A Dangerous Deceit (6 page)

‘How much have you had to drink?'

‘Not much, but he was bigger than me,' he answered, summoning up a rueful grin. He never got anywhere with Margaret by sulking.

She wasn't amused this time. She took hold of his wrist, hurting him, surprising him with the strength of her slender fingers. One glance at her face – not beautiful, Margaret, except maybe for her eyes – and he'd seen that she'd guessed everything. Her usual amiability had deserted her. ‘I'm ashamed of you,' she had said, before letting go of his wrist, giving him a withering glance and leaving.

‘Not as much as I am of myself,' he'd replied to the door she closed behind her, meaning every word.

He was suddenly aware Vinnie had said something he hadn't answered. ‘What?'

‘I said you're not much company today. Come on, we might as well get back.'

He apologized and stood up to offer his hand but she was already on her feet. In a moment, she was going down the hill, five strides ahead of him.

In the red-brick Victorian police station at the corner of Town Hall Square and Market Street, Sergeant Joe Gilmour faced the detective inspector sitting opposite with a cautious respect. Not that he, with his six-foot frame and a sturdy independence, was easily overawed by anyone, and certainly he had no need to feel in awe of Herbert Reardon. Principally because they went back some way, from the time when Joe had worked under Reardon on a tough case out at Broughton Underhill, involving a girl who had drowned. At that time Reardon had been a mere acting inspector, and he himself a young constable in uniform, but unlike many more senior officers, Reardon had had time for a bright chap like Joe, showing him the ropes and encouraging him to use his initiative. Joe had always put his early promotion to sergeant down to the advice and support Reardon had given him in the raw days of his youth.

Soon after that case Joe had moved back to his home town of Folbury in order to keep an eye on his elderly mother, and since then had done his stint as an ordinary, small-town bobby: intervening in domestics, stopping fights after closing time, catching lads scrumping apples and generally keeping the peace. But new avenues were opening up – most of the larger towns and cities now had dedicated detective departments and Joe wanted to be part of it. He was raring to go, ready for more demanding work, and if God had given him any brains, the chance to use them. When his mother had died six months ago he had applied for a transfer to the regional detective department. It hadn't come through yet but he was still hopeful. Crime generally was increasing, and the nature of it changing. Wars were costly: the last one had nearly bankrupted Britain – and most of Europe – of its money as well as its youth, and in the economic slump that had followed even petty criminals were putting their minds to more sophisticated ways of getting money to feed, clothe and house hungry families. There was nothing like necessity for sharpening the wits.

‘Right, Sergeant, let's have the latest,' Reardon was saying, getting down to brass tacks.

In the absence of the senior station officer, Inspector Waterhouse, who had taken a week's leave to attend his daughter's wedding up in Newcastle, to be followed by a holiday in Whitley Bay, an officer from the detective department in Dudley had been dispatched to oversee enquiries into the sudden and unexpected death of Arthur Aston, and Joe had been more than happy to find it was Reardon. He was a decent bloke, tending to the unorthodox, and maybe that was why he hadn't gone further up the ladder than detective inspector. Or maybe he favoured his independence more. He was still riding his motorbike; Joe had seen it that morning in the station yard.

He'd remembered Joe. People did – it was the hair. Joe cursed it, the dark red hair that went with brown eyes, but still red enough to be memorable. Perhaps he should dye it if he wanted to become a detective. On the other hand, he might possibly grow bald before that became necessary, considering the time it was taking for his transfer to come through.

‘What have we got, then?' Reardon said, flipping the pages of the post-mortem report on the dead man, which he hadn't had time to do more than scan quickly. ‘Quick work. Like the mills of God, the path lab usually grinds slowly,' he murmured.

‘Yes, sir.' It appeared that time hadn't reduced Reardon's tendency to come out with these sorts of statements. ‘Well, as you can see, the cause of death
was
asphyxiation, as Dr Dysart initially suspected from the marks round his mouth, and his eyes. It was assumed at first he'd probably tripped or come over dizzy and fallen into the sand, but there were no signs of a struggle and …'

‘And?'

