by Jill McGown
Marian Wheeler, tight-lipped at being thus dismissed, turned and went back into the kitchen by herself.
‘We can use the back bedroom,’ Joanna volunteered.
‘What’s going on. Inspector?’ asked Wheeler.
Lloyd held out a hand, ushering Wheeler into his own study. ‘I’ll tell you, Mr Wheeler,’ he said, looking at Joanna as he spoke. ‘We don’t like being lied to. That’s what’s going on.’
Joanna closed the bedroom door. ‘What does he mean?’ she asked.
Sergeant Hill raised her eyebrows. ‘I think you know what he means,’ she replied, turning to look out of the window.
‘No,’ Joanna said warily, sitting down on the bed.
The sergeant turned, sunlight suddenly breaking through the grey clouds, lighting her as though she were on stage. Dramatic light and shade; Joanna felt as if she were an actor in a drama. Guiltily, she was finding that she rather enjoyed it. Like long ago, when the room they were in had been the sick-bay. She had been the centre of attention then, too.
‘I thought we had a bit more trust going for us than this,’ the sergeant said.
‘Trust?’ repeated Joanna. ‘You arrested my mother, and you expect me to trust you?’
Sergeant Hill gave a short sigh, and looked at her reflectively. After a moment, she turned away, looking out into the strong sunlight. ‘People pay taxes,’ she said slowly. ‘Good money. For a police force. Who are supposed to prevent crime, and investigate the ones they’ve failed to prevent.’
You never knew where you were with her, Joanna thought worriedly. Now, she was to be given a lecture on police-work? She sat back, her elbow on the pillow, in a studied attitude of detached interest.
‘The thing is,’ the sergeant said, turning back again. ‘The bobby on the beat might prevent ten shops being broken into, but nobody knows that. All they know about is the eleventh shop, which does get broken into. And they want results.’
Joanna looked back at her. ‘So?’ she said.
‘So that’s where I come in,’ she said. ‘I have to find out who broke in to the shop – and prove it.’ She came over to the foot of the bed, and sat down. ‘And the only way I can do that is if people trust me enough to tell me the truth.’
‘Why should they?’ Joanna sat up. ‘You hear all the time about policemen on the take, planting evidence—’
She nodded. ‘Just like you hear about the eleventh shop,’ she said. ‘But the rest of us are just doing our jobs. And the whole system depends on people telling the truth. On both sides.’
Joanna looked away from her.
‘Where were you on Christmas Eve?’ she asked.
‘At the pub,’ Joanna said. ‘With my father.’
‘And did you stay there after he’d left?’ she asked.
Joanna froze. ‘What?’ she said, when she could say anything at all. But the sergeant didn’t speak, and Joanna turned her head slowly to look at her.
‘Your father left the pub alone at eight-thirty,’ she said. ‘And I want to know what you did. Did you stay there? What did you do, Joanna?’
‘You think I killed Graham,’ she said, almost inaudibly.
‘I don’t.’
Joanna’s eyes widened with surprise.
‘But your lies make it hard for me to justify my position,’ she went on. ‘What did you do after your father left the pub?’
Joanna’s mind raced. ‘I went to see Dr Lomax,’ she said truthfully.
The sergeant opened her inevitable notebook.
‘She’s our doctor,’ Joanna said. ‘A friend of the family.’
Our doctor, she thought. Her doctor, her parents’ doctor. Poor Graham.
‘Were you seeing her as a friend or a patient?’
‘I was worried about the baby. I told you I’d seen a doctor. I stayed there for a while. We talked about Graham – she told me where he could get help. And then I came home, but I couldn’t get in because the house was locked up.’ The words were coming fast now. ‘I knocked and knocked, and I thought Graham was just being stupid.’
‘What time was this?’
‘I got here at about half past nine, I suppose. I sat in the car to keep warm. And then my father came home.’
‘When?’
‘Half an hour after that,’ she said.
‘Did he have his car?’
‘No. Mummy had it. He was on foot – he came over the field.’
‘The field?’ queried the sergeant.
