Rex went in and, scooping one squirming tot in each arm, lifted them over the backrest of the sofa and plunked them down on the black faux leather in front of the flat screen TV. Looming over them, he pointed a finger at each sticky and terror-stricken face. “Now, do not move until I tell you.”
Exiting the room, he left the door ajar and returned to the exhausted mother. “Want to tell me aboot it, lass?” Something was troubling her. Was it just the fact of being stuck at home with two rambunctious kids? Somehow, he felt something more was afoot.
Donna, forehead reposing in her lap, clasped her knees and rocked back and forth on the stairs. “I feel like a prisoner,” she moaned. “I daren’t go out of the house. Everything’s in hock. The telly will be next. They’ve started calling the house!”
“Who is calling the house?”
“The people Dud owes money to. Listen to this.” She jumped to her feet and lifted the phone bodily from the hall table, unraveling the line as she returned to the stairs. She set it on her knees and lifted the handset. “I saved this message,” she told Rex, pressing a button.
He sat beside her on the step, their thighs touching in the confined space.
“We know where to find you, Mr. Dudley,” a male voice intoned from the receiver. Click.
“That’s it?” Rex asked.
“I didn’t save the others. What d’you think?”
“It sounds a wee bit sinister. Have you called the police?”
Donna shook her head, causing her topknot to slip from its yellow band. “Dud won’t hear of it. He’s waiting on his commissions from the sale of his hot tubs. He says he can pay these scum off.”
“Who are they? And why did the man on the phone call him Mr. Dudley and not Mr. Thorpe?”
Donna shrugged. “You see, Dud bets on the horses.”
“Ah.”
“He promised he’d stop. But he won’t, not until they break his knee caps. That’s what they threatened on the last message.” She looked at Rex. “When you rang the bell, I thought at first you might be one of them. But you sounded different, and you seem like a gentleman. Even if you had been one of Dud’s creditors, I wouldn’t have cared. It’s almost worse not knowing what’s going to happen, what they’ll repossess next. My car’s gone. I know how Dud’s going to get out of this mess. I only hope he did it to protect me and the boys, and not just to save his own precious skin.”
“Are you suggesting he perpetrated a crime to pay off his debts?” Rex asked, mindful of her reaction to Victoria Newcombe’s death.
“He poisoned Mrs. Newcombe and her daughter, didn’t he? That’s what you came to tell me. So Timmy would inherit Newcombe Court. Dud could always twist Timmy around his little finger and get money off him.”
“Mrs. Thorpe, Dudley has not been charged with anything. Suspicion is more likely to attach to someone who was at Newcombe Court early this morning.”
“Dud wasn’t with me all morning. He went out to see a man about some business, or so he said.”
“How long was he gone?”
“An hour, hour and a half. When he got back, he took a shower, got all dressed up, and left me here with the kids, waiting for the doctor.”
“The police will want to confirm everyone’s alibis in due course.”
“Did Dud send you to explain why he was held up?”
Rex wished he could answer in the affirmative. “No, I came under my own steam. The detective in charge is letting me follow an independent line of investigation, providing I demonstrate the utmost discretion.” At least, Lucas hadn’t told him not to.
“Why would he let you do that?”
“I undertake private cases on occasion.”
“You’re from Edinburgh, aren’t you? I always liked a refined Scots burr.”
“My name is Rex Graves.” He rummaged in his wallet for a business card. “I should have introduced myself sooner.”
She smiled weakly and stared in deep thought at the phone. Since she made no attempt to take the card, he left it on the stairs. Bumping and squelching sounds from the leather sofa in the other room punctuated a round of animated character voices on the TV.
“I can get my mum to watch the kids for a bit,” Donna decided, picking up the receiver. “I want to go round to Mabel’s, do a bit of digging into Dud’s finances. He keeps all that stuff there. I’d feel safer if you came with me. Can you?”
Tugging back his cuff, Rex glanced at his watch: 7:30. “I don’t know if Mabel will be back home yet. She and Timmy went to the hospital and are supposed to return to Newcombe Court.”
