Plots and Errors

by Jill McGown

  ‘Then you leave us no option,’ said Inspector Hill. ‘Alexandra Esterbrook, I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of William Rampton in Penhallin, Cornwall on Saturday the twenty-seventh of September. You do not have to say anything . . .’

  Sandie wasn’t listening. How had Paul managed to do what he’d said he’d do? He was dead, for God’s sake.

  ‘You have the right to have someone notified of your arrest.’

  ‘Josh Esterbrook,’ she said. ‘Barton 258763.’ She looked at Inspector Hill. ‘You wouldn’t be doing this to Elizabeth Esterbrook,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t go to Benenden or Roedean or wherever it is she went to school. It was different when you thought I had, wasn’t it?’

  ‘The only thing that’s changed is that we know you’ve lied to us.’

  Sandie didn’t know how Paul had done it, but he had been right; no point in telling the police, he had said, and even after he was dead, his precautions were working, his security measures were still in place.

  But not for long. Which was just as well, because the cells, she discovered, were a non-smoking environment.

  SCENE VIII – BARTONSHIRE.

  Monday, September 29th, 5.25 p.m.

  Lloyd’s Office in Stansfield Police Station.

  Lloyd was not in a good mood. He looked up when Judy knocked and came in.

  ‘I hear you’ve arrested Sandie Esterbrook,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  ‘I have reasonable grounds for suspicion,’ said Judy, looking slightly offended.

  Lloyd sighed. No point in taking it out on Judy. ‘I know you have,’ he sighed. ‘I’ve seen Foster’s report. She had me fooled, I admit it. But you don’t really think she’ll disappear if you let her go, do you?’

  ‘No, but she’s told us this story, and Penhallin want to talk to her, obviously. She’s the best suspect they’ve got. They’d be a bit miffed if she did disappear.’

  Lloyd picked up a pen, doodled on a pad. ‘And you want to hang on to her, because you’re afraid that she’ll end up like Paul Esterbrook if you let her go,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that really why she’s a guest of this establishment?’

  Judy sat down. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was bad enough when I thought he’d killed himself, but now I think I let him go just so someone could murder him. I’m not letting that happen twice. Someone’s already had a go at her, and if it wasn’t Paul, then maybe it was her husband. Maybe she’s afraid to tell us the truth.’

  Lloyd smiled, still working on the shiny top hat he was drawing. It was the only thing he could draw, but he did do top hats very nicely. All the shading, and the highlights. ‘I don’t think she’s that easily intimidated,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe not, but she’s obviously involved in some way. She’s telling this story to cover up for someone. Who else?’

  Lloyd’s ballpoint smudged his top hat, and he scribbled through it. It was better with a pencil, anyway. He let the pen drop, roll over the blotter.

  ‘The lab said they’d have to do an analysis of the burnt paper to find out whether or not it could have been a fax,’ said Judy. ‘Compare it with the paper in the fax, and the paper on the A4 pad. I told them to go ahead, but I suppose that’s a waste of time now, since the whole story is nonsense.’

  ‘Probably. Let it stand, though.’

  ‘How did the Copes’ post-mortem go?’ Judy asked, a touch apprehensively.

  Lloyd smiled tiredly, because Judy already knew that it hadn’t gone well; if it had, he’d have been talking about that, not giving her a hard time about Sandie Esterbrook. ‘Freddie came up with nothing,’ he said.

  Judy made a sympathetic sound. ‘Nothing at all?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  Freddie had found no trace of drugs or intoxicants in either body; there were no blows to the head, no internal injuries, no signs that either of them had been in any way restrained, or had put up a fight. ‘They died of carbon monoxide poisoning and nothing else, Lloyd,’ he had said. ‘Both of them. They were alive, when the car filled with gas. There is nothing whatever to suggest that either of them was in any way rendered unconscious or unable to leave the car.’

  Lloyd had pointed out the flaw in that. ‘Cope couldn’t leave the car,’ he said. ‘Not without his wheelchair.’

  ‘Yes, he could,’ Freddie had said. ‘He was a big, strong man. He could have thrown himself out, pulled himself free. And besides,’ he had added, with infinite, maddening logic, reminding Lloyd of Judy, ‘he could have turned off the engine.’

