Murder Takes the Stage (6 page)

Pulling up ground elder was a satisfactory way of getting rid of frustration, but today, back in the office, the latter returned with as much force as no doubt the former would. She and Peter had been holding back from contacting anyone until the spadework had been done, and until they knew when Ken's scoop would appear. That didn't prevent images of a clown removing his painted face to reveal – what? Nor did it remove that even more poignant image of Rick on his long road to eternity with a fair-haired girl at his side.

‘Don't you think we've given Ken enough time? Let's ask him what's happening,' Georgia pleaded as soon as she had flung off her jacket, greeted Margaret, Peter's carer, who was busy in the kitchen, and cast one scathing look over the piles of catalogues, bills and other inessentials that had constituted post.

Until recently she had owned the house next door, where she had worked and lived until she moved to Medlars with Luke eighteen months ago. Her own house had now been sold, but just at the moment she could have done with its solitude to work off her grumpiness.

‘Your patience is rewarded, child,' Peter said smugly. ‘Ken's emailed to say it will be in next week's issue of the
Broadstairs Chronicle
. It comes out on a Friday.'

‘More waiting!'

‘They also serve  . . .' Peter murmured maddeningly. ‘If it cheers you up, Mike's come up with the name of a chap who worked on the Tom Watson case.'

‘Really?' It did cheer her up. Mike Gilroy had been Peter's sergeant during his police career, before the accident that forced his retirement – if Peter's life today could be called that. Peter still treated him as his private number two, which Detective Superintendent Mike Gilroy permitted, although he had his own ways of gently saying enough is enough.

‘He claims he can't get at the records of the investigation,' Peter said scathingly. ‘Claims he's Downs Area and this case was under Thanet, and then some rubbish about the Data Protection Act. Tom Watson, although officially declared dead in 1963, might still pop up and threaten to sue the almighty Kent Police. Anyway, Mike's chap lives in Tenterden now. His name's Brian James, and he was a PC wet behind the ears in 1952.'

‘What about Cherry Harding?' Georgia demanded. She was impatient to put her image of Tom's sweetheart out of her mind and firmly implant the real woman, because she was surely at the centre of this case. ‘Shouldn't we see her first?'

‘Police first. Cherry Harding will be prejudiced,' Peter pointed out.

‘And the police never are?'

A withering glance. ‘Less likely, let's say. We're all human. Besides,' he added, ‘I'd like to see James before I read Ken's scoop. He was nervous about it, either through excitement or because it was going to stir up the case again, and so we need to know the police's angle on it first.'

‘The murder was well over fifty years ago,' Georgia pointed out. ‘It's ancient history to the vast majority of
Chronicle
readers.'

‘It's the minority Ken might be worried about,' Peter said darkly. ‘Ten to one it will pass unnoticed, but just in case it arouses slumbering passions, I'd like to have more than the basics. It's possible our ex-Chief Inspector Brian James will add some colour.'

‘Possibly over-lurid. Time adds rose-coloured spectacles but sometimes darkens them instead.'

‘Very poetic, but I'm going even if you don't want to.'

Georgia knew when she was beaten. ‘OK. Let's book it.'

‘I have, darling. We're off on Friday afternoon – provided you've no more important engagement like a hair appointment.'

‘My hair,' Georgia retorted, restored to good humour, ‘knows when to lie low.'

Fingers were drummed on the table. ‘There's something else too, Georgia.'

She was immediately alert. ‘Rick?' Peter was avoiding her eye, so it almost certainly was.

‘All thanks to Google. I scrolled through another thousand or so entries. Have you heard of Guidel?'

‘No.' Her heart seemed to be beating painfully.

‘Or the Festival des Sept Chapelles?'

‘No.'

‘Janie says it was inaugurated in 1986 by the Duc de Polignac with the help of Dame Moura Lympany. A music festival, of course, not opera, but it would include Mozart. It's now the Festival de Polignac.'

‘Janie?' Georgia was taken aback. ‘You've told her about Rick?'

Peter looked at her steadily. ‘You have Luke, Georgia.'

‘And you have us both.'

