“Oh no, he won’t, he’ll damn well take notice. I’ll make him take notice.”
Kate spotted a PC enter the canteen and scan the room. He started over in her direction, a piece of paper in his hand.
“Good, here’s the information we’re waiting for. Drink up.” Draining her own teacup, she reached for her shoulderbag and stood up. “Stick at it, Pippa, and you’ll get there. You’ve got the makings.”
Chapter Seven
Mermaid Crescent was only one of several colourful street names that had been chosen by the local council for an estate of extremely colourless houses. To reach it, Kate turned the car by the water works into Hydrangea Grove, then drove along the length of Pearblossom Avenue. The house she sought was one of a terrace of four, all faced with a reconstituted imitation of Cotswold stone. The front garden of number sixteen was particularly unkempt, with seeding weeds everywhere.
Kate and WPC Hamilton got out of the car and approached the front door. The woman who answered the bell could perhaps be described as plump and cuddly. Just at present, her thickly made-up face wore the irate expression of one torn away from a television game show, the sound of which belted from the living room.
“What d’ya want?” she demanded of Kate. Then she clapped eyes on Pippa in uniform standing beside her, and exclaimed, “Oh, my Gawd! Billy,” she yelled over her shoulder, “it’s the bleeding fuzz.”
The television was switched off and a moment later a man in a woollen vest and braces appeared in the doorway behind her. Even shorter than his wife, and slightly built, he had the look of a jockey who’d been caught by the stewards doping the horses.
“Mr. and Mrs. Billings?” Kate enquired.
“Yeah,” the man grunted. “What d’yer want? I ain’t done nothing.”
“Actually,” said Kate, “it’s Mrs. Billings I want to talk to. I’m Detective Chief Inspector Maddox, and this is WPC Hamilton. May we come in?”
He didn’t budge, just jerked a thumb at his wife. “She ain’t done nothing, neither.”
“No, I ain’t done nothing.”
“Do you want us to conduct this interview on the doorstep?” asked Kate. “With the neighbours having a good listen?”
“Oh, all right then, you better come in.”
Their living room, a through room from front to back, could only be described as gaudy. Garishly patterned wallpaper, patterned carpet, and patterned dralon on the overstuffed three-piece suite. A massive television stood in one corner. Also, Kate noted, two video recorders and a camcorder, and a top-of-the-range sound system. She let Billings observe her interest in these items, and he shifted his feet uneasily.
“Listen,” he said. “They was all bought legit.”
Kate ignored him. “Mrs. Billings,” she began, “yesterday morning you took some items of ladies’ clothing to the Nearly-New Boutique in Marlingford High Street. I’d like to know where you got them.”
“Got them?” she parried.
“How and when you acquired them.”
“Well ... they was mine.”
“You told the woman at the shop they were your sister’s.”
“That’s right. She give them to me.”
“I see. What is your sister’s name and address, please, so we can ask her where she got the things from.”
“She ... she’s gone away.”
Kate sighed ostentatiously. “We can still get in touch with her, can’t we? Wherever she happens to be now. So just tell me how to reach her.”
The woman went dumbstruck. Kate said, “Why play around? There isn’t any sister, is there?”
“I ... I ...”
“Suppose you tell me the truth.”
Husband and wife exchanged scared glances. Kate could read their minds. The cops wouldn’t be here if they didn’t already know most of it, would they? Stood to reason. Put you away as soon as look at you, those bastards. Play along a bit, and they might go easy on you.
“We didn’t know that woman’d been done in,” said Billy. “We never saw ’er at all, honest to God. Just the car.”
“Just the car,” his wife echoed.
“A red Escort?” said Kate, her pulses quickening.
“Yeah. Just drew up there, it was, at the side of the road in them woods. We pulled up and had a gander. Called out to see if anyone was around, we did. But no one answered.”
“No one answered,” his wife concurred.
“This was last Wednesday?” Kate queried. “What time?”
Billy scratched his right buttock. “ ’Bout half six. That right, Olive?”