  Forensics, who had been working for two solid days, had not produced anything he could go on at all. Only the Copes’ fingerprints had been found on or in the car, only Andy Cope’s on the car-keys, the gear lever and the steering-wheel, only Kathy Cope’s on the vacuum-cleaner hose and the vacuum-cleaner itself. Rubber glove prints had been found on the last two items, but, given the nature of household tasks, that was hardly unusual. The pattern matched that of the rubber gloves found under Kathy Cope’s sink, and there was no evidence to suggest that anyone other than Kathy Cope had ever worn them. Indeed, there were minute blood-stains from a minor cut found inside the thumb of one glove, which matched Kathy Cope’s blood-type, and which had been caused some considerable time prior to Friday night, so they were undoubtedly her rubber gloves. Even Lloyd drew the line at DNA testing to prove it absolutely.

  The hose had been attached to the exhaust with insulating tape from which they had been unable to get prints, but that meant nothing; its rough, matt surface had always been a very unlikely source. Kathy’s prints had been found on the big garage door, in exactly the position that they would have been had she reached up and pushed it shut from the inside.

  It wasn’t impossible to imagine someone achieving that effect; Kathy could have been forced to close the garage door herself, she would use the Hoover all the time, and wearing her rubber gloves would do the rest. But how could you achieve the actual murder without drugging your victims, or making them drunk, or otherwise rendering them insensible? Even if they had been held at gunpoint, it made no sense. If the gunman had been outside the car, they would have been in possession of as lethal an instrument as he was; if he had been inside, he would have died with them.

  And in the desperation of knowing they were going to die, the gun would have made no difference; they would have tried anything. But they had made no attempt to leave the car, and there was nothing to suggest that the doors had been held shut from the outside; no glue on the windows, nothing jamming the mechanism, nothing that anyone could find to prevent them ventilating the car at least. And, as Freddie had said, nothing to stop Andy Cope simply switching off the engine.

  But someone had murdered them, all the same; Lloyd was absolutely convinced of that, and his investigation wasn’t going to stop here. He wasn’t sure where he could possibly take it, but he would think of something, because he wasn’t having someone going round thinking they could bump people off willy-nilly.

  ‘I’ve been summoned to the presence,’ he said to Judy, getting up, flexing his back. ‘I’ll give you three guesses what about.’

  SCENE IX – BARTONSHIRE.

  Monday, September 29th, 5.35 p.m.

  The Superintendent’s Office.

  Lloyd went up the flight of stairs slowly, still trying to think of something really convincing to say, but all he had was a soul-feeling, and that wouldn’t cut any ice at all with Case.

  ‘Come!’

  Lloyd went in. ‘You wanted me, sir?’

  ‘What’s this about needing more time to complete your enquiries into the Copes’ suicide?’

  ‘I think you’ll find I didn’t use the word ‘‘suicide’’,’ said Lloyd.

  ‘I’m using it. The pathologist is using it. Forensics are using it. So you’re using it. Subject closed.’

  ‘The thing is—’ Lloyd began.

  ‘The enquiry is closed, Lloyd.’ Case’s hand strayed to the cigarette packet on his desk, then he sat back, his hands clasped
behind the head of thick grey hair that Lloyd secretly envied. ‘Do you know how much your obsession with the Cope business has cost us already?’ he demanded.

  ‘It isn’t an obsession. It’s—’

  ‘A hunch. Well, I’m sorry, but they committed suicide, and your hunch is not going to cost us one pennypiece more than it already has. The only reason I’m not nailing you to the wall is that the Esterbrook shootings did make murder a reasonable supposition in the end. You were lucky. So don’t push it, Lloyd. Forget the Copes and concentrate on the real murders we’ve got on our hands.’

  ‘Are you quite happy to accept that the Copes’ suicide was coincidental to the ‘‘real’’ murders?’ he asked.

  ‘Coincidental? No. This murder has got something to do with Esterbrook’s liking for young boys, I’m not denying that. But the Copes were peripheral to it – they happened to be asked to investigate him, that’s all. And they were up to their ears in debt, so Kathy Cope blackmailed Esterbrook at the behest of her boyfriend. Isn’t that what DI Hill thinks too?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lloyd. ‘And blackmailing someone and then double-crossing him is quite a good way of getting yourself murdered.’

