by Gregson, J M
Burgess was delighted. He dropped again into his appalling American accent for his first phrase. ‘OK, Officer, Ah’ll play a hunch. Well, it seems to me that someone was trying to weight the corpse, to hold it down on the bed of the river. I think a weight of some kind was attached to the ankles of this woman by rope or string. Perhaps it was hurriedly or carelessly attached; perhaps some creature of the river helped to remove it. Perhaps the person who attached the weight even intended that the corpse should be free to float to the surface after a few days, but that seems over-subtle.’
‘I agree. The likeliest explanation is that whoever weighted the body intended that it would remain undiscovered, either permanently or for a long period. He or she must have had a reason for that. Of course, anything which makes us uncertain about the precise time of a death immediately makes an investigation difficult.’
To Lambert’s relief, they now moved back into the small, neat office where Burgess kept his records and his reference books. They had hardly arrived there when the phone rang. Burgess gave his name, then passed the phone to Lambert. ‘It’s your Inspector Rushton from the Murder Room,’ he said, rolling the last phrase off his tongue with relish.
Lambert knew from Rushton’s slightly self-important tone that he had some news. The voice on the other end of the line said, ‘I think we have an identification for the victim, sir.’
Chapter Three
In the end, the day turned out to be rather an anti-climax for Ivy Evans.
Mrs Evans was the cleaning lady at The Beeches, though she preferred to describe herself as ‘Mrs Pritchard’s domestic’ when she answered the phone. She did not need to do that very often, for she went to the house only once a week — on Tuesday mornings. Mrs Pritchard would have preferred her to go on Fridays, to get the house spruce for the weekend, but she had explained that her regulars — by which she meant the people who employed her for two days each week — had priority on that day. Mrs Pritchard had accepted the Tuesdays which were all that she could offer meekly enough when she explained. Mrs Evans concluded that that meant that she was a good cleaner.
In truth, The Beeches was an easy house to clean: there were only two adults in occupation, and no small children to worry about. Mrs Evans liked children, but they made work in a house, there was no doubt about that. Her other two employers had four children and three dogs between them, and there was much more work in their houses than in The Beeches. Besides, there wasn’t the satisfaction in cleaning when you knew the place was going to be as untidy as ever within a few hours. She had come to look forward to returning to the peaceful serenity of the gracious rooms and fitted carpets of The Beeches.
On this June morning, it had seemed a particularly attractive prospect as she walked out from the village to the big house at its edge. The hawthorn was fresh and scented in the hedges; there was the warmth she liked to feel in the sun on her back; the huge, deep-pink flowers on the rhododendron at the gate of the big house were open now, where they had been only in bud when she last came. It seemed more than a fortnight ago. She had been sorry to miss last Tuesday’s money, but no doubt the house would be quite tidy, if Mrs Pritchard had been away and her husband was still in Spain.
When she could not get in, she was at first irritated and then alarmed. There was post in the letter box; it was most unlike Mrs Pritchard not to have taken it in by now. Mrs Evans walked round the house, peering through windows and trying the back door. Then she went back into the lane and trudged the two hundred yards to the next house, where she got the Jacksons to ring the police.
She was pleased and secretly surprised by the speed with which they arrived. They had taken much longer to come to the burglary at her neighbour’s cottage during the winter. This time, there were two constables in a patrol car there in twenty minutes, asking her questions and making her feel very important. Mrs Evans had no idea of the priority that was being given to calls like hers, as the police strove to identify a murder victim.
She met the policemen at the front door of The Beeches. She had declined the Jacksons’ offer to wait for them at their house, wanting to keep all the drama of this rare moment of importance to herself. The policemen asked when she had last seen Mrs Pritchard. It was a fortnight since she had been in the house, she explained, but she had seen Mrs Pritchard in the village on the Friday of the same week, so that was ten days ago. They asked why she hadn’t cleaned the house last Tuesday, and she had to explain that although she had come up here as usual, there had been a note under a stone by the front door to say that Mrs Pritchard had gone away and would not need her services until today.
She concealed the irritation she had felt at having walked up to The Beeches for nothing that day, because she felt vaguely that it would be disloyal to her employer to talk about it now. They asked if she had kept the note, and she said she thought she probably still had it somewhere at home. It gave her a little, slightly guilty thrill of excitement to tell them that. She looked up at the tall house, which seemed more silent with every passing minute of the bright morning.
She hoped that Mrs Pritchard wasn’t lying dead in there. But if she was, Ivy Evans would be the only first-hand witness to tell the tale around the village. She tried not to feel too much pleasure in the anticipation; Mrs Pritchard had always been kind to her.
The policemen seemed for a moment at a loss as to what they should do. She did not expect policemen to be uncertain like this, but they did look very young. One of them had taken his hat off as the sun rose higher, and he appeared to Ivy Evans little more than a boy; she was sure also that constables had been much taller than these two when she was young.
