The Cold Hand of Malice (8 page)

Paget remembered all too vividly the damage done to Mrs Holbrook’s face: nose split; jaw broken; teeth smashed; left eye driven into its socket, and hair matted and tangled in the bloody wounds. It had been a vicious attack, and all the more incomprehensible if the woman had been asleep at the time.

‘Sounds like the same metal bar they’ve been using on the back doors and the furniture they smash,’ he told Starkie.

More and more this looked like the work of a psychopath, and psychopaths didn’t need a logical reason for what they did, whether it was smashing things or killing people, and they could be very clever and unpredictable. Witness, for example, the way they had vandalized the other five houses without leaving so much as a clue – with the exception of some dog hairs and a few fibres.

‘Any second thoughts about the time of death?’ he asked.

‘No. I’m leaving the one-hour spread as it is for the record, but as I said before, you won’t be far wrong if you assume she was killed around nine o’clock, give or take fifteen minutes.’

‘Good. That helps,’ Paget told him. ‘Now, Tregalles tells me that Laura Holbrook’s wedding and engagement rings may have been pulled from her finger, and he said he’d passed that information along to you. Any luck with that, Reg?’

‘There were slight abrasions on the knuckle,’ Starkie said, ‘but she could have pulled them off herself for all I know.’

Paget wasn’t surprised, and he wasn’t sure that it mattered very much. The point was, two valuable rings were missing, and there was a chance that the killer or killers would try to dispose of them, and that might just be the break they were looking for.

‘Anything else I should know about?’ he asked.

‘Not unless something comes back from the lab. Otherwise it looks straightforward enough. No surprises as far as I can see.’

‘Good. And thanks, Reg. Appreciate the call.’

Paget was pleasantly surprised to see Grace’s car in the driveway when he got home at ten minutes to six that evening. With the way things had been going these past few months, between staff shortages and heavy workloads in both areas, they were lucky if either of them got home before six thirty or seven most evenings. Luckier still if they arrived more or less at the same time. So he was even more surprised when he opened the front door to be greeted by the aroma of beef roasting in the oven.

Grace appeared at the kitchen door, apron on, oven mitts on her hands.

‘Thank goodness!’ she said with feeling. ‘I half expected you to phone at the last minute to say you would be late. Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding all right, is it?’

He shrugged out of his coat, and made a face. ‘I was rather hoping for a green salad,’ he said, ‘but I suppose I could manage a bit of beef if that’s all you have.’

‘I can dump it in the dustbin,’ she warned, ‘so be careful what you say.’

He gathered her to him. ‘Seems a shame to waste it since you’ve been to all that trouble,’ he said, and kissed her. ‘You must have come home early to do all this. What’s the occasion?’

‘I just felt like it,’ Grace told him, ‘and the work I have to do can be done just as well at home as in the office.’

‘Oh, Grace, surely you don’t have to—’ he began, but she put a finger to his lips.

‘It has to do with the Holbrook case,’ she said, ‘and I want to go over my findings with you and see if we come to the same conclusion. But let’s not go into that now. Dinner is almost ready, so let’s enjoy it.’

‘But . . .’

‘Roast potatoes, peas, Brussels sprouts, Yorkshire pudding and gravy? Enough meat on the joint to give you roast beef sandwiches for the next three days at least? One more word and I’ll burn the lot!’

He sighed heavily and raised his hands in mock surrender. ‘You’re a hard woman, Grace,’ he said, ‘but then, I suppose I shall have to give in as always. Good cooks are so hard to find these days.’

‘And you’re so easily bribed,’ she said. ‘Now, get on upstairs and have your wash. Dinner is in fifteen minutes.’

After the table had been cleared, and the dishwasher loaded, Grace opened her briefcase, took out six folders, and set them out on the table.

‘One for each burglary,’ she told Paget as they sat down side by side at the table. ‘They include itemized lists of the things that were stolen or vandalized at each location, and I believe that what I’m about to show you may be what Charlie was talking about when he sent me out to the Holbrook house.’

