Death in the Family

by Jill McGown

  “Why did you lie when I asked you when you had last seen her?” asked Lloyd.

  “You know why. Because I was there, yelling at her and smashing mirrors, and I knew what you would think. I don’t blame you—I’d think the same thing if I was in your position. Even Kayleigh thought I might have done it, and she knows that I would never have hurt Lesley or anyone else.”

  Lloyd looked at the weekend bag that sat at Phil’s feet. “Are the clothes you were wearing yesterday in that bag?”

  “Yes. You want to take them, is that it?” He pushed the bag over to Lloyd’s side of the table. “Help yourself. My aunt washed and ironed them, I’m afraid, so they might not be of much use to you. Maybe you could leave me the underpants.”

  “Your aunt washed the clothes you were wearing.” Marshall was instantly suspicious. “Why would she do that?”

  Phil smiled. “If she sees something that isn’t hanging up or folded up it goes straight in the machine.”

  Lloyd looked at him for a long time again; Phil was uncomfortably aware that he was being appraised, his statement evaluated, checked against the facts, against Lloyd’s experience of other people in other situations.

  “Why did you drop out of sight immediately after this row?”

  Phil opened his mouth to say that he hadn’t dropped out of sight, he had merely gone to visit his aunt, but that would have been factual rather than true. He had dropped out of sight. “Because I thought the police would be looking for me, and I needed to cool down before I dealt with that.”

  Lloyd raised his eyebrows.

  “I’d committed criminal damage or something, hadn’t I? When I did it, she said she was getting the police this time, because it wasn’t her house and it wasn’t her mirror. She was phoning them when I left. That’s why I left.”

  “Well, if she was, she must have changed her mind,” said Marshall. “We didn’t get a call about anyone committing criminal damage at the cottage.” He paused. “Just a triple nine to report a murder.”

  Phil sighed. “She probably just pretended to phone to get rid of me.”

  Lloyd was frowning slightly. “What phone did she use?”

  Phil failed to see the significance. “Her mobile.” He smiled sadly. “Lesley was never without her mobile—she was involved in so many things that people rang her all the time, day and night. She had it clipped to her belt yesterday, I remember.”

  “Clipped to her belt?” Lloyd looked thoughtful, but he didn’t ask any more questions.

  “Are you going to arrest me?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  That startled Phil; he thought he was bound to be the prime suspect.

  “But I’d be happier if you could find somewhere to stay in Stansfield until the investigation’s completed, or you’ve been eliminated from the inquiry.”

  “I’ll be in Stansfield for the foreseeable future—I don’t want to leave Kayleigh facing the music on her own.”

  Lloyd sat back a little and regarded him again. “You’re very fond of Kayleigh, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.” It occurred to him that Lloyd might well wonder why, and he smiled a little. “You’re seeing her at her worst. Come to that, you’re seeing me at my worst. I’ve always had a temper, but—well, I didn’t go overboard, not like that, not until I lived with Lesley. And the rows were always about Kayleigh, because we both loved her, but Lesley wouldn’t face the facts, and I couldn’t make her see reason. I’d boil over.” He sat back again. “Sheer impotence. That’s what made me smash the mirror.”

  Lloyd nodded. “Just one more thing, Mr. Roddam. Did you see Mrs. Newton’s car when you were at the cottage?”

  Phil was a little puzzled by the question. Lloyd seemed to be taking a very keen interest in Lesley’s possessions. “Yes. It was in the garage.”

  “You didn’t happen to notice what was in it, did you?”

  “It was full of stuff that they were moving into the cottage, I suppose. The back was piled up with all sorts of things.”

  He told them as much as he could remember about what he’d seen in the car. “And her handbag was on the front seat,” he added.

  “And . . . which way was the car facing?”

  “It was in the garage nose first. Why?”

  “The car was stolen, and found abandoned. A handbag was found nearby. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind identifying it?”

  Phil realized then what had happened. “It was Lesley’s car that was driven into Waring?”

  Lloyd didn’t confirm or deny that; Marshall was dispatched to get the handbag that had been found.

