Thanet glanced at the body on the bed and his grip on the photograph frame tightened.
Lineham had noticed the look on his face.
‘What is it, sir?’
Thanet put the photograph carefully back on the table. ‘I knew her, Mike, long ago, when we were at school.’
‘Well?’
Thanet shook his head. ‘Oh no, not well. But she … she was stunning, then. She was a couple of years older than me, and I don’t suppose she even noticed my existence, but half the school was in love with her, or claimed to be.’
‘She was at the Girls’ Grammar?’
‘Yes. She and another girl—I can’t remember her name, but she had red hair, that I do remember—used to go around with a group of sixth formers from the Boys’ Grammar …’ Thanet shook his head. ‘I can hardly believe it.’
‘You’re sure it’s her?’
‘Certain.’ Thanet picked up the photograph and held it out. ‘Look at her.’
Alicia Parnell had had the sort of face which, once seen, is not easily forgotten. The chin was too pointed, the nose too tip-tilted for beauty, but combined with huge dark eyes and high, classically-rounded cheekbones, they created an individuality which had not become blurred over the years. Looking at the snapshot over Lineham’s shoulder Thanet could clearly visualise the softer, more rounded adolescent Alicia beneath the mature face in the photograph.
‘I see what you mean,’ said Lineham.
‘I’d have recognised her anywhere, though I hadn’t seen her in years. Not since …’ He stopped, remembering.
‘Not since what?’
There was a knock at the door and Doctor Mallard appeared, escorted by Jarman, who took one brief, hunted glance around the room and withdrew. Thanet crossed to meet the little police surgeon.
Mallard, as usual, looked irritable, but Thanet ignored this. The loss of his dearly-loved wife, many years before, had left Mallard at odds with the world. Thanet sympathised with his inability to come to terms with his grief and tended to treat him as if he were still the good-humoured old friend Thanet remembered so well.
‘What have we got this time?’ said Mallard, frowning over his half-moon spectacles at the photographer who was obscuring his view of the body.
‘Nearly finished, Bates?’ said Thanet.
‘Yes, sir. Just one or two more.’
‘Hurry it up, then, will you?’
Mallard’s examination of the body did not take long. When he had finished he rose stiffly to his feet, pointedly ignoring Lineham’s outstretched hand. ‘No need to tell you how she died. Any dunderhead can see that for himself.’
‘Manual strangulation?’
‘Yes. The bruises are clearly visible, as you’ve no doubt noted. No scratch marks on the neck, though. Of course, her nails are very short …’
‘What about time of death?’
Mallard hesitated, considering. ‘Taking all the various factors into consideration, I’d say between ten and eleven last night. That’s only a guess, mind.’
‘Of course,’ said Thanet, trying not to grin. Mallard was rarely wrong in such ‘guesses’.
Mallard gave him a severe glance over his spectacles. ‘I mean it.’ He picked up his bag. ‘Well, if the guardians of law and order are satisfied, perhaps I may now be allowed to return home and go to church, like a civilised human being. Don’t bother to come down with me.’
‘I’ve got to have a word with the manager anyway.’
While they waited for the lift Thanet said, ‘She was a local girl, you know.’
‘Local? What makes you think that?’
‘I recognised her. From years back.… There was a photograph on the bedside table,’ he explained as Mallard opened his mouth to protest that nobody could possibly have made such an indentification from that distorted face. ‘She hadn’t changed much—scarcely at all, in fact.’
‘What was her name?’
‘Her maiden name was Doyle. Alicia Doyle.’
‘Doyle … Doyle … Let me see, didn’t she go around with one of the Rain boys for a while?’
‘Yes. Nicholas Rain. The violinist.’
‘Don’t treat me like an idiot! I know he’s the violinist. As a matter of fact I was quite close to the Rain family at one time. His father and I were friends for years, good friends, up until the time of his death. I’ve followed Nicholas’s career with great interest, right from the start. He was playing in Sturrenden last night, you know. I went to the concert.’
