by Graham Ison
‘Very simply because one of them might’ve murdered her, Mr Hammond.’ And, I thought, that might’ve been a good reason for you to have murdered her.
‘Oh, I see.’ Hammond responded to that truism lamely.
‘So, I have to ask you if you know of any other men that your late wife might’ve been seeing on a regular basis.’
‘No, I don’t, but our marriage wasn’t always plain sailing, as you might say. With me being away a lot, I never knew what she was up to.’
So now we had confirmation of what had been hinted at by Bernard Bligh, Susan Penrose and Yvonne, the barmaid at The Bull. Kerry Hammond seemed to be in the habit of playing the field. And that opened up a whole list of new suspects who might’ve had reason to kill her. If only we could find them.
On Friday morning things started to come together.
‘Sheila Armitage obtained a list of all the employees of Kerry Trucking, guv,’ said Kate Ebdon, ‘and I’ve got one of the lads going through the address book that Dave seized from the Hammonds’ house. I’m surprised Hammond didn’t notice it had gone,’ she added.
‘Perhaps he hasn’t looked for it. Anyway, he probably thought that Kerry had taken it to the office with her, or to the airport.’
‘Do you intend to interview all these people?’ asked Kate, flourishing the staff list.
‘How many are there?’
‘All up, about eighty or so, including the drivers, of course.’
‘Not unless I have to,’ I said, appalled at the prospect of conducting that many interviews.
‘It wouldn’t be all of them. I was able to confirm that twenty of the drivers were out of the country at the time of Kerry’s murder.’
‘What, over Christmas?’
‘It seems that the haulage business doesn’t stop for the festive season.’
‘Bit like us,’ muttered Dave, with a measure of bitterness.
‘And presumably you’ve got an address for this Bryce bloke, Kate. He was Kerry’s secretary.’
‘His name’s Bryce Marlow, he’s twenty-four, unmarried, and he lives in Cumber Road, Chiswick. It’s within walking distance of the office.’
‘What time does he normally finish work, Kate?’
‘Six o’clock, according to Bligh. When he wasn’t acting as PA to Kerry Hammond he was helping Thorpe with the general admin.’
‘Did Bligh want to know why we were interested in Marlow?’
‘I didn’t let him know we were interested in him, guv.’ Kate frowned, an indication that she thought I was impugning her professionalism. ‘I told him that we might have to interview all of the firm’s staff, and I asked him about the work hours of a few of the others. Mind you, I wouldn’t be surprised if Bligh didn’t go in for a bit of leg-over himself from time to time.’
‘Come on to you, did he, ma’am?’ asked Dave.
Kate scoffed at the very idea. ‘You must be bloody joking, Sergeant,’ she said. ‘But he did ask me if I fancied having a drink with him at some time.’
‘What did you say to that, Kate?’ I asked.
‘I told him I was much too busy arresting sex offenders and stalkers to waste time on adulterers, guv.’
I almost felt sorry for Bernard Bligh. As I’ve said many times before, it doesn’t pay to get on the wrong side of Kate Ebdon.
‘Let me know if and when you get anything interesting from Kerry’s address book, Kate,’ I said.
NINE
We arrived at Bryce Marlow’s Cumber Road address in Chiswick at half past six.
The woman who answered the door to Marlow’s semi was too old, sixty or so perhaps, to be Marlow’s wife or girlfriend, and I assumed that she was Bryce’s mother. We knew that he was into fancying older women, but not that old.
‘Yes?’ She glanced suspiciously at us. I was accustomed to such wariness. It was not the first time that the arrival on someone’s doorstep of a tall, reasonably well-dressed man and a heavyweight black guy has been regarded with apprehension.
‘We’re police officers, madam,’ I said. ‘We’d like to have a word with Mr Marlow, Mr Bryce Marlow, if he’s here.’
‘I’m his mother,’ said the woman. ‘Whatever’s wrong?’
‘Nothing at all, madam,’ I said, attempting to calm her. ‘We’re making enquiries into the death of Mrs Kerry Hammond. I understand that your son was Mrs Hammond’s secretary.’
