by Janet Neel
‘No, no. Not till the Sunday.’
‘What time would that have been?’
‘I thought you said Antony’s father would have been dead by the early hours of Saturday,’ she said, near to tears.
‘We’re interested in knowing where people were at any time from Friday through till Monday morning when the body was found.’ He let the pause stretch. ‘What time on Sunday would you have met Dr Antony Price?’
‘About 7 p.m. I’m fairly sure that’s right. We had dinner and we came back to my flat and Antony was with me until he left about eleven o’clock on Monday morning.’ She felt under the bright gaze as if she had been found committing some small but squalid crime.
‘Thank you, Dr Brewster.’ Surprisingly, he was not sounding unsympathetic and as she managed to look at him he smiled at her. ‘Now, DC Richey will write all that down for you to sign, if you’ll be kind enough to wait a few minutes. We may want to talk to you again, so please let us know if you change your address again.’
She looked at him sharply. Long eyelashes for a man, she thought, irrelevantly.
‘Specifically the officer in charge of this case, Detective Superintendent McLeish, may want to see you.’
‘McLeish?’
‘Aye. A Scot like myself.’ He waited to see if she had anything else to say, then handed over to the desk sergeant and vanished, followed by his acolyte.
Twenty minutes later, her statement signed, she found a phone box. She made one call to the Refuge then rang St George’s. Antony mercifully was not operating that afternoon and she found him in his office.
‘How did it go?’ he asked, sounding anxious.
‘Not well. I told them you left at ten thirty on Friday.’
‘Did you? I thought it was a bit later than that.’ He had a tight hold on himself.
She went on doggedly, ‘I’m afraid I knew it was ten thirty so I told them so. But look, Antony, it’s worse than that. The man in charge is called McLeish. He’s married to Francesca. The woman I told you about. At the Refuge.’
‘Oh Christ.’ The silence hung between them. ‘I thought you said she was an academic.’ He sounded furiously accusing and she had to remind herself of the reasons why she had met Francesca at all.
‘She’s actually a civil servant in the DTI, on loan to a college. But in any case she is married to this man.’
‘Well, it’s bloody well against the rules for them to talk to each other.’
‘The thing is, Antony, I don’t think we can keep everything secret. I mean the man I talked to, called Davidson, got out of me that I’d lived with you until recently and he asked if we’d had an argument.’
‘You didn’t tell him about … about …?’
‘No, but I’m not sure I was very convincing.’ It was just like Antony, she thought, suddenly enraged, to try and force her to lie to protect him, because he had beaten her up. She remembered suddenly Ellen from the Refuge, married to a barrister, describing with incredulous anger how she had to put on make-up and long-sleeved dresses while the husband who had blacked her eye and left savage bruises on her upper arms criticised her incompetence, because the marks still showed.
‘Annabelle, sorry. I’m sorry you had a difficult time. I’m just worried stupid, have been ever since yesterday, and it’s all got on top of me.’ He was sounding desperate. ‘And I really don’t want all … well, all of that to come out. It would be bad for me – for us, I hope – professionally.’
Silence was a new weapon for Annabelle, but it had proved effective every time so far.
‘And the trouble is, I had a bloody good reason to kill my father, quite apart from what he did to Mum and us. Mum left her money to him for life, then to Francis and me. My father was a trustee. And he’s got at it, I knew he would, that’s why I had to take yours when Francis was in trouble. The old bastard had spent it, I could see he was lying when I went to see him. I’ve just talked to the clown who is the other trustee – it’s all gone, he can’t find it. A clean £100,000.’ It was a wail of anguish and disappointment, and Annabelle felt sick.
‘Do they suspect you?’
‘Well, of course they bloody do. I could have left you and gone to the house, found him there and kicked the table away sometime in the night, couldn’t I? And I can’t prove otherwise.’ Because you had driven me out, Annabelle supplied, painfully.
‘My card’s running out, Antony. I’ll see you tonight.’
‘Detective Inspector Crane would like to see you, sir.’
