Just Desserts Page 15

‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘Are you trying to be gratuitously insulting?’

  ‘I’m trying to get at the truth, Mrs Nayland. A moment’s reflection will tell you that this line of questioning is relevant.’

  She breathed deeply, trying to retain control, to reveal only as much of herself and her emotions as she had to. ‘You mean that if Patrick was playing around, I might have killed him in a fit of jealousy.’

  ‘I meant that if anyone was jealous of what he was doing, that person might have killed him in a fit of murderous violence. It happens, and this death has the marks of a killing like that.’

  She made herself speak evenly, to sound as if she was a woman who would never have lost control of herself like that. ‘Pat had a certain reputation as a Lothario, in the past. When he proposed marriage to me, I was shocked, because I had heard that he played the field, that he wouldn’t be serious enough to venture upon a second marriage. I speak in the past tense, because that’s where this side of his character was left. We had occasional spats in our marriage, as most successful marriages do. But we did not have any problems with either of us pursuing other sexual partners.’

  None that you are aware of, thought Lambert automatically. But he could not offer that reservation to Liza Nayland without being pointlessly discourteous. He went as far as he could, saying stiffly, ‘Other people have spoken of a certain reputation attaching to your husband. You will understand that we needed to ask you about it.’

  ‘And now you have. And now you have my assurance that this is a line of enquiry which won’t lead anywhere.’

  He doubted that. But he thought she meant what she said. They said the wife was always the last to know, and sometimes it was true. He said, ‘Forgive me, but I have to ask this. Are you aware that your husband had a conviction for Indecent Assault?’

  She could have hit him, for bringing this up now. Instead, she looked into the grey eyes and said, ‘I was aware, yes. But thank you for reminding me of it, six days after Pat’s death. I don’t wish to discuss the rights and wrongs of the accusations, though I have my own opinions on them. It’s a long time in the past, part of an unhappy world Pat had left far behind him.’

  Redeemed by a good woman, thought Lambert. The old story. Or, much more often, the old illusion. Many women thought they could reclaim a reprobate by tender loving care, and much more often than not they were wrong. He said, ‘You admitted last time we spoke that your daughter had experienced certain difficulties in adjusting to life with her stepfather.’

  ‘Yes. I also said I thought they were normal difficulties, which should not be exaggerated.’

  ‘Would your daughter support your view that her stepfather was no longer interested in women other than you?’

  How insolent the man was in his persistence! She reminded herself that this was part of his job, forced herself to be coldly polite. ‘Of course she would! Any difficulties Michelle had with Pat were nothing to do with that, I’m sure. If you want my view, their clashes were more concerned with her deficiencies than with Pat’s.’ She hoped desperately that Michelle would support her on this, if they spoke to her again. Surely she owed that much loyalty at least to Pat.

  ‘What will happen now to Camellia Park?’

  It was one of those bewildering switches by which he often caught people off guard. Liza took her time, then decided with relief that she could see no tripwires in this line of questioning. ‘Essentially, it will go on as before. We haven’t agreed the details, but I have asked Chris Pearson to take up a partnership in the enterprise.’

  ‘That’s generous of you.’

  If she took the implication that it might be precipitate, with Pearson still a suspect in a murder investigation, she did not show it. ‘Chris deserves it. He’s worked very hard at that golf course, right from the time before it opened. And it’s not entirely unselfish you know: if Chris decided his future lay somewhere else, I’d be in a hole. No one knows the ins and outs of all aspects of the development as well as Chris Pearson.’

  ‘Who controls the pay structure at Camellia Park?’

  It was abrupt again, without the greasing of the wheels she was used to in more normal conversations. She was beginning to realize that this man’s very brusqueness was a tool, not a social deficiency. ‘Pat did, when he was alive. He always kept finance in his own hands, whatever he delegated to others. But Chris will take it over now, I imagine, though it’s one of the things we shall no doubt confer upon. Both of us will want to know how well the place is doing financially: that will determine future plans for development. And salaries are a big issue in that equation.’

