The Cold Hand of Malice (23 page)

Billie popped the last piece of butter tart into her mouth and sighed contentedly. ‘I feel so much better now after talking to you,’ she said. ‘But please don’t tell John I was here.’

Peggy’s mind had been so busy trying to absorb what she was hearing that she barely acknowledged the implied question before asking, ‘Just when does all this take place – John’s actual move down here, I mean,’ she added hastily as she saw Billie’s pencilled browns begin to draw together in a questioning frown.

‘Oh, sometime next month is what he told me. I don’t know the exact date.’

Sometime next month!
Peggy tried to get the words out of her head, but they were still there an hour later when she left her mother’s house. Not for home as she had told her mother, but to the office. But John as a future VP? No way. But then, that was the way Henry Beaumont worked.

Twenty

Tuesday, March 17

Paget arrived at work some twenty minutes late. It had rained hard all the way in from Ashton Prior to Charter Lane; an accident at the top of Strathe Hill had slowed traffic to a crawl, and the traffic lights were out at the bottom of the hill. Not the way he’d hoped to start the day after spending the previous one standing in for Alcott, still off with the flu, at yet another of Chief Superintendent Brock’s interminable meetings. He’d heaved a mental sigh of relief when the meeting concluded at three o’clock – still time to do a little work – but Brock had asked him to stay behind to discuss the case.

Discussion was hardly the word. Brock had been hell-bent on setting up a special task force to take over the investigation, and it had taken Paget the best part of an hour to try to dissuade him. He’d finally succeeded, but he knew that Brock wouldn’t let the matter rest for long if he couldn’t be shown results.

‘Morning, boss,’ Tregalles greeted him when Paget entered the incident room. He looked remarkably cheerful, considering as Paget could see at a glance, there was nothing new on the whiteboards. Even Ormside looked slightly less dour than usual as he acknowledged Paget’s entrance with a nod.

‘All right, Tregalles,’ he said, ‘what’s happened?’

The sergeant grinned broadly. ‘Must be your birthday, boss,’ he said. ‘Got a present for you.’ The grin faded. Clearly Paget was in no mood for games. ‘Trevor Ballantyne,’ he said soberly. ‘He’s in room number 1. Came in first thing this morning to say he wanted to make a correction to his statement about the night of the murder, but he wouldn’t say any more until you got here. Could be the break we’ve been looking for.’

‘Sounds promising,’ said Paget cautiously, ‘so let’s see what he has to say.’ He started for the door, then paused in mid-stride. ‘Where’s Forsythe?’ he asked Ormside as he scanned the room.

‘Next door picking up faxes,’ the sergeant told him.

‘Send her along as soon as she gets back,’ Paget told him. ‘I’d like her to hear what Ballantyne has to say as well.’

Tregalles didn’t say anything as he followed Paget out, but he couldn’t help wondering why the boss had been taking so much interest in Molly Forsythe lately. Not that she wasn’t worth taking an interest in, he thought. Good-looking woman like that, and smart. And clearly she’d caught Paget’s eye. Could that be the reason for . . .? He gave his head a mental shake. No, couldn’t be, he told himself. Not Paget, not with someone like Grace Lovett living with him. On the other hand, you could never tell when something like that might happen. Tregalles had seen it before – office romances springing up between the most unlikely people working closely together. And even DCIs were human.

Trevor Ballantyne looked as if he hadn’t slept for days. He was neatly dressed and clean-shaven, but his face was grey, and there were dark hollows under his eyes.

Paget and Tregalles faced him across the table, while Molly Forsythe sat near the door. ‘Now, then, Mr Ballantyne,’ said Paget, ‘exactly what is it you wish to tell us?’

Ballantyne ran his tongue across his lips to moisten them. ‘I know I should have told you before,’ he began hesitantly, ‘and I’m sorry, but I didn’t see any harm in it at the time. But with Moira under suspicion, and the way things look, I decided I had to speak up and set the record straight so to speak. I don’t know who killed Laura, but I do know who had the opportunity, and perhaps a motive, and in a way I was part of it – although I didn’t know it at the time, of course,’ he added hastily.

‘A name . . .?’ Paget prompted.

