Mortal Taste (21 page)

‘I should be teaching now. There's someone losing a free period to stand in for me, and children aren't being taught properly.' She had produced aggression without making any conscious decision to use it. A good sign, that: it meant she was carrying the fight to the enemy.

Lambert studied her for a moment with his head a little on one side, for all the world as if she had been a naughty child in a tantrum. It seemed a long time before he responded, and she began to feel uncomfortable. Eventually he said, ‘It's a pity about that. But even education must sometimes take a second seat to murder.'

It sounded in that moment as if he was accusing her, and her words poured out like an angry denial. ‘I told you everything I had to tell last Thursday. This is a waste of time, for both of us.'

‘I think not.'

‘I was perfectly frank about my affair with Peter Logan. I came out and told you everything. Voluntarily.'

Lambert actually smiled into her flushed face. She found herself wanting to strike him. The smug bastard! She clenched her fists against her thighs as she sat on the upright chair, forced herself to listen carefully as he pointed out quietly, ‘Ms Phillips, your initial statement to our officer was full of lies. You told us about your relationship with a murder victim only after we had received information about the affair from a third party.'

‘Darcy Simpson! You put more faith in the tales told by that sad weirdo than in what I had to tell you. I told you, I could have him for stalking, if I could be bothered to report the creepy sod!'

‘Perhaps. Nevertheless, we had to check out information brought to us by a member of the public. Until Mr Simpson made his statement, you were withholding information in a murder investigation. Made you a lady of exceptional interest to us, that did, Ms Phillips.'

He was using the title she had told him irritated her on Thursday. Was he trying deliberately to rile her? But he must have spoken to dozens of people since then, so perhaps he'd simply forgotten. She mustn't become paranoid. Must behave here as if she'd nothing to hide. She wrinkled her retroussé nose a little, the movement which Peter had said always made him want to reach out and touch her. ‘I don't like “Ms”. It's ugly, in speech. If we can't have Tamsin, I'd prefer Miss Phillips.'

He nodded, taking away from what she had thought was a tiny victory with his patient smile. ‘When we saw you on Thursday and confronted you with what Mr Simpson had told us, you admitted to a serious affair with Mr Logan. Do you now wish to revise anything you told us on Thursday?'

He was treating her as a liar, picking his way around her with a careful choice of words and a tone of voice which might have come from a hostile lawyer in court. He had the air of a man who knows everything, who would be delighted if she now enmeshed herself in his net with further denials. But he couldn't know everything, could he? She said, ‘I've nothing to add to what I've already told you. And I would remind you that I'm here of my own volition, helping police voluntarily with their enquiries.'

There was a tautology there, born of her tension, which she was trying hard not to show. She looked from the superintendent's grey, unblinking eyes to the heavy features of that lumpish sergeant, and gave the man the most sudden and dazzling of her smiles. She was shocked when Hook said, ‘I should warn you that withholding or distorting information would be most unwise, Miss Phillips. Perhaps you should take a moment to consider your position.' He flicked his notebook to a new page and held his ball-pen at the ready, as if he expected much to be written before they left this quiet room.

Tamsin determined not to show how shaken she felt. She gazed for a moment at the ceiling, suddenly reluctant to use her wide black eyes on these men who seemed so impervious to their charms. She then looked not at them but over their heads as she said, ‘I told you last Thursday that Peter Logan and I were having a serious relationship at the time of his death. I told you when I'd last seen him and in what circumstances. I've nothing to add to that. That's not because I'm concealing anything. It's because there
is
nothing to add.'

There was a pause, which stretched until she could bear it no longer, and had to transfer her gaze back to Lambert's face. He was watching her as closely as ever, and when he saw the movement of her dark eyes he said quietly, ‘You didn't tell us that your affair with Mr Logan was over several days before his death.'

