Just Desserts (26 page)

‘Two days before his death. He was quite definite that he wanted to—'

‘And who else at Camellia Park knew about it?'

‘That I cannot tell you. Mr Nayland was quite insistent that he was the sole owner, that he didn't need anyone else's agreement to dispose of this asset.'

‘What would happen to the existing staff at Camellia Park?'

An urbane smile descended like a mask over the practised features of the man in the Savile Row suit. ‘It's far too early to talk about that. We shall need to do our own survey of the entire plant and—'

‘So there is no guarantee that they will keep their jobs?'

Dermot Rawlinson looked pained that an outside party should concern himself with such sordid matters. ‘It is normally our policy to install our own operating staff, when we take over a concern which is to be developed. People who share the company ethos, who know the way that we operate our complexes, who recognize the ways in which we maximize the potential of an enterprise.'

Lambert suddenly hated this bland smoothie who was introducing new complications into his life. ‘So you're saying the existing staff would need to fear for their jobs.'

Rawlinson shrugged his immaculate shoulders. ‘Nothing is certain in the modern industrial world, Superintendent. There would be ample notice of any redundancies.'

Lambert sighed, controlling himself with difficulty, telling himself that this new factor wasn't really this odious man's fault; not directly. He said heavily, ‘You have just given me a reason why four people who worked at that little golf course might have wished to kill its owner.'

‘Oh come, that's surely rather melodramatic, Mr Lambert. What I need to know is whom we should be talking to now, to implement the agreement we made with the unfortunate Mr Nayland. Life must go on, you know.'

‘I understand that Mrs Nayland will be inheriting the bulk of her husband's estate. You might wish to know that she is planning to offer the former Chief Executive at Camellia Park a partnership in the company. I imagine that may make the furtherance of your plans much more difficult.'

It gave him a lot of satisfaction to see the smugness drain out of those self-satisfied features. It wasn't until Rawlinson had gone that he turned his attention back to quite how urgent a motive Chris Pearson had acquired to dispose of his employer.

Tomorrow was the last day of term. At the end of the penultimate school day, the children trailed happily homewards, to hours of hackneyed Christmas songs and decking trees with tinsel. In the deserted school, Michelle Nayland waited patiently for the CID men.

Hook had suggested that they came to see her at home, but she knew she couldn't do this with her mother anywhere in the offing. She would move out, eventually. But her departure wasn't as urgent, as absolutely necessary, as it had been before last Wednesday. She would go in a few months, she thought. For the present, she would stay and support her widowed mother through the grief which wracked her, however mistaken that grief might be.

She attempted to prepare her lessons for the last day of term as she waited. She tried not to watch the groups of children straggling down the drive, the boys indulging in noisy horseplay, the girls in confidences about the day they had passed and the night to come. She was near enough in age to the older girls to imagine the kind of things that were being said. After the last day of school tomorrow, they had the mixed delights of the Christmas season and family festivities to come.

It was not until she saw the police car coming up the drive that Michelle realized what she had really been looking for.

She took the Superintendent and his Sergeant through to the school library, now closed for the day, where she knew they would not be disturbed. They were noncommittal in the face of her faltering small talk as they followed her. She shut the door and sat down behind the desk where she had often done a stint as librarian, issuing books, guidance and encouragement to children in the school.

These men needed none of these. They studied her coldly for a moment, watching her hands clasping each other on the desk. Michelle wanted to fold her arms, but the body-language analysts said that was a gesture of keeping people at arm's length, so to speak, that it denoted a lack of co-operation. And these two were certain to be experts in body-language. She resented their calm assessment before they had even asked her a question.

Then Lambert said, ‘We had better begin with a warning, Miss Nayland. We know that you held information back from us when we met last Friday. We are fairly certain, indeed, that you told us deliberate lies on that occasion. I should therefore warn you that in a murder investigation any further deceit will be regarded very seriously, and could even lead to criminal charges.'

