by AG Barnett
“I’m going to count windows!” she said triumphantly.
“She’s gone loopy,” Pea said quietly to Dot as they hurried behind her.
“It’s the blow on the head,” Dot replied. “I knew I didn’t like the look of that doctor, I don’t think she knew what she was doing at all. All that nonsense about not reading.”
Mary stopped and turned back towards the house and looked up at her bedroom window.
“What are you looking at?” Pea asked as they reached her.
The three of them stared upwards in silence.
“I’m counting windows,” Mary said quietly after a moment. “Think about how someone might have killed Melanie in that room,” she said, turning to them.
“We already have thought about it!” Pea cried. “It’s not bloody possible!”
“It must have been possible, Pea, because the woman is dead, isn’t she?”
“Well, yes, but how?!”
“I can’t see anyone being able to get through that door,” Dot said thoughtfully. “So, I guess you’re thinking it was the window, Mary?”
“I am! Actually, you’re the perfect person to ask this, Dot. Look up at the house and point to— No. Wait. You’ve been in my room. I need to get the others to look at it.”
“Mary, for goodness sake!” Pea cried again, waving his long arms in the air. “What on earth are you talking about?!”
“Think about the guests who haven’t been in my room or yours,” Mary said excitedly. She was feeling a rush of adrenaline she hadn’t experienced in years. Not since the early days of shooting Her Law, when the world had seemed a more exciting place and she had felt more alive.
“OK, I’m thinking about them,” Pea said, folding his arms. “But what’s that got to do with anything?”
“If you asked them to point out Melanie’s room, which window do you think they’d point to?”
The three of them looked up at the house again.
“Well, that one!” Pea said exasperatedly. He pointed a long finger towards the third window in from the left.
“No,” Dot said in a quiet but firm voice.
“They’d think about how many doors were in the corridor and then they’d think about the one window in their room.”
“Exactly!” Mary put her hands on Dot’s shoulders from behind and squeezed them. “So, which window would they think was hers if they didn’t know my room had two in it?”
“Bloody hell,” Pea said in a whisper.
“They’d think it was the second window,” Dot answered. “Which is in your room.”
“So that means if the killer did use the window to kill Melanie, they might have thought it was the next room along, and who was in that?”
“Flintock!” Pea cried, turning back to her, his face alive with excitement.
“Who died just a few hours later,” Mary said smugly, placing her hands on her hips. “Maybe the killer decided to finish the job they had wanted to do in the first place and thought they could wrap Melanie’s murder up at the same time?”
“Bloody hell, Mary,” Pea said, looking at her in awe. “You’re a genius! It’s like you’re actually Susan Law!”
“Hold on,” Dot said, in the tone of someone who was generally against any inflating of Mary’s ego, which she already considered to be of more than sufficient size. “I thought we’d agreed that it would be pretty impossible for anyone to climb up there?”
Mary sighed and looked up at the sheer wall again.
“Yes.”
She walked over to it and ran her hand along the unforgiving stone.
“It’s still a bloody good idea though,” Pea said encouragingly. “You should tell the inspector.”
Mary pictured Corrigan and wondered how he would react to her theory. He would listen, she thought. He was the kind of person who looked into your eyes and listened to every word you had to say, soaking your thoughts up like a sponge. You had to watch yourself around someone like that. Oh, everybody says they want someone who really listens to them, but when faced with the reality of talking to someone who would remember every word you say in the heat of the moment, they’d soon regret it.
She imagined him listening and then nodding, thanking her for the idea and telling her that he would consider it. She couldn’t think of anything worse. She liked to know where she was with people. Tell her it was nonsense or tell her it was brilliant. Don’t keep your cards close to your chest, don’t hedge your bets.
She realised she had been going over the conversation with Corrigan in her head for at least a minute, with the other two shuffling in silence behind her, as she stared at the base of the wall.
Why did he seem to infect her brain like this? On a day when she had discovered a dead body, been knocked unconscious and then discovered that someone else might have been killed as she lay there, he seemed to bother her almost as much as these events.
“Come on,” she said, turning away from the wall. “Let’s go back inside.”
Chapter Twenty
Steve Benz and Emily Hanchurch were sitting at the small bar in the living room in silence. They both looked up as Mary and the others entered but said nothing.
Hetty was on the far side of the large room, apparently talking to an armchair.
“And I thought you were ever so good in that,” Hetty was saying in her loud, yet lyrical country voice. “And it was such a shame that they had you get trampled on by that horse.” She looked up and noticed Mary, Dot and Pea.
“Oh hello!” she said, bustling over. “Now Mary, let me have a good look at it.” She reached up to Mary’s head, where she stared at the bandage the doctor had applied as though she could see through it. “What you need is a good rest and a gin and tonic,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice as she led Mary to the sofa before hurrying off towards the bar.
“Can you make that three?” Pea called after her, causing her to turn around and give him a look that implied she would, but he was pushing it.
“What about Steve Benz,” Mary said with a whisper as she looked across to the bar.
“What about him?” Dot asked.
