Just A Coincidence & Florence (Dave Slater Mystery Doubles Book 1)

by Ford,P. F.

  Ferguson was propped up in his bed against a pile of pillows. The transformation in his appearance from when Slater had last seen him, less than twenty-four hours previously, was quite remarkable. The feisty, obstinate old devil from yesterday had been replaced by a pale shadow of a man who looked as though he wasn’t going to be around much longer.

  ‘I dictated a statement last night,’ the old man wheezed as Slater pulled a chair up to his bed. He pointed to a large envelope at the foot of the bed.

  ‘I wasn’t sure I’d be here this morning. I’ve signed it myself and it’s been witnessed by two of the nurses.’

  ‘I still need to ask you some questions,’ said Slater.

  ‘Read that first, then if you have any questions you ask away.’ Ferguson let out a gasping breath. ‘I’ve got a matter of days now, so I’ve nothing to lose.’

  It was ten minutes past nine as Slater opened the envelope, unfolded the statement, and began to read. He read slowly and deliberately, making sure he took it all in. Ten minutes later, he looked up at Ferguson.

  ‘You murdered your own wife?’ he asked.

  ‘Aye. I’m not proud of myself. It was a true crime of passion,’ he said, his voice hoarse. ‘She was the love of my life, and then I caught her in bed with him. I should have killed him, of course, but I wasn’t thinking straight. And he was no hero. He ran away with his tail between his legs while I took it out on her. If he was a real man he woulda stayed and protected her.’

  ‘And then you buried her in the garden.’

  ‘That’s when they saw me. I was caught in a trap of my own making. After that I had to do what they said.’

  ‘And the dead children you buried? You knew about the abuse, and what was going to happen to the kids when they were finished with, yet you said nothing, and became complicit by burying the bodies.’

  Ferguson looked deeply ashamed.

  ‘I’m as bad as him, right?’ he said. ‘Maybe even a bigger coward when all’s said and done.’

  ‘How come you didn’t have to bury Florence?’ asked Slater.

  ‘I was supposed to. But she wasn’t dead when they brought her to me. I couldn’t kill a child, so I hid her in my cottage in the grounds and nursed her back to health. I kept her hidden for two years, then the boss saw her in my garden. I told him she was my niece, come to stay for a few days. But he knew. That’s why he took the photograph, so he could be sure. But when he came back for her, I’d managed to send her away to my sister. Then, not long after that the place closed and we all had to move out.’

  ‘So why did Florence end up back there, on her own?’

  ‘I went to my sister’s to look for her after Hatton House closed, but she’d run away. I had no idea she’d end up back at Hatton House. But she loved that garden, and especially that roundabout.’

  They were both quiet for a couple of minutes until Ferguson spoke again.

  ‘Are you gonna charge me?’

  ‘It doesn’t look like you’re going to be around long enough,’ said Slater. ‘So there doesn’t seem much point. Anyway, I’m much more interested in catching the person who murdered Florence and her brother. It’s the same person who organised all the child abuse, isn’t it?’

  ‘Without a doubt,’ agreed Ferguson. ‘But I’m not telling you who that is.’

  ‘Sir Robert Maunder,’ said Slater. ‘We already know that, we just need a bit of solid proof.’

  Ferguson looked at Slater in amazement.

  ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘What?’ said Slater, doubtfully. ‘He knew all about-’

  ‘Oh, he knew about it,’ interrupted Ferguson. ‘But by the time he found out he’d become a regular visitor to Hatton House. Only he wasn’t coming for the kids, he was coming to have sex with my wife. He couldn’t resist a pretty lady, you see, and they knew it. But once he’d been photographed in bed with her, then got dragged into her murder what could he do? One word out of place and his dirty little secret would have been all over the place. And being a regular visitor it would be easy to implicate him in her murder, abusing kids, and anything that was going on there. He was well and truly buggered.’

  Somewhere, not far from where they sat, a clock chimed the half hour. It was nine-thirty.

  ‘So he wasn’t involved in the child abuse at all?’ asked Slater.

  ‘Och, no way,’ said Ferguson. ‘He’s a philanderer alright, but he’s no pervert.

