Wednesday afternoon. I passed it to Dave and asked if Prendergast had arrived yet. He was locked in the cell with his client, I learned, discussing strategies, defences and tactics. The truth was outside his remit.
“’Ello, Mr Priest,” a squeaky voice said, behind me. I spun round and faced two traffic cops straight in the eye. They were wearing standard-issue Velcro moustaches and don’t-do — that expressions, but neither had a ventriloquist’s dummy sitting on his arm. I tilted my gaze downwards forty-five degrees and met that of a grubby angel standing between them.
“Jamie!” I exclaimed, treading an uneasy path between disapproval and surprise. “What are you doing here?”
“Bin invited in to ’elp you wiv enquiries, ’aven’t I?” he replied.
“And can you ’elp — help — us?”
“Nah. Don’t know nowt about it, do I?”
“Well do your best.” I turned back to the desk, but he said: “’Ere, Mr Priest. Is it right you used to ’ave a knee-type Jag?”
“That’s right,” I told him. “A red one.”
“Cor!” he replied. “Best car on t’road.”
They took him away to feed him on bacon sandwiches while he fed them a pack of lies, and we arranged to interview Silkstone in ten minutes. I went to the bog and washed my face. There was a mounting pile of reports on my desk, but they’d have to wait. I always read them all, but on every murder enquiry we have a dedicated report reader who siphons off the important stuff. I like to read all the irrelevant details, too: the minutiae of the lives of the people who pass through our hands. Sometimes, they tell me things. As Confucius say, wisdom comes through knowledge.
Prendergast was wearing a blue suit and maroon tie, and could have been about to deliver a budget speech. He didn’t. He launched straight into the attack by complaining about our treatment of his client, who was, he reminded us, traumatised by the sudden and violent death of the woman he loved.
I apologised if we had appeared insensitive, but reminded them that Mr Silkstone had, by his own admission, killed a man and we were conducting a murder enquiry. We’d collect some of his own clothes for him, I promised, as soon as the crime scene was released, and I told him that his wife’s body had been taken to the mortuary. We needed Silkstone to formally identify the body later, and he agreed.
“Will he be taken there in handcuffs, Inspector?” Prendergast asked.
“As Mr Silkstone surrendered himself voluntarily I don’t think that will be necessary,” I conceded. I must be getting soft.
The preliminary fencing over, we started asking questions. Silkstone stuck to his story, saying that he’d come home to see Latham leaving his house. Inside, he’d found Margaret lying on the bed with a ligature around her neck. He’d attempted to remove it, but quickly realised that she was dead. The rest was a bit vague, he claimed. It always is. He agreed that he must have followed Latham home and gone in the house after him. He suddenly found himself standing in the kitchen, with Latham’s body lying on the floor, between his feet. There was a knife sticking out of Latham’s chest, and on the worktop there was one of those wooden blocks with several other knives lodged in it. He did not dispute that he stabbed Latham, but claimed to have no memory of the actual deed.
When he realised the enormity of what he’d done he sat in the front room for a while — about ten minutes, he thought — then dialled 999. Prendergast made sympathetic noises about the state of his client’s mind and suggested that Unlawful Killing might be an appropriate charge.
“Do you think there was any sort of relationship between your wife and Latham?” I asked, and Silkstone’s shrug suggested that it was a possibility. The tape doesn’t pick up shrugs, but I let it go. “Could you explain, please,” I asked.
He stubbed his cigarette in the tin ashtray and left the butt there with the other three he’d had. Only prisoners are allowed to smoke in the nick. “I wondered if they were having an affair,” he said. He thought about his words for a while, then added: “Or perhaps Peter — Latham — wanted to start one, and Margaret didn’t. Last week, last Wednesday, I went home early and he was there, talking to her. He said he’d just called in for a coffee, and she said the same. But there was a strained air, if you follow me. They seemed embarrassed that I caught them together. Maybe, you know, he was trying it on.”
“How well did Margaret know him?” I asked, adding: “Officially, so to speak.”
“Quite well,” he replied. “We — that’s Peter and I — married two sisters, back in 1975, and he came to work for me. Neither marriage lasted long, but we stayed friends.”
“What line of work are you in?”
“I’m Northern Manager of Trans Global Finance, and Peter is — was — one of my sales executives.”
“Wasn’t he working yesterday?”
“No. He often sees clients at weekends, when it’s convenient for them, and takes a day off through the week.”
“Is it usually Wednesday?”
“Yes, it is.”
“And Margaret? Did she work?”
“For me. TGF is heavily into e-commerce, and Margaret acted as my secretary, working from home.”
“E-commerce?” I queried, vaguely knowing what he meant.
“Electronic commerce.”
“In other words, your company doesn’t have a huge office block somewhere.”
“That’s right, Inspector. We have very small premises, just an office and a typist, in Halifax and various other towns. Our HQ is in Docklands, but that’s quite modest. Our parent company resides in Geneva.”
I exhaled, puffing my cheeks out, and tapped the desk with my pencil. Dave took it as his cue and came in with: “Mr Silkstone, you said that Latham was at your house the previous Wednesday, when you arrived home early.”
“Yes.” He reached into his pocket and removed a Benson and Hedges packet.
“What time was that?” Dave asked.
“About four o’clock. Perhaps a few minutes earlier.”
“Was it unusual for you to come home at that time?”
“Yes. Very unusual.”
“So Latham could have been there the week before, and the week before that, and you wouldn’t have known.”
He lit a cigarette with a gold lighter borrowed from his brief and took a deep draw on it. “Yes,” he mumbled, exhaling down his nose. There were four of us in the tiny interview room and three of us were passively smoking the equivalent of twenty a day, thanks to Silkstone. The atmosphere in there would have given a Greenpeace activist apoplexy. Carcinogenic condensates were coagulating on the walls, evil little particulates furring-up the light fittings. What they were doing to our tubes I preferred not to imagine but I vowed to sue him if I contracted anything.
“But yesterday you came home early again,” Dave stated.
Good on yer, mate, I thought, as our prisoner sucked his cheeks in and felt round the inside of his mouth with his tongue.
“That’s true,” Silkstone admitted.
“Twice in eight days. Very unusual, wouldn’t you say?”
“Gentlemen,” Prendergast interrupted. “My client is senior management with an international company. His hours are flexible, not governed by the necessity to watch a clock. He works a sixty-hour week and takes time off when he can. I’m sure you can imagine the routine.”
“But still unusual,” Dave insisted.
“He’s right,” Silkstone agreed, talking to his lawyer. Turning to Dave he added: “Last week I wasn’t feeling very well, so I skipped my last appointment and came home early. It wasn’t business, just calling on one of my staff for a pep talk. Yesterday — ” he shrugged his shoulders. “I finished early and went home. That’s all.”
Dave stroked his chin for a few seconds before asking: “Are you sure that’s all?”
Prendergast jumped in again, saying this speculation was leading nowhere, like any good lawyer would have done. What he meant was that if his client went home early because he thought he might catch his wife in bed with her lover, we could tell the court that his actions were premeditated. And that meant murder.
