‘I should hope so,’ said Slider.
Through the first open door, they passed into an office, light and airy, well lit, with plenty of floor space. There were three desks, one bearing a printer and copier and stacks of forms and leaflets. The other two had computers and telephones and the usual office accoutrements. Behind one sat a slight young woman, very fair and pale, who appeared to be suffering from a heavy cold – her eyes and the end of her nose were red and swollen – clattering away full-speed on the keyboard. At the other was a woman in her fifties, rather shapeless-looking, with a mass of greying frizzy hair spreading out and past her shoulders, oversized tortoiseshell glasses slipping to the end of her nose, and an expression of tense concentration on her face as she picked two-fingered at the keys. Through a further wide and open door was a glimpse of a second office, the one which had the windows on to the street. The desk was out of sight to the left, but a youngish man in a wheelchair could be seen, his attention on the occupant of the desk. Slider could distinguish the cut-glass tones of Amanda Sturgess coming from within.
‘Can I help you?’ said the shapeless woman.
‘Detective Inspector Slider and Detective Sergeant Atherton,’ Slider said. ‘To see Amanda Sturgess.’
‘Oh,’ said the woman, looking alarmed. She stood up jerkily, knocking over a pot of pencils and biros on the desk. ‘I’m afraid she’s not available.’ A pencil rolled off the table and she stooped awkwardly to retrieve it. She was about five foot four and extremely fat, and was wearing a waistless print dress which reached her ankles, like a floral tent. She pushed her large glasses up her nose and they slid straight back down, as arrogantly as the Queen Mary down the slipway. ‘Can I help at all? I’m Nora Beale. Ms Sturgess’s partner.’ She came round the end of the desk and took a step towards them, and dithered, as if wondering whether to offer to shake hands or not. The outer edge of her hip knocked a small pile of papers to the ground. ‘Oh!’ she said again, and made to retrieve them, but Atherton got in first, stooping like a hawk, gathering them in one pass of his long fingers and presenting them to her. She almost snatched them from him, looking at him in confused annoyance. ‘They’re confidential,’ she objected, and pushed her glasses up again. ‘Were you enquiring about employing a differently abled person? I have a leaflet covering the legal requirements, if you aren’t sure about them.’
Unseen within the inner room, a hand closed the door.
Slider raised his hand slightly, to prevent the woman attempting to get across the room to the leaflet table, which he thought in her state of nervousness would leave a trail of havoc. The young woman had ceased typing and was watching the scene. ‘No, thank you. I need to speak to Mrs Sturgess about a personal matter.’
‘It’s Ms Sturgess,’ Beale corrected, with more force than anything she had said so far. ‘And I’m afraid it’s quite impossible to speak to her. She has someone with her. One of our clients.’
‘Yes, so I saw,’ Slider said. ‘I’m afraid it is rather urgent, however. Would you please tell her we are here?’
‘I can’t disturb her when she’s with a client,’ she objected, outraged. ‘Our clients are very vulnerable, and must be given every consideration. You’ll have to come back some other time. It’s best to make an appointment, you know. Ms Sturgess is always very busy.’ Her face was mottling, though whether with fear or anger, Slider couldn’t tell. Her devotion to Amanda Sturgess was obvious, but from the little he had seen, it was not so obvious why Amanda would keep her about the place.
‘I quite understand,’ he said soothingly, ‘but I must ask you to interrupt her and tell her we are here. We’ll wait while she winds up the interview.’
Ms Beale made various disapproving, tutting noises, but she blundered back round her desk and rang through to the other office, turning away and covering her mouth while she muttered her message. When she had put the phone down again she went back to her hunt-and-peck typing without a word to the two intruders, though judging from the amount of backspacing she was doing, she was too upset to be making a good job of it. It was the younger woman who said, ‘Would you like to sit down?’ and gestured towards some chairs on her side of the room. Slider smiled at her and politely declined. He was not going to be passively seated and let them think the waiting was all right.
It was eight minutes before the inner door opened and the man in the wheelchair appeared, with Amanda Sturgess behind him. She ignored the visitors with glacial completeness as she escorted him out, talking to him the while, all the way to the lift. Only on her return did she give Slider a cold glance and say, ‘You may come in,’ and then stalked past them into her sanctum.
They followed her in and closed the door, and she faced them, standing, across her desk and got the first punch in. ‘If you wish to speak to me in future you must make an appointment. I do not appreciate your turning up here unannounced, embarrassing me, annoying my staff and upsetting the clients. You must understand that our clients are extremely vulnerable people, and I cannot have disturbing influences putting them at risk.’
Slider took it straight back to her. ‘And you must understand that I do not appreciate being lied to. It makes me feel very disturbed, and when I get disturbed I tend to come and disturb others.’
She was shocked by his use of her own words. Her eyes widened and she reddened angrily. ‘How dare you be facetious?’ she cried. ‘Don’t you grasp the importance of our work here? We are a charity! We deal with disabled people!’
‘It’s not your business I’m interested in, it’s you personally. And you need to grasp that I am investigating a murder, and that hindering an investigation is an imprisonable offence.’
Atherton thought his boss was going in a bit hard, but it seemed he had the measure of her. She shut her mouth with a snap and sat down abruptly, and when she spoke again a moment later her tone was different, quieter.
‘But I’m not. I wouldn’t. Obviously I want to help you if I can, in any way possible, but I don’t see what I can do. I don’t know anything about it. You can’t really suppose that I do.’ She looked at him with furious appeal.
‘What I may or may not suppose is beside the point,’ Slider said. ‘I deal in facts, and the fact is that you have lied to me, and I don’t like it. Lies make me restless. I have to know what’s behind them.’
‘I didn’t lie to you,’ she said indignantly, but there was a consciousness in her eyes, and a wariness. Atherton noted it with interest. She was wondering which lies had been uncovered, he thought – which argued that there had been several of them.
‘There are lies of commission, and lies of omission,’ Slider said. ‘Perhaps a purist might ease their conscience over the latter, but there’s no excuse for the former. You told me that you hadn’t spoken to your former husband for months, and that you only spoke to him about once a year anyway. But we know that you have spoken to him frequently in the last few weeks. And that you had a long telephone conversation with him only a week before his death.’
And suddenly she was quite calm again. She straightened her shoulders, laid her hands before her on the desk, and said, as if it were a normal interview and she was in control of it, ‘The telephone conversations had nothing to do with your investigation, and my not telling you of them has not hampered you in any way. Really, these are very trivial matters to come trampling in here threatening me about. I have a mind to make an official complaint about your behaviour, Inspector Slider. You may not be aware that the Chief Constable of Hertfordshire is a very great personal friend of mine.’