Читать книгу Cooper and Fry Crime Fiction Series Books 1-3: Black Dog, Dancing With the Virgins, Blood on the Tongue - Stephen Booth - Страница 25

DCI Tailby’s office was one of the few rooms in the Edendale Divisional HQ with air conditioning. In the past couple of weeks, there had been a lot of excuses for meetings that had to take place in the DCI’s office and nowhere else. Ben Cooper, though, was sure his visit that afternoon was justified by something besides the unbearable temperature.

‘Very interesting,’ said Tailby when he had finished summarizing his interviews at Dial Cottage. ‘But do you feel you pressed him hard enough, Cooper?’

Cooper remembered what he had said during the morning meeting, and wondered if the DCI was making fun of him. He was glad he had decided not to mention any of what had taken place at Thorpe Farm before he had managed to get Harry into the car.

‘He’s a bit of an awkward character, sir.’

‘I know. Perhaps we’ll have to bring him in and interview him under caution. That would upset his apple cart, eh?’

‘Possibly.’

‘So what do you make of it, Cooper? Do you believe him?’

‘Well, yes, sir, funnily enough.’

‘Mmm?’

‘Well, I believe what he said, because of the things that he didn’t say, if you follow me.’

‘I don’t think I do, Cooper.’

‘Well, it seems to me that he neatly avoided telling a lie. Where there were things he didn’t want to tell me, he just avoided it. Because of that, I think everything he said was true. I think it’s probably against his principles to lie.’

‘Are there still people around like that? I may be a cynical old detective chief inspector, but I thought that idea went out with George Washington.’

‘It’s old-fashioned, I know, but there are still people round here who were brought up like that. My feeling is that Harry Dickinson is one of them. That’s a good reason why he says no more than necessary. The less you say, the less temptation there is to lie.’

‘Tell the truth or say nowt.’

‘That’s it, sir. Exactly.’

‘That’s what my old shift sergeant told me many years ago when I was a new recruit,’ said Tailby. ‘But it was a long time ago. Things change, Cooper.’

‘Not everything changes, sir. With respect.’

Tailby ran a hand vigorously through his hair, as if trying to mix the grey at the front with the darker hair at the back to create something that looked less like a session with the Grecian 2000 that had gone badly wrong. His face was even gaunter than usual, and he looked tired.

‘All right. So has the bird-watcher got his times wrong? Was it earlier than he thought when he saw Dickinson and his dog?’

‘It’s possible. You can lose track of time when you’re up on the hills. It can be very deceptive.’

‘We’ll have to check with him.’ Tailby shuffled a file of reports. ‘Damn it, there’s no mention of whether he had a watch on, or whether it was usually accurate. A bit of a sketchy interview altogether, in fact. Who did that?’ He grimaced. ‘Oh yes, DS Rennie.’

Unconsciously copying the DCI’s gesture, Cooper raised a hand to push a lock of hair back from his forehead and found some of the strands stuck to his skin by sweat.

‘I can’t reconcile the idea of all those people we’re interested in being on the Baulk at the same time,’ he said. ‘Laura, Harry Dickinson, Graham Vernon. And a fourth person – the killer? It seems like too much of a coincidence.’

‘We can’t let Dickinson get away with refusing to say why he wanted to talk to Graham Vernon,’ said Tailby.

‘Can we show that his reasons are relevant to the enquiry?’

Tailby considered it. ‘The whole question of Dickinson and Vernon being out on the Baulk at that time is very relevant.’

‘The bigger question is – what was Vernon doing?’ said Cooper.

‘The Vernon family have got some more questions to answer, I’m afraid. There’s clearly something not right about their account of events just before Laura vanished. Yet they were very convincing during the appeal this morning. Graham Vernon will come over very well on TV.’

Ben Cooper felt distinctly unimpressed by the thought of Vernon’s television persona. In his own experience, anything that was said for the sake of the TV cameras was even less likely to approach the truth than the normal tangle of fabrications and evasions he had to deal with every working day. Lies told under a bright gloss of lights and cameras were lies just the same.