Grace opened the first folder and took out a single sheet of A4 paper. ‘The first house to be hit was in Dunbar Road,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what they expected to find there, because it’s a poor district to start with, so all they came away with were a few coins they found in a drawer, and some bits and pieces of cheap jewellery left by the man’s wife when she left him – worth maybe ten quid for the lot, if they were lucky, and some food. They smashed the glass in a cabinet, which would have cost something like ninety to a hundred pounds to repair, but it wasn’t worth that much to start with, so it was a write-off, as was the small radio they smashed. They also damaged a couple of drawers, possibly in a fit of temper when they failed to find anything of value in them. Cost of repairs or replacement, if they had had them done, would amount to something like two, possibly three hundred pounds. I’ve left out the cost of repairs to the door because that was common to every burglary.

‘Now, look at the one in Abbey Road. Better neighbourhood and they came away with approximately forty pounds – the owner couldn’t be sure of the exact amount, but there was more damage. A TV set, fortunately an older one; a mirror, a clock and several telephones were all destroyed. Estimated cost of replacement approximately eight hundred and forty pounds. The owners are still arguing with their insurance company about the TV, but that figure isn’t far off.’

Grace opened the third folder. ‘Westfield Lane. Similar neighbourhood. A few pounds taken – the owner couldn’t be sure how much, but said it wouldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen at the most – but nothing else was taken, even though there were a number of valuable items worth taking in full view. But the damage there came to well over twelve hundred pounds, and then they stopped to have a meal of sorts. It’s almost as if they are trying to tell us that they know they can take their time, and they have no fear of being caught.

‘Number four,’ Grace continued. ‘View Street. No money taken at all, but the damage was even more severe. They lashed out at everything as they went through the place, and I think Tregalles is right: the damage had become their prime objective. They’ve developed a taste for it. And once again they not only stopped to have a meal, they had a fry-up, a sit-down meal that would take time to prepare and eat. Once again, it looks to me as if they are thumbing their noses at us.

‘Then there was Holywell Street. According to the owners, they never leave money in the house, which may or may not account for the amount of damage they did there. You’ve seen it, Neil; they simply went mad. This time all they ate was half an apple pie, but just to make sure we got the message, they stopped long enough to make custard to go with it.

‘You see the pattern, Neil? The amount of damage has been escalating with each burglary. It goes up every time, except –’ Grace paused for effect – ‘except in this latest case.’

She handed the last sheet to Paget. ‘Take a look. Very little in the way of cash. Mr Holbrook says his wife didn’t carry much in her handbag, but two very valuable rings are missing, her wedding and engagement rings, worth – and I verified this with the insurance company – just over twenty thousand pounds! There was other jewellery there to be taken, not much, but collectively it would have brought in a couple of thousand pounds, but it wasn’t touched. More significantly, it is the only place where jewellery of any value was taken.’

‘Which might suggest that there wasn’t anything of value in the other houses, and the thieves knew what was worth pinching and what wasn’t,’ Paget said.

‘That’s one explanation,’ Grace agreed, ‘but let me go on. I went round with the insurance adjuster this morning, and I asked him to give me his assessment of the damage, and his estimate of the cost of repair or replacement. Just the damage, not property loss such as the money taken from Mrs Holbrook’s handbag, or the rings. Take a guess at what he said.’

Paget shook his head. ‘I haven’t the foggiest,’ he told her. ‘How much?’

‘Six hundred and twenty pounds! Even the picture they slashed was only a print worth about thirty pounds. Doesn’t that strike you as strange?’

‘Possibly,’ Paget said thoughtfully, ‘but on the other hand it might be because they decided to get out of the house as fast as they could after discovering and killing Mrs Holbrook.’

Grace shook her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, ‘because the damage they did was in almost every room in the house. Which suggests that they were there for some time before becoming aware that someone else was in the house. I say “suggests”, because again there are a couple of possibilities.’

Grace brushed the hair away from her eyes as she marshalled her thoughts. ‘Look,’ she continued earnestly, ‘at first glance, it appears to be the work of the same thieves. The contents of Mrs Holbrook’s handbag were emptied on the floor, and a small amount of money was missing. They didn’t take her credit cards, nor did they in the other cases, which is strange, considering that they can be worth far more than cash.

