An Unfinished Murder
Page 24
‘No, I couldn’t. Well, Caroline isn’t likely to go seeking professional therapy. It is down to me to talk her through this. She is my cousin. I’ll pop into Gloucester first, see the solicitor and have a word about probate for Pete’s will. There might be a delay, you know, because of the way he died. Inquest and so on. After that, I’ll drive over to see Caroline…’ He hesitated. ‘Cassie,’ he said, in a different voice, ‘you and the kids mean an awful lot to me, you know. Since they found Rebecca I know I’ve been a bit difficult to live with. I’m sorry about that and… and everything.’
‘Thank you, darling, and I do know. You have been a bit nervy lately. But you’ve been worried about Pete, so I understand. But you shouldn’t have taken Oliver’s light sabre away, just because Dominic broke his.’
‘Oh, all right, I’ll buy Dominic a new one and return Oliver’s. But I do wish they could learn to play quietly.’
He walked out of the room and Cassie heard him exclaim, ‘Oh, Gordana! I didn’t realise you were in the hall. What is it?’
‘Boys are in the sandpit in garden,’ came Gordana’s voice. ‘I come in to find plastic little buckets. But I can’t find little buckets.’
‘They’re outside in the greenhouse!’ Cassie called.
Gordana’s footsteps beat a retreat and Nick put his head round the door. ‘I told you! She snoops!’ he hissed.
Cassie watched him drive away, thoughtfully. Then she sighed and walked into the garden to find the twins building an elaborate castle in the sandpit, with determination written all over their faces.
‘I found the buckets,’ said Gordana, pointing.
‘Yes, I see. Have you checked on Libby?’
‘Baby is sleeping and boys are playing very well, no fighting.’
Cassie brightened. ‘Perhaps they’re getting along better.’
‘So, can I have rest of day off?’ asked Gordana. ‘I need to go shopping, maybe go to Gloucestershire Quays?’
‘Oh, yes, I suppose so. Yes, go by all means.’
A few minutes later, she heard the Mini being driven away, and almost at once, as if the sound of Gordana’s departure had been a signal, a wail from the house announced that Libby had awoken from her nap. Cassie set off back indoors.
* * *
‘I’m not surprised to see you,’ Trevor Barker told his visitor. ‘I’ve got Wallace in custody and, now you’re here, we can interview him properly.’
‘Including about the fire in Stokes’s house?’
‘Certainly! It nearly claimed a second victim in Nina Pengelly.’ Barker scowled. ‘But it didn’t bring about Fred’s death – the whisky and pills did that. Of course, if he hadn’t already been unconscious when the fire reached him, then it would have resulted in his death from inhaling the smoke, especially from the burning horsehair.’
‘A murderer who believes in belt and braces,’ said Carter.
Trevor Barker grunted and they both sat in silence for a moment or two.
Then Carter asked, ‘What about this Wallace?’
‘Stokes’s only close pal and drinking companion. He’s quite a bit younger than Stokes. At the time the body was buried, I’d guess Wallace was in his late twenties.’ Bitterly, Barker added, ‘Now he keeps snakes.’
‘Why present his old chum with a bottle of whisky laced with crushed tablets? I mean, why now?’
‘My guess,’ Barker told him, ‘is that Fred’s nerves were showing signs of strain. Wallace must have started worrying. In addition, I’d paid a call on Stokes to question him. Perhaps that brought Wallace to his decision? If so, I’ll have to live with that. Or perhaps it was the second search we made in the spinney? The first time Wallace, and Fred, knew what we were looking for. The second time, they didn’t, and that could’ve rattled them. Anyhow, it seems that Wallace decided to silence his old mate. He did it in the most merciful way he could think of. Give the old chap a bottle of whisky as a treat, having tampered with it first, and then leave it to human nature, knowing Fred wouldn’t limit himself to just one tot.’
Carter sighed. ‘OK. You say Stokes used to be a truck driver?’
