by Jill McGown
‘Ma’am?’ said one of the constables, and drew Judy back out on to the terrace, speaking to her in a low voice. ‘Mr Esterbrook was in the middle of giving a group of people diving training when we got there,’ he said. ‘And his wife was with him. But someone’s been knocking her about – the injuries aren’t too severe, but she looked a bit unsteady, so we sent her to Barton General for a check-up, to be on the safe side. She reckons she was mugged earlier in the day, but she didn’t report it to the police.’
Judy thought that as unlikely as the constable obviously did. She sneaked another look at Josh Esterbrook. Women were usually covering up for their partners when they lied to the police about injuries. But then again, there could have been a violent argument with her mother-in-law which had ended in tragedy. ‘I take it someone’s with her?’
‘Yes, ma’am. She’ll be brought back here if the hospital don’t keep her in.’
Judy went back into the room, sat down, and opened her notebook. It wasn’t her official notebook; she wrote that up from the copious notes she made in the much larger one she carried around with her. She couldn’t rely on her memory, like Lloyd; she liked having her observations down in black and white. She decided to begin with Josh Esterbrook, who might have been giving his wife some sort of alibi by going diving in the reservoir, and taking her with him. ‘I understand you live here with your stepmother,’ she said. ‘Is that right?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But I have my own set of rooms in another part of the house.’
First person singular. No specific mention of his wife. Judy decided to leave it like that, just for the moment, until she had the lie of the land. ‘Can you tell me anything about what might have gone on here tonight?’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘I was out,’ he said. ‘All day. I left just before ten o’clock this morning, came back at about four o’clock for an hour or so, and this is the first time I’ve been back again since.’
‘Was your stepmother here when you came back this afternoon?’
‘No. It was her day for the beautician. She goes to Barton and gets herself pampered once a month.’
They could check up on Mrs Esterbrook’s movements in Barton, presumably. Judy took a note of the name of the beautician, and Mrs Esterbrook’s preferred restaurant, supplied by Elizabeth Esterbrook.
‘Can you tell me where you were this evening?’ she asked Josh Esterbrook.
‘Where I was most of the day – at the sub-aqua club beside the reservoir. And then later in the evening I was with a group of divers in the reservoir, doing a night-dive – I’m an instructor at the club. Your officers were waiting for me when we got back to the diving platform.’
‘The club is in the grounds of this estate?’
‘Well, technically. But it’s open to the public. It’s about three miles from the house.’ He smiled at her as she looked up from her notes. ‘That isn’t an exaggeration,’ he said. ‘All the land here is in Esterbrook ownership. We only keep some of it private.’ He shrugged. ‘Some people buy Scottish islands. My father bought Little Elmley.’
‘And when did the night-dive get under way?’
‘At around half past eight.’
She turned to Elizabeth Esterbrook then. ‘I understand you found Mrs Esterbrook,’ she said. ‘Do you know what time that would have been?’
The other woman shuddered, and put a hand to her mouth, a muscle working in the side of her face as she fought nausea; Judy felt almost as bad, but there was something about being in charge of a situation that helped you cope with that sort of thing much better than when you were just a witness to it.
‘Nine-thirty,’ said Mrs Esterbrook, when she felt able to speak. ‘Maybe a few minutes before that.’
‘You were coming for dinner, I think the inspector said. At nine-thirty?’ Judy didn’t know why that should surprise her; Lloyd frequently ate as late as that, and, as a result, so did she.
‘Yes. I was in London all day, and she knew I might be late back, so she made it a late dinner. She quite often had dinner very late. I rang the bell, and when Angela didn’t come to the door, I let myself in.’
‘You have a key?’
‘Everyone does. The family, that is. The house belongs to the Esterbrook Family Trust, so everyone was given a key. Angela and Josh are the only ones who live here, though.’
Ah. If Josh and his wife were estranged, that might well account for bruises that she didn’t want to explain to the police. She might have turned up here, and caused some sort of scene that had finally and fatally got out of hand. Judy turned to Josh Esterbrook. ‘Your wife doesn’t live here with you?’
‘Yes, she does,’ he said.
