Scene of Crime

by Jill McGown

  “They should be on the manifest. Do you want me to have a look?”

  “Yes, if you would.” He covered the receiver with his hand. “Keep your fingers crossed.”

  “Hello?”

  “Yes,” said Tom. “Have you got it?”

  “Yeah. It just says the bricks have to be left on the hard standing inside the gates.”

  “The hard standing,” repeated Tom. “His driveway, would that be?” He gave the room a thumbs-up. “Can you tell me when he ordered them?”

  “Oh, let’s see now … yeah, here it is. They were ordered a month ago, for delivery on the twenty-second of December between twelve and one.”

  “Thanks, mate,” Tom said. “Someone will be round to pick that up from you, so don’t lose it.” He hung up. “We’ve got him,” he said. “He arranged for the bricks to be delivered when he knew Estelle would be having lunch with Marianne, and wouldn’t get the driver to put them somewhere more sensible.”

  Lloyd shook his head. “It was all planned,” he said. “All of it. A totally cold-blooded murder to get his hands on her money.”

  “And he wasn’t doing it all in a panic,” said Judy. “That explains why he could be so calm when he turned up for rehearsal.” She frowned. “He was lucky that Gary Sims removed the gag—you said Freddie thought he could have proved murder if he hadn’t.”

  “No,” said Lloyd. “He wasn’t lucky. Carl Bignall didn’t have good luck—he had bad luck. As it happened, the gag was removed by Sims, but just supposing Geoffrey Jones hadn’t called the police. If he hadn’t heard someone being assaulted, hadn’t seen Dexter running away, hadn’t seen the door standing open, he might not have done anything at all.”

  “Carl Bignall left the door shut,” Tom said. “Leeward said he had to open it when he got there. And then he ran back out again, and left it open.”

  “Quite. It was two unrelated incidents that caused the police to be called. If they hadn’t been, Carl Bignall would have come home and found his wife dead. And he, naturally, would have done exactly what Sims did—no one would have questioned it for a moment. So the gag would have been removed anyway. As would the portable stereo. No wonder he went pale when he saw it was gone.”

  “And it was another unrelated incident that got him caught,” said Tom. “Ryan Chester doing what Ryan Chester does. Trying to steal a car.” He grinned. “You were right all along, guv,” he said. “Not me.”

  “Well, Bignall had the best motive,” said Lloyd. “And I didn’t like that artistic burglary.” He sighed. “I just wish I knew how he’d killed her. I got everything that you could possibly bury someone’s face in out of that house, and the lab found nothing on any of them.”

  “How else can you suffocate someone?” asked Judy.

  “There would be bruising if someone tried to stop her breathing by holding her mouth and nose shut,” said Lloyd, “so that’s no good.”

  “It’d be a plastic bag,” said Tom. “He probably threw it away.”

  It had seemed to him to be a less than inspiring thought, but Lloyd was beaming at him, then the next thing Tom knew he was phoning the lab and sweet-talking the young woman who tested for such things into doing just one more thing for him before she went to the staff Christmas party.

  Carl Bignall went into the station and spoke to the young woman at the desk, who asked him to wait. He couldn’t believe it was all over, but it was. He was getting the stereo back, and once he had that, this nightmare would be finished.

  “Dr. Bignall,” said Lloyd.

  Carl had thought they would just give him the stuff. He hadn’t thought it would involve Chief Inspector Lloyd. He got up.

  “Carl Bignall, I’m arresting you for the murder of your wife Estelle Bignall. You do not have to say anything, but anything …”

  Carl found himself in an interview room, hardly able to remember the previous few minutes, or how he had gotten there, even. But gradually it came back to him, and less gradually it was dawning on him that the game was up. He had been told that he didn’t have to say anything, and he didn’t.

  Lloyd had proof that he’d arranged for the bricks being left when and where they had been, he had the tape with the breaking glass on it, and he had two witnesses to the fact that the apparent burglary had already taken place before the window was heard to break. He even had a witness to when he had actually broken the window. They were a soon-to-be struck-off doctor, a car thief, and a pornographer, but their stories meshed, and that was all that mattered.

