Almost immediately Leonardo, dressed only in a pair of red and white candy-striped briefs, drew the curtains. Natalie remained. She was resolved to stay the entire night in that chair if necessary, eating the sandwiches she’d brought and sipping from the half-bottle of Valpolicella.
But at eleven-thirty Orla wanted to go to bed. “There’s no point in you staying,” she said. “He always stops the night.”
If the police had never reappeared in Holmdale Road, Michelle might have extended her forgiveness of Fiona to forgetfulness. She might have taken the advice Matthew gave her and excused her neighbor on the grounds of her grief, her shock, and the almost unbearable pressure she had been under. After all, she and Matthew had shown their support by accompanying Fiona to the funeral of a man they had both disliked and distrusted. But the police came back on Friday morning to say they’d been unable to find any confirmation of the Jarveys’ presence on the Heath on that crucial afternoon. On the other hand, a car of the same make and color as theirs had been seen parked on a meter in Seymour Place, W1, at the relevant time, and Seymour Place, as they must know, was only a short distance from the Odeon, Marble Arch.
Matthew said, in a cool, almost detached voice, “That was not our car.”
“The witness wasn’t able to take the number.”
“If he or she had, it would not have been the number of our car.”
Michelle, glancing at her husband and then down at her own plump hands that lay in her bulky lap, marveled that anyone looking at the two of them could even momentarily suspect them of committing a crime. A fat (if no longer obese) woman of forty-five who couldn’t climb half a dozen steps without gasping and-as much as she loved him, she had to put it like this-a poor skeleton crippled by his own grotesque phobia. That was the last realistic and level-headed thought she was to have for days.
She drew in her breath when the woman asked her, “Can you give us something firmer to establish that you were in your car on the Heath at that time?”
“What kind of thing?” She heard her own voice grown thin and hoarse.
“Or even in Waitrose? The staff don’t remember you there. Well, they remember you”-Michelle thought she detected the suspicion of a grin-“but not which day. Apparently, you often go there.”
The implication was plain, that she and Matthew had purposely planned frequent visits to the supermarket in order to confuse witnesses about the only day they weren’t there.
“And about the Heath, Mrs. Jarvey?”
“I told you, there were other cars there with people in them, but I didn’t know any of them and they didn’t know us.”
After the officers had gone, she clutched hold of Matthew and looked piteously into his face. “I’m so frightened, I don’t know what to do. I thought-I thought, Fiona’s got us into this, she ought to get us out.”
“What does that mean, my darling?”
“I thought, we could ask her to say she saw us on the Heath, she drove up there as soon as she got home-I mean, she could say she got home an hour sooner than she did-and saw us and spoke to us. Or-and this would be better-she could get a friend of hers to say she saw us, someone from down the street, she knows the woman at a hundred and two, I’ve seen them together, and she could-”
“No, Michelle.” Matthew was gentle as always but tough too, as he used to be long ago. “You’d be inciting her to perjury. It would be wrong. And apart from the morality of it, you’d be found out.”
“If she can’t do a little thing like that for us I’ll feel like never speaking to her again.”
“You don’t know. Maybe she would do it. You haven’t tried her-and, Michelle, you’re not going to.”
“Then what will become of us?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Innocent people don’t find themselves in court on a murder charge,” though he was by no means sure of that. “You’re being silly. This is simply hysteria.”
“It is not!” She began sobbing and laughing at the same time. “It’s not, it’s not!”
“Michelle, stop it. I’ve had enough.”
She looked up at him, the tears streaming down her face. “And now she’s made us quarrel. We never quarrel.”
Fiona had returned to work on the previous Monday. People said how sorry they were about Jeff, but those who couldn’t remember his name referred to him as “your friend,” and Fiona thought this reduced him to the status of someone she’d happened to know at college. But she faced more curious glances and inexplicable silences than she would have done if Jeff had died of cancer or a heart attack. Murder marks its victim’s loved ones forever. Fiona knew her name would never again be mentioned among acquaintances without some qualifying phrase defining her as the woman “who lived with that chap who was murdered in a cinema.” Added to this was her bitter regret that she’d mentioned the Jarveys’ names to Violent Crimes. She no longer knew why she had and was driven to the conclusion that, as is often the case in these circumstances, she had come out with it because she had nothing to say, knew nothing, and could think of no real help to offer.
Michelle’s declaration of forgiveness hadn’t been accompanied by much warmth. This quiet, sad woman wasn’t the affectionate and demonstrative maternal creature she’d known, but subdued, retired into herself. Fiona had been into the Jarveys’ house three times since Sunday’s contretemps, so often, she now believed, in the ever-renewed hope that this time Michelle would have changed back into her familiar self, but though perfectly courteous and hospitable, she never had. This Friday afternoon Fiona was there again, using the back door to demonstrate an intimacy she desperately wanted to re-establish. And for a moment it looked as though she was approaching it, for Michelle came out to meet her and kissed her cheek.
Matthew’s manner seemed heartier than usual. It was Michelle, not he, who generally offered her a glass of wine. He fetched a bottle he’d had on ice, filled a glass for her and one for his wife. To her dismay she saw that Michelle’s eyes had filled with tears. “What is it? Oh, what is it? If you cry you’ll have me crying too.”
Michelle made the effort. “The police were here this morning. They don’t believe we were where we said we were that-that day. Someone saw a car like ours parked near the cinema. They want us to prove we were up on the Heath and we-we can’t, we can’t. We’ll never be able to.”
“Yes, you will. I’ll help you. It’s the least I can do. I can’t say I saw you there because the people in my office have already told them I was there till five. But I can find someone who’ll say it. I know someone-I mean, I know her well-who lives in the Vale of Health, and she’ll say you were there, I know she will. She’s just the sort of person who’d go to the police and tell them she’d come to offer evidence to support your story. Let me do it, please. I know it’ll work.”
Michelle was shaking her head, but Matthew had begun to laugh as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
Because he was holding his appointments in Toneborough on Saturday morning instead of Friday, Jims had postponed his constituency by twenty-four hours. In spite of an announcement of his marriage appearing in Thursday’s newspapers and the evident loss of police interest in him as a murder suspect, a good many of his fellow Conservatives in the Commons still cold-shouldered him. But the chief whip had said nothing more. That morning, the leader had nodded to him and even managed a slight smile. Jims was beginning to be confident that the people who mattered believed he’d been ignorant of his wife’s marital status when first he married her.