Loretta Lawson 03 - Don't Leave Me This Way

by Joan Smith

  Ghilardi was out. Loretta tried his number as soon as she got home, around three o’clock, and listened to the phone ring unanswered in the CID room. Eventually a woman picked it up and announced they were all out, Ghilardi included, and she had no idea when they’d be back. It wasn’t her department, she said, she’d been passing and had answered the phone as a favour. She could take a message, but there was no guaranteeing that Ghilardi would be back today. Loretta raised her eyes to the ceiling, said she’d try again later, and put down the phone. It occurred to her that Ghilardi might be tied up on the murder inquiry he’d mentioned a couple of times the day before, the woman who’d been killed while delivering the Christmas post. In that case, perhaps she was wasting her time. If the whole of Lymington CID had been called out on the murder investigation, it seemed unlikely that Ghilardi would be allowed to waste time on an officially closed car accident. Loretta bit her lip, stood up, and went slowly to the hall where she had dumped her shoulder-bag. She took from it a piece of paper, returned to the phone and dialled Tom Neil’s number.

  ‘Hello?’ It was a girl’s voice. Loretta was taken aback for a moment, then guessed she was speaking to Sandra’s daughter.

  ‘Hello. Ah – is Mr Neil there?’

  ‘No. Daddy won’t be back till this evening. About half past six.’

  Loretta hesitated. She was not having much luck.

  ‘Can I take a message?’ The girl sounded polite, well brought up.

  ‘Yes, I – yes.’ She gave her name, spelling it slowly as the girl wrote it down, and her number.

  ‘What shall I say it’s about?’

  ‘About? Um – your mother was a friend of mine, she left some luggage here –’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ The girl’s voice was suddenly sharp.

  ‘It’s a bit difficult to explain – she was staying with me for a few days over Christmas.’ Loretta had not intended to get into a discussion, and she regretted the fact that she hadn’t simply given her name and phone number.

  ‘Why was she staying with you? Why wasn’t she at her flat?’

  ‘Well, because her flat was flooded. Look, I think perhaps I’d better wait and tell your father about it –’

  ‘But I want to know – Daddy hasn’t mentioned you. I’ve never even heard of you.’ She sounded accusing.

  ‘I’m sorry. It happened after you’d gone away, there’s no mystery about it. Honestly.’ Loretta pulled a face as she told the lie.

  There was a moment’s silence, then the girl spoke in a small voice. ‘All right, I’ll tell Daddy.’ Loretta thought she was on the verge of tears.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said feebly. She waited for a second, heard the phone go down at the other end, and replaced the receiver. She hadn’t handled that very well, she thought guiltily, crossing the room to the sofa and picking up Baroness Orczy.

  An hour later she put down the book, disillusioned. Lady Molly hadn’t lived up to the promise of the first page, rapidly degenerating into a series of outlandish mysteries which the heroine solved through reliance on feminine intuition. Definitely a historical curiosity, Loretta thought, debating whether to include it in the course at all. She was still sitting on the sofa, her feet curled under her and her shoes kicked to one side on the floor, and she looked at her watch, wondering when Tom Neil would ring. Not for another couple of hours at least, she thought, still unhappy about her conversation with Sandra’s daughter. Would he be angry with her for upsetting the girl? He must be finding it pretty hard going, adjusting to life as a widower with two teenage – Loretta realized she didn’t know their ages, but assumed her guess was more or less correct – two teenage children.

  She got to her feet, slipping on her shoes, and started for the kitchen. Had she done the right thing? Should she have waited until she got hold of Ghilardi, made absolutely sure he wasn’t interested in the contents of the bags? She stopped by the door, turned, and went back to the phone; she had been intending to make a cup of tea, but it would wait. She dialled Lymington police station again, was put through to the CID room, and heard the phone ring unanswered. She had read that the police were understaffed, but this was ridiculous. . . She put the phone down and went back to the hall. The bags – more accurately a holdall and a suitcase, plus the few bits of clothing Loretta had stuffed into a carrier bag – were standing just inside the front door. She had deposited them there after collecting them from the Panda on her way home from the London Library; she wondered why she had bothered, since she would presumably have to take them by car to one of the London stations and put them on a train to Winchester. It occurred to her that she had secretly hoped for an excited instruction from Ghilardi: ‘Open them at once! This could be important!’

