Last to Leave

by Clare Curzon

  Extending the line of footmarks across the island – ‘hide’ in both senses of the word now, Salmon thought grimly – there was a point on the farther road where a car had been run on to the grass verge. Tyre tracks had been photographed and measured.

  ‘Right,’ Salmon declared. He ordered Accident Notices to be erected on that spot asking the public for information regarding cars seen parked there. ‘Copies to local press,’ he demanded.

  Size eight shoes, narrow, with squarish heels. What were the chances of that description fitting the Railton boy’s biking boots? He guessed Jake would be no more than five feet five, so he’d almost put money on it.

  19

  Beaumont had at last succeeded in running Jake Railton to earth. He was lodging at a student pad with the fellow-biker his father had spoken of. Both were found in sleeping bags on the floor and rather the worse for wear, having survived a night in the cells at West End Central. This had followed a wild round of clubbing that ended with a police raid to pick up dealers in a sleazy joint in Soho.

  The combined experience had required a sixteen-hour sleep-off and provided a cast-iron alibi for the time of the RTA at Woodside. Jake, decidedly frail after a bad experience with Ecstasy and the subsequent humiliation, was further shaken when told of the deaths of his stepmother and her father.

  Beaumont brought Salmon up to date by phone, and the DI took it sourly. This additional blow followed a check on Gus’s own alibi of having spent the crucial night with a single mother of two teenage children, all of whom vouched for his presence at supper and breakfast. Salmon’s pet theory crumbled totally when he learned that Jake’s biking boots were size ten with corrugated sole and broad fitting.

  ‘Bring both Railtons in, just the same,’ he ordered. ‘They may yet lead us to whoever the biker was.’

  ‘If there ever was one,’ Yeadings cautioned. ‘All eye-witnesses were questioned on that point and not one of them recalls seeing a biker at any point on the route between Windsor and the roundabout. The anonymous phone call is all we have on him. I want a copy of that tape.’

  When it was produced he listened to it along with Salmon and Zyczynski. The recording had a crackle of static and the voice sounded muffled. ‘A woman?’ Yeadings asked the others. On the whole they agreed. It was a high rush of words with no pause for breathing and had an unnatural reedy quality.

  ‘Maybe,’ the Boss said. ‘Maybe not. Let’s check.’ He sent for Sergeant Boddy who had been a recording engineer and still put on gigs as a weekend money-spinner. He listened with the others and decided it was an amateur rerecording with the tempo speeded up. ‘If I slow it down the voice will be deeper,’ he told them. ‘Let me take it off for a try.’

  Beaumont, who had returned and left the Railtons in separate interview rooms to cool their heels, was there with them when Boddy brought the changed tape back and played it over. ‘What do you think? Is that a man now?’

  It could be either. ‘Maybe a deep-voiced woman,’ Yeadings suggested innocently, wondering if Salmon would pick up the hint.

  He did. ‘Claudia Dellar,’ he declared with conviction, leaping back to his alternative suspect. ‘She could have set up the crash and put this call out as a diversion.’

  ‘Quoting a licence number that must lead us to Jake Railton? Spiteful, wouldn’t you say? Now that he’s got the Met to establish his alibi, it certainly looks as though he wasn’t on somebody’s list of favourites. If we ask the lady to come back and explain herself when she’s barely had time to turn round at Cooden Beach from the last trip, she won’t be best pleased.’

  Beaumont was looking doubtful. ‘I grant the old harpy’s capable of spite but she can’t have fixed the crash herself, and I don’t see her putting out a contract on her brother-in-law. She’s a tough old loner. Where would she get hold of someone to do the job for her?’

  ‘Why not some member of the family?’ Salmon sneered, eager not to have this possibility shot down.

  ‘None of them would risk it for love,’ Z protested. ‘So she’d need to have a hold over someone. And anyway why would she want either of those two dead? Not for money, since she already had her scam set up for the insurance compensation.’

  ‘Some people never have enough,’ Salmon growled.

  ‘But she’d hardly be likely to inherit from them.’

