Risking It All (35 page)

‘Mr Cornish left the Gardens to run and tell Mr Wilde, who happened to be at home that day, what had happened – that is, that you’d accused his wife of mugging you. We’ve talked to him and he denies your account completely. He admits he did have a pruning knife on him, quite a small knife. That’s understandable. He’s a gardener, engaged at the time on gardening work.’

‘He’s also a murderer. He killed Rennie Duke. He throttled him with garden twine.’

‘Proof?’ she asked sweetly.

‘Well, was garden twine used?’ I challenged.

She didn’t bite. ‘I ask the questions, Fran.’

I thought for a moment, then stooped and hastily unlaced my boot. ‘Here, Ben gave me this for a bootlace. Is it the same string as you found round Duke’s neck? Send it over to forensics.’ I offered up a quick prayer of thanks that I’d not bought a replacement pair of laces from Hari, largely because I’d been so cross with Ganesh for trailing me to Oxford Circus Tube.

She took the string. ‘I will. But what I want to know is what else you think you have against Cornish.’

I sighed. ‘One or both of them also killed LeeAnne Cooper, the missing nurse.’

‘Fran. . .’ she began warningly. ‘This is getting totally out of hand, as if it wasn’t already bad enough. You seem just to be flinging accusations of all kinds, anything that comes into your head. I admit we’re looking for LeeAnne Cooper, but nothing so far has suggested either that she’s dead or that she has the slightest connection with Ben Cornish or Flora Wilde.’

‘There’s a connection,’ I said. She waited. I couldn’t go on. In the end I said dully, ‘I can’t be the one to tell you. Perhaps you should have another talk with Mrs Marks. Tell her you’ve talked to me and I said you should ask her.’

Morgan was quiet for a few moments. Then she said, ‘What gives you the idea she’s dead?’

‘She has to be.’

‘No, she doesn’t. She’s missing. No more than that. People sometimes go missing for years and turn up safe and sound.’

‘You don’t have to tell me,’ I said. ‘My mother was missing for fourteen years. But I know—’

‘How do you
know
?’ she asked gently, but there was steel inside that low-pitched calm voice.

I forced myself to match her self-control but it wasn’t easy. What I was going to say would stir up a hornet’s nest. Yet it had to be said even though, as a result, yet another person’s life would tumble in ruins.

‘I think,’ I said, ‘I know where her body is.’

Morgan expelled her breath in a long sigh. ‘Where? And how long have you known it?’

‘Not long. Not consciously. Maybe it’s been bothering me a while, but I only just put it all together when Ben pulled the knife on me in the Palm House.’ I met her gaze as firmly as I could. ‘If you go out to Wimbledon,’ I said, ‘you will find LeeAnne Cooper’s body in a raised flower bed Ben Cornish built for his great-aunt, Mrs Dorothy Mackenzie, while she was away visiting her sister. I haven’t got any money, but if I had, I’d wager every last red cent on it.’

Morgan had paled. ‘You wouldn’t mess me around on this, Fran? You know what you’re saying?’

I nodded. ‘I’m sticking with it.’

Morgan rose to her feet. ‘I’ll have to request a warrant. Fran, if you’re wrong, you are in more trouble than you’ve ever been in in your life!’

Chapter Seventeen

‘Do you have any idea how many times I’ve bent the rules for you, Fran?’ Inspector Morgan asked.

It was over a week since our previous conversation. I had expected Morgan might have stopped off at the shop, as she’d been so keen to do before, and let me know what was happening. But not a word.

‘You can’t,’ Ganesh had said, ‘expect the police to take you into their confidence.’

‘Why not? They expected me to take them into mine. They must have found something in that garden. If they hadn’t, they’d have been round here like a shot, accusing me of dishing out false information and wasting police time.’

‘That’s if they followed up your idea and looked in that flower bed.’ Ganesh had been in a negative mood. He and Hari had had a long argument over installing a hot drinks machine. He’d half got Hari talked round to it, but it had been an exhausting process.

‘You would think,’ Gan had continued, his mind clearly running on his own problems to the complete disregard of mine, ‘he’d want to make that shop pay.’

‘Doesn’t it?’ I asked, forced to follow the conversation down the path he wanted to lead it.

‘Yes, but not much, not as well as it could. And why not? Because he’s so damn cautious! The hot drinks idea is a really good one. He sells cold drinks so why not, in the winter, sell hot ones? Look, what’s the difference?’

I played devil’s advocate and pointed out that whereas customers expected to find a cold drinks cabinet in a newsagent’s, a hot drinks dispenser would be a novelty. It might not catch on.

‘Go on, take his side,’ grumbled Ganesh.

‘I’m not taking his side. It’s just that he’s probably worried about your ideas after the business with the washroom.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with that washroom!’ Ganesh was indignant.

‘No, but the whole business wasn’t incident-free, was it? Gan, can we get back to talking about whether the police have found anything in Mrs Mackenzie’s flower bed?’

‘They’ve probably dug up nothing but a load of bulbs,’ said Gan, getting his own back for my lack of support over the hot drinks idea.

But they hadn’t, or if they had, they’d dug up something else as well. That same evening, at long last, in the
Evening Standard
, we saw a report that human remains had been found in the garden of a house in Wimbledon. Just that. No mention of any names, but as I pointed out to Gan, unless there’d been a massacre recently in SE19, it had to be poor Nurse Cooper.

A few days later I received a message that Inspector Morgan would like to see me. I was round to the nick in record time.

I couldn’t help noticing, as soon as she walked into the room, that she’d got rid of the Miss Marple gear and the change was pretty startling. She was wearing a charcoal-grey pin-stripe business suit, black tights and low-heeled courts. Clearly finding a body wasn’t the only thing going on. The new look gave her a super-efficient air. She was certainly in bossy mood.

