Russian Roulette

by Sara Sheridan

  ‘And no one had seen him?’

  ‘No.’

  Mirabelle was about to suggest again that they call the police and then make a list of places Billy Randall frequented, apart from the local public house. She wasn’t sure how Vi might take the idea. The poor girl said she wanted to be practical, but she wasn’t behaving that way.

  ‘Well, perhaps it would be best—’ Mirabelle started, but she was cut off by the sound of the front door opening. It banged closed and there was a cheery call from the hallway.

  ‘Vi!’ Billy Randall took off his hat as he walked into the room. Vi’s eyes lit with fury. She sprang out of the chair, launching herself at her husband.

  ‘Where the hell have you been? Where have you been?’ she shrieked, hitting him as she asked the question. It was like watching an insect banging repeatedly against a window. ‘You promised you’d never do it again. I’ve been worried out of my mind.’ When her open hands had no effect, she balled her fingers into fists and began punching. It took a moment for Billy to catch hold of her wrists. ‘Let go,’ she shouted. ‘Let go.’

  ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘That’s some welcome. And in front of a guest. Calm down, Vi, would you?’

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ He sounded nonchalant. ‘It was a big order, love. There was overtime. I thought we could use the money. You wanted that pram for the nipper. Putting the baby to sleep in a drawer is all right in the house, but what about when you need to go out, eh?’ He let go of Vi’s wrists and strolled over to the fireplace. ‘This’ll sort it out,’ he said, taking several coins out of his pocket and popping them into a tin next to the old clock. ‘Now you can pick whichever pram you fancy. Cash in hand,’ he said. ‘I’ll take more overtime if I can get it too. They say there’s a busy spell coming. It’s irregular hours, but it could be good for us. Well, what have you ladies been up to? Hit the gin have you?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Mirabelle said. ‘I only popped over to ask a few questions.’

  ‘Questions?’

  ‘About Helen Quinn.’

  ‘Well, that’s enough of that. You can see Vi’s upset, Miss Bevan. And in her condition. I’m starving. I thought you might cook me a little something, love. Returning breadwinner and all. I could murder a fry-up.’

  ‘I thought you were dead, Billy. I thought you were done for. When Miss Bevan appeared, I thought she’d come to tell me they’d found your body.’

  ‘Don’t make a fuss.’

  ‘A fuss?’ Vi was still furious. ‘I’ll give you a fuss. You can get your own bleeding dinner.’ She swept out of the room. Mirabelle shifted uncomfortably. From the hallway there was the sound of a cupboard door being slammed closed, then Vi swept back in. She was wearing a blue summer coat and, Mirabelle noted, quite a nice hat decorated with a silk flower and some pink ribbon. ‘I’m going out,’ she said, ‘see how you like it when you don’t know where I am.’

  ‘Vi,’ Billy pleaded. ‘Don’t be silly. You know you’ll just go to your mother’s.’

  This infuriated Vi further. She snorted, turned on her heel and burst out of the room, slamming the front door as she left. Mirabelle cast Billy Randall a sympathetic look, although he had clearly brought it on himself. Calmly, as if accepting his fate, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. ‘Makes ’em feisty. Having a baby,’ he said as he lit up and then, remembering his manners, offered Mirabelle the box. She declined. Out of the window, she could just make out Vi’s hat, bobbing above the privet hedges in the direction of the main road.

  ‘I think she was rather worried, Mr Randall. She’d been up all night.’

  Billy shrugged. ‘She’ll be all right,’ he said.

  ‘Where did you meet your wife? She strikes me as a talented sort of person.’

  ‘Talented?’

  ‘She keeps the house beautifully and I think she trimmed that hat she was wearing. And then there’s all of this.’ Mirabelle gestured around the living room. It was shabby but everything had been carefully looked after. ‘She has a nice touch.’

  ‘Oh yes. Vi’s good at that. She’s a homemaker, see.’

  ‘You met her in London?’

  Billy looked momentarily nostalgic. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘We were at a party. She could do card tricks.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘You’d have to admire her Find the Lady. She has nimble fingers, my wife. She’ll be all right once the nipper turns up, you’ll see. It’ll keep her busy.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have called last night? Sent a message?’

