An Unfinished Murder

by An Unfinished Murder (retail) (epub)

  ‘We have to ask you,’ Jess told her gently. ‘Did he appear even more distressed this morning than he has been of late?’

  ‘Of late?’ She raised her head and stared at Jess. ‘You mean, since the girl was found? He’s been going downhill since that day…’ She paused. ‘But this morning, if you must know, he seemed more preoccupied with the meeting at eleven. I was quite pleased, actually, that he was only worrying about that – that he had something else on his mind. Anything to take his thoughts away from you and your precious investigation!’

  The phone beside her on the sofa emitted a tuneful ringtone. She grabbed it, ‘Oh, Cassie, hi. Yes, that’s right. I thought he might have spoken to Nick. OK, right, well, if you should hear from him. Yes, they’re still here.’ The last words were accompanied by a glance towards the visitors. She cut the call.

  ‘Cassie Ellsworth,’ Caroline told them. ‘Nick rang her in case… well, just on an off chance. Nick and Cassie, they’ve got a place at St Ives, Nick’s parents’ cottage. They go there for breaks and we’ve used it, too. But he hasn’t been in touch with Cassie about it, and there’s no landline link to the place.’

  ‘We’ll ask the Devon and Cornwall police to check it out. Have you got the address?’

  Caroline stood up in silence and went out of the room. A few minutes later, she came back with a slip of paper. She handed it to Jess.

  ‘Would you happen to have a key to this place?’ Jess asked.

  ‘No, it doesn’t belong to us. But I know a neighbour down there has a key for emergencies. I don’t know her name. Cassie will tell you, or she can give you a key.’

  Jess went out of the room. In her absence, there was another awkward silence.

  ‘What’s she doing?’ Caroline asked aggressively.

  ‘Arranging the check on the cottage.’

  Jess was back. ‘They’re checking now. Someone is asking Cassie Ellsworth for details of the neighbour with the key.’ She leaned towards Caroline and added, sympathetically, ‘We’re doing our best to find him, and we will. Sometimes – if a person has a breakdown – he, or she, just goes away somewhere, to be alone. Quite often, the missing person comes back after a couple of days. Sometimes they book into a hotel room. Or they go to a holiday property, like the place in St Ives. In normal circumstances, we don’t consider an adult to be a missing person unless they’ve been gone at least forty-eight hours.’

  ‘Not Pete!’ Caroline told them firmly. ‘He doesn’t do this, doesn’t just take off and not let anyone know where he’s going. His office needs to be able to find him. The business is international; financial information comes in at all hours from around the world. He always lets me know if he’s going to be even half an hour late. Now I don’t know where he is.’

  If she was aware this contradicted her previous insistence that there must be a simple explanation for Malone’s disappearance, she didn’t seem aware of it. The energy had seeped out of her again. Caroline’s head was bent. She didn’t look up but asked, through a mane of fair hair that had slipped loose from the hairpins, ‘The canal. He told Beth he was going for a walk. Are you looking… are you looking along the bank?’

  ‘Even as we sit here,’ Carter assured her.

  ‘Find him!’ she said bleakly.

  * * *

  On their return, Carter and Jess found Sergeant Phil Morton waiting for them. He looked like the bearer of bad news. This wasn’t necessarily the case, as Morton’s normal expression wasn’t cheery. But at the moment, he looked gloomier than usual.

  ‘A Mr Nicolas Ellsworth rang to speak to you, sir. He’s very upset. He says, can you call him back straight away? He’s at work but I’ve got the number for his direct line.’

  ‘OK, I’ll call him now.’ To Jess, Carter added, ‘What’s the betting he hasn’t anything useful to tell us but he’s keen to remind us that, whatever is going on, it’s all our fault. Correction, all my fault!’

  Carter braced himself as he waited for the connection.

  ‘What’s all this about Pete being missing?’ Ellsworth’s voice, in his ear, jangled with emotion. ‘How the hell can he be missing? Caroline – his wife, my cousin – she’s going out of her mind!’

  ‘He walked out of his office early today. It’s not been possible to contact him.’

