Crowner and Justice

by Barrie Roberts

  ‘But Sean had a key and you didn’t?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Do you know how the garage was ventilated?’ I asked. ‘When Sean worked in there with the door shut, how did air get in?’

  ‘He’d lifted one of the panels in the roof and pushed it over a bit. When it rained the water used to come in, but it was by the side. It never got on the car or anything. That was how Charlie could see in when we went there.’

  ‘And the next morning he didn’t show up to pick you up?’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘That’s right. He was supposed to pick me up at the Belston Lane roundabout, but he didn’t turn up.’

  ‘What did you do?’ asked Sheila.

  ‘Well, when it got late I tried to ring Charlie — I rang Sean before, but there was no answer and I thought he was on the way to pick me up — but Charlie wasn’t answering. Then I rang Penny — she’s the friend I was supposed to be going to see and we had to sort out a story and then I went home.’

  ‘What did you think had happened, Sylvie?’ Sheila asked.

  The girl twisted her head. ‘I don’t know! I didn’t know! I couldn’t think what had happened.’

  ‘You didn’t think he might have changed his mind?’ I asked.

  ‘No!’ she said, ‘No! Sean wasn’t like that. If he said a thing, he’d do it. If he hadn’t wanted to go with me, he’d have said so.’

  ‘Did you think he might have dropped you?’ Sheila asked quietly.

  Sylvia stared at her. ‘No!’ she repeated, ‘No! He absolutely wouldn’t have done that. Anyway, he wasn’t going to drop me. He kept asking me to marry him.’

  ‘You’re too young,’ I said.

  ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I kept telling him that, but he kept on, saying it would be a long engagement, till I was old enough. It was a sort of joke between us, but Sean meant it, really. He’d said it once or twice before, but after the party he kept on about it.’

  ‘What party?’ said Sheila.

  ‘We went to a party,’ Sylvia said. ‘It was Penny’s brother’s engagement party. It was a really good time.’ Her face screwed up and I thought the tears were going to break at last, but she recovered herself after a moment. ‘It was at the Royal Oak. It was the week before...before Sean died.’

  She half stood and thrust the paper packet she had been holding at Sheila. ‘There’s some photos,’ she said. ‘Sean took them and I got them processed. I never had a chance to give them to him. I expect Kath would like them. He’s in two of them.’

  Sheila took the packet and slipped it into her capacious shoulder-bag. ‘What happened after the Saturday, Sylvie?’ she asked.

  ‘Kath rang me on the Saturday and said that he’d gone out with Charlie on Friday night and hadn’t come home. I didn’t tell her about Friday night and I didn’t tell her about planning to go away with him on Saturday. He’d just told her that he was going to a mate’s up north. I told her I hadn’t seen him at all.’

  Now the tears did come. She lowered her head and they poured down her face while her hands twisted in her lap, without even the packet of photos to occupy them.

  At last she thrust her head up. ‘Do you think that made any difference?’ she asked, plaintively. ‘If I’d told Kath about him being at the garage on Friday night — would that have made any difference?’

  ‘If you mean, would it have saved Sean, Sylvie, the answer’s no,’ Sheila said. ‘He died pretty quickly, late on Friday night according to Doc Macintyre. Nothing you said did any harm.’

  The girl’s shoulders drooped with relief. Sheila passed a tissue and she wiped her eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I was so afraid that I’d caused it.’

  She took a breath and carried on. ‘After I talked to Kath I didn’t know what to think. I’d been worried when Sean never turned up to pick me up, but I couldn’t think why he hadn’t gone home on Friday night. I tried to call Charlie, but I couldn’t get hold of him. I kept trying him all through Sunday and Monday, but there was no answer. Then I got hold of him on Tuesday morning. He said that Kath had been on to him and been looking all over the place for Sean. When I told him about Saturday morning, he said that must mean that Sean had vanished on Friday night, and he thought we ought to check out the garage.’

  ‘Did he say why? To check out the garage?’ I interrupted.

  ‘Not really, he just said that it was the last place either of us had seen him, so we’d better start there.’

