by Jill McGown
‘Why did Marian Wheeler go all the way to Eleanor Langton’s, and then all the way back to Mrs Anthony’s?’ Judy said, her eyes bright with triumph. ‘Why go to Eleanor Langton’s at all?’
He had indeed asked those questions. It seemed to him that they had been answered, but obviously not.
‘Why did Marian Wheeler deny locking the doors, and then insist that she had? Why lock them in the first place?’
He thought that they had established that Marian Wheeler hadn’t locked the doors, whether or not Judy’s little girl was telling the truth. Which, judging from Judy’s almost indecent excitement, she was.
‘Why bother going home to change her dress?’ asked Judy.
‘You wrote that down?’
‘Yes,’ she said, surprised. ‘What I didn’t write down was when you told me just to tell the Hills the truth.’
Lloyd was relieved to hear it.
‘And I thought how they wouldn’t believe me if I did,’ said Judy.
Lloyd sat back, and looked at her. Feed in a few wild scenarios, and Judy would sift through them, rejecting everything but the facts, because she had no imagination to get in the way of the truth. She gathered facts. Some were tiny and vital; some were pages long, and useless. But they were all in there, like that dreadful computer of Sandwell’s. Much more fun, though. It wouldn’t be sitting there, beaming from ear to ear.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘Marian was alone in the house with him,’ Judy said. ‘So she had to have an alibi.’
He nodded slowly.
‘And that’s why she went to see Eleanor Langton. It was a trumped-up excuse. It had to be Eleanor, because she had no obvious friendship with Marian – in fact, gossip would say just the opposite. But Eleanor would be certain to know all the details – know that the time of Marian’s visit mattered. George would tell her everything, and Marian Wheeler knew that.’
Lloyd sighed. ‘And then Mrs Anthony,’ he said, feeling weary. ‘Whom Marian has known from childhood. She knows the old lady’s as sharp as a tack. If anyone was going to notice her new dress, it would be Mrs Anthony.’
‘That’s why she stayed there long enough to take off her coat,’ said Judy. ‘Unlike anywhere else. Then she spilt some coffee, to give herself an excuse to go home.’
‘Where she burned the dress,’ said Lloyd. ‘For us to find, along with all the other evidence.’ Of course, of course. If she had simply denied murdering the man, the chances were that they would find some evidence anyway. So she just gave them a bit more. ‘And she did her trick with the poker,’ he said. ‘To make it look like faked evidence.’
‘And if she had trotted out her alibi,’ Judy said, picking up her notebook, ‘we would have been a lot less inclined to believe it. But as it was,’ she said, ‘she let us discover her alibi for her. And congratulate ourselves on how clever we’d been. Don’t give us that, Mrs Wheeler,’ she said, in a very fair imitation of Mrs Dai Griffith’s accent. ‘You’ve been down the Legion, playing darts.’
Lloyd stood up, and began to pace round the little room. ‘She had to lock up the house,’ he said. ‘She couldn’t risk Elstow being found before she’d finished leaving evidence for us.’
‘And she had to keep it locked,’ said Judy. ‘Because she still didn’t want him found too early. Or we might have got too accurate a time of death.’
Lloyd nodded. The trouble with alibis was that you couldn’t really be in two places at once.
‘She had to lose half an hour,’ said Judy.
He nodded, his back to her. Easy enough to lose half an hour, he’d said. And when she confessed to killing Elstow, she simply made it half an hour later than it actually was. Half an hour which she had spent beetling back and forth across the village.
He ran a hand over his face, and stood staring at the Christmas tree. ‘And she burned the overalls in the back bedroom,’ he said, turning to face Judy. ‘Knowing that when we found burnt clothing upstairs, we wouldn’t look for any other fires.’
‘I wonder how she felt when she saw George spreading them all over the driveway,’ said Judy.
Lloyd shook his head.
She closed the notebook, looking sad, and still a little confused. ‘She must have known we would suspect Joanna,’ she said. ‘She even told us she thought Joanna had killed him. How could she do that to her, Lloyd?’
‘She didn’t.’ Lloyd sat down heavily. ‘The locked doors,’ he said. ‘The Mystery of the Locked Bloody Doors. That was the one piece of evidence that we weren’t supposed to know about.’
Judy frowned.
