The House Sitter (4 page)

Inside, she directed the torch beam up and down the corpse. “Any observations?”

“Would you point it at the head, guv?” Stella knelt and studied the line of the ligature, gently lifting some of the long, red hair. “The crossover is at the back here. Looks as if he took her from behind. Difficult to say what he used. Not wire. The mark is too indefinite. Would you hold it steady?” She bent closer and peered at the bruising. “There’s no obvious weave that I can see, so I doubt if it was rope. Leather, maybe, or some fabric?”

“Let’s ask the pathologist,” Hen said. “I thought you were going to tell me how she rates in the fashion stakes.”

So Stella fingered the hair, looking at the layers. “It isn’t a cheap haircut.”

“Is any these days?”

“All right. She went to a good stylist.”

“The manicure looks expensive, too.”

“Obviously she took care of herself.”

“The swimsuit?”

“Wasn’t from the market, as you put it. See the logo on the side of the shorts? She won’t have got much change out of two hundred for this.”

“A classy lady, then? No jewellery, I notice.”

“No ring mark either.”

“Does that mean anything these days?”

“Just that she doesn’t habitually wear a ring. Did they find any sunglasses?”

“No.”

“I would have expected sunglasses. Designer sunglasses.”

“Dropped on the beach, maybe. We can look through the stuff the fingertip search produced. Thanks, Stell. What kind of car does a woman like this tend to own? A dinky little sports job?”

“Maybe—for the beach. Or if she’s in work, as I guess she could be, a Merc or a BMW would fit.”

“Let’s see what the car park trawl has left us with.”

Outside, Emerson the lifeguard asked if he was needed any more.

Hen Mallin, half his size, took out a fresh cigar and made him wait, coming to a decision. “What time is it?”

“Past eight. I’m supposed to be meeting someone at eight.”

“You’re meeting one of my officers and making a statement.” She flicked her lighter and touched the flame to the cigar. “Then you’ll be free to go.”

Soon enough there wouldn’t be much daylight left. The sky over the sea already had an indigo look to it. In the car park, a few of the search team dropped kebab skewers and tried to look busy when Hen and Stella approached.

“Eight thirty. Car park closed. So what are we left with?” Hen asked the sergeant in charge of this part of the investigation. “How many unclaimed vehicles?”

“Four, ma’am. Two Mitsubishis, a Peugeot and a Range Rover.”

Hen muttered to Stella. “I know what your money’s on.” To the sergeant, she said, “Did you check with the PNC?”

“Yes, guv.”

“And?”

“Two have women owners. That’s one of the Mitsubishis and the Range Rover.”

“How did I guess? Tell me who owns the four-by-four.”

The sergeant read from his notes. “Shiena Wilkinson, 37 Pine Tree Avenue, Petersfield. Had the vehicle from new, two years ago.”

“Mrs, Miss or Ms?”

“Dr.”

“Is she, indeed? And the Mitsubishi owner?”

“A Ms Claudia Cameron, Waterside Cottage, near Boxgrove. She bought it secondhand last January.”

“And the others are registered to men?”

The sergeant told him the second Mitsubishi was owned by a Portsmouth man called West, and the Peugeot belonged to a Londoner called Patel.

“It doesn’t prevent a woman from driving them,” Hen said. “However, let’s start with the obvious.”

Dr Shiena Wilkinson’s Range Rover was parked near the entrance gate in front of the windsurfing club premises, a black vehicle in mint condition. Hen walked around it, checked the tax disc, and saw that it had been issued in Petersfield in April. Forced to stand on tiptoe for a sight of the interior, she looked through the side windows. On the front passenger seat was a pack of mansize Kleenex. A paperback of Jane Austen’s
Emma
was on the back seat.

“I need to get inside.”

“We’ll have to break in unless you’re willing to wait, guv,” the sergeant said.

“As you must have discovered, my darling, there are women who will, and women who won’t. I belong to the second group.”

A jemmy did the job, at some cost to the side window. Hen put on gloves and overshoes, stepped in, tried the seat and said, “She’s longer in the leg than I am, but that doesn’t tell us much.” In the glove compartment she found a roll of peppermints, a bottle of cologne and a small bag of silver coins, presumably for parking machines. Right at the back was a doctor’s prescription pad. “Some people would kill for one of these.” Attached to the door on the driver’s side were a couple of tickets for the Waitrose car park in Petersfield dated a week before.

Dr Wilkinson’s medical bag was out of sight in the storage space at the rear. It held a stethoscope, blood-pressure gauge, speculum, syringe, sterile pads and dressings, tweezers and scissors. Nothing so useful as an address book or diary.