  Yeadings decided the discussion was degenerating towards peevishness, but forbore to point out that there were alternative motives for murder. Pure hate for one. He felt the grim elderly wife of the poet might have a lot of that stored up over the years, whether or not she was behind the crash scene. And again the cause might well lie in the dead man himself. His daughter’s death could have been incidental.

  In a long career of pursuing others’ just, or unjust, deserts, Sir Matthew would have handed out a helluva lot of grief. Besides those who made open threats of revenge, there would be others who stayed silent, nourishing their hatred, building rancour and resentment towards the final explosion. There was no knowing how many there were like that.

  If Sir Matthew Dellar had been the prey of such a one, then the secret to finding the predator could involve a long and arduous task digging into legal history.

  ‘We have enough to hold her,’ Salmon pursued, still on Claudia’s trail. ‘Wasting police time for a start. Then we keep on at her. In a cell, isolated from the others, she’ll break down eventually.’

  ‘She’d get bail,’ Beaumont complained. ‘An old bird like that.’

  Yeadings sighed. ‘The phone call’s peripheral. I’ll grant it was an act of spite, and I’m persuaded she did it, but we’re off the main track there. Bring her back by all means and I’m happy to drag the truth out of her, but don’t expect fireworks. What’s more she’s astute enough to turn round and accuse us of undue harassment.’

  He glanced at his watch. ‘I’ve someone to see in London. And the Railtons are waiting to be finally sorted out. When you’re satisfied, leave a note on my desk.’

  Randolph Metcalfe had already been shown to their table and was more than halfway through a double vodka Martini. ‘On your tab,’ he said mockingly, raising his glass in greeting to Yeadings as he came across.

  ‘Order another,’ the Boss said. ‘I’ll have the same. Plus a litre of still mineral water. Have you had a look at the menu? Anything inspiring there?’

  They settled to old codgers’ talk, covered the necessary inquiries about family and acquaintances in common who’d slid out of view for the one or the other.

  ‘So,’ Metcalfe finally demanded, peaking his quizzical eyebrows, ‘to what do I owe this sudden retrieval from your past?’

  ‘Funny you should say that,’ Yeadings responded. ‘It’s the past I’d like you to wander back into. I’m hoping you’ll recall some of your early days at Fairweather, Mottram and Sneel.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with my memory,’ the other man claimed waspishly. ‘It’s a question of discretion, though. Can’t let the snoopers in on our sanctified history, y’know.’

  But he was mellowing already. That hadn’t been his first vodka while he was waiting for his host.

  ‘Less sanctified that sanitized perhaps in some cases,’ Yeadings dared to suggest.

  The elderly barrister snickered. ‘Recovered scandals,’ he said, delighted. ‘And with no eavesdroppers to pick up on them. What a fascinating invitation. I just hope we aren’t being illicitly recorded.’

  ‘No. I’m simply curious.’ The man was getting too arch for Yeadings’ liking. It was good that the main course had arrived, offering a solid base for all that swilling alcohol. Time to introduce the quarry’s name. ‘Sir Matthew Dellar.’

  Metcalfe laid down his knife and fork. ‘The recently late Sir Matthew Dellar in fact. Actually only mister in the days when we entered by the same front door.

  ‘Now there was a shark if ever there was one. His was always the wig most likely to grow long side-curls. Done very nicely for himself one way and another, I must admit.’
/>   Metcalfe applied himself to his food and didn’t look up for some minutes. Yeadings was afraid he’d dried up; but apparently he was savouring in advance the titbits he was about to drop. When he was ready he unloaded.

  There were a number of choice tales, mostly of cases where Dellar had craftily shafted rivals. Metcalfe was careful to omit his own name from these, but then he’d been considerably junior to the rising star.

  Dellar’s success was owed to more than the winning of lucrative cases; he’d been selective in whom he cultivated, and the Head of Chambers had seen him as his blue-eyed boy.

  ‘Which required some skilled cover-up since the old fellow was a stickler for puritan wholesomeness,’ Metcalfe related with relish. ‘And any of us in the know were careful not to cross the path of a man in the ascendant.’

  ‘What was the thin ice then?’

