by Frank Smith
‘Let me see the back of your hands,’ Jones said.
‘What the hell for?’ Jessop flared. ‘Like I said, I haven’t done anything, and I’m not going anywhere with you.’ He made to push past the two men, but they closed on him, backing him against the side of the van. His hands came up, palms facing out in a gesture of surrender. ‘All right, all right, no need to get pushy,’ he said. ‘So what am I supposed to have done, eh? I’ve been out of town the last couple of days, so what’s all this about?’
‘Show us the back of your hands,’ Jones said again.
Jessop looked mystified, but he held out his hands.
‘Scabs,’ Jones observed as he looked at the hands. ‘Recent by the look of them, wouldn’t you say?’ he said to his partner.
‘Very,’ Albright agreed. ‘How’d you get them, Mr Jessop?’
Jessop shrugged. ‘Get ’em all the time, don’t I?’ he said. ‘Can’t avoid it in this job, lifting crates, messing about with tools. Why? What’s this all about anyway?’
‘We can talk about that down at the station,’ Jones said. ‘Get in the car.’ He nodded to where a car was parked a short distance away.
But Jessop was shaking his head. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘I’m not going anywhere with you. I haven’t done anything, so—’
‘It’s your choice,’ Albright said, moving closer. His voice hardened. ‘Consider yourself under arrest, Mr Jessop. Now, turn around facing the van and put your hands behind your back and listen carefully while my colleague cautions you.’
Jessop hesitated. He wasn’t averse to a scrap, provided the odds were in his favour, but he didn’t like the look of them in this case. Both Jones and Albright looked as if they could take very good care of themselves – and him if it came to it. He turned to face the van and put his hands behind his back.
Molly was about to leave for the day when Paget stopped her in the corridor. ‘Ah, Forsythe,’ he said, ‘glad I caught you. Come with me. I’m about to interview Albert Jessop, and since you are familiar with the situation in the Jessop household, I’d like you to sit in.’
Albert Jessop slouching in his seat, arms folded across his chest, stared sullenly at Paget. ‘So I was seen by a nosy neighbour,’ he sneered. ‘I do live there, you know. My wife and kids live there, so why shouldn’t I be there, eh? Tell me that.’
‘But you haven’t been living there for some time, have you?’ Paget said. ‘According to the people we’ve been speaking to, you spend more time with a woman by the name of Lucy Gilbert than you do at home. Is that not right, Mr Jessop?’
‘So?’ Jessop said truculently. ‘Sharon’s still my wife and they’re still my kids, so I have every right to be there. It’s not a crime.’
Paget took several large glossy photographs of Sharon Jessop’s battered face and upper body from an envelope and placed them in front of Jessop. ‘But attempted murder is a crime,’ he said quietly, ‘so I suggest you start taking this interview seriously, because that is what you will be charged with unless you can convince me otherwise.’
‘Bloody hell!’ Jessop’s eyes suddenly widened in shock as he stared at the photographs. ‘Christ, no! You’re not fitting me up for that! I barely touched her – more of a push, like. She didn’t even fall over. Oh, no, you’re not having me for that!’
‘You were seen,’ said Paget flatly. ‘People in the street saw you there. You ransacked the house looking for money, but there wasn’t any money, was there? No money because your wife had lost her job. So you took it out on her. Beat her unconscious, then just left her there on the floor to die.’
But Jessop was shaking his head violently from side to side. ‘I didn’t do that!’ he burst out. ‘I might have slapped her once or twice, but not like that, for Christ’s sake!’ His eyes narrowed as he jabbed a grimy finger at the pictures. ‘They’re fake!’ he said shrilly. ‘Have to be, because she was all right when I left. You bastards! You’ve tarted them up to make it look worse than it is,’ he accused. ‘Well it won’t bloody work, mate, and I’m not saying another word until I see a solicitor.’ He sat back in the chair and folded his arms. ‘And you can take those fake pictures with you and stuff them, because I know she didn’t look like that when I left her.’
‘So, what do you think, Forsythe?’ Paget asked as they made their way back to what had now become an incident room with the death of Roger Corbett. ‘Was that all bluster or do we have the wrong man?’
