by J F Straker
‘They say not. It’s a large car park—L-shaped—and the Morris is parked round the corner. They wouldn’t see it from the pub.’
‘All right,’ Driver said. ‘Hang on. I’m coming down.’
He had sent Hasted home. Now he rang and gave him the news. ‘Pick you up in half an hour,’ he said. ‘Tell Sybil I’m sorry; I know it’s an anxious time for her. But this can’t wait. Let’s hope the infant will.’
Sybil smiled when Hasted told her. ‘You men!’ she said, patting her stomach. ‘Stop worrying, darling. It’s a baby in here, not a malignant tumour. If you’re not around when the pains start Mrs Holden will run me to the hospital. It’s all organized. So why don’t you just get on with your job and leave me to get on with mine?’
‘Do we advise Doyle?’ Hasted asked, as he joined Driver in the police car.
‘I think not,’ Driver said. ‘Not yet, anyway. Not until we’re more in the picture. All we have is the car. It’s what has happened to his wife that should concern Doyle.’
‘It should, yes,’ Hasted agreed, emphasising ‘should’.
‘There you go again,’ Driver chided.
The pub overlooked the sea, with a road separating it from the dunes and the beach. It was a large, ugly red-brick building with a suitably large car park. A uniformed sergeant and constable waited near the Morris, their attention fixed on the holiday-makers on the beach. Hasted shared their envious interest. But not Driver. For Driver, days off from the job were spent on his boat. As he left the police car he gave the beach and the sea and the holiday-makers a brief glance, and then ignored them.
‘Any further developments?’ he asked the sergeant.
‘No, sir.’
The near-side front wing of the Morris was buckled, the bumper bent. He picked up the woman’s handbag, which lay open on the front seat, and examined the contents. In addition to the usual female paraphernalia there were a chequebook and two credit cards, all bearing Elizabeth’s name or signature. But there was no money and no purse. He found that disconcerting. Why had the woman taken those items with her, wherever she had gone, and left the rest? Why not take the lot in the handbag? His bewilderment increased with the discovery that although there were traces of food in all the containers, all were now empty.
‘She must have got hungry,’ Hasted said. ‘After all, she’d missed her lunch.’
Driver ignored that. ‘Have you looked in the boot?’ he asked the sergeant.
‘No, sir. It’s locked, and none of the keys fit.’
Driver checked. It was true, none of them did. ‘Perhaps that’s why she put the hot-boxes on the back seat,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t open the boot.’
‘I doubt if they’d go in the boot,’ Hasted said. ‘Too big.’
‘Maybe.’ To Driver the boot now loomed important. ‘Ring the garage, George. Find out why there’s no key. All right?’
‘It’s Saturday,’ Hasted said. ‘The garage will be closed.’
‘Then ring the man’s home.’
‘He’ll probably be out. Playing cricket, most likely. It’s only six-thirty, and they don’t draw stumps till seven.’
‘Well, ring anyway.’
Derek Mollison was 32 and lived with his wife Alice on the top floor of his father-in-law’s house, which had been converted into two self-contained flats. It was Alice who answered Hasted’s call. Derek was out, she said. No, not playing cricket; he had gone back to the garage after tea to work on his car. Hasted rang the garage. He had quite a wait before Mollison answered.
‘We’re closed,’ Mollison said curtly. And rang off.
Hasted tried again. Immediately the ringing tone ceased he said, ‘It’s me, Derek. George Hasted. And it’s official, so don’t ring off.’
‘Oh!’ Mollison said. ‘Sorry. What’s up? Found the Morris, have you?’
‘Yes. But—’
‘Good. Is Mrs Doyle OK?’
Hasted explained the situation. Mollison was puzzled. ‘Can’t open the boot? Well, there’s nothing wrong with the lock. I fitted a new one only a few weeks ago. Someone must have tampered with it. Or perhaps you tried the wrong key.’
‘We tried all three.’
‘Four.’ Mollison said.
‘Three,’ Hasted repeated. ‘That’s all there are.’
‘There should be four.’
‘Well, there aren’t. And presumably it’s the key to the boot that’s missing. Do you have a spare?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Can you drop whatever you’re doing and bring it down? The boss wants it and he wants it quick.’
