by Anne Morice
“So, presumably, he wasn’t seen and the car is now languishing in some multi-storey place at Heathrow or Gatwick.”
“No, there’s another routine measure to cover that sort of thing.”
“How very disappointing for you! But you hinted that I should be pleased by the news and I assure you that I’m not. I have no desire for him to escape your clutches, if he’s guilty. I don’t want my horse to win by default.”
“You’ll do better than that. It’s a double triumph for you, really, because the man who really upset the apple cart is none other than your old friend from Fairman’s Garage.”
“You mean Owen’s brother? Dave?”
“That’s the one. It seems he has quite a following in those parts and a number of people take their cars to him for service and repairs, rather than to one of the bigger places in Storhampton and Dedley.”
“Tony included. He’s a mechanical wizard, that Dave.”
“Though not very bright in other ways, it could be said?”
“It could, yes. What was he not being bright about this time?”
“He heard about our appeal and also a good many other things on the local grapevine, but he hadn’t come forward before, because he didn’t think we’d be interested. It was Owen who talked him into it.”
“Interested in what?”
“The fact that one day last week McGrath took his car in to be filled up with petrol, have the oil and water checked and all the rest of it. He told Dave to make a thorough job of it because he had a long journey ahead of him. It’s all on record in the books because he has a monthly account.”
“Well, that takes the bun! He may not be bright, but he’s not a moron either. What can have possessed him?”
“Wait for it! This transaction took place at ten o’clock on Thursday morning.”
It took a second or so for it to sink in and then I said:
“You mean, before . . . ?”
“Exactly! Six or seven hours before the child disappeared.”
“But, Robin, that means . . .”
“That the two events were not connected. Aren’t you pleased?”
“Stunned would be the word. What’s the official verdict?”
“Hard to define. In a sense, of course, it’s pulled the rug from under our feet and we’re still reeling from that. On the other hand, it does nothing positive to establish McGrath’s innocence and he certainly hasn’t come forward to defend himself. The theory now is that he genuinely had planned a trip for Thursday and that somewhere along the way, perhaps on his car radio, he heard the news, changed course and went into hiding. I don’t know, though.”
“You don’t care for it?”
“Well, it wouldn’t have been easy, would it, to hit on a secure hiding place at a moment’s notice and get to it without being recognised? Too late by the time the news broke to cross the Channel or the Irish Sea, even assuming that he’d had the foresight to pack his passport.”
“So privately, what construction do you put on it?”
“On the whole, I subscribe to the view that, as he had undoubtedly organised his trip in advance, he was already in France or Belgium by the time the first news bulletin came out. Since no member of our Royal Family figures in the story, it’s unlikely to have got much press coverage on the continent and he probably hasn’t seen a mention of it. As I say, it does nothing to prove his innocence.”
“Not in a positive way, perhaps, but it does remove the certainty of his guilt, which is more or less how things stood this time yesterday.”
“With the rider that the story he told you could just possibly be true. Well, we shall soon know.”
“Shall we? How?”
“Because, although the case of a missing child in Herefordshire won’t hit the continental headlines, the fact that a man of McGrath’s status is wanted for the murder of his wife will make quite a sensation. So, if that’s where he is, it can’t be long now before he either gives himself up or is recognised and clapped into irons until the extradition papers arrive.”
“I wonder neither of those things has happened already.”
“Me too, but it’s out of our hands now. I was only wanted for the Dedley end of things, although I still have a nasty feeling that we’ve got it wrong and left something out of our calculations which could turn the case upside down.”
“Like the connection I mentioned just now.”
“Which one was that?”
“Two dead women, two missing persons.”
“If you find it,” Robin said, “be sure and let me know. I’ll borrow a helicopter and take you to dinner at Maxim’s.”
I did not have to endure sleepless nights wondering what to wear for this outing because within hours both missing persons had turned up and the connection remained as insubstantial as ever. Both had a tale to unfold, Andrea’s, predictably, being the more improbable and dramatic.
At about the time when Robin and I were discussing hot dinners and helicopters she had wandered into a police station in a south coast holiday resort and announced to the sergeant on desk duty that her bag had been stolen. She had been sitting on a bench in some public gardens, with the bag beside her, when a young man who was passing by seized it and ran off.
At first, she had been too shocked and startled to move or cry out and, by the time she had pulled herself together and approached an elderly couple on a bench not far off, there was little they could do to help her. Realising, however, that she was a stranger to the place and also badly shaken by her experience, they had kindly escorted her to the nearest police station.
Asked for her name and address, she had been able to supply both but further than this she was unable or unwilling to go. She had no idea what she was doing in this town, what its name was, or how she had arrived there. She had a hazy recollection of standing outside a cinema, saying goodnight to someone, but what had happened between then and the moment when she had looked up and seen a young man running away from her, with one arm clasped across his chest, was a complete blank. It was as though the incident had acted as an alarm bell going off in her head and snapping her awake after a long and dreamless sleep.
