Will Power

by Judith Cutler

  She was hardly out of Lizzie’s office – seething at the thought of being bequeathed anyone’s ex, but particularly Lizzie’s – when Rod called her from down the corridor.

  ‘Kate! Kate Power! Have you got a minute?’

  Sergeants tended, didn’t they, to have a minute for a superintendent. Kate stopped short, and walked back towards him.

  ‘Dave Allen tells me there’s been a development on the will front. Can you brief me? Let’s go down to my room. I might be able to organise some coffee.’

  She had an idea that he was scrutinising her rather more closely than she’d have preferred after a particularly bad night, against which the homeopathic pills had been almost useless. They walked in silence to his office. A casual observer might have thought he was taking her back there for a bollocking. The way he ushered her in, pulling up a chair for her, however, was more social than business, as was the way he poured and handed her coffee. Again she was aware of his scrutiny.

  ‘So what’s the latest?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ve just had the second of the two handwriting samples I wanted,’ she began, ‘from Max Cornfield’s friends. Neither of them, incidentally, gives an adequate account of how the signing took place. So we may have conspiracy to defraud. Worse, even to my eyes one signature at the bottom of the will doesn’t seem quite the same as the one on the specimen one that’s just arrived. Leon Horowitz’s. And – though this may not make much sense without an explanation – he says he’s right-handed. I’m talking to a forensic handwriting expert at eleven. If she thinks there’s anything fishy, then I need to talk to both witnesses to compare their accounts of the will signing itself. One of whom hangs out in Berlin, the other in the Algarve. So Lizzie’s told me to pack a bag. She’s talking about tomorrow, if I can get a flight. Which may affect our plans for Saturday. Sorry.’

  ‘We can always make it Sunday,’ he said dismissively. ‘Lizzie’s dealing with all the Foreign Office red tape, I take it?’

  She tried to avoid his scrutiny. ‘Sure: everything’s in her hands.’

  ‘It always used to take ages,’ he said doubtfully. ‘Maybe there’s some euro-fast-track these days.’

  ‘If Lizzie can find it, she’ll be on it,’ she laughed.

  ‘Are you OK about flying?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘Sure. Why?’

  ‘Because – more coffee? No? Because you look quite washed out. As if you didn’t sleep last night, to be frank. Kate, if something’s worrying you, you would tell me, wouldn’t you? As a friend?’ Concern was written all over his fine features. ‘It’s more than just Lizzie, isn’t it?’ he added, very gently.

  ‘I’m fine, honestly.’ The last things she wanted were kindness and sympathy. Maybe that was why Lizzie kept fending hers off. ‘Things are beginning to look pretty bleak for Max Cornfield, though.’

  ‘You don’t want to nail him if he’s killed three women?’

  ‘If I thought for one second he had, there’d be no one keener than me.’

  Sam Kennedy could make time to look at the new sample of handwriting between ten and half-past. So Kate had a chance to sit in the quiet of her office to read through Mrs Duncton’s medical file, which seemed, now she came to think of it, remarkably thin for a woman of her age. No wonder. All it contained was a print-out of her recent prescriptions. Bloody Smallwood. That was why he’d handed it over with so little protest!

  She reached for the phone.

  The receptionist informed her that the doctor didn’t take phone calls during surgery hours.

  ‘In that case I’ll speak to the practice manager.’

  ‘The practice manager is in a meeting.’

  ‘Interrupt the meeting, then.’

  ‘The meeting, Sergeant, is in London.’

  Kate said, very politely, ‘In that case I must speak to Doctor Smallwood. Now.’

  ‘But he’s with a patient.’

  ‘I don’t care if he’s conducting a gynaecological examination of the Queen Mother. I want to talk to him now. Or both he and you, madam, will be discussing the consequences of wasting police time. With a magistrate.’

  She was put through.

  ‘I don’t know what game you think you’re playing, sir,’ she told Smallwood, ‘but it’s a very stupid one. When I ask for a patient’s file I expect a full set of notes in date order. And I shall be expecting to find it waiting for me when I come into the surgery in one hour’s time.’

