‘Whoops, sorry – I just assumed …’
‘Sam Leadbetter. Sorry I can’t shake hands, mine are filthy.’
‘Cleo Atkins.’
Her glance took in the cashmere sweater Hannah had once bought him as a present, motheaten in places though it now was, the rather nice gold watch on his wrist. ‘I should’ve known. You don’t look much like a gardener.’
‘What’s a gardener supposed to look like? You don’t look much like a charlady, either.’
‘Neither do I act like one, I’m afraid. I’m only a temp, thank heaven fasting, as my mother would say. Which is probably what everyone else feels too.’
‘Why are you doing it then?’ he asked, amused.
‘Money,’ she said succinctly. ‘I’m writing a book, but I can’t live on air …’ She stopped and looked down at her feet. Why had she told him that? She could count on the fingers of one hand the people who knew of her ambition. All the same, she noted that she had said ‘I am writing’, not ‘I’m hoping to write’ and felt cheered.
‘A writer?’ Sam’s interest was kindled, and he looked at her with more interest, though he realised immediately she couldn’t mean his sort of writing – dull, factual stuff. She was, he saw now, older than he’d thought by about five years. ‘Well, there must be other jobs than cleaning —’
She groaned. ‘Oh, don’t! You sound just like my mother. She works in the Bursar’s office over there –’ she waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the school – ‘and thinks everyone
should have the same sort of well-defined job, even though it’s a terrible office to work in and the Bursar’s a ratbag.’
He didn’t smile. A stiff silence had taken hold of him. He looked suddenly years older. They had reached the stone seat by the corner of the house, where a pair of size twelve sneakers rested. He sat down and began to remove his gumboots.
‘Have I said something I shouldn’t?’
He put the boots neatly side by side, slipped on the sneakers and stood up. ‘Haven’t you heard the Bursar was shot dead yesterday? Didn’t your mother tell you?’
He was sorry he’d been so blunt when he saw her face crumple, her eyes widen. ‘No, I didn’t know. I don’t live at home now, I didn’t see Mum yesterday. And I haven’t seen the papers, either. Was she – was she
there?
’
‘Not when it happened. But I’m afraid she was the one who found him.’
‘Oh, no!’ Questions raced through her mind, all beginning with the word why. Why hadn’t they let her know? Why hadn’t she rung home the previous night, as she’d intended to do? Why hadn’t she heard about the murder?
The answers were all there, take your choice. Because they didn’t want to worry her. Because she hadn’t yet had Phoebe’s phone reconnected and she hadn’t had change for a phone box on the way to the cinema last night and they wouldn’t have had a clue where to get hold of her: she’d been to see a supposedly significant Japanese film about recently dead souls, the subtitles of which had turned out to be even more obscure than the plot. Afterwards she still hadn’t known what all the fuss was about. And also because she’d had to rush through her breakfast after spending so much time admiring her newly decorated front room and hadn’t even switched on the radio.
‘I shall have to go and see if she’s OK.’ Poor Mum, even she would have a hard time coping with something like that.
‘Of course. Would you like me to run you over there?’
Yes, she would, was her first thought. Brilliant. He’d be a wonderful man in a crisis, like having a seven-foot baseball player just behind you if you fell over. But no, even at a time like this, Daphne wouldn’t appreciate anyone feeling she needed a shoulder to cry on, just because she’d found a dead body. Even
though – especially as – it was someone she hadn’t much liked.
‘That’s really nice of you,’ she told Sam, ‘but if I could just use your phone …’
‘Sure.’
A passage led off the kitchen into the echoing, Victorian tiled hallway at the end. He indicated the telephone, a heavy, ancient black one where you had to dial instead of pressing buttons, and left her to it.
She let it ring twenty times, though after the fourth or fifth ring she knew there’d be no answer. Daphne was always prompt at answering the phone. She rang her father’s office and it was Muriel who picked up the call.
‘Oh, Cleo! Have you heard? You have? Well, your dad’s had to go out, but he’s been trying to get you. You should have your phone reconnected, or get a mobile, you know, he says he’s going to buy you one, first thing he does.’
‘I know, I’ve been thinking the same thing. Is Mum all right, Muriel?’
‘She’s gone in to work, if that’s what you mean.’
‘She’s
what?