  “The fixings for a baby seat seemed to confirm that the baby was Kayleigh’s,” Lloyd said. “Or we might have arrived at the truth sooner.”

  “We had a little boy,” Phil said. “He died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The handbag was brought in, and Phil confirmed that it was Lesley’s. She’d had it for years, a big black leather handbag that she could use whatever she was wearing. She had a small one that she took with her to the sort of function where she had to dress up, and that was it. Lesley hardly ever bought anything new for herself.

  Phil was shown out of Stansfield Police Station by DC Marshall, who pointed along the wide pedestrianized street directly ahead, across the road. “At the far end, you’ll find the Derbyshire Hotel,” he said. “There are cheaper places, but it’s handy, if you’ve not got transport.”

  Phil set off for the Derbyshire. He’d ring Kayleigh when he got there. And Theresa. He needed company, and he hoped she did, too.

  Dean was lying on the bunk, staring up at the ceiling of his cell, when he heard the custody officer check up on him. It wasn’t time for a check; he swung his legs over and sat up as the door was unlocked and DCI Lloyd came in, the custody sergeant hovering anxiously outside.

  “Kayleigh has confirmed that she did ask you to come to Stansfield. And we now know that you didn’t see her or the baby while you were at the cottage, and that you were not the man overheard having an argument. I thought you’d want to know.”

  Dean let out a sigh and leaned back, weak with relief, but it was short-lived.

  “You’re very far from being off the hook.”

  “But you know I was telling the truth! What about the guy I knocked down? Has he told you it wasn’t deliberate?”

  “No, because he has no memory of it. But . . .” Lloyd paused. “I have been given information which supports your contention that it was an accident.”

  “So why am I not off the hook? It’s her mother’s boyfriend you want—the one Kayleigh calls her dad!” He looked at Lloyd’s face, and his shoulders slumped. “You don’t believe me about seeing him, do you?”

  “Oh, yes. We know you told the truth about that, too. The problem is that he says he left Mrs. Newton alive, and you say you found her dead.”

  “And you believe him.”

  Lloyd sucked in his breath. “Well, Dean, you have to look at it from our point of view. He didn’t steal a car and run away from the scene. He didn’t knock the only witness down and almost kill him. He doesn’t have Mrs. Newton’s blood all over his clothes.”

  Dean closed his eyes and bumped the back of his head on the wall, trying to knock the impossibility of his situation out of his mind and concentrate on trying to make Lloyd believe him. “She was dead when I got there,” he said, repeating it with every bump, but Lloyd was talking through him.

  “You, on the other hand, have spent months in prison enduring the sort of treatment that’s handed out to sex offenders, and will spend ten years on the sex offenders’ register—you told me yourself what that means. And Kayleigh told you who you had to blame for that.”

  Dean opened alarmed eyes and sat up. “Hang on a minute—” Kayleigh had said that her mother had made her say those things, but he hadn’t believed her. Her mother couldn’t have made her put on that performance for the jury—that was Kayleigh’s own doing.

  “And she arranged to meet you. On
ly you didn’t wait for her, did you?”

  “I’ve told you why! I thought she’d be on her own in the cottage!”

  “Perhaps. But perhaps, once you saw the van on its way, you knew that Waring would be otherwise engaged, that Kayleigh would be on her way to meet you—and that her mother would be alone in the cottage. Perhaps you didn’t come here to have your photograph taken with Alexandra—perhaps you just played along with Kayleigh in order to take revenge on Lesley Newton.”

  Dean felt the blood drain from his face. “Are you going to charge me?”

  “Not yet. I have some further inquiries to make. But I strongly advise you to reconsider legal advice.”

  Lloyd left, and the custody sergeant slammed and locked the door.

  Dean scrambled off the bunk before he closed the hatch, putting his mouth close to the little opening. “All right!” he shouted after Lloyd. “I’ll get my brief down here. But you keep on inquiring! Because every time you do, you find out that I’m telling the truth, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Mr. Fletcher,” Lloyd’s voice came floating back to him from along the corridor. “I do.”

