Murder in the Morning

by Betty Rowlands

  ‘To gain his sympathy, perhaps. The poor little orphan syndrome. And then, as head of the art department, he was in a position to help her. Perhaps she asked him to use his influence with Doctor Shergold to let her replace the art teacher who was sick.’

  ‘Shergold. The head of the department where they both worked?’

  ‘That’s right. As his secretary, she’d have known about the vacancy as soon as it arose.’

  ‘So you think she was using Willard?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’ It dawned on Melissa that the questions were taking an uncomfortable line.

  ‘Perhaps it had occurred to him that he was being used,’ Harris said smoothly. ‘That would have upset him, wouldn’t it? No one likes to feel they’ve been taken for a ride.’ It was as if he had taken her by the shoulders and forced her to look at something she did not want to see.

  ‘If you’re suggesting that would give him a motive for murdering Angy, I simply don’t believe it!’ she declared, altogether too vehemently for an objective opinion.

  Harris’s eyes never flickered. ‘I’m suggesting nothing,’ he said blandly. ‘Just considering possibilities.’

  ‘Barney isn’t the vengeful sort,’ she declared, sounding more confident than she felt. ‘He might flare up if something upset him but he wouldn’t kill anyone, least of all Angy.’

  ‘On his own admission, he “flared up”, as you put it, enough to do her actual bodily harm last Sunday,’ observed Harris. ‘Or didn’t he bother to mention that to you?’ One corner of his mouth kinked but it was hard to tell whether the cause was amusement or contempt.

  ‘If by “actual bodily harm” you mean a small bruise on the cheek, yes, he did, as a matter of fact!’ she retorted, falling straight into the trap. Not once had there been any reference to contact between her and Barney since the murder.

  The kink deepened until it was almost a grin. She gritted her teeth and dug her nails into the arms of her chair.

  ‘So presumably he told you what the quarrel was about?’ Harris began drawing an elaborate design of circles on a blank page in his notebook. His tone was deceptively casual.

  ‘He said she’d changed and when he tackled her about it, she just laughed. I gather she’d been seeing a lot of someone called Eddie who I think owns the house where she lives.’

  ‘Eddie Brady,’ Harris confirmed, without taking his eyes from his doodling.

  ‘Is that his name?’ Harris looked up and appeared about to say something. Melissa waited but he merely shrugged and wrote something in a margin. ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘Barney had the impression that this Eddie had some kind of influence over Angy and he didn’t like it. I suppose she taunted him and he just lost his temper and lashed out at her. He was full of remorse about it and I’m sure he’d never have gone back and attacked her in cold blood.’

  ‘How well do you know him?’ The small eyes seemed to be dissecting her. She felt her cheeks grow warm and it was an effort not to look away.

  ‘We’ve been colleagues since last September and we’ve become quite friendly.’ She knew that her voice did not sound natural but there was no visible reaction on Harris’s lumpy features. ‘He came back to the college in a dreadful state after finding the body. You really gave him a hard time,’ she went on, suddenly angry on Barney’s behalf. ‘He’s terribly sensitive and he was devastated at what had happened.’

  ‘So he poured it all out to you.’ Harris shifted his massive frame on the chair as if to make sure it was evenly distributed. ‘Perhaps you remember something that might help us?’

  ‘He didn’t kill Angy!’ She had never meant to betray her partisanship so openly but the damage was already done. ‘Honestly, Ken, he’s far too kind and gentle a soul and he worshipped that girl. She was like a daughter to him. Besides, isn’t it obvious now? Rick Lawrence is the killer – he must be!’

  ‘A daughter?’ Harris’s eyebrows lifted and his lips pursed. Again, he had totally ignored part of what she said.

  ‘Yes, didn’t he tell you?’ she said impatiently.

  ‘He told us very little. It made us curious to know what he was trying to hide.’

  ‘He was trying to protect her reputation. Oh, I know this sounds like old-fashioned chivalry but he really did think of her as his daughter. His own little girl died in infancy – she’d have been about the same age – and his wife died giving birth to her.’

