Murder Most Frequent: three more Inspector Constable mysteries (The Inspector Constable Murder Mysteries Book 5)

by Roger Keevil

  “Sounds ideal, guv,” said Copper. “Do you want me to get on to that?”

  “Please do, sergeant.”

  “You'll need to talk to the librarian, sergeant. Penny, have you got Phyllis's number?”

  “Bob'll have it behind the bar somewhere.” Penny was sounding increasingly fragile. “Inspector, do you mind if I go and lie down? I'm really not feeling very well.”

  “Of course, Mrs. Farmer,” said Constable kindly. “It's the shock – it happens to everyone in circumstances like these. Get somebody to bring you a cup of tea.”

  “I'll do it.” Sam jumped to his feet. “And then … inspector, would it be okay if I got back to work? Only I'm sure Bob's going to be busy downstairs, what with all the lunchtime customers ...”

  “Yes, by all means, Mr. Booker. We'll talk again at a more convenient time.”

  “Thank you, Sam,” murmured Penny, holding out a hand to the barman. “You are a godsend.”

  “I'll … er … I won't be long.” Sam bolted from the room.

  “Shall I go and see if Bob's got that number for you, sergeant?” asked Mark.

  “We'll all go, sir,” said Constable. “We'll leave Mrs. Farmer in peace for a while.” He stood and led the way downstairs.

  *

  “Rex Hope's dead?” Phyllis Stein's long thin nose quivered with a mixture of horror and excitement as she unlocked the front door of the Old School. “I still can't believe it! Mind you,” she continued in a more subdued tone, “not that I suppose any of us should be surprised, the way he carried on sometimes. But nobody deserves to die, do they? And stabbed, you say? How horrible!” She threw open a door to the right and ushered the detectives into a large room with high arched windows, furnished with a quantity of folding tables, with stacks of plastic chairs at one end. “Will this be suitable for you?”

  Andy Constable looked around approvingly. “I think this will do very well, Miss Stein. Plenty of power points – although I don't suppose you have particularly high-speed broadband out here in the sticks, do you?”

  “Ah, but we do, inspector,” beamed Phyllis. “The council organised it specially when the library was established. Well, I made sure that they did. I couldn't possibly be expected to run a library without all the modern internet access now, could I? And in all modesty, I'm not without influence, so I'm sure there won't be any difficulty in getting in touch with the other users and cancelling their bookings. I'm hall secretary too, you see.”

  Constable felt faintly intimidated by Phyllis's self-assurance. “That's extremely kind of you, Miss Stein. And we'll square everything with the council from our end. We'll move things in tomorrow morning, if that will be all right with you.”

  “Perfectly, inspector. And you'd better have a spare key, hadn't you? I think I can trust you with it – not that I give them out to just anyone, you know. I've got one through here in my desk.” She led the way into what Constable assumed was the other former classroom, now dotted with fully-laden tall bookcases. “In case you have to be coming and going at all hours. I'm not quite here absolutely all the time, you know.” The middle-aged spinster gave an incongruously girlish giggle. “Even though it feels like it sometimes. So if there's ever anything you need, I'm just through here in the library. Oh, by the way, there's a little kitchenette and the … er … usual offices through that little door there in the hallway. So, I expect you'll be as snug as a bug in a rug.”

  “Thank you, Miss Stein,” replied Constable, suppressing a smile. “We shall do our best.”

  “What next then, guv?” enquired Copper, as the two headed back down School Lane towards their cars, the sound of jingling keys fading behind them as Phyllis relocked the Old School front door.

  “Let's see what more we can find out about the dead man,” said Constable. “You never know, the old adage 'know the man and you know his killer' may be true in this case. You said you've got the address and some keys.”

  “Right here, guv. 'Lombard Cottage, The Green, Blaston Dammett', according to his driving licence, so if I'm any kind of detective, it should be somewhere around here.” The bottom of the lane opened out into a large open space, one side dominated by the lofty presence of the Three Blind Mice, the centre grassed, with a reed-fringed duckpond alongside a modest stone war memorial, and the other sides lined with houses and cottages in various styles. “Left or right, guv?”

