Death at Hazel House

by Betty Rowlands

  ‘Sure, Guv, no problem.’

  ‘Oh, and by the way,’ Castle turned back to Sukey, ‘Holland’s definitely got form, and guess what. He’s “Walter Baby”!’

  She gave an impish grin that made him long to take her face between his hands and kiss her to death. ‘There, what did I tell you?’ she said cheekily.

  Back in the incident room, Castle found a message asking him to ring Inspector Mahony at Headquarters.

  ‘I thought you’d be interested to know that there’s to be a PM on Bayliss,’ Mahony told him when he got through.

  ‘Does that mean the death is being treated as suspicious?’

  ‘Not in the sense that you or I would use the word – not so far, anyway. There’s some doubt about the precise cause, a suggestion the temperature in the sauna could have been abnormally high, possibly due to some malfunction.’

  ‘In which case the widow might be in a position to sue whoever installed it.’

  Mahony gave one of his dry chuckles. ‘That’s the laugh. It was put in by Bayliss’s own company, Bodywise Systems.’

  ‘The outfit that owns the health clubs?’

  ‘The clubs are a fairly recent venture and so are the saunas. Their core business is swimming pools, ornamental fountains, stuff like that.’

  It struck Castle as ironic that a man whose business was primarily concerned with water should end his days in the dry heat of a sauna.

  Eighteen

  Later that afternoon, the Superintendent buttonholed DI Castle and demanded a progress report on the Lorraine Chant investigation. He was not over-impressed by the circumstantial evidence on which the case against Terry Holland rested so far, expressed doubts about the relevance of the pink elastic bands and was in no mood to authorise the allocation of precious man-hours for a check on every retail outlet that might have supplied them. He did, however, concede that only a limited quantity of that peculiarly lurid colour might have been imported and was prepared to allow a certain amount of desk work to be devoted to checking with distributors. His reaction on hearing about the cash paid into the Western Building Society by Terry Holland was marginally more encouraging, although he pointed out with, in Castle’s opinion, unnecessary emphasis and repetition, that since no money had been reported stolen, the link with the case was tenuous, to say the least.

  The Superintendent also – not surprisingly for a man noted for his mistrust of coincidences – warned his inspector against attaching too much significance to the suspect’s previous record. In support of this caveat he spent some time on a prolix re-statement of the reservations Castle himself had earlier expressed to Sergeant Radcliffe. And finally, he returned to a possibility he had raised at the outset, namely that it was Arthur Chant who had killed his wife.

  ‘I did consider that of course, sir, and I questioned him very closely about his movements,’ Castle said patiently. ‘He admits returning home to collect a file he’d left behind, although as it happens we haven’t found anyone who saw his car during the crucial period. He claims he and his wife had coffee together and we found two used mugs in the kitchen to bear that out. He got back to his office in plenty of time for his meeting and nobody noticed anything unusual about his manner. I agree it isn’t possible to eliminate him altogether, but he made no attempt whatever to conceal the body and his shock and grief seemed perfectly genuine.’

  ‘Hmm… well, don’t lose sight of him in your obsession with Holland.’

  ‘Of course not, sir.’ Castle tried not to show resentment at the word ‘obsession’.

  ‘All right,’ the Superintendent ended graciously. ‘If you’re certain Holland’s your man go after him by all means, but make sure you’ve got something concrete on him before you pull him in.’

  When Castle emerged from the interview his optimism, while not entirely dispelled, was considerably dented. As things stood the only hope of an imminent breakthrough lay with the gold necklet, and in his present frame of mind he would not have been surprised to learn that it bore no identifiable prints at all. The afternoon dragged past with no further developments of any significance and at six o’clock, resisting the temptation to check with George Barnes, he went in search of an early dinner. He deliberately chose a restaurant some distance from the police station to minimise the chance of bumping into any of his colleagues. Not that many of them ate out in the evening. The women cooked for themselves and their families, if any, while the majority of the men had wives who prepared their meals, and children who waited up in the hope that Dad would be home in time to hear about the goals they had scored or the good marks they had been awarded at school. Castle had never had kids, but he had once had a wife. He thought it might be nice to have one again. That made him think of Sukey. He had a date with her in two days’ time, but Saturday seemed light years away.

