Good Murder (15 page)

‘How can you be sure?’

‘I wasn’t until I met you. I’m sorry, but you had to be a suspect, Will.’ She called me “Will” with the casual air of a long-standing friend. The whole affair had become a movie for her. Who did she see herself as? Bette Davis? Barbara Stanwyck? More like Marie Dressler, I thought.

‘Now I know,’ she said, between slurps of her milkshake, ‘that my original suspicions about Fred are correct.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Polly was scared of him.’

I had seen no evidence of this. Quite the contrary. Polly had launched herself at Fred with no hint of trepidation. I let Shirley go on without challenging her assertion.

‘Polly didn’t talk about it much. She said … she said …’ Here she faltered, as if what she was about to say might offend my delicate sensibilities.

‘She said that she had to lock her bedroom at night because Fred would, you know …’

She flushed scarlet at the picture of incestuous lust she had painted.

‘He never did anything, but he tried once or twice.’

‘There’s another brother, isn’t there?’

‘Joe. He’s the oldest. He left a few years ago. I didn’t know him. Polly didn’t talk much about him.’

‘What about Mr Drummond, Polly’s father?’

‘There was an accident when we were about ten years old. Mr Drummond’s car hit a tree.’

She was hiding something behind this curious construction. I guessed what it was.

‘Joe was driving, wasn’t he.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Just the way you said it, as though there was no driver at all. He would only have been … what? Fifteen or sixteen?’

She nodded.

‘Yes. I think he must be about thirty now.’

I let this information sink in. The Drummond family was unusually prone to dying violently.

‘Mrs Drummond went a bit batty after that. Joe had to be the man in the house. He left in the end.’ Her voice trailed off.

‘Tell me about Smelt.’

‘Jimmy? Why do you want to know about him?’

I didn’t want to interfere with her certainty about Fred’s guilt and frighten her into silence. Even if Fred had killed Polly he certainly hadn’t cut his mother’s throat. Dead people have great difficulty holding things like knife handles.

‘It’s just that Polly seemed quite close to him.’

Shirley laughed, and the laughter had the unfortunate effect of distorting rather than brightening her features.

‘She only went to that dinner with him to make Patrick jealous.’

‘Who’s Patrick?’

What she said next really took me by surprise.

‘Patrick Lutteral. Her fiancé.’

I cupped my chin in my hand and tried to disguise my interest.

‘She never mentioned him,’ I said, and remembered suddenly the deep kiss, with the promise of more, we had exchanged at her gate.

‘Well, she wouldn’t. It was sort of a secret. They didn’t want Mrs Drummond to find out. Pat’s a Catholic.’

‘Did Fred know?’

‘Yes. He hated Pat. Said he was a bludger and a coward. He’s a porter in the railway, and that’s a reserved industry. Not everyone can join up.’

There was raw vehemence in her voice as she defended Patrick Lutteral. It blazed so suddenly that I suspected Shirley Moynahan of harbouring strong feelings about her best friend’s fiancé.

‘Does anyone else know about the engagement?’

She shrugged.

‘A few people. Patrick’s mates, probably. He would have told them. Not his parents though. They wouldn’t want Pat marrying a Protestant.’

‘Do the police know?’

The question unsettled her. She lowered her gaze for a moment, and then met my eyes directly.

‘I didn’t tell them. I suppose I lied to Sergeant Topaz.’

‘Why didn’t you tell him? It’s a fairly important piece of information.’

‘They’d been having rows, Pat and Polly. Polly wanted to get married right away so that she could move away from Fred and her mother. Pat wanted to wait. He wanted to soften up his parents, try to change their minds about marrying a non-Catholic. Polly said he was weak and that he should lead his own life, and who cares if they couldn’t get married in the Catholic Church. He wanted her to convert. She wouldn’t. Well, imagine her mother. She’d explode. So then she told him that if he didn’t love her enough to marry her no matter what, she’d just better look around for someone who did. That’s why she went to the dinner with Jimmy Smelt.’

‘And that’s why she went to the pictures with me.’

‘Yes, partly, but she really liked you. She told me. She came round after you’d been at the circus thing. She said you knew Cary Grant.’

Shirley finished her milkshake and sucked up the dregs.

‘Did you think the police might suspect Patrick if you told them about the rows?’ I asked.

‘Of course. And that wouldn’t be fair, because Patrick shouldn’t be a suspect.’

Her tone was matter-of-fact — an unashamed declaration of Patrick Lutteral’s innocence. Such certainty could only arise from infatuation. I would have to meet this Lutteral and try to gauge for myself his potential for bloody violence.

‘Did Patrick know that Polly was going to the pictures with me?’

‘Oh, yes. I told him.’

She realised immediately that she had said something she would rather not have said.

‘I ran into him,’ she stammered, stumbling towards an explanation, ‘and he asked what Polly was doing and so I told him. What’s wrong with that?’

This last was a little petulant, and it was obvious that she was lying. She hadn’t run into Patrick Lutteral by accident. She had sought him out and told him all that Polly had told her. It was mischievous. It wasn’t difficult to surmise that Shirley had entertained the hope that Patrick might throw Polly over and turn his gaze in her direction. She offered so much more than Polly. She was a virgin for a start. Had to be. She was Catholic, too, and she adored him.

‘Where can I meet Patrick?’

‘I don’t think you should talk to him about all this. He’s very upset. About Polly.’

I spoke to her firmly.

‘Would you rather the police spoke to him? I’m sorry, Shirley, but I have to speak to him. He might know something that will help me.’

She was quiet for a moment, turning over in her mind which way to play this. She must have known that now I had Patrick’s name and occupation it would be a simple matter to find him. If I was going to talk to Patrick, she wanted to be there.

