‘Your children? Do you meet with them?’
‘All the time, but they never come here.’
‘Would they be concerned by a young lover?’
‘Why should they? They knew their father’s view on how I should live my life after he’d gone. And I don’t intend to be the grieving widow.’
‘But you must be sad,’ Larry said.
‘I was relieved when he died. He was in a lot of pain; there was no quality of life for him.’
‘Dorothy, we will check your story,’ Wendy said.
‘Check if you want to, but you’ll find it to be true. One day I may tire of being here in this hotel and day tripping up to London. Then I might go back to my home, or take a cruise around the world, but I’m not ready for either yet. Colin made me happy whenever I saw him, and if he was making someone else happy, then good for him, good for them.’
‘He was also acting as an escort,’ Larry said.
‘Yet again, it’s not my concern.’
‘Did you give him money?’
‘For services rendered?’
‘Yes.’
‘I gave him presents. Sometimes it was money, sometimes clothes or whatever else he wanted. He never asked, and I had no issue with looking after him. After all, he looked after me. Did anyone else tell you that he was beautiful?’
‘On more than one occasion,’ Wendy said. ‘And a good lover?’
‘You’re not expecting me to be coy now, after all I’ve told you?’
‘No.’
‘Then he was.’
‘Do you know of anyone who might have wanted him dead?’
‘Check if you must, even talk to my children, but no, there is no one.’
‘And you, after we leave here?’
‘I will feel sorrow for Colin. What about his family?’
‘That is another sad story,’ Wendy said.
‘Then tell me no more. Sadness is not something I want to deal with,’ Dorothy Winterly said.
***
It was Wendy who made the phone call to Amelia Bentham; the updated information from the pathologist needed to be followed up. Not that the team in Homicide felt that it was critical in itself, not sure if the fact that both Barry and Matilda Montgomery had low-level traces of cocaine affected the murder enquiry.
Amelia came into Challis Street at 10.20 a.m. It was raining outside. ‘We were going to do an outside shoot down by the river, the latest summer range. No chance today.’
Isaac joined the two women in the interview room. An air of cordiality existed.
‘Amelia, we’ve been informed that Matilda and her brother had used cocaine in the past,’ Isaac said.
‘Matilda, she tried to rebel occasionally, to go against her inherently conservative nature.’
‘You do not deny the cocaine?’
‘It was at a party. The three of us were there, and everyone was getting high on alcohol and whatever else.’
‘Drugs?’
‘Social, nothing heavy. No heroin, nothing like that.’
‘Cocaine?’
‘Chief Inspector, you’re a man of the world. You know it exists.’
‘That’s why we’re meeting here for a chat.’
‘No bright lights, no truncheons, thumbscrews?’
Wendy could see Amelia flirting with Isaac, not that she could blame her, but it was an unusual reaction to witness in a police station.
Isaac ignored the woman’s attempts at light-hearted repartee, realising that it could be an attempt to conceal nervousness. ‘We know that cocaine is freely available, and most parties, especially with the upwardly mobile, the affluent, would have someone snorting it. Are you one of those people?’
‘Never in my house, and that’s the truth.’
‘Why?’ Wendy asked.
‘My parents. You’ve met them, found them to be easy-going on most matters, but drugs are anathema to them. It’s the one thing they draw the line at.’
‘Good people, but why the abhorrence of drugs?’
‘If you must know, when they were younger, they went off the rails for a while, transcendental meditation, hallucinogenic drugs, the obligatory trip to India.’
‘But that was in the sixties and the seventies,’ Isaac said.
‘Late developers, my father would say. But the truth is that it still existed for a couple of decades after. Now my parents will barely take an aspirin.’
‘But you will?’
‘An aspirin, of course. And cocaine, but very occasionally. It doesn’t do much for me, and it didn’t do much for Matilda. That one time she snorted it, she was talking silly for about thirty minutes, and then she was sat in a corner crying her eyes out.’
‘It would take more than the one time for it to have remained in her system.’
‘I only saw her snort it once, and that’s the truth. Maybe she did with Barry, but I wouldn’t know. As I’ve told you on more than one occasion, Matilda was a friend, but we weren’t in each other’s pockets, and Barry used to come over to my place of a night-time. And he wasn’t snorting cocaine with me.’
‘We met another woman yesterday, an older woman, who was involved with him,’ Wendy said.
‘Sleeping with him?’
‘The same as you, casual sex. Amelia, was it casual with you? Or did you harbour feelings of love for him? An attractive man, and you’re at the clucky age, the age of wanting children.’
‘I’m too busy to contemplate the possibility,’ Amelia said.
‘Falling in love, wanting children, are not conscious actions formed by modern values and society,’ Wendy said. ‘They are base instincts, primordial, unalterable, uncontrollable.’
‘Very well. I did want more from him, but he wasn’t giving that to me. When he was with me, I was happy; when he wasn’t, I busied myself with work and other thoughts.’
‘But the love was there, the need for children. Am I correct?’
‘It could have been love
