A Timely Death

by Janet Neel

  ‘Right,’ he said, on an indrawn breath, and walked over to the table. ‘None of them are locked.’ He stood stolidly while two detectives neatly unpacked his expensive case, quick hands moving carefully over all the pockets, patting the lid. ‘What are you looking for? I don’t do or carry drugs.’

  No one replied but they put the suitcase aside and proceeded to open the small flight bag, sorting carefully through the pile of papers. The searchers handed McLeish wordlessly a bulging unmarked envelope, and he weighed it in his hand, raising his eyebrows at Fleming.

  ‘Cash. Open it, do, don’t mind me. It’s not illegal, is it, taking cash out?’

  McLeish pulled on plastic gloves and opened the envelope, glancing at the serial numbers with Davidson, also gloved, craning at his shoulder.

  ‘Got it out of the bank this morning,’ Fleming volunteered. A small movement behind him caught his attention and they watched as he slowly reddened. ‘There’s ten thou there – I thought we’d need some cash.’ He turned towards Sylvia Price who was sitting up straight, colour in her cheeks. ‘You weren’t up to it, Sylvie, so I got it out for us.’

  ‘I have not signed a cheque.’

  ‘No, well … the bank let me have it. I explained about your hand.’

  There was a quiet knock on the door and a BAA man put his head round, eyes wide with interest, and waved an envelope at the room generally. Davidson took it, motioned the man out, read it and passed it to McLeish; it was from Catherine Crane to tell them that Fleming Price’s bank manager, who had cashed a cheque two hours before for £10,000, had another look at the second signature and had got cold feet, deciding that it could not be Sylvia Price’s signature, even with a broken arm.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Fleming,’ he said, neutrally, folding the note away.

  ‘Mrs Price, do you feel able to come to the table?’

  Sylvia Price indicated that she could make the effort and was assisted to the table and the chair replaced for her while the process was repeated. McLeish watched impassively; she was carrying several credit cards and a little cash, but nothing else of any interest, except a lot of embroidered silk underwear, substantial enough but nothing that suggested any real support. Mrs Price watched, equally impassively, and turned and said something confidential to one of the WPCs.

  ‘Sir?’ The girl appeared by McLeish and he tried to relax. ‘Mrs Price says she must go to the toilet.’

  ‘Yes, OK. Go with her,’ he said impatiently, grimly staring at the pile of clothes being packed back into the suitcase. ‘No,’ he said, ‘wait.’ The WPC turned enquiringly, her arm tucked for support under Sylvia Price’s. He took a deep breath and strode over to them. ‘You may of course visit a lavatory but the WPC will have to accompany you into the cubicle. Unless you can wait until after you have been searched.’

  It was right, he wasn’t out of his mind, she knew what he was talking about, he saw, as the colour flooded up under the skin and she started to breathe very fast, and turn up her eyes. ‘Stop that,’ he snapped, holding her shoulders, and her eyes flew open in surprise, like an animal, like a cat.

  ‘Sylvia! What’s happening? What are you doing to her?’ Luke Fleming came up at his side, ready to be angry all over again, but she gave him a look of rage which stopped him in his tracks. She shrugged off McLeish’s hands and went out of the door with both WPCs in attendance, and Bruce Davidson right behind them. Detective Sergeant Black, the senior of the two, was experienced but Jenny Martin was frightened and unsteady.

  ‘What are you looking for, for God’s sake?’ It was Fleming, who had sat down on the edge of the table, looking older and heavier. ‘You can search me,’ he volunteered, with a flicker of bravado, rapidly extinguished by McLeish, who warned him that he could be charged with uttering a false document assuming that Mrs Price would maintain her statement that she had not signed the cheque.

  ‘Sir.’ It was Davidson. ‘In her stays, £50 notes.’

  ‘What about the numbers?’

  ‘They’re right. They check. About £800 light and the one we’ve got already is in the sequence. Congratulations.’

  ‘Thanks, Bruce. Bring her back in a couple of minutes, will you?’

