‘Thank you for declaring me an antique. I wonder which pervert’s pad I might end up in.’
They selected the rest of the exhibits without argument and with ease, including a couple of extra ones so that Harry Barnard could make the final choice. By four o’clock they were ready for a cup of tea and Ros switched the television on.
They were munching biscuits when the national news finished and the local news began. It did so with a picture of The Avenue and a reporter standing, microphone in hand and with a police car behind him, at the entrance to The Willows. ‘In this house last night a man died and foul play is suspected. Police have not yet released the name of the dead man or further details, but the victim is believed to be the well-known radio and television director, Peter Preston.’
Ros Barker had always known it would be so. She looked at Kate Merrick and found her eyes filled with a wild surmise.
Edwina Preston was younger than her husband. Around ten years younger, the experienced eyes of the two senior CID men told them. There was no hint of grey in her light brown hair, but neither of them knew how much of that was due to the hairdresser who had styled it. She looked calm, but so did many people who were riven with grief. Her complexion was good and her only cosmetic seemed to be a rose-pink lipstick. There was no hint of the puffiness that came with weeping around her watchful blue eyes.
The Willows was still a crime scene, and in any case she could not face returning to the big house yet. It was Sue Charles who had convinced her that she needed to inform the police of her whereabouts and her immediate plans; they always spoke to the spouse of the victim as soon as they possibly could, the crime novelist told her confidently. She had rung the station at Oldford from Sue’s house. The calm voice of the policewoman had confirmed that they needed to interview her and had then said that the CID officers would meet her wherever she chose. Eventually, to their surprise and perhaps to her own, she had decided that she would come in to the station at Oldford and do it there.
It was half past four on a bright May afternoon, with a gentle breeze and a few high white clouds moving softly across a blue sky that looked so clear that it might have been rinsed by the early morning rain. Lambert opened the window of his office wide, for the first time in the year, and had tea and biscuits brought in for his visitor. Someone must have divined his wish to treat the new widow sensitively, for on the tray there were china cups and saucers he had not known the station possessed. It was surprising what treasures lurked in the deepest recesses of the police canteen.
He asked Edwina to sit in the single easy chair the room possessed. She glanced at his preparations as she took her seat and said, ‘Thank you. I don’t know what I was expecting. I suppose one of your tight little interview rooms and a grilling.’
A woman already aware of her surroundings and in control of her emotions. That didn’t necessarily mean she wasn’t feeling grief. Death, especially sudden death, hit the bereaved in all sorts of ways. A collapse into helpless weeping might be delayed, or it might not occur at all. The mind and the body found all sorts of ways of coping, and in the end most of them worked. It was part of the CID task to study all reactions with ruthless objectivity.
Lambert took in her inspection of the room and the preparations made for her, then watched her listening with her head a little on one side to the unexpected song of a blackbird from the tree below the open window. He said, ‘I don’t spend much time in here myself. I’m afraid I’m not a modern superintendent, supervising an investigation from my desk. I like to be out and about and meeting people.’
‘I don’t see why you should apologize for that. It sounds good to me.’
He smiled. ‘I should begin by telling you how sorry we are about your loss, and assuring you of our very best efforts to bring to justice the person who killed Mr Preston.’
‘Thank you. Perhaps I should respond with an assurance that I was not that person.’ He must have looked disconcerted at such directness, because she was driven to add, ‘That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? To clear myself of suspicion.’
Lambert smiled. ‘It’s part of the reason. You are also here to give us all the information you can about a man who has died. We know very little as yet about Mr Preston, about the way he thought and the way he lived and the sorts of enemies he might have had. Murder victims cannot speak for themselves, as the victims of other crimes usually can.’
She thought about that for a moment, then said with a rueful smile, ‘It seems strange, Peter not being able to speak for himself. He always had plenty to say.’ She looked up for a reaction, but Lambert was too professional to show how heartily he agreed with that. ‘He had rather a lot of enemies, you know.’
She looked at them again. It was Hook who said, ‘We didn’t know. That’s not going to make our job easier, but it’s an example of the way we need the thoughts of those closest to him to build up the sort of picture my colleague referred to. If it’s not too painful for you at this moment, could you tell us about your own relationship with Mr Preston?’
‘We’d been married for twenty-four years. I suppose I knew Peter better than anyone.’ She spoke as if the thought came as a surprise to her. ‘He was a complex man. I’m sorry — that tells you nothing, does it.’
Hook smiled. ‘It tells us how the person closest to him saw him. It would be useful if you could give us some examples of his complexity.’
‘Yes.’ She paused for so long that it seemed she might say nothing further. But these men were used to silences; they had taught themselves to be unembarrassed by them, to wait as long as it took for people to translate flying thoughts into words. ‘He had a self-image which was very important to him. He’d produced programmes for the BBC and the odd one for ITV in the past. One or two important ones. Documentaries on poets and dramatists, things like that. Sometimes, especially with the later ones, they only used snippets of them amid someone else’s filming or recording. He didn’t like that, but he had to take it. He was quite well paid for his work, in those days.’
‘Which would be when, Mrs Preston?’
‘When?’ She looked for a moment as if Hook had dragged her back from a private reverie. ‘Oh, up to about ten years ago, I suppose. I couldn’t be precise, but it was about then that the work began to dry up.’
‘I see. We have a few press cuttings about him. He usually seems to be described as a freelance producer in the later ones.’
‘That’s what he took to calling himself, in the last few years. It meant that he wasn’t getting the commissions he used to get and didn’t have the influence he used to have. The world of the arts is just as cut-throat as any other world, DS Hook. When the people who make the decisions stop thinking of you for work, the work usually ceases. Peter didn’t admit that that was what was happening to him, even to me. I think that he was aware of it, but his self-image wouldn’t allow him to acknowledge it.’
They had a glimpse in that moment of a more tragic figure lurking beneath the garrulous exterior of the man who had so irritated them a couple of days ago. Hook said, ‘Excuse me for probing into private matters at a time like this, but I’m afraid that in a situation such as this privacy is the first casualty. What were the financial effects of this reduction in work for you and Mr Preston?’
She looked shaken for a moment by the question; finance is a far more sensitive area to probe than sex, with most members of the British middle class. Then she said with a tiny shrug of the shoulders, ‘Peter refused to confront things like that. We still lived in a big house, still pretended we could carry on as in the palmy days. That was part of his image, you see. But we were living off capital, not income. Peter had inherited money of his own and I got the money from my mother’s house plus the rest of her savings when she died. It wouldn’t have lasted for ever. We needed to move to a smaller house, but he wouldn’t face that. It would have meant a loss of face.’ For the first time, she allowed an edge of contempt into this last phrase. She had previously maintained an even, emotionless tone for her account of her husband and the glimpses into her married life.