Siren Song

by Jo A. Hiestand

  McLaren blinked. “Never mind yours, right?”

  “I guess husbands are more important than friends.”

  “Or at least the Truth.” He shifted his position in the chair and said, “So where in this timeline is Marta killed…or, at least, disappear?”

  “I’ll never forget. A Friday night, eleven June.”

  “You were arrested on fifteen June.”

  “Yes.”

  “Damn.”

  “Exactly. I had four days to get even with Marta for her silence, to kill her and hide her body.”

  NINE

  “Why weren’t you arrested for murder, then?” McLaren asked when the tension had relaxed between them. “Seems like you had motive—look what she did to your life.” He paused, his eyes again on the calendar in the kitchen. Of all the tales of injustice he’d heard, this was close to the top. His gaze sought her face again and he asked rather hesitantly, “Or did something happen later?”

  “No. Besides, I had an unbreakable alibi the night of Marta’s death.”

  “Glad to hear it. What was it, if I may ask?”

  “I was in church. Mending hymnals. There were about a dozen of us, I guess. Anyway, the vicar was there, too. They all swore in court that I was there.”

  “If Marta wasn’t found until ten days later, how did your one evening’s alibi serve you?”

  “Linnet had gone with her to the casino in Nottingham. Oh, do you know Linnet?”

  “Yes. I’ve spoken with her.”

  Verity nodded and took another drag on her cigarette. She exhaled into the air above McLaren’s head. “It took Marta a while to get over her illness. I never did know exactly what she had. But she didn’t just bounce back, like you do with a sore throat. So it wasn’t until eleven June that Linnet and Marta found the time to go back to the casino. Of course the police were interested in when they both left—they were trying to set up some sort of time schedule for that night. Anyway, Linnet told the police when they both left. The time was confirmed by the CCTV tape in the car park. It shows Marta’s and Linnet’s cars leaving.”

  “That establishes she was alive then. But what about the time of her death? If her body wasn’t found for ten days. ”

  “She never made it inside her home that night. Her husband rang up the police after he had found the car in their drive. He then rang up Marta’s brother-in-law to see if Marta had stopped overnight there, for some reason.”

  “But the car…”

  “I know. But Alan didn’t know if Marta went off with someone—”

  “Meeting at the house,” McLaren suggested.

  “—or if someone had followed her and kidnapped her. So Alan called Neal. At least he could start eliminating possible places to check.”

  “Neal’s the brother-in-law who lives in Matlock,” McLaren said, getting the timetable and people straight in his head.

  “Yes. Of course, Marta wasn’t there. That’s when Alan got very worried and rang up the police.”

  “And since the pathologist cannot possibly establish time of death from her body condition, being outside for so long…”

  “That’s all the police could really go on, having no witnesses. At least none who came forward. We just had that rough timetable of when she was last seen. You see,” she said, leaning forward slightly, “they couldn’t prove I killed her because they couldn’t establish when she died. It could have been eleven June, the night she disappeared, or sixteen June, and by then I’d been arrested.”

  “Fifteen June.”

  She leaned back, looking sad. “Exactly.”

  “And you were mending hymnals during the time she was at the casino.”

  “The police tried to say I could have met up with Marta somewhere later that night and killed her, but they had no evidence. It was all just speculation.”

  “Where was her body found?” McLaren had the information from the inquest report, but he wanted to see if Verity’s account was the same.

  Her voice timber changed and the words came slower and softer, as though she were again feeling the pain of her friend’s death. “Near Elton. In a ditch near the road. It was awful. She was pretty badly decomposed by then. The weather and animals…” She broke off, her face devoid of color.

  “Do you know if Marta had friends in Elton?”

  “Why was she found there, in other words.”

  “It would give me a lead if she knew someone in the village.”

  “Sorry. Haven’t a clue. Then, I didn’t know a lot of her friends. I didn’t mingle with them. She and I were merely friendly at the shelter. I hardly ever go anywhere, in fact, so I’m not the best person to ask about her friends—living in or out of Elton.”