‘That’s right, but he claims to have just retired around the time of Rebecca’s disappearance. I get where you’re going, Ian. Perhaps, against usual practice, she did hitch a lift? If both Stokes and Rebecca lived in Bamford, she may even have recognised him and not hesitated to get into his lorry? But it would mean that Stokes had driven his lorry down to the Gloucester area on some job, wouldn’t it?’ Barker drew a deep breath. ‘We have checked him out. He did retire about that time. He applied for a disability pension. Back trouble. And how did Wallace become involved? Did Fred knock on his door and ask Wallace to help him bury a dead girl? It’s hardly likely.’
* * *
Wallace sat in the interview room with folded arms and a sullen expression on his face. He turned a bloodshot gaze on Ian Carter. ‘And who’s that? When you come to see me at my house, you had that Markby with you. I thought you were having to trawl round the old folks’ homes to find enough p’licemen. I’ve read about the cutbacks. But I didn’t realise things had got that bad! This one’s got grey hair, as well.’
Wallace shifted his gaze from Carter’s greying but thick mop to glance at the top of Barker’s head; but if he had been going to mention the inspector’s thinning hair, he wisely decided not to.
‘This is Superintendent Carter from the Gloucestershire force. He was involved in the original investigation into the disappearance of Rebecca Hellington,’ Barker almost snarled.
‘And you got nowhere, I suppose?’ Wallace said, disagreeably, to Carter.
‘At the time, no – I didn’t get anywhere,’ Carter confessed.
‘So, that’s it, is it?’ Wallace leaned forward. ‘Now you think you’re going to pin it on me and poor old Fred, are you? Improve the clear-up rate? Rub out the black mark on your record?’
‘You gave “poor old Fred”, as you call him, a bottle of booze full of crushed sleeping tablets!’ snapped the irritated Trevor Barker.
Carter said, ‘I’m not trying to pin anything on you – or on the late Mr Stokes, or anyone else! But Inspector Barker has to investigate the discovery of a body locally; and I have an unsolved disappearance in my part of the world. We both think you can help us.’
‘You think wrong, then!’ snapped Wallace.
Barker had his anger under control now. But there remained a gleam of malign satisfaction in Wallace’s eyes. He knew he had very successfully managed to rile both of the police officers facing him.
Quietly, Carter continued, ‘No, I don’t. I think I’m right. Even if it was all you did, I believe you and Stokes buried the girl. We know where. We don’t know why.’
Wallace’s eyes opened wide in shock. ‘Why? Why? Wouldn’t you, if you found a dead body in your truck?’
There was a peculiarly tense silence. Trevor Barker asked, blandly, ‘Would you like a solicitor, Mr Wallace?’
Wallace leaned back and the chair creaked under his weight. ‘Bloody old fool, Fred! His nerve was going. It was you lot fooling around in that spinney got him jumpy. He was getting ready to spill the beans, I could tell. I didn’t want to… to do what I did. But I had no choice, and you can’t say he didn’t go happy!’
‘What about Nina Pengelly? She nearly died trying to rescue him.’
‘She should have minded her own business,’ was the disagreeable retort. ‘All right, then, I want a solicitor. But I don’t want one who looks about twelve years old.’ He glared at them. ‘And I’m not confessing to murdering that girl! Not now, not ever! Not with a solicitor present or without one! Because Fred and I didn’t kill her!’
Chapter 18
‘I’m a self-employed man,’ began Wallace. ‘I have been, these last twenty or more years.’
The solicitor had arrived and sat beside him, a middle-aged man with baggy eyes and an air of disenchantment. Every line of his attitude announced he’d heard it all over the years.
Barker looked as if he couldn’t stand much more of this, but he managed to control his impatience. Carter kept quiet, understanding that Wallace was still moving things, only now they were his memories. He was being methodical, stacking them in order.
