The Case of the Screaming Beauty

by Alison Golden

  Life would now be forever divided in to “before” and “after”. Before, Isabelle had hated housework, and Graham had found himself too busy to help out as much as he’d wanted. Their home had been cluttered but lively, full of energy, laughter, and endless activities. Isabelle’s time away from working at the hospice was spent with their daughter. She had shepherded Katie through life, encouraging her bright curiosity, her willingness to try new things, her quirky sense of humor. By the age of five, Katie was already comfortable eating any vegetable she was given – to the envious surprise of her classmates’ parents – and was making up little jokes which were just about beginning to make sense.

  He should have been there more, Graham knew. A child needs attention and love and guidance, not an exhausted father with so many other things on his mind. He’d hated the necessity of “outsourcing” some of the responsibilities of raising a child, as Isabelle had called it, and they had struggled to afford a nanny. Cora had genuinely loved Katie, without indulging her, and they had trusted her implicitly. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, really. Just one of those things.

  Graham burned with anger at the memory. Without realizing it, he’d climbed the stairs in a slow trance and found himself at Katie’s bedroom door. Her toys were still on the floor, where she’d left them. He hadn’t stepped in there since the night of the accident, when from the doorway he’d watched his wife, eerily silent with grief, curl up in the tiny bed that still held the fragrance of their little girl.

  The evidence from the closed circuit television cameras was conclusive. A delivery van had run a red light at twenty miles per hour over the limit. Nothing Cora could have done would have prevented the collision. Katie had her seatbelt on and was riding in the back, just like all the advice prompted…but the back-left of the car had taken all the force of the impact.

  Graham sat on the floor of Katie’s bedroom and leaned against the side of her bed, knees tucked under his chin. His eyes closed as his forehead touched the softness of her girly pink blanket, memories of reading her bedtime stories dancing in his mind. The wave hit then. It tumbled over him at first, then, violently, it engulfed him, sucking him down, his anguish annihilating his consciousness. This time, unlike those earlier, he submitted to his deep sorrow, surrendering like a sacrifice at the altar of grief. He knew only complete obedience to its tyranny would transport him through the dark, desolate tunnel that lay before him. He’d resisted until now, but his defenses had grown weaker. It was time to embark on grief’s journey. He was ready. The tears came, finally.

  * * *

  At six foot three and with the build of a rugby prop forward, Harris wasn’t known for his athleticism. Nevertheless, the big man covered the ground with surprising speed. His orders were simple: keep trying DI Graham, get to The Lavender, and don’t let anyone leave.

  “Sir?” he panted. “Thank God. I’ve been trying you for…”

  “What’s the problem, Sergeant?” Graham asked. His voice seemed quiet and hollow, his manner so very different from the zealous determination he’d shown earlier.

  “Sir, I don’t know how we overlooked it, but… Well, Norah won the lottery on Saturday night.”

  Graham had spent half an hour sitting in his car, entirely unsure of where to go, but certain that he couldn’t be in his house for another second. Then he’d headed in the direction of Wales, and Isabelle. He hadn’t thought things through. She hadn’t answered her phone, and he knew it to be a fool’s errand. “Really?” he managed, immediately looking for a place to U-turn on the highway.

  “Five point six million pounds, sir.”

  The DI sat bolt upright in his seat. “Jesus, Sarge.”

  “That’s about right, I’d say. She was the only winner last week.” Harris had double checked the numbers, and then had two colleagues do the same, just to be sure.

  “And she must have known about it by the time she was murdered,” Graham offered.

  “I’d go further than that, sir,” Harris said. “I’d say it goes some way to explaining our mysterious Sunday morning scream.”

  “Bloody hell. You’re at the Lavender?”

  “Yes, sir. Just arrived.”

  “Brilliant. Don’t let anyone leave.” Graham attached the magnetic blue light to the car’s roof and began to bully his way through the evening traffic.

  “Already on it, sir,” Harris replied, grinning as he heard the zeal return to his boss’ voice as the DI cursed at his fellow motorists. “See you soon.”

