Detective Chief Inspector Doherty.
Honey smiled at the thought of when Doherty had told her of his promotion. He’d been so curmudgeonly about it, as though he wasn’t glowing with satisfaction inside – which she knew he was. They’d pressurized him into taking promotion; how noble was that?
It was shortly before midnight when Doherty entered bringing just a hint of the fresher air outside.
Rodney Eastwood, Honey’s occasional washer-up, was on the door. Rodney, was better known as Clint – for obvious reasons. His looks were a far cry from the real Clint Eastwood’s, though. For a start, he was nowhere near six feet, let alone a good few inches over it. He also shaved his head and polished it. Having tattoos all over his skull helped alleviate the glare that might have been there without the spider’s web, the matt-black tarantula, and the tip of a rattlesnake’s tail.
For once, Clint didn’t make a smart remark to Doherty; he must still have been wary following his recent run-in with the Mafia. On seeing Doherty enter Honey immediately ordered a drink – a double gin and tonic. He looked as though he could do with it.Without saying a word he slumped on to the bar stool, grabbed the glass, and knocked half of it back.
‘I was right in thinking you needed that,’ she said to him.
‘Your consideration is appreciated.’
Once the gin was in his system, his eyes raked her over before settling on the inch of cleavage she was flashing.
‘You look sexy.’
‘I dress to order.’
He downed the rest of his drink, set the glass back on the bar, and ordered another. Then he sat there with his eyes closed.
‘I take it you don’t want to kiss me or anything?’
His eyes flashed open. ‘Damn it. I knew there was something I’d forgotten to do.’
His kiss was quick. They were in public after all. The deep tongue-in-mouth stuff would come later.
Doherty stroked his brow. ‘This promotion has turned out exactly the way I thought it would. Less contact, more paperwork.’
‘How will you deal with that?’
The corners of his eyes crinkled with amusement. ‘My assistant’s a degree entrant. She’s used to paperwork.’
This was the first time he’d mentioned that his new assistant was female. He must have seen the look on her face and read what she was thinking.
‘She’s all spectacles and wrinkled brow – very academic – bound to make Chief Constable in no time at all.’
He gave a little grin that was meant to reassure and she was reassured, though she had every intention of checking the competition out when the occasion presented itself.
‘I was disappointed in the manner of Wright’s death. I’d fully expected you to say that he’d been done to death with his own poisoned pen.’
‘I keep asking myself whether there was something symbolic about the meat skewer.’
‘He deserved roasting?’
‘A nasty way to die. Whoever did it was behind him and took full advantage of his inebriated condition.’
‘He was drunk?’
‘As a lord.’
Honey rested her chin on her clenched fist, a faraway look in her eyes. ‘He deserved being spit roasted.’
He stopped talking and looked at her. ‘I hear your tone and from my enquiries I understand that Mr Wright wasn’t exactly Mr Popularity in this fair city. The feedback received consists mostly of certain expletives that I won’t use and certain accusations that I will. Blackmailer and lecher come top of the list. Dare I ask you about your first-hand experience and which of these terms best describes said experience?’
‘Easy! Lecher. It went something like this: I’ll give you a good review and you can give me … fill in the rest of the demand yourself.’
Doherty’s face turned hard-lined and no-nonsense. ‘A meat skewer was too good for him.’ His voice was cold. ‘I take it from that look on your face that you refused his advances and that Mr Wright never dared cross your threshold ever again.’
‘That look means that C.A. Wright was about as popular as a boil on the bum. Think Dracula with a pen instead of a pair of big teeth. His favourite tipple was the blood of hard-working members of the catering and hospitality trade.’
‘So his pieces weren’t always favourable and when they were they came at a price.’
She eyed him sidelong. ‘That depended on the trade-off.’
‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours?’
‘I’ve already told you he was a lecher. So not his back as such, but I think you get my drift.’
Doherty fell to silence and looked down at his drink. She could guess what he was thinking.
‘OK, he tried it on with me, but I had a knight wearing chef’s whites and brandishing a carving knife. Smudger overheard.’
Doherty nodded slowly as he let the information sink in. Smudger Smith, Honey’s sometimes errant and irascible chef, was volatile but likeable, a no-nonsense guy with his own code of chivalry. He also had a short fuse and a wide variety of kitchen knives at his disposal. Steve Doherty had learned long ago that upsetting certain chefs could be bad for one’s health. Obviously C.A. Wright, the dead man, hadn’t cottoned on to that simple truth. Strange, he thought, considering he specialized in articles about the hospitality industry.
‘I didn’t do it,’ said Honey. ‘But whoever did so deserves mention in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list.’
‘Sorry to butt in …’
A shiny head replete with spider’s web butted in between them. It wasn’t usual for Clint to interrupt their evenings at the Zodiac unless it was something serious.
Honey checked his outfit. Just for once he wasn’t wearing fancy dress – the Zodiac seemed to have quite a lot of fancy dress evenings.
‘What’s the problem?’ asked Doherty.
‘It’s about Teddy Devlin. Any idea when the trust can have him back?’
Honey eyed him quizzically.
Clint saw her look and went on to explain.
