Just Desserts (24 page)

She felt herself reddening, tried to keep the anger out of her voice as she said to him, ‘Of course he was serious! Do you think I wouldn't have known in an instant if there was anything phoney about the plans we were making together?'

He was not at all embarrassed. In an ordinary conversation, a man would have been rushing to apologize for the suggestion he had made, to rescue himself from a gaffe before it became a social disaster. But this was no ordinary conversation, and she should have adjusted to that by now. He raised an eyebrow at her reaction, then said, ‘We only know Patrick Nayland through other people's impressions of him. We have had to build up a picture in the last week from what the people who lived with him and worked with him have told us. He has not emerged to us as a man who went in for lasting sexual relationships, as a man who would give up his marriage for an affair. You are giving us a different picture: we have to weigh your view against other people's recollections of a man who cannot speak for himself.'

So other people had been yapping, had been mouthing off about things they knew nothing about. She wondered who. But she mustn't be diverted into that now. She must give all her attention to this man with the long, lined face and the dutiful dolt at his side, who watched her and made an occasional note. ‘I was closer to Pat than anyone. My view should count for more than these others you have spoken to. And I can assure you, he was very serious about me!'

‘He was a reformed character, then.' For the first time, and then only for an instant, he took his eyes off her and looked at Hook beside him, as if the two were mentally comparing notes.

She wanted to flay his visage with her nails, to tear away the smugness with which he seemed to be treating everything she said. But she controlled herself, trying not to reveal the effort that cost her. ‘I'm not a fool, Superintendent. I knew Pat had a certain reputation for the way he treated women. I was cautious at first, even fended him off. But he convinced me that he was serious. And I am not an adolescent girl. As a divorcee, you get lots of offers from men who spot a bit of spare, who think you must be desperate for sex. You have to learn to look after yourself. I have acquired a certain judgement in these things.'

It was a good argument. Convincing even, except to policemen who had learned to be cynical about such protestations. Love, even infatuation, could soon unbalance judgement. ‘So you are quite certain that once Mr Nayland had begun a serious affair with you, he made no other sexual advances.'

She let herself go now. ‘Of course I'm sure of it! Do you think that if Pat had put his hand up anyone else's skirt, I'd still have been there for him? What kind of woman do you think I am?'

Lambert was not at all put out. He smiled at her and said, ‘We are still finding that out, Mrs Moss. Because, as I have to remind you, you concealed a considerable amount about yourself at our first meeting. We now find you are a spirited woman, with the kind of reactions you have just declared. A woman who might even have killed a man, if he had been telling her less than the truth about his intentions.'

It was stated so calmly that it took a moment for her to realize that he was giving her a motive for Pat's murder. She told herself that it was natural enough, that she had expected this from the start. She had not expected it to be so baldly and calmly stated. She tried not to show how shaken she was feeling as she said, ‘I suppose it's logical for you to examine such possibilities. I can only tell you again that I had every confidence in Pat, in his intentions, in our future together.'

She felt her breathing uneven, shaking her whole body. She expected that he might press her further on this, but he merely nodded two or three times. It was Hook who said, ‘You clearly knew much more about Patrick Nayland and his plans than you were prepared to reveal at our first meeting with you. What can you now tell us about his relationship with his General Manager?'

She looked into the weatherbeaten countryman's face, found the blue eyes watching her as keenly as his chief's had before him. She was trying to determine what her tactics should be now, with the transference of attention from her to others, but she found it difficult to think as clearly as she wished to under the intense scrutiny of these two pairs of unembarrassed, acutely interested eyes. ‘Chris Pearson? Pat trusted him. They got on well together. Surely other people must have told you this?' She waited for a comment, for some snippet which would offer guidance to her, but they gave her none. ‘They didn't have many disagreements.'

‘But they had some.' Hook made it a statement, leading her on, implying that she had started on something here.

