Murder in Hyde Park

by Phillip Strang

  Isaac did not mention that as a student before he had joined the police force, he had snorted cocaine once, and apart from the initial rush, the feelings of euphoria, it had done little for him, but then, he had never understood why people smoked dead leaves wrapped in paper.

  After that one time with cocaine, he had never tried it again, and he had never smoked. Wendy, his sergeant, had been a heavy smoker in her time, and he had had to speak to her about it on a couple of occasions, but now she smoked less than before, and the air in the Homicide Department was pleasant and fresh.

  ‘It’s still illegal. The question is where she obtained it.’

  ‘And if it’s relevant to your enquiry,’ Picket added.

  ‘We need to know if her brother was using cocaine.’

  ‘Assume he is. A final confirmation will be available in a couple of days.’

  ‘Their mother, Janice Montgomery?’

  ‘The original report stands.’

  ***

  With the new information from Pathology and Forensics, another element had come into the investigation. Although taking the drug was illegal, it wasn’t Homicide’s primary focus. But whoever had been dealing in the drug could well be a person of interest. Yet another twist and turn in a case that had had more than its fair share.

  Larry and Wendy were sitting in the foyer of the hotel in Windsor when Old Mrs Winterly walked through the front door; a nod from Ingrid Conlon, the receptionist, to indicate who she was.

  As Ingrid had said, ‘Old’ was how Mrs Winterly referred to herself, and the two police officers assumed she would be showing her age, attempting to push it back by the liberal application of makeup and wearing designer clothes.

  That was not what they saw.

  For one thing, the woman did not look seventy-five and would have passed for someone ten to fifteen years younger. Her complexion was clear, her figure still firm, her step sprightly.

  It was Wendy who introduced herself and asked her to come and sit with her and Larry and to answer a few questions. The woman acceded to the request, not showing any concern that it was a police matter. In one hand, she held a designer bag, and it was expensive; Wendy knew such things, though never having the money to buy one for herself. In the other, a Harrods’ bag, green, with the store’s logo emblazoned in gold.

  The store was so strongly identified with the English capital that the bag had in itself become a souvenir, and it was possible to buy one without buying anything else. But that wasn’t the case with Mrs Winterly; hers was full of purchases from the shop.

  ‘What’s this all about?’ Mrs Winterly asked; Larry and Wendy were unable to see her as ‘Old’ anymore.

  ‘Colin Young,’ Wendy said.

  ‘An old woman’s folly,’ came the reply, without hesitation.

  ‘Are you admitting to having a relationship with the man?’ Larry asked.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Please, Mrs Winterly, we’re not here to comment.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter to me either way. I’m just making the best of my life, the same as everyone else. I could afford him, and he made me happy. There’s nothing wrong in that.’

  Wendy had to agree, although she could see that Larry, more straight-laced than he’d care to admit, was not so sure. To Wendy, his view smacked of hypocrisy. A man in his seventies could proudly display a twenty-something on his arm and in his bed, but when the position was reversed, out came the prejudices.

  ‘Unfortunately, we must tell you that Colin Young is dead,’ Wendy said.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. He was good fun, and he kept me entertained.’

  ‘No more than that?’

  ‘What do you want me to say? How did he die?’

  ‘He was murdered in Hyde Park.’

  ‘I saw something about that, but I didn’t take much notice.’

  ‘Weren’t you surprised that he hadn’t been here to see you?’

  ‘No, why should I be? He was a free agent, the same as I am. If he wanted to spend time with me, then great. But if he was occupied elsewhere, then that was fine as well.’

  ‘Do you mean with other women?’

  ‘Other women, other men, it wasn’t my concern.’

  ‘You have a healthy attitude,’ Wendy said. ‘But it doesn’t explain your ambivalence towards him.’

  ‘I think it does. What do you know about me?’

  ‘We’ve only recently become aware of you. We understand that you are seventy-five years of age and that you moved into the hotel about nine months ago.’

