Kill My Darling (16 page)

Well, well, Slider thought. So friend Hibbert is a bit of a Lothario? Somehow he wasn't surprised. Fantasist, Lothario and wide boy. Suspect-wise, what was not to like? ‘I understand you were helping him with his Elvis impersonations,' he said, to prime the pump again.

Bolton looked up, startled out of his thoughts, and gave a reluctant smile. ‘Sharon told you about that, did she? Well, it's something I've done for years. I know it sounds funny, but I make a bit of money at it. You can, if you work hard, but it's a crowded field, so you've got to be good. Well, Scott was always asking me about it. Just to take the piss, to start with. But when he realizes there's actual money in it, he starts to take it serious, and says he wants to get into it.' He shook his head. ‘I always tried to put him off. I mean, I can't see he had any talent for it. And I was worried that what he was really interested in was the girls – you know, you always get some hanging around when you do a stage act, even if it's only in a pub or a community hall. Groupies, he called 'em. He kept talking about them being easy – like fruit falling off a tree, he said. I didn't like that. But he went on and on until in the end, more to shut him up, really, I said I'd help him.'

‘He actually had a date – a booking?'

‘I don't know if you'd call it that. It was a mate's stag night. They weren't paying him or anything, as far as I could gather. Good thing, too – I know he's a mate and everything, but it has to be said, he's a crap Elvis. Can't sing, can't dance – all he had was the dark glasses, and the white rhinestone suit he was gonna hire.'

‘And that was on Friday – last Friday, wasn't it?'

‘That's right.' He looked suddenly stricken. ‘God, the poor bastard. He must be kicking himself that he went. If he'd stayed home, none of this would've happened. He must be heartbroken.'

‘So he did love Melanie?'

‘Oh yes. They were besotted – all over each other. I know maybe I've given the wrong impression – he was a bit of a pain in the neck sometimes, but he was all right really, and he did love her. I think he got annoyed with her sometimes because she wouldn't marry him.'

‘Why do you think that was?'

He made a comical face. ‘I know, women are all supposed to be mad to get married, aren't they? But this time I know for a fact
he
asked
her
and she said no – or not yet, anyway – because they both told me. All she said to me was she wasn't ready yet. She said they'd only been going out two years and it wasn't long enough, and she said she'd got enough on her plate as it was. But Scott wanted kids, and the sooner the better. They were already living together, the way he saw it, and he had plans for them to get a house – well, he
is
in the trade – and the next step in his mind was to get married, have kids. But every time he asked her, she said she wasn't ready.'

Slider nodded. ‘It's a big step,' he said profoundly. Then, ‘Do you know if there was anything in her past that might have made her reluctant to get married?' he tried. He wondered how far the information about Melanie's ‘bit of trouble' had gone.

But Bolton shook his head. ‘I wasn't that chummy with her, really. We'd have a chat, and she was very nice and easy to get on with, but she never gave anything away. It was just time of day, sort of thing. I never felt – well, I reckon there was another Mel inside the one I knew. Must've been, when you think about it – I was just the neighbour, after all. Scott's the one you need to talk to about that,' he concluded; but with a faintly puzzled air, as if he wasn't sure Hibbert
was
the person to apply to, actually.

Which was interesting for all sorts of reasons.

EIGHT

Attitude Sickness

S
imone Ridware, Melanie's work colleague and friend at the Natural History Museum, was a different prospect from Kiera Williams: older, to start with – late thirties by the look of her – well spoken and obviously educated. What Swilley always classified to herself as a National Trust sort of person – posh and well off – but in this case clever too. She was apparently in the Micropalaeontology Section, and how that differed from the Palaeontology Section Swilley no more cared than she could spell it.

Simone Ridware had offered to take her to the canteen for their talk, but Swilley arranged to meet her in a café nearby, by South Kensington Station. Just going into a museum gave her vertigo.

