by Roberta Kray
‘Well, whatever it was, we both know who won.’
Valerie got into her car and fastened the seatbelt. ‘Lena may be a lot of things, but she’s not stupid. She came round here in daylight. She must have realised that she could have been spotted. Especially with that car of hers. It hardly blends into the background, does it?’
‘Except, if all those rumours are true, she never does her own dirty work. I bet she’s got a watertight alibi for the time of death.’
‘True, but why take the risk? She’d know that if she was seen, she’d automatically be a suspect. Why not wait a few days, a week before killing the woman?’
‘Maybe it couldn’t wait. Maybe, for one reason or another, Delia Shields had to be got rid of.’
‘Except it doesn’t look or smell like a professional hit. They used an umbrella, for God’s sake! It’s hardly a weapon of choice, is it? No, this feels more… impulsive, spur of the moment, like someone got mad and picked up the nearest thing to hand.’
While he was thinking, Swann began excavating his ear again.
‘Do you have to?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘That.’ Valerie wrinkled her nose. ‘Whatever horrors are lurking in there, can you kindly leave them in situ, at least until you’re out of my car?’
Swann gave a smirk. ‘Sorry, gov.’
But he wasn’t sorry, not in the slightest. Valerie knew that he took pleasure in annoying her. It was one of his delightful little quirks, like the way he always strained his neck to look up at her face as if she were a twenty-foot giant. ‘Let’s go see what Bob Cannon can tell us.’
Valerie had just pulled into a parking space in front of the cemetery office when her phone started ringing. She dug it out of her bag and glanced at the screen. ‘The station,’ she said, pressing the button and raising the mobile to her ear. ‘Hello. Valerie Middleton.’ She listened to the voice on the other end of the line. ‘Yes, gov, we’re there now. We’ve just arrived.’
Valerie’s eyes scanned the graveyard as she absorbed what she was being told, her gaze taking in the rows of headstones, the neatly mown grass and the flashes of colour from the flowers that had been left. ‘Okay, I understand. Yes, yes, of course.’
‘Problem?’ Swann asked as she hung up.
‘You could say that. Seems we’ve got a complication.’
‘What kind of complication?’
‘The type that means we’re going to have to tread carefully.’
40
The interview with Bob Cannon had proved to be an informative one, confirming their suspicions that Lena Gissing was indeed acquainted with Delia Shields and that he’d seen them together on a couple of occasions. The man, unsurprisingly, had been decidedly shaken up about the murder. He had stared at Valerie and Swann with fear and confusion in his eyes.
‘You don’t think it’s to do with… with this other business?’
Valerie had been the one to answer in what she hoped was a reassuring tone. ‘We’re not entirely sure, but there’s nothing to suggest it, not at the moment.’
Superintendent Saul Redding’s call had meant that discretion was called for. Normally, they’d have interviewed the other members of the cemetery staff there and then, but under the circumstances it had been decided to defer it until later. The last thing they wanted was to scare anyone off. And, as they already had a major suspect, their statements would probably be irrelevant anyway.
‘What was Delia Shields like?’ Swann had asked.
Bob Cannon had struggled with the question. Hesitating, he had picked up a pen and tapped it against his desk. ‘She was very… er… efficient. She’d been here for years, knew the place inside out.’
It hadn’t been much of a eulogy, Valerie thought, considering they’d shared the same office space for the last four years. No mention of being kind or generous or funny. She’d got the impression that Cannon, like Mrs Kent, had not been overly fond of the victim.
Valerie switched her thoughts away from the earlier interview and back to the here and now. The room – interview room 3 – was small, overly warm and somewhat claustrophobic. There was lino on the floor, and the pale brown walls were scuffed. The single window, set high up, had a set of bars across it, and the main light source came from a bright fluorescent tube in the centre of the ceiling. She was sitting beside DS Swann, across the table from Lena Gissing and her solicitor, Michael Brookes.
