Through a Narrow Door

by Faith Martin

  Take this girl, for instance. Janine would have tried the mollycoddling approach, sure that a teenage girl who’d just had an abortion should be treated like a cracked egg that would burst apart at the slightest pressure. Yet here she was, shoulders straightening, tears drying up, and looking at Hillary like … well … like she was the next best thing since sliced bread.

  No doubt about it, Janine was going to miss watching her work. When she’d agreed to marry Mel, he’d pointed out that she’d need to move stations, and had agreed to help her get taken on at Witney. Of course, she fully expected to be promoted to DI within a year, and had made that much clear. Still, Hillary Greene had taught her a lot, and still had much she could have shown her. For a moment, it made Janine wonder whether she was doing the right thing in agreeing to ask for a transfer away from Kidlington.

  ‘OK, I’ll tell you, but it sounds so stupid,’ Heather Soames said now, jerking Janine back to the matter in hand. ‘You see, this girl at school, Natalie Constantine, said that her cousin’s best friend had got pregnant, and because she was Greek Orthodox or something, knew that her mother wouldn’t let her have an abortion, so she got some of these herbal pills from a health shop, and made a bath with really hot water and vinegar, and, well, it worked. She lost the baby. So, that afternoon, I knew Debbie would be in school and Dad would be at work, and because the vinegar would really smell out the bathroom, I had to choose a time when I was all alone. So that afternoon was perfect. So I went home and tried it.’

  She paused to take a much-needed breath, and looked at Hillary with a half-ashamed, half-defiant gaze.

  Hillary shook her head helplessly. In these days of the twenty-first century, for crying out loud, how could teenagers still be so woefully ignorant about such matters? ‘Just as a matter of interest, what were the pills you took? And how many?’ she asked curiously.

  ‘St John’s Wort,’ Heather said promptly. ‘I remembered it because it was such a gross name. And I took quite a few pills, before and after. For days. It’s not poisonous, is it?’ she asked sharply.

  Hillary shook her head. ‘Well, I’m glad at least that you had the sense to come here. Heather, how did you pay for it? This is a private clinic, isn’t it?’

  Heather flushed. ‘Billy gave me some money, two days before … you know, he died. I kept it hidden in my pyjama case at home. Debbie’s a right nosy cow.’

  Hillary smiled wearily. ‘OK, Heather. Just for the record. Did you see Billy Davies at all that day?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you go to Aston Lea? Get someone to give you a lift there perhaps?’

  ‘No! I told you – I was in the bath for, like, nearly an hour. The water had to be hot, so I kept letting some out and refilling it. But nothing happened. Except I smelt like vinegar all that night. Yuck!’

  ‘Did anyone see you at the house that afternoon, either when you arrived home, or when you left for your afternoon lesson afterwards? A next door neighbour, someone getting into or out of a car?’

  ‘Don’t think so. Why, don’t you believe me? The neighbours all work during the day, so it’s not my fault, is it? It’s really dead around our place in the day.’

  Then, as if realizing her unfortunate choice of words, she flushed bright red.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ Janine asked as they walked out the door back towards the car park. They’d offered Heather a lift home, but she preferred to wait and take the train back. Hillary thought she was just putting off the evil moment when she had to confront her father.

  ‘I think the poor kid was telling the truth,’ Hillary said, dialling the Soames’s number and having a brief talk with a powerfully relieved Francis Soames. When she hung up, she carried on the conversation as though she’d never left off. ‘Mind you, she has no witnesses to her alibi, which is no alibi at all. Still, she’s not at the top of my list. Any more than Celia Davies is.’

  Janine nearly rear-ended a gold-coloured Yaris as she negotiated the exit of the car park. ‘Celia! The little sister? You rated her?’

  ‘It crossed my mind,’ Hillary said darkly, as her sergeant gaped at her like a stunned mullet.

  Janine did, in fact, feel seriously wrong-footed. She’d always considered herself to be tough. And certainly way tougher than her DI, whom she’d tended to think of as, well, nearly past it, and certainly as a veteran of a much easier time in the police force. To learn that Hillary had considered an eleven-year-old girl as a suspect, and with such cavalier insouciance, when she herself hadn’t even thought of it, left her feeling somehow reduced.

