Scene of Crime

by Jill McGown

  “It doesn’t read like fiction,” said Finch. “He sounds real to me. He’s older than her, he’s married, she knew him a long time before anything happened—pretending he’s you so that it doesn’t feel like she’s cheating on you—there’s a lot of detail in there for a fantasy.”

  Carl tried to make him understand. “That’s just my point,” he said. “It is me. I’m older than her. I was married when we met. She knew me a long time before anything happened between us. Don’t you see? It is me. A sort of fantasy me, one that still does want to make love to her and make her feel good. As far as Estelle was concerned, there weren’t any other men. There was only me. That’s what was so impossible to live with. And that’s why there is no way that she was having an affair.”

  Finch looked back at him, unmoved. “Except that she had sexual intercourse with someone shortly before her death,” he said.

  Carl sighed. So that was it. “I know she had,” he said. “But it wasn’t with some phantom lover, Sergeant Finch. It was with me.”

  “Oh, Dr. Leeward!”

  Denis turned to see his receptionist coming out from her desk and along the corridor toward him.

  “I think there must be something in your shoe,” she said. “Look—you’re scratching the tiles.”

  He looked down to see a trail of small scratch marks, and used his receptionist’s shoulder to balance himself while he examined the sole of his shoe.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “It’s a piece of glass.” He picked at it to no effect, and smiled at her. “You don’t have a Swiss Army knife on you, do you?”

  She laughed. “Do you want a lift to your surgery?”

  “I’ll hop,” he said. “Thank you.”

  It wasn’t until he had made his way to his office, limping in order not to damage the floor surface any more than he already had, and had sat down, one leg hooked over the other in order to facilitate the removal of the offending piece of glass with the end of a pen, that he realized where he must have picked it up.

  He dropped it in the wastebasket and wondered how long it would be before his luck ran out.

  A silence had fallen after Carl Bignall’s last statement, and Lloyd could practically feel Tom’s total disbelief. He had intended leaving most of the interview to him; he’d wanted to see how the smooth, playwriting doctor coped with Tom. But he hadn’t anticipated Carl’s complete bafflement, and he certainly hadn’t anticipated his last answer.

  “I thought you just said your marriage had gone down the tubes a year ago,” said Tom. “Now you want us to believe you were making love to her yesterday?”

  Bignall nodded. “It had,” he said. “I thought it had. I was going to throw myself on the mercy of my bank manager. Spread out the credit cards, ask him to consolidate the debt and let me pay it off over a very long time. That way, I could leave Estelle.”

  “But?”

  “But the bricks arrived.” Bignall smiled sadly. “For Estelle’s wall. I knew Estelle was going to lunch with Marianne and would be out most of the day, so I had arranged to take the afternoon off to supervise the delivery, but I came home to find that I couldn’t get my car into my driveway because the idiot driver had come early and dumped them right inside the gates. I moved them—by the time I was finished I was all dusty and sweaty, and had to have a shower. Estelle was already in the shower, and—well, one thing led to another.” He looked at Tom. “If you don’t believe me, I’m happy to provide a blood sample for DNA testing.”

  Lloyd frowned. It had to be true. Did that mean the lover theory had gone the way of all theories? Looked like it.

  “And it was great,” Bignall went on. “I don’t know—maybe it was because it had been so long, but it was like when we were first married. We couldn’t get enough of one another. And it threw me into total confusion.” He shrugged. “I was making arrangements to leave her, and there I was in bed with her, wanting never to let her go. I needed time to think—so I told her I had to go to rehearsal.”

  “I don’t suppose that went down too well,” said Tom.

  Bignall shook his head. “No,” he said. “It didn’t. She went through her entire repertoire. I didn’t love her, I was having an affair with Marianne, I found her unattractive—all the usual stuff. And I found myself reassuring her, just as I always had before. I did love her, I just didn’t want to let Marianne down … I was telling her I loved her, for God’s sake! I was supposed to be telling her I wanted a divorce. And it worked, like it had when we were first married—she was reassured. But she said she was tired and that she was going to stay in bed. I left to go to the theater, but I couldn’t, not without sorting myself out. I had to try and work out what I’d done. What I was going to do.”

