We found Frank Tully in the front bedroom.
His phone call had been genuine, but it had brought down on him a terrible retribution and was the last he’d ever make. Whoever had got there before us had clubbed him to the floor, moved the bed to one side and stood over his unconscious form as they looked critically at the height of the ceiling. Then they’d bent Frank’s legs at the knees, used the victim’s shoelaces to lash his feet back against his thighs to reduce his height, and hanged him from the heavy metal light fitting with a length of orange nylon rope.
This time there was no long drop. Frank Tully’s neck had not snapped. The rope had tightened around his neck and, as the air was cut off and his face turned purple and his eyes bulged, he had bounced and jigged at the end of the rope and it had been too much for the screws holding the light fitting and it had ripped out of the ceiling.
The heavy metal had crashed down on his head and sprayed blood. For my own peace of mind I like to think that killed him before he suffocated.
Once we knew Frank was beyond help we walked quietly out of that room of death, shut the door behind us and went downstairs. It was not one of those situations where the premises needed searching. Frank had information for us he was unlikely to have written down, and the time between his phone call and our arrival meant that the killer must have walked in on his heels, walked out minutes before we arrived.
In the darkened hallway, where we had been alternating nervous talk with uneasy silence, I voiced my frustration.
‘Five minutes, if that. The difference between being handed the killer’s head on a plate, or walking away with nothing.’
‘Not quite. Whoever did this left a clear message.’
‘The orange rope?’’ I nodded. ‘He’s telling us he murdered Lorraine Creeney. Which means Caroline Spackman was right: her brother was innocent.’
‘And there’s more, maybe not a conscious or deliberate threat by the killer but certainly one implied by his actions: this is what will happen to you and me if we don’t back off.’
‘Len Tully, too, if he’s not very careful. I wonder where he was when Frank phoned me?’
‘There, perhaps – all you got from Frank was that Len wasn’t going to be here with him. My guess is he doesn’t know anything of what’s been going on – Frank’s phone call, this….’ He waved a hand vaguely. ‘But you do realize the importance of Frank’s phone call – I mean, beyond the startling fact that he was about to give us a name?’
‘Oh yes. Frank was given the name of the killer while he was in the King of Clubs. So, optimistically, the information came from Solly, or Jimmy Beggs … maybe even from George Kingman himself. Looking on the gloomy side, it’s more likely to have come from someone we don’t know, a stranger – but no matter what, it’s one hell of a breakthrough because whoever gave him the name was in George Kingman’s club around lunchtime today.’
Calum had been nodding slowly in agreement. Now he pulled out his mobile.
‘Give me that number,’ he said. ‘On the off chance Len was there with Frank….’
The Post-it note given to me by Karl Tully was in my pocket. I handed it to Calum. He thumbed in the first number, listened, tried the second – shook his head.
‘Land line keeps ringing, mobile’s switched off.’
‘Mm. We’ll keep trying.’ I thought for a moment. ‘You know, the killer as good as admitting he murdered Lorraine still doesn’t tell us how he worked it. I think it’s time we looked at the crime scene.’
‘Which might be difficult if we report this to the polis. They’ll reopen the case, and Joe’s house will be sealed off.’
‘If?’
Calum grinned. ‘Maybe that should have been “when”. I mean, I know we’re going to report it, eventually – but we can do it anonymously and choose the time, can we not?’
‘Putting off the call is risky,’ I said. ‘Someone must have seen us here. Noted the car number.’
Calum winked roguishly. ‘Time of death’s always imprecise. When confronted we don’t deny we were here, but point out that when we left Frank he was alive and kicking—’
‘And planning on hanging around for a while?’
‘Something like that,’ Calum said with a grin, ‘if you’re in the mood for black humour. Come on, let’s go and get that key.’
