A Trio of Murders: A Perfect Match, Redemption, Death of a Dancer

by Jill McGown

  Lloyd had started out in Stansfield, and had met Judy when he moved to London. There, they had worked together until she married, and moved with Michael to Nottingham. He didn’t know whose idea it was to come to Stansfield, but he was glad they had. His divorce had forced him to acknowledge the fact that he was lonely, and the subsequent gap in his life had been filled by the re-arrival of Judy. At least it gave him something to think about.

  Neat houses, arranged in carefully calculated multi-aspect groups flashed past as Judy exceeded the speed limit with a fine disregard for the law she was sworn to enforce. A drunk made his way unsteadily along the pavement; he was doing no one any harm, and they ignored him. The wind hit the car side-on as they turned into Bunyan Road, creating a draught in the old car that ruffled its passengers’ hair.

  ‘If you pull up where that van is,’ Lloyd said, ‘that’ll be fine. I can nip through the alley.’ The alley led to the back-door of the flats, running through the garages, which were hidden, from the road by an ornamental wall.

  Judy drew the car smoothly to a halt. ‘Shall I pick you up in the morning?’ she asked.

  He opened the door, admitting a blast of air that almost took his breath away. ‘Please,’ he said, remembering to close the door in the approved fashion, and waving as she drove away.

  Inside, he poured himself a large whisky and sat down in the reclining chair which he had bought himself as a divorce present. His book lay on the table beside it; he picked it up, found his place, and tried to read it. It usually worked, this cutting himself off. No matter how long a day he’d put in, how tired he was, a nightcap and a chapter or two made him feel better. But tonight his thoughts kept returning to Wade and Julia Mitchell and what had gone on at the boating lake.

  It was no locked-room mystery, he told himself. The body was not lying on the library floor, stabbed with a jewelled paper knife. There was no figure lurking in the gazebo. Wade had taken the girl up there, and for whatever reason, he had strangled her. He had driven away, gone to his garage in the middle of the night, consumed half a bottle of Scotch – the other half was still there. Then he had fled from justice.

  Except, of course, that he hadn’t taken her up there. She owned the place – she had the key. It was in her handbag, which they’d found in the café. So she had taken him up there.

  He opened his book again. Now he knew what had been nagging at him, he began to relax. Tomorrow he could look for the answer. Outside the wind rattled the windows and howled through the alley, but he felt as he had as a child, when he would play in the outhouse, and the concentrated heat would surround his brown summer body like water. If it rained, streaking the dusty window, it was outside. It couldn’t get him.

  The wind, moaning and sighing, was outside. It couldn’t get him.

  The wind carried the sound of the church clock chiming midnight into the Mitchells’ house. Helen switched off the bathroom light, and went into the bedroom, where Donald was already in bed, leafing through a magazine. As she sat on the bed to remove her slippers, she could feel the waves of potential serious discussion coming from his side.

  ‘Helen?’

  ‘Yes, Donald.’ She swung her legs under the bedclothes.

  ‘I’ve been thinking – about this money.’ He half turned to face her. ‘Well, most of it won’t be money, of course, it’ll be shares in the business. But it’s the same thing.’

  ‘What about it?’ Helen was in no mood for the discussion, but it was impossible to divert Donald once he’d made up his mind.

  ‘You do realise how much we’re talking about? Charles was a millionaire – when the radio said he’d made two fortunes, they weren’t joking.’

  ‘I know, Donald,’ Helen said impatiently. Charles, in the way of most millionaires, had not been all that open-handed when he was alive, but he had left the boys a great deal of money, not to mention Donald. And now that Donald was getting the rest, she knew what sort of money they were talking about. ‘Donald – could you get to the point? It’s been a very long day.’

  And Donald, she knew, had every intention of making it even longer.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking – we’re not going to carry on living in a semi-detached in Stansfield, are we?’

  ‘No?’ she said, stiffening slightly. This just wasn’t the time. Her future was not something which particularly concerned her at the moment.

