by Janet Neel
‘Where’s Miss Vernon?’ he said, peremptorily.
‘She’s just been here, but she isn’t right now.’ It was young Woolner again, restored to duty after a break. ‘Shall I go and look?’
‘No, don’t leave Makin, stay right where you are. Go and look and tell me what he’s doing?’
There was a slight clatter as Woolner put the phone down. Then, ‘Asleep, sir, and all the indications are fine, heart, pulse, everything.’
Intelligent, competent bloke, McLeish thought, even through his worries, who had learned which of the appalling tangle of wires and screens in Makin’s room did what. DC Woolner would certainly be asked to work for him again, if he himself remained at the Yard.
‘Don’t move, don’t leave him, don’t let any visitors in. Just say it’s my orders and go on saying it, and keep them out by force if need be.’
The phone rang as he put it down.
‘Sir? The driver dropped Mrs Vernon ten minutes ago.’
‘Get me some help at Hornton Street, Michaels. Unmarked cars, six men. Now. No sirens. No one to force entry, they’re to wait for me – we’ll be there in ten or fifteen minutes ourselves.’
‘Why not ring up Hornton Street, John?’ Bruce Davidson, driving right on the end of the danger limit, shot the car through a gap to the accompaniment of outraged hooting.
‘I’d been wondering about that. I don’t want to cause panic.’ He chewed his lower lip.
‘What’s the charge? We should at least start getting the warrant.’
‘Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it?’ McLeish rolled the window down to signal left across two streams of furious drivers. ‘I can’t actually prove anything at the moment.’
‘It’s no’ as bad as that, John. You have motive and opportunity,’ Davidson protested.
‘Not enough as it stands. Right at this moment I can’t see us being allowed to prosecute.’
‘It’ll have to be a confession, then?’
‘Or another murder. Is traffic always like this here? Go on the pavement, Bruce, use the siren; we’re still far enough away.’
The phone rang as he was hanging out of the passenger window, shouting at pedestrians to get off the pavement, and he ignored it until they had cleared the narrow street and had screamed round three sides of a square. ‘Turn the siren off. McLeish here.’
‘Woolner, sir. Miss Vernon isn’t here: I think she may have left the hospital. Mr Makin is fine, still asleep.’
He chewed his lip. ‘So she’s on her way. Thanks.’
‘It’ll take her a long time to sort out where everyone is, John. We’ve got time.’
‘I thought she’d missed it, actually. Clever of her. I thought we’d left her peacefully holding Makin’s hand for the duration.’
Davidson sought for some comfort. ‘At least Hamilton’s under lock and key.’
‘I bloody nearly let him out, you know. Thank God I didn’t weaken.’
A mile away in the kitchen in Hornton Street Bill Vernon was sitting, more frightened than he had ever been, his coffee steaming unregarded beside him, watching his stepmother drink hers. She was nervous, he thought, dully, the diamonds in her rings flashing as her hands tensed round the coffee cup, but determined.
‘Well, darling, you just got the time wrong. What can we do?’ He heard his voice shake.
‘I’d not feel able, Bill, to let your father go ahead with this afternoon without being clear in my own mind.’ Dorothy put her cup down and looked him full in the face. ‘I saw you, not twenty yards away from me, and I put my glasses on to make sure. I only saw your back, but I’ve known you nearly all your life. And it was seven-twenty, because I looked at my watch. So I decided I’d wait until you’d gone – as I’ve told you. Then you came out running and rubbing at your face. What happened, Bill? Did you find him hurt and dared not tell the police?’
Bill hesitated, considering his options very carefully. ‘I was with Susy by eight-thirty, Dorothy,’ he protested.
‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ she said, sweeping aside his statement. ‘I’ve not slept, Bill, for thinking that you might have left Nigel injured, dying perhaps. It wasn’t you who raised the alarm, I know. It was Francesca’s boyfriend who found him. I’ve lied to that young man, and signed the lie, because I wanted to talk to you first myself. He knows I was there, but he doesn’t know it was you I saw.’
Bill’s attention was caught by the phrasing. ‘Who did you tell him you had seen?’
