Deathly Suspense

by John Paxton Sheriff

  ‘I never talk to his wife.’

  She was joking and smiling, at the top of her form, and I wondered why. I took the chair she’d indicated, watched her walk around her desk and sit in the swivel chair that had been old before she was born, and wondered where I was going with what were now wild flights of fancy. How many pink blouses did Debenhams sell? Take the bottles of peroxide out of bathroom cabinets and how many women had blonde hair? But that was to ignore the voice, and in the few words she had spoken I knew I had been right first time. The last time I’d spoken to Stephanie Grey was not Monday, but Friday. Last night. She’d answered my call on a mobile phone belonging to Len Tully that had later been found in the boot of a Ford Escort abandoned, with Tully’s body inside, on Heswall Dales.

  Suicide? Not on your life. Doubt had gone out of the window. I’d come to listen to a voice I might have heard on the phone, and a glimpse of newspaper headlines had led me to much more than I’d expected – so much more that my head was in a whirl. But now what? Think fast, get out fast? Yes – but first throw down some ground bait and see if she nibbles.

  ‘So, Jack, it’s all over.’

  ‘Mm. The end of a sad story that stretches back twelve months.’

  ‘A real mess. Four men and a woman dead because two of them … played around, were indiscreet. Wayne and Lorraine. Then Joe lost his head. That brought in Frank and Len Tully. And so we had manslaughter, brutal murders, a bizarre accident.…’

  She spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  ‘And suicide?’

  ‘Yes, it seems so.’

  I wondered if she had got that from Haggard, and reminded myself to ask him.

  ‘Unless something comes up at the post mortem.’

  ‘It won’t.’ Her smile was sweet.

  ‘That’s it then. It was an investigation that got overtaken by events and ran out of control. Solved itself, in a very nasty way.’ I climbed to my feet. ‘Will you tell Caroline it’s over?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She came around the desk, a woman in a pink blouse whom I now believed had stood with her long skirt whipping in the cold wind blowing off the River Dee and spoken to me tersely on the phone while in the background a man was committing cold-blooded murder.

  My skin prickled as I shook her hand. My polite smile was a mask. A thought struck me, a barb that might wound took the form of words and I paused on my way out.

  ‘Did you enjoy your trip to Conwy?’

  She smiled and frowned at the same time. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Calum thought he saw you there … I think it was early Sunday morning.’

  ‘Calum?’

  ‘Calum Wick. My colleague. He knows you from George Kingman’s place. The King of Clubs.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘No?’ I shrugged. ‘He knows you by sight, so he’s seen you somewhere – and he’s almost certain he saw you in Conwy.’ Another thought presented itself, and I snapped my fingers. ‘That’s right, he said you were driving a white Fiat Punto.’

  ‘He has a vivid imagination, Jack.’ The smile had become chill. ‘My car’s white, but it’s a Mercedes, and I don’t think I’ve ever visited North Wales.’

  TWENTY

  I tramped down the stairs and into Castle Street, blinking in bright autumn sunlight, and stood on the pavement with my mind working overtime.

  Probing with wounding barbs was one thing, proving that my theories were more than wild flights of fancy was something else. One pink blouse does not a murder make, but add to it the certainty that Stephanie Grey had at the very least been in at Len Tully’s death and a resolute PI begins flexing his muscles. In a manner of speaking.

  One person who might be able to tell me if I had the right pink blouse was the eyewitness who, from afar, had watched a woman slitting Rose Lane’s throat. Getting to her was easy – I’d talk to DI Alun Morgan – but I couldn’t see myself dragging Stephanie along to be identified. The next best thing was a photograph – and I was standing in the right place.

  During the Danny Maguire case I had found Frank Danson’s missing sons. They’d disappeared twenty years ago when he and his wife were at the theatre. That case had finished just two weeks ago; Frank and I had phoned each other a couple of times since then, and Frank’s photographic business, Danson Graphics, was behind expensive smoked glass windows just a few yards away.

