‘I can’t imagine why I told you all that.’
‘Sometimes it’s easier to talk to a stranger.’
‘That depends on the stranger, surely. You seem to have a gift for it, inspector. Perhaps you should join the Samaritans.’
‘No patience. They’d be jumping off high buildings in droves.’
Amy was surprised. He had seemed to her endlessly patient and attentive. But perhaps that was just part of his technique. An enforced physical stillness to encourage revelation. Certainly he seemed to have taken rather a lot of notes. She began to feel slightly ill at ease and was quite relieved when he buzzed for the nice policewoman with the shining hair.
‘We would like, Mrs Lyddiard,’ said Barnaby, unhooking her coat from the curly hat stand, ‘some fingerprints from you. Purely for purposes of elimination. They will not be put on file or kept longer than is absolutely necessary.’
‘That’s fine,’ said Amy.
‘What do you think our chances are of obtaining your sister-in-law’s?’
‘Absolutely nil. She’s a law unto herself, Honoria.’ Barnaby shook hands. As WPC Brierley and she were leaving he said, ‘Take Mrs Lyddiard out via the incident room.’ He smiled at Amy. ‘You might be interested to see how the wheels go round.’
‘Indeed I would.’
Amy followed the policewoman down the corridor determined to make a mental note of everything she saw. She would buy a folder and mark it Police Research. Readers were said to love authentic detail and already Amy’s mind was conjuring a scene in which Araminta - after many tortuous travails - finally collapses on the steps of a station not a million miles removed from Causton CID. There, after being comforted and refreshed, she would pour out her incredible story. Probably to a large, burly man who would hear her out in close and sympathetic silence.
The telephone call from the day-shift barman at the Golden Fleece came shortly after one of the mingiest, stingiest lunches Tom Barnaby had ever eaten. He had been frightened into this austere reckoning when, tired of waiting for the lift, he had wheezed his way up a single flight of stairs to reach the canteen. Having attained the final step he found himself overwhelmed by a terrible choking sensation as if his windpipe had been clamped. There was a zinging in his ears and the hand that gripped the stair rail was not only curiously numb but - he squinted, trying to bring it into focus - curiously on the move.
Though these extraordinary physical sensations lasted only a few seconds it had been long enough to concentrate his mind marvellously on the virtuous section of the menu. Consequently an egg salad now nestled in his stomach alongside a slimmer’s yogurt and a cube of fatless cheese that had looked and tasted like yellow india rubber. (At least he now knew what to give up for Lent.) All this plus two slices of crispbread. Not that these had been crisp any more than they even remotely resembled bread. More like soggy sawdust held together by pockets of air. A clear case for prosecution under the Trades Description Act.
‘Are you all right, chief?’ Troy prised himself away from Audrey Brierley’s desk and sauntered over. His eyebrows were raised in mild inquiry, which was as near as he ever came to demonstrating concern.
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘Indigestion, is it?’
‘You have to have eaten something to get indigestion, sergeant.’
Troy laughed in the careless way young, healthy, slender people have. ‘That’s very good. I must remember that. Tell Mor.’
‘She must really look forward to your return, Gavin.’
‘Yeah, I think she does. Usually has a go at me, though, about not going straight home.’ Like most of the men, and some of the women, Troy unwound after his shift with a few jars in the Police Club.
‘You’d think she’d be grateful. I’ve tried to explain it’s for her that I do it. If I took all the stresses and strains of this job back to 18 Russell Avenue she’d complain fast enough. I dunno . . .’ He swivelled a chair round and sat down more comfortably. ‘Women. No sooner am I in the door than she starts. Jobs usually. When am I going to fix the bathroom tap, kitchen cupboard, landing light? I’m bloody wacked on my day off. All I want to do is kip. After I’ve cleaned and polished the car.
‘You daren’t open your eyes. The second the old lids roll back she’s off. Latest thing is, why don’t I ever talk to her. I said, I never talk to you, Maureen, because I can never get a bloody word in.’
Sensing a lack of interest from the far side of the desk, Troy asked if anything helpful had come out of the interview with Mrs Lyddiard.
