Falling into Crime

by Penny Grubb

  His reply came somewhere close to a laugh. She’d asked Laura who had locked her up. Laura didn’t know.

  No one had seen him. Or rather they’d all seen him and not noticed. The finger pointed at his son-in-law. If he could rid himself of Annie he might yet make it. She felt the pressure ease again. She nerved every muscle in her body. He intended using what she’d said, pretending to relent, giving her half a chance to rise because this was deadlock and time was running out.

  Oh, now the smokescreen’s lifted, Colonel, I can read you so easily.

  She must use this to get free. He mustn’t know she’d sussed him.

  ‘Quiet!’ His weight rammed down on the back of her head, forcing her face into the mud. She struggled to breathe, strained to hear what was going on.

  A voice had cut through the night, up close.

  ‘Grandad …?’

  Mally!

  ‘It was her, Mel. You did well to get her here. And I’m afraid she’s in cahoots with that scoundrel your mother married.’

  ‘But Laura was really here, Grandad.’

  ‘You stole the key from me, Mel.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Grandad. I’m sorry.’ Mally’s voice rose in panic. Annie knew the odd relationship between them had been playacting. What she heard now – Mally’s terror of him – was real.

  ‘Then make amends. Here, hold her down like this. I won’t be long.’

  In a spike of pain to her lower back that made her groan aloud, the weight shifted. It was Mally holding her now. Mally, terrified of her grandfather like she’d been all along. All that loutish behaviour in front of him had been what he wanted to paint the picture of the frail old man who could barely cope; the front he put on for the gossips of Milesthorpe and the interfering woman who asked questions about Terry Martin.

  Mally’s grip was strong, but not quite so strong as her grandfather’s. Annie lay very still, let Mally relax just a little. When she made her move she must be sure of it.

  She heard the colonel’s voice, barking out instructions, the sense of them carried off on the storm.

  ‘Dad’s not here …’ Mally’s voice was small.

  ‘He’s here somewhere, Mel.’

  Annie understood. Did Mally? Her father was on his way here, panicked by some message about his daughter. The colonel intended him to appear in time to take the blame for all this.

  It couldn’t work. It was too late, surely. The frail old man versus the prime suspect up here on the moor. Annie’s body in the sea. Could he keep Mally quiet?

  ‘Hold firm, Mel, but keep clear.’

  More voices far off. Too far off to bother with.

  Annie played comatose. A fraction of a second more … as long as she dared … cringing inwardly at the image of something heavy crashing towards her.

  And then she twisted out of Mally’s grip.

  Half way to her feet, off balance, the colonel came at her.

  The rocks and crashing waves spiralled below. In one dizzying rush, she was back on top of the world, high above the city. Invincible. She read every move before he made it. He would grab her as she dived to get away from the crumbling earth at the lip of the precipice, but she didn’t go that way. She leapt back into the danger zone, getting round him. The storm might try to tip her over, but it acted without malice, she knew all its moves. She knew her face smiled as their stares locked; she tasted the power. He was the one who floundered now.

  She worked with the eddies of the storm, keeping low. He tried to grab out at her, paradoxically needing to drag her away from danger so he could push her over without going with her.

  And even now she’d underestimated him. She’d been so sure she could snatch the fraction of a second that was all she needed, but he read her. He knew power, too.

  Voices from the darkness. She couldn’t take an iota of attention away even to think out the need to shout to them.

  But another voice rang out. ‘Over here!’ Mally shrieked. ‘Over here!’

  ‘Mel!’ her grandfather roared.

  The instant his attention slewed to his granddaughter, Annie leapt for safety. She saw him lunge out at her, felt his hand rake its way down her arm. He seemed right there with her, but she knew she was a fraction ahead.

  A hair’s breadth from safety she heard a gasp and was aware of one of his legs sliding out on the slick clay as he lost his footing. She threw herself back from the hand that grabbed out at her. In the moment of twisting away, their eyes met. An instant frozen in time. Realization. No way back.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. Didn’t want to see. In her mind she gabbled out the words, already rehearsing her script. It happened so quickly … dark … it was dark …

  An angry howl dragged the strength from her as his form disappeared, swallowed up into the night and the crashing of the waves.

