Doxey shrugged. ‘You might call it lack of nerve, Mr Devlin but…’
‘And you claim you never saw Carole again after you left the house?’
Doxey’s tone hardened. ‘I did not lurk about, if that is what you are implying, and follow her into Sefton Park.’
‘Did you quarrel about whether or not to break the news to Guy and Kathleen?’
‘Not at all. I cannot say I care for your insinuations, Mr Devlin. I would sooner have killed myself than seen a hair on her head come to any harm.’
‘I accept that you found her attractive,’ said Harry, ‘but I only have your word for it that you agreed to marry Carole. Suppose her proposal horrified you. After all, you were a rising star of the radical left. An affair with the teenage daughter of your closest colleague might have done you untold harm if it had come to light. Perhaps for you it was only a fling.’ He paused deliberately. ‘If you’d turned her down and she then threatened to go public, wouldn’t that have been a motive for murder?’
Doxey’s plump cheeks were drained of all colour and he was gripping the edge of the desk as if in need of support. When he spoke his voice was choked with anger as well, Harry thought, as with a touch of fear. ‘What you suggest, Mr Devlin, is entirely misconceived. I came here this morning in good faith, hoping to clear up last night’s little misunderstanding. I gather you have a reputation for doggedness and I appreciate that even after thirty years, my relationship with Carole might in some quarters still be seen as providing cause for criticism. The press is never happier than when it is questioning the morals of people in the public eye, and I have made one or two enemies over the years. You can embarrass me, I accept, but you have no grounds whatsoever for accusing me of murder.’
‘So you say.’
‘And I can prove it!’ Doxey raised his voice. He was beginning to look his age: still smart and well groomed, but undoubtedly sixty plus.
Harry gave a sceptical nod, confident now that he had unsettled his man. ‘Really? And how can you do that?’
‘A check on my medical records should suffice. You see, Mr Devlin, two days before Carole was killed, my right wrist was put into plaster. I had slipped on ice the previous day and fractured it when I tried to break my fall. On Leap Year Day in 1964, I could no more have strangled Carole Jeffries than made love to her to celebrate our betrothal.’
After Doxey had gone, Harry sat for a while at his desk, with his phone off the hook. His mind was working furiously. At last he felt sure he could see the sequence of events leading up to Carole Jeffries’ death, rather than the blurred image presented by press cuttings and Cyril Tweats’ old file.
He had a sense of events moving towards a crescendo during the first few weeks of 1964. Carole had been reckless. After stealing Shirley’s lover, she had grown tired of him and turned to an older man. Her contempt for Edwin Smith had mirrored her treatment of Ray Brill. The golden girl of shock-horror news coverage had been tarnished by her unrelenting pursuit of pleasure. And what, he wondered, did her parents make of it all — the adoring Guy and the stern Kathleen? How would they have reacted had they learned that their daughter had fallen in love with a family friend, a man almost twice her age?
The press picture of Carole came into his mind. Over the last few days he had come to understand her and now he believed he knew the reason for her death. He had so desperately wanted to know who had strangled her, and why, and now that he had his answers, his principal emotion was sadness rather than satisfaction. With murder, he reminded himself, there were no slick solutions, just the desolate reality of human behaviour as weak as it was wicked.
Soon he was on the road and heading north. As he drove he tossed around various ideas on how he might obtain confirmation for his hypothesis about Carole’s murder, but in the end he decided he must trust to luck. Even as he was parking once more outside the block of flats where Kathleen Jeffries lived, he had no more than a vague plan for persuading her to talk to him. All he could do was make her realise that the truth could not be buried forever. It must be acknowledged: Vera Smith deserved nothing less.
He pressed her bell and when he heard her sharp voice through the entryphone, he said, ‘This is Harry Devlin again. I really do need to talk to you about Carole.’
He could imagine her compressing her lips in cold anger — and, perhaps, apprehension. ‘I have nothing whatever to say to you.’
‘Mrs Jeffries, please listen to me. I know what happened on that Leap Year Day. I know who strangled your daughter. And what’s more, I strongly suspect that you know too.’
‘You’re talking nonsense! This is most offensive — an impertinent intrusion on private property. If you are not away within the next two minutes, I shall not hesitate to call the police.’
‘It won’t do any good,’ said Harry. ‘And besides, the police will need to be told about the mistake they made thirty years ago. Isn’t it better for us to talk?’
‘Why on earth should I wish to talk to you, you foolish young man?’
‘Because,’ said Harry patiently, ‘you have kept a terrible secret for so long and now it’s a secret no more.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ But there was no disguising the dismay in the disembodied voice.
‘I think you do, Mrs Jeffries. Let’s face the truth together. We both know that Carole was killed by her own father. Your husband, Guy.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
‘Guy idolised her,’ said Kathleen Jeffries, ‘that was half the trouble. And for all his faults, I idolised him.’
Harry nodded. They were sitting in her lounge, a large austerely furnished room which boasted a narrow balcony and a view across the dunes to the distant sea. The dry heat of underfloor central heating made the room warm but somehow far from cosy. Her mantelpiece was bare of family photographs and bric-a-brac; her shelves were crammed with nineteenth-century classics rather than with her husband’s books. Curled up in a corner was the old Labrador that had been her sole companion during the years since Guy’s death. After half an hour of conversation, he felt he had begun to win her confidence and she had even thawed to the extent of making him a cup of tea. In response to her final angry questions, he had explained how he knew that, if Smith was innocent, then unless Carole had fallen prey to a passing maniac, the only person who could have murdered her was Guy.
‘Benny Frederick, like Ray Brill, had an alibi. Clive Doxey had broken his wrist and was scarcely in a fit state to strangle anyone. Who else could have been guilty?’
‘So you followed a simple process of elimination?’ she asked, the hint of scorn in her voice making her sound like an elderly schoolmistress despairing of a pupil’s haphazard ways.
‘No, there was much more to it than that.’
He’d explained that he had puzzled over the dedication at the front of Our Sterile Society. To Carole, whom I adore? I’ve never been a parent and I’m sure if I ever did have a child I might worship her, but I doubt I’d wear my heart on my sleeve in quite the same way. It was obvious from that, and from everything I’d been told, that it was an exceptionally close relationship. Perhaps unhealthily so.’
Yet his ideas had not crystallised until he considered the discrepancy between the newspaper’s published account of an interview Guy gave immediately after the discovery of Carole’s body and the original version preserved in the file on the black. His exact words had been I could never have let her go, but in print he had been quoted as saying I should never have let her go. Presumably a long-forgotten sub-editor had regarded the change as an improvement which seemed to make more sense: yet when one realised Guy was an obsessively devoted father whose only child was about to marry his best friend, a man almost twice her age, the words he actually used took on a sinister significance. Even in the bits and pieces of the old Cyril Tweats file, Guy came over as a man not merely shocked by his bereavement but horrified by it — and, perhaps, filled with self-loathing. It had dawned on Harry that in suspecting Doxey, he had been looking at the wrong man.