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

by Jill McGown

  ‘You’re sure that was the last time you were in there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Mrs Wheeler!’ Lloyd suddenly spun round to face her from having his back to her.

  His voice startled Judy, but Mrs Wheeler looked as calm as ever.

  ‘Your fingerprints were on the poker. There had been an attempt to burn a dress – your dress, which had blood on it. Type B, Mrs Wheeler. Elstow’s type.’

  Marian Wheeler didn’t speak.

  ‘You must give us some explanation for these facts, Mrs Wheeler,’ Judy said, her voice as calm as Mrs Wheeler’s.

  ‘I understood I didn’t have to speak to you at all.’

  Judy sighed. ‘You’ll have to give an explanation to someone, some time,’ she said. ‘You will have to defend the charges, won’t you?’

  ‘You haven’t charged me, have you?’ Mrs Wheeler looked eager; interested. Not as though it was happening to her at all.

  ‘No,’ said Judy. ‘We haven’t. But we will, Mrs Wheeler, unless you have an explanation. Do you?’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Wheeler.

  ‘No?’ Lloyd said. ‘You mean you don’t know how the blood got on your dress? You don’t know how your fingerprints got on the poker?’

  He leant over the table, and Mrs Wheeler pulled back a little.

  ‘You say you were never in the room, Mrs Wheeler. So how come blood got walked out of that room on to the landing on the sole of your shoe?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You don’t know,’ he said, his voice menacingly low and Welsh. ‘Someone tried to clean up the blood on the landing – did you know that? Someone who left their fingerprints by the stain.’ His own hand, fingers spread, thumped down on the table. ‘Your fingerprints, Mrs Wheeler. You don’t know how that happened?’

  She was getting to Lloyd. Judy could tell when simulated anger was turning to real frustration. ‘I’ve just been talking to Joanna,’ she said, conversationally.

  Mrs Wheeler stiffened.

  ‘She suggests that you burned the dress because you were angry with her father.’

  ‘Does she?’ A frown crossed the serene face.

  ‘Were you angry with him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So that isn’t why you burned the dress?’

  ‘No, of course it isn’t.’

  A silence fell, and Lloyd sat down, leaning back, relaxed.

  ‘But you did burn it, didn’t you, Mrs Wheeler?’ Judy asked quietly.

  Mrs Wheeler nodded, and Judy felt her heart skip a little.

  ‘I wanted him to leave,’ Marian Wheeler said. ‘I wanted him out of the house just as much as George did. I just wanted to ask him to leave. To go away, and stop hurting Joanna. So I went up. But – but when I spoke to him, he just . . . came at me. He was drunk, I suppose. I told him to stop, but he was threatening me. I picked up the poker. I told him to stop. I told him I’d hit him.’

  Judy glanced at Lloyd, whose eyebrows twitched a little.

  ‘Are you saying it was self-defence?’ she asked Mrs Wheeler.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘I was frightened. I warned him. But he kept coming. Then he lunged at me, and I hit him. He fell,’ she said. ‘I realised he was dead.’

  ‘We don’t think it was self-defence,’ Judy said carefully. ‘Our evidence suggests that he was lying on the bed when he was attacked.’

  Marian Wheeler’s eyes widened and for a moment she said nothing. Then she shook her head.

  ‘He wasn’t lying on the bed?’

  ‘No. He was coming at me.’

  ‘Where was he when you hit him?’ Lloyd asked.

  ‘Near the fireplace,’ said Mrs Wheeler. ‘That’s why I could pick up the poker.’

  ‘And that’s where you’re saying you struck the first blow?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  Lloyd looked at her for a long time, without speaking. Mrs Wheeler looked back, wide-eyed. Judy stayed out of it. After a while, Lloyd sighed heavily, and rubbed his face. ‘I told you that everything in that room had a story to tell, Mrs Wheeler.’

  Mrs Wheeler looked away from both of them, as though something had caught her attention.

  ‘Blood stains,’ Lloyd went on. ‘They talk, Mrs Wheeler. Elstow was nowhere near the fireplace.’

  She looked back then, her eyes defiant. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He was.’

  ‘Then what?’ said Lloyd, abandoning the topic.

