‘Did you have much contact with Mrs Holmes?’ Thanet asked.
‘No. I saw her twice, once when she brought the picture in for authentication – it was one of Dacre’s best, by the way. The Cricket Match.’
‘Yes, I’ve seen it.’
‘And then of course I saw her briefly at the Private View. With her husband. The place was very crowded and I soon lost sight of them.’
‘You didn’t notice anything unusual, out of the way, that evening?’
‘No, I was terribly busy talking to people. I tried to get around everybody, but it was such a crush. There really was a gratifying amount of interest in this exhibition. So often one feels like a voice crying in the wilderness …’
‘I assume you have a list, of the people who were invited to the Private View?’
‘Yes. In my office, at the College. No, wait a minute, I think my rough copy might still be in my briefcase. Would you like to see it?’
‘I’d like to borrow it, if I may.’
Johnson seemed rather taken aback. ‘Oh. Oh dear, I do hope there won’t be any … but still, I suppose we must try to … very well. I’ll go and see.’
He returned a few moments later, list in hand. ‘I brought a catalogue, too, Inspector, in case you might find it useful.’
‘Very kind of you. Thank you.’ He took the proffered papers, glanced at them, then stowed them carefully away in his inside breast pocket. ‘There’s just one other point, Mr Johnson. Someone showed me one of the catalogues the other day, and the biographical notes on the back mention Annabel Dacre’s “tragic death”. What exactly does that mean? What did she die of?’
They were walking towards the door and now Johnson stopped dead. ‘Dear oh dear, Inspector. You mean you really don’t know?’
‘Know what?’ Thanet asked – and thought, later, that he should have foreseen, by the glint of amused malice in the man’s eyes, what the answer was going to be.
‘That Annabel Dacre was murdered. And what is more, Inspector, her murderer was never found.’
9
There had to be a connection between the two murders. Thanet told himself as he waited impatiently for the file on Annabel Dacre to be unearthed and brought to him. There just had to be. The link was too obvious for it to be otherwise. Somehow the events which led up to Julie’s death had been triggered off at that Private View. But how?
Lineham had left a message saying that he had gone out to join the others in the second round of house-to-house enquiries. No witness had yet come forward in response to the radio and newspaper appeals put out in an attempt to confirm Kendon’s story. Nor had there yet been any success in tracing the whereabouts of Horrocks, the salesman. So far they had not appealed for him by name. Thanet was always reluctant to advertise the names of witnesses except in cases of extreme urgency. The public always seemed ready to jump to unpleasant conclusions and it was all too easy for innocent people to suffer from such publicity. Besides, Horrocks was due back from his trip some time over the weekend and could be interviewed then. And now … well, if Thanet’s hunch was correct, most of the enquiries put in train so far could be irrelevant and all three suspects in the clear.
When the file arrived he had to restrain himself from snatching it from the man who brought it.
Annabel Dacre, he learnt, had been murdered on the evening of November 18, 1960. The same date, surely on which Julie’s father had been killed? Thanet suppressed the urgue to check and read on. She had been found battered to death in her studio at the West Lodge, Champeney House, Little Sutton at 8.45 pm by Jennifer Parr, who had called the police. Julie’s mother, Thanet thought excitedly. It was established that death had occurred between 7.45 and 8.45 pm, the vicar having spoken to Miss Dacre by telephone at the former time. Thanet paused at the name; the Reverend W. Manson. He took the catalogue and invitation list from his pocket, checked. Yes, as he had thought, it was on both lists.
As he read on carefully through the first pages of the bulky file the picture of what had happened on that foggy November day twenty years ago began to emerge.
Jennifer Parr and Annabel Dacre had been close friends. At three o’clock in the afternoon of November 18, Jennifer received a telephone call informing her that her husband had been seriously injured in a road accident and had been taken to Sturrenden General Hospital. He had been driving the Parrs’ only car and as there would be no bus until half past four Jennifer had appealed to Annabel for help: could she run her into Sturrenden and look after Julie while Jennifer stayed at the hospital with her husband?
