Unlucky For Some

by Jill McGown

  Judy looked up as Tom knocked and came in all at once in the way he always had.

  “I’ve let him go, guv. What he told us accounted for his prints being on the purse, and if he had wiped the bag, he’d hardly have overlooked the purse, would he? Anyway, there was still money in it—I don’t think the assailant touched it, which is why he didn’t wipe it clean.”

  Judy frowned slightly. “He was the last person seen with her, he won’t tell us where he was from half past eight to nine o’clock, and now we’ve found his fingerprints at the scene, despite an attempt to remove them. That sounds quite like evidence to me, Tom. Bringing him in might have rattled him enough to make him tell us where he was, so we could cross him off, if nothing else.”

  Tom sat down. “Not many muggers take the time to wipe prints.”

  “I know,” she said. “But I think we’ve established that this isn’t what you’d call a professional mugging. And Stephen isn’t a professional mugger, so that’s hardly an argument.”

  A week on from Mrs. Fenton’s death, and they were no further forward. Conventional wisdom said that if you had no leads within three days, you weren’t going to get any, and Judy was beginning to believe it. Forensics had found no sign of Halliday or anyone else having been in the flat, no reason to believe Mrs. Fenton was killed in there and dragged outside, and no traces of blood on anything that could conceivably have been used as the murder weapon. She hadn’t thought there would be; it had always been a long shot. Apart from anything else, no one heard the dog barking, and the neighbor had said she was sure Heinz would have barked if anything bad had been happening to Mrs. Fenton where he could see it. She had decided to keep Heinz herself, Mrs. Fenton’s brother having said she could, and Judy was pleased about that.

  “I want the house-to-house inquiries extended to include the houses at the top of Murchison Place as well as the flats above it,” she said.

  “But the street was empty, guv.”

  “Maybe someone was looking out of their window, and saw something. Maybe there’s a local busybody.”

  “Right, I’ll ask Hitch to get on to it.”

  Teams of officers, armed with questionnaires, were producing what seemed to be reams and reams of absolutely nothing, just from the house-to-house already being done at the flats, in the hope that someone came in or went out during the half hour unaccounted for, or heard something, or knew something. In the incident room these questionnaires were being sifted through and collated, and the hope was that in among them would be a clue to who had murdered Wilma Fenton.

  Posters had been produced and were being put up in all the shops in Murchison Place and beyond, in case Mrs. Fenton had gone off somewhere instead of going into her flat, but so far they had received no credible sightings of her. They had booked some time on the local TV station for an inexpensive dramatic reconstruction and an appeal for witnesses. That would be going out tonight, so maybe, just maybe they would get some information. Someone ran away from the scene—surely someone got a better look at him than Tony Baker did? But it seemed not.

  Their thought about a loose cobble being used as the murder weapon had been dashed by the SOCOs, who assured them that there were no missing cobbles. They had found nothing of any note in the alley—like Tom had said, one of the very few things in its favor was that it was litter-free, having been swept on Saturday evening, and having had little use between then and the time of the murder.

  “Not even a cigarette butt,” said Tom. “Which is a bit strange. I can’t see Keith Scopes being too environmentally aware.”

  Judy frowned. “Are you saying you don’t think he really was in the alleyway?”

  “Not really. Why would he say he was if he wasn’t? And how would he know who else was there? But I do think it’s funny that we didn’t find a cigarette butt.” He smiled. “Does that count as a little puzzle, do you think?”

  In her smoking days, Judy had been known to drop a cigarette and stand on it, particularly if she was smoking when she shouldn’t. And every now and then the butt would attach itself to the sole of her shoe, so perhaps Scopes’s cigarette butt left the alleyway with him. But while the practice of standing on one’s cigarette butts might not be laudable, even that showed more social awareness than she felt Keith Scopes was likely to possess. He would be a thrower-away, rather than a stepper-on, Judy was sure. “I think perhaps it does,” she said. “Though I can’t see how solving it would help us find Wilma’s killer.”

  “No. Maybe we should be thinking in terms of someone who wanted her dead, rather than a mugging gone wrong,” Tom said.

