Old Sins, Long Memories

by Angela Arney

  It was a disappointed Lizzie who eventually took her leave of Mrs Mills, no nearer to finding Giles Lessing. ‘You’ve been very helpful,’ she said. ‘Thank you for answering all my questions.’

  ‘Hmn!’ said Mrs Mills. ‘I’m not sure that I’ve done the right thing. Maybe I should have kept quiet, because if you’ve got any sense, young woman, you’ll leave well alone. Murderers are for the police to catch, not lady doctors.’

  Lizzie smiled. ‘It’s years since I’ve been called a young woman.’

  ‘When you get to my age everyone is young,’ said Mrs Mills wryly. ‘Would you mind fetching my Zimmer frame from the kitchen for me, dear? I’ll come with you then as far as the front door.’ Lizzie duly obliged, helping to hoist the old lady onto the frame before they set off together towards the hall. ‘I do remember something else about Giles Lessing,’ said Mrs Mills, ‘although I doubt it’s important. He was mad on motorbikes. Old ones. He used to ride them around the lanes at night without lights. Everyone said it was a wonder he wasn’t the one who was killed. But there you are. He survived, although his family didn’t. No justice in this world, is there?’

  ‘None,’ said Lizzie, speaking with difficulty. A cold, hard ball of fear had lodged in her throat. Giles Lessing was in Stibbington. He was the man on the motorbike she’d seen driving away from Darren Evans’s cottage, and now she realized it must have been his motorbike she’d heard on the night of Tarquin’s murder. He must have stayed around long enough to make certain his victim was dead. But she’d forgotten to mention the motorbike to the police, something she ought to rectify now. Remembering Steve Grayson had given her his mobile phone number when they’d first met, she sat in the car with the interior light on and fished in her handbag for her phone.

  Finding the number she called it, but a disembodied voice informed her that the phone was switched off and she should try again later. Lizzie sat for a moment and considered. The fact that Giles Lessing rode a motorbike was not going to tell the police where he was, and anyway, he was he was hardly likely to be advertising his presence. Dr Burton had been his doctor and confidante; maybe he’d kept notes, so perhaps she’d find a clue to Lessing’s whereabouts in amongst them. If anyone had told Lizzie she was venturing further and further into police investigative territory she wouldn’t have listened. The adrenalin was pumping, she was on the trail, and she was going to follow it until she got to the end. Turning the key in the ignition she started down the forest track, turned left at the main road and headed towards the Honeywell Health Centre.

  All the old records were amazingly easy to find. When Lizzie asked Tara if they still existed she merely took her to a room at the end of the corridor, opened the door, pointed towards stacks of boxes on the shelves and said, ‘There you are. No booting up to do, no disks to search, just take out the boxes and look through the old Lloyd George Cards. I’ve always preferred them to the computer. There’s something satisfying about a bundle of brown cards.’

  Lizzie laughed. ‘Tara, you’re too young to be so nostalgic,’ she said.

  Tara shrugged. ‘We’re not all geeks,’ she said as she closed the door leaving Lizzie inside.

  Praise be to God, thought Lizzie, for people who don’t believe in the paperless society. The Lloyd George Cards, the old-fashioned brown medical cards, were all there. Everything had been noted. Patients who had died thirty years before still featured large amongst the piles of notes, and it was not difficult to find Giles Lessing’s records. In the days when patients’ records were for a doctor’s eyes only, it was possible for private anecdotes to be written secure in the knowledge that no one else would ever see them, and Dr Burton had liberally sprinkled his patients’ notes with information of a non-medical nature. Lizzie learned that Giles Lessing’s private income came from properties he owned in the London area and let out by the room, and that when he left Stibbington he had moved back to a flat he owned near Regents Park canal. The address was in the notes. He’d also owned and let out, according to the notes, various farm properties, and boathouses, in and around Stibbington, although there were no specific addresses.

  ‘Pity,’ said Maguire rifling through the notes Lizzie had handed over to him. ‘Pity,’ he repeated, ‘that we don’t know where the Stibbington properties were. Because if he’s here that’s maybe where he is.’

  ‘But you have his London address in there,’ said Lizzie. She was feeling guilty about handing over the records.