  Randall took a deep draw. ‘I wasn’t going to trouble anyone. The neighbours, I mean.’ He shrugged. ‘We’ve been short of money, to tell the truth. I thought she’d be pleased. I don’t mean to be rude but . . .’ He cast his eyes to the door.

  ‘Of course. I’m sorry.’ Mirabelle moved to go and Billy followed. She lingered a moment in the hallway. ‘You don’t happen to know what Mrs Quinn did before she was married, do you? If she had any family?’

  Billy shook his head. ‘Helen? What she did?’ he repeated, as if this was the oddest question anyone had ever posed. ‘I haven’t a clue. Terrible cook though. I’ll tell you that.’

  ‘Yes, I heard.’ Mirabelle smiled. ‘I’m rather that way myself.’

  ‘She was an orphan,’ he said. ‘I know that much.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘One night we were all having a drink and she said meeting Phil had given her a family again. I think she had been, you know, alone. It’s a tragedy what happened.’ Billy’s eyes were hard. ‘A rotten bloody tragedy, pardon my French.’

  ‘What’ll be a tragedy is if Mr Quinn is convicted for his wife’s killing, because, if I’m sure of anything, it’s that he didn’t do it.’

  Billy Randall didn’t meet her eye. He opened the door. ‘He couldn’t have done it. Not all drugged up,’ he said. ‘They’ll let him off. No murder weapon or nothing. No motive either. They’ll have to.’

  Mirabelle felt her fingers tingle as she walked down the path. People said the oddest things sometimes. They said what was on their mind, without realising. Really, she thought, she ought to try Mrs Ambrose. If anyone on Mill Lane would know about Helen Quinn it was the archetypical nosy neighbour. Yet somehow she found herself walking in the opposite direction as she figured out the way to the cricket ground.

  Chapter 14

  Vices are only virtues carried to excess

  Up on the Downs, Superintendent McGregor hovered beside the body. At first the man looked unharmed, as if he was asleep on the grass. His skin was smooth and his pallor was fresh, brushed with a light suntan that he could not have acquired over the English winter. Then, after a few seconds of observation, it became clear the back of his head had been blown away.

  ‘Wherever he killed himself, there’ll be some mess,’ McGregor observed.

  Ellison nodded sagely and only stopped when one of the other constables at the scene cast him a barbed look.

  Ignoring this nascent rivalry, McGregor checked the man’s pockets, but there was nothing. The suit was evening wear – well made too. They’d look into that. ‘You said he had been staying in a hotel?’ He looked up.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Ellison confirmed. ‘They called it in. He hadn’t slept in his room for two nights running and apparently he’d been drinking heavily. He’s Flight Lieutenant George Forgie. Ex-RAF.’

  ‘Who found him?’

  ‘A lady out hacking this morning. There’s a stable over the hill. She was a sturdy type – she took it well.’

  ‘Has anyone formally identified him?’

  ‘No, sir. It’s only from the description – the one the hotel rang in.’

  McGregor hesitated. He hadn’t seen active service during the war. He still felt guilty about that and, as a result, he lacked sympathy that many men found it difficult coming home again. There had been quite a bit of this sort of thing in the early days – men who couldn’t take peacetime after they’d seen war. Th
e aftermath of the conflict dragged on even now. There were men who had been damaged through torture or starvation in prison camps and those who simply couldn’t settle after the adrenalin rush of executing duties of national importance. There were some who found they liked killing and came back to civilian life unable to shake off their murderous impulses. Others, having fought through the war’s deadliest battles and held their nerve, fell apart over small domestic tragedies, as if they had no steel left after what they had been through. Still, suicide was extreme.

  ‘We need to find somebody who knew him. Someone who can identify the poor chap.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And we’ll need to find the last person who saw him alive.’ McGregor judged the timing for himself. Forgie’s body was fresh. He hadn’t been dead for long. ‘Where was he last night – assuming he killed himself at night?’

