Death of an Innocent (Richard and Amelia Patton)

by Roger Ormerod

  I was still trying to protect Amelia’s friend, Olivia, from the lurking horrors, but at that moment I was having difficulty understanding why I should. It had all gone beyond hurt feelings and trampled emotions.

  ‘That,’ she said fiercely, ‘tells me you know a damn sight more about it than just Mark and Nancy. His motivations. Her involvement. Don’t, for Christ’s sake, go on looking at me like that! I didn’t ask you to come here just so that I could practise my interrogation.’

  For the first time Tony spoke. One word. ‘Richard!’

  I raised a finger to him, not looking round. ‘Have you got any further with this?’ I asked her. ‘Clues? Statements?’

  ‘I have Laurence Carter in custody.’

  ‘Have you, by God? Has a charge been made?’

  ‘Pending further enquiries.’

  ‘That’s nonsense. Not Larry.’ I stopped. Had she done that in order to force my hand?

  ‘His fingerprints were on the winch.’

  ‘As they would be.’

  She inclined her head. ‘Naturally. He has admitted to having listened outside the wall of that office, the night you got Mark to tell you his story.’

  I tried to keep my voice level. ‘Did he tell you the gist of that?’

  ‘No. He refused. It’s his legal right.’ She smiled, a thoroughly relaxed and benignant smile. ‘You can tell me.’

  ‘Can I see him?’

  ‘Larry? Yes, of course. Later.’

  ‘Then I’ll co-operate.’

  ‘Thank you. It’s like drawing teeth.’

  ‘I have loyalties I’d like to preserve.’

  ‘You and your loyalties! There’s only one person you owe loyalty to.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘No, you fool. To your wife.’

  I realized, then, that Melanie was even more subtle than I’d guessed. She’d understood the form and manner of my reluctance. I glanced round. Amelia sat, knees touching, her hands wrapped together upon them, her face set and white. Quietly, she nodded. I turned back.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘All of it, of course,’ said Melanie.

  So I told her all of it, from the original phone message until the moment we’d driven away from the hotel. Every detail I could remember. Nothing added, nothing taken away, like the bread you can’t get now. She listened quietly, and when I’d finished she sat a few moments longer, considering the situation.

  ‘I think I can understand why you left it all and went home,’ she said at last.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It might have been better if you’d stayed.’

  ‘Let’s not hold inquests, Melanie. Can we go home, now?’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Where’s your curiosity gone, Richard? Never mind. Of course you may go. After you’ve seen Larry. But I’d hoped...’ She got up from her chair and came round to the front of her desk, leaning back against its edge just as Mark had done. ‘Perhaps you can’t appreciate how that leaves me. Oh yes, I can go to all these people, the two Rustons and the two Deans, and I’d know the questions I’d need to ask. But if you did it, if we went together, then it would give you some authority. Then any questions you asked them they could hardly wriggle round, because you’ve already spoken to them and they’ll recall what they said at that time.’ Her hair was back-lit, her eyes deep and dark. She raised her chin. ‘And I would have it all officially then.’

  ‘No doubt. I wouldn’t argue about that. But look at my position. I’d hardly care —’

  ‘Care?’ she demanded. ‘Haven’t we gone past the point of dodging awkwardnesses — yours and theirs!’

  ‘I suppose that’s true.’ But I hadn’t yet had time to assimilate all the implications. The loyalties, the responsibilities. What was hammering inside my head was the fact that Mark would have been alive at that moment if I’d not walked out on it.

  ‘Must I remind you,’ she was saying crisply, ‘that you didn’t consider my feelings when you showed me that photograph of Nancy, with the sticker on her anorak. Did you take me for a fool? Were you pleased with your little deception?’

  ‘I don’t know —’

  She cut me short, swinging round and leaning back over her desk, which entailed quite a stretch, the kicking up of her skirt with one leg, and an angry yank at one of the top drawers. She turned round, waving an envelope.

  ‘Official photographs,’ she said. ‘Nancy, as we found her.’

  ‘We’re back with Nancy?’

