‘Good God,’ said Vogel. ‘Right Perkins. You’d better tell me everything you know.’
Perkins did so. When he had finished Vogel was thoughtful.
‘So, a man who is at the most a very occasional amateur sailor took out his boat, generally considered to be inadequate at sea for anything except the fairest of fair-weather sailing, on a day like this.’
Vogel gestured through a window near where they were standing.
Barnstaple, like Bideford, is an estuary town, on a tidal river, but further inland and therefore protected to a certain extent from the extremes of coastal weather. Nonetheless driving rain was hammering into the glass, and it was clear that a gale was blowing. A stubby tree on a patch of grass outside had been bent almost horizontal by the wind. The sky was leaden.
‘Why on earth would anyone take any sort of boat out in this weather?’ he asked.
‘Well it wasn’t like this first thing,’ said Perkins. ‘It was a bright sunny morning, wasn’t it, sir? Just like yesterday.’
‘For a while, yes,’ agreed Vogel. ‘But by mid-morning the weather was already beginning to change. In Bideford the wind was blowing right up the estuary. You didn’t need a forecast to know what was coming.’
‘Mr Barham did tell his wife he didn’t plan to be long,’ said Perkins.
‘Yep. But what was he planning?’ asked Vogel, more of himself than anyone else.
He re-entered the interview room, formally ended proceedings, told Felix that the interview would be resumed later, and, once they were alone together, gave Saslow the rundown on what he had just learned from DC Perkins.
‘Barham could just have got things wrong,’ suggested Saslow who could already tell the way her superior officer’s mind was going. ‘I mean, as he wasn’t much of a sailor, he could just have made a terrible mistake. It might not be significant to our investigation at all... ’
‘Saslow,’ said Vogel. ‘You don’t need to be a sailor to check the bloody weather forecast. A man who is central to a murder investigation has inexplicably taken a small and inadequate boat out to sea in highly questionable weather within a day or so of the event. It seems quite likely, does it not, that he is at the very least in serious trouble at sea? He could well be dead. That would make him the second person living in a small secluded close to have died a violent death within less than two days. And the other was his closest neighbour. When conducting a murder investigation, I do not believe in those kinds of coincidences.
‘Come on Saslow. We’re going to Instow to see what Gerry Barham’s wife has to tell us about all this.’
Anne Barham answered the door before either Saslow or Vogel had rung the bell. She must have heard or seen them arrive outside her house.
Vogel could see that she had been crying. She recognized him and Saslow at once, of course. Her hand went to her mouth and she gave a little gasp.
‘Gerry, is it Gerry?’ she asked, her voice little more than a whisper.
Clearly she feared that Vogel and Saslow were bringing the news she had no doubt been fearing for some hours now.
‘We don’t have any further news, Mrs Barham,’ said Vogel quickly. ‘We just wanted to talk to you again, about the events of yesterday and your husband’s disappearance.’
‘Uh yes, of course. I don’t know what it’s got to do with yesterday though. Except, well, I think Gerry was a lot more upset by what happened than I realized.’
Anne Barham led the way into the same sitting room where she had fetched coffee for Vogel and Saslow early the previous morning. This time she offered no such hospitality. The woman was clearly quite distraught. She did not even bid them to sit. The two officers did so anyway, and it was Vogel who suggested that Mrs Barham should join them.
She lowered herself abruptly, and with a bit of a bump, onto a hard chair by the door.
‘I just don’t know what’s happening any more,’ she said. ‘My Gerry, this isn’t like him. He’s... he’s such an orderly man. He used to be a civil servant, you know. Caught the seven a.m. train into central London every morning, and the five p.m. one home. Regular as clockwork. He’s always punctual. Even now he’s retired he has his routine in everything. Never wavers. I don’t think he’s surprised me, not really, in thirty-seven years of marriage... until now—’
Vogel interrupted her. The woman was in danger of being gripped by verbal diarrhoea. It happened in these situations. Vogel had seen it before.
‘Mrs Barham, what I would like you to do is take me through everything that has happened in the period since DC Saslow and I left you yesterday morning until now. Particularly I need to know specifically anything about your husband’s behaviour that was odd or out of character.’
‘Everything about Gerry’s behaviour was odd,’ Anne Barham replied straight away. ‘He wasn’t like my Gerry at all. Not at all.’
She then gave a quite precisely detailed account, perhaps surprisingly so under the circumstances, of Gerry’s unlikely absences, the questionable phone calls, and her own growing sense of concern and anxiety.
When she had finished, Anne Barham began to cry. Which was always Vogel’s worst nightmare. He didn’t know why he couldn’t cope with other people’s tears, but he never had been able to. He sometimes thought that was the main reason he had always tried to be a good husband. He’d only seen his wife Mary cry a handful of times in their twenty years of marriage. And every time it tore his heart out. So he did his utmost to ensure, as much as was humanly possible, that Mary had no cause to cry.
Saslow, however, was thankfully rather more able to deal with displays of emotion. She got up, walked across the room, crouched down next to Anne, and took one of the woman’s hands in hers.
‘We know that the coastguards are doing all they can, and the RNLI,’ she said. ‘There’s still a good chance they’ll find Mr Barham and bring him safely home.’
Vogel had already begun to think that wasn’t very likely, and was pretty sure Saslow didn’t really believe what she’d said. But, for the moment, he was glad that she had said it. Anne Barham stopped crying, dabbed ineffectually at her eyes with a paper tissue, and smiled weakly at Saslow.
Vogel then felt able to continue.
‘Thank you, Mrs Barham, for giving us such a full account,’ he said. ‘I have just one or two questions, if you could bear with me. Did you really have absolutely no idea who your husband was talking to on the phone during those calls which you found... well, you found them rather mysterious, didn’t you?’
‘I did. Yes. He dodged my questions every time I asked him about the calls. And then there were those little walks. Nothing little about them, either.’
‘Could he have been meeting someone, perhaps?’
‘I don’t know. But why? Why would he be meeting someone, and not tell me? Gerry and I don’t have any secrets from each other, Mr Vogel. I know married people often say that when it’s not true at all, but I know it’s true of us.’ She paused. ‘Or at least, I certainly knew it until yesterday,’ she added.
‘Look, Mrs Barham, I am very sorry to ask you this,’ continued Vogel. ‘But has there ever been a time during your marriage when you suspected Gerry may have been unfaithful to you, that there might be someone else in his life?’
‘No. Never. Not for a moment. He’s never been that kind of man, really he hasn’t.’
Vogel did not quite subscribe to the theory that every red-blooded male was ‘that kind of man’ — after all, he was not — but more than twenty years of policing had certainly taught him that most were. However, Anne Barham had answered his highly provocative question with quiet certainty, and totally calmly — indeed much more calmly than Vogel might have expected. This line of questioning not infrequently provoked an emotional outburst from interviewees.