  ‘And that I had a young lover.’

  ‘That’s about it,’ Wendy said.

  ‘If you want me to talk, I need a glass of wine. And call me Dorothy.’ She raised her hand in the direction of the bar at the far end of the foyer. ‘He knows what I want. How about you two? Or are you on duty, not allowed to drink?’

  ‘I’ll have a beer,’ Larry said.

  ‘A glass of wine,’ Wendy added.

  With all three holding a drink, Dorothy Winterly commenced the story of her life. The conversation was being recorded, with her permission.

  ‘I married at twenty-five, a good man, as ambitious as me. We were married for nearly fifty years until he died eighteen months ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Wendy said.

  ‘No need to be. We had a good life together, and he was suffering at the end. We were close, loving, faithful, and we raised two sons and a daughter. My daughter is married and living in America, my sons are still in England. All of them are well-balanced and successful in their own right, and before you ask, yes, they are older than Colin was.’

  ‘Did they express concern about you living here and about Colin Young.’

  ‘It wasn’t any of their business, and even if I told them, they would have wished me well. As I was saying, over time and with a lot of hard work, we started to improve our situation. We could see that betterment required self-discipline and sacrifice. For years, it was us and the children and the business. My husband never enjoyed the benefit at the end of the rainbow, the chance to put his feet up, to do what successful people are meant to do. Once a year, two weeks holiday with the children. When they first came along, a week at Brighton or Cornwall, a tent for all of us, and then later the holidays became better and more exotic.

  ‘My husband became ill, and we discussed our life together, the children and what was to become of me. If was he who said for me to break the chain and to enjoy myself. Our two sons look after the business, and money is not an issue for me. There’s a perfectly good house for me in the country with plenty of room, and it’s beautiful, but I like it here.’

  ‘Your children? Do you meet with them?’

  ‘All the time, but they never come here.’

  ‘Would they be concerned by a young lover?’

  ‘Why should they? They knew their father’s view on how I should live my life after he’d gone. And I don’t intend to be the grieving widow.’

  ‘But you must be sad,’ Larry said.

  ‘I was relieved when he died. He was in a lot of pain; there was no quality of life for him.’

  ‘Dorothy, we will check your story,’ Wendy said.

  ‘Check if you want to, but you’ll find it to be true. One day I may tire of being here in this hotel and day tripping up to London. Then I might go back to my home, or take a cruise around the world, but I’m not ready for either yet. Colin made me happy whenever I saw him, and if he was making someone else happy, then good for him, good for them.’

  ‘He was also acting as an escort,’ Larry said.

  ‘Yet again, it’s not my concern.’

  ‘Did you give him money?’

  ‘For services rendered?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I gave him presents. Sometimes it was money, sometimes clothes or whatever else he wanted. He never asked, and I had no issue with looking after him. After all, he looked after me. Did anyone else tell you that he was beautiful?’

/>   ‘On more than one occasion,’ Wendy said. ‘And a good lover?’

  ‘You’re not expecting me to be coy now, after all I’ve told you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then he was.’

  ‘Do you know of anyone who might have wanted him dead?’

  ‘Check if you must, even talk to my children, but no, there is no one.’

  ‘And you, after we leave here?’

  ‘I will feel sorrow for Colin. What about his family?’

  ‘That is another sad story,’ Wendy said.

  ‘Then tell me no more. Sadness is not something I want to deal with,’ Dorothy Winterly said.

  ***

  It was Wendy who made the phone call to Amelia Bentham; the updated information from the pathologist needed to be followed up. Not that the team in Homicide felt that it was critical in itself, not sure if the fact that both Barry and Matilda Montgomery had low-level traces of cocaine affected the murder enquiry.

  Amelia came into Challis Street at 10.20 a.m. It was raining outside. ‘We were going to do an outside shoot down by the river, the latest summer range. No chance today.’

  Isaac joined the two women in the interview room. An air of cordiality existed.