‘Oh, I see. Yes, he was. What a terrible thing to have happened. It was an awful shock to poor Bryce. You’d better come in, then, Mr, er . . .?’
‘Brock, madam, Detective Chief Inspector Brock, and this is Detective Sergeant Poole. You are Mrs Marlow, I take it.’ It was a valid question. Although she’d admitted to being Bryce Marlow’s mother, she might’ve remarried.
‘Yes, I’m Doreen Marlow,’ she said, leading us into the sitting room. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘Thank you. That’s very kind, but I don’t want to put you to any trouble, Mrs Marlow.’ I didn’t really want tea, but I’m all for giving the impression that the constabulary are a friendly lot. I once forced myself to eat two slices of a spinster’s home-made seed cake, which I detest, in order to be amiable, and thus securing the withdrawal of a complaint that had been made against three of my officers. They’d been careless enough to misread the address on the search warrant, and insisted on rummaging through the old lady’s flat until she’d eventually convinced them that they should’ve been searching the flat upstairs.
‘It’s no trouble,’ said Mrs Marlow. ‘I was just about to make some anyway. I’ll get Bryce for you. I think he’s upstairs doing something on his computer.’
The man who entered the room looked younger than his twenty-four years, but that was probably accounted for by his long blond scruffy hair. He was wearing jeans with a hole in one of the knees, a greyish sweater, and he was barefooted. Personally, I couldn’t understand what Kerry Hammond had seen in him, but then I’m not a woman.
‘Mum said you wanted to see me,’ said Marlow, flopping into an armchair. ‘She said it was about Kerry.’
So, Bryce Marlow called his boss by her first name. When I left school, I took a job with a water company, and I was there for three long and tedious years before joining the police. If anyone had dared to address the chief executive by his first name, particularly his secretary, they’d’ve got the bum’s rush very smartly. But, I suppose, things have moved on since then.
‘I understand you were employed as Mrs Hammond’s secretary, Mr Marlow,’ I said.
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘But there was a lot more to it than that, wasn’t there?’ suggested Dave, getting quickly to the point of our interview.
‘More to it?’ Marlow shot a quick glance at the closed sitting-room door. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ He looked decidedly shifty, and failed to disguise the fact that Dave’s question had unnerved him.
‘Really?’ Dave leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his knees, and linking his hands. It was a menacing attitude. ‘We’ve been told that you and Mrs Hammond were having an affair. A sexual relationship,’ he added, so that there would be no doubt in the young man’s mind.
‘Who told you that?’ Marlow had blushed scarlet and began fidgeting, his fingers playing a devil’s tattoo on the arm of his chair.
‘Never mind who, but we were told that you and she disappeared for half an hour at the firm’s Christmas bash the year before last. What was that all about? Surely the pair of you didn’t nip out for a quick smoke behind the bike sheds.’
‘It was her idea.’ Marlow blurted out the words and looked extremely uncomfortable.
‘What was?’
‘I don’t see that it has anything to do with you.’ Suddenly Marlow developed a little steel, and stared angrily at Dave.
The door opened and Mrs Marlow entered with a tray of tea. ‘I’ll let you pour it yourselves, if you don’t mind,’ she said, placing the tray on a small table. She glanced at each of us in tu
rn, and it seemed that she had detected a tension in the room, but she said nothing more.
Once his mother had left, Bryce Marlow spoke again.
‘I don’t see that my private life is anything to do with the police.’
‘Mr Marlow,’ I said, ‘as I’m investigating the murder of Mrs Hammond, I shall ask any questions I like and I expect truthful answers.’
‘But surely you can’t think I was involved in her death, can you?’
‘I don’t know who was responsible for her death, but I must say that your reticence to answer my sergeant’s questions makes me wonder. Now then, did you have a sexual relationship with Mrs Hammond?’
There was a long pause before Marlow answered, during which time he stared at the ground. ‘Yes,’ he said eventually, shooting another glance at the door.
‘At whose instigation?’ Dave asked.
