by M. J. Trow
‘What time did she leave the hotel?’ Hall asked from the corner.
‘She must have gone to her room to change. George.’
The carousel operator slid another slide into the frame. ‘As you see from this angle of the body, she’s wearing a sweater and jeans. The head waiter says she definitely had a burgundy-coloured dress on in the restaurant.’
Dave Watkiss was on his feet. ‘We found nearly eight quid in loose change in her pockets. And a wallet containing forty more in notes, plus the normal credit cards in a bum bag. No handbag as such.’
‘Can we rule out robbery then, guv?’ somebody in the smoke-filled room had to ask the obvious.
‘Rule out nothing,’ Hall interrupted Watkiss’s answer, ‘until we have a little bit more. How did she leave the hotel, Paul?’
‘Er … we assume taxi. We’ve got blokes out checking the ranks now. Her own car was left in the hotel car park.’
‘Why’s that, guv?’ Jerry Manton wanted to know, trying to find an ashtray in the Incident Room’s gloom.
‘We don’t know,’ Hall said. ‘Unless she thought her own car was too conspicuous. If she was going to meet someone, as seems likely, she perhaps didn’t want the car to be recognized.’
‘Dark green Megane, by the way,’ Garrity chipped in. ‘R reg, all the extras.’
‘So, no one actually saw her leave the Grand,’ Hall checked.
‘No, sir,’ Garrity said. ‘Taxi information pending.’
‘All right. SOCO – Bert?’
Bert Cameron shuffled into Watkiss’s position. His feet hadn’t touched the ground since seven that morning and he was no longer a young man. ‘Body was found by a middle-aged couple out for a bracing walk. A Mr and Mrs … Doncaster, here on holiday.’
‘Time?’ Hall asked him.
‘Six thirtyish,’ Cameron confirmed.
‘Middle-aged couple out at six thirty?’ Manton knew a rat when he smelled one.
‘Seems kosher,’ Watkiss told him, sprawling back in his chair. ‘We checked with their hotel. They’ve been here for nearly two weeks. Due to go home tomorrow. Arranged for a packed breakfast at six every morning. Twitchers.’
‘What’s that, guv?’ Paul Garrity had led a very urban life.
‘Bird watchers to you, Detective Sergeant,’ Watkiss scowled.
‘And to you, Detective Inspector,’ Garrity bowed in his chair.
Hall quickly killed the chuckle that rippled round the room. ‘The Doncasters found her as you saw in the first slide. Bert?’
‘The body was face down,’ Cameron went on. ‘Clothing not rearranged. Apparently no money or personal effects taken. The problem is that, as most of you will know, the Shingle is a well-known shag-site … oh, sorry, Jacquie.’
Detective Constable Carpenter happened to be the only woman in the room at the time. She ignored the guffaws and grimaced at Cameron. Wait till he asked her to change shifts next.
‘So that means the place is awash with tyre tracks, footprints, used condoms, the lot. There’s more tissue paper up there than I’ve had hot dinners. Oh, and a rather unusual copy of Sado for those of you so inclined. See me afterwards.’
‘Thank you, Bert,’ Watkiss silenced the hoots and cat calls. ‘I cancelled my subscription only last week. So how long will it be before you can isolate anything?’
‘Well, Wednesday at the earliest,’ Cameron offered.
‘Monday night,’ Hall corrected him. ‘I’ll square the overtime upstairs. You’ll get all the men you need, but I want answers, Bert. Jacquie, Barbara Needham, the kind of woman she was, who knew her, liked her, hated her.’
‘Yes, guv,’ the girl said. It was a pattern she’d already established for Hannah Morpeth.
‘Right. Eyes open, everybody. Dave, there’ll be a press conference tomorrow at ten. I want you there, Paul, you and Jacquie. The rest of you, crack on. I want the link between these three deaths. And I want it fast. We are becoming a laughing stock, lady and gentlemen. The papers will have a field day unless we give them some answers. Jacquie.’ He motioned her into his office as the Incident Room started to hum with phone calls and VDUs. The lights came on and the beam of the carousel died in the smoke.
‘How did it go with Peter Maxwell?’ he asked, when she’d closed the door, standing across the desk from her.
‘You know Maxwell,’ she hedged.
