The Sedleigh Hall Murder

by Roy Lewis

  Eric Ward nodded. He tried to think of the way the young Arthur Egan would have reacted; the prison years would have changed him, but not enough to make him throwaway the photographs of his young half-brother. And later, when the other evidence comes up it’s too late.’

  ‘He could have fought harder,’ Parton agreed. ‘But the daft bastard was still protecting his brother. And he’d scooted, off to sea and a life rolling from port to port. Or . . .’

  They had reached the end of the Quayside; Parton lit a cigarette and drew on it, his features caricatured in the glow of the cigarette. ‘It still is a bit hard to believe, his taking, the sentence to save Andrews, who had gone off to sea. It’d make more sense if Andrews never did go off to the rolling wave.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Ward asked.

  ‘What if he stayed in the country? Just dropped out of sight — left Tyneside? For that matter, maybe he didn’t even leave Tyneside — just got away from Byker, like Egan did. Close community, around the Wall, but they don’t know a damn thing about Egan after he left — except for the conviction. If Tommy’d left — they wouldn’t know much about him, either. Big place, Tyneside. He could’ve gone to Shields, Sunderland . . . If he was still around, what could Egan do except take the medicine handed out to him?’

  The more Ward thought about it, the more convinced he became that Parton was right. He had not consciously allowed it to come as a possibility to the front of his own mind, and yet how else could he explain his outburst to Arkwright, and his dogged, obsessional commitment to the case? He had shouted at Arkwright—’What if he wasn’t guilty?’ The thought had been there at the back of his mind, in the recesses of his subconscious — it was Parton who was now giving logical foundations to what had been a suspicion.

  And if Tommy Andrews had not gone to sea . . . if Tommy Andrews were still alive, on Tyneside . . .

  ‘All theorizin’, of course,’ Parton said carelessly, as they turned to retrace their steps along the quay. ‘And all a bit pointless, really. Egan’s dead . . . what’s there to prove?’ What indeed — especially when it was all irrelevant to the purpose of Ward’s initial enquiries. ‘It still leaves some unanswered questions, nevertheless,’ Ward said.

  ‘Like Vixen Hill,’ Parton suggested.

  ‘That’s right. Something there drew Egan back. But if it was Tommy Andrews who went there and killed Denby, what was its fascination for Egan? And there’s another thing, too.’

  ‘Yeh?’

  Something crossed his mind momentarily, a dark image he could not grasp. He shook his head. ‘Detective Chief Superintendent Arkwright came to see me today. He got somewhat annoyed when I raised the matter of the planting of evidence in the Egan case twenty years ago.’

  ‘Understandable.’ Parton grinned, in the darkness. ‘Done well, has that lad. But he can be a bad enemy.’

  ‘The thing is, he came to see me about the body’ I discovered at Warkworth.’

  ‘Hell’s flames!’ Parton stopped, stared at him in surprise. ‘No bugger tells me anything around here! Who the hell-’

  ‘She was called Sarah Boden. I intended asking her some questions about the possibility of Arthur Egan having fathered a child on one of the local dairymaids or stable girls. But when I got there, she was dead.’

  ‘And Arkwright—’

  ‘Detective Chief Superintendent Arkwright wasn’t exactly saying so, but he hinted that the death might not have been natural.’

  They said nothing more until they reached Dog Leap Stairs. Parton looked up at him and said quietly, ‘You . . . er . . . you’re suggesting that maybe there’s some connection between what we been saying and this woman’s death?’

  ‘I don’t know. It . . . I can’t see any link yet. Maybe there is none. But for a couple or more days I’d just like to see what we can find out — and to hell with the Francises and the Arkwrights of this world. There’s an answer somewhere, if we can find it . . . Tommy Andrews . . . that photograph of the grave . . . Sarah Boden maybe, too. And . . .’

  The image was before his mind again, dark, crumpled.

  He seized it, held it. ‘And there’s one thing more you can do, Jackie.’

  ‘Yeh?’

