‘I see,’ Mundy grunted.
‘And the shopping, oh my, the shopping … don’t ask … it was just another disaster.’ Felicity Baxendale put her hand to her forehead. ‘Anne Tweedale would give Josh a shopping list and if she was lucky he’d come back with about half the items she’d put on the list, but he was scrupulously honest, you have to say that for him. He would hand her the exact change … never a penny short. Eventually she would send him out with more items than she wanted, so she would give him a list of twenty items, for example, in the hope that he would bring back the ten she really wanted.’
‘She really was very accommodating of him,’ Mundy observed.
‘She was very accommodating, as you say. That’s the correct word. Accommodating. Perfunctory as he was, she was very patient and very accepting of him.’ Felicity Baxendale continued to stroke her cat, which purred contentedly, gradually losing interest in Mundy.
‘Why do you think that was?’ Mundy asked. ‘Why tolerate him in that manner, to that extent, and over what sort of period are we talking about?’
‘A year, perhaps eighteen months.’ Felicity Baxendale once again looked up at the ceiling of her living room. ‘Why? Well, you may ask and all I can guess is because he might have awoken some latent mothering instinct in her. She never married, you see. I don’t think she ever wanted to be married but I think she missed not having had children. I think that that was a great sadness for her, and then along came Joshua, whom she rescued from being taunted by other children because he was a bit slow-witted. That made him more vulnerable and therefore more appealing to Anne Tweedale’s nature. He might have been fifteen, sixteen, seventeen or whatever age he was, but in his head he was only about ten or twelve years old, so he seems to have fulfilled a need she had. She also often told me that she was certain that Josh had more about him than people gave him credit for. She felt very strongly that he had been dismissed too easily, too readily, and because of that belief she would engage him in conversation and encourage him to read. She tried to stimulate him, to stretch him, intellectually speaking, and you know once she said he had good eyes.’
‘Good eyes,’ Mundy repeated. ‘He had keen eyesight, you mean?’
‘No.’ Felicity Baxendale shook her head vigorously. ‘No, I don’t mean that and Anne didn’t mean that either – she meant that there was an honesty about his eyes. You know how it is said that “the eyes are the windows to the soul”?’
‘Yes,’ Mundy put his hand to his chin, ‘yes, I have heard that and I believe it.’
‘Well, that’s what Anne Tweedale meant by “good eyes”. She meant that Joshua had a good soul, his eyes being the window to his soul,’ Felicity Baxendale explained.
‘Ah … I understand now.’ Mundy nodded slowly, lowering his hand.
‘Yes. I have met people with piercing, evil eyes and have met chronic schizophrenics with the classic “glassy” eyes of people with that illness … a look they can’t hide, whether they are unwell or whether they are just plain evil, but Josh did have an honesty about his eyes. I will go along with Anne Tweedale on that point. Readily so. I wouldn’t have him in my house doing odd jobs but he did have an … innocence about him. He had the look of a puppy’s eyes … sort of keen and curious but totally without a puppy’s eagerness to please when it came to applying himself.’ Felicity Baxendale massaged her left earlobe in a casual, subconscious manner. ‘I am certainly no criminal psychologist, but I ask you, really, is that the sort of personality who could stab someone multiple times and then calmly rifle her home for valuables? I think not. Speaking for myself, I think not.’
‘I can see your point,’ Mundy replied, ‘and I confess you do indeed paint a picture of a most unlikely murderer, a most unlikely candidate indeed.’
‘And then, of course, there is the issue of Anne Tweedale’s lovely valuables.’ Felicity Baxendale raised an eyebrow. ‘There is that issue.’
‘Oh?’ Mundy sat forward. ‘Tell me, please, what is the issue?’
