by Granger, Ann
‘The next morning, after that, the fire crew came back and damped down, so I still had to wait. It wasn’t until they’d finally left, around lunchtime, that I walked along the lane to the coppice where I’d left the Clio and, would you believe it? Someone had pinched it! Who on earth would have found it there? I couldn’t believe my eyes. I saw some tyre marks. There were two lots. One lot had been caused when I drove it in there to hide it, and the other lot must have been when it was driven out again. The countryside used to be such a peaceful spot and now you can’t even park a car for forty-eight hours in a lonely patch of woodland, but someone comes along and steals it.’ Muriel glowered at them.
‘We have recovered the car,’ Carter said.
Muriel’s mouth dropped open. ‘That was good going. Where was it?’
‘Just outside Cheltenham.’
‘How did it get there?’ She looked amazed.
‘We’re working on that,’ Carter said evasively.
‘So, Muriel,’ Jess pointed out, ‘your actions resulted in Gervase Crown returning from Portugal to see what was left of his house.’
Distracted from her surprise over the car, Muriel turned back to Jess. ‘Yes, Gervase turned up and he started wandering around the house. I found him there with that poor young woman, the girlfriend of the fellow who died. They were both inside the burnt-out shell. I warned her about him.’
‘How about the anonymous letter?’ Jess asked. ‘Did you write or make up that?’
‘Yes, I tried to frighten him off back to Portugal,’ said Muriel simply. ‘I made up a letter and then I thought, just a minute, the police will trace this because of fingerprints and DNA and all the rest of it. You read about it in the newspapers. Then I remembered that in the library at Weston St Ambrose they’ve got a copier machine. The library is only open two days a week now and mostly it’s run by volunteers. It gets pretty crowded on the two days it is open, so I wasn’t afraid anyone would take any notice of what I was doing. I went down there, as it was a day it was working, and sure enough, there were plenty of people there chattering and looking at the books. Miranda Layton was there but she’s not a chatty woman. She had her nose in a book. No one took any notice of me at the copier and it did it very quickly. I pressed a button and out came a copy. I picked it up wearing my winter gloves. No fingerprints, see?’ Muriel nodded at them, pleased with her cleverness. ‘I stuck the original in my pocket and when I got back home later, I burned it. The other one, the copy, I’d folded up very nicely, gone along to The Royal Oak and slid it under Gervase’s door. I knew it was his room, because I saw him come out of it.’
‘He didn’t see you,’ Jess objected. ‘He said the corridor was empty. The only person around was the cleaner and she was in the next room.’
‘It wasn’t the cleaner in the next room,’ said Muriel in triumph. ‘It was me! I was looking up and down the corridor, trying to work out which was his room, when a door started to open. So I nipped into the next room. The door of that was standing open because the cleaner was about somewhere, but she’d gone for a moment. I heard Gervase come out and just stuck my head out of the door in time to see him at the head of the stairs, going down to his breakfast. So now I knew which was his room, but I heard the cleaner coming back. She must have gone to fetch the vacuum cleaner because she was dragging it along and muttering at it. There’s a lavatory on that corridor. It’s an old Victorian one. It dates from before the rooms had their own facilities, what they call “en suite”. Before that, people queued up for use of the bathroom and didn’t worry about it. Anyway, I nipped into the old lavatory and bolted the door. If the cleaner came and tried to open it, she would think someone from downstairs had come up to use it. I did hear her come back. She went into his room and then she wheeled her trolley full of cleaning stuff away. It had squeaky wheels. She put the vacuum round as well. In case you’re thinking I must have been lurking in that lavatory for a long time, you’re wrong. That cleaner must be the fastest worker in Weston St Ambrose. Bump, bump, splash of tap running, door slam, room clean. Buzz-buzz and the vacuuming finished.
‘So I came out, slipped the note under his door and left. That will give you a nasty surprise! I thought. No one took any notice of me as I walked through downstairs and out into the street. Nobody does. It’s only when I wear my yellow suit that people see me at all. Otherwise, I’m just old Muriel. I’m practically invisible.’ Her smile was unexpected and wistful.
