Betrayal (12 page)

In accepting this, I realised with dismay that I had agreed to go all the way back to Exeter.

W
E ARRIVED
in darkness and monsoon rain. The approaches to the police station were blocked by manoeuvring cars, and we were forced to scurry head down through the deluge to the shimmering entrance. Inside, Henderson shook the water from his collar and pressed his thin hair down to his scalp. Wiping my forehead, I glanced up and saw David.

I grinned weakly. I’d guessed he might be here, I knew Julia had called ahead, but the sight of his sardonic face still gave my spirits a lift. The long journey from London had done nothing for my peace of mind.

David had someone with him, a young thin-faced man with floppy blond hair and a cast in one eye. ‘This is Charles Tingwall of Ruthven & Forbes,’ David announced. ‘He’s here to look after your interests.’

I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. To my impressionable mind, programmed by a hundred television dramas, hiring yourself a solicitor suggested you had something to hide. But in the next more considered moment, I realised that, irrespective of appearances, it was a sensible precaution that I would be foolish not to take.

Tingwall gave me a dry handshake and turned to Henderson.

‘On what basis is Mr Wellesley here, Inspector?’ The two men moved to one side, as if for negotiations. I could just hear the policeman recite, ‘We are hoping Mr Wellesley can help us with our inquiries into the death of Sylvie Mathieson.’

Tingwall then asked: ‘Is Mr Wellesley here as a witness, then, or a suspect?’

‘As a witness.’

‘In which case—’

I didn’t hear any more as David said to me in a robust voice that seemed to carry across the reception area to the duty officer at the enquiry window, ‘What did I tell you? Small brains.’

I frowned a protest at him.

Deliberately misreading my look, he added, ‘Don’t worry, Tingwall will get it sorted. He came highly recommended.’ He added in a tone that was almost offhand, ‘Have they said why you’re here?’

‘No.’

‘Well . . . it has to be the lover scenario, doesn’t it?’

‘Oh thanks.
Thanks
.’

‘What else could it be?’ he said with a flicker of impatience. ‘I told you – they’ve got one-track minds. Just remember, they’re guessing. Don’t let them rattle you. Just tell them where to get off.’

I wasn’t so sure it would be that easy. I wasn’t so sure I would feel quite so confident on this alien territory.

Tingwall and Henderson turned back.

‘I’d like some time with Mr Wellesley,’ Tingwall announced.

Henderson offered, ‘Five minutes?’

‘I’m sure Mr Wellesley could do with a sandwich and a wash and brush up.’

‘Fifteen, then.’

‘Twenty?’ Tingwall raised an eyebrow at me. ‘Mr Wellesley’s come a very long way.’

Henderson yielded with a cursory nod before limping away.

For some reason this well-practised professional exchange did nothing to reassure me.

I said I wasn’t hungry but Tingwall sent David off to buy sandwiches anyway and led me to a bench in a corner of the reception area, away from the lugubrious gaze of the duty officer.

‘Now, Mr Wellesley,’ Tingwall began in a hushed tone, ‘I just want to be sure – they didn’t arrest you?’

‘Arrest me?
No
.’

‘They didn’t caution you?’

‘No.’

‘There was no mention of anything you may say being given in evidence?’

‘No.’

‘Fine.’ He gave me a brief smile which was undermined by the cast in his left eye. ‘And you haven’t said anything to them already?’

‘I gave them a statement yesterday.’

This was obviously the first he’d heard of it. ‘And what did you tell them exactly?’

I gave him a rough summary, and found myself wondering for the hundredth time where I might have slipped up.

‘And you didn’t say anything in the car on the way down?’

‘What? No.’ Apart from a couple of offers to stop at service areas, Henderson and his cohort Phipps had maintained a steadfast silence during the entire journey. If their intention had been to unnerve me, then they had partially succeeded.

‘Have you anything to add to yesterday’s statement?’

‘No.’

‘They haven’t given you any idea of why they’ve asked you back?’ Tingwall enquired cautiously.

I shrugged, ‘No.’

‘And you yourself can’t think of any reason?’

‘No.’