His stepmother blushed. ‘Michael Hamilton: you’re much of a height and I knew I could say later I might have been mistaken. Anyway, he’d been there earlier and he’s the type to have been on the take. I thought the police had the right man.’
‘Does my father know you’re here?’
‘No, Bill, I’ve always tried to bring you and your father together. I came to you first. But you haven’t told me what happened.’
He looked back at her, frozen with panic, and watched with horror and a sort of relief as her expression changed.
‘Was it you who did it, Bill?’
He nodded, unable to speak. ‘I was frightened,’ he managed, after a minute, feeling deathly tired and wanting only comfort.
‘You were part of the lorry fiddle, and Nigel was getting close to you?’ Dorothy Vernon looked out of the window, the coffee suddenly sour in her mouth. ‘You were stealing from us. Why, Bill?’
‘I needed money. I’d no idea you were going to persuade Dad to give me any, let alone such a lot. I didn’t know you’d do that for me. I couldn’t work in Vernon for the rest of my life, it felt like prison, and I’d spent what I had at twenty-one. I’m no good as a QS, but I’d be a good farmer. I’m sorry, Dorothy, I’m so sorry.’ He reached out for her hand, then let his own fall back as she turned to face him.
‘And what about Nigel?’
‘I didn’t mean to hit him so hard. I went in to talk to him about something else, and when I noticed the site log books, I just wanted to get them away. When you saw me I was, honest to God, on my way to a call-box to get help, but then I saw a police car come past and I thought the nightwatchman must have called it, so I ran.’ He paused. ‘I’ve rung the hospital; Makin’s going to be all right.’ He watched her steady face. ‘Can’t you forget it, Dorothy? I’ll never, ever, do anything like that again.’
‘Of course I can’t. Bill.’ She sounded, he registered dully, simply surprised. ‘I have to talk to Robert and we’ll decide what’s to be done, though it would be better if you told him yourself.’
He watched, stunned, as she rose to go, collecting her coat and placing her coffee cup and saucer on the draining-board.
‘I can’t,’ he said, agonized. ‘I can’t lose everything, I can’t. I won’t.’
She looked back at him, amazingly and appallingly unfrightened. ‘I have to talk to your father. He’ll want to know who else was in the theft with you, of course.’
‘Alan Fraser and I organized it.’
He saw her slowly understand her danger. Her hands flew up as he approached her and he tasted blood as her rings cut his lip. He pushed violently back, banging her head against the wall, one large hand over her mouth to silence her, and had to suppress a shout of pain as she bit him. Using all his strength, he smashed her head against the wall once more and, as her knees sagged, lowered her to the floor. Not dead, he thought, frantically, I must get her out of my flat and I must kill her and leave her somewhere where no one can ever find her. Once this afternoon is over it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks, I’ll be free.
He picked up the unconscious, astonishingly heavy bundle, slippery and difficult to grasp in the thick fur coat, and kicked open the door from the kitchen. He staggered through the passage and into his garage, walking round to the back of the big Volvo. He was trying to free one hand from his burden to get the boot open when a dreadful volley of thuds and kicks started up outside and he froze. Then, unbelieving, he heard the splintering crash of his own front door being
broken off its hinges, and the passage filled with running men. Bill stood, transfixed, his burden still in his arms, and the big man in the lead stopped so sharply that the following squad was taken off balance and piled up behind him.
‘Hello, John,’ Bill said, relieved to see someone he knew.
‘Is she dead?’ John McLeish asked calmly, and Bill wondered, distracted, why he was breathing so hard.
‘I don’t think so,’ he answered, and gave the bundle a shake.
‘Let me take her.’ John McLeish was beside him and another man, and they were laying Dorothy down in the passage and John was kneeling beside her while the other man was speaking urgently into his radio, asking for an ambulance. Then McLeish straightened up, breathing more easily now and looking enormous in the narrow corridor.
‘William Vernon, I hereby arrest you on the charge that you did on Tuesday, September 20th, feloniously assault Nigel Makin, with intent to kill. You have the right to remain silent, but anything you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence against you.’
Bill stared at him and felt the corridor start to move: blackness came up and swallowed him as his head went back and his feet slipped from under him.
