Plots and Errors

by Jill McGown

  Interview Room One.

  Sandie was listening to the caution for the third time, smiling a little. She had said it was dangerous. She had said it was crazy. But then, as Josh had pointed out, she liked dangerous and crazy.

  That night at Little Elmley, after her exhaustive and exhausting weekend diving course, he had asked her two questions. One, if she would be prepared to kill Billy Rampton if it helped him get what was due to him: the entire Esterbrook fortune. He was entitled to it, and he needed help to get it. Her help. And two, if she would marry him.

  She had said yes. Of course she had. She had been sent to help him, and killing Billy Rampton was a positive lure. And she had needed no incentive to marry Josh.

  ‘Tell me about the set-up with you and Paul Esterbrook,’ said Inspector Hill. ‘The truth, this time, if that’s possible.’

  Oh, the truth was possible. ‘Paul liked variety,’ Sandie said. ‘Sometimes he wanted Billy, sometimes me, sometimes both of us. Sometimes he just wanted to watch Billy and me.’ She smiled at the inspector. ‘It was my job,’ she said. ‘I found Billy loathsome and I didn’t like Paul, but it’s what I was paid to do, and I did it. I didn’t mind what he wanted me to do, which is why he poached me away from Brendan, gave me that job. It was much safer than using different girls.’

  Then he had used her to humiliate his wife, slapped her for coming on to Josh. That had been a very big mistake. But a much bigger one had been introducing her to Josh in the first place, because she and Josh together were unstoppable.

  ‘Billy wasn’t at the cottage on the Bank Holiday weekend, was he?’

  ‘No,’ said Sandie. ‘Paul sent him home after they had been interrupted. But I had to say he was there when Chief Inspector Lloyd asked me, because Josh doesn’t know that my contract with Paul was sexual – he really believes I was just a decoy. Is he going to have to find out?’ she asked, anxiously. Inspector Hill knew, of course, that she was lying, but that didn’t matter.

  ‘Don’t waste your talent, Sandie,’ she said. ‘Save it for the jury.’

  Sandie smiled, and stopped wasting her talent. Her answer was on the tape; that was what mattered. The real reason for that lie was Josh’s slip in saying he had rung the cottage; Josh had known she was there alone with Paul, and she had worked out that if they did get rumbled, as they had been, it would have been obvious that Josh knew exactly what was what between her and Paul unless she said that Billy was there. And what Josh did or didn’t know was going to be very important, as the inspector would find out.

  Inspector Hill turned a page in her notebook. ‘But Saturday really was a threesome?’

  Paul had thought it was going to be, thought Sandie. He had wanted to make up for his month with Elizabeth in style. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He told Billy to wait for us at the cottage.’

  And Josh had told him to watch for Paul’s car, send the fax and then run to the cottage, and hide in the treehouse. That way Henderson’s men wouldn’t see him, and the police would think that Paul had never had anything to do with Billy.

  It had very nearly worked. Paul had made things a little tricky, taking away her cigarettes and lighter like that; he had always been going to end up with her lighter, but he had actually taken it from her, and that had pinpointed it as hers, with Henderson’s men photographing everything. The police were never meant to know that it was hers; it was just a throwaway lighter – it could have been anyone’s. Josh had removed the big box of matches that Angela kept at the cottage; the lighter in Paul’s pocket, something he would not have carried in the normal way, had been going to be a clue to the fact that he had been set up, but that hadn’t worked quite as planned.

  ‘Are you going to come up with another perfectly rational explanation for all the lies you’ve told? Have you thought of some excellent reason for pretending it was Josh who was in the hotel room with Billy that morning, other than that it gave him an alibi for when the tapes were switched?’

  ‘I never said it was Josh who was in the hotel room with Billy,’ said Sandie.

  The inspector looked a little nonplussed, as she flicked back a page or two, but she moved on. ‘And have you got a really clever story to explain away hiring Arthur Henderson’s agency to watch the cottage, other than to mislead us, and give you an alibi for when the call to Little Elmley was made?’

  ‘We were going to blackmail Paul,’ said Sandie. ‘I told you. But it didn’t work, because Henderson’s men never even saw Billy, and I was never in the cottage with Paul.’

