‘True, but the beauty of the Distress Act is that it doesn’t deal with cars and garages. It deals with horses and cattle, and it says that you can seize them for debt, but you can’t take them more than three miles or across a county boundary.’
‘Ah!’ he said, snatching at the weak point in my argument. ‘How can you prove that my client has breached the Act by crossing a county boundary or taking the animals more than three miles? You have no proof of that!’
Nor did I. It was merely reasonable supposition that Maiden had the animals at his country gaff.
‘Come on!’ I said, bluffing like crazy. ‘We both know where your client has got the ponies, and we both know that you can’t get them there without crossing a county line — two if you go some ways — and it’s certainly a lot more than three miles.’
‘Well, yes,’ he agreed. ‘But how did you know where they were?’
‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘You’ve just confirmed a reasonable suspicion, for which I thank you, though I doubt if Maiden will.’
There was a goodish pause, while he considered the prospects of admitting to Dennis Maiden that he’d just blown the case and exposed Maiden to prosecution under a sixteenth century cattle-rustling statute.
‘I suppose,’ he said at last, ‘that I can advise Mr Maiden, in the interest of goodwill, to return the animals and accept only the grazing fees due to him.’
‘Very wise,’ I said. ‘I’m most grateful for your help. Let me know when my clients can have their ponies back.’
That cheered me up quite a bit, so much so that I felt able to tackle the gap in Con Mulvaney’s case. I was deep in that when the phone rang again.
‘Mr Tyroll,’ said the unmistakable tones of Dennis Maiden. ‘I’ve just had my solicitor onto me. He tells me that this ridiculous piece of law you’ve dug up actually works.’
‘That’s not the view he put to me,’ I said. ‘He told me that it was out of date and dead.’
‘Well, you’ve changed his mind, you smart bugger. He says that I’ve got to give the ponies back.’
‘That would be sensible,’ I said. ‘In return for which, my clients will meet that part of your bill that relates to grazing fees.’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Tell your blokes to ring my Security Manager at my office. He’ll arrange for them to get the animals back.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘Nice dealing with you, Mr Maiden.’
‘Ay,’ he said, ‘Nice dealing with you too, bloody smart alec,’ and he chuckled before putting the phone down.
I rang Samson and passed on the good news, then dictated my bill. All in all, I felt quite pleased with myself. It’s always a good feeling to win a case, and putting Maiden’s nose out of joint pleased me especially.
I didn’t know then that someone would end up dead because of it.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Mrs Johnstone looked older than when I last saw her, which wasn’t surprising. It must have been about five years, and she was well into her seventies by now. She had been one of my early clients when I first began my own practice. She’d had a neighbour dispute and a small accident claim against the Corporation.
Now she wanted me to find out if she was divorced.
‘Well, aren’t you sure?’ I asked, puzzled.
She shook her head. ‘Not really Mr Tyroll,’ she said. ‘You see, when we split up he said he would divorce me, but I don’t know that he ever did.’
‘But you’d have heard from the Court, or his solicitor,’ I objected.
‘I never did,’ she said, ‘and that’s what worries me. He went back to Scotland and said that he’d divorce me, but I never heard.’
‘And when was this?’ I asked.
‘Oh, it would be about twenty-five years ago,’ she said. ‘That’s it, about the time of Her Majesty’s Jubilee.’
‘And you’ve never enquired before?’
She shook her head. ‘You see, it’s never mattered before.’
I paused, looking to express myself carefully and keep my face straight. ‘You’re not,’ I said, ‘thinking of marrying again?’
She laughed. ‘Oh, Good Heavens no!’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s my money, you see.’
‘Your money?’
‘That’s right. I’ve got a little bit — well, quite a bit — put away, and there’s my house.’
I recalled drafting her will. ‘If I remember correctly, that all goes to your sister and her family.’
She smiled. ‘That’s what I want,’ she confirmed, ‘but I don’t want him to have any claim.’
‘When did you last see your husband?’ I asked.
‘Twenty-five years ago. He went back to Scotland to work, and he said that he was going to divorce me, but I never heard from him again.’
‘He could be dead,’ I suggested.
‘That would be convenient,’ she said evenly.
I was evidently missing something here. ‘Can you tell me why it’s important now?’ I asked.
‘I’ve got to go into hospital, Mr Tyroll,’ she said. ‘Sometime this autumn they said. Now, they say it will be alright, that there’s nothing to worry about, but you do, don’t you. Well, maybe not you, you’re young, but at my age you can’t go into hospital and be sure of coming out again, so the thing is, if anything happens to me I don’t want Jamie to have any claim against my money or the house.’
Now I understood. ‘He probably wouldn’t have, anyway,’ I said, ‘and if you haven’t heard of him or from him in a quarter of a century, he probably doesn’t know anything about you. How would he know if you died?’
‘I know it’s a very remote chance, Mr Tyroll, but I don’t want there to be any possibility of that man having anything of mine. Can’t you find out for me if I’ve been divorced?’
I know nothing at all about English matrimonial law and less than that about Scottish, but she was a long-standing client and she was looking at me expectantly as though I had a copy of her divorce decree in my drawer.