‘Sometimes, just sometimes, that's not enough.'

‘No, I see that.' She did. She liked Janie, but there was no real rapport between them, probably, she thought fairly, because they'd not yet been close enough to develop one. But it was Rick who was important today, not Janie. ‘What about the festival?' she asked.

‘In 1994 it took place in July.'

The month Rick disappeared. Hope flared immediately. Could this really be a lead? Could they have hit gold so soon?

‘And it's remarkably near Carnac,' Peter continued.

So why wasn't Peter cock-a-hoop at this discovery? Surely it must mean a positive line of investigation at the very least? Georgia's head began to spin with ideas and ‘what ifs'.

Peter was watching her. ‘Darling,' he said gently, ‘think.'

She couldn't, and Peter had to do it for her. ‘Why, if Guidel was their destination, did Miss Blondie go there so much earlier than Rick?'

‘Maybe the festival went on for quite a time. Maybe he just went only on the day she was singing or just for one particular concert.'

‘It did go on for some time. Two weeks I think.' He was still avoiding her eye, not sharing her flame of hope. ‘There's a big hitch, Georgia,' he said at last.

Too late she realized what it was, and the let-down was all the harder to bear. If Guidel was near Carnac, the French police would have tracked down any accidents or deaths there. There had been a thorough search for Rick after his disappearance had become apparent. As far as she could recall, he had given no fixed time when he expected to be back; she remembered only the uneasy two or three weeks as her parents and she had increasingly tried to believe that Rick was simply somewhere so fascinating or remote that he had no access to a phone or even postbox. No universal mobiles or email then.

‘The police,' she said miserably. ‘Perhaps they overlooked something?'

She thought back to that terrible time when she and Peter had travelled to Brittany; he had not yet been confined to a wheelchair by that botched raid and was still in the Kent police force. The French police had pulled out all the stops, as for one of their own. Every line that Peter could suggest had been followed. Nevertheless, by the time the family had realized he was missing, the trail was cooling. She remembered that nice young inspector, François Décourt, who'd looked after her on the one occasion she had broken down, and had treated them so sympathetically when he told them the search had to be called off.

‘Perhaps Rick went to this festival and then on to somewhere else,' she said desperately, making an effort to recapture lost hope.

‘A blonde girl and an Englishman in the audience of a music festival nearly fifteen years ago, or even singing in it? It's not much to go on, is it?'

‘It's something,' she forced herself to say. ‘If she sang, there would be a programme, a name. Just something to take us forward.'

At least with Tom Watson there was a certain path ahead, she thought. With Rick, there was no known way. She thought of Minnie Haskins' poem made famous by the king's Christmas broadcast in 1939 about the man who stood at the gate of the year: faith was needed to face the darkness to come. Did she have faith now? Cherry Harding still did.

The drive to Tenterden, once Ashford's ring roads had been negotiated, was a pleasant one, despite the rain. Georgia had always liked the town, whose wide streets spoke of another more elegant and prosperous age, despite the infiltration of supermarkets and other modern necessities. Brian James lived on the road to Appledore on the ground floor of an old Edwardian house.

To Georgia, ex-Chief Inspector James still appeared the energetic and energizing leader he must have been during his working life. Upright, tall and with a mop of grey hair, he did a fine impression of a jolly uncle – until one saw the way his sharp eyes were summing you up.

‘Are you still involved with police work?' she asked as he ushered them into a conservatory despite some difficulty with the wheelchair.

‘I tried not to be,' he said ruefully, bustling around with cups, saucers and a teapot. ‘Couldn't resist, of course. Promised them not to dabble in matters no longer my concern, so I'm involved with a police charity. Keeps my hand in together with the odd lunch and reunion. I'm still part of the machine, even if I'm winding down. Amazing the way that work expands to fill the time available. Parkinson's law, isn't it?'

Peter laughed. ‘We've met before, haven't we?'

James looked pleased. ‘Good memory. Yes, I remember you. The curse of the force, I recall. Just as they'd got a case all straight and tidied up you'd throw a spanner in the works.'

‘Only if it tightened the right nuts and bolts.'

