Remains to be Seen (15 page)

‘Varied'. He liked that word. Covered a multitude of sins, ‘varied' did. He put the plates to warm and called through to his wife that the meal would be ready in eight minutes. Might prise a smile out of Brenda, the idea that he could be as precise as that in his culinary skills.

She tried to eat, to please him, tried to keep up her end of the conversation he struggled so conscientiously to create. But it was no good. She eventually pushed her plate aside and said, ‘I'm sorry, Derek. I know you've worked hard with the meal, and it's really very nice, but I just can't eat at the moment. Leave the washing up to me and go and watch the football. I'll be better doing something.'

At seven o'clock on a Saturday evening, there was no football on the television, of course. That just showed how out of touch Brenda was at the moment. There was the usual Saturday night drivel, but he did not switch the set off. Silence would put yet more strain on his conversational skills and his powers of dissimulation.

Brenda came in after twenty minutes or so, glanced at the television set, and sat down with the paper. Derek watched her staring at the crossword; twenty minutes later, she had put in but a single answer. He said tentatively, ‘I know this is very hard for you, love, but you need to pull yourself together, somehow. You're going to be ill, at this rate.'

Brenda Simmons said with a sudden touch of venom in her voice, ‘Whereas you're going to be fine. You never liked Neil. You must be glad he's gone. I expect it's made your week.'

He tried to reassure her that it wasn't so, but he couldn't find the words to be convincing, and he shut up after a couple of sentences. Another ten minutes went by with them stealing surreptitious glances at each other whilst pretending to be involved with their own concerns. Then Brenda Simmons sighed and said, ‘I'm no company for anyone, at the moment, Derek, am I? Why don't you go down to the club and get yourself a game and a bit of cheerful company?'

He tried to conceal the way that his heart leapt at the suggestion. She couldn't know that he had been wondering how to propose just this. And she surely couldn't know that he had other reasons than a bit of banter with his friends to take him there.

Derek said carefully, ‘I don't want to leave you, at a time like this.'

‘You're serving no purpose here, are you? We'll only get irritated with each other, eventually. And I'll be all right – I'll probably be better on my own for a bit, in fact. I might have a little weep, when I don't feel the need to keep up appearances for your sake. And you need a change. That's if you're not too tired, after everything you've been doing in the house.'

‘No. No, I'm all right. I've not done much, you know. Been round with the vacuum and made a simple meal: just the sort of thing you dash off in a couple of hours without noticing.'

She smiled at him, trying to show that she appreciated his efforts, trying to conceal the fact that at this moment he was an irritant, that she wanted him out of the way, so that she could have the house to herself and her sorrow. ‘Get off with you, Derek Simmons. And remember you're driving home, and don't drink too many pints!'

She knew that he wouldn't risk being caught over the limit; it was just her way of dismissing him, and both of them understood it. He said, ‘I'll go for an hour or two, then. Give myself a change, and you a bit of space.'

He tried not to sound too eager, and yet he found himself out of the house and in the driving seat of the car in three minutes. He reversed the car carefully out of the garage, looked hard at the light behind the curtains as he drove away into the cool March darkness. She wasn't watching. He turned left rather than right at the end of the road, away from the snooker club, towards the other end of the town.

At the same time that Derek was escaping from the Simmons house, Percy Peach was feeling at a bit of a loss. He did not see Derek Simmons' car drive past him in the opposite direction as he drove along the Preston road, but there was no reason why he should. Percy had no knowledge as yet of what the stepfather of Neil Cartwright looked like, let alone whether he had any connection with the crime.

Percy was at a loss because Lucy Blake, who nowadays kept him company on most of his Saturday nights, had gone to a school reunion, despite all his frivolous suggestions that she'd be kept in detention or made to write essays. The devil finds work for idle hands, moralizers say. Percy wouldn't have put it as strongly as that. But as he passed the end of Tommy Bloody Tucker's road, he scented a little harmless mischief.

DCI Peach's definition of ‘harmless' was not quite the same as that of other and kinder people. He turned the silver Mondeo round at the next junction and drove thoughtfully back towards the residence of the Head of Brunton CID.

