Murder... Now and Then (49 page)

Lloyd stood up. ‘Er … no,' he said. ‘No, I don't think I'll be charging you, Zelda.'

They left Zelda agog with curiosity and sat in Lloyd's car. Every now and then the curtain would twitch as Zelda checked to see if they were still there.

‘Pregnant,' said Lloyd.

Judy took out her notebook, in which every fact she had been given, every opinion anyone had held, every hint anyone had dropped, had been noted. It had crossed her mind, when she had seen that video, and she had shied away from it. But she couldn't any more. She had to be right. And if she was right …

Lloyd glanced at her. ‘How long has Driver's been closing at five o'clock?' he asked.

‘Only since it was Holyoak's,' she said absently, as she checked the notes she had taken directly from the tape of Anna Worthing's interview. ‘About three months or so.'

‘I am a fool,' he said, putting the car in gear.

‘Mm.' Judy found the note she was looking for.

Late January, because that's when she (Catherine) moved
. And it had to have been when she (Catherine) conceived, thought Judy as she turned the pages.

But how could she have got into the flat? Could she have known Anna Worthing's patent method for dodging the cameras? It seemed very unlikely, and even if she did, she couldn't have known that the fire door was open. She had had no contact with Anna or Max, and they were the only two who knew apart from Bannister.

And no one had come in the main gate after five o'clock, which was when Holyoak was last seen alive by a number of people – not on foot, nor in a car; they had checked eighteen hours of tape to no avail. She closed her eyes, as she realized what that meant.

No one had come in. No one, until the cleaners who had found Holyoak's body. No one at all. And they had checked the tape beyond that, right up to when the first police car came. No other car or vehicle. None.

But that still didn't explain how she had got up to the flat. The lift couldn't be taken up from the car park; she would still have had to use the front door, and she hadn't.

Unless she had been in the flat all along. But no – Zelda went up before Holyoak did. She checked back through her notes, to Rule's interview.

I felt as though someone was there
.

Lloyd's wardrobe doors. Judy shivered. She must have left her clothes in there.

But she had to be sure, she thought, as Lloyd drove back to the station. She would check through everything again before she even advanced the theory to Lloyd. And she'd get Holyoak security to fast-forward through that tape right up to the last possible moment. They would find nothing. She knew that now.

In Lloyd's office, she began her painstaking check again while Lloyd phoned the Tory agent, tapping his foot impatiently while someone went to get him.

‘Can you confirm that no member of your campaigning team called on Mrs Valerie Scott after six p.m. on Thursday the third of May?' he asked. He waited, no more patiently, for the answer, thanked him, hung up, then phoned the agents of both the other parties with the same request. The others, more concerned with the current election and without the Conservative agent's advantage of having already been asked questions about a thirteen-year-old murder, took rather longer, but the intense police questioning at the time had meant that memories remained sharp, and records had been kept.

‘No one,' Lloyd said to her, as he finished the final phone-call. ‘Come on.'

‘You wouldn't like to tell me where we're going?' Judy asked, practically having to run along the corridor to keep up with him.

‘Ma'am,' called Tom Finch as she whizzed past the CID room. She skidded to a halt and looked in.

‘I've got an urgent message for you. From Bannister.'

Judy silently dared Finch to be making some sort of joke. She wasn't in the mood for fun and games, and she had had plenty of experience of rank-pulling. She was sure she could carry it off with just as much panache as Lloyd if she felt it was warranted. This had better be good.

‘He said just to say washing-machine, and you owe him one,' said Finch. ‘He said you'd know what he meant.'

No joke. A genuine message. A genuine message that made no sense at all, because why would she use the washing-machine? She hadn't washed the towels, so why wash anything else? Nothing else would have needed washing, if Judy's careful gathering of the facts meant anything at all.

‘Right Tom,' she said absently. ‘Yes. Yes – thanks.'

Lloyd appeared at her elbow. ‘I thought you were behind me,' he said. ‘Come
on
.'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Where did you say we were going?'

