Murder in Hyde Park

by Phillip Strang

  ‘This was always expected. Was there any mention of the money you took?’

  ‘It was intimidating. There were three of them; one of me.’

  Outside the park, a small café. Wendy walked over, ordered two coffees, and came back, handing one to Christine, taking one for herself.

  Wendy did not object to being a shoulder to cry on, but she could not feel a lot of sympathy for a person whose woes were self-inflicted due to her lack of moral restraint. Yet she still liked the woman, the sort of person who was easy to talk to, not like Gwen, her sister, who was now meeting with her ex, Terry Hislop, a man who had shown the capability to act violently.

  ‘You mentioned three,’ Wendy said as she sipped her coffee. It was lukewarm, with too little milk and not enough sugar. Any other time, she would have complained.

  ‘Archibald Marshall, an accountant, and a woman, the head of Human Resources.’

  ‘Did you know the other two?’

  ‘Not personally, although I’ve no reason to doubt they are who they said.’

  ‘Let’s assume they are. We can check later. Now, what was the gist of the meeting?’

  ‘Archibald Marshall told me that I had been dismissed and that I would be leaving the building immediately.’

  ‘Immediately?’

  ‘It always upsets people, but I did have access to the hotel’s money and privileged information: passwords, bank account details, that sort of thing.’

  ‘You were taking their money, giving it to your fancy man, and then to Marshall. Any mention made of that?’

  ‘Not in detail and they must have known about Archibald. It’s only logical.’

  ‘He wasn’t a stupid man. He could have altered the records.’

  ‘I would have seen if he had, and so would head office. Those two with him knew that he was guilty.’

  ‘And he’s free of all blame, is that it?’

  ‘But why? Why would they do that?’ Christine asked. Wendy thought it had to be a rhetorical question.

  ‘They’ve not finished with him yet. He’ll get a sweetheart deal, and the whole sorry saga will be swept under the table. The hotel maintains its reputation, worth more than what you stole.’

  ‘It’s so unfair.’

  ‘Christine, what happens to him is not your concern, just accept it as one of life’s lessons learnt.’

  ‘He followed Colin once.’

  ‘Who? Marshall?’

  ‘The last time that Colin was in the hotel. Not that Colin ever knew, but I saw Archibald walk out of the hotel not long after Colin and follow him down the road.’

  ‘Are you sure he was following? He could have just been heading in the same direction.’

  ‘I’m certain of it. At the end of the road, Colin had hurried across the road, and Archibald had run after him, almost getting hit by a car. I followed from a distance. I could see that Colin was unaware of what was going on.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Colin went into a building on Westbourne Terrace.’

  The address intrigued Wendy. ‘The number?’

  ‘It was 125. Does it mean anything?’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I stayed there for a few minutes on the street. Archibald was still watching, and I was worried that he’d see me.’

  ‘How long was this before Colin was murdered?’

  ‘Four to five weeks. I can’t remember the exact date, but he was staying at the hotel, so you must be able to find out.’

  ‘Christine, what I suggest you do is to go home, take a long hot bath, drink a glass of wine, and forget today. That’s my recommendation, but you’re on self-destruct, and you may well ignore my advice. So far, you’re free and innocent of all charges. Don’t jeopardise this.’

  ‘I won’t. I’ll do what you said.’

  Wendy wasn’t convinced that she would.

  ***

  Isaac was conscious of Jenny’s packing back at the flat they shared, her growing excitement about her first trip to the Caribbean. He thought that she may have the notion of a wedding proposal on a starlit beach, the waves gently lapping on the seashore, a harp playing in the background. He had to admit that was on his mind to, although not the harp. Maybe a guitar in Jamaica, a Rasta selling drugs down one end of the beach, the noise of cars beeping their horns in the distance.

