Anyway, I gave my story of the events on that Sunday night, though I admit I held back the bit about expecting some piece of mega news from Brad that never materialized. I didn’t want them putting pressure on Brad, he had enough to cope with. I wanted to wait at the station for Brad but they said they were keeping him in overnight and had the right to do so. When I went back next morning they said they had released him on police bail. He wasn’t at his flat and then he just disappeared.’
‘You didn’t report him missing, though?’ Amos asked with just a hint of reproach.
‘Just a minute,’ Mrs Gordon said indignantly, rising to the bait. ‘I didn’t know he wouldn’t show up again. Not at the time. In any case, the police knew he had disappeared. That’s why they were asking me if I knew where he had gone to. There was no need to report him missing. I told them he’d probably gone off with Rita, which is what I believed anyway – and still do to this day. The police just said to let them know if he turned up again.’
‘Didn’t your father know where he had gone?’ Amos asked. ‘Or your other brother?’
Gordon looked surprised.
‘Dad didn’t know, either, and I don’t have another brother.’
Amos leaned forward over the desk.
He said quietly and deliberately: ‘The upstairs tenants at Bradley’s house said they saw his father and brother helping him move his stuff.’
Gordon leaned backwards to restore the distance between herself and the detective inspector. She smiled for a moment and relaxed visibly. Then she replied more slowly, choosing her words more carefully.
‘Dad never mentioned that he had helped Brad to move his stuff and obviously I never asked him because I didn’t know he had. The other guy must have been one of Brad’s mates.’
‘Did your father never refer to your brother’s disappearance or ask if you had heard from him?’
‘No. Dad suffered a stroke soon afterwards. I think the stress killed him. He died without ever fully recovering his speech.’
Chapter 32
At this point Gudgeon saw an opportunity to wrap up proceedings before his client imparted any more information.
‘I think that covers everything, inspector,’ he said in a businesslike manner as he rose to his feet. ‘I think you’ll agree that Mrs Gordon has been more than helpful.’
‘We haven’t quite finished, yet, Mr Gudgeon,’ Amos said coldly. ‘I just want to ask Mrs Gordon about Harry Randall while she is here.’
Mrs Gordon’s face dropped and Gudgeon was also caught off guard.
‘Did you ever meet him before Rita disappeared?’ Amos pressed his advantage.
‘I never really met him at all,’ Mrs Gordon replied flustered.
Tired of intervening only to be slapped down each time, for once Gudgeon made no attempt to ride to his client’s rescue.
‘Well then, did you ever see him before Rita disappeared,’ Amos persisted.
‘No, never,’ Gordon replied with a little too much emphasis.
‘And after Rita disappeared?’
‘Well, yes, I suppose so.’
‘You suppose so? Did you or didn’t you?’
Amos was now leaning forward, looking intently at the woman directly across the table. She was clearly uneasy and glanced momentarily at her solicitor but still Gudgeon held his peace as if to teach her a lesson.
‘Well, I saw him after my interview at the police station,’ she replied testily. ‘They wouldn’t let me see my own brother but they did let me bump into Harry Randall on the way out. I think they did it on purpose to see what happened.’
‘And what did happen?’
‘Randall had the nerve to accuse me and Brad of driving away his daughter. He said we had poisoned her mind against him and had been spreading rumours that he had interfered with her when she was younger. I told him not to be so stupid but I wasn’t going to have a row with him on the police station steps for the amusement of the very officers who had failed to find any trace of her. He shouted abuse at me but I just walked away.’
‘Did you see him again during the inquiry?’ Amos asked.
‘No.’
‘Or later, after the inquiry went cold?’
‘No, definitely not,’ came the emphatic response.
Only now did Amos look across at Swift to see if she had any ideas for pursuing the interview. Swift, however, felt that interviewing with Amos was like her and Jason packing a suitcase: there was his way and her way and once one had started it was impossible for the other to take over half way through.
