Why Aren't They Screaming? (20 page)

Loretta turned and saw Jeremy get up, his face even paler than usual. ‘Well, he's here, as a matter of fact...' she said slowly.

‘Don't tell me you want to search the house
again.'
Jeremy clearly knew they were police officers. ‘I'll have to start charging rent if this goes on much longer!' His attempt at a joke failed to disguise his sudden nervousness.

‘We may need further access later today, sir. But we haven't come about that. Is there somewhere we can talk privately?' He glanced meaningfully at Loretta and Colin.

‘Privately? Is there really any need – oh, if we must. Shall we go over to the house?'

‘Well, sir, my instructions are to ask you to accompany me to the station.'

‘The station? What for? You're not arresting me, are you?' Jeremy's voice was shrill.

‘No, sir. At this stage, I'm just asking you for help with our inquiries. Voluntarily, of course.'

‘Do I have to go?' The question was directed at Colin, and Loretta remembered he was a solicitor. Colin got to his feet and put a restraining hand on Jeremy's arm.

‘Look, old chap, you don't
have
to go. But is there any reason not to? After all –'

Jeremy shook the hand off. ‘All right, all right. What happens now? Handcuffs?' He thrust his wrists belligerently in the direction of the detective who'd done the talking.

‘That won't be necessary, sir. I'm grateful for your cooperation.' This last was said with heavy irony.

Jeremy paused for a moment, looked as if he was about to say something, then thought better of it. He moved towards the door, turned, and attempted a cheerful wave. ‘See you later, then! Soon as I escape from Alcatraz!' He strode off across the garden, the two detectives in his wake.

There was an awkward silence in the kitchen, broken eventually by Colin, ‘Surely they don't think –' He stopped.

Loretta shrugged. It certainly looked as though the police suspected Jeremy of involvement in his wife's murder, but why? How did that tie in with the evidence of the cassette tape? Surely he wasn't in league with the Americans – if it was they who'd made the tape – against his own wife? None of these was a thought she wanted to share with Colin; she shook her head, wishing he would go. ‘I don't know what it means.'

Colin moved to the table, picked up his cup, and drank some of the coffee in it. ‘Well, I must be off – bit of constituency business to see to. Thanks for the coffee.'

‘You're welcome.'

He picked up his bag, inclined his head in her direction, and left by the open door. Loretta closed it and collected up the cups, rinsing them in the sink as she tried, and failed, to make sense of the morning's developments.

Around four, she decided she could no longer bear sitting in the cottage trying to write letters. Frequent trips to the front door had revealed no sign that Jeremy had returned; she wondered if he was still being questioned. Had he even been charged? She looked at the clock, realized she'd just missed the news on Radio Four, and ran lightly up the stairs. She took off her trousers and changed into a summer dress; Robert should be back from London any time now, and she could make a detour to ring Tracey on her way to see him. In the kitchen she checked that the tape was still in her bag, pulled the front door shut behind her, and set off in her car for the phone box she'd used that morning.

Tracey picked up his extension as soon as it rang.

‘Loretta? Sorry, no luck.'

‘What d'you mean?'

‘I spoke to a chap who does a bit of liaison work from time to time, and he says the Yanks aren't talking.'

‘You mean – they won't say whether they made the tape?'

‘No, I mean they won't say anything at all. The point is, and I was told this quite forcefully, that Anglo-American relations are at an all-time low. Or as my friend actually put it, those fuckers wouldn't spell the president's name without an official request in writing from the DG. He says it's not even worth asking them.'

‘But if they aren't involved, why wouldn't they say so?'

‘Look, as I understand it, the Yanks don't want the Brits to know
anything
at the moment – what they're doing or what they aren't doing.'

‘Oh.' Loretta was disappointed. Even though Tracey hadn't been optimistic about his chances of success, she had placed great faith in him. ‘In other words, they've stopped
speaking to each other,' she said sarcastically. ‘Just like a bunch of schoolgirls.'