“Order a transporter, Stella. I want this vehicle examined by forensics.”

“Will you be wanting to look at the others, ma’am?” the sergeant asked.

“Hole in one, sergeant.”

The Mitsubishi owned by the Boxgrove woman was some distance away, near the beach café and close to the last remaining barbecue. This owner was not so tidy as Dr Wilkinson. The floor was littered with used tissues and parking tickets. A pair of shoes. Sweet wrappings. The tax disc was a month out of date.

“Do you want this one opened, ma’am?”

“Please.”

The jemmy came into play again, but not for long. From behind them came a scream of, “What the bloody hell are you doing to my car?” and a woman came running from the barbecue.

“I thought you told me the owner wasn’t around,” Hen muttered to the sergeant.

“You bastards! You’ve smashed my bloody window and the paint on the door is chipped,” Ms Claudia Cameron protested. She was wearing a white wrap made of towelling and candy-striped sandals. Her spiky blond hair looked like the result of poking a wet finger into a live socket.

“Hold on, love,” Hen said as if she was speaking to a child. “Didn’t you see us checking this vehicle?”

“Yes, but I thought you might go away. I’m only a few days over on my tax. It doesn’t give you the right to smash your way in . . . does it?”

“You’re Claudia Cameron?”

“How do you know that?”

“You’ll be compensated, Ms Cameron.”

“That isn’t good enough.” Now that she had a legitimate grievance, she was going to get some mileage out of it. “Just who’s in charge here?”

“Speak to the sergeant, OK? He’ll need your address and so on.”

She was part of the action and obviously didn’t want to be sidelined. “This is about the dead woman they found, isn’t it? Did you think my car belonged to her, or what?”

“Did you see her yourself?”

“No, but everyone is talking about it, poor soul.”

“So how much do you know, Ms Cameron? Did anyone say anything at all to you that might help us find out who she was?”

“Not really.”

“‘Everyone is talking about it’,” Hen repeated to Stella in a good imitation of Claudia Cameron’s voice as they walked away, “but what did everyone see? Diddly-squat. What’s the betting Dr Wilkinson is cooking sausages at the same barbecue and will presently notice her beautiful Range Rover being hoisted onto the transporter and come running over?”

“Don’t even think about it, guv.”

“Actually, I’d welcome it.”

“Why?”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing a doctor.”

“Aren’t you well?”

“It’s in my head. I’ve got this feeling the whole world is against me, and when that happens all I want to do is shut myself in my car and listen to my Agatha Christie tapes.”

Stella laughed.

4

“We have a possible victim, playmates—and I stress that word ‘possible’,” she told her team, assembled for the first formal briefing. Small as she was, there was no disputing her authority. “She is Dr Shiena Wilkinson, from Petersfield, whose Range Rover was found in the car park close to the scene last evening.”

“Don’t we have a positive ID yet, guv?” one of the team asked.

“Later this morning, I hope. One of the other doctors is going to the mortuary.”

“A photo?” Stella Gregson said.

“Not yet.”

“There ought to be one in her house.”

“And the lads doing the search have been told to look out for it.”

“Sometimes they have the doctors’ pictures on view in a medical practice.”

“Not in this case.” Stella was right to pick up on these points, but Hen wanted to get on. “The car is Dr Wilkinson’s. That’s for sure. All the others have been accounted for. She’s thirty-two and a GP, one of five who practise from a health centre in the town. She is unmarried and lives alone in Pine Tree Avenue, a newish development of detached houses overlooking that golf course that you can see from the Chichester Road to the south. She wasn’t on call over the weekend. She’d arranged to take three days off, Saturday to Monday. Likes going to the beach, apparently. But before we all get too excited about Dr Wilkinson, let’s get back to what we know for certain.”

She took a drag at her cigar and pointed with it to the poster-size colour photo of the face displayed on the board behind her. The woman’s wide-open eyes had the glaze of death and the mouth gaped. “Our victim has copper-coloured hair. All that was found with her was the two-piece swimsuit she was wearing. The towel was recovered from the water not long after. We were told she was partly hidden by a windbreak, but it was missing when our patrol arrived. Going by the quality of the towel and swimsuit, she wasn’t short of cash. She had a nice haircut and well-kept nails. No jewellery.”

“Do you think the motive was theft?” George Flint asked. George was the pushy sergeant who wanted Stella’s job.

“It has to be considered. But you don’t need to commit murder to nick a handbag from a beach. People take amazing risks with their property every time they go for a bathe. If you want to steal a bag all you have to do is watch and wait.”

“I know that, guv.”

“She may not even have had a bag with her,” Hen pointed out.