‘It didn't always, if I recall rightly. Remember the case of the woman who—'

‘Water under the bridge,' Peter said firmly. ‘Now, about Tom Watson  . . .'

‘Ah, yes, my first murder case. I was sick on the way out. Made to clear it up.'

‘Always tough, the first,' Peter sympathized. ‘Mine was an easier run. A disputed suicide out of the river. About Tom Watson: he was acquitted, but general opinion seems to be that he was guilty. Where do you stand?'

‘Speaking as a policeman in the force or as an individual? In fact, the answer's guilty in both cases. It worried me when he was arrested, but when he was acquitted, I was still worried – only the other way round. I put it down to first-murder-case nerves, but doubt seemed to go on past that stage.'

‘You didn't think he was guilty?'

He hesitated. ‘I wouldn't go as far as that. It was just that his reactions were odd when we took him in.'

‘How could you tell if it was your first murder case?' Georgia asked.

He looked startled, as if surprised that she too was questioning him, not merely the note taker. In his day even women PCs were probably seen and not heard, she thought.

‘That's why I didn't push it. But maybe it's also why it's stayed in my mind so clearly. Not all the whys and wherefores afterwards, but that first scene. It was he who made the call, you see. A flat “My wife's been murdered.” I didn't hear it myself, but that's what the record said. Straightforward enough, if a bit cool. Two of us went along, me and the sergeant, in case it was just a nutter anxious to shoot a policeman. That didn't happen too much in the nineteen fifties but it was always on the cards. That was still the world of
The Blue Lamp,
the Dirk Bogarde and Jack Warner film, which shockingly suggested for the first time that out in the real world nice policemen could be shot by nasty villains. Relatively speaking, the murder rate was low, but petty crime was soaring after the war. They were hard times, and once you got past the image of brave citizens struggling with shortages and rationing – some was still in force in 1952 – there was a lot of petty theft, black-market spivs and so on. Anyway, back to Tom Watson. He was living in a flat above a dress shop.'

‘We saw it,' Peter told him. ‘Flight of steps at the rear. Entry at the side of the shop.'

‘Right. We both went up, the sergeant first, then me. Watson opened the door to us, blood on his clothes and hands. “My wife's been murdered,” he said again. Very flat, very conversational, as if he'd told us he'd had a bad day at the office. That struck me as strange, and still does.'

‘Because he was so calm?' Georgia asked.

‘No. You often get that. The shock hasn't struck home yet, and they go on automatic pilot. I suppose it was the choice of words, exactly the same as on the phone. Don't know why that struck me as odd, but it did.'

‘Did he continue in that way?' Peter took over.

‘He didn't lose his cool, if that's what you mean.'

‘
Was
it cool?'

James shot a look of respect at Peter. ‘I heard you were sharp. No, in fact, cool isn't the right word. It was as though he didn't care.'

‘About his wife or his situation?'

‘Can't tell you. The latter probably. We went into the living room – parlour, I suppose you'd have called it then – and there she was. Sprawled on the floor on her back, surprisingly little blood, but the knife lying at her side was covered in it.'

That confirmed what Ken had told them, Georgia remembered.

‘We asked him if he'd done it,' Brian James continued, ‘but he didn't reply. Not a word. Not even a shake of the head. He just stayed sitting on the sofa watching us while we called the station to get the inspector over there. We didn't have all this crime-scene stuff in those days, but the principles were the same: the doc, the photographer and so on. What we didn't realize at first was that there was a kiddie on the next floor. I was sent upstairs to see if anyone was up there and found this toddler. She was still sound asleep. She woke up then, of course. There weren't many women PCs in those days, and one of the neighbours took her in. She told us her daughter had been in there babysitting earlier that evening, so the kid was well used to them. The daughter had gone home after Joan came back – alone, incidentally,' he added.

‘And the corpse – Joan. Anything odd about that?'

‘Not particularly. She was all dressed up, I remember. Buxom figure, I suppose we'd have called it then. Too old for me, but I could see she was a looker. Long dark hair, English-rose complexion. Blouse, skirt and great platform soles and heels on her shoes.'