Betrayal (25 page)

‘What about Saturday, the thirtieth of September? You met Sylvie Mathieson there on the boat, didn’t you?’

‘I’ve told you – no.’

‘You met her because you were having an affair with her, didn’t you?’

I made no answer.

‘You met her in the same way that you’d met her many times before, but this time you had an argument which got out of hand and you killed her.’

Everything had been leading up to this statement, yet the baldness of it still took me aback.

‘That’s not true.’

‘Perhaps you didn’t mean to kill her. Perhaps it was just a moment of anger.’

‘Listen—’ I tried to maintain a reasonable tone. ‘I did not see her that day. I did not arrange to meet her. And I certainly did not kill her. And no matter how many times you ask these questions, no matter how often you suggest these –
things
– nothing’s ever going to change that.’ I added emotionally: ‘Because it simply isn’t true.’

Reith exchanged a knowing glance with Phipps. Only Henderson’s expression did not alter.

‘It isn’t true,’ I repeated, lifting my hands helplessly.

My words fell unheeded into the silence.

Henderson sighed, ‘Let’s go back to Saturday, the thirtieth of September, shall we?’

I looked at Tingwall but his absorbed expression gave me no guidance.

We went over it again in minute detail, the unusually long journey, the period that Henderson referred to as unaccounted time, the rest of the weekend. We went back over how well I had known Sylvie, the two visits to the boat, the conversations. We continued in this way for an hour or more. I made no slips, I had learnt my story too well by then, yet the air seemed to grow steadily closer, the lights harsher, and I was glad when Tingwall asked for a break.

Henderson agreed calmly, ‘Very well.’ He went through the signing off procedure for the benefit of the tape, then switched off the machine. ‘Oh, and Mr Tingwall? We would like Mr Wellesley’s fingerprints, if that’s acceptable.’

Tingwall’s squint intensified. ‘This would be for elimination purposes, would it?’

Henderson conceded with a faint shrug. ‘If you like.’

Tingwall asked for a moment to confer and took me into the corridor. ‘Listen,’ he whispered, ‘if we refuse I have the feeling they’ll just slap a charge on you, and then the prints’ll be compulsory anyway. So it might be best to agree. It seems to me that the longer we put off a charge, the better.’

I nodded meekly and we went back into the room.

‘Mr Wellesley will be happy to comply,’ Tingwall announced.

‘I believe Mrs Wellesley’s downstairs, is that correct?’

Tingwall confirmed it.

‘I trust she’ll also be agreeable to providing prints?’

‘Is this necessary?’ I demanded.

Studiously ignoring me, Henderson looked to Tingwall for a reply.

Henderson’s attitude suddenly infuriated me. ‘I’m asking,’ I said, ‘if this is really necessary.’

Tingwall began to speak but I hushed him with a splayed hand.

When Henderson finally addressed me it was grudgingly, as though he was granting me an unnecessary indulgence. ‘To conduct an elimination process,’ he intoned, ‘we have to have the prints of everyone who had access.’

‘That’s an awful lot of people,’ I retorted, though I didn’t know what access he was talking about. ‘My whole family for a start!’

Tingwall cut in smoothly, ‘Will an hour be all right, Inspector? Mr Wellesley will need something to eat before everything closes for the night. And I will need time to confer.’

Henderson looked at his watch. ‘Fingerprints in fifteen minutes? And we’ll continue the interview in the morning at nine.’

Tingwall nodded, and drew me aside. ‘It’ll be a night in the cells, I’m afraid. But I’ll bring in a sandwich, otherwise you’ll get nothing till breakfast.’

‘How long do I have to stay here?’

‘They can hold you twenty-four hours without charge. Thirty-six with the superintendent’s say-so.’

‘I didn’t mean to get angry,’ I said.

He raised an eyebrow.

‘Will it count against me?’

Tingwall caught my bleak attempt at humour. ‘Listen – compared to most of his customers you’re a saint.’

I waited in the stuffy interview room with a yawning Phipps until Tingwall reappeared.

‘Mrs Wellesley has agreed to the fingerprinting,’ he said when Phipps had left. ‘She asked for you to be present. And I said I thought that could be arranged.’ There was admiration in his voice, and deference; it seemed that Tingwall had been rather taken by Ginny.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘am I going mad or . . . If there were drugs in Sylvie’s body then why aren’t the police looking into that side of things? Why aren’t they chasing those connections?’

