Unlucky For Some

by Jill McGown

  From the moment he’d heard that voice coming out of nowhere, telling him to throw out his rifle, what had been a worrying situation had turned into a nightmare, and he had no idea how he had got caught up in it.

  He just wished with all his heart that he could see Ben.

  The revelation that Jack Shaw was recovering had thrown Lloyd, until, after ten minutes of wondering if the solution they had worked out could possibly be entirely wrong, he realized why Jack Shaw wasn’t dead or dying. He had spoken to Jack Shaw, and sweet-talked Freddie into doing him a favor, and now at least they had proof of a kind.

  Grace Halliday had been at the hospital, and though Lloyd hadn’t been allowed to speak to Shaw at any length, what Grace had told him had prompted him to apply for a search warrant, and now the files, photographs, papers and computer disks found in Tony Baker’s room in the Tulliver Inn were being packed into boxes and taken away.

  Lloyd drove out of Stoke Weston, bound for Barton. The afternoon sun shone down, and thanks to Jack Shaw, the village wasn’t in mourning as it would have been if Baker had had his way. Grace Halliday was working in the pub right now, with Ben Waterman helping out, both trying to take their minds off Stephen’s predicament. Lloyd wasn’t sure how Stephen was going to come out of this, not yet.

  Baker himself was under arrest for attempting to pervert the course of justice, being the crime for which they had straightforward, conventional evidence, but Lloyd’s Acting Superintendent was grimly determined that he would be charged with considerably more than that before the day was out.

  Tony had been puzzled when he’d heard the knock on his door—Grace didn’t knock, and Stephen was in a police cell, where he belonged. It had all gone wrong, but it had turned out reasonably well, he’d thought.

  It had turned out to be Ben Waterman, whom he had forgotten was staying there. He’d arrived late yesterday afternoon, and Grace had introduced him. She said he’d had some sort of bust-up with his father.

  “There are two police officers downstairs,” Ben had said. “They said they’d like to see you.”

  Tony had smiled. “This is getting to be a habit,” he’d said. “When they’re stumped, they come to me.”

  But it wasn’t anyone he’d thought it might be. Not the devious Lloyd, or the decorative Hill, or even the deceptive Finch. It was two uniformed constables, who said they were arresting him for attempting to pervert the course of justice, and several detectives who waved a search warrant at him and began to remove all his documents.

  He was taken to Barton, to Highgrove Street Station, and now he was in an interview room with Detective Chief Inspector Lloyd and Acting Detective Superintendent Hill, at something of a disadvantage, as the tape wound round slowly and silently, and he was cautioned. There was little point in talking to a solicitor; he had attempted to pervert the course of justice, and he wasn’t going to deny it. But he couldn’t work out how they knew what he had done.

  “Can you explain how the money found on Wilma Fenton’s body was the money paid out to you, and not the money paid out to her?” asked Acting Superintendent Hill.

  That was the last thing he’d thought would catch him out. How did they know? And before he told them it was a fair cop, he would make certain that they weren’t just taking a flyer. “I take it you can prove that?”

  “We can. We have the numbers of the notes paid out in each case.”

  Well, wouldn’t you just know, thought Tony. But what had seemed so important once was no longer important. Things had moved on.

  “Then, yes,” he said. “I can explain it. Her money was stolen. I replaced it with my own.”

  “And would we be right in assuming that you also removed any possible fingerprints from Mrs. Fenton’s bag, and altered the time of the murder from a few minutes after half past eight to nine o’clock?”

  “You would.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  Because he had been irritated that he should have witnessed a murder that was nothing more than a sordid little mugging. Because he had wanted to make it just a little more interesting than that. But that wasn’t the reason he was going to give them. “To give Stephen Halliday an alibi.”

  “Did you recognize Halliday as Mrs. Fenton’s attacker?” Lloyd asked.

