False Accusations_Nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide...

by Cora Harrison

  Damn proper procedure, Flora said to herself. She couldn’t resist it.

  ‘Rosie,’ she said confidently. ‘What time is it now?’

  There was a long silence. Flora held her breath. Hopefully they had not managed to teach Rosie to read the clock during her years in the remedial stream of Westwood Comprehensive. She guessed not. The silence lengthened. Sergeant Dawkins broke his imaginary pencil. Mr Bradley leaned forward and Jim Prior looked up from his notebook.

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Rosie eventually.

  ‘Can’t you tell the time?’ Sergeant Dawkins asked the question with the first faint hint of impatience in his voice, pointing up at the clock on the wall.

  ‘Course I can.’ Rosie had managed to build up some defence layers during the years between twelve and nineteen. Nevertheless, the hint of a tear trembled in the corners of her large eyes.

  ‘Come on now, Rosie! Why won’t you tell me the time?’ pleaded Sergeant Dawkins, trying to sound like an indulgent father.

  ‘Cos I don’t want to. I’m fed up with questions and I’m not answering any more. I want to go to the toilet.’

  The classic response! One that she had practised assiduously in her early years in school; she knew that it would always be followed by immediate release from whatever form of mental effort that she was finding too much for her. Flora released the breath that she had been holding and looked across the desk. Sergeant Dawkins, she thought triumphantly, knew when he was beaten and he leaned over slightly to speak directly into the tape recorder.

  ‘End of interview, and the time is three fifteen and,’ he consulted his wrist watch, ‘twenty seconds.’

  Chapter 4

  ‘I don’t think that she did it.’ Flora thought that she would get the first word in quickly before anyone else spoke.

  ‘I agree,’ Mr Bradley backed her up instantly. ‘I don’t think the detail is right. She’s very vague.’

  ‘She didn’t say it to you, but she said it to us that her mother screamed,’ Flora continued speaking rapidly. ‘Now, the only chance of smothering a big, heavily-built, strong woman such as Mrs Trevor would have been if she were profoundly asleep at the time. I can’t see her screaming and then allowing Rosie to put a pillow over her mouth. Mrs Trevor was always in control. I’d say that neither of the girls, not even Jenny, ever really rebelled against her authority.’

  ‘Well, if she didn’t do it, why claim that she had done it?’ Sergeant Dawkins put the question in his most reasonable manner.

  ‘She wouldn’t be the first,’ said Mr Bradley. ‘It’s common among attention seekers, especially those of low intelligence.’

  ‘Hmm.’ The sergeant eyed him with an air of weary patience.

  ‘Has the post-mortem come through yet?’ Flora put in the question.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ He had a slight hint of annoyance in his voice. Post-mortems and such things were for the police, not for a woman who was there purely to speak for a youngster who needed assistance.

  ‘I’m just surprised that anyone managed to smother Mrs Trevor,’ continued Flora, ignoring the unfriendly tone. ‘She seemed to me to be such a strong woman.’ A memory came to Flora’s mind. She hesitated for a moment and then hardened her heart. ‘I remember her at a Jumble Sale that we held when I was head of Willowgrove School,’ she said, pretending to address the solicitor, but keeping an eye on the sergeant. ‘A child, a boy from the children’s home, in fact, stole something from a stall and she immediately grabbed his arms, held his two wrists with one hand and searched his pockets with the other. He was quite a strong boy, eleven years old and big for his age and she held him with no trouble at all.’

  Interesting that Rosie had not mentioned Darren Frost, who had played the part of Otter in the play, she thought, as surreptitiously she watched Sergeant Dawkins turn this over in his mind. He would probably remember the name if he heard it. Darren had, doubtless, been picked up by him for shop lifting, cannabis smoking, pick-pocketing and many other petty crimes. No doubt Mrs Trevor had looked down on him and forbade her daughter to even mention his name. Poor Darren. She had heard that he was only just returned from a spell at a Remand Home. He had been in and out of trouble with the police since he went to secondary school. ‘It would take a strong young man to smother her, I would have thought,’ she said aloud.

  ‘And the name of this boy?’ He had asked the question and Flora had to reply to it. Even still she had a moment’s compunction, a moment’s sympathy with Judas. There always, she thought, came a moment before betrayal, a moment when a different path could be chosen. Nevertheless, her first duty was to Rosie.