John McLeish nodded. Catherine had rung him yesterday, asking hopefully if she or one of her team could join his squad at the house in Kensington Church Street, in case the wherewithal for a fraud prosecution was lying around for the taking as it were. McLeish had refused; he had a reason for being there, the Fraud Squad would have been on a fishing expedition. And he had been quite clear as he put the phone down that Catherine had been asked to put this irregular request to him because something – enough – was known of their past relationship. He told his secretary to go home; there was nothing else for her to do tonight and it was only sensible to let her go early to get a credit against the days when he would have to ask her to stay half the night. He decided he, too, would try to get home; it had been a long day. He needed to – wanted to – go over the various bits of information that had come in, but he could do that at home, so his wife could at least have the pleasure of his physical presence and he could relax and have a drink. He looked up at a noise from his outer office, and Catherine appeared in the doorway. She was wearing a pale green suit that he recognised from three years ago and she looked fresh and untouchably beautiful.
‘John. I came to plead with you to let my Guv’nor talk to you. We have – or we had – in our hands an actual person complaining of being defrauded by Mr Price.’
McLeish considered her. ‘Your man hired him from Equity,’ he suggested.
‘No. He’s real. Please, John. Peter – Detective Chief Superintendent Clark – is waiting, biting his fingernails at the other end of the telephone.’ She was very pretty and very pleased with herself, and if they did have a real customer it was absolutely his duty to talk.
‘I’ve just the one call I must make then I’ll come down and see him. Third floor, isn’t it? Will you tell him ten minutes?’ He watched her elegant rear view out of the office, thinking that it was impossible not to feel proprietary about a girl you’d been to bed with, even three years ago. It was true what they said about sex, it was like a chemical reaction, it changed things, people, relationships for ever, even if it hadn’t gone on for very long, or seemed to cut very deep. He rang Francesca, who was not prepared to be mollified and told him his supper would keep very badly.
A review of the available evidence at lunchtime had led him and the team to the conclusion that the field was uncomfortably wide open. Neither of the Price sons had anything that looked like an alibi for late on Friday; Sylvia Price had, in theory, been sixty miles away at Bosham but could only be placed there at six forty-five on Friday evening and ten thirty on Saturday, leaving more than twelve hours unaccounted for. The remaining business partner, Luke Fleming, had been in Majorca, but it was emerging that he, too, had been out of touch with anyone who could give him an alibi. One of McLeish’s squad was sweating over airline schedules to see whether Mr Fleming could have got back to murder his partner without anyone realising he was in England and back to meet contractors on Sunday evening in Puerto Soller. And Miles Arnold had come sharply into the frame with the discovery that his wife had been away with the children on Friday and Saturday night and Mr Arnold had stated that he had watched the television alone at home both nights. ‘He was lying all right,’ Bruce Davidson had reported, cheerfully. ‘Holed up with a lassie somewhere, is my guess.’
The trouble, or one of the troubles, was that this looked like an opportunistic crime. The victim had arranged himself in a position where all it took was someone combining motivation with being on the spot to pul
l the support from under him. Both sons met those criteria, and indeed they were right at the top of his mental list; their father had been a brute, the two Price boys were close and Francis was an addict and Antony a doctor, a good combination if you wanted to commit a murder. He considered a note on his crowded desk; Francis had been released that afternoon, there being no reason to keep him in a prison cell. Antony appeared to be carrying on his duties as usual, and the patients on his operating list to be recovering as expected. Sylvia Price and Luke Fleming had no firm alibis, and he didn’t know enough about their motivation. Any assistance that the Fraud Squad could legitimately give ought to be welcomed with both hands.
He walked down two flights of stairs to do just that, regretting his lost supper with his wife. He found Peter Clark with Catherine seated demurely at his right and an older man, tight-mouthed, at his left. Peter Clark did not stand but nodded in grudging welcome; pissed off, McLeish judged, by not being allowed to crawl all over his investigation just for the asking.
