Remains to be Seen (18 page)

Peach looked at Michelle Naylor thoughtfully, assessing her in the cool, detached way that CID officers cultivate, which the subjects of that assessment usually find disconcerting. This one apparently did not. She was small-boned and delicate, with tightly packed black curls and small bright eyes which were as dark as his own. She was pale, alert, observant; her movements were naturally quick. She was very pretty, in a reserved, feline sort of way. Mrs Naylor reminded him of a feral cat, which appears vulnerable but which is in fact very difficult to capture.

Peach had a feeling she had just delivered herself of a speech she had prepared in advance. He looked round at the high-ceilinged room, with its elegant chaise longue and its oil paintings on the wall, before he smiled at her and said, ‘Are you admitting that you are a little jealous of Mrs Cartwright's new and superior status? You seem to be suggesting that it has led to a cooling of relations between the two of you.'

‘Nothing has happened as far as I'm concerned. I'm suggesting that Sally might be conscious of her new status, not me. As I say, we are not encouraged to take account of such distinctions at Marton Towers. But it has sometimes seemed to me over the last year or so that Sally Cartwright – and possibly her husband as well, for all I know – were a little conscious of the position she had acquired here. That perhaps she thought it necessary to put a little distance between herself and people like me whom she sometimes had to direct during the day.'

‘Your husband didn't mention this to us when we spoke to him yesterday.'

Michelle found to her surprise that she was now quite enjoying this exchange. It was like a rally at table tennis, where your opponent played a good shot and you tried a return which was as good or better. Careful, girl, she told herself. Don't get too excited: remember that in this game you're playing against the fuzz.

She forced herself to take her time, then gave them a fond, indulgent smile at the mention of her husband. ‘James is an innocent, Detective Chief Inspector Peach.' She relished her control as she rolled out his full title. ‘My husband probably wouldn't be very conscious of the subtle nuances of status which some women feel. And he's shut away in his kitchen for most of the time. So long as things are going well in there, he hardly notices anyone else. Perhaps that's why he's a good chef: I've noticed before that chefs are often only conscious of their immediate surroundings.'

She was a cool one, this. Peach, irritated by her control, gave an almost imperceptible nod to the woman at his side, and Lucy Blake said quietly, ‘Did you find this new attitude in Mrs Cartwright exasperating?'

Michelle transferred her attention to this woman whose beauty was almost the opposite of hers. She eyed the striking chestnut, the wide green eyes beneath the forehead which had a suggestion of freckles left over from adolescence, the curves of the body which were such a contrast to her own slender grace. If you're going to try the ‘soft cop after the hard cop' routine, it won't work with me, my girl, she vowed.

Michelle said sharply, ‘I didn't find Sally's attitude to me exasperating, no. I'm not even sure this notion of her new status existed. That is what I said in the first place about it. If you're going to follow it up, I'd rather you didn't tell her that the thought came from me.'

‘We treat everything we are told as confidential, Mrs Naylor. We shall make our own minds up about Mrs Cartwright, in due course. Did you lose much in the fire?'

Michelle was shocked by the sudden switch of ground, but she did not show it. ‘No. We were told to get out and leave things to the professionals, but we had a few minutes to rescue whatever we wanted. I was sorry to see the furniture go: there was some good stuff, from the heyday of the house, but it wasn't ours. And I try not to be sentimental about objects.'

Lucy Blake could believe that. This didn't seem like a woman who would be sentimental about anything. She looked into the small-featured, pretty face beneath the frame of tight black curls. ‘And Mrs Cartwright was evacuated with you to the hotel?'

‘Yes. There was great confusion, as you'd expect. We were completely thrown by the police raid on the house and the arrests, to start with. We were all in the main house discussing what had happened to Mr Crouch when the news of the fire came.'

‘And how do you think that started?'