‘You don't understand, Loretta.' Tracey was being patient. ‘It's all because of Libya. Reagan wasn't prepared for all the flak he's got in the last few weeks, and he wants to know why nobody warned him. The Yanks feel let down –'

‘They
feel let down –'

‘Let's not get into a political discussion. I agree with you, as it happens. I'm no more in favour of Reagan using British bases to bomb Tripoli than you are. But I'm not a fan of Colonel Gadaffi, either.'

‘Neither am I. Now who's starting a discussion?'

‘All right, I'm just telling you the score.'

‘OK, where does that leave us?'

‘Us? Listen, there's nothing else I can do. Or you, for that matter. Take your tape to the police and let them deal with it.'

‘Oh yeah. A long way they'll get. Someone'll put a quiet word in somewhere, and it'll all be dropped.'

‘Maybe. Maybe not. At least give them a chance. They'll get further than either of us could.'

‘Oh, all right. Thanks for your help.'

‘Don't mention it. When are you coming back to London? There's nothing for you to do up there. And I don't like the thought of you hanging round a place where a woman's just been murdered.'

‘Is that a warning? Did your friend in MI5 –'

‘Shhh! I don't want to talk about it on the phone! And no, he didn't say anything about warning you off. Stop being melodramatic. It's just common sense.'

‘Well, I'll come back after I've seen the police. And I must go, I promised to go and have tea with some people in the village.' It was half true, she thought, crossing her fingers. ‘I'll give you a ring when I get back to London. Bye.'

‘Loretta–'

She put down the phone, anxious to avoid questions from Tracey about the identity of the people she was about to visit. Although they had been separated, though not divorced, for years, she still didn't like discussing her lovers with Tracey. He, feeling no such inhibition, had a highly developed sense about when to ask searching questions about the very private
side of her life. It wasn't until she was getting into her car that it occurred to her that she'd forgotten to mention Jeremy Frere's summons to the police station; she hesitated, wondering whether to ring back and ask Tracey to do a bit of digging on her behalf, then decided against. She intended to see Bailey as early as possible next day, and she'd find some way of raising the subject then. She closed the door, fastened her safety belt, and set off for Flitwell.

Loretta parked the car in the road outside Robert's house and walked through the side gate. The faint sound of music from the drawing room told her Robert was at home, and she was immediately nervous. She paused before ringing the bell, trying to analyse what she was feeling; it was more than the mingled sense of anticipation and fear of disappointment that usually accompanied meetings with a new and unfamiliar lover. Her mind had flown back to the brief suspicions she'd harboured the day before as to Robert's possible involvement in Clara's death: there was guilt, yes. And there was anxiety, the knowledge that she might say or do the wrong thing at this delicate point in their relationship. The only thing to do, she decided, was to stop anticipating and get on with it. She pressed the door-bell.

At once the music stopped; this time, it seemed, the player had been Robert. She heard footsteps, then the door opened.

‘Loretta!' He seemed genuinely pleased to see her, stepping forward to embrace her. ‘Come in. I didn't hear your car draw up.'

He stood back, allowing her to precede him into the drawing room.

‘I'm sorry about yesterday, missing you, I mean. I had to do an interview with a Japanese TV company, they're over here making a film about British composers. It was arranged weeks ago, and I couldn't put them off. Do sit down.'

Loretta took a seat at the end of the sofa.

‘I'm sorry I wasn't there when you came over. I suddenly couldn't stand being in the cottage any more – I went racing off to Oxford to do some shopping and get something to eat.'

Robert sat down next to her.

‘Poor old thing,' he said, taking her hand. ‘Probably did
you good to get away. Were you all right on Tuesday night? I feel rather bad about letting you go back there after what happened. Did you get any sleep?'

‘A bit,' she said, relieved that they were able to talk about the murder as easily as this. ‘I wasn't scared. As I said, the place was crawling with police. Are those today's papers?'

‘Yes, have you seen them? Dreadful stuff. I don't know what the press is coming to in this country.'

‘No, I haven't seen any of them. I didn't want to go to the village shop in case anyone realized who I was and started asking for all the gory details. Can I have a look?'

‘Of course. Drink?'

