A Fatal Attachment (20 page)

“It's still a possibility,” said Oddie neutrally. “But a shooting in the course of a break-in is a good deal more likely than a strangling. I don't suppose you'd be any good at identifying anything that's missing, sir?”

“No use at all.” He looked round. “Nice place, nice furniture, a good feel to the place. But I remember practically nothing from my previous visits.”

“What will you do with it?”

“Put it on the market, or let it until the market perks up. Not a time for selling houses at the moment. I'm not the settling-down type, and when I'm forced into it it certainly won't be in somewhere like Bly. I suppose there's
a pub in the place that takes visitors, is there? I don't fancy sleeping in this place, and it doesn't seem fair to plonk myself on Jamie, wherever he is.”

“Yes, there's a pub just down the hill. Purely as a formality, sir, could you tell me what you were doing at the time of the murder?”

“Sure. You tell me the time of the murder.”

“Say—it's a distinct possibility—Monday at ten in the evening.”

“Lord—what's the time difference between here and Anchorage? I came via Washington, so I'm not too sure.”

Oddie leaned over to the desk and dialled 155.

“Nine hours behind GMT,” he said when he came back to them. “That's ten because we're on Summer Time.”

“Right. Midday, then. We had a press conference starting at ten. There was a lot of interest, and I remember looking at my watch at half past eleven, when it was still going on. I should think it broke up a bit before twelve.”

“Right. You'd got back to Anchorage the day before, had you?”

“No, we got back on Friday. The weekend was a bad time for a press conference.”

“And you were staying?—”

“Officially at the Hilton. In fact there are certain . . . needs, that are not catered for by U.S. Army emergency rations.” He grinned. “Would you like her name and address?”

“Please.”

He took out a pen and notebook and wrote it down rapidly.

“The phone number is from memory, but I think it's right. It's a girl I teamed up with when we were making all the preparations. Girls are hard to come by in Anchorage, so I made a date for when the four months were up. I went to the Hilton every day to collect messages, but most of the time I was with her.”

“And later?”

“Monday night I was with her. Then I took a late-night flight to Washington.”

“Well, I think that will be enough, sir. Keep us informed where you are, will you? We'd rather you stayed in the area for a few days. Mrs Perceval's solicitors are Marwick, Chester and Jones, in Halifax. I imagine we'll be releasing the body fairly soon, so it should be possible to have the funeral next week.”

Robert Loxton banged his forehead.

“Oh God—the funeral! I suppose I'll be expected to go. I didn't even get
to my own parents' funerals, but since I'm the heir, and since I'm in this country. . . . Oh well, I'd better buy me a black tie.”

“Did you resent your parents leaving everything to your brother, sir?” asked Oddie, looking straight at him as he stood by the door preparing to leave.

“No, I did not.” He looked back at him, eyes sparkling in lean cheeks. “It was done after consultation with me. I've never had much difficulty raising money for what I want to do. They'd rather lost sympathy—or maybe just interest—over the years. So they wanted to leave it to Jamie as one last chance to settle down. I said: Right-ho. Go ahead. I may say I never thought it would become a police matter. And it's not really, is it?”

“Not so far as I know, sir. We won't keep you.”

Robert Loxton smiled briefly and strode out to his car. They watched him through the window. Oddie turned to Charlie.

“Well?”

“I bet if you phoned that number you'd get his woman friend.”

Oddie raised his eyebrow.

“Meaning?”

“It was all too pat.”

“He'd had her number with him four long months on Mount McKinley,” Oddie pointed out.

“He doesn't strike me as the type to moon over a telephone number in the frozen wastes. But what I meant was, it was all too pat, down to the supposed uncertainty about the number. He knew the number perfectly well.”

“Yes . . . I think, you know, that when the crime is murder people begin acting from the moment that they hear about it. People close to the victim, even people quite distant as well. Perhaps it dates back to hanging, I don't know. But as soon as he heard this chap probably said to himself: ‘When did it happen? Over the weekend I've got Karen Paulson to vouch for me. Then I gave a press conference, then I flew to Washington. . . .” And so on. It doesn't mean he's implicated in any way. Everyone will have done the same. And remember he's used to performing—for potential sponsors, in press conferences and so on.”

