‘I was thinking of transvestism, which is a much more complicated business. The majority are heteros, often with wives and families. The condition is a psychological one and may not affect their sex lives at all.’
‘It’d bloody affect mine,’ said Troy. ‘Maureen came to bed in pit boots, Y-fronts and a jokey moustache I’d be right out the window.’ He paused, shocked into temporary silence by the very thought. ‘So what do they get out of it then? I mean - queers dressing up, OK, it’s sick,’ - he pulled a face of grotesquely exaggerated repulsion - ‘but if they’re playing the girly part in these gruesome fuckarounds, well . . . there you go. But for a straight bloke to do it just to sit around in a hotel lobby - what’s the point?’
‘Simply to be accepted in public as a woman.’
Simply? What was simple about stapling your balls together and calling yourself Doris?
‘They have their own clubs as well. Places where they can meet. But the real challenge is to walk down the street without anyone having the faintest idea that you aren’t exactly what you appear to be.’
‘You seem to know all about it, chief,’ said Troy. Then, watching his back, ‘No offence.’
‘Cully had a friend that way inclined. At Cambridge. She talked about him a lot.’
‘Right.’ The sergeant erased, with some difficulty, a lovely face from his mind’s eye. ‘He certainly seemed to have kept it under his saucy black hat. Not easy in a sharp-eyed place like Midsomer Worthy.’
‘I presume the way it worked was, he’d get all togged up then into the garage via the kitchen and drive straight off.’
‘Having first opened the garage doors.’
‘Well, as the general idea was to avoid drawing attention to himself, Gavin, I think we can safely assume he would have first opened the garage doors, yes.’
‘So, when the car was stolen, he’d be right up shit creek.’
‘Which is why he didn’t go to Uxbridge station to report the theft.’
‘But didn’t Laura Hutton say this woman knocked and someone let her in?’
‘I see that as an extra precaution. Although it was late, and the taxi had taken him right up to the house, at the moment he alighted he must have felt extremely vulnerable. Those halogen lamps are hellish bright. What if someone had chosen that moment to walk by? Or been peeping out from their net curtains?’
‘Or, as things turned out, hiding behind a bush.’
‘It’s common sense to assume that, if you see a person knock on a door and then disappear inside a house, the door has been opened from the inside. But we now know that Mrs Hutton did not see that actually happen.’
‘Hang on though . . .’ Troy screwed up his face again, this time in concentration. ‘Didn’t she see this woman and Hadleigh through the window? Drinking wine or something.’
‘No. She saw only the woman.’
‘But Hadleigh’d hardly be drinking a toast to himself.’
‘I think that’s just what he was doing. There’s a mirror over the fireplace. Why shouldn’t he be raising a glass in self-congratulation after having made it safely back?’
‘Yeah. Actually . . .’ Troy abandoned the sentence but nodded, indicating that he understood completely. Tell the truth, he himself had more than once, whilst waxing and buffing his newly-bought, secondhand Ford Sierra Cossie, raised a can of ice-cold Carling’s and winked at the drop-dead stud reflected in the wing mirror. A thought displaced this attractive recollection.
‘No wonder Laura Hutton thought the woman reminded her of somebody. It was Hadleigh, not that painting. But if all this happened the night before the murder, where’s the kinky gear?’
‘Presumably in the suitcase.’
‘Wow.’ Troy barely breathed the exclamation. His mind was running every which way. ‘That’s why the chest of drawers was always kept locked.’
‘I should imagine so.’
‘But - not at the time of the murder?’
‘One of the things I discovered from Cully is that this need for cross-dressing often coincides with periods of extreme stress. And we know that Hadleigh was suffering in just such a way directly before he died.’
‘So - about to slip into the frillies, he was interrupted . . .’ The words tumbled over each other. Troy got up and started walking around, as drawn to this new scenario now as he had previously been wary. ‘Which would explain why he had got undressed but not into his pyjamas. Hang about, though - would he even think of doing this while someone was still in the house?’
‘I would have said not. But we must remember that he and Jennings go back a long way. For all we know the “unpleasantness in the past” that Hadleigh referred to might have to do with this very thing.’