A Murder to Die For

  ‘But it’s him! Unless he has an identical twin,’ said Blount.

  ‘Oh right. An evil twin,’ said the officer, sarcastically.

  Blount frowned.

  ‘But even if that were true, it would still mean that you have the wrong guy locked up,’ the officer continued.

  ‘Okay, okay. Bail him,’ said Blount begrudgingly.

  The fires in the boat sheds had been impossible to control. Once the old dry wood had caught alight there was no stopping them. Fuel on board the boats and in cans stored in the sheds had added to the conflagration too. The exhausted fire crews, many of which had been up all night dealing with the hotel fire, had decided that their best option was to let the fire consume itself while pumping water from the canal on to the grass around the perimeter to prevent it spreading. All three of the sheds were fiercely ablaze and one had already collapsed. With a noisy crash, the second shed’s rusty tin roof fell to the ground, taking down an entire wall of blackened wooden cladding as it did so.

  ‘Let’s hope there was no one inside,’ said Shunter.

  Miss Wilderspin nodded and watched as the twisted metal skeleton of the third shed folded in upon itself, sending a shower of sparks up into the sky. She had recovered some of her energy and vitality but the incident with the tractor had left her very shaken.

  ‘I keep wondering what Mrs Dallimore was doing in there,’ she said.

  ‘I assume that she was following a lead of some kind. She is a journalist after all,’ said Shunter. He looked at the tractor, which was being fitted with chains so that a crane could lift it out of the canal. ‘Though why she felt the need to break out of the place quite so dramatically I can only guess.’

  ‘You think that she was escaping from the place?’ said Miss Wilderspin.

  ‘I do,’ said Shunter. ‘Her actions smacked of desperation. Maybe she spotted the fire and panicked? Maybe she was locked inside?’

  ‘Locked inside by accident? Or on purpose?’

  ‘Three fires in three separate boat sheds? I think we can rule out accidents.’

  Blount returned to his Incident Room in a huff and rudely ignored the reporters who had gathered outside following the revelation that the dead woman was award-winning author Shirley Pomerance. He was surprised to find the library’s front door locked and it did nothing to improve his mood. Nicola Banton let him in.

  ‘We had to lock it,’ she explained. ‘The media people have gone nuts since they found out who the victim is. Anyway, I don’t know how relevant this is but while you’ve been out I’ve found some interesting bits and pieces regarding those notes in Mrs Handibode’s book that you asked me to research.’

  Blount nodded but didn’t seem to be hearing a word. Banton decided to carry on regardless. ‘I looked at the surname “Falk” and I found a record of a Millicent Falk who married a jeweller and . . . what?’

  Blount had raised his hand for her to stop. ‘This isn’t my case any more,’ he said. ‘Save it for Quisty.’

  In the darkness of the box van’s interior, Esme Handibode’s head bumped against the wall and she cursed the driver. Opposite her, Brenda Tradescant looked to be asleep but it was hard to tell in the gloom.

  Mrs Handibode wished that she could telepathically transmit a message to the other woman saying, ‘This is all your fault.’ But she couldn’t, so she made do with a frown and the best sneer she could muster despite the handicap of her gag.

  The white van drove on deeper into the flat countryside.

  Detective Chief Inspector Gavin Quisty arrived at the Incident Room without warning at 3 p.m. trailed, as always, by his staff officer Detective Sergeant Kim Woon. It was rare to see one of them without the other and there had been suggestions that the two were romantically involved. They had both vehemently denied the rumours, saying that they had no time for the complexity and constraints of a relationship. However, they had no problem admitting that this hadn’t stopped them from having a great deal of sex with each other.

  Quisty was the golden boy of the South Herewardshire Constabulary CID and he was often asked why, after a glittering career with the West Midlands Police in Birmingham, he had transferred to such a small county force. His answer was always uncompromising: ‘I’m going to be Chief Constable one day,’ he would say. ‘A small constabulary means less competition when it comes to promotion. Besides, I need to understand how county forces work in comparison to larger city forces. Different courses require different horses.’ Tall, good-looking and intimidatingly intelligent, he seemed more than capable of achieving his goal, and was already, at the age of just thirty-two, one of the youngest Detective Chief Inspectors in the UK.

