Читать книгу The Liar in the Library - Simon Brett - Страница 13

Though she was being interviewed in her own home (Carole had conveniently remembered something she had to do back at High Tor), Jude was left in no doubt that her police interrogation was a serious matter.

Once they were seated on the sagging, throw-covered sofa and armchairs of her sitting room, the first thing Detective Inspector Rollins said was, ‘You reacted with surprise, Mrs Nicholls, when—’

‘Call me “Jude”. Everyone calls me “Jude”.’

A slight wrinkle of the woman’s nose showed that she didn’t warm to such intimacy, but all she said was, ‘Very well, Jude. You reacted with surprise when I mentioned Burton St Clair’s death. Does that mean you didn’t know he was dead?’

‘Of course that’s what it means!’ The delayed shock of the news suddenly caught up with her. ‘But I can’t believe that Al … Burton’s dead. I was with him only yesterday evening.’

‘We know you were,’ said Rollins. ‘And we think it’s possible that you were the last person to see him alive.’

‘Which is why we’re talking to you,’ added Detective Sergeant Knight, perhaps unnecessarily. Through the confusion of her thoughts, Jude got the impression that the junior officer needed to assert himself, to demonstrate that he wasn’t just a weak male sidekick to a female boss.

‘Did Burton die at home?’ asked Jude. ‘He was about to drive there when I left him.’

‘No,’ the Detective Inspector replied. ‘His body was found in his car this morning in the Fethering Library car park.’

Jude was bewildered. ‘But that’s where I last saw him.’

‘Yes,’ Rollins confirmed.

‘Which is also why we’re talking to you.’ This second intervention by Knight prompted the tiniest wrinkling of his superior’s brow. He had overstepped some mark in their professional relationship. The Detective Inspector’s iPhone lay on her lap. Jude assumed it might contain notes about the beginning of their investigation, but Rollins gave no sign that she would be writing anything down during their interview.

‘Well, how did he die?’ asked Jude. ‘What did he die of?’

‘We don’t know yet,’ replied the Detective Inspector, all police formality. ‘We will have more information when a post-mortem has been conducted.’

‘And forensic investigations,’ Knight contributed.

This again prompted a moue of annoyance from Rollins. Jude thought she knew why, as she asked the obvious question. ‘Forensic? Does that mean there’s a suspicion of foul play?’

‘We’re at a very early stage of our enquiries. At this point any suggestions as to the cause of Mr St Clair’s death would be nothing more than speculation.’

Jude felt appropriately deterred from asking further questions. The ball was still in the Detective Inspector’s court. ‘But, obviously, Jude, we are trying to get as exact a picture as we can of his movements during the last twenty-four hours. We’ve spoken to his wife …’

‘And to his ex-wife?’

‘Yes, we know he was married twice.’ Rollins’s tone was testy, as though Jude had been picking her up on some lapse in her investigative method. ‘We’ve left a message with Megan Sinclair, as she still calls herself, but she hasn’t got back to us yet.’

‘Ah.’

‘One of her neighbours,’ Knight contributed, ‘believes she’s visiting an actress friend in Scarborough.’

Again, Detective Inspector Rollins’s expression suggested that her junior’s intervention was unwelcome. She turned back to her interviewee. ‘Persephone St Clair, the deceased’s widow, said you used to spend a lot of time with him and his former wife …?’

‘Yes, there was a stage when we used to see quite a lot of each other. We’re talking some years ago.’

‘How many years?’

‘Fifteen … twenty …’

Detective Sergeant Knight thought he had been silent for too long. ‘And, back then, were you close to Mr St Clair?’

Again, Rollins looked peeved by the intervention. Maybe that was the very question she had been about to ask.

‘I knew Megan before I knew him. She was my friend. When she got married, it was natural that I met up with them as a couple.’

‘But as you got to know him,’ Knight persisted, ‘did you become closer to Mr St Clair?’

‘If you’re asking if we had an affair, the answer is very definitely no.’

‘That wasn’t what the Sergeant was asking,’ said Rollins in a manner that was definitely a put-down to him. ‘We are merely trying to get as much background to the case as we can.’

‘“Case”?’ echoed Jude. ‘Then you do think there was something suspicious about—’

‘I was guilty of using the wrong word,’ responded the Detective Inspector blandly. ‘I should not have said “case”, I should have said “incident”.’