‘We're going to bring Dr Charles Rule in for questioning,' he said.

She ran after him once again, catching him up as he stepped out into the overcrowded car park.

‘Someone's boxed me in!' he roared. ‘Get whoever it is down here to move that bloody thing!'

Judy complied, by dint of issuing the same order to a passing probationary constable, and finally, finally, she knew she had the answer.

‘Phone,' she said, dashing back in, along to the collator's office. ‘Phone,' she said to the girl, who pushed it across to her. She rang Finch's extension.

‘CID, Sergeant Finch.'

‘Were your knees jammed under the steering wheel when you put Anna Worthing's car away?' she asked.

There was a silence. ‘ No,' he said quietly. ‘ I'm sorry, ma'am. I was … well, you know. A bit miffed. What with … the pictures and everything. Sorry.'

‘Forget it.'

She hung up as the British Telecom engineer, shepherded by the anxious constable, went past the door on his way to get an earful from Lloyd. But God bless him, she thought, for jogging her memory.

Not that she was anxious to bring the crime home to anyone, if she were honest with herself. But now, at last, everything fitted, as she went through her notes for a third and final time. Including the washing-machine, and Anna Worthing's over-anxious neighbour, including Finch's unprintable opinion of Max Scott, so at odds with the mild-mannered, polite, likeable man she had met. Including the disappearing wallet. Even including Anna's first thought when there had been a knock at Holyoak's door.

I thought it might have been Max, but he says he saw me leave
.

But she hadn't seen
Max
, or she would have known that it couldn't have been him. And now Judy knew what she had seen, what had led Anna to that opinion.

Proof would be found in the filter of the machine, she had no doubt; she would go to Holyoak's, get the filter sent off to the lab, receive confirmation that she was right about the security tape, and then … and then, she would really much rather tip the whole lot down a hole and bury it. But they would have to make an arrest instead. Sadly, she closed her notebook.

‘Right,' said Lloyd. ‘Now that you've finished, can I tell you
why
we're taking Dr Rule in for questioning?'

Charles had gone back to work on his book. There seemed very little point in sitting round the house feeling guilty about Gerry; it wasn't going to bring her back, and it was doing him no good.

He addressed the grey screen of the word processor, and tried out a few options on the preface. He wanted to explain about Jimmy Driver, about how helpless and angry Jimmy's untimely death had made him feel. About how the plans for the clinic had been conceived at Jimmy's graveside. How he had felt compelled, driven, to do something to cut out such waste of human life. How poor diets weren't confined to poor countries. Rich diets were poor diets, too.

Poor Diet, Rich Country
, he typed in capital letters.
Rich Country, Poor Diet Rich Diet, Poor Diet
. They were all right. But really only for a book that confined itself to diet and of course his ranged much, much further than that. It wasn't some miracle slimming diet that he was trying to sell. It was health. The health of the body, of the planet. It covered everything from what you ate to what you ate it out of. Eating properly would give you a better body, but you had to keep it that way. Eating, drinking, smoking, sex, CFCs, exhaust poisons, stress, salt sugar—

Smoking, sex, stress, salt sugar – he played with that for a moment or two. Supping, sipping, smoking, sex, stress, salt sugar, saturates … suicide.

He would have thought of that anyway, he told himself. It would be foolish not to use it just because of Gerry. She had always been heading for disaster when the hope of a baby was taken away, whenever and however that had happened. It hadn't been healthy.

He hadn't got a section on mental health, he thought, with the exception of the chapter on stress, and that was more about the physical aspects. He perhaps ought to have a therapist at the clinic, now he came to think of it.

Perhaps he should have got Gerry to see someone.

He turned as someone knocked at the door. ‘Two police officers are here, Dr Rule,' said the girl, a little embarrassed. ‘Shall I show them in?'

‘Yes, do,' he said, swivelling round to face the door as Chief Inspector Lloyd and Inspector Hill came in. He stood up. ‘ Take a seat,' he said. ‘Coffee?'

‘No thank you,' Lloyd said, clearly answering for both of them.

