Thread of Evidence

by Frank Smith

  “Come out and visit me,” Joanna told her. “I’m always around in the mornings. Take the Ludlow bus and ask the driver to drop you at Raddington Lane. It’s less than half a mile from the main road to where I live. When you get to the pub, go round the back and you’ll see a footpath leading off to the left. Follow it and you can’t go wrong. It leads to the old tow-path alongside the canal, and I’m just a few yards down from where it comes out. It’s the only boat there. It’s called Blythe Spirit. You can’t miss it.”

  Take the bus, thought Vikki, despairing. Right. In the middle of the night? And with nothing for bus fare even if there had been a bus? Every penny she had was at the flat, including the fifty quid she’d hidden beneath the wardrobe.

  She lifted her head. It didn’t seem to be throbbing quite as much. Five miles, Joanna had said. Could she walk it? She could but try, and if she had to die somewhere, it might just as well be in some ditch alongside the road as here in this grotty doorway.

  CHAPTER 4

  Detective Chief Inspector Neil Paget was not in the best of humours as he drove into Broadminster at two o’clock in the morning. He had spent some four hours last evening trying to recover files he’d lost on his computer when the power failed in the middle of an entry. He’d found some of them, but where the others were he had no idea, and it had been midnight before he had given up in disgust. So when the phone rang at half past one, he had barely closed his eyes.

  In addition to being the newest, the Tudor was considered to be the best hotel in Broadminster. Built a mere eight years ago, it was also one of the tallest buildings in the town. The battle over that had gone on for months, but the promise of attracting more business to the town by means of the Tudor’s large convention- and meeting-room facilities, to say nothing of superb dining, had won out over the aesthetics of Broadminster’s ancient skyline.

  As for dining, Paget could vouch for the excellence of the fare in the Elizabethan Room. He and Andrea McMillan had dined there on more than one occasion last year, when things were going well between them. Not that they weren’t going well now—except he hardly ever saw her outside work. To be fair, their jobs were so demanding that it was difficult to make arrangements and keep to them, but on the other hand, they’d managed it before. He dismissed the thought as he crossed the lobby and made his way upstairs.

  The scene-of-crimes team, headed by Charlie Dobbs, had already started work. There, also, was Sergeant Tregalles, who lived no more than ten minutes away from the hotel.

  “Nasty one,” Tregalles told him. “Man by the name of James Bolen. Stabbed five times, as near as I can tell without moving him. It looks as if there was some sort of fight or struggle. Watch your feet, sir; someone’s been sick all over the floor.”

  Paget could smell it as he moved into the room. He moved carefully, stepping over a broken table lamp lying on its side. His stomach stirred uneasily as he stood looking down at the naked body on the floor. There were five ugly-looking stab wounds clustered just below the rib-cage. The blood around them had dried, as had the crusted pool that stained the carpet. Dark blotches marked a blanket that looked as if it had been dragged from the bed by the dying man to try to stanch the flow of blood. He leaned closer. There were scratches on the face, beginning just below the left eye and ending at the chin.

  “Bolen,” he said ruminatively. “Isn’t he the builder?”

  “That’s right. James Bolen of Bolen Brothers. They built our house, as a matter of fact. There are two brothers. Or there were. The other one is Harry Bolen. He’s the younger of the two. I met him when we bought the house. Seemed like a nice bloke. Came round a couple of times after we moved in to make sure that everything was all right.”

  Paget nodded but still looked puzzled. “Why is he here?” he wondered aloud. “Doesn’t he live in that big house just past the bridge on the Clunbridge Road?”

  Tregalles nodded. “That’s the one,” he confirmed, “but according to Mr. Quint—he’s the night manager here—Bolen stays here quite often on weekends, and he has a meeting room booked for Monday afternoon and all day Tuesday. It was a Mrs. Jones who found the body. She works the night shift on the desk. I had a word with her, but she’s pretty shaken up, so I thought it best to let her go home. Seems like she had some sort of run-in with a bunch of lads earlier on, then finding the body really knocked her for six.”

