The Maggie Murders

by J P Lomas

  This conflicted with a witness statement in front of Jane from the house to house enquiries team, which stated that a Mr Peter Simpson had seen a nurse entering the deceased’s house at around 11 p.m. on the day in question. The witness had thought it seemed a late hour for such a visit (confirmed by reports from the hospital which placed most visits at between two and five in the afternoon), but had presumed his neighbour must have taken a turn for the worse.

  No other witness had mentioned a nurse, though one spoke of a woman he thought was Mrs Baker being in the area between 10.30 and 11.00pm walking down Allingham Avenue, which was just around the corner from where the Bakers lived. Yet if Connie Baker had been telling the truth, this would have been around the time she was with her mystery man in the lounge bar of the Royal Standard. Still, it was worth looking into and a quick change into the right headgear could easily convince a casual onlooker that a nurse was coming to call.

  But was it an Angel of Mercy, or an Angel of Death who had arrived at 11.00pm?

  ****

  E is for Evil.

  ‘Exe Rated Evil’ according to the headline in the Mail.

  Well I’m gratified to see that the Press have at least called them The Maggie Murders, although naturally I take issue with the word evil. That’s a very subjective and emotive way of looking at it. It’s time to find a fresh perspective; if you reverse the letters of evil, you can make the word live. And that’s what I’m doing, helping this country to live again!

  They should be writing that I’m providing a patriotic service. Look at the evidence; this is simply Thatcherism in action! It’s my contribution to getting the old, ugly and useless off the benefit books. It’s the world which is crazy, not me; I mean how can they call a man a war hero for simply burning half to death on the other side of the world?

  At least I finished the job. A proper war hero would have died attacking the Argies. What’s heroic about getting bombed in a landing craft? At least soldiers like Colonel H had the decency to die with honour. It’s just typical of the left wing bias in the BBC that makes them focus on the plight of the cripples and conscripts.

  With Maggie we’ve finally picked a leader who showed real balls in taking the Falklands back. Not even the Yanks were prepared to back us, whereas she went straight for the jugular and stood up for Britain. It’s about time someone in this country had some guts. If Labour had been in power we’d have gift wrapped the islands and handed them to Galtieri on a silver platter. Even Heath would probably have wanted to talk about what was the right thing to do…

  Well there’s been too much talking in this country. That’s the real evil and that’s why Britain was going to the dogs. Every sodding shop steward had to chip in with his miserable ha’p’orth about t’ rights of t’workers and the length of every bloody tea break had to be put to a vote! No wonder nothing ever got finished! That wasn’t democracy in action; it was holding the country to ransom. Thank God Maggie swept away all that union nonsense. The unions were crippling this country far more than those bombs which crippled that marine long before I put him out of his misery.

  Like Maggie, I’m just helping to remove the cancer of dependency from this country. In the Dark Ages they would have seen many of our modern medical practices as evil. Their healers and scientists would have been misunderstood as witches and warlocks as they were too ignorant to grasp the future. Well I’ve voted for Maggie’s vision. The old ways are dead and it’s time for people to put their superstitious moralising away and embrace the new ways of living. Words like evil are for the morality plays of the middle ages, words like opportunity and enterprise are the buzzwords of today.

  ****

  Sitting on a bench in the Strand Gardens, Spilsbury bit into a soggy, sausage roll as his despondent gaze fell on the War Memorial standing at the centre of the two paved paths which divided the small park into four equal squares of neatly tended, green lawn. Exmouth took its ‘Town of Flowers’ soubriquet seriously and the grass was not only crisply cut, but moreover each section was flanked by blooming flower beds with bright red, gold and orange flowers of a type his wife would have been able to name in both English and Latin.

  Students from the foreign language school with brightly coloured clothes and plastic bags stamped with an ‘EF’ logo sat chatting in a Babel of tongues by the side facing the newly reopened cinema and attendant burger bar. Under shady wooden benches dotted at even spaces under the trees which bordered the gardens sat older people, some who might conceivably remember some of the names displayed on the cenotaph. A couple of girls from one of the local shops or offices were smoking as they sat on the foot high wall by the taxi rank, whilst a couple of teenage Goths kept out of the sun as they surreptitiously took turns sipping from a bottle of cider in the thatched shelter at the far end. He wondered if the Goths had felt the brightly planted hanging baskets which decorated the shelter had been placed there on purpose to annoy them?

  His stomach had been unsettled in the morning and he wondered if it was because of the case. He hadn’t told Felicity, as she’d only insist that he went to see the quack and the last thing he needed was for her to find out that he still hadn’t got around to registering with a GP down here. Experience told him that this was not going to be one with a result at the end. Normally, that wouldn’t have over worried him, he’d had his fair share of cases which led nowhere and yet he felt as this was his last major case it would be nice to go out on a high. If he could be sure it was just one murder he was investigating, then he would have felt more confident about it. The chance that it had been carried out by the wife, another member of the family or a friend would then be relatively strong. Yet, if he was investigating a possible serial killer, then the odds on catching someone killing strangers at random were not in his favour.

