by Clare Curzon
That was when Piers Wilson went for the safest way out and turned State’s evidence. The other two were found guilty of murder and he took a short term for theft and fraud in an open prison. When he came out there was a new life waiting for him.
But not a long one, Yeadings reflected. The question here was – did he get himself killed as Piers Wilson or Paul Wormsley?
The last straw for the ACC seemed to be the retaining of the original typing error – Wilson happy to take on that daft name. A quirky mentality. The chances were that that was one thing about him that hadn’t changed. If, as Wormsley, he’d continued with his twisted sense of humour, whose expense had it been at? Had his quirkiness in this new life driven someone to the limits of endurance? Could that have been Chisholm because the man had found out something he could use to ruin him? Z had mentioned when she first met him that Chisholm looked like a highly successful conman. There was nothing to prove he had left Ashbourne House on the day before Wormsley’s murder. They’d only Neil Raynes’s word to go on.
Whatever the truth on that, Chisholm hadn’t been the one to kill Sheila Wilson. Yeadings had someone quite different to get on that charge. He glanced at his wristwatch, guessed Z might be back home by now, and left the motorway by exit 4 for Chesham.
Twelve minutes later he was heading up the drive to Ashbourne House.
There were several cars parked by the entrance to the house and a little crowd of people staring up at the verandah. As he watched there was a flurry of figures up there, then one of them racing across the long windows with another in close pursuit.
Too late, he accused himself, and watched the collision, then the body fall, slowly turning, on to the stone steps below.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Gabriel Fenner had arrived at the house at about 5.10 that afternoon, looking pale and strained according to Miss Barnes, who had watched him park opposite her windows and sit deep in thought for some five minutes before he left the car, approached the front door, then went back to check he had actually locked the car’s doors. He seemed for once uncertain, perhaps ill.
His was an older model, she explained pedantically hours later, so it had only central locking, not remote. But he had already secured it, automatically, as one does.
He had let himself into the house, having presumably retained his daughter’s bunch of keys. Since neither Sheila’s handbag nor its contents had ever surfaced after the murder, Yeadings was left to wonder how he had come into possession of the key-ring.
It was assumed that he had gone upstairs, rung his ex-wife’s doorbell and gained access. Some five minutes later Rosemary Zyczynski had arrived, had driven to the rear and garaged her car. As she approached the front door Miss Barnes darted out to let her in. ‘I’m a little uneasy,’ she confessed. ‘Mrs Winter’s ex-husband is with her. He’s not been here long, but he looked so strange, really odd somehow. Perhaps it’s foolish of me to worry, but so many awful things have already happened … Do you think, as a friend of hers, you might just look in and see she’s all right?’
Two other cars were now coming up the drive, Major Phillips’s yellow Triumph and a Mondeo which Z recognized as belonging to DI Salmon. The major took charge of Miss Barnes, leading her away for tea and scones. Z felt obliged to wait until her senior officer should decide how warranted Miss Barnes’s fears might be.
When Salmon and Beaumont joined her she explained the situation. The DI looked grim. ‘We may need you later,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile, stay down here.’ He stomped across the hall, making for the staircase.
‘Mea culpa,’ Beaumont breathed. ‘He overheard my end of a call from the Boss. He guessed what he’d gone after in London and he’s determined to get it in first.’
‘Get what in?’
‘The arrest. We’ve been following Fenner since a patrolman reported in that he was heading out this way.’
‘Sergeant Beaumont!’ roared Salmon from the gallery. ‘I need you here! Now!’
So what had the Boss driven to London for? Z asked herself. And why was everyone several steps ahead of her? There must be some vital clue that she had missed.
From below she heard voices at Mrs Winter’s door. The two detectives had walked right through and left it open. The voices continued, the woman’s a high-pitched complaint, Salmon’s a rumble, Fenner’s bitingly harsh. Z ignored instructions and began to follow them up.
