Читать книгу Cooper and Fry Crime Fiction Series Books 1-3: Black Dog, Dancing With the Virgins, Blood on the Tongue - Stephen Booth - Страница 29

It was the first time Diane Fry had visited the Mount. She was not impressed by the mock porticos and the triple garage and the wrought-iron gates. She found the whole thing tasteless, a white box that was out of place set against the scenery of the valley behind it and the rows of stone cottages a few yards down the road. It could have been plonked down here from a suburb of Birmingham. Edgbaston or Bournville, perhaps. It gave no impression of being part of the landscape.

She had been allocated the task of talking to Charlotte Vernon, following DCI Tailby’s interview with her husband and son. Charlotte had been saying little so far, and attention had not been concentrated on her. But now there were other questions that needed to be asked, particularly questions about Lee Sherratt. The boy was still Mr Tailby’s favoured option, though Fry could see he had always kept in mind a second line of enquiry centred on the family. It was possible Charlotte Vernon might hold the key, one way or the other.

Fry was shown in by Daniel. He seemed subdued and sullen, rather than the angry young man she had read about in the reports. But when she told him what she wanted, he took her through the house without a word or a backwards glance, finding no necessity for politeness. It was a pity his alibi had checked out so thoroughly.

Charlotte Vernon had been described by the officers who had seen her as an attractive woman; some had said very attractive. Fry had expected to find a rich man’s spoilt wife, with nothing to do all day but look after her appearance, keeping her body in perfect condition, her hair expensively styled, her cosmetics flawless. But she found a woman in her late thirties, tired and resigned. The cosmetics were certainly there, and might have fooled a man. But Fry recognized that they had been applied without conviction.

Charlotte was wearing cream slacks and a silk shirt. She looked elegant – but then any woman wearing so many hundreds of pounds’ worth of clothes on her back ought to look stylish. Fry had come prepared to feel sympathy for the woman, who had just lost her daughter. She was willing to put the son’s story to the back of her mind, to listen to Charlotte’s version of events. But there was something in the tilt of the woman’s head as she lit a cigarette and settled herself into an armchair; something in the curl of her lips as she looked her up and down critically. In the end, Fry did not get a chance to show sympathy, as Charlotte Vernon opened the interview aggressively.

‘Don’t bother to treat me with kid gloves. I’m all right now.’

‘There are a few questions, Mrs Vernon.’

‘Yes, I’ve been expecting you. Dan’s been to see you, of course. I couldn’t stop him. The poor boy – he gets so mixed up about sex. Some men take a long time to mature, don’t they? I think Dan has got a bad case of delayed puberty.’

‘Your son has made a statement about your relationship with Lee Sherratt, Mrs Vernon.’

‘You mean he found out I was having it off with the gardener, don’t you, dear?’

Fry stared at her without expression. They were in a room full of beautiful old furniture with clear, tidy surfaces. There were three or four large watercolours on the wall, and an expanse of woodblock floor led towards French windows and a flagged terrace with stone balustrades. Fry would have liked to explore the bathroom and the kitchen, to examine the whirlpool bath, the automatic oven, the fitted wardrobes, the self-defrosting fridge and the digital microwave.

‘Is that the way it was, Mrs Vernon?’

‘Certainly. Oh, only a couple of times, but we both enjoyed it. He was unsubtle, but enthusiastic. And an excellent body. It’s so good for morale at my age when you can still make the young men come running.’

‘Did you initiate the relationship?’

‘I suppose I seduced him, yes. It didn’t take much doing.’

‘When did your husband find out what was going on?’

Charlotte shrugged. ‘I don’t really know. Does it matter?’

‘I would have thought so.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Presumably he objected.’

‘You presume wrong, dear. He gets a turn-on from it, old Graham. That’s convenient for both of us, really. It means I’m free to take what lovers I like without any complications. Graham, of course, is quite free to do the same as far as I’m concerned.’

‘But he did object, didn’t he? He sacked Sherratt from his job.’

‘True.’ Charlotte blew a slow smoke ring which hovered in the air between them. ‘But didn’t Graham tell you that was because of Laura.’

‘And was it?’

‘If that’s what Graham says, it must have been, mustn’t it?’

‘Were you aware yourself of Lee Sherratt’s attitude to your daughter? In view of your own relationship with him?’

‘Do I call you Detective Constable?’

‘If you like.’

‘Detective Constable, I don’t know what you imagine I did with Sherratt in the summerhouse, but we certainly didn’t indulge in conversation about my daughter.’

‘But do you think –?’

‘He was more than occupied with me, dear. I can be demanding when I’m aroused.’

