Beside a Narrow Stream (10 page)

‘Annie? No, it doesn’t ring any bells, Inspector,’ he said pleasantly.

Hillary, having no other option, had to let him go. When he was gone, Gemma stirred.

‘Find out who the Annie is in his life, guv?’ she asked
quietly, and Hillary smiled. She really was quick on the uptake, never missed a thing, and had an uncanny knack of anticipating her every need and order.

If she didn’t have some private agenda of her own, she’d be a godsend.

Hillary nodded. When her DS had gone, she stayed on in the quiet room, thinking. When she finally rose, about ten minutes later, she headed, not back upstairs, but outside to the car park. There she opened all the Volkswagen’s doors and windows to let the baking air out, then climbed in and drove north.

She was just pulling up to a set of traffic lights, when she saw them. Keith Barrington’s dark chestnut hair was
eye-catching
enough to attract her attention, and as she braked for the red light, she saw the young man he was with, lean over the table and say something to him.

He was a good-looking youth, early twenties, with a fit, lean body. He looked to be wearing expensive clothes too, and she caught a glimpse of gold on his wrist. Probably a fancy watch. From his salon-style hair cut to his two-hundred pound trainers, he screamed money. His face, however, looked tight and miserable, and was fixed on her DC.

It was his eyes that told her the story.

So, she thought, nodding her head gently.
That
was the way of it.

Barrington didn’t look over his shoulder, so didn’t see his boss driving away. He did, however, look at his watch, and let out a yelp. ‘Shit, I’m so late.’

Gavin threw himself backwards in his chair. ‘Oh, of course, we mustn’t be late for Detective Inspector Greene, must we?’ he snarled.

Keith stood up and looked down at him helplessly. The truth was, he never knew how to handle his lover when he was like this. It only made things worse that, underneath, he could sense Gavin’s very real fear and need.

‘Look, I’ll try to get back early tonight,’ he promised gently. ‘I’m sure you’ll have heard from your dad or Perkins by then. It’ll probably all have blown over.’

‘Much you care,’ Gavin muttered, then shook his head angrily. ‘Oh go on, PC Plod, just piss off.’

Colin Blake looked surprised to see another police officer, especially since this one was calling at his home. Thursdays were his day off, along with Sundays, and he always spent both days painting.

Hillary sensed he was not too pleased to be interrupted, but he was polite enough not to let it show too obviously.

The butcher, and shining light of the Ale and Arty Club, lived in a fairly large, new-build house on the outskirts of Banbury, with an unexpectedly spectacular view across open countryside. Blake had turned the conservatory into a studio, and in one corner an air-conditioning unit hummed steadily and to good effect. Obviously the side-line in painting paid well. She’d looked around curiously when he’d shown her through the hall and main living-room; all the canvases on the walls had been landscapes, and all had pleased her eye.

‘Yours?’ she asked now, pausing beside a river scene. There was something about the colour and the rendition of the willow trees that reminded her of something.

‘Yes, they’re all mine. Ones I couldn’t sell, actually,’ he said, with a modest smile. Hillary, like Gemma, found him pleasantly good-looking, urbane and likeable. She could understand why Wayne Sutton would have hated him.

Hillary nodded at the landscape. ‘It reminds me of something,’ she said, and Colin Blake smiled.

‘Ah. An art lover. Actually, that’s my homage to Constable. No pun intended, officer.’

Hillary smiled. ‘Of course. Those Anglian sketches.’

‘Thank you for not mentioning
The Hay Wain.
’

They walked on through into the conservatory itself, and a
more exotic landscape caught her eye. ‘Homage to Gaugin?’ she asked, and got a laugh in return.

‘Sometimes I do it for fun,’ Colin Blake said, lowering his voice as if he was admitting to something scandalous. ‘You know, just to see how I measure up to the masters. Of course, copying their style doesn’t make you anything more than a good copyist. But at least it does reassure you that you’re not wasting good paint.’

Hillary paused beside a painting of a meadow, just before a storm was due to hit, and found herself gazing into the incredibly lovely dark velvet eyes of a cow. ‘Oh, you’re not wasting paint, Mr Blake,’ she said. She would quite happily have hung any of Colin Blake’s canvases on her walls – if the
Mollern
had had a wall big enough to accommodate one, that is.