  Holy crap, thought Slater. I need to let Norm know about this.

  ‘Err, will you excuse me a minute, Mr Ferguson,’ he said, pushing the statement into his pocket and rushing for the door. ‘I need to make a call…’

  Slater rushed outside to make his call, but before he could get the phone from his pocket, it began to ring. He fumbled the phone from his pocket and looked at the caller display. Whoever it was would have to wait. Then he saw the number. That’s weird. Why’s he calling me? He took the call.

  ‘Norm? That’s weird I was just going to call you.’

  ‘Are you psychic, or something?’

  ‘What? What’s going on?’

  ‘You go first. You said you were just gonna call me.’

  ‘I’ve just been talking to Ferguson. He tells me Maunder wasn’t one of the child abusers. He knew about it, but that’s all,’ said Slater excitedly.

  ‘That’s not going to be much consolation to his widow,’ said Norman, grimly.

  Slater carried on, not really paying attention.

  ‘Apparently, he knew about it but didn’t blow the whistle because… What? What did you just say? His widow?’

  ‘Err, yeah. I think it would be fair to say we have a major problem,’ said Norman quietly. ‘Maunder just blew his brains out with his shotgun.’

  Slater felt as if he’d just been punched hard in the guts. He couldn’t think of anything to say.

  ‘I shoulda rounded him up,’ said Norman. ‘But his wife said he was out and I believed her. By the time I realised he was around he must have already been ready to kill himself.’

  ‘I would have called earlier,’ said Slater. ‘If you’d known earlier you could have stopped him, but I got held up by an accident on the way down here.’

  ‘Are you gonna be long down there? Only I could do with a bit of help up here.’

  Slater patted his pocket to make sure he had the statement.

  ‘I’m on my way, Norm,’ he said. ‘We’ll sort this out, don’t worry.’

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  It was after five o’clock by the time Slater and Norman got back to the station. Now, once again, they were stood in front of DCI Bob Murray’s desk. Slater thought this was becoming a bit too much of a habit – and it was a habit he could happily live without.

  The bollocking had been raging for a good ten minutes so far.

  ‘You got it wrong?’ raged Murray, his voice rising an octave. ‘I’ll say you got it bloody wrong! You’ve hounded a man to death. He’s blown his own brains out because two of my officers wouldn’t listen to their superiors and let it lie. Well? What have you got to say for yourselves?’

  ‘All the evidence-’ began Slater.

  ‘All the circumstantial evidence, Sergeant Slater,’ Murray said, pounding on his desk with each syllable. ‘Because, that’s all you had, wasn’t it? Hearsay is not proof. Surely you don’t need me to tell you that.’

  He sat back in his chair, his chest heaving.

  ‘The CC’s going to go ballistic when I tell him, you know that don’t you? He was a good friend of Maunder’s. He’ll be looking for someone to blame, and as you two went and accused him of child abuse, we’ll all be in the frame. It’s possible we’ll all be suspended and those bloody vultures from Internal Affairs will begin an investigation into our investigation.’

  ‘But we found the jewellery in his office,’ said Norman. ‘There’s nothing circumstantial about that.’

  ‘No, there isn’t. But that just proves he was trying to get away with an insurance fraud
. It doesn’t give you the right to accuse him of child abuse.’

  ‘Err, with respect, Guv. We never accused him of child abuse,’ said Slater.

  ‘You didn’t?’ asked Murray in surprise. ‘But I thought you said he was your number one suspect-’

  ‘He was,’ agreed Norman. ‘We had him down as prime suspect for Mr Winter’s murder because we know Winter sent him a letter accusing him of child abuse. And if we’re right about all that, it would also put him in the frame for murdering Florence. And, if the letter was the catalyst, it gives us good reason to believe he was involved in child abuse back in the sixties.

  ‘But we’ve never told him as much, and we’ve certainly never accused him, because we know we don’t have any proof. As a matter of fact, until this morning, I’ve only ever spoken to him about the fake jewellery theft.’

