A Narrow Return

by Faith Martin

  Hillary frowned right back at him. ‘I can always come back if you’re busy, sir.’

  ‘No, I’m not busy. And call me Steven.’

  ‘Yes, si … Steven.’ She took a seat and brought him up to date. She was concise but left nothing of significance out. Crayle listened to her voice, liking it, and listened to what she had to say, liking it even more. He had to admit – the commander had called it right. She was good. Very good. Already she was unearthing suspects that the original team hadn’t been able to find.

  When she was finished, he was tapping his pen thoughtfully on the desktop.

  ‘You need to get Mark Burgess’s DNA and compare it with the hair fibre,’ he ordered briskly.

  ‘Already got Jimmy on getting a warrant.’

  ‘And you think the eldest girl – Lucy is it? – might have knowledge about the identity of some of her mother’s other lovers?’

  Hillary stirred. ‘Let’s just say, I think she’s holding back on us. I’d like to take another crack at her later. I’ve got the youngsters investigating her recent activities. I’ll ask Sam for an update on that when he gets back to HQ. I’d like a little more leverage before tackling her again. She’s got a hard shell, and it’ll take some cracking.’

  ‘The mother-in-law seems a stretch,’ Crayle said, watching her carefully.

  ‘She probably is,’ Hillary acknowledged readily. ‘But until we know, she can’t be ruled out. Doting mothers can go postal, as we both know. If she was reasonably fit, I can’t see why she couldn’t have hit Anne with the rolling pin. The victim wouldn’t see her as a threat, and so wouldn’t be on her guard. And you read the post mortem report – Anne McRae had a fairly thin skull. The ME didn’t rule out a woman as a possible killer.’

  Steven sighed. ‘I’m not criticizing. You carry on doing it your way. Keep me informed.’

  ‘Sir,’ Hillary said, pretending not to notice when he winced.

  ‘Call me Steven!’

  ‘Yes si … Steven.’

  Sam and Vivienne approached the village hall with eager steps. Although Vivienne wouldn’t have admitted it for anything, she was feeling kind of excited to be out and about and doing real cop stuff.

  Even if it was only lame stuff like this.

  According to the file, Grace McRae had been playing bingo right there on the afternoon that her daughter-in-law was murdered. And the village hall in Middleton Stoney wasn’t that far from Chesterton – maybe three miles, if that.

  ‘Did she have a car, this old biddy?’ Vivienne asked as Sam tried the door and found it locked.

  ‘No. There was a minibus that took a load of them to the venue and then took them back. Damn, it’s locked.’

  ‘’Course it is. Look around for a notice or something saying when it’s open or who to contact if we want to hire the place,’ Vivienne said bossily. ‘So if she didn’t have a car, she was stuck here, wasn’t she? Unless our high-and-mighty boss thinks she jogged the three miles to Chesterton,’ Vivienne laughed. ‘I can just see it – a granny jogging along in that heat. I told you, this is a waste of time.’

  Sam, who’d found a notice board and was busy jotting down the telephone numbers of anyone who had anything to do with the running of the hall, grunted vaguely.

  Vivienne sighed and glanced around. Middleton Stoney was a small village, bisected by a busy main road. ‘What a dump.’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’ Sam asked, using his mobile. ‘I think it’s quite nice.’

  He’d lived with his parents on a large housing estate in Reading before attending university, and now he found himself rather enamoured of the Oxfordshire villages.

  They were way out of his price range, though. ‘It’s quiet,’ he pointed out, ‘and that cottage over there is … hello? Is this Mr Porter? My name is Sam Pickles. Mr Porter, I work for Thames Valley Police. I’m currently outside the village hall in Middleton Stoney…. You do? Oh good, I was hoping you could help me. I’m trying to track down who was running the bingo sessions that would have been held here twenty years ago. I know it’s an odd thing to ask, out of the blue, but I was hoping you might know someone who was active around then.’

  He snapped his fingers at Vivienne and mimed writing something down.

