‘Good afternoon, Miss Sharpe,’ he said.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘Go away. I haven’t time for you today.’
She then pushed the door to. But Angel already had his shoe in the gap. She trapped it in a vice-like grip.
‘I am sorry, Miss Sharpe, to have to resort to this, but this is important and urgent,’ he said.
She eased the pressure on the door and said, ‘Remove your foot at once.’
He was totally unyielding. ‘The alternative to you seeing me now is for me to get a warrant and have you brought down to the station, forcibly, if needs be,’ he said.
‘You can’t do that,’ she said, applying more pressure against the door. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong. I am a highly respectable, retired, senior history teacher. I do not break the law. Why do you keep hounding me like this? This town is full of criminals, why aren’t you out there arresting them? Have you nothing better to do?’
‘I only want to ask you questions, Miss Sharpe, questions about two persons that perhaps only you can answer. Either open this door and let me in, or become the subject of a warrant for your arrest, and a possible charge of obstruction.’
‘This is outrageous,’ she said.
Angel felt the pressure ease off his foot again. He looked up. Ephemore Sharpe had gone.
‘Come in then, if you must,’ he heard her call.
He pushed at the door. It opened easily. He looked inside and saw the back of her waddling awkwardly away from him down the hall.
‘You have no cause to harass an old woman like this,’ she called without looking round. ‘Close the door. I will see you in my study. This way.’
Angel closed the front door and made his way along the hall. Six or seven framed circus posters in wooden frames adorned the walls. They were clearly old, and all of them featured women.
One of them was of a big blonde woman wearing thigh boots and a basque decorated with ribbons and bows. She was smiling and holding a whip in front of a row of tigers who were baring their teeth. The poster read: ‘Cirque Americanos, 1907. Madam Muriel and her six Bengal Tigers!’
Next to it was a poster in German for Circus Barum in Berlin in 1910. It featured a woman named Margarete Kleiser with a huge male lion called Pascha. Next to that was a poster for the Barnum and Bailey Circus, September 1915, which depicted Rose Flanders Bascom in the dress uniform of a US bandsman brandishing a whip, with a line-up of ten lions and tigers. Another poster showed a tiny woman in the middle of a whole cluster of wild cats. Her name was Mabel Stark. It read: ‘Ringling Brothers Circus, Madison Square Gardens, New York’, and was dated 1902. There were more posters, some repeats of the same characters illustrated differently and for different locations and dates. But they were all women with wild cats.
Angel rubbed his chin. Wild animal trainer. Very unusual work for a woman, he thought.
The last poster showed a woman with hair between three and four metres long. She was on exceedingly high stilts that put her level with the ceiling of the circus big top. Splashed across the poster were the words: ‘Amelia Longlegs — 60 feet tall — head in the clouds. The tallest woman in the world.’ Ringling Brothers. Madison Square Gardens. New York. August 17th thru 30th 1899.
Angel wondered if the posters might represent something of her secret ambitions. He was thinking along those lines when he heard her call out from the doorway at the other end of the hall.
‘Come along, young man. I haven’t got all day.’
Her voice was like a fork scraping on a dry plate.
‘Admiring your posters, Miss Sharpe,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
He moved quickly up the hall to her study.
It was a small room. The central piece of furniture was an important looking antique desk with a leather chair, where she chose to sit. Facing her were two wooden upright chairs.
She pointed at them and said, ‘Sit there. But don’t get too comfortable, you’re not staying long.’
The chair seat was hard and the back as straight as a cell door.
Angel thought he wouldn’t be at ease in that house wherever he sat. He looked round the room. The walls were covered with scores of framed photographs. There was hardly a space where one could see any wallpaper. Miss E. Sharpe, MA (Cantab Hons) in mortar board and gown was the prominent subject in all of them. Others in the photographs with her were mostly groups of various numbers of school children.
‘Well, what is it you want?’ she said, glaring at him like a vulture about to dart forward and snatch out an eye.
Angel turned back to her and said, ‘Yes. Well er . . . I am still making inquiries about the very serious matter of the remains of a body we found by the stream in the field behind this house on Monday morning.’
‘I told you I didn’t hear or see anything. What about it?’
‘We didn’t know the identity of the body at the time,’ he said. Then watching her carefully he said, ‘It has since been identified as that of a thirty-year-old property developer in the town, Julius Hobbs.’
She didn’t flinch. Her face was as rigid as the menu at Strangeways.
‘Does the name mean anything at all to you?’ he added.
She lowered the left eyebrow, raised the right and said, ‘I believe I taught a boy of that name.’
‘Do you recall anything about him?’
‘Not much. I seem to remember that he was pasty, skinny and his hair was plastered down with lard.’
Angel was angry. He ran his hand through his hair. ‘Was he a good pupil, Miss Sharpe? Was he well behaved? Was he lazy, or was he industrious? Was he an academic genius or plain stupid? Did he make a contribution to the class, or was he a disruptive nuisance?’
‘Oh I really don’t remember after all these years. I think he must have been satisfactory among thousands of generally ignorant, ill-mannered, smelly and badly brought up children, or I would have remembered.’
