Deadly Alibi

by Leigh Russell

  Geraldine brought Adam up to speed. She had already made a detailed report of the latest development, but they both liked to discuss what was happening.

  ‘So what exactly do we know about this man who met Louise at Euston?’

  ‘Only what we can glean from the CCTV film. I’m going to get an estimate of his height and weight, and compare an analysis of his posture and gait with Chris’s, and also check out her husband’s height and weight, because he knew she was arriving back at Euston on Wednesday evening.’

  ‘Surely Louise would have recognised her lover or her husband if one of them met her at the station?’

  ‘Maybe she did. They could be in on this together. We don’t know where Chris was on Wednesday evening. We don’t know what he might have been up to. And we don’t know where her husband was on Wednesday evening either.’

  ‘So it could have been either of them,’ Adam said. ‘Tom, or Chris, or someone else entirely. She could have chosen to disappear, or been taken away and silenced. We have absolutely no idea what happened to her.’

  ‘We know she was driven to Edgware. We have to discover where she went from there.’

  ‘Well, let’s get hold of that information before we question either of them again. It’s all well and good, detectives on the television claiming to know when people are lying, but here in the real world we can only really guess. And that won’t get us very far in front of a prosecuting barrister.’

  Geraldine smiled. ‘It would make our job a lot easier if we could read people’s minds!’

  ‘Let’s get the results of those analyses. We need some verifiable information, not just speculation.’

  It sounded like a criticism, even though Adam had been speculating as much as her. When he nodded at the door to dismiss her, she was momentarily irritated by his peremptory tone. Remembering that he had only recently been promoted to detective chief inspector, and was not much older than her, Geraldine relented.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘we’ll sort out this mess soon enough.’

  Intending to reassure her senior officer, she was afraid her words sounded patronising. Without waiting for a response, she turned and left his office. Sam agreed with Geraldine that Louise must have arranged to be picked up at Euston so she could disappear. They went over the possibilities. Louise’s husband had known she was due in at Euston at seven fifteen. Geraldine wondered if he could have picked her up in disguise, so the CCTV cameras at the station wouldn’t reveal his identity.

  ‘But why would her husband be in on it?’ Sam asked. ‘I thought the reason she didn’t want to come forward in the first place was because she didn’t want him to find out about her affair?’

  ‘Maybe she confessed, or she could have made up some story to get her husband to spirit her away, in disguise. Until we find her, we won’t know what’s going on. But we do know she got cold feet about giving Chris an alibi. Is that because she’s afraid of her husband finding out, or because she was lying about being with Chris on the night of the murder?’

  ‘I don’t think it was her husband,’ Sam said.

  ‘We need to find her.’

  ‘She can’t stay hidden away forever.’

  Geraldine stepped up the search for the missing witness, circulating her picture to all police forces and security guards across the UK. Despite her reassuring words to Adam, she was worried. With Louise’s refusal to stand by her story, their suspect was as good as convicted. The case was solved. Geraldine should have been pleased, but her brief phone conversation with a woman claiming to be Louise kept playing on her mind.

  24

  That evening Geraldine decided to question Louise’s neighbours, in case anyone had seen her since her return to London. Meanwhile Sam was going to fetch Chris and bring him to the police station where his walking could be filmed. A search warrant had been issued, and a team were being despatched to go through every inch of Chris’s house. It was a long shot, but they were hoping the search team would find a false beard and peaked cap.

  ‘It would certainly help,’ Sam said.

  She looked excited at the thought of discovering the disguise worn by the man who had picked Louise up at Euston.

  ‘If it was Chris,’ Geraldine replied.

  None of them were really in any doubt about Chris’s guilt now that his witness had vanished, but Geraldine couldn’t understand why Chris would want Louise to disappear when she was the only person who could give him an alibi. Sam thought that was obvious. Louise was getting cold feet and Chris wanted to persuade her to back up his alibi, whether or not it was true.

  ‘That just sounds a bit far-fetched. I mean, her husband’s already wanting to know where she is, and Chris and Louise were desperate to keep their affair a secret, weren’t they? Something about this is all beginning to feel a bit odd.’

  Crawling along in the early evening traffic, Geraldine decided she might as well speak to Tom Marshall again after questioning his neighbours. Although he only lived three miles away from her, unless she went to see him in the middle of the night, the journey through heavy traffic was tedious. Turning off the Holloway Road, she parked at the end of the Marshalls’ road and began knocking on the doors on either side of their house, before moving on to houses further away. No one she spoke to seemed at all interested in talking to her. Several of the neighbours had no idea who Louise was. The questioning proved a complete waste of time.

  Finally she rang the doorbell of the Marshalls’ small terraced house. Tom came to the door straight away.

  ‘Have you found her?’ he demanded, his face creased in a worried frown.

  ‘We’re looking for her.’

  She hesitated to admit the police were taking his wife’s disappearance seriously, but his suspicions were already aroused.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘Louise went missing on Wednesday night, barely two days ago. Why is a detective inspector interested in my wife’s running off? I would have thought you’d have more important things to worry about, like looking for criminals.’