  “Where were you after the hymnal session was finished? And the rest of the night.”

  “We finished up around half past ten, I believe. Close to it, anyway.”

  “Marta and Linnet left the casino…at what time?”

  “Just about eleven on the dot.”

  “Thirty minutes difference. Have you an alibi for eleven?”

  “Just that I was home.”

  “Anyone see you?”

  “No.”

  “Probably didn’t matter to your case.”

  “I rang up the police to report my neighbor’s dog. He was barking loudly, incessantly, and had broken out of their back garden. He was running around in my flowers, chasing a rabbit or something. I tried to catch the dog but I couldn’t. My neighbors weren’t home, so I couldn’t get their help. Some few minutes later, at half past eleven, I think, I heard the dog somewhere down the street, in a fight with some other dog. That’s when I rang up police.”

  “They would have a log of your call. Right. Well, the time constraint and distance work in your favor. You couldn’t have driven down to Nottingham at half past ten, found Marta, killed her, and been back by half past eleven to complain about the dog.” Even if someone else phoned from your house, he thought, there’d still be a record of it. It would have been played at the inquest and the case would have taken a different turn.

  “Do you have any ideas yet, Mr. McLaren? Do you think you know who might have killed Marta?”

  He smiled at her enthusiasm. “I’ve just taken on the case, Ms. Dwyer. I need more than a few hours.”

  She nodded, suddenly sober.

  “Perhaps you have an idea. Do you know of anyone who might have held a grudge against her or wished her dead?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  She said it so quickly, so forcibly, McLaren blinked. “Really?”

  “Yes. That neighbor of hers. That kid. Rick Millington. She told me about talking to the constable about the marijuana, which Rick and his group got in trouble over.”

  “You think Rick killed her? A bit far-fetched, isn’t it? If he did ransack her house a bit, it’s a long way from—”

  “If not him, it was his dad.”

  “Really?” His voice held both skepticism and astonishment. “Why do you believe that?”

  “Because he kept coming on to Marta and she wouldn’t have anything to do with him. She loved Alan deeply; she wouldn’t risk her marriage by having an affair with Tom Millington.”

  “Perhaps not intentionally, but a lot of people believe they’ll be faithful for their entire marriage and then suddenly they’re involved with someone.”

  Verity shook her head. Her fingers fumbled with her cigarette, as though she were deciding whether to put it down. “You didn’t know Marta. She had an iron will. She wouldn’t have done that. Especially not with someone like Tom Millington.”

  “What’s wrong with Tom Millington, then?”

  “Have you seen him, talked to him?”

  “Not yet.”

  She shuddered and scrunched up her lips. “When you do, you’ll know what I mean.” She hunched her shoulders and took a drag on the cigarette.

  “So, what you’re saying, then, is that Tom Millington killed Marta because she refused his sexual overtures, correct?�
��

  “Could have done. He gets mad, hits her, she falls, hits her head.” She angled her head, peering at McLaren through the haze of cigarette smoke. “I realize it’s not as good as a written threat or a string of police complaints, but stranger things have happened.”

  McLaren nodded, trying to picture the fight. If it had taken place in Marta’s home, there would have been blood from the head wound. Had Alan found it, cleaned it up, kept it quiet for some reason? Or had the fight taken place in the Millington’s home, or outside somewhere? It could have happened. He said, “You know this about Tom Millington’s sexual advances because you were over at her house once and witnessed it?”

  “Not at all. But we were coworkers. We talked a lot.”

  “About that?”

  “Yes. And about other things. You know—girl talk.”

  McLaren knew what she meant. He’d grown up in a family of women and he’d been engaged. He’d heard enough discussions—serious and comedic—about husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, jobs, diets, bad hair cuts, actors, kids, school grades, health food and love to last him until he turned 100. He could imagine very well Verity and Marta talking about Tom Millington—pro and con.

