‘Did you know that he was visiting Nancy Bartlett, one of your clients, and taking money from her direct?’
‘I found out. I phoned her up a few weeks back, trying to drum up business, and don’t ask the exact date. I’m not police anymore, so I don’t detail everything.’
‘You would have. What did she tell you?’
‘That she was fine, and she had herself a beautiful man.’
‘Which meant she had Colin Young.’
‘It did. Who else was referred to as beautiful? You saw Brent, one of our most popular. A good-looking man, the same as you, and neither of you would be called beautiful. Handsome, masculine, manly, but never beautiful.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I knew how much money she had, how much money she had paid for Colin when she came through me. I remonstrated with her, told her that contractually she was obliged to pay my commission. I’m running a business here, not a charity.’
‘Her response?’
‘Polite, calm, no money.’
‘And you?’
‘Angry. What else would I have been?’
‘Angry enough to have slapped her, to slap Colin, to hit him over the head in Hyde Park and to watch him drown?’
‘Cook, I may not be your idea of the perfect police officer, but I’m not a fool. Money is one thing, murder is another. At some stage the murderer makes a mistake, a missed clue, someone says something, and then it all comes together.’
‘Not like screwing the local tarts, taking a backhander when you were in the force. You got away with those. Domett, you’re in the firing line. Don’t be surprised if we’re not back with an arrest warrant.’
‘What for? Telling you the facts of life?’
‘Another question, when you should have given an answer. Be very careful from here on as to what you do, who you see, what you say.’
***
‘I’ve got a hotel to run,’ Archibald Marshall said from the sanctity of his side of the desk. ‘You’ve arrested Christine. Damn stupid thing for her to do, killing the man.’
It was seven in the evening, and Wendy and Larry were with the man. Neither would admit to liking him, but he had a point if indeed Christine had killed her lover.
‘She’s been remanded. Sergeant Gladstone’s not sure of her guilt. She’s still got her money on you,’ Larry said.
‘For what? I got her out of this hotel with no criminal convictions against her name. I must get some credit for that.’
‘Not from me, you don’t,’ Wendy said. She was not comfortable sitting in the same room as the manager, knowing full well his history, the leverage that he had exerted over Christine Mason, the sexual favours he had received as part of the deal, the money he had taken.
‘How long before you leave the hotel?’ Larry asked.
‘Fourteen days, maybe fifteen.’
‘Another job?’ Wendy snarled.
‘Overseas. A resort, part of the hotel group’s foreign acquisitions. I’m taking control, dealing with the local bureaucracy.’
‘Greasing the palms of every crooked official, is that it?’
‘Not officially,’ Marshall said. Wendy didn’t like the way the man spoke; a self-assuredness that he had got away with embezzlement, the harassment of a fellow employee who now languished in the cells at Challis Street.
‘Whereabouts?’ Larry asked.
‘Barbados.’
‘A promotion?’
‘It’s a tough job, and I’m good at what I do.’
‘You may be that, but I still don’t hold with Christine being labelled a murderer. You had reason to want him dead.’
‘What for? Just because Christine was soiling the bed linen upstairs with him doesn’t mean that I’d want to murder him. The hotel’s senior management has seen fit to reassign me out of the country. They're having a tough time down there with their expansion plans, the builders, the government.’
‘Christine is thrown out, not so much as a reference, and you bask in the glory.’
‘Not glory. I’d rather stay here, but they’ve offered the deal, they call the tune.’
‘And you, one of the children, follow the Pied Piper, not caring that a woman who we are certain you felt some fondness for is sentenced to ten years, probably more, for second-degree murder.’
‘Manslaughter, I would have thought.’
‘You know about these sorts of things? Did you check on the internet what you would get if we arrested you?’
‘Ludicrous, and need I say, slanderous.’
‘It’s a police investigation, slander doesn’t apply. You’re still a criminal, even if your management wants to sweep it under the table.’
‘As you say. Now if you don’t mind, I’m busy.’
It had been a wasted visit, Larry and Wendy knew that. And Wendy was acutely aware that one more piece of damning evidence against Christine Mason would put the final nail in the coffin, and her conviction would be assured.
Back in the office, Gwen Hislop sat with her sister. She had a legal practice that required her time, but her sister had taken precedence. An air of calm existed between the two, due to Christine being mildly sedated, and Gwen feeling guilty for distancing herself from her for years over Terry, her former husband.
Isaac sat in his office wrestling with paperwork, attempting to figure out what to tell Jenny if the trip back to the ancestral homeland was off. He couldn’t hold Christine Mason indefinitely; he didn’t want to formally charge her and have her sent to a woman’s prison. There was a niggling feeling inside him, the same as there was with Wendy, that somehow they were missing something, an already known fact that was crucial to the investigation.
The sixth sense, some police officers called it; the innate knowledge garnered after years of policing that made the difference to knowing someone was guilty or not. Christine Mason, her
