Shades of Evil

by Shirley Wells

  Jill liked to wake up slowly, preferably with coffee in bed. That was out of the question, but she had no intention of doing a single thing before she’d had a caffeine hit.

  ‘You have a shower,’ she said, ‘and I’ll sort the coffee.’

  While it was brewing, she let the cats out, peering into the garden as she did so just in case any lunatics were out there. It was deserted, of course. All the same, she wouldn’t rest easy until the cats were on the right side of a locked cat-flap again.

  She was sitting at the table, a large mug of coffee in front of her when Max came downstairs. Not only had he showered, he’d managed to find a clean shirt. He looked wide awake and smart; she looked as if she’d spent an uncomfortable night on a sofa.

  She poured him a coffee and glanced out of the window again to see what her cats were up to. Sam was sitting on the shed’s roof surveying his world. Rabble and Tojo were having their usual morning fight.

  Max’s phone rang and Jill wondered why they couldn’t even manage a coffee without interruption.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she heard Max say. ‘How? … Do we know when? … Yeah, OK.’

  He ended the call and shook his head in despair.

  ‘What’s happened?’ She hardly dare ask.

  ‘Vincent Cole is dead. He killed himself.’

  It took a moment for his words to sink in.

  ‘No,’ she said with absolute certainty. ‘I don’t know what happened, but no way did he kill himself.’

  ‘Believe me, he did. He’s hanging from the beam in his sitting room.’

  ‘No, Max. He didn’t.’

  ‘Jill,’ he said patiently, ‘the bloke never got over losing his wife. Now his daughter is dead. In his shoes, I’d probably top myself, too.’

  ‘Trust me, Max, this isn’t suicide. Yes, he might have been having thoughts about ending it all but there is no way he would do that before he’d buried Lauren.’

  He was perfectly still, considering that.

  ‘We do all we can for our loved ones,’ she reminded him, ‘and the last thing we can do is lay to them rest with the dignity they deserve. Believe me, Vincent Cole wouldn’t have killed himself before Lauren was at rest beside her mother. When we visited, that’s all he cared about.’

  ‘Shit!’

  Max was on the phone again.

  ‘Vincent Cole,’ he told the person at the other end. ‘I want everyone available out there. And nothing is to be touched. Nothing at all. I’m on my way. I’ll be there’ – he glanced at his watch – ‘half an hour at most.’

  He ended the call and gave Jill a quick kiss. ‘I’ll have to dash. Catch you later.’

  Jill stood at the door to watch him jump in his car, fire the engine and take off down the lane at a speed that was far from sensible given the icy state of the road. Then she went to see if she, too, could shower and find clothes smart enough for the interview she was doing later.

  It was mayhem when Max arrived at Worcester House. Tape sealed off the property. A crowd of neighbours stood in the cold air to see what was going on.

  Max changed into his protective suit in the hallway and then walked into the sitting room where SOCOs in similar suits were gathering evidence. The photographer was busy, bursts of flash lighting the room – and the body – every few seconds.

  Hanging from the centre beam in the room, wearing blue striped pyjamas, was Vincent Cole.

  Beneath Cole was a kitchen chair that had, possibly, been kicked away.

  ‘Who found him?’ Max asked.

  ‘A neighbour. She’s in the kitchen.’

  Max went to the kitchen where an elderly woman was sitting at the table, an untouched cup of tea in front of her and a young WPC opposite her.

  ‘This is Mrs Hollingsworth,’ the WPC told Max. ‘She cleans for Mr Cole and has a key.’

  Max sat opposite her and gave her an encouraging smile.

  ‘You’ve had a terrible shock,’ he said, and she nodded at the understatement.

  ‘What made you come here at this time?’ he asked. ‘It’s a bit early to start cleaning, isn’t it?’

  ‘The wheelie bin,’ she replied, her voice trembling. ‘Oh, I live in the bungalow across the road,’ she explained, ‘and I’ve been coming in to clean for Vince since – since his wife died. Not yesterday. I don’t do Tuesdays. Yesterday, I went into Manchester and didn’t get back till six.’

  ‘You said something about the wheelie bin?’

