Picture of Innocence (7 page)

Judy ignored him. ‘ The real question is do we think they are serious threats?’

‘And
do
we?’ Lloyd let the chair fall back.

‘No,’ Judy said decidedly. ‘If you’re going to murder someone, you murder him. You don’t leave him notes about it. Someone is trying to scare him, upset him … hoping to make him sell the land. I don’t believe that they’re serious death threats.’

‘But you said he was scared of something before all this. Does
he
think someone’s going to kill him?’

Judy tried once again to explain that she hadn’t the faintest idea what Bernard Bailey thought. ‘I just know he’s got the place wired up as though he has the crown jewels in there,’ she said. ‘ If you think you can devise a method of communication that will reveal what he’s frightened of, feel free. I won’t be a bit offended.’

Lloyd smiled. ‘Never have got on with the strong, silent type, have you?’

No. She preferred the talkative type, like Lloyd, like her father. You could judge their moods, catch nuances. Someone like Bernard Bailey was a closed book to her. ‘Feelings are running high about this road, and this sort of thing happens,’ she said. ‘The death threats are on a par with the graffiti, I think. Just less refined.’

‘Right. Let’s call it a day,’ said Lloyd. ‘Let’s face it – we were being used as a sop to soothe one of Case’s Freemason buddies, and we’ve done that now.’

‘
We’ve
done that now?’ said Judy. ‘
We?
I didn’t see you up to your knees in mud.’

‘And I didn’t see you: Lloyd shook his head sadly. ‘That’s something I will regret for a long time.’

‘Closed-circuit television?’ The end of Mike McQueen’s cigar glowed red, and he blew out the match.

Rachel Bailey nodded. She sat at the other side of his desk, as Curtis Law had done that morning; Mike always kept the desk between them, in case she might actually see the effect his libidinous thoughts were having on him.

He remembered the first time he had seen her, when she had turned up at his door just over a year ago, and had introduced herself, first to Shirley, then to him. Curtis Law was right about his ivory tower; he had known Bailey had married again almost immediately, but it hadn’t occurred to him for one moment that his new wife would be nineteen years younger than him and look like Rachel did. He still couldn’t believe it; Rachel married to Bernard Bailey was an impossible notion, like an Escher drawing.

‘Brought the man back with him,’ she said, in her honey-drenched voice. ‘ He’s there now – sortin’ out where all the cameras’ll go and that. Shows he’s rattled.’

There were no tees at all the way she spoke the word, not even the Geordie glottal stop that he had employed as a child. In her mouth, it entirely lost its onomatopoeic quality, and Mike wondered what her tongue had to do to produce the delightful sound it did make, then dragged his thoughts back to business, feeling foolish. Rachel Bailey had awakened dreams and desires in him that he had thought were long gone, and she didn’t even know she was doing it, which made it all the more potent.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘ But he’d hardly go to all that expense if he was thinking of giving up and selling as a result, would he?’

‘Maybe not. But he’s not ignorin’ them. Won’t even let me see them, this time,’ she added, with a wicked smile.

Mike had said that he
would
ignore them, when she had first suggested it. But she had been right; Bailey had called the police in the moment he had seen them. They had overplayed their hand, however, and Bailey had begun to accept them as a fact of life, until she had suggested that a few obscenities would shake him up. She had been right about that too, but it seemed to Mike that it had backfired, if he was getting security cameras put in. It seemed incredible that Bailey could actually be afraid for his life as a result of this nonsense, but it seemed he was; Rachel Bailey knew her man.

She leaned forward. ‘How’s he going to feel if he gets another lot
after
the cameras are in?’

Mike drew reflectively on his cigar, his thoughts far away from Bailey’s closed-circuit television. And ludicrous, he told himself sternly. She was over thirty years his junior, for God’s sake. He’d thought he was immune to all this; he hadn’t given it a thought after Shirley had switched to twin beds, or for a long time before, come to that, which was why she had felt justified in doing it. But when Rachel Bailey was here, he was able to think of practically nothing else, like an adolescent. His long abstinence had made him vulnerable to sexual stimuli, he supposed, and all she had to do was smile at him.

‘Will you do some more for me?’ she asked. ‘ Sayin’ cameras won’t keep him safe?’

