BS14 Kill My Darling

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘And did anyone else ring her during the evening?’

  She frowned. ‘I don’t know. Everybody’s on the phone all the time these days, I probably wouldn’t notice. I only know about Scott because I was sitting next to her and talking to her when he rang, so he interrupted me. And of course I heard her side of it, so I knew they’d made up and everything.’

  ‘Weren’t you sitting next to her the whole time?’

  ‘No, we moved about and changed seats a bit. So she might have had other calls, I just wouldn’t notice.’ She looked at him. ‘So you’ve no idea who did this? None at all?’

  The usual thing was to say ‘we’re following up various lines of investigation’, but meeting the clear gaze in the young, freckled face, he couldn’t prevaricate. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘But she wasn’t attacked on the way home? Didn’t it say on the news she went home from the Vic all right, and then disappeared?’

  ‘So it seems.’

  ‘But I don’t understand – why didn’t Scott know she was missing? They were always talking to each other on the phone. They were like two little lovebirds. If she didn’t answer the phone, he’d surely think something was wrong.’

  It was a good question, Slider thought when she was gone. There was definitely something about Mr Hibbert that invited investigation; but everything in its time.

  Fred ‘The Syrup’ Porson might have had the looks and charm of a bunion, but he had still managed to beguile Duggie Fox into lending him enough uniforms to do the immediate house-to-house canvass. Of course, this only involved the lightly-housed Reservoir Road and the three small culs-de-sac that led off it, so it wasn’t in the order of a lifetime commitment; but Slider gave his boss all credit for extracting anything at all from a man whose attitude towards beneficence resembled that of the proverbial duck’s rectum to pond water.

  It meant that most of Slider’s firm had drifted home by the time he held the first meeting: Mackay and Fathom were still at the house. McLaren and Connolly had done a forage stop on the way back, at the stall on the corner of the market, where they not only did sausage sandwiches and bacon sandwiches, but also a home-made meat pie specifically designed to be eaten on the move without spilling anything down the front – a masterpiece of pastry engineering, very popular with lorry drivers. Connolly had brought a sandwich for Slider – ‘Sausage, guv. Wasn’t it rashers last time? And I remembered the tomato sauce!’ – and he scoffed it in huge bites before going out into the squad room. It was all very well for him to wave a benevolent hand and say, ‘Carry on eating,’ to the troops, but he had his dignity to maintain.

  At the last minute, Porson oozed in, carrying a cup of tea with the saucer on top as a lid, on which reposed two custard creams. He raised an eyebrow at the general noshing that was going on – and his eyebrows were so large and bushy, it was not a negligible gesture, something akin to the raising of Tower Bridge – but he only said, ‘Late lunch? Keep it off the papers, that’s all!’

  Slider gave him a distracted look, having to tear his attention from the fact that McLaren – the man who knew the answer to the question ‘who ate all the pies?’ – had empty hands and an empty mouth, and was gazing off into space with a sappy look of contentment on his face.

  Porson perched on a desk off to the side, gently eased his cup on to its saucer, nudging the biscuits along to make room, and barked, ‘Right!’

  Slider snapped back to attention as DS Hollis, the beanpole Mancunian who was always office manager in these cases, began. ‘The murder of Melanie Hunter, age twenty-six. She was found around six thirty this morning in the woods by Ruislip Lido. We are assuming, for lack of any evidence to the contrary, that she was killed some time on Friday night, after ten thirty when she’s last known to have come home from a night out.’

  ‘But it’s possible, isn’t it, that she was abducted first, and held somewhere, and killed later – say on Saturday night?’ said Atherton.

  ‘Possible,’ Slider said, ‘though there were no visible marks of violence or restraint on the body. It’s hard to hold someone against their will without marking them.’

  ‘Doesn’t that suggest she left the flat of her own free will – whatever time it was?’ Swilley asked.

  ‘You can be abducted,’ Atherton returned, ‘by wiles and beguilement. I was only meaning to point out that we don’t know she was killed on Friday night.’

  ‘And I was only meaning it was likely someone she knew,’ said Swilley. ‘It usually is.’

  There was always a bit of tension between those two, but sometimes it could be productive, so usually Slider left them to get on with it. He nodded to Hollis to carry on.

