‘He garaged the car about a quarter to five,’ said Peter in a thin, brittle voice, his long face sagging with reluctance and distress. ‘I told him he could consider himself free until the following Wednesday noon, and then come in for the Bentley and fetch my wife home. I told him if he liked he could make use of one of the BSAs for his weekend, and he said yes, he would like to. I don’t know what time he left the lodge, but it was all in darkness before six o’clock. He came back prompt at noon on Wednesday, and drove to Gloucester to bring Reginaback.’
‘You didn’t ask him where he was going?’
‘I didn’t. I don’t. Nor where he’d been, when he came back. He’s my wife’s employee, not mine, but even if he were mine I shouldn’t think that gave me any right to ask him where he spends his free time. Only his working hours are bought and paid for.’ He added gently and wearily: ‘Your business, of course, it may very well be. You ask him.’
The young man dried his hands carefully, automatically, confronting them both with a wary face and narrowed eyes. He had left it too late to protest at being interrogated again, and far too late to pretend surprise or indignation. He waited, moistening his lips, a glitter in his eyes that might have been anger, but looked closer kin to desperation.
‘I think,’ said George after a moment of thought, ‘I’d better talk to Stockwood alone. If you don’t mind?’
Blacklock did mind, that was abundantly clear; he felt a degree of responsibility for all the members of his wife’s staff, and was reluctant to abandon any of them to the mercies of the police, however implicit his faith might be, in theory, in British justice. He hesitated for a moment, swung on his heel to pick up his jacket from the stone bench in the middle of the yard.
‘All right! I’ll see you when you’ve finished, Felse. Look in at the house for a moment if I’m not around, will you?’
He went out through the deep archway between the coach-houses with his long, nervous stride, and vanished up the slope of the field towards the hall.
‘Well?’ said George. ‘Where did you spend the weekend?’
The young man drew breath carefully between lips curled in detestation and fright. ‘I’ve told you already. I told your bloke who was here yesterday—’
‘You told him you went to a fishing inn up the Teme valley – I know. Not having a home of your own to go to.’
Stockwood’s head jerked back, the gipsy face took fire in a brief blaze of defiance quickly suppressed.
‘You thought the landlord was a friend of yours, and quick on the uptake, and would see you through. Maybe he promised you he would, when you ’phoned him. Maybe he really would, up to a hold-up or a smash-and-grab. But as soon as he smelled murder he packed it in. He’d not getting lumbered with any part of it, boy. And you weren’t at the Angler’s Arms last Saturday night. So where were you?’
The colour had ebbed from Stockwood’s face so alarmingly that it seemed there could not be enough blood in him to keep his heart working. George took him by the arm and sat him down, unresisting, on the stone bench. The lean young face, self-conscious and proud, stood him off steadily; and in a moment the blanched lines of jaw and mouth eased.
‘That’s better. Take it quietly. It’s very simple. You gave us a phoney tale about where you spent your free week-end. Now all I want is the truth, and for your own sake you’d better produce it. You’d have done better,’ he said dryly, ‘to stick to it in the first place, when you came here after the job. Why didn’t you tell Mrs Blacklock you had a prison record? Oh, no, I haven’t told her, either, so far this is just between you and me. But you must have cased the job and the people before you tried it, you should have been able to judge that she’d take you even with a stretch behind you – maybe all the more.’
‘I didn’t know,’ said the young man through tight lips. ‘How could I? I wanted the job, and I was on the level. I didn’t dare to risk what she’d do if she knew.’
‘I’m telling you, she’d have taken you on just the same. She’d pride herself on giving you your chance.’
‘That’s what you fellows always say. And that’s what women like her always say. But when it came to the point how could I be sure? I’ve done the job properly,’ he said, stiffening his neck arrogantly, and stared up into George’s face without blinking. ‘Didn’t take your lot long to get after my record, did it?’
‘It doesn’t, once we’ve got the idea, once we know you’re lying about your movements last week-end. We can connect. It doesn’t follow,’ said George, ‘that we think you necessarily did the Bloome Street job. It’s a long way from helping to hi-jack a load of cigarettes to killing a man. But nobody lies about his movements without having something to hide. So where were you?’
Stockwood’s jaw clamped tight to shut in whatever words he might have been about to blurt out furiously in George’s face. He sat for a moment with his hands clenched and braced on the edge of the stone seat. There was no hope of success with a second lie, and all too clearly he had no new line of defence prepared. After a brief struggle his lips opened stiffly, and said abruptly: ‘With a woman.’
‘Miss Beck?’ said George conversationally.
‘No, not Miss Beck!’
‘Rosalind Piper again?’
Or was it ‘still’ rather than ‘again’? But there was as little reason for him to hide a connection with her as there was to continue or resume it. According to the records, she had cost him a year in gaol by involving him in the gang in the first place; and she had cost him his marriage, too, it seemed, since there was a divorce hanging over him. Briefly George wondered what she had looked like. A blonde decoy with a brazen face, or a little innocent creature with big blue eyes? The boy could have been only about twenty-one or twenty-two at the time, and not long married, probably a decent enough young man with good prospects, but the usual, ever-present money difficulties; and a quick share-out from one big haul must have seemed to him an enticing proposition, especially the way the experienced Miss Piper had pictured it for him, with herself as a bonus.
‘No!’ Stockwood spat the negative after her memory, and turned his head obstinately away.
‘I have no interest,’ said George patiently, ‘in your private affairs, as long as you’re breaking no laws. You’d better give her a name. If she bears you out, I can forget it.’ If she bore him out, it would be the truth.
‘You might,’ said Stockwood. ‘She wouldn’t.’
‘If she didn’t grudge you the week-end, she won’t grudge you an alibi. What harm can there be in asking her to confirm your story? If, of course, it’s true this time.’
‘It’s true!’
‘And if you did nothing the law would be interested in.’
‘No. I didn’t do anything wrong. You won’t be able to prove I did, because I didn’t.’
‘Then don’t be a fool. Tell me who she is, and help yourself and me.’
‘No – I can’t tell you!’
‘You’ll have to in the end. Come on, now, she won’t be inconvenienced, we have no interest in her. But unless you name her you’re putting yourself in a nasty spot, and casting doubt on every word you have told me.’
‘I can’t help it,’ said Stockwood stubbornly, and licked a trickle of sweat from his lips. ‘I can’t tell you.’
‘You can’t because she’s as big a lie as the fishing weekend. She doesn’t exist.’
‘She does exist! Oh, my God!’ He said it in a sudden, soft, hopeless voice to himself, as though, indeed, she was the only creature who did exist for him, and of her reality he was agonisingly unsure. ‘But I can’t tell you who she is.’
‘You won’t.’