The Young Widow (30 page)

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Authors: Cassandra Chan

BOOK: The Young Widow
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“You must have been very surprised,” said Bethancourt.
“Completely taken aback,” Maddie agreed. “I just stood there staring at him while he ranted on.” She chuckled. “Of course, what he was really trying to do was divert me from Kitty's tomatoes, and it worked beautifully. We never mentioned them again—although I've promised her to have another go at him tomorrow.”
Bethancourt grinned. “Good luck with it,” he said.
“Oh, I think he'll give in eventually, especially since he won't be able to get me off the subject again so easily. I have to admit that when he said he'd seen Annette leaving, all thoughts of tomatoes fled my mind completely. At first I was furious, thinking the police were trying to cover up for her, and then I realized it was a matter of when he'd seen her leave. So almost at once I asked him whether it was before or after I'd called down to him, and he looked very surprised and said, ‘That's right, you said good morning. I'd forgotten.'
Which,” she added exasperatedly, “is just like him. It's a wonder he didn't forget seeing Annette as well.”
“And of course you remembered perfectly well what time it was.”
“I did. Because I recollect thinking it was taking me longer than I thought to answer those letters, and wondering if I'd have them done before lunch at the rate I was going.”
If she was lying, Bethancourt could not tell. Her eyes met his without hesitation and he could see nothing in them beyond glee at having been proved right in the end.
“Well,” he said, “whether McAllister ever plants them or not, Kitty's tomatoes have already served us all well.”
 
 
Gibbons rubbed his hands
down his pant legs. He could not remember ever having sweaty palms before, but then he had never felt so awful. The effort to keep his expression blank while emotions more powerful than any he had ever felt before raged inside him was coming near to breaking him.
Annette was crying now, answering Carmichael's questions in a choked voice while the tears streamed down her cheeks and her eyes held the hurt, bewildered look of a wounded animal.
Gibbons was not far from tears himself and he wondered how much more he could take before he, too, broke down. He looked at the clock and was appalled to find they had only been at it for two hours. It seemed an eternity.
 
 
Bethancourt stood at the
edge of the terrace and stared across the expanse of the flagstones at the side door. He crouched down beside the tulips, riotous with color in the sunlight, and peered up between the balusters of the terrace railing. The door was still visible, but no one coming out of it would notice him here. He sighed and sat
down abruptly in the grass. From what he could see, the story McAllister and Maddie told fit perfectly. Maddie had reason to lie about the time, and she might have done so. But she equally well might be telling the truth. There was no help here for Gibbons.
“Here!” McAllister's shout broke into Bethancourt's thoughts and he turned to see the gardener waving wildly at Cerberus, who was engaged in sniffing along the hedge. The dog's head jerked up and he cocked it to one side, apparently trying to make sense of McAllister's energetic gesticulations.
Bethancourt rose hastily and called his pet to heel.
“I'm terribly sorry, Mr. McAllister,” he said, going to meet the gardener. “Was he bothering something? I should have kept a better eye on him.”
McAllister was eyeing the dog suspiciously.
“Dogs don't belong in gardens,” he said truculently. “They piss all over and kill the plants.”
Bethancourt privately doubted that such a green and robust hedge would die quite so precipitously, but he merely reiterated his apology and said he would keep Cerberus close.
McAllister grunted and transferred his suspicious gaze to Bethancourt. “I remember you,” he said. “You're one of them police. I suppose you've come to hear the whole thing again.” He drew a deep and long-suffering sigh and, before Bethancourt could respond, strode over to the tulip bed, stopping not far from where Bethancourt had been sitting. “I was working here,” said McAllister rapidly. He pointed up at the house. “That's Miss Wellman's window there. She opened it and called down good morning. I waved back and then finished spreading the last of a bag of mulch. I stood up to get another bag, which was lying handy, right there.” He pointed again, this time to a spot on the grass. “As I turned around with it, I see Mrs. Berowne coming out of the door there and going off down those steps. And that was it,” he finished, glaring at Bethancourt.
“That's what happened and that's all that happened and I'm sorrier than I can say that I ever mentioned it.”
“It's all very clear,” said Bethancourt soothingly. “Maddie waved to you and a few moments later you saw Annette leaving.”
McAllister gave him a disgusted look. “Not her,” he said witheringly. “It was t'other one.”
For an instant, Bethancourt's mind failed to understand what McAllister had said, and he stared at him blankly. Then, “What did you say?” he demanded sharply. “The other one? You mean it was Marion Berowne you saw come out of the house and not Annette?”
“That's right. And that's what I've always said,” he added stubbornly.
Bethancourt's mind fled back to that first interview with the gardener. He could not remember clearly, but he thought the man had simply said, “Mrs. Berowne.” Kitty and Mary Simmons always said, “Mr. Paul” or “Mrs. Marion” to differentiate the younger Berownes from the older, but apparently McAllister did not bother, letting the context of his remarks make the distinction for him.
Bethancourt felt as though he were in a dream. It was totally impossible that a whole series of police detectives had simply assumed McAllister was referring to Annette. And yet, he had himself made the assumption because he knew that Annette had indeed left the house by that door.
“You're sure?” he said. “You're sure it was Marion Berowne, the dark-haired one who lives in Little House and is married to Paul?”
McAllister looked at him as if he had gone mad. “Of course I'm sure,” he said indignantly. “There's nothing wrong with my sight. I need spectacles for reading, but not for anything else, and it's not as if those two look alike.”
“No,” agreed Bethancourt, still in a daze, “they don't.”
McAllister was frowning. “Did Miss Wellman think I meant Mrs. Berowne?”
“Yes,” said Bethancourt, abruptly recovering. “Yes, I believe she did. Thank you, Mr. McAllister—I've got to go. Come, Cerberus.”
And he took off at a run, leaving the gardener staring after him.
 