She couldn't think how he had contrived that; perhaps he was rather more than the dutiful dullard she had decided upon. ‘Occasionally they disagreed, yes. Usually it was when Chris wanted to push ahead too fast. Pat said it was easy to have grandiose plans, when you weren't spending your own money.'

‘Mr Pearson wanted to stretch the course from nine holes to eighteen, didn't he?'

They knew about that then. She wondered who had told them, how much else they knew about the personalities involved, how people had spoken to this inquisitive pair about her.

Then she remembered with a shock that she had told them herself. It was a reminder of how very careful she needed to be now. ‘Yes. Pat planned to expand too, but Chris was more impatient. Pat said he wanted to see a healthy profit from the nine-hole set-up before he moved on to eighteen. That the project must generate its own income for expansion.' She brought out that phrase from the past and could almost hear Pat saying it.

‘And this was one of their major sources of disagreement?'

‘Yes. As a matter of fact, I heard them having a bit of a row on the day before Pat died. I imagine that it was about that.'

‘But you aren't certain.' Hook's tones were as slow and measured as earlier; he gave no sign of his excitement, no clue that they had heard nothing of this dispute until this moment.

‘No. I heard raised voices in the office whilst I was working in here. I remember it clearly because Chris was shouting at Pat. I don't think I'd ever heard that before.'

‘But you don't know what they were arguing about.'

‘No. The dispute went on for about ten minutes, I suppose, and they both looked pretty heated after it was over. But neither of them spoke to me about it afterwards. Pat would no doubt have told me in due course, but I didn't see him alone again before he was killed at Soutters.' She hadn't meant to say all that, but it was out before she could stop herself, and she had delivered the words without breaking down.

‘Did anyone else have a reason to want Mr Nayland out of the way?'

It was a curious phrase, that, ‘out of the way'. She had a feeling Lambert would have been more direct. But Hook was just as searching, in his gentler way. ‘No. Well, Alan Fitch didn't like him. But that's different from wanting him dead, isn't it?'

‘Indeed it is. But we have to be interested, nevertheless.'

‘Well, he doesn't say much, Alan. Not to anyone, unless it's to Barry Hooper. But he did tell me to be careful, a couple of weeks ago. He said the leopard didn't change his spots. He was talking about Pat.'

It was the very phrase about Nayland that had come from a very different source, DI Rushton. It had been repeated by Chris Pearson, who had known Nayland as well as anyone. They wondered as they drove away from Camellia Park whether Joanne Moss had eventually come to a bitter acceptance of that view.

E
leanor Hook and Christine Lambert were agreed. Their husbands were not going to wriggle out of the treat, just because they were a week into a murder case.

The women had booked the seats for the performance of
Die
Fledermaus
at the Malvern Theatre months ago. December the twentieth was Bert Hook's birthday, and this was just the right sort of entertainment for the period before Christmas: lighthearted, not too demanding, and yet with enough good tunes and splendid singing to keep everyone interested. The men needn't dress up; they could even wear sweaters if they must. But they must take their wives to the theatre and celebrate Bert's birthday with an outing.

The evening beguiled but did not distract either of the CID men. The operetta was about a celebration, for a start. This was a more elaborate and extended celebration than the one at Soutters Restaurant which had ended so dramatically exactly a week earlier, but nevertheless for the CID men events on stage held overtones of that memorable night.

Die
Fledermaus
has a comic jailer to get the evening off to a good start, a non-singing part which might have been calculated to go down well with policemen, who tend to think they know a thing or two about such people. And the core of the plot involves a masked ball, with all sorts of deceptions going on. It is half a joyous romp, half a satirical swipe at a corrupt society: just the sort of mixture to appeal to seasoned, cynical detectives.

John Lambert found himself wondering about the motives for deceit, about the mechanics of duplicity, about the seeming willingness to be gulled of those who swallowed the deceptions. Over their interval drinks, he and Bert compared notes about the morning's interview with Joanne Moss, about how much they could accept of what she had said to them that day.

