The Cold Hand of Malice (38 page)

‘Of course. Simon called to tell me that Laura was ill and he wanted me to call a couple of clients first thing in the morning to let them know she wouldn’t be able to see them. I told you that before.’

‘You did indeed,’ Paget agreed. ‘And what did you do after you hung up?’

‘I told you that as well,’ Peggy said irritably. ‘Does it
matter
what I did?’

‘Yes, I believe it does,’ Paget told her. ‘I think that when Simon phoned to ask you to let Laura’s clients know that she wouldn’t be able to see them next morning, you
thought
he was letting you know that Laura was in the house alone and vulnerable, while he had an ironclad alibi for the rest of the evening, with Trevor Ballantyne as his witness. An ideal time, you thought, to put into action the final phase of the plan the two of you had been working on since last February.

‘The plan to kill Laura Holbrook.

‘You went to the house, let yourself in with this key, then went upstairs and battered Laura to death. You took off her rings, went downstairs and proceeded to smash a few things to make it look as if it was the work of burglars, then used the murder weapon to pry the back door open to make it look like a forced entry. And then you went home.

‘When Simon returned, and found Laura not only dead but battered beyond recognition, he was understandably appalled to the point where he was physically sick. And from that point on he was in trouble. He couldn’t tell you that he’d been meeting with Henry Beaumont in Susan Chase’s flat, and he couldn’t rely on Trevor keeping quiet either, and that was when he began to panic.

‘And that was when it all began to unravel, wasn’t it, Miss Goodwin? You found out that Simon had been sleeping with Susan Chase while conning you into doing his dirty work for him, and somehow you learned about his secret dealings with Henry Beaumont – and that
was
the final straw, wasn’t it, Miss Goodwin?’

‘You are getting desperate, aren’t you, Chief Inspector?’ said Peggy contemptuously, ‘because we both know who killed Laura. You had your killer here, probably in this very room only last week, but if this is the best you can do I’m not surprised you had to let her go. So, since I haven’t been charged with anything, I have better things to do than sit here listening to your feeble attempts to cobble together some sort of case against me simply because you haven’t been able to make your case against Susan Chase.’

‘Sit down, Miss Goodwin,’ Paget ordered as she started to rise. ‘We haven’t finished here.’ He nodded to Tregalles, who picked up a large plastic bag from beside his chair and set it on the table. ‘Miss Goodwin is being shown items of clothing,’ he said. ‘A tracksuit, dark blue, two-piece, well-worn; Reebok trainers, surgical gloves, and a clear plastic shower hat, all of which were recovered from a skip behind the Fairview Market in Caxton Road last Thursday, March the seventeenth, following the murder of Simon Holbrook earlier that day. Do you recognize these items of clothing, Miss Goodwin?’

The intake of breath when he opened the bag was so quickly controlled that both men would have missed it if they hadn’t been watching closely. ‘I don’t know why you think I should,’ she shrugged. ‘Are they supposed to mean something to me?’

Tregalles slid a photograph across the table. ‘This photograph was taken from your mother’s album earlier today,’ he said. ‘It shows you wearing the tracksuit and trainers, while surrounded by dogs in the garden of your mother’s house. The date on the back of the print is February the seventh of this year.’

Peggy’s eyes glittered at the mention of her mother. ‘You had no right to take things from my mother’s house,’ she breathed. ‘No right at all. And there are all sorts of tracksuits like that around. That picture doesn’t prove anything.’

‘We’ll see,’ Paget said equably. ‘You’ll no doubt have noticed the dark stains on the clothes and shoes,’ he continued. ‘It’s blood, Miss Goodwin. Simon Holbrook’s blood, splattered on to your clothing when you stabbed him a number of times. And then there’s the plastic shower hat. I’m sure you must have been sweating under that hat, because you left quite a few strands of hair inside when you took it off. You’ll be familiar with what our labs can do with DNA testing these days, I’m sure, and I don’t think we will have any trouble proving that those hairs belong to you.

‘However, even if they don’t, they still have the surgical gloves to work with, because you cut your little finger the other day, a paper cut – we were there when it happened, if you remember – and the dressing remained inside the glove when you tore it off and threw it in the bin. Oh, yes, and speaking of the bin, you had to hoist yourself up after you’d taken the gloves off to make sure everything had gone right down into the bin, and you left us a nice set of fingerprints on the metal.

