Death Of a Temptress

by P. F. Ford

  “Sounds good,” said Slater. “Now, before I go to meet her, what can you tell me about the sister?”

  As Slater had suspected, DS Donovan had no time for Beverley Green. As far as he was concerned, she was clearly a total waste of space who just wouldn’t accept the facts. He basically advised Slater to disregard everything she had to say.

  “Look mate,” he had finished. “Ruth Thornhill is just a runaway. She’s an adult and she’s allowed to do what she wants, when she wants. As far as we’re concerned she’s run off with another feller. There’s no law against it, even if she didn’t tell her sister. Maybe her sister didn’t know her quite as well as she thought she did. Whatever, we’ve got better things to do with our time.”

  Chapter Four

  The Glades was a private, gated, and rather exclusive, estate to the south side of Tinton. The whole site occupied 12 acres, but such was the size of these houses, and their gardens, there were only 12 properties in total. An intercom outside the gaes controlled access to the estate. Fortunately for Dave Slater, Beverley Green was expecting him and she buzzed him through straight away.

  The properties were all quite new, but that was their only similarity. The whole site had been developed as a collection of individual houses, all set in different places within their individual plots. This estate was less than five years old, yet Slater found he was driving along a lane with mature trees either side. It was as if the whole thing had been there for many years.

  It certainly wasn’t his style; all this money made him feel rather uncomfortable, but he could appreciate just how much these properties must be worth. If there was any change out of two million quid, he’d be very surprised. It was definitely a case of “how the other half live”.

  As its name suggested, Old Shrubs Cottage was at the end of a driveway bordered by an array of shrubs, which hid the house from view until he rounded a corner and found himself approaching an enormous six-bedroom house.

  Slater knew Beverley Green was 37 years old, with three small children, and from his conversation with Donovan earlier, he was rather expecting to be greeted by some sort of harassed housewife figure. He certainly wasn’t expecting to find the confident, good-looking woman who was waiting at the front door. She was dressed for tennis, her short skirt revealing a shapely pair of tanned legs finished off with expensivelooking tennis shoes.

  “If you’re just off to the tennis club, I can always come back later,” he said, as he introduced himself.

  “Good heavens, no, Sergeant. We have our own court in the garden, behind the house. It’s an indulgence of mine, but I enjoy it and it keeps me fit.”

  Slater thought she was definitely right about that. In modern parlance, she was indeed “fit”.

  She looked Slater up and down.

  “Do you play, Sergeant?”

  “Who? Me? Err, no. I never seem to get much time for sport.”

  “You should try it.” She smiled saucily. “I could teach you. It would be fun to play a game with someone different now and then. Don’t you think?”

  Her face told him nothing, but Slater had been round the block enough times to know an invitation when he heard one. This was a completely unexpected turn of events, and for a few moments it threw him, but he couldn’t afford to let himself get distracted now. In different circumstances, he might even have been prepared to play her little game, but today he wasn’t interested.

  “Maybe another time,” he said, his expression deadpan. “Now. About your sister.”

  Slater noticed a little pout of disapproval momentarily cross her face, but it was gone almost straight away.

  “Ah, yes,” she sighed. “My missing sister. Come on inside and I’ll tell you what I know.”

  She led him through the front door into an elegant hallway. As he followed her, he took in the photographs in the hall. This must be the three children, he thought, and that’s got to be dad. And, of course there’s mum, and finally the happy family group photo. Then they were through into a fabulous kitchen; Slater thought he could probably have fitted his entire house in this one room.

  “This is a beautiful house,” he heard himself say.

  “Only the best.” Beverley Green indicated the superbly equipped kitchen. “I suppose I’m what you could call a kept woman. My husband has a very good job up in the City and he likes me to play the dutiful housewife and raise the children. I’d be a fool not to, really, wouldn’t I? Especially when I can live like this.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Some sort of investment management. I’m not really sure, and I don’t really care if I’m honest. As long as the money keeps rolling in, I’m happy.”

  She must have taken in Slater’s expression.

  “Oh don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those embittered women who feels she’s treated like a doormat. I regard myself as very lucky to have a husband who looks after me so well, and he’s a wonderful father to our three children. He works hard Monday to Friday, often away midweek, but come Friday evening work stops and he’s very much a “hands-on” dad until the next Monday morning. He’s a good man, Sergeant.”

  “You must get a bit lonely if he’s away in the week.”

  “Oh I manage.” She gave him a wry smile. “There’s a very good babysitting service in Tinton. That means I can always go out with the girls on a Wednesday. That’s good enough for me. And, of course, there’s always my tennis.”

  She licked her lips and gave him that innocent look again, but he ignored it.

  “About your sister,” he reminded her, pulling out a stool and perching on it at the breakfast bar. “I know you’ve done all this before, and I have read the reports from the earlier investigation, but I want you to imagine I’m completely new to this investigation and I know nothing. Can you do that?”

  She nodded, and perched herself on a stool alongside him. Then she jumped down again.

  “Before I forget,” she said, “I found these for you.”

  She opened a drawer and handed Slater two photographs.

