Chapter 18

JIMS GAVE VERY little more thought to what Zillah had told him of the police’s intention to call on him on Monday morning. He’d be at home, so of course he’d see them, it was his duty as a citizen; he’d answer their routine questions and later he’d stroll across to the Commons. Unaccustomed to spending much time at home, he found this Sunday evening almost unbearably tedious. Leonardo had invited him to a gay club, the Camping Ground in Earl’s Court Square, and Jims would have loved to accompany him but knew where to draw the line. Instead, with Eugenie sitting beside him making critical comments, he watched as much of a Jane Austen costume drama on television as he could bear and went to bed early.

Something woke him at four o’clock in the morning. He sat up in bed in his solitary and rather austere bedroom, remembering that he hadn’t spent the entire weekend in Casterbridge and Fredington Crucis, as last evening he had taken for granted and sent to the back of his mind. Now it resurfaced, but in a different form. On Friday afternoon he’d driven back to London to recover the mislaid notes for his hunting speech. And he couldn’t simply tell the police that, because the notes hadn’t been in his own home in Abbey Gardens Mansions but in Leonardo’s house in Chelsea. A faint but consistent sheen of sweat broke out across Jims’s face, down his neck, and across his smooth golden chest. He switched the light on.

They would want to know why those papers were in Glebe Terrace and even if he could somehow satisfy them on that point, would inquire why, having recovered them, he failed to go home and spend the night with his new wife in Westminster. It wasn’t as if she was away somewhere—they knew she was at home because they had phoned her there, as she’d told him last night. They’d want to know why, instead, he’d passed the night under the same roof as Leonardo Norton, of the well-known London and Wall Street stockbrokers Frame da Souza Constantine. Various options presented themselves. He could omit to tell them he’d returned to London. Or he could tell them he had returned in the afternoon, had found Zillah asleep, and—unwilling to disturb her—had recovered the papers and gone straight back to Dorset. Or he could say he’d come home late in the evening, found the papers, spent the night with Zillah, and left again very early in the morning before the police came. This would necessitate Zillah’s lying for him. He thought it likely she’d agree, and the children didn’t count since they’d both have been in bed asleep.

Jims hadn’t much in the way of morals; he was generally unprincipled and unscrupulous and quite capable of telling a “white lie” to the police. But when he thought of asking his wife to lie for him, to tell a detective inspector of the murder squad (or whatever they’d changed its name to) that he had been here when he hadn’t, his blood ran cold. He was a member of Parliament. Last week the leader of the Opposition had smiled on him, patted his shoulder. and said, “Well done!” Other MPs referred to him in the Chamber as the honorable member for South Wessex. The honorable member. “Honor” wasn’t a word Jims often much considered but he considered it now. In his position and capacity, honor was supposed to be attached to him; it was as much invested in him as in any medieval knight or servant of the sovereign. Sitting up in bed, wiping the perspiration off himself with a corner of the sheet, Jims told himself he couldn’t ask someone else to lie for him.

What he’d do was forget all about having come home for those notes. Between now and nine when the police were arriving, it would slip his mind. After all, he hadn’t really needed them and could easily have delivered a successful speech without them. It was only that he disliked going unprepared to any function at which he had to speak. He made an effort to get back to sleep but he might as well have tried to turn time back a couple of days, which he would also have liked to do. At six he got up and found that Eugenie and Jordan had already destroyed the peace of his living room by switching on the television to a noisy and very old black-and -white Western. By the time the police came he was cross and moody, but he contrived to sit on the sofa beside Zillah, holding her hand.

The detective inspector was the same woman who had gone with Zillah to the mortuary. She had another plainclothes officer with her, a sergeant. Zillah asked her if she minded Jims’s wife being present and she said not at all, please stay. Zillah squeezed Jims’s hand and looked lovingly into his face, and Jims had to admit to himself that sometimes she could be an asset to him.