  At the other end of the phone, Ellsworth’s breathing was so laboured that Carter began to fear the man might be having some kind of attack. ‘Listen!’ Ellsworth croaked.

  ‘I’m listening, Mr Ellsworth.’

  ‘Pete rang me late last night. We were going to bed. I’ve not told Caroline about this, because Pete asked me not to. He was calling from his garden, all very secretive and odd. He didn’t make a lot of sense. When Caroline called me earlier – while you were at her house – I still didn’t mention it to her, because I don’t know what’s going on and I don’t want to make a problem for Peter. Frankly, Carter, I think the poor bloke is going out of his mind. I warned you, Superintendent, when you were at my house. I warned you Pete was taking all this very badly. He’s like a lot of these intellectually very clever guys. He finds day-to-day problems a bit difficult to handle.’

  Carter, heroically, forbore to remind the speaker that Peter Malone wasn’t the one who fled his home every morning to eat breakfast at a filling station diner. But his expression, when he put down the phone, rivalled Morton’s for pessimism.

  He looked at Jess and said, ‘The signs aren’t good. Apparently, Malone was hiding in his own garden late last night, making an incoherent phone call to Ellsworth and swearing him to secrecy. Ellsworth’s opinion, for what it’s worth, is that Malone is going quietly crackers…’ He paused. ‘We’re going to have to hope he’s not.’

  ‘He’ll turn up,’ said Jess encouragingly.

  ‘When Rebecca went missing, twenty years passed before she reappeared. Let’s hope it doesn’t take Malone that long!’

  * * *

  It didn’t take twenty years. A canoeist found Malone’s body in the canal that evening as the light was failing. The area had been cordoned off when Carter arrived; sightseers were being chivvied away by a couple of uniformed officers.

  ‘Member of the public who found the body is over there, sir,’ Carter was told.

  He ducked under the tape and made his way to the spot.

  ‘I wasn’t sure that was what it was!’ declared the unlucky canoeist. A very young man and probably unused to sudden or unnatural death, he was seated on the bank, wrapped in a thermal blanket. Someone had given him a plastic cup of tea. His pale face peered up at Carter, the emergency lighting that had been set up lending his features an eerie sheen. ‘I was on my way back, it was getting too dark – and suddenly there was this hump in the water. I thought it was a sack of rubbish. I was pretty angry, because a thing like that could sink a canoe. I gave it a push with my paddle and it bobbed up and down and I saw – I saw a head.’

  His features twitched and he fought to control them. Carter guessed he wasn’t far off bursting into tears. ‘I mean, the… the shape, the hump, it was bobbing up and down and suddenly rolled sideways and… I saw a face… his eyes were open. He was looking at me as though I could help him! But I couldn’t…’ His body shook and the undrunk tea slopped out of the cup.

  Carter made his way to the canvas tent erected over the body, which had been laid out on the ground. Huddled in the tent he found the doctor, an older man, hunched over the sad sight, and another constable.

  ‘Looks like a straightforward suicide,’ said the doctor, glancing up, as the newcomer squeezed in. ‘He even filled his pockets with stones, in the old-fashioned way of people who want to drown themselves. Don’t see that so much, these days.’

  He flashed a torch on to the dead face. Carter looked down on Malone in sick recognition. Death has a way of smoothing out stress and the signs of ageing. He was looking down at that angel again, the one on the fresco, trumpeting a message upward into the heavens; the young man he’d met twenty years earlier.


  ‘Put the stones in an evidence bag,’ he ordered.

  The constable moved to obey. Then he asked, ‘This, too, sir?’ and he held out his hand. On the palm lay a sodden packet of cigarettes.

  ‘Did he smoke any?’ asked Carter dully.

  The constable eased open the top of the box. ‘Looks like he only smoked one, sir.’

  ‘Steadying his nerves,’ said the doctor in a matter-of-fact way. ‘Poor devil,’ he added, with more compassion.

  ‘Not devil,’ Carter muttered, ‘angel…’

  But the doctor and the constable didn’t understand and looked at him in puzzlement.

  * * *

  ‘I should have seen it coming!’ Carter muttered. ‘Ellsworth warned me. He told me how distressed Malone was about being questioned again. I should have realised.’

