by Faith Martin
‘Yes,’ Trudy agreed warily, sensing a trap and then telling herself off for being so paranoid.
‘He might feel a little sorry for the girl, or he might be so jaded by now that he couldn’t care less.’ Clement waved a hand in the air to show just how moot this point was. ‘But either way, he sees an opportunity.’
Trudy again winced but said nothing. She knew it only took one rotten apple to spoil the barrel. But she still stubbornly believed that most of her fellow police officers were as straight as they came. Certainly the Sarge was, and she couldn’t see even that vain idiot Rodney Broadstairs really being on the take either.
‘He’s approaching retirement, he’s only got his pension to look forward to, and here he is,’ Clement swept on, ‘in this big, fancy house, with its wealthy occupants, and some silly little girl who doesn’t appreciate what she has, who has gone and done away with herself. So why shouldn’t he make the most of it?’ Clement leaned back in his chair, picturing the scene in his mind. ‘He walks that beat, so he knows the family – or at least enough about them to know they’re Catholic, and wealthy. And, as such, won’t be happy to have it get out that their precious daughter killed herself. So he pockets the evidence of suicide and, when the time’s right, approaches the father.’
‘The father?’ Trudy said sharply. ‘Not the mother?’
‘No, no,’ Clement said firmly. ‘The man of the house is where the power lies – and where the money is.’ He smiled grimly. ‘So, he approaches the stricken father and shows him the suicide note. And being two reasonable men of the world, they come to a civilised agreement. There’s no need for an even worse scandal to come out of an already tragic event, is there? The poor young girl merely made a mistake with her pills.’
‘And later, when PC Gordon retires, he’s able to buy his own little place and work three nights a week on double the customary salary in Mr Fleet-Wright’s haulage yard,’ Trudy added bitterly. ‘Yes. Very nice!’
‘Except Gisela didn’t write the suicide note,’ Clement said.
‘No,’ Trudy sighed. But she refused to ask him who he thought had written it – because she had no idea. Surely, though, the candidates had to be few and far between? Jonathan McGillicuddy, or a member of Gisela’s family? Or a cold-blooded and very clever killer, who Trudy – being so stupid – hadn’t yet even begun to suspect?
‘So, what do we do now?’ she asked instead.
‘Let’s go and ask the person who did write it, of course,’ Clement said.
Trudy’s lips thinned. She known it all along! She’d just known the old vulture would know. ‘And who would that be?’
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Mavis McGillicuddy suddenly remembered where she’d seen the woman before. The woman who’d kept coming up to her gate just after her boy had been taken from her, but couldn’t work up the courage to come to the door.
She was sitting at the kitchen table, darning Marie’s school socks, when the memory simply popped into her head. One day, years ago now, when the sun had been shining brightly – the woman and Jonathan in the garden shed out in their tiny back garden, earnestly discussing something.
Clearly, she’d been one of Jonathan’s clients or had been asking him for gardening advice. Such a simple, irrelevant thing, but her subconscious mind must have been working at it all this time, trying to place her.
When it didn’t really matter at all.
Mavis sighed and stuck the needle rhythmically into the white sock. Perhaps she’d been one of Jonathan’s regular customers and had wanted to come and give her condolences, but hadn’t wanted to intrude. People could sometimes be so kind.
With that little mystery solved, Mavis continued to darn her granddaughter’s socks and pretend everything would be all right soon.
It was the only way she could get through the day.
Clive Greaves sat in his ramshackle shed in the woods on his employer’s estate, placidly plucking pigeons. He’d known the coppers would have to see sense sooner or later, so long as he kept his head down and his mouth shut.
Luckily, he still had his job.
And pheasants didn’t care what his face looked like.
Beatrice Fleet-Wright was nipping the outer, shrivelling leaves off a poinsettia plant in the conservatory when she saw them walking up the garden path. The rather fine-looking and intelligent coroner and the fresh-faced, pretty WPC.
