Guilty Pleasures, page 15
‘Look, I’ve not played games with you. Please, return the favour and just tell me what you think I’ve stolen.’
Smedley leaned forward menacingly. ‘We believe you broke into the safe and removed an item of communion plate with the approximate value of twenty-five thousand pounds.’
I gasped. ‘Even if I knew where the safe was, I wouldn’t know where to find the key or even if what was in there was worth stealing.’
‘We think you did. Nothing else was nearly so valuable.’
‘So there was other stuff?’
‘Was it your own idea to rob the safe? Or was it anyone else’s? The vicar’s, perhaps?’
Maybe I shouldn’t have turned down the idea of a nifty solicitor. ‘Robin is the best, most decent man I know.’
‘But he’s been under a lot of strain. You might both have seen stealing the plate as a way of easing his financial problems.’
‘Stealing would make a priest feel better? Getting a friend to steal? From a church, of all places? Have I just stepped through the Looking Glass?’
Smedley took a deep breath, but Long continued. ‘The thing is, Lina, as you know, your prints are on file. OK, it’s been a long time since we took them, but they don’t go off, you know. Which means we could identify the prints which we found all round the area of the safe.’
I pounced. And was really irritated when my brain chose that precise minute to remind me that in the period of the bloody snuffbox they used to call little boxes pouncet boxes. ‘But not in or on the safe?’ I managed at last.
‘You’d wear gloves, no doubt,’ Smedley sneered. There was a distinct suggestion of even you about her comment.
‘But not in the area of the safe, wherever that might be. Where is it, incidentally? I wouldn’t have thought leaving valuables in full view of a less reverent Joe Public than me was necessarily the best idea. I don’t happen to have a JCB to hand, but I’m sure some people do. The people who drive them into rural post offices, for instance.’
They exchanged a quick glance. I had an idea I’d put my finger on something, but I’d no idea what.
‘As a matter of interest, what were my dabs on?’ I thought hard and had a sudden vision of myself crawling round. ‘Hey, you didn’t find any of my beads, did you?’
Got them! ‘Why should we find beads?’
‘Because I broke a string while I was in the choir. I was looking at those lovely misericords . . . Hey, Fi, the church warden would vouch for me! She found me in there on all fours! So you’ll have knee prints as well as fingerprints. Are they admissible as evidence? I may even have left traces of blood. Hey, you wouldn’t need a gob-swab to get hold of my DNA!’
There was a long silence. In a TV programme, someone would have knocked on the door at this point and brought in more evidence to scupper my whole story. They didn’t now.
‘Look, I really am desperate for the loo.’
‘So you admit being in the area of the safe but nothing else?’
‘If I knew where the safe was . . . Please? The loo?’
When I was brought back, the whole chara . . . charaba . . . the whole silly play got going all over again. Smedley fired a question about Robin and his mental state, but I told her that was his business, not mine. I just repeated that he was one of the best people I’d ever met. I was this close to asking Freya to give him a character reference but thought that that might do more harm than good. And then, this time, just like on TV, there was a knock on the door.
In my fantasy, in popped Morris, riding heroically to the rescue: ‘She’s my informant, my expert witness, my lover.’ Any of those would have been nice. In reality it was another woman officer, clutching a DVD case. She inserted the disk into a player and left.
‘We are now going to show you exhibit blah-blah-blah, Lina, and we would like you to look at it carefully before you say anything.’
The grainy, jerky footage showed the back of a young woman, who was arguing with a middle-aged man in a street somewhere that looked vaguely familiar. Neither meant anything to me, since they were well out of the camera’s favoured range. The date and time ticked along underneath. Suspecting that these might be important, I tried till my brain squeaked to work out what I’d been doing and where I was when the footage was shot. It was only when the camera angle changed abruptly that I realized I did know one of them – the man was none other than Cashmere Roll-Neck, though on this occasion he sported an open shirt. Foolishly, I gave myself away by nodding. At least I suppose that must have been what I did: something made Smedley jot a hurried note. Then the camera cut again, managing to get a reasonable shot of the young woman.
