“She isn’t married. She produced Cherisse when she was at school. That’s how she got that council place in Dersthorpe.”
“Was this a regular thing?” enquired Whitten. “This… ‘seeing’?”
“Not as regular as Ray Gunter would have liked,” said Anne. “Cherisse has quite a few admirers, and what one used to call a roving eye.”
“So where might I find this young lady?”
“She’s behind the bar at the Trafalgar most days.”
Liz glanced surreptitiously at Goss, but the Special Branch man was impassive. Peregrine Lakeby, however, leaned forward in surprise. “The fat girl?” he asked.
Anne raised her eyebrows. “Peregrine! That’s not very gallant.”
“How long had she and Gunter been an item?” Whitten cut across her.
“Well,” Anne replied, “it wasn’t the untroubled romance he’d have liked it to be. According to Elsie, Cherisse had her sights fixed on bigger game.”
“Namely?” enquired Goss.
“The publican. Mr. Badger.”
Peregrine stared. “Clive Badger? He’s treasurer of the golf club. He’s got children at university and a heart condition.”
“That’s as may be, but according to Elsie there have been tender glances exchanged behind the pumps.”
“You didn’t tell me any of this,” said Lakeby.
“You didn’t ask,” smiled Anne. “It’s Gomorrah-on-Sea up here if you keep your ear to the ground. Much better than television.”
Peregrine drained his coffee with an air of finality. “Well, all I can say is: I hope Badger’s got life insurance.” Replacing his cup and saucer on the tray he stretched and looked meaningfully at his watch. “Was there anything else? Because if not I might just… press on with various things.”
“Nothing,” said Whitten, remaining resolutely seated. “Thank you very much for your time.” He turned to Anne. “I wonder if, before we go, I might perhaps just ask Mrs. Lakeby a few more questions?”
Anne Lakeby showed her teeth again. “Certainly. Go on, Perry, off you push.”
Lakeby hesitated, rose to his feet, and, with the tight-lipped air of one unreasonably evicted, left the room. As his footsteps rang out on the tiled floor of the hall, Anne Lakeby drew a long white goose feather from her quilted waistcoat and turned it in her fingers.
“To be perfectly frank with you,” she said, “I couldn’t stand Ray Gunter, and I couldn’t stand having him around. He’d rear up out of the mist like a ghost, smelling of old fish, and then disappear again, without a word. Just last week I told Perry that I wanted him off the estate for good, but…”
“But?”
“But Perry’s got some incomprehensible attachment to him. Partly loyalty to old Ben Gunter, I suppose, even though he died years ago, and partly… Put it this way: if there was a court case, and we lost…”
“Things would have been much worse?”
“Quite. In every sense of the word. But that said, and whatever the legal ramifications, Ray Gunter was certainly up to something.”
“Up to what, do you think?” asked Whitten.
“I don’t know. I’d hear things in the night. Trucks, moving about on the side road. People talking.”
“Surely that’s what you’d expect to hear, given that he had a sack of fish to get into town.”
“At three a.m.? Look, maybe I’m just being a batty old fool, and I certainly wouldn’t have said anything if Ray was still around, but…” She shook her head and fell silent.
“Did your husband ever hear these noises?”
“Not once.” She shrugged cheerfully. “Which of course makes me sound even more bonkers, senile, and generally ready for the scrap heap.”
“I doubt that very much,” said Whitten drily. “Tell me, could we possibly have a look at the garden and the place Gunter kept his boats?”
“Certainly you may. It’s a bit blowy today, but if you don’t mind that…”
The four of them proceeded through the house to the garden entrance. This was a stone-floored area housing a rack of Wellington boots and hung with gardening and shooting clothes. The garden itself, Liz saw, was much more attractive than the house’s austere Victorian front suggested. A long rectangular lawn flanked by flower beds and trees unrolled towards a stand of tall grasses, and presumably some sort of descent to the sea. Through the trees to either side she could see the mudflats, now half submerged by the incoming tide.
“As you probably know, the thing about the Hall is that it’s got the only halfway decent landing place for a couple of miles in either direction,” Anne Lakeby explained. “Which is why, obviously, there have always been boats there. The sailing club’s got a tidal inlet, but it’s not much good for anything bigger or heavier than a Firefly.”
“Is that a boat?” asked Whitten.
“Yes, one of those little yachty things that people learn to sail on. Come and have a look at the beach.”
A couple of minutes later they were standing amongst the tall sedges and grasses, looking down at the shingle and the sea.
“It’s really very private, isn’t it?” said Liz.
“The trees and the walls are there as a windbreak as much as anything else,” said Anne. “But yes, you’re right. It is very private.”
“Has anyone been on the beach today?”
“Only me. This morning.”
“Did you notice anything out of the ordinary?”
Anne frowned. “Not that I can remember,” she said.
“Which way did Gunter come and go?”
Anne pointed to a low door set into the garden’s right-hand wall. “Through there. It leads out to the lane which runs up the side of the house. He had a key.”
Whitten nodded. “I might get a couple of our blokes to give the place a quick look, if that’s all right.”
Anne nodded. “Mr. Whitten, do you think Ray Gunter was involved in anything illegal? I mean, drugs or anything?”
“It’s too early to say,” said Whitten. “It’s not impossible.”
Anne looked thoughtful. Worried, even.
It was her husband that she was worried about, thought Liz, not the late Ray Gunter. And she had every reason to worry, because Peregrine was undoubtedly lying.
Had Goss and Whitten realised that? Had they put the pieces together in the right order? If they hadn’t, she wasn’t in a position to help them.
19
As they left the Headland Hall driveway Liz glanced at her watch. It was 3 p.m. “I’ve got to get back to London,” she told Whitten. “But before I go, could I see where Ray Gunter lived?”
“Sure. I’ll get one of my people to walk you over there.” He turned up his collar against the returning rain. “What did you think of the Lakebys?”
“I think I preferred her to him,” said Liz. “You were right.”
He nodded. “Never underestimate the upper classes. They can be much nicer-and much nastier-than you’d think possible.”
“I’m sure,” she smiled.
Ray Gunter, it turned out, had lived in a flint-walled cottage behind the garage. The front door had been taped off by the police, and the WPC from the village hall let Liz in with a key.
The outside of the cottage was attractive, but the interior was decidedly unprepossessing. The walls were grease-flecked, and the ceilings yellowed with cigarette smoke. In the kitchen the gas stove had not been cleaned for months, and a stack of washing-up languished in the stoneware sink. Liz’s gaze moved from the discarded boots and waterproofs which lay heaped in one corner of the kitchen table, where a sliced white supermarket loaf spilled across a copy of the local paper. Beside it lay a tub of margarine, an open jar of marmalade, and an ashtray made from an unwashed Chinese takeaway carton.
She opened the large free-standing freezer. There was nothing inside except frozen fish, sealed inside plastic bags and painstakingly hand-labelled. Pollack, huss, rock salmon, codling, whiting… In this, if in no other department of his life, Ray Gunter had been assiduous.