Picture of Innocence (19 page)

The phone rang and rang and rang. ‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’ Lloyd asked.

She uncurled herself slowly from the chair, and walked towards the hallway. Lloyd watched her, then blew out his cheeks, finished his lemonade, and followed her out.

‘I’ll be off, Mrs Bailey,’ he said, as she got to the phone. ‘Thank you for the drink.’

Mike waited impatiently for the phone to be picked up. He had spent hours checking the computer files, even system files. Every single inch had been checked through for any trace of the death threats, then checked again, until he had been absolutely certain that nothing remained on the computer that could tie him in to them. But he was sure that there were people who could get files that had been discarded. Somewhere, in that thing’s brain, it probably still had the bloody death threats that he had so obediently written for her. Rachel Bailey was going to pick up that phone, and he wouldn’t stop ringing her until she did.

‘Hello?’

He jumped slightly, having long since given up on her answering this time around. ‘ I’ve got to see you,’ he said. ‘And you’ll have to come here – I can’t be seen at your place. It’ll be crawling with police. So you come here. Now.’

‘Can’t, Mr McQueen,’ she said, her tone as unruffled as ever. ‘Not right now.’

‘I’ve got to talk to you,’ he repeated. ‘And I don’t want the police knowing. If you could get here without Bailey seeing you, you can avoid a few policemen, I’m sure. Just get yourself over here.’

‘I can’t,’ she said again. ‘Don’t know when I’ll be able to get over. Might not be until tomorrow. And when I do, Mr McQueen, I’m walkin’ up your front driveway, ’cos I don’t have to sneak through hedges and cross folks’ fields no more.’

Mike stared at the phone. She was proud of herself. Oh, what did it matter if the police did see her? He was in it up to his neck anyway, as Finch had indicated. ‘Just get here!’ he said, and hung up.

Inspector Hill was very fanciable, Jack Melville had thought automatically as he had asked her in, his heart beating a little too fast. He always gave women a desirability quotient; he did it without even thinking. Rachel Bailey had gone off the scale, of course, and the inspector got a high rating, but it was her calling rather than her sex appeal that had increased his pulse rate. He had thought out a sort of a strategy, but it wasn’t good; he had had very little time. Inspector Hill had gone in, and he had introduced her to Terri.

‘You surely don’t suspect a member of my committee of murdering the man, do you?’ had been Terri’s greeting. ‘ Wasn’t it bad enough accusing us of sending death threats?’

The inspector had explained that with regard to the death threats, they had interviewed everyone who had taken a hostile view of Bailey’s stand over his farm, and had said that her interest in the committee was not because anyone was being accused of anything, but because elimination was ninety per cent of the battle in any investigation. And they had a lot of people to eliminate from this particular enquiry. Mr Bailey’s death did seem, she had pointed out, the answer to a great many prayers.

‘Well, yes, it is, rather,’ Terri had said, combative as ever. ‘I’ll be perfectly honest about that. If prayer constitutes a murder weapon, then I expect you should arrest the entire village.’

And so it had gone on, with Terri dredging up every grievance she had ever had against the police, and she had a lot of grievances. In her time she had been dragged away from sit-downs, forcibly ejected from buildings, locked in a cell after being arrested at a demo for assaulting a police officer. She had been given a caution for that. The next time she had been charged with disturbing the peace, but had been found not guilty by magistrates who had seen her on her best behaviour, unlike the police. Her friends, and by extension, his friends, included all manner of offenders; she had been involved in a drugs raid on one of their houses, and while there hadn’t been any charges against her, she had regarded the whole thing as an invasion of privacy, an affront to civil liberty.

All her resentment of the police was directed at the quite astonishingly patient Inspector Hill, and Jack wondered if the poor woman would ever get round to the real purpose of her visit. She had been here for over half an hour as it was.

‘The inspector isn’t here about the committee,’ he said, eventually, before she talked herself into a charge of boring a police officer to death.

Inspector Hill looked over at him, her eyebrows raised.

‘Isn’t she?’ said Terri, and turned back to Inspector Hill. ‘Then why
are
you here?’

‘I think I’ll let Mr Melville tell you himself,’ she said.

‘I don’t understand,’ Terri said.

