by Jill McGown
‘Were you?’ he said. ‘You see – you say you were. But you didn’t get home until twenty-five to ten. It’s – what? A five minute journey? Seven – eight at the very most. And it was a quiet night – well, it’s a quiet road, isn’t it? At night.’
‘I’ve already explained –’ Helen looked back at Sergeant Hill. ‘– the storm. I couldn’t see where I was going.’ She tried to calm herself by drawing deeply on her cigarette.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You parked in the lay-by.’
‘That’s right.
‘And did what, Mrs Mitchell?’ Sergeant Hill again.
‘Nothing.’ She looked across at Lloyd. ‘Nothing,’ she said again, helplessly.
‘You didn’t go up to the café? Leave your car in the lay-by and go up to the café? Wasn’t that where you saw Mr Wade’s car? Where you knew you would see it, because you’d seen him – go in there on your way to the station?’
‘No!’ Helen had never imagined that this was why she had been brought here. ‘I told you where I saw his car.’
‘After some prompting,’ the sergeant said. ‘I think you saw his car at the boating take – you went into the café to see what was going on, and you saw Wade kill your sister-in-law. I think you didn’t get home until twenty-five to ten because you were helping him. Why did you hide her clothes?’
Helen realised that her mouth was actually open, and hastily closed it. She turned to the inspector. ‘Inspector – do I have to sit and listen to this?’
‘No,’ he said, standing up. He walked over to her, standing close so that she had to hold her head at an uncomfortable angle to look at him. ‘No – you can talk; and we’ll listen. I don’t mind which. But I will tell you this. There seem to be only two people who were in a position to have killed Mrs Mitchell. One of them is Wade, and the other is you.’
‘Me!’ It had got too ludicrous for her even to be nervous any more.
‘What did you think of your sister-in-law?’ Sergeant Hill asked, as the inspector melted into the background once more, back to his desk.
‘I didn’t like her. I never have, and I’m not going to pretend that I did just because she’s dead,’ Helen said. ‘I think you’ll find that very few people liked her.’ Except Donald, presumably, she thought, then looked at the sergeant. Was that what all this was about? ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I see. Someone’s told you about her and Donald, is that it?’
‘You know about that, then?’
‘Yes.’ Helen stubbed out her cigarette in a shower of angry sparks. ‘Why? Were you going to spare my feelings?’
‘If possible,’ the sergeant said. ‘But now that we’ve got it out of the way – I take it you weren’t too happy about the situation?’
Helen lit another cigarette. ‘I couldn’t have cared less, sergeant,’ she said. ‘My husband has had other affairs – in which I assume you have less interest – and I do assure you that the ladies are all still alive to tell the tale.’ She picked up the ashtray, and held it.
‘But this was a little different? She had come into a great deal of money, hadn’t she? Enough to tempt your husband away? Whereas, if she were to die . . .’ She left the thought dangling in the air.
Donald! He thought he’d better tell them about the money. Now look where it had got her. Helen flicked ash nervously into the ashtray. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ she said, because they seemed to expect her to say something. She looked across at the Inspector, but he had gone. ‘I don’t care about the money’, she said. ‘I didn’t care about Julia, except that – except that I didn’t know why he would prefer her. The others I could understand, but I didn’t understand that.’
A policewoman came in, with coffee, followed by Lloyd, who fussed round like a vicar at a tea-party.
‘Sugar, Mrs Mitchell? Milk?’
She didn’t know what to make of him. One minute he would be like this, and the next he would be calmly suggesting that she killed Julia. On the whole, she preferred the aggressive Sergeant Hill, but that wasn’t saying much.
He sat on the sergeant desk. ‘Mrs Mitchell,’ he said. She looked up at him. ‘We have no desire to charge someone for the sake of it. If you know anything about this business that you haven’t told us, then please tell us now.’
It was a trick. Frighten her into telling them something that Chris hadn’t told them. If she told them what he’d said, it would look as though he’d killed her. And he hadn’t. He hadn’t. It was a trap, she knew it was. But she couldn’t see a way out of it. She shook her head slowly, her eyes tight shut. She had to tell them. Oh, Chris, she had to tell them. Tears oozed from beneath her eyelashes, and she heard the door close. Opening her eyes quickly, she saw a blurred Sergeant Hill. They were alone.