  McGregor stared at the man’s bow tie. Then his eyes ran down the body until he came to the shoes, which were devoid of mud. It had been rainy for the last several days. There was no question he hadn’t walked up here on to the rolling hills. McGregor took a deep breath. It was a puzzle, but he was sure he’d get to the bottom of it. Military men, after all, tended to range in groups – Forgie’s friends and acquaintances would fill in a good deal of the detail when he tracked them down. He was about to issue orders to move the body back to town when he noticed the corner of the man’s jacket. Corpses often lay in unwieldy positions, especially when they had been dumped, but the way the jacket had fallen was all wrong. McGregor ran his fingers over the seam and, sure enough, he felt something concealed inside. He pulled a pen from his pocket and slipped it between the stitches, which came away easily to reveal half a dozen gambling chips – blue and silver, each marked fifty guineas.

  ‘A man for the tables,’ he said, as he stared into what was left of Forgie’s peaceful face. Nobody would conceal this kind of currency about their person if they weren’t a hardened gambler. Items sewn into the seams of a person’s clothes were intended for emergencies, but anyone who foresaw a need for gambling chips more than anything else had a very particular take on the essentials of life. Three hundred guineas was very high stakes.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said. This kind of thing made a case more complicated. Gamblers didn’t usually kill themselves when they were three hundred guineas up. Quite the reverse. ‘Right,’ McGregor said, ‘let’s get the body back to town and try to figure out what this bloke was up to.’

  Chapter 15

  All evil comes from a single cause: man’s inability to sit still in a room

  The gates at CVA were closed. Mirabelle peered at the factory through the wrought-iron bars. She rattled them, but the lock held fast so, instead, she began to walk around the perimeter. From the cricket ground next door she could hear the soft thump and whack of a game under way. Now and then the patter of a crowd clapping floated across the spring air like some kind of natural phenomenon – birds flocking or water flowing downhill in a rush. It was sunny but there was a cold nip in the air – the promise of changeable weather. You could never trust it to hold, especially not in spring. It was game of the cricket club to start a match that would last several hours, but if you waited for the weather in England to be just right, you might wait a long time. Ahead of Mirabelle, two women carrying baskets piled with Tupperware wheeled round the corner giggling, and rushed towards the ground, checking their watches. Sandwiches and scones for half-time, she thought. Cricket was a game that involved tea – a sociable concern. She considered following the caterers. You never could tell where you might pick up information, but then she spotted something undeniably more promising. A side door in the factory wall was slightly ajar. She checked no one was watching and then she pushed it, but the door wouldn’t budge any further. Then the smell assailed her. A rank whiff of rotting food and chemicals that came from the other side. She lifted a handkerchief to cover her mouth and nose, and peered round the edge of the wood where she discovered several old bins stacked on top of each other. Sighing, her eye was drawn upwards to the small space above the door as she realised it was the only way in. Two empty beer crates lay a little further along the wall and she pulled them into place, then stepped up, fearless in high heels, and hauled herself over, coming down on the other side safely with the help of the stinking buckets on which she gingerly balanced as she made her way down.

  The factory site was sizeable and, from what she could make out, this side of the building housed the canteen. Through the barred windows, she spotted a bank of tea urns and some large aluminium pots. Checking her heels were not smeared with dirt, she suppressed the urge to gag and moved off smartly into fresher air, to investigate. There must be somebody here, she thought. But the factory’s long windows were dark as she rounded the building and the tarmac was deserted apart from two dusty vans parked near the main gates. Opposite them, she peered through a window and could clearly make out the factory floor and behind it a series of small offices. During the war, a place like this would have been blacked out, but these days you could see what it was making. Piles of mechanical parts were lying around. Oilcans were stacked in a row, ready for action when the workforce arrived on Monday morning. There was not a soul here now, though.

  As Mirabelle rounded the last corner, a large Alsatian dog came bounding towards her from the other side of the compound. She froze and the animal came to an abrupt halt a couple of feet away, letting out a deep bark. Mirabelle’s heart raced, but she held her ground. Somewhere, she’d read that was the thing to do. Hold your ground and show no fear. It seemed to work, or, at least, the dog stopped barking and cocked its head sideways, looking confused.

