by David Blake
‘I suppose there’s always the possibility that she’s some sort of deranged psychotic nut-job.’
‘Christ!’ Tanner exclaimed, ‘Not another one, surely!’
Vicky’s gaze brought Tanner’s attention to Dr Johnstone, skulking his way over towards them; a tablet in one hand, a clear plastic evidence bag in the other.
‘Sorry to interrupt,’ the medical examiner began, holding the bag up for both Tanner and Vicky to see, ‘but I was just handed this by forensics. It was found in the bin beside the bed.’
Vicky peered up at the half-burnt piece of paper that seemed to be hovering inside. ‘A scorned lover’s note?’
‘Looks more like a blackmail letter,’ Tanner responded, squinting his eyes in an attempt to read what was left of the words in bold type.
‘Judging by the amount of money requested,’ Johnstone continued, ‘unless the woman he was with was the man’s wife, and she was using the opportunity to demand a rather hefty divorce settlement, I’d say Tanner’s answer was more likely to be correct.’
Vicky caught the attention of the two men standing before her. ‘We’re not honestly considering the possibility that some hitherto unknown woman, possibly the man’s wife, decided to blackmail him, but when she found her letter left discarded in the bin, she became so enraged that she hand-cuffed him to the bed, forced him to have sex with her before sawing open his rib cage with the hacksaw she just happened to have in her handbag, removing his still beating heart to eventually leave it hanging half-out of the man’s rather surprised looking mouth?’
‘I suppose that depends on what the argument was about,’ Tanner mused. ‘And, of course, whether or not her handbag was big enough to fit a hacksaw inside.’
Vicky folded her arms. ‘Joking aside, it’s hardly the most plausible explanation.’
‘In as much as it’s probably unlikely that the woman was the one doing the blackmailing. However, I think it would be unwise for us to rule out the possibility that she was the one who murdered him.’
‘But she’d have still needed one hell of a motive to have done that to him.’
Tanner glanced thoughtfully up towards the high elaborately plastered ceiling. ‘I suppose it’s possible that it was the blackmailer who simply got tired of waiting for him to pay up. But again, that doesn’t seem very likely either.’
‘That leaves only one other option – that we have three separate events taking place at the same time; the girl tying the man up to have sex with him, someone else who opened up his chest with a hacksaw immediately afterwards, and a third party who was trying to blackmail him?’
‘I guess that’s what you get for being a Knight of the Realm,’ Tanner replied. ‘Was there anything else written on the note, other than the demand for money?’ he continued, glancing around at Johnstone before returning his attention to the bag with the letter inside.
‘Just the amount. Fifty thousand in cash.’
‘Not a huge amount to go on,’ said Vicky, lifting her eyes to Tanner’s.
‘How long until we can expect the results from the post-mortem?’
‘As half the work’s already been done for me, I’ll probably be able to get something over to you for…shall we say, lunchtime tomorrow?’
‘Could we have anything sooner, being who it is?’
Johnstone sighed as he gazed back at the body. ‘I suppose I’ll be able to get an early summation over to you for first thing in the morning, but that’s the best I’ll be able to do.’
CHAPTER FIVE
WITH JOHNSTONE RETURNING his attention to the scene of the crime, Tanner led Vicky out of the bedroom in search of the housekeeper who’d discovered the body.
Asking around, they soon found her sitting at an island table, inside a large Victorian kitchen; a female police constable keeping a watchful eye on her from beside an old ceramic Butler sink.
‘Mrs Wilson?’ Tanner enquired, his line of sight partially blocked by an eclectic mix of pots and pans hanging down from a wrought iron ceiling rack.
The woman glanced up, her rosy crumpled face blinking confirmation at him through round tear-strained eyes.
‘Detective Inspector Tanner and my colleague, Detective Inspector Gilbert, Norfolk Police. Is it OK if we ask you a couple of questions?’
After seeking the female constable’s approval of their two uninvited guests, the housekeeper turned back to open her mouth. ‘I – I don’t think I can tell you very much.’
‘May we start by asking when you found him?’
