by Jill McGown
Her voice was coming from behind the long blonde hair that covered her face, and Lloyd sat down as she spoke.
‘I could see I was upsetting him. Terribly. He’d been a friend of Richard’s. I was making him go through it all again. And I couldn’t stop. Eventually, he just walked away from me. Into the pub.’
Lloyd sat back.
‘And I felt good,’ she said fiercely, then moved her head, to look at him again. ‘But it didn’t last.’
Lloyd didn’t speak.
‘It helped, a little,’ she said. ‘Saying unkind things. I think perhaps you can understand that, Inspector.’
She’d be reading his palm next.
‘Then when George came that evening, he told me what his son-in-law had done to Joanna, and eventually he called him by name. And I realised that I was probably responsible for the whole thing. I felt terrible. Then the next thing I knew, Graham Elstow was dead. And I didn’t tell you because I hoped I wouldn’t have to go through all this.’ There were tears in her eyes.
‘And that was the only time you saw Elstow that day?’
‘Yes, of course.’ The answer was ready enough, but her eyes were wary. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Someone murdered him.’
Judy had relegated herself to note-taker general, he noticed. Perhaps Eleanor Langton unnerved her too.
‘I saw him once,’ said Eleanor. ‘At lunch time. I had no idea he was Joanna’s husband! I’d never met her, and I didn’t know her surname. People in the village call her Joanna Wheeler. I didn’t even know she was married.’
Neither had Constable Parks, thought Lloyd. And the barmaid at the Duke’s Arms hadn’t recognised her surname. Graham Elstow was a non-person as far as the Wheelers were concerned, so there was no reason to disbelieve her on that score.
‘Mrs Langton,’ said Judy. ‘When Mrs Wheeler left here on Christmas Eve, she was upset. Can you tell us why?’
She nodded, and again a blush suffused her face. ‘Something happened,’ she said. ‘Something very trivial and silly, but . . . yes. She could have been upset by it.’
‘Thank you,’ said Judy, and she didn’t press for details.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you all this before,’ said Eleanor. ‘But it really doesn’t help you, does it?’
Lloyd stood up. ‘Oh, I think it does, Mrs Langton,’ he said. ‘There were a number of things puzzling us. Small things. But they do have to be investigated.’
She nodded. ‘In that case, I do apologise,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realise that I would be hindering your enquiry. But I didn’t want to have to discuss my involvement. Especially not with Richard’s mother here.’
‘You couldn’t keep it from her for ever,’ said Lloyd.
‘No.’ She stood up, and went towards the door. ‘But she was worried enough without my telling her it was Graham Elstow who’d been murdered.’ She opened the door, and Lloyd felt as though he was being dismissed. He was being dismissed.
‘I upset Graham, and he got drunk and took it out on his wife. So she took a poker to him. And it was all my fault,’ she said.
Lloyd looked over at Judy, then back at Eleanor Langton. ‘Mrs Langton,’ he said. ‘That’s the second time you’ve accused Mrs Elstow of killing her husband.’
‘Well, didn’t she?’ said Eleanor bitterly. ‘Isn’t that what Marian Wheeler’s charade was about? And isn’t that why George is making himself ill?’
‘Mrs Langton,’ he said. ‘Has anyone indicated to you that that is what happened?’
‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘George likes to believe it was this fictitious intruder.’
Lloyd drove back to Stansfield, beginning to feel that he was getting somewhere at last. He wondered what Eleanor Langton had been like before the accident, before she’d had to spend years waiting for someone to die so that she could get on with her life. But, she’d told him what he wanted to know. She was the answer to the remaining two puzzles. And since all the little puzzles could be accounted for by her presence in the Wheelers’ midst, it was easy enough to put her to one side, and look at what he had left. A domestic. Wife kills brutal husband.
He said as much on the way back, and Judy didn’t argue. But that, he told himself, was possibly because she wasn’t speaking at all. So he turned his attention to other matters; he asked her again to talk to Linda, and she agreed, absently. She was preoccupied, barely listening.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.
