Authors: That Way Murder Lies

Ann Granger (9 page)

BOOK: Ann Granger

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‘You’ve met Inspector Campbell, I understand,’ he said.

‘The young woman?Yes. This isn’t going to be left to her, is it? It’s not an accident. It can’t be. It’s the lunatic who’s been writing those damn letters! He’s responsible.’

Toby was sitting on a window seat, leaning forward, hands loosely clasped. From that vantage point he would be able to see the gardens and although not the lake itself, he would have been
able to observe some of the movement of police vehicles. He looked up and said in a low voice, ‘Fiona wouldn’t have gone down to the lake alone. She was scared of Spike, the goose.’

‘Even to meet someone?’ Markby asked.

‘No! Why should she want to meet anyone at that unholy hour of the morning, anyway?’

‘Toby saw my daughter leave the house just after eight,’ Jenner said. ‘He assumed she was going for an early-morning run. She might have met an intruder in the grounds, of course. It could have been the letter-writer. He might have been hanging round the place, spying on us. He’s clearly demented.’

‘Insanity is quite often claimed as a defence but seldom found to be genuine,’ Markby observed.

‘Nevertheless,’ Jenner replied obstinately, ‘it must occur to you that possibly my wife has been stalked for some time and the letters are an integral part of a vicious and obsessive campaign by this – this person.’ Jenner fell silent, unable to add further words. He merely gestured hopelessly.

‘You understand a post-mortem examination will be carried out on your daughter?’ Markby asked him gently.

Jenner winced. ‘I hate the idea. But it has to be. I know that.’ He and Toby exchanged glances. ‘Fiona had also been struck on the head. That’s what has upset my wife more than anything. It – it’s as though her death is a carbon copy of Freda Kemp’s. Can that be a coincidence?’ Jenner gave a short, mirthless bark of laughter. ‘I don’t think so. I tell you, Markby. There’s a maniac out there and he’s hell bent on persecuting us.’

Markby studied him for a moment. ‘No other member of the household left the house before breakfast? Only your daughter?’

‘No! For goodness’ sake, do we need alibis? I didn’t leave the house. I’m sure my wife didn’t.’

‘I didn’t,’ said Toby. ‘I saw Fiona from the bathroom window. I opened it to let out the steam. If I’d known she was going running I’d have got up earlier and gone with her. I wish I had.’ His face
twisted in misery. ‘She might be alive now. She
would
be alive now!’

‘I shall, of course, be overseeing any investigation,’ Markby told them. ‘But Inspector Campbell will be in charge of things on the ground. She’ll be along to talk to you shortly. Tell her everything you’ve told me and any other detail you may remember.You can have every confidence in her. She has shown herself very able officer in her previous division. She is new here but I’m sure she’ll handle it well.’

As he spoke these words, Markby felt a twinge of an emotion he couldn’t at once identify. He told himself it wasn’t doubt. Campbell had come to them with an excellent reputation in her job. But perhaps the momentary twinge had been one of envy? Campbell was young. She was at the beginning of her career. He was nearing the end of his. His past successes had resulted in promotion to a rank putting him behind a desk for most of his time. He’d much rather be out there where the action was. Yes, dammit, he did envy Campbell!

‘I don’t like it!’ Jenner snapped. ‘She’s too young. I want someone with experience. And a newcomer, you say?’

Markby smiled. ‘That could be a good thing. Newcomers are usually keen. Don’t worry. I’ll keep an eye on things.’

‘I should damn well hope so!’ Jenner’s face had flushed an angry red. He recollected himself and said stiffly, ‘I apologize. I’m not myself. Of course you’ll see everything necessary is done.’

Markby left them and drove slowly back to Bamford. Thus he wasn’t at the lakeside when one of the constables called out to Jess Campbell that there was a tyre mark some distance from the water’s edge.

‘Here, ma’am.’ The man pointed. ’ It’s not too good.’

It was almost obliterated. Either Darren or his father, careering round the lake in pursuit of Spike, must have lumbered straight across it.

‘Accidentally or on purpose,’ Jess said aloud.

‘Inspector?’ The constable looked puzzled.

‘I’ll send the photographer over here and get forensics to make a cast of it,’ Jess said. ‘Well spotted.’

Markby pressed his finger on the doorbell and heard it buzz inside the house. It was an electronic gadget. You pressed the button; it sent a signal to the buzzer inside and a tiny spot glowed on the button to show you it had done it. The trouble was that half the time it hadn’t done it. It meant he strained his ear every time to make sure he caught the buzz.

This time he heard it and the quick approach of Meredith’s footstep. She pulled the door open, relief on her face.

