by Ann Granger
‘She just appeared out of the blue that morning early. She came the back way, straight into the kitchen without so much as a by-your-leave, calling out, “It’s only me!” She’d brought a pot of jam for us, dropped in on her way to open up the church. She was a dab hand at the jam-making. She put it on the table where Dad was sitting with the box, looking all pleased with herself. Then she saw what he was at, messing with those bits of jewellery and such. She asked Dad, what all those things were. Dad said, just things he’d found in the woods. But then she picked up the ring and she asked, in a funny sort of voice, “Where did you get this, Mr Twelvetrees? Did you find this in the woods, too?” And I knew, just knew, from her way and her voice that the ring meant something to her. She’d recognised it.
‘My heart was in my boots. I thought that if I didn’t silence her, she’d go blabbing. It would all come out, after all those years, Dad would be taken away. Everyone in the village would know the truth. Kevin Jones would move me out of the cottage. So I had to follow her over to the church and keep her quiet. She was kneeling saying her prayers when I went in. I called out that it was only me, Dilys, and she didn’t turn round. It was easy. I’ve had more trouble killing a chicken. I didn’t like doing it, mind! But the way I saw it, it had to be done. Then I went home and told Dad I’d done it, that he hadn’t to worry she’d tell about the ring.
‘Dad, he called me a stupid great turnip and asked me what I’d wanted to go killing her for. I told him, because of him, that’s why. It was his fault. He said, I never did do anything right and what if she was only wounded and someone took her to the hospital? She’d know it was me done it. We waited for a while, to see if anything would happen over at the church like someone find her. But nothing happened and Dad got restless. He went over to the church to look, but she was dead all right, so he got out of there. See, Dad didn’t want to be the one to find her and have to answer questions. He got away only in the nick of time because that friend of the superintendent’s turned up and she found Miss Millar. So I had managed it all right, hadn’t I? You’d have thought the old devil would’ve been grateful. I reckoned I’d handled it pretty well. If Dad had had more faith in me and not gone over there prying, that Miss Mitchell wouldn’t have spotted him in the churchyard and Mr Markby wouldn’t have come to the cottage asking questions. I told Dad, after he’d gone, that from then on he was to leave it all to me. I reckoned I sorted things out pretty well.’
‘Surely you’re not claiming that murder is justifiable?’ Ginny Holding asked incredulously.
Dilys sniffed. ‘Well, it would’ve been, wouldn’t it? If that had been the end of it. But I had bad luck as usual and that wasn’t the end of it. People prying, that’s what causes trouble. That friend of Mr Markby’s, she did the very same thing as Miss Millar did. It’s like you’ve got no privacy in your own home. Dad was took queer in the churchyard and she helped him back to the cottage. She went through the kitchen to open up the front door. Dad, silly old fool, had left the back door unlocked and left all the things on the table. I came in not three or four minutes after she’d gone. Dad was sitting in his chair. He told me he’d had a bad turn but the lady had brought him indoors. I knew she’d got in through the back door and she must have seen everything. I ran outside and I saw her in the distance walking towards the woods. I followed her, kept down on the other side of the stone walls and went along the fields. A couple of times the sheep nearly gave me away, running off spooked. But it was raining that hard I reckon the superintendent’s friend was more worried about that than the antics of a few sheep.’
Holding asked in a despairing voice, ‘And it was worth killing one woman and trying to kill another to protect someone like your father?’
Dilys looked affronted. ‘You haven’t been listening! I told you about losing the cottage. How’d you like to lose your home? Besides, I thought perhaps I’d be in trouble because I knew about the women all those years ago, and didn’t tell. I helped bury the hiker, too. But that wasn’t my choosing. It was Dad’s idea.’ Her gaze met Pearce’s, level and almost serene. ‘None of it was my choosing,’ she said. ‘It was all Dad.’
After a moment’s silence, Pearce said hoarsely, ‘Thank you for telling us about it, Dilys. You did the right thing.’
But Dilys had something to ask. ‘Shall I go to prison?’ She didn’t sound worried, rather curious.
‘If you are convicted.’
‘Because I’ve been thinking,’ Dilys said placidly. ‘Now Dad’s dead, Kevin will have me out of that cottage for sure. But if I’m in prison for a nice long time, it’ll be a roof over my head, won’t it?’
