A Cold Case

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘I don’t know really … it just doesn’t feel right. Looking back, it hasn’t felt right for a long time.’ Mundy glanced at his watch. ‘Sorry, but I have to go now. I’m driving up to Chelmsford this afternoon on the young boy case … that being the official cold case.’ He reached for his wallet.

  ‘Of course.’ Janet Thackery began to search her handbag for her car keys.

  ‘So, if I were to phone you,’ Mundy suggested, ‘early next week, perhaps once I see what is showing where …?’

  ‘Yes,’ Janet Thackery beamed warmly, ‘please do. And thank you for lunch, it was lovely. Next time I’ll buy the meal.’

  ‘Last year?’ The proprietor of the Swinton Garage in Newmarket revealed himself to be a slightly built man who wore a brown smock over ordinary city clothes. He had clearly, thought Mundy, progressed well beyond the point where he had to crawl underneath motorcars for his living. Even his office was elevated above the shop floor which seemed to Mundy to be healthily full of cars and with a workforce all fully occupied. The garage clearly had an excellent reputation.

  ‘Sometime between October and December … beginning of and end of,’ Tom Ingram advised. ‘We don’t expect you to recall it but we assume you keep records.’

  ‘Indeed we do but, as you suggest and expect, I don’t remember the vehicle. One-off jobs all seem to merge into one another and you can’t put them in date order in your mind.’ Eric Redmond stood and excused himself, then returned a moment later with a box file which he laid on his desktop as he resumed his seat. ‘The regular customers, of which we have many, we know their cars, but owners who drive in looking for running repairs … Offhand, I can’t place a blue Saab with mismatching doors. Perhaps one of the crew might but it will be in here.’ Redmond opened the file. ‘The motor trade has a dodgy reputation, as I am sure you’ll know. What’s the phrase … it is “a conduit to crime”, as is the antiques business. There are many reputable antiques traders but there are also those who will buy proceeds from burglaries, keep them out of sight for a few years and then slowly drip-feed them back on to the antiques market. It’s like that with the motor trade … there are clean garages and there are dodgy ones. This is one of the clean ones. We keep an invoice for every job done and I mean every job. It does you well to keep the taxman happy and no good to annoy him.’

  ‘Good for you.’ Ingram smiled approvingly. ‘That’s the right attitude.’

  ‘It is the way of it; all the boys down there will know where all the chop shops are in Newmarket.’ Redmond indicated over his shoulder to the garage floor behind and beneath him. ‘None of them is into anything naughty, not that I am aware of, but they’ll all know someone who is.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ingram growled.

  ‘Well … who can help it? Fitters’ network … police officers’ network … lawyers’ network … it’s a way of life. But nothing naughty happens here.’ Redmond picked up the file and rotated it and handed it to Tom Ingram. ‘You are welcome to sift through the invoices until you find the car you are seeking, gentlemen. The invoices are in date order. That is to say reverse date order by financial year. So the invoices at the top are from March/April this year, and the invoices at the bottom are from March/April last year. So … October last year, the invoices from that date onwards will be about halfway down. You can use the office next door if you like. There’s usually a typist in there but she phoned in sick this morning. She hasn’t phoned in sick for three weeks, which is not bad for her, then this morning she decided she has a migraine. That’ll be her for a day or two.’

  ‘Why do you put up with that attitude?’ Mundy smiled as he stood up.

  ‘Ah …’ Redmond waved his hands in the air. ‘Because there’s never any urgent typing work. There is never anything that can’t wait a day or two. Few women want to work in a dirty, oily garage; few women want to work in an all-male environment. Most like clean offices. Then there’s the bother of advertising and interviewing the few applicants that will be prepared to work here. So, better the devil you know is what I say …’

  ‘That’s generous-minded of you.’ Ingram also stood up. ‘Anyway, next door office, you say?’

  ‘Yes.’ Redmond pointed to his left. ‘Small office, through there.’

  Ingram and Mundy sat down at the desk in the adjacent office and opened the box file. Ingram handed all the invoices for October of the previous year to Mundy while he looked at the November invoices. ‘We’ll share the December invoices,’ he added with a grin. The two officers then fell silent as they carefully looked at one invoice after another until Ingram said, ‘Here it is … one Saab 90 “weld exhaust tailpiece”.’

  ‘Is the registration number of the car given?’ Mundy asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Ingram nodded. ‘It is.’

