As if he read these thoughts in her face, DS Hook said suddenly, ‘She tried to support you. She said at first that you’d been with her, but the officer taking her statement sensed that she was lying, I’m afraid.’
Before she could react to this apparent sympathy from his junior, Lambert said, ‘So where were you when you claimed to be in Oxford, Mrs Preston?’
It was all going to come out. Edwina told herself that she had been prepared for this, that she had half-expected that this would happen, sooner or later. She took a sip of tea before she said in a low voice, ‘I was with a man.’
‘We shall need details. The man’s identity, and exactly where you were on Tuesday night.’
‘Of course you will. I can see that. But it’s important to me that you understand why I asked Dell to say I was with her. I wanted to keep Hugh out of this. And I also wanted to preserve my own privacy.’ Then she added with a touch of self-contempt, ‘I suppose I also wanted to avoid my own embarrassment.’
‘Privacy is always a casualty in murder investigations. We cannot even consider issues as trivial as embarrassment. The raw facts are that your husband was murdered on Tuesday night and you chose to lie about where you were at the time.’
She said dully, ‘The man’s name is Hugh Whitfield. We were at a hotel in Broadway, near Stratford-on-Avon. He is married but separated. I would appreciate it if his connection with this could be kept confidential.’
‘We shall need to check this out with Mr Whitfield and the hotel. We shall not reveal it unless it becomes part of a case in court, but there can be no guarantees of confidentiality. You will probably appreciate that you forfeited our goodwill when you chose to lie to the officer in charge of a murder investigation.’
‘Yes. I suppose I can see that now. My first instinct was to protect Hugh. I didn’t want him involved in this business.’
‘Which he now is.’
‘Yes. I can see things more clearly now.’
‘What was your husband’s attitude to this liaison?’
‘Peter didn’t know about it. He was far too occupied with his own concerns to give any thought to me and what I might be doing.’
‘What did he think you were doing when you were away from home overnight?’
‘I told him I was visiting Dell — that’s my daughter — or old friends. There weren’t so many occasions. More often than not, Hugh and I met during the day.’
‘What would you say if we told you that your husband was aware of this relationship? If we told you that he had recorded the dates of your overnight meetings and some of the venues involved?’
Edwina felt the shock running through her limbs like an electric charge. She told herself that she must deal with this, must offer them some sort of response. Her voice seemed to come from a long way away. ‘I didn’t know about that. It doesn’t surprise me. Peter was a very secretive man. He was very sensitive about that filing cabinet.’
‘He had Mr Whitfield’s name and address recorded. He seems to have been compiling some sort of dossier.’
‘That’s what he liked to do. He needed to feel he had control of people. I didn’t think he’d do it with his wife. I didn’t know he knew about Hugh. I should have known better. Finding people’s weaknesses was an obsession with him.’
‘Blackmail?’ It seemed an unlikely crime for one of Peter Preston’s background and pretensions.
‘No. He wasn’t interested in money.’ She said it not with admiration but contempt. ‘All he was interested in was having a hold over people. Power, if you like, but a particular sort of power. He didn’t always use his information, but he liked to feel it was there if he needed it.’ She repeated like one in a trance, ‘I didn’t think he’d do it to me.’
‘What car do you drive, Mrs Preston?’
‘A Fiat C3.’
‘Colour?’
‘Dark green. You think I did this, don’t you?’ She glanced automatically back from the conservatory towards the house behind them and the place where Peter had fallen.
Lambert did not attempt to reassure her. He stated the bald, inescapable facts. ‘We have to consider the possibility. You lied to us about your whereabouts at the time of your husband’s death. You were conducting an affair, which he was documenting for his own purposes. You had ample reason to want him out of your life.’
‘But I didn’t know he was spying on me until you told me just now.’
Hook looked up from his notes. ‘We only have your word for that, Mrs Preston. As far as money and property are concerned, I presume you are the main beneficiary of your husband’s death?’
‘Yes. Unless he revised his will, as well as spying on me.’
‘He wasn’t expecting to die. He’s unlikely to have done that.’
‘No. Are you going to say that I killed him to avoid it?’
Lambert put his crockery back on the low table between them and stood up. ‘We shan’t accuse you of anything, Mrs Preston, until we have more evidence. What do you know of the contents of your husband’s filing cabinet?’
‘Nothing. I told you, he was a very secretive man.’ This time the adjective hissed with contempt.
‘Please don’t leave the area without giving us your new address. We’ll need to speak to you again.’
They drove back to the station in Oldford without exchanging many words. Each was preoccupied with the paradox of this quiet, unremarkable-looking woman in her mid-forties, who had conducted an affair and might well have dispatched an unlovable and increasingly inconvenient husband.
Marjorie Dooks found that she was having to work hard. She was used to dealing with people, to taking account of their backgrounds and reading their feelings. Usually she was very good at achieving whatever she wanted.
It was more difficult with a husband. The domestic setting was very different from a committee one, for a start. And both of you carried the baggage of many years together. You could hardly know too much about anyone, she had decided a long time ago. But there were times when they could definitely know too much about you.
She wanted James to introduce the topic of this murder, which must surely be in his mind as it seemed to be in everyone else’s in Gloucestershire. She talked about plans for the festival and the way the programme was now complete and looking very promising. He complimented her politely on that, as a stranger might have done. But he did not take up the issue of how the sudden death of the most prominent member of that committee was going to affect the programme. Was he uninterested in her affairs, as was usual, or was he deliberately refusing to talk about the topic that dominated her thinking?
In the end, she had to introduce it herself, which she felt put her at a disadvantage. ‘The police were here yesterday, about Peter Preston’s death.’
‘You didn’t tell me.’ He made it sound like an accusation.
‘No. You were late home last night and I didn’t want to bother you with it. It was no big deal — just part of their routine, in cases like this.’
‘Have they got a prime suspect yet?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t suppose they’d tell me, even if they had.’
She wanted him to ask about what they’d said to her, to be at least a little anxious on her behalf, however bizarre the idea that she might be treated as a suspect. But he merely nodded deeply and went back to the Telegraph. She had to say, ‘They asked me if I knew anything about who might have killed him, which of course I didn’t.’
‘Of course not.’
‘They wrote down the details of where I was at the time he died. Just routine, they said.’
‘Yes. It would be.’ James turned over the page and began to read about the prospects for the weekend’s rugby internationals.
‘Tuesday night it was. I told them I was here with you.’
Now at last he looked up at her, his eyebrows raised elaborately in that movement she found so irritating. ‘Was that wise, old girl?’
She hated it when he called her that. She’d told him so; she wondered whether he was now using it as some kind of taunt. ‘I thought it was, at the time. I was anxious to complete their routine for them, to let them remove me from their thinking so that they could get on with arresting the real killer.’