  While masticating his way through an over-cooked steak – he had ordered medium rare, but couldn’t summon the energy to complain – he mentally chewed over the case. His thoughts switched to the victim herself: young, beautiful and, according to hearsay, with a voracious sexual appetite that her adoring but much older husband could not satisfy. It was reasonably certain that she had been on the point of leaving him; the fact that all her jewellery was missing but that the cases had been carefully replaced in the safe indicated that she had intended to postpone for as long as possible the moment when he realised she had no intention of returning.

  What about the money? Castle was convinced to the marrow of his bones that it had come from the safe, and here he was presented with two possibilities: either, despite her husband’s assertion to the contrary, the victim had known where it was and where he kept the key, or someone else had similar knowledge. Holland had installed the safe and could easily have obtained a spare key beforehand. In Castle’s book it was a racing certainty that he was now in possession of its contents, some of which he had been carrying on the day he brought his van in for forensic examination; the remainder he had hung on to for a few days before paying it into his building society account. Where he had fenced the jewellery was anybody’s guess, but sooner or later they’d track it down. And it was quite possible he had been stupid enough to keep some of it to give to his wife. A search of the Holland residence was indicated.

  Despite Sukey’s belief that Lorraine Chant might have enjoyed ‘a bit of rough’ and the fact that Holland’s second name was Walter, Castle strongly doubted that he was the man she had been planning to leave home with. Instinct told him that if she had been going to keep an assignation, it would have been with someone with more style. House-to-house enquiries had revealed that a dark green Jaguar had occasionally been seen near The Hill, but appeals on the local radio and television stations for the driver to come forward had so far produced no result.

  By the time the waiter brought his coffee, Castle’s mind had moved on to his latest interview with Arthur Chant. That afternoon, the man had revealed the hard centre that lay beneath the pain. While never doubting the genuine nature of his grief, the detective had glimpsed a streak of ruthlessness, a determination to do whatever was necessary to protect his assets and his reputation. It could well have been Chant himself who had relocked the empty safe and restored the study to its original state before summoning help… something else that would never be known for certain unless he could be persuaded to own up to it. With a sigh, Castle paid his bill and made his way back to his office.

  He reached it just as Sukey was coming out and his spirits immediately soared as if they had bounced off a trampoline. She was grinning broadly as she followed him back into the room, exclaimed ‘Ta-ra!’ and pointed to the envelope on his desk.

  ‘What have you found?’

  ‘Double whammy!’ She stood beside him as he extracted the contents. ‘There you have a very nice thumb and forefinger. Terry Holland’s. Right in the middle of the necklace where you’ve got a section of plain, undecorated gold. Might have been designed to make our job easy,’ she said smugly. ‘And what an oblig
ing fence, not to give it a polish before flogging it!’

  ‘It probably wasn’t necessary, if Mrs Chant hadn’t even bothered to try it on. You’re absolutely sure the prints are his?’ After all the frustration, it was almost too good to be true.

  ‘Sixteen points, a perfect match,’ Sukey assured him. ‘There are other prints on the box and on the jewellery. Some of them are pretty smudgy, but as you can see, Holland’s are good and sharp. Those are the only ones of his, by the way, there are none on the box itself.’

  ‘That figures. The original case was left in the safe, remember. The necklace is what matters.’ Castle rubbed his hands together in glee. ‘I must have left one or two prints myself when I took the box from Mrs Bayliss, although I made a point of touching it as little as possible… and then presumably Bayliss himself handled it… and his wife.’ He caught Sukey’s eye and detected a hint of impatience. ‘Sorry, you hinted at something else?’

