Murder at the Old Vicarage

by Jill McGown

  ‘What did he call you when you were a baby?’ she asked. ‘He didn’t call you Lloyd then, surely?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lloyd said. ‘The baby, I suppose. That was his problem.’

  Judy’s dark eyes regarded him as she gently blew at the steam from her coffee. ‘No,’ she said. ‘He didn’t tell me.’

  Lloyd laughed. ‘You gave in too soon,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve not given in.’

  He frowned. ‘What’s my father got to do with it, then?’ he asked.

  ‘You and your father went off to look at some furniture,’ she said. ‘To see if you wanted an old dresser, or something.’

  An old dresser or something. A genuine . . . He began to feel uncomfortable again. Because that bit was true. ‘So?’

  ‘So I was left alone,’ she said. She left a pause. ‘With the family Bible.’

  The family Bible? They didn’t have one. Did they? Oh, God, yes. He could remember it. A huge black one that he’d grown up with and seen every day, and to which he had never paid the least attention. But even so, they didn’t write names in it.

  Judy sipped her coffee.

  ‘I’d know,’ he said. ‘If they’d written babies’ names in it.’

  ‘How? Your sisters are older than you. There weren’t any babies after you.’

  Lloyd finished his coffee, and his mug still steamed. ‘What are their names?’ he demanded.

  ‘Megan and Amelia.’

  He poured himself more coffee. ‘I’ve told you that,’ he said. ‘I must have.’ Megan and Melly. That’s what he called them. He never thought of Melly as Amelia. But then his father sometimes called her Amelia. That’s where she got that from. But he couldn’t be sure.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘If you know, tell me.’

  She looked horrified. ‘You said you’d flatten me if I ever used it,’ she protested.

  ‘You are bluffing.’ He pointed at her. ‘But just in case you’re not,’ he said. ‘Don’t you ever utter it. Ever. Not even when you’re alone. Or I’ll—’

  ‘Flatten me,’ she said.

  ‘Worse. I’ll put a notice up in the CID room that you wear a vest. That’ll put a dent in your image, Sergeant Hill.’ He smiled. ‘I’m very glad you’re here,’ he said, giving her a squeeze.

  ‘I’m glad I’m here.’ She lay back, her head on his shoulder. ‘Talk to me,’ she said.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Anything. It doesn’t matter. I don’t listen anyway.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Anything except double-glazing and cavity wall insulation,’ she said.

  Lloyd smiled. ‘Well, that leaves the field fairly open,’ he said. ‘What would you like? The influence of Roman culture on ancient Britons?’ He kissed her, and her response was rather more to his liking than it had been in the car park of that dismal pub. ‘An analysis and comparison of the French and Russian revolutions,’ he said, as she began to loosen his tie. ‘Flora and fauna of the Florida everglades . . .’ Her mouth touched his as he spoke. ‘The pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,’ he said.

  ‘Eleanor Langton,’ she said.

  ‘The habitat of the natterjack toad,’ he carried on, and kissed her as she laughed.

  ‘You said she was in all evening,’ said Judy.

  ‘The decline of Twelfth Night as a popular festival.’ She wasn’t wearing a vest tonight. ‘The effect of television on the British film industry,’ he murmured in her ear, as he undid her bra.

  ‘But she might not have been.’

  ‘Can’t you think of anything else? Pick a subject.’

  She smiled. ‘The pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,’ she said. ‘Marian saw her at five past eight, for about five . . .’

  Lloyd drew her into a long kiss, but it had to end.

  ‘. . . minutes, and George got there at about twenty to nine.’

  ‘In the middle of the last century,’ Lloyd began, his lips on her shoulder, ‘three artists – Rossetti, Holman—’

  ‘And it only takes a few minutes across the fields,’ she said.

  ‘Holman Hunt, and Millais,’ he went on, his lips travelling with the words, ‘decided that they didn’t think much . . . she’d get there at twenty past,’ he said, tackling her zip. ‘At the earliest.’ Or long johns. She’d catch her death.

  ‘Plenty of time to do it,’ said Judy.

  ‘I know,’ said Lloyd. ‘But I’m in the mood now.’

  ‘Eleanor had plenty of time to kill Elstow.’

