A Capital Crime

by Laura Wilson

  ‘Oh, I know … of course … oh, dear … I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘When did Mr Backhouse tell you not to come round?’

  ‘Because of my clothes, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. Was that before or after the sixth or seventh of November?’

  Shirley Morgan thought for a moment. It looked like quite a strain. ‘Before,’ she said, finally. ‘About a month, I think. I remember now … there’d been some trouble, you see. I’d stopped there for a few nights, and John – that’s Muriel’s husband – didn’t like it, because we were in the bed and he had to sleep in the kitchen. He didn’t like that at all.’

  I don’t blame him, thought Stratton. Half-deafening a bloke with that laugh and then turfing him out of his own bed …

  ‘Muriel wanted me to stay because John was going to work somewhere foreign. Something to do with aeroplanes, I think he said. It turned out to be one of his stories … The second night I was there they had a row. John hit Muriel, so she got hold of the bread-knife. He said he’d push her out of the window. I’ve heard him say things like that before to Muriel – “I’ll do you in,” that sort of thing … Well, it got very nasty. Mr Backhouse came up, and he told me to leave.’

  ‘You left with Davies, didn’t you?’

  ‘No, he came after me. He was always giving me the eye. That was after Mr Backhouse said those things about my clothes. He shut the door in my face and told me not to come back, and then a minute later John came out and suggested we go somewhere together. Well …’ She gave Stratton a meaningful look. ‘I didn’t know what to do – I didn’t have anywhere to go, so we walked around … Miserable, it was. Cold. I said I was going to get lodgings, but I didn’t want him coming with me. He was Muriel’s husband,’ she added, as if this might not have occurred to Stratton. ‘John said to pretend we were married, but I said what if we were found out, so then we had a row about it and he got nasty again …’

  For Christ’s sake, thought Stratton, wondering if – given the trouble she was having with a sequence of fairly drastic and important events – it would actually have registered if Davies had beaten the living daylights out of her. ‘What happened then?’ he asked.

  ‘Like I said, we walked around and sat on benches. I found some lodgings. That was the next day … I suppose he must have gone home, because I didn’t see him again. I went to see Muriel because she’s my friend, and she was feeling poorly, with the baby coming.’

  ‘You knew she was pregnant.’

  ‘Yes.’ Shirley’s dull eyes registered surprise. ‘She told me.’

  ‘Did she tell you she was trying to get rid of the baby?’

  ‘Get rid of it?’ Surprise was replaced by incomprehension. ‘Why would she tell me that?’

  Good question, thought Stratton. You’d be a fat lot of use. Poor Muriel, surrounded by idiots. ‘What happened,’ he asked, ‘when you went back to see her?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t see her, did I? I knocked on the door, but there was no answer. I thought she must be in there, so I said if she didn’t want to see me, she’d only got to say so.’

  ‘Why did you think she was in there?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just thought she would be, I suppose. I tried the kitchen door, but it wouldn’t open.’

  ‘Did you hear anything?’

  Shirley shook her head. ‘No. I just had a feeling she was, because when I tried the door, it wasn’t as if it was locked—’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  ‘Yes, because it gave a bit. I thought that was because she was pushing against it to stop me opening it.’

  ‘Leaning on the other side, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. That’s when I said if she didn’t want to talk to me, she should just say, and I’d go. I was quite upset about it, because we were friends.’

  Except that you’d just gone off with her husband, thought Stratton. ‘Did you see anyone in the house?’

  Shirley shook her head, then said, ‘No, but I think Mr Backhouse was there, because I heard something when I went downstairs.’

  ‘Why Mr Backhouse in particular?’

  ‘Because it was a very quiet noise. I couldn’t really tell where it was coming from. I suppose it could have been Muriel, if she was there, but I thought it was him because he’s always creeping about in those plimsolls of his.’

  ‘Frankly,’ said Stratton, when Shirley Morgan had been shown out by PC Canning, ‘that young woman struck me as pretty half-witted, so I think we’d better take Backhouse’s word for it that she visited on the Monday and not the Tuesday. Of course, it could have been her that Walker saw, but Muriel was still alive then, and she could have popped out for something, couldn’t she? And Backhouse saw her on the seventh as well, so that seems more likely.’

