At the Maitland o/night. Don’t tell Driscoll.
Sheila handed the phone back. “That doesn’t say Manchester.”
“No, but the receipt he found in Katya’s things did.”
“It doesn’t say Maddy’s with him, either.”
Brenda grinned. “If he was on his own, could you see him springing for a night at the Maitland?”
Chapter Twelve
“Joe, we have to be out of the room by ten, so we need to get a move on.”
Sat by the window, staring out over Piccadilly Gardens, Joe was lost to his memories of the previous night, and didn’t hear Maddy.
The sun had risen on central Manchester, promising another glorious and cloudless day, and the shoppers were already turning out in force even though most shops, as was their wont on a Sunday morning, would not open until ten o’clock. From the weather outside to the unashamed luxury of the room, the comfort of the double divan bed and memories of the passion spent there overnight, everything was right with Joe Murray’s world.
Well, almost everything.
A text from Brenda the previous evening had warned that Driscoll was looking for him. Maddy’s attentions and need for attention soon took that off his mind, but now she was seated at the table, close to the second window, intent upon her laptop. They had enjoyed an excellent breakfast delivered by room service, and for the last hour her tiny cat’s eyes glasses had been perched on the end of her nose as she absorbed information from the screen. Obviously it was not enough that she was taken up with the research. She kept intruding upon Joe’s serene recollections.
“Joe, are you listening to me.”
“Never a minute’s peace.” He gave up the unequal task. “All right, Maddy. What have you found?”
“Nothing. And that’s the problem. We have to be out of the room in the next twenty minutes, so we have to get moving, but I’ve checked the Law Society and the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and there is no one by the name of Annabelle Immerman on their databases.”
“In Birmingham?”
“Anywhere in England or Wales,” Maddy assured him. “She was a fake.”
Joe nodded. “As we anticipated. And Descant Laboratories?”
“Up front, very proper company. Based in Rugby. They may not talk to me, but if we can get enough information together, they’ll certainly talk to the police.” Maddy shut down the computer.
“It was all a huge scam, then. And that puts Rodney right in the frame.” He frowned as Maddy packed the computer away. “How did they get hold of the report? Those blood samples must have gone from the hospital to this laboratory.”
“Immerman may be a false name, and it could be, as you suggested, that the Immerman woman worked for Descant. Their staff are all listed and there’s no one by that name there.”
“That would explain how they got the original report,” Joe agreed, “and they would have needed it in order to put the fake one together. But it doesn’t tell us how Katya got hold of the real one. Unless all three were in it together from the start, but that is a huge coincidence. Katya knows them both and she suddenly lands a plum job with Sir Douglas. I don’t like coincidences.”
“You’re sure she got the job ad hoc, through one of the daughters.”
“Hermione,” Joe confirmed.
Maddy zipped up the laptop bag, and stood up, ready to leave. “Tell you what. Didn’t you say that the mail was left on the hall table? Suppose it arrived, and either Katya or Rodney took it?”
“How did they know it was from Descant?” Joe asked.
“Many companies have their logo on the front or rear of the envelope, Joe.”
He shook his head. “And suppose Descant didn’t? No, sorry, Maddy, but I don’t buy it. They had to have an example. They’ve planned everything down to the last detail. They would not have left something like that to chance.”
Maddy picked up her handbag, Joe collected the laptop and they left the room.
Ten minutes later, they were in her car, pulling out into the light, Sunday morning traffic.
“Why don’t we shoot off down to Birmingham?” she asked. “We can be there in two hours.”
Joe shook his head. “Can’t. Remember the text last night. Driscoll wants a word or five.”
“Yes, but—”
“Maddy, I’m a material witness in this business. I was first to the old man. Driscoll will be annoyed because I didn’t check with his plods before leaving the house, and when he learns I’ve spent the night in Manchester, he’s gonna be even more annoyed. Push him much further, and he’ll probably arrest me for obstructing his inquiries. Besides, there are still too many questions to answer in Sabden. And where the hell is Katya?”
