Stealth

by Margaret Duffy

  High wrought-iron gates, fitted with electronic locks, and railings with spikes on top fenced off his car parking space and just beyond it was an equally high wooden fence. We could see nothing of the house beyond except the roof and chimney pots. Then I caught sight of a security camera fixed to the trunk of a tree.

  ‘This is the kind of place that brings out the worst in me,’ Patrick said in a low voice.

  ‘You mean you yearn to fashion a man-sized cat-flap in the fence, break in and leave the greasy remains of a takeaway on the dining-room table.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘They’d tried to kill her before, hadn’t they?’

  ‘Well, someone did. I’m staggered that the poor old lady only broke her leg.’

  He went back and gave the exterior of the gates to Miss Smythe’s garden, which were over six feet in height, the same careful scrutiny as he had the back door.

  ‘There are no scrape marks, which one might expect if someone climbed over here quite recently,’ I said.

  ‘No. But if he was fit, and careful, he might not have made any. Or access was gained from the garden next door.’ He locked the gate again. ‘It won’t hurt to leave it unbolted. We might need to pay a quiet visit one night.’

  The address of the niece, Mrs Grant, had been in the case file and we found ourselves outside a tiny cottage, one of a row, very close to the parish church. The woman who answered the door looked at us as though she had been expecting someone else and was now extremely disappointed. We showed her our IDs and Patrick introduced us, adding to her depression.

  ‘May we come in for a few moments?’ he went on to ask.

  ‘Well, I suppose I can hardly refuse . . .’ she replied wearily, opening the door wide.

  Patrick had to duck to go through the low doorway.

  ‘I have been interviewed twice already, you know,’ she said. Then, seeing that we were not about to now change our minds and go away, added: ‘You’d better sit down.’

  The front door opened into a small hallway dominated utterly by a long case clock. The beamed living room accessed through an open archway was furnished in the kind of chintzy fabrics that were just right. The chairs and one small sofa were antiques and of different styles but had all been re-covered in matching fabric. I settled myself on the sofa and found my notebook and a pen in my bag.

  I supposed Jane Grant to be around forty-five years of age but she might have been younger, the strain of recent events evident on her face. Slim and of medium height she was smartly dressed in a plum-coloured loose-fitting trouser suit worn with a white silk blouse and low-heeled black shoes. Her hair was shoulder-length, skilfully highlighted blonde and she gazed at us, slightly apprehensively, with large hazel eyes.

  ‘This won’t take long,’ Patrick was assuring her. ‘And please accept our condolences.’

  ‘Thank you. It was awful finding her like that, you know.’

  ‘I’m sure it was,’ Patrick replied sympathetically. Then he said, ‘Tell me about the time your aunt broke her leg when the tree house collapsed.’

  ‘Oh! No one’s asked me about that. Well, it was dreadful. Auntie was in a terrible state. She managed to get herself back to the house so she could phone me – I could never persuade her to have a mobile – but it would have been far better if she’d dialled nine-nine-nine there and then. So I did and that meant another delay. I tried to stop the bleeding from the cuts and scratches on her arms and legs with clean tea towels and there was a huge graze on her forehead. We had no idea then that her leg was broken even though she said it was very painful. Dreadful, Mr Gillard, dreadful.’

  ‘I get the impression she was an indomitable lady.’

  ‘Absolutely. Some elderly women would have lain out there in the garden and died. But Auntie wasn’t like that; she’d always said she’d tried never to rely on anyone for anything.’

  ‘But I take it you saw quite a lot of her and gave her a hand with the shopping. There was no car parked at the house.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve been there. Yes, Auntie sold her car about eighteen months ago after she’d had a couple of minor bumps with it and I either took her shopping to Sainsbury’s or picked up a few things for her in Tesco’s down in the town on my way by. But she didn’t bother me – preferred her own company and a good book. She even used to play Scrabble against herself in French. And now she’s gone. I can’t get over it really. Why should a burglar pick on her house?’

