THE CHESHIRE CAT MURDERS an enthralling crime mystery full of twists (Yorkshire Murder Mysteries Book 18)
Page 21
‘Why? Why would she do that?’
‘She’s batty, that’s why. She needs her frigging head seeing to. She was my form mistress you know. She said that I had no brains. She said I was stupid. She was rotten to me. It didn’t matter how hard I tried, how long I spent on my homework, she always gave me a low mark. So that at the end of term, Julian Hobbs, Wendy Woods, Scrap Scolding and that crowd would be at the top of the form and I would be at the bottom. It wasn’t frigging fair. Not sometimes either, but always. Every term, every year. It was her plan, you see. She didn’t like me and she was the senior mistress. She made my school life an absolute misery, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I left as soon as I could. They went on to university. They got letters behind their names. If I had taken my GCE I wouldn’t even have passed it. According to her I wouldn’t amount to anything, but she was wrong, you see. I run my own business. I am self-employed. I am a qualified gardener. I have twelve regular customers, and I have a contract with the council. I earn thousands of pounds . . . more money than she ever earned being a bloody teacher.’
‘Well, you’d need a fortune to pay to keep your sick mother in that expensive hospital, wouldn’t you?’
‘Who’s been opening their mouths? I’ll shut them for good if I find out who they are.’
‘There aren’t that many people called Maisie Evans in the world, Philip, whose next of kin is Philip Pryce. It wasn’t that difficult to work out. What’s in the bag?’
‘You keep on about that bag. I found it. It’s true that I was going to bury the stuff here, because it’s hers, Miss Sharpe’s.’
‘And you were going to bury it here. Why here? There’s fields and woods where you could have buried it. You could even have thrown it in the canal.’
‘It’s as good a place as any.’
‘And you were going to bury it so badly, that when we searched the place again, which you thought we would now be certain to do because you thought that we had arrested her and charged her, that we would find it and think the contents were hers.’
‘They are hers. I found them in her barn earlier this evening, when I was feeding her cats. And she is the murderer. I thought that’s why you arrested her. That’s why I’m feeding her bloody cats, isn’t it?’
‘No, Philip. I had Miss Sharpe brought to the station and made sure that you thought we had charged her with the murders expressly to flush you out.’
‘Rubbish. That’s friggin’ rubbish.’
‘It’s no good, Philip. You can’t make it stick,’ Angel said.
Then he decided to take a gamble. The laboratory at Wetherby had the DNA from the semen found on her, but at the time, Angel knew that a match had not yet been found.
He said, ‘We have forensic evidence that proves you had intercourse with Wendy Green, around the time she died. Did you rape her?’
‘Huh,’ Pryce said, then he sniggered. ‘Nobody had to rape Wendy Woods. So what? Even if I did have sex with her, it doesn’t mean to say that I had anything to do with her murder.’
‘Yes, it does. And that, coupled with the contents of that bag you now have no use for, will send you to Wakefield for life.’
‘Oh no, it won’t, Angel,’ Pryce said, and he lifted the dibber high above his head, and brought it down intending to hit Angel with the handle end on his head. Angel dodged away but the blow caught him on the arm. There were more attempts to hit him with the tool.
Pryce was intent on murdering him. He had nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Angel stood facing him, feet astride, hands at the ready, as Pryce rained down further blows. Angel managed to dodge each subsequent one, and eventually managed to grab the handle of the dibber with both hands and with successive pulling and pushing movements eventually pushed the surprised Pryce backwards over the wheelbarrow.
Pryce had to release his grip on the dibber in an effort to save himself. Angel snatched it away and pitched it over the garden wall onto the cobblestones where it landed with a clatter. Then he leaped on Pryce and brought him down on the lawn. Pryce reached up to Angel’s throat and squeezed and tightened his grip thus cutting off his breath. The gardener had a grip of iron. He rolled over putting Angel on his back. Angel struggled to breathe and reached up to Pryce’s hands in an attempt to pull them away. But it was useless. Angel’s memory of elementary anatomy came to mind. He knew the approximate position of the jugular vein in the neck, and the vagus nerve just behind it. A hard enough blow on the right spot would incapacitate Pryce if not kill him. This was a desperate time. He was running out of air. He kept thumping and thumping at it. At the tenth blow, Pryce suddenly relaxed his grip and slumped over him. Angel stayed there a while, exhausted, his lungs pumping vigorously. After a few seconds, he wriggled from under him, got to his feet, rubbed his throat and looked down at the man.
Pryce was motionless.
Angel leaned down, put his fingertips to his neck, found a pulse, sighed with relief, pulled Pryce’s arms out and up his back and handcuffed him. Then he stepped back, brushed his hair out of his eyes and reached into his pocket for his mobile.
* * *
Philip Pryce was duly arrested at 22.30, Ephemore Sharpe was taken home by police car at 22.35, and Angel was in bed by 2 o’clock the following morning.
It was a short night. He awoke at the usual time, made some phone calls to the office at 8.30 that morning, and actually arrived at the station at 10.30.
Everybody Angel passed on his way up the corridor smiled, those he knew well congratulated him.