  ‘Dellar wasn’t married. In those days that was a bit suspect, although no one was likely to speculate on it openly. He kept everyone guessing, though a couple of young men’s names did get hinted at. Then there was that poor cow Gilmour. God knows how many years he kept her dangling in the background. She was a young solicitor in the firm and quite a dish. We heard later they’d kept a love-nest south of the river – Balham or some such place – and she’d been expecting a child. Never heard what became of it, though. He probably made arrangements for it, since he’d defended a number of seedy medics.’

  ‘You mean an abortion?’

  ‘Illegal then, of course, but there was an unofficial trade for those who could afford it.’

  ‘Where would this girl be now?’

  Metcalfe gave a cackle of laughter. ‘Some girl! She’d be a right old crone by now. Gave up completely, like the light went out. Got on the wrong side of old Mottram and disappeared from chambers. We heard later she’d married Dellar’s brother, a writer of sorts but not much cop. Bit of a comedown after the big man himself. Matthew, of course, pulled off a real coup in the marriage stakes and I guess that’s what put paid to the Balham love-nest. Money, y’know. He simply off-loaded the mistress. Well, even he knew better than to shit in his own territory.’

  ‘Gilmour,’ Yeadings repeated thoughtfullly. ‘Claudia Gilmour; would that be?’

  ‘You’ve got it. Tall girl, quite a smasher in a lanky, Virginia Woolf-ish sort of way. Lovely bones,’ he admitted sadly.

  Yeadings drove back to South Bucks with plenty to ponder. He had dropped Metcalfe off at his depressing basement flat in Kilburn. He was a boring old fart but the lunch had left him in a happy half-stupor. Yeadings was grateful, but not enough to make a further arrangement to meet up. He hadn’t missed the scuffed shoes and threadbare cuffs of a long-divorced solitary. They reminded him of the delaying hand of the Ancient Mariner.

  The story had given him a totally new slant on Claudia Dellar, wife now to the brother of her one-time lover, and a mother for a second time. It was too easy, in the case of elderly women, to overlook that once they had been different, young and irresponsible. Miranda, her gifted and strangely detached daughter, was aged thirty. How old would the first child be if it had survived its father’s ‘arrangement’?

  Dellar had been a cold-blooded swine, Yeadings decided. How right he’d been to see the man as meting out grief. It wasn’t clear how Claudia had reacted all those years back, watching her longtime lover move on to someone else, when she had aborted her baby.

  What possessed her to settle for the older brother so much the opposite of the coruscating and successful Matthew? Metcalfe had implied that in that she’d passively submitted to her ex-lover’s diktat, or been dismissively paid off. If so, with such a dominant personality as hers it must rankle even now, to have been summarily dumped, and for money.

  Once it was passed on, this account would only serve to strengthen Salmon’s conviction that she was behind an attempt to kill Sir Matthew Dellar. Money might still indirectly be a part of the motive, but Yeadings’ gut reaction was to see it as a crime of revenge.

  It hadn’t taken Gus Railton long to repeat his account of how he had come to miss the dinner at Windsor with his wife and father-in-law. Questioned, he agreed that he had passed on the story of his spat with Maddie to his son, who then also decided to drop out.

  ‘It stands to reason,’ he appealed to the hard-faced men across the interview room table, ‘that he wouldn’t enjoy an evening with the two of them under those circumstances. Dellar was in a twisted and withering mood and Maddie was nervy. I quite agreed with his decision to go off and join his friends. He’s a decent lad at heart and he’s had a lot to put up with of late. It isn’t easy, you know, for a young man to live under the thumb of a killjoy.’

  ‘But no harder than for you perhaps?’ Beaumont suggested.

  ‘I’ll admit it was difficult at times. I dared not face up to the old bugger. It would have upset Maddie. He was her father after all.’

  ‘Hardest of all for her, caught in the middle.’

  ‘I guess so. And at her time of life …The change, you know.’

  Pulling out all the stops, Beaumont thought. The sobbing strings now. He was sorry for the poor sod, but he’d only himself to blame, walking into a situation like that. He should have stood firm for a marital home without the live-in older generation. Or taken one good look at the family and run for his life.

