by Jill McGown
“Why didn’t you tell us that?”
“Because you only asked me about ones who could have taken the gun. He couldn’t have. I knew it was gone before he came upstairs.”
Lloyd nodded slowly. “And … this punter. Was that before or after Inspector Hill had searched your house?”
“Before,” she said promptly.
Lloyd heaved a huge sigh of relief and looked at Judy, who was looking similarly relieved. He turned back to Ginny. “Why did you say Inspector Hill could have taken the gun?” he asked.
“I never said that!” said Ginny, aghast at the very thought. She twisted around to Judy. “I never!” she said. “Honest—I never!”
Lloyd thought hard about the interview. “But when Sergeant Finch asked you if anyone else could have got it, you said, ‘Just Inspector Hill, when they were searching the house’— didn’t you?”
Ginny shook her head, frowning, thinking, then nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I said that. But he didn’t ask who could have got the gun. He said had anyone else been upstairs and not handcuffed to the bed. And she had been upstairs,” she said earnestly. “And she wasn’t handcuffed to the bed.”
Lloyd smiled broadly, trying, unsuccessfully, to ignore the image that had sprung inevitably to his mind. No, he thought. She’d never stand for it. Would she? He looked at her, saw her trying desperately not to laugh, so as not to offend the deadly serious Ginny. You never knew. She might, he thought, on a good night with a fair wind. But where in the world could they get hold of handcuffs?
“I was just trying to get away from him,” Ginny went on. “But he got me at the top of the stairs. Lennie came in and got him off me.”
He left Ginny with great reluctance. He really did want to spend his life interviewing her. He envied Lennie.
“There you are,” he said to Judy, as he drove off. “The gun was there after your first visit and gone before your second.”
“Mm.”
Lloyd heaved a great, melodramatic sigh. “Now what?” he said.
“You’ve just proved that no one murdered him,” she said. “Now, that would suit me down to the ground, but I’ve a feeling you would rather catch whoever did it.”
Well, yes. He had given Freddie a lecture on the subject. And, indeed, people couldn’t go around doing that sort of thing willy-nilly. But once in a while …?
Maybe not. “All right,” he said. “Do your thing.”
“What thing?”
“The little puzzles,” he said.
“The little puzzles are your thing,” she said.
“But you list them in chronological order—I know you do. So go through all the little puzzles about any of the people who could have got hold of the gun.”
He now waited for a break in the traffic to allow him to escape from Parkside. Judy was turning pages in her notebook, and almost broke her neck when he shot out into the first available space in a most un-Lloyd-like fashion. Serve her right. She was always doing it to him.
“Right,” she said, as they drove through the quietness of a Malworth Sunday, restored to it by the all-too-successful bypass. In an old town like this, it was almost the way driving used to be, when he was a child, and anyone with a car was godlike, majestically sweeping past, their gleaming chariots stirring up faint clouds of dust on the underused roads. “Why did Rob Jarvis team up with Lennie, of all people?” she asked.
“Ginny.”
“Yes, but if he’d got an honest partner to drive during the day, he could have afforded the going rate for Ginny, and still had a profit to show for it,” Judy said. “So why Lennie? He knew he was being ripped off—he told Marshall he knew.”
Lloyd thought. Jarvis was a burglar, without form. Lennie was someone who had tried his hand at a lot of things, all illegal, until quite recently, and would doubtless be doing so again any minute. “Fall guy?” he suggested.
“But he didn’t even try to use him as a fall guy, did he? I mean—if Lennie had keys to the garage, he didn’t say he had.”
“He couldn’t, really, though, could he? He had the taxi that night, not Lennie. He didn’t bargain for someone calling the police while he was on the premises.”
“True.” She ticked it off. “Why use Bonfire Night as a cover, and then ring nine-double-nine?”
“All right,” said Lloyd, sweeping out onto the dual carriageway, giving that some thought. “It wasn’t the murderer who rang nine hundred and ninety-nine. It was a passerby who didn’t want to get involved.”
“Why did this passerby ring Stansfield first?”