‘Nothing,’ she said, frowning. ‘When I was at school,’ she went on, ‘I sometimes even forgot my satchel.’
Lloyd laughed.
‘It was one of those satchels that you carried on your back,’ she said. ‘For cycling.’
Lloyd liked the idea of Judy cycling to school.
‘And I’d eventually be aware that I was too light,’ she said. ‘That’s how I feel now. Too light. Because I’m missing something.’
He drove into the police station car park, but Judy didn’t get out of the car. ‘Why not Wheeler?’ she said.
Lloyd sighed. He’d never known her to get this personally involved before. ‘Wheeler was with Eleanor,’ he said.
‘Before we got there, you thought she might have been prepared to give him an alibi,’ said Judy hotly. ‘What does she do to you, Lloyd? You didn’t even ask her!’
‘She would just have said the same thing,’ Lloyd said. ‘There was no point in asking her.’
‘So you’ll take what she says as gospel, but not what Joanna says?’
‘You said that if you had pieces over when you’d completed the jigsaw, then they must belong to a different puzzle,’ Lloyd reminded her. ‘Eleanor Langton belongs to a different puzzle.’
For a moment, Judy subsided, considering her own words. Then she came back into the fray. ‘You can’t say that,’ she said. ‘Not when you didn’t even ask her about it.’
‘Neither did you.’
‘I was taking my cue from you.’
‘I’d sooner tackle George about it,’ said Lloyd. ‘Eleanor Langton hasn’t got a weak stomach.’
‘Huh.’
All right, so the woman had an effect on him. He hadn’t asked her, because he knew that she would answer him clearly and concisely, and tell him exactly what she wanted him to know, and no more. He hadn’t asked her, because she’d been expecting him to ask her, and just for once he wanted to get the better of her.
‘She’s a witch,’ he said, ‘I kept expecting to see her familiar curled up on a broomstick.’
Judy laughed.
‘It’s not funny,’ he grumbled. ‘Look what she said about saying unkind things.’ He looked at her shamefacedly. ‘How did she know about that?’ he asked, only half in fun.
Judy smiled. ‘Because you did much the same to her,’ she said.
He got out of the car, feeling slightly better. But there was no doubt that Eleanor Langton made every Welsh superstition in his body rise to the surface and leer at him.
‘You fancy her,’ Judy said.
Fancy her! Not a chance. Wheeler fancied her, though. No wonder he was a nervous wreck, if he was bedding Mrs Langton. No, Lloyd didn’t fancy her. But that just would be Judy’s explanation, he thought. She had no soul for Mrs Langton to probe.
‘And Wheeler might never have been near the place on Christmas Eve,’ she added.
‘All right,’ he said, as they walked up the steps. ‘What’s the alternative?’ He opened the door. ‘That Wheeler went straight home when he left the Duke’s Arms, right?’
‘Right.’
‘So how did he get there? He was on foot, and the main road would have taken him the best part of an hour, remember. And no one, but no one saw him cross the field. They did see him walking up Castle Road.’ Of course they did. The vicar and Mrs Langton were the object of considerable interest in the village.
They walked through the CID room, and Lloyd stopped to pick up another sheaf of papers. Information gleaned from the full-scale house to house that
had now been completed, and none of it, he knew without looking, any damn good. ‘Practically the whole village goes to the pub on Christmas Eve,’ he said, as they walked into the office. ‘It’s a tradition. And a lot of them use the shortcut from that side of the village. But no one saw George.’
Judy took off her coat, and sat down.
‘Besides which,’ he said. ‘If your little girl’s telling the truth, the house was locked up before George ever left the pub.’
‘The barmaid could have mistaken the time,’ said Judy.
‘What? I thought we had to believe what we were told.’
‘If my little girl’s telling the truth,’ Judy said, ‘she didn’t murder her husband.’
Lloyd sat down, his face serious. ‘George was in the pub, then went straight to Eleanor Langton’s. Eleanor was at home. Marian was out visiting. We’ve got witnesses to all of that, Judy. And Joanna was at the vicarage, and keeping very quiet about it.’
