Ann Granger

by That Way Murder Lies

‘She’s devoted to him,’ the warden told her. ‘She’ll be upset if he’s in trouble.’ Her tone was reproachful as if, somehow, the trouble was Jess’s fault.

  ‘Does he come and visit her?’ This question came from Ginny.

  ‘Oh, yes, quite regularly, once a month. He doesn’t live in the London area now. Dorothy looks forward to his visits. They keep her going, really. He’s all she has. I must say, he does seem devoted to her.’

  ‘Mrs Pritchard is fit enough to see us?’ Jess asked her. Her heart was sinking. Surely they hadn’t come all this way to be told Mrs Pritchard was too frail to be questioned?

  The warden pursed her lips. ‘Physically, yes, she’s certainly fit enough, although she suffers badly from arthritis. That’s why she lives here. Otherwise, she could certainly manage on her own. She isn’t yet seventy, you know, and most of our residents are a lot older than that. I feel quite sorry for Dorothy, because she’s had to come into a place like this at such a relatively young age. I think she resents it. One can understand her frustration. She’s got all her marbles and, frankly, some of our residents …’ The warden let the words trail away.

  ‘So she will remember something that happened twenty-five years ago?’ Jess asked cautiously.

  ‘Oh, good heavens, yes! Mind you, they nearly all remember things that happened years ago. It’s the things that happened last week they can’t remember! But Dorothy isn’t in that category. Dorothy’s as sharp as a button. It’s really only because she can’t manage for herself on account of the arthritis that she’s here. I should warn you, she can be very outspoken.’

  ‘I’m hoping she will be,’ Jess told her.

  ‘Mm,’ said the warden doubtfully. ‘Well, as I say, Dr Freeman and I see no reason on medical grounds why she can’t be interviewed but, at the same time, we are responsible for her general well-being here. We wouldn’t wish her to become distressed in any way. If she does show signs of that, the interview will have to stop immediately. Is that quite understood?’

  ‘Of course!’ said Jess, trying not to show her impatience.

  The warden sensed that further delay wouldn’t be welcome and got to her feet. ‘Come along, then.’

  She led them along the corridor to a lift. They went up to the first floor and along another corridor until they reached the last door. The warden knocked and opened it.

  ‘Dorothy, the two police officers are here to see you.’

  Jess couldn’t hear a reply. Presumably there had been one because the warden went on, ‘I’ll leave them with you. But I’ll come back in a minute, just to see you’re all right.’

  Jess and Ginny exchanged glances. To be fair to the warden, she hadn’t been told the exact nature of the inquiries the police were following up. But however the warden and the absent Dr Freeman thought of it, to Jess and Ginny this was a murder inquiry and Mrs Dorothy Pritchard (formerly Travis) was part of it.

  The room into which they had been shown was a good size and pleasantly furnished with a traditional look: chintz fabrics and wallpaper smothered with pink rosebuds and sprays of forget-me-nots. But it was unbearably stuffy and overheated. Jess felt herself wilt. She felt trapped and looked automatically towards the window. It was tightly sealed. This room was at the front of the building and the view admitted was that of the busy main road outside the residential home. At least Mrs Pritchard, incarcerated here by her affliction, had a lively scene to watch. On the other hand, the noise of passing traffic must be a nuisance and perhaps that was why the window was kept shut. There were a few personal knick-knacks around, in pride of place among them a framed portrait of a round-faced, unsmiling boy of about twelve in school uniform. His hair had been brushed ruthlessly flat and he stared at the photographer with a level gaze that held just a touch of insolence.

  Mrs Pritchard sat in an easy chair facing the door. She did not bear any particular resemblance to her son, being thin with short-cropped iron-grey hair and deep-set dark eyes which were fixed on her visitors with the kind of hungry intensity one sees in birds of prey which have spotted their next victim. She was dressed in navy-blue trousers, beneath the hems of which protruded swollen ankles and feet thrust into maroon velvet slippers. Despite the uncomfortable heat of the room, she wore a woollen green jumper. It was unadorned with any jewellery. Nevertheless, she had made an effort to dress up for her visitors by the application of make-up. The attempt had not been a success. Her hands, knotted with the disease which had brought her to live here, rested on the arms of her chair. The application of powder and lipstick had been understandably clumsy. The red gash of her mouth was crooked. The loose powder she had used lay in pale patches on her skin and caked up the wrinkles. Her whole facial appearance, the eyes apart, was uncomfortably close to that of a corpse laid out for a formal wake. Jess noticed that Dorothy Pritchard no longer wore her wedding ring. Perhaps now she couldn’t slip it on and off her finger past the swollen joints. Perhaps, Mr Pritchard having died some years earlier (they had learned this before coming here), she just didn’t bother with the outward symbol of matrimony any more.

