by Jill McGown
‘Please.’
‘No phone-calls,’ Maureen said, handing the list back to Lloyd. ‘Sorry.’
‘Just one more thing,’ Lloyd said, as he wrote down Gina’s address and telephone number. ‘Have the rooms been booked out again?’
The manager consulted the register again. ‘Two of them have,’ he said. ‘The double and one of the singles – Mrs Williams’. Why?’
‘Could you keep the other two locked? We’ll be sending round someone to take fingerprints.’
The manager drew himself up to his full height, which fell short even of Lloyd’s. ‘We do clean the rooms after they are vacated, Inspector.’
‘Well – you never know. Drawers, wardrobe shelves, that sort of thing.’
They passed the lounge on their way out. ‘I wish it was opening time,’ Lloyd muttered, as they went out into the suddenly brilliant sunshine.
The sun slanted through the tall trees, but the pine wood was cool, as always. The sharp, clean smell that had almost gone during the rainless days was back, and Helen walked slowly, her feet snapping the tiny twigs that carpeted the ground.
Maria. Inside her head, the word was sung, as it was by the latter-day Romeo in West Side Story, and the tune wouldn’t let her go. Maria, Maria, Maria.
All her married life, the rules had been simple. Donald told lies, and she pretended to believe them. Anything for a quiet life, for the right to call her soul her own. But she had broken the rules. She had minded, and she had refused to accept the lies. And now what? Now that she knew it wasn’t Julia after all?
Surely he had been lying. Julia hadn’t mentioned the boating lake – Helen couldn’t see why it would matter to her what happened to it. Had she really only gone up there to count the salt-cellars? No. No, he was lying, he had to be. But now he was saying that he hadn’t had an affair with Julia, and she knew just as surely that that was the truth.
She might have been the only person in the world, as she moved slowly through the pine wood. If she stopped walking, all she could hear was sporadic birdsong, all she could see was dusty sunlight through tall trees. All she could smell was pine.
But in her head, a voice mocked her, as she turned and headed for home. Maria, it sang. Maria, Maria, Maria.
Donald opened the freezer and looked at the rock-hard chops and steaks, the pizzas and sausage rolls, the labelled and dated pies and stews. Did you have to defrost them? Was that just chicken? The pizza declared itself to be at its very best if cooked from frozen in a preheated oven, and he expected he could manage that.
It hadn’t surprised him when he had arrived home to an empty house, though he couldn’t remember the last time it had happened. He didn’t suppose that Helen would be cooking him too many more meals.
He’d checked the bedroom, to see if she had left him. But there were no clothes missing, no suitcases gone. He was glad. He should be the one to clear out. Helen liked it here, anyway. She liked the town and she liked the house, so obviously she must stay. He’d move out tonight if that made her feel better.
He had just consigned the pizza to the surely-preheated-enough-by-now oven when he heard the front door.
Helen looked pale, but she was calmer than she had been at lunch time, as though she had come to terms with something.
He smiled. ‘There’ll be some pizza in about half an hour,’ he said. ‘If you want any.’
But she just shook her head.
‘We don’t know she rang any of them!’ Judy was annoyed at herself, not at Lloyd. She knew she was being negative, but everything about this business was negative. The fingerprints in Wade’s car were not Julia Mitchell’s, the telephone was not used after nine o’clock, there had been no sexual assault, though the body was naked.
‘It’s a chance,’ Lloyd said. ‘She’s more likely to have rung one of them than anyone else – you said so yourself. And one thing we do know – Wade knows more than he’s saying.’
Judy didn’t believe that. He wasn’t the type – he’d have said something, let slip an unwary word, by now. He just wasn’t clever enough, resilient enough, not to.
‘He must,’ Lloyd said. ‘We know that there is another person involved now. Someone who was at the Derbyshire Hotel at four minutes to eight. There’s a set of unidentified prints in Wade’s car. Are you saying that’s a coincidence?’
‘No.’
‘Then what are you saying?’
‘He says they’re Julia’s prints.’
Lloyd sighed extravagantly, and slumped over his desk in mock exhaustion. ‘But we know they’re not. Don’t we?’
