by Joyce Cato
Except, of course, he’d been in full view of everyone when Tris had been killed. And unless she could think of a way that he might somehow have miraculously got around that, it was no good thinking of him as the killer. She supposed that he could have paid someone else to kill him. But she had never been much of a conspiracy theorist. Besides, hiring a killer opened you up to blackmail, and she couldn’t see someone as canny as Max Wilson doing that. And wasn’t that way over the top anyway?
Jenny sighed wearily and rubbed her forehead. What with the heat and the tension, she was getting a mammoth headache. If it kept up, she’d have to take some aspirin.
‘My wife, Michelle, Inspector,’ Max introduced his wife, sounding almost cheerful. ‘Shelly, the policeman would like to talk to you about Tris,’ he added pleasantly. From his manner, Sergeant Lane thought with disgust, you’d think they were at some social soirée, instead of at a crime scene.
Michelle Wilson managed to smile tremulously at the two police officers. But she was clearly feeling a terrible strain, and Jenny for one, simply had to look away. She found it impossible not to feel sorry for the woman. She couldn’t imagine what must she be thinking, or feeling.
If she’d genuinely been in love with Tris Jones, then she must be in hell right now, unable to admit to her grief, let alone give way to it. And even if the affair hadn’t been that serious, losing someone you had been intimate with to violent death, would still be more than enough to shake anyone to their core.
The blonde woman licked her lips tensely. ‘How can I help, Inspector?’ Michelle asked, her voice faint, and not quite steady.
Causon, who was obviously nobody’s fool, sensed instantly that something odd was going on here. The husband was smiling a little too much like the cat that had dined on a canary soufflé, and the woman beside him flinched as he put a protective arm across her shoulders.
His eyes instantly sharpened on her. ‘Did you see the victim at all today, Mrs Wilson?’ he demanded abruptly.
‘Only in passing,’ Michelle said, obviously rallying just a little. Evidently she was the sort of woman who didn’t like to be bullied. Which was probably just as well, Jenny mused, married to a man like Max.
‘You knew him well?’ Causon persisted.
‘Tris didn’t live in the village, Inspector, he had a place in London,’ she prevaricated. ‘He only came up sometimes at the weekends to visit his parents. We’ve had the Joneses over to dine with us a number of times, but that’s all,’ Michelle went on cleverly. Clearly, she was going to admit to nothing. And her voice was slowly getting stronger.
No doubt, Jenny thought, it had finally occurred to her that she herself might be in some danger now, and she was clearly stiffening her spine in order to face the challenge. ‘Sir Robert and Erica are more our friends than Tristan,’ she added more firmly.
Beside her, Max continued to look matinee-idol handsome and perfectly bland.
‘I see,’ Causon said. And believed that he did. He hadn’t thought to ask the constable, but he suspected that the victim had been a good-looking young bloke. He’d been lying face down the only time that Causon had seen him, but it made sense. And he’d bet his next month’s salary that their victim was probably known to be a bit of a one for the ladies, as well.
‘But did you have a chance to talk to Mr Tristan Jones today?’ he pressed Michelle remorselessly, intent on pinning her down to some definitive answers.
‘No, Inspector. I was sitting out on one of the deck chairs sunbathing nearly all day. I came in for a cold drink and a sandwich at teatime, but I never saw Tris. And I was back in my seat before our team started to bat,’ Michelle said, a little colour returning to her cheeks now. She seemed to be feeling on much firmer ground, and Jenny couldn’t help but think that she was probably telling the truth.
Unless she was as good an actor as her husband?
What’s more, Jenny got the odd but definite feeling that Michelle was talking for somebody else’s benefit, as well as the inspector’s. As if she was trying to get a message across to another person, listening in.
‘You didn’t see Tristan Jones leave the pavilion then?’ Causon carried on.
‘I don’t think so. I was talking to Mavis Dalton, I think. She was telling me all about the birth of her latest grandson. You can ask her,’ she added defiantly.
And again, Jenny felt sure that she was telling the truth. And, once again, telegraphing some triumphant or belligerent message to someone other than the man she was talking to.