I thought it would be a bad idea to let Declan Creeney know what we were doing so I rang Caroline Spackman, found out she had a front door key to Joe’s house, and drove to Mill Street to pick it up at about 3.15. It was almost a quarter to four by the time we got to Beech Crescent, way to early for office workers to be returning home, but just in time for the women ferrying children home from school to gaze imperiously out of their silver Suzuki Vitaras as Calum and I entered Joe Creeney’s house.
‘So much for keeping a low profile,’ I said, as I shut the door.
‘They’ll think we’re cops,’ Calum said. ‘I flashed my open wallet at a tight-looking blonde as we came in.’
‘What’s inside it, your bus pass?’
‘Oh, now that is very bloody droll.’
‘But this,’ I said, ‘is very pleasant indeed.’
The hall was roughly square, and as large as Calum’s living-room. The floor was expensive herringbone parquet, the carpeted stairs Mike Haggard had described climbing the inside of the right-hand exterior wall and turning sharp left at the top. A passage between the stairs and an inner wall led to the rear of the house – probably the kitchen. Set into the inner wall there was a heavy panelled door.
Daylight seeping through venetian blinds covering a small window bathed the stairs in cold light, but late in the afternoon of a grey day the square of coloured glass set at head height in the front door left the hall in eerie semi-darkness. Calum clicked on the light. In the sudden glare from three bulbs in fancy glass shades the floor shone with a rich, polished lustre, and I noticed a small oak telephone table with padded tapestry seat, a corner display unit fitting into the angle between the exterior wall and what I supposed was a downstairs cloakroom.
On the telephone table next to the phone there stood an aerosol can of beeswax furniture polish draped in a crumpled yellow duster.
‘She wasn’t splashing silk emulsion on the walls as Haggard suggested,’ I said quietly. ‘With the police sitting outside her front door she was busying herself with housework to take her mind off the shocking news about her husband Joe.’
‘And not too long after that,’ Calum said bitterly, ‘she was being forced up a stepladder in that passage and probably sqeezing her eyes shut as some bastard dropped a noose over her head.’
For a moment there was silence as we both visualized our worst nightmares and found their horrors as nothing compared to what had been done to Lorraine Creeney. Then I shook myself mentally and the soles of my shoes squeaked on the glossy wood blocks as I crossed the hall to the panelled door and turned the brass knob.
As expected, I found myself in the main living-room, and my eyes were immediately drawn to the big patio doors and beyond those the lawned garden sloping gently up to the back fence.
‘That’s the way Joe came in. He told me those doors would be unlocked.’
‘So he came in that way, stealthily crossed this room and crept silently out into the hall,’ Calum said, walking past me and skirting the huge sofa to look out at the garden. ‘Maybe he went up for her then, maybe later. According to the police, he brought ladder and rope in from the garage. According to Declan Creeney, he must have brought them in from there.’ He pointed to the top of the garden where a Cuprinoled 8’ x 6’ shed stood under the drooping branches of two graceful silver birch trees.
‘Declan knew about the ladder. So did Max.’
‘And others we don’t know about.’
‘According to Manny,’ I said, ‘whoever it was, Rose Lane probably saw him do it.’
‘Him.’ Calum said.
‘That’s right. The mysterious him. But not Joe.’
‘That’s what we believe, and it’s what the latest killing strongly suggests, but there’s no way we can prove it because Rose Lane will take her evidence to the grave.’
‘Unless,’ I said, ‘she told her husband.’
‘Who apparently drifts in and out of dementia.’
I bent to pick up a heavy wooden tray I’d knocked with my foot. As I straightened up my other foot slipped on a white cloth lying crumpled on the polished floor, and I almost fell. I saved myself by grabbing the edge of the open door with my free hand. As I did so I saw a stain on the door’s edge. Head height. Dark.
Paint – or blood. And what was the significance? I shook my head, dismissed it and swore softly as I bent to lean the tray against the wall and draped the cloth across it.
‘People who scatter rugs on polished floors deserve to break a leg.’
‘That, my man, is a tray cloth.’
‘A stray cloth more like,’ I said, and looked around without much hope of spotting any clues.
