The Final Curtain (19 page)

Meanwhile, Dawn Critchlow was checking out the other downstairs rooms while Joanna studied the burglar's point of entry. There was a clear boot print on the inside window sill, and another on the draining board. The SOCOs would have something to work on. She took a good look around then spoke to the Rossingtons. ‘Why did you call in so late?'

They looked guilty. ‘We'd promised we'd look in at least once a week and we hadn't been near.' It was an explanation of sorts.

‘Have you had time to look around and make a note of what's missing?'

Millie Rossington answered for both of them, Frank standing at her side, silent and frowning. ‘I did have a quick look around,' Millie said, still with the same eagerness in her voice. ‘The drawers in the dressing table have been pulled out. That's where Mrs Weeks kept her jewellery. But I don't really know what jewels she had. Some boxes have been thrown on the floor which I suppose contained stuff, but how valuable and what it was I don't know. I never looked inside,' she finished primly.

‘Is anything else gone?'

‘Her study has been turned upside down. Maybe they thought she kept money there. It's in a right mess, papers scattered all over the floor, but I don't know if anything has been taken. I feel awful, Inspector,' she confided. ‘I should have come in the week to check up on things but with Mrs Weeks being away there didn't seem a lot of point. So I can't even tell you
when
it happened.'

‘In the last couple of days, I think,' Joanna said, looking around. ‘We've had a couple of heavy storms in the last week and a bit of snow but yesterday and today have been dry but cold. There isn't much sign of rain in here so I'd plump for in the last forty-eight hours.'

Apart from the glass on the floor the kitchen was untouched. Cupboards and drawers were closed. The room had simply been a mode of entry. Nothing more.

But the study was a different matter. Millie Rossington had been right. There had been a thorough search here. Papers were strewn all over the floor. Drawers were pulled out, their contents emptied. Books had been pulled down from the shelves and lay where they'd fallen. The computer was tipped over, the screen on its face on the floor.

Joanna turned to Millie Rossington. ‘Did she keep money here?'

The cleaning woman looked flustered. ‘I don't know,' she said, eyes flickering towards her husband who still stood, mute and watchful. ‘I don't think Mrs Weeks kept a lot of money around the house. She paid us by standing order. I never saw her with any cash.'

‘Hmm.' Joanna's mind was busy and, as she glanced at Dawn, she could see the same scepticism in the WPC's dark eyes.

They all trooped upstairs next. The burglars must have been in the property for some time. All the bedrooms had been disturbed, drawers pulled out, contents strewn all over the floor, wardrobe doors opened, even clothes, still on their hangers, flung around. Everywhere had a sense of urgency and disruption. Joanna had seen this many times before. It was an all too familiar scene. She knew the ways of burglars. Always in a hurry. In a hurry to get in, find the ‘loot' and make their escape before someone found them. And that sense of urgency now permeated the entire house. She could almost hear the heavy breathing, the shouts, the flinging around of someone's personal possessions. They wandered through. The three bathrooms were the only spaces left untouched.

Joanna came to a decision. ‘We'll need the SOCOs here and Mrs Weeks will have to come back from her holiday and tell us exactly what's missing,' she said. ‘Have we got a contact number for her?'

‘I have,' Millie said. ‘Shall I ring her now?'

‘Why not?'

‘Do
you
want to speak to her?'

‘I'd better.'

Millie Rossington took a small notebook from her pocket, studied the entries, then slowly began to dial. The other end was picked up almost immediately and there followed a three-sided conversation, Timony Weeks' shrill voice piercing the air, Diana Tong's deep voice in the background and Millie Rossington doing her best to play things down and put some calm into the scene.

‘They haven't done a lot of damage.'

Shrill shouts from Timony.

‘It won't take me any time to clear it up, only the police want to know what's missing, Mrs Weeks.'

More shrill barks down the line and Millie continued with her soothing voice. ‘They're going to send a scenes of crime team round and they'll take fingerprints and get any
evidence.
'
(She spoke the word with great deliberation.)