  ‘I assume that you’re Nicola Banton,’ he said with a dashing smile and a firm handshake. ‘May I call you Nicola?’

  ‘Please do,’ said Banton, trying hard not to blush.

  ‘Excellent. Gavin Quisty. I think we can dispense with all of that “sir” or “guv” nonsense while we’re working on the same team. And this is Kim Woon.’

  ‘Nice to meet you both. I’ve heard a lot about you,’ said Banton.

  ‘Statistically, some of it is bound to be true,’ said Quisty with a wink. He was dressed in a royal-blue three-piece suit, complete with pocket watch and chain. His brogues were mirror-shiny and he sported a lemon-coloured cravat and pocket handkerchief. His hair was dark but thinning and swept back like a crest. Facially, he was not dissimilar to Blount, high-cheekboned and angular, but somehow he wore his sharp features much better on his skull. ‘Now, we’ve had a kind of briefing at Bowcester,’ he continued. ‘But it would be much more useful to get the full story from you excellent people who have been working at the coalface. Is it possible to arrange a meeting for everyone involved in the case? Say, for four o’clock?’

  ‘I should think so,’ said Banton.

  ‘Thank you, Nicola. Now, is DI Blount about?’ said Quisty. ‘I’d like to say hello and reassure him that he is still very much an important part of this investigation.’

  ‘I think he might be in the little boys’ room,’ said Banton. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Lovely,’ said Woon.

  ‘I’d prefer tea. Earl Grey if you have it,’ said Quisty.

  Miss Wilderspin had elected to go to the hospital and wait for Mrs Dallimore to wake up in case she had any useful information to share. Shunter, meanwhile, had travelled in a police car to Bowcester Police Station to make a witness statement before being dropped back home so that he could change into some dry clothes. The sight of her supposedly retired husband getting out of a marked police car in wet clothing that stank of diesel was not something that Mrs Shunter could let pass without comment and she did so at length, accusing him of ‘hanging around with the boys’ instead of looking for meaningful work. She was right, of course. He had no legitimate excuse for getting involved. He apologised, kissed her affectionately on the cheek and promised her that he would return to the job-hunting first thing on Monday morning. In the meantime, he headed back into the village to see the end of the festival.

  ‘Consider this . . . plates don’t make sense without gravity.’

  For a long, uncomfortable moment there was silence around the table. Blount crossed his arms and rolled his eyes. Jaine looked at Banton and she gave a tiny shrug. Woon smiled, revealing an endearing gap between her top front teeth. She’d heard this speech before.

  ‘It’s something I heard that astronaut chap, Commander Chris Hadfield, say,’ said Quisty. ‘And it got me thinking.’

  ‘Oh good,’ muttered Blount.

  ‘Imagine that you’re a starship captain and you’re meeting an alien race for the first time,’ said Quisty. ‘And maybe they look completely different to us, like a blob or something. You invite the alien captain on board to say hello and you lay on a banquet of Earth foods. So the aliens come aboard and they see us humans all trying to eat our dinner off plates and the food just keeps drifting away. Wouldn’t they think, “What are those flat things they keep trying t
o put their food on? They make no sense.” And they’d be right. Plates don’t make sense without gravity.’

  ‘Ah I see,’ said Jaine.

  ‘Of course plates make sense,’ said Blount, snippily. ‘They’re just harder to use in space.’

  ‘But that’s exactly my point,’ said Quisty. ‘Plates make sense to you but that’s only because you know that they are a part of our eating tradition and that we evolved on a world where the food doesn’t just float into our mouths. You have all the facts so things make sense. But the aliens don’t, so to them, plates don’t make sense. They’d need to be given the missing facts in order to understand what’s going on.’

  There were unconvincing nods of understanding around the table. Blount folded his arms tighter and tried to sink even more deeply into his hard plastic seat. To his chagrin, Quisty had commandeered the big comfortable librarian’s chair.

  ‘It’s the same story with chopsticks,’ added Woon. ‘Why would any culture develop such an awkward eating utensil when spoons are so much easier to use? You need additional facts to understand the context in which chopsticks were invented.’