  Case stopped trying to look relaxed, and took a cigarette from the packet on his desk. ‘Now you want to pin it on a dead man?’ he said, speaking and lighting his cigarette at the same time. ‘She blued the money on office equipment she didn’t need, her husband eventually found out how she got that money, and that was the last straw. They’d sunk as low as you can go, and they did themselves in. It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘The night before everyone else started getting themselves shot dead?’ said Lloyd, incredulously, ungrammatically. As simple as that. It wasn’t as simple as that. It wasn’t simple at all.

  ‘There is no way in the world that they were murdered, Lloyd!’ Case shouted, his finger jabbing down on the unequivocal reports. ‘They committed suicide.’

  ‘Just like that? Went out shopping, came home and killed themselves?’

  ‘They could have been in that car for hours before they actually decided to do it! We don’t know what went on, but we do know they committed suicide in the end whether you like it or not.’

  ‘They locked all the car doors. Why didn’t they lock both the garage doors? Why just the big one?’

  ‘Who cares?’ Case laid the cigarette down in the ashtray.

  ‘I do. Someone might have locked the main door, but had to leave by the little one after putting Cope’s keys back in the ignition. Give me till the end of the week before you close the enquiry.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To try to get to the bottom of the blackmail business. To find out who this other man is that Kathy was with at the hotel. If he’s a blackmailer, we have to find him. Maybe he can shed some light on why they would have killed themselves.’

  Case shook his head. Smoke spiralled up from the half-smoked cigarette and hung in a cloud over his desk, moving in a shaft of setting sunlight. ‘No,’ he said, picking it up again. ‘We’ve had no complaint of blackmail. We don’t have to find him. We don’t need to know why they killed themselves.’

  Lloyd knew that, but it had been worth a try. He looked at his senior officer through the haze, and decided to go for it. Detective Superintendent Case, confirmed bachelor that he was, lived alone, and it was just possible that Lloyd’s weakest argument would succeed where his strongest had failed.

  ‘Where do you keep your baked beans, sir?’ he asked.

  Case narrowed his eyes at him. ‘I don’t trust you when you remember to call me sir,’ he said. ‘But if you really want to know, I keep them on the second top shelf of the right-hand cupboard above the worktop. Happy?’

  ‘Nowhere else? You don’t keep some in that cupboard and some in another?’

  ‘No,’ said Case, drawing out the word with exaggerated patience. ‘Do you?’

  ‘No,’ said Lloyd. ‘And neither did Kathy Cope. Until Friday night. And she didn’t keep her teabags where they were found, or her eggs in the fridge, but that’s where they were. Someone else put her shopping away. Someone who had no idea where anything was kept. It wasn’t her husband – he never got out of the car.’

  There was a long silence after he had spoken; Lloyd didn’t move, didn’t make a sound.

  Case ground out his cigarette and sighed, a deep, theatrical sigh, shaking his head at his own folly. ‘The end of the week,’ he groaned.

  SCENE X – BARTONSHIRE.

  The following day, Tuesday, September 30th, 8.30 a.m.

  The House at Little Elmley.

  Josh had gone straight to Stansfield police station as soon as they had rung him last night; they had let Sandie know that he was there, but they hadn’t let him see her. He had told various people what he thought of them, but none of the principal players had been in evidence, so it had been a bit of a waste of time. And staying there wouldn’t have helped; Sandie knew he was with her anyway, wherever he was, wherever she was.

  They had said she had been arrested on suspicion of murdering Billy Rampton, but they hadn’t, of course, told him how they had come to that conclusion. If it was just because she had been there, why hadn’t Lloyd arrested her on Saturday night? It had to be something more than that, and he didn’t know what. Things had been taken out of his hands, and he didn’t like that.

  They said she hadn’t asked for a solicitor, but he thought he ought to get hold of one for her. He wasn’t sure whether to get one here or in Penhallin, because they had said they might be taking her there. He washed, shaved, drank some coffee, then headed for Stansfield police station to find out what was happening.