  PC Canning appeared at the door. ‘DI Grove is talking to Mr Benfleet now, sir, and Mr Lorrimer’s here. Shall I bring him in?’

  Lorrimer, a small man who looked as if he’d been kept under the stairs for a number of years, wore a flat grey cap that gave him the appearance of a mushroom and had a palm so damp you could have grown mustard-and-cress on it without much difficulty. ‘Davies come into my shop on Friday the tenth. Said he wanted to sell his furniture because he’d got a job abroad, so I said I’d come and have a look later and give him a price for it. I offered him forty pounds for the lot, and I sent my boy round Monday to collect it and give him the money.’

  ‘When you went to look at the furniture, did you see any wood on the staircase? Floorboards?’

  ‘Yes, there was something. A few boards, I think. In a pile. Wasn’t much room to get past. I remember thinking my boy’d have a bit of a job if they weren’t moved.’

  ‘And how did Davies seem to you?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know the bloke, so that’s a bit difficult. He seemed like he was in a bit of a hurry, but he’d told me he’d got this work abroad so I thought he wanted things sorting out, you know … He wanted me to take all the stuff except the baby’s things. Said the bloke downstairs was keeping them for him until he’d fixed up a place for them to live.’

  ‘Did you see the baby?’

  Lorrimer shook his head. ‘Didn’t see no-one except him.’

  ‘More lies,’ said Stratton, after Lorrimer had gone. ‘That tale about working abroad.’

  ‘And about the money, sir,’ said Ballard. ‘He told Backhouse he’d got sixty pounds for the furniture.’

  ‘Yes, I remember that … It’s odd that he didn’t include the baby’s things. I mean, he sold his wife’s wedding ring, didn’t he? He doesn’t strike me as the type to see the consequences of his actions.’

  ‘You mean looking suspicious, sir?’

  ‘Yes. Mind you, I suppose he had to have something to tell Backhouse, and asking him to keep the baby’s things would have put him off the scent, at least.’

  ‘That must be it, sir. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Pity about the wood on the stairs.’

  ‘Yes … he said a few boards – perhaps some of them had already been put in the washhouse.’

  ‘Not a long passage though, is it, sir? I mean, you’d only need a few.’

  DI Grove’s pipe-bowl appeared round the door, followed, in short order, by the rest of him. ‘Here you are,’ he said, proffering a piece of paper. ‘Benfleet’s statement. Davies sold the furniture on before it was paid for. Said they were behind on payments – forty-eight pounds, he owes – and Benfleet’s had been dunning the mother for the money.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Stratton. ‘She said something of the sort to us.’

  Grove grunted. ‘I saw Murchison, as well, from the van company, and one of the drivers who was a pal of his. Murchison said Davies was always asking for advances on his wages, and when he wouldn’t give him any more Davies told him to stuff the job because he had a better one lined up. That was on Thursday the ninth of November. Murchison paid him off, and that was that. Said he wasn’t sorry to see him go because he’d been mucking things up – he
’d had people complaining the orders weren’t delivered. The other bloke – McAllister, his name is – said that Davies was always complaining about his wife spending too much money and he’d told him that he wished he’d never married her.’

  Ballard, who’d been scanning through Backhouse’s statement, looked up and said, ‘That all fits, sir.’

  ‘That’s a relief,’ said Stratton. ‘Now I suppose I’d better go and report all this to DCI Lamb.’

  Grove grimaced. ‘Best of British luck,’ he murmured, as Stratton left the office.

  ‘I thought I told you,’ said DCI Lamb, stabbing his forefinger on his desk for emphasis, ‘to make sure it was watertight.’

  ‘Yes, sir. But, as I’ve explained, there’s a discrepancy between when Davies says the bodies were put in the washhouse and when the workmen say the floorboards were put there. If they weren’t stacked in front of the bodies, it would have been obvious that something was there, even if it just looked like a bundle of stuff wrapped in a tablecloth. That washhouse is tiny, sir, and those workmen were in and out all the time for their tools. We can’t just ignore it, sir.’