  Mrs Pritchard subjected them both to an unsmiling appraisal and then said curtly, ‘Girls!’

  Behind her, Jess heard Ginny murmur, ‘Oh-oh …’

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Pritchard,’ Jess said politely. ‘I’m Inspector Campbell and this is Sergeant Holding. Here’s my warrant card.’

  She held it out. Mrs Pritchard glanced at it dismissively. ‘I was expecting men. They told me police officers. Naturally I expected men, not girls.’

  Was it the expectation of male visitors which had led the woman to experiment so disastrously with make-up? Jess didn’t know whether to find this tragic or farcical.

  ‘Well, we’re here now,’ she said calmly. ‘May we sit down?’

  ‘Suit yourselves.’ They were not men and they were to be allowed neither the authority Mrs Pritchard would have recognized in male officers, nor accorded the civility she might have extended to them.

  Mrs Pritchard, Jess thought with sudden insight, didn’t like sister women. She had not liked Alison Harris. Alison thought that had been due to the difference in their personal circumstances and the fact that Mrs Pritchard (at that time Travis) had resented Alison’s easy lifestyle. It went deeper than that. The unease which Jess had felt on entering this room, and which she had attributed to the stuffiness and heat, deepened.

  They seated themselves, Jess directly before the painted resentful figure in the armchair, and Ginny slightly to one side of her.

  ‘You’re here about Edmund,’ Mrs Pritchard said abruptly before either of them had time to open the conversation. ‘He’s a good boy. It’s no use you telling me he’s done something wrong. He hasn’t.’

  ‘He’s been arrested in connection with the murder of a young woman called Fiona Jenner, Mrs Pritchard. Did you know that?’

  She sniffed. ‘Yes. He told his lawyer to phone me and explain why he couldn’t come and see me. It’s his regular time, tomorrow. He ought to be here then. He won’t be, because you’ve got him locked up.You have no right.’ The hooded eyelids drooped briefly over the fierce raptor’s eyes. ‘Who is this young woman Fiona?’

  ‘Fiona Jenner? She was the daughter of a retired businessman, Jeremy Jenner, and the stepdaughter of his present wife, Alison, who was formerly Alison Harris.’

  It was hard to tell whether Mrs Pritchard was disconcerted by this news. She ran the tip of her tongue over her desiccated lips, smearing the cheap lipstick even more disastrously. Jess found herself thinking it made it look as if Mrs Pritchard had been eating raw meat. She pushed aside the fanciful notion of a vampire. Yet there was something frightening, inhuman, about this grotesque woman.

  ‘She was always trouble, Alison.’ Mrs Pritchard’s dark eyes sparkled with hate. ‘Has she got Edmund into this fix? It’s the sort of thing she’d do. She was always a bad lot, Alison Harris. I know!’ The last word was spat out viciously.

  ‘We have evidence connecting your son with
the death of Fiona Jenner.’ Ginny Holding took up the interview. ‘And he has confessed.’

  A look of scorn greeted this. ‘You’ve tricked him, you mean. I know the police and their artful ways, their so-called confessions. Edmund’s an innocent. Anyone could get him to sign anything. It won’t count, you know. You can’t get a conviction on the basis of a confession alone. I asked the lawyer. He said you’ve still got to prove it.’

  ‘Not exactly an innocent, though, is he?’ Ginny pointed out. ‘As a young man he was sentenced to a term in youth custody for several offences of house burglary and theft from cars.’

  The woman’s thin cheeks flushed and she darted a vicious look at Ginny. ‘He got into bad company. He didn’t realize what he was doing. I told you, my Edmund is a good boy and an innocent, easily led astray.’

  This conversation was going nowhere rapidly and time was ticking by. The warden would be back soon, checking Dorothy wasn’t distressed. Distressed! thought Jess. The old harridan is on the offensive. If we let her, she’d make mincemeat of us. Meat. Blood. There is was again. That vampire image was lurking at the back of Jess’s mind and wouldn’t go away.

