by Graham Ison
She undressed and hung her uniform in the clothes closet. Crossing the room to her suitcase, she put in the underwear and tights in which she had arrived. During the time she had to wait until the man arrived, she took a much-needed shower. The weather was still in the low eighties Fahrenheit and even the air conditioning in the hotel was struggling to alleviate the humidity.
Emerging from the shower room, she dried herself, brushed her long, honey blonde hair and skilfully applied her make-up. And from her selection of perfumes, she applied the one that had been given to her by the man she was expecting. Next she donned the tiny red thong, matching shelf bra and a pair of sheer black hold-up stockings, all of which she had purchased in Uxbridge. Having slipped into a cream satin robe, she pushed her feet into a pair of black stilettos.
Pouring herself a gin and tonic from the minibar, she sat down in an armchair to await the arrival of her lover.
When the expected knock came, she crossed the room and peered through the peephole. Disconnecting the security chain, she opened the door.
Her lover, attired in a sports shirt and slacks, hastened into the room, pausing only to hang a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the outside handle. He closed the door behind him, locked it and reconnected the security chain.
Sharon slipped off her robe and tossed it on to a chair; it hung there briefly before slithering to the floor. For a moment or two the man stood admiring the girl’s trim and exciting figure. She in turn studied his firm body.
The next twenty seconds were filled with a frenzy of lust as his clothing was strewn about the room and he divested Sharon of her minimal attire, apart from her stockings. Effortlessly lifting her in his arms, he placed her on the bed.
An hour later they lay on top of the duvet, satiated and perspiring. Sharon turned and nestled closer to her lover. ‘I’ve something wonderful to tell you, darling, something that means we can now be together forever,’ she said, moving her hand enticingly down his torso.
Purely on the basis that Fulham was closer to our Empress State Building office than the other names on Sharon’s list, I decided that Dave and I would interview Gordon Harrison first.
It was half past five when we arrived at Glenn Road. Harrison’s terraced house was one of several in the road that had been ‘gentrified’. According to the electoral roll, he lived there by himself. I’d taken a chance on him being at home, and I was lucky.
‘Hi!’ The man who answered the door was attired in shorts, tee-shirt and a pair of flip-flops. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, had a shock of unruly blond hair and was suntanned.
‘Mr Harrison?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I’m Gordon Harrison.’ He looked slightly concerned to be confronted by two strangers on his doorstep, one of whom was six foot tall, well-built and black. ‘You’re not Bible bashers, are you?’
‘No, Mr Harrison, we’re police officers.’ I produced my warrant card to allay any suspicion that we might be undercover evangelists. ‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Brock of Scotland Yard and this is Detective Sergeant Poole.’
‘Are you sure you’ve got the right Gordon Harrison? I mean, what could the police possibly want with me?’ Harrison’s face took on a shifty expression.
‘I think so,’ said Dave. ‘We understand that you’re acquainted with Sharon Gregory.’
‘Oh, Sharon, yah!’ said Harrison, with an air of relief. ‘What’s that sexy blonde bombshell been up to now?’ He stepped forward and shot a glance at the front door that was immediately next to his own, as if fearful that a neighbour might be lurking behind it, listening. ‘You’d better come in and make yourselves comfortable.’
Now that Harrison had said more than a few words, I detected a possibly contrived mid-Atlantic accent. We followed him into his sitting room which, like the hall, had woodblock flooring. I was conscious of the noise my shoes made as we crossed to the only two armchairs in the room.
‘What’s this about Sharon, then? Has something happened to the gorgeous creature? She hasn’t crashed that Mini Cooper of hers, has she?’ Harrison opened the Venetian blinds, moved the chair from his computer workstation, and swung it round so that he could sit down opposite us.
I heard a door closing upstairs somewhere and Harrison cast a nervous glance across the room.
‘She was the victim of a rather brutal burglary last Saturday evening,’ I said, ‘during the course of which her husband was murdered.’
