The Wychford Murders

by Paula Gosling

  He looked at Paddy’s horrified face. ‘I know you’re looking forward to promotion, but let’s not get carried away,’ he said, leaning against the bus stop sign.

  ‘Sorry,’ Paddy mumbled. ‘Frost on the path.’

  ‘That’s your story,’ Abbott grinned. ‘Come on, we’ve got a gap coming up here.’ They darted across the four lanes and jumped the fence on the other side, as another juggernaut and a bus crossed through the space they’d just vacated. Luke turned to his right. ‘We go along here for a way – there’s the stream, or what’s left of it.’ He gestured down at a stained and ugly concrete culvert that protruded from beneath the road. A sluggish flow of discoloured water issued from it and disappeared into the bracken that covered the rest of the hill down to the river below. He continued to walk parallel to the road for another five or six hundred yards, then stopped. ‘Here’s where the path drops down again. Pretty overgrown, not much used on this side any more.’ He turned into what looked to Paddy like an impenetrable wall of undergrowth, but which proved to be thinner in this one spot. They thrashed through it, thorns and weeds catching at their suit coats and their ill-protected ankles. Paddy, a city boy, found this progress through Nature in the raw was not exactly what he had dressed for that morning. He wiped blood from a scratch on one cheek and trudged after Luke, who was moving slowly along the path, his sharp eyes darting everywhere, up, down, around. Paddy stopped for a moment to investigate a wool thread caught on a branch, only to realise it came from Luke’s trousers. He looked up and found that Luke had disappeared. It was only Luke’s sudden ‘Aha!’ that located him. Paddy broke through into a clear space that edged the hospital grounds.

  ‘We’ll have to cut across the corner of their parking area here, and then I think we’ll find the path continues quite clearly down past the housing estate to the towpath itself,’ Luke said. They edged between cars, crossed the gravelled expanse beyond, then between more cars. There seemed to be a lot of activity at the far end of the lot, near the hospital, where a tow-truck was surrounded by a number of gesticulating workmen. Luke paused, moved along, then straightened. ‘Here. I was right. At least the hospital architect had the sense to put in a gate. Must have been a local boy,’ Luke grinned. ‘Easy walking now, Paddy. You can stop growling at me. It’s like being followed by a bear.’

  ‘Need to be to get through all that,’ Paddy grumbled.

  ‘Exactly. I don’t think our killer took this route, although he may have known about it. If I were still living here, I’d skip it, too, but it needed checking.’ They broke through the last of the undergrowth and stopped. ‘Good God, it couldn’t have been a local boy who designed this.’ Abbott was staring, appalled, at the bleak entwining of treeless streets lined by shingled boxes that was the Riverview Estate. ‘On the other hand, I suppose it’s the best place in town to live, because it’s the only place in town from which you can’t see it,’ he added, drily.

  ‘Now, now, a lot of young couples start their lives on estates like these,’ Paddy said, idiotically. Luke looked at him in some dismay.

  ‘And a lot of young couples start their divorces on estates like these, where the women are isolated and the men come home feeling like drones living in a beehive. There’s what I mean,’ Abbott said, gesturing towards a young woman who was pushing a pram on the pavement opposite them. She was slim and fresh and young – but her eyes were worried, and her baby was fretting. She gave them a wary, sideways glance. ‘Give me a broken-down flat any time – at least it has identity. There’s more crime on these estates than in . . . ’

  ‘All right, all right, it was a dumb remark,’ Paddy agreed, sheepishly. ‘What’s happened to your famous path, by the way?’

  ‘It’s been displaced,’ Abbott said, turning round and round. ‘Ah . . . over there.’ He started off towards a small plot of land that had been allocated for a rather dismal toddlers’ playground. Paddy caught up with him by the swings.

  ‘How do you know?’ he asked.

  ‘Water,’ Abbott said. He strode across the patchy grass, towards a break in a tangle of old and young trees.

  ‘Water?’ Paddy repeated.