  ‘Amelia, we’ve been informed that Matilda and her brother had used cocaine in the past,’ Isaac said.

  ‘Matilda, she tried to rebel occasionally, to go against her inherently conservative nature.’

  ‘You do not deny the cocaine?’

  ‘It was at a party. The three of us were there, and everyone was getting high on alcohol and whatever else.’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘Social, nothing heavy. No heroin, nothing like that.’

  ‘Cocaine?’

  ‘Chief Inspector, you’re a man of the world. You know it exists.’

  ‘That’s why we’re meeting here for a chat.’

  ‘No bright lights, no truncheons, thumbscrews?’

  Wendy could see Amelia flirting with Isaac, not that she could blame her, but it was an unusual reaction to witness in a police station.

  Isaac ignored the woman’s attempts at light-hearted repartee, realising that it could be an attempt to conceal nervousness. ‘We know that cocaine is freely available, and most parties, especially with the upwardly mobile, the affluent, would have someone snorting it. Are you one of those people?’

  ‘Never in my house, and that’s the truth.’

  ‘Why?’ Wendy asked.

  ‘My parents. You’ve met them, found them to be easy-going on most matters, but drugs are anathema to them. It’s the one thing they draw the line at.’

  ‘Good people, but why the abhorrence of drugs?’

  ‘If you must know, when they were younger, they went off the rails for a while, transcendental meditation, hallucinogenic drugs, the obligatory trip to India.’

  ‘But that was in the sixties and the seventies,’ Isaac said.

  ‘Late developers, my father would say. But the truth is that it still existed for a couple of decades after. Now my parents will barely take an aspirin.’

  ‘But you will?’

  ‘An aspirin, of course. And cocaine, but very occasionally. It doesn’t do much for me, and it didn’t do much for Matilda. That one time she snorted it, she was talking silly for about thirty minutes, and then she was sat in a corner crying her eyes out.’

  ‘It would take more than the one time for it to have remained in her system.’

  ‘I only saw her snort it once, and that’s the truth. Maybe she did with Barry, but I wouldn’t know. As I’ve told you on more than one occasion, Matilda was a friend, but we weren’t in each other’s pockets, and Barry used to come over to my place of a night-time. And he wasn’t snorting cocaine with me.’

  ‘We met another woman yesterday, an older woman, who was involved with him,’ Wendy said.

  ‘Sleeping with him?’

  ‘The same as you, casual sex. Amelia, was it casual with you? Or did you harbour feelings of love for him? An attractive man, and you’re at the clucky age, the age of wanting children.’

  ‘I’m too busy to contemplate the possibility,’ Amelia said.

  ‘Falling in love, wanting children, are not conscious actions formed by modern values and society,’ Wendy said. ‘They are base instincts, primordial, unalterable, uncontrollable.’

  ‘Very well. I did want more from him, but he wasn’t giving that to me. When he was with me, I was happy; when he wasn’t, I busied myself with work and other thoughts.’

  ‘But the love was there, the need for children. Am I correct?’

  ‘It could have been love if he had let me through the barrier that surrounded him. But he never did. I’m a pragmatist, not a foolish lovestruck teenager. He wasn’t going to change, not then, and probably not in the future.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because Matilda was shaped from the same mould. I never knew either of them, not truly, not the way my father and mother know each other.’

  ‘Love is a strong emotion,’ Isaac said. ‘So is hatred, the need for revenge, for retribution.’

  ‘I rejected love as a wasted emotion,’ Amelia said.

  ‘Sometimes people have a distorted view of life, and they feel the need to lash out at those who have affected their balance, thrown it into confusion.’

  ‘This is ludicrous. I came here at your request, and now you’re virtually accusing me of murder. I couldn’t have done that, not to him.’

  ‘Because you hadn’t rejected love, but because you had embraced it, even though he would not reciprocate.’

