by Faith Martin
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Beatrice Fleet-Wright didn’t look particularly surprised to see her two recent visitors returning to her home again after only a few days, but there was a close, shuttered and wary look lurking behind her polite smile as she greeted them.
She ushered them into the same lovely, lifeless room as before, but this time there was no offer of tea. Such an unthinkable lack of hospitality on her part was clearly an indication of just how nervous she truly was beneath her veneer of polite enquiry, if it could make her so forget her duties as a hostess. Either that or it was a deliberate ploy on her part to make it clear just how brief she expected this second visit to be, a not-so-subtle indication that she expected them to make themselves scarce in short order.
But Trudy rather thought it was the former.
Although she had been too young to really remember the war years, she had clear memories of the dreary years of rationing that had followed, and could recall she hadn’t, for instance, even tasted her first sweet until she was twelve. Even though people had had so little to eat or drink themselves, somehow this had only served to make respecting the laws of hospitality become even more ingrained. One time, her mother had shared her last spoonful of tea with an elderly woman who had come collecting for an orphanage. And for the rest of the month, the family had had to drink something so foul (and made from dandelions) that even the family dog refused to lap it up when she’d emptied it into his bowl.
‘I’m sorry to bother you again so soon, Mrs Fleet-Wright,’ Clement Ryder began with a brief smile, cutting into Trudy’s reminiscences. ‘But when we talked to you last about Mr McGillicuddy and your dealings with him, we think perhaps you might have forgotten to mention something?’
For a second, Beatrice – looking very chic in a soft, heather-coloured twinset, with a pearly grey blouse – froze in place. Then she allowed a slightly baffled frown to appear on her face.
Her make-up, Trudy noted idly, was minimal but flawless. And just a faint scent of violets wafted in the air whenever she moved. It made it almost impossible to believe that this well-heeled, respectable, middle-aged woman could in any way be mixed up in even one murder, let alone two. Always supposing her daughter’s death hadn’t been quite so accidental as the coroner’s court had ruled.
‘Oh? I don’t think so,’ Beatrice said politely. ‘I’m sure I answered all the questions you asked me correctly.’
Clement bit back a small, appreciative smile. Yes, that was a very clever answer, he acknowledged wryly. But then, he was beginning to get the feeling that Mrs Beatrice Fleet-Wright was a very clever woman.
‘Perhaps the fault was ours,’ he conceded amiably. ‘Let me be more clear and precise. We have since learned that, around the time of your daughter’s death, you were, in fact, on at least one occasion, in close contact with Mr McGillicuddy. Is that not so?’
Even on a grey day in the darkest depths of winter, and with limited light coming in through the windows, Trudy could clearly see that the older woman had gone rather pale. She also swallowed visibly.
‘Really?’ Beatrice murmured. ‘It was so long ago… And my memories from that time were…’ Her hands fluttered helplessly. ‘I was given sedatives to take by my doctor around that time. I’m afraid my recollection might not be quite so clear. It was a traumatic time, you understand. I try not to think about it.’
Trudy blinked at this disjointed sequence of sentences. There were too many excuses, mixed up with so much rationalising. And all for nothing, since it was clear as crystal that she was lying.
‘But the occasion we’re referring to would have had reason to stand out, Mrs Fleet-Wright,’ Clement persisted, gently but ruthlessly. ‘It can’t be very often, after all, that a member of the public is asked to provide an alibi for a young man accused of daylight robbery.’
‘Day…’ For a moment, Beatrice’s face went genuinely slack, and a blank look came into her eyes. Trudy felt a cold trickle run down her spine. For, whatever it was Beatrice had expected them to accuse her of, it had certainly not been that.
Which immediately make her wonder. What had this woman thought they’d been talking about? What other contact had she had with her daughter’s former beau?
‘Oh… Oh, yes. Now I remember! That silly nonsense about Jon… Mr McGillicuddy… stealing money and… things… from a chemist, wasn’t it?’ Beatrice said with a light little laugh.
