‘I’ve calmed down.’
‘To batter someone to death because they threatened to ruin you?’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘So you did!’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘“Wouldn’t you” implies you did.’
‘It implies nothing,’ Nathan Samual said solemnly.
‘Even so,’ Hennessey pressed forward, ‘we have assault, grievous bodily harm, malicious damage…not the sort of person you’d want to meet in one of the snickelways on a dark night, are you?’
‘I can look after myself.’
‘Or on a dance-hall floor.’
‘I don’t dance.’
‘Or inside your home.’
‘I didn’t kill them.’
‘Where were you on Sunday afternoon?’
‘I went for a run by the river.’
‘Anybody see you?’
‘Plenty.’
‘Anybody that recognized you, that could offer an alibi? What about your wife?’
‘At the gym. Wednesdays and Sundays are ladies’ days, both are long days for her.’
‘Other days it’s mixed?’
‘Yes. The customers like it that way. A lot of relationships have started in the gym.’
‘I can imagine. Yourself and Amanda Williams being an example of same.’
‘You should come down, free session, I’ll take you round the circuit, maybe you’ll want to enrol. You’ll be the oldest there, but you never know your luck, some women go for the older man, they want a father figure.’
‘As some men go for the older woman, eh, Mr Sheringham?’
‘Only if they have dosh.’ Smiling, provoking, game playing.
‘What about it, fancy a trip round the circuit?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Well, don’t say I didn’t make the offer. It’s no good at the end of your life saying, “I wonder what would have happened if…”’
‘Full of wisdom for one so young, aren’t you?’
‘I was born old, like Merlin the Magician. I get younger by the day.’
‘Where were you on Monday and Tuesday night?’
‘At home.’
‘Alone?’
‘With my wife.’
‘She’ll vouch for that?’
‘She may.’
‘May?’
‘She’s a heavy sleeper. She’ll sleep through an earthquake. Me, I suffer from insomnia from time to time. Not every night, but some nights. There’s been times when I’ve been unable to sleep, I’ve got up, gone out for a six-mile run, come back, showered, got back into bed, grabbed a couple of hours’ sleep and we’ve woken up together and she hasn’t realized I’ve been away.’
‘So you may not have an alibi for Monday and Tuesday night either?’
‘No. But I don’t need one. I didn’t kill anybody, see?’
‘No. Actually, I don’t see.
‘Can you drive a car?’
‘I have the ability, but no licence.’
‘Disqualified, part of the malicious damage incident, it says here.’
‘Guy cut me up at the lights. So I sorted his car. Thought I’d be less likely to get a prison sentence if I only damaged his metal, rather than him.’
‘Seemed to work. Heavy fine but you avoided the slammer. You have access to your car?’
‘Yes.’
‘So it’s not impossible for you to have gone to the Williamses’ bungalow to silence Amanda Williams who was threatening to expose your affair and silence her in the best way you could think of, and then to silence Max Williams because he was unfortunate enough to be there. And it’s not impossible for you to have slipped out of your house on Monday night to sanitize the crime scene, because there’d have been blood everywhere, and it’s not impossible to have slipped out of the house on Tuesday to bury the bodies.’
‘No.’ Sheringham smiled. ‘It’s not impossible but you’ll never prove it.’
‘Why, did you cover your tracks well enough?’
‘Because I didn’t do it.’
‘Double murder. Rotten thing to have on your conscience.’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘Did you have eye contact just before you killed them?’
‘Don’t answer that.’ Nathan Samual turned to Sheringham.
Then to Hennessey he said, ‘That’s a leading question, Chief Inspector.’
‘Which one was first, Sheringham?’
‘Really, Chief Inspector, I protest at this line of questioning.’
Samual turned to Hennessey and, somewhat imperiously, Hennessey thought, said, ‘Chief Inspector, I really have to insist that at this point you must decide whether to charge my client or terminate this interview until you have more evidence.’
‘There is a fingerprint in the bathroom.’ Hennessey leaned back in his chair. ‘That is evidence of unlawful entry.’
‘Not when my client has been a regular visitor to the house.’
Hennessey reached for the off switch of the tape recorder.
‘This interview is terminated at eleven-forty a.m.’ He switched off the machine, the spools stopped turning, the red light faded. ‘Very well, your client is free to leave the police station. But this is not the end of the matter, please understand that.’
Liam McCarty was a well-set man in his forties, short hair, grey suit. He was a sergeant in the City of York Police Drug Squad. He and Hennessey knew each other just well enough to be on first-name terms. Hennessey tapped on the door of McCarty’s office and sat in the chair in front of McCarty’s desk.
‘Come in and sit down,’ said McCarty with a smile.
Hennessey returned the smile. ‘Tim Sheringham?’ he said.
‘Sheringham…Sheringham…bells ring, George, but I can’t place him.’
‘Sheringham’s Gym. He’s a suspect in a code four one. We put his details into the computer and, among other things, he came up as an alert to you and the good men and women of the DS.’
‘Yes…that Sheringham.’ McCarty stood and walked to a filing cabinet, opened it, and extracted a file and handed it to Hennessey.
‘Well, well…’ Hennessey looked at the grainy black and white photographs in the file which showed Tim Sheringham and Max Williams talking to each other, on a park bench, inside a cafe, walking in the centre of York, walking the walls.
‘So they knew each other? He’s in much more deeply than he’s letting on. What’s the story here?’
‘Incomplete as yet, but we believe that Williams was funding an anabolic steroids racket, and I mean big time, putting up money for large-scale purchase of the stuff which Sheringham was then knocking out to the gym customers. We have a couple of guys in the gym, posing as members. Not enough evidence for an arrest yet, but we were focusing on Williams, we had him in for a quiz session…he’s easy meat, no bottle at all…we just let him know that he was under suspicion…just to put the pressure on him, a slight turn of the screw…we floated the possibility of immunity from prosecution in return for information and a statement implicating Sheringham. He’s a rising drug baron in the Famous and Faire and we’re looking to nip him before he rises much further.’
‘Talk about the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.’
‘Well, you do know, we registered our interest, had it entered on the computer which is why he came up as an alert to us. Why, what’s happened?’
‘Just that the guy we believe Sheringham has filled in is none other than Max Williams.’
‘Well, there’s your motivation. If he thought Williams was going to blow the whistle on him, and Sheringham’s a nasty piece of work, he wouldn’t hesitate to off someone if he thought it would save him from a stretch as a guest of Her Majesty.’
‘It’s a far stronger motivation than we thought. Makes more sense - he was into Williams’s wife…playing away from home…he walked out on her and we believe Amanda Williams threatened to tell Mrs Sheringham of the affair she had had with her husband. We believe he killed her to stop that and her husband just got in the way somehow. Now it appears that he had a motivation to ice them both.’
‘Vanessa Sheringham’s a formidable woman. Have you met her?’ McCarty sat back in his chair. ‘She has some control over him, can’t work it out, but she’s the major-domo in the relationship.’