He was still wearing the blue overalls he’d had on when they’d arrested him. Apart from what looked like a freshly acquired oil stain they were very clean. He sat in as relaxed a way as it was possible to sit in an upright wooden chair, which he had turned slightly away from the table so that he could stretch out his long legs.
Karen noticed that his blue canvas boat shoes were also pristine. She looked at his hands. They too were clean and well cared for, the nails clipped short, but in a very manicured kind of way. His fingers were long and sinewy. They were strong hands. Hands which may have strangled a woman and two little girls. Or maybe he smothered them. Could he have used a weapon? A blunt instrument to batter them to death with, a knife to plunge into them? Karen shivered. She still feared that the truth would never be known. She tried to feel confident about this impending interview. But she didn’t. Not anymore. Just looking at Marshall had made her doubt her ability to get through to him at all. She tried to put that out of her mind, but it wasn’t easy.
Bill Talbot had always said that Richard Marshall was inhuman, that the man did not feel and think the way most human beings did. Talbot had once told her that he thought Marshall experienced no guilt because his whole morality was different from that of the vast majority of the human race. He had been able to live with his terrible crime because he was so easily able to justify his own behaviour to himself, able to justify everything. Bill Talbot reckoned that Marshall believed he was the centre of the universe and that his own survival was all that really mattered, that he was the most important person in the world, and probably the cleverest. Marshall had a pretty low opinion of the police and their investigatory efforts, that was for certain; Karen could see that clearly enough in every aspect of his demeanour as he sat opposite her in the interview room.
And in view of their complete lack of success so far, twenty-eight years after the event, Karen had to agree that he had a point.
Bill Talbot also reckoned that Richard Marshall was completely unbreakable. Karen hoped that he wasn’t right. She tried to make herself believe, really believe, that she was the one who could make him talk. She was so aware, in spite of the new evidence, how much still rested on this interview.
“We’ll start when I say. And we’ll stop when I say,” she told Marshall sharply. “You are no longer in control of anything, Mr. Marshall, so let’s get that straight from the start, shall we?”
“Maxwell.”
“No. You have been arrested as Richard Marshall. That was your name when you committed the crime we have arrested you for, it is still your legal name and it is the name you will be charged under. I’ve just told you, you no longer call the shots, and you may as well get used to it.”
Marshall shrugged, held out both hands palms upwards.
“What’s in a name, anyway?” he enquired.
There again was that laconic note in his voice that she had first noticed in Poole. His lips curled in a mocking smile. She had an almost overwhelming urge to slap his face and wipe the smirk off it.
“Right,” she said, briskly motioning to PC Brownlow to switch on the double tape recorder — an extremely neat state-of-the-art digital affair now, very different from the big clumsy machines which had been in operation when Marshall had last been arrested.
“Interview with Richard Marshall, present DC Tompkins, PC Brownlow and Detective Superintendent Karen Meadows.” She glanced down at her watch. “Interview begins 5.15 P. M.”
Then she looked up at Marshall, squared her shoulders, and dived straight in, going for the shock approach.
“You should know that the remains of a body almost certainly identifiable as your wife Clara have been found,” she announced.
If Marshall was shocked he gave no sign of it at all. Instead he leaned further back in his chair and the smile widened.
“Really?” he remarked almost lazily. “I saw something in the paper, actually. Pure speculation. You don’t believe what you read in the papers if you’ve got any sense, do you?”
He looked and sounded extraordinarily sure of himself. But then, Karen reminded herself, if Marshall had killed his little family, as she was so sure that he had, then he would know full well where he had dumped their bodies, and he would be as certain as anyone could be that no body was likely to be found after all that time in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.
He was, however, wrong about that, which was Karen’s trump card. Freak circumstances had preserved at least one of those bodies, trapped it and kept it to some extent intact. Freak circumstances had also thrown up from the ocean bed that Rolex watch which could be traced beyond any reasonable doubt to Clara Marshall. Freak circumstances had at last presented the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary with that stroke of luck John Kelly had said was their due at last.
It was going to give her a lot of pleasure to relate all this to Marshall. Sometimes you held back from telling your suspect much about your case against them. Karen believed this was a situation in which it was right to tell him everything. Indeed she felt it was her only hope of breaking him, if there was even the remotest prospect of that, she thought, as she stared into his mocking eyes.
“On this occasion the newspaper reports have been spot-on,” said Karen.
Marshall’s eyes narrowed. You could almost see his thought processes. “You’ve been able to positively identify a body that would therefore have been in the ocean for twenty-eight years,” he responded eventually, his voice casual but his words chosen with infinite care.
“Yes, we have, as a matter of fact,” Karen responded equally casually, making a big effort to remain calm.
Marshall flinched, she was sure he flinched. It was almost imperceptible, though. For a fleeting moment she thought she saw fear in those pale blue eyes, then it was gone. This man gave so little away.
She explained it all then, briefly but succinctly. And when she told him about the watch, the watch that was almost definitely Clara’s and which had been found by her body, she noticed that he turned his face away, perhaps so that she could no longer see his eyes. She paused several times to let him speak if he wished, wondering if he could be tempted into some indiscretion. He wasn’t, of course. He remained, outwardly at least, as cool as ever.
When she had finished he still did not speak until she actually asked him what he had to say. Marshall shrugged his big shoulders then, and turned to her again, the mockery back in his eyes — if, indeed, it had ever left. He really was a smug bastard.
“So?” he enquired. “Even if it’s Clara’s watch it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve found her body. And if it is her body, well, I still have no idea how it got there. I didn’t put it there. I never touched any of my family. I wouldn’t ever have done such a thing. Not ever.”
“Mr. Marshall, you were seen taking your boat out of Torquay Harbour at night, right after Clara and your girls were seen for the last time. We have witnesses to that. Now your wife’s body has been found at sea, and I promise you absolutely that it is her and that our identification of her will almost certainly already stand up in any court in the land, and that we are confidently expecting further confirmation. I therefore put it to you also that any jury would accept the quite reasonable deduction that you killed Clara and the girls and that you dumped all three of their bodies at sea.”
“No. I didn’t.” Marshall didn’t bat an eyelid. His voice remained steady. “You’ll never shake me, you know. I didn’t do it.”