  Lloyd reported back to Case, who looked heartily relieved to discover that Lesley Newton had been alive and well after Waring left the cottage.

  “At least we can cross him off at last.” Case picked up a typewritten document and handed it to Lloyd. “But Theresa Black just rang Sandwell about Mrs. Newton’s personal papers. She wants Waring’s private medical insurance. And he’s found this.”

  It was a copy of Lesley Newton’s will. As Case had suspected, Waring wasn’t even mentioned. Some of her money went to Roddam, most to a trust for Kayleigh, and the rest to various charities. Lloyd wondered if he should have been so ready to let Roddam go, in view of his financial incentive, however minor. People had been known to murder for less.

  “That’s why I’m not insisting that you charge Fletcher. But it’s the only reason—so as soon as you find anything that clears Roddam, this case is closed.”

  Lloyd went back downstairs, only to be waylaid by Sandwell.

  “I think you’ll want to see this, sir.”

  Lloyd followed Sandwell into the IT room, where they had all the high-tech equipment needed for police work these days.

  “It seems a taxi driver picked up a fare from the station yesterday,” Sandwell said. “Took a man to Brook Way Cottage. He came in this afternoon while you were in Barton, and saw Gary Sims.”

  Lloyd smiled. Sims had presumably used his initiative again. He wasn’t at all unlike how Sandwell had been at that age.

  “The description wasn’t up to much, so Gary took him to the railway station and got him to pick his fare out on the security videos. He spotted him getting off the London train, and Gary thought it was worth taking a look further along the tape to see if he made a return journey, and he did. He brought the tape to me in the incident room five minutes ago.”

  He played the video, and Lloyd saw Phil Roddam, dressed in the open-neck short-sleeved shirt and slacks that were in his weekend bag, pacing up and down the little platform, glancing over at the exit now and then. The station clock and the video itself gave the time and date as eleven-thirty yesterday morning.

  “Same clothes as he was wearing when he got off the train, and no bloodstains. Even before his aunt washed them.” He handed Lloyd a copy of the taxi driver’s statement, which gave as much detail as Sims had been able to persuade out of him. “I think that removes the final question mark, doesn’t it, sir?”

  Maybe he should hand the whole investigation over to Gary Sims, Lloyd thought as Sandwell left and he remained looking at the paused video.

  He had been wrong about a lot of things, not least about Waring. But he’d been right about the baby. He had known, all along, that the baby wasn’t right, that Kayleigh’s nods and shakes of her head weren’t truthful. Case had said that it would be too much of a coincidence, Kayleigh stealing a baby the very day someone killed her mother, and that, more than anything else, had been why Lloyd had doubted himself.

  But Dean Fletcher, already drowning under the weight of circumstantial evidence, had now been revealed to have had both motive and opportunity, and that removed the element of coincidence almost completely; Kayleigh had brought him here in order that he would take her and Emma away with him, and he had used the information she gave him in order to murder Lesley Newton.

  Even so, thought Lloyd. Even so. Phil Roddam, unlike Fletcher, had lied in the first instance. Kayleigh had thought him capable of it, or she wouldn’t have stayed silent all that time. He had more than enough motive; Lesley Newton had cheated on him, thrown him out, was taking Kayleigh away from him, and he came into a bit of money now she was dead. Even his desire to get treatment for Kayleigh could constitute a motive.

  His clothes would go to the lab if Lloyd could persuade Case of the necessity; there could have been microscopic bloodstains on them and they might still be detectable, even if the clothes had been washed. Come to that, Freddie had said merely that the attacker was likely to have been splashed with blood, so Lloyd still wasn’t crossing Roddam off, whatever Case said.

  And tomorrow, once the incident room in Malworth had been packed up, he would have Tom Finch back; he had already detailed him to go through all the statements first thing to acquaint himself with the murder inquiry. He could send him to talk to Roddam’s aunt, see if she was the kind of woman who might help a blood relation evade the clutches of the law.

