A Little Learning (13 page)

He started visibly, as if this were an accusation. He was probably in his early forties, but he had the fresh complexion and open face on which emotions are quickly visible. He had plentiful dark hair, cut short in an almost military fashion; with the curious combination of a thick-ribbed, V-neck green sweater and a dog collar above it, he looked younger than his years and curiously vulnerable. Or perhaps, thought Lucy Blake with quickening interest, he really had something to hide.

For he now said, as if he were framing an apology. ‘It’s true that I was aware of what was going on pretty quickly on Monday morning. But it’s part of my job to be aware of such things, I’d say, so that I can offer any spiritual help that’s called for. And the whole site was seething with the news very early on Monday, you know.’

‘Yes, I know that. I was here myself pretty early on Monday.’ But according to your board outside, you’re normally here on Tuesdays and Thursdays, she thought. And you’re embarrassed about something.

‘In that case you’ll know how people were talking. And the place was alive with police cars and vans.’

Not quite. The only police vehicles on the site had been discreetly parked up against the double garage of the Director’s house, where they were invisible from most points on the site. So this man had been round there, or found some vantage point from which he could watch what was going on. Curiouser and curiouser. Lucy said as casually as she could, ‘Did you know the Carters well, Mr Matthews?’

An innocent enough question, surely. And one he should have known she was bound to ask. Yet he had twitched a little, again, she was sure of it. He said, ‘Do call me Tom, please. Everyone does. Well, I suppose I did know the Carters quite well, yes. That’s why I went round there so promptly to offer my condolences when Ruth came home on Wednesday.’ He said it almost aggressively, as if he were challenging her to defy his logic.

Lucy looked squarely into his blue, anxious eyes. ‘I see. And what about Dr Carter himself, Tom? Would you say that you knew him pretty well?’

‘No. He wasn’t — well, he wasn’t an easy man to get to know.’

It was lame, and she could see he realized that. And it contradicted his first statement that he had known the Carters ‘quite well’. There was something here he didn’t want to reveal, but Lucy couldn’t see what it might be. It was frustrating, because the Reverend Matthews didn’t strike her as a very good liar. But he was not under arrest; he was merely helping the police of his own volition, and he could refuse to cooperate at any point. She said gently, ‘He’s been murdered, Tom, and we’re trying to build up a picture of him. You can help me a little more than that, I’m sure. It’s not a time for mistaken loyalties: we’re trying to establish who might have disliked him enough to kill him.’

Tom Matthews nodded his acceptance of that. ‘But it might have been someone who scarcely knew him at all, mightn’t it? He might have simply stood between someone and something they desperately wanted.’

‘Yes, he might well have done just that. There are all kinds of reasons for murder. But it’s your duty to tell us as much as you can about him.’

He seemed to take a decision. ‘All right. No one liked him very much. He was a pompous ass, in many respects. But a dangerous one. If anyone stood in the way of his own career, he wouldn’t scruple to trample over him. Or her.’

‘Do you speak from personal experience?’

‘No. Rather the reverse, in fact. He was very anxious that the new university should have a chaplain of some sort; he thought it would be good for its image in the local community. The funds would only run to a part-time appointment, but he was determined to have one. I could afford to take two-fifths of a university lecturer’s salary; indeed I was delighted to do so. It’s a good supplement to the meagre stipend of a parish whose congregation has been in steady decline for fifty years.’ He sounded like a man anxious to do justice to a Director who could no longer defend himself.

Or perhaps, thought Lucy, he was just happy to divert the talk into areas he knew were safe. She brought him gently back to the subject which interested her. ‘But Dr Carter had a reputation for ruthlessness.’

‘Yes. It’s mostly hearsay, as far as I’m concerned, but well established. And, well — he wasn’t very well respected as an academic. That matters in a place like this, you know. They used to call him Claptrap Carter.’

‘Yes. Everyone seems to say that. What else can you tell us about him, Tom?’

Perhaps he caught her impatience. He looked at her quickly and said, ‘His children didn’t like him, I’m afraid. Part of it was probably just adolescence, but it went deeper than that.’

There was a little pause before Lucy said, ‘Treated his wife badly, did he?’