  ‘Get up to Warkworth; make some enquiries. When I parked in the square, the car next to mine was one I’d seen before. It was a black Ford with a crumpled wing. I can remember the driver — youngish, fair hair. But I’d seen the car before.’ He paused, thinking. ‘Check the hotels in Warkworth. You might get hold of the registration, and trace the owner—’

  ‘If he stayed in any of them hotels,’ Parton grumbled. ‘Where had you seen this car before, anyway?’

  ‘Just the once. When I was driving down a narrow lane — on the way from Sedleigh Hall to Vixen Hill.’

  Chapter Five

  The forensic laboratories in Gosforth were situated in a series of single-storey brick buildings linked by connecting passageways that always reminded Eric Ward of rabbit runs. He had undertaken a spell as liaison officer with the forensic scientists when he had been newly promoted to Detective Inspector and he knew both the buildings and the people who worked there well. During that period he had learned of the curious hostility that the scientists could bring to bear against the police; it was as though they suspected constantly that their skills and knowledge might be the subject of manipulation, that they might be trapped into making statements that had no real basis of dispassionate, scientific truth, and consequently, until they felt they could trust the officers with whom they dealt their manner could be distinctly cool. It had been Ward’s first task to break down that thinly veiled hostility.

  Now, some years later, he was not certain what kind of reception he might get. He was no longer in the police force, and he had no official business there. At least he had no problem getting in; during his time there security had been pretty tight with passes having to be shown at the entrances, but it was obvious now that the scares of recent years had settled down, and the Civil Service no longer seemed to suspect an IRA man behind every charming smile.

  In fact, he need not have worried about his reception. He made his way to the laboratories and asked a whitecoated girl where he might find Gus Thomas. He was relieved to hear that Gus still had his old office, tucked away in a corner from the main working laboratories relieved, because he had never become accustomed to viewing with equanimity some of the work and some of the specimens displayed at the laboratories. And when he tapped on Gus Thomas’s door and was invited to enter, the look on the civil servant’s face warmed him.

  ‘Eric! How nice to see you again! Come in, come in, and I’ll get you a cup of tea!’

  The little grey-haired man with the striped shirt, polka-dotted bow tie and shabby grey suit waved him to a chair, produced two grimy tea cups and a half-bottle of Scotch, and proceeded to pour two generous measures of whisky. Eric Ward held up a warning hand. ‘Sorry, Gus, not for me. Warned off.’

  Gus Thomas stared at him for a moment with a professional air, as though looking for the signs around Eric’s eyelids, and then he nodded, looked at one of the cups and pulled a face. ‘Can’t go sticking that back in the bottle; sacrilege.’ He drank it down With a flourish and another grimace, contemplated the second cup and then reluctantly placed it on top of the filing cabinet behind him. Eric suspected it would not stay there very long.

  Their talk consisted of pleasantries for a little while, with Gus rambling on about the period Eric had spent as liaison officer and the occasional binge they had had in a local pub in Gosforth High Street, but at last he asked Eric directly what had brought him to the laboratories.

  ‘Fishing, really,’ Eric said.

  ‘For facts.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘As opposed to fiction,’ Gus Thomas said contemptuously. ‘That’s what really gets up my nose, Eric, and always has done. Too many coppers come in here knowing exactly what happened — or what they think happened at a scene of crime, and expect us to produce s
cientific evidence of the occurrences. And if we come up with facts that show the events didn’t happen or couldn’t have happened, hell, it’s not just they don’t want to know, they actually yell that we’re perverting the course of justice!’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘And then there’s the other kind who come stamping in expecting us to provide answers, not just facts. Hell, all we can do is say what we find, not how or why it got there. Still . . .’ Gus Thomas broke off, watching Eric thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Facts, you said. You’re not in the police any more. You investigating something and want some good professional advice, hey?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Eric hesitated. ‘I really wanted to get some information about a job you’re looking at right now. A police matter.’

  Gus Thomas frowned. His eyes drifted to the cup of Scotch on the filing cabinet, and then back to Eric again. ‘Tricky.’

  ‘I realize that — and I accept you might not feel able to tell me very much, if anything.’

