Fatal Legacy (16 page)

‘Why didn’t he?’

‘He said he was going to, after tonight but then …’

Her eyes filled with tears and Fenwick decided to close the interview quickly. He asked a few more questions: an estimated time for Graham’s departure from Scotland; a description of his red XJS which was still missing; his mobile phone number; and confirmation that he had taken a whole bundle of papers with him on his final journey.

Finally, after absent-mindedly finishing her cold, sweet tea, she looked up at him, meeting his eyes warily.

‘I wasn’t with Graham for his money, you know. I didn’t expect to be around for long enough to help him spend it. He usually changed his girls with the season.’ Her eyes suddenly started to drop their tears.

‘But you seem very upset at his death?’

‘Oh, I loved him. I would have done anything for him.’

He asked her gently: ‘Why do you think he killed himself, Jenny?’

She looked at him blankly.

‘Killed himself? You think it’s suicide?’ She shook her head violently at the thought. ‘Graham would never have killed himself. No, this is murder.’

The clock chimed another half-hour and Fenwick took pity on Jenny. He asked her for details of her movements over the past few days and then let her go to bed. Once she’d left the room, he turned to WPC Shah.

‘Did you believe her?’

‘Yes, completely. Everything she said had the ring of truth.’

‘I’m inclined to agree. There was no guilt there, and the right level of shock and sadness.’

‘Excuse me for saying so, sir, but you didn’t ask about Graham Wainwright’s will – or who’ll inherit now.’

‘No, I didn’t. I’m saving that for Jeremy Kemp. We’ll see him next, but I want to check how Cooper’s been getting on first. You wait here and make sure no one goes off to bed.’

It was nearly four o’clock in the morning when Fenwick found Cooper. He had interviewed the kitchen staff quickly and had then gone straight to the scene. The body had finally been removed and the pathologist would undertake the post-mortem at ‘nine a.m. sharp’. Cooper walked his boss over to the tree where the body had been found, dreading his reaction. A familiar white tent had been erected under the vast spreading branches of the beech, spilling bright light out on to the leaf mould and twisted roots that surrounded the massive tree on all sides. Inside, Fenwick found two SOCOs still hard at work, so he waited carefully at the entrance.

‘I need to get back and continue the interviews, so just the key facts, Sergeant.’

‘The scene was a mess when we got here: body taken down from the tree; attempts to remove the noose from the neck had failed; footprints everywhere, coming and going.’

‘We need to find out who did all that. It wasn’t Lucy or Ryan. They left the body exactly as they’d found it. Any view yet on murder, suicide or accident?’

‘According to the police surgeon, all the signs are, and I quote, “that it was accidental strangulation during auto-erotic stimulation”. He had a leather posing pouch on, and there were several of
these
around.’ Cooper handed Fenwick two bagged pornographic magazines full of explicit but straight sex.

‘Any buts?’

‘One or two. The noose was very professional, and the way it was looped around that branch there and back down to the ground …’ Cooper walked delicately over to a large exposed root and pointed from over a metre away, ‘here … doesn’t make sense. I don’t know how he could’ve gradually increased
the pressure from where he was. Looks like a job for two people to make it work.’

‘Make sure somebody stays here when SOCO have gone, and then come up to the house.’

Colin and Jeremy Kemp were lying in wait for him in the entrance hall, tired and angry. They demanded that the
interviews
be speeded up but Fenwick was determined to do them all himself and told them so firmly and politely. He saw Kemp next and learnt that it was he and Sally who had discovered the body for the second time.

‘And Sally was calm when you left her?’

‘Completely, Inspector—’

‘Chief Inspector.’

‘Completely. She’s an extraordinary woman, y’know. I wouldn’t have left her had she not been all right, but she was in remarkable shape, virtually insisted I went.’

‘Really?’ Fenwick raised his eyebrows. He could see Kemp immediately regret the remark, but the solicitor was wise enough to hold his tongue and not make it any worse.

‘So her breakdown this evening – the hysterics – that was out of character, was it?’

