The Murders of Mrs. Austin and Mrs. Beale

by Jill McGown

  I see. So you’ve gone off the idea of suicide?

  I’ve got a baby on the way. Can’t run out on Pauline like that, can I?

  And you think this defence will work, do you? You remember nothing? That one’s sharp, Gordon, old son. She isn’t going to let you toddle off and make tea and let Pauline do the talking, it might work in old movies, but it doesn’t work in real life. She’s going to ask you more questions, and you had better have answers, because she won’t be fooled by Joan Crawford in there.

  He made three mugs of tea, and buttered toast. She must want something to eat.

  He went back in, and put the tray on the table, bringing three chairs round it as Pauline answered the inspector.

  ‘Not very well, no. These flats are very private, really. You can’t hear people through the wall, or anything. Not like our old place.’ She smiled a little. ‘To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure I didn’t prefer the lack of privacy. At least we knew our neighbours there. And we really don’t here. We know the Beales better than the others because Mrs Beale recently joined the board of Austin-Pearce, but that’s the only reason.’

  Too much talking, Pauline, thought Gordon. Could even be regarded as prattling. How very unlike Pauline it all was.

  ‘You were here all evening?’

  Hill. That was it. Gordon had been trying to remember her name all night. Hill. Detective Inspector Hill. He had only heard Pauline’s end of the entry phone conversation; he had imagined a large man with a five o’clock shadow, wearing a raincoat and a trilby. He thought perhaps he ought to update his image of the average police officer; his was Jack Hawkins or someone. Detective Inspector Hill did not in any way resemble Jack Hawkins.

  ‘Yes. Well, I was in all evening. Gordon was out for a couple of hours.’

  ‘What time did you get home, Mr Pearce?’ she asked.

  Gordon looked at Pauline.

  ‘Oh, no use asking him. It was after ten, I know that. About quarter past, I think. Yes – News at Ten was just coming on again.’

  My God. Gordon could feel the frank brown eyes on him again, and shiftily avoided their gaze. If Pauline was going to take to bearing false witness, she might at least have let him in on it. With a great effort he pushed the question of her reasons to the back of his mind.

  ‘Does that seem right, Mr Pearce?’

  ‘If Pauline says so … I just came in and fell asleep in the chair.’

  ‘Were you celebrating something?’

  ‘No – just having dinner with my partner.’

  ‘We think Mrs Beale came home at about eleven o’clock. Were you still up then?’

  The question was addressed to both of them; Gordon looked at Pauline.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I was trying to get Gordon to go to bed, and he just kept falling asleep again. I wasn’t exactly keeping track of the time, but I think it must have been about midnight before I finally got him to bed.’

  This time Gordon knew the frown had appeared. That was true, of course. She was telling the truth as much as possible; covering herself. Covering him. She knew.

  ‘Yes, Mr Pearce?’

  He looked at the inspector. ‘ Sorry?’ he said. ‘Oh – look, I’m forgetting the tea. Come and get it.’

  They sat round the table and drank cool tea and ate soggy toast.

  ‘I thought you were going to say something,’ she said, not letting go.

  Gordon had given himself a few moments’ thinking time. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I just suddenly remembered Pauline telling me it was quarter to midnight.’ He got up. ‘Excuse me a moment,’ he said.

  He walked quickly to the bathroom. It wasn’t an excuse. Suddenly, the deception, the guilt, the realisation of what he had done and what he was doing had hit home, and his bladder had reacted instantly. He sighed with relief, flushed the lavatory, and washed his hands.

  Pauline knew. Somehow, she knew, and she was shielding him. And now, for the first time, Gordon was scared. Scared of an attractive young woman in a summer dress that showed off her very nice legs, who looked a little tired.

  ‘Well,’ she was saying, ‘ if you do remember anything – anything at all – just give me a ring.’ She handed Pauline a card. ‘Don’t think it’s too insignificant, or that you’ll be wasting anyone’s time. That’s sometimes just what we need.’

  She was playing someone too. There they were, the three of them, all playing parts fit to bust, and no one knowing the script.

