Scene of Crime

by Jill McGown

“Nothing! I know nothing about it!”

  Stan shook his head. “All right,” he said. “But—unless you want to land Dex in it, you say no comment to everything—and I mean everything—when they call you back in.”

  Ryan ran a hand through his hair. “All right,” he said. “Sorry, Stan.”

  Denis had never seen Carl like this: pale, nervy, nibbling at a bit of toast only because Meg had insisted that he eat something. He shook his head at himself as he thought it; how did he expect the man to look after something as dreadful as what had happened to him? And yet he couldn’t not be surprised to see the self-assured, urbane, clever Carl brought so low. He looked ill. Poor Carl, who always aimed for the moon, who had had such plans and dreams, looked as though everything he had lived for had gone.

  Denis had never aimed for the moon, never been very ambitious; he had always been the junior partner in any practice he’d worked in, and this one was no exception. It was the young, handsome Carl who set up the practice and had to take on a partner because he was so popular. Denis smiled tiredly. He could see the disappointment on the women’s faces whenever he took a surgery that Carl had intended taking. Half of them had nothing wrong with them, but then, that was true of patients in general.

  As Denis had understood it, Carl’s relations with his wife were all but nonexistent, physical or otherwise; all he had wanted when he married her was someone who looked good on his arm, and someone whose private income was his to spend as he pleased. Her psychological problems might not have been a result of his indifference, but that certainly hadn’t helped her. But perhaps he had been wrong to believe Estelle. Looking at Carl now, starting when the mail came through the letter box with a noisy flop onto the mat, Denis had to rethink all that. Estelle must have meant a great deal more to Carl than he had ever suspected.

  And before last night, he had been jealous of Carl. Jealous of his looks, of his personality, of his charisma. But Carl had nothing that he needed, or even wanted. Carl didn’t even want to be a GP. He wanted to be a playwright, an actor, a producer—whatever. He behaved like a film star. He had his clothes tailored and went to London for a haircut; he bought the latest gadgets, whether for work or fun, then tired of them and gave them to him. Carl changed his car the way he changed lightbulbs—indeed, Denis had fallen heir to one of Carl’s cast-off cars, which Carl had told him he could regard as his own. No money had changed hands; Carl just gave it away. And that sheer extravagance had seemed somehow glamorous to Denis.

  But being jealous of him had been crazy; Carl’s life was all style and no substance, a substitute for happiness, whereas he had everything he wanted: a happy marriage, a comfortable home, grown-up successful children, two happy, healthy grandchildren, a job that suited him down to the ground. And if he had indeed been crazy, Denis knew he wasn’t anymore; it was just a great pity it had taken something quite dreadful to bring him to his senses.

  Dexter Gibson sat beside his mother, his face badly bruised, his eyes scared, and his hands clasped in front of him. Lloyd sat beside Tom Finch, with whom he’d had to have a word about trying to needle Ryan into violence. Tom had protested that he had merely been trying to get Ryan to admit the truth.

  “You do it, sir,” Tom had said. “Saying things to provoke a response.”

  It was something Lloyd had always liked about Tom; the mixture of defiance and deference. He never took anything lying down, but he usually remembered to tack on a “sir” when challenging a senior officer.

  “A response, Tom,” said Lloyd. “Not a black eye. I backed you up in there because I think that’s important, but don’t expect me to do it again.”

  So it was a peeved Tom conducting this interview, and he was getting more peeved by the minute, as Dexter steadfastly refused to say who had given him the beating, insisting that he had fallen down some steps.

  Tom had moved on to the burglary, explaining, as he had to Ryan, exactly what had been found when the police arrived. Dexter reacted, as they had expected him to, with scared, shocked surprise, and, Lloyd fancied, considerable sadness.

  “Someone answering your description was seen running away just after the window broke. Was that you, Dexter?”

  “No comment.”

  “Don’t you start that!” shouted his mother. “That’s your brother that’s taught you that! Answer the man!”

  Dexter looked away. “No. It wasn’t me.”

