Faithful unto Death

by Caroline Graham

  “I’ve no need. As I said the other day, I was at home all Monday evening. Out in the garden until around nine and then in the house.”

  “Did you, late that evening or early the next morning, visit the property known as Nightingales?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “When did you last see Alan Hollingsworth?”

  “I can’t answer that. I don’t remember precisely.”

  Barnaby waited for a few moments then closed the interview, timed the tape and switched the machine off.

  “We have a warrant to search your house, Mr. Patterson. Also our Forensic department will wish to examine your car. You’ll be asked to hand the keys over.”

  “I understand. Can I . . .” He half rose then sat down again. “Is it all right if . . .”

  “You can go home, sir. But please keep us informed of your whereabouts.”

  “Don’t go taking any holidays in the Caribbean,” said Sergeant Troy.

  This spark of levity did not even register.

  “Also,” continued Barnaby, “we’d like a recent photograph. Just a snap will do. Give it to the officer who runs you home, if you would.”

  When his escort arrived, Patterson trudged leadenly off without having made eye contact with either of the two detectives again.

  “What do you reckon?” asked Troy when they were once more back in Barnaby’s office. “In the frame, is he?”

  “I don’t know,” replied the Chief Inspector. “Have to think about that.”

  Troy nodded and sat back to wait. He would relax. He would not bite his nails or run out for a fag. The minutes dragged by. Sergeant Troy’s mind rolled back to when he had first been assigned to his present position, now nearly nine years ago.

  Then he had found his new boss’s refusal to produce an instant opinion on anything and everything somewhat alarming. Barnaby’s dislike of drawing rapid conclusions also caused a certain amount of discomposure. But the sergeant had experienced his keenest unease when faced by the chief’s willingness to acknowledge embarrassment or failure; the two great taboos of police culture. Barnaby had been known on occasion to admit publicly to both, which made some officers, especially the older ones, awkward in his presence. Resentful of his honesty and courage, in their own self-defence they transformed these qualities, in their canteen conversation, to foolishness and a need to curry favour with the younger element. No one ever suggested this to his face. And through it all the gaffer—Sergeant Troy, glanced across the room at the bulky figure lost in thought and fanning itself with a manila folder—didn’t give a bloody toss. You had to admire him.

  It was nearly seven o’clock. Suddenly Barnaby got up and started stuffing things into a briefcase. “Time we weren’t here, Sergeant.”

  “Right, chief.” Another ten minutes and they’d have been on overtime. Ah well, some of us could do with it and some of us are nice and comfortable already, thanks very much.

  A brief “goodnight” and the door slammed.

  Troy put on his silky tweed jacket, adjusted his tie with immaculately clean hands and briefly admired himself in the mirror. Smoothing his hair and smiling, he checked his teeth for any foody bits. Finesse he may lack but you couldn’t fault him when it came to a tidy mouth.

  He unwrapped a stick of Orbit menthol, popped it on to his tongue and set off for the station bar and a glass of weasel piss. Plus a spot of amorous backchat which could well lead, should his cards fall sunny side upwards, to a nice little roll in the hay.

  Chapter Seven

  Think of a figure. Double it. Add on your weight in kilos, your National Insurance number and the National Debt. Take away the figure you first thought of and you’d still be hard pushed to come up with the degrees centigrade registered in the CID’s outer office. The coolest place in the building was the inoperative boiler room.

  The heatwave had been going on now for over a week. Chief Inspector Barnaby, gradually dissolving in his fourth floor office, thought the term singularly inept. Waves, whatever their temperature, moved. He was sitting in stationary air the consistency of thick soup. A large fan on his desk heaved hot gollops of it back and forth.

  After sleeping badly, Barnaby was feeling bad-tempered and depressed. He had dozed off around half past four after spending hours turning the Hollingsworth mystery over and over in his mind.

