by Jill McGown
“It just hasn’t happened yet. He told me that he’s got someone waiting for the opportunity to present itself. So when Stephen ends up in hospital, you’ll know where to look.”
Lloyd didn’t speak for some time as he tried to evaluate what he was being told. Michael Waterman’s background wasn’t criminal, but it was the nearest thing to it, and he did operate in a world where violence wasn’t unknown. That criminal connection was doubtless what Tony Baker’s documentary would be about. Gambling debts were sometimes discouraged in this way, so ordering violence to be done to someone might well be something Waterman practiced from time to time. But Waterman senior’s violent objection to Stephen didn’t seem to make sense, given the situation.
“If your father is so unhappy with Stephen, why does he continue to employ him?”
“Because he has no choice. Stephen is a very good employee—he’s popular, and capable. He’s punctual. Reliable. Honest. What reason could he have for sacking him? If he did, Stephen might take him to a tribunal and tell everyone he was sacked because he was having a relationship with me. My father would sooner die than have that happen. Anyway—he isn’t unhappy with Stephen as a person—just the opposite, until he found out about us. He just wants to discourage his relationship with me, any way he can.” He looked a little embarrassed. “He even suggested that he could have him killed if he wanted to. He wouldn’t—I’m sure he wouldn’t. But that’s how crazy it makes him.”
“How long have you known Stephen?”
“He moved to Stoke Weston seven years ago. I met him once or twice when I was home from school. I liked him, but it didn’t go any further than that, not then. My father took him on when he left school, and after I’d started at university I was home during the summer and I happened to be with my father when he called in to one of the bingo clubs to see about something. I met Stephen again, and we talked. We found out our birthdays were close together, and that we had a lot in common, and . . . well, I think we both knew then that . . . that we were right for each other.”
The last statement had been delivered with a hint of defiance, but Lloyd had no problem with other people’s life choices. And he was quite happy to believe that Ben and Stephen were ideal for each other. All that he was trying to work out was whether it was a match made in heaven or hell. Had they cooked up this alibi between them? Was Waterman really out to get Stephen, or were Stephen and Ben some sort of deadly duo out to get him by committing murders in close proximity to his establishments? He was inclined to believe the young man, but he needed evidence one way or the other.
“Stephen was still seventeen, and I was eighteen. To be honest, we weren’t altogether sure where we stood with the law, so we were being careful anyway. But I told him what my father had done, and what he’d threatened to do to anyone else I took up with. At first, he didn’t believe me—he thought I was overdramatizing. He only knew my father as the man he is most of the time—generous, kind, easy to please—a good man to work for.”
“In general, then, you get on well with your father?”
“If it wasn’t for this. That’s why Stephen couldn’t understand—he’s really fond of him. But eventually, I made him understand that my father was totally irrational about my sexuality, and that he was running a real risk.” He smiled a little sadly. “I expected him to go and find a less complicated relationship, but he just said that in that case, he’d be very careful. And we’ve kept it hidden until now.”
Lloyd was puzzled. “But you couldn’t live like that forever,” he said. “You’re both adults now. How is it going to resolve itself?”
“I thought perhaps Stephen could get a job in St. Andrews, come and live there. But he didn’t want to leave his mother alone in the pub. She depends on him quite a bit for moral support—Stephen’s father running out on her was difficult for her to cope with. He was hoping she would eventually marry again, and he wouldn’t feel so responsible for her.”
That was even more puzzling. “But now that she has found someone else, he isn’t very happy about it, according to his mother.”
“No. He really doesn’t like Tony Baker. It’s unusual for Stephen—he usually just takes people as he finds them. And to be fair, it might not be Baker’s fault—I think Stephen always hoped his mother and Jack Shaw would get it together. But now that he knows she’s open to the idea of a new man in her life, he feels he can leave her, so the situation is resolved, more or less. That’s why I’m here today, really.”
“Oh?”
