Edwina Preston watched Peter for some time before she said calmly, ‘The lawn needs mowing.’
Although he had known she was there for at least a minute, Peter started extravagantly. ‘How many times have I told you not to sneak up on me like that?’
It was the sort of bad acting he deplored in others, she thought contemptuously. ‘How am I supposed to make contact with you? I thought you’d have noticed me by now.’
‘You know very well that when I’m involved with serious matters, my concentration becomes absolute. I can’t help it if I’m a slave to the arts.’
Edwina contemplated this outrageous claim for a moment before deciding against reacting to it. She repeated with deliberate, annoying stolidity, ‘The lawn needs mowing.’ She glanced at the letters and the books so recently assembled upon his desk. ‘The art of horticulture needs your attention. The muse of the garden needs to be propitiated.’
‘Denis will be here tomorrow.’
‘It’s going to rain tonight. He can’t mow it when it’s wet.’
Peter sighed heavily. People rarely understood the demands of culture, and wives were the worst of all. ‘I don’t know why we bother to employ a gardener.’
‘Denis comes for two hours a week. He does most of the heavy work, but he can’t do everything. You said you liked to do the mowing yourself, now that we have the ride-on and there’s no real effort.’
That was another thing about wives. They remembered things you’d said and quoted them back at you. They had a knack of remembering the things that could embarrass you and forgetting the ones that proved far-sighted and justified. Peter gestured with a wide arm over the paper on his desk. ‘Can’t you see I’ve got more important things than your damned garden on my mind at the moment, woman!’
Edwina wrinkled her nose to show him how much she disapproved of that form of address, whilst choosing not to trade insults. ‘You’ll be happy enough to take all the plaudits for the garden when your arty friends are sitting in it with a glass of wine. You’ve said yourself that gardening isn’t a normal hobby; you can’t pick and choose when to take it up and put it down, because nature doesn’t wait for you.’
Again she was flinging back one of his more high-flown thoughts about horticulture to discomfort him — one which, at the time, he didn’t think she’d registered. Peter said impatiently, ‘I’ll try to get round to it later in the day. No promises.’
Edwina didn’t go away as he had expected. She looked at the chaos on his desk, noted that the computer wasn’t even switched on, and said calmly, ‘What exactly are you doing?’
There had been times in the past, better times, when he’d wanted her to ask that, so that he could show off his latest coup in the world of the arts. Now, when he least expected and least wanted it, she was asking for information. ‘A variety of things; I doubt you’d understand them. This damned festival of literature is going to collapse if I don’t rescue it. These local nonentities don’t realize what they’ve taken on.’
He’d been much more enthusiastic about the “damned festival” a few years ago when the first one had been mooted, she thought, when he’d expected to take charge of it and make it his private fiefdom. She had an instant of sympathy for him in his isolation, then thrust it away. Peter wouldn’t take sympathy, if it meant accepting that he was not the towering figure he pretended to be in the aesthetic world.
The phone in the hall rang as she turned away from him. She looked back expectantly at the phone on his desk, but he said, ‘I’ve unplugged it. I don’t wish to be disturbed whilst I’m occupied with important things.’
Edwina had to almost run to the hall phone to prevent the answering machine from cutting in. She gave her number rather breathlessly and a cool, impersonal voice said, ‘To whom am I speaking, please?’
‘My name is Edwina Preston. I should warn you that we don’t buy anything over the phone.’
The woman said with the faintest trace of amusement. ‘This isn’t a sales call, Mrs Preston. It’s Oldford CID here. I’m ringing on behalf of Chief Superintendent Lambert. He needs to have a few words with Mr Peter Preston. Is he at home today?’
‘Yes, he is. Would you like me to bring him to the phone?’ Let’s see if he’s as high-handed with the police as he is with his wife, Edwina thought. She quite looked forward to listening in on this.
‘No there’s no need for that. The chief super wishes to speak to him in person on a private matter. Would one hour from now be convenient?’
‘Yes. One hour from now would be fine.’ That gives him an hour to decide. An hour to decide whether he tries to shrug off the police in the cavalier fashion he adopts for his wife, Edwina thought waspishly.
Sam Hilton was suffering far more than Peter Preston.
He hadn’t really been able to believe what was happening to him on the previous night until he’d found himself sitting between two burly uniformed coppers in the back of a police car. From that moment onwards the exotic beauty of the black officer who had announced his arrest had been denied to him. He’d been kept in the cells, a routine part of the softening-up process. He’d not slept at all until around three and then only fitfully. From six onwards, a drunk and disorderly from the night before had been bellowing from the next cell that he should be released to go fishing with his small son.
You were supposed to be able to see material for poetry in all things, but Sam was finding it impossible in this situation. There was verse of a kind beneath the drawing of an impossibly large male organ on the wall beside his narrow bed and unyielding mattress. But you couldn’t call that doggerel poetry. Someone should tell the man who had struggled with ‘cock’ that not all verse has to rhyme.
He had refused a greasy breakfast and managed only half of the big mug of strong, sweet tea. Sam Hilton didn’t know it, but even his status as a criminal was being diminished in the discussions going on among the professionals two floors above him. He was small fry, they decided, not worthy of the attention of the Drug Squad. Wring him dry of any information he had to offer, then dismiss him with a flea in his ear. As a first offender, he was perhaps not even worth bringing to court. But check all of this out in an interview before he was sent on his way.
Sam knew none of this. His immediate concern as he was taken to the interview room was to conceal how frightened he felt. The two men who came there to interrogate him were equally determined to keep him on edge. You were in no condition to conceal information if you were apprehensive. Detective Inspector Rushton and Detective Sergeant Hook, they announced to the microphone as the cassettes began to turn. Rushton was thirty-four and the younger of the two, but to twenty-two-year-old Sam Hilton they both looked immensely experienced. They conferred with each other, then Rushton turned on the camera attached to the ceiling. ‘New technology, this,’ he explained to the fearful young man on the other side of the square table. ‘Enables us to recall how you looked under questioning, as well as what you said and how you sounded. Quite useful, sometimes.’
He didn’t explain how, but Sam felt even more like a specimen under a microscope. He folded his arms, but he couldn’t keep them still for long, and a moment later he slid them beneath the table and on to his thighs, working them softly against his jeans in an attempt to remove the wetness from his palms. The silence got to him as they watched him and said nothing, as they knew it would. He said, ‘This is all a misunderstanding. I really shouldn’t be here at all.’
Rushton smiled like a cat which has cornered a particularly stupid mouse. ‘Dealing in Class A drugs, Mr Hilton. No misunderstanding there. And the law is very clear, nowadays. A pretty straightforward case, wouldn’t you say, DS Hook?’
‘I would indeed. And the sentences are pretty straightforward, too. About five years for dealing. Probably in a high security prison initially, with some not very nice characters for company.’