Telling Tales (29 page)

“Only once.” The words seemed like a whisper after Vera’s dramatics. “And it was information which he’d probably have been able to get hold of anyway.”

“Well?”

“He wanted to see a copy of the sex offenders register.”

“Why would he want to do that?”

There was a pause. “Keith’s work is all about influence. He needs people on his side. Councillors. Planners. Maybe he felt he could exert a tad more influence if he knew something about the people he was working with.”

“Was he interested in anyone specific?”

“Maybe. He never said.”

Blackmail, Vera thought. That’s what he was after. So it ran in the family. She kept her voice even. “When was this?”

“Not long before Abigail was killed.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

Vera had decided it was time to speak to James Bennett. She could have gone back to Keith Mantel, but no way was he going to give up more information than he wanted. Joe Ashworth had been digging, but he wasn’t local, he didn’t have the contacts and she didn’t want to wait any longer. She found out that James was working and took Ashworth with her to collect him from the Point. She thought they’d take him to the station. That way there’d be no distractions. She told herself there could be all sorts of explanations for his name change, but her imagination was working overtime. He’d been involved in some of Mantel’s illegal operations, she thought. Why else would he want to hide behind an alias? That didn’t make him a murderer, but it made him worth talking to. They didn’t make a show of waiting, just sat in their car next to the pilot’s vehicle until James showed up.

When she saw him walking towards them she had second thoughts. James had been up since the early hours and had that drawn, grey look which is the result of nights of disturbed sleep. She wanted him focused. The way he looked now she could see him dozing off in the interview room, his head on his arm, no good to anyone.

He’d already seen them so they couldn’t drive off. “We can postpone it until later,” she said. “It’s not urgent.”

But James insisted.

“Do you want to let your wife know, then?”

“I’m in earlier than I thought. She’ll not be expecting me for a couple of hours yet.”

They were in a room with no natural light, a strip light which flickered, the smell of stale cigarettes. Vera and James sat opposite each other across a table and Joe Ashworth watched them, his chair pulled away so he seemed an impartial observer, a referee perhaps at a chess match. Vera was wearing one of her shapeless, old lady dresses and a cardigan which she’d buttoned up wrongly at the front. James, still in his uniform, was immaculate.

“This is an informal chat,” Vera said. “Things come up in an enquiry. They’re probably not relevant, but they need clearing up. You’ll understand.”

He nodded.

“Keith Mantel said he’d met you before. Only then you were calling yourself something different. We had to check.”

“Of course.” Very polite, almost as if he was sorry he’d put them to the trouble of snooping round in his past.

“So I was hoping you’d clear it up for us. Explain what it was all about. And at the same time maybe fill in the background details on Keith Mantel.”

Vera hadn’t been sure what to expect. Probably something bland. To be told that it was perfectly legal to change a name by deed poll and that no explanation was required. That it was none of their business. Certainly not this. For James fidgeted briefly with the cap which was sitting upturned in front of him on the table, closed his eyes in a moment of decision and then began to speak, taking them right back to the beginning, telling them, in effect, the history of his life.

“When he was a young man my dad worked on the trawlers. I grew up with all the stories the storms and the larger-than-life skippers and the big chance catches but by the time I was at school, he’d come ashore. Maybe the danger and the discomfort outweighed the adventure; already at that time they were having to go further for fish. It wasn’t easy money. More likely, I think, my mother persuaded him to give it up. It can’t have been much fun for her when he was away.”

Vera nodded, said nothing, waited for him to continue.

“At that time he and my mother ran a news agent and sweet shop in the area where they’d both grown up. I was an only child, but there were cousins to play with in the street, my gran to cook my tea when Mum and Dad were busy. It seemed friendly and safe. There was a lot of bitching, of course. You get hurtful gossip in small communities, I suppose. But it didn’t touch me. I remember it as a good time.