’
‘Well, you know Daphne. She wouldn’t let a little thing like murder stop her – nor would she listen to your father, though I know he doesn’t approve of her going in today,’ Muriel said, the hint of malice in her voice showing she didn’t either. The two women were not by nature designed to feel affinity. ‘He said he’d be back here around ten for a few minutes, if you want to see him. He’s very busy. We’ve suddenly had a whole stack of work come in.’
‘I’d better come straight down, then, I’m only at Kelsey Road,’ Cleo told her, before she’d considered her obligations, though she needn’t have worried about that. Sue had already made a start with the vacuum cleaner, and Sam having explained the situation to her, insisted that she could cope with what needed to be done on her own.
‘Of course you can,’ Dorrie clucked. ‘Just leave what you can’t manage, my dear, a bit of dust never hurt anyone. You go to your mother, Cleo, and tell her how sorry I am, especially for her, for he was a horrid man, as well I know.’ She paused. ‘I’ve met your mother, you know. I slipped in the snow last winter, going down
the hill, sat right down on my coccyx and simply
couldn’t
get up. Not a soul came to help me up, except your mother. So kind! I’d thrown a snowball right across the street at one man and shouted yoo-hoo for help, but he took no notice. Your mother brought me home in her car and made me a cup of tea and a hot bottle, rang for the doctor and waited while he got here. No permanent damage done, thank goodness.’
Highly diverted, despite her indignation at Dorrie’s plight, by a picture of her sitting in the snow throwing snowballs until rescued by Daphne, Cleo almost smiled. But yes, that did sound very like her mother.
Earlier the same morning, the men and women delegated to the enquiry were variously dispersed about the dedicated incident room at Milford Road Divisional Headquarters, waiting for Mayo. Waiting for Godot, it was beginning to seem like. He was late, which was unusual. Hating to be kept waiting himself, it was one of his virtues not to keep others waiting. People had found seats or perched on desks, windowsills, leaned against the walls. The air was thick with chat, banter and cigarette smoke, this last a permanent gripe for the non-smokers, who considered it an infringement of their rights which forced them into passive smoking. Abigail threw open a window before Mayo came in, hoping to forestall any abrasive comments from him. Looked at her watch, again.
‘Finish that Caramello, Scotty give us all a chance to hear what the super has to say when he gets here,’ ordered Kite irritably. He wished Mayo would get a move on. He was torn between the desire not to miss out on anything connected with these two major enquiries, and his appearance as an official witness for the prosecution in the case against Lord Spenderhill at Birmingham Crown Court, where he was due to start giving evidence in an hour or two. The hearing was expected to last some time, so the investigation here might even be over before he’d had a chance to get stuck into it. Story of his life.
Unperturbed by the reprimand, DC Barry Scott, the station slob, amiably screwed the Caramello wrapper and threw it more or less at a waste bin, missing, while noisily sucking the last of the toffee from his teeth and washing it down with a loud slurp of coffee. Kite gave him a look, though chocolate bars were less offensive than some of the more pungent snacks he consumed, and much less so than his personal problem. Despite the look, the belch which followed was barely suppressed. Jenny Platt pointedly picked up the wrapper between finger and thumb and binned it.
‘You can be disgusting,’ she told him.
‘You should see me when I really try.’
‘Try? That’ll be the day!’
‘Watch it, Scotty!’ Farrar warned, meaning watch it in more ways than one. There was no room for passengers on Mayo’s team and Scotty had been pushing it for some time. Grown idle as well as incompetent, he was already a marked man. Few would be sorry to see him go.
Farrar’s intervention gained him Kite’s approval. He hadn’t been among the advocates for Farrar being made up to acting sergeant, but since Carmody, the big Scouse sergeant, had landed himself for a long spell in hospital by being pushed spectacularly down three storeys of a fire escape, thereby leaving a desperate gap on the team, Farrar’s long sought-after promotion had been inevitable. And as his senior officer, Kite felt bound to support him, in public at any rate. Occasionally, he sensed that the lad was at least trying. And Kite had a lot of time for anyone who tried.
Where the hell was Mayo?
A look passed between Kite and Abigail; she nodded and decided to start without him. Immediately she began, the room became quiet, and she had the attention of everyone there. She had just outlined the case, then turned to the board behind her, where the usual montage of facts, names, dates, times, crimescene photographs was assembled, when Mayo came in, unsmiling and apologising for keeping everyone waiting. He waved a hand for Abigail to continue, took a seat to one side and sat listening, one hand cupping his elbow, the other covering his mouth.