He watched Tailby fiddle with the knot of his tie like a man worried about his appearance, and he knew the DCI felt the same way.

‘What about Daniel Vernon?’ asked Cooper.

‘Oh, there are several reliable witnesses to place him in Exeter at the critical times. Seems he’s a member of some left-wing group with social consciences. I can’t imagine where he got ideas like those from. A shame, that, too – I had a feeling about young Daniel. In the end, I let DC Weenink call round at the Mount to ask him about his transport arrangements. It emerges that his father had offered to pay for his rail fare or even to drive down to Devon and collect him when Laura turned up dead on Monday. But Daniel preferred to hitchhike, and it took him all night and half the next morning. We traced the driver of a cattle transporter who dropped him at Junction 28 on the M1 in the early hours.’

‘Interesting.’

‘People aren’t so willing to pick up scruffy youths by the side of the road as they were in my day.’

‘I didn’t mean –’

‘I know what you meant, Cooper. And I agree. But it can wait for a while.’

Cooper wondered whether this was the signal for him to leave. But the DCI seemed to be in an amenable mood, so he decided to press on.

‘How is Lee Sherratt shaping up, sir?’

‘He’s denying everything. Says he had no relationship with Laura Vernon at all, that he hardly knew her, in fact. But the used condom shook him, all right. The DNA will pin him down on that. All we have to do is wait for the results.’

‘Suggesting he had been indulging in some outdoors sex? But it won’t prove the sex was with Laura Vernon.’

‘It’ll be enough to put him under pressure. But we have another alternative anyway. DS Morgan has traced the boyfriend.’

‘Ah.’

‘A lad by the name of Simeon Holmes. Aged seventeen. He lives on the Devonshire Estate in Edendale. Do you know it?’

Cooper knew it well. He had patrolled the beat there as a young bobby, watching out for stolen cars being raced round the streets or gathering information on local drug dealers who operated from the sprawl of prefabricated concrete houses mistakenly slung up in the 1960s.

The Devonshire Estate occupied low-lying land in the valley bottom which had once been wetlands and water meadows until they had been hastily drained for the housing scheme. For thirty-five years the damp had gradually been creeping back into the foundations of the houses, staining the walls with mould and rotting the doors and windows. Many of the houses had become virtually uninhabitable, with fungus growing through the floorboards and water pouring through the roofs. But there was almost nowhere else for the poor of Edendale to go. It was the closest thing the valley had to an inner-city area.

‘How does he come to be Laura Vernon’s boyfriend? He sounds like entirely the wrong type.’

‘He’s not someone her parents would approve of, I don’t suppose,’ said Tailby. ‘Rides a motorbike for a start. He says he met Laura here in town one lunchtime when they should both have been at school. In fact, he says she initiated the relationship, and had been skipping school ever since to meet him in various convenient spots.’

‘Bunking off.’

‘Is that what they call it these days? I thought it was bonking, not bunking.’

‘Missing school, sir, not the other thing.’

‘Oh. Well, by all accounts they were doing the other thing as well. Holmes says she told him she was sixteen.’

‘They always say that.’

‘It’s bloody difficult, though, isn’t it? I certainly couldn’t tell you whether one of these girls out there was fifteen or sixteen. Sometimes they look every bit of eighteen and turn out to be twelve. The CPS wouldn’t entertain a prosecution for statutory rape anyway. Not at seventeen.’

‘There are certainly plenty of leads, then, sir.’

Tailby sighed. ‘Too many. A positive over-abundance of suspects. I’d much prefer to narrow it down to one at an early stage. But at least it avoids the talk of a link with the Edson case.’

‘Were there any reports of motorbikes in Moorhay from the house-to-house?’ asked Cooper.

‘Several. They’re being sifted out from the computer. Holmes is coming in shortly to be interviewed. Perhaps we ought to have a look at him ourselves, you and I. We could leave Harry Dickinson and the Vernons until later. This lad seems to be more than happy to talk. What do you say, Cooper?’

‘I’d like to do that, sir. Thank you.’

