Picture of Innocence (36 page)

But it wasn’t her money. It was Rachel’s. And Rachel needed it desperately. Much more desperately than she did. No one was taking her furniture away, or her car. No one was going to repossess her house, or the surgery, not yet, anyway. And they wouldn’t, because she had a job. A trade. Something that brought money in, that kept the wolf from the door, that stopped the debts getting out of hand. Rachel hadn’t. And they weren’t even her debts.

She would take the money back.

‘Could I see Detective Inspector Hill?’ asked Jack.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said the girl on the desk. ‘I’m afraid she’s at lunch at the moment.’

That was a good start. ‘I believe you’ve been making enquiries about money that went missing from the safe at Bailey’s farm,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I could speak to whoever’s dealing with that?’ That was probably who he should be talking to anyway.

The girl had a consultation with someone else, then invited him to take a seat. In a few moments, a man with riotous blond curls appeared.

‘Sergeant Finch,’ he said. ‘ I believe you wanted to talk to me?’

Not really, thought Jack. I don’t really want to do this at all. He had told Terri last night, but he hadn’t had to sleep in the spare room. Because she had walked out, saying she couldn’t live with a man she couldn’t trust. She had spent the night with one of her SOWS buddies. He wasn’t sure if it was what he had actually done, or the lies he had told about Rachel, that had been the clincher. He suspected it was the latter, and that this was the first recorded instance of a woman leaving her husband because he hadn’t had an affair with the woman next door.

He followed Sergeant Finch into the interview room, and they sat down amid a small electrical storm.

‘It’s on-the blink,’ explained Finch. ‘It’ll settle down in a minute.’

Jack waited until it had, being unable to talk to someone who looked as though he was in a stage representation of a silent movie. ‘I believe you’re looking into the disappearance of some money from Bernard Bailey’s safe,’ he said, when the light came on and stayed on.

‘That’s right,’ said Finch. ‘ Do you know something about it, then?’

Jack almost laughed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know something about it. I took four thousand six hundred pounds in cash to Bernard Bailey on Sunday evening.’

‘Well, at least we know how much is missing now,’ said Finch. ‘And the thing is, Mr Melville, normally it wouldn’t be any of my business what you did with your money, but Bernard Bailey has been murdered. Did anyone else know about this money changing hands?’

Jack smiled at the expression, redolent with skulduggery and dirty work at the crossroads. Which it was, he supposed, but it wasn’t illegal, which was clearly what Finch was assuming. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No one knew. No one but me, and Bernard Bailey.’

‘Thank you,’ said Finch, in a winding-up tone. ‘We might want a statement from you – it depends really, on what happened to the money, and why.’

‘That isn’t all,’ said Jack. ‘Your Inspector Hill told me that I should allow you to decide what is and isn’t relevant to your murder enquiry. And I have some information which I suspect I should have given to her before now.’

‘Fire away,’ said Finch.

‘I am the director and major shareholder of a company called Harmston Estates,’ he said. ‘My wife is the other director, but she didn’t actually know that until last night. I asked her to sign something a long time ago, and she did, without even looking at it, because she trusts me. At that time, I had no intention of compromising her,’ he added. ‘It was just routine. And I’ve done nothing illegal, you understand.’ Finch nodded.

‘But Harmston Estates wholly owns another company called Excelsior Holdings. And Excelsior Holdings owns the woodland through which the road to the so-called Rookery would have to pass if Bernard Bailey had refused to sell his land.’

Finch started making notes.

‘Bernard Bailey and I both took a considerable knock-back about two years ago,’ Jack went on. ‘A risky speculation that failed. He lost just about everything, and I lost very much more than I was prepared to admit. McQueen was offering enough money for the woodland for me to recoup my losses, and make a profit, but his real intention was to take the road through Bailey’s farm. The route through my land was just back-up if Bailey refused to sell.’

Finch looked a little lost, as he tried to keep up.

‘Bailey was in desperate financial difficulties, and he was going to lose the farm if he defaulted on the loan he had taken out on it, so he approached me with a deal. He asked me to pay his loan instalments, and his farmhands’ wages. He showed me proof that he would come into a very large inheritance if and when his wife produced a son, and he would have been able to repay me with interest, provided he could hang on to his farm, and his wife did her bit. I could afford to take the gamble, providing the road did go through the wood as a result, so it was in my interests to help him, and I gave him the money in cash every month.’