Annabel had agreed at once. She picked up Jennifer and Julie, drove them to the hospital and then took Julie home with her, having made Jennifer promise to ring her when she wanted to return home again. She would, she assured Jennifer, keep Julie for the night if necessary. She had done so on the odd occasion in the past and had installed her own old cot from the nursery at Champeney House in the corner of her studio, for this purpose.
At 7.45 pm David Parr died and shortly afterwards Jennifer began ringing Annabel. There was no reply. By ten past eight, knowing that Annabel should be at home looking after Julie, Jennifer, already in a state of shock over her husband’s death, was beginning to feel panicky. She rang for a taxi which, owing to the fog, took twenty-five minutes to do the ten-minute journey, arriving at West Lodge at 8.45. The front door stood wide open and Jennifer, more uneasy than ever, asked the taxi driver to accompany her to the studio upstairs.
She found Annabel dead on the floor of the studio, the back of her skull smashed in, and Julie huddled in a corner of the cot which had, fortunately for the child, been placed in an alcove at the far end of the studio. Curtains had been partly drawn across in front of it, presumably to screen Julie from the light and enable her to go to sleep.
The police, however, were satisfied that although the murderer had presumably been unaware of Julie’s presence, Julie would have been able to see what had happened. The theory that the child had actually witnessed the murder seemed to be confirmed by the fact that she was in a state of shock and unable to speak, a condition which lasted for several days. When she did recover she seemed to have no recollection whatsoever of what had happened.
Satisfied that Jennifer Parr had been under the eye of independent witnesses from three o’clock that afternoon until the discovery of the body and worried for the safety of the little girl, the police had advised Mrs Parr to leave the area at once. At no time, even at the inquest at which Jennifer Parr of course had to give evidence, had the fact of Julie’s presence in Annabel’s studio at the time of the murder been made public.
So. Thanet sat back and thought. Here, then, he was certain, was the source of Julie’s nightmares. The cage was the cot in which Julie had been trapped during what must have been a terrifying experience.
Say, then, that the murderer had been someone known to Julie, say that, unable to cope with the memory of what she had seen, Julie had ‘forgotten’ it completely, wiped it out of her conscious mind. And then suppose that years later she sees the murderer again, but without conscious recognition? The experience might well reactivate those suppressed memories, bring them nearer the level of consciousness in dreams, nightmares in which Julie would experience once more the terror buried deep for so long.
There was an awful lot of supposing and speculation in all this, Thanet thought. Surely, for example, Julie would not have recognised the murderer, after all these years? But it wouldn’t have been necessary, as he had already thought, for Julie actually to have recognised him. There would just have had to be something – a look, a gesture, an expression – which would activate the memories buried deep in her subconscious, causing them to work their way upwards, nearer to the surface of her mind and make their presence felt in those nightmares. Julie would have been bewildered, frightened, aware that something was disturbing her without having any idea of its real nature. Above all, she would have been off balance, vulnerable.
But what about the murde
rer? It was equally unlikely, surely, that he would have recognised, across a crowded room, a child he hadn’t seen for twenty years? Thanet frowned, considering. Unless … unless Julie looked very like her mother at the same age? Jennifer Parr had been twenty-five at the time of Annabel’s murder and Julie had been twenty-three when she died. Mother and daughter resemblances are often striking. Perhaps it had been so in this case. Holmes would probably know.
Thanet picked up the telephone and dialled Holmes’s number. No reply. Perhaps he had taken Thanet’s advice and gone back to work? Thanet rang the supermarket. This time he was in luck. After a few minutes Holmes came on the line. His response to Thanet’s question was puzzled but immediate. Julie had been the ‘spitting image’ of her mother. Holmes had seen photographs of Mrs Parr as a young woman and you would have thought they were photographs of Julie, if it hadn’t been for the difference in the clothes.
