Time to Pay (45 page)

‘If you needed any more proof . . .'

‘It all helps,' Logan said, offering him a hand to get to his feet. ‘Sorry. I had to call it in this time, and I've got a feeling DI Rockley might want a word or two with you.'

The words Rockley chose to open his dialogue with Gideon were not, he suspected, to be found in any official police handbook or code of practice. The DI had had, perforce, to wait until the paramedics had dealt with Gideon's sundry cuts and bruises, and the waiting hadn't improved his mood.

It had been previously agreed that, to prevent Logan's superiors coming down on him like a ton of bricks, Gideon and Tilly should say the policeman had been recruited at the last minute to man the receiver, knowing little of what he was to hear, but Gideon suspected the inspector wasn't deceived.

On the subject of his own part in the proceedings, Gideon was on the receiving end of a lengthy diatribe, peppered with such words as
foolhardy
,
ill considered
and
bloody stupid
, and such phrases as
interfering with an official investigation
and
withholding vital information
.

Gideon listened with half an ear, aware that Rockley was well within his rights to tear a strip off him and, moreover, that he had earned it, but wondering, at the same time, how Pippa was going to take this complete upheaval of her personal life.

When Rockley had said his piece, taken Gideon's statement and departed, presumably to follow Lloyd and his escort back to the station, Gideon sat on one of the benches in the deserted great hall, feeling depressed, sore, and unutterably weary.

Police officers had bagged and labelled the swords and pikes, carrying them away as evidence, and now only the tumbled bench and the untidy heap of faded fabric by the far wall remained to tell of the drama that had been played out. Even to Gideon, the events of the afternoon had assumed a strangely distant and dreamlike quality.

After a couple of minutes, he heard the scrape of a shoe on the stone floor and looked up to see Eve approaching, still wearing the long brown velvet skirt and old-gold linen jacket she'd worn to the restaurant.

‘Hey, you,' she said softly.

‘Hiyah. Sorry I ran out on you at the restaurant.'

‘We wondered where the hell you'd gone.'

‘Yeah, sorry about that. I've seen Giles but I haven't seen Pippa. How's she taking all this? Does she know the full story?'

‘Tilly told her.' Eve came round in front of him and put out a gentle hand to tilt his chin up, with a soft hiss of indrawn breath. ‘She took it pretty
well, all things considered, but then I never believed theirs was a grand passion in the first place.'

‘She'll hate me . . .'

Eve shook her head.

‘For a while, maybe, she'll find it hard to forgive you for being right about him, but she'll come round. But what about you? Are you OK?'

‘OK in the way that someone who's been run over by a bus is OK,' he said with resurfacing humour. ‘How do I look?'

She put her head on one side.

‘I wish I could say romantically scarred, but one eye is almost shut and you've got what looks like a train track running up your cheek. What happened to your hand?'

‘Oh, it's nothing much. They don't think there's anything broken.' Gideon flexed the fingers of his swollen hand experimentally. Because he'd refused to go to hospital the paramedic had carried out
in situ
repairs to the sword cut on his face, but he would have to go to casualty to get his hand checked out properly.

‘Was Rockley very rough with you?' She put a hand on his shoulder and bent to kiss him.

‘No more than I deserved, probably.'

‘I wish you'd told me what you were going to do.'

‘You would have tried to stop me,' he pointed out.

‘And that would have been a bad thing?'

Gideon shrugged. ‘I'm sorry. I couldn't see any other way to get to the truth; Lloyd had covered his tracks too well. I couldn't just stand by and let him get away with it.'

Eve stroked his hair.

‘You know, for a quiet bloke, you're surprisingly bloody-minded! I thought life with you was going to be peaceful and undemanding. How wrong can a person be?'

‘That from a newly hatched biker chick,' he teased. ‘Oh, come on – you know peaceful and undemanding would bore you stiff! But anyway, it's all over now. We'll probably dwindle into old age in perfect tranquillity.'

‘Maybe,' she said, and Gideon was struck by an uncharacteristic note of reserve in her voice. ‘Anyway, I came to tell you that Mrs Morecambe's back and making cups of tea in the kitchen.'

