Murder at the Old Vicarage

by Jill McGown

  ‘I know,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘I was so scared,’ Joanna said again. ‘I was scared about the baby.’ Tears ran down her face again. ‘I knew I’d tell them if I saw them,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to tell them.’

  The sergeant took some tissues from her bag, and handed them to her. ‘Do they still not know?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’ Joanna took a deep, difficult breath. ‘It’s not their baby,’ she said. ‘And it’s not going to be.’

  A nod; understanding, perhaps, a little. ‘Have you seen a doctor?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. She’s made an appointment for me to have tests. But she says there’s nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Sergeant Hill? You won’t tell them, will you?’

  She shook her head. ‘But they’ll have to know sooner or later,’ she said.

  ‘I know. It’s silly, I know, but just not yet.’

  ‘That I can understand,’ said the sergeant, with a little laugh. ‘Believe me.’

  Everyone had their problems. Joanna wondered what Sergeant Hill’s were.

  ‘How long were you married?’ she asked.

  ‘Eighteen months,’ said Joanna. Eighteen months, she thought. A June bride.

  ‘Was he always violent?’

  ‘Not really. Not to start with. He’d get angry with me— He didn’t like . . .’ She looked away. ‘He didn’t like my parents very much,’ she said. ‘And it just somehow started.’

  ‘You said he’d been drinking – was he often drunk?’

  ‘No – he didn’t really drink. He said he’d met someone. I suppose they just—’ She shrugged. ‘It’s Christmas,’ she said. ‘People drink too much.’

  She looked round the safe, secure, comfortable room. ‘He hated this place,’ she said. ‘He said I’d never come out of the womb.’

  It was when Freddie was cheerfully removing bits of Graham Elstow that he dropped his unintentional bombshell.

  ‘Between seven o’clock and nine o’clock,’ he said. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, Kathy?’ The question was thrown over his shoulder at his assistant, who seemed equally happy in her work as she industriously checked samples.

  Lloyd’s face fell. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What about five?’

  ‘Five? No. Definitely still alive and digesting at five. He ate at two o’clock, according to the barmaid.’

  The barmaid had had good reason to remember Elstow, who had refused to leave at closing time. In the end, she had brought in reinforcements, and Elstow had left, protesting that no, he hadn’t got a home to go to, no one could call that a home . . .

  ‘Still alive at five,’ Freddie went on. ‘And at six – almost certainly still at seven.’ He flashed a wide smile at Lloyd. ‘And definitely dead by nine,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t do this to me, Freddie! We’ve got a theory.’

  Freddie sucked in his breath. ‘Tricky things, theories,’ he said.

  ‘Our theory,’ Lloyd went on, ‘says that Elstow arrived in the afternoon to make things up with his wife. He’s successful, and they go up to her room. But Elstow has to knock her about to get in the mood – and when he’s sleeping it off, she gets her own back with the poker.’ He raised his hands. ‘Simple,’ he said.

  ‘Simple is the word,’ said Freddie. ‘Simple, neat, tidy – what a pity it doesn’t fit the facts.’

  He didn’t sound too cut up about it, Lloyd thought sourly.

  ‘He didn’t die until Mrs Elstow was safely in the pub,’ he went on, then picked up some papers. ‘Preliminary report from forensic,’ he said. ‘Have you got yours?’

  ‘No.’ Lloyd glared at him.

  ‘It’s probably on your desk now. They don’t have much to go on yet – they’re working with a skeleton staff, and half of them couldn’t get in. But it does say that Elstow’s full handprint was on the inside of the sitting room door – as it would be, if he’d slammed it shut, like Mrs Elstow said. And there were scuff marks on the polished floorboards, consistent with two people struggling.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Lloyd said. ‘Stop being so smug.’

  Freddie laughed. ‘He was lying on the bed when he was attacked,’ he said. ‘Probably asleep.’ He looked up. ‘That fits in with your theory,’ he said. ‘If only he’d died a couple of hours earlier.’

  Joanna had been a fairly conspicuous visitor to the pub, with her black eyes. They had all seen her arrive with her father, at about ten past seven. Still, Lloyd thought, Freddie said he could have died at seven.

  ‘Could she have killed him before the pub?’ he asked.