Judy nodded. So he was lying. But why? To protect this person? Something had gone on with all three of them up there, and he wasn’t saying what. Her notes now contained the names and addresses of the Saturday night guests at the Derbyshire. The couple had been checked out, and were crossed off. The Plasticraft man was a buyer from Belgium, and he’d been crossed off. That left the Mitchell Engineering man and Mrs Williams from Oxford.
‘Why would he want to protect either of them?’ she asked Lloyd.
‘We won’t know that until we know the whole story,’ he said. ‘But at least we’ve got the Mitchell connection – that might mean something.’
‘That’s no connection at all.’ She moodily turned the pages of the notebook, not looking for anything in particular. ‘The Mitchells haven’t had anything to do with Mitchell Engineering for years. He’ll be another buyer, like the Belgian.’
‘Thank you. You are being a tower of strength.’
Judy smiled her apologies, and turned the pages back again. Statements, opinions, names and addresses, facts. Facts were the only things you could depend on. No suppositions – no presumptions of guilt or innocence. Facts. Like a logic problem. And the facts could not be altered, only seen in a different light.
That light, at last, was dawning. Just a faint glimmer at the very edge of her mind, but it was there, if only she could find it.
The evening shadows lengthened as the sun dipped in the sky, and the woods grew dark. Around the boating lake, the gently rippling water reflected the sun’s rays, casting pools of light on to the bark of the trees.
Across the road, the pine wood stood hushed and motionless in the still evening, silhouetted against the reddening sky. A light went on in one of the houses, as the tall trees blocked the setting sun.
The moth saw the light, and made her way towards it, fluttering up and down the glass in an impotent frenzy. There was a smaller window at the top; it was open. Perhaps she would stumble across it in her attempts to beat her way through the glass, and perhaps she wouldn’t.
But it was there, if only she could find it.
Chapter Thirteen
‘I’ll go and see Mitchell,’ Lloyd said, looking again at the printout. ‘See what he has to say about this phone-call. Could you go and see Gina Whatsit – see if she remembers either of the two we’ve still got to check – oh, and before you do that, can you—’ He could feel his words hit the air and come back to him, like talking in an empty room, and looked up from the print-out to find Judy neatly ticking off notes in her pad.
‘Are you listening to me?’
Evidently not. He walked over to her desk. ‘Come on – we’ve got work to do. Leave the bloody notebook!’ He caught her arm, but she resisted in an abstracted way.
‘It is a logic problem,’ she said, still not really speaking to him, but to herself.
‘Are you back on that?’
‘No – this is different.’ She looked up, aware of him for the first time in five minutes, he was sure. ‘That phone-call was made at four minutes to eight. Right?’
Lloyd nodded.
‘So either Julia herself or Donald Mitchell made it?’
‘Yes.’
‘But neither of their fingerprints is on the phone.’
‘No.’ Lloyd pulled up the visitor’s chair and straddled it, his arms along the back. ‘Because it had been wiped.’
‘Who b
y?’
‘By whom,’ Lloyd said. ‘Any of them, I suppose. Julia, Donald Mitchell – this person at the hotel, Wade.’ He shrugged.
‘But Wade insists that Julia did touch the phone,’ she said. ‘So he’d hardly remove her prints.’ Judy was still turning the pages of the notebook.
Lloyd was puzzled, but interested. ‘He’d wipe it soon enough if his accomplice touched it, though,’ he said. ‘Whoever was in his car touched it, remember.’
Judy nodded, the light of victory in her eye. ‘You remember,’ she said. ‘And while you’re at it, remember that it was Wade who drew our attention to the phone in the first place.’
So it was. ‘All right,’ Lloyd conceded. ‘Not Wade.’
‘Next question. Why did someone – not Wade – wipe the phone?’
‘Please, miss, so that their fingerprints wouldn’t be found,’ Lloyd said.
‘What made them think anyone would be looking?’
‘Dead bodies have that effect on people.’
‘Julia’s dead body.’ She sat back. ‘Which rules out Julia, doesn’t it?’