‘I was beginning to wonder where you were. It’s almost two. Laura’s been on the phone to me. Paul is getting jittery and wanting to know when he can put in the souffle. She thought you might be here or I might know where you were but I couldn’t help her. She said she’d rung your place but there was no reply and you hadn’t left the answerphone on. That was an hour ago. I thought about trying your mobile but I had this horrible feeling you might have been called in on something and that lunch was scrapped.’

‘I’m sorry I’m late, he told her as he followed her inside. ‘I’ll phone Laura and apologize to her and to Paul but I don’t think I fancy lunch.’ His voice and manner had registered with her now.

She asked quietly, ‘What’s happened?’

He smiled at her ruefully. ‘I always seem to be the harbinger of bad news. In this case, it involves the Jenners. I’m afraid your prime suspect for the role of poison pen wielder is dead.’

‘Fiona?’

He saw her hazel eyes widen in shock and the colour drain from her face. Instinctively he put out his hand to grasp her.

‘It’s all right,’ she said at once. But she gripped his hand, even so, for reassurance. ‘That’s terrible. Poor kid. PoorToby … Jeremy, Alison, everyone … What happened? Was it an accident?’

‘To know that exactly we’ll have to await the post-mortem results.’ He explained about the blow Fiona appeared to have
received to the head and that she’d been found in the lake. ‘Very like Freda Kemp.’

He watched this register with her. She turned her face away so that her expression was partly concealed from him. He felt her hand, still in his, twitch.

‘I feel awful,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m so sorry for all the things I said about her, for accusing her of being the letter-writer. You’d say I was theorizing without facts, wouldn’t you? Of course I was. It was stupid.’

‘Don’t feel badly about it,’ he told her gently. ‘No one expected this. We none of us had enough facts. We still don’t.’ Markby released her hand and stared thoughtfully past her towards the window, but it was doubtful he took in the limited view of the back yard. ‘Poison pen campaigns don’t usually end in …’

Meredith was watching his face and rubbing her forearms as if she were cold. ‘In what? You think this is murder, don’t you?’ she said soberly.

‘Yes,’ Markby replied, turning his gaze from the window towards her. ‘I think it very probably is.’

Chapter Five

Jess got to the morgue at four o’clock, having been informed that the coroner’s office had given Dr Fuller the go-ahead to carry out the autopsy. This was a police matter but the corpse was still technically the coroner’s body. The idea of being shut up in the cavernous dissection room with its background noises of running water, its air smelling of antiseptic, was never to be welcomed. But the morning’s clouds had vanished, the sun returned to sparkle teasingly outside the dusty windows, and this just wasn’t the place to be, and at Easter to boot. Still, it couldn’t be helped. She was accompanied by Sergeant Steve Prescott, an amiable giant whose features bore the honourable scars of collisions on the rugby field. He stood by the stainless steel dissection table with its sinister central drainage channel; his hands folded one over the other as if he were at a church service or, alternatively, a Mafia bodyguard awaiting orders. There was also a long-faced photographer fiddling with his camera but as a conversationalist he rated zero. After a brief exchange of greetings on their arrival, that had been that.

The body was covered by a sheet. The silence seemed less respectful than unnatural and Jess felt impelled to break it.

‘Pity it’s happened over Easter.’ A daft remark, she thought. Death doesn’t look at the calendar before it picks its victim and police work wasn’t held up because the rest of the country took a holiday.

Prescott seemed to consider the remark from all angles before
replying, a little unexpectedly, ‘Always seems wrong when it’s a young person. Makes you think.’

So even the impassive Prescott had been filled with intimations of mortality.

Perhaps Prescott felt he needed to explain his remark. ‘I mean, there she is.’ He nodded towards the sheeted corpse. ‘She’d be fit and healthy if she wasn’t dead, bags of money in the family – and as cold as a cod on a fishmonger’s slab.’

There was no arguing with that diagnosis.

There was a slam of a distant door and Dr Fuller bounced in, his pink face still wreathed in smiles, which, Jess thought crossly, hardly suited the occasion. Still, the pathologist was one of those fortunate beings who genuinely enjoyed their work. His green plastic apron reached from his neck to his ankles. Add in his bushy grey eyebrows and he appeared not so much a child’s toy now as a jolly green-clad garden gnome.

‘Here we are again!’ Dr Fuller hailed them. He didn’t actually rub his hands, but Jess had the feeling he would have liked to. ‘To work, then! With luck this shouldn’t take long. Just a moment, let me switch on the machine.’ Fuller set his little tape recorder whirring and, as he worked, he would make a running commentary. ‘Before I begin, I’ve got a little surprise for you, I think,’ he said happily like the kindly paterfamilias he no doubt was.