  ‘Finds the easiest path down,’ Abbott went on. ‘Beyond this is a sloping bank . . . see? And there’s the towpath. Go down here and along the towpath, and arrive at the bottom end of town, some small shops, and a bus stop. She’ll be coming this way, you watch and see.’

  ‘She’ll never get that pram down the slope.’ Paddy said.

  ‘Oh yes, she will. I’d bet she does it every day,’ Abbott said, squinting against the sun which was now above the rooftops. The young woman pushed the pram steadily, a carrier bag of clothing bumping gently against the handle – destined, no doubt, for either the dry cleaners or Oxfam. ‘Afternoon, madam,’ he said, gravely. ‘Could we give you a hand with the pram?’

  She glanced at him nervously. ‘No, thank you.’

  Paddy was about to reassure her that they were trustworthy, when she adroitly twisted the pram to one side and skidded it sideways down the slope to the towpath six feet below. In a moment she’d turned it towards town and disappeared behind the hedge. Abbott smiled. ‘You see? Now if the town council had an ounce of sense, which would be a change from the old days, they’d make a proper job of this shortcut, instead of trying to fence it off.’ He pointed to the broken fencing pushed into the hedge, and a half-hidden sign that said ‘No through way’. ‘Ridiculous. Nobody pays the least attention to it, and I don’t blame them either. Presumably they’re expected to wind their way through that maze of streets to the road and then walk two miles to the other end of town. And two miles back, I might add. Try that with a squalling baby, a couple of carrier bags of groceries, and a headache. Alternatively, we have on offer here a brief walk beside the cooling river. No contest. What was Barry Treat’s address again?’

  This abrupt change of subject caught Paddy off guard, and it took him a minute to find his notebook. Luke kept looking around while he searched for the right page. ‘Number Ten Purlway,’ Paddy pronounced.

  ‘Which puts him along there, I believe.’ Abbott nodded towards the road down which the young mother had come. ‘So this is the way he came, and presumably the way Win Frenholm came, too. Come on.’

  The young woman with the pram had disappeared by the time they reached the towpath. A few minutes’ walk brought them to the place where Win Frenholm had been murdered. Across the river they could glimpse the near corner of the grounds of Peacock Manor.

  ‘So, you see, there is a linking factor,’ Abbott said.

  ‘Yes – fallen arches,’ Paddy said grimly, easing a foot inside his shoes. ‘Did the killer swim the river to kill Mrs Taubman, perhaps?’

  ‘No,’ Abbott said, solemnly. ‘He drove or walked over one of the bridges or took the bus, which is what I propose we do now.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Paddy moaned.

  They didn’t have to wait long for a bus, but it took them only to the centre of town and the bus station. There would be a twenty-minute wait until the next one departed for the hill and the photo-processing plant where they’d left their car. Paddy was all for calling the station for a pick-up, but Abbott said no. He went into the despatcher’s office and obtained the names and addresses of the men who regularly drove the route to the plant in the evenings, which he passed to Paddy to give to Bennett. ‘Tell him to find out if they took any unusual passengers up or back that way on the night Mrs Tompkins was killed,’ he said. ‘At that time of night most of the passengers would be regulars. An unusual pick-up would be noticed, I think. There’s our bus, by the way. At least we can sit down in it until it leaves.’

  As the bus finally left the station and wound its tortuous way through the town Abbott gazed out with fascination at the things that had changed and the things that remained the same. Some of the names above the shops were the same, but the fronts had changed. Many of the familiar high
street chains were represented. Occasionally, there would be something he remembered, something that was just as it had always been. Places where the smells would be the same, but which seemed somehow smaller than he remembered, as if time had compressed them. Pelmer’s the chemists, Osgood’s the sweet shop, Laine’s Wool Shop, all brought a slight curve to his normally serious mouth. ‘Good way to see a town,’ he commented to Paddy. ‘A few feet above, slow-moving, it gives you a new point of view. Things look different. Not a bird’s-eye view, but not a man’s-eye view either.’ He glanced at Paddy. ‘You’re not impressed, I can see.’