‘What about the attack on the real Mr Crown at the house?’ asked Carter, quelling a momentary feeling of sympathy. He couldn’t afford that. He replaced it with an image of Muriel painstakingly shaking petrol around the prone body of Matthew Pietrangelo, standing back and tossing a lighted match …
‘It was late, after dark, and he was struck down by a blow from the rear. It was practically a copycat attack to the one on Matthew Pietrangelo.’
‘Yes, I got a second chance, but that went wrong, too,’ Muriel grumbled. ‘It was his fault. I warned him to leave. He took no notice of my note. But at least I tried. He came out to Key House again. I saw the moving light from my pigeon loft, so I went down there again – carrying the priest. This time I meant to make sure of him. I didn’t want to get the wrong man again, as I’d done the first time. So I waited until I was positive he was the person poking about in there. I think he must have realised someone was there. I even called out his name, Gervase. I was nervous and it didn’t come out very loudly, more a hoarse whisper, so I don’t know if he heard me or not. But he called back, and I heard his voice so knew it was him. I didn’t get in the perfect blow because he struck out with his torch and deflected the priest just enough to make it glance off his head. It was good enough to make him fall down on the floor. I was getting ready to hit him again when that prize booby, Roger Trenton, turned up!’
Muriel’s voice quivered in outrage. ‘Would you credit it? I’d never known Trenton go there after dark. I had to slip out of there and scuttle off home by a roundabout route. It just wasn’t meant to be. Twice I tried to kill Crown. The first time I got the wrong man and the second time I was foiled by someone turning up. The devil looks after his own, they say, and certainly something has looked after Gervase Crown!’
‘Well,’ said Carter to Jess as they returned back upstairs later. ‘If either Pietrangelo’s DNA or that of Gervase Crown is on that priest, that will pretty well sew up a case against Muriel Pickering.’
‘Her story does explain how Alfie Darrow came to find the Clio in the coppice near Mullions,’ Jess pointed out. ‘So it does look as if Alfie was telling the truth – as far as that part of his story goes. I still don’t believe he drove it around and then just abandoned it.’
‘And I don’t think he’ll ever confess to anything else, unless we find the person to whom he sold it. But you never know with police work,’ Carter added more optimistically. ‘Perhaps something will happen to make Mr Darrow change his mind and supply us with the truth.’
Chapter 21
Carter’s optimism was unexpectedly rewarded. They found themselves facing Alfie Darrow rather more quickly than they’d anticipated. The following morning a message was relayed to Jess that Mrs Sandra Darrow, accompanied by her son, wished to speak to her.
‘This I gotta see,’ muttered Morton.
‘Be my guest, Phil.’
The interview room was not very big and with the two police officers, Alfie and Sandra Darrow in it, it appeared an awful lot smaller. Sandra was built on generous lines. Her bulk, startlingly clad in a baggy black top festooned with sequins and a sagging purple skirt, was majestically, if precariously, enthroned on a very small chair. Masses of improbably black hair cascaded over her meaty shoulders and large hoop earrings swung from her ears.
Beside her, her son looked a mere wisp of a human being. He also looked one of the most miserable and his face was a mess, much of it bruised purple and yellow. His nose was bulbous, he had two black eyes and his upper lip was split and puffy. He was hardly re
cognisable.
‘Hello, Alfie,’ remarked Morton, inspecting the damage. ‘What happened to you? Were you in a fight or did someone beat you up? You look as though you’ve walked into a wall.’
Alfie clearly intended to give a colourful reply but was cut short by his mother, who dug a well-directed elbow into his ribs, so that whatever he’d been going to say, all he let out was a gasp of pain.
‘Are you that Inspector Campbell?’ enquired Mrs Darrow of Jess, after studying her minutely, top to toe. ‘Are you the one my boy is always talking about?’
‘I’m Inspector Campbell,’ Jess agreed. ‘I wasn’t aware Alfie talks about me a lot.’
‘Well, he does,’ said Mrs Darrow. She transferred the sharp gaze of her dark, beady eyes, sunk in her doughy face like currants in a hot cross bun, to Morton. ‘’Oo is he?’ she asked. She didn’t ask it of Jess, she asked it of her son.
