by Jill McGown
Sandie frowned, watched, and saw what all the fuss was about, as the camera moved back, and she saw herself hand Paul her mobile phone, and then take her decoy duties just a little more seriously than most decoys would.
‘I think you are a very clever, very plausible liar, Sandie,’ the inspector said, stopping the tape. ‘You told us two stories that you knew we wouldn’t believe, so that we would believe you when you told us the one about being a decoy. And it worked. We did believe it. But your story’s come unstuck, and now you are going to have to work very, very hard if you want me to believe another word you say.’
Sandie shook her head. She wasn’t disagreeing with Inspector Hill’s assessment of her; she was indeed a very clever, very plausible liar. She would put herself in the premier league of liars when she was on form, which she usually was. She just couldn’t believe that her lie had been discovered like this. A pure accident. No one could have known that Paul would open the curtains when he did.
But life was like that, sometimes.
SCENE XXXII – BARTONSHIRE.
Thursday, October 2nd, 1.15 p.m.
Interview Room Two at Stansfield Police Station.
Josh wondered what was happening with Sandie, and what had happened that had got the police so excited. They had been arrested on different charges; Sandie on suspicion of murdering Billy, again; he on suspicion of murdering Angela and Paul.
Sergeant Finch and Chief Inspector Lloyd finally finished the preliminaries, and presumably he would find out why he was here.
‘Where were you at six-thirty in the morning of Sunday the twenty-fourth of August, Mr Esterbrook?’ asked Lloyd.
Josh smiled, as he realized why he was here. ‘I’ve told you both several times. I was at Little Elmley. I had driven home the night before, after I’d holed the boat.’
Lloyd leant forward a little. ‘Would it surprise you to learn, Mr Esterbrook, that a report from a firm called the Cope Detective Agency was found in the bureau in your stepmother’s study?’
No, that wouldn’t surprise him in the least. Josh didn’t speak.
‘Mrs Cope, posing as a guest who had inadvertently got out of the lift at the wrong floor, walked into Room 312 of the Excalibur Hotel in Plymouth, and videoed what she saw. A boy, whom we now know to be Billy Rampton, and an older man.’
Lloyd was trying to be clever. He was pretending that they had the video, which of course they did not. Josh still didn’t speak.
‘The video was apparently unusable, with the exception of one frame,’ Lloyd went on. ‘Mrs Cope had that printed out, but it was no longer with the report when we found it. And, sadly, Mr and Mrs Cope apparently committed suicide in the garage of their home, so they could be of no assistance to us.’
Josh nodded. ‘I read about that,’ he said. Lloyd had thrown in the towel pretty quickly, he thought; he hadn’t really tried.
‘What you won’t have read about, Mr Esterbrook, is that Kathy Cope wasn’t with her husband at the hotel. She and her companion registered as Mr and Mrs Cope, but she was with another man. Who isn’t dead. A lucky break for us, I think you’ll agree.’
Crafty. He hadn’t thrown in the towel at all. Josh smiled. A lucky break indeed.
‘I think, Mr Esterbrook, that you set your brother up, made it look as though he was the man in that report, that he was having a relationship with Billy Rampton, and that he had shot and killed not only Billy, but his own mother, and himself. I think you murdered Mr and Mrs Cope in order that they should not be able to identify you as the man who was with Billy in the hotel room.’
‘Is that why you got married?’ Finch asked. ‘So we wouldn’t realize that you were Billy’s client?’
Josh stared at him. It hadn’t occurred to him for one minute that anyone would think that their marriage had been purely a ploy. ‘You think it’s a marriage of convenience?’ he said. ‘Sandie and I got married because we wanted to live together, and under my father’s ludicrous will, we had to get married in order to do that. But we knew we were meant for one another – I don’t care how corny that sounds, it’s true. I told her all about myself, and she was prepared to live with what I’d done.’
Finch looked sceptical, but Lloyd, he thought, believed him. It was much more important to Josh that they believe him about that than about anything else at all. Sandie was his life, and always would be.
SCENE XXXIII – BARTONSHIRE.
Thursday, October 2nd, 1.30 p.m.
Interview Room One at Stansfield Police Station.