‘Course not. She’s been through hell tonight, coping and being strong for Jenny’s sake. It’s completely understandable that she should collapse at some point. Seeing a man hanging from a tree is enough to frighten anybody half to death. She really is very sensitive. She has so much to manage in her life – you’ve no idea what she does, how much Alexander relies on her, not that he’s even aware of it half the time! The man doesn’t know the luck he was born with.’ The last was said with such bitterness and jealousy that if anything ever happened to Alexander, Fenwick would be inclined to put Jeremy Kemp near the top of the suspect list.

‘What about Graham Wainwright’s will, Mr Kemp? Did he change it, given his inheritance?’

‘Probably, but I can’t say. He was no longer a client of mine. I passed his affairs over to a Mr Sacks, in Reigate. We’ll give you the address first thing.’

‘Why did he change solicitors?’

‘He was upset over his father’s will; blamed our firm in general and me in particular. Said we should have done something to prevent his father changing it. Relationships improved later, but by then he’d already appointed another firm.’

‘Tell me about Alan Wainwright’s will.’ He could tell that Kemp wanted to plead client privilege but then thought better of it.

‘Originally the whole estate, apart from token bequests, was left to his son, Graham. Alan disliked his sister and brother-
in-law
intensely and hated the idea of them having any influence over the business, so they were never going to inherit much, despite their expectations.’

‘And the will was changed so that Alexander and Sally Wainwright-Smith inherited a substantial share of his uncle’s estate?’

‘Yes, effectively half. Shortly afterwards Alan brought me a copy of a letter, approved by the board of Wainwright Enterprises, nominating Alexander as MD should Alan die.’

‘Were you surprised?’

Kemp hesitated a moment, then said shortly, ‘Very.’

It was the only opinion he was prepared to express on the subject. Nor was he very forthcoming about Sally. Fenwick was given again the familiar description of a remarkable woman who had worked ceaselessly to unravel the complications of her husband’s inheritance, on top of being Alexander’s personal assistant and reorganising the managing director’s office.

Cooper joined the interview quietly and sat in a hard chair by the empty fireplace.

Fenwick returned to the recovery of the body, but Kemp seemed reluctant to talk further. His sentences became clipped, his tone studiedly neutral. Not once did he volunteer further fact or opinion.

‘So by the time you returned with the others, the body was lying on the ground. How did Mrs Wainwright-Smith do that?’

‘The devil knows—’ Kemp broke off and stared at Fenwick open-mouthed. It was almost possible to see the cogs in his tired brain click into place. It was quite clear that he’d said something he felt he shouldn’t have, and he looked to Fenwick like a guilty schoolboy, caught out for not remembering his
lesson. There was a silence, in which Kemp’s eyes darted shiftily around the room. He was trying to replay everything that had been said, to calculate a way out of the mess he had placed himself in. But he was too tired to remember all the moves in the deceptively simple conversation, and in the end he simply clamped his fleshy lips even tighter and said nothing.

Probably the most sensible thing he’s done tonight, thought Fenwick.

After Kemp had promised him full details of his movements over the past three days and the names of the rest of the bridge four with whom he and his wife had spent Thursday evening, Fenwick wished him good night.

Mrs Muriel Kemp came in swiftly afterwards. She was a short, thin woman of bird-like movements, given to fluttering her hands when nervous and to speaking in half-sentences, as if she didn’t quite trust herself to conclude an opinion. Her eyes were small, hard, brown, tired now in the early hours of the morning, but still alert.

After five minutes Fenwick concluded that there was little she was going to contribute to the sum of his knowledge about the night’s events, but he was curious to find out her view of Sally Wainwright-Smith.

‘What’s Sally like?’

Mrs Kemp’s hands fidgeted in the air, inches above her lap.

‘All right.’

That was it; no ‘extraordinary woman’ stories here.

‘How well do you know her?’

‘Not well at all. We rarely socialise with the Wainwright-Smiths.’

‘But she had a lot of work to do unravelling Alan Wainwright’s estate, so she must have spent quite a bit of time with your husband.’

‘I don’t know what you are implying, Chief Inspector, really I don’t.’

‘Nothing at all, only that he must have got to know her quite well, and perhaps expressed an opinion about her.’

‘We rarely talked of her. Now, may I go? I’m rather tired.’ She picked up a fringed cushion from the sofa and started to fiddle with the tassels.

‘Mrs Wainwright-Smith’s reactions tonight: did they strike you as odd in any way?’