Mike shook his head. ‘ If the cameras don’t pick up any strangers going through the gate, it will become blindingly obvious that whoever’s putting them up must be someone who doesn’t have to leave the premises,’ he said.

‘Supposin’ the cameras
do
see a stranger?’

‘And when was the last time Bailey let a stranger through that gate?’

‘He has to let some through. Ramblers. They got right of way – he can’t refuse them. ’ Tisn’t worth the hassle, ’cos they won’t go away. Easier just to let them in. They walk right through the farm. Come back through, when they’re done ramblin’. No way he’s goin’ to see nothin’ till next mornin’, and I could’ve put them up by then.’

‘Give him half a dozen strangers to worry about at once?’ Mike shook his head. ‘ No,’ he said. ‘ It’s too risky.’

Her face fell. ‘But it would make him believe that someone can get right past his cameras and kill him any time they want,’ she said. ‘Please, Mr McQueen.’

‘No,’ he repeated, firmly. ‘ These cameras pan and scan. You’d get caught: He shook his head at her through the heavy cigar smoke that hung in the air between them. ‘No,’ he said again.

‘I wouldn’t get caught,’ she said scornfully. ‘ You think I can’t dodge a few cameras? And he’d be scared, Mr McQueen. He would.’

‘Not scared enough. It wouldn’t make him sell up.’

‘But he thinks someone’s out to get him,’ she said. ‘And closed-circuit TV don’t come cheap. So what when
it
don’t work? What next? Guard dogs? Security men? They all cost money. He must be gettin’ close to his limit. Just needs nudgin’, maybe.’

‘And what makes you think this road is important enough to me to help you do the nudging?’

She sat back. ‘You don’t want a
road
,’ she said. ‘You want Bernard’s land. Trouble is, you’re buildin’ an estate, and you
need
a road. So if he don’t give in soon, you’ll have to give up.’

Mike nodded acknowledgement of that, a little surprised at her neat summing up of his situation. ‘ You’re right,’ he said. ‘Work has to start on a road by the beginning of August. And if he’s still hanging on by the end of July, I
am
going to have to take the other route.’

‘And I’d lose my gamble,’ she said. ‘Reckon we both would. You goin’ to let him win without a fight?’

He had fought. So had she. But sometimes you had to accept defeat. ‘ I don’t know how he’s made it this far,’ he said. ‘ But he has, and I don’t think two more months will break him.’

‘
Might
break him,’ said Rachel. ‘If he’s payin’ for all sorts of security, he must be gettin’ in deeper and deeper. Maybe the next lot’d do for him.’

He still shook his head, but he knew that he would do it for her. She could persuade him to do anything, and had, with that voice, that golden, shining hair, and those dark eyebrows and dark-lashed blue eyes, and that long dimple when she smiled her slow smile, as she was doing now. Besides, her visits to him had brought him back to life, to an extent that he would not have believed; even getting Bailey’s land seemed less important than it had. But it was still very important to her that Bailey sold, and he might as well give her a last throw of the dice.

He smiled back, a little reluctantly. ‘All right, pet,’ he said. ‘You’ve talked me into it.’ He sighed his disapproval of his own actions, put down his cigar, and switched on the computer. ‘Again,’ he added.

Judy’s image appeared on the television, uncharacteristically windswept, slightly muddy and very wet.

Lloyd smiled. He called her his gun dog sometimes, because she positively pointed when she got on to anything in an investigation. And surely gun dogs were
supposed
to he wet and muddy on occasion? He listened as she gave coolly professional answers to Curtis Law’s questions, as he had known she would, and sneaked a look at her as she watched herself on television, saw the slight flush in her cheeks.

They were in her flat, which was highly unusual, but it had been the only way he was going to get to see her watch herself on television for the first time. He resisted coming to her flat very often; it seemed to him to be sanctioning their separate lives. But she had refused point-blank to come home with him this evening, so he had turned up here just before her debut, relieving her of the remote control as she had threatened to turn off the TV.

He and Judy had been involved, one way or another, for twenty years, and for the last seven or so he had been trying to get her to move in with him without success. She had agreed, after a long campaign, to marry him when he retired from the job, but he still wasn’t convinced she would move out of her flat even then.

