The Cold Hand of Malice

by Frank Smith

  ‘No, not really. She said something about letting Trevor and me have a night out on our own for a change, but to tell you the truth, I don’t think either Laura or Moira were all that keen to see the film in the first place. Neither of them care for science fiction films, and I can’t say I blame them. I mean the plots are often rubbish, but Trevor and I are more interested in the computer-generated special effects.’

  Holbrook hunched forward in his seat, and for the first time since they’d met that morning, his eyes became alive. ‘Most people don’t realize how much work goes into a film like that,’ he said earnestly. ‘Some of the special effects take years of work by some very talented people. Youngsters, a good many of them, and they are good. Trev and I both have to be creative in our own lines of work – they’re not the same, you understand, but the process is much the same, so we enjoy trying to work out how they achieved certain effects. And we do pick up the odd idea for our own work every now and then. You see . . .’

  Holbrook stopped himself in mid-sentence. ‘Sorry,’ he said guiltily as he drew back. ‘I didn’t mean to run on like that. I was just trying to explain . . . Well, anyway, what it comes down to is, with Laura staying home, it gave Moira the opportunity to beg off.’

  ‘I see. So you left the house at about ten minutes to seven, and went for a drink first at the Fox and Hounds.’

  ‘That’s right. We usually go there. We know the landlord, Bill Chivers, and the pub is just across the road from the cinema.’

  ‘And you left the Fox and Hounds when? Approximately?’

  Holbrook shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Quarter to eight or so, I suppose. Trev said we’d better be going, so we left. Anyway, I don’t see the point of all these questions about where I was, unless –’ his eyes narrowed as they met those of Tregalles – ‘unless,’ he said softly, ‘you think that I had something to do with Laura’s death. Is that what all these questions are about? Well, let me tell you, Sergeant, I loved my wife, and I had nothing to do with her death, so you can get that idea out of your mind right now. Apart from anything else, I was miles away at the time, sitting in a cinema with a witness by my side, so the sooner you stop wasting my time and start looking for the real killers, the better!’

  ‘Three quarters of a mile, actually,’ Tregalles said equably, ‘and while this may seem like a waste of time to you now, it is important that we establish where everyone was when the crime was being committed. Important,’ he continued quickly as Holbrook opened his mouth to speak, ‘because if or when this case comes to trial, the defence will be doing everything in their power to convince a jury that the murder could have been committed by someone else, usually someone very close to the victim. So, if you will just bear with me for just a few more minutes . . .? Now,’ he continued without waiting for a reply, ‘according to our information, the film ended at approximately ten past ten that night. Did you come straight home?’

  It was hard to tell by the way he continued to look at Tregalles, whether Holbrook was convinced or not by the sergeant’s explanation, but he answered the question. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we came straight home.’

  Tregalles nodded encouragingly. ‘And when you first entered the house, there was no indication that anything was amiss. Is that right, sir?’

  ‘Yes – at least at first.’

  ‘So, while Mr Ballantyne went into the front room you went straight upstairs to check on your wife?’

  Holbrook took a deep breath. ‘Yes,’ he said tightly.

  ‘And, according to what we were told the other night, when Mr Ballantyne realized that something was wrong, he came out of the front room, saw you on the stairs, went up himself, then came back down again to call the police. A matter of three or four minutes, perhaps? Would that be about right, sir?’

  ‘This may come as a surprise to you, Sergeant,’ Holbrook said, his words laced with sarcasm, ‘but I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to what time it was. I had a little more on my mind.’

  ‘I do appreciate that,’ Tregalles told him, ‘but you see, I do want to make sure that I haven’t missed something here, because the times don’t seem to add up. I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical explanation, but I can’t see it here. Perhaps you can explain it, sir?’

  ‘Explain what, exactly?’ Holbrook snapped.

  Tregalles frowned and scratched his head. ‘It’s just that the film ended about ten past ten, and . . . where was the car parked, by the way?’

