Killing a Unicorn Page 14

  When at last Kate came in, it was obvious she’d been hurrying. Fanning her heated face, she handed Crouch a sheet of paper, giving him an almost imperceptible nod as she settled herself, and he immediately lost interest in the photos, leaving them where they were for her to gather up, while he read what she had given him.

  She took the opportunity to select a very much clearer picture of the little boy than the previous one they’d been given. She saw that he was very like his mother, but with darkish brown hair, rather than blonde, that flopped in a curve over his brow. He had the promise of a firm chin, which would no doubt save him from looking in any way girlish, or like a copy of Bibi, as he grew older. By then, when his childish features had matured, with those sort of looks, he’d be all set to break a few hearts. Now he was just a sturdily built little boy with a beaming smile that betokened a sunny nature.

  It was a long time since Kate had prayed, but she found herself doing so now. Not using words — she couldn’t have found any that were adequate — but just absorbing this happy, beautiful child into her own being and willing everything she had that no harm would come to him.

  The last photo she picked up was another of Bibi herself, and again as she looked at it came the thought that the future could be read in that face. Inescapable as it seemed to be, however, Kate was a practical policewoman and felt she ought to regard this rather fanciful idea with some scepticism: how could you really tell what a person was like from any photograph, however good? Wasn’t she looking at it with hindsight? There hadn’t been time yet for any in-depth interviews, no opportunity to find out, by talking to people and drawing conclusions from what they said, what this woman had really been like, to have formed some idea as to what had made someone hate her enough to take her life and deprive her child of his mother. She made a note to find time to talk to Francine Calvert, who seemed a sensible person and the one, apart from — or even including — Chip, who she thought had been closer to her, in age and in other respects, than anyone else.

  Dave Crouch was at last talking to Chip, starting from where he’d left off. ‘It would have made life a lot easier, Mr Calvert, if you’d been straight with us from the beginning.’ He glanced briefly at the paper Kate had given him and tapped it. ‘As it is, I think we’d better start again, hadn’t we? And this time from the beginning, with the truth.’

  Chip blustered. ‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I think you understand me well enough. Why didn’t you tell us the real reason you brought Bibi Morgan to live here?’

  ‘Does it need saying? Why do people usually decide to live together?’

  This sort of arrogance was not calculated to gladden Crouch’s heart. ‘Please don’t answer one question with another.’

  ‘What’s happened now has nothing to do with what happened then.’

  Crouch leaned forward and fixed him with a look. ‘Let me get this straight. You’re saying you knew there’d been threats against her life before this, when she lived in Yorkshire — and which had very nearly succeeded — and you’re expecting me to believe you thought there was no connection?’

  Chip went suddenly pale under his tan, with anger, Crouch thought, gratified to see it. Anger was a channel to get through to people. It left them exposed, vulnerable, without control over themselves. ‘The reason I thought there was no connection is because the man who made them is bloody well in prison!’

  ‘Was, Mr Calvert. Graham Armstrong was in prison.’

  There was a measurable silence. ‘Still is. He was sent down for seven years — and that was just over two, two and a half years ago!’

  ‘Haven’t you ever heard of remission?’

  ‘They don’t give remission to somebody as mad as he is, when he hasn’t served half his sentence!’

  ‘Oh yes, they sometimes do. Our caring society is very sympathetic to people like Armstrong,’ Crouch said drily. ‘At the time he was sent down, he was a very disturbed personality, but he’s apparently responded well to the treatment he’s had in prison, and after psychiatric assessment and showing remorse for what he did, he’s been judged fit for release — under licence, of course. He’s been out for nearly three months.’

  Chip’s face was a study. The scar stood out lividly. He looked round a little desperately, but this time there was no bottle of Dutch courage, such as he kept in his study, to help him out.

  ‘Why don’t you begin by telling us exactly what happened, right from when you first met Bianca Morgan, and this time not just an approximation of the truth?’

