‘Found something?’ Scott asked.
‘Golf club, sir. In the bag of clubs over there at the bottom of the stairs. Do you want to see?’
Scott and Powell watched as he drew from a worn leather golf bag a sharp-bladed club with a crust of blood at its rim. ‘Didn’t even bother to wipe it,’ he said.
The body had been removed but Scott remembered how he had seen it the previous afternoon, sprawled on the stone slabs at the foot of the stairs, a bleeding gash clearly visible on the white forehead. He looked at the great staircase which rose straight from the middle of the hall, ran up for a dozen steps and then branched off from a small half-landing into two wings, each going up a further six steps to either end of a gallery. Even in the middle of the day, there was very little natural light – only that which came in through a glass panel on the front door, and the empty space beside it where the doctor, who had seen the body from outside, had smashed the glass to get in. In that gloom, it wouldn’t be difficult to lurk on the stairs to the side, waiting for a girl or woman to come down to the half-landing from the other side and then use the impetus of the run down those six treads to push her with deadly force down onto the stone floor. So why a blow on the head as well?
‘Get that club to forensics as a priority,’ he said, ‘and the area at the top of the stairs is crucial as well as the area at the bottom here. I need anything at all you can find.’
Back in the car, they drove out through a handful of reporters who had not been there when they arrived. They were locals only as yet, he thought. The death was probably on the mid-day news, though, and would be in the national press tomorrow. Glenys Summers’ name was bound to bring the news hounds baying and a media scrum would just be a hindrance in this case; he didn’t believe a call for information from the public would bring them anything useful.
As they stopped outside Renée Deakin’s smart little house in Willow Close, Paula Powell said, ‘You know what I’m thinking?’
‘That we’re barking up the wrong tree with bullying?’
‘Well yes, it’s all looking too carefully planned for kids’ bullying. But more than that. A lot hangs on Renée Deakin’s story, doesn’t it? Because if her caller did mention Glenys’s injured ankle then they weren’t trying to clear the house for a burglary because they would expect that she would be at home and not at the theatre.’
‘In which case the call was designed to make sure that Glenys would be alone in the house.’
‘But they didn’t find Glenys, they found Marina.’
‘And if that’s a murder weapon we just saw, they deliberately killed her. Why?’
‘And would they have killed Glenys if they’d found her there?’
‘Get the story about this phone message,’ he said, ‘then ring for a car to come and pick you up. I’ll see you back at the station.’
As he drove into Marlbury he called Lynne McAndrew, the pathologist. ‘How busy are you?’ he asked.
‘Are you asking me out to lunch?’
‘Sadly not. The young girl who was brought in yesterday – it’s beginning to look more like murder than accident. How quickly can you do the autopsy?’
‘I can do it this afternoon. You’re going to tell me you’ve found a weapon, aren’t you?’
‘A golf club.’
‘That figures.’
‘Meaning?’
‘The head wound. When I examined the body yesterday, it looked too deep a cut to have been made by striking the floor, and I couldn’t see a sharp edge on the stairs that could have caused it.’
‘Do you think the head wound killed her?’
‘I’d say not. Her neck was broken. But I’ll be able to tell you more when I’ve done the autopsy. What kind of golf club, by the way?’
‘I can’t tell you. I don’t play. But the SOCOs are bringing it in.’
In Marlbury, he parked in the car park at the County Hotel, went in through the back, where a couple more reporters were hanging about, and enquired at the reception desk for Mrs Carson. Drawing a blank there, he asked for Miss Summers and the flustered receptionist glanced at the front doors, where two uniformed porters stood on guard, and said Miss Summers had left instructions that she was not to be disturbed.
‘She’s not ready to talk to anyone yet,’ she said in an earnest whisper.
‘I’m afraid she’ll have to talk to us,’ Scott said firmly.