  ‘And, if he wasn’t there, where was Charlie going to look next?’

  ‘He never said. I went into Belston and we met up and went to the garage.’

  She stopped. Sheila said, ‘I know this is the bad part for you, Sylvie, but it really will help us if you can tell us what happened at the garage.’

  For a moment I thought that more tears were coming, but Sylvia gulped them back and began again.

  ‘When we first got there, we tried the door, and I was calling Sean, but there was no answer and the door was locked. I said he couldn’t be in there...’ She gulped again and went on. ‘Charlie said we ought to check inside and I asked him how and he said he thought he could get on the roof. I helped him and he got up the side. I couldn’t see what he was doing, I could just hear him crawling about up there. Then I heard him sliding one of the roof slabs and calling out to Sean. After that he climbed down. He looked really upset and said that Sean was inside and something must have happened to him.’

  She gulped again and gave her eyes a quick wipe with Sheila’s tissue. ‘I said ‘What do you mean — something’s happened to him?” He said, “He’s lying in the car. I think he’s had an accident”. Then he said, “I think he might be dead”. I just went off at that. I was screaming and crying and I remembered beating at poor Charlie and then I don’t really remember anything until the police came. They took me home.’

  She stopped abruptly, and Sheila shot me a warning glance, to indicate that we’d gone far enough in that direction.

  There was a pause, then Sheila said, ‘Did anyone ever take a statement from you, or ask you to attend the Inquest?’

  Sylvia shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I wanted to go to the Inquest, but my mother thought I shouldn’t. I wish I had now. They seem to have said all sorts of things about Sean that weren’t true.’

  ‘What about Charlie?’ Sheila asked. ‘What sort of bloke was he?’

  ‘Charlie? He was a fool. He and Sean had been mates since primary school, always gone around together. They’d played music together. Charlie was weird, though.’

  ‘In what way weird?’ I asked.

  ‘He used to imagine things all the time. Nothing was ever the way it is to Charlie. He always imagined something else. If we went to a film, when we came out he’d be imagining things that weren’t in the film.’

  ‘What did the song “She Moved Through The Fair” mean to him?’ Sheila said.

  Sylvia looked blank. ‘He loved it,’ she said, ‘but what’s it got to do with anything?’

  ‘Take my word for it, there’s a reason,’ said Sheila.

  ‘He just loved that song. He was always singing and whistling it, but like I said, he wasn’t happy with the story. You know the story in the song?’ she asked.

  Sheila nodded. ‘A boy courts a girl who’s socially above him, but she agrees to marry him. Then she dies, but her ghost comes back and tells him that he’s going to die soon and they’ll be together.’

  ‘Right,’ agreed Sylvia, ‘That’s what everyone makes of the song, but Sean didn’t. He used to say that, after the boy and girl met at the fair, the girl was killed by a jealous rich admirer, and her ghost came to warn the boy that the killer was going to get him too, but it didn’t matter because then they’d be together.’

  ‘Did you believe his version?’ I asked.

  ‘No, of course not. It’s obvious in the song. The girl’s ill and doesn’t tell the boy. Then she dies. That’s the “secret that never is shared”, that s
he’s ill.’

  Sheila nodded, thoughtfully. ‘You know,’ she said, carefully, ‘that Charlie’s dead, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sylvia said, quietly. ‘Poor Charlie. He was lost without Sean. Charlie was such a fool. Sean was always like a big brother to him.’

  Suddenly I realised what Sheila was going to do, and I made frantic eye signals to try and prevent her. She ignored me and pressed on.

  ‘It hasn’t been in the papers yet,’ she said, ‘but Charlie didn’t kill himself.’

  Sylvia’s head came up with a jerk and her big black eyes were wide and startled.

  ‘You mean he was killed — murdered?’ she gasped.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sheila. ‘He was.’

  There was a long pause while the girl stared and tried to digest this. Then she said, ‘So — do you mean that Sean was murdered?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sheila.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  We had the row in the car on the way home. I don’t like rowing with Sheila, partly because I usually lose and partly because my ex-wife could take a difference of opinion about a TV programme and parlay it into an epic row, which would run for weeks.