‘Perfect.' Gideon climbed stiffly to his feet. ‘Life is back to normal.'

In the kitchen they found Pippa, Giles, Tilly and Hamish sitting round the table drinking tea, and Mrs Morecambe making sandwiches with doorstep slices of bread and cheese.

It was the first time either Pippa or Mrs Morecambe had seen Gideon's battered face, and their reactions couldn't have been more different.

The housekeeper hurried forward, full of concern, fussing over him until he was safely seated with a mug of tea in his hand. Pippa glanced up when he first came in, then her gaze dropped to the mug in front of her, her expression strained and unhappy.

Clearly envious, Giles was inclined to view the revelations as a drama from which he'd been unfairly excluded, and was eager to hear the mechanics of the confrontation.

‘You do realise you've got me into trouble,' he said. ‘It's quite possible I could be charged for the improper storage and display of weapons.'

‘Yeah. Sorry about that, but I must admit, it wasn't a consideration at the time.'

‘So whose idea was it to grab the swords and halberds?'

‘Lloyd's – look, do we have to talk about this now?' Gideon protested, seeing Pippa beginning to look intensely uncomfortable.

‘What? Oh, I see.' Belatedly, Giles caught on. ‘But we can't just pretend it didn't happen.'

Suddenly, Pippa pushed her chair back and stood up.

‘No. Don't mind me,' she said with brittle brightness and suspiciously sparkling eyes. ‘I've got things to do, anyway. It'll be easier for you to rake it all over if I'm not here.'

She left the room without so much as looking at Gideon, brushing past Logan in the doorway with a muttered apology, and leaving behind an uncomfortable silence.

Life, it seemed, would take a little while to return to normal.

‘Should I go after her, do you think?' Giles asked, doubtfully, and seemed relieved when the general consensus was that she probably needed a little space.

Logan had come to take his leave, but accepted, with no noticeable reluctance, an invitation to stay for tea and sandwiches.

‘How's it going?' he asked Gideon.

‘OK, all things considered.'

‘Sorry I didn't get here sooner, but I was stuck
at work,' Logan explained, tucking into one of the wedge-shaped offerings. ‘Just before I came off shift we were called out to a post office raid, and then there was the report to write up. I can't just down tools and leave if I'm in the middle of something. But then I thought we had an agreement that you wouldn't do anything until you knew I was in place?'

‘Yeah, I know, but if I'd waited it would have all been for nothing, so I just took a chance. I guessed you'd get here as soon as you could. So where
did
you come in – as a matter of interest?'

‘Something about a dog and a dead bird, if I remember rightly. You know, it's not always the best idea to antagonise someone you suspect of murder – especially when you're on your own without back-up!'

‘No, I guess not, but you can't deny I got results.'

‘You bloody nearly got yourself killed – that's what you got!' Logan said. ‘Again!'

‘He was brilliant!' Tilly said, jumping to his defence. ‘We got here just after PC Logan did,' she told Gideon. ‘So we listened in. It was pretty scary not being able to see what was happening, but we were only just down the drive . . .'

‘I wanted to be sure Lloyd-Ellis would incriminate himself,' Logan put in. ‘I knew you'd blow your top if I breezed in before we had enough to nail him, and it didn't sound as though there was any violent activity at that point. But when he offered you a sword, I decided the time had come to step in. Would've been easier if you hadn't locked the door, though.'

‘I didn't want him getting away,' Gideon admitted
sheepishly. ‘If I'd had any idea he would go so completely off the rails, I don't think I'd have gone in, in the first place. But then I thought it was just going to be about Marcus and the diary, and it wasn't until he all but admitted to killing Damien that I realised just how dangerous he really was.'

‘But I don't understand. I thought the case against Adam Tetley was cut and dried,' Tilly put in. ‘DI Rockley said you'd found the gun in a locker and Tetley had the key . . .'

‘Yeah, but Rockley was never completely happy about that,' Logan said. ‘It was just too easy. Plus, Tetley was on nights and he said he slept most of the morning. Neighbours told us that his car was on the drive all day, and he was there when a man from the electricity company called just after noon to read the meter. He could have done it, but it would have been extremely tight. The facts didn't quite fit.'

