Free Betrayal by Clare Francis Page B

over his desk for his diary and flicked a page over. ‘If you want me to come along, I might be able to swing it.’
    ‘I don’t think that’ll be necessary.’ But the fact that he’d suggested it planted a small seed of anxiety in my heart.
    ‘Sure?’
    ‘Sure.’
    ‘All right,’ he conceded immediately. ‘But don’t forget, Hugh – they have small brains. Strictly one-track.’

Two
    T HE DETECTIVE settled himself in his seat. ‘Sorry to have kept you, sir.’
    ‘I am rather pressed for time,’ I remarked. ‘Is this likely to take long?’
    His look suggested that police business did not hurry for anyone, especially people who liked to think they had more important things to do.
    Taking the cap off his pen, he began to write laboriously on a pro forma pad.
    ‘E . . . S . . .’ I said, reading my name upside down. ‘After Well , it’s E . . . S . . .’
    ‘Ah . . .’ He amended it to Wellesley . ‘And your address?’
    I gave it to him, complete with post code.
    ‘That’s central London, is it, sir?’
    ‘Yes. Chelsea.’
    ‘Now . . .’ He fixed me with a bland stare. ‘You were acquainted with Sylvie Mathieson, were you, Mr Wellesley?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And did you know Sylvie well?’ His use of her first name threw me a little, it made our conversation sound like some casual discussion about an old friend. But then the whole interview had an unexpectedly informal air, with the comfortable chairs, the open door, the chatter floating in from the passage and the way the interview had been allocated to neither Henderson nor Jones, but to this Detective Constable Reith, who, with his smooth unshadowed chin and clear complexion, looked far too young to be doing this or any other job.
    ‘At one time I knew her well,’ I said. ‘We met – oh, fifteen or sixteen years ago. But I didn’t see her for a long time after that, not until this summer in fact.’
    ‘This summer. And did you see her often?’
    I inhaled abruptly. ‘No. She came to the boat once. No – twice.’
    ‘The boat?’
    ‘My father’s cruising yacht. My father died recently. I was keeping an eye on the boat. Pumping it out, that sort of thing. She swam by one day.’
    He blinked. ‘Swam by?’
    ‘Yes, swam up to the boat. We started talking. She came aboard for tea.’ Tea: how quaint that sounded, redolent of afternoon and sunlight and respectability.
    ‘Where did this happen?’
    ‘At Dittisham. The boat’s moored in front of my father’s house.’
    ‘And when was this?’
    ‘It must have been—’ I frowned with the effort of memory. ‘June? Some time then.’
    ‘And the other time Sylvie came to the boat, did she swim over on that occasion as well?’ He was intrigued by the swimming, as if this marked Sylvie out as some kind of oddity.
    ‘No, she was rowing a small dinghy. She was on her way to another boat.’
    ‘And which boat was that?’
    ‘Oh, I don’t know its name. But it’s an old-fashioned boat, thirty-five feet or so, a white cutter with a bowsprit. Moored a little further down river, past the ferry.’
    ‘You saw her go to it, did you?’
    ‘Well – I knew she was on her way to a boat. I assumed it was that one. I’d seen her on it before.’
    ‘You’d seen Sylvie on it before?’ he repeated stolidly .
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And when was that?’
    ‘She was with a group of people, they were going off somewhere. It must have been around . . . the beginning of July? Yes – the beginning of July.’
    ‘Did you recognise the people she was with?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘You could point the boat out to us, though?’
    ‘I could . . .’ I made no effort to conceal my reluctance. ‘But I’d rather not. I don’t come down here very often. I’m just on my way back to London now. It would be rather inconvenient. I’m extremely busy at the moment.’
    ‘I mean – if necessary.’
    ‘If necessary,’ I conceded, trying not to sound openly uncooperative. ‘But I’m sure the harbour master will be