  ‘Oh – one other thing,’ she said, on her way out ‘There’s an ashtray downstairs in the foyer – were there two, originally?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pauline, looking a little puzzled. Then her expression changed. She wasn’t puzzled any more, but she wanted the inspector to think she was. Gordon was in no position to say how successful she had been; he only knew it hadn’t fooled him.

  ‘Where’s the other one?’ asked the inspector.

  ‘Isn’t it there?’

  Isn’t it there? Oh, Gordon, Gordon. What’s the little woman doing, for God’s sake?

  The inspector shook her head.

  ‘They were both there yesterday – weren’t they, Gordon?’

  Oh, dear God. Gordon looked helplessly at Pauline, then at the inspector. ‘I … I wouldn’t know,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Thank you anyway.’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ Pauline asked.

  There was a pause before she answered, and then it was evasive. ‘We think it may have been used in the commission of a crime,’ she said. ‘Thank you for your help.’

  Pauline showed her to the door, then shut it, both hands on the eye-level knob, her forehead resting on them.

  ‘Pauline, I—’

  ‘Don’t say anything, please, Gordon.’

  ‘I have to! I can’t let you do this.’

  She turned from the door. ‘I’ve done it,’ she said. ‘ We were here, together, from quarter past ten. And that thing was downstairs. All right?’

  He shook his head. He didn’t understand about the ashtray, and he didn’t think he wanted to. ‘They’ll find out I wasn’t home at quarter past ten,’ he said. ‘Anyone could have seen me – I was probably driving badly, and—’

  She walked up to him. ‘Then we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ she said, putting her arms up, clasping her hands behind his neck. ‘For the moment, that’s our story, and we’re sticking to it.’

  Gordon licked dry tips. ‘Well both end up in prison,’ he said. She gave a quick shake of her head. ‘They have to prove it,’ she said, drawing him into a kiss.

  Did you leave any evidence, old son? That’s the question.

  The smell was the hardest thing to take, and would probably be the most difficult thing to eradicate. The damage, mainly smoke and water, was mostly cosmetic, except where the fire had started. but the office had certainly looked better before it caught light.

  Mickey moved into the centre of the room, and looked round at the devastation. It could have swept through the whole floor; an open-plan office, there was nothing to stop the advance of a fire. But the sprinkler system had done its job, and the damage was limited to one small area. A potted plant, its leaves charred and thick with grime, sat defiantly on a wall unit.

  Mickey walked over to it, and looked closely to see if it might survive its ordeal. He thought it just might.

  ‘Whose office is this?’ he asked.

  ‘Mrs Beale’s,’ said the factory manager.

  Mickey’s back was to him; he carefully rearranged his expression into its previous professional blandness before turning back. The door of one cupboard was partially open, buckled by the heat at the seat of the fire. Mickey removed a pen from his inside pocket, and pushed it open further, inside were bottles and glasses; two unopened bottles of wine, one unopened bottle of gin, and mixers. On the floor, behind the open door, its glass darkened by names, lay a half full bottle of Scotch. A glass, cracked in two, lay on the floor in the middle of the room.r />
  The flooring under the cupboard had been burned away in a semi-circle; elsewhere it was browned and distorted, but there it had burned away.

  ‘Looks as if it started here,’ said Mickey. ‘ It looks as though it must have been deliberate.’

  ‘It was deliberate, all right.’

  ‘Was it now?’ Mickey Drake was interrupted in his conversation with the factory manager by the fire officer. He held out his hand. ‘Sergeant Drake, Stansfield CID.’

  ‘Alarm cut,’ he said, giving Mickey’s hand a shake as perfunctory as his conversation. ‘ Sprinkler system’s on independent wiring. Came on, doused the flames before too much damage done, end of fire. Not discovered till morning.’

  Mickey had to make an effort not to emulate the economy of speech. ‘Ex … good,’ he said, with a smile. ‘Would someone think that cutting the alarm would cut out the sprinklers too?’

