Rest Assured (25 page)

It was Hook who now said unexpectedly, ‘We have a very good idea of who sent those horrid notes, but no absolute proof, Jason. We haven't sought out the proof, in view of the fact that they have ceased to be delivered and that we now have a murder on our hands, as you helpfully acknowledged.'

Jason wanted to leave it at that, to tell them that he was well content to let the sleeping dog of the notes lie. But that wouldn't sound natural. Normal curiosity would demand that he responded to what Hook had just said. He heard an annoying tremor in his voice as he spoke as brightly as he could. ‘Who do you think sent them, then, Bert?' It took an effort for him to use the sergeant's first name, but he wished to invoke him as a friend and a neighbour, not a policeman.

‘I'm sure you have a view on that yourself, Jason.' The weatherbeaten, outdoor face was irritatingly deadpan.

‘Well, I suppose I thought it might be Wally Keane. Debbie's a nosey old besom, but not vicious, I'd say. Wally always struck me as darker and more malicious than Debbie. I think he might have been capable of it.'

‘Always tempting to blame a dead man, isn't it? We find people do that quite a lot. I suppose that's because the person accused is not able to come back with a robust defence and a threat to sue.'

Jason glared at him, feeling let down. It wasn't the sort of aggressive retort you expected from a friend and neighbour. ‘I didn't say it was Wally – not necessarily. I was just speculating. It seems preposterous that it could be anyone around here, and yet it must have been. Wally was secretive and mysterious and perhaps a bit mad. He seemed the likeliest candidate to me.'

‘There is one likelier, don't you think?' This was Lambert, his cool voice striking a note which chilled Jason Ramsbottom.

They knew the truth. He was certain of that now. But he had to carry on, as if he was setting up a surprise in some creaking play. ‘None likelier that I can think of. Otherwise I wouldn't have suggested Wally.'

‘The homes here don't have letter-boxes, I've noticed.'

‘No. They're not necessary. Most people's mail goes to their home addresses. We collect any post here from the office near the entrance. Mr Rawlinson says its more secure that way, and certainly no postman would enjoy trying to deliver to identical units without numbers.' He repeated the manager's explanation mechanically, racing through it lest he should be interrupted.

‘So how did these messages arrive?'

‘They were pushed under the door. It's tight, but it's possible.'

‘Maybe. But it's much easier for the home-owner to put them there himself. And in our view that is almost certainly what happened.'

For a wild moment he thought of suggesting that it could have been Lisa. Then he said desperately, ‘And why on earth would I want to do that?'

‘I can think of a variety of reasons. To alarm your wife, perhaps? You certainly succeeded in doing that – hence her invocation of DS Hook, which you didn't expect. As a diversionary tactic, so that if Wally Keane revealed what he threatened to reveal to your wife, you could discredit him as some sort of unbalanced maniac? You tell us, Mr Ramsbottom.'

The game was up. Jason felt his world collapsing around him. In his head, he could almost hear the sound of walls physically falling. He had known it would come to this. Over the years, he had told himself repeatedly that sooner or later it was bound to happen. For three days, he had thought that with his tormentor dead all might yet be well. He was a fool who couldn't help himself: how many men before him had offered that lame and hopeless explanation of the conduct which had shattered their worlds?

Ramsbottom said in an even, hopeless tone, ‘He was threatening me. He'd had money from me. I couldn't afford to go on paying him. But he said he was going to tell Lisa all about my other life if I didn't. He had chapter and verse, he said. I was afraid that he'd speak to her at any moment. I thought if I could convince her that it was Wally bloody Keane who was sending those notes, she wouldn't take him seriously if he talked to her about me.'

Hook said gently, almost therapeutically, ‘And what was it that he was going to tell her, Jason?'

Jason stared at the comfortable, persuasive face with his mind racing. Eventually he said dully, ‘You know, don't you?'

‘We know about Anna Riley, yes. We know her address and we know some of the dates on which you've visited her. Walter Keane had recorded them on his computer.'

‘He told me that. He was threatening to tell Lisa. I couldn't allow that.'