It was a bit early in the day for Loretta, but she was beginning to relax and thought that one drink would do her no harm.

‘Yes please – gin and tonic?'

‘Coming up.' Robert got up and left the room, leaving her to look through the pile of papers lying on the floor. She quickly found what she was looking for: the
Daily Mail.
Although the murder was front-page news, she had to turn to an inside page to find Adela L'Estrange's contribution. It took up most of page five, and was lavishly illustrated. There was a picture of Clara, unsmiling and rather fierce; one of the exterior of Baldwin's, taken from the front; another showing double glass doors with
Frere Fine Arts
painted across them in imitation handwriting; and one of Jeremy himself. This last was a blurred snapshot taken in what looked like semi-darkness – Jeremy, champagne glass in one hand, had thrown his other arm across the shoulders of a woman whose cleavage threatened to burst the fragile restraint provided by her plunging neckline. ‘When the wife's away ... the husband used to play', the caption read, adding unnecessarily that the photograph showed Jeremy and a blonde friend at a recent nightclub opening.

Loretta winced and turned her attention to the main text, wondering nervously if she would find herself featured in it. The article began unpromisingly: Clara's surname was misspelt, allowing Adela to claim an entirely fictional link between the dead woman and the author of ‘the famous sixteenth-century women's lib manifesto,
A Violation of the
Rights of Woman'.
It went on to describe Clara as the mother of one daughter, ‘a brilliant student at Brighton University', whose name was given, inexplicably, as Eileen. Worse followed. Clara, who had apparently won something called the ‘Beatrice Potter Prize for Children's Books',

was adored by kiddies all over the world. Little did they know – they would not, Thank God, have understood – that the motherly, grey-haired woman who wrote innocent stories about Burmese cats called Bertie and Lettice, was in fact an extreme feminist.

‘She was one of those peace women, a real fanatic,' said one of the dead woman's neighbours, a pretty blonde school-teacher, yesterday.

It took Loretta a moment to recognize herself from this description; she read it twice, gasped, and carried on.

Last month, after Mrs Thatcher gave President Reagan permission to use US bases in Britain to wipe out terrorist strongholds in Libya, Mrs Wollstonecraft allowed a breakaway group from the notorious women's ‘peace' camp at Greenham Common to set up shop on land she owned next to RAF Dunstow. In spite of protests from the base commander, who fears the camp could be used by terrorists disguised as ‘peace' women, and from local shopkeepers, who have reported a spate of petty thefts since the arrival of the women, Mrs Wollstonecraft refused to make them leave.

Meanwhile her husband, Mayfair socialite and gallery owner Jeremy Frere, 36 – Mrs Wollstonecraft refused to change her name at the time of her second marriage – has been increasingly seen at parties in London without his 55-year-old wife (see picture, right).

Mr Frere, who was too upset yesterday to talk about his marriage, is said by friends to have been driven to despair by his wife's association with left-wing political agitators and what one close friend described yesterday as ‘the hard-line, pro-Russian, anti-men brigade'.

The shock of his wife's murder could not have come at a worse time for Mr Frere, whose art business has been hit by the failure of two recent shows and the withdrawal from the business of his long-time business partner, Mr Sam ‘Sonny' Moss, the American entrepreneur. Friends say Mr Frere has been pinning his hopes on the success of his next venture, the first
posthumous exhibition of the work of the recently discovered American depressive artist, Peter Eddy.

‘Have you got to the bit about the depressive artist?' Robert had come back into the room and was holding out her drink. ‘Makes me think of Van Gogh. Perhaps someone should invent a Depressive School – lots of artists who have nothing in common except the fact that they committed suicide. Sorry I took so long – I couldn't remember where I'd put the tonic water.' He sat down beside her.

Loretta sipped her drink. ‘What a dreadful piece,' she said. ‘Why didn't she just come straight out and say Clara was a mad lesbian who drove her husband into the arms of other women?'

‘They're almost an art form in themselves, pieces like that,' Robert observed, moving closer to take another look at the story. ‘Para-realism, you could call it – every fact distantly related to the truth but with a new and ingenious interpretation.'