by Mike Hollow
Jago spoke to her back.
“I’m afraid the truth is your husband is a bigamist, a blackmailer, and in all likelihood an adulterer. Two of those are matters for me, and the last is for you, or perhaps” – he turned to Celia – “perhaps you, to deal with.”
Susan swung round to face Jago. He could see she was beginning to tremble, but still she said nothing.
“If he’s convicted of bigamy and demanding money with menaces,” he continued, “you won’t be seeing him for some time.”
He now turned his attention to George.
“But there’s another and more important question for you, Mr Fletcher. Are you a murderer? You stood to gain from Mary’s death, because it meant this house would pass entirely into Susan’s hands, and thus effectively into yours – provided you could continue to convince her and the world that you were her husband. It was essential for you to maintain that pretence.”
“Hang on,” said George. “What do you mean, ‘pretence’? How dare you accuse me –”
“I say pretence, Mr Fletcher, because not only were you already married to someone else, but to add insult to injury you’d also had a relationship with Mary before you met and married Susan. Was that how you found out about the house? I don’t suppose you wanted news of that liaison to reach Susan’s ears. And if Mary recognized you in that photo, standing alongside Celia as her lawfully wedded husband, did she threaten to tell her sister that her husband was a cheat and a liar and her marriage a sham? She might have relished the opportunity to put Susan in her place. You’re not the only one who knows how to demand money with menaces, and a threat to reveal that information would be quite a menace. Mary had the power to ruin your plans, and you had plenty of reason to want her dead.”
George leaped to his feet. His face was contorted with anger.
“It’s all lies!” he shouted.
He took a step forward, jabbed his right hand into the inside pocket of his jacket and produced a flick knife. Snapping it open, he lunged towards Angela, who was cowering in the chair beside him. She clutched her hands before her and screamed. George grabbed her by the shoulder with his free hand and yanked her to her feet. In an instant he had pulled her back onto his chest and put his arm round her neck, holding the knife to it.
She looked down at the blade pressing against her throat and whimpered.
“Stop him, please. Don’t let him hurt me.”
CHAPTER 45
Fletcher grasped Angela tighter and began to drag her across the room, backing away from Jago. He turned towards the stairs that led up from the cellar, pulling Angela round with him. Cradock got to his feet, apprehensively.
“You, get out of my way!” said George.
Cradock took a step down the stairs towards him. George dragged Angela back a pace, his eyes flitting between Cradock to his right and the rest of the room to his left. He twitched the knife against her throat and shouted at Cradock.
“You let me go, or so help me I’ll –”
Angela let out a tearful moan.
Jago was positioned six to eight feet away – too far to attempt to rush Fletcher. He stood still and spoke quietly.
“Put that knife down, Mr Fletcher. I asked you a question – are you a murderer? You have a choice to make: you can do the wrong thing now and put your head in a noose, or you can be a sensible fellow and calm down.”
George held the knife firmly in place and turned slightly towards Jago.
“But you said –”
Before Fletcher could complete the sentence that was forming in his mind, Cradock plunged down the remaining couple of steps and rammed him sideways against one of the timber props. Fletcher let out a cry of pain as his face slammed into the rough timber, and Angela slipped out of his grasp. Cradock grabbed the man’s right arm and forced it up his back as far as it would go. Fletcher screamed and dropped the knife. Cradock kicked it across the floor to Jago, who stopped it with his foot and picked it up.
Cradock forced his captive down onto a chair. Jago pocketed the flick knife, then pushed a pair of handcuffs onto Fletcher’s wrists, screwed them shut and put the key in his pocket.
“Thank you, Detective Constable,” said Jago. “Now, Mr Fletcher, you sit still and don’t think about moving. Any trouble you’re in is of your own making, and I would advise you not to compound it by any more rash actions.”
Fletcher’s shoulders slumped.
A second bomb landed somewhere outside. This time it was closer. Jago felt the blast transmitted through the ground and into his feet. A scattering of dust fell from the cracks between the floorboards above his head. He brushed it off his shoulder and continued.
“You’re not the only person here that I want to hear the truth from, Mr Fletcher.” He looked round the room. “Here in this cellar we have a sister, a friend, and two betrayed wives. Jealousy is a very powerful emotion, and so is a sense of betrayal.”
Susan spoke for the first time since Fletcher’s attack. Her voice was subdued and her gaze fixed, as though she were struggling to control her emotions.
“You’re saying one of us killed my sister?”
“I’m saying that is possible,” said Jago. “But first there are one or two facts I would like to establish.”
He turned to Angela. She was rubbing her neck.
“I have a question for you, Miss Willerson. Do you need a little time to recover?”
She stopped rubbing, wiped her eyes and began to pat her hair back into shape.
“No, I’m all right. Carry on.”
“You were telling us that Mr Fletcher here had demanded money from you by threatening to report you to the security service as a Fifth Column spy.”
“Yes, that’s right. That man is evil, Inspector. Believe me, he’s the most wicked man I’ve ever met.”
“So he claimed you were a spy. Is it true?”
“Of course not. The whole thing’s nonsense.”
“I have no knowledge of whether you are a spy or not, so let’s assume for the time being you’re not.”
“Very generous of you, I must say.”
“But if that’s the case, what did you have to fear? Why not just call his bluff?”
Angela hesitated before replying.
“It was something else he said – something he knew.”