‘I saw his car at the roundabout,’ she said, haltingly. ‘And I didn’t see him again until about six o’clock in the morning. He was drunk,’ she said. ‘He came to us for help.’
Sergeant Hill nodded. ‘It isn’t a betrayal,’ she said, gently. ‘He’s told us what he can remember. But there are gaps.’
Helen sniffed back the tears, and saw a warmth in the brown eyes that she hadn’t seen before. ‘Will it help him?’ she asked.
‘If he’s telling the truth, then you must tell the truth. It can’t hurt him,’ she said, producing a small cellophane packet of paper hankies from her desk. Helen thought she probably had a tool for taking stones out of horse’s hooves and spoke Chinese as well.
‘He was drunk,’ Helen said again. ‘I couldn’t make much sense of what he said.’
‘It’s better not to try,’ she said. ‘Try just to remember the words. If that’s possible.’
Helen nodded. There weren’t very many to remember. With what was left of her composure, she gave her account of Chris’s visit, tearing the last of her privacy to shreds.
She had told her everything she could remember. When they had been left on their own, and he had begun to sober up, he’d gone quiet, and said nothing more about Julia. The clock behind the sergeant read twenty to ten, and she felt as though she had been here forever.
‘Thank you,’ the sergeant said. ‘There’s nothing more?’
‘Nothing more about her,’ Helen said. ‘I don’t have to tell you anything apart from that, do I?’
‘No.’ She stood up.
‘Do you believe me? Or do you still think I might have killed her?’ Helen had no idea from her demeanour what she believed.
‘We have to look at all the possibilities,’ she said.
‘Oh – wait!’ Helen Mitchell’s face flushed. ‘He asked for her! He asked if she was there – he wanted to speak to her. He did!’
The sergeant sat down again, a dubious look in her eye.
‘No – honestly. He did. He said “Where is she? Is she here?” or something like that. He was too drunk to stand up – but he’d hardly be looking for her if he’d killed her, would he?’
The sergeant didn’t seem as enthusiastic about it as she was.
‘Is it true? Have you got Helen Mitchell here?’ Chris jumped to his feet as Lloyd came in to the room, then wished he hadn’t, and collapsed on to the bunk again. It didn’t hurt unless he forgot. ‘Well?’ he demanded. ‘Have you?’
Inspector Lloyd raised a disapproving eyebrow, and sat down beside him. ‘Who I choose to question is my business,’ he said.
‘Why? Why her?’
‘If she’s here – why not? You’ve told me you went there on Sunday morning, and she’s told me you didn’t.’ He sighed. ‘It occurred to me that I’d given you an easy way out – I suggested that you’d been there. So now I’m asking her.’
Chris subsided a little. Helen would at least confirm that. Every little helped. Unless, of course, she still thought she ought to keep quiet about it. ‘Has she confirmed it?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. If she does, she’s in trouble and if she doesn’t, you’re in worse trouble. Wouldn’t it be easier just to tell the truth?’
Chris massaged his temples, t
rying hard to keep his temper. ‘I am telling you the truth,’ he said. ‘Whoever killed her is still running about and you won’t look for him! You’re so sure it’s me – how do you know he isn’t going to kill someone else?’ He lifted his eyes so that they were looking right into Lloyd’s. ‘I didn’t kill her,’ he said, as though he were talking to a three year old. ‘Do you understand?’
‘I understand the words – but the evidence says different.’ Lloyd stood up. ‘If she provoked you in some way—’
‘She provoked me! She seemed to have a talent for doing that – and maybe somebody finally killed her for it, but it wasn’t me!’ He lifted his leg up on to the bed so that Lloyd couldn’t sit there again.
‘Did she fall when you hit her?’
‘I didn’t hit her – no, she didn’t fall. She stumbled.’ He lay back and closed his eyes.
‘What’s the difference?’
He knew the difference. ‘She didn’t fall over. She lost her balance, and recovered it.’