‘Sorry, too quick for me.’ McLeish was kneeling beside Bill Vernon, who had gone down like a tree. ‘Clipped his head on the bumper. We’ll need another ambulance.’
In the event, they sent Bill Vernon, a huge pad tied incongruously to the side of his head, off with Davidson and a constable in the first ambulance, to get him out of the way. McLeish was kneeling in the corridor beside the young male nurse who was getting an oxygen supply into Dorothy Vernon’s mouth when he saw, over the concentrated bent head, Sally Vernon bang the door of a cab and come rushing over to them.
‘Mum,’ she called, agonized, as she ran towards them. ‘Mum!’
McLeish caught her before she bumped into the stretcher.
‘She’ll be all right, Sally, she’s just had a knock on the head.’ He let her through, keeping a restraining hand on her arm, and she dropped on her knees beside her mother. ‘Mum?’ she said, in agony, stroking her mother’s cheek. ‘She looks awful. Oh, Mum.’
The young male nurse observed that people always looked worse without their dental plates, but it was still a bad injury. She would be much more comfortable in hospital if he could now have space to move her.
Sally stood up looking horrified and clutched at McLeish, who held her back to let the stretcher pass. ‘Never mind that young man, he’s maybe missed the bit of the course where they tell you about reassuring the patient’s relatives. Just you go with her.’
She watched while they packed the stretcher. ‘It was Bill, then?’ she asked, painfully.
‘Yes. Your mother must have seen him on site although she lied to me about it. He had put his watch back, and his girl never noticed that he picked her up much later than eight-thirty. His watch was still wrong the next day, but I didn’t connect that with the facts till mine stopped this morning.’ He considered Sally severely. ‘I may not have been at my best, but your mother deliberately lied to me. She’s bloody lucky to be alive. And a good deal of credit goes to Makin for remembering what was in the logs.’
‘I was on both the sites too.’ Sally turned back to face him as she climbed into the ambulance.
‘You didn’t need the money.’
She looked back at him, and McLeish saw her suddenly as she would look in twenty years’ time. Then the doors were closed and they were gone.
McLeish surveyed his remaining troops; one sergeant and three DCs which, added to the two who had gone in the ambulances, pretty much exhausted the CID force available at Chelsea that morning. He asked the sergeant to stay, and released the rest, to their obvious disappointment.
Upstairs in the flat with the sergeant, he was unwilling to disturb anything until the Forensic team could arrive, so confined himself to looking but not touching. He stopped in front of a small landscape, recognizing the town: it was Jedburgh, viewed from a distance across rolling hills. The picture was pleasing, although he could hear in his head one or other of the Wilson family observing that there was a lot of this sort of painting about, particularly in Scotland. But whether good or indifferent, it represented a long-held ambition which its owner was not now going to realize, and for which he had been prepared to kill. McLeish stood looking at the picture, wondering if there was anything or anyone for which or for whom he would kill. Would he kill to protect? Well – yes: anyone who tried to harm Francesca would not be safe. But would he kill to acquire? He was roused from this contemplation by Michaels on the telephone telling him that Forensic would be with him in fifteen minutes, and that Robert Vernon had been found and was speeding back from Bedford. What, he asked, should be done about Mickey Hamilton, if anything?
‘We can’t prove that Vernon killed Alan Fraser. Hamilton may be our best witness. Don’t do anything; leave him there.’
He waited for Forensic, and watched as the search started. The site logs and the torn-up remains of the computer programme were in the desk, thrust into a bottom drawer; a smudge of blood on the opening page of one log would presumably match that of Nigel Makin. There were also two bank-account folders, one for an account in Geneva and one in Jersey. But there was nothing to connect Bill Vernon with the murder of Alan Fraser; even the bathroom cupboard was innocent of anything more lethal than soluble aspirin.
McLeish wandered through to the kitchen and looked longingly at the kettle. No, Forensic had not yet got in there. He would maybe just go and see if he could get the thermos which Francesca had given him filled while Forensic made some more progress. He peered out of the window to see if he could spot a likely café, and stopped, frozen. Everything was suddenly unnaturally quiet and all the colours around him were very bright, as he stood unmoving, waiting for the thing that had snagged his attention to declare itself again. His eyes focused on the windowsill. A depressed-looking plant, two milk bottles and a blue-and-white thermos. McLeish gaped at it as if it were a bomb and shouted for the nearest member of the Forensic team.
