“I know,” I replied, adding: “I think I’ll ask the professor to look at the crime scene, see what he thinks.” The
professor
is the pathologist at Heckley General Hospital, and at that very moment he was turning his blade towards the fair skin of Mrs Margaret Silkstone, subject of our debate. I locked the car doors and we headed for the entrance.
There was a message from Annette waiting for me at the front desk. A neighbour had positively identified Peter Latham, who had died from a single knife wound to the heart. Time of death between three and six o’clock,
Wednesday afternoon. I passed it to Dave and asked if Prendergast had arrived yet. He was locked in the cell with his client, I learned, discussing strategies, defences and tactics. The truth was outside his remit.
“’Ello, Mr Priest,” a squeaky voice said, behind me. I spun round and faced two traffic cops straight in the eye. They were wearing standard-issue Velcro moustaches and
don’t-do
-that expressions, but neither had a ventriloquist’s dummy sitting on his arm. I tilted my gaze downwards forty-five degrees and met that of a grubby angel standing between them.
“Jamie!” I exclaimed, treading an uneasy path between disapproval and surprise. “What are you doing here?”
“Bin invited in to ’elp you wiv enquiries, ’aven’t I?” he replied.
“And can you ’elp – help – us?”
“Nah. Don’t know nowt about it, do I?”
“Well do your best.” I turned back to the desk, but he said: “’Ere, Mr Priest. Is it right you used to ’ave a knee-type Jag?”
“That’s right,” I told him. “A red one.”
“Cor!” he replied. “Best car on t’road.”
They took him away to feed him on bacon sandwiches while he fed them a pack of lies, and we arranged to
interview
Silkstone in ten minutes. I went to the bog and washed my face. There was a mounting pile of reports on my desk, but they’d have to wait. I always read them all, but on every murder enquiry we have a dedicated report reader who siphons off the important stuff. I like to read all the
irrelevant
details, too: the minutiae of the lives of the people who pass through our hands. Sometimes, they tell me things. As Confucius say, wisdom comes through knowledge.
Prendergast was wearing a blue suit and maroon tie, and could have been about to deliver a budget speech. He didn’t. He launched straight into the attack by complaining about our treatment of his client, who was, he reminded us, traumatised
by the sudden and violent death of the woman he loved.
I apologised if we had appeared insensitive, but reminded them that Mr Silkstone had, by his own admission, killed a man and we were conducting a murder enquiry. We’d collect some of his own clothes for him, I promised, as soon as the crime scene was released, and I told him that his wife’s body had been taken to the mortuary. We needed Silkstone to
formally
identify the body later, and he agreed.
“Will he be taken there in handcuffs, Inspector?” Prendergast asked.
“As Mr Silkstone surrendered himself voluntarily I don’t think that will be necessary,” I conceded. I must be getting soft.
The preliminary fencing over, we started asking
questions
. Silkstone stuck to his story, saying that he’d come home to see Latham leaving his house. Inside, he’d found Margaret lying on the bed with a ligature around her neck. He’d attempted to remove it, but quickly realised that she was dead. The rest was a bit vague, he claimed. It always is. He agreed that he must have followed Latham home and gone in the house after him. He suddenly found himself standing in the kitchen, with Latham’s body lying on the floor, between his feet. There was a knife sticking out of Latham’s chest, and on the worktop there was one of those wooden blocks with several other knives lodged in it. He did not dispute that he stabbed Latham, but claimed to have no memory of the actual deed.
When he realised the enormity of what he’d done he sat in the front room for a while – about ten minutes, he thought – then dialled 999. Prendergast made sympathetic noises about the state of his client’s mind and suggested that Unlawful Killing might be an appropriate charge.
“Do you think there was any sort of relationship between your wife and Latham?” I asked, and Silkstone’s shrug
suggested
that it was a possibility. The tape doesn’t pick up shrugs, but I let it go. “Could you explain, please,” I asked.