  ‘But what has she done? What have you found?’ It was Fleming, suddenly very white. He stared at McLeish then sank into a chair. ‘You’ve found the cash. Christ. She killed him. I didn’t know, I didn’t know, she didn’t tell me.’

  McLeish charged him, formally, with uttering a forged document and as an accessory after the fact of William Price’s murder, and sent him, shaking with shock and protesting, off in a police car with Roberts and two of the squad. He went through to where Sylvia Price was sitting between the two WPCs, attended now by Davidson as well, and charged her with murder. The brown eyes had no light in them, he realised as he recited the familiar lengthy words of caution, and the rest of the face was expressionless. She spoke only to demand her solicitor, and McLeish put her into another car with a telephone. He went back with the remaining three of the team, too much in awe of him to rejoice aloud, but very pleased with themselves, and he was in his office working through the formalities of consigning Sylvia Price to a police cell when Peter Graebner arrived. McLeish took him to the interview room where his client was sitting and offered him coffee and, as he turned from concluding these civilities, saw Davidson and Jenny, all but jumping up and down with excitement, give him the thumbs-up sign.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘The prints match. The notes were given out by the bank on the cheque Mr Price wrote. Mr Price’s prints are on the bands or somewhere on nine of the bundles. Mrs Price’s are on three or four of the notes on the eighth and on the band.’ Davidson had decently let Jenny give him the news. ‘She must have opened up one to use for expenses, like giving Francis Price cash.’

  ‘And Fleming’s?’

  ‘On none of them. You didn’t think he’d done it, did you, John?’

  ‘No. I thought, and I think now, it was she alone.’

  ‘We can check any shop she might have been in.’

  ‘No, anything like that will be lost in the system by now. We were just incredibly lucky that Francis Price had a hole in the inner pocket of his jacket.’

  ‘Weren’t we just,’ Davidson said, soberly. He hesitated.

  ‘Spit it out, Bruce.’

  ‘If she’s the sense to confess to taking the cash but not touching Mr Price, we’ve got a problem.’

  ‘Oh, she’ll plead that more than likely. Peter Graebner will point her that way.’ He looked down at Jenny, who was looking appalled. ‘I told the AC that this morning. It’ll depend a good deal on how Francis copes in the box. His is the only evidence that places her on the spot at the right time. And he was a druggie then and may be again.’

  ‘Can’t we find something else?’ It was Jenny, and both men regarded her kindly.

  ‘Oh, we’ll try. That’s the next two weeks’ work,’ McLeish said. ‘Save it for the meeting.’

  They had the team assembled within thirty seconds of their arrival on the fourth floor, and McLeish explained where they had got to. ‘Now starts the leg work,’ he advised. ‘She left the office at four o’clock and she went to Bosham; we know that, she was placed there by the garage at 6.45 p.m. But she came back.’

  ‘She used her own key to get into the house?’ Roberts suggested.

  ‘I think not through the front door. Lots of people in the street who might have seen her. She knew her husband, she knew how he was likely to entertain himself with her gone and nothing else to do but worry about the company. So she waited somewhere until he drew the curtains in the basement. Then she watched, or counted to twenty, or something, till he was well away, let herself in via the garden door, wearing gloves, pulled the table away from under him, went upstairs and emptied the safe, and went out again through the garden door.’

  ‘At what time, sir?’

  ‘Just before Francis Price met her, whenever that was. About nine thirty, I think.
It would have been dark for half an hour or so. And Antony Price, next morning, thought his father had been dead for twelve hours.’ He looked round his team: their expressions ranged from openly sceptical to downcast and unhappy.

  ‘We know she was there, but I’d be glad to have more proof,’ he said. ‘Once she’d got to Spain, we’d never have seen the cash again. So we had to take her and we’ll just have to find another way of placing her at the scene. We’re starting now from knowing she was there.’

  ‘But someone attacked her two days ago,’ Roberts protested.

