A Fatal Obsession

by Faith Martin

  Fortunately, Mr Braine had sustained only scrapes and bruises after being knocked off his bicycle, falling to the side of the road rather than in the middle of it – which could have resulted in real tragedy had he gone under the wheels of a passing car or lorry. Unfortunately, though, he hadn’t been able to give any sort of description of his assailant, since, after he’d picked himself up and brushed himself down, the perpetrator had already grabbed the satchels of drugs and small amount of cash he’d been carrying, and made off.

  That task had fallen to the main witness in the case, listed in the file as one Mr Malcolm Finch, with an address in Cowley.

  Trudy, with a frown of disapproval, noted that it had taken Mr Finch nearly a week to come forward with this information. He’d given the excuse that, at the time of the incident, he’d been in a hurry to make an important appointment, which had been scheduled for only ten minutes later. He’d gone on to say that, since the robbery victim was clearly all right, he’d not stuck around with the rest of the crowd to watch the aftermath of the drama. It was only later that his conscience started to bother him, leading him to come into the police station five days after the robbery and make a statement.

  With a sigh over the vagaries of the general public, Trudy read his belated testimony with some interest. He stated that he’d been walking down Broad Street during his lunch hour in order to buy stockings for his wife. He had seen the incident, and thought he’d recognised the assailant as being a man he knew only vaguely, when he’d done some gardening work for a neighbour.

  As she read these words – and for a giddying moment – Trudy felt as if the office was abruptly closing in around her. Gardening work?

  Feverishly, her eyes scanned the neatly typed incident report, ignoring the police jargon and hunting out the name…

  And there it was.

  Jonathan McGillicuddy.

  The man who had robbed Mr Braine of his money and drug prescriptions had been Jonathan McGillicuddy!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Anthony Deering wondered if taking Darjeeling out so soon after coming out of hospital had been a good idea after all. Even though he’d kept his mount to a steady walk, he knew the old boy was longing to go for a good run and who could blame him? But every movement felt slightly uncomfortable, so he kept his horse under tight control, denying him his urge to canter.

  The horse showed his displeasure at this by tossing his handsome head and prancing about impatiently, making Anthony tighten the reins and curse him fondly from time to time.

  Still, for all the discomfort – and even with the old boy playing up – it was nice to get out of the house. The weather had turned mild, if still damp, and the fresh air was certainly doing him good. What’s more, Sergeant O’Grady hadn’t objected when he’d said he wanted to go out, leaving Anthony with the distinct impression that the police had their eye on someone and were confident they knew where their suspect was and what he was doing.

  Which was very good news. Before, he now realised, he’d been inclined to be a shade cavalier about the whole thing. But there was nothing like a brush with death to teach a chap a lesson!

  ‘Come on, lad, settle down,’ he told his horse as they approached a cattle-grid, set between two old gateposts, designed to keep his father’s sheep from straying into a field of newly sown winter barley. He knew Darjeeling hated crossing cattle-grids, and he couldn’t say he blamed him. Horses hooves and tightly spaced parallel iron bars didn’t make for a good match. ‘Want to jump it, lad?’ he muttered.

  Then he considered what such a manoeuvre would do to his bruised ribs and sighed. ‘Sorry, lad, not this time. You’ll just have to pick your way across.’

  Which, as it turned out, was a pity. For, had Anthony Deering but known it, he would have been far better off taking the grid at a jump and then enduring the painful jolt of the landing on the other side. Because, as Darjeeling snorted and unhappily began to negotiate the grid, his right forehoof hit a near-invisible strand of fishing wire that had been stretched between the two gateposts, low down near the ground. This then released a short metal pin that had been attached to a small black box, containing a standard bird-scarer, which subsequently let out a large, shot-gun-loud bang.

  Darjeeling, already unnerved by the cattle-grid, let out a whinny of terror, launched himself into the air, and bolted madly. Leaving behind his master, who’d fallen heavily across the metal grid and was now screaming in agony.