“Hmm. I take your point.” She smiled. “But I’m not a material witness to anything, am I? I can go down to Birmingham and ring you when I know something. How about that?”
“It’s good of you, but I don’t want to put you out.”
Accelerating along the inner ring road and making a right towards Oldham and the M60, she said, “Don’t even worry about it. This is the most fun I’ve had in ages, and I can bang all the expenses down to the company.”
Joe thought about it. “You’re not gonna get far with that laboratory.”
“Like I wouldn’t with the Maitland?” she smiled slyly.
“All right, so you did get somewhere. But Descant won’t be open on a Sunday.”
“It can wait until tomorrow morning. By then I should have some ammunition to hit them with. And if I can move fast enough, I’ll still be back with you before lunchtime. If not, I’ll bell you from down there.” She ran a red light, inciting the wrath of a bus driver waiting to cross the junction in his vehicle. Maddy ignored him and accelerated towards the next set of lights. “Joe, you rumbled it, so tell me, what’s the significance of this credit card thing?”
He shrugged. “That is one of the questions I need answering in Sabden. Maybe the old man loaned Katya his card for the weekend she was supposed to be in Birmingham. If so, she took a risk going to Manchester. It would have shown up on the company statements, and with this family, I could see that leading to an inquiry.” He yawned and changed the subject. “You’re determined to go down there?”
“Can it do any harm?”
“No, but I don’t know that it will do much good, either, and I don’t like to think of you wasting your time. Still, if you’re that determined, let’s find a local railway or bus station where you can drop me off, and I’ll make my own way back to Sabden.”
“Don’t be daft. I can have you there in three quarters of an hour.”
“Maddy—”
“I’m insisting, Joe.”
Joe fell silent. He had come across commanding females before, and it was simpler to play along until it became too much of a nuisance, at which point, he would snap back. His memories of the previous night told him he was not at that bite back point yet.
The thought prompted his inquiring mind. “You know, it occurs to me that all we’ve done is come to Manchester to check up on a hotel receipt and do a bit of rooting around on the internet, which we could have done in Burnley.”
Maddy chuckled. “Perfectly true, but last night wouldn’t have been half so much fun in Burnley.”
Dim light dawned in Joe’s consciousness. “So you mean, you dragged us off down here, purely for—”
“Of course.”
Maddy reached the M60 junction, and turned onto the motorway heading north. As she accelerated to seventy, Joe turned over all the possibilities in his mind.
“I’m not looking for any commitment,” he said.
“Good. Because neither am I.” She pulled out into the centre lane to follow the Bury, Blackburn and Burnley spur. “I don’t like labels, Joe. I have two children, so I can’t avoid the label ‘mother’ but I refuse to be tagged as ‘the wife’ by any man. I take my fun where and when I want.”
Joe approved with a murmur.
The contentm
ent he had felt in their room at the Maitland began to dissipate, and Joe knew the feeling well. It was the underlying puzzle, the crime which had brought them together, forcing its way back into the forefront of his mind. There were as many questions to answer in the Midlands as there were here in Lancashire, but the crime and the criminal were still here.
Maddy’s powerful car climbed the steep hill past Bury, whizzing past other cars and the occasional lorry, and he came to a decision.
“Don’t go to Birmingham.”
“Joe, we need answers—”
“I know we do, but the police can handle that end of it. They can check on this solicitor woman, they can speak to Descant, and no matter how much celebrity clout you have, the cops will get a lot more information an awful lot faster. There’s not a great deal you can do down there, Maddy, but you can do plenty here.”
“Like keep you happy again tonight?”
A streak of irritation flashed through Joe. He forced it down. “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”
“Sorry, Joe. I just fancied going to Birmingham and you’ve annoyed me by not letting me.”
“I meant there’s more you can do to help me sort out this puzzle. I’ll tell you what you didn’t do. Annabelle Immerman. You never ran a general search for her on the web.”
