Picture of Innocence (26 page)

He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said.

‘You still think I killed him?

‘No, pet,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you were anywhere near him. Or what would be the point of getting your boyfriend to kill him for you?’

Rachel smiled. ‘Never asked him to,’ she said. ‘Not my fault if he’s hot-headed.’

‘You don’t seem too bothered about him being arrested.’

She was terrified, if he really wanted to know. She had known that Curtis had underestimated Lloyd when she had watched that programme, had known that they should have been making contingency plans, not celebrating anything. They had been lying on the bed, sleeping off the exertions of the afternoon, when the police had walked in on them, and Curtis hadn’t liked it any better than he had when Nicola had found them in the cowshed. He had complained about it, once he’d got his clothes on and hadn’t felt so vulnerable.

They said they’d knocked, but if they had, it hadn’t penetrated. And, she supposed, knocking on the door of a luxury fiat didn’t have quite the same effect as banging on the side of VW camper. That shook the van, echoed. That woke you up, all right. Travellers got the blame for everything, and the scene was one she knew well, with cops invading your privacy, giving orders, silencing protests, acting as though they owned the place. Curtis had looked as bewildered as Lloyd had looked angry, and when one of the uniformed ones had made a remark about her desirability, Lloyd had just told her to cover herself up. And she had thought he was different.

But then, she had been convinced that Curtis really could run rings round the police. Maybe she was losing her touch. The whole thing might be falling apart right now, if they had enough evidence against him. And if they had, how long would she stay out of prison? But she had to take care of her future on the assumption that she had one, and that was just what she was going to do, because McQueen had been panting for it for months. ‘You really not goin’ to buy the land from me, Mr McQueen?’ she asked.

‘I’m really not. And you can drop the Mr McQueen act, because it’s fooling no one, pet.’

She knew that. She eased off a sandal, and smiled, running her bare foot slowly up his leg. ‘You maybe don’t want my land,’ she said. ‘ But you want somethin’ of mine pretty bad: He closed his eyes and groaned as soon as she touched him; after a few moments, she withdrew her foot and sat back, her arms along the back of the bench.

‘Can I have a beer now?’ she asked.

He opened his eyes, and looked at her for a long time. Then he nodded, got up, and went into the house.

Nicola was entertaining another policeman. Sergeant Finch’s angelic looks belied his tough nature, but she found that easier to cope with than Inspector Hill’s unruffled calm. He had wanted to know if she had seen any money in her father’s safe, and she had said no, she hadn’t. He had asked if she had noticed any signs of a disturbance, and she had said no, she hadn’t. He had asked her if she had
left
any money in her father’s safe, and she had laughed.

Then he had got on to the reason for her visit to her father. She had told him that she had gone to the farm to try to find out about the sheep, that her father hadn’t been there, that she had waited for over an hour, then she had left. She was certain he knew she wasn’t telling the truth, but she felt reasonably confident that she could keep him at arm’s length, and out of her psyche, unlike Inspector Hill.

He had come during evening surgery; Gus had sent the last two patients away, having established that the animals weren’t ill, but merely there for annual inoculations. Now he was sitting listening, his eyes going from Finch to her, as though he were watching a tennis match.

‘Why did your father go out, do you think?’

‘I thought he might have gone to look for the sheep.’

‘Why do you suppose the alarms were off?’

‘I can only think that he went across the fields rather than take the Land Rover. He’d have to put the alarms off. He’d be crossing the beams.’

‘Makes sense.’

She knew that. It was what had really happened that didn’t make sense, not what she was telling Finch might have happened.

‘Problem is, your father’s sheep are all accounted for.’

‘I know.’

‘No one else has had a sheep go missing, either.’

Oh, God, she wished they would forget about the bloody sheep. There was no sheep. There never had been any sheep. ‘Maybe my father imagined it,’ she said. ‘He was very drunk when he rang me.’

‘There’s a bit of a problem about that too,’ said Finch. ‘You see, there’s no record of him having telephoned you.’

‘Then presumably he wasn’t at home when he rang me.’

‘Everyone I’ve spoken to says your father had no intention of leaving the farmhouse on Sunday.’

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ Nicola said, surprising herself with the assurance with which she was coping with Finch. She could do this. She really could. She didn’t have to cave in. ‘If he didn’t ring from his own phone, he must have rung from a call box or something, which means he must have left the farm.’