‘And why bother with the lamb when you can have the old ewe, eh?’

Charlotte bared her perfect teeth in a snarl, then changed her mind and turned the snarl into a mirthless laugh.

‘Very good, dear. I wouldn’t have thought you were so good with the farming metaphors.’

Fry was disappointed that she could not crack the woman’s facade. If only she could get through the provocative, brittle exterior, she might expose a soft, vulnerable core that would yield something to the probing.

‘Did you know about Laura’s boyfriend, Simeon Holmes?’

‘No, I didn’t.’ Charlotte sighed. ‘Until your people managed to track him down. I suppose there’s no doubt they had a thing together?’

‘None at all.’

‘She was obviously a bit of a chip off the old block, wasn’t she? She kept her bit on the side quiet, though. Laura usually told me her secrets, but not that one.’

‘Perhaps she thought you would consider him unsuitable. He’s from one of the council estates in Edendale, rides a motorbike.’

‘Unsuitable? Not me.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, I was shagging the gardener, dear.’

Fry gritted her teeth. Charlotte stubbed out her cigarette and began to stir restlessly. The ashtray was already full of stubs, and the air was pungent with stale smoke that mingled with an expensive scent.

‘I hope I’m not shocking you,’ said Charlotte. ‘I know some of you people can be very puritanical. But Graham and I have always had that sort of marriage. It is rather an accepted thing among our circle of friends.’

‘You mentioned other lovers, Mrs Vernon. I need to ask you for some names.’

‘Really? How many years would you like me to go back?’

‘Just the last few months, shall we say?’

‘Are our police looking at jealousy as a motive then? How original.’

‘Names?’

‘All right. There have been one or two of my husband’s business colleagues. Just the odd occasion, you know. Nothing heavy.’

She gave Fry three names, only one of which meant anything.

‘Andrew Milner?’

‘He works for Graham.’

‘I know who he is.’

Fry stared at the woman, wondering if she was really the distraught mother who had appeared in previous reports. Perhaps she was on some drug that the doctor had given her. But she could think of nothing that would completely change a woman’s personality to this. Charlotte studied her expression and laughed her cold laugh again.

‘Oh yes, I’m not too fussy when I’m in the mood.’

‘And have you been in the mood much since Laura was killed? Does the thought of your daughter being attacked and murdered make you feel randy?’

Charlotte’s face seemed to blur and quiver, and her eyes swelled alarmingly. Her limbs trembled and her shoulders slumped into an unnatural position. It was as if the woman had disintegrated suddenly into a broken doll.

‘I go to that place every night, you know,’ she said.

‘What place?’ asked Fry, startled at the unexpected change.

‘I go at night, when no one’s around. Graham hates it. I take flowers for her.’

‘You go where?’

‘That place down there. The place where Laura died.’ She looked up pleadingly. ‘I take her roses and carnations from the garden. Are they the right things to take?’

Back at E Division, Ben Cooper made his way wearily up to the incident room, where just two computer operators were at their terminals and the office manager, DI Baxter, was stacking away some files. Cooper checked through the action sheets, but could find nothing allocated to him.

‘I’m back on duty now, sir.’

‘Nothing for you, Cooper,’ said Baxter. ‘Some of the teams are being reallocated. Your DI wants you back in the CID room. You’ve to report to DS Rennie.’

‘Oh, shit.’

‘Sorry, son.’

Baxter seemed about to reprimand Cooper for his outburst, conscious of the computer operator’s eyes on him. But he looked at Cooper’s face and changed his mind, not being one to kick a man when he was obviously down.

‘Mr Tailby thinks forensics –’

‘Yeah, I know. Thanks.’

Cooper stamped back downstairs. A DC was on the phone in the CID room and Rennie was holding a report in the air, staring at it with an expression of admiration. He noticed Cooper come in and waved a hand casually.

‘Ben. Welcome back to the real world.’

Cooper kicked the chair away from his desk and thumped the pile of paper that had been sitting there since Monday.

‘What’s all this stuff?’

‘Hey, calm down. We don’t want any prima donna tantrums just because you’re not with the big boys on the murder enquiries any more.’

‘Yeah, right. Car crime. They want something doing about car crime, yeah? So what’s new?’

‘This is,’ said Rennie, waving the report. ‘Here, take a look.’

The report landed on Cooper’s desk. It bore the heading of the National Criminal Intelligence Service. ‘What’s this?’

‘New ideas on detecting car crime. It’s good stuff. The super is very impressed. It was the new lass’s idea.’

‘Not Diane Fry?’

‘That’s her. Not bad for a lass, I reckon.’

‘And where is she? Is she already out working on this?’

