‘Better sit down and get on with it then, hadn’t we?’
Eddy Horner followed up this remark by dropping into a chair. Pollard deftly manoeuvred Penny into another beside him, and settled himself facing them both. Toye faded into the background, taking out his notebook.
‘This stage of the enquiry is always very tiresome for people connected with a case, I’m afraid,’ Pollard opened. ‘When we take over, we always like to have information at first hand, whether it’s already been given or not. I’d like to begin with Wendy Shaw herself. How did she come to be employed here?’
‘She was a relative of mine,’ Eddy Horner said heavily.
Pollard could not repress an exclamation of surprise, while registering at the same moment a slight movement of impatience by Penny Townsend.
‘This fact was not in your original statement, Mr Horner,’ he said.
‘I don’t suppose I thought to mention it. She wasn’t a blood relation. Only a distant connection of my late first wife — not Penny’s mother, I’ve been married twice. Mrs Shaw’s husband went off with another woman, leaving her with three kids and next to nothing. I’ve helped out a bit to get ’em educated and able to stand on their own feet. Wendy was training as a children’s nurse. Doing very well, the college said.’
‘So you had known Wendy for some time, Mr Horner, and are in a position to tell us the kind of girl she was?’
‘All this doesn’t add up to nearly as much as it sounds,’ Penny broke in rather irritably. ‘All right, Dad. I know I hit the roof at first, and said things I didn’t mean, and the police will have passed them on. I was frightened about what might have happened to baby. What I mean is,’ she went on, turning to Pollard, ‘sending along some cash, and reading school and college reports doesn’t tell you what a person is really like, does it?’
‘Only to a limited extent,’ he agreed.
‘What I’m trying to get across is this,’ she went on, shaking back her hair. ‘Wendy was a nice enough girl, but she’d had a very drab sort of life at home with a mother who’s got an outsize chip on her shoulder, as far as I can make out. Wendy couldn’t be blamed for it, of course, but she was hopelessly shy and honestly a bit of a drag to have around all the time. I mean, if we had anyone in for a drink, she simply couldn’t utter, and just sat. We tried to get her to join the Youth Club as a holiday member, but it was no go: she was scared stiff at the idea. Then, about two or three weeks ago, she came in from doing some shopping, and said she’d met up with a girl from home, and could she go out with her. Of course, we were thrilled to bits, and pushed it for all we were worth. I told her she could bring the girl up here, but she didn’t seem to want to. Of course, it’s pretty obvious now that it wasn’t a girl friend at all. She’d been picked up by some man, and being so green, poor kid, she wasn’t to know he was a real bad hat. Oh, I know she hadn’t actually been raped, but still… It sticks out a mile, doesn’t it?’
Pollard met her rather aggressive gaze thoughtfully.
‘Have you any evidence — I mean evidence that would stand up in a court of law — that this alleged girl friend was, in fact, a man?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she replied, ‘unless they’d believe me when I said that she changed after she started going out with whoever it was. Perked up. Came in starry-eyed. Didn’t she, Dad?’
Eddy Horner, who had been sitting slumped in his chair, raised his head.
‘I reckon Penny’s got something there,’ he told Pollard. ‘Wendy certainly was a bit brighter lately. My God, this business has blown me right off course. I feel as though I fell down on my responsibility for the child while she was in my house, and I’m not a man who defaults, I’d have you know. We ought to have done more to keep her happy.’
‘I doubt very much whether you could have,’ Pollard replied. ‘There’s no one more unhelpable than a teenager at some stages. To go back to my first question, I should have expected you to get a more experienced nurse for your first baby, Mrs Townsend.’
‘This is it — I did,’ she replied, tossing back her hair again. ‘I just can’t get over the sheer rotten bad luck of it all. I fixed with a first-class college trained nurse to come down here with me at the end of June, and the wretched woman must go and have an acute appendix the day before I came out of the nursing home. It couldn’t have been more inconvenient. But I felt she was worth waiting for, and Dad suddenly thought that Wendy would be on holiday, and might tide me over. We knew that she was reasonably capable with babies from her reports. She jumped at it — a chance to get away from home, of course. And to think that the nurse is due to come on Saturday. It’s ridiculous, the way she’s stuck out for all these weeks of convalescence. People don’t think anything of having an appendix out these days. If only she’d been reasonable, all this would never have happened.’