  “You broke the glass while your wife was in the shower,” he said. “And then you went up and joined her. You knew what would happen. She was desperate for some attention from you.”

  He was desperate. He had lived with her for seven years—that would make a saint desperate. He couldn’t afford to divorce her.

  “You had to keep her from going out, so that was the best way to do it. Besides, you needed her to be in bed, didn’t you? You were going to leave the house with a dead woman in it who was supposed to be alive. There had to be a good reason for people to be unable to get a reply if they knocked at the door or telephoned. It’s Christmas; anyone might come calling.”

  Yes. That had been very important.

  “So you made love to her.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how you could have done that.”

  That bit wasn’t difficult. It had been good—not perhaps the life-changing experience he had led Lloyd to believe, but she had enjoyed it. He’d managed to make her happy right at the end, just as he’d made her happy at the beginning. But he couldn’t keep on making her happy, because nothing he did was ever going to be enough. He wasn’t a god; he had never asked to be worshiped. It wasn’t possible to be the man Estelle imagined he was. That man didn’t exist.

  “And then a mildly kinky sex game perhaps?”

  Spot on. He tied her hands, told her she should kneel in front of him, facing away from him, and then …

  “A plastic bag,” said Lloyd. “You put a plastic bag over her head, and you pushed her down into the pillow and held her there until she died.” He reached down and produced one plastic bag containing another. A black plastic bag. The black plastic bag. He had been worried when they asked him about the roll of bags—he’d realized they were going to subject it to forensic examination. But he’d thought they wouldn’t think of checking it as a murder weapon.

  “This bag,” Lloyd said. “The bag you put the presents and the ornaments in. The bag you dumped in the woods. It has traces of saliva in it, which will be sent for DNA analysis after Christmas. I have little doubt it will prove to be your wife’s.”

  It had been like drowning kittens in a sack. Not pleasant, but reasonably painless, and reasonably quick. Not as quick and painless as a fatal injection, but he had sworn an oath to administer no deadly medicine, and he hadn’t broken it. That wasn’t why he hadn’t, of course. Just that they’d have known right away that he had done it. He had rejected that out of hand.

  “And then you carried her down to the kitchen,” said Lloyd. “I kept asking myself, why the kitchen? But then, I thought she’d died at eight-fifteen, whereas she died at least an hour earlier than that, which was why she was in the kitchen.”

  He had tried to cover every angle, but other people had somehow gotten in on the act, and that had been so confusing.

  “From half past seven,” Lloyd went on, “you would have no control over what was happening. You had a hole in your window—the rain might give you away if her body was wet when it should have been dry, or if the carpet beneath her body was dry when it should have been wet. You couldn’t risk that; you had no idea what the rain was going to do. And anyway, the warmer you kept her body, the better. She wouldn’t stay too warm in a room with a broken window. So the kitchen it was.”

  Carl sighed. It had all started going wrong almost straight away. He’d had no reason to suppose that two police officers would unaccountably be playing the leads in the rehearsal when he got there. And w
hen Lloyd told him that Estelle had been found, he’d almost passed out. That wasn’t supposed to happen. And he definitely wasn’t supposed to be driven home by a Detective Chief Inspector. And then when he’d gotten there and seen those footprints, found the stereo missing, been told that someone had left a glove behind, he thought he was going mad. It looked for all the world as though someone had broken in and burgled the house.

  He had been totally convinced yesterday morning that he would be caught; everyone had taken it for grief, which had been the only good thing about it. And then there was the complication of Dexter. He’d had no idea who was in his house; it could have been Ryan and Dexter, and he half expected a blackmail note or something from Ryan. And then, when he realized why Dexter was there, he had felt so badly about it. He could have gotten him out of that situation almost as soon as he’d gotten into it if he’d paid more attention to Estelle.