  * * *

  Graham’s mind was split animatedly between the evidence and the traffic. He ran through it again, as though delivering an oft-recited poem, tracking each suspect from a starting point on the Sunday, all the way through to the moment of the murder, and after. As he did so, new thoughts began to crystallize. It was as though he’d downed a pot of enervating tea, but this was simply his investigative mind at work, driven by the frustrations of the case, the urgent need to take control of something, and the raw excitement of doing ninety miles an hour with his blue lights blazing.

  Even if he were wrong, even if he’d make a fool of himself in the attempt, he would gather the whole bunch of them together at The Lavender and have it out. Put everything in the open. Show them that he had the measure of this case, that he could still “pull a Dave Graham” when the moment called for it.

  Graham’s car was very fortunate indeed to arrive at The Lavender without serious damage. Flashing blue lights or no, he’d taken extraordinary risks while crossing junctions against the signal and jinked around slower cars – which, on this occasion, meant everyone else – like a racing driver. After thirty-five minutes’ hectic thought and similarly hectic speeding, Graham swerved into the hotel’s beautifully kept driveway, sending a cloud of gravel spinning into Amelia’s flower beds.

  “Sergeant Harris?” Graham called as he burst through the door.

  “Present and correct, sir,” the big sergeant replied, appearing from the dining room. He leaned in closely. “I don’t know how much like the ending of a 1940s murder mystery you wanted this to be, but everyone’s here. Around the dining room table. Figured it was best.”

  Graham peered through to see a very worried looking Cliff and Amelia, Tim Lloyd, Doris Tisbury, and even old Sykes, sitting around the table in perplexed silence. As Graham entered, his mind racing as though he’d just finished his third pot of tea, Cliff stood.

  “DI Graham… I’m hoping there’s a special reason for this,” the proprietor said. “We’ve tried our best to be helpful, but with the police coming and going like this, it’s going to be very hard to rebuild our business.”

  Graham nodded with understanding. “Have a seat, Cliff. All shall be revealed.”

  Cliff was hardly satisfied, it seemed. In the days since the tragedy, Amelia had noticed that her husband was becoming withdrawn and very concerned for their future. His Mexico plan, long cherished and seemingly coming closer, day by patient day, was now seriously undermined. How could they plan for a relaxed retirement when the world was getting to know their establishment as a “murder hotel?” Amelia had tried her best to see the bright side. They could theme the place around the murder, she’d suggested half-seriously, and bring in the morbidly curious at five-star rates.

  “Have you found him?” Tim Lloyd asked next. “The murderer?”

  Graham fixed him with a steady stare. “I may have, Mr. Lloyd. I will be asking you all for some patience while we bring this sad chapter to a close. I believe,” he said, addressing the whole, rather unsettled group, “that we now have sufficient evidence to make an arrest. As you might know, what happens after that is down to our colleagues at the Crown Prosecution Service. They’ll decide if we’ve got enough to secure a conviction. But I’m increasingly confident,” Graham told them. Then he added, after meeting the gaze of each of them, “Nearing certainty.”

  The atmosphere was tense, Harris noted. Probably because we’ve got the bugger where we want him, and he’s in this room.
Or, he pondered as Graham paced, checking his notebooks one last time, someone here knows who did it. A charge of conspiracy or accessory to murder, maybe that old classic of “perverting the course of justice”… you can do almost as much jail time on those charges as you’d do for the murder itself. He was electrified by the prospect of finding their killer; he was also dying to see Graham in action, back to his best, juggling evidence like the accomplished master he was. Go get ‘em, boss.

  “Method,” Graham began, the only person in the room who was on his feet, “motive,” he added, checking the famed triumvirate off on his fingers, “and opportunity. We’ve been searching, Sergeant Harris and I, for a very particular combination of these three elusive elements.” Harris was seated near the door, the better to prevent any ill-advised attempts at an escape from this anxious situation which, he was sure, was about to become acutely uncomfortable for at least one of the participants. “Norah was young, beautiful,” Graham said, and then added, “and, let’s not deny it, desirable”. Harris watched the room’s reactions, trying to read the flickers of eyelids, folding or unfolding of limbs, tilts of the head. In each case, he asked, what does it mean?

