The Magpie (Rufus Stone Detective Stories Book 3)

by K. J. Frost

  “We’ve spoken to Donald Curtis,” I begin, throwing the cat among the pigeons and taking a few steps further into the room, so I’m effectively between the two women. Mrs Sanderson turns to look at me, but doesn’t really react, which isn’t very surprising, considering she has no idea who Donald Curtis is. Miss Sutton, on the other hand, blanches and glares up at me through narrowed eyes.

  “Who is Donald Curtis?” Mr Sanderson asks the obvious question and I focus on him for a moment.

  “He is Miss Sutton’s boyfriend,” I reply. The lady in question swallows hard, then opens her mouth to speak, before closing it again, and staring down at her hands. Mr Sanderson, on the other hand, turns from me to his child’s nanny, and leans back slightly.

  “Is this true?” His voice is serious, strained, concerned. “Y—You have a boyfriend?”

  Miss Sutton raises her face to his and I notice the tears forming in her eyes, her lips trembling. If she’s acting, she’s very good at it. “He’s not my boyfriend. He’s just a friend.”

  “So you deny spending half an hour at his flat last Tuesday lunchtime – when you were supposed to be Christmas shopping?” I ask and her head flips around to me. For a split second, I see the anger in her eyes, before she fixes me with a kind of frozen stare.

  “I’m not denying anything,” she says. “I meant to go Christmas shopping, but I met Donald on the way and he invited me in for a cup of tea.” She turns to her employer. “It would have been rude to decline.” She keeps her gaze fixed on Sanderson, a beseeching expression on her face and, after a slight hesitation, he nods his head.

  “I suppose,” he says, although I’m sure I can hear a note of doubt in his voice that wasn’t there before.

  “You just stopped for tea, did you?” I ask, keeping my attention focused on Miss Sutton.

  “Of course.” She turns to face me, twisting in her seat and raising her chin defiantly. “What do you take me for?”

  “Absolutely, Inspector.” Her employer leaps to her defence. “Miss Sutton has already explained what she was doing. The fact of the matter is, whether she was Christmas shopping, or having tea with this young man, she doesn’t deserve to be doubted.”

  I turn to him, very slowly. “If it’s all the same to you, Mr Sanderson, I will be the judge of that.” He goes to speak, but I forestall him, continuing, “I don’t appreciate being lied to.”

  “Who’s lied to you?” he asks, raising his voice slightly.

  “Miss Sutton has.”

  Her face pales even more, but she doesn’t reply, leaving her employer to fight her corner, which he does, asking, “And how exactly has she done that?”

  I pause, quite deliberately, for a sufficient length of time to enable Miss Sutton to become uncomfortable about what I might say next, being as she and I both know that her visit to Mr Curtis last Tuesday had absolutely nothing to do with tea. “Miss Sutton told me she was Christmas shopping,” I explain eventually, taking in her slight sigh of relief as I speak. “But in reality, she was elsewhere… drinking tea.” I emphasise the last two words, letting her know I don’t believe a word she’s said.

  “Does it matter?” Sanderson asks.

  “Well, lying to the police in a murder enquiry is never a very good idea.”

  “No… obviously not,” he blusters.

  “I—I only said I’d been Christmas shopping because I didn’t want to get into trouble.” Tears well up in Miss Sutton’s eyes again as she looks from me to her employer. “I’d been given permission to go and do that, and it seemed wrong to be doing something else… but…” She covers her face with her hands and starts to sob, rather loudly.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” Mr Sanderson says and puts his arm around her, patting her shoulder and cooing, “There, there, my dear,” at her. She sidles closer, twisting into him, and stutters out a big sigh, between her sobs, allowing her breasts to rub up against his chest. He sucks in a breath himself, and closes his eyes, apparently enjoying the contact.

