by Jill McGown
‘Well, I have. You see – I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.’
‘Judy Hill.’
‘Judy. I used to act – nothing spectacular, and not for very long, but I did, before I met Martin. And you know the old cliché situation in plays when someone is walking to the door, and gets called back at the last minute?’
Judy did.
‘Well, if you’re acting in a play, you’ve read the script – you know you’re going to get called back. And so, unless you’re careful, you look as though you know. We’d get told to remember that it was up to the other actor to call us back – we had to believe we were going to walk through the door – do you know what I mean?’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Julia looked as though she had no intention of staying. She looked as though she was going to leave, long before Donald called her a bitch.’ She shrugged, and smiled a quick, apologetic smile. ‘I haven’t tried to explain that to anyone else.’
Judy said she would bear it in mind. It only strengthened her supposition that Julia knew Chris from somewhere, and had made up her mind to leave the moment she clapped eyes on him, but she didn’t voice this opinion to Julia.
‘Until we know what your brother has to say, we don’t know what’s important and what isn’t. That’s why we’re trying to find out exactly what happened – and what you felt happened,’ she added.
Elaine smiled. ‘Will Chris – I mean, he should have a solicitor, shouldn’t he?’
Judy stood up. ‘Yes, I rather think he should,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t asked for one yet.’
‘Can he ring me? He’s allowed to phone someone, isn’t he?’
‘Yes.’ Judy would get him to ring her if it was the last thing he did. ‘Don’t worry, please. We haven’t heard his side of it yet.’
‘He couldn’t,’ Elaine was still assuring her as she made it to the front door. ‘He just couldn’t.’
She was glad to get away before she found herself agreeing with Mrs Short that her brother couldn’t possibly kill a fly.
The fly that had indeed remained unmolested by Chris Wade still buzzed around the workmen’s hut, and around the policeman who was checking it. He was waved away, and flew out into the afternoon, where the fitful weather was now shining and summerlike.
He flew across the road, to the building with all the people round it. People meant sandwiches, and mayonnaise jar lids, and sugar.
He settled on a camera lens, and was waved away again, towards the boating lake. Ducks – ducks meant bread. He swooped down on a crust that had missed the water.
This was the life.
Chapter Eight
The nightmare was closing in. Chris had rung Elaine, told her that he didn’t want a solicitor. His reasoning was that only guilty people needed solicitors, and he wanted to tell them anything, everything they wanted to know. Elaine had sounded doubtful; he had demanded angrily to know why. Did she believe he’d killed Julia Mitchell? No, of course not, she had said. But perhaps you should get a solicitor.
He sat at a formica covered table, in a smallish room, the walls of which were bare except for the NOTICE TO PERSONS IN POLICE CUSTODY, which he had read and reread until he could recite it. They hadn’t charged him yet, which must mean something, presumably. The constable who had remained in the room with him stared straight ahead, not speaking. It was hard to believe he was even thinking, or breathing come to that. He was standing at the moment, at the side of the door, so Chris assumed that he wasn’t dead. But then, he thought gloomily, he had assumed Julia wasn’t dead.
The inspector had asked him for his version of events, and he’d given it, without interruption. There was a moment while the inspector seemed to be mulling it over, and then he had abruptly left the room, stopping only to advise Chris to think about it.
Think about it. Chris almost laughed. Think about it! He’d thought of nothing else. The steady rain beat down outside, and he tried smiling at the constable, but got no response.
The door opened, and the inspector was back. ‘Right,’ he said, sitting opposite him. ‘Let’s hear it again. From the beginning.’
Chris sighed. ‘I gave her a lift home from my sister’s house.’
‘Did you know her? Had you met her before?’
‘No.’ Chris wondered what he was getting at.
‘Why did you give her a lift?’
‘Do I have to know someone before I offer them a lift? She was leaving, that’s all.’
Lloyd leant back in his chair. ‘She’d only just arrived, hadn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ Chris said. ‘She didn’t want to stay.’
