The Cold Hand of Malice (36 page)

‘From the office. She was going through the orders for the week, and they’re in there.’

‘What time was that?’

‘Quarter to eight, something like that. I can’t tell you exactly.’

‘Did she say if anybody was with her?’

‘No, but I think she would have said if there was someone there, because we were on the phone for a good fifteen minutes.’

‘So she was already downstairs at that time. Was the light on or off in the office when you came in?’

‘Off. The only light on was this one on the stairs.’

Paget moved to the office and turned the light on. The desk was tidy, the filing cabinet was closed. ‘Susan Chase wasn’t coming down when she fell,’ he said. ‘She’d been working here and was going back up. Which makes me wonder how she managed to hit the
back
of her head rather than the front.’

‘She could have tripped, spun round and fallen backward,’ Tregalles suggested.

‘The spiral’s too tight,’ said Paget, ‘and
that
makes me wonder how she managed to end up on the floor the way she did.’

Thirty-One

Wednesday, March 25

‘I stopped at the hospital to see how Susan Chase is,’ said Paget as he took off his coat and joined Ormside, Tregalles and Molly in front of the white boards. ‘She’s still unconscious and by no means out of danger, so if this wasn’t an accident, we could have another murder on our hands. Has SOCO been informed?’

‘Should be on their way now,’ Ormside told him. ‘Tregalles filled me in last night, so I let Charlie know.’

Paget stifled a yawn. It had been half-past one when he’d dropped Michelle Marshall at her car, where she’d left it in front of the gift and chocolate shop in Bishop’s Gate, and two o’clock before he climbed into bed, where Grace was still awake and anxious to hear what had happened.

‘I told Mrs Marshall the shop will be closed until we’re done with it, so she can sleep in this morning – which is more than I’ll be doing,’ he concluded as he buried his face in the pillow.

‘You should,’ Grace said softly. ‘You know you won’t go to sleep right away. You’ll lie there thinking about everything that went on last night. You need something to take your mind off it; you need to relax.’

He felt the warmth of her as she snuggled up beside him; felt her slender fingers slide beneath his pyjama jacket to caress his skin; felt her breath against his ear . . .

He groaned. Resistance was pointless – not that he intended to try very hard. ‘You are a witch and a temptress,’ he said sternly, ‘and you are asking for trouble.’

Her hair brushed his face. ‘Yes, please,’ she murmured as her lips came down on his.

That was the other reason for being late.

‘Tom Maxwell in Forensics left a call for you last night,’ Ormside said. ‘He wants you to call him before nine this morning, because he’ll be tied up in meetings for the rest of the day after that.’

‘Did he say what it was about?’

‘No.’

‘Let’s hope it’s good news,’ Paget muttered as he picked up the phone. ‘We could certainly use some.’

‘Was it?’ Ormside asked cautiously when Paget put the phone down.

Paget nodded. ‘I think we might be getting somewhere at last,’ he said. ‘First of all, they’ve identified a perfume on the tissue the rings were wrapped in. It’s called Fetish.’

Molly looked up from the notes she was copying from the board and said, ‘That’s Peggy Goodwin’s perfume.’

‘Is it?’ said Paget, smiling broadly. ‘I wonder why that doesn’t surprise me? And it makes sense of something else Tom Maxwell told me. He says the tissue also contains someone’s DNA. Apparently someone used it to wipe their nose.’

Molly grimaced. ‘Then used it to wrap the rings?’ she said. ‘That wasn’t very nice.’

‘Perhaps it was unavoidable,’ said Paget. ‘The last time I was in Tavistock Road, the spring flowers were in bloom, and there was fresh green on some of the trees. A deadly combination for someone who has allergies – someone like Peggy Goodwin. If Laura’s rings were planted in Susan’s car, and it was Peggy who planted them, she might well have had a fit of sneezing and had to use whatever came to hand.’

‘Even so . . .’ Molly said.

‘On the other hand,’ Tregalles suggested, ‘perhaps she was making a statement, showing her contempt for Susan.’

‘That’s even worse,’ Molly muttered, wrinkling her nose. ‘You’d think she’d have—’

‘Maxwell also told me,’ Paget broke in, ‘that the blood on the clothing found in the skip matches Holbrook’s blood, the trainers have fibres stuck to them from the bedroom carpet where Holbrook was killed, and there were tiny particles of glass that match the glass from Susan Chase’s car embedded in the soles and heels of the trainers.