Paul and Elizabeth Esterbrook were looking totally baffled. ‘Wife?’ Paul Esterbrook said. ‘What wife?’
Judy looked up quickly. What wife? What sort of family was this?
‘Sandie,’ Josh told them. ‘We got married two months ago.’ To gasps from the other two Esterbrooks, he turned back to Judy with a smile. ‘We didn’t make it public, as you can see.’
To the extent of not even telling his own brother? ‘Might I ask why?’ said Judy.
‘A clause in my father’s will could have made things difficult for Paul – he’s chairman and managing director of IMG and Sandie works for him. Her marriage to me might have contravened the conditions under which Paul operates. It’s a bit complicated, but it could have meant his removal from the board, since under the terms of my father’s will he isn’t supposed to employ any member of my family.’
Judy decided that the reason for this ban was not one into which she could legitimately probe at the moment.
‘Sandie and I got married on an impulse,’ he said. ‘It was only as we were being pronounced man and wife that I realized, and Sandie didn’t want to give up her job before she’d found another, so . . .’ He smiled, shrugged. ‘Angela’s precept was always least said, soonest mended, and we all thought it best to say nothing to Paul and Elizabeth until Sandie found another job.’ He glanced at his half-brother as he spoke, and the smile vanished. ‘But she won’t be working for you any more,’ he said, his voice suddenly cold and hard. ‘So you’ve no need to be concerned.’
Judy made notes as he spoke, and wondered about all of this. Had Sandie been having an affair with her boss? Was that what the Copes had found out, at her mother-in-law’s request? Was that why her husband had assaulted her? Did that explain Mrs Esterbrook’s murder?
She made a note, and moved on to Paul Esterbrook. ‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling us where you’ve been this evening?’ she asked.
He took a little time to compose himself before he started speaking. ‘Josh has a boat berthed at Penhallin in Cornwall,’ he said. ‘We usually go diving at the weekends, but—’
‘Who do you mean by ‘‘we’’?’ asked Judy.
‘Josh, Sandie and myself. But the boat’s been out of commission for a few weeks. I thought it was back in business this weekend, and I went to Penhallin early this morning.’
‘When did you leave?’
‘About half past seven. It takes the best part of six hours to get there. I made an early start.’
‘So you arrived in Penhallin at about lunchtime?’
‘I stopped in Plymouth for an hour or so. I got to Penhallin at about three, I think, and discovered that Josh wasn’t there. But the boat had been broken into, and that worried me, in case something had happened to him.’
‘Did you know about that, Mr Esterbrook?’ asked Judy, turning to Josh.
‘First I’ve heard of it,’ he said. ‘I just forgot to tell Paul I wasn’t taking the boat out after all. I know nothing about a break-in.’
‘Anyway, I drove straight back, and came here,’ Paul Esterbrook went on. ‘Mother—’ He took a deep breath, and released it. ‘Mother said that she thought Josh was in Penhallin, and that got me worried, but I didn’t say anything to her about the boat. I knew Sandie was doing a night-dive here, so I went to see if
she knew where Josh was, but the dive had started. I could see them both out on the reservoir, though, so I stopped worrying, and went home.’
There, he had taken a nap, and had been awakened by the phone. It had been his wife, ringing to tell him what had happened to his mother. His voice had broken as he got to the last bit, but Judy felt, as she had throughout his account, that she was watching someone playing the part of the shocked and bereaved son. His reaction to his brother’s marriage had been real; this was manufactured.
No one seemed too touched by the tragedy, and yet she didn’t get the impression that Mrs Esterbrook had been disliked; it was more as though they were all sitting round discussing someone they didn’t know.
‘So your mother was alive at . . . what time would you say it was when you arrived, Mr Esterbrook?’
‘About ten or five minutes to nine, I think.’
Lloyd had come in during Paul Esterbrook’s account of his evening, and was introducing himself to the group when a young woman in her twenties, with short dark hair, a black eye, a bruised face, a split lip and a police escort arrived. Judy needed even fewer of her detective powers to work out who this particular Esterbrook was. Her husband jumped up, helped her to a seat, and sat beside her, his arm round her.
