, which was why he’d already put out feelers to every police force in the country.
At the top of the hill, he turned left along Church Street, following it until he reached the dirt track which went by the name of Smithy Lane. If he hadn’t been told that my brother’s house was halfway down the track, facing the bowling green, he’d never have guessed that was where John lived, because he’d formed the impression of him as a diffident man, and the last thing this house suggested was diffidence. It was not quite as big as Grandfather’s house, he thought, but it was close enough – and that made it the second largest house in the village.
Flint knocked on the front door, and though – given his experience with other Conroy gatekeepers – he was expecting the knock to be answered by some kind of servant, it was, in fact, Lydia herself who appeared at the door.
‘Do come in, chief inspector,’ she said in a tone that Flint would later describe as ‘gracious hostess’.
Flint’s initial impression of the large hallway was that it had been expensively furnished, and that it would have looked perfectly at home in the glossy pages of a magazine like Country Life. The living room gave him the same impression – it, too, was right rather than personal.
None of this surprised him, though what did come as a surprise was Lydia’s appearance. At the funeral, in her widow’s weeds, she had looked flat-chested and almost boyish. Now, dressed casually – or at least, as casually as anyone can while wearing expensive cashmere – it was clear that she was pleasingly rounded in all the right places.
‘It was good of you to find the time to see me,’ he said. ‘This can’t be easy for you.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ Lydia admitted. ‘But it has to be done.’ She gestured that he should sit down. ‘Can I get you a drink? Tea? Coffee?’
‘I’m fine,’ Flint said.
He sat down, and unlike my cousin Philip in a similar situation, Lydia sat down, too.
‘I suppose the first thing I should ask you, Mrs Conroy, is if your husband had any enemies.’
Lydia laughed in a way which Flint thought managed to be simultaneously gentle and slightly scornful.
‘If you’d known John in life, you wouldn’t have felt the need to ask that question,’ she said. ‘He was – how can I put it? – a completely harmless person.’
‘He was a businessman,’ Flint pointed out. ‘He must have rubbed some people up the wrong way.’
Another small laugh.
‘John wasn’t a businessman in any sense you’d recognize. His grandfather bought his company for him, and most of the business he did was with other branches of Conroy’s.’
‘Did he ever talk to you about having disagreements with any of his employees?’
Lydia shook her head. ‘He didn’t talk much about his work at all. I expect he didn’t think it would interest me.’
The phone on the table next to Lydia’s chair rang.
‘Will you excuse me for a moment?’ she asked.
‘Of course,’ Flint agreed.
Lydia picked up the phone.
‘Margaret,’ she said, ‘how kind of you to call,’ Lydia said. She covered the mouthpiece with her hand and turned towards Flint. ‘Margaret Wilson. We serve on several committees together. It shouldn’t take long.’
‘I’m in no great hurry,’ Flint told her.
‘What’s that?’ Lydia said into the phone. ‘Temporary leave of absence … No, thank you, there’ll be no need for that … I know you’re perfectly capable of taking the chair, and it’s very sweet of you to offer, but quite frankly, I think it will be best for me to keep busy … The autumn garden party? No, that will be going ahead as usual. We can’t let our personal grief stand in the way of raising money for those poor little orphans … Well, that’s
settled then. I’ll see you soon.’ She slammed down the phone. ‘The bitch!’ she almost screamed.
‘I beg your pardon,’ Flint said.
‘She’s wanted to be the chair of the fundraising committee for years,’ Lydia said, calming down somewhat, ‘and with me in mourning, she sees this as the ideal opportunity to snatch it away from me. Honestly, if I thought she’d be any good at it, I’d let her have it. Lord knows, the last thing I want at the moment is to sit through endless meetings.’
‘How did you and your husband get on?’ Flint asked.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I should have thought it was plain enough.’
‘Are you insinuating that I might be behind John’s murder?’ Lydia demanded.