‘My point is that the valuables, her jewellery, would not be of interest to Joshua – not the Joshua I knew. And Joshua would have to know where she kept them, which was upstairs in her bedroom, and it was the case that Anne Tweedale never let Josh go upstairs. Upstairs was her private space, as it is in this house. Upstairs is my bathroom, my bedroom … it was the same in Anne Tweedale’s house.’ Felicity Baxendale stroked her cat. ‘These houses were built in the thirties and there is an outside toilet built into the back of the house, specifically designed for the use of the daily help. Whenever Joshua needed the toilet himself he used Anne’s outside lavatory as she directed him to do.’
‘Interesting …’ Mundy murmured. ‘That is interesting.’
‘You see, Joshua just wouldn’t have known her jewellery was there and I don’t think it would have been of interest to him anyway,’ Felicity Baxendale reiterated.
‘What,’ Mundy asked, ‘would he be interested in, if anything, would you say?’
‘Frankly, I can’t think of anything, anything at all.’ Felicity Baxendale continued to stroke her cat, which continued to purr contentedly. ‘You know, Joshua didn’t seem to me to be a very materialistic young man. I don’t think he had any designs upon Anne Tweedale’s possessions. He went there because he found acceptance and emotional warmth, encouragement and empowerment. Anne’s attitude and approach to him gave him self-confidence; it empowered him to do things he otherwise wouldn’t have attempted to do. She made him feel good about himself. Dragons …’
‘Dragons?’ Mundy smiled.
‘Anne had a book about dragons, a book from her childhood. In it were large coloured paintings of the mythical creatures. She allowed Joshua to look at the book and he loved it. He would sit looking at the paintings and be utterly absorbed. He would return it to its place on the shelf but would always ask to see it if he was taking a rest from any tasks. If he was to take anything from Anne Tweedale’s house,’ Felicity Baxendale explained, ‘it would be that book, and possibly photographs of Anne when she was in her prime … that sort of thing, not diamond rings and pearl necklaces and solid gold brooches. The only items believed to have been stolen were Anne’s jewellery and the carving knife used to kill her. Nothing else was removed.’
‘I see.’ Mundy sat back in the armchair he occupied. ‘That is a good point … interesting … very interesting.’
‘For me,’ Felicity Baxendale continued, ‘the whole thing just does not add up – it never has. Why … what motive had he to kill the person who was giving him so much on an emotional level? It makes no sense, no sense at all.’
‘I can see how you’d think that,’ Mundy replied. Then he asked, ‘Tell me, do you know if Miss Tweedale had any relations?’
‘She had a sister, I do know that she had a sister, but I think they were estranged. It was some family issue, some dispute I was not privy to. The sister had sons – three sons, so Anne Tweedale had three nephews.’ Felicity Baxendale put her fingertips to her forehead. ‘I also think that she had cousins. Her grandmother had had a large family so she had a number of cousins, and in fact I believe her to have been closer to her cousins than she was to her own sister.’
‘I can believe that,’ Mundy offered. ‘You don’t have to live with your cousins so you don’t quarrel but the blood tie is there.’
‘That could very well be the reason.’ Felicity Baxendale smiled approvingly. ‘I never thought of that, but it could. It explains my situation, you see. I have fallen out with my own brother from time to time but never with any one of my cousins and that would explain it: we never got close enough to get into a fight. Thank you. Now I understand my own family.’
‘My pleasure.’ Mundy inclined his head.
‘But the hostility within Anne’s family was very powerful … it was manifest. She once told me that she believed her nephews had plans for her money but that she had made sure that they were not going to get hold of it. When she said that to me one day over elevenses she gla
nced at a glass cabinet which contained her silverware. I was once shown the silver collection and noticed a brown envelope with the words “the Will” written on it.’
‘Oh …’ Mundy groaned. ‘She didn’t lodge her will with a solicitor?’
‘It seems not,’ Felicity Baxendale replied with a sigh.
‘That was asking for trouble,’ Mundy observed. ‘Really a bit silly.’ He paused. ‘Do you know who would have benefitted from her will?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t … no idea. It isn’t really the sort of thing one would talk about with one’s neighbour.’
‘Of course,’ Mundy replied. ‘I wondered if she might have said something.’