‘Anything else?’
‘No.’
‘You know how he died, Miss Sharpe,’ he said rubbing his chin. ‘Erm . . . have you any knowledge of such an animal in the wild or in captivity that might have killed the poor man?’
She raised her head, stretching the scraggy neck up four inches and said, ‘No. But there does seem to be a presence of large, wild cats roaming around. Indeed there was an actual case recently in Cheshire where a wild cat killed a man while he was fishing from a stream.’
‘I heard,’ he said.
She pouted and gave a slight shrug.
He rubbed his chin. She seemed unmoved by the mention of Hobbs being killed by a cat and torn apart by it. He wondered if she would acknowledge that he had recently approached her to buy her farm, and the field behind. He was determined to flush out the truth. Selecting his words carefully, he said, ‘Do you remember anything else about Julius Hobbs?’
‘No,’ she said quickly, then after a moment, she added, ‘Should I?’
‘I thought you might,’ he said.
He pursed his lips and rubbed his chin. ‘Didn’t he recently approach you with a proposition?’ he said.
She half closed her left eye and peeped at him briefly with her right again. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said slowly, then suddenly she added, ‘If he had, what has it to do with you?’
‘Didn’t he want to buy this farm and the land behind it to build houses?’
Her eyebrows shot up. ‘How do you know that?’
‘Well, did he? Did Julius Hobbs offer you a colossal sum of money for the farm and the field?’
‘It wasn’t a colossal sum, but all right, yes, he did,’ she said. ‘But that has nothing to do with you.’
‘And didn’t you turn the offer down flat?’
‘I did.’
‘So you did remember something else about Julius Hobbs. You knew full well who I was referring to from the beginning. Nobody would ever forget being offered a big sum of money. Why did you say you didn’t?’
‘It wasn’t a big sum of money, and
I insist that it is no business of yours.’
‘If it has anything to do with a man’s death, it is my business.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Didn’t Hobbs say that if he couldn’t do a deal with you, he would approach the council, whom he knew were extremely short of housing and were also desperately short of funds? And didn’t he say that he could offer to build an estate of council houses for the good citizens of Bromersley at very low cost, no doubt because of the current lowly state of the building industry, provided that the council contributed the land, your land?’
‘He might have done.’
‘But he did.’
‘You couldn’t know that.’
‘But I do know that, because it is in the notes he left together with the draft of a letter to the council in his files. And you know how the council would get hold of your farm and the field, don’t you?’
She didn’t reply.
‘By issuing a Compulsory Purchase Order,’ he said, ‘which means what it says. And they would pay you as little as they can get away with. Very much less than the sum offered by Julius Hobbs. But you like living here, Miss Sharpe, don’t you?’
‘You ask too many questions.’
‘You like living here. A view of the field and trees beyond, a garden, privacy, not too far from the shops, and plenty of outbuildings to provide accommodation for your cats. I could understand that you would not be eager to move.’
She said nothing.
‘You have a number of cats, don’t you?’ he said.
‘Indeed I do.’
‘Feral cats . . . as well as pet cats . . . and you feed them every day?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I also treat them for their illnesses, neuter them, sometimes administer drugs to cure them, and, when it becomes necessary, put them out of their misery. And I have never received so much as a scratch from any one of them.’
‘So Julius Hobbs was a threat to your peaceful existence here?’
‘You could see it like that, I suppose.’
‘There’s no suppose about it. Then, after living here all your life, Hobbs came along and gave you an ultimatum. Either sell to him or sell to the council.’
‘What are you getting at, young man?’
He decided not to take that line any further at that time. If she was in any way responsible for the death of Julius Hobbs, she would now know that he was on her trail.
‘I’ll come back to that,’ he said. ‘There’s something else, Miss Sharpe. Last Tuesday morning another body was found. It was that of a young woman. She had also been attacked, killed and partly devoured by a wild cat. It was discovered on the side of the footpath of Fish Lane, that’s between this farm and Salmon Cottages.’
‘I know where it is.’
‘You should. It’s not two hundred yards away. I imagine you could see that from an upstairs window.’
She blinked. Her mouth dropped open.
‘It happened Tuesday evening, sometime in the night or in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Did you see or hear anything strange around that time?’
‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘It’s a coincidence.’
‘It’s not a coincidence,’ he said. ‘Two people killed by a big cat less than two hundred yards away from here in two days. It’s not a coincidence, it’s an obvious pattern. Almost on your doorstep. Your house is the nearest building to where both bodies were found. Can you explain it?’
She shook her head.
‘The dead woman was so very badly mauled that we are having difficulty in positively identifying her,’ he continued. ‘However, we are pretty certain that it is a Mrs Wendy Green, a divorcee. You may know her as Wendy Woods.’ He looked at her for some reaction. There was none.
‘Does that ring any bells?’ he said.
She turned up her nose. ‘It does. Not a nice girl. Not a nice girl at all.’
He waited then said, ‘What do you mean?’
‘You do ask a lot of questions.’
He breathed in and out heavily, then said, ‘It’s my job.’
She simply stared at him.
