by David Hodges
There was an internal door off the kitchen giving access to the garage and it was completely empty, a small oil stain in the middle of the floor the only indication that a car had ever been parked inside. There was nothing else in the place worth looking at and certainly no sign of Maurice Copley.
The shed also contained little of interest, save wall-to-wall animal and bird photographs, just as Neville Haslar had said.
Marion Copley waited in the doorway, heedless of the fine rain, while Kate looked around. ‘Did you know Maurice had hidden those corn dollies in here?’ Kate asked.
A loud snort. ‘He didn’t do any such thing. They were planted by someone to get him into trouble – that’s what he said and I believe him.’
‘Why would someone do that?’
‘How would I know?’
‘One of his friends suggested he might have bought them for you as a present?’
‘For me?’ Now Marion Copely was angry. ‘That’s not possible. Maurice may be a two-timer but he would never do that to me. He knows how much I hate things like that.’
Kate frowned. ‘Hate them? What do you mean?’
‘They are the work of the devil and I am a God-fearing Christian woman. I wouldn’t have such wicked idols anywhere near the place.’
The answer caught Kate completely by surprise and for a moment she was taken aback by the vehemence in the woman’s tone. ‘Right,’ she said finally, ‘maybe I was mistaken but one further question: is the shed locked when it’s not being used?’
‘Why would it be? Maurice only uses it for somewhere to display his photographs. All his equipment is kept in the house.’
‘Then anyone could have got inside without you knowing?’
‘That’s what Maurice has been saying all along – those dolls were planted in here by someone. Garden gate is never locked either so anyone could have slipped around the back one night while we were asleep in bed.’
Kate thought about that for a moment but said nothing one way or the other.
‘Well?’ Marion Copely went on. ‘Now do you see what must have happened? Maurice is totally innocent. Tell that to that nasty inspector of yours.’
Kate gave a tight smile. ‘I will, Mrs Copely,’ she promised, ‘and I’m sure he’ll be interested to hear it.’
The words of the distraught woman were still ringing in Kate’s ears as she headed away from Woolavington, en route for Wedmore and Will Fallow’s cottage at Cocklake, her face set in a heavy frown. You could be right, Marion, she mused as a multitude of thoughts crowded her mind. Maybe someone did plant those dolls there but on the other hand, the revelation that the shed was always left unlocked would not in itself get Maurice Copely off the hook. He could still have left them there himself, then used the absence of a padlock as a convenient get-out. Furthermore, in evidential terms, the odds could not have been more stacked against Copely and the only single thing in his favour was the pathologist’s contention that the killer had a finger missing from one hand – but even then, as Roscoe had already said, that was only Doctor Summers’ opinion and she could have made a mistake.
For her part, Kate didn’t know what to believe but unbeknown to her at that moment, enlightenment was soon to be hers and in a way that she would never have expected or wanted.
There were no visible tears in Will Fallow’s cottage. His wife, Rosie, had received the dreadful news of his death from DI Roscoe the previous evening and, apart from a slight gulp and a narrowing of the eyes, she had exhibited little emotion. She was the same now, reluctantly admitting Kate and showing her through to the kitchen where she appeared to be making bread or scones; showing no signs of distress and apparently carrying on with her life as normal. A gaunt woman in her late forties, with her hair tied up in a bun, there was an air of hostility and resentment about her that met Kate like a cold draught.
‘What are you here for?’ she snapped, without offering Kate a seat at the big oak table. ‘Police have already been to see me with the news about William.’
Kate nodded. ‘I’m very sorry about your loss, Mrs Fallow,’ she said. ‘It must have come as a terrible shock.’
To her surprise, the woman gave her a thin, humourless smile. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I always knew he’d break his neck one day in one of his old buildings or fall into a rhyne and drown.’
Kate was taken aback for a moment and just gaped at her. Talk about the grieving widow!
