Amy was surprised to see that Willie Sayers was present at the meeting in the Bridge at ten the following morning. Clearly he had heard something along the Crabwell bush telegraph. Not for the first time she wondered about connections between the various people involved in the case – the people whom she now silently thought of as ‘suspects’. Some of those connections she had found out about, but she felt there was a whole substructure of other former relationships and previous encounters of which she knew nothing.
There seemed to be no question that she, as the convener of the meeting, should be the one in charge of proceedings. There weren’t enough chairs in the Bridge, so Ted, the odd-job man, was despatched to bring more up from the bar. While he was doing this, there was an uneasy silence. Amy looked around the room.
The only suspect who looked at ease was Ianthe Berkeley, and her insouciance had probably been engendered by the bottle of vodka she had bought (not from Room Service but at the bar) the previous evening.
Willie Sayers, still immaculate in pinstripe, looked distinctly edgy. So did Bob Christie, his impression of the hard-bitten Fleet Street veteran now distinctly unconvincing. The outward confidence of Meriel Dane, dressed up to the voluptuous nines, was betrayed by her eyes darting nervously around the room. The Rev Victoria Whitechurch’s eyes were closed as if she were praying, which perhaps she was. The tension felt by Greta Knox and Alice Kennedy showed in the fact that they were holding hands, a sight not previously seen in public in Crabwell. Greg Jepson’s face was visibly twitching, making him look further along the Asperger’s scale than usual.
And Ben Milne, sitting a little apart from the others, was distinctly subdued. During their conversation, which had continued long into the previous evening, Amy had at one point asked if he wanted to bring Stan the cameraman along to record proceedings in the Bridge. The fact that a muckraker as avid as Ben had said no spoke volumes.
Finally, everyone had a seat. Ted had left the room and closed the door behind him.
Amy had read enough detective stories to avoid beginning with the words ‘You may be wondering why I’ve brought you here.’ Instead, she said, ‘We’re here to talk about Fitz’s death.’ Nobody expressed any surprise at that. ‘And also the death of Griffiths Bentley, which I am sure is not unconnected.’ Again, no surprise. Or argument.
‘The reason for the two murders…’ No one reacted to her use of the word ‘… is a secret in Fitz’s past, a secret he was unaware of until the Monday before last… which, as it turned out, was his last day on earth. The secret was that he had an illegitimate son.’
Everyone in the room looked towards the son in question. Clearly the Crabwell bush telegraph had been doing its stuff.
‘And it was that son, Greg Jepson, who told Fitz the glad news when he came to see him in this room that Monday afternoon. Greg also told him that he’d made over a large amount of money to his new-found birth father, more than enough money to modernise, refurbish, and save the Admiral Byng. So it’s no wonder that Fitz was in generous mood as he celebrated his “Last Hurrah” that evening.
‘Then of course comes the question of who was Greg’s birth mother…’
There was a tense silence. Expressions of puzzlement demonstrated that this piece of information had not made it on to the bush telegraph. Greg Jepson studiously avoided looking at Greta Knox. Alice Kennedy held her hand more tightly.
‘That,’ Amy continued, ‘was the secret for the protection of which someone wanted Fitz dead.’ She looked around the room. Still a lot of puzzlement, feigned or real.
To her surprise, Amy found that she was enjoying being centre stage. She liked being able to unroll the narrative at her own pace.
‘So we have to ask ourselves,’ she resumed, ‘who was in a position to find out about Fitz’s secret? Yesterday I went to see Rosalie Jepson, Greg’s adoptive mother. She heard about her son’s birth father from Griffiths Bentley.’
There was a sharp intake of breath from Bob Christie, who made eye contact with Willie Sayers. The MP turned abruptly away.
‘Some of you may know that Griffiths Bentley was a great hoarder of secrets. In the course of his work as a solicitor he became the repository of many details about which his clients might have preferred to keep quiet. And he was not above asking for money to ensure his confidentiality about keeping those secrets.’
‘Blackmail?’ asked Meriel Dane, looking rather shaky.
