Scene of Crime

by Jill McGown

  “Did you hear any of this, Mrs. Jones?”

  “No,” she said. “But I had the television on. I thought maybe that’s what Geoffrey had heard, because they’d been having a row.” She smiled a little. “Well, they always are in soaps, aren’t they?”

  “And that couldn’t have been what you heard?”

  “No, of course it couldn’t! I know the difference between the television and real people. Besides, they don’t use that sort of language in soaps.”

  “What sort of language?”

  “Well, you know,” said Mr. Jones, and lowered his voice, glancing apologetically at his wife. “I heard him call her a ‘fucking bitch.’ ”

  “You’re certain it was from next door?”

  “Well, I couldn’t see anything, because of the hedge, but it was definitely coming from that direction—and it sounded as though they were outside. It certainly wasn’t the TV.”

  “Right,” said Tom. “Then you heard the glass breaking?”

  “Well, I went upstairs and I heard it then. It would be about five or so minutes later, I suppose. I looked out of the back bedroom window to try to find out what was going on, and I saw this boy running out of Eric Watson’s garden and off down the back road. Mr. Watson was in the garden—he shouted at him to stop, but he didn’t, of course.”

  They hadn’t been told that the first time around. All they had known was that Mr. Jones saw him running down the back road. But the back gates to the Bignalls’ garden were locked, so jumping the wall into the neighboring garden would be the quickest way out. Was that how he had come in as well? The hoped-for evidence on the gate wouldn’t be forthcoming if that was the case. And the bit about Watson shouting at the intruder hadn’t been mentioned before either. But perhaps Mr. Jones was embroidering the story second time around, Tom thought.

  “Can you remember exactly what he said?”

  “I think he shouted, ‘Come back here, you little bugger,’ or something like that.” Another glance in his wife’s direction.

  Mr. Jones clearly wasn’t used to swearing in the house; he was almost enjoying the freedom that factual reporting had given him to indulge. And it seemed definite enough, thought Tom. Unless he was a pathological embroiderer of stories, it did seem that he’d heard Watson shouting.

  “And from up there I could see the Bignalls’ French window was wide open, and all the rain was getting in. And there was no light on, so obviously they didn’t know. I didn’t know it was broken, though. It’s just one pane—it wasn’t obvious.”

  “I made him go next door then,” said Mrs. Jones. “To tell them about their French window being open.”

  “So I went and knocked on the front door, but I couldn’t get a reply,” said Mr. Jones. “The front bedroom light was on, but everywhere else was in darkness.”

  “He wouldn’t phone you,” his wife said. “He kept saying they were probably making up after the row and didn’t want to answer the door, didn’t you, Geoffrey?”

  Mr. Jones looked a little embarrassed. “Well, you know,” he mumbled. “They’re that sort of couple.”

  “Oh?” said Tom. “What sort of couple?”

  “Well—you know. Rows and things.”

  “Violent rows?”

  “Oh, no,” said Mrs. Jones. “Never. He was always trying to calm her down when she had one of her turns. She was just a bit—well, highly strung. Sometimes she got a bit depressed, you know. You’d hear her now and then, going on at him. She thought the world of him, really, but she was very suspicious—you’d hear her sometimes screaming at him that he didn’t love her, that he just stayed with her for—”

  “Christine!” said Mr. Jones.

  Mrs. Jones looked mutinous. “Well, it’s true!” she said.

  “Just stayed with her for what?” asked Tom. This was getting very interesting, assuming it wasn’t all just exaggeration.

  “Her money,” said Mrs. Jones. “But she didn’t mean it—I know she didn’t. She was always telling me how much she loved him, and how she wished she didn’t say things like that, because she knew they weren’t true.”

  “Was she the one with the money, then?”

  “Well,” said Mr. Jones, “I don’t know about that, particularly. She had a nice income from a trust her grandfather set up for her. Poor girl lost her parents when she was very young. Her grandfather brought her up on his own—he lost his wife in the same accident. I think that’s why she confided in Christine like she did. A sort of mother figure.”