‘I do recall that her house was cleared by a removal company,’ Felicity Baxendale informed him. ‘Millers Removals and Storage of Burnt Oak.’
‘You have a good memory,’ Mundy observed with a smile.
‘I’d like to think that I do have a good memory,’ Felicity Baxendale replied warmly, ‘especially as one’s faculties tend to diminish with age. I have noticed that I have developed some difficulty remembering words these days, which worries me. My own mother lost her mind at the end and I remember the first symptoms were her inability to remember words. She’d be stringing a complicated sentence together quite happily and then, just as she was about to use a word, it would vanish from her vocabulary. So I am a little worried, but the reason I remember the name of the removal company is that it was also my maiden name. I think I made a good swap. Miller is such a dull name, I always thought, and still do. It belongs to all those other artisan names like Cooper, Potter, Wright, Farmer, Fletcher …’
‘Oh, what’s a Fletcher?’ Mundy asked. ‘What does that name mean?’
‘An arrow maker.’ Felicity Baxendale grinned. ‘The feathers at the rear of an arrow are the arrows’ “fletch”. A fletcher was an arrow maker in medieval times.’
‘I have learned something.’ Mundy returned the grin.
‘But I swapped dull Miller for the more prestigious-sounding Baxendale … and,’ she held up her forefinger, ‘… I got a very good husband into the bargain. Not bad I say. Two for the price of one.’
‘Not bad at all.’ Mundy wrote ‘Millers Removals’ on his notepad. ‘Not bad at all.’
‘They’re still in business,’ Felicity Baxendale advised. ‘I still see their large removal vans now and then – they are painted cream with red lettering. A bit garish for my taste but the important thing for your inquiry, I would have thought, is that they are still in existence, they’re still trading. I understand that they removed the contents of the house into a storage facility pending the terms of the will being observed. The house itself was eventually sold and a very pleasant family moved in … very well-behaved children. The parents are still there though the children have moved on, as children do.’
‘Indeed,’ Mundy mumbled, ‘as you say … as children do.’
‘So that was the last of Anne Tweedale. A sad way to end one’s life and a very sad way to end a good life. She wasn’t that old – she could have lived for another twenty or even thirty years.’ Felicity Baxendale fell silent. Then she said, ‘But I still do not think Joshua could have murdered her. As I said, he didn’t have any sense of ruthlessness about him. He was too considerate.’
‘Considerate?’ Mundy asked.
‘Well, yes … I know a barrister. He is also a parishioner at the church at which I worship and at a church social, some years ago now, we were chatting over tea and cakes and he told me that he had been pleading in murder cases all his working life and had not defended nor prosecuted a single murderer who did not think that the sun shone just for him … or her. There was, he had always found, a chilling sense of self-importance about murderers, a sense of “it’s all about me, the world revolves around me” – that sort of attitude, and that, he said, includes the so-called crimes of passion.’
‘Now that,’ Mundy replied, ‘I would wholly go along with. Wholly.’
‘And Joshua Derbyshire, what was he? I’ll tell you … he was pretty feckless, pretty well inept at everything he did but he would display thoughtfulness in little ways. You see, as much as he wouldn’t buy every item on the shopping list, for instance, he would sometimes use his initiative and buy things if they were on offer and if he knew that Anne Tweedale would have use of them … little things like that, to please her.’
‘I see.’ Mundy tapped his pen on his notebook. ‘As you say, not the actions of a member of the “it’s all about me” brigade.’
‘Yes … exactly,’ Felicity Baxendale held eye contact with Maurice Mundy, ‘that’s what I thought … and as I have just said, that’s what I still think. So I was surprised when he was convicted of her murder, but all the evidence was so solidly stacked up against him and with nothing to argue in his defence. So I assumed that I had been wrong about him and, all the while, the gentle, mild-mannered, inept, feckless Joshua Derbyshire had a very dark side that he had kept well-hidden, but my doubts about the safety of his conviction surfaced and grew over the years … they have grown and grown and grown.’
