‘DCI Barnaby.’
‘Sergeant Troy.’
‘Hmm,’ said Lionel, turning and striding back into the house. His floor-length lovat overcoat, divided at the back from the waist down, flapped vigorously behind flashing a Black Watch tartan lining.
As the door had been left standing open, the policemen followed and found their way to Lionel Lawrence’s study. Ann Lawrence was sitting in a pale blue wing chair by the window. Very still and calm. Unnaturally so, thought Barnaby. He saw her frown and struggle to remember who they were. For a moment he thought she was drunk.
‘Have you found out something?’ asked Lionel Lawrence. ‘Is there news of Carlotta?’
This bloke wants to get his priorities right. Sergeant Troy dug out his notebook and stared severely at the dishevelled parson. We’ve got a murder on our plate here. Then he remembered they might have two murders on their plate if the girl had really drowned and felt minimally less impatient.
Barnaby said, ‘It’s possible.’
‘Oh! Did you hear that, my dear?’ Lionel beamed at his wife who turned her head slowly and with great care towards all of them. ‘There is news about Carlotta.’
‘Carlotta. How lovely.’ The words were slow and thick and unnaturally isolated, one from the other. There was a long pause. ‘Lovely.’
Ann had to struggle to hold the three figures in the room in some sort of focus. Although solid enough in themselves, they seemed to move in an improbable way. Looming forward and retreating, like people in a dream. Their voices echoed slightly.
She had overheard the doctor warning Lionel that she might feel slightly disoriented at first. He had given her an injection and there were some tablets to take three times a day. They were tranquillisers and they certainly worked. She had never felt so tranquil in her life. In fact she felt so tranquil she would have been happy to slip into unconsciousness and never come round again.
It was Jax who had spotted his employer’s wife as he was driving Lionel home. Ann was pacing round and round the taxi rank outside Causton library, her head wagging like a broken doll’s. Lionel leapt out of the car and ran to her. Ann flung herself at him, locked her arms round his neck and started shrieking. Jax had helped get her into the car then driven directly to the doctor’s.
‘Is your wife not well, Mr Lawrence?’ Barnaby asked.
‘Ann?’ inquired Lionel, as if she was only one of many. ‘Just a little run down. Tell me—’
‘I was hoping to talk to her about the day Carlotta disappeared.’
Carlotta . . . Something swam to the surface of Ann’s mind. A slender white shape. A human arm. It curved upwards, a half-moon gleaming against the dark, then sank without a trace.
‘Mrs Lawrence, do you remember what happened before she left? I believe there was an argument.’
Hopeless. Whatever she’d been given was powerful stuff. Barnaby thought it seemed to have been ideally timed to stop her talking to him then told himself not to be melodramatic. No one at the Old Rectory could have known about the police’s reconstruction of the blackmail letter. Or the new direction the case had taken. He turned his attention to Lionel Lawrence.
‘Could you give me any details, sir?’
‘I’m afraid not. The night it happened I was at a meeting till quite late. When I got home, Ann was asleep. How she could have just gone to bed with that poor child . . .’ Lionel shook his head at this sad abrogation of his wife’s duty. ‘The foxes have holes and the birds of the air—’
‘But surely you discussed it the next day.’
Lionel’s face became set in a moonish stubbornness. The chief inspector simply raised an interrogatory eyebrow and waited. Troy, seated with his notebook at a satinwood card table, inhaled with pleasure the mellow natural scent of beeswax. And watched.
He was good at waiting, the gaffer. Once he’d kept it up for nearly ten minutes. Troy, who had no more patience than a two-year-old, asked him how he did it. Barnaby explained that he simply absented himself. Naturally one had to keep eye contact and maintain an intent, sometimes even slightly threatening posture but within these limits the mind could do its own thing. One of the most useful, he found, was listing gardening jobs for the weekend.
Poor old Lawrence just wasn’t up to it. He didn’t last ten seconds, let alone ten minutes.
‘Apparently Ann thought Carlotta had borrowed some earrings. She questioned the girl, obviously very clumsily. Naturally Carlotta got frightened—’
‘I don’t see why,’ said Sergeant Troy. ‘If she hadn’t—’
‘You don’t understand,’ cried the Reverend Lawrence. ‘For someone of her background to be wrongfully accused is a deeply traumatic—’