fellows jealous.”
Once she was safely seated, he sat down and smiled a rather wistful smile. “Mind you, I’m not sure that I would be much threat to a lady these days, anyway. The years pass, you know, and it’s rather a while since I had the opportunity to put it to the test.”
“Still, you’ll be out soon, won’t you?”
“Yes. Yes…” he agreed, but not as though he regarded freedom as an unmixed blessing. Quickly shutting off introspection, he went on, “Still, we mustn’t waste our time. I have been granted a bonus quarter of an hour of your delectable company – ” The compliment was played with light irony – “while you have a quarter of an hour of detailed brain-picking.”
“Sandy did tell you what it was about?”
“And who it was about, yes. Michael Brewer. I read everything in the press about the Janine Buckley murder – in happier times – little thinking that I would one day find myself in the same situation as its perpetrator. I joined him later. I wasn’t given such an extensive sentence for my own…peccadillo.” He pronounced the word lightly, but without real humour. “Very well. What can I tell you about my fellow-participant in Her Majesty’s pleasure?”
“Michael Brewer was released last year, having served his full thirty-year sentence.”
“I suppose he would have been. I haven’t done the arithmetic, but, yes, that would be about right.”
“Since his release, though, no one’s seen him. He hasn’t turned up for any of the scheduled meetings with his probation officer.”
“Ah.” Jimmy Troop nodded.
“You don’t look surprised.”
“No, dear lady. I got the impression that Michael Brewer – a few people in Parkhurst called him Mick, but I never attained that level of intimacy. Anyway, I got the impression that he was of a reclusive nature, so after thirty years of enforced human society, I think hemight well have got away from people as soon as he had the opportunity.”
“How well did you know him, Jimmy?”
The man shrugged his thin shoulders. “Relationships in prison are mostly tangential. Oh, you hear stories of love affairs and things. In my experience, not a lot of that went on. Generally, there are some people you never speak to – and never want to speak to. The occasional – very occasional – real soul mate, and the vast majority with whom one might exchange a word at a meal time, or during exercise.”
“And for you, Michael Brewer fitted into that ‘vast majority’ category?”
He nodded, then smiled wryly. “I hope you don’t mind my saying, Jude – It is Jude, isn’t it?”
She confirmed that it was.
“Then I hope you don’t mind my saying what a rare pleasure it is for me to sit and talk to an attractive woman?”
She giggled, playing along with his gallantry. “It’s a fairly rare pleasure for me to sit and talk to an attractive man.”
She had got the tone just right. With another wry smile, he thanked her. “But enough of this flirtatious badinage. The sands of our quarter of an hour are trickling away. What can I tell you about Michael Brewer?”
“Would you describe him as a violent man?”
“Given the nature of his crime, he was always going to have that reputation.”
“But any signs of violence inside the prison?”
“No. He kept his nose clean. A model prisoner.”
“Any vices, habits, hobbies?”
“He played cards. Well, no, that’s probably the wrong thing to say – playing cards implies that you play them with other people. Michael Brewer just played patience. Endlessly, round and round. Always had a pack of cards with him. I think he must have known a variety of versions of the game. You’d go mad just doing the same thing time and again.”
“Or maybe the appeal of the game was doing the same thing time and again?”
Jimmy Troop thought about this for a moment, then nodded. “You could be right. A good name for a prisoner’s game, isn’t it? Patience?”
For the first time in their encounter, a shadow of pain crossed his face. But his customary urbanity was quickly reasserted.
“Anything else I can tell you about my fellow inmate?”
“I heard that he always protested his innocence of Janine Buckley’s murder.”
Jimmy Troop spread his hands wide. “Show me the prisoner who doesn’t protest his innocence. Oh, there are the hard ones who boast all the time about the crimes they’ve committed, and a good few crimes they’ve only committed in their imaginations, but for most of us the image of innocence is very potent. You’d wake up in the morning from a dream that you hadn’t committed your crime, a seductive dream, a very real dream, and then you’d look around your cell, and the unarguable reality would hit you…” Hepaused, again straying dangerously close to personal territory, then, with a patrician smile, moved on. “Sorry, you were asking me about the violence in Michael Brewer.”
“Yes. You think it was still there?”
“Very definitely. He wasn’t demonstrative, but there was a lot of anger bottled up inside him. He had scores to settle.”
“To settle when he was finally released?”
“I would assume so, yes.”
“He never told you what those scores were?”
An apologetic shake of the head. “As I say, I wasn’t one of his close associates. And I’d have been surprised if he had confided that kind of information even to a close associate, assuming that he ever had any.”
“Did he mention where he might go when he was released?”
“He always spoke fondly of Sussex. Brighton area, Worthing, round there.” Jimmy Troop looked out through the metal-framed windows to the grey-blue humps of the South Downs. “Pity he wasn’t sent here to Austen. He’d have liked it.” A second thought came to him. “Though maybe he would have found it even more frustrating, being so close to where he wanted to be. Maybe he’d have done a runner. Not difficult to get out of a place like this.”
“Jimmy, from what you know of Michael Brewer, which I know isn’t a lot, but going on your instinct, do you think he’d be capable of committing another murder?”
The gentleman in denim laughed, then fixed Jude’s brown eyes with his and said, with total seriousness, “Oh yes. But then we’d all be capable of that, wouldn’t we? It’s committing the first one that takes us by surprise.”
As he spoke the words, he seemed to open a window on to a vista of infinite pain. But only for a second. The mask of languid charm was quickly put back in place, as he looked up to see the guard on the landing tapping his watch.
“Dear lady, I fear our most enjoyable quarter of an hour is at an end.” Jimmy Troop rose from his seat, the complete gentleman. “I’d offer to see you to the gate, Jude – ” he gave a self-depreciating shrug – “but, sadly, circumstances do not allow me to do that.”
? The Witness at the Wedding ?
Twenty-Five
The afternoon that Jude was talking to Jimmy Troop, Carole had a phone call.
“Erm…it’s…erm…”
“Hello, David.”
“I gather…erm…that Gaby and her mother are no longer down in Fethering.”
“No. I think they’re both in Harlow.”
“Marie is certainly, but I believe Gaby’s back in her own flat now. She’s returned to work.”
“Has she?” Carole couldn’t repress a feeling of pique that he had this information and she didn’t.
“Yes, I was talking to Stephen last night and he told me,” said David, rubbing it in. “Which, anyway, I thought was a good…erm…opportunity for us to go back to my plan.”