‘Just one last question,’ Amos said impulsively. ‘Where were you last Thursday, the day that Harry Randall was murdered?’
This was a step too far for Gudgeon, who suddenly burst back into life.
‘You can’t seriously suspect Mrs Gordon,’ he uttered indignantly. ‘You’ve just heard, she didn’t even know the man.’
‘Then she will have a perfectly innocent account of her movements,’ Amos replied calmly.
‘As it happens, I was visiting my sister again,’ Mrs Gordon said smoothly. ‘You can have her name and telephone number if you want to check. I was there all last week.’
Amos pushed a pen and paper across to her. Somewhat miffed, she wrote down the contact details.
‘Thank you, Mrs Gordon, for your cooperation.’ Amos said reluctantly. ‘Would you like us to run you back home?’
George Gudgeon broke his resumed sullen silence.
‘That’s quite all right, inspector,’ he said coldly. ‘I’ll take care of Mrs Gordon.’
As solicitor and client left the police HQ, Amos could hear George Gudgeon complaining to Mrs Gordon: ‘I thought you needed me here to stop the inspector asking too many questions. I can’t help you if you don’t help me.’
Chapter 33
‘So much for the two geegees,’ Amos remarked as he bustled back to his office with Det Sgt Swift hurrying to keep up in his wake.
‘What on earth are you on about?’ Swift asked irritably.
‘Gemma Gordon and George Gudgeon. GG and GG. More donkeys than thoroughbreds.’
By now they were back in the CID room.
‘Listen up everyone,’ Amos ordered. ‘Who’s seen anything in the Rita Randall files about Gemma Irwin?’
Detective Constable Eddie Griffin, the baby of the team in age and length of service, waved his hand like a schoolboy in class. Swift thought he was actually going to say ‘Please, sir’.
Instead, Griffin said: ‘There’s a transcript of an interview several days after the disappearance but it doesn’t amount to much. It was quite a bit after. She said she had seen Rita together with her own brother and Rita’s the night before the disappearance but nothing that indicated why Rita vanished.’
‘Does it say why she didn’t come forward sooner?’ Amos asked.
‘She was staying with some relative and didn’t know about it,’ Griffin replied, fishing into the files on his desk at the same time. ‘It was a sister or aunt somewhere in Wales, I think. Yes, here it is,’ he went on triumphantly pulling out the relevant paperwork. ‘Her sister in Aberystwyth.’
‘Was her story checked out?’
‘I don’t think so, sir.’ Griffin glanced down the single sheet of paper. ‘It doesn’t even give the sister’s name and address.’
‘Hmm,’ said Amos. ‘Keep on looking.’
With that he retired to his room, which he used for very little except to make telephone calls he did not want the rest of the staff to hear. He dialed the retired Inspector Winchester, who answered after just one ring.
‘Winchester,’ came the brusque response.
‘Amos.’
‘I thought it might be. I didn’t think you’d have had done yet.’
‘Gemma Gordon, Bradley Irwin’s sister.’
‘I know who she is. I spent enough time on the bloody case. I even went to her wedding in case Bradley Irwin or Rita Randall turned up. No such luck.’
‘Did you spend a
ny time checking whether she really went to Aberystwyth.’
‘Of course not,’ Winchester responded aggressively. ‘She had nothing much to do with anything. In any case, she went to her sister’s after Rita boarded her train so if she had anything to do with it, which she plainly didn’t, her sister couldn’t have provided an alibi anyway.’
‘Unless Gemma Gordon took Rita to Aberystwyth with her,’ Amos commented. He was rewarded with an audible sharp intake of breath from the other end of the phone line.
‘Stuff and nonsense,’ Winchester blustered.
‘Quite so,’ Amos said abruptly. ‘Sorry to bother you again.’
With that he rang off and dialled Mrs Gordon’s sister.
This call was answered with only a little less alacrity, though with a little more breathlessness, than the one to Winchester. It’s my lucky day, thought Amos – or perhaps Gemma Gordon had alerted her sister. She might just have had time to get home by bombing down the A15.