  ‘There was blood on my dress. I took it off, and put it on the fire. It wouldn’t burn properly, because the fire was almost out. So I used matches, and firelighters. Then when I left, I could see I’d made marks on the landing. I cleaned my shoe, and then I cleaned up the stain.’

  She paused. ‘I washed, and went into my own room. I put on different clothes, and different shoes, and then I went out to check up on the old people, since that was what I had been going to do in the first place. And I did lock the doors,’ she said. ‘So that no one would find him.’

  Judy noted the emphasis – ‘I did lock the doors’ – but its significance escaped her.

  Mrs Wheeler’s statement was being typed when her solicitor arrived, full of apologies to his client for the long delay, occasioned by his car breaking down in the middle of nowhere. He couldn’t even find a phone; he had had to walk to a garage through the snow. He advised her against signing the statement, but she did anyway. Lloyd still didn’t charge her; her solicitor wasn’t happy about that either, but Judy understood his reluctance.

  Back in the office, Judy tidied up her desk. They had informed Mr Wheeler of the course of events, and he’d gone rushing outside. Joanna Elstow had stared uncomprehendingly at them, then followed him. The solicitor had sighed, and gone after both of them.

  ‘Let’s go and talk to Freddie,’ said Lloyd.

  Judy looked at her watch. ‘At the hospital?’ she said. ‘Will he be there this late on a Saturday?’

  ‘Of course he will. He practically lives there.’

  Judy drove them in her car; Lloyd’s had been left at home in favour of the front-wheel drive of official vehicles. Her car might not be in the first flush of youth, she pointed out, but it didn’t get the vapours at a little snow and ice.

  Freddie was, as predicted, at the path lab, as joyful as ever with his choice of profession. ‘Confessed?’ he beamed. ‘Well, there you are. You do win some.’

  ‘Do we?’ Lloyd said. ‘By the time it gets to court, she may well have changed her mind.’

  Judy hated the smell of the place. She didn’t want to be there, and she wasn’t sure why she was. But Freddie was always pleased to see her, so that cheered her slightly.

  Lloyd continued. ‘She’s either going to plead self-defence or not guilty,’ he said. ‘How good a case have I got?’

  ‘She won’t plead self-defence,’ Freddie said decidedly. ‘If she brings in her own pathologist, he can’t not agree with me. The man was lying on the bed when the first blow was struck.’

  ‘She says he was by the fireplace,’ said Lloyd.

  ‘Well, you know he wasn’t.’

  ‘Could he have fallen on to the bed? From being hit?’

  Freddie shook his head. ‘He was on the bed,’ he said. ‘There’s no argument – look at the bedclothes, man!’

  ‘I’d rather not,’ said Lloyd.

  ‘All right,’ sighed Freddie. ‘Let’s suppose we get given an argument. Wherever he was, he wasn’t standing up. Or if he was, then his attacker was standing on a step-ladder. There is no way a blow of that force could have been delivered except from someone with a considerable height advantage – so if you’ve got someone nine feet tall on your list, that’s your man.’

  Lloyd smiled. ‘So what will the defence do with a not guilty plea?’ he asked. ‘Apart from produce a nine-foot tall suspect?’

  ‘Well,’ said Freddie, ‘if I was defending, I would go on build. I wouldn’t produce the giant theory, but I would point out how small and slim Mrs Wheeler
is.’

  ‘You said a woman could have done it,’ Lloyd said in injured tones.

  ‘Certainly. But Mrs Wheeler’s height and weight would suggest that she’d need two hands to produce blows that strong.’ He warmed to his task. ‘She only used one hand on the poker. So if I can produce a good reason for her prints being there, and ram home her diminutive stature . . .’ He left the rest of the sentence eloquently unfinished.

  ‘Are you saying she’ll get off?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Because she could have done it. If she was frightened enough. Or angry enough.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’ Lloyd asked testily.

  Freddie smiled. ‘If she sticks to self-defence, she’s got no chance,’ he said. ‘If she simply says she didn’t do it, well – you’ve got her confession, her prints, and the burnt dress on your side. She’s got the fact that she’s small, pretty, female and a vicar’s wife on hers.’

