“He didn’t know he was living under a death sentence anyway. He died wanting to live.”
Dr Austin clapped sarcastically.
“Not bad,” she said patronisingly. “Not bad. Yes, I came to hate Simeon Knowles, as most people who knew him for long enough did eventually. He was nasty, manipulative and vindictive. I left Fred Westerham to be with him and broke Fred’s heart.
“Then Knowles dumped me for Rebecca Dyson. She was younger and prettier than me and hard up so she was flattered and grateful when Knowles took her to expensive places and bought her expensive clothes. He bought the meals. He bought the clothes. He bought her.
“When I confronted him he laughed in my face. He told me that if I caused trouble he would have me struck off. And to cap everything I had to suffer him coming to my surgery because he was still a patient. Mercifully he didn’t come often because he kept pretty fit.
“It all festered but, as you rightly say, I hadn’t the guts to kill him, though I want to do as much for Fred’s sake as mine. And then I discovered it was now or never. I didn’t intend to incriminate anyone else, not at first. I just invited them along to enjoy the show. And no, the timing on the peal of bells was not spot on. I meant them to start ringing just as Knowles went over the parapet. It was a genuine misunderstanding that caused them to ring out five minutes early.
“I gave the bell-ringers a precise time to start but I made the mistake of telling them it was low tide, which is when they always practice The Brides of Mavis Enderby. That fool looked up low tide, which was five minutes earlier than I said, and started then.
“That was when I realised I could get away with it. So many people with a grudge against him, all milling round with the chance to tamper with the harness. On the way up I slipped the knife into the bell-ringers chamber, which was now empty as the bell-ringers had all gone off with a flea in their ear.
“Poor Fred removed it for me and got rid of it. My one regret in all this is that his conscience got the better of him. I destroyed him twice over.” Dr Austin lifted up her doctor’s bag, saying: “There’s just one more thing.”
She clicked open the catches and before Amos or Swift could grab her across the desk she pulled a hypodermic needle from the back, jabbed it into her arm and pushed in the plunger.
Amos had reacted faster of the two detectives but he stopped halfway across the desk and made no attempt to pull out the needle. Instead, he slowly sank back into his chair.
“I’ll get an ambulance,” Swift gasped but Amos put a restraining hand on her arm.
“No rush,” he said coldly. “We’ve no idea what was in the syringe. Let her go.”
Swift sat back in astonishment.
After a couple of minutes of silence as the three sat staring at each other, Amos finally said: “OK, ask the receptionist to send for an ambulance. I think we’ve waited long enough to make sure.”
They had indeed. Dr Austin slumped forward onto the desk in a coma just as the ambulance arrived.
As the ambulance crew carried the stricken doctor out, Amos said quietly to Swift: “It’s better this way. There was nothing we could prove.”
Chapter 43
Sergeantt Blackbourne was on the front desk when Amos returned to HQ.
“David asked to be informed as soon as you returned,” he told the detective inspector apologetically. “I’ll have to let him know.”
For David, read Chief Constable Sir Robert Fletcher, Amos thought. The nervy, excitable press officer only ever did his master’s bidding. Still, we might as well get it out of the way and put the case behind us. At least there was a successful outcome, even if it didn’t turn out to be the one Fletcher had wanted.
“Go ahead,” he told the sergeant. “I’ll be in CID.”
Sure enough, David appeared at Amos’s shoulder a few moments later in an unusually cheerful and relaxed mood. This could be because he knew Amos was in serious trouble and about to get the bullet or be moved out of harm’s way to traffic or Scunthorpe.
“No need for you to come,” Amos told Swift, partly to spare the detective sergeant if it was trouble and partly to spare himself if he was to have ignominy heaped on him.
“No, no,” David insisted but with good humour. “The Chief Constable wants to see you both. He was quite specific.”
That was probably a good sign, Amos thought, as far as you could tell. Fletcher was unlikely to spread the blame for anything between two officers if he could put it all on Amos.
Fletcher was shuffling through some papers as Amos and Swift entered, a familiar tactic to make himself look busy. But he looked up immediately and put the papers down. Amos breathed an almost audible sigh of relief. That was a really good sign. Fletcher always kept miscreants waiting to put them in their place.
“Ah, Paul, Juliet,” he beamed genially. “Come in, come in.”
There were three levels of address from the Chief Constable. Your rank meant you were in serious trouble; your surname meant you were in mild trouble; first names were undiluted good news.
“Very well done on wrapping up the Simeon Knowles case,” Fletcher continued enthusiastically. “I’ve just heard the good news from Boston. And the culprit has been pronounced dead at the Pilgrim Hospital so we are spared the cost and distraction of a trial.
“The best outcome all round, without a doubt. Who knows what might have come out in a trial anyway? Knowles had a lot of powerful friends in the county, you know. Least said, soonest mended, and all that.”
Including some powerful friends in the police, no doubt, Amos thought, but his reflections of the case were quickly cut short by Fletcher.
“Paul, I’d like your opinion on this press release,” the Chief Constable said. “I’m pleased to say that yesterday the region’s chief constables agreed to a concerted effort in stamping out drug taking, a matter dear to my heart.”