‘But then we come to the vandalism. And this is where I have trouble, because when I took a good hard look at the damage in the Holbrook house, it struck me as being very, very selective, and I think that may be what Charlie was getting at when he sent me over there. Admittedly, they made quite a mess; stuff is strewn about all over the place, but there wasn’t anything of real value that was damaged. As I said, it appeared to me that someone was being very selective in what they broke, and six hundred pounds would be nothing to someone like Holbrook.’

‘What about—?’

‘The rings?’ Grace finished for him, and shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘Opportunism, perhaps? Too valuable to pass up? But that would suggest that they know enough about jewellery to realize their worth, and somehow I doubt that, because they demonstrated no such knowledge in the earlier burglaries.

‘And let’s not forget,’ she continued before Paget could respond, ‘this is the only time they didn’t stop to take food or make a meal.’

Paget nodded slowly. ‘We did wonder about that,’ he said, ‘but decided that even they wouldn’t have the stomach to stay around for the usual meal after killing Laura Holbrook, so they got out as fast as they could. Which, as I said earlier, could also account for the lack of damage in this case. But you’re suggesting it could mean that someone may have used the same MO as a cover to murder Mrs Holbrook. Right?’

Grace gave a non-committal shrug. ‘All I’m saying is that it is a possibility,’ she said. ‘But if that should turn out to be the case, then the question is: who knew that Mrs Holbrook would be alone in the house at that particular time? I spoke to Tregalles this afternoon, and he told me that it was only a short time before they were due to leave that Mrs Holbrook said she had a migraine, and decided to go to bed. So, no one, other than Holbrook and the Ballantynes, knew she’d be alone in the house.’ Grace gathered the folders together. ‘But you’re the detective, my love,’ she said with a grin. ‘You work it out.’

‘All right, let’s assume for the moment that you’re right,’ said Paget. ‘Holbrook and Ballantyne were together the whole evening, assuming their stories check out. I understand there’s a bit of a discrepancy in their statements about the times, but unless they are both lying they have alibis. If they
are
lying, then both would be equally involved, and I find that hard to believe.’

‘Unless Holbrook hired someone else to do the killing while he was well away from the house and could count on Ballantyne and others for an alibi,’ Grace suggested.

‘Possible,’ Paget admitted, ‘but it’s not very likely, is it? That is unless he has criminal connections we don’t know about. Besides, he’d be laying himself open to blackmail. Either way, we need a motive.’

‘As I said, you’re the detective, darling. I just offer suggestions based on my findings.’

As always, Paget had toyed with other possible explanations for the killing of Laura Holbrook, if only because it had become second nature never to accept without question what appeared to be obvious at first glance. But Grace had put some meat on the bones – not a lot, but enough to give him something to think about, and past experience had taught him not to treat her ideas lightly.

‘There was one other person who knew she would be alone in the house,’ Grace said slowly, ‘and that was Mrs Holbrook herself. What if the migraine was simply an excuse to stay behind that night? She could have arranged for someone to come round while her husband was out of the house. She knew approximately how long he would be gone.’

‘Someone? Such as?’

‘I’ve no idea. A friend, a lover, a blackmailer? It’s just a thought, that’s all. There may be nothing to it, but it
is
another possibility.’ Grace leaned forward to emphasize her next words. ‘Seriously, Neil, I am troubled by the fact that so little damage was done to things in the house in this case. As I said, a lot of stuff was strewn about on the floor, but it looked to me more like someone had tried to make it
look
like the others, but didn’t want to spend too much time doing it. But what I find most troubling of all is the theft of the rings. I don’t think they were taken because they were valuable – the thieves or vandals or whatever you want to call them, have always been more interested in trashing the place than they are in valuables. Yes, they’ve taken cash and one or two trinkets, but they’ve ignored cameras, laptops, credit cards and other things easy to carry, preferring to smash them instead. To me, taking the rings was something personal, especially if Laura Holbrook was wearing them when she died, and I think she was. Simon Holbrook says she rarely took them off. It simply doesn’t fit with the other burglaries at all.’