‘Ah, yes, I’d forgotten. We’ve been so tied up with the royal visit …’
‘Bach’s double violin concerto. With that young girl he’s just become engaged to. A fine performance they gave, too … though a bit too sensual for my taste.’
‘I wonder if that was why she was here—Mrs Parnell, I mean. For the concert.’
‘Could be.’
They had reached the ground floor and they parted. Thanet knocked on the door of Jarman’s office.
‘Come in.’
Jarman was sitting at his desk, head in hands.
‘Sit down, Inspector. Have you finished, upstairs?’
‘Not quite. In any case, I’m afraid it will be some time before the room is available to you.’
‘When do you think you’ll be able to get around to dealing with the guests? I’ve got three couples who are all packed and ready to go, and they’re not too pleased at being held up, I can tell you.’
‘Very soon. In most cases it’ll just be a question of taking a brief statement and making sure we have their names and addresses.’
‘Good. Oh, by the way, I’m afraid two couples had already left, before the … before the crime was discovered.’
‘Which floors were they on?’
‘One was on the third, two doors from Mrs Parnell. And the other was on the second.’
‘How long had they been here?’
‘The first couple came a week ago, the second the day before yesterday. They were all on holiday and booked some time ago.’
‘And Mrs Parnell?’
‘Booked a fortnight ago, just for the one night.’
‘I’d like their addresses, and a quiet room where we can question the other guests.’
‘There’s a small lounge on the first floor. Would that do?’
‘Fine. Thank you. Have you had an opportunity to question the staff yet?’
‘Some of them. Of course, a number of those who were on duty last night are not here this morning. The chambermaid, for instance, and she’s not on the phone.… There were two points you might find interesting. The first is that Mrs Parnell made a local call, soon after she checked in.’
‘Do you have the number she rang?’
‘Sorry, no. She just asked for an outside line, around four-thirty.’
‘And the other point?’
‘My receptionist saw her in the foyer at about seven o’clock, talking to some local people, a Mr and Mrs Leyton.’
‘Would that be Mr Richard Leyton, the fruit farmer?’ Thanet hadn’t seen him in years.
‘That’s right. There was a Rotary Club Ladies’ Night here last night, in the Fletcher Hall. My receptionist recognised Mr Leyton because he’d been involved in organising it.’
Thanet groaned inwardly. The place must have been crawling with people between ten and eleven last night. ‘You have the Leytons’ address?’
‘Their telephone number,’ said Jarman unhappily. He handed Thanet a slip of paper. ‘I’ve written it down for you. I don’t like doing this, but I see that I must. Anyway, apparently this was only a brief conversation and then Mrs Parnell left the hotel. She hadn’t had dinner here, we don’t start serving until seven-thirty.’
‘And she didn’t mention where she was going, to your receptionist?’
‘No.’
There was a knock on the door. The ambulance was here to remove the body. With Jarman hovering in the background, anxious to ensure that maximum discretion was observed, Alicia Parnel
l’s mortal remains were discreetly removed via back stairs and rear entrance.
While Thanet had been talking to Jarman, Lineham had been getting on with the search.
‘Found anything, Mike?’
Lineham shook his head. ‘Apart from the contents of her handbag, there’s nothing interesting at all. She’d brought very little with her, just a nightdress, a change of underwear and her toilet things.’
And the photograph, thought Thanet. Why had she brought it, on such a brief trip? And where was her husband—if the man in the photograph was her husband …
‘What was in her bag?’
‘Just the usual stuff—oh, and a rosary.’ Lineham held it up.
‘She was a Catholic then.’ Thanet took it from him and ran the beads through his fingers. How often had Alicia handled them in just this way? Thousands, hundreds of thousands of times, perhaps?
‘Where did she live?’
‘Fulham. Runs an employment agency, by the look of it.’ Lineham handed over a business card.
Alicia had a partner, it seemed, a Jessica Ross. Both their names were on the card, together with the address of the agency in the Fulham Road.
‘No home address?’
‘No. Perhaps she lived over the shop, so to speak.’