‘It’s a short cut to Castle Road,’ said Joanna, and with the words, she realised where her father had been. ‘He waited with me until my mother came home. She was only a few minutes after that.’
‘Why did you lie to us, Joanna?’
‘I didn’t,’ she said indignantly, before she could stop herself.
The sergeant slowly turned back the pages. ‘No,’ she said quietly, looking up. ‘I’m sorry. You just went along with a lie.’
And if she hadn’t initiated the lie, then her father had, and the implication was obvious. Joanna could have bitten her tongue off.
‘Joanna,’ said the sergeant, apparently unconcerned about that. ‘You told me you’d made it up with Graham – you’d decided to go home with him.’
‘I had,’ she said, puzzled.
‘Didn’t you want to talk to him?’
This was getting worse and worse. Joanna shook her head.
‘All that time,’ said Sergeant Hill. ‘From five o’clock. Didn’t you want to see him?’
‘Yes! Yes, of course I did,’ Joanna said. ‘But it would have caused trouble, and that would have upset my mother.’
The sergeant nodded, looking a little baffled.
‘When I did say I was going up to see him, it caused a row,’ she said. ‘Just before Mummy found him.’ The tears threatened again.
Sergeant Hill closed her notebook. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘The solicitor that my father got for my mother,’ Joanna said. ‘He said that Graham might have been seeing someone else – she might have come here that night.’
Her heart sank when she saw the look in Sergeant Hill’s eye. But she had to try. Try to get them to look somewhere else for the murderer.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘He was going to check up – get a private detective. But he won’t now, and I can’t afford to – please.’
‘We already are looking into it,’ said the sergeant. ‘Graham said he’d met someone at the pub, didn’t he? We’re trying to find out about that.’ She stood up. ‘You didn’t go to the house when our people checked it, did you?’
Joanna shook her head.
‘You should,’ she said. ‘You’re more likely to spot any indication of another woman than we are.’
Joanna hadn’t thought of that.
‘But Joanna,’ she said, in the warning voice that Joanna had come to recognise. ‘We have found nothing to suggest another woman, and there is simply no evidence at all that anyone else was in here that night. You do understand that, don’t you?’
Yes, Joanna understood.
‘And I hope you do think you can trust me,’ she said. ‘Because you can, you know.’
As she made to leave, Joanna made up her mind. Because she did trust her. ‘Sergeant Hill,’ she said. ‘There’s – there’s something else. Something you ought to know.’
George had reiterated that he’d been in the pub with Joanna all evening, and said that the barmaid must have been mistaken. Then the inspector had chosen to take him through the whole evening again, and George was beginning to feel sick.
‘Look, I’ve told you this three times! Why aren’t you out looking for whoever came in here? I’ll tell you why! Because you’re convinced that my daughter killed him, that’s why!’
Lloyd looked faintly surprised at the sudden outburst. ‘We’re not convinced,’ he said. ‘I don’t know so much about you.’
‘You have already suggested that I am somehow covering up for my daughter, Inspector.’
‘Her mother did,’ Lloyd said imperturbably.
‘I am not her mother! What her mother did was—’
‘Extremely foolish,’ said Lloyd. ‘If there ever was an intruder, she carefully wiped away any traces of the fact.’ He stood up, and toured the room. ‘But she wouldn’t have been that thorough,’ he said. ‘There would have been something. Fingerprints we couldn’t identify. He came in from all that snow – there would have been footprints. Someone would have seen something. How could he have left here in that state without someone noticing him?’
George clamped his teeth together. He had to see this through; he couldn’t let his stomach be the boss. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, releasing his breath, and turning to look out of the study window at the frozen, still landscape. There was ice on the inside again. ‘You know what I keep thinking?’ he said.
‘What’s that, Mr Wheeler?’
‘That if we’d had central heating, it would never have happened,’ George said slowly, touching the ice, watching it melt and dribble down the glass. ‘Silly, isn’t it?’
‘Not really,’ Lloyd said. ‘You get more shotgun murders in farmhouses than you do in penthouse flats, for instance. You can’t pick something up if it isn’t there to be picked up. And not too many people get bludgeoned to death with thermostats.’