  He was slumped on Jess’s sofa. She wished she’d had something stronger to give him than a glass of cheap white wine. But her drinks cabinet didn’t run to brandy or whisky. There was barely enough wine left in the bottle to top up his glass. But she could do her best to stop him sinking into melancholy.

  ‘Nonsense!’ she said briskly. ‘How? He was a grown man, not a teenager full of angst. OK, when you interviewed him twenty years ago he might have been vulnerable. But not now! He worked in the financial world. For that you need good nerves, or so I’ve always understood.’

  ‘Tell that to his wife! She – and that cousin of hers – are threatening to make an official complaint. I’ll be taken off the case.’

  ‘How can they make out you harassed him? You interviewed him once, very briefly, at his office, and we called on him together, once, at his house. And when we were at his house, his wife was with him. He wasn’t on his own. It wasn’t like one of those old cops and robbers movies, where the police gang up on a suspect in a bare room, lit by a single unshaded bulb, threatening to rough him up!’

  ‘All right,’ mumbled Carter into his wine glass. ‘You know that. I know that. But the widow and the old friend are breathing vengeance. They want blood – mine!’

  ‘Of course,’ Jess went on mildly, ‘there is another possible explanation why Malone jumped into the canal. Some people might say it’s an obvious reason. Let’s suppose he killed Rebecca, twenty years ago. He drove the body to Bamford in an attempt to make it look, if she were ever found, as if she had gone home. He was lucky, or thought himself lucky, because the body wasn’t found. Don’t forget, Malone was the person who kept insisting, from the very first, that she’d gone home to visit her parents that weekend. No one else has come forward to corroborate that. Alan Markby found no trace of her – and I know, from my experience working with him, how thorough he was! Now the body has been found, and the police are back on the case. Malone had thought he was safe. Now he knew he wasn’t. Is it any wonder that he cracked up?’

  Carter leaned back, cradling the empty wine glass in his hands, ‘So, how are we going to prove that now? If it is the reason.’

  ‘Do you think he killed her?’ Jess asked him quietly. ‘Or did you suspect it, twenty years ago?’

  He smiled tiredly. ‘I didn’t know twenty years ago, and I’m beginning to fear that now I’ll never know.’ There was a silence, then he added, ‘Oh, well, if I’m suspended on sick leave pending enquiries, it will at least give me time to go and visit my daughter.’

  ‘No one is going to charge you with breaking any kind of rule regarding interviewees, not while I’ve got anything to do with it!’ said Jess fiercely.

  He looked at her in surprise.

  Chapter 15

  Nina Pengelly studied the plate with the meat pie, gravy, mash and carrots, and wondered whether, if she added a couple of sprigs of broccoli, Fred would eat them. Fred was difficult about greens. Really, she thought crossly, it was worse than trying to feed a child. That reminded her of when Josh and Dilys were small and first came to live with her. They wouldn’t eat anything green, either. Josh was all right now, easy to feed. Nina did wonder how they’d get on if Dilys came back, when they let her out of prison.

  ‘Still,’ she said aloud, addressing Bobby who was perched nearby, ‘after prison food, I dare say she won’t be picky.’

  She placed a tea cloth over the tray and turned her attention back to the bird. ‘You’ve got to go back into your cage, so be a good boy,’ she told him. ‘I’m going to be opening the front door and we can’t risk you flying out, can we? The other birds would kill you. Come along.’

  She walked into the sitting room and Bobby flew after her. She stood by his cage and indicated the open door. ‘Come on, now.’

  He hopped from chair back to chair back and then, obligingly, flew into the cage and on to his swing.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ Nina told him, shutting the door carefully.

  She went back to the kitchen to retrieve the tray and set off down Brocket’s Row towards Fred Stokes’s home. It was a nice day, she thought, not too hot and a pleasant light wind. Up here, at the top of the hill, it could get pretty gusty and when it rained, my, you really knew it. But today…’ She paused and sniffed. There was a funny smell in the air. It didn’t come from the dinner on the tray, that was for sure!