  Chip ignored the suggestion. ‘I can’t believe what I’m hearing! You’re saying they let that maniac loose, after he tried to kill her, her and Jasie? Don’t you realize what he did? He only set fire to the bloody house, deliberately, when they were both in bed and asleep — Christ, he’s a mad beast, he ought to have been locked up and the key thrown away!’

  ‘You weren’t with her, the night this happened?’

  ‘If I had been, none of us would be alive to tell the tale. But I saw the smoke coming from the house, the flames behind the windows. If I hadn’t come along then, it would have been all up with them.’

  Crouch tapped the papers in front of him. ‘You were something of a hero that night, it seems, Mr Calvert.’

  ‘A hero? That’s one way of putting it.’

  His fingers went instinctively to the healed scar-tissue on his face. He hadn’t felt like a hero, then or afterwards. A crass fool, more like, for not realizing what was happening and preventing what might well have been a tragedy. If he hadn’t happened to go out for a walk round the village before going to bed, to cool a head that had felt like a bucket after throwing several drinks too many down his neck in order to try and make some sense out of the situation, it would have been too late. But that had been the end of it, not the beginning.

  He said, his anger rising, ‘If you know all this, why are you badgering me?’

  Crouch was still looking at him as if he were some other species, arrived from some distant planet, perhaps. ‘Didn’t it even occur to you,’ he asked slowly, ‘to think it might have been Armstrong who killed her?’

  There was a long pause. ‘Possibly.’ Chip studied the tip of his polished loafer. ‘Briefly. Well, yes, maybe it did,’ he admitted after a while. ‘Then I thought no, it can’t be. People don’t escape from prison, just like that. They’d have let her know if he had. Never in this life did I imagine they’d just open the door and let the bastard go free — it’s beyond belief.’ He glared at Crouch. ‘Why the hell haven’t you arrested him? He should be the one you’re giving the third degree, not me!’

  ‘That’s all being taken care of. It would help even more if I wasn’t working with one hand tied behind my back.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning we now have the basic facts here,’ Crouch said, tapping the papers on the table in front of him, ‘but I need to know the background, everything that’s led up to this, and only you can tell me that.’

  The clock above the old coach house struck nine. The strokes sounded tinnily across the quiet morning stable yard.

  ‘I don’t see why, but all right,’ Chip said eventually. ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘We’re not going anywhere. Take your time.’

  For a while, Chip sat with his big frame hunched in the chair, his elbows on his knees, breathing deeply, not knowing how to tell it. He began haltingly, but then, as he spoke, it became easier, as if a boil had been lanced, and all the pain was draining away.

  The start of it all had been years ago, when he’d first walked into the Ascomb Arms with a gang of his racing chums, and seen her there, behind the desk, with her silver-gilt hair gleaming against the dark panelling of the reception area, her smile of welcome lighting up her face so that you thought she was smiling for you alone. He’d fallen for her like a lovesick teenager — hook, line and sinker. So much so that he’d stayed on for several days, after the rest of the crowd had gone home. He
’d taken her out, wined and dined her, charmed her, softened her up — if nothing else, that was the one thing he did know how to do. She was a very young twenty-year-old and he could see she was more than a bit dazzled by his attentions, which was flattering, and perhaps if she’d given into him as girls usually did easily enough, his infatuation would have worked itself out naturally, as that usually did, too. But she didn’t. That ought to have warned him, but strangely enough, he hadn’t minded; for once in his life he was prepared to wait, to woo her, because he’d been confident that he’d win her in the end. This, he’d already decided, was the girl he was going to marry …

  She had a divorced mother who owned and ran the hotel where she worked — another beautiful woman, from whom Bibi had inherited her looks but not her reserved nature. Carys Morgan was an expansively dramatic woman, who had once worked as a small-time actress and had been married for a short time to a moderately wealthy businessman. Using the money from her divorce settlement, she had worked her socks off to make a good life for herself and her child. Twelve years later, the determination to get where she was had begun to show in the hard lines around her mouth and the calculation in her eyes. It had cost her a good deal to turn the Ascomb Arms from a village pub into a small, decidedly upmarket place, furnished in country house style and with a growing reputation for comfort, care and excellent food. She employed a superb French chef and organized gourmet weekends, which were booked up months ahead, where she swanned around among her guests, made up and dressed to the nines, a gin and tonic in one hand, cigarette in an amber holder in the other, keeping an eagle eye on everyone and everything.

