‘He’d think that. Hope that.’
He nodded. She had to watch his eyes, she had learned. No good watching that face. And in his eyes there grew a deep pool of relief, that the answer had been provided and was pleasing. ‘Well yeah,’ he said, and still smiling she turned back to face forward, and face the possibility that she had been afraid to recognize.
With the evidence growing that the two robberies were linked, it was increasingly possible that Angela’s murder was linked with both. That could make it a faceless and vicious removal in the course of a crime, the prospect of which made Virginia wince. Her deity was logic, which could be exercised only if emotion and passion were involved. Logic ran out of impetus in the face of cold and callous elimination. But she was committed. She could only pray that Angela had died for a more noble reason.
‘If this Fiesta hadn’t been parked right behind Charlie’s,’ Harry was saying, but again she turned to him.
‘You did say a black Escort?’ she asked.
‘Charlie’s? Yeah, black he ordered, and black he got.’
‘Then why in heaven’s name did he spray it red and green?’
‘I told you…’
‘No. Think about it. He wanted a stupid two-colour car, for the police to have a go at. You got him a black one. Then why did he re-spray both halves? Why not simply one half, say yellow or pink or something, then he’d have a black and yellow car, or whatever?’
‘I suppose he thought…’
‘It would take only half as much work.’
‘…he’d do both halves.’
‘But it’s nonsense. Assuming he expected to get back to his place in due course, by way of that back road you spoke about, he’d re-spray the whole thing as soon as possible. Any colour he liked. So why spray both halves of the car in the first place?’
‘Maybe,’ said Harry, a little disturbed and puzzled by her intensity, ‘he just wanted it red and green.’
‘In which case, why didn’t he ask you to pick up a red Escort or a green one? Tell me that, Harry.’
‘I don’t think it matters. Let me tell you about…’
‘Matters? It’s off-beat behaviour, so of course it matters. There has to be a reason Charlie did that, and if we can find out the reason, then we might be on our way to finding the murderer.’
‘Oh sure,’ he said. ‘If you say so.’ Though what the connection could be between a two-colour car and the death of Angela Reed, who’d become involved so casually, he couldn’t see.
‘So tell me how you met Angela,’ she said, sighing at his lack of response.
‘She just happened to be there, in the little Fiesta parked right behind Charlie’s Escort. What else could I have done? People had seen that thing in me hand, and there was screamin’. Nowhere for me to go, so I went to that car, and it was blind luck the passenger door was unlocked, and I got in and scared her into driving me here.’
He was speaking in a defiant voice. The police had disbelieved, or pretended to disbelieve, his story. So now he deliberately condensed a half hour journey to one clipped statement.
‘Here, Harry?’
‘As you damn well know.’ He nodded heavily. ‘Why else did you pull in at this particular lay-by, if you didn’t know?’
‘Of course I knew. I wanted to see if it’d upset you, sitting here in the lay-by where she was killed.’
‘It isn’t that upsetting me.’
‘I know, I know. Sorry, Harry, it was a stupid trick. Let’s get out and walk, shall we? Stretch our legs, while you tell me all about it.’
He looked at her for a moment in puzzlement, then shrugged massively and opened the passenger’s door.
When she joined him he was stretching, examining the lay-by critically with his head lowered.
‘It’s changed.’
‘Has it?’ she asked. ‘Let’s stroll along to the crossroads.’
‘The bin’s gone. The litter bin.’
‘Yes. It wasn’t a litter bin, Harry, it was a road-grit bin. They’ve put it the other side of the bridge.’
‘That explains it then.’
‘There wouldn’t have been room in a litter bin, would there?’ she asked reasonably.
‘What…oh yes.’
‘That’s where her body was,’ she reminded him. ‘In the bin. It was May, so it was empty of winter grit. Let’s walk up to the road. You hadn’t finished your story.’
