‘What links have you found between Andy Bishop and Elliot Howard?’ she asked.
‘None,’ Tanika said with a sigh. ‘We’ve cross-referenced Mr Bishop’s and Mr Howard’s phone records, emails and diaries, and they’ve never contacted each other as far as we can tell. All of our investigations suggest they’re complete strangers.’
‘Well, that blows that theory out of the water,’ Suzie said.
‘Now then,’ Tanika said, turning to Judith. ‘An officer’s searched Iqbal’s house. She found a copy of the most recent Borlasian magazine on a bookshelf. And page 74 is missing. Torn out. Just as you said it would be. I don’t know how you do it. Really, I don’t.’
‘Perhaps on this one,’ Judith said, ‘it’s best if you never ask.’
‘Okay, I won’t. But I went online and got up the magazine on the school’s website, and it’s like you said. Page 74 has a list of recent deaths in the Old Borlasian community, and two of the names listed are the two people who witnessed Ezra Harrington’s will. Spencer Chapman and Faye Kerr.’
‘Even though they were dead at the time.’
‘Which means we’ll be able to bring criminal charges against Andy Bishop for forging Ezra’s will. So well done, that’s a fantastic result. But more than that, the magazine in Iqbal’s house suggests Iqbal knew about the forgery as well, and if he was going to spill the beans, that’s a clear motive for Andy wanting Iqbal dead. But tell me, how did Andy kill Iqbal, seeing as he was in Malta at the time?’
‘Still working on that one,’ Judith said.
‘Then let me tell you about my phone call with Elliot Howard just now.’
‘You’ve spoken to him?’ Becks asked.
‘Of course,’ Tanika said as she gave the printouts in her hand to Judith. ‘I asked him to send through copies of his diary for every week since his argument with Mr Dunwoody at Henley.’
‘So what was he doing on Monday the fifth of August?’ Judith asked eagerly, flicking through the pages. ‘And how was he when you spoke to him?’
‘Fed up,’ Tanika said. ‘Like I was some stupid woman getting in his way.’
‘Well, you’re not stupid, but you’re definitely getting in his way,’ Judith said with a smile. ‘Ah, here we are, Monday the fifth.’
‘Was he at the rowing dinner?’ Becks asked.
‘Hmm,’ Judith said, not answering immediately.
‘Well?’
‘Sadly not. According to this, he went swimming that night,’ Judith said, and then flicked through the pages to get a better sense of the other diary entries. ‘And he records everything. We’ve got drinks with friends, dinners, choir practices on Thursdays, football matches, badminton on Saturdays. He and his wife lead a full life.’
‘Why are you so interested in that Monday night?’ Tanika asked.
‘It’s the only night that Liz Curtis has an entry in her diary. It was for a rowing dinner. And seeing as we know Elliot Howard rowed back in the day, we were wondering if it was a connection between them both. But according to his diary, every Monday night from eight until nine, Elliot goes swimming in the Court Garden Leisure Centre.’
‘Every Monday night?’ Suzie asked sceptically.
‘Every Monday night. That’s what it says here.’
‘So he’s very unlikely to have been at Liz’s dinner.’
Judith wasn’t happy.
‘Does anyone else get the feeling that whenever we interrogate Elliot’s life, he’s already got himself an alibi? He’s swimming, or he’s at choir practice, or he’s on a webcam holding an auction.’
‘Policing can often feel like this,’ Tanika said. ‘You keep hitting brick walls. But you have to trust in the process. Trust in yourselves. And, knowing what you three have already achieved, even before you had access to the case files, I know you’re going to make a major breakthrough. I just know it.’
Sadly, Tanika’s confidence was misplaced. Because, although the three friends pored over the ballistics, coroner’s and other forensic reports; even though they read all the witness statements and waded through the financial and other background checks, they could find nothing that significantly moved the case on any further. It was so frustrating. Somewhere out there was the killer, if they could only work out who it was.
And all along, Judith kept telling them that there was something big they were missing, something obvious, even. She could feel it in her bones. What was it?
