Picture of Innocence (43 page)

She sat back in the chair, and looked at him. ‘You got proof of any of that, Mr Lloyd?’ she asked, her eyes amused.

‘Not yet.’

‘You expectin’ to get some?’

Lloyd patted his mobile, which he had placed on the desk. ‘I’m expecting a phone call,’ he said. ‘ From a car-hire firm. We can have that car forensically examined. If you left any trace of your presence …’

‘What car’s that?’

Lloyd sighed. ‘I think you know what car, or we wouldn’t have had a visit from Nicola Hutchins.’ He looked at her, his head slightly to one side. ‘I’m curious,’ he said. ‘Curtis Law had hired a car exactly like yours in order for you to get back to the hotel. Did you ask him why? What excuse did he give you? You were a bit slow off the mark, whatever it was.’

He still couldn’t fathom Rachel Bailey. Everything about her was slow, except her mind, and it was hard to believe that she had swallowed whatever Law had told her about that car. But she would never have allowed Nicola Hutchins to get to the very brink of mental collapse before rescuing her, not if she could have avoided it.

‘Don’t know nothin’ ’bout any car,’ she said lazily. ‘ I was in London all the time, Mr Lloyd, and I don’t reckon you can prove no different, or you wouldn’t be here. I’d be at your police station, under arrest, just like Curtis.’

Lloyd knew that was all he was going to get. All anyone was ever going to get. There were so many things he wanted to know, wanted to understand, but Rachel Bailey wasn’t going to explain herself to him or anyone else.

‘I thought Nicola would be here,’ he said. ‘Is she all right?’

‘She’s fine. Mr McQueen’s taken her to see his lawyer, find out how much trouble she’s in. Nell and me’ll be stayin’ with her tonight.’

‘Good. I think that would be best for all three of you.’ He looked round the dingy little office. ‘Is this it?’ he said. ‘Is this what you’re left with?’

‘I’ll be gettin’ some of my stuff back. Me and Mr McQueen’ve got an arrangement,’ she added candidly. ‘Curtis didn’t like it when he found out about McQueen.’ Her eyes widened in would-be innocence. ‘D’you think that’s why he’s tellin’ lies about me?’

Lloyd didn’t dignify that with an answer.

‘But Mr McQueen’s been good to me. He’s even buyin’ me a cow so I can start a smallholdin’.’

Lloyd heard the sarcasm, shook his head. ‘‘That’s what stands between you and poverty?’ he asked. A cow and McQueen’s goodwill?’

‘Reckon so.’

He might have tried to tell her that she was worth more than that, but she must know that herself, and anyway, his phone rang. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, picking it up. ‘Hello, Lloyd here.’

‘Mr Lloyd. It’s David Bingley, Wicked Wheels. I’ve checked up on that car, but it’s no go, I’m afraid. It was put through the car wash and valeted on Tuesday morning.’

What a shame. His last hope of evidence against Rachel Bailey had gone. ‘Ah, well,’ Lloyd said. ‘You win some, and you lose some.’

‘Sorry,’ said Bingley. ‘But I’m glad you rang. It seems that we’ve been trying to get in touch with Mr Wheeler. In fact, the secretary at the depot says she caught the late post on Monday with a letter to him, but there’s been no reply. It’s just that we’ve retrieved some lost property from the vehicle, and it looks as though it might be quite valuable, so …

Lloyd didn’t want to hear this. He really, really didn’t want to hear this.

Jack looked up as Terri came in. She walked in slowly, almost hesitantly, an adverb that he had never found himself applying to his wife’s way of behaving before. She sat down, and looked at him for a long time without speaking.

‘Have you come to discuss divorce?’ he asked, after a few moments of that.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve come to make a confession.’

‘You were having an affair with Bernard Bailey,’ said Jack, with a grin. Humour usually helped, though he wasn’t sure if anything would now.

She pulled a face at the very idea. ‘But it has to do with him,’ she said, and took a deep breath. ‘I told Mike McQueen his financial position. Told him who he’d borrowed from, what sort of loan it was. You told me that in confidence, and I told Mike McQueen, because it would give him leverage. I think that bit of untrustworthiness probably cancels out Excelsior Holdings.’

Jack had reflected on how devious they both were a couple of months back, he remembered. Neither of their devious tactics had paid off. Because someone had murdered the man, and not before time, even if he himself had lost a great deal of money over it.

‘And while your capacity for lying startled even me when I discovered that that story about Rachel Bailey was invented from beginning to end,’ she said, ‘I was even more startled that you had actually kept your promise.’