He stubbed his cigarette in the tin ashtray and left the butt there with the other three he’d had. Only prisoners are allowed to smoke in the nick. “I wondered if they were
having
an affair,” he said. He thought about his words for a while, then added: “Or perhaps Peter – Latham – wanted to start one, and Margaret didn’t. Last week, last Wednesday, I went home early and he was there, talking to her. He said he’d just called in for a coffee, and she said the same. But there was a strained air, if you follow me. They seemed embarrassed that I caught them together. Maybe, you know, he was trying it on.”
“How well did Margaret know him?” I asked, adding: “Officially, so to speak.”
“Quite well,” he replied. “We – that’s Peter and I –
married
two sisters, back in 1975, and he came to work for me. Neither marriage lasted long, but we stayed friends.”
“What line of work are you in?”
“I’m Northern Manager of Trans Global Finance, and Peter is – was – one of my sales executives.”
“Wasn’t he working yesterday?”
“No. He often sees clients at weekends, when it’s
convenient
for them, and takes a day off through the week.”
“Is it usually Wednesday?”
“Yes, it is.”
“And Margaret? Did she work?”
“For me. TGF is heavily into e-commerce, and Margaret acted as my secretary, working from home.”
“E-commerce?” I queried, vaguely knowing what he meant.
“Electronic commerce.”
“In other words, your company doesn’t have a huge office block somewhere.”
“That’s right, Inspector. We have very small premises, just an office and a typist, in Halifax and various other towns. Our HQ is in Docklands, but that’s quite modest. Our parent company resides in Geneva.”
I exhaled, puffing my cheeks out, and tapped the desk with my pencil. Dave took it as his cue and came in with: “Mr Silkstone, you said that Latham was at your house the previous Wednesday, when you arrived home early.”
“Yes.” He reached into his pocket and removed a Benson and Hedges packet.
“What time was that?” Dave asked.
“About four o’clock. Perhaps a few minutes earlier.”
“Was it unusual for you to come home at that time?”
“Yes. Very unusual.”
“So Latham could have been there the week before, and the week before that, and you wouldn’t have known.”
He lit a cigarette with a gold lighter borrowed from his brief and took a deep draw on it. “Yes,” he mumbled,
exhaling
down his nose. There were four of us in the tiny
interview
room and three of us were passively smoking the
equivalent
of twenty a day, thanks to Silkstone. The atmosphere in there would have given a Greenpeace activist apoplexy. Carcinogenic condensates were coagulating on the walls, evil little particulates furring-up the light fittings. What they were doing to our tubes I preferred not to imagine but I vowed to sue him if I contracted anything.
“But yesterday you came home early again,” Dave stated.
Good on yer, mate, I thought, as our prisoner sucked his cheeks in and felt round the inside of his mouth with his tongue.
“That’s true,” Silkstone admitted.
“Twice in eight days. Very unusual, wouldn’t you say?”
“Gentlemen,” Prendergast interrupted. “My client is
senior
management with an international company. His hours are flexible, not governed by the necessity to watch a clock. He works a sixty-hour week and takes time off when he can. I’m sure you can imagine the routine.”
“But still unusual,” Dave insisted.
“He’s right,” Silkstone agreed, talking to his lawyer. Turning to Dave he added: “Last week I wasn’t feeling very
well, so I skipped my last appointment and came home early. It wasn’t business, just calling on one of my staff for a pep talk. Yesterday –” he shrugged his shoulders. “I finished early and went home. That’s all.”
Dave stroked his chin for a few seconds before asking: “Are you sure that’s all?”
Prendergast jumped in again, saying this speculation was leading nowhere, like any good lawyer would have done. What he meant was that if his client went home early because he thought he might catch his wife in bed with her lover, we could tell the court that his actions were
premeditated
. And that meant murder.
Silkstone moved as if to stub the cigarette out, realised it was only half smoked and took another drag on it. “I don’t know,” he replied, ignoring his brief ’s protestations. “I’ve been wondering that myself. Did I expect to find them together again? Is that why I left the afternoon free? You know, subconsciously. I don’t think I did. I loved my wife, trusted her, and she loved me. If I’d really expected to catch them together I’d have returned home even earlier, wouldn’t I?” He took another long draw on the cigarette while we pondered on his question. “Truth is,” he continued, “I’ve been worrying about the old ticker a bit, lately. Decided to cut my workload. That’s why I came home early.”