  ‘And the fact that she was alone with him in the house at the material time,’ Lloyd said. ‘I’ve got that on my side, too.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Suppose she did hit him by the fireplace?’ he said. ‘Ineffectually. Making him dizzy – he grabs hold of her as he falls. So she’s only got one hand free, and she’s terrified. What then?’

  ‘Is that what she says?’ asked Freddie.

  ‘No,’ Lloyd said. ‘But could that produce what you’ve found?’

  ‘If he happened to fall on to the bed,’ said Freddie. ‘Which I suppose he could have done. It’s highly unlikely.’

  ‘But self-defence might work?’

  Freddie shook his head slowly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That could just conceivably have been what happened. But he must have let go. And she didn’t stop hitting him. Two blows were after he was dead, remember.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Lloyd. ‘That’s what puzzles me.’ He got up. ‘Thanks, Freddie,’ he said. ‘See you in court.’

  ‘Are you going to charge her?’ Judy asked, as they got back to the car.

  ‘Not tonight,’ he said. ‘I’m not happy with any of this. Why would she hit him twice after he was dead? And why wouldn’t she tell us that she had?’

  ‘Do you still think she just tried to tidy up after someone else?’

  Lloyd looked tired, as he shook his head. ‘I can’t see when,’ he said.

  Judy frowned. ‘So what do you think?’ she asked, puzzled.

  Lloyd smiled. ‘You’ll give me one of your looks if I tell you,’ he said.

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Well,’ he began a little sheepishly. ‘I’m beginning to think she wasn’t there at all.’

  Judy stared at him, giving him one of her looks. ‘Someone else burned her dress?’ she said incredulously. ‘Someone else put blood on her shoe?’

  He nodded.

  ‘And she’s letting them?’ Judy shook her head. ‘What about the prints on the poker?’ she said.

  ‘Ah, yes. There are those.’

  Judy smiled, and started the car, and there was silence then, as though leaving the lab was a signal that the working day had ended, and now she and Lloyd were back to being just two people who didn’t know what to say to one another.

  The headlights lit the snow-covered verges as the car sped along a country road now dry and cold, and it was the first time they had been alone together, out of working hours, since Christmas morning. It seemed to Judy that Lloyd had engineered their lack of privacy; perhaps it was because she hadn’t responded to what she assumed had been a proposal of marriage, or perhaps because he was regretting it already, and wanted to avoid any discussion on the matter.

  Judy thought of several things she should be saying, but she didn’t voice them. A minute and painful examination of her position had forced her to see things from Lloyd’s point of view. She did want everything her own way. She did want to run back to the safety of her marriage, and it wasn’t a marriage, not really. It never had been. But where she and Michael bickered and complained at one another, she and Lloyd had rows. Real rows, where feelings were involved. Lloyd, with his quick Celtic temper, could forget them five minutes later. Judy couldn’t. It was all too raw and emotional for her, and the rows would haunt her for days. But this one, despite having ended in the odd way that it had, seemed to have left its mark on Lloyd too, and she knew why.

  ‘I didn’t know I was hurting you,’ she said.

  ‘You’re not,’ Lloyd said, his voice surprised. But Lloyd could do that. Surprise, sorrow, anger. Whatever was needed.

  ‘You said you felt like a bottle of aspirin,’ she said.

  ‘That’s irritating,’ he said, as she slowed the car down, and signalled left. ‘It doesn’t hurt.’

  ‘Then why have you been avoiding me?’

  He didn’t answer for a moment, and Judy affected deep concentration on her negotiation of the turn into the old village, where Lloyd had his flat. Stansfield, town of supermarkets and light industrial estates, of civic theatres and car showrooms like the one she was passing, had once just been a farming village, like Byford.

  She could abandon the decision she had come to in the path lab; she could drop Lloyd off by the alleyway. But she drove on, turning through the entrance to the garages, parking beside Lloyd’s car.

  ‘I had no right to say these things,’ Lloyd almost muttered.

  ‘But they’re true,’ Judy said gloomily, stopping the engine. She looked out at the blackness of the garage area, only marginally relieved by stray beams from a failing street-lamp, and not at all in the shadow of the ornamental wall. She was surprised as always that the place wasn’t littered with the unconscious bodies of muggees. But throwing empty bottles at the garage doors seemed to be the most popular pastime in this particular back alley.