  ‘Let’s stop off somewhere for lunch,’ Hillary said, glancing at her watch. It was a bit of a drive back to Kidlington, and she fancied a long cold drink in an anonymous pub. ‘My treat. Besides, we need to talk about you and Mel.’

  Janine felt her chest tighten, but her jaw came out pugnaciously. ‘Boss,’ she said flatly.

  Back at HQ, Tommy was about to take a bite out of a cheese and pickle sandwich. He was still living at home with his mother (yes, Tommy had heard all the jokes) and would be until the estate agent came across with the keys, and the bank sorted out the last details of his and Jean’s joint mortgage. And, just like when he’d been a kid going off to school, his mother insisted on packing him a lunchbox.

  Not that he minded when it included such delicacies as sandwiches as thick as doorstops, and wedges of home-made fruitcake.

  He’d just champed down on a deliciously tangy Double Cheddar, when someone slapped his back so hard it almost made him choke.

  ‘Hey up, my old cocker, you want to be careful of that,’ Frank Ross said, watching with malicious pleasure as Tommy’s eyes began to water as he struggled to catch his breath.

  ‘Wanker,’ Tommy muttered under his breath. He should have known it would be Ross.

  ‘Sergeant Wanker to you, laddy,’ Ross said gleefully, ‘and don’t forget it. Just because you’re off up to the boonies doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods yet.’

  Tommy sighed over the awfulness of the mixed metaphor, and took a second, more cautious bite of his sandwich.

  ‘Come on, no time to stuff your face. We’re off to interview one of our mysterious contestants. This pair, to be precise,’ Ross said, picking up one of the photographs of the couples Billy Davies had photographed arriving at a house with a green-painted gingerbread trim.

  Tommy was so surprised, he nearly choked all over again. ‘What? You found one of them?’

  ‘Course I did! What do you think I’ve been doing all morning?’ Ross demanded. ‘Come on, let’s get going before the girls get back from their morning jaunt.’

  Tommy blinked. ‘How did you get on to them? I went down to the post office, and none of the postmen recognized that street.’

  ‘They wouldn’t, would they?’ Ross said, still with that annoying cheerfulness. ‘Well, not this street at least. This,’ he said tapping it with a dirty fingernail, ‘is a house in Yarnton.’

  Tommy swallowed his bite of sandwich and looked at Ross closely. Was the poisonous little Winnie-the-Pooh-clone drunk? If he’d spent the morning in the pub, as he suspected, he might well be. Not that Frank had ever come in to the office drunk before. Well, not obviously, undeniably drunk.

  Frank gazed back at him with a wide grin. He knew just what the younger man was thinking. And he was not about to admit that he’d found out the whereabouts of one of their mystery couples totally by accident. He had, in fact, been in a pub all morning, in Bladon to be exact. Near enough to be close to the office in case he got his chain yanked by Hillary Greene, but far enough away from the station not to be frequented by tattle-tales. In fact, the pub was a well-known watering place for beat-up coppers trying to keep their heads down, and off the radar, for a couple of hours.

  Which was how he’d run into an old mate of his from traffic, who’d been well into his fourth pint of Coors. Frank, who’d taken an envelope full of the photographs with him, had slapped them down at his table before getting a round in. O
ne or two of them spilled out, and when he came back to the table, he found his old oppo looking through them idly.

  And he recognized the distinctive woodwork on one of the houses, because his father-in-law lived in a house in that very street.

  Which just goes to show, Frank thought now, that it pays to be in the right place, at the right time. Good old fashioned dumb luck. You couldn’t beat it.

  ‘I think we should wait for the guv,’ Tommy said flatly now, and Ross snorted.

  ‘I think we should wait for the guv,’ Ross mimicked snidely. ‘Grow some balls, why don’t you?’

  But Tommy noticed that he made no move to go off on his own, but sat down at his desk, and reached for a file. Within a few minutes, Tommy guessed, he’d be snoring. Well, sod him. One thing he wasn’t going to miss when he transferred to Headington, was Sergeant Frank bloody Ross.

