by Jill McGown
‘Er . . . no thanks,’ said Lloyd. ‘I’m actually here to talk to Josh Esterbrook. DCI Lloyd, Stansfield CID.’ He showed Howard his card.
‘Oh, right!’ Howard laughed. ‘Sorry. He’s with a pupil in the pool. Just go through.’
‘I think Josh’s wife mentioned that you were involved in this night-dive on Saturday?’ said Lloyd.
‘Josh’s wife?’ he said.
‘Sandie.’
Howard looked startled. ‘Are they married now?’ he said. ‘I had no idea. You’d think he’d have said. They’re a funny lot, the Esterbrooks. Paul’s wife rang here the night before that dive, wanting to know if Sandie really was doing it. You’d think she’d just have asked Josh, since he was taking it.’
You would, thought Lloyd. But not if you were trying to catch his brother out, because Josh watched out for his brother.
‘Anyway, she shouldn’t have done it, but she insisted.’
‘I had no idea the reservoir was so close to the Esterbrook house,’ said Lloyd, absently picking up a booklet on sub aqua, leafing through it.
‘Oh, yes. It used to be the manor house in Little Elmley, generations ago. The only reason it didn’t get flooded with the rest of the village was because it was built at the top of the incline – it was empty for years before old man Esterbrook bought it. Anyway, Sandie thought it would be romantic to see the village at night. Josh and I told her she’d see a lot more in daylight, but you know women.’
Lloyd knew women. ‘How many people were doing that particular dive? To the submerged houses?’
‘Just her and Josh. We give individual instruction, so it’s usually just two people at a time.’ He smiled again. ‘Have I not got you interested yet?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Lloyd.
‘Well, keep the booklet. Just in case.’
Lloyd would not only keep it, he would read it. It might give him some valuable information. ‘How long did their dive last?’
‘Half an hour or so. And that was half an hour too long for Sandie, if you ask me. Josh should have put his foot down.’
Lloyd smiled. ‘As you say,’ he said. ‘No accounting for women.’ He put the booklet in his pocket. ‘Thanks,’ he said, patting it. ‘I just go through here, do I?’
SCENE XXIV – BARTONSHIRE.
Wednesday, October 1st, 2.45 p.m.
The Diving Club Pool.
‘There you go,’ said Josh, as his pupil surfaced and blew water from his snorkel. ‘You keep this up, and you won’t believe the sort of things you’ll see when you start swimming in warm waters.’
‘For twenty seconds at a time,’ said the man, with a grin.
‘You’ll get better at that, too. The more you do it, the longer you’ll be able to stay under, the deeper you’ll be able to go.’
‘How long can you manage?’
Josh remembered Sandie saying that if she hadn’t been able to see him swimming, she would have thought he had drowned. That had probably been his best ever; he had wanted so much to impress her. ‘I think my record’s about three minutes,’ he said. ‘But one and a half, two minutes would be average.’
‘You’re joking!’
‘Mr Esterbrook?’
Josh turned to see Chief Inspector Lloyd. ‘Come for a lesson, have you?’ he asked.
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Lloyd. ‘I’d just like to ask you a few questions.’
Josh left his pupil, and mentally braced himself.
‘You told my sergeant that on the Bank Holiday weekend, when you holed the boat, you came back to Little Elmley, and you were at the house on Sunday morning, when you got the call from your mother about this letter, is that right?’
‘Yes,’ said Josh. He suspected that Lloyd didn’t believe him, but that didn’t bother him. He had spent his life being disbelieved. Sometimes he was even telling the truth.
‘Did anyone see you at Little Elmley on Sunday morning?’
‘I doubt it. I got back very late on Saturday night, and as you know, we have no staff there at weekends.’ Josh smiled. ‘Your sergeant wants to know if anyone can verify that I was there that morning, now you want witnesses. What’s this all about?’
Lloyd smiled back. ‘We’re exploring every avenue, as I told your sister-in-law.’
Josh watched him as he left, walking down towards the diving platform. He’d walked here, had he? Perhaps he really was exploring every avenue. But would any of these avenues lead him anywhere? That was the question.