Judy had swallowed every word Sandie Esterbrook had told her, and that hurt her professional pride. She couldn’t tell when this girl was lying, and she had never felt quite so at sea with an interviewee in her life. ‘How about the truth, Sandie?’ she said.
Sandie smiled a little. ‘I was a call-girl, as I told you, but Paul was my client. He arranged our meetings through Brendan at first, and then employed me direct, just as I said. All that was true.’
‘And it was Josh who was seeing Billy,’ said Judy. ‘Not Paul.’ Lloyd’s theory, the one that Case had thrown out as soon as Lloyd had uttered it, the one she had told him that he had had no business airing without running it by her first, was right. Lloyd’s little puzzle of the missing video-frame had been solved. ‘Did you marry him to put us off the scent?’
‘Oh, no. We got married because we love one another.’
‘Didn’t it bother you?’ asked Judy. ‘Josh having had a relationship with another man?’
Sandie smiled. ‘Josh and I just clicked, like I said. We knew – the minute we met, we knew.’
Judy had felt like that about Lloyd. Not with quite as disastrous consequences. A couple of broken marriages. No murders.
‘He told me all about himself,’ Sandie said. ‘I didn’t need to tell him what my background was – Paul had already done that. We decided to forget the past, and look to the future. And that was when we decided to get Josh his freedom – we sorted out exactly what we were going to do over the next few weeks. It meant we couldn’t make the marriage public, and we both had to carry on exactly as before, or Paul would get suspicious.’
Judy looked at her notes, and at Sandie Esterbrook, and tried to make sense of what she was being told. ‘How were you going to get Josh what you call his freedom?’
‘Before I answer that, can I ask you a question?’
It was an unusual request, but Judy couldn’t see why not.
‘Am I right in thinking that after you arrested me the first time, you let me go because you got evidence which proved that I was at the cottage with Paul, just as I’d told Chief Inspector Lloyd?’
Judy’s eyebrows rose slightly. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What do you know about that?’
‘Everything. I employed the Arthur Henderson Agency to be there.’ She shrugged slightly. ‘You’re going to find out sooner or later, so I might as well tell you it was me before the Penhallin Gazette prints a photograph of Angela. She was their most famous resident, after all, even if no one had heard of her. And Arthur Henderson would be on the phone to Penhallin police station immediately.’
Judy felt that all her tricks of the trade were deserting her, as she allowed her surprise and puzzlement at that statement to show on her face. Usually, she could remain entirely expressionless whatever the interviewee was telling her. She had no idea for the moment why Sandie Esterbrook had employed Henderson, but she presumed she would be told. In the meantime, she tried to sound less clueless than she felt. ‘Did you tell Henderson you were Angela?’ she asked, drawing her notebook towards her. Tape or no tape, this she had to note down.
‘No, but I didn’t tell him I wasn’t. And I open the mail at Little Elmley. We were both Mrs A. Esterbrook, you see, so someone had to open the mail, sort out whose was whose, and I haven’t got arthritis. I would get his report, whoever he addressed it to.’ Sandie stubbed out her cigarette. ‘That was why we married when we did,’ she said. ‘So I could do just that. But it isn’t why we got ma
rried.’
Judy nodded, but the bafflement must have been showing.
‘I don’t expect you to understand what we did,’ Sandie said. ‘But Josh feels very cheated. Not just by the will, but by everything that’s happened to him. The will just made matters much worse.’
Judy presumed that this leap back from Saturday to Josh’s father’s will would make sense eventually; she didn’t speak.
‘I don’t know if you’ve read it, but his father virtually put him in prison again. Josh was born at Little Elmley. He grew up there. But if he was going to inherit it, he had to behave in a certain way, defer to Angela all the time. He had to live there, he had to obey her rules. He even had to show Angela our marriage certificate before I could move in there, because of what it says in the will about his conditions of residence. That’s another reason we got married. We wanted to live together, and Josh had to live at Little Elmley.’
‘Why didn’t he contest the will?’ Judy asked. ‘The courts take quite a dim view these days of that sort of thing.’
