table where Langer dropped his bulky body. He was turning a salt cellar in his fingers. These were thick and strong looking, and his hands were large like the rest of him.
"Why did you lie to the other officers, Mr. Langer?" Lynley asked him without preamble.
"You must have known everything you said would be checked."
Langer made no reply to this. Wise man, Lynley thought. He was waiting for more.
"There are no ex-wives. Nor are there children," Lynley said. "Why lie about something so easy to disprove?"
Langer took a moment to tear open two packets of sugar, which he dumped into his coffee. He did not stir it. "It's nothing to do with what happened to Jemima. I've nothing to do with that."
"Yes, but you'd say that, wouldn't you?" Lynley pointed out. "Anyone would."
"It's a matter of consistency. That's all."
"Explain."
"I tell everyone the same. Three ex-wives, children. It keeps things simple."
"That's important to you?"
Langer looked away. From where they sat, the ice rink was visible: all the lovely young things flying about - or otherwise - in their colourful tights and skimpy skirts. "I like to remain uninvolved," he said. "Ex-wives and children help, I find."
"Uninvolved with whom?"
"I'm an instructor. That's all I do with them, whatever their ages. Sometimes a young one or a middle-aged one or any of them develop an interest because we're close on the ice. It's stupid, it doesn't mean anything, and I don't take advantage. Ex-wives make that possible."
"With Jemima Hastings as well?"
"Jemima took lessons from me," Langer told him. "That's the extent of it. She used me, rather."
"For what?"
"I told the others this already. I wasn't lying about that. She wanted to keep her eye on Frazer."
"She phoned you on the day she died. Along with the truth about ex-wives and children, you didn't mention that to the other detectives."
Langer took up his coffee. "I hadn't remembered the call."
"And do you now?"
He looked reflective. "Yes, actually. She was looking for Frazer."
"Was she supposed to be meeting him at the cemetery?"
"I rather think she was checking up on him. She did that often. Anyone Frazer was involved with ended up doing that. Jemima wasn't the first and she wouldn't have been the last.
Long as he worked here that went on."
"A woman checking up on him?"
"A woman, who didn't quite trust him, making sure he was walking the straight and narrow. He rarely did."
"And for Jemima?"
"It was likely business as usual for Frazer, but I don't know, do I? Anyway, I couldn't help her that day, which she ought to have realised before she rang me."
"Why?"
"Because of the time. He isn't here at that hour. Had she thought about it, she would have known he wouldn't be here. But he wasn't answering his mobile, she said. She'd rung him a few times and he wasn't answering and she wanted to know was he still here, where, perhaps, he wouldn't be able to hear it with all the noise." He indicated the clamour round them. "But really, she had to have known he'd already left for home. Anyway, that's what I told her."
For home, Lynley thought. "He didn't go from here directly to Duke's Hotel?"
"He always goes home first. He says he doesn't like to keep his Duke's kit here where it could get dirty, but knowing Frazer, there's another reason." He made a crude gesture with his hands, an indication of sexual intercourse. "Likely he's been doing the job on someone en route, between here and Duke's. Or there at home, even. It wouldn't surprise me. That would be his style. Anyway, Jemima said she'd been leaving him messages and she was feeling panicky."
"She used that term? Panicky?"
"No. But I could hear it in her voice."
"Was it fear perhaps? Not panic, but fear? She was phoning from a cemetery, after all.
People are sometimes frightened in cemeteries."
Langer shrugged off this idea. He said, "I don't think that's what it was. 'F you ask me, I think it was dread of having to look squarely at something she's been denying."
Interesting point, Lynley thought. He said, "Carry on."
"Frazer," he said. "I expect she wanted very much to think Frazer Chaplin was the one, if you know what I mean, the one in inverted commas. But I expect in her heart she knew he wasn't."
"What makes you draw the latter conclusion?"
Langer smiled thinly. "Because it's the conclusion they always reached, Inspector. Every last woman who hooked up with the bloke."
THUS LYNLEY GREATLY anticipated meeting the male paragon he'd been hearing