Murder of the Bride

by C. S. Challinor

  “Yes, but I can’t talk about them. I said you could get the money from Bobby Carter. He looks after the family interests and Dud is family now.”

  “Do you want me to bring Dudley to the phone?”

  “No! They don’t trust him. I said you were my lawyer and you could get them the money. Please!”

  Rex waved his arm in the air and waggled his fingers, attempting to get the inspector’s attention at the far end of the hall. “Get Lucas and Carter here,” he mouthed to Helen. “Okay, Donna,” he resumed. “But it’s the weekend. How do they propose we get that amount of cash at short notice? Presumably they won’t take a cheque …”

  “They want a banker’s draft made out to bearer delivered first thing Monday morning. They’ll release me until then. If I don’t get the money, they’ll kidnap me again whenever they get the chance and dump me somewhere. And you can’t talk to the police.”

  “Can I speak to your abductors?”

  “They won’t speak to anyone directly.”

  “Where are your lads?”

  “At my mom’s.” Rex heard her blow her nose. “I was leaving my house with an overnight bag when they bundled me into a van and blindfolded me—Ow!”

  “What happened?”

  “One of them hit me. I’m not supposed to give away any information.”

  Inspector Lucas and Bobby Carter approached. Rex held them at bay with one hand and motioned for them to be quiet. Helen returned to her spot on the sofa and watched his face with rapt attention.

  “Donna, I have Bobby Carter with me. Let me see what I can sort out.”

  Inspector Lucas, who must have received the gist of the call from Helen, gestured for the phone. “Hello, Donna, I am Robert Carter, the Newcombe family solicitor,” he impersonated. “So Dudley has got himself into a spot of bother, has he? … To the tune of four grand. I see …”

  Lucas was doing his best to refine his normal voice and sound more like a solicitor than a copper. Rex only hoped the men demanding the ransom were unaware of the police presence at Newcombe Court. If they were keeping a low profile, it was possible they had not heard about the murders yet. Doubtful that Donna in her plight had felt the necessity of filling her captors in on what Rex had told her in Aston regarding the poisonings. “Well, I’m sure it won’t come to that,” Lucas said after listening for a moment. “Can I speak to the person in charge? … Yes, I’ll hold.”

  The inspector raised pale ginger eyebrows at Rex as he waited. “As if we didn’t have enough to deal with,” he muttered. “Any problem about raising the cash?” he asked Carter, holding the phone to his chest. The solicitor shook his head as Lucas returned the phone to his ear. “No, we’re not recording the call, Donna … How do we get the banker’s draft to you? … Yes, I’ll tell him—”

  The inspector turned to Rex. “She rang off. The people holding her wouldn’t speak to me. She’ll make contact with you Monday morning. Let’s see what the incoming number is. She said she was calling from a pay phone.”

  He then summoned PC Perrin. He decided the constable should go round to Donna’s mother’s house and interview her in case she had seen or heard anything that might lead to the kidnappers, and he should then talk to the bookie. Dispersing the guests in the immediate vicinity, Lucas informed Dudley of the situation and got his mother-in-law’s address off him.

  Dudley leaned forward on the sofa with the heels of his palms cupping his eyeballs. “I don’t believe this,” he groaned.

  Rex almost felt sorry for him, even though he had brought it upon himself.

  Secrets

  Rex caught up with Stella Pembleton as the caterers made for the front door after being told by the inspector they were free to go. “You must be relieved to know that inorganic arsenic caused the fatal symptoms and not any negligence on your part,” he told her.

  “It certainly is a relief. Not sure where it leaves Pembleton Caterers, though. News of the murders will be all over the media.”

  “There are more sensationalistic aspects to this case than who prepared the buffet. With any luck your name won’t come up.”

  “Do you know who did it?” Stella asked.

  “We may be close. In fact, I wanted to ask you when you might have left the wedding cake unattended this morning, before you iced the top.”