“Well he had just found out that Melanie was his daughter, maybe he didn’t like how Flintock was speaking to her?”
“It’s a bit of a weak reason to try and murder someone though, isn’t it?” Pea replied. “I mean, I doubt he’s even had time to come to terms with Melanie being his daughter. It seems a bit of a leap from there to killing some man because he was a bit rude to her.”
Mary sighed—he was right.
“In any case,” Pea continued, “if your theory is right, Mary, and Melanie was killed by someone getting through the window somehow, wouldn’t they have known it wasn’t her as soon as they got in there? And wouldn’t she have screamed or something?”
“Maybe they didn’t get in the window. Maybe they fired something through it? It was open after all. Then they might not have known who they were firing at in the dark.”
“But it would have been dark outside, and light inside,” Dot said thoughtfully. “Whoever was in there would have been lit up. You’d have seen whoever you were aiming at.”
“Well, aren’t you two a great bloody help?” Mary huffed as Hetty returned with a tray of four drinks.
“It’s not five o’clock here yet, but I’m sure it is somewhere in the world,” she said as she handed out the tall glasses.
Mary looked out of the long French windows at the fading light. It would be night soon. The prospect of spending the evening in Blancham Hall suddenly didn’t seem so appealing to her. Her childhood home had been turned into a place of death.
“What’s going to happen to this place, Pea?” she asked.
Her brother sighed and swirled the ice in his glass.
“I think we’ll have to sell up. I’ve been approached by a conservation group, they would like to restore it and open the grounds to the public.”
“Oh,” Mary said, unsure of what to feel.
�
�What would you think of that?” Pea asked. “This place is yours too.”
“No it isn’t, Pea,” she said, smiling at him. “You were the only one of us who ever fitted here, you know that. This was somewhere I stayed when I was younger, it wasn’t home like it was for you.” She laughed suddenly. “I was the black sheep of the family.”
“Do you know?” Pea said, looking up at the ornate ceiling. “After all the paperwork and endless bills, and things falling apart all over the place, I think the only thing I’ll really miss is the fishing.”
Hetty laughed as Mary and Dot grinned.
“You always were one for your sports,” Hetty chuckled. “Even though you were bloody useless at all of them!”
This time Mary laughed too. The combination of a gin and tonic and her friends around her lightened her mood considerably.
Pea had always loved fishing, heading off from a young age down to the lake where he would sit for hours without so much as a nibble.
Fishing.
Something was gnawing at the back of Mary’s mind, like a worm that had discovered a juicy apple, but found its skin a tough barrier.
“Fishing,” she said out loud, for no apparent reason that either she or anyone else could be sure of.
“You OK there, Mary?” Hetty said, looking at her oddly.
“Yes,” Mary answered slowly. “I think I am.”
She straightened up, drained the rest of her gin and tonic and turned to her brother.
“Pea, do you have a football here at all?” She raised one eyebrow. Since they had been children, Pea had loved the game. Unfortunately, with his slender build and the coordination of a baby deer on ice, he never actually played, other than to constantly walk everywhere with a football either under his arm or at his feet for months, until the next sport came along.
“Yes,” he said, his cheeks glowing somewhat as he glanced at Dot’s inquisitive expression. “There’s one in my bedroom if you must know.”
“And have you got another long extension cord like the one you used on the roof for the mulled cider?”
“Um, yes, I think there’s another one in the storage cupboard on the roof. Why?”
“Don’t worry about that, I just want you to get the football, give it to me, and then take Inspector Corrigan and all go and stand in Melanie’s room, OK?”
She watched her three friends look at each other, reading the concern on their faces.
“My head is fine!” she said, rolling her eyes. “Come on!”
Chapter Twenty-One
Mary rummaged around in the small wooden box that acted as a cupboard for the various items that were used on the roof terrace from time to time. A small barbecue was positioned in one corner with logs for the fire pit piled between its legs. There were wires and extension leads and space where the mulled cider vat normally was. Mary grabbed a long white extension cord from the top shelf and moved across the roof as she unwound it.
Would this work? She didn’t have a clue, but in the absence of any other theory, it was worth a shot. She cursed herself for not thinking of it sooner. The noises she had heard in the night, the open window, where Melanie had been in the room. It all made sense now, but only if this experiment worked.
She peered over the edge of the wall and looked down at the windows below, being careful not to lean on the crumbling wall where she could see that a large chunk had already tumbled down into the grass.
She gently lowered the end with the plug down over the wall and fed out the wire.
“You are clever, Mary, I’ll give you that,”
She spun around towards the voice. Freddie Hale was leaning against the wall where the staircase rose onto the roof via the door. He had a smile on his lips, but there was no humour there. His eyes were sunken and red, his cheeks pale.
Mary left the wire hanging over the edge and moved away from the wall, moving sideways further into the middle of the roof.
“Freddie, is everything OK?” she said, trying to keep her voice light.
“No, Mary, nothing’s OK. I’m not sure it ever will be now.” His voice was flat, unemotional. He began to move towards her and her heart started to pound.
“It was an accident, wasn’t it, Freddie?” she said. “You didn’t mean to hurt Melanie, did you?”