  ‘Right,’ Salmon said finally. ‘Go with the constable here and write it all down, then sign it. Remember we already have it on tape.’

  ‘In which case a written statement shouldn’t be needed,’ Railton protested, bolder once he knew the questioning was over.

  Salmon smiled nastily. ‘They still prefer it in writing,’ he said, ‘once it gets to court.’

  They let Gus go. He was passed in the corridor by his son looking apprehensive.

  ‘Horsy, keep yer tail up,’ Gus quoted and got a blank stare in return.

  Jake had had more than enough of policemen in the last two days. He faced this new DI with a sulky scowl. DS Beaumont, familiar enough by now, didn’t actually make him puke but he was filth all the same.

  Salmon’s disgust with Jake’s use of the Met for his alibi translated itself into disagreeable quibbling over all details of the young man’s statement and prolonging an interview that wasn’t of first importance. Since by then Jake was wise to this, the DI’s manoeuvre succeeded only in increasing his bad humour. He retaliated by adopting an upper-class drawl and a vocabulary which he judged, sometimes rightly, would be foreign to a mere detective inspector. As a result the atmosphere in the small, enclosed room became increasingly tense and heated.

  Beaumont, however, accustomed to teenager-at-bay strategy, happily collected some choice phrases to pass later to his own occasionally errant son.

  Eventually the mental jousting ceased, from exhaustion of material to fling at each other. Jake was entrusted to Beaumont to write his punitive lines and Salmon, uptight with frustration, retired to pass on his spleen elsewhere.

  It pleased Jake to make an involved mess of his written statement. Beaumont, unmoved, scanned the first few lines over his shoulder and binned the paper. ‘Can you manage a computer keyboard?’ he asked mildly, knowing pride wouldn’t permit making a hash of IT literacy Jake gave a lopsided grin and gave in.

  Robert Dellar had been in the West Country chasing the story of a rumoured supermarket takeover when news came through of the accident at Woodside roundabout. It took a few hours to find a substitute to pacify the city desk and he reached the hospital the next day only in time for Gus to inform him of Maddie’s death. His fiancée arrived shortly afterwards and they had sat together by Sir Matthew’s bedside for about twenty minutes waiting in vain for him to come fully awake.

  The double shock had brought on an asthma attack, which Robert was subject to on occasions of sudden stress, and he retired to an outside stairway to use his inhaler, while Marion continued to keep watch. Their visit was duly recorded by the constable on duty outside the ICU. Yeadings, working through a mass
of paperwork later, noted this and entered both names in his logbook with the times given.

  It still worried him that no valid sightings of Jessica Dellar had come in. The photographs released to the media had drawn the usual outbreak of reports, both rational and fantastic. All had been investigated and proved mistaken. By now it seemed most unlikely that she would be deliberately ignoring requests to get in touch. Both her mother and Stone had been adamant that although impulsive she was responsible enough to avoid causing alarm. ‘Especially,’ Kate had said, ‘since once she knew Eddie was injured she would have rushed to his side.’

  Yeadings was impressed by the alliance struck up by Stone and the girl’s mother. Kate was still staying at the man’s house and they appeared to have pooled resources in trying to follow up possible lines of inquiry. Each appeared to be bolstering the other’s courage in facing the total blackout of information.

  He rang through to ask if he might drop in and discuss the ground covered, but was told by the housekeeper that they had just left, following an urgent summons from Wycombe hospital. It appeared that Eddie had twice shown signs of waking from coma. He had even muttered his sister’s name.

  This was too important to miss out on. Yeadings’ Rover was parked close in the police yard. He left a message for Salmon and prepared to drive himself. There was the usual rush-hour clogging of traffic, with gridlock at the complex roundabout system when he reached central Wycombe. He fumed in a three-deep traffic queue while a fire tender and set of ladders were rushed out to head towards the Cressex estate.

  In the hospital grounds he found he hadn’t the right change for parking and cursed that he hadn’t waited for a marked police car. It would be just his luck to have the Rover clamped or towed away.