  Her eyes sparkled in a way that almost made him forget they were on duty. ‘Wait till you hear this!’ she said. ‘Most of the prints on the necklace were round the clasp and therefore incomplete, not easy to identify. Likewise on the earrings – but the box has a high gloss, ideal for lifting prints. Remember the ones we found on the underside of the loo seat at the Chants’ place?’ She straightened up and lifted both thumbs in a triumphant gesture as she delivered her pièce de résistance. ‘We found a match on the box!’

  It took Castle a second or two to spot the connection. Then he snapped his fingers and said, ‘Bayliss! You’re saying Bayliss could have been one of Lorraine Chant’s fancy men!’

  ‘It’s a thought. D’you reckon the widow will cut up rough if we ask permission to take his prints?’

  ‘That shouldn’t be a problem. There’s to be a PM. Will you take care of it?’

  ‘Sure, but why the PM?’

  Castle repeated what Dave Mahony had told him and Sukey suddenly burst out laughing. ‘I didn’t think it was that funny,’ he said.

  ‘It was water, not Walter that Mrs Hapwood overheard,’ she explained. ‘Don’t you see… Hugo Bayliss was Lorraine Chant’s Water Baby. It’s more than likely his firm installed her swimming pool – maybe that’s how they met.’

  Castle was not amused. ‘Thanks, you’ve just chipped away a bit of my case,’ he informed her. ‘Not that it shakes my conviction that Holland’s our man, especially after what you’ve turned up.’

  Sukey did not reply. He saw from her expression that she was busy with some thought that had just occurred to her and he waited for her to share it.

  ‘Supposing it was Bayliss that Lorraine was planning to go off with?’ she said after a few moments. ‘He was obviously pretty well-heeled, but maybe he didn’t have enough to pay for her extravagant tastes. Or maybe she just couldn’t bear the thought of leaving all that lovely money and jewellery behind? Supposing she did know about the safe and decided to empty it.’

  ‘Chant said quite positively that she didn’t. It’s not the sort of thing a man like him would be likely to confide to anyone, not even his wife.’

  ‘There’s nothing to say she didn’t find it when he wasn’t around, though,’ Sukey pointed out. She went on to develop her theory. ‘Lorraine might have been busy filling a bag with the spoils when Holland got into the house and started hoovering up the goodies downstairs. She’s so absorbed in what she’s doing – or maybe she was in the bathroom with the taps running at the crucial time – that she never hears him.’

  ‘Or maybe, she hears something but thinks it’s her lover come to help with the packing,’ Castle continued as Sukey paused for breath. ‘Then Holland comes charging in, she recognises him because he’s been to the house before, doing odd jobs—’

  ‘So he kills her and makes off with the loot,’ Sukey finished. Then she frowned and shook her head. ‘On second thoughts, I’m not so sure it was Bayliss she was planning to elope with.’

  ‘Why d’you say that?’

  ‘Only just over a week ago, he started chatting me up, asking me to go to his place to take photographs. Would he have bothered, if he was planning to go off with Lorraine Chant? And would he have repeated the offer so soon after his lover had been murdered?’

  ‘Hard to tell without knowing the man, although he comes across to me as a pretty unpleasant, amoral sort of person. But that’s something else he won’t be telling us. Inconsiderate blighter, dying on us like that,’ Castle added, recalling Dave Mahony’s wry comment. He put the exhibits back in the envelope and locked it away. He checked the time; it was a little after seven. ‘I’ll see if I can catch the Super and bring him up to date. Then I’ll get a warrant to search Holland’s place and bring him in for questioning.’ He gave one of the official smiles with which he rewarded any of his team for a job well done. ‘Good work, Sukey.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ she replied formally. At the door, she hesitated. ‘There’s one other thing that occurred to me.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Only a small point. That window, the one we think Holland used to enter the house.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It struck me as odd that it was left unfastened. Both Mrs Chant and her husband seem to have been very security conscious.’

