A Killing in the Family

by David W Robinson

  “How would I know? It’s not the kind of thing she discusses with me. Perhaps you could use your native, Yorkshire charm and get her to open up a little.” He smiled evilly.

  “Just ignore him, Joe,” Brenda advised and, grabbing her boss by the arm, dragged him through the gates out onto the rough track which encircled the house.

  “What was that about the pills, Joe?” Sheila asked.

  He explained the A & E doctor’s query to them. “Hermione is the only one we know who takes those kinds of prescription.”

  “And you think she may have doped her father?”

  “Not necessarily, but it’s tempting to think her pills were used. See, last night on the terrace, I noticed the old boy staggering a little. I thought he’d maybe had too much to drink, but now that we know he was full of antidepressants and sleepers…” he trailed off and let them draw their own conclusions.

  The view at the rear of the house was little different to any other side. To their right, they could see the high perimeter wall which fronted onto the road, and on the other three sides, the same manicured grass, beyond which were the impenetrable woods.

  “Could Katya have come this way?” Brenda asked, pointing to the right. “Climbed over the wall and picked up her car from the road.”

  “Sure she could,” Joe said, “but when?”

  “After she stabbed Sir Douglas,” Sheila insisted.

  “No. You’re not listening to me… again. I was in that room and at the window in less than twenty seconds. The only way she could have got out was down the ladder, and she didn’t have time. I would have seen her, and if not, I would have heard her.”

  “Perhaps she let the siren off, not Sir Douglas. And she could have stood at his door to do it, then ran for it down the stairs before you even got your door open,” Brenda suggested.

  “Clever,” Joe said, “but it doesn’t explain how Rodney picked up the siren from the side of the bed.”

  “She threw it there. From the doorway?” Brenda sounded more hopeful than positive.

  “Hmm.” Joe’s face twisted into a judicious pout. “Possible, but unlikely. Police fingerprint people may say whether she handled it or not. But this all begs the question, why did she bother with the siren? Why not just stab the old boy and then leg it? Why let the rest of the house know by blasting off that air horn, and why stab him in the shoulder? If he was doped up, she could have finished him off just as easily.”

  They turned right, onto the grass, making for the far wall.

  “Then what did happen, Joe?” Sheila demanded.

  “I don’t know. Katya’s disappearance points the finger at her, but I get the impression that she left long before Sir Douglas was attacked. The documents she left behind point the finger at Rodney. Either way, someone has gone to extraordinary lengths to set this thing up, and I don’t know how they did it. When we got to him, I’d swear he really had only just been stabbed. The blood was still running. And if it had happened earlier, surely he would have died by the time the siren went off. And if someone attacked him earlier, why let the siren off at all? How did he or she get away so quickly? I told you, didn’t I? None of it makes much sense right now, but you know what I’m like. The killer always makes mistakes, and when they show up, it’ll point us in the right direction.”

  As they skirted the wall and then made their way back to the parking area, Inspector Driscoll came hurrying out of the house.

  “Forgot to bring your sandwiches, eh?” Joe said.

  Driscoll glowered at Joe’s grin. “What were you saying about how quick off the mark you can be, Murray? You never saw the car leave the house, but uniformed had a report of a burning car on the moors in the early hours of this morning. About two miles from here. A Mini-Cooper. And guess what? It’s hers. Katya Nolan’s. You want to open your eyes a bit further.” He unlocked his car and prepared to climb in.

  “She moved it earlier,” Joe declared. “She did not drive out of here while I was looking out of the window.”

  “And there are fairies in my window box.” The inspector climbed into his car, started the engine and with his tyres kicking up dust, tore off.

  Chapter Ten

  They watched the inspector haring up the drive, blasting his horn at Toby’s classic car as it came in through the gates.

  “Now there’s a turn up for the book,” Sheila said.