Finch looked up from the notebook over which his hand had been a positive blur. ‘So Mrs Bailey might have known about the arrangement?’

‘Only if Bailey told her, and I think that most unlikely.’

‘Thing is,’ Finch said. ‘ We’ve reason to believe that Mrs Bailey quite often overheard business transactions.’

‘She didn’t overhear this one,’ said Jack. ‘ She wasn’t there.’

‘But there had obviously been previous transactions.’

‘Yes, every last Sunday in the month. But Bailey had always come to me before. The day was chosen because my wife chairs her committee meetings on Sundays, so I’m alone in the house. The repayments had to be made by the last Monday in the month. But Bailey wouldn’t leave the house for anything or anyone last Sunday, so I went to him.’

‘Why did you lie to Inspector Hill about what you were doing at Bailey’s farm?’ said Finch.

He was direct, thought Jack. It made it easier, somehow, if you called a spade a spade. ‘I lied about it because the committee my wife chairs is the Save Our Woodland Sites committee, and if my plan had worked out, she would have been, in effect, selling the very woodland she was pledged to save. I really didn’t want her to know that. That was what I meant by compromising her’

‘Yes,’ said Finch. ‘I can see that it would.’

‘I also financed Mrs Bailey’s trip to London,’ Jack went on. ‘Bailey was anxious that his wife shouldn’t be there if there was to be a demonstration of any sort, because she was at last expecting a baby, and he rang me to see if I could let him have some cash. I saw him on Thursday, with the money for the trip, and he was, for him, almost cheerful. But on Sunday night, he had had a lot to drink, and he was threatening her. I did tell Inspector Hill that,’ he said. ‘What I didn’t tell her was that he seemed to think she had gone away, not to avoid the demonstration, but to have an abortion.’

‘Did he say why he thought that?’

‘No. He just kept saying that he’d found out that she’d had an abortion. Got rid of his son. And that he was going to kill her. I only knew about this baby because it was … collateral, I suppose, and that’s why I didn’t mention it before, because I was trying to keep my involvement in repaying his loan quiet.’ ‘I think we will take a formal statement, Mr Melville, if you wouldn’t mind waiting there.’

Rachel had got rid of Curtis because McQueen had told her to, and now, armed with her information, she was going to get rid of McQueen too, after going to such lengths to get him. But her mother had brought up seven kids on the road; she came from hardy stock, and she could survive without anyone’s help, if she had to.

Inspector Hill sat opposite her in the interview room; Lloyd stood looking out of the window as she explained the circumstances under which she had overheard McQueen’s conversation with Bernard, and her decision to abort the baby she had been carrying. She tried to sound unconcerned about that, but she didn’t. It had hurt her deeply, and it always would.

‘Shouldn’t’ve done that,’ she added. ‘ But I did. Too late now.’

Inspector Hill had been jotting down notes. Rachel saw her pen stop for a moment, then she carried on.

Lloyd was listening, despite his apparent absorption in what was going on outside. ‘I don’t think that really affects the investigation,’ he said.

‘Wasn’t no way I could go to my doctor, because she wouldn’t have let me do it without us speakin’ to Bernard first, so I had to get it done private. And I’d got no money. So I went to McQueen. Told him if I was having a boy there wasn’t no way he’d ever get Bernard’s land, because Bernard’d get millions from his grandfather’s will so long as he still owned it. Turned out he knew that already.’

Lloyd turned then, came to the table, and sat down.

‘I knew from how he’d talked to Bernard that he was desperate for him to sell him that land,’ Rachel said. ‘That’s why I went to him. And he never even thought twice. Sent me off to a clinic where they didn’t ask no questions, paid for the lot. Turned out it was a boy,’ she added. ‘And I didn’t ask them ’bout that. I didn’t want to know. But he did.’ She looked away. ‘He was glad.’

Lloyd had tipped his chair right back, and was rocking gently. Inspector Hill was looking thoughtful. ‘Why have you come here with this now, Rachel?’ she asked.

‘ ’Cos now I know somethin’ else ’ bout McQueen,’ she said. ‘Somethin’ I reckon
you’ll
want to know.’

Curtis hadn’t gone into work. He had rung in, said that he had caught this virus that was going round.

