by Jill McGown
And yet she couldn’t hate Donald, though she knew that he would have let Chris go to prison. She walked slowly out to the car, and prepared to enter a police station for the second time in her life.
Chris had thought he was going to be charged. He had prepared himself for that; he had decided to get a solicitor, to see what someone else could do, but in a way he had resigned himself to the fact that he had lost.
So that was what he had expected to hear, when the duty sergeant came to see him. Not that he was free to go. At first, the words didn’t mean anything, and he felt like an actor who had been given the wrong cue. The sergeant went on to tell him that he might be required to give evidence, and still it didn’t mean much. He was being shepherded out of the cell, up to the main desk. He was being thanked for his co-operation, he was being apologised to, he was being given back his money and his belt.
He asked if he could telephone his sister, and they said of course he could.
Donald saw Maria arrive, flanked by the inspector and his rather fetching sergeant, out of the corner of his eye, as he was taken into a small room and invited to stay there until the Inspector could see him. A burly young man stood in front of the door in case he should wish to leave.
After some minutes, both the inspector and his sergeant came, and he stood up to greet them.
‘Sit down,’ Lloyd said.
‘Don’t worry, Inspector,’ said Donald. ‘We agreed – once Wade had got himself mixed up in this – that if you got to Maria, the game, as they say, would be up. We can’t even try to fight. You have a number of people who can identify her, I’m sure.’
‘Five or six at the last count,’ Lloyd said.
‘It could have worked,’ Donald said, almost dreamily. ‘If young Mr Wade hadn’t been so keen to give her a lift home. None of these people would have been likely ever to see her again – and if they did the passage of time would have made all the difference.’
‘You have been cautioned, Mr Mitchell,’ the sergeant said.
‘I have indeed,’ he said. ‘But it was a gamble, and we lost.’
‘Whose idea was it?’ Lloyd asked.
Donald thought, and discovered that he really didn’t know. He said as much to the inspector. ‘It was a joint enterprise,’ he said. ‘We both like the finer things in life, and neither of us counted Julia as one of these.’
‘You were very convincing,’ Lloyd said. ‘When I came to break the news.’
‘Oh, that.’ Donald shook his head, remembering the mind-numbing emptiness of that moment, when fact seemed to have overtaken the fiction that he had created. ‘That wasn’t acting, Inspector. When I saw the state that Wade was in, and all the police arriving – I really thought that it was Maria you had found.’ He leant forward. ‘She is very important to me,’ he said. ‘More important than the money, I discovered.’
‘Julia Mitchell left your house at 7.50 p.m. on Saturday,’ the Inspector said. ‘Perhaps you’ll take it from there?’
‘Certainly,’ Donald said, and sighed. ‘I left with Julia, and told her I wanted her to see something at the boating lake. It was quite dark in the café – the trees block the light, you know – and besides, I had taken the precaution of removing the light bulb. It was really quite easy – much easier than I’d imagined.’ He looked from inspector to sergeant and back again. ‘I strangled her,’ he said.
The sergeant was looking back at him, her brown eyes widening just a little. ‘What with?’ she asked.
‘Tights,’ he said helpfully. ‘I’ve burned them, I’m afraid.’
‘And then you rang Miss Fraser at the hotel?’
‘Yes.’ How did they know that? It wasn’t supposed to end like this, but that’s what gambling was all about. Tearing up your betting slip. ‘While she was on her way from the Derbyshire, I removed Julia’s clothes – and Julia, I hasten to add.’
The inspector opened his mouth, then seemed to change his mind.
Donald waited politely, then carried on when it seemed that the inspector was not after all going to speak.
‘Maria and I went on to the Shorts – the idea was that she would leave almost immediately, in a huff. Start walking home, and disappear.’
‘While you were safely visiting the Shorts,’ the sergeant said.
‘Quite. She would have gone back to the café, left Julia’s handbag, changed back into her own clothes, and got rid of Julia’s. Gone back to the Derbyshire, and left Stansfield on the Sunday morning.’
