by M. J. Trow
‘Well, I missed my day, what with not being able to get in. I didn’t know Mrs Troubridge was in the hospital then, o’ course. I called her a few things, I can tell you. Pore ol’ thing.’ Mrs B was a kindly soul and sometimes helped lame dogs over stiles which were miles out of their way. ‘I thought I’d come and catch up. You’ll have washing and things need doing. And what with that murder last night, I ’spect Mrs M’s up at the police station. And here’s you, front door open, with killers about.’
‘How did you know about the murder?’ Maxwell said. ‘It hasn’t been on the news.’
‘Not on the news, no,’ Mrs B retorted. ‘But our Brenda’s bloke, you know, I tol’ you about him, was on that hippodrome stuff, but he’s off it now, well he’s got a milk round and he was delivrin’ out near the airfield and he saw the sirens.’
That was an interesting concept, but Maxwell assumed it must just be a side effect of hippodrome. He knew he shouldn’t ask but did all the same. ‘So how did he know it was a murder?’
‘He popped round, well, he was ahead of time, what with starting the deliv’ry early with some milk left over from Friday mornin’. He saw that Hall and a load of police. In the white things and that. They carried a body out and they don’t do that if it ain’t a murder. I went online soon as our Brenda texted me and there’s nothing yet.’ Mrs B as technophile was something with which Maxwell was still coming to terms. ‘But I thought to meself, I bet that Hall gets Mrs M in on this, though she’s still on her holidays.’ She looked around, as if expecting Jacquie to leap out from behind a pile of newsprint. ‘That where she is, is it?’
‘Yes,’ said Maxwell. It was unusual for Mrs B to only ask one question at a time. The world was turned upside down today.
‘And little Nolan?’
‘With Sylvia Matthews from up at the school. They hung on to him yesterday afternoon.’
‘Oh?’ Mrs B was on it like a Jack Russell on a rat. ‘Something already going on yesterday, was there? I heard there was a murder on that trip. Blood everywhere, I heard. Woman had her head cut off on a roller coaster.’
Maxwell sighed. ‘No, Mrs B. No blood. No decapitation.’
She spotted his omission. They went back a long, long way. ‘But there was a murder, though?’ she asked.
‘Tell you what, Mrs B,’ Maxwell said, getting up from his garden chair and stretching his legs. ‘Why don’t we go upstairs, you can do your cleaning and I’m sure Jacquie would be more than grateful if you did a bit of washing as well. And I’ll make a cup of tea and you can tell me about how Mrs Troubridge got on last night, after we left.’
‘Pore ol’ soul,’ Mrs B said, allowing herself to be ushered out of the garage. ‘She was ever so agitated. But the nurses said she was much more with it than she had been. She was ever so pleased to see you.’
‘Do you think so? I’m pleased to hear you say that, because her other visitor thought she seemed scared of me.’ Maxwell was strangely comforted by the cleaner’s words. He leant over at the foot of the stairs and pulled the front door to; despite the fact that he doubted the existence of the wandering killer, it paid to be careful.
‘You jokin’ me?’ How Maxwell wished that Mrs B wouldn’t let the kids’ speech patterns rub off. He winced and was glad that she had her back to him as she toiled up the stairs. ‘Scared of her, more like. Great big thing, mauling her about. Who is she, anyway?’
‘She’s a cousin of some sort. We met here … do you know, it seems like months ago, but it was only the beginning of the week before last. She’s doing some kind of family research.’ They had reached the landing and Maxwell peeled off into the kitchen to put the kettle on. Mrs B followed him and, extracting a cloth from her bag, began to give the taps a desultory buff. No one could ever accuse her of being too zealous.
‘Pfft,’ Mrs B was unimpressed. ‘Our Glenda’s eldest lad, that’s Brenda’s brother, you probably remember, well, he did a bit of that, but our Glenda made him stop.’
Maxwell knew he shouldn’t, but he had to ask. ‘Why did she do that, Mrs B?’
‘Well, not healthy, is it? Pokin’ your nose into that kind of thing. You never know, do ya, what might turn up, if you know what I mean? Even that Jeremy Paxton cried when he found out about his family’s past doings.’ She looked at him meaningfully, ‘And it’s especially so with our Glenda.’ She paused again. ‘And her ways.’