The woman stared vacantly down at the china teacup she had cradled in her surprisingly large, masculine hands. ‘It was when I came up to change the sheets. Sir Michael likes me to do it every evening, before he goes to bed.’
‘What time was that?’
‘It would have been just before eight o’clock.’
‘Would you have done the same thing yesterday evening?’
‘Of course.’
‘At the same time?’
‘Near enough.’
‘Was anyone inside the bedroom when you did?’
‘Nobody then.’
‘But there was – at some point?’
The woman hesitated, her eyes shifting over to Vicky before narrowing themselves back to Tanner’s. ‘Like most single men, Sir Michael had a tendency to enjoy the company of women.’
‘He wasn’t married?’
‘His wife died in a horse riding accident, some ten years ago.’
‘Children?’
The housekeeper shook her head.
Tanner took a moment to glance about. ‘You’re saying he lived here all on his own?’
‘It’s the Blackwells’ principal residence. It has been since the 16th Century.’
‘So…where’s everyone else?’
‘His father, Lord Blackwell, had a stroke shortly after his wife died, forcing him somewhat reluctantly into a nursing home. Sir Michael is their only child.’
‘And staff?’
‘These days, it’s only me. The gardens are looked after by a contractor.’
‘Am I safe to assume that it wasn’t always like that?’
‘Good Lord, no! When I first started here there were over a dozen staff, but that was back in the seventies.’
‘You’ve been here for fifty years?’ Tanner questioned, with genuine surprise.
‘Fifty-two,’ the woman confirmed, her pale blue eyes sparkling with pride.
‘Then you must know the family inside and out.’
‘Better than most.’
‘Sir Michael as well?’
‘I was in attendance at his birth.’
‘So you can tell us what he was like?’
The elderly woman hesitated for the briefest of moments. ‘As you’d expect from someone of his social standing.’
Tanner raised a curious eyebrow. It was an odd thing for her to have said, but fairly obvious what she’d meant; that her employer was like most people he’d met born with a silver spoon in their mouth; pompous, egocentric, and generally speaking rather arrogant.
‘Did he have a profession?’
‘He studied Medicine, like his father.’
‘Did he ever practice?’
‘He never needed to.’
‘But – he must have had an income from somewhere?’
‘I wouldn’t know anything about that,’ she replied, shaking her head to glance away.
With the lack of staff and the house’s crumbling external structure, Tanner made a mental note to look into the family’s finances before moving the subject along.
‘Going back to yesterday evening, did you see, or maybe hear anyone come into the house, either before or after you changed Sir Michael’s bedding?’
The housekeeper continued staring over the kitchen floor, her mouth remaining stubbornly closed.
‘It’s important, Mrs Wilson.’
‘As I said before,’ she eventually continued, turning to fix Tanner’s eyes, ‘like most single men, Sir
Michael enjoyed the company of women.’
‘Then you know that he was here with someone?’
The housekeeper reached up to wrap her fingers around a small gold cross, hanging lightly down from her neck.
‘Do you know who she was?’
‘I’m sorry, inspector, but I’m unable to say.’
‘You can’t, or you won’t?’
With still no answer forthcoming, Tanner glanced briefly over at Vicky. ‘Mrs Wilson, you do know that it’s a common law offence to knowingly withhold information from a criminal investigation.’
‘I can’t tell you because I don’t know.’
‘Did you see her?’
Her already rosy cheeks flushed with colour, as her eyes sank slowly to the floor.
‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ Tanner muttered, quietly to himself. ‘Are you able to describe her?’
‘To be perfectly honest, inspector, they all looked the same.’
‘They?’
‘Sir Michael hasn’t been in a relationship since his wife passed away.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’
‘He used working girls for that sort of thing.’
‘You mean prostitutes?’
‘I’ve no idea if he paid them or not, but they certainly looked like they were.’
Tanner exchanged a brief glance with Vicky, just to make sure she’d made a note of that before returning his attention back to the housekeeper. ‘Do you know if he had any enemies? Anyone who may have held a grudge against him?’
‘I’m sure a man in his position had literally dozens of people who openly resented him.’