Beside her, Jess was aware that Prescott’s battered features had taken on a suspicious slant. His acquaintance with Dr Fuller was of long standing.

Deftly Dr Fuller turned back the sheet and the body lay revealed. ‘Now then, what do you make of that?’

They leaned forward and studied the area indicated by the pathologist. The photographer moved in for a close-up. Fuller was right. It was a surprise.

‘Stabbed?’ Markby exclaimed. He stared at the inspector. She looked a bit pale, but they usually did on returning from morgue duty. Even so, her excitement could be heard in her voice.

‘Yes, sir. A single thrust which went right through her clothing, between her ribs and straight into her heart. We didn’t realize it at first because she’d been floating in water and the blood had washed away. Also she was wearing a red sweatshirt and it’s a very small puncture mark. Dr Fuller thinks it probably didn’t bleed much. They found the wound at the morgue when they stripped the body.’

‘What you’re saying,’ Markby said tersely, ‘doesn’t sound like a wound made by a knife.’

‘Dr Fuller thinks not. He thinks some possibly home-made, thin weapon with the end sharpened. In diameter it would be rounded. Rather like a thick needle, he guesses.’

Markby drummed his fingers on his desk. ‘Is that diver still down at the lake?’

‘I’ve got a message to the underwater team, sir. They’ve failed to find any underwater rocks on which she might have struck her head as she went in and they were about to pack up. Now they’re looking for anything which might have been a weapon, but that means going further out in the lake. It will take time.’

Markby still looked discontented. It wasn’t, Jess thought, either at the slowness of the underwater search or at her handling of the case. It might be because of the added cost involved in keeping the diving team on. Increasingly they worked with the word ‘budget’ hanging invisibly over their heads, but she didn’t think it was that, either. It was something else.

‘Does he think death would have been instantaneous?’ The superintendent’s voice was abrupt and his bright blue eyes bored into hers.

‘Dr Fuller thinks she probably lived for up to a minute but no longer. There’s no lake water in the lungs, so she was dead by the time she went in there. As for the head wound, he thinks that was inflicted after death, almost certainly deliberately.’

‘And then her killer put her in lake, knowing full well we’d find the real cause of death. He wasn’t trying to cover that up. He was just making a point. He wanted to recall the death of Freda
Kemp. Pah!’ He slapped his hands on the desk top and scowled ferociously but not, she was pleased to see, at her.

‘Freda Kemp?’ Jess asked cautiously, lest the scowl be turned in her direction, after all.

His expression faded to one of mild surprise and then became apologetic. ‘You haven’t had an opportunity to examine the details of the poison pen campaign Mrs Jenner’s been subjected to. But it may turn out to be very much part and parcel of this business. Let’s hope that tyre tread turns up something:

‘It’s a very poor impression, sir, forensics are doing their best.’ She paused. ‘I haven’t told the family yet. There’s a bit of a problem interviewing Mrs Jenner. Her doctor gave her a sedative and she’s out for the count. She probably won’t be too clear-headed tomorrow. I won’t be able to see her until Monday morning.’

Markby nodded. ‘It will give you a chance to read up the file on her trial.’

‘Her trial, sir?’ Had she heard that correctly?

‘Yes, yes, her trial for murder. Twenty-five years ago. She was acquitted.’

‘Merry hell!’ said Jess, hastily amending this to, ‘I’ll do that, sir.’

‘No, you were right the first time,’ he corrected her gloomily. ‘Merry hell describes matters pretty exactly.’

Dorcas Stebbings was seated at her kitchen table. It was late and had grown dark. She could barely see across the room. Lost in her thoughts she had been unaware how gloomy it had got and it wasn’t until the rattle of the old 4x4 roused her that she stood up and went to switch on the light.

The action seemed to set off another train of thought and she remained by the wall with her hand still upraised to the light switch, staring at the room. All these objects were things she touched every day, the scrubbed pine table laid now for their evening meal, the chairs, the kitchen stove, the Welsh dresser with
its array of old decorative plates, most of which had been her mother’s. Each piece of furniture had its place, so unchanging that if by some disaster she’d been struck blind at this very moment, she’d still have been able to navigate her way round without collision. Yet this very familiarity now seemed a fragile thing. It was almost as if she looked at a mirage, about to disappear and be lost for ever.

She heard the stamp of her husband’s feet and a shuffling in the back porch which indicated he was taking off his boots. She moved away from the wall, tidying her hair and straightening her apron in automatic movements, and went to the cooker where she took the lid off a saucepan and peered into it. The sight which met her wasn’t encouraging. The potatoes had boiled dry and begun to stick to the bottom of the pan. She gave it a vigorous shake and dislodged them. Another minute or two and they would have burned.

