‘Why do you think he had the gun out last night? Maguire asked slowly. He didn’t want to rush her. He looked towards Steve hoping he would keep quiet and let Janet tell it in her own time.
‘He told me that he was going to commit suicide. I didn’t believe him.’ She shook her head. ‘I always thought the old gun didn’t work. It was never loaded. But last night he did load it.’ She shivered. ‘He opened the barrel and showed me as he put in the bullets. Then he said he had nothing left to live for, that Avon Hall was bankrupt and there was no money left. Not for the family, not for anyone. He said he couldn’t even pay me, or Jade, or the cook or Bert Grayer. None of us would get our salaries, because the bank had closed all the accounts. He said his family was a mess. He said they all hated each other, and now one of them had killed Jemima. He said he knew who it was, but he wouldn’t tell me. I tried telling him that being bankrupt was not the end of the world, and that lots of businesses went under, that he wasn’t to blame. And I told him that he wasn’t to blame for Jemima’s death either. He shouldn’t take the blame for someone else’s crime. But he wouldn’t listen. He kept repeating, poor, poor girl, now she’s dead and there’s no point in going on. It’s better for me to end it now.’
She paused and shuddered violently. ‘It was then that I suddenly realized that he meant it. He was going to kill himself, and I knew I had to do something to stop him. He was sitting on the chair opposite me at the table and he picked up the gun in both hands, and pointed it towards his chest, then ….’ She slumped forward suddenly, her head in her hands, sobbing convulsively.
‘Then what happened,’ prompted Maguire quietly.
‘I tried to grab the gun, to get it away from his chest. We both had our hands on it. I tugged it away from him as hard as I could. All I could think of was that I must get it away from his chest and his heart. That I must get hold of the gun somehow. I suppose that I must have pulled the trigger because it went off. Oh! Such a dreadful noise. So loud. I thought my eardrums would burst. And then there was the blood.’ Her voice began to rise and get faster and faster until she was gabbling. ‘There was blood, blood, blood, everywhere, and it was all coming from his head. It was everywhere, everywhere. I’ve never seen so much blood. And Harold, well, he sort of gasped and started gulping, then he groaned and fell forward across the table, and I was left standing over him, holding the gun. And I was covered in blood too.’ She stopped talking, sat upright slowly, and looked at Maguire and Steve.
There was silence in the room for a moment, and then she said softly, ‘That was it. The end. I had killed Harold. The only man I’ve ever loved.’
Maguire sat for a moment, then said very quietly, ‘I’m afraid I can’t let you go for the moment, Janet. PC Jones will take you now and settled you down. She’ll look after your needs. Don’t be afraid to ask for anything you want.’
‘What is going to happen to me?’ whispered Janet.
‘I can’t tell you at the moment,’ said Maguire.
*
In another part of Stibbington Police Station, Kevin was wading through the combination of paperwork and computer records as Maguire had asked him to do. He’d managed to speak to Fergus Garrick and tell him that he was expected to present himself at Stibbington the following morning.
‘But I’m very busy,’ Fergus had said in an imperious tone of voice.
‘Did you know that Jemima Villiers has been murdered?’ asked Kevin. ‘And it’s very important that you speak to Detective Chief Inspector Maguire. You were her boyfriend, weren’t you?’
The man at the other end of the phone hesitated for a moment, and then said, ‘I heard about it. But I had a very important appointment up in the midlands, so I couldn’t hang around. Besides, I didn’t murder her, and there’s nothing I can do about it now. Life must go on, and I’m busy.’
Kevin thought he sounded very uncaring. ‘She was your girlfriend,’ he said.
‘We weren’t joined at the hip,’ Fergus snapped. ‘I need to get on with my own life.’