  She had not approved of Chip, whom she saw as an obstacle to her plans for Bibi’s future. Bibi, she’d long ago decided, would continue to run the profitable business built up so arduously over the years when she, Carys, retired. Of course, that wouldn’t be for years yet, Carys had no intention of throwing in the towel in the foreseeable future. But it would take some time, anyway, for Bibi to learn enough to assume her mantle. She wasn’t cast in the same mould as her mother and was still a little naive, unprepared. And perhaps Carys hadn’t met Chip in a good light, seeing him among his rakish cronies, who didn’t impress her with their money and their noisy cars and their Hooray Henry lifestyles.

  But more than that, she saw he had every intention of taking Bibi away and installing her in his family home. Carys wasn’t unaware of the advantages to Bibi of marrying into what she thought of as the county set, but she’d made it her business to look into Chip’s affairs and what she’d found there hadn’t reassured her. There was no money behind him, and Chip himself didn’t impress her as being the sort who would suddenly turn into a solid proposition. She thought it very likely, taking it from the perspective of her own ambitions and inclinations, that he was out for what he could get, namely the ownership of the Ascomb Arms at some future date.

  So she’d put her foot down. Her daughter was of age, her decisions were her own, but Carys had made it clear that if Bibi went ahead and married Chip, she could expect nothing from her, now or in the future. There hadn’t been nearly as much opposition as she’d expected, confirming her opinion of Chip as a man of straw. In fact, Bibi had been no match for her strong-minded mother and, torn between the two, had given in and chosen to stay with Carys. Perhaps she had, after all, inherited a little of her mother’s self-preservation.

  ‘It’s only for the time being,’ she’d pleaded with Chip. ‘She’ll come round, I’ll make her see …’ But this wasn’t what Chip, hurt and rejected, had wanted to hear. He’d shrugged, pretended not to care, and left. He’d never in his life had need to force his attentions on a girl who didn’t reciprocate and he wouldn’t start now. There were, after all, plenty more fish in the sea.

  A couple of years later, again with a crowd, up for the racing, he’d gone back to stay at Ascomb, as an act of bravado, perhaps, or to reassure himself that he’d done the right thing in leaving Bibi, and was cured of her. He’d found her still there, still as beautiful as ever, and discovered himself still in the throes of his infatuation. Yet … he saw a remarkable change in her — the same lovely face, the remote delicacy that had so charmed him, but even more elusive. She’d gone vegetarian. She wore clothes of a vaguely ethnic nature and talked of alternative lifestyles. She liked to think of herself as a free spirit, full of beautiful thoughts. Yet, behind it was a stubbornness he wouldn’t have suspected. He might have said ruthlessness if he hadn’t been so besotted. Before, she’d seemed young for her age, over-protected by that Welsh dragon of a mother; at times she’d seemed a child almost, but now she was a woman, with a mind of her own, and this only added to her attraction. All his old feelings came rushing back.

  ‘Well, Bibi.’

  ‘Well, Chip,’ she’d replied coolly.

  ‘So you’re still here? And your mother?’