  “Anything taken?”

  “Doesn’t look like it. Certainly not money. There’s a wallet with more than two hundred quid in it in the pocket of his coat. That brief-case on the floor is full of papers; I suppose something could have been taken from that.”

  The two men moved aside as a photographer moved in and began taking pictures of the body. Paget circled the room. The covers on the bed were in disarray, and one of the pillows lay on the floor. A pair of light-grey slacks with the belt still in the loops had been tossed across the back of a chair beside the bed, and a white shirt, underpants, socks, and knotted tie lay in a heap on the seat. One black slip-on shoe lay on its side beneath the chair, while its mate was just visible beneath the bed.

  The brief-case to which Tregalles had referred stood beside a table in the corner of the room. A pen, a pad of paper covered in figures, and a pair of glasses lay on the table. Paget looked at the figures. Some of the numbers were in the millions, but there was nothing to indicate what they meant.

  The door of the recessed clothes-closet stood open. Inside, he could see a brown two-piece suit, a grey-green hound’s-tooth-check sports jacket, two white shirts, two ties, and a pair of brown brogues. Paget stood on tiptoe to look on the top shelf, but all he found there was a layer of dust that looked as if it hadn’t been disturbed for months. An open suitcase on a stand beside the wardrobe contained pyjamas, underpants and socks. Paget left them undisturbed; he’d receive an itemized list soon enough. A quick look at the bathroom revealed a shaver and other toilet articles laid out on either side of the wash-basin.

  “Bloody hell!” The words were spoken softly but with vehemence as the photographer rose to his feet and examined his knee. A spot of blood appeared. The man pulled up the leg of his slacks and began dabbing at his knee with a handkerchief. “Glass,” he said, holding up a tiny shard for all to see. “Must be the bulb from the lamp. I didn’t see it there,” he told Charlie, who had come to take a look. “Better warn Dr. Starkie to watch it when he comes.”

  Charlie glanced at his watch. “If he comes,” he grumbled. “He should have been here long since.”

  Paget looked thoughtfully at the floor. “When you take samples from that patch of carpet, I’d like you to mark on the floor plan the area covered by the broken glass,” he told Charlie. “I think it might prove useful.”

  Charlie grunted acknowledgement. He was a taciturn man at best.

  Still somewhat preoccupied, Paget turned, and in trying to avoid the glass-covered area, almost fell over a white-clad figure bent over the victim’s clothing on the back of a chair. “Sorry,” he said as he grabbed at the figure to steady himself. “I didn’t see …” He stopped, and snatched his hands away as if he’d been burnt.

  The figure straightened and turned to face Paget. “That’s quite all right, sir,” said Grace Lovett with an impish grin. “I’m used to being overlooked.”

  “Grace? I—I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was you.” He could feel the colour rising in his face.

  “It’s these new suits and hats,” she told him, dead-pan. “They make us all look alike.”

  “That’ll be the day!” Tregalles muttered beneath his breath, but still loud enough for his boss to hear.

  “Well … no harm done, I suppose,” said Paget gruffly as he moved away. “Sergeant?”

  “Sir!” Tregalles replied smartly, and wiped the smile from his face as he followed Paget from the room.

  Paget didn’t know why he should feel so embarrassed. It was an honest mistake. But he’d clutched hard to save himself, and it was too late to do anything about it by the ti
me he realized that it was not a man he was holding. Fortunately, Grace had taken it in good part, but he’d still felt foolish. And Tregalles hadn’t helped.

  Paget liked Grace. Charlie had other good people on his team, but Grace Lovett had a talent for analysis that went beyond the obvious. Whether it was a matter of perception or intuition, Paget didn’t know, but whatever it was, it had served them both well in the past.

  “Right,” he said as he and Tregalles moved out into the corridor. “I want a statement from everyone on this floor: what did they see? What did they hear? Anything the slightest bit unusual—you know what we need. Meanwhile, I’ll have a word with this man, Quint.”

  “You want the statements now, sir?” Tregalles grimaced as he looked at the time. People would not take kindly to being dragged from their beds in the middle of the night.