“ ’Bout half six.”
“Was it raining at the time?”
“Had bin. It’d stopped by then. I said to Olive, crying shame it was, the way that lovely little motor had got all wet inside with the hood down.”
“You were driving along that lane near East Dean at about half-past six on Wednesday evening, and you saw a red Escort parked at the side of the road. There was no one in sight. Correct? So what then?”
“Listen,” Billy said urgently, “if we tell yer, you can’t go nicking us on anything to do with that rape and her getting strangled. That weren’t nothing to do with us. I told you, we din’t even know she was there. Her body, I mean. Dead and everything.”
“If we’d known,” said Olive with a rare burst of original thinking, “we’d have scarpered. Oh, yes!”
“We’d have scarpered,” echoed her husband.
“So am I to understand, then, that you drove the car away?”
“Well, it was asking for it, weren’t it? Just sitting there waiting to be pinched.”
“Were the keys in the ignition?”
“Yeah, they was. But even if they hadn’t bin that wouldn’t’ve stopped me.” His professional pride was at stake. “Blimey, the day I can’t start a motor without a key, I’ll hand in me chips.”
Kate by-passed the issue of his apparent regular involvement in car thefts. Just now she had a higher priority.
“I presume,” she said, “there was a suitcase in the Escort, and when you saw the quality of the clothes it contained, you reckoned you could raise quite a bit of cash?”
“It ... it seemed a wicked waste not to,” said Olive, a sentiment with which her husband agreed.
“A wicked waste, it would’ve bin.”
About to ask if there had also been a handbag in the Escort, Kate paused. The Billingses might deny it on principle, thus limiting the amount of trouble they were in. But the presence or otherwise of the handbag could be crucial. Kate framed her question with care; in court it would have been disallowed as leading the witness.
“You also found the victim’s handbag in the car, of course?”
“Just sitting there, it were,” said Billy.
“Where, exactly?”
“Shoved in the stowage bin on the door.”
“On the driver’s side?”
He nodded glumly.
What woman would leave her handbag in an open, unlocked car? If she left the car for any reason she’d take it with her, or at least lock it away in the boot. She was killed in her car, Kate! That was almost certainly it ... killed in her car and her body carried into those woods.
“Where is the handbag now?” she demanded. “Do you have it here?”
“No,” they both shrilled. “It ain’t here. We ain’t got it.”
Damn! “So where is it?”
“We chucked it away, din’t we?” muttered Billy. “Olive was going to keep some of the stuff, make-up and suchlike, but when we heard last night about that woman getting done in and you was looking for the car, we got the wind-up. We drove over Linchmere way and chucked it in the gravel pit there. Shoved a brick inside and tossed it in the water.”
“Did you keep anything? Anything at all?”
“Well, we hung on to the cash, naturally.”
Naturally! “How much cash?”
He exchanged a quick look with Olive. “Only about twenty quid. Just over.”
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Kate gave him a disbelieving stare. Corinne had drawn money from the hotel safe just before setting out.
“Don’t you mean just over a hundred pounds?”
“Oh, all right, then,” he agreed sulkily.
That missing shoe could prove a clincher to her new theory.
“Was there a shoe in the car?” she asked. “Just one. Black. High-heeled?”
“Yeah, there were. It’d got itself stuck under the clutch pedal, and I had to stop to hook it out. Afterwards, I searched around for its partner, but it wasn’t nowhere in the car. So I brought it back with me, thinking Olive might have found the other one in the stuff she’d brought home in our car. But she hadn’t, so we threw it in the bin.”
“Will it still be there?”
Olive shook her head. “Emptied Thursday.”
Sod it! Small hope of finding that shoe now, but the motions would have to be gone through. An unpleasant job at the refuse tip for some luckless police officers.
“You’d better come with us, you two,” Kate told them. “We’ll want statements from you both. And you’ll be taken to that gravel pit to show us the exact point where you threw the handbag into the water. I badly want that handbag. And the car, of course. That’s got to be tracked down.”