‘I do a bit for them now and again – collecting money on the streets, assisting with sorting out donations, old clothes and stuff like that. You can get a packet for recycling nowadays. I told them the copper in charge came in here with his bit of … sorry … lady friend, so told them I would ask.’
The subject of recycling brought the cardboard coffin to mind, and not just because Memory Meadow was now an official burial site for the ecologically motivated. A fit of the giggles threatened.
Doherty shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Clint. Teddy Devlin is impounded as evidence. Whoever put him in there must have left some important clues behind. Forensic are on the job. I’m afraid your friends at the charity won’t be getting him back in a hurry.’
Clint pulled a face, at the same time sucking in his bottom lip as though there were more to say, more that he didn’t really want to say but couldn’t help saying.
‘It couldn’t have happened on the street though – must have happened when it got nicked – by the geezer who did the job – killed the bloke inside I mean.’
Clint was shuffling from one foot to another. He shuffled like that whenever there was something he didn’t want to divulge – he’d done it when he’d bent a stainless steel ladle – ostensibly competing with another of the hired helps as to who was the strongest. The ladle was never the same again. It still had a kink in it and soup was as likely to end up over the floor as it was in the dish.
‘Is there something you’re not saying?’ Doherty asked him.
It sounded as though Clint might know something of the case and as such this totally changed Doherty’s demeanour. To describe him as a coiled spring wasn’t far off the mark. Honey sensed he was ready to grab Clint if he dared move away before giving an adequate response.
Clint continued his soft shoe shuffle. ‘Umm. There could be. It’s just a teeny-weeny bit of info – from a friend. She had nothing to do with it really – she was just out there collecting … It was just a laugh
– you know how young folk are …’
Doherty rose off his seat.
Honey was all ears.
‘The young folk. Who were they?’
Clint shrugged. ‘I don’t know the names of the students. Just her.’
‘A name,’ Doherty was saying. ‘Give me a name.’
‘Tracey Maplin.’
Chapter Eleven
It wasn’t the best location in the world, seeing as the traffic on the A36 never let up until late at night and thundered anew around six in the morning. But the noise and smell of diesel had never bothered Agnes Morden, the woman who watched from the pavement. A giant ‘SOLD’ sign was being pasted across the auction notice. At least it covered the sign beneath, the one she found both embarrassing and terribly hurtful.
‘Bank Acquisition’, it said on the sign. The sad fact of the matter was that the bank had pulled the rug from under the feet of the owners. Agnes and her husband, Walter, had worked hard to get their little hotel going. It had only had nine rooms, so was small by hotel standards, but quite large if termed a guest house.
They’d steadily gone from strength to strength, working on the building as well as in it, replacing the old-fashioned decoration with something light, bright, and attractive. Throwing out old furniture, they’d replaced it with lovely antiques purchased at a reasonable price from local auction houses.
The old place had looked a treat when they’d finished. It was cosy and traditionally furnished. Most people had found its quaint decor appealing; very few had not. For a while they’d made a good profit, enough to keep themselves and send their son to study Economics at university. Everything had been going swimmingly until one night in June.
Agnes scowled at the thought of the one person who had gone out of his way to destroy them. C.A. Wright had been cutting and contemptuous. What right had he had to run them down so badly? It wasn’t as though he hadn’t been well taken care of. She’d gone out of her way to look after him. ‘Perhaps,’ Walter had said, ‘that is exactly why he did what he did.’
C.A. Wright had liked people to fawn over him. Some people were like that. They weren’t really out for service; they wanted servility and the lower you bowed and scraped the better they liked it. She pursed her lips at the thought of his imperious attitude. She’d done her best to cater for him, even staying up half the night to wash and iron some clothes he said he desperately needed for the following day.
The following day had not been half so sunny as the day before. He’d laughed in their faces; told them they were a couple of amateurs who had no idea how ‘the game’ worked. You only got a good review if you paid for it. That was what he’d told them.
Agnes had burst into tears. Walter had been furious and refused bluntly to pay him anything. Then he’d made a pass at their daughter. Only sixteen, barely out of school and he’d made a pass at her. Cathy had been flattered. Strong-minded and intrigued, she’d encouraged his attention despite her parents’ opposition.
The incident had brought on Walter’s first heart attack. He’d never been the same after that. Then the recession; changes in the exchange rate meant people from abroad just weren’t coming. Everything coincided to destroy them, but the trigger for it, in her mind at least, was C.A. Wright.
The fact that he was dead actually brought a smile to her face despite the pain she was feeling. It saddened her to see the old place being sold for conversion to luxury apartments, but at least she had some vestige of revenge. C.A. Wright was dead. May he rot in hell!
‘There’s some justice after all, Walter,’ she said out loud. Nobody was listening, of course. Devastated at losing all that they’d worked for, Walter had died of a heart attack two months ago. Her world was shattered.