  “Oh, stop making so much fuss, will you?” We all turn to Mrs Sanderson as she raises her voice. She’s still sitting back in her chair, although instead of facing out of the window, she’s staring at her husband and Miss Sutton. I wonder for a moment if she’s jealous, but then I take into consideration her tone of voice and the vacant expression on her face and I realise she’s just rather bored with the histrionics. I’m inclined to agree with her, although I keep my thoughts to myself and turn back to Miss Sutton, who’s doing her best to mop up her tears, with assistance from her employer.

  “Can you just take me through what happened when you’d finished drinking tea with Mr Curtis?” I ask.

  “Now?” Mr Sanderson says. “Can’t you see she’s upset. I’m sure this can wait.”

  “And I’m sure it can’t,” I reply.

  “So am I,” his wife puts in. “I’d quite like to know what was going on, considering our nanny lied to us.”

  “She didn’t lie.” Mr Sanderson lets go of Miss Sutton and turns to his wife, his anger apparent in his eyes. “She’s already explained. She met this young man on her way to the shops. It wasn’t planned.”

  Mrs Sanderson gives her husband a look that says she’s no more convinced by the nanny than I am. “Believe that if you want, but I’d like to hear her answers to the inspector’s questions.”

  A part of me feels bolstered by Mrs Sanderson’s support, but then again, I’m also aware that if she’s the guilty party here, it would make perfect sense for her to push the limelight onto Miss Sutton and away from herself, so I’m not going to be swayed by her comments.

  Miss Sutton looks up at me. “What was the question?” she asks, playing for time, I presume.

  “I’d like you to repeat to me what happened when you’d finished with Mr Curtis.”

  She nods her head and looks down at her hands. “Well,” she begins, mumbling slightly, “as I told you the other day, I came back here and found Mrs Slater and Lois were looking after Amy and Eve. Amy was being a little boisterous, so I suggested I’d take them both out to the park, so she could let off some steam.”

  “And?” I prompt.

  “And then I got them both dressed up in their winter clothes, and put Eve in the pram, and we set off.”

  “For the park?”

  She nods her head. “Yes.”

  “What time was this?”

  “I’ve already been through this,” she says, plaintively. “Between one and half past. I told you.”

  “Well, let’s see if you can be more precise, shall we?”

  She pauses. “I don’t think I can.”

  “Try and work it out,” I suggest. “What time did you finish with Mr Curtis?” I already know the answer to this, but I want to see what she says.

  “A few minutes after one, I suppose. He had to get back to work.” Well, the timing tallies, even if the reasoning doesn’t, being as he said she was the one who had to leave, because she’d only been given an hour off work herself.

  “And how long did it take you to walk back here?” I ask.

  “Ten or fifteen minutes at most.”

  “Right, so you got back here at, let’s say, one-twenty.”

  “I suppose.”

  “And then it took you ten minutes to get the girls ready to go out?” I propose and she nods her head. “And another ten or fifteen to walk to the park?”

  “Yes, about that.”

  “So you’d have reached there at… one-forty-five, at the latest?” These timings are an irrelevance. I know them all already. I just want to see if she’ll trip herself up. That’s the sole purpose of this charade. That and gauging the two women’s reactions – both to my questions, and to each other.

  Again, she nods her head.

  “And then how long had you been walking with the pram when the problem occurred with the wheel?” I ask.

  “I honestly don’t know.” She sounds quite desperate and Mr Sanderson glares up at me, but I silence him with a ha
rd stare of my own, before looking back at Miss Sutton and raising my eyebrows. “Maybe ten minutes,” she says eventually. “No longer than that.”

  “And then you told me you spent five minutes or so fixing the wheel and dealing with Eve’s mitten. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that was when you noticed Amy wasn’t there?”

  She sniffles loudly, and whimpers, “Yes.”

  “So the time at this stage would have been, roughly, two o’clock?”

  “I suppose.” She shrugs her shoulders.

  “And yet the alarm wasn’t raised until two-thirty-four. Even allowing for the fact that Mrs Slater had to calm you down before she telephoned for the police, that still leaves approximately thirty minutes between the time she went missing, and the time you got back here, Miss Sutton.”