‘Print it and measure it,’ he said, urgently. ‘Can I use the phone?’ He picked the receiver up, sticky from the fingerprint powder, and nearly dropped it. ‘The Fraser case, Fred,’ he said as it was answered, no longer feeling tired or conscious of a desire for coffee. The thermos – the one the dope was in, of course. I don’t mean dope, I mean antihistamine. What does it look like?’ he waited, barely able to breathe while the patient man at the other end went off to look.
‘One clear print, one partial, John. Not the flat-owner’s.’ It was the leader of the Forensic team.
‘Put it in a bag. Yes, Fred?’ He repeated the description and the measurements of the thermos that reposed in the custody of his people at the Yard to the Forensics man, who was nodding. ‘Thanks, Fred. Don’t lose it, will you?’
‘A duplicate, John?’ the Forensics man at his side asked, interested.
‘Yes, please God. I must get it back to the Yard and match those prints.’
‘Whose will they be?’
‘Alan Fraser’s, I hope.’
18
‘But they weren’t Alan’s? They didn’t match?’
‘No. They were Bill Vernon’s girlfriend’s prints, and two of his.’
John McLeish had arrived unannounced at Francesca’s house and found Peregrine and Charlie there. Both had immediately declared their intention of leaving and were poised in attitudes of imminent departure on kitchen chairs, but neither of them, blast them, was actually making a move. He roused himself to explain, realizing that it was probably the only way to get them to go.
‘I hoped, you see, that we’d be able to nail Bill Vernon. A duplicate thermos is the only explanation that makes sense: it just isn’t possible that the antihistamine was in the milk, the sugar or the tea. Too indirect, too risky – we all saw that once we settled down to think. You couldn’t be sure that Alan would take enough sugar or milk, and you also couldn’t
be sure someone else in the gang wouldn’t knock himself out or turn giddy and ruin the whole plan. It had to be some method of delivering the antihistamine infallibly to Alan, and to Alan alone.’
‘But you can’t pin it on Bill Vernon?’
‘Not yet. But I had a team going round the local chemists with photographs, looking for anyone who had bought several packets of any brand of antihistamine at one time – and I’ve now sent them back to ask about blue-and-white thermoses.’
Charlie and Perry gazed at him. ‘Who is on that sort of team? The ordinary copper?’
‘No, no, a detective sergeant with a few detective constables. I did it when I was starting. Most police work is routine,’ he added, noticing the disbelieving, sidelong looks both younger men were giving him.
‘I see,’ Perry said, recovering himself and putting down his glass in a way that inspired McLeish to hope that he was actually now going to leave. Charlie destroyed this possibility by asking, diffidently, what was actually happening at this moment. ‘I mean, you have a team out at all the chemists, but where is everyone else? What is happening to all the Vernons?’
It would be Charlie, the most contemplative and thoughtful of the gang, who had asked after Bill Vernon’s family, McLeish thought. He deserved an answer.
‘Well, Bill is still in the Scrubs hospital, pretty much in a state of shock. He’ll have to come up tomorrow before magistrates, and we’ll ask for him to be remanded on bail. We’ve charged him with attempted murder of his stepmother.’
‘What about the attack on Nigel Makin? Did he not do that?’ Perry asked.
‘Oh yes, but we haven’t got the case absolutely clear. We need to go over a witness’s statement again.’
‘How is Dorothy Vernon?’ Francesca asked.
‘She’s in the Wellington, conscious, but not able to talk. Sally is rushing between her mother and Nigel, who is still in St. Mary’s. He’s doing all right – he’ll be out in a couple of days.’
‘I saw Robert Vernon today, but I didn’t like to ask about the others,’ Francesca said, soberly. ‘He came in just to talk to Bill Westland and me for five minutes and said that we would understand, of course, that he could do nothing for the moment other than try to look after his family. We made noises of inarticulate sympathy – even my good godfather couldn’t manage to say anything sensible to someone whose wife had been half killed by his son.’