  ‘So you’re telling me that Angelica Caroli was a substitute for the child he had lost?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Men have killed their daughters before now,’ Harris pointed out. ‘Just as a lover will murder a faithless mistress, if a daughter he idolises should fall off her pedestal . . . ’

  ‘I don’t believe it!’

  ‘You don’t believe Angelica Caroli was the sort to fall off her pedestal?’

  ‘I don’t believe Barney Willard is capable of murder. As to Angy, I’m beginning to believe she’s capable of quite a lot. She lied to him about her family and . . . ’ Just in time, she checked herself from referring to the possibility of Angy’s pregnancy. She had not been officially told and it would do Barney’s case no good if the police knew he was aware of it and had said nothing to them.

  ‘And?’ said Harris. Frantically, Melissa tried to think of something to fill the gap.

  ‘ . . . and Doug Wilson was always throwing out innuendoes,’ she said, praying that it sounded convincing. ‘Hinting that Angy was “no better than she should be” as they used to say, as if he knew something.’

  ‘Wilson? Ah yes, the English teacher. Fancies himself a real young stallion, doesn’t he?’

  ‘You could say that. It used to enrage Barney when he hinted that Angy might have been unchaste.’

  ‘Do you think she was “unchaste”?’ Harris seemed to find the word mildly amusing.

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me.’ Melissa was shocked at the vitriol in her voice. ‘She had certainly slept with Rick Lawrence . . . she as good as told me so. And she wasn’t short of admirers. As Lou put it, the best cherries always fell into her mouth. She had this facile, ingenuous way with her, all soft and pliant. I think she hated confrontation so she’d always say or do what was easiest and caused the least hassle at the time.’

  ‘Would it be fair to say that in spite of being on friendly terms with her, you didn’t really like her very much?’

  ‘I certainly didn’t dislike her, but I don’t think I would have trusted her very far,’ Melissa admitted. ‘She had a kind of felinity.’ Lou’s comment came back to her: ‘Cats take what they want and then walk away.’ Whatever it was that Angy had taken this time, someone had seen to it that she didn’t walk away.

  Harris put his notebook to one side and drew a folder from his briefcase. ‘I thought you might be interested in these,’ he said. He went over to a small table on which Melissa kept magazines. ‘May I?’ He cleared a space and laid out a series of crayon portraits.

  ‘Good heavens, that’s me!’ Melissa picked up one of the drawings and stared at it in astonishment. It was signed ‘AC’ in an elaborate monogram. ‘Are these Angy’s? They’re very good . . . but I’ve never sat for her.’

  ‘Apparently none of her subjects did. They were all done from memory. A very talented girl, it seems.’

  Melissa ran her eye along the row of sketches. ‘There’s Barney . . . Rodney Shergold . . . Doug Wilson. This is Sybil Bliss who comes to my writers’ workshop. The lad with the earring is one of her art students, I think.’ Harris nodded confirmation. ‘I don’t know him,’ she added, picking up the last sketch.

  ‘That’s Eddie Brady.’

  ‘Oh, so that’s what he looks like.’ The face was clean-shaven, with high cheekbones and an unsmiling mouth. A lock of straight hair fell across a high, unlined forehead; overhanging brows gave a brooding expression.

  As before when Eddie’s name was mentioned, Harris seemed about to say something and then changed his mind. He gathered up the sketches and put the
m away.

  ‘We found them in her flat.’ He took out a second folder. ‘Here’s the PM report. Knowing your professional interest in these matters, I thought you might be interested in the gory details.’ He ran his eye down the typewritten sheet. ‘She was killed by a single blow with a kitchen knife, struck from above, some time on Tuesday afternoon or evening as near as can be determined. The blow severed her windpipe and the actual cause of death was asphyxia. She choked on her own blood.’

  ‘How absolutely horrible!’ Melissa put a hand to her mouth and swallowed hard.

  ‘At least it was quicker than bleeding to death. The pathologist reckoned two minutes, and of course, she’d have lost consciousness before that. As it was, she managed to reach the telephone and get the receiver off. Not that it would have done her much good even if she had managed to call 999. She wouldn’t have been able to speak.’

