‘Yes, sir. A big dark glass bottle of the stuff, she said, worth forty pounds. Who would want to steal a shipload of iodine?’
Angel rubbed his chin. ‘Leave it with me, lad. I’ll see to it.’
Crisp looked pleased to offload the query.
‘But there’s something I want you to do as a matter of urgency and importance, lad. It might interfere with any weekend arrangements you may have with your young lady.’
Crisp hesitated a second then said, ‘There is no young lady at the moment, sir.’
This surprised Angel as he knew that Crisp had a particular interest in the opposite sex. Indeed, he was known frequently to be dating at least two young ladies at the same time.
‘I thought you were going strong with that pretty young civvy in accounts,’ Angel said.
Crisp hesitated again. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘I was.’
Angel expected more information.
Crisp, not eager to volunteer any, turned away.
Angel pursed his lips. He wasn’t prepared to be put off. ‘Well, what happened?’ he said.
‘She . . . she got married on Saturday.’
Angel’s eyes flickered several times and his mouth dropped open. He wanted to smile but he didn’t. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Well, erm, anyway, I’ve just had a squad of men go through Ephemore Sharpe’s place looking for that wild cat. There was not a trace. I can only conclude that she must be hiding it somewhere away from the farm. Now she would have to visit it every day or so, to feed it and clean it out, so I want you to get a team together and watch her day and night. She must lead us to it eventually. When she moves, I want you to ring me on my mobile. Doesn’t matter what time it is. Three of you should be enough. It shouldn’t take above two or three days. And the weekend is coming up. You’ll get overtime, of course.’
Crisp smiled. The overtime would be welcome.
‘Right,’ Angel said. ‘Crack on with it.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Crisp said, and he went out.
Angel sighed and ran his hand through his hair. It was difficult for him to accept that they hadn’t found a single clue that would lead him to the hiding place of that elusive wild cat or evidence that Ephemore Sharpe had murdered Julius Hobbs and Wendy Green. Confidence was draining away from him like oil from a BP pipeline. He had that feeling that he would never solve this case.
The phone rang. He reached out for it. It was Dr Mac. He sounded quite animated.
‘I’ve almost completed the PM on that female victim, Michael,’ he said. ‘And I have just discovered something you would want to know about urgently.’
Angel was all ears. ‘Yes, well, what is it, Mac?’
‘The woman had sexual intercourse shortly before she died.’
Angel’s eyebrows went up. ‘That’s interesting,’ he said. He wanted to say that it certainly wasn’t a wild cat, but he didn’t.
‘Have you sorted out her ID yet?’ Mac said.
‘We believe that she was Wendy Green, a divorced woman, aged 30, who, by reputation, was no Mother Teresa. The donor wasn’t likely to be her ex-husband and I don’t know of any other suitor. Will you be able to retrieve a semen sample?’
‘Already have done. I’ll send it off to Wetherby today. It could be your lucky day.’
The find was potentially a big step forward. The semen sample could be checked against DNA records held in Wetherby and if the man was on file, he could be positively identified. Angel was buzzing with questions.
‘How long before she died had she had intercourse?’ he said.
‘Could have been minutes. Possibly several hours.’
‘Well, was she raped, Mac?’
‘Hard to say. So many contusions. So many lacerations. Who knows? But I can say that she had been regularly sexually active lately.’
Angel nodded. ‘Right, Mac. Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you very much indeed. Goodbye.’
He tapped the cancel button followed by Don Taylor’s number.
‘Yes, sir,’ Taylor said.
Angel told him about the conversation he had just had with Dr Mac and then went on to say, ‘Drop the ethanol and the saltpetre. Do that later. Go straight to Wendy Green’s house and check for evidence of the recent presence of a man there . . . on the bed, in the bed, in the bathroom. Examine the towels and the bedding and check them. If a man’s been there, there’ll be something: a fleck of dead skin on the carpet, a hair on a towel, a stain on a sheet, perspiration on a pillow. Whatever there is, Don, don’t miss it. I want it!’
‘I’ll do what I can, sir.’