She’d said things, not drugs, Trudy noted, which was surely the most obvious thing to have said. But clearly Mrs Fleet-Wright didn’t like mentioning prescription drugs, which wasn’t perhaps so surprising. They were bound to be a sore topic for her, given her daughter’s dependence on them and the fact that they had – somehow – been responsible for her death.
She shot the coroner a quick glance to see if he’d picked up on the telltale mistake, and thought he probably had.
‘Was it such nonsense?’ Clement asked calmly.
‘Of course it was!’ Beatrice said quickly, rushing to defend him. ‘Mr McGillicuddy was a hard-working and respectable man. He’d never been in trouble with the law in his life – as I’m sure you must be in a position to know.’
Trudy nodded. There had certainly been no ‘previous’ incidents that had brought the murdered man to police attention.
‘So you had no doubts that he couldn’t possibly have been the man who robbed the chemist’s delivery boy? Even though he was identified by someone who knew him slightly?’ Clement swept on quietly.
For a moment, an extraordinary expression flitted across Beatrice’s face, but it was gone so quickly that Trudy couldn’t quite place it. She was certain, though, that there was anger in it – and perhaps fear? Or was it… regret? Sorrow? Something negative, anyway.
‘Clearly that was a mistake on the witness’s part,’ Beatrice said flatly. And at that point, she drew in a rather long breath. Clement noted, with a doctor’s detached observation, that she was in danger of hyperventilating if she carried on like this. Clearly she was in a very highly charged emotional state (with her nerves at absolute stretching point) if she was forgetting how to breathe properly.
‘Luckily for him, then, that he was able to provide such a solid alibi,’ Clement acknowledged smoothly, looking at her expectantly.
‘Yes, yes, I suppose it was,’ she agreed faintly. ‘When the police called, asking about it… The thing was… my magnolia tree had been in dire need of attention for some time. And I didn’t really trust the gardener we had hired after Jonathan… er… left us to treat it properly. So I’d asked him if he wouldn’t mind pruning it for me. Just a one-off job – and it happened to be on that day.’
Beatrice paused once more for a much-needed breath.
‘That was quite a coincidence,’ Clement said, with absolutely no inflection in his voice whatsoever.
Beatrice merely shrugged. ‘Coincidences do happen, though, don’t they, Dr Ryder?’ she challenged him mildly. ‘So, naturally, when the police contacted me and asked if I could confirm Mr McGillicuddy was working here in the garden when that poor man was being knocked off his bicycle and robbed, I had to say he was.’
‘Naturally,’ Clement said dryly. ‘And that was the last time you saw him?’
‘Yes.’
‘And your daughter died, in fact, only a few days after the robbery?’
Beatrice again swallowed convulsively and stared down at her hands. ‘Yes,’ she said faintly.
‘Mrs Fleet-Wright,’ Clement said gently. ‘Are you sure you don’t know who killed Mr McGillicuddy?’
Beatrice went white. Her head shot up. And then she stared at him levelly for quite a number of silent, tense seconds. ‘Dr Ryder,’ she eventually said calmly, ‘I can assure you I have no idea at all who killed Mr McGillicuddy.’
‘Or why?’
‘Or why,’ she repeated firmly.
‘So do you believe her?’ Trudy demanded as they walked outside and climbed once more into his Rover.
‘About w
hat? Her giving your murder victim an alibi, or not knowing who killed him?’
‘About the alibi,’ Trudy said.
‘No. I think she was lying through her teeth about the whole thing.’
‘So do I!’
‘Especially since, when she was called upon to give him his alibi, her daughter had been dead for only two days.’
‘What? No, it was just before… Oh. Oh, of course!’ Trudy breathed. She’d forgotten about the reluctant witness. Mr Braine had been robbed two days before Gisela died, but Mr Finch had only plucked up the nerve to come in and tell what he had seen five days later. By which time, Gisela had been dead for two days.
‘Would a woman still reeling from a shock like that really be thinking about her magnolia tree?’ Clement asked with a snort. ‘And, for that matter, is the middle of summer even the time to be pruning one of them?’