Judy sighed, at last admitting defeat.
Lloyd nodded. ‘If you ask me, Joanna left the pub, and went home. She could and did get in. She put on the overalls, went upstairs and killed her husband. She burned the overalls in the back bedroom, because the fire in her room would practically be out by then. And she knew that she’d be the first person we’d suspect, so she locked up the house, went to Dr Lomax, then came home and waited, saying that she had been locked out. But she wasn’t to know that her father had his own reasons for keeping quiet about where he’d been, and before she knew it, he was giving her a different alibi. One that hopefully covered him too, as far as his wife was concerned.’
He tipped his chair back, as the scenario presented itself. ‘I don’t believe Marian Wheeler did go home to change her dress,’ he said suddenly. ‘That’s why she doesn’t know when the doors were locked. Why would she go home? She was wearing a coat, and she wasn’t going to stay anywhere else long enough to take it off. She finished her rounds of the old folk, and then came home. That’s when she went up to change her dress – that’s when she found Elstow.’ Oh yes, he thought, it was all coming clear now. ‘She thought Joanna had killed him that afternoon. That’s when she burned the dress and put her own prints on the poker.’
He let the chair fall forward. ‘I think that when we got there, she was as mystified about the doors as anyone. She denied locking them, remember. But then she finds out that Joanna and George weren’t at the pub all the time, and she begins to put two and two together. She realises what must have happened, and why the place was locked up. And that’s why she was so keen to point out that she had locked the doors – check your notebook,’ he said, ‘if you don’t remember. I saw you underline it.’
‘I remember,’ Judy said dispiritedly. But she still didn’t quite give in. ‘Why did Joanna tell us about the overalls, in that case?’ she asked.
‘Someone would, eventually. She thought it might be better if it came from her. So that you would say just what you are saying.’
‘Forensic can’t tell us very much,’ said Judy.
‘No,’ agreed Lloyd. ‘But if we can tell the Wheelers something they don’t think we know, that might just do the trick.’
‘That they burned the overalls,’ said Judy. ‘Does that mean you still think the whole family’s involved?’
‘I think Wheeler’s stomach is very involved,’ said Lloyd. ‘He knew when Joanna left the pub, at least.’ He got up. ‘Home time,’ he said. ‘Hours past home time.’ He smiled. ‘At least you won’t get into trouble with your mother-in-law tonight.’
‘No, thank God,’ said Judy.
‘Tell you what. Why don’t you come back to the flat for something to eat?’ Lloyd asked. ‘Make up for lunch time.’
She hesitated, but she accepted. He was winning.
Seven o’clock. Where on earth had Joanna got to? Marian laid the table, still determined that she would go on as normal. At least she could dig George out of the study, to which he had retreated immediately after lunch. He seemed to spend all his time in there. All the time that he wasn’t spending in the bathroom, she thought worriedly. It was going on too long. She walked into the study, and stopped dead.
‘What are you doing with that?’ she asked.
George sighed. ‘It was my father’s,’ he said, a faraway look in his eye. The gun rested on his arm, pointing towards her.
‘I know that,’ said Marian. ‘George – please put it down,’ she added nervously, as his inexpert finger strayed towards the trigger.
‘What?’ he said vaguely. ‘Oh.’ He laid it on the desk. ‘It’s not loaded,’ he said.
‘Good,’ she said, walking slowly over to the desk. ‘Why have you got it?’
‘He killed things with it,’ George said.
Marian sat down. ‘What were you going to do with it?’ she asked gently.
George’s shoulders hunched a little, like a child’s. He reminded Marian of Joanna when she didn’t want to go to bed. ‘I was just . . . looking at it,’ he said.
Marian looked at it. Oh God, what was happening? ‘Why, George?’ she asked.
He didn’t answer; didn’t even seem to hear her, or see her. She glanced round the room, and saw the open cupboard, a pile of things on the floor beside it. ‘Did you find it in there?’ she asked, startled.
