Jones seems astonished by these revelations, and his cartoon voice reaches an even higher pitch than usual.
‘Ever been married?’ asks Charles.
‘Er … well, no. Why?’
Charles, who has discovered that marriage does not always deliver the advertised bliss, finds the facts rather less surprising. ‘Just wondered.’
‘Anyway,’ continues Jones, ‘the best is yet to come. He says, and his wife confirms, that that evening they both went to the place where he was to meet the deceased to break it off. The wife went to make sure he didn’t lose his nerve. He’d tried ending the relationship more than once before. Apparently, the deceased was able “to wind him round her little finger” — the wife’s words; you’ll be getting a statement from her too. Well, the deceased never showed. They waited several hours and went home. He expected a call from her over the next few days, but heard nothing. He eventually concluded she’d thrown him over, done him a favour he said, so he never called her. He has a pretty good alibi for the rest of the week too, as they had family arriving from South Africa, and they all went off to the Continent for five days.’
Charles says nothing for a while as he continues to make notes. ‘Were you present at the interviews?’ he asks finally.
‘Part of them, yes.’
‘What did you make of the couple?’
‘I thought he was telling the truth. He’s a professional man, slick and handsome, but I get the impression the deceased dominated him, and he liked it. He was in thrall to her … sexually … you know? The wife was more difficult to judge. I can’t really understand why she put up with it for so long, but I don’t for a moment think she’s an accomplice to murder. Very earnest. Pillar of the local church.’
‘Prima facie evidence of guilt, in my book.’
‘You’re not serious, are you?’
Charles sighs silently. ‘No.’
‘Good. Anyway, we’re still checking the alibi for the following days, but I’ve seen dated photographs with them standing under the Eiffel Tower, so I expect it’ll all check out.’
‘Very well,’ concludes Charles. ‘For the moment, let’s assume they’re in the clear. What’s the second piece of evidence?’
‘Before I go into that, one last point about the boyfriend. He remembers some of the clothes the deceased was wearing when he last saw her.’ Charles hears Jones leafing through some papers. ‘Yes, here it is: “…a pink dress with darker pink flowers, white collar and cuffs, black suspenders and stockings”. He claims it was his favourite outfit of hers, and she wore it specially for their dirty weekend. He says he bought the dress for her, on a New York business trip. Note, no other underwear. Used to stop off and have sex in a field, apparently. Which means that if he didn’t kill her, someone else did within a reasonably short time.’
‘Why? Because she was wearing those clothes when the body was found? Not necessarily. She could’ve left home wearing them. Or packed them when she left, for later use. In fact, she could’ve been wearing them at any future time, especially if they were her favourite manhunting outfit. Still, I take your point. It’s an interesting possibility. What’s the second piece of evidence?’
‘The body. It’s definitely the judge’s wife. The dental records leave no room for doubt.’
‘Any news from the lab about those bruises?’
‘The ones on her neck? No, nothing yet. I’m due to chase them up this afternoon. So, what next? Can we arrest him, do you think?’
‘No. It’s still far too tenuous. Not only is there no evidence of murder yet, but there’s no connection to him.’
‘She didn’t tie herself up and jump in.’
‘No. But have you thought of the possibility that one person might have killed her, and another disposed of the body?’
‘Unlikely, and that’s still two crimes for which he’s a reasonable suspect.’
‘I’m afraid I disagree. You told me you didn’t want to act until you were sure. Yes, there’s evidence of crimes, but there’s still nothing to link him to either one. The fact that she didn’t turn up to meet the boyfriend doesn’t help us, other than to exclude him. She could have left the matrimonial home wearing that outfit, or with it packed, and been picked up in Cumberland by the murderer. We know she liked to live dangerously, and she had no trouble picking up men. It’s easy to see a woman like that attracting danger from any number of sources.’
The line goes silent as Jones considers these possibilities. ‘All right, I take your point. Any other suggestions as to the evidence then?’
‘I’d like to wait and find out what you discover at the house.’
‘Fine.’ There’s another pause. ‘What’s your gut feeling?’ asks Jones.
‘I don’t have one yet. Sorry.’
‘If he didn’t kill her, he’s a saint. I’d have murdered her,’ says Jones, betraying the first, albeit injudicious, evidence of a sense of humour since Charles met him.
‘Would you, now?’
Jones is surprised by the sarcasm and bitterness in Charles’s voice. The line falls silent for a third time.
Charles can almost hear the cogs in Jones’s head clicking slowly into gear as he remembers some of the gossip surrounding Charles. Indeed, Charles can detect from Jones’s sharp intake of breath exactly the moment the little Canadian solicitor remembers how Charles’s wife was murdered and who was charged with the crime. ‘Oh, goodness, I’m sorry, Mr Holborne … Charles … I completely forgot.’
‘It’s OK. Forget it.’
‘No, it was terribly tactless, please forgive me.’
‘Forget it.’
‘Yes … well … anyway … according to the friends of the family and the neighbours, he was a saint. There are other statements. They’re almost unanimous: he wasn’t the type for violence.’
‘There’s no such man in my experience. Everyone can be violent, given the right circumstances, the right provocation. And the more I read, the stronger the motive becomes. This woman had a black belt in provocation.’
