‘We don’t doubt that, although what you did doesn’t help. She was at an impressionable age, looking to her peers for advice, not to you.’
‘I couldn’t accept it. I tightened the controls on her, on Barry, but then she left home and went to university.’
‘Young men?’
‘I don’t think so. In truth, Matilda was not an affectionate person, more like me than her mother. But she had wanted to experiment. I could see her getting in with the wrong crowd at university, a repeat of what had happened at school. I went to the house she shared, offered to drive her from home to the university and back every day. I had her interests at heart. I was doing it for her. She was so innocent, a rose amongst thorns.’
‘It’s obsessive,’ Larry said.
‘It’s parental love. Your children will grow up, want to leave home, start answering back, call you a retarded old fool who should be in a museum.’
‘You hit your daughter at the house she shared?’
‘Never. I may have grabbed her by her arm, but I could never hit her; she knew that.’
‘Then what?’
‘Barry was there. The relationship between us was not good. He’s more like his mother.’
‘Did he intervene?’
‘He tried to reason with me, to let Matilda stay at the house. He was taking out one of the housemates, not sure which one. You know about Barry?’
‘That he was attractive to women?’ Isaac said.
‘Young or old, they would always fawn over him. Even when he was young, he had this innate charm. He knew it as well.’
‘That’s why we’ve considered that a jealous husband or a former boyfriend could have killed him.’
‘It’s possible. Matilda loved him more than anyone else in the world, but it was the love of a sister for a brother, and I never touched her. I couldn’t, too pure, too innocent.’
‘She had a boyfriend a few months ago,’ Isaac said. ‘We’ve interviewed him. He said she was emotionally cold. Does that surprise you?’
‘She meant no harm, but she could not express herself the way that her mother could, that Barry could.’
‘Yet with all this love for Matilda, you never saw her again.’
‘I couldn’t, don’t you understand? She had grown up, and she had boyfriends, lovers. My feelings towards her never changed, but she was tainted goods.’
‘You gave her a house.’
‘What else could I do? I wanted to protect her, but I couldn’t control her anymore. I did the best I could; not good enough, obviously.’
‘Let’s come back to Barry. What happened after the incident at the shared house?’
‘I never saw him again. Not that I didn’t want to at first, but then he changed. No longer was he with a woman by choice; now he was selling himself.’
‘A male escort?’
‘It upset his mother when she found out, and I vowed never to allow his name to be mentioned again.’
‘Your wife?’
‘She wanted to forgive him, but I forbade it. It would have been too much emotional stress for her to deal with. I did it to protect her.’
‘Were you ashamed of your son?’
‘Yes.’
‘Matilda?’
‘Her mother would meet her. I paid all her bills. I hoped that one day she would find a good man, settle down, and then we could have reconciled, but now…’
‘Thank you, Mr Montgomery,’ Isaac said. ‘I don’t think we have any more questions for now. Sorry, only one. The shared house, do you have its address?’
Montgomery wrote the address on a piece of paper and left the room. The two police officers could see a broken man; a man who had confronted his demons, a man who through his actions had sent his two children on a path from which there was no return.
Chapter 16
There was no doubt in anybody’s mind that bringing Stanley Montgomery into Homicide had been a good move. For once they had a new avenue of enquiry that would take them away from the current suspects, and into hitherto unconsidered areas.
Wendy could see the need to meet with Christine Mason again. If, and it seemed clear that it was true, Barry Montgomery, alias Colin Young, alias whoever else, had been selling his services, then had the accounts manager at the Fitzroy Hotel been a client or a paramour? Had the man’s feelings for her been genuine, had hers for him? And was the manager, the unpleasant man that Wendy instinctively didn’t like and Christine was afraid of, not the villain of the piece, but merely a man who had seen the truth?
‘What do you reckon?’ Larry asked.
Wendy was still trying to digest all that she was being told, trying to put the pieces together, aiming to identify inconsistencies in Christine Mason’s story, her hesitancy, her need to look away at certain times. ‘We need to know who paid the bill at the Fitzroy,’ she said.
‘The credit card, we know it was valid and in the name of Colin Young,’ Bridget said.
‘If the man was a male escort, then where did he operate from? How do the women make contact with him? And why the Fitzroy?’
‘As good a place as any to make contact with his clients,’ Larry said.
‘Not if Christine Mason was there, it wasn’t,’ Wendy said. ‘We know her to be a jealous woman, and if she had seen anything…’
‘Anything what?’
‘She would have had her proof. But we know the story about the taxi near to Paddington Station is correct. Why tell us that story if she had known the truth about him before?’
‘Unless she was blinded by love,’ Isaac said.
The team was in Isaac’s office, the investigation was getting hot, the culprit was not far from being discovered, hiding behind a thin disguise. It was the time that DCI Isaac Cook liked the best:
