‘More or less.’
I forced myself to think. My mind felt so slow. ‘He must have had help,’ I said. ‘Who collected the docket from the firm of solicitors? The woman who said she was me. It was Tania, wasn’t it?’
‘We’ve interviewed Miss Lucas.’
‘Did she confess?’
‘Confess?’ said Ramsay. ‘She admitted carrying out certain tasks on his behalf.’
‘Criminal tasks.’
‘She claims she had no suspicion of anything criminal.’
‘She was pretending to be me.’
‘She said that must have been a misunderstanding.’
‘Bollocks,’ I said. ‘They were sleeping together, you know.’
Ramsay coughed. ‘I’ve no evidence of that,’ he said, ‘not that it would be relevant. Except possibly to show she was in thrall to him.’
‘In thrall?’ I said. ‘You mean she’s a weak woman? So she’s not to be charged with being an accomplice to murder, interfering with the course of justice?’
‘We’ve got a file but we’re not sure there’s a reasonable chance of a conviction.’
‘What about the company?’
‘It’s currently in administration, pending investigation of certain irregularities.’
‘You mean Joe was stealing from his clients. That he was up to his neck in it.’
‘That has been suggested,’ said Ramsay.
‘And presumably Tania knew nothing about that either.’
Ramsay shrugged instead of replying. That was his reply.
‘I suppose at least you accept that Joe killed Frances.’
‘Yes, we do. We’re assuming that Mrs Shaw knew, or at least suspected, what he had done and was going to expose him.’
‘That makes sense,’ I said, remembering Frances’s agitation, the sense of guilt, how close she had come to confessing to me. If she had, she wouldn’t have been dead now. ‘She was clearly troubled.’
For a minute Ramsay stared at me gloomily, then turned to the window. A dishevelled pigeon was sitting on the other side of the glass, its beady eyes glaring in.
‘What about the deaths of Milena and Greg?’ I asked. ‘Do you also accept Joe killed them?’
‘We’ve reopened the file.’
‘You don’t sound very grateful to me.’
‘Your role in the investigation has been mixed,’ said Ramsay, ‘but at an appropriate time…’
‘Is that what you meant when you said the inquiry wasn’t completely over?’
‘Did I?’
‘More or less, you said.’
He paused, seeming shifty, ill-at-ease.
‘When this accident happened, or shortly before,’ he said, ‘you had developed suspicions of Mr Foreman’s role in the case.’
I suddenly felt under threat. ‘How do you mean?’
‘What I’m trying to say, Ms Falkner,’ said Ramsay, in a deliberate tone, as if he was speaking to a child, ‘is that I’m working under the assumption that you had suspicions of Mr Foreman and then he realized you had these suspicions and that there was some sort of struggle while you were driving. Perhaps he tried to seize the wheel. And you crashed. Accidentally.’
I thought for a moment. ‘I don’t remember,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember anything about the accident. It’s a blank. Is that all right?’
‘Yes,’ said DI Ramsay. ‘That’ll do.’
Chapter Thirty-three
I walked to Fergus’s house with the box in both hands. It was early, a soft dawn breaking over the rooftops. Even here, in the streets of London, birds were singing all around me. At that time of the morning the volume seemed to have been turned up. I could see the blackbird on the branch of a tree, its throat pulsing.
Fergus was waiting. He opened the door before I knocked and stepped out to join me, kissing me on both cheeks and giving me a small smile.
‘Ready?’ I asked.
‘Ready.’
We didn’t talk. After twenty minutes or so we left the road and entered the Heath, making our way along the empty paths to the wilderness. We could no longer see the city glittering in the pale sunlight, or hear the noise of cars. I remembered that other dawn when I had walked there: then it had been winter, and I had come alone to talk to Greg. Standing under the boughs of an oak tree, I turned to Fergus.
‘It began like this,’ I said. ‘The alarm went and he woke and reached over to my side of the bed to turn it off, then he kissed me on the mouth and he said, “Good morning, gorgeous, did you have nice dreams?” and I muttered something thickly in reply but he couldn’t make out the words. He got out of bed and pulled on his dressing-gown, leaving me still tangled up with sleep. He went downstairs and made us both a cup of tea, and he brought mine upstairs in my stripy mug – which was what he always did, every morning. He watched me struggle up to sitting, half laughing at me. Then he had a quick shower. He sang in the shower, loudly, humming where he couldn’t remember the words. It was “ The Long and Winding Road”.
‘Mornings were always a bit of a rush and that morning was no different. He put on his clothes, brushed his teeth, didn’t bother shaving, then went downstairs, where I joined him, still not dressed. He didn’t have time for a proper breakfast. He bustled around, making coffee, reading out snippets from the headlines, finding a folder he needed. Then the post arrived. We heard it clatter on to the floor and he went to get it. He opened it standing up, tossing junkmail on to the table. He opened the envelope containing Marjorie Sutton’s signatures or, rather, Joe’s practice versions of them. He read Milena Livingstone’s scrawled message. He didn’t understand what he was looking at but he was puzzled. He tossed the sheet of paper on to the table, along with the rest of the discarded post, because he was late and in a hurry. The last time I saw him, he had a piece of slightly burnt toast in his mouth and he was running out of the door, keys in one hand, briefcase in the other.
‘He drove to work and got there by about nine. He made himself and Tania a pot of coffee, then went through his post and his emails, which he answered. Joe wasn’t there – he’d left a message with Tania that he was going to see a client. Then you arrived, to help with the new software that was being installed. Greg sat on his desk, swinging his legs, and talked to you about the IVF treatment I was going to have. He said he was sure it would turn out all right in the end. He was always the optimist, wasn’t he? Then he had a meeting with one of his clients, Angela Crewe, who wanted to set up a trust fund for her grandchild. After that, he made five phone calls, then another pot of coffee and ate two shortbread biscuits, which were his favourite. He kept them in the biscuit tin with the sunflowers on the lid.
‘He went out to lunch with you at the little Italian place round the corner from the office, and he ate spaghetti with clams, which he didn’t finish, and drank a glass of tap water, because he had just decided that bottled water was immoral. He probably told you that.’
‘Yes, he did,’ said Fergus.
‘You also talked about running, compared times. You went back to work and he went into his office and shut the door. The phone rang and it was Milena. She asked if he had received the page of signatures in the post and he replied that he had. She said she was sure that an intelligent man like him must have grasped its implications and Greg responded sharply that he didn’t deal in suspicions and implications and put down the phone.’
‘Is this all true?’ asked Fergus.
It was starting to rain and the drops felt cold and good on my face.
‘Most of it,’ I said. ‘Some of it’s the sort of thing that must have happened. The rest of it is what I tell myself in the middle of the night.
‘After he had put the phone down on Milena he sat for a while, pondering. Then he went into Joe’s office to ask him about it, but Joe still wasn’t there and he wasn’t answering his mobile. So instead he called up Marjorie Sutton’s files and went through them carefully. After he’d done that he rang her and made an appointment to see her the following day. He said it was urgent.