‘All right,’ she said, and I sensed that I had gone down in her estimation by forcing her into this position. She agreed to bring Patrick to the side door of St Mary’s Church in Adelaide Street at 6.00 pm the following day.

Next day’s rehearsal was interrupted by the arrival of a policeman I had not seen before. He was a man in his fifties, and he wore no stripes on his sleeve. To still be a constable so late in life spoke volumes about what happens when low intelligence meets lack of ambition. He was bald, or nearly so, and had skin as tanned as leather. His pate was dotted all over with beads of sweat which he mopped constantly.

‘Detective Sergeant Conroy wants to see William Power at the station,’ he wheezed.

‘And you are?’ I asked imperiously.

‘Constable Valentine.’ He grinned idiotically. ‘I’m to escort you.’

Sending the station’s lowest-ranking and most ostentatiously unimpressive officer was Conroy’s less-than-subtle reminder of his low opinion of me. It wasn’t Valentine’s fault that he was half-witted — he’d probably been dropped on his head as an infant — so I resisted the temptation and refrained from taking the mickey out of him on our way to the station. In fact, Constable Valentine was agreeable company. Despite having a catalogue of reasons not to be, he was a happy man, and his happiness placed him beyond the reach of parody.

When we reached the police station Conroy was unable to see me immediately. I’d expected this and was determined not to be annoyed by it. Conroy would get no satisfaction from me. He would be shown that my patience was inexhaustible, and that if he thought he could break me in this way he had another think coming. I occupied my time by quietly singing ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ over and over again, until the constable behind the desk asked me to desist. I declined.

‘Think of it as singing to keep all our spirits up,’ I said, and crooned, ‘There’ll be bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover, tomorrow, just you wait and see,’ for the umpteenth time. Conroy passed through the outer office where I was sitting and did not acknowledge me. He spoke loudly to the desk clerk. I closed my eyes and raised the volume of my melodious rendition, and gave no indication that I was aware of his presence.

‘He won’t shut up singing that fucking song,’ said the desk clerk.

‘I don’t hear anything,’ Conroy said, ‘except a sound like there’s something wrong with the drains.’

He left and didn’t return for half an hour. He then asked me the same questions he had asked previously. I gave him the same answers, but without rancour and with a considered air as if it was almost a pleasure to provide him with the information he sought.

‘I hope you don’t think I’m badgering you,’ he said snidely.

‘Not at all. It is one’s civic duty to assist the police, and I am pleased to perform that duty when called upon to do so. Please don’t hesitate to call me back if you think of any new questions or if there is anything you haven’t understood.’

His eye quivered in its socket as if my words were an electric prod touching the vulnerable white.

‘You can go,’ he said, and I admired his measured tone.

There was no point returning to Wright’s Hall now. The cast would have left. It was almost five-thirty. Shirley and Patrick were due at St Mary’s at six. I could use the half hour to explore the church.

The front entrance to St Mary’s was set well back from Adelaide Street. The façade was simple, with a stained-glass window set above a rather severe gabled doorway. Decorative elements on the exterior were few, which is why the unecclesiastical figure of a cockerel perched atop the roof drew the eye. Two women emerged from the church, chattering and laughing. They paid scant attention to me. They were followed by Shirley Moynahan and a young man, who, when he saw me, stopped Shirley and lifted his chin in my direction.

My first impression of Patrick Lutteral was that Polly would have had him for breakfast. He was timid. He was good looking I suppose, but they were the soft, half-formed good looks of a boy, even though he must have been twenty. His reddish-blond hair was straight and combed neatly away from his face with the squeaky precision of an altar boy. I would not have been in the least surprised to learn that his mother had combed it for him before he left the house. His mouth was full and sensual, and it made me slightly nauseous to think that it had visited Polly’s lips, just as mine had. Shirley’s demeanour in his company confirmed my suspicions about her feelings for him. Perhaps she wasn’t wrong to have hopes in relation to this young man. He might be persuaded that her constancy and piety were adequate substitutes for the pleasures of the flesh.

In the few seconds it took for them to reach me, I concluded that Patrick Lutteral would face two choices in his life — marriage to Shirley Moynahan and their consequent dry, joyless and procreative couplings, or the priesthood, where his boyish, rosy-hued face would decline into the jowly visage of a middle-aged monsignor, his cheeks florid with exploded capillaries and his eyes deadened by envy of the sad and harmless sexual misdemeanours of his dull parishioners.

‘This is Patrick,’ Shirley said, and added unnecessarily that they had both just been to confession, where Shirley had probably unburdened herself of the impure thoughts she entertained about her unimpressive companion.

‘I’m William Power.’ I held out my hand. Patrick did not reciprocate.

‘So, we start as rivals,’ I said. ‘That’s fine by me, but it’s not to your advantage to be so sour. Polly wasn’t interested in me. She was using me to get at you. It puzzles me that she would do this, but there you are.’ I saw no reason to obfuscate.

‘We can’t talk here,’ Patrick said, and his voice was unexpectedly deep. ‘Someone will see us.’

I followed them around to the side of the church, where we stood in the shadow of a door which was not in regular use. I didn’t beat about the bush.

‘No doubt Shirley has told you why I wish to speak to you.’

‘She also told me that they think you killed Polly. Why should I think otherwise?’

‘Because it is entirely possible that you killed her.’

Shirley exhaled a high-pitched shriek of outrage. Patrick coughed in disbelief at this bold and brutal assertion.

‘I had no reason to kill Polly,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you existed, let alone that you and Polly had an understanding. You on the other hand had a good reason. Jealousy.’

‘I don’t have to hear this,’ he said, rallying, and made to walk away.

‘You’d better talk fast,’ I said, ‘because the only way I’m not going to the police with the information about your engagement and your arguments is if you can convince me that you didn’t do it. I’m not playing a game with you. I don’t have that luxury.’