The woman eyed him for a moment, weighing up her conflicting fears of upsetting Glenys Summers and annoying a police inspector, and picked up the phone. It rang for a long time and when it was eventually answered it was a long time before the receptionist spoke. Scott watched as she flushed with the impact of what he assumed was an outpouring of abuse. ‘I am very sorry, Miss Summers, really,’ she said at last, ‘but I have a police chief inspector here and he says he needs to speak to you.’ There followed more from the other end of the line. ‘She’ll be down,’ she said as she put down the receiver. ‘She doesn’t want you to go up there.’
As Scott waited, he wandered round the reception area. He was familiar enough with the hotel: its position on the High Street in the centre of Marlbury, its host of meeting rooms and its banqueting hall made it the premier venue for conferences, civic events and gatherings of the great and the good in general. There would be an empty meeting room somewhere where he could interview Glenys Summers. He could do with some lunch at some point, he thought, and glanced into the coffee shop which led off the reception hall. It was pretty full but his eye was caught immediately by a uniformed WPC sitting in the corner. She saw him at the same moment and jumped up. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t know you were here. WPC Sarah Shepherd, family liaison. I was asked to stay with Mrs Carson – Miss Summers – but she wants to be on her own for the moment and I thought –’
‘That’s all right. It’s useful you’re here. You can sit in on my interview with her. She’s coming down in a moment.’
The young woman hesitated. ‘I should warn you, sir. I don’t think I got off to a very good start with her.’
‘Oh?’
He looked at her. She was a large young woman with a round face that retained a child-like pudginess. He doubted there was anything naïve about her, though. Family liaison was a difficult job and she had a reputation for being good at it.
‘I haven’t come across a reaction quite like hers before,’ she said. ‘She just seems so angry.’
‘Grief can make people angry, though, can’t it?’
‘Oh yes, but it isn’t usually the first emotion. Usually it comes later, when people feel the investigation has stalled and they start to get angry that we’re not doing enough.’
‘Is she angry with you?’
‘She seemed to be.’
‘Well, here she comes.’
A woman of forty or so was limping down the stairs towards them, recognisable in the way people are who are known only from print or celluloid – familiar but different. Small and slight, her face pale inside her trademark blond bob, she was wearing a calf-length black jersey dress and a startlingly white bandage on her right ankle. He went forward to wait for her at the foot of the stairs. As she reached the bottom and released the handrail she put out two hands to him. ‘The chief inspector, I presume?’ she said, and her voice had the breathy, child-like quality he remembered from her films.
‘Chief Inspector David Scott,’ he said, releasing a hand to fish out his warrant card.
‘I’m Glenys,’ she said.
‘Of course you are,’ he said, and felt foolish. ‘You know WPC Sarah Shepherd already, I think,’ he added. She gave a dismissive nod and he said, ‘She’ll be sitting in on our interview. I hope you’ll find that she’ll be helpful to you in the next few days.’ Getting no response, he said, ‘I’m sure we can find an empty meeting room down here, where we can talk in private,’ and turned to lead the way into the interior of the hotel.
She clutched his arm, however, and looked up into his face. ‘Do you mind if I lea
n on you? It’s still difficult to walk on this wretched ankle.’ And so they set off arm in arm down the wide corridor with Sarah Shepherd falling in behind like an awkward, serge-clad bridesmaid.
Scott spotted an empty room off to the left, with no signs that it had been prepared for a meeting, and they settled down at one end of a long conference table. ’Would you like a drink or anything?’ he asked. ‘I’m sure Sarah would –’
‘Oh, a glass of water perhaps,’ she said, turning to Sarah Shepherd, ‘with ice.’
‘Can I get anything for you, sir?’ the WPC asked.
‘A cup of coffee would be wonderful, Sarah.’
‘No problem.’ Swapping bridesmaid for waitress, she left the room.
‘Mrs Carson,’ Scott said, ‘Let me –’
‘Oh please,’ she interrupted, ’do call me Glenys. Everyone does.’ And that was really awkward, Scott thought. He couldn’t call her Glenys – it was inappropriate – but he couldn’t call her Mrs Carson now either, and “Miss Summers” felt odd when he was talking to her as Marina Carson’s mother. He’d have to avoid calling her anything, and that was uncomfortable.
