Almost Love (4 page)

“She doesn’t like doctors very much, but I’d say that her doctor is bound to have a record of it, because she travelled abroad so much. She will have had to agree to injections, possibly blood tests, both before and after some of the expeditions that she went on.”

“Do you know her doctor?”

“Not personally, but I know her name. It is Dr Rentzenbrinck. I believe her first name is Marianna, but I can check. Her telephone number will probably be in my aunt’s address book.”

“Do you know where to find it?”

“Oh, yes. She keeps it by the telephone in the parlour. Ringing people up is one of her great pleasures: she has many friends throughout the world and she doesn’t sleep well. And she virtually never goes out in the evenings. That’s why I thought it so odd that she didn’t answer the phone last night.”

“How many times did you try?”

“Oh, several. At least four. On the first occasion, the phone was engaged, which made her later failure to respond even odder. Of course, it could just have been someone leaving a message via BT callminder, or whatever it’s called. I use an old-fashioned answering machine myself. My aunt is surprisingly up-to-date in some ways.”

“Has anyone checked for 1571 messages?” Tim asked PC Cooper.

“No, sir. Would you like me to do it now?”

“No. Leave it until the SOCOs have tested it for prints.”

Guy Maichment’s swarthy face changed colour.

“But my fingerprints will be on it,” he said. “I used it when I telephoned the police. In any case, why would an intruder want to use the telephone?”

“I don’t know why – they probably wouldn’t, in fact. But it’s our job to check. We can eliminate your prints, Mr Maichment, and those of your aunt. So don’t worry about that.”

“I don’t know how long fingerprints last. If it’s more than a few days, Jane’s will be on it as well.”

“We can eliminate any of the fingerprints of people who have used the phone legitimately, if we know who they are, and then see what, if any, we have left,” Tim explained patiently. “What else did you touch? I’m assuming that you didn’t put your hands on the wall – this wall, I mean?” He waved a hand at the red smear.

“Good God, no.” Guy Maichment recoiled. “I can’t stand blood, actually. Why would you think I’d touch
that
?”

“Just checking,” Tim said again. “You might have been groping for the light switch, for example. Did you turn the light on? Could you tell us exactly what happened, and what you did, in the order in which you did it, if you can remember? I’m sorry if you have already been over it with PC Cooper,” he added, as Guy Maichment began to look affronted again.

“We didn’t talk about it in detail,” Gary Cooper said quickly.

“Well, I’d like to understand the detail now,” said Tim. “Should we stand outside again? We can’t sit down here, but we can go and sit in my car if you like; or in the panda car.”

“I don’t mind standing, but I should like to get away from that,” Guy Maichment said, gesturing at the wall. “It gives me the creeps.”

They filed out into the sunshine. Guy Maichment bent to remove the overshoes.

“I’d leave those on for the moment, Mr Maichment. We’ll need to go back into the house eventually. When you’re ready, PC Cooper will take notes.”

Guy Maichment cleared his throat.

“I came in the car. I have a Land Rover as well, but it needs some rep[airs after a problem when I was on my latest landscaping contract. I drove up the track quite slowly; the car is quite noisy, and if my aunt had been asleep I didn’t want to alarm her by waking her up suddenly. When I reached the house everything was in darkness. As you can imagine, it is very dark here in the woods at night, even when there is a full moon. There was a crescent moon last night, so it wasn’t bright. I dipped the headlights and drove as near to the front door as I could – to about where the panda car is standing now. I’m not sure what I intended to do next. I have a key, but I should have been reluctant to alarm her by unlocking the door during the night. I know that sounds stupid, since I had made the journey on purpose to check that she was OK, but I suppose that really I’d hoped to find the downstairs lights on. She sometimes stayed up half the night and often slept in a chair rather than going to bed.

“I was still wavering about what to do when I saw her cat. I had parked to the right of the house, you understand, so I didn’t have a direct view of the front door. But I saw the cat slink round the side of the building. He was approaching from the back garden. I watched him closely; I like cats and I thought I was probably watching him hunt. When he reached the front wall of the house, he crept along it, keeping in very close. I could still make him out – by the light of the dipped headlights I could see the front of the house and a few feet beyond it – when suddenly he disappeared. I was sure it wasn’t simply because I’d taken my eye off him; one moment he was inching along the wall, the next he had gone. I thought that perhaps my aunt had opened the door to let him in, so I got out of the car to see if she was there.”

