A Fatal Affair

by Faith Martin

  Trudy caught Clement’s gaze and frowned thoughtfully. If Janet was right, and the murdered girl had found some way to make her dreams come true, had Iris gone so far as to break things off with David? She’d hardly want to take her boyfriend to the capital with her and have him underfoot whilst she enjoyed her big adventure, would she? And if she had jilted him, maybe she hadn’t been particularly kind about it? She could just see someone like Iris, all caught up in her own world, being callous and unthinking about the feelings of others. And if she’d been particularly brutal about it – maybe even laughed at him – it might have led to him strangling her in a fit of rage.

  ‘Did she actually say what her plans were?’ Trudy asked cautiously.

  ‘Oh no. But then, Iris liked to be mysterious,’ Janet said, half admiringly and half bitterly. ‘You know, cultivate an air of … oh, I don’t know … glamour, I suppose. She would tease and taunt you with some outrageous claim, until you thought she was talking so much pie-in-the-sky, but then the moment you called her on it, she’d pull it off. Like saying she was going to wear a pearl necklace at the next village hall dance, but not showing up in it. And then, when you teased her about it, she’d turn up in the village shop wearing it when she bought a loaf of bread. She liked to keep people guessing about her. I think it made her feel important.’

  Trudy smiled. ‘She sounds as if she could be a bit of a handful.’

  ‘She was,’ Janet said flatly.

  ‘She sounds like she might be hard work though – to have as a best friend,’ Trudy tried again.

  But again it became clear that no criticism of the dead May Queen would be tolerated as Janet’s pretty lips firmed ominously again. ‘I liked her, no matter what people said,’ she insisted firmly.

  Trudy knew she’d never get anywhere whilst the dead girl’s memory remained sacrosanct, so she tried to find a lever that she might use to prise open Janet’s lips again. ‘Someone told us that she had the habit of stealing other girls’ boyfriends,’ she mused. ‘Was David going out with someone else before Iris? Maybe someone who was jealous of Iris for stealing him away?’

  Janet thought about this intriguing possibility for a moment, but then sighed. ‘I suppose it’s possible that he met someone at that college he was going to, and jilted her when he and Iris got together,’ Janet said indifferently. ‘But he’d not been going with any girl from the village.’

  Janet nodded, again catching Clement’s knowing eye. Unless Janet was a very good actress, she hadn’t been going out with David Finch herself then. Unless she had been secretly interested in him, but knowing of Iris’s poaching ways, had been careful to hide her true feelings?

  Then, remembering the warm way Ronnie Dewberry had talked about her, she tried another angle. ‘Did you and Iris ever double-date? With his best friend, maybe?’

  ‘Ronnie?’ Janet said very casually. ‘No, I’ve never stepped out with Ronnie,’ she said, her eyes never wavering from a dead stare straight ahead.

  Trudy gave a mental nod. Unless she was much mistaken, Janet might not have ever dated the handsome young farmer, but she had probably wanted to. Unless, again, she was being manipulated by a very clever young woman who was as intelligent as she was lovely.

  Just supposing Janet had been in love with David? Passionately and deeply in love. Iris, who probably had superlatively accurate radar when it came to her best friend’s emotional state, would almost certainly have picked up on it. And if Janet’s mother was to be believed, Iris would then have made it her mission in life to steal David away – and then probably have grown bored with him once she had.

  And how would Janet feel about all that? Perhaps her so-called best friend’s latest betrayal had been a step too far? It wasn’t impossible for a woman to strangle another woman, was it? Janet was taller than Iris, and although willowy, was probably strong enough. And then what? With Iris dead, and displayed so contemptuously on the village green, had her thoughts turned to punishing David? Regardless of whether or not he’d even known of any feelings Janet might have had for him, someone emotionally fraught and unbalanced enough to kill once, surely wouldn’t hesitate to kill again.

