by Jill McGown
SCENE XXI – BARTONSHIRE.
Wednesday, October 1st, 11.10 a.m.
IMG’s Offices.
IMG’s head office was functional sixties, square and many-storeyed by Stansfield’s low-rise standards; the entrance hall, however, was the epitome of eighties conspicuous consumerism, celebrating the decade in which Paul Esterbrook senior had become a serious player. And in amongst the original artwork, the cedar panelling, the hessian wallpaper, the linoleum-and-leather-covered reception desk which swept round one corner, the indoor trees and plants, was a display case of bottled gases; big cylinders, little cylinders, cylinders with multiple attachments, showing the full range of gases and containers offered by IMG, bringing the whole thing down to earth again. Judy smiled at this irritating necessity to display their wares.
‘Have you come to arrest me again?’ Sandie Esterbrook nodded to the chair in front of the desk. ‘Take a seat,’ she said.
‘I want to ask you some questions. You don’t have to answer them.’
She smiled. ‘But it may harm my defence if I don’t?’ she said.
‘No,’ said Judy. ‘Nothing like that. I’d just like to know how you met Paul Esterbrook.’
Sandie Esterbrook looked at her, still smiling slightly. ‘Sergeant Finch thinks I gave up being a prostitute,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t. I just polished up the image, and moved upmarket, which keeps you out of the magistrates’ courts. I still wasn’t respectable, though. I was a call-girl.’
She had polished up the image to considerable effect, Judy thought. She hadn’t quite put her in the Roedean bracket, but then Sandie hadn’t chosen to place herself there; Judy was sure she could carry off Roedean if she wanted. She came across as something not unlike Judy herself; the product of middle-class, comfortable parents who had paid for her education at a middle-class, comfortable day-school, having sadly despaired of state education by the late sixties, in Judy’s father’s case. But Sandie Esterbrook was the product of a deprived background that she had run away from, and her own quick intelligence.
‘Brendan—’ She ducked her head in a brief apology. ‘Who isn’t my ex-boyfriend, but my ex-pimp, ran a very high-class operation in Barton, and he had boys on his books too. Paul Esterbrook was a client.’ She picked up her cigarettes, offered Judy one.
Judy took it, and listened as Sandie told her how Brendan had asked her if she would be prepared to act as decoy for Paul Esterbrook in various hotels, with various boys, attracting attention away from them and to herself in case someone was watching him, and she had agreed. How, when Paul had wanted her to accompany him on weekends to Cornwall, Brendan had said no, because he didn’t like his girls being that far away from his seat of operations. Besides, Paul wasn’t using one of his boys; he had made alternative arrangements in Plymouth, and Brendan, naturally, hadn’t liked that. Paul had offered Sandie a deal, and she had taken it, moved to Stansfield in order not to be too close to the irritated Brendan, and had become Paul Esterbrook’s personal assistant.
‘Did he know he was being watched?’
‘No. He didn’t really believe he was, not to start with. He just did everything on that assumption, because that way he couldn’t be caught out if and when she did put someone on to him.’
‘Can I ask you about Saturday?’ said Judy. ‘You told DCI Lloyd that Billy was already there when you got there.’
She nodded.
‘Would Paul have given Billy a key?’
‘No. Billy was probably waiting at the back. You can get into the garden from the shore. I expect Paul let him in when I was still outside.’
Billy had been hiding in the treehouse, according to the fingerprints they had found. Paul must have told him to do that, and that didn’t seem to accord with his stated belief, according to Josh, that he wasn’t going to be watched that weekend. Judy asked Sandie Esterbrook about that.
‘But he was convinced Josh was up to something,’ she said. ‘He was sure it had something to do with the cottage, so he probably did tell Billy to keep out of sight.’
That seemed reasonable to Judy, but Lloyd thought Billy had been hiding from Paul, that Paul didn’t even know he was there. And there was one thing bothering Judy about Sandie’s story. ‘When you did go into the cottage, what exactly did you do?’ she asked.
‘I told Chief Inspector Lloyd everything I could remember,’ she said.