  Judy sighed. They’d been through all this before. “We’ve found nothing at all in Wilma’s background that would make anyone want to kill her. And if anyone had wanted to kill her, they would have made a proper job of it. That blow wouldn’t normally have killed someone—Freddie is absolutely adamant about that.”

  “Yes, but—” Tom leaned forward, “what if he didn’t need to hit her again, because he realized she’d died after the first blow?”

  “Why was he hitting her at all, if it wasn’t for her winnings?”

  “If it was for her winnings, why didn’t he take them?” Tom countered. “That money wasn’t dropped, guv. It was spread out. You know it was.”

  “I don’t know it was. It looks odd, I’ll give you that, but it could just have fallen that way. It’s not impossible.”

  She remembered vaguely something she’d read in a book on logic about yellow blackbirds. How it was impossible to prove that there were no yellow blackbirds. Logically, all that could be said was that no one had ever seen one. And the idea of banknotes falling from someone’s hand and landing separately, scattered over someone’s body, none of them missing or going on the ground, was as likely as a yellow blackbird, but it wasn’t impossible.

  And Stephen Halliday, by all accounts, was a very unlikely mugger, but that wasn’t impossible either. He could have come back, gone into Wilma’s flat, and then left with her again, on some pretext. When she suggested that, Tom, of course, had an answer.

  “Jerry Wheelan would have seen him if he’d come back, guv.”

  “Not necessarily—he could have been busy with customers.”

  “But why would she still have her winnings in her bag? Surely if she had been in and come out again, she would have taken them out?”

  “If he wanted to make it look like an opportunist mugging, he could have left the envelope for us to find,” said Judy, and smiled. “Though that brings us back to why he didn’t take the money if he wanted it to look like a mugging, so—yes, perhaps there was some other motive.” She sighed. “But whatever the motive for killing her, she must have been somewhere during that half hour, Tom. And her flat seems the most obvious place.”

  “But Halliday isn’t the most obvious candidate. I don’t know where he was at nine o’clock, but I don’t believe he was killing Wilma Fenton. He’s a nice lad, Judy.”

  “Even though he likes guns?” She smiled.

  “Yeah, all right. Even though he likes guns. He’s a nice lad who’s never been in any sort of trouble. Maybe Wilma did have someone who wanted her dead, but I don’t think it was Stephen Halliday.”

  They had asked everyone at the bingo club if anything at all unusual had happened on Sunday night, or if Wilma said anything to anyone that might throw some light on what subsequently happened to her. Maybe, they had thought, someone had a grudge. Maybe they objected to her winning the money. Maybe they thought gambling was evil, and spread the money out on her as a warning to others.

  But the single most unusual thing that had happened was that Michael Waterman had been there, and he never worked on a Sunday. It was odd, and anything odd got noted down. Judy was a believer in Lloyd’s theory that if you solved the little puzzles, the big one became less puzzling. It was particularly odd because he had gone there despite the fact that he had had to get someone else to drive him. But they had about four dozen witnesses who saw him come int
o the club at half past eight, and stay there until ten, so he wasn’t hitting poor old Wilma on the head at nine o’clock.

  “What we really need,” said Judy, “is someone who saw the person who ran away. Or someone who saw Wilma during that half hour.”

  “All the same,” said Tom, “it had to be someone who knew she had won money, so it had to be someone who was at the bingo club.”

  “Not necessarily. Keith Scopes almost certainly overheard the conversation. Maybe he tricked his way into her flat, and—Come in!” Judy called, as someone knocked, glad that she didn’t have to finish her sentence because it was simply going to take her back round the same circle. Why didn’t he take the money?

  Gary Sims popped his head round the door. “Mr. Baker’s downstairs, ma'am—I tried to deal with it, but he says he has to speak to you.”

  Maybe he’d remembered something, Judy thought hopefully as she went down to the informal interview room.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Baker?”

  He took out an envelope, and carefully removed a letter from it, holding it by the very edge, unfolding it with a shake of his hand, and laying it on the table. “My fingerprints are already on it,” he said. “You might not want to touch it.” He laid theenvelope alongside it.

  Judy leaned on the table, and read the letter, her eyes widening. “When did you get this?”

