Innocent Victims

by Minette Walters

  He eyed her thoughtfully. “If you can tell me how they did it, I might agree with you.”

  “Before they came to our house or after they left it,” she suggested. “The pathologist’s timings are wrong.”

  He pulled a piece of paper from a pile on his desk and turned it towards her. “That’s an itemised British Telecom list of every call made from Sowerbridge Manor during the week leading up to the murders.” He touched the last number. “This one was made by Dorothy Jenkins to a friend of hers in London and was timed at ten-thirty p.m. on the night she died. The duration time was just over three minutes. We’ve spoken to the friend and she described Miss Jenkins as at ‘the end of her tether.’ Apparently Mrs. Fanshaw was a difficult patient to nurse—Alzheimer’s sufferers usually are—and Miss Jenkins had phoned this woman—also a nurse—to tell her that she felt like ‘smothering the old bitch where she lay.’ It had happened several times before, but this time Miss Jenkins was in tears and rang off abruptly when her friend said she had someone with her and couldn’t talk for long.” He paused for a moment. “The friend was worried enough to phone back after her visitor had gone,” he went on, “and she estimates the time of that call at about a quarter past midnight. The line was engaged so she couldn’t get through, and she admits to being relieved because she thought it meant Miss Jenkins had found someone else to confide in.”

  Siobhan frowned. “Well, at least it proves she was alive after midnight, doesn’t it?”

  The inspector shook his head. “I’m afraid not. The phone in the kitchen had been knocked off its rest—we think Miss Jenkins may have been trying to dial nine-nine-nine when she was attacked”—he tapped his finger on the piece of paper—“which means that, with or without the pathologist’s timings, she must have been killed between that last itemised call at ten-thirty and her friend’s return call at fifteen minutes past midnight, when the phone was already off the hook.”

  5.

  00:32 a.m.—Tuesday, 9th March, 1999

  Even as Siobhan lifted the receiver to call the police and report Rosheen missing, she was having second thoughts. They hadn’t taken a blind bit of notice in the past, she thought bitterly, so why should it be different today? She could even predict how the conversation would go simply because she had been there so many times before.

  Calm down, Mrs. Lavenham. . . . It was undoubtedly a hoax. . . . Let’s see now . . . didn’t someone phone you not so long ago pretending to be Bridey in the throes of a heart attack . . . ? We rushed an ambulance to her only to find her alive and well and watching television. . . . You and your nanny are Irish. . . . Someone thought it would be entertaining to get a rise out of you by creeping into Kilkenny Cottage and making a call. . . . Everyone knows the O’Riordans are notoriously careless about locking their back door. . . . Sadly we can’t legislate for practical jokes. . . . Your nanny . . . ? She’ll be watching the fire along with everyone else. . . .

  With a sigh of frustration, she replaced the receiver and listened to the message again. “Hello? Are you there, Rosheen? It’s . . .”

  She had been so sure it was Liam the first time she heard it, but now she was less certain. The Irish accent was the easiest accent in the world to ape, and Liam’s was so broad any fool could do it. For want of someone more sensible to talk to, she telephoned Ian in his hotel bedroom in Rome. “It’s me,” she said, “and I’ve only just got back. I’m sorry to wake you but they’ve burnt Kilkenny Cottage and Rosheen’s missing. Do you think I should phone the police?”

  “Hang on,” he said sleepily. “Run that one by me again. Who’s they?”

  “I don’t know,” she said in frustration. “Someone—anyone—Peter Haversley patted Cynthia on the back when the roof caved in. If I knew where the O’Riordans were I’d phone them, but Rosheen’s the only one who knows the number—and she’s not here. I’d go back to the fire if I had a car—the village is swarming with policemen—but I’ve had to leave mine at the church and yours is at Heathrow—and the children will never be able to walk all the way down the drive, not at this time of night.”

  He gave a long yawn. “You’re going much too fast. I’ve only just woken up. What’s this about Kilkenny Cottage burning down?”

  She explained it slowly.

  “So where’s Rosheen?” He sounded more alert now. “And what the hell was she doing leaving the boys?”

