He sounded genuinely sympathetic. "With the best will in the world, Miss Lascelles, that is out of the question. These are harsh recessionary times, and you're a privileged young woman, surrounded by people only too willing to watch out for your rights. We'll ask your housemistress to contact a lawyer. She won't hesitate, I'm sure. Apart from anything else, she will want to keep the unpleasantness under wraps so to speak. After all, she does have the school's reputation to think of."
"Bastard!" she snapped. "I just won't answer your questions then."
He manufactured a look of surprise. "Do I gather you don't want a solicitor after all?"
"No. Yes." She hugged herself. "But I'm not saying anything."
Cooper returned to his seat. "That's your privilege. But if I don't get any answers from you, then I shall have to ask my questions elsewhere. In my experience, thieves do not confine themselves to stealing from just one person. I wonder what will happen if I call the rest of your house together and ask them en masse if any of their possessions have gone missing in the last year or so. The inference, surely, will be obvious because they know my only connection with the school is you."
"That's blackmail."
"Standard police procedure, Miss Lascelles. If a copper can't get his information one way, then he's duty-bound to try another."
She scowled ferociously. "I didn't kill her."
"Have I said you did?"
She couldn't resist answering, it seemed. "It's what you're thinking. If I was there I must have killed her."
"She probably died during the early half of the night, between nine o'clock and midnight, say. Were you there then?"
She looked relieved. "No. I left at five. I had to be back in time for a physics lecture. It's one of my A level subjects and I gave the vote of thanks at the end."
He took out his pad. "What time did the lecture start?"
"Seven thirty."
"And you were there for the start?"
"Yes."
"How did you manage to do that? You clearly didn't walk thirty miles in two and a half hours."
"I borrowed a bicycle."
He looked deeply sceptical. "What time did you arrive at your grandmother's, Miss Lascelles?"
"I don't know. About three thirty, I suppose."
"And what time did you leave the school?"
"After lunch."
"I see," he said ponderously, "so you rode thirty miles in one direction in two hours, rested for an hour and a half with your grandmother and then rode thirty miles back again. You must be a very fit young woman. May I have the name of the person whose bicycle you borrowed?" He licked the point of his pencil and held it poised above the page.
"I don't know whose it was. I borrowed it without asking."
He made a note. "Shall we call a spade a spade and be done with the pretence? You mean you stole it. Like the earrings and the fifty pounds."
"I put it back. That's not stealing."
"Back where?"
"In the bike shed."
"Good, then you'll be able to identify it for me."
"I'm not sure. I just took the best one I could find. What difference does it make which bicycle it was?"
"Because you're going to hop on board again and I'm going to follow closely behind you all the way to Fontwell." He looked amused. "You see, I don't believe you're capable of riding thirty miles in two hours, Miss Lascelles, but I'm quite happy for you to prove me wrong. Then you can have an hour and a half s rest before you ride back again."
"You can't do that. That's just fucking-" she cast about for a word "-harassment."
"Of course I can do it. It's called a reconstruction. You've just put yourself at the scene of a crime on the day the crime was committed, you're a member of the victim's family with easy access to her house and you thought you were going to inherit money from her. All of which puts you high on the list of probable suspects. Either you prove to my satisfaction that you did go by bicycle, or you tell me now how you really got there. Someone drove you, didn't they?"
She sat in a sullen silence, scraping her toe back and forth across the carpet. "I hitched," she said suddenly. "I didn't want to tell you because the school would throw a fit if they knew."
"Was your grandmother alive when you left Cedar House at five o'clock?"
She looked put out by the sudden switch of direction. "She must have been, mustn't she, as I didn't kill her."
"So you spoke to her?"
Ruth eyed him warily. "Yes," she muttered. "I left my key at school and had to ring the doorbell."
"Then she'll have asked you how you got there. If you had to hitch, she won't have been expecting you."
"I said I had a lift from a friend."
"But that wasn't true, was it, and, as you knew you were going to have to hitch back to school again on a dark November evening, why didn't you ask your grandmother to drive you? She had a car and, according to you, she was fond of you. She'd have done it without a murmur, wouldn't she? Why would you do something so dangerous as hitching in the dark?"
"I didn't think about it."
He sighed. "Where did you hitch from, Miss Lascelles? Fontwell itself, or did you walk the three miles along Gazing Lane to the main road? If it was Fontwell, then we'll be able to find the person who picked you up."
"I walked along Gazing Lane," she said obligingly.
"And what sort of shoes were you wearing?"
"Trainers."
"Then they'll have mud from the lane squeezed into every seam and crevice. It was raining most of that afternoon. The boys at forensic will have a field day. Your shoes will vindicate you if you're telling the truth. And if you're not..." he smiled grimly, "I will make your life a misery, Miss Lascelles. I will interview every girl in the school, if necessary, to ask them who you consort with, who's had to cover for you when you've gone AWOL, what you steal and why you're stealing it. And if at the end of it you have an ounce of credibility left, then I'll start all over again. Is that clear? Now, who drove you to your grandmother's?"
There were tears in her eyes. "It's got nothing to do with Granny's death."
"Then what can you lose by telling me?"
"I'll be expelled."
"You'll be expelled far quicker if I have to explain why I'm carting your clothing off for forensic examination."
She buried her face in her hands. "My boyfriend," she muttered.
"Name?" her demanded relentlessly.
"Dave-Dave Hughes."
"Address?"
She shook her head. "I can't tell you. He'd kill me."
Cooper frowned at the bent head. "How did you meet him?"
She raised her tear-stained face. "He did the tarmac on the school drive." She read censure in his eyes and leapt to defend herself. "It's not like that."
"Like what?"
"I'm not a slut. We love each other."
Her sexual morality had been the last thing on his mind but it was clearly at the forefront of hers. He felt sorry for her. She was accusing herself, he thought, when she called her mother a whore. "Does he own the house?"
She shook her head. "It's a squat."
"But he must have a telephone or you wouldn't be able to contact him."
"It's a mobile."
"May I have the number?"
She looked alarmed. "He'd be furious."
You bet your life he would, thought Cooper. He wondered what Hughes was involved in. Drugs? Under-age sex? Pornography? Expulsion was the least of Ruth's problems if any of these were true. He showed no impatience for the address or phone number. "Tell me about him," he invited instead. "How long have you known him? How old is he?"
He had to prise the information from her with patient cajoling and, as she spoke and listened to herself, he saw the dawning confirmation of her worst fears: that this was not a story of Montagues and Capulets thwarting innocent love but, rather, a seedy log of sweaty half-hours in the back of a white Ford transit. Told baldly, of course, it lacked even the saving attraction of eroticism and Cooper, like Ruth, found the telling uncomfortable. He did his best to make it easy for her but her embarrassment was contagious and they looked away from each other more often than their eyes met.