Still remembering her reading of crime fiction, Amy restrained herself from the classic response: ‘It’s such an ugly word – blackmail.’ Instead, she said, ‘I wonder, though, whether Griffiths Bentley actually found out the details about Fitz’s son for himself, or whether he got the information from someone else. Whether he even paid that person for the information.’ She turned to face Bob Christie. ‘You did quite a lot of research on Fitz, didn’t you, for a profile you were thinking of doing on him?’
The editor’s face empurpled as he blustered, ‘Yes, but he didn’t pay me money for what I told him.’
‘But you admit you did tell Griffiths about the illegitimate child?’
‘I did. I had come across the truth in my research. But, as I say, no money changed hands.’
‘So what did change hands?’ Amy felt her intuition had never been so finely honed. ‘Was the deal an exchange of information?’
Bob Christie’s blush now threatened apoplexy. ‘Yes, all right, it was.’
‘So what did you reveal to Griffiths Bentley?’
Bob Christie looked around the Bridge for support. None of the faces offered any, so he said in a subdued tone, ‘I told him that Meriel Dane’s real name was Merle Johannsson, and that she had been all over the papers when she very nearly murdered her husband.’
The only colour left in the cook’s face came from her make-up. She looked pleadingly around the room, but, like Bob Christie, did not see anyone about to come to her rescue. The expressions of surprise, though, told her that until that moment no one present had known about her lurid past. Unusually, she remained silent. She was hyperventilating so much that she couldn’t speak.
Amy didn’t look at her. She focussed again on Bob Christie. ‘What you didn’t know, though, was that Griffiths Bentley hadn’t found that information from his own research. He was told about it by someone else.’
‘Was he?’
‘Oh yes. By someone whose business was trading dirty secrets.’ She turned to face the MP. ‘Someone who had investigated your past, Mr Sayers, and found out about the unexplained drowning in Regent’s Canal of a girl called Jilly.’
Willie Sayers looked suddenly hollow in his pinstriped shell.
‘Someone,’ Amy continued implacably, ‘whose profession is finding Skeletons in Cupboards!’
They all turned their gazes on Ben Milne, whose customary laid-back calm deserted him as he said, ‘All right, I’m not denying anything Amy has accused me of. Yes, I do trade in dirty secrets. There’s an insatiable popular appetite for them. Someone’s got to feed that hunger, and that’s what I do. I’m bloody good at it too. I don’t feel any shame about my profession. If I wasn’t doing it, someone else would be. I don’t feel the need to have my actions inhibited by some outdated moral code.’
The response to this came from a new voice. Greta Knox hadn’t spoken in the meeting before. She asked coolly, ‘Would you describe committing murder as an offence against some outdated moral code?’
‘No, I wouldn’t. Nor,’ Ben replied, ‘have I ever been near to murdering anyone… unlike someone else in this room. Someone who has committed murder twice.’
This allegation did produce a confused reaction in the Bridge, as all of the suspects started to put forward their defences, the reasons why they could not have had anything to do with the killings of Fitz and Griffiths Bentley. All of the suspects, that is, except for one.
Ben Milne looked across at Amy and gave a curt nod. That was the signal they had agreed between themselves during their long discussions the nig
ht before.
Amy Walpole drew a deep breath and then began.
‘In spite of the coroner’s hastily-reached verdict, I don’t think there is anyone in this room who believes that Fitz committed suicide. We all know that he was murdered, though probably only three of us know who killed him.
‘I wouldn’t know either, but for the fact that there was a witness to the murder.’
This revelation produced a series of assorted gasps.
‘There was a kind of fatal logical sequence in what happened. When Greg Jepson found out who his birth father was, he arranged to meet Fitz and tell him. Fitz then said something during his “Last Hurrah” that made the murderer think he was about to spread the news around. So he had to be silenced. When Griffiths Bentley offered the same threat, he was fated to meet the same end.
‘The second murder had, so far as we know, no witnesses. But the first did. Through a telescope, the murderer was seen drowning Fitz in his own dinghy.
‘There was also, found in the bottom of the boat, a gold-coloured button that had been torn off during the struggle. It hadn’t come off the Admiral’s blazer.
‘Do I need to say more?’
‘No, you don’t.’ Releasing her partner’s hand as she spoke, Alice Kennedy stood up.
