Murder on Page One (16 page)

‘Candice Dalton and Sidney Francis, but we couldn’t be sure, and a half competent defence counsel would make mincemeat of us if we were more definite.’

Osborne snorted. He had spent Friday lunchtime having an unproductive talk with Weasel, who had found no one willing to speak on the record about Johnson’s hold over Littlepool Prison.

Baggo said, ‘Sam, the boy from Ms Swanson’s agency, sent some photos he took of the man who followed her. I have them on my computer. Do you want to see them, gov?’

Osborne tried to hide his wince. ‘Might as well have a gander,’ he said.

If the number of photos was anything to go by, Sam had enjoyed his unconventional assignment. Half of them showed nothing except people’s backs, but in one a man with thinning, dark hair looked over his shoulder, a cigarette in his hand.

‘That’s a good enough view to trace him,’ Baggo said.

‘There’s a lot of men that look like that,’ Osborne said. It was the waiter from Pyotr’s Place. Another photo showed him entering the restaurant.

‘Have we not got enough for a warrant to search this Pyotr’s Place?’ Baggo asked, pointing to the photograph. ‘There is something very fishy about that establishment, apart from their food.’

‘Don’t try to tell me what to do, Chandakarvup,’ Osborne blustered. ‘We’ll shake up the crap crime writers and make an arrest. I don’t want any more of these agents killed on my watch.’

Wondering who to shake up, and how to do it, Osborne scratched his crotch. The telephone rang and he answered it. When he ended the call, he said, ‘Another bloody agent’s got themselves murdered. This one’s been buried alive.’

* * *

Hardcliffe’s wood was just outside Headley, to the east of Hampshire. On Sunday evening, a desperately worried Vanessa Noble had gone looking for her husband when he was late in returning from his run. She had warned him that, carrying too much weight, running a marathon would be the death of him. After driving about in the dark with their two teenage daughters, she had phoned the police. The three of them had gone out again on a stumbling, fruitless search before passing a miserable night.

The call had come as they picked at breakfast. Drainage workers had noticed the disruption of their excavations and the bravest of them had jumped into the trench and scraped the soil until the body had been revealed. The breakfast call had not told them this, merely that a body had been found, the caller non-committal concerning the details. These details became clear when Vanessa had gone to identify the body, and she had returned home in a state of shock. To lose her husband due to a heart attack was one thing, to imagine him murdered, fully conscious as soil was heaped on top of him, was more than she could cope with.

Telling the girls had been awful. She had phoned their school, Roedean, to explain why she was keeping them at home, maintaining her composure with an effort. Then she phoned their solicitor, Marcus Ramsay. When the doorbell sounded, she had expected it to be Marcus, but it was Lionel Parker who stood awkwardly on the doorstep before wrapping his arms round her. This physical contact destroyed her reserve, and she spent the next half hour weeping.

* * *

Flick had dropped Osborne and Peters at the murder scene before going on with Baggo to visit the widow. The Noble family home was a mock Tudor manor house with fields at one side and at the back. Two ponies watched their arrival, wearing winter blankets but chewing grass with unconcerned contentment.

A lean man in his early forties answered the door. He introduced himself as Lionel Parker, a family friend. As he led the way to the drawing room, where Vanessa was, he explained that he had known Richard at Cambridge and they had formed their own literary agency, Noble Parker, based in Guildford. He lived nearby in Fleet and had come round as soon as the solicitor had rung.

Vanessa, fair and thin, did not stand when the detectives came into the room. She lifted a pale, tear-stained face and held out a limp hand. Her other hand lay in her lap, clutching a sodden handkerchief. Parker sat on the sofa beside her, a solicitous expression on his face.

Hesitantly, she described the events of the previous twenty-four hours. She could think of no one who might want to murder Richard, there had been no threats she was aware of, and his recent behaviour had been quite normal. For the last few weeks he had gone for a run every Sunday afternoon. While his route had varied, he had always finished by going through Hardcliffe’s wood. He had been training for the London Marathon, she added bitterly, looking daggers at Parker.

