PRELUDE TO MURDER: A Rex Graves Mystery

by C. S. Challinor

  “Well, I’m here now,” he replied pleasantly.

  “I spoke to my mum and she said I shouldn’t say anything because there’s a police investigation going on.”

  “She’s right,” Rex conceded. “Have you retained counsel?”

  “A lawyer? What for? I’m not guilty of anything.” Her pretty face pouted in defiance.

  “Then you have nothing to hide. Perhaps we can talk on the bench?” He indicated one out of earshot of anyone else, yet close enough to the roundabout for her to keep an eye on the brothers. They wore matching rugby shirts and sported sticking plasters on their scuffed knees. A third boy grabbed the hand rail and spun them faster, running alongside in the muddy grass and then pushing away.

  Tracy huddled down on the bench, hands deep in her pockets. Her fine platinum hair blew back in the breeze, her cheeks glowed pink from the bracing air. It was hard to gauge her figure in the heavy coat, but she appeared more fulsome than the diminutive Cheryl, and her periwinkle blue eyes were not as innocent, in spite of her younger age. Had Tracy been in love with Tom? Rex looked around at the rows of rectangular houses, where she presumably still lived with her parents, and further wondered if she had seen Tom as an attractive way out of a humdrum existence.

  “I’m not with the Derby police or anything like that,” he restated. “As I explained on the phone, my fiancée knew your employers, and since I sometimes work on private cases, I thought I’d look into this one.”

  “Have you spoken to Mrs. Simmons?”

  “Who is Mrs. Simmons?”

  “Lydia’s mum,” Tracy said in a mildly exasperated tone.

  Good, thought Rex; she’s beginning to think I’m a harmless old fool. “I spoke to Daniel Gladstone in person and have his support. Naturally, he wants to know how his brother and sister-in-law were poisoned.”

  “Why not let the detectives get on with their jobs?” Tracy retorted, gaining assurance.

  “I’m sure they are. I don’t suppose they questioned you,” he remarked, knowing full well they would have.

  “Well, of course they did.” Tracy glanced at him with an expression close to distain. “I was their nanny! I was with them for over a year.” She straightened her shoulders in self-importance.

  “Well, that makes you a valuable witness. I was under the impression you were just the babysitter,” he said, feeling justified in lying in this one instance in view of her less than cordial attitude towards him. He began to think the only reason she had agreed to meet with him was because she didn’t want to arouse suspicion by refusing. Now that she’d formed the opinion he didn’t know anything, she began to relax and act superior.

  “I’m only babysitting until I find full-time work,” she said with a haughty sniff.

  “And, unfortunately, your past employers can’t furnish you with a reference,” he said sympathetically, doubting Lydia would have given her a good one if she suspected her of stealing her valuables, or her husband.

  When Tracy declined to comment, he asked, “Do you still see Hannah?”

  She shook her head and then shrugged. “Mrs. Simmons is taking care of her granddaughter now. Don’t know how she’s managing,” she added. “Hannah is at that age where she’s hard to reason with. I mean, she’s a lovely child and everything, but she can be demanding.”

  “Precocious?” Rex recalled Jill referring to Hannah as Daddy’s little girl. Had Tracy been jealous?

  “Tom—that’s Mr. Gladstone, but they insisted I called them Tom and Lydia—he spoilt her rotten. She’d wheedle and throw tantrums if she didn’t get her own way.”

  Tracy’s voice betrayed her working-class Derbyshire roots. Her delicate looks and careful demeanour were curiously at odds with her dialect, self-consciously toned down as it was. She didn’t wear much make-up or a surfeit of trinkets like so many girls of her age. Her coat, suede boots, and what he could see of her jeans, were of good quality and in discreet taste. Here was a girl, he thought, desperate to rise out of her background, and a man like Tom could be her one-way ticket out.

  “Derek!” she suddenly hollered at the boy on the roundabout leaning out with arms akimbo, one knee hooked around the rail preventing him from falling off. “Get back on properly or I’ll take you both home,” she threatened. He complied at leisure and then leapt off the platform and rushed towards the climbing frame, his two companions running after him and yelling with glee. “They’re a right pair,” she grumbled. “I much prefer girls.”

