An Accidental Shroud (17 page)

'The security man. He'll tell you what time I got there. I believe we exchanged some remarks about the storm getting up.'

'And he can also confirm what time you left?'

'I'm not sure about that. I think he was on his rounds then, which didn't matter, as far as I was concerned. Naturally, I've the means of getting in and out of my own premises – and I've said what time I got home.'

'I have to tell you, we've already spoken to the security man and he confirms your call at the office. But he also says it wasn't much after eleven-twenty, when he was coming back into the foyer after visiting the toilet, that he saw you leaving,' Mayo said, keeping his private opinions of the so-called security arrangements at Wilding Enterprises to himself. 'I reckon it's about a ten-minute drive from Chandlers' Way to here.'

'You've been checking up on me with my office?'

'Oh yes, sir, matter of routine.' It was easier to fall back on police-speak than to explain the obvious, that
every
statement was painstakingly checked.

Jake's brows came down, thunderclouds appeared on the horizon. The room held its breath, and everyone in it held theirs. Christine's hands were tightly clasped together. Then Wilding smiled and the sun shone again. 'Of course, you would do that.'

Mayo exchanged a glance with Abigail. It had been a fair performance, a good pretence of anger, but it wouldn't wash. Wilding had already been perfectly aware, before he was told, that the police had been checking with his security people, otherwise, why had he so prudently amended his statement?

He now said easily, 'Well then, the security man must've been mistaken, mustn't he?'

'During the storm, Mr Wilding, a large branch fell off a tree in your neighbours' garden and smashed through their greenhouse roof. They were awake because of this and Mr Blarney and his wife both say they saw your car drive past their house and into the drive. But that was nearly one o'clock, not half past eleven.'

'What?' Wilding was taken aback, as well he might be if he hadn't known until then that his neighbours had been questioned about movements in his household that night, and furious for real, this time, though he tried to conceal it. He really had a temper, this man. Mayo noted it with interest.

Matthew, who had been exhibiting signs of boredom, shifting restlessly on his seat throughout this conversation, suddenly jumped up, too, declaring, 'I'm off, you don't want me here.'

'Stay where you are, Matthew,' his father snapped. Matthew looked pretty sick but, after a moment's hesitation, sat down again, scowling.

'We'd better have the rest of it, Mr Wilding. Where did you go between leaving your office at eleven-twenty and getting home just before one?' Receiving no reply, Mayo pressed, 'Maybe you went up to your building site, to check that everything was all right?'

Jake gave a sudden, unamused laugh. 'So that's where these questions are leading! I might've known. Oh yes – I'm well aware certain sections of the community believe I was responsible for knocking down Forde Manor. I can't tell you how bloody stupid that idea is.'

'You're saying it wouldn't have been possible?'

'Oh, it's possible all right, but that site's potentially worth a packet to me. The manor house was a listed building. If it was proved that I'd deliberately demolished it, d'you think I'd ever be allowed to develop the site?'

'I couldn't comment on that. Out of my province. But there's plenty of evidence to show it didn't fall down on its own – smashed fences, vehicle tracks leading to and from your site. Until it's proved otherwise, it's bound to be assumed you had a hand in it.'

'You're making my point – if I
had
knocked it down. I'd have made bloody certain there wasn't any evidence left!'

Yes, I dare say you'd have tried, Mayo thought, having seen no reason as yet to revise Carmody's opinion of Wilding as a slippery customer. 'Then if you didn't go along to the site after you left your office, where were you, sir, for the next hour and a half?'

'Since I don't see that's any of your damned business, I don't propose to tell you.'

'Think about it, Mr Wilding. I'd advise you to think carefully about your position.'

Wilding crossed to a drinks table in the corner to pour himself a large slug of neat Scotch, downing half of it in a gulp. Christine said in a low voice, 'Oh, tell them, Jake, tell them. It doesn't really matter, whatever it is.' Their eyes met, as if there was nobody else in the room. It was a woman, Abigail thought.

'Was it a woman you were visiting?' Mayo asked. It usually was. 'And before you say anything, I have to tell you that we've examined the pick-up truck belonging to you, and found forensic evidence indicating that Nigel Fontenoy's body was at some time transported in it.'

