‘I wonder what sort of car she drove?’ Markov pondered. ‘She wasn’t without money. Lesser Listlea is a wealthy village, it’s not far from here...and this handbag alone...’
‘She drove a Beemer,’ said Carmen Pharoah.
Markov smiled at her. ‘How do you know that?’
‘Ah...’ Pharoah grinned. ‘And I also know the colour. It’s silver. German racing silver, as you’d expect of a BMW’
‘How —?’
‘Because it’s there.’ She pointed to a road bridge over the canal about fifty yards away. The car was not fully visible, just the roof, but sufficient to be able to identify it. A BMW in German racing silver. Stationary, where a car would not be parked.
Markov placed the handbag in the self-sealing production bag and he and Carmen Pharoah walked yet further along the canal, to the bridge, to the steps from the towpath to the road. They examined the car. The doors were not locked, the keys were still in the ignition.
‘The only reason this is still here is that its location was not known to the car thieves,’ Markov said softly, more to himself than to Carmen Pharoah. ‘So, did she fall or was she pushed?’
‘Oh, pushed, I expect,’ Pharoah replied matter-of-factly, but with tongue in cheek.
‘I expect so as well.’ He reached for his radio and pressed the Send button. He reported the location of the car and its possible relevance to the incident, requesting a constable and a roll of blue and white police tape. ‘She didn’t commit suicide... The police surgeon believes that she was not breathing when she went into the water. It’s not a suicide spot anyway... So if she was attacked, the attacker had no interest in her possessions...the motive wasn’t robbery. Her handbag, her jewellery say so.’
‘Didn’t want the car, either,’ added Pharoah. ‘He or she or they had to have had a personal motive, unless it was a random attack.’
‘It’s not the place for a random attack,’ Markov said. ‘On the one hand it’s isolated, but on the other, there’s quite a lot of traffic down the road. My money is on a personal motive.’
* * * *
Leaving a constable on duty by the BMW which had blue and white police tape fastened round it, Markov and Pharoah drove to Dovecote Cottage, Lesser Listlea. They found that Dovecote Cottage was a cottage in the same sense that the chapel at Kings College, Cambridge, is a ‘chapel’ despite being as large as a small cathedral; and in the same sense that York is a city despite the fact that in terms of its area, it could fit within the confines of a housing estate in a major city. Dovecote Cottage revealed itself to be a half-timbered Elizabethan manor house, built in an L shape in front of a gravelled courtyard in the middle of which stood a stone fountain belonging to a later, possibly Victorian era... So thought Markov as he slowed the car to a halt beside the Bentley which stood near the front door. The door of the house opened as Markov and Pharoah stepped out of their car.
‘Yes?’ The man was well built, fifty-something. A dark-blue towelling dressing gown covered silk pyjamas.
‘Police.’
‘Yes?’
‘Mr Winner?’ Markov approached and showed his ID.
“Tis I.’
‘We have a few questions...’
‘You’d better come in.’
Winner received the police in the hallway of his house, where they sat opposite each other on benches which stood alongside walls of ancient beams.
‘Oh my,’ he said when Markov revealed the reason for their visit. ‘Oh my...’
‘Do you know what her car would be doing on the bridge over the canal?’
‘The bridge in question...it’s on the route that she favours to get from the village to York. She drives it daily. I prefer the main road, but she likes the rural route. But I’ve no idea why she should have stopped where she did. Which way was the car pointing?’
‘Towards the village.’
‘So she was coming home. She was very cautious...she wouldn’t have stopped, not unless it was because she knew someone...someone she recognised.’
‘What time did you expect your wife to return home?’
‘Last night? About nine-thirty, ten. She went to visit her sister, she lives in York. The two of them, once they get their heads together, at my expense...calling up all my past misdeeds and indiscretions. She was about to take me to the cleaner’s... They would have spent the evening planning my ruin.’
‘So, you’d benefit from your wife’s death?’
‘Oh yes... In fact, I’m just beginning to realise just what a great weight might have been lifted from my shoulders...just what a shadow I am escaping from, if it is my wife.’
‘We’ll have to ask you to accompany us to York District Hospital to identify the body...if you can.’
‘The car, the handbag, the clothing you describe - it’ll be her all right. But yes, formality has to be observed.’
‘Before we go, could you tell us where you were at about nine-thirty last night?’
‘Here.’
‘Alone?’
‘Alone. I was working. The industry is in a bad state at the moment.’
‘The industry?’
‘Electronics. I am the Winner of Winner Electronics, the factory on the industrial estate.’
‘Ah yes,’ Markov nodded.
‘I’m asking my managers to put in unpaid overtime to avert collapse. I can’t do that if I’m not prepared to do the same.’
‘Of course.’
‘I made a few phone calls...sent a few faxes... They could be confirmed. I have itemised bills. The people to whom I spoke will be able to confirm that ‘twas I who spoke.’