‘I’d like a word in private, Inspector!’ snapped the solicitor.
In the corridor outside the interview room, the solicitor buttonholed Pearce with a fierce gleam in his eye. ‘I wish it to be made quite plain that my client spoke to you so freely against my advice. I warned her against making a confession and I shall be advising her to withdraw it.’
‘Why?’ Pearce asked bluntly.
‘Good heavens, man! Need you ask? Her reasons for making it are extremely suspect. She wants to go to prison because, as she put it, it will give her a roof over her head! If you expect to go to court on the basis of that confession, I should tell you I shall make sure that a jury knows that is her reason. If a judge hears her talking like that, he’ll probably tell the jury to disregard it!’
Pearce was inclined to agree but didn’t say so. Instead he said, ‘You can’t deny she attacked Miss Mitchell.’
‘She may have attacked her. She didn’t kill her. That she killed the other woman, Hester Millar, is something we only have her word for. The old father probably did it. He was always going in that church, she told me so. He liked to chat to the churchwardens of which Miss Millar was one. You can’t rely on anything she’s told you, and that’s the top and bottom of it. As for that business of burying the hiker in the woods—’
‘Don’t tell me all that grisly detail came out of her imagination,’ Pearce interrupted.
The solicitor looked momentarily disconcerted. ‘Yes, well, we still can’t believe that she witnessed it, just because she said so. The old man could equally have come back and told her about it. Just as he could have come home and told her he killed Hester Millar. Or possibly neither of them killed her. Can’t you see, Mrs Pullen is desperate not to find herself homeless? Now her father’s dead, she sees prison as a safe refuge. The woman’s mind is scrambled.’
‘We’ll leave it to a jury, shall we?’ Pearce suggested.
The solicitor snorted. ‘The whole taradiddle rests on the existence of that box of trophies.’
‘Which Miss Mitchell saw and can describe.’
‘But,’ said the solicitor nastily, ‘can’t produce.’
Pearce eyed the solicitor suspiciously. ‘Tell me, why are you so keen to get her off?’
‘It’s my job,’ retorted the solicitor silkily.
‘There’s more to it than that.’
The young man gave him a dirty look. ‘All right. She’s poor and uneducated. She’s middle-aged, unattractive and totally unaware of the impact of what she says. She was a battered child who grew up in fear under the thumb of that wicked old man. Despite her evasions, I believe he abused her and her sister sexually when they were children and probably abused her after her mother’s death. You’ll have noticed she avoided straight answers to any question about that kind of abuse being inflicted on her either as a child or later. He beat the kids up, that’s all she’d admit.’
Pearce said thoughtfully, ‘If she doesn’t want to tell, she won’t. Don’t plan on making that part of your defence.’
The solicitor fixed him with a glittering eye. ‘When people like her fall foul of the law and get into the system, they can’t defend themselves. Everything they say or do makes it worse. They make a poor impression on a jury. Yes, I’m going to do my damnedest to get her off that murder charge! And you know perfectly well you have to do more than r
ely on a confession. You’ve got to have proof.’
He stalked off.
Pearce trudged upstairs to Markby’s office. The superintendent looked up as he appeared and asked, ‘Things not going well, Dave?’
‘Look at it this way,’ returned Pearce gloomily, rubbing his jaw. ‘She’s confessed but it’s just our luck that her solicitor is a crusader.’
He explained, summarising what had happened in the interview room.
‘Doing his job, Dave,’ said Markby. ‘Like he said. And we’re going to do ours.’
‘Patronising, public-school ponce!’ growled Pearce. ‘Sorry, sir, I meant the solicitor. I didn’t mean you.’
‘Thank you, Dave. I appreciate you making that clear.’
‘I mean,’ Pearce pursued the point. ‘I don’t suppose Dilys would have liked to hear herself described the way he described her. Anyway, he’s wrong. He’s talking as if she’s simple. She’s not. She’s a cold-blooded killer and she’s what my grandma used to call as artful as a cartload of monkeys. She’d run rings round that solicitor any day if she put her mind to it. And now she’s running rings round us.’
‘You mean the remark about wanting to go to prison,’ Markby said.