Once again the inspector opened his mouth, a little hesitantly, but this time he proceeded with the question. ‘Why did you remove her underclothes?’ he asked.
Donald looked and sounded like a professor answering a bright student. I thought it looked better – you might have wondered, if they had been intact. Wondered why, I mean. So I took them off and hid them under a tree on the way back to the café. Maria was there by then, and we just went on our way.’
‘When did you plan all this?’ the sergeant asked.
‘The moment Julia gave Maria notice, I suppose,’ Donald answered. ‘Just after Charles died. It started as a sort of joke, really. Then Maria had to move into digs.’ The awful digs that she had hated, where the thought that Julia was worth shoving under a bus had become less of a joke, and more of a discussion. ‘We realised that it might not be all that difficult. We saw snags, but not too many.’ He smiled. ‘And not the right ones, it would appear.’
His audience did not respond, and he went on. ‘I arranged for Martin Short to meet Maria at Julia’s – we had a key, of course. It was easy – we just had to wait until Julia went away for a while.’
The sergeant was writing everything down, her pen making little swishing noises as she wrote.
‘The meeting lasted quite a long time,’ he said. ‘But Maria was only there for a few moments. Just long enough for him to get a general impression of her. So that he would be a good witness when the time came.’ He smiled, a touch ruefully. ‘But when the time came, Wade happened,’ he said. ‘I imagine you’ll be asking Maria about what happened then.’
‘We will,’ the inspector said. ‘But go on.’
‘He offered her a lift – she did her best to refuse, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. She couldn’t go on refusing – the Shorts would have got too good a look at her. So she tried to get rid of him, but he stuck like a leech.’ He shook his head. ‘He even picked up that table and sat down for a nice chat. But you’ll know that.’
‘Yes, we know that.’
‘In the end, she was frantic – she’d tried everything else so she grabbed the phone and threatened him with the police. It worked.’
He sat back. ‘She tried to get rid of her fingerprints – was that the mistake?’
‘One of them,’ the sergeant said.
‘Well – she felt she couldn’t just leave them. And she thought if she wiped the phone clean, you might wonder about that – so she tried to wipe the parts she’d held. We didn’t think it would matter too much – her fingerprints shouldn’t mean anything to you.’ If they did, he wasn’t going to be told, he realised. ‘Anyway, she changed back into her own clothes which were in one of the boats, and walked back to the hotel. She rolled up Julia’s clothes and threw them as far as she could into the wood.’
‘Then you kindly provided us with a fuzzy photograph of Julia.’
‘Yes – a bit too recognisable for my liking, but there weren’t any others, except the wedding photographs, and we got rid of them. But there you are – that wasn’t what let us down. Even after you’d got Wade, I thought we had a chance. He’d obviously seen nothing – he didn’t know it wasn’t Julia he was with. Maria even thought he’d done us a favour – taking the suspicion away from me, but I wasn’t so sure. I’d have preferred it to have been an unknown assailant.’
‘The best laid schemes,’ the inspector said, a trifle unoriginally, in Donald’s opinion.
‘As you say, Inspector. But I still don’t understand why yo
u were so reluctant to charge him.’
The inspector looked steadily at him. ‘You should have left the underwear,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Two different people got rid of her clothes. That’s what puzzled us, Mr Mitchell.’
Oh, dear. Helen was always telling him about that. He always thought that if he added artistic little touches, he could get away with murder.
Judy pushed the typewriter away, and held her hands to the small of her back. ‘Done it,’ she said, but Lloyd had long since fallen asleep, his head resting on his hand. She looked at him for a moment, trying not to think of her marriage, or of what sort of future she might have, because it was too soon, and too difficult.
Last night hadn’t been a beginning; they had known for years that it would happen one day. But it wasn’t an ending – it wasn’t an itch that they’d scratched and now it was gone. It was just another stage in their curious detached relationship.
Lloyd opened his eyes, as he realised that the typing had stopped. ‘What did you want to do that tonight for, anyway?’ he asked.
‘It’s tidier,’ she said. ‘And I don’t have to come in to it in the morning.’
