‘Mark is on Dr Gregson’s list, not mine.’
‘Rather a fine point, isn’t it?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Why didn’t Dr Gregson come himself? He is taking the night calls, isn’t he?’
‘Yes, he is. I suppose that under the circumstances he thought I’d like to be with Mark. Mark and I have been – quite close. Also, since I would probably be here for some time, it left him free to take any other emergency calls. I really didn’t take the time to enquire into his motives – I was just grateful for his kindness.’
‘I see.’ Luke’s voice was carefully neutral. ‘According to the houseman, Mr Peacock and his mother had an argument before he left the house this evening. An argument about you.’
‘Oh?’ Jennifer kept her eyes on Mark.
‘Yes.’ Luke’s smile was tight. ‘He said there had been arguments before. About you.’
Jennifer sighed. ‘Mrs Taubman didn’t – approve – of me. Me, or my profession, or both.’
Luke nodded. ‘Apparently she used the phrase “over my dead body”. Any comment?’
‘She was a very melodramatic woman, fond of making scenes,’ Jennifer said. ‘That was one of the methods she used to get her way.’
‘Did Mr Peacock mention this argument to you?’ Luke asked.
‘No. It can’t have been important.’
‘I see.’
Jennifer stirred, uneasily. ‘Why aren’t you outside, with the others, prodding about and looking for fingerprints and all that kind of thing?’ she demanded. She felt oddly frightened by Luke. He seemed strange and distant, and she found it hard to reconcile the charm and vulnerability he’d shown at the dinner table the other night with the brusque and intimidating person he was now. Mark looked so defenceless, slumped there, with these two great hulks looming above him.
‘There are specialists to do that,’ Luke said, gently, sensing her resentment. ‘We’re supposed to assess their results, and question suspects.’
‘There. I knew you suspected him,’ Jennifer snapped, her worst suspicions confirmed. ‘Mark was with me until nearly eleven.’
‘Eleven? Are you certain that was the time?’
‘Yes. I looked at the clock as I left.’
‘When you left? You left separately?’
‘I had met Mark there, so I had my car with me.’
‘I see.’ He made a note of this.
‘So he couldn’t have had anything to do with it.’
‘I didn’t say he did,’ Luke told her, mildly. ‘What are you getting so excited about?’
‘Oh . . . ’ Jennifer could feel tears dangerously close. ‘First David, now you . . . I’m just sick of it, that’s all.’
‘Sick of what?’ Paddy asked in some confusion. Luke just watched Jennifer as she again brushed Mark’s hair back from his forehead and then sat down beside him proprietorially.
‘Oh, people not trusting Mark just because he’s rich and handsome,’ Jennifer grumbled.
‘Poor guy,’ Luke said, in a wry tone. ‘My heart bleeds for him.’
Jennifer’s eyes blazed up at him, then, slowly, the fire died. She even managed a small laugh. ‘You know what I mean,’ she said, ruefully. ‘It’s just came out funny, that’s all.’
Mark stirred beside her. ‘Jenny . . . ’ he whispered.
‘Yes, Mark, what is it?’
‘Basil . . . somebody should tell Basil. I need him here.’
‘Who’s Basil?’ Luke asked.
‘Basil Taubman is his mother’s second husband. Mark’s stepfather, I suppose, although it’s hard to think of him that way. He’s not exactly the fatherly type,’ Jennifer said.
‘Where is this Taubman?’ Luke asked Mark.
Mark’s eyes were dreamy, his manner vague. ‘London. Basil stayed at his club in London last night and tonight because of some meeting or other,’ he told them in a slow drawl. ‘Somebody should tell him she’s dead. Ding-dong, the witch is dead.’ Silently, tears began to well up in Mark’s eyes and overflow down his cheeks.
Abbott, looking at him, felt a kind of withdrawal in himself. The man even looks handsome when he’s grieving, he thought. It didn’t seem right, somehow, and yet something in him sensed the grief, at least, was real.
‘I don’t think this is going to get us very far tonight,’ Paddy said. ‘Let’s put him to bed and talk to him in the morning. Don’t you agree, Doctor?’ He looked at Jennifer. She couldn’t read his eyes, but she thought there was some kindness in the suggestion. More to the point, some sense.