‘Her husband!’ Harrison’s face registered shock. Although whether it was shock at the news of Clifford Gregory’s murder or the fact that Sharon was married was not immediately apparent.
‘I take it you didn’t know she was married, Mr Harrison,’ said Dave, rightly assuming the latter to be the case.
‘Christ, no! I certainly didn’t. How long had she been married?’
‘About seven years,’ said Dave.
‘Ye Gods!’ exclaimed Harrison. ‘Well, the deceitful little bitch. She never mentioned a husband.’
‘How did you meet her?’ I asked.
‘On a flight to Miami. I go there quite often. She’s an air hostess, you know.’
‘Yes, we know. Were you travelling to Miami on business?’
‘Sure. I fly to the States quite a lot. I arrange bespoke holidays for rich executives.’
That explained the accent I’d noticed earlier. Maybe.
‘What on earth are bespoke holidays for rich executives?’ asked Dave.
Harrison gave a boyish grin. ‘Between you and me, it’s for guys who’ve got more money than they know what to do with. Often they’re the sort who work in the financial sector and get a bigger bonus than I make in a year, and that’s saying something. They come to me to arrange a custom-built holiday at virtually any place of their choosing. Money no object. And I arrange all the bookings on the Internet, so it keeps my overheads down.’ He half turned to wave at his computer. ‘But I still have to go to these places and check them out. More often than not, they want a discreet hideaway so they can take their latest squeeze for a dirty weekend. Or even a week. I suppose they tell their wives or current live-ins that they’re away on business, but should I worry?’
‘How very deceitful,’ murmured Dave.
‘Yeah, it is, isn’t it?’ said Harrison with a laugh. ‘But I make a handsome profit out of it.’
‘Is Miami always the venue for these getaways?’ I asked, thinking that the story he’d just told was too good to be true.
‘Not always, although that’s one of the more popular destinations. Well, Florida and California are the two favourites, but I travel all over the world. I even arranged one for a guy who wanted to spend a week at a monastery in the Himalayas. And before you ask, no, he didn’t take his bird with him. As a matter of fact, I think he finished up staying there for good. Still, it takes all sorts, I suppose.’
‘When did you last see Sharon Gregory?’ I asked, steering Harrison away from verbally downloading his holiday brochure.
Harrison pondered the question. ‘About a month ago, I suppose,’ he said eventually. ‘We spent a happy forty-eight hours in a hotel room overlooking Miami Beach. And that wasn’t the first time, either. Mind you, I don’t think I was the only guy in her life. But I didn’t know she was married; she wasn’t wearing a ring or anything.’ He forced a laugh. ‘In fact, she wasn’t wearing anything at all most of the time,’ he added, and lapsed momentarily into silence. ‘D’you reckon it was one of those other guys who murdered her husband?’
‘We’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘Was it you?’ Sometimes the occasional direct question produces an unexpected admission. But not this time.
‘Christ, no! As I said, I didn’t even know she was married.’
‘I presume you met on a flight when she was on duty?’ said Dave.
‘That’s right. That must’ve been about a year or so ago, I suppose. Nine hours is quite a long time to get to know someone, and she made a point of giving me the address of the stopover hotel where she’d be staying wi
th the crew. Three times! And finished up by jotting it down on one of those little paper mats they put the drinks on. I guessed I was on a promise, so I changed my hotel reservation and spent a pleasant couple of nights in the sack with her.’
‘Has she been in touch with you recently, say, in the last twenty-four hours?’ I was hoping that Sharon had contacted him and told him where she was. But again I was disappointed.
‘No. I gave her my mobile number ages ago so she could tell me when she’d next be going to Miami, but I haven’t heard from her since the last time we were there. I suppose we must’ve arranged meetings at her hotel in Miami at least four or five times over the past year. I even thought about getting serious over her, though I guessed she was seeing other guys. But now you tell me she’s married.’
‘Not any more she isn’t,’ said Dave.
‘I might call her, then,’ said Harrison.
‘If you do find her, perhaps you’d let me know,’ I said, as we rose to leave. I handed Harrison one of my cards. ‘We’re rather anxious to have a word with her. Just to tidy up a few loose ends.’
