Mike was silent and she aired her thoughts out loud. What did O’Sullivan say? She’d been talking to Frost for an hour before he jumped.’ She met Mike’s eyes. ‘I wonder what he said.’
‘We’ll never know now, Jo.’
‘I’m banking on us finding out, Korpanski.’
Mike was scratching his chin with the tip of his thumb, was a habit he had when struggling to think. The rasping sound was threatening to annoy her. He stopped doing it Just in time and looked up. ‘She couldn’t have known Selkirk was going to be murdered,’ he said, ‘or she wouldn’t have had anything to do with it. If you remember, Jo, when we spoke to her she seemed confident he’d turn up, didn’t she? What if she thought he was just going to be abducted or kidnapped for money – or something,’ he finished lamely.
She nodded. ‘Maybe.’
One of the uniformed officers returned from a tour of the building’s exterior.
‘No sign of a break-in,’ he said. ‘My guess is that she let the killer in herself.’
Joanna forced herself to bend over the girl’s body and study the neck. Twined around it, lying loosely now, was a nylon stocking.
‘Let’s go outside,’ she said suddenly. It was dusk. The lights of the town looked falsely welcoming. One of them shone on a murderer. Distant traffic roared along the road. No sign yet of flashing blue lights.
‘It’s time to go right back to the beginning, Mike,’ she said decisively. ‘I think we’d better speak to the Selkirks again, both mother and son and not forgetting Grandpa Tony.’ She stopped and gritted her teeth. ‘In fact, in the mood I’m in I could even suspect pretty little Lucy or our pregnant mare.’
Mike looked at her in surprise.
‘And then,’ she said, ‘I’m going to revisit the Carter family.’
She couldn’t ignore Mike any longer. ‘All right, all right. They lost their daughter. I’m sorry for them. I really am, but someone had Selkirk killed and that led to this.’
‘Joanna,’ he objected, ‘they wouldn’t have killed Yolande.’
‘Not even to get at Selkirk?’
He shook his head. ‘Not after three years.’
And the infuriating thing was, she knew he was right. She couldn’t see either of the Carters having any involvement in the nurse’s death. Their hatred had all been centred on the man who had destroyed ... no, murdered ... their daughter. But it hadn’t made them lose their humanity. They would not have killed Yolande Prince.
Perhaps it was the enforced inactivity of the wait for Matthew and the SOCOs, or the return to the small room, but now a new horror was beginning to take shape. ‘Surely,’ she said, ‘surely, Michael Frost’s death was suicide?’
Mike, as usual, was prosaic. ‘Well, pushing someone out of a window would be a clumsy method of murder.’
She agreed.
‘Maybe the point isn’t so much whether he committed suicide as why?’
‘Why what?’ she said irritably.
‘Why did he commit suicide?’
She frowned. ‘Because he was depressed.’
‘Yeah, but why was he depressed?’
She stared at him. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t they usually have a reason? Maybe there’s something there.’
She stared at him. ‘We could certainly follow it up,’ she said, ‘see if anyone knows.’
‘She must have known,’ he said. ‘She was the one who was talking to him just before he jumped. I bet he told her everything. She knew why he was depressed. She must have done. Maybe that’s why she did what she did. I know I’m right, Jo,’ he added defensively.
‘And it cost her her life?’
Mike was standing behind her. ‘She didn’t put up much of a struggle, did she?’ He glanced around the room. ‘No broken furniture. She just sat there and let whoever it was walk behind her and do it.’
The SOC officers, when they finally arrived, were a pleasure to watch, she thought as they began working methodically around the room, starting with the door, moving along the hall carpet, examining the walls for stains, brushing surfaces with fingerprint dust, taking sellotape samples from the long curtains.
With them worked the police photographer, who snapped every conceivable angle and drew diagrams to illustrate, hopefully in court, the positions of everything in the room.
Outside the front door a small cluster of neighbours was gathering. Joanna detailed the two uniformed officers to start gathering statements. ‘I’ll talk to anyone later who thinks they saw something.’