‘Yes,’ Hall nodded. ‘Unfortunately, I do. And even more unfortunately, so do you.’
‘Sir?’
‘All right, Jacquie,’ he motioned her to sit down. ‘Drop the “sir” stuff. Did he get the message?’
‘To stay out of the way? I think so.’
‘You think so?’
‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have sent a woman to do a man’s job,’ she blurted and sat there shaking, instantly regretting it.
For a moment she thought she saw a flicker of a smile play around Hall’s lips, but it must have been a trick of the light. Hall didn’t do smiles. ‘I didn’t think I’d hear that sort of comment at this end of the ’nineties, Jacquie, and from you of all people. From equal opportunities to ball-buster. Isn’t that it?’
‘Perhaps …’ She was in for a penny, she might as well go for the whole pound. ‘Perhaps I’m not who you think I am, sir,’ she said.
Hall leaned forward, clasping his hands on the desk. ‘What’s important, Jacquie, is who you think you are. Are you a copper or are you a woman?’
It was a question she’d asked herself countless times, especially when it had to do with Peter Maxwell. But it wasn’t a question she’d ever expected to hear from the guv’nor; not from the DCI. ‘Can’t I be both?’ she asked.
‘Jacquie, Jacquie,’ he leaned back, sighing. It had been another long, bad Friday. ‘That’s a question only you can answer.’
Patronizing bastard, Jacquie snarled inside, mentally promising herself that if he called her ‘my dear’ she’d push his lap-top up his arse. Seven years on the force had taught her directness like that.
‘What does he know?’ Hall asked, changing tack. His team’s welfare was his concern too, but at the moment, he had three murders to solve.
‘“Tiddly” and I quote, “squat”.’
‘And you believe him?’
She looked at the blank lenses, with no eyes behind them. And she hated Henry Hall at that moment for his facelessness. ‘No, sir, I don’t. He was outside Martin Bairstow’s house because of something Wood and Stapleton had told him.’
‘Who?’
‘The first two re-enactors to leave. They went home to Brighton after Miles Needham was killed.’
‘Ah, yes. They were in the clear, weren’t they?’
‘Nothing to hold them for, sir,’ she said.
‘But Maxwell thought otherwise.’
‘Apparently.’
‘How did he find them, Jacquie?’ Hall had to ask.
He saw the girl’s jaw flexing as she summoned up an answer. ‘Not from me, Chief Inspector.’
Hall nodded, searching the girl’s face, weighing her loyalty. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to hear it. Maxwell’s been bothering Dr Astley,’ he went on. ‘Shall we pick him up?’
‘I don’t know when he “bothered” Dr Astley, sir. Was it since I warned him off?’
‘No,’ said Hall, sensing a shift in the girl’s stance. ‘No, I don’t believe so.’
‘Then we should leave him well alone, sir. At least, that would be my advice.’
‘Would it now?’ Hall had placed his fingers together and patted his thumbs slowly as he spoke. ‘Well, that may be sound enough advice, Jacquie, for now. That will be all, thank you.’
Interview over. Hook off. She scraped back her chair. At the door he stopped her.
‘Jacquie,’ he said with an edge in his voice he didn’t usually let people hear. ‘Just what is your relationship with Peter Maxwell?’
He watched her tense, her knuckles whiten, her neck mottle under the white blouse. ‘I don’t have a relat
ionship with Peter Maxwell, sir,’ she said, her eye clear, her head high.
‘Barbara Needham,’ the DCI said. ‘That’s the only relationship I want you to have at the moment, Jacquie. Clear?’
‘As a bell, sir,’ and she left him to the ringing phones and the pestering world.
All that was left of Barbara Jayne Needham lay on the slab in Jim Astley’s mortuary. The good doctor had let Henry Hall down a bit, it had to be admitted. His promised time had come and gone – Astley had grabbed what was billed as an apple Danish in the Cafeteria-from-Hell upstairs – and was back to the matter in hand thereafter. He spoke into the microphone suspended from the ceiling, the dead woman reflected like terrible twins in his glasses.