‘And then found the sheep.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And then found the sheep.’

‘And the sheep was on the road, so presumably he must have been on the road when he found it.’

‘Yes,’ said Nicola, tiredly.

‘So he hadn’t crossed the fields to look for it? He’d gone out for some other reason, and just … found it?’

‘Yes. Is that so unlikely?’

‘No,’ said Finch. ‘ But according to you, he left the house unlocked and the alarms off, and that seems very unlikely.’

With that, Gus got up and left the room. Again. And now she had to answer Sergeant Finch’s questions with no moral support at all. But then, she thought, wasn’t that precisely what she had been doing all along?

‘He was drunk. I told you.’

‘Then why do you think he went out?’

‘Perhaps he finished the whisky he had in the house, and went to get another bottle.’ Nicola was rather enjoying this fiction. And the quickest way to walk to the village is by crossing the fields. So that might be why he had to leave the alarms off.’

‘Well,’ said Finch. ‘That would be an explanation. Except that no one saw him at the pub or anywhere else on Sunday night.’

‘Then I’ve no idea,’ said Nicola. There was, after all, no reason why she should have.

When Mike had returned with her beer, she had been as she was now, sitting on the edge of the table, her long legs crossed at the ankles, her bare feet on the bench. He had put the can and a glass on the table and had sat down, his hand resting on her feet, absently stroking them in an unconscious gesture of ownership as she told him why the money that the land represented was so important to her.

He had thought that he had been poor, because his parents had struggled, like so many people in the north-east, in the depression. He had been three years old when the war had widowed his mother; she had had to bring him and his sisters up as best she could until they could leave school and get jobs. But poor though they were, he had always had shoes on his feet, and a roof over his head; Rachel had been born into a peaceful, affluent society, and she had begged in the streets. The world made very little sense to him.

She was playing with him, of course. Not literally, as she had done ten minutes ago, briefly and agonizingly, but just as she had for the last twelve months. And he let her talk until the sun was all but gone, until she leaned over to drop the can into his refuse bin, and the expanse of suntanned thigh exposed by the movement was too much for him.

‘I’ll buy your land,’ he said, his voice thick, and stood up. ‘Can we go to bed now, for God’s sake?’

She uncrossed her legs, placing them one either side of him on the bench, inviting him to take her there and then, in the dark privacy of his walled terrace.

Her unused beer glass swayed and toppled, rolling slowly over the polished, varnished timbers of Shirley’s rustic monstrosity, and in as many moments as it took for it to reach the edge and shatter on the paving, years of denial and months of sheer lust were emptied into that golden body.

Rachel kicked off the pants he had dragged down out of his way, and slid off the table, smiling at him. ‘Now let’s go to bed and do it right,’ she said.

Rachel would be frantic with worry by now. The police had frightened her, barging into the bedroom like that; they’d frightened him, too, looking as though they wouldn’t think twice about putting the boot in. But they had merely escorted him to Barton’s main police station, and then he had been taken to his own house while a couple of DCs searched it, then he had finally been brought here. But this wasn’t supposed to be happening.

He smoked quickly, stubbing cigarettes out half smoked, lighting new ones. So far, he had denied ever seeing the knife in his life before, denied that he had bought the paper in London, denied that he had been on a train on Sunday night.

Lloyd tipped his chair back, and Curtis watched as it balanced precariously on its hind legs.

‘You helped Mr Bailey install his closed-circuit television system?’ he asked. ‘Is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you’ll know where all the cameras are, I suppose.’

‘I didn’t put them up personally,’ said Curtis. ‘I helped him decide how best to employ them.’

‘Which included where to site them.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did you do that? Aren’t there professionals who do that sort of thing?’

‘Mr Bailey was a very prudent man. He preferred to have my advice for nothing.’

‘Why did you offer to help him?’

‘I would have thought that was obvious,’ Curtis said. ‘I wanted to be near Rachel.’

‘I think you wanted to get to know his security systems,’ said Lloyd.

‘Why would I want to do that?’

‘Because you wanted his wife. And doing away with Bailey would clear the field, wouldn’t it? Apart from anything else, she’s going to come into a tidy bit of money when she sells.’