Ballantyne drew a deep breath. ‘Simon,’ he said. ‘I’m not saying he did it,’ he went on quickly, ‘but he wasn’t where he said he was, and with the way things were with the marriage, it could have been him. But I do know that Moira had nothing to do with it.’

‘You’re saying you lied when you told us Simon was with you that evening? Is that correct, Mr Ballantyne?’

He nodded. ‘And I’m sorry. I know it’s a crime to mislead the police but, as I said, I couldn’t believe it at first, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.’

Ballantyne went on to tell them that he had picked up Simon Holbrook shortly before seven o’clock as he’d originally stated, but they had only gone a short distance before Simon said he was sorry, but Susan Chase had telephoned just before he left the house to ask if he could help her with a problem she had with the shop’s security system. It wasn’t working properly, and she was nervous about leaving it overnight, so Simon said he’d come over and see what he could do. But he’d made it clear that he didn’t want Laura to know, because she might get the wrong idea, so he’d asked Trevor to say that they’d been together all evening if the subject should ever come up.

‘I dropped him off at the shop,’ Ballantyne explained, ‘and picked him up on my way back. I was going to drop him off then go on home, but he invited me in for a nightcap – a sort of thank you for going along with him, I thought at the time – so I went in.

‘Because it was all fiction, of course,’ he continued. ‘We both knew it; I mean I knew that he and Susan had been seeing each other on the quiet for months, but I didn’t see any real harm in it. Simon hadn’t said anything, at least not in so many words, but you could see that things were beginning to go pear-shaped with their marriage, so I wasn’t exactly surprised when Simon asked me to drop him off.’

He paused, frowning as if something was puzzling him. ‘Except he seemed to be more on edge than usual that night,’ he said slowly. ‘Mind you, he’s a funny chap at the best of times, up one minute, down the next. It’s tension. When it’s really bad it makes him ill, and I knew he was worried about the situation at home, so I left it. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but he suffers from depression, and he only gets more upset if you try to talk to him about it.’

Paget said, ‘What did you mean when you said you knew he was worried about the situation at home? What situation, exactly?’

‘Just the way things had changed,’ said Ballantyne. ‘Less than a year ago he couldn’t stop talking about how wonderful Laura was, and how she had saved the company, and how bright the future was. And he was right; the woman is brilliant – or was, of course, but I haven’t heard him utter one good word about her in recent months. Not one!’

‘So what brought about the change?’ asked Paget.

‘Laura’s attitude, mostly. The business was all she thought about; she couldn’t talk about anything else, and she was constantly putting Simon down. Like he told me himself a couple of weeks ago. He said, “She isn’t interested in me at all. All she ever wanted was the company. I mean without me and my ideas there wouldn’t be any –”’ Ballantyne glanced at Molly, and decided to leave out the actual words that Holbrook had used, and said instead – ‘“friggin company”. He said she was overruling him at work, putting him down in front of others, and it was just as bad at home.’

Ballantyne shook his head sadly. ‘We’ve noticed the change in them ourselves,’ he continued. ‘Moira and I have talked about it. Simon’s been trying to put a brave face on it, but we’ve noticed it at the club. Just the odd word now and again, but Laura could really put the knife in when she wanted to, and she was so good at it that you hardly knew she’d done it until you thought about it later.’

‘What did you mean when you said it was just as bad at home?’ Paget asked. ‘Did Mr Holbrook elaborate?’

‘Sex,’ said Ballantyne, lowering his voice. ‘He told me that he and Laura hadn’t had sex in months, and
that
must have been the last straw for poor old Simon. I felt sorry for him, I really did, which was why I was willing to go along with him that night when he gave me that cock-and-bull story about Susan’s security system. Funny, though, when you think about it, isn’t it? I mean him and Susan after he left her for Laura. Mind you, it was Laura who did the running, but Simon was as much to blame, so I’m still amazed that Susan would have anything to do with either of them. But she took it all in her stride the way she does with everything else.’ He frowned. ‘If it were anyone else but Susan, I’d be tempted to think she could be doing it for revenge – taking Simon back from her sister, if you know what I mean.’

‘You and Simon Holbrook must go back a few years,’ Tregalles said. ‘How long have you known each other?’