  SCENE XI – BARTONSHIRE.

  Tuesday, September 30th, 9.05 a.m.

  Stansfield Police Station.

  Judy had been at work for half an hour when Penhallin faxed through a statement made to them early that morning by one Arthur Henderson, yet another private investigator who had become involved in this business.

  ‘Why do private eyes keep coming out of the woodwork?’ Lloyd demanded, when she went in to tell him.

  ‘Well,’ said Judy, ‘Elizabeth Esterbrook was pretty well bound to employ one sooner or later, and Angela wanted things done that only private investigators can do, so perhaps it isn’t so odd. It’s what he has to tell us that’s really interesting.’

  Arthur Henderson was the sort of private investigator that Lloyd accepted Mrs Esterbrook might more readily employ; Judy had rung Penhallin to check on him and had discovered that he had had an impeccable thirty years with the Devon and Cornwall police, and ran a thriving agency staffed by hand-picked operatives whose credentials were equally impeccable. He clearly wouldn’t have touched the Plymouth job, smacking as it did of collusion and set-up, so Angela had had to go elsewhere for that.

  She had employed Mr Henderson twice, according to his handwritten, lengthy statement; the first time had been on the twenty-second of July, when she had asked him to investigate a youth she was thinking of employing; he had been entirely unsuitable, and Mr Henderson had told her that. She had been very grateful to him, and when she had begun to suspect that someone had been using her cottage on the weekends when she wasn’t in residence, she had come to him again, three weeks ago. She had wanted a discreet watch kept on her cottage, and a full report of anyone seen using it.

  His operatives had concealed themselves in an apparently abandoned vehicle, a favourite ploy of Mr Henderson’s, apparently, and they had maintained a twenty-four-hour surveillance from eight o’clock on Friday morning until they had aborted it on the Sunday, for obvious reasons. Mr Henderson would not normally reveal a client’s business to anyone, but in view of what had occurred on the Sunday, when his operatives saw a body being removed from the cottage by police, he had given the matter deep thought, and had in the end decided that it was only right to let the police know what his operatives had seen the previous day.

  And since he now understood from the newspapers that the deceased w
as the boy whom he had investigated for Mrs Esterbrook, and that his death was being linked to two others at Mrs Esterbrook’s Bartonshire address, he had not sent her a copy of the report, and would not, unless and until he was given the go-ahead by the police.

  The report, also faxed through, confirmed every word that Sandie Esterbrook had told them, and the timed and dated photographs, scanned and sent by the Internet in preference to the less desirable fax in order that there should be no doubt about the identities of the people photographed, established that Paul Esterbrook’s dramatic exit had been minutes after the call to Little Elmley.

  Tom had been most anxious to be the one to speak to Foster, and Judy was happy to let him do that. Foster needed someone with no time for diplomacy to point out the error of his ways.

  Lloyd put the report down. ‘I don’t think you can keep her in protective custody any longer,’ he said.

  ‘It doesn’t look as though it’s necessary,’ said Judy. ‘I doubt if she’s in any danger. I think Paul must have carried out the other shootings and then shot himself, don’t you?’

  But she could see from the look on Lloyd’s face that despite Arthur Henderson’s indisputable evidence, he didn’t think that. ‘It could still be a set-up,’ he said. ‘That video-frame Kathy Cope sent to Mrs Esterbrook is missing, and that has to mean something.’

  ‘He’d arranged an alibi, Lloyd,’ Judy pointed out.

  He nodded. ‘But he told Sandie about it, didn’t he? Before anyone had been shot, before he’d seen this letter supposedly from his mother. The alibi might just be coincidental.’

  It might.

  SCENE XII – BARTONSHIRE.

  Tuesday, September 30th, 9.30 a.m.

  The Courtyard at Stansfield Police Station.

  Sandie had been given breakfast, some exercise in the yard, and allowed, while she was outside, to smoke. These three things had served to put her in a better mood. Being told that she was free to go put her in something approaching a good mood. Finding Josh waiting for her had meant that by the time she saw DI Hill approaching, she had lost the desire to call her names. The woman had only been doing her job, and she had been up against Paul Esterbrook’s military-style security; he had told Sandie he would make her look a liar, and he had.