  The girl in the photos was rather frumpy looking, with dowdy clothes that made her resemble a refugee from the 50s. She had long, lacklustre, brown hair, and dull brown eyes. In a crowd, she would have stood out as the one with the least amount of fashion sense.

  “Did she always dress like this?” asked Slater in surprise. With Ruth working for a magazine, he had expected to see someone rather closer to the cutting edge of fashion.

  “She wasn’t exactly a sexy dresser in the family tradition, I’m afraid.” Beverley sighed, climbing back onto her stool.

  Slater looked thoughtfully at the photographs for a moment, but then decided to let it lie.

  “Ok,” he said instead, setting down his notebook and pencil. “I need you to tell me everything you know. Start by telling me about Ruth and her job.”

  “Ruth was my little sister,” Beverley began. “I was 10 when she was born and I think she was a mistake. My parents never seemed to have any time for her so I always seemed to be the one who looked out for her…”

  Beverley spoke for the best part of an hour. Slater prompted her with a few questions here and there, but by the time they had finished, it seemed he had an extensive amount of background information to work on.

  Ruth Thornhill had virtually been raised by her sister, to the point of living with her on and off for years, even after Beverley had married. She led a pretty unremarkable life for her first 25 years, but then, apparently, she had discovered a desire to become a journalist. She had managed to secure a job with a magazine up in London, working as a receptionist/clerk. At that time, she had been travelling to London by train every day.

  But Ruth was ambitious and hard working, and about 15 months ago, the magazine had promoted her to staff writer. Of course, at first she got little or no credit for her writing, but then she was given the chance to write small features which she did under the pen-name of ”Ruby Rider”.

  As she began to develop her car
eer, she began to benefit from some of the perks of the job. One of these perks included the magazine paying for her to stay in a small hotel (Beverley wasn’t sure, but she thought it was called The Mistral) during the week, meaning she only had to travel up on Monday morning and then home again on Friday afternoon.

  She was having a relationship with a Tinton man called Tony Warwick. Beverley didn’t seem to know much about him, and she certainly didn’t seem to like him, but she also didn’t appear to have any particular reason for her dislike.

  Everything had seemed to be going well for Ruth, and then, suddenly, about six months ago she had disappeared. Apparently, she had sent text messages to her boyfriend in the days following her disappearance, which indicated she had run away with another man; but Beverley insisted it couldn’t be true. She claimed Ruth was crazy about her boyfriend and would never have run away. She had a good job and had everything going for her. Why would she have thrown it all away? she had asked Slater.

  He left with Beverley’s final words ringing in his ears. “And she would have told me first whatever she had decided to do. She had even told me when she got pregnant a few years ago. I had helped her arrange an abortion. So, you see, we had no secrets. She would have told me.”

  Slater knew people rarely told each other everything, and he thought it more than possible that a girl spending the week in London on her own could meet someone else and decide to run away, but he had kept his own counsel, deciding he wasn’t prepared to argue the point just yet.

  As Slater was saying goodbye, a young man came cycling up the drive. He was dressed for tennis.

  Slater looked at Beverley Green, who looked back at him straight-faced.

  “My tennis coach and sometime mixed doubles partner, Sebastian,” she said, her face giving nothing away. “Come to play with me.”

  “Yeah. Right. Of course he has,” said Slater.

  As he drove slowly down the drive, Slater wondered if maybe his imagination was playing tricks on him; or did these women really find him so attractive? Perhaps they just had a thing about policemen. Then he recalled the nurse who had insisted she would only let him into her flat if he “arrested” her first.

  “Then we’ll see how good you are with your truncheon,” she had said, giggling.

  For the first time in days, he smiled happily as he recalled that night.

  Then he thought about the frumpy looking girl in the photographs Beverley had given him and his smile faded. A girl who dressed like that working as a receptionist for a magazine – it seemed rather unlikely, didn’t it?

  Chapter Five

  Next on Slater’s list was the boyfriend, Tony Warwick. He rented a tiny, rather tatty looking, terraced house near the centre of town. Whoever the landlord was, he clearly didn’t seem to think he should spend any of the rent on improvements. The front door was old, not the ”antique worth preserving” sort of old, but the ”should be condemned and replaced” sort of old. It didn’t even fit the frame properly.

  Dave Slater was a great believer in his ability to quickly size people up, and he wasn’t often wrong. He quickly took in the tall, thin figure in the doorway and his first impression was that there was something distinctly odd about Tony Warwick. And, whatever Beverley Green might say to the contrary, Slater just couldn’t imagine Ruth, or anyone else for that matter, being crazy about this man.

  The first thing Slater noticed when he was invited through the rickety front door was the huge crucifix hanging from the wall. Two candles burned on a sideboard beneath it. Beverley hadn’t mentioned anything about Ruth being religious and Slater was already struggling to see how she would have become involved with this rather strange man.

  Tony Warwick’s version of events was a good match for Beverley’s, as far as Ruth’s job and disappearance were concerned, but Slater was interested to learn a bit more about their relationship.

  “So how did you come to meet?” he asked.

  “At church. After Ruth committed her sin, she came to the church to repent. I met her there and took pity on her.”