‘Sorry, George,’ Mollison said. ‘No can do. No wheels. You’ll have to get one of your lot to collect it. Or why not ask Doyle? He’s nearer. And it’s his wife that’s missing.’
‘Well, anyway, have the key ready.’
Driver had been contemplating forcing the lock and was impatient at the prospect of further delay. But Hasted persuaded him. Doyle would know if his wife had a friend in the vicinity who she might be visiting. ‘He should make it in twenty minutes if he gets a move on,’ Hasted said. ‘We can wait that long, can’t we?’
‘I suppose so,’ Driver agreed. ‘If he’s back from Winchester, that is.’
‘He’ll be back,’ Hasted said. ‘He’s had more than enough time.’
Hitherto Hasted had had very little contact with David Doyle, and his concept of the man had been formed largely by hearsay. Hearsay had not been kind. Selfish and mean-tempered and uncooperative, hearsay had said, and not in the least interested in village affairs. So Doyle’s ready cooperation now came as a pleasant surprise. ‘I’m on my way,’ Doyle said. ‘The questions can wait.’
Andrew came with him. A uniformed policeman made way for them through the little crowd of spectators and indicated where they should park. Doyle gave Hasted the key, exchanged a few words and went to stare at the Morris. Hands in the pockets of his jeans, Andrew watched the holiday-makers trudging back over the dunes, laden with towels and hampers and rugs and other impedimenta, and then joined his father. They were peering into the interior of the car when the lid of the boot came up, followed by gasps of horror and a muttered oath from Hasted, and they hurried to discover the cause of this intense reaction. Wrapped in her plastic mackintosh, Elizabeth Doyle lay on her side, her body curled in a tight ball, her eyes staring at them sightlessly, her pale lips parted as if they had looked that way as she breathed her last.
*
David and Andrew sat together in the landlord’s private sitting room. The pub was open to custom, and the hubbub of many voices came faintly up to them from the several bars below. Down in the car park, out of sight of the sitting room, the police were busy, as they had been for the past half-hour. It had been at Driver’s suggestion, readily agreed to by the landlord, that the two men were waiting upstairs. ‘There may be questions that need to be answered,’ Driver had told David, ‘and the sooner they’re answered the better. So I’d appreciate it if you’d hang on here a while.’ They had refused the landlord’s offer of sandwiches—neither had felt like food after what they had seen—but had accepted a glass of brandy each, although Andrew had taken only a few sips at his. He did not like brandy.
David had arrived home later than expected, and after a bath and a stiff whisky he had had time for only a few words with Andrew before Hasted had rung. They had spoken little on the journey down, for communication was never easy between them and David had pushed the Volvo as fast as the road and the traffic permitted. Now, shaken by the sight of Elizabeth’s contorted body, they found it no easier to express their emotions. How do you suppose it happened? Andrew had asked. David had no ready answer. Elizabeth would never have stopped for a hitchhiker, he said, so the killer must have caught her while the Morris was stationary. But if robbery had been the motive, why kill her? Elizabeth would not have been foolish enough to resist a demand for money; the mere threat of force would have persuaded her to hand it over. And there had been no sign of dirt on h
er clothing to suggest she might have been thrown to the muddy ground and raped.
‘Perhaps he didn’t mean to kill her,’ Andrew said after a long silence. ‘Perhaps she started to scream and he wanted to silence her.’
‘Perhaps,’ his father agreed.
Andrew got up to stare out of the window. The Morris was obscured from his view by a wing of the building. The sun was down, the beach practically deserted.
‘There wasn’t much blood,’ he said.
‘No,’ David said. ‘There wasn’t much blood.’
*
Cramped in the confines of the boot, with rigor mortis to stiffen it, the body had been difficult to move, but it was out now and the ambulance had taken it away. The pathologist and the police photographers had gone; the crowd rimming the roped-off area of the car park had thinned. There had been no television or radio crews, and of the three newspaper reporters only one remained. Soon the Morris would be gone too, towed away to divisional headquarters for further examination. Then the ropes and the cones would be removed and the car park returned to normal.