  ‘Darren Frost,’ she said aloud and forced herself to add, ‘He still lives at the Children’s Home in Willowgrove. It’s a London Overspill Place. They allow them to stay on until they are twenty-one. They have flats for the older ones.’ She saw Sergeant Dawkins make a quick note. Darren, Flora salved her conscience instantly, hopefully had an alibi for an early morning event in Dewhurst Lane. He might have been at the party on Willow Island, but surely that was well over by the time that the murder had taken place. Simon had slammed his bedroom door at about six in the morning and had slept heavily until she roused him at eleven. And like her Simon, she doubted whether Darren was an early riser. But any diversion was useful while she sought to clear Rosie’s name.

  ‘And you think he might still have borne a grudge against Mrs Trevor?’ asked the sergeant. ‘After all those years? It seems a small matter.’

  ‘Possibly,’ she said and forced herself to go on. ‘That wasn’t all, though. At the end of that year he stole some money, including a fifty-pound note, from the collection after a school play in 1983 and when he came out of the remand home — just a few weeks, there, I think, Mrs Trevor got up a petition against him going to the local secondary school with the other Willowgrove children. There was quite a lot of bad feeling about him in the village. He travelled in on the same school bus as her two daughters, of course, so I suppose she felt that justified her in hounding him.’

  ‘A fifty-pound note!’ exclaimed the solicitor. ‘Well, you had well-off parents at that village school, Mrs Morgan. Fifty pounds was a lot of money in 1983.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Flora. The sergeant still had his eye on the silent phone so she might as well chatter on. ‘These village schools, well, we had all sorts, children of farm labourers, council house dwellers, and, of course, in our case, one or two boys from a small local authority home for abused children from London, sons and daughters of the butcher, the baker, the offspring of the local doctor, the commuting engineer.’ The solicitor was nodding wisely, but the sergeant looked bored and so she finished her tale more quickly. ‘And the fifty-pound note came from a prosperous stockbroker. We had his son. The father was well-known at that time. Was even on the television one evening.

  He donated the fifty-pound note. When the collecting box was brought on stage at the end of performance, Mr Rice, whose son Benjamin had acted the part of Toad, came up on stage just as I was thanking all of the parents for their generosity and he said that he would top it up and he put the note on the top. He had been waving it in the air all the way up the middle aisle between the chairs in the school hall. Everyone, adults and children, could see it. I could hear the gasps. It was all very public.’

  ‘And I suppose you put it into your desk, locked the drawer and were astonished in the morning to find that the whole lot had been swiped,’ Sergeant Dawkins had a look of amusement on his face. Her little story had tickled him.

  ‘That’s true,’ admitted Flora. ‘I came in at half past seven next morning and found the lock on my desk had been broken. And of course the police immediately jumped to the conclusion that Darren Frost, from the children’s home, who had been found shop-lifting on a few occasions, was the culprit. One of the parents in the school was a policeman and he went straight there to the children’s home while the boys were having breakfast. Poor Darren. They went to his room while he was eating
his porridge.’

  ‘And found the lot.’ Sergeant Dawkins was getting bored. ‘Tucked under his pillow, I suppose.’

  ‘Not the note,’ Flora said regretfully. ‘Of course, if Darren Frost had been a hardened criminal I don’t suppose that he would have hidden any of the money inside his pillow, but he left the cash and the smaller notes there and found somewhere else for the fifty. It never turned up.’

  ‘But Mrs Trevor got up a petition to exclude him from the school where her daughters attended.’

  ‘It was more a matter of excluding him from the bus that took the Willowgrove children into the town,’ Flora pointed out. ‘And she succeeded, too. The local authority caved in, as they always do when it won’t cost them too much. They got the taxi driver, Ian Madden’s father, to drive him to and fro. He had looked utterly miserable, poor fellow, when I met him at Christmas that year. I tried to tell him that it was very posh to be arriving at school in a taxi, but he had got it into his head that only disabled children, “dummies” he said, were driven that way. And, of course, he missed all the fun that they had on that school bus.’

