Echoes of Silence

by Marjorie Eccles

  But now, where had the carrot gone? Turned out to be nothing except the frocks and shoes, the New Look suits, the furs (which nobody wanted nowadays), the hats and handbags that Freya had left to her. Stored up from the days when she’d modelled for the famous couture houses: model gowns acquired as favours or at cost, worn once or twice, then swaddled away with a canny foreknowledge of their future worth … Most of them now likely to fetch a respectable bob or two if auctioned, though not Princess Di, or even Spice Girl prices, not by any means. And certainly not enough to retire on – nor anywhere near as much as she’d calculated, almost an insult, really, after giving a lifetime’s service. A pittance, she thought, working herself up to a fury, forgetting that it had swung both ways. Angry at Freya, who’d always told her everything, for keeping the true state of her finances to herself. But cheering up when she remembered that it was more than the rest of them – Freya’s own family – were likely to get. And don’t forget the jewellery, or some of it.

  Once upon a time, Freya had admired the picture of herself wearing jewels, then through necessity taught herself not to, losing interest as one by one they had to be disposed of, sold or pawned. Or were lost, disappeared, never missed … the ruby ring, the tourmaline one, the Victorian garnet pin, set in marcasite, the pearls – and that sapphire pendant … Dot had lost count, except for their value. Where Freya had admired them as decorative adjuncts to her person, Dot had coveted them, among other reasons, as future insurance.

  Whiteley and Horsfall had promised to keep Richmond informed of any suitable accommodation which became available, and with Saturday morning’s post came details of one of the flats at Roydholme, as the converted mill by the river was now to be called – Roydholme, without the Mill. Early viewing for this desirable, much sought after property was strongly advised.

  Pity about that, it sounded interesting, he thought, swearing roundly as he banged into the kitchen table yet again while preparing his breakfast; the smallness of this place was getting seriously on his nerves and his landlady driving him nuts. Breakfast was the only time she wasn’t likely to pop her head round the door, if it wasn’t locked, or shout through the letter box if it was, that it was only her, come to do the hoovering, or the brasses, leave that washing up, I’ll do it, Mr Richmond, and did you hear about so and so and how are you getting on finding out who’s done that there murder?

  Not so well that he could afford to take time off to go viewing property, Richmond thought sardonically now, angling his legs under the table and pouring himself some coffee. He read on: the owners were not in residence at the moment but a neighbour would be pleased to show prospective buyers around by appointment, weekends and evenings. Ring E. Graham, Steynton Fine Art.

  It was a moment or two before he made the connection and saw a way he could in fact fit in a viewing of the flat, after all. He would check, but he was certain that E. Graham must be Elvira Graham, since he knew she lived in one of the flats at Roydholme. She had to be seen about the appointment she’d had with the murdered woman, and Richmond had no doubt he could arrange to conduct the interview himself, as he’d always intended.

  When he got to the office, he rang the number given. She had a clear voice and a decisive way of speaking. ‘Tomorrow morning? I have a lunch date, but I can give you half an hour,’ she told him, quickly setting her own limits to the time of his visit. He agreed and gave her his name, omitting his official status.

  Later that morning he sat in Jackson Farr’s office, listening with him to the recording of Eddie Nagle’s second interview, which Jacks had thought it circumspect to conduct personally.

  The bastard didn’t sound quite so cocksure this time, despite the fact that nothing had been discovered from a forensic examination of his clothes, that his car had been found to be clean as a whistle – unnaturally so, with not even the slightest trace of the mucky slush that was being tramped inside everyone else’s car. Not even the normal, expected traces of himself and his wife. Perhaps he’d been less cocky due to the fact of being interviewed by the detective superintendent himself. Perhaps he was just intimidated by that impressive bulk.

  After further questioning about the night of Wyn Austwick’s murder, which had got him no further, Jacks was returning to the events of 5th January, ten years previously. ‘I’d like you to listen to this,’ he told Nagle, switching on a tape.

