Somerset’s. The Caroline Poole case was muddying the waters, and it wasn’t fair to Latham to use it to pre-judge him.
Dave said: “Where’s our rock, then?” to change the subject. What he meant was don’t tell your grandma how to suck eggs.
“What rock?”
“Our Blackpool rock. You had a day at the seaside and you didn’t bring us any rock back?”
“It was raining. I didn’t hang about.”
He turned to Annette. “Shows how much he thinks of us.”
Annette looked thoughtful. She said: “So Latham didn’t have an alibi for the Caroline Poole job.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Which means, of course, that Silkstone probably didn’t have one, either.”
“Yes, Annette,” I agreed. “That thought had occurred to me, too.”
“Unless he was alone with Margaret at the time,” Dave suggested.
“But she’s dead,” Annette and I replied, simultaneously.
They went off to Pontefract and I went upstairs for the morning prayer meeting. Gilbert huffed and puffed and thought I was wasting time on details when the big picture was as plain as a gravy stain. The Caroline Poole case wasn’t ours. End of story. Latham killed Margaret. Silkstone killed Latham. End of story.
“But we don’t know that Silkstone wasn’t involved with Margaret’s death,” I argued.
“Well if he was he’s got away with it. Good luck to the bloke, we can’t win ’em all, Charlie.”
Gareth Adey offered his considered opinion, which agreed with Gilbert’s. It always does. “I think Mr Wood is right, Charlie,” he told me. “Good grief, two murders cleared up is pretty good going by anybody’s standards. Well done, I say, and I bet the Chief Constable is thinking the same way. Now, can we talk about the new CCTV in the market place?”
So we did. Three minutes about two murders, half an hour about his poxy TV cameras. “Well done, Charlie. Two murders cleared up. Maybe you’ll get a commendation.” And what about frigging justice, I thought?
I rang Michelle Webster when I was back in my office, to satisfy myself that she was OK. “I was worried about you,” I told her, after the formalities. “That was rather a large G and T you made yourself.” She giggled, saying that there was no T in it, and hoped that she had behaved herself. We chatted for a while, had a laugh and said goodbye. She never asked about Latham or his funeral, never mentioned the man who killed him, never asked how her friend Margaret had died. I replaced the phone and wondered why I’d bothered.
Somerset were more interested, when I rang them, and thanked me for my efforts. As Gilbert said, they were regarding it as a clear-up. In the middle of our conversation someone in the big office held up a phone and mouthed: “For you,” at me, through the glass. I shook my head and waved the one I was holding.
He took a message then came to deliver it, leaning in the doorway of my little office until I’d finished. “That was the Jeff from the court,” he said. “The magistrate has remanded Silkstone in custody and he’s been taken to Bentley. His solicitor has intimated that they’ll be pleading guilty to manslaughter, with provocation and lashings of mitigating circumstances.”
“Hey, that’s good news,” I said. “I expected him to be let loose. Good for the CPS, for once.”
“A short, sharp shock,” he replied. “Teach him what he’s in for. They’ll free him next time.”
“Yep,” I agreed.
We had a loose-ends meeting at four o’clock. Annette placed a huge bag of Pontefract cakes and one of all- sorts on the table in front of me. “Where did you get these?” I asked.
“Pontefract.”
“They do sell them in the supermarket,” I argued.
“Not fresh ones, straight from the oven.”
I found a coconut mushroom and popped it into my mouth, saying: “Dese are by faborites,” as I passed the bag across the table.
“There’s a castle there,” Dave said.
“Where Richard the Second was murdered,” Annette added.
“It’s an interesting place.”
“And stinks of liquorice.”
“But it’s quite a pleasant smell, really.”
“And every other building is a pub.”
“OK, OK, spare me the travelogue,” I protested as I sucked a piece of coconut from between my teeth. “Next weekend we’ll all have a day out in Pontefract. Now can we talk about you-know-what, please.”
Other information had come in and been collated. Most significant were the facts that Silkstone and his wife had blazing rows and were in severe financial difficulties. The car was leased and he’d slipped behind a couple of times with his mortgage payments. His salary, we discovered, was quite modest, and the hefty commissions that he was used to weren’t coming his way. Margaret’s death had given him a timely leg-up out of the shit creek.
Neighbours confirmed that Latham was a regular Wednesday afternoon visitor. No bedroom curtains were pulled across after he arrived, but it wasn’t possible for anyone to see into the room.
“Actually,” Dave confided, “between us and these four walls, it’s quite pleasant in the afternoon, with the curtains open.”
“Put that in your report,” I told him. The phone in my office rang and I went to answer it. It was the CPS solicitor to ask if I’d received the news about Silkstone. I said I had and congratulated him on a minor victory. I suspected that was what he wanted to hear. When I went back into the main office Dave was in full swing.
“…and my dad told me to keep a big sweet jar under the bed,” he was saying, “and to put a dried pea in it every time we made love. And then, after I was forty, to take one out every time we made love. He said that nobody ever emptied the jar.”
“Subject normal,” Annette explained as I resumed my seat.
“And have you emptied it?” somebody asked.
“Not yet,” I interrupted, “but I’m helping him. Where were we?”
Latham’s wife had married, and divorced, for a second time. Silkstone had given her husband a job as a salesman, first in double glazing, then in the financial sector, but he did it very reluctantly. It just wasn’t his scene, she’d said, but the money was good. Apparently his affable manner took punters by surprise, and they trusted him, so he did reasonably well without trying too hard. Silkstone came north because of the job, and Latham followed him, but his marriage failed soon after.
“What went wrong?” I asked.
“Partly boredom, partly the affair,” Annette replied. “She was attracted to him because of his laid back approach to life, but it quickly paled. At first she couldn’t believe that he’d had enough go in him to have an affair. Coming up here was a fresh start, but it didn’t work out.”
“And what about Caroline Poole? Did you get round to her?”
“Yes, Boss. She remembered, with a bit of prompting, that Peter’s car was the same type that we were looking for. She thinks she mentioned it to him and he just shrugged it off. They never discussed it again.”
“But Latham wasn’t at home with her on the night in question?”
“She doesn’t think so, and he didn’t ask her for an alibi. It was all a non-event as far as she was concerned.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. She doesn’t believe that he killed Margaret. He was the least-violent person imaginable, she said.”
“She couldn’t believe he was having an affair, either,” I pointed out.
“I know,” Annette agreed, with a shrug.
Dave said: “I reckon that’s about as far as we can go with this, Chas. We’ve done our bit.”
“Yep,” I replied, “that just about sews it up. Now answer me this. If bus advertising works, why do they have to advertise it on the backs of all the buses?”
Dave said: “Eh?” and Annette’s expression implied something similar.
“Why,” I repeated, “do they have to advertise bus advertising? It obviously doesn’t work, otherwise they’d advertise something that pays them, like Coca-Cola or Fenning’s Fever Cure, wouldn’t they?”
“Is that what you’ve been thinking about all day?” Dave grumbled.