His opening tone was gravely neutral, but Michelle was sure she detected a certain relish in the last sentence. She said, ‘I'm sure any deception was unintended. After all, I have nothing to hide.'

She thought they would challenge her on that. She wanted them to do just that, to show their hand and tell her exactly how much they had learned from the others. Instead, Hook flicked his notebook open and said suddenly, ‘I think we'll have your account of your visit to the basement of Soutters Restaurant again. In detail, this time, with anything significant which you may have omitted on Friday.'

‘I'll tell you everything I can remember. I went down there well before the murder – well, I suppose I should say well before the body was discovered. Twenty minutes at least before that, I should say. I went to the Ladies, was in there for no more than two or three minutes, and came back up the stairs and into the restaurant. I think Patrick was still at the table when I returned, but I couldn't be certain of that: things were pretty boisterous by that time.'

Hook nodded slowly. ‘That is more or less what you told us on Friday. Did you see anyone else whilst you were down there?'

‘No. There was no one in the ladies' loo. There may of course have been someone behind the closed door of the Gents, but I haven't got X-ray eyes.' She was sorry she'd said that, as soon as it was out. Flippancy would only antagonize them.

Lambert studied her for a moment, then said without preamble, ‘Either you are lying or other parties are. Since at least two people have reported seeing you coming up the stairs just before the murder was discovered, it seems highly probable that it is you.'

She swallowed hard, finding her tongue suddenly very dry against the roof of her mouth. ‘I may have made a mistake, I suppose. None of us thought at the time that the order of events was important. Except your murderer, I suppose.'

‘And we have to ask ourselves why you lied to us, Miss Nayland.' Lambert carried on as if she had never spoken. ‘We have to ask ourselves whether the people who saw you in the basement and on the stairs were witnessing a murderer leaving the scene of her crime.'

‘They weren't.'

‘You must try to convince us of that. In the circumstances, I'm sure you will agree that that is only fair.' He allowed himself the ghost of a smile, enjoying cornering this cool young adversary.

Michelle made herself take her time, nodding slowly as she digested what he had said and decided there was no alternative. ‘All right, it's true what you say. What others have told you. I was down there only shortly before the corpse was discovered. I saw the young black boy, Barry Hooper. A couple of minutes later, Joanne Moss had found Patrick's body and was screaming hysterically.'

‘So why tell us otherwise?'

She made herself pause, telling herself that she had known this was going to come out today, that however long she took over her replies they couldn't hold it against her, whatever they thought. Only the actual words she used, not how long she took, would be recorded by the fat one in his damned notebook. ‘I wanted to put myself as far away as possible from the killing. I thought it was bound to come out eventually that I didn't like the victim, that if I said I'd been down there just before he'd died, you'd be bound to conclude that I'd put the knife into him.' It sounded thin to her as she said it, but it was the best she could do.

‘We don't work like that, Miss Nayland. And you're far too intelligent not to realize that anyone you saw down there immediately before the murder was discovered has to be a leading suspect. So why did you withhold that information?'

‘Because I wanted whoever had done it to get away with it! Because as far as I was concerned, he'd executed a cruel bastard, not committed a murder!' This time the words came leaping out of her spontaneously. Her relief that she was being honest at last startled her even as it flooded through her. Her anger was like a drug; perhaps this was a drug, adrenaline, she thought, her elation widening her eyes and making the blood sing in her ears.

It was Lambert who paused now, wondering if he had his killer sitting before him in the unlikely setting of a school library, watching her excitement seep away as he studied her and did not speak. ‘You told us on Friday that your stepfather was kind to you. That you'd got over the initial difficulties of a new man replacing your own father in the household. That he was sympathetic to your problems when you were training to be a teacher.'

She listened to her own breathing, hearing it slow as he deflated her with her own words. ‘All right, that was a load of balls! I hated Patrick Nayland. Nothing was going to alter that.'

‘Your mother thinks he was a good man. That he had your best interests at heart.'

