Dying to Know (20 page)

‘See?' asked Max coming to a halt just beyond Lightoller's, directly at the back of Mr Hocking's bakery.

I saw, although I did not make much of it. The gardens were short and, being at the back of shops, uncared for to the point of wilderness. Many of the weeds were dying but before this fate they had grown to two, three, even four feet high and dense enough to require something on the scale of a machete to penetrate. They were damp, too; damp and cold-looking.

‘No, I don't.'

‘For a start off, Inspector Masson said that no one had been seen entering the shop from either the front or the rear. This undergrowth is so thick, an elephant could have come knocking completely unseen.'

‘True.'

‘And then look at the back of the shop. There's a staircase down from the top flat.'

She was right, but it took me a moment or two longer to grasp the implication. ‘So Mr Hocking could have got down from the flat without Lil or anyone else seeing him.'

‘Exactly.'

‘It doesn't look as though he made his way through that lot, though,' I said, indicating the weeds. ‘There's no sign of a Hocking-sized hole.'

But she had an immediate answer. ‘Judging by the state of the fences, I bet he could get through to his neighbour's garden without too much bother just breaking it down.'

‘How did he get into the shop, then? The back door was locked.'

‘If the back door was locked, perhaps he knocked and was let in by Lightoller; perhaps he was here to make a payment. In any case, we don't know that the door
was
locked. It doesn't matter. He could have got in and, as I suggested to the inspector, he could have got out again, leaving the door locked and without being seen by anyone.'

‘Surely Masson's thought of all this.'

‘But he's convinced that your father did it; or at least, he's convinced enough not to be actively pursuing other lines of enquiry. He might have worked out that Samuel Hocking doesn't have a decent alibi, but he almost certainly doesn't know about the blackmail.'

She was right. Masson might well have thought of all this, but it didn't mean anything because he didn't know about Hocking's potential motive. Max said, ‘We ought to tell him.'

But something was holding me back from doing that; I didn't know why, but I thought it would be a bad idea. At which point, something occurred to me. ‘What about the back of the grocer's? What about their access? I mean, they're not lacking a motive either, are they?'

‘You think Mrs Parrish is a murderess?' In those days, we still talked about ‘murderesses' and we were still quaint enough to be shocked by the concept.

‘Maybe, or even Mr Parrish. Perhaps his wife confessed to him what was going on and he took it out on Lightoller.'

‘Wouldn't he be more likely to take it out on Mr Hocking?'

I thought, Well, of course he would, but I'm just casting around for hope here.

The back of the grocery shop proved to have come under the influence of a woman, though. The fence was still intact and relatively well preserved because it had been regularly creosoted. By peering through the knotholes and the cracks around the gate, we could see that it had been, to a certain extent, tended. The weeds had been kept down and the grass, although not ideal for croquet, was relatively short. We were able to see that the fence separating the two properties was intact and robust.

I said, ‘Well, it doesn't look as if either of them could have sneaked around the back with too much ease.'

‘We ought to talk to them, though. We need to get something to eat tonight, and maybe we'll get some sort of idea of how things lay between them and Mr Lightoller.'

She was right, but I was none too hopeful. I was also wondering what Mrs Parrish would say when she saw me.

TWENTY-EIGHT

M
r Malcolm Parrish had not been around when I had raised the alarm about Oliver Lightoller's death. He was a portly man, with a cheerful face that was craggy and seemingly a tough job for his razor, given the number of minor cuts spread out on it. He had no neck to speak of and jet-black hair that doubtless looked just like the packet said it would; possibly to inject yet more illusion of youth into his appearance. His establishment was one of those shops that seemed to stock everything, that was so crowded that wherever the eye looked there was something different to see. It called itself a grocery store, but that term was stretched to include stationery, small items of hardware, greetings cards, toys, equipment for dressmaking, a large selection of second-hand books and an array of magazines, some softly pornographic. It smelled of furniture polish laced with a soupçon of something that at first I could not place, appreciating only after Mr Parrish had reached up to a top shelf to fetch a large tin of baked beans for Max, that it was his body odour.