  There had been an extremely vivid and unpleasant dream just seconds before he woke. He was standing in the greenhouse watching a small, insignificant insect crawling up a pane of glass. He reached out and squashed it with his nail. A tiny spot of reddish brown liquid spurted out. This was followed by another, larger display which ran down the glass in a thin but steady stream. Then a quick gush of much brighter fluid followed by an absolute avalanche of thick, scarlet foam. Barnaby, his hands and jacket sleeves suddenly drenched, had recoiled in horror.

  He pushed the image to the back of his mind by tackling the daily papers. Simone’s picture was on the front page of all the tabloids, accompanied by some barmily imaginative headlines. Alan had been posthumously promoted to Gordon Gecko status: Dead Tycoon’s Blonde Lovely Vanishes! Madonna Lookalike Kidnapped! Have You Seen Sexy Simone—Tragic Widow of Top Financier?

  At least, thought the Chief Inspector, shoving aside the Sun, they’d been spared Phew! What A Corker!

  He flipped through the small handful of house-to-house reports that it was thought were worth putting on his desk but discovered that all of them merely confirmed material that was already on record. He noticed, too, that so far Sarah Lawson had been unavailable on each occasion the police had called and decided he would attempt to visit her himself. As it was Saturday there was a fair chance he would find her in.

  The SOCO report on Nightingales’ garden and garage, also on his desk, revealed little of real interest. Fingertip searches had found nothing out of the ordinary. The baked earth yielded no footprints, nor were there any disturbed or broken plants. At the far end of the back garden was a tough and densely growing hedge of spiny berberis. Impossible to either climb or push through without leaving plenty of evidence that one had done so.

  All the prints in the garage belonged to Alan Hollingsworth. Nothing untoward had been found there. Gardening tools and a mower. Boxes with half-empty paint tins and some wallpaper but no brushes, turps, rags or rollers. Presumably the Hollingsworths employed a decorator when they needed the place tarting up. It was the car Barnaby was interested in. He picked up his phone, buzzed Forensic and asked how long the report on this would be.

  “Any minute now.”

  “You mean next week?”

  “You know your trouble, Chief Inspector?” said Aubrey. “You’ve no faith in the system.”

  “I can’t think why.”

  As Barnaby replaced the receiver, Sergeant Troy came in and placed a single cup of coffee on his desk. Barnaby immediately wondered what on earth had driven him to ask for it in this weather. Habit, probably. Yet the first sip was very enjoyable.

  “Sergeant Brierley’s in the incident room, chief.” Taut as a wound-up spring, he was, a quivery snap to the voice. “You asked me to let you know when she came in.”

  “Thank you.” Not all the door-to-door team had returned when Barnaby had left the previous night. He was particularly interested in discovering how things were at the Brockleys.

  “You sound rather sour, Gavin. Been putting you through it, has she, our Audrey?”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to say anything but since you mention it,” Troy’s Adam’s apple rose and fell rapidly, “how come it’s suddenly not OK for me to call her Miss Canteloupe of the year but perfectly OK for her to call me a talking dick?”

  “It’s called redressing the balance,” said Barnaby. Then, before the conversation could predictably touch on swings and roundabouts, he added, “Anything worthwhile in over the last half-hour?”

  “I notice she don’t have to go on no Behavioural Correction Course.”

  “I asked you a question.”

/>   Troy pursed his lips. You were supposed to talk about what was worrying you these days in the new, caring sharing cop shop. Lob in for a spot of counselling if you were the wet, spineless sort.

  “Well, there’s been a call from that poncy jeweller in Bond Street. Recognises Hollingsworth’s photo. He is definitely the bloke who bought the necklace. Didn’t clock Simone though. Putting it all in writing for us.”

  “Excellent.”

  “Got the photo fax from Harpers on the actual article. Bloody spectacular, it is. Bet she had to spend some hours on her back to pay for that.”

  “For Christ’s sake, man.”

  “What?”

  “The woman’s been put through hell. By now she’s probably dead.”