Thanet replaced the receiver with satisfaction. So far, so good. The next step would be to check which of the original suspects of Annabel’s murder had attended the Private View. It would then be a matter of narrowing down the field by an examination of their movements on the night Julie had died. With the exhibition catalogue and the Private View invitation list spread out beside him he began to skim quickly through the reports of interviews with witnesses. Details could wait until later. First, he wanted to know how far his theory held up.
It was a relatively simple matter to pick out the names of the main suspects of the Dacre case. They had all been interviewed over and over again. It was, however, somewhat disconcerting to find that there were so many – five, in all. Thanet’s excitement mounted as, one by one he checked them off on his lists and discovered that four out of the five had loaned paintings to the Exhibition and had therefore automatically received invitations to the Private View. It really was beginning to look as though he might be right. With any luck he might even be able to kill two birds with one stone and track down a double murderer!
His stomach gave a protesting rumble and he glanced at his watch. Half past one. He’d have a quick bite to eat, then settle down to study the file in detail. He frowned. For some time now he’d had a nagging feeling that there was something he’d forgotten to do. What could it be? Stiff from sitting so long in one position he flexed his back. The twinge of pain reminded him what it was. He’d had an appointment with the physiotherapist at twelve. He must ring and apolgise at once. Joan would be furious that he’d forgotten.
During lunch he brooded over what he had learnt. After that inital pang of pity and sorrow at his first sight of Julie’s dead body his attitude to her murder had been intellectual. It was a puzzle to be solved, a jigsaw to be assembled, a challenge against which he must pit his wits. Now he found that in the light of this new knowledge his feelings towards the case and above all towards Julie had changed.
To begin with, what sort of an effect would the witnessing of a brutal murder have had on a child of three? Thanet thought of Sprig, and shuddered. Would Julie have understood what she had seen? Probably not, he decided, but she must have sensed the violence in the air, have been terrified by the attack itself and by the sight of the bloody mess that had been the back of Annabel’s head, frightened out of her wits by being left alone in relatively unfamiliar surroundings with only Annabel’s body for company. She could have had to wait for anything up to an hour before her mother arrived, and to a frightened child even a minute must seem sixty seconds too long.
Small wonder, then, that Julie had unconsciously opted to ‘forget’ the whole affair, scarcely surprising that the police had deliberately suppressed any mention of her presence at the scene of the murder, and understandable that her mother had whisked her off to the anonymity of London, had given her to understand that they had never lived anywhere else and had hidden that painting away in the attic.
Mrs Parr must have thought that once those early nightmares ended – and Thanet had no doubt that they had been very similar in content to the ones Julie had recently experienced – that Julie had completely recovered from her horrific experience. But Thanet was beginning to believe that it had marked Julie for life, making her terrified of emotion and cutting her off from the prospect of ever making satisfying relationships. A part of her had, like Annabel, died that night and had never been able to come to life again. Fanciful? he asked himself. Perhaps. But he felt it explained so much about Julie that had hitherto puzzled him.
Julie hadn’t really had a chance. Too late, now, to give her one, but not too late perhaps to fight back on her behalf, to track down the person who had crippled her mind and, if Thanet were right, had finally destroyed her body too.
He headed back to his office with a new sense of determination. Lineham was waiting for him. Thanet took one look at him and said, ‘Bad morning?’
‘Very frustrating. Nothing new at all. And no whisper yet of the girl Kendon claims to have seen. There were plenty of women between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five, of course, but none who fitted the bill. We asked about women who were visiting in the area that evening too, but with no luck. The girl could live anywhere in Sturrenden, of course, and if so, we’ll just have to hope she comes forward in response to the appeals.’
‘Any news of Horrocks yet?’
‘Not so far. He’s expected home some time tomorrow, though, so we should be able to get hold of him then.’
‘Right. Well come on, sit down. There have been developments.’
Lineham listened attentively while Thanet outlined his discoveries of the morning.
‘You can read it all up for yourself later, of course,’ Thanet finished up, ‘but what do you think?’
Lineham’s pleasant face was troubled. ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit, well, far-fetched, sir?’