‘Now, Fred Stokes,’ said Wallace, and Barker sat up and looked more alert. ‘He was a real trucker, once. Drove them big rigs all over the place – abroad, too. You wouldn’t believe it, looking at him now. I knew him from the pub, not well, but I knew he’d had to retire because of his back, after he was involved in a big pile-up on a motorway. The whole pub knew that. He groused about it non-stop. He was short of cash, too, only had the dis-ability pension. Well, I got an enquiry about a job. It was moving antiques. Someone had bought an old bed at auction. A Victorian thing it was, with a walnut headboard all carved with cherubs and grapes and things. And the weight of it! The chap wanted it taken down to a house near Gloucester. So, I got the job. It was all dismantled, in pieces, but I needed someone else to give me a hand. Fred’s bad back had stopped him driving the trucks, but he was still pretty handy. He was a lot bigger chap in those days, really beefy. So I offered him a few quid to come with me, and help me out with this bed. We got it on my pickup and tied the tarpaulin over it and off we went. We went early in the morning to beat the worst of the traffic. It wasn’t a bad run.’
‘Can you tell us the address to which you took it?’ asked Barker.
Wallace shook his head. ‘I keep all the records for seven years, like you got to, self-employed like I am. But we’re talking twenty years ago! My records and my memory for details don’t go back that far!’ Unexpectedly, he chuckled. ‘I do remember we had a hell of a job getting it through the door of the house we took it to! Anyhow, we did it. Fred refused to manhandle the pieces up the stairs, on account of his back, and the house-owner had to help me with that. Then we set off home. It was about, oh, midday…’ He paused and looked up, enquiringly. ‘Any chance of a cup of tea?’
‘When you’ve finished,’ said Barker.
Wallace shrugged his heavy shoulders. ‘Well, we were pretty thirsty that day, twenty years ago, after lugging that bed around. Getting hungry, too. So, we decided, before we drove home we’d stop at a pub somewhere, for a pie and a pint. We’d already decided to drive back along the minor roads, country route, because by then the motorways and main roads had got busy. Anyway, we were in no hurry and it was a nice sunny morning, a Saturday, early June. You can get all sorts of weather in June, but this was really summery. Anyhow, we were driving along, keeping an eye open for a nice pub. You don’t get a pub unless there’s a few houses around; and there were some nice houses along the road we were taking. You couldn’t see too much of them, because they were in big grounds, had high hedges and big gravel drives. Really wealthy lot, they were, who lived round there. You could just see the roofs and top floors poking up above the hedges and bushes. They weren’t that old, I reckon, built sometime in the nineteen-thirties, I’d guess.’
Carter raised his head and stared at Wallace as if he was about to ask him something, but he kept silent so as not to disturb the flow of the story.
‘Then we saw this pub and it looked a nice place. The car park was only small, and there were a couple of cars already parked in it, so we didn’t try and turn in there. We just pulled off the road and parked up on the verge. There was nothing of any value in the back of the pickup, only some ropes and the tarpaulin lying in a heap. Anyone could see there was nothing worth pinching. And it was quiet along there.’
Wallace stopped speaking and frowned. They waited impatiently. Then Wallace’s brow cleared. ‘We had ham and chicken pie. They’d got it at the counter under a glass dome. Sort of looked home-made. It was pretty good, I remember. They put a bit of salad with it. Not that I’m keen on salad, as a rule. But a pub like that always gives you salad. Not the sort of place that gives you pickles. They gave us a bit of that French bread, too. It was a swanky sort of place, like I said. So we took our time and had a nice little meal. We must have been in there about an hour or just under.
‘Then we decided we’d better get going. We didn’t check the pickup; we didn’t see the need to. It was where we’d left it. We drove off back to Bamford and it didn’t take long, maybe another hour and a half. When we got here I dropped Fred off first. I didn’t drive up the hill to Brocket’s Row. I stopped at the bottom just past the spinney. Fred said not to bother to drive up to the top, he’d walk. So he got out and started back alongside the pickup, to the beginning of the road up the hill. I was going to drive on but I heard him shout and then he slapped the side of the pickup to attract my attention. He came back and opened the passenger door of the cab and stuck his head in. “Someone’s been messing around in the back,” he said. That’s his words. I remember. I asked what he meant. He told me the tarpaulin and ropes were still there but they’d been moved. The tarpaulin had been folded over when we put it in there after unloading that bed. Now it was stretched out flat. Only it wasn’t really flat, there was a bump in it as if something was underneath it. The ropes were all pushed together up one end. So I got out and went back with him to investigate. We got up into the back and pulled off the tarpaulin…’ Wallace paused. ‘And there she was.’