  Jenny’s notion of the Caribbean, he realised, was tempered by the movies and the travel brochures, not the reality. He knew that behind the gloss there was crime and poverty and misery. In the resorts, she would see very little of them, but they were going to stay with his parents. She had grown up in a small town in Sussex, a county on the coast to the south of London. Her childhood had consisted of country life, a school for the girls of gentlefolk, a safe and happy environment where the family house was separated from the world outside by a privet hedge, not the electric fence that surrounded his parents’ house.

  ‘Nancy Bartlett lied to you?’ Isaac said to Larry, Wendy was standing beside him. This three of them were at Challis Street. It was Wendy who had come back with the latest revelation from Christine Mason.

  ‘It’s her address, 125, Westbourne Terrace, but why?’ What did she hope to gain? If she was still paying him for services rendered, then why didn’t she tell us? I’ll go with Wendy, check her out.’

  ‘We could bring her into the station.’

  ‘If needed, we will.’

  ‘Has anyone checked on the father?’

  ‘Not recently. According to Amelia Bentham, he’s been around at Matilda’s house since she died,’ Wendy said. ‘Apparently he wants to sell the place.’

  ‘A discounted price if anyone finds out the truth of what happened in there.’

  ‘We’ve never satisfactorily answered the question as to why the woman committed suicide,’ Larry said.

  ‘She died because of the trauma in her life, the death of her brother.’

  ‘But she was dead when we found out about the house, which means she either killed him, or she had been told.’

  ‘Or she had read the newspaper, seen a photo and a description on the internet.’

  ‘Let’s assume that she had realised who it was. What’s the normal reaction?’

  ‘To contact the police, to break down in hysterics.’

  ‘Not to commit suicide, is that what we’re saying?’

  ‘It is. Yet there’s an inconsistency. Matilda Montgomery was measured in her suicide. It was all too neat. Only a calm person could have done that, and why hanging? Melodramatic, don’t you think?’

  ‘It was a statement. Not to us, but to someone else.’

  ‘Her father?’

  ‘She wanted him to feel the pain that he had caused them over the years. Remember, he loved his daughter and his wife, even his son. And he felt that whatever he had inflicted on them was the act of a loving father, not that either of the children believed it. And with her death, Matilda was finally saying to him, “you were wrong, it was you who destroyed our lives, made my mother miserable, drove my brother away, made me an emotional vacuum”. And what if she believed it was her father who had murdered his own son, her brother?’

  ‘She would have been frightened of coming to the police, frightened to confront her father. All his life he had been the dominant figure, good or bad. It would be inconceivable for her to ask him for the truth, impossible for her to tell us what she believed.’

  ‘The woman must have been half-crazy.’

  ‘If she was half, then what is her father?’

  ***

  Nancy Bartlett was initially pleased to open the door of her penthouse flat to Larry; not so keen on him entering with Wendy.

  ‘This is Sergeant Gladstone,’ Larry said. On the dining room table, three bottles of wine, a plate of snacks. Some candles lit the main room, the windows closed, an incense stick burning somewhere, its smell permeating the room.

  ‘It’s not convenient,’ Nancy Bartlett said as the two police officers stood in her flat. She was dress
ed in a pair of designer jeans and a white blouse. Her hair, as usual, was coiffured, her makeup flawless, her lips, as were her fingernails, a bright shade of red.

  Larry thought she looked good; Wendy did not. She had seen enough painted tarts in her time, and the flat was set up for seduction, or one was already occurring.

  ‘Are you alone?’ Wendy asked.

  ‘No,’ the woman replied. Wendy smiled at what they had interrupted, envied the woman in some ways, disapproved in another.

  ‘Important information regarding you and Colin Young has come to light. We need to know the answer, and we need to know now,’ Larry said.

  A blustering reply from Nancy Bartlett, an attempt to close a bedroom door. Wendy walked over in that general direction, attempting to look unconcerned. The woman wasn’t suspected of murder, and her alibi had been checked by Bridget and found to be tight. The police had no right to search the flat, but Wendy was a woman; she could sense that something was amiss.

  Wendy returned to where Larry and Nancy Bartlett were. ‘Good view you’ve got here,’ she said as she casually looked out of the window, the previously closed curtains now fully open.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ the woman’s meek reply. ‘What’s this all about?’