“So where did she keep her car key?”

“A pocket.”

“In a swimsuit?”

“They can have pockets.”

“Ah, yes.”

“Actually, this one didn’t,” Hen admitted.

“So where were her clothes? In the car?”

“We found no clothes in the car, and no bag either.”

“Then the killer walked off with her clothes, or her bag, or both. We’re dealing with theft here.”

Hen tilted her head sharply. “You don’t give up, do you? OK— probably she did have a bag. But theft may not be the real motive. The killer may have taken the bag to make identification more difficult. I don’t see the link between strangulation and stealing handbags.”

“What’s left if we rule out theft?”

“Wise up, George. Most killings are carried out by people in a close relationship with the victim. Family, lovers, ex-lovers.”

George Flint had hammered away at this theory for long enough. It was another voice that asked, “Guv, do we know if she was alone on the beach?”

“We know nothing. The lifeguard claims he didn’t see her alive. The witnesses all left before the patrol car arrived.”

“We’ll have to put out an appeal, guv.”

“I’m coming to that.”

“What about this lifeguard? Is he a suspect? Can we believe everything he tells us?”

“He’s an Australian named Emerson, and he’s not comfortable. I dare say there are things he doesn’t want us to know about how he got the job. But he was on duty. To have killed her, he’d have needed to leave his post for a while, and someone might have noticed.”

“There must be other lifeguards. I’ve seen more than one of them sitting up there. He could ask one of his mates to cover for him and take time out to kill her.”

“For what reason?”

“Who knows? He recognised her as someone who dumped him some time in the past?”

“Not much of a motive,” George Flint commented.

“We don’t have
any
motive yet.”

Stella nudged the discussion in another direction. “If the victim
is
this doctor, we could have another motive: the patient with a grudge.”

“That’s good, Stell,” Hen said, forgetting her own insistence that they’d said enough about Dr Wilkinson. “I like that. GPs deal with life and death issues every day. There are always people who feel they were denied the right treatment, or misdiagnosed.”

“Or refused the drugs they want.”

“Would you take that on, Stella? Go to the health centre and find out what you can.”

“You mean look at patients’ records?”

Someone sitting near Stella murmured in a sing-song tone, “Data Protection.”

“Talk to the receptionists, pick out the gossipy one and ask about the nutters and complainers they have to deal with,” Hen said. “You’ll get names. Then try the nurses and the cleaners and the caretaker. I don’t have to tell you, Stella.”

“But you did.”

Smiles all round, Hen’s included.

“Getting back to what happened on the beach, we need to find this guy who alerted the lifeguard. He was asked to remain at the scene, and didn’t. We have a description of sorts. Tall and thin. Short, brown hair. Around thirty years of age. Skin turning red, so presumably he wasn’t a regular on the beach. And we have his name . . . Smith.”

She timed the pay-off like a stand-up comic and got the laugh she expected.

“He has a wife or partner, short, a bit overweight and with dyed blond hair. Also a five-year-old daughter called Haley.”

“Are we regarding him as a suspect?” a youngish DC asked.

“Because he left the scene, you mean?”

A sergeant across the room said dismissively, “He called the lifeguard. We can rule him out.”

“Not yet, we can’t,” Hen said. “It’s not unknown for the perpetrator to blow the whistle. Ask any fire investigator. In a high proportion of arson cases the informant is the guy who started the fire. They think it draws suspicion away from them.”

“Does that hold for murder as well?”

“I said it’s not unknown, sunshine. Let’s say Smith is our principal witness. I want to talk to all three members of that family and anyone else who was on that stretch of beach. I’m going on the local TV news tonight—by which time we should know for sure if Shiena Wilkinson is our victim.”

For Olga, also, the day had been stressful. She worked on a checkout in the local Safeway, an early shift that freed her in time to collect Haley from school at three thirty. At lunchtime in the staffroom, she had seen the Sun’s headline STRANGLED ON THE BEACH, and was appalled to discover it referred to the dead woman at Wightview Sands.

“I’ve been waiting all afternoon to talk to you,” she said as soon as Mike came in. “I tried calling the shop, but I couldn’t get through.”

“Something up?” he said without much interest.

“This.” She held the paper up to her chest, watching for the headline to make its impact.

“You think I haven’t seen that? We sell papers—remember?”

“It’s the woman we found, Mike. It says Wightview Sands. They’re appealing for witnesses.”

His offhand manner changed abruptly. “You haven’t phoned the police?”

“Not yet. I thought you’d like to speak to them.”

“Whatever for?”

She stared at him. “I told you. They want to hear from witnesses.” She slapped the paper on the table in front of him.