  ‘You’re sure about this, are you?’

  ‘Yes, sir. All three statements – Kendall, Walker and Carpenter. Walker swept out the washhouse on the morning of Wednesday the eighth, when, according to Davies, Muriel’s body was in there, and he says he saw nothing at all. And Carpenter says he left the pulled-up boards from the hall on the stairs on the Thursday and Friday, and only put them into the washhouse on the Monday—’

  ‘Get them back in here, Stratton. I’ll see them myself. Not Carpenter, just the foreman and the plasterer – they’ll do.’

  ‘But Carpenter’s the one who moved the—’

  ‘Stratton!’ This time, it wasn’t a forefinger but a fist that pounded Lamb’s desk. Realising that the offer of any more elaboration would be met with an apoplectic response, Stratton decided that his best bet was to say as little as possible and let his superior get it out of his system.

  ‘Look,’ said Lamb, making an obvious effort to restrain himself and adopt a reasonable tone. ‘Your man’s confessed, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well then. There’s no point in overcomplicating matters. What we need to do – what you should be doing – is make sure that there aren’t any weak links in the chain of evidence.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And – as I believe I’ve already reminded you – Mr Backhouse was a Special Constable. You couldn’t have a better witness if you’d invented him, man. His word’s going to weigh more than some dullard of a workman – and you’ve just told me that even the foreman admits that what’s on the time sheets is poppycock.’

  ‘He didn’t quite say that, sir.’

  ‘As near as dammit! For God’s sake, man, stop wasting my time! Just get out of here and fetch those witnesses. You’ll be present, but I don’t want you sticking your oar in unless I tell you. And I’ll need all the statements you’ve taken on my desk as soon as you can.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Having delivered the statements, Stratton sat down at his own desk and closed his eyes. Feeling Jenny’s presence so strongly that she seemed almost to be physically there beside him, he kept his eyes shut so as not to dispel the illusion. ‘Stay with me for a moment, love,’ he murmured. ‘It’s going to be a very long day.’

  Despite his resentment at Lamb’s mental armour-plating against any new, unfamiliar idea, Stratton knew that his superior was right. It wasn’t going to be anyone else: in cases of domestic murder, spouses or lovers were, invariably, responsible. Besides which, there were no other suspects, just a problem with consistency. Lamb’s words about Backhouse – You couldn’t have a better witness if you’d invented him – echoed in his mind. He thought of Shirley Morgan’s shudder of disgust when she’d talked about Backhouse padding around in his plimsolls and giving her the willies. Half-witted she might be but Stratton, remembering the first time he’d met Backhouse – the way the man had sidled up behind him, the soft cough, the quiet precision of the speech, the blinking eyes behind the thick glasses, the general creepiness – knew exactly how she felt. Perhaps they ought to look into Mr Backhouse. After all, if something seemed too good to be true, then it probably was. He’d ask Ballard to check Backhouse’s background. It was pretty unlikely, Stratton thought, that he would turn up anything, but it was best to be on the safe side, especially with Lamb on the warpath.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  At half past seven the next morning, Stratton and Ballard stood side by side in the Gents’ at West End Central, staring bleary-eyed into the mirror and wearily scraping razors across their chins. By the end of Lamb’s interviews, first with Kendall, and then with Walker, Stratton had been almost as desperate to get out of the room as the witnesses themselves. For a total of five hours, Lamb had first made the workmen wait, then alternately threatened and cajoled, thumping the table and shoving mortuary photographs of Muriel and the baby under their noses, until, in the end, he’d got what he wanted. Although Stratton had witnessed Lamb in action often enough – and he was bloody good, you had to give him that – and he had used similar methods himself on numerous occasions, he’d felt increasingly uneasy, despite the fact that both the Backhouses had, independently of each other, given statements that the wood had been stacked in the washhouse during the week. What really bothered him was that he couldn’t put his finger on quite why he felt so uneasy.

