The Red Chairs Mystery

by L. D. Culliford

  When Holly asked why Rita stopped working, McInnes simply said, bluntly, ‘Because I told her to pack it up’. When pressed, he explained that they didn’t need the money, and he had wanted his wife to spend more time on the housework, cooking and gardening, and on being a mother to Hazel.

  ‘You could have hired some help for her’, Holly remarked.

  ‘Oh I did’, said Wayne. ‘We have a cook-housekeeper and a gardener. That’s what I meant, really. I wanted Rita at home to keep an eye on them, give them instructions and so on; but she was a bit lenient, not very assertive. She did prefer staying at home, though. She even did most of her shopping on the internet.’

  Jack took down the details of the hired help. After a few more questions, which McInnes answered somewhat nonchalantly, he thought, they took a tour of the house and garden. When they came upon Rita’s Mercedes saloon, parked in the garage next to Wayne’s Lamborghini, her husband also mentioned that she had left behind her mobile phone and house keys, which seemed odd. The couple had a joint bank account, he added helpfully, but since her disappearance his wife had not withdrawn funds or made any use of her credit or debit cards.

  Jack asked if his wife had any other savings or sources of income.

  ‘No’, said McInnes. ‘Her father died some years ago… Heart attack playing squash! He was only fifty-three. I took over the business, and he left everything else to Dora, Rita’s mother. She’s had Alzheimer’s for years… Lives in a home in Partridge Green at fifteen hundred quid a week. That’s where that money has all been going.’

  ‘How is she?’ Holly asked.

  ‘Completely gaga!’ was the reply. ‘Away with the fairies… Nothing she says makes any sense. The last time Rita went, more than six months ago now, Dora didn’t recognize her or Hazel. Rita said she wasn’t going back there again.’

  After the tour, Holly put a few questions to Hazel in the sitting-room as Jack and her father stood by. She was very aware that here was a young woman in a situation similar to the one she had found herself in when her mother disappeared with Uncle Bob, her seducer; but Hazel seemed much less distressed than she had been at the time.

  There was not much to go on. Neither Wayne nor Hazel could say if any of Rita’s clothes were missing, for example; so many remained in the wardrobes of the master bedroom and in the principal guest room. They both denied that Rita might have been particularly unhappy. Hazel confirmed that her mother was a shy person who had few friends and kept to herself. The detectives were given the strong impression that she had been living to keep the house and garden spotless and orderly. To have the child of a successful man, to supervise and keep house for him, was all she had ever wanted.

  Hazel went back to her room. When invited to explain his wife’s earlier disappearance, McInnes gave a shrug, holding his arms up, palms open, as if to question whether anyone could truly explain a woman’s mysterious impulses. When pressed on the matter by Holly, he glanced at her with a sullen, contemptuous look, then smiled quickly at Jack and admitted that at the time he had briefly been seeing another woman. ‘We got over it’, was his way of dismissing the episode now.

  This time it was Jack who tried pinning him down. ‘Have you been seeing any other women recently, Mr McInnes?’ He asked. The reply was a curt and emphatic denial. ‘No, I most certainly have not.’

  Jack was unfazed. ‘Just so we know’, he replied.

  The two detectives left, filed a report together, and set in train the usual missing person’s enquiry, circulating the photo and description, alerting the media and other regional police forces. The bank confirmed that there had been no activity initiated by Mrs McInnes on the joint account for several weeks. The house and her mobile phone records showed nothing unusual, only a few calls, mainly to service providers of one kind or another. Holly made a note of Rita’s hairdresser’s number, her GP surgery details, and contact information for one or two other people who might have been able to shed light on the missing woman’s whereabouts.

  Holly and Jack spoke separately to the cook and the gardener over the following days. Both gave a different, brighter picture of Rita as a relatively chatty and sociable person, house-proud and proud too of her daughter’s achievements. She had never discussed the relationship with her husband with either of them. As far as they knew, she was content with her life. Neither had been present on the day she disappeared. Mrs Sampson had two weekdays off each week, and Jim, the gardener, only came to the house on Tuesdays and Thursdays. When she disappeared, Mr McInnes had simply told them that his wife had gone away for a couple of weeks, and neither had thought much more about it.