  “I don’t know.” She told him about the telephone call from Kilkenny Cottage. “If it was Liam, Rosheen may have gone up there to see him, and now I’m worried they were in the house when the fire started. Everyone thinks it was empty because we watched them go this morning.” She described the scene for him as Liam helped Bridey into their Ford Estate then drove unsmilingly past the group of similarly unsmiling neighbours who had gathered at the crossroads to see them off. “It was awful,” she said. “I went down to collect Patch, and bloody Cynthia started hissing at them so the rest joined in. I really hate them, Ian.”

  He didn’t answer immediately. “Look,” he said then, “the fire brigade don’t just take people’s words for this kind of thing. They’ll have checked to make sure there was no one in the house as soon as they got there. And if Liam and Bridey did come back, their car would have been parked at the front and someone would have noticed it. Okay, I agree the village is full of bigots, but they’re not murderers, Shiv, and they wouldn’t keep quiet if they thought the O’Riordans were burning to death. Come on, think about it. You know I’m right.”

  “What about Rosheen?”

  “Yes, well,” he said dryly, “it wouldn’t be the first time, would it? Did you check the barn? I expect she’s out there getting laid by Kevin Wyllie.”

  “She’s only done it once.”

  “She’s used the barn once,” he corrected her, “but it’s anyone’s guess how often she’s been laid by Kevin. I’ll bet you a pound to a penny the’re tucked up together somewhere and she’ll come wandering in with a smile on her face when you least expect it. I hope you tear strips off her for it, too. She’s no damn business to leave the boys on their own.”

  She let it ride, unwilling to be drawn into another argument about Rosheen’s morals. Ian worked on the principle that what the eye didn’t see the heart didn’t grieve over, and refused to recognise the hypocrisy of his position, while Siobhan’s view was that Kevin was merely the bit of “rough” that was keeping Rosheen amused while she looked for something better. God knew every woman did it. . . . The road to respectability was far from straight. . . . In any case, she agreed with his final sentiment. Even if it was Liam who phoned from the cottage, Rosheen’s first responsibility was to James and Oliver. “So what should I do? Just wait for her to come back?”

  “I don’t see you have much choice. She’s over twenty-one so the police won’t do anything tonight.”

  “Okay.”

  He knew her too well. “You don’t sound convinced.”

  She wasn’t, but then she was more relaxed about the way Rosheen conducted herself than he was. The fact that they’d come home early one night and caught her in the barn with her knickers down had offended Ian deeply, even though Rosheen had been monitoring the boys all the time via a two-way transmitter that she’d taken with her. Ian had wanted to sack her on the spot, but Siobhan had persuaded him out of it after extracting a promise from Rosheen that the affair would be confined to her spare time in the future. Afterwards, and because she was a great deal less puritanical than her English husband, Siobhan had buried her face in her pillow to stifle her laughter. Her view was that Rosheen had shown typical Irish tact by having sex outside in the barn rather than under the Lavenhams’ roof. As she pointed out to Ian: “We’d never have known Kevin was there if she’d smuggled him into her room and told him to perform quietly.”

  “It’s just that I’m tired,” she lied, knowing she could never describe her sense of foreboding dow
n the telephone to someone over a thousand miles away. Empty houses gave her the shivers at the best of times—a throwback to the rambling, echoing mansion of her childhood, which her overactive imagination had peopled with giants and spectres. . . . “Look, go back to sleep and I’ll ring you tomorrow. It’ll have sorted itself out by then. Just make sure you come home on Friday,” she ended severely, “or I’ll file for divorce immediately. I didn’t marry you to be deserted for the Ravenelli brothers.”

  “I will,” he promised.

  Siobhan listened to the click as he hung up at the other end, then replaced her own receiver before opening the front door and looking towards the dark shape of the barn. She searched for a chink of light between the double doors but knew she was wasting her time even while she was doing it. Rosheen had been so terrified by Ian’s threat to tell her parents in Ireland what she’d been up to that her sessions with Kevin were now confined to somewhere a great deal more private than Fording Farm’s barn.

