Killing Me Softly (23 page)

‘Barbie? Afraid she's gone in to Kington to do some shopping. Be back in time to get her father's lunch, though. Least, I hope so, I've to get home and see to my old man's food. He'd starve rather than get it himself,' she added with a chuckle. ‘Would you like to see her father? He's up today, in the conservatory, feeling much better, he is.'

She took them through the house and into a built-on, heated conservatory overlooking a walled garden, where an old man was dozing over the
Telegraph
in an upright padded cane chair. His eyes flew open as they came in, a tall, distinguished-looking man, wearing a yellow sweater over a checked shirt, twill trousers and highly polished leather slippers.

The woman announced, ‘Some people here to see you, Commander.'

He put the paper aside before attempting to rise stiffly.

‘Please don't get up,' Jenny said, and Carmody explained who they were, and that it was his daughter they'd come to see.

The old man sat up straighter, looked from one to the other, sizing them up. ‘Better wait for her, then. Shouldn't be long. If you've come all this way, you'd like some refreshment. You can oblige, Mrs Sanderson?' he asked of the woman who had lingered in the background, clearly having anticipated the request.

‘That I can. Coffee or tea?'

‘Tea! Good God, they want something stronger than tea!'

‘I don't suppose they do, and neither do you, if you're going to take any notice of the doctor.' Her smile made rosy apples of her cheeks, but her eyes were unrelenting.

‘Chance'd be a fine thing,' he muttered, casting a longing look at the bottles ranged on a side table. When Jenny said coffee would be lovely, he cast his eyes to heaven. Mrs Sanderson beamed and bustled off, and when they were settled in chairs opposite the old man, he said, ‘Know it's Barbara you've come to see, but can I be of any help?'

Jenny exchanged a swift glance with Carmody. The commander had high spots of colour on both cheekbones, his eyes were bright, and he had the drawn look of someone recently ill. He smiled, noting the hesitation. It was quite something, that smile, she thought he must have been a knockout in his younger days, in his naval uniform.

‘I'm not an invalid, y'know, never mind all this claptrap.' His gesture took in the bottles of pills by his chair. ‘Damn nuisance, that's all – though I thought I was about to cash in my chips, I can tell you, when they carted me off. Needn't have bothered, of course, fuss about nothing, right as rain in an hour or two. They're going to give me a decoke, blow through m'tubes. Something called an angioplasty.'

‘When did it happen?' Jenny asked sympathetically.

‘Last Saturday lunch time. Just doing the crossword and keeled over like a bloody pack of cards – if you'll excuse me, miss.'

Mrs Sanderson came back with a laden tray; her idea of refreshments was anyone else's idea of a substantial lunch. There were hot sausage rolls and sandwiches besides coffee and chocolate biscuits, and not until she had seen the visitors supplied to her satisfaction did she leave them again, informing her employer that it was time she was on her way, she'd prepared the veg for lunch. ‘See you Monday, then.'

The commander left the subject of Barbie in abeyance while they ate – the sausage rolls were home-made, with country butcher's sausagemeat, Jenny decided appreciatively – and returned to the preoccupation of his own collapse which, despite his pooh-poohing, had evidently shaken him a lot. ‘At least it brought Barbara home, it's a lonely life for me since her mother died. Nothing to do but write my damned memoirs. Well, I suppose it passes the time.' He waved to a table in one corner of the conservatory, neatly stacked with papers and a portable typewriter. ‘Had an interesting life in the navy, never made admiral though, despite the name.' He paused to let them see the joke, but didn't wait for a laugh; the humour of it had evidently worn thin with familiarity, even for himself. Jenny smiled, all the same. ‘Been all over the world,' he went on. ‘Barbara thought the book a good idea.' The commander himself sounded depressed at the notion, and the papers didn't appear to have been disturbed that morning, at least. One more ex-service memoir would hardly set the publishing world on fire with enthusiasm, but Jenny could see that wasn't the point. As long as it kept a lonely old man occupied.

He said suddenly, ‘The police are no strangers to this household, y'know. And m'daughter and I don't have any secrets from each other. No need to take my word, of course, and if you want to wait until she gets here, I've no objections. But I might be able to help.'

