Kill My Darling (11 page)

‘Yes, please,' said Swilley.

She heaved herself to her feet again and went for the tin and a spoon. ‘I've stopped having it,' she said. ‘I was putting on too much weight. It's surprising how you don't miss it, after a bit. I tried to get Andy off it, but he burns it off, he's on the go so much. We're saving for a place of our own with his Elvis money, but you've got to have such a big deposit these days. But we've
got
to move now. It gives me the willies, thinking about that poor Melanie – such a nice girl she was. Of course, I only knew her just to say hello to, but she was always friendly and nice – not like that lot underneath, the Beales, always complaining if we so much as scrape a chair, and making a fuss about Andy practising. And is that right, him in the basement turns out to be a murderer? I read in the paper he killed his wife. Why haven't you arrested him?'

‘There's no evidence to suggest he had anything to do with it,' Swilley said, trying to be patient.

‘Well, it must have been him. Stands to reason. If he's killed once, he's bound to kill again. None of us are safe as long as he's around. There was this woman on a phone-fin this morning when I was getting Andy his breakfast, who said it was a disgrace he was on the loose, any of us could be killed in our beds for all anyone cared. I always thought he had funny eyes – not that I've ever spoken to him, he keeps himself to himself, but they always do, don't they? My mum says—'

‘So you didn't know Melanie very well?' Swilley broke in before the flood could carry her away again.

‘No, like I said, just to say hello to. But Andy's friends with Scott. They go drinking together sometimes, when Melanie works late or she's out with her friends. I don't go, I don't like pubs. But Andy brings him back here for coffee and a chat. And Scott goes to Andy's gigs sometimes, helps out with the sound equipment, that sort of thing. He wants to be an impersonator himself, Scott does, but he hasn't got the voice. I mean, you can't just wiggle about for half an hour – people expect the songs as well. Andy does “Heartbreak Hotel” so's you couldn't tell it
wasn't
Elvis, he's that good,' she said proudly.

‘Do you like Scott?' Swilley got in while she took a breath.

‘Oh yes, he's lovely. Oh –' her face changed to tragedy-mode – ‘he must be heartbroken about Melanie. He was mad about her. They were such a lovely couple. Besotted. He must be kicking himself that he went away for the weekend. If he'd been here, it wouldn't have happened.'

‘Do you know where he was?'

‘Oh yes, he told Andy. It was a friend's wedding, and he was doing his Elvis thing at the stag night.' She made a face. ‘He doesn't even have the right hair – he has to wear a wig. He isn't a patch on my Andy. But Andy watched him rehearse and gave him some tips. He wasn't going to get paid for doing the stag night, so I suppose it didn't matter so much, and I expect they'd all be too drunk to notice anyway. You know what stag nights are like.'

‘So were you and Andy home on Friday night?'

‘Yes, and it makes me feel faint to think about it. To think we were up here watching Graham Norton while that horrible man was killing poor Melanie, and we never heard a thing.'

‘You didn't hear any sounds of disturbance from downstairs? Anyone come in or go out? Any cars arriving or leaving, during the evening or night?'

‘No, Andy came home, oh, about half past seven, quarter to eight, and we had our meal, and then we settled in to watch the telly. We went to bed about eleven, just after, and that was that. Andy sleeps really heavily, he's that tired at the end of the day. And even if I'm awake, I can't hear anything for him snoring. Mind you, we wouldn't hear anything from up here anyway. We never do. The Beales,
they're
the ones who are always complaining about noise,' she concluded bitterly. ‘You can't
move
up here without them moaning. You should ask them.'

‘I will,' said Swilley.

But the Beales – whom she had to track down at work – could not help. They were extremely indignant that their lives had been disrupted by the press, and asked, like Sharon Bolton, why Fitton had not been arrested, and how a convicted murderer could be allowed to roam around unsupervised, putting everyone's lives at risk. But they had been out at a friend's for dinner on Friday evening, going straight from work, and had not arrived home until after midnight. They had not seen anyone else around, nor heard any sounds during the night. They had gone out at about half past ten the following morning, to shop and then to lunch, and had not heard or seen anything untoward before leaving. They had not heard the dog barking, though they had heard that creature upstairs moving furniture about, and playing the radio far too loudly. You'd think she was roller-skating on the bare boards, sometimes, the noise she managed to make.

