Death in the Family

by Jill McGown

  Who the hell was Ian Waring, and when was he supposed to have attempted to murder him?

  * * *

  CHAPTER NINE

  Judy opened her eyes to the early-morning sunshine, wondering, just for a second, why the dread in the pit of her stomach. And why the silence?

  The dread was for Emma. The silence was because this was the first time Judy had woken of her own accord since the eighth of January.

  She got up and padded quickly through to the nursery, smiling when she saw Charlotte, like her father, soundly, deeply, earnestly asleep. Judy had slept like that once, but her ability to sleep through anything but very sunny mornings hadn’t been able entirely to withstand Lloyd’s habit of staying up until all hours before coming to bed, had been further eroded by pregnancy, and had been destroyed altogether by the living alarm clock in the cot.

  If only they had found Emma, this would have been a pleasant change, solitary Saturday morning moments when no one was demanding her attention. But Lloyd’s mystery baby seemed to belong to Kayleigh, so that ray of hope, never exactly brilliant, had faded away.

  She pulled on a robe and went into the kitchen, wondering if she dared try to make herself breakfast. She always used to have a cooked breakfast, but she had found it too difficult after Charlotte’s arrival; a plate of bacon and eggs would make her feel a whole lot better about life, she was sure. Lloyd would feed Charlotte if she announced that she was hungry while Judy was still eating. He hadn’t been home until late and he had to go into work, so it wasn’t very fair to expect him to do that, but she risked it anyway.

  Charlotte graciously allowed Judy to make and eat her own breakfast before she demanded to know where hers was, and Lloyd, showered and shaved, came into the kitchen to find Charlotte being burped. He reached for his coffee—all he ever had in the morning—with one hand and with the other seized the digital camera that he had bought before Charlotte was even born.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that! I must look awful. You’re never going to look at them all anyway.”

  “Yes, I am. You can do all sorts of things with them once they’re on the computer. If you look awful, my love, I can make you look radiant. I can even turn you into someone else altogether, if that seems preferable.”

  The man who once positively backed out of a room with a computer in it had discovered that they Did Things, and that was all he needed to know. Lloyd loved gadgets. Judy shook her head. “Are you going to need a lift to a petrol station? Because if you are, you’d better put that thing down and get dressed. You said you were going to Barton to see Kayleigh before you went to work.”

  “Oh—yes. I’d forgotten about the car.” He drank some coffee and disappeared again while Judy got herself and Charlotte ready.

  “We’re going to the garage,” she said to Charlotte. “Where we have to buy not just petrol, but a whole new petrol can, because Daddy’s left his somewhere, and he’s not sure where. Then we have to go and put the petrol in Daddy’s car, because he let it run out. He’s had to leave it on a road in a business park, and it will probably have been vandalized, if not stolen. And he lectures me.”

  Charlotte beamed at her, and Judy felt guilty about having what Nina Crawford had lost. And about wanting to go back to work, especially now that she knew she might be going to run Malworth CID. It would be a challenge; it was hard to win back the trust of the community when it had been lost. But it would be a challenge that she would relish, and she had liked what she had seen of McArthur, so that hadn’t put her off.

  But that young woman with her Gucci shoes and briefcase and her old pram had. Charlotte meant everything to Judy, she knew that now, and she didn’t want ever to think of her as a chore, a burden to be off-loaded, as coming second. But Judy did want to go back to work, so did that make her just the same as Ms. Gucci? She would see what Lloyd thought, when he wasn’t so busy. For now, all he could think of was his murder investigation.

  And despite Dean Fletcher having come on the scene, Lloyd still seemed to suspect Ian Waring, Judy found out, as she drove him to the petrol station. “But why would he do that?” she asked. “Surely you don’t think he murdered the woman because he didn’t want to go to Australia?”

  “Because she was rich, perhaps.”

  “Does he get her money?”

  Lloyd shrugged.

  “Anyway—didn’t you say he was with his ex-partner when the postman heard the row going on?” She was watching the car behind her in the rearview mirror; he was a little too close for comfort. She had become very aware of that since having Charlotte in the back. “He couldn’t be in two places at once.”

