Murder in the Morning: An absolutely unputdownable cozy murder mystery novel (A Melissa Craig Mystery Book 2)

by Betty Rowlands

  Sybil leapt from her chair, sending it toppling sideways on to the floor. ‘Don’t you dare touch me!’ she hissed. ‘Are you coming Melissa? I’m not staying here another minute!’

  ‘You’re dead right!’ Eddie marched to the door and yanked it open. “There’s the way out . . . piss off!’

  Looking as if there was a dead cat in her path and leaving as much space as possible between herself and Eddie, Sybil marched out of the room. Drawing aside her skirts, thought Melissa sadly. She just can’t cope with this sort of thing.

  Eddie stood holding the door-knob, her face twisted in a ferocious glare. ‘What are you waiting for?’ she snarled at Melissa.

  ‘Please, let me stay another minute or two,’ said Melissa quietly. Outside, they heard Sybil’s shoes clattering up the stone steps. ‘She’s really a very kind person but she’s led a completely sheltered life and . . . ’

  ‘Don’t bloody patronise me!’ Eddie’s stance was still aggressive but her grip on the door-knob slackened.

  ‘I’m not patronising you. Your relationships are nothing to do with me. All I’m after . . . ’

  Eddie swallowed and gnawed her lips, blinking ferociously. ‘We’ve got as much right to love as anyone.’

  ‘Of course you have; we all have. Barney Willard loved Angy too but we both know it wasn’t her body he was after and I can’t believe he would ever have hurt her. I want to help him and the only way I can do that is try and find out who really killed her. You were in love with her . . . won’t you help?’

  ‘Don’t see what I can do.’ Eddie gave the door a shove and returned to her chair. She spun it round and straddled the seat, laid her forearms along the back and sank her head on them. ‘Any one of those three could have done it, couldn’t they?’ she mumbled, her face hidden. ‘And in the end, what difference does it make? She’s dead, that’s all I can think of.’

  ‘If they charge the wrong man, it’ll make a difference to him!’ said Melissa drily.

  Eddie raised her head. ‘So what’s your theory?’

  ‘I haven’t got one, but I have a hunch that Delia Forbes may be involved in some way. Not in that way!’ she added hastily as Eddie jerked her head up like a watchdog at the sound of an intruder. ‘She joined the art class at the beginning of this term and I believe Angy was quite impressed with her talent.’

  ‘Ah, that one!’ Comprehension and relief softened the hard set of Eddie’s features. ‘Now I know who you mean. Angy never mentioned the name, or if she did, it didn’t register.’

  ‘You met her?’

  ‘No, but I saw a sketch of her.’

  ‘Ah yes, Angy’s portrait sketches.’

  ‘She’d been working on them for quite a while. They were all done from memory and she was quite pleased with them. It was only the other day that she showed them to me. She kept them all in a portfolio; the fuzz took it away.’

  ‘Yes, I know, I’ve seen it. I remember the one of you. It was very good – they all were, as far as I could tell. There was one of a young man in her class that I’d never met but . . . wait a minute!’ Melissa sat bolt upright. Signals were flashing in her brain.

  ‘What’s up?’ demanded Eddie. ‘Have you thought of something?’

  ‘Please, let me think!’ Melissa closed her eyes and gnawed her thumb as she struggled to nail down the clue that fluttered moth-like in her memory. ‘Those sketches . . . can you remember how many there were and who they were of?’

  Eddie cocked her head on one side and pursed her lips. ‘I think so. I went through them a second time with the copper who came round here.’ She straightened up and began ticking off on her fingers. ‘There was me, there was you and your holier-than-thou friend.’ Her mouth contorted in a sneer. ‘Then there was the beardo-weirdo,’ Melissa winced at this pejorative reference to Barney, ‘and the Wednesday creep. That’s five. There were eight altogether. Angy counted them as she was putting them away.’ Eddie wrinkled her brow. ‘There was that randy English teacher . . . ’

  ‘Doug Wilson! I’d totally forgotten him! Did Angy ever talk about him?’