She wanted to fly at him, to tear his face open with the nails she now felt digging into her thighs as she strove for control. He was bringing it all back, those last, outraged exchanges after Peter had ditched her, the way she had flown at him in her flat, the way he had held her arms above her head so that they should not touch him as she yelled her fury into his face. She could almost feel his strong hands upon her wrists now, almost hear the obscenities she had spat point-blank at the wide mouth she had felt upon hers so often.

‘It wasn't over.' The words were so low that she scarcely heard them herself.

She looked up to check if Lambert had heard, found him raising his eyebrows as he said, ‘But hadn't Mr Logan set his sights upon someone else?'

‘Liza Allen, you mean? That wouldn't have lasted. She was just a young tart who flashed her legs at Peter. I'd have had him back. I wasn't going to let him go off with that little bitch, was I?'

‘I don't know, Miss Phillips. Tell me exactly what you planned to do when you found that Miss Allen had supplanted you in your lover's attentions, please.'

She was furious with his old-fashioned phrases, with the way he was probing her about this. Taunting her with it, wasn't he? Throwing that flashy young bitch's triumph in her face and enjoying it. ‘It wouldn't have lasted. She opened her legs and gave him an easy shag, that's all. He could never resist that, Peter. But I'd have had him back! He'd have bloody soon come back to me or I'd have—' She stopped suddenly and belatedly, aghast at herself.

‘Or you'd have what? Killed him for attempting to leave you?'

She almost rose from the chair in her anger. She wanted to fling herself upon him, upon either of these smug men, to release the anger she felt surging against the frail dam of her throat.

She fought for the control she had been so confident she possessed when she came into this room, but found herself still panting for breath. She caught a glimpse of the photograph of Peter with his wife and family, still on his desk where he had always kept it. They had laughed at the farce of that conventional picture together, but now the faces of his family seemed to be looking up and mocking her, claiming the last laugh after all on her pretensions.

It took Tamsin a long time to retrieve a measure of control. She said in a low, even voice, ‘Of course I don't mean that I killed him! It's ridiculous and melodramatic of you even to suggest it.'

‘Perhaps. But you have a history, Miss Phillips. Five years ago, you very nearly killed another man because he decided to finish an affair with you.'

She felt the hopelessness of her position. She could hear the despair in her own voice as she stared at Peter's desk and made the ritual denials. ‘That was different. And if it had been as you say it was, I'd have gone to prison, wouldn't I? But the matter never came to court.'

‘Because Mr Simpson refused to bring charges or appear as a witness. There was no other reason. This time we shall call him, if we need him.'

The wide black eyes which had brought her so many conquests were her enemies now, revealing her fear. She looked up into Lambert's calm, lined face, which seemed to her not to have changed its expression since they began. ‘What do you mean? What can bloody Darcy Simpson possibly have to say now?'

‘He will testify, if called upon to do so, that you have threatened him with a firearm. A pistol very similar to the one which was used to murder Peter Logan.'

‘What?' She heard a peal of laughter, mounting towards hysteria. It took her a moment to realize that it was coming from herself. ‘Darcy told you I'd threatened him, did he? Did he also tell you that he was making my life a misery with the way he followed me about? That the very fabric of my new life in Cheltenham was being threatened by this clown from the past?'

‘Do you deny that six months ago you threatened him with a firearm? That you told him that you would use it upon him, if he continued to track your movements?'

It was falling into place like a malevolent jigsaw. And she couldn't see what she could do to destroy the picture they were assembling. She tried to work up some spirit, to convey her feeling of mad farce running out of control. But her voice was flat and unconvincing as she said, ‘That's ridiculous. Darcy Simpson was never in any danger from me.'

‘Do you deny that you threatened him with a firearm?'

‘It was harmless. A replica. I waved it at him to try to stop him following me about.'

Lambert waited for her to look at him again before he said, ‘You can't expect us simply to believe that, after the string of lies and half-truths you've given us so far.'

‘It's the truth. I don't care whether you believe it or not.'

