Lovers and Liars (78 page)

He said this in a flat, and final way. Then he bent to his camera cases, and began to assemble another set of lenses. He did not look up again. Gini stood there for a few more minutes, then she turned and quietly left the house.

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‘TIME OF deathT alley Police was young, short The sergeant from the Thames V

and plump. He had a punitive haircut. They were in the canteen at the Oxford division’s headquarters, just outside Headington. The sergeant was eating sausage, eggs, chips and beans - a cholesterol overdose. He cut up his sausage and chewed contemplatively - Gini tried to force herself to concentrate. the story she’d spun about researching an article on modern police methods had seemed effective. The sergeant was being co-operative, but to her neither he nor the canteen seemed very real.

‘Around six yesterday morning,’ he went on. ‘We reckon he was hit by one of the early commuter trains. We’ll know more definitely when we get the results of the autopsy. You could call back later, talk to the detective inspector. He’s over at the mortuary now.’

The sergeant had a slow Gloucestershire accent, and a stolid demeanour. His round blue eyes fixed themselves on Gini’s face. He mopped up egg yolk and continued to chew.

‘It carat have been easy to make identification then,’ Gini said. The sergeant shrugged. ‘He was carrying the usual ID. His Range Rover was parked by the bridge. He had its keys in his pocket. He was wearing a signet ring, with one of those crest things on it. His father wears one just the same.’

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‘Did his father identify the bodyT

‘What was left of it. Yes. Not a pleasant job . ‘I’m sure. Was it suicideT

‘That’s for the coroner to say.’

The sergeant munched the last of the chips. He looked at Gini and gave a sigh.

‘Put it this way - where he died, the line’s straight. You’d see an oncoming train from a mile away - more. Not too many people drive out into the middle of nowhere and decide to lie down on live rails.’ He paused. ‘On the other hand, he’d been drinking. Jhe body reeked of booze. I’d say he was way over the limit to drive. There was an empty whisky flask in his coat pocket, and an empty Scotch bottle in the car. Plus, the night before, he’d been dining in college. Plenty of wine and port. He was well and truly oiled … ‘

‘The night before? In college? Would that be Christ Church?’ ‘That’s right.’ He opened a notebook and flicked through its pages. ‘I checked his movements myself. Well, it wasn’t difficult. His tutor heard the reports on the local radio station. He called us straightaway .

‘His tutorT

‘Former tutor, I should say. Party by the name of Dr Anthony Knowles.’

The sergeant’s expression became dour: Gini had the impression that he and Knowles hadn’t exactly hit it off.

‘I’ve heard of Knowles … ‘

‘Who hasn’t?’ He glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice. ‘Twenty minutes after I saw him, we had his friend the chief constable on the phone. Telling me to get a move on. Don’t quote me … ‘

‘I won’t quote you.’

‘But they want this one sewn up nice and neat. I have to watch my p’s and qs.’

Gini considered this. It surely could not be true. McMullen might have died on the railwayline early Friday morning, but he could not have been dining in Christ Church the night before. That night was the night she and Pascal had talked to him; he had dropped them off in Oxford around nine-fifteen, then returned to his hide-out above Hawthorne’s estate. So Knowles had lied to the police. Interesting, too, that Knowles should claim he heard the news item on the local radio station. She herself had tuned in to that station in the hire-car she’d picked up at Oxford station.

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It played an unremitting blast of rock music - she wouldn’t have expected that to be Knowles’s taste at all.

She pushed her hair back tiredly from her face. She knew she was neither thinking nor operating very well. She could hear Pascal’s voice at the back of her mind all the time. The pain of their parting was a physical ache. She could have located it exactly, have put her hand across her heart and said: The pain is there.

‘You want a cup of coffee, love? You don’t look too well, you know.’

‘No, no thank you. I’m fine.’ She leaned forward. ‘So tell me, if McMullen dined in college on Thursday night, what happened thenT

‘According to Dr Knowles, the dinner broke up late. He and McMullen went back to his rooms. They broke open a bottle of nineteen twelve port or what-have-you and talked. Knowles pushed off to bed around three in the morning. When he woke at eleven, McMullen had gone. Some life, eh? I wouldn’t mind being one of those dons.’

‘You mean he expected McMullen to be in college the next morning?’