  That’s enough, thought Flora, feeling rather ashamed of herself, and wishing that she could have found some other suspect to divert the police from Rosie. The trouble was that she knew the young people of the village, that young adult group, so much better than the older ones. She had only stayed a few years in that little school. And not long in Brocklehurst either. With her newly-widowed circumstances, it had seemed imperative to earn as much money as possible and she had rapidly moved on and upwards in the educational hierarchy. ‘So, no news of the post-mortem, is there?’ she concluded.

  ‘No news of the post-mortem yet, as far as I know.’ Sergeant Dawkins lifted the phone, barked out the question and then shook his head as he replaced it.

  ‘But you think that the time of death was eight o’clock?’

  ‘How do you know that?’ He seemed astonished and Flora smiled.

  ‘I guessed it from the way you mentioned it,’ she said sweetly. ‘Rosie guessed too; she’s expert at reading faces.’

  ‘Hmm.’ A man of few words — though he would probably be fluent and well prepared in a courthouse. He eyed her with dislike. Flora found herself not caring. She wasn’t going to let him get away with anything. Her job was to protect Rosie. There was little chance now that he and she would be friends, or even colleagues working for the same aim. He wanted this case solved and tidied away. And Rosie, after all, had made a confession.

  After a minute he said, ‘The doctor thinks that it was sometime between six and eight. Couldn’t be sure. Eight seems more plausible. Apparently the taxi driver saw her alive at six in the morning. No sign of this Rosie, then. Just the younger daughter, Jenny. Off to Majorca, apparently. She caught the plane, all right, according to the taxi driver. He took her to Gatwick, said she got there in of plenty of time. And she was in Majorca when P.C. Prior phoned up her hotel.’ He turned an interrogative eye on Jim Prior who responded with a vivid flush.

  ‘Did the taxi driver actually see her?’ enquired Flora. She did want to ask the question but she also wanted to save poor Jim Prior from being asked why and how he knew which hotel Jenny was staying at. A bit of a bully that sergeant, she thought disapprovingly. And then when he leafed through his notes impatiently, she said, ‘But she was found in her nightdress, is that right?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sergeant Dawkins’ tone of voice implied that matter had been already covered. In another minute he would sigh heavily, again, but still she persisted.

  ‘So Mrs Trevor would have to have got up, dressed and then undressed again,’ said Flora firmly. ‘From what I know of the woman she was always perfectly turned out. I can’t imagine her coming to the door in her nightdress in front of a young man. So did Ian Madden, the taxi driver, actually see Mrs Trevor?’

  Sergeant Dawkins continued turning over pages and gave an impatient look at Jim Prior who was looking uncomfortable and unsure. Flora waited. Sergeant Dawkins, she thought, was not going to get away without answering her question.

  ‘Ah, here we are. P.C. Prior’s handwriting is not the easiest. Yes, the taxi driver saw her. He heard her respond when Miss Jenny Trevor ... what’s this word, Prior?’

  ‘Farewell, sir,’ said poor Jim, blushing heavily.

  ‘Called a farewell,’ read the sergeant woodenly.

  ‘Which could mean that he just heard her, or thought that he heard her.’ Flora made the statement in an authoritative fashion and looked across at the solicitor.

  He did not fail her. ‘Widens the window of opportunity, doesn’t it?’ he said. ‘I seem to remember when my daughter was still at home, that she would shout from the stairs, “Bye, Dad”, if she was going off early; or “Night, Dad” if she came back late. I never remember her waiting for an answer. Probably thought it would be something annoying like: “When will you be back?” or “Why are you so late?”’ He smiled in besotted-father style. Valuable contribution, she thought, and nodded approval at him.

  ‘So Jenny could have shouted out: “Bye, Mum”, and that was what Ian Madden heard. He wouldn’t know whether she was up or not. He might have assumed that she was,’ she added. ‘He’s an only child and his mother was always very protective of him. She would be up to get his breakfast no matter what hour he was leaving the house. But Mrs Trevor was quite tough. She’d be much more likely to think that Jenny could get her own breakfast, that’s if she had wanted it after the party.’

  ‘So the only other person in the house then, after her sister left, was Miss Rosie Trevor,’ said the Sergeant.

  It all did look very suspicious from the police point of view. Flora had to admit that.

  ‘But why would she have done it?’ wondered Mr Bradley. ‘Why kill her mother?’