‘No,’ Pollard could not refrain from saying, ‘it wouldn’t, and Wendy Shaw would still be alive.’
There was a short silence, in the course of which Penny Townsend looked slightly uncomfortable.
‘Mrs Shaw told me she didn’t know of any girl friend of Wendy’s on holiday down here,’ Eddy Horner said suddenly.
‘There’s a lot most mothers don’t know about their daughters’ friends these days,’ Pollard replied. ‘I shall be seeing Mrs Shaw, and enquiries will be made in her neighbourhood, of course. Are you both quite sure that Wendy said she had met a friend from home, and not a college friend?’
Assured on this point, he began to ask questions about the events of Friday evening. Step by step he covered the ground from their departure for Stoneham at approximately seven o’clock, to their delayed return at twenty minutes to twelve. They had found the bungalow in darkness, the television set switched on here in the sitting room, the baby whimpering in its cot, and no sign of Wendy. They had searched in vain for a note explaining her absence, but had found that her coat — a scarlet anorak — and her white plastic handbag were missing. The catch of the Yale lock on the front door was down, as they had left it, but the door at the end of the passage which led into the garden was unlocked. They admitted that this door was often overlooked, and left unsecured all night. There had been no sign of any disturbance inside the bungalow, and nothing was missing other than the coat and bag. Mr Townsend had gone out in the pouring rain and searched the garden and drive, and after ringing the school to ask if Wendy had been seen down there, they had finally contacted Constable Pike.
Aware that these statements tallied with those recorded in the case file, Pollard asked to see over the bungalow. The guest wing was to the right of the front door. It consisted of a large double bedroom occupied by Penny and the baby, a single room which had been Wendy Shaw’s, a bathroom and lavatory and a small kitchenette. Wendy’s room was comfortable and well-furnished, and she had been provided with an armchair and a transistor radio. All these rooms faced south, being reached by a passage on the north side of the bungalow, which ended in the garden door already mentioned.
Pollard looked at the highly polished parquet floor of the passage.
‘I understand that your daily woman cleaned as usual on Saturday morning,’ he said.
‘How the hell were we to know that it ought to be left?’ Eddy demanded with self-accusatory truculence.
‘You couldn’t reasonably have been expected to at that stage,’ Pollard replied, ‘especially after Constable Pike had checked up for signs of anything in the way of a break-in. It’s unfortunate, as things have turned out, but all cases have their bits of bad luck, and unexpected good luck, too, come to that.’ He looked at his watch, and turned to Toye. ‘Inspector, if you nip down in the car, I think you’ll catch Mr Chugg on his way home for his dinner. Ask him to come up here for a few minutes.’
Toye vanished.
‘Chugg’s one of the best,’ Eddy Horner said heavily. ‘If anyone round here can tell you what you want to know, he can.’
Unexpectedly Penny Townsend shivered.
‘If you’ll excuse me,�
� she said shakily, ‘I ought to be seeing to baby.’
‘Could I have a word with your Mrs Barrow?’ Pollard asked Eddy.
‘Sure. Come this way.’
Pollard followed in the direction of the kitchen. Here a grey-haired woman was preparing lunch. Eddy Horner introduced her, and left them together. To Pollard’s amazement she made a birdlike dart at him.
‘Excuse me,’ she exclaimed, ‘A little end of thread caught on your coat.’
The action, he quickly realized, was symptomatic. The driving force of her life was hostility to anything which could be described as dirt or mess. Quite oblivious of what lay behind his questioning, she described with relish the thoroughness of her regular Saturday morning cleaning of Uncharted Seas.
‘It ’as to be done proper, seein’ as I don’t come up Sundays,’ she explained. ‘I ’ad to leave the outsides of the winders as it was rainin’ and blowin’, but they got a good do Monday. All caked with salt and sand, they were, after the gale.’
Breaking off, she hurried across to the cooker, and gave the contents of a saucepan a brisk stir.
Pressed as to whether she had noticed anything in the least out of the ordinary when cleaning on Saturday morning, she shook her head emphatically.