Then the phone rang, and Tailby took a call from downstairs. He nodded with the beginnings of a small smile.

‘Change of plan,’ he said. ‘DI Hitchens can tackle Holmes instead. If you pop downstairs, you’ll find Mr Daniel Vernon waiting. Apparently he has a few things he wants to tell us.’

One of the twin tape decks had developed a faint, irritating squeak. Diane Fry thought it could almost have been designed to do that deliberately, to unnerve an interviewee. But today it was likely to unnerve the interviewers first.

‘We go to the arcades at lunchtime from school, see. Sometimes we stay all afternoon. Nobody bothers about us.’

Simeon Holmes was still dressed in the bottom half of his black biking leathers, but had taken off the jacket as a gesture towards the stifling atmosphere of the interview room. He was wearing a black Manic Street Preachers T-shirt that revealed smooth, well-developed arms and shoulders, and there were small blue tattoos at the base of his neck on either side. His hair was cropped close on top, but had been left to grow long at the back. He had a gold earring in one ear and a small birthmark near one eyebrow. Diane Fry remembered that DS Morgan had described Holmes as the sort of muscular lout that some girls liked. And he had a 500 cc motorbike as well.

‘But you’re a pupil at Edendale Community School,’ said Hitchens with barely concealed amazement.

‘That’s right, mate.’

‘How can you take all afternoon off from school?’

‘We get study periods, see? It means we can do what we like, with no lessons to go to.’

‘Do what you like? Do anything but study, I suppose.’

Holmes shrugged. ‘Everybody does it.’

‘I see.’

Hitchens exchanged glances with Fry, who raised her eyebrows. It was no surprise to her what lads like Simeon Holmes got up to.

‘You told Detective Sergeant Morgan that you met Laura Vernon at one of the amusement arcades in Dale Street.’

‘Tommy’s Amusements, yeah. I was playing one of those computer fight games, you know? Tommy’s has the best games, and I was knocking up a high score. There were a few of us in there, maybe six or seven of us.’

‘Fellow sixth formers?’

‘Some of them.’

‘And?’

‘Well, one of my mates, who was near the front window, shouted to me that there was this tart messing with my bike outside. So I went out, and there she was sitting on the saddle waggling the handlebars. A bloody cheek, it was, to be honest. If it’d been a bloke doing that, I’d have decked him. I don’t like people messing with my bike. But it was this tart, Laura.’

Fry’s nose twitched. There was a curious smell in the interview room which had been getting stronger during the past few minutes. It was warm and stuffy in the small room, but the smell was something more than just the sour odour of stale male sweat.

‘You didn’t know Laura before that?’ she asked.

‘Never set eyes on her before.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I would’ve remembered, luv, believe me. I don’t forget a good-looking tart.’

Holmes grinned at Diane Fry, who remained impassive, much as she would have liked to have ‘decked’ him. She had never much liked being called ‘luv’ by youths like Simeon Holmes.

‘She was an attractive girl, wasn’t she?’ said Hitchens.

‘Yeah. She was.’

Was that a slight flinching? Fry had seen before the people who seemed almost unperturbed by the death of someone they knew well, until they were referred to in that awful past tense. The fact of their death seemed to come home in one tiny word.

‘So why was she on your motorbike?’ asked Hitchens.

‘She was just looking, she said. A lot of birds like bikes, you know. They find ’em dead sexy. They can’t wait to get their legs astride one.’

‘Is that why you ride one?’

Holmes grinned again. ‘Not really. But it helps, you know?’

‘So are you saying she was interested in the bike, not in you?’ asked Fry.

Holmes looked at her, ignoring her frown as the grin stayed on his face. ‘Give over. Well, you might have thought so at first – she was pretending to play it a bit cool, like. But all I had to do was give a bit of chat, you know, and we got talking straight off. She came in the arcade to watch me play. Yeah, and later on one of the other lads in there, who knew her – he told me she’d been asking about me a couple of days before. She wanted to know who I was, what my name was, you know. So she’d obviously fancied me. The bike thing was just a bit of a ploy.’ He turned towards Hitchens again. ‘Birds do that sort of stuff, you know?’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Hitchens. For a moment, Fry thought the DI was going to give Holmes a matey wink. If he did, she was going to have to walk out.