A shotgun, George thought. He had a shotgun. His father’s shotgun. He put the back of his hand to his mouth. The fields. Look at the fields. White, clean, fresh. Cold. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck. He turned, his stomach lurching. ‘If that’s all you wanted, Inspector,’ he said, as civilly as he could, ‘I do have some things to be getting on with.’
‘No, it isn’t all,’ said Lloyd. ‘I want the truth.’
George fought the nausea. His legs were shaking. He sat down, and tried desperately to get control. They knew he’d left the pub. He’d have to say something. ‘I was at Eleanor Langton’s,’ he said, not looking at him.
‘Eleanor Langton’s,’ repeated Lloyd.
George looked up, not sure what reaction to expect. Shock? Disapproval? Or a boys-will-be-boys wink? He got none of those things.
‘Times?’ Lloyd said.
‘I went straight there from the pub,’ said George.
‘When did you leave?’
‘Not until I had to,’ he replied bleakly.
‘When was that?’
George stared out of the window. ‘A little before ten,’ he said. ‘The snow had drifted off the field, so I went that way. It only took a few minutes to get home.’
Oh, Eleanor, why aren’t you on the phone? He looked at the ash on the snow. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Heaven and hell, life or death. To be or not to be, that was the question.
The inspector was leaving. ‘Thank you, Mr Wheeler,’ he said, opening the door to find Sergeant Hill waiting in the hall. ‘Right, Sergeant,’ he said, his voice unnecessarily loud. ‘I think we’ve finished here.’ He glanced back in. ‘For the moment,’ he said, closing the door.
When he heard the front door shut, George went to the window, and watched as they went down the porch steps. As they crossed the driveway, the inspector glanced back, and George automatically stepped back from the window. They got into their car, and drove away.
To Eleanor’s, no doubt. George fled upstairs to the bathroom.
Eleanor lay on the sofa, pampering herself with a dry sherry and a box of chocolate mints. Tessa had gone off with her grandmother as arranged, ostensibly to give Eleanor a rest; but Eleanor knew what was really on Penny’s mind. If a blood-crazed murderer was going to break in here one dark night, he wasn’t going to get Penny’s grandchild. Eleanor smiled, as she had at Penny’s efforts to get her to go back to Stansfield with them. But it did give her a rest, so she would enjoy it. And of course, there was a knock on the door.
Eleanor’s heart sank when she saw the inspector, with the policewoman who had come in during her interview.
‘This is Sergeant Hill,’ he said. ‘May we come in?’
‘Yes. Please do.’
They walked ahead of her into the sitting room. Eleanor took a deep breath of cold air before she closed the door.
‘I was just having a sherry,’ she said, as she joined them. ‘Would you like one?’
‘No, thank you, Mrs Langton,’ Lloyd said.
She smiled. ‘I thought we’d agreed on Eleanor.’
She was interested to see the sergeant’s immediate and hastily cancelled reaction.
‘Mrs Langton,’ the inspector said. ‘Did you see Mr Wheeler on Christmas Eve at any time?’
Eleanor indicated the armchairs, and sat down on the sofa again. ‘Yes,’ she said carefully. ‘He came here in the morning to ask if I would play the organ that afternoon.’
‘Did you see him again?’ asked the sergeant.
‘At the church,’ said Eleanor, noticing that the sergeant wore a wedding ring. Interesting. She wondered about that fleeting look of concern, and thought that she might play up to it. It would be quite fun to land Inspector Lloyd right in it. ‘I didn’t get the chance to speak to him,’ she added.
‘And these are the only times you saw him?’ asked Lloyd.
‘It’s up to you what you do about it.’ George’s words. This was her chance to do something about it. She forgot about making a fool of Lloyd, as she tried to decide what to do.
‘Mrs Langton? Could you answer the question?’ said the sergeant.
‘Yes,’ she said firmly. ‘I’ll answer it. I saw him later. He came here about half an hour after Marian did. I know he’s told you he was with his daughter, but if you ask me it’s time she was responsible for her own actions.’
