Plots and Errors

by Jill McGown

  ‘Covering his infidelity, as you so prissily put it, with Billy,’ Case said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Lloyd.

  Case sat back, his arms folded across what was becoming an ever bulkier frame. ‘Perhaps?’ he repeated.

  ‘We’ve only got Sandie Esterbrook’s word for it that Paul Esterbrook even knew Billy was at the cottage.’

  ‘Billy was found in the bedroom, half in and half out of his clothes, and the items found in his jacket pocket strongly suggest that he was there with the intention of having sex with someone,’ said Case.

  ‘But we’ve only got Sandie Esterbrook’s word for it that Billy was expecting to see Paul Esterbrook.’

  Case closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘Let me get this straight. You’re suggesting that we’ve got the wrong end of the stick altogether? That Paul was expecting to spend the weekend with Sandie, and that Billy thought he’d be meeting Josh Esterbrook?’

  Lloyd had never, ever tried a theory out on Case. He usually reserved them strictly for Judy. Sometimes, at a pinch, Freddie. In dire emergency, Tom Finch. Never Case. But he’d only just thought of this one. ‘It’s a possibility,’ he said.

  ‘Josh and Sandie Esterbrook are married.’

  ‘Paul was married too. That doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘But he hadn’t been near his wife for ten years. Josh Esterbrook is newly married.’

  ‘Why?’ said Lloyd.

  ‘Why?’ repeated Case, puzzled, then nodded extravagantly. ‘Oh, right, I’ve got it,’ he said. ‘They got married to put us off the scent, right? So we wouldn’t realize that it’s Josh that’s the queer.’

  Not quite how Lloyd would have put it, but in essence what he was considering as a working hypothesis. ‘Elizabeth Esterbrook still maintains that it was Josh who was having the relationship with Billy Rampton, not Paul,’ he said. ‘What if she’s right?’

  Case was shaking his head. ‘She just doesn’t want to believe it, Lloyd. That’s all.’

  ‘I’d like to get Counsel’s Opinion,’ Lloyd said.

  ‘Counsel’s Opinion on what? Your daft theory?’

  ‘The will. I’d like to see how strong a claim Josh Esterbrook will have if we close this enquiry as it stands.’

  ‘Not on your life. Do you know how much an hour barristers charge, for God’s sake? Paul Esterbrook murdered Billy and then he murdered his mother, and there isn’t anything we can do about that, since he very decently shot himself as well. We issue a statement that no one else is being sought, and stop spending money on this business!’

  ‘And why did he kill himself after going to all that trouble?’

  ‘He flipped, Lloyd. He killed the boy, he killed his mother, and once we set Judy Hill on to him, he knew it was all over. I think I’d have shot myself too.’

  Lloyd ignored the jibe about Judy. Case liked to rattle his cage about their relationship, and he had learned to keep his mouth shut. Soon, she would be based in headquarters, and they would openly be a couple, living together, if he could ever get her to that stage. Case would have no ammunition then. Lloyd was only surprised that he hadn’t yet noticed Judy’s thickening waistline. ‘What about this letter that his mother wanted him to collect for her?’ he tried. ‘His brother confirms his story about that. So he could have made that call a month previously, as he said he did, and if he did, then he was set up, and that tape was left for us to find.’

  They had had the tape fingerprinted; Elizabeth Esterbrook’s prints had been found, naturally, because she had put the tape in for Angela in the first place, but no one else’s prints were on it at all, as Case was quick to point out.

  ‘And once again, it’s Josh Esterbrook who told you about the letter, so where does that leave your daft theory that he’s masterminding all this? And we are unable to confirm Paul Esterbrook’s story about making the call a month previously because of his convenient inability to remember whose mobile phone he was using at the time!’

  ‘We know it wasn’t Billy Rampton’s,’ muttered Lloyd.

  ‘That’s because he didn’t make the call a month ago from a mobile phone! He made it on Saturday from the cottage phone. Why would he use a mobile, for God’s sake? There are two perfectly good phones at the cottage. He said that to account for the fact that no call was made from the cottage to Little Elmley a month ago. There was no call from a mobile phone. Give up, Lloyd!’