  ‘Now and again. Earthy type, she used to say, but it was all talk with him and he never gave her any trouble that she told me about.’ Eddie shook her head and added wistfully, ‘I think she would have told me.’

  ‘She never went out with him?’

  ‘Don’t think so. She said he asked her once or twice but she turned him down and he soon got the message.’

  ‘That’s six. What about the other two?’

  ‘The disabled lad in her class. She took a lot of pains with him. It was because she felt so sorry for him but your Barney didn’t like it . . . huh! And the last one was of that Delia woman . . . but now I come to think of it, it wasn’t there when the police brought them round.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Melissa. The signals were flashing furiously; was this the breakthrough she was after?

  Eddie nodded, frowning. ‘I never noticed at the time. I must have been too upset.’

  ‘I saw those sketches too, after Angy was killed. All the ones you’ve mentioned were there except the one of Delia Forbes.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Angy took her portfolio of sketches to show the students at her art class on Tuesday afternoon, the day she was murdered. I know the one of Delia was there then because Sybil saw it. Sybil also heard Angy giving Delia her address so it’s reasonable to assume that she was expecting a visit from her some time. Let’s suppose Delia did come here that afternoon. Maybe Angy gave her the sketch of herself as a present?’

  ‘She wouldn’t do that!’ shouted Eddie, pounding the back of her chair with her fists. ‘She’d never part with any of her stuff . . . she wouldn’t even let me have the one of me!’ This time, grief was too much for her. Tears rolled unchecked down her face and her shoulders shook. ‘I might get hold of it when the Bill have done with it,’ she gasped between sobs. ‘It’d be something to remember her by.’

  ‘I daresay her aunt and uncle would let you have it,’ said Melissa, aware that this might be unlikely but feeling impelled to give some comfort to a fellow human being in so much distress.

  Eddie lifted her head. Her face was blotchy and her eyes swollen. ‘You think it’s important, the portrait of Delia being missing?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Maybe it was there after all and we both missed it. It was there on Tuesday, it was there on Monday when Lou Stacey came to see Angy . . . ’

  At the mention of Lou’s name, Eddie’s face darkened. ‘Angy never told me she was coming here. I got to hear about it from the police.’

  ‘But you knew about her relationship with Lou and Rick?’

  ‘Rick? You mean that brute she ran away from? Yes, of course I did.’ Eddie’s knuckles whitened as she gripped the back of her chair. ‘Angy and I had supper together on the Monday evening but she never said that girl had been here, or that Rick was coming to see her.’ Once more, the strong features threatened to disintegrate but she held them bravely in place. ‘I could have arranged to be there when he called . . . none of this would have happened if I’d been there to take care of her.’ She gave the back of her chair a despairing slap, got up and began pacing to and fro, jerkily shaking clasped hands. ‘Why the hell didn’t she tell me?’

  ‘It was obviously something she wanted to handle on her own,’ Melissa said gently. ‘In any case, weren’t you going to be away on a course or something?’

  Eddie swung round and glared. ‘What do you know about that?’

  ‘Only that you couldn’t help the police very much because you’d been away for a couple of days,’ said Melissa.

  ‘The course was in Bristol and I went there straight from my office during the afternoon,’ said Eddie and there was a kind of hasty defiance in her tone. ‘I could have arranged to set off later if I’d known. She should never have had to face him by herself.’

  ‘You’re forgetting one thing,’ Melissa pointed out. ‘Rick claims that Angy was already dead when he go
t there and he’s obviously managed to convince the police that his story is true. DCI Harris says he’s been eliminated from the case.’

  ‘Ken Harris? You know him?’

  ‘Yes. Do you?’

  Eddie shrugged. ‘Our paths cross from time to time, when we have a client in common. He’s okay as coppers go.’ She picked up her empty mug and got to her feet, her self-control apparently restored. ‘Sure I can’t get you any tea? I’m going for a refill.’

  ‘No thanks.’ Melissa stood up. ‘I don’t suppose you’d let me see Angy’s flat?’ she asked.

  Eddie hesitated. ‘It’s probably a bit of a shambles. I got the woman who comes in to clean the hall and stairs to go up and wash off the floors but I haven’t been up there myself since the fuzz left. Couldn’t bring myself to.’

