‘So that was the deal – you persuade everyone to come, and he writes the recommendation?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why didn’t you tell us all this before?’
‘Why do you think?’ Phil McCann asked angrily. ‘I didn’t tell you because I was ashamed of myself for persuading some of the cast that coming up here was in their own best interests, when I didn’t really believe it was.’
‘And if you hadn’t been so persuasive, it’s more than likely that Mark Cotton and Bradley Quirk would still be alive,’ Meadows said.
‘You can’t blame me for that!’ McCann protested.
‘I don’t,’ Meadows told him, ‘but I think there’s at least a small part of you that already has.’
On the other side of the two-way mirror, Paniatowski found herself nodding. She would not have handled the interview in the same way as Kate Meadows had done, but then there were very few aspects of police work that she and Meadows would approach from the same angle. That didn’t matter as long as Meadows was effective – and she had been.
‘You can’t blame me for that!’ Phil McCann had said, his face flooded with guilt.
But it had been the guilt of a man who thought he might have contributed to a death, rather than of a man who regretted taking a life.
There was a gentle tapping on the door, then the door itself opened and a WPC entered the observation room.
‘Sorry to disturb you, ma’am, but you left instructions that you wanted to know the moment the doctors at Whitebridge General would agree to let you see Maggie Maitland,’ she said.
‘And they’ve agreed now?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
It was highly unlikely that Maggie Maitland would have anything useful to say about Mark Cotton’s murder, and Paniatowski really didn’t want to go and see her. But the chief constable would expect her to talk to Maggie, and when you were fielding flak as she was, the last person you wanted to get on the wrong side of was the man who could take you off the case any time he felt like it.
And looking on the bright side, while seeing Maggie might be a waste of her time, it would at least be buying time for the rest of the team – and buying time for the rest of the team, she accepted, was something that she, and only she, could do.
‘You look to me like a man who is suffering from the mother and father of hangovers, Mr Talbot,’ Meadows said loudly. ‘Am I right? Is there a blacksmith hammering away at an anvil somewhere inside your head?’
Talbot covered his ears with his hands.
‘Yes,’ he moaned.
‘How much did you drink last night?’
‘I don’t know. I stopped counting after the ninth pint.’
‘It was a celebration, was it?’
‘More like a wake for my career. I was here when Mark Cotton died, and that makes me bad luck – it’s like having the mark of Cain on me forever.’
‘If I remember rightly, Cain got his mark because he was a murderer,’ Meadows said. ‘Are you a murderer, Mr Talbot?’
‘God, no!’
‘And yet you were seen to be hanging around the steps up to the platform, shortly before Cotton died.’
‘I explained all that to you. I was just so angry I didn’t really know what I was doing.’
‘Bollocks,’ Meadow said. ‘You were clear-headed enough to notice that Ruth Audley was looking at you suspiciously, and then, because of that, to walk away. But not long after, you went back to the steps, didn’t you? And this time you had a large jar of make-up with you.’
‘I didn’t …’
‘There’ll be no charges laid against you, Mr Talbot – not if you tell us the truth.’
‘He’d taken my big chance away from me, and I wanted him to miss his cue,’ Talbot said miserably. ‘I wanted him to make a fool of himself in front of all those people.’
‘Tell me what you did last night when you got back to the boarding house,’ Meadows said.
‘I nearly didn’t make it back at all. I fell over twice. And once I was my room, I threw myself on to my bed and blacked out. The next thing I knew, it was morning and a bobby was waking me up.’
‘Thank you very much, Mr Talbot, you can go for now,’ Meadows said.
Talbot stood up very gingerly.
‘I didn’t kill Mark, you know.’
‘I never said you did.’
‘But if I’d known somebody had fixed the noose, I’d never have done that thing with the make-up. If I’d known he was going to his death, I’d probably have been standing by the steps in case he needed any help getting up them.’
‘I take it Sarah Audley was expelled from Blackthorn Independent School,’ Beresford said.
‘Oh yes,’ Parry agreed. ‘Given the way she’d spoken, she’d left the headmistress very little choice. But it was what happened next – a few days after the expulsion – which is important.’
Though many of her younger pupils probably imagine that Miss Hallam lives in a dark tower guarded by vampire bats, she actually owns a rather nice bungalow on the outskirts of town, and it is to this bungalow that she is driving when she sees the column of smoke in the near distance. At first, she simply assumes that one of her neighbours is burning garden rubbish, but then she realizes that it is coming from her own garden.
She speeds up, then slams on the brakes as she reaches her back gate. Her garden shed is on fire, and though it has not yet been quite burned to the ground, she can see that it is already far too late to save it. Still, the responsible thing to do is to call the fire bridge as soon as possible, and she strides quickly up the garden path to the house.
And then, as she reaches the veranda, she sees her cat. It is hanging from a bracket designed to hold plant pots, and it is quite dead. A note, written in block capitals, has been fastened to the cat, and that note reads: ‘SCREW YOU, YOU OLD BITCH.’
‘Jesus!’ Beresford said.
‘I’ll admit that the fact that a cat was involved gave me an extra incentive, but I would have been concerned anyway, because anybody who’ll do that kind of thing is a danger to both the community and themselves,’ Parry said.