They were cruising downhill now, towards the small town of Rawtenstall, nestling in the Rosendale valley. Maddy tucked in behind a lorry, ready to branch off on the road to Accrington and Burnley.
“We didn’t have time, did we?” She reminded him with a husky laugh. “I don’t imagine it’ll do much good, because I don’t think it’s her real name, but I’ll do it when we get to The Coven Inn. And I’ll book in there for the night. Now why is this business such a puzzle? It seems clear enough to me. Katya had Rodney had this scam going and something happened to change their plans.”
Joe shook his head. “There is at least one more person involved.”
“Annabelle Immerman.”
“Then who is she? Can’t be one of the daughters or the staff, or Sir Douglas would have recognised her when they met in Birmingham.”
“She’s the one who helped Katya get away.”
“And who stabbed the old man?”
“I told you that yesterday. Katya. And I told you how she could have done it.” Maddy followed the truck onto the A56, and then accelerated into the offside lane to overtake. “I think you’re over-complicating this thing, Joe.”
“No. There are too many questions which don’t have answers, and the main ones are the most puzzling. What is the motive, and why didn’t they actually kill the old boy?”
“Motive seems obvious to me. Money. They’re after a dip in Sir Douglas’s will. Rodney may not know about it, but I’ll bet Katya does. The other matters will come out in the wash.”
“In which case, I repeat, why didn’t she kill the old boy?”
***
At the Ballantyne residence, much the same questions occupied Inspector Driscoll.
Unlike Joe, he had only Katya Nolan as a suspect, and despite his intelligence and excellent arrest record, he lacked Maddy’s logical incisiveness which had helped her speculate on the method when talking to Joe.
Consequently, after breaking the crime scene tape on Sir Douglas’s door and entering the bedroom, he made an effort to recreate the scene in his imagination. He could picture Katya and Sir Douglas arguing, he could see her bring out the knife, force the frail old man back onto the bed and bear down on him. He could easily visualise Sir Douglas fighting back, calling for help, then reaching, with his right hand, for the air horn. At that point, Katya would have elected to jam the knife into his shoulder rather than his chest. But the old man still had the strength to press the button on the siren. Katya knocked it from his hand and it fell to the floor on the far side of the bed, while she ran for the window and the ladder she had placed there to facilitate her escape.
Driscoll had bought a similar air horn from a filling station on his way home the previous evening, and he prepared to use it to bring Joe’s actions into the reconstruction.
“Go into Murray’s room,” he ordered Sergeant Hollis. “I’ll give you a minute to get there. Sit on the far side of the bed. That should simulate the time it took Murray to get out of bed, put his slippers on and get out here. When you hear the horn, come straight to this room. When you get in here. Pause, look at the bed, and then make for the window and look out. Got all that?”
With a dutiful nod, Hollis left and Driscoll reset his stopwatch. Checking his wristwatch, he allowed Hollis a full minute to prepare then held up the air horn and pressed the button. The horn screamed into the empty room, and Driscoll started his stopwatch.
At four seconds, he heard the door of Joe’s room open, and the clump of Hollis’ boots crossing the landing. The door flew open, the sergeant entered and paused a moment to look at the bed, then looking at the window, crossed to it and leaned out.
“Eleven seconds,” Driscoll said, pushing the button on his stopwatch and checking the readout.
“She could have jumped, sir,” Hollis suggested. “It’s only about ten feet to the ground.”
The inspector looked from the bed to the window and back again. “Hmm. Four seconds before you came through the door. Let’s say she knocked the can out of old man’s hand, then legged it to the window, climbed onto it and jumped… she might just have made it by the time Murray came in here. But she’d have had only about five or six seconds to get away before he leaned out. How far could she have got?”
“She doesn’t have to get far, sir. If you look, the corner of the building is only ten, twenty yards away.”
Driscoll took Hollis’s place and leaned out. The corner of the building was slightly more than twenty yards, according to his estimate, but he had to admit that, at a pinch, she might just have done it.