‘I don’t give a fuck about the money!’ Curtis shouted, stung into a genuine response.

‘Mr Law,’ Lloyd said, in a sing-song tone both bored and disapproving.

‘I’m sorry,’ Curtis said, and looked at Inspector Hill. ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘But the money doesn’t come into it.’

Lloyd let the chair down suddenly, making him jump. ‘ Doesn’t come into what?’

‘My feelings for Rachel.’ Nice try, thought Curtis, but it didn’t work.

‘We know the paper was purchased in London on Sunday night,’ Lloyd said. ‘We have a security video which shows that you left Barton station at around half past twelve on Monday morning. And this was found in your house, Mr Law. I am showing Mr Law the cancelled return ticket from St Pancras to Barton,’ he told the tape, and placed a plastic bag marked AM2 on the table. ‘The seat was reserved,’ he said. ‘ Smoking, facing, on the eleven-thirty train. Which arrives in Barton at twelve-thirty in the morning,’ he added. ‘Give or take the odd cow on the line.’

Curtis looked at it, then at Lloyd.

‘It was in your expenses folder,’ he said.

‘Perks,’ said Curtis.

‘The person calling himself Mr Bailey left the hotel to catch an eleven-thirty train from St Pancras,’ Lloyd said. ‘Was that you?’

‘Yes, it was me.’

‘Then are you trying to tell us that it isn’t your paper? That this is not your crossword?’

They knew it was his paper, and it would take a handwriting expert two seconds to confirm that it was his printing in the crossword grid, his scribbled workings-out in the margins. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s my paper. And I did buy it at King’s Cross station on Sunday night. But I dropped it at the farm when I went up there on Monday morning, that’s all.’ It was a lie, and it was barely spoken before it was spotted by Lloyd.

‘If you already had the paper, why did you buy another one?’

‘I hadn’t got mine with me.’

‘Either of them?’

Curtis looked at him. ‘What?’

‘You get it delivered to your home. And you’d bought one at King’s Cross. Two newspapers. And yet you bought a third.’

‘I had to take my car in for a service,’ he said. ‘I had to meet Gary because he was giving me a lift into Harmston, and I knew I’d be leaving before the paper came. That’s why I bought one in London. Because I like having it with me at work. There’s a lot of hanging about.’

‘But then you didn’t take it with you to work? Why not?’

Curtis shrugged.

‘I think you didn’t have it with you because you’d dropped it while you were stabbing Bernard Bailey,’ Lloyd said.

Inspector Hill took over then. ‘Someone tampered with-the CCTV at Bailey’s farm,’ she said. ‘Someone ran the tape back thirteen minutes, and shortly afterwards, someone left. Someone who knew how to avoid the camera on the roadway. Someone who looked very like you.’

Curtis shrugged again, and tapped his fingers quickly on the table for a moment or two, before taking another cigarette from the packet. They couldn’t be certain it was him, not from the view he’d presented to the camera. They had to have more on him than that.

‘We know you made an earlier visit to Bailey’s farmhouse than the one you made at ten-thirty on Monday morning,’ Lloyd said. ‘Because you saw money in the safe, and that door was closed while you and your cameraman were in the house.’

Curtis smiled. ‘ You wouldn’t dare use that,’ he said. ‘Your mates would swear black was white if it meant they could get back at me for
Mr Big
.’

Lloyd looked surprised. ‘You have a very high opinion of my popularity rating.’

‘No,’ said Curtis. ‘I have a very low opinion of your colleagues.’

‘There were Coca-Cola cans and cigarette ends found on the road outside Bernard Bailey’s property,’ Inspector Hill said. ‘You know if they were yours, and we can find out. The cans have fingerprints on them, and we can have the cigarette ends tested. We can get a DNA profile from saliva.’

‘Then maybe you’d better do that,’ said Curtis.

‘I think we’ll leave you to think about the wisdom of that,’ Lloyd said, getting up. ‘Interview suspended, 20.55 hours.’

Curtis was taken to the cells, and asked if he wanted a meal. He did; he hadn’t had any lunch, and he was starving. This wasn’t supposed to be happening, he thought, as his meal came, and he forced it down to give himself strength for the next session. But it was, and all he could do was try to keep Rachel out of it.