‘So what action did you take?’
‘Based on the fact that the words on the note were exactly the same as the words that Sarah Audley had used to Miss Hallam only a few days earlier, I went to the Audley house to talk to Sarah.’
Maggie Maitland looked a mess. Her hair was tangled, her face was a mass of blotches, and she was wearing a straitjacket. But at least there was some comprehension – and possibly a little tranquillity – in her eyes.
‘They say you’re from the police,’ she said.
‘I am,’ Paniatowski replied.
‘They say if I can behave myself with you, they might let me out of this thing.’
‘Let’s hope so.’
‘What is it you want to know?’
‘How long were you hiding in the theatre, Maggie?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t count the days.’
‘Were you there before the company arrived?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Were you there before Mark Cotton arrived?’
‘Yes. I had to be, because I knew that once his thugs turned up, they’d find a way to keep me out.’
‘Would you like to tell me precisely why you were there in the theatre?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘You know why I was there.’
‘Tell me, anyway.’
‘I was there to kill Mark.’
‘Then why didn’t you? There were none of his security people inside the theatre, and he was there for over a week. You must have had numerous opportunities to do it.’
‘You’re wrong, there weren’t any opportunities – because we were never ever alone. There were all those people there, talking to him, touching him,’ Maggie said, and with every word her voice was getting louder and more out of control. ‘He smiled at them sometimes – he never smiled at me!’
‘You need to calm down, Maggie,’ Paniatowski urg
ed, glancing over her shoulder to see if the doctors, who she knew were watching them, were about to tell her that that was enough. ‘If you want to get out of that straitjacket, you need to calm down. Do you understand?’
Maggie merely nodded, as if she didn’t trust herself to speak.
‘Take a few slow, deep breaths, Maggie,’ Paniatowski said.
Maggie took some breaths.
‘Is that better?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘Yes.’
‘You were saying that you needed him to be alone. Why did you need him to be alone?’
‘Because I couldn’t just kill him like that, could I? I needed to follow the Plan, and I couldn’t follow it if anybody else was there.’
‘What was the plan, Maggie?’
‘Look at me,’ Maggie Maitland said. ‘I’m beautiful, aren’t I?’
‘We’re all beautiful – in our own way.’
‘But not everybody’s like me – I’m gorgeous. So why wouldn’t Mark fall in love with me?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s because he didn’t believe that I really loved him. And that’s where the Plan came in. I was going to give him a fatal wound, and as he lay there dying, I was going to kill myself right in front of him. Then he’d see, wouldn’t he? In those last few moments of his life, he’d finally understand how much I loved him.’
‘I can understand why you’d kill yourself to prove to him how much you loved him, but if you really did love him, why would you kill him as well?’
Maggie looked at her in a way which suggested she thought the wrong person was in the straitjacket.
‘I’d have killed him so that nobody else could have him,’ she said.
Sergeant Parry rings the bell, and the door is answered by a beautiful young woman. For a moment, he thinks this might be Sarah herself, but then he realizes that this woman is at least twenty-two or twenty-three.
He shows her his warrant card, and, in answer to his request, she tells him that her name is Ruth Audley.
‘Do you live here, Miss Audley?’ he asks.
‘I used to,’ she says. ‘But at the moment, I’m living and working in Whitebridge, Lancashire.’
‘So you’re just visiting then?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you here for some kind of family event?’
The question seems to confuse her.
Yes,’ she says. ‘Well no, not exactly. My sister’s had a bit of a problem recently, and I’ve come down to advise her.’
Yes, he thinks, calling your headmistress a bitch and getting expelled from school could be called a problem, but Sarah has, in fact, more problems than her sister could ever imagine.
‘It’s your sister I’ve come to see,’ he says. ‘Is she in?’
More confusion.
‘I think … I think it would be better if you talked to my mother,’ Ruth says.
She leads Parry down the corridor and into a living room in which almost all the furniture is heavy, Edwardian and basically hideous.
Ruth reads the expression on his face, and laughs to cover her embarrassment.
‘I know it’s awful,’ she says, ‘but Mother inherited it from my grandparents, and she simply won’t throw it out.’
She invites Parry to sit down and goes to look for her mother. When she returns, it is with a tall, rigid woman who has the coldest eyes Parry has ever seen.
‘This is Sergeant Parry, Mother,’ Ruth says nervously.
Parry stands up and holds out his hand.
Mrs Audley looks down at the hand as if he is offering her a piece of dog shit, and says, ‘What do you want?’
No mention of his rank or evidence of any other social courtesy, he notes.
‘I’d like to talk to your younger daughter,’ he says.
‘Concerning what?’
‘There has been an incident. A cat was killed and a garden shed was set on fire …’
‘That had nothing to do with Sarah,’ Mrs Audley says firmly.
‘There was a note pinned to the cat …’
There is emotion in Mrs Audley’s eyes now – and that emotion is blazing anger.
