Cold Coffin (8 page)

“I understand that you heartily disliked Dr. Trent?”

Barlow stared at her, his jaw slackening. “Why should you say that?”

“Are you denying that it’s true?”

He looked down fixedly at his hands, and began picking at the quick of one finger. “Well ... nobody liked him that much. Nobody. He had a way of always acting superior, and sneering at people all the time.”

“At you in particular?”

Barlow flickered his eyes up to meet hers again, and Kate tried to read the look that lurked in them. Guilt? Anger? Or just plain fear at being treated like a suspect? He seemed about to say something, something explanatory, then changed his mind and resumed the keen study of his hands.

“No, not really,” he muttered.

“When did you last see Dr. Trent?”

“Packing up time yesterday. Five o’clock.”

“You left the lab before he did?”

“As it happens, yes.” He glared defiance. “Any reason why I shouldn’t?”

“And you’re sure you didn’t see him again after that?”

“I already told you.”

“Someone, Mr. Barlow, someone who didn’t like Dr. Trent,
did
see him last night. Someone called at his cottage, perhaps taking a bottle of whisky designed to look like a placatory gesture—after a quarrel, it could be. That someone then managed to persuade Dr. Trent to accompany him into the nearby woods, and there pushed him into the pond to drown. Could it have been you, I wonder?”

She watched every trace of colour bleach from his face. “It wasn’t me. No way. I had nothing to do with his death, nothing at all. I wasn’t anywhere near Trent’s cottage last night.”

“Then all you need to do is to prove it by telling me
where
you were.”

“I was with my girlfriend.”

“That’s ...” Kate glanced down at her pad as if for the name. A display of formality could often be unnerving to an interviewee. “... Sandra English?”

“That’s right. Sandra and I ... we spent the whole evening together. I picked her up outside the office block after work and we drove over to Oxford.”

“Oxford? Any special reason?”

“That was where I went to university. Nuffield College. I promised to show Sandra around sometime, and it was a fine evening.”

“Did you meet anyone you knew?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“So you looked around your old college. What then?”

“I suggested going to a pub for something to eat.”

“Which pub?” asked Boulter.

“The Cricketers’ Arms at Boscombe.” This was a large and popular hostelry, invariably packed with customers on a summer evening. “We had spaghetti bolognese.”

“You’re known there, are you?”

“Not exactly. We’ve been there once or twice before.”

“What time did you arrive?”

He shrugged. “About nine, I suppose.”

“Did you speak to anyone? Would any of the bar staff remember your being there? The waitress?”

“They were all pretty busy.”

“Did you see any friends while you were there?”

He shook his head. “No, we didn’t.”

“So what it boils down to is that you and Sandra can only vouch for each other. What time did you leave the pub?”

Another shrug. “Closing time. Eleven o’clock.”

“What did you do after that?”

Barlow gave her a defiant glare. “D’you want me to spell it out? She and I were ... together, right up until late. Then I dropped Sandra off at her home.”

“Where exactly were you together until late?” she enquired dryly.

“Over by Ampney-on-the-Water. There are places there where you can pull off the road.”

“And just how late was it that you left Sandra at her home?”

“It must have been a few minutes before one-thirty. I got to my digs just after then.”

“Can anyone confirm that?”

“You can ask my landlady if you want to. She was watching some late show on television in her bedroom, and I called out goodnight as I passed her door.”

“Then you went to bed yourself and stayed there?”

“That’s right.”

“Hmm! I’d like to talk a bit more about Dr. Trent. His personal life. What friends did he have?”

“Why ask me? I had nothing to do with him except just for work.”

“But surely ... the odd overheard remark, a telephone call he made or received while you were around.”

Barlow shook his head. “He didn’t seem to have any friends.”

“Oh, come now,” said Kate, and added sententiously, “No man is an island.”

“Well, Trent was—as near as anyone could be.”

“Did he never socialize at all? Never have a drink with anyone?”

A shrug. “I can’t say. I saw him in the local now and then ... not to talk to, I mean, I always took care to avoid him. I think Gavin wanted to be accepted as one of the regulars, but he always put everyone’s back up. He bragged about how he belonged to Mensa, and he just couldn’t stop acting as if he had a superior brain to the rest of us.”