Chapter Four
The air was motionless, heavy with the musty smell of hay. The departing harvester had left an empty husk of silence. Harry fell into step beside her, his feet heavy and hard on the tar and pebble surface. The lane was narrow, the banks high. He noticed that she was examining the grass verge each side, but said nothing for a few moments, until she deliberately tramped through a few yards of weeds on the right-hand verge, kicking her way through the tangled mess left by the summer’s growth. A dust of seed rose round her legs, casting fawn shadings on her slacks.
‘There’d be fewer weeds in May,’ she said, ‘but at that time they would be growing fast.’
‘If it matters.’
‘Perhaps it does.’ She stopped at a five-barred gate, beyond which the stubble of the wheat stretched ahead and away, rising towards the hills. ‘You were saying? The Fiesta,’ she prompted, resting her arms on the top bar.
He leaned over it beside her, staring at nothing, his mind in the past. ‘I got in and scared hell outa her, and she drove me away. Twenty or so she’d have been. Nothing to her, thin as a shaving and five feet nothing in her socks.’
‘Socks?’ She nudged him. ‘You saw her in her socks?’
‘A figure of whatsit. In the car she was a whisp of nothin’. I showed her the gun an’ said drive, and she laughed. Couldn’t believe it, I suppose, so I stuck my face at her, and that did it…she drove. Only not as fast as I’d’ve liked, so I kind of snarled at her and offered to break her arm, and she said how’d she drive with a broken arm, and just went on drivin’, following the smell of Charlie’s burnt rubber. Cheeky, she was. She was gettin’ at me all the time. Said was that a stick-up, an’ I said it was. So she said where’s the loot then? And I hadda say my mate’d got it, and that got a good laugh, and all the time the police cars were streakin’ past with everythin’ going, and she just drove. After a bit she said I wasn’t frightenin’ her with me toy gun, so I threw it outa the window. By that time we were drivin’ outa town, but I said nothin’, because we was headin’ this way, which suited me, and she was all chatty, like we were goin’ on a picnic or somethin’. Trouble was, I never did get the hang of frightenin’ women…’
‘How was that, Harry?’
‘Dunno why. No challenge to it, you see. P’raps that was it. Try breakin’ the arm of an Irish navvy, that’s a challenge. Women…you daren’t touch ’em, they’d snap like twigs. So there’s no heart in it. She musta seen that, ’cause she said where could she drop me, and were we headin’ for my place and was I gonna ask her in for a drink? I shoulda taken time to smack her bottom, but when I’d got her to head for the lay-by…’ He jerked his head back towards the Merc. ‘By that time I wanted to be on me own.’
‘Something special about that lay-by, was there?’ she asked idly, aware that Vic Fletcher’s Metro had now quietly slipped into it and was parked behind her Mercedes.
‘It was where I used to park the cars I’d got for Charlie. Nice’n quiet there, so I could walk up to the phone box and check with him that it was all clear, before drivin’ them in.’
‘Show me this phone box, will you.’
He heaved himself upright and led her the few yards to the junction. The crossing road was wider, but still minor, and was the only direct link between the township of Porchester, itself small, and the tiny village of Harley Green, where Charlie had had his spraying shed.
‘The phone booth’s up the hill to the right there, just round the bend. Can’t see it from here. So when I dumped her in the lay-by…’
‘Dumped her?’
>
‘Alive, damn it, and yellin’ blue murder at me an’ calling me a thievin’ skunk. When I dumped her there, I told her there was a phone box less’n a quarter of a mile away, but I didn’t tell her which way. Get it? She’d gotta guess, which’d give me a bitta time to drive a roundabout route to Charlie’s. But she musta guessed right first time, ’cause I ran bang smack into a police trap, which meant she’d rung a 999 call and told ’em, and I needn’t have wasted my 10p.’
She turned from him and began to pace slowly up the hill towards the phone box. When he caught up with her she spoke quietly but intensely.
‘You haven’t mentioned that before. You gave her money?’
‘Aw hell! I’d got her out of the car and was headin’ round to the driver’s seat, an’ I said she’d better phone for a taxi and she screamed at me that she hadn’t got any money, and I tossed her a 10p piece.’
‘Her shoulder bag was on the back seat. There was money in that. But Harry — there was no tenpence piece in the pocket of her jacket when they found her.’