‘It wouldn’t be the first time a wife had killed her husband, but no, that’s not what I’m saying,’ Flint said calmly, before popping a Nuttall’s Minto into his mouth. ‘Try to understand my position, Mrs Conroy. I’m looking for a motive here, and the more I can learn about the victims – what they were like as individuals, and how they related to other people – the better the chance I have of uncovering that motive. Clearly, then, anything and everything I learn might be of value. And that’s why I asked you about your marriage.’
Lydia nodded, somewhat mollified. ‘Neither John nor I were what you’d call passionate people,’ she said. ‘The earth certainly didn’t move every time we looked at one another, but we did love each other.’
‘I have to ask you this,’ Flint said apologetically. ‘Did your husband, as far as you know, ever have an affair?’
‘I think I can promise you that he never looked at another woman after he married me.’
Flint coughed awkwardly. ‘And what about yourself?’
‘What about me?’
‘Did you have an affair?’
‘Certainly not!’ Lydia said, with just a hint of conventional outrage returning to her voice. ‘I wouldn’t even consider risking my position in this village for the sake of a few cheap thrills.’
‘You say your husband has no enemies – is the same true of his brother, Rob? Is he the sort of man likely to work anyone up into a homicidal rage?’
‘I’m sure a few of his rivals in publishing hate him,’ Lydia said. ‘That would only be natural, especially after he was named Independent Publisher of the Year two years running. But that’s just speculation on my part, because I can’t honestly say I’ve seen enough of him to form a real opinion.’
‘I see,’ Flint said, noncommittally.
‘He hardly ever comes to the village,’ Lydia amplified. ‘Oh, he’s put in the odd appearance at the family parties – because that’s what old Charlie wanted, and by and large what old Charlie wanted, he got – but apart from that we rarely got together.’
Flint smiled. ‘You didn’t like the family parties much, did you, Mrs Conroy?’ he asked.
Lydia waved her hands in a gesture of dismissal. ‘Oh, I suppose they went as well as could be expected, considering they were made up of a group of people who had nothing much in common apart from blood ties.’
‘Tell me about Philip Conroy,’ Flint suggested.
‘There’s nothing to say, except that he’s spent his whole life trying to be a bigger playboy than his father.’
‘And what about your father-in-law, Edward Conroy?’
‘We didn’t have a lot to talk about – I like to entertain a great deal, and he was a solitary soul by nature, especially after his wife died – but I certainly never argued with him, and I don’t think anyone else did, either.’
Flint stood up. ‘I’ll not take up any more of your time, Mrs Conroy, and don’t bother getting up, because I’ll see myself out.’ He walked to the lounge door, then suddenly swung round. ‘Were you here in the village the night before your husband died?’
‘No, I wasn’t.’
‘Then where were you?’
‘I was at a health farm. It’s part of my regular routine. I go for the full treatment twice a year.’
‘Do you always go to the same one?’
‘No, I like to vary it.’
‘And where was the one you were staying at the night before the crash?’
‘It’s called the Middleton Health Spa. It’s outside Bath.’
‘In other words, it was very close to where your husband spent his last night alive.’
‘Don’t you think that hasn’t crossed my mind, too?’ Lydia said with some emotion. ‘Can you appreciate how dreadful it is to realize that, instead of him spending his last few hours alone, I could have been with him?’
‘Yes, it must be a very hard cross for you to bear,’ Flint said. ‘Thank you for your time, Mrs Conroy.’
As he walked down the lane that led back to the village, Flint took out his phone and dialled Sergeant Matthews’ number.
‘How are things going at your end, Matthews?’ he asked, when the sergeant picked up.
‘There’s very little to report, sir,’ the sergeant admitted. ‘We’ve got the results of the post-mortems, and there were traces of alcohol in Tony Conroy’s system, but – according to the doc – not enough to impair his driving. Other than that, there’s nothing worth commenting on – no trace of poison, no evidence of serious illness. It was the crash that killed them, pure and simple.’
‘What about the Bristol police?’
‘They’ve made a general appeal for anybody who might have seen something in the garage that night, but there’s been no response.’
‘John Conroy’s wife says she spent the night before the crash at the Middleton Health Spa, near Bath,’ Flint said. ‘I want you to drive down there and find out if she did.’
