‘Do you believe Rachel Bailey had nothing to do with it until afterwards?’ she asked, as he drove her home.
He sighed. ‘I don’t know.’ Then he smiled tiredly. ‘But if that’s her story, you can be sure she will stick to it.’
Yes. She couldn’t walk all over Rachel. Not even Bernard Bailey had been able to do that, because Rachel was as tough as the old boots in which she had spent her childhood. And she might be very good at summing up the flaws in her fellow man, but she was as paralysed with fear at the idea of returning to the poverty in which she had grown up as Nicola was of returning to the violence in which she had; Nicola had chosen Gutless Gus as insurance against it, and Rachel had chosen the pursuit of money.
‘Where do you think she’s gone?’ she asked.
‘Who knows?’ said Lloyd. ‘But she’ll turn up. She has to, if she wants to collect.’
Judy frowned. ‘Will she collect?’ she said. ‘If she’s involved?’
‘I’m not sure. I think she might. I’m sure she persuaded Law to do it, but possibly not overtly. I doubt if we could prove she helped plan it.’
He was parking in the restricted zone. ‘You’ll have to get up and move the car before eight if you’re thinking of staying the night,’ she said.
He smiled. ‘I wasn’t,’ he said. ‘For one thing, I have to change my clothes now and again, and for another, I’ve got a bit of a headache. I think I’ll just go home, if you don’t mind – I’ll pick you up in the morning.’
She smiled too. ‘You don’t have to make excuses,’ she said. ‘ I wasn’t thinking of jumping on your bones.’
‘I’m not making excuses! I’ve got a headache. But I would like to use your loo. I don’t know how many cans of drink I’ve got through today. This weather gives me a thirst.’
They were in the flat, in the hallway, and Lloyd was on his way to the bathroom, before she remembered. She went into the sitting room, telling herself that he had absolutely no reason whatever to open her bathroom cabinet, when she heard the loo flush, heard the question that followed a moment later.
‘Have you got any aspirin in here?’ he called. ‘I don’t think I’ve got any at home. I can’t remember the last time I had a—’
The unfinished sentence said it all. She sat down, and waited.
He appeared in the doorway, the box in his hand. ‘And are you?’ he asked, his voice like ice.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I haven’t done it yet.’
‘But you do know,’ he said. ‘ Or you wouldn’t have bought it.’ He came into the room.
She couldn’t look at him. ‘I have all the symptoms.’
‘How long?’
‘This is the second month I’ve missed.’
‘Then you really don’t need this, do you? And when was I going to be let in on your little secret?’
‘I was going to tell you!’ she said. ‘I just – I just wanted to be sure.’
‘You
are
sure!’ He sat down on her coffee table, and made her look at him. ‘ Why didn’t you tell me?’ he asked.
She was so confused about the whole thing she hardly knew any more why she had kept it secret. Because she had hoped she was mistaken, and she had known that she wasn’t, and she didn’t know what she wanted to do about it.
‘I wanted to be sure of how I felt,’ she said.
‘How you felt,’ he said. ‘ Of course, how
you
feel is so much more important, isn’t it, than how
I
might feel.’
‘That’s not fair.’
‘It’s always you!’ he said, his voice rising. ‘What
you
want to do, how
you
want to live, what
you
need, what
you
want. So
you
were going to decide what
you
wanted to do with
our
baby! Do you
ever
think of us as a couple?’
‘Of course I do!’
‘Well, you’ve a bloody funny way of showing it! And when you had decided you didn’t want to keep it? What were you going to do then? I’d never have known, would I?’
‘Yes! I didn’t mean I wanted to—’ She broke off, and started again. ‘I just wanted to work out how I felt about it before I spoke to you, that’s all!’
‘Don’t kid yourself, Judy! I’d have known nothing about it. That’s why you didn’t tell me. Because I’ve got no say in the matter.’
‘No!’ she said. She had been trying to pretend that she wasn’t pregnant, in the hope that it would all just go away, and she would never have to decide where she stood, but she had always been going to tell him, once she understood her own feelings. ‘This is what I was trying to avoid!’ she said. ‘The last thing I need is you giving me a hard time before I even know what I want!’
‘The last thing
you
need. Before you know what
you
want. To hell with what
I
need or want. Don’t you think perhaps I need to know whether or not you want my baby?’