SCENE XXVII – BARTONSHIRE.
The following day, Thursday, October 2nd, 9.10 a.m.
Stansfield Police Station.
Lloyd could hear Freddie grinning as soon as he mentioned the Copes. ‘What theory did you have this time, Lloyd?’ he asked.
‘It occurred to me that my chief suspect is an expert diver. He can hold his breath for two minutes on average. Does that help? Would they be woozy enough not to be able to help themselves after two minutes? After all, they might not have reached the desperation level before the stuff impaired their judgement.’
Freddie laughed. ‘No, sorry, Lloyd,’ he said. ‘Not with that low a concentration of carbon monoxide. They’d practically have to be swigging it straight from the bottle for that to work.’
Oh, well, thought Lloyd. It was worth a try. ‘Thanks, Freddie,’ he said, with a sigh. ‘I think that might just be my last throw of the—’ His eyes widened. ‘Bottle,’ he said.
Bottle. He suddenly saw, in his mind’s eye, the display, the one Judy had told him about, in the middle of IMG’s opulent entrance hall, spoiling its décor. Bottled gases just aren’t sexy, she’d said. Bottled gases. He sat back, and nodded slowly. Of course, of course. Swigging it straight from the bottle was precisely what they had done.
‘Your last throw of the bottle? Lloyd? Are you there? You haven’t passed out on me, have you?’
‘No,’ said Lloyd. ‘I haven’t. But how long would the Copes have taken to pass out if we were talking about pure carbon monoxide?’
‘Seconds,’ said Freddie, his voice losing the bantering tone and growing interested. ‘Less than a minute. They’d have got a fatal dose before they knew what had hit them. A couple of breaths might be all it would take.’
‘How does this sound, Freddie? A man with a gun, and a small cylinder of pure carbon monoxide, readily available from the family emporium. Odourless, colourless, tasteless and portable. He’s in the car with them, but he’s holding his breath, and they’re not. They simply don’t know what’s happening – they think they’re being robbed or something, until it’s too late. Then, as soon as they go under, he gets out, fixes up the vacuum-cleaner hose, and they die of inhaling exhaust fumes.’
There was a silence. ‘If it was murder, then it sounds as though you’ve cracked how it was done, but you’re not much better off,’ he said. ‘Yes, it could have been done like that, but your man covered his tracks too well for you to prove it. And it’s still a toss-up, isn’t it? Between Paul and Josh Esterbrook?’
Yes. It was still a toss-up. And proving it, even if he traced the carbon monoxide back to IMG, would be virtually impossible. He would try, though. And somehow it still made Lloyd feel better, because now all his little puzzles about the Copes had been answered. They knew how Kathy had come by her new office equipment, knew almost certainly how she had had access to sophisticated surveillance devices, and they knew why Mrs Esterbrook had gone to her rather than someone more reputable. And he had been right about why the small garage door had had to be left unlocked, and why Kathy’s tins of beans had been put away in the wrong place, because the Copes had indeed been murdered, and now they knew how the murder had been achieved.
But they didn’t yet know why they had been murdered. Because she had been blackmailing Paul Esterbrook? Or because she could identify Josh Esterbrook as the man in the hotel room with Billy? The missing video-frame suggested the latter, but Case could obviously be right; Angela Esterbrook might simply have destroyed it once it
had served its purpose. Either way, the murderer had got the wrong man when he murdered Andy Cope, and if Kathy’s boyfriend could be found, they might find out who exactly it was that Kathy Cope saw when she walked in to Room 312. But their enquiries into who Kathy’s boyfriend was had so far proved fruitless.
He had no sooner hung up than the phone rang again, and he answered it to Lettie Markham.
‘I’m sending my report to you by courier, but the bottom line is that I believe that letter is genuine.’
Lloyd sighed. He had had hopes of that letter, but if Lettie thought it was genuine, then perhaps things really were just the way they seemed. Angela Esterbrook had written that letter, and had signed her death warrant.