He still didn’t answer, and she got up to look in the cupboard, as though it could give her some answers. She always kept the gun in the sitting room, locked up. ‘George? Where did you get it?’
His eyes seemed to focus slowly as he looked at her. ‘The usual place,’ he said.
‘And you brought it in here?’ She looked again at George’s cupboard. Normality. Pretend that this is all normal. ‘Were you thinking of keeping it in there?’ she said, striving to make her voice sound unconcerned. ‘Because I don’t think it’s a very good idea,’ she said. ‘That lock’s very flimsy.’
He’d picked the damn thing up again. Marian carried on gamely. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘if someone broke in, they could get hold of it. We have to keep it secure.’
‘It was my father’s,’ he said.
Was that it? It was his father’s, so he wanted it? Anything was worth a try. ‘Would you rather I didn’t use it?’ she asked.
‘What?’ George looked puzzled. ‘Good Lord, no. You use it whenever you like.’ He put it down again.
Marian sat opposite him. ‘George – don’t you think you should see a doctor?’ she asked gently.
He looked faintly surprised. ‘The stomach?’ he said. ‘No. It’ll pass.’
Marian dragged her eyes away from the gun to look at George himself, ‘I think . . .’ she said hesitantly, afraid that the wrong word would spark the quick temper that seemed to have died. Marian wanted to see it back, see George back to his old self. But not while he was like this. ‘I think you’re a bit run down,’ she said. ‘Depressed.’
‘A nervous breakdown?’ he asked. ‘Is that what you think it is?’
‘It could be,’ said Marian carefully.
‘I think it is,’ George said, disconcertingly.
Marian’s mouth was dry. This frightened her; George had always just been George. But now, his eyes held an almost accusing look, and she didn’t know why. ‘What is wrong?’ she asked.
Suddenly, he came to life. ‘You ask me that? Joanna’s husband is murdered in this very house, and you ask me what’s wrong?’
At least bluster was something she understood. ‘This started long before Graham Elstow turned up here,’ she said. ‘You’ve been . . .’ She plunged in. ‘You’ve been acting very oddly for a long time,’ she said. ‘Since before that.’
‘Before that I had to bring my daughter home from hospital. That’s when I was sick before,’ he said.
‘It’s not just being sick,’ said Marian. She wouldn’t be swayed. ‘All that stuff about breaking commandments,’ she said. ‘What was all that about?’
He didn’t answer.
‘It started when Eleanor Langton ca
me here, didn’t it?’ she said.
‘Ah.’ George sat back. ‘My mid-life fantasy,’ he said.
‘Well isn’t she?’ Marian asked.
‘Probably,’ said George, his voice tired.
‘Don’t let her make you ill,’ she said. ‘Whatever you’ve done – whatever you do, I’ll be here.’
‘I know,’ said George, and his eyes went to the gun.
Marian stiffened. ‘George,’ she said, alarmed that she had said the wrong thing. ‘Are you in love with her? Or do you just want to kick over the traces?’ She paused. ‘Break a commandment?’
He gave her a half smile. ‘I’ve broken lots of commandments, Marian,’ he said.
Marian stared at him, perplexed. ‘Diana Lomax,’ she said, bringing common sense to the rescue. ‘Go and see her, please, George.’
‘She’ll cheer me up, will she?’
‘She’ll recommend someone who can help,’ said Marian. ‘It would help, you know. If you could talk to someone.’
‘It does,’ said George. ‘It helps when I talk to Eleanor.’
‘What about?’ asked Marian.
‘Anything,’ George said. ‘She’s spent a long time just watching people, you know. Listening to them. Not joining in, so she had time to take stock of them, to assess them. She understands people.’ He smiled, the strange, faraway smile that he’d had when he was holding the gun. ‘A lot of the other play-group mothers don’t like her. That’s because she understands them, sees through them. It makes them feel uncomfortable.’
‘But she helps you?’ Marian asked, frowning.
‘Yes. She understands.’
‘Don’t I?’
He shook his head. ‘On Christmas Eve,’ he said, ‘she helped me write my sermon. She suggested it.’