  ‘Death was apparently caused by a blow to the back of the head, but there wasn’t a lot o’ blood at the site, so she may have been killed elsewhere and the body taken to the woods to hide it.’ He looked up. ‘Might’ve been killed at the flat, maybe?’

  ‘There was no sign of disturbance when we went in,’ Atherton said. ‘So unless the murderer was very thorough at cleaning up . . .?’

  ‘We’ve got a forensic team in there now,’ Slider said. ‘If there’s any blood, they’ll find it. It’s not easy to carry a body downstairs and get it into a car without making a noise, and without anyone seeing anything. But that’s the next thing on the list – canvass the other residents of the house, and the immediate neighbours.’

  ‘If she was killed at the flat, you’re thinking it was the boyfriend that did it?’ Swilley said.

  ‘He wasn’t even in London,’ Atherton objected.

  ‘So he says.’

  ‘He was at a wedding. Hundreds of witnesses. You can’t fake that.’

  ‘That is something we’ll have to check on,’ Slider said.

  Hollis made a note. ‘Hibbert alibi.’

  ‘Add “Hibbert motive” while you’re at it,’ said Atherton.

  ‘It’s not just him,’ Connolly put in. ‘So far everybody loved her. She was so nice she’d get on your nerves.’

  ‘It needn’t be Hibbert, even if she was killed at the flat,’ Atherton said. ‘Could be someone she invited in. Or someone who followed her home.’

  ‘McLaren’s been looking into her route home,’ Slider said.

  Connolly jabbed an elbow into McLaren, who returned to earth with a bump. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘there’s a street camera right opposite the Princess Vic that’s got her coming out eight minutes past ten. You can see it’s her clear enough. Then she turns down Becklow Road, where she’s parked the car. You can see her get in and drive off, towards Askew Road, the way she was facing.’

  ‘But if she didn’t get home until nearly half ten,’ Connolly said, ‘that’s too much time. Sure, it’s only five minutes – ten at most – in the car.’

  ‘She must have stopped somewhere,’ Swilley said.

  McLaren was nodding. ‘I was gonna say, there’s a camera at the Seven Stars, and that’s the way she’d come, if she was going straight home. She’d go down Becklow, left into Askew, left at the Seven Stars on to Goldhawk, left into Cathnor, bosh. But she never appears out of Askew Road. I went all the way up to midnight.’

  ‘So either she went all through the back streets to get home, which is daft,’ said Hollis.

  ‘Or she doubled back and went home the Uxbridge Road way,’ said Swilley.

  ‘But why would she?’ said McLaren.

  ‘Maybe she thought of something she wanted on the way home from the shops on Uxbridge Road,’ Swilley said. ‘There’s a couple of late-nighters along there.’

  ‘Like what?’ McLaren demanded.

  ‘Tampax,’ Swilley suggested, to embarrass him, but it was Hollis who blushed.

  ‘Or maybe she went somewhere else completely,’ said McLaren.

  ‘She couldn’t have gone anywhere much if she was back home by half past.’

  ‘She could have picked someone up and taken them home with her,’ said Atherton. ‘Fitton didn’t see her go in, only heard the car, so she could ha
ve had someone with her.’

  ‘And then later she could have offered to drive them home,’ McLaren said excitedly, seeing a possibility.

  ‘She left her handbag behind, you plank,’ said Connolly.

  ‘If it wasn’t far, she might just’ve grabbed her keys,’ he defended himself. ‘If she wasn’t gonna be long.’

  ‘And the murderer returned her car afterwards and put the car keys back in her handbag?’ Atherton said witheringly.

  But Swilley repeated his words in an entirely different voice. ‘And the murderer returned her car, and put the keys back in her handbag! That solves all the problems!’

  ‘Except that the dog didn’t bark when the murderer let himself in at some unearthly hour, with her blood on his hands?’ Atherton countered.

  ‘I’m about sick of that dog not barking,’ Porson said, making them all jump, because they’d forgotten he was there. ‘This is not a bloody Shylock Holmes story. You’re all forgetting one thing: we’ve only got Ronnie Fitton’s word for it that she got home by ten thirty. Or at all.’