“How about women?” asked Kate.

“He never talked about anyone.” A smirk. “My guess is that he had to pay for it.”

He’d deliberately spoken crudely, Kate guessed, to get a reaction from her. But she just asked mildly, “Have you any evidence to back up that guess?”

He shrugged a no.

“That will be all, then, Mr. Barlow. We’ll require a written statement from you, but tomorrow will do for that.”

As the door closed behind him, Kate instructed Boulter, “Go and fetch Sandra English in here, before Barlow has a chance to square their stories about last night. Quickly, Tim.”

When the secretary arrived, she looked scared. Kate smiled pleasantly to put her at her ease. Off guard.

“There’s something I should have asked when I spoke to you earlier, Miss English. Could you please tell me about your movements yesterday evening. I’m asking everybody, just for the record.”

Sandra, unlike most people faced with such a demand, was ready and eager to answer. “I went out with Roger ... Roger Barlow.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Well, at five o’clock when we finished work, Roger drove me to Oxford. I’d asked him to show me his old college. Then afterwards we came back to a pub at Boscombe for supper. We had spaghetti bolognese.”

“What did you each have to drink?” Kate tossed in.

“Er ... I had a glass of white wine.”

“And Roger?”

“He had bitter. A pint of bitter—I think.”

“Did either of you have another drink?”

That had thrown her. She swallowed hard, then said, “I ... I can’t really remember. I think we had the same again.”

“And after you left the pub? What did you do then?”

“Well ... we drove on a bit, then we stopped and ... and chatted.”

“I get the picture,” said Kate dryly. “How long did you ... chat?”

Colour flooded to her face. “I don’t really know. It was well past midnight when I got home. After one, I think.”

“You’re very fond of Roger, aren’t you?”

She met Kate’s eyes proudly. “Yes, I love him.”

“Well, thank you, Miss English. That will be all for now.”

To Boulter, when they were alone, Kate said vexedly, “We were too late, weren’t we? The story tripped off her tongue, just as Roger had agreed it with her. Except for the drinks they had, they’d forgotten to fix that, so she had to improvise. Those two have something to hide about last night, but whether it was murder remains to be seen.”

It was getting late. Kate decided that she would interview only the laboratory assistants who had worked most closely with Gavin Trent. The remainder would be seen by other detectives on her team. There were two women involved. The first, Rachel Pye, a bubbly dark-haired girl of about twenty, was agog with the drama of it all. The disappearance of the head of the firm, then a murder, and now a police investigation with her as an important witness! However, she had nothing useful to tell Kate.

The other woman was in her mid-fifties, Mrs. Violet Sneddon, and Boulter remembered her by name as being something of a colourful character from the days when his wife had worked at Croptech. She was a little round tub of a woman, with dead straight greying hair chopped off short just below the ears. Her plump wrinkled face was defiantly devoid of make-up. One shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, she said piously to Kate, but it hadn’t been a change for the better when Dr. Lintott had gone off to America and Dr. Trent was appointed in his place. Very fussy, Dr. Trent was ... had been. A bit over-fussy, if she told the honest truth. All the same, though, who’d want to kill him? It gave you the shivers to think that someone around these parts—possibly someone you actually knew—was a killer. Nobody deserved to be brutally murdered, not even a bad-tempered man like Dr. Trent had been.

“Bad tempered?” Kate prompted.

“Oh, well ... he could be. Only now and then, mind. Most of the time he was just sort of standoffish, as if he thought you were beneath him. Then all of a sudden, out of the blue, he’d sort of explode and start shouting. Mind you, in the past it had never been as bad as it was last Monday.”

“What happened on Monday?”

“He’d been a bit odd all morning, from when he first arrived. Specially odd, I mean. He hardly spoke a single word to anyone, and when he did it was only to snap at them. Then just before lunch time I was helping Roger ... Roger Barlow, to set up some equipment for a new experiment, and one of those big glass retorts got smashed. It was a pure accident, I was carrying the thing and Roger turned suddenly to speak to me and knocked it flying right out of my hands. It smashed to smithereens on the floor. Dr. Trent went nearly berserk, screaming at Roger and calling him a great clumsy oaf. It was horribly unfair, because it wasn’t really anyone’s fault. Just one of those things that happen now and then in a lab.”