Rosie Fallow seemed to pick up on her sense of shock and sighed as she began working at the dough in her basin with strong deft fingers. ‘You have to understand, Sergeant,’ she said, ‘that for something like twenty years William and I have been living here as husband and wife in name only. His all-absorbing interest in the past had long since killed any togetherness that might have been there once.’ She looked up and for a brief moment Kate detected something akin to wistfulness in her eyes but then it was gone as her jaw tightened and she resumed her pummelling of the dough. ‘We had no real feelings for each other, you see, except a degree of tolerance but went our separate ways. Then, two months ago, to add insult to injury, I discovered that William had begun having an affair. Some woman at the local library – a Miss Rendle or Randle, something like that. So if you were expecting to come here today and find a grieving widow, I have to disappoint you. I’m sorry William is dead, of course but the man I once knew died a long time ago.’
Kate’s head was spinning. Miss Rundle? Will Fallow had been over the side with Pink Glasses? That was a real showstopper. And there was she thinking what a nice inoffensive little man he was.
‘How did you find out about this affair?’ she said, trying to conceal her excitement.
Rosie Fallow glanced at her quickly, then returned to her dough. ‘I suspected something was going on,’ she said. ‘You know, a series of phone calls from some woman that were always claimed to be wrong numbers, several late nights out, which was not William’s usual habit, and a trace of lipstick on one of his handkerchiefs.’ She made a brief attempt at humour. ‘Not his shade, you see.’
‘But how did you know who the woman was and where she worked?’
‘Ah!’ she said, half turning towards her with her hands resting on the edge of the basin. ‘I decided to turn detective and when William went out one afternoon after a phone call, I did a quick 1471 and got the number of the caller. When I rang the number, I discovered I was through to the new Levels Community Library, so I asked to speak to a fictitious woman whose name I dreamed up. The lady at the other end said there was no one of that name there and gave her own name when I asked for it.’
Kate smiled her admiration. ‘Did you confront your husband with what you had found out?’
‘Good heavens, no. To be honest, I wasn’t that interested in hearing all the lies he was bound to come out with.’
‘He could have been collecting a library book he had reserved?’
She smiled again. ‘Hardly, and I recognized his trollop’s voice from the “wrong number” phone calls I had received. She had quite a posh clipped tone. Very distinctive.’
Kate nodded slowly, thinking that that fitted Pink Glasses to a tee. ‘A couple more questions, if you don’t mind, Mrs Fallow. When did you last see your husband?’
‘Yesterday afternoon, when he went out in his car. I never saw him again after that.’
‘Did he receive any phone calls – like from this Miss Rundle – before he went?’
Rosie Fallow wiped her hands on a tea towel and crossed the room to a large Welsh dresser. Picking something up, she returned to the table and held out a piece of paper that appeared to have been torn from a notebook. ‘He didn’t receive any calls but he did make one – about an hour before he left. Fortunately, he wrote the number down and left the note in his study, where I found it when I went in to tidy up. Looks like a local number but I have no idea who it belongs to.’
Kate took the piece of paper from her as if it was a priceless fragment of papyrus. ‘May I keep this?’ she
said.
Rosie Fallow shrugged and returned to her dough. ‘Be my guest,’ she said. ‘Anything else you want?’
‘I’d like to have a look around his study.’
‘Go ahead but you won’t find anything of interest. He wasn’t a very interesting man.’
And Rosie Fallow turned out to be right. All Kate found were books, photographs of what were probably historical sites and bundles of notes, which appeared to be a part-completed manuscript he was writing, entitled Sacred Sites of Antiquity.
Taking her leave of the lonely embittered woman, she returned to her car outside, but before driving away she called up the incident room on her radio and got Tom Green, one of the civilian operators. ‘Can you get on to Directory Enquiries and ask them for the subscriber of a local telephone number for me. Call me back soonest, will you?’
‘Do my best, Kate,’ Green replied, taking the number off her. But, as he ended the call, he turned to Roscoe, who was standing behind him with a question written into his craggy features.
‘Kate Hamblin – I mean Lewis – sir,’ he explained. ‘Wants me to trace a telephone number for her.’
