“It’s easily checked.”
“Oh, I shall check it. Never fear. I’ve already put my researcher on to it. I called her on the flight.”
“You are a fast worker, my love.”
“But first I think I’ll be good and contact the bill and tell them Jeff had lunch with me last Friday.”
Natalie wasn’t alone in believing something fishy had been going on. The investigating officers had never been satisfied by Zillah’s explanation of the letter she had written to Jeffrey Leach. The word he had used to her on some unspecified visit he’d paid to Abbey Gardens Mansions when he’d stolen her credit card wasn’t “cow,” whatever she might say. Zillah Melcombe-Smith wouldn’t be fazed by that. And she had been fazed, she’d been very frightened. Such a woman, doubtless, seldom wrote letters to anyone, she wasn’t that sort; but she had written to Leach under great pressure of-what? Guilt? Extreme fear? Terror of some sort of discovery? Perhaps all those.
When they interviewed Natalie they were glad to be further on with piecing together the ways Leach had spent the day prior to his cinema visit. And she was able to contribute to the history of him they were starting to compile, something of his past. That, for instance, he’d been newly married when he’d first lived in Queen’s Park, that besides his wife there had been many women before her, all owning their homes and able to keep him. Natalie told them things they already knew about Fiona Harrington and Zillah Melcombe-Smith and something they didn’t know: that when she split up from Leach rather more than a year before he had moved back to Queen’s Park, this time to Harvist Road, and there doubtless had found himself another woman. They returned to their scrutiny of the letter.
Mrs. Melcombe-Smith had remarried in March. Her divorce had taken place in the previous spring. Or so she said. There were children involved, questions of custody and child support, so the divorce could hardly have been a simple, quick affair. If the word Leach had used to her had aroused so much terror, might it not perhaps have something to do with that divorce, some factor that had come out in the proceedings or resulted from the process? To check would be easy and uncomplicated, starting with January of the previous year and going on from there.
The sergeant’s wife still had a copy of the Daily Telegraph Magazine in which Natalie Reckman’s piece had appeared; she was one of those people who seldom throw anything away. He hadn’t looked at it the first time round but he did now. He read with particular interest the passage where Natalie wrote that Mrs. Melcombe-Smith appeared to have lived the first twenty-seven years of her life in jobless, manless isolation in Long Fredington, Dorset. No mention of a former husband, no talk of children.
Both those Melcombe-Smiths were behaving oddly, to put it mildly. No one could be found who had seen the MP in Fredington Crucis on Friday or Saturday, but two people had told the local constable that his distinctive car, which he always left parked outside the front door of Fredington Crucis House, wasn’t there after 9 A.M. on Friday. The postman who delivered a package at 8:45 A.M. on Saturday took it away again because no one answered the door. Irene Vincey, coming in to clean half an hour later, found the house empty and no sign that Jims’s bed had been slept in.
No porter at Abbey Gardens Mansions had seen him between midday on Thursday and Sunday afternoon. The most damning thing for Jims was when the manager of the Golden Hind in Casterbridge called to say that Mr. Melcombe-Smith had canceled his table reservation for lunch and someone had told him this was information to interest the police. A man called Ivo Carew, the chairman of a cancer charity, reluctantly confirmed this, using a few choice epithets about the Golden Hind manager.
With no idea of what might lie in store for him, Jims made a speech in the Commons about the Conservatives being the party of old-fashioned values but new-fashioned kindness, consideration, and true freedom. Quentin Letts quoted it in the Daily Mail (wittily and with a few snide comments) and rumors began running around the Palace of Westminster that the member for South Wessex was tipped for an under-secretaryship. Shadow, of course, which rather reduced the glory.
Jims thought the police fools, anyway, and probably too much in awe of him, landed gentry as he was, to trouble him again. He was so young, so good-looking, and so rich. That night he dreamed a new version of a dream he’d sometimes had in the past, but this time when he came down the steps of Number Ten Downing Street to the waiting cameramen he had Zillah on his arm, the youngest and most beautiful First Lady in living memory. God was in His heaven, thought Jims, and everything more or less right with the world.
Chapter 19
ZILLAH RATHER SURPRISED herself by discovering how little she cared about Jerry’s death. Could she ever have loved him? It made the years she’d spent more or less with him seem a waste of time. Of course, she’d got the children out of them, there was that. Back into the routine of driving them to and from their schools, she felt a sublime indifference toward everyone but herself and them. With a free morning before her to do as she liked, she put the police out of her mind, she even forgot Jims and the difficulties he seemed deliberately to create for her, and reveled in just being alone for three hours. She celebrated by buying a Caroline Charles dress and a Philip Treacy hat to wear at a royal garden party.
Whenever she bought clothes, Zillah formed a picture in her mind of herself wearing the new garment in some particular, usually glamorous, scenario. Sometimes she would be accompanied by a man-up until she married him it was often Jims-and sometimes, very occasionally, by her children dressed in equally ravishing outfits. It was an innocent form of fantasizing that gave her a lot of pleasure. As she alighted from a taxi in Great College Street, the rosebud-sprigged dress in a bag in one hand, the pink straw hat in a bandbox, she was imagining herself on a sunny lawn with a glass of champagne in her hand. She had just curtsied with exceptional grace to the Queen and was listening to the admiring words of a young and handsome hereditary peer who was obviously deeply attracted to her. The events of the past few days had almost been erased from her mind.
It was twenty past eleven. She just had time to go up to flat seven, hang up the dress, put the hat away, and have a quick cup of coffee before driving off to fetch Jordan. She ran up the steps to the art nouveau double doors, pushed them open, and tripped into the foyer. There, sitting on one of the gilt and red velvet chairs, was the journalist who had been so rude to her and had written that horrible piece for the Telegraph magazine.
Zillah could hardly understand how a woman would choose to wear the same black suit on two consecutive visits to the same person. And not even vary her shoes or her jewelry. That same curiously shaped gold ring was on her right hand. “Were you waiting for me?” She barely paused in her rush to the lift. “I have to go out again immediately to fetch my son from school.”
“That’s quite all right, Mrs. Melcombe-Smith. I’ll wait.”
Zillah went up in the lift. While she was hanging up the dress she thought maybe she ought to have asked the woman-Natalie Reckman was her name, how could she have forgotten even for a moment?-to come upstairs and wait for her. But journalists really weren’t the sort of people to leave alone in one’s home. They might do anything, pry into one’s private drawers, read one’s letters. They were worse than Malina Daz or, come to that, poor Jerry. She no longer fancied coffee. A brandy would have been more beneficial but she wasn’t going to start down that road. Instead of returning to the foyer, she went all the way down in the lift to the basement car park, and fifteen minutes later had picked up Jordan and brought him back.