‘I agree there. God spare us from women like her.’
‘Amen to that,’ replies Charles.
CHAPTER 6
The Johansens watch, speechless, as the policemen methodically, unemotionally, destroy their lovely home. Anke Johansen is too upset, too astonished, even to cry. Tears will come later, in the following weeks and months as she slowly attempts to rebuild the beautiful Danish home she’s painstakingly created during their three years in this alien country. The Johansens know nothing of a judge, his missing wife or their marital difficulties. They can answer none of the detective inspector’s relentless questions. All they know is they purchased a house from a man who they were told was a lawyer. They’ve never met him, never spoken directly to him, never found anything unusual in what was his house, and never, Gud forbyde! had to wash blood off walls.
The couple sit in their kitchen, finding it almost impossible to focus on the questions fired at them while, all around and above them, banging and crashing can be heard as, piece by piece, their home is taken apart. There are men in the loft lifting the insulation that Erik laid only the previous winter; men in the garden shed, decanting all the old garden implements and discarding them onto the smooth green lawn; men in the bathroom taking the white panels off the bath and the immersion heater and leaving dents and scratches all over them; men in the lounge peeling back layers of wallpaper, and men in the bedrooms lifting the carpets. Erik sits next to his wife on the tall pine stool at the kitchen bench, clasping her hand in his, knowing in his heart that no matter what receipts the inspector offers, no matter how many times he promises that everything will be replaced in perfect order, they will never again feel secure in their lovely home.
After half an hour of questions, a young police officer in uniform puts his head round the door and raises his eyebrows.
‘Got something?’ asks the man known to Charles as “DI Smith”, putting his pen down on the bench and sliding off the stoo
l.
‘Maybe.’
Smith speaks as kindly as he can to the Johansens. ‘It might be as well if you wait here. I expect there’s quite a mess. I’ll only be a moment.’
He disappears after his young colleague, and for a moment the Johansens wait in the kitchen. There is then a particularly loud bang from the room above them and Anke tears her hand from her husband’s grip and runs upstairs. He follows. They find the inspector kneeling in the middle of the floor of their bedroom. The furniture has been moved to one side of the room and the carpet lifted and rolled back to reveal shiny floorboards. Anke has always liked polished wooden floors, but these were stained a dark oak colour, darker than any of the other floors in the house, and they hadn’t matched their light pine furniture. So she had the room carpeted in a lovely light green colour which complemented the greens and blues of the patchwork quilt her mother had sewn and given to them as a moving-in present.
That carpet is now rucked and creased, partly pinned down by a wardrobe moved from the side of the room and made grubby by the loose floorboards that she sees have been removed and discarded on top of it. As she will discover, it’ll take weeks for the creases to disappear and professional cleaning will never manage completely to eradicate the marks.
The Johansens watch unnoticed from the door as a group of men in a tight circle peer into the space, now revealed, between the removed floorboards and the ceiling of the dining room below. The young policeman is showing the inspector something on the joists and on the underside of several of the floorboards. Erik leans into the room to get a closer look and sees irregular black stains. Some dark liquid seems to have been spilled on the floor and soaked through the floorboards, staining their undersides. Little rivulets of dried liquid can be seen on the joists and, on the top of the plasterboard that forms the ceiling of the dining room below, there is a large irregular stain. The colour is different from that of the wood stain, more red, more beautiful. Had the entire floor been that colour, Erik doubts that his wife would have wanted to carpet the room at all.
One of the men, one not wearing a uniform, has taken out a scalpel and is carefully scraping the top layer of the staining into a tiny plastic bag.
‘Look here,’ says another man, and the tight circle of men shifts on its haunches, a crab-like creature with a single mind, to the right. The speaker is pointing to some cable that disappears down through the ceiling, part of the lighting circuit. Below it, on the other side of the boards, is the ceiling rose and the beautiful brass chandelier in the centre of the dining room ceiling. That belonged to the former owners. The dining room has not been decorated at all since the Johansens moved in; they know few people in England and entertain infrequently, so that room was their last priority when moulding the new home to the personalities of its new occupants. In any event, the dining room and the bedroom above looked as if they’d been redecorated more recently than the others and so the Johansens felt justified in leaving them to last.
Another man speaks. ‘It runs right down the wire.’
‘Is there enough?’ asks Smith.
‘Well, the stuff on the boards has soaked right in. I doubt that it’ll be possible to do much with it. But where it’s on plastic, it’s simply dried on the surface.’
‘Let’s have a look downstairs,’ says the inspector, getting up.
He and two of the others push past the Johansens and descend to the dining room. Erik follows them, his curiosity pricked, while Anke remains upstairs. In the dining room, the Inspector takes a chair and stands on it underneath the chandelier. It is a lovely piece of metalwork, with six graceful brass arms spreading from a central sphere. The wire from the bedroom disappears down into the sphere and then splits to serve the bulbs at the end of each arm.
It jangles slightly at the inspector’s touch. His hands move around the sphere gently, probing, twisting, trying to find if it comes undone. Suddenly it separates, and the top half moves upwards along the cable as if someone had sliced the top off a hard-boiled egg.