She didn’t even try to gauge what sort of effect her words were having on her audience. She had started now.
‘If she finally had the guts to take a poker to her husband, then she should have the guts to admit it,’ she said.
‘And that’s what happened, is it?’ asked Lloyd.
‘I don’t know what happened! All I know is what it’s doing to George – it’s making him ill. It’s what he thinks happened – that’s why he said he was with her! It’s why her mother did what she did. Joanna must be protected at all costs – well, I think it’s costing too much. Whatever he’s told you, George was here. Until about quarter to ten.’
She looked at them then, for their reaction. They didn’t seem very impressed.
‘Half an hour after Marian left,’ said Lloyd. ‘That would be what – half past eight?’
‘Something like that,’ said Eleanor. ‘Maybe a few minutes later. And whatever George has told you, I’m telling you the truth.’
‘That is what he told us,’ the sergeant said. ‘Thank you, Mrs Langton.’
They had left before the full impact of what the sergeant had said hit Eleanor.
George. They’d been checking up on George.
Chapter Eight
Eleanor took the mini, though the pub was so close, preferring to brave the elements on four wheels. The car park was filling up now that it was lunch time, but she found a space; she hadn’t been able to find one on Christmas Eve, or she might never have seen him.
Her foot slipped on the icy ground as she got out, and she walked carefully towards the back entrance. On Christmas Eve, she had had to park in Castle Road; she had used the main entrance. And so had Graham Elstow, coming in as she was going out, the mere sight of him tearing at emotions already exposed by George’s visit.
She pushed open the door, and found herself glancing along the corridor to the bar, checking who was there. But Graham Elstow was one person she was never going to bump into again. The phone was being used; Eleanor waited, her face hot with the memory of that day, her heart beating too fast. But the man hung up, and said ‘All yours, darling’, as though she wasn’t in an advanced state of panic. She thanked him, and dialled the number, clutching the coin hard, so that her hand didn’t shake too much.
‘Byford 2212.’
‘Is Mr Wheeler
there, please?’ Eleanor was surprised at how ordinary her voice sounded.
‘I think so,’ said the voice. Marian’s? Joanna’s? Eleanor didn’t know Marian well enough to tell, and she didn’t know Joanna at all. ‘Who’s calling, please?’
Oh God, she hadn’t thought of that. But come on, Eleanor. Pull yourself together. You’ve called him before – you have business with him. And what’s changed, what’s really changed?
‘Eleanor Langton.’
There was the tiniest of pauses. ‘Just a moment, please.’
She could hear footsteps in the hallway, then muffled voices.
‘Hello – Eleanor?’ He sounded ordinary too. Not like the tortured man he was.
‘George.’ She glanced along the corridor. No one around. And the people in the bar too far away to hear. ‘I’ve had the police,’ she said.
There was a silence. Then, ‘Yes?’
‘Yes!’ she said impatiently, ‘I told them you were with me,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said again, ‘I thought you probably would.’
He sounded so unconcerned. So matter-of-fact. What if she’d told them that she hadn’t seen him? Wasn’t that what he’d asked her to do, in his oblique way? Was he relieved or angry that she’d told them?
‘But George—’ She turned her back on the people in the bar.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Thanks for ringing.’
Eleanor realised. ‘Oh, hell, there’s someone with you.’
‘That’s right.’
‘I’ve got to talk to you.’
Another silence. ‘Yes – perhaps tomorrow?’ The casual tone was beginning to sound a little desperate.
‘Tomorrow?’ Eleanor echoed. ‘Can’t you come before that?’
‘No,’ he said, and she could hear paper rustling. ‘No, sorry.’
‘All right,’ she said weakly.
‘Fine. Tomorrow, then. First thing.’
Eleanor hung up, and let out a sigh.
‘Stood you up, has he, love?’
She whirled round, her face burning, to see the man who had been using the phone before her.
He looked a little alarmed. ‘Nothing personal,’ he said. ‘Just a joke.’ He picked up the receiver. ‘At least you got through,’ he said. ‘That’s more than I did.’