  ‘Oh, I’m always willing to learn,’ Paddy acknowledged. They were coming to the foot of the hill now. Suddenly he straightened in his seat, then turned as they passed a truck towing a car with a smashed-in front end. ‘Oh, God,’ he said, half to himself. Luke turned, too. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. That’s Frances’ car,’ Paddy said. ‘What the hell’s happened to it? And to her?’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Frances stared up at Jennifer from the hospital bed. ‘Oh, Jasus,’ she said, her accent considerably more pronounced than usual, in travail. ‘I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life, coming through the wall of the surgical theatre like that and Mr Blythe looking up, scalpel in his hand, never batting an eye. “Has that car been sterilised?” he says, and me sitting there like a great goop with the steering wheel half up my jumper and all the instruments across the bonnet like a canteen of cutlery on a barrow.’

  ‘It must have been dreadful,’ Jennifer said, trying to be sympathetic, and not to laugh. Frances looked at her twitching mouth and sighed in resignation.

  ‘I’d laugh, too, if it didn’t hurt my ribs. It was only that ice on the slope, wasn’t it, and me locking the brakes, I was that startled when I started to skid.’

  The new surgical wing was built half into the ground, with a wide sloping ditch surrounding it on three and a half sides. The walls were of tinted one-way glass panels and exposed steel girders. At the rear was a service drive curving down from the general parking lot. This was on the west side of the building, and consequently had got no sun by nine o’clock that morning. Frances, coming in to park, had hit a thin sheet of ice created by a leaking hosepipe and had slewed down the service drive straight into the side of Theatre Two, where the senior orthopaedic consultant had been about to commence a complex pelvic osteotomy.

  ‘He was lovely, really. He sent the patient into Theatre Three with Mr Marsh, and lifted me out of the car as gently as a babe, once he’d made certain there was nothing broken,’ Frances said. ‘Called a trolley for me, sent me over to Casualty, and here I am. I suppose he had to scrub up again and all, but he never complained. Thank God the patient never woke up, it would have been cardiac arrest at the least. Oh, God, I’ll never live it down. I’ll be working here for the rest of my life, paying it off, plus having to face Mr Blythe nearly every day too. You know what he is for the teasing.’

  ‘I’ll have a little word with him,’ Jennifer said. ‘And as for the question of payment, it seems to me you have a good case for negligence against the hospital concerning that broken pipe or drain or whatever it was that sent the water over the parking lot in the first place.’

  ‘They weren’t to know it would freeze.’

  ‘In late October? They could hardly deny the possibility,’ Jennifer said, firmly. ‘No, I expect the insurance companies will settle it between them. Now, do you need anything?’

  Frances was wearing a surgical collar for whiplash, and had several cracked ribs, but otherwise her injuries were mainly bruising. They were keeping her in for twenty-four hours’ observation. She tried to shake her head, and winced. ‘Not unless they decide to commit me to the local Home for the Bewildered,’ she said, mournfully. ‘It’s the fairies, I tell you. They’ve got it in for me, and no mistake. I could just hammer the little divils.’

  Jennifer laughed. ‘I’ll pick you up tomorrow after surgery,’ she said, waving as she went down the ward. She nearly ran into Paddy Smith at the door. ‘Fourth bed on the right,’ she told him. ‘Tell her you’ve arrested the fairies involved, and are holding them in a shoebox for trial.’

  ‘The fairies again, is it?’ Paddy asked, grimly. ‘More likely she needs new lenses in her spectacles and a bell to warn people she’s coming.’

  ‘Paddy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s fine. Bruised, not broken.’

  ‘Oh? Well, then.’ His relief was visible. ‘A shoebox, did you say?’

  ‘I gather they’re small,’ Jennifer grinned.

  Downstairs, she found Luke waiting for his associate in reception. He had his hands jammed in his trouser pockets and was leaning against a windowsill, his long legs stretched out before him as he contemplated some mud that had stuck to the instep of one shoe. He looked up at the sound of Jennifer’s heels on the lino, and his blue eyes instantly became wary.

  ‘She’s all right,’ Jennifer said.