‘I have to admit it was a good performance,’ Molly told him. ‘He seemed to be genuinely shaken by those pictures, but I don’t think Sharon was lying when she told me it was Jessop who beat her up. And, as you said yourself, sir, he admits to being there, even admits to “slapping her”, as he put it, and judging by the bruises on Sharon’s arms, I’m sure he’s done this sort of thing before. I think he just lost it when he realized there was no money and not much chance of getting any since Sharon had lost her job. Thank God the kids weren’t there.’
Paget nodded. ‘I think you’re right,’ he said. ‘But just to be on the safe side, I’d like you to have another chat with Sharon Jessop to see if she remembers anything else about what happened that night. If she sticks to her story we’ll charge him and hold him.’
‘The trouble is,’ Molly said, ‘he’ll probably make bail and be out on the street by noon tomorrow. I just hope he doesn’t do a runner.’
‘Do you think he might?’
Molly shrugged. ‘I really don’t know that much about him,’ she said candidly. ‘Everything I’ve heard comes from Sharon, her father, and her friend, Rachel from years ago, but none of it is good.’
‘And yet he doesn’t have any form to speak of,’ Paget observed, ‘so either he is more clever than he appears to be or he’s telling the truth.’
‘Frankly, sir,’ said Molly sceptically, ‘I’m not sure I could agree with you on either of those options. Did you see the size of his hands? And the scars on them?’
‘I did,’ said Paget, ‘but you have to bear in mind the kind of work he does.’
Molly remained silent, but it was clear she wasn’t convinced.
Marion Alcott died in her sleep ten minutes before midnight. Thomas Alcott, dozing in the chair beside the bed, came awake, only vaguely aware at first that something had changed.
Still only half awake, he listened. Faint, hushed voices came from the nurses’ station down the hall, but inside the room . . . The rhythmic, rasping sound he’d become accustomed to was gone. He found himself holding his own breath as he struggled to his feet and leaned over the bed. His wife’s hand with the intravenous needle taped to it lay still on top of the covers. He took her hand gently in his own, and only then was he able to bring himself to look at her face.
Perhaps it was the tears in his eyes that distorted his vision, but the face he saw was that of the girl he’d married more than thirty years ago, so young, so vibrant, so full of life and so full of love.
He whispered her name, then, for the first time in many years, he knelt beside the bed and prayed.
TWENTY-THREE
Tuesday, July 21st
‘David Taylor admits to receiving Roger Corbett’s phone call,’ Tregalles concluded at the morning briefing, ‘but he says he was busy and told Corbett he would call him back as soon as he was free. But then he forgot about it until later when he was closing up. He says he tried to call Corbett but couldn’t reach him. He claims he spent the rest of the evening either in the shop or upstairs in his flat. He lives alone; he made no phone calls, and he didn’t receive any, which means he can’t prove he was there, and I can’t prove he wasn’t.
‘I’m going to talk to Chadwell and Kevin Taylor next. All of the calls Corbett made that day were short, except for the one to Chadwell, so perhaps I can get more out of him.’
Ormside snorted. ‘Good luck!’ he said, remembering his brief interview with Chadwell. He pulled a bulky file from a drawer. ‘But before you go, we’d better have something on record about the call Barry
Grant made to David Taylor, because it was never mentioned in the original investigation. Is Taylor coming in to make a statement?’
‘I don’t think that’s really necessary, do you, boss?’ Tregalles said with a questioning look in Paget’s direction. ‘I thought I’d just stick a note in the file.’
Paget agreed. ‘Just make sure it’s legible,’ he warned.
‘Better have it typed, then,’ Ormside muttered. ‘The way Tregalles writes, he should have been a doctor.’
Paget glanced at the time. ‘I’ll be in Mr Alcott’s office for the rest of the morning,’ he said, ‘and if anyone is looking for me, discourage them, because I do not want to be disturbed.’
Fiona looked strangely subdued as Paget approached her desk outside Alcott’s office. Normally, she was on her feet the moment he appeared, ready to bring him up to date on any new developments since she’d seen him last; pass on any messages she hadn’t been able to take care of herself, and offer her assistance and/or advice if he asked for it – and sometimes even if he didn’t ask for it.