  ‘Would Mr Pearson have known about the wage structure whilst your husband was alive?’

  She thought carefully, anxious now to convince him that she was holding nothing back. ‘I think probably not. Pat would share everything else, and I know he rated Chris highly, but it was something of a fetish with him to be secretive about what he paid people. He said he’d had to endure people knowing exactly what he earned when he was on military pay scales, and he hadn’t liked it. So people who worked in his enterprises were going to enjoy privacy in that. Pat used to say that knowledge about salaries only led to petty jealousies, so it was better that everyone only knew about his or her own wage.’

  ‘I think he was probably right about that. Your husband and Mr Pearson were both ex-military men, weren’t they?’

  ‘Yes. They’d both served many years in the Army. I think that was a common bond between them. They seemed to get on well from the start. People forget that everyone thought it was quite a risky enterprise, starting a golf course from scratch. And of course Pat had to lay out quite a lot of money before there was anything coming back from the course. He put most of his officer’s gratuity into it. There was an interval of fifteen months between the time when he bought the land and the moment when the first green fees started coming in. I can remember that April morning very well.’

  ‘Did you know that Mr Pearson used to be in the SAS?’

  ‘No.’ She tried not to resent the fact that he had dragged her rudely away from her reminiscences of happier times. ‘Is it important?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Probably not. It seems rather odd that he doesn’t seem to have told anyone about it, but I gather that secrecy is encouraged by the SAS.’

  Suddenly, Lambert stood up, looking very tall in this small, claustrophobic setting. ‘If you have any further thoughts, Mrs Nayland, whether in connection with the issues we’ve raised today or anything else in this case, please get in touch with the CID section here immediately.’

  DS Hook ushered her out to her car. Liza Nayland sat silently for a moment before she started the engine, scarcely believing how much the exchange had taken out of her, how searching it had been.

  She was surprised to see her hands trembling on the steering wheel as she drove home.

  Fifteen

  Barry Hooper was nervous. The CID men had been back to see Alan Fitch again and they must have given him a real grilling. He couldn’t get the full story out of his boss, but he could see that they’d upset him. It wasn’t easy to disturb Alan, but those buggers had done it.

  And if they’d been back to Alan Fitch, they were sure to come back also to him. Yet they didn’t. All through the long length of Tuesday morning, he waited for them to come, but there was no sign of the police Mondeo making its cautious way up the unpaved track to confront him in the greenkeeper’s shed.

  Alan Fitch clearly wanted to be alone with his thoughts after the previous afternoon’s confrontation with the CID. He had given Barry a job on his own this morning, repairing the damage caused by subsidence at the back of the ninth tee. The young man went about it methodically, peeling the turf back carefully and adding soil to level the ground beneath, making sure that the grass when he rolled it back into place was just slightly proud of the ground around it, to allow a little for settling. Alan had shown him how to do work like this, and Barry wanted to show his
mentor that he could do a perfect job without supervision or guidance.

  Yet it took Barry Hooper longer than it should have done, because for once he could not give his mind fully to the work. All the time, as he sliced beneath the turf and peeled it carefully back, he watched the entrance to the club, expecting to see that police car turning carefully between the high brick pillars into Camellia Park.

  When he met up with Alan Fitch for lunch in the room they knew so well at the end of the shed, few words were exchanged. Each man was preoccupied with his own concerns, and the part of the day which Barry normally most enjoyed was tense and joyless. After a few minutes, he could stand it no longer. He muttered some excuse to Fitch and roared away on the Ducati, feeling some of the tension stripped away from him as the icy wind howled around his face on the way into Gloucester.

  He knew what he wanted when he walked into his familiar room, where the police had talked to him three days earlier. But he made himself a cup of coffee first, pretending to unwind, simulating the actions he would have taken in a more innocent context. He wished yet again that he had not done what he had done last Wednesday night at Soutters, tortured himself anew with the picture of how serene his life might have been now if he had only acted differently then.