  “I always wondered if she was killed for her money,” Verity said slowly. Her voice had taken on the heavy, slow manner of someone waking from a deep dream and still held in its spell. She rose from her chair, went to the bookcase, and grabbed a photograph. Three women grinned from the confines of a gold-toned metal frame: Marta, Verity and some other woman. They stood side by side, cheek to cheek, their arms around each other’s shoulders. Best friends, sharing a joke. The photo had been sharing part of the shelf with a half dozen small, ceramic animals. They were lifelike, painstakingly detailed. Several books on raptors, European badgers and wildflowers filled the rest of the shelf. Angling the photo toward McLaren, she said, “Funny, isn’t it? I feel closer to Marta now than when we worked together. Why is that? Does it have something to do with guilt?”

  “Why should you feel guilty? You’ve taken the blame for the missing money. Surely you don’t wish you had been the murder victim instead of Marta.”

  “No,” she said, staring at the picture. “At least… No, I don’t know. At times I’m all right. I go about my day, resigned to my lot and making plans for when this all ends. But there are other times when I think about Marta and how her husband and son must miss her. She had a good many friends, you know. More than I’ll ever have. They must miss her dreadfully.”

  “So to ease or erase their suffering, you think you should have been killed.”

  Verity gently returned the photo to its spot and rearranged a hedgehog. “Sounds absurd when you talk about it. But no, I wouldn’t go that far. I’ve no death wish.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s that she was so young and she was so warm and funny and full of life. Forty-five is awfully young to die, isn’t it?”

  “Most people leave unfinished dreams, Ms. Dwyer, if that’s what you’re thinking. Even if you live to be a hundred, there will probably be something you’ve not done that you wish to. Don’t let Marta’s brief life and her incomplete works haunt you. You had nothing to do with any of this other than be a pawn. It seems to me that you’ve been more than giving.” Who else would make your sacrifices, he thought. Taking the blame, keeping silent.

  “I told Alan I wasn’t going to jail for Marta,” Verity said, breaking the quiet. “I had taken that money, I admit, but I wasn’t going to be saddled with suspicions of Marta’s death, no matter how good my motive was. Those suspicions would cling to me the rest of my life. I said I wasn’t taking the blame for any of it.”

  “What did Alan say?”

  “Nothing much. He just looked at me with those big brown eyes of his, threw his arm around his son’s shoulders like some talisman or bulwark or challenge, and said he was sorry but he couldn’t believe Marta had anything to do with the stolen money. What a laugh. Like he couldn’t believe Marta was capable of anything like that.”

  “He didn’t know about her gambling, then.”

  “Sure, he knew, but not about how often she gambled. It was like she was some perfect little saintly statue, perched atop a pedestal. Only her plaster façade had developed cracks he couldn’t see. Or he chose to overlook.” She took another drag on her cigarette. The cloud of smoke hung in front of her but she ignored it. “I liked Marta; we’d been close friends. Or so I thought until this happened. Until her silence.” She flicked the end of her cigarette over the ashtray. “Though I will say in her defense that she didn’t agree to my arrest when the money discrepancy was discovered. She was vehement about that.”

  “But she didn’t explain why you’d given her the money,” McLaren suggested.

  “No. Other than that little squeak, she didn’t defend me in any way.”

  “And, from what you just told me about Alan’s response, Marta didn’t say a thing to him about the money, either.”

  “If she did, Alan wouldn’t admit in public that his wife was involved in a theft.”

  “Nice couple.”

  Verity snorted. “Not as bad as Bonnie and Clyde or Rosemary and Fred West,” she said, recalling the serial killers. “But bad enough for me.”

  “Especially when you considered her a friend.”

  “Then she repays my friendship that way.”

  “Hard to take.”

  “Harder than Alan being momentarily embarrassed at his precious bank, yes, or having to find another job if his boss looks at him funny.”

  “A slight inconvenience when measured against your situation.”

