‘Assorted twins,’ Pollard told her. ‘Meet Andrew and Rose Pollard, aged two years and eight months. This very day they’re being interviewed for places in a play group.’
Mrs Vention pounced on the snapshot from his wallet with a delighted exclamation.
Later, after a well-earned meal at their Stoneham hotel, Pollard persuaded Toye to take the rest of the evening off.
‘Look what’s on at the Odeon,’ he said, taking up an evening paper. ‘The Tomahawk Thunder Trail — real full-blooded stuff. Just your cuppa. If you push off now, you’ll get in for the last house.’
After Toye had gone off to indulge his surprising passion for Westerns, Pollard made for a telephone kiosk, and rang his wife.
Her voice came excitedly over the line.
‘They’ve both been accepted for September! Isn’t it super? People aren’t supposed to know until tomorrow, but Mrs Lind whispered to me when I went to fetch them. Apparently, they stared at the ones who howled, and made themselves completely at home investigating the equipment. They even asked intelligibly to be taken to the loo.’
‘The first step on the educational ladder has been achieved, in fact.’
‘Come off it, darling! What I’m thinking of is a gorgeous spot of free time each morning for shopping or a hair do, or just pottering. How are things going?’
‘We haven’t done much driving today,’ he said, using their motoring code. ‘Just running around at this stage…’
Much cheered by this contact with home, he went out of the hotel in search of the nearest open space. Strolling round an uninspired public park, he was unable to keep his mind off the case. At any rate, Wendy Shaw had emerged as a person. A pathetic one, stunted by the pressures brought to bear on her by her mother’s curious mental state. But certainly a person with a sense of loyalty and duty. This was important. If she had not abandoned the Townsend baby of her own free will, something sinister and puzzling must have happened…
Poor kid, Pollard thought, his mind starting off on another track. Immature, but just starting to feel the urgent need to have a life of her own, apart from her mother. A very vulnerable state, making her an easy prey to some plausible type with a diseased mind.
As he returned to the hotel, he reviewed the various enquiries he had set in motion. At Kittitoe, the movements of people and cars during the critical period on Friday night were being investigated. Here, at Stoneham, the local chaps were checking up on Wendy’s friends. The anorak was being matched up with Ted Chugg’s find at the forensic laboratory. All in order, but he had a sense of something overlooked. This lasted through a long soak in a hot bath, and it was not until he was getting into bed that he suddenly knew what it was. Why had Eddy Horner rung the school on Friday night? Had he any reason to suppose that Wendy either was or had been there? And if so, what was it?
At this point another idea struck him, and he collected the case file and hunted through it for Superintendent Crookshank’s summary of developments up to the Yard’s take-over. Yes, the telephone had been answered by Mrs Makepeace. There was no mention of one of the Horner staff being fetched, which implied that Eddy Horner was satisfied that she would have known if Wendy had shown up. And it was Mrs Makepeace whose quick-wittedness had led to the discovery of the body. What was it that Crookshank said about her? ‘Aged 28. Widow. Reliable type.’ Quite a testimonial from a saturnine chap like that. Obviously she must be seen at once. There was nothing to stop her going off for the rest of the school holidays.
Cursing himself for not having thought about her as a potentially useful witness before, Pollard looked up St Julitta’s telephone number in the case file and dialled it.
Leaning back on his pillows he annoyingly got the number engaged signal, replaced the receiver and waited. At the end of five minutes he tried again, with the same result. A third attempt was no more successful. Anyway, it looks as though she’s still there, he thought. A caretaker would hardly go on nattering like this. I’ll try first thing in the morning.
He had hardly put out his bedside light when his telephone bleeped.
‘Stoneham Police Station, sir,’ came a voice. ‘There’s just been a call for you from Kittitoe. A Mrs Marcia Makepeace of St Julitta’s School would be glad if you could call to see her any time tomorrow. She has some information which she thinks might be of use to you.’
7.
‘Sir,’ said Mr Pickwick, ‘you’re another.’
Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
As they drove down to Kittitoe on the following morning, Pollard skimmed through the detailed information on Eddy Horner and the two Townsends which the Yard had amassed and sent to him. At intervals he read excerpts aloud to Toye.
‘Well, I hope that satisfies even your cautious mind,’ he said. ‘A quite remarkable absence of skeletons in cupboards.’
It was a radiant morning. Pollard felt stimulated by having a definite objective in the shape of the interview asked for by Mrs Makepeace. On arriving at Constable Pike’s, however, they were greeted by an unexpected development. In the course of the house-to-house enquiry, Jack Nancekivell, landlord of the King William, had recognized Wendy Shaw’s photograph as that of a girl who had recently been in his pub.
‘Quick work, Pike,’ Pollard complimented him. ‘Let’s go right along.’
The King William’s frontage on the village street was modest, but its corner site and former stabling in the rear had enabled it to expand to meet the increasing number of visitors to the area. It was well-kept and had a welcoming atmosphere, and Pollard could visualize it packed to suffocation during the holiday season. He wondered what there could have been about Wendy Shaw to attract the landlord’s attention.
Jack Nancekivell was built foursquare, with a cheerful red face. Vigorous cleaning was in progress in the bars, and the three policemen were escorted into his private sanctum. Regretfully refusing offers of refreshment, Pollard put his question.
‘Thought as you’d be askin’ me that,’ the landlord replied, ‘seein’ as you can’t hardly lift yer elbow in ’ere summer evenins. At first glance she looked a proper kiddy, an’ I sized ’er up careful, thinkin’ she might be under age, before Joe served the chap she was with. Then I saw she was older than what I’d thought.’
‘And what was the chap like, Mr Nancekivell?’ Pollard asked hopefully.
‘Ar, now y’r askin’. If only I’d known what was comin’, but there. Tell the truth I didn’t pay much ’eed to ’im. I wasn’t servin’ ’im, just keepin’ me eye on things from t’other end of the bar, and the place was packed to bustin’. Young, an’ shaggy like, same as most of ’em these days. Not tall or short, so as you’d notice.’
‘Can you remember ever seeing him in here without the girl?’
‘Lumme, sir! It ain’t as though I ever ’ad ’im clear to start with. Maybe if I saw ’is photo, I’d call ’im to mind.’
Skilled questioning failed to elicit any further details of the young man’s appearance, but Jack Nancekivell was confident that he had seen Wendy in the pub on one or two other occasions subsequently. Pressed for dates, he could only say that it had been within the past two or three weeks.
‘Sorry I can’t be no more ’elp,’ he added.
‘You’ve been quite a bit of help,’ Pollard told him. ‘It’s possible we may ask you to come along to an identity parade one of these days. In the meantime, if you think of anything, or pick up anything when customers are talking in the bar, get on to me through Pike here, won’t you?’
Five minutes later Toye brought the car to a standstill outside St Julitta’s. The front door was open, and the sound of an electric polisher in use came from a room leading off the entrance hall. In response to a request for Mrs Makepeace, the woman who had been operating it escorted them up two flights of stairs, and along a passage to a door which was ajar. From within came a man’s voice, expostulating angrily and excitedly. There was a sudden silence as their escort knocked loudly. The next moment the
door was flung open by a tall, fair young woman with an expression of embarrassed annoyance. She swiftly converted this into one of polite greeting.
‘Thank you for bringing these gentlemen up, Mrs Freen,’ she said. ‘Good morning. I’m Marcia Makepeace, and I take it you’re Detective-Superintendent Pollard? Do come in, won’t you?’
‘Thank you,’ Pollard replied, following her into the room. ‘This is Inspector Toye, who is working with me on the case.’ He looked pointedly at the man who stood with his back to the mantelpiece, flushed and frowning.
‘Mr Medlicott, St Julitta’s bursar,’ Marcia Makepeace said rather hurriedly. ‘Do sit down.’
Andrew Medlicott acknowledged Pollard’s slight bow with a nod, murmured something about correspondence, and went quickly out of the room.