‘Yes. That would be better for him.’
‘I want to talk to him now,’ Luke said, flatly. Paddy looked at him in surprise, Jennifer with irritation.
‘Can’t you see he’s upset and under the influence of drugs?’ she demanded. ‘He’s not responsible for anything he says.’
‘Which might make it all that much more interesting,’ Luke said. ‘What are you so afraid he’ll say, Jennifer?’
‘I’m not afraid of anything he might say,’ she told Luke angrily. ‘I’m just afraid you’ll bully him into saying something that could be misinterpreted.’
‘My, my – he does seem to inspire motherliness in his women, doesn’t he?’ Luke said. ‘Big boy like that should be able to look after himself, shouldn’t he?’
‘That was a rotten thing to say,’ Jennifer snapped.
‘Yes, it was,’ Paddy agreed. ‘She’s right, Luke. You should know nothing he says now could be used in evidence. Leave him till morning.’ Paddy was puzzled by Luke’s emotional reaction, and put it down to old enmities, or perhaps new interests. Jennifer Eames was a very attractive woman, and Margaret Abbott had been dead for two years. Luke hadn’t liked hearing that Jennifer was involved with Mark Peacock. And he’d apparently never liked Peacock himself.
They’d been wrong to send Luke down here. The usual policy was dislocation – sending in strangers. Perhaps they’d felt that twenty years would have made Luke a stranger to his home town. Perhaps they hadn’t realised the old connection existed – murder enquiries hardly allow time for an in-depth study of a detective’s personnel file before assignment. Or perhaps – and most likely – there hadn’t been anyone else available at the time. Nevertheless, it was already making things difficult. If he hadn’t recognised that, he wouldn’t have spoken as he had to Luke in front of someone else.
Luke stared at his partner and saw something of what was in his mind. He accepted Paddy’s reservations. Maybe Paddy hadn’t yet seen the pattern that he thought he saw in these killings.
On the other hand, maybe that pattern didn’t exist.
‘Very well,’ he said, brusquely, turning away. ‘Put him to bed. But I’m leaving someone here with him until morning.’
‘Can he do that? Treat Mark as a suspect?’ Jennifer demanded of Paddy, who was watching Luke’s retreating figure with some bemusement.
‘I’m afraid he can do just about anything he damn well pleases, as long as he sticks to the letter of the law. And he knows the letter of the law, believe me. I shouldn’t worry about it,’ Paddy reassured her. ‘Let’s get him upstairs and into bed, shall we? Things will look better in the morning.’
Jennifer looked at him and her mouth quirked. ‘I deserve more than that, Paddy Smith.’
He grinned engagingly. ‘Damn thing is, it’s true, you know. Things do look better in the morning. Something about blood sugar, or lack of oxygen to the brain, no doubt.’
Together they helped a limp and whimpering Mark up the elegant sweep of the manor stairway. ‘I hear you took Frances out to dinner tonight,’ Jennifer grunted.
‘I would have,’ Paddy agreed, puffing a little. ‘She was going to meet me in town, but she couldn’t get her car started. By the time I got to her place it was so late we settled for scrambled eggs on toast.’
‘Did France
s cook them?’ Jennifer asked, in some amazement.
‘More or less,’ Paddy said with a smile, remembering the smoke that had filled the kitchen and the eggs hitting the wall. ‘More or less.’
Chapter Fourteen
‘Sorry, Paddy,’ said Luke, as his partner came up to stand beside him. They watched Jennifer’s car go down the drive, carefully skirting the assembled police vehicles. ‘That was stupid of me.’
Paddy shrugged. ‘You’ve been stupid before, and I expect—’
‘—that I’ll be stupid again?’ Luke sighed. ‘No doubt.’ He turned to look back at the house. ‘Is he still crying?’
‘No.’ Paddy said, gravely. ‘He got the giggles when we were trying to get his socks off, and couldn’t stop for quite a while. Jennifer says sedatives take people like that sometimes.’
‘I wonder,’ Luke said, impassively, and walked down the lawn towards the canvas barrier that encircled the corpse. ‘Did Bennett’s man arrive before you left?’