  “Why does everyone assume that this row was with Lesley Newton?”

  “Because she’s the one who was found dead.” The driver behind her turned off, much to Judy’s relief. She wondered about one of these stickers telling people there was a baby in the back, but she decided against it. People always thought they could stop in time and would whether there was a sticker or not. Besides, she had always hated the stickers before.

  “We have rows,” Lloyd pointed out. “Nobody finds battered bodies lying around as a result.”

  “Not yet.” She signaled the turn for the service station.

  “Isn’t the row more likely to have been with Kayleigh herself? Who else could tell Fletcher with any authority that he wasn’t the father?”

  That seemed reasonable. “Do you think that’s true?”

  “I doubt it. I’m still having trouble accepting that Kayleigh had relations with one man, never mind more than one. I suspect he came causing trouble, and she told him that purely to get rid of him.”

  “But if Waring had already killed Lesley before he took the van back to Theresa Black,” Judy said when Lloyd had returned with his new petrol can and was filling it up, “that means Kayleigh and Fletcher were having this argument with Lesley’s dead body in the house.”

  “Yes,” said Lloyd thoughtfully. “It does, doesn’t it? And it wouldn’t surprise me. Fletcher says he fell over a dead body, and perhaps he did, because I think Kayleigh knew her mother was dead before I told her. She seemed to know something had happened to her, at any rate. And she was anxious to know where Ian was.”

  “Of course she knew something had happened to her mother—the police were all over the place. And she wanted to know where Ian was because she needed to see a friendly face.”

  “I’m not convinced his was a friendly face.” Lloyd went off to pay for the petrol, and Judy realized what else was wrong with Lloyd’s theory.

  “Don’t you think Theresa Black would have noticed the blood on Waring’s clothes, if he’d done it before he left?” she asked when they were under way again.

  “He had other clothes there. He could have dumped the ones he was wearing, and changed.”

  “Where did he dump them? No one’s found any bloodstained clothes, have they?”

  “Well, no, not unless you count the ones Mrs. Newton was unpacking, and that would mean he was wearing a size ten floral print summer dress when he did it, so all right, he didn’t dump the clothes. But he could have been stark naked, for all we know.”

  “Why? Or are you saying it was planned?”

  “Oh, I’m sure it was planned.”

  He obviously wasn’t going to tell her why he was so sure, which meant it was something he had yet to prove. But Waring did have blood on his clothes, which seemed to negate what Lloyd had just said. Judy pointed that out.

  “So he did,” he conceded. “And yet, whatever way you look at it—whether he murdered her or not—there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for him to have blood on his clothes. So it’s a little puzzle, isn’t it?”

  It wasn’t really a puzzle, Judy thought as she drove to where Lloyd had left his car. Just because seasoned police officers, used to the aftermath of violence, used to dealing with road accidents, recognized death when they saw it didn’t mean that Waring did—he could have tried to revive Lesley, however useless the
attempt. Or could simply have held her in his arms, unwilling to believe what had happened; Freddie was quite right—there was no right way to react to sudden and violent death.

  But Lloyd was into his theorizing stride. “So let’s say that Waring has done away with Lesley, and has left the cottage. Kayleigh comes back from wherever she’s been—Waring got rid of her on some pretext or another—and she’s on her own with Alexandra when Dean Fletcher arrives. He argues with her about taking Alexandra to Australia, and she tells him he’s not Alexandra’s father to get rid of him.”

  Judy nodded.

  “But he doesn’t give up, so Kayleigh, carrying Alexandra, tries to leave by way of the utility room. She’s still in the kitchen when she puts the utility room light on, and she sees her mother’s body. She comes back out of the kitchen just as Waring arrives home. She realizes that he must have killed her, and runs out of the house, into the woods, and stays there until she feels brave enough to come back.”

  “OK.”