“There’s a spare key she keeps on the window ledge. Dud sometimes uses it. I just need the recent bank statements, to see how much is in the account. All his private papers and financial documents are at his old home. Timmy helps with his taxes.”
“What would Mabel say if you went in her house when she wasn’t home?”
“What could she say? If Dud is hiding stuff from me, I’ve a right to know.”
“Might be better if you waited until she got back.”
“She won’t let me look in his old room. She always takes his side. It’s not like I’m going to take anything—I just want to look. I’ll say I forgot Duddie’s toy gun and he was screaming for it.” She started dialing. “But in case someone’s after Dud and I’m followed, I need you to come with me.”
Rex hesitated, loath to become embroiled in the domestic dispute.
“It won’t take long. It’s less than a kilometer away.”
Seeing the despair in her eyes, he nodded in confirmation. He could not let her go alone and, in any event, he welcomed the excuse to see the Thorpe family home. He rose from the stairs and, returning to the front room, found Duddie in the process of smothering his younger brother with a sofa cushion. When he saw Rex, he shot back into a sitting position. Brendan, curled into a ball, pummeled the cushion with his feet. When he, too, caught sight of Rex, he froze and stared up at him with masochistic delight.
Rex pulled a clean handkerchief from his pocket and, bending down, wiped the boy’s nose for him, removing what he could of the encrusted gunk surrounding it with deft swoops of the linen. A sippy cup containing what looked like Ribena had come unscrewed and was leaking black currant juice onto the cream rug. He attempted to mop that up too, but it soaked into his handkerchief, forcing him to abandon it on the floor rather than risk staining the lining of his pocket. He rose wearily to his feet.
“Your gran might be coming to watch you both for a while,” he informed the boys. “Your mum’s mum,” he specified so they knew which one.
“Nan, Nan, Nan,” the eldest started chanting, enthusiastically joined by his brother in a piping falsetto as he bounced up and down on the sofa.
Donna appeared and admonished the kids. “Their nan lives around the corner,” she told Rex. “I’ll get my shoes. Can we go in your car?”
“No problem.” He followed her back into the hall, still a tad hesitant about what he was getting into.
“I tried Dud on his mobile but he’s not answering, so I called Timmy. The baby is in intensive care and Polly is still out of it. He’s heading back to Newcombe with his mum.”
At that moment, an older and thicker Donna let herself in the front door, her surprised glance roving over the strange man in her daughter’s hallway. With one hand, she unknotted her head-scarf beaded with raindrops and, pulling it off, draped it over the wooden coat tree in the corner. She wore an array of Zircon studs in her left ear beneath an upsweep of bleached blond hair cut short at the back.
“I’ve brought the fairy cakes I made with the boys this morning,” she told Donna, holding up a plastic container.
“Nan, Nan!” a crescendo of voices spilled from the front room.
“Coming,” the elder woman responded, upbeat and in control, much like a general about to enter the fray.
“Best take your plastic poncho,” she advised her daughter. “It’s coming down heavy.” She stared in concern at
Donna’s face. “You going to tell me what’s going on?”
“When I get back,” Donna promised. “But something bad has happened. Mr. Graves is here to help. He’s a private detective.”
“Listen, Donna,” Rex cautioned. “May I call you Donna? I may not be helping you at all. If your husband is involved in the Newcombe business, I need to know.”
“What Newcombe business?” Donna’s mother asked. “Is it about money?” Clearly she did not have any close friends among the Newcombes or Thorpes who might have called her with news of the murders. Rex decided this wasn’t the time to enlighten her. He and Donna had to get going.
“In the unlikely event Dud calls, I’m in the shower,” Donna instructed, grabbing a transparent poncho from the coat tree and opening the front door. “Don’t worry,” she added.
Her mother looked no less worried at hearing this.
Rex passed in front of her. “Wait here while I pull up the car.” Turning up the collar of his jacket, he plunged headlong into the rain.
“Take care of her, Mr. Graves,” Donna’s mother called after him.