He was asked about the weekend and he said he’d spent it in Dorset. “I went down to my constituency on Thursday afternoon and held my appointments in Casterbridge on Friday morning. At the Shire Hall. After that I drove back to my house in Fredington Crucis and worked on a speech I was making on Saturday evening to the Countryside Alliance. I spent the night there and the following day, made my speech later on, and dined with the alliance. I drove home here on Sunday morning.”

The sergeant took notes. “Is there anyone who can confirm your presence in your Dorset house on Friday, Mr. Melcombe-Smith?”

Jims put on an expression of incredulity. It was one he’d often worn in the House of Commons when some government member made a remark he thought it would become him to regard as ludicrous. “To what are these questions tending?”

He knew the answer he’d get. “They are a matter of routine, sir, that’s all. Is there someone who can confirm your presence? Perhaps a member of your staff?”

“In these degenerate days,” drawled Jims, “I do not have a staff. A woman comes up from the village to clean and keep an eye on things. A Mrs. Vincey. She provides food in the fridge for the weekend when I’m going to be there. She wasn’t there that day.”

“No one called on you?”

“I fear not. My mother spends part of the summer there but mostly she lives in Monte Carlo. She was here, of course, for our wedding”—Zillah’s hand received a squeeze—“but she went back a month ago.”

The police officers looked rather puzzled by this unnecessary information, as well they might. “Mr. Melcombe-Smith, I’m not questioning what you say, but isn’t it rather odd for a young and active man like yourself, a very busy man and newly married, to pass what must have been about thirty hours indoors with nothing much to occupy him but the sort of speech he was well used to making? It was an exceptionally fine day and I believe the countryside around Fredington Crucis is beautiful, yet you didn’t even go out for a walk?”

“You certainly are questioning what I say. Of course I went for a walk.”

“Then perhaps someone saw you?”

“I am unlikely to know the answer to that.”

Later in the day Jims was walking across New Palace Yard toward the members’ entrance. He felt reasonably satisfied with what had happened and was sure he’d hear no more. After all, they couldn’t possibly suspect him of making away with Jeffrey Leach, not him. He had no motive, he hadn’t seen the man for at least three years. In the worst-case scenario, if they found out about his return to London—and they couldn’t—he’d brazen it out, say he’d forgotten. Or give story number four, the one he hadn’t thought of in the small hours, that he’d returned in the night after Zillah was asleep, slept in the spare room so as not to disturb her, and left before she was awake. That would cover everything.

When Michelle told her the murdered man in the cinema was Jeff, Fiona had suffered that momentary loss of consciousness once apparently common in women but now rare. She fainted. Michelle, who a few weeks ago couldn’t have got down to the floor, did so with ease, sat beside her stroking her forehead and whispering, “My dear, my poor dear.”

Fiona came to, said it wasn’t true, was it? It couldn’t be true. Jeff couldn’t be dead. She’d seen a paper which said it was someone called Jeffrey Leach. Michelle told her the police were coming. Would she feel able to see them? Fiona nodded. The shock had been so great, she couldn’t take much else in. Michelle got her onto the sofa, helped her put her feet up, and made milky coffee with plenty of sugar in it. A better remedy for shock than brandy, she said.

“Was he really called Leach?” Fiona asked after a moment or two.

“It seems so.”

“Why did he tell me he was called Leigh? Why did he give me a false name? He’d been living with me for six months.”

“I don’t know, darling. I wish I knew.”

At her interview with the police—the same woman who had taken Zillah to the mortuary and would speak to Jims the next morning— Fiona suffered the beginnings of disillusionment to add to the pain of her loss. That his name was truly Jeffrey John Leach was confirmed, that he was in touch with his former wife, and that he appeared to have had no employment for several years, not perhaps since his student days. The police asked her where she’d been on Friday afternoon and to that she gave very little thought. She could easily name half a dozen people who saw and spoke to her at her merchant bank between three and five. “I wouldn’t have harmed him,” she said, a tear running down her face. “I loved him.”