So they were back. Again.
Her heart leapt to her throat as she wondered what they could possibly want now. She’d hoped she’d seen the last of them, but deep down inside she’d known she hadn’t. Now she walked to the front door, aware that her palms were feeling moist. Nervously she wiped them on her grey worsted skirt as she opened the door to their polite knock.
She smiled, feeling as if her face might crack as she led them back to the front room. This time she remembered to ask if they wanted tea, but this time they both declined.
‘Mrs Fleet-Wright,’ Clement began, reaching into his inner coat pocket and withdrawing a piece of lavender-coloured paper ensconced in a plastic bag.
Her eyes went to it, and her mouth went totally dry. She recognised it at once, of course. But how… How could that be?
‘This is a suicide note, signed by Gisela, which was, until recently, in the possession of PC Gordon. He was the first police officer on the scene after your daughter died,’ Clement explained, slowly and clearly. ‘We believe he took it from your daughter’s bedroom and used it to blackmail your husband into giving him a large sum of money, and thereafter has continued to extort money from your husband, on a regular basis, in the form of a so-called “salary”. But you were aware of all this.’
He made it a statement rather than a question, leaving her no room to deny it.
After a moment’s frantic thought, Beatrice realised it would be pointless to do so. Instead, she stared down at her hands and said simply, ‘Yes.’
Her mind was racing. How much did they truly know? And how much could she still keep from them?
‘You knew your daughter had committed suicide right from the start, in fact,’ he continued calmly.
Trudy, sitting, listening, marvelling, felt her heart thumping loudly. She also felt slightly sick. Something momentous was going to happen, she just knew it – could almost feel and taste it. The culmination of all their hard work and investigation was about to pay off. She felt almost afraid to breathe.
‘Yes,’ Beatrice responded to his question, her tone flat and almost uninterested.
‘And your husband persuaded you to stand up in the coroner’s court and lie about that day.’
‘I thought I should do that.’
‘To say you might have accidentally been responsible for your daughter taking more pills – or that, between the two of you, and through an unfortunate lack of communication, circumstances contrived to ensure that your daughter consumed a fatal dose of her medication.’
‘It’s what happened, after all.’
‘But you knew it wasn’t true?’
‘Who can say what’s really true?’
‘Would you care to tell us what really happened that day?’ Clement, demanded purposefully.
Beatrice blinked and took a long, slow, breath. If she was careful, if she was very careful indeed, perhaps she could end all this here and now. As long as this insistent, frightening man thought he’d got to the truth of the matter, surely he’d leave them all alone? All she had to do was keep her head, and not let slip anything they didn’t already know. And, of course, keep the deep, dark, ugly truth firmly buried.
‘Most of what I said was true,’ she insisted, her voice little more than a whisper. ‘I remember it was a lovely summer’s day – the school holidays had just started, so both of the children were at home. I’d been due to go to a charity meeting, but at the last minute I changed my mind. I just didn’t feel like it. Gisela had been acting really oddly all day – even more tense and wound up than usual. So I decided to stay at home.’ She
paused and stared down at her hands in her lap. ‘About three o’clock I went up to her room to check on her. At first I thought she was sleeping. And then I saw… I saw her pill bottles were all opened and some were scattered around… I went to the bed and shook her, but even as I did it, I knew… She was so still. So pale. So… somewhere else. I sat beside her. She wasn’t breathing… I just knew it was all too late.’
Trudy felt herself swallow hard.
‘My poor, lovely, ill daughter…’ Beatrice cried. ‘And then I saw it.’ She nodded at the lavender piece of paper, still held lightly in Clement’s hand. ‘I read it and couldn’t… I just couldn’t… I ran downstairs and telephoned my husband. He told me to call our doctor. And when he came, he called in the police.’
‘Did he see the note?’ Trudy spoke for the first time.