Chapter 33
There were no major breakthroughs for the women on the first day. There were none on the second, either. All they seemed to do was go round and round in circles, rehashing the same clues and leads, and, above all, the same watertight alibis of Elliot Howard and Andy Bishop.
The spirits of the three friends started to flag. They could see the sly looks they got whenever they entered or left the police station, or had the temerity to request specific information, and they increasingly felt as though they were letting Tanika down. After all, she’d gone out on a limb to get them involved and they weren’t doing anything to repay that faith.
By the Wednesday, neither Becks nor Suzie could spare any more time to work the case. Suzie had dogs to walk and Becks a home that she believed had completely fallen into disarray over the previous two days. So Judith spent Wednesday at the police station on her own. But it wasn’t the same without her friends. She felt a touch foolish. Like the silly, interfering old woman she knew Tanika’s colleagues already thought she was.
When she finally got home after a whole day cooped up inside, she decided she needed a swim more than ever to clear her mind.
After weeks of sunshine, the evening brought bruised clouds, and the air was oppressively hot. A storm was on the way, Judith could tell as she swam upstream.
To try and relieve her feelings of frustration, Judith did what she always did. She counted her blessings. There were so many. She was fit, she wanted for nothing, and she’d even made some new friends. But despite her efforts to remain positive, Judith couldn’t stop her thoughts returning to the work she’d been doing at the police station, which had led precisely nowhere as far as she could see.
In particular, she kept thinking about the antique pistol the killer had used and the medallions he’d left behind at the scene of each murder. The fact that each victim had been shot dead with an antique Luger screamed to Judith that Elliot Howard had to be the killer, but the fact that Masonic medallions had been left on the bodies screamed just as loudly that it had to have been Andy Bishop.
Judith had a terrible feeling that the killer was playing with her, playing with the police. After all, why leave any kind of clues like bronze medallions behind at the scene? Wouldn’t any killer worth their salt focus on getting in there, committing murder, and then getting out again without leaving any clues whatsoever? The medallions made no sense.
As Judith’s swimming brought her alongside Stefan’s property, she treaded water for a minute, looking at the bank of bulrushes, her mind going back to the night of the murder. To have been this close to the killer at the precise moment he’d shot and killed Stefan Dunwoody! It was incredible to consider.
A shiver ran through Judith’s body and she decided to cut short her swim and let the river bear her back to her house. As she floated along, she found herself marvelling at how the river linked so many people in Marlow. She lived on it, as had Stefan, and if she kept going with the current, she’d pass through Marlow and come out the other side, heading towards the rowing centre.
Judith found herself mulling the fact that Liz Curtis was an ex international rower, just as Elliot Howard had also rowed in his youth. What about Stefan Dunwoody? Had he once rowed? After all, he’d been at the Henley Royal Regatta, hadn’t he? Judith realised she’d failed to make the connection before. Stefan had been at a rowing regatta when he’d first argued with Elliot!
She felt a tingle of excitement. It was a sensation she associated with solving crossword puzzles. A realisation that although she still didn
’t know the answer, she was in the right territory. And the more she thought of Stefan and Elliot meeting at Henley, the more certain she was that her instincts were right.
Once she got back to her house, Judith dressed and poured herself a generous glug of what she liked to call ‘thinking Scotch’. She then went over to her baize card table and fired up her tablet computer. Pulling down some sheets of A4, she sharpened one of her already-sharp HB pencils and set to work.
She typed ‘Elliot Howard’ and ‘+rowing’ into her search engine. There weren’t any hits. Never mind. She tried again by searching for ‘rowing’ with ‘Stefan Dunwoody’ and was surprised to get a result. It was an article in the Marlow Free Press and Judith clicked the link.
The page she navigated to was in the ‘Homes and Garden’ section of the paper and was all about ‘local art gallery owner Stefan Dunwoody’ showing off his home for the readers. There were lots of photos of Stefan in his home, but Judith avidly read the text trying to discover what Stefan had said about ‘rowing’. She soon found the relevant paragraph.