Joe cracked a knuckle, a habit he'd somehow picked up and was trying hard to break because he knew it set people's teeth on edge. His aunt with whom he now lodged had told him so often enough. Besides, it annoyed Joe almost as much; he felt it was all too likely to give a false impression of nerves. Maisie Henshall, bless her, had never said anything but he wondered if she'd noticed. They were getting along very nicely, thank you – well, a good bit more than that, he'd reason to hope – and he didn't want her to think he had objectionable habits, not if she was ever to become Mrs Joe Gilmour.

‘And what?' Reardon repeated, trying to push his chair back a few inches in order to be able to stretch his long legs. There was barely room for anyone other than the occupant of the big desk that had been wedged into the cramped space found for the temporary DI, never mind Joe's equally solid frame. But Reardon had shown tact in not asking to take over the office of the absent Waterhouse.

Joe frowned. ‘I don't know. Stands to reason if you fall head first into a heap of sand and you get it in your mouth and eyes, you find it hard to breathe. But you'd try to get up, wouldn't you, or at any rate roll over to get your face out of the sand? You wouldn't just lie there until you died.'

Reardon was looking over the flash photographs taken at the scene. The victim was lying on his back and the depression where he'd fallen before being turned over was clear. ‘Not unless you were stunned by the fall,' he said, and added as Joe shook his head, ‘Damp sand can be pretty unyielding. Or if you'd fainted, say, or lost consciousness – there was that wound on his temple, don't forget – and that was why you fell in the first place.'

‘How many healthy men do that?' Joe protested. ‘Just faint, I mean. There was no sign he
wasn't
healthy, though he was overweight and soon out of puff, according to the foreman, and the Path blokes have agreed with Dr Dysart that the cut on the side of his head was superficial, not much more than a graze, and anyway it wasn't recent and couldn't have anything to do with his death. There was no sign of a struggle, no handprints or anything to show he'd tried to lever himself up.'

‘Hmm. Didn't the woman in his office, Eileen Gerrity, seem to think he could have had a stroke, or a heart attack?'

‘Yes, but they say no to that as well. Anyway, there's something else – if you read the report further, sir, you'll see there's a bruise on the back of his neck, right at the base, that can't be accounted for.'

‘A rabbit punch?'

‘Not that sort of bruise. It's possible he could have been held down with something heavy.' He paused. ‘A foot? After he fell – or was pushed.'

Reardon considered. Twirling his fountain pen between his fingers, he gazed at the map of Folbury and its environs that he'd already managed to dredge up from somewhere and pinned to the wall. His chair was sideways to the window, which faced a brick wall only feet away, and the hideous scars on his left profile were reflected in the glass. Some people found it embarrassing to look Reardon in the face; disrespectful young PCs had been overheard bandying nicknames for the ugly-faced detective inspector when he'd arrived – until they encountered the baleful glance of Sergeant Gilmour, who knew they were honourable scars, acquired during the late war. Joe knew himself to be lucky, as they were, to have escaped the trenches. He'd been conscripted but done no more than his basic training before the Armistice was declared and he'd been sent home. But Reardon's scars didn't seem to bother the man himself, or if they did he concealed it, and the more you got to know him, the less you noticed them.

‘Besides,' Joe continued, ‘there's the matter of the key to the foundry. That's a puzzle.' He explained that Stanley Dowson, the foreman, had told them the foundry door was locked when he went in, but there'd been no door key on Aston's person, and despite a search, it hadn't turned up anywhere else.

‘How many keys are there?'

‘Just two it seems, one that's kept in the office next door, and Aston's own.'

‘Is it a Yale lock?'

‘No, that's just it, it's a mortice. The door couldn't have locked itself behind him when he went in, and there seems no reason why he should have locked it himself. If someone was in there with him, they turned the key and took it with them when they left. Why?'

‘Panicking at what they'd done, or giving themselves a bit of time, who knows? I gather the foundry hadn't been working for a day or two, but somebody from the machine shop next door was bound to go in and find him, probably sooner rather than later.' He threw a sharp look at Joe. ‘So what are you thinking, Sergeant?'