He glanced at her sharply. ‘Yes. That was quick of you. I suppose you get used to seeing these things.’

‘Just as you do, I expect.’

‘Yes. You see things in other people’s lives that you’d never have met in your own, when you’re a clergyman. Or a police officer, I suppose. Yes, George treated Ruth badly, over the years. No beatings, or anything like that — as far as I’m aware. More what the courts would call mental cruelty, I think.’

‘Anyway, their relationship wasn’t good.’

‘That would be putting it mildly. As a matter of fact, I know Ruth was planning to divorce him, later this year.’

That was the first they’d heard of that. The enigmatic Ruth Carter hadn’t pretended the marriage had been ideal, but had certainly not mentioned a break-up. It made this death very opportune for her. Lucy said as casually as she could, ‘And do you know what George Carter’s reaction to this would have been?’

Tom Matthews looked at her sharply, in that curious, open-faced way of his, like a child faced with an unexpectedly difficult question. He said roughly, ‘He wouldn’t have had much choice, would he? Not under the modern divorce laws. Anyway, he’s hardly led a blameless life himself.’

With the eminently beddable Carmen Campbell for one, thought Lucy. For a man sixteen years older than the lithe Barbadian, without obvious physical attractions, old Claptrap had done rather well for himself there. She said, ‘Other women, you mean. You’d better let me have the details, Tom.’

He shook his head violently. ‘I couldn’t do that. For one thing, I don’t know any details.’

‘Then it’s just gossip?’

He looked thoroughly uncomfortable. ‘No, I wouldn’t say that. But I really don’t know the details. And I can’t give you any source. This has to be confidential.’

‘Even in a murder inquiry?’

‘Even then. I shouldn’t have said so much, I suppose. But I thought you’d be certain to find out anyway, in the course of your investigation.’

‘We already do know a certain amount, that’s true. But I was hoping you could add to our knowledge. It’s —’

‘I can’t. I’m sorry.’

His lips set in a line of determination, like a child’s when it has said too much. More to keep him talking than for any other reason, Lucy Blake said, ‘You were an army chaplain at one time, I believe, Tom.’

‘Yes. I quite enjoyed it, to tell you the truth. Went into Kosovo in 1999 and 2000. They always like to have the padre with them, on active service, the armed forces. And it’s surprising how any prospect of death makes young men interested in religion. It was the time when I did my most valuable work, I think.’ His enthusiasm for those days came leaping out of him.

‘You were an expert marksman, too, I believe. That must be unusual, for a padre.’

She had tried to throw in this one strange fact lightly, but he became suddenly guarded, as if she had been making an attempt to trip him. ‘It is quite unusual, yes. But I’d shown an aptitude, for small arms shooting in particular, at school, and the army likes to foster the idea that all officers are potentially fighting men, so they encouraged me to develop it. They even sent me to shoot at Bisley, in 1997.’

There was something here, she was sure. He had shown a flash of dismay when she raised his shooting prowess, and then tried to divert her back to Bisley in 1997. She said, ‘I don’t suppose you fired a gun in Kosovo, though, did you?’

‘No. I was strictly non-combatant there. That’s how it had to be, and how I wanted it. It’s far easier to offer spiritual help when soldiers see you as a colleague, but not a fighting one.’

‘So you haven’t been back in civilian life for very long.’

‘Fourteen months. I was lucky to get the post at St Catherine’s.’ He grinned. ‘Well, not so lucky, perhaps, to be honest. The Church of England is chronically short of vicars, as you probably know, and the stipend was quite small. I was delighted to get the job here a month later to supplement it, as I said.’

Lucy nodded, then made a last attempt to drag him back from an area where he was comfortable to the one which had seemed to disturb him. ‘Dr Carter was shot through the head with a revolver, you know. A Smith and Wesson, according to the ballistics experts at forensic.’

He looked shaken again, but determined. He said without a smile, ‘I was something of an expert with a Smith and Wesson, DS Blake. But I didn’t shoot George Carter.’

Lucy permitted herself the smile he had not been able to manage. ‘I see. And have you any idea who might have done?’

‘No. If I think of anyone, I’ll contact you immediately.’