  “Whichever way we go, it'll no doubt be the last place we get to,” smiled Constable. “Left.” He set out to follow the road which encircled the Green.

  As it turned out, he was unduly pessimistic. Lombard Cottage stood almost exactly halfway round the circuit, its whitewashed frontage shielded from the road by only a white picket fence and a small front garden, mostly gravelled, with a few evergreen shrubs in tastefully disposed terracotta pots. The double Georgian frontage, sash windows arranged in perfect symmetry about the black-painted front door with its gleaming brass dolphin knocker, forsook all attempts at ostentation, yet subtly hinted at a degree of style and elegance within. Copper selected what looked like the appropriate key and opened the door.

  The hall had the air of having been recently decorated by a designer with exacting but minimalist tastes. A white-painted staircase rose straight ahead, its treads bearing the same carpet in some sort of woven plant material as that which covered the floor of the hall. Walls painted in the palest of creams displayed two or three large framed prints of architect's drawings of buildings in the Palladian style, while a small sofa table in a light wood under a wall mirror was adorned with nothing other than a stylised wooden sculpture of a seagull and a large ceramic charger with a motif of cream and brown swirls. A door to the left led through to a sitting room which stretched the full depth of the house, furnished with a pair of large cream leather sofas artistically dotted with cushions in shades of caramel and chocolate, a large flat-screen television in the recess to one side of the evidently original marble fireplace, and a mahogany Georgian bureau in the other. Small tables bore lamps of a modernist design. The hall carpet was carried through to the french windows at the rear, which gave a glimpse of the garden beyond.

  “Not exactly what you'd call characterful, is it, sir?” remarked Copper. “It feels more like a hotel than anything.”

  “My thoughts precisely,” agreed Constable. “Doesn't tell us a lot about the man, does it? Let's see if the rest of the place is any more forthcoming.”

  It wasn't. The dining room on the opposite side of the hall was furnished with table and chairs of Scandinavian design, with on the walls a sprinkling of monochrome prints of birch forests in the snow to reinforce the image. The kitchen, with glass-fronted wall cupboards and black granite worktops, resembled that of a show house. Upstairs, the main bedroom was again a study in white, with a deep carpet, a king-size bed with a scatter of cushions in amber and ochre, and one wall lined with mirror-fronted wardrobes which, when opened, revealed an immaculate array of suits and shirts, shelves with neatly-stowed jumpers and underwear, and a full-height rack of shoes. The en-suite bathroom was just as unrevealing – a white claw-foot bath, an obviously expensive suite of fittings, and a cabinet of toiletries from an extremely prestigious shop in London's Burlington Arcade. The other two bedrooms were simply furnished, with a single bed in each together with wardrobes and cabinets of plain design but good quality, and seemed to be unused.

  “Don't know what to make of him, guv,” said Copper, as the detectives descended the stairs. “Obviously, loads of money but a real ...”

  “Conundrum,” broke in Constable. “There has to be something about him, otherwise what is he doing lying murdered in a wood?”

  “I suppose it could have just been random,” said Copper. “Kid with a knife, hanging about to mug somebody – something went wrong, and our bloke ends up dead.”

  “Not actually likely, though, is it, sergeant?” said Constable. “For a start, look at the location. It's not exactly somewhere where you're going to get a lot of passing tra
ffic, is it? Plus stabbing in the back? That's not really classic mugging, is it? And you said there was a bum-bag?”

  “Yes, guv. That's where I snaffled the keys from. SOCO have got it now.”

  “Together with the rest of the contents, no doubt. Like the wallet that the chap's driving licence was in. A phone, maybe?”

  “Oh.” Copper was crestfallen. “Of course, you're right, sir. I didn't think it through. Sorry.”

  “Not to worry, sergeant,” responded Constable breezily. “When you've got as little to go on so far as we have, even daft suggestions sometimes bear fruit. I suspect we may get some idea of a motive once we've had a chance to talk to a few people. And ...” His eye lighted on the bureau in the sitting room. “Once we've had a chance to take a look through this.” He sat down, dropped the front leaf, and began to browse through the sheaf of papers revealed. “Ah. Well, here's an answer to one of our questions. Now we know where the loads of money come from.”