He lifted his shoulders like the two halves of a drawbridge, then allowed them to slump. ‘So she lost it.’
‘Have you ever seen a police search? They’d have found it. Believe me, they would, anywhere in the lay-by, the road up here, the phone box. They’d have found it.’
‘Don’t know what you’re on about,’ he grunted. ‘She must’ve phoned for a taxi.’
‘No taxi firm got a call.’
‘So she phoned somebody else…’
‘Ah yes. But who? She wouldn’t need money for a 999 call. So who would she phone, when she’d phoned the police about her car and about you and the hold-up, and they’d said: wait there? Who would she want to call, I wonder, with her tenpence?’
They walked five more steady paces. He said at last: ‘So you don’t believe me.’
She paused long enough to punch his arm. ‘I thought we’d got that clear. I believe you, Harry. The whole thing depends on you, and if I’m not going to believe you we might as well pack it in. Is that the phone box?’
The idea of painting phone booths red is so that they should stand out. This was one of the old design, cast-iron body and small glass panes, but it wasn’t standing out. It was set back against a high wall of natural stone, beyond which was clearly private property, and beyond which there was also a rampant ivy root, which had drooped its feelers over the wall and clad the booth in an almost impenetrable screen. It was unvandalized, possibly because the vandals hadn’t found it. When she went inside and lifted the handset she got the dialling tone. She fought her way out again.
‘Well endowed with graffiti,’ she commented.
‘I used to phone Charlie from here.’
‘So I see. A bit of the graffiti’s yours.’
‘Eh?’
‘Just above the phone. CB 297 it says. Was that Charlie Braine’s number?’
‘Well,’ he grumbled, tugging at his thicker ear, ‘I kinda forget things like numbers.’
She laughed, and thumped his arm again. He wished she would stop doing it. Virginia had more muscle than she was entitled to, and sharp knuckles.
She stood back, straddled her legs, and put her fists on her hips. ‘She walked up here, found this phone booth first try, called the police, then used your tenpence to phone somebody else, and didn’t wait here, as she was asked to, but walked back to the lay-by and waited there. I wonder why she would do that, Harry, go back to the lay-by? Officer Graham, who came to pick her up, didn’t see her. She wasn’t waiting here. Nor at the lay-by. Perhaps she was already dead, Harry, already tucked away in the grit container. If so, it was very quick work. There wouldn’t be time, you see. Officer Graham got a radio call and drove straight here from Porchester. Five miles, is it? Angela wasn’t anywhere to be seen, so it was reported back, and the patrol car was called in. It was two hours later they found the body.’
It sounded like a rehearsed speech. To Harry it sounded prepared, as though she’d waited only until she had all the facts demonstrated to her — and to Harry himself before throwing it at him. Because it meant that Harry was the only person who’d known where Angela Reed was! Because Harry might well have turned back, regretting that he hadn’t disposed of her at the lay-by when he had the chance, and aware that Charlie Braine could cause her car — and therefore the only connection between Harry and Angela — to disappear under a new coat of paint. And because Harry, who’d claimed he’d wasted time on a roundabout route, might well have used that time in killing her.
‘You think I done it,’ he said, nothing in his voice, nothing in his eyes.
‘I didn’t say that. I’ve already told you…’
‘As good as.’
‘You have to face the fact, Harry, that if nobody knew where she was, then all that’s left is a casual passer-by, who stopped and killed her. She wasn’t raped. Nothing like that. Just attacked, and left with a half-inch hole in her forehead. That’s what we’ve got to argue round.’
‘We?’
‘Because you’re the only one who knew she was here.’
‘If she got her tenpenn’orth, what about the one she phoned?’
‘Well yes — that hypothetical person, who’d have had to move like a flash of lightning to get here before Officer Graham. So…we have to find that person. Come on, Harry.’ She took his arm, allowed her fingers to rest in the crook of it, and began to walk him back to the car.
‘Funny,’ she said, ‘that she’d trouble to walk back to the lay-by. It must have been painful.’