  She rolled her eyes in a parody of long-suffering patience and reached for her notebook and pen, obediently jotting down names and tentative addresses as he relayed them.

  She was already getting bored. It was all such a monumental waste of time!

  Tom Warrington pulled off the main Oxford to Banbury road, and parked the car on the side of the narrow lane. He didn’t want to drive into the hamlet proper, and wasn’t particularly happy about leaving the car this close to his target either, but he had no other choice. Leaving the car on the main road would attract far more attention to it.

  He glanced at his watch as he slid out from behind the driver’s wheel and locked the car. Nearly noon. With any luck, everybody would be out at work. Just how busy could a place like Thrupp be anyway? He’d have to be very unlucky for anybody to notice the car, let alone take down its licence plate number.

  He walked casually down the lane, trying to look like a tourist, and saw not a soul. At the canal, however, he saw that several narrowboats had smoke coming out of their narrow chimney stacks, and knew he would have to be careful. He could be observed. Not that he was that worried – on the canal, strangers came and went all the time. It was part of the transient lifestyle.

  He walked casually past the pub and down the towpath, heading north, glancing at the lines of boats as he went. But none of them was named the Mollern. When he got to the last one in the line, he turned and strolled back, going in the other direction. He went under a low arched stone bridge, and past more boats.

  At last, he spotted her boat. It looked different from all of the others, and he felt his heart swell with pride. Of course it was different. She’d hardly be likely to live in any old boat, would she? Hers was a soft subtle blue-grey colour, with old gold and white and black trim. Her boat looked elegant and sophisticated, unlike some of the others, with their garish reds, greens and blues.

  Her boat was older than most too – no, classic – he corrected himself, and luckily for him, it was the second-but-last in the line of boats at this end.

  As he walked on, he looked quickly down into the boat behind, but its little round porthole windows had curtains drawn over each of them. Perfect. As he’d hoped, the boat belonged to a fair-weather boatee. He knew from his research, that a lot of narrowboat owners only lived on their vessels in the summer. Winter on the canal was too much for most.

  Unfortunately the very last boat in the line, the one directly in front of the Mollern had the curtains drawn back at the windows. But as he walked past it carefully and went on down the towpath for a way, he could hear no movement from within, and no sound of the radio or conversation. He turned around and took another careful walk back, and when he was level with the boat called not too loudly, ‘Hello, anyone in?’

  If anyone was in, he could always use his ID badge and say he was here to warn boaters about the rise in theft on the canal.

  He called again, a little louder. ‘Hello, on board Kingfisher?’

  Nothing.

  Perfect. The boat was empty after all.

  He walked back to the Mollern, stepped confidently onto the deck and bent down to start picking the padlock on the double front iron doors.

  ‘Good grief, that’s twenty years ago now!’ Penelope Mobbs said, looking from Sam to Vivienne, who were standing on her doorstep, and trying to look non-threatening.

  Hers was the fourth name on the list of people the current caretaker of Middleton Stoney’s village hall had given them, but since she still lived in the village, they’d tried her first.

  Sam smiled back at her hopefully. ‘Yes, ma’am. I know that. But Mr Porter said you were one of those who volunteered back then.’

  ‘Well, you’d better come in then,’ Mrs Mobbs said, st
anding back to let them pass. She lived in a tiny, rather dirty-looking cottage that faced the main road. Sam suspected that it was the road pollution that gave the cottage its grimy appearance, for inside it was all clean and tidy.

  They crammed into a dinky little living room that was kept a shade too warm with a gas fire. ‘Tea?’ Mrs Mobbs asked, but was already half way to the kitchen before they could say either yes or no.

  She was a woman in her late seventies, Sam would have guessed, and like most old people, she remembered things from years ago, whereas they couldn’t tell you what they did yesterday.

  Luckily for them, she recalled the bingo sessions well. She even remembered Grace McRae.