‘Nothing I latched on to at the time. But I had the feeling after she’d left that something was said that rang false. I don’t necessarily mean that she was lying - just that there was some discrepancy. I’m just about to read through it again.’
But, almost before he had finished speaking, the phone rang and the resulting conversation put all thoughts of Amy’s interview from his head.
Garry Briggs, the day barman, was unsure whether the scrap of information he could add to that of his colleagues was worth passing on, but he had seen the woman they were all being asked about leaving the hotel car park, on more than one occasion, in a black Celica. Barnaby asked Mr Briggs if he had noticed who was driving at the time.
‘She was.’
‘Are you sure? If this is the vehicle I’m thinking of the windows would be dark.’
‘Positive. Saw her getting in and out. Always on her own.’ When these remarks were received in silence he added regretfully, ‘I did say it wasn’t much.’
The chief inspector thanked him and hung up. Sergeant Troy, quietly attentive, was leaning forward, hands resting lightly on his knees. He said, ‘So she had the use of his car. Which means she wasn’t a casual pick-up.’
‘Find Laura Hutton’s statement, would you?’
Looking slightly puzzled, Troy did so. Barnaby read it quickly through while punching out her number. She picked up the phone immediately but asked if he would ring back.
‘I’m showing an estate agent round at the moment.’
‘It won’t take a second, Mrs Hutton. It’s about the night you saw this woman arrive at Plover’s Rest. Do you remember—’
‘Good God, man, of course I remember.’
‘What I’m asking is,’ he glanced down at the form, ‘you said she knocked at the door.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Did you see anyone open it?’
‘Well . . . Gerald.’
‘But did you
see
?’
‘No. The porch is in the way.’
‘Did you hear the chain being taken off, perhaps?’
‘Not really. The taxi’s engine was running.’
‘Just one more thing. When you looked through the window—’
‘I’m not discussing this matter any more. I’ve told you - there’s someone here.’ She banged the phone down.
It didn’t really signify. Barnaby, mentally transported to the cottage, stood precisely where Laura Hutton had stood, in the soft earth of the flower border, and peered through an imaginary gap in the velvet curtains. He recalled the shape and furnishings of the room.
‘What’s all this in aid of, chief?’
Barnaby did not reply for some time. Just sat, his eyes focused on the past, tapping at the statement absently.
‘We’ve been taking things at face value, sergeant.’
‘How’s that then?’
‘Obviously one has to do this at the beginning of a case, but I have foolishly let things run on.’
‘You mean in respect of this woman?’
‘Yes.’
‘I wouldn’t say that, chief. We’ve followed the usual procedures. We already know a little bit more about her. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before she’s found.’
‘I doubt if she will ever be “found”, Gavin. I doubt, in fact, if she exists at all.’
‘But all these people have seen her.’
‘I believe that what they have seen is Gerald Hadleigh.’
‘
Hadleigh?
’
‘That’s right.’
There was complete silence after this. Troy searched for the correct response. Or at least one that would not make him look an absolute prat. But the truth was that this bizarre possibility had simply not occurred to him and, far from now appearing quite likely, the more he thought about the idea the barmier it seemed. In the end he said, simply, ‘What makes you so sure, sir?’
‘Various things, but primarily aspects of Hadleigh’s character. This immense reserve, for instance, that everyone who has met him comments on. His secrecy. I’m obviously guessing blind here, but he may have regarded this woman as his true self and the suave, retired civil servant as a false persona. This would make all the lies he seems to have told comprehensible.’
‘Freaky deaky.’ Troy flashed his Glad To Be Normal button. ‘Just a tarty old drag queen then.’
‘I was thinking of transvestism, which is a much more complicated business. The majority are heteros, often with wives and families. The condition is a psychological one and may not affect their sex lives at all.’
‘It’d bloody affect mine,’ said Troy. ‘Maureen came to bed in pit boots, Y-fronts and a jokey moustache I’d be right out the window.’ He paused, shocked into temporary silence by the very thought. ‘So what do they get out of it then? I mean - queers dressing up, OK, it’s sick,’ - he pulled a face of grotesquely exaggerated repulsion - ‘but if they’re playing the girly part in these gruesome fuckarounds, well . . . there you go. But for a straight bloke to do it just to sit around in a hotel lobby - what’s the point?’