‘Very well, Mrs Johnstone,’ I said. ‘Where was your husband living in Scotland?’
‘Aberdeen,’ she said. ‘And he was doing something connected with the oil-rigs, not on one but something to do with them.’
‘And you don’t have an address?’
She shook her head. ‘Oh no. I never heard from him after he went up there.’
I collected a few more vague recollections from her, told her that I’d do my best, saw her out, and sat down and sighed.
The phone rang. It was Tom Wellington. ‘Can you come over to my place tonight?’ he asked. ‘I’m sending Sylvia abroad tomorrow, so it’ll be your last chance to talk to her.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Look, I’m grateful for this, Tom. It can’t be easy.’
‘It wasn’t,’ he said, tersely. ‘Her mother doesn’t agree. Luckily Sylvia thinks it might be a good idea, but mind how you go with her, Chris. I’ve seen you in court.’
‘Come on, Tom. This is different. Anyway, I was going to ask if I could bring Sheila. Another woman might put Sylvia more at ease and Sheila gets along well with most people.’
‘Good idea,’ he said. ‘See you both about eight, then?’
‘Right.’
I knew where Tom’s place is, though I’d never been honoured with an invitation before. Sheila was making bad jokes about seeing how a real Pommy lawyer lives when we came to the hill brow above the Wellington home. She pulled in and we scanned the landscape.
In the summer evening the valley below us looked delightful, all trees and meadows, but I saw no sign of a house.
‘There it is,’ said Sheila, and pointed.
I looked in that direction and saw what I took to be a medium-sized light industrial plant nestling behind a grove of trees. It looked as if it turned out electric clocks or inflatable teddy bears.
‘Can’t be,’ I said.
‘Nothing else in sight,’ she said, and started the car.
We followed the road into the valley; coming at
last to a sign for Tom’s place. The long drive led us through the grove of trees and around a wide lawn to the front of the building we had seen. It looked no better in close up, and I guessed that anyone without Tom’s money and clout would never have got it past a Planning Officer.
As we pulled up, Tom emerged from the wide, glazed front door and raised a hand to us. After handshakes he led us inside and we began to see that, despite the industrial exterior, the interior was sumptuous.
The hall in which we paused was floored with parquet, ornamented with a few rich rugs. The rear wall was all glass and revealed that the house was built Roman villa style, in a square around an inner courtyard. Through the glass we could see a large garden, where several paths wandered through artfully designed rockery, shrubbery and flowers towards a wide lily pool with a small fountain. The roofline was low enough to allow the evening sun to light the garden for a while yet. I was frankly envious.
‘No swimming pool, Tom?’ I said.
He gestured to the right. ‘Over there,’ he said. ‘Indoors. Outdoor jobs are a waste of money in this climate.’
I saw that the right wing of the house was roofed in shatterproof glass where it covered the indoor pool, and realised that I had wasted my feeble joke.
Tom led us through to a drawing room, expensively furnished and again with a rear wall of sliding glass doors giving access to the central garden. We sat and he organised drinks.
‘How are you planning to do this?’ he asked, once we all had a glass in hand.
‘I told you that my wife was pretty unhappy about it. She thinks it’ll upset Sylvia all over again, so she’s gone to a meeting so she can blame it all on me.’
‘The last thing I want to do, Tom, is upset Sylvia anymore,’ I said. ‘I want to tell her that we’re virtually certain that Sean didn’t commit suicide. Surely, that’s got to be good news for her?’
He nodded. ‘Fair enough,’ he said, ‘But what about this other suicide? What’s his name — Nesbit?’
‘She knows about that?’
‘It’s been in the papers,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t seem to have affected her, but she knew him as well.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘one thing I can tell you, which hasn’t reached the press yet, is that Charlie Nesbit didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered.’
‘Murdered!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why on earth would someone murder a feckless little runt like Nesbit?’
‘We don’t know,’ I said, ‘but I can assure you that it was murder.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘You’re not saying, are you, that Sean was murdered?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It seems most likely that Sean’s death was an unlucky accident, but Charlie was definitely murdered.’
‘You know,’ he said, thoughtfully, ‘Sylvia said that once, that she thought Sean was murdered. She was very upset at the time, rambling about how he wouldn’t have committed suicide and it couldn’t be an accident.’
‘Did she give any reason why she thought that?’ asked Sheila.
He shook his head. ‘No, she was just sounding off. I thought she was just desperate to reject the idea that he’d committed suicide.’
‘Then anything we can tell her will be good news,’ I said. He nodded. ‘So, how are you going to do it?’
‘I’m going to tell her exactly what we’ve discovered, that it was most probably an accident, but it certainly wasn’t suicide. Hopefully, after that, she may be willing to talk to us a bit and help us with a few answers.’
‘Right,’ he said, and uncoiled himself from his chair. ‘I’ll fetch Sylvia.’
He was gone only briefly, returning with his daughter. She was no longer the vivacious little beauty who had graced Sean’s snapshots. The long black hair that had bounced and whirled about her smiling features in his pictures now hung lifelessly round her pale face, and her eyes were big pools of darkness with shadows below.