  “Her sin?” Slater was puzzled.

  “She had intercourse with a man outside of marriage, and was with child. Then she had that operation,” explained Warwick.

  “Ah, right,” said Slater, not sure if Ruth had committed one, two or three sins in Warwick’s eyes. “And you took pity on her?”

  “I offered to stand by her and help her achieve repentance.”

  Slater didn’t like the sound of this.

  “And how exactly was she going to do that?”

  “Through prayer, of course,” said Warwick, as though he were addressing an idiot. “She used to come here and we would pray together.”

  “And that was the full extent of your relationship?”

  Warwick looked shocked by Slater’s question.

  “What are you suggesting, Sergeant?”

  “I mean, were you in a sexual relationship with Ruth?”

  “Sex outside of marriage is a mortal sin, Sergeant. I was trying to help Ruth repent,” replied Warwick, clearly trying to be patient. “She had already committed that sin once, it would have been a terrible thing if I had committed the same sin with her, don’t you think? If that had happened, then I, too, would have been a sinner.”

  His holier-than-thou attitude was beginning to get under Slater’s skin, but before he could speak, Warwick continued talking.

  “Sadly Ruth couldn’t control her lustful urges. She ran off with another man.”

  He opened a drawer and produced a mobile phone.

  “Here,” he said, handing it to Slater. “You can see what she had to say for herself.”

  Slater took the phone and began to thumb his way through the text messages. There were four in total, spread over seven days, starting two days after she had last been seen. As he read through them, Slater became more and more convinced there was something very odd about them.

  According to Warwick, he and Ruth had a very non-sexual relationship. In fact, the way he told it they hardly had a relationship at all – they just prayed together. Yet the tone of the text messages suggested Ruth had been apologising for breaking off a warm, loving, and obviously sexual, relationship. Here was something else that didn’t make sense.

  “These texts would suggest that your relationship with Ruth consisted of rather more than just praying together, don’t you think?”

  “Who can say what goes on in the mind of such a sinner, Sergeant? It’s true we had talked of the possibility of us perhaps getting married one day, but first she had to prove her repentance and I thought that was still a long way off. In fact, it looks as though she’s never going to achieve it now. I tried but I failed. Such is life, I’m afraid.”

  Slater looked hard at Warwick, almost as if he was trying to see right inside the man’s head, but of course, he couldn’t. He wondered why Warwick would keep the messages when he seemed to have so readily dismissed Ruth as a waste of his time, and yet there seemed to be no anger at her wasting his time and cheating on him.

  “Don’t you feel angry that she let you down?”

  “What good would anger do, Sergeant? Some of us are strong and some of us are weak. Anger is the property of the weak.”

  Slater felt he couldn’t take much more of this sanctimonious bullshit. He had to get out of there before he did something very unprofessional, so he made his excuses and left. As he drove away, his mind was spinning into overdrive. What on earth was going on here? And why did the previous investigation turn a blind eye to all these inconsistencies?

  Was it simply the case that with the texts as evidence, no body, and nothing to suggest foul play, they just chose the easiest way out? It crossed his mind that it would be quite easy for him to do exactly the same. After all, it would be a lot less hassle.

  But Dave Slater was tenacious, rather like a dog that has discovered a new smell. And he felt this particular smell was becoming more interesting by the minute. He wasn’t going to stop sniffi
ng around just yet.

  “So what do you think? Are you going to take it on?” asked Jenny Radstock.

  Slater shifted the phone to a more comfortable position.

  “You’re very persistent, Ms Radstock,” he replied.

  “It’s a good way to make sure I get what I want,” she said. “And in my experience, it usually works.”

  “And what is it you want?”

  “I want to make sure you take this case.”

  “And if I say no?”

  “I’ll be very disappointed,” she said. “This case needs someone who can be relied upon to do a thorough job; someone who’s tenacious enough to see it through to the end. I know you’ve spoken to Beverley Green. You seem to have a fan there; she was very impressed. I think she would be very grateful if you could find out what really happened to Ruth.”

  The implied innuendo made it quite clear how Jenny thought Beverley might show her gratitude, but Slater was unimpressed. In fact, he was rather insulted by the suggestion he could be persuaded by such an offer.

  “Really,” he said, dryly. “I’ll be sure to bear that in mind when I make my decision.”

  “But surely you’ve seen enough by now,” she protested. “Don’t tell me you’re not intrigued.”

  “I suppose I could easily go mad if I sit here staring at four walls much longer.”

  “So you will take it then?” she asked, sounding triumphant.

  “It’s not as if I’ve got anything else to do right now, is it?” he said, sighing.

  “You won’t regret this, Sergeant. And, like I said before, I’d like to meet up so you can keep me up to date with your progress. I am good company, I promise.”

  “Would these meetings be official, or simply to satisfy your curiosity?” he asked.

  “Oh, I have lots of curiosity, Sergeant. Don’t you? I’d like to think our meetings could be very satisfying, for both of us,” she said, sounding saucy. “You’ve got my number. Give me a ring when you’re ready. I have a weekend house near Tinton – we could meet there. I have to go now. Bye.”