The back door opened. Stebbings ducked his head and entered.

‘You’re late,’ she observed from the stove.

‘Of course I’m late! You heard what happened? I found her. The police kept asking me the same damn-fool questions over and over again. If that wasn’t enough, I had to drive right across the county, didn’t I? To get rid of that damn bird, Mr Jenner’s orders. I felt like wringing its neck.’

‘You didn’t?’ she asked, looking up with a frightened face. ‘Mrs Jenner wouldn’t like that.’

‘Mrs Jenner wouldn’t know, would she? But I didn’t, though I swear if it comes back again I will. I took it to another of those wildlife parks. They reckoned they can keep it until the next time a flock of Canada geese comes over. They’ve got a big pen where they put the injured birds and it’s in there. They get the flocks in from time to time. They didn’t think it would be long.’ Stebbings sat at the table and asked, ‘What’s for my tea, then?’

‘I made a meat pie, but I expect it’s dried out now. My potatoes have nearly boiled away.’

‘I should’ve phoned you, I suppose,’ said her husband. ‘But it clear slipped my mind with all that’s happened today. One bloody thing after another and no idea what’s going to happen next! I don’t want another day like it.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ His failure to let her know he’d be late wasn’t the reason for the spoilt meal. She hadn’t been able to keep her mind off the awful news. With her hands encased in padded oven mitts she stooped to take the pie from the oven and carried it over to the table where she set it on a wooden stand.

‘So what’s up with you, then?’ Stebbings asked, watching her.

‘Should there be anything wrong with me?’ she retorted.

‘Face as long as a fiddle. Just because the pie is burnt, is it?’

‘I’m upset, aren’t I? Just like you!’ She sank down on the nearest chair and divested her hands of the mitts. ‘I’m afraid, too, Harry.’ The confession gained her no sympathy.

‘What have you got to be frightened about?’ he demanded.

‘How can you ask? All this business, the poor young lady … Liz Whittle came down and told me what the police were doing. She’s terrible distressed. I’d seen all the police cars going up there earlier, of course. I knew it had to be something bad.’

‘It’s got nothing to do with us,’ he growled. ‘I’ve done my part, pulling her out of the lake and going up to the house to tell them about it. Just forget about it now, can’t you? It’s what I want to do.’

‘It could affect us, though, couldn’t it?’ she persisted and began to tinker with the knife and fork set before her, moving them away from the plate, bringing them closer. ‘Mr Jenner might take against living here now his daughter’s died here like that, so horribly. If he sells up, what’ll happen to us?’

‘I’ll work for the next owner, won’t I? It was old Mr Gray who took me on first and he dropped dead not eighteen month after, but Mr Jenner, when he bought the place, he wanted me to stay.’

‘Another new owner still might not want you. You don’t know who’d buy. It might be some company that would turn the place into something like a, like a retirement home or a business centre.
They might contract the upkeep of the grounds out to one of these firms that goes round doing that sort of thing.’

Her husband’s fist came crashing down on the table top, making all the cutlery jump. The salt cellar fell over and the grains spilled on the table. His wife gave a little cry and hastened to scrape up a pinch of salt and throw it over her left shoulder.

‘What are you doing that for? That’s bloody superstition, that is!’

‘It’s bad luck, Harry, to spill the salt. And bad luck is what’s coming to us. It’s here already with the young lady drowning and if Mr Jenner decides to up and leave—’

‘For crying out loud, woman! Why worry about something like that before it happens? Why should he want to leave the place?’ Stebbings howled in exasperation.

‘His wife might want to.’

‘It’s always the same with you women,’ he grumbled. ‘If one argument doesn’t work, you find another. The girl was Mr Jenner’s daughter, not his wife’s.’

‘Mrs Jenner will still be terribly upset, she must be! Anyway, she’s been not too happy these last few weeks, even before this awful thing happened. Perhaps she’s tired of living out here and got a fancy to go and live in town? I dare say it’s a bit quiet for her here. This death, well, it could decide her.’

He stared at her fiercely. ‘Who told you that? That Mrs Jenner’s been moping?’

‘Liz Whittle. She says Mrs Jenner’s been acting odd, well, different. She’s been on edge like her nerves were bad.’

Stebbings twisted his huge knotted hands together and scowled. ‘There could be any reason for that.You don’t want to go gossiping with Liz Whittle.’ He straightened up and dismissed the matter. ‘I want my tea. Where’s Darren?’

‘He’s up in the attic in his work room. I’ll go and call him.’

‘I’ll go,’ Stebbings said, getting up. ‘Just you get those spuds on the table.’

BOOK: Ann Granger

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