Night Intruders
Donna directed Rex to Mabel’s house, having spent the brief drive looking over her shoulder and airing her anxieties about the hit men who were threatening her husband. “I just don’t know what they’ll stop at,” she said more than once. “If they’ve got our home phone number, they know our address, as we’re listed.”
This was not at all reassuring to Rex, who was fond of his knee caps. “What will you do with the information you find?” he asked, unpersuaded that Donna had thought this through logically, as was often the case with people under considerable stress.
“I’ll consider my options.”
“Your mother seems a together sort of person,” he offered as consolation.
“She’s a godsend, but she hasn’t any money to help us. She warned me against marrying Dud. Stop! It’s this one right here.”
Rex parked on the street in front of the white end-of-terrace house Donna had indicated. The windows, hung with net curtains, were unlit from within. A dim globe light beneath the stone porch roof revealed a glass-paned door. His phone stirred in his jacket. Drawing it from his pocket, he saw Helen’s name on the display. Oops. He’d been gone longer than intended.
“Rex! Where are you?”
“I’m still in Aston chasing down leads. What’s going on at Newcombe Court?”
“The police are still here dithering about.”
“Are the Thorpes there?”
“Yes, all three. When are you coming back?”
“Verra soon, lass, I promise.” He snapped his phone shut and returned it to his pocket.
“Was that your wife?” Donna asked.
“My fiancée. A truly understanding woman. Ready?”
She nodded but seemed reluctant to leave the peace and warmth of the car. He was anxious to take a quick look inside the house before Mabel got home. Even if Donna had a flimsy pretext for being there, he had none.
“I hope you get on well with your mother-in-law,” he said.
“She interferes a lot and, of course, no one is good enough for her Dudley.” Donna sat looking at her hands, her diamond solitaire sparkling with white fire in the gloom. “Dud wanted me to pawn it,” she said, holding up the fingers of her left hand. “But I won’t.”
On that note, she opened the passenger door. The rain had eased off again. Avoiding the puddles, Rex followed her up the path to the porch.
“Oh, bugger, it’s not here,” Donna said sweeping her fingers along the window ledge. “It’s usually kept in a crack at this end. What are we going to do?”
Heck if I know, Rex thought. This was, to be sure, an anticlimactic turn of events. “Why does Mabel keep a spare key outside?”
“Timmy is forgetful.”
“That’s true,” Rex said, recalling the scene at the church gate when Mabel had reminded her son about his inhaler and Tums. Rex looked around for another suitable hiding place for the key. “He’s also quite tall,” he murmured, reaching into a hanging basket of purple and yellow pansies above his head.
People were often more concerned about accidentally being locked out of their homes than about a burglar finding an easy way in, as he had learned from trying cases of home invasion. Feeling uncomfortably like a burglar himself, he groped among the velvety petals and discovered the small hard item he sought.
“Eureka,” he said, holding up the key.
Donna grabbed it and rammed it into the keyhole. “I bet they put it up there so I wouldn’t find it.”
The door opened. Rex took the key and replaced it in the basket.
Once inside, Donna threw off her wet poncho. Before either of them could make another move, a thud from behind the door to their right froze them to the spot. Rex’s heart leaped to his throat. Seemed they weren’t alone after all. By the porch light seeping through the frosted glass, Rex signaled for them to get out. That’s when he heard a meow.
Donna put a restraining hand on his sleeve. “It’s only Monty.” As she switched on the light in the stairwell, a large ginger tom tore out of the room and bolted for the back of the house, tail at half mast.
“I would have thought Timmy was the type to be allergic to cats.”
“He’s not, but Dud is. Timmy’s had him eight years.” Donna mounted the stairs. “I’m going to check out my husband’s old room. Keep watch, will you? Best lock the door.”
Rex did so and followed the ginger tom’s path to the kitchen. Donna must have put the light on in Dudley’s room. An upstairs window shed illumination on the walled-in garden, which backed onto those of a similar row of terraced homes. He decided to risk putting on the kitchen light since the house was already lit up like Vegas.
