Scene of Crime (27 page)

Denis had been there. He put his hand to his mouth and closed his eyes, unwilling to think beyond that point.

“Carl?” she said, her voice fearful. “What is it?”

What in God’s name had been happening in his house last night? He didn’t know the answer to that, but he did know what had been happening with Estelle and Denis for the last two months. It hadn’t been a fantasy. It hadn’t been a writing project. It had been the truth.

He saw Meg’s anxious face looking into his. “I—I think Denis was at my house last night,” he said. “I think someone saw his car.”

She looked puzzled. “No,” she said. “He was with his brother. They’ve been going out for a drink on Monday nights for weeks. That’s what I was going to tell you. It’s all some mix-up, it must be. I don’t know why he hasn’t told them where he was, but Alan will clear it all up.”

Carl shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t think he does go out with Alan on Mondays.” His mind was racing through all the possibilities, rejecting all
but one of them. His voice was far away, as if someone else was speaking. “I thought Estelle went to a writer’s group, but she didn’t.”

“Carl, what are you saying?”

Carl closed his eyes, shook his head. “I think they were having an affair,” he said. “She wrote about it in her journal. I thought she’d made it all up.”

“Denis and Estelle?” she said, her lip trembling. “But he was—she … she was his patient! He wouldn’t do that. She wasn’t …” She tailed off, then swallowed. “She wasn’t
well
.”

Carl half laughed, half sobbed. “Tell me about it,” he said.

She hadn’t been making it up about having an affair, he thought, and maybe she hadn’t been making it up about Watson. He had to tell the police. Now. Dexter could be in danger.

“I—I’ve got to go, Meg,” he said.

“Where?”

He didn’t answer. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Lloyd was busy when Carl got to the Stansfield police station, but he said he’d wait. He didn’t want to talk to anyone else. He waited in the small anteroom at the entrance to the station, not exactly happy about what he was about to tell Chief Inspector Lloyd, but if he was right, Dexter had to be gotten out of the situation he had found himself in.

“Dr. Bignall,” Lloyd said as he came in. “Have you remembered something that might be of use to us?”

“Not exactly,” said Carl. “But I understand that Dexter Gibson was seen running away last night, and that you think he was running away from my house.”

“I’m sorry,” said Lloyd. “I’m afraid I can’t discuss that with you.”

“I realize you can’t confirm it, but Janet herself told me. The thing is—I think I might know why Dexter was there.”

“Oh?”

“I …” Carl took a moment. This was not going to show him in a good light, but he hadn’t thought there was a scrap of truth in it. “I told you that Estelle got much worse when Watson moved in next door,” he said.

“Yes,” said Lloyd.

“She would say things about him. They sounded ridiculous. That she saw people going in there but she could never see them in the house, that he must have some secret room where he took them—all that sort of paranoid stuff.”

Lloyd frowned. “Had she ever said that sort of thing about anyone else?”

“Not like that,” said Carl. “And it sounded ludicrous. I asked her if she saw them come out again, because I thought she was accusing him of being a serial killer or something. And she said of course they came out again—it was what they were doing while they were in there that bothered her. And who they were doing it to. It really did sound crazy.”

He saw Lloyd sneak a look at his watch. “Sorry,” Carl said. “You’ve had a very long day—I realize that. And I am getting to the point. It’s—It’s just important to me that you understand the kind of climate we lived in.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Lloyd. “Take all the time you need.”

“The thing is, she went on like that about people all the time—well, not like that, exactly, but she was always
thinking people were out to get her, up to something, conspiring against her. I really didn’t think anything much about it.”

“And now you think there was something to it?”

Lloyd clearly thought it was time he stopped trying to justify his lack of interest, though he honestly did feel it had been justified. Estelle’s misgivings about everyone and everything had been constant, her capacity for invention staggering at times. He’d grown used to ignoring her.

“I don’t know if there was something to it,” he said. “But in the summer she told me she’d seen Dexter Gibson leaving Watson’s house, that she believed Watson was sexually exploiting him, that the other people she saw going in there were abusing him and Watson was photographing it all in this secret room. That was too much—I told her to get help from someone more qualified in that area than Denis.” He felt his face burn. “I know how that sounds. But—But I had to live with that sort of thing day in, day out. I’d long ago exhausted my supply of understanding.”