  ‘Mrs Pritchard,’ she said briskly. ‘We haven’t come to talk about Fiona Jenner. We’ve come to talk to you about an event which happened twenty-five years ago. Do you remember the death of Freda Kemp?’

  There was a silence. The dark eyes blinked once. ‘Of course I remember it. I worked for Miss Kemp. She was a nice old lady. Alison was her niece. She twisted Miss Kemp round her little finger. She was always so sweet and loving when she arrived for a visit.’ Mrs Pritchard adopted a high-pitched babyish voice. “Oh, Auntie Freda, how lovely to see you!” ’ Mrs Pritchard’s voice dropped again to its normal level. ‘Then, within an hour of being there, she’d have wheedled money out of her aunt. Shocking, it was, to see it.’

  ‘Your name was Travis then?’ Ginny asked her.

  Mrs Pritchard again transferred her gaze briefly to Ginny, this time treating her to and up-and-down appraisal. She pursed her lips and nodded. ‘It was. I married young. I didn’t know better. Ron Travis was no good. He wouldn’t work. Spent any money he got in his pocket down at the pub. In the end, he left. He told me there was no work to be had in Cornwall and he was going out of the county to find some. He was going to Taunton. So he went and I never saw him again. Never expected to. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say. But he left me with a child to care for and no means of doing it. Typical.’ She leaned forwards and her dark eyes glowed. ‘I’ve had a hard life.You modern women, you’ve no idea.’

  Unwisely Ginny began, ‘There are still single mothers—’

  She was interrupted. ‘Half of them are single by choice! I had no choice. I had to go out cleaning floors and looking after people. You girls with your good jobs and your cars, money in your pockets, foreign holidays, going out dancing at night … What do you know? I never enjoyed any of that!’

  ‘Do you remember the day Miss Kemp died?’ Jess asked loudly, putting an end to this tirade.

  ‘I do.’ Mrs Pritchard blinked again and for the first time a note of caution sounded in her voice. ‘That is to say, I knew nothing of it at the time. It was a Sunday and I didn’t go to the cottage on a Sunday. It was my one day off. Day off? I spent it working in my own place, doing all the laundry and scrubbing and polishing I didn’t have time for during the week because I was out doing it for other people. That’s why my hands are the way they are now, useless. Hard work did that. Anyway, I went to the cottage on the Monday morning, same as usual. The doors were all unlocked but Miss Kemp wasn’t in the cottage. I thought, perhaps she’s in the garden. So I went out to see, and there she was, lying face down in the pond. I thought first of all that she’d drowned. But the police said later that couldn’t be because there was no water in her lungs.They said it was murder. So I told them, I knew who’d done it. It was Alison. She’d been there that Sunday. She’d arrived on the Saturday and I saw her. She was the same as usual, buttering up Miss Kemp. She couldn’t wait to get her hands on Miss Kemp’s money. I told that police officer …’

  ‘Mr Barnes-Wakefield?’ Ginny asked.

  ‘That’s the one. I told him, he had to look no further than Miss Harris.’ Mrs Pritchard gave a satisfied nod and sat back in her chair.

  ‘But,’ Jess said quietly, ‘that’s not how it happened really, is it? Not according to Edmund.’

  The dark eyes blazed at her. ‘Edmund was a ten-year-old child at the time! What did he know about it? What have you made him say? You’ve been tricking my son! Making him say things, say nonsense!’

  ‘Edmund tells us Miss Kemp found him in the cottage, after Alison left. He was looking for money.’

  ‘It’s a lie!’ Mrs Pritchard’s voice filled with room. Her face contorted with rage. ‘It’s a wicked lie!’

  ‘He was frightened and struck out with a paperweight. Then he fetched you and it was your idea to put Miss Kemp in the pond, to make it look like an accident.’

  Mrs Pritchard leaned forwards again. Her arthritic hands made clawing motions and the green jumper heaved with emotion. The red gash of a mouth worked soundlessly for a few seconds and then the words burst out as if released from a dam. ‘Lies – lies – all of it! It’s wicked to say such a thing. Alison killed her auntie. Alison did it!’

  ‘Judge and jury cleared Alison.’