Angel returned the phone to its dock, rubbed his chin, then reached in the desk drawer for his address book. He found a number and tapped it into his phone.
A voice said, ‘St Magdalene’s Hospital. Can I help you?’
‘Sister Mary Clare, please. Detective Inspector Angel.’
‘Thank you, Detective Inspector. Hold the line, please.’
The music ‘Greensleeves’ abruptly assailed Angel’s ear. He patiently heard it played through three times and sighed. The music suddenly stopped and the voice returned.
‘Sister is not in her office. I’ll put a call out for her. Hold the line, please.’
‘Greensleeves’ is certainly pleasant enough the first time but becomes annoying on its sixth rendering. Angel began drumming a Sousa march on his desk until he suddenly heard the music stop and a man’s voice with an American accent said, ‘I say, Inspector Angel, how very pleased I am to speak to you again. It’s Dr Edward G. Rubenstein. I’m afraid we cannot find dear Sister Mary Clare. Is it anything I can assist you with?’
‘She reported the loss of a bottle of iodine to my sergeant, I understand.’
‘Did she? I didn’t know,’ Rubenstein said. Then he added, ‘I mean, I knew about the burglary, I didn’t know that she had reported it. I wouldn’t have bothered you with anything as trivial as a broken window and the loss of a fairly innocuous item like a bottle of iodine. I’m sure you have many more serious crimes to deal with.’
‘Kind of you to consider our time, Doctor.’
‘Not at all, Inspector. Not at all. So, I don’t think there is any need to pursue this little matter any further.’
Angel frowned. His stubborn streak came to the fore. ‘That’s all right, Doctor. Whenever the law is broken and we’ve been notified, we can’t ignore it.’
‘Oh. Yes. Er . . . right,’ Rubenstein said. ‘By the way, Inspector, I’m hoping that you and your dear wife will come round to my house for dinner in the near future, you know.’
Angel remembered he had asked him about this before. Mary wouldn’t want to go and he certainly wasn’t keen. ‘Well thank you, Doctor. Most kind. However I am overwhelmed with work at the moment —’
‘It’s those killings by that wild cat, isn’t it?’
Angel never freely gave out information to anybody. It cost too much to acquire in the first place. ‘I have several difficult cases at the moment,’ he said.
‘Well, I’ll leave the invitation open.’
‘Thank you. Goodbye, Doctor,’ Angel said quickly. He smiled knowingly as he cancelled the call and replaced the phone.
Almost straight away, the phone bell rang out. He was still smiling as he snatched it up. He could hear coughing and laboured breathing. He knew it was Superintendent Harker. The smile vanished.
‘Hello! Hello!’ Harker said at length.
‘It’s Angel, sir.’
‘There you are lad,’ he said. He was breathless and angry. ‘Been trying to get you for ages. Always giving the engaged signal. I want you up in my office, now!’
There was a loud click in the earpiece and the phone went dead.
Angel blew out a balloon’s worth of breath. He wondered what Harker wanted him for. The meetings with him were never helpful, supportive or productive.
He stood up and charged out of the office. He knocked on the superintendent’s door, determined to get it over with as soon as possible.
> It was still hot and sticky inside the room.
Harker looked up from the cluttered desk, his wrinkled face as red as a judge’s robe. He coughed several times and, at the same time, pointed to a chair the other side of the desk and clawed a tissue out of a box on the desk.
Angel sat down.
Eventually Harker said, ‘I think you’ve excelled yourself this time, lad.’
Angel looked at him expressionless.
‘There are not many highly reputable, professional, honest people who have a perfectly clean record, in this town. No, but you manage to find one . . . an elderly, retired schoolteacher who has served the community for over thirty-six years. You intimidate her, cross-question her, then take a squad of men in uniform and search her home and property for — of all things — a live wild cat, a cougar. After you make a thorough search, you find — amazingly — no wild animals, no cougar. Instead you find a part bottle of ethanol and a quantity of saltpetre. You impound them and tell her that she may be charged with burglary.’
Angel knew it would be a waste of time, but he decided he must make an effort to defend his actions.