They asked her about the Pritchards’ two children, who lived away and hardly ever came here, and about Mr Pritchard. She was able to help them there, telling them of his trip to Spain with his friends from the golf club. He was away for about ten days, she thought. She wasn’t sure on which day the party had gone, but it was at a weekend; a Saturday or a Sunday, she believed. They must be due back any time now.
The policeman who had kept his hat on went round to the side of the house, looking for a moment into the big greenhouse, where the plants seemed to be in dire need of water. He got out his little radio and spoke quietly into it for a few moments. The little box gave a series of harsh crackles, and then a distorted electronic voice replied to him. Mrs Evans, who would have liked to relay the conversation to her husband and her neighbours later in the day, could distinguish not a word on either side of the exchange.
The policeman came back and nodded briefly to his companion. They walked round the house, with Mrs Evans following a little way behind them. ‘We shall have to get in, m’ dear. You don’t know where there’s a spare key, do you?’
‘No. I’d have got in myself, if there’d been one, wouldn’t I?’ She felt quite daring, ticking off policemen like that, but they were very young. He thought of telling her that the kind of people who left notes under stones on their front doorsteps to announce that the house was empty also often left keys around the place, but he didn’t say anything.
She half hoped they would bring a sledgehammer and smash the lock on the big front door, as she had seen policemen do on television, but instead they broke a pane in the window of the downstairs cloakroom and reached in a hand to the catch. Then the one who had already discarded his hat took off his tunic and got in through the window. He managed to open the front door and the two policemen moved into the dark cavern of the hall.
Mrs Evans made to follow them, getting ready to act as guide to the house she knew so well, but the one who still wore his checked cap turned and stopped her. ‘Best wait here for a few minutes, m’ dear,’ he said. ‘There’s no knowing what we’re going to find inside, and we wouldn’t want you upset. We’re used to it, you see, so we’re prepared for anything.’
She felt cheated for a moment. Then she consoled herself with the undeniable prospect of melodrama which his last words had carried. If her mistress — the drama
had already elevated her status in the house to that of valued servant — was lying dead from a heart attack or a seizure, she would demand full details of the scene. If Mrs Pritchard had been killed by intruders, she would thrust her way past these callow young guardians to take in the full horror of the blood-soaked scene for her subsequent accounts of it.
She began to wonder if she would be featured on Crimewatch on the television. She would need to get her hair done.
It seemed to take the men a long time to go through the house, and the suspense built up her excitement and stretched her ever more active imagination towards new scenarios. It would have been much quicker if they had let her take them round, she thought. She did not know the cautious tread they employed and their careful, gloved handling of the doors as they moved from room to room. If there was to be a Scene of Crime team here later in the day, they did not want to blot their apprentice copybooks.
But they came out breathing more easily as they blinked at the sudden sunlight. ‘No one in there, m’ dear,’ the one in his shirtsleeves said. She tried not to look disappointed.
He asked if she had any idea where Mrs Pritchard might be staying, and she told them sharply that if she had known that, she would have told him before he broke the window to get in. The other one went back into the house and came out with the leather-bound book the Pritchards kept beside the telephone. ‘We shall need to take this with us,’ he said. She didn’t like it, but she supposed it was quite in order for the police to remove things from a house.
Then he asked her to help them find the children’s phone numbers in the book, and she was immediately mollified. She managed to remember their first names, though she had seen the daughter only once and the son never. They managed with a little difficulty to find them in the list of numbers and addresses, their task made easier by Mrs Evans’s knowledge that neither of them was local.
She rode back to the village in the police car, sitting erect and proud in the back to show any spectators that she was not under arrest. She wished it was more than quarter of a mile — she had scarcely the chance to savour the journey. They allowed her to make them a quick cup of tea, so that there was more opportunity for the village to remark the shiny white police car as it stood at her front gate.
They radioed in to tell the station that they had accompanied her home so that she could search for the note Mrs Pritchard had left for her on the previous Tuesday. For a few panic-stricken moments, whilst the policemen drank their tea and reminisced about their weekend in the kitchen at the back of the house, she thought that she had after all thrown it out with the rubbish.
Then she found it, under Mr Evans’s pools coupon on the sideboard. It had her name on an envelope, like a real letter. The scrap of paper inside said only, I’ll be away this week, after all. Sorry I couldn’t let you know earlier. See you next Tuesday as usual. Laura Pritchard. It seemed strange that they should attach so much importance to a few simple words like that.
The policeman looked at it for a moment, preparing to put it carefully away inside a pocketbook in his breast pocket. He said, ‘Is this Mrs Pritchard’s writing? That might be quite important, you see.’
Mrs Evans understood, and felt the thrill of an awful excitement. But when she inspected the note, she had to say, ‘Yes, that’s her writing.’ She was disappointed for the rest of the day.
Chapter Four
Mark Warner turned the BMW out of the lane and on to the main road.
He would have driven fast on this stretch normally, pushing the needle past eighty as he reached the dual carriageway, but today he drove more soberly, easing the big car along at between fifty and sixty, where he could scarcely hear the engine note.