  She grimaced, realizing how unlikely this was. On the other hand, would it really do any harm if she took a quick look inside – just to put her mind at rest? Before she could have second thoughts, Loretta seized the bags and heaved them into the drawing-room, lining them up by the sofa. She sat down, pulling the holdall towards her, and at that moment Bertie trotted into the room, woken from his nap upstairs by the sound of the bags being moved. He sniffed the holdall, put out a tentative paw and tried to insert it in the gap left by the imperfectly closed zip fastening.

  ‘Bertie –’ Loretta lifted him gently to one side and unzipped the bag. She pulled the sides apart and looked into the opening, seeing nothing but an untidy mass of clothes. She began taking them out, vainly attempting to smooth away the wrinkles in each skirt or sweater before placing it neatly on the sofa beside her. The task was interrupted by Bertie, who let out an interested yowl and jumped inside the bag, turning round so that his head stuck out from one end. Loretta laughed and lifted him out.

  She went on removing clothes until she got to the bottom of the bag, where a pair of high-heeled purple suede shoes was lying squashed out of shape by the weight of sweaters, skirts and underwear which had been piled on top. Loretta put her hand inside the left one, trying to ease it back into shape, and noticed it was the work of an expensive Italian shoemaker. Why hadn’t Sandra taken better care of them? She turned the shoe over and saw that the sole was hardly worn. She put it down and picked up the other, and as she felt inside her fingers encountered a wad of tissue paper. It was bright green and looked as if it had been put there to keep the shape of the shoe, but as Loretta removed it a tiny key fell out. She picked it up, and her eye fell on the lock of Sandra’s suitcase. She inserted the key, noticing out of one eye that the cat was inside the holdall again, and it turned smoothly. She lowered the suitcase on to its side, pressed the catches with her thumbs and lifted the lid. A purple dress was folded neatly on top, and Loretta lifted it out, wondering if it had been bought to go with the shoes, or vice versa. It wasn’t silk, as she had first thought, but a synthetic imitation, and as she held it up she saw it was cut so that it would drape rather oddly over the hips. It reminded her of the clothes worn by the women in those American television series she only ever saw at her mother’s – Dallas or Dynasty. It certainly wasn’t what she had expected of Sandra. Loretta pulled a face, thinking there was no accounting for taste, and began folding the dress. She added it to the pile on the sofa and turned back to the case, and her eyes opened wide in astonishment. There were several bundles of banknotes randomly distributed across the top layer of clothes, each of them secured with an elastic band.

  ‘What the –’ Loretta began, putting out her hand but not quite touching the money.

  The cat leapt out of the empty holdall and sniffed at this new discovery, quickly losing interest in it. He turned his attention to chasing an ear-ring which had fallen on the floor. Loretta lifted one of the bundles, turning it over as though she didn’t quite believe it was real. It was a wad of twenty-pound notes, so many of them that she had no sense of how much money she was holding. She removed the elastic band, dropped it to the floor, and began to count.

  When she had finished she picked up the band and automatically twisted it roun
d the notes. She might have miscounted by one or two, but the total was in the region of fifty-six. Making a rapid calculation in her head, she worked out that the bundle amounted to £1,120. There were three more, two of ten-pound notes and a thinner one of fives. Loretta got up, went into the hall, and came back with pen and paper. She picked up a bundle of ten-pound notes and started her second count.

  Six or seven minutes later she stared at her notebook, checking her addition. The grand total was £2,440. Loretta was flabbergasted; she could hear Sandra’s voice tearfully announcing that she was rather short of money as clearly as if the dead woman was standing next to her. Where had the cash come from, and what was it for? And why not keep it in a bank? Suddenly Loretta felt cross; she never kept large sums in the flat – not that she had them – and it irritated her to think that Sandra had behaved in a way that was an invitation to burglars. There had been a spate of break-ins in Liverpool Road in recent months, with some houses and flats suffering more than once. The last thing Loretta wanted was for word to get round that there was easy money to be had in her flat. This train of thought occupied her mind for a moment, until it was replaced by a more immediate dilemma. What was she going to do? The presence of the money in Sandra’s suitcase was certainly an odd circumstance, but it didn’t point in any particular direction. Maybe she had – Loretta shook her head, unable to think of any obvious reason for carrying so much cash.