  “And did you?” asked Lloyd.

  “Yes. I decided to give it another go. For her sake this time—not the way we’d done it before. I would still sort out the money side of it, so I wasn’t dependent on her, but I’d stay with her, really try to make it work this time. But—” He shook his head. “—a couple of burglars had other ideas about that. I still can’t quite make myself believe that.”

  Lloyd got up and, under the pretext of stretching his legs, sneaked a look at his watch. This interview hadn’t gone at all as he’d expected; it looked, unfortunately, as though he would be able to make it to the prenatal clinic after all. He had expected a high-powered solicitor querying every question, demanding to know the source of their information, dragging the whole thing out. Not the total bafflement that he had seen from Bignall. But he still had some pertinent questions to ask; he always allowed talkers to just talk, and then he would take them over what they had said.

  “You said your wife didn’t know any other men.” He turned to look at Bignall as he spoke. “But she did. There are men at the dramatic society, for instance. Of course she knew other men.”

  Bignall nodded. “Yes, yes—you’re right, of course you are. But she was obsessive about me. Everything I did affected Estelle. If I looked at her the wrong way, she developed symptoms of some illness or other. Everything she did was attention-seeking, and it was my attention she sought. She simply didn’t consider other men.” He shook his head. “This isn’t boasting,” he said. “It’s just a fact. That’s what I meant, really. Her other significant relationships were with women.”

  Lloyd nodded. “You say that what she’s written in her diary—her journal—is about you,” he said.

  “I think so.”

  “Did you have a relationship with Estelle while you were married to someone else?”

  “No. I had been divorced about a year before Estelle and I began our relationship.”

  “That isn’t what she says in the diary, is it?”

  “No,” said Bignall. “But perhaps she felt like that about me before I was divorced. Or—given that she always accused me of having affairs with other women—maybe she was fictionally having an affair with me. Being the other woman. I don’t know. Who knows what went on in Estelle’s head? Not me.”

  “Do you think she meant you to read it?”

  “Quite possibly. She made no attempt to hide it—she kept it by the bed. As I said, everything was done in order to get my attention, and she had lost it entirely by then.”

  “But you didn’t read it—was that due to morality or lack of interest?”

  “Guess.” He looked down, then up again. “I know I don’t come out of this very well,” he said. “I’m a doctor, I had a sick wife, and I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with her. So I gave up. No—I wasn’t interested in her diary in the least.”

  “But last night everything in the garden was suddenly lovely again?” said Tom.

  Bignall looked at him for a moment. “No,” he said. “But I remembered why I had married her. I wanted to try again. That’s all. I don’t know if it could have worked, and I never will. Because she died before I could find out.”

  “While you were driving around,” said Tom.

  At last Bignall lost his cool.
“Yes!” he said. “While I was driving round! I’m sorry I can’t prove that to your satisfaction, Sergeant Finch, but it just didn’t occur to me to get a parking ticket or let some speed camera clock me doing eighty miles an hour. I didn’t conveniently park somewhere I had to pay for, I didn’t happen to wave to someone I knew. To the best of my knowledge I was not driving in the sort of place that has surveillance cameras—all I can tell you is that I drove around country lanes and tried to sort my life out, only to find out that some burglar had sorted it out for me!”

  “We aren’t convinced about the burglar,” Tom said. “There are question marks over your wife’s death, and the burglary itself.”

  And Bignall surprised him again. Lloyd had expected the anger to increase with righteous indignation at the suggestion being made.

  But Bignall was nodding. “I thought there must be,” he said. “Or you wouldn’t have thought I’d had anything to do with it. Besides—they hardly took anything. I couldn’t see why they would have to do something like that—why wouldn’t they just run away with whatever they’d managed to grab?”

  “Why did you tell Marianne Mackintosh that your wife had a cold?” asked Lloyd.