  ‘I asked him if Winter had sent him a letter,’ volunteered Slater. ‘But I swear I have never accused him of child abuse.’

  ‘So what are you saying? That there’s another reason, and it’s not our fault?’ asked Murray.

  He was still red, but Slater sensed he was calming down slightly.

  ‘For a guy in his position, being guilty of fraud could be enough to tip him over the edge,’ said Slater.

  ‘When I was talking to Maunder’s wife,’ added Norman, ‘she said he’s been getting phone calls from someone. She said he was worried about the calls, but he was keeping it from her. Maybe someone’s been blackmailing him. That would explain why he’s broke, and why he needed the insurance money, and if he knew we were onto him, and it was all going to come out, maybe that’s why he shot himself.’

  ‘And you’re quite sure you haven’t accused him of child abuse?’

  ‘Definitely not,’ said Slater. ‘We suspected him, but we never said as much to him.’

  ‘And now you’ve got a witness who confirms he wasn’t,’ said Murray. ‘Are you sure he’s telling the truth?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Slater. ‘He caught Maunder with his wife back then, so he’s definitely not going to be doing Maunder any favours. He could crucify the guy if he wanted to.’

  ‘Well, look, I’m going to have to tell the CC, before someone else does. I’ll try to persuade him you had good reason to be there and keep him off our backs for as long as I can. At least we’ve got the jewels to back that up. In the meantime, you need to find out who’s been blackmailing him, and why he topped himself.’

  They had agreed it was going to be a long night. If necessary, they would go right through every little thing again. But first, Norman had insisted, they needed coffee.

  ‘I think that went quite well, all things considered,’ ventured Norman, as they walked away from Murray’s office and headed for the canteen.

  ‘You do?’ asked Slater. ‘I thought he was going to burst a blood vessel.’

  ‘For sure,’ said Norman. ‘But I think we got off quite lightly. I was expecting to be suspended.’

  ‘That’s probably coming later, when the CC gets his way,’ said Slater, gloomily.

  ‘Oh well,’ said Norman, chirpily. ‘Look on the bright side. It won’t be the first time, and I could do with a rest.’

  They pushed their way through the canteen doors and headed for the coffee machine.

  ‘I’m thinking I spend far too much time stood in front of the Old Man’s desk, getting my arse kicked,’ complained Slater.

  ‘You and me both,’ agreed Norman. ‘But, would you rather be a “yes” man?’

  He poured two huge coffees into styrofoam cups, pushed the lids into place and paid his dues, before handing one over to Slater and then leading the way back through the doors.

  ‘You know, I’ve never had a suspect do that to me before,’ he said. ‘And I hope it never happens again.’

  ‘It might not have happened at all, if I hadn’t been delayed,’ said Slater, guiltily. ‘If I’d let you know what Ferguson had said half an hour earlier, you could have stopped him.’

  ‘You can’t think like that,’ said Norman, firmly. ‘That’s like me saying it might not have happened if I hadn’t gone up there with a search warrant. For what it’s worth, I don’t think he even knew we were there, and he wasn’t warned we were coming, so my guess is he had planned to do it anyway. Whatever we did this morning woulda made no difference.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right.’ Slater sighed. ‘It’s just that it all seems a bit of a mess right now.’

  ‘The whole thing seems a mess right now, for sure,’ agreed Norman. ‘But I don’t think that’s our fault. We can only follow the clues where they appear to lead. The thing is I think we’re missing the one clue that really matters.’

  ‘We’re missing something, that’s for sure.’

  ‘It’s gotta be there somewhere,’ said Norman. ‘I just think we haven’t seen it yet, or we’ve seen it and not recognised it for what it is.’

  ‘Maybe we should come at it from a different direction. Ferguson told me that Maunder had been set up in a honey trap, and that if he ever said anything, he would have been implicated in the child abuse, even though he wasn’t involved. What if he was being blackmailed ever since? That would explain why he’s broke.’

  ‘But what about the big cash withdrawals when Winter and Florence were killed?’ asked Norman. ‘How does that work?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Slater. ‘I haven’t worked that one out yet. Unless they were bonus payments for the blackmailer to bump off Winter and Florence. But then why blow his brains out?’