‘Walter Keane had the names and the addresses of previous women, too.'

Suddenly and without warning, Jason Ramsbottom buried his face in his hands. His shoulders shook and a series of tearless sobs wrenched at his head. His questioners said nothing, offered no words of understanding or consolation. Emotion makes people vulnerable, and extreme emotion makes them most vulnerable of all. This was a murder suspect; the more disturbed and off balance he was, the more he was likely to reveal. They waited silently until he made some sort of recovery and dropped his hands to his lap. ‘I've been an utter fool! I know that.'

‘You were a blackmail victim. We don't like blackmailers, but Walter Keane has the same rights as other citizens and his death must be investigated just as vigorously.'

‘I'm on the road for a lot of the time. My work takes me away from home. There have always been women. Never more than one at a time.' He sounded like a man offering mitigating circumstances in court. ‘Wally was demanding more money. I couldn't afford to go on paying him. Not the sums he was demanding. And Lisa would have realized: she'd have wanted to know where the money was going. I'd already given him ten thousand pounds six months ago. I told Lisa that I'd lost my bonus because of the recession and the firm's loss of sales when I paid him that, but I couldn't have explained away any more.'

‘So you were anxious not to lose your wife.'

‘She means the world to me, does Lisa. She and Ellie. I couldn't bear to lose my daughter.'

Bert Hook said quietly, ‘Then why play away? Why leap into bed with a succession of women, if your family means so much to you?'

Ramsbottom shook his head desolately. ‘It's a compulsion. I've always had other women. Never more than one at a time, but I've always had them. Monogamy has never seemed a natural human state to me and I've needed the passion.' Now he was reiterating the arguments he'd put to himself many times to this most unlikely of audiences. It was ridiculous, but in his confusion he did not recognize that: he was speaking more to himself than to his hearers. ‘And yet still the most important thing in the world to me is my family. The most important people in the world are Lisa and Ellie.'

‘And Wally Keane was threatening to destroy that world for you.'

Jason didn't see the implication of that statement. He was far too preoccupied with his own wretchedness. ‘Will you have to tell Lisa about this? It will destroy me if you do.'

Lambert didn't answer that. He said instead, ‘You said a few moments ago, “He was threatening to tell Lisa. I couldn't allow that.” So what steps did you take to prevent it happening?'

Jason Ramsbottom's eyes widened with horror as he confronted the question. ‘I didn't kill Wally. I wanted him dead, if that was the only thing that was going to stop his antics. But it wasn't me who strung him up.'

They let the silence stretch, allowed him to hear how lame his protestation sounded after what had gone before it. It was Hook who eventually said, ‘I think you should tell us again where you were last Friday night between the hours of nine and eleven, Jason. It may be that you wish to make adjustments to what you told us on Saturday.'

Jason tried to ignore the air of menace which had somehow descended upon the burly, unremarkable figure of DS Hook. ‘I was with Lisa. For those hours and throughout the night. She told you that on Saturday.'

Bert flicked over a page in his notebook, though he knew the facts of the matter perfectly well. ‘Correction. You told us that. Lisa did not deny it. The difference may be unimportant; it can also on occasions be significant.'

‘Well, that's where I was: in our holiday home with my wife. I didn't kill Wally Keane. I'm not a violent man.'

‘Yet you put a man in hospital after a violent brawl. You were lucky he wasn't more seriously hurt. You could easily have been facing a manslaughter charge.'

This felt worse coming from a neighbour and a man with whom he'd had an agreeable round of golf two hundred yards from here, even though it was Lisa and not he who had brought in Hook. Jason said bleakly, ‘That was sixteen years ago. I was wilder then. It was before I was married.'

‘You were in fact twenty-four. Scarcely a teenager led astray by others.'

‘But more stupid and more brutal. I got in with the wrong set.'

Hook gave him a grim smile. ‘We never meet anyone who got in with the right set, Jason. We don't accept it as an excuse. If you're into clichés, try the one about the leopard not changing its spots. We find that men who use violence at twenty-four usually still see it as a solution when they're forty.'