  “Then where were you at about ten past, quarter past eight last night?”

  “Walking.”

  “Why would you want to be out walking on a cold, wet night?”

  Dexter shrugged.

  “Where were you walking?”

  “Round.”

  “Were you in Windermere Terrace?”

  “No.”

  “Were you in Eliot Way?”

  Dexter looked haunted. “Where’s that?”

  “It’s the service road that runs behind Windermere Terrace,” said Tom, with commendable patience, in the circumstances, since Dexter knew exactly where and what Eliot Way was. “A teenage boy wearing a shiny green bomber jacket was seen running down Eliot Way. Was that you?”

  Dexter opened his mouth, then closed it, shaking his head.

  Lloyd looked at him for a moment, then got up and strolled around the little room, keeping well away from the boy and his mother. Someone had once accused him of intimidation when he had gotten too close, and that wasn’t what he was after at all. He just liked to be able to catch nonhardened suspects off guard with a question. He liked to see their expression just before they managed to rearrange it. And if they thought he was paying no attention, it sometimes worked.

  Lloyd stood on tiptoe to look out of the window at the gray skies and the rain beading the cars in the car park, sneaking a look at Dexter now and then as Tom continued to work patiently on his resilience; Mrs. Gibson was allowing Tom a long leash, but Dexter’s answers, though they passed muster with his mother, might as well have been “No comment.”

  Tom was talking about Estelle Bignall and what Dexter had known about her habits on a Monday night. Dexter had gone very quiet, looking down at his hands, and Lloyd could see a tear in the corner of his eye, which he blinked away, swallowing hard.

  “Did you like Mrs. Bignall, Dexter?” Lloyd asked before he could recover, turning as he spoke.

  Dexter looked up at him, his brown eyes wide with anxiety, nodding dumbly as a tear trickled down his face.

  “A lot?”

  “She was really nice,” he said miserably. “She was good fun.”

  Not according to her husband she wasn’t. She had mood swings and depressions and was very difficult to live with, according to him. Lloyd thought it wouldn’t hurt to pursue this for a moment.

  “In what way was she good fun?” he asked.

  “Oh—just good fun. When she was in a good mood. She could be really funny—she would do impressions of Marianne, make everyone laugh. It made Marianne laugh, too,” he added, obviously worried that Lloyd might think she was being cruel behind Marianne’s back.

  “But she wasn’t always in a good mood?”

  “Sometimes she got cross, or she would be upset, and cry. But she was still a nice person.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “We did a musical in the summer.”

  “What part did she play?”

  Dexter shook his head. “She wasn’t in it. She didn’t really like being on the stage anymore. She helped with the costumes and that.”

  “And you haven’t seen her since then?”

  “No. She left. She wanted to do something else.”

  Lloyd nodded. “Did you miss her?”

  “Yes.”

  It was perfectly obvious that the last thing Dexter would do was take part in a burglary at Estelle Bignall’s house. So what was he doing there? Lloyd wondered if his fondness for Estelle Bignall might be the explanation. “Did you go to see her last night, Dexter? Is that why you were there?”


  His eyes immediately dropped from Lloyd’s. “I wasn’t there.”

  The brief moment of openness was over; Dexter was back to telling uncomfortable lies. Lloyd tried a different tack.

  “Does your brother Ryan know the Bignalls?”

  “Not really.” Dexter wiped away the tear with the heel of his hand.

  “Is Dr. Bignall not his doctor, too?” asked Tom.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Gibson. “But Ryan never goes to the doctor. The only time he sees Dr. Bignall is if he gives Dexter a lift home from rehearsals.”

  “So he won’t feel the same way about them as you do,” Lloyd said to Dexter.

  “S’pose not.”

  “You know what I think happened, Dexter?” Lloyd sat down opposite him again. “I think you found out Ryan was going to burgle their house. I think you told him he shouldn’t do that, and he forced you to go along with him, to make sure you couldn’t tell on him. When you got there, you argued with him, and he knocked you about.”