‘And Chief Inspector Maguire needs you here by nine sharp tomorrow morning,’ Kevin snapped back, ‘otherwise there will be an arrest warrant out for you.’ He slammed the phone down. He wasn’t sure whether it was possible to get an arrest warrant, but he’d taken a dislike to Fergus, and enjoyed hearing Fergus’s gasp at the other end of the line when he mentioned arrest. He sounded a horrible, insensitive man. He deserved to be arrested. Savouring his tiny moment of triumph he turned back to the mountain of paperwork he still had to sort through. He started with the waiters and barmen for that night and put them on to a spreadsheet, sorting out the names in what he thought might be their order of importance. Some of them had connections to the organizers of the evening function, and lived in London, but had never been to Avinton, or Hampshire before. And all of those, without exception, had taken the minibus at the end of the evening to Salisbury railway station, where they caught the late train back to London. Kevin put them down as the least important. The rest of the casual staff, including Jemima and Ruth, were local, and most of them had known each other and had gone to primary school together. But as they got older their paths were more diverse; private schools for the ones from wealthy families like the Villiers, local comprehensive for the others, then sixth form college for some, or straight into work as gardeners or apprentice car mechanics for others, and a few like the Villiers girls on to university.
The very last person on his list had not worked at the perfume launch, but was the owner of the burnt out red Citroen and was registered as SORN by the DVLA. That person was Thomas Maplin, currently a university student at Salisbury, and definitely more importantly, thought Kevin, the current boyfriend of Ruth Villiers. Kevin wondered what forensics had turned up on the car, and decided to try to get the information for Maguire before they brought Thomas Maplin in for questioning.
*
Lizzie sat in her consulting room and looked at the list of patients due to see her that morning. She felt worn out; so many conflicting thoughts were crowding in on her brain. Harold Villiers collapsing, then wandering off on his own and ending up being shot. She found it difficult to believe that Janet Hastings had actually shot him, but she’d seen the evidence with her own eyes. She had to believe it.
However, the thing which was worrying her most, and about which she could do nothing, was the fact that she had left Harold Villiers at home, when he was very ill, albeit with a critical care team. Something she’d never done before. Dick Jamieson had warned her that private patients caused trouble, because they demanded their own way even at the expense of the best course of treatment. She’d ignored his advice, and let Harold Villiers dictate his own terms, with disastrous results.
The critical care team, the most expensive demanded by Harold, had turned out to be hopeless, and had let him, their patient, go out alone where he then got himself shot. Would the Villiers family prosecute her? It was not beyond the realms of possibility. Should she report the events to the Medical Defence Union? Her head swam, she felt dizzy.
She looked at her list again. It was a smallish one. With a bit of luck, she’d get back to Silver Cottage early and be able to snatch a rest, provided there were not too many visits lined up for her afterwards. She pressed her buzzer for the first patient to come in, but to her surprise, Dick Jamieson pushed open the door and came in.
He sat himself down opposite her. ‘Phineas Merryweather has been on the phone to me,’ he said. ‘I’ve asked Tara to make you a strong cup of coffee and bring it in.’
‘Oh, you needn’t…,’ Lizzie began to say.
Dick interrupted her. ‘I know I needn’t,’ he said. ‘But I am. I’ve also asked Tara to reschedule your patients. Both Peter and Stephen’s lists are quite small this morning. It’s the fine weather, you know. Always strikes me as miraculous how patients are so well when the weather is fine, but come in and crowd the damned place out when it’s raining. But there you go. That’s life.’
The doo
r opened again and Tara came in carrying a large mug of hot coffee. ‘I’ve made it strong like you said,’ she told Dick. Then turned to Lizzie and put the mug down carefully on a coaster on her desk. ‘Your patients have all been redistributed, and no one has complained.’
‘And the ones going to Stephen will know that they’ll be able to get a prescription for whatever they want,’ said Lizzie irritably.
‘There’s no need to be sour about it,’ said Dick as soon as Tara had left the room. ‘It’s a bad habit of yours, sniping at Steven, one that you should curb.’
‘I know,’ said Lizzie guiltily, and sipped the coffee. It was strong and slightly bitter, but made her feel more awake. ‘I am grateful really, and I will thank them both.’
‘But how did you know that I was absolutely exhausted?’ She smiled at the elderly man sitting opposite her.
Dick didn’t smile back. In fact, he looked rather serious. ‘As I told you, Phineas phoned me regarding Harold Villiers,’ he said. ‘That’s how I know you’ve been up half the night, and then again since early this morning only to find your patient was down by the river and had been shot.’