‘Oh, Lloyd! It’s not
like
that!’ She certainly didn’t want anyone else’s. She just wasn’t sure she could face having any baby. ‘Is it important to you that I do have it?’ she asked.
‘Oh, who cares? Certainly not you! Why break the habit of a lifetime and start worrying about what’s important to me now?’ He put the package down on the table, and stood up. ‘There you are,’ he said. There seems very little point in doing it, but go ahead, if it makes you feel better. Let me know if you need any time off work.’
The flat door slammed, and she heard his feet rattle down the stairs, heard the front door slam. Heard his car door slam. Heard the engine start up, heard it roar off, much faster than usual.
She walked out on rows, not him. She drove fast, not him. She had really hurt him this time, and that was the last thing she had meant to do.
Detective Constable Marshall was a pleasant, friendly Scot, with a delivery almost as slow as Rachel’s, and a face almost as anxious as Nell’s, but every time a policeman walked up the path, however unthreatening, Nicola was certain that he had come for her. DC Marshall had come to tell her that Curtis Law had been charged with her father’s murder, and it had taken her a moment to adjust to what he had said.
‘Just Curtis Law?’ she said, her heart beating a little too fast.
‘We would like to interview one other person in connection with the incident,’ he said, clearly being careful not to deviate from the press release.
Rachel. It had to be.
Gus was hovering, as he always was at the start of the police interviews; if events were to take a turn he didn’t like, he would be off like a shot. If she
had
told him about her father, he would probably have left her sooner than actually do anything about it.
‘And we thought you ought to know that the postmortem will be carried out on your father’s body this morning,’ he said.
Nicola nodded briefly, then realized that the funeral hadn’t even crossed her mind. ‘Will his body be released after that?’ she asked. ‘For the funeral arrangements to be made?’
‘It might be,’ said Marshall. ‘ But there’s a possibility that it won’t, now that charges have been brought. The defence might want the chance to carry out their own post-mortem.’
He left, and she turned to go back into the surgery.
‘Don’t you think the funeral arrangements are Rachel’s business?’ Gus said.
‘I don’t know whose business they are,’ she said. ‘Rachel’s boyfriend’s been charged with his murder, and I don’t think she’ll be far behind. Even if she isn’t, I doubt very much if she’ll
attend
his funeral, far less arrange it.’
Gus looked startled, as well he might. She had never snapped at him in her life. And she didn’t even really mean all that. She was sure Rachel would discuss it all with her, if appropriate. But right now, it seemed singularly inappropriate.
‘Nicky,’ Gus said slowly, almost unwillingly. ‘On Sunday your dad wouldn’t leave the house, not for five minutes.’
‘What about it?’
‘Well … Finch said yesterday, didn’t he? That there was no record of him calling this number.’ He looked down.
Nicola had no urge to kiss the top of his head. ‘So?’
His head came up again. ‘ Did he really ring you about a sheep?’ he asked.
Nicola went through to the surgery. There was no need to answer; it didn’t matter whether her father had or hadn’t rung her about a sheep. What mattered was that Gus had asked.
‘At last,’ Freddie said.
‘Sorry I’m a bit late. I presumed you’d start without me.’ Lloyd always contrived to be a bit late. The actual opening ceremony was the one that got to him. Once Freddie was diving about with bits of body, he could just about take it. This morning, he wasn’t sure he could take any of it.
‘No, no, no!’ said Freddie. ‘Not that! At last you have brought me one that Spilsbury himself would have smacked his lips over.’
Freddie was happier than Lloyd had ever seen him, and Freddie was a man who was immensely happy in his work. That did not make Lloyd feel one jot better.
‘Go on,’ he groaned.
‘Well, the stab wounds didn’t kill him. Neither did the barbiturates.’
Barbiturates? Lloyd blinked at Freddie, beaming with pride and pleasure, enjoying every macabre moment, and he still hadn’t got to the punchline.
‘No,’ he went on, ‘ what did for him was respiratory failure due to a massive overdose of morphine.’ He smiled even more happily. ‘Enough to see off a horse.’
A lot of questions came into Lloyd’s mind, but one more than any other. ‘How late for this post-mortem am I?’ he asked.