  Lloyd sat back. ‘Except that if your little girl’s telling the truth, then she would have been there by the time Eleanor Langton arrived,’ he said.

  ‘Joanna could have been and gone by twenty past.’

  ‘In which case, she wouldn’t have found the door locked, would she?’

  ‘Are you saying that Joanna is telling the truth?’

  ‘No,’ he said, with great patience. ‘I’m saying that if it was Eleanor, then there’s no reason to disbelieve Joanna. And if there’s no reason to disbelieve Joanna, then it wasn’t Eleanor. You like logic problems – sort that one out.’

  Judy took his hands. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll forgive you,’ he said. ‘But only because I’m damned if that family’s going to spoil this evening.’

  Judy smiled, and lay back, taking him with her. ‘What family?’ she said.

  ‘Will you stay the night?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, Lloyd, I can’t,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve never spent the night with me.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘Please, Lloyd, I don’t want another row.’

  ‘Why can’t you?’ he asked. He didn’t want another row. He wanted her to stay.

  ‘I have to meet Michael’s train at half past seven in the morning,’ she said.

  ‘There is a half past seven in the morning here,’ Lloyd said.

  She kissed him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It would be too obvious that I hadn’t been home. There would be too many questions.’

  Don’t go on at her, he told himself. Don’t spoil it again. He smiled. ‘And you can’t tell lies,’ he said.

  She shook her head.

  ‘What you need,’ he said seriously, putting his hands on her shoulders, ‘is a piece of magic chalk.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll buy it. What’s magic chalk?’

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Dai’s going home from work, and calls in for a quick drink. And there at the bar is the most beautiful blonde he’s ever seen. He can’t believe his luck when she buys him a drink. So he sits down, and chats her up a bit, and then she says would he like to come home with her and make love to her.’

  Judy smiled.

  ‘Would he not?’ Lloyd went on. ‘So Dai throws caution to the wind, goes home with her, and makes love to her for hours. But all good things must come to an end, and Dai’s getting dressed to go home when he sees the time. “My God,” he says. “Look at the time. What am I going to tell the wife?”’

  ‘Are you making this up as you go along?’

  Lloyd grinned. ‘ “Don’t worry, Dai,” she says. “I’ve got some magic chalk here, see?” And she gives him a piece of chalk. Well, it just looks like ordinary chalk to Dai, but she swears it’s magic. “Just put it behind your ear,” she says, “and tell your wife the truth.”’

  Judy moved closer to him as he spoke. ‘You are making it up,’ she said.

  ‘Dai doesn’t fancy that at all,’ said Lloyd. ‘But the blonde just smiles again. “Trust me,” she says. “It’s magic.” So Dai goes home, taking the chalk with him.’

  ‘Does this go on all night?’ Judy asked. ‘So I’ll have to stay – like Whatshername telling stories?’

  ‘Scheherazade,’ said Lloyd. ‘Now, he doesn’t have much faith in this chalk, but he’s got no chance otherwise. When he gets home, he puts it behind his ear, and goes in. “Where have you been, then?” says his wife. And Dai takes a deep breath. “I’ve been making love to a beautiful blonde all night,” he says. “Don
’t give me that, Dai Griffith,” says his wife. “You’ve been down the Legion playing darts – you’ve still got the chalk behind your ear!”’

  Judy laughed, but then her eyes widened, and the smile faded. She twisted away from him, reaching for her handbag.

  ‘Leave it!’ he ordered. ‘Don’t dare bring out that notebook!’ Gun-dogs were supposed to obey.

  She leafed through the pages, and looked up. ‘It’s all here, Lloyd,’ she said. ‘We had all the pieces. You were asking the right questions, all along.’

  Lloyd looked over her shoulder at her notes, but he couldn’t decipher the mixture of Judy’s own form of speedwriting, the odd clear word and dozens of question-marks and asterisks. ‘I hope your official notebook doesn’t look like that,’ he said.

  ‘Why did Marian Wheeler go all the way to Eleanor Langton’s, and then all the way back to Mrs Anthony’s?’ Judy said, her eyes bright with triumph. ‘Why go to Eleanor Langton’s at all?’

  He had indeed asked those questions. It seemed to him that they had been answered, but obviously not.

  ‘Why did Marian Wheeler deny locking the doors, and then insist that she had? Why lock them in the first place?’

