Death at Rainbow Cottage by Jo Allen (book club books txt) 📗

the woman said, as reassuring as his practice nurse about to draw blood from a nervous patient. ‘I believe you’ve got something to tell us about Len Pierce. Is that right?’

‘Yes.’ Giles cleared his throat like a bad actor about to deliver a famous line. ‘I imagine you’ll have guessed already. I was Lenny’s lover.’ The phrase screamed, like a bad headline in a red-top tabloid. He threw them an appealing glance, begging them not to judge him too harshly. ‘But I swear I didn’t kill him.’

His wedding ring caught the light and he turned it over on his finger thinking of Janice, wondering what she’d say when she found out. Their names were engraved together inside the ring, along with the date and a temptation to fate, the words Happy Ever After. He’d tried, but he’d failed. Would she understand that?

‘Okay,’ the man said, suspending the discussion while the receptionist appeared with coffees for himself and the woman, ‘why don't we start at the beginning? Tell us a bit about yourself.’ He pushed his chair back and the sergeant sat forward to take over the interview but Giles wasn’t fooled. While he was concentrating on what she had to say her boss would listen and watch the two of them, chipping in where necessary, reading Giles’s body language and interpreting his nervousness as something deeper and far more sinister, as guilt or fear. And he’d be right in that. Giles was both guilty and fearful.

‘I’m Dr Giles Butler. GP. From Kirkby Lonsdale.’ He coughed. ‘I’m fifty-six. Married.’ Because that mattered, if only to Janice. ‘Three sons, two at university, one still at school.’ He issued the two of them with a pleading look, trying it on one of them, then the other, backwards and forwards and turning to Ashleigh O’Halloran.

‘Thanks, Dr Butler. Let’s start off with what made you come and talk to us.’

Gracie. It had been her sound common sense, the doubt he’d heard in her voice. That the only person left alive who understood him might suspect him had forced his hand. He couldn’t let her think he was a killer and this was the only way out.

‘I saw your appeal on the news.’ He nodded towards Jude Satterthwaite, who seemed to hide a wry smile. ‘I had no idea. I was shocked when I heard.’

‘The television appeal was on Monday,’ the sergeant reminded him. ‘Why didn’t you get in touch with us before?’

‘I was very busy.’ Giles’s nerves tightened into nausea. ‘But it was on my conscience once I saw the appeal. It was a shock, a terrible shock.’ He reached for the cup and the dregs of his cold coffee. ‘I didn’t kill Lenny — I swear I didn’t. But you’ll think I did.’

‘We don’t think anything, Dr Butler.’ The woman picked up her pen, turned it over in her fingers and put it down again, a futile gesture since the man was taking the notes . ‘We’re here to listen. Tell us about how you know Lenny. That’s a good starting point.’

He gave a small, huffing sigh, reviewing a prepared speech and trying to remember all the things he had to say. ‘I’m gay. I suppose you know that.’ Someone in a lab somewhere would already have unpacked the secret he’d kept from everyone but Len and Gracie for the best part of forty years. ‘Obviously I hadn’t told anyone.’

‘Obviously,’ she affirmed, without a trace of irony

The difficulty of explaining his domestic situation was too much, though it would hardly be unusual, and she didn’t ask. Thank God for that. Janice would be disappointed in him. The boys would be furious or, worse, mortified. His patients, or some of them, would be shocked, either at his sexuality or his cowardice. A few might not care. ‘I met him about eighteen months ago, in a cafe in Penrith. He’d been in to see his bank manager and I’d been at the hospital to visit my father. The place was busy so he asked if he could share my table and we got chatting.’ Like Brief Encounter, or a bad romance. He wasn’t sure which.

‘You got on well, then.’

What attracted one person to another? It certainly hadn’t been his looks. Len had been a skinny man with a sharp expression that reflected his dissatisfaction with the way the world had treated him, but whatever it was some bolt from the blue had taken Giles straight in the stomach and those decades of forcing himself into his parents’ expectations had been swept aside. ‘I can't remember what, but there was something about him that made me laugh. I took to him straight away.’ That was the good side. Len had had a dry wit, not unlike Giles’ own. He’d poked fun at him for his staid respectability, teased him about his double life while being the first person ever to understand it. They’d laughed about it, and a whole lot of other, trivial things. In this world it did you good to laugh. ‘You know how it is. Sometimes you meet the least likely people and you click. That was what it was like with Lenny and me.’ Most of all he’d loved Len’s stubborn refusal to care about what other people thought of him. If he had his time over again… Gay, he’d have said to the world at large, wide-eyed at the age of sixteen when the possibility had first, briefly, occurred to him, so what? But life punished you for being born in the wrong generation and he was trapped in its expectations.

‘And you started meeting regularly?’

‘Yes. For coffee at first, and to talk. Then later, more.’ He couldn’t help it. He went scarlet, reached for his coffee again and found the cup empty. ‘We didn’t always have sex.’ In the end it hadn’t been about that. ‘Sometimes we just talked. Sometimes we went for a walk.