They examined Jeff’s clothes and what they called his “personal effects.” As a result of watching television programs, Fiona asked tentatively if she would be needed to identify Jeff. They said that wouldn’t be necessary, as Mr. Leach’s former wife had already done so. Fiona found this more upsetting than anything she’d so far heard and she began to sob. Through her tears she made it known that she’d like to see Jeff and they said that could be arranged.

When they’d gone she fell into Michelle’s arms. “There’s never been anyone I felt about the way I did about him. He was the man I’d been waiting for all my life. I can’t live without him.”

Most people would say eight months’ acquaintanceship wasn’t enough for life, and Fiona’s sorrow would pass, but Michelle had known Matthew for only two when she married him and what would she have felt if he’d died? “I know, darling, I know.”

Fiona thought how unkind she’d been to Jeff that evening in Rosmarino when she’d told him to save his silly stories for their baby, she was grown-up. She remembered how she’d reproved him for not being as nice as he might have been to Michelle. Oh, why hadn’t she loved him as he’d deserved?

Responsibility for the recycling and rubbish bins in the neighborhood of Ladbroke Grove station was not Westminster’s or Brent’s but that of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The men who came to empty them on Monday regarded anything in them worth having as their especial perks, and discarded goods were generally picked over with an eye to unconsidered trifles.

The green Marks and Spencer’s bag was still fairly near the top of one of the bins and the younger of the recycling men spotted inside it something wrapped in tissue. It looked as if whoever had used it as a waste receptacle—it was sure to be a she, he said scornfully to his mate—had forgotten she had left a newly bought item inside. And so it was. Investigation revealed a pale blue cashmere sweater, which would do admirably as a birthday present for the recycler’s girlfriend.

Something else was in the bag. They unwrapped it. By that time everyone in the country who read a newspaper or watched television knew the police were looking for the weapon used by the Cinema Slayer. This might well be it.

The cemetery desecration made an even better story than Natalie Reckman had expected. Witchcraft appeared to have been involved, and an interview with an English resident in Rome revealed the possibility of satanic rites carried out near the burial place of Shelley’s heart. Building a new theater was a project she thought she might work up into an article if she described what was happening on the Palatine Hill and recommended something similar for London as a sort of follow-up to millennium celebrations. It might be called the Millennium Theatre or even, thought Natalie, her imagination running away with her, the Natalie Reckman Theatre.

Before getting on the plane home on Monday morning, she bought an English newspaper. It was, of course, a paper from the day before, the Sunday Telegraph, and there she read that the dead man, victim of a murderer becoming known as the Cinema Slayer, was Jeffrey Leach.

Most people, however tough and however experienced, feel some pang, frisson, or tremor of nostalgia on learning of a former lover’s death. Natalie had never loved Jeff but she’d liked him, enjoyed his company, and admired his looks, even when quite aware he was using her. In the prime of life, he had met a horrible death at the hands of some madman. Poor old Jeff, she said to herself, what a thing to happen, poor old Jeff.

That horrible death must have taken place no more than an hour or so after his leaving her in Wellington Street. Sitting in the aircraft, that morning’s paper delivered to her and on her lap, Natalie remembered, as they left the restaurant, how Jeff had asked her to go to the cinema with him. If she’d gone, would things have been different? Maybe she’d have chosen a completely different cinema to go to. But another possibility was that she’d have been killed too.

The someone she’d told Jeff she was very happy with was at Heathrow to meet her. They had lunch together and Natalie told him all about it. A journalist himself, though of rather a different kind, he saw what she meant when she said there might be a story in it. “Poor Jeff looked a bit funny when I talked about this Zillah woman. Guilty, I felt. Well, maybe not so much guilty as having something to hide. There’s been something fishy going on. I’m wondering if they were never divorced at all. That would be just like Jeff.”

“It’s easily checked.”

“Oh, I shall check it. Never fear. I’ve already put my researcher on to it. I called her on the flight.”

“You are a fast worker, my love.”

