A Dangerous Deceit (16 page)

He had barely stepped thankfully out on to the pavement and shut the car door behind him before he heard a reedy voice summoning him: ‘You there – policeman! Here a minute.' He turned in the direction of the call and saw a white-haired woman sitting at an open window in one of the houses just behind him, beckoning. ‘Policeman!' she called again.

Joe was over the moon that Reardon had succeeded in having him taken off all other duties in order to work with him on this case, but so much for plain clothes and anonymity! He hoped he hadn't developed police plod. More likely it was the hair that made him a target for anyone who thought they could nobble him to find out what was going on. This woman had obviously seen him previously with the other police and remembered. He sighed and walked over to the house.

The warm weather was continuing and the sash window had been thrown up from the bottom. The old woman sat in a chair in front of it, swathed in shawls. Behind her he glimpsed the sad trappings of an invalid's existence: a table with pillboxes and a jug of water, a white counterpane on a brass bedstead that had been brought downstairs for the convenience of those who had to care for her, a helpless old person who had to be helped from bed to chair.

This particular old person, however, though she looked frail, with lines of pain drawn round her mouth and her face leached of all colour, seemed far from helpless. She was briskly knitting a sock on four steel needles, the heel already turned, her hands moving ceaselessly, without the need to look at what she was doing. Her eyes were bright with intelligence. ‘Have you caught who did it yet?'

It was what he'd expected and he didn't pretend not to understand. Aston's death was presently the main topic of excited interest in the whole of Folbury, but especially here, in the street where it had occurred. ‘Not yet, Mrs …?'

‘Ibbotson.
Miss
Ibbotson. Gladys. You never came to ask me any questions.'

‘Not me personally, no, but I was under the impression everyone in the street had been approached by one of our officers.'

‘The rest of them were, but I wasn't so well the day they came round. I'd had to take to my bed that day, so my niece didn't bother me. She tells me they wanted to know if anybody saw anything funny going on.'

‘That's right, but if you were confined to bed, Miss Ibbotson—'

‘Gladys. Nobody calls me Miss Ibbotson. See, I wasn't in bed, not
then.
Not the day they say it happened, I mean.' Joe felt a quickening of interest. He perched himself on the stone windowsill, where he could talk to her without having to bend down and not raise his voice too much, though there was no chance of being overheard since the street was deserted at the moment. ‘I see most things, you know, sitting here,' she went on. ‘Nothing else to do but look out and watch folk.'

Day after day, Joe thought, nothing to see but the mundane life in the street: the comings and goings between the various workshops, children running about, bouncing balls against the wall or playing marbles, neighbours setting out to go shopping must provide the sum total of her day's interest. No view except of Aston's workshop, the motor repair place belching out fumes and the tall Victorian brick-built elementary school looming up behind that. ‘So what did you see, then, Gladys? Or maybe who?'

‘Well, for a start I saw Vincent.'

‘Who's Vincent?' He didn't recall any Vincent being mentioned by the two bobbies who'd done the door-knocking, and he'd been looking through the notes they'd made just before he left the station.

‘The milkman. Tompkin's lad.' She was enjoying this, spinning it out. ‘I had my eye on him because he
will
leave his blessed float right in the middle of the road while he delivers, don't matter how many times he's told he's obstructing other traffic, and I was going to give him a piece of my mind – until it happened. No thought for anybody else, not like his father used to be. It's only a narrow street and if anybody else comes along it causes a right commotion, I can tell you.'

No one else had mentioned the inconsiderate milkman to the police, but then, his arrival was an everyday occurrence, so familiar no doubt that he'd grown to be part of the scenery – and in any case it hardly seemed likely he'd nipped in and shoved Aston down into the sand between delivering pints of milk. ‘What do you mean, “until it happened”? What happened?'

‘We-ell …' Gladys did not intend to be rushed. ‘Somebody did want to get past the float – it was a butcher's van, and the driver got mad and started tooting his horn enough to waken the dead. The poor old horse nearly bolted – would've done, I daresay, if Vincent hadn't come back with his churn just in time to grab the reins before he'd fairly got going. But he nearly ran over that woman that was crossing the road, all the same.'