He paused and swallowed, then passed the back of his hand across his forehead. It was an affected gesture, Tim thought, as if Guy Maichment were trying to conjure up some more appropriate signs of emotion than the ones he had shown so far.

“You don’t happen to have any water, do you? My throat is very dry.”

“I’ve got an unopened bottle of water in my car,” said Gary Cooper.

“Would you mind getting it?” said Tim. He was quite pleased to have the opportunity to observe Guy Maichment out of role, as it were, for a few seconds.

“You must be feeling tired, sir,” he said. “I’m sorry that I have to put you through all this. You will appreciate that in order to find your aunt I need as much detail as I can get from you while it is still fresh in your mind. As you pointed out, time is of the essence.”

“I quite understand. I suppose it has just hit me, that’s all.”

Tim gave him a casual look. Guy’s eyes still glittered unnaturally brightly, like a child’s at a birthday party. Perhaps this was genuinely his way of coping with stress. It seemed odd, somehow, but no doubt a psychologist would say otherwise. Tim might contact one to see, or consult one of his many psychology books. It was a subject which fascinated him.

Gary Cooper came back with a small bottle of Evian water. Guy took it from him – not so much as a murmur of thanks, Tim noted – wrenched the cap off it and drank thirstily. He supposed that was fair enough: the man had been here for several hours and had presumably consumed nothing since the previous evening.

“So,” he said, “you got out of the car. Did you lock it?”

“No. I wouldn’t have locked it while it was parked at my aunt’s, but as a matter of fact I rarely do. It’s such an old heap that I’m pretty confident that no-one will try to steal it.”

Tim inclined his head. This wasn’t the right time to give a lecture on the dangers of ‘twocking’.

“So what did you do?”

“I took the torch from the dashboard and switched it on. Then I left the car and followed where the cat had gone. I walked in close to the side of the house, as he did.”

“Any particular reason for that?”

“Not really. I suppose that I felt that what I was doing was quite eerie; to follow in the cat’s footsteps made it seem a bit more . . . normal.”

“Indeed,” said Tim. Whatever the state of Guy Maichment’s psychological health, he was not great on logic. “Did you find the cat?”

“No. But when I reached the door, I found it open. I was right in my assumption that the cat had been let into the house. Just not by my aunt.”

“That’s an interesting way of putting it.”

“What do you mean?”

Shit, Tim thought. I’ve put him back on the defensive again. He tried to smile reassuringly.

“Oh, nothing much: you must forgive me, I’m obsessed with terminology; it’s a bit of a hobby of mine. If I had been telling your story, I’d probably have said that the cat had got into the house and when I reached the door I found that it was open. Do you have any reason to believe that the cat was let in?”

Guy Maichment shrugged. “Someone must have left the door open.”

“I agree: but the question is, when? Do you have any reason to believe that the cat was let in by someone while you were watching it? Did you notice whether the door was open when you first arrived?”

“The answer is ‘no’ to both questions,” said Guy huffily. “If I’d seen that the door was open to start with, naturally I shouldn’t have wondered whether it was the right thing to do to go into the house. I’d have jumped out of the car as quickly as I could and gone to see what was wrong. My aunt may be a little eccentric, but she certainly isn’t in the habit of leaving her door wide open in the middle of the night.”

“Did you see or hear anyone else at all?”

“No. No-one.”

“So you went into the house. You say that you didn’t turn the lights on. Why was that?”

“I thought that if there was an intruder inside I would stand a better chance of apprehending them if they didn’t know where I was.”

“But you didn’t turn the torch off?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Guy Maichment shrugged again, but he was calmer now. He smiled self-depreciatively.

“Scared, I guess. I didn’t stop to think it through properly, but I was pretty alarmed. I don’t pretend to be a hero.”

“Once you were in the house, did you call out to your aunt?”

“No. By then I had already decided that something was wrong.”