The orange tom, a shorthaired species with a white chin and snowy forepaws, stood by the cat flap eying him, waiting perhaps to see if the stranger would replenish his food bowl. Rex had not expected to find anything as companionable and homely as this fine fellow at Mabel’s abode, for she had struck him as somewhat sterile and austere. When Monty saw that no treats were forthcoming, he head-butted the flap, and his furry hindquarters and striped tail followed through the gap, leaving Rex alone.
The kitchen, though not ultra-modern, was neat and orderly. Two cups and saucers had been left upside down to dry on the draining board. Ditto a pair of teaspoons. A quick and careful look in the dishwasher revealed two neatly stacked breakfast bowls and plates, as yet unwashed. His gaze rested on the blue tin canisters on the Formica counter by the stove, labeled Tea, Coffee, and Sugar, but he refrained from rifling through the cabinets. An in-depth search was well outside his purview, and he was on extremely thin ice being here in the first place. He wished Donna would hurry up. He had an uncomfortable feeling about the whole situation.
His shoes squeaked on the shiny linoleum as he tiptoed into the dinette, where half the table was spread with bills and correspondence. A Welsh dresser in dark mahogany, matching the table, displayed a crockery set of the same blue floral design as the tea cups by the sink and the bowls and plates in the dishwasher—
serviceable ware but not fine china, in keeping with what he had seen so far of the house. On a shelf mainly reserved for cookery books, his eye picked out a number of medical encyclopedias and books on accounting.
A creak sounded on the landing upstairs. Rex flipped off the kitchen light and returned to the hall, glancing into the shadowy living room as he passed and confirming his impression of a functional and comfortable house, but not one on which a lot of money had been lavished. Perhaps Mabel had downgraded after Dr. Thorpe’s death.
“Find what you were looking for?” he called up the stairs.
Receiving no answer, he climbed the carpeted steps two at a time and, taking a right turn on the landing, entered the room directly above the kitchen. No Donna.
A brown shag pile rug curled up against the base boards. In a corner perpendicular to the window lay a narro
w bed draped with a beige crochet coverlet. Continuing anticlockwise, his gaze took in a bedside table and a small desk beneath the window ledge, each with the drawers hanging open and, against the third wall, a wardrobe whose doors stood agape, empty but for a few boxes on the upper shelf.
Across from the desk, a cheap set of shelves sagged beneath a boyhood collection of old textbooks, sports trophies, and souvenirs from the seaside—shells, artfully shaped driftwood, and colored bottles washed up on some shore. Posters of soccer stars tacked to the patterned wallpaper and a crossbow propped in a corner behind the door lent an element of masculinity to the old-maidish décor and rounded out his inventory of the most noteworthy items in the room.
Donna wandered through the doorway, holding a depleted checkbook and a sheaf of bank statements. “Couldn’t find anything next door,” she informed him. “I didn’t dare touch Timmy’s stuff as he’d notice if anything was out of place. This is what I found in here.”
She brandished the contents in her hand. “We’re still in the black, but only just. Twenty-eight quid in the chequing account to last us until the end of the month. Nothing in savings. I found several large cash withdrawals, which would be for his bookie. And something else. A cancelled cheque to a Doctor Forspaniak for almost the amount of our monthly mortgage, dated November of last year. Dud’s never been ill in his life, except for the occasional hangover.”
“Maybe it was supplemental care for his mother.”
“Mabel has the constitution of an ox, though you wouldn’t think it to look at her. Timmy bears the brunt of ailments in that family.”
“Let’s get everything put back the way it was,” Rex suggested, keen to get going now that Donna had what she’d come for and he’d gained an insight into the Thorpe family home.
As they moved toward the door, Rex cocked a thumb in the direction of the wooden bow. “Does your husband fancy himself as Robin Hood?”
Donna snortled. “You mean rob the rich to give to the poor? Meaning himself. Yeah, maybe.”
“You seriously think he poisoned the Newcombe family to get hold of their money?”
Murder of the Bride Page 13