Ann had to struggle to hold the three figures in the room in some sort of focus. Although solid enough in themselves, they seemed to move in an improbable way. Looming forward and retreating, like people in a dream. Their voices echoed slightly.
She had overheard the doctor warning Lionel that she might feel slightly disoriented at first. He had given her an injection and there were some tablets to take three times a day. They were tranquillisers and they certainly worked. She had never felt so tranquil in her life. In fact she felt so tranquil she would have been happy to slip into unconsciousness and never come round again.
It was Jax who had spotted his employer’s wife as he was driving Lionel home. Ann was pacing round and round the taxi rank outside Causton library, her head wagging like a broken doll’s. Lionel leapt out of the car and ran to her. Ann flung herself at him, locked her arms round his neck and started shrieking. Jax had helped get her into the car then driven directly to the doctor’s.
‘Is your wife not well, Mr Lawrence?’ Barnaby asked.
‘Ann?’ inquired Lionel, as if she was only one of many. ‘Just a little run down. Tell me—’
‘I was hoping to talk to her about the day Carlotta disappeared.’
Carlotta ... Something swam to the surface of Ann’s mind. A slender white shape. A human arm. It curved upwards, a half-moon gleaming against the dark, then sank without a trace.
‘Mrs Lawrence, do you remember what happened before she left? I believe there was an argument.’
Hopeless. Whatever she’d been given was powerful stuff. Barnaby thought it seemed to have been ideally timed to stop her talking to him then told himself not to be melodramatic. No one at the Old Rectory could have known about the police’s reconstruction of the blackmail letter. Or the new direction the case had taken. He turned his attention to Lionel Lawrence.
‘Could you give me any details, sir?’
‘I’m afraid not. The night it happened I was at a meeting till quite late. When I got home, Ann was asleep. How she could have just gone to bed with that poor child ...’ Lionel shook his head at this sad abrogation of his wife’s duty. ‘The foxes have holes and the birds of the air—’
‘But surely you discussed it the next day.’
Lionel’s face became set in a moonish stubbornness. The chief inspector simply raised an interrogatory eyebrow and waited. Troy, seated with his notebook at a satinwood card table, inhaled with pleasure the mellow natural scent of beeswax. And watched.
He was good at waiting, the gaffer. Once he’d kept it up for nearly ten minutes. Troy, who had no more patience than a two-year-old, asked him how he did it. Barnaby explained that he simply absented himself. Naturally one had to keep eye contact and maintain an intent, sometimes even slightly threatening posture but within these limits the mind could do its own thing. One of the most useful, he found, was listing gardening jobs for the weekend.
Poor old Lawrence just wasn’t up to it. He didn’t last ten seconds, let alone ten minutes.
‘Apparently Ann thought Carlotta had borrowed some earrings. She questioned the girl, obviously very clumsily. Naturally Carlotta got frightened—’
‘I don’t see why,’ said Sergeant Troy. ‘If she hadn’t—’
‘You don’t understand,’ cried the Reverend Lawrence. ‘For someone of her background to be wrongfully accused is a deeply traumatic—’
‘And you believe it was wrongfully, Mr Lawrence?’ asked Barnaby.
‘I know it was.’ Sounding unchristianly smug and self-righteous. ‘Ann is notoriously careless. People are who’ve never known want.’
‘Still, such things do happen,’ said Troy, feeling sorry for the devastated, long gone Mrs Lawrence. In return he got an incredulous stare awarding him ten out of ten for sensitivity plus bonus points for tender loving care.
‘Could you tell us something about her background, Mr Lawrence?’ asked the chief inspector.
‘It’s all on record at the Caritas Agency.’
‘Yes, and we shall be talking to them. But right now I’m talking to you.’
The Reverend looked rather taken aback at the sudden hardening of his interrogator’s voice.
‘I don’t see how prying into the girl’s past will help find her.’ He blinked weakly. ‘Everyone has a clean slate here.’
‘I believe she often received airmail letters.’
‘Oh, I doubt that, you know.’ Lawrence smiled indulgently.
‘Apparently she threw them away unopened,’ added Sergeant Troy.
‘Who on earth told you such a story?’ It didn’t take him long to run through the possible suspects. ‘I’m surprised you attend to servants’ gossip, Inspector.’
This brought a response from the blue armchair. Ann Lawrence gave a muffled cry and struggled to sit up. She tried to speak but her tongue, a huge lump of inert flesh in her mouth, would hardly move.
‘Herry ... no ... not ... serv ...’
‘Now look what you’ve done!’ He crossed over to his wife, propelled, it seemed to Barnaby, more by annoyance at her behaviour than care for her wellbeing. ‘We must get you upstairs, Ann.’ He glared at the two policemen who stared stolidly back. ‘If you want to talk to myself or my wife again you can make an appointment in the proper manner.’
‘That’s not how it works, I’m afraid, sir,’ said the chief inspector. ‘And I have to inform you that if you remain uncooperative, any future interviews could well be taking place at the station.’
‘We’ll have to watch our step there, chief,’ said Troy with a chuckle in his voice as they were crossing the gravel. ‘Him and his fancy handshake connections.’
Barnaby commented briefly on the Reverend Lawrence’s Masonic connections, employing the vividly concise gift for imagery and pithy dialogue that made his subordinates so apprehensive of getting a summons to his office.
Troy had a good laugh and went over the retort a few times to make sure he remembered it to pass on in the canteen. By the time he’d got this well and truly sorted, they were standing by the door of the garage flat.
This time he had seen them coming. Seen the car, seen them go into the main house. He would be well prepared. Barnaby, recalling the interruption from Lawrence on the last occasion they talked to Jackson, trusted the Reverend would be spending the next twenty minutes or so remonstrating with his wife.
Sergeant Troy’s thoughts were running along precisely the same lines. One more up-chucking display of snivelling hypocrisy from the chauffeur and he could see the Red Lion’s Apricot and Raspberry Pavlova suddenly forming a tasteful mosaic on the smart cream carpet. And he would not be cleaning it up.
The door was opened. Jackson stood there wearing a silvery tweed jacket and black cotton polo neck sweater. His face wore an expression of unguarded candour. ‘And to think when you said you’d be back, Inspector, I thought you was just stringing me along.’
‘Mr Jackson.’
‘Terry to you.’ He stood politely aside and they all went upstairs.
The flat looked pretty much the same as the last time they were here except for a new ironing board leaning up against a wall by the kitchen. Both the kitchen and bathroom doors were wide open as if to deny they had anything to conceal. There was a copy of yesterday’s Daily Star sunny side up on the coffee table.
Jackson sat on the settee. His manner was bland and compliant. But his eyes were keenly focused and Barnaby noticed he sat well forward, hands resting lightly on his knees, the fingers curled like a sprinter.
‘Do you always drive Mr Lawrence, Terry?’
Jackson looked surprised then wary. Whatever he had expected, it had not been this.
‘Yes. Me or Mrs L. He never got round to learning.’