  Was it Watson who had made Estelle the way she was? Or was she just a victim from the moment she was born? He hadn’t meant her to be his victim, not until it all became too much to bear. She had threatened suicide over and over again; he found himself hoping that she carried out her threat, and somehow the plan to murder her had evolved from there.

  Then the bombshell about Denis. He had been there. Carl had been certain that his luck had run out right there, but once again, it hadn’t. He’d come so tantalizingly close to pulling it off; he had weathered all these totally baffling complications, and sitting waiting for his stereo, he allowed himself to believe for the very first time that he would soon have the incriminating tape back, that he was home free.

  “Do you have anything to say, Dr. Bignall?”

  Carl looked at Lloyd, who had suspected him from the very first moment, as he had known he would, but who had grimly stuck to that suspicion in a way that he’d hoped he wouldn’t, and he smiled. “I’m not denying it,” he said. “I did murder my wife. But …” He sighed.

  “But?” said Lloyd.

  “But I think, in my defense, that she quite literally drove me mad.”

  Tom and Lloyd were enjoying their super-expensive Christmas lunch, Judy was pleased to note. No one had gone for the Christmas menu, being all too aware of the turkey-eating days stretching ahead of them. She had given up halfway through the main course, but they were on to the puddings.

  She had assumed that even a place as expensive as this would be booked up for Christmas Eve, but she thought it was worth a try, and they’d had one table for three left. Her original plan had been to treat Lloyd to lunch, but since the table could accommodate three, she thought it might be nice to bring Tom along; she missed working with them both.

  She had almost felt like explaining to the manager that one of the party did look as though he was on his way to a neo-Nazi rally but was really a very nice man. Her omniscience had impressed Tom; Lloyd had told her, of course, that Tom and his wife were in a semipermanent state of hostility, but Judy felt that she was probably right about the cause.

  Tom caught her looking at him and smiled. “This is great,” he said. “Thanks for inviting me.”

  “You’re very welcome. I like having you around—you’re a good antidote to certain Welshmen of my acquaintance. I don’t suppose I could book you for the delivery room, could I? I suspect the father of my child might go AWOL.”

  Tom looked at Lloyd. “Weren’t you present when your other kids were born?” he asked.

  “No,” said Lloyd.

  “Seriously? You really didn’t—”

  “No. Can we change the subject?”

  Tom grinned. “Are you scared?”

  “Too true.”

  “Oh, it’s wonderful. It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. You’re standing there one minute with—”

  Lloyd put down his spoon. “If you say one more word, I’ll ask the manager to throw you out,” he said.

  Tom went back to his dessert, then looked up at Lloyd again. “How do you feel about me discussing work?” he asked.

  “Oh, that’s all right. I discuss work at all times of the day and night.”

  “Right,” said Tom. “You know in TV series where the thick sergeant says, ‘There’s one thing I don’t understand,’ and the clever inspector explains it? Well, there’s one thing I don’t understand. Why did Carl Bignall rig up the sound effect to go off for a time when he didn’t have an alibi anyway?”

  “Oh, that was the bit that worked,” said Lloyd. “He didn’t fool Freddie with the gag, and he didn’t fool me with the burglary, but he fooled everyone with that.” He put the spoon on his empty plate and sat back. “You are very unhappily married to a very unstable woman who is worth a small fortune once she’s dead,” he said. “If she dies an unnatural death during a burglary at a time for which you have an apparent alibi, what am I, as the clever inspector, going to do if I suspect for even a moment that the burglary was faked? I’m going to wonder about that alibi. I’m going to wonder when she really died.”

  “Whereas …” said Judy, who had also been the thick sergeant, but hadn’t wanted to admit it, and was now beginning to understand. “Whereas if, on the other hand, you have no alibi at all, and I suspect the burglary was faked, then I am going to run myself into the ground trying to find out where you were at that particular time. And since you were nowhere near the scene of the crime, I am going to prove nothing. And I am going to overlook all the time you had before you ever left the house in which to dispose of your wife and fake the burglary.”