  “No!” Tony was shocked by the suggestion. The glimpse he’d got of Mrs. Fenton’s attacker could have been anyone—he had seen only a shadowy figure. “Of course I didn’t—I saw no more than I said. But Waterman and I saw Stephen running after Wilma Fenton and going into the alley with her. I was about two minutes behind them, and when I got to the mouth of the alley, I saw what I described in some detail to you, Superintendent, except that the mugger merely made off with the victim’s bag.”

  He saw Lloyd and Hill glance at each other, then she looked back at him. “Go on,” she said.

  “I went after him,” he said. “But he was running way too fast for me to catch up. In the car park, I found Wilma’s bag, and I found the discarded envelope. I’ve no doubt he was hiding in the car park somewhere, but I couldn’t see anyone at all. And I knew how bad it would look for Stephen—though I didn’t know him particularly well, I honestly believed that he wouldn’t have done such a thing.”

  She shook her head slightly. “You committed a serious offense in order to stop Stephen Halliday coming under suspicion?”

  “Yes. Because I know how police minds work. There can be no other explanation than the one that immediately presents itself. Waterman had seen Stephen with Wilma, and if I called the police . . .” He shrugged. “I thought that another innocent man would be gobbled up by the system. My first instinct was simply to carry on to my car, and let someone else find her body. But as I looked at the envelope, I realized that I could make it look less like a mugging. I could replace the money—I could wipe the bag and her purse and everything else, and put them back beside her.”

  “And spreading the notes out on her body?” said Lloyd. “What was that all about?”

  Tony smiled a little. “A theatrical touch. I wanted it to look as though the motive was something other than theft. Envy, perhaps. Or disapproval.”

  He had wanted it to look interesting. He had wanted to have witnessed something that baffled the police. He had wanted the murder that he had witnessed to be one that caused a bit of a stir. He’d wanted it to be a murder of substance.

  “And when I’d set the scene, I waited for as long as I could before I rang the police, because I thought that Stephen would be wherever he was going by then, and would have an alibi. I said I’d been working in my car, and had been going back to the club when I saw it, so I had to say it happened the opposite way round from the way it had.”

  He was getting nothing back from Lloyd as he spoke; he was just sitting, his eyes cold, listening without reaction. From Judy Hill, he was getting waves of disbelief, but that didn’t matter. His motive was his own business—it made no difference. It wouldn’t lessen the offense. But an altruistic motive might just lessen the disapproval of the press and public. And that did matter.

  “What can I say? It was a very stupid and very inappropriate thing to do, but I did it.”

  It would have been very stupid and very inappropriate if he really had been trying to save Stephen’s neck, he thought, but it had been purely to make a mundane murder less humdrum. It wasn’t until long afterward that he began to realize that Stephen really had killed Wilma Fenton. And by then his spicing up of that unintentional murder had started something almost unstoppable.

  “He did kill Mrs. Fenton,” he said. “I know that now. And then he went on to kill again, as a sort of challenge to me. Grace must have told him what I said about the money being spread out, though naturally she denies that. I feel so stupid about telling her, but as I told you, I genuinely believed that Stephen was innocent at that point, and that theatrical detail was one that I thought might stop her worrying so much. It was much later that I began to realize how wrong I’d been.” He shook his head
. “I, of all people, should have realized that murderers come in all varieties. I tried, I swear to you, I tried to make up for what I’d done. I thought, if I could only work out what was in his mind, I might be able to stop him killing the next person, but—”

  Lloyd held up a hand. “I know you were a journalist,” he said. “And a writer. And now you’re a columnist and broadcaster. You’re a very versatile man, Mr. Baker. Were you an actor, too?”

  Tony frowned. “I’m sorry?”

  “The distress is very good,” said Lloyd. “Very good. And, I have to admit that you had me fooled. My superintendent here was never just as beguiled as I was, I have to admit that, too. And her predecessor was even less taken in by you. But then I have this tendency to be a little bit starstruck. Not unlike Mrs. Halliday.”