They had known Melanie Hunter only to say hello to, and had thought her nice, friendly, pleasant. They had spoken to Scott Hibbert once or twice. He seemed a very nice man, too. He worked for an estate agent, but it was an upmarket one – was it Jackson Stops? No, Hatter and Ruck, that was it – which of course made a difference. He had a plan for turning the house into two maisonettes by getting rid of the undesirable top floor and basement people. The Beales could have a really nice maisonette if they could incorporate the top floor into their flat. Hibbert had thought the freeholder would be willing, and the top floor were only renting, and he said there were always ways of getting renters out, but that man Fitton actually owned his flat, so he had to be persuaded to sell. Scott Hibbert had raised the matter with him but so far without success. Mr Beale wanted to know what the position would be when Fitton went to prison for murdering Melanie Hunter. Would his flat be seized, and would it go on the open market? He wondered whether the notoriety would raise the price or suppress it. He seemed hopeful it would be the latter. Mrs Beale had doubts about remaining there at all, now this had happened, but Mr Beale thought property was hard enough to come by in this area, and one shouldn't be foolishly squeamish, especially when turning the flats into two maisonettes would considerably more than double the value of each. When would they be arresting Fitton?

The Beales, she told Slider when she reported back, were a charming couple, but cold and ruthless.

‘A sort of Steve and Eydie Amin?' Slider offered.

‘But it does at least tighten up Scott Hibbert's alibi, boss,' Swilley said, not knowing who Steve and Eydie were. ‘If he was actually doing an entertainment at the stag night on Friday, there was no way he wouldn't be missed. And though he might have a motive for getting rid of Ronnie Fitton and the Boltons, he had none for getting rid of Melanie.'

‘Except,' Slider said, ‘if he had any reason to expect to inherit the flat on her death, so he could double its value and keep all the profit himself. But that's a meagre sort of motive, and not one I'd like to have to convince a jury of.'

‘He couldn't double its value without getting Fitton to sell,' said Swilley. ‘But if Fitton went down for the murder, that would get him out of the way.' She was joking, he could see, but there was some serious thought behind it.

‘Go on,' he invited.

She smiled. ‘And then the other people leave because they don't want to live in a murder house, the price falls because of the notoriety, he snaps up the other flats cheap, and then he redevelops the whole house and makes a killing. Pardon the pun.'

‘Ingenious,' Slider said.

‘Yeah,' said Swilley apologetically. ‘It'd make a good movie. And nobody likes estate agents. But anyway, he loved her – everyone says so.'

‘All the same, we need to check up on his movements. Since we don't know exactly what time Melanie was killed, there's still the possibility that he drove home from Salisbury during the night and went back afterwards. And –' he forestalled her objection – ‘we can work on the motive afterwards, if necessary.'

Connolly was glad to see the dog perk up as she pulled up in front of the house. There were neighbours and pressmen gathered along the pavement, keeping a respectful but agog distance from the front door where a uniform – Dave Bright – was keeping guard. He came down to the car as she stopped, but recognized Slider and nodded. He was an old-fashioned copper, large, authoritative and serene, and such was his presence that no one moved when he opened the car door for her. When she encouraged the dog out after her, there was a murmur among the neighbours and a stirring, like a wheat field in a summer breeze, among the pressmen, but Bright looked left and right and raised a massive hand, and everyone came to rest again, though there was a frenzied zip-zip of photo-shutters, like a caucus of cicadas. Slider's exit was met with a barrage of questions from the fourth estate, cancelling each other out since he could not hear them over each other – though they seemed to be mostly about Ronnie Fitton. He ignored them sturdily, following Bright, Connolly and the dog up the path, past the family car, to the front door.

