A Shred of Evidence (17 page)

Colin stared at him. My God, he’d been worrying about Finch. “I didn’t kill her!” he shouted. “I’ve just told you! I avoided her. I didn’t go across the Green. As I got to Woodthorpe Close I remembered the letter, and I …” He closed his eyes. “I didn’t want to deal with some teenager with a fantasy … I just kept running along Byford Road.”

“You were aiming to get home by ten, you said?”

Colin nodded. No one bothered telling him to speak for the tape.

“But you didn’t get there until twenty past.”

“No. Because I took the long way round.”

“It’s not that long a way round, is it, Mr. Cochrane? I doubt if it’s even a mile.”

“It’s only about half a mile, two-thirds at the most,” said Colin tiredly. He wasn’t looking at either of them now.

“And yet you seem to be saying that it took you twenty minutes,” said Lloyd. “I don’t believe you, Mr. Cochrane.”

“Tough,” said Colin.

“It wouldn’t take me twenty minutes to walk half a mile, never mind run, and I’m not a world-class athlete,” Lloyd continued. “As you may have noticed.”

Yes, Colin could see that he probably wasn’t. He hadn’t been asked a question, he saw no reason to respond, and Lloyd didn’t pursue it.

“And you maintain that you didn’t know who had written this letter to you?” asked Finch.

“Yes,” said Colin. “I’ve never known. Not until now.”

“
Never
known?”

Again, Colin shook his head. This time he was asked to speak for the tape. “No,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean? Have there been other letters?”

Colin sighed. “They began last term. I didn’t know who was sending them.”

“Did they always arrange meetings?”

“No. This is the first one to do that.”

“Were they all like that?”

“Yes. It’s not all that unusual,” said Colin.

“Not unusual?” Finch repeated.

Colin looked up slowly. “If you’re on television and under seventy, you get all sorts of letters,” he said. “They’re sometimes very … explicit about what they’d like to do.”

“Trouble is, Mr. Cochrane, she says you’ve actually done these things with her.”

Colin sighed. “I know. That’s what made these letters different. But it’s a fantasy. Make-believe.”

“Is it? So when did you get this letter?”

“Yesterday morning. It was in my pigeon-hole at work, like all the others have been. That means, to save you time, that
they were part of the internal system—they came through the office, not the post. That means that it was someone at the school who was sending them.”

“How many would you say you had received?”

“I don’t know.” Colin shrugged. “A dozen or so, altogether.”

“And you kept them.”

Colin frowned. “No,” he said.

“You kept this one.”

“I meant to get rid of it. I just forgot about it.”

Finch looked totally disbelieving. “You made this detour in order to avoid her, but you forgot you had her letter in your pocket?”

Colin rubbed his eyes. “I remembered then, but I forgot when I got home.”

“Because you were so keen to get your running things into the machine?”

“I just wasn’t thinking about it, that’s all!”

“No,” said Finch. “I’m sure you weren’t.”

“I didn’t go to meet her. I’m desperately sorry that she was murdered while she was waiting for me, but it wasn’t my fault!”

“No? Before this one, you say you’ve had eleven other letters?”

“I wasn’t counting. Something like that.”

Lloyd was merely listening to the conversation now, his chair tipped back. He took no part in it. He didn’t seem terribly interested.

“And what did you do about it?”

Colin blinked. “What was I supposed to do about it?” he asked.

“Did you show them to anyone? The headmaster? Another teacher? Your wife?”

“Would you show them to your wife?” Colin demanded.

Finch picked up the letter and looked at it for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, if there was no reason not to.”

“And what if she believed it?”

Finch grinned. “That wouldn’t be very likely,” he said. “I’m not that much of an athlete either.”

“Oh, for—” Colin put his hands over his eyes. Erica had believed the one she had seen, whatever Finch’s wife would or would not have done. But he wasn’t about to tell them that.

He’d told them everything they needed to know. He’d told them about the letters, about the detour … He didn’t have to discuss the ins and outs of his marriage with these people.

He let his hands slide down. “If you start making enquiries into this sort of thing, it becomes public knowledge,” he said. “I didn’t want that.”

Finch smiled.

“Look! Adolescents go through phases. Making a big fuss is no way to deal with it. I just ignored them.”

“By putting them in your pocket?”