  “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “Of course you have!” Lloyd stood up, and walked over to the old-fashioned frosted-glass sash window, open slightly to admit fresh air on this warm day, but barred, presumably to prevent escape from this ground-floor interview room. He leaned on the windowsill, and looked out. “Stephen Halliday may or may not have killed Wilma Fenton,” he said. “But he didn’t kill Lewis, or Guthrie, or try to kill his mother or Jack Shaw. You did that.”

  Tony looked at Judy Hill, whose brown eyes regarded him with curiosity. He smiled. “I think,” he said, “that you’re making the same mistake as Grace. You’ve found my research, and jumped to conclusions.”

  “No, Mr. Baker,” she said. “What we found in your room merely confirmed what we already believed.”

  He didn’t launch into the explanation that he’d offered Grace—somehow he felt that it would be unlikely to have the same effect on the cool, composed woman who sat opposite him. But the photographs and plans weren’t enough to convict him—not even to charge him. He could prove that was how he had hunted down Challenger’s potential victim, that it was how he worked. He had kept them for the book he was going to write for publication after his death, telling the world how he had led the police in a murderous dance while apparently working with them. When Grace Halliday had found them, he had thought of destroying them, but then he had realized that such an action would suggest his guilt, so he had kept them quite openly. What guilty man would do that?

  He looked over at Lloyd, but he seemed to be engrossed in whatever it was he could see through that window.

  “The psychological profiler that we brought in said that the writer of the letters had what amounted to an obsession with you,” said Superintendent Hill.

  “It does seem that way,” said Tony.

  “And the only person I’ve met during this investigation who is obsessed with you is you,” she said.

  Tony dismissed that with a smile and a shake of his head. “I realized when I got the very first letter that you might consider the possibility that I’d written it to myself, but really—that does seem a very flimsy basis for an accusation of serial murder.”

  “Oh, it is. Very flimsy,” said Lloyd. “But you see, real murder has a motive. It doesn’t matter whether it’s God telling someone to kill, or someone trying to get his hands on Wilma Fenton’s prize money—there is always a motive, and that gives the investigators something, however nebulous, to get hold of.”

  In the street outside, Tony could hear traffic rumbling past, and Lloyd was still staring out at it as he spoke.

  “But there was no motive for these murders. The victims were chosen for ease of dispatch. And, to be perfectly frank, all that the police can do in a situation like that is wait for the murderer to make a mistake. And you finally did make a mistake.”

  Lloyd turned as he spoke the last sentence, and Tony wondered if he had seen the moment’s irritation that he had felt at the suggestion that he had made a mistake. He mustn’t give himself away, because they were on a fishing expedition, and nothing more. He had left them no evidence, and he didn’t make mistakes.

  “May Day was your downfall, Mr. Baker,” he went on. “Grace Halliday was your intended victim, but Jack Shaw saved her life. You knew that he must have seen something, so he had to go. But the rifle had jammed, and you found out as soon as you hit him that Shaw couldn’t be beaten to death without spattering his murderer with blood, so he had to be got rid of some other way.” Lloyd left the window, and sat down opposite him once more. “That puzzled me,” he said. “Because Jack Shaw wasn’t dead, and no one could have thought that he was. And yet you had chosen to leave your signature as if he were dead. Why? This morning, I realized why. And two hours ago, I had my suspicions confirmed—a massive dose of insulin had been administered as Jack Shaw lay unconscious.”

  Tony was amused. “Really? I always understood that insulin was absorbed into the body too quickly for there to be a reliable test for its presence. Besides, it’s impossible to distinguish from the body’s own insulin.” He looked at Judy Hill. “I’m disappointed in you, Superintendent. I would have thought you would know better than to let your subordinates get up to tricks like that.”

  “I can assure you that the test was thoroughly reliable,” she said, her voice as crisp and frosty as a January midnight.

  Oh, dear—she really was disappointing him now. It was all on tape, and telling fibs wasn’t allowed. He had always been quite impressed by her, but she would never get to be a real superintendent at this rate. He smiled. “In that case, I obviously need to update my medical knowledge.”

  “Of course,” said Lloyd, “Jack Shaw can never tell us who fired that shot at Grace Halliday and therefore who administered that injection, but I don’t think we need his testimony.”