None of this, however, did anything to delay her rehabilitation, for Gregory, needless to say, had not been idle during her absence. She had already been registered as officially missing and within half an hour he had been summoned and was on his way to collect her. By the same evening she was at home in her own bed, with instructions from her doctor to remain there for at least twenty-four hours. He attributed the amnesia to delayed shock, resulting from the fire and her stepmother’s death, and his prognosis was that her memory would return by degrees. On no account should she be urged to try and recapture it.
Matters had not turned out so comfortably for James, but his surrender had also taken place in a police station. This one was in Shropshire, a few miles from the Welsh border and his explanation for being there was as follows:
On the previous Thursday morning he had left Sowerley and driven directly to a cottage he owned in Wales. It was an isolated and primitive sort of place, originally a stone-walled shelter used by shepherds, which he had bought and added on to several years before. He had been drawn to it by the opportunities it offered for bird watching and by the nearby trout stream, in which he now owned fishing rights. He was in the habit of visiting the place several times during the spring and summer, although never accompanied by his wife. Such visits were usually made on impulse and often coincided with periods when she was planning to be away herself.
The recent one, however, had been arranged further in advance than usual. He was expecting a friend to join him there on Friday or Saturday and had gone to some trouble to stock up with provisions and to make sure the cottage was properly cleaned and aired before he arrived.
It had been a wasted effort, though, because the man never turned up and nor did James hear a word from him. This had been an annoyance, but not a totally unexpected one because the friend had
a specialised job and was always liable to be called upon at short notice.
He had listened from time to time to news bulletins on his transistor radio and so had been able to follow the progress in the search for the boy. Although it had meant nothing personal to him, his curiosity had been stirred by memories of the landscaping he had carried out so near to where it was all happening. Aside from that, it was just one more depressing news item, tucked away among others which were worse, and on Tuesday he had missed it altogether.
This was because he had by then given up all expectation of seeing his friend and had therefore packed a picnic lunch and spent the whole day fishing, not getting home until dusk. He had listened to a symphony concert while eating his supper and had then read a book until it was time to go to bed, and the news about his wife had not reached him until Wednesday. He had then accepted the inevitable and driven to the nearest police station on the English side of the border.
“How much truth in it?” I asked when Robin had finished telling me.
“Plenty. Everything in the cottage was exactly as you’d expect, if someone had been staying there recently and left in a hurry. Empty food tins, two beds made up but only one slept in, matching tyre marks on the cart track down through the field. Oh, he was there all right.”
“Has he been charged?”
“No, the questioning goes on. They’ve been at it for eight hours and there are probably at least eight more to come.”
“So he hasn’t confessed, obviously. Was his story about finding his wife gone, leaving the bloodstained pillow behind her, the same as he told me?”
“In every particular.”
“And you still think it might be true?”
“I suppose I am keeping an open mind about it.”
“Yes, that’s the trouble, isn’t it? It’s so completely incredible that one’s instinct is to believe it. What about the friend who never turned up, though? That, at least, must be true because James will have to name him and, if he does exist and can confirm that he had been invited, there’ll no longer be any doubt of its being planned in advance.”
“He does exist and he has confirmed it.”
“Oh well, that’s something, I suppose, but what a peculiar way to behave! Imagine just not turning up! And then later, when the hue and cry started, why didn’t he come forward? I don’t understand.”
“You may when you hear who he is.”
“No, really? Who?”
“Alan Ferguson.”
“Honestly, Robin, I can’t believe it.”
“Why not? He told you they used to get on pretty well, so long as there were no wives around.”
“In that case, why did he let his old friend down and not bother to tell him that he wouldn’t be coming?”
“Knowing Alan as I do, I think it’s capable of explanation. He said he ran into McGrath at his club a few weeks ago and they had lunch together. McGrath suggested this trip and Alan fell in with it and made a note in his diary. I expect he had every intention of keeping to it at the time, but . . .”
“But?”
“He now claims that it was only a loose kind of arrangement, not binding on either side and that, when he heard no more, he concluded that James had either had second thoughts, or had forgotten the first one. In other words, it was one of those ideas which go down so well with a glass of port and are afterwards regretted or forgotten. His excuse for not coming forward when he heard that James was wanted by the police is on roughly the same lines. Not having heard from him, he concluded the trip had been cancelled and it did not occur to him that James would have gone there on his own.”
“But you think that’s just eyewash?”