  ‘Don’t you see? It has to be murder!’

  Trudy was pacing up and down in front of the coroner’s desk, her face flushed with excitement and glowing with pride. Her WPC’s cap lay tossed carelessly on the desk in front of him as she continued to pace, reading rapidly from her notebook.

  ‘It says right here,’ she continued, talking so fast that Clement could barely follow her, ‘that when Mr McGillicuddy was brought in and put in a lineup, the witness, Malcolm Finch, said he was almost certain it was him he’d seen rob Jack Braine. Though he didn’t really want to testify to it. But then, witnesses often don’t.’ Trudy put in the aside with such a world-weary sigh that it sent the coroner’s lips twitching in amusement.

  ‘And from this you deduce that Gisela was murdered?’ he asked mildly.

  ‘Yes, and I’ll tell you why!’ Trudy insisted, scrabbling through her notes. ‘You’re a medical man. Half the names of the drugs that were stolen I can’t even pronounce, let alone spell. But I copied them down carefully, and then I went back to the case files from the coroner’s court and… here… See?’

  She all but slapped her notebook down, opened at the spot where she’d meticulously listed the stolen items from the Braine robbery, and pointed to one multisyllable word. Then, in the Fleet-Wright court transcripts, she put another finger on the same word.

  ‘It’s the same medication! Gisela was on this… this…’ She stuttered over the tongue-twisting chemical formula. Obligingly Clement read it out loud for her, the word flowing easily off his physician’s tongue.

  ‘Yes. It’s the exact same course of medication Gisela was on! Don’t you see?’ she demanded, glowing with excitement. ‘Jonathan stole it in order to kill her with it.’

  ‘And her mother gave him an alibi?’ Clement mused, watching her with an almost fond smile. She was so excited she was almost coming out of her skin!

  But there was no doubting the young WPC had come up with a real golden nugget of information. He just wasn’t quite sure, yet, precisely where and how it fit into the jigsaw they were trying to put together.

  ‘Of course! They were in it together. See, here…’ Again, Trudy frantically bent down and riffled through her notebook. She was standing over the desk, so close beside him that the material on the arm of her uniform actually touched his sleeve. For a moment, as she searched through her notes for the relevant information, she was close enough to smell his breath.

  And distinctly smelt alcohol.

  As a police officer, she knew the smell well. More often than not, most Saturday nights she and Rodney Broadstairs spent a vast amount of their night shift escorting unruly drunks to the cells.

  For a moment, the surprising revelation that Dr Clement Ryder was taken to drinking during the day distracted her. She hadn’t heard any rumours that the old vulture liked to drink, had she?

  But she was too excited with what she’d found out to pay much attention to that intriguing – and worrying – little snippet just now. Though she did file it away to be duly considered and mulled over later.

  ‘Here. It says that after Jonathan was brought in, and after Mr Finch made his positive identification, he was closely questioned by the sergeant in the case, who gave him his due caution and told him he was likely to be charged with robbery and assault. But when he was asked where he was at the time of the robbery, Jonathan McGillicuddy immediately said he had been gardening for Mrs Beatrice Fleet-Wright.’

  Trudy stood up in triumph. ‘But we know, by this time…’ She tapped the date of the rob
bery significantly. ‘…That Jonathan hadn’t been employed as the Fleet-Wright gardener for quite some time! And this less than a week before Gisela died, mind.’

  ‘If I remember, he left just before breaking up with Gisela.’ Clement offered thoughtfully. Which made sense. If you knew you were going to stop seeing a girl, you’d make sure you weren’t going to be hanging around, doing the family garden.

  ‘Exactly. So Beatrice must have been lying when she gave him that alibi! And just look at the date of the robbery,’ she crowed. ‘Mr Braine was robbed just three days before Gisela died! That has to be significant.’

  Trudy stared at the older man, wondering why he wasn’t looking more excited by all this. Surely, this was the breakthrough they were looking for?