  He thought that they had established that Marian Wheeler hadn’t locked the doors, whether or not Judy’s little girl was telling the truth. Which, judging from Judy’s almost indecent excitement, she was.

  ‘Why bother going home to change her dress?’ asked Judy.

  ‘You wrote that down?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, surprised. ‘What I didn’t write down was when you told me just to tell the Hills the truth.’

  Lloyd was relieved to hear it.

  ‘And I thought how they wouldn’t believe me if I did,’ said Judy.

  Lloyd sat back, and looked at her. Feed in a few wild scenarios, and Judy would sift through them, rejecting everything but the facts, because she had no imagination to get in the way of the truth. She gathered facts. Some were tiny and vital; some were pages long, and useless. But they were all in there, like that dreadful computer of Sandwell’s. Much more fun, though. It wouldn’t be sitting there, beaming from ear to ear.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘Marian was alone in the house with him,’ Judy said. ‘So she had to have an alibi.’

  He nodded slowly.

  ‘And that’s why she went to see Eleanor Langton. It was a trumped-up excuse. It had to be Eleanor, because she had no obvious friendship with Marian – in fact, gossip would say just the opposite. But Eleanor would be certain to know all the details – know that the time of Marian’s visit mattered. George would tell her everything, and Marian Wheeler knew that.’

  Lloyd sighed. ‘And then Mrs Anthony,’ he said, feeling weary. ‘Whom Marian has known from childhood. She knows the old lady’s as sharp as a tack. If anyone was going to notice her new dress, it would be Mrs Anthony.’

  ‘That’s why she stayed there long enough to take off her coat,’ said Judy. ‘Unlike anywhere else. Then she spilt some coffee, to give herself an excuse to go home.’

  ‘Where she burned the dress,’ said Lloyd. ‘For us to find, along with all the other evidence.’ Of course, of course. If she had simply denied murdering the man, the chances were that they would find some evidence anyway. So she just gave them a bit more. ‘And she did her trick with the poker,’ he said. ‘To make it look like faked evidence.’

  ‘And if she had trotted out her alibi,’ Judy said, picking up her notebook, ‘we would have been a lot less inclined to believe it. But as it was,’ she said, ‘she let us discover her alibi for her. And congratulate ourselves on how clever we’d been. Don’t give us that, Mrs Wheeler,’ she said, in a very fair imitation of Mrs Dai Griffith’s accent. ‘You’ve been down the Legion, playing darts.’

  Lloyd stood up, and began to pace round the little room. ‘She had to lock up the house,’ he said. ‘She couldn’t risk Elstow being found before she’d finished leaving evidence for us.’

  ‘And she had to keep it locked,’ said Judy. ‘Because she still didn’t want him found too early. Or we might have got too accurate a time of death.’

  Lloyd nodded. The trouble with alibis was that you couldn’t really be in two places at once.

  ‘She had to lose half an hour,’ said Judy.

  He nodded, his back to her. Easy enough to lose half an hour, he’d said. And when she confessed to killing Elstow, she simply made it half an hour later than it actually was. Half an hour which she had spent beetling back and forth across the village.

  He ran a hand over his face, and stood staring at the Christmas tree. ‘And she burned the overalls in the back bedroom,’ he said, turning to face Judy. ‘Knowing that when we found burnt clothing upstairs, we wouldn’t look for any other fires.’

  ‘I wonder how she felt when she saw George spreading them all over the driveway,’ said Judy.

  Lloyd shook his head.

  She closed the notebook, looking sad, and still a little confused. ‘She must have known we would suspect Joanna,’ she said. ‘She even told us she thought Joanna had killed him. How could she do that to her, Lloyd?’

  ‘She didn’t.’ Lloyd sat down heavily. ‘The locked doors,’ he said. ‘The Mystery of the Locked Bloody Doors. That was the one piece of evidence that we weren’t supposed to know about.’

  Judy frowned.

  ‘Marian and George always went to the pub on Christmas Eve,’ Lloyd said. ‘Every year. And every year, they stayed until ten-thirty, singing carols. So she packed George and Joanna off in the belief that they’d do the same, and would therefore have cast-iron alibis. She would be home first, and no one would ever know the house had been locked up at all.’

  ‘But they didn’t stay,’ said Judy.