Turning to him, Baggo asked, ‘How does your agency deal with submissions from new authors?’

Parker frowned. ‘What does that have to do with this dreadful business?’ he snapped.

‘Possibly quite a lot, sir. I would be most grateful if you would tell me.’

‘Frankly, we ignore most of them. We have a quick look at some, but the publishing business is highly competitive, and new talent has to be exceptional before we consider representation.’

‘Do you reply to aspiring authors who contact you?’

‘No. We let silence speak for itself.’

‘Like the silence of the grave, perhaps?’

Parker sat forward, his eyes boring into Baggo’s. Speaking slowly, he said, ‘That must rank as one of the most tasteless, insensitive remarks I have ever heard. Clearly, the Metropolitan Police is nothing like what it was. No doubt they will find some excuse for you, but I trust that your sergeant will educate you about how we behave here as you leave. Mrs Noble has had quite enough.’

Flick coughed. ‘I have one question. Did Mr Noble handle crime novels?’

Parker nodded curtly. ‘Yes.’

Baggo also coughed. ‘And I have one more, if this does not upset English etiquette. Do you have any record at all of aspiring authors who have submitted to you?’

Parker curled his lip. ‘I would have thought it was obvious from what I have already said that the answer to that particularly stupid question is “no”.’

Flick stood up, nodding to Baggo with one eyebrow raised. She spoke words of condolence, conscious of their futility and turned to go.

Baggo said to Vanessa, ‘I know you have had a most terrible shock. I am very sorry if I offended you, but there was a point to all of my questions. You know, I really want to catch your husband’s killer.’

There was a ray of warmth in Vanessa’s answering smile that only Baggo saw. Flick and Parker turned as a teenage girl entered the room. She was well-built, with a ruddy complexion she had not inherited from her mother. Her eyes were red from crying.

‘Mum, do you need the phone? Like I really need to speak to Louise?’ the girl said.

Before Vanessa answered, Parker said, ‘Can’t it wait till later, Gill? You’re still quite traumatised.’ He put his arm round her shoulder, but she shrugged it away and moved across the room to her mother.

‘Mum?’ she said.

‘All right, darling. What’s Jenny doing?’

‘i-Pod,’ Gill replied. She looked at Flick and Baggo. ‘Police?’ she asked then, without waiting for a reply but shooting a glare at Parker, left.

‘She’s very upset,’ Parker said quickly.

As they drove out of the gate, which boasted a statue of a white lion on either side, Flick said, ‘I wonder …’

‘I wonder, too,’ Baggo agreed.

* * * 

‘So what do we know?’ Osborne asked as Flick drove up the M3 towards London.

Peters, who had just come off the phone to the pathologist, said, ‘It’s another clever killing. The doc reckons Noble was running downhill when he was tripped. The palms of both hands were grazed. Then he was tasered twice. They found two sets of electrodes in his back. He was pushed into the open drainage ditch and landed face down. Two ribs were cracked at the back, and that fits with the boulder that was right on top of him. Then the soil was piled on. Horrid way to go.’

Flick said, ‘He went out running every Sunday afternoon and always took the same route home. I don’t suppose the killer left a footprint at the scene, or anything helpful like that?’

‘Correct, Sarge,’ Peters said. ‘We’re against someone meticulous, that’s for sure. There were tyre tracks, but not necessarily anything to do with the murder, and pretty common anyway.’

Baggo said, ‘Noble didn’t acknowledge submissions from aspiring authors. You can imagine him being buried alive, screaming blue murder for help and getting no answer.’

Osborne asked, ‘What’s the widow like?’

Flick said, ‘As upset as you might expect. Noble had a business partner, Lionel Parker. He was at the house, and we wondered if there might be something between him and Vanessa Noble. One of the Nobles’ girls reacted very badly to him.’

‘He did not take to me,’ Baggo said.

‘Probably got some taste, then.’ Osborne laughed. ‘Damn. Damn. Damn. We’re playing catch-up all the time, with nothing to go on. We need to start putting pressure on the crap crime writers.’