They sat side by side on Ben’s bed as he typed up the dossier on his laptop, but there was no warmth between them. The task was not a difficult one. Even without the confession, witness statements from Rosalie Jepson and the Crabwell Surgery, where Amy had found Alice had not turned up for the Mother and Baby Clinic the previous afternoon, would have provided enough evidence for a prosecution.
When they had both agreed the text, Ben emailed it off to DI Cole. And Amy was so excited that she wondered whether she’d be able to resist texting the officer the name of the person who’d confessed to the two murders.
‘So many bloody footprints,’ DC Chesterton said, close to despair.
‘Shoeprints, you berk,’ Cole said. ‘Anyone would think Man Friday had been here, the way you talk.’
For over an hour, the two policemen had been in the churchyard at Crabwell beside the open grave where Griffiths Bentley’s corpse had been found. They had several large drums of plaster, buckets of water, and spades, and were diligently making casts of all the impressions they could find. Already they had ruined their clothes, and might have stepped out of a slapstick film. Chesterton had asked if this wasn’t really a job for the scene-of-crime team, but Cole insisted the work had to be done before Allingham of the Yard got there.
‘This will be the clincher,’ Cole said. ‘You may not appreciate it right now, but a shoe impression is as good as a fingerprint in modern forensic science. It’s not so much the pattern of the tread as the wear pattern, the thousands of little nicks and scratches that show up under the microscope. Do you understand what this means?’
‘We can match the killer’s prints to the shoes worn by one of the suspects,’ Chesterton said in a bored voice. ‘But there are so many, including yours and mine and the gravedigger’s and the vicar’s and the people who lifted the body out, not to mention the world and his wife who came to have a gawp.’
‘We can eliminate all those.’
‘But it’s going to take an age.’ He gave the inspector a penetrating look. ‘If you really know who the murderer is, as you say you do, wouldn’t we be better employed in the interview room?’
Cole wiped some plaster away from his face. ‘No, this is the answer. Statements under questioning are no substitute for the proof a shoeprint provides. It’s visual, too. It will look good in the papers and on television news.’
‘Are you willing to state what sort of shoes your suspect was wearing?’ Chesterton asked. ‘Trainers, wellies, or even high heels?’ His superior had stubbornly declined to reveal who the killer was. Maybe he would reveal the gender. Chesterton doubted this. He secretly suspected Cole had been bluffing all along, and that this farce in the graveyard was desperation.
‘I’ll check my phone again,’ Cole said. He had a man posted at the station to notify him when Allingham of the Yard stepped off the London train. After some scrolling, he said, ‘It’s not good news. He’s at Ipswich already, and a driver was sent to meet him. Jesus, Joseph and Mary, what can we do?’
Chesterton treated this as a rhetorical question.
‘How many casts have we made?’ Cole asked, starting to panic.
Chesterton leaned on his spade and looked at the tarpaulin where their products were arrayed like a catch of white fish.
‘Over fifty, but most of them haven’t dried yet.’
‘Call the station, see if they can stall him, take him out for a meal or something.’
‘Wouldn’t it be better coming from you, sir?’
But Cole seemed to be hyperventilating. He handed his mobile to Chesterton, and it pinged.
‘There’s a text just in from Amy Walpole. Do you want me to read it?’
Cole had his arms around the legs of a stone angel and was gazing upwards as if he needed a miracle. He managed to give a nod.
Chesterton read the message rapidly. ‘Well, here’s a turn-up. She says they had their meeting and Alice Kennedy has confessed to murdering Fitzsimmons and Bentley.’
‘Confessed?’ Cole asked, starting to get control of himself again.
‘That’s what she says.’
‘Alice who?’
‘Kennedy. Isn’t she the partner of the Girl Guide leader, Greta Knox?’
‘You’re right.’ He straightened up and draped a companionable arm over the angel’s wing. ‘I knew all along. Her shoeprint will be here somewhere.’
‘She murdered the Admiral as well?’ Chesterton queried.
‘Oh, yes,’ Cole said, ‘and we must go to Knox’s cottage right now and make the arrest.’
‘In this state?’ Chesterton said. ‘Have you seen yourself, sir?’