“All the same,” said Charlie, “I think you should ask the Anchorage police to check the girlfriend out. And ask them to check the time of the press conference and the date very carefully.”

“I shall. Are there any other eggs you wish to teach me to suck?”

“No, grandma,” said Charlie, grinning. “He's perfectly plausible and
rather impressive, and you're probably right he can have nothing to do with it. Why did he mention his brother, though, when he says he had no idea he was back in the neighbourhood?”

“Yes, I wondered about that. You're suggesting he wanted to draw him to our attention, even cast suspicion in that direction?”

“Sounds rotten put like that. Maybe diffuse suspicion a bit. There was a lot of talk about the Hoddles resenting Lydia's role without apparently any real knowledge to back it up. . . .” Charlie turned from the window and wandered over to the wall by the door. “I keep thinking about this picture.”

Oddie turned round and came over.

“The picture of George the Fifth and Nicholas the whatever-it-was?”

“Yes. Like as two peas, like I said. How alike do you think they'd have been if they'd shaved their beards off?”

C
HARLIE
Peace felt like a schoolboy who has been given an unexpected holiday. He felt the same sense of limitless possibilities open before him, the same feeling that he must not throw them away by squandering the time on irrelevancies. Mike Oddie had told him he would be tied up for much of the day on routine jobs, and had a visit to Marwick, Chester and Jones lined up for the afternoon. Charlie was free to do what he liked in the way of checking things that bothered him, talking to people on the fringes of the case.

“But leave the Hoddles,” Oddie said. “He won't be back from school until late afternoon, and we both of us should be there.”

Charlie felt what sports writers call a surge of adrenalin. Co-operation, swapping of views, plans of campaign were all very well, but there is nothing quite like freedom.

Liberated at last from supervision, the first thing he did was pure self-indulgence. He went to the Halifax Library to find pictures of George V and Nicholas II without beards. This was not as easy as he had expected. The English king was the problem: he seemed to have been hirsute from puberty on. Finally a librarian found a book of photographs from the Victorian court, with Prince George shortly before he went to sea. There was, Charlie thought, no more than a vague family resemblance between him and his Russian cousin. The shape of the head was similar, the look of the forehead, but the lower part of the face showed them to be not particularly alike. It was the beards that made the resemblance.

Having satisfied himself on this, Charlie grinned self-deprecatingly at the thought of how short a distance it got him. Beyond the fact that Robert and Jamie Loxton, though very different when clean-shaven, might look very similar with beards, he had discovered nothing. And since both men seemed to have tight alibis, he had got nowhere. Except that there was a man with a
beard somewhere in the case, and he needed to be either accounted for or eliminated. Were Jamie and Robert Loxton's alibis as tight as they seemed? He felt he might be thought by Oddie to have wasted time, and decided to punish himself with a morning of routine. Still, it would do no harm to start it in the village of Kedgely.

They had already established by a telephone call to the White Rose in Luddenden that the final eaters of dinner on Monday the twelfth paid their bill at 9:26. They had talked to one of the waiters who was on duty that night, and he remembered the fuss over the lost keys, which he thought took up a good three or four minutes after that. He described Jamie Loxton with a fair degree of accuracy. Still, Lydia was not killed until ten—and ten
at the earliest.
Charlie left his car in a pub yard at Kedgely, which was a village of fifteen or twenty houses along a very minor road. The houses were mostly of stone, poky but attractive. Charlie set out in the direction of the village shop along a pavement so narrow as to be useless. It was in such an environment that Charlie felt at his most alien—a feeling that could be pleasurable as well as unsettling. There was no one in the street, but when he reached the door of the village shop he could hear gossip going on inside. His appearance put a stop to that: the customer smiled nervously and retreated from the shop. Charlie Peace did tend to have that effect on people.

“You must be the policeman,” said Mary Scully.

He didn't have to ask how she knew. Kedgely saw few black people, and Jamie would have told her already that one of the detectives investigating the murder was black. The whole of Kedgely would know that, and would most probably know by now that he was back. It would be that sort of place.