‘There’s such a lot to settle up after this course we’ve just had here,’ Marcia Makepeace said, sitting down herself. ‘It’s good of you to come so soon. I expect you get a lot of tiresome people thinking they’ve something important to tell you, when it’s really nothing at all.’
She sounded distrait and flustered, and Pollard gave her a breathing space by recapitulating the information in the file about Eddy Horner’s telephone call to her on the previous Friday night, and the discovery of Wendy Shaw’s body on Monday morning.
‘Have I got all these points right, Mrs Makepeace?’ he asked.
‘Yes, absolutely.’ She stopped as if uncertain how to go on.
‘What I’d like you to do now, is to tell me about this course, and to what extent Mr Horner and the rest of his household were personally involved in it.’
At this she began to talk freely about the fire at the Horner hotel at Biddle Bay in the spring, Mr Horner’s request to rent the school for the second and third weeks in August, and the general organization of the Fortnight. As he listened, Pollard unobtrusively took in the room and its contents.
Presumably it was her private sitting room, as it contained no office equipment. The studio portrait on the bureau of a young man with an attractive lively face was surely the dead husband — she was a widow, according to the file. His attention was sharpened by an unframed and unmounted photograph of a group of five people, three men and two women, also on the top of the bureau…
‘That’s roughly how the Fortnight ran,’ Marcia Makepeace was saying. ‘You asked if Mr Horner and his household were involved at all. The answer to that is not at all, except —’ she hesitated fractionally — ‘that on the evening before it started he asked the lecturers, and myself, and Mr and Mrs Medlicott up to Uncharted Seas for drinks.’
‘And this, I rather think, brings us to your reason for your asking me to come along this morning, doesn’t it?’
Pollard smiled at her, but she did not respond.
‘Well, I suppose it does — in a way.’
He waited, conscious of Toye in the background with his pen poised over his notebook. She had turned her face away, and was staring out of the window. Then, with a visible effort of will, she glanced quickly at him and began to speak. The words came slowly, as if carefully chosen.
‘This drinks party was the first time I saw Wendy Shaw. She struck me as young and naive, and — well — rather gauche. In the course of the evening she and one of our lecturers seemed to gravitate to each other to some extent. He was — is — a young man called Geoffrey Boothby.’ Her eyes went involuntarily to the top of the bureau. ‘I like him,’ she went on with a touch of defiance. ‘He’s a bit way out. Untidy, long-haired, no social graces, apt to be aggressive, and so on. Immensely enthusiastic about the countryside, and geology, which is his shop. Very kind and patient to the Fortnighters, and I must say some of them were rather dim. Of course I don’t believe for one single moment that he murdered Wendy Shaw,’ she ended with rather a rush.
Pollard waited for a couple of moments.
‘I think you’ve more than this to tell me, haven’t you, Mrs Makepeace?’ he asked. ‘Did you see these two together on later occasions?’
‘Only once. I saw them out together in Geoff Boothby’s car.’
‘That’s still only twice you saw them together. Perhaps you’ve discussed it with someone else who had also seen them?’
To his surprise Marcia blushed, and then looked annoyed with herself.
‘Surely you don’t accept people’s statements at second-hand?’ she parried.
‘Of course not. When you have given us this person’s name, we shall check-up.’
‘Mr Michael Jay, who was in charge of the Fortnight, has told me that he saw Wendy and Geoff together in the bar of the King William once or twice,’ she said, still slightly pink.
‘When did Mr Jay leave here?’ Pollard asked.
‘Last Saturday morning.’
‘And when did he give you this information?’
‘Just before he went.’
‘Was Mr Boothby here on Saturday morning?’
‘Yes, he was.’
‘In that case, then, there could have been no question of his having gone off with Wendy Shaw, could there? And on Saturday morning no one, except for her murderer, knew that she was dead. If I may say so, you don’t strike me as a gossipy type, Mrs Makepeace. How did you and Mr Jay come to have this conversation on what must have been a very busy morning?’
‘He knew Constable Pike had been round, and asked me if anything was up. I — I told him I was just a bit worried because I’d seen Geoff go out after the film show we had on Friday night. I didn’t want to mention this to Pike, so I asked Mr Jay’s advice.’