  ‘Where we usually leave it,’ Holbrook said irritably, ‘in the car park beside the Fox and Hounds, but I fail to see—’

  ‘Any problems getting out?’ Tregalles interrupted. ‘Any delays?’

  Holbrook closed his eyes. His body language said plainly that he was having difficulty keeping his temper. ‘We came out,’ he said through gritted teeth, ‘we walked across the road, got in the car and drove home. Is that specific enough for you, Sergeant?’

  ‘Which means you would have been home about, oh, let’s say no later than twenty-five past ten, assuming you didn’t stop anywhere along the way. You didn’t, did you, sir?’

  ‘No, we did not stop along the way,’ Holbrook said, enunciating each word carefully as if speaking to a backward child. ‘And,’ he added with emphasis, ‘I’ve had more than enough of these questions. I assume I am free to leave?’ He began to rise, but Tregalles waved him back.

  ‘In a moment, if you don’t mind, sir,’ he said. ‘Just want to clear up one small point. You see, according to what you’ve told me, you got home about twenty-five past ten and went straight upstairs. Both you and Mr Ballantyne agree that you weren’t in the house more than a few minutes before Mr Ballantyne called us. But our records show that his call came in at 10.58, which leaves a gap of some twenty-five to thirty minutes unaccounted for between the time you got home and the time Mr Ballantyne called us. Is there something I’m missing here, Mr Holbrook?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, man!’ Holbrook flared. ‘My wife was killed that night. Not just killed, but beaten to death by some madman, and you sit there asking me about what time it was when I did this or that? I have tried to be cooperative, but this is ridiculous! So we didn’t get the times exactly right. So what? Do you think you’d be checking your watch to make sure you got the times right if it was your wife who’d been killed?’

  Holbrook stood up. ‘I think it’s about time you got your priorities right,’ he said scathingly, ‘and you can do what you like with your damned statement, because I’m finished here.’

  Seven

  It was late in the afternoon before Dr Starkie telephoned Paget to give him a summary of the results of the autopsy on Mrs Holbrook.

  ‘It’s pretty straightforward,’ Starkie told him. ‘The woman died of repeated blows to the head. Six in all, as near as I can tell, and there is nothing to indicate that she put up a fight. In fact, I doubt if she was even awake. If, as we are told, she took sleeping pills along with paracetamol, some of which we found on the floor, if you remember, chances are she was asleep when the first blow was struck.

  ‘The weapon was some sort of flat metal bar approximately three to three-and-a-half centimetres wide, and roughly half a centimetre thick, and I found traces of rust embedded in the wounds. Could be almost any old piece of scrap metal, but whatever it was, it was used with considerable force. The entire front of the skull was crushed, but then, I don’t have to tell you, do I? You saw what it had done to her face.’

  Paget remembered all too vividly the damage done to Mrs Holbrook’s face: nose split; jaw broken; teeth smashed; left eye driven into its socket, and hair matted and tangled in the bloody wounds. It had been a vicious attack, and all the more incomprehensible if the woman had been asleep at the time.

  ‘Sounds like the same metal bar they’ve been using on the back doors and the furniture they smash,’ he told Starkie.

  More and more this looked like the work of a psychopath, and psychopaths didn’t need a logical reason for what they did, whether it was smas
hing things or killing people, and they could be very clever and unpredictable. Witness, for example, the way they had vandalized the other five houses without leaving so much as a clue – with the exception of some dog hairs and a few fibres.

  ‘Any second thoughts about the time of death?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I’m leaving the one-hour spread as it is for the record, but as I said before, you won’t be far wrong if you assume she was killed around nine o’clock, give or take fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Good. That helps,’ Paget told him. ‘Now, Tregalles tells me that Laura Holbrook’s wedding and engagement rings may have been pulled from her finger, and he said he’d passed that information along to you. Any luck with that, Reg?’

  ‘There were slight abrasions on the knuckle,’ Starkie said, ‘but she could have pulled them off herself for all I know.’