  Without a body, there was little Jack’s boss would allow them to do to extend the investigation, but when nothing transpired after six weeks, they did go back to the house. On this occasion, a warm Friday afternoon, they had not arranged an appointment. McInnes, a tanned, well-built, clean-shaven figure, came to the door in swimming shorts with a bath towel over his shoulder. Showing no surprise, alarm or irritation, he led them casually to his study, from where, through the window, they could see Hazel on a lounger by the swimming pool with another, slightly more mature young woman on a water-float nearby.

  ‘Who is that?’ Holly asked pointedly.

  ‘That’s Susan,’ McInnes replied. ‘Susan Bettany. She’s moved in to help me look after Hazel.’

  ‘Did she come from an agency?’

  ‘No. As a matter of fact, she works in my office. She needed somewhere to live, so I invited her here… It seemed like a good idea to kill two birds with the one stone, so to speak.’ His voice, she noticed, remained calm. There were no immediate grounds for suspicion. Nevertheless, Jack made a point of asking to be introduced.

  ‘She’s a flirty little minx, that one!’ He said to Holly when they were back on the pavement outside later. ‘Even I felt the sex oozing out of her, and that’s saying something!’ Adding, as a cautionary afterthought, ‘You’d better not tell Brian I said that.’ Holly noticed the sudden pink glow, his cheeks briefly on fire.

  ‘Do you think she’s his mistress?’

  ‘There could very well be more here than meets the eye’. Jack, quickly regaining composure, gave a non-committal response. ‘Let’s have a chat with the Chief.’

  It became a murder enquiry. The suspicion fell on Wayne McInnes that he had fallen for young Susan Bettany at work and started an affair. Rita had either found out and confronted him, or he had possibly decided to forestall her and do away with her before she noticed anything. But it was all circumstantial. There was no direct evidence. Wayne did later admit to being in love with Susan, and she with him, but both insisted that this had only happened after she moved into the house, at least two months after Rita disappeared.

  ‘He’s got a sailing-boat moored in the marina’, said Holly one day, ‘He could have murdered her and disposed of the body at sea in the dark, couldn’t he?’

  ‘Well, he could have’, said Jack, ‘But it’s all supposition. Unless he confesses, or the body turns up somewhere, we’ve got nothing. I think we should dig a little deeper.’

  They discovered from his business records that McInnes had often used his wife as a sleeping partner, listing her as a board member of some of his companies and therefore owner, or joint-owner, of several properties. He was already wealthy in his own right, but would stand to gain a lot more if Rita were dead. According to the family solicitor, Donald Barkham, her Will left everything to Wayne, apart from a portfolio of shares invested in trust for Hazel when she reached eighteen.

  They arrested and held Wayne McInnes in custody for forty-eight hours on suspicion of murder, interrogating him relentlessly during office hours in the official presence of Barkham. Throughout, he maintained his innocence. They went to search the house, and then the garden, using specialists with archaeological radar equipment to try and find buried remains; but all this searching was fruitless too, apart f
rom a single tiny bloodstain on the master-bedroom carpet that matched Rita McInnes’s DNA, taken from one of her hair-brushes. They had to let him go. Susan, who turned out to be twenty-two, exactly half Wayne’s age, was interviewed as well, but gave away nothing. The detective duo had to admit to a stalemate. For many months, that’s how it stayed.

  ***

  Jack and Holly either met or spoke on the phone about the case every week. They gleaned nothing significant from the hairdresser, staff at the GP practice or from anyone else, until they visited Andy Murry at his Hove office in Church Road. He was a kindly man in his late sixties who had been running his independent estate agents for more than thirty years. His ‘associates’ were his wife and three children, none of whom actually worked in the business.