It was an impressive house, Edwardian and detached, with rhododendrons arching over the gates and a magnolia heavy with buds near the front door. Barbara Tucker opened the door when he rang and peered down two steps at the cheerful round face of her husband's
bête noire
. ‘Oh, it's you!' she said. Her disapproval was deafening.

With the light behind her, Barbara's formidable bulk at the top of the steps made her an even more impressive Brünnhilde. ‘You're looking radiant tonight, Mrs T!' Percy said. ‘Regrettably, though, it's your husband that I need to see.'

‘It's not convenient. We're going out. It's Saturday night, you know, and he's off duty.'

Percy decided that Tommy Bloody Tucker's talent for the blindin' bleedin' obvious had probably been refined by marriage. ‘We policemen are never off duty, Mrs Tucker. Your husband has often had occasion to remind me of that.'

She said with unconcealed distaste, ‘I suppose you'd better come in.' Then she went to the bottom of the staircase and yelled into the upper regions of the house, ‘Thomas! That Chief Inspector of yours is here to see you. On Saturday night.'

He's going to get a bollocking for this, when I'm gone, thought Percy happily.

Thomas Bulstrode Tucker had been trying and failing to tie on a black bow tie, so he was already irritated. He took Peach into a dining room without heat and said, ‘You'll have to be quick. We're going out. We're off to a dinner with the Chairman of the Brunton Police Authority,' he said self-importantly. He couldn't resist the opportunity to impress, despite his impatience to be rid of this annoying subordinate.

Peach was not a man easily impressed. ‘Be careful about the company you keep, sir. Do you want me to help you with that tie?'

‘No, I don't! Just tell me why you've come disturbing my weekend and then get on your way.'

‘Your orders, sir.'

‘My orders?' Tucker hoped fervently that Barbara was not listening outside the heavy dining-room door.

‘You said that I was to keep you fully briefed on the situation, sir. That this was a high-profile case and you wanted the latest information to be relayed to you at all times.'

‘I didn't mean at seven twenty on a Saturday night.'

‘Yes, sir. I'll make a note of that for future reference. Put it in writing for myself, later in the evening.'

‘Well, what is it?' Chief Superintendent Tucker had discerned a silver lining. He might be able to impress the Chairman of the Police Authority and other luminaries with the latest news on the case; he would make it clear to them that he had been working on this crime until the very moment he had to come to dinner with them.

‘There's still a chance that the butler did it,' said Peach portentously.

‘The butler?'

Peach thought that Tucker in a white shirt with a string of bow tie in his hand could still look appealingly like a distressed fish. ‘Doesn't call himself that, sir. But he's something similar. Thought you might like to stretch a point for your friends when you're holding them rapt with your account of the mysterious affair at Marton Towers. I'm told that in Agatha Christie the butler was often a leading suspect.'

‘Look! Get on with it and get out!'

‘Yes, sir. Admirably succinct, as is your wont. Well, Mr Neville Holloway is still in the frame. That's the butler, sir, though he calls himself something different. So is the victim's wife, sir. Rather a voluptuous lady, I think you'd find her.' He glanced thoughtfully towards the door and the Brünnhilde beyond it, beside whom Sally Cartwright was certainly sylph-like. ‘She didn't seem unduly distressed by having her husband burnt to a rather large cinder. Interesting, we thought.'

‘This could have waited until Monday.'

‘Your orders, though, sir. Too conscientious for your own good. Never really away from the job. And there is one thing that I needed to warn you about.'

‘And what would that be?' Tucker's voice was ominously steady now.

‘All the employees up there seem to have been in trouble with us boys in blue, sir. Several of them have done time, and all of them seem to have been questioned in connection with previous offences.'

‘And why do I need to know this, at the moment when I am preparing to attend an important function on a Saturday evening?'

‘Didn't want you embarrassing yourself, sir. Didn't want you unwittingly suggesting that any of these people might make sturdy members of your Lodge.'

