A Fatal Affair

by Faith Martin

  ‘Yeah, I suppose it was,’ he agreed sadly. ‘Mad about her, he was.’

  ‘A lot of people in the village have remarked how lovely she was,’ Trudy put in, deciding it was time she added something to the mix. She watched Ronnie closely and sure enough, at this praise of the dead May Queen, angry colour swept up into his face.

  ‘Oh yeah, she was something to look at right enough,’ Ronnie said. ‘Pretty as a picture and rotten through and through.’

  Once again his father moved a little agitatedly forward, as if to try and silence him, and then thought better of it.

  ‘You didn’t like her then,’ Clement said dryly.

  ‘That I didn’t, mister,’ Ronnie said flatly. ‘Everyone knew she was doing the dirty on him, seeing other men and what-not. She had half the silly old sods in the village wrapped around her little finger, and not just people our age neither, but married men who should’a known better. Old enough to be her dad, some of ’em! It was sickening. She even had some arty type promising to take her picture and make her famous and promising all sorts. And she lapped it up – all the attention. Made her feel like Gina Lollobridgida or something, I dare say.’ He shot his father’s stiff and disapproving back another scowl. ‘I don’t care if you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead! Everyone saw her, going around in fancy clothes that she couldn’t afford to buy for herself, sprayed in French perfume and wearing gold. Where’d she get all those little gee-gaws, ey? From some silly old duffer who should have been old enough to know better, that’s who. Flirting, and playing up to them! The only one who couldn’t see it was David.’ He finally ran out of bile, his voice dropping to a more despairing tone now. ‘He would never hear a word said against her. Poor fool! And look where it got him!’

  He slammed his hand down sharply on the table, making both his father and Trudy jump. Only Clement continued to watch him, unruffled.

  ‘I’m sorry you lost your friend,’ the coroner said gently. And for a moment, Ronnie Dewberry’s blue eyes swam with unshed tears. Then he shook his head and cleared his throat. ‘Yeah. Well …’

  ‘So you never fell for her charms yourself?’ Trudy ventured to break the small sad silence that followed.

  ‘No. Unlike some, I had more sense!’ Ronnie shot back.

  ‘She must have had some redeeming features though. Nobody’s all bad,’ Trudy tried again, but Ronnie was having none of it.

  ‘If she did, I can’t think of one. She was a nasty bit of goods through and through. She even treated her best friend like dirt. Now what does that say about her, hey?’

  ‘Her best friend?’ Trudy echoed.

  ‘Yeah, Janet Baines. Now there’s a decent enough girl,’ he added quietly. ‘She dresses proper, like, and doesn’t think she’s the queen bee. Mind you, she has a bit of a bad time with her mother, I reckon. She’s the over-protective sort,’ he added, as Trudy’s eyebrows rose in query. ‘Smothers her a bit, you know the kind. Janet’s her only child, and tries to keep her tied to her apron strings. I think that’s why Iris was able to get her claws into her – Janet, I mean. You know, she helped Janet get away from her mum for a bit and have some fun. If you can call it fun. Not that Janet … Well, it’s none of my business is it,’ he said with a final shake of his head. ‘Anyway, if you’ve finished, I got work to do.’

  ‘Have some porridge,’ his father said half-heartedly, but the younger Dewberry simply shook his head and stumped out of the house.

  ‘You ain’t gotta take anythin’ the boy says to heart,’ his father said heavily. ‘Things ain’t been the same around here since I found young David … well, since I found him.’

  ‘We’re sorry to intrude, Mr Dewberry,’ Trudy said quietly. ‘Thank you for speaking to us. We’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread it around the village that we’re here tying up some lose ends,’ she added, thinking of Duncan Gillingham. ‘There are still reporters lurking about …’

  But Ray Dewberry snorted disdainfully. ‘Don’t have no truck with the likes of them!’ he promised. And for that, Trudy could only feel very grateful.

  Chapter 13

  Once outside, Trudy and Clement walked thoughtfully towards the Rover. ‘So what do you think?’ Trudy mused. ‘Is it a case of “methinks the young man doth protest too much” or do you think he genuinely didn’t like her?’

