Sour Grapes Read online

  Back in London the following Wednesday evening, Emma was sitting in a trendy wine bar in Covent Garden with Jane and one of her star crime reporters, Hal Marstall. He was only five or six years older than Emma, but he had the kind of confidence she thought she would never achieve, the kind that allows its enviable possessor to admit to mistakes and ignorance without looking a fool. He also seemed to be funny and he was definitely good-looking, with soft dark hair and a pleasantly self-deprecating smile.

  Watching Jane watching him with half-resentful admiration, Emma could not help thinking of an occasion several months earlier when Willow had told her a little about Jane’s latest unhappy passion for a man much younger than herself. Emma wondered whether Hal could have been the man.

  ‘I’m off.’ Having drained her glass, Jane picked up her heavy, sacklike shoulder bag. ‘Things to do, people to see. Give Emma whatever she needs, won’t you, Hal? And don’t forget she’s a mate. Treat her kindly.’

  ‘How could I not?’ Hal gave Emma a dazzling smile before turning to Jane. She nodded at him without smiling and then kissed Emma in an unusually elaborate farewell, promising to ring her soon.

  Hal swivelled on his stool so that he was still looking after Jane when she reached the stairs and glanced back at them. He waved gracefully and waited until she had gone.

  ‘She’s a brilliant editor, you know,’ he said as he returned his attention to Emma. ‘We all admire her, even though she scares the pants off the lot of us. How do you come to know her? It seems rather unlikely, if you’ll forgive my saying so.’

  ‘She’s a friend of Willow King, who is an old friend of mine,’ said Emma, thinking that no one who could talk so dispassionately about Jane could ever have been more than a colleague.

  ‘No! How interesting.’ Hal’s dark-grey eyes had sharpened, but his voice was as casual as ever.

  ‘Why?’ Emma asked warily. She had noticed his eyes. ‘D’you know her too?’

  ‘Unfortunately no. And even more unfortunately Jane has a hands-off policy as far as her friends are concerned, which means that the interesting Mrs Worth is off limits.’

  ‘But why should you mind that?’ asked Emma so quickly that the question was out before she realised that a sphinx-like smile would have been a much better response. Unable to produce one to order, she added, ‘She must be about the most law-abiding person I know: the last person to interest a crime reporter.’

  ‘Except that she’s been involved in several investigations herself, hasn’t she?’ Emma managed to say nothing at all. ‘Someone even said that she met her husband when they were both investigating the same murder,’ Hal went on. ‘He was sure she had done it and so she felt she had to get to the real killer first. She did it, too, didn’t she?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ said Emma, lying. If it had not been for that particular case, when a Cabinet minister had been murdered in the middle of Clapham Common, she would never have met Willow herself.

  ‘I think she sounds fascinating,’ said Hal. ‘I can’t tell you how much I envy you being a friend of hers.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Emma, wishing that he were not a tabloid journalist. She liked what little she had seen of him and in almost any other circumstances she would have enjoyed telling him how wonderful Willow was. But in the past several journalists had written snide little pieces about the amateur investigating novelist who was married to a senior officer of the Metropolitan Police, and Emma was not prepared to risk encouraging another of them. She resolved to practise Sphinx-like smiles the next time she was in front of a mirror and to be very careful of everything she said.

  ‘And she writes bestsellers, too, doesn’t she?’ he went on, sounding full of exactly the kind of admiration that would normally have made Emma happy to prattle on for hours. ‘D’you like them?’

  ‘She’s a good friend,’ said Emma before firmly shutting her mouth.

  ‘How dull!’ said Hal, laughing. ‘Oh, well, it was worth a try. I suppose if you’re not going to help me have a crack at the truth about Cressida Woodruffe/Mrs Worth/Willow King, we’d better get down to whatever it is you want me to do for you.’

  ‘Oh, dear, that makes me sound very grudging and very mean.’

  ‘Well, it shouldn’t,’ said Hal, not laughing any more. He looked at her with what seemed to be genuine admiration. ‘You’re obviously a loyal friend. There aren’t a lot of those about, I can tell you. Look, before we start, shall I get another bottle of this, or would you rather have something else?’

