by J P Lomas
She thought it was supposed to have been a girls’ only night and was off her head on Bacardi and coke when the stags from Nina’s fiancé’s do arrived at the same club; among them was Carl. With half the station there the danger and possible embarrassment of the situation was very clear to her and she’d tried to slip away whilst he bought drinks at the bar. Unfortunately, her need to visit the toilet and to recover her coat, delayed her progress – though she wondered sometimes if her faffing around for her cloak room ticket until he appeared in the reception area of the club was not quite unrelated.
Feeling that she shouldn’t fight against her destiny, she’d let him accompany her outside. Only when she felt they were probably out of sight of any colleagues had she given in to her desperate need to kiss him.
Of course she’d told Tim straightaway, well as soon as she was sober and they’d laughed it off as a drunken escapade. He’d even made up some story about fancying the girl at the Cash ‘n’ Carry to make her feel better. Though she hadn’t told him how Carl’s hand had slid between her legs when he’d manoeuvred her up against the wall. She’d also avoided articulating the half formed thought that she probably would have let him, if she hadn’t puked her guts out…
Sometimes she felt guilty; other times she wondered what it would have been like?
‘Mum?’
Jane’s reverie was broken by her daughter.
‘You’re not turning into one of those mothers smashed out of their minds on tranquilisers, are you?’
‘No. Just thinking about a case.’
‘Well remember to “Just Say No!” if you are turning into a junkie, Mum.’
Jane smiled at Jenny as she passed her the water glass. The sight of her daughter and the return to domestic chaos was enough to remind her of why she was glad to be happily trapped in family life. Even Leo’s nascent teenage tantrums could be cute at times, the petulant curl of his lip reminiscent of her own arguments with her mother.
With her children in bed and Tim washing up, Jane reclined on the sofa with a mug of peppermint tea and considered why Connie Baker had got under her skin. Connie’s story had for a fleeting moment connected with Jane’s own darker desires, though in Connie’s circumstances Jane could not see herself doing the same.
Jane knew if she did take a lover, and for a moment the face of Kevin Summers, the fresh faced rookie from work flittered deliciously through her mind, she’d never stop loving Tim. He might be developing a paunch and have a dreadful taste in music; however the thought of losing him was unbearable. She wondered if it could be possible to divorce something as simple as sex from long term love? Although the word divorce, was probably not the most apposite one to be thinking about in relation to this. If she had followed it up with Carl would she have regretted it? Would she have been able to tell Tim? She felt he would probably have forgiven her, but could she have forgiven herself? Whatever the drawbacks of her current domestic arrangements, there was no way on earth she wanted to lose them.
Maybe sexer would be a better word than lover, but she had a feeling she didn’t possess Connie’s calm ability to be so dispassionate about sex. And Connie hadn’t had kids to think about… For a moment her thoughts were diverted by wondering if the coving over the patio doors might need re-painting, before her thoughts returned to Connie. Ultimately, she didn’t think Connie was a bad woman, though the fact she could understand her had unsettled her. She knew her new boss disagreed; Spilsbury would probably have happily thrown the first stone if given the chance.
During the interview she could tell the DCI was unsympathetic to her story. Connie and Calum might not quite have had the ring of Romeo and Juliet and yet it seemed they had been equally star-crossed. She had been the Cheltenham educated solicitor’s daughter, whilst he had been her all action bit of rough; however they had risked all for love. Parental approval had been cut off and she was fortunate that she’d already received the benefits of her trust fund. If Calum had been an officer they might have approved, but marrying someone who didn’t even have a commission wouldn’t go down well in their circles. Her husband might have served with distinction in Northern Ireland, yet unfortunately this did not make up for leaving school at sixteen and having a father who was an unemployed welder.
Ironically, it had been sex which had been the glue to keep them together at first. By the end of the interview, Jane had felt she had gained a greater knowledge of sex than any amount of Lovers’ Guides could tell her. She half wondered if it was the guilt making Connie hymn their coupling and at other times wondered if she was doing it to make her feel small. And what on earth was the perineum?
