by Jill McGown
‘Moving out?’ Lloyd said.
‘They didn’t make you a DCI for nothing, did they?’ said Foster, with a grin. ‘I’m moving to a better part of town, since you ask.’
Crime didn’t pay? That was a laugh. ‘My sergeant tells me that you took a video of Angela Esterbrook’s cottage in Penhallin before the one that made you rich,’ he said. ‘We want to see it.’
Foster waved a hand at the packing cases. ‘No can do,’ he said. ‘It’ll be at the bottom of one of these.’
‘Find it.’
‘I can’t. I’ll look it out as soon as I get to—’
Lloyd stepped towards him. ‘Find it,’ he said. ‘Or I’m sure I can think of something to charge you with, even if Sergeant Finch was unable to come up with anything.’
Foster started attacking one of the packing cases, and ten minutes later, Lloyd and Judy were looking at a video of Angela Esterbrook’s bedroom, sans Paul and Sandie, but plus a radio-alarm-telephone. A tiny bit of evidence, but it all counted.
They were letting themselves out when Debbie Miller came up the path. ‘Lloyd!’ she said. ‘It’s been ages since I’ve seen you.’
Lloyd smiled. ‘How are you, Debbie?’ he asked.
‘Not too bad at all,’ she said.
Lloyd had known that Debbie worked for Foster, and knew that she and Joe had split up a few months ago, but he hadn’t thought that she would be silly enough to hitch her wagon to Foster’s tarnished star. ‘Are you and Ian . . .?’ he said, with a nod of his head back into the sitting room, where Foster was packing everything away again.
‘No, nothing like that,’ she said, with a laugh. ‘I’m just helping him move, that’s all.’
Good. Foster might be a bit of a villain, but he wasn’t at all an unpleasant man; in fact, Lloyd had always rather liked him. He had always been generous with his time and his advice and, whenever he had any, even his money, so Debbie could have fallen for him. But, like Debbie’s husband, he was a gambler, and unlike Debbie’s husband, he had become dishonest in order to feed his habit; Lloyd was glad that Debbie had resisted his charms.
‘I’m glad I’ve run into you,’ she said. ‘When you get back to Stansfield, you can tell Joe I don’t appreciate him swanning off to Plymouth with an old flame as soon as my back’s turned.’
Lloyd smiled. ‘I won’t be seeing him,’ he said. ‘He’s back at HQ now.’
‘He’s in Barton again?’
‘Yes. And if I know Joe, he’ll be pining for you, whatever he’s been—’ He stared at her. ‘Where did you say he’d swanned off to?’
‘Plymouth. Ian saw him there with Kathy White, of all people. Do you remember her? What’s she like? She’s only a name to me. He used to be engaged to her.’
Lloyd didn’t have time to explain that she had no reason now to worry about Kathy White; he and Judy were out of Foster’s house and on their way to Barton HQ before Debbie had had time to close the door.
SCENE VI – BARTONSHIRE.
Friday, October 3rd, 1.00 p.m.
Bartonshire Constabulary Headquarters in Barton.
Joe was a little startled to see them, and a little reticent about his dalliance in Plymouth with Kathy Cope. In fact, he wasn’t at all sure what they were talking about, wasn’t even that certain that he had ever been in Plymouth, with or without Kathy Cope.
‘Joe,’ said Judy, with her nanny voice on. ‘There are lots of interview rooms here – we can do this officially, if you’d rather.’
‘Whoa, whoa, hold your horses,’ said Joe. ‘All right, I was in Plymouth with Kathy. So what?’
‘You were helping her out on a job she’d got from a Mrs Esterbrook,’ said Judy.
Joe smiled. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t moonlighting, if that’s what you think. I wasn’t getting paid for it or anything.’
‘That makes no difference, and you know it.’
‘No, look – it’s not the way it seems.’
They listened as Joe explained his involvement with Kathy, his intention to take early retirement and join the Copes in their business venture, Kathy’s plan to make Andy more open to this suggestion, and the utter failure of that plan. She had bought office equipment, and surveillance equipment, and Joe had footed the bill.