Stansfield looked very pretty at this time of year. It wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination a picturesque town—all housing estates and neighborhood shops with flat roofs. But in spring and autumn, its woodland setting and its planted roundabouts came into their own. The parkland around the boating lake was a wonderful mix of greens and browns, with great orange splashes, and deep red tinges. Yellow leaves were just beginning to lose their grip on the trees, carpeting the grass beneath them.
He signaled left, and tried not to look at the town center, about which he had bad dreams. He didn’t know who had designed it in the first place; he hadn’t thought much of it then. But now …
“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t think of any reason. I thought it might be Drummond himself, trying to ring you, but the lab says no. The blood was on the phone before those digits were pressed. Who knows police station numbers?”
“Police officers.”
“Apart from police officers.”
“Informers?”
“Neighborhood Watch,” said Lloyd.
“Solicitors.”
“We’ve got a taxi-driver-cum-burglar, a petty villain, a secretary or whatever Mrs. Jarvis is, and a copper turned security man.”
“And a police officer,” said Judy.
Lloyd ignored her. “I like the last one best,” he said. He thought hard to try to produce a reason for anyone at all ringing Stansfield, especially Matt Burbidge, but he couldn’t. “No,” he said. “Still no answer. Next.”
“Why didn’t Mrs. Jarvis use her car?” said Judy.
Lloyd turned left and left again into the police station car park, and squeezed the car into his space. He switched off, and looked at Judy. “I thought that one had so many possible answers it didn’t constitute a puzzle,” he said, getting out.
“It has,” said Judy, as they walked toward the building. “But maybe we should find out what sort of car she drives. Drove. Whatever. Maybe she did take it—maybe someone saw it at the scene.”
“And maybe all Mr. Morgan’s friends are part of a conspiracy?” Lloyd grinned, and held the door open for her. “You’re getting worse than me.”
In the CID room, Marshall blinked a little, gathering his thoughts slowly, like he did every thing else, as he was asked the question. “I don’t know,” he said, at last. “I didn’t see her car. I can find out for you, sir.”
“No, that’s all right.” Lloyd sat on his desk. “You didn’t see it?” he repeated. “Was the taxi in the garage?”
“No. It was on the road outside the house. There wasn’t a car in the garage. Just all the stolen goods.”
“Was there a car outside, in the courtyard of the garages? Or outside the house, where the taxi was?”
“No. No, because I was the only car there when I parked, besides the taxi. And there was nothing parked outside the garages.”
“And both Mr. and Mrs. Jarvis were there?”
“Yes,” said Marshall.
“Then where was her car, Constable Marshall? The car that sits in her garage while she takes the bus?”
“Sorry, sir?”
“Nothing.” Lloyd got off Marshall’s desk, went into Judy’s office, and sat on her desk, facing her as she followed him in. “She wouldn’t have been able to drive it if it wasn’t there,” he said. “Would she?”
“But who could have taken it? The only likely candidate is her husband, and he was
driving his taxi—he couldn’t drive two cars at once.”
No. Lloyd tried hard to think of even the wildest scenario that could include Burbidge getting his hands on Mrs. Jarvis’s car, but it defeated him. “Lennie hasn’t taken to stealing cars, has he?” he asked.
Judy laughed. “That would be too much like hard work,” she said. “Besides, Mrs. Jarvis wouldn’t have had to gather up her courage to open the door—it would have been open.”
Lloyd turned to look at her as she sat down, and shrugged. “I don’t think Mrs. Jarvis’s car can have anything to do with it,” he said. “Lenny must have taken the gun. Ginny must still be covering for him.”
“Why would Ginny keep me out of jail rather than Lennie?” asked Judy. “She thinks the world of him. If it was a toss-up between me and Lennie, there would be no contest. She would have said she only missed the gun after I’d been there. Like a shot.”
“But she doesn’t know it’s a toss-up between you and Lennie. She thought she was putting the blame on Rob Jarvis.”
Judy nodded. “She wasn’t to know Jarvis was pulling the plug on Keith’s serial at the very moment Drummond got a bullet in his head,” she said.
