The Shape of Snakes (44 page)

Sam stepped forward angrily but I shook my head at him. This was my fight and I'd waited a long time for it. "If you want a slanging match, Libby, then I'm happy to oblige ... Sam and Jock, too, I should imagine. But if you're as desperate to get away as you say then I suggest we sort these statements."

She hated her position of weakness, but she had the sense to force a smile. "All right. What do you want to know?"

"Which is correct? That you'd had a bath and were doing the laundry when Sam arrived? Or that you'd done the cooking and were watching television?"

She shook her head in convincing perplexity. "I honestly don't know," she said slowly. "It's so long ago I've forgotten most of the details. I just wrote down what I normally did at that time-cooking then catching the news-but if Sam's positive-?" She broke off to look at him. "Do you remember it that well?"

"Yes."

She was disconcerted by the bluntness of his answer. "I don't see how you can. It's not as if it was the only time you came to the house looking for sex."

"No," he agreed, "but it was the
last
time ... and I'd told you it was going to be the last time over the phone that afternoon. I said I wanted to talk to you about ending the affair without destroying everyone in the process. And I was furious when you draped yourself all over me the minute I came through the door, saying you'd had a bath in my honor and were washing sheets so you'd be able to replace our dirty ones on the bed before Jock came home. You can't have forgotten that, Libby. You told me I was frightening you because I said I'd do you some damage if you didn't take your hands off me immediately."

She gave a small laugh. "Oh, well ... if that's how you want to play it ... it's no skin off my nose. What does it matter what I was doing, anyway?" She shifted her gaze back to me. "We'll go with Sam's version. Does that make you happy?"

I nodded.

"Then you're a fool."

"Maybe." I crossed my arms and studied the point of my shoe, in no hurry to go on.

"Is that all there is?" she said indignantly. "Did you make me come all this way just so you could feel better about your husband's cheating?"

"Not quite," I said without rancor. "There's a major question mark over the time of Sam's arrival. He says 7:45, you say 6:30."

She frowned, as if trying to remember. "Okay, split the difference," she said helpfully. "Make it 7. Neither of us can be that precise after twenty years."

"Sam can," I countered mildly. "He's worked out his timing rather more accurately than you have ... and there's no way he could have reached you before a quarter to eight. If you calculate his walk from the office to the tube, the average time of the train journey, plus the walk from Richmond station to Graham Road, it's impossible for him to have done that trip in under an hour and a quarter. Which means 7:45 has to be the agreed time because he didn't leave work until 6:30."

Her hands moved impatiently in her lap. "How do you know that? Why should Sam's memory of the time he left his office be any better than mine of the time he arrived?"

"Because I'm not going by Sam's memory," I told her. "I was so suspicious of him after he and Jock made their statements that I checked with his office. I hoped I could get some proof that he was lying about the time he reached Graham Road because I knew the security guard clocked everyone out at the end of the day to make sure the building was empty before he locked up. I persuaded him to let me have a photocopy of the register for 14.11.78." I nodded toward the rucksack at my feet. "It's in there with 18:30 against Sam's name."

Her eyes dropped immediately to the bag but she didn't say anything.

"So we're agreed that 7:45 was the time Sam arrived?" I repeated.

She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. "I can't see what difference it makes. All we did was talk."

"Yes, that's what you both say. Your version is that you talked for two and a half hours. His is that you talked for an hour."

She shrugged. "I didn't keep track."

"But you disagree over how the conversation went. Sam says he gave you an ultimatum-either the affair had to end or he'd come clean with me that night. You say it was you who delivered the ultimatum."

She cast a malicious glance in Sam's direction. "He can't say anything else," she said, "not if he wants you to believe I draped myself all over him when he came through the door."

I smiled slightly. "But that's the whole point, Libby. After the show you put on when he arrived, Sam expected you to be difficult ... but you weren't. You said you'd leave him alone ... no more hanging around outside his office ... no more demands on his time ... and the only quid pro quo was that he keep his mouth shut so that Jock wouldn't have an excuse to divorce you."

''Which suggests it was me who delivered the ultimatum, doesn't it?"

"If that were true, why was Sam so keen to accept it?"

Her eyes narrowed warily as she tried to see the point I was making. "What makes you think he was?"

I shrugged. "Because he couldn't sign up to your fabricated alibi quick enough. He was even happy to rope Jock into the lie if it meant he could distance himself from you. Not that your husband minded," I said with an ironic glance in Jock's direction, "because he didn't want his Tuesday evenings with Sharon made public. But why would Sam go along with it unless he had something to gain? There were any number of reasons he could have given for being in your house that night-none of which were remotely suspicious. Looking for Jock, being one."

"Why ask me?" she demanded. "Sam's the one who lied. All I did was tell the truth, which was that I'd been at home all evening, waiting for my husband. And I didn't have to pretend I was alone either because the police made that assumption themselves. It's not my responsibility if Sam decided to sign a statement saying he was at your place when he wasn't."

"Except he says you didn't give him any choice. According to him, you phoned him at his office the next morning to say the police were asking about people's movements the previous night because they were looking for anyone who'd seen Annie. You then told him you'd dug him out of a hole by saying he and Jock had been at our house from 7:45 and it was down to him to persuade Jock to support the story. You said I'd never suspect he'd been with you if it was your husband who gave him an alibi. And you were right, I didn't."

"This is Sam's version, presumably?" she murmured sarcastically.

"Yes."

She glanced at my rucksack again. "And there's no statement from an earwigging telephone operator to back it up?"

"No."

"Then
you
can believe what
you
like, and the police can believe what
they
like." she said indifferently. "Sam's always going to put his own gloss on it-he wouldn't be human if he didn't-but he's the one who lied and I'm the one who told the truth. And I'm damned if I'll let him put the blame for his perjury on to me."