 
It was an enormous
relief to Gibbons when the constable came and beckoned him surreptitiously out of the interview room. Relief mixed with guilt that he must leave Annette to struggle on alone. He knew she was watching him as he left.
Outside, he passed his hand over his face and drew a deep breath.
“What is it?” he asked.
“A phone call, sir,” said the constable, clearly a little nervous at having interrupted such an important interview. “I wouldn't have intruded, but he said it was urgent. A man named Bethancourt.”
“All right,” said Gibbons, pushing away from the wall. “I'll take it over there.”
Bethancourt's voice was excited, but to Gibbons's weary brain it seemed to come from a great way off.
“Phillip?” he said. “I can't talk long—I have to get back there.”
“What I've got changes everything,” said Bethancourt. “McAllister never saw Annette leave the house at all.”
“What?” said Gibbons, sounding only vaguely puzzled. “But he said he did, Phillip—he's said so from the very beginning.”
“No, he didn't,” insisted Bethancourt. “He only said he saw Mrs. Berowne. But he didn't mean Annette, Jack. He meant Marion Berowne. It was she he saw, not Annette at all.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line.
“Jack? Did you hear me?”
“Marion Berowne?” repeated Gibbons. “Oh, my God. Where are you, Phillip?”
“At Hurtwood Hall. I'm calling from the car.”
“Stay there.”
Gibbons rang off abruptly and ran back to the interview room without even pausing to assimilate what he had been told. The news seemed hardly credible to him, but it was an excuse to stop the interview and by this time he would have taken any excuse at all to do so. He stuck his head in the door and said, “Sir? I'm afraid I need to see you a moment.”
Everyone turned to stare at him, which told him that his emotions were plain to be read on his face, but he did not care.
Carmichael was surprised, but nevertheless said, “Of course, Sergeant,” and suspended the interview verbally for the benefit of the recorder. Then he rose and came out into the hall, shutting the door firmly behind him, and looked at his sergeant curiously.
“What is it, lad?” he asked. “You seem all of-a-to-do.”
“I suppose I am, sir,” said Gibbons. “Phillip Bethancourt just rang. He went down to Hurtwood Hall this morning to say good-bye to Kitty Whitcomb and ran into McAllister. He says McAllister claims he never saw Annette Berowne leaving the house, that it was Marion Berowne he saw.”
“Marion Berowne?” repeated Carmichael, thunderstruck. “Is Bethancourt sure?”
“He says he is, sir.”
Carmichael frowned. “I remember talking to McAllister that first day. I could have sworn he just said ‘Mrs. Berowne.' And I distinctly remember that all the other servants referred to her as ‘Mrs. Marion' or ‘Mrs. Paul.'”
“That's how I remember it, sir,” agreed Gibbons. “I suppose McAllister could have meant Marion Berowne instead of Annette, but at the time all I remember thinking was that we had confirmation that Annette Berowne did leave the way she said she did at some point.”
Carmichael's frown deepened. He re-entered the interview room and said, “Forgive me, Mrs. Berowne, but I've been called away. Constable, would you please escort Mrs. Berowne and her solicitor back to a holding cell?”
“Yes, sir,” said the policewoman who had been brought in to witness the interview.
Annette looked confused, and her solicitor frowned, but Carmichael's attention was already on the case file lying open on the table. Gibbons smiled at Annette as she passed him, but dared give her no clearer sign, and then they were gone and Carmichael was beckoning him over.
“Here's McAllister's statement,” he said as the WPC closed the door behind her. “‘I saw Mrs. Berowne leave the house and go down the terrace steps along the path.' That's what you wrote, Sergeant, and that's what I remember.”
“Yes, sir, and I certainly thought he meant Annette Berowne at the time.”
“But look here, lad. Just before that, McAllister said that Mr. Berowne came along quite early and spoke to him. I remember that, too, because I thought he meant Geoffrey Berowne and asked if he didn't mean Mr. Paul Berowne.”
Gibbons was nodding excitedly. “That's true, sir. I remember it as well. What does Commander Andrews's report say?”
Carmichael turned back the pages until he came to the reports that had been given to them when they took over the case.
“The same thing,” he said after a moment. “That James McAllister saw Annette Berowne leaving the house that morning, but of course that's just paraphrased from the actual interview.” He leaned back. “I can't think why no one questioned this before. Even Maddie Wellman—she may have lied about the time, but I'm as certain as I can be that she wasn't concealing Marion Berowne's activities from us.”
“I know why I didn't, sir,” said Gibbons. “It was because that's what I was expecting to hear. Mrs. Berowne—I mean, Annette—had already told us she left the house that way and walked through the garden to the footpath and I knew from the case file that McAllister
said he'd seen her do so. So when I heard him say it myself, it never occurred to me to question it.”
“I suppose that's what was in my mind, as well,” said Carmichael and he grimaced. “This is one case where great minds do not think alike. I wonder how Bethancourt came to discover it.”
“I don't know, sir,” said Gibbons. “I came to report to you as soon as he'd told me. But he's standing by the phone—I thought you'd want to speak to him yourself.”
“So I do,” said Carmichael, closing the case file and rising. “We've got a lot to do here, Gibbons, but let's take first things first. I'll talk to Bethancourt and then we'd best check with Gorringe and Andrews before we leave here to see McAllister. And while we're about it, we can be thinking about what motive Marion Berowne could possibly have to kill her father-in-law.”

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