Amos introduced himself and apologized for ringing, stressing that it was purely a routine matter and that there was nothing to worry about.
‘Yes, that’s quite all right,’ said the cultured voice at the other end.
‘Am I speaking to the sister of Mrs Gemma Gordon, who lives at Waddington near Lincoln?’ Amos inquired.
‘That’s correct.’
‘I understand that Mrs Gordon visits you from time to time.’
‘That is also correct. She usually comes on her own once or twice in the summer when her husband is working and occasionally they both come at Christmas.’
It all seemed too pat to Amos, as if this had been rehearsed. And why was this woman not asking what the questions were all about?
He asked: ‘May I ask when she last visited, either with or without her husband?’
‘Yes, I have the dates here,’ came the immediate response. Mrs Gordon’s sister readily reeled off the full week in which Harry Randall had been murdered.
‘Did she leave Aberystwyth at all that week?’
‘No, she was here all the time.’
‘Did she or your brother Bradley Irwin ever mention a young woman by the name of Rita Randall?’
‘Yes, of course. She was the daughter of that man who was found murdered the last time that Gemma was here. Gemma said Brad was rather sweet on her. In fact, Gemma delayed her visit the weekend the girl went off without telling anyone where she was going. But Gemma couldn’t have had anything to do with her disappearance because she set off for Aberystwyth by the early train on the Monday.’
‘Did you meet her at the station at your end?’
‘Yes, I always do.’
‘Was anyone with her? Did she speak to anyone as she left the train? A travelling companion, perhaps?’
‘No, she was on her own, of course. She wouldn’t speak to strangers on a train.’
‘I must ask you this bluntly,’ Amos persisted. ‘Was Rita Randall with her?’
‘Good lord, no,’ Mrs Gordon’s sister gasped. That was one question she had not expected. ‘Of course, she … she could have been on the train, I … I wouldn’t know. I can’t remember who else might have got off, it was all so long ago.’
Amos thanked the woman for her cooperation and rang off. He walked thoughtfully to the door of his room and spent some time talking to Jennifer, who had a hobby of collecting obscure books connected with Lincolnshire. It was too much to hope that she would have a set of train timetables dating back 15 years but she did have something near enough to what Amos wanted.
As a result, he spent some time poring over columns of figures, making careful mathematical calculations on a notepad.
Chapter 34
Amos had just put his calculations to one side when the day began to go rapidly downhill.
DC Michael Yates, who had been doing such sterling if plodding service, blotted his copybook by returning from lunch with the news that Sheila Burns, the chief reporter on the Lincolnshire Echo, had called while he was interviewing Mrs Gordon.
Yates had rightly picked up the call because staff were under strict instructions that Amos’s phone must be answered in his absence during a murder inquiry.
‘She was asking if you were free for coffee, sir,’ Yates told the inspector. ‘She said she had something very important to discuss.’
‘For God’s sake,’ Amos exploded. ‘Why the hell did you go for lunch instead of waiting for me to come out of the interview room? You could at least have left a message on my desk.’
Yates was spared further berating, at least for the time being, because at that moment Amos found out what the call was all about. The first edition of the Lincolnshire Echo dropped on his desk like a bombshell. Normally there was little in it to interest him. The better stories, news breaking that day, appeared in the afternoon editions.
If Sheila Burns was hoping to take her revenge after he had let her down earlier in the investigation, she had certainly succeeded. The front page lead must have been written overnight and Burns must have been sufficiently confident she had it all to herself if she had held it back to run all editions rather than slam it into the final edition the previous day.
She was right about that, and in labeling it EXCLUSIVE, too.
‘I saw the Randall murderer’ screamed the headline. A quick glance showed that Burns had achieved what Amos and his team had neglected to pursue, a chat with the elusive woman who lived almost opposite the late and so far unlamented Harry Randall.