  ‘Everyone gets careless at times. In any case, she’d probably have checked all round before leaving the house. Not that she’d have cared any more, as she wasn’t planning to come back.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose that’s it.’ Sukey went out of the room. A sensation of light and warmth seemed to go with her. But at least, he reflected, Saturday no longer felt so far away.

  With Radcliffe and Hill for back-up, DI Castle knocked at the door of the house in Exeter Street. It was opened by Rita Holland; she took one look at them and exclaimed, ‘Don’t you lot ever give up?’ before scuttling along the passage shouting, ‘Tel, it’s the coppers again!’

  ‘Well, that saved us asking if he’s in,’ muttered Radcliffe. ‘D’you think one of us should be round the back in case he does a runner, Guv?’

  Terry Holland made a reply to the question unnecessary by emerging from the kitchen with a child’s book in his hand. ‘What is it this time?’ he demanded.

  ‘Terence Walter Holland, I’m arresting you on suspicion of being involved in the murder of Mrs Lorraine Chant on Friday the eighth of June,’ Castle began, but before he could proceed with the formal caution there was a shriek of mingled rage and terror from Rita, who threw herself in front of Castle and pummelled her husband in the chest.

  ‘You bloody fool, why didn’t you listen to me?’ she sobbed. ‘I told you not to have any more to do with Charlie Foss! We was all right till you caught up with him… I knew it’d all go wrong—’

  ‘Shut up and go and look after Billy!’ Holland pushed her aside and thrust the book into her hands. She clutched it to her chest like a shield and shrank away from him, her expression distraught. Behind her, the boy appeared in the doorway, his eyes round with alarm beneath the shock of brown hair that tumbled over his forehead. His mother pushed him back into the kitchen and closed the door behind her.

  ‘This is rubbish… you’ve got it all wrong,’ Holland said angrily, shaking off the hand that Radcliffe had laid on his arm. His resistance collapsed when Hill came to the sergeant’s assistance; between them they got the handcuffs on, but still he protested. ‘I told you, I don’t know nothing about no murder, you’ve got the wrong man.’

  ‘You can tell us all about it at the station,’ said Castle. To Radcliffe he said, ‘Take him to the car and wait. I’ll be a few minutes. And I want you,’ he turned to Hill, ‘to come back here and carry out a search, after I’ve had a word with Mrs Holland.’

  The scene that greeted Castle in the kitchen was one he had encountered, with variations, many times before. It was at moments like this that he wished he had chosen a different job. Rita Holland was sitting in a chair with her arms round Billy, who was standing with his face hidden in her shoulder. Tears were pouring down he
r face as she silently stroked the boy’s hair, her cheek resting against his temple, her expression one of utter defeat. She raised her eyes as Castle entered, then looked away as if the sight of him added to her misery. The kitchen was shabby, but spotlessly clean. A window hung with blue and white checked curtains gave onto a tiny but well-tended back garden where roses bloomed and birds fluttered round a feeding table. For the umpteenth time Castle found himself asking the question, Don’t they care about the effect on their families? Sometimes, of course, the wives were in it up to their necks. He knew instinctively that it was not the case here.

  He reached for a chair. ‘May I?’ he said, and waited for her nod before sitting down. ‘I have to ask you a few questions, Mrs Holland. Do you think it might be better if Billy went out to play?’

  ‘He wants to stay here with me,’ she replied dully as, without showing his face, the child tightened his grip round her neck.

  ‘All right, I’ll make it as easy for you as I can. First of all, I have to tell you that we have reason to believe there is stolen property in the house. I have a warrant to have it searched.’

  He half expected her to protest, but she merely shrugged. ‘Go ahead, you won’t find nothing.’

  ‘And I’d like you to tell me about Charlie Foss.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘When I arrested your husband, you mentioned someone called Charlie Foss. Who is he?’

  ‘He and Terry used to be mates, back in London,’ she said after a pause. Castle could see her mind working, asking herself how much she should say, how much he might already know.

  ‘When did Terry last see him?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘But you think it might have been recently?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask him?’

  ‘I will, when we get back to the station. At the moment, I’m asking you.’