Lloyd didn’t speak. Carl had no idea what he was thinking.

“And then she told me that when she was thirteen she desperately wanted to be a model or an actress—you know, like little girls do. She was in a school play, and Eric Watson came to take photographs for the program. He told her that if she wanted to be a model, she had to have photographs to show the agencies, and he would take them for her, that she wouldn’t have to pay him, just help him out with some odd jobs.”

“I expect I can guess the rest,” said Lloyd.

Carl nodded. “She found that the ‘odd jobs’ meant taking her clothes off and modeling in provocative poses
for him. He told her that models and actresses had to get used to that sort of thing, so she did it. And then he said he would like her to pose with other people, and he would pay her to do it. She agreed to that as well, and found she couldn’t get out of it—whenever she said she didn’t want to do something, he would threaten to send the photographs to her grandfather. So she found herself performing all manner of sexual acts with all manner of people in all manner of places until she was too old to be of interest to him.”

“And you didn’t believe her when she told you this?”

He sighed. He knew what it sounded like, but she’d been dramatizing herself and her life for years. “No,” he said. “I thought she was just trying to draw attention to herself, as usual. I told her that she would find herself in court if she continued saying things like that.”

“Did she say that Watson himself had abused her?”

“No.” Carl frowned, thinking about that. If he hadn’t dismissed it as he had, perhaps that would have struck him, but it hadn’t. “I should probably have taken more notice of that, shouldn’t I? It’s not the sort of detail you’d expect in a fantasy.”

He was reminded then of Finch, who had said almost exactly that about Estelle’s journal. He obviously wasn’t very good at spotting the truth when he saw or heard it.

“She told me that he just took the photographs,” he said. “That he called the people who bought them pervs.”

“If she thought he was doing that to Dexter, did she try to do anything about it? Did she speak to Watson about it?”

Carl shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“And she didn’t contact us, I presume.”

“No. I tried to call her bluff, told her to tell the police, but she said if it went to court, she couldn’t bring herself to give evidence, which I said was very convenient.” He shook his head. “I know I sound like a brute, but I’d had years and years of her paranoia—I thought this was just a new twist.”

“What’s changed your mind?”

Carl shook his head. “I have no more proof now than I had then. But I know you’ve arrested Denis Leeward.” He shook his head. “I don’t think for a minute that Denis had anything to do with Estelle’s death, but I am assuming it was his car that was seen, and that he is the lover Estelle was writing about.”

Lloyd didn’t confirm that, of course, but if he’d been wrong, Carl was sure that Lloyd would have put him right.

“If she was telling the truth about that, then I have no reason to suppose she wasn’t telling the truth about Watson. And what I do know is that Watson has a studio in Welchester—which is where Estelle lived until she was fifteen—and that he met Dexter during the school holidays, when Dexter came to my house with his mother one day, and now I know that he does a Saturday job for Watson. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized it could explain an awful lot about Estelle and the way she was, couldn’t it? It would certainly explain how she was about Watson.”

“It would,” said Lloyd.

“And Estelle said she saw Dexter coming out of Watson’s house, so if he was seen running out of Watson’s garden last night, it seems possible he was in Watson’s house rather than mine.”

Lloyd nodded seriously and stood up, holding open
the door much as Carl himself had held the door open for Marianne, no doubt with just as much relief that his visitor was going.

Carl got to the door. “If that story about Watson is all just a sick fantasy of Estelle’s, I’m sorry. And I didn’t mean to take up so much of your time, but I wanted you to understand why I didn’t react the way another husband might have reacted to his wife telling him something like that. If I’d thought for a minute it was true, I’d have tried to get Dexter out of it.”

“Thank you, Dr. Bignall. I will look into it.”

Carl paused. “I hope it
was
a sick fantasy,” he said. “Or if it wasn’t, I hope that Dexter is better able to cope with it than Estelle was.”