  Lloyd blew out his cheeks. He was getting too old for this, but he would not give up. ‘Why would he insist he’d made that call on a Sunday?’

  ‘He’d have said he made it on a Sunday because he was as devious as all hell, and he wanted you to start thinking exactly what you are thinking.’

  Lloyd gathered himself for his final assault. ‘But if he did all that because of Kathy Cope’s report, doesn’t the fact that the visual evidence was removed but the report was still there strike you as a little odd? Why didn’t he take the report itself?’

  ‘He didn’t have anything to do with that. I don’t suppose his mother wanted to keep a picture of her son in that pos—’ Case smiled. ‘—situation,’ he amended.

  Lloyd threw his hands in the air. ‘But she wanted an entire video of it in the first place, according to the report.’

  ‘A few seconds, Lloyd, not a Hollywood production. She felt she needed concrete proof. To be certain that her son really was doing what she suspected he was doing, before she took any action. The still confirmed it to her satisfaction, and she threw it away. The report was in a concealed drawer – he just didn’t know where to look for it.’

  ‘Of course he’d know where to look for it!’ said Lloyd. ‘I grew up with one of these old bureaux. I could open every secret compartment and hidden drawer by the time I was five! And so could Josh and Paul Esterbrook, I’m sure.’

  For once, his illustration from his childhood was true; he really had grown up with a bureau like that. And that was a little puzzle that he hadn’t even mentioned to Judy yet. His mother had also kept keepsakes in those not-so-hidden drawers; keepsakes were pleasant things. Angela’s had been old love-letters and her first try at a novel. It seemed odd to Lloyd that she would put something in with them as unpleasant to her as Kathy Cope’s report must have been. But he didn’t have time to speculate on that, not right now. ‘I believe the visual evidence was removed because it wasn’t Paul Esterbrook who was with Billy Rampton,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes it was, Lloyd. And Billy Rampton colluded with Angela Esterbrook to trap him. That’s why Paul Esterbrook shot Billy, and it’s why he shot his mother, and when he realized he could never get away with it, he shot himself.’ Case stood up, took his jacket from the back of the chair. ‘Penhallin police are happy to accept that. I’m happy to accept that. So if you want more work done on this, you can pay for your experts yourself, because I’m not authorizing the work. And I’ll close the enquiry anyway, so it will be a waste of time.’

  Yes, thought Lloyd, as Case shrugged on his jacket, and cleared his desk. That was what he had thought he would say. So he hit Case with his statistic, the one he’d been saving up.

  ‘Five people knew for a fact which of the Esterbrook brothers was in that hotel bedroom with Billy,’ he said, and illustrated with his fingers, sticking each one up in turn, starting with the little finger of his left hand. ‘Billy himself, Angela Esterbrook, Kathy Cope, Paul Esterbrook and Josh Esterbrook.’ His left hand had the fingers spread wide. ‘And four of them are dead.’ He closed his hand, holding the solitary thumb eloquently in the air.

  Case looked at the thumb for a long time, then closed his eyes. ‘I don’t believe I’m saying this,’ he said. ‘All right, Lloyd, you can have your Counsel’s Opinion and your handwriting expert. What’s another couple of thousand on top of what you’ve already spent? But it’s the same deal as the Copes. The end of the week.’

  ‘The end of the week,’ said Lloyd.

  The end of the week?

  SCENE XVIII – NORFOLK.


  The following day, Wednesday, October 1st, 9.30 a.m.

  The Home of Letitia Markham.

  ‘Sergeant Finch, it just isn’t something that you can do in twenty-four hours,’ she said, spreading her arms wide in a huge gesture of hopelessness.

  Tom had been chosen to approach the dark and dramatic Lettie, as Lloyd called her, Professor Markham, as he respectfully called her, about the recovered letter from Angela Esterbrook. His boyish charm, Lloyd had said, would bowl Lettie over. So far, it wasn’t working terribly well.

  ‘It’s not even the original letter!’ she said. ‘Impressions – what am I supposed to tell you about them?’ She tossed back her long hair, still suspiciously black despite her sixty-odd summers. ‘Except that she must have been very angry when she wrote it,’ she said. ‘And deep impressions help.’