It was like looking at myself from the other side of a mirror losing its silvering. Me, and yet not me. She was taller for a start, by about four inches, I’d judge. Griff wouldn’t have passed the clothes as suitable to venture out in. And her face looked over made-up, even in the poor footage.
‘What were you arguing about, Lina?’
Although I’d seen an attack coming, this particular line disconcerted me, probably because I was too busy wondering how to get in touch with this almost double of mine. I never did have much in the way of concentration, after all, except when it came to restoring china.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Then I remembered, with a blush, precisely what I’d been doing at the time and date shown on the screen – I’d been with Morris. In bed.
‘I asked you what you’d been arguing about.’
From nowhere came the right response, even if Griff might not have approved of the grammar. Perhaps it was the thought of Morris, who was never lost for words, especially nice meaty ones. ‘Telling you that would presuppose that one of the disputants was me.’ Not so much as a stutter. I added firmly, ‘I do recognize the man, but I don’t know his name. I’ve met him precisely twice.’ I gave them details. ‘I’ve even got the Marks and Spencer till receipt, so you should be able to check – to verify what I’ve said,’ I added helpfully.
Long gave a dry, not very pleasant, laugh. ‘The fact that you can prove you were with him on one occasion hardly proves that you weren’t on another.’
She was right, of course. Perhaps I did need a lawyer, to stop me saying silly things.
I waited for their next move.
‘So what were you arguing about?’
‘I don’t know because I wasn’t there. The woman he was talking to might resemble me but that’s all.’ She was my doppelgänger, of course. I cursed myself for not trying harder to find her, especially as Morris had said – with his copper’s instinct, strong as my divvying – that it might be important. I took a breath. ‘In fact, when I met the man, he looked shocked and horrified. He pretty well bolted. So when I met him by M and S’s olive oil, I challenged him. He bolted again.’ Their faces were imposs . . . impati . . . impassive. I continued, ‘A dear friend of mine also mistook the woman for me. She’s based in Hastings.’
They exchanged a look. ‘How convenient for you.’
Raising my hands might have looked like a gesture of surrender, but certainly wasn’t. ‘I have spoken to other people about the confusion. Look.’ I pointed to the screen. ‘She’s taller than me for a start. And I do not do diamanté T-shirts. Ever.’ I was getting silly now, not what I meant at all. What I really wanted to do, needed to do, was ask what I was supposed to have done, but I had an idea I’d soon be told.
‘What we’d like you to do is agree to DNA testing. What this means—’
‘Check those blood spots. If they don’t help, I think I’m one of that generation of people who had their DNA routinely taken and stored, whether or not they were ever charged. So you don’t need to repeat the gob-swab stuff. And while you’re at it, you can tell me how to apply to have the sample destroyed.’ It would have made a terrific exit line. But in such a situation you don’t exactly get up and walk out. Not without risking arrest, which would be a problem. So I tried my hardest to morph back from the hard street-girl I’d been two minutes ago into the sweetly reasonable person I’d aimed at earlier.
‘I don’t think you appreciate how serious this is, Lina.’
‘If I don’t, perhaps it’s because you still haven’t told me why you’ve needed to question me for the last hour.’ Calm down, calm down. No point in exaggerating: it couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes’ interrogation over Cashmere Roll-Neck.
‘Suppose you look at this then.’ She fast forwarded. She went through the rigmarole of identifying the disk again. The only words she didn’t use were showing the accused, though her tone sure as hell implied them.
The argument was getting physical. At first, the woman got the worst of it, but then the man looked scared out of his wits and bolted.
‘This is the last footage we have of our friend. Our late friend.’
‘So what happened to him?’ I asked. Just like that. I’d wanted to say all sorts of cool things: DNA at the crime scene, and the difference between mine and the killer’s; my alibi. Instead I stared, probably insolently. At last, seeing the effect that my question and then my silence were having, I made my mouth move. ‘I’ve already told you I’ve never met the woman, and I only spoke to the man once.’