  “And where's that, sir?”

  “He worked in the City of London.” The sound of riffling paper. “Some kind of trader with Morgmann Brothers.”

  “Never heard of them, sir.”

  “To be honest, I don't really know that much about them. I've just heard them mentioned on the money programmes on the BBC from time to time. Moving cash, buying investments, that kind of activity – not exactly the sort of thing I'm going to be chucking my pension at when it finally arrives, but I know that some people do. So that's how Mr. Hope managed to finance this rather pleasant house with its rather expensive contents.”

  “So maybe somebody killed him because he was rich. Not everybody loves a banker these days.”

  “True, but a mite tenuous. Let's see what else we've got. Oho!”

  “Oho, sir? Really?” Copper sounded amused.

  “Could have been worse,” admitted Constable. “I could have said 'hello, hello, what have we here?'.”

  “And what have we, sir?”

  “An address book.”

  “You what?” Copper was incredulous. “That's all a bit antediluvian, isn't it, guv? Who keeps an address book these days? I've got everything on my phone.”

  “Hmmm.” Constable leafed through the pages. “Phones can fall into the wrong hands. And sometimes you might want to keep a little book for a particular reason.”

  “Such as …?”

  “That I don't know. But I'll tell you one thing that strikes me. All the names in here are women, Penny Farmer among them. And … oh look … one of them has the Sword and Dagger as her address. One Adelaide Knight. Or, for short, Addy, as mentioned by Mrs. Farmer. What a coincidence.”

  “Her pub being the place where Rex Hope was last seen alive, sir.”

  “Exactly. So, let's follow the trail and go and see the lady. You never know, we may actually be beginning to get somewhere.”

  *

  The car park at the rear of the Sword and Dagger was emptying rapidly as Andy Constable and Dave Copper drove in and parked alongside one another in a corner. Entering the bar, the detectives found it sparsely populated by a straggle of customers who looked as if they were in the throes of polishing off the last of their drinks before heading home for a late Sunday lunch. The smiling young woman behind the bar greeted them brightly.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen. What can I get you?”

  “Police.” Constable and Copper both proffered their warrant cards. “We're looking for Mrs. Knight. Would that be you?”

  “No, I'm Anna. Addy's out in the kitchen. And by the way, it's Miss.” Constable and Copper exchanged glances. “Oh … this is about poor Rex, isn't it? I'll get her for you.” Anna pushed through the door at the rear of the bar, and a murmur of voices was heard.

  “Good afternoon.” A woman appeared in the doorway. Mid-forties, Constable guessed. With short dark hair, and dressed in jeans and a check blouse, she exuded confidence. “I thought somebody would be round before too long. I'm Adelaide Knight. I gather you're looking for me.”

  “We are, Miss Knight. I'm Detective Inspector Constable and this is Detective Sergeant Copper.” The two re-presented their identification. “And I'd like to ask you a few questions.”

  “Good lord, that takes me back,” responded Addy unexpectedly. “The number of times I've heard a conversation start with those words.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Constable sounded puzzled.

  Addy laughed. “Sorry, inspector. It's just that we're on the same side. Well, used to be. I'm ex-Met. Used to earn my living in the big city before I came out to live in greener pastures.”

  “Uniform?”

  “Plain-clothes. Actually, extremely plain. I used to be part of one of the protection squads.”

  Constable was impressed. “Exciting stuff, I should imagine. Can't think why you'd want to give up something like that. Don't you find country life rather dull by comparison?”

  Addy shrugged. “Oh, there was a bit of a misunderstanding, and I had the chance to get out early with quite a nice pay-off, so I grabbed it. Just enough to enable me to get this place. Anyway, I expect you're not here to talk about me. And as for dull, if life around here were that dull you wouldn't be standing in my bar.”

  “True, Miss Knight. Obviously I need to know what you can tell me about the events of this morning.” Constable looked around. Just one or two customers remained, but his eye lit on a quiet corner at the far end of the room. “Shall we sit down?”

