‘Stop talking, Murray. You’re not helping.’
CHAPTER 47
Jimmy Ewing, former drummer with The Moondreams, could hardly lift a teacup these days never mind keep a beat on a drum kit. At home he spent half his day attached to an oxygen mask, the other dozing in his armchair or asleep in his downstairs bedroom. A life of excess: cigarettes, alcohol and, for a time, dependence on prescription pills, accounted for a steady decline in his health. He suffered now from arthritis, poor circulation, diabetes and COPD: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Tara rang the doorbell of the house in Hesketh Road in Southport, an extensive building with a high pitched roof and Tudor style architraves. The house was remarkably similar in style to the one in Woolton where Jez Riordan had lived. Tara and Murray had said little more to each other on the drive from the city.
The door was opened by a wrinkle-faced woman with long silver-grey hair and penny glasses, who was wearing jeans and a grey T-shirt with ‘I “heart” LA’ in red lettering stretched across a full but sagging bosom. Tara introduced herself and asked to speak with Mr Ewing. In the brief exchange with the woman she learned that she was Molly Ewing, the long-suffering wife of Jimmy, she joked, although Tara thought it was probably not far from the truth. Molly Ewing led them down a bright hallway, lined with several framed photographs of what Tara presumed were family members, and into an equally bright lounge. There they found Jimmy Ewing asleep in his chair facing a television with a cookery programme showing.
‘Jimmy!’ shouted Molly. ‘Police are here to see you.’ She tapped his foot and he jumped awake.
When Ewing noticed he had company he pulled down his oxygen mask and eventually sat up straight in his chair.
‘I’ll make some tea,’ said Molly. ‘Sit yourselves down.’
She left the room, while Tara and Murray both sat in a large cushioned sofa to Ewing’s left and facing a tall fireplace with a dark wood mantelpiece. A modern log burner sat on the hearth but it wasn’t lit.
‘What can I do for Merseyside’s finest?’ Ewing croaked as slowly he perked up. His Scouse accent had not diminished with his age, although there was little strength in his voice. His hair was long and silver, he was unshaven and his abdomen looked distended. He wore brown slacks without a belt and a red plaid shirt stretched across his tummy, straining several buttons.
‘Would you mind telling us how well you knew Jez Riordan?’ said Tara. As she spoke, she noticed for the first time a large framed picture above and behind Ewing. It was a photograph of The Moondreams in performance. Ewing’s extensive drum kit was most prominent, the face of the young drummer relishing his playing.
‘Jez?’ said Ewing. ‘She was Eddie’s secretary.’
‘Did you know when she first joined the company that she was the daughter of Paul Gibson?’
‘I soon found out.’
‘Anything you want to add about that?’
‘What can I say? The lass had a rough life. We were glad to see her making a go of things, unlike her old man.’
‘Did you have much to do with her?’
Ewing shook his head.
‘Did she cause you any trouble?’
‘Trouble? What kind of trouble?’
‘How did you feel about her having an affair with Richard Andrews?’
‘That was none of my business.’
Molly Ewing appeared with a tray of cups and saucers and a pot of tea. She set it on a coffee table in front of Tara and Murray then proceeded to serve as Tara continued with her questions. So far, she had learned nothing from the old drummer and swiftly moved her inquiry on to the subject of The Moondreams.
‘What can you tell me about the break-up of your group back in the sixties?’
‘A shame that it had to happen,’ Ewing wheezed then coughed. His wife passed him a cup of tea containing a lot of milk. ‘We were on the verge of making it big when Roddy died.’
‘What happened that night when he drowned?’
There followed a bout of prolonged coughing and Molly had to take the cup from her husband in case he spilt his tea. Tara and Murray sipped at theirs.
‘He fell in the Mersey. Pissed as a fart.’
‘Is that it?’
‘It’s all that I know,’ said Ewing taking his cup back again.
‘Where were you when it happened?’
