‘Have you had lunch, darling?’
It took him a moment to reply. ‘No … no, I didn’t have time with all the disruptions this morning.’
‘I’ll have something sent up from the kitchen.’ Then she turned to Kathy, ‘Come along,’ she said, and led them out of the room.
Her office was in the basement. From the foot of the spiral staircase Kathy and Gordon followed her down a corridor with a vaulted stone ceiling, past cubicles, offices and treatment rooms inserted between the massive piers supporting the main floors above. They came to a door with a rippled-glass vision panel and she showed them inside to tubular metal-framed seats in front of her metal desk, on which stood a telephone and a VDU. An examination couch took up one side of the room and filing cabinets the other. Above her chair a semicircular window had been set in the thick wall, like an eye peering out at the dark sky above. A fluorescent fitting mounted to the underside of the stone vault cast a cold and functional light over the room.
At first, after Stephen Beamish-Newell, Kathy found Laura’s curt, business-like manner refreshing.
‘My husband works too hard,’ she said. She had fine features, a long neck, good posture, blonde hair tied up neatly at the back of her head. Younger than her husband by at least ten years, Kathy guessed, her light-hazel eyes held no warmth and seemed dull with fatigue. ‘He doesn’t need this.’
‘Has this happened at a particularly bad time, then?’ Kathy tried to sound sympathetic, although the woman’s apparent indifference to Petrou’s fate was startling.
‘There’s never a good time, is there?’
‘I just wondered if he’d been under particular pressure lately.’
Laura’s eyes narrowed. ‘By the end of the summer we’re always a bit drained. We haven’t been able to get a break this year.’
‘What’s your role in the clinic, Mrs Beamish-Newell?’
‘I organize the treatment schedules. Stephen identifies the therapy regime for each patient, and I organize them into timetables and so on. I also keep a general eye on what goes on down here. I’ve been a nurse for fifteen years.’
‘So you knew Alex Petrou well.’
‘Of course.’
‘What was your assessment of him?’
‘Not all that high. He was inclined to be a bit showy, lacked substance. Tended to lose interest when it came to the difficult bits. Left it to somebody else. But he was quite popular with a number of the patients.’
‘Men and women?’
She shrugged. ‘Yes, both.’
‘Anyone special?’
‘Special? I’m talking about some of the patients liking his …. his manner, that’s all. He was quite amusing, personable. Nothing more special than that, as far as I’m aware.’
‘And staff? Any close friends, people he saw socially?’
‘I wouldn’t know about that. I was never aware of any particular friendships there.’
‘When did you last see him?’
‘Not yesterday. It would have been Saturday afternoon. He was exercising in the gym down the corridor there. I came in here to work. Some of the patients were coming and going.’
‘Did you actually speak to him then?’
‘Briefly.’
‘Do you know what he did on Saturday evening?’ She shook her head. ‘Sorry.’
‘Were you aware of him being in any way depressed, down?’
‘No, I didn’t notice anything.’
Mrs Beamish-Newell described her movements on the Sunday, as her husband had done, confirming his account. Some time after he had left their house to go to his office in the afternoon she had also come over, at around five or five-fifteen she thought, to prepare the drawing room for the recital. Although she had come in through the basement entrance and passed the door to the gym where Long had earlier been with Petrou, she had seen no sign of either of them.
Kathy asked to see the gym, and she led them back down the vaulted corridor to a doorway set in a recess. It was locked, and she took a master key from a pocket in her white coat to open the heavy door. The place smelt of damp mixed with the aroma of leather, talcum powder and sweat.
‘Alex made this room his own,’ Laura Beamish-Newell said, switching on the light. The room had the same low, vaulted ceiling as the corridor, and contained an assortment of weights, mats and exercise machines scattered around the floor. The grille of an extractor fan was visible high up in one corner, but there were no windows.
‘Is it the lack of a note that’s bothering you?’ Mrs Beamish-Newell said suddenly. ‘Only, you know they don’t always leave one.’
For the first time Kathy felt that the other woman was trying to communicate with her rather than just fend her off. ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘But we haven’t found anyone who even thought he was depressed.’
‘Then again, it could have been an accident.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Oh come on, Sergeant.’ Laura looked hard at her. ‘In our work we’ve both seen stranger things. It happens, accidental hanging. Maybe he was doing it for kicks.’
From the corridor they could hear the muffled sound of patients returning to the basement for the afternoon treatment session.
‘Would that seem likely to you, knowing him?’
‘Yes,’ she turned away. ‘Yes, I think it would.’
She was reaching for the door when it abruptly swung open in front of her. Geoffrey Parsons was there, face flushed. He saw her and began gabbling rapidly. ‘Laura! What are you doing? I thought we — ’ Then he noticed Kathy and Gordon standing in the background, staring at him. ‘Oh … I’m sorry.’ He blinked several times. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. I’ll catch up with you later.’ He turned on his heel and hurried away. Laura Beamish-Newell glanced at Kathy with a bleak little smile, almost apologetic. ‘We’re all under pressure,’ she said. ‘It’s all very upsetting.’
Ben Bromley came round his desk to shake Kathy’s hand. He looked at her keenly.
‘When they told me it was a woman in charge, I realized I’d never actually seen a woman detective in the flesh, so to speak. I mean, apart from on telly.’
‘I hope I’m not a disappointment,’ Kathy replied drily.
‘Oh no, I’m sure you won’t be. From what I hear you’ve made quite an impact with our senior management already, not to mention the punters.’ He grinned at her, eyes twinkling.
‘Is that right?’
‘Enough said. I promised myself I wouldn’t speak out of turn. Come on in and sit down. I think we can find room. It’s a bit cramped in here, as you can see.’
It was true that the room looked no bigger than the storeroom it had indeed previously been, and all available surfaces, including the chairs, were covered with piles of computer print-outs, brochures and other papers.
‘Yorkshire, is it?’ Kathy asked.
‘Lancashire — Bolton,’ he replied.
She nodded. ‘I was partly brought up in Sheffield, but I still have trouble telling the difference.’
‘I saw the light six years ago. Company I’d been with for the previous fifteen years making window frames finally went the way of half the rest of the north of England, down the tubes. Taken over actually, by southerners. Asset-stripped and closed down. I decided if we couldn’t beat ’em I’d better join ’em. Actually I was bloody lucky. Sir Peter Maples, chairman of the conglomerate that took us over, had just acquired a hobby — ’ he rolled his eyes around the room ‘this place. He’d just rescued it from a fate worse than liquidation and was looking for a business manager to put in. I am he.’
He had managed to clear a couple of seats for Kathy and Gordon during this, and they all sat down. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ he asked. Kathy hesitated.
‘No, no.’ He waved a hand. ‘None of that molasses muck or whatever it is they drink here.’ He reached into a drawer in his desk and pulled out a tin of ground coffee with a triumphant flourish. ‘Italian, smashing, what do you say?’
‘Actually,’ Kathy said with a deep breath, ‘that’s the best thing anyone’s said to me all day.’
‘Hear, hear,’ Dowling muttered under his breath.