Now Fenner’s voice had risen in protest, almost desperate. There was a clamour as they all joined in. His final cry of, ‘No! No, you can’t! Vanessa!’ was cut off by Beaumont’s monotonous recital. ‘Gabriel Fenner I am arresting you for the murder of Sheila Winter. You have the right to remain silent …’
How – Z marvelled – had they reached that conclusion? Had she been so completely taken in by the man’s apparent controlled grief that she’d failed to see some indication of his guilt? Surely whatever it was that took Yeadings to London, it couldn’t have swung things around so, at this point in a fruitless investigation.
She was on the threshold now and followed them in. Vanessa Winter stood against the opposite wall, mouth agape, the fingers of one hand tearing at her tousled hair, hysterically incapable of speech. Z went across to take care of her. That was surely what Salmon had expected of her.
But the woman was a wild thing, crouching, defending herself with a bottle that she drew from behind her and brandished like a weapon. She turned from Fenner to Z as she approached. ‘Vanessa, it’s all right,’ Z told her.
‘Mind out!’ Fenner shouted. ‘For God’s sake. Can’t you see she’s insane?’ He flung himself towards her, arms outflung.
Then the whole scene seemed to explode. While the others stood petrified, Vanessa sprang at the nearest window and threw it wide. Then she was away, Fenner the first to recover and be after her.
Beaumont and Salmon made for the opening and became wedged for a second before they were through. Z heard Vanessa’s banshee wail as she ran towards the verandah’s end. The men rushed headlong after her.
Lights from indoors shone out on the wrought iron screen. The tall mirror set in it glowed like an open doorway promising escape. Then the hideous image sprang out at her, framed in it – Sheila, risen from the dead, leaping at her with – only a pace or so behind – Gabriel swooping like an avenging angel.
Cut off on both sides as the detectives came panting up, she twisted away, fell against the verandah rail, shrieked at the hunting pack, hung rigid a brief instant, then flung herself over.
Her scream went on until the awful sound of her body reaching ground.
Chapter Twenty-Six
It was after eight o’clock before things quietened completely and all but two of the cars had dispersed, leaving a single uniformed constable to guard the taped off area from which the body had been removed. Lights would shine on from some of the windows until nearly dawn as residents picked over the possibilities and found their several ways of dealing with the new horror.
Surrounded by discarded coffee cups in her apartment, Rosemary Zyczynski was in consultation with the superintendent and her fellow DS. As bemused as any of them, at least she clung to the consolation that she’d been right about Fenner. There was no question of charging him once Yeadings had intervened. Not that the unfortunate man was in very good condition after DI Salmon’s considerable weight had flattened him to the verandah’s floor among Sheila’s tubs of evergreens, and Beaumont twisted his arms back to cuff his wrists.
‘Not Fenner,’ Yeadings had insisted, panting upstairs to take overall charge and forestall serious charges of illegal arrest with actual bodily harm.
‘She wasn’t running from him, but from justice,’ he now explained. ‘I’d say from her conscience too, if I was convinced she had one. That must have disappeared some time back, along with her sense of reality. Fenner was right to hope for her being sectioned. He’d pity enough not to want her facing a charge of homicide.’
‘So he’d guessed?’ Z asked.
‘He’d worked it out, partly from his knowledge of the way she was, and what she wore.’
‘She was wearing one of Sheila’s dresses.’ The details of that crumpled body were still fixed in Z’s mind. ‘I knew she’d been raiding her daughter’s wardrobe since Sheila was killed, but I remembered it too from another time. That was the dress I saw dropped on the floor when I mistook it for Sheila making love in the drawing-room as I came in.
‘But Sheila wasn’t the sort to cheat on the man she intended to marry. And I believed Jonathan Baker when he swore he’d never been inside the house since the conversion was completed.
‘I realize now it was Vanessa I saw, but I still can’t guess at the man.’
‘That’s interesting.’ Yeadings said, ‘but what I was referring to was the mink coat. Her husband bought it for Vanessa almost twenty-five years ago, when she was making a name for herself as April Fenner. Those are the initials embroidered in the lining. She hung on to the coat even after it was politically incorrect to be seen in furs. Its monetary value had shrunk but she treasured its connections; the memories of past glories. She must have been panicked out of her mind when she let it be used to cover the body.’