Trudy, who was no gardener either, had no idea. Not that it mattered. Clearly, Beatrice Fleet-Wright would have been in no fit state to even be thinking about her precious garden. Much less asking her dead daughter’s former boyfriend to attend to it. Which made the alibi she had given Jonathan McGillicuddy even more outlandishly false.
‘And yet, for all that, I’m not so sure she wasn’t telling the truth about the rest of it,’ Trudy said after a moment’s thought. ‘When she said she didn’t know who had killed Jonathan, I got the feeling she was being honest.’ Then, not wanting to be teased about ‘women’s intuition’ (which was something her male colleagues liked to deride with much male condescension), she added firmly, ‘But of course, my personal opinion is neither here nor there. It’s facts and proof that we need.’
How many times had both Sergeant O’Grady and her DI drummed that into her?
‘Yes, that always helps,’ Clement said dryly. ‘But a good detective should always listen to their inner voice too. We often pick up things, especially as we gain in experience, that can’t always be quantified in terms of specific data. Sometimes instinct is a good starting point.’
Taken rather by surprise at this unscientific observation on the part of her colleague, Trudy fell thoughtfully silent as he drove them back to the station house.
She hadn’t been inside long, however, before she was brought quickly up-to-date on Anthony Deering’s latest near-miss.
‘He’s been able to stay at home, which is good,’ Rodney Broadstairs told her, sweeping back his golden hair with one hand and reaching for his notebook with the other. ‘His GP didn’t think anything was broken, so there was no need for the poor sod to have to go back to hospital. But on top of all his other injuries, getting these latest cuts and bruises must have hurt like the devil. You wouldn’t catch me riding no horse.’
Trudy, fighting back the urge to laugh as she instantly pictured Rodney on horseback, sighed. ‘So what’s been happening?’
‘The DI has had Clive Greaves brought back in for questioning. He’s grilling him now, down in the cells. I mean, it stands to reason he must have done it, don’t it?’
‘Does it?’
‘Yeah. I told you – the horse was spooked by one of them things you hear in the fields going off bang every now and then, to keep the pigeons and crows and what-have-you off the seed. And our man Greaves is a gamekeeper, yeah? On a farming and hunting estate. Stands to reason, he’d have access to one of them, and know how to use ’em.’
Trudy frowned. ‘But almost anybody could get hold of one, couldn’t they? The hardware shops would sell them. And they can’t be that hard to use, surely?’
‘Nah, Jennings is convinced he’s our man,’ Broadstairs said comfortably. ‘One – he got burned in that fire.’ He ticked the points off on his fingers. ‘Two, he’s right here in the area. And now, three, this latest attempt to bump off Deering’s precious son and heir with a piece of farming kit? Got to be Greaves, ain’t it? Anyway, at least while he’s in here being grilled by the Sarge and the DI, the likes of me and you won’t be needed to pull any more night duty on obbo, watching his comings and goings.’
Well, at least that was true, Trudy thought, with a bright smile. She didn’t particularly relish having to spend any more freezing nights watching Mr Greaves stagger home from the pub to his lodgings.
But the next morning, when Sir Marcus Deering received what was to turn out to be his final anonymous letter, it seemed she might not have to worry about following Clive Greaves around ever again.
For the letter came first class, and after certain exhaustive inquiries at the Post Office were made, it became clear the letter had been posted at 2.30 p.m. the preceding day. At which precise time, Mr Clive Greaves had been ‘helping the police with their inquiries’ at St Aldates’ nick.
So unless he had an accomplice – or had managed to be in two places at the same time – DI Jennings had to concede he couldn’t possibly have been responsible for sending the latest letter.
On first receiving the envelope from his tremulous, sympathetic secretary, Sir Marcus had immediately phoned Jennings, who, along with Sergeant O’Grady, had motored over to his home. Now all three men were gathered in his study, and the air was palpable with dread.
‘So it’s come right down to it at last, just like I knew it always must!’ had been Sir Marcus’s first, trembling words to them on their arrival. His face looked dreadful – haggard and drawn, and he had a defeated slope to his shoulders.
With a look of fear and despair on his face, he handed the note over.
YOUR TIME IS NOW UP.