  Joe was not surprised. “She had an accomplice. She must have had. And it wasn’t Rodney Asquith.” He sighed. “Earlier in the night she moved her car to the moors. The accomplice brought her back, one of them did the deed, then got into his car to get away. It’s the only possible answer.” His face fell. “And now we have no hook on her. Not without knowing who the accomplice might be.”

  “That doesn’t explain why you didn’t see her, Joe,” Brenda pointed out. “And how did she get out of here without running up the drive. You would have seen her.”

  They had investigated the far wall and found it practically un-scalable. It was sheer, and the gaps between stones were so narrow, so smoothly finished that they would not have provided sufficient handhold for anyone to climb it.

  Thinking on the matter, Joe looked toward the woods. “It’s the only way. Driscoll was right I didn’t have my eyes open… well I did, but I was looking in the wrong direction.”

  They followed his gaze.

  “Through the woods?” Sheila asked.

  Watching Toby climb out of his car, Joe nodded. “Sir Douglas told me they’re practically impenetrable, but he also said there were paths through them. She’s been here long enough to find those paths, and work out a way to the far wall. If the wood really is that dense, ten to one there’s at least one tree she could climb which would let her get over the wall. While I was busy looking down and along the drive, she was probably legging it across the grass.” Shaking himself out of his depression, he strode forward to meet Toby. “How is he?”

  “No change. Who the hell was that?” Toby waved frantically back at the drive and gates.

  “Inspector Driscoll of the local filth,” Joe explained. “They’ve found Katya’s car.”

  The younger Ballantyne’s eyes lit up. “Have they, now? And her?” He waited for Joe to shake his head, and then asked, “What about your friend the genealogist?”

  “She’s on her way. I’m meeting her at The Coven Inn about one o’clock.”

  Toby nodded his approval. “Good. You will keep me informed?”

  “Count on it.”

  ***

  “So what about Joe Murray? Is there a Mrs Murray?

  Serena’s question caught Joe slightly unawares. He needed to talk to members of the family, and he had spotted her ambling around the lawns alone and apparently deep in thought, so decided to join her. Toby, having gone to the house and fed himself, was busy polishing the windscreen of his maroon Aston Martin Lagonda, and Sheila and Brenda could be seen on the terrace chatting with Verity and Hermione. Neither of the other two men could be seen.

  “There was a Mrs Murray,” he said. “She left me over ten years ago, then she left dear old Albion. Cleared off to Tenerife to live a life of luxury in the sun, and pulling beers in a bar for a living. Haven’t seen her since, and if I ever see her again, ten to one she’ll borrow fifty quid off me. As for me, I still run a truckers café in Sanford. Not your sort of place, I shouldn’t imagine.”

  “And you’d be right. I’m terribly snobby about such things. You’re here with your two concubines, then? You must lead a very exciting life.”

  Joe chuckled. “Concubines? Not likely. Sheila, Brenda and I are friends, and it’s been that way since primary school. Oh I had a bit of a thing with Brenda last year, but it just, sort of fizzled out. You know. How does that compare to the Ballantyne relationships?”

  “Favourably,” Serena replied after giving the matter a moment’s thought. “If you listen to Verity, marriages are made in heaven according to God’s law, but here at The Sorting House they’re forged in t
he hottest fires of hell.”

  “You surprise me,” Joe said. “The old man hinted that not everything in the garden is as rosy as he’d like, but he never told me there was strife.”

  Serena topped and turned to stare at Joe’s two friends and her sisters-in-law. They were about fifty yards from the terrace and whatever the four women were talking about, it was inaudible to them. The reverse would be true, and Joe wondered whether that knowledge prompted Serena to go on in the candid manner that she did.

  “Hermione is a bit of a dunderhead, to be frank.”

  Joe hid his surprise. “I thought she was some kind of historian.”

  “Oh, she is. Oxford, don’t you know. First class honours, and what she doesn’t know about the history of this area, right back to the Plantagenets isn’t worth knowing. Socially, maritally, however, she’s as thick as the proverbial short plank. That bloody husband of hers has chased up more bits on the side than you’ve served meat pies.”