Tingwall’s eyes took on a wary light. ‘Drugs? Were there drugs?’

‘That’s what my brother said. He’d heard from somewhere – the hospital, some doctors. And if she was into drugs there must have been dealers, drug addicts . . . Perhaps she was in debt to them. Perhaps . . . I don’t know – but something.’

Tingwall mulled on this. ‘It would certainly seem like an area worth investigating,’ he said cautiously.

‘So why are they ignoring it?’

‘We don’t know they are. They could well be looking into it.’

‘Oh yes?’ I said heavily. ‘Well, it doesn’t seem that way to me. It seems to me that they’ve made up their minds.’

‘It’s not easy to tell the police what to do, Hugh. They don’t always like it. But I’ll try.’ He didn’t look too hopeful.

Phipps came to lead us to the fingerprinting room. Ginny was already there, sitting apart from the waiting officers. When she saw me she rose hurriedly and kissed me. Standing in that dreary room with her classy Joseph suit and her long slender legs and her curtain of shining hair, she looked like a vision visited on a wasteland.

‘All right?’ she whispered, and there was no mistaking the question in her eyes.

‘All right,’ I said, and my look told her what she wanted to know, that I had kept my promise and stuck to our story.

She clutched my arm in a gesture of encouragement and complicity.

We stood at the desk side by side like a couple in a register office. When Ginny offered up her hand to the sergeant I saw that she was trembling. As the sergeant rolled the first of her fingers across the paper she gave a shudder that travelled the length of her body. When the last print was taken she exhaled suddenly and, wiping the ink from her fingers, turned and gave me an anxious lopsided smile. Looking at her then I couldn’t imagine why I had ever thought I didn’t love her.

In the morning they let me out of the cell to wash and shave. I turned down the large fried breakfast and settled for dark tea and dry toast. Tingwall appeared at nine, looking very young with his smooth scrubbed skin and bright expression.

He told me the interview had been postponed and no new time fixed.

‘Is that good or bad?’

‘Impossible to say.’

‘So I could be here all day?’

‘Yes.’

I didn’t ask about the press, because I knew that if there wasn’t anything in the papers today, there would be tomorrow, and I wasn’t ready to face up to the consequences of that quite yet.

‘They’ve asked for your wife to make her statement this morning so I’ve arranged it for eleven. Your sister-in-law is driving her in.’

‘Will I be able to see her?’

He made an apologetic face. ‘Probably not.’

Ginny had stayed the night at Furze Lodge. David and Mary would have been kind and attentive, but probably rather overwhelming too, and I suspected that she would be feeling the strain.

After Tingwall left I asked for pen and paper, which the duty officers let me have, and, in an attempt at normality, I balanced the paper on my knee and tried to work on some marketing plans. But the gesture was hopeless, I simply couldn’t concentrate, and after a while I lay on the bunk staring at the ceiling, wondering how people could survive this for days on end. At noon a plate of fish and chips arrived with a gluey pudding and more strong tea. At one Tingwall came to tell me that Ginny had made her statement without a hitch and the whole thing had been completed in just over an hour.

‘She did very well,’ Tingwall remarked with an odd embarrassed smile, as though he were especially proud of her. ‘They haven’t said anything about you,’ he added. ‘No interview time set.’

‘Is that good or bad?’

‘Can’t say. They may be waiting for something.’

The afternoon was endless. By three I was pacing the cell, by five I was asking for Tingwall. It came to me then that, unnerving though imprisonment may be, it is not the lack of freedom which most undermines you, it is the sudden powerlessness, the sheer inability to communicate.

They finally called me at nine. We took our places in the interview room like seasoned players. At first Henderson did not diverge from his routine. He retrod the same ground, I carefully repeated my answers. The new question was an hour coming. We were going through the weekend of Sylvie’s death when Henderson said: ‘On the Sunday you were away from your wife for some of the time, is that right?’

I wondered exactly what Ginny had told them. ‘There were lots of chores to be done that weekend,’ I said. ‘We split the tasks between us. Mostly I was in the house, and yes – for some of the time my wife was doing other jobs.’

