Telling Tales (24 page)

They spoil their little girls. And then I spent so much time at work. When I was around, I wanted to make it special for her.” He paused. There’d been other women before Jeanie. I’d brought some of them home. But they all knew that Abigail came first.”

“Jeanie must have been special, then.”

“Not particularly, no. She was young, pretty enough. A talented musician. But there have been others prettier, sexier.”

“Yet she was the first one you moved in.”

“I didn’t move her in. She turned up, uninvited, with all her bags, after a row with her father. When I came in from work she’d unpacked. A fait accompli.”

“Why did you let her stay?”

“Apathy. Devilment. Her father had never liked me and it was amusing to wind him up. And there was something about her. Something innocent, I suppose. She reminded me a bit of Liz when she was a girl. She made me feel young again. That first night she was so grateful to be here, so eager to please. She’d have done anything for me. It was flattering. I took the easy way out. It wasn’t as if I was home much. I told myself it would be good for Abigail to have the company of someone nearer her own age.”

“But Abigail didn’t like her?”

“Couldn’t stand her,” he said simply. “Too used to getting her own way, I suppose. Always being the centre of attention.”

“So you told Jeanie she’d have to leave?”

“Eventually. In the autumn. I could tell by then it wasn’t going to work. I was too old after all. She was so intense and it became clear that she wanted more from the relationship than I did.”

“Marriage?”

“Maybe. She never mentioned it but I wouldn’t have been surprised.” He hesitated. “Besides, there was someone else. I was looking for an excuse to get rid of Jeanie. The situation was messy, a distraction.”

“What happened when you asked Jeanie to leave?”

“It was horrible. I knew she could be moody, unpredictable, but that day she lost it completely. She blamed it all on Abigail. I’d always thought of her as rather prim, but she let fly with a stream of filth.”

“What did she say about Abigail?” Vera asked. “Precisely.”

“She called her a dirty little slut. Amongst other things.”

“You didn’t mention that in your statement.” Vera waited but Mantel didn’t respond and she continued slowly, “I can understand why you were so angry. What do you think made Jeanie so abusive?”

“Because she knew it would hurt me. She was jealous.”

“Why slut though? Why that particularly?”

“If you want to know about Abigail’s sexual history, you could ask,” Mantel said and that made Vera feel like a worm again, as she had when they’d first arrived.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry. You do see why it could be important.”

i “They asked about boyfriends first time round. Sexual partners, they said. It hadn’t occurred to me that she might have been sleeping with someone.”

“You were shocked.”

“I had no right to be shocked. I slept with women, many of them not much older than Abigail. I was surprised. I had thought she would talk to me about some thing like that. I’d known it would happen, of course. I’d prepared myself for it. Imagined her bringing some boy home. I knew I wouldn’t take to him, however decent and respectable he might be, but thought I could pretend. Welcome him in. Then I wouldn’t lose her. I hadn’t thought she’d keep it a secret.”

“She was under age. The boy would have been committing an offence.”

“Perhaps that was it.”

“You had no idea at all who she was seeing?”

“None at all. She had a party for her fifteenth birthday. There were boys here for that. I could probably remember the names of some of them. But I was around for most of the evening and there didn’t seem to be anyone special.”

“Nick Lineham? Does that ring a bell?”

“The teacher’s lad. Yes, he was one of them.”

“And Christopher Winter?”

“Emma was here, of course. She and Abigail were best friends. But I don’t remember seeing the boy. Abigail had laughed about him, talked about a crush, but I don’t think he’d have been invited. Wasn’t he quite a lot younger?”

“Only a year,” Vera said. “That was all.”

He was staring out into the garden, distracted for a moment by the cloud of rooks which scattered from an old sycamore and he seemed not to hear.

“Let me take you back to the night of the bonfire.” In her mind she saw him, standing there, welcoming his guests with his trophy girlfriend by his side. Middle-aged of course but fit and charming. This person seemed older. She liked him better. “Did you see Christopher Winter during the evening?”