Sandie Esterbrook was deathly pale, and under other circumstances Judy would have had to ascertain that she was fit to be questioned, but she wasn’t a suspect, she wasn’t under arrest, and the hospital had released her. She glanced at Lloyd, who gave a slight shake of his head. He wanted to let things ride, see what happened.
Both the other Esterbrooks looked horrified, but once again, Judy felt that Paul Esterbrook’s horror was a touch theatrical. She was used to Lloyd, who was a natural actor; Paul Esterbrook wasn’t. They asked what had happened, and Judy made notes, not just of what the girl was saying, but of the reactions of the others as she told them that she had been mugged in the multistorey car park in Stansfield when returning to her car. She had refused to let go of her bag, and they had run away.
Stansfield’s multi-storey didn’t have security cameras, so there was no way of checking her story. It also didn’t have many muggings, despite that. It did have a lot of custom; it was hard to think of any time on a Saturday when the incident wouldn’t have been seen. Elizabeth Esterbrook glanced at her husband, often, while the girl spoke, and Josh Esterbrook never took his eyes off him. Judy was glad he wasn’t looking at her like that.
‘Can I ask when this happened?’ she asked, when the girl had finished.
‘I’d been shopping – well, window shopping. I couldn’t see anything I wanted. About half past six, I think.’
‘And after it had happened, what did you do?’
‘I got into the car and sat there for a long time. When I felt better, I came straight to the club, because I would have been late for the dive if I’d come home first. Josh and Howard didn’t want me to do it, but I felt I had to. It was probably silly.’
She had actually done the dive? In that condition? Judy didn’t know much about the sport, but she didn’t imagine it had been a good idea. ‘Was it that important that you do it?’ she asked.
Sandie Esterbrook shrugged a little. ‘It seemed to be,’ she said. ‘It was all I could think of, that I’d be late for the dive. I don’t know why – it just seemed important to do it. Not to let what had happened stop me doing what I wanted to do.’
Judy nodded. ‘I can understand that,’ she said. She could understand it; she just didn’t really believe it. Or that Sandie Esterbrook had received those injuries less than six hours ago.
Lloyd sat down, and took them all in with a slow look round the room. ‘I really am very sorry to be so blunt, but can any of you think of any reason why someone would want to kill Mrs Esterbrook?’
‘I presume a burglar or something must have got in, and my mother surprised him,’ said Paul Esterbrook. ‘The house is usually empty at weekends.’
He was offering a plausible explanation, unlike the others. That quite often indicated a desire to shift blame. And there was something going on between him and his half-brother that they would have to investigate.
Tom knocked, and appeared in the door from the hallway, speaking to Josh Esterbrook. ‘There’s an answering machine in your mother’s—’
‘Stepmother.’
‘Sorry. In your stepmother’s study. It’s flashing, which I presume means there are messages, but I can’t get them to play. I wondered if—’
‘It’s done that before,’ Elizabeth Esterbrook said. ‘It must be a faulty tape or something. Because it’s quite new – I put it in not long ago. But it wouldn’t play once before – remember, Josh? You fixed it.’
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, and turned back to Tom. ‘You have to rewind it manually and record a new message before it’ll work again.’ He smiled. ‘But I expect you want to know what’s on it, don’t you?’
‘Can I ask what you do when you come here at weekends?’ Judy asked Elizabeth Esterbrook.
‘I’m helping—’ She took a breath, and corrected the tense. ‘I was helping Angela with her autobiography.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Lloyd. ‘She was a novelist, wasn’t she?’
‘Yes. She couldn’t use the word-processor any more, though, because of her arthritis, so I was helping her out.’ She looked at Tom. ‘You won’t be able to play the tape, I’m afraid,’ she said.
‘Oh, that’s all right. It’ll keep.’
Tom went back out, and Lloyd smiled apologetically. ‘Might I be very familiar, and call you all by your first names, should the need arise? Otherwise, this is going to get rather confusing.’
There was a general nod of assent.
‘Perhaps you could help me, Paul. It would be foolish of me to pretend that I don’t know just how wealthy your family is – can you save me some time by telling me if anyone stands to benefit financially from your mother’s death?’
‘I’ll come into a bit of money,’ said Paul.