‘We have a promising lead here,’ Peter Clark said, and McLeish inclined his head in indication of willingness to hear more. ‘A customer of Price Fleming; a chap who bought a unit on the basis of a set of pictures. Here.’
McLeish considered the three pictures; all looked exactly like each other, five-storey, pleasant blocks with the sea in the background and groups of trees.
‘As I understand it you don’t exactly buy a unit. You buy the right to a week or two weeks in the company’s Majorcan properties,’ he said cautiously.
‘That’s correct. But our man – a Mr Fabian Mastry – was interested particularly in these three blocks because they are in a part of the coast where he’ll meet lots of other chaps like him. So he paid his money for two weeks in June and, on impulse, flew down at the weekend just to have a look.’
‘And?’
‘And there is a site on which stand the outlines, as it were, of those three buildings. Walls about three feet high, no one on site, no one’s been on site for six weeks. He has enough Spanish to have asked. So he rings up the office on Monday afternoon and gets a secretary who tells him that Mr Price is indisposed and Mr Fleming is in Spain. He sits and worries until he sees the papers this morning and it took him the rest of the day to find his way to us. Our feeling is he may be one of several.’
They were looking very pleased with themselves, McLeish thought, except Catherine who had her head down in contemplation of a pad of paper. This was not a new complaint, he understood suddenly, they’d had this Fabian worrying them before and they’d told him to go and see what was on the ground. And finally he had, and after that the story ran more or less as he had been told. And they’d just been lucky – better not to suppose they might have orchestrated it – that their man rang when the office was in total disarray in the aftermath of William Price’s death, and there was no one to reassure him.
‘Well, I assume all that has given you cause to interview the directors of the company,’ he said, briskly.
‘When you’ve finished with them of course. I don’t know how far you’ve got.’ Clark looked hopeful.
‘I’ve interviewed Mrs Price, but we didn’t talk about the company because she was still under medical supervision and I just wanted to know where she was when her husband died. I’m due to see her again tomorrow. One of my lads interviewed Luke Fleming who got back yesterday; I read his statement and I’m due to see him tomorrow as well. If you want to hold a different conversation, I wouldn’t want to stand in your way, but I think we – the Yard – have to be a bit careful. I don’t want to be accused of harassment.’
‘Nor do we.’ Peter Clark was into the breach at once. ‘That’s why we hoped we could just have a look at whatever papers and records you got out of the office, or put one of our people in there.’
McLeish sat and thought; a thing he never minded doing publicly, although it caused his excitable, over-reactive in-laws great difficulty. ‘I’ll take a view on that after you’ve interviewed the directors,’ he said, and saw their faces fall. ‘Sorry, but we need to find a murderer more than we need to sort out a fraud. You can see all the statements you want, of course. And if I were you I’d interview Luke Fleming first. Mrs Price has Peter Graebner as her brief.’
‘Thank you for that.’ Peter Clark was prepared to settle for the inch he’d got and try and take the ell tomorrow. ‘I’ll send Catherine up with you now to get them if that’s all right.’ He looked speculatively from her to McLeish.
‘Of course, Detective Inspector Davidson will get them out for her – he’s still here. I’m late for supper,’ he added, and wished he hadn’t; it came out very defensive.
He handed Catherine over to Bruce Davidson and retired to his office to collect his bits and pieces together. Francesca was exasperated because he always carried a briefcase full of papers whether he could see a time when he might read them or not. The point was that a policeman’s life left you odd lumps of time, unexpectedly, in funny places, and it was in those patches that he could catch up and often would suddenly see a pattern. None of this cut any ice with his wife, who led a regular life, went to her office every day and was moreover – he had to concede – ferociously disciplined in her work habits.
He looked up to find Bruce Davidson had joined him, and was silently watching him pack.
‘I thought I’d have a wee word. I saw Dr Brewster – Dr Antony Price’s girl. Something odd there; she’d moved out just before all this happened.’
‘I forgot you were seeing her. You’re quite right, there’s a lot wrong there.’ He relayed what his wife had told him.