  ‘And ten minutes later she’s sipping cider?’ Freddie said. ‘No, Lloyd. I think he was alive at seven, anyway.’

  ‘But it’s possible? In theory?’

  ‘Theoretically, he could have died at seven. But for Wheeler and his daughter to be in the pub by ten past – which several witnesses say they were – they have to have left the house by seven. The weather precluded speeding – if we assume they travelled at a reasonable speed, it would certainly take ten minutes from the vicarage to the pub.’

  ‘Are you saying he couldn’t have died even a few minutes before seven?’ asked Lloyd.

  ‘I am. Seven and nine are the absolute outside times, Lloyd. Between seven-thirty and eight-thirty would be my guess.’

  ‘So I have no leeway?’

  ‘No,’ said Freddie. ‘Not on the time. But there are two other interesting points,’ he said, brightening up.

  Lloyd shook his head. ‘Other people would object to their Christmas Day being broken into in this fashion, Freddie. Why don’t you?’

  ‘I’m happy in my work,’ he said, with a shrug.

  Lloyd looked at Freddie’s work, and shook his head again.

  ‘This has made my day,’ he went on enthusiastically. ‘It’s a puzzle, Lloyd. If you look at the—’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it, Freddie, whatever it is.’

  ‘Right. Two of the blows occurred after death. They’re not particularly heavy – nothing like as heavy as the others.’

  ‘Whoever did it expended a lot of energy,’ said Lloyd.

  ‘Sure, sure. The last blows wouldn’t be as strong,’ Freddie said. ‘But if you were that tired – why hit him again?’

  ‘She just kept going until she was certain,’ said Lloyd. He couldn’t see what there was to get excited about.

  And he didn’t miss Freddie’s raised eyebrows at his use of gender, but it was Freddie who had said that he thought the prints on the poker were a woman’s.

  And Lloyd thought they were Joanna Elstow’s, and would continue to do so until he was proved wrong. But God knew when that would be. It was Christmas Day, and it was snowing; that apparently meant that the system ground to a halt.

  ‘Elstow died almost immediately,’ said Freddie. ‘But he got hit again, twice, some considerable time after he had died.’

  Lloyd frowned. ‘Why would anyone want to do that?’

  ‘You’re the detective,’ said Freddie. He grinned.

  Lloyd regarded him sourly. ‘When you haven’t got your hands in a corpse, you’re nice and miserable like the rest of us,’ he said. ‘You’re only really happy round death. That’s weird, Freddie.’

  ‘So I’ve been told. I like dead bodies.’ He smiled. ‘I like some live bodies, too. Has Sergeant Hill recovered?’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Lloyd. ‘You said two points. What’s the other?’

  ‘The prints on the poker – oh, I forgot. You haven’t seen the report yet.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘They agree with me that they’re probably a woman’s,’ said Freddie. ‘Of course, since we haven’t got the comparison with the family’s prints yet . . .’

  ‘The Wheelers’ prints were taken as soon as possible,’ Lloyd said with exaggerated patience. ‘Don’t blame me because they’ve got stuck in some bureaucratic snowdrift.’

  Freddie laughed. ‘It’s lonely at the to
p, Acting Chief Inspector.’

  ‘Is that it?’ Lloyd said. ‘That they’re a woman’s prints?’

  ‘Could be a woman’s prints. And yes, in a way, that is it, because the poker was held with one hand. Now, it’s not impossible, but I’d have said that to inflict blows like that, the average woman would have needed both hands.’

  Lloyd nodded. ‘A good double-handed backhand, you said this morning.’

  ‘That’s still what I think,’ said Freddie. ‘So there you are. You go away and puzzle that lot out, and I’ll get busy on the details. If and when we can get any,’ he added.

  Lloyd groaned. ‘It only happened today,’ he said. ‘And it’s Christmas Day, Freddie – a day we simple folk celebrate.’

  ‘Until we’ve got them, you don’t know if you’re looking for an intruder or not,’ Freddie said.

  ‘Intruder!’ Lloyd snorted. ‘It’s a domestic, Freddie. Pure and simple.’

  ‘Like your theory?’

  Lloyd sighed. ‘Don’t remind me,’ he said. ‘I’ve just sent Sergeant Hill to lean on someone that you tell me was in a pub with a hundred witnesses when the deceased met his maker.’

