“We didn’t sleep together, Chief Inspector. I wish we had.”
“You told us last time,” said Macbeth, “that you hadn’t seen her throughout that two-year period. Do you wish to change that statement?”
“No.”
“Then it isn’t true that you’d been meeting your wife regularly for some time?”
“Totally untrue.” Harry was startled. The trend of the interview was puzzling him and he looked from one detective to another in search of a clue to their line of reasoning. Their faces were trained to yield no secrets, but he was conscious of frustration not far below their surface assurance. They were uncertain of their ground, he could tell. Important pieces were missing from the picture that they were trying to build and so they were pursuing a speculative enquiry in the hope of stumbling across a fresh signpost to the truth. He was well acquainted with how they must feel after years of cross-examining resilient witnesses — themselves policemen, more often than not — who refused to break down but whom he suspected of holding the key that he sought. The tricks of their trade closely resembled his own: the haphazard questioning, the dodgem swerves from blandness to provocation.
Might as well steal the initiative. “So what progress have you made with the investigation, Chief Inspector? Any prospect of an arrest in the near future?”
“Not imminently, I’m afraid, sir. As you can gather, our enquiries are continuing. We have received some valuable information, it’s fair to say.”
“Such as?”
“Well, sir, you’ll appreciate that we have to limit what we disclose at this stage, even to the husband of the deceased.”
The deceased. The words struck him like a slap on the cheek, a reminder of the fact of Liz’s death. He said, “Have you traced her lover yet?”
Macbeth snorted. Skinner said calmly, “I’m sorry to say that my sergeant isn’t finding it easy to come to terms with the existence of your wife’s new lover.”
No need to feign bewilderment at that. “I don’t understand.”
“I’ll spell it out for you, sir. We’ve interviewed a large number of people who were on good terms with your wife, including several of the friends and relations you told us about. So far, none of them can come up with a name for this new man in your wife’s life.”
“Nothing odd about that, it’s typical Liz.” How to explain her to men whom she had never met? “She would like to dramatise the situation, make a mystery where none existed.” A thought occurred to him. “And she certainly told her sister a little about the man.”
“Together with one or two others, that’s perfectly true. But it is a mite surprising that she played her cards so close to her chest, wouldn’t you agree? I gather that she was a lady who liked to — if I may say so — talk about herself.”
“The man’s married. She didn’t want his wife to find out.”
“Could be, sir.” Skinner’s eyelids drooped. “Then again, there seems to have been a widely held opinion that one day the two of you would get back together again. Mrs. Edge thought that, for instance.”
“As I said, it was my hope too. Forlorn, as it proved.”
“Yes, Mr. Devlin. All the same, I can believe she was unhappy with Michael Coghlan — she’d made a bad move there. I can accept that she was having an affair. Yet there’s no hard evidence of any other relationship. Obviously, you will say that she covered her tracks, but at present the man most people think she really cared for was you.”
“I wish they’d been right.” Harry felt the urge well up inside him to find a cigarette, have a smoke to ease the tension. But he suddenly realised that it was important for him to resist temptation. “I’ve already made it clear to you that I’d have been glad to have her back. She could have left Coghlan any hour of the day or night as far as I was concerned.”
“Yet, sir, is that correct? The man’s known for being violent. Would she have had the nerve to kick him into touch?”
Harry said, “Liz didn’t lack guts.”
Macbeth intervened. “What about her attempt at suicide?”
“What are you…?” Too late Harry realised that he didn’t know how to reply. In his confusion he allowed the sentence to trail away. The detectives were watching him closely. Taking a deep breath, he said, “She never discussed it with me.”
“Yet you were aware of it?” This was Skinner.
“Yes — that is, I saw her left wrist on Wednesday night. I didn’t mention it then. I imagined — in her own good time…”
“The wounds were only superficial, I’m told. But they appear to have been inflicted recently. Could you explain why you failed to mention the matter in your statement?”
Helplessly, Harry shook his head. “No reason. It didn’t cross my mind. Or seem important. Obviously I only gave you the gist of what happened the other night. Not a verbatim report.”
Macbeth said, “So you say that your wife arrived unexpectedly on Wednesday night after two years of playing away from home. You noticed that she had tried to kill herself but didn’t utter a word. And the next day she was murdered. Is that what you’re asking us to accept?”
“I’m not asking you to accept anything,” said Harry. To his dismay, he found that he was almost shouting. “I’ve simply explained what happened.”
Skinner said, “But are you telling us everything you know?”
“As far as I can recall. You must remember, this isn’t an ordinary experience.” Feeling the need for a prop, for something to do with his hands, he again felt that pressing desire for the comfort of a cigarette. It occurred to him then that Liz would have been amused by the thought that she had, indirectly, caused him to practise such self- denial when all her attempts to persuade him to give up during her lifetime had failed. He relaxed, but only for a moment.
Skinner finally lobbed his grenade.
“So it would come as a complete surprise, would it, for you to learn that your wife was pregnant?”
Harry stared at the detective, unable to utter a word.
“Yes, Mr. Devlin, about eight weeks gone.”
Hoarsely, Harry said, “I know nothing about that. Nothing at all.”
Skinner’s gloomy face wrinkled with disbelief as he said, “Can we take it, then, that you deny being the father?”
Chapter Ten
The moment the detectives had gone, Harry telephoned his sister-in-law. Maggie’s voice was anxious. Gone was her customary assurance, the quiet pleasure at having planned life as a series of attainable targets — marriage, children, money — that had irritated Liz and, perhaps, made her jealous.
Cutting short the conversational preliminaries, he said, “The police have been round again. They tell me Liz was pregnant.”
“What?”
He repeated himself. From Maggie’s faltering response, he had little doubt that the news stunned her just as much as it had him.
“She didn’t tell you, then?”
“No, no. I — can’t believe it.”
“Hard to imagine, I agree, Liz as a mother. It hasn’t sunk in with me either, yet.” Nor had it. Their own talks about having children seemed to belong to a long ago era when being young meant that there was plenty of time, no need to rush. Liz had said, “Let’s live a little, first.” Unless she had grown careless, her outlook must have changed. The reminder of how far he and his wife had grown apart in the two years of their separation was like a punch to the solar plexus.
Maggie asked, “Do they know who the father is?”