‘No evidence of assault from the front,’ he was saying as assistants came and went in green gowns and varying levels of professionalism. ‘Crushed right cheekbone caused, almost certainly, by being hit from behind when the cheek was in contact with the ground.’ The dead woman’s face was a mask of bruises, her right eye bulging grotesquely out of its socket with the impact of the trauma around it. Astley travelled to her feet. ‘One broken toe nail, big toe, left foot, caused I would think again, by the fall.’ He looked along the curve of her thighs. ‘Lividity very apparent,’ he said in his post-mortem monotone, ‘in consequence of the corpse having lain on its front for some hours. No apparent bruising to thighs, abdomen or genitals. No sign of sexual assault. No presence of semen,’ he probed with no apology to the dead woman, ‘internally. Turn her over, Joe, will you?’
Astley sneezed violently to one side of the table while Joe was doing the honours. ‘Christ, I’ve been longing to do that.’
They’d already shaved off Barbara Needham’s thick black hair and from the back, were it not for the damage to the skull, she looked like a mannequin with its sightless eyes and deathly pallor, that some shop assistant had laid aside ready to dress for the window. Barbara Needham, who would never buy a dress or have a window in her day again.
‘Cause of death,’ Astley was back at the microphone again, ‘one severe blow to the parietal region of the skull. A hole,’ he fumbled with his folding ruler, ‘three point eight centimetres across the mid line. We’ve got cracks radiating out under the skin here,’ he felt deftly with his gloved fingers, ‘I’ll confirm that later when we start cutting. Murder weapon is an object approximately fifteen or sixteen centimetres long, perhaps seven centimetres wide. Microscopy may give us something on that later. Will somebody answer that bloody phone?’
Someone did. ‘It’s Mr Hall, doctor,’ a voice called through from Astley’s office.
‘Later!’ Astley bellowed. ‘Tell him I’ll call him with news, not speculation.’
Henry Hall had caught Jim Astley at bad moments before. That would have to be good enough for now.
‘I think he’s still here, sir,’ the girl on the Leighford police station switchboard said.
‘Good,’ Astley grunted, ‘because I am.’ It was half past eleven by his lab clock and the eleven fourteen to Hove was rattling past outside, its lights flaring, its seats empty. Jim Astley watched it go, through the slatted blinds. He couldn’t remember when he’d caught a bus last.
‘Hall,’ a voice crackled over the line.
‘Henry, it’s Jim Astley.’
‘Jim, good of you to ring.’
‘I’m sorry for the hour. Do you want the rudiments?’
‘I got savaged today, Jim,’ the DCI confessed. ‘First the Chief Constable, then the Press. I could do with a bloody miracle, to be frank.’
‘Your lady died as near as I can ascertain at shortly after ten last night. Cause of death was a single blow to the back of the head. A heavy brass instrument.’
‘Brass?’ Hall frowned. ‘What? A candlestick?’ It was beginning to sound as though Colonel Mustard was in the frame after all, but on the Shingle, not in the library.
‘Not my province, I’m afraid.’ Astley knew a buck when he passed one. ‘No sexual assault. It’s my guess – and for all it’s educated, it is a guess – that she was running away from her attacker – probably broke a toe nail as she tumbled – and wallop! Goodbye, Dolly Gray. Massive trauma to the brain of course. Neck muscles shot to hell. I’m not sure she’d have known very much about it.’
‘Well, thanks, Jim. I appreciate that. Maybe it’ll be some sort of comfort to whatever family she’s got.’
‘There’s one more thing, Henry,’ the DCI heard the doctor say. ‘How old was Barbara Needham?’
‘Forty-four according to our records. Why?’
‘That’s what I’d have put her at by the state of the body. We found something else. She was four and a half months pregnant.’
Silence.
‘Henry?’
‘Was she?’
‘I don’t suppose it would have shown. Small for a foetus of that age – and what with expensive designer clothes …’
‘So it’s a double murder,’ Hall said grimly.
‘Yes,’ Astley had to agree. ‘Technically, I suppose it is.’
‘Can you do tests?’
‘What, on the foetus?’
‘Yes. Is that possible?’
‘Yes. Poor little bugger had his own blood supply. What are we looking for? Paternity?’
‘That’s about the size of it, Jim,’ Hall said. ‘You see, I have reason to believe that Mr and Mrs Needham hadn’t shared a marital bed for some time. Certainly not for the last four and a half months. It could give me a motive.’