  Paget wasn’t surprised, and he wasn’t sure that it mattered very much. The point was, two valuable rings were missing, and there was a chance that the killer or killers would try to dispose of them, and that might just be the break they were looking for.

  ‘Anything else I should know about?’ he asked.

  ‘Not unless something comes back from the lab. Otherwise it looks straightforward enough. No surprises as far as I can see.’

  ‘Good. And thanks, Reg. Appreciate the call.’

  Paget was pleasantly surprised to see Grace’s car in the driveway when he got home at ten minutes to six that evening. With the way things had been going these past few months, between staff shortages and heavy workloads in both areas, they were lucky if either of them got home before six thirty or seven most evenings. Luckier still if they arrived more or less at the same time. So he was even more surprised when he opened the front door to be greeted by the aroma of beef roasting in the oven.

  Grace appeared at the kitchen door, apron on, oven mitts on her hands.

  ‘Thank goodness!’ she said with feeling. ‘I half expected you to phone at the last minute to say you would be late. Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding all right, is it?’

  He shrugged out of his coat, and made a face. ‘I was rather hoping for a green salad,’ he said, ‘but I suppose I could manage a bit of beef if that’s all you have.’

  ‘I can dump it in the dustbin,’ she warned, ‘so be careful what you say.’

  He gathered her to him. ‘Seems a shame to waste it since you’ve been to all that trouble,’ he said, and kissed her. ‘You must have come home early to do all this. What’s the occasion?’

  ‘I just felt like it,’ Grace told him, ‘and the work I have to do can be done just as well at home as in the office.’

  ‘Oh, Grace, surely you don’t have to—’ he began, but she put a finger to his lips.

  ‘It has to do with the Holbrook case,’ she said, ‘and I want to go over my findings with you and see if we come to the same conclusion. But let’s not go into that now. Dinner is almost ready, so let’s enjoy it.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Roast potatoes, peas, Brussels sprouts, Yorkshire pudding and gravy? Enough meat on the joint to give you roast beef sandwiches for the next three days at least? One more word and I’ll burn the lot!’

  He sighed heavily and raised his hands in mock surrender. ‘You’re a hard woman, Grace,’ he said, ‘but then, I suppose I shall have to give in as always. Good cooks are so hard to find these days.’

  ‘And you’re so easily bribed,’ she said. ‘Now, get on upstairs and have your wash. Dinner is in fifteen minutes.’

  After the table had been cleared, and the dishwasher loaded, Grace opened her briefcase, took out six folders, and set them out on the table.

  ‘One for each burglary,’ she told Paget as they sat down side by side at the table. ‘They include itemized lists of the things that were stolen or vandalized at each location, and I believe that what I’m about to show you may be what Charlie was talking about when he sent me out to the Holbrook house.’

  Grace opened the first folder and took out a single sheet of A4 paper. ‘The first house to be hit was in Dunbar Road,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what they expected to find there, because it’s a poor district to start with, so all they came away with were a few coins they found in a drawer, and some bits and pieces of cheap jewellery left by the man’s wife when she left him – worth maybe ten quid for the lot, if they were lucky, and some food. They smashed the glass in a cabinet, which would have cost something like ninety to a hundred pounds to repair, but it wasn’t worth that much to start with, so it was a write-off, as was the small radio they smashed. They also damaged a couple of drawers, possibly in a fit of temper when they failed to find anything of value in them. Cost of repairs or replacement, if they had had them done, would amount to something like two, possibly three hundred pounds. I’ve left out the cost of repairs to the door because that was common to every burglary.

  ‘Now, look at the one in Abbey Road. Better neighbourhood and they came away with approximately forty pounds – the owner couldn’t be sure of the exact amount, but there was more damage. A TV set, fortunately an older one; a mirror, a clock and several telephones were all destroyed. Estimated cost of replacement approximately eight hundred and forty pounds. The owners are still arguing with their insurance company about the TV, but that figure isn’t far off.’

