Having interviewed so many people in one day and left poor Karen to type up their statements for tomorrow’s meeting, Gablecross felt too hyped up to go home and hung around the set, watching, listening and once again failing to nail either Rupert or Tristan, who were still bitching at each other.
For the fourth night running, therefore, guiltily aware that he hadn’t rung in, Gablecross drove through Eldercombe village long after midnight. After the splendours of Valhalla and the pretty cottages along Paradise High Street, with their front gardens full of phlox and standard roses, his house on the Greenview estate seemed humiliatingly poky.
Bought on a mortgage back in the seventies, a Hungerford house had been every young couple’s dream. Newly painted in pastel colours, with friendly neighbours and the morning sun streaming into a modern kitchen, it had had a genuinely green view across Eldercombe valley to Ricky France-Lynch’s house floating in woods like a grey battleship.
But in no time at all developer George Hungerford had started slapping more and more houses around them, blocking out any view, filling the estate with less friendly neighbours, where children took drugs, heaved bricks through windows and resented having a cop living so near.
The value of Gablecross’s house had plummeted and a move to a larger one, where the children could have rooms of their own and surrounded by fields, was only looking possible with the added boost of Margaret’s income as deputy head.
Tim was proud of his wife’s achievement, but he wished the name of the headmaster, Brian Chambers, a smiling leftie with a brown beard who drove a P-reg Volvo Estate, fell off her tongue a little less often. Chambers and Margaret shared a love of opera and swapped CDs. Tim knew he was getting a taste of his own medicine for spending so much time over the years with comely women witnesses. He knew Margaret longed to hear about the goings-on at Valhalla, how she would have given anything to meet Hermione, Chloe, Alpheus and Granville Hastings, but he was still resentful of Brian.
Gablecross thought the pack at Valhalla were crackers and he needed to mull over them with his wife. He hadn’t sussed Tristan de Montigny or Mikhail at all. Finding her awake last night, he had asked her if she’d ever heard of Baby Spinosissimo, but at the first ‘Brian thinks he’s remarkable’, he felt himself shutting up like a clam, and the signed CD from Hermione had stayed in the glove compartment.
Difficult crimes always pushed away the rest of Gablecross’s life. Over the years, Margaret had learnt to cope with the defensive walls, the pensive silences and the dawn homecomings. Her first pay packet had been spent on a microwave.
Expecting earache, Gablecross was amazed to be greeted by an empty house. Going into the kitchen, he found a tomato salad, a French stick, a quarter of Dutch cheese still in its Cellophane wrapping, and a Tesco’s lasagne awaiting him. Against the lasagne was propped a note: ‘Five minutes in the microwave, gone to a staff meeting.’
No doubt tucked up in some bar, or worse, with Brian Chambers, thought Gablecross savagely. He ignored the lasagne, making do with a pickled onion, a slice of ancient pork pie and the
Tomorrow, he must go and see Tabitha, and try to pin down Tristan. He put aside the paper, and tried seriously to work out who might have killed Rannaldini, but he couldn’t concentrate with Margaret still out. It was only when he went into the lounge half an hour later for a large Scotch to calm his rage that he found his wife fast asleep on the sofa, the
Fetching the duvet from their bed, he laid it over her. He mustn’t forget their wedding anniversary on Sunday.
The great excitements of Thursday’s Inner Cabinet meeting were, first, that Bob Harefield had been in the air flying to Adelaide on Sunday night when both Hermione and Meredith claimed to have been telephoning him and, second, Mikhail’s two-litre Smirnoff bottle contained traces of H20 but absolutely no alcohol.
‘So the bugger was pretending to be drunk the whole time,’ chuntered Gerald Portland.
Mikhail had also pretended to pass out under the weeping ash for four hours until an
Mikhail, who also flatly refused to admit he had nicked Gablecross’s initialled Parker pen, even when he was caught signing autographs with it in Paradise on Thursday morning, was without contrition.