  Stella’s features drew taut as she gave the question some thought. “Oh, goodness. As I told the police, I was in and out of the kitchen. Lydia asked me to see that she had placed the flowers correctly. And then Mr. Carter couldn’t find his private stash of malt whisky and got into an altercation with the bartender, which I had to referee. Victoria Newcombe was upstairs getting ready. It’s stressful when people interfere with the arrangements at the last minute.”

  “Did Bobby Carter find his whisky?”

  “Eventually. But only after all the staff went hunting for it. He must have set the bottles down at the front door when he rang the bell this morning, and then forgotten about them. But he swore he had put them on the sideboard.”

  “When was this?”

  “Nine-ish. Rachel came to get me. I was about to ice the top and final tier of the cake.”

  “Thank you.” Rex wished the Pembleton sisters luck with their business and saw them off in their small van. In the dark, he detected two constables guarding the gate.

  Back inside the front door, he contemplated the sparsely inhabited hall, which the caterers had cleared of debris and glasses. Roger Litton had ordered take-out from a local Indian restaurant, and his wife and Helen were clearing a space on the table in the great hall. It was beginning to turn decidedly chilly, with only one fireplace to heat the vast space, the other, where the miniature figures had been dug out, having not been relit. He approached Dudley while Mabel was busy cooing over Timmy in a far corner.

  “What is Donna’s mobile number?”

  “She doesn’t have one, does she? I already told Freckle Face.”

  “What about your mother-in-law’s number?”

  Dudley read the number from his phone. Rex checked it against the digits on his display screen and sighed in frustration. A match. Donna had not called from a pay phone after all. Curious … Good thing PC Perrin had gone round to Donna’s mother’s house.

  “It’s a land line number,” Dudley told him. “Susan doesn’t have a mobile either, which is just as well, seeing as how much time she and Donna already spend nattering on the phone.”

  “How much do you owe your bookie?”

  “Three thousand quid.”

  “That extra thousand they’re demanding must be interest.”

  “Norman wouldn’t do that. And he’d never send a couple of heavies round. He knows I’m good for it.”

  “These heavies are threatening to remove Donna’s engagement ring by brute force.”

  “Silly bitch. I told her we should pawn it.”

  “You don’t sound overly concerned.”

  “Norman wouldn’t use those tactics. He’s a decent bloke at heart.”

  “You’d better hope so. ‘We know where to find you, Mr. Dudley,’” Rex said in a threatening tone. “Do those words sound familiar to you?”

  Dudley chuckled. “That’s one of my mates, putting on that voice for a laugh. I saved that message from years ago. It was my stag night. Dave called before they came to pick me up in a limo to take us all to a club in Derby.”

  “Did a girl jump out of a cake?”

  “Yeah, a cake shaped like a hot tub. My boss arranged it.” A reminiscing grin spread over Dudley’s coarsely handsome features. “My mates did me proud.”

  “Talking of cakes, did you poison Victoria and Polly Newcombe?”

  Caught off guard, as was Rex’s intention, Dudley’s head snapped up and he gaped at Rex. “What, murder my own—”

  “Your own what, Mr. Thorpe?”

  “Family. They’re my family now that Timmy’s wed Polly.”

  Rex considered all this while scrutinizing the young man.

&n
bsp; “What, you don’t believe me?” Dudley demanded, his dark gaze glued to Rex’s in bold defiance.

  “Were you at Newcombe Court before the wedding ceremony?”

  “No, I had some business to attend to.”

  Rex moved on to his next question. “Mr. Thorpe, are you allergic to cats?”

  Dudley stared at him in disbelief. “What do you want to know that for?”

  “Are you?”

  “Well, yeah,” the young man said cautiously. “I can’t go into my mum’s house without sneezing.”

  “Have you been here all evening?”

  “Never left. Ask anybody.”

  “Somebody was at your mother’s tonight. Was it one of your friends?”

  Dudley said nothing.

  “Come on, Mr. Thorpe. The proverbial cat is out of the bag. Did you tell your friend where to find the key and to go into your old room to remove something that might incriminate you if the police search the house?”

  The young man stared back at Rex, clearly wondering how the Scotsman knew so much. “Nothing criminal, I can tell you that much. I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “Doesna mean you’re not responsible,” Rex told him. “What does Dave look like?”