She walked listlessly to a chair and sat silently while Tom introduced us.
‘Chris and Sheila just want to tell you about the things they’ve found about Sean,’ he said. ‘I think you’ll want to hear what they’ve got to say, and maybe you can help them. It’s for Mrs McBride’s sake, really, and yours. You’d want to help Sean’s mother, wouldn’t you? You always said how you liked her.’
The silent girl nodded without looking up.
‘I don’t think you’ll want me listening in,’ he went on, ‘but I’ll be just out in the garden, not far away if you want me.’
He nodded to us and let himself out into the courtyard, standing for a moment and looking back to us, then strolling away along one of the paths.
There was a silence after he left. Sylvia sat with her hands on her knees, one hand clutching a brightly coloured packet. At last she looked up and spoke. ‘He didn’t commit suicide, did he, Mr Tyroll?’ she said, in a small voice. Her big, dead eyes swung from my face to Sheila’s. ‘Tell me he didn’t. He couldn’t have done.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
‘Why couldn’t he have done?’ Sheila asked gently.
‘Because — because he was happy. Everything was alright. We were going away the next morning.’
‘Sylvia,’ I said, ‘at the Inquest it was said that he was about to be in court for a breathalyser. Didn’t that worry him?’
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, emphatically ‘He knew he’d lose his licence, but that didn’t worry him much. Most of the time he walked, anyway, and there were plenty of people to give him lifts. That was why we were going away in the morning. He said that, since he was going to lose his licence, we’d better take our last chance to have a weekend away together.’
‘Were you going to a friend’s?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I told my parents that I was going alone to stay with a girlfriend, but really Sean and I were going for a weekend in a hotel.’
‘Do your parents know now?’ Sheila asked.
‘I think Daddy suspects something like that, but they’ve never asked. You won’t tell them, will you?’
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘Tell me, do you know anything about Sean suffering from headaches?’
She shook her head emphatically. ‘No,’ she said. ‘There was nothing wrong with him. He was a joke in our crowd, because when everyone else had colds and ’flu he never seemed to catch it. All that at the Inquest was lies. He never had headaches.’
‘The Inquest was told that his friends said he had headaches. Do you know who that was?’ Sheila asked.
‘I asked all our lot,’ the girl said. ‘Most of them weren’t even asked about him, and none of them said he had headaches because he didn’t.’
Sheila looked at me with a wondering grimace. Sylvia said, ‘He didn’t commit suicide, Mr Tyroll. He couldn’t have done, he wouldn’t have done. What happened to him?’
‘We don’t believe it was suicide,’ I said, ‘nor does the pathologist who did the post mortem, Dr Macintyre. He thinks that it was most likely some kind of accident.’
‘What kind?’ Sylvia asked, staring at me with her big, dark eyes.
‘We don’t know,’ I said, carefully. ‘How often was Sean in that garage?’
‘He was there all the time when he wasn’t with me. I used to tell him he fancied the car more than me.’
‘So he knew the garage and he must have been aware of the danger from exhaust fumes — he was a mechanic,’ said Sheila.
‘Is that what you think happened?’ Sylvia asked.
‘It might have done,’ I said. ‘What do you remember about the last time you saw him? How did you come to be together at the garage?’
‘Well,’ she began, ‘we weren’t going to see each other that evening, originally. We were going to meet up the next morning and go away for our weekend. That night my mother was dragging Daddy and I to one of her dos, but it was called off, so I wanted to see Sean. No one was answering the phone at his home, so I called Charlie Nesbit and asked him if he’d find Sean and tell him that I’d s
ee him at the garage.’
‘Did you have a key?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I just used to hang about the yard by the garages if I got there first. That’s what I did that night. Then Sean came and we went in and got in the car.’ Her voice trailed away, and for the first time her face showed a little colour.
‘We don’t need to know what you did, Sylvie,’ Sheila assured her. ‘What sort of a mood was Sean in?’
‘He was up, pleased to see me. He hadn’t expected to see me that night till he got my message from Charlie.’
‘And you didn’t have any kind of disagreement?’ I asked.
‘No, no, no,’ she said. ‘We were fine — everything was alright, we were looking forward to a weekend together.’
‘What did you talk about?’ I said.
‘Where we were going for the weekend, what we’d do, that kind of thing. Nothing special.’
‘What time did you leave?’ Sheila said.
‘I had to be home by eleven,’ Sylvia replied. ‘So I left Sean about half past ten, near enough.’
‘And where was Sean when you left him?’ I asked.
‘He was sitting in the back seat of the car. The front seat was out on the floor. He took it out so that we could be more comfortable on the back seat.’ She coloured up again. ‘He was going to put it back in, ready for the morning.’
‘Did you close the door behind you?’ Sheila asked.
‘Yes. It wasn’t open very far. I ducked underneath it and pulled it down, shut.’
‘Why was that?’ I asked.
‘Sean always kept it pulled down and locked
when he was working in there. He said there were some strange people in the flats by the garages and he didn’t want them bothering him. He’d got really good tools in there as well.’
‘How did the door lock?’ Sheila said.
‘It was automatic. Once you pulled it right down into place the lock operated and you could only open it with a key.’
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