It was all happening on the work front, but right now he didn’t care about any of it. They wanted to get
Mr Big
out on the network next week, on the August edition of
Monthly Factfile
, in order to cash in on the publicity surrounding him. He should have been at a meeting about it right now, but he hadn’t been able to make himself go in.

He had been awake all night, thinking about what Rachel had done without a second thought, while he was locked up because of her, charged with murder because of her. He had thought that Rachel, beautiful though she was, fixated on the money though she was, sexy as she was, had been, in a way, unworldly. She would listen to him, and he had enjoyed explaining things to her. He had thought that she needed a champion, a knight in shining armour, a protector.

She had needed no explanations, no protection. He had offered himself up to her, told her that he was going to be in possession of a whole pharmacopoeia of drugs. She had seen her way out; she had come up with her ridiculous notion of slipping Bailey a lethal Mickey Finn, because she knew he would come up with something better, and that he would take all the risks for her.

And what had she been doing while he was taking those risks? He couldn’t bear to think of it, but he couldn’t get the image out of his mind. He hated McQueen. And he hated her.

Mike had just finished lunch when Lloyd and Inspector Hill had arrived. They knew, somehow, about the photograph, and Rachel was the only person who had ever been in the bedroom besides himself and Shirley. Shirley had never liked the idea of a cleaning lady; the one they had had to employ for this big house did what Shirley called the public rooms, as though they lived in the White House. Mike found it hard to believe that Bailey had kept a photograph of her, but perhaps he had, because Rachel must have recognized it somehow.

‘Her name was Margaret,’ he said, picking up a cigar, coming out on to the terrace, handing them the photograph. ‘She was fifteen years old when that was taken, and she was fifteen years old when Bernard Bailey got her pregnant for the first time. She was my stepdaughter.’

He sat down, took out matches, and lit the cigar. ‘She came to me and told me she was going to have a baby. I think she chose me in preference to her mother because I was always as soft as butter with her. And she was right; I wasn’t angry. Bailey was handsome, when he was young, and I think I understood. But she wanted to marry him, and her mother and I both said no. We didn’t want to separate them or anything – we just wanted her to wait. But that row was the last conversation we ever had with her. It was the last time we ever saw her.’

Chief Inspector Lloyd stood; Inspector Hill sat opposite him as Rachel had done last night. He didn’t suppose the same service was on offer, but he certainly wouldn’t turn it down if it was. She was a nice-looking woman; well dressed. Good clothes. Shirley had taught him to appreciate dress sense, and he had taught her about what made a match and what didn’t. He could have advised the inspector that those shoes didn’t quite go with the dress. The colours quarrelled a little. Not much, but Mike had noticed. Some people had an eye for shades and colours, some didn’t. He always had had. Shirley hadn’t. Rachel Bailey had.

‘Didn’t she keep in touch at all?’ asked Inspector Hill.

Mike shook his head. ‘She vanished,’ he said. ‘They vanished. We had no idea where she was, or what was happening to her. And we tried, believe me, we tried to trace her. But there was a slight problem.’

‘And what was that?’ Lloyd asked.

‘Bailey wasn’t called Bailey when we knew him,’ said Mike. ‘His name was Hawthorne. We spent years checking what must have been nearly every Hawthorne in the United Kingdom. Cost a fortune, and got us nowhere. In the end, we gave up.’ He drew on his cigar, and watched the smoke drift up into another golden day. ‘We only ever had Margaret,’ he said. ‘ Shirley lost one baby after we were married, and she couldn’t have any more. Well, she passed that particular problem on, didn’t she? So everything revolved round Margaret, and … and Hawthorne
stole
her. She was still a child.’ He inhaled some smoke. ‘She might just as well have been kidnapped.

Shirley … Shirley
died
a little with every month that passed, and we didn’t hear from her.’

‘Even kidnappers contact their victims,’ said Inspector Hill.

Mike nodded. ‘And you know that the hostage wants to be returned,’ he said. ‘Margaret didn’t want to come back to us, or even see us, or she would have got in touch. That was the hardest thing to take. And our marriage survived it, but it was never the same. We’d lost …’ He tried to think of a way to explain. ‘We’d lost the future, I suppose,’ he said. ‘ Seeing her grow up, having grandchildren …’ He shrugged. ‘But that wasn’t to be, anyway.’