‘An officer arrived, pad in hand, as ordered. Do you really think Peacock will say anything worth knowing about?’
‘Maybe. Even under drugs, a man who’s killed his mother is bound to sleep uneasily.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Very. Evening, Cyril. Cold night for it.’
The pathologist looked up and snapped his tape measure back into its case in irritation. ‘You’d think murderers would have the decency to be afraid of pneumonia like everyone else,’ he complained. ‘I’m getting too old to go crouching on damp lawns like this.’
‘Can you give me a tight time of death on this one?’ Luke asked.
‘Not at the moment.’
‘Can you give me a rough time?’ Luke asked, patiently. ‘Can you tell me whether it was before or after midnight?’
Franklin glanced at his watch, then at the corpse of Mabel Peacock Taubman. ‘Probably before – but maybe after. Certainly around that time.’
Luke looked at Paddy. ‘Thank you.’
‘Are you going to tell me that this one was pregnant, too?’ Franklin asked, sarcastically.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Shame,’ the pathologist said. ‘I’d like to think there was hope yet for the middle-aged. Still.’ He shrugged. ‘I press on.’
‘Cyril . . . ’
Franklin sighed. ‘Yes, Luke, there is good reason to believe this is the work of the same person or persons who murdered the other two.’
‘Did you say persons, plural?’ Paddy asked, quickly.
‘I like to cover myself,’ the coroner said. ‘You never know who’s listening.’ He continued his macabre ministrations, concentrating on the wound itself. There were small squishy noises and a brief gasp of air, as if Mabel Taubman had suddenly taken a breath. But the white, drained face, somewhat collapsed under its mask of carefully applied makeup, showed no sign of life. Luke moved away quickly, Paddy at his heels.
‘I swear he did that on purpose,’ Paddy said, hunching into his disreputable raincoat.
‘Hates to be watched at the scene,’ Luke said. ‘Always has.’
PC Bennett caught up with them, and trotted alongside like an eager retriever. ‘We’ve got a psycho, haven’t we?’ he asked. He seemed torn between the rage of the lawkeeper over the intransigence of the criminal, and a kind of morbid pride that their simple locale could produce a murderer of this calibre. He hated himself for the latter, but it did seem so extraordinary a thing to happen in Wychford. There would be no keeping it out of the national papers now. And if thoughts of a job well done leading to promotion tugged at his attention, he turned them firmly out of his mind. Nevertheless, they left an echo. He was twenty-four, and wanted to start a family.
‘Could be,’ Luke said, non-committally. ‘Have you put a good man in with Peacock?’
‘No, I put in a good woman,’ Bennett said, but his self-congratulatory chuckle at the joke died in his throat under Abbott’s glare.
‘I suppose it’s PC Carter, the attractive blonde who’s been typing our reports and summaries?’
‘Well, yes . . . ’
‘Get her out and put in a man,’ Abbott ordered abruptly. ‘Tell her it’s no reflection on her ability – I just don’t want to be left open to possible criticism from the press. They’d just love our leaving a woman alone with a drugged local Romeo, wouldn’t they?’ He glanced at Paddy. ‘You should know better.’
‘She’s a good officer. She’ll resent it,’ Paddy said, mildly.
‘She’d resent a slit throat even more,’ Luke said.
‘You can’t seriously believe that Peacock killed his own mother,’ Paddy said, in some surprise. ‘And the other two as well? Jennifer gives him an alibi for tonight . . . ’
‘You heard Cyril. Around midnight, he said. Jennifer says he left her before eleven. They booked his call to the station at twenty past midnight – over an hour unaccounted for. He could have come home and picked up the quarrel he’d had with his mother before he left. Say his mother found out he was with Jennifer and started an argument about it and he killed her.’
‘Cyril also said she died where she was found,’ Paddy reminded him. ‘If he killed her as a result of an argument, how did he get her to come outside?’
‘Maybe she ran outside to get away from him.’
‘Taking time to put a coat on?’
‘Exactly,’ Luke said, grimly. ‘Would a stranger have given her time to do that?’
