Dead on Course (15 page)

Lambert said,
‘It may not do. I’m speaking generally rather than specifically, of course, but any statistician would tell you there is quite a high correlation between previous convictions and later, more serious offences. Criminal records are one of the best starting points we have in many investigations.’

‘
Even when the crime is quite different and much more serious?’

‘
Even when the crime is murder, Miss Peters.’ She gasped at the word, realising he had enunciated the very noun she had been reluctant to acknowledge herself. Without her recognising quite how it had happened, their positions were now reversed: Lambert was direct and aggressive after his earlier circumlocutions, and she seemed evasive by comparison.

As if to
emphasise her position, he said coolly, ‘As a matter of fact, there is a fairly high correlation between convictions for drug offences and subsequent serious crime.’

It was the first mention of the nature of her offence. She glanced for the first time at Hook, wondering how much this silent recorder had known. He might previously have been a statue, for all the attention she had given him, and he took care now to present his best sculptured impassivity. She looked suddenly tired as she said sullenly,
‘It was only for cannabis. And it was a long time ago.’

‘
And you weren’t selling it to others. As far as anyone could prove.’ There might have been a hint of irony in Lambert’s even tones, but it was impossible to be certain.

She flashed him a basilisk glance of pure hate, then cast her eyes sharply down, as if she
realised belatedly that they divulged too much. They were very beautiful eyes and she had used them countless times to manipulate men; it was disconcerting now to find them revealing so much she would have wished to conceal. She said, ‘I never traded. I was in the theatre, and everyone used pot then.’

He knew enough for that to ring true. But there was no reason why he should concede it to her now: his task was to unmask a murderer. Or murderess; but probably that was an outdated term in these days of equality. No doubt Ms Peters would call herself an actor.
‘Perhaps your companions did use pot. But it was a criminal offence, and you were found guilty.’

‘
I was only twenty-one. I haven’t been in court since.’

Her phrasing suggest
ed to an ear tuned to such protestations that she had been near to it on some occasions. But perhaps she was just unfortunate in her choice of words. The conviction was fourteen years behind her: that made her thirty-five. She looked it, but she was a woman whom the years enhanced rather than reduced, up to a certain point. Her figure had not thickened at the waist, her hair was still as dazzling as in her youth, her face not yet seriously lined. It was the kind of face that experience made more exciting as it built upon the blanker beauty of youth. Lambert said, ‘Did Harrington know about your drugs conviction?’

The abrupt transfer from her own problems to the central issue of the interview stilled the last of her truculence. Her troubled face revealed too much: they saw her consider whether to lie, decide against it, and say reluctantly,
‘Yes.’

‘
How?’

She shrugged the shapely shoulders automatically.
‘He knew most things.’

‘
And how did he come to know this one?’

‘
I don’t know.’ Now she was lying; her face set like a child’s, obstinate in denial yet not expecting to be believed.

‘
Was it not from your own lips?’

The green eyes, dark now with anger and apprehension, flashed to his for a moment, speculating on how much he knew.
‘It might have been. But I think he knew before—’

Her voice dropped away hopelessly. It was almost a mercy when he said gently,
‘Before what, Miss Peters?’

‘
I had an affair with Guy Harrington. I suppose you know that: you seem to know everything.’ She said it bitterly, and he made no attempt to deny it. An impression that the CID were omniscient was a most useful delusion to foster in the public.

‘
How long ago was this?’

‘
It ended four years ago last month.’

Very precise: he wondered what should be deduced from that.
‘And it had lasted for how long?’

‘
Seven months.’

Again the detail. He decided she must have expected this to come out and thought about her answers. It made him wonder how important the affair was in the case.
‘Did Mrs Harrington know about this relationship?’

He had expected her to b
ridle before now at his impertinence; she showed no sign of doing so. ‘I expect she did. She’s not stupid, and I wasn’t the first. Nor the last.’ Her smile was at her own expense, but it lit up the pale face for a moment. That face had no doubt caused anguish to many men in its time; now it seemed to be recognising the irony of its rejection.

That thought prompted Lambert
’s next question. ‘Who ended the affair, Miss Peters?’ She looked at him sharply at last, so that he added, ‘I’m sorry to probe so far, but you will appreciate that we need to know as much as we can about the victim’s past in a death of this sort.’

There was a touch of the contempt with which she had begun as she said,
‘I suppose so. But you’ll find this has nothing to do with it. Anyway, it was Guy who ditched me, if you must know.’

‘
I’m afraid I must. I appreciate your candour, Miss Peters, but I should have to ask other people about this if you refused to talk about it. It gives you, after all, a common motive for murder.’

‘
“
Nor
hell
a
fury
like
a
woman
scorned
,” you mean?’

He bowed his head in unconscious acknowledgement.
‘You have the quotation accurately, unlike most people who use the thought.’

‘
I appeared in Congreve when I was at drama school. I told you I was an actress, Mr Lambert.’

So he was wrong about that: she had chosen the term he would have used himself.
He must check any other assumptions he made about her. ‘About a fifth of murders in Britain involve what are loosely called “crimes of passion”. So we would be wrong not to investigate any possibility of that kind. Unfortunately for the perpetrators, it is a concept treated more sympathetically in French law than in English or Scottish courts. Why did Harrington end the affair?’