  He saw Mrs. Gibson take an indignant breath, and shook his head, hoping she would understand what he was doing. He didn’t actually think that at all; Judy had pointed out the rather large flaw in that theory.

  “No!” Dexter shouted. “Ryan wouldn’t ever hit me! And anyway, he wasn’t even there!”

  Lloyd couldn’t help feeling smug. He sat back. “But you were there, weren’t you, Dexter?”

  Dexter nodded, and Mrs. Gibson’s mouth fell open. “Dexter!” she said. “What are you saying?”

  He turned to look at her. “I didn’t burgle anywhere! I was just there, that’s all.”

  “Did you break a window?” asked Lloyd

  “No. I heard it break, and I ran away.”

  “Why were you there in the first place?” asked Mrs. Gibson. “Did you go to see Mr. Watson?”

  “No.”

  Dexter was shaking his head all the time, twisting around as he answered his mother and Lloyd. Now Tom chipped in.

  “Do you know Mr. Watson?”

  “Yes. I work for him on Saturday mornings.”

  “So he knows you—did he see you?”

  “Yes. He shouted at me to stop, but I didn’t.”

  “Why not, if you hadn’t done anything?”

  Dexter looked at Tom and shrugged. “I didn’t think he’d believe me.”

  So Watson had simply been unwilling to give Dexter’s name to the police, Lloyd thought. That would explain why he had lied about it, why he had spoken about boys from the London Road estate having been there.

  “So why were you there?” Tom was asking.

  “I went for a walk. I told you.”

  Tom made a disbelieving noise. “That area must be an hour’s walk from where you live,” he said.

  Dexter shrugged again.

  Lloyd sat back. “All right, Dexter, we’ll accept that, for the moment. You were out for a stroll in the rain and cold, and you found yourself in the vicinity of Windermere Terrace. Where were you when you heard the window break?”

  “Where he said,” said Dexter, looking down at his hands. “Eliot Way.”

  Lloyd leaned forward a little. “We know that’s where you ran to, Dexter,” he said. “But where did you run from?”

  Dexter looked away. “Nowhere. I was in Eliot Way all the time.”

  “But Mr. Watson’s security light came on, didn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So how did it come on? Was it when you ran across his garden from the Bignalls’ garden? Is that why you didn’t stop when he shouted? Because you didn’t want to have to explain what you’d been doing?”

  “No.”

  “There are some bricks piled up in the garden of number 4 Windermere Terrace,” Lloyd went on. “Some of them had collapsed. If someone running out of the Bignalls’ garden into the one next door had climbed over the bricks and they gave way, he might have hurt himself quite badly when they collapsed.”

  Dexter frowned slightly.

  “Is that how you hurt yourself, Dexter?”

  “No. I wasn’t in their garden.”

  Lloyd sighed. He had hoped to get Dexter cooperating a little more than this, because if he was there, he might have heard the scuffle that Jones heard, might even have seen who it was. Perhaps he saw something he shouldn’t have seen, was frightened to tell anyone about it. “Did you see who did break the window?”

  “No.”

  “Did someone do that to you to keep you from telling?”

  “No one did it. I fell,” Dexter said, looking down again. “I fell down some steps.”

  “What steps?” Lloyd spread his hands. “There aren’t any steps there, Dexter.”

  “On my way home.”

  “And where were these steps?” asked Tom.

  Dexter’s voice was barely audible. “Can’t remember.” And now he really began to cry.

  “We’ll take a break,” said Lloyd, before Mrs. Gibson, practiced as she was in the art of being an appropriate adult, called a halt herself. She wanted to get at the truth as much as they did, but not, Lloyd was sure, at the expense of her son’s self-control.

  Outside in the corridor, Tom shook his head. “How was that different from what I did, sir?” he asked.

  “How was what different?”

  “Saying you thought Ryan had beaten him up. You never thought that. How was that different from me asking if Mrs. Gibson had burgled the house?”

  Lloyd wasn’t sure; he just knew there was a difference. “Style?” he suggested. “I’m less aggressive, perhaps.”