‘You didn't say you'd seen a woman as well, Gladys.'

‘Didn't I?' She grinned mischievously, showing an unexpected dimple, then sobered. ‘Anyway, I hadn't noticed her till then, you know, what with the milk cart in the middle of the road and all the shemozzle it was creating. But she could have come out of the foundry. I don't say she
did
, mind, I didn't actually see her come out, but she could have.'

What people thought they saw at the time of an incident and what they really did
see didn't always hang together. Neither did what different people had seen at the same incident always coincide. But Gladys Ibbotson didn't seem like a person who made mistakes.

‘Are you sure it wasn't a man?'

‘Not unless he was wearing women's skirts.'

‘What sort of woman was she then? Old, young, short, tall? Had you ever seen her before?'

Gladys shook her head. ‘I don't know. Only saw her for a second or two, out of my eye corner, so to speak, and the milk cart between us. She didn't try to cross the road again, just jumped back sharpish from the horse's hooves and turned and ran round the corner. I think that was why I remembered her, because she ran.'

‘What time would this be?'

‘Nine o'clock,' Gladys said promptly. ‘The school bell had just sounded and everything went quiet in the playground, like it does. I checked my clock with it. Sometimes Muriel forgets to wind it up, and if there's one thing I can't abide, it's a clock that's not right.'

‘Did you know Mr Aston, Miss Ibbotson?'

‘Gladys. Only by sight. I used to see him, him and that woman that works for him, but I've never had cause to speak to either of them. Very smart chap, I'll say that for him. Always in a nice dark suit and a black bowler. Shoes polished.'

‘He used to be in the army.'

‘That accounts for it, then.'

‘Well, thanks – Gladys. You've been very helpful.' Joe eased himself from the windowsill, ready to go across to Aston's. ‘Don't forget to let us know if you recall anything else.'

‘Well, you know, I do remember one other thing, now I come to think of it. I don't suppose it'll be any help, but she was wearing a brown coat, that woman.'

‘I'll make a note of that.' Maisie had a brown coat. And how many other women in Folbury owned one? Scores, for all Joe knew.

That women could and did murder was hardly news, but it was an intriguing idea, that a woman might have been responsible for killing a big man like Aston. And yet, it wouldn't have needed much physical strength – a push from behind, Aston perhaps winded as he landed in the sand, and then a foot pressed on his neck – a minute or two would have sufficed.

The workshop was in full operation once more, men standing in front of their machines, the screech of grinding and drilling setting Joe's teeth on edge. Straight away he spotted Stanley Dowson, who lifted a hand in recognition but didn't accompany him into the office, where Eileen Gerrity, in a fug of cigarette smoke, was bent over a stack of what looked like invoices. Her coat was hanging on a peg at the back of the door. It was green, a darkish green, unlike the bright emerald shade of her jumper, patriotic to her native Ireland no doubt but a violent contrast to her hair – much more carroty than his own, he noted.

She made no objection to his request to look through the safe once more, and waved him to the desk which Arthur Aston had presumably occupied, after which she left him to get on with it and disappeared. In a few minutes, she returned with a pint mug of tea, which she placed at his elbow.

‘Thanks, Eileen. Very welcome.'

‘Sugar?' She held out a blue sugar bag with a teaspoon stuck into it.

‘Please. I see you're back in business already,' he said, helping himself and then waving the teaspoon towards the activity beyond the glass. From where he sat, he could see every machine on the shop floor. Aston would have been well placed to keep an eye on the men working for him.

‘There's no reason not to for the moment,' she said, ‘until we know how things are going to pan out. We still have orders to complete, and the chaps need their wages.'

‘And after that?'

She shrugged. ‘It'll depend on her, on Lily Aston, won't it? Whether she keeps the place going or sells up.' A shade of vindictiveness coloured the way she said it. Maybe it was a sore point that the business would go to Aston's wife – especially if the rumours about Eileen's association with her boss were true and she suspected he hadn't left a will, and that she herself was therefore unlikely to get anything.