  I found him in the outer office where pink and yellow silk flowers stood in tall floor vases, carpet tiles muffled footsteps, and three desks created an island of carpeted space. He greeted me with delight, and showed intense interest when I told him what I wanted: photographs of Stephanie Grey, back and front, from several angles.

  He knew her by sight – she passed his studio every day on her way to lunch – and he readily agreed to take the photographs himself. As he pointed out, a professional photographer takes photographs, and if Miss Grey happened to be in Castle Street when he was going about his business then the odds were she’d appear in several of the shots. Short odds he told me with a grin: she’d be in every shot.

  The trouble was it was early November, and when Stephanie walked downstairs and into the street she would certainly have a jacket or coat covering the thin pink blouse. We mulled over that problem for a few minutes, then Frank had a brainwave. He told me he knew the snack bar where she had lunch, and had recently taken advertising shots for the owner’s menus and brochure. Some of them hadn’t turned out too well – he winked – and would have to be retaken. Now seemed like a good time, and as the coffee bar was as hot as Hades which forced everyone to remove their coats….

  I agreed to wander away, and call back in a couple of hours to pick up the ten by eight colour prints he assured me he would have ready.

  I wanted peace and quiet to make phone calls and I wouldn’t find that sitting with Manny Yates in the American Bar. So what I did was walk up there, get him to dig his keys out of his flamboyant red waistcoat, then walk back along Lime Street and climb the stairs to the small room with its desks and banker’s green-shaded lights and filing cabinets and cork boards with coloured pins where – at the ripe old age of thirty-five – I had served my private eye apprenticeship.

  Manny kept his bottles of hooch in the top drawer of a heavy wooden filing cabinet of the kind that might have been nicked from Admiral Street police station in the years before the wars. Was the police station there then? I didn’t know, but what I did know was that my first phone call was to DI Mike Haggard’s office in that station, and for that – or the other calls – I didn’t need alcohol.

  I found a big white mug, filled it with tonic water from the bottle that stood alongside the gin in the filing cabinet, then sat behind Manny’s desk and picked up the phone.

  ‘Mike?’

  ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘and here was me havin’ one of those nice days the Yanks are always on about.’

  ‘This will make it even nicer. I’ve been talking to Stephanie Grey. She’s ready to tell Caroline Spackman I’m off the case.’

  ‘She knows that anyway. Vine went to Mill Street this morning with a young female constable. He told Mrs Spackman new evidence suggests her brother killed his wife with the aid of an accomplice. And that accomplice is dead.’

  ‘Fair enough. Of course you know I don’t agree.’

  ‘Yeah, like you don’t agree Len Tully committed suicide.’

  ‘I don’t, but that reminds me,’ I said. ‘You’re pretty thick with our Stephanie, right?’

  ‘She’s a solicitor, so we’ve crossed swords in court. And useful information passes back and forth. Does that make either of us thick?’

  I chuckled. ‘You told her Len Tully was dead. Did you mention suicide?’

  ‘No, because it’s not official.’

  ‘As a possibility?’

  ‘I told her what I’d tell anyone: cause of death’ll be determined by a post mortem.’ The line was silent for a moment. Then he couldn’t hold back. ‘Why?’


  ‘She knows, so either someone told her, she’s guessing … or.…’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Haggard said softly, ‘what fuckin’ wild-goose chase are you on now?’

  ‘I’ll let you know when I get back from Deganwy.’

  The next call was to DI Alun Morgan. I reached him on his mobile, he prevaricated with technique refined by constant use then gave me Grace Williams’s telephone number and five minutes later I was through to the eyewitness and had made an appointment to see her at three o’clock that afternoon.

  The drive both ways with a chat in the middle would leave me plenty of time to order a Chinese meal for three to be delivered at eight o’clock to Eleanor’s flat in Grassendale.

  The marina and executive residences under construction on the Deganwy side of Conwy harbour were of interest to me because I’d recently seen the same sort of development when Sian and I were in Gibraltar. We had dined with a suspect at a night spot called Bianca’s, sipping Jameson’s and gin and tonics alongside placid waters where luxury yachts and cruisers rocked gently at expensive moorings. Oh, I know, every local council with a handy stretch of water’s doing marinas nowadays, but when I was stationed in Gibraltar the waters of the bay practically lapped at the traffic zipping along Queensway. Now offices and flats stand on acres of reclaimed land, and two marinas – at the last count – poke their white concrete tentacles into the clear blue waters.