“When he was at sea my father was active in the union and he still took an interest in politics after he’d left. You’d have thought he’d be a natural Conservative, a small businessman making his own way in the world, but it wasn’t like that. He wasn’t a communist. Not quite. But certainly a socialist of the old school. I can’t imagine him having any truck with a New Labour government. He’d always been a party member and he had time then to become more active. I remember him canvassing during elections, coming home full of the arguments he’d had on the doorsteps. I don’t know what my mother made of it. She probably realized he needed something to stop him getting bored. At first, I think, she saw it as a harmless hobby, like fishing or train spotting

“I was halfway through high school when he was persuaded to stand for the council. Not that he took much persuading. By then the marriage was going through a rough patch. They kept things polite for me, managed a show of affection while they were in together, but as I’ve said, it was a small community and people were only too eager to pass on the gossip. I learned he’d had a number of women. Finally, it seemed, he settled on another party member, a teacher. As I heard it, they were inseparable. I was furious at the time, humiliated. How could he carry on like that and come back at night to my mother? She must have come to the same conclusion, because one night while my father was at a council meeting, she packed up all her stuff and left. She didn’t ask me to go with her and even if she had done, I’d probably not have gone. Despite his faults, I always believed I had more in common with my father and anyway he was the more vulnerable. Of the two of them I felt he needed most looking after and that I had a responsibility towards him. My mother could take care of herself. It turned out I was probably right, because, soon after, she set up home with an insurance salesman. She would have had a regular income, at least. She invited me to visit her in their new house somewhere in the suburbs, but I couldn’t do it. It was irrational but I was angry on my father’s behalf. When I left school, I joined him in the business.”

He paused for breath and again Vera could see how tired he was. “Can I get you anything, Captain Bennett? Coffee? A glass of water?”

He seemed surprised by her kindness and shook his head. “I’m sorry to be so long-winded. I suppose none of this is relevant.”

Vera leaned towards him across the table, seemed almost about to touch his hand. “You tell it in your own way, pet. I’m listening.”

“It must have been around that time that Dad got friendly with Keith Mantel. Keith was a small-time developer then. He’d buy a few properties in rundown areas of the town, do them up and sell them on. The ones on the se afront he tried to let as holiday homes. You could tell he had grand ideas, but Dad probably thought they were in the same league independent businessmen trying to claw a living in competition with the big boys.”

“Did they meet socially?”

“That’s all it was at first, social.”

“Were you involved?”

“Not often. Sometimes Keith would come round to our house. To escape one of his women, he’d say. They’d stay up all night drinking. Dad would start on his stories of life at sea and Keith would provide a willing audience. I tried to keep out of it. Someone had to be up early to sort the papers and anyway I didn’t trust the man. Dad was on the council’s planning committee. It seemed obvious to me that Mantel wasn’t just there to talk about the good old days. He’d be after something.

“Then he took Dad away on holiday. The teacher was off the scene by then and Keith set up a trip to a villa on the Algarve with a couple of young women in tow. It didn’t cost Dad a bean. He was so naive. “Can’t you see what you’re setting yourself up for?” I said. “What do you think he’s going to want in return?” But he wouldn’t have it. They were just mates. That’s what mates did. They shared around their good fortune.”

“What did Mantel want in return?” Vera asked.

“I’m not sure the first time. I never heard the details. I know that soon after a development of Mantel’s passed through the committee on the nod. It was old people’s flats, I think. Sheltered housing. There was a grand opening and Dad dragged me along to it. I don’t know how he squared it with his conscience. Perhaps they’d have approved the plans anyway. But after that it was always going to be difficult to stand up to Mantel. The crisis came with the proposed building of a new leisure centre. Mantel put in the lowest tender but his plans weren’t as good as those of the competitor company. After the planning meeting my father phoned him up to tell him he’d been unsuccessful. I was in the room when he made the call. “Never mind, eh, lad. You win some, you lose some. Better luck next time.” He really thought Mantel would have a few beers and put it down to experience.”

“But he didn’t.”