  He had already heard the rumours about his predecessor’s fate. Hardly noticing the bland sausage meat and pastry he was consuming, he contemplated on whether or not he might persuade the top brass to see if his current case might be connected with the butcher’s murder by experimenting with a development his mate Tel had been bending his ear about over drinks at Bob’s daughter’s wedding.

  Terry, it transpired, had engineered a transfer from the Met to the East Midlands, as his wife wanted to be closer to her sister or something like that. To be honest he hadn’t been paying much attention to his former colleague’s domestic arrangements, as the free bar had already lowered his boredom threshold. It was only when Tel moved on to shop talk that he found his interest piqued. It seemed the Leicestershire lot had been getting excited about a new technique they’d been using in the case of two local school girls who had been raped and murdered. So much for an easier life in the sticks! Like Brian, Tel had been hoping for an easier life leaving the Met, only to find himself also involved in a double murder investigation on his first case. Though at least Terry had had the good sense to remain a DS, it wouldn’t be his arse on the line if it went tits up…

  It had been a nasty case, nastier even than this one as kids were involved. Like him (if Hawkins’ theory was to be trusted), Tel hadn’t arrived right at the beginning of the case, but only when they’d connected a murder of a local teenager to another similar killing five years’ before. Tel hadn’t been especially happy about his superiors’ decision to bring in the boffins, as he’d been convinced they’d got their man. Under questioning a Richard Buckland had coughed to the murder of Dawn Ashworth, whose body had been found on Ten Pound Lane in Leicestershire. The trouble was he wouldn’t confess to killing Lynda Mann on the sinister sounding Black Pad Footpath in 1981 and yet the police were convinced the same guy had killed both Lynda and Dawn.

  In Terry’s opinion Buckland would have got life for Dawn’s murder and that would have been that if the forensics boys hadn’t been trialling a new technique with the local university. This was something called DNA profiling and Spilsbury still couldn’t remember what the initials stood for. The best explanation that Tel could offer was that it wa
s supposed to be as good as fingerprinting, although it was based on matching blood and semen samples. At the time Spilsbury had found the latter particularly distasteful, especially as the waiters had just begun serving the fish.

  His eyes had become increasingly glazed over as his friend had tried explaining the science to him, but now his greasy fingers held a faxed copy of a report from the West Midlands police explaining it in details he was beginning to glean. Semen samples and blood taken from the first girl, Lynda Mann, narrowed her killer down to 10% of the male population. Of course, that still proved too many for a match, but by the time Dawn Ashworth’s body was found strangled in similar circumstances, the boffins had figured out that if they took blood and saliva samples from 5000 local men, then they’d get their man.

  This DNA stuff seemed to mean Buckland was ruled out as the killer - though Spilsbury was more convinced of his innocence by the fact that he would have been just 14 at the time of the first murder, rather than all the sci-fi stuff in the report. He wondered if a jury would be convinced by this type of evidence, let alone whether the powers that be would ever consider the expense of such an investigation? The last he’d heard from Terry was that they’d fingered a local baker for both killings.

  His bosses had already outlined the expense of re-opening part of the recently mothballed local police station to him and so he felt an expensive diversion into the world of science fiction would be as welcome as a fart in a space shuttle. At the moment it was irrelevant anyway, as he had neither fingerprints, nor anything else which might have evidence of the killer’s blood or saliva on it that this new test might show, even if it was ever accepted by the courts.

  Well for now he’d settle on having Hawkins bringing in the glamorous widow for questioning. With any luck Hawkins would be wrong about this murder being connected and it would turn out to be a plain, old domestic after all. It couldn’t have been easy for the wife suddenly finding she had gone from being married to an action man, to a cripple overnight. Perhaps she had just snapped, or else she was doing the dirty on him and he found out? Either way, at least motives like this made sense and didn’t take a degree in science to work out! Getting up he wondered if there was a toilet in the fast food place he could use?

  ****

  In Exeter, Dent was becoming almost as excited as Britain’s speculators by the paperwork in front of him. It may not have had figures on it outlining vast potential profits; however he felt it contained data that might enable him to invest in his very own futures market. The last four years had already yielded a considerable rise in his personal stock and if he invested the information in front of him wisely, he was sure further dividends would follow.

  Having worked his way up from being an Assistant Chief Constable to becoming the Deputy Chief Constable of the largest police force in England (geographically speaking) he had been beginning to speculate when the once coveted title of Deputy might finally become replaced by Acting, before there was nothing in front of the words Chief Constable. Given the amount of time Sir Robert seemed to be indisposed (station gossip held out that it was his prostate) Dent felt that he was running the show anyway. Most of the big decisions were his and only rubber stamped by the Chief. In fact any decisions made by Sir Robert recently had been invariably contrary and sometimes downright damaging. Letting that wog run the Kellow case for one; there might have been a result if people had listened to him. Still, at least Dent had been able to clean up the mess they’d made in appointing Sobers.

  Spilsbury’s report outlining a possible link between the two Exmouth murders might just as well have been the goose that laid the golden egg for Dent. Big murder cases were few and far between on the South-West peninsula and something like this could well get the nationals interested – particularly if there was a serial killer at large. If Dent’s lips hadn’t been so dry, they would have watered at this moment.