  “Is that a problem, Sergeant?”

  “It is the middle of the night,” Tregalles pointed out.

  “I’m well aware of the time,” said Paget testily, “but the job has to be done, and half of them are probably awake by now with all this activity going on, so let’s get on with it, shall we?”

  “So, it was about three quarters of an hour before anyone answered Mr. Bolen’s call for help,” said Paget. “Is that right, Mr. Quint?”

  The night manager bridled. “Well, yes, if you want to put it that way, Chief Inspector.” Quint was a short, balding, sharp-featured man of about fifty. He resented the fact that a murder had been committed in what he had come to regard as his hotel. He resented, also, that the sergeant, who had spoken to him earlier, had taken it upon himself to send Brenda Jones home, leaving him to answer all the questions.

  “I sent Mrs. Jones up as soon as the call came in,” he continued, “and I thought that’s where she was. But those bloody hooligans wouldn’t let her get off the lift. Every time she tried to get out, they held her back. They kept riding up and down until they became tired of that game, then piled out on the fourth floor and started throwing a ball about and wouldn’t let her go. But I knew nothing about that at the time. It wasn’t until some of the guests phoned down to complain about people running up and down the corridor that I knew anything was wrong.”

  Quint sniffed. “By the time everything was sorted, I’d forgotten about the call, and so had Mrs. Jones. Later, when she did remember, she went upstairs and found …” Quint drew in a deep breath and swallowed hard as he remembered the scene. “But you’ve been up there,” he went on. “You’ve seen it for yourself.”

  Quint shook his head, trying to rid himself of the image. When she came back down, I thought she was going to faint, she looked so white. “Mr. Quint,” she says, “Mr. Bolen’s dead. I think we’d better ring the police.”

  “To be honest, I didn’t know whether to believe her or not,” he went on. “I mean, she was still upset about that run-in with those yobs upstairs, and I thought she must be mistaken. At least about Bolen being dead. So I told her to stay in the office, then went up to have a look for myself.”

  “The door to Bolen’s room was open?”

  “No. Mrs. Jones had closed it, so I had to use my passkey. But she told me it was partly open when she first got there, which was why she went inside.”

  “Did you touch anything?”

  “Good God, no. I came straight back here and phoned your lot.”

  “Did you or Mrs. Jones see anyone go in or out around that time?”

  “No. I …” Quint stopped, frowned, and looked off into the distance, as if trying to recall an elusive memory. “There was a girl,” he said. “Funny, that. I’d almost forgotten her.”

  Paget raised an inquiring eyebrow.

  “A girl,” Quint said slowly. “Not much more than a kid. She came down the stairs and ran across the lobby to the door just as I was getting in the lift to go upstairs to look for Mrs. Jones. I only caught a glimpse of her as the doors were closing, but the odd thing was, she was barefoot and carrying her shoes in her hand.”

  “Can you describe her?”

  “She had a scarf over her head, so I didn’t see much of her face. Very young, though; very pale. I’m not sure about her hair. It might have been fair, but the scarf hid most of it, and she was wearing a mac buttoned up to the chin. Not very tall. Not much more than five feet one or two, I shouldn’t think. Thin. Bare legs, and as I said, bare feet.”

  “Colour of the scarf and mac?”

  “Dark scarf. Can’t say as to colour. And a light-coloured mac. Cream, light brown or grey; I’m not sure.”

  “And the shoes? You said she was carrying her shoes.”

  “Fancy ones. You know the sort—high heels, nothing much but bits of leather straps on top. She was carrying them by the straps.”

  “Very good, Mr. Quint. Do you remember what time that would be?”

  Quint thought back. “It was just after half past twelve when the calls about those young tearaways began coming in, so it would be a couple of minutes after that.”

  “Had you ever seen the girl before?”

  “Don’t think so, but as I said, I couldn’t see her face.”

  “Did Mr. Bolen have any visitors after you came on duty last night?”