‘Savin’ all the mud and mess they’d brought in Friday night looking for Wendy, poor girl. Nice kiddy she was. Not much to say for ’erself, but I’d rather ’ave it that way meself than all these brazen ’ussies these days. Bit of an innercent, I’d say, and one of these sex maniacs took advantage of ’er. My, if that isn’t Ted Chugg with his great boots out there! Not comin’ in, is ’e?’
‘No,’ Pollard reassured her, ‘I’m going out to talk to him. Thank you for your help, Mrs Barrow.’
‘Pleased, I’m sure,’ she replied perfunctorily, and before he reached the door was back at her saucepans again.
Ted Chugg was a quiet man with intent light blue eyes, surprisingly pale for one who led a largely outdoor life. Pollard slipped into the back of the car, and gave him the gist of the post mortem report on Wendy Shaw.
‘You see what I’m getting at,’ he concluded. ‘We’d like your opinion on where she probably went into the water. As far as we know at present, she was last seen alive — except by the murderer — at seven o’clock on Friday evening, and there was no answer to a phone call made to the bungalow at ten-fifteen. You already know that the body was found in the cave down there about half-past nine on Monday morning.’
Ted Chugg listened and nodded.
‘Not much doubt as to where she went in, to my way o’ thinkin’,’ he said. ‘Up over.’
He jerked his head in the direction of Beckon Cove.
Pollard gave an exclamation of surprise.
‘Why, on the Ordnance map it looks as though the Cove is all but land-locked,’ he said. ‘I’d have expected anything going in there just to drift around in circles.’
‘Take a look, shall us?’ suggested the coastguard.
All three men went up the slope behind the bungalow, and stood at the top of a zigzag flight of concrete steps leading down to a crescent of shingle on the east side of Beckon Cove. The narrow outlet to the sea was directly facing this little beach. Immediately below where they were standing the water was deep, and lay in the dark shadow of the Beckon Head ridge. Ted Chugg pointed downwards.
‘I reckon the maid was pitched over from yur,’ he said. ‘’Tis this way. There’s a current swirls round the Cove clockwise, see? Friday night’s ebb’d move a body round towards the gap. Wind shifted westwards durin’ the night, and banked up Saturday mornin’’s flood, makin’ for a mighty powerful scour out to sea when the tide turned. As I sees it, she’d be washed out clear of the ’eadland. There’s an offshore current out yonder, workin’ north to south, and ’twould carry ’er past Beckon, round into Kittitoe Bay, where she’d be carried up the beach on the flood. ’Twas top o’ springs over the weekend.’
Pollard, who detested heights, stood well back from the railing on the outside of the steps as he followed the coastguard’s argument.
‘I see all that,’ he said, ‘but why do you think the body was chucked in from here? Wouldn’t the same thing have happened in the end from any point off the headland?’
‘Kittitoe Bay side, visitors pokin’ around would’ve found’n afore Monday mornin’,’ Ted Chugg said decisively. ‘Off the end o’ Beckon — well — ’twould be a rare job luggin’ a body out there, in the dark, what’s more. It don’t seem likely to me.’
‘Fair enough,’ Pollard agreed, looking unhappily at Toye, who was hanging perilously over the railing, and peering downwards.
‘Sheer for a good hundred and fifty feet,’ the latter said, righting himself. ‘And nothing much clothes would have caught on from the look of it. The water’s pretty deep down there, isn’t it?’
‘Round six foot at low tide,’ Ted Chugg told him. ‘The cliff’s undercut a bit, though, an’ the current’d carry ’er close in. Shall us go down?’
After Toye had made a fruitless attempt to bring up identifiable fingerprints from the railing, they made the descent to the Cove.
It was surprisingly hot down on the shingle. The high encircling cliffs created an atmosphere of secluded remoteness. Apart from the rhythmic rattle of shingle shifted by the ebbing tide, and the occasional cries of seabirds floating far above, the silence was unbroken. Pollard developed a strong distaste for the place. There was a rank smell of stranded seaweed, and the drifting clouds produced the unpleasant illusion that the cliffs were collapsing inwards.
‘Not my cuppa,’ Ted Chugg remarked, echoing his thoughts. ‘Too shut in, like. Pongs, too. What’ll us be lookin’ for, sir?’