  Into the office came the sound of Nagle scraping his chair back, his cough as he listened to the statement he’d recorded at that time. ‘I last saw Beth, just before twelve, when she was going upstairs for her music lesson with Mr Denshaw before the midday meal. My wife had made sandwiches for the family but we always have fish and chips Saturday dinner time, and I’d been down into Steynton to fetch them. I knew Beth would rather have had chips, so when I saw her I asked if she’d like one, and I opened the parcel and let her have a few. She was a lovely little girl and I was very fond of her. I never saw her again. I had a sleep after we’d eaten, and didn’t wake up until my wife woke me and told me Beth was missing. I helped to look for her, took the car out and drove it round for several hours, but nobody ever saw her again.’

  ‘I’m giving you the chance to amend that statement if you want to, Mr Nagle,’ Jacks said after the tape was switched off and the new one substituted.

  ‘Why should I? Case is closed, far as I know.’

  ‘We’ve reason now to think Mrs Austwick’s murder may throw further light on it.’

  A massive creak that could only have been Jacks, shifting his weight, nearly obliterated Nagle’s next few words.

  ‘That’s it, is it? You’re trying to pin that on me, an’ all! You better fink again, mate! Her mum confessed, didn’t she? Mind, I can understand how you want to get somebody else for it, him being her dad an’ all.’ He paused. ‘Richmond, I mean.’ There was an unsubtle warning there of trouble ahead, of allegations of conflict of interest coming clearly across from the recording. Then the voice changed, became maudlin. ‘How can you fink that, Mr Farr? I wouldn’t’ve harmed a hair of that child’s head! She was a little sweetheart.’ He blew his nose loudly.

  Richmond stood up abruptly, shoving his hands into his pockets, walked the length of the room and back. Times like this he wished he hadn’t given up smoking. Or hadn’t taken a vow never to use violence against a suspect. Christ!

  Jacks’s hand hovered over the machine, ready to switch off. He flicked a glance at Richmond but was apparently reassured enough to let it carry on playing. ‘Leave it out, Eddie,’ he was saying. ‘CI Richmond’s dealing with the murder of Wyn Austwick.’ Silence for a moment, then: ‘How long have you worked at Low Rigg?’

  ‘Since I married Dot. 1977.’

  No hesitation there. His memory had improved since Richmond had asked him that question. ‘That was the date you - er – left the Marines, I see,’ Jacks said. ‘Still a young man! I’d have thought you’d have wanted something to stretch you, use your intelligence a bit more, like. Looking after an old woman’s car, piddling around the house, not much job satisfaction there. Must’ve paid well to compensate.’

  ‘Don’t know about that. Like I told Richmond, I’ve another source of income.’

  ‘Oh right, yes, I’d forgot, you must be rolling in it, part-time job at the health club, an’ all! Unless you get a lot of winnings on the bow-wows.’

  ‘I do all right. I’m not what you’d call greedy.’

  Jacks let the silence go on. Sounds of Nagle fidgeting, blowing his nose again.

  ‘Why did Mrs Denshaw keep you on, Eddie?’ Jacks asked at last. ‘We have it on good authority that you and she didn’t get on all that well together.’

  ‘She had to have a man around the house. Who told you we didn’t get on?’

  It had, in fact, been Polly, spoken to by Richmond himself over the telephone. Her voice cool at first, then warming as the conversation proceeded, its natural lilt returning. She wasn’t a person, Richmond thought, who could stay angry for long, though she hadn’
t been entirely pleased with him when they’d last parted company. People rarely were when they were caught at a disadvantage, but he’d had no choice, had felt constrained to treat her as he would any other witness. Hadn’t wanted to leave it like that, though. Which was one of the reasons he’d rung, with a question which he knew couldn’t have a ready answer, which he could have made a stab at answering, anyway. But Polly hadn’t needed long to think.