  ‘No,’ Lloyd protested, ‘I knew the position all along. You were right.’

  This wasn’t helping, thought Judy. Trust Lloyd, who could always be relied upon to defend himself, to turn sweetly reasonable on her.

  ‘I am being selfish,’ she said, ‘I know I am. But—’ She stopped. How could she explain it to Lloyd? She and Michael didn’t need one another; they needed the marriage. That was why Michael had thought up his ridiculous notion of starting a family – it was one way to keep the marriage going. A marriage they both needed because it was safe, and predictable, and pleasantly boring, like a cricket match which will inevitably end in a draw.

  ‘So what if you are?’ said Lloyd. He gave a short, unamused laugh. ‘If you’d given in to my lustful advances in the first place, you’d have the bachelor flat, and I’d be the one hanging on to my marriage.’

  It was a joke, of sorts. But it wasn’t true.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re braver than me.’

  ‘Why won’t you tell him about us, Judy?’ he asked.

  She didn’t reply.

  ‘I can’t believe he hasn’t guessed,’ Lloyd went on.

  He may have guessed, thought Judy. But she didn’t think so. And guessing wasn’t the same as finding out for certain. And it certainly wasn’t the same as being told.

  ‘Why?’ he asked again.

  Judy tried to explain. ‘There’s only ever been Michael and you,’ she said. ‘And you could come from different planets.’

  ‘The trouble is,’ said Lloyd, ‘we’re on the same planet.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. Worse; they were in the same town. But she had to run some risks for Lloyd, or it was all too selfish for words. ‘I’m here now,’ she said. ‘But I can’t stay long – you do understand that.’

  It had been a hard decision to make; she hadn’t reckoned on Lloyd’s reaction.

  ‘What?’ he said, taking his arm away.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. It was an innocent question.

  ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’ His voice grew louder. ‘You can’t see, can you? You still don’t understand!’

  He was shouting so loudly that Judy glanced fearfully up at the flats in case someone might hear.

  ‘I told you w
hat was wrong on Christmas morning,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to share you any more, Judy. Do you understand? I don’t want to share you any more!’ And he got out and slammed the door so hard that the car rocked.

  Chapter Six

  Marian Wheeler had been awake when they brought her breakfast. The girl, an uncompromising young woman with sensible legs – though, Marian supposed, you didn’t have much option but to have sensible legs in uniform – seemed almost apologetic. But there was nothing wrong with the food. She had sampled the canteen cooking in her YOC days; she had never imagined she would be eating it in a cell. She was by herself, because the others being detained were men. It gave her time to think.

  By the time lunch had arrived, she had worked out what she was going to do. The solicitor had come, but she had refused to see him. Once she knew he was gone, she told the policewoman that she wanted to change her statement.

  And now a sergeant was here; not the desk sergeant from last night, but it wouldn’t be. He’d be on a different shift. This one had grey hair, and a kind, bored expression. Last night’s had been a little surly, she thought. This one said his name was Woodford. Did she want someone to take down her new statement?

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll write it myself, if that’s all right.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s fine.’

  The girl gave her a form, and the sergeant told her what to write at the beginning.

  I make this statement of my own free will. I have been told that I need not say anything unless I wish to do so and that whatever I say may be given in evidence.

  She signed that, and the sergeant left, leaving the girl with her. That inhibited her a little, like the invigilator in an exam, when he walks between the desks. But in the end, it was finished.

  ‘Read it through,’ said the girl. ‘Make sure it says what you want it to say. Then sign it.’

  Marian read it through.

  In my statement dated 27th December, I said that I had killed my son-in-law Graham Elstow in self-defence. This was untrue. I was about to leave the house at about ten minutes to eight, but I did not want to leave him alone in the house, and I decided to try making him leave. I only intended speaking to him, but when I went up and told him to leave, he wouldn’t answer, and he wouldn’t turn round. He pretended to be asleep, and that made me angry. I suppose I just wanted to hurt him because he had hurt Joanna. I picked up the poker, and hit him. He sort of sat up, and fell off the bed. I kept on hitting him. I knew I had killed him. I had blood on my dress, and I burned it. I left the house at approximately eight twenty-five.