‘We could check all the doors and windows,’ I said, ‘but I don’t see the point. If the police say they were locked, that’s good enough, and we’re left with the insoluble problem of how the real killer made his escape.’
‘There’s always the possibility that when winding us up Manny had stumbled on the truth.’
I stared at him. ‘What – Lorraine committed suicide?’
Calum was frowning as he came away from the patio doors.
‘Think about the alternative. Not only would a killer have to make his escape leaving doors and windows locked on the inside, the time of death tells us he must have been here, committing murder, when Joe walked through those patio doors.’
‘Then there would have been a fight.’
‘Damn right there would.’
‘But there wasn’t. The police heard nothing until the disturbance that forced them to break down the door. When they did, they found Joe alone with his dead wife.’
Calum dropped into one of the big easy chairs. I wandered around looking at sideboard and roll-top desk and cocktail cabinet and walls hung with original oil paintings and a plasma television with a screen as big as a shop window, and I thought of dramas I’d seen on the box and Jonathon Creek stories with impossible twists and I told myself, think laterally, and you’ll reach just the one possible conclusion.
‘The other alternative is that Joe let him out, and locked the doors,’ I said. ‘He might even have let him in – he told me he was expected. What if he really did snap in gaol. He got out to murder Lorraine – and he had help all the way.’
‘Nice try,’ Calum said. ‘Apart from raising the question of why he’d lock himself in the house with his dead wife, he couldn’t have let this mysterious helper out the front way because the police were sitting in a Panda. And if you remember, Haggard told you the back of the house had been checked. The only person to cross that garden was Joe Creeney – on his way in.’
‘Yes,’ I said gloomily, ‘and when the police did break in he tried to run, didn’t he …?’
I was still bemoaning the destruction of another brilliant theory when the front door bell chimed so loudly in the quiet it chopped a good five years from our lives.
Declan Creeney knew where Lorraine kept the booze, and he made straight for it. The cocktail cabinet crashed open, the decanter stopper squeaked, amber liquid splashed into crystal glasses and he handed them out with a splash of Canada Dry and a fierce scowl.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Investigating.’
‘Where’d you get the key?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘My brother and his wife are dead, the case is closed and you’re trespassing.’
‘So what are you doing here? Removing the evidence?’
He frowned.
‘What bloody evidence?’
‘Oh, clothing you left in Lorraine’s wardrobe. Your razor and toothbrush from the glass shelf in the en-suite, pyjamas from under her pillow….’
He was standing, glass in hand, his back to the garden. The light put his face in shadow. I couldn’t see his eyes.
‘You been talking to Max?’
‘Is he right?’
He snorted. ‘Depends what he said. I’ve already told you I was looking after Lorraine for Joe. Now they’re both dead and I’m the executor.’
‘Ah!’ I nodded sagely. ‘A licence for the unscrupulous to print money: this house must be worth a packet.’
‘What the hell do you want?’
Calum stirred. He’d remained sprawled in the deep easy chair, sipping his Chivas Regal. Until the Scot’s sudden movement alerted him, I think Declan had forgotten he was there.
‘For starters,’ Calum said, ‘we’d like to know where you were around the time your kid brother was going over the wall.’
‘Talking business with my manager in the Copacobana.’
‘Aye, you were there at eleven because Max saw you, but he was leaving when you got there. Are you telling us you stayed? You didn’t maybe go out for a wee while – say some time before midnight?’
‘Piss off.’
‘Charming.’ Calum grinned across at me. ‘Didn’t someone tell us the Copacobana was where Wayne Tully used to work?’
‘Manager,’ I said, ‘according to his brothers. With an eye for the ladies.’
‘Joe got it all wrong,’ Declan said, shaking his head. ‘He thought Lorraine was playing away from home, got his sights set on Wayne Tully as the super stud and went to see him at his house in Fazakerley. Big mistake. They came to blows, and you know the rest.’