‘Looking less and less possible that it was an accident, isn't it, sir?'

Reardon made a non-committal sound which Joe took to be agreement.

Murder. Manslaughter, at least. A serious crime, whichever it was. And contrary to public belief, one that could still sicken the police. The taking of a human life brought a pretty sharp reminder that police business was more than just keeping the peace, that it also dealt with matters of life and death.

‘Remind me, what time was he found?'

‘About half-eleven. Dr Dysart was called straight away and she estimated he hadn't been dead long – three or four hours at most. His wife says they left the house for work at about half past eight.'

‘They?'

‘Yes. He gave her a lift as far as the shops and then took his car on to the garage where it was booked in to have the brakes adjusted. Walking from there would have taken about twenty minutes, so he should have arrived at the office before half nine at the latest, but nobody was unduly worried when he didn't turn up – he was the boss, he didn't have to clock in.'

‘All right, Sergeant.' Reardon squared his notes together. ‘Usual procedures, then.'

Usual procedures. That meant summoning up the fairly limited resources open to Folbury's police, who were not accustomed to dealing with murder or the routine that went with it.

‘I'll do my best to get extra manpower if it's needed, but I warn you we probably won't.'

This was likely to be true, but it shouldn't be a long drawn-out business – probably solved by the end of the week if they were lucky. This wasn't detective fiction, just a small-town murder. Likely as not, the culprit would turn out to be someone who'd been known to have it in for the victim and seized his chance when Aston had stumbled and fallen into the sand, or had knocked him down in a fight begun in the heat of the moment. But then, more deliberately, had held him down until he stopped breathing. Somebody who knew him, where he worked, what his routine was. Unlikely they'd be looking for a stranger, anyway. Most murderers were known to their victims, and it was more than possible that someone else, who knew that bad blood had existed, would come forward and say so.

Reardon was staring at the map again, as though making Folbury and its environs part of his inner landscape, ‘Houses on the opposite side of the road in Henrietta Street, aren't there?'

Joe was able to tell him he'd already sent a couple of lads door-knocking, asking if anyone was seen going into the foundry, or coming out, anybody acting suspicious lately.

‘And?'

‘Nix – from those they've managed to talk to so far, anyway. Nobody saw anything, but we haven't caught up with everybody yet. Sure as eggs, some old biddy will have been nosey-parkering through the curtains, and if he was followed, or whoever it was went with him into the foundry, they might have been seen – unless they were waiting for him inside when he arrived.'

And if they'd let themselves in and been waiting there long, good luck to them, he thought, recalling the bone-cold, almost windowless black hole, with only naked bulbs from the ceiling, that comprised the foundry; there were a couple of boxes to sit on and another for a makeshift table where the two foundry men employed there could eat their sandwiches at dinner time – though when the furnace was lit, like enough it would have been hot as hell's kitchen.

‘OK. We'll also need to find out whether anybody was likely to have had a grudge, disaffected employees or such, and what his habits, friends and/or enemies were … talk to the employees … well, I don't have to tell you, do I? You know the form. Good luck.' He turned back to the file, but Joe made no immediate move to leave. ‘Is there something else, Sergeant?'

Joe hesitated. He was sometimes impulsive. Maybe he should keep his mouth shut this time until he'd spoken to Waterhouse. The inspector was a thorn in Joe's flesh, suspicious of one he regarded as a whippersnapper with a probable ambition to overtake him and who routinely put every obstacle he could in Joe's way. He might well choose to believe Joe had gone behind his back. On the other hand, the idea was bothering Joe … He plunged.

‘The thing is, it's all put me in mind of something that happened at the end of February. A body that was found under the snow near Maxstead, a mile or two out of the village. Not far from Maxstead Court – that's the house belonging to the Scroopes – they're the big name around here.'

Reardon thought for a moment or two. ‘Found when the thaw came, skull wounds, still unidentified. What about him?'