  He switched off the video recorder and put the tape back in its box. For now, he was going home. Or so he thought, but when he left the IT room it was to find that Mrs. Spears was in the front office, wanting to know if she could get into the Malworth house to pick something up.

  “Kayleigh had a small case packed,” Mrs. Spears explained. “For running-away purposes. It had her personal things in it, and her favorite clothes, that sort of thing. She intended taking it with her when she left the house, but once she actually had the baby with her, she realized she couldn’t carry them both, so she left it there. I wondered if I might be allowed to pick it up for her? We’ve found clothes for her, but she’d obviously be happier with her own things, and I believe all her other clothes are still with the police.”

  “I don’t see why she can’t have it,” Lloyd said. “I’ll let you in myself—I live in Malworth, and I’m just about to call it a day, anyway.”

  Lloyd had taken the keys in order to have a look round the house tomorrow, just in case it yielded any clues to which of his suspects had actually killed Lesley Newton. It was possibly the longest shot ever, but he had to be able to tell himself that he had left no stone unturned before he charged what he believed to be an innocent man with murder. The lab hadn’t been able to get any prints from the murder weapon, and he was fast running out of options.

  The house was indeed directly across Bridge Street from the park; it would have taken Kayleigh about thirty seconds to lift Emma from her pram and run across the road into the house, and then she simply had to get on a bus to Stansfield before McArthur had even marshaled his troops, before Tom and Judy had started their walk, before members of the public were aware that anything had happened. No wonder no one had seen her.

  “That must be it,” said Mrs. Spears, picking up a black leather case.

  “I’d like to take a look in it, before you take it.”

  It contained exactly what Kayleigh had said it contained, considerably more expensive clothes than the ones Mrs. Spears had found for her to wear, some keepsakes, and her toilet bag, plus a feeding bottle, an opened packet of formula milk, and some jars of baby food.

  Lloyd smiled sadly at the pathetic little collection. Kayleigh had thought that by now she would be on her way to wherever, to set up her idyllic life with Dean in his camper van, living on fresh air and kisses, presumably. At least the baby would have been fed. He closed the case and wondered just how alarmed Dean would have been if he’d discovered why he’d really been brought to
Stansfield. Going back to prison would have seemed preferable, Lloyd was sure.

  He saw Mrs. Spears off the premises and conducted a search that revealed nothing of any interest at all. It was like a show house, with its tasteful furniture and fittings and no character whatsoever. That, if it had ever existed, had been removed with its occupants.

  The door to the kitchen was a swing door; it pushed open from either side and closed itself again. But on the hallway side there was a little mark, about fifteen inches from the bottom of the door. As though, Lloyd thought as he crouched to examine it, the door was normally propped open and whatever propped it open had marked it. A doorstop, presumably, one of the same height as the cast-iron cat and one that had been there since long before Mrs. Newton bought the house: that mark had been made over years. He got up again and pushed the door to and fro as he thought.

  Some of the witness statements were more easily doubted than others. The time of Phil Roddam’s visit to Lesley was fluid; they knew the train had arrived at five past ten, but there had been no taxis on the rank. Roddam had had to wait for what had seemed to him to be half an hour or so, and when young Sims had inquired, the taxi driver had said that he picked Roddam up at some time between twenty past ten and twenty to eleven.

  And one white van looked very much like another. Dean Fletcher had no idea what time he had seen Roddam, only that he’d seen him after he had seen the van, which was why he had thought Kayleigh would be in the cottage on her own. But he could have seen another van altogether.

  Other evidence wasn’t so easily dismissed. If only Phil Roddam had found Lesley dead, rather than infuriatingly alive. If only the security cameras at Theresa’s flat hadn’t confirmed that Waring had indeed driven the van in at twenty minutes to eleven, in person, in full color. If only the very definite postman had heard the argument just a little earlier.

  Lloyd’s eyes widened. But perhaps he had, he thought. Perhaps he had.

  What Theresa liked best about Phil Roddam was what she had noticed the very first time she had spoken to him; his disarming frankness about himself.