  All that was left was the high breathing of someone who’d sprinted beyond their capacity, someone close by.

  ‘Annie?’ Jennifer’s voice had barely the strength to breathe her name.

  Annie let herself sink back down into the mud. All her power to read the vagaries of the storm had vanished. She held tight to the grass beneath her and slithered backwards away from the edge. She was aware of Jennifer beside her, keeping low, moving the other way wanting to see over.

  ‘They called you then. Thank God. I wasn’t sure they would.’

  ‘Who? No one called me. You tried to leave a message on my voicemail. Couldn’t make out what you said, but I heard the sound of the sea before you cut out. It made me think of the night we found the body up here. I guessed where you’d be.’

  As Jennifer reached the edge, the winds howled their unease and a pale moon slid into view spreading a ribbon of silver across the sea. Annie imagined a momentary glistening edge to the body far below before the waves crashed in to obliterate the sight and the storm whipped a dark cloud across to shroud the scene.

  She heard Jennifer’s gasp of surprise. ‘But it isn’t him. That isn’t Melissa Fletcher’s father.’

  ‘I know.’ Annie lay on the mud, hands shaking as they clutched tight to tufts of grass. Without haste she let in the idea she was safe. ‘It’s her grandfather. It’s Colonel Ludgrove. I didn’t realize … not till too late anyway.’

  She thought she’d been so clever … built up a picture no one else had seen … but details matter. And she’d missed so much.

  The sea breeze became a jagged hand scraping across her back, freezing the sweat on her skin, making her shake in earnest. She rolled over and forced herself to her feet. Her eyes told her that people were racing about shouting, that vehicles bumped towards them over the rough ground, but the rush of the waves and the wind overlay everything as though no other sound would ever pierce this landscape again.

  As soon as she’d wrapped herself in the security of the thought, an unearthly cry sliced through the air, cutting out the best efforts of sea and sky. Annie started up in alarm, was aware of Jennifer beside her, face ashen. She spun round to the source of the noise. Mally stood alone, pose rigid as though paralysed in some bizarre act of pagan worship, eyes turned skywards, arms and hands raised twisted, clutching an invisible foe. The only movement was in her face that contorted as she let out scream after scream.

  Chapter 29

  Annie watched as people rushed towards Mally. After her first shock, she stopped and allowed her mind to remember. Everything. Details matter.

  The sodden form of Kay, leading an equally sodden Boxer, plodded across her line of sight. Someone she didn’t recognize strode up to take the pair in hand. Annie looked round for Laura and saw her sitting on the grass, as oblivious as Kay to the shrieks that rent the night air. She walked over to her.

  ‘Come on, Laura. Let’s get to the road and find somewhere warm.’

  Laura allowed herself to be raised to her feet. Annie supported the shivering girl and led her back towards civilisation.

  She reflected later that it had not been by any plan on her part. It was
the detail that teemed in her mind, the things she had to get straight. And because in the end these had drawn her to Laura and not to Mally, the sight that greeted the Tunbridges as they leapt from their car almost before it had skidded to a halt on the verge, was of their daughter being led out of the hellhole with Annie at her side, arms wrapped protectively around her. In the mêlée that followed, the hugs, the gasps over Laura, Annie felt her hands wrung and her shoulders squeezed as expressions of gratitude tumbled out. She knew she had her third case. Vince would be furious.

  In the rush of emotion with which Laura and her parents collided, Mrs Tunbridge grabbed her daughter. ‘Oh Laura … how … what … where…?’

  Laura gabbled out her own confused account in a torrent of words, as events teetered back towards equilibrium. Annie stayed at the periphery of the family group and listened intently.

  After the day that Laura had seen Terry Martin in Mally’s house with Charles Tremlow and heard their conversation, she’d taken special note of what went on there. Because she and Mally had been at loggerheads over the cheating at the Showcross, she hadn’t shared what she’d overheard, but the track at the bottom of the crescent was a bridleway, a popular route for the girls on their ponies. Laura had seen smoke from the chimney of the Fletcher’s house and gone round later to investigate. Back doors were rarely locked in Milesthorpe, not even the colonel’s daughter’s with the comatose victims inside. Laura had sneaked in unnoticed the first time and although she’d missed the horrors that lay in the garage, had recognized the scorched half page and pulled it from the grate. She’d decided to copy it through a fax machine.