  Calling for a second cup of coffee, he reclined in his chair and began planning his briefing for the press. If he could be seen to be in charge of this investigation, then all the credit amassed would surely lead to his need for that larger office upstairs sooner, rather than later. If things went wrong, well then it might still be useful to have Sir Robert around, but with an experienced London copper like Spilsbury leading the inquiry, then he couldn’t see them failing to get a result this time.

  Sitting up in his chair, he reached for the intercom and buzzed his PA. It was time to call Delia and get her to set the VCR to tape the news bulletins that evening. His wife might even get that holiday home in Provence she wanted if all went to plan.

  Chapter 13

  ‘You weren’t at home.’

  The statement was simple enough, but the answer would be revealing thought Jane. Not being at home in the morning, afternoon, or evening might have a ready number of lies to explain a possible absence, but not being at home in the early hours of the morning as your husband burnt to death would take something a little more creative.

  This was why Constance Baker was now sitting opposite them in the interview room, a duty solicitor at her side. They’d put compassion to one side and their suspicions on maximum when she’d arrived home after it had already been declared a crime scene.

  ‘I was at work.’

  The lie was so obvious it was hardly worth Jane’s time in pulling it apart.

  ‘On Fridays, you work as a classroom assistant at the local primary school. A school which doesn’t open until 8.00am on most days and which on Friday was opening even later owing to it being used as a polling station the day before.’

  ‘My other work.’

  ‘You also help out organising charity events with a children’s organisation in Exeter according to your neighbours. Are you expecting us to believe they needed you there between the hours of midnight and two a.m. on Friday 12th June; the day your husband was murdered?’

  Connie flinched. Jane waited. Silence was often the best tactic when you had a suspect on the run and the beautiful, expensively dressed brunette in front of her certainly counted as a suspect.

  Connie dabbed at her mascara, as her earlier self-possession appeared ready to leave her.

  ‘There’s only one job I know of where a woman dresses to the nines and is out all night,’ Spilsbury interjected, as he pushed a cigarette across the table.

  Jane watched as Connie took the bait.

  ‘Are you calling me a whore?’

  Connie’s earlier composure had deserted her. A mixture of emotions played themselves out on a face which earlier had been a mask of grief.

  Jane watched as the duty solicitor tried to cope with the warrior woman beside him; the fury in the Jaeger dress though was too much for the brown suited, sweating lawyer who ineffectually tried to calm his client, whilst failing to upbraid the smug Spilsbury.

  The interview was going to plan; Jane offered a way out for Connie, or at least another wrong turning to destabilise her.

  ‘Perhaps you were with a friend?’

  ‘If you mean by that was I fucking someone, yes I fucking well was!’

  It was now Jane who found herself wrong footed. On a daily basis she heard far worse in the police canteen; however this was like hearing the Queen swearing and did not square with her idea of the beautiful, intelligent woman who faced her across the table.

  ‘And may we know the name of this lover?’ Spilsbury enquired sweetly.

  ‘He wasn’t my lover; he was a fuck, a casual fuck as my husband died!’ Connie spat back.

  Even Spilsbury seemed to have been taken aback by that and her solicitor seemed to have found one of his doodles more absorbing than the scene in front of him.

  ****

  As Tim served up fish fingers and chips for her and the kids, Jane caught herself wondering what it would be like to have a lover. She’d had her chances. From the day she had joined up colleagues had been cracking on to her. Usually she laughed it off, sometimes it got to her and occasionally it flattered her. She knew some girls who had
it let it get to them and had left the force, or put in a complaint (which never seemed to achieve more than them being transferred) and some who gave as good as they got.

  Her wedding ring gave her some defence, though it seemed to up the badinage. Though there were still a few who hadn’t quite got out of the habit of assuming she was a dyke, but making Sergeant had helped put most of the overt wise crackers in their place. Sometimes though the intensity of the work and the feeling that not even the most intimate outsider could really understand what she did had placed her in situations where the lure of a good looking colleague and the chance of some extra- curricular fun had been hard to resist.

  Saturnine Carl Roberts had almost been her undoing. They’d spent six months working together on investigating a spate of violent burglaries in and around Exeter. Within moments of meeting they’d been firing off the mutual insults which so often conceal an attraction between would be lovers. After a few days she’d found herself just using the case as an excuse to make more time to work with him. As he was married and also had children, Jane had willed herself to believe there was no danger, but as she discovered their shared love for the same food, books and films, she found herself falling ever more deeply for him. Trying not to be alone with him had become futile; resisting the urge to respond when he brushed against her had become almost impossible.

  Knowing her reputation as being a bit of a lightweight when it came to drinking, the only precaution she’d taken was always to insist on soft drinks on the increasing number of times she found herself discussing their case notes in early evening pubs and bars. She had a fairly good idea that a few glasses of white wine would have been enough to turn a platonic friendship into a full blown affair. Of course this had just given Carl more ammunition to tease her with, but given that he liked a drink and she was more than willing to do the driving she managed to maintain her equilibrium until the night of Nina’s Hen-do.