  ‘She was a bit of a bossy woman, Grace,’ Mrs Mobbs confided several minutes later, as they all munched down on some digestives. ‘She was always going on about that son of hers – from the way she talked, you think he was something special, instead of a coach driver. But she made him sound glamorous, you know. “Melvin says Bruges is really old,” and, “of course, he can speak several languages now.” All that sort of thing. Like he was in the diplomatic service, instead of a plain old bus driver! But we used to just ignore her. It was easier than picking her up on it all the time.’

  ‘She didn’t like her daughter-in-law, did she?’ Vivienne said bluntly. ‘The one who was murdered.’

  Penelope Mobbs’s old lips puckered in disapproval. ‘You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,’ she admonished. Although whether she was telling off Vivienne for saying something about the now deceased Grace, or whether she’d been thinking of Grace, who shouldn’t have had anything bad to say about her deceased daughter-in-law, neither Sam or Vivienne could quite work out.

  It took him ages to get into the boat, but at last he was inside. Tom crouched down to avoid hitting his head and went down the three narrow iron stairs into the boat. His heart was beating so fast he had to gulp in air.

  It felt weird. Everything was so narrow and tiny. And he felt low down too, and the ground under his feet felt just a little bit off. Of course, there was no ground under his feet – only water. It wasn’t as if the boat rocked, exactly, because it didn’t, but his mind and body could tell that this environment was something new to him.

  He was not particularly sure that he liked it. This distressed him somewhat. Because Hillary Greene chose to live in it, it had to be good. There was probably a whole different cultural ethos to it, but he was still so new to it, it would take him a while to attune himself. Having satisfied himself on that score, he felt himself begin to relax and enjoy himself.

  He breathed deeply and smelt her.

  It wasn’t just the light, floral perfume she used either, it was a combination of things – the aroma of her life. Soap and books, leather and wood. He moved forward, going into the small main living area. Books lined the walls.

  Of course, she had a BA in English literature from Oxford. He perused them – the poetry, the Brontes, Beowulf. Stuff he could never have read or understood in a million years.

  She was so clever, his Hillary. Cultured, brilliant.

  He moved to the kitchen. Fresh veg in the tiny fridge, a small loaf of bread from a bakery – the kind with seeds.

  Of course, she’d eat right. She didn’t smoke, he knew, and never had done. She was probably a modest drinker too – in fact, he could only find one bottle of wine in the place – a good quality white.

  What else? Hell, she had class, this woman. Not like the others.

  He went to what he was sure must be her bedroom and stood outside the door, his hands literally tingling with anticipation. What sort of lingerie would she wear?

  He slid the door open and looked inside the tiny bedroom – at the neatly made single bed, almost monastic-looking in its purity.

  She never slept around – everyone knew that.

  He’d heard it said that she’d been with another officer from Vice a while back, but he didn’t believe it.

  With a sigh of pure pleasure, he stepped into her tiny domain and stared down at the pillow. Just to think, eight hours ago, her head rested there, and she’d been asleep.

  He closed his eyes, picturing it. Pictured him being there with her, the two of them pressed so close together, like a pair of spoons, on that tiny bed.

  Hillary left early for lunch, and pedalled back to Thrupp. The landlord’s son had agreed to bring Puff back in his own lunch hour, and she had a modest cheque in her bag, ready to hand over. She knew it was daft, but she was sort of looking forward to seeing her old car again.

  She felt as if she was going to meet up with a long-lost friend.

  Sam and Vivienne thanked Mrs Mobbs for her help and left her to her grimy cottage. In Sam’s hand was the name and old address for the minibus driver. The volunteer world was a small one, obviously closely knit and friendly, and Sam wasn’t at all surprised that the man who drove the minibus should be on her Christmas card list.

  He drove to Bicester in less than ten minutes, but it took him twice that long to find the address in Glory Farm, a large, rambling housing estate that seemed designed by planners to deliberately baffle anyone wanting to either live or visit there.

  Glenn Timmons was perhaps a few years younger than Grace Mobbs, but it was obvious from the moment he opened the door that his driving days were long over.

  The man shook from head to foot.