Max said, ‘Do you have any bacon?'

He indicated a small cold cabinet. ‘Only streaky.'

‘I'll have one packet, please.'

He complied with her wishes. Max asked, ‘Eggs?' and eggs were duly inspected and then supplied, half a dozen white, each with a little lion stamped on it. Mrs Parrish entered the room and, while we both struggled to suppress the image of what Mr Hocking had done to her with a chocolate eclair, she began making room on the shelves to our right for some more tins of vegetables. Max was just choosing which type of sausage to have – Walls best with or without skin – when Mrs Parrish straightened and caught sight of me. Her face betrayed instant recognition and before she could speak, I began with, ‘Hello again.'

‘Hello.'

Mr Parrish looked on with an interesting expression. Mrs Parrish had dropped her gaze from me and found something that she liked about her shoes. She was still attached to a cigarette and from closer quarters, I could see was a good fifteen years younger than her husband; she had made an effort with make-up, too, but it was a doomed attempt because it was failing to make up for the lines of tiredness and anno domini that the life of an English shopkeeper's wife had given her.

‘Do you two know each other?'

His tone had changed quite noticeably; gone was the affable shopkeeper, eager to please and therefore perhaps make a few more bob; now there was an injection of curiosity, and none too passive curiosity either. Mr Parrish was a jealous man.

I said, ‘We met when I raised the alarm about Oliver Lightoller's death. You weren't here, I think.'

‘Oh?' This in a tone that came across as paranoid, an impression compounded by the way he looked me up and down as he spoke.

Max chipped in with, ‘Wasn't it awful?'

Mrs Parrish agreed at once. ‘It was dreadful.'

‘And then his wife, too . . .'

Mr Parrish, it then transpired, was not a man of great tact. ‘I read in the local rag that your father's under suspicion. Is that right?'

‘My father's seriously ill in hospital,' I pointed out. ‘No one knows what happened.'

He made a face that said quite clearly that he wasn't fool enough to fall for
that
one, which I ignored and said, ‘You missed all the excitement, Mr Parrish.'

‘I'll live.'

‘At the cash and carry, were you?'

He patently thought it was none of my business but replied anyway, ‘We'd run out of frozen chips. What with the weekend coming up, I wanted to get in a good stock.'

I smiled. ‘Of course.'

‘I would have been here, only I had a puncture on the way back. Bloody nuisance it was.'

Max asked, ‘How much do I owe you?'

He totted the total up on a cheap paper pad with a pencil that was well chewed at one end and, at the other, trimmed to a square point with a pen knife. ‘Two pounds thirty-three.'

As Max proffered the money, she said, ‘We were just in the bakery. Mr Hocking's very upset.'

This lie produced a gratifying reaction. Mr Parrish's face darkened, while that of his spouse blanched. These equal and opposite reactions almost cancelled each other out, so that the overall colour balance remained undisturbed. Then, Mrs Parrish left the shop muttering something about having to get on, while Mr Parrish crashed down the keys on his till with what I thought was a quite unnecessary amount of violence and said tersely, ‘We're all upset.'

As if completely unaware of the atmosphere, Max enquired, ‘Did you know Mr Lightoller well?'

The money safely deposited, he slammed the cash drawer shut and said, ‘Not particularly.'

‘But surely, you were neighbours, after all.'

He handed over the receipt and gathered up the handles of the plastic bag that contained our purchases. ‘That's all we were.'

There was a tone of finality in these words that prevented either of us from probing further. We left the shop, none the wiser but considerably more intrigued.

In the car on the way home, Max went through what we had learned.

‘Neither Mr Hocking nor Mr Parrish had an alibi for the time that the first murder took place, and both of them had a potential motive.'

‘From the way that Hocking's name went down with the Parrishes, I would say that there's some sort of history there.'