  “About an hour ago. It could be a hoax, of course. My newspaper colleagues sometimes have a misplaced sense of humor.”

  Gary was glad to be back in Malworth, and pleased that he had been put on the murder inquiry, but even they produced dull jobs that had to be done, and he was doing one such. He had spent the afternoon going through the questionnaires from the house-to-house, a task enlivened only by the fact that from the office in which he was working, it was possible to see people arrive and leave, and that had been very diverting. He had no idea what was going on, but something clearly was.

  Detective Chief Superintendent Yardley had been the first to arrive, and after about an hour or so, Tony Baker, whose arrival seemed to have triggered all the activity, left. But Yardley didn’t go—he was still here, and divisional commanders and CID heads had come and gone all day. Then Yardley, DCI Hill and DCI Lloyd all went off in the Chief Super’s official car, driven by a constable who’d told Gary, when he brought DCI Hill back, that they had all had a meeting with the Chief Constable himself.

  He was almost a real detective, he told himself. In May he would be going on the course that would give him the full DC rank. He ought to be able to deduce what was happening, but he couldn’t. He scratched his head. What could they be about, these meetings that were so secret that no one he had spoken to had the slightest idea why they were happening? Whatever it was, the atmosphere of the whole building was charged, and Gary had been a police officer long enough to know that it wouldn’t be long before everyone knew what it was all about, however secret they wanted to keep it.

  It was going-home time, and he took his jacket from the back of his chair, half wishing he could stay. But whatever it was, and however intriguing it seemed, even he wasn’t prepared to go through any more questionnaires on the off-chance of finding out.

  The next morning, Tom arrived at work to find Judy in his office. If he had been asked once yesterday what was going on, he had been asked two dozen times, and he had no more idea than anyone else. He was sure Gary Sims thought he was lying when he denied all knowledge of the reason for all the comings and goings. But he was about to find out.

  “Sorry I couldn’t tell you yesterday,” said Judy. “But I was told it was on a strict need-to-know basis, and it took me until this morning to convince them that you did need to know if you were to be able to do your job properly.” She handed him a letter. “This is a copy of a letter Tony Baker received yesterday.”

  Tom glanced at it, typewritten in capital letters, and his heart sank.

  “YOU THINK YOU'RE SO CLEVER, BUT I DON'T THINK YOU'RE CLEVER ENOUGH. YOU COULDN'T EVEN CATCH ME ON SUNDAY NIGHT, AND YOU WERE ALMOST ON TOP OF ME. I'M GOING TO KILL AGAIN, SO IF YOU'RE ALL YOU'RE CRACKED UP TO BE YOU'D BETTER FIND ME FIRST. DO YOU NEED A CLUE? THE NEXT ONE WILL BE IN STANSFIELD NEXT MONTH. I THINK I'LL STRANGLE THIS ONE. I AM YOUR NEW CHALLENGER. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN.”

  He looked up at Judy. “Could it be a hoax?” he asked.

  “Tony Baker thinks it might be. But I’ve a horrible feeling it isn’t.”

  A serial murderer. The one thing everyone dreaded, in or out of the police force. And one that communicated his intentions—that was the worst of all.

  Judy gave him a brief résumé of the strategy discussed. “We should be getting it on paper today,” she said. “It mostly concerns the uniforms. But we can’t swamp Stansfield with police officers forever—if he can’t do it next month, he’ll do it some other time. We simply don’t have the manpower to cover every possible contingency, and we don’t even know what his problem is yet. So it’s up to us to catch him before it matters. We’re getting the inquiry team beefed up, but I don’t know the details yet.”

  Tom nodded. “I think we have to assume that it has something to do with Mrs. Fenton having won money at bingo,” he said.

  “The ACC agrees with you about that,” said Judy. “He wants plainclothes officers in all Stansfield’s bingo halls until further notice, with an officer to watch for anyone apparently tailing winners when they leave.”

  A thought struck Tom. “But what if he’s lying, and it isn’t going to be Stansfield at all?”

  Judy shrugged. “Then we’re no worse off than if we hadn’t heard from him at all. At least it’s something positive that we can do.”