  Freddie bristled slightly. ‘Let’s hope she left her rubber truncheon at home then,’ he said. ‘Look – you shouldn’t have gone on my estimate at the scene. I told you it was rough – I even told you it could be down to eight hours.’

  Lloyd held up a conciliatory hand. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know. But young Mrs Elstow is not telling the truth about what went on, wherever she was when he was killed,’ he added.

  ‘When did he stop beating his wife?’ Freddie said.

  ‘Quite.’ Lloyd shook his head. ‘How you can make jokes in a morgue is beyond me,’ he said, looking at his watch. Four forty-three. Surely Judy would have been and gone by the time he got to the station. ‘I’m off,’ he said. ‘Enjoy yourself with the rest of Mr Elstow.’

  ‘I shall,’ said Freddie cheerfully. ‘I shall.’

  ‘It’s Graham’s father,’ said Marian to Joanna. ‘On the phone. I didn’t say you were here.’

  She had almost gone in when she’d heard Joanna crying. She had gone in as soon as Sergeant Hill had left. But Joanna had said that everything was fine. It had just caught up with her, she had said. Sergeant Hill had comforted her, she’d said. She hadn’t made her cry. So all that worrying had been in vain.

  ‘I’ll talk to him,’ said Joanna. ‘I think it’ll be about the funeral arrangements. I called him, but he wasn’t there.’

  The funeral. Marian hadn’t given it a thought. It was as if once they had removed his body from the house, that was that. But it wasn’t, of course. It was very far from being that.

  ‘No one can do anything until the police say so, anyway,’ said Joanna. ‘I ought to go and see him, really.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marian absently. ‘Perhaps you ought.’

  She could hear the rise and fall of Joanna’s voice on the phone. It would be over, she told herself. One day, it would all be over, and they could get back to normal.

  ‘The vicar,’ Eleanor said, in answer to the inevitable question that had been an unnaturally long time coming.

  Penny’s smile faded. ‘The vicar?’ she repeated. ‘You didn’t tell me you knew them.’

  ‘I don’t really.’ Eleanor was very fond of her mother-in-law, who had been everything to her for the last two years: her mother, her friend, her adviser, a shoulder to cry on, a baby-sitter. But she was incurably interested in other people’s business.

  ‘Why was he here?’

  Eleanor pushed her chair away from the table, and eyed the remains of the Christmas dinner. Tessa’s plate, abandoned in favour of Dumbo in the other room, was particularly uninviting. Two-year-olds had no preconceived notions about what you could eat with what.

  ‘We’ll get this done in no time,’ Penny said reassuringly, standing up. She hesitated. ‘You’re not—’ she began, then obviously decided that even she couldn’t continue that particular line of enquiry. ‘Why was he here?’ she asked, taking the direct approach.

  ‘They’d invited us over,’ Eleanor said. ‘He came to explain what had happened.’

  ‘Oh.’ Penny began to pile up plates. ‘Are you going to finish your pudding?’ she asked.

  Eleanor shook her head.

  ‘I thought you were worried this morning. Why didn’t you tell me you knew them?’ She made a hideous pile of left-overs.

  ‘I didn’t want to worry you,’ Eleanor said. ‘One of us worrying was enough.’

  ‘Who was killed?’ Penny asked, her voice low.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Eleanor, departing from the truth. ‘He didn’t go into details. Someone who was visiting them.’

  Penny tutted. ‘How did it happen?’ she asked.

  ‘They think it was a burglar.’

  ‘You mean someone just got in and killed someone?’ Penny pushed open the kitchen door. ‘Haven’t they caught anyone?’ she asked, alarmed.

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’ Eleanor picked up the cream jug and the barely-touched pudding. She didn’t know how much of this third-degree she could take.

  ‘I don’t like the idea of your being here alone,’ Penny said. ‘Why don’t you and Tessa come back with me? Spend the rest of the holiday in Stansfield?’

  Eleanor managed a smile. ‘I’m not really on holiday except for today and tomorrow,’ she said.

  ‘It seems so lonely here,’ Penny persisted. ‘Tessa’s all on her own.’

  ‘Not usually. There’s the play-group – there are lots of children in the village.’