  The shabby wallpaper, with its almost indiscernible twenty-year-old pattern, and the torn curtain which concealed the tiny scullery were comforting to him by their very familiarity. At this time of day, most people who lived in this rabbit warren of a house were out, and no sounds of his neighbours came to him through the thin dividing walls. He should have enjoyed the privacy, but today he found himself longing for the reassurance of other, human noises around him.

  Having delayed the action as long as he could, he walked as he had always planned to do to the scratched dresser and opened the second drawer down. The last bit of cocaine, the rock he had cut in half, lay like an accusation beneath the white vest and the blue socks. He had meant to save it, to make his supply last longer this time. But he needed it now, not at some time in a future he could not predict.

  When all this was over, he would definitely give up the habit.

  For a few minutes, he could not dismiss the thought that he might not be at liberty when all this was over. Then he felt the lightness in his head as he went out to the Ducati. Better go carefully, on the way back to the golf course. It would be ironic if the police picked him up just for speeding, after what he’d done last Wednesday night.

  Unlike Liza Nayland, Chris Pearson was anxious to be interviewed in his own home. Bert Hook had no objection to that. A drive through the Gloucestershire lanes, even on the nineteenth of December, with the temperature low and the trees leafless, had its own charms after the pressures of the station.

  The near-white sun was already low, but the winter sky had that crisp blueness which seems to be deepened and accentuated by the long English twilight. The pasture fields rose between walls and hedges towards the long ridge of the Malverns on their left, a landscape which had not changed much in several hundred years. The gaunt skeletons of oak and chestnut stood like sentinels over ancient farms, as if protecting them against the changes which besieged the life around them.

  It was an illusion, Bert Hook knew – the country now employed a twentieth of the people who had made their living from it a century earlier, and television aerials and discs rose above the old farmhouses and cottages – but an agreeable illusion, nonetheless. And the lanes were pleasantly free of traffic: they met only one other car on their journey to Pearson’s village.

  Pearson had the wide oak door of the long thatched house open as they went up the path. He said, ‘The wife’s out for the afternoon in Cheltenham at a meeting of the Fine Arts Society. We won’t be disturbed.’

  Hook wondered if the unnecessary detail, like his readiness to receive them, betrayed nervousness in a man who he would have thought was rarely troubled by nerves. Pearson took them into the neat dining room with the prints of the Middle East on the walls, where they had spoken five days earlier.

  Lambert waited unhurriedly until they were all sitting down and Hook had his notebook at the ready, watching how Pearson’s fingers drummed briefly upon the table, how he stilled them and withdrew his hands from sight below the table top, as if he feared their movements might betray him. Then he said, ‘We now know rather more about the murder victim. It seems that some people, including you, withheld information about him at our first meetings.’

  It was a challenging start, and it looked for a moment as though Pearson would show his annoyance at it. But he controlled himself and said, ‘I told you what I knew about Patrick. I answered all your questions.’

  Lambert gave him a bleak smile. ‘When you know nothing about a dead man, as we did then, it is not easy to know the right questions to ask. I said “withheld information”. I did not accuse you of a direct lie.’

  ‘Patrick was a good friend to me. You can’t expect me to blacken his reputation, especially after he died like that.’

  ‘A fair point, in normal circumstances. But you do not need reminding that these are hardly that. Is it true that Mr Nayland was a womanizer?’

  Chris looked up into the calm face with the grey eyes which studied him so closely. He had not expected so direct a question; he had become used to the cautious, respectful reactions of the people Pat Nayland had employed at Camellia Park. ‘Yes. Pat wasn’t good at resisting anything in a skirt – or in trousers, if it was female and attractive. Is this relevant?’

  ‘It may be. I don’t need to explain why.’

