False Accusations_Nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide...
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‘That’s the way with them at that age,’ Flora said tolerantly. ‘Up one minute and down the next: it’s the same with my Simon.’ She noted that Anthony was supposed to have gone to the airport by bus on Sunday, although Jason had not mentioned that fact and had pretended to think that Anthony, also, might have gone to the party. And also that Jason was up unusually early on the morning when Mrs Trevor met her death; he’d gone to the party on Willow Island, but, apparently had not tumbled into bed when he came home, as Simon did. Why not? she asked herself. Why did Jason stay up?
But faced by an affectionate mother, she felt ashamed of her questions. She was trying to do her best for Rosie, but what if doing her best for Rosie meant putting another of the girl’s classmates into prison. Whatever mercy would be shown to Rosie, none would be shown to the tall, heavily-built son of a butcher if he had smothered a middle-aged woman, purely because he was in love with the woman’s daughter. ‘Well, I’d better be going,’ she said aloud. ‘The garden needs watering and I haven’t had a minute to myself for the last few days.’
‘No, I don’t suppose you have.’ Mrs Osmotherley was reluctant to let go of her.
‘Did Anthony come home from Majorca at the same time as Jenny?’ Flora asked quickly. The bus from Brocklehurst had just stopped across the road. There would be bound to be a few people coming into the shop in a minute. The meat from the Osmotherley Butcher’s Shop was far better than anything one could get in Brocklehurst.
Mrs Osmotherley nodded. ‘Oh, he came back all right. Came with her. He wouldn’t let her face that on her own. He was here yesterday evening. He’s very upset about it all. We all are. These two poor girls! I hope you can do something for Rosie, Mrs Morgan. Of all people, you know what those kids are like. I always said that; always said that you were a great judge of character. These policemen should listen to you.’
‘Well I hope you’re right, Mrs Osmotherley. I’ll tell them what you say,’ Flora said as she paid her bill and left the shop.
So Jason, according to his mother, didn’t know that Anthony had gone to Majorca with Jenny. Did he know, now, Flora wondered? Jenny and he had certainly seemed to be getting on well when Flora had met them at lunchtime. Was Jason perhaps hoping that with Mrs Trevor out of the way, he and Jenny might become a couple again?
On her way home, Flora heard the familiar clank, clank of the Hi-Mac digging out the new drain. She slowed down and then parked in a convenient gate entrance. Alf saw her coming and rested the large arm of the digger safely on the opposite side of the drain. He climbed down from his cab and came down the road to meet her.
‘Rosie?’ he enquired and she was pleased to hear how clearly he could pronounce the girl’s name.
‘She’s very upset, very sad,’ said Flora. Alf, she often reminded herself, though he had a strong speech impediment, was sharp and clever in many ways. She would not humiliate him by treating him as a child.
He said something that she didn’t understand, but made a gesture from eyes to chin bone with his large, mud-stained forefingers.
‘Yes, I’m afraid so. Yes, she does cry a lot. But Rosie did always cry very easily. I go to see her every day,’ she added, pointing in the direction of the town of Brocklehurst.
He fumbled in his pocket and took out a five pound note. ‘Shocola.’ He made a gesture of popping sweets into his mouth and she nodded her understanding and accepted the money.
‘What a good idea. A box of chocolates. She’ll love that. I’ll tell her that you sent them.’
‘Nasty ’uoman.’ That was what he had said before. He seemed to be brooding over it, turning over what approximated to words within his mind.
‘’Oo tell ’em. Kever ’uoman, ’Oo ...’ He nodded at her. She was never sure why he had such of an admiration for her, but thought it was something to do with her job. He was of the generation that were in awe of teachers.
Flora shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Alf. I’m trying to guess who did it, but I don’t know. Not for certain. It’s not my job. The police have to find out.’
She wasn’t sure whether he understood that or not, but after a moment’s thought, he nodded vigorously.
‘Fi’ out,’ he said and climbed back onto the high seat of the Hi-Mac. She wasn’t sure if it was a command to her or an instruction to himself.
‘So, what did you get out of Mrs Osmotherley, then,’ asked Paula, laying down her steak knife and taking a long drink of wine. Piper had been fed and was now sleeping happily in the stable under the trees. He could be walked in the cool of the evening after Flora left. Or else, hopefully, Simon would come home and take him for a run in the woods.
‘I was very lucky,’ Flora admitted. ‘No one came into the shop for a long time and Mr Osmotherley was busy dealing with a carcass in the back room, so I was able to have a nice long chat.’
‘She had something to tell you about Jason?’ Paula helped herself to some of the mushroom sauce.
‘Yes, plenty, and about Anthony.’
‘Anthony?’
Flora told her all about Anthony being with Jenny out in Majorca and about the enmity between the twins.
‘Anthony wouldn’t have strangled Mrs Trevor, would he?’
‘No, he went back that night. Took the bus to the airport. Neither he nor Jenny went to the Willow Island party, according to Mrs Osmotherley.’ But Simon did go to that party, she thought.