‘Did she fall against the table? Cut her face?’
Chris opened his eyes to find Lloyd standing over him. ‘No. As far as I know, she didn’t hurt herself at all. But if there was a cut on her face, then there was. It didn’t happen then.’ He swung his leg off the bed again, and reached for his crutch. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, through his teeth. Jail would be peaceful compared with this.
‘She hit her head on the table,’ Lloyd said. ‘We know she did, so stop telling lies about that, at least.’
Chris stood by the wall, his fist hitting it disconsolately, impotently.
‘All right. Who else did you have in your car recently?’
At least it was a different question. ‘How recently?’ he asked, slightly disoriented by the new subject.
‘Well, let’s start with the same day. Saturday. We’ve found a set of fingerprints – they’re not yours, and they’re not hers. We just wondered whose they were?’
Chris frowned. Saturday? His brow cleared as he remembered. ‘It was a girl,’ he said. ‘She came to the garage looking for petrol, because she’d run out. I ran her back to her car. They must be hers.’
Lloyd was going into his amazed routine. ‘I’m lucky to find a petrol station that even employs people any more,’ he said. ‘And here, you are, running stranded motorists back to their cars! I must remember that – is it a service you offer to everyone?’
Chris leant against the wall. ‘It was lunch time,’ he said. ‘I was closing up anyway. So I ran her back to her car. It’s got nothing to do with this.’ He had forgotten her; she had been nice.
‘Hasn’t it? Fond of giving people lifts, are you? Pretty girls, at any rate?’
‘I do favours for pretty girls that I might not do for you,’ Chris said. ‘I think you’ll find that’s quite normal.’
Lloyd walked to the door. ‘If there’s anything you know about Saturday night that you haven’t told us,’ he said, ‘you’d better tell me now. I don’t think you killed her – at least, not without help. But I’m going to have to charge you, because you’re the only one I’ve got. If you’re covering up for someone, believe me the favour won’t be returned. You might get your reward in heaven, but here you’ll just be sent to prison.’
Chris pushed himself away from the wall, weary of the whole thing. ‘You know as much as I do,’ he said, and sank down on the bunk. If they thought he’d go to these lengths to cover up for someone, then they must believe the someone to be Helen. They thought she’d helped him – or that she had killed her. ‘And leave Helen Mitchell out of it,’ he said.
‘Jealousy is unpredictable,’ Lloyd said. ‘Can’t leave her out.’
‘You’re wrong about that, you know. Donald wasn’t seeing Julia. It’s the girl that worked for her – used to work for her.’
Lloyd looked faintly surprised. ‘No matter,’ he said, after a moment. ‘She thought it was Julia.’
*
‘I thought you were at work.’
Donald had had more enthusiastic greetings in his time. ‘I came home to pick up some of Charles’s papers,’ he said.
‘Would you like to know where I’ve been?’ She threw her handbag down on the sofa. ‘While you’ve been sorting out your nice rosy future?’
Donald was sure he wouldn’t like to know, but he was going to be told, anyway.
‘I’ve been to the police station – do you know I’ve never been in one before? When I do go, I’m on the wrong side of the law!’
‘What made you go there?’
‘What made me go there?’ Helen tore open a new packet of cigarettes. ‘What made me go there was a six-foot-four policeman. Because you saw fit to bandy our business about!’ She struck a match savagely, knocking its head off, and scrabbled in the box for another. ‘I believe I was taken in for questioning. They think I might have killed Julia, so that you could get her money!’ She succeeded in lighting the cigarette at last. ‘Thank you, Donald. While you’re choosing premises in Mayfair or whatever it is you’re doing, I’m being accused of murder.’
Donald sat down. They couldn’t seriously think – but no, they obviously didn’t, or she wouldn’t be here.
‘Failing that,’ she went on, ‘Chris killed her, but I helped him cover it up. I wasn’t very good at it, was I?’ She sat down, her hands shaking with anger, and blew her nose noisily.
Donald kept his distance, that seeming to be the safest thing to do. ‘They didn’t seriously accuse you of all that, did they?’