  The sergeant shrugged. ‘Very common,’ he said in a bored voice. ‘These youngsters often have a lot of bottled-up hate for the parent — this episode with the perfume would probably have been enough to trigger off the outburst. She steals the mother’s best perfume; she admitted to that; steals the perfume, probably sprays it all over herself. These things are expensive,’ he added sourly.

  Flora wondered whether he had a wife at home who demanded a bottle of Chanel for every wedding anniversary, but endeavoured to suppress the thought. No point in antagonising the man any further. He wore an irritated and impatient expression, so she fixed a look of attentiveness on her face and scribbled a note to show that she was paying attention.

  ‘The mother wakes up,’ he continued, sounding bored with the whole business, ‘has a screaming row with the daughter about the perfume, perhaps goes back to sleep again and then Rosie thinks she’ll put an end to all this. She sneaks back into the bedroom and puts a pillow over her mother’s face and holds it down until she kills her.’

  There was a silence after he finished. It did all sound plausible. That’s if you did not know Rosie and know her gentle, child-like nature.

  ‘Will you be questioning her again, today, Sergeant?’ asked Mr Bradley.

  ‘No, I don’t think so. I’ll wait until tomorrow when I have the autopsy report in my hand.’

  ‘What about the other daughter, Jenny?’ Flora asked. ‘Has anyone been in contact with her? You said something about Police Cadet Prior getting in touch.’

  ‘P.C. Prior knew where she was going and with my permission he phoned her. She’s on her way back. She was out in one of those holiday places, where was it, again, Constable?’

  He glanced across at Jim, who said hastily, ‘Majorca, Sir.’ His ears were a bright pink. Happened every time Jenny’s name came up. Simon, thought Flora, was just the same and Simon was a tougher and more sophisticated boy than Jim Prior. Unless Jim had changed very much since their days at primary school.

  ‘Does Jenny live in the house?’ asked Mr Bradley.

  ‘Not usually, I understand, but she told P.C. Prior, when she met him in the pub, that she would be there last night; apparently the taxi was to ca
ll for her at six in the morning and drive her to the airport. Her car is left at her mother’s house. She thought it would be safer there.’

  ‘What about bail?’ I asked.

  Sergeant Dawkins shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t recommend bail,’ he said briskly. ‘For one thing, there is no close relative to stand bail as far as we can gather. She says she had no aunts or uncles, not even cousins; and her granny is very sick and in a nursing home. For another the sister won’t arrive home until tomorrow morning — we don’t want this girl Rosie alone in that house by herself. There could be a risk of suicide with a girl like that.’

  Chapter 5

  ‘Have you heard the news?’ Joanna Rice didn’t normally interrupt her husband while he was turning over the pink pages of the Financial Times. This morning, however, her news was dramatic enough to give her courage. ‘It’s the postman; he told me the whole story,’ she said, putting forward the name as though to give credence to her piece of gossip.

  ‘What?’ Michael Rice sounded bored, but then he was usually bored by her. And he made no effort to hide the fact. She resented his attitude, but didn’t quite know how to combat it. Defensively she said: ‘Mrs Trevor is dead. Her body has been taken away by an ambulance and a police car. The postman thinks that it might be foul play, thinks someone murdered her.’

  ‘Foul play,’ he mocked, turning the pages of the Financial Times with a flourish.

  She flushed angrily. ‘You could be a bit sorry for the woman. You were keen enough at her, weren’t you, that night in The Welcome Stranger? The whole pub could see you looking down her dress.’

  ‘Shut up!’ He said it without looking at her and somehow that made it even more of an insult.

  ‘You didn’t talk like that twenty years ago,’ she said and knew that it sounded stupid. Why hadn’t she got a separate bank account all those years ago? It wasn’t the usual thing in the early 1970s. Well, so Michael had said, anyway. And she had to admit that he had done very well with the money that she had brought to him. Bought and sold stocks and shares. That was all that she knew about it. They lived in a fine style. Things not quite so good now as they had been in the early eighties, but nevertheless, Michael, who had just been an accountant’s clerk when she married him, had done very well with her father’s money. But had it been of any use to her? Had she not lurched between boredom and embarrassment as she tried to shut her eyes to his womanising? Her own fault, perhaps. She should have put her foot down.