‘So have mine.’ Maurice Mundy folded his notepad and stood up. ‘So have mine.’
119 Frere Way in Norwich revealed itself to be a small, council-owned property close to a single-storey primary school. It was boarded by an overgrown yellow privet hedge and the area between the road and the front door could not, in Mundy’s mind, be considered a front lawn, but neither could it be called a gravelled area. It was, he and Tom Ingram saw, a mixture of both, with patches of worn grass interspersed with patches of gravel. The house shared a driveway with the house to its left as viewed from the roadway, the garages belonging to each house standing side by side at the top of the driveway, there appearing to be a clear agreement between the two householders that the driveway should never be blocked by parked cars. The house was of sixties vintage, thought Mundy, built of light-coloured and lightweight brick with a roof of concrete tiles, upon which moss was growing. The door and window frames were painted white. A narrow concrete lintel stood above the front door, supported by two circular metal columns which, like the house, were also painted in white. Lace curtains hung untidily in the single ground-floor window adjacent to the door. Ingram and Mundy walked across the gravel and grass area in front of the house, making a crunching sound as they did so. Ingram knocked on the door with a polite yet authoritative tap. It was rapidly opened by a small, bespectacled man dressed in a clean but un-ironed blue shirt and brown corduroy trousers. Tartan-patterned carpet slippers encased his bare feet. He did not appear, to the officers, to have shaved for two or three days.
‘Police,’ Ingram announced as he and Maurice Mundy held up their identity cards for his inspection.
‘Yes?’ The man seemed to the officers to be nervous. He held the door ajar, poking his head and left side of his body round the edge of the door, between the door and the doorframe.
‘Mr Cassey?’ Ingram asked. ‘Mr Kenneth Cassey?’
‘Yes?’ Cassey continued to sound nervous. Mundy thought him to be in his mid-fifties.
‘Do you mind if we come in?’ Mundy pressed. He was anxious to see inside Cassey’s house. ‘Better than talking on the doorstep in full view of your neighbours.’
‘Why? What’s it about?’ Cassey’s voice trembled.
‘Did you once own a Saab 90?’ Mundy asked and then quoted the registration number. ‘It’s about that car.’
‘Yes.’ Cassey suddenly sounded relieved. ‘Some years ago … but yes, that was one of the cars I owned.’
‘Grey, with red or brown doors?’ Ingram asked.
‘Yes, that’s the one.’ Cassey continued to relax. ‘The previous owner replaced the doors – I bought it like that. Both had been damaged in separate accidents. He got them off a similar car but didn’t have them resprayed to match. He said that the car wasn’t worth the cost of the respray.’ Cassey opened the door. ‘Do come in … if you wish.’
The inside of C
assey’s house was, the officers found, as plain and basic and as down-at-heel as the exterior. The floorboards were bare save for three sheets of ill-matched matting. The chairs and settee were black, inexpensive and plastic covered with thin orange cushions. A small television stood in the corner of the room resting on an equally small, flimsy-looking table. The room smelled musty and, looking beyond the room through an open doorway to the kitchen, both officers saw a large pile of accumulated washing-up in the sink. The kitchen window looked out upon an ill-kept rear garden. It was, the officers saw, the home of an unmarried, childless man. Clearly so.
‘What did you do with the car?’ Ingram asked.
‘Sold it. Sold it on. I sold it privately … bought another Saab,’ Cassey explained, ‘then another. I had three Saabs, one after the other … I used to like driving them.’
‘Do you run a car now?’ Ingram peered out across the rear garden.
‘Not any more. I got made redundant,’ Cassey explained. ‘I was a delivery van driver.’
‘UK-wide?’ Mundy asked.
‘Occasionally we’d get a long drive and I’d stay in a guesthouse but usually I was home each evening. I delivered mainly round East Anglia.’ Cassey spoke with a slight trace of an East Anglian accent.
A Cold Case Page 9