  Clement smiled. ‘Hard to say. But I think we can be sure, for some reason or other, that he definitely wasn’t indifferent to Iris. But whether or not he disliked her as much as he claimed, or whether he was secretly pining after her …’ He shrugged. ‘We’ll probably never know.’

  ‘But if he was smitten with her, and was even seeing Iris behind his best friend’s back,’ Trudy persisted, ‘does that give him motive to kill either Iris or David? I mean, let’s just say for argument’s sake that he had a great passion for Iris – he might have killed her if she turned him down. Or if she didn’t turn him down, and they’d been seeing each other, what if he found out that she was two-timing both himself and David? We keep hearing how Iris was popular with practically all the male population of the village, after all.’ Trudy paused and took a much-needed breath, then frowned. ‘But why then would he turn around after killing Iris and kill David? That doesn’t make sense, does it?’

  She slipped into the passenger seat and waited for Clement to settle behind the wheel before she was off and running again. ‘And if he didn’t kill Iris, but secretly loved her, could it be that he believed David murdered her, and killed David in revenge?’

  Clement grunted, amused by all the eager speculation, and reached into his pocket to pull out the car keys. As he did so, he felt his hand begin to tremble and twitch. He knew he couldn’t fit the keys into the ignition right then without drawing attention to his most recent fit of ‘the shakes’ so he sat back instead, waiting for it to pass. At least, with his young friend in such a talkative mood, he wouldn’t be pressed for something to keep her distracted!

  ‘That’s a lot of speculation,’ he said slowly. ‘Let’s take it a step at a time and see if we can’t sort it out.’ He glanced out of the window as a black and white sheepdog darted across the farmyard and slipped into one of the outhouses. ‘If – and that’s a big “if” by the way – we say that Ronnie is the killer, are we saying that Ronnie lured David to the barn and killed him in cold blood?’

  Trudy stared thoughtfully out of the window. ‘Well, it’s a starting point, isn’t it? I mean, why did David die in the barn at all? If he committed suicide he could have done it anywhere. He could have slit his wrists in the bath at his home, or taken pills with alcohol on the village green, where Iris died. Or …’

  Clement couldn’t help but grin. ‘All right, I get the picture. But don’t forget that if he did kill himself, and his preferred method was hanging, then the barn would make perfect sense to him. He knew it well, remember, because he played there as a kid. He would have known about the handy rafters, and the rope lying around.’

  ‘Yes, but all of that goes equally well for Ronnie too, if he was the killer,’ Trudy pointed out reasonably. ‘He could have asked David to meet him at the barn – I don’t know, telling him he’d found something out about Iris or what-have-you. And once he was there, he offered him a drink laced with the sleeping pills. And then, when he was feeling woozy, put the rope around his neck and hauled him up.’ She stopped abruptly at that, suddenly appalled by the image that swept into her head. ‘That’s awful. To be betrayed and killed by your best friend.’

  ‘If it happened at all,’ Clement reminded her steadily, glancing down unobtrusively to check his hand. It was fluttering gently now, down between the door panel and the side of his leg, but it wasn’t trembling quite as much as it had been. ‘We still don’t know if suicide can be ruled out. Has your DI Jennings done anything about checking out the condition of the stepladder that he supposedly used?’

  Trudy nodded. ‘Yes, he’s got some expert on woodwork looking at it. He expects to have a report soon.’
>
  Clement sighed. ‘Well, until we have something evidentiary to go on, it seems to me we have far too much to contend with. Did David kill Iris, or didn’t he? Did David commit suicide, or didn’t he? If he did neither, did the same person who killed Iris kill David? It’s possible – but not likely, I admit – that one person could have killed Iris, and someone else killed David! If we’re not careful, we’ll start running around like headless chickens.’

  Trudy sighed, but she knew the coroner was right.

  ‘We need to keep our focus on one thing – and that’s David,’ Clement reminded her firmly. ‘His state of mind before he died. What he was doing, who he was seeing, what he was saying about Iris. Because if his father is right, and David was actively trying to find out who killed Iris …’

  ‘Then by following his tracks, we might find out who killed her too?’ Trudy put in eagerly.