‘Not her,’ said Rennie. ‘She’s still on the Vernon enquiry.’

Fry phoned Vernon Finance, but was put through to a particularly unhelpful and protective secretary who told her that Andrew Milner was out of the office all afternoon. She eventually persuaded the secretary to give her his mobile number, and ate a tuna sandwich while she dialled. When he answered, Milner was clearly on the road somewhere. There was heavy traffic noise in the background, and he was shouting, as people did when they were using the hands-free adaptor in a car.

‘Who did you say you were? Hold on, I’m just turning on to the A57.’

When she got it through to him who she was, he went very quiet for a moment. Perhaps it was just the signal being broken up by the high ridges of Stanage Edge and the Hallam Moors.

‘Give me a second, and I’ll pull into a layby,’ he said.

Fry talked to Andrew Milner for several minutes, trying to catch the tone of the man’s replies against the thundering slipstream of passing lorries and the intermittent fading of his cellphone signal. She thought he sounded nervous and defensive, but he stuck to a firm line on the suggestion of any relationship with his employer’s wife. It was ridiculous, it was nonsense. Charlotte Vernon obviously wasn’t well.

Eventually, Fry let him go when he pleaded that he was late for an important meeting. She felt sure that he was hiding something, but couldn’t pin down what it was. She needed some more information before she could know the right questions to ask. Time to talk to Andrew Milner’s wife.

The Milners lived in a brick pre-war semi on one of the hills overlooking the centre of Edendale. The front door was set into an arched porch, with a round opaque window made up of shaped pieces of coloured glass.

All the cars parked in the street had pink stickers taped to their windscreens, and notices on the lampposts warned that parking was by resident’s permit only. But Fry found room for her Peugeot on a small drive in front of a car port. By the corner of the house she noticed an old brick chimney pot that had been planted with red geraniums.

Margaret Milner took her into a lounge dominated by leaded bay windows draped in net and a wheel-shaped chandelier supporting electric candles. A display cabinet contained limited-edition figurines, miniature cottages and commemorative plates.

‘Andrew’s at work, of course,’ said Margaret. ‘He’s been very busy since what happened to Laura Vernon. But Graham says he’ll be back at the office next Monday. Apparently Charlotte is feeling better now. But people don’t really come to terms with these things properly until after the funeral, I find.’

‘Have you been in touch with the Vernons yourself?’

Margaret hesitated. ‘I’ve tried to ring Charlotte, but nobody ever answers the phone. You just get the answering machine.’

‘I’ve just come from the Mount myself,’ said Fry.

‘Oh?’ Margaret didn’t seem to know what else to say. She was wearing a long skirt and strappy shoes with flat soles, and she had a light sweater tied round her shoulders. She looked hot and uncomfortable, but then so did everybody in this weather.

‘I’ve been talking to Mrs Vernon.’

‘Is she – how is she taking it all?’

‘Not quite in the way you might expect.’

‘Oh?’ said Margaret again.

Fry walked across to the bay windows and peered through the net at the front garden. Close up, she could see that the geraniums were wilting and turning brown, and their petals had formed a dark-red pool around the base of the chimney pot.

‘What sort of relationship would you say your husband has with the Vernons?’ she asked.

‘He works for Graham. It’s a good job and Andrew works hard.’ Margaret sat down, straightening her skirt, perching uneasily on the edge of an armchair. She looked at Fry anxiously, worried by the fact that she insisted on remaining standing by the window, despite the hint. ‘He was out of work for a while, you know. It made him appreciate having a secure job.’

‘Just a relationship between employer and employee, then? Or something more?’

‘Well, I don’t really know what you mean,’ said Margaret. ‘They work very closely together. You have to have a fairly close personal relationship, I suppose.’

‘A personal relationship? Friends, then? Do you socialize with the Vernons? Have you visited their house?’

‘Yes, we have. Once or twice. Graham is very hospitable.’

Fry watched her closely, noting the shift in the gaze, the involuntary movements of the hands that fidgeted constantly, as if seeking something to pat back into place, something that could be put right with a quick shake and a smoothing of the palms.

‘And Charlotte Vernon?’ said Fry. ‘Is she equally hospitable?’

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ asked Margaret with a note of desperation.

‘No, thank you.’

‘I’ll make one, I think.’

‘If you like.’

Fry followed her into the kitchen, making Margaret Milner even more nervous as she slouched against the oak-effect units and got in the way of the fridge door being opened. Margaret stared at her over the top of the door with a plastic bottle of skimmed milk in her hand.

‘What exactly is it that you want?’

‘A bit of help, that’s all,’ said Fry. ‘I’m trying to fill in a few details.’