‘Anything you wish to say, Miss Goodwin?’

Peggy gave a shrug suggesting that what he was saying was of little concern to her. ‘I know how desperate you must be to find someone guilty of killing Simon, so I have to assume all this was planted to make me look guilty. And if that is the best you can do, I’m not surprised you had to let Susan go, when you know as well as I do that she is the one who killed Simon.’

‘Which is what you would like us to believe,’ Paget told her, ‘but there’s more.’ He turned the trainers over on their sides. ‘If you look very closely, you will see fibres stuck to the bottom of the shoes, and tiny shards of glass embedded in the soles and heels. The fibres come from the carpet in Simon Holbrook’s bedroom; the substance adhering to them is Simon Holbrook’s blood, and the glass embedded in the shoes is identical to the glass recovered from a broken window in Susan Chase’s car—’

‘Which would suggest to any
reasonable
person,’ Peggy cut in, ‘that the trainers belong to Susan, and it was probably she who managed to get hold of those clothes to try to incriminate me.’

‘Nice try,’ Paget told her, ‘but I prefer to think of it as the other way round. When you finally realized that Simon Holbrook had been conning you for years; that he was in fact sleeping with Susan Chase, and had been for months, you followed her, and when she left her car in Tavistock Road, you decided to plant evidence in the car – the rings you had torn from Laura Holbrook’s fingers when you killed her.

‘I’m sure you’ve noticed,’ he continued, ‘that the people in Tavistock Road pride themselves on their displays of early spring flowers, but it’s not the place for someone with allergies, like yourself, is it? Was it a sudden fit of sneezing that caught you by surprise the night you smashed the window in Susan Chase’s car and put the rings in the glovebox? I believe the tissue you used to wrap them in can be traced to you, Miss Goodwin.’

Peggy rolled her eyes as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘So you found Laura’s rings in Susan’s car,’ she said sarcastically. ‘Did it not occur to your tiny minds that perhaps
Susan
put them there after killing Laura? She’s been after Simon for years, and I suppose she thought that if she got rid of Laura he would turn to her. But Simon had no time for Susan. He told me himself that he wished he could find a way to get rid of her attentions, but he felt sorry for her and didn’t want to hurt her feelings.’

‘So sorry for her, in fact,’ said Paget, ‘that he had been sleeping with her at every opportunity long before his wife died?’

But Peggy shook her head. ‘That,’ she said emphatically, ‘is a lie put about by Susan. She desperately wanted it to be true.’

‘It is true and you know it,’ Paget told her. ‘He has been going away with Susan Chase or sleeping with her virtually every time his wife was away on business. And you know it’s true because you were in the house while she was in Simon Holbrook’s bed upstairs. Waiting to kill him for that very reason as well as for what he was about to do with you when he turned the company over to Drexler-Davies.’

Paget sounded almost sympathetic as he said, ‘After all you have done for him throughout the years, including the ultimate demonstration of your devotion to him by planning and executing the murder of his wife. And a very clever plan it was, Miss Goodwin, breaking into people’s homes while they were away – the homes of people who had confided in you when they came into the shop to buy a present or a card. But you left dog hair behind in several houses as well as in Laura Holbrook’s bedroom when you killed her; dog hair that can be traced back to the dogs you helped your mother groom. And it was you who killed Simon because, after all you had done for him throughout the years, including ridding him of his wife, he was casting you aside for Susan Chase. Not only that, but he was quite prepared to see you pushed out of Holbrook Micro-Engineering Labs when he sold out to Drexler-Davies.’

‘That’s not true! Simon would never sell out to Drexler-Davies.’

‘Oh, yes he would,’ Paget told her. ‘We have proof of that, and you would have been the loser – again. You have always been in love with Simon, haven’t you, Miss Goodwin, but Simon was never in love with you, was he? He used you in the same way he used other women. He may have slept with you but he never loved you. Simon Holbrook used women and discarded them when he was tired of them or they were no longer useful to him. He used you to get his company up and running, but as soon as someone with better skills and more money came along, you were pushed aside.’