“I didn’t want to dispose of it at the school.”

“I think you met her, Mr. Cochrane,” said Finch. “I think you met her, like you’ve been doing for months. I don’t think you were running through any industrial estate at nine-thirty. I think that’s what you do all the other nights you go out training. But on Tuesdays, it’s Natalie.”

“That’s not true!” Colin shouted, jumping to his feet.

Lloyd’s chair thumped down. “Sit down,” he said quietly.

Colin had almost forgotten he was there. He took a deep breath and sat down. “I don’t know how or why I’m here,” he said, his mouth dry. “I knew Natalie from the drama group. I didn’t even know her surname, not properly. I didn’t know that she was the one who was writing those letters. I didn’t go to meet her. I thought it was a harmless fantasy that whoever was writing those letters would grow out of.”

“Why did you keep this one?” asked Finch.

“I took it home to dispose of it,” Colin said. “It was a fantasy. Nothing more. Do you think I’d forget I had it if it had been true?”

Finch picked up the letter again. “She’s got some imagination,” he said.

Colin looked at him with something approaching loathing. “Some people do,” he said.

“Like you,” said Finch.

Colin had always thought that if you just lived your life
without hurting other people, this sort of thing couldn’t happen to you. But it could. He licked dry lips. “I would like some tea,” he said, his voice quiet, a little hoarse from shouting. “And I’d like to make a phone call.” He looked up at Lloyd. “I can make a phone call even if I’m not under arrest, can I?” he asked.

“You can indeed,” said Lloyd. “Sergeant Finch will show you where the telephone is.” He leant over to the machine. “Interview suspended fifteen forty-five,” he said.

Kim heard the bell that signalled her release from school with mixed feelings.

She wanted to get out of here, to get home and away from everyone talking about Natalie, though it had helped, in a way. But her talk with the inspector had unsettled her. She felt as though she had betrayed someone, and she wasn’t even sure who.

Hannah, she supposed, though that was silly. But she ought to call in on her way home, see if she was all right and tell her that she had had to break her promise. It wasn’t as though Hannah had any reason to want Colin Cochrane’s name kept out of it, except that she idolized him.

But Kim liked him too. He was good fun in the drama group, and she really couldn’t imagine him having an affair with anyone, never mind a pupil. And she was quite certain that he could never have …

Her mind flinched away from the word. Poor Natalie. Yes, she had been right to tell the police everything she knew, even that Natalie might have very easily got in over her head with someone. And the inspector had said that rumours didn’t mean anything, so she wasn’t jumping to conclusions about who the someone was. Not officially, at any rate.

She had given her Dave Britten’s name without a qualm, and he hadn’t been seeing Natalie for months. But that was because she knew Dave, knew that he would never kill anyone. She had told the other policeman the other boys she knew had been with Natalie. So why did she feel so bad about Colin Cochrane? She hadn’t said it was him, just that there were
rumours. She had just said what Natalie had told her, and what she had heard.

But he was well known, and this sort of thing couldn’t be kept quiet. If it got out, it would be in the papers, and if it wasn’t him, if it wasn’t true, then Hannah was right. It could ruin everything for him for no reason at all.

She wished she had talked to someone else first. Not Hannah—that was silly. Hannah was always going to take Colin Cochrane’s side. She should have talked to someone who would have given her proper advice. Someone like Mr. Murray.

She walked slowly in the afternoon sunshine to Hannah’s house. She didn’t want to tell her, but it would be easier just to get it over with. She would have to remember to phone her mum at the salon, so that she didn’t worry if she got home first.

Judy hadn’t been back in her office two minutes before Lloyd came in and sat, infuriatingly, on her desk.

“Cochrane’s having tea and biscuits,” he said. “Aren’t we civilized? How did you get on?”

She told him what she had found out from the neighbours, but that was old news, apparently.

“His wife stuck to her story,” she said. “She saw Natalie alive and well at nine fifty-five, and the dog found her dead fifteen or twenty minutes later.”

“Do you still believe her?” asked Lloyd.

Judy nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Though she was a bit thrown when I told her that her husband didn’t get back until twenty past ten.”

“He’s got a thing about time-keeping,” said Lloyd. He got up and walked to the window. “He doesn’t want to give us a sample for DNA,” he said.