‘Oh, I see,’ Maxwell indeed did see. He remembered Glenda now. She occasionally helped out at Leighford High in the dining room and she had a predatory gleam which had even discomfited James Diamond, who didn’t usually notice such things.
‘Now you come to mention it,’ Mrs B said, ‘I did notice a resemblance. Across the eyes. But I can’t say I took to her. She’s just so …’ It was unusual, but she was actually lost for words.
‘I know,’ nodded Maxwell, turning as the kettle came to the boil. ‘She’s just so big.’
‘And clumsy,’ added Mrs B and turned her brief attention to the draining board.
They were soon sitting opposite one another, sipping tea at the table. They had known each other since God was a lad and there wasn’t always need for words. But as always, Mrs B got straight to the heart of the matter, if with some inaccuracies built in.
‘It is terrible, though, innit?’ she said at last, ‘That Mr Medlicott getting hatcheted like that.’
Maxwell spluttered into his tea. ‘Hatcheted?’ he said. ‘I don’t think so. I think he …’ And then he realised the stark truth. He didn’t know anything. Jacquie had said she didn’t get the impression that he had committed suicide. That might mean that he had had a small tap on the head, had been shot, bludgeoned, set on fire, dismembered or all five. He was in no position to argue with anything that his cleaning lady had to say. He just hated this feeling. So, he said all he could say. ‘Hatcheted. Well. Goodness. I’ll go to the foot of our stairs.’
‘Our Brenda’s chap said there was blood everywhere. Great pools of it, apparently. That’s a shame, that.’
How could pools of blood make death more of a shame than any other method of despatch, Maxwell wondered.
He was about to find out. ‘When they come to sell the place, it’ll keep coming back, the stain. Seeps into the floorboards, see. Can’t get it out,’ she informed him. ‘Mind you, some people go for that, don’ they? You know, murder house, this-way-to-where-it-happened sort of thing.’
Bowing to her superior knowledge, he drank off the rest of his tea and went back to his newspaper dungeon.
Henry Hall had never really believed in the innate goodness of humankind. When he was a child he had always seen the wasp, not the ice cream, the jellyfish, not the sand. So, when the front desk called up to say that Izzy Medlicott’s mother was downstairs, he was ready for more or less anything. He popped his head around the door of the night duty room. ‘Jacquie? Are you busy?’
She twisted round in her chair. ‘Not really, guv.’ She pushed a lock of hair behind her ear. He hoped she wouldn’t go all severe on him when she made inspector. He’d never really liked that look, the strained-back hair, looking like Olive Oyl. ‘Is there something you need me to do?’
He would have loved to say, ‘Yes. There’s a woman downstairs who I don’t want to see. It’s the dead woman’s mother, the mother-in-law of both dead men.’ But instead he just said, ‘There’s an interview I’d like you to sit in on, if you would.’
‘No problem.’ She stood up and swung her jacket off the back of the chair and shrugged it on. ‘Who is it?’
‘It’s …’ he stopped. It wasn’t like him to be missing vital information. ‘In fact, I don’t know her name. It’s Isabelle Medlicott’s mother.’
‘She got here quickly,’ Jacquie said. ‘When did she get a call?’
‘I got someone to do it first thing. We’ll need to provide someone to do the ID on the Isle of Wight, plus of course, she can do Tom Medlicott.’
‘Even so.’ Jacquie looked at her watch. Nowhere near
lunchtime yet. ‘She must have shifted.’
‘Where did she have to come from?’ Henry asked. ‘I didn’t know you knew her.’
Jacquie raised her eyebrows, surprised at herself. ‘I don’t. I just … well, I suppose I assumed she came from up in the Midlands somewhere, further north, even. From where Izzy came from. For all I know she might live down the road.’
‘Well,’ Henry Hall said, setting off down the corridor, ‘Let’s find out, shall we?’