  But killing a fit young man was a vastly different proposition from killing a smaller woman. Hence the need to drug him with the tainted alcohol first. And then, once he was too woozy to put up a real struggle … But would Janet have the strength, once she’d placed the rope around his neck, to haul his body into the air and tie off the rope? Trudy just couldn’t see it somehow.

  She gave a small sigh, but all that speculation meant that she had hesitated too long to ask the next question, and Janet was quick to take advantage of it.

  ‘Look, I’d better get back to the shop. Miss Boisier doesn’t like being on her own in case we get a lot of customers in all at once.’ And so saying, she slipped lithely to her feet and turned to head back towards the narrow alleyway.

  ‘Thank you for your time, Miss Baines,’ Clement said gallantly. It earned him nothing more than a brief, distracted smile, and then she was gone.

  She even walked elegantly, Trudy thought dispassionately, watching Janet’s willowy form in the sky-blue dress disappear into the shadows.

  ‘So, what did you make of her?’ Trudy asked her mentor curiously. ‘She really is quite beautiful, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes,’ Clement admitted, sounding mildly amused. ‘She and Iris must have made quite a dazzling pair. No wonder half the male population of the village seemed smitten with them.’

  ‘Do you think Janet might be in danger as well?’ Trudy asked, suddenly alarmed. It had never occurred to her that Iris’s death wasn’t a one-off thing, but Clement’s sudden grouping of them together made her feel afraid now for Janet. What if there was a maniac in the village intent on going around killing beautiful girls? Iris might only be the first!

  To her dismay, Clement took his time in answering, and when he did, she didn’t find his response particularly comforting.

  ‘How can we know? Until we know who killed Iris, and why, nothing’s certain, is it? Do you get the feeling that the relationship between those two girls was rather an odd one?’

  ‘What – oh you mean because you can’t really tell whether they were friends or rivals? Best buddies, or secret enemies?’ Trudy said. ‘Not really. Girls can be like that sometimes,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘You can really like someone, and really hate them at the same time.’

  Now it was Clement’s turn to look vaguely worried. ‘Really?’ And he wondered if his own daughter’s school friendships had been so convoluted.

  Trudy smiled, deciding it would only confuse – and alarm – him more if she tried to explain a teenage girl’s mentality to him. ‘We’re not really seeing things any more clearly, are we? With the case, I mean.’

  Clement sighed. ‘No. But I think there’s someone who might be able to lift the fog for us a bit, don’t you? Someone who might have known Iris rather well if the gossips have it right?’

  Trudy only had to think for a moment. Then she nodded. ‘You mean this arty-type chap who’s either a crook, or a celebrity, or something very disreputable, depending on who’s doing the describing?’

  ‘That’s the chap,’ Clement said amiably.

  Chapter 18

  ‘So what do we actually know about Mortimer Crowley?’ Clement asked as they sat in his car, watching a female blackbird industriously investigating the bottom of a nearby garden hedge for caterpillars and beetles.

  He’d driven back from Oxford and parked near the village green. It seemed appropriate somehow, although all signs that the pretty spot had once been the sign of a particular nasty murder were now gone. Even the flattened grass, where many constabulary boots had once trudged, had now sprung up bright and green again and was rife with daisies, courtesy of the spring rain and sunshine. The permanent maypole, though, was still rooted in place, and he wondered, idly, if tradition would win out and it would be allowed to stay there, or if some future village committee woul
d elect to have it removed.

  Trudy sighed. ‘I heard he was a person of interest in the Iris Carmody case quite early on, but nothing much seemed to come of it,’ she admitted with a rueful smile. ‘I overheard the Sarge talking about him to one of the other constables on the team,’ she further confessed.

  ‘Were you curious enough to do a little digging around about the murder case?’ Clement asked mildly, careful to keep his eyes on the village scenery. The last thing he wanted was to make her feel he was putting her on the spot, or questioning what she did – or didn’t do – at work. Although they worked well together, he was always aware that her job meant a lot to her, and he never intended to trespass on her priorities if he could avoid it.