  ‘No wonder none of the estate agents here knew where he’d gone to,’ said Grayson. ‘We found the one who sold his house,’ he told Lizzie, ‘but we couldn’t trace a forwarding address’. He picked up a page of medical notes and began to read. Lizzie snatched it back. ‘You do realize that patients’ notes are confidential, even though the man’s a murderer.’

  ‘He’s a suspect that’s all, nothing more at this stage,’ said Maguire dourly as Lizzie gave a derisive snort. ‘And you shouldn’t break the rules, either, if you’re worried about it, and neither should you jump to conclusions.’ Lizzie opened her mouth to protest, but Maguire silenced her with a sharp bark of, ‘Steve!’

  ‘Yes, sir?’ Grayson who’d been leaning against a filing cabinet, jumped to attention.

  ‘Take this,’ he handed him the paper with Lessing’s last known address on it, ‘and find out if he still lives there and if he does where he is at the moment.’

  ‘He’s here. In Stibbington,’ said Lizzie. ‘I know it. He’s been riding his motorbike around. I’ve seen him. And what’s more I saw a motorcyclist riding away from Darren Evans’s bungalow the day we found his body; I suppose he’d gone back to check that he really was dead. And I heard a motorbike when I got back to Silver Cottage and found Tarquin’s body. Plus I’ve seen it going along the shore road near the House on the Hard.’

  Maguire pushed the bundle of notes across the table. ‘Take these and put them back where they belong. I’m not interested in his medical conditions, past or present; I’ve got the information that’s useful. And as far as the motorcyclist is concerned, what you’ve seen is a man on a bike, and that doesn’t prove it is Giles Lessing. And, you should have told me earlier about seeing it at the Evans bungalow.’

  ‘I know,’ said Lizzie. ‘Sorry.’

  Maguire picked up the notes and held them out. ‘Take them,’ he said.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say thank you? You’ve got an address, which you wouldn’t have got without me.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Maguire. He looked at Lizzie sternly. ‘Now go back to your doctoring, and leave the police work to me and my colleagues. Murder is a dangerous business. Leave it alone. Don’t get mixed up in it.’

  ‘But I am mixed up in it,’ said Lizzie, resenting his tone of voice.

  ‘Leave it alone,’ Maguire repeated, losing his temper. Leaning forward he banged the palm of one hand flat on the desk. ‘For God’s sake, woman,’ he shouted, ‘this isn’t a cosy TV series where a clever amateur uncovers the murder under the nose of some dumb policeman. We’re probably dealing with someone who is seriously deranged here. Don’t get involved, or your own life might be in danger. Leave the police work to the experts.’

  Lizzie glared at him. She didn’t like being shouted at by men. It reminded her too much of Mike.

  She stood up, picked up the notes, and made, what she hoped, was a dignified exit. But she couldn’t resist having the last word.

  Pausing at the door of his office she said in dulcet tones, ‘I was only assisting the police, something I believe every citizen is encouraged to do.’

  Maguire didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. He slumped back down in his chair, his ferocious glare saying it all. Even Grayson looked worried.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ‘Well, Tess,’ said Maguire to the dog, who was sitting on her special mat beside him. He’d gone home to take her for a walk and then bring her back to the office as it looked like being another late night. ‘I’ve well and truly put an end to any invitations for u
s to have supper at Silver Cottage again. Dr Browne did not like being told what to do!’

  Tess looked back at him, her brown eyes full of undemanding affection. Undemanding and non-judgemental, that is the good thing about dogs, thought Maguire. If only more people could be like that. Rosemary had been, but she’d been exceptional, and indeed there were times during their marriage, if he were honest, that Maguire had felt irritated by her lack of what he termed ‘spirit’. But all those feelings had been swept away by her illness. Then, her courageous acceptance of her fate seemed almost saint-like. Now, Maguire didn’t allow himself to think of her as anything other than perfect. Lizzie Browne certainly wasn’t in the same mould, he mused bad-temperedly. She was a clever, interfering, infuriating woman who couldn’t have been easy to live with. No wonder she was divorced.