‘It’s far from definitive, as I warned your sergeant it would be,’ she said. ‘And, of course, the subject’s arthritis meant that some differences were to be expected. That seems just to have resulted in a tendency to write more carefully, more the way she used to write as a girl – taking more time about it. There are some spacing queries, but I’m reasonably happy that it wasn’t written by anyone other than Angela Esterbrook, and that it was written to someone called Paul – I don’t think the name’s been interfered with.’
‘Ah, well,’ said Lloyd.
‘I’ve gone into quite a bit more detail on the report, but that’s the gist of it. A very much qualified thumbs-up, because without the time and without the original, I can’t give you any more than that.’
‘Thanks, Lettie,’ he said. ‘I owe you a very good meal in a very good restaurant, even if this isn’t the answer I wanted.’
It didn’t therefore surprise Lloyd when Judy came in to show him Hotshot’s friend Heather’s pronouncement on the will – transported to Stansfield police station through the good offices of a fellow barrister appearing at the magistrates’ court – that it was equally inconclusive.
It was Heather’s opinion, with a small ‘o’ because she wouldn’t dream of regarding it as a professional brief in view of the ridiculously short time she had had to study the problem, that in cases where a situation existed that had been unforeseen by the testator, the spirit of the wishes of the testator carried the day if that could be gleaned from those situations which had been foreseen.
In this case, the testator had foreseen the possibility of Angela Esterbrook predeceasing Paul Esterbrook in circumstances in which Paul Esterbrook had already disqualified himself from inheriting and Josh Esterbrook had not completed his period of qualification, and in that event, Josh was not to inherit anything; the entire Little Elmley estate was to be sold, and the proceeds invested in the Esterbrook Marine Research Fund. The fact that murder rather than divorce would be what disqualified Paul Esterbrook in the circumstance outlined could be regarded as incidental, and the testator’s wishes would prevail.
But, Heather went on – in true lawyer style – the original stipulation could be seen as constituting a specific deterrent to Josh Esterbrook were he thinking of removing his stepmother by foul means in order to hasten his inheritance, since the basis for all the restrictions and stipulations concerning Josh Esterbrook’s inheritance appeared to be his criminal conviction for manslaughter, and his father’s belief that he might become mentally unstable as his mother had before him. Therefore, since, in the circumstance outlined, he would be innocent of such a deed, a court might well decide in his favour.
The layman’s reading of it, which she understood was the point of view in which they were most interested, would have led Josh Esterbrook to the conclusion that in the event of his half-brother being deemed to have murdered his stepmother, he stood as good a chance of winning as of losing, and he wouldn’t be far wrong.
He put down the hastily written note, and shrugged. He had homed in on a suspect and had been trying to make the evidence fit his conclusion; it wasn’t going to do that, so he might as well accept it.
‘I’m pretty sure that Paul was seeing Billy,’ Judy said. ‘I believe what Sandie told me, and Paul’s prints were on the back door-handle – that does suggest that he let Billy in.’
Judy’s pretty sure was good enough for Lloyd. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I give in. Josh had only half a motive, which isn’t enough. Paul Esterbrook killed Billy, and his mother, and himself.’ He smiled. ‘And the Copes,’ he added, and told her how clever he had been.
His phone rang again, and he picked it up, half expecting it to be Case thanking God that he’d come to his senses at last.
‘It’s Morris here, re the Rampton/Esterbrook murders? DI Hill asked us to check whether the remains found in the wastepaper basket in the Esterbrook cottage was paper from the fax machine or the A4 pad on the desk, and the answer is that it came from neither.’
Par for the course, thought Lloyd. Inconclusive evidence was all they were ever going to get. ‘Thanks anyway,’ he said. ‘She must just have used the pad to lean on, I suppose.’
‘Well,’ said Morris. ‘She might have done. But she must have over-ordered her typing paper to one hell of an extent, because our analysis shows that the ashes are composed of materials that haven’t been in use in mass paper production since the 1960s. Also, there’s a very good chance, going on weight, that it was foolscap paper. I think you’re looking at a letter that’s near as dammit forty years old.’
‘I said it was written to her husband!’ was Judy’s instant and triumphant response when Lloyd told her.
