Seeing is Believing (12 page)

With my arm through his, I said, ‘Malcolm, Lynne told me a rather surprising thing before you got home.’ And I went on and told him what she had told me of Peter's inability to father a child.

He was less interested than I had thought he would be.

‘I don't know what that woman's come here for,’ he muttered. ‘It'll only bring the press down on us. Is that why she came, d'you think? Did she think that being connected with a murder would be useful publicity?’

‘I should have thought it would be very bad publicity,’ I said.

‘You can't tell nowadays,’ he said. ‘Haven't you noticed how the news on television, night after night, consists of violence of some sort or other. Civil wars, terrorism, riots, assassinations, road accidents and probably a homely murder or two, like ours. Good news isn't news, apparently, or does nothing good ever actually happen? I wish she hadn't come.’

‘But I'm sure it was just out of good nature,’ I said. ‘You could see how glad Avril was to see her.’

‘Avril started life as an actress, didn't she, even though she never got anywhere with it?’

I looked at him in surprise.

‘D'you mean you didn't believe she was glad to see Lynne?’

‘I felt a touch of doubt.’

‘But why?’

‘I don't know, I don't know,’ he said irritably. ‘It was just a feeling I had for a moment. Probably quite wrong. But what you've been telling me about Peter doesn't really have any connection with the murder, does it? You might say, I suppose, that it gave Avril a possible motive for killing him, but wouldn't a divorce and remarriage really have done as well? Or she could simply have left him and found herself a boyfriend.’

‘Yes, she could have left him,’ I said, ‘but she may have been worried about money. Except for that attempt to be an actress, I don't think she's ever had any sort of job and I don't suppose he'd have kept her supplied if she'd simply walked out on him. He may have refused a divorce, and I don't suppose he'd ever given her grounds for going ahead with one on her own, so I don't believe he'd have had to pay her anything. But now that he's dead I suppose she'll inherit all he had — his share of that company Loxley Matthews, for instance.’

‘Anyway, she was in London when he was killed, so she can't have had anything to do with it.’

‘Of course.’

He gave me a sidelong look.

‘Are you really beginning to get suspicious of her, Frances?’

‘I'm a little bit suspicious of almost everybody, I find, and at the same time nobody. Oh, I don't know what I think, and I don't suppose you do either. I'd like to think about something quite different — those celandines, for instance.’

They were in the grass at the base of the hedgerow down the other side of the lane, gaily yellow and full of the spring. On the other side of the lane, where the houses were, we had passed the cottage where the two sisters lived, and who at that time were in the South of France, so there was no sign of life there. But in the garden of the next house, where the Askews, the young couple with
the two small children lived, the whole family was out, doing some weeding of the flowerbeds, and also keeping an eye on what was going on in the Loxleys’ garden. When they saw us they waved to us and we waved back. They had not been in the village very long and we did not know them well, though we had been for drinks in each other's houses and I liked what I knew of them. But now a curious thing happened. The young man, Ernest Askew, who had been stooping over a bed of wallflowers, plucking out weeds, straightened up and stood for a moment, rubbing his back as if it were aching and I saw that he was wearing gardening gloves. I also saw that he was tall, slim, well-built and wide-shouldered, and for a moment, I had a singular vision of him as red-haired, when in fact his thick, curly hair was a dark brown. But with a red wig covering the dark brown, he could quite easily have been the figure that I had seen at the Loxleys’ gate, which I had taken for Fred Dyer.

It was only momentary. I had no reason to imagine that Ernest Askew would shoot Peter Loxley. Yet he could so easily have been the man at the gate. And for all I knew, he and Peter might have had some violent quarrel. But I had no reason either to imagine that Fred Dyer would shoot Peter, and I realized that if I was not careful I should be seeing possible Fred Dyers everywhere. As we walked on, I tried very hard to recall exactly what that figure at the gate had been like.
Had
it been Fred? There had been something wrong, it seemed to me now, about the red hair. It had been a little too brilliantly red and a little too thick and bushy, in fact, just the sort of hair that someone wearing the wig from the cupboard in the village hall would have appeared to have. The more I thought about it, the more convinced of this I became, but I did not speak of it to Malcolm. I would tell Detective Inspector Holroyd about it when next I saw him, which I supposed would be fairly soon. We walked on past Hugh Maskell's house and into the road that wound through the village. Hugh
was tall, well-built and wide-shouldered and just possibly had a motive … I did my best not to think of that as we approached the Green Man.