Mr Dunwoody laughs when I ask him why he bought a house on the River Thames. ‘I can’t swim and I’ve always disliked rowing, so you’d think it was strange me buying an old watermill. But I love the wildlife you get on the river. As long as you never make me get in a boat, I’m happy.’
Judith’s enthusiasm evaporated. That rather answered the question, didn’t it? If Stefan had a connection to anyone in the case it wouldn’t be because of rowing.
But Judith knew, in the same way you couldn’t give up on a crossword clue until you’d gone through all of the permutations – tried every single letter of the alphabet – she should keep trying to see what links she could find to rowing among the witnesses and victims. So she typed ‘Iqbal Kassam’ and ‘rowing’ into the search bar.
There were no hits.
Next she typed both ‘Liz Curtis’ and ‘Danny Curtis’ plus the word ‘rowing’ into the search bar, but she got hundreds of hits, mostly from travel and tourism websites and blogs.
Judith frowned to herself. How was it going to be possible to find out about Liz’s rowing career rather than her rowing centre? She tried clicking through on the links, and running the search again using different words, but she kept getting nowhere. There were any number of online articles praising the rowing centre as a great day out for the kids, or lamenting its closure during the most recent floods, but nothing that specifically tied Liz or her husband Danny to competitive rowing.
By midnight, Judith’s mind was scrambled. The ‘thinking Scotch’ she’d been drinking had very much turned into ‘unthinking Scotch’ sometime around ten-ish, and she wasn’t sure what she’d achieved since then. She’d tried searching every local newspaper’s website, and every nearby rowing club’s website as well, from William Borlase’s and Great Marlow schools to the Marlow town rowing club, and the Leander club in Henley. But no matter how hard she hunted, she couldn’t find the link.
Her whole evening had been a busted flush.
And yet Judith still had a feeling in her soul that she was on the right track. And even deeper within her was the knowledge that the local newspaper and rowing websites only went back so far. Everything was digitally up-to-date for the last ten years or so, but in the ten years before then, the various websites had a spotty record of scanned information or incomplete copy-typed archives. As for the preceding decades, the 1990s and 1980s, none of the newspapers had a searchable database, and it was the same for the rowing clubs as well. Both Elliot’s career as a schoolboy rower and Liz’s for Team GB pre-dated the internet by some distance.
Judith hauled herself to her feet. It was time for bed. But before she oriented herself so she could aim for the foot of the staircase, she found her hand going to the key around her neck and her eyes blurrily focusing on the oak door to the side of the drinks table. She was dimly aware that while this was very definitely not the time, it was possible she wouldn’t be able to put it off any longer.
On the way to bed, Judith told herself that a good night’s sleep would hopefully provide a solution.
The extraordinary thing was, she was right.
Chapter 34
The next day, Elliot Howard was hungry. He’d arrived at work at 10 a.m. sharp, as usual, and his morning had been no more taxing than any other, but he’d felt fidgety, on edge. He wanted to get out. So, although it wasn’t yet eleven, he decided to leave the office. A short walk away was the commercial estate where a sandwich van would sell him a nice bacon butty that he could accompany with a Styrofoam cup of tea. Telling everyone he was popping out for half an hour, he left the building.
As he strode off, Elliot didn’t notice the older woman sitting on a bench by a large hydrangea bush, even though she was wearing a dark grey cape.
Judith watched Elliot leave and a surge of adrenaline coursed through her. The coast was clear! But for how long, that was the question. She got up from the bench, picked up the carrier bag that was at her side, and bustled over to the auction house.
Striding in, she saw Elliot’s wife Daisy sitting at her desk.
‘Good morning,’ Judith announced, knowing she would have to use all of her force of personality to get what she needed.
Daisy looked surprised to see Judith.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘You won’t remember, but I saw your husband a few weeks ago.’
‘Oh I remember very well. He told me all about it. You made up a story to trap him. Something about a dress and a glass of wine.’