“Finch could be right,” said Judy doubtfully. “She could be lying. She definitely thought Cochrane would be safe at home by ten, so it would have been an alibi, of sorts.” She swivelled round to look at him. “I just don’t think she
is
lying,” she said. “If she was making it up, why would she say she saw her in
such a specific spot, standing by the wall opposite the depot—why not just say she saw her on the Green itself?”

“I think you could both be right,” said Lloyd. “You and Finch.”

Judy could feel a theory coming on.

“We said that something had to have happened between their being on intimate terms and her being murdered,” he said.

No, thought Judy. You said that. She still hadn’t made her mind up about the order in which all the things that had happened to Natalie had occurred. But she was unobtrusively jotting down Lloyd’s musings. They were almost always right.

“And that she was there with someone when Mrs. Cochrane saw her,” Lloyd went on. “Suppose that was Cochrane? He met her, as arranged. It was five to ten—time for him to be on his way home. But—as Finch said—Mrs. C. turned up, checking up on him. He hears someone coming and makes himself scarce, but Natalia hangs around.”

Judy frowned. “Why would she do that?” she asked.

Lloyd turned to face her. “She can’t run as fast as him,” he said.

“Isn’t that ungrammatical?”

He smiled. “It’s … colloquial,” he said.

Got him, for once. Judy felt inordinately proud of that. “All right,” she said. “How does that make him angry?”

“That doesn’t,” said Lloyd. “But Natalia sees a way of forcing the issue. Mrs. Cochrane follows the dog into the woods, and Natalia goes to where Cochrane’s lying low, tells him who she’s just seen, and starts making things difficult for him. He loses his temper …”

“Kim said that Natalie wouldn’t do something like that,” said Judy.

“He goes off to the school to fetch his car. Mrs. C. comes out of the wood, and Sherlock finds Natalia’s body,” said Lloyd. “He picks up the car, and gets back at twenty past. She has no idea that any of it had anything to do with her husband. She simply reports what she saw, and what she found.”

“Mm.”

Lloyd looked offended. “Mm?” he repeated. “Mm? Is that the best you can do? What’s wrong with it?”

Judy thought about it. Most of it made sense. Perhaps it all did. What was wrong with it was something that she couldn’t tick off neatly in her notebook, because it was what Tom Finch would call a gut feeling. She took refuge in facts.

“If he was leaving to go home at five to ten,” she said, “and he’s got a thing about being on time, then he obviously hadn’t intended picking up his car. So why would he do that after he’d just murdered someone? Wouldn’t he rather just get home?”

“Ah,” said Lloyd. “No. Because he had blood on his track-suit—why else was he washing it? He could run along a road without anyone seeing it, perhaps, but could he walk up his garden path in full view of the neighbours? No. So he needed the car, because that way he could get right into the house without being seen.”

That seemed like very quick thinking on the part of someone who had just done away with his lover, Judy thought.

“What about the tyre marks?” she asked.

“Coincidence,” he said. “You said that yourself.”

She had. But why would someone be leaving there in a hurry? There had to be a reason. And murder was as good a reason as any.

Lloyd left to continue his interview with Cochrane, and Judy thought about what he had said. It did make sense, and if Cochrane was refusing to let them have a sample …

But theories were dangerous. Everyone seemed to have one about this, and no two were alike. Judy flicked through her notebook, already full of statements and questions and comments. Very few facts.

Fact—Natalie had had sexual intercourse. Fact—Natalie had been murdered. Fact—presumably—Cochrane had been twenty minutes later than intended getting home. Fact—until proof to the contrary was found—Cochrane’s missing twenty minutes were the ones in which Natalie had died.

But there, as far as she could see, the facts ended and the theories began. And both Lloyd’s and Finch’s depended on the
one thing that had struck her as wrong. She didn’t believe Natalie had written that letter.

The interview resumed at sixteen-thirty hours.

“Mr. Cochrane,” Lloyd said. “Before the refreshment break, you asked why you were here at all, so I’ll tell you.”

Cochrane looked a little apprehensive.

“In a case like this, it’s our job to suspect people who were known to the deceased—it’s not often a complete stranger, you know. We have to talk to people who have a possible motive, people who had the opportunity. And we have circumstantial evidence which points, for the moment, to you.”