‘Birds like her especially,’ said Holmes.

‘Like what?’

‘Well, she was from the posh school, you know. High Carrs. The kids there aren’t supposed to be down in town during school hours, not even the sixth formers. But she’d sneaked out. She was like that, Laura. Didn’t give a toss about school really.’

‘She was a bright girl, though, from what we hear.’

‘Sure. Dead bright. She could have sailed through her GCSEs, I reckon, but she couldn’t be bothered with all the studying. She was more into music. I reckon her parents put her right off school. It happens, you know. Some parents push their kids too hard and they go totally the other way. It’s a shame really.’

‘Teenage rebellion, eh?’

‘Yeah, right. Did it yourself, eh, mate? Well, maybe Laura would have come out of it, if she’d got the chance.’

‘Yes, Simeon. But you didn’t exactly encourage her to go back to school, did you?’

‘Well, no. We hit it off pretty well, you see, from the beginning. She started coming down to the arcades regular. I was a bit surprised, to be honest – she was a bit too upmarket for me, if you know what I mean. Not my usual type. But she was dead keen. Yeah, dead keen. And I didn’t say no. Well, you don’t, do you?’

The curious smell was definitely coming from Holmes. Fry discounted the sweet smell of alcohol, the rank bite of cigarette smoke. No drugs she had ever come across smelled quite like that. Perhaps it was something to do with the motorbike leathers. Some kind of oil used to soften up the leather maybe, which was now being evaporated by the heat and humidity in the interview room. But to produce that sort of stink it would have to have been something like rancid pig fat.

‘Didn’t Laura get into trouble at school for breaking the rules?’ she asked.

‘Dunno. She never said. She wouldn’t have given a toss anyway.’

‘But her parents might have.’

Holmes shrugged. ‘She didn’t talk about them much.’

‘Basically, you would say that Laura instigated the relationship?’ asked Hitchens.

‘What? Oh, yeah. She started it, all right. Dead keen, like I said.’

‘Had she had other boyfriends?’

‘Sure. She was no Little Miss Innocent. Don’t go getting that idea.’

Fry leaned forward to put her next question.

‘When did you start having sex with her, Simeon?’

Holmes looked from Hitchens to Fry, the worry that had been behind the grin coming to the surface now.

‘Look, this is about who killed her, right? That’s what you lot are bothered about. I mean, you’re not going to come on heavy about the age thing, are you?’

‘What do you mean, Simeon?’

‘Well, she told me she was sixteen, you know, but …’

‘You knew she was younger, didn’t you?’

Holmes looked at Hitchens appealingly. ‘You’re not interested in that, are you? It isn’t important now, is it? Now she’s dead.’

‘That’s what I think too,’ said Hitchens.

‘Right. Well, I didn’t want you thinking I was making excuses, like. But, to be honest, she was gasping for it, big time. Couldn’t wait to get my trousers off. Being frank, like.’

‘Oh really?’

‘Well, it’s right. She wanted to do it all the time. We used to go into the park, or we’d get on the bike and drive out somewhere into the country. Up on the hills. She liked that.’

‘So you had sex often?’

‘All the time – well, every time we met, if we had long enough. And sometimes when we didn’t have long enough, too, if you know what I mean. Yeah.’

Fry thought if Holmes grinned again she would have to slap the cuffs on him and read him his rights on a charge of offensive behaviour.

‘Was she a virgin before she met you?’ she asked.

‘No way.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Well, look, for one thing you can tell when you do it the first time, you know. By how they react and other things.’ He hesitated, looking sideways at Fry. ‘Anyway, she knew what it was all about, all right. In any case, the lad that she’d asked about me, he’d already had her himself. He told me about her. Reckoned there had been others too.’

‘Plenty of boyfriends, then.’

‘Yeah. She was dead keen on the blokes.’