‘Do you suspect her?’ Matthews asked.
‘I suspect no one – and everyone,’ Flint said, in an Inspector Clouseau voice. ‘No, she’s not a prime suspect – she doesn’t look particularly devastated, but everyone reacts differently to death – but then again, we’d look complete bloody idiots if she did turn out to be the murderer, and we hadn’t even tested out her alibi.’
‘That’s true enough,’ Matthews agreed.
If I had really been the murderer’s intended victim, I thought as my train slowed down to enter Warrington railway station, then I was safer in Cheshire than I would have been in Oxford, where it was likely that my unknown enemy lived. But was I really safe anywhere? The killer had managed to reach us in Bristol, why should the village I’d been brought up in present him with any insurmountable difficulties? The only sensible course would be to go into hiding – but I had too many questions needing an answer to even contemplate that.
The train journey up had done my injured body no good at all, and when I put a little weight on my left leg as I walked towards the ticket barrier, shooting pains travelled from my knee up to my hip.
I stepped out into the forecourt. Once upon a time, either my father or my brother would have been waiting for me, but now they were both dead, and I hailed a taxi.
The trip to the village was just over eight miles. The first part of it was through the outskirts of the town. Then, after we had crossed the Manchester Ship Canal and passed by the golf course, we were in open countryside, and I found myself thinking of a summer day just like this one – though an eternity ago – when Jill paid her one and only visit to the village.
It had been the long vac at the end of our first year – and though we didn’t know it, our last year – at college. We’d agreed that she should spend some time with her own parents before she met mine. When we made the arrangement, it had seemed perfectly reasonable, but the second I was back in the village, I found myself wishing the weeks would melt away so I could get my ordeal over.
And an ordeal was what I expected it to be, because I had no idea what Jill would think of my family, and I fretted, as I tried to perceive them through the eyes of an outsider.
The closer her visit drew, the more I worried about her reactions. I told myself I was being stupid – if she married
anyone, it would be me, not the family – yet I couldn’t suppress the fear that her meeting them would cause her to see me in a new light.
The day finally arrived. I picked Jill up from Warrington railway station and drove her back to the village along the country lanes in which the hedgerows were a glorious summer green, and young birds, celebrating their new mastery over life, swooped joyously in the sky above.
‘Are you always this nervous behind the wheel?’ asked Jill, who had never seen me on anything but a bicycle before.
‘I’m not nervous,’ I said, surprised. ‘Why would you think I was?’
She smiled. ‘Oh, I don’t know – probably the fact that you’re driving so slowly.’
And I realized that she was right – I was driving slowly.
I was behind the wheel of my uncle’s Jaguar X-J.
‘Take it,’ he’d urged me. ‘You’ll soon learn, Rob, that nothing impresses the totty like a big powerful machine being put through its paces.’
And maybe I would have put it through its paces with anyone else as my passenger, but Jill was different. I didn’t want to impress her. I wanted, with every ounce of my being, to protect her and keep her safe – to lay down my own life for her, if that was what it took.
We had tea with my parents – who were as shy and withdrawn as usual – then walked down the narrow street which led to the church, and from there down the hill to my grandparents’ house.
It was Grandmother who answered the door. ‘So you’re Jill,’ she said. ‘Well, you’re even prettier than I imagined you’d be.’
I grinned at my girlfriend’s discomfort, but, in fact, I was feeling vaguely uneasy because, though I told myself I was being irrational, I had my strongest misgivings about Jill meeting my grandfather.
The problem was that I’d come to value the old man’s opinion over the years. And now I was frightened that he might disapprove of Jill. Or more to the point – if I’m being honest – I was afraid he’d spot in her some fatal flaw which I had previously overlooked.
Grandmother made us a second tea – despite our protests that we’d already eaten – and out of politeness we had to make a show of picking at it as we sat in the lounge and talked. The conversation flowed freely, but most of it passed between Jill and my grandfather. I had never realized before what a good listener Grandfather really was, nor how interested he could be in the answers. He treated Jill as if she were the most important person in the world, which of course – to me – she was.
The Company Page 10
