Die With Me (27 page)

‘Do you think this is our man?’ Steele asked, still looking at Kennedy as if she was hoping for something more.

Again Kennedy paused for thought, then shook his head. ‘Impossible to tell. It’s all academic anyway, if you can’t hold him.’

Steele sighed, locked her fingers and stretched her arms out in front as if her shoulders were stiff. ‘We can’t let him go yet,’ she said. ‘He’s all we’ve got. If he doesn’t want to talk, we’d better search his flat and see if we can turn something up. Can you sort it out, Nick?’

Minderedes was about to reply when there was a knock and Harriet Wilson put her head around the door, catching Tartaglia’s eye.

‘Mr Asher would like to talk to you, Inspector. Off the record.’

‘Off the record, what does he think this is?’ Steele said. ‘A blooming free session of counselling?’

Wilson shrugged. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger. I don’t even know what it is he wants to say. But he’s said he will only speak to the Inspector alone.’

‘Just me?’ Tartaglia asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t even want me there. I think he’s actually trying to be cooperative,’ she added, seeing Steele shaking her head. ‘If you assume innocence for a change rather than instant guilt, why don’t you give it a whirl?’

‘Why should we?’ Steele said flatly. ‘He’s in here on suspicion of murder. We’re not at his beck and call.’

‘I know it’s nothing to do with me,’ Wilson said. ‘But what have you got to lose? The time’s ticking away and you know that you’ve got nothing to hold him here.’

‘We haven’t searched his flat yet.’

‘If he’s innocent, like he says, you won’t find anything and I doubt whether he’ll want to speak to you any more after that.’ She looked around the room at the watching faces. ‘Look, what harm can it do, just a few minutes of the Inspector’s time. If you don’t learn anything, you can always go back to plan A, that is if you have a plan A.’

After a bit of bartering they had compromised. No tape and no video, but Tartaglia, now sitting opposite Asher, alone in the room, was allowed to make notes. If, in the end, he was wrong and Asher turned out to be Tom, it would be the strangest of games. He had brought Asher a sandwich and a cup of coffee, both of which sat on the table untouched.

‘We spoke on the phone a couple of times,’ Asher said quietly. ‘At first she was very wary, kept trying to catch me out. I began to think that it wasn’t worth the ticket. But gradually she came round a bit.’

‘Why do you think that was?’

Asher paused for a moment, as if he was trying to think back. ‘Well, she said my voice was different, for starters.’

‘In what way different?’

‘Don’t know. Different tone maybe. I got the feeling the other bloke spoke posh, like the people who read the news on the telly. She thought I was putting on my accent at first.’

‘You persuaded her you weren’t?’

‘Not to start with. Asked me where I come from and all sorts of other things like that, family, school, you know. It was like being interviewed for a bloody job. I had to tell her my name’s not Chris. That put her off for a bit. Then she rang me again with some more questions.’

‘Did she tell you anything about herself?’

‘Said she was a lawyer. That didn’t surprise me, the way she kept asking the bleeding questions. Really pissed me off, it did. But when she told me her husband had died in the tsunami, I felt sorry for her. Then she told me about the other bloke and I understood why she had to check me out.’

‘This was all on the phone?’

Asher nodded.

‘For someone who was so wary to start off with, it sounds as if she was easily convinced, don’t you think? How did she know that you weren’t the other man?’

‘Gut feel, I suppose,’ Asher said, almost a little too quickly. ‘You just make your mind up about someone.’

Tartaglia stared hard at him, making Asher look away. ‘There’s more, isn’t there, Mr Asher?’

Asher was silent for a moment before replying. ‘Yeah. It’s what I didn’t want to say before.’ He looked up at Tartaglia. ‘Do you have a fag?’

In spite of the no smoking sign on the wall, Tartaglia offered him one and lit one himself. Asher took the first pull as if it were his last, then leaned back hard against his chair, making it creak. He sighed heavily. ‘I suppose you’d better know. She wouldn’t meet me at all, until I told her why I wanted to top myself.’

Again Asher was silent, as if something was weighing heavily on his mind. His face was slack, mouth half open, eyes vacant as if he were somewhere else.

‘Well?’ Tartaglia said.