“No, but I meant to hurt someone.”
“Flintock? But why?”
“He wouldn’t let me leave him.” He took another step forward. “Melanie had said she couldn’t respect someone who wouldn’t stand up for themselves. She said I had to leave him or we were through.”
“But Flintock wouldn’t let you go?”
Freddie shook his head and took another step forward. She could see now that his eyes were wet with tears.
“He had me tied up in a contract that was unbreakable. I signed it years ago when I was younger. I didn’t have a clue what it all meant then, but it would have bankrupted me if I’d left.”
“So, you decided to just remove the problem?”
“I was drunk, I wasn’t thinking straight!” he snapped suddenly, his hands reaching up and wrenching at his mop of hair as his face twisted in anguish.
“I just couldn’t let him ruin everything!” he moaned, his fingers clawing his cheeks, leaving red, angry marks. “He just wouldn’t let me breathe! I’d met him downstairs in the kitchen, he was laughing at me. He told me that I shouldn’t have been naive enough to sign something I didn’t understand. He said we were locked together and that he wasn’t going to let Melanie get in our way. I came up here and finished the cider.”
“When did you realise it wasn’t Flintock you’d killed?”
He recoiled as though she had slapped him.
“I didn’t know, I couldn’t see, it was dark.” He spoke in short bursts, as though the words were coming out as unwillingly as vomit. “I tried to get her to let me in, I was going to tell her what I’d done.”
“That’s when I saw you on the landing, knocking at her door?”
“Yes. She didn’t answer.” His voice faded away, his eyes glazed.
Mary inched to her left, eyeing the doorway that led to the spiral staircase downwards. As she was judging the distance and whether she would be able to slip past Freddie before he reacted, the door opened and Steve Benz stepped out, followed by Emily Hanchurch.
They froze as they surveyed the scene. Mary’s eyes flickered to Freddie, who still seemed locked in his own, dark thoughts.
“And once you realised you had killed her, you decided to finish the job you had wanted to do on Flintock?” Mary said in a voice loud enough to carry to the two newcomers.
Freddie looked up at her with lifeless eyes.
“It was his fault. She died because of him. He had to pay.”
Mary listened to the flat, staccato speech as her eyes flickered to Steve, who was standing behind him. He had gestured to Emily to stay and picked up a short length of wood that had been leaning against the wall to the right of the doorway.
Mary realised she had given Steve away as Freddie’s face creased into a frown of confusion and he began to turn.
She acted on instinct. The frustrations and stress of the last few weeks pouring out of her in one pure moment of rage and anguish. She charged at him, hitting him in the back with her shoulder as hard as she could, and sending them both sprawling onto the gravelled surface.
Freddie was fighting to right himself from the moment he hit the floor and threw Mary off to one side just as Steve Benz swung the length of wood, bringing it down on Freddie’s head with a dull thunk that rendered him motionless on the floor.
“Thank you,” Mary said breathlessly as she pulled herself to her feet. Steve was standing over Freddie with fire in his eyes and a furious expression that Mary had never seen in him before. It contorted his plain face into something to be feared.
She watched as he slowly raised the wood once more, looming over the prone figure. With horror, Mary realised that Steve Benz was going to strike Freddie aga
in, and then again, and that he wouldn’t stop until the man who had killed the daughter he had just met, had shared her fate.
She tried to shout, but her throat had tightened in fear. Instead, it was Emily who shouted.
“Steve!”
Steve Benz froze with his arms high above his head, the wood still. Mary watched the fury fall from his face, to be replaced by sadness. His arms sagged and the wood clattered to the floor. Emily put her hand around him and turned him away from them.
The door leading down to the house banged open and Mary looked up to see Corrigan framed in the doorway. His deep brown eyes scanned the scene in an instant before he headed towards Mary at speed.
“Are you OK, Miss Blake?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Mary said, getting up and brushing herself down. “Though you might want a constable to come and arrest Freddie Hale for the murder of both Melanie Shaw and Dave Flintock.” She put her hands on her hips, feeling every bit the character of Susan Law that she had played for so many years.
Corrigan smiled and turned to the uniformed officer who had followed him onto the roof.
“Check Mr Hale’s injuries and if he’s OK, make sure he’s restrained,” he said in a jovial tone. “Well, Miss Blake,” he turned back to her, “it seems you keep turning up in the middle of this mess. Now you’re telling me that you’ve discovered who the culprit is, and it’s Mr Hale here?”
“She’s right,” Steve Benz said, stepping towards them with Emily on his arm. He was composed again now; all traces of the furious anger Mary had seen earlier were gone. “I heard Hale admit it. He was going to kill Mary too until I hit him over the head.”
“Ha!” Mary exclaimed. “He could have tried, I’m the one who tackled him to the floor.”
Freddie Hale groaned himself awake as he was raised to his feet by the constable.
“We’ll need to take a statement from all of you, and I think it’s time we ran the gauntlet of the press and got you all down to the station. First, though, I believe you were going to show us something that would shed light on how Melanie was killed inside a locked room?”
