The Night She Died

by Dorothy Simpson

  ‘Later, man, later.’ Thanet almost pushed Bentley out of the office in his impatience to be gone. ‘If we don’t hurry, we’ll miss him.’

  Outside the building Bentley automatically turned towards the car park. Thanet grabbed his sleeve. ‘It’ll be quicker to walk. Too much traffic.’

  Bentley said nothing, merely swung after Thanet who was setting off at a half-run in the direction of the High Street. The pavements were filling up rapidly with people on their way home from work and already the traffic in the High Street was at a standstill.

  By the time they reached Parrish’s office it was almost half past five and Thanet was steeling himself for disappointment. If Parrish wasn’t there …

  But he was. Just. Thanet and Bentley reached him as he turned away from locking the door.

  ‘Could we have a word, do you think, Mr Parrish?’

  Parrish turned. ‘Oh, for God’s sake! This is a bit much. I was just on my way home.’

  ‘Could we go back inside for a few minutes, sir?’

  Parrish hesitated, frowning. ‘Won’t tomorrow do?’

  ‘I’m sorry. There’s just a small point to clear up. It shouldn’t take too long.’

  With an ill grace Parrish turned back to the door, set his elegant black executive briefcase down with a thump and fished the keys out of his pocket. He unlocked the door, pushed it open and stalked across the reception area to his own room. Thanet, who had been afraid that Parrish might have stayed in the outer office for the interview, followed him with satisfaction. Parrish’s office suited his purpose marginally better.

  Parrish put his briefcase on the desk, turned and, folding his arms, half-sat on the front edge of his desk facing them. ‘Well, Inspector?’

  ‘Could we sit down, Mr Parrish?’ Thanet asked. He wasn’t going to let Parrish take charge of this session.

  Parrish gestured towards two chairs and sat down behind his desk. As if to underline the proposed brevity of the meeting, however, he kept his coat on.

  Thanet picked up one of the wooden armchairs which stood against the wall and set it down in front of his desk, facing Parrish squarely. Bentley sat down a little distance away and took out his notebook. Parrish opened his mouth to speak, but Thanet quickly took the initiative.

  ‘It’s simply a matter of checking certain facts, Mr Parrish.’

  ‘What facts?’ Parrish made a show of pretending to relax, sat back in his chair with his hands thrust casually into his pockets. Thanet was sorry about the hands. They were always a give-away. He would be willing to bet that they were tightly clenched, knuckles white.

  ‘Such facts as the precise time at which you left Mrs Penge on the evening Julie Holmes died.’

  The muscles around Parrish’s jaw tightened. ‘At half past nine. I told you.’

  ‘Yes, you did, didn’t you. The second time we interviewed you. The first time you told us you’d stayed at home all evening.’

  ‘I explained that. I was trying to protect the lady.’

  Thanet shrugged. ‘For whatever reason. The point is, that when someone has lied to us once we tend to be, how shall I put it, a little suspicious of him? And, of course, to check what he says very thoroughly. As we did with your story.’

  Parrish raised his eyebrows. ‘And?’

  ‘And we discovered that you had lied to us again.’

  Parrish shrugged. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  Despite his casual tone, however, his eyes had become wary.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you do,’ Thanet said. ‘Unfortunately for you, Mr Parrish, you happen to have been parking your car, on Tuesday evenings, in the space which custom allots to a certain local resident. And he’s been getting rather angry about it. Now last Tuesday evening, your car was again in his parking space, and as he didn’t know where to find you he kept a very close eye on it, hoping to catch you when you drove away. So close an eye, to be precise, that he went out every quarter of an hour. Your car was still parked in Jubilee Road at eight-forty-five, but when he came out just before nine he saw you driving it away. Needless to say, he was very angry to have missed you.’

  ‘Damned cheek,’ Parrish growled. ‘I’ve as much right to that parking space as he has. I’m a householder there, aren’t I? I pay good rent for that flat.’

  ‘That, as you well know, is not the point. The point is, why did you tell us you didn’t leave Mrs Penge until nine-thirty?’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Parrish said calmly. ‘You’ve only his word against mine. And you yourself admit he’s got a grudge against me. He must be laughing his head off, thinking of the jam he’s got me into, lying about the time he saw me leave.’