‘On and off ever since our schooldays,’ he said. ‘Not that we ever chummed around together or anything like that. He was a couple of years ahead of me, and that’s a lot when you’re kids. And then, of course, we went our separate ways: university, jobs that took us in different directions, and it was only when Simon came back to Broadminster to set up his business here that we came into contact again. Even then we didn’t really get together until we met through the badminton club.’

‘Your wife mentioned that you also knew the Chase sisters during those early years,’ said Paget.

‘Right, I did. At school. In fact Laura and I were in the same form for a while. Susan was a year ahead of her sister to start with, but Laura went into an accelerated programme, which meant that she and Susan ended up in the sixth form at the same time. And it didn’t matter what Susan did, Laura always had to do the same or go one better. The two girls were as different as chalk and cheese. Laura was always looking for a challenge; she always had to be best; top of the class, but Susan wasn’t like that at all. She was a good student, mark you; always well up there near the top, but she wasn’t interested in competing with her sister, and I think that used to annoy Laura more than anything – that Susan didn’t respond when she was challenged, I mean.

‘Lovely girl, Susan,’ Ballantyne continued wistfully. ‘She really didn’t deserve to have a sister like Laura always nipping at her heels. She would have made someone a wonderful wife, but it wasn’t to be. She never married. Not that she didn’t have the chance.’ The way he said it made Paget wonder if Ballantyne had had hopes in that direction himself back then.

‘Funny,’ Ballantyne continued, frowning, ‘I haven’t thought of it for years, but the only time I ever saw Susan get really upset, was because of something Laura did to her. Laura treated it as a huge joke, but it was anything but a joke to Susan. She put on a brave face, but I’m sure she could have killed her . . .’

Ballantyne stopped abruptly. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Just a figure of speech. Didn’t mean to run on like that. It’s just that I hadn’t thought about some of those things in years.’

‘What exactly was it that Laura did?’ Tregalles asked.

Ballantyne looked uncomfortable. ‘It’s all in the past,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t mean anything now. I’m afraid I got off track.’

‘Nevertheless, we would like to hear it,’ said Paget, taking the lead again.

‘It was just a figure of speech,’ Ballantyne said. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’ He looked from one to the other as if expecting a response, but when no one spoke, he sat back in his chair and shrugged in a way that said he thought it was a waste of time.

‘Susan would have been about eighteen at the time,’ he said. ‘She was going with a chap a couple of years older than she was, and things were beginning to get pretty serious when Laura moved in on him and took him away from her. Laura dumped him later, but the damage was done. As I said, she treated it as a big joke at the time, but it wasn’t a joke to Susan. And then, along comes Laura again some seventeen or eighteen years later, and damned if she doesn’t do it again with Simon.’

Ballantyne saw the look that passed between the two detectives. ‘Look,’ he said earnestly, ‘if it had been anyone else but Susan, maybe they would have reacted differently, maybe even violently, but not Susan. She’s not like that. In fact I’ve never met anyone who didn’t like Susan.’

‘Except Laura,’ Paget observed drily. ‘But let’s get back to the night Laura was killed. Did you see Simon actually go into the shop?’

Ballantyne shook his head. ‘No. I dropped him off and drove away.’

‘And now you are suggesting that, instead of going in, he made his way back to the house, killed his wife, then returned in time for you to pick him up again outside the shop. Is that right, Mr Ballantyne?’

Ballantyne squirmed in his seat. ‘I said it’s possible, that’s all,’ he protested. ‘I don’t know that’s what happened, but
somebody
killed Laura, didn’t they? I didn’t think of it at the time, of course. It was such a shock finding Laura the way we did, that it didn’t occur to me to connect the two things.’

‘Any ideas about how he would get from the shop to the house and back again?’

Ballantyne shrugged. ‘He could have walked; it’s less than a mile. Or he could have used Susan’s car. I suppose it’s possible that he and Susan were in it together, but I really can’t see Susan being involved. But Simon would hardly take a taxi, would he?’

‘There is another possibility,’ Paget said. ‘And that is that Mr Holbrook had arranged to be picked up by
your
wife, and the two of them went back to the house, where it was she who killed Laura Holbrook. They were
her
fingerprints we found all over the crime scene, and
her
clothes that were stained with Laura Holbrook’s blood. Doesn’t that seem a more likely explanation, Mr Ballantyne?’