by Diane Janes
THIRTY-TWO
‘She sounds like a far better detective than you or Tom,’ Mo said when Fran had finished relating the conversation to her that evening. ‘How on earth does she know so much about all these people anyway?’
‘She stumbled across the information about the VC by accident and it was the same with John James really. Apparently they arranged to meet, so that she could hand over all her membership files, and he was tying the trip in with attending an athletics meeting somewhere. I’ve no idea how she knew about Mr Winterbottom and the singing – just from casual chit-chat, I suppose.’
‘But all that business with that horrible Latchford man and those other women. I think it’s absolutely scandalous that this Miss Rumsey went out of her way to look into the whole business, but then, when she finally got to the bottom of it, the wretched committee refused to do anything about it.’
‘Basically that’s because he blackmailed them into keeping quiet.’
‘Tommyrot!’ exclaimed Mo. ‘They ought to have stood up to him. If that Allonby fellow had told him to sue and be damned, he would have soon backed down. You can’t win a slander case if what people are saying about you is true. If you ask me, I think your society behaved in a pretty cowardly, shabby kind of way. Anyway, after what Miss Rumsey has told you, I assume that Stephen Latchford goes right to the top of the list of suspects?’
‘You suppose right, except that I can’t quite see what he stood to gain by killing her.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, murdering someone is pretty drastic.’
‘I should say so.’
‘To murder someone in this particular way required a lot of advance planning and must have carried a certain amount of risk.’
‘I’m with you so far.’
‘One woman had complained to the committee about Latchford bothering her and her complaint had got her precisely nowhere. Jennifer Rumsey had uncovered other victims of his attentions and still nothing was done, and Linda Dexter had never shown any signs of complaining about him at all, so where’s the motive?’
‘We can’t be absolutely sure that she hadn’t said anything about him bothering her.’
‘If she had complained to the committee recently then I’m sure that Tom and I would have heard about it, and if she had gone direct to the police that would have made him a suspect after she died – particularly as they knew that he was in the room opposite to hers – so the fact that he wasn’t treated as a suspect and that the police believe there were no suspicious circumstances rather suggests that there was no complaint.’
Mo considered this with her head on one side. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘In which case, as you say, what is Latchford’s motive for getting rid of her?’
‘Oh dear … Well, there’s possible gain, but for that we would need to tie him to the Harpers somehow, because Mrs Harper is the only one who inherits. There’s the need to silence Linda over her research …’
‘Which brings in the hotel people and your society chairman, but not Mr Latchford.’
‘And Mr Chairman has a secondary motive inasmuch that he probably doesn’t want news of his affair getting back to Mrs Allonby. Although I have to admit that there’s nothing to suggest Linda Dexter even knew that something was going on between him and Mrs Ingoldsby – I didn’t, until Tom pointed it out to me.’
Mo shook her head and clicked her tongue in mock disapproval. ‘And you call yourself a detective?’
‘Finally, there’s the Halfpenny Landing murders.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Mo said. ‘But I just don’t see how that comes into it at all.’
‘Nor do I, really. It just sort of hangs about, like a bit of jigsaw puzzle that won’t fit.’
‘How old is Stephen Latchford?’
‘I’m not entirely sure. In his forties, I would guess.’
‘So he’s the right age to have fought in the war?’
‘Easily.’
‘Well then, couldn’t he be your escaped murderer? This chap who was rumoured to have joined up and then been killed, but who could just as easily have managed to circulate a rumour of his death, survived the war and gone on to make a new life for himself elsewhere? How old was that chap when the Halfpenny Landing murders took place?’
‘About twenty-one, twenty-two, something like that. I’ve got it written in my notes. But Stephen Latchford can’t have been the Halfpenny Landing killer, because Marcus Dryden knew him and his family before the war.’
Mo was still reluctant to let go of the idea and used her fingers for some swift arithmetic before saying, ‘If he was twenty-one in 1914, then he would be thirty-six now. That does fit – or nearly fit – with Latchford.’
‘And half the other men in the society. We’ve got a lot of ex-servicemen.’
‘How old is Tom Dod?’
‘I don’t know.’ To her annoyance, Fran felt her cheeks colour. ‘He doesn’t seem as old as thirty-six.’
‘How old is his son?’
‘He had his tenth birthday last month. Tom mentioned it.’
‘Most men don’t marry until their mid-twenties.’
There was a moment’s silence before Mo said, ‘But anyway, why would the Halfpenny Landing man want to murder Linda Dexter now, after all this time?’
‘I don’t know. Clearly there was something very peculiar about the whole business at Halfpenny Landing. You have this young man, Edwin Traynor, who first of all sets his cap at the sister who doesn’t have any money and then jilts her in favour of the younger stepsister who is an heiress. He becomes secretly engaged to this girl and gets her to make a will in his favour, and then he murders her and her surviving parent, hoping to inherit the family fortune. What’s the first thing that strikes you about that situation?’
‘That he’s a nasty, greedy little beast?’
‘Apart from that?’