  Maybe the blackmailer was going to up the ante if he’d been paid to commit murder. But it would also make sense for the blackmailer to want them dead, wouldn’t it? He had a nice little earner going on there, and they could have spoilt it for him.’

  ‘The blackmailer’s the key to this,’ said Slater. ‘If only we can work out who it is.’

  They were back in their office now. There was no sign of Jolly, but that was no surprise; she would have gone home ages ago. She had, however, left a note.

  ‘Wow. Jane’s been busy,’ Slater told Norman as he read it. ‘She’s been through nearly all those old records from Hatton House. There’s just a small pile left on her desk.’

  ‘If that’s all there is,’ said Norman, looking at the slim pile of papers on her desk, ‘why don’t I start there? At least then we know we’ve covered all the evidence we have at least once.’

  He sat down at Jolly’s desk and began to work his way through the pile of old papers. Slater went to his desk and sorted everything into order. Then he started the long, boring process of reading his way through all the evidence they had collected. It really was going to be a long night.

  It was just before seven when his mobile phone began to ring.

  ‘It’s Jane. Are you still at work? Or have you been sacked?’

  ‘No, we’re still here, Jane,’ he said. ‘I think we came fairly close to being suspended, but we seem to have been spared for now. Anyway, shouldn’t you be bathing kids, or whatever it is you working mums do of an evening?’

  ‘That’s what husbands are for,’ she said. ‘In return I get the dubious pleasure of going to the supermarket on my way home from work. I’ve just got back, actually. But I bumped into someone while I was there, and we got talking. I think you need to hear what I found out.’

  ‘I’m all ears.’

  Norman turned over to the next document just as Slater’s phone began to ring. He was getting a headache already and they had a long way to go yet. As soon as he heard Slater mention the name ‘Jane’, his attention began to waver as he tried to listen in to Slater’s end of the conversation. As a result, he almost missed what was on the document in front of him. What he saw didn’t make sense at first, and he had to read it through again.

  ‘Holy shit!’ he said, aloud. ‘This can’t be right.’

  He studied the document for a minute or two before it dawned on him. Of course! There was a way it could be right.

  He rushed over to hi
s own desk, clutching the document he’d just read, and started tapping an address into his web browser. A website flashed up on the monitor. He clicked on the ‘About’ page link. As soon as the page came up, he started reading.

  ‘Ha!’ he said. ‘Now it makes sense. Now a whole lot of things might start to make sense.’

  Slater was still listening on the phone. Norman hoped he wasn’t going to be long, because he was pretty sure he’d just found what they were looking for. It wasn’t that they’d missed it before. They just hadn’t got to it until now.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  ‘Ah. Mr Hunter,’ said Bob Murray. ‘Thank you for coming in and giving us the chance to explain our side.’

  He led Hunter from the reception area and out into a corridor.

  ‘I’ve saved us a room so we can talk undisturbed,’ he said.

  ‘I’m glad to see you’re taking this seriously enough to have a senior officer taking charge and not those two clowns who’ve caused this unfortunate incident,’ said Hunter, his usual good humoured smile missing this morning. ‘You realise I’m here on behalf of Lady Maunder, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Murray. ‘I’m very sorry she couldn’t be here. I think she may have found this rather illuminating.’

  ‘I can’t imagine you can come up with a good enough excuse for your behaviour,’ said Hunter. ‘I’ll listen anyway, but I must warn you I intend to make an official complaint. And Lady Maunder will be taking legal action.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Murray. ‘Of course, she will.’

  He opened a door and ushered Hunter inside. Slater and Norman were stood behind a table waiting for them.

  ‘What are these two idiots doing here?’ snapped Hunter. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘These two “idiots” would like to ask you a couple of questions,’ explained Murray with a beaming smile. ‘I’m sure a legal man, like yourself, would be interested in seeing justice served. Right and wrong. All that sort of stuff, you know?’

  ‘I’m not wasting my time talking to these people,’ raged Hunter. ‘They shouldn’t even be here. They’re a disgrace to the police force. I’m leaving.’