‘Well, did you teach her?’ he said. ‘Was she in one of your classes?’
‘Yes, she was, and quite unmemorable.’
‘Is that all you have to say about her?’
‘There is nothing else to say.’
The muscles in Angel’s jaw tightened. He ran his hand through his hair. ‘Please tell me anything and everything you can about her.’
She thought a moment, then said, ‘I cannot remember anything at all about her school days. They were quite undistinguished. She must have been a satisfactory pupil or I would have remembered. However, a few years after she left school, indeed I had retired — it was in 1999, I recall — I needed some domestic help on a temporary basis. In a weak moment, I engaged her. Four mornings a week, I believe. I knew the job was beneath her. She was going to Cambridge University. The money I paid her was supposed to be going towards paying off her student grant. But she was useless. I should have dismissed her on the first day, but I knew she needed the money.’
‘How long was she in your employ then?’
‘Two weeks, I think, or something like that. She had to go.’
‘You gave her the sack?’
‘Domestically, she was useless. Also, she was a thief. She stole things.’
‘Such as?’
‘She stole a pot cat that I had had for years. A figure of a rather special lion, Pascha. I liked it quite a lot. It was something my father gave me as a girl. Don’t know what else she might have taken. If she would take one thing, she might have taken a dozen other things.’
‘What did she say when you faced her with it?’
‘She denied it, of course.’
‘It might not have been her, then?’
Ephemore Sharpe’s grey face went scarlet. Her eyes shone like headlights on the chief constable’s Mercedes. ‘It certainly was her, young man. Who else could it have been? No one else came into the house. She was the only person it could have been. It was in the bottom drawer of the sideboard.’
She illustrated her indignation further by puffing and sniffing for a few seconds more then added, ‘You need to be very careful what you say, young man. Very careful indeed.’
Angel remained resolutely deadpan. He had been threatened by suspects before. No bad-tempered harridan would disturb his equilibrium.
‘Did you report it to the police?’ he said.
She glared at him then said, ‘Of course I didn’t. What use would that have been?’
‘Well, on the one hand you might have got it back and on the other, there would have been a record of the crime.’
Ephemore Sharpe suddenly stood up, her face as black as fingerprint ink. ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ she said. ‘It’s time for you to go.’
He shook his head, pursed his lips and said, ‘Settle yourself down, Miss Sharpe. I’m not leaving here until I have finished my questions. And I must warn you, if I do not get answers, you could very well find yourself drinking your goodnight cocoa down at the station.’
She stood a few moments unsure what to do. After a moment, she slumped down into the leather chair.
‘This is intolerable,’ she said. ‘How much longer do I have to put up with this?’
He ignored the question. His lips tightened again. He wanted to get back on track. ‘What else did she steal?’ he said.
Ephemore Sharpe swallowed once or twice then said, ‘I don’t know of anything else for certain, I just thought that if she would take one thing, she would probably take other things, that’s all. She had the morals of an alley cat.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘She had a following of at least three young men at the same time. They used to call for her here. It was disgusting. I had to stop it.’
‘Do you have their names?’
‘Oh no. I had no interest in them.’
‘Do you remember anyt
hing at all about any of them?’
‘I think her favourite beau was a boy called Kevin. He had the noisiest motor bike I ever heard.’
‘Did you and Wendy Woods, as she was known then, part company as friends?’
‘Certainly not. I was the employer and she was the employee, and a pretty useless employee at that. I paid her the sum we agreed, and that was that. I was not kindly disposed to her, considering that I had chosen her for the job out of six others because I knew she needed the money. And I received no thanks for it at all.’
Angel nodded in acknowledgement of the answer, then rubbed his chin. In an inexplicable way, he felt cheated because he didn’t feel that he was much further forward with his inquiries. He was pretty certain that he would not be able to extract any more information from Sharpe without more data, therefore the interview seemed to have arrived at a natural conclusion. Exactly how and why the two people were killed still remained a mystery, although he had opened at least one new thought about it.
‘Perhaps you would be kind enough to show me round this house and your barns, Miss Sharpe.’
She glared at him. ‘Certainly not. This isn’t Chatsworth.’
Angel pursed his lips. He should have expected that. Anyway, he resolved to get a search warrant as soon as possible and have the house, the outbuildings and the barns searched. It was not beyond her to have a pet cougar hidden away in the back of one of the barns.
He stood up. ‘Very well, Miss Sharpe,’ he said. ‘That’s all for now.’
She was soon following him down the hall to the front door. There was no chit chat. She wanted him to leave and he couldn’t get away fast enough. He opened the front door, then it happened. Right in the nose again. Pungent and sickly sweet. The smell of cheap scent.
His eyes flashed around feverishly seeking the source. If wickedness had a smell, that was it. He stepped outside and quickly turned back to face her.
‘What is that sweet smell, Miss Sharpe?’ he said. ‘Are you wearing perfume?’
She held up her hands in horror. ‘Certainly not, Inspector,’ she said.
THE CHESHIRE CAT MURDERS an enthralling crime mystery full of twists (Yorkshire Murder Mysteries Book 18) Page 11