  “I have a grown son. Lads can be boisterous, I’ll give you that.”

  “Devin’s all right. Not like them two, anyway. Tom was stricter with him. The senior Mr. Gladstone is a strict man and probably treated Tom that way growing up.”

  Rex rather thought she liked saying her ex-employer’s name. An incoming call on her phone interrupted the conversation. Rex leant back on the bench while she made arrangements for a babysitting job in the week. Another call followed on its heels, this time from a beau, whom she agreed to meet that evening, though not with any great enthusiasm. The indistinct male voice Rex heard did not belong to a mature man of the world; hence, perhaps, her laconic tone.

  Had Tom Gladstone been drawn to much younger women? There had been that incident at the Christmas party with the intern, as relayed by Cheryl, but perhaps he just liked to flirt with them to prove he still had what it took. Rex remembered his packet of humbugs and drew it from his pocket. He offered Tracy one as she returned her phone to her coat, and was surprised when she accepted. They sucked and chewed in companionable silence for a few moments watching the trio tackling the climbing frame. Derek and his younger brother swung from the bars, imitating chimpanzees at the zoo with ooh-ooh-ooh noises and scratching gestures. Tracy gazed at them sullenly.

  “I should give them bananas for lunch,” she remarked around the sweet in her mouth.

  “How long do you have them?”

  “Until four, more’s the pity.”

  He noticed she did not smile a lot. In fact, not once in his presence. Was she really shy, as Helen and Jill had described her, or was she simply not forthcoming? She was something of a paradox, and it seemed a lot went on behind those watchful, and perhaps calculating, blue eyes. What could he ask her without putting her on her guard?

  “How about Lydia? Was she a good mum?” he ventured.

  “She was okay. I suppose it’s hard juggling a child and a career, but I was there five days a week and sometimes in the evening to help out. Mrs. Simmons came to babysit when I couldn’t, and looked after Hannah while her parents were in Paris. The Gladstones didn’t spend many evenings in, and once Hannah was in bed, they often went out.”

  “But they treated you well?”

  “Couldn’t complain.” This was said in a tone that suggested she would if given half a chance. Rex decided to give her that chance.

  “Being with a young child on your own, day in, day out, is hard. Many people don’t realize unless they’ve been there.”

  Tracy nodded vigorously. “Sometimes I wanted to tear my hair out, but they still had the energy after a day at the office to dress up and go out for dinner or to a party.”

  “I hear Lydia Gladstone was very glamorous,” Rex said, interested to see her reaction.

  “She could afford to be. She had some amazing jewellery and clothes.”

  Some of which jewellery had gone missing.

  “Plus her mom owns a beauty parlour. Some women have all the luck.”

  “Tom cut quite a figure too. I saw a photo of him at his sister’s wedding.”

  Tracy nodded, almost imperceptibly. Her cheek coloured over and above the pink hue from the cold. She turned her face away. Was that a tear trickling from the outer corner of her eye, or was it watering from the sting of a sharp gust of wind? Rex directed his gaze straight ahead and gave her time to recover.

  “I should get the lads in before they catch their death of cold,” she said with renewed composure, lifting her shoulder and brushing her wet cheek
bone against the coat.

  “I need to get going too. You have my card. Call me if you remember anything that might help in the case.” As she got up from the bench, he stood also. “I don’t suppose you have any idea what happened to your ex-employers?” he asked in a final gambit.

  “I don’t,” she said, looking up at him. “I left their house at six on Friday when Lydia came home, and didn’t hear what had happened to them until my mom woke me late that Sunday night to tell me I didn’t need to go to work the next day. She’d seen on the news they were dead.”

  Tracy spun away and hurried in the direction of the climbing frame. He watched her with a measure of pity. He was certain her dreams had been dashed, but whether by her own doing he could not be sure.

  Chapter 15

  His mind was still on his meeting with Tracy ten minutes later when he spotted a dumpy man in a crumpled suit unloading a vacuum cleaner from the boot of an old Rover. The car had lost its shine over the course of the years and was of a matt oxblood hue. Rex turned into the residential street of terraced homes and parked behind the vehicle. The man greeted Rex as he got out of his car and asked if he was interested in a bargain.