It was a long, gabled building, mostly covered in cream-coloured rough-cast and built in Victorian times. It had a large car park behind it and next to it, with only a narrow alley between them, was a pleasant-looking modern house with a roof of grey pantiles and painted a pale green, in which Lucille and Kevin Bird lived. It was Kevin's work and fairly successful. There was a narrow strip of lawn in front of it, with no fence between it and the road. The very handsome garden that Lucille had created was at the back of the house. She and Kevin were just coming out of it and making their way to the entrance of the Green Man as we approached.

Malcolm introduced Lynne to them and she gave them the smile that had enchanted thousands. Kevin looked as if he would have wagged his tail if he had had a tail to wag. Lucille greeted her stiffly.

‘We are honoured,’ she said gravely, the pleasure she took in meeting a celebrity evident in her tone. She led the way in at the door. The room inside was long with a bar at one end of it, and several mirrors and framed advertisements hung on the walls. A number of the tables were placed close together and a good many of these had been taken so that the place already seemed full. ‘You'll join us,’ Lucille stated. ‘Kevin and I often come in here for Sunday lunch.’

None of the tables was big enough to take seven people, but we pushed two together and seated ourselves on benches round them.

‘Their steak and chips is really very creditable,’ Lucille went on. ‘But what will you have to drink? Kevin, you'll get us our drinks. Mrs Denison, you must be quite American by now; you'd like a cocktail, I'm sure, but I advise you against anything more ambitious than a gin and tonic.
Or would you prefer whisky? Scotch on the rocks, what about that? … No? Sherry? Frances, I know you will have sherry and Malcolm will have whisky and water without ice. Mr Hewlett, what will you have?’

Brian chose whisky with water without ice, and as Kevin set off to the bar to collect the drinks, Brian followed him to help him bring them to the table. Lucille herself and Kevin both had sherry. By the time that Kevin and Brian returned to the table, a young woman in jeans and a T-shirt had planted a menu on our table and left us, and when she came back to take our orders, we all seemed to feel that Lucille had decided what we were to eat and obediently asked for steak and chips, though I have a liking for fish and chips myself, as they do them at the Green Man, but I lacked the courage not to conform.

Looking at Lynne with stiff graciousness, Lucille said, ‘You've chosen an unfortunate time to come to Ranes-wood, Mrs Denison. You must be finding the atmosphere very different from what you expected.’

‘Oh, I knew what had happened here before I came,’ Lynne answered. ‘In fact, it was what brought me. I thought I might be able to take Avril back to London with me. But she seems to have managed to make arrangements here for herself.’

‘I'm so glad that Kevin and I are getting away,’ Lucille said. ‘Did I tell you about our plans to go to my relatives in Toronto? We're going next week. I'm so looking forward to it. They're always so good to me. Last time I went, about a year ago, Kevin couldn't go with me, as he hadn't got leave from his office, but this time we've arranged things so that the visit coincides with his holiday. You're very pleased about that, aren't you, Kevin? Kevin loves Canada.’

At that moment, a man with a camera aimed it at Lynne and rapidly snapped a photograph of her. She seemed unconscious of it, as she did when another man did the same, unless a certain air of sadness about her, that
appeared to me to increase just then, was her response to it. It might have been that she thought this appropriate to her situation, rather than the almost cheerful face with which she had listened to Lucille. I was afraid that these men might be going to intrude on our lunch party with questions to Lynne, but they had the courtesy not to do so.

A few minutes later, when our steak and chips was just being served to us, Fred Dyer and Sharon Sawyer came into the bar.

They made for a table at the far end of the room, and in passing us, Sharon gave us a shy little smile, and Fred a stiff nod without a trace of a smile on his face. When they sat down, Fred had his back to us and his broad shoulders blotted out Sharon from our view. All of us except Lynne had nodded back to them as they passed, then acted as if we had no special interest in them, but Lynne gazed after them with a look of astonishment on her face.

