Remains to be Seen (29 page)

Neville Holloway said, ‘At the moment, I've got two gardeners coming in part-time, to ensure that things don't get out of hand. If our new venture takes off and we become a little clearer about what the future holds for Marton Towers and for all of us, I might be able to consider a full-time employee for the estate work, but at present the funds won't run to it.'

There followed a discussion of the kind of money they needed to raise from their new enterprise, which naturally interested all of them because their futures depended on it. It was Sally Cartwright who eventually raised the factor which none of them had chosen to mention. ‘We'll be able to plan developments properly once we get the police off the site and we can think about restoring the stable block.'

They looked automatically towards that black-edged and ugly gap in the long, low regularity of the auxiliary building which had housed the recent dramas, and at the adjacent spot where the police had established what they called a Murder Room to accommodate their enquiry. Then, almost as if they were operated by one brain, the four pairs of eyes swung back towards the more cheering spectacle of the grandeur of the long drive up from the gatehouse, as it ran between the twin rectangular lakes, with their water-fowl and the water-lilies showing their first green of the season.

At that moment, as if answering a cue in a film, a police car turned in between the high, distant gates and moved steadily up the tarmac towards the mansion. They heard the sound of tyres on gravel in the sudden prevailing silence, watched DCI Peach and his driver, DS Blake, leave the vehicle, and exchange words with each other which the watchers could not hear.

Then, almost as if he knew they were assembled in Holloway's office, Peach turned and raised his dark eyes in a long, unblinking look at the window beside the pillared entrance at the top of the steps.

He was with them in thirty seconds, during which no one spoke. As the detective stood in the high doorway of the panelled room, Holloway explained a little nervously, ‘We've been planning what we can do to raise revenue and secure our futures. To allow the public access to this wonderful site and do a little to return it to the community.' He threw in a couple of phrases from the publicity brochure he was planning.

‘Admirable,' was all that Peach said, in such a neutral and preoccupied tone that it was impossible to determine whether he was being ironic. ‘In the meantime, I need to have words with Mr Naylor.'

‘I do hope you're not planning to deprive us of our chef,' said Holloway with a smile and a return to something like his normal panache. ‘Mr Naylor is integral to our plans; we confidently expect him to be the star turn of many future wedding celebrations. But we've finished this morning's meeting. You may have my office for your little talk with James, if you would like it.'

‘We'll do it in the Murder Room, I think,' said an unsmiling Peach. His tone permitted no discussion, and the others watched James Naylor leave the room with as good a grace as he could manage. They saw him crossing the gravel a few seconds later, moving unevenly as his trainers slid over the yielding surface, casting a last glance back towards the room he had left and his wife's white face at the window.

The officers left Naylor on his own for a good five minutes with just a uniformed constable sitting silently in the corner of the room, knowing that an already nervous man would only become more edgy with the waiting.

Even when they came into the room, they positioned themselves unhurriedly opposite James Naylor, as he sat awkwardly on his hard-edged upright chair, and stared at him impassively for several seconds. Eventually, his nerve broke and he said, ‘Can we get this over with quickly, please? There are things in the mansion that I need to be getting on with.'

Peach gave him his predator's smile. ‘How long this takes is very much in your hands, Mr Naylor.'

‘I – I don't see how that can be.'

Peach waited for the eyes which were flashing their gaze wildly around the room to come back to his, as he knew they must do. ‘I mean simply that a confession would simplify matters, for you as well as for us.'

James Naylor tried desperately to stem the pulses he felt racing in his head. They couldn't know anything they hadn't known before, surely. No one would have shopped him, would they? Surely no one
could
have shopped him? The police hadn't charged him with anything. They must surely be bluffing. He fancied he could feel the blood rushing into his face, then draining away, but that must surely be no more than an illusion. Chefs were used to the heat of the kitchen, lived with it all the time. But this was a greater heat than he had ever felt in his life.