  Chris nodded slowly, taking his time, taking care to disguise his relief at this line of questioning. They didn’t know the important thing he had concealed, just as Liza Nayland hadn’t known when he spoke to her yesterday after the inquest. ‘Yes. I can see that now. I apologize for not mentioning this aspect of Pat’s character to you last Thursday. I can only say that it would have seemed disloyal, on the day after he had been murdered. Pat was a good friend to me.’

  ‘Mrs Nayland didn’t seem to us to be aware of her husband’s predilection for other women. Do you think she was?’

  He gave it thought, happy to stay on this theme, which could surely not harm him. ‘No, I don’t think she was. But I didn’t see her often, you know. She very rarely came to the golf course.’

  ‘But if she had, she would have seen things which distressed her?’

  It was almost a statement, rather than a question. He was quick, this man. Chris wondered how much more they’d discovered which they weren’t revealing to him yet. They’d talked to every one of the staff at Camellia Park, he knew that. He’d better be as frank as he could, in this area where he was not threatened. ‘Pat flirted with every pretty woman. Nothing wrong with that. But if he got the slightest encouragement, he went further.’

  ‘Are you aware that many years ago he had a conviction for Indecent Assault?’

  ‘No. But it doesn’t really surprise me. And the leopard hadn’t changed his spots. I sometimes thought that the modern laws about sexual harassment would catch him out, but he got away with it.’

  For a man who’d claimed to be anxious to respect a dead friend, he was now being almost too frank. But that was what they had asked him to be, after all. Lambert said, ‘And who in particular attracted his favours?’

  Chris Pearson smiled ruefully. Behind the smile, his brain was working quickly. He was pretty certain now that they knew the important name. He couldn’t afford to conceal it; on the contrary, he could only see that it was in his interests to reveal it and divert suspicion. ‘I told you, Pat wasn’t very discriminating, or even very cautious. He was prepared to put it about wherever the opportunity offered. But I think he had a long-term affair going with Joanne Moss.’

  ‘How long ago did this begin?’

  ‘I couldn’t be precise about that. I knew Pat would make a pass at her, as he did at most attractive women, but I didn’t know he’d had a favourable response. Joanne at least was very dis
creet about it, particularly in the early days. And she was only working part-time at first, and they no doubt met away from the course. It’s been rather more obvious in the last couple of years, to me at least. But Joanne has never spoken about it to me, and I’ve never raised it with her. For all I know, she still thinks no one but the two of them knew about it.’

  ‘And did he confine his extramarital attentions to his mistress?’

  It seemed a strange way of phrasing the question. But they were trained to be accurate, to exclude any possibility of confusion, he supposed. ‘No. I told you, he was unable to resist a pretty face or a female curve. He was always flirting with the more attractive women golfers on the course, testing the ground for more serious approaches. Pat was discreet when Joanne was around, but I doubt if he was capable of being faithful to any woman.’

  ‘You said last time we spoke that you were very close to him. Did he discuss his affairs with you?’

  This had gone far enough. He had given them every impression of being open and helpful. He didn’t want to emerge now as a man who betrayed confidences. ‘Professionally close, I should have said. We developed the course together, and discussed every aspect of that project together. But he was, after all, my employer, and both of us knew it. We didn’t discuss his women. Had Pat asked my opinion on his behaviour with women, I should have given it, but he didn’t.’

  ‘You clearly know more than anyone left alive about the running of Camellia Park. Mrs Nayland acknowledged that.’

  Chris said stiffly, like a man who is suspicious of praise, ‘I believe that is true. It was and is my job, after all.’

  ‘You are no doubt familiar with the pay-sheets, then.’

  It had been slipped quietly under his guard, like a stiletto slid silently into the ribs. He said, ‘No. That is one thing Pat kept to himself.’

  ‘Even though you were familiar with all aspects of the development.’

  His own phrases were being thrown back into his face; but there was no ring of irony in Lambert’s voice, just a careful, persistent curiosity. Chris summoned a smile and said, ‘That was the one aspect that Pat kept to himself. He said if people were content with what he paid them, there was no need for them to know what anyone else earned.’