‘I've no idea. There's some pretty old wiring in the stabling block. Much of it dated from about the nineteen fifties, Neil Cartwright thought. I think he was planning to do some re-wiring, next winter, when things were quiet on the estate. He was away from the place last Wednesday, of course: or so we thought at the time. But I expect the fire-service people will come up with some ideas about how the blaze started.'

‘When did you last see Neil Cartwright?'

Michelle took her time, pretended to think, as if the question had come as a surprise to her. ‘I think it must have been on the Friday before he went off on leave. He came in for lunch in the main house. I remember it because he had a twig in his hair from a tree he'd been working on at the back of the grounds, and the men teased him about it.' She paused, her small, sharp-featured face grave with concentration. ‘I don't think I saw him again after that. He had a week off from the Saturday, you know. He was going off to see his sister, somewhere in Scotland, I think.'

Lucy wondered how much of the vagueness was genuine and how much was calculated. ‘Where were you last Sunday, Mrs Naylor?'

‘You're asking me to account for myself?' Michelle Naylor wrinkled her nose in amusement at the idea, looking more feline than ever.

‘We shall be asking everyone to account for themselves, unless we have a confession.'

‘And we shall give special attention to those with criminal records, of course.' This woman was far too calm: Peach was glad to come back in to the interrogation with a barb.

‘A conviction for shoplifting when I was a kid? It's a long step from that to murder.'

‘True. But you weren't really such a kid: you were nineteen at the time, and it was an expensive piece of jewellery you attempted to steal. Perhaps you were lucky not to get a custodial sentence, in view of your previous record of thefts.'

She was stung, and for the first time she let it show. ‘That's what the magistrate said at the time, and I took notice of him. I've gone eleven years without even being questioned by you lot since then.'

‘Until now, that is, when you find yourself involved in a murder investigation. So would you answer DS Blake's question, please: where were you last Sunday?'

‘That all you've got for a time of death? A whole day to cover? It's not going to be easy for you, is it?' Michelle couldn't resist letting her derision show, in a little twist of the conversational knife which she knew she should have resisted. ‘But of course I'll account for myself. As an innocent party, I'm only too anxious to assist the police to find the culprit, you see. I went to Tesco's with my husband on Sunday morning. I visited my mother and father in Bolton on Sunday afternoon. I was back in our cottage in the stable block by around seven o'clock, I'd say, and I was there for the rest of the evening. With James, of course. I'm sure my husband will confirm that for you, if you need it.'

Alibis provided by spouses were always suspect, but they were often also the most difficult ones to shake. Peach said, ‘Who do you think killed Neil Cartwright, Mrs Naylor?'

‘I've no idea. Someone from outside this place, I should think. I can't think that anyone working at the Towers would have done it. We're not murderers here, whatever you might think about people with minor criminal records.'

She was almost truculent with them, as the adrenaline coursed through her veins. They seemed to be watching for a reaction when they told her that they'd probably need to speak to her again, which she took as a confession of failure on their part. Then they took their leave of her.

Michelle went out of the suite with them and watched them walk down the wide staircase into the panelled reception hall of the mansion. From the long window in the huge first floor room, she watched the police car move sedately down the drive and disappear at the gatehouse.

The interview had gone well, she decided. She was surprised how well, and how when she had expected to be nervous she had taken them on and held her own. There would be some kind of reaction in her body now. After all that tension, she was sure she could actually feel her pulse slowing. She went and looked in the heavily framed antique mirror in the next room of the suite, noting how much colour and animation there was now in her normally pale face.

And then, quite unexpectedly, she burst into tears.

M
onday morning. Sergeant Jack Clark of the Drugs Squad was not yet back at work. He'd been debriefed and had a short, unproductive session with the police psychiatrist. Then he'd been told to take at least two weeks off, after his intensive period of undercover work in the squat, to take things easy and have a complete rest.

Go off abroad, they'd said, if you fancy it. Rehabilitation, that was the word. Do anything you liked to cut yourself off from that strange life you had compelled yourself to lead for the last few months.