Lloyd nodded, and pushed his chair back so that it squeaked on the tiled floor. He walked to the window. ‘Did she want a lift?’
‘What?’
‘You heard.’
‘She said she was going to walk.’
‘So? Why were you so keen to give her a lift?’ He tutted at the rain, and waited for a reply.
‘I wasn’t! It was getting dark, and it’s a lonely road – there was going to be a storm.’
‘A lonely road,’ Lloyd repeated. ‘It is, isn’t it?’
‘Yes!’
Lloyd turned quickly. ‘Did she want a lift? Did she say yes, thank you?’
‘No, she—’
‘What?’
‘She said she’d walk.’ Chris traced a crack in the formica with his fingernail.
‘So what did you do?’
‘I said she should let me drive her home.’
Lloyd turned back to the window. ‘Along the lonely road.’ He leant over and looked out, craning his neck as though he were trying to see something, and wasn’t really interested in the conversation at all. ‘How many times did she refuse?’
Chris stared at the back of his head, and the patch of scalp showing through the dark hair. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, alarmed.
‘I do. Four times, according to your brother-in-law. Three or four times, he said.’ Lloyd faced him, and smiled. ‘But you insisted, didn’t you?’
‘I suppose so – I just thought . . .’ Chris tailed off. He had insisted.
‘All right – so she got a lift, whether she wanted one or not. Then what?’
‘It wasn’t like that – I just—’
‘I don’t care what it was like! Then what?’ Lloyd was leaning over him, hands on the table. Chris shrank back.
‘We were going along Thorpe Wood Road, and she asked me to stop the car. I pulled up in the lay-by.’
‘Why did she want you stop?’
‘She said she thought she’d lost her pen – she looked in her bag for it, and said she must have left it in the café.’
‘Her pen. What made her suddenly realise she’d lost her pen? Writing postcards, was she?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve told you all this already.’
‘And I listened, Mr Wade. But now my critical faculties have been improved by a cup of tea, and now I want to know why.’
‘I don’t know!’ Chris roared, then took a deep breath. ‘Sorry.’
‘Quite all right, Mr Wade. All right, she’d lost her pen. Then what happened?’
‘We’ve been through all this,’ Chris said. ‘She looked for it, and decided she must have left it in the café. So I took her up there.’
‘Ah yes – you took her up there.’ Lloyd sat down again. ‘At her request?’
Chris closed his eyes. ‘No, not really.’
‘You insisted again, did you?’
‘She said I had just to go on. She’d walk from there.’
Lloyd tilted his chair back and looked at him for a long time, until he began to feel even more uncomfortable than he had.
‘I didn’t like the idea of her going in there alone – it’s in the middle of the wood, practically. So I said I’d take her up there.’
‘But she didn’t want you to?’ Lloyd let his chair fall forward with a thud.
‘No, I suppose she didn’t. Look – I thought last night �
� she might have wanted to—’ It sounded crazy now.
‘Yes?’
‘To – kill herself. And that could be why she didn’t want me to come with her. Could she?’ They hadn’t told him how she’d died. It was still a hope.
Lloyd stared at him. ‘I see,’ he said in tones of extremely Welsh wonderment. ‘If a girl doesn’t want your company it must be because she’s suicidal? Oh – I’ve never been that fortunate. Usually, if a girl doesn’t want me it’s because she’s got something much more interesting to do – that doesn’t usually include killing herself.’
‘Could she?’ Chris persisted.
‘Let’s say it’s unlikely, shall we?’ Lloyd smiled.
‘How did she die?’
‘Now, Mr Wade – you know how she died. But we digress. She got taken up to the café whether she wanted to be taken or not.’ He stood up again, and stretched. ‘It’s been another long day,’ he said to Chris. ‘So, you take her up there – go on.’
‘When we got to the café, she said she’d just run in and see if her pen was there.’
