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

by Jill McGown

  ‘Well – you’d just gone back to work. Seen Mr Lloyd again. I had to do something.’

  ‘Why?’ Her voice was a whisper.

  ‘I couldn’t have you leaving first,’ he said. ‘It would have spoiled the surprise.’

  She blinked painfully as he smiled at her.

  ‘What was all that about, this morning?’ she asked, bewildered.

  ‘I wasn’t going to let you upstage me,’ he said. ‘Why should I make it easy for you?’

  She gave an uncomprehending shake of her head.

  ‘If you’d ever bothered getting to know me, you would have known it was rubbish,’ he said, and shook his head as he looked at her. ‘You were good enough to tell me this morning why you married me. Do you want to know why I married you? A reason that won’t have occurred to you.’

  She could feel the tears hot on her face.

  ‘I loved you,’ he said. ‘But I don’t any more. And I sincerely hope that your unexpected return means that I have screwed things up between you and Mr Lloyd.’

  She turned and ran blindly upstairs. She was opening drawers, delving in the wardrobe, taking out underwear and clothes and shoving them into a laundry-bag. She couldn’t see what she was doing because of the tears; she had no idea what she was taking.

  Her toothbrush. She ought to have her toothbrush. She went into the bathroom, elbowing Michael aside as he arrived on the landing.

  Toothbrush, comb, make-up. She swept them all up, taking a sponge-bag from the back of the door. Some of the things fell as she tried to undo the drawstring, and she kneeled down, picking them up, trying to wipe away the tears. She got everything into the bag, and pulled the string tight. A nightdress. She would need a nightdress.

  She turned to the door, and stopped. My God, Lloyd had never seen her in a nightdress, she realised, as she went back into the bedroom, with Michael still on the landing.

  She was trying to open the drawer that always jammed, tugging at it uselessly as Michael came into the bedroom. The surge of anger served to open the drawer. She looked at him through a mist. ‘Loved me?’ she said, and it hurt to speak. She consigned the nightdress to the bag, and picked it up.

  ‘We should talk,’ he said. ‘About the house, and so on.’

  She ignored him.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

  ‘Lloyd’s.’

  ‘Are you so sure you’ll be welcome?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  She threw the bag into the back of the car, and sat in it until the tears subsided. She drove off, back to Lloyd. No, she wasn’t sure she would be welcome.

  But he would let her in. And that, she told the absent Michael, that was love.

  Treadwell read for a while after going to bed, but he couldn’t get interested. He leaned over Marcia to turn off the light.

  ‘No, Barry,’ she said.

  Nothing had been further from his thoughts; her response was automatic, produced at the first sign of anything that might be construed as an overture. It had made him smile once, long ago; it was a hangover from their chaste courting days, he had thought, given that in those early months of marriage it had not apparently been a serious rejection. As time wore on, however, the cajoling and persuasion had become wearisome, the objective hardly worth the time and trouble expended on its achievement.

  Without discussion, an understanding had evolved that his requests – it would be overstating the urgency to call them demands – would be met, despite the token protest, at infrequent intervals. This was one such, and he availed himself of the opportunity on the grounds that it might be a while before the next time, and it might serve to make him feel better. Marcia took little notice of the proceedings; he expected no more than her occasional compliance.

  He supposed he must have slept, or he couldn’t, presumably, have woken up. He had no idea what time it was; it felt like morning, despite the darkness. He looked across at the smudged blur of light on the bedside table. Six forty-five; it was morning, despite the blackness beyond the window, despite the lack of noise. Schools were unbelievably noisy places, with hundreds of feet scurrying along uncarpeted floors, hundreds of voices raised at once in separate, animated conversations. The walls echoed with sound from dawn till dusk; only now was the place still and silent. But this morning the silence had a different quality.

  Treadwell got out of bed, shivering a little in the chill air of the room. He reached for his dressing-gown, and was still struggling with it in the darkness as he crossed over to the window. Outside, the dim lighting revealed the outlines of the buildings. Beyond them, though he couldn’t see it, lay the playing-field. The rain that had drenched that dreadful night had gone as though it had never been; even the sleety snow had gone, and the ground was dry and cold once more.

