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

of doing it. He nodded, not even sure if that was the right answer.

‘Was he putting you under pressure?’

Another nod.

‘Did he threaten you?’ the sergeant asked.

He was shocked at that. ‘He’d never have hurt me.’

‘I didn’t mean that. But you had a lot to lose, didn’t you?’

‘He did say he’d tell my wife about our relationship if I didn’t. But I don’t think he would have done.’ Janice would go ballistic when she found out, and she’d be even more devastated if she realised it hadn’t changed the way he’d felt about Lenny. Love made you a fool at the best of times and illicit love turned you into a victim.

‘Okay. Now tell me,’ the woman said with a sigh, ‘about how you knew Gracie Pepper.’

They knew. He looked up again. Under Jude Satterthwaite’s cool impatience and Ashleigh O’Halloran’s interest, he realised that what Janice thought was the least of his problems, but it was still Len who lingered in his thoughts. ‘I’m not a violent man. I’d never have hurt him.’

‘About Gracie,’ persisted the woman.

It was easier to tell her. ‘I met her at the hospital. My father has been in and out of there for a long time. Not that there’s really anything wrong with him but old age, but he’s constantly being hospitalised with infections and for a while he hasn’t been quite well enough to go home. I go up to visit when I can. Sometimes I’d combine it with a visit to Lenny. It was a good excuse.’

‘Makes a change from golf,’ said the chief inspector, his voice dripping with criticism.

Giles addressed himself to the sergeant. ‘You know Gracie worked in the elder care unit. Dad thought the world of her from the minute she arrived, and she did of him, so I made a point of seeking her out to ask about him. We found out we got on, straight away.’ Like the sergeant, Gracie had been someone it was easy to talk to at a time when Giles had needed to talk. More than ever he wished he’d been honest. ‘It was an entirely innocent relationship.’ He smiled, wryly. ‘Ironically, of course, if my wife had found out she’d have thought I was having an affair. But I think she’d have forgiven me more easily for an affair with a woman than she would have done for an affair with a man.’ It was about margins, how wrong you could be and salvage soothing from your mistakes.

The woman was looking at him in a strange way, as if she’d like to disagree with him but didn’t dare. ‘You weren’t interested in her, sexually?’

It was a roundabout way of asking a question. ‘No. I might have been, I suppose, but I always assumed she preferred women to men, though she never said.’ He took out a handkerchief and wiped a bead of sweat away from his brow as he thought about Gracie. ‘To be honest with you, it was a relief to have an uncomplicated relationship.’

‘Okay.’ Satterthwaite snapped back into the discussion. ‘Let’s ask you some additional questions. Did you see Gracie Pepper last Tuesday?’

‘She drove me to the lane at Temple Sowerby,’ Giles said. Heat prickled under his collar and he didn’t even have the courage to flip his shirt button loose in case it somehow incriminated him.

‘Why?’

‘Because I needed—’ A tear pricked his eye, the final humiliation. ‘I needed to find closure.’

‘Gracie knew about you and Len,’ the chief inspector went on. ‘Did she threaten to tell your wife?’

‘No!’

‘Did you ask her to drive you to the lane with the idea, perhaps, of murdering her there?’

He thought of Gracie, standing in the lane in the fading light, of a cloud of starlings wheeling above their head, of a moment of fear when she’d accused him of killing Lenny. ‘No, I never did! It was sentiment. That was all. Sentiment.’

The two police officers exchanged glances. ‘When did you last see Gracie?’ DCI Satterthwaite asked him.

He sat back, shoulders straight. ‘On Tuesday afternoon.’

‘Tuesday was the day she died.’

He bowed his head.

‘Where and when did you see her?’

‘At the hospital. She was just going off shift as I arrived. I spent an hour with my father and then I left.’ He drew a long breath. ‘She invited me back to her house for supper.’

‘Why was that?’

He looked across at Colleen and her closed expression told him this didn’t look good. ‘I’ve been struggling. It was bad enough when Lenny was alive, but since his death I’ve realised how close I came to dying, either at the same time or in his place. Gracie understood.’ Rather like he sensed Sergeant O’Halloran did, and that must be why Satterthwaite had muscled his way back into the interview. Resenting that, he turned away and back, once again, to his more sympathetic interrogator. ‘She knew how conflicted I was about Len. I loved him but sometimes he made me feel like a coward and a hypocrite. But with Gracie I never felt judged. She never judged anybody. So when I’d finished with Dad, I went round to her house as we’d arranged, but she wasn’t there.’

‘What did you do then?’

‘I knew I hadn’t got the time or the date wrong, because we’d spoken about it just that afternoon, but I didn’t want to hang about, so I left the car and walked back into town. I thought I’d give it half an hour and then go back. I walked down to the Market Square and along to the New Squares. Then I walked back along King Street, and I was there when I heard sirens and saw blue lights.’ And he’d seen these two detectives, running down the hill as if someone’s life depended on it. Now he knew where they’d been heading.

‘Okay.’ Satterthwaite sat