Cold air from the open fridge was filling the space between them, chilling Fry’s skin and condensing on the steel surfaces. Margaret seemed reluctant to reach for the handle to close it, afraid to reach too near to Fry in case she touched her and was contaminated by something that could not be killed by Jeyes Fluid and bleach.

‘I don’t know what details I can give you. I really don’t.’

Margaret actually walked away, leaving the fridge ajar, to switch on the kettle. When Fry slammed the door, Margaret jerked as if she had been shot, slopping water on to the work surface.

‘Would you know where to find Mr Milner just now, if you needed to?’

Margaret glanced automatically at the clock. ‘His office would be able to tell you where he is. He has to drive around a lot. Meetings with clients, you know. He’s so busy. He may not be home until late again tonight.’

Home late and she never knew where he was? Fry wondered whether Andrew Milner really was as busy as he told his wife. She wouldn’t accept that anything was impossible.

‘Maybe there are times when you don’t know where your husband is, but Graham Vernon does know.’

‘Of course.’

‘And sometimes, perhaps, it’s Charlotte Vernon who knows where he is?’

For a moment, Margaret did nothing but stare at the simmering kettle as if it had muttered a rude word. Then she opened her mouth and eyes wide and began to flap her fingers. ‘Oh no, what do you mean?’

‘I think it’s fairly straightforward. Mrs Vernon was quite open about it.’

‘Was she implying something about Andrew? It’s quite ridiculous, isn’t it? She’s obviously not well. She must have been affected very badly for her to make up things like that.’

‘You don’t think it’s true?’

‘True? What nonsense! Andrew? Nonsense!’

‘You realize that the wife is often the last to know?’

‘Oh, but really … Andrew?’ She laughed suddenly, foolishly. ‘It’s just not possible.’

‘OK.’ The kettle began to boil, but was ignored. A small cloud of steam drifted across the kitchen, but dissipated before it could warm Fry’s chilled hands. ‘One last detail, Mrs Milner. Are you related to a boy called Simeon Holmes?’

‘Simeon is my cousin Alison’s son. They live on the Devonshire Estate.’

‘Were you aware that he was Laura Vernon’s boyfriend?’

Margaret wrung her hands and stared out of the bay window. ‘Not until Alison told me last night. She said he had to go to the police station.’

‘Something else you didn’t know, then?’

‘No, no,’ cried Margaret. ‘Not Andrew. It’s impossible!’

Fry trod in the slithery skin of geranium petals as she left the house. Though still scarlet on the surface, they were black and rotting underneath. Impossible? The only thing that was impossible was the idea that she might have been willing to sit and take tea with Margaret Milner among her miniature cottages and net curtains.

While she turned the Peugeot round, Fry thought of one more place to try. This one would be a pleasure, she thought, as she remembered the way Helen Milner had looked at Ben Cooper in the street at Moorhay.

Helen took a phone call from her mother as soon as Diane Fry had left the house in Edendale, and she had to spend some minutes placating her. When she had finally hung up, Helen rang her grandparents’ number. She knew they didn’t use the telephone much, and had only been persuaded to have it put in for emergencies, with Andrew paying the rental. When it rang, she could picture the two old people looking at the phone in alarm, reluctant to answer it. Eventually, Harry would get up slowly and take hold of the handset, answering the telephone being a man’s job.

‘Granddad, it’s Helen.’

‘Helen, what’s up, love?’

‘It’s the police, Granddad. They’ve been asking questions about Dad.’

‘Have they now? That pillock with the big words, or the nasty piece of work that was with him?’

‘Neither.’

‘Was it –?’

‘No, it was the woman. Detective Constable Fry.’

‘Her? She’s nothing but a bit of a lass.’

‘Even so …’

Harry paused, considering. ‘Aye, you’re right. Best to know.’

Diane Fry found Helen Milner’s cottage to be one of four tiny homes created out of a barn conversion.

The barn had a wavy roof and there was a clutter of old farm buildings at the back that no one had yet found a way of using. Inside, the walls were of undressed stone, with casement windows and pitch-covered beams. Most of the furniture was second-hand stripped pine, with wicker chairs and a rush mat on the kitchen floor.

Helen greeted her without any indication of surprise, and Fry guessed that the phone lines had been busy during her journey across Edendale. She expected this third member of the Milner family to be as unforthcoming as the others, to tell the same story of shock and ignorance, to use the same, familiar words of outraged innocence.

But she was amazed how long the visit lasted. And she was fascinated and enlightened by the story that Helen Milner had to tell her over the instant coffee in the hand-thrown pottery mugs. By the second coffee, Fry had almost forgotten what she had come for.