Roscoe frowned. ‘Why?’
‘Didn’t say, sir.’
Roscoe nodded. ‘You should have asked,’ he growled. ‘Keep me informed.’ And he didn’t look too happy as he walked away.
CHAPTER 22
Kate nearly ploughed into a tractor when she pulled out on to the main Cheddar road and turned towards Wedmore. So much information was whirling round inside her head that for a moment her concentration was not where it should have been and in the thickening marshland mist the big unlit Fordson had been just a looming shadow. Fortunately, the farmer simply contented himself with a very prominent ‘V’ sign in her direction as he lurched round the nose of her car and carried on towards Wedmore, and she accepted the insult with a shaky grin, forced to follow him for an embarrassing couple of miles, until he turned off through an open gateway.
So, naughty old Will Fallow had been seeing to Pink Glasses for a bit of rumpy-pumpy, had he? But how was that relevant to his last-minute phone call to whoever it was before he met his grisly end at Dark Annie’s cottage? And why had the revelation about Marion Copely’s feelings towards straw dolls, vis-à-vis her Christian convictions, seemed so significant when it didn’t really alter Copely’s status as the prime suspect anyway? Somehow she knew that all of it was not only relevant and significant but also connected in some way. Furthermore, though at present everything was a jumble of loose strands, like the red sports car and Maurice Copely’s unlocked shed, she sensed that there was something else lurking in the back of her mind – some fragment of information she had picked up along the way – which would tie it all together, if only she could tease it out.
As it transpired, however, there were no more disclosures or revelations to consider for the second part of the day. The Turners were not at home when she called, with neither car in the driveway, and when she dropped in at the Levels Community Library, she found a tall Asian man in a white turban behind the desk instead of Pink Glasses, who turned out to be the senior librarian.
‘Jane Rundle had to go home early – I’ve had to fill in for her,’ he said, his eyes widening when Kate flashed her warrant card. ‘Apparently a close friend of hers has been found dead. She was very upset when she left here.’
I’m sure she was, Kate mused, especially if, as her reaction to the news seemed to confirm, she and little Will were an item.
The librarian was at first reluctant to give Rundle’s home address but did so after Kate exerted some official pressure. Not that it did her any good. No one appeared to be at home in the neat semi-detached house she located in a side street off the main promenade in Burnham-on-Sea and not even the neighbours responded to her loud knocking.
‘Now, where the hell have you gone, miss?’ Kate muttered to herself as she went back into the street and studied the upper windows of the house. ‘Are you hiding behind the curtains, perhaps?’
But Jane Rundle was doing no such thing. In fact, unbeknown to Kate at that precise moment, she was walking into the foyer of Highbridge police station, white-faced and tight-lipped.
‘Can I help you, madam?’ the officer on the desk asked with a smile.
Pink Glasses nodded. ‘I want to speak to the officer in charge of the current murder investigation,’ she said.
The officer made an apologetic grimace. ‘Sorry, ma’am but that won’t be possible unless you have a very good reason. He’s an extremely busy man, you see.’
‘Oh, I have a good reason all right,’ she replied sharply. ‘Tell him I know who his killer is but I won’t reveal his name unless I am given immediate police protection!’
Kate felt as if she had reached a dead end as far as her inquiries were concerned. She had gone back to the Turners’ house but they still had not returned and their place had that dead feel to it, which suggested they wouldn’t be home any time soon. Anxious to cover all avenues, she re-visited the Schofields and Ed Shearing, and, after getting a hostile unproductive response from both Daniel Schofield and Melanie Schofield’s unsavoury boyfriend, she drove all the way out to Bridgwater to call on Philip Granger – only to meet another brick wall when his wife told her that he was out at a ‘Masonic do’.
Her earlier excitement now dulled and reluctant to return to Highbridge police station to face Detective Superintendent Ansell, she headed for the one place where she could be sure of a sympathetic ear.
Hayden had a mouthful of cheese sandwich when she let herself in the front door and there was football on the big 42-inch television screen in the living room.