She had no need to conceal her contempt for him now; she was glad to hear it flaring in her words as she said, ‘My mother saw what she wanted to see. Nayland was a randy goat who didn't trouble to control his urges! He shoved his hand up any skirt that offered, and quite a few that didn't.'

‘Including yours?'

She had expected him to contest her wildness. Instead he had gone quietly to the heart of the matter. She had never intended to give them this, to present them with a red-hot motive as well as wounding the one person she wanted to protect, her mother. But she said, just as quietly now as Lambert, ‘Including mine, Superintendent. Not withholding the truth now, am I?'

‘You're telling us that Patrick Nayland made a sexual assault on you?'

‘I'm giving you more than that. I'm telling you that he tried to rape me!'

‘When was this?'

She'd never expected them to be so calm, to accept her astonishing revelations without argument. It dawned upon her dimly that these men probably heard startling things like this all the time. ‘A fortnight before he was killed.'

‘We need some details, please.'

Lambert spoke softly, even sympathetically. She wanted to deny him, to scream at him that her word was enough, that she could not relive that day. But she had lied to them, lied more or less throughout her first meeting with them last Friday. So now they would need convincing; women sometimes did make wild allegations about rape, didn't they? She said dully, ‘I said he tried. He didn't succeed.'

‘We need a little more. I'm sorry.' Lambert was apologetic but insistent. She wondered if he had daughters himself.

Michelle nodded. Now that she was embarked upon it, it didn't seem such a terrible thing to have to talk about it. The important thing was to convince them what a sod Nayland had been. ‘It was after I had come home from school. Mum was out. Patrick wasn't normally there at that time, but he was on that day. Afterwards I thought he might have been waiting for me. I didn't suspect anything, at first. He sat me down and gave me a stiff gin and tonic, said I needed to relax after the trials of the school day. Ironically enough, that was quite true: I'd had a difficult day; it was mild but wet, and the kids couldn't go out much at lunchtime. That always gets them overexcited in the afternoon.'

‘But you gave him no encouragement.'

It was a statement, not a question, and that emboldened her. ‘No. But at first, I'd no idea what he intended. I knew that he couldn't be trusted with women, but I never thought he'd try anything on with me. I even thought he was trying to be pleasant, to build the bridges between us that my mother was always on about.' She shuddered even now at the thought of that early evening moment, in the quiet house with the winter darkness around it.

‘But it wasn't like that.' This was Hook, as sympathetic as his chief, offering nothing more than the prompt she needed to continue a difficult tale. It was almost as if they were apologetic on behalf of their sex.

Michelle said, ‘He put his hand on my shoulder, said what an attractive woman I was now, how he'd enjoyed watching me turn from an adolescent into a desirable young lady. Then he put his nose in my hair, said how beddable I smelt. I tried to move away, said something about this not being the sort of thing I wanted to hear from a stepfather. He said he wanted to be much more than that, that he could introduce me to the joys life had to offer to a woman like me. That was his phrase: I can hear him saying it, even now.' A trembling took her over unexpectedly, running, slight but insistent, through all her limbs.

Hook said, ‘You must have realized what he was up to by this time. What did you do about it?'

‘I told him not to be so silly. I couldn't believe it was happening to me. But it was. He grabbed me with both hands when I tried to move away from him. Said I was a tease, that I'd led him on, that I knew very well what I was doing.' She stopped in horror, remembering how she had lied to these men, how important it was to her now to convince them. ‘I didn't, though! Lead him on, I mean.'

Hook gave her a tiny smile of encouragement, a smile which said he believed her. ‘No. It's what nearly all men claim, in cases of assault and rape.'

Michelle was more grateful to that stolid man for that than she could ever have imagined. ‘He said it was time to stop play-acting, that this was for real. He pressed me against the back of the sofa, then almost had me on the floor when I fought him. He said that there was no way out of this, that I wanted it really, that I'd be grateful to him afterwards, that I'd come back for more and beg for it.' She spoke with mounting revulsion, as if piling up the details of a bad dream. It had become just that, in the days since Nayland's death.