‘As well, they found a finger dressing with blood on it inside one of the rubber gloves. They’ll be doing DNA tests on that and the wrapping around the rings.’

‘Little finger, right hand,’ Molly said. ‘Remember, sir? Goodwin cut her little finger when Holbrook shoved those papers at her the other day.’

‘I remember,’ Paget told her, ‘and I think this little lot is going to clinch the case against Peggy Goodwin. We’ll need search warrants for all three locations: Goodwin’s office, her flat, and her mother’s place in Bishop’s Gate,’ Paget said.

A uniformed constable entered the room and made straight for Paget. ‘Something for you, sir,’ he said. ‘Delivered by hand from the hospital.’ He handed Paget a brown envelope.

Paget thanked the man and opened it. Six high-definition pictures, together with a folded note slid out on to the desk. The pictures were close-ups of a shaved area of Susan Chase’s skull, and there was a note.

‘Since Dr Starkie is more familiar with the sort of thing for which you may be looking,’ Carradine had written, ‘I asked for his opinion, and you will see his comment at the bottom of the page. Hope this proves to be of some value.’ An indecipherable squiggle followed.

Starkie’s note was short and to the point. ‘Look familiar?’ it said.

Starkie was right. The shape of the wound looked very much like those on Laura Holbrook’s head. Paget turned to Ormside. ‘I want someone assigned to the hospital immediately,’ he said. ‘If Susan Chase’s injuries are the result of an attack rather than an accident, I want to make sure that no one tries to finish the job.’

‘A woman from SOCO is in the office, sir,’ the uniformed constable told Paget as he entered the Basket of Flowers. ‘And a bit of all right she is, too, if you don’t mind my saying so. Name of Lovett.’

‘Really, Constable?’ Paget said. ‘I shall have to take a look for myself, then, shan’t I?’

Paget went through to the back and stood in the open doorway to the office. Grace was on her hands and knees behind the desk, and she wasn’t aware that he was there until he spoke. ‘I’m told by the constable out front that the woman from SOCO is a bit of all right,’ he said. ‘I think you have an admirer there.’

Still on her knees, Grace popped her head up above the desk. ‘I suppose I should be flattered,’ she said, ‘but I suspect that anything in a skirt would be a bit of all right to that man.’

‘You’re in a boiler suit.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I told him he didn’t know the half of it, and you were—’

‘Oh, Neil, you didn’t!’ Grace looked horrified as she started to get up, then shook her head when she saw the grin on his face. ‘You had better not have if you value your life,’ she warned.

‘So what’s Charlie’s chief analyst doing here scrambling about on hands and knees?’ he asked.

‘Cliff was here taking pictures first thing this morning, but most of our people are over in Tenborough at the scene of a warehouse robbery that went wrong last night. So I’m it for the moment.’

‘Find anything useful?’

‘Hard to say what is and what isn’t, but I’m bagging anything that looks promising. Are you looking for anything in particular?’

‘Yes, I am. I’d like to know, if Susan Chase fell backwards and hit her head on that fourth step from the bottom of the stairs, how she managed to end up on the floor at the bottom? It would have made more sense to me if she’d been found part way up the stairs.’

‘Perhaps she managed to push herself to her feet, then tumbled the rest of the way?’

Paget shook his head. ‘I doubt that,’ he said. ‘It’s a bad fracture and she’s still unconscious.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Grace pointed out. ‘There are documented cases of people who have carried on as if nothing had happened after severe blows to the head, only to collapse later.’

Paget squatted down to examine the iron steps. ‘It’s possible,’ he agreed, ‘but I saw the pictures of the wound this morning, and I don’t think she fell against this step. I think her injury was caused by the same weapon that killed Laura Holbrook, and so does Starkie.’

‘You think all this was staged?’

‘I can’t prove it, at least not yet, but I don’t think it was an accident.’

Grace studied the marks on the carpet. ‘According to what you told me last night, or should I say this morning, and the way it’s drawn out here, one of the crutches was broken, and Susan was lying on top of one of the pieces, so it would seem we are supposed to believe that, either it broke and caused her to fall, or she slipped and it broke when she went down. But if the whole thing was staged, it might explain this.’ Grace led Paget under the curve of the staircase and pointed upward. ‘I found splinters from the broken crutch caught between the fifth step and the side support, and several more on the floor below the steps.