  ‘Of course. That’s where it’s all sprung from. Nancy’s death. Look at them.’

  I slid them out of the envelope. There must have been fifty, but I had no intention of sorting through all of them. One was enough. Two, perhaps, too much. Nancy, on the bank after they’d brought her out, lying on her back with her face swollen and distorted, a travesty of her real beauty and vivacity. There was no yellow sticker on her anorak. And one as she’d been found, lying in the water with her face hidden. There was no sticker on that one, either.

  Silently, I handed them back. I reached inside my pocket an brought out the two pictures I’d had from Harvey Cole, and the one I’d had from Larry with Nancy in the sailing dinghy.

  This last, Melanie examined first. I watched her lips tighten. Then she handed it back and spoke quietly.

  ‘Larry had the means, the opportunity, and the motive for killing Mark. This photo only confirms his motive. The person who took this picture would surely have reason to kill her murderer.’

  ‘I agree with that. He said he’d got hundreds of them. You’re now satisfied she was murdered? I mean, my evidence against Mark would never have got as far as a court.’

  ‘It doesn’t need to. And I’m convinced. Now...these other two you had from Harvey...you showed me the one with the sticker on, when I knew there hadn’t been one when we found her. It was because of this that I knew you were being tricky with me. And too clever, Richard, because you’d worked out, by some complex reasoning of your own, that the photo showing the sticker had to be the way she’d been left for us to find. No...please let me finish this. I knew this wasn’t so, and I was sure the sticker hadn’t been on when she was found by the photographer.’

  ‘Why?’

  She sighed. ‘Because I conducted experiments. I went to the length of contacting the charity organizers and getting a few left-over stickers. I experimented, this way and that. One: a sticker wouldn’t stay on for long when it was stuck to a damp surface, and her anorak was damp. Two: a sticker stuck to dry material, even left for a few hours, fell off as soon as the surface was wetted. So I knew it was impossible that she’d been found originally with a sticker already there, and I knew there wasn’t one when we got there. D’you see what that means, Richard? It means the photographer deliberately put a sticker there for one of the two photographs. It would only need to stay there for a minute. Then the body was left as it was found by us.’

  ‘Ah!’ This was no more than a dismal comment. I saw then how my reasoning had been faulty from the beginning.

  ‘Is that all you can say?’

  ‘I’d assumed the fiddling with the sticker had been intended to fool you — the police. I see now I was wrong. The intention was purely and simply to take a photograph that’d fool the person who was to receive the pictures.’

  She positively grinned at me. A row of small, white teeth displayed themselves. ‘And so...’ She plunged her hand into the envelope of official photographs, and produced a yellow envelope, very like the one I already had. She offered it to me.

  From its right-hand pocket I drew out a pair of photographs. They were duplicates of the ones Harvey Cole had sold to me.

  But of course, the sender would have sent one pair, and kept the other pair for himself.

  ‘You found this lot in Mark’s room, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes. Turn them over, Richard.’

  I did so. On the back of the one showing Nancy without a sticker on her anorak there was printed: D/D? I assumed this to m
ean: date of death — any time. On the back of the other one, with the sticker, was printed: D/D 7/5. This meant: date of death — 7th May.

  I stared at them a long time. ‘The top left-hand corners,’ Melanie prompted.

  The one without the ticker was numbered 1. The one with the sticker was numbered 2.

  I looked up. She nodded, and said: ‘The pictures were meant to say —’

  ‘I know. Intended to tell Mark — not you — that the body had been left with a sticker on, and that this indicated she’d died on the collection Saturday, and Mark had therefore been given an alibi for that day. Always providing he did have an alibi for that day...’

  She took over, calmly overriding me. ‘We’ve enquired, as well as we could in the time available. It seems much of that day is covered. He collected his tin and his stickers in the morning, and he was stationed at the bridge. There was a natural gap at lunch time, but now you’ve covered that, as he had lunch with Olivia Dean.’

  ‘You can’t have checked that!’