  ‘Don’t worry, miss,’ a voice shouted. The dog looked around and barked again, this time at a small boy who was perched high on the brick wall on the other side of the courtyard. ‘His name’s Napoleon. He’s hopeless.’ The boy grinned. ‘He won’t hurt you. Honest.’

  Mirabelle felt her ribcage lower. The dog wagged its tail. ‘What are you doing up there?’ she asked.

  ‘I could ask you the same thing. It isn’t trespass if you don’t go over. You’re the one that’s inside, miss.’

  The boy had a point.

  ‘I’m hoping to find someone. A caretaker, maybe,’ Mirabelle explained.

  ‘Well, you found Napoleon. Not much of a guard but that’s all there is. He’d lick you to death, wouldn’t he?’

  Mirabelle regarded the dog, which was now panting heavily. ‘Hello, boy,’ she said, trying not to sound nervous. ‘Hello there,’ she tried again, this time reaching out to pet him. As she sank her fingers into Napoleon’s thick fur, the dog’s tongue lolled with pleasure. ‘You’re right,’ she said, as he whimpered, ‘he’s not much use, is he?’ As she stood up, the dog fell in at her heel, which made her think of Bill Turpin, the third member of the McGuigan & McGuigan team, who had the knack of taming any animal. Maybe his influence had rubbed off on her.

  ‘Sometimes kids throw stones at the poor fellow. Them dogs is German. But I think he’s a good old boy and it isn’t his fault, is it? I always bring him a biscuit. I throw it down first of all and he lets me sit here. Once, he tried to jump up but he can’t reach me. He knows that now.’

  ‘But what are you doing?’ Mirabelle repeated, patting the animal absent-mindedly as she stared upwards. Little boys were often quite strange, in her experience, but the thrill of sitting on top of a brick wall must be limited and it appeared the boy did so regularly.

  The child nodded vaguely over Mirabelle’s head. ‘Best view I could think of,’ he said. ‘They won’t let you in. Not unless you’re a member. Very toffee-nosed, they are at the cricket club. My dad says we come from the wrong side of the tracks.’

  ‘You’re watching the match?’

  ‘I can see most of it from here. You won’t tell them, will you?’ The dog woofed forlornly and stared at the child’s leg, clearly wishing he could reach it. ‘I think he likes a bit of company,’ the boy said with a smile. �
��It’s a mutual arrangement, isn’t that what they call it?’

  Mirabelle sighed. Napoleon was having a busy day between the interloper on the wall and the woman who had made it over the top of the stinking bins. ‘And there’s no one about? No one from the factory?’

  The boy shook his head. ‘Not till tomorrow. Six a.m. the first lot arrive. What are you after them for?’

  ‘I’m trying to find out if there was a late order placed last night. If the factory was open for overtime?’

  ‘Late order? What do you mean?’

  ‘I want to see if work ran on all Saturday afternoon and evening.’

  ‘There was nobody here yesterday. Not after lunch.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I watched the juniors,’ the boy said smartly.

  ‘So what time did the place close?’

  ‘Lunchtime as usual. Twelve noon on a Saturday, miss.’

  ‘And you’re sure there was no one inside? No one at all?’

  ‘My dad works in the stockroom. I’m sure all right.’

  ‘And you were sitting on this wall yesterday afternoon?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And you didn’t see anyone?’

  ‘The union wouldn’t have it for one thing,’ the boy pointed out.

  ‘How did you get up there?’ Mirabelle wondered out loud.

  The boy grinned. ‘My cousin gives me a lift. He’s not interested in cricket.’

  ‘And he’ll help you down?’

  ‘I can drop down myself. It’s high, but you just dangle and then roll. Like a parachute soldier.’

  ‘SAS?’

  The child looked delighted. Mirabelle sighed. It seemed her only way out was back over the stinking bins. I should have looked up earlier, she thought.

  The boy was momentarily distracted by something on the far side of the wall. ‘That’s a six,’ he reported. Then he turned his attention back to Mirabelle. ‘What did you think they were doing anyway? If the factory was open all night?’