Judith was thrown. This was a very different Daisy to the last time they’d spoken. What on earth had changed?
‘I’m sorry?’
‘He said you’d come to spy on him.’
‘That’s not true. I merely asked him to pay for a dress he’d ruined.’
‘A lie.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘It’s a lie. I can tell. You’re lying.’
‘I’m doing no such thing,’ Judith blustered. ‘Now if you don’t mind, I need to leave the damaged dress in your husband’s office.’
‘You can’t go in there!’ Daisy called out, but it was too late as Judith strode into Elliot’s office and tried to look at all of the framed rowing pictures on the walls.
This had been the idea she’d woken up with that morning. After all, if she was looking for a record of Elliot’s rowing past, where better to start than the walls of his office? Here was every triumphant crew he’d participated in, and they even had a list of the names of the people in the photos written on the cardboard mounts. It would be perfect for finding out if he’d ever rowed with any of the witnesses or victims in the murders.
But before Judith could get a good look, Daisy stormed in behind her.
‘I said you can’t come in here. This is my husband’s office, his private office!’
There was a ferocity to Daisy that Judith found frightening. She was like a she-wolf defending her young cubs from danger.
‘We’ve worked so hard to be happy,’ Daisy hissed. ‘Together. Elliot and me. And I’m not having anything get in our way. Or anyone. Now get out. Get out!’
Judith realised she’d better do as she was told or she was at risk of being physically assaulted.
As she left the auction house, Judith tried to process what had happened. Why had Daisy overreacted like that? Was she just protecting her husband? Or was there more to it than that?
It was an interesting question, but Judith couldn’t give it her full attention. This was because, while she’d been in Elliot’s study, she’d made what she knew was a major breakthrough. In the row of photos on the wall, there’d been a gap that hadn’t been there before.
Since her last visit, Elliot had removed one of the rowing photos from the wall.
Judith was now convinced. Rowing was the link they’d been looking for all this time. It had to be. And if that were the case, then Judith knew she had no choice. Her hand went to the key on th
e chain around her neck.
It was time.
‘You wanted to see us?’ Becks said as Judith showed her and Suzie into her house and explained about her trip to Elliot Howard’s study and her encounter with his wife, Daisy.
‘She went for you?’ Suzie asked.
‘I couldn’t understand it. The first time we met she was so lovely. But this time she was like a wounded animal.’
‘I wonder what’s changed?’ Becks asked.
‘She’s worked out her husband’s a killer,’ Suzie said simply. ‘That’s what’s changed.’
‘Yes, that could well be it,’ Judith agreed.
‘So why do you think Elliot’s taken down a rowing photo?’ Becks asked.
‘Well, I can tell you I’ve researched everything to do with rowing online,’ Judith said. ‘And I’ve found nothing.’
‘So it’s not connected?’ Becks asked, confused.
‘No, I still think it’s connected. But Elliot was a schoolboy rower, and that was back in the 1980s, long before we had the internet. So I suggest we see if we can find out for ourselves what the link was.’
As she spoke, Judith took the chain off from around her neck and held up the key on the end of it.
Suzie’s eyes widened, although Becks didn’t yet realise the significance of what was about to happen.
Judith smiled for Suzie’s benefit as she headed to the door that stood to the side of the drinks cabinet.
‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ Judith said as she inserted the key into the lock. ‘It’s not as interesting as you’d maybe think.’
On the one hand, Judith was right, and on the other, she was so very, very, wrong.
Chapter 35
After Judith opened the door, her friends didn’t speak for quite a few seconds.
‘Bloody hell!’ Suzie eventually managed, summing up the feelings of both her and Becks.
The room that Judith had opened was thick with dust and stuffed wall to wall and floor to ceiling with piles and piles of newspapers, magazines, brochures and leaflets, all stacked in towers up to ten feet tall that leant one against the other, or were heaped in great slicks of paper where a tower had collapsed, and the whole seemed to be held together by thick cobwebs that went from the skyscrapers of paper to the ceiling and to the walls.
The Marlow Murder Club Page 23