‘Yes,’ Lizzie drank the rest of the coffee. ‘It was a shock,’ she admitted. ‘I should never have left him in the care of those two idiots from the Critical Care Team.’
‘That’s what I want to talk to you about.’ Dick held up his hand to stop Lizzie from interrupting. ‘Unfortunately Danny Bayley has heard of it. Apparently Spud Murphy told him, and then he heard more from one of the ground staff at Avon Hall. I don’t think Critical Care will be wanting their dereliction of duty to be broadcast, so they will keep quiet.’
‘Spud Murphy was out early for a bit of fishing,’ Lizzie said. ‘He heard the gunshot as well as us, and was the first into the lodge by the eel trap. So he knew Harold was dead, but he didn’t know that he should have been in bed and was being cared for.’
‘Hmm, the pyjamas might have given that away.’ Dick paused for a moment, then added, ‘well, someone told him and he told Danny. As a result there will be a garbled version of events in this Friday’s edition of the Stibbington Times.’
Lizzie groaned. ‘What can I do? I can’t stop him. And people will think that I don’t care about my patients and that I just left Harold Villiers at home instead of getting him into hospital, which is where he should have been.’
‘No, you can’t stop him, but we can thwart him. I’ve already spoken briefly to Adam Maguire, and I understand that he’d arrived to interview Harold Villiers and was at Avon Hall when he was taken ill. Then you made the arrangements for Harold to be cared for at home because he insisted. Adam tells me that he knew you were unhappy about the situation but were unable to do anything about it. He was also unhappy because Harold Villiers was not well enough to be interviewed that night. However, The Critical Care Company is an expensive and well-known company, which you both had every reason to trust. That was the situation. What happened later is now a serious police matter, and until all the facts are known, no news bulletins will be given, apart from one. Adam says that this will be issued to all the local news agencies, radio and television, so Danny Bayley won’t have the monopoly, and therefore won’t be able to embroider it in his usual flamboyant way. All this has been agreed with Superintendent Warren, who is very anxious because the Villiers are a prominent family in the county. He will sign off the statement.’ Dick leaned back in his chair and heaved a sigh of relief. ‘There, what do you think of that? I think we’ve covered every angle, for the moment anyway.’
‘Oh Dick,’ said Lizzie. ‘How can I thank you?’
‘By cheering up, and by driving down to Stibbington station now, this minute, and speaking to Adam and Superintendent Warren. They want you to OK the statement before they issue it.’
Lizzie didn’t need telling twice. As she walked through the main office and out the back entrance towards her car she could see Tara, the main receptionist, and her sidekick Sharon peering at her through the office window. They knew something had happened, but they didn’t know what. Not yet. Soon all of Stibbington would know that another member of the Villiers family had died in violent circumstances. However, none of the events of last night and this morning, she reflected, had helped anyone to get any nearer to finding out who had killed Jemima Villiers. She felt depressed. It wasn’t right that such a lovely young girl should die in such horrible circumstances. She was sorry for Harold as well, of course, but it was Jemima’s fate that preyed on her mind. She remembered her the night of the perfume launch, when she was flitting around with trays of champagne, tossing her long blonde hair back over her shoulders, being cheeky to Phineas, and flirting a bit with other men. That night she had reminded Lizzie of her own daughter, Louise, young, carefree, not afraid of anything, not a worry in the world.
*
On arrival at the station she was ushered into Maguire’s office. He was sitting there alone looking grim faced. He indicated she should sit and said, ‘we need to wait for Phineas, Superintendent Warren and Dave Harvey.’ Then he reached into the file on his desk and passed her the copy of the letter Jemima had written to Harold.
Lizzie read it silently, and then passed it back to him. ‘How wrong I was,’ she said slowly. ‘I thought she led a charmed life. A frivolous life like those shoes of hers.’
‘We were all wrong,’ said Maguire. ‘Although, according to Phineas, her brother Simon gave a bit of a clue that night at the event. Apparently, he was very demanding, and she was definitely snappy with him. But nobody thought anything about it at the time.’
‘Simon had had too much to drink,’ said Lizzie. ‘That’s what I thought.’