  ‘I used to wonder myself why she tolerated him, because she clearly loathed him and didn’t care how obvious it was. Could only have been that she suffered him on account of Dot,’ she’d said, which had been how Richmond had figured it until his reading of that incriminating paper. ‘Otherwise he’d have been out, long since. I think she knew that if she tried to get rid of him, Dot would go, too. Dot’s very fond of Eddie, in spite of -’ She’d stopped herself, then added quickly, ‘in spite of him being such a dead loss.’ Which wasn’t what she’d been going to say in the first place, he was sure. But you could never be one hundred per cent certain over the telephone, when you couldn’t see the face of the person you were speaking to, it was why he didn’t like using it unless he had to.

  ‘Somebody took Beth away from Low Rigg that day,’ Jacks was reminding Nagle on the tape as it whirred on. ‘If not the person that killed her. Somebody put her under that bandstand. All right, it was eventually assumed it was her mother who’d come and picked her up. But without anybody seeing her? Without her saying a word to anybody? You know what? I find that hard to believe.’

  ‘Please yourself what you believe.’

  ‘I’ll repeat, somebody took her away. There’s a difference,’ Jacks went on, ‘between committing murder and being an accessory after the fact, but you don’t need me to tell you even that’s a very serious matter. Enough to put anybody who’s convicted of it away for a very long time.’

  ‘I answered all these questions once before. You haven’t got no right to go harping on what’s over and done wiv.’

  ‘We’ve every right, lad, if we think it has a bearing on what happened to Mrs Austwick, and if we think you know a hell of a lot more than you’re letting on about both murders. Which we do. Make no mistake about that.’

  ‘You’re wasting your time! You know I didn’t kill Wyn, I couldn’t of. Not when I was playing darts wiv a pub full of blokes – including one of your lot.’

  ‘That where you got that cut lip? Punch-up after losing, was it? You want to watch it, Eddie. Seeems to me you’re too often in the wars for your own good.’

  ‘I walked into a door.’

  Jacks had kept him as long as he could, but Nagle knew when he’d got his teeth into a good alibi and clung on like that pit bull terrier he’d once owned.

  It was going to be a long haul. But Richmond was in no doubt now as to what he believed: that Nagle had been guaranteed employment for getting rid of Beth’s body; Austwick had found this out and was holding it over Freya, who believed the killer to be Peter. This would scarcely have bothered Nagle – what would have bothered him, though, was Austwick holding incriminating evidence of the part he’d played. So much so that he’d disposed of her. Or maybe the person who had killed Beth – whether this was Denshaw or not – had made it worth his while to do so.

  How he’d done this when he was playing darts under the eye of a pub full of people, including a policeman, was still a mystery.

  ‘I have the manager from the NatWest on the line, returning your call, sir,’ Richmond was informed by the switchboard operator.

  ‘Put him through, please.’

  ‘Cranwell here, Chief Inspector,’ said a clipped, guarded voice. ‘I believe I’m at liberty now to divulge the information you requested about Mrs Austwick’s affairs.’

  And not before time, Richmond thought. These people had no sense of urgency in these matters. Nor was it in the nature of banks to appear too ready with information, never mind that it was at their fingertips nowadays, easily available at the tap of a few computer keys. It would have looked too easy, as if anyone could become a bank manager. ‘Go ahead, Mr Cranwell, I’m listening.’

  ‘Ahem, well … I hope you have time to spare.’

  Ten minutes later, Richmond put the phone down, bemused but much enlightened, and within a very short time, he was back in Jacks’s office.

  ‘So she did leave a will, after all,’ Jacks interrupted, grinning, when Richmond had scarcely begun. ‘That little scrote Trev’s not going to come in for it after all.’

  ‘Not a bean. She made the bank executors to her will and left everything to her brother, presumably the bloke on the motorbike in that photo. Not that he’s likely to benefit, poor sod. He was involved in a near-fatal motor accident about twenty years ago, leaving him paralysed and with permanent brain damage.’

  Jacks hunched his shoulders, tut-tutted. ‘No use telling ’em, these young lads. But if they knew what a motorbike accident can do ’

  ‘It wasn’t a motorbike accident. He was in the car she was driving. She was drunk and piled it into a lorry.’

  ‘Bloody hell! That’s some guilt to be carrying around for twenty years.’