  ‘Oh, don’t misunderstand,’ he said. ‘I’m not sitting here counting the profits. But there isn’t much point in pretending that we’ve got anything to preserve, is there? And I didn’t want you to think that I’d just swan off somewhere once I could.’ He paused, apparently waiting for her to say something.

  Helen couldn’t think of anything much to say.

  ‘I will leave,’ he said. ‘Whenever we think it’s best. But you’ll get half of whatever it is I’ve got by then – I’m not waiting for some judge to sort it out. I just thought you ought to know.’

  She nodded. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘We could see it coming,’ he said. ‘It’s just that the money made our minds up. There wouldn’t be much point in sticking together so we could be miserable in mink, would there?’

  ‘No.’ The money had made Donald’s mind up. But he was right, of course. ‘Was it the money?’ she asked. ‘Or had you decided anyway?’

  There was a heartbeat before Donald answered. ‘I’d decided,’ he said. ‘When I realised what Chris meant to you.’

  Helen lay awake in the darkness for a long time, her mind on Chris, as the gales swept in. He must have found somewhere to go, she thought, to comfort herself, but she shivered. So Donald had known all the time – it wasn’t too difficult, she supposed. Of all the people in the world, he ought to know the signs.

  Judy Hill slept, dreaming that everyone she ever knew was playing tennis in the rain. Her husband wasn’t playing; he was standing a little way off, and it wasn’t raining where he was. He was complaining, all the same. There was a flapping noise, and a bird swooped down, catching her in its talons. She tried to fight it, but it flapped furiously.

  She woke up, her mouth dry, her body tense. The flapping was in the room, and it hurt to move. She lay still, afraid of the noise, until her mind cleared, and she turned to see the curtains billowing out into the room, opened by the wind. The moon was high and small, and silver-edged streams of cloud raced across the sky. Rain, carried on the wind, hit the window as she rose to close it. For some moments she leant on the window sill, looking out at the curve of the road, at the new trees, whose leaves were falling fast. The trees bent in the wind; she wondered if they would survive the wild night.

  She lived in the more established part of Stansfield, which meant that the houses were twenty-five years old, and built in terraces, with a single aspect. It also meant that you could find your way from one end of the street to the other. She had gone down in the folklore of Stansfield Constabulary by having to get a member of the public to get her out again when she had entered one of the new pedestrian estates without a compass. The next day, she had found a distress flare on the passenger seat of the car. She smiled to herself, closed the curtains and went back to bed. She liked Stansfield.

  Michael, of course, didn’t. But then Michael didn’t like anywhere much, and wouldn’t, until he could afford to live uptown. Mr Thingy’s Spanish hacienda would suit him down to the ground. Living in a council house was something Michael had never got used to, despite having done so from birth. The New York trip meant a lot to him; she wished, a little guiltily, that she had been more enthusiastic for his sake. But then, she argued with herself, everything he does is for his sake, so perhaps he didn’t need her blessing. She missed him, in an odd way, when he was off selling computers – this time, he’d only been home two days, and they had been spent sniping at one another, largely because he had failed to sell any computers. And he was worried about New York, because the firm had had to scrape together the money to send him; he desperately wanted to do
well.

  It was so much easier to be charitable about him when he wasn’t there. This morning’s row had been the same as all the others – she couldn’t remember what had started it, but as always, it ended up being about their standard of living, which suited her and didn’t suit Michael. No one in their right minds would live in a place like this, and so on.

  And now, of all things, there had been a murder. That was something that Michael would regard as a personal insult if ever there was one. Stansfield had been his idea; she had opened her mouth to tell him that she knew someone there, and had closed it again. Not because it would have put him off, and not because he was likely to read anything into it. Whatever else he was, Michael was not the jealous type. No, she hadn’t told him because she knew there was more to it than that. She doubted if she would ever have married Michael if it hadn’t been for Lloyd, complete with wife and children.