  ‘I’ll go up on my own if you’d rather not.’

  ‘If you think it’ll do any good.’ Eddie rummaged in a china bowl of oddments on the mantelpiece and handed Melissa a bright new key. ‘I had the lock changed after . . . it happened. The old one was worn and didn’t always shut properly. I’d been meaning to do it for days and I keep asking myself whether it was my fault her killer got in.’

  ‘Don’t blame yourself. It’s pretty certain it was someone she knew and she’d have let him – or her – in anyway.’

  It was the first time that the possibility of the murderer’s being a woman had occurred to Melissa and the realisation came as a shock. Eddie was staring at her with eyes as hard as granite but all she said was, ‘You’ll have to go in at the front door. It’s right at the top.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll only be a minute or two.’

  The interior of the house was very much like the outside. The woodwork, once painted white but now faded to a dingy cream with a grey deposit in the crevices, was chipped and scuffed and the pattern of leaves and flowers on the stair carpet had long since been reduced to a brownish blur. Doors with tarnished locks and dog-eared name cards attached with drawing-pins indicated the entrances to the individual flats.

  At the top of the final flight of stairs was a single door. Like the key which Eddie had given to Melissa, the lock was new and there were marks where the paint had been disturbed. Would it have made any difference, Melissa wondered as she turned the key, if that lock had been changed earlier? Probably not, but the possibility would haunt Eddie for a long while.

  Melissa felt a faint sensation of queasiness as she pushed open the door. It led into a tiny vestibule with doors on all three sides. The one on the left was half open, revealing a narrow kitchen, little more than a passage with a sink and draining board under a window at the far end, a cooker, refrigerator, a small table and a wooden chair on one side and on the other a laminated work-surface with cupboards and drawers below and a run of shelves above. All the fittings were shabby and well used, probably obtained through the ‘small ads’ column in the local paper. There was a row of bright enamel saucepans, an Italian coffee pot and two or three painted ceramic jars on the shelves; Melissa bent down to peek into a cupboard and saw an array of packets and tinned foods and several types of pasta in glass jars. In another cupboard were two or three bottles of Italian wine.

  The police who had occupied the flat while they made their searches had left plenty of traces of their stay. Mugs containing the congealed remains of tea and coffee stood in the sink, on the draining-board was an ashtray filled with cigarette butts and the smell of stale tobacco smoke hung in the air. The place had a seedy atmosphere totally out of keeping with Angy’s flower-like freshness.

  Ken Harris had said she was stabbed in this room. What had she been doing when the killer struck? She had been expecting a visit from Rick Lawrence; if Lou’s predictions were correct she would have changed from her working clothes into something more alluring and put on fresh make-up and perfume to receive him. Melissa wondered if the police had taken this into account and what Angy had been wearing when her body was found. It might be insignificant. She pulled a notebook from her handbag and wrote ‘query clothes’ on a fresh page.

  In their search for fingerprints, the detectives had been liberal in their use of grey aluminium powder and little or no attempt had been made to remove it. The cleaner had evidently taken her instructions literally and limited her activities to washing the blood off the floor, which was covered in a hideous, embossed vinyl. Melissa stared at it and then glanced again round the little kitchen, trying to picture Angy’s last moments.

  On the work-surface, several well-defined areas clear of the ubiquitous dust showed where items had been removed for further examination. One was large and rectangular; Melissa guessed that it was here that Angy had kept the wooden block of kitchen knives that Lou had mentioned. Iris had a similar block in her kitchen; once Melissa remembered being asked to hand her one of the knives. She recalled how she had steadied the block with one hand while pulling at the handle with the other, and how smoothly the blade had slid from its slot. Was this what the murderer had done, leaving fingerprints which were by now enlarged and recorded and locked away at the police station, waiting to be produced at the trial? Whose trial would it be? Someone who had called on Angy, found her groomed and perfumed and ready to receive a rival, and been moved to uncontrollable violence by the belief that she had been unfaithful? With a shudder, Melissa returned to the hall.

