The Liar in the Library

TWENTY-SEVEN

‘What do we do?’ asked Carole, as she steered the Renault out of the University of Clincham campus. ‘Go straight round to his place? Fix to meet him somewhere?’

‘We don’t do either yet,’ Jude replied. ‘My dealings with Detective Inspector Rollins have got me worried about how easily the truth gets distorted. I want to be absolutely sure that we’ve got our facts right before we make any accusations.’

‘Very well,’ said Carole, wishing her neighbour would speak a little less gnomically. ‘Where do we go?’

‘We go back to the library.’

So that was where she drove them. Nothing was said on the twenty-minute drive.

Carole parked the Renault in the Fethering Library car park. When they got out, both women wrapped their coats firmly around them. The wind stung their faces as it whistled acidly up from the sea. Carole started towards the library doors.

‘No,’ said Jude. ‘We’re not going there.’

Eveline Ollerenshaw’s house was rather as they had expected it to be. The year 1997 had been the significant one in her life. That was when her husband Gerald had ‘passed on’, and since then no redecoration had taken place and no new furnishings had been brought in. It was a relatively short time ago, less than twenty years, but the place felt as though it was in a time capsule.

Evvie seemed unsurprised to see them. She invited them into her front room and insisted on going to make tea. Though it was still in theory daytime, that Wednesday in Fethering would never properly come alight. Since they’d come into the house, rain had started and was slashing icy diagonals across the window panes.

The front faced out towards the sea. Dunes cut off sight of the beach, but a sullen grey line of horizon showed, only slightly lighter than the grey sky above.

More interesting, though, to Carole and Jude, were the windows facing to the left of the front room. As Evvie had suggested, they provided a perfect viewpoint over the library car park. If they were matched by bedroom windows on the floor above, from there surveillance would be even better.

The old lady tottered in with tea and all the trimmings, including a home-made cake. The loaded tray looked very precarious in her thin, veined hands, but the two women knew better than to offer any assistance.

When they had been equipped with cups of tea, when Jude had accepted a slice of coffee cake and Carole had refused one, Evvie settled into her regular armchair, which looked straight out towards the library. ‘Well,’ she said comfortably, ‘I suppose you want to talk to me about what happened the night Burton St Clair died.’

‘That would be very helpful if you wouldn’t mind,’ said Jude.

‘Have the police talked to you about it?’ asked Carole.

‘Oh yes, they did.’ The old lady sounded pleased at having been the centre of attention for a while. ‘They came to see me the next day … well, the day the body was found.’

‘Last Wednesday?’

‘That’s right. Obviously, because of this house’s geographical location, if anyone was going to have seen anything that happened that night, I’d be the one, wouldn’t I?’

‘Yes,’ Jude agreed. And then asked, with some urgency, ‘And did you see anything?’

‘Well, there are really two questions there, Jude.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘There’s the question of whether I saw anything, and there’s the question of whether I told the police that I’d seen anything.’

‘And you’re saying the answers to the two questions are different?’

‘Yes, I am, Jude.’

‘Are you saying in fact that you lied to the police?’ asked Carole, whose loyalty to her former employer, the Home Office, was prone to come up at such moments.

‘I didn’t lie to them so much, as I didn’t tell them the complete truth.’

‘And why was that?’ Carole’s tone was still harsh. ‘Did you have something to hide?’

‘No, no,’ the old lady replied. ‘Someone of my age hasn’t a lot to hide. I just didn’t really want to be involved with the police.’

‘Oh?’ Carole had the skill of putting quite a lot of accusation into a monosyllable.

‘Why didn’t you want to be involved?’ asked Jude, more gently.

‘Well, it goes back to an experience my late husband Gerald had. He was always a very law-abiding man. Brought up that way, and he spent his career in insurance, so he was never going to break the law, was he? But there was a scandal at the firm he worked for, a scandal to do with car insurance.’

‘What happened?’

‘It involved a company of panel beaters – you know, car-repair people?’

‘We have heard of panel beaters,’ said Carole, in a manner testy enough to prompt a look of mild reproof from Jude. They were both desperate for the information that Eveline Ollerenshaw had to reveal, but the old lady had to be allowed to deliver it at her own pace.

‘Well, these panel beaters had got into the habit – the criminal habit, it should be said – of making the damage to cars that were brought in for repair rather worse than that caused by the original accidents.’

‘So that the insurance companies were charged more than they should have been?’

‘Exactly, Carole. And there was some deal whereby the extra money was divided up between the owner of the vehicle and the panel beaters.’

‘There have been scams like that around,’ said Jude, ‘as long as there has been car insurance.’

‘Oh yes. But for this particular fiddle to work, when the police investigated it, they reckoned there had to be someone on the inside.’

‘Someone in the insurance company?’

‘Yes.’ Resentful of Carole’s hurrying her, Eveline Ollerenshaw deliberately slowed down her narrative. ‘Well, the thing was, because Gerald worked in the car insurance section of the company, and because it was a very small department, for some time there was suspicion that he might have been involved in the fiddle. Of course he wasn’t – and eventually it was proved that he wasn’t. The rotten apple was a junior clerk – wide boy from the East End; he should have been the first suspect straight away – but Gerald was very much upset by the episode. He said it showed how easily lies get believed as truth, and how easy it would be for a miscarriage of justice to take place. He never forgot it.’

Evvie was silent for a moment, lost in recollection. Then she pulled herself back to the present. ‘Anyway, thereafter Gerald always discouraged me from doing anything to help the police. So when that Detective Inspector Rollins and her gawky sidekick came round here to ask if I’d seen anything during the night in the library car park … No, of course I hadn’t! I normally sleep very badly, I told them, but I had a really early night on the Tuesday and I’d slept right through. One of the best night’s sleep I’d had for a long time.’

Eveline Ollerenshaw sat back in her armchair with considerable satisfaction.

Carole and Jude exchanged looks, both thinking the same thing: by what small details the processes of justice can be affected. Detective Inspector Rollins and Detective Sergeant Knight had spent more than a week in frustrating dead-end investigations, Jude had been put through a nightmare of suspicion … and all the time there had been a witness to the crime. A witness who, for a reason that didn’t stand up to any logical examination, had withheld her testimony and not revealed to the police what she had witnessed on the night in question.

Assuming, of course, that she had witnessed something on the night in question.

Jude asked first. ‘So tell me, Evvie, what did you see?’

The old lady’s narrative provided just what they had hoped for. It confirmed suppositions they had made, and provided new details. After a couple of supplementary questions, Carole and Jude had all the information they required.

They thanked her, refused offers of more tea and cake, and left Eveline Ollerenshaw to her loneliness.