‘And leaves Mitchell and the hotel-guest.’
She smiled. ‘Mitchell and the hotel-guest – hang on to that, too.’ She pursed her lips in a determined effort to concentrate. ‘The partial print on the phone matches the ones in Wade’s car. So it’s reasonable to believe that those were the prints that someone was trying to get rid of. Mitchell had no need to get rid of his – he could have used that phone at any time without suspicion . . . the only reason for the phone being wiped is that it had prints on it that shouldn’t be there.’
Lloyd began to see the pieces more clearly. Not quite slotted together yet, but he had a feeling they were going to be.
‘Bad acting,’ Judy said. ‘That’s what Elaine Short said it was. Bad acting.’ She looked up. ‘Have you thought about that dentist’s card?’
‘Not constantly.’
‘What do you do with yours?’
‘Dentist’s reminders? Burn them,’ Lloyd admitted.
‘I prop mine up somewhere,’ she said. ‘To remind me. And then I throw them away when I’ve been.’ She smiled, to prove how successful this method was. ‘I’m not saying she wouldn’t keep hers in her bag – but wasn’t it lucky? You find a naked body that could be anyone, and umpteen proofs of identity in her handbag, including the name of her dentist.’
Lloyd thought about it. ‘Because it was important that she should be identified? However long it took to find her?’
‘And think about what Girvan said about the time of death. The earlier the better – as early as the circumstances allow.’ She moved her pencil down the neat lines of writing. ‘Yes – here it is. We knew when she had last eaten, and he said that if you worked it out from that, it could give too early a time of death. He assumed fear – and we had reason to think he was right to – which slows the digestive processes down. So he ended up with a later time of death than he’d thought at first.’ She looked up, her face eager. ‘But supposing she wasn’t afraid? Before people kept telling us she was, we thought she’d been taken by surprise, without a struggle, even. Which gave her no time to be afraid, and that brings you back to the early end of the range. Nearer eight o’clock? About five to eight?’
Lloyd sat up slowly. ‘Mitchell killed her? Then made the call to the hotel?” He got up, picking up the chair and putting it back against the wall.
‘Mitchell. Who needed her to be identified. And who had to remove her clothes with care because someone else was going to wear them. Pretend to be Julia.’ She suddenly deflated, like a pricked balloon. ‘Except that Short already knew her,’ she said. ‘I should have known it was too good to be true.’
‘Did he?’ Lloyd said, reaching for her phone, sitting on her desk.
‘Yes. He even saw them on a dirty weekend at that hotel in London.’
‘Did he? Why? Why go to an hotel? Who’d go to a crummy hotel when they’d got the run of what I gather is virtually a mansion?’ He asked for a number. ‘I don’t need notes,’ he said. ‘I remember things.’
‘Greenwood and Short,’ said a pert voice.
‘Mr Short, please.’
Martin Short came to the phone. ‘Can I help you?’
‘I think you can, Mr Short. Lloyd, Stansfield CID.’
‘Good afternoon, Inspector.’ Short was his usual affable self. ‘How can I help you?’
‘You mentioned something to me, Mr Short. A chance meeting that you had with Mr Mitchell in an hotel?’
There was a slightly embarrassed silence. ‘Not a meeting, thank God,’ he said. ‘I mean – he didn’t see me.’
‘When was this, Mr Short?’
‘Oh – about three weeks ago, I think. Just a second, my diary’s here somewhere.’
It took a lot longer than a second, but Short came back to the phone eventually. ‘Yes,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Three weeks ago on Saturday.’ He flicked the page. ‘It was the Sunday morning that I saw them, when I was checking out.’
‘Thank you Mr Short,’ Lloyd said. ‘Two more things. One – how many times did you actually meet Mrs Mitchell?’
‘Three – if you count that time. Once, at her house in London, not long after her husband died, to discuss the various properties they wanted me to handle. The hotel – and then at our house on Saturday.’
‘And two – could you let me have the name of the hotel that you were staying at, please?’
Short obliged, in a puzzled tone, but Lloyd merely thanked him, with no explanation.