‘I just wanted to say,’ he went on, ‘how sorry I am for your loss. This is just a preliminary interview and I hope not to distress you too much. We just need to establish some facts about events yesterday afternoon.’
‘Don’t worry about me, Chief Inspector,’ she said, brushing a hand across her eyes (she was wearing no make-up as far as he could see). ‘I’m tougher than I look. If there’s anything I can tell you that will help you find out what happened, I will.’
Sarah Shepherd reappeared with the drinks and Scott asked, ‘Can you tell me what happened about the phone call to Renée Deakin yesterday morning? You definitely didn’t make it?’
‘Definitely! I don’t do mornings, Chief Inspector. I keep theatre hours – late nights and late mornings. I certainly don’t make phone calls at 9 a.m.’
‘And when did you realise that the hoax call had been made?’
‘Well, when Renée didn’t turn up. She comes from twelve till three. As I told you, I don’t like to be disturbed in the morning. Coming in at midday, she makes my lunch among other things, and then she goes off at three to pick up her boys. I didn’t notice that she hadn’t arrived until about twenty past twelve, I suppose, and then I rang and she told me about the phone call.’
‘What was your reaction when she told you?’ Scott asked.
She took a sip of her water, put the glass down and folded her hands together. ‘I was terrified, Chief Inspector. I realised immediately that someone was ensuring that I would be alone in the house, incapacitated and vulnerable. That someone knew everything that was going on in the house – Renée’s hours, my accident, everything.’ She gave a little laugh and sipped some more water. ‘I don’t want to sound like a heroine in a Hitchcock film but I have no doubt that someone was trying to kill me. My slip on the stairs the day before was no accident – someone had spread grease there while I was still sleeping. It wasn’t there when my husband and Marina went down earlier – they didn’t slip. And there have been other times, too, though nobody would take me seriously about them.’
‘Can you tell me about the other times?’
‘Oh, you’ll probably say I’m imagining things, just like my husband does, but the other day there was definitely someone creeping around the house.’
‘When was that?’
‘Last week. Tuesday? Yes, Tuesday.’
‘Did you see anyone?’
‘No, but I heard him, upstairs, going from room to room, opening drawers.’
‘What made you think it was a man? Did it sound like a man’s tread?’
‘Well, I don’t know.’ She looked at him, startled, her composure shaken for the first time. ‘I assumed – a woman alone – an intruder – you assume it’s a man, don’t you?’
‘What did you do when you realised someone was there?’
‘I slipped out of the back door and went and hid in Hector’s writing room in the garden. It’s got windows on three sides so I could see anyone coming, and I armed myself with a paper knife. Pathetic really.’
‘And did anyone come?’
‘No. Eventually Marina got home from school and came looking for me. We went in together and he’d obviously gone.’
‘Who did you tell about this?’
‘Only my husband – and Marina knew, of course.’
‘And your son?’
‘Oh Edmund boards at Marlbury Abbey. He’s a weekly boarder – home at weekends – which suits us all perfectly. He was missing out on the extras – school plays and so on – as a day boy, but we didn’t want to lose him altogether. He wasn’t here so I didn’t bother him with it.’
‘You said no-one would take you seriously. That was only your husband and daughter then?’
‘And Dr Fletcher. My husband told him.’ She paused and looked directly at Scott. The look was so unwavering and disturbing that he had to look away. ‘The thing you have to understand,’ she said, ‘is that I used to be a drunk – and, quite frankly, I still am sometimes. Now the people who run my life – my husband and my agent – didn’t want the world to know that sweet little Glenys was a lush, so they put it about that I was “fragile” and “delicate”. When Colin and Hector concocted the plan of carrying me off to Switzerland, the story was not that I was going to be dried out but that I was “in very precarious health” and “in need of complete rest”. Well that’s all very well, but what people thought was that I was off my chump.’ As she grew more animated, Scott thought, you could hear her original Welshness bubbling through under her clipped English accent. ‘Trouble was,’ she went on, ‘Hector’s started to believe his own fiction – acts as if I’m half barmy. Which I most definitely am not.’