They’d only been married for two years when Calum had been sent to the Falklands and been emasculated. ‘The fucking Argies blew his cock off!’ was how Connie had put it. Jane could still recall how Spilsbury had flinched at this. It seemed her husband had been at Bluff Cove on a landing craft when it was hit by Argentinean bombs. Whilst most of the journalists had focussed on the Welsh Guards who had been lost on the Sir Galahad, he had become one of the unreported casualties that day. According to Connie, he was described in reports of the incident as being ‘lucky’ to have survived. Jane wondered what had happened to the unlucky ones?
Connie‘s next assertion that the idea for her having sex with other men had come from her husband had been another instance in the interrogation where she feared for Spilsbury’s rising blood pressure. She’d explained how their rows and arguments had been increasing. The more she tried to care for him, the more he resented her. He preferred ‘crippled’ to ‘disabled’; said it described him better. Apparently he’d been so fearful that she would leave him, or have an affair to satisfy her unfulfilled needs that he had suggested she look for a lover. Jane had believed her when she had asserted that she had never wanted to do this, but had only done so because her husband had implored her to – though she could tell Spilsbury thought she was lying.
Connie’s first lover had been a tourist she’d picked up in a local night spot. She’d made herself up to look a million dollars and then been taken to a cheap hotel where they’d done it in a single bed. She explained to them that she’d felt guilty and disappointed and yet her husband had demanded she describe the encounter for his own voyeuristic pleasure. At first she said she’d been reluctant, yet as it seemed to excite him, she had acquiesced. By this point in the interview Jane had been convinced that one of the pulsing veins on her boss’ neck was going to burst…
Emboldened by this and beginning to take some pleasure in these acts, Connie explained how she’d taken a more regular lover from her previous school where she had also worked as a classroom assistant, before breaking that one off when her husband feared she was getting ‘feelings’ for the teacher she was seeing.
She’d then gone round the clubs and pubs of nearby Exeter, picking up tourists and married men on a near weekly basis until she got bored of how sordid it made her feel. She’d told Calum she was still doing it, but spent most of her evenings drinking a bottle of wine, before crashing out at a cheap hotel. Her stories for Calum became ever more entertaining and fanciful, just as her nights became ever more lonely and miserable.
Eventually, she got into a relationship with the Director of the Charity she worked for. She was reluctant to give his name, as he had a wife and kids, but Jane soon persuaded her to name John Howard as her lover of the last few months.
Yet, he hadn’t been the man she’d been with on the night of the murder.
A friend of hers from the Children’s Charity, Clare (she was unsure of the surname), had persuaded her to go out for a few drinks on election night. They’d arranged to meet at the lounge bar of the Royal Standard Hotel on the Front, but Clare hadn’t shown up. Instead there had been a good looking, younger man there who had been exactly her type: dark, muscular and intense, she hadn’t objected when he suggested finishing their drinks in his room.
And no, she hadn’t felt cheap. The sex had been electrifying. The man had be
en passionate, firm and disappointingly absent when she woke in the morning. Exactly the type of lover her husband would have approved of. Yet here she stopped, as she realised this was one exploit she’d never entertain him with now.
She hadn’t been able to remember his name, because she hadn’t asked for it in the first place. Jane wondered why this detail kept disturbing her? The room had been paid for in cash and the signature in the hotel register was illegible.
‘Fancy a night cap?’ Jane’s meditations on Connie were broken off by Tim appearing in the doorway proffering the remains of the wine.
‘Why not?’ she smiled and pulled Tim on to the sofa beside her. Swigging the wine back in one mouthful, she pushed him back on the sofa and straddled him.
‘Time for me to be bad cop…’
‘What if…?’
But she had already eased herself out of her t-shirt and freed her breasts.