But surely Simon was home before anything happened to Mrs Trevor. Could she be sure of that? She had a vague memory of Piper’s welcoming bark, but she would find it hard to swear to the time. Had Sergeant Dawkins questioned those who went to the party? Simon had said nothing, nor had the sergeant.
‘Let’s take our wine and that lovely cheese out in the garden.’ In a moment Paula had chopped the cheese into bite-sized lumps, put them, the glasses of wine and the bottle on a tray and Flora followed her outside.
‘Isn’t that pond lovely? Alf Barfoot made a great job of it,’ commented Paula. ‘You’re lucky that you have such a nice, private garden with no neighbours on either side. It’s good and big, too. That laneway at the back is too far away for anyone to overhear us, I suppose, so we can gossip in peace. Now, we know that Rosie didn’t commit the murder, so who do you think that it was? I’m beginning to put my money on Jason.’
Flora was silent for a moment. The whole idea was repulsive. ‘It’s very hard to think of someone that I have known since a child as a murderer,’ she said eventually.
‘I suppose that it’s not as difficult as one imagines to commit a murder. And remember Jason is a butcher. He’d be used to killing things. It wouldn’t mean the same to him as it might to me or you. I was thinking about that today when I was watching Mr Osmotherley’s calves from my window, running races in the field, just like little boys in school. It does seem dreadful, doesn’t it that they are killed for meat. But a butcher has to kill them. What if Jason persuaded himself that Jenny would be better off without her mother. She’d have much more money for one thing. Remember that the grandmother, Mrs Trevor’s mother, hasn’t long to go. There’ll be quite a sum. I wonder if Mrs Trevor left a will.’
Flora thought about that. It might, she thought, be more relevant to ask whether Mrs Herskins had made a will. There was something deeply distasteful about the whole matter, this business of suspecting people who had been in school with her own son. It couldn’t be helped, though. She had to get Rosie out from that prison.
‘That’s right,’ Flora said sombrely, taking another sip of wine. ‘You see, in an odd sort of way, I feel that if Mrs Trevor was murdered for any particular reason, then Jenny might be the key. If we set aside Rosie as the murderer —’
‘The more I think about it, the more I know that it wasn’t her,’ said Paula energetically. ‘People around the village are saying things like: “Well, she was always a bit odd”, but she wasn’t odd in that way; she never hurt anyone in all her time at primary school. I can’t see her murdering her mother.’
‘But what if she was getting in the way of one of Jenny’s boyfriends? There seems no doubt but that Jenny is the sort of girl who was very attractive to men. Do you remember what she was like even in primary school? She always had all the boys on a piece of string. What if someone like, say Jason Osmotherley, got terribly obsessed with Jenny, but she was getting tired of him? And, worse still, had taken up with his twin brother. And, of course, if he were obsessed with Jenny; he would probably blame Jenny’s mother more than the girl herself. That’s the way that love goes,’ said Paula wisely.
‘I wish Sergeant Dawkins would do his job and find whoever did this murder,’ Flora said. ‘I’m sick of finding suspects from my days at Willowgrove School.’ Even she, herself, was startled to hear the depth of anger in her own voice and Paula had the tact to say nothing for a few minutes.
‘But the thing is, Flora,’ she said then, ‘you do know these people and you’ve seen them when they were young children, when they hadn’t learned to disguise their natures. And so have I, of course. I’m telling you now that Jason is a far more likely suspect than either poor Rosie, or that unfortunate boy from the children’s home who never had a chance. Jason Osmotherley, for all his charm, always had a strange streak of temper; Anthony, of course, was always a sweetheart.’
‘And Jenny, it seems,’ Flora said slowly and reflectively, ‘has gone back to value Anthony more than Jason, just as she did when she was at school.’
‘And that may have caused trouble,’ finished Paula, stoutly resolute in her case.
They looked at each other and then looked away.
Perhaps there was going to be no easy answer to this murder of Mrs Trevor.
Chapter 18
‘Turn on your TV — switch to the breakfast show.’ Paula’s voice was high and excited. ‘I’ll ring you back when it’s finished.’
The presenter was in full flow when Flora switched on. He was standing beside the river with the island in the background and the camera lingered over the pollarded willow trees and the cool ripples of water on the sandy shore. There was a long shot of the Trevors’ bungalow, looking idyllic among the trees, with its neatly mown and well-watered lawn bearing witness to Mrs Trevor’s work ethic. There was no hint of the main road that hummed with traffic only a few hundred yards away behind the back garden, no hint either of the fact that it was directly beneath the flight path of aeroplanes bound for the nearby airport.
Then there was a gradual zooming in of the camera, closer and closer to the French window that opened onto Mrs Trevor’s bedroom from the garden.
‘Last Monday morning when a mother of two girls was killed here in this village, this very door stood open to the garden,’ intoned the presenter. ‘Did the murderer come in through this door on that lovely summer morning? Perhaps he or she expected to find Mrs Trevor had already gone to work. She may have been overheard, bidding goodbye to her daughter Jenny who was getting into a taxi to take her to the airport on the way to her dream holiday in Majorca. Our reporter, Millie Sparks, is here now to talk to Jenny.’