‘Nice whistle,’ I observed of the suit.

‘I’m giving a press conference later,’ she said, a bit starchy but not quite able to hide a smirk.

Now that smug look riled me because, after all, without me they wouldn’t have found out what happened to LeeAnne Cooper, let alone Clarence Duke. But does anyone invite me to come along to a press conference? Does any journalist hotfoot it to my dingy room at Norm’s asking for my personal account? Do I get any much-needed publicity? What do you think?

‘You found her, then, or so I read in the
Standard
.’ I couldn’t help but sound sarcastic. Morgan ought to be cringingly grateful, not sitting there dolled up for the cameras. ‘I wasn’t flinging accusations, as you said, and I wasn’t wrong about the flower bed.’

‘Yes, we found her.’ Morgan sighed and tapped her teeth with her biro in a very un-Superwoman manner. ‘And despite the fact that an attempt seems to have been made to hasten the destruction of the body by the addition to the soil of some lime-based garden product, the remains have been identified and there are sufficient details of her injuries in the pathologist’s report to point to her being the victim of a knife attack.’

‘Nasty,’ I said queasily. I stopped feeling sorry for myself. It was a horrid business. I said something more to that effect.

Morgan nodded and picked absently at a bit of cotton on her sleeve. ‘A very unpleasant business altogether.’

‘And you’ve charged Ben Cornish?’

‘We’ve charged Cornish with the disposal of the body of LeeAnne Cooper. That’s all for the moment, but it’s enough to hold him on. The elderly owner of the property was very upset when we arrived to dig up her garden. She was on the phone to her solicitor straight away, trying to stop us. She couldn’t believe we had anything against her great-nephew. Kept telling us what a lovely, kind boy he was. Then, when we found the remains, she collapsed and had to be taken to hospital. We end up carrying the can when that sort of thing happens to a member of the public,’ added Morgan grimly. ‘Accusations of insensitivity when dealing with an old lady and all the rest of it. Anyone would think we had buried the body along with the daffodil bulbs.’

‘I feel sort of responsible too,’ I said. ‘But I had to tell you.’

‘There are a number of things you should have told us, Fran, right from the beginning. We now know why LeeAnne Cooper and Clarence Duke were so interested in the Wildes. Mrs Marks eventually put us on to it. But you knew too, didn’t you, Fran? About your sister? You knew all along.’

‘I didn’t know she existed until my mother told me. It came out of the blue to me,’ I said bitterly. ‘And how could I tell you? Mum was counting on me.’

‘Withholding evidence is a serious matter. It could be said you tried to impede our enquiries. That’s an offence.’

‘I didn’t impede your enquiries into Rennie Duke’s death. I only tried to protect my mother and sister,’ I protested.

‘You could have told us straight away,’ she insisted, deaf to my argument. ‘Especially when you knew we were seeking the whereabouts of your mother’s other child. You could have saved us several wasted man-hours which could have been given to the Duke murder investigation. The superintendent was not pleased.’

I told her I realised that and was sorry. ‘But what could I do? Now you know it all, you ought to understand why I didn’t speak up. I couldn’t grass up my own mother!’

‘I know, and that’s why I put up a strong case in your defence. No charges will be made against you, Fran, but you’re very lucky. You’ve got away with it by the skin of your teeth, and not for the first time!’

Sergeant Cole, who was sitting in on this interview, complete with fresh set of spots, gave me a jaundiced look. Left to him, he’d have thrown the book at me.

‘Thanks,’ I told her. ‘But it seems to me the police are being a tad ungrateful. You wouldn’t have found LeeAnne and you wouldn’t have got Cornish but for me.’

‘Cornish nearly got you,’ she pointed out mildly.

I didn’t need to be reminded. I was totting up far too many close shaves in my life to date. Next time – I’d make sure there wasn’t a next time.

‘What happens now about Rennie Duke’s murder?’ I asked impatiently. ‘When are you going to charge one of them with that?’

‘Charges against Cornish in regard to the death of Mr Duke are being prepared.’ She was being evasive.

I smelled a rat. ‘What about the Wildes?’ It seemed I had to force them into the conversation. Morgan was being altogether too damn careful not to mention them.

‘That’s a separate matter. Clearly there’s a lot to sort out before any steps are taken. Because it involves the future of the child, however, it’s likely it will be treated as a civil matter rather than a criminal one, left to social services to sort out.’

‘You can’t leave it to them. They’ll take her away and bung her in some crappy kids’ home,’ I objected.

‘Not necessarily. They’re letting her stay with the Wildes until it’s decided what steps to take. It was wrong of your mother to hand over her baby as she did, whatever her motives or circumstances. Of course, it’s not illegal to ask someone to look after your child for you as a temporary measure. But this was a definite attempt to circumvent official adoption procedures and use a genuine birth certificate to establish a false identity, plus all the later misrepresentations which follow from that. I can’t say for sure that there will be no charges. All I can say is that the welfare of the child will be put first.’

Morgan smiled thinly. ‘Mr Wilde has his legal team working on it. He’s a wealthy man. He can pay for the best. Naturally, even if she stays with the Wildes, her situation will have to be regularised. Legally, she’s Miranda Varady. It’s astonishing that they got away with it for so long. It’s all there in the records: registration of both births, issuing of a death certificate, record of the cremation of the infant Nicola Wilde . . . The Wildes must have spent thirteen years terrified someone would check.’

And someone had eventually checked, I thought. Rennie Duke, a methodical little guy with a knowledge of where to look and a nose for a secret. Not to mention poor foolish Nurse Cooper, who’d thought her boat had come in but had instead paved the way to her own violent death.