‘You said you’d met him twice.’
In my imagination, hearing the cell door close behind me, it was all I could do not to wilt. But I took a breath and squared my shoulders. ‘Yes. Met him twice. Spoken once. When I met him in the Cathedral crypt, he bolted at the sight of me. I spoke to him in M and S. I told you. I’ve told you all I can. I don’t even know his name.’ When they didn’t help out there, I added, ‘Please may I go now?’ After all that assertiveness, I ended up whining just like a school kid. Even though the alibi I could have given for my double’s encounter with Cashmere Roll-Neck was certainly a pretty adult one.
As, grim-faced and reluctant, they ushered me back to the safer side of the police world, one where someone had found Griff a cup of tea and made sure the surveillance cameras kept an eye on our van, I asked myself a question this time. Just why hadn’t I mentioned Morris?
TWENTY
Griff fussed and coddled me, chuntering away as we dealt with all the aftermath of the fair. I didn’t know whether I was soothed and irritated – probably a lot of both. At last he picked up on my mood, and supper was a very quiet affair. Clearly, he knew I was holding something back, and since we’d not mentioned him telling Estelle Sanditon that I had a boyfriend in the Met, he’d probably got a pretty good idea of how relations between me and Morris stood. Or not. Morris hadn’t been in touch today. Not at all.
As I sipped the tiny glass of port Griff insisted would settle what he called my nerves, and actually went straight to my head, a few ideas started to pop up. One was to contact Josie about sightings of my double; I nearly put it off, but hauling myself to the office I dialled her number. I held on forever. Nothing except her answerphone. I left a very short message, interrupted by a massive yawn. Another was to text Morris – nothing romantic in case he was spending time with Penny, but to ask him what to do with the fake snuffbox. I toyed with mentioning my encounter with Freya’s colleagues, but thought face to face would be better for that. Face to face or at least ear to ear.
I was so tired – or so zapped by the port – I told Griff I needed an early night and was ready to head upstairs when I realized I hadn’t checked our security footage. One of us always does this just in case anyone’s chanced his or her luck, even if they’d find it next to impossible to penetrate our defences, so we could keep a particular eye open for them. We had a nice shot of the village postie, another of the woman who delivers the parish mag. So I could put it to bed. But I pressed the wrong button and found I was watching the shots from the camera watching the gates to the yard. I got a nice close up of myself, staring up at a policewoman looming over me. Something told me not to delete it. In fact, I rewound it a bit, to look at the pair of them, in their car. Why should they have come in an unmarked vehicle? That really worried me. And why should they look so very different from the blonde clones who interviewed me?
I could practically hear the cogs going round in my brain. I certainly felt them. Very carefully indeed, I saved the footage to disk. Then I called Griff.
He peered closely, with and without his reading glasses. His frown was puzzled, and eventually very relieved. ‘No, I don’t think you’ve gone crazy, loved one. The women are quite different from the ones I saw at the police station – though it was only a glimpse I had of all four, of course. But there is something very familiar indeed about this one.’ He pointed at the one at the side of the van. ‘Very familiar indeed.’ This time it was Griff’s brain cogs that worked overtime: he even held his head as if to steady it. ‘No, it’s gone. But I trust it will pop up at three this morning, as such things irritatingly do. No, I shan’t summon you immediately – you need your slumber, sweet one. I shall write it down, so I still have it in the morning. By then everything will seem much clearer. It will for you too, you know,’ he added ambi . . . ambid . . . ambiguously.
I was still in the shower next morning when Griff shouted that Morris wanted to speak to me. I yelled that I would phone back in five minutes. All the same, I speeded up; he had a career to worry about, not to mention a failing marriage and a baby.
What I didn’t expect when I trotted downstairs, still in kimono and slippers, was to see his back view at the kitchen table. Should I bolt back upstairs and dress, not to mention doing something with my hair? It was too late. He’d turned with a smile that made my heart give a jolt that almost winded me.