  ‘What’s the case?’

  ‘An old lady. Sarah Boden.’

  Gus Thomas nodded. ‘We got her down in the lab. Interesting case . . . And I’ve had that bloody slob Arkwright on my back already. Why the hell he can’t leave things to his liaison man . . . you were a good liaison copper, Eric.’ His glance drifted to the cup of whisky again. ‘Oh, what the hell!’ He reached back, took down the cup and sipped at the whisky appreciatively. It mellowed his judgement. ‘All right, ask away, Eric, and if I can help, I will.’

  ‘I found the body, Gus. I thought it was an accident. But I’ve seen Arkwright too, and he dropped a few hints which lead me to believe it wasn’t an accident. I want no more than that, really — to know what you’ve found to suggest one thing or the other.’

  ‘If that’s all you want to know, there’s no real problem — because I know I can trust your discretion. But a straight answer . . . well, that’s not so easy.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Let me put it like this. That old lady, she had a visitor, right? If she hadn’t, she’d still be alive. But whether it was a deliberate killing... that’d be difficult to prove.’ Eric Ward was puzzled. ‘What have you got, then?’

  ‘Not a great deal,’ Gus Thomas admitted. ‘Some scratches on her neck; bruises on the upper arms and the thigh, left side. Contusions of a minor nature elsewhere; the scalp wound; a displaced vertebra, not much more than that.’

  ‘Cause of death?’

  Thomas sniffed and sipped his whisky. ‘Couldn’t have been any heat in the kitchen. Hypothermia . . . but maybe shock. Difficult to say how long she’s been dead, you see.’

  Eric Ward was silent for a little while. The forensic scientist watched him, and waited. He knew what was coming. ‘It’ll only be an educated guess,’ he said softly, ‘and I wouldn’t do it for Arkwright, because he’d try to make it official. But for you . . .’

  ‘All right, tell me what you think happened, Gus.’

  Gus Thomas nodded, satisfied. Much as he might complain about the questions police officers asked him, and much though he might deny he produced anything other than facts from evidence supplied him, he nevertheless loved — with the right people — to discuss hypothetical possibilities. This was one of those times.

  ‘I wouldn’t know how long her visitor was in the house, but it wasn’t long. I did a scale on the temperature, speed of drying, amount of water on the carpet — and I guess he wasn’t there more than an hour.’

  ‘He?’

  ‘Can’t be positive, but some of the fluff picked off her clothes suggests contact with male suiting. But not easy . . . Anyway, he wasn’t there long — and maybe he didn’t intend to kill her, and maybe it was all pretty botched anyway. My hypothesis would be that he got niggled with her, perhaps took her by her upper arms and shook her, pretty violently. It displaced a small bone in her neck, and she was in pain. She might even have fainted. And then, or maybe earlier, this character also got his hands on her neck — maybe in the same argument. Then, when she was unconscious he dragged her into the kitchen — there are marks in the hallway, and carpet threads in her shoes dropped her and left her there for the cold to deal with.’

  ‘What about the wound on her head?’

  ‘Could have been enough to stun her, but I doubt it. Shock could have done it, of course — but I suspect she maybe fainted when he was shaking her. But it was all a bit botched, and amateurish.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Eric asked.

  Gus Thomas finished the whisky, and gazed reluctantly at the empty cup. ‘Come on, Eric, if you were going to knock off a frail old lady wouldn’t you make the scene a bit more convincing? And leaving her in the cold kitchen, for God’s sake! That was taking a chance. She might have come around, crawled to the door. Unless she’d already stopped breathing — which is possible. No . . . he took chances, a real amateur job.’

  ‘Effective enough, nevertheless.’

  Gus Thomas grimaced. ‘Admit that. But untidy. I will say one thing, though. He’s a cool bastard. He shook hell out of that old girl and when she dropped on him he decided to kill her. He took her in the kitchen and deliberately banged her head, hard, against the cooker. Takes a peculiar kind of savagery to do that, you know, to an unconscious old woman. Oh, aye, a cool bastard.’

