‘To contact the police, to break down in hysterics.’
‘Not to commit suicide, is that what we’re saying?’
‘It is. Yet there’s an inconsistency. Matilda Montgomery was measured in her suicide. It was all too neat. Only a calm person could have done that, and why hanging? Melodramatic, don’t you think?’
‘It was a statement. Not to us, but to someone else.’
‘Her father?’
‘She wanted him to feel the pain that he had caused them over the years. Remember, he loved his daughter and his wife, even his son. And he felt that whatever he had inflicted on them was the act of a loving father, not that either of the children believed it. And with her death, Matilda was finally saying to him, “you were wrong, it was you who destroyed our lives, made my mother miserable, drove my brother away, made me an emotional vacuum”. And what if she believed it was her father who had murdered his own son, her brother?’
‘She would have been frightened of coming to the police, frightened to confront her father. All his life he had been the dominant figure, good or bad. It would be inconceivable for her to ask him for the truth, impossible for her to tell us what she believed.’
‘The woman must have been half-crazy.’
‘If she was half, then what is her father?’
***
Nancy Bartlett was initially pleased to open the door of her penthouse flat to Larry; not so keen on him entering with Wendy.
‘This is Sergeant Gladstone,’ Larry said. On the dining room table, three bottles of wine, a plate of snacks. Some candles lit the main room, the windows closed, an incense stick burning somewhere, its smell permeating the room.
‘It’s not convenient,’ Nancy Bartlett said as the two police officers stood in her flat. She was dressed in a pair of designer jeans and a white blouse. Her hair, as usual, was coiffured, her makeup flawless, her lips, as were her fingernails, a bright shade of red.
Larry thought she looked good; Wendy did not. She had seen enough painted tarts in her time, and the flat was set up for seduction, or one was already occurring.
‘Are you alone?’ Wendy asked.
‘No,’ the woman replied. Wendy smiled at what they had interrupted, envied the woman in some ways, disapproved in another.
‘Important information regarding you and Colin Young has come to light. We need to know the answer, and we need to know now,’ Larry said.
A blustering reply from Nancy Bartlett, an attempt to close a bedroom door. Wendy walked over in that general direction, attempting to look unconcerned. The woman wasn’t suspected of murder, and her alibi had been checked by Bridget and found to be tight. The police had no right to search the flat, but Wendy was a woman; she could sense that something was amiss.
Wendy returned to where Larry and Nancy Bartlett were. ‘Good view you’ve got here,’ she said as she casually looked out of the window, the previously closed curtains now fully open.
‘Yes, it is,’ the woman’s meek reply. ‘What’s this all about?’
‘You lied to us,’ Wendy said.
‘When have I lied? Inspector Hill was here a few days ago, and I told him all that I knew.’
‘Not the fact that you’ve been screwing one of our suspects.’
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’
Wendy walked back over to the bedroom door and pushed it wide open. ‘You’d better join us,’ she said.
A sheepish Archibald Marshall came out of the room and over to where Larry and Nancy Bartlett were sitting. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong,’ he said.
‘What’s this here with you two?’ Wendy said.
‘What does it look like?’ Nancy Bartlett said. ‘Charades?’ A nervous attempt at humour to defuse what was a compromising situation.
‘How long have you two been involved?’ Larry asked.
‘A few weeks,’ Marshall replied.
‘Another lie?’ Wendy said.
For one moment, she hoped he was guilty of murder as that would ensure Christine Mason’s innocence.
But now there was Nancy Bartlett, a woman whom Larry had regarded as a bit player in the saga.
‘When I was here last time, you told me that you hadn’t seen Colin Young for some years,’ Larry said.
‘That was true.’
‘He knocked on your door four weeks ago. We have the date. Do you deny this?’
‘I kept in contact with Colin. Occasionally we’d meet. Sometimes for a meal or a drink in the pub, and sometimes we’d come back here. It wasn’t a commercial arrangement, although sometimes I gave him something.’
‘So why the lying?’
‘I didn’t want to become involved in your investigation. I was frightened you’d want to blame me.’
‘And now you’re with Archibald Marshall. Are you aware of his involvement?’
‘Archibald is a friend, nothing more. I know that Colin used to stay at his hotel, and he was sleeping with one of the staff.’
‘Were you upset?’
‘With Colin sleeping around? Not at all.’
‘Archibald Marshall is no Colin Young,’ Wendy said, looking over at the pathetic lump of humanity.
‘He followed Colin here one day, so he knew my address. He knocked on the door two days after Colin had been identified as the dead body in Hyde Park.’
‘Yet you acted as though you didn’t know when I told you,’ Larry reminded her.
‘What did you expect of me? I know how the law works, guilty by association.’
‘That’s what’s happened to me, isn’t it?’ Marshall said. He had pulled over a dining chair and was sitting sideways on it.
‘Is it?’ Wendy asked. ‘I met with Christine not long after you dismissed her.’
‘And you believed her version?’
‘Not totally.’
‘She told you what a bastard I was, and how I had mistreated her, and then had her sacked.’
‘Something like that,’ Wendy admitted.
‘She’s right. I did have her sacked, but I