  ‘Actually, what I’d like most is some water. Sorry to sound like a goody-goody. It’s just that with all that wine and the nuts, I’m panting with thirst.’

  ‘OK.’ He left her for a surprisingly short time and was back with a litre bottle of Perrier and two tumblers packed with ice cubes. ‘Now, what exactly is it you want to know about the shit Lutterworth?’

  ‘Lots of things.’ Emma reached into the bottom of her blue-nylon rucksack. ‘D’you mind a tape recorder?’

  ‘No. At least, not much. I take it you won’t be quoting me anywhere. I mean this is all off-the-record, background stuff, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Emma, amused at his slight anxiety. She had noticed before that journalists could become extremely twitchy if they thought they might be the target of the sort of reportage they themselves produced. Having switched on her small cassette recorder, she added, ‘If I want to quote anything in the thesis I’ll submit it to you and get formal permission. How’s that?’

  ‘Great.’ Hal’s eyes twinkled as he smiled in acknowledgment of her laughter, and she felt much safer than she had when he was asking the questions. She also felt as though she had known him for years.

  ‘First of all, I want to know what sort of a man Lutterworth is. You called him a shit: why?’

  ‘I never met him,’ said Hal, ‘but from everything I heard and saw I’d have said he was a pretty good shit: selfish, pleased with himself, unable to believe that the world did not exist for his convenience—that sort of thing. I know the police loathed him and I’m pretty sure the jury did, too.’

  ‘But why? What did he do to them?’

  ‘It wasn’t anything he did: it was his manner. The tone he took in court got right up everyone’s nose. He behaved as though no one in the world had any right to question any of his movements that night or any other. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons why they found him guilty.’

  ‘Aha! And you thought he wasn’t?’

  ‘Good lord no. I’m sure he was.’

  Emma searched his face for signs of doubt. ‘Something tells me you’re not completely certain.’

  ‘Then it’s a lying something. I thought he was guilty as hell during the trial and nothing I’ve heard since has changed my mind.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, before drinking some of the icy water. ‘But what about his alibi? I know it’s not exactly cast-iron, but haven’t you ever thought there might have been something in it?’

  ‘Not for more than about a second,’ said Hal, shaking his head so that his soft hair danced around his eyes. He pushed it back impatiently, as though he had no idea how attractive it was. ‘There was no one at Hill, Snow, Parkes & Partners who would testify that he’d been working late that night. All the defence offered was his word, and that’s not worth much.’

  ‘Although there was nothing in the file Jane produced that suggested there was anyone who could categorically prove that he wasn’t there, working away.’

  ‘True enough. And of course technically he didn’t have to prove anything. It’s always up to the prosecution to do any proving that goes on.’

  ‘Yes, I know that,’ said Emma, surprised that Hal thought she might not have been aware of anything so fundamental to the British legal system. She tried not to imagine what else he might be thinking about her capabilities. ‘I’ve been worrying about it. As far as I could see from the file, all the prosecution had to go on was his retracted confession and a whole lot of circumstan
tial evidence. There wasn’t anything incontrovertible that put him in the driving seat at the time of the crash, was there? His counsel must have pointed that out to the jury.’

  ‘Yes, he did, several times,’ said Hal drily. ‘As did the judge in his summing up. It’s perfectly true that everything the forensic scientists found could have had an innocent explanation. The hairs and fibres that belonged to Lutterworth needn’t have been left in the car at the time it crashed. Fluff from the driving seat could have stuck to his trousers when he moved it from the car park. And so on. But the jury seemed prepared to believe that they had enough to convict him on.’

  ‘And so they did.’

  ‘Yup. Although it did occur to me at the time that if he’d bothered to make them like him—and Heaven knows it’s not usually difficult to make people like one—they might well have let him off.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Emma, feeling uncomfortable. Ever since Hal had commended her loyalty to Willow and stopped asking questions, she had felt her own instinctive liking for him strengthen. It had not occurred to her until then that he might have been doing and saying things designed to achieve precisely that.