The inspector peers into the lower half of the sphere. There’s a plastic junction box from which the cable divides. The junction box sits in black crusty material almost a quarter of an inch deep.
‘Get another chair, and look at this,’ he says excitedly to one of the men not wearing uniform. The other does as requested, and looks.
‘Perfect,’ he says, reaching into his pocket for another plastic bag. ‘He was bloody lucky the house didn’t burn down. This could easily have shorted.’
The inspector descends from his chair and is about to speak when another officer appears at the door. ‘Look what I’ve found,’ he announces proudly. In his gloved hand is a length of cable. ‘It was under the water tank in the loft.’ He brings it forward and the Inspector studies it without touching it.
‘Mr Johansen, would you mind having a look at this, sir? Don’t touch it, please.’ Johansen moves forward. ‘It’s co-axial cable for a television aerial,’ says Smith.
‘Yes?’
‘Did you bring this into the house?’
‘No. I have no such cable. The television outlets were already installed when we arrived. I have done no work to them.’
‘Thank you. Bag it up please, Robert.’ The policeman leaves carrying the cable. ‘And don’t forget to log exactly where you found it!’ calls Smith after him. He turns to Mr Johansen. ‘I don’t suppose you have any idea what that red staining on the underside of your floorboards upstairs is, do you?’ Johansen shakes his head. ‘No, I didn’t think so. Perhaps you would like to take your wife back into the kitchen, sir? It’ll be less distressing for her. We may be some time still.’
Discoveries come thick and fast thereafter. Under the wallpaper in the bedroom are found splashes of the same reddish black stain as in the floorspace. Removal of the coving around the bedroom ceiling reveals more. The police officers, so good-humoured and light-hearted when they arrived, slowly become grim and silent as they realise that a bloodbath has occurred in the room.
Three hours later they depart, filling two vans with their plastic-bagged prizes, and leaving Mr and Mrs Johansen standing in the wreckage of their home, clutching Kent County Constabulary Property Receipts.
CHAPTER 7
Charles closes the outer doors of Chambers, double-locks them, and walks downstairs into the courtyard. It’s almost ten o’clock, dusk is falling, and the Temple is silent.
The gas lamps have just been lit and they glow like warm yellow candles, as yet casting no light on their surroundings. This is the time of day when Charles loves the Temple most. The sky over the River Thames glows with phosphorescent pinks and blues, and the red brick of the buildings, the green of the lawns and the pitted white stone of the Temple Church all seem to vibrate with colour. He walks through Sergeant’s Inn and hesitates as he passes the rear door to The Clachan. The rise and fall of animated conversation and the smell of alcohol strike him simultaneously, and for a moment he’s tempted to push open the door and step into the showy drinking establishment to see who’s holding court. He can guess the “regulars” who will be there lingering over “one last bottle” — the criminal Bar in particular is infamous for its poseurs, storytellers and claret conversationalists — but he’s not in the mood to join a party that’s already well on its way to inebriation.
He crosses Fleet Street, half-deserted by this time in the evening, and walks the hundred or so yards to the block that houses his pocket-sized home. Dennis, the concierge cum porter, has left for the day and Charles reaches over the reception desk for his post before climbing the stairs to his flat.
The place is so small he can throw his briefcase and robes bag onto the couch from the front door. He crosses the lobby in a single step, enters the kitchen and pours himself a large scotch. He drinks most of it in a single swallow and then tops up his glass. He then joins his briefcase on the couch. As he is about to reach for the television switch, the telephone rings.
‘Mr Holborne? It’s Mr Jones.’
‘Good evening, Mr Jones,’ says Charles, taking another sip of scotch.
‘Forgive me for tracking you down. I called your clerk at home, and she gave me the number. It’s urgent, I’m afraid. I’m at Maidstone police station now with two of the officers involved in the investigation, one of whom you’ve met. They wish to arrest the suspect, but before they do so I would like your input.’
‘Fire away.’
‘Time is of the essence, as we believe the suspect may now be aware of the enquiries. The police have spent the last six hours executing a search warrant at the address where he lived at the time of the wife’s disappearance. In the loft we found co-axial cable identical to that used to tie the plastic sheeting round the body. That’s not all. The entire house has been redecorated, probably more than once. However, in the main bedroom, under the carpet, are boards that have been heavily stained and re-varnished. We lifted them up, and on the underside of the boards, over a large area, there is bloodstaining. It’s even dripped through into the light fitting below. There are splashes all over the bedroom. We’ve no match yet, but it tests as human blood. If we’re going to move, I think we should do it now. The question is: is there enough to arrest him?’
‘There is now. But do it voluntarily if at all possible. “Helping with enquiries”.’
‘Understood,’ says Jones, and he hangs up immediately.
Charles does the same and turns on the television. He’s hungry, but just wants five minutes before rousing himself to start cooking.
Ringing suddenly fills Charles’s head. He reaches blindly to the telephone beside him and puts the receiver to his ear.
The Waxwork Corpse: A legal thriller with a chilling twist (Charles Holborne Legal Thrillers Book 5) Page 6