“Just checking,” he said. “I'm sure you understand that we have to. Now, you left the restaurant about 9:29 or so.”

“Golly,” said Mary, impressed. “You know more about our movements than we do ourselves.”

Charlie favoured her with one of his more approachable grins. He liked what he saw. She was a slim, wiry woman in her forties—active, down-to-earth, easy to get on with. Certainly not like any of the media stereotypes of the social worker: batty, bossy or meddling.

“You then drove straight back here?”

“Yes, not very fast. Jamie's car doesn't
do
very fast. We got back at ten to ten by the chapel clock.”

“Anybody vouch for that?”

“I don't know. I've tried to keep off the subject in the shop, though it's
not easy. But we are a very nosey bunch—I include myself, because I used to be a social worker, and I still like poking my nose in other people's affairs. I would guess that if you ask around someone will have seen us. They'll be interested in whether I sleep at the shop or at Jamie's. Try Mrs Formby in Willow Bank. She's a widow lady who tends to dart over to the window every time she hears voices or a car. If she wasn't in bed by then it's ten to one she saw us.”

“And you did sleep in the shop that night, and Mr Loxton drove off towards the farm?”

“Yes—I waved him off in that direction,
not
the direction of Bly.”

“But of course he has nothing to back him up on his movements after ten to ten.”

“Nothing except his obvious unsuitability as a murderer. I should have thought even the police would have seen that as a killer Jamie is a nonstarter.”

“This is my third murder. I'm keeping an open mind. But I've known drug-pushers who were the nicest guys in the world—boys I'd be happy if my sister took up with.”

He grinned, more ferociously this time, and while Mary was formulating the objection that it wasn't because Jamie was too nice that he was a nonstarter but because, well—Charlie had wheeled around and left the shop.

Mrs Formby at Willow Bank was, as expected, a most obliging witness.

“Oh yes, I saw them come back. I was just passing the window when he let her out of the car . . . No, I couldn't see him very well, but I saw her, and of course I know the car. It was still light, you see, or not quite dark. It was ten to ten by the chapel clock, and I remember thinking: ten to ten and still a bit of light.”

“Call that thought?” Charlie said to himself, but he smiled his thanks and went back to his car, lodging in the back of his mind the thought that she probably hadn't seen the driver of the car at all.

His next stop was the little wood just above Lydia's cottage. He drove there at a moderate speed for him, and timed himself: twenty minutes. Jamie Loxton (assuming it was him in the car at Kedgely) could have been around Lydia's cottage by about ten past ten. Which left unaccounted for the man in the woods around twenty past nine, and the man who—person who—interrupted Lydia's phone call. Charlie drove into the wood and left the car on the lane leading towards the gravel pit. Then he got out and looked around. Somewhere in the undergrowth Jason Wetherby and his girlfriend were petting when the
car drove up. He looked at his wristwatch and set off briskly along the path, then down the road to the cottage. Eight minutes. That would get the mystery man on to the scene probably around the time Lydia and the boys had set off for the village. Perhaps he had watched them.

Charlie had now approached the cottage from a new angle, and once more he stopped to look around him. Jason and his girlfriend had gone their separate ways back to Bly, he by the road down the hill, she by a back path. There was a path along the hedge which skirted the small back garden of the cottage. Charlie began along it. It was broad to start with, twin-tracked, until it led into the cottage's garage. Then it narrowed to become a normal country path across a tract of barren hillside. Charlie started down it, but frowning to himself. If the man in the woods was nothing to do with Lydia's murder—say he was the fancy man of someone in the village whose husband was on nights—then this path left him quite as exposed as the road down the hill. He stopped and looked: he could be seen from the kitchens on a little estate of private houses built off the main street of Bly, as well as from most of the houses in that street. He spotted at least three people who were watching him intently now. It was still twilight at half past nine, when the man would have gone down. In fact, he would have been even more exposed on the path, because people who saw him would have wondered why he was taking the path rather than the road. On the other hand, if it was someone with legitimate business in Bly, one who took this short cut to a house at the end of the street, why leave his car in the wood rather than on the road? Why not drive all the way there?