He left the police station feeling a little bit better now that he’d told them what he feared about Dexter, and a little less confused. At least he knew who one of the people was who had been in his house last night. But the police had said there were two sets of unidentified fingerprints, and that was what worried him. Was the other person just a burglar? Or was that also someone he knew?

At nine-fifteen Lloyd left the busy Riverside Family Center, having spoken to Mrs. Gibson, who was going to bring Dexter to see him at the Malworth police station, preferring that to having him visit Dexter at home. He was taking Estelle a great deal more seriously than her husband had done, and not just because he felt heart sorry for this woman who had found herself being exploited all her life by every man she had ever met, but because what had come across very clearly from his interviews with Mrs. Gibson’s sons was that Ryan was very fond of Dexter, and that Dexter was not at all afraid
of him. But Dexter was afraid of someone, and that someone was looking ever more like Eric Watson.

Lloyd had done some checking up with people whose local knowledge was more extensive than his; twelve years ago, when Estelle would have been thirteen years old, the West End Studio had been in a backstreet in Welchester, part of an old tenement building divided into small units, and it still was. It was by no stretch of the imagination successful, and yet Watson had bought a house in a very expensive area of Malworth, had one full-time employee in the studio, and usually employed at least one youngster after school or on Saturdays, paying them well. So where had he gotten the money? Tom had rightly been suspicious of his affluence all along.

His interview with Mrs. Gibson had gone better than he could possibly have hoped, given the very disturbing idea that he was presenting to her. Once she got over the initial shock, she pulled herself together, and he felt that she wouldn’t go to pieces on him if they found out that the same thing had been happening to Dexter as had happened to Estelle. Most important of all—she understood that her presence might inhibit Dexter, and agreed to a social worker being present instead if that proved to be the case.

At half past nine they came in to see him, and Lloyd got straight to the point as soon as the interview began; if there was nothing in it, they would soon know. “What sort of work do you do for Eric Watson, Dexter?”

And he saw it; the instant evasion, the dropping of those expressive eyes, the shrug. “Go out with him on jobs,” he said.

“What sort of jobs?”

“Photo shoots. For catalogues and calendars and things.” Dexter still wouldn’t look at him.

“What sort of catalogues and calendars?”

A shrug. “Clothes and that. Scenery.”

“And what do you do on these photo shoots?”

“Just make sure he’s got film in all his cameras, and fetch things when he needs them.”

“And where do these photo shoots take place?”

“All over.”

“Has he ever asked you to model for him?”

He shook his head.

“Have you ever been in Mr. Watson’s house?”

He shook his head more vehemently, but he didn’t speak.

“I think you have, Dexter. Mrs. Bignall saw you there once, didn’t she?”

His head still shook, his lips tightly closed, his eyes cast down.

“And I think you were in his house again last night.”

Still just the constant shaking of his head.

“Did he give you that beating?” asked Lloyd.

Dexter’s head stopped shaking, but he didn’t answer.

“Okay,” said Lloyd. “Tell me more about the photo shoots. Tell me exactly what you do.”

Nothing. Not even a shrug.

Paradoxically, Lloyd knew that this lapse into total noncommunication meant that he was getting there at last, and so did Mrs. Gibson, who put her hand on her son’s back, gently patting him.

“Dexter,” she said. “Tell Mr. Lloyd. You’re not in trouble. Not with the police, and not with me. Just tell him what goes on.”

Dexter’s eyes slid around to look sideways at her.

“Do you want me to go?” said Mrs. Gibson.

He nodded, and Mrs. Gibson left, to be replaced by the social worker, who breezily informed Dexter that nothing he said could possibly shock him. He had seen it all, heard it all, and these things had been going on since time began. And from there, slowly at first, the story came out. No prompting, no suggesting. Dexter wanted to talk, and now that he knew they knew, he had no reason to stay silent.

His story was the same, in all essentials, to the one Estelle had told Carl Bignall. Watson had talked to Dexter the day he’d gone with his mother to the Bignalls’ house, had found out that Dexter desperately wanted to act, and told him that he made movies. He said that actors needed publicity photographs, offered to do some for him if he would help him out in his studio in return, and maybe one day he could act in one of his films.