  He learned with a shock that Carys was dead, that she’d been killed a couple of years before when her car collided with a tractor coming out of a farm-turning on the road from York, and Bibi was trying her best to run the hotel on her own. It was fairly obvious, however, that Carys had been proved right. Bibi might be older, she might have the willingness, but she was woefully lacking in her mother’s business sense. The hotel, now, was not well run. Chip saw signs of neglect everywhere, the French chef had left and the food was not up to the old high standards, reflecting too much Bibi’s own vegetarian inclinations. She had no chance of emulating her mother in the nicely judged way she mixed with her guests, either, cordial and welcoming, yet keep-your-distance. She couldn’t even control the noisy excesses of the group of young men Chip was with — though she tried, as her mother had, by chatting with them, being friendly, accepting the odd drink. More than the odd one, if the truth were told. There’d been a riotous party on the last night which had resulted in vociferous complaints from the other guests in the hotel.

  Chip paused in his narrative, passed his tongue round his dry lips. Kate reached out to the carafe of iced water she’d placed on the table earlier and poured him a glass.

  ‘Thanks.’ He took a deep draught and smiled gratefully, though the ice in it that she’d begged from the kitchen had long since melted.

  Up to this point, Crouch had allowed him to carry on without interruption. Now that Chip had at last begun to talk he didn’t want anything to interrupt the flow. But there was something he needed to know and this pause gave him the chance to ask it. ‘What about the child?’

  Chip stared at him. ‘Jasie wasn’t born then. I still wanted to marry her and take her away from it all — things were in a hopeless mess, and there didn’t seem to be a lot of hope of retrieving them. She wasn’t Carys, she hadn’t got her push.’

  ‘And what did she say to that?’

  ‘She said she realized that things were not going as well as they should, but everything was about to change. She had in fact already hired someone to come in and manage the place. He was arriving the following week and between them they’d soon have things back to what they had been. Anybody with half an eye could see it wasn’t going to work, the place had gone too far downhill for someone as unfitted for the job as Bibi to pull it back. But she insisted she could, and this manager, she said, had come highly recommended … together, they’d get the hotel on its feet again. How naive can you get?’

  ‘It was Armstrong? Graham Armstrong was the new manager?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said bitterly. ‘And he turned out to be a total disaster, though I’d no idea of this until later. There was nothing I could do to influence her. She still refused to marry me, so I left and that was that. As far as I was concerned, it was over. Done with. Finis.’

  And yet, whatever he’d said and thought about other fish in the sea, he hadn’t been able to get her out of his mind. She’d haunted his dreams, wouldn’t be dismissed from his life. He didn’t let it show, outwardly he went on being the same good old Chip, hail fellow well met, with women still featuring largely in his life, plen
ty of whom he fancied, but none of them enough to want to marry.

  ‘Then, years later, out of the blue, I had a telephone call from her. She begged me to come and see her. She said she was desperate, but wouldn’t say anything more until I got there. I drove up, didn’t bother to book, and when I arrived I found the Ascomb Arms had been taken over by someone else. It was a comfortable enough place to stay, the food was OK but nothing special, they’d redecorated and made it spruce again, but — ordinary, somehow. I suppose they just lacked Carys’s flair. They told me Bibi still worked in the hotel a few days each week, but she was married now, and she had a child, though she was separated from her husband. She still lived in the village, in a cottage down a narrow lane, just off the main street. There was something cagey about the way they spoke about her husband. I suppose I wasn’t really surprised to hear that he was the bloke who’d come to manage the hotel. Armstrong.’

  Chip drank some more of the tepid water. He hadn’t been sure whether it was a good idea to see her or not, but he’d gone to the address the hotel had given him, all the same, and found her with this little boy, about six years old, Jasie — or James, he’d still been then. Chip had always thought the boy’s insistence on being called by the new name his school friends in Middleton Thorpe had given him was one way of pretending that the life he’d left behind had never happened.

  If Chip had been surprised to see the change in Bibi the first time he’d returned, this time he was astounded — and enraged — at what marriage to this man Armstrong had done to her. She’d never been an assertive person, but now she was cowed and seemed frightened of her own shadow. She’d clutched the child to her, he’d clung to her, and Chip wasn’t sure who was protecting whom.