Amos looked through the statement and suggested one or two tweaks, more to show willing than to seriously improve the press release. David was actually very skilled at writing press releases and Amos said so. There was no harm in making one sincere comment among this show of hypocrisy.
*
There was one further twist to the story. Almost a year later, as Paul Amos and his wife managed to venture into Lincoln shopping for Christmas presents, undiverted by a telephone call hauling the inspector off to work, Amos spotted Eve German, alone but laden with carrier bags, emerging from under the ancient arch that formed Stonebow.
It was German who recognised Amos first.
“Inspector,” she called out cheerfully, “You see me in better circumstances than you did before.”
Amos introduced her to his wife and asked what had happened in the intervening months.
“I got a letter from a solicitor in Boston asking me to visit their offices. My heart sank when I got it because I assumed it was about some debt I’d run up and couldn’t pay but it said I would hear something to my advantage so I thought there was nothing to lose.
“It turned out that Simeon Knowles’s daughter in Australia had died of a heart attack. Apparently it was something genetic – his wife and son suffered the same fate, as I think you know. Luckily for me she died just before her father and she had no children, so Stephen was his only living relative.
“I’d put his father’s name on the birth certificate so all the estate came to Stephen to be held in trust. The trustees agreed I could sell the house, which was far too big for us, and buy a smaller place in Lincoln in Stephen’s name. They also negotiated to clear my debts at a reduced rate to give Stephen a secure future.
“We had no real friends in Boston and Stephen was unhappy at his local school so he was content to move. He’s settled into his new school really well and, as you can see,” she said holding up the shopping, “we are about to have our first real Christmas in years.”
“Simeon Knowles seems to have done more good dying than he did living,” Amos remarked to his wife as Eve German sailed off down
the High Street.
“It’s the sign of a saint,” his wife replied dryly. “They work miracles once they are dead.”
If you enjoyed reading Holy Murder by Rodney Hobson, you may be interested in Dead Money by Rodney Hobson, also published by Endeavour Press.
Extract from Dead Money by Rodney Hobson
Prologue
The dark came as a shock. It was obviously expected but there was no way of preparing for it, no way of practising for it.
Nor was there any going back. This might be the only opportunity and there was desperately little time.
The stairs were fairly easy, a regular height that could be taken with a steady step, touching the wall with the left hand to guide round corners. It was the level part at each floor and halfway up each flight that was tricky, the sudden lurch forward when the expected step up was missing.
Then came another shuffle round the corner until a toe end caught the next flight.
It was too risky to try counting the stairs. The important thing was to count the floors, to be sure of getting the right one. Two flat turns to each storey.
There was just enough light from the far end to find the door, to avoid clanging the bar against the wall as it was swapped to the left hand and the key to the right, to find the keyhole with a shaking hand and to turn the key.
The door clinked slightly as it was opened but the chain was not on. The curtains were open yet it still took a few precious seconds to make out the way through the lounge and into the short passage.
The door at the far left of the passage was open. The bedroom was dark and only the vaguest shape could be made out.
Down came the bar with a grunt. A pause for breath, then another blow. Then another, the series building up into a frenzy, striking all over the bed to be sure.
Not a sound came from the shape. The bar fell noiselessly onto the thick carpet.
An elbow caught with a start against something at the side. Eyes that were slowly adjusting to what little light crept through the curtains made out a bedside lamp.
One click of the switch revealed the full horror of what had happened.
Chapter 1
“It’s coming to something,” grumbled Nick Foster as he brushed up the leaves. “Coming to something.”
It’s coming to something when you have to put a security barrier up, Foster thought. This is Lincolnshire in the 1990s, for heavens sake. Dull, quiet Lincolnshire. Killiney Court was just a small block of flats in a small town – well, a fairly large block in a fairly large town by Lincolnshire standards, Foster muttered away to himself, but hardly Chicago in the 1930s.
Killiney Court used to be council property but years of neglect, uncaring tenants of an uncaring council, had led to a decision to bulldoze the place. Sleathorpe Properties stepped in at the last minute, picked the place up for a nominal sum and spent millions on refurbishment.
Here was the result: 24 luxury flats, four to each floor, in a solid brick and concrete building. It was a lifestyle that was beyond the hope of most of the surrounding populace but even paradise has its price. Killiney Court had been beset by petty thieving. It had caused tension among the residents as well as complaints that it was easy for envious outsiders to get in.
Hence the new sentry box that was being erected across the entrance. There a guard could sit all day and night, the tedium broken only by occasionally swinging the barrier up and down to let cars in and out of the short narrow drive.
Grumble and rustle, rustle and grumble, Foster edged his way round the bottom of the block. He was in no rush. He was 70 and would die leaning on his broom, though he did not intend that to happen for a long time yet. He had looked 70 since he was 50 and would still look 70 when he was 90.
His hair, though grey, was mainly intact. His face was chubby but lined. His body and clothes were indeterminate, as he hid them under an ill-fitting overall tied loosely at the waist.