  ‘Breakthrough …’ Mundy sat back in the chair he occupied. ‘That is a real breakthrough. With that we can use the Met’s computer to trace the owner of the car on the day that both Janet Laws was abducted and murdered and Oliver Walwyn was murdered. This is a breakthrough.’

  ‘How far do we take this?’ Ingram glanced at Mundy. ‘You know the rules of the game.’

  ‘As far as we can,’ Mundy replied with a broad smile. ‘As far as we can … right up to the point of arrest.’

  Ingram held up his hand. ‘Steady, Maurice. Steady on. You know the rules, like I say. We are obliged to report any developments and this is a development … you have just said so yourself.’

  ‘All right, I’ll write a memo to the Chelmsford police that will keep them happy.’ Mundy continued to smile. ‘And it will cover us.’

  ‘I don’t like it, Maurice.’ Ingram raised his voice. ‘I don’t like it at all. Our case is the murder of Oliver Walwyn. The murder of Janet Laws is a hot case and it’s not ours to meddle in. That’s been made very plain.’

  ‘Let’s just see how far we get, shall we? Let’s just take it one old step at a time.’ Mundy paused. ‘We’re still groping in the dark; there may be nothing in this lead, nothing at all. When we have hard facts, then … then we’ll notify the people in other boxes. That’s what we’ll do.’

  ‘I still don’t like it.’ Ingram sighed. ‘I’m not happy that that’s correct.’

  The two officers returned to London in an awkward and strained silence.

  The man entered his house, sank wearily on to the ancient settee and used the remote control to switch on the small television. He watched the early evening news and then the local news, both with little interest. He remained seated in front of the television set, feeling drained of energy, until eight p.m., when he stood and walked into the narrow, dimly lit hallway of his house and put on a long raincoat and a scarf, both of which he had bought in a charity shop, and then screwed his brown fedora on to his head. He opened his front door and walked the few paces from the door to the pavement of Lidyard Road, N19, and then he turned to his left. He strolled the short walk to the pub which stood on the corner of Lidyard Road and Archway Road.

  The man remained in the pub for two hours enjoying a chat with the publican until the pub became busy, then he drank alone. Occasionally he would catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror behind the bar and would see a gaunt-looking, thin-faced man with grey hair cut severely short in a crew-cut style, whose clothing made him look ‘genteel shabby’ in terms of his appearance. When nearing the end of what he knew would be his final beer of the evening, he took a handful of coins from his trouser pocket and placed them in the British Legion Remembrance Day Poppy Appeal can. He took a poppy and a pin and affixed the poppy to the left hand lapel of his sports jacket. He raised a hand in a gesture of parting to the publican who said a cheery ‘goodnight’ in reply. The man stepped out of the pub on to Archway Road, buttoned up his coat against the steady drizzle which had by then begun to fall vertically on London town and walked slowly home. He entered the narrow hallway of his house, peeled off the wet coat and hung it dripping on a peg behind the door, then placed his damp fedora on the same peg over th
e coat. He walked to the kitchen and took the top pizza from a pile of six which were stacked in the fridge, unwrapped the cellophane and placed it in the oven at the prescribed temperature for the correct length of time. He ate the pizza while sitting on the settee in his living room, keeping a still-uninterested eye on the television while he did so. Upon completing the meal he carried the plate to the kitchen and placed it amid the pile of washing-up in the sink. He then retired for the night.

  The man was Maurice Mundy.

  FOUR

  ‘Well, yes … yes … over the years. Yes, I dare say that we became quite close friends.’ Felicity Baxendale revealed herself to be a portly woman of medium height with a ready smile. Upon inspecting Maurice Mundy’s identity card she invited him into her house and escorted him into her living room where they sat facing each other in identical armchairs which were separated by a sheepskin rug upon a scarlet carpet. ‘We met as neighbours and the friendship grew. It started as a joke … Tweedale and Baxendale, the “Dales” of Burnt Oak, like the Yorkshire Dales, but there is no Dale or Vale in the UK of either name, so we were amused by the coincidence of two people with similar names both seeming to be evoking a real place, and yet no such place existed in either case …’

  ‘Remarkable coincidence,’ Mundy commented. ‘Quite remarkable.’