  ‘Yes. Knowing it would be dark when I got home, I put my bin out before I left. I always put mine out the night – or day – before because they come early to empty it. This morning, I was up early. Couldn’t sleep for some reason. Anyway, I saw that Vince hadn’t put his bin out. You can see it now. It’s still round the corner of the house.’

  ‘And that’s unusual?’ Max asked.

  ‘Oh, yes. He’s a stickler about it. He likes to get up very early and normally he’ll put it out about six o’clock. The bin men are always here by seven in the morning. Always.’

  She looked at the tea in front of her and took a hesitant sip.

  ‘I spoke to him when I put mine out,’ she said. ‘He was getting his car out of the garage. He told me he’d probably put his out later because it’s so dark in the mornings.’

  ‘And that’s all he said.’

  ‘More or less, yes. I told him, yet again, that if there was anything I could do, he just had to say the word. I don’t suppose there is – was – but I did feel for him. That girl meant the world to him, poor man.’

  Max nodded at that.

  ‘How did he seem?’ he asked her.

  ‘The same as usual,’ she replied. ‘He thanked me, said he was doing all right. Mind,’ she added, ‘he used to be in the army so I suppose he thinks it’s weak to show his feelings.’

  ‘Did he say anything else?’

  ‘No. But it was cold and we were both keen to get back inside.’

  That was understandable.

  ‘I wouldn’t normally dream of going in the house,’ she went on, ‘using my key, I mean, unless it’s my day to clean. But, like I said, it felt wrong. In fact, it felt so wrong that I nipped over here and rang the bell a couple of times. There was no answer. I even shouted through the letterbox a couple of times. Nothing.’

  ‘So you came inside?’ Max asked.

  ‘Not then, no. I thought he must still be in bed or – to be honest, I didn’t know what to think.’ She took a long, shaky breath. ‘Then I thought he might have taken a fall, or had a heart attack. I just didn’t know. So I took his keys from the hook and came across here again. I rang the doorbell a couple of times, shouted through the letterbox, and then – and then I let myself in. I shouted up the stairs, but it felt horrible. So quiet. I pushed open the sitting room door, switched on the light, and that’s when I saw him.’

  Tears welled in her eyes and she took a white lace handkerchief from the pocket of her coat.

  ‘I can’t believe he’d do such a thing,’ she said on a sob, mopping at her eyes. ‘I mean, I know losing his wife hit him hard. And now this. This is just the worst thing that can happen to anyone. Losing a child, it’s the worst thing imaginable. But even so…’

  Max nodded his understanding.

  ‘Did you touch anything when you came in?’ he asked and she looked surprised by the question.

  ‘No. Why?’ Before Max could answer, she said, ‘Well, I used the phone to dial 999. But no, nothing else. The woman who answered the phone asked me to stay here. I sat on the stairs.’ She pointed in the direction of the staircase. ‘I couldn’t bear to see him like that so I sat on the stairs. It wasn’t many minutes before two policemen arrived.’

  ‘OK. Thank you.’

  Max left her with the WPC and took a look around the rest of the house.

  There was nothing at all to suggest that this was anything other than a suicide.

  He stood in what had to be Cole’s bedroom and gazed around him. It was a large room, the ceiling lowe
r than those downstairs, and was dominated by a double bed with a mahogany headboard. The bed was unmade, the pillows crumpled.

  He pulled open the wardrobe doors. Trousers, shirts and jackets were hanging from the rail, some beneath dust covers. A poppy was pinned to a blue blazer, a reminder of Remembrance Day. Highly polished shoes were lined up neatly on a low shelf.

  A comb sat on the mirrored dressing table, alongside a small trophy engraved with Harrington Amateur Dramatic Society, but, other than that, it was bare. Max pulled open drawers and frowned at what he saw. Here, unlike in the rest of the house, was the sort of mess that would have driven a man like Cole crazy. Underwear had been thrown in untidily. A couple of T-shirts would need ironing again before they could be worn. A belt, pushed in haphazardly, stopped the drawer opening smoothly.

  Odd.

  He walked down the stairs and into the sitting room where Cole’s body was finally being released.