  ‘I don’t think so, and I didn’t at the time. She did it herself.’ He did not look at Bruce Davidson but saw him nod in acknowledgement. ‘It was too pat; she said she didn’t know who had attacked her, but she had Antony Price, known to be violent, on the spot, she knew Miles Arnold had flung out, and she knew that Fleming would be in his flat by himself. Good way of deflecting attention on to the three men in her immediate circle. And rather bad luck on her that Miles Arnold – who had every cause to wish her ill – was drinking with the Private Secretary to the Chief Whip at the time.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘She took out the light bulb and threw herself down the stairs. Took resolution but she’s not short of that. We’ll never prove it, of course, and it’s just another loose end for the defence to make hay with, as it were. I’m going to wait for Mrs P’s solicitor, but the rest of you need to start the hard graft. We need to place that car in the area on Friday night.’

  Epilogue

  Tuesday, 3 May

  ‘Catherine. Come in. How are you?’

  ‘Frustrated.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear that.’ McLeish smiled at her; she had been avoiding him and he had not known how to ease the situation without putting himself in a false position.

  ‘All I’ve got, after a lot of work, is Luke Fleming pleading guilty to attempted fraudulent conversion of the £10,000 he tried to take to Majorca. The £20,000 odd he took out in Spain he paid back, explaining it was in another company account all the time. We could have done something there, except it all happened in Majorca and it had come back. It just wasn’t worth the bother, not now the company is being sold. But how are you doing, John?’

  He passed her the coffee his secretary had just brought in. ‘You’ve not heard?’ She blushed, and he grinned. ‘Nice to see you anyway. Well, we placed the car here for Friday night. We must have had every copper in West London on house-to-house, but we got lucky. She’d left it so a woman in Portland Road – you know it? – had a struggle getting into her patch of off-street parking, and noted the number in order to ring up if the car was still there in the morning.’

  ‘Not quite enough.’

  ‘Enough to get her to change her story. We’d caught her with the cash and even if her brief had managed to rubbish Francis Price as a witness, we’d placed the car exactly where it shouldn’t have been. So she’s saying now she came back from Bosham, having forgotten something, walked in on a dead husband, hanging from the ceiling, realised someone had moved the table and rushed out again, panicked.’

  ‘Pausing only to take the cash from the safe.’

  ‘A weak point, thank God.’

  ‘Will it play?’ Catherine asked, carefully.

  ‘The CPS are still thinking about it. There are two other possible suspects which the defence can play with unfortunately, particularly if they don’t put her in the box. I’ve got people trying to place Fleming in Barnsley to get him out of the way. The defence can muddy the waters by suggesting either Francis or Luke Fleming did it. The AC thinks Fleming must have been in it, but Mrs Price isn’t saying if he was. My own feeling is that he wasn’t, and that he is truly staggered by the whole thing.’

  ‘He’d been thinking of her as a little woman.’

  ‘Yes. As it turns out she had all her buttons on, kept clear of the business and did her old man in when it looked as if he was going to get both of them into trouble.’

  ‘Was she going to marry Fleming?’ Catherine asked. ‘I mean, before.’

  ‘Not sure. If it looked like the best way of having a comfortable life, well then, yes. But she might have decided against him when she found he was on the take.’

  ‘Or done him in too.’

  ‘Yes,’ McLeish agreed, thoughtfully. ‘And done it somewhere outside the jurisdiction so she didn’t meet us again.’

  They considered the prospect in silence and McLeish collected himself. ‘My best bet is that the CPS will agree to go ahead, but who knows?’

  ‘You seem fairly relaxed about it.’

  ‘No, I’m not, but I’ve three active cases … well, two. We’ve got a result in Neasden and it’s the eighty per cent rule, isn’t it? Put the effort where you can get a result.’ He studied her. She was drinking coffee, calmly, showing no signs of getting up to leave. ‘Cath?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I hear that Dave is going to come up in court after all.’

  ‘He’s decided he’s recovered and he’s pleading guilty to assault. He realised he could be in a bin for ever if he just went on having a breakdown.’

  ‘You’re over him?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I didn’t know I was, but I am. I have to appear of course, and go through the story, and it’ll be all over the Met again, but that’ll be it finished.’

  ‘So you’ll go on here?’