  I suppose I started it.

  ‘You shouldn’t have told her that Sean was murdered,’ I complained, when we were only just out of Tom’s drive.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he wasn’t.’

  ‘Was too,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean? I thought we agreed that he died by accident?’ I protested.

  ‘No, cobber. You and John Parry and the Doc agreed that he died by accident, but not one of you can explain how that accident happened.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ I said. ‘He and Sylvia were making love in the car. We know that, right?’

  ‘Right,’ she agreed.

  ‘It was a chilly evening. Perhaps they had the engine running, to keep warm.’

  ‘They were teenagers,’ snorted Sheila. ‘They didn’t need to run the motor to keep warm. They’ll do it in three feet of snow when the urge moves them. Anyway, she never said the engine was running.’

  ‘We never asked her,’ I pointed out.

  ‘You never asked her, Sherlock — so we don’t know.’

  ‘OK, so maybe they didn’t. But, anyway, she leaves to catch her bus and shuts the garage door behind her...’

  ‘Yair,’ Sheila interrupted, ‘and an experienced mechanic — an experienced mechanic who’s worked in that garage with the door shut — sits in his car and turns on the engine to keep himself warm and accidentally kills himself!’

  ‘Right!’ I said. ‘That’s exactly it. He’s relaxed after sex. The cold air gets to him and he switches on the engine. Then he just sits there and passes out. It’s odourless, you know, carbon monoxide. That’s why so many people get lumbered by it.’

  ‘You,’ she said, ‘are lumbered with a theory that won’t stand up, and you know it. Sean McBride was murdered. Sylvia knows it.’

  ‘She thinks she knows it,’ I complained. ‘But that’s because you told her so.’

  ‘I told her so because it’s bloody true, but she already knew it. She just didn’t know that she knew it.’

  ‘That’s about as clear as the philosophical mixture of guesswork and mathematics you were trying on John Parry the other night,’ I said.

  ‘If,’ she said, ‘you had been listening to what Sylvia Wellington said, and remembering what we know about Sean’s death, you might have caught on.’

  I didn’t understand that, so I changed my attack.

  ‘Don’t you think that you should have kept your opinions from the girl?’ I asked. ‘She’s screwed up enough about Sean’s death, anyway.’

  ‘Don’t come the raw prawn with me, cobber! It was you who thought she’d be better off knowing that he didn’t top himself. Now she knows that she wasn’t responsible in any way, that it wasn’t even a stupid accident. Now she knows that some bastard killed her bloke and she can get angry. That’s got to be better for her.’

  ‘If it’s true,’ I said.

  ‘Of course it’s bloody true!’ she snapped. ‘Now, stop talking rubbish and direct me out of these backblocks.’

  I shut up and settled for the small satisfaction of knowing that she’d taken a wrong turning.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  There was no argument about who prepared supper when we got home — I did. While I was doing so, Sheila delved into my briefcase for the McBride file and sat at the dining table with the file in front of her and a bottle of Talisker alongside. I got the feeling that she was shotting her guns ready to blow me out of the water.

  The meal passed in almost total silence. Sheila closed the file before eating, but it still lay close to her, presumably as a warning to me that I hadn’t got away with it.

  The meal finished, Sheila poured me a large glass of malt, lifted her own and smiled at me. I could have been fooled by the smile, but I could see that her freckles were still standing out darkly, which only happens when she’s angry or frightened and she certainly didn’t look frightened.

  ‘Now then,’ she began, ‘let me just review the essential facts in the case of Sean McBride and Charlie Nesbit.’

  ‘Are they the same case?’ I asked, as innocently as I could.

  She showed her teeth. ‘Let us, for the moment, assume that they are connected.’

  ‘Very well,’ I agreed.

