Body Politic (14 page)

Lambert
looked at her calmly, assessing her state of mind, not troubling to disguise his scrutiny. A kindly man in most of his dealings, he could be quite ruthless in pursuit of the truth. This concentration was one of the first qualities he looked for in a detective, when he was considering personnel for transfer to CID. He said, ‘You were engaged to marry Raymond Keane, I believe.’

‘
Then you believe wrong.’ She allowed her anger to come out in the contradiction, then smiled nervously, attempting to conciliate. ‘I was expected to marry him, yes. But we were never engaged.’

‘
I see.’ He looked coolly into her eyes for a moment, until she dropped her gaze to the hands which twisted in her lap. ‘And when did you last see Mr Keane?’

She
took a deep breath, knowing this was going to be difficult, thinking of the questions which were bound to come. ‘On the Sunday before he died.’

He
raised his eyebrows at her, looking his surprise, trying to draw her into further words. When she offered him nothing, he said, ‘You seem very confident about when he died. We haven’t more than the vaguest idea of even the day of his death yet.’

‘
No. Neither have I. I don’t know why I said that. I just—just sort of presumed that he must have been killed quite soon after he was last seen, I suppose. I spoke to his mother, you see, and we agreed that she should report him missing—this was a couple of days after Christmas. It seemed then that no one had seen him since Christmas Eve. I—I must have assumed that he’d died shortly after he was last seen, I suppose.’

She
was talking too much, unable to stop as she stumbled towards an explanation, a retrieval of the blunder she had made through thinking too far ahead, beyond the apparently simple query he had put to her about her last meeting with Raymond. And this quiet, neatly dressed snake of a man was allowing her to blunder on, listening to her fallibility, watching her every uncertain move. She looked from the lean intensity of the superintendent’s features to the more reassuring roundness of the face at his side, but Hook was busy writing, recording the detail of her evasions.

She
looked at the watch which dangled from the pin at her breast, wishing bitterly that she had not revealed at the outset that she was now off duty, wishing more profoundly than she could ever have thought possible for a conclusion to this. Lambert said, ‘So you hadn’t seen Mr Keane between December the eighteenth and the discovery of his body on January the third. And you left it to someone else to report him missing. That seems to indicate a notable lack of anxiety in one so close to the deceased. Or were you not expecting to see him in all that time?’ He kept his tone neutral, just inside any note of insolence. Zoe Renwick was still helping them on a voluntary basis with their enquiries, though it would suit him if she did not realize that too clearly.

Her
shoulders set squarely beneath the blue cotton of her uniform. She took a deep breath, making no attempt now to conceal her discomfort from them. ‘I had decided not to marry Raymond. I wasn’t looking forward to telling him that. It—it suited me that I did not have to argue it out with him, I suppose.’ That at any rate was genuine, and it was a relief to her to deliver the truth.

‘
Why did you decide not to marry him, Miss Renwick?’

‘
That is my business, Superintendent. It has nothing to do with his death.’

‘
It would be better to let us decide that.’

‘
It was between Raymond and me. I never got the chance to tell him my reasons.’ It was curious, she thought, that the exchange with Raymond which she had so dreaded should now give her an excuse for reticence with these strangers.

‘
And you think those reasons have nothing to do with his death.’

‘
I’m sure of it.’ She was tight-lipped, determined. The strong-featured face which had looked so attractive when it had been broadened by her opening smile was now pinched and strained as the blue eyes stared not at her tormentor but past him.

‘
What arrangements had you made for the Christmas holiday period?’

‘
I was to spend it with Raymond. I should have gone to the cottage on Christmas Eve to meet him there. But I rang and left a message on his answerphone, asking him to ring me when he got there.’

‘
Did he ring you?’

‘
No.’ She thrust her hands suddenly into the capacious pockets of her uniform, as if they were altogether too revealing to be exposed to their relentless gaze.

‘
Have you any idea why not?’

‘
No. Perhaps he didn’t play back the tape when he got in. He was expecting me to arrive at any time, I suppose.’

‘
Did you go to the cottage? On that day or any of the following ones?’

‘
No. I had volunteered myself for Christmas duty here. I knew Raymond would want me to go and talk: it gave me a good reason not to.’

‘
Very well. So you did not see the man you had planned to marry, who apparently still thought he was going to marry you, after December the eighteenth. Can you give us some account of his last hours with you, please?’

‘
We spent the weekend together. At his cottage.’

Lambert
wanted to ask her what had happened between them on this last weekend, but the questions which formed themselves in his mind seemed like prurient probings into the sexual exchanges between the pair. It was Hook, looking up from his notes, who said, ‘Did you see anyone else over that weekend, Miss Renwick?’

She
tumbled into an account of the Conservative wine and cheese at the chairman of the local association’s mansion, piling on the detail breathlessly, feeling herself at least safe in this neutral area, which they could check so easily if they wanted to. She made it seem the centrepiece of the weekend, as if it had dominated all else, as if the weekend had been built around it. It was a relief not to be made to recall her last sexual exchanges with Raymond, those last tumblings in the familiar big bed in the low-ceilinged room beneath the thatch, which she was now reluctant to admit to herself had been so enjoyable to her.

But
Hook established that the wine-and-cheese function was at the Saturday lunchtime, that they had spent no more than an hour and a half at the big house, that they had gone back to Raymond’s cottage. She felt as he wrote the times down, as he recorded so meticulously the hour at which they had returned, that he was about to ask whether they had gone to bed then, to demand the details of the intensity of their physical passion on that last afternoon. Instead, he said quietly, ‘Mr Keane left you on the Sunday evening?’