  “No one asked for him, if that’s what you mean. But people come and go all the time, and I have no way of knowing whether they are guests or visitors unless they actually come to the desk. We ask the guests to leave their keys here, but a lot of them don’t.”

  “You say that Bolen came here quite often. Was he always alone?”

  “That’s right,” Quint confirmed. “Always the same room, if it was available.”

  “He was married?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But his wife never accompanied him when he stayed here?”

  “No.”

  “Did he ever give you any idea why he would stay here rather than go home?”

  Quint shook his head. “I assumed it had something to do with his business. He wasn’t the sort to stop and chat. Not like his brother, Harry.” Quint paused. “Come to think of it, Harry Bolen was here earlier on. Well, not actually here. I saw him in the car-park as I was coming to work. He was standing beside his car, talking to someone inside.”

  “What time was this?”

  “About quarter to eleven. I start at eleven.”

  “Did you see who he was talking to?”

  “No. Well, I could tell it was a woman, but all I could see was the back of her head. Mr. Bolen had the door open and the light was on inside the car.”

  “What about the colour of her hair? Could you see that?”

  Quint pursed his lips. “Fair, I think. Yes, I’m sure it was fair.”

  “Did you hear anything of their conversation?”

  “No.”

  Paget sensed a growing resistance to his questions. He had the feeling that Quint knew more than he was telling, but there was nothing to be gained by pushing the man at this point. Besides, he was anxious to get back upstairs to hear what Charlie and Reg Starkie had to say.

  “We found this under the bed,” Charlie Dobbs greeted him, holding up a clear plastic bag containing a short, broad-bladed knife. It had an imitation leather handle; it was the sort of knife favoured by Boy Scouts, and the chances of tracing it would be virtually nil. The handle was stained, and the blade was streaked with what looked like rust. But the edge of the blade looked as if it had been honed recently, and the dark-brown stains had nothing to do with rust.

  Charlie nodded in the direction of Reg Starkie, the rotund pathologist, who was kneeling on the floor beside the body, muttering into a microphone attached to his lapel. “Reg won’t commit himself until he’s done the autopsy, but he did agree that the knife appears to match the shape of the wounds, so chances are this is your murder weapon. If it’s not, I don’t know what it’s doing here. Oh, yes, and somebody used the bathroom to clean himself off before leaving. Or herself, more likely.”

  “You think a woman did this?” Paget asked.
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  Charlie shrugged. “Don’t know,” he said. “But we found a pair of panties—if you can call something the size of a postage stamp panties—in the bed. There were blonde hairs in the bed as well, and more blonde hairs in the wash basin. We also found a black evening bag; it had slipped down between the seat cushion and the side of the chair. Not much in it: lipstick, a compact and some tissues.”

  Tregalles appeared in the doorway. “Can’t say that did a lot for public relations,” he declared with a cheerfulness that belied his words. “But I have spoken to everyone on this floor, and no one admits to seeing or hearing anything.”

  “Anyone check the empty rooms?” asked Paget.

  “Yes. And there’s no sign that they have been disturbed,” Tregalles assured him. “As for the rest of the floors, I didn’t see the point of getting people up right away, so I’ve arranged to have some of our people on each floor by six o’clock. They’ll knock on doors and ask the usual questions. And,” the sergeant concluded, “I have two of our people standing by downstairs to make sure that no one leaves the hotel without being questioned and having their name and address checked.”

  “Right.” Paget looked around the room. “There isn’t much more we can do here,” he observed, “so once Reg has finished his examination …”

  “Which I’ve done,” growled Starkie as he packed the last of his instruments away and closed the box. “But I would like to take a closer look at that blanket.” He struggled to get up, then sank back. “I’m getting too old for this sort of thing,” he puffed. “Give me a hand up, will you? It’s the knees. They don’t work as well as they used to.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Charlie muttered as Paget moved to help the doctor to his feet. “What we need is a block and tackle.”

  “I’ll bloody block and tackle you if you don’t give me a hand up.” Starkie’s face, already red, was slowly turning purple and he was wheezing heavily. Even Charlie looked alarmed as he moved in to give Paget a hand.