‘Which was?’ Pollard queried.
‘That it wasn’t in the least necessary. As you said, no one knew that Wendy had been killed at this stage.’
‘And now that it is known, you decided that you ought to give us this information?’
‘Well — er, actually Mr Jay feels rather strongly that it ought to be passed on as things have turned out. He rang me about it yesterday morning, and again last night, when I’d had time to think it over. Last night,’ she repeated, a shade absently, and then hurried on. ‘He suggested contacting you himself, but we decided in the end that it would be simpler if I did, as anyway you’d want it first-hand in the end. Not that it means that either of us thinks that Geoff Boothby’s involved in the very slightest. It’s only that Mi — Mr Jay says that it’s in Geoff’s interests, and the police will find out, and so one might as well,’ she ended rather incoherently.
‘Mr Jay is a wise man,’ Pollard said. ‘We shall need to see him personally, of course. I take it you have his present address?’
He listened as Marcia explained that Michael Jay, the two Kings and Susan Crump were now conducting a Discovery Fortnight at Crowncliff on the south coast, but that Geoff Boothby, who was not a full-time member of the Horner staff, had returned to his home at Winnage on the previous Saturday. As far as she knew he was still there. She had the home address of all members of the Kittitoe Fortnight for forwarding correspondence.
Aware of a good many points which needed clearing up, Pollard looked at his watch and made a quick decision.
‘Mrs Makepeace,’ he said in a non-official tone, ‘I hope this isn’t sheer nerve on my part, but is there any chance of a cuppa? We made an awfully early start this morning.’
Marcia started to her feet with a horrified exclamation.
‘How frightful of me, especially as I asked you to come! I do apologise. We’ll have one at once — there’s a pantry next door.’
As the door closed behind her Pollard swung round to Toye.
‘Well?’ he queried.
‘That chap who was creating when we turned up looked a bit odd, I thought,’ Toye commented. ‘Nervy, and rattled.’
‘Yea. And I got the impression that the dust-up they were having was something to do with our call. We’d better find out a bit more about Mr Medlicott. Anything else?’
‘She’s sweet on this bloke Jay.’
‘Pretty quick work in a fortnight, what? Could it
be that he was popping the question over the blower last night? The line down here was blocked long enough.’
‘A very nice lady,’ Toye said reprovingly. ‘You wouldn’t want her spending the rest of her life on her memories, would you?’
‘Bless my soul! You must have started going to another sort of film. Come off romance, and keep your mind on the job.’
As he spoke Pollard got up and went across to the bureau. He picked up the unmounted photograph and studied it.
‘I bet this is a group of the Horner staff who were here,’ he said. ‘The only one she’s got of Jay. All the same we’ll have to wrest it from her for a bit. It could be useful to get the young chap blown up. Possible lead, don’t you think?’
Toye agreed.
‘It’s the first hint of anyone the Shaw girl went around with. Chances are he went out to the pub Friday night, the weather being what it was. Maybe Nancekivell’ll recognize the photo.’
The door reopened, and he rose politely to relieve Marcia of the tray she was carrying.
In the more relaxed atmosphere over the cuppas Pollard managed to build up a clear picture of Geoff Boothby’s exit on Friday night after the film show. Asked how she could be so definite about the time, Marcia explained that the evening was running late, owing to the delayed return from the expedition which had held up the final editing of the Fortnight film. She had counted on the entertainment being over by about nine-twenty, but it had gone on until ten minutes to ten, as an extra film had been put on first, while they waited for Mr King to finish the editing. This meant that the domestic staff on duty to serve tea and coffee after the film show were kept late, and she had been very clock conscious.
In reply to further questions, she had no idea when Geoff Boothby had returned. All five of the lecturers had been lent keys of the front door for the duration of the Fortnight. Mr Jay had told her that when he went up to his room at ten minutes past twelve, there had been no light in Geoff Boothby’s, next door to him, and he had assumed that the latter had already turned in. At all events he had not heard anyone come in later.
No Vacation From Murder Page 8