****
The added police presence in and around Exmouth was bad news for Nigel Byrne as he returned along the Hulham Road with a fare. The Ford Granada he’d been loaned by Cedar Cabs was in about the same state of health as he was. Byrne was overweight, had a smoker’s cough and if he’d been bothered to keep any of the appointments made for him by Mandy with their GP, would have discovered he’d developed a serious heart condition; the car had a bald front tyre, faulty gearbox and a broken taillight. For the traffic police it was a gift – the detectives in CID might struggle to get the murder off their books, but here was another crime waiting to be processed, turned into a statistic and then added to their performance tables. The fact that Byrne was moonlighting and unlicensed was just the cherry on the top.
The flashing blue lights in the mirror would have announced to a less complacent man that the game was up, but Nigel Byrne had been trying to blag his way out of things ever since his mum had caught him stealing change from her purse. He assured the elderly lady in the back that he’d have this bit of bother sorted out in no time and that she’d be down at the tea dance on the front in plenty of time.
He was right about the lady. One of the supernumeraries attending the murder scene gave Ethel Greenacre good cause to praise ‘those nice boys in blue’ with her septuagenarian dancing friends by giving her a ride to the Pavilion, but Nigel Byrne was not able to smarm his way out of a trip to the station. Even taking the crumpled photos of Rob and Mikey out of his wallet and trying the hard working father in need of a break routine on the cops hadn’t worked. A search of the car had turned up the cannabis he’d picked up for Abel on an earlier trip that day. As he was bundled into the back of the squad car something other than just self-pity did make its way into his mind, which was the nagging refrain that this time Mandy would not forgive him and the knowledge that if she did take the boys to her mum’s again, this time he wouldn’t be getting them back.
Chapter 14
‘Do you believe her?’ Spilsbury asked as he wheezed into his chair.
‘Partly.‘
‘What about the man she was screwing?’
‘I’ve checked with the hotel and no-one can recall taking a booking for a gentleman in Room 12 on the night in question. There is a signature in the register, but it’s illegible and could just as easily be her name.’
‘Hardly, a gentleman!’
‘You seemed to be giving her the once over sir, or is that you just find it difficult to talk to the face when interviewing taller women?’
‘No need to get sarky, Sergeant.’
‘We’ve put a call in, but trying to trace a holidaymaker, if he was a holidaymaker, during the tourist season is going to be like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Mrs Baker’s description of tall dark and handsome doesn’t exactly help. I’ve asked for an artist’s impression, but we’ll be lucky to get more than Julio Iglesias sporting an enormously large cock given her remembrance of that night.’
Spilsbury blushed visibly. It wasn’t just the effort of having walked down the corridor in the summer heat which made his blotchy, booze damaged skin redder than before, rather the fact that Jane now swore like a regular bloke. He could have put up with the more earthy comments from a proper policeman, but not from a member of ‘the gentler sex’ as he liked to term all the ones he didn’t regard as whores or tarts. This expectation of how nice women should speak extended to Mrs Spilsbury, his daughter and the ladies at the cricket club. Perhaps not everyone could speak as if they were in an Ealing Comedy, but at least they might try!
‘Can we put her in the frame, Sergeant?’
‘If we don’t believe that story about her husband being okay with her sexual escapades?’
‘Which is frankly rubbish.’
‘Then we could argue she had no use for a man who could no longer get it up for her?’
‘No need to spell it out woman, we’ve had quite enough sordid details for one day.’
‘So you’ve no philosophy on the sexually liberated modern young woman expressing her physical desires outside the bounds of a conventional relationship, sir?’
Spilsbury’s eyes grew a little more bulbous, if that were possible and the sweat stains appearing under his tan suit jacket were rippling even further out.
‘I just want to know if we can make a case against her?’
‘For having sex outside marriage?’
Spilsbury was growing increasingly apoplectic as he loosened his kipper tie. He moved uncomfortably in his seat and his usually pasty face reddened further.
‘For murdering her husband! I don’t care if she’s the Whore of Babylon; I just want someone put away for this!’