  It gave them pause. Slider had had that possibility in the back of his mind all along, but he had been hoping not to have to look at it, because if Fitton had no alibi, there was no reason he should have, which was the worst of cases to prove. He knew the victim and had the key to her house, and he knew the dog. But he’d had two days to cover his tracks, if tracks there were, so how would they ever catch him out?

  ‘If the victim’s car was used, that meant it left the space in front of Fitton’s window and returned there without him hearing anything,’ he said.

  ‘Or he’s lying about not hearing anything,’ Porson concluded.

  Slider caught Connolly’s eye, and a sympathy flashed between them. He could see she didn’t want it to be Fitton either, though presumably for different reasons. ‘Why would Fitton kill her?’ she said. ‘He liked her.’

  ‘Maybe he liked her too much,’ said Atherton.

  ‘Well, there’s got to be a car in it somewhere,’ said Slider. ‘She didn’t walk to Ruislip. We’ll take hers in, check it for traces. We’ll have to canvass the immediate area, Cathnor Road and Goldhawk to either side of the turning, see if anyone saw anything. Interview the people upstairs – they may know something, or have heard something. Any cars in the area behaving suspiciously – check any possible route from Cathnor Road to the Lido for that. And McLaren, you carry on checking her route home – all the cameras there are, bus cameras, shops, private houses, the lot. And we’ll have to get after the motive. We’ll have to talk to her friends and family, find out who else was in her life recently, what she’s been up to, who she knew.’

  ‘There’s one other thing no one’s mentioned,’ Porson said. They all looked at him. ‘Stamford House.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Connolly asked. She was fairly new to the area.

  ‘It’s a secure home for violent young offenders,’ Slider said. ‘Right next door to Cathnor Road.’

  ‘Just over the wall from their back gardens, in fact,’ Atherton expanded. ‘They had a lot of trouble there a couple of years ago. Drugs, fights, breakouts. I thought they’d got it all under control again, though. I haven’t heard of anyone getting out recently.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean somebody didn’t get over the wall and back in before anyone noticed,’ Hollis said.

  Slider said, ‘I’m reluctant to jump immediately into suspecting the obvious suspect—’

  ‘Obvious is as obvious does,’ Porson said obscurely.

  ‘—but in any case, it doesn’t fit in with the whole body-in-the-woods scenario. A violent random attacker would just leave the body where it was. And none of those kids would have a car.’

  ‘Always steal one,’ McLaren said with a shrug.

  ‘Better look into it,’ Porson said. ‘Find out if any motors went missing from the area that night. And whether any of the YOs went AWOL. Best to leave no stone unthrown. You never know.’

  Slider sighed. A tea urn had nothing on him. That was the trouble, he thought. Sometimes you never did.

  By the next day the press had got hold of Ronnie Fitton’s past history, and it was splashed all over everywhere, all the details of the murder of his wife, the court case and the sentence, with photographs from the time. By the time Slider got in to work, there had been telephone calls of complaint from the upstairs neighbours that the house was besieged by press and they couldn’t get out. Uniforms had been dispatched to clear the access, but there was no way in law to stop reporters shouting questions at the residents as they hurried to their cars, or taking photos of them through the car windows as they backed out.

  When Slider reached his room, the phone was ringing. It was Freddie Cameron. ‘You’ll get the full report in writing, of course, but I thought you’d like to know—’

  ‘You’ve done the post-mortem?’ Slider interrupted. He wasn’t at his best until the first cup of tea hit his bloodstream.

  ‘No, I’ve been using my magical powers to peer into the past,’ Freddie said with patient irony.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Slider.

  ‘Granted. I thought you’d like to know that death was caused by the blow to the head. A single blow of considerable force with a rigid object, probably metal, at least eight inches long, probably with squared edges.’

  ‘Something like a large spanner?’

  ‘That’s possible. Unconsciousness would have been immediate and death probably followed within a very short time, a minute or two at the most. So there will be blood somewhere, but possibly not much of it.’

  ‘And you’ve nothing more to say about the time of death?’

  ‘Sorry, can’t help you. But the hypostasis suggests that she was probably placed where you found her straight away. As you know, the livor mortis starts much sooner after death than the rigor – in as little as twenty minutes – and the staining is permanent. So we’d know if she’d been moved into a different position.’