  “Do you want a drink while we talk? We brew a very fine drop of ale here,” coaxed Addy. “Three, in fact. Or are you going to stick to the 'not while on duty' mantra?”

  “I think we'd better,” replied Constable, ignoring Copper's appealing look and faint groan of disappointment. And as the three seated themselves, “Now, I gather that this was the last place Rex Hope was seen alive.”

  “Not by me,” said Addy. “I was out the back in the brewery at the time. My girl Anna saw Penny Farmer and her little trail of hangers-on – you'd better speak to her if you want any information about that.”

  “We shall. But there are one or two things I'd like to clarify. You knew Rex Hope, I take it?”

  “Yes. Everybody knew Rex.”

  “Well?”

  “Not especially. Why?”

  “I was just wondering why your name would feature in a little book we found in Mr. Hope's house. Names, addresses, phone numbers – quite a number of ladies.”

  Addy smiled wryly. “Yes, that sounds like Rex. He was … how shall I put it … always eager to expand his circle of friends.”

  “Including yourself?”

  “He might have wanted to,” snorted Addy. “It didn't do him much good!”

  “So are you saying he made advances? Unwelcome ones?”

  “Nothing I couldn't handle, Mr. Constable.” Addy gazed levelly at the inspector.

  “Well, that's good to know. How about other people? Can you think of anyone else who might not have felt as capable as yourself? Anyone who might have had something against him?”

  “You're talking about enemies, aren't you, inspector?”

  “Frankly, yes.”

  “I couldn't honestly say. I never really had any dealings with him, so he never did me any harm. As for anyone else, they'll have to speak for themselves. Why don't you ask around?” Addy clamped her lips firmly together. Evidently there was a story to be told, but it was clear that she was not prepared to reveal anything further.

  Constable elected to leave the matter for the moment. “No doubt that's exactly what we shall be doing, Miss Knight. And if there's nothing more you can tell us about this morning, we'd better speak to your colleague.”

  “Anna,” called Addy. “Can you come over here, please.” She stood. “I'll leave her to you.”

  “Take a seat, Anna,” said Constable affably, as the young barmaid approached nervously. “So, it's Miss …?”

  “Prentiss. Two 's'es.”

  “And you work here in the bar.”

  “Only
at weekends. I'm a student at Camford. Chemistry.”

  “ I see.” Constable smiled. “Must come in handy if you have anything to do with the pub home-brews.”

  “Er … yes.” Anna nodded uncertainly.

  “Now, I understand you may have been the last person to see Mr. Hope alive. Can you tell me what happened?”

  “Not much, really. Mr. Hope and the others were out training for the run ...”

  “People keep mentioning this 'run',” broke in Constable. “I don't actually know what that's all about.”

  “It's some sort of village tradition,” explained Anna. “I don't really know the history of it – some sort of fun charity thing, I think. And all sorts of teams take part, including two from the two pubs in the village – us and the Three Blind Mice, that is. There's an old rivalry which goes back years, but it's all quite friendly really.”

  “And are you part of the team from the Dagger?”

  “Yes. There's me, Addy, and Barbara.”

  “Who?”

  “Barbara Dwyer. She's one of our customers. She lives just round the corner in Church Lane. Number 8,” she added, in response to Copper's interrogative eyebrow as he made notes.

  “And Mr. Hope and the others were out for a run …?” prompted Constable.

  “And they stopped off here for a breather, and Mr. Hope said he fancied a coffee, but the others didn't. So they carried on while Mr. Hope came inside and I made him his coffee. He took it back outside, and then he must have gone off after them just a few minutes later.”

  “And that was the last you saw of him?”

  “Yes. I went out to fetch his cup, and he'd gone.”

  “One thing I notice, Anna,” said the inspector. “You refer to Mr. Hope as just that – Mr. Hope. Everyone else calls him Rex. Any special reason?”

  Anna seemed slightly flustered by the question. “No. It's just that … well, he was quite a bit older than me. Not that that seemed to bother him.”

  “Ah.” Constable pounced on the unguarded remark. “Are you saying that Mr. Hope was maybe a little friendlier towards you than you wanted him to be?”