Thanet remembered Alicia’s expensive clothes and jewellery. ‘Unlikely, I would have thought. I wonder if Jarman’s got a London directory.’
He had, and Lineham’s guess proved correct. Alicia was listed as A. Parnell, with a different telephone number from the agency, but the same address. There was no reply, when they tried ringing.
‘We’d better go and take a look,’ said Thanet.
It took a little while to get clearance for the trip from the Metropolitan Police and while they were waiting Thanet organised the work to be done in their absence: the hotel staff and guests were to be questioned and the Leytons were to be interviewed.
Then he and Lineham headed for the M20 and London.
TWO
The Sunday morning traffic was light, and they were soon on the motorway. The London-bound carriageway was virtually empty, but on the other side of the crash barrier a steady stream of cars was speeding towards the coast, crammed with families heading for their weekly dose of sun, sea and sand. For a while both men were silent, thinking back over the events of the morning. Eventually, ‘Since what?’ said Lineham.
‘Mmm?’ It took a moment or two for Thanet to register the question, but when he did he had no problem in knowing what Lineham meant. He and the sergeant had been working together for so long that they were well-attuned to each other’s thought processes.
‘Oh … I’d been going to say, not since just after the inquest.’
Lineham, who was driving, shot Thanet a quick, interested glance: ‘What inquest?’
‘Odd, isn’t it? You don’t think about someone or some period of your life for years and then suddenly, something triggers off that particular memory chain and the images come so thick and fast, so vividly, that you wonder how on earth you could have forgotten them.’
‘Inquest on who?’
‘Whom,’ corrected Thanet. ‘A boy called Paul Leyton. It was a real tragedy. He was one of those who seemed to have everything. He was brilliant, for a start, all set to become a fine classical scholar. But he was also a first-rate sportsman—captain of cricket, of rugger, you name it, he could do it better than anyone else.’
‘I can’t stand people like that.’
Thanet cast an amused glance at his sergeant. Obviously, Lineham did not enjoy being reminded of his own inadequacies.
‘For us younger boys he had an almost god-like quality. He looked like one, for that matter—the sort of profile you see on Greek coins, golden curls …’
‘Ugh.’
‘… the lot. And whatever you say, it didn’t seem to stop his contemporaries liking him. I was a couple of years younger than he—he was the same age as Alicia—but I know he was immensely popular with his year. And the masters liked him too.’
‘So what happened to this paragon?’
‘He killed himself.’
‘What?’
Lineham was genuinely shocked, a little ashamed, too, Thanet thought, of his sneering tone of a moment ago.
‘But why? The way you were talking, it sounds as though he had everything to live for.’
‘That’s what everybody said. But at the inquest it came out that he had been very much in love with Alicia—yes, the same Alicia—that his work had been falling off because things hadn’t been going too well between them, and that on the day he committed suicide she had finally broken off with him. The whole thing caused a bit of a furore at the time because Paul had been so universally popular. Alicia and her parents left the area shortly afterwards.’
‘Just a minute,’ said Lineham, with a note of excitement, ‘did you say Paul Leyton? Wasn’t that a Richard Leyton who was seen talking to Mrs Parnell in the foyer last night?’
‘Paul’s younger brother.’
‘Interesting.’
‘Very.’
‘You don’t think …’
‘At the moment I’m not thinking anything. We’ve only been on the case five minutes and it would be a waste of time.’
They were both silent for a while. They had switched to the M2 at Dartford and were now coming into the outskirts of London. Lineham gestured at a For Sale sign.
‘Louise and I had hoped to go and look at some more houses today.’
The Linehams were still living in the tiny terraced house they had bought when they were first married. Their son, Richard, was now eighteen months old and they were beginning to think of a second child. This was the time, they felt, to try to find somewhere with a little more space—a third bedroom, and a larger garden, perhaps. They had begun by putting their own house on the market, and had been delighted if somewhat disconcerted when it had found a buyer within a week. They had plunged at once into an intensive search for the kind of property they wanted, so far without success. Now, completion was only a matter of weeks away and the matter was becoming urgent.