  ‘Well yes, there’s that,’ Clement agreed, turning the car keys thoughtfully in his hand, relieved to find he could manipulate them quite well now. ‘But we’re not actually supposed to be investigating Iris’s death, are we? Didn’t your inspector make that very clear?’

  Trudy bit her lip. ‘Yes. I mean …’ Her eyes shifted to him slyly. ‘But if we do happen to find out who killed Iris …’

  Clement laughed outright. ‘You want to show your sergeant and Jennings what you can do?’ Well, that was understandable, he thought with a smile.

  Trudy sighed again, but said nothing. He was right, of course. She was desperate to prove to her superiors that they shouldn’t leave her out of the big cases in future.

  ‘Well, we won’t accomplish anything sitting in the car,’ Clement said, leaning forward and so blocking her view of what he was doing. He got the key into the ignition on the second try, then leaned back in his seat again.

  ‘I think we should talk to this girl Janet Baines, don’t you?’ he murmured. ‘If David was trying to find Iris’s killer, he must have talked to her best friend. Even I know that girls tell things to other girls that they’d never confide in a month of Sundays to the chap they’re actually stepping out with.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Trudy agreed.

  But after asking a young lad playing with a whip-and-top in the street the way to the Baines’ house, they found they were out of luck. Janet Baines wasn’t home.

  But her mother was.

  Chapter 14

  The Baines’ house turned out to be a fairly large, detached house a little way down the lane leading from the village green. It had a colourful front garden, and an old man was busy working in it, tying up lupin plants. Clement suspected that Mrs Baines probably employed retired villagers to maintain both her house and gardens, which meant that she couldn’t be short of a bob or two.

  Unlike Iris’s working-class background, her best friend came from a family a step or two up from her on the social ladder, and he suspected that had probably rankled.

  ‘Do we know anything about the family?’ Trudy asked him, as they opened the gate and walked up to the front door, watched curiously by the old man with green fingers.

  ‘I don’t. None of the Baines family were called as witnesses,’ he pointed out. ‘So they wouldn’t have been included in my files.’

  Trudy didn’t like going in without prior information, but since they were severely hampered by the fact that their investigation was being conducted without official sanction, she had no choice. So she knocked on the door and hoped for the best.

  The woman who answered the summons a few moments later was tall and thin, with shoulder-length brown hair and large brown eyes. She was not quite beautiful, and dressed in a twin-set the colour of peaches. She looked to be in her early forties. ‘Yes?’ she asked sharply, looking instantly at Clement.

  ‘Dr Ryder, city coroner. Mrs Baines, is it?’

  ‘Yes, I’m Angela Baines. I’m afraid I don’t understand …’ She trailed off politely, and Clement smiled his best, most soothing smile.

  ‘I resided over the David Finch inquest, and I’m just in the village doing some final tidying up of the case. I was hoping that I might speak to your daughter Janet.’

  ‘Janet? Why? She hardly knew David,’ Angela Finch said sharply, and Trudy gave a mental nod. Ronnie Dewberry was right – this was definitely a protective mother all right. She already looked ready to go into battle on her daughter’s behalf, and Trudy only hoped that Dr Ryder would be able to charm her around a bit, otherwise they’d quickly have the door slammed in their faces. She had already come to the conclusion that Mrs Finch regarded Trudy as beneath her notice. She probably regarded all young women around her daughter’s age as insignificant.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure that must be the case, Mrs Baines,’ Clement said smoothly. ‘I just wanted to ask her a few questions about Iris Carmody and whether or not David had asked her any questions about what had happened to Iris. It goes to state of mind, you know,’ he added as if confiding in her. In fact, what he’d just said was all but meaningless, but Trudy admired the psychology behind it. People were always flattered to think that they were being allowed access to confidential information of which their friends or neighbours were unaware.

  At the mention of the dead May Queen, Angela’s face instantly tightened however. ‘Oh her. I see.’ She sniffed, then cast a quick, anxious glance up and down the street. ‘You’d better come in then, but Janet’s not here right now. Still, no point in giving the neighbours something else to wag their tongues over.’