  Her eyes widen. “What are you suggesting?” she says, raising her voice and sitting up slightly.

  “I’m suggesting that it took you an awfully long time to return home, considering you were presumably in a hurry to report her disappearance.”

  “Well… I had to look around for her first, didn’t I?”

  “Of course she did.” Mr Sanderson sits forward himself now. “She couldn’t just leave the park without checking whether Amy was there, could she?”

  “No,” I reply slowly, as though I’m thinking this through. “The thing is…” I pause for effect, “… it’s not a large space, and there’s not much undergrowth to speak of; apart from a few bushes on the perimeter, there’s nowhere for a child to hide. I wonder that it took more than a few minutes to search… and you could have made it back here in probably five minutes, I’d have thought, walking at speed.” I stop talking and wait, but no-one says a word. “Still,” I say suddenly, “if it took you twenty-five minutes to look around the park, then it took you twenty-five minutes.”

  Miss Sutton stares up at me for a long moment, and then turns away, her bottom lip trapped between her teeth.

  “Inspector Stone,” Mr Sanderson says, raising his voice. “I really—”

  I hold up my hand to quieten him and turn to his wife.

  “Mrs Sanderson?” She’s gazing at her husband, but at the mention of her own name, she twists in her seat and looks up at me.

  “Yes?”

  “I know you were with Mr Cooke for half an hour or so, at roughly the same time that Miss Sutton was having tea with Mr Curtis. Can you tell me again what happened when you got back here?”

  “Back here?” she murmurs, in a rather dream-like state.

  “Yes. When you’d left Mr Cooke’s house and returned home… what happened?”

  “I—I went to bed,” she replies.

  “Straight away?”

  “Yes. I had a headache.”

  “Nothing new there,” her husband murmurs, loud enough for us all to hear, although no-one responds to him.

  “What time was this?” I ask her, focusing on the timings, just like I did with Miss Sutton, even though I don’t need to.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do you know what time you left Mr Cooke?” I ask her.

  She thinks for a moment. “One o’clock,” she replies eventually. “He had an appointment.”

  “I see. And how did you get back here?”

  She looks up at me, confusion apparent on her face. “I—I have my own car,” she says, as though the answer should be obvious to me. “It’s kept in the garage.”

  I nod my head. “So you’d have been back here by about one-fifteen at the latest?”

  “Well, no,” she replies quietly. “I went to the chemists in Thames Ditton first, to get some aspirin, and then I had to walk back to my car, so…”

  “You didn’t mention this when we questioned you before.”

  She pales. “I forgot. I’m always having to buy aspirin. It slipped my mind.”

  “I see. So, you’d have arrived back here at, let’s say, one-thirty or possibly a little later?”

  “A little later, I think. There was quite a queue in the chemists.”

  “Did you see Miss Sutton or your children at that point? Perhaps leaving the house, or on their way to the park?”

  “No. But I was concentrating on driving. My head was hurting rather badly by that stage. I just wanted to get home, take the aspirin and go to bed.” Her voice is rather monotone, like she’s bored with my questioning, and would really rather be elsewhere – with David Cooke, probably.

  “What happened then?” I ask.

  “I think I must have dozed off,” she replies. “But I woke with a start when the front door slammed. And then I heard all the commotion and came downstairs to see what was going on.”

  “I see.”

  Mr Sanderson gets to his feet, stepping towards me, a bullish expression on his face. “What’s all this about, Inspector? I’m sure you’ve asked all these questions already.”

  “Well, we’re finished now.” I make a point of not answering him and turn towards the door. “Thank you all for your time.” They gaze at me, bewildered. “We’ll show ourselves out.”

  I nod at Thompson, who puts away his notebook in his jacket pocket, and opens the living room door, allowing me to go out ahead of him. Lois has left our hats in the hallway, and we pick them up and put them on before letting ourselves out

  We get into the car and sit for a moment, facing the garage doors.