  “No objections yet? This must be a record.” He thought for a moment before carrying on. “Meanwhile, Waring and Dean are left in the house. Waring can’t trot out his story about having found the body, so he has to dispose of the witnesses, starting with Dean. He hopes to deal with Kayleigh later.”

  Now poor Ian Waring was turning into a would-be multiple murderer, but Judy still didn’t raise any objections. Theorizing was how Lloyd disposed of his little puzzles, and their disposal made the big puzzle easier to solve, according to him. He was very often right.

  “Yes. . . .” Lloyd expanded on his theme. “Waring fought with Dean, and the fight took them into the sitting room, where Dean was pushed into the mirror, getting covered in cuts from the broken glass. Possibly was attacked with that little table, getting the blow to his head, cracking his ribs.”

  Judy smiled. “Why didn’t Waring just use the doorstop again? It would have been more effective.”

  “Because it was still in the utility room. And Dean Fletcher is covered in cuts, which is more than anyone else is—he must have got them somehow. And the cracked ribs.”

  “Perhaps he fell over the branch of a tree, like he said. He was found in the woods, wasn’t he?”

  Lloyd ignored her mundane solution. “He managed to get away, and ran through to the kitchen, with Waring following. In the utility room, they struggled again—disturbing the body, and each getting the victim’s blood on their clothing—until Dean finally got away from him and ran into the garage.”

  “Intrepid, isn’t he?” Judy pulled into the curb ahead of Lloyd’s car, which had remained unmolested during the night. “He’s got cracked ribs and concussion, but Dean wins through.”

  “He didn’t have concussion,” said Lloyd in defense of his story. “Just a bang on the head. He was woozy, but not concussed. Anyway, Waring runs out of the utility room via the kitchen and hallway—leaving shoe prints—arriving at the front door as Dean drives out. And Dean runs the car into him.”

  “Why?”

  “To stop him doing anything to Kayleigh.”

  “And then he kindly stopped to ring the police?” She undid her seat belt. “Are you going to put that petrol in your car, or what?”

  They got out, and Lloyd unlocked his petrol cap. Judy checked Charlotte, who had predictably fallen asleep, and felt again a pang of guilt.

  “No reason why he shouldn’t ring the police. He wouldn’t want the man to die, because it would make it more difficult for him if he got caught.” Lloyd emptied the contents of the petrol can into his tank as he spoke. “But, obviously, he had no intention of getting caught—he didn’t even want us knowing he’d been there, since that would land him in trouble, so he gave Waring’s name; then he drove off, and abandoned the car.” He put the empty can in the boot and slammed it shut. “Well? Does it pass muster?”

  It accounted for the shoe prints and the blood on Fletcher’s and Waring’s clothes. It accounted for Kayleigh wandering round carrying a fourteen-pound baby for three and a half hours. Judy couldn’t see anything immediately wrong with it, except that it was nonsense, but Lloyd knew that already. She watched him drive off, then got back into the car, and drove Charlotte home, firmly putting the missing Emma and her own shortcomings as a mother out of her mind and concentrating on Lloyd’s investigation instead.

  Lloyd didn’t believe his wild theories; they were just possible answers to the questions thrown up by an investigation, until they could be disproved. He wanted them to be challenged, to have the holes in them pointed out, so that he could see the facts more clearly. Judy hadn’t been able to find much in the way of elimination that time, so she probably hadn’t helped very much; it wasn’t as easy when she was having to work on his puzzles secondhand.

  But she had a little puzzle of her own, because while Lloyd didn’t think for a minute that all that had gone on exactly as he had outlined it, he really did seem to suspect Waring of this murder, and it was for no reason at all that Judy could see.

  It was DCI Lloyd, Mrs. Spears said, and once again Kayleigh found herself in the quiet room. She had discovered that it was a room that you had to have permission to go into; if someone was in there who wanted to be alone, you couldn’t just barge in on her. But the system didn’t seem to work with Kayleigh; she hadn’t been alone in it for five minutes.