  “How long have you known her?”

  “They moved in when they got married,” said Mrs. Jones. “Seven years ago, now. They’re a nice couple, really.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Well,” she said. “You know. They were. But she made his life a bit difficult—she knew she did. They almost split up at one point, but they got over that. She would come and see me when she needed to get something off her chest.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Jones. “Like I say, they argued all the time, and then they’d make up. So that’s what I thought they were doing.”

  “But I didn’t think that was very likely,” said Mrs. Jones. “There was the breaking glass and that boy running away and everything. And even if they were doing what he thought they were doing, they could still have been broken into, I said. So eventually he phoned you.”

  “Were you at home earlier in the evening, Mrs. Jones?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t notice anything today about teatime, did you? We’ve been told that kids were making a bit of a nuisance of themselves.”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’ve seen gangs of boys from the London Road estate here quite often, though. They’re a bit rowdy, and they can make a bit of a mess, but they don’t really do any harm.”

  “They’re probably the ones doing the break-ins,” said Mr. Jones. “Don’t do any harm, my foot.”

  “Would you mind letting me see the view from the back bedroom?” asked Tom, getting up.

  After a show of reluctance, Mr. Jones agreed that he didn’t mind enough actually to prohibit it. Upstairs, Tom looked out of the window, getting the lay of the land. A six-foot-high wall ran along the rear of the properties on this side of the road, punctuated along its length by wooden gates to the driveways leading to the double garages. The high hedge between the Jones’ garden and that of the Bignalls would have meant that Mr. Jones had no view of the Bignalls’ garden, or of the French windows, until he came up to this vantage point. A low wall separated the Bignalls’ garden from their neighbor’s on the other side. Bricks were piled up neatly beside it; one pile, however, lay scattered on the ground, about halfway down. The intruder could have knocked them over in his haste to leave.

  Tom could see reasonably well because now the lights at the rear were on, but that had obviously not been the case when Mr. Jones looked out of this window earlier. The back road itself was a short, unlit service road, and behind that lay a small wood, so no light was to be had there. He would have been able to see someone running through Watson’s gate two gardens away, but it was hard to see how he had seen anything more definite than that on this rainy, starless, moonless night.

  “It’s very dark,” he said. “How could you be sure the boy you saw running away was black?”

  “Watson’s got one of these high-power security lights,” he said. “Goes on as soon as there’s any movement, floods the place with light. I could see that boy as clearly as if it was daylight.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “He was black. I told you.”

  “Yes,” said Tom, his patience once again severely tested. “Anything else? What he was wearing, perhaps? Did he have short hair, or dreadlocks, or what? Was he fat, thin, tall, short … how old would you say he was?”

  “He was black,” repeated Mr. Jones, with a shrug.

  “Mr. Jones, can’t you just tell me a bit more than that?”

  Mr. Jones sighed again. “Definitely young, smallish—maybe a child,
maybe a teenager. Wearing the sort of thing they wear.”

  The sort of thing who wore? Black people? Teenagers? Burglars, maybe. The newspaper cartoon image of a burglar complete with mask and striped jersey and his bag of stolen goods over his shoulder came into Tom’s mind. He frowned as he realized something.

  “You saw this boy immediately after hearing the window break?”

  “Yes.”

  Tom didn’t know what, if anything, was missing from next door, but he did know that the intruder had time to make the usual sort of mess. Drawers had been pulled out, cupboards opened, shelves disturbed, and it certainly looked as though items were missing from them. So if this youth had run away the minute the window was broken, it seemed more likely he was a lookout who had gotten cold feet rather than the actual burglar. Whoever was doing the actual burgling might still have been inside. If Mr. Jones hadn’t wasted almost half an hour between hearing the altercation and phoning the police, they might have arrived with the intruder still on the premises. Or at least in time to save Mrs. Bignall.

  “Was this boy carrying anything?” he asked.