‘Francesca gets around, doesn’t she?’ Davidson said, shaking his head. ‘What about my godson?’
‘She’s not doing the Refuge any more. Her mum is back on duty.’ He was aware he was sounding edgy.
Davidson let a pause elapse. ‘I’ve just given Catherine all the statements and the freedom of the photocopier.’
‘Good. That’s what I agreed. And we may have to do more but not yet.’
‘She’s looking tired.’
‘Catherine? Is she?’
‘The clack is that her bloke – the one she lived with, what’s his name … Davies … used to beat her.’
McLeish straightened and banged his shoulder on the edge of the desk.
‘I don’t believe it. She’d not have put up with it.’
‘Well, as to that … Well, in the end, she didn’t. Got an injunction under the Act and got rid of him. But she’d had a bit by then.’
‘How do you know?’
‘WPC in the unit at Haringay.’ Davidson was gazing at the huge pin board on the wall with apparent interest.
‘But she went back to him after … after the Morgan case,’ McLeish said, stunned.
‘Where you met her. Yes. He promised to stop, seemingly, and she gave it another go.’
He found he felt slightly sick and extremely angry. Poor Catherine. Beautiful Catherine, who could have had anyone she wanted, including him.
‘I didn’t want you to hear it in the canteen,’ Davidson said, still engaged in a minute inspection of the board.
‘No. Thanks, Bruce.’ He collected his two briefcases and banged his way into the lift down to the car-park. But he had to sit in the car for a full five minutes before he could collect himself.
Matthew Sutherland turned into the pub; he hadn’t used it before but it looked cheerful and well kept. He had spent three hours with Peter Graebner, sorting out a witness statement in an assault case, and needed something to take away the taste of the stewed tea, served by the prospective witness’s mother. And he needed a pee and had not felt able to ask for the bathroom in the dirty flat, overflowing with children.
His immediate needs attended to, he sat in a corner with a second pint and looked round him. It was a nice room with a decent gas-powered log fire, whose artificial flames looked pleasantly real, and polished glasses on the bar. It was busy, as pubs were in that part of London at ni
ne in the evening, but not noisy, people who had come out for a quiet drink after supper, rather than people who had come out to get drunk. It was a peaceful, middle-aged, slightly eccentric place, and Matthew sat enjoying the quiet.
The door opened and a man of about his own age came in, turning clumsily to close it after him. He made for the bar jerkily and sat heavily in the manner of a swimmer just succeeding in reaching the shore. Had a few, Matt thought, and watched as the lady of the house alerted her husband with a jerk of her head, and the man carefully put down the glass he was polishing so his hands were free before approaching the prospective customer. He had to bend forward and ask the man to repeat himself, Matthew saw, and even then he wasn’t sure what had been said. He straightened up, looked to his wife for guidance and at that moment the man fell off the bar stool, straight over sideways, not moving a hand to save himself, just flat down on the floor, with a thud, so he lay sprawled, unmoving and limp. The rest of the customers sat and stared while the barman peered disbelievingly over the counter. His wife banged up the flap on the counter; she was obviously furious. ‘John, Fred, give me a hand will you? We’ll just put this one out in the street where he came from.’ Mine host, recovering from his astonishment, came round to help and he and the bulky man, who had been sitting nearest, bent to help, tugging at the fallen man.
‘Hang on.’ He had not meant to have anything to do with this scene, but he had seen the man’s head go back and his eyes roll as they tried to move him. ‘Excuse me, sorry.’ He was out of his seat and squatting by the man, turning his head gently, the stertorous breathing very loud.
‘Are you a doctor?’
He ignored the question, delivered as it was in tones of utter disbelief, and forced a dirty shirt and sweater up above the elbow on the man’s right arm, so that they could all see the pitted injection sites inside the elbow. He looked up into their horrified faces. ‘No, I’m a lawyer. But you need an ambulance. It’s an overdose, tell them. Heroin probably.’