When he had first interviewed her, just after Aston's body had been found, Eileen had been in a state of shock. Now she seemed to have recovered what seemed to be her natural bounce and resilience. She was a war widow and needed to work, she had told him then, her husband had been killed on the Western Front – thank God they'd had no children. A well-developed woman who gave off energy like an electric light bulb – even her orangey hair seemed to strike off sparks – she had worked for Arthur Aston ever since the establishment of Aston's Engineering.

Joe remembered what Lily had told him about her husband working late. Unprepossessing as Aston had been, he had not seemed to see that as a bar to approaching women – and from Maisie's testimony, even young girls – and rumour had it that his association with Eileen had been going on for years. Actually, Joe could see the attraction this woman would have had for him – the utter contrast between her and his lacklustre wife. Eileen Gerrity seemed like the sort of woman who would in other circumstances enjoy a laugh, and not be averse to a drink or two, while poor Lily looked as though she would at the best of times have difficulty in summoning up a smile.

He wondered if she had known what was going on, and that was why she had mentioned all those late nights at the office. She hadn't given any signs that she had, but he was beginning to suspect Lily was a dark horse.

‘Anything you want to know, just ask,' Eileen said, returning to her desk.

Joe was here to give closer attention than before to the contents of both the safe and Aston's desk, not the sort of task he relished, but previously time hadn't allowed more than a cursory look at what the safe contained. He didn't expect to find anything he'd missed, though, mainly because there was surprisingly little in the way of paperwork. Arthur Aston, or Eileen, or maybe both, had set up a fairly simple accounting system, which seemed to work well enough for them. There had been the usual stuff, he recalled – the wages book, purchase and sales ledgers, invoice files, bank statements, correspondence files – and that had been about it. Eileen kept the figures neatly and Aston's diary was also kept up-to-date by her, though he'd had relatively few appointments, most of them seeming to be with regular clients. Occasionally, beside a customer's name, Aston had made the same sort of cryptic notes he'd written on the back of his chequebook, and that seemed to be all he had needed.

‘Where did Mr Aston meet his customers?' he asked Eileen over his shoulder.

Her desk chair was back to back with Aston's, where Joe was sitting, and she swivelled round to answer. ‘Sometimes for lunch at the Rotary Club, if he thought they were important, or else at the customer's place, sometimes here.' She laughed at his raised eyebrows and pointed to the spare chair in the corner. ‘It was as good as anywhere. There wasn't anything special that I didn't know about.'

‘What about his business relationships, were they good?'

She didn't reply for a moment and then she said carefully, ‘It wasn't his policy to make enemies.'

‘I'm not suggesting it was, but was there anyone who was dissatisfied with the way he conducted business? Now, or at any time previously?'

She played with the fountain pen she was holding without meeting his eyes. ‘Well, I can only think of one, but honestly, if you knew Frank Greenwood …'

‘Who's he?'

‘Greenwood and Bell. They're the carriers we use to pick up and deliver orders.' He waited. ‘Oh, all right. It was Arthur's – Mr Aston's – practice to go through the statements sent in once a month with me, and to see what money we had coming in, what bills we had outstanding, what needed to be paid straight away and what could run on for another month. He liked to play about with the accounts, you know. Keeping the money moving, he called it. Frank Greenwood's normally pretty easy-going and he didn't usually press for quick payment, so we'd sometimes let his account go for another month – but then it got to two months, and when it reached three, he stormed in here one day and demanded immediate payment or else …' She frowned. ‘It took the wind out of Arthur's sails, but to be fair, I think it was Frank's partner, Charlie Bell, who was doing the demanding, and he sent Frank because he's always been the one to deal with us.'

‘“Or else”? What did he mean by that?'

‘He threatened the law. He tried to get nasty but, well, it was just a laugh. He's not that sort, not really. If you're thinking he might have killed Arthur, you're wrong. He couldn't knock the skin off a rice pudding.'