‘I see.’

‘So. Background,’ Rollins went on. ‘Had you kept in touch with Burton St Clair since the days when you spent time with him and his wife … some fifteen or twenty years ago?’ The way she echoed the words seemed to carry the implication that Jude was not necessarily a very reliable witness.

‘No, not really.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I mean that I haven’t been regularly in touch with him. I heard a bit about what he was up to from mutual friends …’

‘Did you know that his first marriage had broken down?’ asked Detective Sergeant Knight.

‘I heard about that, yes. Then, obviously, I saw media coverage of the success of Stray Leaves in Autumn …’

Rollins picked up the conversational baton. ‘And was that why you decided you would go and hear him speaking last night at Fethering Library? You saw in the local paper that he would be there and you thought you’d go and re-establish contact with an old friend?’

‘It wasn’t exactly like that.’

‘Oh?’ The Detective Inspector’s manner made it very difficult for Jude not to sound guilty. Though, of course, she told herself, there was nothing that she needed to sound guilty for.

‘Burton contacted me, said he’d be in Fethering, and suggested I might like to come along to the library.’

‘So you had kept in regular touch?’ said Detective Sergeant Knight accusingly.

‘No. He contacted me through Facebook. I don’t use it a lot, but I do have an account. For some of my clients it’s their preferred means of communication.’

‘Clients?’ Rollins reminded herself. ‘Oh yes, of course. You’re a healer, aren’t you?’

Jude was well used to the layers of scepticism that could be lathered on to that particular word. ‘Yes, that’s what I do.’

‘So … until this approach through Facebook, you hadn’t had direct contact from either Burton or his first wife Megan for fifteen … twenty years …?’

‘No.’

‘And you hadn’t made contact with them?’

‘No.’ Jude suddenly remembered the previous evening. ‘Well, that is to say …’

‘Yes?’

‘I did send an email to Megan yesterday.’

‘Oh?’ Detective Inspector Rollins’s tone made this sound like a major revelation. ‘Was that after you had left Fethering Library?’

‘Yes, when I got back here.’

‘And why, after this long break, did you suddenly get in touch with her?’

‘There was a query about Burton St Clair’s writing that was raised in the Q & A session after his talk. I wanted to check a factual detail with Megan.’

‘I see. Well, we’ll be able to see her emails when we get in touch with her.’

‘I can show you the text of what I sent right now,’ said Jude, as near to being rattled as her habitually serene temperament allowed.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Detective Inspector Rollins. For the first time, she looked down at her iPhone, woke up the screen and consulted some notes she had written there. ‘Now, according to Vix Winter, the junior librarian who found Mr St Clair’s body in the car park this morning, last night, just as she and her boss were leaving, she saw you getting into Mr St Clair’s car. She also said that, by then, all of the other people who’d attended the talk had gone home.’

‘Yes. That’s what happened. It was pouring with rain. Burton had offered to drive me back here.’

‘But he didn’t drive you back here. The dry patch under his car suggested that it hadn’t moved since he arrived at the library earlier in the evening.’

‘That’s entirely possible, yes.’

‘So why didn’t he drive you home, Jude?’

‘We had an argument.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And could you tell me what that argument was about?’

‘Very well.’

‘In fact, could you tell me exactly what happened last night, from the moment—’ Rollins looked down at her screen to check the name – ‘Di Thompson locked up the library and left in her car with Vix Winter, until you left Burton St Clair in his car … assuming that is what happened?’

The level of scepticism in the Detective Inspector’s attitude and body language did not lessen as Jude began her narrative. If anything, it increased.

Jude was punctiliously accurate in her reconstruction of the events inside Burton’s BMW. They were so recent that she didn’t have to dig too deep into her memory. But as she replayed the awkwardness of the encounter, she was annoyed to find herself blushing. And at the end of her narration, she could sense that Rollins did not believe the truth she had just been told.

Before the Detective Inspector could pass any comment, however, the iPhone on her lap rang. ‘Rollins,’ she said. ‘Ah, Megan Sinclair. Thank you for getting back to me.’

She rose to her feet. ‘I’ll take this in the hall,’ she announced as she left the room.

Detective Sergeant Knight and Jude looked at each other. Neither had much to say. The silence felt heavy between them.