  ‘Yes, but it was the joke that broke the ice and then, over time, a friendship developed despite the age gap. Anne was over twenty years older than me, you see. She had just turned sixty when she was murdered whereas I was barely forty at the time.’

  ‘What were your feelings about that?’ Mundy asked.

  ‘My feelings about the age gap? It didn’t bother me at all. As you will have found out yourself – once you’re an adult, over thirty, then you’re all in the same club.’ Felicity Baxendale looked confused at Mundy’s question.

  ‘No.’ Mundy grinned. ‘Sorry, I wasn’t very clear; I meant what did you feel about her murder?’

  ‘Feel at the time? A whole rollercoaster of feelings and emotions … disbelief, anger, sadness for her … mainly anger, I think.’ Felicity Baxendale glanced up towards the ceiling. ‘How she took that boy into her home, how she befriended him … and for him to turn on her like that, carve her up with a kitchen knife – horrible. Really, really horrible. Things like that happen down in the East End, down in the Docklands of Bermondsey and places like that, but it should not happen in Burnt Oak. This is suburbia, where the professional middle class live. Yet it did happen and the conviction was safe and sound. So now, why the visit? What is happening after nearly thirty years? Is it the case that the police are having doubts about the safety of his conviction?’

  Mundy pursed his lips. ‘We are reviewing it, shall I put it that way. So, leaving aside the strength of the case against Joshua Derbyshire and the safety of his conviction … leaving all that aside for a moment, can I ask what your thoughts about him being her killer were … and are?’

  Felicity Baxendale reclined in her armchair. Her black-and-white cat which had been eyeing Mundy with suspicion suddenly ran across the floor and leapt into her lap where it curled up, yet still fixing Mundy with an unblinking stare. ‘I was shocked. Very shocked. I couldn’t believe that Anne had been murdered and I could not believe that it was the ever-so-gentle Joshua that had killed her. I was in a terrible state of disbelief for a long time … we both were.’

  ‘We?’ Mundy asked.

  ‘My husband and I.’ Felicity Baxendale began to stroke the cat who purred loudly and contentedly. ‘He has since passed on.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ Mundy offered.

  ‘Thank you, but it is most often the way of it. You men die young and we women, well, we just hang on. Can’t be that much of a weaker sex, can we?’

  ‘Fairer, I always thought.’ Mundy smiled. ‘I never thought that women were necessarily weaker.’

  Felicity Baxendale also smiled. ‘You are diplomatic, Mr Mundy, but it’s true – men fall over often unfairly early in life and the old creaking gate continues to creak. I dare say I wasn’t helped by being nearly fourteen years younger than my husband, which is a significant age gap, but it left me a widow at a relatively young age. I was in my early fifties when my husband died.’

  ‘I have a friend, a lady friend who is in much the same situation. She’s a relatively recent widow and she’s still in her early fifties,’ Mundy replied. ‘She’s coping well mainly due to her employment. Her job gives her something to do.’

  ‘That’s an advantage I don’t have.’ Felicity Baxendale looked down at her cat. ‘I have no skills to bring to the workplace. I was married “from the gymslip” as the expression has it, and never did anything but manage a house and look after children. I was blissfully happy doing so. I felt totally fulfilled. I can understand why some women want a career but I was never more content than when I swapped my dolls’ house for a real house and swapped my dolls for real children.’ She once again looked up at the ceiling, as if recovering good memories. ‘But early fifties … tell your friend to get married again. She might treasure her husband’s memory but the marriage bed will seem very empty. She will miss going to sleep each night with a man who loves her cupping her in his arms. I missed that terribly. I still do. So give her that advice.’

  ‘I will.’ Mundy inclined his head. ‘I’ll tell her that … I see her often and will tell her that.’

  ‘But Joshua … my thoughts … well, my thoughts were and still are that he was a most unlikely murderer.’ Felicity Baxendale glanced across the living room at Maurice Mundy. ‘A most unlikely murderer indeed. It would be like a lop-eared rabbit suddenly revealing a killer instinct, or a hamster or a koala or a panda … if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mundy put his hand up to the side of his head, ‘I see what you mean exactly, I can conjure the image … a bit like a goldfish suddenly becoming a barracuda-like flesh-eating predator, or like a sparrow suddenly swooping on a field mouse.’

