Peter Lovesey - The Headhunters

‘He’d pick it up.’

‘You think so?’

‘Men do.’

‘I suppose he might.’ She could see a persuasive cause and effect in what Jake was suggesting with his terse interpretation of the nightmare. ‘If he’d made it up about killing Cartwright just to get back in Gem’s favour, he wouldn’t deny it after she’d slept with him. He’d hope it would be a secret between them.’

‘But Gemma can’t keep secrets.’

‘Right. She insists that Rick confesses to me.’

‘So he’s forced to repeat the lie.’

Her brain was fizzing with this new possibility, one she wouldn’t have considered without Jake’s prompting. Like the horrors of childhood, the fear drained away when it was explained.

‘I’ve spent time with men who killed,’ he said. ‘There’s something about them Rick doesn’t have.’

‘But Mr Cartwright is still missing.’

‘He may be dead.’ He looked away at a seabird skimming the water. ‘Doesn’t mean you have to believe Rick. Or Gemma.’

Hen allowed Gary to drive her to Kleentext, seeing that he was known there. He’d spoken to Gemma Casey, the woman who was running the office while the boss was missing. Hen remembered her as an open talker, freely admitting she’d resented Fiona’s too obvious overtures to Cartwright, the manager. Today she was still in her outer office, and looking under strain. No surprise, considering she was just a PA who found herself trying to run a business.

‘If you’re wondering why we’re back so soon,’ Hen said, ‘you supplied one of my officers with this list of recent clients. I notice you printed some cards for the nature reserve at Pagham.’

‘That’s right. Geese on the ice. Nice for Christmas.’

‘A goose on the plate is better.’

‘My thought exactly,’ Gemma said, ‘but I wouldn’t mention it to the client.’

‘Who was the client?’

‘You said already-the Pagham Harbour people.’

‘Yes, but who came here and placed the order?’

‘A man called Jake Kernow.’

Hen could gladly have goose-stepped around the room. ‘And would he have met Fiona Halliday when he came here?’

Gemma tapped her chin. ‘It’s possible. I took the order, but Fiona was always hovering around this office.’

‘To be noticed by the boss?’

She smiled. ‘You have it. She was supposed be in accounts, but she spent more time swanning in and out of here than checking invoices.’

‘But you can’t say for certain if she and Mr Kernow met on one of his visits?’

‘I didn’t actually see them together.’

‘Was he alone here at any stage?’

‘More than once I had to go downstairs and fetch some samples of card or proofs. I made him a coffee and left him for five or ten minutes.’

‘In that time he could have met Fiona?’

‘I don’t see why not.’

‘I was told he made four visits here.’

‘That’s what I recall.’

‘Seems a lot.’

Gemma reddened. ‘To be perfectly honest, I think he fancied me. Well, I know he did, because we went bowling together.’

‘You went out with him?’

‘Just the once. I felt sorry for him. He gets a bit tongue-tied, doesn’t know what to say to a girl.’

‘But he succeeded with you?’

‘Depends what you mean by “succeeded,” she said with a smile. ‘We bowled a few ends. It didn’t last. I managed to unload him onto a friend.’

‘Not Fiona?’

‘Christ, no. I don’t like speaking ill of the departed, but she was never a friend. One of my yoga chums.’

‘You say you felt sorry for him. It sounds as if he does rather well with girls.’

‘Now that you mention it. He’s not much of a looker, but he appeals to the caring, maternal thing. Not for long, in my case.’

‘Why? Did you have a bad experience with him?’

‘Nothing like that. I got bored, that’s all.’ She held up her forefinger. ‘I’ve just had a thought. When he kept coming back here on any pretext-like insisting on bringing the proof to me in person when he could easily have put it in the post or left it at reception-I took it that he wanted to go out with me. Maybe he was trying to get a date with Fiona.’

‘She didn’t mention going out with him?’

‘She wouldn’t. Not to me.’

‘Is there anyone else she worked with who might know?’

‘Can’t think of anybody. She wasn’t one to have close friends.’

‘But she got on with Mr Cartwright?’

‘Huh!’ It still rankled evidently. ‘She’d be with him behind that door and I’d be told they were not to be interrupted.’

‘You think they were having sex?’

She glanced towards Gary. ‘Close your ears, Sunny Jim. This is girl talk. I saw the smirk when she came out. She was practically rubbing her hands.’

‘You’ve worked here for how long?’ Hen asked.

‘Twelve years.’

‘And Fiona?’

‘Less than two. At first I was sorry for her, a lone parent, young kid to bring up. We got quite friendly. I’ve had it tough, too, but not in the way she had. She was telling me Mr Cartwright was coming onto her and she didn’t know how to give him the old heave-ho. I believed her. Then she started appearing in these ridiculous low-cut dresses and I sussed her out. She’d been trying to pull him from the word go, and wanted to find out if I was a threat.’

‘Weren’t you?’

She frowned. ‘I don’t confuse business with pleasure. Besides, he’s not my type.’

‘So what do you think happened to him?’

‘He hasn’t absconded with the funds, I’m glad to say. He left here with Fiona looking as if they were off for a quickie, or maybe even the whole weekend. I was really surprised when she was found in the Mill Pond. He’s a waste of space and a pain to work for, but in my wildest dreams I’ve never thought of him as a killer. It says in the papers she was murdered. Are you sure it wasn’t some kind of accident?’

‘There’s no doubt about it,’ Hen said. ‘She was held down in the water.’

‘Horrible.’

‘We can agree on that.’ She turned to Gary. ‘Feel like a trip to the nature reserve?’

Jake seemed in no hurry to return to dry land. He told Jo the harbour had once been so deep that it was navigable by Tudor galleons all the way up to Sidlesham. Centuries of silting had encouraged Victorian landowners to block off the narrow entrance and reclaim hundreds of acres for farming, and they managed it for about forty years, but a great storm in 1910 broke through the defences. ‘What the sea wants, it gets,’ he said. The nature reserve had been created and now the land grabbers had to look elsewhere.

Here in his own workplace, he had no difficulty stringing sentences together. He pointed to a formation of birds flying overhead and talked with relish of the latest arrivals, a flock of curlews driven south by the onset of the Arctic winter. ‘We see them best at low tide, digging for the lugworm and gilly-crab. Right now the tide’s in, so they’re resting up. The wildfowl at this time of year are marvellous. Godwits, redshank. We’re blessed.’

She knew he was taking her mind off the gruesome stuff she’d grappled with all night, and she was thankful. The panorama from out here in the middle helped get her thoughts in proportion again. He could be right about Rick making it all up to impress Gemma.

A large, dark bird swooped and splashed into the sea close to them. ‘What’s that one?’ she asked.

‘Isle of Wight parson.’

‘Get away.’

‘Cormorant. You have to see him perched on the cliff, like a reverend in his pulpit.’ He watched her with such intensity that she became uncomfortable. ‘You’re very trusting.’

‘Why do you say that?’