There was a quick switch to Millie, sitting beside Jenny at the kitchen counter: both were perched on high stools and the impression conveyed was probably supposed to be of a girl-to-girl chat.
Jenny was looking very pale, with black shadows under her eyes. She was wearing a black suit and in a rather poignant way, her clothing made her look, at once, both older and younger than she really was — it didn’t suit her and it seemed like something that a mother would persuade her daughter to buy for a first interview.
Millie led her through the events of Monday morning and Jenny broke down and wept when she recalled teasing her mother about wearing the grey woollen dressing gown on such a hot morning, because she didn’t want the taxi driver to see her in her floor-length silk nightdress. Flora’s own eyes filled for a moment. It seemed unbearably poignant. And then Jenny moved towards the sitting room, Millie followed and so, of course, did the cameraman.
The camera concentrated on Jenny as she paused to linger on the useless bolt on the inside of the front door, watched the opening of the sitting-room door and then dramatically focused on a large portrait on the wall of the room. The picture was so perfectly lit that Flora suspected that this was no accident.
It was a photograph of Rosie, blown up to a large size. Rosie was sitting on a grass bank, blonde curls slightly blown back by a summer breeze, a dreamy expression on her face, her blue eyes fixed on the viewer, her red lips curved in a gentle smile. The grass around her was dotted with pink clover, yellow hawkweed, large fluffy marguerites and in one slender hand Rosie dangled a daisy chain. She was wearing one of those simple, floating dresses of which she was so fond, this time a forget-me-not blue and she looked like a maiden from a King Arthur romance.
Flora would be prepared to bet that not a single viewer of morning TV would have noticed that moment’s silence as the camera lingered lovingly on the exquisite girl.
‘Who is that?’ exclaimed Millie after a moment of hushed admiration.
‘That’s my sister, Rosie,’ said Jenny. Her voice trembled and her eyes were misted with tears. She took out a tissue and blotted them.
Flora held her breath. Surely no television company would allow Jenny to mention that this girl was now in the custody of the police, being questioned about the murder of her mother. Very few juries would be prepared to find guilty a girl who looked like that: like the embodiment of innocence.
But, of course, nothing like that happened. Flora had underestimated Jenny. She just sighed and continued to gaze sadly at her sister’s portrait.
‘I understand that your sister suffers from some form of autism,’ said Millie in hushed, respectful tones. ‘The death of your mother must be very hard for her to understand.’
‘Poor Rosie,’ gulped Jenny. She paused, visibly fighting for self-control. Flora suddenly remembered how excellently she had acted her part in The Wind in the Willows in those last weeks in primary school. Jenny had lost none of that ability. There was true artistry in the way that she peeped at Millie as if wondering how much to trust her and then breathed in a great sigh.
‘Poor Rosie,’ she repeated. ‘She’s always lived in a little world of her own. She would say the most extraordinary things and then feel that she had to stick to them. She’s very sensitive, you see. She’s always afraid that people might laugh at her if she’s caught out telling a little story.’
Millie nodded respectfully, and the camera shifted back to the beautiful portrait and lingered over it, while Jenny said quietly, ‘When I was a little girl I used to think that Rosie was like that princess imprisoned in a castle by all those briars…’
She said no more. She had the artistry to leave the sentence hanging. It may have been slightly puzzling to the watching public, who would wonder what this had to do with the brutal murder of the mother of these two girls, but if Rosie ever did come to trial, it would be unlikely that any court in the county would be able to select a jury of twelve persons where none had a clear image of Rosie’s child-like innocence in their minds.
I wonder if Sergeant Dawkins watches early morning TV, Flora speculated as she moved over to the sink to fill her kettle. Clever little minx, Jenny!
The phone rang just as Flora had begun to drink her coffee. She took it with her. Conversations with Paula were usually quite long.
‘Well, I saw it,’ she said as she picked up the receiver.
‘Oh, good,’ said a masculine voice. ‘How are you this morning, Flora?’
‘Oh, Ted.’ Flora took a quick gulp of coffee. ‘Yes, I saw it. My former secretary rang to tell me it was on.’
‘Good, wasn’t it?’ He sounded contented. ‘I don’t know how she m
anaged to get the TV to do that programme. Usually they are very careful about stepping on the toes of the police.’
‘Jenny’s pretty good at getting her own way,’ Flora assured him. She didn’t mention the boyfriend. It had been clever to have the interview conducted by a female reporter — no doubt that had been arranged also, but she would say nothing of it to Ted. I trust him, thought Flora, but only in the way that I trust most people — which was that, generally, it is best to keep your own counsel.
‘It’s only a matter of time now before the newspapers get hold of the fact that Rosie is in custody; there will be huge interest in this — I wouldn’t be surprised if it were picked up by national TV — hopefully before the police officially disclose that she is being questioned. That is what will suit us best.’