  ‘If indeed it was a burglar,’ Patrick said. ‘Presumably you’re aware of her opinions concerning the people next door.’

  ‘It was a fixation with her,’ Jane Grant lamented. ‘It started in quite a small way – I mean, everyone sometimes gets a bit annoyed with the neighbours, don’t they? – but then it began to take over her mind. I have to say I got impatient with her until I realized that she might be showing early signs of dementia. And then when she was given an ASBO . . .’ She broke off and threw up her hands in despair.

  ‘Embarrassing for you,’ Patrick said with a smile.

  ‘Of course. All I could tell my friends was that she was losing the plot. And she didn’t care! I thought she’d be so upset with the disgrace of it but she just kept saying that she’d be proved right eventually. And the Trents are such nice people.’

  ‘You’ve met them?’ I queried.

  Not for the first time during my involvement with SOCA the one being interviewed expressed surprise that the note-taker was asking questions.

  ‘Er, yes, at a fund-raising event in the park for a local children’s charity. Hereward Trent was there with his wife and I was given to understand that they’d made a most generous donation.’

  ‘So you shook his hand kind of thing.’

  ‘Yes, exactly that.’

  ‘But you’ve never been to the house.’

  ‘No. I don’t know anyone who has and get the impression they’re quiet sort of people normally but do occasionally have parties. But everyone does, don’t they?’

  ‘From whom do you get the impression they’re normally quiet?’ Patrick said.

  ‘Well, I suppose from general local opinion.’

  ‘But not your aunt.’

  ‘No, she said their parties could be really noisy. I have to say I thought she was confusing the Trents with the house on the far side of them where all the bins are in the garden. They must have been the noisy ones.’ She added, slightly sharply: ‘Is it really important?’

  ‘Only to a policeman,’ he answered. ‘Are you aware of the latest findings? That your aunt was murdered?’

  ‘Someone phoned me and said it was now a murder inquiry. I assume the burglar threw her down the stairs but how anyone can tell—’

  ‘She’d been strangled either just before or just after she fell,’ Patrick interrupted.

  ‘I see,’ she said stiffly. ‘This is very distressing.’

  ‘What time did your aunt normally go to bed?’

  The woman collected herself for a few moments and then said, ‘It varied. If there was a concert she wanted to listen to on Radio Three she’d stay up a bit later but was probably in bed by ten on most nights.’

  ‘In the report prepared by the Metropolitan Police it’s noted that you’d said that a few of the best pieces of your aunt’s jewellery might be missing. Have you had any subsequent thoughts about that?’

  ‘I’ve thought about it quite a lot actually but I don’t know if she gave them away or perhaps put them in a bank. I simply can’t say. I know there was a thick gold chain with a locket on it that was her mother’s. That definitely isn’t there. I can remember seeing her grandfather’s gold watch chain too, and a diamond ring. They don’t seem to be there either.’

  ‘I’m afraid I shall have to ask you a few personal questions. You haven’t mentioned your husband. Does he live here with you?’

  ‘No, Clive and I are separated. He’s a civil engineer and working on a project somewhere in Luton. I don’t have his address there.’

&nb
sp; ‘He went off with someone else?’ I asked, not about to go all soft on her.

  She glowered at me. ‘No. We just decided to part. There was nothing acrimonious about it.’

  ‘Then why don’t you have his address?’

  ‘It’s a temporary one and I just don’t, that’s all,’ she answered, her voice rising. ‘And really, I don’t see what it—’

  Smoothly, Patrick interrupted with, ‘Are you a beneficiary in your aunt’s will?’

  ‘I can’t see what that has to—’

  ‘Please answer the question.’

  After a flustered few seconds Mrs Grant said, ‘I – I suppose I must be. I know she’s named me as executor as other than a cousin on her father’s side who lives in Canada I am – was – her only living relative. My mother, who died when I was in my late twenties, was her sister.’ After a little pause she added: ‘It was one of the reasons Auntie came to live here, to be near me.’