‘Simply to be accepted in public as a woman.’
Simply? What was simple about stapling your balls together and calling yourself Doris?
‘They have their own clubs as well. Places where they can meet. But the real challenge is to walk down the street without anyone having the faintest idea that you aren’t exactly what you appear to be.’
‘You seem to know all about it, chief,’ said Troy. Then, watching his back, ‘No offence.’
‘Cully had a friend that way inclined. At Cambridge. She talked about him a lot.’
‘Right.’ The sergeant erased, with some difficulty, a lovely face from his mind’s eye. ‘He certainly seemed to have kept it under his saucy black hat. Not easy in a sharp-eyed place like Midsomer Worthy.’
‘I presume the way it worked was, he’d get all togged up then into the garage via the kitchen and drive straight off.’
‘Having first opened the garage doors.’
‘Well, as the general idea was to avoid drawing attention to himself, Gavin, I think we can safely assume he would have first opened the garage doors, yes.’
‘So, when the car was stolen, he’d be right up shit creek.’
‘Which is why he didn’t go to Uxbridge station to report the theft.’
‘But didn’t Laura Hutton say this woman knocked and someone let her in?’
‘I see that as an extra precaution. Although it was late, and the taxi had taken him right up to the house, at the moment he alighted he must have felt extremely vulnerable. Those halogen lamps are hellish bright. What if someone had chosen that moment to walk by? Or been peeping out from their net curtains?’
‘Or, as things turned out, hiding behind a bush.’
‘It’s common sense to assume that, if you see a person knock on a door and then disappear inside a house, the door has been opened from the inside. But we now know that Mrs Hutton did not see that actually happen.’
‘Hang on though . . .’ Troy screwed up his face again, this time in concentration. ‘Didn’t she see this woman and Hadleigh through the window? Drinking wine or something.’
‘No. She saw only the woman.’
‘But Hadleigh’d hardly be drinking a toast to himself.’
‘I think that’s just what he was doing. There’s a mirror over the fireplace. Why shouldn’t he be raising a glass in self-congratulation after having made it safely back?’
‘Yeah. Actually . . .’ Troy abandoned the sentence but nodded, indicating that he understood completely. Tell the truth, he himself had more than once, whilst waxing and buffing his newly-bought, secondhand Ford Sierra Cossie, raised a can of ice-cold Carling’s and winked at the drop-dead stud reflected in the wing mirror. A thought displaced this attractive recollection.
‘No wonder Laura Hutton thought the woman reminded her of somebody. It was Hadleigh, not that painting. But if all this happened the night before the murder, where’s the kinky gear?’
‘Presumably in the suitcase.’
‘Wow.’ Troy barely breathed the exclamation. His mind was running every which way. ‘That’s why the chest of drawers was always kept locked.’
‘I should imagine so.’
‘But - not at the time of the murder?’
‘One of the things I discovered from Cully is that this need for cross-dressing often coincides with periods of extreme stress. And we know that Hadleigh was suffering in just such a way directly before he died.’
‘So - about to slip into the frillies, he was interrupted . . .’ The words tumbled over each other. Troy got up and started walking around, as drawn to this new scenario now as he had previously been wary. ‘Which would explain why he had got undressed but not into his pyjamas. Hang about, though - would he even think of doing this while someone was still in the house?’
‘I would have said not. But we must remember that he and Jennings go back a long way. For all we know the “unpleasantness in the past” that Hadleigh referred to might have to do with this very thing.’
‘Perhaps Jennings was threatening exposure?’
‘Unlikely. What would be the point? It’s not as if Hadleigh’s breaking the law.’
‘True. The worse that could happen is a few funny looks from the locals. All he’d have to do then is pack his stuff and go back to the Smoke. Nobody cares up there if you’re buggering the goldfish on your night off. Even so,’ Troy stopped his pacing and sat down again, ‘must be relevant, all this clobber. Otherwise why would the murderer take it away?’
‘If it was the murderer.’