  Tom felt a little surge of triumph. He had tried the Judy method. Don’t say anything, and if they speak next, they’re cracking, she said. She had spoken at length about how she couldn’t possibly do it, but she was cracking.

  ‘I know, professor,’ he said. ‘But my boss reckoned I’d be able to sweet-talk you into doing it all the same. I don’t where he got that idea from.’

  She smiled. ‘I can see through you, Sergeant Finch. Even so, you might be able to sweet-talk me into many things, but not pronouncing on this letter within twenty-four hours.’ She picked it up, perused it. ‘Have you any idea how much work is involved?’

  ‘Well – to be honest,’ said Tom, ‘I don’t. I don’t even know how you begin to go about it.’

  She looked up. ‘Are you interested?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, yes. I think it’s fascinating.’ It was true; he liked things that had to be worried at and pored over and worked at. It gave you something to get your teeth into.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Let’s take the signature, ‘‘Angela’’. Now, people never sign their name the same way twice. Therefore, if this ‘‘Angela’’ were to match up exactly to another example of her signature, that would in fact suggest . . .’

  Tom listened, and watched, and congratulated himself, as he was given instruction on handwriting comparison.

  ‘ . . . and then you do it all again for the bottom of each letter,’ she said. ‘And then you plot the spaces, and the slant of the letters, and the boldness of the downstrokes and – well, that’s just some of it. It’s very painstaking work. It takes hours, and the report takes even longer. I have a great many other calls on my time, young man.’

  ‘Chief Inspector Lloyd thinks that someone is going to get away with murdering five people.’

  Her dark eyes grew wide. ‘Five people?’ she repeated. ‘That seems like four more than the average murderer allows himself. Why haven’t I read about it in the papers?’

  ‘Well, because three of them are believed to be suicide, and the two murders happened in two different counties, neither of them this one. It’s never got beyond the local news.’

  She looked at the letter again. ‘What exactly is he trying to discover about this document?’

  ‘We need to know if it’s genuine or not, and who it was really written to,’ said Tom, diving into his briefcase. ‘I’ve brought lots of examples of Mrs Esterbrook’s writing that are known to be genuine,’ he said. ‘Her diaries, and a shopping list. She had arthritis, so the recent examples are fairly short, like the shopping list. She didn’t keep a handwritten diary any more, but we’ve brought the most recent one. And as many examples as we could get of her signature, including the most recent, which was a postcard to her daughter-in-law, also signed just ‘‘Angela’’, like that letter.’ He put them on the table. ‘And we would like to be sure that the name ‘‘Paul’’ is in the same writing as the rest, even if the body of the letter’s genuine,’ he said. ‘Could it originally have been written to someone called Josh?’

  ‘Mm,’ she said, and held the letter at a slight angle.

  ‘There are lots of examples of the name ‘‘Paul’’ in the diaries for comparison purposes,’ added Tom. ‘Her husband’s name was Paul.’

  She now had the letter, and the comparison samples. Tom held his breath while she looked at the work she already had, and the work that he had given her.

  ‘I can’t possibly give you a definitive answer. I couldn’t, with all the time in the world, not with a recovered document. And in twenty-four hours . . . well.’

  ‘No,’ said Tom, inwardly turning somersaults, whooping, punching the air. ‘Of course not. And we’re not expecting anything like that, Professor Markham, just – well, just your best guess, really.’

  SCENE XIX – BARTONSHIRE.

  Wednesday, October 1st, 10.30 a.m.

  Barristers’ Chambers in Barton.

  It was when Lloyd had asked her to take Paul Esterbrook senior’s will to James Harper that Judy realized just how strongly he believed in Paul Esterbrook junior’s innocence of these murders. Because it was with James Harper – Hotshot Harper, as she had disparagingly once called him – thirty-something, handsome, successful and charming, that she had come as close as she ever had, as close as she ever would, she hoped, to being unfaithful to Lloyd. And Lloyd knew that.

  ‘You want me to do what?’ Harper’s grey eyes, as ever, were amused.

  She smiled. ‘I need to know what chance Josh Esterbrook stands of successfully claiming title to Little Elmley, if Paul Esterbrook is deemed to have murdered his mother. You must know someone who could do that.’