Mo favoured her friend with a blank look. ‘Go on, Sexton Blake, I know you’re dying to tell me.’
‘He would be the obvious suspect.’
‘Well, yes, clearly.’
‘Think about it. You have gone to all that trouble to get the girl to fall in love with you, make her will and so forth. You commit an elaborate murder which involves, from memory, stealing a boat and hiking miles across the countryside, and then when the police come knocking at your door, as you know that they inevitably will, you don’t have an alibi ready and waiting.’
‘It would be pretty difficult to have an alibi if you had been out murdering your fiancée and her father. On the other hand, I suppose that if you said you had spent the entire night at home, alone, although that’s pretty lame, it’s then up to the police to prove that it wasn’t the case.’
‘But don’t you see?’ There was a growing note of excitement in Fran’s voice. ‘Edwin Traynor did something far worse than provide your “lame” alibi. He told the police a story which they were able to disprove straight away.’
‘Remind me?’
‘He told them that he had spent the evening with Linda, the stepsister and his old flame. It was a lie and, worse still for him, she could easily prove that it was a lie, because she had spent the evening with some other friends at a party.’
‘Why on earth …’
‘Would he say that?’ Fran finished the sentence for her. ‘One can’t help thinking that if he really was innocent, bumping into the stepsister would have provided a perfect alibi because no one would expect someone who had previously been thrown over by young Mr Traynor to volunteer him a false alibi, whereas people might suspect that someone like his mother would lie to save him from the gallows.’
‘Well, yes, I can see why it would have been a godsend for him, if it had really happened that way, but what would be the point of saying it when it wasn’t true? Quite obviously the jilted girlfriend would tell the truth and say that he had not been with her that night.’
‘Bear with me. We agree that if he was guilty and had to choose someone who he hoped would lie
for him, then his mother, or a good friend, or basically almost anyone, would be a far better proposition than the girl he’d thrown over for her richer stepsister … unless, that is, you’d been planning the whole thing with her from the very beginning.’
‘But surely … No, hold on a minute …’
‘It’s far-fetched, I admit, but you can see, can’t you, that it is possible?’
‘So,’ Mo mused. ‘How would it work? He would do the evil deed and inherit the money, and she would be the person who provided him with his perfect alibi, thanks to this apparently accidental meeting.’
‘And later on,’ Fran took up the theory, ‘they would be drawn together again in their supposed mutual grief and, after a respectable interval, they would get married and the money would be theirs.’
‘Except, of course, that it didn’t pan out like that at all.’
‘No,’ Fran said, ‘because if I’m right about this, the plan was even more complicated than that. Suppose you were the jealous, impoverished stepsister who had secretly always hated the father who had deserted you, and his other daughter, the spoiled little rich girl who had always had so much more than you. Then let’s suppose that you met a young man who was not only besotted with you, but was as black-hearted as you were. Let’s imagine that you dangled the prospect of that fortune under his nose and, between the pair of you, you came up with a plan for the perfect murder. The actual murder was to be committed by the boyfriend, for whom you, the jilted sister, would unexpectedly provide an alibi. Or, rather, you promised him that you would provide the alibi, but in fact you had a quite different plan.’
‘Oh my goodness.’ Mo clapped a hand to her mouth. ‘Now I see it! The police turn up to question him and he tells them the story that he and Linda have planned together, but then she doesn’t back him up. He would be in a cleft stick, because he couldn’t possibly tell the police about her part in the scheme without also admitting that he did the murder and putting a rope around his neck.’
‘Precisely. Telling the truth about her would not have got him off – even if the jury believed him. His best hope was to come up with an alternative alibi and hope to get off completely.’
Mo gasped. ‘She meant to get him hanged, at which point she would have inherited everything.’
‘According to Tom, she would probably have inherited anyway. The police assumed at the time that he didn’t understand the way the inheritance laws worked, but the real explanation was that under the plan as he understood it, it didn’t matter who was going to inherit, because the two of them would live happily ever after, sharing the loot.’
‘She persuaded him to commit her murder.’
‘Precisely. Remember what her stepsister said about Linda’s secret jealousy? I thought she had kept that photograph of her father’s house for sentimental reasons, but it wasn’t that at all. If she had really cared about her father, she would have kept a picture of him. She kept that photograph of the house as a kind of trophy. It was proof that she had had the last laugh.’
‘You have to admit,’ Mo said, ‘that it would be a jolly clever plan. Far better to frame someone for the killing, because that would put you completely in the clear, instead of leaving everyone forever speculating about an unsolved mystery.’
‘And the plan almost came off, except for one loose end – he escaped.’
‘Would he have come looking for her?’
‘Not straight away,’ Fran said. ‘His first thought would have been to make good his escape and, if the rumours are right, he did that by joining the army.’
‘And then by managing to have it put about that he’d been killed, when really he had taken on some other identity. The thing is … I know that revenge is a dish best served cold and all that, but isn’t ten years rather a long time to wait?’
‘That’s what I thought – initially – but then I realized that he had a problem.’