‘Now, let’s say that Susan was higher up the staircase than we thought – it doesn’t matter in this case whether she was going up or coming down – and her crutch became wedged between the steps and broke. If she fell from there, there is no way she could have ended up where she was found, because the spiral is too tight. Unless, of course, she tumbled around the curve, but then she would be pretty banged up by the time she got to the bottom. Was she badly bruised?’

‘Not that I’m aware of. The surgeon didn’t mention it.’

‘So, how did the splinters get here?’ Grace asked rhetorically. ‘A wooden crutch is not that easy to break. But if someone wanted to break one deliberately, all they would have to do is jam it between the back of these two steps, put their weight on the lower end of the crutch, and you have all the leverage necessary to snap the thing in two. I didn’t know if it meant anything at the time, but I photographed it and bagged the splinters just in case.’

Paget nodded slowly. ‘Then Mrs Marshall may not have been imagining things when she said she thought she saw someone in the shadows back here when she first entered the shop. Someone who slipped out of the back door in such a hurry that they didn’t have time to close it properly. Which may be why he or she didn’t have time to study the scene to make sure it looked right before they left – or to make sure that Susan was dead!’

‘Bit of a hold-up on the warrants,’ Ormside told Paget later that day. ‘The super phoned down to say he’s being questioned about why we need to go into the Johnson house and shop, since no one in those premises is suspected of a crime. I went over it with him about the dogs, and I
think
I was able to satisfy him, but it doesn’t look as if we’ll be getting all three warrants until the end of the day. Do you still want to have the teams ready to go when they do arrive? It will mean a hell of a lot of overtime, and I very much doubt if the super will authorize it.’

Paget shook his head. ‘We’d never get authorization for the overtime, so you can tell everyone to stand down. I don’t think Goodwin will be going anywhere, so we’ll go in after she’s left for work tomorrow morning.’

Thirty-Two

Thursday, March 26

Much of the morning briefing session was taken up with the forthcoming execution of the search warrants, and the assignment of people to each location. Len Ormside – much to his surprise and consternation – was the designated leader of the team that would be searching the shop and living quarters in Bishop’s Gate, while Tregalles would head the team searching Peggy Goodwin’s flat in Caledonia Street.

Paget would wait until he’d heard back from the first two teams before leading his team into the Micro-Engineering Labs building to search Peggy Goodwin’s office, and bring her in for questioning.

‘So let’s make sure that no one is allowed to let her know what is happening until we get there,’ he concluded, ‘and that applies particularly to Mr and Mrs Johnson. No phone calls in or out for them until we bring Goodwin in. You all know what we’re looking for, so make sure you remember the rules, because I want everything to be done by the book. No short cuts. Any questions? Right, then, you’ll be leaving here in fifteen minutes.’

‘I haven’t seen Molly this morning,’ Tregalles said, looking around. ‘Whose team is she on?’

‘She’s away today,’ Ormside told him. ‘She’ll be back tomorrow.’

‘A day off in the middle of the week when we’re just about to wrap this up?’ Tregalles said. ‘How did she wangle that? Bit of pull with the boss, was it, since she seems to be the flavour of the month?’

‘That’s right,’ Ormside said. ‘Same as was done for you when you sat your sergeant’s exam.’

‘Molly’s taking the
sergeant’s
exam?’ Tregalles spluttered. ‘She never said anything about that to me.’

‘Nor anyone else,’ said Ormside. ‘I had to know, of course, and so did Paget in order to assess her field experience and readiness for the practical aspects of the position if she passes the exam. Molly said she didn’t want anyone else to know in case she found she wasn’t ready for it. But she’s been studying hard, and I’m sure she’ll do well.’

Tregalles blew out his cheeks. ‘So
that’s
what’s been going on,’ he said. ‘You might have
told
me, Len. I mean you must admit it did look a bit odd, and I couldn’t help wondering why the boss kept taking her with him.’

‘Thought he’d gone off you in favour of Molly, did you?’

‘’Course not!’ Tregalles could feel his face reddening. Ormside had come just a little too close to the truth for comfort. ‘It’s just that I don’t see why you couldn’t have at least given me a hint.’