‘I think the much maligned Mr Wade has been proved right again,’ Lloyd said, as he put down the phone.
‘Right about what this time?’
‘He says that it wasn’t Julia Mitchell that Donald was seeing – it was her housekeeper. And the London hotel seems to bear him out – again. Why would Julia have to go to an hotel with him?’
Judy practically bundled him out of the door and into her car. Her haste was justified; Gina remembered Mrs Williams well. She invited Lloyd and Judy into the flat that she shared with two other girls, both obviously pleased to have become involved in the murder enquiry, however vaguely.
‘I checked her in,’ Gina said. ‘I remember her because you don’t often get women on their own. She was blonde – quite attractive.’
‘Did she go out at all?’
‘Yes – she went out at about eight o’clock – just after I’d put a call through to her, so I thought she must have a date. But she was back just after nine, so I don’t suppose it was.’
‘And, to coin a phrase,’ Lloyd said, ‘would you know her if you saw her again?’
‘Oh, yes. I think so.’
‘We’ll be in touch,’ Judy said. ‘You might be asked to pick her out of a line – do you think you’d be able to do that?’
Gina thought she would and it came as no surprise to them, when they got back to the station, to be told that Thames Valley couldn’t trace a Mrs Williams at the address given. Were Stansfield sure that the address was Oxford itself, or could it be one of the villages near Oxford?
They went into the office, and as the light flashed and flickered into reluctant life, Lloyd sat down with a sigh, feeling as though he had just got his mythical brother off a murder charge. He rang the number of the Mitchell house in London, and hung up when the phone was answered.
‘I thought she’d move back in,’ he said. ‘Why not? Donald Mitchell owns the place now.’ He picked up the phone again, and rang for a car.
And so it was that just two hours later, they were standing on the doorstep of the Mitchell residence, which was indeed practically a mansion, inviting Maria Fraser to accompany them to the local police station. Maria was surprised to see them. She was attractive, as Gina and Diane had both said. Her hair was up, whereas Julia’s had been down – fairer than Julia’s, but who’d notice degrees of fairness? Make-up and clothes would turn her into an identical police description. Blonde, early thirties, denim skirt and
jacket.
She complained, as they escorted her from the house, that she didn’t know what was going on. Lloyd smiled when Judy assured her that she would pick it up as she went along.
He had never seen such a perfect match. She had caught the dashboard with the four fingers of her right hand, and she couldn’t have done it better if she’d been trying to leave a set of fingerprints. Which, of course, she had been trying very hard not to do. She had done the only thing she could think of to stop herself touching anything. She had folded her arms.
No wonder, thought Lloyd, that she was none too keen to accept a lift from Wade. No wonder she looked scared, as he insisted on coming into the café with her. No wonder she was almost hysterical when he wouldn’t leave.
She wasn’t hysterical now. She sat between Judy and Lloyd on their way back to Stansfield, staring straight ahead, saying nothing, apparently calm.
‘We’ll be asking you to take part in an identification parade, of course,’ Lloyd said, conversationally.
‘Of course,’ she said.
The car doors slammed, and Helen watched as the police drove off with Donald, under arrest. It hadn’t really come as a shock – more, perhaps, as a relief, because the responsibility had been shifted from her shoulders. She had seen Donald’s hand in it from the moment she realised that it was Maria with whom he’d been having an affair. It had all worked out too well.
Donald wasn’t a lucky man – he made his own luck. Julia’s death meant that he could have money, and Maria, and a clear conscience, because Helen would be provided for.
She had known him too long. He was worried about Chris – far too worried, because nothing really worried Donald that didn’t affect him personally. Chris worried him, because Chris had blundered in where he wasn’t wanted. And then there were the lies. The lies about Julia’s obsession with the boating lake. Helen knew when he was lying; she always had. Walking on her own in the pine wood, trying to sort it out, she had realised that if the lies were not to cover up an affair, then they must be for some other reason. And the reason had to be the murder.
And now, she didn’t have to choose. She stood in the sitting room where a moment ago the police had arrested Donald for murder, and she thanked God for saving Chris.