‘By whom?’ Beaumont demanded.
‘I’ll tell you what I think. We knew Sheila came back here after work on the night she was murdered. Her ‘Nat’ was waiting for her out at the hotel in Burnham Beeches. She was elated, full of excitement about her coming wedding. Something slipped out and Vanessa pounced on it. She saw it as a threat of desertion. And the girl was going on to a happiness that she could never attain herself. As Fenner guessed, there was a burst of ungovernable anger.
‘Sheila had snatched a sandwich because dinner at the hotel would be late. She started to eat it in the bathroom while she ran a shower. Vanessa took a kitchen knife and followed Sheila in. That’s where she caught her, naked and unprepared. And that’s where the experts will be looking for bloodstains tomorrow. A bathroom’s an easy place to sluice clean, but there are always some minute traces that get overlooked.’
‘But who helped her? She couldn’t drive. We’re agreed, aren’t we? – that there was a second person involved in disposing of the body.’
‘Who would she turn to but the mystery lover Z now says she caught in flagrante delicto? Let’s consider who that might be.’
‘Chisholm, Raynes or Wormsley,’ Beaumont listed them. ‘We can disregard Major Phillips, who’s in full pursuit of Miss Barnes.’
‘So, with Wormsley deceased and Chisholm absent, we’d best go and talk to young Mr Raynes, who has been lying suspiciously low during all this recent kerfuffle,’ Yeadings observed.
Z got up slowly off the sofa and stretched her stiff legs. She walked through to the kitchen. They heard her open a cupboard door, then beat with a saucepan base on the water pipe supplying the sink unit. They waited in a curious silence until a minute or two later there came an answering, muffled tapping.
‘He’ll be coming round,’ she announced, and went to leave the apartment door ajar.
‘Prison-style communication,’ said Beaumont admiringly
There was a short wait, then a tentative rap on the outer door and the young man came in, unshaven and in a crumpled shirt. ‘What’s this?’ he demanded, eyeing the others with hostility.
‘Like it looks,’ Beaumont said shortly. ‘A court of inquiry. We want to know if you were Vanessa Winter’s lover.’
They watched the boy’s face redden, grow purple at the shock of the implication. He was past speech. ‘Neil,’ Z said gently, ‘he doesn’t understand.’
‘She was dis – gust – ing,’ he ground out at last.
‘Neil, she’s dead.’
It shocked him. ‘How? When?’
‘Sit down,’ Yeadings ordered him. ‘It’s been a shock for everyone. She went over the verandah railing some hours ago. Didn’t you hear all the coming and going?’
Raynes shook his head. ‘I’ve been asleep.’ He looked sheepish. ‘I’d missed out on some of my medication so I took a double dose to catch up. I went out like a light. Then I heard Rosemary hammering. What’s happened?’
They all looked towards Yeadings. How would he put it?
‘Dr Fenner was here,’ he began. ‘He suspected that his ex-wife had killed his daughter. He says he came to try and make her go away while he arranged for her to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act.’
‘So that she couldn’t be tried?’
‘That was his idea. But several other people arrived more or less at once and she panicked. She tried to run away, fled along the verandah, and then … It’s not quite sure what she thought, but there’s a full length mirror there at the end where this apartment’s verandah begins …’
‘She was wearing a dress of Sheila’s,’ Z said haltingly. Except for height and age they were quite alike; same corn-silk hair, cut the same way. I think she saw her reflection and thought it was Sheila.’
‘Her ghost, wanting revenge.’
‘Something like that,’ Yeadings agreed. ‘We’ll never know for sure, but she couldn’t face it. She jumped.’
‘Better that way. She was mad, you know.’ Neil’s voice held a mixture of shame and relief. ‘I’d have had to go away. She was voracious. It was awful. If you’d seen her …’
‘She tried to seduce you?’
He nodded. ‘Twice.’
‘But you didn’t …’
‘God, no!’ It was heartfelt. Nobody could doubt him.
‘Do you suppose,’ Beaumont suggested, ‘that she tried anything of the sort with your friend Mr Chisholm?’