  Perhaps that was what it was with Julia Mitchell. Perhaps they should dig around in her past a little bit, see if Wade figured in it at all. They didn’t have to prove motive, but it was so much easier if you knew why someone had done something. She’d look into that tomorrow.

  *

  At least he’d got out in time. Chris gulped in the cold air, trying to take all his weight on one foot, then washed in the rain-water that had gathered in the dented roof. Once he was certain he wasn’t going to be sick again, he went back inside, shivering and exhausted. But the smell of the store of apples hit him, and he had to go back out. He was sweating, and cold. He thought he might die here, and they would find another body in the woods.

  He sat on the step, holding his pounding head, trembling in the wind. No, he wasn’t going to die. His system had just rebelled against the whisky and the apples and the pain and the fear. With a great effort of will, he held his breath, and moved his provisions out, throwing them as far away as he could.

  He’d had more than enough of being a fugitive. He wasn’t even sure why he was one, so tomorrow they could have him. He could keep Helen out of it.

  Donald was beginning to feel pleasantly drowsy at last. He had almost forgotten what sleep was like, but now he could feel it stealing up to the edges of his mind, gradually blurring the thought processes. Helen slept beside him, breathing deeply; he wished, in a way, that their marriage could continue. Donald wasn’t sure what love was – he didn’t think he’d ever loved anyone – but Helen had probably produced an emotion more akin to love than anyone else, and he had no desire to hurt her. But he had done, over and over again, and so in the end she had turned to someone else. That was, as he’d told her, when he knew he must call it a day. If Chris could make her happy, then he mustn’t hang about to make her feel guilty.

  But now, of course, all this had happened, and who knew what was going to happen next? The whole senseless business was threatening everyone’s security, not least Helen’s.

  But he could make her financially secure, which might in some measure make up for the harm he’d done. It was, he concluded sleepily, the best he could do.

  As the storm grew outside, Donald turned in the warmth of his bed, and went to sleep.

  *

  The night winds were sweeping the south-east, lashing the sea into a fury, crashing the waves on to the promenades; further inland, trees fell, blocking roads and railway lines. Hen-houses were left roofless, and cold-frames smashed as slates were dislodged.

  In Stansfield, garden gates swung squeakily and Coke tins rattled along the town centre streets. Rubbish swirled into the corners in the back-street delivery areas, whipped up from the communal waste bins.

  In Thorpe Woods, the wind moaned through the trees, and the night was alive with the sound of shifting leaves. A hedgehog, seeking shelter, crept under the tangle of nettles and weeds and sniffed curiously at the metal surface. It tempered the wind, and he stayed there.

  Inside, Chris Wade tossed and turned on the hard bench, which was not made to accommodate six feet of aching muscle. On the same principle as the hedgehog, he too stayed there.

  Chapter Six

  Lloyd got into the car beside her, his mood matching the bright Autumn morning. ‘The cop-shop, driver,’ he said.

  Judy didn’t reply. Her interrupted night had made her less than sociable, and she could have done without Lloyd’s bonhomie.

  ‘Beautiful day,’ he said, rolling down the window, and breathing in extravagantly. ‘Doesn’t that do your soul good?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Weather forecast said it would rain later – pity.’ He grinned. ‘It would do your soul good, if you’d got one.’

  ‘I’m sure it would.’

  A train rattled past, underneath them, as she drove on to Thorpe Wood Road. The odd one stopped at the station, but most of them roared through, like that one.

  ‘Can you hear the trains at night?’ she asked.

  ‘Sometimes, if the wind’s in the right direction.’ He laughed. ‘Last night you could only hear the wind.’

  Lloyd lived in old Stansfield, the village that had been there long before the cuckoo in the nest. The flat in which he lived was in one of two blocks, carefully designed to blend in with the atmosphere of the village, as it was still called. The experiment had worked; they were just part of the scenery.