  ‘Not yet. But afterwards...Richard, he naturally had friends around there amongst the water people. Between them — those we knocked up in the night — he was noticed at various times in the morning and afternoon. Then he took his takings in to the collection centre, and spent some of the evening in the pub with his friends, probably spending more money than he’d collected all day, and went home. He’s well covered for the Saturday.’

  ‘When in fact it’d be no use whatsoever to him as an alibi.’

  ‘And why is that, Richard?’ There was a glint in her eyes.

  ‘Because you’ve said there wasn’t a yellow sticker on her anorak when she was found, and you claim there couldn’t possibly have been one after so long in the water.’

  She showed me her teeth again. I couldn’t understand what she was getting at. ‘Now look in the other pocket.’

  I put my fingers in the other pocket of the envelope, and withdrew a strip of four 35 mm negatives. The outer two were blank. The inner two were clearly those relating to the prints. I stared at them a long while, breathing deeply, controlling my anger at Harvey Cole, and my fury at myself. Of course Harvey had not sold me the full record of his robbery. He’d already sold the negatives to Mark. No wonder they’d been worth £1,000 to him.

  ‘Negatives!’ I said. ‘Not once...not once did I give a thought to negatives. The rotten, treacherous sneak. Your precious Harvey. It was the negatives he was asked to get for Mark. Not the damned prints. Harvey kept the prints back for whichever fool should come along. And that was me.’

  She said, ‘We have no time to waste on self-castigation, Richard.’ But she was smiling openly now, dead pleased with herself and her choice of words. I had to assume she was just as pleased with the performance of her favourite burglar.

  ‘If you look at the negatives with a magnifier...here...’ She once more did her athletic reach back and her yank at a drawer, and came up with a hand magnifier. ‘Use this. The colours are reversed in relation to the spectrum, so the little yellow sticker shows up as a dark purple spot.’

  Holding them up to the light I checked this with her magnifier. As these were on 35 mm film, the frames were numbered. 12 and 13. The outer two had been deliberately blanked out. The one numbered 12 was the one that showed the purple dot. The other one, the second in the exposure sequence, did not.

  ‘That’s strange,’ I said.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The negative showing the sticker was exposed first, but the prints sent to Mark are numbered the other way round, with the sticker one second.’

  She made an impatient gesture. ‘He — or she of course — could number them in whatever way was required.’

  I handed the magnifier and the envelope back to her. ‘But all the same...just imagine it, Melanie, that scene as it was when the photographer came along. According to you, Nancy could not have been wearing a sticker at that time. So...assume that. But the photographer needed one showing a sticker, in order to send it to Mark. Now...surely it would’ve been logical for one picture to be taken as she was found, without any sticker. Then stick one on for the second shot. Then the negatives would’ve been in the same order as the prints were numbered. One: stickerless. Two: with sticker. But in fact...I hesitated, feeling a brisk and warm surge of quickening interest.

  She didn’t seem to see what I was getting at. ‘Yes?’

  ‘In fact, he — the photographer — ignored the fact that Nancy’s body was in an ideal position and condition for his first picture, which he wanted stickerless, and put a sticker on the anorak for the first shot. Then he took it off and exposed the second one. That’s illogical behaviour, Melanie. Damn it all, are we going to accept that he then stuck on another sticker, in order to leave her showing one? It’s all too complex. This was May, and daylight. These photos aren’t flashlight. Daylight, and May, and although he wasn’t spotted doing it, the area couldn’t have been all that deserted. It’d be too big a risk, wasting time, when the quick and simple thing would’ve been to take one as she was found, then one with the sticker...and simply get as far away as possible as quickly as possible.’ I shrugged, not having apparently received much response.

  Then slowly she smiled. ‘Very good,’ she said quietly. ‘That was quick. It was ages before I saw all that.’ The smile became a grin of conspiracy. ‘I wanted your unprompted opinion. Now you can understand why I need you. The way those photos was taken is illogical, as you say. It’s got a special reason we can’t see, and it was done like that deliberately. When I can see why, by whom, and how it came about, then, Richard, I think I’ll have a lead to Mark’s killer. It all links up. I can feel it. Make sense of the actions...’