  From those Gibraltar flats you gaze across to the Spanish port of Algeciras, from Deganwy you look across a much smaller stretch of water to Conwy Harbour, and it was when doing just that early on Monday morning that Grace Williams had witnessed murder.

  I had expected to find her in one of those grand modern blocks, but instead the address I had led me up a road close to a pub called Maggie Murphy’s. Grace’s neat old black and white house was at the end of an unadopted gravelly lane. It stood on a grassy rise overlooking the main road, and had wonderful unrestricted views from the front garden.

  I parked alongside a bird stand under a tall sycamore, climbed out of the car carrying the manila envelope I’d got from Frank Danson, and my first surprise came when a tall old gentleman of military bearing stood with a slight list as he opened the front door then, with weaving gait, led me through a house smelling of lavender and cigars. My second came when I walked into what turned out to be a bright front room and was introduced to the plump, grey-haired woman in a shiny wheelchair.

  ‘Two dicky hips,’ she said, her accent faintly Welsh, and she smiled at the look on my face. ‘What did you expect, then, a toothless old crone with dirty net curtains, a brass-bound telescope and a black notebook for composing poison-pen letters?’

  ‘Alun Morgan told me absolutely nothing, so I came with an open mind.’

  ‘Yes, well, you can tell that to the marines. What I do from my front window evokes images in people’s minds – the wrong image, as it happens, in much the same way that it’s wrong for those poor photographers who take pictures at school concerts and swimming galas to be branded with that awful name. I’m disabled; I do have a brass-bound telescope, but I use it for watching sea birds, fishing boats, yachts sailing in and out of the harbour – oh, I watch just about everything but I’m not a … a.…’

  ‘Peeping Tom?’

  ‘Another horrible name. No, of course I’m not.’

  ‘Unadulterated balderdash, and well you bloody know it.’

  Behind me, the tall old relic had spoken in fond tones that would have been clipped if they hadn’t been slurred.

  ‘Yes, well, Roger does like his gin, and I do love my telescope and all it brings me,’ Grace Williams said – and then, out of the blue, she gave me a broad wink.

  So what did I make of that? Well, probably the only reason I couldn’t think of her as a Peeping Tom was because of her name – I suppose you could call it her saving grace. But she certainly peeped, she had the powerful ocular equipment set up on a sturdy tripod in the bay window, and my guess was she spent more time looking into people’s bedrooms than she did watching and yawning as gulls nested.

  By the time I turned around, Roger had wandered off and I could hear him bumping into the furniture as he searched for the Bombay Sapphire. Grace waved me to a comfortable settee, wheeled herself silently across the thick beige carpet so that she was close to me, and watched eagerly as I opened the big envelope.

  I tipped Frank Danson’s ten by eight prints into my hand, held them face down.

  ‘You saw her from a distance. These are close–ups. D’you think you can sort of close one eye and squint?’

  ‘Give ‘em here, you daft sod.’

  She studied the glossy colour prints intently, placing each one in her ample lap as she turned to the next, her lips pursing and unpursing – if that’s right – and a slight flush turning her powdered cheeks pink.

  She looked up at me, a twinkle in her eyes.

  ‘She’s got a knife,’ she said, ‘but all she’s doing here is slicing a Danish. ‘

  ‘Mm. Did you actually see her—?’

  ‘Administer the coup de grâce?’ She chuckled. ‘Damn right I did.’

  ‘This woman?’

  She hesitated. Her bottom lip jutted. She glanced sideways at the big telescope; absently moved her strong hands so that the wheelchair rocked backwards and forwards.

  ‘Probably.’

  She looked through the half-dozen prints, held up one that showed Stephanie Grey on her way out of the coffee bar. Back view. Almost full length. Long dark skirt brushing her ankles.

