J. Gregson - Die Happy

Lambert smiled. ‘Which includes praise as well as negative comment, as you reminded me on Thursday.’

How accurately he remembered things she had tossed out so lightly at the time! Ros smiled back at him and said, ‘Mr Barnard has selected extracts from the critics which reflect well on me. Perhaps I should take care to remember that there are other and less flattering judgements.’ She felt perfectly relaxed, buoyed by her successes of the afternoon, cocooned for the moment from the more sordid realities of life outside her art.

‘You are very charitable towards Mr Preston. He was far more vindictive than you suggest.’

The first warning bells rang in her head, recalling her abruptly from the successes of the day. She said thoughtfully, ‘I suppose he was the kind of man who treasured a grievance.’

‘Not only treasured it but documented it fully. The sort of man who would build up detailed dossiers on people he came to regard as enemies.’

Ros was conscious of both men studying her intently, watching her reactions to this, trying to decide whether it was news to her or whether she was already aware of it. ‘Are you saying that he compiled such a dossier about me?’

‘Yes. Are you telling us that you were not aware of that?’

She did not answer them directly. ‘It’s the sort of thing he would have done, I suppose. He couldn’t let anything go. If he thought you were being favoured at his expense, he took it very personally.’ She forced a smile. ‘It’s flattering, in a way, to think that he thought I was worthy of that sort of attention.’

‘He had a lot of practice. By the time of his death, he had become an expert at delving into people’s pasts. He employed a private detective to build up his knowledge, whenever he thought that was worthwhile. He had people followed and kept careful notes of dates, times and other details.’

Ros made herself pause and think. ‘Preston would hardly have found that sort of attention worth his while, in my case. I have made no secret of my association with Kate Merrick — rather the reverse, if you wish to know. I’ve been proud enough of it to proclaim it at times. Everyone knows we’re partners. A generation ago, that might still have been mildly interesting, though hardly scandalous, except to a few old fogies. Nowadays, I don’t think anyone turns a hair.’

Lambert still knew a few who would, in rural and highly conservative Gloucestershire. ‘I think Peter Preston realized that. He’d moved in circles where being gay was common and accepted, even thirty years ago. But he took care to inform himself about your earlier history. He didn’t name his sources in his files, but I suspect he knew former police officers and sounded them out about you. Information like that should remain confidential, but we have little control over people in the police service once they retire. For the unscrupulous, it can be a way of supplementing a pension. I suspect Preston paid people for information revealed, though in your case there are no names attached.’

Ros’s mouth was suddenly very dry. ‘What sort of information?’

‘He went back ten or twelve years. To your last days at school and your years at the art college.’

‘I got in with the wrong set.’ For the first time in her life, she found herself mouthing the phrase she had heard so often from her mother.

‘Very much the wrong set. You probably know that several of your former associates are now in prison. Two of them serving five-year sentences for GBH.’

‘I cut myself off from them. I haven’t followed their careers since then.’ She tried to be firm, even dismissive, but it sounded a weak denial even in her own ears.

‘You were guilty of some pretty wild things yourself, when you were nineteen and twenty.’

‘I was never charged with any offence.’

‘You came very near to it, even with the good lawyer your mother called in for you.’

‘It’s ten years since I was in any trouble. It’s no longer relevant.’

Bert Hook said gently, ‘It wouldn’t be, Ros, if this wasn’t a murder enquiry. We have to take into account any previous tendency to see violence as a solution to problems.’

She could think only of going into the tired cliches about once a villain always a villain and innocent until proved guilty. From being on a high from the sale of her paintings, she felt abruptly deflated and exhausted. She was back in the world of reality, which was presenting its harshest aspect to her. She repeated the same futile argument in a flat voice. ‘My life now is totally different from my life ten years ago. What I did then has no bearing on my life today.’

‘Unless your behaviour then shows character traits that persist, Ros. It doesn’t make you guilty of the crime committed last Tuesday night, but we have to take these things into account. Past experience tells us that we need to do this. The records show that people who’ve been violent once tend to be violent again, when they’re put under pressure.’

She tried to muster some sort of denial, but he made it all sound distressingly logical. And her mind was weary, too weary to resist. She nodded dumbly, not trusting her tongue. Hook spoke with a gentleness which mitigated the harshness of his message. ‘Ten years ago, you stabbed a man, Ros. By all accounts, you were lucky that he didn’t die.’

She found a voice, low but steady, resisting the instinct deep within her that her case was hopeless. ‘I was threatened. We were in a gang, fighting a rival gang. It all happened very fast. The situation was much more confused than you’re making it.’

‘You were the only woman there. Didn’t that warn you that there might be violence?’

She was silent for so long that they wondered whether she would answer. Then, with a voice that seemed to come from a long way away, she heard herself say, ‘My mum thought for years I was just a tomboy and at the time I bought into that. Drug fixes and breaking the law seemed normal, once you were in the gang. Rumbles were part of the excitement. You didn’t think much about it, until it got out of hand and everything went wrong.’

‘But wasn’t it the prospect of violence which drew you into the group? You were an intelligent girl, an intelligent young woman by then. You must have known that there were violent, aggressive men in that gang, that there was a war going on over territory at the time.’

‘I was naive. I was very young for my age.’ Again she could hear these plaintive, futile pleas in her mother’s voice. She sought for some more genuine reason of her own. ‘I hadn’t found my own sexual identity at the time. I didn’t want boys for sex, but I wanted the other excitements of being in a gang. Perhaps I was attracted to violence — I certainly found it exciting.’

Hook switched to the present, so deftly that she did not realize at first what he was about. ‘We have the file that Peter Preston compiled on you, with the details of this and other incidents. Did he threaten you with what he had found? Did he say he would reveal these things about you?’

She wanted to deny it all, to say that she’d known nothing and been completely unaware of what Preston could do to her. But her brain was working again now. There was no way she could know what other people had told them. If they caught her out in a lie, it would make what they already knew even more damning to her. ‘Yes. I knew Peter wanted to speak to me after the last literature festival committee, but I stayed with other people, then left without speaking to him. But he rang me up at our flat. He seemed to know that Kate was out and I was on my own, but I don’t know how.’

‘When was this?’

A long pause, which seemed to her only to make her reply more damning when she produced it. ‘Last Tuesday morning.’