  ‘Oh, look – there’s a young tree down,’ he said. ‘It’s hardly a tree at all – only about an inch thick.’

  ‘I thought the one outside our house might fall, but it didn’t.’

  ‘ “The gale, it plies the sapling double, and thick on Severn snow the leaves”,’ Lloyd said, winding up the window as the soul-improving freshness proved too much. ‘Michael wasn’t home very long this time, was he? Had to love you and leave you, did he?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’ She heard herself give an audible, unintentional, sigh.

  ‘It goes on, you know.’

  She frowned. ‘What does?’

  ‘ “On Wenlock Edge” – you should listen to it. “There, like the wind through woods in riot . . .” ’

  But she didn’t listen. She drove, letting the words wash over her. He didn’t need a rapt audience – he just needed someone there so that he wasn’t too obviously speaking for his own pleasure. She could imagine him as a fiery Welsh minister, threatening cringing congregations with hellfire, pronounced with about five Ls. Dropping his voice for dramatic effect, raising it at precisely the right moment to make them jump. It was a good voice – an actor’s voice. It could be full of reassurance, coaxing a story from a frightened child, or cold and unemotional, if he wanted to alarm. He used speech to make up for the fact that he was the only Welshman in the world who couldn’t sing.

  The carefully controlled Welsh accent broke through her own private thoughts.

  ‘ “. . . Today, the Roman and his trouble are ashes under Uricon.”’ He paused. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘You mean apart from the fact that you’re reciting poetry at half past eight in the morning?’

  ‘Poets know a thing or two,’ he said mildly, ‘about feelings. More than computer salesmen.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be hard,’ she said. ‘What’s put you in such good humour, anyway? You’re not usually this cheerful first thing.’

  ‘I don’t really know. Except that it occurred to me last night that if Wade was in the café with her, she must have taken him there, because she had the key.’

  Judy thought for a moment. ‘Why, do you think?’

  ‘Why did she take him in there? God knows, but at least we can try to find out.’

  ‘No – why did she have the key?’

  ‘It was her café.’

  ‘Yes, but she hardly went around clutching the key to it. She was coming to see it – Donald Mitchell must have had the key in the first place. So why did he give it to her?’

  Lloyd shook his head. ‘We can ask him today – we’re going there. I’m going to take Elaine Short up on her suggestion, and find out what Helen Mitchell was doing.’

 
Judy aired her own suggestion about taking a look at Julia’s history.

  ‘Do you think Wade might have had an old score to settle?’ Lloyd asked. ‘It’s possible, I suppose. But nobody seems to think they recognised one another. Still – that’s another thing we can do. See? Things are looking up already.’

  They crossed the car park as the sun dipped behind a cloud, and the forecast rain began to fall.

  ‘Sir? I’ve left the reports on your desk – they’re both there.’

  Lloyd smiled broadly. ‘Today is going to be good,’ he said to Judy as they collected good mornings and messages walking through the CID room. He pushed open the door and stood flamboyantly aside to let her through.

  Judy watched as he scanned the reports. He threw them across to her. ‘All we have to do is find him,’ he said.

  Judy stooped to retrieve the folder which had, of course, missed her desk and scattered its contents on the floor.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  Julia Mitchell had died between 7.30 p.m. and 9.00 p.m. ‘Death was due to asphyxiation, caused by the restriction of her breathing with tights or a nylon stocking or similar being tightened round her throat. There were minor abrasions, but nothing to suggest that her attacker would be injured in any way. The most noticeable of her injuries was a deep graze below the left eye, in which traces of wood varnish were found. This was thought to have been caused as she lost consciousness and fell, as the small amount of bleeding suggested that it had happened very shortly before death. The blood on the table matched that of the deceased, and the varnish was of a type and age similar to that found in the wound. There was no evidence of sexual activity.

  She moved on to the list of stomach contents, listening with half an ear as Lloyd picked up the phone.

  ‘Could you get me Mr Donald Mitchell, please? His number is Stansfield 3074.’