  ‘Yes … exactly.’ Felicity Baxendale raised her forefinger. ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’ She paused. ‘You see, I am not a psychologist but I would have thought that the man who killed Anne Tweedale must have had more about him than gentle, slothful Joshua. I – we – would have seen some display of aggression, at least some form of ill temper or shortness of fuse, but we never saw anything like that, not ever.’

  ‘So he was always very calm,’ Mundy confirmed. ‘Always very mild-mannered?’

  ‘Yes,’ Felicity Baxendale replied clearly. ‘Always very placid, very calm, very at peace with himself … very head in the clouds, as if he were detached from life. I often thought that he needed a damn good shaking up. You know, I used to watch him wash Anne Tweedale’s car. He would just wipe the sponge over the bodywork. He would put no effort into the job at all … and yes, that is the word I am looking for – effort. There was no effort in anything he did, no sense of it at all. No application. He would wash that lovely old two-tone grey Rolls-Royce of hers very slowly, quite content to move the sponge backwards and forwards, making the car wet, but when the water had evaporated the car looked no cleaner – not to me, anyway. It was more like all he had done was redistribute the dirt. He gave it no elbow grease at all.’ Felicity Baxendale sighed. ‘I wouldn’t have had him doing odd jobs about my house. He also had the same attitude to Anne Tweedale’s garden. He’d pick something up from out of the flowerbed and look about him, then stoop to pick something else up and look about him again, and when he claimed to have finished working the garden looked just the same as it did when he had started weeding it. And I’ll tell you another little anecdote about Josh and the garden. Anne had a pair of shears, not an electric hedge-cutter.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mundy replied. ‘Don’t see many these days.’

  ‘No. Shame, really, I think, because I quite liked the sound of the shears going clip, clip, clip. It was a reassuring, very Sunday afternoon summertime sound. An “all is well with the world” sort of sound … that’s what I always felt w
hen my late husband was trimming the hedge, but the gardener I employ these days attacks the privet with an electric hedge-trimmer. He does the job in a tenth of the time it used to take my husband but I always feel that something has been lost. The sound of an electric hedge-cutter just isn’t conducive to calm … but Joshua, I kid you not, had to be shown how to hold the shears. When he picked them up he’d tried to cut the hedge by pointing them at the privet.’

  ‘Oh, no.’ Mundy gasped. ‘That is quite pathetic.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Felicity Baxendale smiled. ‘Isn’t it just? Quite pathetic. Anne Tweedale had to take them from him and demonstrate how to lay the blades against the privet … that was Joshua’s functioning level. Cutting a privet hedge is a man’s job and she, an elderly woman, had to teach him how to use the shears, and even then it was a casual snip … long pause … snip … long pause … snip. He would say he had cut the hedge and Anne would say “Well done, Josh”, and then when he had gone home she would roll up her sleeves and, damn me, if she didn’t do the job herself. I really would not have tolerated him. I really wouldn’t have.’

  ‘No focus?’ Mundy offered.

  ‘None. He had no single-minded determination – none that I could ever detect,’ Felicity Baxendale explained as she stroked her cat slowly and caringly. ‘And it was pretty much the same inside the house as he helped her polish the brass shell casings.’

  ‘Ah.’ Mundy smiled. ‘Yes, I heard about the shell casings.’

  ‘She had quite a collection … all sorts of sizes, brought back from France by a relative who was over there fighting the 1914–18 war, the “war to end all wars”. She had thirty-seven all told, and each one had KH scratched on the bottom, those being her relative’s initials. They would sit and polish them together, her and Joshua. It was a job for a winter’s day, sitting and polishing, them having a chat while they worked away in Anne’s living room, but Josh’s lack of elbow grease, as my father would say, meant that his version of polishing the brass was smearing the polish all over them, so Anne had to polish his shells once he had left her house. Sometimes they’d sit out in the sun and polish them but Josh’s attitude was just the same. Eventually she sensibly decided on a division of labour. Josh would put the polish on the shell casing and then hand the shell to her and she would do the actual polishing. That arrangement seemed to work well – it satisfied both parties. Josh felt useful and Anne Tweedale had her collection of shell casings polished and looking resplendent. Mind you, my husband was upset about that collection, he said he couldn’t help thinking that when each one of the shells was sent flying by the explosive in the casing it probably cost a young man his life or a few young men their lives in a single explosion. But Anne never thought like that. She just liked the shiny things adorning her living room, especially since they had been brought back by one of her relatives.’