‘And – forgive me again, but I don’t imagine you and I put quite the same construction on the phrase ‘‘a bit of money’’. Perhaps you could give me what the Americans call, I believe, a ballpark figure?’
What he believed they called a ballpark figure? Judy wasn’t sure who Lloyd was playing, but he was playing someone. Someone frightfully British and solid and dependable. Not someone happily at home with Americanisms, and entirely unpredictable in his approach to problems.
It was Josh, not Paul, who gave him the ballpark figure he had requested. ‘Oh, let’s say twenty million pounds as a nice round figure,’ he said, with a smile.
Lloyd gave a low whistle, which just might have been his first genuine reaction that evening, Judy thought. But even she, after twenty years, rarely knew what was genuine and what wasn’t. That was one of the reasons she had never moved in with him. She never knew what he truly felt about anything; not even the baby. He just produced whatever reaction he felt appropriate. Or amusing. He could always fool her.
‘Quite,’ said Josh. ‘It sounds like a hell of a lot of money to me, too. But to Paul . . .’ He shrugged, and glanced coldly at his half-brother again. ‘No. Paul has much, much greater expectations, don’t you, Paul?’
‘Oh?’ Lloyd looked at Paul.
‘In a few years I’ll come into the major shareholding in IMG currently held by the Esterbrook Family Trust,’ Paul said, stiffly. ‘I imagine that’s what Josh is referring to.’
‘I see,’ said Lloyd.
‘I doubt that you do,’ said Josh. ‘Paul stands to acquire seventy-five per cent of a business worth three-quarters of a billion or so. He wouldn’t murder his own mother for a few measly millions.’
‘I don’t think I suggested that he would,’ said Lloyd, looking positively hurt; Judy knew that look, and saw through it. So did Josh Esterbrook.
‘No,’ he said, looking as contrite as Lloyd had looked injured. ‘Of course you didn’t.’
‘It’s all right, Josh,’ said
Paul. ‘I can fight my own battles.’
‘Oh, it’s not a battle,’ said Lloyd, apparently even more shocked at that suggestion. ‘Just questions. We have to ask them, I’m afraid, even at times like these. And you yourself, Josh? Do you benefit at all?’
‘No,’ said Josh. ‘Paul gets this place, which is what I would have got if Angela hadn’t died.’ He smiled. ‘I’ll tell you what, Chief Inspector – I’ll give you a copy of the will, so you can sort out for yourself exactly who gets what now that Angela’s dead. But it’s quite simple where I’m concerned. I get nothing.’
Lloyd gave a little nod of thanks as Freddie appeared in the patio door, smiling at Judy behind the backs of the other people in the room, the broad, beaming smile that he never allowed his customers’ nearest and dearest to see, and winked at her. ‘I’ll be on my way,’ he said.
‘Oh – hang on a minute,’ said Lloyd, getting up, and going out on to the terrace with him. After a brief conversation, Freddie left and Lloyd came back into the room, sitting down at the table as he thought for a moment. ‘I take it you have domestic staff here?’ he asked Josh Esterbrook.
‘During the week. They don’t live in, and they don’t work at weekends.’
‘Is that generally known?’ Lloyd asked.
Josh shrugged. ‘It isn’t a secret,’ he said. ‘We’re usually all in Penhallin at the weekend.’
‘Your mother went diving too?’
‘No, she hated it,’ said Josh. ‘But she had a weekend cottage in Penhallin.’
‘Where exactly is Penhallin?’ Lloyd asked.
‘Just across the Sound from Plymouth.’
Judy and Lloyd mentally glanced at one another.
‘But once a month, Angela gave herself a treat in Barton, as I told Inspector Hill. Elizabeth’s usually here during the day on Saturday and Sunday, but she was away all day today too, of course.’
Sandie Esterbrook had fallen asleep, her head resting on her husband’s shoulder, and Judy was certain that Josh was quite unaware of that, unaware, almost, of her presence, and yet entirely aware of it, as though she were a part of his own body. She tried to think what it reminded her of; a mother with a baby, perhaps. She was just part of him: safe now, and sleeping, and he was behaving as though she wasn’t there at all.