He fell silent and, at last, when he showed no sign of speaking again, Barker urged, ‘Who was?’
Wallace looked at him in surprise. ‘Who do you think? That girl all the fuss is about. Of course, we didn’t know at the time who she was! Hadn’t a clue. Nor how she’d got there. Except, of course, it must have happened while we were in the pub having our pie and pint.’ Wallace drew himself up and said, fiercely, ‘Someone dumped her in my pickup. Bloody cheek!’
Carter asked tersely, ‘Any sign of rigor?’
Wallace moved his head to look at him, his expression suggesting he was glad someone had asked a sensible question. ‘It was just starting – and she was cold. I reckon she hadn’t been dead long, though. But she was dead, no mistake.’
‘Signs of injury?’
He shook his head. ‘No, not that we could see. Her eyes were open, and her mouth. She looked…’ Wallace paused, and when he spoke again his tone had softened. ‘She looked scared, poor kid. She was only young, I’d say eighteen or nineteen. Of course, I’m not saying she had been scared when she died, because we didn’t know that! But I suppose she probably was. Anyway, she looked scared. It upset me, upset Fred too, to be honest. Apart from the fact that she was in my pickup and we’d got a dead body on our hands! What were we supposed to do with her?’
‘Contact the police!’ said Barker crisply.
Wallace rolled his eyes. ‘Do me a favour,’ he said. ‘What would the p’lice have said? Think they would have believed us? Not a chance. And don’t forget, I’d just started out in business on my own account. I couldn’t let the police impound my vehicle while they crawled all over it looking for clues. Besides, no one would believe us. I wouldn’t have believed it meself if someone had told me they’d parked a pickup in a quiet back road, while they went to the pub, and when they got back, someone had left a dead body in it! I mean, people do take advantage if anyone is clearing out a house and hires a b
ig skip. It’s left sitting outside all night long unattended. House-owner gets up in the morning and finds people have chucked all sorts of stuff in there. But not in a pickup truck, and not a dead body!’
Wallace shook his head. ‘Fair makes you wonder!’ he observed in a philosophical comment on the ways of the world.
‘So, what did you do, Mickey?’ asked Carter.
Wallace looked at him. ‘Got rid of her, that’s what. What anyone in my predicament would do.’
‘How?’ snapped Barker.
‘Decided to bury her in Brocket’s Spinney. We were parked right by the place, after all. Couldn’t be more convenient. We argued about it for a while, because Fred was worried she’d be found. It wasn’t as if no one ever went in the spinney. Local kids played there. Eventually, he agreed. So we lifted her out of the back of the pickup, carried her into the trees, and put her down. She had stiffened up a bit more by then and that worried us a bit. She’d be more difficult to bury when rigor had really got her. We covered her over with leaves and branches while Fred stayed there on guard, like. We didn’t cover her to hide her from anyone else, but because Fred didn’t like looking at her. I drove home to get a couple of tools to do the job – spade and a shovel.’
‘Fred lived nearer, just up the hill,’ Barker pointed out. ‘Why didn’t you stay on guard? Let Fred go up the hill to his house and get some garden tools? He must have had some.’
‘Sure he did,’ growled Wallace, ‘and he’d got an old mother as well, what he lived with. If she’d seen him setting off down the road with a couple of digging tools, she’d have asked him where he was going and what for.’ Wallace drew a deep breath. ‘She’d have been a witness! That’s what she’d have been. You lot know all about witnesses. Now me, I lived on my own at the time, I wasn’t married then.’ For a moment Wallace sounded wistful. ‘So I went home and got what was needed and went back to the spinney. It must have been just about three-quarters of an hour later.