‘He’s a sergeant, name of Morton,’ muttered Alfie. ‘He’s another one always on at me.’
Jess and Morton exchanged glances. Were they about to be accused by Mrs Darrow of harassing her blameless boy?
Jess decided it was time she took control of the interview. ‘Well, Mrs Darrow, I’m leading the team looking into the attempted robbery at Briskett’s bank.’
But Mrs Darrow had her own agenda. ‘I’m a woman on my own,’ she announced. ‘My husband left.’
Both officers looked nonplussed.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Jess, not sure what else could be said.
‘I wasn’t,’ said Mrs Darrow. ‘I was glad to see him go. He was useless. Now my Alfie here …’ She threw out a hand and struck her son in the chest to indicate she meant that Alfie and not any other Alfie lurking in the room. Alfie winced and gurgled. ‘My Alfie was never a bad boy. I don’t say he was ever a saint, but what kid is a saint, especially these days?’
Jess and Morton made vague noises of agreement. Morton followed it with a sigh of exasperation and a muttered, ‘Here we go!’
‘Of course, he’s been in trouble from time to time, but he’s never meant any harm by any of it,’ Mrs Darrow informed them in tones suddenly confidential. Her ample bosom tilted forward but the rolls of fat at the level of her waist did not allow of bending. ‘His problem is he don’t think. He’s never been what you’d call very quick on the uptake. He was never no good at school. But I blame the teachers he had. They said he couldn’t keep up in the class he was in. I said to them, that’s what they were there for, to help him keep up. Then they put him in one of those classes for slow learners but he never learned anything there, either, so they might just as well have left him where he was.’ She frowned. ‘One of them people what come to the school and assess the kids said he’d got a deficiency. He’d got no attention.’
‘Attention deficiency disorder?’ Morton was getting into the swing of Alfie’s educational problems.
‘That’s it,’ she said, nodding at Morton. ‘And he has. I know that for a fact because for years I’ve talked to him until I’m blue in the face and he never has listened.’
‘Mrs Darrow,’ Jess asked, seeing that the discussion of Alfie’s failure at school, and resulting failure at life in general, might take over the interview, ‘may I ask—’
She got no further.
‘I’m just coming to that!’ snapped the lady. ‘If you’d hang on a minute.’
Wildly, Jess wondered if the Darrows were in any way related to Muriel Pickering, who had a similar linear approach to any narrative. But Muriel had expressed such a poor opinion of ‘that little rotter, Alfie Darrow’ that it seemed unlikely.
‘He told me,’ said Mrs Darrow, ‘how the police had pulled him in, because of that car he found abandoned.’
‘Yes, we’re very interested in—’ began Morton in a new attempt to introduce his questions regarding the getaway car.
Mrs Darrow rolled over his words inexorably, like the tide. ‘And then you told him it had bin used in a bank raid. That right?’ She was still addressing Jess.
‘That’s certainly correct, Mrs Darrow,’ Jess told her. ‘Your son has admitted taking the car from—’
Mrs Darrow was impervious to attempts to wrest control of the interview. ‘I heard about that bank raid on the local news on telly. The robbers never got any money, I heard. Then he comes home looking like that.’ She pointed at her son’s damaged face. ‘Blood all over my bathroom. So I said to him, you listen to me, my boy. You tell the cops all you know because otherwise …’ Mrs Darrow drew a deep breath and declared, ‘you’ll be an accessory.’ The little black eyes fixed Jess. ‘That right?’
‘Er, yes, Mrs Darrow, Alfie could be an accessory if he’s not told us all he knows.’
‘See?’ said Mrs Darrow to her son. ‘That’s what I said, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, Mum,’ said Alfie miserably.
Morton passed a hand over his brow.
‘“What did you do with that car?” I asked him. Didn’t I, Alfie?’
‘Yes, Mum.’ Alfie, who was in reality almost nineteen years old, now seemed to have regressed to the age of six.
‘He said first of all he’d left it by the road somewhere. But I didn’t bring him up all these years not to know when he’s holding out on me. That right?’ she demanded of the hapless Alfie again.
‘No, yes, Mum,’ said Alfie, sinking further down beside his imposing mama.
