‘Come to that, I can understand totally why there are women, married to some missionary-position bore, who seek out no-strings fun with young lads. If the only price they have to pay is a few quid a time — then it’s damn good value.’
Rose pushed back her chair and stood up. Already she regretted her outburst, but it was too late now. All that was left was to beat a fast retreat before she said even more that she would later regret.
Simon had not replied and she knew that was an ominous sign. She sighed.
‘I’m going to bed,’ she said, rather more quietly.
Simon sat at the table for several minutes more. He was shocked. Rose was quite right up to a point — he would maintain that he believed in sexual equality but, all the same, he had been appalled by much of what she had said.
He still loved Rose and had always been confident, even at their blackest moments, of her true feelings for him. Rows like this were not that unusual in their marriage and did not necessarily upset Simon that much. He accepted that he and his wife were both volatile independent people who were bound to clash occasionally. And, in fact, he had always taken the attitude that husbands and wives who proudly professed that they hadn’t had a cross word in twenty years together were probably too boring to have a point of view worth having a cross word over.
This time, however, he had found Rose’s outburst deeply disturbing. He wondered uneasily how much she had been expressing her own suppressed views on sex. And, not for the first time in their marriage, he found himself harbouring suspicions about her sexuality and where it might occasionally lead her.
Nine
Simon had obviously slept in the spare room. Rose did not check whether or not he was still in bed. She just showered and dressed as quickly as possible, grabbed a quick cup of tea without which she really could not start the day, and left the house.
It was just before seven. There would be the usual team briefing in the murder incident room at 8.30 a.m. After that Rose planned another visit to the Crescent Hotel. She felt the key to it all must lie there somewhere. The only chance of tracing the mysterious Mrs Pattinson seemed to be through the Crescent. She had intended to blitz the place as soon as the identification of the body was over and she was actively looking forward to giving that slimy little manager a good going over.
The early briefing passed uneventfully. Certainly nobody had any kind of break-through to report. Rose gave the obligatory pep talk, stressed the importance of finding Mrs Pattinson, and then, accompanied by Peter Mellor, set off for the Crescent Hotel.
On the way out, two veteran detective constables were standing chatting by the coffee machine. Rose had particularly good hearing. Sometimes she was not sure whether this was a blessing or a curse.
‘There she bloody goes again — and God knows when she last interviewed anyone before getting the big murder,’ she overheard one remark sarcastically to the other when they presumed she was safely out of ear-shot.
She didn’t know whether Peter Mellor had also heard, but she was aware of the old-fashioned look he gave her as they climbed into their car. Most rank-and-file policemen and women think that no officer over the level of sergeant ought to be on the road at all, let alone interviewing suspects. Certainly the place for a senior investigating officer is considered to be firmly behind his or her desk. Indeed, Rose knew she was going to have to watch it or she would face censure from above for doing too much running around and not enough organising. Perhaps it was because she was still new to the top job that she could not resist.
At the Crescent Hotel DS Mellor remained stiffly disapproving of everything — of a woman buying sex, of the hotel, of Avon Escorts, and of the murdered young man whose unsavoury way of life he seemed to regard almost as a personal slight. But Mellor’s grim presence was almost a bonus when Rose gave the hotel manager the third degree she had been so looking forward to.
She had already discovered from the housekeeper that, as far as the woman knew, Mrs Pattinson had not once been still in residence when the maids had arrived to clean her room in the mornings. Rose suspected that the mysterious Mrs Pattinson slipped quietly away as soon as she finished doing whatever it was she did with the young men from Avon.
‘She never stayed overnight, that’s the truth, isn’t it?’ Rose was quite openly aggressive with Henry Bannerman now.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Bannerman replied, but he was not nearly as smugly superior as he had been on the night that Marty Morris’s body was discovered. Rose wondered exactly what he was hiding. She was quite sure there was something.
‘You must have known what Mrs Pattinson was using your hotel for, it was quite obvious, surely?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Bannerman, attempting to bristle, but not succeeding very well.
The interview was conducted in the hotel manager’s office, Bannerman sitting behind his desk, DCI Piper sitting on the upright chair opposite him and DS Mellor standing by her side. The sergeant moved menacingly forwards and leaned on Henry Bannerman’s desk so that his face was only inches away from that of the other man.
‘This place is little more than a knocking shop, that’s what I think,’ he said. ‘And personally I’m not going to be happy until I’ve closed it down.’
The sergeant’s voice was cold and quiet. Rose found him quite frightening when he was like this, so the effect on Henry Bannerman came as no surprise.
The pompous little man cringed in his seat. There was no sign at all now of the patronising attitude which had previously so irritated Rose. That gave her considerable satisfaction. But nothing much else was gained by the confrontation. If Henry Bannerman knew anything more about Mrs Pattinson, Avon Escorts, or Marty Morris and his violent death, then he certainly wasn’t telling.
As the Detective Chief Inspector and her sergeant left the hotel, Peter Mellor’s mobile phone rang. He listened in silence for a couple of minutes and it seemed to Rose that his face hardened as he did so.
‘It seems that our young friend batted for both sides,’ he said grimly. ‘He had a gay lover who didn’t like what his boy did for a living one little bit. Obsessively jealous, he’s been described as apparently.’
‘We might be getting somewhere at last, then,’ commented Rose. ‘Do we have a name?’
‘Yep. Smoothie called Jonathon Lee. We know him apparently. Given to outbursts of violence, particularly if he’s been on the crack. Into that too and deals in the stuff, so it’s more than likely young Marty was as well. They’ve picked him up, by the way. Taking him into the nick now.’
‘What are we waiting for?’ asked Rose.
Mellor regarded her without a deal of enthusiasm.
‘Shouldn’t we get a couple of DCs to talk to him, boss?’ he said.
Rose knew that was what she should do. Mellor wasn’t often wrong. That was why she liked to work so closely with him. She also knew what the lads had started to call him too. And if she knew, she assumed that so did he. ‘Her ladyship’s bum boy.’ Rose was the wrong sex, too young and had the wrong colour hair. Whether or not she was a good police officer was not always a factor in the Avon and Somerset Constabulary.
No matter. Other people’s opinions were something else she couldn’t worry about. She could only do things her way.