The young man took a breath. “This is going to sound odd, but next week, I come into a lot of money left to me by my mother, and Stephen doesn’t know about it yet. There were reasons I didn’t tell him, which had nothing to do with Stephen himself.”
Lloyd pushed his chair back onto its back legs, and swayed gently as Ben spoke. Today was what he wanted to know about. Today was what mattered. So he looked as if he wasn’t remotely interested, and said nothing.
“I wanted to give him a surprise, cheer him up a bit, because I knew he’d been a bit down lately—I thought it was his mother taking up with Baker that was getting to him, but no wonder he was down, being suspected of all this.”
The two things might not be unconnected, thought Lloyd, as he listened impassively.
“Anyway, I went house-hunting over the weekend, and I was going to make a flying visit here, tell him about the money, show him the houses I’d found, see if any of them appealed to him. We were going to go off somewhere together for the afternoon. But, as things turned out, we were only going to have about an hour and a half free, so we arranged to meet in the summerhouse to make the most of it.”
That was interesting. Lloyd let his chair fall forward with a bang, making the young man jump. “What happened to change your plans?”
“Two things. Stephen couldn’t get the afternoon off, and my father wanted me to meet Tony Baker—he invited him and Grace Halliday to lunch, and I was the guest of honor, more or less, so I couldn’t get out of it.”
“Did anyone else know of your arrangement to meet in the summerhouse?”
“No. Unfortunately, my father found out because I had to tell DI Finch where Stephen was when he said that they were cordoning that area off. That’s when everything came out. We had a furious row, and then I found out you’d arrested Stephen.”
Lloyd nodded slowly. He had a lot to digest from this interview. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for being so frank. I take it you will be available, should we want to talk to you again?”
“Yes—but I won’t be at the Grange.”
“Oh?” Lloyd raised his eyebrows.
“He’s gone too far this time—he knew Stephen was too scared to tell you where he was that night, and he would have let him be suspected of murder sooner than say anything. He tried to stop me talking to you.”
“Even so,” said Lloyd, “is that what you really want? To cut yourself off from your father altogether?”
“No. But he’s left me no choice. I’ll be staying at the Tulliver until this nonsense about Stephen is sorted out.”
Lloyd was sorry that the young man’s relationship with his father had been damaged to that extent, but he would sleep a little more soundly tonight knowing that Ben Waterman was at the Tulliver.
The young man leaned forward, his elbows on the table, and looked Lloyd straight in the eye as he spoke, quietly and firmly. “Stephen is quite simply the most levelheaded, straightforward, caring person that I’ve ever known. The idea that he’s going around killing people for any reason at all is ludicrous.”
Gary was in the office with Alan Marshall, DI Finch and Acting Superintendent Hill, discussing Halliday’s interview, when DCI Lloyd came back and told them what Ben Waterman had said about his father.
“That’s what Stephen said, too,” said Finch. “Doesn’t mean it’s the truth, though, does it? They could have cooked it up between them.”
“I thought you were on his side.”
“I
am. But just because I want to believe him doesn’t mean that I should. I’m playing . . . what is it you call it?”
Lloyd smiled. “Devil’s advocate,” he said. “But he was probably right that it would get back to Waterman if he gave us his alibi. So if we assume, for the moment, that Ben and Stephen are telling the truth, and the consensus seems to be that we should, then where does that leave us?”
“Someone’s framing Stephen,” said Finch. “And my money’s on Michael Waterman. He knew that Stephen had an alibi for the first murder that he was afraid to give us, he can have him working wherever he wants, he can arrange for Scopes to hurt people, and now he’s saying he can just as easily have them killed. And I know Scopes—he wouldn’t think twice, if the price was right.”
Lloyd looked doubtful. “Ben says his father knew nothing about the assignation in the summerhouse until after the incident. I think whoever it is knew Stephen was going to be there.”
“And why would he go to all that trouble?” asked Marshall. “If he can arrange murders, why not arrange for Stephen to be killed?”