  If only she’d sent the original with Maz, she wouldn’t have tried to return it to the grate and been caught by the colonel who, in what must have been a panicked bout of quick thinking, made up the message from Mally to get Laura up to the prison where he could first subdue and then kill her.

  Annie fought to get her head round the cold calculations of the man who’d set himself up as a pillar of the community. Events had snowballed on to him. Just as he felt confident enough to use Elizabeth Atkins’s money, Terry Martin came on the scene asking awkward questions, then Tremlow saw more than he should. While he dealt with him, Annie was in his face and Laura showed up with the incriminating page. If he hadn’t been prepared to throw in the towel at that stage, nothing would have stopped him, and what had happened at the cliff’s edge was for the best.

  And now, there were things she must do.

  ‘Could I borrow your phone?’ she asked Mr Tunbridge, hoping his mobile would find a network up here by the road.

  She called Pat to tell her what had happened, to let her know where she was.

  The right thing for her to do now was sit tight with the Tunbridges until the confusion eased. The police would want to question her, to get all she knew. She was pretty sure they hadn’t yet figured out why Colonel Ludgrove had done it, but she could tell them that. First thing though was her duty to the Martins.

  It was far too late at night but she couldn’t leave it. The ring tone buzzed in her ear for a long time before Martha’s voice, befuddled by sleep, said, ‘Hello. Who’s that? What is it?’

  ‘It’s Annie Raymond. I’ve news for you. Can I come round?’

  A pause, then, ‘We’ll be waiting.’

  Annie handed back the phone. ‘Mr Tunbridge, could I ask you to do me another favour?’

  With his help she was able to slip away unnoticed. He drove her back to where she’d parked the car in Milesthorpe. She thought back to the colonel’s kitchen. Those two cups of tea. After he heard Pat was outside waiting, he’d changed his mind about the nip of brandy – was that to mask the taste of what he’d already put in it? He’d carried the cups through and hadn’t touched his.

  Would she have disappeared and turned up two days later dead in Pat’s car with a pipe from the exhaust? Pat might have wondered, but could only have said she didn’t know Annie well. Cursory enquiries would have shown her virtually penniless and homeless; the product of a fractured childhood. Yes, the colonel had lost his one chance there.

  As she pulled up outside the house in Withernsea, the door opened to reveal Martha wrapped in layers of cotton nightdress and the rough sack-like material of a long bulky dressing gown. For just a fraction of a second she paused and stared hard at Annie. Then she pulled the door wide and said, ‘Come through.’

  Annie glimpsed her own profile in the hallstand as she stepped inside. Her hair stuck out like a spiky halo framing a face smeared with mud. No wonder Martha had had to check to be sure it was her. As she followed her to the small sitting room she became aware of the huge clods of clay that still clung to her shoes, the swathes of mud that stiffened her clothes. Dirt and grass rained down on to the carpet with every step.

  She stopped. Surely Martha hadn’t meant her to come in, to violate the pristine neatness of her home.

  ‘Come and sit down, love.’ Bill’s voice summoned her from where he sat in his usual armchair, bundled in the same rough material as his wife and with striped pyjama trousers emerging from beneath the identical dressing gown.

  She stared at them, felt the damp that seeped through to her skin, looked at the spotless moquette of the empty armchair.

  ‘You said you had news,’ Bill prompted.

  They didn’t care about the mud, or the state she’d leave the furniture in; all they cared about was that she had news. She stepped carefully forward trying to dislodge as little loose stuff as possible and picked up a newspaper from the table. Spread open, it was reasonable protection for the fabric of the chair. It crackled as she sat down on it.

  ‘I don’t know when it started,’ she told them, ‘but Terry had worked it out. He’d confronted Mr Tremlow with evidence that the work on the house next-door was paid for from the money Elizabeth Atkins left to Milesthorpe church.’ Annie imagined Tremlow horrified, rushing to the colonel for reassurance that Terry had it wrong.