  ‘You said no one could prove whether Lutterworth had gone in and out of the building as he claimed,’ she said, struggling to get the interview back on to a professional footing, ‘but I thought those sort of businesses always have electronic gates and smart cards and things that record everyone going in and out.’

  Hal finished his water and then said, ‘Most do. And Hill, Snow, Parkes do now, I gather. But they didn’t then. At that stage they had uniformed security guards behind a glass screen, monitoring the arrivals and departures, taking in parcels, that sort of thing. They covered the building twenty-four hours a day in four six-hour shifts. None of the men on duty during the relevant shifts that night could remember seeing Lutterworth go out when he claimed to have gone to move his car, or return soaking wet after he’d done so, or even leave the building for good at whenever it was; twenty to eleven, I think he said.’

  ‘But would they have noticed? Big offices like theirs have people going in and out all the time, even as late as that. I can’t believe that any of the security guards had the kind of photographic memory that would have allowed them to state exactly who passed them, even if they’d been asked immediately. And I can’t imagine that they were,’ said Emma. ‘I don’t suppose they were questioned at all until at least twenty-four hours later. How likely is it that they’d have been able to produce an absolutely accurate account of who did and who didn’t walk past them that night? I mean, it’s a huge company.’

  ‘Partnership actually.’

  ‘Is that an important distinction?’ she asked in some irritation.

  ‘In some ways,’ Hal said, but then he laughed. ‘Not as far as this discussion is concerned, I know. I suppose I’m just a bit of a control freak trying to get the upper hand again. D’you mind?’

  ‘Not when you’re as honest about it as that,’ said Emma truthfully.

  ‘I’m glad,’ he said, sounding serious again. ‘I’d hate you to…to feel uncomfortable with me, Emma.’

  ‘Me? Good heavens, of course I don’t. Where were we? Yes. Lutterworth going in and out without being seen by the security guards.’

  ‘So we were. I can accept that he might be missed once, even twice at a pinch, but all three times?’ said Hal. ‘Come on, Emma. That’s as absurd as suggesting that all the security guards had photographic memories.’

  She drank some more water, feeling the prickle of the bubbles on her tongue.

  ‘Unless the two on duty were distracted by something? I’ve been into offices like that after normal working hours and had to wait for a noticeable amount of time until the guard had finished talking to someone else or put down his Evening Standard or answered a telephone or something. Haven’t you?’

  ‘I can see you’ve a wonderful eye for a gap in the evidence,’ he said without answering the question.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, wondering why he had resorted to such blatant flattery. It seemed surprisingly clumsy for a man who claimed to find it so easy to make people like him. ‘Was there anything else that made you sure he was guilty?’

  ‘Well,’ Hal said, watching her with what looked like amusement in his attractive eyes, ‘like the police, I find it quite hard to swallow the fact that he would have stood in the pouring rain—and it was bucketing down that night—to telephone them about his stolen car. Wouldn’t any normal person have run straight back to his office and rung them from there in the dry? I’m sure he only cooked up that story because he knew he was going to get drenched before he could get himself back to London after the crash.’

  ‘Perhaps. But, on the other hand, perhaps he was the sort of man who wouldn’t have minded getting wet?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Emma! Think how uncomfortable it would have been. And think about his clothes, too. He certainly cared about them.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Well, he had his suits made for him, and he always wore Jermyn Street shirts and Church’s shoes. I’d have thought he would have hated having all that messed up by the rain.’

  ‘Right,’ said Emma, prepared to take Hal’s word for that. ‘Then I think there’s only one other thing that’s really bothering me: there was nothing in the cuttings Jane lent me about his blood-alcohol level when he was arrested that night. The police must have tested him, I imagine.’

  ‘They did.’

  ‘And?’

  Hal did not say anything, just sat watching her over the rim of his almost-empty glass. She tried to read the expression in his eyes, but they told her nothing.

