The Final Curtain

by Priscilla Masters

  Joanna had to admit: she’d done a very half-hearted job of investigating either Timony Weeks’ past life or the more recent complaints. Now she wished she’d spent more time in Butterfield Farm, walked around, looked more carefully and with more insight at the pictures of Timony in her various stages of life, with her multiples of husbands, and listened more carefully to her stories; delved further into her histronics, the supposed blurring of fact and fiction, to seek out the truth. She had heard the tales of a child growing up under the glare of celebrity, and in her day Timony Weeks had been as famous as Cheryl Cole or Kristen Stewart were today. Now it was too late.

  Followed by Diana Tong, who was now silent, Joanna wandered around Butterfield, from room to room, realizing that the rooms were set out like a stage set. But even observing the house she couldn’t connect the Timony Weeks she had known with someone whose father had been in prison and had spent her early years in abject poverty, living in what had, even then, been classed as a slum. Usually Joanna could detect accents. Most people give their roots away in a tone or a phrase, their pronunciation of one or two giveaway words. But stage school and elocution lessons had eradicated any sign or sound of a regional twang. Her mother appeared to have signed her daughter away, believing that to escape from poverty was an answer to her prayers without considering what really lay ahead for the child. What sort of mother had she been to give her up so completely to a TV set? Back came the answer. A mother who was naive.

  So did Timony have any living relatives? Now that it was too late Joanna wished very much that she had done more, had at least glimpsed the real child who lay behind the manufactured fantasy figure.

  Diana Tong observed her activities without comment. But her lips seemed to press together tighter and Joanna had the impression that the companion was not only grieving but uneasy. As she walked past her Diana opened her mouth as though to say something but her eyes slid away and she didn’t speak, merely frowned and gave a slight shake of her head.

  Eventually Joanna and Mike holed up in the barn, ineffectively heated now by electric radiators; much of the heat seemed to soar into the rafters. They might be cold but the barns were, like the rest of Butterfield, immaculately clean, with no hay and not even the faintest scent of an animal. Joanna had never been in such a sanitized barn. The team gathered around her on makeshift benches and she wrote names on a whiteboard, trying to focus the enquiry, fully aware that she could be accused of ‘shutting the stable door’.

  What else was she to do?

  She addressed the entire room but in reality she had already decided which teams to allocate and where. ‘Find out all you can about the dead woman, both as Dorothy Hook and Timony Weeks.’ She walked across the barn floor and deliberately shut the door. It was possible that when the story broke there would be a prurient interest out of proportion to the secluded life Timony Weeks had adopted in the past few years. The first name she wrote was: Diana Tong.

  She turned around and addressed DC Hesketh-Brown. ‘Danny, you and Hannah just keep an eye on her, will you? I can’t think of any obvious motive she might have for setting up recent events and I certainly can’t imagine her killing the cat in such a cruel way, but it has to be said, she’s the one on the spot.’ She turned back to the board. ‘Bridget, you and Phil Scott look into the ex-husbands, will you?’ Again she wrote three names on the board, bracketing them together:

  Adrian MacWilliam, Sol Brannigan and Rolf Van Eelen. ‘I’ve picked Sol out because Timony herself said he was a nasty piece of work, and we know he’s been in prison for grievous bodily harm and armed robbery. Adrian MacWilliam – well, no reason really, except that he was her husband.’ She turned back to the board. ‘Rolf Van Eelen is probably the only one with a real motive. He is almost certainly Timony’s legal beneficiary if she died intestate and they were never divorced. See if you can track these down then speak to her solicitor and find out more exactly how much money Timony Weeks had and who gets it. And while you’re at it you might search out Carmen Weeks, last heard of in Dubai, and see if it still rankles that Timony stole her husband.’ Bridget Anderton and Phil Scott nodded and smiled.