“Well, it doesn’t quite hang together, does it? The fact that he’d written it down in his diary suggests that the invitation had been given and accepted in rather more definite terms than he now pretends. But, of course, that was weeks ago, before his wife became so worked up about her cousin. I daresay he didn’t take that seriously, to begin with, but then, as time went by, with no word from Rosamund, he may have got cold feet. At a guess, he regretted accepting the invitation, but he couldn’t very well telephone McGrath and say ‘Listen, old boy, since there seems to be a lot of talk going around about you having murdered your wife, I’m not too keen to spend a weekend with you in darkest Wales, so do you mind if we call it off?’ Instead, he lay low, took no action, failed to call back when his secretary told him McGrath had telephoned and kept his fingers crossed that he would be able to slide out of it, without any fuss.”
“Why not simply have said that he couldn’t make it because he had an urgent job coming up?”
“Because things don’t work out that way in his line of business. Not many arsonists are considerate enough to give advance notice of their activities. Besides, an excuse of that kind would probably only have led to McGrath postponing the trip to the following weekend, or the one after that.”
“So why didn’t he come forward when the corpse was identified?”
“Same sort of reason. He’s the type who can’t face unpleasantness, tries to shut it out of his mind and hope to God it will go away. This one refused to go away, though, and I’m afraid it looks as though your outsider will lose the race, after all.”
“You did say you had an open mind?”
“Yes, but your trouble is that you equate open-mindedness with being on your side and what it really means is that he is just as likely to be guilty as not guilty and, if it turns out to be the first, it could explain why he singled you out to hear that tale about coming home to find his wife had been murdered and spirited away.”
“How could it do that?”
“Not just because you were a sympathetic audience, or, as Toby would have it, because he fancied you. It’s more likely that he wanted to try it out on someone, in case he needed to use it on a later occasion and you had something unique to offer him.”
“What would that be?”
“A degree of expertise, combined with an endless store of curiosity, is now I would describe it. He could depend on you to pick out any flaws and to question him on them and, knowing something of your background, he reckoned on their being similar to the questions he might later have to face from the police.”
“A dry run, in other words? Well, I don’t flatter myself that I’ve made your task any harder for you. Although, I suppose, if you’re right and I have helped him to plug up a few holes, it may take that much longer to break him down.”
“And perhaps all you really did was to lend a sympathetic ear to an innocent victim. Time will tell.”
“Time, plus another dip into the endless store” was one reply that came to mind, but I did not say it aloud.
EIGHTEEN
Two days later James McGrath was formally charged with murder and in due course made a brief appearance in a Magistrate’s Court, where he pleaded Not Guilty. The hearing was then adjourned and the prisoner remanded in custody until it should re-open in a higher court. Bail was refused.
These facts were reported in the evening paper which Robin brought home with him and he also brought Alan Ferguson, who was able to provide others which had not been printed.
It appeared that they had met by chance, when both were on their way home and Robin had invited him to cash in his rain check, but I thought there might have been an element of contrivance in it too, since the meeting had occurred near the newspaper stand where Robin habitually stopped off every evening. Alan, however, was not prepared to admit it.
“Stroke of luck for me, running into your husband like that,” he said, when Robin had gone to fetch the ice for himself and me. “I wasn’t looking forward to spending an evening alone in my bachelor quarters. This news has been quite a knock.”
“Yes, it must be terrible for you and worse still for your wife, I suppose? How is she bearing up?”
“Not well. She always takes things very much to heart, so you can imagine what the last few days have done to her.”
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br /> In view of this and of Isobel’s reputed dependence on him, I wondered that he should have found it necessary to spend an evening in his bachelor quarters, or to lurk about by news-stands, in order to delay it, but he simply said:
“There’s not much I can do for her and she’s got our younger daughter home for the school holidays now. I should only be in the way.”
“What’s her attitude? That James is guilty?”
“Oh, no question about it. There isn’t a chance in hell of his getting off, is there?” he asked, as Robin came back into the room.
“Wouldn’t know, I’m afraid. Here you are, Tessa, here’s yours.”
“I wouldn’t call the motive very strong,” I remarked, clinking the ice reflectively. “I know she was reputed to have money, but he can’t be exactly hard up himself and, anyway, he couldn’t have touched hers until she was proved dead, which is presumably what he was trying to avoid.”
With his glass halfway to its destination, Alan lowered it again, saying:
“You seem to know a fair bit about it. I was under the impression you hadn’t met them?”
“My fault, but you asked me if I’d met Rosamund and I said I hadn’t, which was true. I had met her husband, though, and I’d heard the rumours about him. I’m afraid that’s why I encouraged you to talk about them. Sheer curiosity and I apologise if you find it distasteful.”
“You mustn’t mind Tessa,” Robin told him, “she takes a burning interest in crime and always hopes that the prime suspect will turn out to be innocent.”
“I see!” Alan said, in the voice of one who had now heard everything. “Well, personally, I’d give him about as much chance as a snowball in hell.”
“I thought you liked him?”
“Yes, I do, but what’s that got to do with it?”
“Just that if you consider him capable of doing a thing like this, without even an overpowering motive to excuse it, it’s hard to understand how you can find him likeable as well.”