Downstairs, in one of the nicer interview rooms, with low chairs and a coffee table, with nothing chained up or screwed down, Isabelle Medlicott’s mother sat, arms folded, lips pursed. Her age was impossible to gauge; her hair was suspiciously glossy and a uniform black, so dark it was almost blue. Her make-up was immaculate, but no foundation, no matter how much Jane Fonda recommended it, could counteract the bitter expression and the hardness around the mouth and eyes. She looked as though she knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Her restless eyes seemed to be appraising the rather grubby furniture and deciding she wouldn’t give a brass farthing for it. Her handbag, at first glance Louis Vuitton, at second glance a cheap knock-off, stood four-square in front of her on the table. She looked up as Hall and Jacquie went in but decided they weren’t worth the wear and tear on her eyes and looked away almost at once, to resume her checking out of the room. The glance had been brief, but she had priced Jacquie’s suede jacket and linen trousers to within a couple of pounds. Hall’s suit had almost beaten her; it looked like Hugo Boss, but this man was a policeman. It had to be Matalan. She was wrong on both counts. It was Armani. Margaret Hall was a demon on eBay and it had been his Christmas present.
The police persons sat opposite her. ‘Mrs …?’
The woman didn’t fill her name into the gap, leaving an awkward silence. Eventually, she said, ‘Ms.’
‘I’m sorry.’ In his hatred of the term, Hall and Maxwell became one. The DCI tried again, this time more directly. ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t provided with your name, Ms …’
‘Nelson,’ she said. ‘I reverted to my maiden name when I got divorced.’
‘I see,’ Hall said. Jacquie had quietly brought out her notebook and jotted it down. ‘May we have your address?’ he asked. ‘Just for the record?’
‘It’s 92 Olivier Terrace, Spindleford,’ she said. ‘I suppose it counts as Gosport. Hampshire. I can never remember the postcode. PO something, I suppose. I haven’t lived there long.’
‘Thank you,’ Hall said. So, she didn’t live far away. Not from either murder scene. He reminded himself hurriedly that this woman was a bereaved mother, but it wasn’t easy. ‘First of all, Ms Nelson, may I offer our condolences on your loss?’
‘What loss in particular are you talking about?’ she snapped. ‘Would that be my ex-husband? My ex-son-in-law? My daughter? My son-in-law? Which?’
‘I beg your pardon,’ Hall said, hating the woman so much he wanted to squeeze her throat until her eyes popped out. Jacquie, hearing him hiss quietly through his teeth, knew what he was feeling and would happily have held his coat. But Henry Hall gave nothing away that the woman would have noticed and carried on smoothly. ‘I do realise that it has been difficult for you just lately …’ but he got no further.
‘Difficult?’ she spat. ‘How can you realise that? First, my husband leaves me for some chit in his office, and takes my daughter with him, shoves her in boarding school, won’t let her see me. Then, stupid fool takes to drink when the little tart ditches him, kills his stupid self and leaves everything to Isabelle. Every last stick and stone of the house I used to live in, every last penny he hadn’t poured down his stupid throat or gambled away on stupid horses and cards and God knows what.’
Hall and Jacquie murmured sympathetically, but there was no stopping her.
‘Then Paul – best of the bunch, if you ask me, not that anybody ever asked me, bit older than Izzy, but steady – he goes and falls off a stupid ladder. I’d been in touch; he was going to see what he could do, financially. In fact,’ and she flicked her hair in a simulacrum of coquetry, ‘given time, I’m not sure that it might not have grown to something more.’ She didn’t seem to notice the looks of horror on the faces of Hall and Jacquie, each a perfect reflection of the other. ‘Anyway, as I say, stupid ladder stopped that. Then Izzy falls off a cliff. I ask you, who does that in real life?’ She looked up as if waiting for an answer to a perfectly sensible question. ‘Well, nobody, that’s who. She was paying the rent on this poxy little house I’m in, but I thought she might at least buy me somewhere. Wouldn’t have to be big. And of course, she would have been loaded, with Paul dead.’ She looked at Hall. ‘Did she know Paul was dead? You know, before she died?’
‘We think not,’ Hall said, keeping his voice level with an effort. ‘The Northants police did try to find her, but—’
‘Right. Well, she would have been. Loaded. He’d left everything to her, you know.’
Hall and Jacquie exchanged glances. That solved that question, anyway. But Jacquie had a question of her own. ‘You seem to think that Mr Masters had a lot to leave. As a teacher, I don’t quite see …’
‘The house, I expect,’ she said. ‘Izzy didn’t go halves when they divorced, because of it having belonged to his parents, childhood home, that kind of thing. But it would come to her when he died, or half would if he had remarried. That was the settlement, or at least the main part of it.’