‘It was Kerry’s.’
‘And how did that come about?’ asked Dave. ‘Did she just proposition you one day? Say something like, d’you fancy hopping into bed for a quick screw?’
‘No, it wasn’t like that.’ Marlow probably viewed his affair with his boss as a romantic tryst, rather than the sordid coupling that Dave was implying. ‘It was when she took me to Paris. She had to go there on business, she said.’ Now that he had admitted to an affair with Kerry, he seemed to be more relaxed in answering our questions.
‘When was this?’
‘About eighteen months ago, I suppose. Yes, it was in July of the year before last, and she said she intended taking me with her. It was natural enough for me to accompany her, she said, as I was her secretary, and she wanted to show me the sights. I’d never been to Paris before, you see. She told me that it would be a bit of a reward for all the hard work I’d done for her.’
‘And that’s when the affair began, I suppose,’ said Dave.
‘Yes. Kerry certainly knew her way about when it came to travelling. We went by Eurostar, first class of course, and had champagne and a meal on the train. At the Gare du Nord, she got a taxi to take us to a super hotel in the rue de Rivoli, and we stayed there for the whole time. I think that she’d stayed there before because the staff seemed to know her.’
‘And what exactly was this business that she had to do in Paris?’
‘That’s the funny thing about it; there didn’t seem to be any, unless she did whatever she had to do on her laptop or on the Internet.’ Marlow gave the impression of being baffled, but it wasn’t convincing. ‘But then, why bother to go to Paris? She could’ve done all that in England.’
‘It looks as though she’d planned the whole thing just to get you into her bed,’ said Dave, half to himself.
‘I suppose so,’ said Marlow quietly, as though loath to admit that he’d fallen into the clutches of a scheming woman several years older than he was. ‘We had separate rooms in the hotel, with a communicating door, and after we’d arrived and unpacked, she invited me into her room and ordered a bottle of champagne from room service. We sat and chatted for a while, and then she took me out to dinner at a swish restaurant in the Champs Elysees.’
‘Did Mrs Hammond speak French?’ asked Dave.
‘She spoke it fluently,’ said Marlow, ‘which was just as well because I don’t understand a word of it.’
‘And then you returned to the hotel . . . after your cosy little dinner, did you?’
‘Yes, and I thought that was the end of the evening. But at about half past eleven, Kerry came through the communicating door into my room without knocking. I hadn’t locked it from my side, you see. In fact, I didn’t know you could. I’d never stayed anywhere like that before, but I found out later that there was a lock on each side of the door.’
I wondered if Bryce Marlow really was an innocent abroad, or whether he was pretending to be. ‘Were you asleep when she came in?’ I asked.
‘No, I was reading. But I was absolutely amazed because she wasn’t wearing anything. I couldn’t believe that my boss would do such a thing.’
‘Did she speak?’
‘No, she didn’t say a word; she just got into bed with me.’
‘How long were the pair of you in Paris, Mr Marlow?’
‘Four days.’
‘What did you do during that time?’ I glanced at Dave and thought I detected a smirk on his face.
‘We spent each day sightseeing around the city. She took me to see the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, and one evening we had dinner on the Seine on one of the bâteaux mouches; I think that’s what they call them. And we did a fair amount of shopping. Kerry bought a lot of clothes for herself, and a couple of expensive shirts and two ties for me.’
‘Did she pay all the bills for the hotel and the meals?’
‘Yes, she paid for everything. Well, actually she said the company was paying, but that was the same thing really, wasn’t it?’
‘And presumably you and Mrs Hammond slept together from then on.’
‘Yes, we did. And then each morning, she’d go back into her room and untidy her bed so that it looked as though she’d slept in it.’
‘I wonder why she bothered. The French are quite accustomed to that sort of thing. In fact, it’s almost a national sport,’ said Dave, in an aside. ‘And I suppose you each had a double bed.’
‘Yes. Kerry said she’d particularly asked for each of us to have a double bed because they’re more comfortable. She said that some French beds are shorter than English ones, but I didn’t notice any difference.’