Jason said dully, ‘I didn't kill Wally Keane. Please don't tell Lisa about Anna Riley and the others.'

It took Jason Ramsbottom a long time to walk back to his home by the lake and the cheerful, unsuspecting wife who awaited him there. His face was grim as he told Lisa, ‘You may need to stress to them that I was with you on Friday night.'

Matt and Freda Potts were climbing in the Brecon Beacons. She'd been surprised when he'd suggested it, but she'd gone along with the idea readily enough: anything that would take her away from Twin Lakes and the way Matt was brooding darkly was fine by her.

The pair didn't speak much as they drove the fifty miles through the Welsh hills to where they planned to begin their climb. Freda made occasional remarks about the spectacular scenery, but most of them met with nothing more than monosyllables from her husband. He was not exactly surly, but he seemed to be preoccupied with greater concerns than her nervous prattle. She hoped that the high spaces and clear air of the Beacons would eventually change his mood.

They were on the lower slopes of the hill, a mile away from the car, before Matt offered his first conversational gambit of the day. ‘We used to train on these hills, when I was in the army. The officers used to time us, over the top and down the other side. We got points for each minute by which we bettered the target time.'

That was the SAS, she knew, though he never used that term, even now, unless it was wrung from him. Secrecy had been bred into him, had become a way of life then. SAS men hadn't been allowed to talk about their missions, hadn't even known where they were going nor what they were to do until the last minute. Action was the keynote: you used as few words as possible.

Today was a sort of mission, in Matthew Potts's mind.

Freda panted behind him, anxious to make the most of the nearest thing she would get to a conversational opening. ‘This is a pretty steep climb, isn't it?' She gazed ahead at the steeper slopes awaiting them. ‘You're pretty fit now. You must have been a really hard man then.'

‘We were carrying heavy packs. You should try taking this at a run with half a hundredweight on your back.' Some unspoken memory twisted the grim line of his lips into a momentary smile.

He set off ahead of her, moving his compact, powerful frame forward with rapid strides, his feet seeming to the woman behind him to race as swiftly as a dancer's away from her. She was sure that she was a healthy and fit thirty-five-year-old. She power-walked, whenever she had time for it, and she played tennis every week, being always prepared for a strenuous singles as well as the less demanding and more sociable doubles. And young Wayne Briggs would certainly have said she was athletic … She thrust that thought angrily from her mind.

She couldn't catch Matt to extend the conversation. He climbed swiftly and relentlessly ahead of her, moving over the rough stones and steep rises of the path as if he had been jogging on smooth and level ground, leaving her further and further behind him without a backward glance. After each half-mile of strenuous climbing, he paused and waited for her to rejoin him. And after each half-mile she rejoined him breathless and with aching limbs, planting her backside firmly on the nearest flat boulder to recover herself.

When her heart resumed its normal beat and she could summon the breath for conversation, she commented on the view below them and the lonely glory of their day on the hills. His only reaction was to nod briefly or to offer her the monosyllables she had received in the car. She tried challenging him directly with a jocular, ‘Who's being moody today? Remembering old times in the Brecons, are we?'

This prompted no reaction beyond a minimal raising of his chin and a sniffing of the cool mountain air. Then, before she could attempt again to dispel his coldness, he was away. All she saw were his strong thighs and powerful back muscles above her on the path, growing ever smaller as his moving figure pressed on and away from her, towards the blue sky and the racing clouds above them. She gave up the effort to keep up with him, even to stay anywhere near him, and concentrated upon the increasingly steep and twisting path beneath her feet, bending low to assist her progress, even using her hands for balance and speed in one or two more tricky spots.

This was the longest stretch Matt had climbed without stopping and waiting for her. She began to wonder whether he had climbed up and over the summit and was now moving swiftly down the other side, as he had done in the days of his SAS training. Was he trying to detach himself from her? Did he wish to leave her alone on the high and lonely slopes of the mountain? She wasn't physically frightened; she was a perfectly competent walker and mountaineer. She would simply return the way she had come, if that was what was most sensible. There was no danger from the weather today, as there often could be in the mountains.