  Lamb had backtracked, gone in circles, insisted and generally muddied the waters until the workmen began to question their recollections of events. Stratton had seen the uncertainty in their eyes – reality, as they saw it, assuming different shapes until, finally, it became unrecognisable. Their statements now suggested that there may have been planks of wood and dead bodies in the washhouse but they’d somehow failed to notice them; even, in the case of Walker, when sweeping the place – not, of course, that workmen were ever very good at cleaning up after themselves …

  With Carpenter out of the picture altogether, the timings were certainly looking more solid, but nevertheless … And as for Lamb telling Walker that they had ten witnesses who’d seen planks in the washhouse during the week … ‘Talk about entering the realms of fantasy,’ he muttered.

  ‘We seem to have been there from the beginning, sir,’ said Ballard, rubbing his chin. ‘What with Davies’s first statements from Wales, I mean.’

  ‘That’s true. Mind you, Davies wouldn’t recognise the truth if it bashed him on the nose. If it wasn’t for the Backhouses saying they heard bumps in the night of the seventh, I’d think he’d got the dates wrong.’

  ‘He’s been consistent about the seventh throughout, though, sir – it’s practically the only thing that’s been the same in all the statements: that she died sometime on that day.’

  ‘Well, the business with the bumps couldn’t have just been a case of Edna Backhouse backing up what her husband said, because she told Grove about it when she made her statement. She said the wood was in the washhouse before the workmen did, too, and of course she was up and about the place – Backhouse said he’d spent a lot of time in bed for his back, remember? Mind you, it’s still a bit of a mess, what with the muddle over days and the baby being left alone all that time and not crying … not to mention the dog. I don’t know what to think.’

  Ballard looked surprised. ‘We have got a case, sir.’

  ‘Oh, yes …’ Stratton rolled his eyes. ‘We’ve got one of those all right.’

  The sergeant’s surprise turned to incredulity. ‘Do you mean, sir, that you think Davies isn’t guilty?’

  ‘Course he is,’ said Stratton. ‘I just wish it were a bit clearer, that’s all. Have you got any hot water?’

  Ballard shook his head. ‘Tepid, sir.’

  ‘So’s this.’ Stratton leant on the edge of the basin. He did feel bloody tired, but it wasn’t just that. The inconsistencies nagged at him, as did the thought that Davies m
ight well hang as a result of partial evidence. The other capital cases he’d worked on had been, on the face of it, a lot more complicated than this one, but there was just something … ‘You know,’ he said, ‘Monica brought back a book from the library a few months ago. Abstract paintings – Cubism and what-have-you. All the pictures had names telling you what they were of – “Still life with a newspaper” or something – and I could see that was what they were supposed to be, but not how they fitted together, or why anyone would want to paint them like that in the first place. This whole business is a bit like that. Mind you, I don’t know anything about art and paintings, and they were in black and white …’ And, he thought, no-one got hanged at the end of it.

  As he’d said this, Stratton had been staring at the porcelain tiles, but, looking up, he saw the worried expression on the sergeant’s face. Hardly surprising, thought Stratton, with him talking a lot of bollocks like that. ‘Sorry, Ballard. You must think I’m going off my head, too.’

  ‘No, sir, but are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘Fine. I’m tired, that’s what it is. Those bloody camp beds … You’d get a better night’s sleep on a park bench.’ He unplugged the basin. Watching the scummy grey water gurgle away, he thought, I must be even more tired than I feel.

  His job was to uphold the law, not to question it. That was the reason – well, one of them, anyway – that he’d joined the police force in the first place. It’s the best justice system there is, he told himself, and then reflected that he didn’t actually know that because, without knowledge of other places, he wasn’t in a position to make comparisons. He adjusted the towel on its roller and turned back to Ballard, who was still regarding him with some concern. ‘Do you think,’ he asked, ‘that British justice is the best there is?’

  Ballard raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s a pretty big question, sir. I don’t really know. I don’t suppose any system in the world is perfect – ours isn’t – but it’s reckoned to be the best by people who know about these things.’

  ‘Wiser heads than ours, you mean.’