  ‘Korpanski, Mike,’ she appealed, as she wrote another name on the board: long-lost sister. ‘According to Diana, Timony or Dorothy Hook had a sister, Kathleen, who has died. Just look into her, will you, please?’ She knew he was far more interested in the luxury cars which were vanishing from around the area than the death of the actress. But he raised his eyebrows and smiled. He would not let her down. ‘Take Jason with you and look into this. Alan, you take WPC Critchlow and find out about the fan who assaulted Ms Weeks, Paul Dariel. See if you can try to make contact with him.’ She gave them all a smile of encouragement then spoke to PC Paul Ruthin, a relative newcomer to the Moorlands. ‘I’d like you to look into the wild card, Stuart Renshaw. I just wonder about him.’

  Beneath that she wrote, John Reeves and Tom Brassington, then addressed PCs Timmis and McBrine. ‘You two may as well stay in the moorlands and look into the two farmers whose land borders Butterfield. I’ll be honest,’ she continued, ‘I can’t really see either of them having much to do with this but check it out anyway. And while you’re at it you might have another word with the Faulkeners. Just dig around and see if there was any reason why a pair of hikers ended up trespassing on this particular property.’ She scanned the room, smiled and finished the briefing. ‘And in case you’re wondering what I’m going to get up to, I’m going to do a spot of reading.’ She risked a joke. ‘No, I don’t mean the latest bestseller from Peter Lovesey, though I have to say I’m tempted.’ There was a titter around the room. They all knew her predilection for crime fiction. ‘I’m going to take a look through Timony Weeks’ autobiography and see if there’s anything there that gives us a hint. Let’s meet back here, shall we say tomorrow morning, eight o’clock. Any questions?’

  There was a general shaking of heads so she thanked them and dismissed them.

  Korpanski had stayed behind but she didn’t know why. She assumed it would be to grumble because he had been pulled off the case of the high-profile cars. ‘Mike?’ she queried, knowing he was disgruntled, if not fully understanding why. Later, when she analysed it, she realized his dissatisfaction was, in a way, predictable. Korpanski was a realist, a pragmatist who dealt only in concrete facts, disliked ideas and fantasy. Particularly hunches. He wanted reality. This was the very worst case he could have been asked to work on.

  ‘We didn’t even know her name,’ he grumbled. ‘Only her stage name.’ His neck was red with anger. ‘Bloody woman, I wish she’d never moved to the moorlands. Or at least,’ he conceded, ‘if she did have to move here that when the threats started she’d moved herself out again.’

  Her head jerked around. Unwittingly Detective Sergeant Mike Korpanski had put his finger on something. ‘You have a point,’ she said. ‘Why did she come here in the first place and then stubbornly stay if she was so unnerved by the attention?’

  ‘Didn’t she say something about feeling more comfortable in a remote location than in a city?’

  ‘It seemed a pretty weak excuse to me,’ Joanna said. ‘But if it was true there are plenty of other remote locations. She didn’t have to stay here but she was determined to.’

  ‘She didn’t,’ Mike agreed, his anger cooling as they discussed the case, ‘but she’d recreated her Shangri-La here, in the moorlands. She’d have had to start all over again, get planning permission in the green belt, which can be difficult to obtain. And it seems that she didn’t want just any old house. She wanted to recreate Butterfield Farm. She was lucky to get planning permission for it here. She would probably have had no end of trouble in another rural location.’

  Joanna nodded slowly, starting to see things from another angle. She hadn’t been able to leave, to abandon this recreation of a happier life. She had been prisoner to the illusion she had created.

  Korpanski looked straight into her eyes. ‘There’s something else that’s struck
me, Jo,’ he said. ‘These practical jokes obviously unsettled her. So why didn’t Diana Tong move in with her permanently?’

  ‘She needed something, somewhere of her own. Timony would have swallowed her up whole,’ Joanna responded, but knowing she had had similar thoughts. ‘Though she did seem to spend most of her time there anyway.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Mike said, turned around and spotted Jason hovering near the door. ‘Well, I’d better be off. Come on, Sparks.’

  Joanna felt restless watching the officers depart to their allocated tasks and, on leaving the barn, seeing the forensic teams scour the property in their slow, methodical way. She wandered up to the house with an overwhelming feeling that it was Timony’s past which had resulted in her murder. The pranks had been a warning and, when not heeded, she had died. Someone had been trying to tell her something, to warn her of what might happen if she didn’t comply. What were those dark memories threatening to surface? If Timony had read the messages she had not heeded them. And Joanna did not understand them. Comply with what?