  She turned to the more immediate problem, thinking the best plan was to inform Ghilardi of her find but she might not be able to get hold of him before Tom Neil returned her call. Telling Neil about the cash might produce an interesting reaction, but could she bring herself to admit she’d been rifling through his wife’s belongings? Another, and awful, thought occurred to her. How could she prove there hadn’t been even more money, that she hadn’t helped herself to some of it? Neil might take the line that someone who was unscrupulous enough to open the bags in the first place would not stop at searching them. She couldn’t prove otherwise; the only person who could testify that she hadn’t taken anything was Sandra herself, and that was no help at all.

  Loretta looked down, saw the suitcase was still almost full, and decided she might as well see what else it contained. In for a penny, in for a pound – the phrase was rather appropriate in this instance, she thought. There were more clothes, including a couple of outfits in the same style as the purple dress. Loretta saw as she lifted them out that they had designer labels, not ones she recognized, and they didn’t tell her much except to confirm that Sandra’s taste had definitely changed for the worse. Perhaps it was the effect of her age, Loretta speculated, remembering Sandra’s remark about being the wrong side of thirty-five.

  She took out the last item of clothing, a badly creased cream satin shirt with shoulder pads, and saw a bundle of letters lying in the bottom of the suitcase. It was secured, like the banknotes, with an elastic band. Loretta stared at it for a moment, struggling with her conscience. Reading a dead woman’s correspondence – wasn’t there something distasteful about that? Loretta told herself she had done it before, in the course of research, although it was hardly a fair analogy. These were private letters, not those of a public or semi-public figure. On the other hand, they might well throw some light on the mystery of Sandra’s death, and wasn’t that sufficient justification for examining them? It wasn’t as if it was sheer nosiness –

  Loretta picked up the bundle and twisted off the elastic band. Her eyes lit up when she saw that the first letter to Sandra, which wasn’t in an envelope, was dated September; perhaps she could now solve the mystery of Sandra’s whereabouts immediately before her move to London. But a quick flip through the correspondence produced only two envelopes, one blank and the other addressed to Sandra in Notting Hill. The postmark was so smudged that it gave no clue as to when Sandra took up residence there, though it did at least provide Loretta with the address of her flat. Sandra had lived at 35 Norfolk Gardens, W10; the name of the road rang a faint bell, and Loretta remembered that one of the lecturers in her department had lived briefly in Suffolk Gardens – she had been to dinner there a couple of times. Both roads, she thought, ran between Ladbroke Grove and Portobello Road. She gave up her attempt to read the postmark and went back to the top letter, smoothing it out and reading a few lines before passing on to the next.

  It, and the next four or five, were from Sandra’s children, Felix and Lizzie. The boy’s letters were short and perfunctory, dutiful accounts of rugby matches, debates, and the usual paraphernalia of public-school life. Loretta learned that he was a pupil at Rokeham, an expensive establishment on the Welsh border with a reputation for athletic prowess rather than academic achievement. His sister was also at boarding-school, one near Plymouth which Loretta hadn’t heard of, but her letters were composed with a great deal more vivacity. There was nothing to suggest anything out of the ordinary in either child’s correspondence, and Loretta began to think the letters had no bearing on Sandra’s disappearance and death. She came to the blank envelope, which turned out to contain a set of printed membership cards: ‘In The Pink – Luxury Health and Fitness Centre’, she read, wondering in that case why the cards were pale blue. Perhaps it was some sort of joke? They were unused, and each had a space for the member’s name, number and expiry date. The club’s address was somewhere in South London, with a postcode Loretta couldn’t put an area to. Nor could she imagine why Sandra was carrying the cards around with her, until it occurred to her that perhaps she had been hoping to recruit her friends to the club. Loretta pulled a face, thankful that Sandra hadn’t tried to talk her into joining, and returned the cards to the envelope.