  “I suppose,” sighed Tom.

  “And apparently Michael Waterman’s already put some measures in place in his bingo halls, in view of what happened to Mrs. Fenton. He’s now paying out checks only, and if a winner is unaccompanied and has no transport, he’s giving them a complimentary taxi home.”

  Very generous, thought Tom. But in a way, it could work against them. The point of putting detectives in the bingo halls was so that this man would be caught. Giving him no opportunity to follow someone out gave the police no opportunity to follow him. Cure was better than prevention in his book. They needed to catch this person, not merely cramp his style.

  And no sooner had he digested this piece of information than it was all happening again, as Judy was once again whisked off to HQ, and he had no idea why. Presumably, once again he didn’t need to know.

  Judy had arrived at Stansfield to pick Lloyd up and take him to HQ, to which they had both been summoned.

  “Do you know what this is about?” Lloyd had asked her.

  “No—do you?”

  “No. If we find out that nobody needs to know, can we all just go home?”

  Now, they sat in the small conference room. After a few minutes, DCS Yardley and the ACC joined them, sitting down at the table, uttering polite greetings.

  Yardley got straight to the point. “This is a fax of a letter received this morning by the editor of the so-called newspaper that Tony Baker works for.” He pushed copies across to Judy and Lloyd. “As you’ll see, our job is about to be made even more difficult.”

  Lloyd felt in his pocket for his glasses, then in his other pocket. Finally, he located them in his breast pocket, and read:

  I AM THE MAN WHO MURDERED WILMA FENTON IN MALWORTH ON SUNDAY 13 FEBRUARY. SHE IS JUST THE FIRST. I HAVE WRITTEN TO TONY BAKER TELLING HIM WHEN AND WHERE AND HOW I WILL KILL AGAIN AND CHALLENGING HIM TO FIND ME BEFORE MY NEXT VICTIM DIES. IS YOUR MAN UP TO THIS CHALLENGE? I DON'T THINK SO.

  The ACC had a degree in business administration, Lloyd knew. He wondered if that had covered madmen who wanted to pit their wits against well-known amateur sleuths in the full glare of the national media.

  “They only got this today?” he asked.

  “Yes—postmarked Bartonshire, yesterday’s date.”

  “That’s odd,” said Lloyd. “You’d thi
nk he’d have posted them together.” He smiled to himself as he saw Judy make a note. He pointed out the oddities, and she wrote them down. They very often proved to be important in the end. Or not, of course.

  “Writing to the paper was probably an afterthought,” said Yardley.

  “Probably. Are they going to publish it?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Yardley. “The Chief tried to talk them out of it, but without success. They have agreed to let us see any future letters before publication, in case they contain anything of a sensitive nature that we would rather wasn’t made public, but they wouldn’t agree that this letter contained any sensitive information, since it doesn’t go into any detail.”

  The upshot of all yesterday’s meetings had been that they should keep a lid on the letter in order not to panic the public, not a decision with which Lloyd had agreed. In his experience, the authorities panicked, not the public. What the public didn’t like was being kept in the dark, and this sort of thing had a habit of leaking out piecemeal. Now, keeping the public in the dark was no longer an option, so he thought they should go whole hog and tell people what they knew.

  “The problem is,” he said, “that this letter gives the impression that we are in possession of considerably more information than we are. Are we also making public the contents of the letter to Tony Baker?”

  “No,” said the ACC. “It’s still felt that naming the town would cause unnecessary panic, and the media has not been and will not be made privy to the contents of that letter.”

  “That’s all very well, sir,” Lloyd said, “but if the press think we’ve been told exactly when and where it’s going to happen, we’re going to be given a rough ride if we fail to prevent this proposed murder.”

  “Our strategy for dealing with the press has already been decided,” said the ACC. “DCS Yardley will deal with all pressrelated issues, including any press conferences, interviews and the wording of press releases. He will liaise with the press officer over any statements that she makes directly to the press, and will be briefed on exactly how much or how little we want the media to know at any given point in time. No other officer should under any circumstances make any comment at all to the media. I’m relying on all line managers making that entirely clear to each and every person for whom he or she has responsibility.”