‘This was at nine-thirty?’
‘No... No, earlier. I was reading reports at about that time...then I went outside. I enjoy the dusk at this time of year - that would have been about nine-thirty, ten, just outside in the garden - but I was alone.’
‘Your wife, was she depressed of late?’
‘No... Just the opposite, in fact. She was enthusiastic in a vindictive sort of way...burning up with determination to fleece me in a divorce settlement.’
‘But she was living here?’
‘All part of the Great Plan to ruin me. Can’t bring a lady friend home while she’s in the house, can I? And she knows it. We sleep separately, but it’s still the one roof... Makes things very difficult for me.’
‘Not the sort of person to take her own life, then?’
‘Hardly.’ Winner smiled. ‘My wife take her own life, I hardly think so... No...not a chance. She had everything to live for, i.e, my total ruin. She was poised to take half of what I possess, plus a massive amount of maintenance. She had a lot to live for. She and her sister had their knives out for me.’
‘So you really have benefited from her death? If it is she?’
‘Oh yes, only the collapse of my business empire to worry about now. A minor headache by comparison. I make no secret of it. I have no feelings for my wife now. I haven’t for a long time. I was angry about the possible divorce settlement because she wasn’t very supportive of me while I was building up...more of a hindrance. I really did it despite her, not because of her.’
‘So, it’s not true that behind every successful man there is a good woman?’
‘Not in my case, it’s not. Just isn’t. I certainly could have used such a female in my life, but it wasn’t my lot. I’d come home each day to a wife screaming for new clothes and no food. She would say that if I was hungry I could send out for a pizza. I went for her looks and found them skin-deep and that the skin was covering a very ugly personality. I should have listened to my grandmother when she told me to shut my eyes and listen to the voice. “Do your courting on the telephone,” she’d say. I should have listened.’
‘She sounds like a sensible woman.’
‘She was. She’s still alive but her mind is away. I visit her when I can, but it’s difficult to sit with a woman who once was full of such horse sense and wisdom who now thinks she’s a little girl and does
n’t recognise me. Keeps asking me if her daddy’s going to come home from the war. Anyway, I’ll claw my kit on, go and see the corpse. Never done this before...’ Winner stood.
‘It’s not like what you may have seen in the films... She won’t be pulled out of a drawer, you’ll see her from behind a glass screen.’
‘It will be as if she is floating,’ added Pharoah.
It was in fact just as Carmen Pharoah had described. The woman floating on a bed, tightly tucked up. ‘It is she,’ said Max Winner. ‘That’s my wife, Sadie Winner, aged forty-five years. Quite frankly, I don’t know which one of us rests in peace.’
* * * *
Bill Hatch stood - a short, balding, rotund man with stubby fingers. He was the sort of man who would be found in a pigeon loft lovingly stroking his beloved birds, or perhaps reading a tabloid newspaper on the top deck of a bus, or downing pints of mild and bitter in a smoky pub. But he was, in fact, a Home Office pathologist. He examined the corpse of Sadie Winner in the pathology laboratory of the York District Hospital and said, ‘The police surgeon is quite correct. Even before I make the first and even slightest incision, I can tell you that she didn’t drown.’
‘No?’ Carmen Pharoah responded from the corner of the room from where she was observing the post-mortem for the police.
‘No.’ He ran his hands through Sadie Winner’s scalp hair. ‘No, she was hit over the head. A single blow, feels like from behind... We’ll see.’ He took a scalpel and made an incision round the perimeter of the skull above the level of the ears and then peeled the scalp back and revealed the skull. ‘Yes...fractured skull...bleeding was internal...subdural haematoma...a single blow with a blunt object...caused a starlike fracturing. She also had a very thin skull. A person with a thicker skull might have survived this blow, but in her case, death would have been instantaneous.’
* * * *
Carmen Pharoah met Simon Markov, as arranged, for lunch in the town. Later they walked the walls back towards Friargate, the ancient city spreading out at either side beneath them. They walked in silence, enjoying each other’s company, then Carmen Pharoah said, ‘If you had battered someone over the head, what would you do with the murder weapon?’
‘Get rid of it.’
‘In the first conventional place?’
‘Yes.’
‘Such as a canal, for instance?’
Markov smiled at her. ‘Yes, such as a canal, for instance?’
‘A job for the frog boys. We’ll ask Ken Menninot to authorise it. Meanwhile, to matters of greater import.’ She slid her arm into his. ‘Tonight I thought we’d eat Chinese.’
‘Can do, if you wish. In fact...’ Markov paused and halted. ‘Look.’ He indicated towards the railway station below and across the road from where they stood on the battlements. ‘Isn’t that Max Winner?’
‘It is.’
The two cops watched as Max Winner stood talking with a woman many, many years his junior. She was slender, ginger-haired, casually dressed. The woman suddenly stepped forwards and kissed him. Max Winner responded by holding her upper arms, but perfunctorily so. She was more interested in him than he was in her. Their body language said so.
