‘I’m not saying that the newspaper is in any way culpable for Miss Fielding’s death, but it’s reasonable to assume that the man who has taken her place knew her routines and her schedule for this weekend. He obviously knew where she lived, and he was convincing enough for his deception to go undetected, at least at first.’
‘Go on, then. What does he look like?’
‘He’s about thirty, with sandy brown hair, worn quite long, and a beard. Six foot, or thereabouts, and a London accent. Are there any reporters or photographers who fit that description?’
He heard the relief in Robertson’s voice. ‘No, sorry. There’s no one like that on my staff.’
‘What about past employees? Anyone who might hold a grudge against Miss Fielding?’ A police car drew up outside and the landlord glared at Penrose as two men in uniform joined him by the reception desk, adding very little to the festive atmosphere, or to the hotel’s reputation for a warm welcome.
‘Not that I can think of,’ Robertson was saying. ‘The only person who looks anything like …’ He tailed off, and when he spoke again, his tone was anything but dismissive. ‘Christ, he was in the office with us – of course he was. But why would he …’
‘Who was in the office?’ Penrose demanded impatiently.
‘Jack Naylor. But he’s just the cleaner, for God’s sake, he couldn’t possibly have anything to do with—’
Penrose put the phone down without waiting to hear what Jack Naylor could or couldn’t do. ‘I’ll need your dining room,’ he said to the landlord, and signalled to the two policemen to follow him. ‘Jack Naylor?’ he called across the bar. Naylor realised his mistake as soon as he turned round, but the response had been instinctive and it was too late now to go back on it. He looked up, and it was the expression rather than the face itself that Penrose found so familiar. The muddle of fear, grief and curiosity was the same now in the man as it had been in the eyes of the boy staring back at him from the coal bunker, eighteen years ago to the day – and he looked so vulnerable that, for the briefest of seconds, Penrose was there again in that snow-covered yard, chilled to the core and feeling the raw, helpless despair that he had back then. In spite of the circumstances, his overwhelming emotion was sadness. ‘You are Jack Naylor?’ he said quietly, and the man nodded. ‘Then, Mr Naylor, I’m arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Alexandra Fielding, Richard Hartley and Emily Soper.’
Naylor stood up, and Penrose was relieved that he made no attempt to argue. ‘Where do you want to do this?’ he asked.
‘Please come with me.’
Everything had happened so suddenly that it took the other people round the table a moment to catch up, and Penrose and Naylor were on their way out of the bar by the time Johnny Soper launched himself across the room. ‘You bastard! What did you do to my mother? I’ll fucking kill you.’
The policemen pulled him away while Naylor just stood there taking the blows, then watched as Trannack tried to calm Soper down. Penrose waited to see if his prisoner would deny responsibility for the third charge against him, which seemed so different from the others, but he didn’t. ‘It’s terrible to feel that kind of rage,’ he said instead. ‘It eats you up inside, and then you’re lost.’
Penrose heard the emotion in his voice, and realised that this was the first time in his career that he had wanted to be wrong. They went through to the restaurant, leaving one of the policemen in the bar to keep an eye on things there. The room had been emptied but not cleared, and still smelt strongly of roast turkey and alcohol, and Penrose tried in vain to remember a more inappropriate setting for an interview. He chose a table that couldn’t be seen from reception, and swept the spent crackers and discarded novelties onto the floor. ‘Sit down, Mr Naylor.’
‘What happened to “Jack”? You were friendlier last time we met.’
‘Last time we met, you hadn’t killed anyone.’ Naylor gave him a sad, faintly pitying look, as if he had failed to understand some fundamental truth, and Penrose remembered the conversation in the library the night before, when Richard Hartley – in Naylor’s hearing – had raised the possibility that there was more to the horror in the slums than had ever been revealed; suddenly he wondered if he had been wrong to dismiss the rumours so readily.
He took the snowman decoration out of his pocket and slid it across the table. ‘You kept this all those years.’
Naylor nodded, satisfied. ‘I wondered if you’d recognise it.’
‘That was taking a risk, wasn’t it? Leaving something I’d recognise with the body.’
‘Only if you assume I wanted to get away with it.’ He shook his head to emphasise the words. ‘No, this all started at Christmas, and it’s right that it should end there.’
‘But it doesn’t end, does it?’ Penrose said, angered by Naylor’s arrogance in deciding the course of the story. ‘Not for the people left behind. You should understand that better than anyone. It doesn’t end for Angela Hartley or for Johnny Soper, just because you say it does. It doesn’t end for Alex Fielding’s family or her colleagues at The Times. She was a young woman with a bright future ahead of her. Who knows what she might have achieved? What gives you the right to decide who lives and who dies?’
Naylor smiled, but there was no malice in it. ‘So you don’t know everything,’ he said, ‘but you’re still taking her side, just like everyone else did. They all favoured her, even then – the vicar and his wife, the newspapers, the authorities. She was the little girl, the clever one, the angel.’
‘You mean Alex Fielding …’
‘Was my sister, yes. Alice, as you knew her, although she never acknowledged that when she grew up.’ He accepted a cigarette from the packet that Penrose passed across the table. ‘Alex was my sister, and she looked out for me – putting me up in her living room, getting me a run-of-the-mill job in the place where she shone, sweeping me the crumbs off her table. But that was all right.’ He obviously sensed Penrose’s scepticism, because he added: ‘Really, it was. It was all right because I loved her and she loved me. Even what happened eighteen years ago was bearable because we faced it together. She never forgot your kindness, you know. Neither of us did, but she worshipped you.’
It came again, that familiar feeling of desolation that Penrose would have found hard to explain. ‘And what did happen eighteen years ago? Do we know the truth, or was there more to it?’
Naylor ignored the question, lost in his thoughts, and Penrose knew that he would have to wait for the story to unravel in its own time. ‘My sister said you saved her life that day. I always thought I’d done that, but apparently not.’
‘What did she mean?’
He shrugged. ‘That you’d given her a sense of purpose, I think. Do you remember? After you found us, we had to go back inside the house to wait for Hartley to come and collect us, and that policeman’s case was at the bottom of the stairs. You caught us playing with one of the cameras, and we thought you were going to tell us off, but you sat us both down and showed us how it worked. You’ll have noticed from my efforts this morning that Alex listened better than I did.’ His fingers moved restlessly, absentmindedly fastening and unfastening one of the buttons on his jacket. ‘You showed her how to take her first photograph, and you promised to bring it to her when it was developed. I didn’t believe you, but you kept your word – that time, at least.’ Naylor reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a tattered image of himself as a little boy, and the forced smile in the picture seemed out of place against the pale face and haunted eyes. ‘Alex treasured this. It killed her when you stopped coming to see us.’