  I was hearing her words, hearing them in my consciousness like a distant chant, while at the same time my mind was running wild, embracing all the details of our last visit to Norfolk and analysing them. Because I knew, with a sick and certain despair, exactly why the pictures had been taken in that way, why the prints had been numbered as they had been, the intentions and the motivations. All this I saw with a bleak clarity. I sat and stared at Melanie, watching her lips moving, feeling the blood run from my face and hoping she wouldn’t notice, feeling my fingers tingling. I wanted to leap from that chair and march out and walk and walk and walk, until my brain settled and relaxed. And until I knew what to do — what I had to do. Though I hated the thought, I was certain I knew who had done it, and equally certain I’d been the cause of Mark’s death. So I was trapped.

  I was aware that Melanie was gesturing the end to her little speech, raising her arms and allowing the gesture to round it off. She appeared not to notice my distress. If I missed the last few words it didn’t matter. She wanted me to go with her to Mansfield Park.

  I marvelled that she, who’d had the evidence so much longer than I, had not seen the answer at once.

  Then at last Amelia, aroused by the nature of the forthcoming expedition, spoke out. She had sat there quietly, apart from the sundry exclamations that had escaped her.

  ‘He deserved to die,’ she said flatly. ‘It’s not right to...to persecute...’

  Melanie looked at her with sympathy. Her voice was quiet and persuasive when she spoke. ‘You ought to know, Amelia, that officially a death is a death. A murder is a murder. If we’d been after Nancy’s killer, you would’ve approved. Mark’s, no. I can understand that. But it’s got to stop some time. I’ve got Larry in detention. Am I going to sit back and let it take its course, all the way to court? There’d be a case, you know. And if I released him now, who would be the next one to look for revenge? It’s got to stop. You must see that.’

  Amelia tightened her lips stubbornly, but she said, ‘I suppose you’re right.’

  I cleared my throat, not certain my voice would work. ‘She is right, my dear. We’ve got to go on with it now.’

  ‘Must I come with you?’

  ‘No. No real need. The decision’s yours.’

  ‘I ought to be with Ol
ivia.’ She stubbornly clung to that.

  ‘If you think so.’ But I couldn’t get any enthusiasm into it. She shook her head. It would be agony for her. ‘I’d better come along then.’

  And Tony beamed at her with pride, blast him.

  Melanie straightened to her full height and slapped her thighs. ‘Now...I suppose you haven’t had lunch, and neither have I. So I’ll introduce you to our canteen. Perhaps you’d like to see Larry first, Richard...’ She left it hanging, raising her eyebrows. I nodded. ‘Very well. Amelia and I will go along to the canteen, and Tony can take you down to see Larry. He knows the way. Coming, Amelia? You’ll be fascinated by our canteen, I’m sure.’

  Damn it all, she was pleased as hell at the anticipation of the forthcoming visit.

  Together they preceded us from the office. I looked at Tony, and he smiled.

  ‘Knows how to get her way, doesn’t she!’ I commented sourly.

  ‘You’re dead right. She adapts the technique to the circumstances. Come on. Brand new cells. You’ll like ‘em.’

  ‘Do they know you?’

  ‘I’ve been introduced.’

  We went down to see Larry.

  15

  Brand new cells, yes, as clean and soulless as they could possibly be, and equally depressing as the battered boxes I’d been used to. The officer on duty let us to it. He didn’t trouble to shut the door.

  Larry got to his feet. He’d had a choice — stretch out on the unwelcoming plastic-covered mattress, or sit upright on a plain hardwood chair. He’d been sitting, reading a thick book. For a person accused of murder, he seemed strangely undisturbed. He was still at a stage where he could tell himself that it didn’t happen to people like him, and wouldn’t continue to do so for long. He put his book face down on the bed, and wiped his palms on his jeans.

  ‘Shut the door, will you. There’s a hell of a draught.’

  Tony eased the door shut with his hip. I said: ‘You’re in a bit of a fix here, aren’t you.’ Not a question. He was.

  ‘Have you come to dig me out, Mr Patton?’ He eased himself down on to the bed. I sat on the low chair with my knees high.