  “I guess it just showed their true colors, which hurt me deeply.” She crushed out the cigarette. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about all this. Well, you do, don’t you, when you’re serving a sentence?” The street had grown quiet. No traffic drove down the road, no dogs barked, no birds twittered at the windowsill or in the trees. The world seemed to be listening for Verity’s thoughts. “It’s kind of hard to forget. If there hadn’t been all that money… Well, maybe none of this would have happened. What do you think?”

  “Do you mean the money from the animal shelter?”

  “No. The money she won that night at the casino.”

  “I thought she lost. I thought that was the reason she couldn’t put the money back in your cash register, the reason that led to—” He nodded toward the kitchen and the calendar.

  “My year of new experiences. Sorry. I didn’t make it clear. No, I was talking about the night she won, the night she was murdered.”

  “Eleven June.”

  “She’d won a huge amount of money. I know about it because it was brought up at the trial. The croupier testified as to her winning, a player at the table also testified, the cashier testified, and Linnet testified. They all remarked as to the amount. It was the same in each person’s telling: two hundred fifty-three thousand five hundred sixty pounds.”

  “A lot.” McLaren exhaled loudly.

  “More than several year’s salaries, and earned in a moment with a flick of the croupier’s wrist and Marta’s positioning of her chips. Must be nice.”

  “I’ve heard of big wins before, but rarely of a win that large. She must have been over the moon.”

  “I suppose so. I never got to ask her.” She let the implication hang in the air between them.

  “If she was killed that night, what happened to the money she won?”

  “Presumably stolen. It wasn’t found on her body.”

  * * * *

  McLaren was nearly home, approaching Somerley from the copse of birch and willow that sheltered the remains of an old stone barn. It’d been a full day and he had a lot to consider—not only with the case but also with Dena and Karin. Was it coincidence that these two personal segments had cropped up the moment he’d taken on this cold case? He’d left his mobile phone number with Verity, getting her solemn assurance she’d ring him in case she thought of any
thing else. Which he hoped she would—she seemed to be a reliable witness and a person who had a stake in what had happened. That she appeared to hold no grudge against Marta, despite her eleven months community service order and lost job, told him a lot about her character. So yes, he was hoping she would come up with something he could use when she’d had a chance to think.

  He was considering the disappearance of the casino money when he turned down the main street. Dena’s red MG was parked opposite the pub. He stopped his car behind hers, locked his car, and strode into the courtyard. She was sitting at a wrought iron table, writing a letter, but stopped and looked up at him as he came up to her. “Thirsty? Or just thought of a good retort from last night’s conversation?” She shoved a strand of her hair behind her ear. It caught the golden rays of the early evening sun, bringing out the hints of chestnut coloring in its brunette hue. It was also fragrant with the scent of her shampoo—honeysuckle. Like the soap and perfume she used.

  McLaren stared at its beauty, nearly drowning in her scent.

  “Well? Am I supposed to be intimidated by your strong, silent stance, or is this a game of charades and I’m to guess what you’re portraying? Rock of Gibraltar, right? Or a statue of Adonis. It can’t be that you’re tongue-tied. I’ve heard you rabbit on about cases.”

  “For God’s sake, Dena—”

  “Well, that’s a start. Maybe not as nice as ‘Hi, how are you?’ but it’s something. You’re probably rusty—no one to talk to but your pile of rocks. Not that you ever were a smashing conversationalist, but you could always talk about police work. It was just the personal topics, the unleashing of your emotions that you couldn’t handle. Are you any better at that now? Had any practice standing in front of the bathroom mirror?”

  He stared down at her, pain and anger etched on his face. “Why do I—or any copper—get crucified and criticized for the very traits that make us good cops? We’re taught from Day One that we must show no emotion on duty, that we must wear a public face in order to be seen to be in control of any situation.”

  “I’ve heard your recital, Michael. Your safety and your career are on the line if you lose control. Any control. The damned list is endless! Control of your emotions, the victim’s emotions. Control of the traffic, people, the crime scene. Calm down, submit to orders, submit to authority, don’t let the suspect know you’re scared or repulsed or angry or sad or humiliated. You’ll lose your power.”