  ‘Might the jewellery have come to you too?’

  ‘I think that’s perfectly possible.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d be good enough to run through what happened the afternoon you found her body.’

  Visibly, the woman fought her irritation. ‘As I’ve already explained, several times, Auntie had rung and asked me to fetch a few bits of shopping. She knew I was going to take the car and do my own.’

  ‘She didn’t want to go with you?’ I said.

  ‘No, not this time. And I have to say I didn’t mind as it took for ever when she did come with me as she liked to dawdle and look at things.’

  ‘So she didn’t answer the door when you called with the shopping,’ Patrick said.

  ‘I have a key. It saved startling her with the doorbell if she was having a little nap.’

  ‘Was she at all hard of hearing?’

  ‘Very slightly, but not enough to be a real handicap.’

  ‘And she was lying at the bottom of the stairs.’

  ‘Yes. It was a horrible shock. I – I thought she might just have knocked herself out falling but . . .’

  ‘Does anyone else have a key?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re quite sure about that?’

  ‘No, I can’t be absolutely sure but Auntie never mentioned anyone else having one.’

  ‘I get the impression from that that your aunt could be a little reticent on some matters.’

  ‘She was a very private person. Her generation often are. I never pried.’

  ‘She never discussed in detail her suspicions about next door with you at all, the reasons behind them?’

  ‘Er – she did at one time but . . .’

  ‘Soon got to realize that you weren’t sympathetic?’

  Shoulders drooping, Jane Grant said, ‘I became so wearied by it all I’m afraid that I just didn’t want to hear about it any more. In fact, I warned her that she was only making trouble for herself. Do you have many more questions? Only I’m expecting a friend very shortly.’

  ‘Did she have the tree house built?’ Patrick continued as though she had not asked the question.

  ‘Oh, no. That was put up by the previous people for their children. Auntie did love it though.’

  ‘How long ago might that have been?’

  ‘Less than ten years, I should imagine, as it was quite new-looking. Auntie had only been living there for five. She’d had a flat in the same road until that house came on the market. She found she couldn’t live without a garden.’

  Her gardener, a local man, Peter Blackmore, had been interviewed by the Met. Originally Royal Horticultural Society trained he had had positions at several National Trust properties, finishing his career at Stourhead. Now semi-retired, he helped the elderly and infirm by cutting their lawns, trimming hedges and similar tasks, charging, one gathered, ‘very reasonable rates’. A widower, he had been staying with his daughter in Woodford Green at the time of Miss Smythe’s death and was not a suspect.

  ‘Did you ever wonder why the tree house collapsed?’ Patrick wanted to know.

  She turned a frank gaze on to him. ‘No, why should I? Perhaps it hadn’t been very well built.’

  ‘Did she question what had happened?’

  ‘Yes, she said she thought someone next door might have damaged it in some way. Which is nonsense, of course.’

  ‘And yet it’s been left where it fell.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have it cleared away for some reason.’

  Patrick asked a couple more questions about her aunt’s past and her teaching career and then we left.

  ‘Miss Smythe didn’t mention suspecting the tree house had been deliberately damaged in the letters,’ I said, thinking aloud as we crossed the nearby main road.

  ‘She may well have thought she had no evidence.’

  ‘Which rather points to her only having written about things that she saw with her own eyes and wasn’t totally paranoid about everything.’

  Patrick made for one of several small tables outside a nearby café, or more correctly, an establishment devoted to the serving and sale of fine teas. He chose to sit where a small cypress tree in a pot partially concealed us from being seen from Jane Grant’s cottage away over to the right on the other side of the road.

  ‘You want to see if she was telling the truth about expecting a visitor,’ I said, perusing the menu.

  ‘And if so who they are.’