  ‘Okay, you win. Yes, I loved him. Is that what you wanted to hear?’ Amelia said. ‘And now he’s dead, and I don’t know who killed him, nor do you.’

  ‘Thank you for being honest. Now, what else don’t we know?’

  ‘Matilda knew how I felt about her brother.’

  ‘Did she tell him?’

  ‘She may have, but I don’t think so. She was possessive of her brother. From what I understood, their childhood must have formed an unbreakable bond, the reason that both of them were incapable of unconditional love.’

  ‘The cocaine, other drugs?’

  ‘That’s all I know, and that’s the truth. I wish that Barry was still alive, not that it would have helped me. He wouldn’t have been mine, apart for the occasional one-night stand.’

  Wendy felt sad for the woman who had a good moral compass from her parents, but not the love of a man her age that she craved.

  Amelia Bentham left Challis Street and hailed a taxi. She gave Wendy a hug as she was getting into the vehicle. ‘I miss him, but life goes on,’ she said.

  ‘It takes time, that’s the hard part,’ Wendy said, remembering the feeling of emptiness when her husband had passed away.

  Chapter 26

  Christine Mason left the hotel where she had worked for the last four years, three months, and eight days: the period clearly stated on the severance notice she had received when she had been called into Archibald Marshall’s office and summarily dismissed.

  Marshall had been professional, she might have agreed, if she had not been shocked by the suddenness of the dismissal. Alongside him in the office was a senior manager from head office, as well as the hotel group’s chief accountant.

  ‘There’ll be no reference,’ Marshall had said. ‘Embezzlement is a serious crime.’

  The pot calling the kettle black, she should have said, but did not. And as the time since her removal from the hotel extended, Christine reflected on it. There were questions with no answers. Why did it need a chief accountant? Why did it need someone from head office? The woman had said she was the head of Human Resources, but Christine had never heard of her before.

  She was guilty of rank stupidity, she knew that, in giving money to Colin whom she had loved, and then to Marshall whom she detested and had slept with because he protected her. And then telling her husband of her infidelity, remembering her sister and her husband entwined. Remembering
Terry, Gwen’s former husband, and her bearing his unborn child in her teens. All that she had suffered, yet Archibald Marshall had come out of the sordid and shabby business at the hotel as though he smelt of roses.

  Christine Mason was determined to find out the truth, and, as her shock abated to be replaced by bewilderment and then anger, she made a phone call. ‘The park bench where we met before,’ she said.

  From her handbag she withdrew the severance notice detailing the financial settlement, the confidentiality agreement. It did not mention the specifics, only the generalisations about not discussing internal hotel procedures and finances, and not to reveal anything that could be of benefit to a competitor. Not that she intended to work for another hotel, anyway. It was a small world, and she knew that her departure from the hotel would be gossip for the next week, the rumour mill working overtime trying to figure out what had gone on, and why.

  There’d be some who would say it was due to incompetence, although it hadn’t been. Others would say it was a witch hunt, another sign of male domination of a weak and defenceless woman. Few, if any, would realise that she was the sacrificial goat to protect the hotel’s reputation and that of its manager. But why Marshall? He was equally guilty, and she had the proof.

  Isaac dropped Wendy off at the park entrance. It wasn’t that far from Challis Street, and parking in inner London was a nightmare, even for a police car. And Wendy was sure that she did not intend to rush away from her meeting with Christine Mason. Bridget was still trying to find out who the specials were on Domett’s list, Amelia Bentham had brought a degree of uncertainty to her situation, and Terry Hislop had met up with his former wife in London.

  There was a belief that an imminent breakthrough was about to happen, but the team had felt that before, only for them to fall flat on their face.

  Wendy found Christine Mason sitting on the bench, as agreed. From a distance, she looked a lonely and lost soul.

  ‘What is it, Christine?’ Wendy said as she sat down beside her.

  The enveloping hug from the woman was not expected. ‘I’ve been dismissed,’ she said. Her voice was tremulous.