He was followed in by Don Taylor carrying the bag Pryce was so secretive about. He quickly made for the SOCO office.
Ahmed came in with a tray of tea using the blue and white china tea set. ‘Congratulations, sir. I knew we could do it.’
Angel smiled. ‘Thank you, lad.’
About an hour later, there was a knock at the door.
Angel looked up from his desk. ‘Come in,’ he said.
It was Don Taylor. He wasn’t smiling. ‘I’ve had a look at the stuff in Pryce’s bag, sir,’ he said. ‘His prints are all over them.’
‘That’s good,’ Angel said and pointed to a chair.
Taylor sat down.
‘There are three items,’ he said. ‘Most ingenious and horrific: pair of rubber moulds of a cougar’s paws glued on to strong elastic garters that fitted over his shoes so that wherever he trod, particularly on mud, the only marks he made were from the moulds. That explains why there were never any human prints for us to find.’
‘I knew it had to be something like that.’
‘There is a contraption comprising four pieces of horn, shaped and sharpened to the exact shape and size of a cougar’s claws, and set in a rubber mould. He used that to reproduce claw marks.’
Angel nodded.
‘And there’s a thing made entirely of steel that represents the full set of teeth of a fully grown cougar. The upper set and lower set were hinged at the back and fitted with handles like pliers so that the jaws could be opened, set round the flesh, the handle squeezed to replicate the bite, and then pulled.’
Angel said. ‘They’ll lock Pryce up as a nutcase.’
‘You must come and look, sir.’
‘I will. Later.’
‘Where did he get all this information from, sir? The size of the jaw, the position of the incisors, the spread of the claws in the paw . . . everything so precise.’
‘He’d pick all that up through his interest in taxidermy.’
‘Oh. He was the man who had that place on Huddersfield Road then?’
Angel nodded and said, ‘His prints will prove it.’
‘So there was no wild cat, sir,’ Taylor said. ‘No cougar.’
‘That’s right. But Pryce knew Ephemore Sharpe’s family’s interest in them from the posters in her house and so on. He tried every trick in the book to pass the blame for the murders of Julius Hobbs and Wendy Green on to her.’
‘He was most ingenious,’ Taylor
said.
‘Before you go, Don, did you come across any scent spray or similar among his belongings?’
‘I was coming to that, sir. In a pocket of his boiler suit, he had a small aerosol contrived from an air freshener can, filled with cheap commercial scent usually used diluted to sweeten the air in cinemas and theatres. The taxidermy business is a very smelly business. I suppose if ever he thought he or his clothes ponged a bit, he might surreptitiously pull out the little can and press the button.’
Angel nodded. He pursed his lips. That was exactly what happened, several times.
‘Thank you, Don,’ he said.
Taylor went out.
Ahmed came in. ‘Finished with the tea, sir?’ he said.
‘Almost,’ Angel said, picking up the cup.
‘DS Crisp has just come in . . . I think he wants to see you, sir, privately.’
‘Ask him to come in. He doesn’t have to stand on ceremony.’
Ahmed picked up the tray, opened the door and called out, ‘Come on in, Sarge, I’m just going.’
He went out and Trevor Crisp came in and closed the door.
‘Ah,’ Crisp said. ‘Good morning, sir. You’re on your own at last. I understand that Philip Pryce, the gardener, is the murderer, that he’s in the cells, and that you have a watertight case that will put him away for life.’
‘That’s about right.’
‘And that you fooled him into giving himself away.’
Angel nodded.
‘That’s great, sir. Fantastic. You always manage it in the end. I’ve seen you do it a hundred times, one way or another, but . . . well, sir . . .’ Crisp ran out of words. He just sat there shaking his head and smiling.
‘What is it, Trevor?’
‘Is it true — I can hardly believe it — that you kept Ephemore Sharpe quietly sitting in the interview room drinking tea with two patrolmen for nigh on six hours?’
Angel nodded again. ‘Yes.’
Crisp shook his head bewildered. ‘For goodness’ sake, how on earth did you manage to do that?’
Angel smiled. ‘Wasn’t that difficult,’ he said. ‘Yesterday afternoon I spoke to her on her own. And I said that I knew she had lied about Wendy Green stealing the pot lion, Pascha. I told her that you and I had followed her and seen her plant the ornament in the dead girl’s garage. In fact, I took the ornament with me and showed it to her. Then I offered her a deal. I told her that I wanted her to come back with us in a police car and stay in the station for several hours while we flushed out Philip Pryce. Furthermore, I said that if she didn’t do as I asked, I would tell Selwyn Plumm, the senior reporter on the Chronicle about the lie she had told about the dead woman, and the devious way she had attempted to prove it. I said that Plumm would publish the facts on the front page. Well, I got a torrent of abuse, a spiel about her family’s good name, about the Sharpes giving public service to the town for over a hundred years, and so on, but when she simmered down, she agreed to it. And afterwards, I gave her back the pot lion. That’s all there was to it.’
Crisp was agog with surprise and admiration. ‘Where did the actual murders take place?’