  Perhaps it had all been a bad dream. Perhaps the rain hadn’t happened. Perhaps – Treadwell sighed – perhaps none of it had happened. Perhaps Diana was still vibrantly alive. And it seemed almost possible that none of it had happened. He had had dreams that had remained real for minutes after waking. How did he know? He couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t, standing here in the dark with the school lying as frostily still below him as Marcia had. It didn’t look like a place where a murder had happened.

  Treadwell left the bedroom, went downstairs, and out into the cold, dark morning. Past the staff block, across to the junior dormitory, going to where he could see the playing-field, its frost-covered surface gleaming as dawn broke.

  He had had to see for himself the proof that it had all happened. He hadn’t really believed that it had just been a dream, but some sort of desperate hope had made him go and check. And there they were, two lines of ribbon across the field, as if it had been marked out for a cross-country run. Tomorrow, once again, police would inch their way across the grass, looking for something, anything, to lead them to Diana’s killer.

  Treadwell turned away, and became consciously aware of the muffled sound. He had been aware of it all along, he supposed. The peculiar quality of this morning’s silence was that it wasn’t silent; sounds of the rude world were intruding. A sound. An engine, running.

  Puzzled, a little tentative, he walked round the side of the junior dormitory. The sound was marginally louder, but not loud enough to be coming from one of the dark shapes in the car park. He walked slowly, disbelievingly, towards the sound, towards the private garage that came with the junior dormitory. His hand reached out of its own accord, and he tried to push the door open. Something was jamming it; cloth, paper, something.

  He pushed harder, almost falling as the door swung up, releasing the dense, choking fumes into the morning air.

  Chapter Six

  Wearing Lloyd’s spare dressing-gown, Judy pulled the cord on the blind, which ran up the kitchen window with a loud snap as it reached the top. Daylight slanted into the kitchen as the sun reflected on the hard frost.

  The flat was a kind of antidote to Lloyd himself; it was even more tranquil in the early morning. Hardy British birds called to one another through the cold air, and below the window the village street still slept. So did Lloyd; it remained to be seen what he was like first thing.

  She surveyed the fridge. Bacon, eggs. Good. Frying-pan – where did he keep his frying-pan? On the rare occasions that she had eaten in the flat, Lloyd had done the cooking. It was ridiculous that she didn’t know where he kept the frying-pan. Ah – up there. She took it down, glancing out of the window at the sleeping street.

  Bread. She opened the bread-bin, but only a few crumbs remained. He had used the last of the bread to make sandwiches last night.

  During the drive to the flat, the shock had turned to anger; she had announced as Lloyd opened the door that since everyone was agreed that she was a selfish pig who never thought of anyone but herself, perhaps they could take that as read and skip the part where she got told it all again. Then, tight-lipped, she had told Lloyd what a fool Michael had made of her, just so that he could watch her jum
p through hoops. Lloyd had listened, and then had asked what she had had to eat.

  She had realised that she had eaten virtually nothing all day, and he had made sandwiches. You should not, he had said, make commitments on an empty stomach. It gave you cramp.

  Now she was hungry again.

  It was a gas cooker, and she wasn’t used to one. It was Lloyd’s opinion that she shouldn’t be allowed near any sort of cooker, but she could at least make breakfast, if she knew how to make the thing work. It was supposed to be automatic, but the clicking noises that it made when she turned the tap seemed to have no intention of lighting the gas.

  She had just given up when she heard the kitchen door open, felt Lloyd’s arms come round her waist.

  She twisted round to look at him. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, smiling at him.

  ‘I was supposed to get up first,’ he said. ‘And bring you breakfast in bed.’

  She kissed him. ‘I don’t like breakfast in bed,’ she said.

  ‘You amaze me,’ he smiled. ‘Oh, well, the rose on the breakfast-tray is out, I suppose.’

  ‘I’ll bring you breakfast in bed, if you like,’ she said. ‘If you tell me how to light the damn cooker.’