  Trudy smiled, even more ruefully than before, and made no sign that she regarded his question as intrusive. ‘That’s the thing about being given all the paperwork and filing to do,’ she said super-casually. ‘Often you drop papers on the floor and have to pick them up.’

  ‘And naturally your eyes can’t help but pick up the odd word or two as you replace them in their correct order,’ Clement mused idly.

  ‘You can hardly avoid it,’ Trudy agreed. ‘As far as I can tell, the Iris Carmody case is suffering from a real lack of physical evidence and or witnesses.’

  Clement sighed. ‘And now that David Finch has died – probably by suicide – perhaps the investigating officer is thinking that the case is all but closed anyway?’

  Trudy thought about it for a moment, and wondered. Was DI Jennings assuming David had killed his girlfriend then himself, and thus, the case could be wound down? Was allowing herself and Dr Ryder to ‘investigate’ the circumstances surrounding David’s death nothing more than sop to a grieving father and a superior officer? Or did Jennings still have an open mind?

  ‘Well, if he is, Inspector Jennings isn’t likely to discuss it with me,’ Trudy said wryly.

  Clement nodded at this, but refused to be defeatist. ‘So, how bad is our local Lothario?’ he asked briskly. ‘Does he deserve the scorn of the housewives of Middle Fenton? Or was he more sinned against than sinning?’

  Trudy sighed. ‘Well, for a start, Mr Crowley is very well off. He owns a lot of real estate around here – some land he leases to farmers, but mostly he buys up local cottages when they come up on the market and then he leases them back out again. A few of the more upmarket ones he does up and rents out as country or second homes to incomers from London and Birmingham. That’s how he comes to have a place in the village – he often uses one of them he did up for himself. His main residence is in London, though, I think. So that alone doesn’t really endear him to the locals.’

  ‘Hmmm. Does he spend much time here?’

  ‘A fair bit, yes, from what I can tell.’

  This made Clement frown thoughtfully. ‘Which makes me wonder just what the attraction can be?’ he muttered, glancing around the quiet, pretty-but-unspectacular village. ‘You’d have thought, if he was into a bohemian kind of lifestyle that he’d rather stick to clubs in Soho, the world of cinema, nightclubs and avant-garde art parties. But there’s nothing like that around here, and he doesn’t sound like the kind of man to indulge in bucolic pleasures.’

  Trudy shrugged. She was not quite sure what ‘bucolic’ meant and she didn’t want to show her ignorance. ‘All I can tell you is that he owns art galleries in Chelsea and Solihull, and one in Brighton. But from what I could gather, they’re all run by managers. He has some stocks and shares, but he has a broker for that.’

  ‘So he’s hardly a workaholic,’ Clement mused. ‘Again, it makes me wonder just what he does with all his spare time? Especially around here.’

  Trudy shrugged. ‘He has no criminal record, I know that. It was one of the first things the Sergeant asked to be checked out. He’s not married either – well, not now, anyway. He was married, to a woman called Alison Browne-Gore, but she died about five years ago. She was rich too – an heiress of some kind to a gin, or wine dynasty or something like that. Her family made a lot of money out of booze. I think he still owns a lot of breweries he inherited from her. They had no children though.’

  ‘Is he old?’

  ‘Pretty old – forty-one.’

  Clement hid a wince at that, and supposed that, to a girl of twenty, forty-one might seem fairly aged. She probably thought of himself as positively ancient. And as if thinking about his advancing years had triggered it, he felt his left leg begin to tremble slightly.

  He ignored it.

  ‘Where did he go to school?’ he asked curiously.

  ‘Eton, then Oxford,’ Trudy said at once.

  ‘You must have dropped a lot of files,’ Clement said, highly entertained.

  Trudy flushed a little, but didn’t deny it.

  ‘Did you find out just how well he knew our dead May Queen?’ Clement asked, turning the key in the ignition to start the motor. ‘If he came to the serious attention of your sergeant, I would imagine there had to be more against him than mere idle village gossip.’

