‘Only for a while. I was sorry to hear about your husband.’
‘I stayed by him while he was sick, but now that he’s fully recovered and can take care of himself, we’re finally getting a divorce. I should have done it years ago. What brings you here? Oh my God, you’re not working, are you?’
Janice had never been a convincing liar. ‘My attendance is connected to a case,’ she admitted. ‘A woman called Jocelyn Roquesby died near here in a pub called the Old Bell Tavern.’
‘We were just talking about her. She was quite a regular. Naturally, there are some people here who take their conspiracies rather too seriously,’ she indicated a group of barrel-stomached men in cable-knit jumpers gathered in the corner, ‘and they think she was murdered.’
‘I’m afraid in this instance they might be right,’ said Longbright. ‘Is there any specific reason for them thinking that?’
‘One of the main reasons she used to attend was because she had quite a few conspiracy theories of her own. Phillip, her ex-husband, was in some senior government post and she was supposedly well known on the Westminster dinner-party circuit. Reading between the lines, I’d say she became a bit of an embarrassment for him, a few too many indiscreet remarks made over the liqueurs, and he filed for divorce. Some of her stories sounded very plausible, though. There were plenty of people here who were prepared to listen to her ideas, and I daresay quite a few more will turn up now that she’s dead.’
Longbright began to see how conspiracy theories developed. If Roquesby had just been a housewife and her husband had worked in the local post office, no one other than those directly involved would have questioned the circumstances of her death. You had to be in a position of some power before the seeds of suspicion could be sown and your demise could invite the status of conspiracy. How easy would it be to become tangled in the skein of half-truths and hearsay that encrusted themselves around the circumstances of a high-profile death?
‘Did she make any good friends here? Or bring anyone else along?’
‘She was ever so sweet, and rather lonely. Undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, I believe. She didn’t say much during the general debates, but really enjoyed meeting new people.’
‘What kind of stories did she used to tell?’
‘You have to understand that she was very bitter about Phillip. She said he dumped her because she knew things about the government, but in fact I hear he left her for a younger woman with a firmer bust and a smaller mind, as they all do. Then one day she wouldn’t talk about it any more. Said it was a private matter, but I think she was warned off by the gleam in the eyes of our conspirators. I imagine that coming here was a way of forgetting her personal troubles. The last thing she’d have wanted to do was to have them dragged out in public. These events can get very personal. Conspiracy theorists have little respect for privacy, everything is regarded as fair game. And conspiracies breed in the face of opposing truths. As a student, I created some crop circles with a friend down on Box Hill, taking step-by-step photographs of how we did it with a plank and some ropes. A couple of months later, I posted the pictures to the local paper. When the article appeared I received hate mail from people telling me I was deliberately trying to discredit the “Box Hill Circles”. I became a victim in my own conspiracy.’
‘Do you think if someone had gone up to Mrs Roquesby in a pub and started making polite conversation, she would have responded, encouraged him?’
‘Not very likely. She seemed shy. I think it took a fair amount of courage just to come here. She told me she had no close personal friends at all, and hardly any family apart from her daughter.’
Which suggested that Jocelyn Roquesby had not known her attacker, and that he struck at random. It was the worst possible news she could have wished for, and the last thing she wanted to report back to Arthur and John.
Jack Renfield had been seated in the Old Bell Tavern for over an hour, and had switched from orange juice to lager because he was bored and angry. He eyed the rowdy office workers over the top of his glass, and longed to wipe the grins off their faces by nicking them for infringing by-laws, just because they were enjoying themselves. That one, he thought, smug git trying to impress some bird from the office, he’s probably got a wrap of coke in his pocket. I’d love to pull him up and see the look on his face. Several of his mates were on the pavement, impeding the passage of passers-by. That was enough to get them arrested.
Renfield always felt like arresting someone when he was lonely.
How, he wondered, had he allowed himself to be manoeuvred into the PCU, where everyone hated him? He felt sure Bryant and May were laughing at him behind his back, ordering him to spend the evening sitting in a pub by himself, in the absurd hope that he might pick up some kind of information about the killer. Why weren’t they hammering the fear of the law into relatives and colleagues, chasing down the recent contacts of the deceased and demanding answers? A nutcase wanders around the city’s public houses armed with a syringe and nobody sees him – how the hell was that possible? And instead of trying to discover his identity, Bryant announces that they must first understand his motive. Crimes that produced no leads in forty-eight hours were virtually dead. No wonder the Home Office tried to shut the unit down every five minutes; the place was an anachronistic embarrassment, a division that fancied itself more at home in the pages of the Strand magazine than on the mean streets of Camden Town.