  “Sort of powerful across the shoulders. He’s into bodybuilding.”

  “Does he own a hooded jacket?”

  “Now you mention it, yeah. A navy blue one.”

  “Has he ever been to Newcombe Court?”

  “No, never. Why should he?”

  Good question, Rex thought. Jasmina may well have been lying about the hooded intruder. “Could one of your friends have told Donna the amount you owed your bookie?”

  “My mates are loyal. They’d never tell Donna my private business.” So his friends were entitled to know Dudley’s private business, but not his wife? “But Timmy might’ve told her,” Dudley added slowly, his jaw slipping askew in suspicion. “I went to him for the three grand, but he said he needed to be saving money now that he had a baby on the way. That’s a laugh.”

  Rex was prevented from probing deeper by Mabel’s arrival.

  “We’re going home now,” she told Rex. “Timmy has to rest and Dudley needs to see his boys before they go to bed.”

  “Susan has the kids tonight,” Dudley told her without explaining the circumstances. Presumably he didn’t want his mother knowing about the ransom demand.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you all to stay a while longer until my sergeant returns from Worley,” Inspector Lucas intervened, approaching the Thorpe family.

  “What’s in Worley?” Dudley asked.

  “Another dead body,” the inspector informed him. “Thomas Newcombe. I wanted the facts before making the announcement.”

  The Thorpes stared at him, speechless.

  “I think you’ll find Donna’s call was a hoax,” Rex told Lucas in private. “She called from her mother’s house, not a pay phone.”

  “As if we wouldn’t check.”

  “She can’t have thought her plan through very carefully. I suppose she’ll change her story and say her abductors told her to say she was calling from a pay phone so the police wouldn’t go straight round to her mum’s and apprehend them. Another reason to disbelieve her story: Dudley identified a so-called threatening phone message as being a practical joke by one of his friends on his stag night.”

  “And you believe him?”

  “In retrospect, I do. The message addressed him as Mr. Dudley rather than Mr. Thorpe, which seemed odd.”

  “I suspected a hoax when her abductors wouldn’t come to the phone. PC Perrin will find out more, but it’s a ruddy waste of police time. If the ransom turns out to be a scheme of Donna Thorpe’s invention, she’ll be charged with extortion, no two ways about it.”

  “She’s under severe stress,” Rex offered in her defense.

  The inspector, who had developed purplish swags beneath his eyes over the course of the evening, looked to be under considerable stress himself. Rex felt partly to blame. If he hadn’t gone to Donna’s house, she might not have concocted this scam. Perhaps she had just needed a sympathetic ear to begin with, and a desperate plan had evolved after he had witnessed the intruder at Mabel’s house.

  “She’s strung out looking after two wee monsters,” Rex went on to explain. “And money is tight.”

  “Well, her husband shouldn’t be frittering it away on the horses. What’s she like, this Donna?”

  “An ordinary enough lass. She feels trapped, I think, and she’s under the impression her husband might have murdered the Newcombes.”

  “Really. And why would she think that?”

  Suspecting Donna’s motives at the time, Rex had hesitated to tell the inspector about Dudley’s absence from the house that morning. He did so now, but urged caution. “If Donna fabricated her own kidnapping, her active imagination is equally capable of framing her husband out of spite. She might even believe he is the murderer. Either way, the hoax appears to be a desperate ploy to get the money owed, plus a bonus for her, before he’s arrested.”

  At that juncture, Sergeant Dartford returned, his squat figure making a beeline for Lucas. One look at his face told Rex he had important news.

  “Well?” the inspector asked. “Did you bring the note?

  “I have a copy right here.” Dartford whipped the item from his pocket with a smug grin. Rex wondered if he had in fact had his teeth knocked in at some point or if it was some genetic defect that made them grow inward and crooked. “The original is being tested for prints.”

  Lucas read the note and handed it to Rex. “It was found in Newcombe’s briefcase. The paper had been torn from the top half of a white sheet. On it were handwritten the words, “Worley Station Bridge, 9:15 am. M.”

