Just Desserts (29 page)

‘Other people had told you that he wasn't to be trusted. When did you find that they were right and you were wrong?'

He was making it sound as if everything was already decided. She knew she must cling to her version of events if she was to get away with it now. She forced a smile, made herself look from the blank wall into those all-seeing grey eyes. ‘I don't know who you've been talking to, but they've given you the wrong idea. Pat and I were going to be married.'

‘When?'

She hadn't expected that. She didn't have an answer ready for it, and she found herself suddenly without the energy to go on dreaming up lies. ‘We hadn't decided when, exactly. It would have been after he'd told Liza. We couldn't make definite plans until then. Pat had to let her down gently.' Her voice almost broke on the last phrase, as she quoted her dead lover so exactly.

‘You told us about the argument that Chris Pearson had with Nayland. Told us how their voices were raised against each other in what became a blazing full-scale row.'

‘Yes.' For a moment, hope sang within her. ‘I never told you that Chris killed him, though, did I? It wouldn't be fair of you to presume—'

‘I think you discovered what that row was about, didn't you, Mrs Moss?'

‘No. I heard the two of them shouting at each other, that was all. I knew it must be serious, because I'd never heard them so worked up about anything before.' Her lips set sullenly on that contention.

It was Hook who now said softly, ‘He let you down, didn't he, Joanne? There's no need to protect him any longer, now that we know what happened. You pressed him about what was happening, and he told you that he was selling Camellia Park to a big company.'

His voice was beguiling with its soft Herefordshire accent, luring her towards agreement with every phrase. She had protected the bastard's memory for long enough. It would be a relief to tell them just how badly he had behaved. Her voice seemed to come from a long way away as she said, ‘He wasn't just selling the golf course. He was selling out on me.'

Hook nodded sympathetically. ‘He told you that, when you asked him about the row with Mr Pearson, didn't he?'

He seemed very concerned for her. This must be what counselling was like, she supposed. ‘I couldn't help hearing what the two of them said at the end of the row. So when I got Pat on his own, I asked him whether it was true that he was selling up. He said yes, it was an offer too good to refuse. He couldn't guarantee anyone's future, but he couldn't turn down the price he was getting. He was going to wash his hands of the whole project and move away. I thought at first that he meant with me.'

Her eyes brimmed for a moment with tears at the memory of that awful moment when the scales were stripped from her eyes, but she dashed them angrily away with the back of her hand. ‘He said he was staying with Liza, that I should have known all along that it would work out like that, that I was a fool to imagine that it could ever have been any different.'

‘And so you decided to kill him.'

Hook's soft tones made it a statement, not a question. There seemed no point in denying him. Joanne found that she only wanted to put her own case, not to deceive them any more. ‘Not at that moment, I didn't. But Alan Fitch came in the next morning and saw that I was upset. He'd been trying to warn me about Pat for months, but I wouldn't listen. Now he saw that I would listen to him, and he told me about some of the other women that Pat had had a go at. Then I asked Michelle Nayland to meet me in a pub, because I knew that she hated him. She told me what he'd tried to do to her.'

‘So you decided to be rid of him once and for all.' Hook made it sound to her the most natural, the most logical way to react. Confession was a relief, really. It seemed to Joanne now that the most important thing was to get the facts absolutely right. ‘Not at that moment, I didn't.'

‘But you took a knife with you to Soutters that night. You must have been thinking about it.'

Joanne nodded slowly. She seemed almost to be discussing the actions of someone else, now: someone very close to her, but not herself. ‘I suppose perhaps I must have been. I put a knife into my handbag when I left the kitchen at Camellia Park. But I've often brought utensils home if I wanted to use them here. I've only a small kitchen here, you see, and we're very well equipped at the golf clubhouse.'

She nodded, a suburban housewife explaining the boring business of food preparation. Hook thought how carefully a defence counsel would explore this in due course, as he sought desperately to show a jury that this was an impulsive crime of passion, not a premeditated act. He said gently, ‘Will you tell us exactly what happened in the basement of Soutters Restaurant, please?'

Her brow furrowed with concentration beneath the neat black hair, and she suddenly looked quite young, like a schoolgirl determined to give an accurate account of an incident which had happened nine days earlier. ‘I saw Pat leave his seat at the middle of the table and go downstairs. I followed him down a couple of minutes later, on impulse. I met him coming out of the Gents. He looked so smug that I screamed at him. I was so furious that he stepped back a pace or two. I liked that. Liked the shocked look on his face.'

A small, unnerving smile crept over her features as she remembered the moment.

‘And what happened next, Joanne?' Hook was as quietly persuasive as if he had been handling a difficult child.

Her face darkened. ‘He said it was no dice. This dinner had now become not just a celebration of the first ten years, but a way of saying farewell to everyone. I said what about all our plans for the future. Why had he paid me more than the job was worth if he hadn't been serious about our future together? He laughed and said he reckoned it was money well spent. And I should reckon myself lucky; I'd been well paid for all the services I'd offered. Especially the ones in bed. That's when I stabbed him.'

With that last chilling simplicity, the smile came back to her lips.

‘So you'd taken the knife down there with you.'

‘I'd taken my handbag. I don't know when I took the knife out, but it was there in my hand when I needed it.'

‘What happened next, Joanne?'

‘I don't remember anything else very clearly. I think I screamed at him about his other women and about Michelle as I went on stabbing him. I must have put the knife away in my handbag. But I don't think I realized I'd killed him then.'

‘But you screamed, and brought the others.'

‘Not then, I didn't. I heard someone coming, so I shut myself in one of the cubicles. A couple of people came in, one after the other. I don't know who they were, because I was keeping very quiet and planning what to do.'

Hook knew. Alan Fitch, who'd merely checked that Nayland was dead, and then Barry Hooper, who had removed the dead man's watch. He said gently, ‘So what did you do, after you'd had this time to think, Joanne?'

‘I came out of the cubicle, gave it a couple of minutes, and then screamed. Pretended I'd just found him, you see.' A smile of content at her cunning suffused her features. ‘I almost got away with it, didn't I?'

She let Hook put the cups and the parkin back on the tray and carry it away into the kitchen whilst she sat staring past Lambert at the wall, still with that knowing half-smile upon her face. She made no attempt at resistance as Lambert pronounced the formal words of arrest and they took her out to the car.

Joanne Moss scarcely glanced at the handcuffs on her slim wrists as she sat in the back of the car with the silent Hook. She looked unseeing through the windows of the police Mondeo as Lambert drove slowly through the Christmas shopping crowds in Gloucester. The only movement of her head came as she raised her eyes to look towards the floodlit tower of the cathedral, as they passed it and moved into the darkness beyond the city. Bert Hook was happy that her last image of the outside world should be this unchanging one.

The choir was singing unaccompanied, its tones pure, almost ethereal. The sound of ‘In the Bleak Midwinter' followed them into the night.