  Where better to look for the answer to that than in her own story of her life? She met Diana Tong, stony-faced, in the hallway. ‘Timony’s memoirs,’ Joanna said, stepping towards the study. ‘I’m going to take a look.’

  ‘Whatever for?’ Diana Tong looked genuinely puzzled.

  Joanna decided she was sick of giving reasons, of being dictated to, of having her strings pulled by others. ‘I don’t need to give you a reason, Mrs Tong,’ she said flatly. ‘Butterfield is now a major crime scene and her book may hold some clues.’

  And so Diana Tong pressed back against the wall and Joanna passed her, feeling the companion’s resentment hot and angry. She didn’t care.

  She reached the study and switched on the computer. No password, she noted. Open to anyone. She copied My Memoirs on to a USB stick and took it back to the barn, like a lion hoarding its kill. She moved the heater closer, inserted the memory stick into her own computer. And read.

  At two thirty Matthew rang to see if she intended being present at the post-mortem. She looked through the windows as he spoke. Butterfield was a hive of activity and the teams were working equally hard, some on the telephone, others on their computers, and still others had left the area to pursue their suspects. They would all be following up their initial leads but they could do without her for a while. And the post-mortem of a murder victim necessitated a police presence – if only to validate the samples. She asked Matthew to wait for her to arrive, told Mike he would be in charge for the next few hours and drove the thirteen miles towards the mortuary in Stoke. Mark Fask would meet her there.

  The mortuary in Newcastle-under-Lyme was an unprepossessing building, small and square with little to announce its function apart from an unobtrusive board. It was as though it wanted no one to notice it. Which was reasonable, Joanna decided, given its purpose. She slid her Honda into the parking space next to Matthew’s BMW.

  He was already gowned up in his scrubs and looked anxious to begin. In the mortuary he always wore an air of slight impatience, as though he wanted to get on with things quickly. He was frowning as he stood back and waited for her to fasten a gown on over her own clothes. Though Joanna had attended scores of post-mortems she still had the usual feeling of apprehension. The truth was she hated them. Although she was acutely aware that they were necessary they seemed to her to be the final insult to the victim – even their inner organs and most private secrets would be exposed, under the arc light. All the way through, from the jud-dud of the Stryker saw and the clumsy stitching of the attendants whose job it was to stuff the organs back into their cavities, they still made her feel slightly sick, though she had never repeated her first performance in this very mortuary. They all watched in silence as the attendant did the initial weigh-ins of measurements and observations. Matthew stood back, eagle-eyed, his hands clasped. He moved once and that was to check the video camera was set up properly. He made a brief introduction, name, persons present and then slowly ran the camera over the body. Timony Weeks, or Dorothy Hook, was finally fully exposed.

  She looked even thinner naked. As tiny as a child and bony too. Joanna was struck by her physical vulnerability. Even she was unprepared for the feeling of pity she felt for this woman in death, who had appeared so irritatingly strange in life.

  Matthew’s attention was now on the X-rays he had taken to help him locate the final positions of the bullets. When he moved back over to the body he began, with a probe, to follow the trajectory of the two bullet holes, taking careful measurements to ascertain the calibre of the firearm. Then he began excising the tissue around them, moving in with the probe until he found the bullets. These were removed with a pair of long, angled forceps ready for the ballistics department. Hopefully, at some point, they would have a weapon to compare them with. The rest of the post-mortem was routine. Apart from the attentions of a cosmetic surgeon Timony, it appeared, had been in good health.

  Half an hour later Matthew was giving her his findings. ‘The head wound was inflicted first,’ he said. ‘There is slightly more contusion and bleeding there. Immediately after that, I would guess, she was shot in the heart. The head wound entered the frontal lobe of the brain, ricocheted against the cranium and lodged in the top of the spine. The heart assault was similarly deadly. It entered the left ventricle and lodged in the thoracic spine. Death would have been virtually instantaneous.’ He was looking down at Timony as he related his findings. ‘Nothing else of note really. She was in very good shape, some of it thanks to surgery.’ He looked across at her. ‘Some clumsy, most very skilled, particularly the very enthusiastic face lift. Oh,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘and she had had a child at some point.’