‘
Yes. He had to get back to London. He had appointments on the Monday in the Commons, I think.’

‘
Yes. We already have a full picture of his last week in London. It is his next weekend, his last hours, after he had come back to Gloucestershire, which we are now anxious to document. From Christmas Eve until whatever time he died.’

When
this did not produce any comment from her, Lambert said, ‘Let’s complete the picture of your last weekend with Mr Keane, then. Did you spend Sunday, December the eighteenth alone together?’

She
had known this would come. And she wanted to tell them about it. The bare facts of the meeting, anyway. There was no point in trying to deceive them, when they were bound to find out about it from others. ‘No, not all of it. We went to see Moira Yates.’

Zoe
watched Hook write down the name carefully in his round longhand. Lambert said quietly, ‘Who is that, please?’ and she had no method of knowing whether the name was new to them or not, whether they already knew all and more of what she was going to tell them, from other viewpoints. ‘She was Raymond’s former mistress. The woman he was involved with before he met me. The woman who thought she was going to marry him, before I came along.’

She
had got all of the worst of it out at once. Lambert raised his eyebrows a little, and she knew immediately the source of his surprise. ‘You’re wondering why I went with Raymond on that visit. Yes, I’ve wondered myself, since. Perhaps it was no more than curiosity, to see another woman he had once cared deeply for. Anyway, it was difficult for me, seeing her. I’d never met her before. And I shouldn’t have gone. I realized that, as soon as we set foot in the house, but it was too late then.’

‘
Why did Mr Keane go to see her? It must have been embarrassing for him, surely?’

‘
Yes. But he felt he wanted to show her once and for all that everything was over between them. They hadn’t seen each other for four months, you see. Not since he had met me, I think. And he was preparing to announce our engagement; he wanted to tie up loose ends before he did that.’ The phrases Raymond had used when he had spoken to her about this seemed very banal now, as she brought them out to these strangers. And perhaps, after all, they had not been the full story. She saw now that his main object had been to make sure that his former lover did not become a political embarrassment to him in the months and the years to come.

She
looked at the shrewd, still expectant face of Lambert and added, ‘Miss Yates was ill, too. Had been almost since they split up, I believe. It was natural that he should want to reassure himself about her, I think.’ She found herself wanting to give Raymond the full credit for his actions now that he was dead, to put the most favourable public gloss on his visit to that strange house.

He
did not ask her as she expected him to do about the nature of Moira Yates’s illness. She wondered again how much they knew about the other people who had been close to Raymond in his last days. Instead, Lambert said, Was anyone else present at this meeting?’ and she felt he was testing her, inviting her to fall into some trap she could not see.

‘
Moira’s brother was there. Dermot Yates. We were in his house, in fact. And a man whose name I cannot remember. An old flame of Moira’s, Raymond said afterwards. He was certainly trying to be very protective of her. I can’t remember his name.’

‘
Gerald Sangster, perhaps?’

‘
That’s right.’ They did know, then. Her blood ran suddenly cold at the range and effectiveness of the police machine. She could surely not hope to deceive these persistent, methodical men permanently.

‘
Did you see anything in this meeting to cause you concern?’ When she did not immediately reply to the question, Lambert said, ‘Did Mr Keane behave truculently, for instance? Did he do anything to arouse hatred in any or all of the three people you met on that afternoon?’

Relief
flooded into her, with the thought that they were considering other people as candidates for this killing. Or was it all an elaborate ploy to put her off her guard? She had no idea of the way such men went about their business, and her ignorance was a breeding ground for the fear which rose to clutch so persistently at her heart. ‘No. I didn’t see anything like that. I don’t know quite what Raymond intended. I never found out, because it was Moira Yates who controlled that meeting.’ The memory of the woman’s febrile dominance came back vividly to her, and for a moment its vividness thrust out even her own fear of what was going to happen.

‘
Controlled it?’

‘
She took over the whole visit. As if it were just a showcase for her. As if it were a scene designed for her to show how little she needed Raymond. How inferior his will was to hers.’

Lambert
studied her carefully, then nodded. ‘You have obviously thought about that meeting a lot in the last fortnight.’

Zoe
nodded, forcing a little smile. ‘It made a big impression on me. I realized that whatever else Moira Yates might be or might have been, she is a remarkable woman.’ Powerful enough to use me as just part of the furniture, she thought; not many women have done that. And powerful enough to make me see things in Raymond Keane that I had not recognized in months of intimate contact.

Lambert
wondered how far to pursue this. But, like most policemen, he shied away from the subjective. Establish the facts, all the facts, before you speculate, was his watchword with his subordinates. He could be a positive Gradgrind about gathering the facts in the first stages of an investigation. He said, ‘What about the other two people who were present at this meeting?’

‘
As I said, it was at Dermot Yates’s house. He’s her elder brother, who’s been looking after Moira during her illness. I gather there are normally just the two of them in the house. He tried to control Moira—not very effectively. I think he was knocked off balance by the way she took over the proceedings. She was full of energy, and I got the impression that that was a surprise to him, that she had been listless for a long time.’ She had forgotten that she had not specified the nature of Moira’s illness, was speaking as if they knew as much as she did about it. ‘Miss Yates has been suffering from agoraphobia. Hasn’t been able to leave the house for months.’

‘
And what about Gerald Sangster? How did he react to her behaviour?’