“I don’t think I would have recognized him. Ten years makes a lot of difference to someone that age and I only saw him a few times while Abigail was alive. Sitting in the back of his mother’s car when she came to collect Emma. Once on the Point, I think. His parents were here last night. They’d have seen him, surely, if he’d been one of the guests?”

“Probably. Were there many strangers here?”

“People I didn’t know, certainly. The tickets were on sale in the pub and the post office. The lifeboat crew brought their friends.”

“You recognized Caroline Fletcher?”

“Yes. She was the officer in charge of the original enquiry.”

“Did you invite her?”

“No.”

“Why was she here?”

She could see him framing a noncommittal reply in his head, then give up on it, too exhausted perhaps to make the effort to lie. “To check up on me. To remind me that we could both face problems if I spoke to the authorities.” Then, flippant, “Because she can’t keep away.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.” Though she was beginning to. Understanding was seeping into her brain like water into an estuary.

i “Look. I said that I’d met someone else before Jeanie moved in here and it made things messy, complicated.” He paused.

“Go on.” She was sitting very still, staring into his face.

He returned her gaze. Again she thought he would refuse to answer.

“The woman was Caroline.”

“You were going out with Caroline Fletcher while she was investigating your daughter’s murder?” Vera was apoplectic, scarlet, marble-eyed. Only just holding it together.

“We were close, yes.”

“And it never occurred to her to declare an interest? She could have wrecked the whole case.”

“We’d been discreet. We didn’t think anyone would find out.”

Dan Greenwood had guessed, Vera thought, but he’d been too daft and too loyal to say anything. No wonder Fletcher had taken against Jeanie from the beginning.

“What did you promise her to get a conviction?” Vera demanded.

“Nothing. There was no need. She wanted it as much as I did.”

She was besotted, Vera thought. What is wrong with all these women? She was a strong, clever woman and she threw her career away for a prat like you. That was why she left the service. So she’d be free to marry you when you asked her. Is that what you promised? But you never did. She was even more of a mug than Jeanie Long.

Mantel walked with them to their car, and stood shivering while Ashworth patted his pockets for the keys.

“One thing,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Emma’s husband. The one who calls himself Bennett. The pilot on the river.”

“What about him?”

“I recognized him last night. He didn’t realize. You should check him out. That wasn’t his name when I first met him.”

“What was his name?”

He shrugged and Vera couldn’t tell whether he didn’t remember or he thought he’d told them enough.

Before they could ask him more he turned and walked quickly back to the house.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Vera was stranded in the deep armchair. It was too low for her to climb out with any sort of dignity. She ate the last chip, licked her finger and collected the last scraps of batter, then screwed the greasy paper into a ball and hurled it overarm towards the waste bin in the corner. Dan Greenwood retrieved it from the floor. They were in the Old Forge, in the room next to his office. Just her and Greenwood. She’d sent Ashworth to the FE college where Emma had worked, to talk to Nicholas Lineham who, when he was a lad, might once have had sex with Abigail Mantel. So many connections, she thought. People waltzing in and out of each other’s lives. She felt her eyes glaze as she pictured the patterns, the lines of connection. Her lids began to droop. At her age she deserved a nap in the afternoon.

“Did you make that coffee?” she said. Some temptations you couldn’t give into.

He nodded to the tray on the upturned crate beside him.

“Well, it’s no good to me there.”

He lifted the mug to within her reach.

“How did you know Mantel was screwing Fletcher?”

“I didn’t.” Defensive, touchy.

“You’re not surprised though.”

“She was never happy without a man in her life. She doesn’t come across as the needy sort, but it was like she couldn’t believe in herself without a man to admire her.”

“Oh, God.” She leaned back in her chair, legs stretched ahead of her, heels on the floor, and stared at the ceiling. “Not another one.”

“What?”

“I’ve had Ashworth spouting psychobabble ever since he arrived.” She pulled herself more upright so she could look Greenwood in the face. “Did she ever have a go at you?”

“What do you mean?” He took out a tin of tobacco and began to roll a cigarette. His hands were shaking.

“Don’t go all coy on me, Danny. You know what I’m getting at.”

His neck, underneath the beard was flushed. “Nan,” he said. “I wasn’t important enough. She never took me that seriously.”