They nodded and disappeared outside. It was another half an hour before Matthew arrived. And, like waiting for an ambulance, the time seemed long and impossibly drawn out. She heard his car pull up outside, the steps taken two at a time, then the door being pushed open. Timberland shoes, jeans, a navy sweater, the familiar honey-coloured tousled hair and a more familiar expression. He was smiling.
‘Well, good thing you cancelled,’ he said ruefully.
She nodded and made a face. ‘Look,’ she awkwardly, trying to keep her voice low. She was aware of the room full of watching police officers. ‘I know we need to talk but it’ll have to wait until this case is finished. We’re all working flat out, Matthew. I’m sorry.’
He gave her a quick look which carried in it an accusation that she didn’t care enough. ‘I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, Joanna, but our relationship,’ he said very quietly, ‘is permanently on a back burner. I think I warrant more than that.’
She stood miserably, at a loss, and was relieved to hear sergeant Barraclough clearing his throat behind her.
She put her hand on Matthew’s arm. ‘A weekend away,’ she said urgently. ‘I promise, somewhere luxurious. As soon as this case is sorted. Please, Matthew.’
He stared at her for a moment, then turned away and directed his attention to the victim. There was an immediate change in his manner, an absorption in the thin face as he snapped on a pair of surgeon’s gloves and opened his black Gladstone bag.
‘Nasty business,’ he said as he fingered the stocking draped around the neck, prised open the glazed eyes. ‘Petechiae.’ he murmured. He examined her tongue. He worked so swiftly and deftly, as she had seen so many times before.
It was only ten minutes later that he straightened up. ‘Superficially,’ he said, ‘I’d say she’s been dead three or four days. Putrefaction.’ He gave an apologetic laugh. ‘Sorry.’ He held up his hands. ‘I know you hate it. Ten guesses as to the cause of death.’ He touched the stocking. ‘Easy, really. Strong stuff – pulled hard. Not even knotted. Just pulled very tight.’ He stopped. ‘Crossed over at the back. Shock and strong hands,’ he said.
‘How strong?’ she asked. ‘Can women be excluded?’
He shook his head. ‘Unfortunately not. The element of surprise, plus a quick flick of the wrist.’ He tapped her plaster cast. ‘You couldn’t have done it though, Jo.’
‘Thanks,’ she said drily. ‘That really narrows the field.’
He was peeling off his disposable gloves. ‘I suppose she’s connected with the Selkirk case?’
Joanna nodded. ‘She was on duty at the hospital that night. She was probably the one who let the murderer into the hospital.’
Matthew raised his eyebrows. ‘It’s the same ...?’
‘Not in a month of Sundays,’ she said. ‘Not his style.’
‘So who ...?’
‘You tell me.’
‘When was she last seen alive?’
‘The morning Selkirk was missed.’ She stopped. ‘I interviewed her.’
‘I think she died within a few hours of speaking to you.’ He turned his head round. ‘Didn’t they miss her at the hospital?’
‘Someone rang her in sick, claiming to be her mother.
The story fitted so well, that she’d had such a shock the doctor had said she should have some time off to recover. No one suspected a thing.’
‘Well, it looks as though she was murdered soon after getting home.’ He
gave the ghost of a smile. ‘She’s still in uniform.’
She met the light in his eyes. ‘We had noticed.’
‘Sorry.’ He raised his hand in mock defence. ‘Not trying to tell you your job.’
‘Good.’
‘I’ll get in touch with the Coroner,’ he said, ‘and provisionally we’ll set the PM for nine tomorrow morning. OK with you?’ She nodded.
‘You’re giving me a lot of work lately.’ He grinned at her affectionately.
‘Unfortunately.’ She looked down at the body. ‘I wish this hadn’t happened. She was a decent girl.’
Joanna stared out of the first-floor window across the town. Even by night she could pick out landmarks. Pinnacles of churches, the late-night supermarket and beyond that the deep, empty black of the Staffordshire moorlands. She sighed.
Something pricked at her consciousness and she wandered into the kitchen to find Korpanski.
‘The morning before Seikirk’s death,’ she said slowly, ‘he got a letter, didn’t he?’
Mike nodded.