  ‘There must have been an awful lot of blood.’

  ‘There was . . . well spread around too. We think she was stabbed in the kitchen; the trail leads from there into the bed-sitting-room. On the way past she must have fallen against the bathroom door. There’s blood and her fingerprints down the panels and on the handle. From there it seems she staggered and crawled over to the bed, where she finally collapsed.’

  ‘Barney said he’d called her number on Tuesday evening but it was engaged.’

  ‘It would be, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘But the receiver must have been put back some time before he rang on Wednesday evening because he heard it ringing.’

  ‘If he’s telling the truth. He insists it was in place when he got to the flat and found her yesterday morning. He used it to call us.’

  ‘So either the murderer replaced the receiver once Angy was dead, or he came back later and did it, or someone else came to the flat and did it but didn’t report finding her body.’ Suddenly, the adrenalin began to flow. The logical side of her brain had taken over, the way it did when she was devising puzzles for Nathan Latimer to resolve. For the moment, Barney was forgotten.

  ‘Gets complicated, doesn’t it?’ said Harris, with an unexpected grin that put her in mind of a Toby jug. ‘Just to add to our problems, security in that house is non-existent; the front door is left open all day and the last one in at night locks up . . . if they remember. The flats have individual locks but, would you believe, the one on Angy’s front door is defective and only functions if the door is slammed really hard.’

  ‘So anyone could have gone in and out?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘What about the other tenants? Didn’t they hear anything?’

  ‘We’re out of luck there as well. Eddie Brady lives in the basement and was away on a two-day residential course for social workers. Went to the training centre straight from the office on Tuesday and didn’t get back until late yesterday. There are two other flats in the house; one’s just been vacated and the people in the other one are on holiday. Angy lived right at the top, in a converted attic.’

  ‘And she was all alone in the house?’

  ‘Except for her killer, yes.’

  ‘What about people going in and out? Workmen or someone delivering things?’

  ‘No luck so far, but my men are combing the area for more witnesses.’

  ‘What else does the PM say?’

  ‘Nothing that helps us very much. She was a healthy young woman and the only time she’d consulted her doctor since coming to Stowbridge was for a sore throat last January. Not a virgin but no evidence of recent sexual activity or assault, so we’re not looking for a rapist.’

  ‘No sign of pregnancy or recent termination?’ Melissa tried to sound detached and clinical.

  ‘Definitely not. She was menstruating.’ Harris shot Melissa a searching look before putting the papers away. ‘Does that surprise you?’

  ‘Not especially. I just wondered.’

  ‘Are you sure you didn’t have another reason for asking?’

  ‘What reason would I have?’

  ‘You might be thinking that her relationship with your friend Willard wasn’t as innocent as he’d like you to believe.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking anything of the kind!’

  ‘All right.’ Harris stood up and moved towards the door. ‘I’m sure you’ll let us know if you think of anything else that might help.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Would you care for something before you go? Coffee, or a drink?’

  ‘No thanks, I’ve already stayed longer than I intended.’ At the front door he said, ‘Be careful, Melissa. Don’t take any risks.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean? You don’t suppose I’m a potential victim?’ She tried to sound flippant but he did not smile.

  ‘I think you know what I mean but if you insist I’ll spell it out. Our enquiries are at an early stage and we have totally open minds. No one has been eliminated. No one,’ he repeated with what she considered quite unnecessary emphasis. ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘If you’re warning me against Barney Willard . . . ’

  ‘He had motive and opportunity and he hasn’t been entirely straight with us.’

  ‘But I told you . . . ’

  ‘Perhaps I’ll be more inclined to believe his story when I hear it directly from him.’

  Melissa felt a surge of outrage on Barney’s behalf. ‘You’re not going to put him through all that trauma again?’ she pleaded. ‘He’s heartbroken over Angy’s death. And what about Rick Lawrence? Surely he’s got a much stronger motive . . . and he was seen near Angy’s flat at the crucial time.’