‘No idea. I was pissed, too. We’d just finished playing The Cavern. Then we made it to The Grapes for a few before closing. Somebody slipped us some bottles of gin and vodka, maybe a few pills. Next thing I know, it’s the following day and I got the news from our manager that Roddy was missing. Then they pulled his body from the river.’
‘So none of the other members of the group were with Roddy when he died?’
Ewing was now sipping his tea and more concerned with the cookery programme on TV than in answering Tara’s questions.
‘Not that I know of,’ he replied.
They left the house with Tara concluding that she was not going to get to the bottom of the story of what happened to Roddy Craig in 1968, at least not from any of the surviving Moondreams.
‘Doesn’t that strike you as odd, Alan?’ she said as they climbed into their car. ‘None of them have anything to say about what happened to their lead singer.’
‘Maybe there isn’t anything, ma’am.’
‘I know you think that, but don’t you also think it strange that not one of them asked me why I was interested in what happened to Roddy Craig?’
* * *
As Murray pulled onto the road from the driveway of the house, another car, with headlights already on in the fading daylight, slowed down to let them out. The driver recognised both officers as they drove away and wondered what their business had been within the Ewing household. That pretty detective was doing too much snooping for his liking.
CHAPTER 48
Arriving back at the station in the early evening, Tara and Murray encountered a small gathering, including DC John Wilson and Superintendent Tweedy, around a PC monitor in the office. None of the group seemed to notice Tara and Murray as they arrived.
‘Watch it again,’ Wilson was saying. ‘Look at the right hand.’
‘What are we looking at, folks?’ Murray chirped.
No one responded as everyone continued to study the screen. Tara had a clear view and looked on in horror at the figure displayed. The person was holding something in their hand, but she couldn’t make it out.
‘What is it?’ she asked. Wilson paused the screen.
‘Ma’am, I think this is our poisoner,’ said Wilson. ‘This is CCTV taken at a superstore in Bootle. We have more footage of the same bloke.’
‘Bloke?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
If anything, Tara had been expecting to see a woman. Somehow she still thought it possible that Jez Riordan had been the poisoner. Now she was staring at a screen that showed evidence that the possible Liverpool poisoner was male. She didn’t dare look at Murray. She knew he would have a smug grin stretched across his face. She looked on, mystified, as Wilson ran through the evidence he and his colleagues had uncovered.
‘Firstly, we have three shots of the same guy at three different stores in the city on the same day.’
Tara watched the short video pieces showing a man walking through a store entrance wheeling a shopping trolley. On each video he wore a loose-fitting waist-length coat, a baseball cap pulled down to cover his face and a pair of sunglasses.
‘This one,’ said Wilson, referring to the third section of footage, ‘is the store in Bootle where David Leigh’s wife did her weekly shopping. Leigh, the man who died in Williamson Square.’
Tara continued to examine all the footage that Wilson had assembled. Next, she saw what presumably was the same man entering a high street convenience store, this time minus a trolley.
‘This is the shop where the students did their shopping.’
‘Is there anything to identify him or that shows him tamp
ering with food?’ Murray asked.
Tara didn’t acknowledge his question. Wilson clicked the mouse of the computer and another set of files appeared. He clicked on the first tab at the bottom of the screen.
‘This piece clearly shows him doing something to a package that he lifted from the frozen food section.’
Tara looked on as the man removed what appeared to be a frozen ready meal and slipped the outer cardboard sleeve away to reveal part of the film-covered plastic tray. He took a careful look around him then something appeared in his right hand that he seemed to press against the food package. Just as quickly, his hand returned to his coat pocket then re-appeared to slide the outer packaging back over the plastic tray. Then he replaced the carton in the freezer and moved on, out of shot of the camera.
‘We were lucky with that shot,’ said Wilson. ‘Apparently, the store was in the process of re-aligning their cameras to suit a new shop layout. A week later, the freezers were moved and a clothing area was put in place in front of this particular camera.’
‘Which store was that?’ Tara asked.