Valerie stared hard at Lena Gissing, taking in every look, every gesture, every facial tic, anything that could provide some evidence of the woman’s guilt. But unless she was an exceptionally good actress, Lena seemed genuinely shocked that Delia Shields was dead. She wasn’t making any attempt to deny that she had seen her on Saturday either.
‘But she was fine,’ Lena said. ‘I can’t… I don’t… Christ, who’d do a thing like that?’
Valerie noted the paleness of her face, the tightness around the eyes. ‘So how, exactly, did you and Delia Shields know each other?’
‘We went to school together. We’ve been friends for years.’
‘And why did you go to see her on Saturday?’
‘No reason in particular. Just for a coffee, a catch-up.’ Aware that she was under scrutiny, Lena stared back at Valerie. ‘That’s what friends do, isn’t it? It’s not against the law.’
Valerie gave a thin smile. ‘And how did she seem?’
‘Seem?’
‘In herself. Was she happy, sad, anxious? Was she upset about anything?’
Valerie thought she saw something flicker in Lena’s face, but it was there and gone in a second.
‘No. She was just… Delia. There was nothing out of the ordinary. We had a coffee, a chat and then I left. I don’t think I was there for more than twenty minutes.’
‘That was a short visit, wasn’t it? Not much time for catching up.’
‘There was a gala in the evening, a charity do in the West End. I had to go home and get changed.’
Valerie felt Kieran Swann shift beside her as if reminding her of their earlier conversation about the alibi. There it was already, dropped neatly in at the first opportunity. But then that would be second nature to a woman like Lena Gissing. She knew how the law worked, knew how to cover her back. ‘We have a witness who claims that you seemed upset when you left.’
‘Me?’ Lena said. ‘Why on earth should I have been upset?’
‘And that you left in a hurry.’
Lena’s hands fluttered up from the table and dropped back down again. ‘I did leave in a hurry. Like I just told you, I had somewhere to be and I was running late.’
‘This witness, they claim that Delia was upset too.’
Lena released a thin hiss of breath. ‘Then your witness was wrong. Delia might have been a little… well, irritated by the fact I was leaving so soon, but she certainly wasn’t upset. I turned up a bit late, you see, and then had to rush off again. She wasn’t very happy about it, and I can’t say I blame her. If I’d known what was going to happen…’ She stopped, her eyes raking the walls before coming back to settle on Valerie again. ‘I still can’t believe that she’s dead.’
Valerie allowed a short silence to settle over the room before continuing. ‘Do you own a grey and black umbrella with a silver-coloured handle?’
Lena seemed as startled as Mrs Kent at the question. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘If you could just answer the question, please.’
‘Yes, yes, I do.’
‘And is that umbrella currently in your possession?’
‘No, I left it at Delia’s. By the time I went, it had stopped raining and I forgot all about it. But why are you asking about —’ She broke off suddenly as if a light bulb had gone on in her head. ‘No, you can’t mean… You can’t… You don’t…’
‘Yes,’ Valerie said. ‘It would appear so.’
Lena shook her head. She swallowed hard, her mouth twisting. ‘But… Jesus, my umbrella?’
Valerie migh
t almost have felt sorry for her, but she knew too much about Lena Gissing to waste her sympathy. The woman was a madam, everyone knew that, albeit a high-class one. She pimped out girls to the highest bidder. And she wasn’t above a spot of murder either. The jury might have believed her when it came to the death of her first husband, but the police and the CPS remained convinced of her guilt. ‘As you were the last person to see Delia Shields alive —’
‘Not quite the last,’ Michael Brookes interrupted tartly. ‘I think you’ll find that was the murderer.’
Lena’s eyes grew cold and hard. ‘Don’t think you’re pinning this on me. I had nothing to do with it. Nothing! I want to take a break,’ she said, glancing at her solicitor and dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. ‘My best friend has just been killed and – ’ she gave a rather histrionic gulp ‘– it’s all a dreadful shock.’
‘Any objections, Inspector?’ Michael Brookes asked.