‘Doesn’t matter, man. No time to lose. This will go down as my biggest triumph. Bloody Allingham can skulk back to Scotland Yard and tell them Suffolk Police had it under control all along. Sod Allingham of the Yard. Let the world know Cole of Crabwell solved this one. With some help,’ he added, looking up at the angel and crossing himself.
‘But we thought the Admiral committed suicide, fell into his boat and died after a lethal cocktail of drink and drugs.’
‘Not so,’ Cole said, back to his assertive best. ‘I never believed that. There was definite evidence of a struggle.’ He dipped his plaster-white hand into a pocket and took out the evidence bag containing the blazer button Chesterton had found in the Admiral’s boat. ‘The vital clue. I didn’t want everyone panicking over a murder, so I played a canny hand and put it about that Fitz committed suicide. It was always obvious there had been a struggle and this little item was ripped off the old man’s blazer.’
‘But you said it caught on something as he fell.’
‘So unlikely I scarcely dared suggest it, but you swallowed it, and so did the rest of them. One of the rowlocks.’
‘Rollocks,’ said Chesterton.
They hurried off to make the arrest.
Greta Knox unlocked the front door and led the way into the living room. As it always did, the painting above the fireplace caught her eye. The spare Pyrenean landscape had only one human touch: an abandoned jacket lying beside a wine flask; it was as though something had happened to call away their owner just before the artist came along. The air of mystery had captivated her when she first saw the picture. Now, though, there was no time for contemplating art. She turned to her partner.
‘Dearest Alice, we shan’t have long before the wretched police arrive. Should we try and do a moonlight flit in the middle of the day?’ She’d tried to speak lightly, but her voice failed as she saw Alice was trembling. She put her arms around the person who meant the most to her in the whole world and held her close. ‘It’s all right,’ she murmured. ‘Everything will be all right.’ Inside, though, she wondered whether anything wou
ld be all right ever again.
After a moment Alice drew back. ‘Perhaps a glass of brandy?’ She sat down in her usual chair.
‘Of course.’ Greta hurried to the drinks table and poured them each a substantial glass of Courvoisier. ‘I’m sure you can’t really have murdered Fitz, or that wretched solicitor. Why did you say you had? Did you think I was going to be accused?’ She gave Alice her brandy and watched while a generous quantity disappeared, and colour came back into the GP’s face. Then she went to her chair and sat, trying to grasp a sense of normality. There had been an air of unreality about the whole session in the pub after the funeral; surely it belonged in an Agatha Christie novel?
Alice took a deep breath. Her trembling had stopped and she looked very, very tired. An attempt at smiling failed miserably. ‘Darling Greta, there’s nothing you can do. I have confessed. It wasn’t that I was afraid you would be accused, I knew you hadn’t killed either Fitz or Griffiths Bentley because I murdered both.’
Greta felt shock run through her with the force of electricity. It seemed that something, some deep belief that this couldn’t be happening, had insulated her until now from the facts. She flung herself at Alice’s feet. ‘Why?’ she cried. ‘Why?’
Alice sighed and reached for her hands. ‘I couldn’t let your life be ruined by that dreadful man.’
‘Fitz? But he wasn’t dreadful.’ This was a nightmare and it was getting worse.
‘He’d told Gregory Jepson that you were his mother.’
‘But Gregory wasn’t going to tell anyone else, nor was Fitz.’
‘Wasn’t he? He’d been banging the drum in the bar that evening. You were involved with your Guides and didn’t hear him, but he announced again and again that it was his “Last Hurrah”. And that slimy TV presenter, Ben Milne, was trying to get him to confess sordid details of his life for his wretched programme. The more I thought about it, the more I was afraid for your secret. So I set off back to the pub along the beach and found him by his dinghy. He was het up, a couple of local lads had borrowed the boat and left it a long way from its usual mooring. Safe enough, the anchor was well sunk in the shingle, but he was always a fusspot about the wretched craft; it had to be in its particular place. I tried to get him to promise he wouldn’t tell Milne about you and him, but he became almost incoherent. Of course he’d had far too much to drink and he kept on telling me it was all good news and he’d tell everyone the next day. It sounded as though he was going to announce he was Jepson’s father and you were his mother. I could just see the TV programme relating all the facts of Fitz’s scandalous life. I got all wound up and went at him in a fury.’
The Sinking Admiral Page 25