He had hoped to surprise her into some revelation by the abruptness of the question, but he did not succeed. She gave a rueful smile; it was not a habitual expression for her, but it made her look very attractive.
‘There was nothing very complicated about it. He moved on to pastures new. I knew I wasn’t the first woman he’d had, by a long chalk. And I’d had enough experience to know better. But we all think we’ll be different from the rest. Or at least that we’ll be cool enough to end it in our own good time. Guy took up with a girl in his office and laughed in my face.’

‘
Forgive me, but detectives can’t allow the dead to rest in peace. We have to build up a picture of a man who isn’t here to speak for himself. I must ask you what kind of man you think Harrington was.’

Again she gave that curiously unguarded smile at herself and her foolishness.
‘You don’t have to apologise, Superintendent. Guy was a bastard. Attractive enough, ready with charm and money when he wanted something. Women don’t acknowledge to themselves how important money is, you know. At the time you think it’s incidental, but it greases the wheels of an affair, especially in the early stages. Sometimes I’m not very fond of my own sex and the way we deceive ourselves.’

Lambert waited to see if she would enlarge upon this generality, but she merely looked at him wryly when he didn
’t immediately press on. Perhaps she thought she had pushed herself up the list of suspects by her bitterness about the dead man. He said, ‘How much did Mrs Harrington know of her husband’s activities?’

‘
As much as she cared to, I think. Marie is highly intelligent and pretty clear-sighted. I told you I think she knew all about our affair, though she chose not to mention it to me. Probably she knew it would run its course, like others before it.’

‘How much do you think she resented her husband’s activities?’

Meg Peters shrugged her beautifully rounded shoulders.
‘Impossible to say. I’ve asked myself that before: I’m not entirely insensitive to the feelings of others. I don’t know what there was left in the marriage, if anything. She doesn’t give much away.’

Lambert nodded. Just as much as she cares to, he thought, remembering the elegant grey-haired woman who had been so disconcertingly insistent on identifying the body at the scene of the crime. Both she and the woman in front of him would have had the will and the drive to push a man to a mortal fall if the spirit had moved them to it. He said,
‘I hope you will understand that I have to ask this. How serious is your present relationship with Mr Nash?’

For a moment he thought she was about to erupt. Then she relaxed visibly; how much this came from a conscious effort he was unable to determine.
‘Very serious. We intend to get married in two months’ time.’

‘
Will your wedding distress anyone?’

It was
curiously phrased, but she understood him readily enough. ‘No. Tony is already separated. I have no other serious commitments. No one will be anything but pleased, now that Harrington is dead.’ She brought the idea in almost as a challenge; her small chin jutted defiantly forward beneath the full lips.

‘
He didn’t approve of the match?’

‘
He approved of very little that he hadn’t arranged himself. And Tony was an employee. Guy was like a mediaeval lord of the manor where they were concerned. Thought he should control everything, from their religion to whom they married. Not that he concerned himself much with religion!’ she added as an afterthought.

‘
Why didn’t he want Tony Nash to marry you?’

‘
I’ve thought about that a lot over the last few months. I think he couldn’t bear that a former mistress of his, even a discarded one, should bind herself to another man. Not under his nose with one of his senior employees.’

She looked up at him anxiously, confirming his suspicion that there was more to this business than she had told him.
‘And what else had he against your marriage?’ he prompted gently.

The green eyes gazed steadily at her high-heeled shoes as she said,
‘I don’t think Guy liked the idea of his sexual preferences being leaked to one of his employees. Actually, Tony and I never speak of him, least of all in our more intimate moments, but Guy wouldn’t have understood that. He was always anxious to dig the dirt on anyone himself.’

‘
And there were things about himself that he wouldn’t have cared to reveal?’

‘
There are things about most of us that we wouldn’t care to reveal, Mr Lambert.’ For a moment it was she who was in charge and he the gauche stumbler among things he did not comprehend. She did not exploit it. ‘Guy was like a lot of sexually aggressive men: secretly ashamed of what he asked in the stress of passion. He was into bondage; he was titillated by chains and leather underwear.’

It was very quiet in a room that now seemed over-warm. Bert Hook, concentrating with all his will upon his slow round handwriting, found this did not blur the vividness of the visions of the opule
nt Meg Peters which thrust themselves upon his mind’s eye.

Lambert said,
‘And you think he was afraid you would reveal his preferences to your fiancé?’

She nodded; a red tress fell over her left eye, and she brushed it impatiently away.
‘I’m certain of it. And he thought Tony would have made use of the knowledge to get some kind of hold over him. He would certainly have done that himself in the same circumstances, and he couldn’t believe anyone else would behave differently.’

Lambert watched her closely as he said,
‘Harrington is emerging from the various conversations I’ve had as a decidedly unattractive character. A dangerous enemy, perhaps. Had he any means of harming you, beyond what we have already discussed?’

She looked at him in surpr
ise; above the turquoise of her blouse, he was sure he caught fear in those wide green eyes. For a second she studied him, estimating what he might know. Then she dropped her eyes again and said softly, ‘No. Nothing.’

He waited, stretching the moment, hoping the tension would draw her into something more revealing. He said with minatory severity,
‘It would be far better to tell us everything now, Miss Peters. You have already been very helpful.’

‘
Too helpful, it seems.’ She was almost back to her opening hostility. ‘All my frankness has done is to make you press me for information I do not have.’

There was enough actress in her for her angry disdain to carry some conviction, but she did not meet his eyes as she had done earlier. He was convinced there was something more, but equally certain that he would not extract it now, for her lips had set in a determined line. He wondered if any of the others in the group knew what it was that she was so anxious to conceal. It must be very personal, in view of what she had already revealed.