Sue did not make the mistake of underestimating the depths of his despair. He had been lying in a pit of it for days and would be crouched there still if she had not happened to drop by. She felt the burden of her responsibility and found herself wishing, but only briefly, that she had called in the Social Services after all and handed things over to them.
She turned over various responses in her mind, but each seemed less adequate than the one before. Her normal response to the crises which happened, with exuberant regularity, in the play-group was one of kind, mildly bossy nannyism. Worse than useless here. Inadvertently Sue sighed, exasperated by her own inadequacy, and her heart quickened with the fear of making a mistake, of choosing words so hopelessly inept that instead of effecting a rescue they would push Rex even deeper into the shadows. But speak she must, for it looked as if, any minute now, he was going to start crying again. She said, with great determination, ‘Rex - I am absolutely sure you have got this absolutely wrong.’
The forcefulness of this approach certainly seemed to impress. Rex sat up on the old kitchen chair looking almost alarmed. ‘Wrong?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why are you so sure?’
‘Because it’s quite impossible.’ Why was she so sure? Heaven send me a reason. Please. Any reason. Oh - if only Rex didn’t looked so pitifully hopeful. ‘Because . . . Because he’s a famous writer.’
‘I don’t see—’
‘Famous writers don’t murder people. They simply don’t.’
‘. . . Well . . .’
‘Name one. Name me one famous murdering writer.’ Sue waited, but not too long. No point in tempting fate. ‘You can’t, can you?’
‘Not off the top of my head,’ admitted Rex.
‘That’s because murderers are always nobodies. That’s why they do them. So they can get in the papers and be somebodies.’
‘But everything that happened. Gerald—’
‘I’m not saying you’ve got that wrong. Where your mistake lies is in the conclusions you’ve drawn.’
‘Oh?’
‘Which you have come to not for logical reasons but because you’re consumed with guilt.’
‘God, I am. Yes. God, yes.’
‘So you’re not thinking straight. For instance, haven’t you asked yourself why someone should be in the woods at that hour of the night, in such appalling weather, watching Gerald’s house?’
‘You mean . . . that person could have been the murderer?’
‘I’m convinced of it. And what’s more (out of sight Sue crossed her fingers tightly) the police are too. In fact only yesterday they were back there. Testing for footprints and . . . um . . . measuring. If you hadn’t been shut away here being so silly you’d have seen them.’
She hoped this wasn’t too bracing. Rex was looking infinitesimally less crumbly but still far from convinced, as his next words underlined.
‘But there’s no escaping the fact that Gerald was afraid to be left alone with Jennings.’
‘I’ve some ideas on that situation as well,’ said Sue, thinking on her toes and lying in her teeth. ‘I’ve been wondering if we haven’t been in danger of taking Gerald’s words too literally.’
‘I don’t quite understand.’
‘Not wanting to be left alone with someone doesn’t necessarily mean physical fear of that person. Gerald could have wanted to avoid Max’s company for all sorts of reasons.’
‘Such as?’
He was beginning to sound genuinely interested. Sue cast frantically around for sensible-sounding reasons whilst her face remained calm behind a smile of quiet optimism. Finally one of the more florid convolutions in Rompers came to her rescue.
‘I would like to suggest,’ she began, with a trace of the swagger that lawyers assume preparatory to hooking their thumbs in their waistcoats and uttering the words ‘your honour’, ‘an intelligence connection. I think we should be asking ourselves why Gerald was so secretive about his past.’
‘But he wasn’t—’
‘Pardon me, Rex,’ (objection overruled) ‘but he most certainly was. How on earth do you think a low-grade clerk in the Ministry of Agriculture could retire in his early forties, buy a house like Plover’s Rest and an expensive car and live, apparently in comfort, without ever doing a stroke of work again?’
‘Good heavens!’ Rex stared hard at Sue, his mouth hanging slightly open. ‘He couldn’t possibly.’
‘I put it to you that the section of the Civil Service that Gerald worked for was not Agriculture but MI5. And that Max was either a fellow conspirator or, more likely, Gerald’s control. They went through hell together - maybe saved each other’s lives - but eventually Gerald just couldn’t take any more. He became a burnt-out case. No further use to the government. So they cast him aside.’