‘Ah, Kate,’ he said, ‘what a nice surprise.’
She stared at the television cynically. ‘Liar,’ she said.
He threw her a pained expression from his armchair, muting the sound of the television but keeping one eye on the screen. ‘That’s not very nice, old girl,’ he complained. ‘After all the work I’ve been doing on your behalf.’
She stopped in the middle of the room with a frown. ‘Work?’ she queried, glancing through the open kitchen door at the crowded draining board. ‘Was that supposed to include washing your dirty dishes?’
He sighed heavily. ‘Not that sort of work, my sweet,’ he replied. ‘I’m talking work work.’ Then he broke off to cheer at the screen. ‘They’ve done it!’ he exclaimed. ‘Goalless draw, which means they stay in the league.’
Kate shook her head wearily and, slipping off her coat and draping it over the back of a chair, continued into the kitchen. There was no point trying to hold a conversation with Hayden when he was either watching football or looking at classic car magazines and she was actually halfway through making a cheese sandwich for herself before he finally tore himself away from the screen and hobbled into the kitchen, leaning on his stick.
‘Pickle?’ he said, removing the lid of the jar standing on the chopping board and holding the jar up in front of her.
‘Hayd,’ she said solemnly, ‘you are a slob!’
He grinned. ‘And you, old girl, are a very lucky detective sergeant to have old Hayd looking after you.’
She pushed past him into the living room, her cheese sandwich on a plate in one hand and a glass of red wine in the other.
He followed her back into the room and, bending slightly, lifted a sheet of A4 paper from the coffee table and handed it to her as she sat down in an armchair.
‘As you know,’ he explained, sitting down also, ‘I am a classic car enthusiast – in fact, I used to own a Morgan before I got into old Jags – and I was very curious when you told me about the red sports car thing.’
Kate paused in the act of chewing and glanced casually at the list of names and addresses on the piece of paper, her plate perched on her lap and her wine glass starting to tip over in her other hand. ‘Hayden, what is this?’ she exclaimed. ‘There must be thirty names and addresses here—’
‘Exactly.’ He beamed. ‘All local r
esidents who live within a six-mile radius of Highbridge. You see, knowing the background to these murders, it occurred to me that our – your – man had to know the area pretty well to be able to select his victims and move around with apparent impunity. Apart from that one sighting by your only witness, Daphne Herbert, and your own brief glimpses of him, he has been able to commit his crimes and return home without being seen by a soul, so I hit on six miles as a feasible radius for him to live and operate within.’
Kate frowned. ‘That still doesn’t explain—’
‘Coming to that,’ he interjected. ‘Then I thought about the red sports car you were trying to trace plus my main love in life – after you, of course – which is classic cars.’
‘It may not be a classic car. It could just be a modern sports car, like mine.’
‘True but it was worth a check anyway. So I got in touch with the secretary of my local car club and got him to go through his register for me and pull out any red sports cars – classic or otherwise – he could find among his members. It was a long shot but that’s the list he faxed me five minutes ago.’ He frowned. ‘Right in the middle of a penalty too.’
For a few minutes Kate pored over the list of names which filled the sheet.
‘Don’t know whether it’s any good to you,’ he encouraged. ‘Haven’t had a chance to look at it myself.’
But Kate hardly heard him. Instead, she gaped at the paper in her hand as if mesmerized.
‘I’ve been blind as well as deaf,’ she gasped, dropping the wine glass on the floor and spilling its contents over the carpet, then staggering to her feet to send her plate flying off her lap after it. ‘It was so obvious and I just didn’t get it.’
Hayden stared back at her, obviously startled by her reaction. ‘Steady on, old girl!’ he exclaimed, his gaze dropping to the red wine seeping into the carpet. ‘Didn’t get what?’
She ran one hand through her hair, shaking her head in frustration and stumbling backwards towards the door. ‘Think about it, Hayd,’ she exclaimed. ‘The legend of Strawfoot, the straw dolls, the psychopath connection, “Et tu, Brute?” – we’ve all been played for fools!’