  “You sound like you’re from my neck of the woods,” Rex said pleasantly.

  “Dunfermline, originally,” the salesman replied, setting the Hoover, an upright with a coiled suction tube, on the pavement. He stuck out his right hand. “Larry Leath.”

  “Ah, from Fife, across the water from me.” Rex shook his hand and introduced himself. “I believe you were in my fiancée’s neighbourhood; a month back, was it? Barley Close. Her friend bought one of your vacuum cleaners.”

  The man pushed his glasses up his nose. “Barley Close,” he repeated pensively, pulling on his scruffy, yellowish grey beard. “Oh, aye. That’s just down the road. Only made the one sale that morning, to a lady driving instructor. Some of the residents were a bit snooty. Not her, but them living in the larger homes. There was this one lass, a wee blonde wi’ a bairn of aboot three. The woman was not much more than a bairn herself, but someone was taking care of her. Nice hoose, and huge sapphires in her ears and a diamond rock on her ring finger. Right fancy for day wear! I used to be in the jewellery business, so I know a real gem from a fake. Anyhoo, she said she didn’t do business with travelling salesmen.” Leath shook his head in disbelief. “I said I like to get oot and meet my customers. She said she had no need of a Hoover that had fallen off the back of a lorry, the cheek! And that she had a new, top-o’-the-line model. Then she slammed the door in my face!”

  Rex deduced he was talking about Tracy, since there were no other children of Hannah’s age on Helen’s street. “A green door with a brass knocker?” Rex asked when the flushed man finally paused for breath.

  “Aye. The hoose at the top of the cul-de-sac.”

  “She was the nanny.”

  “Noo!” The man looked stunned. “She said she was the lady of the hoose when I asked.”

  Wishful thinking on her part, thought Rex. “That was where a married couple overdosed on antifreeze.”

  The salesman again showed his surprise, his glasses riding up his nose to meet his unruly eyebrows. “The woman I met wasna the same one as on the telly, and I never met the husband, so I didna put two and two together. Thought it must be a different home…,” the man trailed off, shaking his head. “Mind you, I don’t pay much attention to the news. They make a lot of the stuff up just to promote ratings. Epidemics blown oot of all proportion, jumbo jets vanishing into thin air—in this day and age! That hasna happened since the Bermuda Triangle hoax. And dinna get me started on—”

  “You don’t happen to recall what day you visited Barley Close, do you?” Rex interrupted him, having no wish to get the man started on any more conspiracy theories.

  “It would have been a weekday. I’m at my repair shop most Saturdays and I never work on the Sabbath.” As Leath shut the lid of the boot, Rex noticed a pile of boxes and a toolkit in the back seat. He memorised the number plate, just to be thorough, and made an excuse to leave before the man could ask why he was interested in his visit to Barley Close.

  As he got in his car and drove away, he wondered about the image the salesman had provided of Tracy playing dress-up with Lydia’s jewellery and pretending to be Tom Gladstone’s wife. It comported so well with the impression he had formed of her in the park.

  By the time he returned to Helen’s house, Jill had left to give a lesson to a pupil due to take his driving test in the coming week. He would have to wait to tell her about his encounter with her salesman. Helen was eager to hear what he had made of Tracy and whether he now shared her and Jill’s opinion that she was the poisoner. Rex admitted to being of two minds.

  “I agree she appears to have had feelings for Tom. She said his name in a much softer way than she spoke of Lydia or even Hannah.” He sank into the sofa and said pensively, “She doesn’t seem happy.”

  “She never struck me as particularly happy,” Helen remarked, settling in beside him, a novel bookmarked halfway in her hand. “And now she’s lost Tom and her job.”

  “I found her a wee bit snitty, to be honest.”

  Helen laughed. “Poor Rex. Perhaps she was just having a bad day. But the girl I remember was quiet and almost deferential. Perhaps that was her nanny persona. In any case, did you get the impression she was capable of doing her employers in?”