The pub was crowded. Driver and Hasted sought out the landlord and were taken into a back room to talk. The murder was the main topic of conversation in the bars, the landlord said, and two of his regular customers reported having seen the Morris there on leaving the pub the previous day. His son had also noticed it on his return at four-thirty from visiting his fiancée. ‘So it’s certainly been there since around two o’clock yesterday,’ he said. ‘If not before.’
‘And nobody got curious, wondering what those hot-boxes were doing on the back seat?’ Driver asked.
The landlord shrugged. ‘I don’t suppose anyone saw them. I mean, who’d bother to look inside the car? You don’t, do you? Not in a pub car park. Either you’re in too big a hurry for a gargle or you’ve got to get home before the missus says the meal is ruined.’ He looked from Driver to Hasted. ‘Can I get either of you two gentlemen a drink?’
Both reluctantly declined. ‘Didn’t your son wonder what the Morris was doing in the car park at four-thirty, when the pub was closed?’ Driver asked.
The landlord shook his head. ‘Cars are parked out there all hours,’ he said. ‘Specially at holiday times. Most of the small hotels and guesthouses and such don’t have parking space, so a lot of the visitors leave their cars here. Some ask, some don’t. But we don’t mind. There’s plenty of room and it’s good for business. Brings them in for a drink after they’ve parked.’
The damage to the front of the Morris, together with its estimated time of arrival in the car park, was proof enough that this was the car that had collided with Driver’s Rover outside the chief’s house. Driver remembered the neighbour’s comment, ‘Going like the clappers’, coupled with a collision that could have been the result only of reckless driving, suggested that the driver could have been high on drink or drugs. In which case the man might have been crazy enough to visit the pub after parking. But there the landlord could offer no help. The place had been packed, he said, they had been rushed off their feet. He could recall a few of the regulars. The rest were just a blur in his memory.
They went upstairs to talk to the Doyles. Andrew was by the window, staring out at the darkening sea; he turned as the door opened. David sat in an armchair, his pipe gurgling wetly as he drew on it. There was no obvious evidence of grief, Hasted noticed. Nor had there been. They had both looked shocked at the sight of Elizabeth Doyle’s dead body. Then they had turned away, to wait in silence until Driver had taken them into the pub. Either they’re great poker players, he thought, or they weren’t all that sold on the late Mrs D.
‘We found a small black purse in the pocket of your wife’s mackintosh,’ Driver told David. ‘It contained six pounds and fifty pence, all in silver. Would that be payment for the meals?’
‘I imagine so,’ David said. ‘She would keep her own money separate, probably in the handbag.’
‘In a red purse?’
‘If the handbag was red, yes.’
‘There was no money in the handbag, sir,’ Driver said. ‘Nor in the matching purse. How much would you expect there to have been?’
‘Not much. Twenty—thirty pounds, maybe. Mostly she used her credit cards. Were they stolen, Inspector?’
‘No,’ Driver said. ‘Nor her chequebook. And it’s Superintendent.’
‘Sorry. But that’s odd, isn’t it? They’d be a hell of a lot more valuable, wouldn’t they, than just a few quid?’
‘They could be,’ Driver agreed. ‘It’s odd, too, that he should take the money in her handbag but leave the purse in her mackintosh untouched.’
‘He must have missed it.’
‘Possibly,’ Driver said, without conviction. ‘But he could hardly have missed the pearl necklace she was wearing, or her rings, or her gold wristwatch. And he didn’t take those.’
‘Would there have been anything else of value in her handbag, Mr Doyle?’ Hasted asked.
‘I don’t know, I’m afraid.’
‘There’s her gold pencil,’ Andrew said. ‘She kept that in her handbag. A propelling pencil.’
Driver looked at Hasted, who shook his head. They had found no pencil. ‘Were her initials on it?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ David said. ‘E. J. M. Her middle name was Jane.’
‘M.?’ Hasted queried.
‘A present from her first husband. His name was Mackie.’
‘Well, I think that’s about all for the present,’ Driver said. ‘I need hardly say how much we regret this tragic business. You can rest assured we’ll do all we can to catch the brute responsible. Not that there’s much consolation for you in that, I’m afraid.’