‘Who is that perfectly gorgeous man?’ she asked.

It took me by surprise. I had never thought of Fred as gorgeous. But his air of remoteness, that trick he had of looking through one as if he did not really recognize one's existence, had always put me off. I knew that in appreciating people's looks I was more likely to be influenced by the expression on their faces, rather than by their features, and Fred's expression had none of the warmth and liveliness that I liked. But trying to see him now with Lynne's eyes, I had to admit that his features were excellent. If you did not care too much about what his face told you about him, he really was very good-looking.

Brian responded to Lynne. That gorgeous man is very likely a multiple murderer.’

She gave a smothered little cry and Lucille said, ‘What
do
you mean, Mr Hewlett?’

He gave a shrug. ‘I shouldn't have said that. Forget it.’

‘No, but you must have meant something,’ Lucille said.

‘I know there's some suspicion that he may have been connected with poor Peter's death, but a
multiple
murderer — what can you mean?’

‘As I said, I shouldn't have said it,’ Brian replied, though I felt fairly sure that he had done it deliberately, for reasons of his own. ‘But the truth is, every time I see him, I find myself wondering what he's doing in Raneswood. He worked for a time in Edgewater, you see, where I live myself, and he left it because he found himself being suspected of having committed three particularly revolting murders. You no doubt remember them. Three girls were found strangled, with their heads smothered in black plastic bags, and a woman claimed to have seen Fred Dyer, or Jack Benyon as we called him then, leaving the spot where one of the bodies was found -’

‘Oh, please, please,’ Kevin broke in, his voice unnaturally shrill, ‘don't go on with it! I can't stand it. I'll never be able to eat my steak and chips if you go on.’

‘Don't be ridiculous, dear boy,’ Lucille said. ‘I find this very interesting. You say he was called Jack Benyon when he was in Edgewater, Mr Hewlett. You're quite sure of that?’

‘Yes, quite sure,’ Brian replied. ‘He may or may not be a murderer, but he's some kind of crook. People don't change their names for nothing.’

‘But he wasn't arrested?’

‘No, there wasn't nearly enough evidence against him. The woman who identified him changed her mind and his girlfriend gave him an alibi. But then he disappeared. That seemed to tell against him, but actually, he'd told our Inspector Dalling, who was in charge of the case, that he was going, and why. And I suppose his reason was a perfectly good one, that he couldn't stand the atmosphere of suspicion in which he was living. I think most people thought he was guilty. But I'd like to know what brought him to Raneswood. Was it just chance, or did he come here for some reason?’

‘What reason could he possibly have?’ Lucille asked. ‘I suppose he was just drifting about, getting jobs where he could, and then he happened to pick up with that girl, Sharon, and she gave him a place to live and no doubt introduced him to people she knew who gave him jobs and he found he could make a living.’

Lynne leant forward.

‘But you've some idea in your mind, haven't you, Mr Hewlett?’ she said.

‘An idea?’ he said.

‘An idea about a reason that could have brought him here.’

‘Not really. No.’

‘I think you have.’

He shook his head. ‘One has fancies, but I think Mrs Bird's probably right, that he drifted here by chance.’

At that moment, Fred got up and went to the bar to get himself and Sharon more drinks and I had the first clear view of her that I had had since they had sat down and if ever I had seen fear on a human face, there it was. There was an agony of anxiety in her eyes. Then she leant back in her chair, closing them, as if she felt that they were betraying her. She looked very young and forlorn. I felt a disagreeable twinge of guilt, because it was almost certainly my identifying Fred as the man whom I had seen at the Loxleys’ gate that now filled her with terror. Whether it was terror of what might happen to him, or of the man himself, I could not tell. If it was of what might happen to him it must mean that the alibi that she had given him was false and that she herself believed in my identification and that she was living with a murderer. But more probably it was fear that he would be unable to prove his innocence and at any time now might be arrested, what she had to say for him simply not being believed. I wondered if I could get hold of her and tell her that I was almost sure now that I had been mistaken in thinking that it was Fred whom I had seen at the gate.