  ‘Why didn’t you put anything about that in any of your reports?’ she said to push him into giving her what she wanted. ‘Because there was no trace of alcohol in his blood at all?’

  ‘I said you were good at spotting the gaps,’ said Hal eventually. ‘As it happens, you’re right. But there are people who might say the police would have preferred him to be sober.’

  ‘Why on earth?’

  ‘Because there are people who feel that being drunk is something of an excuse. Killing someone in a car crash when you’re stone-cold sober does somehow seem worse.’

  ‘Does it?’ Emma was genuinely puzzled. ‘How extraordinary! So you think they could have suppressed the breathalyser test result because of that?’

  ‘No, I’m not saying that at all. I’ve no evidence either way. Anyway, no one even tried to test him for several hours. I can’t remember exactly how long it was, but I think it was nearly dawn before they went to his flat to arrest him.’

  ‘Not quite dawn, I think. Three in the morning was what you put in one of your pieces, and half a bottle of whisky can’t be metabolised that quickly.’

  ‘Oh, no. No one suggests it could. But there’s nothing to say that the bottle in the car was full when Lutterworth started his journey, or that he didn’t have help drinking it that night.’

  Emma thought once more of the puzzling unmatched blood that had been found on the broken window.

  ‘So, like me, you’ve been assuming he had a passenger with him,’ she said casually. ‘D’you think it was a girlfriend of some kind?’

  Hal shrugged. ‘It seems the obvious answer to a lot of the questions that were never asked. At least, as far as I could gather they weren’t. It would also explain why he didn’t want his wife to know anything about it, why he claimed the car had been stolen at first, and why he confessed when he thought the police might start asking awkward questions about the passenger.’

  Seeing the hope of a promising foundation for her thesis disappearing, Emma silently finished her water and thought about all the implications of what Hal had said. She did not even notice that he had stopped talking.

  ‘Even so,’ she said after a while, ‘I’m not sure that I can see a man being prepared to go to prison to hide the fact that he was unfaithful to his wife. It’s not exactly uncommon, after all. And prison for a m
an like him must mean the end of his career. Surely he’d rather have admitted to the mistress, even if it did cause trouble at home, and kept his job and what I imagine must have been a pretty hefty profit-share. Unless it was the woman whose position… No, I can’t believe that. Although, I suppose it could be a Great Gatsby kind of thing and the mistress was driving, and he was just being chivalrous because he was in love with her.’

  ‘But he wasn’t,’ said Hal. ‘Prepared to go to prison, I mean. I don’t know about the state of his heart. That’s why he changed his plea to not guilty in court and said the police had bullied him into confessing in the first place. He—or his brief—must have thought he could swing it with the jury and get off.’

  ‘I wonder. Did you ever talk to him directly?’

  ‘I tried,’ said Hal with his best charming, regretful smile. ‘But you know these auditors: they learn secrecy long before they’ve even discovered how to add up. He wasn’t prepared to say a single word to any journalist. And by the time he’d been convicted I was off on another story. His was interesting enough while it lasted, but it wasn’t exactly the crime of the century.’

  ‘Even though the woman and her child died?’

  ‘Even though they died,’ Hal agreed.

  ‘Did you ever think to look further into it? You know, to try to find out where he’d bought the whisky or who his mistress might have been so that you could talk to her?’

  Hal shook his head and smiled kindly down at her. ‘What would have been the point? He’d been convicted. He was doing time. And I had other fish to fry.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you had,’ agreed Emma, trying to match his lighthearted tone.

  She wondered a little why Jane had not asked Hal to satisfy her anxiety to know whether there was anything in what Mrs Lutterworth had claimed.

  ‘But it does seem a bit of a waste of your brilliant interviewing technique not to have got to the bottom of the story.’

  ‘It is pretty brilliant, isn’t it?’ Hal said, his tone making her laugh. ‘But there are a lot of calls on it and that story was dead in the water by then. Look, I’m going to have to take myself and my brilliant technique off now. Have I given you enough to be useful? I wouldn’t want to short-change any of Jane’s friends.’