‘When I asked her where she got the ethanol and saltpetre from, sir,’ Angel began, ‘she said that she couldn’t remember. I didn’t think that that was a satisfactory answer. When I said that she might be charged with burglary and asked her if she had anything to say, she said, ‘Go to hell’. I didn’t think that an innocent, highly reputable, honest schoolteacher would make a reply of that kind in those circumstances. Anyway, SOCO are checking them out to try to determine whether or not they were the items stolen from the hospital.’
Harker sniffed, then reached forward and took a couple of sheets of paper stapled together off the top of one of the piles of documents on his desk. He glanced at them then said, ‘Well Angel, I can save you and SOCO the trouble. Miss Sharpe’s solicitor, Mr Cardinal, who left my office only five minutes ago, gave me these two invoices showing that the purchases were made from a wholesale chemist in Leeds in 2009.’
He passed them over the desk to him.
Angel took them. His jaw muscles tightened as he pored over them. ‘She could have told me that at the time and saved herself a solicitor’s bill,’ he said.
‘Could you seriously imagine that a woman of her standing, age and physical limitations would slap a treacle paper on the hospital window, in the middle of the night, break the glass, and climb inside to steal a few pounds’ worth of chemicals?’
‘Potentially dangerous chemicals, sir,’ he said. ‘It has been known.’
‘Not by a schoolteacher of her age and standing, lad,’ Harker said. ‘Why, only last month the chief constable was consulted by the Home Office — and it was passed down to me — to advise on the suitability or otherwise of appointing Miss Sharpe to be a Justice of the Peace. And there was absolutely nothing known against her. I might tell you that her name was approved with flying colours. I tell you this in the strictest confidence, of course.’
Angel was tired of this offensive. It was unjustified. Ephemore Sharpe was a monster.
‘Have you met the woman, sir?’ he said.
‘That is irrelevant,’ he said.
Angel nodded knowingly.
‘As a matter of fact,’ Harker continued, with a sniff, ‘my parents couldn’t get me a place at Bromersley Grammar.’
‘I thought you hadn’t, sir,’ Angel said. ‘If you had met her you would have thought differently.’
‘Well, that is your opinion and fortunately not that of everybody else,’ Harker said. ‘I know that you think you are something special on this earth, Angel, because you keep getting your photograph in the papers, articles written about you, and are frequently referred to as the Inspector Angel, who — like the Mounties — always gets his man. But you don’t impress me any, and I am ordering you from now on to leave Miss Sharpe strictly alone. Her smart-arse solicitor has threatened a writ against the chief constable if she is pestered again. I want you to understand that I mean what I say. In the past, I have taken a lenient view when you have sneakily disobeyed my orders. You may have thought that I was stupid and that I didn’t notice. Well, on this occasion, lad, for once in your life, you will do as you are told, or you will find yourself out on your ear. Do you understand?’
Angel sighed. Enough was enough. Sweet reasonableness had flown out of the window. He knew when he was beaten. He stood up. ‘Anything else, sir?’
‘No. Get out.’
Angel stormed down the corridor, while under his breath calling Harker every rude word and expletive he knew.
He reached his office door, put his hand on the knob then changed his mind. He wanted some fresh air. He turned and went back along the corridor towards the back door. He needed a change. He needed a holiday. And a new job. And £38,000 to pay off the balance of the mortgage, the community charge and the gas bill. And somebody who could open an old safe without a key. And he needed to solve the most difficult case he could ever remember. Most of all he needed Mary, but he didn’t want any more argument. He simply wanted peace and quiet.
Outside was dry, cool and dull, but the air was fresh . . . came in direct from the Pennines. He stood there a few minutes, cool breeze on his cheeks and forehead, hands in pockets, looking out across the car park, the green fields and the Pennines beyond, undecided what to do. Eventually, he made for the BMW, and climbed into the driver’s seat. He switched on the radio. Dreamy music with violins and a harp filled the car. It was something by Fauré. He started the engine and drove into the town centre . . . eventually he found himself turning into the Forest Hill estate on the outskirts of Bromersley and then to his own house on Park Street. When he realized where he was, he left the car on the drive and went into the house.