  “He’d have walked away from it if it hadn’t been for Watson and Leeward getting themselves involved,” said Tom.

  “He might,” said Lloyd.

  “It’s poetic justice, when you think of it,” Judy said. “Watson and Leeward haven’t come out of it much better than Carl Bignall. She’s got her own back on all of them.”

  “And you know,” Lloyd said, “Bignall didn’t believe her about either Watson or Leeward. Perhaps if he’d known her better, he could have murdered her more successfully.”

  Judy drove them back to Stansfield, and Lloyd went off to see what Watson and his solicitor had come up with.

  “It might take a long time,” he told Judy. “I shouldn’t wait, if I were you.” He smiled. “And I hereby declare this incident room officially closed. Have a nice Christmas, everyone.”

  His good wishes were returned as people thankfully packed up the incident room in the knowledge that their Christmas holiday stood a reasonable chance of being uninterrupted by work.

  Tom picked up his coat and grinned at Judy. “I know there’s a lot of paperwork to do, guv, but it’s Christmas Eve, and I think I’d better go home now and start growing my hair.”

  The Pink Panther had come through for him, and Ryan was a free man once more. As was Baz; since Ryan had been otherwise engaged while the trial had been going on, he had no way of knowing if it had been Stan’s eloquence, the tie, seasonal goodwill, or a combination of all three that had gotten Baz off with a fine, but lunchtime found them celebrating over a pie and a pint amidst all the office Christmas parties.

  Now, as late afternoon descended and the December skies grew dark, they were sitting in Baz’s van, and Ryan was sorting out their immediate future. Someone had to come up with the money to pay Baz’s fine; Baz had asked for time to pay, and was technically supposed to produce the money every week from his Social Security check but that wasn’t going to happen; Baz and his money were inevitably soon parted. And Ryan would soon be in the same boat.

  In the old days, he hadn’t bothered paying fines, but that was a mug’s game; fines should be treated like a business expense, paid as promptly as was necessary in order not to get into worse trouble. So the money had to be gotten from somewhere.

  And now that Ryan knew exactly what had been happening to Dex, and who had been responsible, he had an idea where that money might be coming from.

  “Come on,” he said to Baz. “Let’s go.”

  “Where to?”

  “Win
dermere Terrace,” said Ryan.

  “Isn’t that where that woman died?”

  Ryan nodded.

  “Why do you want to go there, Ry?”

  “You’ll find out when we get there,” Ryan said.

  Baz was used to being given enigmatic instructions; he put the van in gear and set off for Windermere Terrace.

  Eric had talked it over with his brief; if he continued to deny the assault and his filmmaking activities, they could make a not entirely circumstantial case against him for murder, and it might succeed, because they would dig and dig until they found the people who had worked with Estelle. They would have Dexter’s evidence that she’d been there, threatening him, and he could end up being tried not just for what he had done, but for what he had not done.

  Thus he had made a full and frank statement about what he had really been doing between half past seven and eight-fifteen, and it had taken hours. They couldn’t charge him straight away; the papers had to be sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions to see what exactly they could charge him with, and he was given bail.

  He came out of the police station and looked at the queue for cabs with a groan. Christmas Eve, and he’d be standing there till Boxing Day before he got one. His solicitor took pity on him and gave him a lift home, which was something, he supposed. Bloody well should, he thought, considering the bill he’s going to send when this is finished.

  He let himself into the house, and stopped dead.

  It was very late by the time Lloyd got home; he had felt obliged to call in at the Malworth station and discuss the latest burglary, which had taken place while the resident was being held in custody at the Stansfield police station.

  “With the house next door being empty, no one saw or heard a thing,” said Inspector Saunders. “TV, video, hi-fi—you name it. It’s gone.”

  “Had he put ID marks on them, by any chance?”

  “No,” said Saunders. “Well—people just don’t think, do they? Never think it’ll happen to them.” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t think we’ll trace them.”