Eventually, Eleanor Hook overheard their muttered conference and brought it to an abrupt end. She encouraged her husband to talk about sopranos, which he did with a surprisingly comprehensive knowledge, and about the advantages of the Viennese lilt to Strauss in his operettas. Christine Lambert listened and was filled with admiration. ‘On the timetable at Barnardo's was it, Bert, opera singing?'

Hook grinned. ‘If you listened to anything but pop groups, you were highly suspect then. It wasn't much better when I was a young policeman in the section house. They thought you were probably gay if you listened to classical CDs! It wasn't until Pavarotti and the three tenors and Nessun Dorma at the World Cup that coppers were allowed to like opera singing.'

He proceeded to discuss different versions of the Czardas in
Die
Fledermaus
, totally unconscious of the contrast between his village-bobby exterior and the erudition he was exhibiting. John Lambert knew that this disparity between appearance and reality, between Hook's stolid exterior and the active, imaginative brain beneath it, had stood them in good stead again today, when he was pretty sure that Joanne Moss had underestimated Hook.

During the second half of the operetta, the extravagant costumes and the luscious music of the ball on stage, not to mention the multiple intrigues and resolutions of the plot, should have taken up his full concentration. Instead, Lambert found his mind constantly straying to what they had to do in the days to come, to the people they still had to confront with new knowledge, to the conflict they had heard about between the dead man and his General Manager, Chris Pearson.

In retrospect, Lambert thought that it was probably at that beguiling moment when the entire company joined in the waltz from
Die
Fledermaus
that the identity of the murderer of Patrick Nayland came to him.

Thirty-six hours after he had been eased out from beneath the pantechnicon, Barry Hooper was fit to be interviewed by detectives. Modern medicine has its disadvantages as well as its blessings.

The delicate black hands looked curiously fragile as they lay without movement on the very white hospital sheets, like the hands of someone who worked all day at a desk rather than on the various tasks of golf-course maintenance. The dark brown eyes in the too-revealing young face filled with fear when he saw who his visitors were. ‘I panicked. I knew I was going too fast, but I couldn't seem to do anything else.' He addressed his remarks automatically to Bert Hook, whom he remembered from their first meeting as the more sympathetic of the two, a man who had ridden motorcycles himself in his youth.

‘It's a good bike, the Ducati 620,' said Hook. ‘But dangerous, in the wrong hands.'

‘Is it a write-off?' Even now, when he knew he must watch his every word, Barry couldn't resist the query about his beloved machine.

‘It's been taken into a garage and examined with a view to charges by our forensic people. I hear it's repairable.' Despite himself, Hook found himself smiling at the pathetic relief on the slim black face. ‘But you won't be riding anything for quite some time, lad.'

Barry had memorized all the ward sister had told him about his condition. ‘I've got a broken leg and a broken collar bone, and a couple of cracked ribs. They thought at first that my pelvis might be smashed, but it's only severe bruising. I was really very lucky. I might be out in a week or ten days, with luck.' He listed his injuries carefully, almost proudly, managing that peculiar male feat of sounding as if his survival reflected some sort of credit upon himself. He looked at the drip above his head, at the multiple medical equipment around his bed, as if he could scarcely believe his luck.

‘You'll need to be able to move about and fend for yourself before you're fit to leave,' said Hook automatically. He thought of the tiny shabby room in that rabbit-warren of a house in Gloucester, of the difficulties of being an invalid in an anonymous, uncaring, squalid place like that.

‘Alan Fitch and his wife came in to see me last night. They say I can go there until I'm able to look after myself.' Hooper announced it with a proud wonderment. Bert, who remembered the first time when someone had invited the young Hook into their home, understood perfectly that delighted response to a kindness which seemed almost miraculous.

He didn't remind the man in the bed that such a convalescence would be dependent on neither of the men being behind bars by then.

Lambert thought the preliminaries due to an injured man had gone far enough. He said caustically, ‘You're in trouble, Mr Hooper, apart from your injuries.'