Lloyd leant over the table again. ‘Who opened the door?’
Chris didn’t know what that had got to do with it, but he’d told them he’d tell them everything. ‘She did – she had the key.’
‘No – you misunderstand. Who opened the car door?’
‘Oh – I see.’ He didn’t really, but it was easy enough. ‘I did. It’s very stiff – so I leant over and opened it for her.’
‘You leant over and opened it for her – you did open it, did you?’
‘Yes. Why—’
‘An old trick, but a good one, in my book. Leaning over to open the door – gives you the proximity necessary to make further progress.’
‘It was nothing like that! I’d have to lean over to open it for anyone who wasn’t used to it.’
‘And so she nipped in and got her pen, did she?’ Lloyd was walking round now, disconcertingly.
‘No.’
‘No!’ He was overdoing the incredulity a bit, Chris thought, beginning to get his measure.
‘No. She came back out and said the light wasn’t working and it might take a little while, so I should just go on, and she’d get home herself.’
‘And you said rightie-oh, and went on your way?’
‘No.’
Lloyd sat down in sheer amazement. ‘Fancy that. What did you say?’
‘I said I had a torch in the car, and I’d come and help her look for it.’ Chris spoke through his teeth. Every word seemed to make matters worse.
‘In the café where the light wasn’t working? In the lonely café in the middle of the wood? Did she say oh yes please?’
‘No.’ Chris looked at him. ‘No, she didn’t. But I went in anyway.’
‘Persistent, aren’t you, Mr Wade? You must have taken quite a shine to her.’
Chris shook his head.
‘Most of us would have been put off by now. She didn’t seem to want your company. There must have been a reason for your persistence.’
There was a reason for his persistence. Of course there was.
But it had nothing whatever to do with Julia.
‘The boating lake murder – a man is taken in for questioning.’
Thus began the ITV news, and Helen watched it with a gin and tonic and a cigarette for company. Donald had come back, and gone straight out again to the police to see if Chris needed his help.
‘The man wanted in connection with the murder of thirty-five year old widow Julia Mitchell gave himself up this afternoon, as the police net was closing in on his hiding-place. He is currently helping the police with their enquiries, and no charges have yet been made.’
Film of Thorpe Wood came up, with policemen searching.
‘A large section of the search party returned to normal duty this morning, but police did continue to search for what was described as vital evidence. However, this search was called off at lunchtime. A police presence is being maintained in the area to prevent any possible evidence being tampered with.
‘Inspector David Lloyd spoke to Mel Brown this afternoon.’
Inspector Lloyd mouthed silently at the camera for some moments. The film jerked and came to a standstill, and the newscaster appeared, unaware that he was on camera.
He looked up, under his eyebrows, quickly, then down again. Then, with studied confidence, he lifted his head again.
‘I’m sorry, we seem to have some trouble with the sound on that film. We’ll come back to it if we can. The police say that they are still anxious to hear from anyone who was in the Thorpe Wood area of Stansfield on Saturday night, and they would like to hear from the driver of a dark, open sports car which was seen at about nine o’clock on the night of the murder.’
A blown-up fuzzy photograph of Julia smiled out at Helen from the screen.
‘Police have issued this photograph of the murdered woman, which they say was taken some time ago. Mrs Mitchell was wearing a denim skirt and jacket . . .’
Helen switched off the television. They weren’t convinced it was Chris, then. They couldn’t be, or they wouldn’t be going to all this trouble.
But they didn’t seem to be looking for anyone else.
‘Ah yes, Inspector. You wanted to know a bit more about the time of death, I believe?’ The pathologist’s polite Glasgow voice sounded slightly condescending, but pleasant enough.
Lloyd, taking a breather from questioning, had decided to check the details more thoroughly, since Wade’s insistence that she was alive when he left was fairly convincing.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Is there likely to be any lee-way?’ Lloyd had reserved a corner of the blotter for notes on the conversation.