  ‘Oh no, Mr Parrish. Not only his word.’ Thanet paused. ‘Mrs Penge confirms that you and she parted before nine-thirty. In fact, she says she left you at twenty-five to nine.’

  Parrish looked at Thanet in disbelief for a moment, his eyes narrowed into slits. Then, ‘The bitch,’ he said. ‘The lying bitch.’

  ‘I think not, sir. As you well know, Mrs Penge has everything to lose by making this statement.’

  The barb had gone home. ‘She won’t get away with this!’

  ‘Charming,’ said Thanet. ‘Can I believe my ears? A lady to protect, I believe you said?’

  ‘No lady would behave like that. A lady would’ve stood by me.’

  ‘Stood by you in what?’ Thanet said softly.

  Parrish stared at him for a moment or two and then, astonishingly, began to laugh. ‘Oh no, Inspector, you’re not going to catch me like that. OK, so I told you a second lie. The very fact that you’re here now proves that my reason for doing so was justified. When you came here the second time and told me that my car had been seen parked in the area, I could see that I had to come clean about Phyllis. So I did. But I made a mistake. A genuine mistake. I got the time wrong. Usually, you see, we do split up about nine-thirty, but that Tuesday I was feeling a bit under the weather. Things didn’t go with their usual bounce, so I decided to call it a day earlier than usual. Then, when I thought back, after you’d gone, I realised that I’d made a mistake in time. Now, Inspector, what would you have done? You told me yourself, a few minutes ago, that when someone has been caught out in a lie once, the next time you’re even less inclined to believe him. So I thought it would be more sensible to ask Phyllis to stick to our usual time of nine-thirty, if she was questioned.’

  ‘You didn’t think of ringing me up, to tell us of your “mistakes”?’

  ‘No thank you, Inspector. So far as I knew you were off my back, and I wanted it to stay that way.’

  ‘So what, exactly, did you do, after she had left that evening?’ Please God, thought Thanet, he’ll say he stayed in the flat for a little while, got straight into his car and drove away. To be caught out a third time in one interview might just rattle him.

  Parrish narrowed his eyes, apparently in recollection. ‘Phyllis left at about twenty-five to nine. I tidied up, made sure that everything was secure and left a few minutes later – at about twenty to nine, I suppose. Then I went for a little stroll.’

  ‘In which direction?’

  Parrish shrugged. ‘I really can’t remember. Does it matter?’

  It might. Did you see anyone?’

  Parrish shook his head. ‘Not a soul, so far as I can remember.’

  ‘At a quarter to nine on a fine May evening?’ Thanet leant back casually in his chair, put his hands in his pockets.

  Parrish lifted his shoulders, spread his hands. ‘It was getting dusk. No doubt there was the odd person about.’ He gave a pseudo-charming smile. ‘It’ll be your job to find them, won’t it, Inspector?’

  It would if his ploy didn’t work, Thanet thought grimly. He took his hands out of his pockets and stood up. ‘Right, Mr Parrish. I’m sorry to have delayed you. Thanet stooped. ‘There’s something on the floor under your desk,’ he said. He straightened up, held out his hand.

  Parrish stared at the enamelled mermaid, his face set. ‘That’s
not mine, it’s Julie’s.’

  ‘It belonged to Mrs Holmes?’

  ‘Yes. Damned office cleaners. Can’t trust them to do anything properly these days. It must have been lying there all this time.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Thanet heavily. ‘Almost a week, if it was hers. You’re sure it didn’t belong to one of the other girls?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ Parrish said testily. ‘She was my personal secretary, remember. She must have dropped it one day, without realising it. She used to take dictation sitting almost where you were, in that chair. I saw her wear it.’

  ‘When, Mr Parrish?’ Thanet said softly. ‘When did you see her wear it?’

  Parrish shrugged again. ‘Does it really matter, Inspector? It’s hers, that’s all I can tell you. It’s a very distinctive thing, the sort of thing you don’t forget easily, isn’t it?’

