One Way Ticket

by Evie Evans

  The next part was forensic exhibits. Not only had I broken the chain of evidence by taking Tina’s photo and birthday cards home, I’d potentially incriminated Aunt June by letting her handle them - now they’d have her fingerprints all over them. Oops. I skipped over to the next section.

  “Do we even have an interview strategy?” I asked.

  Addi looked about eight years old with his tongue poking out, marking locations on the map. “A what?”

  “I thought so.”

  It was official - this investigation was a shambles. The only bit we’d done right was when I’d made the list of people already interviewed. We should have used a standard questionnaire to interview Tina’s neighbours, ensuring we asked the same questions each time instead of randomly thinking of things to ask. All the interviews we’d done and the dozens Addi had conducted previously were technically invalid. I thought of all the notes I’d typed up and could have cried. It wasn’t like this on Columbo.

  Addi showed me the map once he’d finished putting little crosses on it.

  “Right that represents the house-to-house enquiry that’s been conducted,” I told him.

  “It’s much easier to see where we’ve been like this.”

  “Yes, and there are quite a few blanks on the map, aren’t there?

  “Some of them are holiday homes, they’re not occupied,” Addi told me.

  “What about the rest?”

  “There are a couple of apartments here I didn’t speak to,” he admitted, pointing to an area round the corner from the murder scene. “I remember one of them was out. I meant to go back.”

  “We need to work out a set of questions to ask before we go interview anyone else, no more doing it off the top of our heads.”

  “I don’t see how it’s going to work if I can only ask these questions?” Addi said after I’d written down some of the examples from the manual.

  “You can ask other stuff, this is just to make sure we cover the basics. Did you know we’re meant to record a rough description of everyone?”

  I finished typing the list and printed off a few copies. “We’ll use this as a form. I’ve added a large box at the bottom for extra stuff.”

  When I was done, I sat back with a feeling of satisfaction. This was a bit like being back in my old job in England, following procedures, typing up forms. I felt much more confident now we were more organised.

  Addi had been wriggling around in his seat for much of it. “We still don’t know who the killer is, we’re just wasting time,” he moaned.

  “This is not a waste of time. It’s showing where the gaps in your investigation are. Look, there’re at least half a dozen people in her neighbourhood you haven’t spoken to yet. And the ones you have interviewed, you haven’t got all the basic information from.”

  “But, do we need all this paperwork?”

  “Yes, there’s no point going off half-cocked.”

  Addi looked at me and I realised I couldn’t explain that phrase.

  It was already four o’clock, so I suggested calling it a day (Addi: what else would you call it?) and starting on the house-to-house interviews in the morning.

  After a decent nights sleep, I felt a little more optimistic starting on the list of Tina’s neighbours previously missed. The sun was even shining this morning.

  “You haven’t forgotten you’re coming to dinner tonight?” Addi asked as we set off.

  It was like a black cloud had suddenly hovered overhead. “No.” Aunt June had laughed her head off when I’d told her. She was convinced Addi’s mother wanted to scare me off. “Is your mum mad at me?”

  “No, she just wants to meet you. I guess I’ve mentioned you a few times.”

  “Hmm.” I carried on sorting the list of neighbours into a running order I thought would be the most speedy and propitious, and tried not to think about why his mother really wanted to see me. “Right, we’re not messing about anymore, we are following a Plan today.” When we arrived, I led Addi to the first house on my list. The man was out, and so were the next two.

  “This is why police work takes so long,” Addi told me as we went back to one house for the third time, to see if the occupant had returned, “human beings’ lives don’t follow plans.”

  Mine certainly didn’t. It took nearly four hours to track down and interview all but one of the neighbours. And in that time we didn’t learn anything new. It wasn’t our best morning.

  “How long do you want to wait around for?” I asked, conscious my stomach was signalling we were well into lunchtime. We’d been sitting in Addi’s car outside the house of our last neighbour for half an hour, waiting for him to turn up.

  Addi glanced at his watch. “I guess we may as well go, we could be sat here all day.” He reached into his pocket for something. “I’ll just push a note through his door before we go.” I watched him start scribbling on one of his business cards.

  At the same time, an elderly man came round the corner and made his way slowly up the slight incline where we were waiting. Just under six foot tall, black glasses, stringy grey hair, bit of a stoop, he matched the description a neighbour had given us of the man we were waiting for. Typical of him to turn up as we were about to leave for lunch.

  “Here, look at this guy coming along,” I told Addi. “D’you reckon that’s him?”

  Addi stopped writing and watched him for a few moments. “Only one way to find out,” he told me and opened the car door.

  “Mr Harris?” he called, sticking his head out.

  The man took in the car and the two of us, eyes widening. Before Addi had the chance to say anything else, the man turned tail and loped off back down the road (I would say ran but that would be a bit ambitious), throwing down his carrier bag in the process.

  Before I knew it, I had the car door open and was in hot pursuit with Addi, who’d gotten tangled in his seat belt in his haste to give chase. Even at his pedestrian pace, the old man had cleared the corner and was trying to negotiate a low fence when we caught up with him.

  “Police, stop!” Addi shouted at him.