When his wife saw him, she knew something was wrong. She frowned, glanced at the kitchen clock, saw that it said twenty-five to five, which confirmed it. ‘What’s the matter? You’re early. You’re never early.’
His shift ended nominally at 5 p.m. but he rarely arrived home before 5.30 and many a time it was several hours after that.
He went up to her, kissed her gently on the lips.
Mary frowned. ‘There is something wrong, Michael. What is it?’
He shook his head.
‘Somebody died?’ Mary said.
‘Yes,’ he growled, ‘me.’
The row about ‘Gelly’ Rollings was instantly forgotten.
Angel was bursting to talk to her, as she was always a sympathetic listener. As always, she was willing to listen.
He told her about the heated conversation he had had with Harker and the instruction he had had to leave Ephemore Sharpe alone. He followed on with a detailed account of both murders and the case against the wild cat and the woman.
After some thought, Mary said, ‘It seems to be a very complicated case, Michael, but you worry too much. You must take it easy. If you get —’
‘I can’t take it easy, Mary. If I wanted to take it easy, I’d write poetry, take up knitting or be a back-bench MP. I have to solve this case.’
‘I know that it is important to you, but —’
He wasn’t listening to her.
‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘there are no traces of the presence of a human anywhere near the corpse. There are plenty of signs of the cougar . . . its paw marks are all over the place . . . and yet, both victims died from hefty blows to the temple with a round, blunt instrument that must have been applied by hand, a human hand. I can’t think of any other way they would have been delivered. A wild cat, such as a cougar could not possibly hold an instrument in its paws and deliver such hefty blows.’
‘What makes you so certain that Ephemore Sharpe is involved in the case?’
‘Both victims were found within two hundred yards of her farmhouse. She knows more about cats than just about anybody in Bromersley, with the possible exception of old man Fairclough, the vet. Her family — her grandfather in particular — has a history of the keeping an
d training of wild cats, and there is a poster in her house of Haydn Sharpe, her grandfather, with a group of tigers. And she appears to need to have power over people. As a schoolteacher, that was perfect for her. Now she is retired, that power over children has been taken from her. Power is important to her. This seems to be a trait in the Sharpe family. She has substituted animals for the children. Now if she could train a wild cat to go out and kill a human selected by her, that would surely pick her out as an exceptionally powerful woman. That’s what I think she seeks.’
‘Is there anything else?’
‘Huh. She is obnoxious, obstructive, hates the police and me in particular.’
‘That’s not evidence.’
‘None of it is evidence, love. What I have just rattled off to you are facts.’
Mary said: ‘Well, maybe she is innocent?’
He wrinkled his nose. He didn’t want to admit it. He shrugged. ‘Maybe.’
His mobile phone rang out.
He frowned and dived into his pocket. He saw Trevor Crisp’s name on the phone’s LED. His jaw muscles tightened. He looked at Mary. ‘Then again,’ he said, ‘maybe she isn’t.’
‘Sorry to bother you, sir,’ Crisp said, ‘but I know you wanted to know about any movement of Ephemore Sharpe. About twenty minutes ago, she left her house carrying something . . . it is too dark to be certain what it is . . . looks like a plastic shopping bag. Anyway, I am following her on foot. She’s walking on Rustle Spring Lane towards St Magdalene’s Hospital.’
Angel’s heart jumped. ‘Don’t lose her, lad. I’ll come down. Where is she now?’
‘Just passing Mawdesley Cemetery on the left-hand side.’
‘Be with you in five minutes.’
Mary stared at him. ‘You’re not going out now, are you? You haven’t had anything to eat.’
‘Ephemore Sharpe is on the move. I want to find out what she’s up to. It would help my case if I could catch her breaking into St Magdalene’s pharmacy again.’
‘You won’t be late, will you?’
‘No, love,’ he said.
She watched him rush out of the room. She thought for a moment then called after him, ‘What would you like for your supper?’
THE CHESHIRE CAT MURDERS an enthralling crime mystery full of twists (Yorkshire Murder Mysteries Book 18) Page 15