  Some fifteen minutes later, when we had ordered our tea, Patrick keeping careful watch around the tree and the traffic, he suddenly swore under his breath. ‘Keep your back turned,’ he whispered. ‘He’s looking around before he rings the doorbell.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Clement Hamlyn.’

  SIX

  ‘Do you think Jane Grant could be a willing partner in anything that’s going on or might Hamlyn have some kind of hold over her?’ Michael Greenway said later that day.

  ‘Difficult to tell,’ Patrick replied. ‘Although the person she was expecting was described as a friend.’

  The commander turned to me. ‘Ingrid?’

  ‘She was apprehensive, but I think most women would be if SOCA turned up on their doorstep. My problem with it is that I simply can’t imagine the two of them being friends. I’m worried that Hamlyn’s been asked to get to know her in an effort to find out what her aunt told her about things she had seen next door and, if that is the case, she’s in danger.’

  ‘Gut feelings though?’ Greenway persisted. ‘This bloke can hardly be described as love’s young dream, so don’t you think she would have confided in you if she was nervous about him?’

  ‘It might be early days. And he is a famous writer. Perhaps he’s a good actor as well and concocted some story using a false name about being a friend of her aunt’s. Did Miss Smythe tell her niece the name of the man she’d seen urinating in the garden next door? Whatever, Jane Grant may well be in it up to her ears. Sorry, but that’s the best I can do at the moment.’

  ‘Did you inform Mrs Grant that her aunt had written to us?’ Greenway went on to ask.

  ‘No,’ Patrick answered, ‘but she may well have known already if her aunt told her. They appear to have been quite close. And she could have mentioned it to Hamlyn.’

  Absent-mindedly, Greenway made patterns with paper clips on his desk for a quarter of a minute or so. He had recently acquired quite a collection of these, all colours. A bit like worry beads, perhaps. Then he said, ‘The Met have already interviewed this Trent character which, as he’s the immediate neighbour, is normal of course following a death thought to be connected with a suspected burglary, which was what it was to begin with. He said neither he nor his family had heard anything that night and, quote, “the old woman had recently kept herself to herself, thank God”. I would like you to go and interview him again, and the wife if possible. But I must stress this – don’t play it as though he’s under even the faintest suspicion. You’re merely carrying on with the investigation now it’s murder and SOCA’s got the job.’

  ‘An
d the reason SOCA’s got the job?’ Patrick enquired, a very reasonable query, I thought.

  The commander gazed at him steadily. ‘I thought you used to work for MI5. Anything you like. Lie, man, lie.’

  If Patrick was offended by this he showed no sign of it. I was more concerned by Greenway’s apparent lapse of memory concerning us having already noisily bumped into Trent’s aforementioned dodgy associate in France. I voiced this worry, adding that surely Clement Hamlyn would have related to Trent what had occurred and given him our descriptions, thereby causing him to conclude immediately that he could, by association, be under suspicion.

  ‘It’s worth taking into consideration,’ Greenway said. ‘But I think it’s also worth the risk. I’m of the opinion that Hamlyn went to France strictly on his own business – which Trent probably isn’t interested in – and his threat to Coates about the stealth boat being there to make sure he paid up was nothing to do with Trent and a lie. No, as I said, play it cool.’

  I had reservations about this as well but kept quiet. Just because you stir a murky pond it does not necessarily follow than anything stinking floats to the surface. This train of thought was soon to be oddly coincidental.

  Patrick was not happy with his orders either. He said, ‘Before I do anything – and frankly, sending the pair of us in to talk to him in view of what happened at the literary festival is, to my mind, folly – I would like you to—’

  His face grim, the commander interrupted with: ‘You don’t think I’ve thought this through properly?’

  ‘With respect, no.’

  There was a tense silence broken when Greenway said, ‘First you would like me to do what?’

  ‘Consider investigating the possibility that this man is involved in what appears to be a protection racket involving, for once, gang bosses and their head honchos as victims.’