Spilsbury rather spoilt his moment by jabbing a stubby finger in Jane’s direction, whilst at the same time overturning half a Styrofoam cup of cold coffee onto his lap as he swept it with his sleeve. Its contents formed an unsavoury alliance with the crumbs from the pasty he had just consumed; a force of nature that his Burton’s trousers did not seem up to repelling.
Whilst the D.C.I. spread the stain further across his lap, as he angrily swooped at it with some Kleenex supplied by Jane, she reflected more keenly on Connie’s possible guilt.
‘As far as I can see, Sir – careful you’re rubbing it in not out, she had nothing to gain from leaving her husband. John Howard, the man from the charity she named as her lover, was clearly very embarrassed to be talking to us. He’s a local councillor and quote ‘happily married’. He’s admitted to the affair, which I’d say was mutually beneficial. They’d both get their rocks off two or three times a month and then go back to playing Happy Families. I wouldn’t say either of them would have used the ‘L’ word, it was just plain and, from Connie’s description, not such simple sex.’
Spilsbury looked up unamused from his clean up endeavours, as Jane passed him her remaining hanky.
‘Connie doesn’t need money either. The house was in her name and Calum had nothing apart from his disability pension. His compensation money went on converting their house to his needs. To be honest, I think she loved him and pitied him.’
‘Pitied?’
‘He was a hero, sir. Served with distinction in Northern Ireland. An all-round action man until The Falklands placed him in a wheelchair. Looking at the photos of him in uniform, you can see why Connie fancied him. I imagine Mrs Spilsbury took quite a shine to you when she saw you in uniform.’
In spite of himself, the D.I’s podgy face gained the impression of a smile as the younger woman’s half barb turned itself into an unintended compliment.
‘We’ve also got nothing from forensics to tie her to the scene.’
‘But she’s got no alibi?’
‘If she was at the hotel, then she’s been honest when she says she was very discreet in leaving it, though I’d say she’s got previous for slipping away from assignations like that.’
‘Anything to tie her in with the other murder?’
‘They were both on election nights, involve arson and took place within a couple of miles of each other; however there’s
no obvious family or financial connection between the victims. Yet I still believe they’re linked.’
‘Well, I don’t.’
‘Care to elaborate, Sir?’
This was most certainly sarcasm, though if Jane had been conscious of meaning to express it out loud, she would have been surprised.
‘Former DI Sobers seemed to think there was some homophobic reason behind Kellow’s death. I can’t say I’m in whole hearted agreement, but that looks like the best lead we had. Sgt Baker certainly wasn’t a woofter, whatever the truth behind his wife’s bizarre story and so we’re looking at either jealousy or money. Dig a bit deeper into their finances, for all we know the wife’s blown her fortune on one of those share deals and has an insurance policy on hubby’s life.’
Jane’s face remained neutral, but her husband could have told from the tilt of her head and the way her fingers curled around the edge of her chair that she didn’t buy into Spilsbury’s theory.
****
Again it was Debbie who provided Jane with the tip that led her to discovering more about Connie’s other extra marital affairs. The possibility that her last but one lover, John Howard might have killed Calum Baker out of jealousy had been a non-starter. This lead had fizzled out, when they’d discovered the local councillor had indeed spent the night of the election celebrating the results coming in with the crème de la crème of the local Tory party. Jane just hoped their other suspects weren’t all so well connected as Connie’s handsome lover.
Fortunately, what Debbie had unearthed looked more promising. The Catholic Church had become fairly adept about keeping its dirty linen out of the papers, but unfortunately for them Debbie’s younger cousin had been attending St Winifred’s RC Primary School when Nativity-Gate had kicked off.
To be fair, it wasn’t the type of story which was likely to make even the inside pages of a local weekly paper. Some of the Red Tops might have made something of the more salacious details along the lines of ‘Nativity Play Love Triangle Shocker’ or ‘Away in a Ménage’, yet this one had managed to remain a very local scandal.