Tingwall tapped his fingers together pensively. ‘Well, if they’ve got their wires crossed, I mean if they’re completely on the wrong track, then you must say so.’ He waited for a sign that I had understood this. Getting nothing back, he spelled it out again. ‘If they have some notion that’s completely wrong, then you must put them right.’

The thought of what they could have got wrong made me feel ill, but I managed a faint nod.

‘Now, you should be aware of your rights—’

‘My rights?’ I protested. ‘God – you make it sound as though I’m about to be charged or something.’

‘I apologise. I didn’t make myself clear. I meant your rights at interview.’

‘I’m not sure that makes me feel a whole lot better. The way everyone’s going on I’m beginning to feel like a suspect.’

‘The police do that to everyone, I’m afraid. It’s their way.’ He gave the unconvincing smile again. ‘Now, you are here in an entirely voluntary capacity, to help them with their inquiries. As a result, nothing you say can be held against you. If, however, they suddenly decide to caution you, mid-interview or whatever, then I must warn you that everything will change.’

Far from bolstering my confidence, this conversation was eroding it fast. ‘So you think I
am
a suspect?’

‘Er – no, Mr Wellesley.’ Tingwall chose his words with the care of someone picking his way over barbed wire. ‘Not at all. At the same time . . .’ He was struggling to get it right. ‘. . . they don’t usually bring someone all this way unless they think, rightly or wrongly, that he or she has information of some kind.’

Even in my more optimistic moments I’d realised that the police wouldn’t have sent their big guns to bring me all the way down here unless they believed I had something to tell them. But it was one thing to think it, and quite another to hear it from a professional.

‘In that case,’ I said, ‘you’d better spell it out for me.’

Now that he was on firmer ground, Tingwall moved confidently into his stride. ‘The important thing to remember is that you don’t have to answer any questions you don’t want to.’

My anxieties shot back to the surface. ‘Won’t that look bad?’

‘It doesn’t matter how it looks. If there are any areas that you feel are best left unanswered – for whatever reason – then you shouldn’t answer them.’

‘But it’s not like that,’ I murmured. ‘I told them everything yesterday.’

‘Fine. But bear it in mind, all the same,’ Tingwall said.

I felt bound to ask, ‘And if I don’t want to answer? What do I say?’

‘I leave that up to you,’ he said with curious emphasis, as if there was an obvious conclusion to be drawn from this.

I didn’t understand and said so.

‘Well, let’s put it this way . . .’ His disconcerting squinty eyes seemed to focus somewhere on my left cheek. ‘It’s better to say you can’t remember than to be vague or to change your mind. And if you’re simply not sure of something, again, don’t just take a stab at it, don’t give a vague answer. Just say you can’t remember. Keep it simple.’

I took a long breath. ‘Okay.’

David came back with the sandwiches, but I still wasn’t hungry and, leaving David with Tingwall, I asked the duty officer the way to the gents. The basins were smeared with dirt, one was missing its plug, and the taps were the type that switch themselves off after yielding a niggardly trickle. I splashed some water over my face and washed my hands. Drying my face with a paper towel, I told myself I felt refreshed.

When I got back to the reception area David was pulling on his coat. ‘I’m going over to the hospital. I’ll come back later.’

‘Don’t feel you have to.’

‘Well, it’s hardly out of my way, is it?’ he replied in the brusque tone he used to discourage further discussion.

I followed him outside and we stood under the dripping porch. ‘I was thinking,’ I said, ‘if this gets out, if the press get hold of it . . .
Christ
.’ The idea was enough to shake me.

‘I’ve talked to Tingwall about that. He’s dealing with it.’

‘He is?’

‘No guarantees, though. The press are always sniffing around. He can only try.’

I clamped my eyes shut in an attempt to close out images of the newspaper headlines. ‘What a time to choose!’

David couldn’t think what I was talking about.

‘The buyout!’

‘Oh.’

‘The Chartered Bank is on the brink of committing itself. The thing’s practically off the ground.’

‘Well, that’s good.’ But his tone conveyed a lack of interest.

‘Off the ground, subject to raising the rest of the money, I mean.’

I said this so that he wouldn’t think I was taking his support for granted, but he interpreted it as an untimely attempt to push my case.

‘Yes, well,’ he said with visible irritation, ‘Give us time, eh?’