  He remembered Rita McInnes very well, he told them. He had taken her on about nine years earlier. It transpired that after leaving school she had worked for a chain of estate agents, so she knew quite a lot about the business, even though she had not been employed since her daughter was born. She had come into the shop one day enquiring about a job, just when he had needed someone to help with the lettings. Her duties involved viewing properties and assessing their suitability, and later showing these flats and houses to potential rental clients. She was hard-working, competent, reliable and friendly, he said. Her clients spoke well of her, and she seemed to like engaging with them. She also got on well with her colleagues on the sales side, but he didn’t think she had made any particular friends. He had been sorry to lose her when McInnes telephoned one day to say she would not be coming in again. He had wanted to speak to her himself, but Wayne wouldn’t allow it. He had not heard that she had disappeared and was clearly worried for her.

  ‘My wife and I give a garden party in the summer each year for my staff’, he told the detectives. ‘The McInnes’s only came once, and I did notice that Rita seemed a different person in her husband’s company, very wary and inhibited. He, in contrast, was extremely outgoing, charming all the lady employees and such like. He drank quite a bit, too, I noticed. I got the impression that he felt he could do what he liked, and that he really dominated Rita. She was the one who had to stay dry, for example, so she could drive them both home. I felt sorry for her, and I often tried to give her the opportunity to talk about it afterwards, but she was definitely the loyal type and never spoke up.’

  Mr. Murry then asked a couple of women from the sales section to step into his office, so that Jack and Holly could quiz them too. Both confirmed, in the main, what he had already told them. Rita was friendly but highly discreet. She never gossiped about anyone, and she never spoke about personal matters. The only person they thought she might have confided in was another Rita, Rita Punnett from Australia, who had been taken on a year or more earlier on a temporary basis to help with lettings when a new block of luxury apartments was opened and Murry’s had twenty-five of them on the books all at once. The Aussie Rita was such an extrovert, you couldn’t help but like her, they said. But Rita Punnett had returned to New South Wales after she left the job a few weeks earlier, when almost all the new flats had been let or sold. It wasn’t much of a lead.

  Before dismissing the two women, Jack asked if they had ever met Wayne McInnes and what they thought of him. They both remembered him from Mr Murry’s garden party and had been flattered by him at first for his cheeky comments; but they both soon saw through this empty repartee. ‘It was all flannel, you could tell’, one of them said. ‘I wouldn’t let him sell me a house’. ‘I wouldn’t let him sell me a doormat’, rejoined the other. It was clear that, ultimately, they had not found him trustworthy or likeable at all.

  Hopes rose briefly, about six further weeks into the enquiry, when a woman’s body, comparable to Rita’s, was found washed up on a beach in Cornwall, but the DNA tests did not match. At first, Holly suspected the possibility that Wayne had rigged the hairbrush they had collected from among Rita’s possessions, so they asked for a blood sample from Hazel, as her DNA would be measurably close to her mother’s. The detectives had to admit they had nothing new, though, when Hazel’s DNA proved more of a match for the hairbrush than for the Cornish corpse.

  It was a frustrating time. More months went by without any progress. Occasional reports of sightings, in Sussex and further afield, turned out to be false alarms. After a year, Jack’s chief suggested closing the enquiry, which would have meant Jack and Holly no longer having an excuse to meet to discuss the case; but finally he agreed to a three-month extension before they would have to relegate the matter to the ‘Cold Case’ file. Fortuitously, only days before that time limit expired, and just ten days before Holly began investigating her golf course mystery, there was a dramatic development.

  It came from the Norfolk Constabulary in Norwich. A routine message reached Jack’s computer stating that a woman had visited the Police Station in Sheringham claiming to be Rita McInnes. The woman said that she had left her home and her husband deliberately, and that she was perfectly alright. She was planning to divorce Wayne, and did not want him knowing her whereabouts. Attached to the report was a message, ‘Can we take her name off the missing-person’s register now?’ Jack’s immediate instinct was ‘No’.

  When he contacted Holly that same morning, they discussed the possibilities, including the idea that Wayne had arranged for someone to impersonate his wife, travel to Norfolk and make the reported claim. They asked the Norfolk Police to ask the woman to return, or visit her at the address she had given, to obtain fingerprint and DNA samples. It was a shock then, a few days later, when the results appeared to confirm the woman’s identity as the missing Rita. Jack, his boss, Holly and Laura Garbutt then held a conference by telephone, the upshot of which was that, as this was still officially a murder enquiry, the two detectives would go to Norfolk and interview Mrs. McInnes, assuming she would co-operate.