“But first I think I’ll be good and contact the bill and tell them Jeff had lunch with me last Friday.”

Natalie wasn’t alone in believing something fishy had been going on. The investigating officers had never been satisfied by Zillah’s explanation of the letter she had written to Jeffrey Leach. The word he had used to her on some unspecified visit he’d paid to Abbey Gardens Mansions when he’d stolen her credit card wasn’t “cow,” whatever she might say. Zillah Melcombe-Smith wouldn’t be fazed by that. And she had been fazed, she’d been very frightened. Such a woman, doubtless, seldom wrote letters to anyone, she wasn’t that sort; but she had written to Leach under great pressure of—what? Guilt? Extreme fear? Terror of some sort of discovery? Perhaps all those.

When they interviewed Natalie they were glad to be further on with piecing together the ways Leach had spent the day prior to his cinema visit. And she was able to contribute to the history of him they were starting to compile, something of his past. That, for instance, he’d been newly married when he’d first lived in Queen’s Park, that besides his wife there had been many women before her, all owning their homes and able to keep him. Natalie told them things they already knew about Fiona Harrington and Zillah Melcombe-Smith and something they didn’t know: that when she split up from Leach rather more than a year before he had moved back to Queen’s Park, this time to Harvist Road, and there doubtless had found himself another woman. They returned to their scrutiny of the letter.

Mrs. Melcombe-Smith had remarried in March. Her divorce had taken place in the previous spring. Or so she said. There were children involved, questions of custody and child support, so the divorce could hardly have been a simple, quick affair. If the word Leach had used to her had aroused so much terror, might it not perhaps have something to do with that divorce, some factor that had come out in the proceedings or resulted from the process? To check would be easy and uncomplicated, starting with January of the previous year and going on from there.

The sergeant’s wife still had a copy of the Daily Telegraph Magazine in which Natalie Reckman’s piece had appeared; she was one of those people who seldom throw anything away. He hadn’t looked at it the first time round but he did now. He read with particular interest the passage where Natalie wrote that Mrs. Melcombe-Smith appeared to have lived the first twenty-seven years of her life in jobless, manless isolation in Long Fredington, Dorset. No mention of a former husband, no talk of children.

Both those Melcombe-Smiths were behaving oddly, to put it mildly. No one could be found who had seen the MP in Fredington Crucis on Friday or Saturday, but two people had told the local constable that his distinctive car, which he always left parked outside the front door of Fredington Crucis House, wasn’t there after 9 A.M. on Friday. The postman who delivered a package at 8:45 A.M. on Saturday took it away again because no one answered the door. Irene Vincey, coming in to clean half an hour later, found the house empty and no sign that Jims’s bed had been slept in.

No porter at Abbey Gardens Mansions had seen him between midday on Thursday and Sunday afternoon. The most damning thing for Jims was when the manager of the Golden Hind in Casterbridge called to say that Mr. Melcombe-Smith had canceled his table reservation for lunch and someone had told him this was information to interest the police. A man called Ivo Carew, the chairman of a cancer charity, reluctantly confirmed this, using a few choice epithets about the Golden Hind manager.

With no idea of what might lie in store for him, Jims made a speech in the Commons about the Conservatives being the party of old-fashioned values but new-fashioned kindness, consideration, and true freedom. Quentin Letts quoted it in the Daily Mail (wittily and with a few snide comments) and rumors began running around the Palace of Westminster that the member for South Wessex was tipped for an under-secretaryship. Shadow, of course, which rather reduced the glory.

Jims thought the police fools, anyway, and probably too much in awe of him, landed gentry as he was, to trouble him again. He was so young, so good-looking, and so rich. That night he dreamed a new version of a dream he’d sometimes had in the past, but this time when he came down the steps of Number Ten Downing Street to the waiting cameramen he had Zillah on his arm, the youngest and most beautiful First Lady in living memory. God was in His heaven, thought Jims, and everything more or less right with the world.