‘No, I’m afraid not. I’ve given you what I consider to be the minimum and maximum. Thought you’d got him, didn’t you?’
‘Well, we’re questioning someone. He’s quite ready to admit that he left her after nine o’clock, but he insists that she was in robust health.’ Lloyd paused. ‘Is it possible for someone to have killed her after nine o’clock?’
‘She was dead by nine o’clock, Inspector. Well dead, if you ask me.’
Lloyd looked across at Judy, listening on the extension. ‘It’s just that I don’t want some clever dick turning up at the trial and throwing in a reasonable doubt.’ There was no question of that; Wade couldn’t prove where he was after nine o’clock either, but it sounded better than admitting that you believed your suspect for no good reason.
‘There isn’t one, in my opinion. And I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone to disagree.’
‘But pathologists have been known to disagree about time of death,’ Lloyd said. ‘I don’t want that to happen, if possible.’
‘Oh, of course they have. It isn’t an exact science – far from it. You have to piece together what happened from what you know, what you can deduce – and what you can guess.’ He warmed to his task. ‘As you no doubt know, you arrive at the time of death using several factors. Body temperature is the most reliable – rigor is the least.’
‘And in this case?’
‘In this case we had the added advantage of knowing when she last ate. But all these things are variables. Body temperatures for instance. A dead body loses heat, obviously, but in this case it would gain heat after death. Asphyxiation sends the body temperature up, and then it starts to fall. And there was quite an extreme drop in the outside temperature during that night – plus the fact that it was raining very heavily.’ He coughed, a deep, bronchial, smoker’s cough. ‘But you’ll know all about that,’ he said. ‘From other cases.’
‘Some of it,’ Lloyd said guardedly. ‘But it is the first murder-case I’ve taken charge of where there was any doubt at all. Both the others have pleaded guilty to manslaughter, thank God.’
Girvan laughed. ‘Well,’ he said, through the hacking cough that the laugh had produced, ‘as long as I’m not teaching my grandmother to suck eggs.’ He finished coughing,
and continued. ‘We know certain things. When she last ate, when she was last seen alive – that sort of thing. The stomach is a good guide – but its emptying process can be affected by a number of things, too.’
Lloyd was beginning to wish he’d never asked. ‘I’m not over-keen on stomachs,’ he said, with a little laugh.
‘Don’t worry. All I mean is that if we just took that as a guide, it could give us too early a time of death. But the emotions experienced by the deceased come into the reckoning then. Fear slows the whole process down. So, you allow more time from when she ate.’
Lloyd could hear him flicking over pages.
‘I believe she’d been having an argument with someone – if she was angry, that would speed the process up – but I think it’s fairly safe to assume that there would be a considerable element of fear, from the circumstances.’
‘Wouldn’t there always be? If someone has been murdered?’
‘Yes, I imagine there would. Once they know what’s happening. No, I mean over a period of time.’
‘She was seen at about half past eight,’ Lloyd said. ‘We’re told she looked scared then – I have to admit we were a bit dubious about that.’
‘Ah,’ Girvan said. ‘That seems quite likely from what we know. And taking everything into consideration, she had been dead for over ten and under twelve hours, which brings you to the times I gave you.’
‘But are you saying that it couldn’t have happened at five past nine?’
‘She was dead by nine o’clock, Inspector – and that’s stretching it as far as I can. I’d be happier with 8.45 myself but I allowed a bit more. But not after nine – definitely not.’
He was rather more prepared to commit himself than most, which was something, Lloyd thought.
‘Thank you for your time,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to be sure it couldn’t have been later.’
‘No. Even if you assume that she was angry, which is the only question mark, that would make it earlier rather than later.’ He coughed again, and Lloyd could feel his own chest tightening.
‘If your man was with her from – what was it?’ He took the opportunity to cough while he obviously flicked the pages back again. ‘Half past eight until nine? Then he killed her Inspector or he was there when someone else did.’