He said, ‘I'm not going to confess. You've got the wrong person here.' He wanted stronger words, but they would not come to him.

‘I don't think so, Mr Naylor. You gave yourself away, you know.'

He knew it. He'd never in his life been confident with words, and now they'd let him down, in this, his greatest crisis. James Naylor felt in his heart that the game was up even as he said woodenly, ‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘You knew that the body of Neil Cartwright had been stowed away in the room above the office where the fire was started. That was information which could only have been possessed by the man who killed him.'

‘No. You're mistaken. I never knew that.' He heard his voice rising in panic, and was powerless to control it.

‘You told us about it when we saw you on Wednesday, Mr Naylor. We reminded you that you knew all about the geography of this place, and you then maintained that other people as well as you knew the place where the body had been hidden. But apart from us, only Neil Cartwright's murderer knew that the body had been hidden away like that.' Whereas the chef's voice had risen towards hysteria, Peach's tone seemed to become ever calmer and more confident with his announcement.

‘No! No. I told you about my Michelle's affair with Cartwright on Wednesday, that's all. Nothing more.' He wanted it to be true, wanted to state it again in different words, to shout it at them, as if by repetition he could make it true. But words as usual were not his friends.

Peach was inexorable. ‘We knew that the body had been stowed away in that locked room for three days before Wednesday night's fire. The information was not revealed to anyone else. It was not contained in any of the bulletins released to radio, television or the press.'

This man whose dark eyes never seemed to blink found words easy, was able to torment his victim with them, whereas James found it so hard to summon the phrases he needed. It was unfair. James fought the unfairness of it, struggled against the urge to throw in his hand and have done with it. ‘I didn't know about it. I didn't say that I did. You must be mistaken.'

Peach said calmly, ‘Recall Mr Naylor's words to him, will you, please, DS Blake.'

Lucy flicked over the pages of her small notebook to the words she already knew by heart. ‘Mr Naylor, you said to us on Wednesday morning, “Other people as well as me knew the room where the body was hidden before the fire”. No mention had been made by any CID officer of the body of Neil Cartwright being hidden in such a manner.'

Now her eyes as well as Peach's were on him. They were soft, green, almost sorrowing, it seemed to James. They made him feel as he looked into them that all further resistance was futile, that confession would from now on be the best option for him, as well as for them and everyone else concerned. Including Michelle. He thought of his wife's face, regular and pretty beneath her black hair, so different from the softer beauty of this face in front of him, with its colour and its suggestion of freckles within the frame of chestnut hair.

James Naylor looked deliberately away from DS Blake's persuasive face, down at the carpetless floor. His words surprised him as well as his listeners as he said, ‘Michelle had nothing to do with this.'

Lucy Blake said softly, ‘Tell us what happened on that Sunday, James.'

It was the first time that either of them had used his forename: it seemed to him an acknowledgement that it was all over. And with that thought, his tongue was miraculously loosened.

‘I met him. Out in the country, away from everyone else. That was Neil's idea. I'd said to him that we needed to talk, if we were going to continue to work together and live alongside each other on the site, and he said that it needed to be where no one else could see us.'

‘He didn't think you were going to kill him, then.'

He glanced up at her, then dropped his eyes again, as if he could afford no distraction to his concentration. ‘I didn't mean to kill him. Not when we set up the meeting.'

Months later, Lucy thought, this would be material for a defending counsel, arguing for mitigation on the grounds that this was an impulsive, not a premeditated killing. Not her concern, that. ‘So you set up this meeting. For what time on that Sunday?'

‘Neil set it up, not me. He was going off to see his sister in Scotland, leaving the Towers at about one. He said the easiest thing was for me to follow him out a little later. He'd wait for me at the place we arranged: it was out on the slopes of Pendle Hill. He said he knew a lane off the road which was only used by farm traffic; we wouldn't be disturbed there, even on a Sunday, Neil said.'