‘Thank you, Inspector Greene. Something cold to drink?’

Hillary accepted a glass of real lemonade, mouth-wateringly swimming in ice-cubes, and took a seat. The easel he was working on was standing in the middle of the room, uncovered, and Hillary could see that he was currently painting a cottage scene, one frothing with flowering wisteria. In the foreground, a rusty iron railing fence was awash with a pale pink clematis. A child’s bike lay abandoned on a somewhat scruffy lawn.

‘Wayne would have called it chocolate box naff,’ Colin said, catching the direction of her eye. The painting was almost finished, and Hillary could quite clearly see the peeling white paint on the rotting wooden window frames, the odd missing tile on the roof, the weeds growing through the path. In spite of its loveliness, the sense she got from it was one of acceptable poverty. A novel concept. And, for some reason she couldn’t fathom, it aroused a vague, not unpleasant sense of nostalgia in her.

‘He was jealous of you,’ she said, making it a statement.

Colin Blake looked at her, sighed a little, and shrugged. ‘Nothing I could do about it. He just didn’t like me.’

‘And you didn’t like him?’

Colin smiled. ‘It’s hard to like someone who doesn’t like you back, isn’t it? Who has no respect for your art or talent, who despises your friends and ridicules your lifestyle and way of living. Unless you’re a saint of course. No,’ he took a seat in a padded swinging garden chair, and sipped from his own glass of lemonade. ‘I didn’t like him. But I didn’t kill him.’

Hillary nodded. She knew from reading Gemma’s notes on their interview, that he was here at the time of the killing, painting this very same canvas, and that his wife, Bernice, could vouch for him.

Not that
that
meant anything. Wives and mothers made notoriously bad character witnesses and alibi-providers.

But why would Colin Blake kill Wayne Sutton anyway? If anything, it should be the other way around. It was Sutton who was jealous and bitter. Now if
Blake
had been found dead, Sutton would have been in the hot seat for sure.

‘Do you know anyone called Annie, Mr Blake?’

‘Annie Coulson – she lives next door,’ he said at once, then smiled, puzzled. ‘Why?’

Hillary smiled back. ‘Does Mrs Coulson know Wayne Sutton?’

‘It’s Ms. Our Annie is a feminist. And gay. She’d have a fit if you called her Mrs,’ Colin said with a wide grin. ‘And no, I don’t suppose for a minute she knew Wayne. Why should she?’

‘Did Wayne ever mention anyone called Annie to you?’

Colin thought for a moment, then shook his head. ‘Wayne and I didn’t talk much, though. You should ask his friends. The woman who paints abstracts for instance.’

Hillary nodded glumly, thanked him for the lemonade, gave the unfinished painting a last, regretful look, and took her leave.

On the way out, she passed an exquisite pen and wash drawing of a woman with long, auburn hair. She looked at it and nodded.

‘Augustus John. With a hint of Burne-Jones.’

Colin Blake gave an ironic bow.

When she got back to HQ, the desk sergeant beckoned her over.

‘Hill, got a live one for you. Man and woman just come in. Wanted to talk to whoever was in charge of the Wayne Sutton inquiry. Husband and wife outfit, wife wears the trousers. Hubby didn’t want to be here. I put them in Five.’

Hillary thanked him. ‘Call upstairs and send Barrington down will you?’

The desk sergeant cheerfully agreed, and Hillary made her way to Interview Room Five. It looked exactly as Interview Room Two had looked. Inside, a short, dumpy woman sat grimly staring forward. She was wearing a bright,
flower-patterned
summer dress, tights and sandals, and clutched a handbag as if her life depended on it. Beside her, tall and thin, and casting apprehensive looks at the PC standing in one corner, was a man wearing a pair of creased summer shorts and a faded T-shirt. He had wispy grey hair and long, bony hands. He looked as if a breeze could blow him off his seat.

Hillary smiled at them as she took a seat, and introduced herself. ‘And you are?’ She looked to the woman first.

‘Celia Benson. This is my husband Raymond. Please forgive him, I had to drag him away from the garden.’ She sniffed, eyeing her husband’s casual apparel with an angry eye. Her husband stiffened, but his mouth firmed into a stubborn line. Hillary suspected a long-running argument, and bit her lip.