  Geraldine nodded. ‘You’re quite right. Looking for her would normally be a matter for the missing persons’ bureau, nothing to do with us. We wouldn’t be investigating your wife’s disappearance at all if we didn’t think she could help us. We need to speak to her in relation to another matter, a serious crime.’

  Tom stared at her. ‘You mean she’s a witness? An eye witness to a crime? And now she’s disappeared.’ His expression altered and he took a step forward. ‘Jesus Christ, do you think someone’s bumped her off to silence her? I had no idea. I thought she’d run off and left me. What happened? What did she see?’

  ‘No, Mr Marshall, you’ve got this all wrong. Please, calm down. Your wife didn’t witness a crime. No one wants to silence her. We think she might be able to help us with our enquiries by confirming one of our suspects’ alibis.’

  Tom paused, thinking. ‘You mean some woman’s been accused of bumping off her bloke, and she told you Lou was cutting her hair when the murder took place?’

  ‘Something very like that, yes.’

  ‘Was that in Birmingham? And where is Lou?’

  ‘That’s what we’d like to know. But the fact that a serious crime is involved means that she might be in some danger without knowing it, so we need to find her as soon as possible.’

  ‘Something’s happened to her, hasn’t it?’ he replied. ‘She’s disappeared. Something’s happened. That’s why she’s gone missing, isn’t it? Christ, I thought she’d run off and left me, but she’s never gone off like that before, and now, just when she’s needed to give some poor woman an alibi, she’s disappeared. She’s in trouble, isn’t she? You’ve got to find her.’

  Geraldine assured him they were doing their best.

  ‘There are a few questions you could help us with,’ she went on cautiously.

  He nodde
d, staring eagerly at her. ‘What? What? Tell me!’

  ‘First of all, can you tell me how tall you are?’

  He looked surprised by the question. ‘What?’

  ‘How tall are you?’

  ‘Just over six foot. Why?’

  ‘Can you be more specific?’

  ‘What? No. You’ll be wanting to know my shoe size next.’

  ‘That would be useful, yes.’

  He frowned. ‘Eleven.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What the hell’s that got to do with my wife?’

  As vaguely as she could, Geraldine gave a convoluted account of how Louise had been sighted on CCTV accompanied by a man.

  By now Tom’s eyes were almost hidden by his heavy brow. ‘OK, I get it. This guy she was with has abducted her to stop her giving someone an alibi, and you want to find out if it was me.’

  ‘We need to eliminate you from our enquiries,’ Geraldine admitted. There was no point in trying to pretend otherwise.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t me who took her. I don’t know where she is. But I want you to tell me where she was seen. And when. I’ll find the bastard who’s taken her, if you don’t get on with it. Bloody hell, what have you been doing? Find him! Why are you wasting time talking to me? I don’t know where she is, do I?’

  Geraldine found his protest convincing. Nevertheless, she intended to reserve her judgement until she received corroboration that Tom and the bearded man at Euston station could not be one and the same man.

  ‘One more question, please. Where were you between seven and eight on Wednesday evening?’

  He gave a surly smile. ‘I was at home, on my own, waiting for my wife to call me to say she was on her way back to Holloway station and did I want to walk down and meet her, and help her with her luggage. And no, there’s no one who can confirm that because I was here on my own.’

  Hoping to catch him out in a lie, she asked whether he had been at home on his own the following evening as well. She knew he hadn’t answered the door.

  ‘Thursday? I was playing cards with some friends. We meet every Thursday.’

  He gave her contact details for his three friends, assuring her they would confirm his whereabouts on Thursday evening. Thanking him, Geraldine left. Once again, her enquiries had been fruitless. While Louise continued hiding herself away, Chris’s alibi remained unconfirmed.

  25

  Unshaven, pasty-faced and puffy-eyed, Chris glared at Geraldine across the interview table. Considering what he had been through, she shouldn’t have been shocked at the change in his appearance. All the same, she was dismayed at how ghastly he looked. It was not so much his soiled clothes and dishevelled appearance that surprised her as the furtive air he had acquired. She tried to think back to her initial impression of him when he had arrived at the police station to report his wife missing. He had seemed worried and uneasy, and had been a bit of a mess, but he hadn’t looked guilty. If she had met him for the first time now, her conclusions might have been very different. It was hard not to be influenced by his bedraggled presence, however hard she tried to remain impartial.

  Attempting to analyse her response to Chris’s appearance, she wondered whether she had been unfair to her twin sister. After all, as Sam had pointed out, it was natural that Helena’s eyes should look red at her mother’s funeral. Helena had been brought up by their birth mother. Geraldine should have taken that into account. Preoccupied by her own concerns, she was afraid she had judged her sister too harshly. She had already resolved to redress that, but now she wondered if waiting until the investigation was complete was just procrastinating. She decided to contact Helena after work and arrange to meet her that weekend. They could meet on neutral territory. There was no need for Geraldine to divulge her address straight away. She felt nervous yet unexpectedly relieved by her decision, as though a weight had lifted from her shoulders. She must have been feeling guilty without even realising it, not least because she had been ignoring her mother’s dying wish that she look out for her sister.