  ‘I never eat breakfast.’

  Judy couldn’t conceive of anyone not eating breakfast as a deliberate policy. Especially on a Sunday.

  She kissed him again, hugging him close to her.

  ‘What was that for?’ he asked.

  ‘For being such a nice man,’ she said.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ he said suspiciously. ‘What have you done with Judy Hill? I know all about body-snatchers – I’m a film buff, you know.’

  ‘Shut up.’ She hit him.

  ‘What have I done that’s so nice?’ he asked. ‘I thought I was horrible to you.’

  Judy took the bacon out of the fridge, and set about finding scissors for the rind.

  ‘How come you’re up so early?’ he asked.

  ‘A thought occurred to me.’

  He smiled. ‘I know I’m going to regret this,’ he said. ‘A thought about what?’

  ‘Diana Hamlyn.’

  Lloyd nodded slowly. ‘The earth moved for me, too,’ he said.

  ‘Doesn’t it always?’ said Judy, and smiled. ‘I did put her out of my mind for a while.’

  ‘So what brought her back?’

  ‘In a way,’ said Judy slowly, ‘that was what brought her back. She never had that.’

  Lloyd raised his eyebrows. ‘I rather thought the whole point was that she got too much of that,’ he said.

  ‘No, she didn’t,’ Judy argued. ‘Hamlyn says he loved her, but he didn’t want her. And the men who did want her didn’t give a damn.’ She shook her head. ‘It was so joyless,’ she said.

  Lloyd frowned, puzzled. ‘That’s what kept you off your sleep?’ he said, his voice disbelieving. ‘You’re not developing a soul at this late stage, are you? I don’t know if I could cope with that.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Judy, shaking her head. ‘It was just a passing thought. But it made me think about Sam Waters.’

  ‘How very distressing,’ said Lloyd.

  ‘He said he saw her with a boy.’ Judy cut off the rind, and nicked the bacon as she spoke. ‘How do you light this thing?’ she asked.

  ‘Ah,’ said Lloyd.

  ‘Ah?’

  ‘I had a thought, too,’ he said. ‘I don’t think the grey thread means much. All the boys danced with the ladies – I expect we could have found grey threads on any of their clothes.’

  ‘But he says he saw her with a boy, nevertheless,’ said Judy.

  ‘You don’t think that’s just Waters stirring it?’

  ‘Not necessarily. Do you have any tomato, or anything?’

  ‘Mushrooms?’ he suggested. ‘Salad drawer. I tend to agree with the headmaster,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t sound as if she would be interested in one of the boys. She wasn’t interested in them when she was an adolescent herself. It was Hamlyn she went after, remember.’

  ‘I don’t think she was interested in a boy,’ said Judy. ‘Not for that reason, at any rate. But Waters’s pen went missing during the dinner. From the top table. Suppose Mrs Hamlyn saw who took the pen, and that’s why Waters saw her with one of the boys?’

  ‘She takes him outside rather than make a fuss with all these people there?’ Lloyd said, nodding slowly. ‘Could be. Do you have anyone in mind?’ he asked.

  ‘How do you light this cooker?’ she demanded.

  ‘You have to use matches,’ Lloyd said, frowning distractedly as he spoke. ‘The automatic thing doesn’t work.’ He took matches from the cupboard. ‘I’m the one who is supposed to come up with theories,’ he complained. ‘Not you.’

  She applied the match to the grill, half of which remained unlit then exploded into life. ‘That’s dangerous,’ she said, as she left it to heat up.

  ‘So are theories, as Freddie never tires of reminding me,’ said Lloyd. ‘Do you have anyone in mind?’

  ‘Well – it depends. The other ladies at the top table were the wife of the chairman of governors and Mrs Treadwell. First, I want to find out which boys danced with them. Because they’d have access to the pen.’

  ‘And?’ said Lloyd.

  ‘And if one of them was Matthew Cawston, then I’ve got someone in mind,’ she said. ‘Treadwell said that Mrs Hamlyn almost knocked Cawston over on her way to talk to Newby. And, apart from Newby himself, she only had contact with the boy she danced with and Cawston. So, if she was with a boy at all, he seems the most likely. And he’s in Palmerston House, which is where the stuff was found.’