‘Marian and George always went to the pub on Christmas Eve,’ Lloyd said. ‘Every year. And every year, they stayed until ten-thirty, singing carols. So she packed George and Joanna off in the belief that they’d do the same, and would therefore have cast-iron alibis. She would be home first, and no one would ever know the house had been locked up at all.’
‘But they didn’t stay,’ said Judy.
‘No. They didn’t. And Joanna arrives home at ten past eight to find herself inexplicably locked out.’ He looked across at Judy. ‘She thinks it’s her husband being bloody-minded, and goes off to see the doctor. She doesn’t tell her parents that, because she doesn’t want them to know about the baby. When she gets home again, she waits for them to come home. They get in, and now she’s the one who feels bloody-minded. So she does what her mother asks, and doesn’t go up to see her husband. Off they all go out again, and when they come back and find Elstow . . .’ He bowed his apologies to Judy. ‘In all innocence, she tells us that they were locked out. Which puts Marian in a fix, because she didn’t want us to know.’
‘And then, she realises that they weren’t together all evening,’ said Judy. ‘You said that too.’
‘So she has to tell us that she did lock the doors. To prove that it couldn’t have been Joanna, because she couldn’t have got in. Only she didn’t know about Joanna’s earlier trip home, did she? She thought she had covered her when she said she’d locked the doors at nine. Those doors,’ he said. ‘They were bothering me all along.’
The phone rang, and there was a moment before Lloyd snapped back, and picked it up. ‘Lloyd,’ he said.
‘Sorry to bother you so late, sir, but I thought I’d better ring you. We’ve had Mrs Elstow on the phone, saying that her mother’s gone missing.’
‘Missing?’ said Lloyd. ‘Has she now?’
‘Young lady sounded pretty desperate,’ he said. ‘I’ve sent WPC Alexander – didn’t think I should send Parks. Not on his own, anyway.’
‘Right,’ said Lloyd. ‘Thank you. Let Parks get his beauty sleep. I’m on my way.’ He almost hung up, then put the receiver back to his ear. ‘I’ll pick up Sergeant Hill on the way,’ he said, with a wink in her direction.
‘But I think,’ he said to her as he replaced the receiver, ‘that you should probably do up at least some of your clothes.’
She had been gloriously unaware of her déshabillée throughout both his bringing it about, and her triumphant unearthing of the truth. Lloyd straightened his tie, and grinned.
‘Ready?’ he said.
*
Marian had wanted to kill Graham Elstow when she had stood by Joanna’s hospital bed. She had wanted to, but the thought of actually doing it hadn’t occurred to her. Not then. And she had wanted to kill him when she had gone to the house for Joanna’s clothes, with him in attendance, mumbling apologies at her as she packed. But she hadn’t thought of actually doing it, because Joanna wasn’t going back. So he didn’t matter any more, and Graham Elstow hadn’t so much as entered Marian’s mind from the moment she had left that house with Joanna’s suitcase, until Christmas Eve, when he turned up at the vicarage.
And she hadn’t thought about killing Eleanor Langton at all, until now.
She had come looking for help, that was all. George needed help. He was ill because he was so convinced of Eleanor’s guilt that he was displaying the symptoms; Marian had en
joyed the effect that her words had had on Eleanor, who sat at the kitchen table, her head on her hand, her coffee cold beside her.
Marian had thought that George’s infatuation with her was a passing phase, something that at worst a few illicit afternoons would have cured. The towel round Eleanor’s head accentuated the fine bone structure, the youthful, unlined face. She wouldn’t have blamed George if he had given in to a physical attraction.
Eleanor slowly unwound the towel, and her hair fell down in damp golden strands. The movement caused the bathrobe to fall open slightly, revealing long, shapely legs. Marian compared herself with the girl who sat opposite. Twenty-six, seven? Slim. Elegant. Wearing only a bathrobe, and she had thought that it was George at the door, just like last time.
And yes, Marian would back herself against a fantasy any day. But Eleanor Langton was no fantasy. Whatever George wanted, one thing was clear. One thing was certain. And it was more potent than all of Eleanor’s physical attraction. Eleanor Langton wanted George.
Eleanor absently rubbed her hair with the towel as she looked at Marian. ‘You’re wrong,’ she said.
‘Wrong?’