“Especially if Murray was looking the other way first. Towards the car park.” Driscoll came back into the room. “She then waits until it’s a bit quieter and legs it. But didn’t someone go out for a smoke, or something?”
“I’d need to check the statements, sir, but if memory serves me correctly, Mr Claremont was stood outside the front door smoking at just after three forty am.”
“Twenty-five minutes later, though, isn’t it? Plenty of time for her to have legged it across the grass, but even so, I still reckon she went for the woods and not the gates. She fights her way through the trees, then she’s over the wall, meeting her accomplice and they’re gone. Anything on the all ports warning?”
“Nothing, sir. The Border Agency are onto it. If she tries to use her passport, they’ll have her.”
“I’m sure they will. But if she doesn’t leave the country, we could take years to find her. All right, Hollis. Get me a small team together. They’re going back into the woods and I want to brief them properly this time.”
Sergeant Hollis was a good ten years older than the CID man, and he knew better than to argue, but he also had his uniformed men to consider, and searching dense woodland in this heat wave was not conducive to staff welfare or good health and safety. “You don’t think she’s hiding there, sir?”
“No, I don’t. But I think she left that way, and she might have left traces behind. And while we’re at it, see if you can scrounge a few more bods, either from the station or from the moors where she burned her car. I want them the other side of the perimeter walls.” Still leaning on the windowsill, Driscoll waved at the outside. “See, Nick, if she went over the walls, her accomplice must have been waiting for her. I know it’s been dry as toast for the last fortnight, but there may be tracks we can lift. Get onto it, will you?”
“Right, sir.”
Hollis left and Driscoll turned to gaze out over the Ballantyne property again. “And I also wanna know what you’ve been up to, Joe Murray.”
***
Maddy nosed her silver-grey Audi in alongside Joe’s recently acquired Ford, and he mentally compared the t
wo. Hers was shining, spotlessly clean inside and out. His paintwork was fading and although he had cleaned the interior (at Sheila and Brenda’s insistence) it lacked the freshness and sparkle of Maddy’s.
“Shall we grab a bite to eat before you face the big bad bobby?”
Maddy’s question brought him out of his contemplation. He checked his wristwatch. 11:45. “No. Better not. I’ll get something at the Ballantyne place.” He fished into his pocket for his car keys and they both climbed out.
Maddy opened the boot, unzipped her laptop case, and passed him the brown envelope. “Want me to follow you down there?”
“Yes,” Joe admitted, “but I don’t think it would be wise. Driscoll is a snapper and chances are he’d book you along with me. I reckon you can do more good here on the internet.”
Maddy stood, hands on hips, and gave him her sternest look. “Do I get the impression you’re trying to gently dump me, Joe Murray?”
He was concentrating so finely on his coming interview with Driscoll, rehearsing the things he would and would not say that he missed the hint of cheeky humour in her voice. “No, of course not. It’s just that—”
“I’m teasing, Joe.”
“Oh. Right. Yeah.” Clutching the brown envelope to his chest, he eyed her laptop. “You have copies of all this?”
“Everything. You’d better get off down there. I’ll ring the moment I have some information.” She leaned forward pecked him on the cheek, and removed the laptop case from the boot, before locking the car up. Looking up at the stone building, its absurd mementoes of the Pendle Witch legends smothering its front, she sighed. “Not much chance of sneaking you into a bedroom here.”
Joe laughed as he unlocked his car. “After last night, I need some rest. I’ll get going, Maddy. Maybe I can join you for dinner here.”
“And a good rest afterwards?” She shook her head. “If you’re going to be any good for me, Joe Murray, you need to build up your stamina. I’ll catch you later.”
Smiling to himself, a multitude of various and vicarious memories flooding his mind and mixing with anticipation of the forthcoming arguments, he watched Maddy stroll into the pub, and then turned the key to kick the engine over, reversed off the car park, heading for the Ballantyne estate.
A Killing in the Family Page 14
