Chapter Twenty-nine
I saw a nature documentary once that showed a baby seal lying in a little hole in the Arctic ice sheet. Above, in the outside world, it was about fifty below but in the hole it was warm, at least by baby-seal standards. It must have felt safe as well. But it wasn’t. Miles away, a mother bear, desperate to feed its cub, had caught the scent of the subterranean baby seal and smashed her way through the snow and ice to get at it.
That was more or less how I felt when DCI Stuart Ramsay came to see me in my work shed. It felt wrong. The whole point of me being there was to pretend that people like him didn’t exist.
‘I was working,’ I said.
‘That’s fine,’ he replied. ‘Don’t mind me.’
‘All right.’ I continued with my sanding while he wandered around the room, picking up tools, occasionally glancing at me with a look of puzzlement, as if I was doing something unimaginably exotic.
‘What are you working on?’
‘It’s a storage chest Greg and I found in a skip months ago. I said I’d repair it and they could have it in the office. It’s really quite nice – look at the carvings on the top. I thought, after Greg died, I wouldn’t bother with it, but now I’ve decided I’m going to do it for them anyway. Joe will like it.’
Ramsay picked up a plastic squeezy bottle and sniffed at the nozzle. He pulled a face. ‘What’s this?’ he said.
‘It’s a laminate,’ I said. ‘It’s the sort of thing teenagers sniff and then go to hospital.’
He put the bottle down. ‘My gran used to hate old furniture,’ he said. ‘She said she hated the idea of sitting in a chair that a dead person had sat in.’
‘It’s a point of view,’ I said.
‘When people got married, they were supposed to buy themselves nice new furniture. That was the tradition then.’ He knelt over one of the chairs I had dismantled. ‘This is the sort of thing that would have been put on a bonfire in the old days.’
‘I guess you haven’t come to hire me,’ I said, ‘so why are you here?’
‘I’m on your side, Ms Falkner,’ he said. ‘You may not think so, but I am.’
‘I wasn’t thinking about it.’
‘It’s just that you make it difficult for someone to be on your side.’
‘You’re a policeman,’ I said. ‘You’re not meant to be on anybody’s side. You’re meant to investigate and find out the truth.’
He looked dubiously at my workbench, then leaned back on it, half sitting. ‘I’m not really here,’ he said. He consulted his watch. ‘I finished work half an hour ago. I’m on my way home.’
‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ I said. ‘Or a drink?’
‘My wife’s waiting at home for me,’ he said, ‘with a drink. Cold white wine, probably.’
‘Sounds nice,’ I said. ‘But if you’re not on duty…’
‘I just wanted to tip you off that things might get a bit messy.’
‘Why do you want to tip me off?’ I said. ‘And why should they get messy?’
‘Obviously it’s all rubbish. You – Well, it sounds stupid even to say the words, but I’m going to anyway. You obviously couldn’t have been involved with the death of your husband, could you?’
I’d been carrying on intermittently with my piece of sandpaper, but now I stopped and stood up. ‘Are you waiting for me to say no?’ I said.
‘You’ve been going around making yourself look suspicious but it still doesn’t work.’
‘It doesn’t work because it isn’t true,’ I said.
‘We don’t work on truth. We work on evidence. Even so. The death of your husband was recorded as an accident. You were the one who was going around screaming that it wasn’t. I’ve tried to think about it as a double bluff, or a triple bluff, but I can’t make it work. And then not only did you claim you didn’t know about your husband’s infidelity, you actually made a bloody… Well, you kept claiming it was all a mistake, that they weren’t even having an affair. Even when you found evidence that they were.’
‘But the evidence doesn’t work.’
‘Evidence is always messy.’
‘Not messy,’ I said. ‘Impossible.’
He was rocking himself back and forth on the bench. ‘You really didn’t know about the affair?’ he said. ‘I mean before your husband’s death.’
‘I don’t believe he was having an affair.’
‘Did you have an argument on the day of your husband’s death?’
‘No.’
Ramsay stood up and walked across the room to look out of the window. ‘Do you need planning permission for a shed like this?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Interesting,’ he said.
‘Is that relevant?’
‘I’ve been thinking of buying one,’ he said. ‘Somewhere to go that’s out of the house. To get back to what I was saying, you’ll notice I’m asking you these questions informally, not taking an official statement. If I had been, it might have seemed I was trying to catch you out.’
‘How?’
‘We’ve been talking to various people.’ He took a notebook from his pocket and flicked through several pages. ‘Including people in your husband’s office. Mr Kelly, for instance, who was in the office that day doing a software update. He said that early on the afternoon of the day your husband died, he heard one end of an argument on the phone between your husband and someone Mr Kelly assumed was you. Perhaps it wasn’t you.’
‘Fergus said that?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s right. It was me.’
‘You said you hadn’t had an argument.’
‘It wasn’t an important argument.’
‘What was it about?’
‘Something completely trivial.’ Ramsay didn’t reply. He was clearly wanting to hear more. ‘It was about him coming home late.’
‘You had an argument about that?’
‘All our arguments were about trivial things. Oh, for God’s sake, I’ve still got the text he sent me afterwards.’ I picked up my mobile phone and scrolled down to one of the messages I hadn’t been able to delete. I handed the phone to Ramsay. He extracted some reading glasses laboriously from his top pocket and put them on.
“‘Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry. Im a stupid fool.” That’s a lot of sorries. Do you mind if I take this?’
‘It’s my phone. I need it.’
‘It’ll be returned to you. Pay-as-you-go phones are available in the meantime.’
‘What do you want it for?’
Ramsay put the phone in his pocket. ‘A cynical person would say that your husband doesn’t say what he’s sorry about. He could be sorry that he’s been unfaithful.’
‘He wasn’t unfaithful.’
‘I’m sure you’re right.’
‘Your wine will be getting warm.’
‘I’m not cynical,’ he said. ‘I’m on your side. I know you’ve worked hard to incriminate yourself, but you haven’t done a good enough job. That crash, with your husband and Milena Livingstone. You couldn’t have done that on your own.’
‘Why do you say on my own?’
‘No reason. Besides, who would you do it with? I’ve talked to her husband as well. Her widower. We don’t really say “widower”, do we? I’ve always wondered why. He didn’t seem like someone to arrange a murder. He seemed more like the tolerant type. If you see what I mean.’
‘If you mean do I agree that he didn’t kill his wife, I do.’
‘And your husband.’
‘Well, of course.’
‘And then there’s Frances Shaw.’
‘I didn’t kill Frances!’
‘I’m just playing devil’s advocate here, trying to construct the sort of theory that a hostile person might. It might be seen as an unfortunate coincidence that you worked for the company run by your husband’s lover.’