  ‘All right,’ Clement admonished, ‘let’s just sit down for a minute and calmly and rationally think this through.’

  Reluctantly, Trudy forced herself to sit on the edge of her chair.

  ‘You’re saying Jonathan McGillicuddy robbed the chemist’s lad in order to get his hands on this specific batch of medication. The same medication he knew Gisela used?’ he began quietly.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And he did so in order to give her a fatal overdose of it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that Mrs Fleet-Wright had to be a party to this, either as an accessory after the fact, or as an active participant, because she provided him with a false alibi when he needed it?’ he continued patiently.

  Trudy, by now, was becoming a shade impatient with all this measured, careful talking. She knew the coroner was a very educated and clever man, but did he have to be so pedantic all the time? ‘Yes. Surely that’s obvious?’ she demanded.

  Clement Ryder smiled patiently. ‘Is it, WPC Loveday?’ he asked gently. ‘Why did Jonathan need to steal the drugs at all? Her mother had access to Gisela’s own supply whenever she wanted it,’ he pointed out with devastating logic.

  Trudy opened her mouth, and then closed it again. She thought for a second, and then said slowly, ‘Well, perhaps it was just Jonathan on his own? He’d left Gisela by then, and didn’t work in the gardens any more, so he wouldn’t have access to her room. Which meant he needed to get some of the pills for himself. He’d have known what brand of pills she took, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘All right,’ Clement conceded patiently. ‘Say that’s true. He steals the pills. How does he get her to take them? There were no marks of violence on her body, remember, and nobody saw him in the house the day she died.’

  ‘Oh, come on! He could have sneaked in easily. And Gisela would have been so glad to see him!’

  ‘So glad that she’d let him feed her pills?’

  Trudy stared at him angrily. She was beginning to feel foolish now, because she had the appalling feeling she was making a spectacle of herself. She could feel herself deflating by the second. But some inner demon wouldn’t let her give up her lovely theories without a fight!

  ‘No. But she would have taken them from her mother!’

  ‘So we’re back to Beatrice and Jonathan being in it together then? In which case, my previous question still stands. Why did he need to rob the chemist’s lad?’

  Trudy slowly slumped back in her chair. It didn’t make much sense, did it? Unless… ‘What if they only got together to conspire about things after Gisela died?’ she hazarded. Yes – that was better. ‘Let’s just say Jonathan did steal the drugs, and did somehow get Gisela to take too many. And afterwards, for some reason, Beatrice found out about it. And, again for some reason we don’t know yet, agreed to cover it all up. The scandal or something…’

  Her voice trailed off as she saw the coroner’s white eyebrows slowly beginning to rise at all the ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’ she was scattering around.

  ‘Oh, I know that’s a bit lame – but she might have wanted to avoid the scandal, mightn’t she?’ Trudy persisted, a shade plaintively. ‘They are Roman Catholics, and Dad always says the rich are different from everybody else – that they don’t think the same way we do. Or she might have been… well… rather fond of Jonathan herself.’ She put forward this second offering a shade timidly.

  It made her blush to think of a woman her mother’s age being interested in a man so much younger, but she knew such things happened.

  ‘All right, let’s go with that hypothesis for a moment,’ Clement said, pretending not to notice her sudden unease. ‘Jonathan killed Gisela and, for some reason, knew he could rely on Gisela’s mother to be his ally. Let me ask you one simple question.’

  Trudy tensed, sensing a trap. ‘Yes?’ she said uncertainly.

  ‘Why did Jonathan McGillicuddy murder Gisela?’ Clement asked simply.

  Trudy blinked. ‘Why? Well, because…because…he loved her. Or hated her. Or because she was making such a nuisance of herself – take your pick!’

  But already Clement was shaking his head. ‘No, that simply won’t do, WPC Loveday, and you know it. Men kill women out of passion or jealousy, yes. But we already know that Jonathan was the one to end their relationship. So he was hardly still in love with her. And at the time of her death, he’d been free and clear of her for several months. He had no reason to need her dead. So why go to all the trouble and risk of killing her?’