  With a sigh she retreated to the kitchen and settled on a cushion in front of the Aga with Patch’s head lying scross her lap and the bottle of wine beside her. It was another ten minutes before she noticed that the key to Kilkenny Cottage, which should have been hanging from a hook on the dresser, was no longer there.

  Wednesday, 10th February, 1999

  “But why are you so sure it was Patrick?” Siobhan had asked the inspector then. “Why not a total stranger? I mean, anyone could have taken the hammer from his toolbox if he’d left it in the kitchen the way he says he did.”

  “Because there were no signs of a break-in. Whoever killed them either had a key to the front door or was let in by Dorothy Jenkins. And that means it must have been someone she knew.”

  “Maybe she hadn’t locked up,” said Siobhan, clutching at straws. “Maybe they came in through the back door.”

  “Have you ever tried to open the back door to the manor, Mrs. Lavenham?”

  “No.”

  “Apart from the fact that the bolts were rusted into their sockets, it’s so warped and swollen with damp you have to put a shoulder to it to force it ajar, and it screams like a banshee every time you do it. If a stranger had come in through the back door at eleven o’clock at night, he wouldn’t have caught Miss Jenkins in the kitchen. She’d have taken to her heels the minute she heard the banshee-wailing and would have used one of the phones upstairs to call the police.”

  “You can’t know that,” argued Siobhan. “Sowerbridge is the sleepiest place on earth. Why would she assume it was an intruder? She probably thought it was Jeremy paying a late-night visit to his grandmother.”

  “We don’t think so.” He picked up a pen and turned it between his fingers. “As far as we can establish, that door was never used. Certainly none of the neighbours report going in that way. The milkman said Miss Jenkins kept it bolted because on the one occasion when she tried to open it, it became so wedged that she had to ask him to force it shut again.”

  She sighed, admitting defeat. “Patrick’s always been so sweet to me and my children. I just can’t believe he’s a murderer.”

  He smiled at her naivete. “The two are not mutually exclusive, Mrs. Lavenham. I expect Jack the Ripper’s neighbour said the same about him.”

  01:00 a.m.—Tuesday, 9th March, 1999

  People began to shiver as the smouldering remains were dowsed by the fire hoses and the pungent smell of wet ashes stung their nostrils. In the aftermath of excitement, a sense of shame crept among the inhabitants of Sowerbridge—­schadenfreude was surely alien to their natures?—and bit by bit the crowd began to disperse. Only the Haversleys, the Bentleys, and Jeremy Jardine lingered at the crossroads, held by a mutual fascination for the scene of devastation that would greet them every time they emerged from their houses.

  “We won’t be able to open our windows for weeks,” said Nora Bentley, wrinkling her nose. “The smell will be suffocating.”

  “It’ll be worse when the wind gets up and deposits soot all over the place,” complained Peter Haversley, brushing ash from his coat.

  His wife clicked her tongue impatiently. “We’ll just have to put up with it,” she said. “It’s hardly the end of the world.”

  Sam Bentley surprised her with a sudden bark of laughter. “Well spoken, Cynthia, considering you’ll be bearing the brunt of it. The prevailing winds are southwesterly, which means most of the muck will collect in Malvern House. Still”—he paused to glance from her to Peter—“you sow a wind and you reap a whirlwind, eh?”

  There was a short silence.

  “Have you noticed how Liam’s wrecks have survived intact?” asked Nora then, with assumed brightness. “Is it a judgment, do you think?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Jeremy.

  Sam gave another brief chortle. “Is it ridiculous? You complained enough when there were only the cars to worry about. Now you’ve got a burnt-out cottage to worry about as well. I can’t believe the O’Riordans were insured, so it’ll be years before anything is done. If you’re lucky, a developer will buy the land and build an estate of little boxes on your doorstep. If you’re unlucky, Liam will put up a corrugated- iron shack and live in that. And do you know, Jeremy, I hope he does. Personal revenge is so much sweeter than anything the law can offer.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’d have been wiser to call the fire brigade earlier,” said the old doctor bluntly. “Nero may have fiddled while Rome burned, but it didn’t do his reputation any good.”