Millie's reassurance didn't do a lot of good. From where she stood Joanna could hear the muted tones of Timony down the phone, hysterical and sobbing. In the end the phone was handed to Diana Tong, who sounded shaken but a great deal calmer, and Joanna took the phone from Millie Rossington's hands, which were still shaking with excitement, she suspected, rather than anxiety.

‘It's DI Piercy here,' she said. ‘We need you to come back. We need to know what's been taken. And, of course, the property is currently unsecured.'

‘We'll stay.' Frank Rossington had spoken at last. ‘Till they come back.'

‘That would be helpful,' Joanna admitted.

Diana's sensible voice came on the line again. ‘We'll head back within the hour.'

‘You're in …?'

‘North Devon. It'll take us a few hours to get back to Butterfield but we'll leave straight away.'

‘Just one question, Mrs Tong. There's no burglar alarm here?'

‘What would be the point?' Diana Tong asked coolly. ‘Who would hear it?'

Heaven help her, Joanna thought as she spoke again. ‘You could have them connected to the police station.'

Diana's response was a snort. ‘Four false alarms and you're disconnected.'

She was right. ‘I'll call over in the morning,' Joanna said, ‘and we'll get the scenes of crime team to pick up any evidence. They'll be along in the morning too.'

She handed the phone back to Millie Rossington, who agreed with her husband's offer. Perhaps they had guilty consciences about neglecting their employer's property. ‘We'll be here, Mrs Tong,' she said, reassurance oozing out of every pore. ‘We'll stay and wait for your return.' It seemed a good idea.

M
atthew was none too pleased when she told him she had work to do. They had had the curry the night before but a few hours later than planned. He grumbled for a bit as she climbed out of bed, then said, ‘What time do you think you'll finish?'

She took in the discontent on his face and responded with false brightness. ‘I expect to be busy for most of the morning. I'm sorry.' She tried out her charm, sat down beside him and stroked his cheek, smiling at him and waiting for him to return it. She breathed in the spicy tang of his aftershave, felt the muscles in his arms tighten. She could feel his mood change and gave him a broad smile with more than a hint of flirtation. ‘But I should be free this afternoon.'

‘Good,' he said. ‘Then we can go for a walk.'

‘Perfect.' She kissed the last vestiges of grumpiness away from his mouth and felt it curve into a smile. Matthew didn't usually sulk for long.

Even as she opened the front door of Waterfall Cottage to let herself out and walked down the path to her car, she realized that it was a good day for a winter's walk. It was bright, crisp and not quite so cold as it had been lately. Spring whispered to reassure the countryside that it would return and melt the winter blues away. Soon. Soon.

The drive out to Butterfield was pure pleasure today, the air laundered clean by last night's frost. She only wished she had been on her bike. Apart from the odd slippery patch where the sun had not beamed it was a perfect day for a hard ride followed by a long wallow in a hot bath, scented and oiled.

The farm itself looked Beatrix Potter-esque, peaceful nestling in the valley. It hardly looked like the scene of a crime – even a minor one. This scene seemed a million miles away from sordid city theft, doors kicked in and television sets lugged down three flights of stairs, screaming police cars and deafening burglar alarms.

The three cars stood neatly side by side, the elderly Volvo looking even more ancient and scruffy when sandwiched between the sparkling Isuzu and the Qashqai. The Rossingtons must have kept to their word and stayed the night, or else returned to Butterfield very early this morning. Joanna switched the engine off and sat for a while, thinking.