  Mr. Jones frowned, and thought. “No,” he said eventually. “No, now that you mention it, I don’t think he was. He was running very fast—you know? Arms going like pistons. He couldn’t have been carrying anything.”

  Well, at least they could try finding the lookout, if only Mr. Jones could see past the color of his skin to give a decent description. Once they had him, there would be no problem. He was obviously already alarmed, and once he found out that his partner in crime had caused someone’s death, he would be very eager to shift the blame.

  Tom tried again, dredging up the interviewing techniques he was supposed to apply when dealing with honest, upright citizens who had inadvertently become mixed up in a criminal investigation. “Now that you’ve got a picture of him in your head, can you remember anything about what he was wearing? Anything at all about him?”

  Mr. Jones was shaking his head slowly, but then he stopped and frowned again. “One of those bomber jacket things,” he said. “Shiny. Green, maybe. Yes. Yes, I think it was green. But Mr. Watson might be able to give you a better description—he was much closer to him than I was. He was standing by his greenhouse, and the boy was at his gate.”

  Yes, thought Tom, looking over at the greenhouse. He would only be about ten feet away from the boy. The only problem was that Mr. Watson said he hadn’t seen or heard anything or anyone at all, and he had once been a policeman himself, according to the uniforms. But while Mr. Jones might not be someone Tom had taken to readily, it seemed unlikely that he’d imagined all this, so Watson was definitely worth a visit.

  “Thank you,” he said, making his way back to the stairs. “You’ve been a great help. And I’m sorry if we’ve inconvenienced you.”

  “It’s a terrible business. In this neighborhood, too.”

  Lloyd pulled up in the once-quiet street with its handful of well-to-do terraced houses, now alive with vehicles and urgency, and looked at Carl Bignall. “If you’d prefer to go to a neighbor or a friend,” he began, “I can—”

  “No.” Bignall opened the car door. “No, I’m all right, thank you.” He got out and walked slightly unsteadily toward the house.

  Lloyd had driven him home because Bignall had received such a shock when he heard what had happened; he definitely wasn’t all right. Lloyd caught up with him. “Dr. Bignall, if you could follow me, it might be as well,” he said. “The SOCOs—the scene-of-crime officers—might want us to keep clear of any area they still need to examine.”

  “Yes,” muttered Bignall, falling into step behind him. “Yes, of course. I understand.”

  They met Tom as he emerged from the house next door. “Ah, good,” Lloyd said as all three reached Carl Bignall’s front door. “Could you look after Dr. Bignall, Tom?”

  Tom took Bignall into the sitting room, and Lloyd continued on to the kitchen at the end of the hallway, where Estelle Bignall’s body lay. He was walking under streamers and holly; how sad it all looked.

  “You can come in, sir,” said the young constable who stood guard. “The SOCOs just finished in here.”

  Lloyd went in and looked at the small, slim young woman who lay on the floor, naked under her bathrobe, her hands bound behind her back with the belt, her ankles taped up. Hanging loosely around her neck was a man’s tie, still knotted tightly at the back, and on the floor beside the body lay a rolled-up ball of material and a man’s glove. The photographer was snapping away, impassively and efficiently.

  “Did the FME remove the gag?” Lloyd asked. “I’m sorry—I don’t know your name.”

  The young man stood almost to attention. “PC Gary Sims, sir. I removed the gag and got the material out of her mouth. I then attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but it failed.”

  Lloyd nodded, smiling a little. “I’m not a court of law, Gary,” he said.

  Sims relaxed a little. “I wasn’t sure what to do, sir. I thought she was dead, but you know—you’re told you mustn’t assume that, you must try to preserve life, but you’re told not to disturb a homicide scene, and I couldn’t do both, so I just did what I thought I had to do.”

  “That’s all you can do,” said Lloyd, and looked down at the body again. “Was she still warm, then?”

  “Not exactly warm. But not cold.”

  Lloyd nodded, and looked again at the victim. She was in her mid-twenties, fair, probably very attractive before this happened to her.

  “Do we know who that glove belongs to?”