  ‘No. They didn’t. And Joanna arrives home at ten past eight to find herself inexplicably locked out.’ He looked across at Judy. ‘She thinks it’s her husband being bloody-minded, and goes off to see the doctor. She doesn’t tell her parents that, because she doesn’t want them to know about the baby. When she gets home again, she waits for them to come home. They get in, and now she’s the one who feels bloody-minded. So she does what her mother asks, and doesn’t go up to see her husband. Off they all go out again, and when they come back and find Elstow . . .’ He bowed his apologies to Judy. ‘In all innocence, she tells us that they were locked out. Which puts Marian in a fix, because she didn’t want us to know.’

  ‘And then, she realises that they weren’t together all evening,’ said Judy. ‘You said that too.’

  ‘So she has to tell us that she did lock the doors. To prove that it couldn’t have been Joanna, because she couldn’t have got in. Only she didn’t know about Joanna’s earlier trip home, did she? She thought she had covered her when she said she’d locked the doors at nine. Those doors,’ he said. ‘They were bothering me all along.’

  The phone rang, and there was a moment before Lloyd snapped back, and picked it up. ‘Lloyd,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry to bother you so late, sir, but I thought I’d better ring you. We’ve had Mrs Elstow on the phone, saying that her mother’s gone missing.’

  ‘Missing?’ said Lloyd. ‘Has she now?’

  ‘Young lady sounded pretty desperate,’ he said. ‘I’ve sent WPC Alexander – didn’t think I should send Parks. Not on his own, anyway.’

  ‘Right,’ said Lloyd. ‘Thank you. Let Parks get his beauty sleep. I’m on my way.’ He almost hung up, then put the receiver back to his ear. ‘I’ll pick up Sergeant Hill on the way,’ he said, with a wink in her direction.

  ‘But I think,’ he said to her as he replaced the receiver, ‘that you should probably do up at least some of your clothes.’

  She had been gloriously unaware of her déshabillée throughout both his bringing it about, and her triumphant unearthing of the truth. Lloyd straightened his tie, and grinned.

  ‘Ready?’ he said.

  *

  Marian had wanted to kill Graham Elstow when she h
ad stood by Joanna’s hospital bed. She had wanted to, but the thought of actually doing it hadn’t occurred to her. Not then. And she had wanted to kill him when she had gone to the house for Joanna’s clothes, with him in attendance, mumbling apologies at her as she packed. But she hadn’t thought of actually doing it, because Joanna wasn’t going back. So he didn’t matter any more, and Graham Elstow hadn’t so much as entered Marian’s mind from the moment she had left that house with Joanna’s suitcase, until Christmas Eve, when he turned up at the vicarage.

  And she hadn’t thought about killing Eleanor Langton at all, until now.

  She had come looking for help, that was all. George needed help. He was ill because he was so convinced of Eleanor’s guilt that he was displaying the symptoms; Marian had enjoyed the effect that her words had had on Eleanor, who sat at the kitchen table, her head on her hand, her coffee cold beside her.

  Marian had thought that George’s infatuation with her was a passing phase, something that at worst a few illicit afternoons would have cured. The towel round Eleanor’s head accentuated the fine bone structure, the youthful, unlined face. She wouldn’t have blamed George if he had given in to a physical attraction.

  Eleanor slowly unwound the towel, and her hair fell down in damp golden strands. The movement caused the bathrobe to fall open slightly, revealing long, shapely legs. Marian compared herself with the girl who sat opposite. Twenty-six, seven? Slim. Elegant. Wearing only a bathrobe, and she had thought that it was George at the door, just like last time.

  And yes, Marian would back herself against a fantasy any day. But Eleanor Langton was no fantasy. Whatever George wanted, one thing was clear. One thing was certain. And it was more potent than all of Eleanor’s physical attraction. Eleanor Langton wanted George.

  Eleanor absently rubbed her hair with the towel as she looked at Marian. ‘You’re wrong,’ she said.

  ‘Wrong?’

  ‘Perhaps George does think I killed Graham Elstow,’ she said. ‘But that isn’t what’s making him ill.’ She sat forward slightly. ‘He needs the freedom to be himself, Marian,’ she said.

  ‘Freedom,’ repeated Marian thoughtfully. ‘Yes, perhaps you’re right.’