Jenny’s eyes went quickly to Michelle’s husband.
Max Wilson’s smile was fixed on his face, and his eyes very carefully avoided looking at his wife directly.
Causon again nodded almost imperceptibly to his sergeant, but Graham Lane caught it and interpreted it instantly with a brief nod. Oh yes, he would most definitely be talking to this Mavis Dalton lady.
But even the sergeant suspected that the proud grandmother would probably end up corroborating the witness’s story in every detail. For it would be foolish indeed for Michelle Wilson to lie about something that could so easily be disproved. Besides, if she had been seen leaving her seat and wandering around to the back of the pavilion, he was sure that they would all have known about it long before now.
He knew how villages and their grapevines worked. Someone (and probably more than just one) would have been only too eager to tell one of the uniforms all about it. People did so like to be at the centre of a drama.
No, Graham Lane thought to himself with some satisfaction. On the whole, he was convinced that here was yet another one they could eliminate from the pool of suspects. And at this rate, they’d be zeroing in on the killer in no time, by the simple process of elimination, if nothing else.
‘All right, that’s all for now, thank you, Mrs Wilson,’ Causon said with a brief smile.
But without a doubt, he’d be speaking to her later on at some point, when he could get her on her own and safely down to an interview room at the local station, with a recording device firmly in play. Because unless he missed his guess, there was plenty of mileage to be had there, and he wasn’t going to be satisfied until he knew what exactly had been going on between the Wilsons and the victim.
‘And thank you, too, sir,’ Causon nodded a dismissal at Max Wilson, who nodded amiably back, slipped his hand around his wife’s waist and said sweetly, ‘Come along then, darling.’
Michelle’s eyes flickered bleakly, but she moved off with him without a further word.
Jenny watched them go pensively and sighed.
She too could count, and the suspect list was now narrowing very sharply indeed. Her eyes sought out, and found, those of James Cluley, who was standing some little distance away out on the field, and therefore presumably out of earshot of what was happening.
He looked a lonely and forlorn figure, and her heart contracted with a slight pang.
She hadn’t forgotten seeing young Mark Rawley passing behind the back of the pavilion shortly before tea. And she knew that she had a duty to tell the inspector what she’d seen then – and also what she’d seen and heard for herself earlier in the day, about the state of their family’s finances.
Although it made her feel like a bit of a rat to have to do it.
What’s more, she was sure that Inspector Causon would have filed away the fact that, of all the people who’d wondered where Tris might have been, it had been the old man who’d thought of looking for him behind the pavilion. And that in itself surely raised some serious questions.
So, before she could chicken out, she forced herself to step out of the doorway to the kitchen and moved a little closer to the two policemen just inside the main room. There was no point putting the evil moment off, she tried to console herself. It simply had to be done.
She caught the slighter, fair-haired police officer’s attention first. His eyes met hers, were about to move away again, then came back again, as she made a slight movement with her hand, raising it jus
t a little. She then nudged her head towards the interior of the kitchen, looked pointedly at his superior, and then turned and walked inside.
Several people saw the sergeant step up to his chief and say something quietly in his ear, but none caught what he said. And the inspector’s face didn’t change.
Just then, one of the PCs came back. ‘Sir, SOCO is here, but no sign of the pathologist yet.’
‘OK. Any sign of any other reinforcements yet? A couple more uniforms at least?’
‘I’m afraid not, sir. Not yet. But I rang the station and asked if they could call in anyone off duty, and they said two more PCs were on their way over. They should be here any minute.’
Causon grunted in disgust. It was better than nothing, he supposed, but this was no way to be forced to run an investigation. But until he had more men on the ground, he was severely restricted in what he could do.
‘Right then. Constable, direct the SOCO and the doctor to the scene of crime. Lane, I want you to organize what uniforms we do have. We need the names and addresses and a brief preliminary statement from everyone here. Concentrate on those who saw Tristan Jones, or spoke to him, obviously. But I also want to know if anyone saw or noticed anything else in the least out of the ordinary – whether it concerned the victim or not.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Causon nodded, and disappeared further into the pavilion.