‘It’s in Speke,’ Wilson replied. ‘Emma Whitehouse bought two cartons of vegetarian lasagne from that very freezer a day later. Norman Forbes, also from Speke, was shopping in that store on the same day that the food was tampered with. We haven’t yet found out what he bought.’
‘What did the perpetrator use to spike the food?’ Tara asked.
‘We think it is a syringe of some kind, with or without a needle. We are not sure. If you zoom in on this shot from Bootle, I think he is wearing some type of glove, latex maybe.’
‘And there’s nothing you have that shows his face?’
‘No, ma’am, but we’re still searching. We still have loads of street cameras and car park stuff to look at.’
* * *
Tara sat alone in her car ready for home, but she had not yet started the engine. Her mind tried to process the information just learned in the office, real evidence on a screen, not some concoction of a theory she had invented. It seemed easy now, and also ridiculous, to have placed Jez Riordan at the centre of this mystery. She was a chemist, and she had endured a tough upbringing in a household devoured by tragedy. It seemed to Tara reason enough for Jez to embark on a plan to get back at the people she blamed for ruining her life. Now, though, Tara decided that she must look elsewhere for the answers.
CHAPTER 49
With her job as a police detective, it might have been expected that Tara was always cautious when out alone after dark, even if she was only making her way home from work. But it was so easy to become complacent, thinking that nothing was ever going to happen to her. Driving from the station, she was oblivious of the car following behind. It was the same car that had slowed to let Murray emerge from the driveway of the Ewing home three hours earlier. She was unaware that it made every turn that she made, and she took no notice of it when it piggy-backed its way through the barrier into the parking area beneath her building.
She wandered away from the kitchen and sat on her sofa, nursing a glass of cool white wine, her prawn salad abandoned on the counter. She had taken note of Anne Gibson’s number, on the day they’d met following Jez’s funeral, and called it up. The woman’s chirpy voice answered a few seconds later.
‘Hello, Anne, it’s DI Tara Grogan here. I wanted to ask you a few more questions if you don’t mind.’
‘Fire away, Inspector.’
‘Can you tell me which university Jessica attended in London?’
‘Oh, love, they all sound the same to me. I think it was Imperial College. Would that sound right?’
‘Yes, that seems likely. You told me that she studied chemistry. Did she ever do any research or specialise in any particular field?’
‘I wouldn’t have a clue about that, love. She was Dr Gibson, but she never seemed to use the title and, as you know, she had started going by the name of Riordan by the time she came back to Liverpool.’
‘Thank you, Anne. You’ve been very helpful. Sorry to have disturbed you.’
‘No problem, love, anytime.’
Still holding her phone, she did a quick Google search for the name, Jessica Gibson, Imperial College. There were quite a few relevant hits with Jessica’s name.
The first referred to an exhibition of paintings held at the college two years earlier, but Tara was looking for a mention of science, chemistry, or possibly a reference to food or poisons. It didn’t take long to find it. There was sufficient information in the titles of the scientific papers for Tara to realise that she had been correct in her thinking about Jez. Many of the articles in the list had Jez designated either as the first-named author, as a co-author, or as the corresponding author, that is, the person who was the direct contact between the scientists and the publishers of the journal.
Safety perspectives of seafood in the food supply chain.
Detection methods for ciguatera food poisoning.
Identification of ciguatera poisoning cases in Puerto Rico.
The effect of cooking upon concentrations of marine bio-toxins in seafood.
Phycotoxins in marine shellfish: occurrence and effects on humans.
Tara recognised enough terms and phrases to realise that Jez could well have been responsible for the cases of poisoning in Liverpool. If she had mentioned the name to Dr McCush she was certain he would have been familiar with Jez Riordan, or Jessica Gibson as it appeared now on the screen and was directly associated with research into food toxins. If Jez had been involved in poisoning people in Liverpool then who was the man Wilson had found on the CCTV, and who had murdered Jez?
There was an abrupt knocking on her door. Her mind was elsewhere, dealing with confused thoughts. Tara didn’t think it odd that the caller had not buzzed the intercom from the main entrance of her building.