Wilding was beginning to look hunted. His gaze travelled round the circle of faces. Either way he was in a cleft stick: if he didn't tell the truth about where he'd been he ran the risk of laying himself open either to suspicion of knocking down the house, or much worse, murder. If he did . .. The silence lengthened. He finished his whisky. 'All right. But it isn't what you think.'

If I'd a pound for every time I'd heard that, thought Mayo, I could retire tomorrow.

Abigail said nothing either, but waited, her pencil at the ready. Wilding suddenly took hold of his wife's hand and, eventually, spoke. 'It was my ex-wife I went to see.' And was silent again.

'Her name and address, sir?' Abigail prompted, unaware of the havoc she was wreaking.

'Mrs Naomi Graham.' Wilding gave her address, which Abigail copied down, while his wife and their children looked on in varying degrees of stunned disbelief.

The Black Bull wasn't the sort of place Mayo would have put a foot in by choice, but tonight it would serve its purpose, which was as a convenient place to have a drink with Abigail and talk over the latest events before going home. It was pretty insalubrious, its air thick with tobacco fumes, its ceilings pickled dark brown, with a noisy darts match in progress, a juke-box playing non-stop, and video-games along one wall, but there were quiet corners. In any case, you could probably have shouted state secrets at the top of your voice and not been heard over the noise.

The first person they saw on entering was Carmody. He went to get them drinks, and while Abigail was in the ladies, Mayo hitched himself into a corner bench seat by the window, abstractedly watching the darts players. He was thinking how aptly it had all slotted into place after Jake Wilding had given them the name of his ex-wife. Naomi Graham. The name George Fontenoy had supplied, the young jewellery designer who had worked briefly with the Fontenoys, disappeared and then, it now transpired, reappeared later to marry Jake Wilding and give birth to Matthew. A brief interlude, after which she'd once more departed, leaving her child behind. And had recently returned to Lavenstock yet again, this time plus a daughter – and another son, older than Matthew by several years.

'I should never have gone to see her. She's always been big trouble,' Wilding had admitted bitterly. 'I should've told Nigel to go to hell when he asked me, let him do his own dirty work, then I wouldn't have been in this mess.'

'And you expect us to believe that's the only reason you went to see her – simply because Nigel Fontenoy asked you to?'

'I owed him one, I felt it was the least I could do.'

Something about the way he said that made Mayo think again about the contents of the letter Nigel Fontenoy had written to Wilding. And he thought he knew what was wrong about that idea of a loan. 'To repay what you owe me,' was how Fontenoy had phrased it. Nothing about repayment of
money.
'We're talking other kinds of favours here, I take it, not hard cash? It wasn't the repayment of a loan you went to discuss with him?'

'I've never said it was. It was you jumped to that conclusion yourselves. I did owe Nigel a bob or two, sure, but that wasn't why I finally agreed to help him. He'd been very useful to me, not long ago, and I don't forget things like that.'

Nor, apparently, did Fontenoy, and hadn't been averse to reminding Wilding of the fact. Favours in kind, thought Mayo. Blackmail was another word for it. Either was a lot more credible than the idea of Fontenoy having the sort of big money Wilding would be interested in borrowing.

'All right, tell me in what way you were obligated to him.'

But Wilding wouldn't be pushed that far. 'Never mind, it was nothing to do with this business.'

'I suggest it had everything to do with it. It was Fontenoy you owed, and Fontenoy who was murdered. Don't tell me you'd have run errands for him on a night like that if you'd been able to get out of it.'

'Running errands wasn't how I saw it. The storm didn't really get all that bad until after midnight – and anyway, there was something personal I needed to discuss with Naomi – something she'd written to me about.' Wilding had glanced uneasily at Matthew, who had been sitting in frozen silence during these revelations. The glance lingered for a moment before he turned deliberately away, avoiding looking at the boy. 'She has her elder son living with her. She seems to have some crazy idea in her head that he's my son, too.'

Carmody, followed by Abigail, came back from the bar with a half of shandy and a Scotch, putting the former in front of Abigail.