  Tony regarded Lloyd with amusement. Perhaps they did have some sort of test these days. But even if they had, what sort of proof did they think that was?

  “Are you seriously suggesting that because insulin was used on Jack Shaw I must be the one who used it? Anyone who was at the Grange yesterday could have got hold of it—it’s kept in the fridge, for God’s sake! Stephen could have got it. Grace. Mike Waterman. Even that security guard—Scopes, or whatever his name is. He drinks in the Tulliver—he could have got into the kitchen when no one was looking.”

  “But each of them would have had to know that he or she was going to need it,” said Lloyd. “The assailant had planned a shooting—why would he be carrying insulin with him? Unless, of course, he was diabetic, on a clinical trial that necessitated a lunchtime injection, and had been invited to lunch.”

  “Oh, please.” Tony laughed, shook his head. “Do you imagine that would stand up in court?”

  “I think it would carry some weight,” said Lloyd.

  “Not enough, unfortunately. I suggest that Stephen took it for his next victim, but had to use it on Jack instead. I further suggest that I was going to be his next victim, and that he had it with him for that purpose. He used a different method for each victim, remember—I expect he thought it an appropriate way for me to die. And I think that but for the intervention of Jack Shaw, I would have been the person lying in an irreversible coma. It’s Shaw who’s in the coma, however, and without his eyewitness testimony, you’re stuck with the fact that anyone who was in the vicinity could have injected him with insulin.”

  “No, Mr. Baker. I’m not. You see, none of the other people who were there—Stephen, Grace Halliday, Keith Scopes, or Mike Waterman—could have intended murdering Jack Shaw that way.”

  “And how do you arrive at that conclusion?”

  “Because if any of these people had wanted to kill Jack Shaw,” said Lloyd, “they wouldn’t have injected the insulin into his artificial leg.”

  Tony blinked at him, not speaking.

  “I know,” said Lloyd. “You’d never guess, would you? He’s even a Morris dancer. It’s wonderful, isn’t it, how some people can overcome adversity like that? Grace Halliday was telling me that it’s a very expensive leg—Jack got a good deal of compensation for the accident, and it was invested well for him. He’s always had top-of-the-range, state-of-
the-art legs. That’s why he can dance. And why you’d never know he had an artificial leg at all. There are very few things he can’t do with ease. But getting up when he’s fallen is one of them.”

  Tony still just stared at him, motionless, speechless.

  “So that’s how we know insulin was used. The pathology lab at the hospital carried out a test and it was found in his artificial leg, which I think you will agree produces none of its own to confuse the issue.”

  Tony was trying to come to terms with what he was being told, but his head was spinning.

  “The coma that you hoped would be put down to the head injury was indeed caused by that, and was fortunately by no means irreversible. Jack’s alive, Mr. Baker. Alive and awake. He began regaining consciousness in the early hours of the morning, and I was able to speak to him very briefly just before I came here. He was fortunate—no brain damage, and his memory of the incident is intact.”

  Game over. Tony steepled his fingers and pressed them to his lips, closing his eyes. This wasn’t how it had been supposed to end, but that was how it was with games of chance. Someone won, someone lost.

  He opened his eyes, and looked at Judy Hill. “I expect you would like to know why I did it.”

  “I know why you did it,” she said. “You were being blackmailed.”

  “Has Stephen confessed?”

  She shook her head. “We used our powers of deduction,” she said. “We do have some.”

  They were much sharper than he’d imagined they would be. He smiled. “I was indeed being blackmailed,” he said. “I’m afraid I’ve destroyed all the letters.” He hadn’t been too worried when the detectives came with their search warrant, because the letters were the only thing that could have helped them, or so he had thought. “I got the first one after Mrs. Fenton’s murder.”

  He could still remember how he had felt when he had opened that letter, and realized that it had to be from Wilma Fenton’s murderer. He could remember all the blackmail letters, word for word, because he had examined them minutely in the hope of finding a clue to who was writing them.