  Max walked over to the sideboard and opened the drawers. Here, the same mess existed. Perhaps Cole was only tidy where things were visible.

  No, that didn’t make any sense. The man had been tidy to the point of obsession.

  It seemed to Max that someone had rummaged through drawers looking for something. But what? An officer was examining the vacuum cleaner. ‘Looks like he used the cable from this, Max.’

  So Cole had donned his pyjamas, gone to bed, decided to end it all, come downstairs, cut a length of cable and hanged himself? No way.

  This wasn’t suicide. Vincent Cole had been murdered, Max was sure of it.

  Max spent much of that day pacing his office, reading through paperwork and waiting for reports that didn’t come.

  You could gather all the evidence in the world, he thought irritably, but until it had been analysed, it was worse than useless. And the waiting was driving him crazy.

  Jill was doing a TV interview today so he couldn’t even moan to her.

  Phil Meredith thought Max was going mad. As far as Max’s boss was concerned, the fact that Cole had decided to end it all should be obvious to anyone.

  ‘Even you, Max! Christ, there’s no need to go looking for trouble …’

  Max stepped into the bustling incident room. He stared at a wall of photos and annoyed everyone who didn’t have a phone glued to their ear by demanding answers they couldn’t give him. The collective sigh of relief as he left the room was audible.

  In Cole’s situation Max knew that he too would want to see his daughter buried. He wasn’t religious, he had no belief in any afterlife, but it was something you did. You did your best for your loved ones whether they were alive or dead. The only thing Cole could do for Lauren now was see her buried next to her mother. No way would he have killed himself before he’d performed that one last act for his daughter.

  As he walked along the corridor, he peered through a glass door and saw Doug leaning back in a chair staring at CCTV footage. While doing that, he was chatting to Clive White.

  Max pushed open the door.

  ‘Hello, Clive. You’re spending more time in the building since you’ve been suspended than you did when you were working.’

  ‘I’m still trying to get sponsorship, guv. Coppers are the most tight-fisted bastards imaginable.’

  ‘We’re all overworked and underpaid.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘So how’s it going?’

  ‘I’m bored rigid,’ Clive admitted.

  Max could understand that. God alone knew what he’d do with his time if he ever found himself in the same situation.

  ‘I’ve had a clear out in the house,’ Clive went on, ‘and taken a load of junk to the tip. I thought I’d call in here on the way back and see if I could get more money out of anyone.’

  ‘I’ve had to cough up,’ Doug said, his eyes not leaving the screen.

  ‘What’s that?’ Max asked, nodding at the fuzzy town centre pictures. ‘And where is it?’ It wasn’t Harrington.

  ‘Blackpool,’ Doug said with little enthusiasm. ‘There was a robbery last night and guess who gets lumbered with this job.’

  Max had heard about the robbery, but it didn’t interest him.

  ‘Hey, go back a bit,’ Clive said suddenly. ‘Back to where that white car was.’

  ‘If you see a couple of blokes wearing balaclavas, I’ll double my sponsorship,’ Doug promised as he rewound the tape. ‘I hate this job.’

  ‘There!’ Clive said.

  Something in his voice had Max peering closely at the image.

  ‘What?’ Doug, like Max, was none the wiser.

  ‘That girl,’ Clive said, tapping a finger against the screen.

  ‘Good God!’ Now, Max knew exactly what Clive was thinking. ‘Go back a few seconds, Doug.’

  The three of them watched as a young girl, her arm gripped by a tall man, was helped into a white car. The man was wearing what looked to be a leather coat with the collar hiding most of his face.

  ‘See what you can do with it, Doug, and let me know when you’ve got something clear. If you can’t get the car’s registration, see what else there is – scratches, dents, furry dice in the windscreen – anything.’ Realizing that Doug knew exactly what was needed, he nodded at Clive. ‘Good work.’

  ‘Thanks, guv.’

  As far as Max could remember, none of the possible sightings of Yasmin Smith had been in Blackpool. But that meant nothing. She might, just might, be the girl on the screen.

  He refused to get too hopeful. And he wasn’t letting Adam Smith know about this yet.