I nodded as if I agreed with her. "Fair enough, but you'll need to be ready for police questions about who proposed what and when because Sam's revised statement says the ideas came from you-in particular his and Jock's alleged sighting of Annie at 7:45." I paused. "According to Sam, that was your suggestion. You told him the police wanted proof that she was staggering about in the road earlier in the evening, and if he gave it to them they'd call it an accident and the whole bloody mess would go away."

I was lying, of course-Sam had never denied that the reason he mentioned Annie was to get himself out of the hole he'd dug with me when he told me she was drunk-but Libby didn't have a monopoly on invention, and it was fascinating to see how rapidly her control deserted her when she was accused of something she hadn't done. In a horrible sort of way, she reminded me of Maureen as she hissed and spat her furious denials. We were all shits ... ganging up on her because we didn't like her ... making Sam out to be the victim ... trying to shove responsibility on to her...

"Why would I have suggested anything so bloody stupid?" she finished. "Supposing the police hadn't believed Sam and Jock? Supposing we'd all had to admit what we'd really been doing that night? Why would I tell him to say he'd seen Annie just before the one period in the whole evening when we both had a cast-iron alibi? It's ridiculous. They'd think we were in collusion to cast suspicion away from ourselves. I'd never saddle myself with anything so unnecessary."

I studied her for a moment. "But why would you even worry about collusion?" I asked curiously. "Surely all you knew when you phoned Sam the next morning was that Annie had died outside our house at 9:30? How does that make mention of her stupid and unnecessary?"

She sobered rapidly. "Sam told me you were saying it was murder."

"Not true," Sam countered fiercely. "I was so ashamed of leaving the poor woman in the gutter that I steered clear of the whole blasted subject. All you and I discussed that morning was how to avoid saying that I'd been with you."

She gave an angry smile. "Then maybe I'm talking with hindsight, but it's hardly the point at issue. You're accusing me of inventing an absurd lie when anyone who focused attention on themselves by saying they'd seen Annie that night was a fool ... particularly if they were trying to hide an affair.
You
may be that kind of fool, Sam, but
I'm
certainly not."

"That's very true," I said before Sam could fire off again. "I've always thought how clever you were to keep your story simple, claim absolute ignorance and offer no alibi at all. All you had to say was:
I can't help you ... I was home alone from five o 'clock ... didn 't hear anything ... didn 't see anything ... didn't go anywhere.
You could repeat that till you were blue in the face because there was no one to contradict you except Sam. And once you'd muzzled him, you were safe as houses, because if the police
had
caught you out in a lie, you'd have shrugged and said, you were only trying to keep the affair secret."

"I didn't need an alibi," she said.

"No," I agreed, "but only because no one saw you with Annie at 6:30. I presume you bumped into each other in the road, and she started calling you a 'dirty tart' again. But why the hell did you have to go out at all, Libby? What was it for? To buy some booze in the hopes of putting Sam in a better mood? Or maybe you needed it yourself because you were boiling mad about being given the elbow? Is that why you lost your temper with Annie so quickly? Because you were angry that Sam had made it clear he'd rather stay with his wife than play stud to a bored tart who hadn't got the gumption to get up off her backside and find an identity for herself that didn't involve exploiting men? Why couldn't you stay in your sordid little bed and weep for your own inadequacies instead of killing Annie because she dared to point them out to you?"

Caution smoothed the planes of her face turning it into a practiced mask. "Don't be ridiculous," she said. "What's 6:30 got to do with anything?"

I took a printout of her e-mailed statement from my pocket. "It's the time you gave in here, so presumably it's important."

She made another dismissive gesture. "I've already said I'll go with Sam's version, not mine. Are you going to crucify me for making a mistake?"

"Your worst mistake was to have a bath and start washing your clothes," I said, "but I suppose you had her blood on you. The postmortem photographs prove you went for her like a madwoman."

"Oh, for God's sake!" she said wearily. "I assumed Sam and I were going to make love, so of course I had a bath. And it wasn't my clothes I was washing-it was sheets."

I tapped the e-mail. "Then why didn't you put that in here? Why pretend otherwise?"

She managed a creditable laugh. "Because I forgot. In any case, I wouldn't have let Sam in at all if I'd had anything to hide."

"You couldn't afford not to. He'd already told you over the phone that he was going to confess everything to me that evening if you didn't agree to end it."

"It was over anyway. Why should I care?"

I looked at Sam. "Because you were afraid he'd tell me Annie knew about the affair. He says she was always accosting you in the street calling you a 'dirty tart.'" I touched my toe to the rucksack. "There's a letter in here from Michael Percy, describing how you lashed out at her with your shopping bag and ended up on the ground, arse over tit. And you wouldn't want me adding you to the list of people with grudges against Annie." I finished, "not if you'd just left her for dead in her house."

"I never set foot in that tip," she said in a remarkably steady voice, "then, or at any other time."

"Oh, yes, you did," I told her. "You pushed in behind her as she unlocked her door because she'd had the bloody nerve to call you what you were-a cheap tart." I took the photograph of the brass artillery shell in Beth Slater's sitting room from my pocket. "Is this what you used?" I asked, showing it to her. "It's the first thing that would have come to hand because Annie kept it in her hallway. What did you do? Yank out the peacock feathers and bring it down on the back of her head with two hands so that she collapsed on her sitting-room floor? Then what? You lost your rag completely and beat her and kicked her until she lost consciousness? Do you dream about that, Libby? Do you wake up in a sweat every time you remember it?"

She stood up abruptly, sending her chair flying. "I don't have to listen to this," she said, reaching for her handbag.