“Because the door was open?”

“Yes.”

“When did you first see the blood – or whatever it is – on the wall?”

“Not until after I came back downstairs. I turned the lights on after I searched the house.”

“So you searched the whole house by torchlight?”

“Yes.”

“Did you start with the upstairs rooms?”

“Yes.”

“Why was that? If there had been an intruder in the house and they were still downstairs, they could either have got away or trapped you. And what about your aunt? You said that she sometimes sleeps all night in a chair. Didn’t you think that she might have been doing that last night? In which case, she would have been very frightened if she’d woken up to hear someone moving around upstairs. Much more frightened than if you’d rung the doorbell.”

Guy Maichment shot Tim a look of pure loathing. Tim noted that the pupils of his eyes shrank rapidly, while the irises, normally hazel, took on an iridescent yellow hue. The yellow faded as suddenly as it had appeared when Maichment tamed his stare. He evidently hoped that his anger had gone unnoticed. He dropped his gaze and attempted another of his “I-was-doing-my-best-but-was-out-of-my-depth” shrugs. Tim kept his eyes steadfastly fixed on Maichment’s face throughout this performance. He was beginning to lose patience. It was clear that the man had something to hide and he was tired of pussyfooting around. He stopped himself from directly challenging Maichment by recalling the day on which Katrin and Juliet Armstrong had each separately told him that he gave himself away too easily. Instead he waited. Guy Maichment compressed his lips, and ran his tongue around the top one. He took another swig from the water-bottle.

“To be honest, I don’t know why I went upstairs first. The doors to all the downstairs rooms were closed, and the staircase leads straight up from the hall, as you see. It just seemed the natural thing to do.”

“I see. How many rooms are there upstairs?”

“Three. My aunt’s bedroom, Jane Halliwell’s room and what Claudia calls the box-room. It actually has a single bed in it, but there’s a lot of junk in there as well. When guests stay, Jane usually moves out of her room into the box-room for a few nights.”

“Isn’t there a bathroom?”

“Yes, but it’s downstairs; it’s part of the extension at the back of the house. As you can imagine, there was no bathroom when the house was built, nor for centuries afterwards, as far as I know. My aunt didn’t build the extension herself. I think it was added in the 1930s.”

“So you went upstairs, still with the lights off, still shining your torch, and looked in all of the rooms?”

“Yes.”

“Which one did you start with?”

“My aunt’s bedroom. I knocked on the door and said, ‘Claudia, it’s me, Guy. Don’t be alarmed. I’ve just come to see that you’re all right. May I come in?’”

“Was there any response?”

“Of course there wasn’t. As you are perfectly aware, she’s disappeared.”

“So then you entered the room?”

“Yes. I knocked again, a little louder, and then I went in. I could see immediately that she wasn’t in the bed. I walked round the bed, in case she had fallen on to the floor. There’s a walk-in cupboard – her ‘closet’, she calls it – on that side of the room, beyond the window. I opened the door and shone the torch in there as well. I thought there was an outside chance that she might have hidden in there, if she’d been alarmed by something.”

Tim nodded.

“And after that?”

“I went into Jane’s room. It’s much smaller, with no large cupboards, so I just stood in the doorway and swung the torchlight around. I don’t think I’ve been in it once since Jane came to live here, but it is just as I’d expect her room to be: pin-neat, with nothing left out at all. Then the box-room. As I’ve said, it’s full of junk. The bed is made up, but piled with stuff at the moment: it looks like old curtains. And all the usual boxes that my aunt refuses to get rid of. It was pretty obvious that there was no-one lurking in there.”

“Then back downstairs again?”

“Yes. I came down the stairs by torchlight and opened the door to the parlour. It was there that I decided to turn on the lights. The parlour is cluttered and I was afraid of tripping over something. In any case, I was pretty convinced by this time that I was alone in the house – though it did cross my mind . . . .” Guy Maichment paused abruptly.

“Go on, Mr Maichment. What crossed your mind?”

“It did occur to me that she might have died, or had a stroke, or something.”

“Quite a natural thought. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the open door, I’m guessing this would have been the thought uppermost in your mind?”