‘Bits of bright red cloth, ripped off an anorak, and possibly bits of the white wadding the thing was padded with. There’s a white plastic handbag somewhere, too, unless the murderer took it off with him.’
They walked to the limit of the beach on their left. Ted Chugg began to wade into the water.
‘I’ll work me way round a bit,’ he said. ‘It shelves, but there’s a foothold so long as you goes steady, an’ keeps in close.’
‘Can’t we get hold of an RAF rubber dinghy, or inflatable raft?’ Pollard suggested.
‘Bit o’ wet don’t worry me, sir. I’ve got me boots on.’
The underwater shingle squeaked and slithered as he progressed, steadying himself against the base of the cliff, and scrutinizing both cliff face and water. Pollard and Toye watched him reach the point immediately below where they had stood at the top of the steps, and pass beyond it. About a dozen yards further on he suddenly stopped, and bent forward. Then, gripping at the cliff with his left hand, he groped under the surface of the water with his right, and hoisted up what looked like a long flat strip of metal. He shouted, but the words were swallowed up in the echo from the cliffs. Turning, he began to retrace his steps, holding his find clear of the water.
‘What the hell has he got there?’ Pollard demanded. ‘It looks like part of a barrel hoop.’
‘Could be,’ Toye agreed cautiously.
Emerging on to the dry shingle, Ted Chugg held out a rusty flat length of metal, about an inch and a half wide. Caught up on it, and held secure by a scarlet thread was a torn scrap of material of the same colour.
‘Wendy Shaw’s anorak, all right,’ Pollard exclaimed triumphantly, as he examined it with care. ‘It’ll have to go to the forensic boys for confirmation, but I’d stake my pension on it, wouldn’t you, Toye? Man,’ he told Chugg, ‘this is the first definite lead we’ve had.’
6.
Home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse.
Shaw. Maxims for Revolutionists.
The investigations in Beckon Cove had been time-consuming, leaving no chance of lunch before the inquest. Toye drove Ted Chugg back to his home in the village, and hastily collected up sandwiches and a couple of cans of beer before rejoining Pollard, who had strolled out on the road to Biddle Bay. They ran the car
into a layby, and between mouthfuls agreed that Eddy Horner and his daughter were just not on as suspects in the case.
‘Of course, I’d like absolute proof that Wendy Shaw was alive when they left for Stoneham,’ Pollard said. ‘That sort of thing’s tidier. But in the meantime one has to use a bit of common sense. Old Horner’s unthinkable as a murderer, and Penny Townsend couldn’t possibly have carried the job through single-handed. Anyway, I can’t see her taking the risk of committing a murder unless her entire well-being depended on it, perhaps. There’s not a shred of evidence that Wendy was any sort of threat to her.’
Toye took another sandwich. ‘There’s the husband,’ he said indistinctly.
‘Come off it,’ Pollard replied. ‘You’ve seen Wendy’s photograph. There’s a point beyond which the camera can’t lie. Or are you suggesting that Townsend is a homicidal maniac, and his wife and father-in-law are trying to cover for him? Well, we’ll soon have the life histories of all three of them through from the Yard, to put your mind at rest. Here, look at the time… We’ll be late for the inquest if we don’t watch out.’
They slipped into the seats kept for them just before the coroner, a brisk solicitor from Winnage, opened the proceedings. He conducted them so expeditiously that he was driving away again in under half an hour, having seen through the necessary formalities and adjourned the court for a fortnight. The packed village hall emptied rapidly, leaving Pollard and Toye discussing the manpower needed for a house-to-house enquiry in and around Kittitoe with Superintendent Bostock of the Winnage Constabulary. Presently they came out on to the steps, and stood talking for a few minutes longer. By this time all but a handful of curious onlookers had drifted off, and Constable Pike stood surveying the scene with the air of one who had maintained law and order under difficulties. As Superintendent Bostock called to him to come over and hear what had been decided, Pollard noticed a grey-haired, rather distinguished looking man sitting in a Rover drawn up at the kerb. As soon as the Winnage police car departed, the stranger got out and came forward.
No Vacation From Murder Page 6