‘Were there other boyfriends while you were seeing her, perhaps?’

‘Dunno really. Could have been, I suppose. She never mentioned to me if she had.’

‘It wouldn’t be unusual, for the sort of girl you seem to be describing. She might even do it deliberately, to make you jealous.’

‘I’m not the jealous type,’ said Holmes. Then his smile shrank and faded, and he looked at Fry again. ‘Oh yeah, I see what you’re getting at. You’ve got an idea that I got jealous of some other bloke and bashed her, right? Well, you can forget that right off. She was OK, Laura, good fun. But things like that don’t last, you know? We all move on. It’s what I would have expected, for either her or me to find someone else and it’d be over. A good few weeks together, and that’s it. It wasn’t a problem. I didn’t see her as much in the holidays anyway – she couldn’t get away from the parents, you know.’

‘We have a witness who saw Laura talking to a young man on the path behind the Mount shortly before she was killed on Saturday night,’ said Hitchens.

‘It wasn’t me, mate. I’ve already told the other bloke where I was. I was at Matlock Bath with about fifty other bikers.’

‘Yes, so you said.’ Officers were already busy checking out the names and places Holmes had given to DS Morgan. Depending on what they came back with, the youth might have to be sent home for now.

Fry would be pleased to get out of the interview room soon to get some fresh air, because the smell was becoming overpowering. She noticed Hitchens pull out a handkerchief as if to wipe his nose, but keeping it there a long time.

‘Besides,’ said Holmes, ‘I’ve never been near her place. Did someone say it was me they saw?’

‘Not specifically,’ said Hitchens.

‘There you are then.’

Holmes was relaxing now. Fry hated to see him relaxing. He might start to grin again. ‘When you had sex with Laura,’ she said, ‘did you like to bite her?’

He stared at her with distaste. ‘Get lost,’ he said.

‘You refuse to answer?’

‘It’s none of your business.’

‘Would you be willing to let us take a mould of your teeth?’ asked Hitchens.

‘What the hell for?’

‘To help eliminate you from our enquiries, Simeon. If you didn’t harm Laura Vernon, then you have absolutely nothing to worry about.’

Simeon Holmes wasn’t quite so stupid as he pretended. Fry could see him figuring it out. A question about his sexual techniques, and a request for a mould from his teeth. They hadn’t exactly been subtle with their questions. Because of his casual manner, Holmes might be easy to underestimate. But he had a choice now. He could work out that a mould might prove his guilt, if he was guilty. But if he was innocent, it might also clear him and get the police off his back. Fry and Hitchens both waited patiently to see which way he would jump.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘No problem.’

Hitchens’s face fell in disappointment. But before he could say anything else, there was a knock on the door and DS Rennie stuck his head into the room. He did a quick double take at the fetid atmosphere and his face screwed up in disgust. Hitchens announced a break in the interview, switched off the tapes, and went out into the corridor to speak to Rennie.

Left alone with Simeon Holmes, Fry was able to study him afresh. The young man met her eyes directly. But a layer of affectation seemed to have dropped away from him in the last few minutes, the final shreds of some assumed role dissipating as DI Hitchens left the room. Fry couldn’t quite figure out what it was. She didn’t think he had been lying during the interview. And yet … How old was Holmes? Seventeen?

‘You must be in the sixth form at the Community School now, Simeon,’ she said.

Holmes raised his eyebrows, saying nothing, but looking meaningfully at the motionless tape machines.

‘Just asking,’ she said.

He grinned slowly – that annoying, self-satisfied grin he had. But still nothing.

‘Only I was thinking,’ said Fry, ‘that I bet you’ve got a bit more brain than most of your mates.’

‘Dead right.’

‘And I bet you do quite well at school when you turn your mind to it. What are your best subjects? Let me guess – mechanical engineering? Car maintenance, perhaps?’

Holmes sneered. ‘Chemistry and biology, actually. I take my A levels next year.’

Intrigued, Fry found herself looking at a new Simeon Holmes, one who even sounded quite different.

