An elderly, uniformed maid had let Swilley in, and she was shown into a drawing-room which was like the office all over again, only more so – high ceilings, antiques, oil paintings, bronzes; that expensive silence only the houses of the very wealthy seem to have, the stillness of air that no unruly passions would ever stir; the absence of smell, except for a breath of clean carpets and the faintest ghost of potpourri.
When Scott-Chatton entered she was preceded by two elegant whippets, one black with a white mark on its breast, the other brindle-grey. They looked at Swilley from a distance, twitching their tucked-down tails ingratiatingly but not venturing close. Swilley noted that they were both wearing diamond collars. It struck her as not what she would have expected from Scott-Chatton – too vulgarly ostentatious. It also looked, to her admittedly inexpert eye, as if they were real diamonds.
‘Eos and Aurora,’ Scott-Chatton said, as if Swilley had asked. ‘Do you like dogs?’
‘I can take ’em or leave ’em,’ Swilley said.
Scott-Chatton did not ask her to sit, nor sat herself, but remained standing where she had halted, a little way into the room, looking at Swilley with eyes that were no longer chips of ice, rubbing her fingers very slowly as if they were cold, or aching. Swilley had seen old people do that, and it was not a gesture she would have associated with this woman. ‘I have a few questions I want to put to you, if that’s all right.’
Scott-Chatton searched her face. ‘It wasn’t robbery, was it?’
‘We don’t know yet, but it may have had something to do with Mr Stonax’s life, so we need to find out as much about him as possible. I’m afraid we’re a bit confused about what your relationship was with him. His daughter seems to think you and he were still going out together, which is what you suggested to me, but someone else says you dropped him when he got the sack from the DTI.’
‘I can guess who that was,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t take everything Shawna says literally. She has a grudge against me.’
‘Oh?’ said Swilley receptively.
‘She came in to work one day quite unsuitably dressed and I asked her to go home and change. Naturally she took that as a mortal insult, and she’s been waging a war of attrition on me ever since.’
‘Why don’t you sack her, then?’
Scott-Chatton only raised her eyebrows. ‘You can’t dismiss a person these days except for stealing. Surely you know that?’
‘She says Mr Stonax tried to persuade you to keep seeing him and you refused. She overheard him saying he wanted to talk to you and you saying it wouldn’t make any difference.’ A blush of anger coloured Scott-Chatton’s face and Swilley reckoned she might yet find a way of sacking young Shawna, employment laws or no employment laws. ‘Also the gossip papers say you’re going out with Mr Freddie Bell of the Three Bells gaming company.’
Now Scott-Chatton sat. She did it gracefully, but there was a look of involuntariness about it. The dogs came close to her, shivering in that disconcerting way whippets have.
‘I’ll tell you everything,’ she said, ‘because I can see otherwise you will take away all the wrong impressions. But I don’t think it will help you, because I don’t understand any of it myself.’
Swilley seated herself, uninvited, in the chair opposite, and got out her notebook. ‘Go on.’
‘I want you to know that I loved Ed,’ she began, looking at her hands. ‘He was a wonderful man – a truly good man. He was tireless in his pursuit of truth. He was honourable in his profession. And more than that, he was so warm – he lit up a room when he came into it. I was still married when I first met him, though Hugo and I had already separated. When my divorce came through, Ed and I were going to marry, but then his ex-wife died, and he said for decency’s sake we ought to wait a few months. I honoured him for that. How many men would have so much delicacy?’ She looked up as she said this, as if she wanted an answer.
Swilley was interested in the choice of the word delicacy, and wondered what, really, it meant. She declined to answer, saying merely, ‘Go on.’
Scott-Chatton made a little, unhappy movement of her shoulders. ‘I wish to God, now, he had not been so sensitive. At least we would have been married. We would have had that. As it was, that awful trouble came along.’
‘The three-in-a-bed high jinks?’
She flinched at the words. ‘Please, don’t say it like that. And don’t think for a moment there was anything in it. I know he was innocent.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because he told me.’ She met Swilley’s eyes. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. He would never lie to me. And he wasn’t the sort of man who would ever do something like that, anyway. The whole thing was a fraud, to blackmail him into leaving the department.’
‘If you knew he was innocent, why did you dump him?’
‘I didn’t,’ she cried, with sufficient anguish to make the little dogs stare up at her in what looked like shock. Voices were never raised in these hallowed spaces. ‘I would have stood by him publicly, but Ed persuaded me to seem to part company with him, for the sake of our various causes. I was very much against it, but he said I had to think of the greater good. The scandal was quite dreadful at the time, and he said it would rub off on to me, and on to the Trust and the other various charities that we had both worked so hard for. Donors would have pulled out. The press would have revived it every time the Trust was mentioned. He said I would be throwing away all we had worked for. We argued about it very much – that must be what Shawna overheard, and she got it quite the wrong way around, you see. But I knew there was truth in what he said and I allowed myself to be persuaded. But I wish – you don’t know how I wish – I had resisted him.’
Swilley wasn’t interested in her remorse. ‘If the thing was a fraud, why didn’t he make a fuss? Challenge it? Take it to court?’
‘They had the photographs. Oh, I knew they were faked, he knew they were faked – well, of course he did,’ she corrected herself with a little shake of the head. ‘But there they were, and at the first hint of resistance on his part they went to the papers. You know the rest. They were splashed everywhere, and once the genie is out of the bottle you can’t put it back. It’s no use protesting your innocence, because no-one will believe you. As it was, if he had gone quietly when they showed the photographs to him privately, it would have saved two other people from disgrace – Sid Andrew and that poor girl. I’ve forgotten her name, now. Isn’t that dreadful? But they were both ruined. And if he’d challenged them publicly, who knows what would have happened next?’ She looked up and met Swilley’s sceptical gaze, and said with a touch of heat, ‘Ed said they would target me next, or his daughter. Probably both of us. He said it was better for him to say nothing and go. Photographs are easy to fake – my God, they proved that all right! – and other documents too. Imagine what they could have done to his daughter’s life. I’d have been willing to risk it, for myself, but Ed wanted me to distance myself from him as soon as possible, and so – and so that’s what I did.’
‘So why did they want him out? And why not just sack him?’ Swilley asked.
‘He wouldn’t tell me anything about it. He said it was better if I didn’t know. But from what I can gather he had found something out that they didn’t want known. They couldn’t just dismiss him – they had to do it in a way that would discredit him, so that he couldn’t go public with what he knew. But as to what it was – I truly don’t know.’ She looked at Swilley unhappily. ‘You don’t believe me. You think I’m exaggerating the whole affair.’