‘In a shed at the back of Pryce’s house. I met Don Taylor there first thing this morning. We found the remains of Hobbs’s coat there. Pryce had torn it up and was using pieces as cleaning cloths. And there was Wendy Green’s purse with her credit cards and other stuff. It was pretty gruesome in there. He used his truck and his wheelbarrow to transport the bodies. It all checked out.’
A mobile phone rang. It was Angel’s. He reached into his pocket for it.
It was Mary. ‘Hello, darling,’ she said.
‘Just a minute, Mary, I’ve got Trevor Crisp with me. I think we’ve finished. Just want to see if he has anything else for me.’
Crisp said, ‘No, sir. That’s fine. I’m off . . . Give my compliments to Mrs Angel.’
‘Now then, love?’ he said. ‘Anything wrong?’
‘No, on the contrary. I’m at Jordan’s Car Breakers, Barnsley Common. He’s cutting open the safe. He should have it open in about half an hour. Can you come over?’
Angel winced. ‘I don’t know, Mary,’ he said.
‘Listen, Michael, Mr Jordan turned it over about an hour ago and something inside it made a noise. I heard it. Like a metallic clink. Come on. You can spare me an hour, can’t you?’
Angel hesitated.
‘Aren’t you curious to find out what’s inside,’ she said.
He glanced down at the papers on the desk nearest to him, looked at his watch and said, ‘Of course. Why not? I’m on my way,’ he said. He stood up, closed the phone and put it in his pocket as he reached out for his coat.
The phone on his desk rang. He snatched it up. ‘Angel.’
There was the usual heavy breathing, then the superintendent said, ‘I see that you’ve got a suspect for those breaking and entering and stealing of chemicals from St Magdalene’s Hospital.’
‘Yes, sir. We have recovered the stolen items and they have the thief’s prints on them, so it should go straight through.’
‘It was the same man who murdered Julius Hobbs and Wendy Green?’
‘Yes, sir. Philip Pryce.’
‘And there never was an animal wild or otherwise involved.’
‘That’s right, sir.’
‘That’s what I said at the beginning. You could have saved a lot of time there, Angel. And another thing: the chief constable is not very pleased about your lad, DC Ahaz, stealing that pretty blue and white antique tea set from his secretary’s office. No doubt he was following instructions from you. That tea set was given to this station in return for services rendered and it is only right that the chief constable should have first option on any such perks. What do you think the executive offices have CCTV for? If that lad ever wants promotion, he’d better return it smartish.’
* * *
Angel arrived at Jordan’s Car Breakers. He drove through the open doors into a big enclosed field bursting with 5,000 old, battered cars, some piled five high. He drove down an alley through more wrecks to a gathering of four men and one woman huddled under a corrugated roofed shelter. The older man in the middle wearing goggles was sitting on an oil drum concentrating on holding an acetylene torch flame steady on the safe casing. The other four were standing around, shielding their eyes and watching the point of the flame.
They heard Angel’s car arrive and all except the man with the torch looked round.
Mary Angel said, ‘It’s my husband.’
They glanced at him then returned their gaze to the safe.
She crossed to the car as Angel got out. ‘You’re just in time. Mr Jordan said he’ll have it open in a couple of minutes.’
Jordan stood up. ‘We’re through,’ he said.
He turned off the flow from both bottles to extinguish the flame, put the cutter down and reached out for a long crowbar which he pushed into the line of the cut on the top of the safe. He gave it a quick jerk and the entire front of the safe fell with a thud onto the ground.
Mary crouched down and looked inside. The only item there was an OXO tin. She took it out. It had something small but heavy inside. She put it on the top of the safe.
All eyes were on the tin.
She looked up at Angel who had moved up close next to her. He nodded. She opened the tin and inside it was a sealed envelope. There was something heavy inside it. It was addressed simply to Michael Angel’s father, ‘Ernest’.
‘You’d better open it, love,’ she said, passing it to Angel.
He took it and quickly tore it open. A key dropped out with a handwritten swing label fastened to it. He read the label. ‘Spare key to safe.’
‘Is that all?’ Mary said.
Angel felt inside the envelope. ‘There’s something else.’
He poked it out. It was a folded sheet of paper. He unfolded it, read it and frowned.
‘What’s it say?’ Mary said.
‘It says “IOU £100�
�. And it’s signed, “Uncle Willy”.’
THE END
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OTHER BOOKS BY ROGER SILVERWOOD
YORKSHIRE MURDER MYSTERIES
Book 1: THE MISSING NURSE
Book 2: THE MISSING WIFE
Book 3: THE MAN IN THE PINK SUIT
Book 4: THE MORALS OF A MURDERER
Book 5: THE AUCTION MURDERS
Book 6: THE MISSING KILLER
Book 7: THE UMBRELLA MURDERS
Book 8: THE MISSING MILLIONAIRE
Book 9: THE MISSING THIEF
Book 10: FIND THE LADY
Book 11: THE MISSING MODEL
Book 12: MURDER IN BARE FEET
Book 13: THE MISSING HUSBAND
Book 14: THE CUCKOO CLOCK MURDERS
Book 15: SHRINE TO MURDER
Book 16: THE SNUFFBOX MURDERS
Book 17: THE DOG COLLAR MURDERS
Book 18: THE CHESHIRE CAT MURDERS
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