  ‘But we know Gisela was determined to win him back,’ Trudy insisted gamely. ‘We know she kept on trying to talk to him, even followed him around. And she wasn’t very stable, was she? Perhaps he was scared she might… I don’t know… do something really crazy and embarrass him. Or perhaps she’d begun to behave so oddly he feared she might present a danger to his mother – or his little girl!’

  Clement nodded. ‘Yes, that might do it,’ he finally conceded. ‘But we have no evidence that that was the case, do we? And if any of that had been true, and he had been worried about it, why didn’t he simply go to the police? Or seek legal advice? Or go to the girl’s family, and tell them something needed to be done or he’d have her committed? Don’t forget, by all accounts, Jonathan McGillicuddy was a plain, simple, law-abiding lad. Do you really think his first thought would be to commit an act of murder? Without at least trying some of those alternatives?’

  Trudy blinked.

  ‘Or that the girl’s mother, her mother, Trudy, would connive with him to murder her only daughter?’ he continued.

  ‘DI Jennings said most murders happen in the family,’ Trudy said stubbornly. But, in truth, she now felt totally confused.

  When she’d read the Braine file, she’d thought it provided the answers to all their questions. Now she didn’t know what she had uncovered. Except, perhaps, more confusion.

  For a while she simply sat in a somewhat sulky silence, annoyed the old vulture was being such a wet blanket, but slowly coming to terms with the fact that he was probably right. And going over things again, this time with less excitement and more care, one thing was becoming more and more abundantly clear.

  She simply didn’t have the brains for this job.

  Right away, Dr Ryder had seen the problems that came with this new evidence, but she hadn’t had a clue!

  ‘I’m not good enough to do this, am I?’ she finally blurted out miserably.

  ‘Nonsense! Don’t go all self-pitying on me, Constable,’ Clement snapped bracingly. ‘I’ll warrant you’ve got more brains in your little finger than most of your colleagues at that station house have in their entire bodies. And certainly more than that vain little twerp I notice admiring his good looks in the window glass every time I see him.’

  In spite of herself, Trudy laughed at this clear description of Rodney Broadstairs.

  Then she felt the smile fall away. ‘I thought I’d found the answers, though. I thought I had it all figured out. But I was wrong.’

  Clement smiled wryly. She was such a contradiction, this young woman. Bright but naive, innocent yet savvy, determined and stubborn, and yet so quick to blush. She was still so inchoate and unformed she sometimes worried him. And yet, there was no denying h
e found her a useful sounding board, helping him to order and examine his thoughts more clearly. And in spite of all the odds being against it, he felt they had the makings of a really good team.

  ‘So, tell me, what do you think you’ve learned by this episode?’ he asked, rather enjoying the role of being an educator again.

  ‘Not to jump to conclusions,’ Trudy said at once, and with some bitterness.

  ‘And in learning that, do you think you’ve probably learned more than you did in all your months of police training? What else?’

  Trudy blinked, thought about it for a moment, and then nodded. ‘To think things through logically. To ask and answer questions. To keep a clear head and question everything.’

  ‘Even more valuable lessons learned,’ he nodded approvingly. ‘And you think you’re not cut out for this job?’ he scoffed.

  ‘You’re just trying to cheer me up.’

  Clement snorted. ‘Young woman, let me assure you, I have better things to do with my valuable time than pander to your ego. So, let’s get on with the important stuff, shall we?’ He rose from his chair and slipped on his raincoat and favourite homburg hat.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Trudy asked blankly, quickly gathering her accoutrements together and putting them into her leather satchel. Fixing her cap quickly on top of her head, she hastily tucked a few strands of escaped hair neatly underneath it.

  ‘To talk to Beatrice Fleet-Wright again, of course,’ Clement said, looking at her sharply. ‘Where else?’