‘Yeah, sure.’ Harrison tucked the card into a pocket of his shorts, and escorted us to the front door.
‘Who was that, darling?’ A coffee-skinned Jamaican girl wearing only a pair of denim shorts entered the living room once she was satisfied that the front door was closed.
‘The police, Shona, my love,’ said Harrison.
‘The police! What did they want?’
‘It was something to do with the car, but they got the wrong car and the wrong Gordon Harrison.’
‘That’s all right, then. I thought for one horrible moment it might’ve been your wife. Or worse still that they were on to you about your other business.’
‘No chance of that, sweetie. And as for Krisztina, she’s in Botoşani visiting her parents.’ Harrison told the lie smoothly; it didn’t do for the two women in his enterprise to know too much about each other.
‘Good.’ Shona moved closer and put her arms around Harrison’s neck. ‘Now, where were we when we were so rudely interrupted?’
‘One down and five to go,’ I said, as we drove away from Fulham.
‘And two of those are in the States,’ said Dave hopefully. ‘D’you think …?’
‘No, Dave. Don’t get too excited,’ I said. ‘The commander would have a blue fit if I suggested we flew there in pursuit of our enquiries.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘Drop me at Waterloo Station and then go home.’
I caught the train to Surbiton with minutes to spare and immediately called Gail on my mobile, resisting the temptation to use that hackneyed phrase that one hears so often: ‘I’m on a train.’
‘Hello, stranger,’ said Gail. ‘Is there any danger of my seeing you in the near future?’ In the course of our relationship, Gail Sutton had become somewhat blasé about my job and the antisocial hours that went with it.
‘I’m on my way, darling,’ I said. ‘I should be with you in about half an hour. And I’m hungry.’
‘Hungry for what?’ asked Gail.
I’d met Gail some years ago while investigating the murder of her friend Patricia Hunter. They had both been appearing in the chorus line of a second-rate revue called Scatterbrain at London’s Granville Theatre.
There is a story behind Gail’s demotion from actress to chorus girl. A year or so prior to that, she’d been appearing in the lead female role of Amanda Prynne in a revival of Sir Noël Coward’s Private Lives at the Richmond Theatre. Feeling unwell, she’d handed over the part to her understudy and returned home unexpectedly to find her husband, Gerald Andrews, in the marital bed with a nude dancer who, according to Gail, was still performing in character. That was the final indignity to be visited upon Gail by her philandering husband and signalled the end of a marriage that had fast been unravelling anyway. After the divorce Gail had reverted to using her maiden name of Sutton.
However, in a chauvinistically unreasonable act of spite, Andrews, a theatrical director, had done his best to prevent Gail from getting any decent parts thereafter. Hence her appearance in the chorus line at the Granville. Or as she described it: ‘Kicking the air for a living.’
Not that Gail had to worry about earning a living. Her father, George, was a multimillionaire property developer whose home and business were in Nottingham, and he gave his only daughter a generous allowance. George’s only apparent vice was a tendency to talk non-stop about the land speed record and Formula One motor racing until his wife, Sally, an effervescent former dancer, told him to shut up. But I could put up with non-stop lectures about such historical luminaries as Sir Malcolm Campbell, Sir Henry Segrave, Tazio Nuvolari, Hans Stück and their contemporaries on the odd occasion that I was in George’s company.
Alighting from the train at Surbiton, I bought a bottle of chilled champagne from a local wine shop and took a taxi to Kingston.
Gail’s neo-Georgian townhouse – a euphemism for a modern three-storied terraced house – was only a mile or so from my flat on the other side of Surbiton railway station. But these days I tended to spend more time at Gail’s house, and in her bed, than at my own pad.
I let myself in with the key that Gail had given me a few months ago. In return, I’d given her a key to my flat. It was a sort of compromise; we had discussed my moving in with her, but had eventually reached a mutual agreement that our relationship might become less harmonious if we lived with each other on a permanent basis. This was especially true given the odd hours at which I was called back to duty.