“Because Ben would know that he’d done that, and would never forgive him,” said Lloyd. “He does what he does because he loves Ben—however cockeyed that seems.”
Finch looked thoughtful. “Waterman gave Stephen the gun cabinet,” he said. “He could still have a key to it, couldn’t he?”
Gary’s eyes widened when he heard that. “He was in the pub this morning, sir, on his own. If he has got a key, he could have got hold of the rifle and given it to Scopes.”
“As your acting superintendent, I would caution against rushing out and arresting them.”
Everyone looked at their acting superintendent.
“I would remind you that neither of them could have killed Davy Guthrie,” she said. “They were both in the casino from when we know he was alive until well after he was found dead. The firearms officer says whoever fired that gun was an experienced shot, and Scopes seems to have no interest in guns whatsoever. Circumstantial evidence is what’s landed Stephen where he is, so let’s not jump to conclusions about anyone else.”
Gary smiled. The DI had said that she could demolish what seemed like a perfectly good theory in two seconds, and she just had.
That was when Hitchin came back from the hospital. “You’re not going to believe this, ma'am,” he said.
“Try me.”
“I was just leaving the hospital when a nurse comes running after me. She said that in the rush to get Shaw to the theater, they had forgotten to tell me that when they undressed Shaw, they rolled down his white stockings and took off the crêpe bandage to see how bad the sprain was, and what they found was a load of cotton-wool padding to make his ankle appear to be swollen. There was nothing wrong with it at all.”
“You’re right, Hitch,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”
Gary loved working on this team—it wasn’t like anything else he’d done at all. After the first few days, they hardly even bothered with ranks, or anything. You could say what you wanted to anyone, and if they thought it was rubbish, they’d tell you. But if they didn’t, they would listen. It was like being at home with your family, and it was the best job he’d had, in or out of the police. From having longed to get back to normal CID duties, he now found himself wishing he never had to go back to them, and half hoping that the inquiry into the Anonymous Assassin would go on forever.
“And then there’s the bells,” said Lloyd. “Which have just become even more of a puzzle.”
“The bells?” said Superintendent Hill.
“Jack Shaw’s would-be murderer used one set of bells to weigh down the money. But the other set wasn’t still round his leg—it was in his pocket. Now, I can’t see his assailant bothering to remove both sets and put one of them in Shaw’s pocket, so I think Shaw must have removed them himself beforehand.”
She frowned. “What’s odd about that? Would you go round with bells on your legs if you didn’t have to?”
“No, but Shaw did, didn’t he? He must have had to take them off in order to prepare his fake sprained ankle, then put them back on again, just to take them off again later. Why?”
The idea of removing bells was reminding Gary of something. When he realized what it was, he thought he might have solved that little puzzle. “We’ve got a cat,” he said. “When he was a kitten, my mum got him one of those flea collars, and put it on him. And he sat there pulling at it with his teeth, and we thought he didn’t like the feeling of it round his neck. But my mum said to leave him for a while, and he’d get used to it. He was pulling at it for about half an hour, and when he stopped, the bell was lying on the floor. He couldn’t have cared less about the collar—he just didn’t want his prey to hear him coming.”
Lloyd beamed at him. “The boy’s a genius—of course that’s why! And it’s why Grace Halliday didn’t know he was there. He was stalking her, and in order to do that, he had to get out of the Morris dancing, so he faked a sprained ankle.”
“And he made sure that he was with Grace Halliday from the moment she got there, by going home and getting a lift back up there with her,” said Marshall, slowly, then frowned. “But if he wanted to stalk her, why wear the costume at all? If I wanted to merge into the background, a Morris dancing costume wouldn’t be my first choice of camouflage.”