  “I had to give her some reason for being so late,” said Bignall. “I said Estelle wasn’t well, because that was something she would just accept without asking questions.”

  “Why a cold in the head, particularly?”

  Bignall shrugged slightly. “She asked if she had flu—I just downgraded it a little.”

  Lloyd really couldn’t see any reason to continue the interview. He took Bignall up on his offer of a blood sample; the doctor could deal with that while he was dealing with Watson. Just because she and her husband had sexual relations prior to the break-in didn’t mean that she hadn’t been sexually assaulted, and the Pink Panther theory hadn’t been disproved yet. Perhaps some psychotic friend of Baz Martin’s had tied her up and raped her.

  Besides, he still wasn’t at all sure about Bignall, but until they had something more than very circumstantial and doubtful evidence, there seemed little point in keeping him here, however much of a motive he had. And they did still have the unidentified shoe prints and fingerprints to account for.

  Back in the incident room he had a few moments before his alarm told him it was time to go home. He looked at Tom, who looked as puzzled as he felt. “What do you make of it?” he asked.

  “He seemed genuine enough when he got angry,” said Tom. “And I don’t think his car was there, guv. He looked as if he thought you were making it up.”

  Lloyd nodded. “I think we have to assume that Ryan was making it up,” he said. “Have you had any luck with the Pink Panther?”

  “No,” said Tom. “It was all a bit of a shambles—and it wasn’t the same people using the costumes all the time, because people got so hot in them. I don’t think it’s possible to trace one of them in particular.” He shook his head. “It would be a waste of time, anyway, guv. I reckon he got it all out of the paper.”

  Lloyd was beginning to see another puzzle presenting itself. “If Ryan’s lying about seeing Bignall’s car and about being in the traffic jam, then what was he doing?”

  “Burgling the Bignalls’ house,” said Tom.

  “Then who owns the shoe and fingerprints?”

  “Probably the two uniforms,” Tom answered morosely.

  Lloyd sincerely hoped that Tom’s throwaway remark wasn’t right. Perhaps they had been demanding shoes and fingerprints from half of Malworth while all the time it had been the police called to the scene who had left the ones they’d found.

  On the other hand, if they had, it would solve a lot of little puzzles.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Thanks,” Eric said as he was being shown out. “For nothing.”

  “I am terribly sorry if we inconvenienced you,” said Finch, with heavy sarcasm. “You could have avoided a trip to the station if you had just told me the truth earlier.”

  Inconvenience and expense, thought Eric, as his solicitor made his way out ahead of him, his clock still running.

  “Why didn’t you think the break-in was worthy of even an anonymous call to the police?”

  “I told you—I didn’t give a damn.” Eric stood in the open doorway. “I’ve had nothing but aggravation from them—why should I care if their house got robbed?”

  “You weren’t worried for Mrs. Bignall’s safety? I mean—I know you didn’t get along, but even so, you were a policeman once, and you thought the intruders were still on the premises, didn’t you? You thought they were still there when the uniforms arrived—one of them said you’d called him out on procedure because he let his mate go into the house alone.”

  Eric shrugged. “Well, I hadn’t seen anyone leave after Dexter,” he said. “So I didn’t think he should be letting that kid go in without backup, and I told him that.”

  “You were worried about a rookie cop running into the intruders, but Estelle Bignall could take her chances with them?”

  “I thought she was out!”

  “What made you think that?”

  Eric sighed. “Because I saw him drive off, and she usually left before him on Mondays. I thought the house was empty apart from the burglars.”

  That seemed to interest Finch a great deal. Eric shook his head as he went out into the night. Cops. He’d never been able to work them out, not even when he was one.

  Judy had been startled to hear Lloyd’s car horn; she’d resigned herself to yet another solitary appointment. He really was trying very hard to be a new man, and she supposed she ought to be trying a lot harder to be a new woman.

  She didn’t even really want him with her, not from the caring, sharing point of view. Anyone would do for checkups, if she was honest. Her mother, her next door neighbor. Tom Finch, Alan Marshall. Even Joe Miller. She just didn’t want to do any of this on her own, and if someone else was with her at the clinic, they could listen to the advice, too, and it wouldn’t be solely her responsibility to remember what she was supposed to be doing.