‘No,’ Valerie said, reaching for the button on the recorder, and relaying the information out loud. Even as she spoke, she knew that Lena’s penthouse apartment at Silverstone Heights was being searched. Would they find anything useful? It was doubtful, but still worth a try. Even professionals like Lena could make mistakes.
Outside in the corridor, she looked at Swann. ‘What do you think?’
‘She’s lying about Delia Shields. Reckon the two of them had a major falling-out.’
‘Yes, me too. She’s never going to admit it, though.’
They walked along the corridor, pushed through the swing doors into the busy incident room and made a beeline for the coffee machine. While Valerie sipped on the insipid brown liquid, she tried to sort out her approach for the rest of the interview. She was sure that Lena’s alibi for later on in the night would stand up, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t got someone else to do her dirty work for her. If they could only get to the bottom of what the row had been about, then they might be able to make sense of the murder.
A young DC gave her a wave from across the room. ‘Call for you, gov. It’s Jenny. She’s at the Heights.’
Valerie went over to the desk and picked up the phone. As she listened to what PC Jenny Allen had to relay, a smile spread slowly across her face. ‘Good. That’s excellent. Get it over to the lab as quickly as you can.’ She put down the receiver and walked back to Swann, still grinning like a Cheshire cat.
‘Good news, gov?’
‘The best. You won’t believe what they found in Lena’s washing machine.’
‘I’m not even going to guess.’
‘A man’s white shirt,’ Valerie said triumphantly. ‘One white shirt heavily spattered with blood.’
‘You’re kidding? Before or after it had been through the wash?’
‘Before. Thankfully, Lena hadn’t got round to doing the laundry yet. Bit careless of her, huh?’
Swann’s face took on its thinking expression, his heavy eyebrows coming together. ‘Tony Gissing, then? We still don’t know the exact time of death. He could have paid Delia a visit after this gala thing was over.’
Valerie shook her head. ‘No, the shirt’s too small to be Tony’s, or either of his sons’. Which leaves us with?’
‘Adam Vasser,’ Swann said.
‘Exactly. Got it in one. Let’s pull the bastard in.’
41
Adam Vasser lay supine on the thin uncomfortable mattress, staring up at the cracks in the ceiling. The cell was warm and stank of piss and bleach. Across the way, a drunk was cursing and hammering on the door, a noise that had been going on for most of the night and which showed no sign of abating.
‘Just shut the fuck up!’ he yelled.
‘You shut the fuck up!’ came the prompt reply.
Resigned to sleeplessness, Adam found himself reliving snippets of his two-hour interrogation at the hands of DI Valerie Middleton and her sidekick. The bitch already had him in the frame for murder, but she was about to get a nasty surprise. When the report came back from the lab, it would show that, just as he’d claimed, the blood on his white shirt didn’t belong to Delia Shields at all.
‘So you’re saying that this blood came from a fight you were in?’
‘Yeah,’ he’d said, sitting back and folding his arms. ‘Last week. I don’t know, Tuesday, Wednesday night? I was walking home minding my own business – about midnight, I think – when a couple of geezers jumped me. Druggies, I reckon, after some cash or my phone. So we had a bit of a scuffle and then they ran off.’
‘You beat off two of them?’ DS Swann had asked, not even bothering to hide the incredulity in his tone. ‘That’s some going.’
‘What can I say? Used to do a bit of boxing when I was younger. I like to keep myself fit. Plus, to be honest, I reckon they were off their heads and didn’t actually expect me to fight back.’ He had stretched out his right hand across the table, palm down. ‘See,’ he’d said, showing them his still-bruised knuckles. ‘That’s what I got for my trouble.’
Adam smiled as he thought about his actual victim, the filthy rent boy in Soho. He felt again the thrill of bringing his fist down into the boy’s face, of the cracking of bone against bone, of the splitting of flesh. But no one knew about the whore; no one knew and no one cared. It had been careless, though, leaving the bloodied shirt at the Heights – and typical of his slattern of a mother to leave the dirty washing sitting there for days. But at least he’d got rid of the clothes he’d been wearing when he’d battered Delia Shields to death. He’d put them in a black plastic bag, caught a bus to Bethnal Green and wandered around the backstreets until he found a bin to dump them in.