  Another silence.

  “What are you implying?” demanded Cynthia aggressively. “That Jeremy could somehow have prevented the fire?”

  Jeremy Jardine folded his arms. “I’ll sue you for slander if you are, Sam.”

  “It won’t be just me. Half the village is wondering why Nora and I smelt burning before you did, and why Cynthia and Peter took themselves off to Salisbury on a Monday evening for the first time in living memory.”

  “Coincidence,” grunted Peter Haversley. “Pure coincidence.”

  “Well, I pray for all your sakes you’re telling the truth,” murmured Sam, wiping a weary hand across his ash-grimed face, “because the police aren’t the only ones who’ll be asking questions. The Lavenhams certainly won’t stay quiet.”

  “I hope you’re not suggesting that one of us set fire to that beastly little place,” said Cynthia crossly. “Honestly, Sam, I wonder about you sometimes.”

  He shook his head sadly, wishing he could dislike her as comprehensively as Siobhan Lavenham did. “No, Cynthia, I’m suggesting you knew it was going to happen, and even incited the local youths to do it. You can argue that you wanted revenge for Lavinia and Dorothy’s deaths, but aiding and abetting any crime is a prosecutable offence and”—he sighed—“you’ll get no sympathy from me if you go to prison for it.”

  Behind them, in the hall of Malvern House, the telephone began to ring. . . .

  Wednesday, 10th February, 1999

  Siobhan had put an opened envelope on the desk in front of the detective inspector. “Even if Patrick is the murderer and even if Bridey knows he is, it doesn’t excuse this kind of thing,” she said. “I can’t prove it came from Cynthia Haversley, but I’m a hundred percent certain it did. She’s busting a gut to make life so unpleasant for Liam and Bridey that they’ll leave of their own accord.”

  The inspector frowned as he removed a folded piece of paper and read the letters pasted onto it.

  HAnGInG IS Too GOoD foR THE LikEs of YOU.

  BUrN in h e l l

  “Who was it sent to?” he asked.

  “Bridey.”

  “Why did she give it to you and not to the police?”

  “Because she knew I was coming here today and asked me to bring it with me. It was posted through her letterbox sometime the night before la
st.”

  (“They’ll take more notice of you than they ever take of me,” the old woman had said, pressing the envelope urgently into Siobhan’s hands. “Make them understand we’re in danger before it’s too late.”)

  He turned the envolope over. “Why do you think it came from Mrs. Haversley?”

  Feminine intuition, thought Siobhan wryly. “Because the letters that make up ‘hell’ have been cut from a Daily Telegraph banner imprint. It’s the only broadsheet newspaper that has an ‘h,’ an ‘e,’ and two ‘l’s in its title, and Cynthia takes the Telegraph every day.”

  “Along with how many other people in Sowerbridge?”

  She smiled slightly. “Quite a few, but no one else has Cynthia Haversley’s poisonous frame of mind. She loves stirring. The more she can work people up, the happier she is. It gives her a sense of importance to have everyone dancing to her tune.”

  “You don’t like her.” It was a statement rather than a question.

  “No.”

  “Neither do I,” admitted the inspector, “but it doesn’t make her guilty, Mrs. Lavenham. Liam and/or Bridey could have acquired a Telegraph just as easily and sent this letter to themselves.”

  “That’s what Bridey told me you’d say.”

  “Because it’s the truth?” he suggested mildly. “Mrs. Haversley’s a fat, clumsy woman with fingers like sausages, and if she’d been wearing gloves the whole exercise would have been impossible. This”—he touched the letter—“is too neat. There’s not a letter out of place.”

  “Peter then.”

  “Peter Haversley’s an alcoholic. His hands shake.”

  “Jeremy Jardine?”

  “I doubt it. Poison-pen letters are usually written by women. I’m sorry, Mrs. Lavenham, but I can guarantee the only fingerprints I will find on this—other than yours and mine, of course—are Bridey O’Riordan’s. Not because the person who did it wore gloves, but because Bridey did it herself.”