  But it was definitely Lloyd whom she wanted there when she was actually giving birth. She had a feeling that something just might come up at work when that time arrived, and hoped she would be too busy to care.

  Everything was fine, and now she and Lloyd were making their way out of the Health Center. She smiled at him. “How tempted were you to ring and say you couldn’t get away?” she asked as they walked toward the small, rapidly emptying car park.

  “Not very,” said Lloyd. “We’re getting nowhere fast. Bignall seems totally baffled about his car being seen there. And he dismissed the diary altogether. He thinks she was fantasizing.”

  “Marianne doesn’t,” said Judy. “She thought Estelle was seeing someone before she read her diary. Her Monday nights were very important to her, apparently. Marianne was really surprised when Carl said she was skipping it, thought she really must be ill.”

  Lloyd’s mobile rang just as they got to the car; Judy got in while he took the call, trying to remember what it was like just to get into a car and sit down without having to think about it.

  Lloyd got in. “It seems Marianne was right,” he said. “We thought she’d been entertaining Papa at home, but she wasn’t—she was going out every Monday. She might not have been going to her writer’s group, but she was going somewhere.”

  Lloyd couldn’t drive and theorize at the same time, so they just sat there while he worked on that. “So she didn’t go off to her Monday evening tryst, did she?” he said. “And there’s Papa, waiting for her wherever it is they meet. So what does he do when she doesn’t turn up? He waits until he knows that Carl’s gone and goes to her. And what does he find? That she’s resumed relations with Carl and doesn’t want him anymore now that she has the real thing back.”

  Judy didn’t need to hear the rest of this theory. It was the scenario as before, but with Papa rather than Carl in a jealous rage. This time it did account for the footprints, at least. Bu
t the big objection remained.

  “It’s the same problem we had with Carl,” she said. “When did he tie her hands?”

  “I’m still passing on that,” said Lloyd, starting the car and turning to look out of the rear window as he backed out. “Speak of the devil,” he said.

  Judy twisted around but she couldn’t see anyone she knew, never mind someone they had just mentioned. “Which devil?” she said.

  “Carl Bignall,” Lloyd said. “There’s his car.”

  Judy looked at the handful of cars left but she still couldn’t see it. “Where?”

  “There!” he said impatiently. “Beside the Range Rover.”

  “What—the Saab turbo? That’s not Carl’s car.”

  Lloyd was staring at her. “What do you mean?” he said.

  “He drives a Mazda,” she said. “What made you think it was his?”

  There was a silence before Lloyd answered. “Because it is if you do a vehicle check,” he said slowly, and shook his head. “I should have realized when Ryan told me about the car in the first place. That car’s four years old—Bignall was bound to have bought a new one in that time.”

  “He’s had two new ones since I’ve known him,” said Judy. “The one before was a BMW.”

  Lloyd looked across at the Saab. “Ryan Chester saw that car in Eliot Way at eight-fifteen last night.” He looked back at Judy. “So who would be driving a car registered to Bignall and parking it here?”

  Judy could think of only one person, and she knew that Lloyd neither needed nor wanted an answer. There was a moment when they were both unwilling to believe what they were both thinking; it was Lloyd who finally put it into words.

  “Denis Leeward fits the bill. He’s someone she’s known a long time. An older man. Married. And if half of what Carl Bignall says about Estelle is true, she was in no fit mental state to make a rational decision about something like that. And it is true—think about what she wrote, Judy.”

  Judy could see the scrawled handwriting of the first account of this affair. He made love to me tonight. I didn’t really want him to, but he said it would help me, so I let him. She swallowed as the tears that came embarrassingly easily to her in her current state welled up in her eyes. That wasn’t just some fly-by-night chancer taking advantage of Estelle’s fragile mental state, her crushing loneliness; that was her doctor, her friend, her husband’s partner. “How well do you know Leeward?” she asked.