  “What’s this smudge at the bottom?” Lucas asked Dartford, leaning into Rex and jabbing at the paper.

  “Heavy grease or engine oil on the original. The lab is doing an analysis.”

  “No envelope?”

  “None was found.”

  Rex addressed the inspector. “May I compare it to the note written to Polly’s aunt Gwen asking her to meet the sender at the top of the tower?”

  Lucas pulled the plastic-covered missive from his jacket pocket. “I’ll have Perrin get this to the lab pronto. Nobody I asked recognized or admitted to recognizing the writing.”

  “Similar,” Rex said, studying the notes. “Spiky capital M in both.” He jabbed at the first letter of the note to Gwen Jones: “Meet me at the top of the tower. An admirer.”

  “Perhaps someone should speak to Mack Simmons, the mechanic who was seeing Polly before he moved to St. Ives,” Rex suggested. “It might be helpful to corroborate when he left.”

  Lucas nodded curtly. “It’s possible he snuck back. All I got from the guests was that he was an unsavory character who worked at a garage in Aston, which has since closed.”

  “Robert Carter paid him to leave Aston,” Rex told him.

  “Hear that?” Lucas asked the sergeant. “I knew that solicitor was hiding something. What else did you find out at Worley?”

  “Newcombe fell from one of them wrought-iron bridges with low railings built before suicide and murder became so popular,” Dartford replied. “It’s only a small station. Platform was deserted around 9:15, according to the ticket clerk. One witness recalls a middle-aged man in a suit up on the bridge, looking as if he was waiting for someone. Could be our man, although middle-aged blokes in suits isn’t a rare sight.”

  “More so on a Saturday,” Rex pointed out. “But no one saw the person he was waiting for? No one saw him fall?”

  Dartford shook his head emphatically. “No security cameras either. A couple of female shoppers waiting for the next train into Derby saw the body on the far tracks, split seconds before a fast train went ploughing over it. The briefcase was recovered beside the tracks, intact. It contained his passport, driving licence, family photos, a hotel receipt, and other documentation enabling us
to retrace his most recent movements.”

  Sergeant Dartford proceeded to fill the inspector in on the scant details he had gleaned from his inquiries into Tom Newcombe’s life, latterly spent on his common-law wife’s family farm outside Bucharest, fixing clocks and watches, and trading in antiques. The woman, Tereza, had been forthcoming about her relationship with Newcombe past and present when visited by the Romanian police, but had denied knowledge of his plans involving a reunion with his daughter beyond the newspaper clipping she had found in a drawer of a desk he was in the process of restoring. He had told her he was going to London on business.

  “Seems he lied out of both sides of his mouth,” the inspector remarked when Dartford came to the end of his report.

  “A shady character, to be sure,” the sergeant agreed.

  “But how did he get hold of the clipping about his daughter’s engagement?” Lucas tapped on his bottom teeth with his pencil.

  “Romania is part of the European Union,” Dartford reminded his superior. “The Times would be available for ex-pats and visitors.”

  “Maybe M sent it to him,” Rex ventured.

  Lucas told his sergeant to contact Mack Simmons in Cornwall. “If M is our murderer,” he said, “it can only be one of three people. Let’s find out which one.”

  Paternity

  After a quick bowl of lukewarm curry and a few poppadoms, Rex decided to have another stab at Dudley Thorpe while Dartford was calling St. Ives. Preoccupied with the Worley murder, Lucas had not yet informed Dudley that his wife might have been making the story up about the kidnappers.

  Undeterred by the mute hostility Rex felt directed at him from the young man, he sat opposite him and leaned forward, hands clasped loosely between his knees. “I wonder if I might have a few more minutes of your time.”

  “I’ve told you and your police friends everything relevant to my wife’s situation and to the murder enquiry. And now we’re stuck here even longer on account of Mr. Newcombe’s death. I’m losing count, mate. And I told you—I have nothing relevant to add.”

  “Well, it can be hard to know what is relevant,” Rex submitted. “For example, what if I were to tell you that Timmy is not the father of Polly’s baby?”