  The inspector smiled. ‘And perhaps you’re going to convince me that shooting Billy Rampton between the eyes was some form of self-defence?’

  Oh, no, thought Sandie. It hadn’t been self-defence. She smiled again. Billy had laughed, when he’d seen her, with her black eye and her swollen jaw and her split lip. Laughed, as he pulled on his clothes, said it couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. Shooting Billy between the eyes hadn’t been self-defence; it had been sheer, naked aggression. It had been exquisitely enjoyable. And she had felt like God.

  Then she had closed the bedroom door, gone downstairs, emptied the already burned and crushed letter into the wastebin, left the A4 pad, packed the gun in her weekend bag, and left the cottage, closing the door, automatically locking it. When Paul had come back, she had told him that she had been unable to find her cigarettes and lighter. He had sworn at her, gone back in, found them, after a few minutes’ searching, where she had left them for him to find, and had come back out again. And Arthur Henderson’s operatives had taken photographs of it all. If the worst came to the worst, which it had, there would be reasonable doubt as to who had done what to Billy.

  ‘No rejoinder?’ said Inspector Hill. ‘So what are you going to say about that, Sandie?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to say anything. I’m going to let you prove I murdered Billy Rampton.’ She smiled again. ‘If you can.’

  SCENE IX – BARTONSHIRE.

  Friday, October 3rd, 4.00 p.m.

  Interview Room Two.

  Josh sat back and watched as Lloyd did what he now recognized as his thing. He would wander round the room, standing on tiptoe to look out of the window, reading anything he could lay his hands on, sometimes not apparently taking any notice at all of what was being said, while Sergeant Finch fired questions at Josh that he wasn’t answering, so it was all a bit of a waste of time.

  Three years ago, he had found those letters from Angela. The one in which she told his father about her visit to Little Elmley had been the last one; it had made him want to avenge his mother’s death, stop these people getting their hands on his father’s money. The one that had set him thinking about how that might be achieved had been the first.

  He had seen how it could be adapted to read as though it had been written to his half-brother rather than his father. Of course the original wouldn’t fool anyone, not even Paul; it was quite evidently thirty years old. But a tracing of it – a tracing of it on to a pad . . . that might work. And if the police found the ashes of a letter, and impressions on a pad, they might check out those impressions. With a little judicious pruning here and there, it could look as though Angela was threatening him with exposure, and that Paul had murdered his mother, and then committed suicide. Easy enough to get the police to check the pad out if they were too stupid or too lazy or just too busy to think of it themselves.

  But that was jettisoned because it wasn’t good enough – at best, he would only get Little Elmley if Paul had murdered his mother. He wanted something that would get him everything, and the only thing that would do that would be if Angela was already dead, and Elizabeth murdered Paul. At first, that had seemed impossible.

  A more complex plot had evolved when Billy had arrived on the scene, involving Billy’s demise, but there were lots of reasons why it wouldn’t work. Complex plots had a way of unravelling before the gaze of the police. They had a much harder time with murders which took place on the spur of the moment than they
did with plots and plans. They would see through a setup; they would be suspicious of this handily imprinted letter. They had all sorts of equipment these days; they might test the ashes. If he burned anything other than the real letter, then any writing on it could be proved to be a forgery. If he burned the real letter, they might be able to analyse the remains, find out that it was written a long time ago. It was too risky.

  And that was when his crazy idea had begun to evolve. Give them a set-up to unravel, but make it look like Elizabeth’s set-up. Elizabeth couldn’t frame her husband for the murder of his mother, because that way she would get nothing, but she could frame Josh for it, because that way she would get everything. But then, Josh had no motive for murder; his father had seen to that. So she would hardly do that. Unless . . .

  Josh had gone back, then, to his very first thought. Little Elmley might not be enough motive for him, but it would be enough to make a frame-up by Elizabeth believable. The problem was that he needed help to carry it out, and where could you get that sort of help? Billy was easy. All you had to do was pay him, and Billy would do anything. But if Billy’s own murder was part of it, that had to be carried out by a third person, and while three could keep a secret if two of them were dead, Josh couldn’t risk killing two accomplices. Billy had to be dispatched by someone in whom Josh had infinite trust, and no such person existed. So the crazy idea remained just that.