Jack looked at her, and smiled, shrugged a little. ‘I imagine I was caught on camera, so to speak,’ he said. At the scene of the crime.’ He tried to make it sound jovial; it just sounded a little desperate. He turned to the inspector, holding up his hands. ‘ But I’m not guilty, officer,’ he said.

‘
You
were there?’ said Terri, her eyes wide. ‘At Bailey’s farm? When? Why?’

‘It was at about ten o’clock last night,’ he said, in a truthful answer to her first question. ‘I was his financial adviser,’ he added, in an inadequate, semi-truthful reply to her second. ‘I had to see him sometimes.’

He saw the look that suddenly crossed Terri’s face as he spoke, a sort of helpless, hurt look, as she thought of a better reason why he might have visited Bailey’s farm than the one he’d given. ‘Financial adviser!’ she shouted. ‘Your wonderful scheme practically bankrupted him! He had nothing left for you to advise him about! Besides, you were the enemy over this road business. He wouldn’t have let you in.’ There was a slight stress on the gender.

Jack hadn’t expected that sort of furious reaction, and certainly not in public. He turned, a little embarrassed, to the inspector. ‘A couple of years ago I suggested that he might like to come in with me on something that I thought could make us both a tidy profit,’ he said. ‘ But it was a risk. He went
against
my advice.’ He looked at Terri as he said that, then turned back to the inspector. ‘He thought he’d inherited his grandfather’s skill with investments as well as his farm,’ he said. ‘He wouldn’t listen to me, and he went – quite literally – for broke. My previous tips had been successful, and he … well, he was greedy. He lost a huge amount of money. But I – I kept him abreast of what was happening with what shares he still had invested.’

Terri got up and left the room. It had seemed all right, when he had rehearsed it. Now, with Terri’s total disbelief, and the inspector’s astute brown eyes looking sceptically into his, it seemed pathetic.

Inspector Hill looked at the door which Terri had closed firmly behind her. ‘Your wife doesn’t seem to think that you were giving Mr Bailey financial advice,’ she said.

‘I know what my wife thinks,’ said Jack. ‘But she’s wrong. Rachel Bailey wasn’t even there last night! She was away for the weekend.’

‘Yes,’ said the inspector. ‘Can I ask where
you
were over the weekend, Mr Melville?’

Jack stared at her. ‘ Just because my wife seems to have jumped to conclusions doesn’t mean that you have to Inspector.’

‘You seem to be the one who jumped to that particular conclusion, Mr Melville. I didn’t mention Mrs Bailey.’

‘Yes, I suppose I did; Jack conceded, with a sigh. ‘ But I imagine that is the construction that my wife has put on the visit.’ He knew damn well it was, with good reason. And while he didn’t really want his fondness for the opposite sex to be dragged into this, at least it had sidetracked the inspector; he didn’t think he would have coped very well if she had questioned him about the small investments he had invented for Bailey. ‘But I barely know Rachel Bailey,’ he added, ‘and I was here all weekend. With my wife.’

‘Thank you.’ She jotted something down in her notebook, then looked up. ‘Surely Bernard Bailey had liquidated all his assets?’ she said.

Jack swallowed. She wasn’t that easily sidetracked after all. ‘It wasn’t worth his while,’ he said. ‘A few hundred pounds, that’s all.’

She raised her eyebrows again. ‘Perhaps you have the share certificates,’ she said. ‘ Mr Bailey doesn’t seem to have them.’

‘He didn’t have the shares any more,’ said Jack uncomfortably. Wise saws about tangled webs came into his mind; he was now having to invent a transaction. ‘He sold them a few days ago.’

‘I thought it wasn’t worth his while?’

Oh, hell. ‘It wasn’t! Not until recently.’ He was digging himself in deeper with every word. ‘He needed money quickly for some reason,’ he said, seizing on a partial truth once again. ‘So he sold the shares. It was peanuts. Enough for his wife to have a weekend at a good hotel in London, which is what I gather he spent it on.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, clearly not believing a word of it. ‘But if he had sold them before the weekend, why were you there last night, Mr Melville?’

‘Oh, that,’ he said. No more clever touches. Just a nice, straightforward lie. ‘I just went to try to make him see sense. A sort of eleventh-hour appeal to his better nature. But I don’t think he had a better nature.’

She accepted that at face value, or at least pretended that she had. ‘Perhaps you can tell me how Mr Bailey seemed to you?’ she asked.