‘Too bad. Anything promising?’
‘There was one. A Victorian semi-detached in Frittenden Road. I think Louise is going to go over it tomorrow.’
Frittenden Road would have the merit of being further away from Mrs Lineham senior, Thanet noted. The Linehams’ present house was only five minutes’ walk from hers. For years the sergeant’s life had been complicated and bedevilled by the unreasonable demands of his possessive mother. Widowed young, she had had to bring up her son alone, and for Lineham, emerging into adulthood, life seemed to have been one major battle after another—first to enter upon his chosen career in the police force, then to marry the girl of his choice, Louise. For the first couple of years of his married life he seemed to have been perpetually caught in the cross-fire between wife and mother, constantly trying to placate both and succeeding in pleasing neither. Then, with Richard’s birth, things had changed. Mrs Lineham senior, with a new focus for her attention, had begun to channel her devotion towards her grandson. This had created a whole new set of problems for Louise, but had at least had the merit of taking the pressure off Lineham. Thanet couldn’t help admiring his sergeant’s determination to make his own choices and fulfil his obligations as he saw them, despite the pressure of two dominating women. Many men, he felt, would have gone under long ago and it was good to see Lineham in calm waters at last, if only temporarily. Though Thanet couldn’t help feeling that if the young couple did move to the other side of town, it wouldn’t be long before Mrs Lineham senior followed them. In any case she certainly wasn’t going to allow it to happen without giving them a bad time first.
‘I’m not sure of the way from here, sir. Could you keep an eye on the map and the road signs, now?’
‘I think it’ll be fairly straightforward so long as we don’t hit too many one-way streets.’
Alicia Parnell’s employment agency was called Jobline
and appeared to be thriving. The single-storey premises were freshly painted in black and cream and the shop front was full of advertisements for jobs, some on display boards, others on slowly-revolving columns. The plate glass was clean and when Thanet peered in he could see that the office was close-carpeted and attractively furnished with sleek desks, leather chairs and flourishing pot plants. In the back wall was an inner door.
‘There’s no upstairs.’ said Lineham. ‘If she does live here she wouldn’t want to go through the office every time she goes in and out. This’ll be her front door, don’t you think?’
Alongside the entrance to the shop was a solid, panelled wooden door without a number, unobtrusively painted black to match. Cunningly concealed in a fold of the moulding was a spyhole. Alicia, then, had been security-conscious. Had she lived here alone? If so, at night she would have been pretty isolated. To the left of Jobline was a small boutique called Annie’s, to the right a shoe-repair shop.
‘Must be,’ he agreed. ‘We’d better ring, first, in case her husband’s at home.’
There was no answer, but they rang twice more and waited several minutes before Thanet took Alicia’s keys from his pocket. The second fitted perfectly, turning twice in the lock before the catch was released.
They found themselves in a long, wide corridor which obviously ran the depth of the shop. It was carpeted in a soft, leaf green. When Lineham found the light switch they saw that the wallpaper was cream, with a tiny, geometric scribbled design in green, and that there were green-framed abstract prints evenly spaced along the left-hand wall. The door at the far end led to a surprisingly spacious ground-floor flat.
‘I should think this runs along behind the agency and both the shops on either side,’ said Lineham. ‘Pretty plush, isn’t it?’
The sitting room was large, with ceiling-height patio doors leading into a tiny walled garden with climbing plants on the walls and white, wrought-iron chairs and table. Apart from a thick creamy rug in front of the long, low settee upholstered in soft, blond leather, the floor of polished, golden wood blocks was bare. There was one matching armchair, a low coffee table and, near the hatch leading into the kitchen, a dining table of smoky glass and four cream tulip-shaped dining chairs. The long, abstract painting in creams, browns and misty blue which hung above the settee was the only decorative object in the room apart from a six-foot tree with feathery leaves which stood in a huge cream ceramic pot near the patio doors. The effect was light, airy, yet austere, the taste of a woman given more to understatement than to exaggeration.
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