Lloyd stared at her. “Who’s Keith?” he asked.
She looked up. “Oh, Lloyd—he’s just the husband of a couple who lived next door to Michael and me. Please—don’t start thinking I’m throwing myself at every—”
“No, no,” he said, holding up his hands as though he was stopping traffic. “No—I mean, is that why you wanted to know if I’d recorded it?”
She looked a little guilty. “Yes,” she said. “And I didn’t want to say that I had more friends you didn’t know ab—”
“Judy,” he said. “What you were doing at nine o’clock on Friday night may be a matter for speculation, but not what I was doing. And I can assure you, I wasn’t watching television.”
She frowned. “Did you tape it, then?” she asked.
He made a loud, impatient noise. “You’re sounding just like Ginny!” he said. “No, I didn’t tape it. It wasn’t on on Friday night! It’s on Wednesday nights!”
Lloyd had been defending Judy’s honor at nine o’clock on Friday. He had been in the act of placing a bet with Detective Chief Superintendent Case on that honor when they had heard about Drummond’s murder.
And he’d won his bet. But that had been betting on a certainty—no fun at all. This was much better than that. For once, he had the answers to the little puzzles. Even the anonymous Neighborhood Watch call to Stansfield police station.
He stood up, and looked out of Judy’s window at the town center, bathed in autumn sunshine, along what used to be a street but which was now a pedestrian walkway strewn with strange things for children to play on, people to sit on, potted plants, the odd tree, and a great deal of windblown litter, up to where the taxis formed a U at the top. The taxi rank; one of the places Rob Jarvis had thought he might have been at nine o’clock on Friday night.
But he had been burgling a house, hadn’t he?
“Did you see your friend?” asked Ginny, curled up on the sofa, not watching a program about dragonflies. She switched off the TV as Lennie came and sat beside her.
“Yes,” he said, smiling, putting his arm around her.
“Is he all right?” She assumed it was a he.
“He’s going to be fine,” said Lennie. “And so are we.” He took his arm away, and felt in his back pocket for his wallet, taking out a twenty-pound note and a five-pound note. “That’s our capital,” he said. “But the debt’s been paid off, Ginny. He won’t be back.”
“How could you pay him all that money?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s settled. This’11 buy food for a bit. And there are some jobs around. Casual work. On the demolition around here, and stuff like that.”
Ginny smiled. “You don’t know how to do anything,” she said.
“I know how to do this.” His hand slipped inside her shirt, and his fingertip brushed her breast. He put his arm back around her again, and she leaned back, her eyes closed, enjoying the gentle tickling.
“I wish I could kiss you,” he said.
“You can.”
“It’ll hurt.”
She shook her head, and felt his mouth gently touch her bruised lips.
“I love you,” he said.
“I know,” she said.
Carole Jarvis opened the door, and smiled nervously at Chief Inspector Lloyd. He had a woman with him; he introduced her as Detective Inspector Hill. She was attractive. Well dressed. Somehow she never thought of policewomen as looking like that. She thought of them in uniform, and looking a bit butch. Stereotyping. Like her burglar with his bag marked swag. But burglars looked like Rob, and policewomen looked like her.
“Mr. Lloyd. Do come in. I—that is—Steve … Stephen said he’d given you the names and addresses of the people at his flat that night—I’m sure they’ll—”
“That’s quite all right, Mrs. Jarvis,” he said. “It’s actually Mr. Jarvis we’ve come to see.”
Yes. He had eaten his Sunday lunch. He hadn’t wanted it; she could see that. But he had eaten it.
“Is he at home? I noticed his taxi was outside, so I thought …”
“He—he’s doing some work on my car, I think,” she said. “He keeps it in good order—just in case I want to—” She held the back of her hand to her mouth. “He … he’ll be in the garage, I expect,” she said. “If you want to speak to—”
She closed the door on them. They could find him. Maybe he really was mending her car, but there had been nothing wrong with it when she had driven it. After he’d rung her up from the police station, told her to take it back to the garage, to put it away, just in case anyone had seen him drive away from the park. He didn’t want it seen.