Near the top of the board was written the name of the victim, Charles Howard Wetherby, aged forty-four, and pinned underneath was a large photograph of him taken at some school function, very much alive, plus several less attractive ones taken after he was dead. Stills of the room where he was killed, diagrams plotting the position the killer must have taken, the distance he stood from the body, the pattern of blood splashes, a diagram of the estimated trajectory of the bullet, plus a computer-generated map on the wall showing the layout of the school and tracing all the possible means of entry into it, and entry into the Bursar’s office … all this surrounding the bland face of the man who was now dead.
‘I trust you’ve now all read your information sheets,’ Abigail went on, ‘so you don’t need to be told that Doc Ison estimates the time of death as not more than ten minutes or so before he was called, which was at one thirty.’
At 12.08 precisely Trish, one of the two girls in the outer office, had set the recorded message giving the times the office would next be open, and departed with the other girl, Beverley; they’d been clock-watching because they’d wanted to catch the stall on the open market where they could buy reject designer knitwear, before everything was sold out. A minute later, Mrs Atkins had popped her head round the door and told Wetherby she was going to lunch. She’d then driven home for a quick snack and to prepare vegetables for the evening meal, and returned at half-past one. She had taken some papers into his office and found Wetherby dead.
‘Other people we need to speak to are these.’ Abigail indicated on the board the names of Wetherby’s colleagues on the administration and teaching staffs, with special attention to the name of John Riach, and additionally, Sam Leadbetter. After a moment’s thought, she picked up the marker and added Dorrie Lockett’s name to the board. ‘Most of you are familiar with this lady. She’s on the list because she went to the Bursar’s office around noon, too, seemingly to give him a piece of her mind.’ This generated some amusement among the troops, and she warned, ‘But before you get any ideas, he was seen alive after she left.’
‘All the same,’ Kite intervened thoughtfully, ‘until she got too old to cope with that sort of hassle, she used to work at Villiers House.’ He was referring to one of the women’s refuges in the town. ‘And I once saw her go for a drunken Irishman twice her size who was looking for his wife there. He didn’t know what had hit him.’
‘That’s a thought to bear in mind, unlikely suspect though she might seem,’ Abigail said. ‘Dorrie saw her home under threat – or at least herself as being persecuted. She knows enough about abused women to hate their abusers – plus, she’s a law unto herself.’ Privately, she thought Dorrie Lockett actually shooting Wetherby seemed, even so, an unlikely scenario.
‘So, there are the basic facts we have to work with,’ she concluded. ‘What we now need to find out is what his relations
were like with his family, his colleagues, if he had any other known associates. Especially if any of them owns a gun or knows how to use one. As you know, a cartridge case was found at the scene. Ballistics say the weapon was a 9mm automatic, something like a Beretta, or a Walther PKK. Plus anything else you can pick up. You know the drill. Sergeant Farrar will issue the allocations. Mr Mayo?’
He seemed worried, she thought, as he stood up to speak. Not outwardly apparent to anyone who knew him less well than she did, perhaps, but this murder, coming almost on top of the other, was putting a strain on everyone, and Mayo most of all. Extra resources had been forthcoming, but not nearly enough. There would necessarily have to be some doubling up and this would put additional demands on men and women already disappointed by the lack of any success in getting anywhere at all with the previous murder. Nor were they likely to get any further, until they found out who the dead woman had been, yet no one had so far come forward to claim her as a missing relative, friend or partner. The inevitable conclusion was that she had been a stranger to the area, brought here from elsewhere – which made the question of the place where she’d been found an even more puzzling one.
Mayo said, ‘All I want to say is that we need a result on this case, and I’m sure you’re all aware of why. But not at all costs. We need a safe conviction, but let me emphasise that I want it handled properly. None of us want
this
investigation to drag on – but don’t sacrifice thoroughness for speed.’
Having exhorted everyone to get cracking and waste no more time, thanking them in advance for what he knew would be their best efforts, Mayo closed the meeting. ‘Give it your best, lads.’ Before leaving for his own office, he then spoke to his two inspectors, explaining why he’d been delayed.