In the house of mourning, tea was brewing, as it always was, and a large, spongey woman was ministering to Mrs Wiseman in the sitting room, and was introduced as ‘my friend' by Mrs Wiseman and ‘Margie Sutton from number forty-eight' by herself. Bethany was in the kitchen with a school friend – ‘we couldn't make her go in today, not with all this going on, and reporters everywhere' – and Mr Wiseman was also home, hovering angrily between sitting room and kitchen, his clenched fists shoved into his pockets and his face twitching with tension. He seemed irritated not only by the crowds outside but by the presence of ‘Margie' inside.

‘My wife felt she needed support,' was all he said, but it was the way he said it.

Slider could see that Margie might come across as irritating, obviously relishing the tragedy and the opportunities it opened up for being sentimental and gushingly supportive.

‘Ooh, I
know
,' she crooned to anything Mrs Wiseman said, while urging her to ‘put her feet up', ‘be kind to herself', and not ‘hold it back'. She had soft, moist eyes like over-boiled gooseberries, and such a cascade of chins her fat white face looked like a cat on a pile of cushions.

But there was no doubt Marty the dog was pleased to see them. He strained forward on the leash, wagging his entire back end with gladness, and when Connolly released him, shoved his nose into the crutch of each person in turn, swinging his body round for patting, and panting with happiness. Mrs Wiseman seemed distracted and inclined to weep at him, but Mr Wiseman was hugely glad of the distraction and petted the dog extensively, saying, ‘Good old boy. Good old dog,' over and over. Bethany and her friend came to the door to see what was happening, and were easily persuaded to take Marty out into the garden and play with him; which, when a little semaphore between Slider and Connolly had taken place, left the kitchen free for Slider to interview Mr Wiseman, while Connolly worked her magic on the distaff side in the sitting room.

Wiseman seemed relieved to be in the presence of just another man, and his tension seemed to drop back a notch – though he was still wound so tight it didn't make him the king of cool by several nuclear reactors' worth. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?' he offered, with a slight awkwardness that suggested he thought this was a woman's opening, and that he only felt constrained to make it because of the unusual circumstances. Slider calculated that Wiseman would not sit down so was better off with something to do, and accepted. It got his fists out of his pockets, at any rate – Slider was worried for his stitching.

He studied the man as he moved about the kitchen, making a fresh pot. Ian Wiseman was not exceptionally tall – about five ten, Slider thought – but there was no doubt he was in shape. His face was lean and tanned, his hair thick and curly and with very little grey in the brown, his shoulders and arms powerful, his body neat and his legs muscled. He was wearing cord trousers and a V-necked sweater over a check shirt, open at the neck – just the clothes Slider would have expected of a teacher off duty. His hands shook slightly as he made the tea, the tendons stood out in his neck and his expression was grim with, Slider presumed, maintaining control in such difficult circumstances. Otherwise, he thought, he would have been quite good-looking, in a dark-haired, blue-feyed, Irish sort of way.

‘This must be difficult for you,' Slider said in sympathetic tones, by way of opening the conversation.

‘It certainly is,' he snapped back immediately. ‘Crowds out there so we can't get out of our own front door. Our life not our own. We've had to unplug the phone. I had to keep Bethany home from school, and God knows she can't afford to lose any more days. She's already had time off this term with a cold, and with her grades she needs to keep her nose to the grindstone. And then to cap it all my head sent a message to tell me not to come in this week!' He crashed the lid on to the teapot with a kind of suppressed fury. ‘Not that I would have been able to go today, the way things are, but to have him write me off, and for the whole week! I've got a hockey team to coach for the play-offs, I've got soccer teams, I've got basketball inter-schools coming up, I've got kids lined up for private coaching – and I'm stuck indoors here. I can't afford to take a week off.'

Interesting approach to bereavement, Slider thought, not without pity. It took different people different ways, and he could see that, for an active man, being cooped up with two dripping females and nothing to do would be trying. Still it was not his job to sympathize.

‘And you must be upset about Melanie,' he said.

Wiseman's back was to him, pouring the tea. He seemed to pause for a beat, and then said, rather stiffly, ‘Of course I'm upset.' He finished pouring and brought Slider's cup and saucer to the table. ‘Do you take sugar?'