It was as near as a polite man could get to telling her that the interview was over. And indeed, she had nothing else to ask him, for the moment.

But Lucy Blake felt sure as she drove away that this would not be the last she would see of the Reverend Thomas Matthews.

Fifteen

The elderly lady had plainly never been inside a police station before; she looked quite distraught. The station sergeant prepared himself for a lost dog or cat: that combination of anxiety and determination usually stemmed from a missing animal.

He prepared himself to be avuncular and consoling, to offer the usual assurances about pets turning up safe and well in the most unlikely places. Station sergeants are programmed to deal with the mundane daily round of trivia. When the lady said her name was Mrs Gwendolyn Crowthorne it did not immediately ring any bells. She wanted to see Detective Inspector Peach, she said, and the sergeant prepared to deliver his spiel about how busy senior CID officers are and to deal with her himself. It was only when she said that she was the mother-in-law of the murdered Dr George Andrew Carter that she got his full attention. Two minutes later, Mrs Crowthorne was ushered into the office of DI Peach.

It was plain to Percy that she was very upset, that she had needed to screw up all her courage to come here. But that courage gave this determined old lady a surprising dignity. He made her as comfortable as he could on the upright chair before his desk, tried to order tea for her, and found it refused by the lady herself. ‘I’d much rather gets this over as quickly as possible, Mr Peach,’ she said in a high, quavery voice. ‘This isn’t easy for me, and if I take too long over it, my nerve may fail.’

Peach recognized her now, despite her distress and the best clothes she had put on to come here. ‘I saw you briefly, in your own house, in Kendal, didn’t I, Mrs Crowthorne?’ She nodded vigorously. ‘There was no need for you to come all the way down here, you know.’

She managed a smile at last, reassured by his kindly reception. ‘I couldn’t have done it on the phone, Mr Peach. Didn’t have one until I was past forty, and I’ve never really felt comfortable with them — not when there’s something delicate to say. Besides, I thought if I came down here I’d go and see my daughter first. Explain what I had to do.’

‘And did you do that?’

‘No. Ruth doesn’t know I’m here. I should have told her, but I was afraid she’d talk me out of it. I’m not as strong as I used to be.’

Not physically you aren’t, thought Percy. But I’d still back you to carry something through, if you set your mind to it. Gwendolyn Crowthorne reminded him of his own mother as she sat there: she was distressed, confused, lonely, and not very far from tears, but also absolutely conscious of what was the right course of action and determined to carry it through. Perhaps it was something which would die with this generation, that moral certainty about the right thing to do. No one — and least of all the errant modern youth with whom Percy dealt for so much of his time — seemed now to have this clear, unfaltering idea of what was right and what was wrong.

People of Mrs Crowthorne’s generation sinned from time to time, as people always have, but they knew sin when they saw it. Percy Peach had been brought up on sin, in a school run by the Catholic clergy; he could have taken a degree in guilt. But sin was an old-fashioned concept, nowadays.

All this flashed through Percy’s mind before he said quietly, ‘This is about your daughter, isn’t it, Mrs Crowthorne? And your dead son-in-law?’

She nodded, tight-lipped with emotion, appreciative that he had introduced the subject for her. Then she blurted out, ‘Ruth told you she was with me last weekend, didn’t she? Well, she wasn’t. Not for the whole of it.’

Peach nodded quietly, indicating that she was only confirming what he had already known, making it easier for her, though this was in fact the first he had heard of this. He said, ‘She was there when I came to the house on Monday. How long had she been there, Mrs Crowthorne?’

Mrs Crowthorne’s small, taut face had relaxed a little, with the relief of confession. He could imagine how she had agonized for three days before coming here to reveal the truth and be a traitor to her daughter. ‘She came on Sunday evening. She hadn’t been there for the whole of the weekend at all.’

That left a full two days unaccounted for: Ruth Carter had told him that she had gone to her mother’s house when she left the UEL site on Friday morning, and spent the whole of the weekend there. Where had she been during that missing time? Most pertinently of all, where had she been on the Saturday night when her husband had been shot?