‘Surely, though, it was Mr Hocking, not Parrish, who was being blackmailed.'

‘We don't know that. Perhaps Lightoller judged Mrs Parrish to be the weaker party. She's got more to lose, after all. He blackmails her; she tells Hocking; Hocking goes round and does him in.'

‘But it's still Hocking doing the murdering, not Mr Parrish.'

‘OK, then. Lightoller blackmails Mrs Parrish who then breaks down and confesses all to her husband. He decides the best way to deal with matters is to bump Lightoller off, then, at a later date, go after Hocking. Perhaps he's just biding his time.'

‘Or maybe he was hoping to frame Mr Hocking for the murder . . .'

I shook my head. ‘He didn't do a very good job, then, did he? It's my father who's in the frame for it.'

‘But that's because he barged in as Doris Lightoller was being killed. That meant that he had to change plans. He
was
planning to implicate Hocking, but now he's got to think of something else.'

She had missed something obvious. ‘Why did he kill Doris? She wasn't obviously involved.'

‘They were both in it together, maybe Tom, too. Anyway, we know why he went to the house – to find the evidence – so perhaps Doris Lightoller was just in the way.'

‘I still think that Hocking has the strongest motive. It was Hocking who turned up at the house, trying to break in.'

There was a pause. We were nearly back at Dad's house when Max asked, ‘So what's going on between the Parrishes?'

I shrugged. ‘Probably nothing more than paranoia. Parrish strikes me as the pathologically jealous type. I bet over the years he's suspected everyone from the coalman to the delivery driver of having an affair with his wife.'

‘For a moment, I thought he was suspecting you.'

‘For a moment, so did I.'

I parked in the drive in front of Dad's house and, as I got out, I could hear the phone ringing inside. I sprinted for the door and just got it open in time to pick up the receiver. It was AMH. Dad was conscious.

TWENTY-NINE

H
e wasn't sitting up and cheeking the nurses, but he was most definitely alive and awake and wonderful to see. He was lying slightly more upright than he had been, still hooked up to a cardiac monitor and two drips, but with more colour in his cheeks and without that sunken expression that so nearly caricatures death. Percy was standing outside the room when we arrived, looking pleased with himself.

‘He came round about an hour ago. He seems quite his old self, though a bit croaky.'

We went in. He turned his bandage-bedecked head to look at us, although he didn't try to raise it off the pillow. ‘Ah, Lance. About time.' His voice was dry and husky.

‘Hello, Dad.'

Max said, ‘Hello, Dr Elliot. I'm so glad to see you getting better.'

He regarded her for a moment and then said formally, ‘Thank you, Miss Christy. I'm touched by your concern.'

I suppressed an urge to chastise him. We sat on two chairs by his bedside as Percy slipped into the room, presumably to make sure that he didn't miss Dad's confession to a double murder. I asked, ‘Does it hurt?'

He gave me the benefit of what can only be described as a baleful look. ‘What do you think? That gentleman with the peculiar accent and irritatingly cheerful demeanour tells me that he cracked open my skull and scooped out several pints of blood. From the way that he described it, he used a foot pump and a ladle, so, yes, it does smart rather.'

Max asked, ‘Can you remember what happened?'

I was aware that Percy sat up a little straighter in his chair. Dad thought about things. ‘I'm told I was found at the bottom of the stairs in the Lightollers' house.'

‘That's right.'

‘I think I remember hearing a commotion coming from next door. I was outside servicing the motor mower before putting it away for the winter, and I heard Doris screaming and shouting. I hurried to the front and banged on the front door, called out a few times, but Doris was making such a row I don't think she heard me.' He paused and frowned. ‘I think I nipped around the back, but that's where it starts to go hazy . . .'

I said carefully, ‘Has anyone talked to you about Doris?'

He was concentrating hard, lost in a past that he could not quite claim as his own, and had to come back to what I had said. ‘Doris? No. Is she all right?'