  ‘Yes. Fraud’s my bag, I’ve found what I want to do.’ She considered him under her eyelashes. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m here for two or three years.’ He hesitated. ‘Cath…’

  ‘Don’t say it, John. I need to find a bloke of my own. And not a policeman for preference.’ She looked into his face. ‘Or isn’t that what you were going to say?’

  ‘It’s what I ought to have been going to say.’

  She looked away finally. ‘I need to get back.’ She put her cup down and waited as he struggled to his feet, banging a knee on the coffee table, then stretched up and kissed him lightly on the cheek and was gone, leaving the smell of primroses behind her.

  Francesca hesitated at the ward door, taking in the group on the balcony. It was a cold spring day and Annabelle Brewster, her face very pale, was sitting in a chair wrapped in a blanket. Matthew was sitting on the balcony rail, perilously close to overbalancing, looking like a bird of prey in his long black coat, and Francis Price was also present, shivering in a denim jacket. She took a deep breath and sneezed as she inhaled the scent of the bunch of daffodils she was clutching.

  ‘Bless you.’ Matthew had slid off the balcony and was coming towards her to kiss her and she sneezed against his shoulder.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ she said, disengaging herself, and presented the daffodils to Annabelle. ‘How are you?’ she asked, and wished she hadn’t, as tears came to Annabelle’s eyes.

  ‘A lot better. I feel feeble sitting here.’

  ‘You just bloody stay there until you’re right,’ Matt said, brusquely. ‘Everything’s under control.’

  Francesca considered him. She had only spoken to him on the phone once in the last week, and she was both delighted to see him and apprehensive. She knew from John that Peter Graebner, acting for Sylvia Price, and his lawyer friend, acting for Francis, and Antony’s solicitor had jointly applied to the court to appoint an administrator to Bill Price’s estate. Matt had rung her up between meetings and had observed that there was a marked shortage of suitable executors in the late Bill Price’s immediate circle: his widow was on bail, charged with his murder, his partner was on bail, charged with theft from the company, his eldest son was in custody, charged with attempting to murder Annabelle, and his second son, even if currently reformed, had two recent convictions for drug abuse. Bit like the last act of Macbeth or Titus Andronicus, she had suggested, and as if all that were not difficult enough, no one of the survivors was prepared to agree that any other should be appointed. It made you understand, they had agreed, what the law and the whole system for administering
it was for, to cut through these Gordian entanglements. And no sooner had the administrator – a partner in a firm of accountants – been appointed, than he had received an offer for the business which, while not generous, was good enough, and it seemed likely that all parties would manage to agree to accept. The only point of debate was whether a much chastened Luke Fleming would succeed in getting himself taken on by the new owners, on the basis that, provided they never let him sign a cheque, he did at least know where all the buildings, the bank accounts, and people were. The administrator had also let it be known that he was not going to attempt to defend claims from Antony and Francis Price for the return of trust funds invested in the company in defiance of the Trustee Investments Act, or from Miles Arnold for monies wrongly diverted. So, as Matt had observed, Francis would have enough to buy a flat, Miles Arnold could finance a new career if his constituency association could offer no more than the very lukewarm support they had managed so far, and Antony Price could pay his own legal fees.

  She understood, as the atmosphere of the room settled, that she had interrupted an argument, and looked enquiringly at Matt. He looked back, in a moment of swift and complete communication.

  ‘Antony Price’s brief is negotiating for a charge of assault rather than attempted murder.’

  ‘Mm,’ she said, glancing at Annabelle’s white, miserable face. ‘And what do we think the truth is?’

  The other three gazed at her.

  ‘Always a good place to start,’ she pointed out.

  ‘Yes,’ Matt said appreciatively. ‘Well, I know that I had to hit him over the head to get his fingers off her neck – I couldn’t get him away. No, for fuck’s sake, Anna, shut up.’

  ‘She’s not interrupting you, only weeping, you thug,’ Francesca protested.

  ‘Well, she can stop doing that and all,’ he said furiously. ‘Personally and professionally I object. There’s no way I’m going to lie in court.’