Jack cast wildly round his memory for any promise he had made, never mind kept, and was unable To locate it.

‘You really haven’t had an affair since the last time we spoke about it,’ she said.

Oh, that. True.

‘You really did manage to live in the same village as Rachel Bailey without adding her to your list of conquests.’

Ah. Well. Sort of true. In that Rachel Bailey had steadfastly refused to be added. Still. Terri didn’t know that. She thought that the story about the pass was a lie too. Did that make the truth a lie? Or a lie the truth? He really had lost the place now.

‘I’m quite proud of you for that,’ she said.

‘Does this mean you’re not leaving me?’ he asked.

She smiled. ‘How can I leave? I’ve got a painting to finish before we have to sell this place and move to a semi in Stansfield.’ She got up. ‘And the shadows should be right just about now.’

Rachel shaded her eyes from the setting sun that slanted through the office window as Lloyd concluded his conversation with the car-hire firm.

‘Right,’ Lloyd said. ‘Well, if you could just hang on to it for now, Mr Bingley, someone will be collecting it from you. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Yes, I think it will be of assistance. Thank you again, and goodbye.’

He put the phone down and looked at her. ‘The car
had
been valeted,’ he said.

‘Reckoned it most likely would’ve been,’ she said.

‘But they did find some lost property.’

Rachel nodded. She’d gathered that.

‘And you rang the hotel with a description of
your
lost property,’ Lloyd said. ‘I don’t know if you realize it, but …’ He waved a hand at the fireplace. ‘It works both ways,’ he said. ‘ I overheard you.’

Rachel glanced at the fireplace, then back at Lloyd. ‘Never thought ’bout that,’ she said.

It was true; she had never thought about it. As far as she could recall, no conversation had ever taken place in the bedroom, unless you counted Bernard’s quietly spoken threats, and her desperate phone call to Nicola the next day. It had never occurred to her that her call to the hotel might have been overheard. But it had.

‘Then perhaps you should think about it now,’ he said.

Rachel nodded, thought about it, then made a small bet with herself. If she was wrong, it wouldn’t be for the first time, and she had always been, would always be, a gambler. ‘Seems to me,’ she said slowly, getting up from the desk, ‘that you and me and the man you were talkin’ to are the only folk who know bout this.’

Lloyd’s eyebrows rose very slightly.

‘And only you and me know what it means,’ she said.

‘So?’

‘So if you collected it from him yourself, you could get rid of it, and no one’d ever know
nothin’ ‘bout
it ’ cept you and me.’ She closed the blinds, doing the old, neglected office a favour, as the rose-tinted light was softened and diffused. She turned to look at him, and smiled. ‘Would they?’ she said.

Lloyd’s face held a would-be puzzled frown. ‘And why would I do that, Mrs Bailey?’

Rachel walked over to him, sitting on the edge of the desk as she had sat on Mike McQueen’s garden table. But this evening she was fully clothed, and her shoes stayed on. The highly unsubtle methods she had used on McQueen wouldn’t go down too well with Lloyd. ‘Maybe ’cos I’d be real grateful,’ she said.

‘A bribe, is it?’ said Lloyd, sounding very Welsh.

‘Don’t reckon you’d take no money, even if I had any,’ she said. ‘But maybe I got somethin’ you want.’

‘Are you offering to go to
bed
with me, Mrs Bailey?’ he said, as though the thought had just that moment occurred to him.

‘Don’t think they left no beds,’ Rachel said. ‘Reckon we could manage without, don’t you?’

Lloyd shook his head. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘But no, thank you.’

‘Don’t have to be here,’ she said. ‘Don’t have to be now. Don’t have to be just the once, neither. I’m not goin’ nowhere, ‘less it’s to jail. You want me to end up there, Mr Lloyd?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t. But much as I don’t like the idea of your going to prison, and much as it grieves me to have to decline your offer, the answer’s still no.’

Rachel shrugged, pushed herself away from the desk, and sat on the safe, deemed too heavy for the truck by the bailiffs, reaching behind her to pull the blinds open again, angling them so that the sun’s dying rays fell away from Lloyd. ‘That all right?’ she asked.

‘Fine,’ said Lloyd. ‘ Mrs Bailey, did you ask Curtis Law to murder your husband for you?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘But he offered.’ Her eyes held his, and she gave the tiniest of shrugs. ‘Offer I couldn’t refuse,’ she said.

‘What about the death threats?’