Thanet was as taken aback, as if a pet mouse had bitten him and said sharply, ‘Far-fetched? What do you mean, far-fetched?’
Lineham flushed and said defensively, ‘You did tell me yesterday to say what I really thought.’
The pigeons were coming home to roost with a vengeance, Thanet thought. ‘You’re quite right, of course, I did,’ he said, more gently. ‘So go on, tell me what you mean.’
‘Well, here we are with three perfectly good suspects, Holmes, Parrish and Kendon. I know we’re not getting anywhere at the moment …’
‘Dead right, we aren’t.’
‘But that’s always happening,’ Lineham went on doggedly. ‘Sooner or later, with any luck, we’ll get a break. Kendon’s witness will turn up, Horocks might come up with something new … Whereas this theory, well yes, I admit it seems possible that Julie Holmes and Annabel Dacre were murdered by the same person, but isn’t it much more likely that Julie was killed by someone who was involved with her now?’
‘Why? If the motive is powerful enough … It’s common knowledge that when someone has killed once he will find it easier the second time. Just think, man. This killer has been safe for twenty years and suddenly, bang, his security is threatened. He sees the girl who witnessed the first murder, a girl he thought never to see again, he recognises her, is pretty certain she has recognised him. Isn’t it logical that he’d try and get rid of her?’
‘But sir, with respect, there’s an awful lot of assumptions there. You’re assuming he recognised her, assuming he thought she’d recognised him and, most important of all, assuming he knew she’d witnessed the murder. How could he have known that, why should he have thought that she was any danger to him at all. From what you say, Julie’s presence in the Dacre woman’s studio was a closely guarded secret. The police kept quiet about it, Mrs Parr took her away, right after the murder, and I should think everyone thought what they were supposed to think, that she’d gone away because the double shock of her husband’s death and her friend’s murder, both on the same day, had been too much for her. I really can’t see why, even if the murderer did recognise Julie at the Private View, he should have thought she was any threat to him.’
‘All right
,’ Thanet said, ‘I admit there’s a doubt there. But it could have happened. The murderer could have found out, afterwards, quite by chance, that Julie was in the studio that night. Someone could have seen Annabel Dacre with the child, going into West Lodge, have mentioned it later, in casual conversation. She herself might even have mentioned that she was looking after Julie to the vicar, when he rang that evening to ask for news of Julie’s father. News gets around in villages, almost as if it is carried on the wind from one house to another. The murderer might not have known at the time that Julie was there, but that doesn’t mean he might not have found out later. Dammit, man, you must admit it’s possible.’
‘I can see that.’ But Lineham was clearly not convinced. Thanet looked at him in exasperation for a moment or two and then said, ‘In any case, what have we got to lose, by trying to find out? You admit yourself that we’ve come to a dead end at the moment.’
Grudgingly, Lineham agreed.
Thanet began to laugh. ‘You certainly took my advice seriously, yesterday. No, don’t apologise! All in all, I prefer it this way. Livens things up a bit.’
Lineham grinned.
‘Good,’ Thanet said briskly. He picked up his sheet of scribbled notes. ‘Now then, I think the first thing is to find out exactly where these people are living now. Unfortunately their addresses are not on this rough list of Mr Johnson’s, and I don’t suppose for a moment they’ll all still be living in Little Sutton.’
‘No.’ Lineham was clearly now giving the matter his full attention. ‘Highly unlikely, I should think. A murder in a village, the murderer never found. People would have been bound to know who the main suspects were and life couldn’t have been very comfortable for them, knowing that people were watching them, wondering if they were guilty. It’s not easy to live down a thing like that.’
‘No. So you’d better start digging. Try Johnson’s secretary first, get her to go into the College today, if necessary. If you can’t get hold of her, you’ll have to ring Johnson again. He won’t be very pleased, but it can’t be helped. I don’t really want to wait until Monday. If you can’t get hold of either of them you’ll have to use your own initiative.’
The Night She Died Page 11