Barrington came in, and Hillary introduced him. ‘DC Barrington will take notes,’ she said softly. ‘Now, I understand you have something for us concerning the Wayne Sutton murder inquiry?’

‘Yes, we do,’ Celia said at once, then nudged her spouse with her elbow. ‘Tell her Ray.’

‘You tell her,’ Ray shot back, his voice surprisingly deep for
one who looked so insubstantial. ‘You’re the one who wanted to come down here.’

‘That’s because I’ve got a brain in my head, and a civic bone in my body. But
you’re
the one who heard ’em. Now just tell the lady. The sooner you do, the sooner you can get back to that bloody compost heap and your precious tomato plants.’

Her husband heaved a long suffering sigh, and looked, finally, at Hillary. ‘It’s like this. I was out just before dark – the best time to water tomatoes is after the sun goes down – it can’t burn the leaves, then, see?’

His wife rolled her eyes.

Hillary bit her lip again.

‘So I don’t expect they saw me. They wouldn’t have been arguing so loud if they had known I was there. Madge likes to pretend she’s such a lady.’

Celia Benson snorted inelegantly.

‘Madge? We’re talking about Madge Eaverson, yes?’ Hillary interrupted, just to make sure.

‘That’s right. We live next door to where she used to live. Used to be her Mum and Dad’s place,’ Celia broke in, as if unable to bear being silent any longer. ‘Her poor mother would turn in her grave if she knew what she’d been getting up to with that young man.’

‘Wayne Sutton?’

‘Am I telling this or are you?’ Ray Benson asked, turning to look at his wife, and sounding aggrieved. ‘Only if you want to tell it, what did you drag me down here for anyway?’

‘Oh, get on with it!’ Celia huffed.

Ray turned, with ostentatious patience, back to Hillary. ‘It’s like I said. It was just getting dark, and my tomatoes are against the wall connecting our gardens. Anyways, I heard Madge and that artist chap arguing.’

‘You’re talking about Wayne Sutton now?’ Hillary clarified.

‘That’s him. Him that rented her place. Well …’ he added, when his wife snorted again. ‘Well, whatever. It’s none of my
business,’ he cast his wife a telling look. ‘But that night they were going at it hammer and tongs, and I couldn’t help but hear. I mean, they must have been right the other side of the wall.’

‘When was this, Mr Benson?’

‘Ah. Now you got me.’

‘He’s hopeless with time,’ his wife chipped in, smugly. As if it was something to be proud of. ‘But I can tell you it must have been a few days before Wayne got killed.’

‘Ah, sounds about right,’ Ray chipped in. ‘They were just beginning to flower. My tomato plants,’ he added, when everyone looked at him blankly.

Hillary nodded. ‘And what was the argument about, Mr Benson, could you tell?’

‘Oh yerse,’ Ray said, nodding sagely. ‘Couldn’t help but hear every word.’ Then, when everyone again stared at him patiently, he coloured slightly, and said in a rush, ‘she were threatening to throw him out. Said she’d had enough, and this latest floozy of his was the last straw.’

Hillary drew in a quick breath. The latest floozy.

The mysterious Annie maybe?

Hillary took him through it, meticulously coaxing out every detail he could remember, but there had been no mention of the name Annie, by either Madge or their victim.

By the end of the interview, Ray Benson looked almost to be enjoying himself, and his wife with almost glowing with civic pride. It was obvious that the important policewoman was pleased with them, and when they left, there was not a cross word between them.

Hillary watched them go, then leaned back with a satisfied sigh. ‘Right then, let’s get Madge in,’ Hillary said softly. And smiled. ‘This just isn’t her day, is it?’ First her husband leaves her, now her neighbour drops her in the mire.

Was getting arrested for murdering her lover going to top it all off nicely?

M
adge Eaverson glanced around the Interview Room and smiled. ‘So, the telly has got it right. This room looks just like one I saw on
The Bill
once.’

Hillary smiled. Beside her, Keith Barrington was thinking about Gavin Moreland. Or, to be precise, his father, Sir Reginald. Right now, he’d be sitting in an interview room similar to this one, with the London traffic churning away outside. Of course, he would be surrounded by top-class solicitors, all telling him what to answer and what not to answer, what to admit to, what to fudge, what to deny outright.