  The door facing the entrance turned out to be a bathroom. The fittings here also looked as if they had been in service for a long time – probably salvaged from a demolition site. There were traces of police activity here as well – more grey dust mingled with Angy’s musky talc. Sadly, Melissa closed the door – like the floors, washed clean of Angy’s blood – and went into the bed-sitting-room.

  It was a largish room under the roof, with a dormer window let into the sloping ceiling and a second window which, like the kitchen, overlooked the garden of the house next door. The furniture was sparse: a circular table and two chairs; a plain bookshelf crammed with books about art and artists. Under the window was an easel and a stool and beside it a battered chest of drawers. The bed was at the far end and next to it was a small cabinet on which stood a lamp and a telephone . . . the telephone through which the dying, terrified Angy had tried to summon help. The floor was bare as if a carpet had been removed, no doubt for forensic examination. In a kind of bemused horror, Melissa imagined the ugly pattern of stains that must have formed as the lifeblood flowed remorselessly away.

  On the window-sill, wearing like everything else its grey veil of powder, a white china vase held the remains of half a dozen tulips. Denuded heads on pale green drooping stems hung like mourners at a graveside over the ring of faded scarlet petals that lay on the painted wood. The recurring line of Sybil’s poem came back to Melissa’s mind, the poem about dead flowers that she had written in memory of a beautiful girl, savagely cut down. Without realising it, she spoke the words aloud: ‘And the spent petals lie, where they fall, on the ground.’

  ‘That’s very moving,’ said a voice at her elbow. Melissa spun round, almost petrified with shock, to see Eddie standing behind her.

  ‘You frightened the daylights out of me!’ she gasped. ‘I never heard you come in.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Eddie took a couple of steps forward, her eyes fixed on the dead flowers. ‘I bought her those the day before she died, so’s she’d think of me while I was away.’ She gathered the faded petals together with cupped hands, lifted a couple between her fingers and then let them fall. ‘Who wrote the poetry?’ she asked gruffly.

  ‘Oh, er, one of my students.’ It would have been tactless to reveal that Sybil was the author.

  Eddie nodded abstractedly. ‘I had to come sooner or later and I thought it’d be easier with someone else here.’ She stared about her, grimacing. ‘What a pigsty they made of it! You should have seen the way Angy kept it . . . like a new pin. I used to tease her about being so house-proud and she’d tell me how her Aunt Rosina brought her up to do everything just so.’

  Teaching her
all the domestic arts, Melissa reflected, in the hope that she’d one day end up a housewife and mother in the true Italian tradition. Eddie would have to be pretty discreet about her relationship with Angy if she wanted to persuade Aunt Rosina to hand over that sketch as a keepsake.

  Eddie’s gaze ran on round the room, taking in, as if seeing them for the first time, the stool and easel, the framed reproduction Leonardo drawings on the walls, the low divan bed. The Florentine lace cover was rumpled and she walked over and bent down to straighten it. ‘I can see the copper on night duty made himself comfortable,’ she muttered resentfully.

  ‘I’d better be going,’ said Melissa. She felt awkward at intruding on private grief. ‘Here’s the key. Thank you so much for letting me in and everything.’

  ‘Don’t suppose it’s been much help.’

  ‘You never know.’

  A glint of sardonic humour appeared unexpectedly in Eddie’s eyes. ‘Tell your friend I’m sorry I offended her sensibilities!’

  Melissa grinned back at her. ‘Thanks. I will!’

  Seventeen

  Sybil’s expression when she opened the door in response to Melissa’s ring was a blend of dignity and embarrassment. ‘So you managed to escape unscathed!’ she commented as she led the way up to her sitting-room.

  Behind her back, Melissa smiled at this shot at appearing worldly-wise. It struck her as comical, so soon after the expressions of revulsion and outrage on coming face to face for the first time with sexual deviance.

  ‘It occurred to me,’ Sybil continued as she waved Melissa to a chair, ‘that . . . that person might have had a motive for killing Angy.’ She herself sat on the couch and settled her skirts primly around her legs in what struck Melissa, in a flash of impish humour, as a symbolic gesture of respectability and self-protection.

  ‘You mean Eddie?’ she responded in surprise. ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’