‘Not like you, that. Lying to the police, I mean — well, not telling them the complete truth, anyway. I’ve always thought of you as a classic conformist. You’ve been quite short with me when I’ve tried to cut the odd corner, as is necessary in business.’
She was sure now that he was enjoying himself. His puzzled, slightly pained tone told her that. ‘Anyway, you’ll need to confirm it, if they ask you.’
‘Need to confirm it.’ He pursed his lips, as if weighing it as a proposition. ‘I see, old girl. You’re trying to cut a few corners. Whatever you say, then.’ James Dooks returned to the sports pages with a small, enigmatic smile.
Saturday the fourteenth of May. A bright morning, with the sun high in the sky by nine o’clock and a gentle breeze moving the few high white clouds very slowly across a very clear blue sky.
Lambert picked Hook up in his big old Vauxhall. The lanes were quiet and they enjoyed the journey through the burgeoning Gloucestershire countryside. The hawthorn hedges were full of new pale green leaves and the rich red soil was disappearing beneath neat rows of spreading corn and barley. The large eyes of Herefordshire cattle gazed curiously at them as the car breasted the slope beside their pasture. Then the Vauxhall ran into the valley and into the deep shade between long, straight rows of newly foliaged beeches, arching over them like the nave of a great natural cathedral. Bert thought of the boys he had left at home, dearly loved but full of energy and increasingly fractious, as they moved towards adolescence. There were compensations for having to work at weekends.
They were surprised to see Sue Charles in gardening trousers and gloves when they arrived at her bungalow. She stood up and put her trowel down on the barrow beside her, which was full of discarded wallflowers after their short and glorious blaze of colour and scent. Lambert said, ‘I’m sorry. Were you not expecting us?’
‘Yes, of course I was. But I was up early and it was such a lovely morning that I thought I’d do a little weeding before you came. But I don’t wear my watch in the garden and I lose track of the time. Come in and I’ll put the kettle on. It will only be instant, I’m afraid, but it won’t take long. That’s what the name implies, I suppose.’
Lambert said that there was really no need, that it wasn’t long since they’d breakfasted, but Sue insisted. They sat for a couple of minutes on the sofa in the sitting room, trying to regard Roland with as much disdain as the cat accorded them. Hook apologized for disturbing the crime novelist’s weekend and her gardening, but she said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, I’m glad to see you. I have a few old friends, but I don’t get many visitors, nowadays.’
Every action and reaction made it seem more ridiculous that this friendly, competent woman should be involved in a murder enquiry. They were served with coffee and home-made biscuits before Lambert could say, ‘We know a lot more about Mr Preston than when we spoke to you on Thursday. He seemed to us then a rather petty man with annoying pretensions. He has now proved to be much more vicious that that.’
Sue sat down carefully with her own cup of coffee. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. He was no friend of mine, but one doesn’t like to hear such things about the dead. One would rather they could be left in peace, but I quite understand that in the case of a murder victim you need to unearth every fact you can.’
‘You write about murder, Mrs Charles. You must study people, as I’m told all writers do. Did Mr Preston strike you as a man who would excite the hate that seems to have motivated this killing?’
‘Goodness me, Mr Lambert! I’m an amateur in these things. One has perforce to acquire a little knowledge about police procedures, and I suppose you’re right about studying people, but you must have far more experience of murderers than I have!’
‘Nevertheless, we should like to have your views, since you had much more contact with this victim than most people we have spoken to.’
‘I suppose that’s true, though I hadn’t thought about it before. To put it crudely, Peter had been discourteous to me for a number of years. I think I told you yesterday that he took care to let me know how little he thought of my writing. He was also dismissive of crime writers in general. “Practitioners of trivial ephemera,” he called us. I rather enjoyed asking him if that wasn’t a tautology.’ She chuckled at the reminiscence and took a large and unladylike bite of ginger biscuit. ‘I’m sorry. I realize this is a very serious business. Did I see Peter as a candidate for murder victim? I never really thought of him as that. I couldn’t take him very seriously, but I suppose if I had done I’d have seen him as malicious, perhaps even dangerous. I certainly shouldn’t have liked to live with him! Poor Edwina had to do that, of course. She must have seen something attractive in Peter, at one time. I suppose he was handsome, as a younger man.’
She spoke as if she was considering that idea for the first time. Lambert said quietly, ‘How close was Preston to his wife at the time of his death?’
Sue furrowed her brow as she gave due consideration to that. ‘I didn’t mix with them socially as a couple, but I’ve met Edwina in other settings. I’d say they were growing steadily further apart, that she had devised methods of coping with his tiresome pretensions. I think she’d developed a life of her own which did not involve Peter.’
There was a shrewd writer’s brain behind the ageing, wordy woman whom he sensed she was enjoying playing. Lambert acknowledged that by asking simply, ‘You saw Preston many times with Marjorie Dooks. Would you tell us about that, please?’
‘I only saw them in committee, though just occasionally he tried to pursue his ideas more informally after the meetings were over. I confess I rather enjoyed their confrontations — probably because Marjorie had the measure of Peter. She was fair but firm, in a way which I could never have been. Of course, she held most of the cards, in that she was chair of the committee, but she was as tactful as it was possible to be.’
‘Thank you. What about the younger members of that committee?’
‘Ros Barker and Sam Hilton? I’ve thought about them as candidates for homicide, of course, since this happened — that’s inevitable, I suppose, when you’re involved in a real murder and have a background of writing about it. Peter was very insulting and dismissive about Ros’s paintings and Sam’s poetry, and when your work is attacked you’re more deeply hurt than you like to admit. And in so far as one can generalize, young people seem to react more violently to insults than my generation. George, my husband, used to say that if young men still had National Service to endure, they’d have a better sense of discipline, but I’ve never been sure about that.’
‘Peter Preston’s sense of grievance went much deeper than most people realized, Mrs Charles. Were you aware of that yourself?’
‘No.’ She paused for a moment, her face filling with the interest of a new idea, then nodded. ‘It doesn’t surprise me, though. What evidence do you have for saying that?’
‘The contents of the filing cabinet in his study. He kept detailed files on everyone he regarded as an enemy.’
‘How very interesting. Peter never struck me as a blackmailer.’
‘We have no evidence that he ever tried to extract money from anyone. His wife thinks that he used what he gathered to manipulate people rather than to exert financial pressure.’
‘How intriguing!’ The head with its neat grey hair was a little on one side; the clear blue eyes alight with mischief. ‘Did he have a file on me, Mr Lambert?’
Lambert was as serious as she was amused. ‘He did indeed.’
‘And are you able to tell me about it?’
He paused to glance at Hook. He was struck as strongly as he had ever been in his life by the incongruity of people like Sue Charles being involved in the grim business of murder. ‘There were several rather trivial and petty entries about yourself. There were also some rather more serious allegations about your husband.’