He had enough troubles, without being pinched again for speeding. Besides, he was in no hurry to get to this particular meeting. He drove past the freight storage depot, where he fancied he saw an air of bustling prosperity which made his own troubles seem all the more desperate. He was glad to get out on to the Bristol road, beneath a wide blue sky which made the sparse traffic seem even thinner.
He went into the works to pick up the order book. He still kept one for his own information, though computers had long made such things obsolete. It was a small, red, linen-backed book, with handwritten entries in his flowing, confident script; the book was an exact replica of the one he had kept when they had started the business in a single Portakabin with two machines. Those had been exciting days, when new orders had come easily and the world had waited expectantly at his feet.
They had been simpler and better days too, he now decided.
The small work force tried hard to look busy when they saw that he was around, but he knew the tasks far too well to be deceived. He had worked all of the machines in the factory himself, before he afforded himself the title of managing director and left them behind. And he had been happiest when using those machines, he realized, with a shaft of the self-insight which he normally did not allow himself. In those early days, the men had been surprised to find that anyone with a university degree was so talented and well-informed about practical matters. That had made them respectful of his expertise and delighted to follow him as he developed the company.
He must not allow himself to get sentimental about the past and its successes. Something would turn up; it always had. The trouble was this damned recession, and those damned green shoots of recovery which had proved nothing more than a Chancellor’s pipedream. If only bloody Laura had been prepared to help, even just a little. Just enough to reduce their borrowings, until things picked up… She’d have got her money back, and interest, too, if she’d wanted it.
Mothers-in-law were supposed to be obstructive though, weren’t they? Well, Laura had certainly been that. And now she wasn’t even there to ask. If her will left money to Joyce, that would be as good as putting it in the hands of Warner Plastics, wouldn’t it? … Not for the first time, he thrust away that dangerously agreeable thought.
‘Have Collinsons confirmed that order?’ he asked Joe Brown, the senior foreman who had been glorified with the title of director. He knew the answer before he got the older man’s worried negative; when there was good news, you were greeted with it at the door. He could not remember how long it had been since the last genuine good news.
He kept a bright face as he moved among the eight men who were all that remained of the twenty he had employed in the days when business burgeoned and there were nothing but compliments for the speed of his expansion and the quality of his products. It was important for morale that they should not see that the boss was worried. The quality of what they made was as good as ever, but no one could fight a demand dwindling as quickly as this.
At least he did not have to wait when he got to the bank. Cummins came out of his office immediately. He was in his late forties, with hair already silvered at the temples and a broad, rather nervous face. He held out his hand and gave Mark a broad smile. He was trying to be as pleasant as he could, but embarrassment made his bearing seem unctuous rather than friendly. Mark hoped that the half dozen people who were waiting at the counter did not notice that. The manager’s ‘Good to see you, Mr Warner!’ seemed to him too loud and too hearty for its hollowness not to be obvious to all.
Perhaps his situation was making him over-sensitive. He sat in the armchair in front of the desk when he was invited, and tried to take the initiative. ‘It’s good of you to see me, George,’ he said, ignoring the fact that he had been summoned here. ‘Actually, I wanted a word with you about increasing our capital base.’ He was a little vague about exactly what the term meant, but he had heard his accountant use it.
Perhaps he had expected in any case that he would be interrupted before he was allowed any exposition of his needs. Cummins did not look at him. He steepled his long fingers and looked at the leather-edged blotter on his desk as he said, ‘There can be no question of that at present, I’m afraid, Mr Warner. Unless, of course, you are able to report a sudden upturn in business?’ His
grey eyebrows arched hopefully upwards.
Mark was not a fool. He knew that the manager’s refusal to respond to his attempt to use Christian names was even more sinister than this question to which the man already knew the answer. He said, ‘Not just yet, I’m afraid.’
Cummins gave a slight, sudden shake of his grey head, which was almost a nervous tic; it reminded Mark Warner of the way his cat refused food it did not fancy. ‘That’s what I feared. In fact, I asked you to see me today because it looks as though we are going to have to do something about the situation at Warner Plastics.’ He always used the full name of the company. It made it less of a personal attack.
‘We’d like to do something ourselves. We can’t go and drag customers in by the scruff of their necks.’
‘No.’ Cummins had stopped smiling, and he did not begin again even in response to the nervous grin with which Warner accompanied this thought. ‘It’s because of that that the bank has now to give attention to your accumulating debt, Mr Warner.’
Mark swallowed hard and kept smiling. Don’t let him get away with that — take the fight to him. But keep it light, he told himself. It was an impossible brief, but he tried. ‘You were happy enough to advance us the money for the new factory, George. I came and took your advice, and you positively encouraged us to expand our production and move on from our old premises.’
Cummins smiled. It was an undertaker’s professional smile. ‘It looked the right advice at the time. On the figures you provided. The ultimate decision to expand was yours, of course. All the bank did was to offer the facilities for you to do so.’
‘Facilities which apparently you are now trying to remove.’
Cummins said, ‘You took a commercial decision, Mr Warner. You can’t blame the bank because it now turns out to have been ill-advised.’ He did not pause to consider that the advice had been his.