His bluff manner didn't deceive. He had a shrewd assessment of what was to come, Carmody thought. He wiped the flakes of pastry from his fingers and reached into his inside pocket for the photocopy of the newspaper article and the picture of Barbie, which he handed to Nelson. ‘What can you tell us about that case?'

The paper was steady in the old man's hand. He gave it a cursory glance – it was evidently not new to him – then passed it back. ‘Thought that's what you must be here for. Well, the details of the story were common knowledge. It was in all the papers,
ad nauseam.
I assume that's not what you want to know.'

‘You know that Tim Wishart is dead?'

An unreadable expression crossed the old man's face. ‘Paul Matthews is dead, too.'

‘You say you and your daughter have no secrets from each other. So presumably you know that the firm she went to work for in Lavenstock is owned by Wishart's wife?'

‘Wishart's wife?'

He hadn't known that, at any rate. It had caught him off balance, but he quickly recovered and added gamely, ‘That's a coincidence. Barbara and Wishart never met, you know, during the case.' He stared out of the window, where bluetits were trapezing to and fro, pecking on an almost empty wire mesh container. ‘Bird-feeder needs filling again – damn squirrels,' he said. ‘Come and pinch the nuts, bite through the mesh, greedy little buggers.' He turned away. ‘She went through a rotten time after Paul was sentenced, y'know. Due to be married within a month of that, all the plans made. And then, when he took his own life in prison ... my poor girl... she went to pieces. Never be any justice until people realize it's the victims who pay the penalty ... there were times, I tell you, when I hated those two men, Wishart and Pardoe. No excuses for Paul, what he did was wrong, but they were no less guilty, and he was left to take the punishment. I can't be sorry one of them, at least, is dead. She went through a long depression, and lost her job. Since then –'

A kitchen pinger on the table beside him startled them all with a shrill noise. ‘Blasted pills,' he muttered, ‘wouldn't remember to take them, otherwise.' He took two with a glass of water, making a performance of it, grumbling about the necessity. ‘Still,' he said, putting the glass back on the table with very careful precision, ‘one thing this little how-d'ye-do of mine's done, it's brought m'daughter back home, as I say.'

As if she'd been waiting in the wings for the right moment to enter, Barbie Nelson herself at that moment came into the room.

To Jenny, who'd never met her before, she came as something of a surprise. This wasn't the carefree girl pictured in the newspaper photograph, nor the one she'd imagined from the DI's description; she'd expected a quite different personality from the tall, rather severe-looking young woman who now entered, dressed in a well-cut skirt and heavy silk shirt. Expensive clothes, cleverly designed especially with big women in mind. She'd abandoned the heavy spectacles, revealing rather lovely, lustrous dark eyes, and the way she was now wearing her smoothly brushed dark brown hair, swept back from her forehead, showed off her creamy skin. Jenny, whose short, curly hair and pretty, round, pink-cheeked face forever denied her the elegance she longed for, looked down at her neat jacket and pleated skirt and sighed in despair.

If she was surprised to see the visitors, Barbie didn't show it. She said hello and then walked over to her father and kissed him before turning inquiringly to the others, a smile still on her face. The smile did a lot to change Jenny's initial impression of her severity. Could this be the sort of woman who'd deliberately shot a man in the face at close range? She did, in fact, look rather jolly. But appearances counted for nothing, as her next words showed.

‘So, he's copped it at last, has he?'

‘If you're talking about Tim Wishart, yes.'

‘Somebody's shown some sense then. Given the bastard what he deserves.'

Not all women had been suckers for Wishart's charm, Carmody thought. This was the second who'd thought him a bastard. The commander made a small sound. He looked suddenly very tired.

‘Sorry, Dad.' Barbie reached a hand out to his. ‘You don't want to hear this.' To the others she said, ‘Come into the kitchen while I get the lunch going.'

‘Barbara –'

‘It's better,' she said gently. ‘I'll tell you everything later, I promise, but I'd rather you didn't hear this way.'

