Remains to be Seen (25 page)

‘Yes, sir. I had heard that. This man's called Derek Simmons. Neil Cartwright refused to change his name to Simmons – that's not at all surprising, since he was almost an adult at the time of his mother's second marriage. But he remained very attached to his real father, apparently. Simmons went to some trouble to arrange an alibi for what he thought was the time of the murder, sir. He now admits that he was at Marton Towers at that time, trying to see Neil Cartwright. He claims he never found him.'

‘That might be significant, you know.'

Peach's sigh was audible. ‘We thought that, sir. Especially as we've now exposed this alibi Derek Simmons set up for himself.'

A frown furrowed the noble brow of Thomas Bulstrode Tucker. ‘You've brought me too many suspects, Peach. It's your job to make arrests, not speculate like this.'

‘Just thought you'd like to be brought up to date with the case as it stands at this moment, sir. Especially as you told me at our last meeting how important it was for you to keep the Chairman of the Police Authority thoroughly briefed on our activities.'

Peach went back down the stairs consoling himself that he had contrived to leave on a final mention of the egregious Henry Rawcliffe.

It would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast, Lucy Blake thought, as Michelle Naylor came into the murder room.

The dead man's lover was petite, attractive, very pale, with small, pretty features which were so perfect as to be almost doll-like. DC Clyde Northcott, who sat beside her and studied this woman he had not seen before, was six feet three and very black. The woman opposite her was pretending to be calm, whatever she was really feeling; the man beside her made no attempt to disguise his intensity.

DS Blake dispensed quickly with the formalities of introduction and then said, ‘Mrs Naylor, why did you choose to conceal from us your relationship with a murder victim?'

‘Because it seemed the best thing for his memory and for all of us who remained alive.'

‘But you were warned that there could be no secrets when you were involved in a murder investigation.'

‘Yes, I was made aware of that. But I didn't want to cause problems for either Sally Cartwright or myself, and I didn't want Neil to be remembered as an adulterer. So I concealed our affair from you. It seems to me now that I may have been wrong to do so.' Michelle glanced from the young female face, with its light skin, its hint of freckles and its frame of chestnut hair, to the implacable black features and piercing dark brown eyes to the right of it, and found comfort in neither of them.

Just when she thought the black officer was going to remain silent and watchful throughout, he said, ‘How would you describe your present relationship with your husband?'

She had been prepared for more questioning about Neil rather than this sudden switch. She made herself take her time, wondering how James would expect her to answer, how her husband might have responded to the same question about her. ‘Not as bad as you might think. It may not be an ideal marriage, but we're not about to tear each other's throats out.'

‘How long has James known about your relationship with Neil Cartwright?'

She was perfectly cool now, remembering what she and James had agreed, what it was in both their interests to say. ‘About a month. Maybe a little more.' Even if that bitch Sally Cartwright said something different, it wouldn't undermine them. Sally might have rumbled what was going on at a different time from James.

‘And how did your husband react?'

‘He wasn't pleased. No man would be. But this is the twenty-first century, Detective Constable Northcott, and these things aren't uncommon. We are working things out in a civilized way: I use the present tense because we were still trying to resolve things at the time of Neil's death. We'll be all right, James and I, in the long run.' She gave him a confident, insolent smile, implying that whatever things were like where he had grown up as a piccaninny, they were different in her more sophisticated world.

Clyde Northcott, who had been born and raised in Lancashire and only rarely moved beyond its boundaries, understood much more of her contempt than she realized, but he did not react to it. He said coldly, ‘In our experience, men react violently to discoveries like this. And in your case, the men knew each other well and were living close to each other on the site at Marton Towers, which must have made reactions much more intense. Don't you think it possible that your husband might have killed your lover?'

‘No. I know James and he isn't like that.' She tried hard to be firm and dismissive.

‘So how do you think Neil Cartwright died?'