‘It is the morning,’ he grumbled. ‘Can we go now?’
‘I’ve never been in court with you,’ she said, switching off the light as they left.
‘No?’
‘No. But I’ll be there this time. I can’t think why I didn’t do it years ago.’
Lloyd looked sleepily uninterested.
‘You can’t tell a court of law that your first name’s David,’ she said, pushing open the door to the car park.
‘Oh yes I can.’ Lloyd turned his collar up against the soft rain.
‘But that’s not your name.’ Judy got into the car, and pushed open the passenger door.
‘It is now,’ Lloyd said, getting in beside her. ‘Officially, at least.’ He lifted the door, and closed it quietly. ‘I just kept the initial.’
That ruled out Shirley or Marion, Judy thought. She grinned. ‘It’s that bad? You actually changed it?’
‘As soon as I was old enough. And I’m not going to tell you, so you might as well give up.’
Judy began the process of starting the engine. ‘But other people know – people you grew up with. Went to school with – they know.’
‘Some,’ he said. ‘Which is how come everyone calls me Lloyd.’ The car coughed its way into a semblance of life. ‘Because they know,’ he continued, his voice flat, ‘that regardless of age, infirmity or sex, I will flatten them if they use it.’
Judy put the car in gear and splashed it through the puddle that had formed at the entrance. ‘I’ll find out,’ she promised him. ‘Somehow.’ She glanced across at him.
He closed his eyes. ‘No doubt,’ he murmured, sleepily. ‘But you’re not exempt.’
*
Stansfield was a carpet of orange lights in the darkness, as the owl flew silently over, on his way to a wood he knew where an owl could get a decent meal.
An old, dirty Ford Anglia made its way through the village, turning into the garages behind some flats. It disappeared as its lights went out. The owl flew on, towards the dark blot in the orange lights, towards his late-night snack.
He glided down, ghostly pale against the dark sky, and sat on the roof, motionless and ready. It was quiet tonight; the lake was dark and still. The gentle rain had barely dampened his feathers before it had stopped, and the night skies were clearing. It was pleasant, and cool, and not like the other night, when he’d perched here. When the storm was coming, and it had been so hot and heavy. That had been unpleasant. Yes, he thought, as movement caught his eye, and he swooped down upon his supper, that had been unpleasant.
In fact, that had been murder.
REDEMPTION
Hail, O ever-blessèd morn!
hail, redemption’s happy dawn!
sing through all Jerusalem:
‘Christ is born in Bethlehem!’
Chapter One
Lloyd finished the last chapter of his library book, and closed it with relief, wishing that it was in his power to abandon books half-way through. But no matter how obvious the plot, how stilted the dialogue, he was obliged by some natural law to finish them. The worse they were, the more likely he was to devour them, reading into the small hours to get them out of the way. Good books relaxed him, and he would fall asleep with them in his hand, but no such luck with the lousy ones.
He balanced the book on top of the others on his bedside table, and ran his hand over his hair to smooth it down. It was habit – he couldn’t get used to his hair being so short now. He had decided that people who were rapidly losing their hair should not draw attention to the fact by keeping the remaining hair long. He still thought it looked odd; Judy said she liked it. He had wondered about growing a moustache, to make up for the shortfall on his head – he craned his neck to see himself in the dressing-table mirror, and pulled a face. His unshaven face held the ghost of what a moustache might look like, and he didn’t think it would do. Tall, military types could carry off moustaches, but he had come in at the low end of the regulation height. Too small and dark, he decided. He’d look like a bookie’s runner.
He lay back, wide awake, aware that the pile of work which awaited him was being added to as he lay doing nothing. Added to by pre-Christmas burglars who helped themselves to the presents under someone else’s tree – added to by the ones who stole the trees, come to that; the chain-saws got stolen around August, the trees in December. Added to by the drunks, added to by the jolly Christmas spirit that brought out the pickpockets and the handbag snatchers, the credit-card frauds and the conmen in the market square.