“What did Roger Barlow say?”

“Not much. He started to, then he gave a shrug and walked away. Showing his contempt very plain, you know, and I didn’t blame him one bit. Poor Roger had an awful lot to put up with from Dr. Trent. For one thing, he never got the credit for developing a new technique for testing for toxicity which will save the firm thousands ... well, he reckons it will. He went and complained about that to Sir Noah, but
he
seemed to side with Dr. Trent. I don’t know the ins and outs of it all, but it did seem very hard on poor Roger. He’s a nice lad. A bit of a devil, but young men always are at that age, aren’t they? I know my two sons were. Still, when they meet the right girl they usually settle down. I’ve got three lovely grandchildren now, and another one expected any day.”

“When did this occur, about Roger developing the new technique? How long ago?”

“I can’t rightly say. It must be some weeks ago now, and Roger’s been grumbling about Dr. Trent ever since. And Sir Noah, too, about the unfairness of it all. Mind you, on Monday, I think Dr. Trent realized afterwards that he’d gone too far about that broken retort, because he muttered a sort of apology to me later on. He said that he’d had a bad migraine over the weekend, and it had left him feeling washed out.”

“Did he suffer regularly from migraine attacks?” asked Kate.

“Well, not that often. But now and then we’d see the signs, Rachel and me, and we’d take special care not to upset him. Once or twice he even felt so bad that he had to pack up early and go home.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Sneddon, you’ve been extremely helpful.”

Her heavy features registered alarm. “Oh ... I do hope I haven’t been talking out of turn. I mean, I wouldn’t want to get Roger into trouble.”

“Don’t worry. If everyone spoke as frankly and truthfully to the police as you have, our job would be a great deal easier.”

Before heading for home, Kate looked in at the newly set up Incident Room at the Aston Pringle station. A preliminary report from Scenes of Crime was on her desk concerning their investigation of Gavin Trent’s cottage. She and Boulter scanned it together, he reading it over her shoulder. Fingerprints other than Trent’s own had been found which were as yet unidentified. A notable fact, though, was that the whisky bottle and the glass on the table were devoid of prints. They’d been wiped clean. As had the back door handle, both inside and out.

“What are we to make of that, Tim?”

He scratched his ear. “The killer had handled those things, so he made sure we wouldn’t find his prints.”

“But see what it says, no sign of a struggle at the cottage. I reckon we were on the right track in thinking that Trent had a visitor that night who drank whisky with him, then somehow persuaded him to walk with him to that pond in the woods. After the killing, the assailant then returned to Trent’s cottage to remove any evidence of his previous visit.”

Boulter was looking excited. “So the guy had it all worked out in advance, even to slipping the bolt on the kitchen door so he could get back in without having to take the keys off Trent’s body.”

“It’s a theory that fits the evidence, Tim. Do we know if Trent had a woman to do his household cleaning? Have you sorted that out yet?”

“Yep.” Boulter flicked through a sheaf of papers, then handed one to Kate. “He used one of those domestic cleaning services. Apparently they send in a pair of cleaners to give the whole place a thorough going over. Not necessarily the same ones each time.”

Kate ran her eye down the report. “Last cleaned on Tuesday. Get the two cleaners interviewed to see if they can come up with anything useful. And you’ll need to get their prints to eliminate them. The same goes for everybody else who’s been sent there to clean. Now, what about Trent’s sister? Has she been informed of his death yet?”

He shook his head. “The Lancashire police tell us she’s away on holiday with her family. Caravanning. They’re trying to track her down.”

“This’ll put a damper on the holiday. Anything else?”

He was checking through the reports once more when the door opened and a PC looked in.

“Just to let you know, ma’am, that Mr. Richard Gower has been trying to contact you all day. He wanted to know where you were.”

“Huh! It’s not my job to feed information to the press. He’ll have to be content with official handouts, the same as the rest of them.”

As the door closed again, Boulter glanced at Kate curiously. He hesitated a moment, then ventured, “Maybe he just wants to make a date, guv. You could do with a relaxing evening after a day like today.”