‘Don't be ridiculous. The only man who might even be considered for the brotherhood is the man in overall charge at Marton Towers, the man you so witlessly refer to as the butler, and even he—'

‘Neville Holloway, sir.'

‘Well, it's just possible that a man like him might be—'

‘Fraudster, sir.'

‘He is?'

You'd know that, if you'd kept in touch with the case. If you weren't such an old fraud yourself. ‘Done years inside for it, sir. Came out seventeen years ago. Been going straight since then. So he says.'

‘If this is all you've come to say, then you can be on your way. We're just about to—'

‘About to go out junketing with the Chairman of the Police Authority, yes, sir. Well, I shan't detain you any longer. Just thought you'd like to let the big man know that we're ceaselessly in pursuit of criminals, even on Saturday nights.'

Tucker said, ‘I shall certainly let Henry Rawcliffe know that. I'll tell him all about your efforts in this high-profile case.'

Percy knew that he wouldn't do anything of the sort. The only person mentioned favourably to Henry Rawcliffe would be Chief Superintendent Tommy Bloody Tucker himself. But if the rumour he had heard that morning about the Chairman of the Police Authority had anything in it, that suited Percy down to the ground.

Barbara Tucker was checking the string of pearls on her ample neck when he emerged into the hall with his chief. Someone should surely tell her that orange wasn't the right colour for an evening dress on one of her splendid proportions. It would take a much bigger man than Tommy Bloody Tucker to do that; a latter-day Siegfried would be required.

‘Enjoy your evening!' Percy Peach called from the darkness, as Brünnhilde shut the front door firmly upon him.

There was no one in at the house when Derek Simmons got there. He waited outside the shabby front door in the car for twenty minutes, in the faint hope that the man he wanted to see would come back. Then he saw the woman who lived next door peering out at him suspiciously for the second time, and knew it was time to go. The last thing he wanted was to have her ringing the police. He would have to hope he could buttonhole his friend in the more public setting of the snooker club, after all.

The club was crowded on Saturday night, but he got a game within twenty minutes. ‘Don't usually see you on a Saturday,' said his opponent, as he potted the first black of the frame.

Derek said a little too loudly, ‘No. Sunday's my night. I'm here every Sunday. Quieter than Saturdays. I'm invariably here for most of the evening, on a Sunday.' The more people around here who were made aware of that, the better.

It was a scrappy game. Derek was quite a skilled player, and his opponent, knowing he wasn't up to the same standard, played a cagey safety game and waited for his chances. As he left the cue ball near the bottom cushion for the third time in a row, he said, ‘You fully retired now, Derek?'

‘Yes. I do a bit of part-time, though, when people want plans drawn for extensions and the like.'

‘Consultancy.'

Derek grinned. ‘That's what you'd call it, if you'd retired from a high-powered job in industry. It means I do the odd small job, to bring in a bit of beer money and keep me out of mischief.'

He tried to focus on the game, but he couldn't concentrate when he wanted to. He was watching the door all the time to see if the man he wanted to see would come into the club; it was so crowded that he was afraid of missing him. The decibel level was rising with each passing minute. The Rovers had won that afternoon, and there was much lively discussion of the merits of various players.

Derek eventually missed a crucial brown, which he would normally have potted without difficulty, and his opponent gleefully finished off the frame on the pink. He was happy enough to go back to his friends and relate the details of his triumph over the formidable Derek Simmons.

And Derek was happy enough to be rid of him, for he had spotted the man he had come here to speak with. Harry Barnard was a lean man, with an even leaner head and a pencil-thin moustache of the sort sported by Hollywood stars in the nineteen fifties and sixties. He was one of those men who had never moved on from the fashions of their youth. At this moment, Derek Simmons found such permanence quite appealing. A man who did not change his appearance might be solid and reliable, once he had given his word.

He bought two pints of bitter and shepherded Harry away from the group beseeching him to play dominoes and into the far corner of the huge room. They sat down together on the bench which overlooked the snooker tables. They would not be disturbed here. Those who were playing snooker were immersed in their game, and all those who were not playing snooker were busy drinking and exchanging insults and cheerful laughter at the other end of the club.