‘So I’m still in hock to the bank, and I haven’t had the heart to get any of the stuff back,’ he said. ‘I went to see her daughter, but I couldn’t make myself mention it.’
‘So where is this surveillance equipment?’ said Lloyd.
‘Up in her loft,’ said Joe. ‘She couldn’t let Andy see it, because he’d know she hadn’t got that sort of stuff without advice, and he’d know where the advice had come from. She wanted to choose her moment before she told him about me. But she chose the wrong one anyway.’
‘Her instructions from Mrs Esterbrook were that she was to surprise the occupants of Room 312 of the Excalibur,’ said Judy. ‘Did you see them?’
‘No,’ said Joe. ‘I never clapped eyes on them, except on the video.’
Lloyd shook his head. What Joe Miller might or might not have seen on a video wasn’t evidence. And the video had been no good; he would have thrown it away. That one usable frame might have made all the difference.
‘That whole thing was very iffy,’ Joe went on. ‘I told her that I thought the bloke was being set up, but you know Kathy, Lloyd – it wasn’t her problem what this Mrs Esterbrook was going to do with the evidence, all that.’
That sounded like Kathy, Lloyd thought.
‘She wanted me to grab some frames from the video for her to send to her client, so I knew I’d get my hands on it before she did, and I never had much intention of letting her have it back. I did a bit of asking around, to see if Esterbrook was worth blackmailing, and found out he was loaded. I wasn’t letting Kathy walk into that kind of set-up. So I rang her and said the video was useless. Grabbed a frame where the bloke was masked by the kid, and sent her that. No one could use it to blackmail anyone.’
The video wasn’t useless? Lloyd crossed his fingers as Judy asked her next question, and luck, possibly for the first time in this whole investigation, was on their side. The answer was yes. He still had it. He’d kept it in case Kathy cottoned on to what he’d done, and demanded its return. He’d never thrown it away. In fact . . . he reached into a drawer.
‘This is it,’ he said.
Lloyd looked at it, and then at Joe. For a long time. ‘You weren’t thinking of . . .’ he hesitated to use the actual word. ‘ . . . making use of it yourself, were you?’ he asked. ‘If times got very hard?’
‘No!’ said Joe, eyes innocently wide. ‘As if.’
‘As if,’ said Lloyd. Oh, well. It really was useless now, from the blackmailing point of view, and Joe would probably have found that stuck in his throat just as much as asking Kathy’s daughter for the equipment had. He would give him the benefit of the doubt.
Especially as five minutes later they were watching as the camera moved unsteadily out of a lift, along a corridor, and the door of Room 312 was pushed open, to reveal Billy, exactly as Kathy had described him, turning quickly towards the doorway, and a shocked and angry Paul Esterbrook getting to his feet as the air turned blue with mouthed, silent expletives. The camera backed out, the door closed, and Joe switched off the tape.
‘Any good?’ he said.
Lloyd nodded, and looked at Judy. Good enough for them to feel that they could overlook Joe’s foray into private investigation, and his possible thoughts on blackmail. And he could safely leave Judy to put the fear of God into Joe about both of these things, he thought. She was going to be his boss, after all; she would want to have the reins firmly in her own hands. But that would have to wait, because meanwhile, they had work to do.
Once again, Debbie almost collided with them in the doorway, still trying to attach her visitor’s pass to her blouse. ‘You’ve not arrested him, then?’ she said, throwing a less than loving look at her husband.
‘No,’ said Joe, s
miling. ‘They’ve not arrested me.’
Debbie gave up, and stuffed her visitor’s pass in her skirt pocket. ‘You just get into trouble when I’m not around,’ she said. ‘And the kids miss you. I’ll come back if you want me to, but on my terms.’
‘Good,’ said Joe, not one whit bothered about the public nature of this brisk, cross, perfunctory reconciliation. ‘But you might not want to come back. I’ve got myself in hock for about four thousand quid.’
‘What sort of bet was that, for God’s sake?’
‘A losing one.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘Ian was a bit luckier, it seems, and he’s given me a golden handshake. I’m prepared to pay off your debt if you’re prepared to have your salary paid into my account.’