‘I've no idea.' She resisted the temptation to tell them that this was their job, not hers. ‘I told you, I saw him drive away from here on Sunday. En route to a Scotland which he never reached. It seems likely that his death took place away from here, that he was killed by someone with no connection with Marton Towers.'

A scenario which would of course be very convenient for this sharp-eyed woman and everyone else who lived here. Lucy Blake said quietly, ‘That would require someone with no knowledge of the place to have killed him elsewhere and brought the body back here. To have known of a place where the body might be left undiscovered until a fire could destroy it, or at least burn so much of it away that forensic evidence was removed.'

She watched the woman closely as she spoke, expecting some reaction from her to this brutal description of her lover's end, but Michelle Naylor remained outwardly calm. ‘I see the logic of that, when you point it out to me. But I can't think that anyone I know here could possibly have killed Neil. None of us was an angel in our previous lives, as you've been at pains to point out to us, but none of us has the profile of a murderer.'

Lucy wondered just how much the strange collection of personalities at Marton Towers had exchanged notes on their previous police interviews. Neville Holloway and the two women in particular seemed very composed, even when their deceptions were exposed. Perhaps it was the fact that all of them had been in trouble with the police years earlier in their lives which made them seem so calm under questioning. She said irritably, ‘Where was your relationship with Neil Cartwright going at the time of his death?'

All the questions she had anticipated were coming at her, but not in the order she had expected them. Michelle allowed herself a small smile: it was a good thing that she and James had agreed what they would say beforehand on this. ‘We weren't going to break up our marriages, or anything drastic like that. Neither of us wanted that. It's a pity Neil isn't here to speak for himself about it. I say that because it's my opinion that the affair had pretty well run its course by the time of Neil's death.'

‘By the time your respective spouses had found out about it, you mean?'

She smiled again, trying to show them that she understood what they were doing and was proof against it. ‘I didn't mean that, no. But I don't deny that the fact that we'd been rumbled had something to do with the way I felt. It's not easy to come home to the marital bed when your husband knows you're coming from someone else's. And people say that secrecy is one of the things which gives an affair its excitement. They may well be right.'

Clyde Northcott said suddenly, ‘We haven't been able to pin down the time of death. When exactly do
you
think Neil Cartwright died, Mrs Naylor?'

This was something she hadn't expected. She went back quickly in her mind over her previous account of how she had spent that fateful Sunday, but she couldn't see anything there to excite their suspicions. ‘No. If I knew that, I might be able to tell you who killed him, mightn't I?'

‘You might even have killed him yourself, Mrs Naylor.' Clyde Northcott did not smile as he said the words. ‘Had you fallen out with Neil Cartwright in the period immediately before his death?'

‘No.' Michelle could feel her pulses racing, but she kept her body and her hands very still.

‘You appear strangely unaffected by his death.'

She had thought there might be something like this from them, but she had not expected anything so blunt and unapologetic, so openly challenging. ‘You have no idea what I feel. If I keep my emotions under control when I speak to you, that is surely to everyone's advantage.'

Lucy Blake had contented herself for several minutes with watching the reactions of this woman who, although not much older than her, was physically so different from herself. She now said slowly, ‘Everyone we have spoken to at Marton Towers has been holding things back. Can you think of a reason for that?'

Michelle Naylor looked hard into the eyes beneath the broad forehead; they were a distinctive aquamarine colour, but they seemed to change from green to blue with the intensity of the light. She allowed herself a little smile of contempt at this woman whom she found she so disliked. ‘Perhaps it's because we've all had experiences of police interrogation before. Perhaps those experiences have made us cautious. Perhaps we have learned not to trust the police.'

‘And perhaps one of you is concealing murder.'

Michelle shrugged her small, neat shoulders. ‘You wouldn't expect me to comment on that, Detective Sergeant Blake. I've already assured you that I didn't kill Neil.'

‘And perhaps someone who didn't commit this murder is protecting the person who did. Becoming an accessory after the fact can lead to very serious charges.'