  Lloyd was still frowning slightly as he went to answer the phone, which was ringing unaccountably early for a Sunday. ‘And to think’, he said, ‘I just fell asleep while all that was going on.’

  She smiled. ‘You obviously inspired me,’ she called after him.

  ‘Huh,’ he called back, as he picked up the phone.

  Two minutes later, Judy was reluctantly turning off the gas, putting the bacon back in the fridge, and getting ready to head out to the school again.

  They arrived to yet another tangle of emergency vehicles, and drove into the car park, almost mowing down the headmaster.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Treadwell kept saying, over and over again, as they got out of the car. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  Freddie was already there; he called them over to the garage. As they walked across the quiet car park, a banshee’s wail made Judy freeze. She looked up to see nothing more alarming than WPC Alexander at the balcony door, which would have benefited from some oil on its hinges.

  ‘Sergeant Hill,’ she said. ‘There’s a note up here, addressed to the chief inspector.’

  They went round to the front of the building, and up to the Hamlyns’ living-quarters. Lloyd read the note, then stood aside to let Judy see it.

  ‘Dear Mr Lloyd,’ it read, ‘I am writing this to you in order to make it clear that I died by my own hand. I can see that my death in the middle of your inquiry into my wife’s murder could seem suspicious.

  ‘I wasn’t happy until I met Diana. I was unhappy during our brief separation. I don’t believe I can possibly be happy without her, and I cannot live with the belief that I caused her death. Forgive me for causing you more work, as I know I will.’ It was signed, and dated.

  ‘I’ll get the handwriting checked out,’ said Freddie. ‘And check it for prints. Just in case.’

  Judy looked out of the open door at the scene below. Poor Mr Hamlyn, she thought. Calmly, logically, arriving at the conclusion that life wouldn’t be worth living. Her eye caught the fire-escape on which the scene-of-crime people had been working. They had found some threads of material, and what might be blood-stains at the foot of the steps; they were working on the evidence as fast as they could, but it all took time, and Hamlyn couldn’t face having any more time.

  They went back down. Lloyd went into the garage with Freddie, and Judy went
in search of Treadwell. At least he was alive.

  As she arrived at the house, a motorbike drew up beside her.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  She turned to see a dark young man, who was removing his helmet the better to converse with her.

  ‘I’m looking for a Detective Sergeant Hill,’ he said. ‘Is he here, do you know?’

  ‘You’ve found him,’ Judy said, smiling.

  ‘Oh – sorry. The message just said . . . so I assumed . . . sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘Did you want me?’

  ‘You want me,’ he said. ‘Jim Lacey. I kept being told a Sergeant Hill was looking for me, but no one said what about, or where you were.’

  ‘I think we kept just missing you,’ she said.

  ‘I’m on the move all day,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I heard about . . . well – what happened, and put two and two together.’ He shook his head, and blinked a little. ‘I still can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘What sort of a nutter does something like that?’

  ‘I’ll find somewhere we can talk,’ she said. She rather liked Mr Lacey, and at least he seemed more forthcoming than anyone else she had spoken to.

  ‘I don’t think you’ll have to,’ he said. He unzipped a pocket in his leather jacket. ‘That’s where I was on Friday night,’ he said. He handed her a hospital appointment card. ‘I was in a bit of a punch-up,’ he said. ‘I had to go to casualty. You can check up,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, smiling. Mr Lacey was probably no stranger to the police, and he was anxious to prove that he had had nothing to do with events at the school. She made a note of his address.

  ‘Since you’re here,’ she said, ‘can you tell me anything about Diana Hamlyn?’

  ‘She was all right!’ he said, almost angrily. ‘I know what everyone thinks, but – well, she was all right.’

  Matthew Cawston was standing a little way off, watching what was going on, looking rather like a model for the sharp clothes he was wearing. She wondered if she was right about him. She had better go entirely by the book in case she wasn’t – Matthew would know all about his rights, she was sure.