  ‘Are you Chinese then?’ asked Blount. Woon did have something of a Far Eastern look about her; a look that was accentuated by her short black bob and straight fringe.

  ‘Cornish, actually,’ said Woon. ‘But my grandmother came from Hong Kong.’

  ‘Now there’s a story of cosmic connections,’ said Quisty. ‘Woon is a Cornish surname. And also a Chinese surname. Kim’s grandparents bonded over the fact that they had the same family name despite coming from vastly separated cultures.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Banton.

  ‘Hmf,’ said Blount.

  ‘So why were chopsticks invented?’ asked Jaine.

  ‘No one really knows, to be honest. But probably because they were kinder to people’s highly decorative porcelain or lacquered tableware,’ explained Woon. ‘Spoons would scrape the patterns off.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Banton.

  ‘But bugger all to do with the Shirley Pomerance murder,’ said Blount. ‘This is all a waste of time.’

  ‘Brian, Brian, Brian. It has everything to do with it,’ said Quisty. ‘This murder doesn’t make sense at the moment because the facts you have so far uncovered – and excellent facts they are too, by the way – don’t connect with each other. We need to find the facts in between, the facts that help us to make sense of what’s happened. We have a victim but we have no motive and no clear perpetrator. There appears to be no obvious reason why any of the people on our current list of suspects would kill Shirley Pomerance.’

  ‘Have you read any of her books?’ said Blount, simultaneously managing to somehow smile and sneer.

  ‘A literary critic too? You are a man of many talents,’ said Quisty, smiling in return. ‘But, joking aside, there is a reason why someone murdered Shirley Pomerance. Find that reason and it will connect us to our killer. As Lord Peter Wimsey says in Busman’s Honeymoon, “Once you’ve got the How, the Why drives it home.” The answer always lies in the connections – we need to identify the gaps in our knowledge and then work out how to fill them. And we’ll do that by exploring new avenues of thought and by accessing new sources of information that maybe we didn’t realise existed.’

  Blount harrumphed.

  ‘In fact, Nicola here was telling me earlier that she’s found some very interesting connections already,’ said Quisty.

  ‘DI Blount asked me to look into some notes he found that Mrs Handibode had scribbled in a book,’ said Banton.

  ‘Well spotted, Brian!’ said Quisty.

  Blount harrumphed again.

  ‘I found out, firstly, that a person called Millicent Falk married a jeweller in 1939 called Henry Welter who ran a shop in Sherrinford. And the ring that identified the victim as Shirley Pomerance came from a jeweller’s shop in Sherrinford called Welter and Dickentrice.’

  ‘You see? Connections,’ said Quisty.

  ‘Coincidence,’ said Blount, secretly rather pleased with himself for making something of the notes.

  ‘Coincidences can be very revealing, Brian. Go on, Nicola.’

  ‘It is the same jeweller’s,’ said Banton. ‘I phoned the current owner, a Mr Peter Dickentrice, and he said that the shop was owned solely by the Welter family right up until 1986 when the last of the Welters retired. He’s been running the business ever since. He fixed Miss Pomerance’s ring and told me that it was originally made by Henry Welter for his wife-to-be, Millicent Falk. It was her wedding ring. Sad story, really. He was killed during the Second World War and she had to learn to be a jeweller herself to keep the business in the family.’

  ‘You see?’ said Quisty. ‘We have a ring made for someone called Millicent, an oh-so-pertinent name when you consider when and where our murder happened, and—’

  ‘Why is it?’ said Blount. ‘There are probably hundreds of Millicents among the fans outside.’

  ‘Actually, there aren’t,’ said Banton. ‘Millicent isn’t a common name at all. Milly, yes, but not Millicent. It was popular with the Victorians but then it tailed off in the early twentieth century. It wasn’t even in the top one hundred most popular names around the time that Millicent Falk would’ve been born and I could only find about five hundred birth records nationwide in the census data. The name has only had a revival in the last decade, partly because of Agnes Crabbe’s books.’

  ‘It’s still not relevant.’