‘That’s it. Confession? It’s worthless. She made it worthless the moment she said that about going to gaol to have a roof over her head. What’s more, she knew it and didn’t need the solicitor to tell her so!’ Pearce snorted.
Markby nodded his agreement. ‘A confession without evidence to back it is, in any case, worthless. We must find that box with the old man’s collection in it.’
‘We’re turning that cottage inside-out,’ Pearce protested.
Markby sat silent. The Potato Man had escaped justice. Left to the eager-beaver solicitor, the Potato Man’s daughter might yet beat a murder charge, unless they could come up with some tangible evidence.
‘And we had it,’ he said softly. ‘We had it and I didn’t realise it. Jam! I had jam on my shirt cuff when I left that cottage. She was bending over the pedal-bin throwing something away. She was throwing away that pot of jam! If Ruth had just remembered, while I was talking to her at the vicarage, that Hester had been holding a pot of jam, I might have got on to Dilys straight away!’
It hadn’t been the only indication. Hindsight was a wonderful thing and Markby reflected ruefully on what it was telling him now. Another image had filled his head, that of Dilys opening the cottage door to him when he came to seek her father and her immediate declaration on seeing him that, ‘We’ve got nothing to do with it!’ He might well have asked her, there and then, with what? For Dilys hadn’t been among the spectators at the church so how had she known what to deny? Of course, she might have popped her head out of her front door and a neighbour given her the news. But her denial, when she’d been asked no question, told its own tale. It was the reaction of her type to any suggestion she might be responsible for anything meaning trouble. He should have twigged that her defensive reaction to the mere sight of him meant she had something to hide, that the use of ‘we’ meant they both did, she and the old man.
There was a rap on the door. ‘Sir?’ It was Ginny Holding’s voice, and seconds later her excited face peered round it. ‘Sorry to interrupt but thought you’d like to know.’
Ginny wasn’t without enjoying a moment of triumph. She paused then threw open the door wide so that she was revealed clasping a soot-streaked shoebox. ‘They just brought it in, sir! They found it stuffed up the chimney. All the things are in there, the ring, everything.’
A smile broke on Markby’s face. ‘Well done, Ginny.’
‘Great!’ said Pearce in a muffled voice.
Markby looked at him. Pearce was holding his hand to his jaw again.
‘For crying out loud, Dave,’ Markby said wearily. ‘See a dentist about that tooth first thing tomorrow morning. And when you have, come in and see me. We’ve got another line of enquiry to open up.’
‘What?’ Pearce gazed at him baffled.
‘Come on, Dave. You said yourself the woman is a cold-blooded killer. Mr Pullen and his girlfriend, the barmaid, both disappeared overnight and were never seen again. Dilys never bothered to file for divorce. She wouldn’t need to, would she, if she knew he was dead? Look, the same scenario has been replaying itself at that pub for weeks now. Norman Stubbings, tired of his wife Evie, has been fooling around with Cheryl Spencer. The difference is, Evie hasn’t taken a kitchen knife to Norman – yet. Well, go on, then, get to it.’
Outside his office, a dismayed Dave Pearce turned to Sergeant Holding. ‘He’s not serious, is he, Ginny? I haven’t got to dig up those bloody woods again?’
Chapter Seventeen
Roger was in the garden when Markby got out of his car before the old vicarage. Seeing a visitor, he let out hysterical barks of welcome and pounded towards the gate. When he reached it he stood on his hind legs, hung his huge paws over the topmost bar, and dribbled happily.
Markby patted his head, which seemed to drive Roger delirious, and told him, ‘I’m just coming to see your mistress, if you don’t mind getting down off the gate.’
Roger barked expectantly and showed no sign of moving. He was too heavy to push. Fortunately, his owner had heard the commotion and was coming towards them.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said on spying Markby. ‘Hang on, I’ll let you in.’ She threw her arms round Roger’s neck and hauled him away from the gate. ‘Come on, then!’ she panted.
Markby hurriedly open the gate, slipped through and closed it securely behind him. Roger wriggled furiously in the headlock Muriel Scott had on him.
‘Go indoors!’ ordered Mrs Scott. ‘The front door’s unlatched. When you’re in, I’ll follow and shut Roger out here.’