  ‘My good woman—’

  What century did the man think he was in? ‘In one hour, Doctor,’ she said flatly, and put down the phone. Thank goodness for the Dr Kennedys of this world.

  ‘I would say,’ Sam Kennedy said, peering at the magnified will, ‘that it is likely that the person who wrote the will forged Horowitz’s signature. And more so since you tell me that Horowitz is right-handed, it makes it even more likely.’ She smiled. ‘Want to have a look? Look, this is the will version, this the new one.’

  Kate nodded. ‘Oh, yes. It’s those striations you told me about. They go in a different direction on Horowitz’s sample signature.’

  ‘And the quality of line is much better. When you write the same name every day, you don’t have to think about it. If you’re writing someone else’s signature from memory – he didn’t even have it to hand to copy, presumably? – then the line fades and deepens where you’d expect uniformity. See?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t sound very pleased,’ Sam said accusingly.

  ‘I’d much rather everything had been completely legal and above-board. I’m going to have to ask a nice man some nasty questions. And maybe get him sent down.’

  Sam stared. ‘How can someone be a nice man and do a wicked thing like this?’

  It might, of course, be even more serious, mightn’t it? If you could forge a will bringing you millions of pounds, there was always a chance – as Lizzie and even the late Maeve Duncton had pointed out – that you might have killed the person making the will. But not, surely to goodness, not if you were Max Cornfield.

  Kate pulled herself straight, managed a smile. ‘So it looks as if I may be popping off to Berlin soon.’

  ‘Lucky you. You don’t want someone to carry your bags? No? Tell you what, why don’t you meet up with my bloke? He could show you bits of Berlin the tourists don’t get to see.’

  ‘That’d be great, though I suspect I shall fly back the same day.’ Yes, someone’s current lover would be nicer than someone’s discard.

  Stopping long enough to collect a thick file from a receptionist who contrived to be both cowed and surly, Kate headed briskly back to Sutton Coldfield and the incident room.

  Dave Allen greeted her with a cheery wave, and her news with an enveloping handshake. ‘Well done, excellent news. So we can fry the bugger on toast for that at least.’

  ‘At least?’

  ‘Yes, the bleeder seems to have an alibi for the morning Mrs D was killed. At least two office workers saw him, three neighbours heard him and there were indeed three calls to the council complaining about the smoke from his bonfire. Not even the same three neighbours, as it happens: two of those complaining say they wouldn’t have if they’d known it was that nice Mr Cornfield’s fire. So unless we can break the alibi – and believe me, that’s number one priority at the moment – it’ll be hard to pin that murder on him at least.’

  ‘That murder?’ she repeated. ‘Who else?’ As if she didn’t know. ‘Mrs Hamilton – has she … is she …?’

  ‘Mrs Ha— Oh, the old lady in Sellv Oak. No, she’s OK, or she was when we checked with the consultant this morning. He says her heart’s simply wearing out. It’s been bad for years and years, he says. Something making her jump could have caused problems, but so could an exciting passage in a book – and she was in the middle of a Dick Francis. All bloody inconclusive. Why don’t you sit down? You make the place untidy hovering around like that.’

  Kate said nothing. She had a nasty suspicion what was coming next.
If she’d thought it, every other decent cop would have thought it.

  Dave raised a finger. ‘So it’s up to you: if you can get a couple of nice incriminating statements from his buddies, then what we’ll do is apply to the Home Office to have Mrs Barr exhumed. Despite what her GP said.’

  ‘GP?’

  ‘Yes, Lizzie King got on to him this morning. She said you hadn’t got round to it for some reason, so she’d get him sorted. Have I said the wrong thing?’

  Opening and shutting her mouth in disbelief wouldn’t help. ‘Since when has DI King been involved in the case, sir?’

  He slapped his desk. ‘Oh, for crying out loud! DI King? Sir? You’re not coming the prima donna, are you?’

  ‘I wasn’t aware of her involvement, that’s all.’ She forced herself to relax. Putting Dave’s back up was hardly the way to help the case. ‘I suppose – where did this exhumation idea come from, Gaffer? Lizzie?’

