Sally turned away without saying anything. Sometimes she thought Hunter was right. Despite his reputation Ramsay was getting old and soft. He was perceptive enough but he didn’t have the guts to see a thing through.
‘Where’s Gordon?’ Ramsay asked.
‘In the canteen.’ Sulking, she thought. Because I got the girl to tell me about Bernard and Claire.
‘I want him in on this too.’
She was going to ask why but managed to bite her tongue just in time.
When they got to Cotter’s Row only Marilyn was in. They heard her clatter down the stairs to come to the door. She’d changed from her uniform into washed-out jeans and a sweater. When she turned to let them in Ramsay saw the label on the jeans pocket. It wasn’t one that any of her friends would have recognized. Her mum had probably bought them for £5.99 from a stall on Blyth market. Prue’s daughter wouldn’t have been seen dead in them.
‘Claire’s baby-sitting for Kim Houghton,’ Marilyn said. ‘ Dad’s gone with her.’ Then, speaking directly to Sally, ‘I suppose they wanted a bit of privacy.’
‘When do you expect them back?’
She shrugged.
‘Not till late. They said not to wait up.’
‘Bring them back here now, Gordon.’ Ramsay spoke quietly but they could tell he wasn’t going to be pissed about. ‘Find out where Kim Houghton is and get her home. If necessary Sally can baby-sit until she gets back.’
As soon as he’d spoken he knew Sally wouldn’t like it. She hadn’t joined the force to be a childminder.
‘That is all right, Sally?’ With hardly a trace of sarcasm.
‘Of course,’ she said huffily. She started away from the door then turned back hopefully. ‘Unless Marilyn wants to do it. It might be less awkward for her to be out of the house.’
‘No.’ For some reason he couldn’t even quite explain to himself why he wanted Marilyn there. Perhaps to remind Bernard and Claire of their responsibility. Or to represent Kath Howe. Because no one else had liked her very much and that wasn’t a good enough reason to let a killer get away.
It took half an hour to fetch Kim Houghton from the club. Sally decided that as Kim was just down the road she wouldn’t be needed as sitter. Ramsay could wait that long. In number two Ramsay waited downstairs alone. Marilyn offered him tea. When he declined she went back upstairs to her room. To someone without experience of teenagers that might have seemed strange or rude, but Prue’s daughter ignored all adult visitors to the house as a matter of course. A matter even of honour.
He was glad of the silence and the opportunity for thought. He went into the living room intending to rearrange the furniture to his liking before the interview and he was struck by the change in the place. When he had looked in on his first visit to the house it had been cluttered, uninviting, dirty. It still looked as if it was never used, but much of the junk had been taken away and it was spotless. There was a smell of furniture polish. He thought the carpet had been cleaned. He supposed Claire had been spring cleaning. Her way of making a fresh start? Or something more sinister?
Hunter came in.
‘They’re on their way. Kim and her fancy man were just down at the club.’
‘This house was searched, wasn’t it?’ They had been looking for letters, an address book, some indication that Mrs Howe knew her murderer.
‘Yeah. The day after the body was found. You suggested it and Mr Howe gave his permission.’
‘But properly searched?’
‘Well, we didn’t pull up the floorboards. I mean the chap had just lost his wife. Be sensitive, you said.’
Because there had been no real suspicion then that Mrs Howe had been killed in the house. And if anything had been hidden after the murder it would be long gone now. Still, Ramsay thought, it wouldn’t hurt to get a team in.
He and Hunter interviewed Bernard first. They took him into the front room.
‘By man, it’s like an ice box in here.’ Hunter shivered to make his point. Bernard switched on an electric fire, but it seemed to have little effect on the temperature.
Ramsay, remembering what Marilyn had told Sally about thin walls, had suggested that the women might like to watch television while they waited. The noise from the back room was distracting but at least the interview would not be overheard.
Bernard was red faced, blustering, defensive. There were three easy chairs in the room, all covered with the nylon stretch covers which are advertised in mail-order catalogues. Ramsay motioned him to sit down.
‘I don’t know what this is all about,’ Bernard said. ‘Really, it’s not on.’
‘Come on, man.’ Hunter was chummy. He perched on the arm of Bernard’s chair. ‘You can’t expect to keep things quiet when you sneak off for a night together. What do you think Kim made of the two of you turning up on her doorstep? She’ll not have thought you were there to play Scrabble.’
Bernard blushed a deeper crimson, said nothing.
‘Or didn’t you turn up together? Is that how you worked it? Claire went first, then you trotted on down when the coast was clear?’
There was no answer. Hunter’s voice hardened.
‘Is that how you worked it?’
‘Yes.’ It was a scarcely audible mumble.
‘Well, all this secrecy has really landed you in the shit.’ Hunter was all smiles again. ‘You do see, Bernard, that the only way to get out of it is to answer all our questions? If you lie to us again we’ll think you’ve got something else to hide. Beside your little affair, I mean.’ He got up from the arm of the chair, looked down on his victim. ‘You do see that, Bernard, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Despite the cold he had begun to sweat. ‘But we didn’t really lie.’ He was panicking and the words came out as a babble. ‘Not about anything important. Not about Kath’s murder. If you’d asked us we’d have told you.’
‘What would you have told us?’
‘Well, that Claire and I had become…’ He paused. ‘… friendly.’
Hunter walked away in apparent disgust. He stood with his back to the fire, his arms folded, watching.
‘Tell me,’ Ramsay said gently. ‘When did you and Claire start to become “friendly”?’
Bernard looked at him suspiciously. He, too, had changed from his work clothes. He was wearing olive green cords, worn thin at the knees and a Marks & Spencer’s patterned sweater in lilac and pink. A Christmas present, Ramsay supposed, from his mother. Claire would have had more taste and Kath would have considered it an extravagance.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Was it soon after Claire came to stay with you?’
‘She wasn’t under age!’ The panic had returned. ‘ She was seventeen.’
‘Didn’t it occur to you that you might be abusing a position of trust?’ Ramsay asked.
Of course it didn’t, he thought. That’s what the Minister’s wife said when you wandered off into the night with the little boy. Like the spoilt child you are you did just what you felt like. You didn’t consider the consequences at all.
‘Abuse never came into it,’ Bernard said. ‘ You ask Claire. We were happy together. That didn’t seem wrong.’
‘I don’t suppose that’s how Kath saw it.’
‘No,’ Bernard muttered. ‘ Kath didn’t understand. Not at first, anyway.’
‘How did she find out?’
‘It was September. Claire hadn’t started working for the Coulthards. She’d finished at the college but she couldn’t find a job so she was home a lot. My office works flexitime. If I do enough overtime I can have the occasional half-day off. We knew Kath was going to be out that afternoon. She was doing a course at the Open Door Learning Centre. Word processing. She thought she’d be able to help Marilyn with her school work. It was every Wednesday. But the tutor was ill so she came back early.’
‘She didn’t come home because she suspected you were being unfaithful?’
Bernard winced at the word, shook his head. ‘ No, she didn’t suspect anything. That might have been easier. It was the shock. That’s what floored her.’ He stared past Hunter. ‘You should have seen her face.’