The answer was a barking laugh. ‘Even she would have known better. He could have anyone he wanted, and he’s – particular, disciplined. If he was the last man left on the planet and she was the only woman … Never! I tell you, I know him.’
It sounded heartfelt enough, but how well does any young man know an older one, Yeadings wondered.
‘Which leaves Wormsley,’ Beaumont concluded, wholly convinced by the young man’s denial.
‘Ah yes, Wormsley. Since he too is safely dead, let me tell you about him,’ Yeadings offered. ‘As you may know I was called out to Kidlington this afternoon, for a word with the ACC (Crime).
‘It appears that Wormsley’s real name was Piers Wilson.’ And he explained to them how the Japanese car scam had worked and that the villains had fallen out over its outcome. ‘So he may or may not have been involved in that murder, and he’d escaped from it almost unscathed. What he couldn’t afford was to blot his lily-white new identity by association with another killing.
‘I’m assuming it was Wormsley whom Vanessa rang to beg for help when she’d stabbed her daughter. When he got here he found he was up to the neck in it. He’d no connection with the daughter, whatever his secret relations with Vanessa might be. He opted for dumping the body nude, assuming suspicion must fall on a lover. But he had to wrap it in something and helped himself out of Vanessa’s wardrobe to a fur coat she’d never worn for a couple of decades. We don’t know how he got back from Henley. If Vanessa called a cab from a local firm that wouldn’t have been investigated from the Henley end. But I doubt she had the courage to go there herself. It’s more likely Wormsley got his assistant from the studio to drive out and fetch him. He had some reason to trust her discretion, because she provided him with his later alibi when we investigated the break-in. It would have been his quirky little touch to take the half-eaten sandwich along for display with the hip flask. All props for the dramatic scene.’
‘That was Wormsley too?’ Neil asked, incredulous.
‘It’s more than possible,’ Yeadings told them. ‘Later we shall be opening up his apartment. A locksmith will de-activate the electronic system and our experts will conduct a search. Then we’ll know a lot more about the man.’
‘Searching for what?’ the young man pressed.
‘For whatever we find,’ he said simply.
Z shook her head. ‘It’s all gone so wr
ong. Poor Beattie had meant things to be very different: her dream of creating a set of friends brought together at random. A meeting of unlike minds.’
‘A substitute family.’ Yeadings nodded. ‘And then there’s Sheila Winter’s dream too, tragically ruined.’
‘Not entirely,’ Z reminded him. ‘Her shares in the garden centre will go to Fenner now, won’t they? He’ll have majority control and make the bank appoint financial and operational managers. So something will have survived.’
‘Back to normality,’ Neil murmured.
‘What’s normal?’ Yeadings asked sombrely.
There was an unhelpful silence.
‘God, I sound like Pontius Pilate going on about Truth.’ He rounded impatiently on Neil. ‘Isn’t it time you came clean about your friend Chisholm? Just between the four of us. Sub rosa, so to speak. Exactly what is he up to?’
Neil hesitated, then gestured with open hands. ‘It’s quite legal. But risky. He makes trips abroad to rescue children taken away in a tug-of-love. It’s usually English mothers who’ve won custody rights, after mixed marriages break down. Clients find him by word of mouth, or sometimes on the internet, in encoded messages. He has an office in St Albans – Chisholm and Watkins, Factors. There’s big money in it sometimes. Other times he barely breaks even.’
‘Legalized kidnap?’ Z marvelled.
‘That sort of thing.’
Yeadings made no comment, rising to take his leave. ‘Listen folks, it’s getting late and I for one am ready for bed. So I’ll say goodnight and go see if I still have a family.’
Beaumont was preparing his final report on the case. Perhaps it was contact with Max that made it come out with a flavour of the press: ‘On Tuesday November 19th, nine days after the discovery of Sheila Winter’s fur-wrapped body in the car park at Henley-on-Thames, a SOCO team entered Flat 5 at Ashbourne House, which was the registered property of Paul Wormsley, deceased, originally known as Piers Wilson …’