  Parkinsons Disease, Sam thought at once, who’d lost his maternal grandfather to the illness a couple of years before.

  ‘Yes?’ the voice wavered as did the rest of him. He was a tall, very lean man, covered in liver spots.

  Beside him, he felt Vivienne shudder.

  ‘Mr Timmons?’ He showed the man his ID card, careful to hold it close to his face so that he could see it. ‘We’re with the police, Mr Timmons. Is it all right if we ask you some questions about when you used to drive the minibus for the old folks?’

  Glenn Timmons looked astonished. ‘D’yah what?’ he quavered.

  Patiently, Sam repeated himself. Beside him, Vivienne sighed heavily.

  Hillary swung her legs off the bike whilst it was still in motion and put her foot to the tarmac of The Boat’s parking lot, coming to a practised walking trot as she pushed the bike ahead of her before propping it up against the wall.

  She glanced along the canal automatically towards where her boat was moored, but her eye was snagged by a familiar pale green outline.

  ‘Puff,’ she said, walking over towards the car and grinning widely.

  The old Golf hadn’t suffered much under new ownership as far as she could see. For a car that was getting close to being twenty years old, it still, to her eyes at least, looked to be in fairly good nick. OK, so maybe her eyes were a bit biased.

  But she hardly needed a fancy motor.

  She gave the bonnet a friendly pat, and headed towards the pub. If the landlord didn’t fancy paying for the drinks, she’d stand the old man’s son a drink herself.

  She’d half expected to find her car a mess of rust, with the trim coming off and the tyres bald. To find out that the young sod had actually looked after it had earned him a single malt.

  Or whatever his particular poison was.

  On her boat, a few hundred yards away, Tom Warrington lay on Hillary Greene’s bed, holding her nightgown to his face and breathing deeply.

  ‘Oh yes, I remember Grace all right,’ Glenn Timmons said in his unnervingly uneven voice. ‘Bit of a tartar, that one.’ Course, we all knew about that dreadful murder. Her son’s wife. Terrible it was.’

  They were sitting in his parlour, his daughter sitting opposite. She had come around to cook his lunch, and on finding the police – or their representatives – in situ, had decided to stay on.

  She now listened openly, looking intrigued and half-proud, as if her father’s input was up there with giving testimony at the Old Bailey.

  Vivienne thought that she probably had a dull life, if this was the highlight of her day.

  ‘Anne McRae,
’ Sam prompted.

  ‘Yes. That was it.’

  ‘Mrs McRae was at Middleton Stoney, playing bingo when it happened,’ Sam added, wondering if he was giving out too much information. Surely he should be asking questions, not supplying answers? The trouble was, the old man looked so fragile and confused.

  ‘Ah, that’s right. I remember. I drove them. There was a bunch come from Bicester.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Sam said relieved. ‘You remember?’

  ‘Well, I remember reading about it in the papers,’ Glenn said tremulously. ‘And the next week, Grace was holding forth about it. She did like to hear the sound of her own voice, that woman.’

  ‘So you can definitely say that she was playing bingo when it happened?’ Vivienne put in restlessly, wanting to get away from this place and this creepy sick old man as soon as she could.

  ‘Yes. I suppose so,’ Glenn said, rather uncertainly to Sam’s ear.

  ‘You remember her getting into your minibus to be driven back, Mr Timmons?’ he pressed.

  ‘Well, she must’a done, son. I took ’em there, and I brought ’em back. Unless’n she took the regular bus, like.’

  Sam perked up. ‘The regular bus?’

  ‘Ah. The red ’un, the one the local bus company ran. Well it used to be red, probably a different colour now. It’s still running though to this day, but for how much longer, what with all the cutbacks and so on, who can say? It’s on a regular run from Oxford to Bicester, going through all the villages en route. That stops at Middleton Stoney. I knew some of the drivers who do the route, see.’

  Sam felt his heart rate pick up.

  ‘Did it go to Chesterton do you know?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Glenn said, perking up. ‘The next stop would have been Chesterton.’