‘Anyone specific? Someone who’d perhaps come round to the house to threaten him?’
‘Good Lord, no! I’d have called the police if they had.’
‘OK, what about friends?’
‘What about them?’
‘Did he have any in particular?’
‘One or two.’
‘Any chance you could be more specific?’
‘There were two he’d spend most of his time with.’
‘I don’t suppose you know their names, by any chance?’
‘A Mr Sanders and a Mr Wallace, neither of which I liked the look of.’
‘Any idea as to their first names?’
‘I’m not sure I was ever told.’
‘And what did they like to do together? Play golf?’
‘From what I could gather, they spent most of their time messing about on board their boat.’
CHAPTER SIX
ADVISING THE HOUSEKEEPER that she’d need to provide their forensics team with her fingerprints and a DNA sample, with nobody else left to speak to, Tanner led Vicky out of the house onto its expansive unkept gravel driveway.
‘Any thoughts about Mrs Wilson?’ he asked, stepping over towards their respective cars.
‘Only that she seemed to be doing her best to protect the Blackwell family’s reputation.’
Tanner zipped up his sailing jacket against the cool summer night’s air. ‘Do you think she was being protective, or more that she was doing her best to hide her disgust?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Did you see the cross around her neck?’
‘I can’t say that I did,’ Vicky conceded.
‘If she turns out to be some sort of Christian fanatic, I can’t imagine she’d have been too pleased to find herself having to show an endless stream of prostitutes in through the front door of the house she’d spent the vast proportion of her life working at. Who knows, maybe she snapped when she accidently walked in to find him handcuffed to the bed whilst being ridden like a donkey.’
‘If that was the case, wouldn’t she have killed the girl as well?’
Tanner shrugged. ‘Maybe she tried but found herself hindered by the fact that she wasn’t chained to the bed in quite the same way as her lord and master.’
‘And would she really have been able to saw open his chest like that?’ continued Vicky, her tone drenched in doubt.
‘Johnstone did say that just about anyone would have been capable of doing so, at least from a physical point of view, and it’s not as if she had the appearance of being a weak and feeble old lady. Far from it! Maybe her idea was to make it look like the girl had done it, thinking that being banged-up for first degree murder was a suitable punishment for her sacrilegious profession.’
‘I’ve just thought of something else,’ Vicky began, stopping beside Tanner’s car. ‘What if she’d been included in his will, and came to the conclusion that she couldn’t wait another thirty-odd years to cash in?’
Tanner gave her a sideways glance. ‘Do you think that’s likely?’
‘Not really, but I suppose it’s possible.’
‘If she has been included in his will, we’re soon going to find out. I suggest we make that the first thing to take a look at. The second will be the state of Sir Michael’s finances. She may not have been willing to comment, but even if he couldn’t be described as broke, it’s fairly clear that he wasn’t exactly rolling in cash, not if he couldn’t afford to keep his estate in anywhere near the condition it must have been when the place was crawling with servants.’
‘Anything else?’ asked Vicky, pulling out her notebook.
‘The girl he was with. We have to find her. Even if she wasn’t directly responsible, there’s every chance she was part of the plan. It’s simply too much of a coincidence that she just happened to handcuff him to the bed shortly before someone else dropped by with a hacksaw. Maybe she was told to go there with the instructions to ensure he was tied down before letting someone else in through the back door. For all we know, she was there at the time he was cut open. Her testimony is going to be vital.’
‘OK, I’ll tell Dr Johnstone that we need her DNA sample as a priority. Hopefully, we’ll then be able to find her on the database.’
‘Next on the list will be to identify the two men the housekeeper said he used to hang out with. What were their names again?’
Vicky turned back a page in her notes. ‘Mr Sanders and Mr Wallace.’
‘It’s a shame she didn’t know their first names. I’d hate to think how many Sanders’ and Wallace’s there are in Norfolk.’
‘She did say they used to spend most of the time on board their boat.’
‘Yes, she did, didn’t she,’ said Tanner, tapping a pensive finger against his square-shaped chin. ‘I wonder if that meant that they owned a boat together?’