C.A. Wright had persisted with his pursuit of their daughter, Cathy, until Walter had lost his rag and landed him a right hook – right on the nose! The man had backed off, then laughed. That’s when he really began to needle them. Calls followed from Health and Safety Officers, the planning department, even the Inland Revenue. Wright stirred them all up. Walter had suffered the first heart attack and had recovered only slowly. The business had gone downhill from then on. There was nothing that could be done. Tending Walter had been more important than business. She’d let things slide. Guests no longer came. Money became scarce. By the time Walter had suffered the second heart attack that had taken him off, there was little she could do. She certainly hadn’t wanted to keep the place: too many memories of working together, too many late nights worrying about how to cope with their growing indebtedness to the bank.
Sighing, she turned away. It was all water under the bridge now.
After a few footsteps her phone rang. She fumbled in her bag and got it out, checked the number, and smiled.
‘He’s dead then,’ said the voice on the other end.
‘Yes,’ she said, the smile widening. ‘He’s dead. There’s some justice in this world after all. God bless whoever did it.’
Doherty was told there was a woman to see him.
‘She reckons it’s relevant to the murder case, guv,’ said Samantha, his latest uniformed assistant.
Doherty grunted. The usual collection of nuts seeking their fifteen minutes of fame had been in to say they knew who did it. Some owned up to the crime themselves, lured by the prospect of a warm bed and food for the night. Once their stories were checked out they’d be let loose on the streets again – until the next murder likely to make the newspaper headlines.
‘She states that Colin Wright ran off with her daughter.’
Doherty stopped filling in his expenses sheet, pen dangling over one of the inevitable boxes waiting to be ticked.
‘How does she look?’
Samantha smiled. ‘Clean and tidy. Respectable in fact.’
Doherty sighed with relief. He couldn’t take interviewing yet another down-and-out desperate for a mug of hot tea, shepherd’s pie, and apple dumpling and custard.
‘Wheel her in.’
His eyes lingered on Samantha’s rear as she exited his office. A whole raft of female staff were being wheeled out to help him with his paperwork. Samantha was the best looking so far and also the most efficient.
He told himself that Honey would not be jealous. Of course she wouldn’t.
The woman ushered into his office had tired eyes that might better be described as searching. Her hair was pulled back into what used to be called a French pleat. He wasn’t sure what it was called now, but he remembered his mother wearing the same style.
‘Mrs Morden,’ said Samantha as she pulled out the chair on the opposite side of the desk to where Doherty was sitting.
Doherty welcomed her and told her his name.
She was wearing a trench coat with the collar pulled up. It wasn’t raining outside so he took it she was cold. Either that or she wished to hide behind it.
Hands forward, fingers interlocked, he leaned forward across the desk, making sure his expression was pleasant rather than smiling.
‘So, Mrs Morden. You told my sergeant that your daughter ran away with Colin Wright, the man who was recently murdered. Is that true?’
The woman on the other side of the desk seemed to swell up with the depth of her sigh.
‘He was staying with us. He wouldn’t leave her alone.’ Her hooded eyes, up until now downcast, flashed wide to look at him. ‘She was sixteen, Mr Doherty. Sixteen!’
The writing pad on which he made notes during interviews or doodled if he was bored had been half hidden beneath the folder containing blank expense sheets. Mrs Morden had mentioned that Colin Wright had stayed with her. Just in case this proved useful, he pulled the pad in front of him and reached for a ballpoint pen.
‘You say he stayed with you. Was that at your private residence?’
She shook her head. ‘We used to own a hotel. My husband and I. Our daughter lived with us. Mr Wright stayed with us for a number of days. He told us he would write a very favourable review about our hotel. Walter and I we
re over the moon about it. That’s before we discovered what he was like and what his motives really were.’
‘What was the name of your hotel?’
‘Twin Turrets. It was one of those Victorian places with a turret at each corner, a bit like a castle. He pursued our daughter, Mr Doherty, and persuaded her to go off with him.’
All Doherty had written on the pad so far was Mrs Morden’s name and the name of her hotel. He couldn’t see himself adding anything more because he couldn’t see where this was going. Far from assisting in capturing the murderer, as an ex-hotelier, Mrs Morden was likely to end up as a suspect herself.
He felt it only proper to point this out to her.
‘Did you feel like killing him?’
His eyes looked deeply into hers as much as for any sign of guilt as well as putting her on the spot, making her understand that she could quite easily incriminate herself.
Mrs Morden, it turned out, was no fool.
Her eyes blazed with the intensity of a tigress seeking her young.
‘Don’t mock me, Mr Doherty. That man killed my husband without using a weapon. He broke his heart, Mr Doherty. He destroyed our business and enticed our daughter away. I would have killed him with my bare hands myself if the opportunity had been presented. However, it wasn’t me that killed him. All I came here for is to ask that you bear my daughter in mind. She might have moved in with him. She might have gone abroad.’ She shook her head forlornly, her eyes getting moister by the minute. ‘All I ask is that when you investigate this case you bear my Cathy in mind.’
Chapter Twelve
The old saying ‘it never rains but it pours’ came to Honey’s mind as she tried to cope with more than one job and more than one piece of news at a time.
Anna, her best chambermaid, was heading back to Poland with her baby, Casper was pressing her for details of Wright’s murder, and her mother had left messages regarding some kind of emergency she needed help with.
Wicked Words: A Honey Driver Murder Mystery (Honey Driver Mysteries) Page 11