  ‘In twenty-four hours?’

  ‘Sooner would be preferable,’ she said.

  He looked a little dubious. ‘Are you in some sort of trouble?’ he asked. ‘Is that why you’ve come directly to me?’

  ‘No. This is entirely above board, authorized by my superintendent. It’s just very, very urgent. There was no time to go through the usual channels. And since I had a friend at court, you might say . . .’

  ‘Does your superintendent have the faintest idea how much people in this chambers cost?’ He took the bulky will from her, and flicked through its pages, absently brushing his fair hair from his forehead with his hand. Then he looked up at her and smiled. ‘This is a joke, right?’

  ‘No joke.’

  ‘You want someone to advise you, by this time tomorrow, on what he believes would be the outcome of a court hearing that could last months – years, even?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His face grew serious. ‘It can’t be done, Judy. Truly.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He waved a hand round his office, at the law books in their glass cases. ‘Whoever did it would need to work through practically all of them before he could begin to give you a reasoned opinion.’

  ‘Well, of course, that would be impossible,’ Judy said. ‘But you see court cases all the time that are grinding on forever, and everyone knows what the result’s going to be. All I want your expert to do is second-guess the judge. Give it his best shot.’

  ‘How, without going through it in detail?’

  ‘We don’t want a barrister’s opinion, really,’ she said. ‘We want to know what Josh Esterbrook’s opinion would have been, given that he had a long time to study it. We just think a barrister will be able to home in on the bits that matter more quickly than any of us can. Would Josh Esterbrook believe he stood a good enough chance to murder for it? That’s all we need to know.’

  The twinkle was back in his eye. ‘In twenty-four hours,’ he said. ‘Even your suspect had three years to think about it.’ He looked at the will again, then set it down, and looked up at her. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll give it to a friend of mine who will give it her best shot, I promise, because she’ll enjoy the challenge. I happen to know she’s got the evening free, which, since you are a detective, you will readily realize means that now, so have I. Perhaps I can turn that to advantage.’

  Judy smiled.

  ‘Dinner?’ He paused, shook his head. ‘A couple of glasses of Bolly in a wine-bar?’ He rested his chin on his hand. ‘A cappuccino i
n a coffee house? A mug of tea at a mobile café?’ He looked at her enquiringly, shaking his head, and sighed. ‘Then I might not be able to persuade Heather to do it after all,’ he said. ‘My powers of persuasion seem to be on the wane.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll manage,’ said Judy. ‘And I doubt that she would think much of you swanning off to glamorous mobile cafés with other women while she was working, anyway, so I’m saving you from yourself.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She turned to go. She got as far as opening the door.

  ‘Oh, and Judy?’

  She turned, eyebrows raised.

  ‘When’s it due?’

  She went slightly pink. ‘You—’

  ‘Now, now. Language is not permitted in chambers. I might have pretended not to notice if you’d been nicer to me.’ He smiled. ‘Congratulations. Are you finally going to marry the poor man?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘You should.’ He grinned. ‘I know, I know,’ he said, lifting his hands. ‘When you want my opinion, you’ll ask for it.’

  SCENE XX – BARTONSHIRE.

  Wednesday, October 1st, 11.00 a.m.

  On the Road from Barton to Stansfield.

  Judy drove back, rather glad – perhaps for the first time – that she was pregnant, and therefore not exactly fling material, because attractive though she found James Harper, she loved Lloyd and had loved him for twenty years, and had no desire to rock any boats. She was going to have his baby because of that love, and would, in all probability, jump off a cliff for him if for some reason he needed her to, but she had fought shy of marriage. The baby had changed things, and her new job meant that their relationship could be put on an official footing at last. Marriage was on the agenda, as Hotshot had pointed out. That scared her a little. Her new job scared her. The baby scared her.

  So she put all of that to the back of her mind, as she pulled up at the traffic-lights that greeted cars coming into Stansfield from Barton, put there to help the IMG traffic keep moving at the shift changes, and unnecessary at all other times. Since she was here, she thought, she might as well see if Sandie Esterbrook was at work; she wanted to talk to her about something that she might not feel like discussing in front of her husband.