Dead in the Water - Tickler Peter (книги онлайн без регистрации TXT) 📗

Mullen did as he was told. She picked up a pad and a couple of pencils from one of the jars, walked back to the main kitchen table and perched on its edge. “You can drink your tea and you can talk if you want, but otherwise I want you to keep still.”

Mullen didn’t talk. He sat and sipped and concentrated on a dark smudge on the white wall. He could hear her pencil gliding across the paper, long strokes and short strokes, wild flourishes and careful hatching, and occasionally moments of inactivity when the only sound was her muttering not quite soundlessly to herself.

“Now look at me,” she said, ripping a sheet from the pad and setting it down beside her. “And put your tea down.”

He obeyed. He had never had anyone do this to him before and it felt unsettling, as if he was being examined and found wanting. He watched her face, as her eyes constantly flicked between his face and her pad, absorbed in the present. An ambulance went past outside, but there wasn’t even a flicker of distraction. The front door opened. Mullen’s eyes moved and took in the puzzled outline of her husband.

“Doug,” she snapped, forcing him to face her again. There was exasperation in her voice and she scratched harder and faster with her pencil, fearful that the opportunity was almost gone.

“What’s all this then?” There was surprise in Kevin Branston’s voice.

“I’m drawing Doug,” she said, still wielding her pencil with an air of desperation. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“What are you doing here, Doug?” Branston clearly wasn’t pleased.

Mullen said nothing. He had reverted to looking at Gina, giving her his fullest attention. He felt irrationally angry that Branston had returned and interrupted her. But the spell had been broken and Gina gave a sigh of disgust. “I haven’t finished!”

For a moment Mullen wondered if there was going to be a full-scale argument, but Branston shrugged as if this was normal. “OK. I’m off to the loo.” And he turned back along the corridor, taking his newspaper with him, and trudged up the stairs.

Gina returned to her sketch, head bent so low over it that her hair hung down like a curtain. Mullen knew he had to ask his question now or he never would, even if it was a leading one and deceitful too. But the thought had been there ever since the previous evening, and it had put down roots.

“Kevin tells me you suffer from insomnia.”

She gave a half laugh from behind the hair. “Something like that.”

“Do you find rohypnol helps?” It was a stab in the dark.

For several seconds she made no response, as her pencil continued to skate across the paper. Finally she stopped, raised her head, pushed her hair out of her eyes and regarded Mullen. “He shouldn’t have talked about it,” she said. “It’s none of anyone else’s business.” It wasn’t an admission, but it wasn’t a denial either.

“Can I see what you’ve drawn?” Mullen was more than curious to see what she had made of him, but he also wanted to change the subject.

“No,” she said firmly. She tucked her notepad under her arm, picked up the first sketch from the table and then, like her husband, retreated along the corridor and up the stairs. Mullen picked up his mug and drained what was left of the tea. He couldn’t shake off the feeling that he had had a great opportunity and blown it.

* * *

“So why exactly are you here?” Kevin Branston said. The irritation in his voice was palpable. Three or four minutes had passed since Gina had disappeared upstairs and he had reappeared. Mullen couldn’t help but wonder if and what they had been saying to each other. “This is my home and it is outside of work hours.”

“I’m not here about work.”

“So what the hell is this visit about?”

“Chris. Chris who drowned in the river.”

Branston seemed surprised. He peered at Mullen, his eyes narrowing. “What?”

“I’d like to know why you met Chris in Costa in Queen Street a few weeks ago and gave him a substantial sum of money.”

Branston opened his mouth and then shut it. Mullen could see his Adam’s apple working overtime. His face had flushed visibly, betraying the anger within. “I think you’d better leave.”

“Was he blackmailing you?”

There was no response from Branston.

Mullen pressed. “About your relationship with Diana Downey?”

The blood drained from Branston’s face. He wobbled. For a moment, it seemed to Mullen that he was in danger of collapsing on the floor, but he grabbed the work surface with his hand, knocking over a packet of cereal as he did so.

“We aren’t having a relationship.” His words were barely audible.

“I saw you coming out of the vicarage on Thursday.” Mullen paused, allowing the information to sink in. “At two twenty in the afternoon to be precise.”

“Look, it’s not what you think.” Branston went to the sink and poured himself a glass of water. He drank half of it before he continued. “Diana is a friend. A good friend. But that’s all. I think she’s gay if you must know, though we’ve never discussed it. She’s been very supportive. About Gina that is.” He paused, as if wondering how much to say. “Gina has mental health issues. I find it a bit difficult sometimes, coping with it. I met Diana at the Meeting Place first. She came along because she was very interested in what we were doing there. I really appreciated that. And I soon found out that she was a good listener too. So she agreed that I could come and talk to her at the vicarage, well away from work and home. I guess you’d call it informal counselling.”

“If it was merely counselling, why did you give Chris money?”

“I’m coming to that.” He licked his lips and drank some more water. “Chris was a bastard. He noticed we got on well and he discovered that I was visiting Diana. He joked about how it would be easy for someone to get the wrong idea about it. At least I thought it was a joke. But the next thing was he was telling me how hard up he was and that what he really wanted to do was go and live in Spain. He knew someone there, he said, who would help him get work. But he needed money to get himself there. It was all a load of rubbish, of course. But I was naive enough to think that if I gave him ?500, then at least he would clear off and we’d be shot of him.”

“We?” Mullen couldn’t help himself from jumping on the word. “So Diana knew about this?”

“No.” Branston fell silent for a long moment. Eventually he continued. “What I mean is that Diana knew about Chris’s insinuations that we were having a sexual relationship. But I never told her about the ?500 I gave him. You have to believe that. It was my own stupid idea. For three days I thought it had worked a treat. Chris disappeared from view. I was really pleased with myself. But then he turned up again at the Meeting Place, a smirk on his face. ‘Change of plan,’ he told me.”

“And did you have a change of plan too?”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Did you decide to kill him?”

“What on earth are you talking about? He fell into the river because he was drunk as a skunk.”

Mullen shook his head. “I believe that someone helped him to fall into the river.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

Mullen shrugged. “Call it an educated guess.”

Branston glared at him. Mullen noticed that his hands had clenched into fists, but it didn’t bother him. He was confident that if it came to a fight, he would be more than a match for the guy.

Eventually Branston responded. “You think I did it?”

“As far as I can see, you’ve certainly got a motive.” In truth the longer the conversation had gone on, the less certain Mullen felt about his theory, but it was the only one he had.

“I think you had better leave,” Branston said. “Now!”

“As you wish.”

* * *

Paul Atkinson very nearly didn’t answer the door bell. He had had enough of people calling in to offer their condolences and ask nosey questions. God knew he and Janice hadn’t had the best of relationships. A lot of that was his fault. But it was partly hers too. It was hard to live with someone who was always checking up on you. Janice had always wanted to know who he had been meeting for lunch (especially if they were female), what they had been discussing, what the woman was wearing and how old she was. Her enquiries were about as subtle as a sledge hammer. In the end, it had pushed him into having the affairs she was so suspicious about. Not with anyone at St Mark’s. That would have been far too risky. Usually it happened on his business trips to the States, where the other party accepted it for what it was — a brief sexual encounter where neither makes any emotional demands on the other. There had been one-night stands in Prague and Berlin too. But he had kept things safely at a distance until Becca. He hadn’t been looking for an affair or expecting one. It had just happened and it had been great until Janice found out.