And, for the first time, Beatrice looked a little disconcerted. Her mind raced. What should she answer? Was it a trick? What would they most readily believe? ‘I’m not sure,’ she said eventually, hedging her bets. ‘If he did, he never said anything to me.’
Clement smiled grimly. Well done, WPC Loveday, he thought. First blood to you.
‘Anyway, the policeman came,’ Beatrice continued quickly. ‘I was… in a daze. At some point, they came and took my lovely Gisela away. And then my husband was talking to me about… the neighbours. Our priest. The scandal. And of course, once it all sank in, I agreed with him totally,’ Beatrice rushed on. The quicker she could get the story out, the sooner they’d leave. ‘We couldn’t have it said that Gisela killed herself. It was a mortal sin. The church wouldn’t have allowed us to b… bury her…’
For a moment it looked as if the woman was finally going to break down and cry at last, but she caught herself in time. Her shoulders stiffened, and her back straightened. She stared sightlessly out of the window and gave a small, tremulous smile.
‘So I agreed to say… what I did,’ she finished.
‘Even though it meant you would be taking the blame for something you didn’t do?’ Trudy said softly. ‘In open court. Knowing everyone would blame you for all but killing your own daughter?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you must have known you’d be reviled. Or pitied?’ Trudy said. For a woman such as this, who put respectability before all else, that was such a massive sacrifice. Trudy couldn’t help but admire her for it.
Beatrice shrugged fatalistically. ‘Better that than having them talking about Gisela as if she was… My daughter was ill, don’t you see?’ she said, with sudden ferocity. ‘It wasn’t as if she could help herself… Her mind was… I had to protect her! I was her mother!’
Clement nodded. ‘Yes, I understand that.’
Beatrice turned to him eagerly. ‘Then you do see?’ she cried.
‘Oh, yes, I think I do,’ Clement said. ‘You needed to protect your daughter from herself.’
‘Exactly!’
‘Because she wasn’t responsible for her actions.’
‘Yes! You and I, we’re normal. Our brains are normal, we think rationally.’ Beatrice pleaded her cause passionately, leaning forward a little on her chair now, her eyes fixed with burning intensity on Clement Ryder. ‘We have checks and measures, we have a good, working conscience. We think with a clear head and see things as they really are,’ she swept on passionately. ‘But Gisela wasn’t like that. She was ill! You’re a medical man – oh, you must understand?’
Clement nodded. ‘And that’s why you did what you did, after finding her dead.’
‘Yes, I… what do you mean?’ Beatrice asked sharply. ‘I didn’t do anything after I found her dead. I told you. I just sat beside her and wept.’
‘Oh, no, Mrs Fleet-Wright,’ Clement said, his voice becoming a shade harder now. ‘You may well have sat beside her and wept. But that was only the beginning. Because of what you saw in your daughter’s bedroom that day – when you found her dead and saw what she’d done – you had a lot of covering up to do, didn’t you?’
Both Beatrice and Trudy were now staring at the coroner intently. And because they were, neither one of them noticed the door to the parlour very gently ease open. Only Clement saw it, and was momentarily thrown.
Then, when the door remained simply ajar, Clement decided to carry on. But even as he spoke, he was alert, his quick brain weighing and assessing all the possibilities.
‘I think it’s time you told us the truth now, Mrs Fleet-Wright,’ he said firmly. And perhaps a shade more loudly than before, ‘And let’s start with this, shall we?’ He gave the piece of lavender paper a little shake. ‘Because you wrote this, didn’t you? The handwriting expert who confirmed it was a forgery said it was a very good effort. In fact, he even went so far as to say that Gisela’s writing and that of the forger had a lot of naturally occurring similarities. As might be expected, if the daughter had been taught to write by her mother.’
Beatrice gazed at him helplessly. After a long, fraught moment, Trudy saw the older woman’s shoulders slump in defeat.
‘Yes, I wrote it,’ Beatrice said.
‘Why?’