‘His stepmother and his half-brother refused to back him, and he wasn’t sure he would win, because of what he’d done. He thought that they might think his father had every right to make him sit it out if he wanted to inherit. He only did that hold-up because of the way he—’ She shook her head. ‘It’s too long a story,’ she said. ‘But he couldn’t afford to take the chance of contesting the will.’
‘So he chose to live with his stepmother in order to inherit?’ said Judy, determined not to start feeling sorry for Josh Esterbrook. ‘No one forced him to do that.’
‘Perhaps not. But he’s an Esterbrook too, and they don’t give up on what they believe to be theirs by right. The other two watched him like hawks, waiting for him to put a foot wrong. Angela did it because she felt a duty to his father, and Paul did it because he wanted to get one over on Josh.’ She lit another cigarette. ‘Josh just wanted to be free. So . . .’
This was the part that Judy had been waiting for. People’s motivation was something she had long ago given up trying to fathom. Sandie didn’t seem at all likely to be confessing to murder, but she was confessing to something. Or she would, once she got round to it.
‘Paul was right to be suspicious when he drove me on to Bodmin Moor,’ she said, lifting her chin a little. ‘Josh and I were plotting against him. And telling Paul that we were lovers might have been a bit painful, but at least it got him back on the road to the cottage, which was where I wanted him to be. He so nearly guessed what we were up to,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘But I got him there.’ She gave a short sigh, almost a sour little laugh. ‘Much good it did me,’ she said.
‘What were you plotting to do, exactly?’
‘Well, first, I got Henderson to investigate Billy, so I could check that he was thorough, and honest and all the rest, since Josh knew the sort of thing Billy got up to, and we would know if Henderson’s operatives, as he calls them, had really dug for the information. We wanted the evidence to be rock-solid, because we were going to have proof that Paul had spent the weekend with me in that cottage. Times, observations, photographic evidence, the lot.’
‘You were going to blackmail him?’
‘Do a deal with him. Josh and I would leave Little Elmley, and Josh would eventually be disinherited – Angela would see to that. Paul would fall heir to it, and then he’d immediately transfer it back to Josh, or else Elizabeth would get all the evidence she needed. It would have taken a long time, but at least Josh would have been free while he was waiting.’
Judy supposed Paul Esterbrook had been something of a sitting duck for blackmailers; he had been going to come into more than enough money to keep several of the species in comparative luxury, and he had felt compelled to risk losing it all.
‘Did holing the boat have something to do with all of this?’ she asked.
Sandie nodded. ‘Josh wanted to get the boat out of commission for a while, then make Paul think the weekends were beginning again, only to have a change of plan at the last minute. That way Paul would be more than amenable to his suggestion that he use the cottage, because a month of celibacy to Paul would be like a year to anyone else.’
The devious and cunning Esterbrook mind, Judy thought. She was glad she hadn’t married into the family, but she had a feeling that Sandie could hold her own with them rather better than Elizabeth had.
‘And it was a sort of trial run. We had to be sure that Paul would be prepared to use his mother’s cottage in an emergency. And he did, so we went for it. It was quite difficult to arrange, but it seemed simple enough to carry out. As it turned out, it wasn’t, because first he’d beaten me up, and then when we did get there he came running out and said we weren’t staying, so Henderson’s men weren’t going to get anything at all. We hadn’t even been in the cottage together, because I stayed outside and had a cigarette until I stopped shaking.’ She smiled. ‘Josh says it was meant, that we weren’t cut out to be blackmailers. Fate arranged it so I could prove I wasn’t a liar.’
‘But you are, of course, a liar,’ said Judy, writing as she spoke. ‘Because Billy Rampton wasn’t involved with Paul Esterbrook.’ She looked up from her notes. ‘Why did you say that he was at the cottage with Paul on Saturday? What was all that business about him refusing to leave, if it wasn’t to implicate Paul in his murder?’
Sandie tapped ash from her cigarette into the foil ashtray, then rolled the tip round, deciding whether or not to answer. Judy expected her to call for her solicitor, but she didn’t.
‘When Josh and Chief Inspector Lloyd found Billy dead, and Chief Inspector Lloyd was asking about him, Josh realized that he thought Billy had been involved with Paul.’