  DCI Lloyd smiled his serious smile and she and Mrs. Spears sat down, but he didn’t; he walked slowly round the room, looking at the pictures on the walls—drawings that the children had done, mostly. “I’d like to talk to you about Alexandra,” he said.

  Kayleigh’s heart gave such a dip that it hurt.

  “I think I was mistaken,” he went on, “when I assumed that Alexandra was your sister. She isn’t your sister, is she?”

  Kayleigh shook her head, waiting to see what was coming before allowing herself to speak.

  “And last night, I spoke to Dean.” DCI Lloyd wasn’t looking at her; he was putting his glasses on to read the names of the children who had done the pictures. He glanced at her as he said Dean’s name.

  They’d got Dean. She still couldn’t understand why he had gone to the cottage. And why did he take her mother’s car? That must be how they found him.

  “Was it you and Dean who were having the argument about Alexandra?”

  She didn’t know what to do. But if she said that it was, then they might not work out that it must have been Phil, arguing with her mother. She swallowed and nodded.

  “All right, Kayleigh.” He gave her shoulder a little pat. “I’ll leave you alone now.” He walked to the door and turned back. “We haven’t been able to get hold of Mr. Roddam yet, but we’ll get him here as soon as we can. Do you think you might feel able to talk to him?”

  Kayleigh nodded again. If she could talk to Phil on his own, it might make things a bit easier.

  They had given him trousers and an open-neck shirt, old but clean; he was clearly going to be here for some time, or it would have been paper overalls. Now he was in an interview room, watching while they set up the tape. He had waived his right to have a solicitor present. In his experience, solicitors just complicated things, and what he was going to tell them was very simple.

  “You know why you’re here, Mr. Fletcher?” said Chief Inspector Lloyd.

  “No.”

  “Well, for one thing,” said the man who had called himself Acting Detective Inspector Sandwell, “you’ve admitted taking and driving away a car without the owner’s consent.”

  “Fair enough.” Dean turned to Lloyd. “But you arrested me for trying to murder someone I’ve never even heard of.”

  “Ian Waring,” said Lloyd. “Who owns Brook Way Cottage. He’s in intensive care at Barton General Hospital, having been run down in his own driveway, and our laboratory has confirmed that the car you’ve admitted taking and driving away is the car that was used to run him down.”

  Dean didn’t understand. He hadn’t run anyone down. Why did they think he had? Ian Waring mus
t be the guy at the cottage. But . . . it didn’t make sense. If that’s who he was and they found him in his driveway, then who had run him down? And when? Dean thought about those desperate moments in the garage and felt himself grow pale as he realized what must have happened. Just like when they had interviewed him about Kayleigh, he was discovering that he had done what they were accusing him of doing, and once again, he hadn’t known he’d done it. “Oh, Jesus,” he said.

  “Go on, Mr. Fletcher.”

  “Oh, God. Oh, look—I swear to God, I didn’t know I’d hit anyone. I just backed out as fast as I could, and there was all this stuff piled up in the back, you know? I couldn’t see where I was going. I just turned the car left so I could drive out of the gates frontwards, and I knew I’d hit something, but I swear . . . I didn’t know it was him!” He couldn’t believe it; of all the things that had happened yesterday, he had thought that taking the car was the least of his troubles.

  “And if you had known you’d hit someone,” Sandwell said, his voice heavily sarcastic, “you would of course have stopped and rendered assistance?”

  “No, I’m not saying that! I wanted out of there, and I’d probably have just carried on—but I didn’t know I’d hit anyone. I thought I’d banged into one of those pillars. It wasn’t deliberate, for God’s sake!”

  Lloyd stood up then; he started wandering round, like he’d done last night in the hospital. Dean watched him for a moment.

  “All right,” said Sandwell. “What were you doing at the cottage in the first place?”

  “I thought Kayleigh would be there.” Dean prepared himself to tell his story, but as far as he could see, Lloyd wasn’t even going to listen, never mind believe him. “I didn’t get an answer when I knocked, but I could see there was a side door off the garage into the house, and it was open, so I went in that way. But it was dark, and I tripped over something heavy.”