  “She had recently divorced and was in a fragile state after escaping a difficult and sometimes traumatic relationship.” Graham turned to Tim, whose expression was dark and concerned. “As Mr. Lloyd well knows.”

  Tim misread this comment as an accusation of some sort. “I had nothing to do with…”

  “Hold that thought, for the moment, if you would, sir,” Graham told him. “I’m afraid I’m obliged by habit to do what my former sergeant used to call my ‘speechy thing.’ I think a lot better out loud. If you’ll indulge me.” It wasn’t a request, but Lloyd nodded his assent anyway.

  “She was in a new relationship, apparently a happy one,” Graham said, bringing another unwarranted nod from Lloyd. “She was planning a vacation, and to everyone we’ve spoken to who knew her, she seemed at her happiest in years.”

  He referred quickly to his notebook, more to ensure that he hadn’t forgotten anything than to remind him what would come next. The evidence had already laid itself out in his mind, with almost all of the necessary connections firmly in place. It remained only to present his findings to those involved, judge their responses, listen to their defense, and name the killer.

  “Mr. Sykes,” Graham said, his voice raised to ensure the old man would hear. “Would you tell us all, once more, how you came across the driver you handed to my colleague, Mr. Stevens?”

  Sykes started as though waking from a brief but deep sleep. “Eh?” he asked. “Oh, yes… In the bunker, it was, on the fairway. Bloody strange, I said to myself, to leave a perfectly good golf club under a foot of sand.”

  “And how did you come to see it, buried as it was?” Graham asked him.

  “Well,” Sykes said, thinking back. “I suppose it was jutting out of the sand just a bit. You know, enough for me to see there was something there.”

  Graham took a step towards the ancient groundskeeper, who was dressed in a green polo shirt from the nearby club. “Are you in the habit of patrolling the fairways, searching for buried murder weapons?”

  “Beg pardon?” Sykes said. In these last few years, as his deafness took a greater hold, this pair of words were perhaps his most common response. Cliff patiently repeated the question for him.

  “I walk the course, as I’m required to,” Sykes replied defensively. “What of it?”

  Graham had decided, Harris saw, to address the least likely suspect first. He wondered why but knew better than to question DI Graham’s methods. “You would not be the first person,” Graham informed him, “to present important evidence to the police in order to deflect suspicion.”

  Sykes listened intently, his head cocked to one side, and chewed on Graham’s comment for a moment. Then he said, “You know, I’m flattered, young man.”

  The DI had hardly expected this. “Flattered, Mr. Sykes?”

  The old man chuckled to himself. “I’ve been strolling around God’s great Earth since there were still posters of Lord Kitchener on walls of the London pubs demanding that we do our duty and fight the Germans in Flanders,” he recalled. “I’ve taken lives, I don’t mind admitting it. But that was in Korea, when I was even younger than you are now. But now, I couldn’t hit a golf ball twenty yards on my best day. No,” he chuckled again, “my violent days are long past.”

  To Harris, and all the others, it seemed that Graham had gotten off on the wrong foot, making a frivolous accusation against a man who couldn’t possibly have been involved in Norah’s murder.

  “Quite so,” Graham said. “Forgive me, Mr. Sykes.”

  A wave of his ancient, leathery hand and another cackle of mirth let Graham know where he stood.

  “I do hope,” Tim Lloyd officiously opined, “that you’ve brought something firmer than that.”

  Harris scowled at the man, but Graham answered the question with grace. “Just getting warmed up, Mr. Lloyd. Perhaps,” he said, adjusting his planned order of inquisition, “you might explain why you lied to us about having been banished to your room on the night Norah was murdered.”

  He almost stood, but the looming, guardian presence of Harris stopped him short. “Lied?” he gasped. “Why on Earth would I lie?”

  “Come now, Mr. Lloyd. We’re all adults here. Norah and yourself were involved in a physical relationship,” Graham said, deliberately choosing a delicate phrasing. “But you insist that Norah turfed you out on that Sunday evening to sleep in your own room. Very odd, wouldn’t you say?”