But would they be enough? What if he really was going to be charged? What happened then?

‘Lots of the television companies have technical consultants and advisors, Mrs Eaverson. Mostly stage-struck retired old coppers.’ Hillary said with a short laugh.

‘Madge, please call me Madge. I told you before, when you visited last. Whenever I hear “Mrs Eaverson” I think of Tommy’s mother – or even worse, his old granny.’ She shuddered, then reached into her bag for a cigarette. Hillary coughed politely and she put it back.

Barrington shifted on his chair again, and Hillary shot him a quick look. He was staring down at his notebook, but she could tell his thoughts were miles away. And she could guess where.

His boyfriend was young and good-looking, and the last time she’d seen him, had been deeply miserable. Were they on the verge of splitting up? Whatever the problem was, it was time to bring her DC back to the here and now.

‘Keith, would you like to start?’ Hillary asked, and watched him jump.

Barrington, after a startled glance at her, cleared his throat, and looked up at the woman opposite him. This was his first shot at a formal interview with a murder suspect. He knew that it meant Hillary Greene was beginning to trust him, and had decided to stretch him a little. Give him a little responsibility. Damn it, now was not the time to be distracted! He cast around for something to say, something to open the interview and set the right tone. To his dismay, his mind stayed blank. Beside him, he could feel his DI getting restive.

‘We understand your husband has left you, Mrs Eaverson,’ he said quickly, and then blinked, wondering if that had been too blunt. Maybe he should have eased into it? What if he’d just alienated the witness and made her clam up? Manfully, he resisted the urge to look across at his superior officer to gauge her reaction, or seek tacit instructions.

Madge Eaverson laughed. She was wearing a pristine pale-lilac trouser suit with an electric blue raw silk shirt. Amethyst and diamond earrings glittered at her lobes, whilst a perfume that had probably come with a fierce price tag wafted around her. But her eyes looked tight, and she was obviously itching for a cigarette.

‘Yes, at last!’ she said with an exaggerated sigh of relief. ‘I’ve been hoping he’d push off for ages. Well, I’ve been giving him the hint for some time now, but some men just don’t get it do they? I think they wear blinkers half the time.’

Keith nodded. Of course, whatever was happening now in London largely depended on what crime Sir Reginald was suspected of committing. If it was only straight forward avoidance of duty or … He cut off the thought and forced himself to listen to what his
own
suspect was saying.

‘Do you really expect us to believe that you’re not sorry, Mrs Eaverson?’ he asked, hoping he’d made his voice sound sceptical enough.

‘Of course I do, dear boy.’

Keith smiled briefly. ‘But, if that was the case, why not leave him yourself? Just pack your bags and go?’

Madge smiled pityingly. ‘Because that’s just it.
I
didn’t want to pack
my
bags and go.
I
wanted to stay in the house, thus keeping the moral high ground.’ Seeing that he still wasn’t getting it, she grinned widely. ‘I wanted to hold all the cards in the upcoming divorce settlement.’ She shot Hillary an amused look. ‘He’s so young and innocent, isn’t he, bless him?’

Keith felt himself flush. Damn, he should have thought of all that himself.

‘But with Tommy leaving me, just walking out like he has, I get everything I want,’ Madge said smugly. ‘I’ve already got a call in to the locksmith to change the locks, I can tell you.’

Keith nodded. Had Gavin gone back to London? When he returned home tonight, would he find him waiting for him at the bedsit, criticizing the floor space, ordering Chinese and taunting him about a hard day at the office. Or would the place be quiet. Cold. Tidy. As it had been before he came? The thought made a hard knot form in his stomach. No matter how much trouble his relationship with Gavin could cause him, the thought of being left on his own again made him feel cold.

Acknowledging this, he then looked flatly across at Mrs Eaverson. ‘I find it hard to believe that you’re as relaxed about all this as you seem, Mrs Eaverson,’ he said softly.

Madge blinked, and looked away. For a moment, she looked as if she was going to cry. Then she shrugged. ‘I’m a tough old bird. When you hit forty you develop a skin like a rhino. You need it.’ She glanced across at Hillary. ‘Well, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Men can skin you alive if you let them.’