‘I’m on my way to Ashford to pick up Eurostar, but I thought I’d better collect that snuffbox and drop it into Maidstone for safe keeping.’
‘Good idea,’ I said matter-of-factly. Possibly. ‘I’ll go and get it.’
I probably established an Olympic record for throwing clothes on; I grabbed the box from my secret safe on the way back down again. By this time his face was very serious. No doubt Griff had been regaling him with the story of yesterday’s encounter with the police.
‘Obviously on a fishing expedition,’ he said briskly, slipping the box into an evidence bag and scribbling a receipt. ‘They haven’t anything concrete against you – I assume! – and hoped you’d incriminate yourself.’
I could have wished Griff anywhere except in our kitchen, busying himself with the coffee pot. He might have had his back to us, but you could almost feel the draught as his ears flapped.
‘You were right when you said we needed to find my double,’ I said, which didn’t seem to be an answer to anything. ‘You see, they almost have a case against me for burgling the church – except I still don’t know where the safe might be. But the footage of me arguing with the murder victim isn’t of me at all – I was definitely at home at the times the screen showed.’
‘The trouble is,’ Griff chipped in, ‘I was away with Aidan at the time, and can’t give her an alibi. Whatever repair she was doing at the time could be at best a silent witness.’ He sat down heavily and sipped his coffee in silence. ‘However,’ he said, perking up as the first drop of caffeine started its work, ‘I did have a three o’clock moment, dear one, and I did write down the thought that had been so elusive. Morris, we have some curious footage of two women officers who came to arrest our lovely girl. They not only appear to be quite different from the ones who subsequently interviewed her, though presumably there could be an innocent explanation for that, but also one of them has a more than fleeting resemblance to the man whom I so foolishly admitted to our cottage and who tried to find the original snuffbox.’ He beamed. ‘As soon as we’re all done here, I will phone Josie and ask for her immediate assistance with locating the double and you can show Morris our pretty photos, my chick.’
I was halfway to my feet when I heard myself say, ‘No! Not Josie. If my double could kill Cashmere . . . No, not Josie!’ Frail but as stubborn as they come. And more than ready to fight my corner. ‘In fact, tell her to stay at home until – until Freya’s colleagues have spoken to her, at least.’
Morris put his hand on my arm and forced me back on to the chair. ‘Are you having one of your divvy moments, Lina? You are, aren’t you?’ He fished his phone out and dialled. Sighing with frustration, he muttered, ‘Best coverage by the front door, yes?’
‘Nice to know someone who trusts you implicitly,’ Griff said. He meant a lot more, didn’t he?
Morris reappeared, closing his mobile. ‘OK, someone’s going to talk to Josie. Maybe a call from you, Griff, to tell her to sit tight till my colleagues turn up – but also to demand ID before she takes her front door off the chain. Right?’
Griff scuttled off.
The moment he’d gone, Morris kissed me. ‘You were very quiet when Griff was talking about vases testifying you were here. Do I gather this was because I’m your alibi?’
I nodded, swallowing hard. ‘Just in case – you know, you and Penny ever . . . They’ve no case, Morris, and I didn’t want to drag you into anything you didn’t want to be dragged into,’ I ended lamely.
‘You lovely girl. But if push comes to shove, name me and be damned. They don’t need to know what we were actually doing, do they? Not every last detail?’
‘They’ll work it out, since I didn’t say in the first place. Are you OK with that?’
‘I wouldn’t be OK with you standing trial for something you didn’t do. Anything. But especially robbery or murder.’ He kissed me again.
‘If you’re sure . . . Anyway, look, these are the pics. I’ll burn them on to a disk for you.’
He peered at the screen, literally scratching his head. ‘It’s a bit weird, two women officers coming to bring you in, and another pair of women turning up at roughly the same time to – well, we don’t know what their intentions were, but I bet they concerned the snuffbox or its fraudulent spawn.’ He cupped the side of my face, but didn’t repeat the kiss, since Griff bustled out of the office. ‘Very weird, in fact,’ he added, as if he meant Griff to overhear.