  ‘That’s neither here nor there.’

  It was the first time she’d seen Dave bluster.

  ‘Gaffer, you may think I’m off my head, but may I suggest something that may save us all a lot of time and effort? I think we should haul Cornfield in and simply talk to him.’

  ‘And you suppose he’ll sit down and tell us he’s killed her! Come on, Kate!’ He shook his head, more in sorrow, she thought, than anger.

  She bit her lip. ‘He’s not a young man. He’s in a very emotional state, especially after yesterday, and he may just want to get things off his chest. It’s not even a particularly high-risk strategy. The evidence will still be there waiting for us if he denies it, won’t it?’

  He looked at her for several seconds, pulling his lip. At last he said, ‘OK, Power. If that’s what you think, what are you waiting for? Go, go, go!’

  ‘Only one thing, Gaffer,’ she said, smiling ruefully, ‘today’s his day for travelling. He’s down in Cheltenham at the moment.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  If Dave Allen had wanted to scream and shout, he showed commendable restraint, merely dismissing Kate to do the most tedious tasks he could find – reading Mrs Duncton’s file and running to earth the missing sister, Edna. She was just leaving the incident room, tail between her legs, when he called her grudgingly back.

  ‘Do you want to work with Jane McCallum again?’ he asked. ‘Two heads being better than one?’

  She smiled, and then, seeing the kindliness in his eyes, allowed her smile to deepen and her dimples to appear.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, diving into Black Country again, ‘you’m a real bonny wench when you do that. If I wasn’t going to have my silver anniversary, I swear I’d be round this desk and joining the rest of the blokes sniffing after you. Tell you what, though, chick,’ he dropped his voice confidentially, so she had to return to his desk, ‘you want to keep away from us married ones.’

  She started. ‘What the hell—?’

  ‘You look like a bloody terrier, all stiff-legged,’ he said mildly. ‘Sit down, wench. I’ve hit some nerve, haven’t I? I only meant to have a bit of a joke, like. And at my expense, too.’

  She sat reluctantly, but said nothing. Had she overreacted? It might well be that it was just possible for Lizzie to have five minutes’ conversation without spreading muck, of course.

  ‘You got some fellow giving you grief?’ he asked, kindly enough. ‘I haven’t heard anything and I don’t want to. But I’ll tell you something for nothing. Married men stay married. You want to get yourself one of your own.’ He smiled again. ‘I’ll tell you summat else, an’ all. A pretty wench like you should only have to knock and they’ll come out of the bleeding woodwork. Now, get on with the job, and no more letting suspects go off to bloody Cheltenham. Oh,’ he called her back, ‘you’ll find young Zain Khan’s real hot stuff when it comes to deciphering medics’ scrawls, and he’s got a bit of a dodgy foot at the moment. You could do a lot worse than ask him to cast his beadies over that there file. That way we’ll get him back to his cricket a bit sooner and convince him he’s being useful. What d’you think?’

  ‘If you really want to know, Gaffer,’ she said. ‘I think you’re a boss in a million.’

  ‘Thank God for computers and computer records,’ Jane said, sitting down at her keyboard and easing her skirt by running a finger round the waistband. ‘It’s no good, is it – this last half stone’ll have to come off. It was Crete that fixed me. I always thought salad would be slimming …’

  It wouldn’t be kind to point out that it was what came with the salad that counted: who could resist feta and olives anyway?

  NCIS, national health, national insurance, DVLA: any one of those could have a record of the missing Edna. But none did, not by her maiden name. So, while Kate checked and rechecked house-to-house statements for any details of strange women that might make a coherent picture, Jane continued her trawl through name changes by deed poll and by marriage. By one o’clock they’d come up with nothing.

  ‘Disappeared off the face of the earth – our bit of earth, at least,’ Kate told Dave Allen, as he stopped by their corner. ‘And I’ve got a short blonde woman about five foot ten, with a dark mop of hair who looks as if she sells double-glazing or might be on the game. Such goings on in sunny Sutton.’