One small, striped package and the odd Christmas card were the only hint of Christmas in Acting Chief Inspector Lloyd’s flat. Not that he had any objection to glitter and tinsel – in fact, if he were truthful with himself, which he quite often was, he was a bit of a sucker for jingle bells. But there was another natural law which decreed that no man be alone at Christmas, and he would once again be made welcome by Jack Woodford and his nice, comfortable wife in their nice, comfortable house. Lloyd didn’t really know if they actively desired his presence at their festivities, but they knew that they had to ask him, and he knew that he had to accept. And he would give their grandchildren presents that their parents would insist were too expensive, as he had done for the past three Christmases, and the collective Wood-fords would give him a bottle of malt whisky.
He liked buying presents for the children; his own were grown up now, and just got presents like everyone else’s. He had missed his annual excursion into the magic world of children’s toys. His Christmas visit to his own offspring consisted of an hour or two on Boxing Day, with Barbara making polite conversation as though they hadn’t been married for over eighteen years before it all came to pieces in their hands. So he was glad of the Wood-fords’ goodwill, and he enjoyed the cheerful, noisy family Christmas. Especially this year, now that his father was beginning to get used to the idea of being a widower, and had decided to go back to Wales to live, which he’d wanted to do ever since he’d left. What with that, and Judy about to have her in-laws staying with her, Lloyd would have been very much alone.
Judy was the detective sergeant with whom he’d worked, off and on, for seven of the fifteen years since he’d met her. He had been married then, and the twenty-year-old Judy had rejected his advances, her eyes sad. Eventually, she herself had married, and moved away. Because Barbara had wanted it, and because it might have saved his marriage, Lloyd had requested a return to Stansfield, but the divorce had happened anyway. Then, eighteen months ago, Judy had arrived back in his life, a brand new detective sergeant. Since then they had, with a sense of inevitability, become lovers. Occasional lovers, he thought, with an audible sigh. Very occasional.
When Michael was at home, he and Judy weren’t lovers. And Michael’s promotion had ensured that he was home for considerably longer periods than before. Michael, a computer s
alesman turned sales director; Michael, to whom Judy professed an unexplained wish to remain married.
The covert nature of their relationship was beginning to irk Lloyd, though Judy seemed happy enough with things as they were. He wished she was with him now, in his three o’clock in the morning wakefulness, though even that pleasure would have been qualified by her ability, figuratively at least, to keep him at arm’s length. He looked at the little gift-wrapped parcel on the dressing table. It ought to be tied with ribbon, he decided. And under a tree. He’d get one tomorrow. And some lights. Tomorrow was Christmas Eve; today, he corrected himself. Judy was on leave to play hostess to Michael’s parents. He probably wouldn’t even see her until after the holiday, but her present would be under a bloody tree if he had to keep it there until March.
He switched off the light, and closed his eyes. He wondered if it was still snowing, as it had been when he’d retired with his dreadful book. A white Christmas – it looked pretty, but the roads hadn’t been gritted, and the traffic lads would be busy. His thoughts dwelt on work until at last his mind began to shunt itself into a siding for what was left of the night. Filtered through the fog of sleep, the sighing of the wind reached his ears, and his last conscious thought was for the traffic division, if the snow drifted.
George Wheeler rubbed his eyes as the early morning sun glinted on the snow. Not so early morning, he realised. It was ten o’clock, and he still hadn’t written a word.
‘I’m sure you understand, Vicar, being a Christian.’
Perhaps it was when those words were addressed to him by someone whose motives he had no desire to understand, and with whose values he had no desire to be aligned, that George Wheeler had stopped believing. Not in God, for he knew that he had never honestly believed in God as a being, an entity. As a force for good, perhaps – something inherent in man – but not as some sort of super-caretaker.
Stopped believing in himself? No, that wasn’t right either. George believed in himself, for there he was, flesh, blood and bodily functions. And bodily desires – was it perversion to find himself appreciatively eyeing the young mothers at the church play group, or mere perversity? Was it middle-aged conceit that made him imagine that young Mrs Langton was seeing past his clerical collar to the man, or a sign that soon he would be roaming the streets of Soho, a News of the World headline manqué?