  There were more letters from the children, written in the late autumn, and a complaining note had entered Lizzie’s. Why hadn’t Sandra answered her last letter – it was two and a half weeks since she’d written. Later she thanked her mother for a postcard but said it didn’t make up for not having a proper letter. And why hadn’t Sandra come home at half-term? Had she had another row with Daddy? Loretta raised her eyebrows at this point, and read on with interest. Tom Neil had taken his daughter and a friend of hers called Emma to lunch at the Old Mill in Winchester, but this had apparently failed to placate her. Felix hadn’t come home at half-term, either, Lizzie wrote, he’d gone to stay with one of his repulsive friends. . .

  If Sandra had fallen behind in writing to Felix, his letters betrayed no sign of it. He had scored three tries and one conversion in an inter-house rugby match; he had made a sort of metal thing for hanging coats on in Mr Porcas’s metal-work class. Loretta thought he sounded a very unimaginative young man. But the last letter from Lizzie, in December, was a genuine cry of anguish:

  WHY aren’t you coming on holiday? You promised you would, and I haven’t seen you since AUGUST. You NEVER come to see me at school any more. Daddy says you’re too busy at work but I don’t believe him. Emma says you and Daddy are going to get divorced, and then I’ll have to stay at school in the holidays like that Italian girl whose father is a prince or something. You won’t get divorced, will you? Emma’s mum doesn’t let her dad into the house any more, she has to wait for him outside when he comes to take her to McDonald’s. She says your parents getting divorced is AWFUL.

  There was more in this vein, but it didn’t add anything to what Loretta had already learned and she folded up the letter. Poor kid, she thought wryly, no wonder she’d been suspicious on the phone. She wondered how old Lizzie was – the impression she had was fourteen or fifteen, though boarding-school children were sometimes precocious. She’d certainly been sharp enough to pick up the fact that something was wrong between her parents – she hadn’t believed Tom Neil’s excuse for Sandra missing the family holiday, either. It occurred to Loretta that the rows between Sandra and her husband might account for Sandra’s volatile mood at Christmas, though she was still no wiser about the source of the money. . . She shook her head and turned to the final piece of correspondence, the envelope with the unreadable post
mark and the Norfolk Gardens address. She felt inside and pulled out a postcard, staring in surprise at a rather tasteless soft-focus photograph of a naked woman lying on a bed. The model was facing away from the camera, and filmy white curtains blew into the room from an open window. Loretta turned it over and read the handwritten message, her eyes opening wide as she did so:

  Saturday night was great [underlined] – can’t wait to do it again! Apart from the hotel – too bloody stuffy! How about that place in Brighton you told me about? Hope you like the picture – guess who it reminds me of!

  There was no signature, just three words which made an extraordinary initial impact on Loretta: ‘Your loving son!’ The idea that the note was from Felix Neil lasted only a few seconds; it was obvious that Sandra had spent a night at a hotel with the writer, and Loretta dismissed out of hand the idea that she had had an affair with her own son. In any case, she quickly realized the handwriting was different. She cast around for other explanations for the phrase, and decided the most plausible was that the unknown lover was, or looked, considerably younger than Sandra, and had been taken for her son – perhaps by the hotel they’d stayed at. Loretta felt a stab of pity – such a mistake couldn’t have done much for Sandra’s self-esteem. It was followed by anger as she thought of John Tracey’s engagement to a woman half his age and the double standard which sanctioned relationships between men and much younger women but treated the reverse situation as a joke. Loretta read the message again, turning it over to look with distaste at the reclining nude on the other side. Presumably the last line was intended to suggest a resemblance between the model and Sandra. She couldn’t see it, but then she’d never encountered Sandra without her clothes. She was thrusting the card back in its envelope when it occurred to her that it might be an important clue. Ghilardi had wanted to know whether Sandra had a lover, and here was the evidence ... All the same, it was of limited use: Loretta had no idea of his name or where he lived, and the only inference that could be drawn from the message was that he was young or had a youthful appearance. She bundled up the letters and returned them to the bottom of the suitcase, following them with Sandra’s folded clothes. The cat had got tired of playing with the single earring and she picked it up from the floor, tucking it in with the clothes and wondering what had happened to its partner. Soon everything was in place except the purple dress and the bundles of banknotes. Loretta hesitated and then, not knowing what else to do, grasped the cash with both hands and dumped it on top. She arranged the folds of the dress over it and closed the lid, feeling a momentary sense of relief as great as if she’d solved all the problems raised by her investigation of the luggage.