  Rex combed his beard thoughtfully with his fingers. “If Tom had been the one to succumb to acute poisoning, I might be tempted to believe he was poisoned by accident, with Lydia the intended victim, but the systematic poisoning poses a problem. Someone premeditated his murder. At a pinch I can see Tracy killing Lydia on purpose, but not Tom.”

  “Because she cared for him?”

  “So it appears.”

  “What if he rejected her?” Helen asked. “Wouldn’t that be a powerful motive for an impressionable young woman?”

  “Possibly.” He still felt Tracy more capable of killing her perceived rival, especially if she felt Lydia might sack her over the theft of her valuables. That crime had not been solved, and Lydia might only have been waiting to find a suitable replacement for Tracy. Moreover, he personally thought the girl had an attitude, and her mooning over Tom had probably not gone unnoticed by Lydia. He heard the rustle of a page being turned beside him and decided to give his brain a break from the case by catching up on the Sunday papers while Helen read her book.

  Discouraged by the news on all fronts, he asked Helen what she thought about getting away in April to his remote lodge in the Highlands, which they had visited only once since the Christmas holidays. Just the two of them, he suggested. She said she thought it was a lovely idea. He set the Guardian on the carpet and held out his arm to her. She snuggled close, stretching her legs the length of the sofa.

  They got around to discussing the possibility of acquiring a dog when they were married, one they could take to the lodge and leave with Rex’s mother when they went abroad. For that reason it would have to be a smaller dog. They decided on a black Scottish Terrier, and Helen came up with the not so original name of Scottie for the proposed pet.

  When she took up her book again, Rex closed his eyes and within minutes dozed off into a dreamless nap. Helen awoke him some time later with a cup of tea.

  “If you sleep much longer, you might have difficulty tonight.”

  He stretched and yawned. “But such a nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon!” He took a gulp of tea.

  “That looks like Lydia's mother's car,” Helen exclaimed as she was drawing the curtains. “She drives a burgundy Mercedes.”

  “Paula Simmons?” Rex asked with alacrity.

  “There's only one place she could be going…”

  He jumped up from the sofa, fully awake. “Fancy a walk?”

  Chapter 16

  They grabbed their coats and headed towards the Gladstone house on foot, only slowing down when they came to within a stone's throw of the driveway, wh
ich was blocked by an older-model Mercedes sedan that looked almost purple in the light of the street lamp. Its occupant had vacated it, and lights appeared in the upstairs windows of the house.

  Rex stopped beyond the car and sniffed the air. “Smells like rain.”

  “You’re right,” Helen said, loitering beside him.

  “Still, we've been lucky with the weather this weekend.”

  They drew out the conversation while they waited.

  “Oh, let me knot up your scarf for you. There, that's better,” Helen patted the lapels of his overcoat. “What's she doing in there?” she muttered under her breath. “If we stand about much longer, we’ll begin to look obvious.”

  Just then, the door burst open and a statuesque brunette in a padded sleeveless jacket exited the front door carrying a large cardboard box in her arms. Rex rushed up to the police tape and lifted it so she could pass under it.

  “Hello, Mrs. Simmons,” Helen called out brightly.

  The woman, harried and breathless, acknowledged Helen with a brief nod. Rex introduced himself and offered to take the box to her car.

  “Oh, would you?” The aging beauty wore her dark hair up in a lacquered bun, her black eyeliner applied in the Cleopatra look in vogue in the sixties. Retro primrose earrings in pink plastic studded her ears. “Thank you!” she gasped, handing him her burden. “Helen, isn’t it?” she said, turning to his fiancée. “I so very much appreciated the condolence card you sent. It’s been a terrible time and I haven’t had a chance to reply to everyone yet,” she hurried on in a marked Midlands accent.

  “Absolutely no need, especially now we’ve run into each other,” Helen assured her. “We were just taking a pre-dinner walk.”

  Mrs. Simmons held out her key fob and beeped open the boot of her Mercedes. She extracted an empty box and Rex placed the full one inside the car. “I came for the rest of Hannah’s toys, poor child. I’m doing my best to take care of her on my own.” She gave a sigh of woe.

  “That can’t be easy,” Helen said.