‘Oh yes. This McMullen had been going through a difficult patch, apparently. He’d been staying there as Knowles’s guest for some while.’

‘Really? In college? For how long?’

The sergeant consulted his notebook. ‘Four days. In one of the college guest-rooms. Same staircase as Dr Knowles. He arrived there last Monday, and was due to leave Friday evening. Supposed to be going on from there to his parents’. They live in Shropshire. Near the border with Wales. But he’d obviously been planning something. They got a letter from him Friday morning. His father showed it to me. McMullen told them he couldn’t go on.’

‘Did he give a reasonT

‘General depression. No job. No woman. That kind of thing.’ The sergeant shrugged.

Gini frowned. So Knowles had lied to the police - and an attempt had been made to suggest suicide as plausible. Yet why should McMullen want to kill himself now? Could the man she and Pascal had been speaking to that Thursday night have then deliberately killed himself, only ten hours later? She did not believe that for an instant, not at all. She felt a sudden quickening excitement. She had been right, she thought: this death was not what it seemed. And if the police had accepted the idea that McMullen had been

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staying in Christ Church they presumably knew

I nothing of the

1,

cottage in the woods. She leaned forward again.

‘So I guess McMullen must have left all his belongings at Christ Church?’

‘Not much.’ The sergeant shrugged. ‘One suitcase. Change of clothes.’

‘You have a list of the belongings You found on his body? I’m interested, you know, in how you piece together someone’s ID. It might help my story .

‘A list. Yes.’ The sergeant sighed. ‘Lists. Paperwork. Bumf. it never bloody well stops, pardon my French. Used to be forms in triplicate. It’s all computers now. I can let you have a copy, I suppose. No reason why not. Come down to the DI’s office now.’

In the office, the sergeant heaved his weight into a revolving chair, rummaged through some paperwork and eventually found the print-out he was looking for. He handed it across. ‘This article you’re doing . He looked up at her. ‘Modern police methods, that’s it?’

‘Right.’ ‘Why pick this case? It’s routine, love. We could set you up with a nice little homicide.’ He smiled. ‘Or drugs. The drug scene in Oxford is very active now. Only the other week-‘

Gini interrupted him quickly. ‘No, no. My editor wants a routine case. That’s the whole point. So readers can understand daily policework. I wonder. I have a map here. Can you show me where it Was exactly that he died?’

She passed her map across. It was a large-scale walkers’ Ordnance Survey, one inch to the mile. The sergeant scanned it for a second or two, then placed one large finger on a square ten miles to the south-east of the city. There, in an area with few villages, among open fields and woods, a solitary bridge took a minor road over the railwayline.

‘There/ he said. ‘See that bridge? Miles from bloody anywhere. It was right there:

Gini re-folded the map without comment. Not miles from anywhere exactly, but close, very close to where she had been two days before with Pascal.

Outside, in her hire-car, she examined the map more closely, frowning and trying to remember the terrain. Yes, here was the church and the graveyard where she and Pascal kept watch. Here, in the valley below, was Hawthorne’s house. Here, on the far side of that valley, were the woods and the cottage where McMullen

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had holed up. And here - a tiny square - was the cottage itself, and the track McMullen had driven.

The track continued beyond the cottage. That continuation had been invisible in the dark, but on the map its route was clear. It wound down through the woods behind the cottage. Three miles further on, it joined a minor road. That junction was fifty yards from the bridge where McMullen died.

And not just close to the bridge, either. She started the engine, stopped, checked the map one last time. On the map, the boundaries of John Hawthorne’s estate were clear. McMullen had ostensibly met his death less than half a mile from the high stone wall of Hawthorne’s estate. And, of course, for a man obsessed with pointing the finger at Hawthorne, that was a very suggestive place to die.

She hesitated, and looked at her watch. it was nearly two. She just had time to call Anthony Knowles, and then make it to the railway-fine and to the cottage in the woods before the light failed.

She drove a short way, found a phone box, and dialled Christ Church, A polite porter informed her that Dr Knowles was unavailable. He had left that morning for a conference in Rome, and would be away for three days. No, he regretted, but they were not permitted to give out numbers.

Gini hung up the phone. She leaned her face against the cold glass of the door panels. She watched the traffic go past. It was beginning to rain again, lightly. Just two days ago, she and Pascal had walked this way, on their arrival in Oxford, filling in time before that meeting at the Paradise Caf6. On the corner of the street over there, just there, Pascal had looked down at her, and taken her hand. The pain was suddenly overwhelming. She felt it surge through her, and clench at her heart.