  Jack said he would make the call, not entirely trusting Holly to stay neutral and keep calm on the phone. ‘How could she just leave her daughter like that?’ Holly had been incandescent when first hearing the news.

  ‘You haven’t completely forgiven your mother yet, have you, Angel?’ Jack had said gently. ‘You know we can’t afford to let that affect your judgement in this case.’

  ‘It won’t… I won’t let it.’ Holly was irritated. ‘I do know how to be professional, Jack. I’m not going to judge Mrs McInnes. I’m sure she had perfectly good reasons, leaving so suddenly without letting anyone know; but I do really want to know what they were.’

  Jack had been sympathetic but firm. ‘If you can’t get control of yourself and your feelings, Angel’, he said, ‘I will not be asking you to come with me’. So she assured him again that she would remain perfectly calm.

  The 6th

  Chapter

  It was two hundred miles to Sheringham by car, or a five-hour train ride involving changes in London and Norwich. After discussion, they decided to go by road and take turns driving the unmarked police vehicle. It was going to be a long day; but Jack still felt the need to restrain Holly from speeding as the needle tended to rocket above seventy on the motorways when she was at the wheel. ‘Do you always drive this fast?’ he asked her one time. Eyes focused intently on the road ahead, Holly slowed down just a little, but she did not reply.

  They switched over after stopping for petrol. Holly noticed immediately how cautiously and correctly Jack handled the car. ‘I did the advanced driving course once’, he explained. ‘And I was a traffic cop for a couple of years, remember. I saw many hideous accidents, most of them preventable; most caused by people speeding. I just make it a rule to go quietly, always stay back from the car in front and leave plenty of room to stop. I won’t let anyone get too close behind me either. I draw away or let them pass. It doesn’t do any harm.’

  Holly was chastened, and as they went along admitted to feeling rather tense. ‘I had a dream about my mother last night’, she said. ‘It wasn’t horrible. She
was just there, at the end of a passageway of some kind, as if she was waiting for me.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right’, she added. ‘This case has got to me more than I realized.’

  ‘You’ll be fine, Angel’, Jack replied, giving her a reassuring glance. ‘You are a true professional, no doubt about that at all.’

  They took another break later for coffee, but Jack volunteered to carry on driving. ‘I want you rested, not wound up like a Dinky Toy’, he said.

  Holly did not resist. They were motoring on in silence through the landscape, flat Norfolk farming country, when Jack switched on the radio. Holly said she preferred news and current affairs programmes, but Jack insisted on tuning in to a classical music station. ‘It’s soothing’, he said, as they listened first to a Vivaldi concerto and then a gentle piece by Ravel.

  ‘It was Brian who got me interested in classical music’, Jack mentioned, switching the radio off again when the programme reached a commercial break that was going on too long. ‘He’s much more knowledgeable and educated about such things than me.’

  ‘How did you two meet?’ Holly enquired, ‘If you don’t mind me asking’.

  ‘I nicked him’, said Jack.

  ‘You arrested him?’ Holly could hardly believe this. ‘What for?’

  Jack recounted how Brian, having finished university in London, had come to Brighton after being appointed to a job in local government. Having to repay his student loan, he had been forced to stay in cheap, poor quality lodgings. He didn’t know anybody in Sussex. On his twenty-second birthday, he had decided to go out and treat himself. In a fashionable downtown bistro, he had ordered a meal of crab-filled ravioli, then Mediterranean rabbit stew, together with a bottle of Côtes du Rhone that he must have drunk rather quickly. After that, he had gone, for the first time in his life, to a gay bar. This was in The Lanes; and there he had started drinking Brandy Alexanders. Soon, a truck-driver type with a paunch and bad breath came over to where he was sitting and tried chatting him up. Brian was either too polite or too frightened to tell him to get lost. He just sat there drinking more cocktails while the other fellow boasted about sexual exploits. His conquests, apparently, included both men and women.