  ‘You lied to us,’ Wendy said.

  ‘When have I lied? Inspector Hill was here a few days ago, and I told him all that I knew.’

  ‘Not the fact that you’ve been screwing one of our suspects.’

  ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

  Wendy walked back over to the bedroom door and pushed it wide open. ‘You’d better join us,’ she said.

  A sheepish Archibald Marshall came out of the room and over to where Larry and Nancy Bartlett were sitting. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong,’ he said.

  ‘What’s this here with you two?’ Wendy said.

  ‘What does it look like?’ Nancy Bartlett said. ‘Charades?’ A nervous attempt at humour to defuse what was a compromising situation.

  ‘How long have you two been involved?’ Larry asked.

  ‘A few weeks,’ Marshall replied.

  ‘Another lie?’ Wendy said.

  For one moment, she hoped he was guilty of murder as that would ensure Christine Mason’s innocence.

  But now there was Nancy Bartlett, a woman whom Larry had regarded as a bit player in the saga.

  ‘When I was here last time, you told me that you hadn’t seen Colin Young for some years,’ Larry said.

  ‘That was true.’

  ‘He knocked on your door four weeks ago. We have the date. Do you deny this?’

  ‘I kept in contact with Colin. Occasionally we’d meet. Sometimes for a meal or a drink in the pub, and sometimes we’d come back here. It wasn’t a commercial arrangement, although sometimes I gave him something.’

  ‘So why the lying?’

  ‘I didn’t want to become involved in your investigation. I was frightened you’d want to blame me.’

  ‘And now you’re with Archibald Marshall. Are you aware of his involvement?’

  ‘Archibald is a friend, nothing more. I know that Colin used to stay at his hotel, and he was sleeping with one of the staff.’

  ‘Were you upset?’

  ‘With Colin sleeping around? Not at all.’

  ‘Archibald Marshall is no Colin Young,’ Wendy said, looking over at the pathetic lump of humanity.

  ‘He followed Colin here one day, so he knew my address. He knocked on the door two days after Colin had been identified as the dead body in Hyde Park.’

  ‘Yet you acted as though you didn’t know when I told you,’ Larry reminded her.

  ‘What did you expect of me? I know how the law works, guilty by association.’

  ‘That’s what’s happened to me, isn’t it?’ Marshall said. He had pulled over a dining chair and was sitting sideways on it.

  ‘Is it?’ Wendy asked. ‘I met with Christine not long after you dismissed her.’

  ‘And you believed her version?’

  ‘Not totally.’

  ‘She told you what a bastard I was, and how I had mistreated her, and then had her sacked.’

  ‘Something like that,’ Wendy admitted.

  ‘She’s right. I did have her sacked, but I worked behind the scenes to ensure that she’d leave the hotel with no crime against her name, and a substantial payout. Did she tell you how much she received?’

  ‘Not the details.’

  ‘That’s Christine, isn’t it? I’ll tell you that she received the usual payments, plus a full year’s salary. And all she had to do was to sign a confidentiality agreement that she wouldn’t reveal the truth of what she had taken, what she had done. The woman was consorting with a murdered man, a man who sold himself, having sex with him in the hotel. She did well out of it.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’ve got three months before I receive a similar deal.’

  ‘Why not now?’

  ‘Two people in management leaving at the same time raises suspicion. One only causes gossip.’

  ‘Will they honour their side of the bargain?’

  ‘They will. I’ve got it in writing.’

  ‘You forced Christine to sleep with you?’

  ‘Force? A strong word, if you don’t mind me saying,’ Marshall said. It was clear that he was feeling increasingly comfortable with the situation.

  Though he didn’t like him, Larry could see that the man might be telling the truth. Christine Mason was hardly the best character witness; yet the perception that she was the most truthful was based on the fact that she was attractive, Marshall was not.

  ‘Are you saying it was mutual?’ Wendy asked.

