mistake in his conclusion, but this new, sober Mark, was a different person. She didn’t think he was likely to make errors at all.
She pulled up outside the White House at ten to six. Just a few minutes later Agnetha was showing in a man in his forties wearing low slung jeans. He had a mop of curly brown hair and an impish grin and was no more than five feet four inches tall. He held out a gnarled hand. ‘Tony Pye,’ he said. ‘You must be Mrs Gunn. I’ve heard a lot about you from Jericho. We’re friends. Drink at the same pub.’
‘Right.’ Martha swallowed a smile at the thought of Jericho Palfreyman and Tony sharing a couple of pints down at the local. She could just imagine Jericho leaking the latest drama that he was supposed to keep secret.
Incorrigible.
‘Shall we look at the room?’
Tony took a long, critical look at the half-painted walls, the thick layer of gloss paint on the skirting board, the moulded ceiling, the French windows, the splashes of paint on the floor where she and Sam had finally given up the effort. He gave his verdict: ‘Lovely room. What exactly did you have in mind?’ Like Jericho he was another one with a pleasant Shropshire burr. Shrewsbury born and bred.
‘Plain emulsioned walls, the skirting board and ceiling stripped and repainted.’
‘Did you want to get the paint yourself?’
‘I know the colour I have in mind. A sort of jersey cream with sage walls.’
‘I can get you a couple of shade cards,’ he said. ‘I’ll drop them off. Much cheaper if I get the paint.’ He grinned. ‘I get it trade price.’
‘Well that’s that then,’ she said. ‘How much?’
She’d already decided that he was going to do it.
He gave her a price roughly what she’d had in mind.
‘And when can you start?’
‘Next week.’
EIGHT
Alex wanted to put some questions to Alice Sedgewick alone. He didn’t want her husband aggressively taking over the entire interview, threatening and generally being obstructive. He wanted to get to the bottom of the entire affair and quickly but, like most experienced detectives, Alex Randall knew that investigations could and would not be hurried. The facts would tease themselves out bit by bit.
He had a think about how best to solve this problem and finally decided to ring Acantha Palk and request that she bring her client down to the station.
‘We’ll only keep her an hour or so,’ he said. ‘I just want to ask her a few questions. Clarify a couple of points. That’s all.’ He kept his voice deliberately casual.
She agreed readily and Alex gained the impression that she was as curious as he was to get to the bottom of this very odd affair, which involved her friend.
They arrived at ten and Alex quickly realized something else. Right in front of his eyes Alice Sedgewick was changing. Morphing into something else. Today she was wearing a very smart tweed woollen suit with high-heeled boots and looked more confident than he had seen her before. It was as though she was plucking some inner strength from deep within her own resources.
‘Inspector,’ she said with a warm smile, holding out her hand.
Acantha Palk too greeted him with smiling confidence.
The two women had patently come to some sort of agreement, an impasse, he decided.
He addressed Alice. ‘I hope you don’t mind, Mrs Sedgewick, but I’d like to clear up one or two things that are puzzling me.’
She appeared quite composed. She leaned forward. ‘But you do acknowledge, inspector, that I can have had nothing to do with the death of that little baby?’
Randall was prepared. ‘It would seem so,’ he said cautiously.
Alice Sedgewick leaned back in her chair. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I very much wanted to clear that up.’
‘Quite,’ Alex said. ‘But nevertheless the discovery made you do certain things.’
Instantly Alice looked wary. She gave a swift glance at her friend. Alex continued smoothly. ‘You undressed the baby.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ Alice insisted. ‘The baby was wrapped in a shawl. It was in tatters. As I pulled it out the shawl simply fell away.’
Acantha Palk gave him a triumphant look.
‘You didn’t notice what sex the child was?’
Alice shook her head slowly. ‘I can tell you, inspector, that was the last thing on my mind.’
It was a reasonable answer.
Acantha’s fine eyes were fixed on his face. She was trying to read whether the detective believed her client or not.
Alex kept his face impassive. ‘Mrs Sedgewick,’ he said. ‘Who is Poppy?’
She didn’t even hesitate. ‘My grandmother. Didn’t I tell you that? I meant to. My grandmother was named Poppy Eastley.’
Acantha gave her a friend a startled look.
Alex ploughed on. ‘Why did you call the
The evasive look was back. Alice Sedgewick’s mouth opened a little. Her eyes dropped to the floor, flickering from side to side. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said uncertainly. Then, from somewhere, she found an answer. ‘The baby, so stiff and still, limbs stuck together,’ she said, ‘reminded me of the dolls in the doll’s houses. The Frozen Charlottes. Poppy’s House.’
She didn’t even expect to be believed, Alex thought with a shock.
‘Is there anything else, inspector?’ Acantha Palk asked with icy politeness.
‘Yes,’ he said, looking not at the solicitor but at Alice. ‘I wonder if you’d mind,’ he said, with formal politeness, ‘going through the events of last Saturday night?’
She looked startled. ‘Again? Why?’
Alex leaned forward. ‘It’s surprising,’ he said, in a friendly manner, ‘how often one forgets a small detail, the sort of detail which appears insignificant. Unimportant. Sometimes, just sometimes -’ he gave her a pleasant, bland smile – ‘that little detail -’ he held up his forefinger and thumb in a pincer movement – ‘can be the very one which cracks the case.’
Acantha Palk looked guarded and suspicious. ‘Is this really necessary, inspector? Isn’t it simply going to cause Mrs Sedgewick further suffering?’
Alex held up his hand. ‘Humour me, Mrs Palk.’
Acantha Palk folded her arms and raised no more objections.
‘Take it from about – say – six o’clock?’
‘Well – I had some tea.’
Randall didn’t interrupt.
‘Just one of those nasty supermarket takeaways,’ she continued, speaking very quickly now. ‘I was going to watch the TV but it was all celebrity dancing and stuff like that. The films were rubbish. I’d seen them all before – the ones I wanted to, anyway. I got fidgety. So I poured myself a glass of wine and tried to settle down to a book.’ She looked straight at him and continued in the quick, breathless voice. ‘It was a thriller but I couldn’t get into that either. So I started drawing plans for the loft conversion.’ She met his eyes, challenging him. ‘The trouble was that however I tried to draw the plans the hot water tank kept getting in the way and I couldn’t see where else it could go in the house. I didn’t want to move it down to the bathroom and the place is too big for one of those Combi- boilers. I wanted the extra guest rooms to have their own bathrooms and I wondered if I could have a sewing room