  ‘So what next?’ He looked at her very steadily. ‘I know you don’t like the idea of your Cornfield being a serial killer, but …’

  ‘Come on, Gaffer, Michael Barton said she left home, not that she disappeared at the same time Max Cornfield was digging a trench for his runner beans!’

  ‘Talk to Barton again. Precise details. And did I hear you say you’d checked his alibi?’

  ‘You didn’t.’ She checked a pile of paperwork. ‘But the DC taking his statement the afternoon he ID’d his sister did. Said he was – hang on – shopping in Lichfield at the time. And he had till receipts with the time of transaction on them. And there’s nothing in these,’ she tapped the pile she’d been working through, ‘to indicate the presence in this neck of the woods of any man between fifty and seventy at the relevant time. But it’d be nice to put him under a bit of pressure too: shall Jane and I bring him down here?’ She wasn’t unaware of her reluctance to pull Cornfield in under similar circumstances: yes, she’d been letting her standards slip, hadn’t she? Why had she been so lax with him?

  ‘That means a double journey, and we’re supposed to be watching our petrol budget. No, you talk to him out there. You can always wheel him in if he wants to make a sudden confession! Tell me, Kate,’ he added, bringing up a chair and sitting down with a sigh, ‘why does young Lizzie want you to hare round Europe when a simple phone call might do?’

  ‘More serious, Gaffer, than that. Neither man mentions the presence of the other when he talks about witnessing the will. I’ve got the strongest suspicion that Horowitz wasn’t actually there. The question, to my mind, is really not whether Cornfield bumped off any of these women, but whether he persuaded Steiner to become his accomplice in taking over twelve million quid.’

  ‘Conspiracy. OK. Do you really want a couple of days jetting round Europe?’

  She grinned. ‘Wouldn’t say no. And even if I did phone, to be fair, if either of them said anything incriminating, I’d have to go off with my commission rogatoire and a friendly foreign cop and talk to them, wouldn’t I?’

  He dropped his voice. ‘Don’t tell anyone I said this, but Lizzie has been known to cut corners. And it isn’t her that comes to grief. Remember that chick.’ He patted her arm. ‘Now,’ he said, raising his voice to include Jane, ‘would you wenches like a bite down the pub before you go and talk to the good doctor? I could just fancy a plate of chips.’

  ‘So long as I can phone the hospital first,’ Kate said. ‘I’d like to know how the old lady’s doing.’

  Which was not particularly well. The young man at the other end of the phone didn’t seem overly concerned. My God, what if they thought she was too old to resuscitate if she had another attack?

  ‘Remember s
he’s a key witness in a murder inquiry,’ she told him. ‘And we prefer our witnesses alive.’

  Dr Barton’s case still stood ostentatiously in his elegant hall. Suave had slipped to peevish by the time they’d explained their mission, and he made no offer of tea or coffee as he showed them into the same room as before. Nor did he invite them to sit down.

  ‘This preoccupation with the prodigal sister,’ he said. ‘I can’t understand it.’

  ‘Dr Barton,’ Kate said carefully, ‘it can’t have escaped your notice that if the will is overturned you and your sister stand to inherit a considerable amount of money. The least we can do is tell her the good news.’

  ‘I told you, I’ve no desire to challenge the will. That was Maeve’s idea. Now she’s dead, surely—’

  ‘Once the law discovers an element of doubt about anything, it can’t just stop in mid-process.’

  ‘You mean there is an irregularity? My God! But – for goodness’ sake – I told you, there’s no doubt whatsoever in my mind that my mother would have wanted him to have everything. Or that he deserved everything. So what was wrong?’

  Kate withdrew behind the sort of official tone and language Rod would have deplored. I’m not in a position to reveal any details, sir. But we do need to determine your sister’s whereabouts if we can. Now, if we might just ask you a few more questions? May we sit down?’

  He nodded, as if still too stunned to do proper honours, collapsing into a chair himself. Jane sat out of his immediate sight-line and produced her notebook.

  ‘Now, would you simply tell us the circumstances in which Edna left home? A family row?’ Kate prompted him. ‘A row over a boyfriend? That sort of thing.’