  “What did you make of her lies?” I ask Thompson.

  “The nanny’s, or the wife’s?” he clarifies.

  “The nanny’s. I think Mrs Sanderson’s omission was genuine, don’t you?”

  “Yes, it seemed to be, but then I suppose we still have to bear in mind that the nanny wasn’t in the park where the girl was found – she was at the other one – and we mustn’t forget that she’s also the only one who really seems to have liked the little girl. Maybe that’s why she got so upset about the whole thing.”

  “And that’s why she lied about Curtis? Because there’s no way they were drinking tea for half an hour last Tuesday lunchtime.”

  “No, but she could hardly admit that, could she? She’d lose her job.”

  I twist in my seat and face him properly. “Are you being generous to Miss Sutton because you like her?” I ask, and he turns to look at me, seemingly surprised.

  “No,” he says. “I don’t like her. And besides, I’m a one woman man nowadays. But are you being so negative about her, because you don’t? Like her, that is?”

  I smile at him. “No, I’m not. I don’t like Mrs Sanderson either. I treat them both with the same contempt.”

  He returns my smile. “Didn’t you think Mrs Sanderson’s level of disinterest was a bit odd?” he asks. “She seemed so bored with the whole process.”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “And, let’s face it, no-one heard her come into the house. We only have her word for it that she got home when she said she did.”

  “Are you suggesting she went to the park and persuaded her daughter to come away with her, and Miss Sutton didn’t notice?”

  “I don’t know,” he muses. “But I suppose if Amy could have been convinced to leave with anyone, it would have been her mother.”

  I turn back to face the front of the car.

  “You’re not convinced, are you?” Thompson asks, starting the engine and selecting reverse to pull back out of the driveway.

  “I don’t know. That’s half the bloody problem.”

  I’m feeling even more despondent now than I was before, I think. My ploy to question them didn’t really gain us anything. Alright, so Miss Sutton lied, but as Thompson says, she had good reason to – namely the fear of losing her position. But at the same time, I’m still not convinced that a mother could murder her child – at least not in the way that Amy Sanderson was murdered.

  “She reminds me a little of my sister-in-law,” Thompson says, a little wistfully as we head back towards Kingston.

  “Who?”

  “Mrs Sanderson.�
��

  “In what way?” I ask.

  “Oh, Catherine was the same after the birth of her second child.”

  “What? She had an affair?”

  “No, you fool,” he remarks, smiling across at me. “She was detached. You know, cut off from everything. She took months and months to recover.”

  “And would she have done any physical harm to her child… her children?” I correct myself, remembering he said ‘second child’.

  “No, but she struggled to care for them both, and found it hard to cope with the newborn. If it hadn’t been for Julia’s mother, God knows what would have happened.”

  “What about her husband?” I ask. “Didn’t he do anything?”

  “When he could, yes. But he was at work during the day. That’s when Julia’s mother took over. She said it was some sort of depression… ‘baby blues’ or something, she called it.”

  I turn and face him again. “And is this a proper medical condition?”

  He shrugs his shoulders. “I have no idea.”

  I nod my head. “I think I’d like to go and see Doctor Wyatt before we go back to the station.”

  “Okay.”

  “I want to see if he knows anything about this.”

  “You realise he’s more used to dealing with corpses, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but he might have an idea… and if he doesn’t, he’ll probably know someone who does.”

  Wyatt is just leaving his office when we get there, his hat in one hand, a briefcase in the other.

  “Can you spare me five minutes?” I ask him as he locks his door.

  “I suppose.” He checks his watch. “As long as you don’t mind walking with me. I’ve got a meeting to get to. What’s the problem?”

  “I—I wondered if you know anything about… I’m not sure how to phrase this…”

  “Just spit it out, man,” he says, a little impatiently.

  “Do you know anything about women becoming depressed after they’ve given birth.”