Charles dismissed the girl. ‘I … I find it more therapeutic to work,' he said.

‘I can understand that,' Lloyd said. ‘ But I must ask you to come with us to the station, Dr Rule. We have some questions to put to you concerning the murder of Mrs Valerie Scott …'

Charles listened to himself being cautioned. They had done that at the time, he thought. They had questioned him several times, because he had known Valerie. And now that they had reopened the case, they were having to do it all again. They hadn't taken him to the station before. Just questioned him at home.

He looked at the word processor. At the certificates on the wall, his own, and those of the people he employed. He had almost made it. Once the book had been published, he would have made it. People would have beaten a path to his door. If Holyoak had been around, pumping money into it, it couldn't have failed. But Holyoak was gone. Gerry was gone, and that was who he had been doing it for. No it wasn't. He had been doing it for himself. Rule Clinics everywhere.
Living By Rule
. That would have been a good title.

He went with them, got into the car, got to the station, was taken to an interview room, and after a moment or two, they came in, told him that the interview would be recorded, did the preliminaries, and then faced him across a table.

‘Dr Rule – did Valerie Scott tell you that her husband was having an affair with your wife?' asked Inspector Hill.

No one had asked that last time. Was he having an affair with Valerie – oh, boy, he'd got asked that over and over again. The very idea. They were working on some desperate theory that Valerie had indulged in a tit-for-tat affair, and the boyfriend had become violent when she had tried to end it before she began divorce proceedings or whatever against Max over this other woman.

But they had never asked if Max had been having an affair with Gerry. Because they had been convinced that his other woman had been Catherine, and they didn't really appreciate Max Scott's appetite. God knew how many women he'd laid since getting Catherine pregnant. The business with Gerry had been over for weeks by the time Valerie had managed to work out what her husband had been doing on her evening-class nights. My God, in the bloody surgery, according to Valerie. Someone had asked her if Max was all right, because she'd seen him coming out of the doctor's three times in as many weeks.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘ She did.'

‘And did she threaten to tell the British Medical Association?'

Wrong lot. He'd told her that. Complaints should be made to the General Medical Council, he'd told her. Forget it, Valerie, he'd told her. I have. It's over – you and I both know what Max is like.

‘Yes, she did.'

‘Did she speak to you about this before or after the general election was called?' asked Lloyd.

‘Odd question.'

‘Could I have an answer?'

They knew. He had got away with his one antisocial act for all these years, but they knew, or they would never have asked that question.

‘Before.'

‘And you hastily joined the Conservative Club, and signed up as a member of the campaign team to support the Conservative candidate?'

‘He was a friend of mine.' But he shouldn't capitulate too soon. There was still a chance. They hadn't charged him, hadn't even arrested him. He had been taken in for questioning. They presumably didn't actually have evidence – how could they have, thirteen years later?

‘And you were doing him a favour,' said Lloyd.

‘Yes.'

‘And then a few months ago, you asked him to return the favour. Not for yourself, for Victor Holyoak. And not so that he would invest money in your clinic, but so that he would make Max Scott general manager.'

‘Yes.'

‘You're very loyal to Mr Scott.'

‘He's my oldest friend.'

‘You never once, for instance, doubted – not even for an instant – that he was innocent of the murder of his wife, did you?'

‘Of course I didn't.'

Lloyd nodded. ‘Of course not,' he said. ‘ Even though you knew that just once in a blue moon, Max Scott could be roused to anger, and that he found that anger very difficult to control.'

‘Not that difficult – not where women were concerned. To him, it would be like defacing the Mona Lisa, or dropping a Ming vase.'

‘You didn't even let the tiniest doubt creep in on Wednesday, when you knew that he had followed his wife out of the office and started slapping her very hard – hard enough to leave marks?'

‘No,' said Charles.

‘Everyone else did. People who had believed in him enough to cover up his indiscretions at the time of his wife's death were frightened that perhaps he really had murdered Valerie after all. But not you, Dr Rule.'