  ‘Right,’ said Slider. ‘But she could have been abducted first, and killed later than Friday night?’

  ‘Except that there were no signs of her having been restrained or tied up, no marks of rough handling, and, as we guessed from the fact she was fully dressed, no sexual violence.’

  ‘What about consensual sex?’

  ‘Not recent,’ Cameron said, and became extra dry. ‘The subject was menstruating, old bean. That vacancy had been filled.’

  That fitted with what Kiera had said. ‘What about the ligature?’ he asked.

  ‘Ah yes, there was some bruising of the neck, but manually inflicted, and very superficial. I had to look hard for it. Someone might have gripped her and shaken her in a fit of pique, but without any intention to cause serious harm, or even as a joke, perhaps. The ligature was placed post-mortem.’

  ‘Why on earth—?’

  ‘That’s your job, old thing, not mine,’ said Cameron. ‘Human nature’s a mystery to me. It’s the reason I became a pathologist – nice, quiet dead patients, no lawsuits.’

  Slider was thinking. ‘Perhaps the stomach contents can give us an idea of when she died?’

  ‘I’ve secured them and sent them for analysis. And I’ve sent the blood for a tox screen, but there’s no pathology to suggest drugs of any sort. And I’ve sent off the clothes. Apropos of which, they were pretty neat and tidy – again, no sign that she had been held anywhere, tied up in a dusty attic or crammed in a car boot. And she must have been carried, not dragged, after death.’

  ‘Well, that all adds up to a mystery,’ Slider said.

  ‘It’s the way you like ’em,’ Cameron said cheerfully.

  ‘I don’t like ’em at all,’ he said, ‘but I still get ’em.’

  His tea arrived, with Connolly on the other end of it.

  ‘I’ve had Mr Fitton on the phone, guv, complaining that we ratted him out to the press,’ she said. ‘He says they’re all round the house. I told him it wasn’t us – it wasn’t, was it?’

  ‘Not officially. An
d I’m very down on leaks. But there must be a hundred people here and in Hillingdon who know about him being her neighbour. Any one of them could have spilled the beans, and there’s no way to find out who.’ He eyed her curiously. ‘Are you feeling sorry for him?’

  ‘Not him,’ she denied hastily. ‘The dog. He says to me, how can he take the dog out for its walks with them surrounding him every step, and he daren’t shove ’em aside for fear they’ll put a charge on him.’

  ‘So he still has the dog?’

  ‘Yeah, boss – he says your man Hibbert’s never asked about it. Too heartbroken, maybe.’ She hesitated.

  ‘Yes? Out with it?’

  ‘Well, guv, apparently the parents used to look after the dog when she went on holiday. So I thought, maybe if one of us was to go over to fetch it and take it to them . . .?’

  ‘You’re not a dog warden.’

  ‘But it’d be a chance to have another go at Mr Fitton.’

  ‘If I want to talk to Fitton I can have him brought in.’

  ‘At least that’d give him a bit of peace and quiet,’ Connolly grumbled. ‘But, guv, if I did the dog thing first, it’d look friendly, not so official, and he might tell me things he wouldn’t say in an interview room.’

  Slider considered. ‘I think you may be underestimating Fitton. Someone who’s done fifteen years inside knows how to guard his tongue.’

  ‘Then you’d never scare anything out of him, either,’ she said reasonably. ‘Might as well let me try charming it out, guv. What harm?’

  Slider considered. ‘D’you want to take someone with you?’

  ‘Sure God, he’d never open up to me if I’d a minder with me. And he’d have to be a mentaller to take a crack at me with all them peelers and the world’s press outside.’

  ‘Well, you can have a go,’ Slider said, ‘but don’t get your hopes up too much.’

  ‘OK, guv. At least it’ll be a kindness for Marty.’

  ‘Marty?’

  ‘The dog.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Probably not for Fitton, though. As things stood, the dog was likely the only friend he had in the world. ‘It’ll be a good opportunity for talking to the parents, as well,’ he said. ‘I’d like to see them for myself. Pick me up when you’ve got the dog and we can go together.’