‘Everybody got it wrong. Joe didn’t go near Fazakerley. He was drinking in the Sleepy Pussy.’
I’d expected that to shock him, but he rode the punch without blinking. Was he a poker player par excellence, or was my startling news already history?
‘Oh yeah? The plea was guilty to manslaughter. Entered by his solicitor, at Joe’s insistence.’
‘He was protecting someone,’ I said, ‘or saving his own skin.’
‘Crap. If he didn’t do it, who did?’
I smiled, and probed the opening. ‘How about you?’
‘I was somewhere else at the time.’ He grinned. ‘Ask Joe’s solicitor.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘She. You know her well. It was Stephanie Grey.’
TWELVE
I dropped Calum at his flat in Grassendale. He was about to make an anonymous phone call to the police to report a murder. I was heading for the Dingle to return Joe’s key to Caroline.
Before I left I once again tried Len Tully’s numbers. No use. One rang without response, the other was still switched off.
Declan Creeney’s words were still ringing in my ears, and the thought that accompanied them as I cruised along Aigburth Road was that Stephanie Grey had been sparing with the truth. Oh, she’d mentioned manslaughter, but had said nothing about Joe asking her to enter a guilty plea. You know the feeling: when you catch someone telling even the mildest of lies you begin to wonder how many more there have been. Trust goes out of the window – the more so in this case because the investigation seemed to be getting more complicated by the hour and the news of Stephanie’s involvement had come from Declan Creeney.
A man who, for the first time, I was seriously considering as a suspect.
I turned off at the Dingle, powered up Beloe Street and was close to Caroline Spackman’s house in Mill Street when I recognized something about the car in front of me. A white Fiat Punto. A tall man in the passenger seat, the driver a blonde woman wearing a red fleece.
My scalp prickled. I slowed down, let it pull ahead. It didn’t go far. As I eased into the kerb I watched it pull acros the street and stop outside Caroline’s house. The blonde young woman got out and waited on the pavement for the man to come around the car. Max Spackman.
I lowered my window. Spackman and the young woman were talking animatedly. Then he grinned, they embraced and, as she ran ba
ck to the car, I heard her call, above the noise of the traffic, ‘Bye, Dad.’
My poor brain could take no more. When she had driven off and the front door had slammed behind Max I dug an envelope out of the glove compartment, slipped Joe’s key inside and sealed the flap. When the coast was clear I climbed out, ran across the street and poked the envelope through Caroline’s letter box. Very quietly.
Then, feeling more than a little dazed, I drove home to Wales.
THIRTEEN
My decision to drive into Wales was not quite spur of the moment. Calum had posted the parcel containing red boxes of Black Watch Grenadiers, they were on their way to Nova Scotia and he had an empty work table. I had several non-urgent toy soldier orders from dealers in the USA, but they were for figurines I didn’t have in stock so I planned to spend Thursday morning in my workshop casting those sets.
While Calum and I had spent Wednesday talking to suspects, conferring with our Lime Street mentor and making gruesome discoveries, Sian had been severing links with Nigel at Radio Merseyside and her producer in Granada’s Manchester studios, and making joyful telephone calls to several hard-bitten ex-army characters she had worked with on adventure training courses.
I had spoken to her via mobile phone: she was spending another night at Meg Morgan’s flat,. Tomorrow, Thursday, she would finalize the arrangements for a survival course for IBM executives she was to co-lead in western Scotland early in the winter.
She also agreed to phone Fiona Lake, Lorraine Creeney’s sister, and fix up an appointment. If she could make that for Thursday, she would get it over with and perhaps have something helpful to contribute to the three-way discussion I thought was urgently needed.
Calum, too, was hoping to have more news: Stan Jones was not just asking around about Joe Creeney’s cell mate – Damon Knight – he’d made arrangements to visit the man. This, too, would be done tomorrow. Stan was meeting Calum when he got back from the gaol, to pass on any information he’d managed to extract.
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