‘As good as.’ She relaxed a little. ‘Oh, it was just to scare me into telling them that Chris came here.’
‘And did you?’
‘Yes. Relax, Donald. They’ve let me off with a smacked hand. And your name didn’t even come up – not in that connection, anyway.’
Donald frowned. ‘In what connection, then?’
‘What do you think? Please stop pretending!’
Donald didn’t know what to stop pretending about, and that worried him. Before he could ask, Helen pushed past him, running out of the room and slamming the front door.
He looked out at the sky, picked up a coat, and followed her.
‘Thank you, Mr Muller,’ Lloyd said.
Mr Muller was the driver of the brown Triumph Spitfire with the unreliable top. He’d seen the news, and he came as soon as he could get away from work to tell them that it was him. The rain had come on, and he’d stopped to try and get the top over, but it was stuck. So he had driven on with it down, and he had seen a lady in a car in the lay-by, who would, he supposed, be the one who had given his description to the police. It would have been about five past nine, because he was late for an appointment, and he’d looked at his watch when the bloody top stuck. He hadn’t seen either the man or the woman, which was why he hadn’t come forward before. He hoped he hadn’t inconvenienced them.
‘Someone helped him out,’ Lloyd said. ‘There were two people running about with her clothes.’
‘But she was in the car,’ Judy said. The phone rang, and she picked it up, saying yes and no when appropriate. ‘That was the lab,’ she said.
‘And?’
‘The phone has a number of prints on it, naturally. They’d need fingerprints from the normal users to sort them out. Is it worth it?’
Lloyd didn’t know. ‘Perhaps – can they do anything without that?’
‘They’re checking the ones that are good enough, but some were obliterated. They say it had been partially cleaned with some sort of disinfectant. Probably one of those telephone wipes.’
‘That’s all we needed. A hygiene freak for a boatman.’
‘That’s the funny thing,’ Judy said, something obviously sparking off a memory. ‘We were in there on Sunday – do you remember? And that phone doesn’t get cleaned. Not by any hygiene freak, anyway.’
Clouds had rolled over the blue skies, and rain began to fall, at first in slow, large drops which fell into the pond and caused ripples to roll out, gently rocking the ducks. As it gat
hered strength, and the spots became small and determined, the odd groups of people who had gathered to look at where she was found began to disperse.
The ducks, fluffing out their feathers, wondered anew who had put out the rumour that they liked rain, and watched the people go. All except one, who sat on the bench in the rain, looking at them, but not seeing them. They swam up to be near her, and caught her attention. Looking round, she picked up a stray crust and threw it, but they could see that she had other things on her mind.
They all grabbed bits of bread.
Chapter Eleven
Helen had so far ignored Donald’s entreaties to explain. She stared into the boating lake, its surface spiked with rain, listening to the hiss, smelling the freshness.
‘You had to bring her here,’ she said. ‘Because of some silly game of yours, she’s dead, and they think Chris killed her.’
‘A silly game?’ Donald sounded genuinely puzzled, but she still wouldn’t look at him. The grass, greener now that the rain had come, stretched down to the road. And on the opposite side, the tall pine trees which had hidden Chris. During the long summer she and Chris had walked in their cathedral coolness, and they had hidden both of them. Now everyone knew; they constituted nothing more than a woodland hideout, a place where a murderer evaded the police.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Donald said. ‘It isn’t sensible, sitting here in the rain – come home.’
Sensible. What was sensible about any of it? She didn’t want to be here. Here, where it all started, where the summer ended.
The rain grew heavier, and Donald took off his coat. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Put this on at least – you’re getting soaked.’
She pushed the coat away. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at work?’ she asked.
‘Yes. What’s so terrible about that? Work goes on.’
She shivered. ‘I wouldn’t have believed you could be that cold-blooded,’ she said. ‘I know you don’t believe in sentiment, but I thought I knew you better.’
‘Is this about Chris?’ he asked. ‘I’m worried about Chris – you know I am! But there’s nothing I can do about it – so I have to be practical. I’ve offered help – he knows he needn’t worry about money. But I won’t be staying in Stansfield, and the sooner I can sort it out and get out of your hair the better.’