“Did you ever see them together Fletcher and Mantel?”

He shook his head slowly. “I heard a phone call. She didn’t know I was there. I mean, it could have been to anyone. By that time my judgement was shot and my paranoia was sky high, but I thought it was to him.”

“What did she say?”

, “It was just after we’d taken Jeanie into custody. She was telling him that she’d be charged by the end of the day. That was all. But it was the way she was saying it. Like she was a little girl. A good little girl who’d done as she was told.”

“Christ,” Vera said. “You’d want to puke.”

“I felt sorry for her really.” Greenwood nipped the end off the cigarette. “Like I said, my judgement was shot. I should have stood up to her. I knew we were cutting corners.”

Vera drank her coffee as if she couldn’t trust herself to say anything.

He rolled the cigarette in his fingers but still he didn’t light up. “I met her last week.”

“You met Fletcher?”

“She phoned me, asked if we could go out for a drink. I told her I was too busy. Just a quick one before closing time, she said. She picked me up from here…” He looked at Vera, but she refused to help him out. “By then the pubs were closed so we went back to my place.” He blushed. “Nothing happened. Nothing like that. Just a drink and a chat.”

“What did she want then?”

“Ib know if I’d heard anything, if you’d been in touch. She couldn’t understand why she’d not been contacted.”

“And you told her. Of course.”

“I felt sorry for her. I explained. She’s not as tough as she makes out.”

“You do realize she’s a suspect in a murder enquiry? Probably the prime suspect as things have turned out.”

“No.” A rejection of the whole notion.

“She certainly had a motive for killing Abigail Mantel and arresting Jeanie Long. We’ve only her word for it that she didn’t speak to Christopher Winter at the time of the original enquiry. It’s possible that he saw her with Abigail that afternoon and she persuaded him it was of no importance. You can see she could be persuasive. Especially with a young lad. Perhaps that was why he turned up in Elvet now. He wanted to set things straight.”

“No,” Greenwood said again. She thought he would like to put his hands over his ears and shut out her words.

“She was there the night he died,” Vera went on relentlessly. “She had possible motive, opportunity. And she disappeared just before the body was found. There’s a stronger case against her than against anyone else involved.”

He’d been looking at the cracked and dusty tiles on the floor. Now he looked straight at her. “You don’t really believe she’s a double murderer?”

“Probably not,” she said. “But she’s bad news. If she gets in touch with you again let me know.”

They sat for a long time, staring at each other in silence.

“What do you know about James Bennett?” Vera said at last.

“He’s a pilot on the Humber.”

“I know that, man. It’s all anyone says about him.”

“You can’t have him down as a suspect. He wasn’t living round here when Abigail Mantel was killed.”

“How do you know?”

“He only moved into the village when he married Emma and they bought the house over the square.”

“When was that?”

“Not long. Two years at the most.”

“You’re mates, aren’t you?”

“I suppose so.” The concept seemed to embarrass him. “We both play cricket for the village team. Have a few pints together after a game.”

“So he’ll have talked about his background, his family. You know where he grew up.”

“Not really,” Greenwood said. “Mostly it’s talk about the mid-order collapse or where we can find a decent bowler.”

“You’re winding me up.”

“He likes talking about his work. Pilotage.”

“Safe ground,” she said. “He won’t be caught out on that.”

“What do you mean?”

“According to Mantel, he’s not who he says he is.”

“How would he know?”

“He recognized him apparently.”

“And you believe Mantel?”

“Yes,” Vera said. “I think I do.”

She stood up. She’d arranged to meet Ashworth in the teashop over the road. It would do as an office for the time being. Better than the station in the town which had turned out to be enemy territory. Eventually, she supposed, she’d have to put in another appearance there, show her face round the door of the incident room, smile to show they were all on the same side, working together, but at the moment it suited her to keep her position ambiguous and detached. Better all round if no one knew where she was and what she was up to. Caroline Fletcher, it seemed, still had a way of inspiring loyalty among her former colleagues. She looked down at Greenwood. He was hunched forwards, his shoulders tense.