  ‘Don’t be so dismissive, Brian. Try to think laterally. The more facts we have, the more connections we make and the more we understand. We’re trying to construct a lattice, a web, a circuit diagram of causal events. If we add everything we know, plus anything that seems to have a connection, no matter how flimsy or insubstantial or coincidental it seems, the web will get richer. New connections will form spontaneously and new insights will appear. It’s as if we’re growing a mind, a brain, from scratch. And that, my dear colleagues, is why we call it intelligence.’

  Blount’s eyes rolled so high that all you could see were the whites.

  ‘Mr Welter made a ring for the love of his life, a lady called Millicent Falk,’ said Quisty. ‘It must have been very precious to her. Especially after she then lost him in the war.’

  ‘So?’ said Blount.

  ‘So, what connects those people to our murder?’

  ‘Nothing. They died years ago.’

  ‘Indeed they did,’ said Quisty. ‘But what I want to know is . . . why did Mrs Handibode mention the name Falk in her notes in connection with the words “ANDREW T – SECRET”, and why was Millicent Falk’s precious wedding ring on the finger of our murder victim, Miss Pomerance, yesterday?’

  Upon hearing the news of Savidge’s release, Helen Greeley had found herself in a world of doubt and uncertainty. She wanted to apologise to him for telling the police where he’d been hiding but she suspected that he probably wouldn’t want to see her ever again. Therefore, she’d asked Nicola Banton to relay a message to him at Bowcester Police Station to meet her at the Gondolier Italian all-day restaurant at five o’clock. If he didn’t show up, she would have her answer. In the meantime, she had agreed to a short and informal press junket at the village hall, now reopened to the public. Thankfully, in an effort to cover up the debacle on the houseboat, the police hadn’t released the identity of the suspect they’d been looking to arrest, which meant that no one yet knew about Greeley’s involvement. However, they had been keen to ask her about other events and, after a flurry of questions about the fire and the explosions at the hotel, the line of questioning had turned to her non-appearance on Saturday night and to romance.

  ‘So who is this mystery man you were with?’ asked a lady from the Bowcester Mercury. ‘Anyone we’d know?’

  ‘That’s my business for now,’ said Greeley. ‘But I will tell you that he’s not famous or rich or powerful. He’s just a guy. And he’s a lot like me in the way he looks at the world.’

  ‘How did yo
u meet?’

  ‘Ah, now there’s a story! And I may share it with you one day,’ said Greeley, smiling. ‘But not today.’

  ‘Is it true he climbed up to your room on a rope?’ asked the showbiz editor for the South Herewardshire Bugle.

  ‘It all sounds frightfully romantic, doesn’t it?’ said Greeley with a wink. ‘Had there been a rose-covered trellis I’m sure he’d have used that instead.’

  ‘So just how serious is it, Miss Greeley?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ she said enigmatically.

  ‘And what do you say to the rumours that you were abducted and held prisoner?’ asked a lady from the Lady.

  ‘I say nonsense. But now I must go and get changed and have something to eat before tonight’s events. It’s been a frightening and terrible experience for everybody and my heart goes out to those who were injured. Thank you.’

  And now, as she sat in the Gondolier and waited to see if Savidge would turn up, she toyed with a new phone she’d obtained and wished that there was someone she could talk to other than reporters. Normally she’d have phoned her agent for advice and a girl-to-girl chat. But the court case wasn’t yet finished and, as a member of the jury, Portia was unavailable. In fact, having been held incommunicado at a hotel for several nights, it was quite possible that she hadn’t even heard about the events in Nasely yet. Greeley realised just how much she relied upon her agent for advice, help and reassurance. But, to her surprise, she realised that the person she most wished she could talk to was the man she knew as Stingray.

  Savidge walked through the crowds of Millies in extreme discomfort. Partly, it was the constricting nature of his cocktail dress. But it was also because of sudden flashbacks and fuzzy memories of his experiences the day before when the very sight of a Cutter had filled him with horror. Even now, walking among them felt uncomfortable and he’d shuddered several times. Thankfully, a police doctor had prescribed him replacement pills and they were helping to take the edge off his distress.