  ‘Not totally, not that I forced her either. Christine is not the saint that you want to portray her as. She was embezzling money before I found out, and she easily took on board my suggestion. I may be disreputable, according to her, but I’m not the villain of the piece here.’

  ‘Mr Marshall, you are, and you know it. But you’re right, Christine is no saint. But how about Nancy Bartlett?’ Wendy said. ‘What’s your story?’

  ‘There is no story. I have money, enough to see me out. Check me out if you want, but you’ll not find any dirt against me.’

  ‘But you met with Colin Young not long before he died. You must be regarded as suspect.’

  ‘I liked him, but that was all.’

  Larry and Wendy left the two not-so-young lovers in their love nest and left the flat. Another unexpected element to the murder investigation.

  Chapter 27

  It was Gwen Hislop who phoned Isaac, not on account of her sister, but because of the visit to her house by Terry Hislop. Her sister had mentioned it once before to Wendy, but then there had been no significance attached to it. But now, Christine Mason’s sister, as well as being her lawyer, was saying that there was more to it.

  Isaac, alone in the office and glad of the opportunity to get out, visited the woman at her house.

  ‘Terry has been here,’ Gwen said. Old news to Isaac, but he decided not to mention that Homicide knew of Terry Hislop being in London.

  ‘You’ve asked me here,’ Isaac said. There was no cup of tea, no chat about the weather and life in general, nothing that transformed Gwen Hislop from hard and severe to soft and agreeable. She was, he decided, the sort of woman who would have no trouble finding a man to keep her company, but from what the department had found out and from what her sister had said, she had been on her own since her marriage to Terry. And that was a long time ago, more than twenty years.

  ‘He’s been twice. The first time he was disagreeable, yet I let him into the house. He wanted to reflect on good times in the past.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I indulged him with his fantasies.’

  ‘Are you saying that there were no good times?’

  ‘Not that I can remember, and certainly not after my dear sister,’ sarcastically said, Isaac noted, ‘told me that she had been screwing him behind my back.’r />
  ‘I thought you were friends again.’ Isaac had to admit that she had a colourful manner in the way she spoke, and she was articulate, her choice of words entertaining.

  ‘Not friends, sisters.’

  ‘Does Christine know all of this?’

  ‘We’re not talking at this time. She left here and went back to her house, and good riddance to her. It’s a good job I don’t have a dog, or she would have taken it as well.’

  ‘The parting was acrimonious?’

  ‘You could say that. No doubt you and your officers think she’s a lovely person, liberal with her favours, but basically, harmless and agreeable?’

  ‘To some extent. But we’re not naive. She committed a criminal act, but we’re not charging her, no proof. And, as you say, “liberal with her favours”.’

  ‘Forget about her for the moment,’ Gwen said. ‘A coffee.’

  Wendy would have said it was the Isaac charm, softening the hardest heart. ‘That’d be fine,’ he said.

  ‘The second time,’ Gwen Hislop said after she had returned with two cups, ‘Terry had been drinking. I didn’t want to let him in, but he stuck his shoe in the door as I tried to close it.’

  ‘Did he harm you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘In the past?’

  ‘Statute of limitations on that far back. Let’s focus on his last visit.’

  ‘He’s in your house, he’s drunk, he’s angry.’

  ‘Not drunk, just a little unsteady on his feet. It used to be a joke in our courting days, how I could down four pints of beer and still walk a straight line and he’d be struggling to stand up.’

  ‘He’s not committed a criminal act by visiting you, then?’

  ‘He frightened me, but no. I’d say he’d drunk two to three pints, enough to think we were still married, and I was there for him.’

  ‘Amorous advances?’

  ‘He thought they were, I didn’t. I don’t need a lecher pawing me, not now.’

  ‘You live alone,’ Isaac said.

  ‘I’ve just become used to my own company. I’m not a man hater, not anything really. Terry was enough for me, and the years passed by. For the first five, I was definitely anti-men, and then I had my career and my own cosy environment.’