Percy saw that the old eyes opposite him were brimming with tears. One of these stole softly down Mrs Crowthorne’s wrinkled cheek, cutting a path through the powder she had put on to come here, making her suddenly raddled and old. He said gently, ‘You must have been very fond of your son-in-law, Mrs Crowthorne.’

She nodded, and the tear dropped from her chin on to the lapel of her dark blue coat. As if this had made her conscious of her weeping for the first time, she pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and rubbed vigorously at her face. It smudged the powder further, made this woman who had been well groomed when she set out from her house sixty miles away more than ever like one of the ageing, pathetic, drunken females who ended their nights in the Brunton nick. Her voice seemed to come from a long way off when she said, ‘He was always very kind to me, was George. Very considerate.’

Peach said conventionally, ‘That’s good to hear.’ Where there were no considerations of career or prestige, Claptrap Carter had obviously had a much better side: it was another facet of the personality they could only study after the man’s death, and a surprising one. ‘But your daughter didn’t feel the same about him, did she?’

‘No. That upset me, but there was nothing I could do about it. Ruth was planning to get rid of him.’ She realized what she had said and looked up at Peach in alarm, but he gave her nothing more than a reassuring smile. ‘I mean that Ruth was planning to get a divorce. She said that now that the children had virtually left home and George was in the job he’d never dreamed he’d get, she could go without doing him any damage.’

That phrasing didn’t sound like a woman with murder in mind. But this was a mother speaking, no doubt anxious to put the best gloss she could on the relationship, especially in view of the fact that she was now feeling like a traitor to Ruth. Peach said quietly, ‘Mrs Crowthorne, do you know where your daughter was on Friday and Saturday, when she claimed she was with you?’

‘No. She didn’t say.’ The bedraggled, desperately unhappy lady looked unseeingly at the papers on Peach’s desk.

He wanted to leave it at that, to tell himself that this elderly woman had been through enough anguish and he should be happy with what she had brought him. But he could see that she knew more than this. He did not even have to harden his heart: he was so much the detective after his years in the job that he knew he must have every scrap of information which the old lady could give him. He said, ‘But Ruth asked you to conceal the truth for her, didn’t she? She asked you to say that she had been with you for the whole of the weekend.’

‘Yes. But I told her I couldn’t guarantee that I’d lie for her.’ A sad little smile of pride flitted across her smudged face. ‘That’s why she didn’t want you to see me at all, when you came to my house on Monday.’

‘And you’ve a good idea where she was on Friday and Saturday, haven’t you, Mrs Crowthorne?’

She nodded wearily, her eyes cast down. She moved one small foot against the other, watching the blue leather shoe as if it was a vitally important movement. She was still watching those feet when she said, ‘She didn’t tell me where she was, and I didn’t ask her. But I suspect she was with a man. I don’t know his name; I was too upset about the break-up with George even to ask her about it.’

Peach stood up, came round his desk, broke one of the unwritten rules of police practice as he laid a hand upon a female interviewee. He dropped his fingers lightly on the bowed shoulder of the small woman who sat so precisely on the upright chair and said, ‘You’ve done the right thing, Mrs Crowthorne. I know it wasn’t easy, but it was right. We’d have found out eventually, you know, but it would have taken us a little longer and probably been a lot messier. Now, before you leave here, you’re going to have that tea.’

He went down to the canteen himself and came back with a pot of tea and two cups and saucers, a refinement he did not normally practise. She had pulled a mirror and comb from her handbag and repaired her face while he was away. They sat companionably for ten minutes together, munching ginger biscuits, talking of her house in Kendal, of her dead husband, of the nice girl with the chestnut hair who had gone with him to that house, of anything rather than the thing which had brought her here.

Mrs Crowthorne spoke of how unhappy she was with the very idea of divorce, and Percy Peach told her that it had happened to him, that it wasn’t the end of the world. She reminded him irresistibly of his dead mother as she said, ‘You should try walking out with that pretty girl who works with you, if she’s not spoken for. A man like you needs a good woman.’

She was so much like his mother that he wanted to say that he would call in and see her, when all this was over. But he couldn’t say that. Not when it was much more possible than it had been an hour earlier that he would be arresting Mrs Crowthorne’s daughter as a murderer.