Despite being called Simone she was not French, even a bit. ‘It was a name my mother picked. She just had a liking for it,' she said apologetically. ‘I have a brother called Hubert, so I suppose I got off lightly.' She came from Maidstone originally, where her father was a solicitor, had gone to Benenden, then Cambridge, had worked for BP for a short time and then found her home-from-home within the dreaming spires and glazed Victorian tiles of the Nat His Mu. She had married a subsurface geologist she had met at BP (bet
their
conversations at home are exciting, Swilley thought) and had two children, Poppy and Oliver, aged five and seven, and lived in a large Victorian house in the nice bit of Muswell Hill. No surprises there.

She was, however, wearing a very elegant suit on her enviable figure, and Swilley would really have liked a better view of her shoes. Who'd have thought palaeontology was a hotbed of fashion?

They ordered coffee and Danish pastries, and Mrs Ridware opened the batting with, ‘You want to talk to me about Melanie, of course. What can I tell you?'

She had short, dark hair, fine and curly, like soft black feathers all over her head, and an averagely good-looking face subtly enhanced by skilful make-up. A geek, but
hardly dull at all
, Swilley paraphrased to herself. To the penetrating eye, she looked a little pale and worn under the make-up, and Swilley wondered if it was on Melanie's behalf, and hoped so. She put aside her chippy prejudices and prepared to listen.

‘What was she like?' she asked. ‘Did you like her?'

‘We were friends,' said Mrs Ridware, as if that said it all. And then, ‘I had tremendous admiration for her. She came from quite a difficult background, but she never let it hold her back. What she achieved, she achieved on her own merits. She was very good at her job, and she had a brilliant career ahead of her.' She paused and, as if realizing that this sounded too much like a press release, added in a different tone, ‘Yes, I liked her. We were very close, and I shall miss her very much.'

‘When you say she had a difficult background—?' Swilley tried.

‘She came from a poor home,' Mrs Ridware said. ‘Her father was feckless and her mother was ineffectual, so she was thrown on her own resources. He was often out of work, and I believe he gambled, too, so money was always tight. And her mother was a poor housekeeper. All too often Melanie as a child came home to have to cook supper herself and wash and iron her own clothes for school. She never had the material things other girls had, and I know you may think that's character-building –' she smiled at Swilley, who hadn't thought anything of the sort – ‘but girls can be cruel and it's hard always to be an outsider. But despite his inadequacies, she adored her father. I gather he was a charming wastrel.'

Swilley nodded.

‘That sort can be the hardest to resist, and do the most damage.'

‘Melanie told you all this herself, did she?' Swilley asked.

‘Yes, over time. It was hard for her to confide at first – I think she'd held herself back for so many years it had become a habit. But we liked each other from the first moment she joined the museum, and bit by bit the barriers came down – with me, at least. She was always guarded with other people.' She hesitated, and Swilley gave an encouraging nod. ‘She developed a technique of getting everyone she met to talk about themselves, so that she wouldn't have to talk about
her
self. To be the listener is always safer – and it makes people like you. Everyone loved her. She had a large number of friends. But I think fundamentally she was a very lonely person.'

‘Why was that?'

‘Partly her background – her parents, I mean – and partly her father being killed. You know about that?'

‘In the train crash – yes.'

‘It was a terrible blow to her, and she had to do all the coping because her mother couldn't. She had to suppress her feelings and get on with things. And then her mother remarried a basically unsympathetic man, so the protective shell just got thicker, until it became such a habit she couldn't break it. When she first came to the museum I think she was desperate to talk to someone, but simply didn't know how. Fortunately we struck up a friendship and—' She shrugged, elegantly. ‘I was glad to be her confidante.'

‘So she didn't get on with her stepfather?'

‘She wouldn't have liked anyone who took her father's place. But I gather – I never met him, you understand – that he was somewhat
limited
. No imagination. Everything by the book because he couldn't think further than that. And she might have accepted that – her mother, after all, was no Einstein – except that he gave himself airs and claimed a superiority he didn't have, and used it as the basis for imposing discipline on her.'