‘Something you might have forgotten when you were telling him. Go through what you did for me.’
‘I put away the glasses that Paul had taken out,’ she said. ‘I checked the fax machine in case he’d left the fax on it, but he hadn’t. Josh hadn’t sent a fax, of course, so that was hardly surprising.’
‘So you were over by the desk?’
‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t notice anything then?’ Judy gave up trying not to prompt her. ‘A smell of burning, perhaps?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Nothing. Josh said that something had been burned in the wastepaper bin, but I didn’t notice it.’
Paul could have burned whatever it was when he went back in, but why get Sandie to tidy everything up and then leave burned paper for Angela to find? Perhaps Lloyd was right; perhaps he had been set up, and hadn’t murdered Billy at all.
If Sandie was part of that set-up, she would surely have said that she had smelt burning, that she had noticed the contents of the wastebin? But since Henderson’s men had kept surveillance on the cottage until Billy’s body was found, and had seen no one else go near it, Billy’s murderer did seem to be a toss-up between Sandie and Paul.
Though of course, Judy thought, it could be approached from the rear, and no one had been watching the back.
SCENE XXII – BARTONSHIRE.
Wednesday, October 1st, 12.00 noon.
Elizabeth’s House.
It was Chief Inspector Lloyd again. Elizabeth felt quite disappointed that they seemed to have stopped sending Sergeant Finch, but at least Lloyd was a senior officer, and might be able to tell her more.
‘What’s happening?’ she said.
‘Our enquiries are proceeding, Mrs Esterbrook.’
‘That’s officialese. What’s really happening? It’s dreadful – everyone thinks Paul did those awful things and he’s not alive to defend himself!’
Her distress was real enough; she didn’t actually care that people thought that Paul had murdered that boy and his own mother, but she did care that the police seemed to think it. She sighed. ‘Last Friday, I was convinced that Paul was seeing Sandie, that all that business about the night-dive was a lie. By Saturday, I was convinced that she was just a red herring. And now you’re telling me it was this Billy person Paul was involved with, and I don’t know what to think.’
‘It does accord with your belief that Sandie was a red herring,’ said Lloyd.
‘I know, I know,’ she sighed. And, if truth be told, Elizabeth didn’t find it too difficult to believe; Paul’s sexual tastes had always been inexplicable as far as she was concerned. They might have included someone like Billy. But Josh was the one who hadn’t looked at a woman for three years, not Paul. ‘All I can do is beg you, Mr Lloyd, not to take an Esterbrook’s word for anything.’
‘I can only assure you, Mrs Esterbrook, that we are exploring every avenue.’ He smiled apologetically. ‘More officialese, I know, but true nonetheless.’
That was easy enough to say, but they didn’t have her incentive. Paul’s shares in IMG would form part of his estate providing his name was cleared. She would be immensely wealthy. And if ever anyone deserved to be, she did, after putting up with that bloody family all these years. But if they continued to believe what they seemed to believe, she would be a great deal worse off, not better off.
‘You do know,’ she said, ‘that if Paul is held responsible for his mother’s murder the entire Esterbrook Family Trust holdings will go to some marine exploration project? My God, they’ll be able to raise Atlantis with that sort of cash.’
Lloyd smiled.
‘As I said, our enquiries are proceeding.’
‘Is that what you’re here to tell me?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m here to ask you something. At your mother-in-law’s house on Saturday evening, you told my sergeant that the answering machine had failed to work properly before. Do you by any chance remember when that was?’
‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth. ‘It was the Sunday of the Bank Holiday weekend, because Angela had been visiting friends in London on Saturday, and you can’t get a train back from St Pancras to Barton after nine o’clock on a Saturday, so she stayed over. And I only had to work on the Sunday, which is why I remember when it was.’
Lloyd smiled. ‘You didn’t get Bank Holiday weekends off, then?’
‘Volunteers never do,’ said Elizabeth, with an answering smile. ‘I went over to Little Elmley and found the answering machine blinking, but it wouldn’t play.’
‘What time was that, Mrs Esterbrook?’