‘I didn’t mean that.’ But it was too complicated to put the matter right and reluctantly I let it pass.

David looked at his watch. He frequently gave this impression of needing to be somewhere else; it was one of his stratagems for keeping people, particularly difficult patients, at arm’s length.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘Ginny doesn’t know where I am. I thought it best, in case she worried – you know. But now . . . well, I’m not so sure. I’d hate her to hear about this from someone else.’

‘Ah, she knows, in fact. I called and told her.’

‘You did?’ I should have been annoyed at such peremptory action, and part of me was, yet Ginny would have had to know sooner or later, and I was quite relieved that David had been the one to tell her. He could always be relied on to down-play a crisis, and his uncompromising brand of logic would have checked Ginny’s tendency to overreaction.

As if to confirm this, he said, ‘I told her not to come down. I said there was absolutely no point, that it was just a routine thing and she was best at home.’

‘And she was happy about that?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said emphatically.

I said with a tremor of emotion, ‘Thanks.’

With an offhand wave and a sharp twitch of the mouth in what might have been intended as a smile, he went out into the rain.

Tingwall announced our readiness and a uniformed officer let us through a security door and along a passage to a door marked Interview Room 2. This was a different room from the one where I’d talked to Reith. The floor was uncarpeted, the chairs hard and upright, and there was a tape recorder at one end of the table. The fluorescent lighting gave off a ghostly flicker, and there was a stale tang of cigarettes and heavily scented floor polish.

Tingwall and I sat on one side of the table, Henderson on the other, with Reith to his left. Phipps stood against the wall, by the door.

Henderson intoned some preliminaries in an expressionless voice, thanking me for my willingness to help them with their inquiries – as if he had offered me much option – explaining that he simply wished to establish one or two facts. His thin, lipless mouth was like a slit set at random amid the broad heavy features. He had the skin of a heavy smoker, porous and etched with webs of deep lines, and his eyes were hooded and droopy as a spaniel’s. It was a spent and punished face, but not, I felt, a stupid one.

He repeated most of the questions that Reith had asked me the day before. How did I know Sylvie, when and where had I seen her in the last few months, what had happened when we met.

I took my answers slowly, matching them to the ones I had given Reith the day before, conscious of Henderson’s washed-out eyes and his air of quiet watchfulness. As we progressed, part of me stood outside myself wondering what sort of an impression I was making, yet the more self-aware I became the more unnatural I sounded to my own ears and the more I felt I was exhibiting the body language of someone with something to hide.

‘To summarise then,’ Henderson said, ‘the first time you saw Sylvie Mathieson this summer was when she swam to the boat and you had tea together for perhaps forty-five minutes?’

‘Yes.’

‘The second time she also came to the boat and you—’

‘She didn’t come on board,’ I corrected him mildly. ‘She just tapped on the hull.’

‘So she remained in this other boat she came in, and you talked for ten minutes?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the third time you met on the quay?’

‘We bumped into each other, yes.’

‘And you talked for—?’

‘Oh . . . two, three minutes. At the most.’

‘So, it was just the three times then?’

I hated the way that repetition etched these details deeper and deeper into the stone of fact. ‘I think so, yes.’

‘You
think
so?’

‘Well, as far as I remember.’

His eyes flickered to life. ‘Your memory could be faulty then? Might it have been four times that you met, or five, or even more?’

‘No.
No
. If it was more than three, then it wasn’t much more. Four at the outside.’ This was sounding terrible. I was beginning to appreciate Tingwall’s warning about vague answers.

‘Well, if it was four, on what other occasion did you meet her?’

‘Look, I’m not sure I did meet her again. But if I did it was probably on the water. But really, I can’t remember.’

I felt sure Henderson would pursue this, but for some reason he took on a distant look, and asked, ‘You spent a lot of time on the water this summer, did you?’

‘A few weekends, that’s all.’

‘Out sailing?’

‘Only once. Mainly I was just doing the maintenance.’

Appearing distracted, Henderson dropped his eyes and gave a slight nod. When he looked up again his gaze had regained its watchfulness. ‘How would you describe your relationship with Sylvie Mathieson?’ he asked, and suddenly there was a charge in the air.