Paget looked puzzled as he shook his head. ‘I don’t understand how you could let him use you in that way. You are in many ways a very intelligent woman, but you seem to have a blind spot when it comes to Simon Holbrook. You didn’t even get the message when he brought Laura Southern into the firm to take your place, then added insult to injury by expecting you to bring her up to speed. In fact you
still
didn’t get the message when he went off and
married
the woman?’

Peggy’s eyes glittered. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she grated. ‘Simon wasn’t like that at all. Yes, women were attracted to him, and in Laura’s case he was attracted to her. Laura was very clever, I’ll grant her that, and Simon became infatuated with her. But that’s all it was, infatuation, and by the time he realized that it was the company she wanted to control, and her interest in him was only for his talent as the key to the success of the company, it was too late to do much about it.’

‘Except kill her,’ said Paget quietly. ‘And who better to get him to do it for him than the ever-faithful Peggy Goodwin? The woman who would do anything for him, especially if she thought he’d make good on his promise of marriage when the time was right.

‘But the time would never be right, would it, Miss Goodwin? Because while he was persuading you to do his dirty work, he was bedding Susan Chase, and he made her exactly the same promise. She really believed he would marry her and they would go off together to Solihull once the deal was finalized with Drexler-Davies. Perhaps he meant it this time, but I doubt it even if things had worked out as he’d planned. But one thing I do know, after talking to Henry Beaumont, is that Simon was quite prepared to abandon you, because Beaumont had made it clear that you and others would be replaced by his own people. I suppose you could take some comfort from the fact that Simon did express regret at having to lose someone he described as “a secretary – a good one, but still just a secretary”.’

‘That’s a lie!’ she said savagely. Colour had slowly drained from Peggy’s face as Paget made each point. ‘Simon wasn’t like that. You didn’t know him as I did.’

Peggy paused to steady her breathing, but her voice shook as she continued. ‘As for being in love with Simon,
yes
, I was in love with him, and he was in love with me. He only married Laura because we were desperate for the money she brought into the company, as well as the expertise to market our products. He discussed it with me, and I agreed it was the only way. Simon hated every minute he was married to her, but it was Susan who killed her, because she has always wanted Simon for herself. Susan hated Laura. Simon had nothing to do with Laura’s death, and neither did I.

‘As for this other business of merging with Drexler-Davies, that’s nonsense. If it had been true, I would have been the first to know about it, because Simon discussed everything with me. Simon
needed
me. Apart from anything else, he would have had to keep me on, because I know more about that company that anyone in Beaumont’s transition team.’

‘Transition team? Interesting choice of words, Miss Goodwin, especially since you claim to know nothing about such a merger. But you did know, didn’t you? Not because Simon told you, but because of this.’

Paget took a clear plastic evidence bag from his pocket and put it on the table. Inside was a small silver-coloured object no bigger than his little finger. ‘I’m sure you’ll recognize it,’ he said, ‘because it’s a flash drive memory stick taken from your flat this morning. It contains copies of every email between Simon Holbrook and Henry Beaumont, and it has your fingerprints all over it. And the comments he makes about you, Miss Goodwin – not exactly flattering, are they? Not the sort of thing one expects from a lover.

‘And that,’ he concluded, ‘was the final betrayal, wasn’t it, Miss Goodwin?’

There were tears in Peggy’s eyes, but they glittered with hatred as she said, ‘You don’t know
anything
about me and Simon—’ only to be cut off by Tregalles.

‘Sorry to interrupt, Miss Goodwin,’ he said, ‘but I would like to take a closer look at one of the keys on that ring.’ He reached across the table to spread the keys inside the bag, and point to one of them – a longer, heavier key than the others. ‘I’ve seen another one like that,’ he said. ‘I wondered why the key to Holbrook’s back door was sitting on a shelf beside the door. But this explains it. That’s the way you left the morning you killed him, isn’t it, Miss Goodwin? You left the front door on the latch so that Janice West would go in and find the body, but you left by the back door because you didn’t want to take the chance of someone seeing you with that black bag of clothing under the street lights at the front of the house. You locked the back door behind you with this key, leaving the second key on the shelf beside the door so we would think it had been locked from the inside, and the killer had left by the front door. That was your bike beside the back door, wasn’t it? You rode home on it, stopping just long enough to drop the bloodstained clothing into a skip along the way. As a matter of fact I found the bike in your lock-up garage this morning, and the tyre tread matched perfectly.’