‘It would be about quarter to ten, I suppose.’
He nodded, and thought for a moment. ‘Was Josh at Little Elmley that morning?’ he asked. ‘You said he fixed the answering machine.’
‘No. He was in Penhallin,’ Elizabeth said. ‘It was the day the boat was holed.’
Lloyd shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ve established that the boat was holed on the Saturday. I’m afraid you were misled by your husband.’
She nodded. Finch had clearly been puzzled when she had said it had happened on the Sunday; she had realized then that she had probably been misled. She shrugged. ‘As I said – you can’t take an Esterbrook’s word for anything. Josh always looked out for Paul. Covered up for him, told lies for him. I couldn’t compete with both of them.’
‘So when did Josh fix the machine?’
‘When he came home.’
‘Could you then listen to the message that had been left on it?’
‘No. It doesn’t work like that. It thinks you’ve heard it. So it just gets recorded over when it takes another message.’
‘And did it, to your knowledge, take any more messages?’
‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Because we tested it.’ She frowned. ‘Why are you asking about that?’
‘It might be important.’ Lloyd smiled again. ‘Well, thank you very much, Mrs Esterbrook. You’ve been most helpful.’
SCENE XXIII – BARTONSHIRE.
Wednesday, October 1st, 12.30 p.m.
IMG’s Offices.
‘You said you wouldn’t cross the street to talk to Billy,’ Inspector Hill said. ‘Why?’
Sandie shook her head slightly. She had met Billy the same day as she had met Josh; her reactions to the two couldn’t haven’t been more different. And in neither case had she found any reason to alter her first impression.
‘He was into everything,’ she said. ‘Drugs, porn, you name it, Billy had a hand in it. He once boasted to me about having supplied the victim for a snuff movie. He was a liar, as I told Chief Inspector Lloyd, so he probably didn’t, but it wouldn’t be because of his scruples.’
‘You said you didn’t like Paul much, come to that.’
She smiled. ‘No, I didn’t,’ she said. ‘But if it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t have met Josh. I’ll always be truly grateful to him for that.’ And that was the truth.
Inspector Hill left then, and Sandie watched the Clio pull out on to the main road and go briskly off, back to the police station, no doubt. Almost everything she had told the inspector had been the truth, but not quite all, and she was confident that Inspector Hill had believed her when she had lied, just as she had refused to believe her when she had told the truth.
But then, lying was so much easier.
SCENE XXIV – BARTONSHIRE.
Wednesday, October 1st, 1.10 p.m.
The House at Little Elmley.
Angela Esterbrook’s study was no longer sealed now that the SOCOs had finished with it, but Lloyd had been given grudging permission by the housekeeper to go in, and was now being given willing assistance by the girl who had helped Mrs Esterbrook in the kitchen. She expressed her sadness at her previous employer’s passing, but again it was with detachment. Angela Esterbrook hadn’t really inspired affection, Lloyd found himself thinking. That was a bit sad.
‘It was Mrs Esterbrook got me interested in cooking – she wouldn’t have anything out of a packet. And she did the cooking – she wouldn’t hear of getting a cook. But she would let me have a go, because she liked teaching me. Everything had to be fresh – even when it was just lunch for herself. But she couldn’t chop vegetables or grate cheese or anything like that.’
‘Did she often eat alone?’
‘No. Josh has his own kitchen and all that, but he was usually here for lunch and dinner. And his girlfriend, lately. Well – his wife. I didn’t know they were married.’
Angela really hadn’t told anyone that Josh and Sandie were married, presumably, not even someone she worked with every day.
‘I thought she was here a lot, but I didn’t know she lived here. They never said she’d moved in, and they didn’t say they were married. That’s a bit weird.’
It was, as she said, a bit weird, but even the cleaners hadn’t known, as Lloyd had found out by a similar line of questioning. Josh’s rooms had remained resolutely male; young Mrs Esterbrook’s wardrobe had presumably been housed in one of the many guest rooms. Weird seemed to be situation normal for the Esterbrooks. He was beginning to feel that with a family to whom subterfuge, plot and counterplot was apparently second nature, he might be on a hiding to nothing, but he wasn’t beaten yet.