“He came round to the house that night. A bottle of whisky in one hand. A big brown envelope in the other. I tried to stick around but Mantel sent me away. I went out for a couple of hours and when I came back he was leaving. My father was sitting on the floor. I’d never seen that before. Men of his generation didn’t sit on the floor. All around him on the carpet were photos from the Portuguese trip. Dad in a deck chair with an almost naked blonde sprawled all over him. Dad sitting next to Mantel in a restaurant, laughing at one of his jokes. He was sitting on the floor and he was crying.”

“Mantel had threatened to go public?”

“He said he’d leak the story to the papers that he’d bribed Dad to approve the sheltered housing scheme. He’d bounce back, he said. But Dad wouldn’t. Imagine the headlines. Holiday Romp for Socialist Councillor. Sex and Sangria on the Rates. In one sense it was true of course. My father had allowed himself to be influenced. He’d been a fool.

“He wasn’t only bothered about what his friends in the party would think. It was the people he drank with in the club, and the family. All the aunts and cousins who’d supported him through the divorce because they believed he was something special.”

James paused. The strip light flickered again and faded. Ashworth stood on his chair and thumped the plastic casing. The light returned. James continued as if there’d been no interruption.

“His trouble was that he’d been taken in by his own propaganda. Marty Shaw, champion of the people. He’d believed in that. He didn’t like the real man … I told him he could resign. Keep a low profile for a bit. People would forget. “People might,” he said. “I won’t. Nor will you, will you?” I couldn’t answer. He’d had a lot to drink and I helped him to bed.

“When I woke up he’d gone and so had his car. I thought he’d just taken off for a few days. It would have been in character, running away. I imagined him holed up with an old friend from his fishing days, feeling sorry for himself and drowning his sorrows. I carried on as usual, running the shop, making his excuses to the customers.”

“But he hadn’t run away.”

“Not like that. Three days later his car was reported abandoned.”

“Where?”

“In Elvet. In that car park by the river.”

Where Vera had been with Michael Long the day before. Close to the phone box where Christopher Winter had tried to make his call.

“But he wasn’t in it?”

“He’d left a note. At least he’d bothered to do that. Sending me his love. Asking me to remember him kindly…” James took a deep breath. “He must have waited until the tide was high. He just walked out into the river. He’d never learned to swim. He walked until the current took him, sucked his legs from under him, pulled him down. The shore is uneven there, mud and shingle and outcrops of rock. Perhaps he stumbled. I wonder sometimes if he fought it at the last moment. If he tried to hold the air in his lungs when he went under … It was nearly a month before his body was washed up. Hardly a body by then. They identified him through his dental records.

“In the docks when I’m working late, I think I see him sometimes.”

i “That was when you changed your name?” Vera asked. “At the time of the suicide?”

“Yes.”

An extreme reaction.”

“You don’t understand. It wasn’t just the name. I didn’t want to be Marty Shaw’s son, associated with backhanders and bribes. I didn’t want to run the family business, putting up with the pity, listening to the poisonous gossip of the customers and the family. I wanted to start again.”

“All the same…”

“Look, I was young. You do overact at that age. There was a terrible embarrassment. The pictures, Mantel… It all seemed so squalid, in such bad taste. I sold stories like that every Sunday to fools who slavered over them, then turned self-righteous. If my father had been involved in a major fraud, insider dealing, something like that, I’d probably have found it easier. Emma calls me a snob sometimes. Perhaps she’s right.”

“So you ran away too.”

“If you like. But it was more than that. I felt like somebody different, that I could start from scratch, be the person I was meant to be.”

“You chose to go to sea. That must have been your father’s influence.”

“All those stories he told me when I was a child? Perhaps.”

“Why did you move to Elvet?”

“Emma came from here.”

“Did you know that Keith Mantel lived in the village?”

“There was all that publicity when his daughter died. Her murder made it easier for me to contemplate living in the village. I don’t think I could have risked running into him otherwise. I mean, I knew then that he’d lost someone close to him too. It was harder to hate him.”

“Revenge?”

“I wasn’t sorry she was dead,” he said sharply. “But I wouldn’t have killed her.”