She snorted in reply and concentrated on the plait she was making in the fringe. ‘She’s an odd woman. Nothing she does surprises me.’

‘In what way is she odd?’

‘She just is, Chief Inspector; a woman of contrasts, let’s say. She’s not a woman’s woman, you know. She really gets on much better with men … It’s hard for me to judge.’

Muriel Kemp would say no more and Fenwick let her go.

The interview with Colin Wainwright-McAdam, Graham’s uncle by marriage, followed a strangely similar pattern to that with Jeremy Kemp, but revealed nothing new, other than the fact that Colin was an objectionable, snobbish man. He too was full of praise for Sally, explaining to Fenwick how delicate she was beneath the deceptively robust exterior.

‘A wife like Sally would be an asset to any man, Chief Inspector, no matter how competent he was in his own right.’

Finally, as the clock chimed the hour yet again, Alexander Wainwright-Smith was woken from a deep slumber on a couch in front of the dying embers of his sitting-room fire. Cooper guided the dozy man through the great hall to join Fenwick and Shah, then positioned himself quietly out of everybody’s line of sight. He didn’t think that this death was suicide – it smelt wrong – and until he’d discovered Wainwright-Smith fast asleep in his drawing room he had been his prime suspect. The sight of the sleeping man, mouth sagging open, one arm thrown wide, the other holding a floral cushion tight to his chest, had changed his mind. It wasn’t just that he looked innocent, he
slept
innocently. He’d never known a guilty man, unless he was a true psychopath, sleep so well on the night of his crime, whilst waiting for his first police interview.

Alexander yawned noisily, then covered his mouth in a hasty apology. WPC Shah contorted her jaw as she tried to stifle a sympathetic response.

‘Sorry, I’m just so groggy.’ He rubbed his face briskly, then shook his head. ‘There, better. You must be exhausted.’

Fenwick shrugged, then started his questions for the last time that night. Alexander answered him thoughtfully. Despite
his best attempts, he was still befuddled from his sleep and the drug of the pre-dawn hour. Perfect, as far as Fenwick was concerned; the man didn’t appear to have the wit or energy to be anything other than honest. He repeated the detail of his meeting with Lucy and Ryan, the subsequent search parties, the discovery of the body and the return to the house. When Fenwick quizzed him gently about his guests’ reactions, including those of his wife, he answered simply, with clear recall of the various conversations. Even when Fenwick
challenged
him on Sally’s hysterics, his composure didn’t falter. Yes, he’d been surprised, but then it had been an extraordinary day, and who was he to criticise such a human reaction?

‘How is Mrs Wainwright-Smith?’

‘Asleep. She took a couple of tablets and went straight out.’

‘Is this a regular prescription?’

‘Sadly, yes. She’s being treated for mild depression by our doctor. He said it’s nothing to worry about, although he’d like her to see a specialist and get more rest. Fat chance now.’

‘What’s caused her condition?’

‘I’m not really sure. We’ve been through a hell of a lot since my uncle died in January and at first Sally seemed to cope really well. We moved into the Hall last month and she redecorated, helped me analyse the business, worked through the mess of our inheritance, tried to heal the rift with my family and then came and organised my office. But in the last few weeks it has all seemed to get on top of her.’

‘Any idea why?’

‘None at all, except that I’m working long hours now, so perhaps she gets lonely. We’ve only been married a few months, so I suspect this sudden change is a shock.’

Fenwick sensed that Wainwright-Smith was holding something back, but he was wide awake now and fully in control. He decided to change the subject.

‘So you didn’t know her long before you married?’

Alexander laughed. ‘No. We had what is called a whirlwind romance. I met her before Christmas and married her in January.’

‘Big wedding?’ Fenwick wanted to probe into Sally’s background without alerting her husband to his interest.

‘No, just a few of my family. Sally didn’t invite anyone.’

‘That’s unusual.’

‘She’s a very private person, Chief Inspector, and she said she wanted a new life and a break from the past.’

‘Why was that?’

‘You’re asking a lot of strange questions, in the
circumstances
.’

‘You’re right. My mind’s drifting. Forgive the idle curiosity, we’re all tired. I’ll leave the rest of my questions until tomorrow morning, when we’ll be back to interview your wife. Good night, Mr Wainwright-Smith.’