She wondered if Cartwright had been out there with his lover, if he knew it was private because he had taken this man's wife there in the past. James Naylor was broken now, and all of them knew it. Her role was merely to keep him talking. She said gently, ‘So you followed Cartwright in your own car.'

He nodded. ‘About twenty minutes later. So that no one would think I was following Neil. But I don't think anyone even saw me go.'

He was probably right. Certainly no one had reported it. Lucy already had a feeling that the cool and thoughtful Michelle Naylor might turn out to be an accessory after the fact, but that might be difficult to prove, if this man chose to protect her. ‘And what happened at the meeting, James?'

‘I said I wanted to be sure that it was all over between him and Michelle. I said I'd forgiven Michelle, and I hoped that Sally had forgiven Neil. I pointed out that all of us needed our jobs at Marton Towers, so I wanted to discuss how we were going to recover from this and go on living and working together.'

There was a naivety about this man that was quite touching. Lucy thought as she had done before that it is not always the most evil or naturally vicious people who commit murder. She said, ‘But your meeting didn't go as you planned it, did it, James?'

‘No. Neil said that Michelle had been mistaken if she'd ever thought it was anything very serious. He said she'd never been anything more than an easy screw for him.' His face twisted in pain as he brought out the coarse phrase.

‘So you quarrelled.'

‘He said he wasn't the first she'd had and he wouldn't be the last. Said I'd need to watch her in the future, if she wasn't to go over the wall again. I hit him then.'

His fair-skinned face was just for an instant as proud as a boasting schoolboy's. Then it clouded again with the thought of his present situation. Lucy Blake offered the latest of her prompts. ‘And it got out of hand, I suppose.'

She seemed to understand. James felt absurdly, disproportionately grateful to her for that. ‘I thought he'd be sorry for what he'd done; that he'd be anxious to wipe the slate clean and get on with the rest of our lives. I thought I was being generous, when I told him I was willing to forget what had happened between him and Michelle.' He stopped, looked from one to the other of the two very different faces in front of him, and said with an air of wonder, ‘I love my wife, you know. We were going to be all right, until I did this.'

Lucy Blake spoke into the silence. ‘You were saying that Neil Cartwright just wouldn't let it go.'

‘He taunted me. Said I was a loser, that I'd asked for it. It was when he said that it would happen again that I lost it. He'd broken a young shoot off a tree before I got there. A willow, he said it was: Neil knew about these things, even when the trees weren't in leaf.' He paused for a moment; in that instant, precision about which tree was involved seemed of supreme importance to him. ‘Neil had been swishing the tops off weeds with this whippy shoot whilst he waited for me. He threw it away when he turned to go to his car. I grabbed it and threw it round his neck from behind, pulled it against his throat until he stopped struggling. I just wanted to stop him using those words. He didn't have a chance. I'm pretty strong, you know, when I lose my temper.'

It was half a boast, half an apology. For a moment, he was a callow, overgrown schoolboy who is proud of his new-found strength, even as he apologizes for a minor breakage. They had to remind themselves that this fresh-faced, awkward, seemingly gauche creature was a killer who had just confessed to garrotting the man who had taken his wife to bed.

It was Peach who now growled, ‘I think you had better tell us what happened next, Mr Naylor.'

‘I put the shoot of wood into my car – I flung it over the hedge on my way home, when I was miles away from where Neil had died. Well, it was a murder weapon, wasn't it?' He smiled a little at his cleverness, seemingly prepared to ignore the irony that he was now giving them every detail they needed of his crime.

‘You had a corpse on your hands.'

‘Yes. I thought about leaving Neil's body in his car, hoping you'd think it had been a random killing.' Now that he had given up and the tension was broken, he felt almost unnaturally calm. ‘But I knew you'd come back to the people who'd worked with him at Marton Towers, and I didn't want that. I – I didn't want people to find out about what had been going on between him and Michelle.' He was suddenly blushing over his desire to protect his wife's reputation, despite the desperate nature of his own situation.