While Clarke apologized for disturbing her, Joyce stared unseeingly into the middle distance. She looked deranged, thought Vogel, but then who wouldn’t, given what she’d been through that day? He glanced at Clarke, who gave a brief nod to indicate that she wanted him to lead the questioning.
‘We need you to tell us exactly what happened when you were proceeding along the Hotwell Road alongside the Floating Harbour, Mrs Mildmay,’ he began without further preamble. ‘You told me earlier that your husband, Charlie, was driving. Is that correct? Can you tell us how your vehicle came to leave the road and be submerged?’
Joyce focused her newly mad eyes on Vogel.
‘I told you that too, didn’t I? I told someone, back on the quay, he wanted to kill us all,’ she said. ‘He tried to kill us all. My children are dead. And Charlie did it deliberately. Oh my God, yes. He slammed his foot on the accelerator and drove at the railings as fast as he could.’
Joyce, it seemed, needed no official confirmation of the death of her children. She had been in the car with them when it went under. She had probably watched them drown.
‘Can you tell me how you all came to be with your husband in the Range Rover?’ the DI asked. ‘I know this must be unbelievably hard for you, but can you please tell me, starting at the beginning, everything that happened from the moment you and Molly left the house to come here and visit your father?’
Joyce looked blank.
‘Mrs Mildmay, if you want justice for your children, please help us now,’ interjected DCI Clarke.
‘Justice? What good is justice?’ Joyce snapped.
She closed those mad eyes. For a moment Vogel feared she was going to clam up and they would learn nothing. Then she opened her eyes again and proceeded to speak in a voice that was quite calm, albeit distant. She seemed to be at least trying to tell them everything she could, continuing at length in the same dispassionate manner, and in surprising detail. It was as if, Vogel thought, she was telling a story about somebody else, or even reciting a piece of fiction.
She told the two detectives about the texts to Molly, the drive to Exmoor, the barn in the wood, about her shock at finding out that Charlie was alive, about Monika and the affair with Charlie, and, perhaps most significantly of all, about Charlie’s explanation for having staged his own disappearance.
‘He said that he and my father worked for the government, brokering arms deals. He said he’d been seduced into joining the business by my father...’
She broke off then, lost in her own thoughts. Awful, soul-destroying thoughts.
‘My father has always been persuasive,’ she continued sourly, her voice rising in anger. ‘He’s always been able to get people to do exactly what he wants. To bend their wills to his own. Damn him. Damn him to hell.’
Then, suddenly calm again, she carried on with her dark tale.
‘But it all went stale for Charlie over the years, he said. He came to regret relinquishing his ideals and allowing my father to take over his life. When Dad started trading in chemical weapons, Charlie said he was disgusted. But the final straw for him was when he found out that Dad was siphoning off arms and supplying them to criminals.’
Vogel glanced at Clarke. She raised an eyebrow, in that quizzical way that she had.
Oblivious, Joyce continued: ‘Charlie said my father turned against him as soon as he challenged him over the chemical warfare thing. Charlie threatened to go to the authorities, but Dad talked him out of it. He didn’t dare challenge Dad about supplying weapons to criminals. He said it would have been too dangerous, and anyway he’d given up trying to talk Dad round. He was planning to go to the police without saying anything, or so he said.’
Joyce sounded unconvinced.
‘But Dad found out. Charlie thought he might have been hacking into his computer. He said my father was planning to put a contract out on him. That’s when he decided to stage his own death and run away to start a new life. I thought it was all too far-fetched to be believable. Now I don’t know. I don’t know what to believe about anything any more.’
The two detectives continued to press her further on the matter of illicit arms dealing. Joyce continued to cooperate to the best of her ability. Or certainly she appeared to.
‘Charlie blamed everything on my father,’ she said. ‘He glossed over his sordid little affair with Monika as if that didn’t matter. Not that it did really. Or it doesn’t now. He blamed my father for ruining his life.’
Clarke cut in with a question: ‘Charlie was quite clear that your father was the person who was trading arms with criminal elements, was he, Mrs Mildmay?’
‘Yes. Absolutely clear. Who else? My father is Tanner-Max, whatever anyone else might think. He had access to the sort of people who kill for a living. “On a daily rate.” That’s what Charlie said.’
An idea was forming in Vogel’s head.
‘Mrs Mildmay, did Charlie say how he’d found out that your father was involved in illicit arms deals?’ he asked.
Joyce shook her head.
‘Did you ask him how he found out?’ Vogel persisted.
‘No. I was too busy trying to take in what he was telling me.’
‘So he gave you absolutely no idea about that.’
‘No. I suppose he must’ve found an email or something. That he’d hacked into Dad’s email... Only, no, it was the other way round. He said Dad had hacked into his computer. Or got somebody to do it for him. Neither Dad nor Charlie have ever been very good with computers.’
Vogel asked whether she had considered that Charlie could have shot her father. She nodded, then repeated what Charlie had told her about being miles away on the moors with Fred at the time.
‘In any case, he wouldn’t have known how to handle a gun, even if he’d got hold of one,’ she volunteered. ‘Or at least, I don’t think he would. Right now I’m not sure that I ever really knew Charlie at all. Or my bloody father.’
She looked directly at Vogel.
‘He was out of his mind, completely out of his mind,’ she said. ‘And he’d brought it on himself, like he always brought everything on himself. For years I suspected he was addicted to prescription drugs. Then I found out that, since going missing, all those months he was living with that woman, he’d been smoking skunk. Day in and day out, she said.’
‘Skunk,’ repeated Vogel thoughtfully. ‘So do you think he had become psychotic?’
‘Maybe. What does it matter?’ asked Joyce. ‘He killed my children.’
Vogel returned to his previous line of questioning: ‘Did Charlie express a view about who might have shot your father?’
‘He said he didn’t even know Dad had been shot until I told him. Then he said it must have been the criminals Dad was dealing with. That Dad had been playing with fire. Maybe Dad hadn’t delivered what he said he would, or fallen out with them...’
She stared at Vogel with those disturbing eyes.
‘What does it matter?’ she repeated. ‘My children are dead. Their lives are over. My life is over too.’
Vogel forced himself not to look away. Joyce’s eyes were so unnaturally bright. She really did look mad, he thought. Nobody ever said that any more. He supposed it wasn’t considered politically correct. But it happened, surely. That events in people’s lives were so devastating that they simply lost their minds. Even if in the modern world you called it something else. Vogel had no idea that Joyce had thought the same thing about Charlie. And that she had told Charlie so.
Suddenly Joyce slumped back on the pillow, closed her eyes, and seemed to shut Vogel and Clarke out, not responding to their voices, whatever they said.