She had known, as soon as she had heard about Drummond, why her car had been gone from the garage; why all she had seen when she had opened the door had been someone else’s property, neatly stacked along the wall of her private hell. She had made him tell her.
And when the interview about the burglaries had taken such a long time, he had had to ask her to take the car back. It was parked in a street off Epstein Drive. She had picked it up, driven it back. He had come home eventually, and he should have been glad that it had worked, that he was free of Drummond forever, and no one any the wiser.
But he had just taken the cab out. Nothing had changed. Nothing at all. And he had known that it wasn’t going to work from the moment he had pulled the trigger. And she knew why he had gone to the garage, why she mustn’t stop him. He couldn’t go on like that; he had wanted to die ever since it had happened, ever since Drummond had raped him.
It had been a long time since he’d gone; it must all be over. But she hadn’t been able to go and see. She couldn’t have brought herself to open that door. Not again. She had been so relieved to see Chief Inspector Lloyd.
She would ring Steve. Once they had found him. He would understand why she hadn’t stopped him.
Judy was having her birthday meal at last. Candlelight and Lloyd’s seduction table lamp were all that lit the room, and the tension between them had gone at last. They had talked, as they had a perverse tendency to do in their most intimate moments, about work.
Judy had automatically pulled the hose from the exhaust pipe as soon as Lloyd had opened the garage door, but it had been too late; Drummond had claimed what she hoped and prayed was his final victim. But there was no guarantee of that.
They had pieced it together. Jarvis had teamed up with Lennie, had allowed Lennie to rob him blind, to use his cab for immoral purposes, to do what he liked with it, in return for two things: Ginny, and someone to blame when his luck ran out.
But then Drummond had come home, and Ginny had shown him the gun. Jarvis had been a soldier, and a gun was a quick and efficient way of bringing about Drummond’s destruction; the seed had been sown, and he hadn’t wanted Lennie to take the blame for the burglaries anymo
re, because they were going to give him his alibi.
That night, Wednesday night, he burgled Keith’s house. He unlocked the front door, left pots and pans piled up against it. At a few minutes after nine, he unplugged the video, the television, everything he would usually steal, and piled it up at the back door, left it unlocked, and went back to his cab driving.
If the burglary had been discovered before the firework display that was to mask the sound of the shots, then perhaps the murder would not have happened when it had. But it would have happened, of that Judy was certain.
Jarvis had driven to Malworth, to pick up his fare, the one who had eventually decided to stay the night. And he had seen Drummond leave the block of flats opposite, followed him, watched him dumping clothes in a less jealously guarded bonfire than the symbolic Parkside Regeneration bonfire. If he had had any doubts about carrying out his plan, then surely what he must have heard on the early morning news had made the decision for him.
On Friday morning he went to Ginny, and took the gun in the moments when he was alone in the room. Then he rang Colin Drummond, promised him the information that everyone present at the trial knew he most wanted, arranged to meet him at nine o’clock in the underpass. Sometime in the afternoon, while she was at work, he drove his wife’s car to a street close to the semiburgled house. At twenty to nine that evening, he left his cab outside number seventeen Epstein Drive, and ran to his wife’s car. He drove back to Malworth, left the car in the desolate and deserted park, an hour before the two or three street girls gathered, and went into the underpass to wait for Drummond.
Drummond had been on time; Judy had seen him. He had walked along the underpass to, as Lloyd had said all along, his terrorist-style death, passing the barely conscious and terrified Ginny, who had pressed herself into the shadows at the sound of his footsteps. Jarvis had carried out the execution, taken Drummond’s mobile phone and had gone back up the banking to his car. Judy had heard his running feet just before she had found Ginny. He had made what Lloyd called his Neighborhood Watch call first; he had rung Stansfield police station and reported that he could see a light moving around in seventeen Epstein Drive, whose owners, he knew, were on holiday. Then he had hung up, and had keyed three nines and thrown the phone down in the open space, so that Handel’s music booming over from the bonfire would alert the emergency operator as to where the emergency was, and everyone would know exactly when Drummond had died.