‘Not much,’ David agreed. He stood up, pocketing his pipe. ‘How did she die, Superintendent?’
‘We won’t know that until after the autopsy,’ Driver said. ‘There was a nasty wound on the back of her head. But we can’t say how it was caused. We don’t even know if it was the actual cause of death. That’s for the pathologist to determine.’
‘But you think it was a blow, don’t you? That killed her, I mean.’
‘I’d say it’s highly probable.’
Despite the lateness of the hour, neither Driver nor Hasted suggested they stay for a meal. Both men were hungry, but Hasted was anxious to get home as soon as the job permitted and Driver sensed his anxiety. They made a brief stop at Greenway’s house on the way back. The chief was not a patient invalid. He hated the enforced absence from his office, unable to believe that it could function satisfactorily without him. ‘I want to be kept fully informed,’ he had told Driver. ‘I want today’s news today, not tomorrow or the day after. The body may be shaky but the brain isn’t. So don’t hold out on me, Driver.’ And although at times it was inconvenient, Driver had done his best to comply.
Hasted waited outside in the car and considered the prospect of fatherhood for the second time. Neither he nor Sybil had firm opinions on names, although Sybil favoured ‘James’ for a boy and ‘Rosemary’ for a girl. Driver and Sybil’s sister Enid had agreed to be godparents; a decision on the third godparent would be decided later, dependent on the baby’s sex. Jason, who had developed a precocious aptitude for picking up adult expressions and mostly applying them correctly, said it did not matter to him a can of beans whether it was a boy or a girl, and gave the impression he would prefer neither. No doubt he saw the baby as a potential rival for his parents’ love and attention, which hitherto had been solely his.
Driver returned to the car with fresh information on the vehicle that had collided with his Rover. A woman who lived further down the road had heard the noise of the collision and had reached a window in time to see the Morris pass. ‘Edna Greenway says the woman is positive there were two people in front,’ Driver said. ‘Unfortunately she couldn’t describe them, although she thinks the driver was young and a man.’
‘We could have guessed that,’ Hasted said.
‘Yes. So we have two alternatives. E
ither chummy had an accomplice, or his companion was Elizabeth Doyle, alive and yet to be disposed of.’
‘If she were struggling with him it could explain the erratic driving,’ Hasted said.
‘True. All the same, I fancy the accomplice.’
The bishop made no reference to the murder in his sermon. He had taken as his text a passage from St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans—‘Let love be without dissimulation’—and murder did not fit readily into the substance he had prepared. Especially as he had not known of it until he arrived at the Vicarage. But when the congregation left the church after the service and gathered in little groups to chat, it was the murder, not the sermon, that was the main topic of conversation. Elizabeth Doyle had been a figure in the community. Not a popular figure, perhaps, but a figure nonetheless: President of the Women’s Institute, a member of the parish council, the representative for West Deering on the county housing committee. She would certainly be missed, as would her financial contributions to various local funds and causes.
Neither Andrew nor his father attended the service. They were not regular church-goers, and usually it had been Elizabeth’s bullying that had got them there. But most of West Deering and the neighbouring villages were there in force. No doubt the bishop was partly the attraction, but Frances suspected the murder had much to do with it. For herself, she had heard it from Sybil Hasted, when she had telephoned after breakfast to ask after Sybil’s condition. But how had others come by the news?
‘Straight from the horse’s mouth,’ Harvey Scott boomed when she asked him. ‘Patricia went over to the Manor yesterday evening to invite Andrew for tennis this afternoon.’ He grinned. ‘Couldn’t just telephone, of course, had to ask him in person. The Doyles had just got back from where the body was found.’
‘Poor Andrew!’ Frances said. ‘I feel so sad for him. He strikes me as such a lost person, if you know what I mean. Lost and lonely.’
‘Andrew and Elizabeth weren’t exactly close,’ Maisie Scott said. Like her two daughters she had an abundance of rich auburn hair, but the resemblance ended there. She was a cheerful little tub of a woman, with a round face in which the features—nose, mouth, eyes—seemed unnaturally large. ‘I doubt if he’ll miss her all that much.’