‘Something wrong, Fiona?’ he asked.
The secretary lifted her head and he could see she’d been crying. ‘It’s Mrs Alcott,’ she said in a low voice. ‘She died last night. I tried to ring Mr Alcott this morning to find out how she was, but I couldn’t get him, so I phoned the hospital, but they wouldn’t tell me anything.’
Fiona took a tissue from her sleeve and blew her nose. ‘I knew something was wrong, because they usually say something over there when you ask, even though they aren’t supposed to unless you’re a relative. So I rang his daughter, Valerie. Her phone and mobile number are in Mr Alcott’s phone file,’ she explained, ‘and she told me that her mother had passed away just before midnight last night.’
The phone in Alcott’s office rang, and a corresponding light flashed on the secretary’s phone. She picked it up and said, ‘Superintendent Alcott’s office . . . Yes, he’s here . . . Yes, yes . . . all right, Sergeant, yes, I’ll . . .’
Paget put his hand out for the phone, but instead of giving it to him, Fiona put it down. ‘That was Sergeant Tregalles,’ she said, ‘and he sounded very excited. He said he has something to show you, and he’d like you to go back down there at once to see it for yourself.’
‘So much for my instructions that I wasn’t to be disturbed,’ Paget muttered. He turned to leave, but paused when he saw the question in Fiona’s eyes. ‘Was there something else?’ he asked.
‘It’s just that Valerie says her father’s now gone missing and . . . it’s probably silly,’ she said, ‘but the way he was talking the other day . . . you don’t think Mr Alcott would do anything . . . well, you know . . .?’ She couldn’t bring herself to say the words.
‘Paget placed his hand on Fiona’s shoulder and held her eyes with his own. ‘No, I don’t,’ he said firmly. ‘I suspect he just needs to be alone for a while. I’m sure he’ll turn up when he’s ready.’
Tregalles and Ormside were bent over Ormside’s desk, each with a magnifying glass in hand, studying a series of black and white photographs when Paget entered the room.
‘Take a look at this, boss,’ Tregalles said as he straightened up and handed a magnifying glass to Paget. ‘These pictures were taken at the scene when Barry Grant is supposed to have killed himself. I just happened to take a look at them when I was putting the file away after adding in the note about Barry’s call to David Taylor, and that’s when I saw it. Take a look at the one on top, the close-up of the shotgun. Look at the end of the barrels. See the tiny steel fibres left when the barrels were sawn through? There is no way they would have been there if that gun was fired after the barrels were sawn off. They’d have been blown away. Those barrels were sawn off after Grant was shot.’
Paget bent over the picture. He didn’t see it at first, but suddenly there it was. Tregalles was right; and yet apparently no one had picked it up during the original investigation. Someone had slipped up badly back then. Very badly.
‘Well done, Tregalles,’ he said as he handed the photograph and magnifying glass back to the Sergeant. ‘So, it looks as if someone killed young Grant because he was perceived to be a weak link, and I suspect that Roger Corbett was killed for exactly the same reason.’
The town planning offices were not in the town hall itself, but in the annexe, a cube-like, flat-roofed structure behind the main building, only partly hidden from view by trees and shrubs planted for that very purpose. Built of breeze block and brick cladding – a cost-saving measure at the time – it needed to be hidden, Tregalles thought. He entered the building and approached a counter barring further progress.
‘I’m here to see John Chadwell,’ he told the girl behind the counter.
‘Do you have an appointment?’ the girl asked.
‘I spoke to him earlier,’ Tregalles said, holding up his warrant card.
The girl barely glanced at it before lifting a hinged part of the counter and motioning him through. A telephone rang on a desk behind her. She picked it up and cupped a hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Fourth one on the left,’ she whispered, pointing to the corridor behind her.
The door to the fourth office on the left was partly open. A burly man with greying hair stood hunched over his desk, head bent as he studied a blueprint. Tregalles pushed the door wider and said, ‘Mr Chadwell?’
The man raised his head. ‘And who are you?’ he demanded.
‘I’m the man you told you were too busy to see this morning,’ Tregalles said as he entered the office and pushed the door shut behind him. ‘Detective Sergeant Tregalles, investigating the murder of a friend of yours, Roger Corbett.’