  Janine drove into the parking lot at HQ at 2.15 that afternoon, feeling a little uneasy. They’d found a pub in Brackley, and both had ordered the grilled chicken salad. After she’d told Hillary about her inconclusive interview with June Warrender, Janine had tensed herself, ready for an angry lecture, but none had been forthcoming.

  Hillary had, instead, simply asked her if she was sure she knew what she was doing in accepting Mel’s proposal, and then sat silently as Janine had, rather aggressively it had to be said, stated her long list of reasons for accepting. Hillary had listened with no expression at all on her face, then simply nodded, and ordered herself a large gin and tonic. Janine, who was driving, had to make do with orange juice. Although a G&T would have gone down well at that point.

  Now, as she followed her boss through the big, open-plan office, she found herself, very annoyingly, beginning to have second thoughts about the whole thing. Luckily, her phone rang just then, and she dumped her bag on the table, answered it, and listened intently.

  Frank Ross wasted no time telling Hillary that he’d possibly tracked down one of the streets in the photograph to a nearby village called Yarnton. Hillary could hear Janine talking on the phone, and could tell by the tone of her voice that she was excited by something.

  ‘Well done Frank,’ Hillary said, amazed to find herself actually saying those words. ‘You and Tommy go and make sure. If you confirm a visual match, start going around the neighbours, discreetly mind, and find out who lives there.’ She tapped the house pictured in the photograph. ‘And then run a full background check on them. But don’t approach them yet.’

  ‘Right guv,’ Tommy said, already getting up. Frank, looking more disgusted, rose reluctantly to his feet.

  ‘That was the landlord of the pub in Cropredy, guv,’ Janine said, hanging up and watching Tommy and Frank disappear. ‘You know, that pub where Martin Warrender and his girlfriend have been hanging out. He wasn’t there when I called by, and he’d been the one serving that night, so I asked the barmaid to get him to call me back. He was a bit cagey on the phone, but I think he knew who and what I was talking about.’

  Hillary nodded. ‘OK. Let’s go.’

  Janine looked at her surprised. Although Hillary often accompanied her on interviews (much to the disapproval of a lot of people who thought DIs should be chained to their desks, where they couldn’t cause too much trouble), she wouldn’t have thought this particular interview would have been of any interest to the SIO.

  Still, hers was not to reason why.…

  In the parking lot, Frank Ross yanked open the door of his rusting Fiat, swearing under his breath as he did so. Tommy took one look at him, and said he’d take his own car. The mood Frank was in, he was just as likely to wrap his car around a lamp-post as not.

  So what if Hillary wanted to know something about the people before interviewing them? So what if she’d asked them to do the legwork. That was their job, wasn’t it? Tommy just didn’t know how Hillary put up with Frank Ross. Or why the brass had lumbered her with him in the first place.

  The landlord of the Goat and Honeypot was watching football on the bar telly. The interior was cool and dark, and apart from one man supping beer and reading a paper, the place was totally deserted.

  ‘Queer name for a pub, innit?’ Janine commented as they approached the bar.

  ‘Best not to ask how they came by it,’ Hillary advised. ‘Someone might just tell you.’

  Janine was still grinning over that when the landlord drew his gaze reluctantly from the screen.

  Janine identified herself, and the landlord nodded. He wasn’t a heavy-set man, and had thin shoulders and a narrow waist, but he had one of the most gigantic beer bellies Hillary had ever seen. He turned watery blue eyes on them, and slowly reached out to take the photograph of Marty Warrender that Janine offered to him. His slow movements, the near-baldness of his dome, and the sagging wattle of skin at his neck, all reminded Hillary of a tortoise.

  ‘Marty,’ the landlord said simply.

  ‘You recognize him? Have you seen him in here in the company of a woman, recently?’

  ‘Yes. He often comes in to have a drink with his sister-in-law.’

  ‘Oh,’ Janine said blankly. Damn, a dead end. But the old gossip at the dry cleaners had been sure.…

  ‘Very close to his sister-in-law, is he?’ she heard Hillary ask dryly, and the landlord chuckled.