  “No, sir. It was there when I found her. I didn’t touch it.”

  “Why would he remove one glove, do you think?”

  “Maybe he couldn’t tie her up properly with his gloves on.”

  “But if you had to remove one glove to tie a knot, wouldn’t you have to remove both of them?” It was a little puzzle, he thought. And little puzzles sometimes solved the bigger ones.

  “Not if you used your teeth, sir. He would have been hanging onto her with his other hand while he tied her up, wouldn’t he?”

  Yes, presumably he would be doing that. So it wasn’t a little puzzle after all, then. Who needed Judy? Everyone could point out flaws in his reasoning. Even little boys in police uniforms.

  “There was one of these Sellotape dispensers on the table, and scissors,” said Sims, nodding over to the kitchen table, on which lay a roll of Christmas paper. “Someone had been wrapping presents, I think. The SOCO took them.”

  Perhaps, thought Lloyd, the burglar had left a set of his doubtless already-filed fingerprints for them to find when he used the tape. And whether he had or not, Lloyd had every intention of having whoever did this behind bars before the holiday began.

  Through the adjoining door he could see the crime scene technicians dusting the window and everything else that had been disturbed, examining the carpet, collecting samples of the mud that had been walked through from the garden into the dining room, carefully bagging up the broken glass that lay on the rain-soaked carpet, the brick that lay on the patio. He would wait until they finished before he went in.

  Freddie arrived as he went back out into the hallway.

  “Lloyd! We meet again. Good of you to let me fit in my game of squash before you called.”

  “She’s in the kitchen, Freddie. Constable Sims is with her.”

  “Is Constable Sims male or female?”

  “Male.”

  Freddie pulled a face. “Your police force is sadly lacking in talent at the moment, you know that, don’t you? I think I’ll report you to the Equal Opportunities people.”

  “Sir!” called Sims. “They’ve finished next door—they’ve moved out to the patio now.”

  “Thank you,” said Lloyd, and left Freddie and Sims to their work, as he went into the large dining room, also decorated for the season. One of the Bignalls obviously made a big thing of Christmas. More garlands, balloons, baubles, and a tall Christmas tree whose lights changed color t
hrough the spectrum. Books lay scattered on one shelf, and the other shelves were empty save for a vase of flowers. It looked almost artistic—minimalist, Japanese. He had never been struck by the artistry of a burglary before. Tom came in from the hallway.

  “Dr. Bignall’s with PC Warren,” he said. “He’s pretty shell-shocked, but Warren’s checking the rest of the house with him.”

  Tom had unloaded Bignall; Lloyd wasn’t surprised. Victim support was not Tom’s strong suit at the best of times, and with the new haircut, Tom looked exactly what he was: a tough, uncompromising detective sergeant. The curls had been disarming; people had let their guard down a little, were taken by surprise when he’d shown his mettle. Lloyd felt that he might have thrown away an advantage.

  “Guv—I think there might have been two of them. Dr. Bignall says there were a lot of presents under the tree in here, and they’re not here now.” He nodded over to where the tree, slightly lopsided, sat in its tub, two Christmas-wrapped presents beneath it. “Someone else must have removed them, because this kid who ran away wasn’t carrying anything. And I want to talk to the other neighbors, especially Watson. We’re getting conflicting stories.”

  Lloyd listened to what had been overheard, to how Tom thought the burglars had gained entry to the property, and to the information he’d gleaned about the Bignalls’ marriage.

  “Right, Tom—you go ahead and talk to the neighbors. I’ll try and find out what’s gone missing.”

  “And one other thing,” said Tom as they walked out together into the hall. “Jones said the disturbance sounded as though it was going on outside, and it was definitely before the window was broken. If it was the intruders, one of them was female.”

  Lloyd went into the sitting room to ask Carl Bignall if he could tell them what presents had been stolen. His reaction to Lloyd’s question was predictable.

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Your sergeant just asked me that! Why on earth are you so bothered about what’s missing? I told him—I don’t care.”