  ‘But for Christmas, I mean. The people next door to me have got a little boy a few months older than Tessa – that would be company for her, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘We’re perfectly all right here, Penny. We won’t be murdered in our beds, I promise.’

  Penny sighed, and went into the kitchen. For a moment, all that could be heard was water running into the dish basin. Then it was turned off, and there was a little silence.

  ‘Someone was,’ she called through. ‘Don’t forget that.’

  Chapter Five

  ‘Something odd,’ Jack Woodford said, as his head appeared round Lloyd’s door. ‘Got a minute?’

  ‘All the time you want,’ Lloyd said. ‘Something odd means we’re getting there.’

  Jack looked less certain of that than Lloyd, as he came in, a sheet of paper in his hand.

  Judy arrived before Jack had closed the door. ‘I thought I’d better report in,’ she said.

  Lloyd had indeed successfully avoided her the day before, after his visit to the morgue; he had rather hoped that she wouldn’t come in today.

  ‘You thought you’d get away from your in-laws,’ said Jack.

  ‘That too,’ she confessed with a smile, taking off the new leather coat that she was wearing.

  ‘Jack’s about to give us something to go on,’ said Lloyd, glad that Jack was there. Their row had been yesterday; it seemed like a year ago. But it was still only Boxing Day, and this interminable festive season ground on around them, with no shops open and no proper programmes on the telly, even if he’d had the energy to watch.

  Jack laid the sheet of paper on Lloyd’s desk. ‘My lads have been checking up on the people Mrs Wheeler visited,’ he said. ‘On Christmas Eve.’

  Lloyd glanced down at the list. Beside the names, Jack had jotted down times.

  ‘They’re only approximate,’ Jack said, as Lloyd opened his mouth to ask. ‘People didn’t think to look at their watches in case the vicar’s wife needed an alibi for murder.’

  ‘No,’ said Lloyd.

  ‘But she says she left the vicarage at about ten to eight – right?’ He didn’t wait for the unnecessary confirmation. ‘And the earliest visit we can find is . . .’ He leant over, reading the sheet upside down. ‘Mrs Anthony,’ he said, running his finger down the list of names. ‘And that was at eight twenty-five. The thing is – Mrs Anthony’s house is in a row of cotta
ges right beside the drive up to the vicarage.’

  Lloyd remembered passing them just after they had spoken to the snow-plough crew.

  ‘If Mrs W. had gone on her hands and knees into a force eight,’ Jack went on, ‘she’d have taken no more than five minutes getting there. Which seems to my untrained eye to leave half an hour unaccounted for.’

  ‘Well, well, well,’ said Lloyd briskly, looking over at Judy. ‘I think we’d better go and talk to this Mrs Anthony – don’t you?’

  On the way, Judy expanded a little on the notes she’d left him on her interview with Joanna. She had obviously believed her; Lloyd trusted Judy’s instincts, but he had a question.

  ‘If she’d made it up with him,’ he asked, ‘why didn’t she go up to see him?’ He slowed down to let Judy read the numbers on the cottages.

  ‘Eleven, thirteen – seventeen must be that one with the yellow door,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. That is a bit odd.’

  ‘It’s not like you to miss a trick,’ he said.

  She got out of the car without replying. He’d said it to annoy her. She had said nothing at all about their row, or about his parting shot. In fact, she was behaving as though nothing had happened, obeying Lloyd’s own rule that their private relationship mustn’t affect their work. But she was much more of a professional than he would ever be, and the ease with which she donned her policeman’s helmet irritated him. Irrationally, he conceded. But it did.

  Mrs Anthony took some time to come to the door; when it opened, they saw a frail old lady backing her wheelchair away. Lloyd introduced himself and Judy, and they were shown into a small, neat living room.

  ‘Do you remember Mrs Wheeler coming to see you on Christmas Eve?’ Judy asked, raising her voice slightly, enunciating clearly.

  Lloyd suppressed a smile as Mrs Anthony regarded Judy with a bleak eye. ‘I am almost eighty years old,’ she said. ‘I sometimes have to use this wheelchair. I would prefer to be thirty-five and walking about, like you, but I do assure you that neither of these disadvantages affects my hearing, my acumen, or my memory.’

  Judy’s face grew pink. ‘Oh – I do apologise if I gave the impression—’