‘Right,’ he said, when he had recorded a message on a brand-new tape on Angela’s machine. ‘I’d like you to go into the hallway, ring this number, and leave a message on the machine. Then I’ll ring you back and give you further instructions.’
‘What’ll I say?’
‘ ‘‘Mary had a little lamb’’ is a popular choice.’
Half an hour later, he had established to his own satisfaction that there was nothing wrong with the answering machine, elderly though it was. But if you removed the tape before playing the message, or after saving it, then the light continued to blink. Putting in a different tape then produced exactly the situation Tom Finch had found on Saturday night. A tape that would neither play nor record, with the message light blinking. Lloyd became more than ever convinced that the tape Tom had found had been planted.
‘Thanks,’ he said as he left the office. ‘You’ve been a great help.’ He paused on his way to the front door. ‘You couldn’t tell me how to walk to the diving club from here, could you?’ he asked.
‘Sure. Come through to the kitchen.’
He followed her along the corridor into the kitchen, where Angela Esterbrook’s body had lain the first time he visited this house.
The girl opened the door. ‘Do you see the willow tree?’ she said. ‘If you walk past it, you’ll come to a wooden gate. The path takes you to a jetty. Go down there to the edge of the water, and then follow the shoreline round to the left. You’ll see the diving platform first, and the club’s just at the top of the slope.’
SCENE XXV – BARTONSHIRE.
Wednesday, October 1st, 2.15 p.m.
The Reservoir and Diving Club at Little Elmley.
Admirable directions, Lloyd thought, as he found himself at the landing-stage. He wasn’t starting from the dual carriageway as Sandie Esterbrook claimed she had, but he could see where she would have had to leave the road, and scramble down to the water’s edge. He would add two minutes to his journey time. He wanted to see if you really could get from there to the club in under ten minutes as she said she had.
Twelve minutes later, he was walking up the stony slope towards the club. Plus the two minutes he first thought of, and his journey time came to fourteen minutes. Could that time have had five minutes shaved off it by someone half his age, running rather than walking, and spurred on by sheer necessity? Yes, he thought, it probably could. He had no
reason to doubt her on that score. He went into the club, finding himself in a small reception area with a notice board, and two shop-window models wearing diving gear.
He had been trying to work out how the Copes were murdered, in the hope that in that way he might be able to prove who had murdered them. And now he was looking at equipment designed to keep you alive in a hostile environment, and that set him thinking.
‘Can I help you?’ said a voice.
An aqualung? No. It was far too bulky. You couldn’t wear it, not without attracting attention to yourself. And you certainly couldn’t get into a car, especially not a Ford Fiesta, wearing one of them. And carrying it about with you would hardly be practical.
‘You might prefer snorkelling,’ the man said. ‘That’s what you learn first, anyway.’
A snorkel? That seemed rather more portable. He looked at the two kinds of snorkel the man was pointing out to him, and tried to work out any way in which a tall, well-built man could position himself in the back seat of a Ford Fiesta in such a way that he could hold people at gunpoint and breathe air with the snorkel through a slightly open window at the same time. There wasn’t one, he decided, since they were designed to lie flat against the side of the head. His face would be squashed up against the glass. And anyway, his victims would have laughed themselves to death before the fumes had had time to take hold.
The big objection was that no one would just sit there, even if their assailant did have a gun, knowing they were going to die. His mother used to say of unpleasant choices that she would sooner be shot than poisoned, and he imagined that, given the literal choice, most people would. They would have tried to get out; Andy Cope would indeed have switched off the engine. They would have done something, and their assailant would have had to shoot them, or let them go, because people simply didn’t die to order. He was glad he hadn’t shared that non-starter of a theory with anyone else.
‘But you can hire equipment,’ the man said. ‘You don’t have to buy it all before you even know if you want to do it.’ He smiled, held out his hand. ‘Howard,’ he said. ‘I’m one of the instructors here. Are you interested in learning to dive?’