But it wasn't as easy as that.

He'd been all right at home for the first twenty-four hours. He'd slept the clock round, on the first night in his own bed. And he'd enjoyed just lazing about the place for the first day. He'd strolled down to the corner shop for a newspaper, where he'd been greeted like a long-lost friend by the Asian proprietor. He'd explained that he'd been away ‘working in the south' for the last couple of months. Then he'd walked through the park on a crisp March morning, breathing deeply on the cool, clear air, watching the mothers and toddlers feeding the ducks, listening to the birdsong which was the herald of spring. Jack Clark had spent an hour savouring the innocence which surrounded him here, after the weeks of not daring to relax.

He'd even enjoyed resurrecting the ambience of a flat which had been empty for months. He'd lounged in the chair with his paper, made himself coffee at eleven, worked the microwave back into life for his lunchtime snack, created a small, deliberate untidiness upon the sterile surfaces of a home which had been unoccupied for so long.

It was four years since Jack's divorce. He was used to living alone by this time, he told himself. He made a cool, detached phone call to his ex-wife, who had another man now, to tell her that he was back in the land of the living. The call ended flatly, with him telling her what they had told each other a score of times before, that it was a blessing that there had been no children from their union.

By sundown, Jack Clark was bored. Worse than bored, if he was honest. He was beset by the relentless, gnawing knowledge that whatever he turned his hand to was no more than a diversion, an attempt to distract himself from more important concerns. And yet at the moment he had no important concerns: he was enjoying what his superintendent had called a well-earned rest. Except that he wasn't enjoying it at all.

By seven o'clock that night, Jack Clark knew that he was missing the danger which had driven his life for the last ten weeks. Knew that his life was incomplete without it. He despised himself for this strand in his personality, tried to convince himself that it was not in fact so, that this was a temporary, passing malaise. He had been warned that it would be an inevitable psychological consequence of the work he had undertaken as an undercover instrument in the necessary fight against an evil trade.

But Jack knew that his problems came from within, not from without. The super had told him that the squad needed people like him, that the unending war against the dangerous men who directed the illegal drugs trade could only be won with his help. But Jack knew that he needed that work even more than it needed him. He could never again take on a close relationship with a partner, because he was a loner who needed danger, who craved it as strongly as any addict craved his chosen drug.

He told himself that he had known this for some time now, that there was nothing new in this sombre recognition. But he was overtaken by a bleak and chilling loneliness.

He switched off the television which had flickered unseen in the corner of the room and picked up the
Evening Dispatch
. There had been a fire after the raid on Marton Towers which had been the triumphant consummation of his undercover mission. And amidst the desolation of the ruins, there had been the incinerated remains of a corpse. He read the bald details of the latest police press officer's handout, which confirmed that both arson and murder were suspected, though the two serious crimes were not necessarily connected. There were dangerous people up at the Towers, probably beyond the circle of the drugs barons he had helped to trap.

He felt a stirring of envy at the notion of danger. And he knew things: things which might just be helpful to the man looking for a killer. Jack spent ten minutes convincing himself of that. Then he rang Brunton CID section, and was told that the man in charge of the investigation was a Detective Chief Inspector Peach. Percy Peach, the station sergeant told him, as if it was a name everyone would know. Jack thought it was a ridiculous name for a detective, but he knew how people in the police service loved the simple pleasures of alliteration.

Jack Clark arranged to see DCI Percy Peach at nine o'clock the next morning.

Whilst Jack Clark was living through his edgy Monday, Percy Peach was enduring trials of another sort. Working undercover was the most dangerous assignment in the land, but at least men like Clark never had to deal with a Tommy Bloody Tucker.

‘Hope you enjoyed your Saturday night junket, sir,' said Peach.

Chief Superintendent Tucker said testily, ‘It wasn't a junket. It was a social occasion undertaken in the line of duty. I wouldn't expect you to understand that, Peach.'