Nothing about this case felt quite real: the people involved, the incidents. She almost felt, particularly with the farm deliberately mimicking the TV series, that even Butterfield itself was part of a deliberate illusion, a manufactured scenario. Joanna felt like a bit player, someone who had been written in to one of the more dramatic episodes of the soap rather than in real life. For the first time in her life she felt like a puppet, carried along and controlled by others – if not her body then her mind. She still wondered. Was all this about Timony being attention-seeking, wishing to return to the days when she had been
star of the show, pet of the people
? Did she hanker after fame? Were these little tricks simply a way of getting her headlines back, to draw the public's attention and sympathy towards her once again and increase the value of her memoirs? Was she
using
the police to earn an extra half million or so?
Poor Timony, victim of a secret stalker
. It certainly had a ring to it but even the local paper had not, so far, been interested in running the story. Maybe now, with the burglary … But that would draw the wrong sort of attention, not from the book-buying public but the criminal fraternity. The stupid thing was that Joanna couldn't work it out for herself. Here she was, a detective of some years' experience and a psychology graduate to boot, and she didn't have a bloody clue whether Timony Weeks had invented these events and was using the police for her own ends. Deep down she felt uneasy, particularly by Timony's claim of ‘grey, wraithlike' memories from her past attempting to surface. Could these somehow be linked to recent events? Was she really the victim of a sinister and secretive prankster? If so, where would they stop?
When
would they stop? These are the worst sorts of cases for the police. A murder and you could dive right in with all the resources you needed at your elbow. But this? Sheer frustration. Or was she looking into this too deeply, almost willing events to escalate further? She didn't know. But, as she chewed over recent goings-on, Joanna had to admit the story of Gerald Portmann's watch had a particularly pleasing ring to it. Even she could have penned the accompanying headlines.
Dead Man's Watch Found In Star's Bedroom!
And the lines underneath telling of the fact that the watch had been buried in Gerald's coffin only to magically reappear forty years later certainly had an Edgar Allan Poe-esque ring to them.
The Pit and the Pendulum
or
The Fall of the House of Usher
or
The Premature Burial
. Take your pick.

And now there was the burglary. A simple enough crime, a broken window, probably valuables stolen. But this was completely different. Far more tangible, less reliant on Timony's testimony, particularly as she had been away at the time and not even been the one to discover it. That had been left to the humble Millie Rossington. But surely this was about gain rather than malice.

Even now Joanna was wondering … Was it possible that Timony Weeks and Diana Tong had not been in Devon earlier in the week but actually had been here, setting the scene for yet another dramatic event? That would make Diana Tong a colluder rather than victim/dogsbody. Somehow Joanna didn't think so. But the very fact that she was questioning in such minute detail made Joanna aware of how doubtful she was of every single ‘fact' she had been fed.

She climbed out of the car, locked it and walked the few steps to the door. The truth was the only sort of person she could imagine hanging around Butterfield Farm to play these silly tricks was a histrionic and slightly mad actress. And the obvious answer to that was Timony. Joanna knew that it wasn't fair to assign a character simply because of a profession, but there was a powerful argument to support this theory. There would be no gain for anyone else. Joanna updated that statement. Now there
would
be gain. If jewellery had been stolen it would be worth something. It still didn't exclude Timony. She owned it anyway but there was bound to be an insurance payout. And so the theories and counter theories went round and round in Joanna's head.

She was just wondering again about Diana Tong's role in all this when she opened the door herself. And as Joanna looked at the calm and competent face she found it hard to believe that Mrs Tong would enjoy this drama. In fact, if anything, she looked slightly bored with it all. ‘Good morning, Inspector,' she said. It looked as though the Rossingtons were just leaving. As Joanna faced Diana Tong they were emerging from the front door, saying their farewells to a stony-faced companion and an embarrassingly effusive Timony Weeks, who gave the odd noisy sob and hugged her cleaning woman. A quick glance at the Rossingtons' faces told Joanna that they were acutely embarrassed at this show of emotion. Frank hurried past her, head down.

Joanna watched them scuttle away like impatient crabs, climb into their car and drive off. As the Volvo moved up the track it passed the white SOCO van coming down. Things were moving forward.

Once the greetings and introductions were over it was time for business and Joanna became focused. ‘I'd prefer it if you didn't tidy up just yet,' she said to the two women. ‘The police photographer will want to take some pictures and the less you disturb the scene the more evidence we can collect and the greater chance we have of securing a conviction.'