The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [134]
He smiled rather sourly as he dropped into the armchair beside the desk. “Indeed, but I suspect it’s a waste of taxpayers’ money. Are you ever going to use it? Ms. Derbyshire refuses to wear hers.”
“There’s no point when she’s out in the fields. It needs a landline or a telephone signal to work.”
He cast his usual glance around the office as if something would suddenly show itself to him. “I had a word with Alan Collins last night. He said you’re too clever for me, and I might as well give up now. He also said he won’t be shedding any tears if MacKenzie’s never heard of again. If anyone deserves what he gets, it’s your attacker.”
I doubted Alan had said anything so crass, particularly to an opposite number in a different county. “Really?” I asked in surprise. “I’ve always thought of him as such a stickler for the rule of law. I can’t imagine him ever going on record with favourable views about summary justice and vigilantism.”
“It wasn’t on record,” Bagley said. “It was a private conversation.”
“Still…will he repeat those remarks to me, do you think? I like the one about my being too clever for you. If I were to broaden that out into a general piece, contrasting IQ levels among the police with those of prison inmates—” I raised an eyebrow. “What do you think?”
“That you’re probably the most annoying person I’ve ever met,” he said grimly. “Why doesn’t it worry you to be interviewed, Ms. Burns? Why doesn’t it make you angry? Why don’t you have a solicitor? Why isn’t he arguing police harassment?”
“He? If I had one, don’t you think he’d be a she?”
Bagley flicked ash irritably into the ashtray on the desk. “There you go again. Everything has to be turned into a joke.”
“But I enjoy your visits,” I said. “Winterbourne Barton’s a black hole as far as social interaction’s concerned.”
“I’m not here to entertain you.”
“But you do,” I assured him. “I love watching you poke around the garden looking for clues. Have you found anything yet? Jess says you keep going back to her granary, so presumably you’re wondering if we buried MacKenzie under a ton of wheat? It wouldn’t have been easy, you know. Grain’s like quicksand. We’d have had trouble lugging a corpse on to the heap without sinking in ourselves.”
“She’s added another ton in the last couple of weeks.”
“And it’s all about to be shifted to a commercial grain store. Don’t you think someone will notice if a body tumbles out?” I watched his mouth turn down. “I don’t understand why you can’t accept that he freed himself and took to his heels. Is it because you’d have killed him if you’d been in our shoes?”
He took a thoughtful drag of his cigarette. “I’m sure you dreamt of revenge.”
“All the time,” I said with a small laugh, “but it did me even less good than checking the window locks. I lost so much weight over it that I feel like an old hen about to drop off her perch. Look.” I extended a bony right arm. “If there’s any useful meat on me you’d need a microscope to find it. How could that”—I cocked my left forefinger at a grape-sized bicep—“vanish a corpse in thirty minutes?”
He smiled reluctantly. “I’ve no idea. Would you like to tell me?”
“There’s nothing to tell, but even if there were you wouldn’t be able to use it. You’re on your own and there’s no recorder. Anything I said would be inadmissible as evidence.”
“For my own satisfaction then.”
I glanced towards the hall. “I wanted to kill him,” I admitted. “I would have done if I’d been a better shot. I was aiming for his head when I hit his fingers…and the only reason I didn’t take another swipe was because it felt as if I’d been electrocuted when the axe slammed on to the flagstones. I had judders all the way up my arms and into the base of my neck. That’s when I decided it would be better to tie him up.”
I squashed my fag end into the ashtray. “Jess wanted to kill him, too—she was devastated about Bertie—but we couldn’t see how to do it. Peter had already left and there wasn’t time to work anything out. I suggested