He smiled. She didn’t do that, as a rule. He did, whenever he was proved right. But she had indeed said that. ‘But if it was written to Paul senior,’ he said, ‘why is she threatening him with the police? Where’s the copy?’ He picked things up from his untidy desk, looking under them, unearthing it. ‘Ah, here it is.’ He read it again, and frowned. ‘And what do you think she means about his having deceived her and everyone else, including his wife?’ He handed it to Judy. ‘And why is she telling him to ‘‘come home’’ if he was living with his first wife?’
Judy took the letter. ‘She seems to think he lives with her,’ she said, frowning. ‘He couldn’t have lived in two places at once.’ And then she nodded, smiled to herself. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘He did live in two places at once.’ She looked up. ‘The funny spaces. I knew there was something odd about them.’
‘What? You’re being a gundog, and I don’t know what you’re pointing at.’
‘Not the solution of the murders, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘If I’m right, it’s a very old crime indeed. It’s not against the law to have an illegitimate child, but it is to have an illegitimate wife.’
‘Bigamy?’
‘I think you’ll have to go even further back with Angela’s diaries to be certain, but that space? The one between ‘‘all about the’’ and ‘‘little boy’’? I think that sentence originally read ‘‘all about the wife and little boy you keep secret. And that other one, the one between ‘‘me’’ and ‘‘that’’ where she says ‘‘how could you take advantage of me like that?’’ I bet that was ‘‘me and Paul’’ or words to that effect.’ She sat back, and smiled at him. ‘I think Angela had just found out, and was threatening to blow the whistle.’
Of course, thought Lloyd, reading the letter again with that thought in mind, wondering how he could possibly not have worked it out already. But where did it leave them and their rather more serious and considerably more current crimes which now seemed as far from a solution as they had been to start with?
Well, for one thing, it proved that Paul Esterbrook had been set up, because Judy might have been right about the addressee, but Paul hadn’t made a ghastly mistake, as she had thought, because that letter hadn’t just been lying around. It had been indented on an A4 pad.
‘Someone traced it on to the pad,’ he said. ‘Someone went over it with a stylus or whatever, leaving out the words that didn’t quite fit Paul’s situation, and producing indentations which would indeed resemble Angela Esterbrook’s handwriting when she was younger.’
Judy nodded slowly. ‘And then they burned
the original,’ she said. ‘Paul didn’t read that letter at all.’ She frowned again. ‘We were meant to find the imprints, to think that was what had made him leave in such a hurry. But something made him leave – maybe he really did get a fax.’
‘Are we still checking that?’
‘Yes. They’ve moved on to public libraries now.’
‘We have to know if Josh had access to Angela’s letters,’ Lloyd said. ‘And if he had, I want him and his wife brought in. Elizabeth Esterbrook will know.’
He stared into the middle distance, trying to work out what exactly had been done to Paul Esterbrook, and why. The evidence, as Judy had pointed out, did suggest that Paul was indeed the one who had been seeing Billy, and now they knew that someone had used that relationship to frame him for Billy’s murder, and the murder of his own mother.
The only person who could benefit from that was Josh Esterbrook, however touch-and-go the likelihood of success, because Elizabeth would be infinitely worse off if her husband was deemed to have murdered his mother. His estate would be limited to that which he owned himself, and that was really very little, less than a man in his position would normally own. The Esterbrook Family Trust owned their house, IMG owned their cars. He had apparently killed himself, so quite possibly no insurance pay-out. And no huge inheritance, because it would have been gained by the murder of his mother.
‘I’ll get someone on to Angela’s early diaries,’ said Judy, frowning slightly. ‘Before I speak to Elizabeth Esterbrook. I want to be sure of my facts.’
‘The letter’s a fake,’ said Lloyd, slowly, ‘so the message on the answering machine was probably just what Paul said it was. An old message. And someone used it to frame him. That tape was planted for us to find after circumstances had been created to make it seem incriminating.’ But the tape itself was of no use to them; it didn’t even have glove prints on it, never mind Josh Esterbrook’s fingerprints, so they weren’t going to get him that way.