* * * *
Ken Menninot, Sergeant, CID, listened to Pharoah’s feedback on the PM and her theory about the discarding of the murder weapon. He authorised a small team of divers to search the canal beneath the bridge on which Sadie Winner’s car had been located. The murder weapon revealed itself to have been a smooth rock, large enough to just fit in one hand, inside a woollen hiking sock. When swung, it would have made quite an impact, especially on an unusually thin skull.
* * * *
Pharoah and Markov drove out to Winner’s house.
‘I thought I’d see you again,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Only not quite so soon.’ He stood at the entrance of his house. As he and the cops stood there, a woman bundled out of the house, elbowing him aside, carrying a cardboard box with her.
The woman stopped at the sight of Pharoah and Markov, both in plain clothes but both with the unmistakable stamp of police officers about them. She turned and yelled ‘Murderer!’ at Winner. Then she stamped off to a small car and drove angrily away.
‘My sister-in-law,’ Winner explained apologetically. ‘Won’t you come in? Please.’
On this occasion Winner received Pharoah and Markov in the sitting room of his house. The cops, reading the room, noted he had a taste for antiques - furniture, china, paintings. ‘The distress you just witnessed,’ he said, settling into a chair, ‘is due in part, I believe, to the fact that my ex-wife’s sister believed that her money troubles would have been solved upon our divorce. My ex-wife’s sister and her husband live a very hand-to-mouth existence. The car she had... I’ve never seen it before. She must have borrowed it. She certainly doesn’t own one.’
‘I see.’
‘Tell you the truth, your arrival rescued me. But she’ll be back, collecting Sadie’s possessions and anything of mine I may be foolish enough to leave behind. In fact, she didn’t make an attempt to remove all Sadie’s possessions, gives her the excuse to come back.’
‘You could leave them at the door.’
‘I could, couldn’t I? That hadn’t occurred to me.’ Winner smiled. ‘It is my house, after all, isn’t it?’
‘Mr Winner,’ Markov said, ‘that young woman that you were speaking to outside the railway station this lunchtime —
‘You saw us?’
‘We were up on the walls.’
‘I see. Yes...that was Julia. Another bane of my life. I don’t really have a great deal of success with women - my ex... now Julia. Julia really was the start of all my troubles ten years ago now.’
‘Ten years?’
‘Julia’s older than she looks. She’s in her late twenties.’
‘Really?’
‘She acts and dresses like a teenager. I confess I worry about her, psychologically speaking. She’s just not with us, it’s as if she’s on another planet.’
‘How did you meet?’
‘She was an employee at the factory. A low-skilled job...a secretarial job, but she seemed to latch herself onto me...speak to me on any pretext...sending notes to my wife. Telling Sadie that she, Julia, and I were to be married. Really set the cat among the pigeons. My ex - my wife - call her my ex, but we were not divorced. I’ll have to start calling her my late wife now - anyway, Sadie. Once that seed of suspicion grew, it grew to something mammoth. A bit like a mustard tree. A small seed grows into a huge tree. So we drifted apart and I had my affairs, but definitely not with little Miss Julia Patton, though she continued to shadow me.’
‘Do you know where she lives?’
‘Tang Hall Estate, Two Cheviot Avenue. Seen the address often enough on the letters she has sent to me. Sorry, you are...?’
‘DCs Pharoah and Markov. In case you should want to contact us - you may need a contact person - we’re working the six a.m. until two p.m. shift this week.’
‘Overtime, then.’ Winner glanced at the grandfather clock. It was two-thirty p.m.
‘Par for the course,’ Markov said, smiling.
* * * *
Pharoah and Markov drove back to York, through the city centre and out to Tang Hall: low-rise, unkempt gardens, houses with boarded-up windows, motorcycles fastened to lamp posts with massive chains and padlocks, cars in driveways being ‘done up’ prior to resale for a modest profit. Number 2 Cheviot Avenue fitted into the surrounding area, an overgrown garden and a pile of uncollected domestic refuse by the side door. The cops knocked at the front door. The sound of the knocker echoed within.
‘I don’t know why we are here,’ said Pharoah.
‘Because we are,’ Markov replied. ‘We’re here to find what we shall find, if anything.’
The door was flung open and a woman with ginger hair and glazed blue eyes stood on the threshold. ‘Yes?’
‘Julia Patton?’
‘Aye.’ At close hand she did indeed look
older than she did from a distance.
‘Police.’
An intake of breath. ‘Yes?’
‘We understand that you know Mr Winner? Mr Max Winner?’
‘Aye.’ She smiled. The name clearly triggered something and she said, ‘Winner by name, winner by nature.’
“You know him well?’
‘Very. Very well indeed.’
‘Where were you last night?’
The Best British Mysteries 3 - [Anthology] Page 34