  Instead, he rang Jackie Ingram to see when her postmortem report on Vincent Cole would be available. Needless to say, her greeting was less than warm.

  ‘I’ve told you, Max, you’ll have my report later today. Believe it or not, I have other things to do.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ He put on his grovelling voice. ‘Is there nothing you can tell me? Nothing at all?’

  There was a long pause, followed by a sigh. ‘I can tell you that he was already dead before that cable went round his neck. Something heavy to the back to the head.’

  Bingo!

  ‘If a victim falls several feet, the noose will fracture his neck, bringing a fairly quick death,’ she said. ‘If the fall is short, as in this case, death is through strangulation, which is slow and painful. The victim’s eyes would protrude and his face would be engorged with blood. This definitely wasn’t suicide, Max.’

  ‘Thanks, Jackie. I appreciate it.’

  ‘You owe me,’ she said, and cut the connection.

  It wasn’t until their food was brought to their table that evening that Max realized he hadn’t eaten all day. He’d had enough coffee to keep him awake for a week, but he was ravenous. Jill, sitting opposite him and looking unusually smart having come straight from the television studios, was always hungry.

  They were in the Black Bull, a large pub on the outskirts of Harrington that was winning acclaim for its simple home-cooked fare.

  ‘Anything new?’ Jill asked him.

  ‘Let me see.’ As it turned out, he’d had a busy day, one of those where surprise had followed surprise. ‘Firstly, your friend Steve Carlisle has been released.’

  ‘You’re kidding me. I bet that wasn’t your decision.’

  ‘It wasn’t.’

  Max’s boss had gone from being convinced that Cole had committed suicide to being equally convinced that the same person had killed both Lauren and Vincent.

  ‘Which means Steve Carlisle is innocent,’ Phil Meredith had said.

  ‘It means no such thing,’ Max had argued.

  ‘You haven’t got anything that will secure a conviction, Max. You’ll have to let him go.’

  Max wasn’t happy about it, but Meredith was right. They didn’t have anything that would qualify as hard evidence so Steve Carlisle was a free man again. For now.

  ‘As you thought,’ he told Jill, ‘Cole didn’t hang himself. He suffered a fatal blow to the back of the head before he was strung up in h
is sitting room.’

  Jill shuddered, but he knew it wouldn’t put her off her food.

  ‘Why?’ she asked, and Max had no explanation.

  ‘That remains a mystery.’

  ‘But why the delay? Why kill Lauren and then wait over a week before killing her father?’

  ‘You’re assuming we’re looking for one killer,’ he pointed out. ‘Just as Phil Meredith is.’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m assuming nothing.’

  He was completely in the dark. If they were looking for the same man, he could only imagine that both Lauren and her father knew something they shouldn’t. At least, the killer thought they did. But if that was the case, why wait a week?

  As he enjoyed his food, officers were out there knocking on doors and begging for information. Max only hoped they were successful.

  ‘On top of that lot,’ he went on, ‘we may, and I stress the may, have captured Yasmin Smith on CCTV in Blackpool.’

  ‘Really? God, no wonder you’re looking pleased with yourself.’

  But he wasn’t. He was no closer to finding Yasmin than he had been four months ago. He was no closer to catching Lauren Cole’s killer, either. Or her father’s.

  ‘Your friend and mine, Clive White, was the one to spot Yasmin,’ he added. ‘If indeed it was Yasmin.’

  ‘Clive?’ He saw the way her lips tightened. ‘What the hell was he doing looking at CCTV?’

  ‘He called in—’

  ‘Why?’ she demanded. ‘What’s the point of him being suspended from duty when he’s spending more time at the blasted nick than away from it?’

  ‘He called in to try and get some more sponsorship,’ Max explained patiently. ‘He wasn’t there above five minutes.’ He had no idea how long Clive was actually in the building, but he couldn’t see that it mattered. ‘While he was chatting to Doug, he spotted a girl who looked a lot like Yasmin.’

  ‘He’s suspended from duty, Max. He shouldn’t be there.’

  ‘If he hadn’t been, we wouldn’t have spotted Yasmin.’ Seeing that she was about to argue, he quickly changed the subject. ‘How’s your food?’