  A constable had been despatched to the scrapyard with a photograph of Chris, in hopes that someone would remember seeing him there. Everyone who worked at the scrapyard was shown the photograph and the same question was put to each of them. But the fact that no one remembered seeing him didn’t prove that he had never been there.

  ‘What about a bloke with a big black beard?’ the constable had asked.

  ‘We get some blokes with beards, yes,’ the manager had replied.

  It was pointless. Without anyone recognising Chris from his photograph, they couldn’t prove he had been there. All Geraldine could do was try and bluff a confession out of him.

  ‘You took some licence plates off a wrecked car,’ she hazarded.

  Chris looked puzzled. He shook his head but didn’t answer. His lawyer leaned over and murmured to him. Chris shook his head again and muttered in reply. Geraldine couldn’t hear what either of them said, but she could imagine the conversation. After a brief exchange, inaudible to everyone but the two men, the lawyer looked directly at Geraldine.

  ‘Is my client now being accused of stealing car parts? He has no idea what you’re referring to. Whatever next, Inspector? Are you going to accuse him of joy riding? What on earth would he want with car licence plates?’

  Chris looked scared, but the lawyer knew she was just casting about, hoping to snare a confession. If she had any proof, she would have produced it by now.

  ‘Is this accusation based on any evidence?’ the lawyer pressed on.

  Geraldine turned to Chris. ‘Do you admit to removing the licence plates from a car at a scrapyard?’

  ‘No, no, I didn’t do anything of the sort,’ Chris said. ‘I never stole any licence plates. I never stole anything from a car. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never even been to a scrapyard.’

  Still hoping to catch Chris unawares, Geraldine threw out her next question without pausing. Conscious of the lawyer watching her through half-closed eyes, she knew an ill-considered response was unlikely. If Chris was unsure what to say, he would turn to his lawyer for advice. Nevertheless, she pressed on.

  ‘What happened to your wife, Chris?’’

  He shrugged miserably. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s happened since… since she was taken’

  It was a slightly odd turn of phrase.

  ‘Taken from you?’

  ‘Killed,’ he said quietly.

  ‘It’s painful for my client to acknowledge,’ the lawyer chipped in without opening his eyes fully.

  ‘Were you thinking about Louise when you said she was taken?’ Geraldine asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Chris looked round at his lawyer who shrugged his wide shoulders and sat, poised to intervene. ‘What’s happened to Louise?’ Chris sounded as though he might burst into tears.

  ‘She’s missing.’

  ‘Oh my God. What are you saying? Has Louise been killed as well?’

  ‘We don’t know what’s happened to her.’

  Once again, Chris looked so pitiful Geraldine would have felt sorry for him if he hadn’t been suspected of murdering his wife. Psychopaths could be very convincing. She refused to allow him to engage her sympathy.

  ‘She was your alibi,’ the lawyer muttered, audibly this time.

  ‘Where is she?’ Chris asked, in apparent bewilderment.

  Geraldine asked him again where he had been at the time of his wife’s murder. Seeing Chris’s distress, the lawyer insisted on taking a break.

  ‘I need to talk to my client,’ he said firmly. ‘If his witness has gone missing, you should be considering who might stand to gain from her disappearance.’

  ‘If she really is a witness to his alibi,’ Geraldine replied.

  ‘You know she is. You spoke to her yourself on the phone,�
�� the lawyer blustered, but he appreciated the gravity of the situation. ‘I need to speak to my client,’ he repeated.

  Before they stood up to leave, Geraldine told Chris that his house was being thoroughly searched. If there was any shred of evidence to link him to the death of his wife, or the disappearance of his mistress, the search team would find it.

  ‘Find Louise,’ was all he said in response. ‘Please, find Louise.’

  As soon as Geraldine arrived home, after a thoroughly unsatisfactory day, she called the mobile number registered to her sister’s name. The line had been disconnected. On a hunch, she tried the number still registered in her mother’s name and Helena answered.

  ‘Is that Helena?’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  Geraldine felt an unpleasant sensation, as though her stomach was dropping. ‘It’s Erin.’

  Geraldine focused on keeping her voice steady as she had been trained to do in situations of extreme stress.

  ‘Erin who?’

  ‘Erin your sister.’

  ‘Oh yeah. What you after? She didn’t leave anything, nothing worth having.’

  If their mother had owned anything of value, Geraldine suspected Helena would have sold it by now. She frowned, mentally chastising herself for jumping to conclusions about her sister again.

  ‘I’m not after anything,’ she said quickly.

  ‘Oh yeah? What you phoning for then?’

  Helena’s speech was slightly slurred. She was probably drunk. Geraldine regretted not having poured herself a large glass of wine before making the call. She kept going.

  ‘I thought we might meet?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we’re sisters, for God’s sake, twins. It’s not my fault we’ve never met before. I really tried to meet my – our mother, but she didn’t want to know. And I only found out about you after she died. Until then I didn’t even know you existed. I just want to meet you and maybe we can – I don’t know, I just thought maybe we could meet. Helena? Helena? Are you still there?’