“Huh, you’ll be lucky,” said Billy. “It’ll have gone by now. Vanished.”
“Vanished?” exclaimed Pippa Hamilton, mystified.
“Out of the country by now. Might be anywhere.”
Kate explained to the WPC. “That’s the way these ringers often work. They line up a buyer for a specific model of car somewhere abroad, then get one pinched to order by someone like our friend here. The cars are shipped off in no time at all. I presume,” she said to Billy, “that you’d been told to be on the lookout for an Escort Cabriolet?”
He grabbed at that as a sort of justification. “A red ’un, too, they wanted. That’s why it seemed a real gift from ’eaven, parked there just asking to be drove away. Olive and me were on our way to visit her mum in hospital, but it wouldn’t have seemed right, somehow, not to have grabbed a wonderful chance like that.”
“We all get our gifts from heaven,” said Kate, and grinned at Pippa. “You’ll agree with that, won’t you, constable?”
“Does this mean you’re going to do me for the car?” Billy muttered sullenly.
“You and Olive both,” Kate assured him. “For the car and the suitcase and the handbag and the money. But thankfully not by me; I’ve got bigger fish to fry. Come along, let’s get moving.”
A small convoy of vehicles bumped down a rutted track to the disused gravel pit. Two police cars—in one of which were Billy and Olive Billings—a Land-Rover carrying the police diver and his assistant plus all their gear, and Kate and Sergeant Boulter bringing up the rear in her Montego.
There was no moon, just a glimmer of starlight which gave ghostly substance to the wraiths of mist lying low across the water. On the way, Kate had remarked on the mildness of the evening for September, but down here she felt a dank chill in the air as she got out of the car.
The Billingses were led along the water’s edge, arguing between themselves, until they finally agreed on the spot where they had thrown in the handbag.
“About here, it were,” Billy declared. “Must be.”
“Must be,” Olive confirmed.
They all stood around stamping their feet and hugging their arms while the diver and his mate made preparations. Finally, the rubber dinghy was inflated and on the water, the diver clad in full regalia. Kate watched him submerge into the dark water, and shivered.
“Rather him than me,” said Boulter beside her.
The water was deep and murky. The light from the diver’s powerful handlamp glimmered for a while, then was lost. They waited, for hours it seemed. Kate began to lose hope. She went over to join the Billings pair. They too looked anxious now, as if they’d been banking on the recovery of the handbag to vindicate their crimes.
“Are you sure you pinpointed the right spot?” she asked.
“Dead sure,” said Billy, sounding uncertain.
“Dead sure,” his wife agreed, no less doubtfully.
“Well, I hope for your sakes that you’re right.” Though quite what she meant by this threat Kate didn’t know.
Another tense ten minutes, then the underwater light shivered into view; the surface swirled, and the diver’s head reappeared. He held something aloft, waving it triumphantly.
Brought ashore, the handbag was a soggy mess, the leather slimy and disgusting. A stench arose from it.
“God!” said the diver. “The muck down there. All sorts, you’d never believe.”
“No bodies, I suppose?” Boulter joked.
“If it was bodies you wanted, Tim, you should have said.”
The sergeant had spread a plastic sheet on the ground, while someone shone a light for him. Undoing the clasp, he tipped out the handbag’s contents. The usual woman’s things, apart from the hefty stone placed inside by the Billingses. What interested Kate most was the wallet, a passport, and a small leather-bound notebook.
“What’s that, Sergeant? Has it got addresses in it?”
Gingerly, Boulter opened the little book. “Job to see, ma’am. It’s totally sodden. I doubt if this is going to be much help to us.”
“Okay, we’ll get back to the Incident Room. If we can’t get any information out of it ourselves, we’ll pass it over to the lab.” She turned to the diver. “Thanks, Alec. Sorry it was such a mucky job for you.”
“I’ve done a lot worse, ma’am.”
“See, we was right,” said Billy virtuously.
“We was right.”
“So you were,” said Kate. “But you needn’t look so smug about it. You’re lucky not to be charged on a much more serious charge than theft. Whatever the court hands out, you should count yourselves fortunate.”