Asher looked up. ‘I used to be a PE teacher, until recently, that is. My last job was at a posh girls’ school out in Surrey.’ He paused, filling his lungs with more smoke. ‘I made the stupid mistake of falling for one of the girls. It was nothing smutty,’ he added quickly, catching the look on Tartaglia’s face. ‘Nothing like that, Inspector. I’m not a paedophile. Really I’m not. All we did was a bit of kissing and cuddling, that’s all.’

‘I’ve heard that before.’

‘I can see what you’re thinking but you’re wrong. They were all wrong. Her name’s Sarah and I loved her, you see. I really loved her and wanted to marry her when she was old enough. She was fifteen going on twenty-five. A beautiful young thing with a wise head on young shoulders. She was a lot wiser than me, I can tell you.’

Asher took another deep drag on the cigarette, blowing the smoke into rings, which curled up towards the strip light above. ‘To cut a long story short, her parents found out, went to see the bloody headmistress and I was sacked. It’s not fair, is it?’

‘What, being sacked?’

‘No. I didn’t mind about that so much. What’s unfair is you can’t choose who you love, can you?’

Tartaglia saw the pain in Asher’s eyes and nodded. How right Asher was. The pursuit of love, nothing sensible or reasoned about it, something that, try as you might, was impossible to control: the madness; the highs; the terrible lows. He thought back, remembering all those stupid mistakes and errors of judgement that he’d made, the time and energy wasted, hope burning strong, followed by disillusionment, finding that he’d been chasing after a fantasy. The cold light of day that flooded in afterwards was always so harsh and unforgiving. But he had never been totally desperate and without hope. He had never lost all sense of himself or his trust in the goodness of life and the future. Perhaps he had never let himself go to the brink, never completely put himself on the line. Some people were just more highly tuned than others. Although he wasn’t like Sean Asher, he could still feel for him and pity his pain.

‘You wanted to kill yourself because of her?’ Tartalia asked.

Asher nodded, nibbling hard at a piece of loose skin around one of his nails. His finger was bleeding but he didn’t seem to care. ‘Her parents took her away from school and sent her abroad for the summer. She got over it quickly but I didn’t. Still haven’t,’ he added after a moment.

‘We’ll have to check this out, you know.’

Asher shrugged. ‘Be my guest. I’ve nothing to hide now. I thought she still loved me, you see, that it was only a matter of time before we could be together. Then…’

‘Then?’

Asher sighed. ‘Then she wrote to me. They call it a Dear John letter, don’t they? Except mine was addressed to Dear Sean. It was horrible, like another person talking, someone I didn’t know. Maybe her mother made her write it but she signed it. And it was her writing. It did me in, I can tell you. When Kelly asked to see proof of why I wanted to top myself, to see that I was genuine, like, I sent her the letter. Then she understood.’

‘We didn’t come across anything like that in her flat when we went through her things.’

‘She sent it back to me, didn’t she. I’ve still got it and I can show you, if you want.’

‘Please. Why didn’t you tell us this before?’

‘None of you were listening, were you? Too busy trying to make me confess to something I hadn’t done. I thought you wouldn’t understand about Sarah, thought you’d judge me, call me a fucking paedophile and lock me up. Anyway, it’s private. It’s my business, nobody else’s.’

Asher was probably right about how they might have reacted earlier. Tartaglia couldn’t help respecting his reasons for wanting to keep quiet, relieved that at least he now appeared to be getting to the truth. ‘So, getting back to Kelly Goodhart. You managed to convince her that you were genuine.’

Asher nodded.

‘Do you remember anything else she may have said about the other man who contacted her?’

‘I know she never met him. But she said she thought she could trust him and he proved her wrong.’

‘Those were her exact words?’

‘Maybe I haven’t got it quite right but something along those lines. We’d met up, you see. She said she wanted to see me, face to face, like. It was the last hurdle she put me through. We went to a café just off the North End Road. I showed her my passport, just so she’d know I was who I said I was. She said the other bloke had freaked her out. She said he’d been playing with her, egging her on, messing with her head. She could see I wasn’t into that sort of thing.’

From what Asher had said, it sounded like Tom had tried to get to Kelly Goodhart. ‘Did she tell you how he was doing this?’

‘No.’

‘Is there anything else you can tell me about him?’

‘Sorry, no.’