‘Perhaps George does think I killed Graham Elstow,’ she said. ‘But that isn’t what’s making him ill.’ She sat forward slightly. ‘He needs the freedom to be himself, Marian,’ she said.
‘Freedom,’ repeated Marian thoughtfully. ‘Yes, perhaps you’re right.’
And she thought again of those cartridges, in the gun that George had pointed at her. She stood up.
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ she said again. ‘But at least we can make sure that he doesn’t get it at the point of a gun. I’ll go and get it.’ She turned on her way to the door. ‘If that’s still all right with you,’ she said.
‘Of course,’ Eleanor said tiredly. ‘It should be out of harm’s way, whatever he was going to do with it.’
‘Quite,’ said Marian.
She walked along the corridor to the front door, leaving it open as she stepped out into the icy night. There was a thick layer of frost on the car already, and for a moment, she thought that the boot lock had frozen. But it gave at last, and she took out the gun, leaving the boot open. Slipping her hand into the pocket of her jacket, she felt for the cartridges. Light streamed across the courtyard from the open door, and eventually Eleanor would come out, to see what was wrong. And she would come up to the car. Closer. Closer.
It was a dreadful accident. Dreadful. I couldn’t leave the gun in the house, not with George behaving like he was. So I thought the best place would be the gun room at the cattle. I only ever use it there anyway, and the castle could always use an extra gun. I was so stupid, not checking it. But George had thought it wasn’t loaded – that’s what you told me, wasn’t it, George? It was dreadful. Eleanor came with me to get it; I took it out of the boot, and it just . . .
Marian would never forgive herself for not checking the gun. But she would forgive George his lie. She would be patient, and sympathetic, and understanding.
And he would come back to her, just like Joanna.
They left George and Joanna with WPC Alexander. They didn’t know where Marian was, they said; they had rung everyone they could think of. And Judy had seen Joanna’s face when Lloyd had said that there were some more questions he wanted to put to her mother, if she contacted her or her father. Joanna had not been surprised.
They were on their way to the castle for inscrutable reasons of Lloyd’s. ‘What if she’s in bed?’ Judy asked, as Lloyd carefully drove at five miles an hour through the castle grounds.
‘Then we’ll go away again,’ he said. ‘But you heard George – he thought that Eleanor had killed Graham Elstow, and Marian knows it.’ He glanced at her. ‘And I think Marian would be very keen to drop that snippet of information into Eleanor’s lap,’ he said.
‘But do you think she’s still here?’ asked Judy. ‘It’s late,’ she pointed out. ‘By most people’s standards.’
‘No,’ said Lloyd. ‘But Mrs Langton just might know where she’s gone. Or make a good guess,’ he added, with a laugh. His tiredness was evident in the Welshness of his accent, usually carefully controlled and measured. ‘Besides,’ he said. ‘Eleanor Langton’s been the answer to all the other puzzles, hasn’t she? Let’s see what she can do with this one.’
The castle appeared on their left, huge and black. ‘I don’t think you should drive right in,’ said Judy. ‘It really is very late, Lloyd. We might frighten her.’
Lloyd pulled up at the gatehouse, and they walked over the frozen, snow-covered gravel, through the massive entrance, into the castle proper, their footsteps deadened by the snow and the fourteen feet thickness of the walls.
They heard Eleanor Langton’s voice softly calling Marian’s name.
Marian Wheeler said something that they couldn’t catch, as she and Lloyd arrived at the turn into the courtyard. Lloyd, a yard or so to her right, couldn’t see what Judy could see.
It happened so quickly; it happened so slowly. She had seen it in films, when they slowed the action down. She had thought it was just for effect, but that was how it was.
Eleanor Langton, walking towards the Wheelers’ car. Marian Wheeler, hidden by the open boot, gun raised, pointed at Eleanor, her finger on the trigger.
‘Mrs Langton!’ Judy’s own voice, echoing round the ancient buildings. ‘Stay where you are!’
Marian Wheeler turning. Turning instantly, turning in slow motion. Turning, her finger pulling the trigger.
Seeing the ground rushing towards her, as the shot shattered the still night. Hearing glass break, feeling pain tearing at her leg. Running feet; Lloyd calling out. Hands touching her. ‘Get inside!’ Lloyd’s voice. Lloyd’s hands. Blackness.