'Cheers, Ted.'

'Well, did he knock that house down? Wilding, I mean?'

'If he didn't,' Mayo said, 'he could know who did. A backhander to one of his workmen, it's been done before. It's part of the pattern, though I'm damned if I see how, just yet.'

He sipped his Bell's, not to his taste but the best whisky on offer here, and relapsed into silence. Carmody, listening to Abigail give the gist of the interview, regretfully contemplated the froth left on the sides of his glass, all that was left of his beer. He was driving home and two halves was his limit. 'And you thought the Book of Genesis was complicated,' was his comment on the Wilding family relationships.

'It changes things,' Abigail said. 'At least we know now what it was Fontenoy expected Wilding could get from Naomi that he couldn't – some sort of document or letter is what he says. Wilding swears she wouldn't, in fact, give it to him, though Fontenoy must've thought Wilding had it in his power to make her an offer she couldn't refuse for it. But whatever that might've been, he isn't saying.'

'A promise to acknowledge Joss Graham as his son?' Carmody suggested. 'Wilding might have agreed to that – might even have been glad to find an heir to his business, since Matthew doesn't appear to be interested.'

The silence that greeted this didn't encourage him to go on.

Mayo said, 'Somebody should go and see this Naomi Graham. I think it ought to be you, Abigail. From all we've heard, anyone in trousers is likely to be eaten alive.'

'I'll go first thing tomorrow.' She frowned. 'You know, I find it hard to believe that Wilding really didn't know who Joss Graham was until he got that letter from Naomi.'

Mayo wasn't so sure. 'No reason why he should connect everyone he met by the name of Graham with his ex-wife, is there? Especially if he never knew Naomi had had a child before she married him, as he claims – though why she never told him, if she thought he was the father, beats me.' He took a sip of his whisky. 'And it was fairly obvious from the way both young Matthew and Lindsay Hammond took the news that they'd no idea of any family connections.'

'I'm having problems with that,' Abigail said, pushing her chair back and preparing to leave. She still had at least an hour's work in front of her at the station, and then the drive home before she could drop thankfully into bed. That was what her life seemed to consist of lately – work and bed. Too much of one and not enough of the other. She stifled a cracking yawn. 'No, I can't imagine being friends with people for as long as they have, and not knowing the first thing about them.'

'I can,' said Carmody, who had three children of his own, now dispersed about the country in various jobs and universities, whom he only saw when they came home for Maureen to do their washing. Quite often, they didn't know their friends' surnames and sometimes, he suspected, not even their forenames, since whatever their mothers had had them christened, they all seemed to answer to nicknames consisting of grunts of one syllable.

Lindsay couldn't, however hard she tried, ever remember a more dread evening. As far as she was concerned, scenes of any kind were to be avoided at all costs. Family scenes were even worse. And when they happened in front of other people – in this case the police – they were the absolute pits.

She woke the next morning feeling worse than if she hadn't gone to bed at all. Her eyes flew open and she was instantly fully awake, every gruesome detail of the night before clear and sharp in her mind, intensifying and adding an extra edge to the misery of the last days. She'd begun to feel so much more as if she were getting a grip back on reality over the last few weeks, almost back to her normal self, and then Nigel had been murdered, and everything had fallen apart again. All her life she'd been plagued by too much imagination and her sleep last night had been filled with dark dreams.

She could smell freshly brewed coffee and grilled bacon, hear Jake moving about, getting ready for work. How could they? How could they act normally, just as if nothing had happened!

Her clothes, usually neatly folded the night before, lay thrown anyhow over a chair. She washed hurriedly, scrambled into jeans and sweater, went downstairs and poked her head round the kitchen door. Matthew was there, leaning against the cupboards, a steaming mug of coffee in his hand. He looked ghastly, waxy pale under his tan, like old chewing gum. Her mother sat at the table, also drinking coffee. Lindsay was even more shocked at her haggard appearance, though she was already dressed, in a polo-necked green sweater and corduroy trousers, and was even made up, which was a mistake.

'I'm going for a swim,' Lindsay announced.

'Watch you don't get cold. It's a chilly morning. Don't forget to dry your hair properly.'