  ‘What?’ News indeed, when Timony had categorically denied it.

  ‘Yes,’ he said defensively. ‘You can’t mistake it, Jo. The cervix changes shape.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  Matthew looked affronted. ‘Yes, I am sure.’

  He could not know how many things this altered.

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know that,’ he said, still a bit peeved. ‘Probably in her teens.’

  ‘But there’s been no mention of a child.’ She thought for a minute. ‘There is no child.’

  He grinned at her and gave the smallest twitch of his shoulders. ‘Can’t help that,’ he said, ‘but she had had a pregnancy and a vaginal delivery. I’ve seen the episiotomy scar. That means,’ he said, eyeing her, ‘that she went into labour. I can’t know if the child lived or died but she did definitely give birth.’

  Joanna digested this little snicket of information, then, ‘Anything else?’

  ‘We-ell, looking at the X-rays …’ He crossed the room to the computer screen to study the image, which even she could see was displaying an easily recognizable forearm. Radius and ulnar. There is this …’ He traced a faint mark on one of the bones. Joanna peered but could not interpret the point he was making. It looked like a thickening. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Ossification,’ he said, ‘of an old – a very old – fracture of the right radius. Probably done when she was around ten. Possibly a greenstick. Not set very well, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Why would that be?’

  ‘It wasn’t set properly. I would assume that she didn’t receive medical attention.’

  ‘Why might that be?’

  Matthew shrugged. ‘Who knows? Perhaps she didn’t think it was that bad. A greenstick isn’t a complete break but a partial snap. Or …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It was probably done years ago. She might have been just a kid.’

  But at the age of ten Timony had been a ‘studio kid’. Pampered and observed all the time.

  ‘What would it mean?’

  Matthew was busy scrubbing his hands. ‘You mean as far as a deformity is concerned?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Very slight. She might have had trouble writing – unless she was left handed.’

  Joa
nna tried to remember and failed. People use both hands on a computer keyboard. ‘Is this likely to have any bearing on her …?’

  Matthew’s eyes gleamed mischievously as he slipped out of his rubber apron. ‘I’m just the simple pathologist, Jo,’ he said. ‘You’re the clever police woman. I just report the facts. It’s you who must draw the conclusions.’

  She could have thrown a pillow at him – if one had been to hand. As it was she made do with scolding him. ‘Matthew Levin,’ she said severely, tempted to wag a finger at him. ‘You can be the most irritating.’ His smile was far too warm for her to continue. She substituted the scolding with a giggle, then asked, ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No. As I said: she was in great shape for someone starting her sixties. No atheroma. No nasty holes in the brain. She had the body of a healthy fifty-year-old.’ His expression changed. ‘She would probably have lived for years.’

  ‘Instead …’ There was no need to finish the sentence. She smiled at him. ‘Thank you, Matt.’

  ‘My pleasure, my lady,’ he said, sweeping a mock bow. She watched him, feeling his good humour leak into her psyche. His boyish enthusiasm for his work endeared him to her. He could never know how much.

  ‘You’ve taken some toxicology samples?’

  He grinned again. ‘You don’t have to remind me of my job, Joanna,’ he said gently.

  ‘No. What about the cosmetic surgery? Before I go just run me through it.’

  ‘Hmm,’ was his response. ‘We-ell, as you probably guessed, a whole heap of stuff, some done years ago. They don’t use these breast implants any more. Far too synthetic-looking and they’ve capsulated anyway, and the work on her abdomen is quite crude. It’s almost butchery. Cheap stuff. Not done in the States or Harley Street, at a guess, but one of the provincial centres. Teeth.’ He inserted a gloved finger into the mouth. ‘All veneered. Done more recently. An expensive job this time. At a guess none of this has any bearing on her murder.’