Hillary thought briefly of Mike Regis. Mike who hated her boat and wanted her to move in with him. Mike who made her
laugh, and worry at the same time. Mike whom she had no idea what to do with.

She glanced across at Keith, silently giving him permission to carry on.

‘Did Wayne Sutton get under your skin, Mrs Eaverson?’ Keith asked, quite pleased with that. It sounded clever, and it had obviously upset her.

‘Wayne?’ Madge said sharply, then gave another graphic shrug. ‘Oh, well, Wayne was just a bit of fun. A distraction from life’s boredom. You simply didn’t take Wayne seriously.’

Keith nodded. ‘But that’s not strictly true, is it? I mean, you took him seriously enough to threaten to evict him because of all his other affairs.’

Madge paled slightly. This time she reached for her bag and lit a cigarette, shooting a defiant glance at Hillary as she did so. ‘You can arrest me for smoking in a no smoking area if you like,’ she offered with a laugh.

Keith, seeing his witness was distracted, found his thoughts going once again to London. If Sir Reginald was charged, that would mean a trial. And Gavin would have to return home then, right?

‘Oh, I don’t think I’ll arrest you for
that
, Madge,’ Hillary said softly, emphasizing the ‘that’ just enough for the other woman to pale even more.

And if Sir Reginald was found guilty, Keith thought, with a growing sense of desperation, might not Gavin feel forced to take over the chairmanship of his father’s company? With no more tennis games, he’d have no more excuses to be away from the capital. No more visits to Oxford. No more …

He saw Hillary’s head turn sharply in his direction, and he licked his lips. Damn it,
he had to concentrate
!

‘We know you argued, fiercely, with the victim shortly before he was murdered, Mrs Eaverson,’ he said, trying to sound menacing, whilst at the same time, keeping his voice even and flat, for the benefit of the tape recorder revolving
slowly and silently on the table before them. Never let it be said, by any defence barrister, that the police had intimidated a witness.

‘How in the hell did you know that?’ Madge asked, drawing from the cigarette deeply and trying for nonchalant devil-
may-care
, but sounding just a shade too surprised. Then, seeing it was no use denying it, she gave another bark of laughter.

‘Oh well, might as well come clean, I suppose,’ she drawled. ‘Yes, Wayne and me did have a bit of a barney. But I quickly cooled off. I’m not one who holds a grudge, or lets things fester inside them. Ask anyone who knows me.’

Keith smiled briefly. ‘What, exactly, was this argument about, Mrs Eaverson?’

‘Apparently you already know,’ Madge said, a shade testily, then sighed, and took another drag of her cigarette. ‘It was about his other women, of course. I mean, I didn’t mind all those old dears who flattered him and bought his paintings and cooed all over them to their equally daft friends. And that young girl of his – Monica. Well, she was just a lightweight. But he’d got someone else … someone he was being very secretive about. And that wasn’t like him,’ Madge said softly, her voice becoming reflective now. ‘It wasn’t like him at all.’

Hillary decided it was time to take over. This was beginning to get interesting and it was obvious Barrington’s heart wasn’t really in it.

‘And that sounded the alarm bells, didn’t it Madge?’ she said softly. ‘The others were probably something of a running joke between you, right? The woman who let him have the car, Denise Collier, the Ale and Arty crowd. They weren’t anything to worry about, right?’

‘Right,’ Madge said with a smile, totally oblivious to the fact that that was what all of ‘them’ thought about ‘the others’ as well – including Madge Eaverson. ‘That Denise was a bit of a pain in the arse though. Too possessive by half,’ she mused grimly.

‘But Wayne found that funny, I bet.’

‘Yeah,’ Madge said, relaxing a bit, smiling slightly in remembrance.

‘Yeah, he did.’

‘But this new girl was different,’ Hillary said softly. ‘How, exactly?’

Beside her, Keith listened with half an ear. He could ring Gavin’s mobile the minute he was out of here, find out where he was. And then what? If he was on his way to London could he really ask him to come back? And come back to what? A lousy bedsit in a backwater city?