Sir Marcus slumped back into his chair, looking distraught. ‘What can I do?’ he asked desperately. ‘I must do something to save my son! Do you think if I offered to make restitution it would keep Anthony safe? Yes, I can do that, can’t I?’ he babbled eagerly. ‘I can put an advert in the paper saying I’m going to give the survivors of the fire some compensation? You’ll help me find them, right?’
Jennings half-heartedly agreed, sympathising with the man’s desperation, and said all the usual platitudes and comforting things; that he was confident it was now only a matter of time before they found out just who had murdered Jonathan McGillicuddy. But he wasn’t feeling particularly sanguine about it.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Glenda Gordon walked nervously down the street, glancing over her shoulder every so often, as if expecting to see her husband’s furious face as he came charging down the street behind her.
Of course, he did no such thing. He was once again on his allotment, where at this time of year he spent more time in his shed, drinking whisky-laden tea out of his thermos with his little coterie of old cronies, than doing any actual digging.
She marched up to St Aldates police station before she could lose her nerve and bolt back home and then glanced quickly around. Luckily, on such a drab January afternoon, everyone was too busy scuttling about on their own business to pay any attention to her and her doings.
Nervously, she stepped inside and looked around furtively. She’d never been inside a police station before. Clutching her handbag tightly in front of her, she approached the desk sergeant – who looked like a kindly sort of individual – and gave what she hoped was a confident smile.
Phil Monroe watched the approaching member of the public with professional detachment and mild curiosity. Good-quality coat, nice enough shoes, a typical housewife. Pale face, big, anxious eyes. Timid. As he greeted her, he wondered what it was she wanted to report. Lost cat, or peeping Tom?
‘Yes, madam, how can I help you?’
‘Is WPC Loveday here, please?’ Glenda asked, glancing through the open inner door to the main office, as if expecting to see a bunch of ravening wolves fighting over a deer carcass. ‘I was wondering if I could talk to her privately?’ she added anxiously. She didn’t know if any of Dickie’s former colleagues worked here, and she absolutely didn’t want her visit to the station getting back to him.
Phil nodded, lifting up the flap behind his desk and stepping out of his domain with a comforting smile. ‘Nothing easier,
madam,’ he assured her. ‘This way, please.’ After getting her name, he deposited her in an interview room, then left very smartly to fetch his favourite constable, guessing that Trudy Loveday’s witness might do a runner if she was left alone for any length of time.
She had the look of a frightened rabbit about her.
‘Hello, Mrs Gordon,’ Trudy said brightly, the moment she stepped inside.
‘I’ve been thinking about what you said before,’ Glenda Gordon began quickly, wanting to get the words out before she could change her mind. ‘I don’t know what it’s all about, mind,’ she said, somewhat confusingly, ‘but I know my Dickie and his little ways, and I know he can’t have done anything really wrong, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.’ She wanted to make that clear.
She then pulled from her handbag a rather small, padded brown envelope. ‘He always keeps his little secrets locked in his sock drawer, you see,’ she carried on. ‘Silly, really, because I know where he keeps the key. Usually he just keeps a flask of best brandy in there and some… er…’ Here she broke off abruptly. There was no need to tell this pretty young girl about the harmless, but rather smutty, pictures Dickie liked to drool over. ‘Anyway, I think this might be what you wanted,’ she said hastily, thrusting it towards a rather startled Trudy.
‘I’ll need it back, mind, when you’ve finished with it,’ Glenda rushed on. ‘I want to get it back into his sock drawer before he knows it’s gone.’
Trudy blinked as she took the envelope, her heart rate accelerating as she saw the initials the former PC had written in pencil on one side. G F-W.
The diary! It had to be. But even as she thought it, Trudy realised it couldn’t be Gisela’s missing diary that was inside. The envelope was far too light. In fact… She peeked inside and saw only a square of pale paper, encased in a plastic evidence bag.
‘How soon can I have it back?’ Glenda demanded, luckily distracting her from her first impulse, which was to snatch it out and read it. But, of course, she couldn’t do that. She had to maintain the integrity of the evidence.