  ‘It certainly is,’ Thanet said. ‘Which is precisely why I picked it for my purpose.’

  ‘Your purpose?’ Now, for the first time, Parrish looked rattled.

  ‘Yes. I’m afraid, Mr Parrish, that there is no way in which you could have seen Mrs Holmes wear that brooch in this office. Her husband bought it for her on the way home from work the night she died, gave it to her after supper that evening. She was wearing it when she was killed …’

  Now at last Parrish understood the trap into which he had fallen and Thanet watched with satisfaction as the confident lines of the man’s face began to blur, to disintegrate.

  As Parrish dropped his head into his hands Thanet nodded to Bentley.

  The words of the charge were music in his ears.

  18

  ‘So then what happened?’ Lineham asked eagerly.

  It was later the same evening and Lineham was sitting up in bed, looking absurdly young in blue and white striped pyjamas.

  Thanet grimaced. ‘Oh, it was rather disgusting really. He broke down, grovelled. It hadn’t been his fault, he hadn’t intended to kill her and so on and so on. Says he went there on impulse. Since Julie appeared on the scene he’d been getting more and more tired of Phyllis Penge. Julie was a much more attractive proposition and the resistance she was putting up to his advances had merely served to whet his appetite. I think he genuinely believes himself irresistible and thought Julie’s apparent rejection of him was a token resistance, put up for the sake of form. He was also convinced that if only he could get her alone, away from the office, he’d win her over. The trouble was that she refused all his invitations to lunch, drinks and so on and he was getting more and more desperate. The more she held off, the more he wanted her.

  ‘The night she died he’d found Phyllis Penge less interesting than ever and he decided to cut their time together short. He says that when she’d gone and he’d tidied up he looked at his watch, found that it was only twenty to nine and remembered that Julie’s husband always went to night school on Tuesdays. Personally I think he’d been building up to this for weeks. He was well aware that Julie lived only a few minutes away from his little love nest. And in view of the night school, Tuesday was the obvious day for him to try to get her on her own. On the other hand he didn’t want to lose his present mistress until Julie showed signs of being more forthcoming.

  ‘Anyway, whether the decision was made on the spur of the moment or not, he waited until he thought Phyllis was safely out of the way, then set off briskly for Julie’s house. He arrived there just a minute or two after Kendon had left – though he didn’t know that, of course. It seems highly likely that Parrish was the person Kendon glimpsed turning into Gladstone Road as he entered the wood to take the footpath to the station. And Parrish remembers seeing a man just going through the swing gate as he turned into the road.

  ‘Anyway he claims that he put up his hand to knock at the front door, but before he could do so Julie flung it open and came at him with a knife, screaming at him. Instinctively he put up his hands to defend himself, grabbed for the hand with the knife, they struggled and she was killed.’

  ‘But why attack Parrish?’

  ‘My guess is that she thought he was Kendon. Just think. The door of that house is half-glazed and Kendon and Parrish are much the same height and build. Now Kendon had been at the door just a minute or so before, trying to get Julie to let him in. Through the glass panel it might well have looked as though he’d come back for one more try, and even when the door was open Parrish would have had the light – which was fading anyway – behind him. And I think that she was in such a state by then that she was incapable of thinking rationally. I doubt if she stopped to look at him, she just launched at him.’

  ‘She’d reached the point of no return, so to speak.’

  ‘Breaking point, as Mrs Thorpe put it. Yes.’

  Lineham was silent for a while, thinking it over. Eventually, ‘You said he claims that this was what happened. Don’t you believe him?’

  ‘Oh come on, Mike. I believe the bit about Julie coming at him with a knife and so on, yes, because it is entirely consistent with everything else we know, but the rest of it … No, he’s just trying to save his skin. Can you see him being so frightened by Julie’s attack, so little in control of the struggle that he has to kill her to defend himself? Julie was small, slight. She wouldn’t have had a chance against someone his size.’

  ‘They do say that people who have gone over the edge have an abnormal strength,’ Lineham offered diffidently.