‘I’m not sure I can describe it, not really,’ Madge said, looking at Hillary helplessly. ‘He started hiding things from me. Not telling me stuff. He was up to something, and with Wayne that could only mean one thing. I got the feeling she was rich. I mean, seriously rich. I began to get the impression that he thought he was soon going to be able to give all the others the heave-ho. He was beginning to be less cautious around them. Less charming. He’d even allow himself the odd snipe around them. Oh, nothing too bad, nothing to cut off the supply of money. But I noticed it. It was as if he was expecting to be able to do without them soon.’

Hillary nodded. ‘It sounds to me as if he was planning on getting married.’

Madge paled even further.

‘I mean, how else could he be sure of her?’ she pressed on inexorably. ‘Unless they had some sort of legal bond, she could have cut off his “allowance” at any time. But a legal husband – well now, he’d have rights.’

Madge stabbed out her cigarette viciously. ‘That’s what I was thinking, too. That’s why I asked him about her that night. Teased him a bit. Tried to figure out how far things had gone. He got uppity, at first, then downright mad. Told me to leave it alone.’

‘Was her name Annie?’ Hillary asked abruptly.

‘Huh?’ Madge looked up from her bag, and the temptingly
open packet of cigarettes, and her eyes narrowed. ‘No. I don’t know. Why? Do
you
know who she is? Has the bitch come forward?’

Hillary hid her disappointment behind a non-committal smile. Still no confirmation that Annie existed. Sutton must have been really keen to keep her in the shadows. But then, if she
was
rich, and he
had
been in with a chance of marrying all that cash, he would have been extra careful to keep his current lifestyle a secret from her. No wonder he didn’t want any of his paying fan club to know about her. They might just have paid her a visit and dropped a few home truths in her ear.

Who knows, perhaps one of them already had. Could Annie have found out that her fiancé was nothing more than a gigolo? Had she lured him to that meadow and killed him, leaving behind a taunting red paper heart to show just what she thought of handsome young men who tried to marry her for her money?

‘So who’s this Annie then?’ Madge asked querulously, and Hillary shrugged.

‘It’s just a name that’s come up in our inquiries, that’s all,’ she said vaguely.

‘Well, I don’t know if that was the name of his new woman or not,’ Madge said slowly. ‘But I know she lives in Heyford bloody Sudbury.’

Heyford Sudbury again, Hillary thought. The name of that pretty near-Cotswold village kept right on popping up. ‘Oh? How do you know that?’ she asked curiously.

And Madge Eaverson flushed. Then she reached for another cigarette and lit up. Hillary, who was slightly allergic to cigarette smoke, bit her lip and leaned back in her chair. The smoke, in the airless room, drifted almost straight up, but she could begin to feel the back of her throat tickle.

‘Madge,’ Hillary prompted. ‘How do you know where she lives?’

Madge Eaverson’s eyes drifted around the walls of the
room, to the window – which was too high to see out of – ricocheted off the constable standing stolid and silent in the corner and then back to Hillary.

She sighed heavily. ‘Look, this is going to sound worse than it is. I mean, it’s going to sound bad. But it’s not like I’m some sort of loony-tunes or anything. I’m not a stalker. I mean, I’m not that desperate, it’s just that …’ She took a drag helplessly, and Hillary suddenly twigged.

‘You followed him,’ she guessed flatly.

Madge shrugged, smiled, then laughed. ‘Yeah. I followed him. Pretty pathetic, huh?’ She sighed and rubbed her eyes tiredly. ‘One afternoon, about two weeks ago, I heard him on the phone as I was coming to collect the rent.’ She blushed delicately, and glanced quickly at Keith Barrington, knowing that he must know what she meant by that.

But Keith Barrington looked back at her blankly. She might have been comforted to know that his thoughts were far away from contemplating her afternoon sex sessions with a murder victim.

Hillary wouldn’t have been. She’d have given him a lecture that would blister his ears.

‘Yes, go on,’ Hillary said crisply, not wanting sudden embarrassment on the witness’s part to hold up the flow of her evidence.

‘Well, I knew he must be talking to her. He was usually so open and loud on the phone. You know, he always had a larger than life personality. But this time he was almost whispering. And when he saw me, he muttered something and hung up at once. He’d never done that before. And all that afternoon he was distracted. I could feel it. Well, a woman can, can’t she?’