Joe looked astonished. ‘How much did he give you, for God’s sake?’ he asked.
‘Ten per cent.’
‘Ten per cent of what?’
‘Never you mind. Is it a deal?’
‘Yes,’ said Joe, still a little bewildered. ‘It’s a deal.’
Lloyd smiled. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘touching though this romantic reunion is, I’m afraid we have to go now.’
They had almost made it to the lift when Joe caught them up. ‘Lloyd?’ he said, his voice low so that his wife wouldn’t hear what he had to say. ‘I – I feel bad about Kathy. I don’t want the office equipment back now, and it’s worth a bob or two. Her daughter could sell it – help defray the funeral expenses and all that. And the surveillance stuff’s up in the loft, like I said. She can get a good price for it.’
‘Why is it in the loft?’ said Judy.
‘Well, it’s difficult to hide a security video recorder and monitor anywhere else. Kathy had a couple of covert security cameras up in the house.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, at first it was just to see if they worked, and to see whether Andy spotted them,’ he said. ‘He never did. They’re practically invisible. But until she had a professional use for them she kept a tape running in case she got burgled or something. Said she’d feel a bit of an idiot if anything happened and they weren’t operational.’
‘So where are these cameras, if they’re practically invisible?’ asked Lloyd. ‘It would help Kathy’s daughter if she knew.’
‘One’s in her office, and the other’s in the kitchen clock.’
Lloyd blinked at him. ‘The kitchen clock?’
‘Yeah. You can put them anywhere – they’re tiny little—’ He shook his head, when he realized why Lloyd had asked. ‘Oh, no, sorry – it won’t have anything on it that’ll help you about the so-called suicide. The tapes run themselves back and start again if no one changes them. Anything the camera picked up last Friday night will have been recorded over half a dozen times.’
Par for the course, thought Lloyd, as they got into the lift. The rub of the green had not been with them in this enquiry.
SCENE VII – BARTONSHIRE.
Friday, October 3rd, 2.00 p.m.
The Superintendent’s Office, Stansfield Police Station.
Back in Stansfield, Tom told them that Billy’s motorbike had indeed been found in the tiny car park of the Penhallin library; naturally enough, the local police had not seen any need to inform Stansfield of that. They had been a little surprised that Billy knew where the library was, that was all.
The Esterbrook mind was even more cunning and even more devious than Lloyd could possibly have imagined, as he told Case before launching into the story that Judy had finally pieced together, and Case listened, nodding now and then, but frowning throughout. He was still frowning when Lloyd had finished.
‘Let me see if I’ve got this straight,’ he said. ‘Josh Esterbrook wanted to do away with his half-brother and his stepmother, right?’
‘Almost right,’ said Lloyd. ‘He wanted to do away with his stepmother and his half-brother. In that order. That was very important.’
‘And he wanted us to believe that his sister-in-law had done it.’
Lloyd nodded.
‘So first, he made it look as though Paul had murdered Billy and his mother and then committed suicide, but in such a way as to make it seem a bit too convenient. A letter burned beyond resurrection just happens to have been imprinted on a pad, Mrs Esterbrook just happens to have a report from a private detective about Billy’s activities in Paul’s hotel room, an incriminating message is found on Mrs Esterbrook’s answering machine, and so on.’ He ducked his head by way of apology. ‘Too many clues, like you said. Why did he do that?’
‘Because,’ said Lloyd patiently, ‘that was the only way that we would think of suspecting him. Framing Paul for his mother’s murder was the only way that gave him a financial motive.’
‘And why did he want us to suspect him?’
‘Because that way we would start listening seriously to Elizabeth when she kept insisting that it was Josh who was having a relationship with Billy. The visual evidence that should have been with the Copes’ report was missing, and once we found out about Sandie and Paul, and that the letter and tape were fakes, we would think that Josh was the man with Billy that morning, and had destroyed the video-still to stop us finding out.’
‘Whereas he destroyed it to stop us finding out that it was Paul who was with Billy.’ Case scratched his head. ‘Why did they ask for visual evidence in the first place, then? Why not just a written report?’