  The fire officer smiled. ‘Good question. Probably would. Wires terminate in a junction box in the basement, and that’s where they’ve been cut. If you follow the wiring as it looks to the naked eye, if you get my meaning, you’d think you’d got both. But if you look at the wiring diagram …’

  To Mickey’s horror, he unfolded a sheet of paper. He couldn’t even follow the London Underground map, but his question had apparently been astute enough to qualify him as an aficionado of wiring systems. He nodded and tried to look intelligent. The upshot was that the wires parted company in the junction box, and that only someone involved in actually wiring up the system would have any reason to know that. And since whoever did it didn’t know that, it narrowed the field down to the rest of the civilised world.

  ‘Well, thank you very much,’ he said, and watched with relief as the fire officer went back about his duties. He turned back to the factory manager. ‘Right – I think perhaps if we could go to your office …’

  ‘I shouldn’t by rights be doing this,’ he said, as he reluctantly led the way. ‘But none of the directors has come in this morning.’

  No, thought Mickey. There’s a good reason for that, as you are about to find out.

  In the glass-panelled office, door closed, he told the manager why Mr Austin wasn’t in.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ he said. ‘ Oh, dear, dear. That’s dreadful – that’s unbelievable. Nice woman, Mrs Austin. I didn’t see her all that often, but she was always … oh, dear.’

  Mickey took a deep breath, and told him why Mrs Beale had failed to discover the fire in her office for herself.

  ‘Dear God.’

  No instant praise for the dead this time. Just stunned disbelief. Mickey allowed the man a moment or two to gather his thoughts. ‘I don’t know if you’re aware of the fact, but Mr and Mrs Beale live next door to Mr Pearce, so I shouldn’t expect him in too early, either.’

  ‘I wasn’t really expecting him in anyway,’ said the manager.

  ‘Oh?’ Mickey sat forward a little. ‘Why was that?’

  ‘Well – I think it’s all a bit hush-hush.’ He snorted. ‘A lot of things are, these days. Not like when it was just Gordon Pearce.’

  Mickey smiled. ‘I don’t think hush-hush counts any more,’ he said.

  ‘No. Anyway, I don’t know what it was all about. It was just that Mr Austin—’ He broke off, and shook his head again. ‘Poor lass,’ he said. ‘ Do you know who—?’ He finished the sentence with another shake of his head.

  ‘No arrest has been made yet,’ said Mickey.

  ‘Well he came to me last night and said that Mrs Beale would be here on a more regular basis in future. She normally just comes in once or twice a week. And that if Mr Pearce wasn’t here today, I had to refer anything that cropped up on transport to her.’

  Mickey nodded. ‘Transport – that’s Mr Pearce’s job, is it?’

  ‘Well – there used to be a transport manager, but now each of the directors is responsible overall for particular things. And the managing director is labour and transport. So that he’s on the spot if there are any major problems. The other directors just turn up for board meetings.’

  ‘Isn’t Mr Pearce an engineer?’

  ‘Yes, but that side of it hardly involves him now. He employs people who know more about what we’re doing here than he does himself. He got bogged down with running a company while techniques improved and production got slicker and faster, except here. When Austin came, he made a lot of changes. All for the better.’

  ‘Does that mean he sacked a lot of people?’

  ‘There was a rationalisation programme,’ said the manager.

  ‘He sacked a lot of people,’ repeated Mickey.

  ‘Yes, but you’re not suggesting that someone would … come on!’

  Mickey shook his head. But someone had set fire to Rosemary Beale’s office, and someone had strangled Rosemary Beale. Someone was less than satisfied with something she had done. And the office suggested it was something she had done in her guise as an Austin-Pearce director rather than any other of her activities.

  ‘Anyway,’ said the manager. ‘It was Austin did that – not her. I don’t hold much brief for the woman. I’m sorry she died the way she did, but if half what I’ve heard is right, I’m not all that surprised. But she had nothing to do with the redundancies. That was all over with by the time she got involved.’

  ‘How many directors are there?’

  ‘Five – including Mrs Beale.’

  ‘Austin, Pearce, Mrs Beale and …?’

  ‘Fred Mullen and Charles Race.’