“That isn’t us. We didn’t see anything.”

“I
spoke
to her, for God’s sake. She was sitting right in front of us.”

“About what? What did you say?”

“I don’t know. Something about Haley.”

“What?”

“Her high spirits, her energy, something like that.”

“That’s all?”

“It was just a few friendly words.”

He tossed the paper across the room onto a chair. “What use is a few friendly words? They want witnesses to a murder, not people making small talk. You’d be done for wasting their time.”

“That isn’t true, Mike. It says they want anyone who was there to come forward, however little they saw. We can tell them what time she arrived—soon after us—and that she didn’t have anyone with her. No, hold on, there was that guy who tried to chat her up.”

“I didn’t see anyone.”

“Black T-shirt. Tall, dark, with curly hair. This was before lunch. You were asleep. She wasn’t amused, and he walked off, not too pleased. It didn’t amount to anything, but . . .”

“If it didn’t amount to anything, forget it.”

“They may want to know about him. She seemed to know him.”

“OK, she recognised someone. Big deal.”

“He didn’t upset her, or anything. She was in a cheerful state of mind, or she wouldn’t have spoken to me.”

“We know bugger all about her state of mind,” he said, troubled by her old-fashioned faith in the system. “You can’t read anything into a couple of words exchanged on a beach. Forget it. Other people may have seen something. We didn’t. We’re minor players. They don’t want the likes of us wasting their precious time.”

“Do you think so?” The force of his words was starting to tell on Olga.

“I know it. Listen, do you want a police car outside the house and all our nosy neighbours having a field day? That’s what’s going to happen if you call them.”

“I don’t care what the neighbours think. This poor woman was murdered.”

“Right. And what can we expect if we call the police? They’ll tear us to shreds. They won’t believe we sat on the beach all afternoon and saw sod all. The woman was murdered a few yards away from us. How come we didn’t notice? We’ll look a prize pair of idiots.”

Olga hesitated. She hadn’t thought of this.

“And that’s not all,” Mike hammered the point home. “If the case ever goes to court, we’ll be called as witnesses
for the defence
. Think about that for a moment. You and I will be the dimwits who failed to spot the killer. How do you fancy being cross-examined by the prosecution about your memories of that afternoon just to save some pervert from justice?”

“But if it’s true that we didn’t see anything . . .”

“They’ll make a laughing stock of us. We’ll be filmed going into the court and coming out of it. People will think we’re on the killer’s side. You know what I think?” he said, letting his voice sink to a lower, more reasonable note. “I think she was killed while we were swimming.”

Olga was relieved. “That’s what I was thinking, too.”

“We could have been a million miles away. We saw nothing.”

“When we came back from our swim, and Haley was missing, I thought the woman was asleep,” Olga recalled, picturing the scene. “She was very still. She could have been dead already.”

“Must have been.”

“I wouldn’t put it quite so strongly as that. When Haley went missing, you went off to look for her and I was in no state to notice anything. The woman could have been strangled while I was standing there, looking along the beach. What a ghastly thought!”

“Unlikely.”

“And when the lifeguard brought her back, I ran up the beach towards them. It could have happened then.”

“Does it matter?” Mike said. “The whole point is that we don’t know because we saw nothing.”

“You were the first to find her dead.”

“Someone was going to find her. I’m keeping out of this, Olga. Our life is heavy enough. We can do without this.”

He’d talked her round. She was uneasy, but she didn’t want another argument. There had been too many in their marriage in recent days.

Stella had targeted the receptionist she reckoned would say most if encouraged, the smiling woman in her fifties with carefully made-up eyes that gleamed through dark-framed oval rims. Mrs Bassington would have you believe she ran the entire health centre without interference from doctors, nurses or her fellow receptionists. She had shown Stella straight into Shiena Wilkinson’s consulting room, a stark place with little in it suggestive of the doctor’s personality except a Vermeer print on the wall behind the desk. There was a box of tissues on the desk. No family photos.

“What’s she like?” Mrs Bassington repeated. “A sweet doctor, very popular with the patients.”

“I meant in appearance.”

“Oh. Rather pretty in an intelligent way, if you understand me. She’s slim and about your height. Lovely hair with a reddish tinge to it. Natural, I’m sure. You can tell, can’t you?”

“Reddish?”

“Chestnut, I’d call it.”

Would chestnut pass for copper, the description everyone seemed to agree on? Stella wondered. She thought of copper as more red than brown. She was too experienced to put words in the witness’s mouth. “What length?”

“That I couldn’t tell you. She always wears it up, fastened across the back with a large wooden clasp like a geisha. It could be quite long. I’ve never seen it loose.”