“Thank you,” Taryn said, as though Lou had offered her sympathies. She hadn’t. Then another thing occurred to her: “Does he need anything?”
“I’ll make sure someone asks him. He might like a suit to wear in the morning.”
“Of course.”
Lou smiled. “We’re doing everything we can to minimize the stress of the situation, so try not to worry. But I’m afraid we’re running an investigation into a very serious offense. We need to establish exactly what happened as quickly as possible.”
“And you think my dad killed Polly?”
Lou’s eyes flicked up to meet Taryn’s. “What makes you say that?”
“You said he’d been arrested for murder . . .”
“He’s been charged with the murder of Barbara Fletcher-Norman.”
Taryn was confused again. “But I thought she killed herself? She drove herself over the edge of the quarry, didn’t she?”
“There are still a lot of questions we’re trying to answer.”
Taryn said, “He said something really strange to me, on the phone. He called last night to tell me he was being discharged from the hospital today, he asked me to come and pick him up . . . and we were talking about Barbara, and he said, ‘She liked to kill people.’ I didn’t know what he meant. I mean, I assumed he meant Polly, but even so . . . it was such a strange thing.”
“You’re sure he was talking about Barbara?”
Taryn didn’t answer.
Lou Smith leaned forward in her chair. “Taryn. I think it’s really, really important that I find Flora. Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”
11:14
It was only when she parked outside Yonder Cottage that Flora noticed her hands were shaking. She gripped the steering wheel tighter to see if that would help. Deep breaths. She needed to chill out. She needed to think.
But there was no time to think anymore.
She got out of the car and slammed the door behind her, setting off up the driveway. A moment later she was passing the stables. Behind them, in the paddock, Elki stood by the gate, chewing, watching her. The other horses were all out in the field with her, where she had left them this morning.
She carried on round the bend at the top of the driveway. Of course, she could have driven all the way up and parked outside the barn, but she needed a few moments—cold air on her face, the smell of the farm, a chance to get her bearings.
The door to the barn was open, the Land Rover parked outside. She walked in without hesitation, over to the office. Nigel was sitting inside, watching her approach through the glass panel in the door. He had a glass in his hand, whiskey already even though it wasn’t even lunchtime. His face was florid.
Flora did not knock, just opened the door and went in.
“You might as well sit down,” he said, after a moment.
She sat.
“You look worse than I thought you would,” he said. “Where did you sleep?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t sleep.”
“Figures.”
He offered her the bottle of whiskey and she took it, gulping it back in the hope that it would help, somehow give her the courage that she desperately needed.
“So,” he said. “What is it you want, Flora? I’m guessing you’re here because you want something.”
“I want to know what happened,” she said.
“It’s not what you think,” he said.
“Don’t tell me what I think!” Her anger was swift, out of nowhere. She tried to calm it again with a big gulp of whiskey, fire going down her throat. “Just—just tell me the truth, if you can.”
He took a deep breath in, his bright-blue eyes studying her. “Here’s the deal, then. I will tell you everything that happened that night. You will then go and get the items you removed from Petrie’s house last night and bring them back here. After that, we will decide how we can move on from this. Agreed?”
So he knew. Despite the pulse pounding in her head, the fear that this was all some sort of trick, Flora nodded. “Agreed.”
“There was a delivery that night. Something went wrong and it turned up here at the farm instead of the place where the driver should have gone.”
He didn’t continue for a moment, looking across Flora’s shoulder as though he was remembering it.
“A delivery of what? People?”
He didn’t answer the question, but carried on as though he hadn’t heard. “It was late, it was dark, I had them on my phone telling me to sort it out and I was getting angry because all of this should have been straightforward.”
“Who’s ‘them’?”
“Friends of mine. Believe me, that’s something you don’t want to know.”
He drank from his glass as though it were water. Flora passed him the bottle so he could refill his glass, and then accepted it back from him and drank some more, pretending she wasn’t trying to match him gulp for gulp. If he wanted an anesthetic against this awful discussion, so did she.
“What’s that got to do with Polly?”
“Polly had been out somewhere. The lorry was blocking the drive so she couldn’t get in and she drove round the other way, to the farmhouse, and walked back down through the yard. She saw me and came over, asked me what was going on. I told her it was a feed delivery that had come in the wrong way.”
He stopped and his eyes went up to the ceiling. Flora realized he was actually showing some emotion now. She knew how that felt: recalling Polly, remembering her alive. Every thought of her, walking, talking, breathing, smiling—it hurt like a blow to the face.
“She didn’t believe a word of it,” he said.
“I’m not surprised.”
“I told her to go back to the cottage and stay there, told her to go to bed. But she was, I don’t know, weird. She’d been crying and she was unsteady on her feet, as though she was drunk. And she was all dressed up. She looked . . . she looked . . .”
He put the glass down carefully, deliberately, on top of the papers on the desk and ran his hand across his face, through his hair.
“Then what happened?”