  ‘Isn’t it? Those banker’s orders represent what she’s been paying to a small private nursing home ever since, run by a woman called Enid Brentdale, place near Leicester. She’s left enough to keep on paying the bills for as long as he’s likely to last – which they don’t anticipate will be long. Anything left goes to Mencap.’

  ‘Hope they’re not counting on there being much left then. These nursing homes don’t come cheap.’

  ‘I suppose that’s why she wasn’t so particular where she got her money from. Funny, you know, I’d never have associated her with having a sense of duty, or a conscience … but there you are. She’s kept him in that nursing home for nigh on twenty years, and spent weeks at a time with him even though he didn’t really know who she was. I’ve spoken to them and it seems she was due to go down there last week, but had to cancel when she had to go into hospital herself.’

  ‘That’s why she went to all that rigmarole about Spain? Didn’t want anybody to know where she was really going?’

  ‘Search me. But I suppose it could make sense in a way. If she’d felt so guilty about her brother she’d kept him secret all these years, it could have become a way of life.’

  15

  For once, and for no apparent reason, Richmond slept dreamlessly, and woke to a thick yellow sky, ready to release more snow on to the world below. Only this time it looked as if it meant business, not just an inch or two falling overnight, later to melt into slush and then freeze, turning roads and pavements into skating rinks. He made himself some bracing coffee. For all he’d slept without dreams, he didn’t feel rested.

  He drove straight to Roydholme. Its riverside situation had very likely saved the old mill from the fate of many of its satanic companions, he thought when he arrived, though its conversion had apparently gone through without opposition. Wholesale clearance of derelict properties, and some not so derelict, had taken place around it and now it stood in solitary splendour just below the road bridge, a car-park alongside, and young, hopeful trees planted where trees hadn’t stood for many a long day. A large, foursquare building, five storeys with a twin-gabled roof and rows of long windows set at regular intervals on all its four sides. Nothing beautiful about it except a certain honesty of purpose, now gone by the board in pursuit of expediency, but what of that? Finding a present-day use for it had to be better than letting it rot.

  The whole of the ground floor of the original woollen-spinning mill, plus its various outbuildings, had been converted by a firm of developers into a shopping area, designed in a carefully haphazard manner, with units of various shapes and sizes dealing in a variety of products. He walked down the middle of the concourse, past the craft boutiques, the flower and patisserie shops ranged either side, a couple of upmarket cafés from whence issued a smell of good coffee, a hairdresser and, not least, Ginny Katz’s knitwear shop. Though
slowly gaining popularity as its reputation spread, the enterprise was still uncertain, financially shaky, Richmond had heard, mostly owing to the high rents being charged for the units, some of which were still empty. Shopkeepers were reluctant to commit themselves, cautious until they saw how things were going. If the price of the flat quoted in the details sent to him by Whiteley and Horsfall reflected other prices in the development, they had his sympathy.

  There was a lift, but he chose to use the stairs to the top floor where Elvira Graham lived. He almost wished he hadn’t. The extent of his puffing, by the time he reached there, was making him seriously reconsider how fit he was. The stairwell emerged into a central corridor, carpeted in a serviceable dark blue, the walls painted in a bland, neutral stone colour, with nothing to distinguish it from a modern hotel save the wood-stained, mock-Victorian front doors to each flat. He’d just about got his breath back by the time he was ringing the bell on the door marked ‘E. Graham’.

  She held it open after he’d introduced himself. ‘Come in while I get the key.’

  The winter sunlight, filtered through the snow-filled sky, cast an eerie light through the three big windows of the spacious apartment on to a spread of thick, soft carpet, on to smoothly plastered walls, tinted a pale honey colour. Her furniture was modern: comfortable chairs and sofas, a pair of low tables, dining furniture at one end, and little else apart from one or two judiciously placed pieces of metal which he took to be sculptures. One wall was dominated by a huge abstract painting in hot, vibrant acrylics slashed with black, which Richmond wasn’t competent to judge, except that it seemed to him to be full of energy and not a little anger.