* * * *
At the now almost deserted Incident Room, Kate and Boulter examined the handbag’s contents anew. The wallet, robbed of cash, contained what one would expect—credit cards, driver’s licence and certificate of insurance. The notebook, limp and sodden, was totally indecipherable.
“Definitely a forensic job,” said Kate. “Come on, Tim, it’s off home for us.”
He looked grim. No Julie waiting at home for him tonight, of course. “Reckon I’ll catch the last half-hour at the boozer,” he muttered.
“If you do that, Tim, mind you walk home. Or take a taxi. Hear me?”
He shot her a look that was charged with venom. Venom against her, or the absent Julie? Both, probably. He’d worked well all day, but now that the strain of the job was temporarily lifted he looked as if he might fall to pieces. Kate had a feeling that if she uttered a single word on the subject of his wife, Boulter would either start yelling at her to mind her own bloody business, or she’d have him sobbing on her shoulder. She couldn’t afford to let either happen.
She stood up, buttoned her jacket and slung her bag over her shoulder.
“Go straight home, Tim,” she advised him earnestly. “Get yourself something to eat, then hit the sack. That’s what I intend to do.” She walked out before he could answer.
Once home, Kate remembered something she ought to have done by now. Luckily it wasn’t too late. Her aunt never went to bed early.
“Kate?” The eagerness in Felix’s voice pricked her niece’s conscience. “I’d have phoned you, but I knew you must be hellishly busy.”
“I’ve just this minute got home. Sorry about yesterday, Felix. We’ll do your birthday outing some other time.”
“Don’t worry about it, girl. How’re things going on the case? I read all about it in the paper this morning. Sounds a ghastly business.”
“It is pretty horrible. I met Corinne Saxon once, you know. At that big do to mark the opening of the hotel.”
“Oh yes, of course, I hadn’t thought. You were there with Richard, weren’t you? Funny he didn’t mention that to
me.”
“When didn’t he mention it?” Kate asked suspiciously.
“At lunchtime, at the Wagon and Horses.”
A Saturday meeting at the Chipping Bassett pub had become a little ritual that Kate and her aunt both enjoyed, whenever Kate’s workload allowed. Richard sometimes joined them. So it wasn’t in the least odd that those two had chanced to meet up. All the same ...
“What was he doing there?” Kate demanded. “He must have known that I’d never be able to make it today.”
“The man is entitled to enjoy a drink, dammit, even without the pleasure of your company. Likewise me. I must say, though, Richard was very taciturn. I mentioned this murder enquiry you’re on, and he just looked at me daggers and clammed up. Have you two had a row?”
“Something like that.” Kate certainly wasn’t about to fill her aunt in with the details.
“Well, make it up fast. Life’s far too short to waste time in quarrelling.”
“Ah, the sagacity of the sere and yellow.”
“Don’t knock it, girl. When you reach my advanced years and look at all the missed opportunities in life, it makes one feel angry. You young people don’t appreciate a good thing when you find it. Why you and Richard can’t admit that you’re ideal for each other, I just do not know. If you had a grain of commonsense, Kate, you’d get on the phone to him this minute, and ...”
“Do me a favour,” Kate interrupted. “Spare me the agony aunt bit. Whatever’s up with you tonight? You’re not usually given to maudlin rambling. My advice to you, auntie dear, is to screw the cap back on that bottle of Scotch and get yourself off to bed.”
Chapter Eight
Sunday morning Boulter was at the Incident Room ahead of her, scowling his face off. No need to ask if the errant Julie had had a change of heart and returned to the nest. Exasperated, Kate felt a longing to bang their two silly heads together.
“Morning, Tim. Has the post-mortem report been sent over yet?”
“Arrived a few minutes ago, ma’am,” he told her with a cheerless grimace.
“Give it here, then,” she said, and headed for her office.
The report was a wordy document, as pompous as its author, Dr. Meddowes. A few minutes later Kate called Boulter in.
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