‘Not much use for stripping a bike, surely?’ she said.

The guarded look began to fall back across the youth’s face. Fry could almost see the transformation taking place in his features as he reverted to his role with a dismissive snort.

‘Perhaps you were thinking of going on to university,’ she said. Then she held herself quite still, tingling with satisfaction, as she saw the beginnings of a blush seep into Simeon’s neck and across his cheeks. She had found something that embarrassed him. Something that he wouldn’t want to talk about with his biker mates.

‘With good grades in chemistry and biology you could study – what? Medicine?’

His mouth opened, moving compulsively. Deep in his eyes there was a small spurt of pain and distress, as if Fry had struck close to the most vulnerable part of his anatomy. She hurried to press home her advantage.

‘Is that it? Would you like to be a doctor one day, Simeon?’

But the spell was broken as DI Hitchens opened the door just in time to hear the last two sentences. His face contorted at the thought that he might go along to his local surgery and find this youth was his new GP. Then he nodded Diane Fry out of the room, leaving Simeon Holmes starting to grin again in the midst of his peculiar smell.

‘We can hand this one back to Morgan,’ said Hitchens. ‘They’ve found those hikers. We’re off to West Yorkshire, Diane.’

Ben Cooper had not seen Daniel Vernon before. He wasn’t impressed at first sight, but had learned not to judge people younger than himself too quickly. It was a mistake to dismiss someone because they did not dress as you did or behave in quite the same way. Daniel Vernon was a student. That probably meant he went to all-night raves and took cannabis and Ecstasy. He probably took a different girl home every night and lay in bed all day. He probably thought nothing of stealing traffic signs from the roadside, beer glasses and ashtrays from pubs. But in a few years he would be a respectable, well-off member of the community demanding better protection from the police.

Daniel looked as though he had drunk too much cheap beer in the Students’ Union. He was dressed in a grubby white T-shirt with the name of an American university written across the front. The T-shirt smelled of sweat.

Cooper took Daniel up to an interview room, where Tailby was waiting. They hardly needed to ask any questions before Daniel had begun to talk. He was eager to get something off his chest, and it quickly became clear what it was.

‘I find it astonishing,’ said Tailby a few minutes later, ‘that you should be so eager to come in here and tell me such things about your parents.’

‘It’s true,’ said Daniel. ‘I couldn’t give a toss what they do among themselves or with their tacky friends. But they were blind to what it was doing to Laura. She thought it was OK, all that. She wanted to try things out for herself. She got a taste for sex when she was about thirteen. She told me all about it, though she would never listen to my advice. Mum, she never suspected, even now. Dad –’ He shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

‘You tried to talk some sense into her, didn’t you, Daniel?’

‘I tried. But it was a waste of time.’

‘We found your letters, you know.’

‘Yes, I know you did. You took the one I wrote to her after she’d told me about Simeon Holmes.’

‘Yes, Holmes,’ said Tailby. ‘Do you know him?’

‘No. But it was the way Laura talked about him that made me write to her like that. It sounded more serious this time. She wasn’t just playing any more. My big worry was that she would let someone like him get her pregnant. I wanted to be sure she was still taking the pills she got from the doctor. She told me she was.’

Daniel looked up at Tailby with a question.

‘She wasn’t pregnant,’ said the DCI, though he refrained from explaining how they knew. Or rather, how the pathologist knew. There was such a thing as too much information. ‘But why have you decided to tell us all this now, Daniel?’

‘I don’t doubt that my father has been telling you things about Lee Sherratt and Laura. I won’t have you believing them. Laura wasn’t interested in Sherratt, or him in her.’

‘But your mother …’

‘My mother had the hots for him. She likes them young. And he was quite willing. My father knew, of course. He knew what was going on. He always knows.’

‘You’re saying that your mother was actually having an affair with her gardener?’

‘Sounds very D. H. Lawrence put like that, doesn’t it?’

‘Does it?’

‘But Lee Sherratt is just a youth from the village who saw the chance of getting his end away with an older woman. He isn’t exactly a Mellors.’