For a moment, it seemed that hope flared briefly in her eyes, and Trudy could almost see her brain whirring. Could she think up a lie? Could she still somehow salvage something from the wreckage?
But Beatrice could clearly see from the expression in Clement Ryder’s eyes, as could Trudy, that it would be pointless.
‘You already know, don’t you?’ Beatrice whispered, all hope now clearly lost.
‘I can guess,’ Clement corrected her. ‘She wanted him hanged, didn’t she?’ he said simply. ‘And you couldn’t let that happen.’
Trudy felt her jaw drop.
What? Who? What…?
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Rex had begun creeping down the stairs the moment he’d heard his mother’s voice in the hall, alerted to the fact that she was clearly agitated by the excessively polite tone of her voice. By the time he’d reached the front room, he could guess who the visitors were. The same pair as before – the nosy coroner and his pretty WPC sidekick.
Having them in the house again made him smile.
Once in the hall, and by placing his ear carefully against the door to the parlour, he could catch about half of what was being said. But as the conversation became progressively more and more interesting and exciting, he’d become frustrated at missing key bits of it and so had risked opening the door a fraction.
Rex was glad, for now he could fully appreciate how the wily, silver-haired coroner was grilling his mother. He found it impressive the way he wasn’t letting her get away with her usual tricks. Not many men managed to get the better of his mother – certainly not his father, that was for sure. In fact, Rex was fully confident that his dear Pater understood very little of what went on under his own roof.
Now, as he heard the last chilling accusation, he felt his breath catch in his chest. Although he wanted to burst in and tell the old man to keep his filthy opinions about Gisela to himself, another part of him couldn’t help but feel elated, and a wide smile stretched across his face. At last! After all the lies, and the long, dreary, tedious years without his sister, things were livening up again. All the pretence was about to come tumbling down around everyone’s ears, and the consequences were going to be glorious!
Oh, if only Gisela were here to share the fun.
He clamped his hand over his mouth to prevent the chuckles of glee bubbling up inside him and listened with ever more intensity.
Just how would his dearest mama react to that latest cannon shot across her bows?
Inside the parlour, everything had gone preternaturally quiet.
Beatrice opened her mouth, then closed it again, like a landed fish. Trudy felt pretty sure she was doing the same thing, and then wondered, with a lance of horror and despair, if Clement Ryder was drunk.
It was the only thing she could think of that might account for his last outlandish statement.
‘I don’t… I don’t…’ Be
atrice stuttered helplessly.
Clement, seeing Trudy’s wide-eyed look, shot her a brief, hard glare that told her plainly to sit still and shut up.
Sitting still, and shutting up, Trudy glared back at him.
‘Come on, Mrs Fleet-Wright, we’re not stupid, you know,’ he chided her impatiently. ‘And I have to tell you now that WPC Loveday and myself haven’t been investigating Jonathan McGillicuddy’s murder, as such, as we may have led you to believe earlier. In fact, we have been re-examining your daughter’s case. And in the course of our investigations, we’ve uncovered many illuminating facts that, had they seen the light of day in the original coroner’s court proceedings, would have resulted in a very different verdict being handed down.’
Beatrice had now gone so pale she had begun to look positively ethereal.
‘So, let’s start again, shall we, and this time without any lies?’ Clement suggested briskly, his eyes flitting briefly to the still-open door. Perhaps it had just clicked open and come ajar in a draught? Or were inquisitive ears listening closely?
‘When you found your daughter that afternoon, it was clear she’d taken her own life. She’d left plenty of evidence to that effect, hadn’t she? In fact, far too much?’ Clement began firmly and confidently. ‘Let me see – we know she must have left certain pill bottles somewhere easily found. Pill bottles that shouldn’t have been there?’
Trudy blinked. The stolen pills? But…
‘And then there was her diary. We know she kept one. Now that, I’m sure, would have made for some very interesting reading, wouldn’t it?’ he swept on.
Slowly, Beatrice lowered her face into her cupped hands and moaned softly.