Flick said, ‘There’s one we didn’t put down as a suspect because she lives in Newcastle. Her victim was buried alive. Her name is …’

‘Cilla Pargiter,’ Baggo said.

‘Well you two know where you are heading tomorrow,’ Osborne said.

15

The train north was nearly half an hour late. It gave Flick and Baggo time to see that the papers had now decided that one person, ‘Crimewriter’, was responsible for killing the agents. The police did not look good, particularly as Inspector Osborne had been unavailable for comment. Palfrey had also ducked under the parapet, and it had been left to Cumberland to reassure the public that the investigation was making progress. The fact that such a senior officer had come forward to say so little merely emphasised the problem.

Eventually, the train pulled into Newcastle Station. At the entrance of the great, soot-blackened, Victorian building, Flick and Baggo easily found a taxi to take them to the Jesmond area of the ‘toon’, where Cilla Pargiter lived. They were unable to understand most of what the driver said, and conversation petered out, though he cheerfully gave them his company’s card for their return to the station.

The red brick terrace suggested neither affluence nor poverty. The front garden of number twenty-four comprised a square of straggly grass bisected by badly-laid paving stones that bore traces of having been painted many years previously. It seemed that no one was in, but as Flick’s finger was poised to press the bell a second time, the door was flung open and a fat, middle-aged woman greeted them with a smile that quickly faded.

‘Not today, my loves,’ she said, making to close the door.

Just in time, Flick got her foot in the way. ‘We’re police,’ she said. ‘Are you Ms Pargiter?’

The woman tensed then peered suspiciously at them. ‘You’ll have your warrant cards?’ she asked. Her hands shook as she took a pair of spectacles from the pocket of her thick, paint-stained, woolly cardigan and examined them.

‘You’d best come in, I guess,’ she said, and led the way to a sitting-room that resembled an art gallery. Paintings covered every wall. Most were still life or animals, but there were landscapes and some portraits as well.

Above the fireplace was one larger than the rest, showing the heads and shoulders of two young women. Scarcely more than girls, they appeared identical with oval, grey eyes and ski-jump noses framed by long, straight, blonde hair. Both had strong chins. Their lips were pulled down on the right, making their expressions difficult to read. The girl on the left, more in profile, was half-turned towards a sandy beach and a black rock jutting from an azure sea. The girl on the right looked away from her sister, her head slightly bowed.

‘Is this about Penny?’ the woman blurted out before Flick said anything.

‘Penny?’ Flick asked.

The woman sat down heavily. ‘My daughter,’ she said, looking up at the picture.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t follow,’ Flick said quietly.

Frowning, the woman sighed. ‘She was drowned. Nearly four years ago.’ Her voice catching, she added, ‘Her body was never recovered. Swept out to sea. I keep hoping …’

‘I’m sorry,’ Flick repeated. ‘Are you Cilla Pargiter?’ she asked.

She shook her head. ‘That’s my other daughter, Penny’s twin. Cilla will be back soon,’ she explained. ‘What do you want with her, anyway?’

‘Her name cropped up in an inquiry, that’s all. We have a few questions we’d like to ask her. Nothing to worry about.’ Flick tried to sound reassuring.

The woman shifted in her seat and looked from one to the other. ‘Right. That’s a mercy. I’m Margaret Pargiter, by the way. I suppose you won’t say no to a cuppa tea.’

‘You could have warned me. I thought you looked her up on Facebook,’ Flick snapped as soon as Margaret had left.

‘I tried to catch your eye. But there was nothing about her sister. As I said in the train, it was a very dull profile.’

Unimpressed, Flick stood to have a closer look at the painting, comparing mother and daughters. The oval eyes and the nose were similar. Years younger and stones lighter, Margaret could nearly have been either of these girls. Her chin was less prominent and her mouth, full-lipped but unremarkable, lacked the distinctive downward twist. From the kitchen came the sound of nose-blowing. When she returned, forcing a smile, Margaret carried a tea-tray with a plate of cakes.