Michelle wondered what had happened to the ‘hard cop and soft cop' routine. These two seemed only concerned to press her hard. She said carefully, with just a touch of insolence, ‘It's as well that I'm not doing that, then, isn't it? I can't speak for anyone else, of course.'

She wondered when they had gone whether she should have played the distressed lover deprived of her man. They had picked her up on her lack of any obvious grief over Neil. But fortunately he wasn't here any more to clarify the temperature of the affair for them.

B
en Freeman was pleasantly tired at the end of his work at Brunton Golf Club.

With the lengthening days, the grass was beginning to grow and it was time to get the last of the winter tasks out of the way before the hectic burgeoning of spring increased its demands on all of the green staff. He had spent the morning planting rhododendrons, which would make a brave show behind the greens on two of the par-three holes during the coming May and in many Mays to come. In the afternoon, Ben had watched in wonder as a lorry delivered two twenty-foot-tall oaks and planted them with the special digger which enabled trees of this maturity to be set with little disturbance to their roots.

‘This is one of the things we couldn't do when I started this job,' the Head Greenkeeper told him, as they completed the planting and tidied the site when the specialist tree firm had departed. ‘Until ten years or so ago, we just had to plant six-foot-high saplings and wait for them to grow. Now we can bring in sturdy young trees and watch them replace the old ones which have fallen with the minimum of delay. A young lad like you will see these fellows in full maturity before you reach retiring age.'

They stood for a moment in the March twilight, looking up at the slim, healthy young branches high above their heads against the darkening blue of the sky, marvelling at this combination of ancient nature and modern technology. Then the greenkeeper put his spade on his shoulder and said contentedly, ‘That's enough work for one day, lad. We'll have a brew before you go, if you've got the time.'

They drove the tractor back to the big greenkeepers' shed, with its smells of oil and soil and grass, its machines which looked twice as big as they did outside when they were housed in this safe haven for the night. The other three members of the staff had already left; course workers began work early, at half-past seven each morning, to get on with as much work as possible before golfers appeared on the course, and finished correspondingly early.

They went into the familiar room at the end of the huge shed, with the battered armchairs which had been brought here when they became too shabby for the club lounge, the scratched wooden lockers, the Pirelli girlie calendar ten years out of date, the little electric stove and kettle. The Head Greenkeeper switched on the two-bar electric fire and filled the kettle. He nodded at the girl on the calendar as he waited for the water to boil. ‘Do you a bit of good, she could!' he said, with a leer which was as much part of his unthinking male ritual as the tea.

Jim Burns had resisted all attempts to bring in more modern and daring porn to replace the Pirelli. Although he couldn't have explained it, he considered that the old and well-thumbed calendar gave a sort of antique distinction to male lust. He had his own cottage by the clubhouse and was happily married, with three grown-up daughters. But like most people who worked with the seasons, he was a traditionalist. This grizzled, growling, kindly fifty-year-old liked to be assured that the younger men who worked for him were heterosexual and lubricious; it was part of his insulation against what he saw as the increasingly varied and dangerous world outside his work.

They chatted happily over strong, hot tea, enclosed by the cosy intimacy that drops upon men who have worked hard together for most of the day when they sit down to rest. The Head Greenkeeper took a long, appreciative pull at his mug of tea, then exhaled noisily, in a way his wife would certainly have disapproved. ‘You're doing all right, lad,' he said.

From Jim Burns, that was high praise, and Ben Freeman dimly understood it as such. Burns was not a man with any gift for small talk, but Ben asked him things about the history of the course and the plans for the future, and the older man was unexpectedly forthcoming. Like many taciturn men, he became quite voluble once his enthusiasm was kindled, and this was the area of both his expertise and his interest. When they eventually finished their conversation, Jim Burns found himself following the familiar route back to the cottage in near darkness, with a light, chill wind which was cool enough to remind him that it was still only late March. The clocks would go forward on Saturday; that was always the date which marked the real beginning of spring for a greenkeeper.