Sergeant Hitchin smiled. “I think camouflage is more or less exactly what it was. I mean, let’s face it—Morris dancers look a bit silly, don’t they? So Stephen and his mother wouldn’t spend too long wondering why he hadn’t stayed at the Grange, if that was where he wanted to be—they would just indulge him. He turns up in his silly costume, jingling wherever he goes, hobbling about on crutches, wanting to go back to the May Day festivities. It obviously means a lot to him, so they just humor him.” He shrugged. “No questions asked.”
Lloyd went into a sort of reverie then, and everyone looked at him, waiting for an inspired theory.
“No,” he said, after a moment or two. “I have tried very hard to produce a scenario in which Jack Shaw somehow managed to shoot at Grace Halliday at the same time as apparently saving her life.”
Finch laughed. “Not even you, guv.”
“Oh, don’t be too sure. If it had ended there, I might have suggested that he and Stephen had devised it between them to make Shaw seem more glamorous in Grace’s eyes, but it didn’t end there, did it? Because someone then hit him so hard with his own crutch that he’s in a coma.”
“Shaw must have known that Grace Halliday was in danger,” Finch said. “But knew that she wouldn’t listen to him if he warned her. That means that she was in danger from either Stephen or Tony Baker. She would surely have listened to him about anyone else.”
“I think so,” said Lloyd. “And I think you’re right—he was following her to be on hand if she needed him. And she did need him. He saved her life.”
“And almost got killed himself in the process,” said Marshall.
“Yes,” said Lloyd. “He almost got killed. And that’s the real puzzle. Why isn’t Jack Shaw dead?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
* * *
The next morning, Stephen, looking slightly crumpled, was waiting in the interview room when Gary and DI Finch got there. Things weren’t looking good for him, thought Gary, as they confronted him with the evidence gathered by the scene-of-crime officers.
His prints had been found on the rifle, of course, and the bullet in the tree had been fired from that rifle. Ballistics had done their homework on the bullet’s trajectory, and had marked on a photograph where they thought the gunman had been when it was fired. Stephen could easily have been there in the time at his disposal, and then run along the path to the summerhouse. The crutch found by the lake had inflicted Jack Shaw’s head wound, and the other had been lying in the undergrowth near where Shaw had been found. Stephen Halliday’s prints had been found on both of them. The only other fingerprints were Jack Shaw’s own.
Add to that t
he facts that he had admitted threatening Keith Scopes with the rifle and had at first refused to surrender to the police, and that seemed to Gary to add up to evidence of attempted murder.
On the plus side, as far as Stephen was concerned, the test done on his hands was inconclusive; there were traces on the skin of the residue left when someone fired a gun, but he had been shooting the night before, and it could have remained there even after he’d washed, so that would probably be thrown out. Gary tried in vain to find something else in his favor that was less damning than that.
Halliday explained that he had handled Shaw’s crutches that morning when he and his mother had taken Shaw up to the Grange, and Gary was sure that his mother would confirm that, but Shaw’s confirmation would be needed to make it entirely believable, and Shaw was in a coma.
But if Halliday was their man, they had to get him for more than just attempted murder. DI Finch opened the file in front of him and took out six photographs, two from each murder scene, placing them silently in front of Stephen one at a time.
Stephen looked down at them, and frowned. “I didn’t know he did that with the money,” he said. “What’s that all about?”
“We thought you might tell us.”
Stephen sighed.
“Did you kill these people, Stephen?”
“No.” He frowned. “I thought you said Ben had confirmed that I was with him when Wilma was killed. Why are you showing me her photograph? Do you still think I did it?”
“Well—you and Ben could have made all that up about being in his father’s flat, couldn’t you?”
Stephen nodded. “I suppose we could,” he said. “I can’t win, can I? If I do have an alibi, you don’t believe it.”
He looked at all the photographs, and reacted in exactly the way everyone who looked at them did. They weren’t horrific; Gary had seen much worse even in his short time in the police. But it was never nice to look at photographs of dead bodies, and Stephen wasn’t looking at them any more closely than he had to. But if they had been hoping that he would somehow give himself away, then they had been wrong.