Her quiet, reasonable tone had its effect. ‘Well, if you must. Don't think I'm really up to any more at the moment, if the truth be told.'

‘He's right,' she said, when they were in the neat, well-appointed kitchen, where she made no attempt to start on the lunch, but sat with them at the table. ‘My father's right. I wouldn't have come home if he hadn't collapsed on Saturday. Not permanently. I can't be glad for him that he did have that attack, but you don't always see things straight until you're shocked into it. When I got that telephone call, I suddenly saw myself through his eyes, and I thought, what am I messing about at? What am I doing here? So ..' She shrugged and spread her hands. ‘I came home.'

‘And what
had
you been doing there, Miss Nelson?' Carmody asked. ‘Apart from writing anonymous letters?'

A tide of colour swept across her face and neck. ‘Oh God, he didn't throw them away, then! That was stupid, infantile. I only sent a couple, don't know why I sent any ... except that it seemed to get rid of some of my frustration. I wanted to make him see, to prick his conscience. That's a laugh! He wouldn't have recognised his conscience if it had jumped up and bitten him. But I couldn't accept that he could just get away, scot free, while Paul was – dead. It was a case of lashing out, I was just so
angry
... I don't suppose you can understand that, people like you.'

‘Like us?'

‘Oh, you know, always so – together. You never see or hear of a policeman, or woman, freaked out.'

Jenny thought of PC Willens, an officer she'd once seen go berserk over a driver half asleep at the traffic lights – road rage, they were now calling it – but kept silent. Carmody, who'd seen more than that in his time, the force having its share of neurotics, just as anywhere else, with enough pressure to make the most stable personality lose both their balance and their sense of perspective, not to mention their temper, said nothing either. ‘How come you were able to get a job with Miller's Wife?' he asked instead.

‘I took the
Advertiser,
the local paper, for months. Just to keep tabs on him. When I saw the advert for someone to work there I grabbed it, it was the nearest I could get to him – and it turned out to be a good move, he was always around the place, one way or another.'

‘Did you intend to kill him, Miss Nelson?'

She didn't answer immediately, tracing the grain of the woodwork on the table with her fingernail. After a moment, she looked up. ‘I don't know what I intended. I felt as though I
could
have killed him, when Paul died. Perhaps I did mean it, I think I was a little bit out of my mind, you know? There was the idea of revenge, yes, but in a half-baked way – those silly notes ... Then, when I met him, and saw how susceptible he was to women – I thought, this is it. If I could get close enough, I thought, I could hurt him, the way he'd hurt me ...'

‘Was that why you kept the knife by your bed?'

There was a slight pause. ‘Didn't I put it back? I must have forgotten. I used to take it upstairs with me at first because – it was a bit eerie being on those premises alone at night, until you got used to it.'

‘At first? You took it up later, intending to kill Tim Wishart with it?'

‘I didn't have to, did I? Somebody else did it for me.'

Jenny looked at her and suddenly thought: she'll need watching, this one. For all her apparent frankness, there was something secretive about her, something unstable that would always surface. No one who wasn't slightly mad could have contemplated such actions. Jenny found no difficulty in accepting Barbie's story and could quite easily imagine it played out to its first intended conclusion, had it not been for her father's collapse. There was genuine love and concern there, she thought, and it might have been what had saved her.

Carmody was asking, ‘What time did you leave Lavenstock on Saturday afternoon?'

‘I didn't notice the time. I had the telephone call from Mrs Sanderson to tell me about my father and I just rushed off. About two o'clock, it must have been.'

‘Mrs Redvers has told us that her answering machine recorded a message from you at two forty.'

‘Then it must have been later than I thought, mustn't it? I was very upset and confused. I wasn't really thinking straight. I went straight to the hospital. They'll tell you what time I got there.'

‘Why didn't you tell her the truth about why you'd so suddenly decided to leave? Or leave an address?'

Barbie watched Jenny taking it all down in her notebook, in her careful, schoolgirlish hand.

‘I didn't – I
don't
– want to have anything more to do with any of them. I'm not proud of what happened, but it's over and done with. I just want to be left alone to live my life and forget it.'