‘First that woman – who should never have been appointed headmistress – unfairly expels my daughter from school,’ she said, ‘and now she is accusing her of killing her cat. Well, that is just too much.’ She paused. ‘Since you seem to be completely ignorant of the facts, I consider it no more than my duty to put you straight. What that so-called headmistress claims occurred behind the bicycle sheds never happened.’
‘There were witnesses, Mrs Audley – quite a number of them.’
‘It simply did not happen. I have my daughter’s word on that. And now you may leave.’
‘I need to talk to your daughter.’
‘You will not talk to her. This is my house, and when I tell you to leave, you will leave.’
He really has no choice in the matter. He thanks her for her time, and she ignores him.
As he is walking down the path, he senses he is being watched. He turns around and see’s a girl’s face at one of the downstairs windows. He expects her to disappear now that she has been spotted. But she doesn’t. She keeps on looking at him, and then slowly – very slowly – her face fills with a look of pure, malicious triumph.
‘Of course, it’s always possible she didn’t kill the cat,’ Beresford said. ‘The lad she’d been screwing was there when she called the headmistress a bitch, and she might have told any number of her friends—’
‘There’s more,’ Parry interrupted him. ‘If there hadn’t been more, I’d never have brought you all this way.’
TWENTY
‘Did you notice anything unusual last night, Miss Audley?’ Meadows asked, across the interview table.
‘Well, yes,’ Ruth Audley said. ‘Except it was more like early morning than last night, and, at the time, I thought it was annoying, rather than strange.’
‘Tell us about it,’ Meadows suggested.
‘I woke up at around about five o’clock this morning, absolutely bursting to go to the toilet, but as I was putting my dressing gown on, I heard footsteps on the stairs …’
‘Were they coming up from the ground floor, or coming down from the second floor?’
‘Coming down from the second floor.’
‘You’re sure of that?’
‘Absolutely. The stairs from the ground floor to the first floor are solid oak, but the ones leading up to the second floor – which, I suppose, used to be the servants’ quarters – are made of much thinner wood and creak. Really, the two sounds are quite distinct.’
‘I see,’ said Meadows – who, when she’d been in the house, had noticed the same phenomenon herself. ‘Carry on.’
‘The next thing I heard was the bathroom door clicking shut. I was really annoyed to have missed my chance, but then I told myself that since it had to be Jerry, Bradley or Phil, he wouldn’t be long in there, because men never are. So I sat on the bed and tried to think of something else.’
‘How long were you sitting there?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe two or three minutes. Anyway, since I hadn’t heard him come out again, I stepped out on to the landing. And that was when I heard the sound of water, and realized he was running a bath. So I went up to the bathroom door, tapped lightly and whispered something like, “Could I just use the toilet before you have your bath”?’
‘Why did you whisper it?’ Meadows asked.
‘I didn’t want to disturb the others. But whoever was in there didn’t open the door – I thought perhaps he couldn’t hear me over the sound of running water – and I was getting fairly desperate by then. So I went downstairs to the kitchen and I … well, to be honest, I did what I had to do in a bucket.’
‘And then you went back upstairs?’
‘No, I was wide awake by then, and I thought that since I was in the kitchen, I might as well make myself a cup of tea. It was probably about fifteen minutes before I did go back upstairs a
gain, and when I reached the first-floor landing, I saw the bathroom door was wide open.’
‘So what did you think then?’
‘I just thought that whoever had fancied an early bath had finished it and gone back to bed.’
‘And what do you think now?’
Ruth Audley shuddered. ‘I think the killer was in the bathroom, cleansing himself of Bradley Quirk’s blood,’ she said.
‘That’s what I think, too,’ Meadows said.
‘You saw Mark Cotton die, didn’t you?’ Paniatowski asked Maggie Maitland.
‘How do you know that?’
Because that’s the only thing that would explain the state you were in when we found you, Paniatowski thought.
‘It’s just a guess,’ she said aloud.
‘Yes, I saw him die. I was up in that place where there’s all the ropes and sandbags and stuff.’
‘The fly loft.’
‘Is that what it’s called?’ Maggie asked, uninterestedly. ‘I’d been there before. Once, there was somebody else there, and I nearly got caught, but the rest of the time, there was nobody.’
That made sense, Paniatowski thought. After things were set up for the production, there was no need for anyone to go into the fly loft.
‘Tell me what you saw on the night Mark Cotton died,’ she said.
‘I saw Mark step off the platform. I’d watched him do it before, and he’d only fallen a little way, but this time he went much further, and when he came to a stop, his head was at a funny angle. And all I could think was – oh my God, he’s dead, he’s dead, and now I’ll never have the chance to show him just how much I really love him.’
‘So then you went back to the props room, which was where you kept your supplies, to hide behind the scenery.’
‘Did I?’
‘Don’t you remember?’
‘I saw my darling – my wonderful angel – die, and then the next thing I knew, I was in here.’
She had run blindly back to her den, like the wounded animal she was, Paniatowski thought, and in the confusion, no one had noticed her.
‘Thank you for talking to me, Miss Maitland,’ she said. ‘You should get some rest now.’
‘What was the woman doing?’ Maggie asked.
‘What woman?’
‘The one with the rope. The one I told you about, who nearly caught me in that loft.’
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