  Until Sandie. From the moment she had found his revolver, picked it up with that gleam in her eye, he had known she was the one who was going to help him. And she had done it right in front of Elizabeth, slotting into place the very first building block of his plan by letting Elizabeth see the gun. That was when he knew she had been sent; that was when the plan was completed. Not detailed, not worked out, not fine-tuned. He and Sandie had done that between them, and she had thought of all sorts of little touches.

  The phone-call was her idea; she had printed out the spurious solicitors’ letter on the computer at work. And she had thought of how to make Paul’s message sound truly anguished. He smiled as he thought of that. He had sat in Little Elmley and listened to Paul’s agonized voice, his cursing and swearing, and he couldn’t believe it when Paul actually mentioned his inheritance. Though that had turned out to be almost as much of a drawback as a blessing.

  Then he had removed the tape with a pair of tweezers, popped it in a polythene bag, wound on a brand-new tape a few inches, and left it on the machine. When Elizabeth had arrived, its light would have been blinking, a message apparently recorded on the tape, but one that she would have been unable to play. That evening, he had rewound the tape, got Angela to record a message, got Sandie to test it, and that was that. He had the incriminating tape, complete with Elizabeth’s fingerprints. The lack of his own – which he would have pointed out to the police, if he had had to – would make it seem that she must have removed the tape.

  For a while, he and Sandie had thought that the Copes were blackmailing Paul, and would send them nothing. But their report had duly arrived, and Josh had nearly had kittens when he found out that Paul was still being blackmailed – especially when he said he was dealing with it. He had had visions of them both turning up to murder the Copes.

  ‘All right, Mr Esterbrook,’ Lloyd said, coming over and sitting on the edge of the table. ‘Since you don’t want to talk to us, I’ll talk to you. I’ll tell you, shall I, how you carried out these murders? And you can stop me if I go wrong anywhere.’

  Josh sat back, relaxed and smiling.

  ‘First of all, you murdered the Copes.’

  Correct. And, of course, if the Copes died the night before Angela did, the police would want to know what work they had done for her, and they would find the report in her not-for-publication drawer of the bureau, where Josh had left it after he shot her, minus the visual evidence. Elizabeth’s conviction that it was Josh who was gay would do the rest.

  Lloyd had worked out exactly how he’d murdered the Copes; he had even sent someone to IMG, looking for paperwork on a cylinder of carbon monoxide, and had found a chit, written by Sandie and signed by Paul, for just such an item, needed for demonstration purposes at some fictitious conference. Of course, that wouldn’t do him any good, because he had no proof at all of the use to which it had been put, or whether the chit had been initiated by Sandie or Paul. But it had been good work, Josh had to give him that.

  The plan had been that Sandie and Paul would go to Penhallin in separate cars; she would arrive at the cottage first, and Billy would watch for Paul’s car entering Penhallin, then bomb off to the library on his bike, send the fax, then run along the shore to be in position for Paul to let him into the cottage; Sandie would detain Paul long enough to let him get there, in the way that Paul could always be detained. Then she would go out for a cigarette, Paul would go to the back door to let Billy in, and Billy would go straight upstairs before Paul saw the fax, and would have time to press last number redial, which was all he had to do to register a call to Angela’s number.

  That had worked too, despite Paul’s insistence that they use his car, and the many problems poor Sandie had had on her way to Penhallin. In some ways, she had told Josh, the beating had helped; she had simply refused to leave the car, which had given Billy the vital minutes he needed to get there.

  ‘Sandie waited outside, having a cigarette,’ said Lloyd. ‘Paul went inside, let Billy in, and while Billy was upstairs phoning Little Elmley, Paul was downstairs finding the fax, which told him exactly what to do. He’d be in too much of a panic to notice where the fax had come from. And he’d always done what you’d told him; you’d always covered for him, got him out of trouble before. What he didn’t know was that you very often created the trouble in the first place, just like this time. You sent him off to the boat, and Sandie went in and killed Billy.’