Opening her eyes. Lloyd was kneeling beside her. ‘I’m all right,’ she said. ‘I’m all right.’
‘Thank God.’ He pressed his forehead to hers.
She tried to get up, but she felt dizzy, and leant back against the wall.
‘Wait,’ said Lloyd. ‘Take it easy. You were out for a couple of minutes.’
‘Was I?’ She frowned. ‘My leg,’ she said. ‘It hurts.’
Lloyd looked down. ‘It’s cut,’ he said. ‘Quite badly. You must have caught it on one of those spikes when you went down.’
Judy looked at the wrought iron, foot-high spikes which carried an ornamental chain round a flower bed.
‘Is she all right?’ Marian Wheeler’s voice, afraid; it came out of the darkness. She was close, but Judy couldn’t see her.
‘I’m all right, Mrs Wheeler,’ she said, grunting with the effort of getting to her feet. She leant on Lloyd. ‘I think you got one of the castle windows,’ she said, trying to sound positively jolly.
‘I didn’t mean to shoot at you,’ said Mrs Wheeler. ‘It was her. It was her.’
Lloyd put his arm round Judy’s waist. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Sit down in the car.’ He led her to the Wheelers’ car, and opened the door for her. From there, Judy could see Eleanor, inside the house, framed in the light from the doorway.
‘She was going to take George away from me,’ Marian said. ‘I couldn’t let her do that. I let Graham Elstow take Joanna, and look what happened.’
Judy looked at Lloyd, who shrugged. ‘Let her go on talking, I suppose,’ he said quietly, in answer to her unvoiced question. ‘Can you see her?’
Judy peered into the deep shadow of the castle, and shook her head.
‘It should be all right as long as Eleanor stays in the house,’ Lloyd said, crouching down. He gently lifted the torn cloth away from Judy’s leg. ‘I think I should rip it some more,’ he said. ‘Keep it away from the wound.’
Judy nodded, and closed her eyes while he dealt with it.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked doubtfully.
‘Yes.’ She glanced down unwillingly, and looked away again. ‘I don’t think it’s as bad as it looks,’ she said. ‘It hurts like hell – isn’t that a good sign?’
He smi
led, and stood up. ‘Mrs Wheeler?’ he said. ‘The sergeant’s hurt. I think she should go to hospital.’
‘Then take her. I didn’t mean to hurt her.’
Lloyd sighed quietly. ‘I know that,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think we can leave without you.’
There was silence.
‘We know what happened, Mrs Wheeler,’ he said.
‘But I had to kill him,’ she said. ‘We’d never have got rid of him. I had to. I had two hours to work out what to do. It was quite clever, don’t you think?’
Judy shivered.
‘Yes,’ said Lloyd. ‘It was quite clever.’
‘Joanna’s having Graham Elstow’s baby,’ Marian said. ‘She thinks I don’t know. But I was washing her poor face, and I heard her. I heard her. Let the baby be all right. I heard her. A baby. A baby! He’d have rights. Even if she left him, he’d have rights. Over my grandchild. We’d never have got rid of him. I had to kill him.’
Judy closed her eyes, as the pain throbbed through her leg.
‘Mrs Wheeler,’ Lloyd said, his voice soothing. ‘Why don’t you come out where I can see you? And you don’t need the gun, do you?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, sounding surprised. ‘It’s all over. Don’t you see? It’s over. I just wanted to explain.’
The throbbing increased with Judy’s heartbeat, as she looked at Lloyd. She put her hand on his, where it rested on the car door.
‘No, Mrs Wheeler,’ he said. ‘It’s not all over. People will listen. They’ll help you.’
‘They’ll send me to prison.’
Practical, sensible, thought Judy. But then Marian Wheeler was a realist.
‘Yes,’ said Lloyd. ‘They might. But even if they do, they’ll still help. You know that.’ He paused. ‘You’ve helped people, Mrs Wheeler. So now they’ll help you.’
She moved then, and they could just see her shape standing out from the shadow of the castle walls. Judy patted Lloyd’s hand.
‘Mrs Wheeler,’ he said. ‘I really think that Sergeant Hill should go to hospital. Will you come with us?’
The sirens were faint at first; they grew louder, until the sound filled the air, punctuated by a shotgun blast.