  ‘Not that I had anything other than the occasional pasta supper in mind. Divorced and acerbic Dr Browne might be, but she is also a damned good cook.’

  ‘Sir?’ Steve Grayson popped his head around the door. ‘Oh, you are alone. I thought you had someone with you.’

  ‘Just talking to the dog,’ said Maguire, guessing, rightly, that Grayson was thinking, poor old sod, reduced to talking to the dog because there’s no one else.

  ‘Major and Mrs Brockett-Smythe are here, sir.’

  ‘Good. Escort her down to the interview room; I’ll be down in a moment.’

  Grayson’s eyebrows shot sky high. ‘Interview room? Do you suspect her?’

  ‘Let’s say that I suspect she is not telling me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and that if she did it would help us enormously in our inquiries, Steve.’

  Grayson grinned. ‘Amen to that.’

  A few moments later, after he had deposited Tess with WPC Jones, who loved dogs, Maguire sat down in the interview room by the side of Grayson and opposite a clearly very nervous, Mrs Brockett-Smythe.

  ‘I’m sorry to have to drag you in here,’ said Maguire, switching on the recorder. He had no desire to terrorize the poor woman, but he had to get at the truth. ‘Have you any objection to this conversation being recorded?’

  ‘No, I suppose not. But you’ve already spoken to me once, and I can’t tell you any more.’ Her voice was high-pitched, and trembling.

  ‘I know.’ Maguire was soothing. ‘But at the time you were, understandably, very upset, and we didn’t record the interview. There are certain rules and regulations which we, as policemen, have to abide by otherwise we should all lose our jobs.’

  ‘I understand you went shopping yesterday morning,’ said Grayson consulting his notes. ‘It wasn’t your usual day, was it?’

  Mrs Brockett-Smythe nodded. ‘No, Ivy usually comes on Wednesdays and Saturdays.’

  ‘So why did you change it to Tuesday?’ Maguire spoke very quietly, in a matter-of-fact kind of voice, as if it didn’t really matter. He smiled at the nervous woman opposite. ‘We have to put everything down, no matter how small and trivial it may seem.’

  ‘I’d run out of toilet rolls. I know I could have phoned Ivy and asked her to bring some up. She would have done, she’s always so helpful, but I wanted to get away, get out.’ The words came out in a rush and when she’d finished speaking Mrs Brockett-Smythe leaned back in her chair as if exhausted.

  ‘It must have been a terrible strain for you, looking after Melinda,’ said Maguire. ‘I can understand you wanting to get out.’

  ‘Yes.’ The woman opposite relaxed a visible slackening of facial muscles and body position. ‘She wasn’t my daughter, you know, and she wasn’t ill when I married the major.’

  ‘Would you have still married him if she had been ill?’ asked Grayson.

  Maguire shot him an irritated look. That, he thought, was putting it too bluntly; it was the kind of thing they could find out by other means. But too late now, Grayson had blurted it out.

  However Mrs Brockett-Smythe didn’t appear to take offence, rather the opposite. She became almost confidential. ‘The answer to that is almost certainly no,’ she said. ‘I would not have married him. But by the time Melinda became ill it was too late.’

  ‘You could have left him,’ said Maguire.

  A pair of pale blue eyes stared back at him in surprise. ‘But I’d married him, and I loved him. I still do love him. I’d made my promises so I couldn’t go back on them, although sometimes I must admit I have prayed that she would die soon.’

  ‘And now she has,’ said Grayson.

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t want it like that.’ The reply came swiftly. Mrs Brockett-Smythe shuddered. ‘No one could want it to end like that. It was horrible.’ She shuddered again.

  ‘I understand your husband was at the back of the house repairing a fence when you left to go shopping,’ said Maguire.

  She nodded. ‘Yes. The fence had been blown down in the gales of the previous week. It’s a long way from the house, behind the hazel copse at the far end of our land, so I didn’t bother to tell him I was going. Ivy James arrived, and I left her making herself a cup of tea in the kitchen.’

  ‘Were the outside doors locked?’

  ‘Oh no. We never bother, not when we’re there. There’s no need. There’s not much crime around here.’ The understatement of the year, thought Maguire in view of recent happenings, but he remained silent and let her continue. ‘Melinda’s room was locked, of course,’ she said. ‘From the outside. But you already know that.’