  ‘You know enough about police work to be sure that we’ll follow every lead, but I don’t have to remind you that Lawrence may have a perfectly sound alibi and that the man seen by witnesses could be an innocent look-alike.’ The put-down was made gently enough but once again, Melissa felt foolish at having revealed her feelings so easily.

  ‘I understand,’ she said lamely. ‘I appreciate your concern for me.’

  He opened the door of his car, put his briefcase on the back seat, then took off his jacket and laid it on top. He did all this slowly and deliberately, the way he always seemed to do everything. There must be times when he moves quickly, Melissa thought, trying to imagine him in hot pursuit of some villain.

  His eyes met hers above the roof of the car. ‘Remember now, don’t go sticking your neck out,’ he said in a low voice, although there was nothing but a solitary cow within earshot. ‘Once a man has killed, for whatever reason, he’ll do it again if he has to.’ He got into the car and started the engine before she could reply.

  Eleven

  ‘I wonder if they’ve arrested Rick Lawrence yet?’ remarked Melissa during supper. She had spent the first part of the evening putting Iris in the picture and was aware that her relief that the heat should by now be off Barney had not escaped notice.

  Iris, helping herself to vegetable curry, raised her eyebrows.

  ‘You seem pretty sure he did it,’ she said.

  ‘Of course he did it.’

  ‘May simply have been calling on an old friend.’

  ‘Old friend? After the way Angy treated him?’

  Iris waved a dismissive fork. ‘You sound like that clown-faced child – what was her name? Lucy something or other.’

  ‘Lou Stacey. But surely . . . ’

  ‘Be rational. All that hoo-ha was nearly a year ago.’

  ‘He could have been nursing a grudge, brooded over it, then at last found out where Angy was and gone after her.’

  ‘Unlikely. Might have growled around for a week or so, then gone back to work.’

  ‘You sound very sure.’

  ‘Self-centred lot, we artists. Get absorbed in our work. Can’t be bothered to waste time over difficult relationships. Quite capable of anything in the heat of the moment, though.’ Iris jabbed her fork in Melissa’s direction. ‘Remember that, before you get too carried away over lover-boy,’ she warned.

  ‘You’re as bad as Ken Harris!’ said Mel
issa impatiently. ‘I won’t have people hinting that Barney is a murderer.’

  ‘Only thinking of your own good.’ Iris put a hand over Melissa’s wrist and gave a disarming grin. ‘Don’t want you topped. I might get undesirable neighbours!’

  Melissa laughed, her momentary annoyance forgotten. ‘All right, I’ll be careful.’

  Iris pushed aside her empty plate and refilled their glasses with elderflower champagne. ‘Good vegetarian supper, Melissa. You’re learning!’

  ‘Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for bringing the wine.’ Melissa took their plates to the kitchen and fetched the dessert. When they had finished eating she sat back and picked up her glass. ‘One thing that puzzles me,’ she said, ‘is the way Angy seems to have changed her attitude to Barney. And why let him think she was pregnant when it wasn’t true? She must have known it would upset him and she told me more than once how much she hated seeing people unhappy.’

  ‘So she made an exception in his case.’

  ‘Yes, but why? He’d been good to her. He probably recommended her for the job in the Art Department. He’d have done anything in the world for her.’

  ‘Bored with having him hanging around looking pi?’ speculated Iris, swirling her glass and watching the bubbles streaming in sparkling columns to the surface of the wine. ‘Or he’d been pestering her to marry him? Could have figured the baby yarn’d shock him into dropping her.’

  ‘He didn’t want to marry her. He thought of her as his daughter.’

  ‘So he told you. Could have been lying.’

  ‘He wasn’t lying.’

  Iris, fiddling with the stem of her glass, looked across the table with a troubled expression. ‘Wish you’d stop kidding yourself. You hardly know the man. He admitted he lost his temper and slapped her. Could have picked up the knife and struck out in a blind rage.’

  ‘That’s what he thinks the police have been trying to get him to admit.’

  ‘Without knowing about the baby story,’ Iris pointed out. ‘Wait till they hear that.’

  ‘They won’t get it from Barney. I’m the only one that knows and he never meant to tell me.’