‘Was there anything else she said?’

‘She told me she’d been born and brought up a Catholic and she asked me if I was religious. When I said I’m not, haven’t been to church since I was a kid, she seemed relieved. Said that religion was a disguise for all sorts of evil things. That people use it to get what they want. It was just after we’d been talking about the other bloke but I don’t know if it had anything to do with him.’

‘You’re sure there’s nothing else?’

Asher took a final drag on his cigarette, which was almost down to the butt, and dropped it into his cup of coffee, where it hissed momentarily. ‘I’ve told you everything, I swear. She was a sharp lady, Inspector. Real brainy and nice. I’m sorry she’s gone, truly I am.’

‘Why didn’t you try and talk her out of it?’

‘Because I understood her. I knew what she were feeling, what she was going through. She wanted to end it and I respected that. I could see that the light had gone out for her and it were how I felt at the time too. She just had a darn sight more courage than me.’

They would still have to search Asher’s flat just to make sure, but Tartaglia was convinced by now that nothing would come of it. At least in the meantime, whatever Steele and Kennedy thought, he knew somehow he had made progress.

Dave Wightman drew up along the road from the address in West Hampstead that Tartaglia had given him, and killed the engine. They had let Sean Asher go just before midnight and Wightman had driven quickly over from Paddington Green so that he was ready and waiting for Steele when she arrived home. If Kennedy was with her, Tartaglia had told him to keep watch and take notes. If not, he could go home. When Tartaglia had explained the situation and told him what Clarke had said to him earlier in the hospital, Wightman was only too happy to be involved and trusted with the task. If that’s what the boss wanted, that’s what he would do, no questions asked. He respected both Clarke and Tartaglia more than anybody and he had no liking for Kennedy. He seemed so full of himself and there was also something rather odd about him, although he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was. However, he wasn’t entirely surprised to find that Kennedy was a bloody peeping Tom. In his view, all perverts deserved to be outed. Never mind that Steele would be hopping mad if she found out. She had a real blind spot where Kennedy was concerned and if something peculiar was going on, it needed to be exposed.

Wightman looked at his watch. It was well past midnight. Luckily, he had nobody waiting at home for him, apart from his mum, and she was used to his erratic hours and would have been in bed, asleep, long ago. He listened to Heart FM for about ten minutes, until he saw Steele’s car coming down the road and switched off the radio. He ducked down as she passed and waited for her to get out. She was on her own and he watched her park a little further along the road, walk to the front door and go in.

Tartaglia had left Paddington Green before any of them and in ten minutes he was home. He felt wired, thoughts buzzing in his mind. Even though it would be an early start next morning, there was no point in trying to go to sleep yet. He switched on the music system, not bothering to check what CD was in the machine, opened a bottle of Gavi which had been chilling in the fridge, and poured himself a large glass. It tasted a little sharp but he didn’t care. Unbuttoning his shirt, he walked around the room with his glass of wine, thinking about Sean Asher. Something Asher had said kept niggling at him but try as he might, he couldn’t think what it was. He tried replaying the interview in his mind, word by word, seeing Asher sitting in front of him, picturing his expressions and reactions. But it still wouldn’t come. From experience he knew not to try and winkle it out, no point in trying to force it. It would come when it was ready, if at all.

There was only one message on the answer machine, from Nicoletta, again insisting that he come to lunch. He was positive now that she was hatching a plot and, irritated by her persistence, he deleted the message, went into the bathroom, turned on the shower and got undressed. As soon as the water was hot, he stepped in, turned the tap on full to get maximum pressure and moved the temperature gauge up a little until the heat was almost unbearable. The cubicle filled with steam almost immediately and he took several deep breaths, shutting his eyes, trying to clear his thoughts.

Thinking of the second email that Steele had received that day, he wondered how she was feeling, going back to her flat on her own. He couldn’t believe that the words had left her untouched, that she wouldn’t be worried. But there was no point in offering help where it wasn’t wanted. He grabbed a bottle of shampoo from the rack and massaged a small amount into his scalp. It felt good and he stood rubbing it in, thanking his lucky stars that his thick hair showed no signs of thinning as he got older, unlike his brother-in-law John, Nicoletta’s husband, who had lost most of his hair in the space of five years.