Tailby wasn’t sure what he was talking about. ‘Your father believes Sherratt may have killed your sister.’

‘If he did,’ said Daniel. ‘If he did kill her – it was my father’s fault.’

‘Ah. How do you make that out?’

‘He let it go on,’ he said. ‘Until it had gone too far. He enjoyed it.’

‘What?’

‘Oh yes.’

Daniel pulled at his T-shirt, which was sticking to his sides where the sweat was beginning to dry. He fidgeted in his chair, his jeans squeaking on the leather. He looked from Tailby to Cooper, the expression in his eyes shifting and changing. When he spoke again, his voice had altered. It was quiet, less aggressive, with an adolescent edge to it that spoke of an inner pain he could no longer conceal.

‘One day,’ he said, ‘I came across my father in his room. I wanted to speak to him about something I needed for university, just before I went away. I knocked on the door, but he must not have heard me. It turned out he was otherwise engaged.’

Daniel gave him a small, ironic smile. Tailby didn’t react. His face was expressionless, but for one eyebrow lifted slightly – indicating a mild interest only. It spurred Daniel on more than a probing question would have done.

‘He was standing at the windows. He was using binoculars, looking at something in the garden. At first I thought he was watching birds. I was surprised, I didn’t know he had taken up a hobby. He was never a man for hobbies, except golf – and even that is a business tool.’

‘Go on.’

‘I was about to ask him what species he had seen. There have been woodpeckers in the garden sometimes. Then he heard me come in, and when he turned towards me I saw him. I mean … I saw his face. He was startled, and angry at being interrupted. But most of all, he looked guilty. He asked me what I wanted. I wanted to know what he was looking at, but he wouldn’t say. He started to bluster about trying out the binoculars before he loaned them to a friend. But as I stood there, looking out of the window, I saw my mother.’

The young man was silent for several seconds, until Tailby thought he had finished. The DCI began to frown, frustrated at the seeming pointlessness of the story. But Daniel had more to tell.

‘She was with Lee Sherratt. In the summerhouse down there. He was naked from the waist up, as he often was, and he was grinning. My mother had been wearing a red silk shirt, with the ends tied at the front in a sort of loose bow. When I saw her, she was just putting it back on. It was the first time I had seen my mother’s breasts.’

The silence grew in the interview room. Somewhere in the station someone started whistling. A telephone rang half a dozen times before it was answered. Tailby dared not move in his seat for fear of breaking the moment.

‘But that wasn’t the worst,’ said Daniel. ‘The most sickening thing of all was my father. When I came into the room and he turned away from the window, I noticed two things straightaway. The first was the binoculars round his neck. The second was his erection.’

The young man was staring at the desk, as if interested in the ballpoint pens and a scatter of paperclips. Tailby remembered Graham Vernon’s desk in his study. There had been a framed print propped against a table lamp, a photograph of a wedding couple, taken in the 1970s by the look of the bridegroom’s hairstyle and the lapels of his suit. Graham Vernon was recognizable by his salesman’s smile, and the sincerity of his direct gaze at the camera. But allowing for the changes in fashion, in his youth Graham Vernon had looked very much like this young man in front of them now.

‘It was sticking out at the front of his trousers like a monstrous growth,’ said Daniel. ‘It was unreal. At first I couldn’t figure out what it was, you know. I thought he had something in his pocket. But he never carries anything in his pockets because it spoils the cut of his suit. Then I realized. The fact is, it turned him on to watch my mother having sex with the gardener. That’s my father, Chief Inspector.’ His voice cracked. ‘That’s the bastard I call my father.’

Tailby nodded slowly. He had spent too long in the police service to be shocked by other people’s sexual activities. They were merely facts to be noted now, data to be filed away as possible motives, to be assessed for their relevance to other details in the mass of information that was pouring into the incident room. The life and background of Laura Vernon were being pieced together, bit by bit, like a badly designed jigsaw. Everything that cast light on her circumstances was important. But how much could be trusted of what was said by an angry, bitter young man who hated his father and had just had his sister murdered?