*

Superintendent Thomas Bulstrode Tucker was wondering whether he should set up one of his media conferences. He had already popped out during the morning and had his hair trimmed, just in case he should be parading it before the television cameras in the next couple of days.

He was good at public relations, good at smoothing ruffled feathers, at delivering the clichés which had to be used with ringing sincerity — this came easily to him, because he rarely recognized them as clichés. With his trim figure in his tailored uniform, his strong profile, his still plentiful head of groomed, greying hair, he was an excellent police front man, well practised in reassuring the public that no stone was being left unturned, that the Brunton Police Service never slept.

The Chief Constable and the Deputy Chief Constable knew well enough who did the work, who achieved the results. But because it is not easy to get rid of the inefficient, particularly once they have attained a certain rank, they tolerated Tucker, even encouraged him, in those fields where he was moderately effective. The CID unit he headed solved a surprising percentage of the crimes which came its way, so why rock the boat? Tucker might be a balloon of hot air, but he could be a useful one, if he was not pricked in public.

DI Percy Peach pricked him very often, in private. And now, when he was irritated by Tommy Bloody Tucker’s pompous fumblings, after the sincerity of the old lady he had just escorted to her car, Peach thought alarming Tucker would give him an agreeable few minutes of light relief.

‘I need you to brief me on the latest state of play in the Carter inquiry,’ said Tucker. He puffed out his chest. ‘I may have to conduct a media conference, before you disappear for the weekend.’

Before you do, you mean, you idle old sod. Thought Percy. He volunteered the most inane of his vast range of grins. ‘Nowhere near an arrest yet. Plenty of suspects,’ he summarized cheerfully.

Tucker sighed wearily, produced a pencil from the top drawer of his desk, and prepared to make notes as he said, ‘I hope you’re not causing mayhem among important citizens of the area. You’d better brief me.’

‘Yes, sir. Well, the victim’s wife, to start with. You said most murders were domestic, and directed me to check whether she might have been lying about her whereabouts at the time of death. With your usual perception, sir, it now emerges, because it seems —’

‘I’ve remembered the lady since I saw you yesterday, Peach. I’ve met her myself, as a matter of fact, at Masonic Ladies’ nights. And a more charming lady you couldn’t wish to encounter. So I can save you a bit of time there. I should put her way down on your list of suspects, and devote your energies to some more worthy possibility.’

‘Really, sir. An interesting thought, that. Because I’ve just been told that Ruth Carter wasn’t where she says she was at all, at the time when Claptrap Carter bought it.’

‘I hate these Americanisms, Peach, as I’m sure I’ve told you before. And Mrs Carter — Ruth, as you say — struck me as a woman who would certainly never commit homicide. I’m sure whoever has denounced her is quite unsound. Who is it?’

‘Her mother, sir. Most respectable elderly lady, she seemed to me, sir. But I haven’t your eye for these things, I know. I’d better let the team know Ruth Carter’s not to be investigated. But I think I’d better say it’s on your orders — the fact that she seems a charming lady may not be enough to convince them, in itself.’ He was staring at the wall behind Tucker, on a line two inches above his head, which his chief should have seen as a danger signal.

‘Of course you must investigate her, Peach! Why on earth must you take things I say so literally? Who else have you got in the frame?’

‘Senior Tutor at the UEL, sir. Walter Culpepper. Told you about him before, sir. His ancestor rogered Queen Catherine Howard, sir, if you remember, and was executed for it. So, you could say he comes from a criminal family, in a way.’

‘Isn’t he the man you thought was desperate to become the Director of the UEL himself?’

‘That’s the cove, sir. Right clever bugger, he is.’ Percy knew brains always made his chief wary, if not suspicious.

‘You’ll need to handle him carefully, you know. Treat him with kid gloves.’

‘Really, sir?’ Peach looked immensely disappointed. ‘I’d rather thought we might give him a bit of third degree, if you gave the word for it. Shine a light in his eyes, shout at him a bit, maybe make sure he fell off his chair once or twice in the course of an interview. He’s sixty-one and a bit frail-looking, and I think he might blurt out everything he knows if you just give us —’