Maguire stood up as the door to his office opened and Superintendent Warren came in, closely followed by Phineas, and Dave Harvey. He pulled a chair out for the superintendent who sat down next to Lizzie.
Superintendent Warren was a large man, larger than Phineas, and looked as if the only exercise he got was lifting a glass of wine, or probably something stronger, judging by his high colour.
Phineas, although large, still got plenty of exercise by crawling about looking at corpses thought Lizzie, comparing the two. The Superintendent nodded at Lizzie and shook her hand. ‘I don’t want to know all the gory details,’ he said to Phineas. ‘You can go into minutiae later, when I’ve gone. I’m due at Winchester Castle, a County meeting, in an hour’s time. All I’m concerned with for the moment is the statement we are going to release in order to stymie Danny Bayley’s over developed imagination.’
He lowered himself into the chair Adam had pulled forward, puffing as he did so. Lizzie thought the buttons on his braided and decorated uniform might pop if he put on any more weight. When sitting beside him, Phineas looking quite slim.
Adam drew several sheets of paper from his file and passed them around. Lizzie read hers carefully. It was more or less what Dick had told her, and it seemed OK to her. It was brief, and to the point. Stating all the salient details, nothing more nothing less, only what was needed. ‘I’m happy with it; in as far as I’m ever going to be,’ she said. ‘I only wish I’d never been involved in the whole damned episode.’
‘Amen to that.’ Superintendent Warren folded his piece of paper and put it in his pocket. ‘But don’t worry about it. These hiccups happen, and Adam here is good at stonewalling investigative journalists. That’s why I always leave these jobs to him if I can.’ He rose to leave. ‘I’ll get off to my meeting now, and will leave you to get on with Phineas’s gory stuff.’ He turned to Lizzie, ‘are you leaving young lady? If so, I’ll walk you to your car.’
‘Well, I…,’ Lizzie, desperately wanting to know the results of the post mortem on Harold Villiers, decided she might as well come clean. ‘If you don’t mind, sir,’ she said, ‘I’d like to know the post mortem results, as I was Harold Villiers’ doctor, and if he didn’t die from gunshot wounds, then I’d like to know what it was that finished him off.’
The superintendent laughed. �
��I’d forgotten you are part of the blood and gore brigade. I’ll be off then, and leave you three to it.’
As soon as he’d gone Maguire called in Steve and Kevin. ‘Saves repeating it all,’ he said, as Phineas began spreading out sheets of paper across his desk, then opened up his iPad and scrolled down.
‘First things first,’ said Phineas. ‘Janet Hastings did not shoot Harold Villiers. Her prints were not even on the trigger. Only his. Hers were on the gun of course, not that it was easy to find them, as there was so much slippery gunk. Old blood, and it was old by the time we got the gun to the lab, tends to distort prints. However, we got some, and Harold’s were quite clear on the trigger.’
‘So who did shoot him?’ asked Kevin, looking rather startled as Phineas showed them various photos of the gun at different angles, and enlargements of the prints.
‘He shot himself,’ said Phineas in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘I’ve seen it often. In a fight, when everyone is scrabbling for the gun. No one quite knows what’s happening and there’s no control. The gun goes off of course whenever someone’s finger presses hard on the trigger, whether they meant it to or not. And that’s what I think happened. Harold shot himself.’
‘But you told me earlier,’ said Maguire, ‘that the head wound he had couldn’t possibly have killed him.’
‘I didn’t say it killed him. I said he shot himself,’ said Phineas. Lizzie thought he sounded triumphant, like a conjuror producing a rabbit out of a hat. ‘What he actually died from was a massive cerebral haemorrhage, which happened more or less simultaneously as he and Janet were fighting for the gun. A blackout. That’s why he gulped, like she said, and slumped forward over the desk. I wondered about that when she said it.’
‘Natural causes,’ said Maguire gloomily. ‘It makes it more complicated than ever. I wonder if he really was contemplating suicide. And if he was, was it because he had killed his own daughter?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Phineas, shaking his head. ‘He may certainly have been intending suicide, with a family like his, he had reason enough. But I don’t think he killed Jemima, unless he had an accomplice who moved the body.’
The Dead Girl's Shoes Page 17