  Grace opened the third folder. ‘Westfield Lane. Similar neighbourhood. A few pounds taken – the owner couldn’t be sure how much, but said it wouldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen at the most – but nothing else was taken, even though there were a number of valuable items worth taking in full view. But the damage there came to well over twelve hundred pounds, and then they stopped to have a meal of sorts. It’s almost as if they are trying to tell us that they know they can take their time, and they have no fear of being caught.

  ‘Number four,’ Grace continued. ‘View Street. No money taken at all, but the damage was even more severe. They lashed out at everything as they went through the place, and I think Tregalles is right: the damage had become their prime objective. They’ve developed a taste for it. And once again they not only stopped to have a meal, they had a fry-up, a sit-down meal that would take time to prepare and eat. Once again, it looks to me as if they are thumbing their noses at us.

  ‘Then there was Holywell Street. According to the owners, they never leave money in the house, which may or may not account for the amount of damage they did there. You’ve seen it, Neil; they simply went mad. This time all they ate was half an apple pie, but just to make sure we got the message, they stopped long enough to make custard to go with it.

  ‘You see the pattern, Neil? The amount of damage has been escalating with each burglary. It goes up every time, except –’ Grace paused for effect – ‘except in this latest case.’

  She handed the last sheet to Paget. ‘Take a look. Very little in the way of cash. Mr Holbrook says his wife didn’t carry much in her handbag, but two very valuable rings are missing, her wedding and engagement rings, worth – and I verified this with the insurance company – just over twenty thousand pounds! There was other jewellery there to be taken, not much, but collectively it would have brought in a couple of thousand pounds, but it wasn’t touched. More significantly, it is the only place where jewellery of any value was taken.’

  ‘Which might suggest that there wasn’t anything of value in the other houses, and the thieves knew what was worth pinching and what wasn’t,’ Paget said.

  ‘That’s one explanation,’ Grace agreed, ‘but let me go on. I went round with the insurance adjuster this morning, and I asked him to give me his assessment of the damage, and his estimate of the cost of repair or replacement. Just the damage, not property loss such as the money taken from Mrs Holbrook’s handbag, or the rings. Take a guess at what he said.’

  Paget shook his head. ‘I haven’t the foggiest,’ he told her. ‘How much?’

  ‘Six hundred and twenty pounds! Even the picture they slashed was only a print worth about thirty
pounds. Doesn’t that strike you as strange?’

  ‘Possibly,’ Paget said thoughtfully, ‘but on the other hand it might be because they decided to get out of the house as fast as they could after discovering and killing Mrs Holbrook.’

  Grace shook her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, ‘because the damage they did was in almost every room in the house. Which suggests that they were there for some time before becoming aware that someone else was in the house. I say “suggests”, because again there are a couple of possibilities.’

  Grace brushed the hair away from her eyes as she marshalled her thoughts. ‘Look,’ she continued earnestly, ‘at first glance, it appears to be the work of the same thieves. The contents of Mrs Holbrook’s handbag were emptied on the floor, and a small amount of money was missing. They didn’t take her credit cards, nor did they in the other cases, which is strange, considering that they can be worth far more than cash.

  ‘But then we come to the vandalism. And this is where I have trouble, because when I took a good hard look at the damage in the Holbrook house, it struck me as being very, very selective, and I think that may be what Charlie was getting at when he sent me over there. Admittedly, they made quite a mess; stuff is strewn about all over the place, but there wasn’t anything of real value that was damaged. As I said, it appeared to me that someone was being very selective in what they broke, and six hundred pounds would be nothing to someone like Holbrook.’

  ‘What about—?’

  ‘The rings?’ Grace finished for him, and shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘Opportunism, perhaps? Too valuable to pass up? But that would suggest that they know enough about jewellery to realize their worth, and somehow I doubt that, because they demonstrated no such knowledge in the earlier burglaries.

  ‘And let’s not forget,’ she continued before Paget could respond, ‘this is the only time they didn’t stop to take food or make a meal.’