The ground level at Killiney Court was open except for the lift in the centre at the back.
“Wind blows right through,” he chuntered. “Brings all the dirt and leaves. Now we’ve got the building mess as well.”
Foster had a point. One workman was drilling into tarmac and concrete while another stood supervising. They were making rather more mess than was necessary. No one, however, paid much attention to Foster’s grumbles, which were in any case directed mainly to himself.
Even the security guard, sitting at his temporary desk under the shelter of the block where he had taken up his duties at the beginning of the week, had learned to turn a deaf ear by the fifth day.
“Just keep an eye on things, Nick, while I nip to the toilet,” he said, easing off the chair and ambling round behind the lifts.
“Toilets aren’t that way,” Foster grumbled to himself. He knew the guard was going for a cigarette. Smoking on duty was a serious sin, a sackable offence. Some of the hoity toity residents didn’t like to return to their palatial mansions to be confronted by a security guard with a cigarette protruding from his mouth, forcing them to run the gauntlet of a ring of smoke.
That was the fifth time the guard had “gone to the toilet” and it was still only midday.
“Friday the thirteenth,” grumbled Foster. Rustle and grumble. “Unlucky for somebody.”
It was 4.30 pm when the first car drove in and the new barrier was raised in earnest for its debut performance. Ray Jones, local businessman, entrepreneur with a finger in a dozen small-time enterprises dotted around the area, steered his BMW towards the barrier. He could afford a Mercedes, he told himself frequently, and others occasionally, but he did not like to display his wealth.
Jones, late fifties, stocky, heavily greying and slightly round-shouldered, waved peremptorily at the lone sentinel, now half way through his allotted shift and seated proudly, if a little uncomfortably, in his bright new sentry box. He pressed a button and the barrier swung up, just a little too late to avoid forcing Jones to slow almost to a halt.
Jones gave him a sharp look that meant “get the timing right”, then he swung away into his parking slot down the left hand side of the block and under the high surrounding wall. As he got out and clicked the remote control key to lock the car, he heard a loud peep from another vehicle following him in.
The second car was a Mercedes. Scott Warren’s signal had alerted the guard, who this time swung up the barrier far too soon. This incident annoyed Jones twice over: he hated people to misuse their horns and that guard, who would have to be paid out of the community fees, had got the timing on the barrier wrong again. Jones liked things in their proper place at their proper times just as God had intended them.
“Evening, Ray,” Warren called cheerily from his open window as he drove past to his own bay two further on. Jones stood and watched the younger man with a mixture of contempt and annoyance.
He waited until Warren was getting out of the car and was caught in that awkward position with the door open, one leg out on the ground and one still in the well in front of the seat – the momentary pause before the driver summons the extra ounce of energy to rise to his feet.
“Christian names are for Christians,” Jones remarked bluntly, “and horns are for warning other road users, not for greeting all and sundry.”
Warren gave just a hint of being put out by this rebuke, then he sprang to his feet with a forced laugh. He was 30 years younger, tall, fit, well built and still tanned from a late summer holiday.
“What an old fusspot you are, Ray,” he returned, deliberately using the familiar tone of address that he knew irked Jones. “What do they teach you at church on a Sunday night? Hate thy neighbour? Don’t be so stuffy. It’s all first names now.”
Yet for all his bluster, Warren was clearly the lesser of the two men and both knew it.
There is a thin line between smugness and charisma and Jones was on the right side of it. He had a presence that Warren would never have, especially now Warren was struggling to fabricate the natural air that had come
so readily when he and Jones had first met.
Warren ran one of those newfangled high tech operations that Jones fervently believed would never really catch on: his own small video recording company. Despite his reservations, Jones had backed it personally, hoping for a quick profit before the fad inevitably died a natural death.
Warren had shown a bit more respect then, when he needed the money. All that equipment was expensive and Jones had slowly turned the screw until Warren was finally reduced to grovelling for it.
Still, the operation had started to make its mark. Warren had contacts in London, from where most of the work emanated – work that could be done anywhere in the country, whizzed down high speed telephone wires or delivered in bubble wrapped packages by express couriers. The investment was beginning to come good and Jones had finally got a small dividend. It was a start, but not enough and not quickly enough.
The two men walked together nearly to the lift, side by side but a good yard apart. The awkwardness was broken when Jones spotted a third vehicle approaching down Killiney Road. As the car turned into the drive, the barrier swung up, nicely timed so that the Ford Mondeo eased through without having to change speed. The guard was getting the hang of it.
Joanna Stevens was a tall, handsome woman in her early 30s, as was readily apparent when she stepped from her car, which she parked on the opposite side from the two men. Warren hesitated and watched as Jones strode across to her.
Warren disliked the woman intensely but viewed her with trepidation. She was a jumped up little brat who interfered too much, who thought she knew it all but who hadn’t the guts to drive a sports car. She dressed old for her age, too. Yet he almost feared her, for her command of figures was quite awesome and he was obliged to put his books at her mercy because Jones insisted on it as a condition of his investment.
Holy Murder Page 14