‘He couldn’t trust to luck,’ said Lloyd. ‘He killed the Copes to make certain they couldn’t tell us who was really with Billy, but he killed them when he did so that there was no chance that we would overlook the connection. They died the night before the murders at Little Elmley, and their copy of the report to Mrs Esterbrook had been removed from their files, so naturally, we would be looking for that report once she was found murdered. When we located it, we would discover that the photographic evidence had gone, and once everything else started falling into place, we would be certain that it was Josh who had been with Billy. And he wouldn’t deny that, but he would deny trying to frame Paul for murder. We wouldn’t believe him until we realized that he had an alibi.’
‘Because that frame-up relied on someone switching tapes at Little Elmley at a time that Josh Esterbrook couldn’t have done it, if he had been with Billy,’ said Case. ‘Right. I’ve got that too. So then, finally, we start suspecting Elizabeth Esterbrook of having set Josh up.’
Lloyd nodded. ‘He knew she was going to be away all last Saturday, with no one to corroborate her story about where she had been. He knew she would tell us about the gun, that she would tell us that it was he, Josh, who was Billy’s client. He knew she could shoot, knew that she had had access to Angela’s letters, and apparent access to the tape with Paul’s message on it. He arranged things so that once we had his alibi, it would look as though she had set him up by making it look as though he had set Paul up for murder,’ he said. ‘A sort of treble bluff.’
Case lit a cigarette. ‘So instead of just murdering them and framing her for it, he went all round the houses. Why?’
‘Because he knew that a frame-up can always be detected. It might not be, of course – police officers have a habit of going for the obvious—’
‘Yes, yes, all right,’ said Case.
‘—but not always. And once you suspect a set-up, it’s usually very easy to prove, so Josh Esterbrook would never have risked doing that. But having once found a set-up, and proved it, then discovered that my prime suspect couldn’t have done it, but the major beneficiary of an enormous fortune could have set him up, even I didn’t go looking for a third set-up. You need Judy Hill for that. Fortunately, for the moment, we’ve got her.’
‘So nothing we’ve been looking at in this case has been real?’
‘Nothing. Everything was manufactured by Josh and Sandie Esterbrook. Angela Esterbrook didn’t employ the Copes any more than she employed Henderson, Elizabeth Esterbrook never even saw the tape with Paul’s message on it once the message had been received, and Paul’s message t
o Angela was about a solicitors’ letter that existed only because Josh Esterbrook brought it into being – Angela never asked Paul to bring her any letter. The real letter – the one they traced on to an A4 pad and then burned, the one from Angela to Paul senior – was what made Josh dream up this whole fantastic plot, and he’s the only person still alive who has ever clapped eyes on it. It took him three years to plan it, and it very nearly worked.’
‘So what went wrong?’
‘Oh, lots of things went wrong,’ said Lloyd. ‘But they rode them – unlike Paul, they can both think on their feet. What really did for them was that Kathy Cope had a minor fling with an old flame.’ He smiled a little sadly. ‘She was looking for an escape route, just like she always did.’
‘But why did he do it?’ said Case. ‘For a fifty-fifty chance of getting Little Elmley? A white elephant? He killed five people for the possibility of getting something a few years earlier than he was going to get it anyway? He couldn’t get anything else – his father’s will doesn’t allow for him getting anything else. Not if his stepmother and his half-brother are both dead.’
Lloyd smiled. ‘That’s why the order in which he killed them mattered. His father’s will doesn’t allow for him getting anything else. But if this had worked, it wouldn’t have been his father’s will that counted any more. It would have been Paul’s will. Because Angela Esterbrook predeceased Paul, the entire Esterbrook Family Trust forms part of Paul Esterbrook’s estate, and the bulk of that goes to his wife.’
‘And if she had been guilty of his murder, she wouldn’t inherit,’ said Case.
‘Quite. The estate, everything that came to Paul under his father’s will and which would have gone to Elizabeth – the whole half-billion-pound package – would then have gone to his next of kin.’
‘Josh Esterbrook,’ said Case, his brow clearing at last.
SCENE VIII – BARTONSHIRE.
Friday, October 3rd, 3.00 p.m.