‘Yesterday,’ Scott said, ‘you decided to go to London. Was that because you were afraid to stay in the house?’
‘Of course it was. It seemed the only thing to do.’
‘Did you ring Marina at any time – or text her – to let her know where you were?’
‘Well she doesn’t have a mobile. And I forgot to take mine with me, I was in such a rush to leave. So –’ She shrugged.
‘You didn’t think she might be worried about you, given the fact that she knew that you felt you were in danger?’
She looked at him. ‘I really didn’t. I’m afraid I panicked,’ she said.
‘And it didn’t occur to you that if there was an intruder, Marina might encounter them?’
She put her hand to her mouth and shook her head. ‘I just didn’t think. I’ll never be able to forgive myself. I just didn’t think. I knew they were after me. It didn’t occur to me that anyone else could be in danger.’
Scott allowed her a moment and then asked, ‘You’ve thought for some time that you were in danger. Who did you think was trying to harm you?’
The blue eyes took on a misty vagueness. ‘Celebrities attract all kinds of madmen, don’t they? I assumed it was someone who’d seen the show and got an obsession. Someone with a sick mind. It’s not uncommon for actresses to be threatened by stalkers, as I’m sure you know.’
‘So you think it was a single individual?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘The phone call to Mrs Deakin suggests that it’s a woman.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘I suppose a woman might find me attractive too,’ she said.
‘Do you think it is at all possible that someone could have mistaken Marina for you – if they saw her only from the back?’
She gave a little shrug. ‘Well, I think of her as just a little girl, of course, but she shot up recently and Hector commented the other day that she was as tall as me. And she’s always insisted on wearing her hair in a bob like mine – very sweet, really. And I’m very slight, of course. That’s how I get away with playing young.’
‘Given your fear of intruders,’ Scott said, ‘I’m surprised that we found the kitchen door unlo
cked. Do you really think that you could have gone out and left it unlocked?’
‘I think it was probably locked, but I didn’t take the key out of the lock. There’s a cat flap, you see, and you can reach in and get the key. We leave it in the lock when we’re at home but we try to remember to take it out when we go out. Yesterday, I was in such a panic, I didn’t do it.’
‘If it’s any comfort,’ Sarah Shepherd put in quietly, ‘it won’t have made any real difference. In our experience, if an intruder’s determined to get in, he will anyway.’
Uncomforted, Glenys Summers gave her a look of cold dislike.
‘Could you just tell me which train you caught?’ Scott asked.
‘It was the train that leaves Shepton Halt at one thirty-three. It meant I was a bit late for the show but they weren’t going to refuse to let me in.’
Scott closed his notebook. ‘I think that’s all for now, thank you. I won’t distress you any more.’ He helped her to her feet and as they proceeded back down the aisle he asked, ‘There’s just one thing. If someone wanted to find you alone, why didn’t they go into the house before Mrs Deakin was due to arrive and save themselves the trouble of the phone call?’
‘Hector,’ she said. ‘Hector’s around in the morning. He’s not an early starter either. He potters about, reads the paper, goes for a walk. Then he goes into Marlbury to work in the abbey library. He likes to have his lunch in the café in the crypt there.’
As he left her at the lift doors, he said, ‘WPC Shepherd is here to support you and keep you informed of any developments. I’m sure –’
He got no further. She raised both hands to her head in an extravagant gesture of impatience. ‘Oh please!’ she hissed. ‘Spare me her mooning around. I don’t need support. I’ll deal with my grief in my own way. Take her away and give her some real work to do.’ She stepped into the lift and the doors closed smoothly behind her.
Scott looked at Sarah Shepherd. ‘Have you had lunch?’ he asked. ‘If not, I’ll buy you a sandwich.’ They ate more or less in silence. Scott could see that Sarah was mortified by her failure with Glenys Summers but he didn’t know how to reassure her and his mind was on his next interview, with Dr Fletcher. He had read the statement that Colin Fletcher had given the previous evening and there were things in it that didn’t add up. He needed some answers.
All the Daughters Page 6