Atherton should be having this conversation, Swilley thought resentfully. Or the boss. I'm a solid facts girl.
She didn't like her stepdad, and he tried to make her toe the line.
Why dress it up in all this airy-fairy psychobabble? ‘Did he hit her?'

‘I didn't mean discipline in that sense,' Mrs Ridware said, kindly enough to get up Swilley's nose.

‘But did he hit her?' she repeated stolidly.

She hesitated. ‘I think he did, on occasion – but not violently. I don't want you to think he was beating her, or anything like that. Not that Nigel and I believe in corporal punishment – we would
never
hit Poppy or Oliver – it sends all the wrong signals and teaches the wrong values. But many people believe that the occasional slap is justified, and I suppose Melanie's stepfather was one of them. Of course, she was too old by then to do other than resent it, especially as he wasn't her real father. They used to have tremendous arguments, she told me. I think it was a relief all round when she left home.'

‘Did she tell you about the trouble she got into?'

‘You mean—?'

‘Getting pregnant,' Swilley said brutally. The girl was dead, for heaven's sake. The time to be holding stuff back was well gone.

‘Yes, she told me about that. How did you know?'

‘Her mum told us.'

‘Oh. Of course. But I don't think she told another soul about it. Certainly nobody here knew except me. It was a desperately painful incident, and coming so soon after her father dying . . .'

‘Did she resent her stepdad for making her have the abortion?'

‘No, not exactly. She knew it was the only thing to be done, and she knew she wouldn't have had the same career if she
had
kept it. I don't think he forced her – of course, there was pressure put on her, but if she'd really insisted . . .'

Yeah, thought Swilley. That's all right from someone with nice supportive parents who always discussed things rationally with their kids. And where money had never been an issue. She knew what ‘pressure' would have meant in Melanie's case, and how there would have been no alternative for a girl with no money and nowhere else to go.

‘But she regretted it deeply, all the same,' Mrs Ridware went on. ‘She brooded about the child she didn't have. She felt guilty because she hadn't protected it. And she doubted her fitness to be a mother, because she had failed so spectacularly at the first hurdle.' She sighed. ‘It was something we talked about often, when we went out alone together, after work. She envied me my children, said how lucky I was to have had a normal life, with everything happening as it should, naturally and in the right order.' She looked at Swilley, her eyes suddenly vulnerable and troubled. ‘I know I'm lucky, I really do. I have everything, and Melanie—' She bit her lip. ‘Now she's had even her life taken away from her. Whoever did that—' She stopped abruptly and looked away.

She really had cared about Melanie, then. Swilley liked her better.

‘What about Scott Hibbert? Did you ever meet him?'

‘Once or twice, when he came to meet Melanie after work, and at the Christmas party. They'd only been going out for just over two years. I can't say I knew him well, except for what Melanie told me.'

‘And what was that?'

‘She was madly in love with him,' said Mrs Ridware, with a sorrowful look, ‘but in my view he wasn't right for her. She had real depths and real intellect, but he was just a – a flashy, self-centred nothing. He was so shallow—' She paused, and Swilley finished for her without thinking:

‘—it was a wonder he didn't evaporate?'

But she didn't take offence. She gave a small, controlled smile. ‘Yes. I must remember that – it's good.'

‘But they were living together and he wanted to marry her.'

‘Yes, she said he'd proposed more than once. I think he thought she'd be a good corporate wife – an asset to his career. It was all about him. He was an awful snob, you know – still is, I suppose. I don't know why I'm talking about him in the past tense. At the Christmas parties he was always name-dropping, buttonholing the most important people, trying to ingratiate himself with anyone with a title. I think he thought Melanie would give him a leg up the social scale.'

‘So he didn't love her?'

‘Oh, goodness, I didn't mean that. I'm sure he did. He was certainly all over her, embarrassingly so sometimes. But I don't think he ever really – what do they say nowadays? –
got
her. He loved her for the wrong reasons, because he didn't really know her.'