“The difficulty is that no one confirms your presence at Fredington Crucis House during Friday afternoon and evening, Mr. Melcombe-Smith. Two callers at the house noticed that your car was absent.”
“Who?”
“You know I’m not at liberty to tell you that. You still maintain you spent Friday evening there? And stayed over Friday night?”
“My client,” said Damien, “has already told you so. Several times.”
Jims was starting to get cross. “Why would I have killed the guy, anyway? For what possible reason would I have stuck a knife in him?”
“Well, Mr. Melcombe-Smith,” said Miss, or Detective Inspector, Demeanor, “he was married to the lady with whom you’d been through a form of marriage.” She smiled very faintly as Jims winced. “It would have been very much in your interest to have him out of the way, especially if he’d threatened to reveal the truth to, say, a newspaper.”
“So what? Everybody else reveals it. Anyway, he wasn’t blackmailing me. I thought Zillah and he had never been married. I hadn’t seen him for years.” Like many in his position, Jims was anxious to be scrupulous about telling the truth in every area of questioning except one. “Well, two years.”
The words “so you say” were plainly written on the woman’s face. “You came back to London on Friday afternoon, didn’t you, Mr. Melcombe-Smith?”
Jims was silent. He was hesitating. He could feel doubt, a loss of confidence in his friend and client, by some strange means emanating from Damien. Violent Crimes was looking at him. Behind them, on the ocher-colored wall, a crack in the plaster ran from ceiling to skirting board. It was shaped, Jims thought, like the silhouette of a man with an erection. He looked away.
Damien, who was a good guy, a real friend in need despite his wavering trust, said softly, “If you don’t mean to charge Mr. Melcombe-Smith, and I don’t think you do, you’re obliged to let him go home now.”
Violent Crimes knew a trick worth two of that. “You drove back to London to fetch something. Something you’d forgotten. I’ve been wondering if it was the notes for your speech to the Countryside Alliance. It’s a coincidence, but the chief constable of Wessex happened to be there.”
Jims tried to remember if he’d referred to the missing notes and his return to retrieve them when he was making that speech. He couldn’t remember. And it wouldn’t matter whether he’d referred to them or not. It was enough that this policeman had the sense, the skill, if you like, to suggest that he had. It didn’t even matter whether it was true about the chief constable. He looked at Damien in despair and Damien said nothing.
“Mr. Melcombe-Smith?”
They contrived by the tone of their voices to make his name ridiculous. Jims thought of appealing to them to keep what he might confess to them a secret. Would they agree? Or should he trust to luck? He considered the procedures he read about in the newspapers that preceded murder trials, or any court cases come to that. The police never told the media how they arrived at arresting someone or charging someone or how they agreed to or exploded alibis. There must be something in law which forbade their doing so. Not for the first time he wished he’d read law instead of history and practiced for a while at the criminal bar.
“Mr. Melcombe-Smith?”
“All right, I did come back to London.” He dared not look at Damien. “I had, as you say, forgotten my notes. I started the drive back soon after one and had something to eat at a-well, a sort of cafe on the A30.” A sound, something between a sniff and a grunt, came from Damien. Or maybe not, perhaps he’d imagined it. “I’m not sure where. They might remember me. The traffic was bad. I didn’t get home till seven.”
It was interesting, almost disconcerting, the way they accepted that up till now he’d lied. They didn’t comment. Neither said, “So you’ve been lying to us” or “Why didn’t you tell the truth before?” It was as if they were entirely used to a kind of endemic mendacity, it was what they expected. Jims began to feel sick.
“So you went home, Mr. Melcombe-Smith?”
Nothing but the truth would do now. “I’d left the notes at a friend’s house.”
“Ah,” said Inspector Demeanor. “And where might that be?”
He gave her Leonardo’s address. Beside him Damien seemed to swell and palpitate, though when he turned to look at him the solicitor was sitting there, immobile and calm. Jims wanted to fall on his knees before them and beg them to say nothing, to tell no one, to accept his word, just as Zillah had wanted to kneel to him. He stayed where he was, his face expressionless.
“And Mr. Norton will confirm what you say?”
The truth once told starts a train of truth. “I didn’t see him until eight-thirty. As I was going out to eat I met him coming in.”
“So you left Casterbridge at-what? Half past one?”
“About that,” said Jims.
“And you reached Glebe Terrace at seven? Five and a half hours to drive a hundred and fifty miles, James?”
Something he’d said, or simply because he’d admitted to lying, had reduced him in their eyes. He’d taken away his own dignity and thereby lost the privilege of being treated courteously. “I know it took a long time,” he said. “I’ve never taken so long before. There were miles of roadworks. That bit took me nearly an hour to get through. Then there was a pile-up near Heathrow.”
They would check, of course, and find it was true. It hardly helped him. “The Merry Cookhouse”-it pained him to utter the words-“where I had lunch was just before the roadworks, if that’s any use.”
“It may be. The relevant time is between 3:30 and 4:30 P.M. Did anyone see you enter the house in Glebe Terrace?”
How could he have forgotten, even for a moment? Relief flooded him. It was like drinking something warm and sweet when in a state of shock. “The woman next door-it’s 56a, I think-she gave me her key.”
“And now,” said Damien, “perhaps you’ll let Mr. Melcombe-Smith go.”
When the phone rang or when someone came to the front door, every time these things happened, Michelle thought it was the police. The joke aspect of being treated with suspicion had gone. She’d got it into her head it would be impossible to find witnesses to her and Matthew’s whereabouts that Friday afternoon and, though she wasn’t usually a nervous woman, she saw them both high on the list of suspects. Miscarriages of justice did happen, people were mistakenly tried and falsely imprisoned. She’d only once encountered the police before and that was when the Jarveys’ car was broken into and the radio stolen.
Matthew did his best to reassure her: “Darling, I think you must believe that when they say an inquiry is routine it is routine.”
“I hated being questioned like that. It was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
That made him laugh, but not unkindly. “No, it wasn’t. The worst thing that’s ever happened to you was when you thought I was going to die through my stupid food fads.”
“Not stupid,” Michelle said hotly. “You don’t mean that. You mean your illness.”
“Well, it’s not really fear of being arrested that’s upsetting you, is it? It’s not being suspected of a crime or interrogated, it’s indignation at Fiona’s behavior.”
“More than that, Matthew.” She went close behind the chair where he sat reading the Spectator, and put her arms round his neck. He looked up into her face. “It’s real pain over what she did. I’ll never be able to think of her, let alone speak to her, without remembering what she did.”
He said very seriously, “You’ll have to get over that.”
“Yes, but how? I wish I weren’t the sort of person who remembers forever hurtful things people have said or done. But I am. I do. I don’t like it, I know I ought to forgive and forget. If only I could. I remember unkind things people said to me when I was at school. I mean, thirty years ago, darling. The words they used are as fresh in my mind as when they first said them.”