  But here Trudy had to admit to her dearth of knowledge. ‘I don’t know. The actual case files are kept locked in the DI’s desk.’

  ‘And you don’t have a key?’ Clement couldn’t help but tease.

  Trudy shot him a reproachful look and said nothing. Taking the hint, Clement let his smile fade. ‘Whereabouts in the village does he live?’ he asked instead.

  ‘Near the manor house, off Church Lane,’ Trudy said promptly.

  Clement looked at his watch and frowned. ‘Might be a job for tomorrow morning,’ he said, and Trudy nodded. With a grunt, Clement put the car in gear and set off to drive his young friend back to Oxford.

  Chapter 19

  Mortimer Crowley’s house was a handsome Georgian building, typically square and with elegant proportions, built out of the local Cotswold stone which glowed in the morning light. An ancient wisteria had colonised nearly all of the south-facing façade. It had a large, well-tended garden, and a small stable block had been converted into garages.

  Trudy couldn’t imagine living in a place like this.

  ‘Let’s hope he’s home,’ Clement, less impressed, said mildly as they walked up the thickly gravelled driveway. On the front step, he reached for a black, wrought-iron bell-pull and yanked on it. In the distance, behind the solid oak door, they could just hear a faint tinkling sound.

  The man who opened the door nearly a minute later looked distinctly hungover, and was barely out of his twenties. Rumpled clothes matched his rumpled brown hair and unshaven chin, and his bloodshot eyes blinked blearily. He regarded them without interest for a moment and absently scratched himself on the chin.

  ‘Huh? Yeah? Wannah-you-wan’?’ he slurred.

  ‘We’re hoping to have a word with Mr Mortimer Crowley,’ Clement said clearly and slowly.

  For a second the young man continued to look at them blankly, but then slowly nodded. ‘Oh. Morty? Yeah … he mus’ be around somewhere …’ So saying, he stepped back and beckoned them in, revealing a rather lovely hall.

  It had the usual black-and-white tiled floor, and housed a fine example of a late-eighteenth-century grandfather clock, that was standing flush to one wall. Although it was ticking ponderously, it was running late. A small but charming wooden staircase swept in an elegant curve off to the left, inviting the visitor upstairs, but the young man gestured vaguely past it and into the darker far corner. ‘In there somewhere, pro’bly,’ he said, and then left them somewhat abruptly.

  Trudy and Clement just had time to see that he’d plunged into a downstairs lavatory before the door swung back behind him. A moment or two later came a vague sound of retching.

  ‘Well, so far our party-loving friend seems to be living up to his reputation,’ Clement said with a slight smile of distaste.

  ‘You think he often has friends over who get too drunk and have to stay the night?’ Trudy asked, part-scandalised, part-intrigued. ‘Do you think they all come from London?’ She had never been to L
ondon in her life and regarded it as almost a foreign country – slightly dangerous and unknowable.

  Clement shrugged. ‘I’d imagine so. Well, shall we see if we can find the man himself?’

  Trudy nodded, and set off towards the far side of the hall that had been indicated by their not-very helpful friend. As she moved, her head swivelled from side to side, taking it all in. As befitted an art dealer, there were indeed a lot of paintings hung on the various walls, but somewhat to her disappointment, none of them were of nude women – or men, for that matter. For the most part, they were landscapes, or dark portraits of various men and women in period costume, but she had no idea if they were great works of art or cheap reproductions. Her secondary school had been hot on teaching ‘the three R’s’ but it had been rather more reticent when it came to art appreciation.

  She glanced at Clement, who was also looking at the paintings, but didn’t want to appear ignorant by asking what he thought of them. She had no doubt that he would know if they were authentic though; a man of refinement like Dr Ryder was bound to know. Instead she chose to think things through for herself, and came to the conclusion that a man who owned art galleries was unlikely to hang anything on his own walls that wasn’t a credit to him.

  Unless he was the sort who liked to play jokes, and had the kind of humour that would allow him to find it funny to hang worthless daubs in his private residence?