‘Let’s go back to Saturday,’ Middleton had said.
‘Haven’t we already covered that?’
‘Let’s go over it again.’
Oh, he’d known their game all right, making him repeat the story over and over in the hope that he’d eventually trip himself up. But he hadn’t been born yesterday. Keep it simple, that was the trick. Never embellish. Never provide unnecessary detail. ‘I was at the garage for most of the afternoon, and then at about half five I went over to the Heights. I’d left my watch there, in my mum’s apartment, and wanted to pick it up. We had coffee together and then she went out to see Delia Shields. About ten minutes later, I went home to Cherry Street, and that’s where I stayed for the rest of the night.’
‘On a Saturday?’ Middleton had asked. ‘You stayed home on a Saturday night?’
‘I wasn’t in the mood to go out. Just fancied a quiet night in, bit of music, a few beers. Nothing wrong with that, is there?’
‘And no one else was there with you?’
‘All on my lonesome.’
‘You didn’t leave the flat at any time?’
‘No.’
They had asked a lot of stuff about Delia and he’d kept his answers simple. ‘I didn’t really know her that well. I mean, she’s been around since for ever, but my mother didn’t see her that often.’
‘Did you like her?’
He had given a shrug. ‘Never thought much about it. To be honest, I can’t even remember the last time I saw her.’
Adam’s gaze slipped down from the ceiling and focused on the graffiti-covered walls of the cell. The light, a dim bulb, cast deep shadows over the room. He suddenly recalled that afternoon a year or so ago when he and his mother had been on their way back from the West End and she’d decided to call in at the cemetery. He’d been desperate for a slash and so had gone with her into the office. Delia had pointed him towards a short corridor leading off from the back.
‘It’s just down there, Adam. Go to the end and it’s on your right.’
As he was heading towards the bog, he’d passed a small side room with its door open. He’d glanced casually inside and seen the rows of hooks on the wall with heavy metal keys hanging down from them. Attached to each key was a label with a name and plot number. It was only while he was relieving himself that the idea sprang into his head. The keys, he realised, were for the old brick ma
usoleums scattered around the graveyard. On his way back, he had slipped into the room and picked a key at random, figuring that no one would even notice it was missing.
Adam stretched out his arms, smiled and yawned. ‘God bless the Belvederes,’ he murmured. And he’d chosen well too, the coffin house being situated well off the beaten track and away from prying eyes. It had been the perfect place to hide his stash. Drugs, guns, knives – over the past twelve months he’d accumulated everything he’d need for when the time came.
It was another two hours before Adam finally heard the heavy tread of shoes on the lino outside. The door was unlocked and swung open. A uniformed officer looked at him with nothing but contempt in his eyes.
‘Okay, shift yourself. You’re being released.’
‘About time,’ he said, swinging his legs off the bed and standing up. The report from the lab must be in. He was in the clear. Blondie wouldn’t be pleased. He could imagine the look on her face as she’d read through the results, the words destroying all hope of an easy conviction.
His mother, with a face like thunder, was already being booked out at the counter. Her clothes were crumpled, and her usually immaculate make-up was smeared. There were dark circles under her eyes. She glanced at him, her mouth a thin, tight line. He was going to get a bollocking, but she wouldn’t do it in front of the filth.
Ten minutes later, after Adam had retrieved his watch, his wallet, his phone and his keys, the two of them left the station.
‘Swear to me you didn’t do it,’ she said as they walked together along Cowan Road.
‘They’ve just released me. Doesn’t that tell you something?’
Lena gave a snort. ‘Only that they haven’t got enough to charge you with.’
‘Why would I want to kill Delia?’
‘Why do you do anything?’
An antagonistic silence fell between them, lasting all the way to the corner of Cherry Street. ‘See you, then,’ he said.