“She kept demanding to know what was going on. And I got the impression she didn’t even really give a shit, she just wanted someone to shout at. She wanted an argument. And the driver, the driver of the lorry, he’d been making phone calls, I’d been making phone calls. And then the Petrie boy turned up with some others. I’d sent him off to get some help, meaning he should find somewhere else for the lorry to park up overnight and do the handover, and instead of doing that the stupid little fucker had gone and got half of his crazy family. And everyone was standing around arguing, and Polly was there, arguing too, even though it had nothing at all to do with her. I kept thinking the neighbors were going to hear, that Brian or that mad wife of his would hear and call the police.”
A tear slid down Nigel’s cheek, and the sight of it was somehow more alarming than anything she’d seen or heard today.
“I could have done something,” he said. “I had no idea it would end up the way it did.”
He rubbed the tear away, sniffed. “Anyway, in the end she’d had enough and she went back to the cottage. We managed to reverse the lorry out, went ahead with the rendezvous in a different location. It took hours, during which she phoned and left a message on my voice mail to have a go at me all over again. I tried to call back, but there was no answer so I assumed she must have gone to bed. I went back to the farmhouse. I hadn’t realized Polly’s car was still parked outside. The keys were inside, so I drove it round to the cottage. All the lights were off and I walked back round and went in the house.”
He fell silent again.
The whiskey was making Flora’s lips feel numb, and asking questions felt like a chore, like an effort.
“That’s it?”
“Yes. Flora, I don’t know for sure what happened to Polly.”
“But you think it was one of the men who were here? One of your friends?”
“It??
?s possible, although I don’t know why. They’re fucked in the head, half of them off their brains on gear of one sort or another. I don’t think it was Petrie, unless one of his uncles told him to do it. He may be weird, but I don’t think he could cope with that level of violence without giving himself away afterwards.”
Flora thought about it. She thought about Petrie, the weaselly little shit, with his hands on Polly. Her brain was working better now. The alcohol, maybe. Gradually things were starting to make sense.
“You said . . . you said to that man, who was in here yesterday. You said that he’d seen something. You were talking about Petrie. You said, ‘You’d be mental too, if you’d seen what he’d seen.’ What was that all about?”
Nigel didn’t answer. He was swilling whiskey round his mouth as if it were mouthwash before swallowing it in big gulps. His glass, once again, was empty. He reached for the bottle, refilled his glass, and put it back on the table between them.
“Dad? What did you mean?”
“Petrie was acting up the next day. Excitable. I thought it was just because he’d had a late night. Then, when all the police were here in the afternoon he told me he’d seen all the blood.”
“What?”
“I asked him what he meant. He said he’d been in to see Polly, early. He used to pick her up on the way to the stables sometimes, did you know that? He said he’d gone in the back door and seen the blood. He said he’d been scared and had gone home for a few hours.”
“Dad, why didn’t you tell the police?”
“Oh, have a word with yourself, Flora. The kid knows way too much about the business. Think he’d just stick to what he’s told to say?”
“So what did you do?”
“What do you think? I told him he’d imagined it and sent him home.”
“He imagined it? Are you serious?”
Nigel laughed briefly. “I know. But it seemed to work. On Saturday I went round and had a long conversation with him and his dad, made our position clear. He’s been all right since then.”
There was another question she needed to ask, something that had been plaguing her for days.
“You know Mum thinks you’re Polly’s—”
“I know what your mother thinks. She’s got this idea in her head that I had an affair with Cassandra Leuchars and Polly was the result. Right?”
Flora nodded.
“I don’t know, is the honest answer. Cassandra told us all that Polly was conceived after she came back to the U.K., that she went and got herself pregnant thanks to some donor center, or whatever they call it. We didn’t see her again for nearly three years because they went off to the States and I didn’t think any more of it. Look, does it even matter?”
Her mouth dropped open. “Of course it fucking matters! Are you mad?”
“Flora,” he said. “Don’t raise your voice.”
“You were screwing her, Dad, and I was in love with her. She could have been your daughter! She could have been my sister!”
He sighed, so calm, so matter-of-fact. “It’s incredibly unlikely. I only slept with her mother once or twice, and believe me Cass Leuchars was sleeping with absolutely bloody everyone. And it’s not as if I wasn’t careful. Do you have any more questions, Flora, because this subject is now closed.”
Flora gritted her teeth. He’d taken advantage of Polly, hadn’t he? He might have told her that their relationship had been sexual only in the last few months, but why should she believe him? He might have been abusing her for years. They’d all taken advantage of her, hadn’t they? All the people she’d gotten involved with. They’d all been prepared to take whatever Polly gave, because she was generous and kind and loving and she had so much love it was spilling out of her, love and pleasure and desire. And none of them had been there when Polly needed them. None of them.
Not even Flora.
“We had a deal, Flora.” Nigel’s voice was perfectly calm. “Now I expect you to go and get me those items. Come straight back here and there will be no more said about it. Understand?”
She stood up, unsteadily. She was clearly in no fit state to drive, but he let her go. The air outside the barn was colder, the breeze bringing her back to life again. It wasn’t far to the studio. The chances were, she might pass only one or two cars on the way.