According to the report, Joan Gunstone claimed that she ‘just happened’ to be looking out of her front bedroom window when she saw someone she took to be a woman knock at Randall’s door and he let her in almost immediately.
Gunstone was surprised that the woman was middle aged, since ‘it was usually tarty teenage girls’ visiting Randall and they never needed to knock because ‘he was always watching out for them’.
The witness went on to say that she had never seen the woman visit Randall before, although ‘of course’ she did not keep watch on his house all the time so she could not be sure that the woman had never been there.
However, she got a clear view of the murderer and would undoubtedly recognize her if she saw her again.
Gunstone certainly gave a good impression of keeping watch on Randall, for she was well aware of the regular if infrequent visits of a young man who called from time to time. Like several other neighbours, she was quite convinced that this was Randall’s son. Indeed, she stated categorically that it was, though there was nothing in the story to suggest that she knew for certain.
The report went on to describe Gunstone as well known throughout the county because she formerly ran a nursery garden on land that she had acquired at the back of her house and was something of an expert on hardy plants.
Amos grabbed his jacket, which he had only just dropped over the back of his chair.
‘Come on, Juliet,’ he called to Swift. ‘This time we will talk to the Gunstone woman if we have to knock the door down.’
Yates called across to him as he rose. He had returned swiftly to his desk just in time to pick up another call was waving a telephone with his hand firmly over the speaking part.
‘Sheila Burns again,’ he mouthed quietly.
‘Tell her she’s just missed me,’ Amos replied. ‘Say I’ll catch up with her later.’
It was not Burns that Amos was most anxious to avoid, though. As he and Swift made a hasty exit through the back into the car park, he caught sight of the lower half of David, the Chief Constable’s faithful lapdog, trotting down the stairs at the far end of the corridor.
As expected, Fletcher had according to his custom taken a glance at the front page of the first edition hoping to see some measure of support for his anti-smoking campaign and was affronted to see that priority was given to a murder, and one that he had not been properly briefed on at that.
Amos and Swift made their getaway down the steep hill that led to the lower part of the city, only to suffer the f
rustration of being held up at the level crossing near the station, where the barrier stayed down for a good 20 minutes as several trains came through.
‘What on earth’s going on?’ Amos demanded. ‘We never get more than two trains at a time if that, one each way.’
‘We heard about it at headquarters,’ Swift explained, ‘but it went right out of my mind in the rush. Motorists have been ringing up to complain. I gather that there has been a power failure on the main East Coast line through Grantham and trains are being diverted through here.’
‘Just what we need,’ grumbled Amos. ‘It’s too far to go round now. When we see the barriers come up, put on the siren and shoot round the queue.’
This proved to be of limited benefit. The car was too far back for them to see the barrier properly, so by the time Swift shot forward there was already a melee where the road turned left into the lower section of the High Street.
A large swell of pedestrians stretching across the road surged both ways over the tracks, colliding with the wave coming in the opposite direction and daring motorists to mow them down. As Swift took the turn on the wrong side of the road, she almost collided with the first vehicles forging through from the south.
She had just forced her way back onto her correct side when the barriers came down again. This time the hold-up cost another 15 minutes but at least when the way came clear again the siren parted the crowd like Moses and the Red Sea.
Swift took the siren off as soon as the officers were clear of the seething mass but the lower part of the High Street was narrow and the traffic was busy, so progress remained slow. Finally they made their way south to the road where Harry Randall had met his fate under the watchful but unhelpful gaze of Joan Gunstone.
The car finally pulled up at Gunstone’s home the best part of half an hour later than Amos had expected. There was already a posse banging on her door. Amos recognized the reporter from Radio Lincolnshire and a reporter and cameraman from BBC Look North.
They were looking pretty cheesed off. There are few more woeful or angry sights than journalists who have been scooped and who are being denied the opportunity to catch up.
Unlikely Graves (Detective Inspector Paul Amos Mystery series) Page 12