  ‘Maybe, but not to that degree. I just can’t believe it. Anyway, it’s not for us to decide, thank God. We can leave that to the powers that be. But I have a feeling that a good prosecuting counsel will make mincement of the self-defence idea. No, I think it was deliberate all right. Not premeditated, no, but I would guess that the attack was the last straw for our Jeremy, as far as Julie was concerned. I think he genuinely believes himself to be God’s gift to women and thought that Julie was just playing hard-to-get. I expect he thought that if only he had a little while alone with her she’d melt like snow in summer. I bet he set off for her house as jaunty as a peacock and what happens? She comes at him with a knife, for God’s sake! It must have been a shattering blow to his ego, his vanity. He couldn’t possibly have known, of course, that she wasn’t really seeing him at all, or why she was in that state. So I would guess that his instinctive reaction was anger. ‘The little bitch. Leading me up the garden path …’ Something like that. And of course, he had to act fast because there she was, coming for him with a knife. He didn’t have time for second thoughts. So he turned her own knife against her.’

  ‘Deliberately.’

  ‘Sure. Deliberately. Incidentally, Mike, something occurred to me. You remember those two reports we had, of a tall, dark man walking towards Gladstone Road and how we thought the witnesses must have got the times wrong?’

  ‘Of course! You mean it wasn’t one man but two. First Kendon, passing Disraeli Terrace, then Parrish passing Shaftesbury Road – which explains why the sighting further away was five minutes later.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  There was silence for a few minutes while both men thought back over the case.

  ‘Of course,’ Thanet said eventually, ‘we’re still no nearer knowing who killed Annabel Dacre.’

  ‘You’re going on with that?’

  ‘No. Oh no, not likely. After all, there’s no new evidence, is there? And Low did as thorough a job as you’d hope to find. No, I’m afraid Annabel’s murderer is safe.’

  ‘But I thought you said you were pretty well convinced that it was Mrs Pocock who killed her?’

  ‘I still am, yes. But being convinced is one thing. Proving it, as you well know, is another.’

  ‘It goes against the grain, though, to know that a murderer has gone free.’

  ‘Yes,’ Thanet agreed automatically. But he was thinking of the Pocock children and knew that they were getting on to dangerous ground. If there had been even the remotest chance of proving Edna Pocock’s guilt he would, he knew, have had to take action. As it was, he di
dn’t want to examine his own feelings too closely. If one started feeling sympathetic towards murderers there was no telling where one would end up. And there was something that had to be said. He braced himself. ‘So you see, Mike, you were right.’ The effort it had cost him to make the admission made his voice sound harsh, almost aggressive.

  Lineham looked startled, as well he might. ‘What about?’

  ‘About it being much more likely that Julie was killed because of what was happening in the present, rather than because of something that had happened in the distant past.’

  With the temperature Lineham was running Thanet wouldn’t have thought a blush would be visible, but it was. It spread slowly up Lineham’s neck, into cheeks and forehead.

  ‘My goodness,’ said his mother, coming into the room with a cup of coffee for Thanet and a jug of lemonade neatly covered with a snowy white linen napkin for her son. ‘Just look at you!’ She handed the coffee to Thanet, set the jug down on the bedside table and laid the back of her hand against Lineham’s forehead.

  ‘I’m all right, mother,’ he said irritably, with an embarrassed glance at Thanet.

  She stood back, looked at him consideringly, her head tilted to one side. ‘I could have sworn … Here,’ she took the thermometer from the little glass of disinfectant on the table beside the bed, ‘just let me …’

  Lineham waved it away. ‘Not now, mother, please. Later, when Inspector Thanet has gone.’

  Thanet could see why Lineham was finding it difficult to spread his wings.

  Mrs Lineham’s lips set in a disapproving line. ‘Very well, dear.’ She poured a glass of lemonade, thrust it into his hand. ‘Anyway, try to keep drinking now, won’t you. It’ll bring your temperature down quicker than anything.’

  Lineham took the glass without protest, waited until she had left the room, then set it down on the bedside table with a rebellious thump. He caught Thanet’s eye.

  ‘Women!’ Thanet said, and was relieved to see Lineham grin. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, draining the last of his coffee, ‘I knew you’d want to hear how it all ended.’ He set the cup down, stood up. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better be getting home.’