Still deep in thought, she went to her door and pulled it open wide.
CHAPTER 50
He rushed forward. Both his hands grasped her neck. She made it easy for him by reeling backwards. Deftly, he kicked the door closed behind him and forced Tara further inside the room. She could do little to resist him. He swung around behind her and placed his gloved hand over her mouth.
‘Now, let’s see what we have,’ he said, sounding confident, yet Tara could feel his agitation, the trembling in his hands as he kept hold of her.
He pulled a roll of duct tape from his coat pocket and, with Tara wriggling in his grasp, he still managed to pull the end free and stick it to her face. It wasn’t neat, but he gripped her hair tightly as he wound the tape several times around her head. When he’d finished, he noticed that both Tara’s mouth and nose were covered. She couldn’t breathe, her hands reaching desperately for the gag. Quickly, he pulled down on the tape so that her nostrils were exposed. Tara continued to struggle, but he maintained a firm grip on her arm as he dragged her to the bedroom. He found her dressing gown lying on the unmade bed.
‘This will do,’ he said, tugging the belt free from the garment.
He shoved Tara’s face into the mattress and pinned her to the bed with his knee pressing into her shoulder blade. Again, she struggled for breath as her attacker fumbled then managed to tie her hands behind her back. When he released his hold on her she found it difficult to right herself. Not only was the belt tied around her wrists but it was also wound around her neck. The more she struggled, the tighter the belt was upon her throat. Her cries were lost as she drew a breath through her nose and her face coloured a deep red. He wasted no time in dragging her back to the lounge where he thrust her onto the sofa and she landed on her back. Despite her struggling to breathe, her mind tried to deal with the shock of seeing this man standing before her.
‘Now, Inspector Grogan, any more nonsense from you and I’ll pull that tight around your pretty neck.’
Toby Ewing didn’t have the look of a villain. He didn’t appear strong enough, although Tara now knew differently. Despite his air of confidence, his voice maintained that wimpi
sh quality she’d observed on their first meeting. He had never struck her as a successful company executive and certainly never as an accomplice to Jez Riordan. She had so many questions for him, but she feared that soon they would be of no consequence. There was no doubt in her mind that Toby Ewing intended to kill her.
She watched him pace around her living room, a man running on his nerves.
‘You’re a very clever lady, Inspector,’ he said. ‘I saw you talking to Maggie’s brother and Jez’s aunt. Do you specialise in attending funerals? Then you ask my father about his past, about The Moondreams, of all things. How the hell did you arrive at that? A real super-sleuth, although you’re certainly a lot prettier than Miss Marple, and much younger, too. But you really should stay out of things that don’t concern you. My father is not a healthy man. He doesn’t need the police asking him questions about stuff that happened fifty years ago. And for what?’
Tara looked pleadingly at him, towering over her as she languished on her sofa. The slightest movement of her hands behind her, or of her head, and the belt tightened around her neck. It was hard enough breathing through her nose; she felt like she could pass out at any moment. What did Ewing want with her? What had he come to tell her? She looked on helplessly as he wandered around her flat. Why not kill her straightaway?
‘Ah, prawns! How appropriate and how convenient, too.’ He helped himself to a prawn, dipping it into the dish of seafood sauce on the counter then popping it into his mouth and licking his finger. ‘Wonderful. I love prawns, especially spicy or with loads of garlic. Come and join me.’
She didn’t move, but Ewing came towards her and gently helped her to her feet. In doing so, he knocked over her glass of wine and it spilt onto her mobile phone.
‘Oops! Careful,’ he said.
Gripping her tightly by the arm, he led her to the kitchen and stood her before what was supposed to have been her evening meal. She drew a strong breath through her nose as her fear caused her slight body to tremble and her knees to buckle. Ewing produced a small, clear plastic vial from his pocket. Tara could see that it contained only a few drops of a clear liquid. But the realisation of what it might be had her whimpering, and she tried to pull away.
THE DARING NIGHT Page 18