In her purse, she had the number of the rented house in St John’s Wood. Taking it out, her hands trembling, she picked up the phone and dialled.

By midday, Pascal had completed his camera set-ups. Two telephoto lenses, their cameras mounted on tripods, one trained on the entrance steps to Hawthorne’s villa, the other on the windows to the rear. He had pushed all the furniture in the room against the wall, so he could move fast and without hindrance in the window region, even in the dark. In addition to these, he had four other cameras, two loaded with monochrome, two with colour, all to be hand-held.

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As long as he was intent on these preparations he could keep the pain at bay. The minute they were completed, it returned. He sat there, in that ugly, incongruous room, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Why had he said those things? Why had he done those things? He buried his face in his hands. He felt filled with rage and anxiety and self-hate; he thought: I am a fool.

He knew why he had acted as he did to some extent. He had been so desperate to prevent Gini from leaving alone that he was prepared to use almost any means to stop her. He had been convinced that if he loaded her choice in that way, he would prevent her going. The instant he realized she would still not be dissuaded, even if it meant ending their affair, he had been caught up in a hideous spiral of pain and anger and incomprehension and doubt. Jealousy of Hawthorne, that too; and continuing uncertainty as to what exactly could have happened between Hawthorne and Gini the previous evening. His mind had leapt from one crazy, facile conclusion to another: she could not love him; she was concealing something; she was not concealing something … He rose to his feet with an angry exclamation, and began to pace the room.

Pride, he thought: he was guilty of indulging wounded pride, of being obstinate, foolhardy, intemperate, incautious - and what was the result? He had thrown Gini a key. Thrown it, in a horrible contemptuous way, not even given it to her, and spoken to her in that vile, cold, distanced way he had perfected in the years of his marriage. He had done all these things, at a moment when all he truly wanted to do was take her in his arms - and then, not surprisingly, she had left. Walked out. She was now somewhere in Oxford. Alone. He couldn’t call her, or contact her - and he knew, just knew, that she was every bit as proud and obstinate as he was, and so she would never contact him, she would not phone.

Fool, he said to himself. Fool, fool, fool. He stared around at the pink brocade, and suddenly it was unbearable to be there any longer. He slammed out of the house, went as far as the garden gate, then realized he had no bike, no car, no transport. What if Gini were in trouble? What if she needed him? He slammed back into the house, called the nearest car-hire company, stormed out again, remembered he had not switched on the answering machine, ran back in again, stared at it, and then started a series of frantic calls. The Thames Valley Police were helpful, but the sergeant dealing with this case was on his lunch-break. No, they couldn’t say where he was, he wasn’t answering his office phone. Pascal then tried Christ Church, and when he learned Dr Knowles

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was away, his spirits rose. Perhaps that meant Gini would give up and leave Oxford. Maybe, after all, she would come here, that evening, on her return. He left an incoherent message with the porter, switched on the answering machine. He went straight to the car-hire company, and hired the fastest car they had available, a black Rover with a souped-up engine. Pascal hated it on sight. He drove it away from the garage, driving fast and recklessly, slamming up through the gears.

He drove around the area for a short while, trying to concentrate on the geography of this story, the geography here. He drove into Regent’s Park, and past the mosque, past the ambassador’s residence almost opposite it. He timed the distance from there back to the cul-de-sac. Gini had estimated it as five minutes. The way he was driving, he did it in two and a half.

He shot past the cul-de-sac entrance, did an illegal U-turn to the accompaniment of a cacophony of horns. He accelerated back the way he had come, slammed on the brakes, parked on a yellow line where parking was forbidden, got out of the car, and walked into Regent’s Park. Avoiding the ambassador’s residence to his right, he turned left and walked along a path between bare plane trees. It was bitterly cold. The sun shone. He passed the buildings of London Zoo on his left, and turned into the open spaces of the park itself. He came to a halt. He stared unseeingly at these acres of trees and grass. From behind him, where the zoofs animal enclosures were, came one long eddying cry. It was high in pitch. It could have been the cry of a bird or an animal. It was a prison-house cry, suggestive of hunger or desolation. It was not repeated. Pascal walked on.