‘We thought it was meant to frighten him and it did, enough to give him a heart attack.’
Mike demurred.
‘I know. I know. I’m not saying the person who hired Gallini anticipated that, but it did, and he’d had letters before, hadn’t he?’ She was using him as a sounding-board. ‘The others had been sent by the Carter family.’
Mike nodded in agreement, wondering where all this was leading.
But Joanna was not to be hurried. ‘And they’d rattled him enough for him to contact the police. We warned them off. This new letter upset him again but this time he didn’t consult the police but asked his partner to deal with it, or so Wilde claims.’
‘Wilde had already drafted out a reply.’
‘Incriminating evidence if the subject of the telephone conversation was not the letter but something else.’
Mike sighed. ‘We can’t ever prove what they talked about.’
‘And that’s the problem of a murder investigation. You never know who’s lying and who’s telling the truth. And sometimes people hide things for no good reason.’
‘So where does that lead us?’
Joanna gave a quick laugh. ‘I don’t know, Mike. I’m simply bouncing ideas off you.’
‘Back to the letter,’ Mike said. ‘The Carters deny sending it.’
‘As someone once said, they would, wouldn’t they?’
‘Then where does that leave us as far as the letter is concerned?’
‘It’s clouded the entire issue.’
‘Either that or it’s the sternest pointer towards the truth, but I’m certain that no one could possibly have known that Selkirk would be so intimidated by the letter that he would be admitted to hospital. No one,’ she said emphatically. ‘Not his wife. Not his doctor.’ She paused. ‘And certainly not Gallini himself. But he was admitted and that must have meant a sudden change of plan. Someone must have instructed Gallini where to find Selkirk and just as suddenly they had to rope someone in to make sure Gallini got Selkirk out of the hospital without discovery.’
She motioned towards the living room door. ‘It was poor old Yolande’s bad luck that she was the one they picked on, which leads us to wonder why. Why her? What hold did they have over her? What lever could they have used to coerce her into something so against her nature? And again, Mike, we’re back to the Frost case, which seems the only blemish on an otherwise unexceptional and exemplary life.’
She peered out of the window through the slats of the blind. ‘Now if the connection had been with poor little Rowena Carter’s accident I could have understood the whole thing better, but a suicide ...’ She drew in a deep breath. ‘Once we’ve spoken to Yolande’s parents we’d better study the facts surrounding Michael Frost’s suicide a bit closer. OK?’
They moved back to the sitting room and Joanna took a last look at Yolande. She turned back to Mike. ‘Let’s get her out of here,’ she said. ‘Let the SOCOs have their way. Call a briefing for 8 p.m. and get all the files on the Frost case out. And get on to forensics for the comparison of the letter Selkirk got the morning he died with the Carter ones, will you?’
It was a half-hour journey to Meir, to a small, neat box of a house with a tidy, manicured front garden.
The lights were on, the curtains undrawn. They were being watched.
The front door opened as they walked up the path and a little black Scottie dog snapped at their heels.
An elderly couple were framed in the doorway, the man with his arm protectively around the woman’s shoulders. They made no attempt to call off the dog.
Joanna flashed her ID card. ‘Detective Inspector Piercy. And this is Detective Sergeant Korpanski,’ she said gently. ‘We’re from the Leek Police. May we come in? I’m afraid we have some bad news.’
She recognized them from one of the photographs she’d seen in the maisonette. The father was elderly with a bent back and a military-style moustache, the woman plump and wearing an apron. She was fumbling with the strings, then finally tugged hard enough to snap them. She whisked it off over her head.
They sat in the dining room, formally gathered around a cheap teak table with a white ring in the centre where a vase must have stood. Joanna cleared her throat.
‘What’s happened?’ It was the man who spoke. ‘After you rang we tried to telephone her.’ He looked confused. ‘There was no answer. And at work they said she’d been off all week.’ He asked the same question again. ‘What’s happened? Is she all right?’
‘I’m afraid we found her dead in her flat,’ Joanna said gently. She had learned to break bad news by degree. Let them know she was dead first. Give them time to digest that unpalatable fact before telling them the rest.