  ‘Very. His wife would have his guts for garters, I reckon, if she found out. A bit of a tartar, she is.’

  ‘But no one’s going to tell her?’ Hillary said, still in that same, amused, dry tone.

  ‘No one round here, any rate,’ the landlord said, and went back to his screen.

  Janine bit her lip. That was twice in one day that Hillary had got the drop on her.

  ‘Find out the sister-in-law’s name, then go interview her. Make sure Billy didn’t approach her for dosh. If Marty Warrender turned him down, as he said he did, he might have thought he’d have better luck with the lady,’ Hillary instructed as they headed for the door. ‘Find out where she was when Billy died, and if she has an alibi. Check it out thoroughly.’

  Janine nodded, but as she drove back to HQ, she felt oddly depressed.

  Hillary went back to her desk and phoned Francis Soames. Heather had got back safe and sound and had confessed all. He sounded shaken up, and appalled by his daughter’s recent traumas, but also, oddly, a lot calmer. She hoped the Soames were going to be OK.

  When she lowered the receiver and looked up, Paul Danvers was just coming out of his office. He saw her at her desk, and smiled, but didn’t divert over.

  Hillary watched him leave, wondering if he was gone for the day, in which case she wouldn’t have to worry about him and whatever private agenda he seemed to be working on. Instead, she reached for one of the files in her in-tray. No matter how fast she cleared it, some malicious elf seemed to sneak in under the cover of darkness and fill it up again. It was nearly 3.30.

  She had no idea her case was about to blow wide open.

  chapter fifteen

  Janine came back first and reported. ‘Boss. The sister-in-law is one Felicia Cummings. She lives in Cropredy, and works in Banbury, just down the road from her brother-in-law. Very convenient,’ she grinned. ‘Flick – that’s what she prefers to be called – admitted to the affair with Martin Warrender, but only after she realized there was no point denying it. Apparently it’s been going on sixteen years! Sixteen years! Can you imagine?’

  Hillary, who’d heard of far weirder things in her time, shrugged. ‘Did her sister know?’

  ‘According to Flick, no. But I’m not so sure. I mean, how’s a woman going to miss the fact that her sister and husband are at it, and have been for sixteen years? She’d have to be living in cloud cuckoo land not to have twigged.’

  Hillary shook her head. ‘Not necessarily. I had a case once, of bigamy. This man had been keeping three different families over a period of twenty-five years, and not one of the wives or children knew about the others. A travelling salesman. He divided his time equally. Very fair-minded chap was Mr Tarkington.’r />
  Janine shook her head. ‘Well, I dunno,’ she said dubiously. ‘Anyway, Flick was certain her sister was in the dark about it. But she’s got a rock-solid alibi for the time Billy died. She was at work – a place that sells expensive glass and crystal figurines and whatnot. You know, the sort of place you go to come Mother’s Day or Christmas if you’ve got a yearning to buy a miniature tree made out of amethysts or whatever.’

  Hillary nodded. ‘I think I know the place. How many staff are there?’

  ‘Three, and all three were at work the day Billy died. I talked to all of them separately – and the other two are adamant Felicia never left the shop.’

  ‘Lunch hour?’

  ‘No good boss, they staggered it, so there were always two in the shop. Flick did go to the café over the road for her lunch break, but the café owner confirmed it. She’s a bit of a regular there. He says she left about 2.15, and the girls in the shop confirmed she was back by 2.20.’

  Hillary sighed. It seemed airtight. ‘Did Billy approach her for money?’

  Janine frowned and tapped her pencil against her lips. ‘Not sure, boss. She says not, but she seemed a bit touchy to me. If I had to guess, I’d say that he had, but that she’d told him to sod off, and then told her boyfriend all about it. I could try and get a warrant to check her bank accounts, I suppose?’

  Hillary shook her head. ‘Not just yet. If all else fails, we can always go back to her.’ She glanced at her watch, willing the phone to ring, but it was nearly forty minutes before Tommy checked back in.