‘Then you should care. Your position is now very serious. However, there is an easy way to resolve this matter. You can produce this replica pistol. It won't prove that it was what you used when you threatened Mr Simpson, of course, but it would at least support your story.'

She could hear the scepticism in his every phrase, sense how he saw her wriggling hopelessly in the face of the facts. She looked down, caught the photograph of Peter and his family again in her gaze. Jane Logan's smile seemed to be mocking her now: the wife triumphant at the last over the mistress.

Tamsin said dully, ‘I haven't got it. I threw it away.'

‘When was this?'

‘I don't know. Months ago.'

‘A very convenient disposal.'

‘Except that it wasn't. If I had it now, I could show you how harmless it was.'

‘Maybe. Mr Simpson didn't think it was harmless. According to him, it had the desired effect. He stopped stalking you.'

She summoned up a smile, though she could not imbue it with the contempt she wanted. ‘Darcy knows nothing about firearms, Superintendent. He was very easily frightened.'

‘Not surprisingly, as you'd almost killed him with a knife on a previous occasion. Did you know where Mr Logan was going to be on the Monday night when he was killed?'

‘No. How could I? You know now that he wasn't seeing me any more.' It was the first time that she had admitted that Peter's rejection was final, even to herself, and it shook her more than she could have forecast.

Lambert's calm tones were inexorable. ‘You knew that Peter Logan was seeing Liza Allen, didn't you?'

She nodded, near to tears and despising herself for it.

‘And you know where she lives?'

Her first impulse was to deny it, but they had exposed her in so much that it seemed futile. She said softly, ‘Yes, I knew. I'd taken care to find out. Women like to torture themselves in these situations, you see.'

‘And you knew that Mr Logan was at a conference in Birmingham on that Monday?'

‘Yes. Everyone in the school did. It had been announced in the staff meeting. It was a feather in the cap of the school that he was speaking as an expert on secondary education.'

‘And you had conducted a liaison with Mr Logan yourself over several months. You would know his habits. Didn't it occur to you that he might take advantage of his day's absence from Cheltenham to visit his new lover before he went home in the evening?'

She wanted to deny it, strove hard to summon up the words to do so. But it was so exactly the pattern that their own affair had followed, so much Peter's habit to snatch time like this after a day away, that argument seemed futile. She would have been naive not to see the possibilities Lambert was suggesting, and naivety was not her thing. She said, ‘So I knew he might visit his little tart on that Monday evening. So what? It doesn't mean I waited for him near that park in Leckhampton and killed him.'

‘It means that you had the opportunity. You gave us a motive yourself a few minutes ago.'

She sought desperately for a reply. ‘You can search my flat. You won't find any pistol there.'

Lambert gave her a faint smile. ‘You would be very foolish if you kept a murder weapon at your residence. But we may need to search your flat, in due course. For the present, you can get back to teaching history to those children you were so worried about.'

Tamsin Phillips sat alone in Peter's room for minutes after they had gone, scarcely believing that they had not arrested her. Then she went across to the big desk and picked up the outside phone. The voice from the solicitor's office was reassuringly mundane when it asked what she wanted. Tamsin tried to echo its calmness as she said, ‘I think I may need legal advice and representation.'

‘It's high-profile, John, as we all knew it would be, this Logan murder.' Douglas Gibson stood and poured a cup of coffee for his senior superintendent, treating him like one of the local dignitaries with whom he seemed nowadays to spend so much of his time. Well, John Lambert would be a civilian himself soon enough now, unless the anonymous powers that be above them relented on their decision to retire him.

‘Yes, sir. I'm grateful to you for keeping the media out of my hair in the last week.' Lambert resisted the urge to enquire whether there was any news on his own situation. Much better to accept that he was going, that this would be his final case. He was here to report on the state of progress in his last murder case, and that is what he would do.

‘I haven't got an arrest for you, or even a prime suspect, as yet. But we've narrowed down the options.'

Gibson grinned. ‘You should be dealing with the media yourself, John. Does “narrowed down the options” mean anything or nothing?'