‘Where are you?’ I shouted.
‘In here,’ Gail replied unhelpfully.
I took a guess and walked through to the dining room on the ground floor. Gail was busy setting out some exotic cold supper. Barefooted, she was attired in a pair of short denim shorts that were almost hidden by one of my casual shirts. I’d often wondered where that shirt had gone.
‘Ah, the wanderer returns,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen you for ages, darling. What’s kept you away? Another dead body?’
‘You guessed,’ I said, as I opened the champagne and took a couple of flutes from the sideboard.
‘I’m just about finished here. Let’s go upstairs and have our drink.’
I gave her a hug and a kiss, and ran my forefinger up her spine, but she smacked my hand away. ‘First things first,’ she said playfully.
‘Just what I was thinking,’ I said. I picked up the two glasses and the bottle and followed her upstairs to the sitting room.
The meal was superb, as usual – Gail’s a brilliant cook – and I drank too much wine. Declaring myself unfit to walk home, and having no hope of finding a taxi, I stayed the night. Again.
I arrived at work about nine o’clock on Tuesday morning, feeling tired and reminding myself not to spend the night with Gail when I’m working on a case. And not to drink too much.
I’d just settled in my office with a strong cup of coffee and a couple of paracetamol tablets when Colin Wilberforce appeared on the scene.
‘What is it, Colin?’
‘An interesting development, sir. I did the usual routine check of criminal records on all the names that have come up so far in the enquiry. The only one to have previous convictions is Sidney Miller, Sharon Gregory’s neighbour.’
‘Oh?’ I took a sip of my coffee, but decided I didn’t need the paracetamol after all. There’s nothing quite like that sort of revelation to bring me back to life. ‘What’s his form, Colin?’
‘One for burglary when he was seventeen, sir …’ Wilberforce smiled knowingly. ‘And one for rape when he was thirty years of age. He was sent down for a seven-year stretch, but was released on licence after he’d served three and a half years. He was placed on the Sex Offenders’ Register for twenty years. He’s got another five to go before he’s clear.’
‘What did he get for the burglary?’
‘Probation, sir. It seemed there were extenuating circumstances.’
‘Is that it, Colin?’
‘You mean he hasn’t been caught. Thank you, Colin.’
For the next ten minutes I mulled over the implications of a convicted housebreaker living next door to a recently burgled house. Especially one where the householder had been murdered.
I sent for Kate Ebdon. ‘I’ve heard, guv,’ she said, when I began to tell her about Miller’s past. ‘What d’you intend to do about it?’
‘I’ve thought all along that Sharon Gregory’s burglar was an accomplice, rather than an unknown intruder, Kate. I want you and Dave to go out to West Drayton and feel Miller’s collar on suspicion of aggravated burglary. That’ll do for a start, but we might be able to up it to murder if we’re lucky.’
‘Shall I take him to Uxbridge nick? I think that’s the nearest.’
‘To hell with that,’ I said. ‘Bring him up to Fulham. And give me a ring when you’re there. Of course, he might be out plumbing, but his bosomy wife will probably know where he can be found.’
It was midday before I heard from Kate. ‘I’ve got him banged up in Fulham, guv, and he’s not happy.’
‘I didn’t expect him to be, Kate. I’ll be with you shortly. Has he said anything, apart from complaining?’
‘Nothing relevant, guv.’
EIGHT
‘What’s this all about, Mr Brock? I ain’t done nothing wrong,’ whined Miller plaintively, the moment that Dave and I entered the interview room at Fulham police station in Heckfield Road. It was apparent that the confident, almost cocky plumber we’d interviewed at his home in West Drayton had reverted to type, replaced by the obsequious ex-con.
Dave turned on the recording machine and announced who was present.
‘Twenty-eight years ago you were convicted of a burglary at a dwelling house in Harwich, Mr Miller,’ I began.
‘It was a mistake,’ said Miller.
‘They always say that,’ murmured Dave.