‘With Elsa and the two students, Millie Taylor and Karina Scott. Not forgetting Nick Haslam. They were best placed to know his movements. They would have known whether he had the opportunity to kill Faith Matthew or not.’
‘Could they all be lying?’
Cooper laughed. ‘You and I know perfectly well that everybody could be lying.’
‘So what then?’
‘Revenge as a motive would make sense in two scenarios — if Darius Roth was the one who killed Faith or if someone had good reason to believe he did.’
‘That would mean they had knowledge of the incident that we don’t.’
Cooper shook his head. ‘Not necessarily. Belief doesn’t always need evidence.’
‘Unfortunately.’
‘The rest of our witnesses don’t have first-hand evidence of where Darius was, because they were in a different group and didn’t see him after they split up.’
‘Does that narrow it down at all?’ said Villiers.
‘I hope so. At least if we can get prints or DNA, we’ll have some suspects for comparison. Meanwhile, let’s see if we can focus our attention even more. Who actually found the body?’
‘The gardener.’
‘Will Sankey? You talk to him, then, Carol, and I’ll deal with Mrs Roth.’
‘Good luck,’ said Villiers.
Elsa Roth was hugging her arms round her chest as if trying to hold in some emotion. Cooper felt immediately sorry for her. Whatever his own views of her husband, Elsa’s world had just been torn apart.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Roth,’ said Cooper, ‘but we do need to ask some questions. Weren’t you concerned that your husband was missing?’
‘I don’t keep track of Darius’s movements,’ said Elsa. ‘He doesn’t like it. He gets annoyed if I ask him where he’s going or where he’s been. So I don’t ask.’
‘But you must have had an idea whether he was at home or he’d gone to work.’
‘He does a lot of his business from home. He has an office at the other end of the house.’
It was that phrase ‘the other end of the house’ that reminded Cooper he was in a different world. Back home at Tollhouse Cottage, he was aware of every sound in the house, knew which room the cat was in from the sound of her snoring or the click of her claws on the floorboards.
Here at Trespass Lodge, it was possible for Elsa Roth not to know whether her husband was at home or not, and vice versa. They seemed to have occupied different ends of the lodge for much of the time, and the property was so large that there would be no sounds reaching from one end to the other.
He imagined they would probably have phoned each other if they needed to speak. Darius could even have got one of his cars out of the garage and driven away without Elsa knowing, if he wanted to.
‘So you didn’t notice your husband had gone down to the chapel?’
‘No.’
‘And did you see anyone else this morning?’
‘Only the gardener, Will. And we have a cleaner, Milena. She was here this morning. But she’s very discreet.’
‘Discreet?’ repeated Cooper.
Why was he interpreting that word to mean that Milena wouldn’t tell him anything? Was that what Elsa intended? Perhaps. A discreet servant might notice things but wouldn’t talk about them. He felt sure Elsa wouldn’t refer to Milena as a servant, though. That was very Edwardian.
‘Who knew about the old chapel?’
‘All the members of the club, of course,’ she said.
‘You mean the New Trespassers Walking Club.’
‘Of course.’
‘And previous members too?’
‘I suppose so.’ She looked around vaguely, as if she couldn’t remember anything before today. ‘Yes, they all came here at some time.’
‘Did your husband often come down to the chapel from the house at that time of night?’
‘He might have done, now and then. We have separate bedrooms. Sometimes he came home late from a meeting or a dinner, or something like that, so he arranged our rooms so that he wouldn’t disturb me. But there were a few times when I was woken up by something in the early hours of the morning and thought it was Darius arriving home in his car. When I looked out of the window, though, I saw him walking up the garden from the lake, so I know he spent time down here on his own.’
‘On his own?’ repeated Cooper.
Elsa looked puzzled. ‘Well, I assumed...’
‘What?’ said Cooper. ‘What did you assume your husband was doing down here, Mrs Roth?’
She shrugged feebly. ‘Just that he wanted to be on his own, and this was his place to do it. Some people are like that, aren’t they?’
‘Yes, it’s true.’
‘Well, then?’
‘Did it never occur to you that Darius might not be on his own at the old chapel, that he could be meeting someone?’
‘I don’t know who that would be,’ she said.
Again she hadn’t asked questions. From what she said, it seemed Elsa hadn’t even raised the possibility in her own mind. A saying of his mother’s came into Cooper’s head: There are none so blind as those who will not see. Where did that quotation come from? Or was it one of those ancient proverbs attributed to ‘Anonymous’, their origins lost in time? It was amazing how accurate they could still be.
Cooper went back out to his Toyota, which was parked on the gravel at the front of Trespass Lodge. Carol Villiers was waiting for him when he reached his car.
‘I’ve talked to Will Sankey,’ she said. ‘It seems he’d worked his way down to that end of the grounds as usual by late morning and he noticed the door of the old chapel was open. He says it wasn’t unknown for Darius to be down there, but he never left the door open. So Sankey went in to check. And there was the body.’
‘Did he see anyone else?’ asked Cooper.
‘He says he didn’t see anyone in the grounds or at the house this morning except Darius and Elsa Roth themselves.’
‘Where did he see Elsa?’
‘He spoke to her briefly in the garden room when he arrived. He parks his van at that side of the house so it isn’t visible to visitors.’
Villiers raised an eyebrow at him. What did that mean?
‘Do you think something is going on between Elsa and Sankey?’ said Cooper.
‘No. Nothing from his point of view, anyway. I have a feeling from what he said that Elsa might sometimes feel a bit... lonely.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘Me neither. But Will Sankey is too cautious to get involved in anything like that. I think he’s in the clear.’
‘Good. It would be too bad if it turned out to be the gardener who did it,’ said Cooper. ‘Too much of a cliché.’
‘Unfortunately, we don’t have anyone else in the vicinity for the time when Darius Roth was killed. Only Sankey. And Elsa, of course.’
‘And you’ve just said Sankey is in the clear.’
‘Well, all right. I don’t want to jump to conclusions.’
‘You don’t like Elsa much, do you?’ said Cooper.
‘To be honest,’ said Villiers, ‘I haven’t met one of them that I like so far.’
‘And there’s one other, by the way,’ said Cooper.
‘Who?’
‘The cleaner, Milena,’ he said. ‘But she’s too discreet.’
Villiers looked at him oddly.
‘When we came here the first time, we managed to approach the chapel without passing the house,’ she said. ‘We reached it from the footpath through the woods. Anyone else could have done that.’
‘Of course, if they knew about it.’
Cooper looked around the front of Trespass Lodge, noting the glint of lenses angled high on the walls under the eaves.