  Tim folded his arms. “She was angry with me,” he explained. “I said some stupid things. I regretted them, and I apologized, but she told me she’d just left a relationship in which her man made her feel second best and wouldn’t stand for feeling that way again.”

  “Mrs. Tisbury,” Graham said. “You are our only source on these matters. Did Tim sleep in his own bed on Sunday night?”

  Doris sat immobile, like a fleshy, imperturbable battle cruiser at anchor. “He did,” she answered. “But Norah did not.”

  “You’re certain?” Graham asked.

  “Detective Inspector,” she began in a tone which would brook not the least argument, “I’ve been making hotel beds since before your mum and dad were courting. I’d know in an instant if they’d been slept in. Hers was just as I’d left it that morning.”

  The room chewed this over, inclined to believe the ever-dependable Doris.

  “But I’m afraid there’s another piece of evidence which we have to consider,” Graham told them. He was enjoying this role in a strange way, both the meticulous combing-through of the evidence and the showmanship such a group interrogation seemed to demand. “I have evidence from a normally reliable source that Tim and Norah were anything but falling out on Sunday evening. Isn’t that so, Mr. Swansbourne?”

  Cliff gave an uncertain glance, first at his wife, and then at Harris. “Well, I was only reporting what I thought I heard.”

  “Naturally, sir, that’s all any of us can try to do. But, wouldn’t you say, that the ‘sounds of love’ you claimed to hear from their room are, not to put too fine a point on it, rather distinctive?”

  He squirmed in his seat. “I’d say so.”

  “Not the kind of thing you’re likely to construe if, say, what was actually coming from the room was the silence of a lone woman, doing nothing in particular.”

  Cliff pursed his lips. “I really don’t know what you’re driving at.”

  Graham stopped. “Driving,” he said. “Driving, yes. An interesting choice of word.”

  Cliff looked appealingly at Amelia. For the first time, Harris saw something genuinely of note in the wealth of body language around the table. He’s reaching out to her. He wants her help. He’s scared of what Graham might say next. I don’t bloody well believe it…

  “I think you do know what I’m driving at, sir. Do you deny that you visited Norah in her room on Sunda
y afternoon or early evening?”

  Harris was surprised. This was entirely new. Was Graham just guessing now or playing a more subtle game?

  “I don’t remember,” Cliff began.

  “And did she, at any point, share with you the news that had been such a profound shock, that very morning, that she’d cried out in gleeful surprise?”

  Amelia’s head snapped round. “I knew it! I knew I wasn’t losing my marbles!”

  Cliff tried to quieten her. “I have no idea what you…”

  “Six,” Graham said. “Nineteen. Twenty-two. Twenty-nine. Does this have a familiar ring to it?”

  Sykes piped up. “That’ll be the lottery, that will,” he told them. “You need two more numbers.”

  “I do indeed, Mr. Sykes. Thirty-three and thirty-five. I’m sure there was a bonus ball too, but Norah didn’t need it.” He turned his head to look at Tim. “Did she, Mr. Lloyd?”

  Scarlet-faced and looking as guilty as sin, Tim replied, “That’s right.”

  “She was planning to celebrate the win, was she not?” Graham asked Lloyd. “Perhaps seeing if Cliff had a bottle of Champagne behind the bar. Probably by engaging in activities designed to culminate in emitting the ‘sounds of love’, even. But you screwed it up, didn’t you?”

  Lloyd gave every impression of wanting to simply vanish into a hole in the floor. “It wasn’t my greatest moment.”

  “Tell us what happened,” Graham demanded. He was visibly angry with Lloyd, as much for his deceit as for his careless mistreatment of Norah at her time of greatest happiness.

  “I put pressure on her,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to start my own company. Investigative Reporters for Hire,” he said. “I even picked out a logo I liked.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Amelia scoffed.

  “I needed money up front, and all I said was… Well, I suggested that Norah could back the company, give me a solid start.”