  ‘Right, then. Sean McBride is a great, longtime mate of Charlie Nesbit. Sean is courting Sylvia Wellington. Charlie occasionally acts as a go-between. Sean and Sylvie often meet and pursue their purposes at Sean’s garage. On the weekend in question, they are planning a dirty weekend away in a hotel. Shortly before that weekend, Sean’s home is broken into, but nothing, apparently, is stolen. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ I agreed, ‘but what has that got to do with it?’

  ‘What has what got to do with what?’

  ‘What has the break-in at Sean’s home got to do with the deaths of either Sean or Charlie?’

  ‘If you’ll shut up, we shall see.’

  ‘Does that mean you don’t know?’

  ‘Not at this moment,’ she admitted, glowering, ‘but we shall see. Now — Sylvie decides to see Sean on the Friday evening, and phones Charlie. Charlie tells Sean...’

  ‘He told the Coroner that he didn’t,’ I interrupted.

  ‘He was lying,’ she said. ‘Charlie told Sean, and Sean went to the garage. He was probably going there anyway, because he had to replace the passenger seat of the car, ready for the trip the next day. Sylvie meets him at the garage and a good time is had by all until about ten thirty, when Sylvie leaves, dropping the garage door behind her so that it locks. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ I agreed.

  She looked at me, obviously expecting an argument. After a moment she continued. ‘Sean, in a state of post-coital euphoria, sprawls in the rear seat of the car and lights a cigarette...’

  ‘Is the engine running at this point?’ I interjected.

  ‘We don’t know,’ she said. ‘It may have been running while they were fooling about, or he might have switched it on afterwards.’

  ‘Seems to me that this summary contains a lot of “We don’t knows”,’ I remarked.

  ‘Kindly,’ she said, ‘shut your face until I have finished, when you may put any intelligent question that occurs to you or make valid comments. Now — at some point after Sylvie leaves the engine is definitely running. I don’t think it matters when it started. The fact is that the garage filled with invisible, odourless, poisonous gas and young Sean quietly died without even knowing it. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘On the morning after Sean’s death, his good friend Charlie trots into his Building Society office and deposits a wad of rhino.’

  ‘Rhino?’ I queried.

  ‘Boodle, oof, spondulix, bread, money,’ she explained. ‘What was that for and where did it come from?’

  ‘Maybe someone paid Charlie for ge
tting them what they couldn’t find when they broke into Sean’s place,’ I suggested. ‘After all, he was certain on that Friday evening that Sean was out.’

  ‘Yair,’ she said, ‘and if you believe Kath, he also knew that Kath was at home doing Sean’s laundry, so he’d hardly have gone and broken in.’

  ‘Perhaps he tipped off someone else,’ I suggested.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ she said. ‘So far as we know, Kath’s place was only burgled once and nothing was taken.’

  ‘What do you think they were looking for?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, then shot a fierce glance across the table. ‘Don’t say it!’ she commanded.

  I swallowed my comment. Sheila took another drink and went on. ‘So far, we have a dead youngster in that garage — a boy who knew about cars and who had often worked in that garage with the door closed, but who somehow managed to get gassed by exhaust fumes. Then, on Tuesday morning, Charlie wants to go and have a look at the garage.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He told Sylvia that they should start from where Sean was last seen,’ I reminded her.

  ‘I know that, and it doesn’t make sense. He knew that Kath had already been there and not found Sean, so why go again?’

  ‘Because he knew how to get in if the place was locked?’ I hazarded.

  She pointed a finger. ‘Right!’ she said, with a surprised intonation. ‘Exactly right, cobber. Doesn’t that suggest he knew — or at least thought it possible — that something had happened to Sean in the garage?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted.

  She smiled, dazzlingly. ‘Well, bloody well,’ she said, and went on. ‘When they found the door still locked, Charlie climbed on the roof, right?’

  ‘Right,’ I agreed again.

  ‘Then he shifted one of the roof slabs and looked into the garage and saw Sean’s leg sticking out of the car. Yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, bewildered.

  ‘That’s why I said that Sylvie knew that her bloke was murdered,’ Sheila said. ‘She just didn’t know that she knew.’

  Now I was completely at a loss. ‘I give up,’ I said.