‘They were just to get Curtis here.’ Because seeing Curtis reminded her that real life was going on beyond Bailey’s farm. Because she had to have some respite from Bernard Bailey. Because Curtis had taken away her prescriptions, and had brought her six months’ supply of pills at a time, in a spirit of self-interest. ‘Wasn’t thinkin’ of killin’ no one, not then.’

‘So when was it all planned?’

‘In the spring. Curtis reckons it took him a week’s solid thinkin’ to work it all out. Then he booked the suite, and came here, tellin’ Bernard ’bout this demonstration that was planned, how some of them had said they were goin’ to get him, get me, even. Got him all worked up, so when I said I’d go away for the weekend, he jumped at it.’

Lloyd nodded. ‘And that was when you were given your instructions? At the weekend?’

‘Yes. Told me we had to talk to folk at the hotel, make sure everyone saw us, remembered us. That we’d order dinner on Sunday night, and he’d order a cab for eleven, then leave right after they brought in the food and go back to Harmston. Said he was goin’ to poison Bernard. He’d get here just before he went to bed, put somethin’ in his whisky.’ She got up, and switched on the desk lamp, sitting on the corner of the desk. ‘But he reckoned we’d be the first people you’d suspect, ’cos Nicola’d never be able to keep quiet ’bout us. And she’d tell you ’ bout how Bernard treated me. And everyone knew how Curtis could get hold of drugs, and how much the land was goin’ to be worth to McQueen.’

Lloyd looked as though he was going to say something, but he didn’t, so she carried on.

‘And he said you’d be able to find out when he’d been given the stuff, so we had to have alibis. I had to take the cab to St Pancras, walk over to King’s Cross, buy Monday’s
Times
, and bring it to him on the train. I had to get clothes a couple of sizes bigger’n I take, so I could wear them over his waistcoat thing, and change on the train. I had to use his return ticket, and that way it’d look like he was on the train when it happened. Then I had to drive back to London, and phone room service at half three. That way it’d look like I'd never left the hotel.’

She hadn’t liked it. She had said so, but he’d just kept saying that it would work. And it very nearly had. Very, very nearly.

‘It was OK to start with,’ she went on. ‘But on Sunday, I didn’t want him to go. I didn’t want him to do it. I didn’t know nothin’ ’cept what he’d told me, and it didn’t sound like an alibi to me. But he said to trust him.’ She gave Lloyd a brief smile. ‘Didn’t have no option, so I did. I got the paper, and I caught the train, and I met him. Gave him his paper, his ticket, his waistcoat and his wig, and that was when he said ’bout ringin’ Steve.’

‘Did you ask why?’

‘Said he was goin’ back to the farm, goin’ to make it look like it happened in the
middle
of the night. Said it wouldn’t be no good if he just gave you the paper, that you’d get suspicious if he produced some-thin’ that gave him an alibi. But you’d find it, and he’d tell you a lie ’bout droppin’ it there that mornin’, so you’d prove he couldn’t have. And when you found out when Bernard really died, you’d already have proved he couldn’t’ve done it.’

‘Why couldn’t you have just brought the newspaper with you in the morning, left it there yourself?’

‘I asked that. He said someone might find Bernard ’fore I got home, and the paper had to be there if they did.’

Lloyd gave a reluctant smile. ‘ I have to hand it to Mr Law,’ he said. ‘He really did think of everything. I think you really were as much in the dark as we were.’

Rachel nodded almost vigorous agreement. ‘When I did get here, it wasn’t like he’d said it would be at all. I thought it’d all gone wrong, and I just lost it. Never had hysterics before – wondered who was makin’ all the noise. Never cried so much in my whole life as I cried this week. Never felt so scared, neither.’ She shrugged. ‘Never murdered no one before, though.’

‘I should hope not,’ said Lloyd.

‘Don’t do your nerves no good. Anyway, Curtis told me that he’d never meant to poison him. He’d just said that, so I’d react right, I didn’t know nothin’ bout no overdose of morphine till Nicola told me.’

‘But the post-mortem was delayed,’ said Lloyd. ‘So we knew nothing about the overdose either. And Mr Law found himself being arrested, which was the last thing he’d meant to happen.’

‘I was sick as a dog after you left that flat,’ she said. ‘ Scared out of my wits all week.’

Lloyd got up, started walking round the room again. ‘But I understand you still found time to take care of business,’ he said, looking at the small collection of things she had managed to hang on to. ‘ Your arrangement with Mr McQueen, for instance.’

‘Didn’t have no option bout that, neither.’

‘But you knew that land was already McQueen’s,’ he said. ‘ What was the point of trying to sell it to him?’