‘How so?’
‘The road surface. Look at it, gravelly and rough. No nice smooth pavement to step on to. Not much grass.’
‘Why painful?’
‘Didn’t you know?’ She gave his arm an admonitory shake. ‘She wasn’t wearing any shoes. Just tights. They never found her shoes. Not in her car, not where they searched.’
‘But she did have her shoes.’ His step was slowing. ‘I was driving away, and she shouted: my shoes, you big oaf, my shoes! So I slung ’em outa the window. Couldn’t work the pedals with them things underfoot.’
She drew him to a halt and turned to face him, where she could watch his eyes and at the same time prevent him from walking on.
‘Something else you didn’t say before,’ she said quietly.
He fluttered a huge hand in front of her face. ‘Details, details.’
‘What were the shoes like?’
‘Shoes. I just heaved ’em.’
‘Try.’
‘Oh…I suppose…pinkish, I think. Those spike things like Cynth wore.’
‘Stilettos, Harry. We call ’em stilettos. It could be why she kicked them off for driving.’
‘Right then. So she wore ’em to walk up here to the phone and back, and didn’t have ’em…afterwards. So what?’
‘That head wound, that’s what. It was thought it could’ve been caused by a stiletto heel. The shape and size of the wound was right. That seemed to mean another woman’s heel, if Angela didn’t have any shoes. But if she had them, it could have been done by one of her own. She was wearing her pink skirt, and her tights didn’t show any signs of wear on the soles, no tatters as she’d have had with walking on this road, and no grass stains. So she got back to the lay-by…’
‘You know an awful lot.’
‘Got back to the lay-by, still wearing her shoes,’ she pushed on. ‘And perhaps one of those shoes killed her. One of them, Harry. It’s possible that that one would have been taken away — who doesn’t know about fingerprints?’
‘You didn’t get all this from police records.’ His voice was deep.
‘But why take away both? Tell me that, Harry.’
‘Strikes me it’s you who ought to be doing the tellin’,’ he said stolidly. ‘All this business about what she was wearing. Her pink skirt, you said. Like as if you knew what clothes she owned. And all about her tights. How would you know that?’
‘I told you. I’ve got connecti
ons.’
‘Hah!’ It was flat contempt.
She knew then that she could no longer hold back from him. It had been a mistake to lie to him about her interest. She had assumed he would understand a money motive rather than an emotional one. But at the beginning she had wanted from him no more than information. She had been using him, as had all his past acquaintances. But now the situation had changed, and she knew she needed him. He had to be told, even if it complicated their relationship, might even destroy it.
So she stared up into his lumpy face and his miserable eyes, and told him.
‘Harry, I knew about the skirt and the tights because they were returned to me. I was the one who arranged the funeral, and I was the one who went along to her little flat and examined the clothes there, because I knew her exact wardrobe. I was her nearest living relative.’
Daughter? thought Harry. No…impossible. Aunt and niece? But Virginia didn’t seem auntish. ‘You’re her sister?’ he tried.
‘I’m nine years older,’ she told him, dodging a little because it was irrelevant. ‘So now you know. I’m not doing this for the jewels or the money. I loved her, as simple as that. She was wild and she was always in trouble, but she always came to me. Except that last time. I want to know why, whether I let her down somehow, and…oh, for God’s sake, Harry, I just loved her.’
His eyes were clouded with distress. For her? For himself?
‘You should’ve said.’
She made a hopeless gesture.
‘Thought we were kinda partners,’ he told her. ‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Would you have helped…?’
‘Hah!’ he said, a gleam peering through the screen of his eyes. ‘I think I see. If you’re her sister, then you’d have known she was married. She’d have told you.’
‘Of course she would.’ Her lower lip was caught in her teeth.
‘Then Vic Fletcher’s not…’
‘Of course not.’
‘Then he’s got no reason to talk about killing me.’
‘No reason at all.’
Then she waited for him to think it through, wondering whether he’d need prompting. He reached up and rubbed his face vigorously, and when he lowered his hands he was grinning.
The Second Jeopardy Page 4