Caroline Majors and her friend Ettie watched him avidly to see where he was going, but just then, Graham Lane ushered them outside, to be corralled with the others to give their statements.
Jenny was standing with her back to the kitchen door, looking pensively out of the French windows when Causon stepped into the room. He closed the door firmly behind him.
‘I wondered just when you were going to speak up,’ he said.
Jenny jumped guiltily, turned around, and then told herself off for feeling so wrong-footed. It was not, after all, as if she’d done anything wrong.
‘Oh. You know who I am then?’ she said, her shoulders slumping a little. So much for hoping to fly under the radar.
‘I recognized you the moment I set eyes on you,’ Causon agreed heavily. ‘Our very own Miss Marple. Every copper in a fifty-mile radius knows all about you, Miss Starling,’ he assured her.
His tone was not particularly complimentary.
Jenny shot him a speaking glance. ‘Now really, Inspector. Do I look like a fluffy, little old lady?’ she snapped.
The inspector’s lips twitched briefly as his eyes roved over her ample, voluptuous figure. ‘Not hardly,’ he agreed sourly. ‘But I don’t like people who meddle in police investigations,’ he shot back.
‘Neither would I, in your shoes,’ Jenny responded coolly. ‘And if you really knew all about me, then you’d know that I’ve never meddled with the police in my life. It’s not as if I ask to get caught up in stuff like this,’ she added, genuinely aggrieved.
Causon sighed, and held out his hands in a brief, conciliatory gesture. ‘Look, let’s not get into semantics, OK? Let’s just say that I’ll freely admit that you’ve proved yourself to be a useful witness in times past. Now, do you have anything for me, or don’t you?’
Jenny sighed and sat down. ‘I suppose I do.’
And she proceeded to tell him all that she knew about James Cluley, his financial predicament, and the movements of his angry grandson, Mark Rawley.
CHAPTER SIX
‘And you saw the boy, when exactly?’ the inspector asked, when she’d finished her account, not only of her observations about young Mark Rawley, but about everything else she’d seen, heard or surmised, over the course of the day so far.
Jenny sighed, immediately feeling foolish. She’d known that that was bound to be one of the first questions that he’d ask, of course, and she’d been trying to pinpoint the time now for some while, and had totally failed. She felt curiously ashamed of this, as if she should have been able to do better. After all, given all her previous experience with police cases, she wasn’t exactly new at this.
But at the time, she’d had no reason to pay particular attention, and she was regretting it now.
‘I’m sorry, Inspector, really I am,’ she said humbly. ‘Especially in light of what you’ve just said about me being such a reliable witness and all, but I really can’t give you an accurate time,’ she admitted wryly. ‘In my defence, I can only say that I have been working flat out all day, what with only having the one oven, and so much baking to get done, which meant that I haven’t really had a chance to catch my breath and … Oh, never mind.’ Now she was just making excuses, she thought, crossly, and if there was one thing she hated, it was a whiner. So she firmed her shoulders and forced herself to concentrate on what really mattered. ‘I think it was just before tea-time,’ she said, still feeling all kinds of a fool for not being sure. ‘Now that was due to start at four, but I’m sure it started a little before that, because I can remember Caroline saying that the other team were all out, or over, or dismissed, or whatever it is, early. So, say, at a rough estimate, it should have been sometime between three twenty and three forty? Er … but I really should like to point out that can only be regarded as my best guess. I wouldn’t rely on it without some other form of confirmation, if I were you,’ she added lamely.
Causon sighed, piling on her sense of failure. ‘And you saw him go by the French windows, over there, you say?’ He indicated the double set of glass doors at the back of the room with a cursory wave of his hand. ‘He never came into the pavilion, for instance? To eat, maybe? A young lad, and free food, and all that?’
‘No, I’m positive I never saw him hanging around. I only happened to notice him at all, because, you know how it is, when something moves past you in the corner of your eye, it attracts your attention.’