‘Maybe she put it over her shoulders to call the dog, opened the door, and the guy grabbed her on the doorstep,’ Bennett suggested, eagerly. ‘It could have happened like that, couldn’t it.’
Luke looked at him, looked back at the doorway, sighed and nodded. ‘Well done. Yes, it could have.’
‘Is that what you’re going to tell the papers?’ Bennett wanted to know.
Abbott stopped his headlong charge across the lawn to the car and turned to stare at the young officer. ‘No. We are going to tell them a psychotic killer is on the loose in Wychford, and we are instituting extreme measures to identify and arrest him.’
‘Are we?’ Bennett asked, cheering up immediately.
Abbott looked disappointed. ‘Use your head, boy,’ he said, and got into his car. Bennett looked at Paddy questioningly.
‘We don’t want to start a panic, we want to catch a killer,’ Paddy said, kindly. ‘Just put out the usual “we expect an arrest shortly” announcement, all right?’
‘But they’re going to want more,’ Bennett protested.
‘Then they’ll have to make it up as they go along, won’t they? They can panic all they like, but we can’t, officially or unofficially,’ Paddy said and went around to get behind the wheel.
Bennett watched the car head down the driveway, then turned and looked down the lawn at the circle of light haloing the canvas surround and the milling collection of forensic experts. As each man passed into the light his personal cloud of frozen breath was revealed, wreathing his head and shoulders. The night air was crystal clear, and the lower voices of the men carried across the grass. On one side they were preparing a body bag and a stretcher, while across the width of the lawn a torchlight search had begun.
The press will turn this into a circus, Bennett thought, with some dismay. He shivered inside his uniform coat, and turned to glance up at Peacock Manor. The spindly poles of the builder’s scaffolding made a webwork around its dark bulk, clattering and creaking eerily in the darkness. Better relieve PC Carter, then. If this was going to turn into a circus, the last thing he intended to provide was the lady in the spangled tights.
He’d sit with the poxy bastard himself.
When Jennifer got back to High Hedges, David was waiting for her. He wasn’t awake, but had dozed off in Aunt Clodie’s favourite chair before the dying fire. She stood in the doorway and looked at him for a mo
ment, before going out into the hall again and making a bit of a noise. When she re-entered the sitting room, he was awake.
‘Well?’ he demanded. ‘After you left it occurred to me that it might be some kind of hoax, so I called back to confirm. Paddy Smith answered, so . . . ’
‘They’re all there,’ Jennifer said, sinking into the chair opposite him. ‘She’s down at the foot of the lawn. Since I was there I signed the certificate for them.’
‘And was it the same as the others?’
‘I gather so. Her throat was certainly cut wide open.’
‘And does that finally convince your wonderful Inspector Luke Abbott that we have a psychopathic killer at large here in Wychford?’
‘No,’ Jennifer said, in a small voice.
David sat up with an astonished look on his face. ‘No? Are you serious?’
‘It’s my fault, I’m afraid. Mark was hysterical and I gave him quite a jolt of Thorazine. He went out almost completely.’
‘Why the hell did you do that?’
‘I didn’t mean to knock him out – Mark must be hypersensitive to it. Anyway, it meant that he couldn’t be legally questioned, which is really what I was after.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Because they all seemed to be ganging up on him. Because it seemed right. Mark might have said things that Luke could misinterpret. He didn’t get along with his mother, and yet he was dominated by her. I just wanted him to be more in control when he was questioned.’
‘Sounds to me like you suspect him yourself.’
‘Don’t be stupid, of course I don’t. It was just that Luke was behaving so . . . so . . . like a policeman.’
‘Hardly surprising,’ David pointed out.
‘I know, I know. At any rate, the result seems to be that he does suspect Mark of killing his mother.’ Jennifer’s voice was oddly distant. ‘At least, that’s how he’s behaving at the moment. He’s got someone watching Mark while he sleeps, in case he says anything incriminating, I suppose. He intends to ask him a lot of questions as soon as he wakes up.’
David looked as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘Come on, Jennifer. You’re just feeling defensive because of your feelings towards Mark.’ His brow cleared a little. ‘Luke is just being officious, and you’ve misunderstood . . . ’
The Wychford Murders Page 12