‘I’ve just spent the last half-hour with the ACC, drawing up a statement for the press. There’ll be a conference tomorrow morning,’ he told them abruptly. ‘He’s not too happy, as you might imagine, with this latest shooting.’ Which must be the understatement of all time, Abigail thought, looking at him with sympathy. Sheering, the ACC, was not a patient man, perhaps understandably, being ultimately accountable for what had now become three outstanding, unsolved murders on his patch.
An hour later, every man and woman having been made aware of their particular area of responsibility, the incident room had emptied. Kite brought two cups of coffee for himself and Abigail and perched companionably on her desk. The scratchiness between them after his return to plain clothes on his promotion to inspector had reached a fairly amiable truce. Kite wasn’t the introspective type and he didn’t care to probe too deeply on the reasons. It might have had something to do with the fact that Abigail’s departure was a more or less foregone conclusion.
They’d barely drunk their coffee before Mayo buzzed. ‘My office, both you and Martin, pronto,’ he barked when Abigail answered.
It wasn’t like Mayo to be so peremptory, not without apparent reason. ‘Jump to it, Martin. His Nibs is suddenly either in a mood or a big hurry.’
Mayo motioned them to two chairs in front of his desk when they entered, and without saying anything further, slid across the surface what Abigail saw immediately was the pathologist’s report, which must have just come in. It ended up midway between the two of them. ‘You first,’ Kite said generously.
Abigail read it, guessing now at the source of Mayo’s abruptness. Tension could take you like that, when you hardly dared to believe in something that indicated a break might suddenly be possible.
The report was straightforward. A general description of the body. Results of the internal examination, with details of the condition and weights of the various organs, showing that he had been a man in previous good health. And most importantly followed the results of the external examination, giving a detailed description of the cerebral wound caused by the entry of the bullet, fired at close range from a small-calibre handgun. In-driven fragments of bone had resulted in irreversible damage to the brain, causing immediate death.
But the rider accompanying the report was why Mayo had sent for them: the bullet which had been extracted from Wetherby’s brain had been identified as of the same make, model and calibre as the bullet which had killed the woman found in the River Kyne.
Timpson-Ludgate had made no further comment, except to say that it had already been sent to the ballistics people for
further examination and comparison with the first one. Every bullet retained the markings of the barrel it was fired from, every barrel had singular irregularities peculiar to itself and none other, therefore if it could be shown that the striations on the bullets were identical, it could safely be assumed they were fired from the same gun …
‘And I don’t need any funny remarks about first finding your gun,’ Mayo said, forestalling Kite before he’d time to open his mouth. He lapsed into a thoughtful silence, from which he eventually roused himself, reaching for the telephone and requesting Delia to put him through to someone called Geoff Blake in Forensic Ballistics.
The resulting conversation, after an interchange of greetings, made as little sense as one-sided conversations usually did, except that it was very apparent a favour was being called in, and that Mayo would appreciate the results of the tests and comparisons of the two bullets extracted from the two victims being on his desk as soon as possible. It didn’t actually sound like a request for a favour: from here, it sounded half-way towards an order, but presumably Geoff Blake didn’t see it like that. He said something which evidently restored Mayo’s equilibrium and made him laugh as he put the phone down.
He pushed himself away from the desk and paced about a bit with his hands in his pockets. ‘The press are going to have a bloody field day with this – three unexplained shootings in as many months!’
‘You don’t believe —’ Abigail began.
‘No, I don’t believe the Fermanagh business had anything to do with these last – but no way are these two cases going to follow that into the same limbo – not if I’ve anything to do with it. Forget Fermanagh, concentrate on this.’ He slapped a hand down on the path report. ‘We might start by having a look at something that cropped up yesterday.’ He told them about his conversation with George Atkins.
‘If George thinks there’s something fishy the chances are he’s right,’ Kite said when he’d finished, and Mayo nodded. Like himself, George believed in what he called his copper’s nose. Neither acknowledged hunches or intuition – except the sort gained through a lifetime’s experience. They weighed a notion,
balanced what they knew of the facts against the possibilities, and came up with ideas.
‘And Reuben Bysouth’s reputation doesn’t exactly smell of violets,’ Kite added. ‘I remember him from when I first joined the force. If this old woman is as friendly with him as she seems to be, I suggest she’d bear watching, too.’
‘Right, but they’re not necessarily
friends,
’ Abigail pointed out. ‘Though you might need to call your neighbours that if they’re the only ones for miles. If she needed help when she was being flooded out, who else would she turn to?’