Causon nodded. ‘Yes – it distracts you.’
‘Yes, exactly. So I just looked up from whatever it was I was doing, saw him walk past outside and thought nothing more about it. But if I’d seen him inside the pavilion, I would have remembered. And I’m sure that I didn’t. Mind you, I was in and out of the kitchen all of the time, and if he’d made a fleeting visit – to filch some cakes or whatever and then amscray with them, I might not necessarily have been aware of that. You’d have to ask Caroline, or her friend Ettie. I’m not so sure whether Erica would have noticed him,’ she added with a slight smile. She rather thought that the local peasantry might not have registered on the Lady of the Manor’s radar.
‘Right,’ the inspector grunted, no doubt thinking much the same thing. Causon reached into his pocket, withdrew his mobile and pressed a speed-dial number – obviously his sergeant’s. ‘Yes, Lane? I want you to find out the address of one Mark Rawley, the grandson of James Cluley. It’s almost certainly somewhere in the village here. Then I want you to go and fetch him down here. Yes, here.’ He paused, then sighed. ‘I know it’s not procedure. But I want the lad on the scene. I want to see how it affects him.’ Again he paused and listened, then grunted. ‘No, bring him through into the kitchen. And Lane – I want you to make sure that his granddad sees you bringing him in here. Got that? Right.’
Jenny winced as she quickly ran over the ramifications of the senior policeman’s orders. Poor old James, she thought. No doubt about it, Causon had him firmly in his sights by the looks of it. And there were no flies on the inspector, Jenny thought, with both admiration, and just a smidgen of apprehension.
‘Sir!’ Both Jenny and the inspector jumped a little as a police constable suddenly pushed open the door and stuck his head in. Causon shot him a sour look, but mercifully refrained from telling him just what he thought about idiots who nearly gave their superior officers heart attacks. ‘Sir, I thought you’d like to know.’ The constable, unaware of his lucky escape, was too keen to impart his news to even notice Jenny’s presence. ‘One of the witnesses I’ve been talking to says that he saw something which struck him as odd. But it was nothing to do with the victim, though.’
‘Well, spit it out, man,’ Causon said, ignoring the way the young constable finally looked at Jenny a shade questioningly, and, rather late in the day, became unsure whether or not he should be discussing police business in front of a member of the public.
He shot the inspector a slightly shame-faced look, and seemed braced for impact, but Causon, after a moment’s deliberation, decided to let it pass. Although he knew himself to be many things (and short-tempered may have been one of them) he was not a hypocrite, and since he too had decided to work with rather than against the travelling cook, he didn’t feel comfortable lecturing others for committing the same sin.
‘Yes, sir.’ The lad flushed at the older man’s gruff tone, and carried on quickly. ‘He says that just before play began for the second time, that is just after tea, he saw one of the Much Rousham cricketers called Lorcan Greeves re-enter the playing field and sit down just outside the pavilion. He thought nothing much of it, except for the fact that Mr Greeves had just been talking to a young lad, and that he, Mr Greeves that is, looked “sort of furtive” about it.’ The PC, consulting his notebook, shrugged defensively. ‘I know that witnesses can start imagining all sorts of things during situations like this, so when I pressed him a little, he couldn’t really back up why he thought this Mr Greeves person was being “furtive”. He just thought that perhaps it was because of the way this Mr Greeves looked all around before coming back to the pavilion, as if checking to see if anybody was watching him.’
The young police constable paused to take a much-needed breath of air, and glanced nervously at his superior officer. ‘You did say that you wanted a note to be made of anything out of the ordinary, sir,’ he reminded him diffidently.
Causon nodded a touch impatiently. ‘Yes, yes, you did the right thing. Keep at it, son. And I’ll be wanting a word with this witness later.’ Especially since, according to that fount of all knowledge, Jenny Starling, this Lorcan Greeves creature might very well be another man with a good motive for wanting Tristan Jones put out of the way. ‘I don’t suppose this witness of yours said who the lad that Greeves was talking to might be, did he?’