‘Darling, I should imagine he had a whole hatful of problems.’
‘I’m focusing on one in particular. In order to pay Linda Dexter back, he first had to find her. Just think about it for a moment … When he last saw her in 1914, she was Belinda Chappell – wasn’t that her maiden name? By the time the war was over, she had become Linda Dexter and was living miles away. Christina Harper actually said something to the effect that she thought one of Linda’s reasons for rushing into a marriage was as a means of changing her name and leaving the district. When the old boyfriend came back from the war, pretending to be someone else, he could hardly just drop in on her remaining family and ask them where she’d gone.’
‘Oh, jolly good point. He would have had to track her down. Good heavens, where on earth would you start?’
‘In the case of an heiress, you’d probably start with the gossip columns, but he’d get no joy there, because Linda Dexter didn’t lead that kind of life.’
‘From what you’ve said, quite the opposite. She was a virtual recluse. And this is probably the reason why.’
‘It does seem to fit. It mightn’t have been too difficult to find out her married name, because the wedding would surely have been mentioned in the papers, but getting to know where she went to live afterwards would be much more problematic, so eventually you would have to try to second guess what she might be doing. Mrs Harper told me that Linda had always been fascinated by Robert Barnaby’s books, so if you found out that there was a Robert Barnaby Society, it might well be worth joining it, on the off-chance that it led you to Linda.’
‘That’s a brilliant piece of sleuthing,’ said Mo.
‘But is it the correct solution?’
‘How long has Stephen Latchford been a member?’
‘Oh, absolutely ages.’
‘And did he always live near Mrs Dexter?’
‘As it happens, I don’t think he did. Jennifer Rumsey said something about him living near Darlington, before he moved across the Pennines and lived somewhere in the vicinity of Carlisle.’
‘Ah ha. So he joined the society, invented a pretext to get hold of a membership list, found out where Linda Dexter lived and went to live nearby, but then he realized that instead of breaking into her house one night, it would be easier to murder her at the conference. You could see why he’d want it to look like an accident or suicide, because so long as everyone went along with that, no one would start poking about and making any other connections.’
‘My problem with all this is that Linda Dexter would surely have recognized him – and if she did, all she needed to do was report him to the police and have him arrested.’
‘Oh.’ Mo sounded deflated. ‘So basically it’s a brilliant theory, but it doesn’t actually work.’
‘Unless he somehow persuaded her not to give him away. If I’m right, then they had been in league together once before, remember. If she had him arrested, there was always the possibility that he would be able to convince people that she’d been in on the original murder plot all along, and that would mean her standing trial alongside him, whereas if he persuaded her that he’d forgiven her the double-cross, she might agree with him that it was better for them both to keep quiet.’
‘I’m not sure that I would trust someone who had murdered my father and my stepsister.’
‘But you’re not someone who would have plotted that murder in the first place. Linda had played a very high stakes game and won, but at a price. She must have wondered all the time whether Edwin Traynor was still alive, and if so, whether he might one day seek retribution. If he turned up in the Barnaby Society and appeared to be perfectly harmless after all, mightn’t it be a relief?’
‘I suppose so. The question is how do you prove that Stephen Latchford is Eddie Traynor?’
‘I’m not at all sure that Stephen Latchford is Eddie Traynor. In fact, I don’t see how he can be, not if what Mr Dryden said is true.’
‘Then it must be one of the other men in the right age group.’
Fran sighed. ‘One of the problems is that I can’t even
remember exactly who was there. I tried to make a list at one point, but I only managed to remember about sixty names and I think the attendance was much closer to a hundred.’
‘Oh, Lord. That will throw up dozens of possible suspects.’
‘It isn’t just a question of being in the right age group,’ Fran said. ‘Jennifer Rumsey made an interesting point when she said that we hardly know anything about one another, and of course that’s true of a lot of members, but there are some that we’ve gleaned odd bits and pieces about which would completely rule them out. For example, Marcus Dryden has lived at the Furnival Towers for years, helping to run the family business. There’s continuity there which goes back before the war, and therefore he cannot possibly be Edwin Traynor. By the same token, Hugh Allonby has been a literature buff for ages – he’s too old to be Edwin Traynor anyway, but even if he was the right age, he has a known past.’
‘I see what you mean. Whoever Edwin Traynor is now, he can’t have been that person before the war.’
‘Exactly. So that means no family, no old school chums, nothing in his life that goes back more than ten years, whereas Marcus Dryden definitely mentioned that Stephen Latchford’s mother used to stay at the Furnival Towers before the war, and that he stayed there himself on a couple of occasions.’
‘What about Tom Dod? Does he have any family, apart from a wife and child acquired after 1918?’
Fran did not reply.
THIRTY-THREE
‘Hello, is that Mr James? It is? Oh, jolly good. It’s Frances Black here.’
‘And what can I do for you, Mrs Black?’
Fran was relieved to note that the membership secretary’s tone was cordial, particularly as their last telephone conversation had ended on a rather hostile note.