‘Very late. I opened him up last night. Couldn’t wait any longer’
‘You mean,’ Lloyd said slowly, ‘ like a child sneaking down to open his Christmas presents?’
‘Yes,’ said Freddie, gloriously unaware of Lloyd’s horrified reaction to what he had said. ‘Exactly. I knew he couldn’t have died from loss of blood – well, I said so at the scene. And I thought maybe respiratory failure at the time, if you remember. But I said I thought it was odd. I asked if he was on medication, because he’d had the radiators on, which suggested that he had felt cold, and some morphine-based drugs will do that to you, if you’ve taken too much, and there were signs which suggested it might be that. But Judy said he wasn’t on medication. Then when I had a good look at him back here, I saw the bruising on his jugular. I wondered about that, obviously, but I had to put him away. Then last night when I got back, I came here and opened him up, and that was when I found all the—’
‘Don’t,’ said Lloyd. Details he could not take, not after drinking so long and so late after he had reached home last night that he had got Tom Finch to pick him up this morning rather than drive into work. All he’d need would be to get breathalysed and lose his job before he was made redundant. It was only at the police station that he had remembered about Judy. She had arrived late; they hadn’t spoken. He had picked up his car before coming here, on the grounds that the alcohol had had more than enough time to leave his system; he really hadn’t had all that much. He had drunk long and late, but not particularly to excess. However, his head still ached, and his stomach was still just a little fragile, so perhaps his system knew better than he did just how much counted as excess.
Freddie smiled. All right,’ he said. ‘No gory details. You look a bit rough, do you know that? Anyway, I know I should have told you I was doing it, but we’ve got this equipment now,’ he said, pointing above his head. ‘Videos the whole operation, so I thought – why bother Lloyd? He can watch it at his leisure and fast-forward through the really nasty bits.’
Another bloody video. Literally bloody, this time. Lloyd felt as though he had spent his entire life watching videos. And indeed, that had, until this week, been his relaxation. Old films, old TV series, that sort of thing. But he thought that this case might spoil that innocent pleasure for life. Had it really only been yesterday that he had thought he might want to do it for a living?
He felt like death himself as he looked at Freddie, who was labelling some unspeakable specimen, and sighed. ‘And now that you
have
the pathologist’s equivalent of a mountain bike with thirty-six gears, where does that leave the man we charged yesterday evening with murder?’ he said.
Freddie sucked in his breath. ‘ Stab wounds didn’t kill him,’ he repeated. ‘I told you it was an odd one – you should have waited.’
‘Did they hasten his death?’ asked Lloyd. ‘They must have, surely.’
‘No. Wounds like that, inflicted on someone in as robust good health as Mr Bailey, not only wouldn’t have killed him, they wouldn’t have kept him in hospital. A pub-brawl injury. He’d have been patched up and sent home. The worst one wasn’t remotely life-threatening.’
Lloyd rubbed his forehead. ‘But he wasn’t in robust good health when he was stabbed,’ he said. ‘He had been pumped full of barbiturates and morphine and had been throwing up and God knows what all. What happens if you stab someone in
that
condition?’
Freddie signalled for the singularly unfortunate Mr Bailey to be wheeled away, and the hosing-down and cleaning-up operation began. ‘What happens,’ he said, ‘is that you make a number of unnecessary holes in his chest. The stabbing didn’t make a blind bit of difference.’
Lloyd didn’t want to hear this. He really, really didn’t want to hear this.
Freddie peeled off his gloves and threw them in the bin. ‘If these wounds had been inflicted on someone who had not subsequently died, you’d have been looking at a charge of malicious wounding at best, I’d say. Maybe attempted murder, in that I understand that to have been the intention, but the knife didn’t go in far enough to do any real damage.’
‘You mean we’re going to have to let him go?’
‘I’m just the pathologist – I don’t make the rules. I’m saying that your man stuck a not very sharp knife into his victim with a fair degree of force, but it didn’t go in very far, largely because it was a very short knife, and the deepest wound, the one I thought might be serious when I examined him at the scene, was in no way life-threatening, because he didn’t hit any vital functions, and the wound was not of itself serious. The stabbing did not contribute to Mr Bailey’s death, Lloyd. So unless he poisoned him as well …’ He grinned. ‘I’d say Mr Law’s actions had nothing whatever to do with Mr Bailey’s demise.’