  And so saying, she stepped a shade reluctantly aside to let them pass. ‘Please, go on through to the end.’ She indicated a short, rather ill-lit corridor that led off the hall.

  ‘Is your husband home, Mrs Baines?’ Clement asked. No doubt he was hoping that if he was, he might be in a more talkative mood than his wife.

  ‘I’m a widow. Have been for some years now,’ Angela said briskly, following them down the corridor and then indicating a door off to the left. Clement, in the lead, obligingly opened the door, revealing an extremely tidy and clean room, done out in shades of magnolia and beige. There was a fairly new-looking three-piece suite done out in some knobbly material the colour of oatmeal, and a deep-pile carpet in a similar colour.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. If you’d rather have someone else here with you whilst we talk … a sister perhaps?’ Clement asked casually, making Trudy cast him a swift, slightly surprised look. She was pretty sure that Angela Baines was the sort of woman who believed she could cope with anyone or anything on her own, and sure enough, the woman’s already stiff shoulders stiffened even further.

  ‘That won’t be necessary, I’m sure,’ she sniffed. ‘Brian left us very well provided-for, as you can see,’ she gave a quick, casual wave that was meant to take in the entire house, not just the well-appointed room, ‘and I’ve been managing our affairs quite well on my own ever since he passed. Now, what’s all this about Iris? Oh, please sit down. Tea?’ she made the last offer abruptly, an obvious afterthought and one which she believed they’d forgo, because she was already sitting down herself.

  ‘No thank you, Mrs Baines, we’re fine for the present,’ Clement said, taking his cue from her without batting an eyelash. Here, he understood, was a woman with a one-track mind who would not be distracted by social niceties.

  Consequently, he got right down to business. ‘We understand that Iris and Janet were friends? Best friends, in fact?’

  Angela drew in a sharp breath. ‘Supposedly,’ she said. ‘At least, I know that’s how Janet saw things,’ she amended.

  ‘You saw them differently?’ Clement asked.

  ‘Of course. I’m older and wiser than my daughter, Dr …’

  ‘Ryder.’

  ‘Yes. Well. Janet was far too trusting in my opinion. She thought Iris was her friend, when it was clear the girl had no real feelings of friendship towards her at all.’

  ‘That sounds rather harsh,’ Clement mused mildly.

  Angela’s thin lips tightened mutinously. ‘It may be so, bu
t it’s true nonetheless. Oh, I could see right through that little Miss, right from the time they met in primary school. Even then, as a five-year-old, Iris was as jealous as jealous could be of Janet. It was as plain as a pikestaff,’ she added, nodding firmly.

  ‘Oh? In what way?’ Clement continued to keep his voice light and vaguely disinterested. This, he knew, would goad her on more than anything.

  ‘In every way,’ Angela said sharply. ‘She was green with envy because I gave Janet things that her own family couldn’t afford. Clothes, toys, books, you name it. If I gave Janet a new doll, Iris would somehow have to ruin it. Drop it, break it, get the clothes muddy. She just couldn’t bear for Janet to have nice things that she didn’t.’

  ‘Children can be very fierce sometimes,’ Clement said.

  ‘Oh, that was just the beginning. When they were little, I could make excuses for Iris, because she was, as you said, just a little child. But as they grew older, she became even worse – more sly and cunning. She began to deliberately get my Janet into no end of trouble at school. She’d do things and then run off, leaving my daughter to the take the blame. I think her teachers soon cottoned on to that though,’ she added with satisfaction. ‘They soon realised what was what. Iris was a good-looking girl, but then so is my Janet – in a less obvious way. They could see that Iris was always trying to undermine her.’

  ‘And this … rivalry … continued as they grew into adulthood, I take it?’ Clement asked.

  Angela looked as though she might have snorted at this, if she hadn’t been so ladylike. As it was, she contented herself with a magnificent sniff. ‘I should say so! If ever a boy showed any interest in Janet at all, Iris had to snatch him away. If ever Janet had her hair cut in the latest fashion, Iris had to go one better. The same with clothes. If I took Janet shopping for a new outfit, Iris wouldn’t rest until she had something even more showy. It was pathetic really.’

  ‘And Janet never realised any of this?’ Trudy ventured timidly.