  The old guy ignored him and carried on trying to get his leg over (the fence). We each took an arm and pulled him back.

  “I aint done nothing,” the man told us, trying to wrestle himself from our grasp.

  Addi rustled in his pockets and pulled out a pair of handcuffs as I tried to keep hold of the old man’s arms. It seemed a bit wrong to handcuff an old man but he was stronger than he looked.

  “I am arresting you for the murder of Tina Lloyd,” Addi informed him, trying to clip on the cuffs. After struggling successfully to lock the second one, Addi started to march his captive back to the car. I followed, out of breath with the sense of exhilaration.

  Had we caught a murderer?

  22 The Last In Line

  My adrenalin was running so high it was a few minutes before I took in what the old man was saying as Addi put him in the back of the car.

  “Murder? Murder? Are you crazy? I haven’t murdered anyone!”

  “So why were you running away?” Addi asked him.

  “I aint saying nothing more,” the old man told us angrily.

  I felt a little vulnerable having him sitting behind me in the car, so I turned slightly to keep him in view. I also couldn’t help the small doubts starting to form in my brain. I tried to dismiss them with the thought that, as Addi had previously pointed out, all criminals deny their crimes.

  When we arrived back at the police station, Addi took him up to the desk to be booked in. I plonked the man’s carrier bag I’d picked up off the street on the desk next to him.

  “I’ll do this, you’d better go back to your office,” Addi told me.

  I’m never around for the good stuff. Now, I’d have to hang around trying to pick up titbits of information. On the other hand, it was well past lunchtime. I went back to my desk and got out my lunchbox. It took depressingly few minutes to demolish my sandwiches, apple and crisps, and feel that fami
liar sense of disappointment once the box was empty.

  More case notes had appeared in my in-tray so, despite it being Christmas, someone was actually doing some work somewhere. I began to type them up, keeping an eye on the corridor. I don’t know why, they’d had to have to conducted the interview with cue cards for me to be able to see anything from where I sat.

  I’d almost gotten to the end of an interesting case of cat harassment when Addi came in. In my opinion, he didn’t look overly happy, not like someone who’d just caught a murderer should.

  “It’s not him,” he announced, pulling Vara’s chair over and sitting down heavily.

  “He’s not Joe Harris?”

  “Yes, it’s him but it’s not him.”

  I gave him a quizzical look.

  “He’s not the murderer.”

  “So why did he run?”

  “He’s been scamming women, claiming to want to marry them to get at their money.”

  I opened my mouth to protest that he couldn’t possibly appeal to women, before remembering Kostas wasn’t that much of a looker either. I shut it again.

  “Tina could have found out about him, threatened to reveal all? Good motive for murder.”

  “Yes, except he was in England when she was killed. We’ve just confirmed with the airline.”

  “Oh. Murder conviction looking a bit less likely now?”

  “We may be able to get him on a fraud count, but that’s it.”

  We sat and mourned our almost victory for a few moments.

  “Fraud’s not bad,” I said eventually. “It’s something, the day hasn’t been a total loss. You can tell the mayor you arrested someone else.”

  Addi just looked at me.

  “Look, we’ve completed all the house to house interviews, that’s another task we can tick off.”

  “But we didn’t learn anything new, not about the murder.”

  “At least we’ve talked to everyone now. We’re leaving no stone unturned.” I could see Addi didn’t understand why I felt so happy about this.

  “We’re doing things properly now, being thorough,” I explained, waving the completed interview forms at him.

  “I’d rather we caught the murderer than be thorough.”

  Some people are just born picky.

  “We haven’t gotten any further,” Addi bemoaned further as I began my typing again.

  “That’s not true, we’ve eliminated more people from our enquiries.”

  “Yes, but we’ve eliminated everyone! What do we do now?”

  I stopped typing for a moment to consider. “Start from the beginning again? Go back and talk to the people from the start? None of those interviews were done properly.”

  My companion let out a loud groan.

  “What about Tina’s job back in England in the doctor’s surgery? Aren’t there any leads there?”

  Addi got up. “I’ll get the patient list. There aren’t any names on it I recognised though.”

  He came back with a fair wodge of paper. “This is confidential, yes? The names on here.”

  “Naturally,” I told him felling slightly affronted. “I didn’t realise policework involved so much reading. I thought it was more getting out there and chasing people down.”

  “It would be handy to have this list online, something searchable,” Addi said. “Someone could type the names into a spreadsheet maybe.”

  I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. “No, they couldn’t. It’s in alphabetical order anyway, it’s easy enough to search.” I hunted for the names of people we’d talked to so far. No Roger, no Simon Richards, no Elsie Meadows (shame), no Louise Allen, and none of the neighbours we’d spoken to that morning.

  “You’re right, there’s no one we know on this list.”

  “It can’t be related to her old job then.”

  “Unless… How easy would it be for someone to change their name coming here from abroad? I mean, what’s to stop me calling myself Jane Doe when I arrive? If I didn’t know anyone here?”

  “Your passport.”

  “But who goes round looking in people’s passports once they’ve left the airport?”

  “The bank? When you open a bank account.”