  ‘So anyone could have got into the house,’ said Maguire.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said quickly. ‘Well, they must have done, mustn’t they? How else could Melinda have been murdered?’

  ‘How else indeed,’ said Maguire and, leaning slightly forward just to emphasize his words, said, ‘interview with Mrs Brockett-Smythe ended at 5.35p.m.’

  Mrs Brockett-Smythe almost fell out of her chair. ‘Is that all?’

  Maguire smiled. ‘Yes, you may go now, and I would advise you and your husband to go to the Royal Oak and have a meal. You deserve a little relaxation this evening after all you’ve been through.’

  She stood up. Maguire noticed she was still trembling. ‘Yes, perhaps we will,’ she said. ‘Yes, that’s a good idea.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Maguire, just as she reached the door. ‘How did you acquire that nasty bruise just under your hairline on the right side of your forehead?’

  A hand instinctively flew up to it, and tugged a piece of hair down. ‘Melinda hit me,’ she said. ‘Yesterday morning, before she was killed.’

  ‘Sounds like she was telling the truth,’ said Grayson after she’d gone. ‘Perhaps Lessing did get at Melinda and do it.’

  ‘Yes.’ Maguire ran the tape back to the beginning. ‘But if Lessing killed Melinda why the hell didn’t he shoot her? Why slit her throat?’

  ‘Quieter,’ said Grayson. ‘Ivy James was downstairs, and the major was somewhere in the garden. A shot would have been heard by both of them.’

  ‘I know that’s the logical reason, but somehow it doesn’t feel right.’

  ‘Sir?’ Grayson was clearly puzzled.

  Maguire left the interview room to collect Tess. ‘Don’t worry, Steve, I was in danger for a moment or two of letting a gut feeling get in the way of plain common sense. Come on, we’ve got to track down Lessing. Much as I hate to admit it, I think Dr Browne is right and that he is still here in Stibbington. Although God knows why; the Walshes left years ago.’

  ‘The parents have moved back,’ said Grayson. ‘Ann told me. They’ve bought one of those luxury flats down by the quay.’

  Maguire stared angrily at his younger colleague. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me that before?’

  ‘I only found out myself today. When I went home for a sandwich at lunchtime Ann and I talked about the murders and then she told me. And we’ve been busy ever since. Besides, I didn’t think they were in danger. After all, it was their son who was involved in the crash not them, and he’s not here.’

  ‘God knows how you ever got to be made
a detective.’ Maguire stomped angrily from the room, followed by the now very anxious Grayson. He collected Tess and went back to his office. ‘Forget about going home for supper,’ he told Grayson. ‘I want to know the whereabouts of Giles Lessing, pronto. Get those two they’ve sent down from Winchester on to it, and just make sure the three of you come up with a result.’

  ‘Where are you going, sir? The super might ask.’

  ‘Out,’ said Maguire, ‘and pass me that damned phone. I suppose I’d better take it with me. Call me as soon as you find out anything. And I do mean anything.’

  ‘He’s bound to find out sooner or later.’ Joan Walsh stood at the large bay window of their apartment and looked out across the darkening windswept harbour. The serried masts of the yachts in the marina lurched about haphazardly in the wind. Even the water in the inner harbour was choppy, white horses curling and spitting on every scrap of open water where the wind caught and snatched it up. Normally a peaceful scene, it looked out of control. Dark and menacing, exactly the way Joan was feeling , as though her life was beginning to spiral out of control. But of course Geoffrey would never think that. ‘We can’t keep three murders from him,’ she said. ‘He’s bound to find out.’

  Geoffrey suddenly surprised her. ‘Perhaps it might be safer if he went back to London,’ he conceded. Joan nearly wept with relief. To get Niall away from Stibbington was her one aim now. Back to London and to safety. Her husband joined her at the window. ‘But you’ll have to think up some excuse,’ he said. ‘Say you’re feeling ill, can’t cope with the family, and it would be better if they went back and had Christmas on their own. Say Tom is getting on your nerves. Niall knows you’ve always suffered with your nerves.’