  ‘Tremlow wouldn’t have suspected the colonel, not at that stage. And I don’t think Terry did to start with. He thought it was Edward Balham, the other church warden.’ As she spoke, Annie thought of the still unidentified body in the building on the cliff. She intended having the full story now from either Scott or Jennifer. And if they wouldn’t play ball then there were plenty of things she wouldn’t tell them in return.

  As she unravelled the tale for the Martins, Annie saw it more clearly in her own mind. Terry’s obsession with the church wardens, the ones who’d been left in control of Elizabeth Atkins’s legacy, made sense now.

  ‘It was just the right focus,’ she told them. ‘No one else had spotted what was going on.’

  ‘Why didn’t the others know? Weren’t they all in charge of that money?’

  She told them about the elderly trio; Last of the Summer Wine; a bit of a joke. Balham, who was retired from everything except some nominal oversight of the farm that operated as efficiently with as without him. Whether Balham’s extracurricular activities in that building by the cliff had any bearing, she didn’t know. Tremlow, nervy, ineffective, happy to do as his assertive friend told him until he found himself covering for a murder. Then there was the colonel. A leader of men, whose daughter brought shame on the family and near bankruptcy with her high living and divorce settlement. Likely the colonel had killed Elizabeth Atkins once the paperwork was straight enough for him to get hold of the money. Doris was probably right. No one would ever know now.

  Yes, she thought, Terry had been on the point of uncovering the fraud, until his ill-judged pursuit of Balham had derailed him.

  ‘Terry must have had the whole story ready to roll,’ she said, ‘but Colonel Ludgrove caught up with him.’

  ‘How did he kill our Terry?’

  Annie’s mind raced over what she now knew, sorting fact from supposition. The Martins didn’t want theory, they wanted facts, so she presented it to them that way. She was pretty sure she had it right.

  ‘Terry bumped into Meliss
a Fletcher that Sunday in Milesthorpe. He asked her about Edward Balham and she directed him to her grandfather. She ran wild but she knew where her grandfather’s boundaries lay. She was wary of crossing his friends and Balham was one of his friends. One of the other girls had told Terry about the building on the cliff, but Melissa had found him some paperwork on Elizabeth Atkins’s legacy. She had no idea what it meant.’

  ‘So what happened that Sunday?’

  ‘Terry went to confront the colonel.’ That was the theory that made Terry look brave and decisive. More likely he’d gone to dig for detail on Balham.

  She told them how the colonel had knocked Terry out and fed him alcohol to keep him comatose as he came round, and noted a rapid nod of agreement from Bill. They knew he wasn’t a drinker and this lifted the slur. She wondered what other drug the colonel had used. Something that made him keep his victims alive for two days to get it out of their system. She’d need to find out about that.

  ‘Where was he those missing two days?’

  ‘In the Fletcher’s house. The colonel took him there unconscious from his own house.’ Having felt the colonel’s strength, Annie had no problem with presenting this theory as fact. Terry had probably been bundled into the boot of the car. The house next-door to Tremlow’s, like Tremlow’s own, had an integral garage so no problem getting him in. And, of course, the colonel would be an expected visitor looking after the place while his daughter was away. Even with its ever-open doors, Milesthorpe was the sort of place where everyone had everyone else’s key. The colonel had a key to Balham’s including to the shed on the cliff. It must have been a nasty moment for him when Annie produced a copy he hadn’t known existed.

  And it was Annie who’d signed Tremlow’s death warrant when she’d rung the colonel about his friend. As she and Pat searched the house, poor Tremlow must have been next-door drugged, maybe in his own car in the Fletcher’s garage.

  ‘So the man who confessed? He didn’t kill our Terry?’

  ‘No, but the colonel got him to go out in a panic with a weapon that night and hit out. He might have thought he’d done it at first. The colonel must have been there all along. That business about Tremlow ringing him up, about him struggling his way across the fields was just lies. Tremlow knew by then that Terry was right about the church legacy. The colonel tried to keep him quiet by persuading him he’d killed Terry.’