‘She was away on the boat for two hours?’

‘I can’t remember how long she was there, but yes, she went to the boat.’

‘You asked her to go there?’

‘No. No, it was . . . There were certain jobs that only I could do – sorting through trunks, papers, that sort of thing. It was simply the way it worked out, that she should go to the boat.’

‘What was she doing on the boat exactly?’

‘Oh . . . Cleaning it out, taking things off. Preparing the boat to be laid up.’

‘Laid up?’

‘Hauled out of the water and put ashore for the winter.’

‘She always did that job, did she?’

‘No, it was my father who did that sort of thing. It was his boat. He always looked after it.’

‘So why should your wife go and do the job? How would she know what to do?’

I understood now. I had sent Ginny to the boat as a ploy to get her out of the house and win time to cover up my crime of the previous night. Or perhaps they weren’t absolutely sure when Sylvie had been killed. Perhaps they thought I had done it on the Sunday morning and calmly proceeded to carry her body down to the river in full view of the walkers and rowers and weekend sailors, and dumped her in the river.

‘My wife knew the boat well. She used to sail on it when we were first married. She knew what had to be done – clearing out the galley, taking off the bedding – that kind of thing.’

‘That was what you asked her to do, was it? The galley and the bedding?’

‘I told you – we didn’t go into detail. I left it up to her. She’s very good at all that.’

Henderson pondered this. ‘And while she was away you . . .?’

‘I went through a trunkful of old letters.’

‘You didn’t see anyone?’

‘Well – no. I was up in the attic.’

‘No one came to the house?’

‘Not that I know of. I probably wouldn’t have heard the doorbell.’

Henderson watched me tensely. ‘And what time did your wife return?’

‘About one? No – twelve-thirty.’

‘And then what happened?’

‘We had lunch. As my wife will have told you.’

He was still for a moment, then in a display of disappointment or resignation he fanned out his fleshy fingers and flexed his shoulders before moving back to old ground.

And that was the turning point, though I didn’t realise it immediately. Henderson went through the motions for another half hour or so, but his voice took on a weary tone, he looked at his watch from time to time, and Tingwall, reading the signs, began to push for an end to the proceedings. Like barrow boys, they began to negotiate. Taking me aside, Tingwall asked me if as a concession I might be willing to stay in the area for a couple of days.

‘Do I have to?’

‘No. But it might persuade them not to apply for a custody extension.’

And so I agreed because by that time I would have done almost anything to get out of there.

It wasn’t until I walked into the reception area and saw Ginny that I allowed myself anything approaching relief.

She gasped when she saw me. ‘Thank God,’ she kept saying. ‘Thank God.’ And she began to cry, half laughing as she did so.

‘It may not be over,’ I said.

She searched my face, she absorbed this slowly. ‘Well, let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.’

It was almost midnight when the taxi dropped us at Furze Lodge. David opened the door.

‘You shouldn’t have waited up,’ I said.

‘What the hell,’ he said airily, and kissed Ginny on both cheeks.

‘I’m rather tired,’ Ginny announced in a subdued voice. ‘I think I’ll go straight to bed.’

I offered to bring her up a hot drink. At first she said not to bother, but perhaps she understood that in my inept inarticulate way I was trying to show my gratitude to her, because she changed her mind and said if there was a camomile tea she’d love one, otherwise anything would do.

I followed David into the kitchen and watched him hunt vaguely through a couple of cupboards. ‘We’re not really into herbal stuff,’ he declared apologetically. Eventually he found a lone sachet of peppermint tea.

‘Well?’ he demanded as he filled the kettle and plumped it on the Aga.

‘Well . . . they’ve let me out, but they think I did it.’

‘Think or know?’

‘Actually,’ I protested stiffly, ‘there’s nothing to know.’

‘I meant,’ he retorted with a flash of impatience, ‘what evidence do they have?’

‘They’re not saying.’

Shaking his head, he disappeared and came back almost immediately with a bottle of Scotch and two glasses.

‘David, you said that Sylvie was into drugs—’

He slung the glasses onto the counter between us. ‘Did I?’

‘Yes. You said so the other day. You said she was into all sorts of stuff.’

He slopped some whisky into the glasses and pulled his mouth down into an expression of denial. ‘I don’t think so.’