The man was of a stern constitution. ‘Dead,’ he said bluntly. ‘How?’
‘We’re not absolutely sure yet,’ Joanna said cautiously. ‘There’ll have to be a –’
‘Post-mortem?’ the man said brutally.
Joanna nodded.
‘Well, how do you think she died?’ His eyes were grey and watering. ‘Not natural causes. She was a healthy girl.’
Joanna took a deep breath. ‘We have reason to believe someone may have got into her flat. It looks as though she was strangled.’ She paused. ‘I’m so sorry.’
The woman dissolved then. ‘She’s a gentle girl, our Yolande,’ she said. ‘All we’ve got, you know.’ She sniffed loudly. ‘We’ve only got the one.’
She would learn to change the tense.
‘She’s so gentle and kind too. Always helping people. Always helping people.’
The man was gripping the arms of his chair. His knuckles showed bone-white. ‘Was it one of them sex maniacs?’
‘We can’t be sure,’ Joanna said. ‘Not until we have the results of the post-mortem. But no, I don’t think so. We think it happened some time last Tuesday.’
The woman looked appalled. ‘And she’s been lying there all this time? On her own?’
Joanna nodded.
‘Our girl – my daughter – lying dead – untended?’
The man stared at Joanna. ‘Who did it’ he said, and then, ‘What can we do to help get him?’
‘We’re going to want to take a statement – later.’
‘Now!’ the man almost shouted. ‘Ask your questions now.’
‘We don’t usually in cases –’
His eyes were bulging. ‘Ask them,’ he said through gritted teeth.
‘We think,’ Joanna said gently, ‘that Yolande’s death was somehow connected with other incidents at the hospital.’
‘That solicitor chap?’
‘Possibly. Did she say anything about it?’
Yolande’s father nodded. ‘She rang us after you’d been questioning her. She sounded fine. Said he’d be turning up none the worse for his experience’ He was moving his head backwards and forwards. ‘She was sure nothing would happen to him. It gave us a shock when you found him dead.’
<
br /> Both Mike and Joanna were silent for a moment, digesting this piece of information, then Joanna leaned across the table. ‘What can you tell us about Michael Frost?’
Mr Prince looked puzzled. It was not what he had expected. ‘Michael Frost,’ he said slowly. ‘Was that the man who jumped out of the window? That was ages ago. What on earth has he got to do with this?’ He crumpled in the chair.
His wife put her hand on his arm. ‘I remember about Michael Frost,’ she said quietly.
Joanna turned to her. ‘What did Yolande say about him?’
‘He was only a young man,’ she said. ‘His wife had been ill. He was depressed about it. Yolande spoke to him. She tried to comfort him a bit. It was awful for her. She thought she’d cheered him up a bit. He said he felt better. So she thought he was all right again.’ She stopped. ‘He said he didn’t need his tablets that night. He’d made some tough decision and he felt better, much better. She didn’t bother watching him after that. She saw him writing something. The next thing she knew he’d gone through the window. She couldn’t believe it. And there was this letter, you see, addressed to his wife. She put it in her pocket. She was so frightened.’ The woman’s eyes were abstract and bleak. ‘Then once she’d hidden the letter there was nothing she could do. She couldn’t just produce it in court. But it did explain everything’
‘What did it say?’
‘She didn’t tell me,’ Mrs Prince said proudly. ‘She was a loyal girl, loyal to her patients. Always kept their secrets for them. But it would have made things easier for her, especially when that O’Sullivan man started making such trouble. Making snide remarks.’
Both the detectives could well imagine that. Mrs Prince looked at each of them carefully. ‘She did feel responsible, you see. She’d been sitting talking to him. We went to the inquest,’ she said. ‘They didn’t blame her, you know. Everyone said even the Coroner – that she’d done all she could. It was the hospital inquiry that asked why she’d been on a psychiatric ward in the first place. Yolande was off sick for a long time afterwards. She felt so responsible. She only wanted to help him. She thought she had. She was one of these girls with a strong social conscience,’ she said. She pressed her hand across her mouth. ‘She was our only child. What have we got left now?’
And None Shall Sleep Page 15