‘I see.’ Jacquie made a note. It said ‘What a grasping bitch!’ She angled her pad so that Hall could see, then thought better of it and turned over the page.
‘So, anyway, when the house is sold, she would have got the lot. Well, did get the lot, I suppose, because he died before she did.’
Then suddenly, the Devil got into Henry Hall. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘This is good news for Mr Medlicott’s children, isn’t it? Nice to have a windfall when you’re young. They won’t have to worry about student loans, or anything, will they?’
The woman froze. She could scarcely move her lips enough to whisper, ‘Pardon?’
‘Well,’ Henry continued, ‘if Isabelle got everything because her ex-husband died first, then Tom Medlicott’s heirs will get everything now, because Isabelle died first. That’s right, isn’t it, Jacquie?’ His face betrayed nothing, but inside he was laughing like a loon.
‘I believe so, Detective Chief Inspector,’ Jacquie said gravely. ‘Lucky children indeed, although not so lucky, having lost their father.’
The woman opposite rose to her feet, but stiffly, as though on wires. ‘I’ll contest it,’ she hissed. ‘He killed her, that’s what he did. He killed her and then he killed himself. I’ll go to the Police Complaints Department. I’ll go to the Ombudsman. I’ll go to the Supreme Court.’
‘I hardly think that this is a matter for the United States to get involved in,’ Henry Hall was imperturbable. ‘But if they show any interest, we’ll be in touch.’
‘What?’ she screeched like a banshee. ‘Are you condescending to me, you … you condescending git? I’ll have your badge, I’ll have your job … And you …’ she spun round, pointing at Jacquie, ‘what do you know about anything, you … you tart you?’ By this time she was out in the foyer and pushing her way through the barrier to the outside. A harmless little old lady stood there with a tin of biscuits, brought in to say thank you for the safe return of her no-longer-missing Yorkshire terrier. ‘And you,’ the bereaved mother yelled, turning on her. ‘What are you looking at? You’re a tart as well, I shouldn’t wonder.’ And with that she threw herself out of the door, spoiling her exit a little by having to turn and free her coat which was caught on the door handle.
The foyer was silent for a moment, before the little old lady bent to her shopping basket, from which protruded a beribboned head. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘She wasn’t a very nice person was she, Keith?’
And all the gathered policemen and women shook their heads. Jacquie patted Keith’s head, apologising silently to Metternich for cons
orting with the enemy. ‘She certainly wasn’t,’ she agreed, then turned to Henry Hall. ‘So I gather we’re looking for someone else to do the ID?’
‘Looks that way,’ sighed Hall. ‘We’ll see who we can come up with in a minute. I don’t want it to be you, Jacquie, but more than that I don’t want it to be Max. It would only encourage him. What about Sylvia?’
‘Well, I suppose she could,’ said Jacquie. ‘But from a selfish point of view, I’d rather it wasn’t, because she’s looking after Nole at the moment and I want him kept away from all this as much as possible.’
‘I understand,’ Hall said. ‘It might have to be you, then, I’m afraid. Perhaps we can rig up some kind of webcam so we don’t have to send you down there. I’ll get Bob on that.’ They climbed the stairs in silence and then he said, explosively, ‘She was a monster, wasn’t she? Had you had any inkling of that? In your chats with Tom?’
‘Well, she clearly wasn’t close to them,’ Jacquie said. ‘I had no idea about the house rent, though. Perhaps even Tom didn’t know that.’
‘It was probably the cheapest way of keeping her at arm’s length,’ Hall said. ‘Is she a suspect, though? I must say, I’d love her to be.’ They had arrived at his office and he pushed open the door and waved her in.
‘No,’ Jacquie said, sitting in the chair opposite his. ‘If anything, she is an anti-suspect, because she had so much reason for keeping Izzy alive, or at least alive until all other beneficiaries were dead.’
Hall sat down and frowned at the files which were beginning to clutter his desk. ‘Yes, I suppose so. But what if she just took the chance to kill Izzy? She followed her to the Island and they had a row? Then she was going to frame Tom, so he couldn’t benefit … then … Does that work?’
‘Possibly in an episode of Midsomer Murders. I’m not sure it makes much sense in Leighford, though, guv.’
‘Oh, I know,’ he said. He looked up at Jacquie. ‘Go and have some lunch. Or go home, if you want. We can carry on here.’