Which, I thought, was a good point. I quizzed him about how he’d felt as he drove to Latham’s house; how he gained entry; about the knife and any conversation he had with Latham. It was a waste of time. Everything was obscured by the thick red mist of convenient memory loss. There’s a lot more of it about than you’d ever believe, especially among murder suspects. “Interview terminated,” I said, looking up at the clock and reading off the time. Dave reached out and stopped the tape.
“Your case papers will be sent to the crown prosecutors,” I told Silkstone, “who will determine the level of charge against you. Assuming the results of the forensic tests validate what
you say they may decide to go for a charge of manslaughter. If not, I shall be pressing for a murder charge. You will be committed for trial at crown court and we shall be applying for you to be remanded in custody until then. Is there
anything
you wish to ask me?”
Silkstone shook his head. Prendergast said: “I have explained the procedure to my client, Inspector. We will be making our own clinical and psychiatric reports and demand full access to any forensic procedures that are being
undertaken
. It goes without saying that we will be applying for bail.”
“You do that,” I replied, sliding my chair back and
standing
up.
We grabbed a bacon sandwich in the canteen and drove to Latham’s house on the West Wood estate. There are no trees at the West Woods, because the landscape around Heckley does not suit them. The ground is rocky, the winters harsh and the sheep omnivorous. Archaeologists following the builders’ excavators found remnants of a forest in the patch of peat bog they were building on, and an imaginative sales person did the rest. There is no North, South or East Wood.
We wandered around his home from room to room,
looking
in drawers, feeling through the pockets of his suits, like a couple of vultures picking over a carcass. Wilbur Smith’s
Elephant Song
was lying on a shelf within reach of his easy chair, with a bookmark at about the halfway point. In the smallest bedroom, filled with junk, there was a big bag of fishing rods and a box of tackle. I hadn’t marked him as a fisherman.
On his fridge-freezer door, held in place by a magnetic Bart Simpson, was a postcard showing a painting that I recognised. I eased it off and looked at the back, but it was blank. “Gauguin,” I said, flapping the card towards Dave.
“You’d know,” he replied.
I replaced it exactly where I’d found it and opened the
fridge door. He ate ready meals from the supermarket,
supplemented
with oven chips, and was seriously deficient in vegetables.
“He didn’t eat properly,” I said.
“You’d know,” Dave repeated.
I was drawn, as always, to the bedroom. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at the two photographs, when Dave joined me.
“Who do you reckon she is?” I asked.
He looked at the picture of the young girl without
handling
it. “Mmm, interesting,” he mused. “Taken a while ago. Could be his wife, assuming that’s them in the other picture. Is it, er, a bit on the salacious side, or is that just me?”
“It’s just you,” I told him, untruthfully.
“I don’t think it’s a daughter or niece,” he continued.
“Why not?”
“Well, I wouldn’t frame a similar picture of our Sophie and have it on display, and she’d certainly have something to say about it if I did. I reckon it’s his wife, when she was at school. They keep it there for a laugh, or a bit of extra
stimulation
. I don’t know, you’re the one with all the experience. I’m just a happily married man.”
“The SOCO reckons it was taken about the same time as the wedding photo,” I said, “which means it’s not the wife.”
“Fair enough,” he replied, adding: “Maybe all will be revealed at the meeting, when we learn something about his background.”
“Let’s hope so,” I said. We left, locking the door behind us, and told the PC on duty that we still wanted the crime scene maintaining.
In the car Dave said: “That photo.”
“Mmm.”
“Of the young girl.”
“Mmm.”
“Maybe it’s just a curio type of thing. The sort of picture you might pick up at a car boot sale, or something. Know
what I mean?”
“I think so,” I said. “A collector’s item. Like some dirty old Victorian might have drooled over.”
“Yeah. Voluptuous innocence and all that crap.”
“Lewis Carroll and Alice,” I suggested.
“Exactly. He used to photograph children in the nude, you know.”
“Crikey,” I said. “So where did he keep his spare films?”