11:49
It was a relief, in the end.
They took Brian back to his cell and shut the door, locked it. It wasn’t silent, it wasn’t even quiet, he could hear shouting from somewhere further down the corridor, the officers laughing and joking at the desk, but it was good to be alone for a moment.
He hadn’t cried in years. He hadn’t cried when Barbara died, he hadn’t felt much need to cry with pain or self-pity when he’d been in the hospital, even though he’d felt plenty of both. But he cried in his cell. Shoulders shaking, tears squeezing from between tightly closed eyelids, face in his hands.
Just a few moments, that was enough. He pulled himself together quickly. Can’t go there, no point.
The cell door opened again and they brought him food, pasta with some sort of sauce, a bread roll, a yogurt, and a paper cup of water.
“All right, Brian?” the custody officer asked him. “Want any magazines, anything like that?”
He shook his head, accepting the tray onto the plastic mattress next to him.
“Can I see my daughter?”
“I’ll see if I can sort something out. But you’re feeling all right? You don’t need the nurse?”
The nurse—oh God, the nurse! He’d be perfectly happy if he never saw the woman again, heart attack or no heart attack.
The officer went away again. They’d already explained all the rules to him, what he could expect from them. He had been charged with the murder of his wife and he was to be taken to the Magistrate’s Court tomorrow morning. There was no likelihood of bail. Seeing the magistrate was going to be amusing, Brian thought. He knew most of them; some of them he counted among his close friends.
The food remained untouched next to him. It smelled odd, synthetic. Even the water, when he got close to it, had a metallic odor that put him off.
In the end, he had decided it would be better all round if he told the truth about what he’d done. He was so tired, in any case, so fed up with the whole thing. He could not even blame it on a momentary lapse of judgment because there had been so many of them over the years, starting with the first time he was unfaithful to his first wife, to Jean, Taryn’s mother. Because once you’d done it once, no point not doing it again, was there? If he’d remained faithful, he would never have misbehaved with Polly, he would never have met Suzanne, and when he’d argued with his wife and she had fallen, he would not have allowed himself to be persuaded that killing her instead of calling an ambulance was the best course of action.
Once the admission had been made, Simon McGrath, who had been almost jumping out of his seat, changed his stance toward damage limitation, told him exactly what he might expect and how he could still get off with a lighter sentence, particularly if there was evidence that he had been coerced into this course of action by his partner.
Tired of it, so tired. He listened to McGrath and nodded, and then went ahead and answered their questions anyway.
The woman who was doing most of the questioning, with the hint of a Brummie accent, did not give anything away. The man beside her straightened in his chair, flushed, and began to fidget as Brian explained what had happened, bit by bit. Every time they asked him a question in relation to Suzanne, that would have implicated her in any of it, he answered with a “no comment.”
No comment, nothing to say about that. No comment . . .
He owed her nothing, but he felt safer to leave her out of it. Taking the blame for Barbara at least meant he didn’t have to see Suzanne again, didn’t have to confront her, feel the force of her disapproval.
It ended with more questions about Polly.
“I don’t know anything about that,” he’d said.
“Did you see Polly that night?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Brian,” Sam Hollands had said. “Let’s not start that again.”
He waited for the question, looking at them both.
“We have fingerprints in Polly’s car—on the steering wheel, the handbrake, and the gearstick, among other places—which have been identified as yours. So the evidence suggests that at some point recently you drove Polly’s car. What can you tell us about that?”
He had had to provide his fingerprints, along with a cheek swab, a search, and the loss of the last vestiges of his dignity when he’d been brought in. He hadn’t even thought about it.
He took his time answering, considered making up some story about helping her to park the car earlier in the week, but there was no point. He wanted to get it all over with. The trick of it was figuring out what to say without going into detail.
“I saw Polly in town. She was upset because she had arranged to meet a friend who had not turned up and I offered to drive her home, because I thought she might have been drinking. So I drove her home.”
“Which friend?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Come on, Brian. You drove her some distance and she was upset, but she didn’t say who had upset her?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Where did you meet her?”
“In town, somewhere. I don’t remember.”
Sam Hollands had paused then, checked her notes, taken her time with the next question. He took the opportunity to fill the pause, hoping that this would deflect her attention away from Suzanne.
“When we got back to Morden there was a lorry blocking the drive to Yonder Cottage, so I pulled in to the drive of the Barn, across the road, and got out of the car to see what was going on. Polly climbed into the driver’s seat and drove up the road to go in the other drive, the one that leads to the farmhouse. That was the last I saw of her.”
“What time was this, Brian?”
“I don’t know. Late. Half-past eleven, maybe twelve.”
“And what did you do then?”
“I went home and had a bath, as I said.”
There were more questions about Polly. They explained to him about the shot put, suggesting he had taken it to the quarry and thrown it over. He had not. They explained that they believed it was possible he had killed Polly in order to frame Barbara for murder. He had done nothing of the kind.