  Billy’s body had come as a real shock to Josh; he had realized for the first time what he had asked Sandie to do for him, the trust that she had placed in him when she had agreed to do it. Up until then, he had just been deeply grateful that he could trust her; he hadn’t realized that trust had to operate both ways.

  Paul having given Sandie that beating had made things difficult, of course, and his suspicion that he was somehow being manipulated by Josh had even furnished him with a reason for taking Sandie with him despite his belief that he was not being followed; Lloyd had suggested that reason himself, accepted the whole thing, instead of querying it, as they had wanted him to.

  Lloyd carried on. ‘Then Sandie went back to Little Elmley with Paul, being dropped at the point where she could scramble down to the edge of the reservoir, and run to the club to join the night-dive, leaving the gun at the landing-stage on her way. She had been beaten up – you must have found it hard, Mr Esterbrook, to let her dive in that condition, but you had to, didn’t you?’

  Yes, that had hurt.

  ‘Not because Paul would give her another beating if she didn’t – you would never have allowed that to happen – but because it was during that dive that you were going to murder your stepmother.’

  Oh, very good. He’d worked that out, too. Josh didn’t know what had finally done for their plan, but something had, because Lloyd wasn’t groping in the dark. He knew what they had done.

  ‘You took Sandie to the submerged houses, and you left her there. These houses are very close to the Esterbrook house – you swam underwater to the landing-stage, got out, took off your scuba gear, and picked up the gun, complete with silencer. You walked up to the house, and you stood at the open door of the kitchen and shot your stepmother dead.’

  Lloyd suggested that the extra shots had been intended to mutilate her, but they hadn’t; he had just wanted to be certain she was dead. He wasn’t a natural with a gun, not like Sandie. Lloyd had even checked with Howard how much air had been in his aqualung when he had surfaced from the dive, but Josh didn’t overlook details like that. He’d only had the cylinder half-full when he went in, because he would only be in the wa
ter for a few minutes, and at nothing like Sandie’s depth.

  ‘Then you walked along the terrace, and went into Mrs Esterbrook’s study. You left the Copes’ report in the bureau, and you removed the tape from the answering machine, and replaced it with the one containing Paul’s message, the one with Elizabeth Esterbrook’s fingerprints on it. I imagine the one you removed is at the bottom of the reservoir, because then you went back to the landing-stage, left the gun where you had found it, put your diving gear back on, rejoined Sandie, and surfaced.’

  That tape had very nearly stopped the whole thing in its tracks. The police had heard it at the house, somehow, and Paul’s mention of his inheritance had meant that they had taken him away for questioning. Josh had wanted to dispose of Paul before he spoke to the police.

  ‘And your brother’s car was still at Little Elmley,’ said Lloyd. ‘All you had to do was go and get the gun once everyone had gone, and wait. Wait for him to return to his car to pick it up. And when he did, you shot him dead too.’

  Yes. And he had taken some pleasure in nearly blowing his head off. Paul had said, once he knew he was going to die, that Josh wouldn’t get away with it; he had been right, for once in his life. Josh wasn’t sure how they had been found out, but they had. He hadn’t known whether or not Elizabeth really did have someone following Paul; they had done everything on the assumption that she had. But no one had bargained for Paul having done a deal with the guy; that apparently arranged alibi had almost scuppered the whole thing, and made the police go with the obvious solution before the investigation had got to the stage where they could prompt them. Later on, that would have been easy enough, had it been necessary. Josh would have mentioned the bigamy, and the angry letter he had found from Angela to Paul . . .

  But they had got on to that themselves, and had duly started suspecting him. The problem was that they hadn’t quite got round to accusing him of being Billy’s boyfriend, because the scenario he and Sandie had intended presenting hadn’t materialized, thanks to Paul’s boorish behaviour, and they believed Sandie’s story about being a decoy. It had looked then as though it wasn’t going to go beyond suspicion into actual accusation; looked as though their plot had failed, and all the back-up plots in the world weren’t going to save it. Paul was going to be held responsible for all the murders.