  ‘And that’s what you think happened?’ Eric asked. ‘That’s what I think happened. But I’d never swear to it in a court of law. All I’d point to would be the facts and for a fact, this bloody cup is empty. You staying long, Eric?’

  Eric wasn’t staying long.

  * * *

  He had another call to make in Gosforth — the witnessing of a will, which he had used as an excuse at the office to come out in the direction of the forensic laboratories — and when that task was completed he made his way back to Francis, Shaw and Elder in a thoughtful mood. To date, his basic intention had been to discover the beneficiaries, if any, of the Egan estate. Last evening, with Jackie Parton, he had decided to finish the other task with which he had become obsessed — the discovery of the truth about Egan and Colonel Denby, and the possible rehabilitation of Egan’s name. But it had all been an exercise in the past, a dredging of old waters. Now suddenly there was the distinct possibility that the past had come alive and was very much part of the present. It was a sobering thought. Arkwright’s hints had been one thing; Gus Thomas’s hypothesis had been another. He had trust in the judgement of the little man in Gosforth. He was too experienced a scientist to be far wrong in his deductions.

  When he entered the office the receptionist signalled to him. He stuck his head around the door and she told him, somewhat flustered by a call coming in, that there was a client waiting for him in his room. Ward frowned. He wasn’t expecting anyone, and he was not really in the mood for an interview almost before he had got back to his room. No doubt it would be someone Paul had foisted off on him. He walked quickly up the stairs and entered his room.

  The woman rose from the chair to face him. It was Anne Morcomb.

  She was dressed in a dark blue suit that showed off her figure to considerable advantage but her manner was restrained, slightly nervous, as though she felt ill at ease in this room. He went forward to shake her hand, but her smile was faint, and tremulous at the edges. She sat down as he walked behind his desk; he felt as nervous as she looked.

  ‘I’m surprised to see you here,’ he said inanely. ‘You look . . . different.’

  ‘I could hardly visit town in jodhpurs,’ she said, but the smile slipped again and she looked intensely at him, with a frown creasing her forehead. ‘I heard this morning . . . about Sarah.’

  So that was it. Eric Ward sat down and contemplated his hands for a few moments. His nervousness was dying, to be replaced by something else — a slight anxiety. This girl was going to ask questions; he did not know how much he should tell her.

  ‘I understand you . . . you were there. It was in the morning papers. What . . . what happened?’

/>   Briefly Eric told her of his visit to Castle Street, of what he had found, of how he had reacted. It was quickly told, and he related nothing of Arkwright’s visit, or Gus Thomas’s hypothesis.

  ‘You went there after you left me, then?’ she asked. He nodded, and she went on, ‘So if you hadn’t had . . . an attack, you would have gone there that evening, and maybe she wouldn’t have died.’

  He stared at her. It was odd; she had put into words what had lain at the back of his mind, without expression, but now it was in the open. If he had gone there that evening and spoken to her, the killer might not have visited her. More, he might no longer have needed to kill her. Something of his thoughts appeared in his face, for Anne Morcomb said sharply, ‘Are you all right?’

  He stared at her, thinking back, coldly. There was no way in which he could feel guilty about what had happened, and yet he must bear a degree of responsibility. Woodenly he said, ‘That’s right. If I had gone there, she wouldn’t have died . . . No, I’m all right, Anne, I was just thinking of something else . . .’

  ‘So you never got to speak to her in the end,’ she said, after a little while.

  He shook his head. ‘Maybe she would have had no information anyway.’

  ‘You don’t think that, though, do you?’ She was looking at him with real sympathy in her eyes. ‘And now you feel you never will close to your satisfaction this Egan thing.’

  Her sympathy broke through to him suddenly. He shook his head again. ‘It’s not just that. The fact is, I did know more than I told you out at Seddon Burn. And maybe Sarah Boden could have helped, maybe not. You see, Anne, I believe Arthur Egan never killed Colonel Denby. I believe he was merely protecting his halfbrother — and he got railroaded by policemen who were eager for a conviction.’