  “Not difficult. Meat pies are a Lancashire thing. I’m from Yorkshire.”

  “You know what I mean. And Hermione puts up with it. She refuses to believe the tales about him, but he’s the reason she’s on those antidepressants and sleeping pills. He’s a serial groper and if you listen to his barroom banter in The Coven Inn, he must have shagged half the women in the village. But in Hermione’s eyes, he can do no wrong.” Serena shifted her focus slightly. And then there’s Verity. She’s a throwback to her grandfather. She suffers from the three pees.”

  Joe was still trying to come to terms with Serena’s frank opinion of Hermione and Jeffrey. “Come again?”

  “Pious, priggish and prudish. She and Quentin have been married about eight years, and I think they’ve had sex ten times. Purely a guess, of course, and I could be wildly overestimating it. Her knickers are welded into place. She gives all her free time to the church, and the nearest she comes to joy is when she mans the soup kitchen on Boxing Day, feeding the down and outs of Burnley and Blackburn. In return, her husband spends most of his time on one golf course or another trying to make a living from the game. He’s a church widower, and she’s a golf widow.”

  Joe’s gaze spun through ninety degrees to take in Toby, meticulously working his duster over the windscreen of his car. “And what of your marriage?”

  Serena sighed and narrowed her stare on her husband. “I’m a widow, too. Not to other women or golf, or even God, but to boys’ toys.” She watched for a moment while Toby applied a dash of polish to his chamois. “If he paid me half the attention he gives to his Aston Martin, his E-type and his Alfa Romeo, I wouldn’t be half so catty.” Her gaze wandered further round the parking area. “Not forgetting his helicopter, of course.” She spun round and faced Joe. “Toby is a good husband, Mr Murray. He ensures I have a comfortable life, and he attends to my, er, needs, shall we say? But he does so from a sense of duty, not desire. It is his bounden duty to ensure that his wife and children are well cared for. Result, I have everything I could wish for, the boys are going through university without the financial concerns of other students, and yet… ” Now she glared back at the classic car. “I swear one of these days, I will burn the bloody garage to the ground with those damned cars in it.”

  Many comments ran through Joe’s mind, but he suppressed them all. He checked his watch. “I have to be somewhere else in about fifteen minutes.”

  Serena nodded and they began the slow walk back to the terrace.

  “Tell me something,” Joe invited. “If the old man dies, what will happen to all these unhappy relationships?”

  Serena chuckled. “The nuclear scenario. It would take us back to year zero.” She sucked in her breath. “The Ballantyne children are quite wealthy, but the riches are all tied up in company stock, and dear old daddy will not allow them to sell. Should he pop his clogs, I think Quentin will pressure Verity into materialising some of her theoretical wealth. She will give a sizeable sum to the church, and Quentin will take the rest and go off round the world on a golfing tour. Jeffrey will insist that Hermione realises all her inheritance, then he’ll take half of it and leave her. She will get the rude awakening she’s had coming for years, but she’ll still be worth millions, and she’ll spend the rest of her life holding fortune hunters at arm’s length.”

  “And what of its effect on you?”

  “Oddly enough, it would probably be the best thing that could happen to Toby and me.”

  Once more her candour took Joe by surprise. “How so?”

  “Toby would have to grow up.”

  He was puzzled. “I thought he was already head of the company. According to what he told me, he has overall control of the day to day running.”

  “He is, and he does, but I’m not talking about Ballantyne Distribution. Douglas’s death would make Toby the head of the family, and that brings with it responsibilities which may just make him aware how much more there is to life than a four litre, straight six with a double overhead camshaft.” She threw back her head and delivered a throaty laugh. “If I thought that dream might come true, it would be worth my while to murder the old man.”

  Joe logged the information in his agile brain, even though he doubted that he would need it again.

  As they made the terrace, his thoughts were on the imminent meeting with Maddy, and her opinions on the credit card receipt. That thought automatically prompted recollections of the conversation with Toby the previous afternoon, and a logic switch clicked in his brain.