He got his first look at Bailey, a saturnine man with a face like granite, who did indeed communicate one word at a time. And then he got his first look at Mrs Bailey, and discovered that it wasn’t just the chance of TV stardom that he had missed. ‘You didn’t tell me about her, did you?’ he said, his voice accusing.

Judy glanced at him sideways. ‘I wanted you to see her for yourself,’ she said. ‘So you’d understand.’

‘Understand what?’

‘Why the next death threat’s going to come from me,’ she said, turning to face him. ‘You ever do that to me again and I’ll kill you.’

Lloyd really didn’t know what he’d done this time. ‘What? What did I do to you?’

‘When I met her I felt – and looked – a complete idiot.’

Lloyd frowned, then his brow cleared, as he realized. ‘You
weren’t
wearing the wellies!’ he said, delightedly.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘ I’m standing there looking like a refugee from a Marx Brothers film, and
she—’
She pointed to the television. ‘
She
gets out of a BMW sports car!’

‘You can’t blame me for that,’ Lloyd protested, and looked again at Mrs Bailey, trying to analyse what it was about her. Item by item, Olivia-style, her face was like anyone else’s. ‘
Item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin …
’ Rachel Bailey’s eyes were blue, if Judy’s television was to be believed, and she was beautiful, certainly. She had a wonderful smile. But there was something much more than that there.

They’d given it names over the years. It. Sex appeal.
Je ne sais quoi
. It was something that both men and women saw, and recognized, and found very attractive. Something the camera loved. It couldn’t be acquired. And whatever it was, Mrs Bailey had it. He stared at the screen, mesmerized by this goddess who chose to live in the back of beyond with someone like Bailey.

‘What on earth does she see in him?’ he asked.

‘I’ll give you three guesses.’

Lloyd smiled. ‘What a cynical person you are. She’s probably deeply in love with him.’

‘It’s a weird set-up,’ Judy said. ‘She hasn’t got a key to her own front gate. He talks to her the same way he talks to his dog. She looks like that, and she behaves like a nineteenth-century serving-girl. She fetches his shoes. Takes off his muddy boots for him. Washes them.’

‘See? That’s a labour of love,’ said Lloyd, with a grin. ‘ If I’d been there, I’d have cleaned the mud off yours with a gladsome heart.’

Judy left the room. When she came back, a pair of shoes caked with a thin layer of dried mud dropped in his lap.

‘Then you can clean them,’ she said.

Not bad, thought Jack Melville, when he appeared on the screen. Not bad.

Terri smiled at him. ‘You look good on TV,’ she said.

Yes, he’d thought that himself, immodestly. Maybe he could interest
Aquarius 1830
in giving him a regular spot on stocks and shares, to explain them to the masses – give them tips on buying and selling. After all, lots of them owned shares in this and that now that everything had been privatized. He’d give that some thought. It would do no harm to think about the odd income supplement.

‘And I liked the bit about roads being a necessary evil,’ she said. ‘Shows we’re not all fanatics.’

The acceptable face of anti-road campaigning. But for how long? If the road did go through the woodland they would get the mob here, chaining themselves to trees, lying down in front of the earth movers, looking for a fight with the security men.

It occurred to him later, as they sat down to dinner, and he was entertained to the iniquities of civilization, that Terri would undoubtedly support them, might even join them. But they wouldn’t win. They never did; he’d explained that to her when she and her conservationist friends had made a fuss about McQueen’s development in the first place. He told her again, now. All fanatics did was alienate people, he said.

And she said that if it wasn’t for fanatics, women still wouldn’t have the vote. Come to that, most men wouldn’t. Just people like him. If it wasn’t for fanatics, wrongs would never be righted. Fanatics brought publicity to a cause, and non-fanatics gradually realized that something had to be done.

He hoped he wasn’t going to discover at this late stage that he was married to a fanatic, however worthy they were. She had remained on the fringes of fanaticism thus far, and during her history of campaign and opposition and demonstration she had had the odd brush with the law, a concept for which she had no little contempt. She admired even less its administrators and enforcers, but basically it had been nice, middle-class, hobbyist rebellion, and he wanted it to stay that way. He didn’t want her to go off and live up a tree in Bluebell Wood.

But she might.