  Won’t give a toss what I say then, will she? Troy watched the Brazilian disappearing down Barnaby’s gullet and thought he was a funny bloke, the gaffer. If he hadn’t seen him with his back against the wall fighting his corner, or making an arrest when the bloke was not only armed but high as a kite on amphetamines, or hanging halfway down a cliff trying to talk up some woman who’d drowned her baby—if Troy had not seen all these things and plenty more besides, he might well have got the impression that the DCI was a touch soft-headed.

  They took the lift down to the incident room. Neither man spoke but the younger sneaked a couple of glances sideways. Barnaby looked stern. Imperturbable, you might say, should you be fortunate enough to have access to Talisa-Leanne Troy’s dictionary. The sergeant decided that the chief was cast down at the total lack of possible faces to put in the frame. He could not have been more wrong.

  Unlike his bag carrier, who liked things cut and dried as soon as was humanly possible, Barnaby was quite happy to drift, for a short while at least, in what some early mystic once called the cloud of unknowing. He was also reflecting, with a considerable degree of satisfaction, on the recent departure of his bête noir, Inspector Ian Meredith, a smug Oxbridge know-all from Bramshill, the police training college for the elite. Deciding, like Alexander the Great, to declare himself a god at the age of thirty-two, Meredith had promptly been elevated to the Flying Squad. The whole station had been relieved to see him go. No one wanted the nephew of the Chief Constable sniffing round the place.

  The incident room was not what you’d call lively. Phones were ringing, sure. Staff were studying the notice-boards. Material was being logged and there was a regular low buzz of conversation as information was exchanged, checked, or cross-referenced. But the near frenzy of barely contained activity that could be generated at the start of an urgent or especially dramatic investigation was markedly absent.

  Sergeant Brierley not being immediately visible, Barnaby went to the reader’s desk to catch up on what was currently coming in. As he had expected, there was more hearsay and suggestion than hard facts. Dozens of people thought they had seen Simone. On a ferry to France. Sleeping in a doorway in Glasgow. At a bistro in Old Compton Street, plainly under the influence of drugs. And dancing on a table in the Old Dun Cow, Milton Keynes.

  But there was something really solid from the marketday bus passengers. Two women plus a toddler in a pushchair had followed Simone into Bobby’s, Causton’s only department store. She had gone into the Ladies, as they had themselves. Both had used the toilet but Simone had still not come out by the time they left. Now, wise after the event, both were convinced that “poor Mrs. Hollingsworth” had been hiding “from those dreadful people who were after her.”

  Alan’s first wife had been traced and interviewed in Birkenhead where, after remarrying, she was still working as a general practioner. Barnaby picked up the fascimiled sheets and settled at a desk to read them.

  Miriam Anderson, as she now was, had last heard from her previous husband just before his second marriage. He had sent her and her husband an invitation accompanied by what Dr. Anderson described as a pathetic and childish letter. This described his present happiness in glowing terms. It also dwelt at some length on the youth, beauty and sweetness of his bride. And on how much she adored him.

  “I suppose the idea,” read Barnaby, “was to make me realise, now it was too late, what I’d thrown away. To be honest, it just made me laugh. I was never more glad to escape from anyone than I was from Alan Hollingsworth. And it was not easy by a long chalk. For weeks after I came back up here he was either on the telephone begging me to come back or driving up to the Wirral and making a nuisance of himself. It was only when I threatened to go to the police that he kept away. Even then, for several months, I was bombarded with letters. In the end I used to chuck them in the bin, unopened.”

  Asked in more detail about her first marriage, Dr. Anderson more or less repeated what Barnaby had already heard from Gray Patterson. On hearing of Hollingsworth’s death, she had assumed it was suicide. Although he had never threatened her, he had threatened to harm himself on more than one occasion when she talked about leaving him.

  Dr. Anderson could contribute nothing useful as to the matter or manner of Simone’s abduction. On both dates relevant to the inquiry she had been provably elsewhere.

  Not much meat there—Barnaby pushed the sheets of paper aside—but it was useful to have at least part of Patterson’s statement confirmed.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “Audrey.” He smiled at the sight of her. At her shining cap of blonde hair and peachy skin and tranquil, shining eyes. You couldn’t help it. She gave him a slight but grave smile in return.