  He stopped, still some distance away from his companions and the Ballantyne women. Keeping his voice down, he said, “You know something? When I was talking to your husband yesterday, he told me you would turn up at last night’s dinner in a glorious evening gown, which would have been charged to his company credit card. He was right about the gown, but how could you charge it to his card?”

  “I borrow it.”

  “With or without his knowledge?”

  “Most of the time, with it, now and again, without. Is it important?”

  Joe shook his head. “I don’t think so. It’s just that I don’t understand much about these things. I have a credit card, and I pick up some of The Lazy Luncheonette bills with it, but no one else could use it. They’d have to forge my signature.”

  Serena chuckled. “So you haven’t heard of chip and pin in West Yorkshire?”

  “Of course we have, but my credit cards says, Mister J Murray. Neither of my girls could be mistaken for a mister, and I’m so well-known that my nephew couldn’t get away with it either.”

  Serena laughed again, and allowed her affected superiority to shine through. “I shop in very expensive stores, Mr Murray. They know me, they know my husband, they know the Ballantynes. They don’t ask questions, they just take the money and deliver the goods.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Maddy looked just as good as the last time Joe had seen her, although she was dressed a little more conservatively.

  They had met in Windermere the year previously, when she had been engaged on research for a client and Joe was a guest at the wedding of Alec and Julia Staines’s son. Maddy had proved instrumental in getting evidence which helped convict a murderer, and since then an internet friendship had developed between them.

  Distance and the pressure of work had ensured that meetings in the real world had been rare, but Joe had made a couple of trips to Scarborough to join her for dinner, and they had met once in Leeds when Maddy was due at the TV studios.

  She still compared well to his memories of Windermere. Back then he had estimated her to be in her mid-forties, but later learned she was just a few months short of her fiftieth birthday. A buxom blonde she had been dressed in shorts and a skimpy top when they first met, an outfit which showed a little more flesh than was good for his blood pressure. Climbing out of her Audi on the front car park of The Coven Inn, he was relieved to see that she wore a simple skirt and a white blouse buttoned up to the neck. About his height, a woman with a smile in her eyes, she rema
ined resolutely unmarried and was slightly famous having presented a number of TV shows in the Yorkshire and Tyne-Tees area.

  On entering The Coven Inn, there was a brief interlude with Lester Parks, who pumped Joe for information on events at The Sorting House.

  “Whisper is there was a murder last night.”

  “The whispers are wrong,” Joe said. “Do you know my friend, Maddy Chester, the TV presenter?”

  This proved sufficient a distraction for Lester while Joe wondered how rumours managed to spread so quickly. The landlord and his wife had their son take a photograph with Maddy between them, and once that was done, Joe and Maddy retired to the beer garden at the rear.

  The place was busy. Families, enjoying the weekend sunshine, crowded the wooden tables and bench seats, children cavorted on the swings and slides in their play, and squeals of delight came from a small, bouncy castle, once more decorated with items associated with witchcraft and black magic.

  Over a ploughman’s lunch and a couple of beers, Maddy listened to Joe’s convoluted account of what had happened overnight, occasionally asking questions to clarify one point or another, and then finally took the envelope from him.

  She spent several minutes looking through it, and finally removed the receipt from its smaller envelope, and studied it before saying, “I don’t understand what’s so important about this, Joe.”

  “Look at the date,” he instructed. “Then compare it to the other reports. May twentieth is the date Katya allegedly followed Rodney to the Midlands.”

  “Right. Okay.”

  “Now look at the hotel. The Maitland, Portland Street, Manchester.”

  Light dawned in Maddy’s steel blue eyes. “Ah. Of course. I’ve stayed at the Maitland a time or two. So what was she doing in Manchester when she claimed to have gone to Birmingham?”

  “Precisely. You’re the genealogist, Maddy, so you tell me. Is there any way she could have got all the information on Rodney over the internet?”