  ‘The flat across the water, the one where that woman was murdered, has patio doors leading out onto a tiny veranda. Fancy iron railings. Nothing to get in the way of someone having a sly look from afar.’ Her eyes were pensive. ‘If you were to ask me—’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Then I’m almost certain the woman in this photograph is the woman I saw commit a bloody murder.’

  ‘How almost certain?’

  ‘They say you can change your identity, but not your ears – I didn’t see her ears then and I can’t see them now, so that’s not much use. But the lights in that flat across the water were bright – she wasn’t worried about being seen – and it’s the stance, isn’t it? She didn’t know she was being watched, then or today – this was taken today?’

  ‘Lunchtime.’

  ‘Well there you are. She was relaxed, just as she must have been on the night of the murder, acting naturally, no reason to change—’

  ‘Sticking a knife in in another human-being’s neck is an unnatural act. She’d be tense, wound up, muscles as tight as piano wire.’

  ‘Unusual, yes, and totally unacceptable, but not an unnatural act in the way that I understand the term.’ Again her eyes were twinkling. She took another long look at the print, said softly, ‘If it was her it sends a shiver down the spine, looking at her.’

  ‘And was it?’

  ‘Oh … I don’t know …’ She looked at me. ‘I can’t be a hundred per cent certain.…’

  ‘Eighty?’

  ‘Better than that. Ninety.’ She grinned at me, and lifted her eyebrows and a plump hand.

  ‘Done,’ I said, and leaned forward to give the delightful little curtain twitcher the awaited high five.

  TWENTY-ONE

  ‘Ladies of advanced years,’ Eleanor said, ‘are often a little scatterbrained.’ She touched her white hair and winked at Sian. ‘They’re also kittenish; they like to lead gullible men up the garden path.’

  ‘I’ll point that out to Reg,’ I said, ‘warn him what to expect.’

  ‘Oh, he knows, and he couldn’t wait for it to happen. Why d’you think he invited me to Gibraltar?’

  ‘If you’re going to go into that,’ Sian said, ‘this is where I cover my ears.’

  The Chinese meal had been oriental excellence in dainty edible slivers and deep-fried pouches soaked in hot grease and savoury sauces that led to frequent rinses in fingerbowls and, that finished, we were scattered around the c
omfortable room on settee and easy chairs, as relaxed as well fed cats. The table had been cleared (I think Sian did that), the dishes were in the dishwasher, and the table lamp with its rich red shade cast a warm glow over a room where expensive red wine glistened in crystal glasses that were held with what could only be gay abandon.

  The champagne had mysteriously disappeared from my shopping list; it seems that gentlemen of advanced years are also scatterbrained, particularly those with murder in mind. And haunted by dilemma. Should I inform Haggard of my suspicions, or hold back? I seemed to have Stephanie Grey nailed on two counts, but could a solicitor be so naïve that she’d risked answering Len Tully’s phone, and continued to wear the pink blouse in which she’d committed one murder while assisting in a second?

  ‘A penny for them, Jack,’ Eleanor said.

  I sighed. ‘Has Sian told you all about the Joe Creeney case?’

  ‘As much as she knows, which seems to be most of it. Then you brought exciting news about a bent solicitor when you walked in, and now … well, what comes next? Where do you go from here? I know Miss Grey’s your new suspect and you think two of the murders are linked, but there are others, and trying to pull them all together must be like trying to catch sardines in a net intended for cod.’

  I smiled absently, sipped my wine and thought for a moment.

  ‘If you know the story,’ I said, ‘you know some of the unanswered questions. One of them is why did Joe Creeney break out of jail and go straight to where the police were sure to find him? Another is who was already there in the house, and expecting him? Mike Haggard believes that he went there to murder his wife, and he was meeting his accomplice. But if he’s wrong, and I believe he is, then the question remains unanswered.’

  ‘Not any more,’ Sian said. ‘Damon Knight was very talkative. I think he was jealous of Joe.’

  ‘I’m sure he was. Joe was getting out.’

  ‘More than that. The plans someone had put in place for Joe included a new identity, and a new life overseas. With Lorraine.’