‘He … he was a little under the weather,’ he said. ‘He’d been drinking.’

‘Was he drunk?’

‘Yes, not to put too fine a point on it.’

Bailey had been drinking, and, for the first time Jack could ever remember, garrulous. Last night, his tongue loosened by alcohol, Bailey had talked. More than that; he had made threats. Terrible threats.

‘I suppose it might just have been reaction to the business about the demonstration; he went on, since she had said nothing. ‘If you spend all day expecting hostile hordes to descend on you, and then they don’t …’ He shrugged again. ‘ But he …’ He sighed, knowing what her reaction would he to what he was about to say. ‘ He was threatening to kill his wife.’ He looked down, away from the steady brown gaze. ‘He said he would break every bone in her body. From what I could gather, he’d beaten her up quite regularly. And he said he thought he’d kicked some sense into her last time, but he hadn’t. And that he would kill her this time, because he might as well go to prison if he was going to lose everything.’

‘Did he say why he intended doing this?’

‘No.’ A lie.

She looked at him enquiringly. ‘Were you thinking of mentioning this at all, Mr Melville?’ she asked. ‘If I hadn’t come here?’

‘Well … I wasn’t sure of its relevance,’ he said. ‘ I mean, if
she
had been found stabbed, of course I would have told you. But … well, she wasn’t, was she?
He
was.’

And she might have stabbed him to death in preference to having every bone in her body broken. He knew that. He just hadn’t felt obliged to tell the police, that was all; he hadn’t wanted Terri to know he’d been there, and he hadn’t wanted to get Rachel Bailey suspected of murdering her husband.

Inspector Hill nodded. ‘ If you have any other information,’ she said, ‘perhaps you’ll let
me
decide its relevance to this enquiry?’

‘That’s all I know.’ All that he was going to tell her, at any rate.

‘There is something you may
really
not have thought relevant,’ she said. ‘Were the radiators on in the sitting room?’

‘I wouldn’t know. I was in his office.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘We may wish to talk to you again.’

He showed her out, and turned to look at the staircase. Terri was up there, and he had to go and face her. More lies, more tangled webs.

‘She thinks I just stood by and let him—’ Gus’s lips came together, and he couldn’t find the words to finish the sentence.

‘She doesn’t,’ said Nicola.

‘Of course she does! You heard her!’ He shook his head disbelievingly. ‘All those times,’ he said. ‘All those times that you told me you’d slipped, or some animal had kicked you! It was an animal all right! How often?’ he demanded. ‘How often, since we’ve been married?’

Nicola sighed. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. And he never kicked me. He saved that for Rachel.’

‘But why did he do anything to you? What had you done? Give me for instances.’

She arrested her hand as it went to push her hair behind her ears. She didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t want to tell him. But she would. Why couldn’t she be more like Rachel? Rachel, who had defied Bernard Bailey at every turn, regardless of the painful, bruising consequences, even after he’d half killed her. She had been the unwitting cause of it, one time.

‘Once was when he told me he was marrying Rachel,’ she said. ‘I said it was too soon and she was too young. He … he took exception to that.’

‘And?’

‘Gus, I don’t want to—’

‘Tell me! What else?’

‘Lots of things. You never knew what it would be. The last time was when I tried to trace Bailey’s farm in Yorkshire,’ she said. ‘Remember? Last spring?’

He frowned. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘ What of it?’

‘When I couldn’t find anyone who’d heard of it, I asked him about it.’ She shrugged. ‘ I didn’t know I’d done anything wrong. He just … started punching me. Said it was for prying into his business.’

‘And did you tell Rachel that he hit you?’

‘No. She must have seen him one time.’

Gus stared at her. ‘ I stuck up for him when people called him names!’ He jumped up. ‘How could you let me do that? Why didn’t you
tell
me? I could have put a stop to it!’

‘How?’ said Nicola, helplessly. ‘By beating
him
up? By going to the police? I didn’t want any of that! I didn’t want you to know.’

‘Because you think I’m as useless as she does!’ he said, and went out, slamming the door.

Nicola felt sick. She should have told Gus. Rachel probably did think that he already knew, that he had been too spineless to do anything about it. And was that why she
hadn’t
told him? Because he would have wrung his hands, and done nothing? Easy enough to say he would have put a stop to it now that the threat had gone. And what when he found out what she had done to avenge herself for all the hammerings? What then?