He wasn’t sure quite how she was going to manage that. Markby opened the front door, went in, pushed the door back ajar, and waited in the hall. After a moment and sounds of combat the door flew open. Muriel catapulted inside and slammed the door in Roger’s face. He responded by attacking it. His claws could be heard scraping teeth-grindingly on what was left of the paintwork.
‘There’s no harm in him,’ declared his breathless owner, leaning back against the door. ‘He wants to be friends. The only reason he laid Dilys Twelvetrees out flat in the woods, the day she went for Meredith, was because he’d recognised her and wanted to say hello.’
‘I’m very glad he did. He saved the day.’
‘You’re sure Dilys killed Hester, then?’ Muriel stared hard at him.
‘I believe so and we’ll work hard proving it.’ He eyed her curiously. ‘Meredith told me that when you saw Hester dead in the church you appeared more surprised at the identity of the corpse than at its presence. Had you expected it to be someone else?’
She sniffed and said promptly, ‘Norman, from the pub. Either him or one of those daft girls he’s always fooling with. I thought Evie might finally have snapped and taken a carving knife to him. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had.’
Surprised, Markby asked, ‘You knew he took his girlfriends to the church tower?’
She had the grace to redden and avoid his eye. ‘Not exactly, well, I did suspect. His dad had been bell-ringer, you see. That would probably have given him the idea.’
Markby blinked. ‘And you said nothing?’
Mrs Scott rallied. ‘To whom? To Evie? Didn’t she have enough troubles? That family, Twelvetrees – Norman’s mother was a Twelvetrees, did you know? They always did look on women as punchbags.’ She met his gaze now. ‘Or worse,’ she added.
There was a silence as both contemplated the crimes of the late Old Billy Twelvetrees.
Muriel Scott broke it to say, ‘I don’t know why we’re standing out here. Come in and sit down.’
He followed her into the untidy drawing room and took a seat on the horsehair sofa. Muriel flopped into an armchair and asked, ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’
‘Please don’t bother. I really can’t stay long. I felt I had to come
and explain to you that we shan’t be making an offer for the house.’
She gave a mirthless hoot. ‘I didn’t think you would! After all that’s happened? The last place Meredith wants to live is Lower Stovey, I should think.’
‘She isn’t keen on the place, I admit.’ She wasn’t keen on the house, either, but if Muriel liked to think their objection was to the village, rather than the vicarage, that suited him.
‘If I don’t sell it to you, I dare say I’ll sell it to someone else eventually,’ Muriel observed. ‘I’ll have to bring the price down. Just so long as I get enough to buy a little place somewhere for me and Roger.’
‘Roger would prefer the countryside, I imagine.’
‘I wouldn’t take him to the town. He’d hate it and so would I.’ Muriel tapped her fingers on the arm of her chair. ‘You know, years ago, when I came to this house to look after the Reverend Pattinson, I was really thrilled. I was widowed, broke, homeless, rather as poor Dilys was after her husband bolted with the barmaid. But I’d better luck that she did. When they told me that Miss Pattinson, as she was then, had asked if I’d keep house for her father, it was like a miracle. I wrote straight away to accept. I met Miss Pattinson and the old reverend and we all got on like a house on fire. It seemed meant, somehow, that I should come here. He was no trouble, Reverend Pattinson. A bit absent-minded and living among his books, like I said. But he ate whatever I put in front of him, was always polite to me, followed instructions. If I told him to go and change his jacket he’d toddle off and do it. He was a nice old chap.’
‘And you had relatives in the village, another reason to be here.’
She raised an eyebrow at him. ‘Yes, I did. How did you know?’
‘Ruth Aston told me Martin Jones is your uncle. That he told her you were available to keep house and it was to him she made the suggestion you come here.’
‘That’s right. But Kevin wrote me the letter because Uncle Martin wasn’t used to writing letters. Kevin, of course, is my cousin. Not that I go over to the farm much. I can’t take Roger there. He misbehaves all over the place. It’s a funny thing. My Uncle Martin always said Old Billy had been the best farmworker he’d ever hired. The Reverend Pattinson never spoke badly of the family, either, because Mrs Twelvetrees had once been the cleaner here. But then, the reverend was a man who couldn’t see what was under his nose half the time. He had a problem distinguishing between what was real life and what he’d like life to be. Do you understand me?’