  ‘You’re not expecting them in, are you?’

  The manager shook his head. ‘Though I’d better get on to them and tell them what’s happened,’ he said. ‘Bloody hell.’

  Mickey sucked in his breath in sympathy. ‘It took me a long time to work out how to tell you,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll bet it did.’

  Mickey was about to leave, and had lifted himself off the chair a fraction when he caught a look on the other man’s face. He sat down again.

  ‘It’s …’ he began, but looked at Mickey.

  Mickey looked receptive, and he didn’t speak.

  ‘It’s not something I’d normally talk about,’ he went on. ‘I don’t encourage gossip, but you can’t stop it. And you can’t help hearing it, and you can’t help noticing things yourself.’

  Mickey continued to look interested.

  ‘Men are worse gossips than women, you know,’ he said. ‘I know. I’ve worked in factories all my life – mostly with women. But men are worse.’ He leant forward, and lowered his voice, unnecessarily, since not only was the room soundproof, but there was absolutely no one in the vicinity; they were all working diligently at desks with green screens on them. ‘They reckon she only got on the board because she was sleeping with Austin,’ he said.

  Mickey stared at him. ‘Rosemary Beale?’ he said, with a total lack of professional detachment. He knew the woman. She was a tart. Had been. Then Beale had employed her at one of his clubs, and she had married him, and become respectable. After a fashion. He didn’t know Jonathan Austin, but from what he’d seen of him, of his house, of his manner … it seemed inconceivable.

  And yet it didn’t, now be came to think about it. In the last century, no one would have thought it at all odd. All the same, he argued with himself, it might not have surprised him so much if she had still been prying her trade. But she wasn’t. Still, it did explain why she was on the board. It didn’t, he thought, explain why she wanted to be.

  ‘That’s what I said. Someone like him and a woman like her? I thought they were talking rubbish, but then – well, you can’t deny what you see with your own eyes, can you?’

  Mickey looked round the factory, with its glass partitions everywhere in the office area, and none at all in the production area, from what he had seen of it. A vast warehouse of a place, as unappealing inside as it was out, in his opinion. He could see clear to the other end of the room. Not the sort of place to conduct an illicit romance, he wouldn’t have thought.
r />   ‘What did you see with your own eyes?’ he asked.

  ‘Them. Whispering in corners. Taking long lunch hours – sitting in the car park for practically the whole afternoon. Once, I caught them behind a lorry.’

  Mickey tried and failed to see Jonathan Austin being caught in a compromising position behind a lorry. But it wasn’t difficult to imagine Rosemary Beale in such circumstances, and if the man was involved with her, then she had presumably caused him to shed his inhibitions.

  ‘I mean, they weren’t doing anything … you know. Not then. But I’ve heard they had somewhere in Barton that they went to.’

  ‘And you think that this might have something to do with what’s been happening?’

  ‘Well – someone might resent it,’ said the factory manager, guardedly.

  Pearce, thought Mickey. That had to be who the man was indicating. Pearce, being pushed out by Mrs Beale. He had seen Pearce briefly last night, when Judy Hill had been trying to contact her divisional DCI without success. Spoken to him. He hadn’t said much; his wife had answered for him, saying he was still half-smashed from his evening out.

  As he walked back through the factory, he passed Rosemary Beale’s office, and stopped and looked. The fire officer was in there making notes; Mickey looked at the hole in the tiling, and the bottle at the door.

  ‘Can I have a word?’ he asked the fire officer.

  ‘Come in,’ said Jonathan to the handsome young man who stood at the door. ‘ You’re the one who brought me here yesterday, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Sergeant Drake.’

  ‘You’re rather more formally dressed this afternoon.’ Drake looked a little embarrassed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘ I was caught a bit on the hop, I’m afraid.’

  Jonathan offered him a chair, and sat down himself, reaching over for his cigarettes.

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Drake, to the proffered packet.

  ‘Are you a bachelor, Mr Drake?’ He looked a little surprised at the question. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Well

  – not really. Divorced.’

  Jonathan lit his cigarette. ‘An occupational hazard, I believe.’