‘So how did he come to have the key?' Hamish wanted to know.

Logan swallowed a mouthful of tea.

‘He told us it came in the post, in a plain brown envelope, addressed to him, and I guess he was probably telling the truth. I mean, what would
you
do if something like that turned up? Most people would do what he did – look at it, wonder where the hell it came from, and then put it on the window sill and forget all about it. It was a clever move on Lloyd-Ellis' part. It seems he's been pretty clever all along. We underestimated him. Not that he was ever really a suspect, because we didn't have a motive and, in any case, he seemed to have a watertight alibi for the
shooting. Mind you – if we'd known about the list of names from the start, it might have been a different matter.' He slanted a look at Gideon under his brows. ‘Our friend here has something of a history of withholding information.'

‘I just wanted to find out whether it was actually relevant before dumping everyone in it,' Gideon explained. ‘I thought Damien's family had had enough to deal with. How was I to know I was lighting the blue touchpaper?'

The day of the Tarrant and Stour Team Chase dawned fine, clear and windy. In the absence of Lloyd, Tilly had offered to step into the breach, riding Comet.

Waiting at the start with Pippa, Tilly and Steve Pettet, the hunt dragsman, Gideon shivered with nervous anticipation and wondered, for the umpteenth time that morning, just what the hell he was doing there.

Blackbird sidled restlessly beneath him, ducking his head down and grinding his teeth. Gideon had visions of him exploding into a frenzy of bucking as soon as they got under way, and could only be glad that there would be nobody amongst the spectators who knew him. Giles had had business commitments – a new and satisfying concept for him. Even Eve had had to cry off, having promised to see her friend Trevor Erskine off in his yacht for a six-month painting odyssey to the Mediterranean.

‘Two minutes,' the starter called, and Tilly gave Gideon a reassuring smile. They were all wearing matching purple rugby shirts with the team name,
Stour Grapes, emblazoned across the shoulders. The name had been Giles' idea.

Pippa was walking Skylark in circles next to Steve, who rode a lean grey horse with a casual ease that Gideon envied. The arrest of the Master of the Tarrant and Stour Hunt was, inevitably, the talk of the day, unfortunately for Pippa. Knowing of her relationship with Lloyd, a number of people had approached her, agog for news. Gideon was full of admiration for the way she had politely denied any knowledge of his misdemeanours and suggested they ask his wife.

In the fortnight since the showdown at the Priory, Gideon's working relationship with Pippa had gradually settled back into something approaching its former status. Away from the horses, however, she avoided him whenever she could, and seemed depressed and unhappy. They hadn't talked about what had happened and Gideon decided that Eve had been wrong for once, and that Pippa had been more deeply attached to Lloyd than any of them had suspected. Whatever the case, the discovery of Lloyd's duplicity seemed to have hit her hard, and, as the one who'd been instrumental in bringing it out into the open, Gideon was reluctant to offer his support for fear of being rebuffed.

For himself, his scars were healing, even the worst bruises not much more now than yellowing remnants, and the sword slash a thin red line. His hand was still tender, and strapped on this occasion, but it was fully functional, and his attempts to use it as an excuse for not riding in the team had received short shrift.

‘Thirty seconds,' the starter called, and they began to manoeuvre the horses so that they were at least all facing the same way.

‘OK?' Tilly asked brightly.

‘Sure.' Gideon smiled. ‘But if I disappear into the wide blue yonder, just carry on without me! It's only the first three riders that count.'

‘You'll be all right!'

All four horses stood stock-still while the starter counted them down, then with a whoop from Steve they were away, Blackbird accelerating so swiftly that Gideon was almost thrown out the back door. Now that would have been
really
embarrassing, he thought, as they powered up a slight incline to the first of the twenty-two fences on the course; Pippa in the lead, side by side with Steve, Gideon third and Tilly bringing up the rear.

They flew the first hedge in that order, all the horses jumping high and wide, and swung left-handed across the next field towards a stile in the far corner.