Mrs Darrow retrieved her capacious handbag from the floor beside her. It was made of black shiny plastic and was decorated with appliqué pink plastic daisies. From it she took a bloodstained, oily rag and threw it on the table between them.
‘He come home with that,’ she said. ‘He come from Cheltenham on the bus with it. I know that because my neighbour, Leanne Somerton, she was on the bus and saw him. She told me later, in the pub. That rag,’ Mrs Darrow pointed at the object as a barrister might have indicated Exhibit A. ‘That rag’s been in a garage.’
‘Ah!’ exclaimed Morton, seizing what he feared might be his last chance to get to the information he wanted. ‘Sold it on somewhere, did you, Alfie? Who was the dealer you took it to?’
‘I never,’ said Alfie obstinately.
His parent turned a gimlet eye on him and he sank down even further in his chair. If he’d tried to go any lower, he’d have rolled off on to the floor.
‘So, if he tells you what he really done with it,’ continued Mrs Darrow, turning back to Jess, ‘will that go in his favour? I reckon it should. Because he’s come in here voluntarily.’
At that even Alfie looked as though, for a split second, he might disagree, but then obviously realising the futility of arguing with his parent, just sniffed.
‘He didn’t tell you right off first time you asked him about the car,’ explained Mrs Darrow, ‘because he was scared. He knew he should tell you, because he knows right from wrong.’
Now it was Phil Morton who looked as if he longed to disagree with her.
‘So,’ concluded Sandra Darrow, ‘he’s come in here now to do the right thing and tell you what he really done with it.’
There was a silence in which Alfie found himself the target of three pairs of eyes. He made a last attempt to avoid the inevitable.
‘If I tell you,’ he said pathetically, ‘I’ll get well done over.’ He pointed at his face. ‘This’ll be nothing to it. He’ll set the dog on me.’
‘Who is “he”, Alfie?’
‘I can’t tell you, can I?’ Alfie again pointed at his disfigured features. ‘You blind or something?’
‘It could go in your favour, as your mother says,’ countered Morton.
‘That won’t help me if I’ve got two broken legs, will it?’ cried Alfie in despair.
‘You tell them right now!’ ordered his mother. ‘And if anyone comes threatening you afterwards, you tell them they’ll have to deal with me!’ She straightened up, folded her hands over her patent handbag, and stared serenely at the police officers. ‘I weigh just a smidgeon under eighteen stone and I like a fight
,’ she said.
For a moment, it seemed to Jess she could hear the clash of weaponry and the cries of battle. Perhaps there was something in reincarnation, after all. Beneath that black sequinned top did there beat the heart of Boadicea?
‘Go on, then,’ urged Mrs Darrow of Alfie. ‘Tell them.’
So Alfie, after a pause to allow Morton to caution him, told them.
‘There’s this bloke called Gaz, and honest, he ain’t going to like this one bit. But he buys old cars, so I sold him that one, the Clio. I never knew what he was going to do with it. What’s more,’ and now real tears welled up in Alfie’s eyes, ‘he’s never paid me for it. Nuffin’, not a lousy penny.’
‘So I reckon,’ interposed his mother, ‘that my son didn’t sell the car, if he didn’t get paid. He might have wanted to sell the car, but he didn’t get any money so you can’t say he did sell it, did he? All he did was find it, abandoned like he said, and drive it around a bit. Any youngster would do that,’ concluded Mrs Darrow. ‘It don’t make him a criminal.’
Under continuing protest, Alfie had made his statement and been warned that charges would be made once it had all been checked out. He departed forlornly in the company of his mother.
The oily rag from Gaz’s premises had been carefully bagged up and sent to forensics. They had already found the wheelman for the bungled bank job (‘where would we be without informers?’ Carter had remarked). Pretty soon they would have the other members of the gang.
‘And everything, murder, arson and attempted robbery, will be neatly tied up … in due course,’ Carter observed.
‘He means,’ Morton grumbled to Jess, ‘now for all the paperwork.’
Chapter 22
Petra was again at work in her barn studio when Gervase came. She heard him call her name faintly from beyond the closed barn doors, and twisted to face them. They slid apart with a groan of wood and a teeth-grinding scrape along the gravel.