I was far from convinced by Marlow’s account of what was supposed to have happened. He was twenty-four years of age, for God’s sake, and I very much doubted that he was the inexperienced youth he was purporting to be. I thought it just as likely that the events he’d described had occurred the other way round: that Marlow had gone into Kerry Hammond’s room on the off-chance of her being willing, and found to his delight that she was. I certainly didn’t believe his story of not knowing that hotel communicating doors could be locked from both sides. On the other hand, her insistence on double beds seemed to indicate Kerry had done a bit of what we in the police call forward planning.
‘Did this relationship continue after you returned to England?’ I asked.
‘Yes. It became quite a regular thing after that. I usually went to her house in Barnes when her husband was away. He was away quite often.’
‘And this affair lasted until Mrs Hammond was murdered, did it?’
Marlow nodded sadly. ‘Yes, it did.’
‘D’you think that Mr Hammond knew that you had become his wife’s lover?’
‘God, I hope not.’
I think that Hammond probably did know, but none of that mattered a damn unless Marlow had murdered Kerry. ‘Where were you on Christmas Eve, Mr Marlow? This Christmas Eve just gone.’
‘I was at the company’s party in Chiswick.’
‘From when until when?’
Marlow gave the impression of considering the question carefully. ‘I suppose I got there about a quarter past eight. I didn’t stay long because I don’t like leaving my mother alone, especially at Christmas, not since my father died a couple of years ago. But Mum was quite adamant that I should go.’
‘What time did you get back home?’ I asked.
‘It must’ve been about ten. It’s only a five minute walk from here, and I had my mobile with me in case Mum wanted me.’
‘Where were you before going to the party?’
‘Here, of course. I’d finished work at midday on Christmas Eve, and I came straight home and had tea with Mum.’
‘And she can vouch for that, can she?’
‘Certainly. D’you want me to call her?’
‘That won’t be necessary.’ I was sure that Mrs Marlow would confirm her son’s story, whether it was true or not. That was always the problem with alibis provided by relatives.
‘What’s going to happen to you now, Bryce?’ asked Dave. ‘As you were Mrs Hammond’s secretary, there won’t be a job for you any mo
re, will there?’
‘I’m hoping they’ll find me something,’ said Marlow. ‘I’m thinking of trying for a heavy goods vehicle driver’s licence. I rather fancy driving one of those Volvo artics across Europe.’
‘Do you have a driving licence, then?’ Dave asked.
‘Oh yes, but only for a car.’
‘And do you own a car?’
‘Yes, it’s that old VW outside.’
We thanked Mrs Marlow for the tea and left.
Dave took a note of the VW’s registration mark before we drove out of Cumber Road. ‘Do we keep Marlow on the list, guv?’ he asked.
‘He could’ve done it, Dave, despite claiming he was at home at the relevant time. We know he was at the party, but we only have his word for when he got there and when he left. Yvonne the barmaid won’t be much help, either. Bryce admits to owning a car, and he would have had plenty of time to get to Heathrow and then go on to the party. Or return to it.’
It was now nearing eight o’clock, and I decided that it was time for another talk with Michael Roberts, alias Miguel Rodriguez, dodgy proprietor of the Spanish Fly nightclub. I wanted to know where he was on the night of the murder, because sure as hell he hadn’t been where he’d said he was.
The bouncer recognized us immediately, but bouncers have an innate ability to remember policemen who call at the nightclub where they work.
‘He’s not here, guv’nor,’ said the bouncer, in reply to our query for Rodriguez.
‘Where is he, then?’ demanded Dave.
‘Haven’t a clue,’ said the bouncer, with a shrug of his steroid-developed shoulders.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Elliot.’ The bouncer seemed loath to admit it.
‘First name or last name?’ asked Dave.
‘First,’ said Elliot.
‘And your last name?’
‘Williams.’
‘When did you last see Mr Rodriguez, Elliot?’
‘A few days ago.’
‘How many days are a few days?’
‘Well, it’s, like, a few days.’
‘I should’ve been a dentist,’ muttered Dave.