  “A lot of these expats don’t open one, do they? Some of the pensioners carry on using their UK one.”

  “True. But what about when they apply for their residency permit. They’d need their passports for that.”

  “Have they all got permits?”

  “I guess I’ll have to run their names against the database.” He got up again.

  “And I guess I’ll be here. Typing. Still.”

  He came back again, about an hour later.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “They all have permits apart from Dorothy White.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “A friend of Tina’s. Tina was meant to have dinner at Mrs White’s house on the day of her death. It was Dorothy White that found her body when Tina didn’t show up,” he said.

  “What do you know about Dorothy White?”

  “A widow. Used to be a hospital administrator, now retired.”

  “Hospital administrator. And Tina worked in a doctor’s surgery. Is there a coincidence there?”

  “Shall we go talk to her?”

  I submitted the interview I’d been typing up. The clock said 3:10. “Yes, let’s go see Dorothy White. The people who find the body are always suspicious anyway.”

  I picked up my coat and we walked down the central corridor to the main exit. “I tell you what,” I said, “I enjoyed that arrest this morning. It was pretty exciting, chasing down a dangerous criminal.”

  “A 68 year old, what do you call it? Gigolo? With a bad hip. He was hardly an escaped fugitive,” Addi berated me as we approached his car.

  “He could have been armed.”

  “What with? A pacemaker? Get in.”

  The journey of three streets took precisely two minutes. “We could have walked here, you know.”

  “Doesn’t give the right impression.”

  Dorothy White’s address was a small, cream coloured, terraced house in one of the modern complexes that were springing up all over the town.

  “It would be funny if she tried to make a run for it as well, wouldn’t it?” I said as Addi rang her doorbell. “Brace yourself,” I warned as we heard someone come to the door.

  Mrs White wasn’t surprised to see us, in fact, she looked quite pleased as she invited us in and offered to put the kettle on. It made a nice change from our usual frosty reception. Like the locals, Mrs White seemed to be feeling the cold and was well wrapped in slippers and a large cardigan.

  “Sorry to bother you again, you must have answered a lot of questions already,” I told her as we stood in her tidy kitchen, watching her make three cups of tea.

  “Oh, no bother. I’ve had the newspapers around and all sorts. The doorbell hardly stopped ringing the day after.”

  I got the feeling Mrs White wasn’t too upset about the unexpected attention.

  “It must have been terrible for you to find the…Tina,” I said.

  “Oh awful,” she began, handing out the cups. “I had no idea when I went in. When I saw her lying there in front of the couch, for a minute I thought she’d passed out or something. It was only when I got closer and saw her eyes that I realised.” She gave a shudder. “Oh, it almost gave me nightmares, I can tell you.”

  “You were a hospital administrator, weren’t you? Did you know Tina back in England?” I asked.

  “No, I only met her when she moved over here. Shall we sit down?” she asked, nodding at me trying to juggle writing on my interview questionnaire sheet with holding the cup of tea. We each took a seat at the dining table at the end of her kitchen.

  “Funny, that the two of you worked in healthcare,” I said.

  “Yes, I suppose it was. I never thought about that before. Isn’t it strange how you never think of these things until someone points them out?”r />
  “And Tina had been due here that evening?” I asked.

  “That’s right. She was coming for dinner just after 5 o’clock. Nothing fancy, just macaroni cheese. I’m not one for pasta much but I do like macaroni cheese. Probably not good for me, mind, all that cheese, but I don’t eat it often.”

  “And it was just going to be the two of you?”

  “No, Paul, my neighbour, was coming round as well. I feel a bit sorry for him sometimes, being on his own like me−”

  “Sorry,” I interrupted. “Paul? Your neighbour’s called Paul?”

  “Yes, do you know him?”

  Be still my beating heart! Had we found ‘all my love, Paul’ from the birthday card at last?

  “He was very quiet to begin with, just a ‘hello’ when you saw him,” Mrs White was running on, “you know, but now we get on like a house on fire.”

  “Was Mrs Lloyd seeing anyone at the time of her death?” Addi edged in when Mrs White stopped to draw breath.

  She looked down at the floor. Was she embarrassed? “I don’t think so, I don’t really know. She had a lot of men friends. She was a very friendly person. She wasn’t a bad person. My son says−”

  Addi couldn’t wait to hear what her son said. “So, when Tina didn’t show up you and Paul went−”

  “No, Paul didn’t go. We had our dinner after waiting for a while. Afterwards, when Tina hadn’t responded to any of my phone calls, I decided to see if anything was wrong. Paul left when I did.”

  “And Paul lives next door you say?”

  “Yes, number 23, just next door here.” She pointed to her left.

  “And he’s just a friend?” I asked.

  Was it my imagination or did Mrs White blush slightly?

  “That’s right. You’re very appreciative of your friends when you get to my age. It’s all right for you young ones, but when you get older you need a lot more help−”

  “Can I just ask,” I interrupted her again, “if you know what Paul had been doing that afternoon? Bit of a long shot I know, but do you remember?”

  “I can’t really. I’m not sure he’d been doing anything but I can’t be certain. It’s a long time ago.”