‘And?’
‘And then he asked Josh if it would make any difference to his expectations under the will if Paul had killed Angela. Obviously, he meant over what he thought was his relationship with Billy. Josh didn’t know whether it made a difference or not – he hadn’t thought about it. But he thought about it then. I mean, Angela and Paul were dead, and that meant he didn’t get anything at all. But Billy was dead, too, and if people thought Paul had killed Angela over him, he wasn’t going to be around to tell them any different. Josh thought he might get Little Elmley after all. And so . . .’ She shrugged. ‘He didn’t correct Chief Inspector Lloyd’s impression.’
Lloyd would be annoyed if he had inadvertently put the idea into Josh Esterbrook’s head, Judy thought. But it was a long way from there to the decoy story, to the disappearing photograph. She might not be able to sense when Sandie Esterbrook was lying, but she could find holes in stories if they were there to be found. ‘And who gave you the idea of saying you were just a decoy?’ she asked.
‘Elizabeth, mainly.’
Judy frowned. ‘Elizabeth?’
‘Oh, not on purpose. But Josh rang me up from Penhallin, said Billy was dead, and that the police thought that Paul had been involved with him. That we could still salvage something, maybe, but I’d have to think of a good reason why I was at the cottage, if we were going to try it. I had several hours to think of a good reason before they got back to Little Elmley. And eventually I remembered Josh telling me that Elizabeth had asked him if I was just a red herring, if Paul was really seeing someone else, and just wanted her to believe it was me. I realized that it could have looked like that. So that’s what I said.’ She stubbed out her second cigarette. ‘And I had to say Billy was there, obviously. But I knew that Henderson’s photographs wouldn’t show any sign of him, so I said he refused to leave, so as to account for that.’
‘And how do you account for Billy being killed there?’
‘I can’t.’
All right. Judy decided to leave that topic, and move on to the phone-call. She started the tape again, and they watched Paul Esterbrook punch out a number on Sandie’s mobile phone. She frowned. The call on Saturday had been made from the bedroom phone, according to Lloyd. But there wasn’t a phone in the bedroom – that was w
hy Paul was using Sandie’s mobile. She made a note of that, then paused the tape.
‘Do you remember that call that Paul Esterbrook is making?’ she asked.
‘Yes. It was to his mother. Chief Inspector Lloyd asked about that – I was a bit evasive. I’m sorry. He was leaving a message on her machine to say that he’d found her letter.’
Judy glanced at the screen, allowed the action to continue for just long enough, then switched the tape off. ‘And can you tell me why you’re doing what you’re doing in that video?’ she asked.
Sandie smiled suddenly, widely. ‘Self-preservation,’ she said. ‘He was in a foul mood because his mother had interrupted his long weekend, and I can assure you that six hours in a car with Paul Esterbrook in a foul mood is no fun at all. I was hoping I could get him into a better one before we left. But he just blamed me for keeping him late, so it probably made matters worse in the long run.’ She smiled again. ‘And Penhallin to Stansfield is a very long run,’ she said.
‘Can you remember what he said to his mother?’ asked Judy.
‘He just said that he’d found the letter and was on his way back, or something like that.’
‘He didn’t swear at her?’
‘No!’ Sandie grinned again. ‘Paul wouldn’t swear at his mother,’ she said. ‘He had to keep on her good side. Everyone had to. She had a wicked temper. Like Paul. He used his fists, but she was vindictive.’
As her visit to her bigamous husband’s legitimate wife proved, thought Judy. Sandie seemed to be telling the truth, but she couldn’t be sure. She tried hard to get in touch with the instinctive feel that she almost always had when she was interviewing, but she couldn’t. ‘Did he swear at you?’ she asked.
Sandie thought, shaking her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Well – what I mean is that he swore like a trooper all the time if things weren’t going his way. He might have sworn while he was talking to me, but I don’t know if you’d call that swearing at me, exactly. He wasn’t calling me names, or anything. Not like when he did this.’ She gestured to her face, at the now-fading bruises. ‘He was a bit cross because I’d done it when he was on the phone,’ she said. ‘He probably did swear. I stopped noticing it. You do, after a while.’