  ‘Pah!’ She actually spat. The woman spat, not much and to one side, but a thin arc of saliva crossed the air and landed on the carpet. Both Jess and Ginny Holding had been spat at before, by drunks and yobs, but in this floral-decorated room it was doubly shocking.

  If Mrs Pritchard was aware of how she had dismayed her audience, she didn’t show it. She continued with her tirade. ‘She hoodwinked that jury. She put on her usual act: all sweetness and light, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. She was just a nice young girl and everyone was being so nasty to her … They all fell for it. Just as Miss Kemp fell for it. But I never did, never!’

  Disgusted by the spitting and unable to disguise her repugnance, Jess said sharply, ‘Your son is also to be charged in relation to offences against another woman. She was forced by your son into his cottage. He threatened her with a sharpened screwdriver …’

  ‘It’s a lie! My Edmund wouldn’t do that! Do you think I don’t know my own son?’

  Now the woman’s voice was shrill. Her whole body writhed with anger. The red mouth jerked into extraordinary shapes. The dark eyes were venomous in their intensity. ‘I know all about you girls … You never knew any hardship! Men like my Edmund aren’t safe from you girls! Not from Alison, the scheming little bitch, nor from this Fiona person you told me of. Whoever she was, my Edmund had nothing to do with what happened to her. If someone killed her, so what? She was probably just another rich spoilt brat who got what was coming to her! It’s all lies, filth, wickedness … You call yourselves police officers and you’re supposed to know about right and wrong but you twist it all to trap the innocent, you do the devil’s work … I know your type …’

  By now she was becoming incoherent. The words bubbled out of her mouth accompanied by a stream of spittle. She swayed back and forth. The words, screeched at them, echoed off the walls of the chintzy little room. Jess and Ginny gazed at her in horror, appalled by the sight and powerless to interrupt. In the middle of it all, the door opened and the warden walked in.

  ‘Dorothy? Dorothy?’ She ran to Mrs Pritchard and then turned on the two police officers. ‘I heard her shouting. I told you, I made it quite clear, you weren’t to upset her! Whatever will Dr Freeman say?’

  ‘Can we charge her with anything?’ Ginny asked as they left. She sounded shaken.

  ‘I doubt it,’ Jess returned. ‘Ted Pritchard has told us what happened at the Kemp cottage, but there’s no corroborating evidence. We can’t even charge his mother with obstructing police inquiries. He says they put the body in the pond. She says they didn’t. It’s her word against his. She had nothing to do with t
he Fiona Jenner murder. She had nothing to do with the poison pen letters. Mind you, hate mail would be just her style. But with her arthritic hands, she couldn’t write it. Couldn’t even use a keyboard, probably, if she tried, and I don’t see her trying to. She’s vicious, twisted woman and if you want to look at it that way, she’s at the bottom of it all. But charge her? No. There’s nothing we can bring against her. It’s not a crime to be unpleasant.’

  ‘Chantal wanted Fiona interred,’ Alison said, grasping Meredith’s hand. ‘So Jeremy agreed. Perhaps having a grave to visit is helpful, better than – than the other way. That’s so final. Thank you for coming today.’

  They were gathered in a quiet country churchyard. The church was only partly in use and no burials had taken place here for some time. It had been a matter of getting permission from the bishop but that had not been a problem.

  The churchyard lay in a slight hollow so that all around them the lichen-encrusted tombstones formed a circle, suggesting unseen spectators. The spirits of those whose mortal remains crumbled away here now watched with interest as a new arrival prepared to join their number. Father Holland had come from Bamford, as usual on his motorbike, to conduct the service. The bike was discreetly hidden away in the shadow of massive old yew trees which must have stood here as long as the church had, perhaps even longer. Father Holland, surplice fluttering in the wind, had led them from the interior to a grassy spot in the lee of a crumbling stone wall. There they had remained, in silence, heads bowed, as Fiona was finally committed to the earth.

  ‘How is Jeremy?’ Meredith murmured.

  Both she and Alison glanced towards Jenner. He was still standing by the open grave, aloof from the other mourners, hands folded, staring down at his child’s coffin.They saw Father Holland approach and speak to him. Jeremy nodded but appeared to be paying little attention.

  ‘He feels the unfairness of it so,’ Alison whispered back. ‘She was young, beautiful and, well, rich. The world ought to have been at her feet. Chantal’s managing rather better because she’s been able to weep and her husband’s come from Switzerland to support her.’