Chadwell glowered. ‘You’ve got no right to come barging in here like this,’ he said. ‘How do you think it looks to my colleagues?’
‘Like a good citizen helping us with our enquiries,’ Tregalles told him. ‘Unless, of course, there is some reason why you don’t want to help us find the person who killed Roger Corbett, or you have something to hide . . .?’
Chadwell’s scowl deepened. ‘Of course I don’t have anything to hide,’ he snapped. ‘The reason I put you off when you rang this morning was because I’m busy and it upsets my schedule.’
‘I imagine Mr Corbett felt much the same when someone killed him and upset his schedule,’ Tregalles observed drily. ‘Which brings me to the question I came here to ask you, Mr Chadwell. Why did Roger Corbett ring you, first at the office and then at home, last Tuesday afternoon?’ He pulled out a chair and sat down.
Chadwell’s face was set as he took his own seat. ‘I don’t know,’ he growled. ‘I could barely understand the man. He was drunk and rambling.’
‘And yet you stayed on the line for more than six minutes,’ Tregalles told him. ‘There must have been some sort of exchange between the two of you?’ He took out his notebook. ‘And I see that you rang Kevin Taylor’s number immediately following your conversation with Corbett. What was that about?’
Chadwell sat back in his chair and eyed Tregalles dispassionately. ‘All right, then,’ he said, glancing at his watch to emphasize that his time was limited. ‘The wife took the call, but she couldn’t make any sense out of what Roger was on about, so she handed it on to me. As I said, he was drunk, and it took a few minutes for me to understand what he was talking about, but I gathered that he was convinced that he was suspected of having had something to do with that old case you’ve been working on, the robbery and killing of Kevin Taylor’s father. I told him that was absurd, but he kept on and on about it, and it became clear to me that the man was on the verge of a total breakdown if someone couldn’t sort him out.
‘I’ll be honest with you, Sergeant, I didn’t know what to do about it. I mean I didn’t understand why Roger was calling me anyway. It’s not as if we’ve ever been close friends. I know one’s not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but quite frankly, Sergeant, I couldn’t stand the man. So I told him to phone his wife and have her come and take him home, but he said she w
as away somewhere. So, finally, I rang Kevin at his office, but they said he was out, so I tried his home but he wasn’t there either. Tried his mobile, but he must have had it switched off, because I didn’t get him.’
‘Why Kevin Taylor?’
‘Because Kevin’s always more or less looked out for Roger, though why he bothered I don’t know. As far as I was concerned, what Corbett needed was a good boot up the backside; sympathy just made him worse. Anyway, I couldn’t get Kevin, so I talked to Steph, and she persuaded me to go down there and get the man home. I wasn’t keen, but the wife was nagging me to go as well, so I went. Soft as they come, is Amy.’
‘To where, exactly?’
‘The Unicorn. That’s where he was calling from, but it turned out to be a waste of time, because Corbett wasn’t there when I got there. They told me he’d been in, but he’d been gone for some time.’
‘What time would that be?’ Tregalles asked.
Chadwell shrugged. ‘Five thirty or thereabouts,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you exactly.’
Tregalles consulted his notebook. ‘And yet your call to the Taylors ended at eighteen minutes past four. That’s a gap of an hour or more. Can you explain that?’
Clearly annoyed by the question, Chadwell said, ‘I had work to do. Work I had brought home to prepare for a council meeting that evening, and I didn’t see why I should just up and leave it and put myself out for a man who was drunk and wallowing in self-pity.’
‘I see.’ Tregalles closed his notebook and put it in his pocket. ‘And then what?’ he asked. ‘What did you do when you found that Mr Corbett had left the Unicorn?’
‘Went back home, of course,’ Chadwell told him. ‘Barely had time for dinner, such as it was, before I had to be back here in time for the weekly council meeting at seven.’
‘And your wife will confirm all this, I suppose?’ said Tregalles as he got to his feet.
Chadwell bridled. ‘Why do you need to talk to her?’ he demanded. ‘Isn’t my word good enough? It’s obvious you have the times of the phone calls, so what is there to verify?’