  “Guv, the kid’s in there crying his eyes out!”

  Lloyd smiled. “That’s because he wants to tell us who beat him up, and he’s afraid to,” he said. “He’s confused and frightened because of what happened to him—not because I was aggressive.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t be, with a fourteen-year-old boy who’s never been in trouble,” said Tom. “It was Ryan Chester I was interviewing, Sir.”

  That was true. And it was Tom’s usual way of interviewing regular customers, or those he felt he could rattle—asking quick-fire questions, stinging them into a response that might need a bit of explaining away. Lloyd wasn’t sure why he had felt the need to warn him about his technique this time. It was because of Ryan’s reaction, he supposed, but he wasn’t sure why what Tom said had made Ryan so angry—he must have known Tom wasn’t seriously accusing his mother of the crime, that Tom had said what he did to indicate how ludicrous the alternative was. So why had Ryan taken such deep exception to it? After some further consideration, Lloyd thought he knew.

  “I think,” he said, “the difference is that what you could get away with when you had a halo of golden curls you can’t get away with now. Is there any chance you’ll let them grow back?”

  Judy was finding it increasingly difficult to get into the confined space behind the desk that had been set up in her living room; she was eternally grateful to the Assistant Chief Constable for suggesting that most of the work on the LINKS project could be done at home, and she didn’t have to look ungainly in front of Joe Miller. Not that her public image was his reason for making the suggestion; he was hoping that her maternity leave might be less disruptive that way, because with luck she would just give birth and carry on working, like Russian peasants were once popularly supposed to do.

  She booted up the computer to begin her day’s work, and logged on, feeling, as she always did, that the new rank she entered every day was a little fraudulent. The DCI rank had been part lure and part forward planning on the ACC’s part. She knew that it had not gone down well with her colleagues, particularly those who had not even been considered for this cushy number. But those were the breaks, she told herself. She had spent her first twenty years in this job being passed over because of her sex; if it had now become politically expedient to promote a token woman within CID while removing her from any chance of actually heading up a major inquiry, why should she worry?

  At the moment, the Local Information Net
worked Knowledge System was just an idea in the Assistant Chief Constable’s mind, but they had asked everyone to input as much detail as they could from the crimes committed in various divisions in order to get an idea of how it would work in practice. It was voluntary, which meant they weren’t getting a lot to work with.

  At the suggestion of the ACC, Joe himself had been collating information gleaned from various local papers about antisocial behavior in which the police hadn’t become involved. He had gone back to the beginning of the year and entered anything he could find about noisy neighbors or bullying in schools—anything that reflected badly on anyone, basically, on the principle that if they indulged in one kind of antisocial behavior, they might indulge in another, more criminal kind, and a connection might be made.

  Lloyd, predictably, had muttered things about Big Brother and the freedom of the individual when Judy told him what Joe was doing. He really shouldn’t have been a policeman, thought Judy. He would have been much more at home heading protest marches than policing them. He had wanted to know if the Data Protection Act covered it, and Judy pointed out that for the moment, it wasn’t being networked—no one but she and Joe could read it. If and when the system was made available, not only to Bartonshire, but to the neighboring county forces, they would ensure that it complied with the law.

  Lloyd had made a disbelieving noise.

  “It’s all public knowledge anyway,” she had said. “He’s getting these things out of newspapers, Lloyd!”

  “Even so,” said Lloyd. “What you’re saying is that if some rapist, say, is heard to whistle a particular tune, and you find out that someone drove his neighbors mad playing the same tune at full volume over and over again, we’ll descend on him and accuse him of rape.”

  “We’d need a bit more than that,” Judy had argued. “But if the rapist was seven feet tall with blue hair, and so was the neighbor from hell—yes, we would probably think we had our man. And he wouldn’t have been on police files, would he?”

  “It’s sinister.”

  “No, it’s not! It’s something about the community that the bobby on the beat would have known. We’re just making his beat a little more wide-ranging, that’s all.”