‘Yes, I see. Look, Henry, can this wait till morning? It’s been a bugger of a day. Much longer in this bloody lab and I’ll turn into a pumpkin.’
‘Yes, of course, Jim. Tomorrow will be fine.’ And the doctor hung up.
Tomorrow would be Sunday. Eighteen days since the murder of Miles Needham, fifteen since that of Hannah Morpeth. Henry Hall leaned back in his chair and tilted his glasses onto his forehead, just to prove to the contemptuous world that he had eyes after all behind those blank lenses. He picked up the little book of numbers and addresses, the one that Paul Garrity had found next to Barbara Needham’s bedside at the Grand. He flicked it open to the letter ‘I’ and read the only name in it he recognized – ‘John Irving, Caius College, Cambridge’ and the number underneath. On a whim, he flicked to the ‘M’s. Damn, he found himself smiling, alone where no one could see in the dim light of the silent Incident Room. No Peter Maxwell. Well, never mind. Perhaps there’d be better luck next time.
12
Not for the first time in her seven years on the Force, Jacquie Carpenter found herself trying to put together the pieces of a person’s life. Barbara Jayne Needham had come into the world on 4 August 1954. If she’d been the type to buy one of those copies of newspapers of the day she was born, she’d have known that Britain’s first supersonic fighter, the ‘Lightning’ was screaming through the skies as she was screaming through the maternity unit at Harpenden Hospital. More relevantly to her future husband’s calling, the Independent Television Authority was set up that afternoon under the chairmanship of Sir Kenneth Clarke.
Barbara Robinson as she was then wasn’t exactly to the manor born, but the family had a bob or two. An only child, she went to an expensive London girls’ school before becoming somebody’s PA in advertising. She acquired a taste for fast men and fast promotion and seemed to get both with equal ease. She’d known Miles Needham for years before they married. In fact, they had a relationship of sorts, Barbara’s mother told Jacquie, when Barbara was still at school. The Robinsons had a house near Bournemouth and Miles was a local boy.
‘Bit of a ruffian, dear, in those days,’ the old girl confided.
Jacquie had gone with the usual trepidation, to tell a mother that her daughter was dead. But Alice Robinson was of the old school. She’d never cried in front of servants as a child because she’d been told not to; she never cried in front of policemen; she didn’t intend to start now. Time enough for that later.
Jacquie sat in the vast d
rawing-room of the Harpenden house where the Hertfordshire CID had directed her, aware of her heels clicking on the polished parquet whenever she moved. A ghastly ormolu clock struck the hour as the dead woman’s mother came to terms with Jacquie’s news.
‘To be honest, I never really liked Miles. When Babs rang me to tell me he was dead, it was as though he was just a celebrity rather than my son-in-law. I felt the loss of dear old Frank Sinatra more keenly. Drinky, dear? Or don’t you on duty?’
Jacquie smiled and declined, and the old girl tottered across to the tantalus. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, glancing up at the portrait over the Adam fireplace. ‘I don’t know what Ernest would have made of all this. You don’t expect your children to go first, do you? Do you have children, my dear?’
‘Er … no,’ Jacquie told her, suddenly feeling very awkward in that huge chair in that vast room, staring out of the French windows and the endless grounds that stretched away into the summer sunshine. For all it was June it was strangely cold in that drawing-room with the old woman and her memories.
‘Babs couldn’t bear him, of course, latterly, I mean.’
‘Who?’ Jacquie had lost the thread of this conversation.
‘Miles, dear.’ Alice Robinson thought perhaps she’d better go more slowly. She’d never had much faith in the police ever since they lost that rotter, Lord Lucan. ‘Her husband. The fire had gone, I think.’
‘Mrs Robinson,’ Jacquie had to broach it sooner or later, ‘did you know that Barbara was pregnant?’
The old girl spun from the fireplace and sat down quickly, staring at Jacquie as if she were an alien entity.
‘Obviously not,’ Jacquie answered her own question. ‘Is it possible … could the baby have been Miles’s?’
The old girl sat upright like the dowager she was. ‘My former son-in-law deposited his seed quite liberally, WPC, but never, since their honeymoon, where it was supposed to go. Are you absolutely sure of this?’
‘Yes, Mrs Robinson,’ Jacquie said. ‘About four and a half months.’