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘How did you know about it?’

  ‘We saw her car being towed away, and made some enquiries. That’s our job, you know. Making enquiries.’

  ‘I’m told you’re pretty good at it.’

  ‘When we aren’t hassling your friends, you mean?’

  Jennifer looked down, then met his eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Luke, I shouldn’t have flown off the handle at you last night. I was wrong.’

  He inclined his head, slightly. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘We had a request in the office this morning concerning Mark’s blood type. I assume that’s to help eliminate the possibility of his fathering the Frenholm baby?’ she raised a hand. ‘Wait, no, I’m sorry, I had no right to ask that.’

  ‘Because you refused to tell us?’

  She felt herself growing red. ‘Since Mark himself refused, I decided . . . ’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. We got his blood type from hospital records. We couldn’t eliminate him, but that’s not saying much. We’d need a proper sample to make any closer comparisons. He’s just one of a number of people we’re looking at.’ His voice was very measured, very calm.

  ‘Here’s looking at you, kid,’ Jennifer said, lightly.

  He considered this, and awarded it a small smile. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And what do you see?’

  ‘Someone I used to know. Someone who’s changed, or been changed, very deeply. Where’s all the laughter you used to have, Luke?’

  ‘In the grave with my wife,’ he snapped, then sighed in exasperation and looked away. ‘Sorry, that was uncalled for. And not true, because I would never burden her memory with that blame. It’s the job, Jenny, the job and the victims and the need to suspect everyone, everything, all the time. It gets to be a habit.’

  ‘Then why do it?’

  ‘Because I’m good at it. Because despite what it does to me, I like what I do. Killing people is wrong. You take an oath about that, so do I. The temptation is always there, to grow too strong, to play God, to make decisions without due care and attention, just because it would be easier all round.’

  ‘Such as not suspecting Mark because he’s my . . . boyfriend?’

  ‘Or even not suspecting you because Mark’s mother was against your becoming involved with her golden boy.’

  Jenny was dumbfounded. ‘You suspect me?’

  He shrugged. ‘Not seriously, but conscience and logic both indicate you can’t be rejected as a possibility. You’re medically trained, you’d know where to make the cut and how much force to use. The women wouldn’t have suspected another woman, they might have turned their backs on you without fear. You’re young and strong and quick.’

  ‘And am I supposed to have fathered Win Frenholm’s baby, too, perchance?’ She didn’t know whether to laugh or kick him.

  ‘You could have found out Mark had had an affair with her, killed out of je
alousy and/or hate, then turned on his mother who stood in your way almost as much.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s automatic. I could make a good case out for any number of people, providing certain things were true. I’m only talking about possibilities, Jennifer. Conjecture. Patterns. However, we still don’t know that the deaths are connected.’

  ‘My God, what does it take to convince you?’ she demanded. ‘I can see what David meant. Does this killer have to put up a sign saying “Catch me if you can” or something?’

  ‘It would be a big help.’ He smiled, sadly. ‘You see, it’s easy for everyone, the media, the local people, Gregson, you, to jump to the conclusion that it’s the same man. It would be easy for me, too.’

  ‘And you don’t like the easy route?’

  He gazed at his shoe again. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Would you rather believe it’s three separate murders?’ She asked the question quite seriously.

  ‘Obviously not. My thoughts now tend towards a division of one and two – but which one is separate and which two go together is the problem. The person who killed Beryl Tompkins might have killed the other two – or he might have killed just one of them. Or neither.’

  ‘But surely, forensic evidence . . . ’

  ‘Cyril Franklin is brilliant, but he can only go so far without a magic spyglass to look back in time. Murder is an awkward business – victims struggle, feet slip. No two deaths are ever exactly alike. Only similar, at best. Even if the same killer uses the same method every time, differences occur. For Cyril and for us, the best bet is experienced observation and instinct. Something bothers him and bothers me, but neither of us can decide just what it is, yet. It may not even be the same thing. Hence my suspicion of your golden boy and his rather melodramatic over-reaction to his mother’s murder.’