  Nina stood, looking around her, scenting the breeze like an animal. She walked on a few steps. The smell – a horrible, acrid smell – was getting stronger. It was getting more pungent the nearer she got to Fred’s house.

  Nina began to run and then, because it was difficult to do that and not drop the tray, she stopped to place the tray on the ground and hurried on without it. There was no one at home in any of the houses between hers and Fred’s, she knew that. They all went out to work. Whatever it was, it had to be caused by something at Fred’s!

  She had reached the house. She ran up to the front window and peered in, hoping to see him sitting in his armchair in front of the telly, waiting for her to bring in his dinner as she always did. But she couldn’t see anything. Had he closed the curtains? No, the obstacle to seeing into the room didn’t come from curtains. Had she suddenly gone blind? No, she could see all around her quite clearly. But the window was totally opaque. Behind the glass was a swirling black mass.

  Nina ran to the front and scrabbled at the letter box for the key on a string behind it. She should have brought her own key. She’d had Fred’s key for years but she’d got into the habit of using the key that hung behind the door. Her fingers touched the string and she hauled out the key, fitting it to the lock with fingers made clumsy by panic. In her mind she was delivering a tirade of accusation and blame targeted at her neighbour. Silly old fool! How many times had she told him about smoking so much and being so careless when putting the lit cigarettes down? It was nothing short of a miracle that he hadn’t caused a fire before now!

  The door opened and a great mass of black smoke billowed out and enveloped her. She started coughing and spluttering as it entered her chest and stung her eyes, making them water. She rubbed at them, determined to keep them open, and managed to call his name. ‘Fred? Fred!’

  But that was a waste of time. Nina ran back to where she’d abandoned the tray and snatched the cloth from it. Folding it into a triangle, she tied it over her face and ran back. She still couldn’t see inside the house through the smoke. As fast as it billowed out through the open front door, fresh clouds of dark grey poured into the hall from the living room. Drawing breath was well-nigh impossible, but the poor visibility didn’t trouble her, because she knew her way. She ran her hand along the wall and advanced down the hallway until she found the opening into the room where Fred must be. She was trying to hold her breath and knew she couldn’t hold it much longer.

  The open front door meant the hall now acted like a flue. The smoke was drawn out along it and rolled in great clouds into the open air. For a moment or two it thinned indoors and allowed her to make out the shape of the chair and the form huddled in it. She grasped his jacket and hauled him on to the floor. He fell like a rag doll, unconscious. Kneeling beside him, she leane
d across his inert form to grab his wrists and her fingers knocked against a bottle lying on the floor. It was square and flat – a whisky bottle, she thought. Who bought him that? Then she began to scramble backwards, dragging the inert Fred Stokes with her. There was no weight to him. But, even down here at floor level, it was so difficult to catch any breath that she doubted they’d make it into the hall.

  When she did manage it, she found dragging her load was even more difficult because the hall was narrow and Fred had to be manoeuvred through the doorway and turned at an angle to face the front door. Afterwards, she could never work out quite how she did it. All she did remember was that, as she continued hauling Fred along with her, there was a crackling sound from the room they’d left and a sudden bright red-and-yellow flame leapt up and flickered through the doorway and into the hall. Her ears were filled with a roaring noise and the crash of something exploding, probably the television set. Nina knew she couldn’t pull Fred along much further. She realised he might be dead. But it wasn’t in her nature to abandon him, even though the fire was gaining strength in the room they’d left. She’d die here with him, in the hallway.

  And then salvation came in the form of someone else. Another person was there, incredibly. Someone had pushed through the smoke and had grabbed Nina and was tugging at her. Nina thought that the would-be rescuer probably didn’t realise that she, in turn, was gripping Fred – and she couldn’t tell them. But the rescuer was strong and determined. Nina, still linked to Fred, was hauled along the hall, through the door, a painful exit over the step, and out into the front garden. Here it was still smoky but there was enough air to take a painful breath. Nina began to cough. Her chest hurt, her throat felt as though someone had sandpapered it, but she was breathing. Someone else was shouting, a woman’s voice. She thought she heard the voice shout ‘fire’ and ‘ambulance’ but, still holding Fred’s wrists, Nina drifted into unconsciousness.