  “I was going to wait for briefing but Gavin said you were looking for some feedback on the house-to-house straightaway.”

  Gavin—not Skipper, not Sergeant. Since Audrey had been made up, such respectful distinctions had melted away. And oh, how Troy resented it. The years of pulling rank—and no one pulls rank like the chronically insecure—had come to an end overnight. Barnaby watched with some amusement as Audrey more than came into her own.

  “That’s right. How did you get on at the Brockleys?”

  “They’re absolutely distraught about their daughter. She still hasn’t come back.”

  “And there’s been no more messages?”

  “Nothing. They seem to think we’re actively looking for her. It was a bit awkward, sir.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “I couldn’t tell them there’s no way we can spend time or resources on a missing person’s file unless special circumstances make it necessary.”

  “Well, let’s hope they don’t.”

  “As you suggested, I asked if they had noticed anything at all in the way of comings and goings next door. And I got a really good result.”

  “Excellent. Let’s have it then.”

  “Neither of them have been sleeping much. I gathered that most of their time’s been spent staring out of the window, more or less willing Brenda home. Unlike Mr. Dawlish, they not only heard Hollingsworth drive away the night he died, but they also heard him come back just before eleven. What’s more, they saw him.”

  “Ahh,” said the Chief Inspector aware, even as he spoke, of the muscles in his throat slowly tightening. “Clearly?”

  “Very. There’s a powerful halogen lamp by Nightingales’ garage. Any approach switches it on. He didn’t get out of the car—the garage is remote-controlled—but Iris is absolutely sure it was him. They both paid very close attention. Being excited, you see, when a car turned into the close.”

  “They would be, poor devils. Was he by himself?”

  “Yes. Reg said you could see right into the Volvo. There was no one else in the car.”

  “And afterwards?” His stomach became still and cold, then squeezed itself up into an apprehensive ball, as if in expectation of a blow.

  “I’m sorry sir. Nothing.”

  “Don’t do this to me, Audrey.”

  “No one came to the house, Chief Inspector. Iris watched until nearly one. Then she had a rest and Reg took over till daylight.”

  “Which window was this?”

  “Brenda’s bedroom. It overlooks
the drive next door.”

  “One or the other must’ve dozed off.”

  “They say not.”

  “Made some tea, then. Went to the loo. Christ, they’re only human.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It would only take a minute. Seconds, even. All we need is Brockley momentarily distracted and whoever murdered Hollingsworth would be across the forecourt and knocking on Nightingales’ door.”

  “You think they were waiting, then? Concealed somewhere?”

  “Yes, I do.” Because the alternative, that there was no one waiting and that Hollingsworth, alone in the house, had taken his own life, was insupportable. Barnaby had abandoned that possibility for good and all within minutes of finding the body and he had no intention of reclaiming it.

  “They saw no one leave?”

  “No, Chief Inspector.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Not really. They kept watching but after this only caught what everyone else did. SOCO about the place, officers guarding the house. That sort of thing.”

  “Sod them, then.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It was just about that time, almost to the second, in fact, that Mrs. Molfrey cried out, “Eureka!”

  Not in her bath, as things turned out, but while rootling around with a little hoe among the foxgloves and delphiniums. It was always the case, she thought, flinging down the implement and tottering up the garden path as fast as her twiggy old legs could carry her. Dwell and dwell upon something, seek it out, give it your undivided time and attention and where were you? Up the proverbial gum tree. But put it from your mind, thumb your nose at it even, and here it was, high-kicking its way into your consciousness for all it was worth.

  Mrs. Molfrey had placed Barnaby’s card directly underneath the heavy Bakelite telephone so had no need to hunt for it. She picked it up with trembling hands. Her fingers trembled as she dialled the number and her lips trembled as she prepared to speak. Her mind shook and trembled under the load of this surely revelatory snippet of information.