“Something he knew about you that was true and that you didn’t want other people to know?”
“Yes. I was afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Afraid I’d lose my job.”
“And why was that?”
“It’s because of my work, the work we do at the company. It’s war work. Secret war work. I can’t tell you what it is – I had to sign the Official Secrets Act.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to tell us what it is. But if you had a personal secret that you didn’t want your employers to know, one that made you fear for your job, I shall have to ask you to tell me what that secret was.”
Angela seemed to be weighing up the risks in her mind, unsure whether to speak.
“I belonged to the Link. Do you know what that was?”
“I do.”
“This was before the war, you understand. I had views, you see – views that it doesn’t pay to have now. The Link was a kind of Anglo-German friendship society, but there was a bit more to it than that. They said the only way to have peace in the world was for Britain and Germany to be friendly and cooperate. Then when there was that business with Czechoslovakia they said the Munich Agreement was only putting right a terrible injustice that we’d all done to Germany in the peace treaties at the end of the Great War.”
“You mean it was Nazi sympathizers?”
“Some people might say so, but that wasn’t against the law in 1938. I was a bit young and naïve. They had a branch in Ilford, and I went along to some of their meetings. I thought German people were nice and we ought to be friends with them, and I agreed with what some of those Link people said about the Jews controlling
everything and needing to be sorted out. I’ve never told anyone I was mixed up with it, and if my employers knew I reckon I’d be out of a job. I don’t know how he found out.”
“I think the answer to that may be quite simple,” said Jago. “Mr Fletcher, I’ve been told by another witness that you were a member of the Link yourself. Is that true?”
Fletcher nodded silently.
“And you somehow knew of Miss Willerson’s past involvement with it?”
“Yes.”
“How was that?”
“I remembered her name from the membership list. It’s an unusual name.”
“I see.”
Jago turned back to Angela.
“And you say the prospect of being dismissed worried you.”
“Yes. That job’s everything to me. I haven’t got a husband, I’ve no family – my job’s all I’ve got. I have to pay my own way. So when he mentioned the Link, that was the last straw. I knew he’d found out everything about me and was about to ruin my life.”
“So then what happened?”
“He said he’d give me two days to think it over, and not to try anything funny, because I was under surveillance. He said I mustn’t tell anyone what he’d said, or I’d be in trouble with the law, because of the Official Secrets Act. Those two days were the worst of my life.”
“And did he come back after two days?”
“Yes.”
“How much did you pay him?”
Angela gave a bitter laugh.
“Everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“This time he came to my flat. It was just as the sirens were going off for an air raid, but he wouldn’t let me go out to the shelter. He kept me there in the flat. I got emotional and begged him not to report me, not to tell anyone about my past, and he seemed to soften up. He said he didn’t want me to go to prison, he liked me, and he’d be prepared not to report me, but he’d be taking a big risk himself, so I’d have to give him an assurance – a ‘deposit’, he called it. I was getting worried about the bombs coming, so I said what do you mean, and he said it would be like bail, a sum of money to ensure I behaved myself in future. When I asked him how much, he said seventy pounds. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve never had that much money at one time. I started crying. Then he got all sympathetic and kind, and said I could give him a different kind of guarantee: he’d see to it that I wasn’t arrested if I was nice to him.”
“And would I be right in thinking –”
“Yes, Inspector, you would. You probably think I’m stupid, but I was so worried, I didn’t know what to do. He was there in the flat, the bombs were starting to fall outside, and he was threatening to expose my past or even have me arrested. So yes, like a fool I was ‘nice to him’, right there in my own flat. Then he went. I felt ashamed, filthy, disgusted with myself. I was broken.”
Angela pointed an accusing finger at Fletcher and seemed to struggle to control her feelings as she spoke.
“You need to arrest that man and send him to prison. He’s a criminal.”
A silence followed. Angela began to weep quietly into her handkerchief. When she spoke, her voice was muffled.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Yes,” said Jago.
“When Mary was… When Mary was attacked, did she die quickly?”
“She died of strangulation. That doesn’t kill immediately, but I understand from the pathologist that she would have lost consciousness within a few seconds.”
Angela nodded slowly.
“That’s good. So she didn’t suffer?”
“I cannot say that, Miss Willerson.”
CHAPTER 46
Jago left Angela to her thoughts and took a few steps across the room to Susan. Her back was pressed against the wall, and there was still a distracted look in her eyes.
“I realize the last few minutes must have been distressing for you, Mrs Fletcher,” he said. “But I need to ask you about Mary.”
Susan’s body twitched, as if she were waking from a sleep. She nodded silently, then met his gaze and stood straight before him.
“Go ahead. Ask me anything you like.”
“When we spoke to you this morning you said you didn’t like your sister and you had nothing in common with her. Is that a matter of regret to you?”
“Regret?” said Susan. “What is there to regret? She had her life and I have mine – or had it, until you turned up here.” Her voice faltered, but she wiped her eyes and continued. “Listen, Inspector, it isn’t always all sweetness and light having a sister. There were plenty of times when I wished I didn’t have one. I’d have been happy enough on my own.”
“You suggested before that you found it difficult having a sister who was older than you. Is that what the problem was?”
“Some girls manage. If they have a big sister they look up to her, they want to be like her, but I never did. Mary never gave me any reason to. I think she resented the fact that I’d come along. You know what it’s like – there’s an only child and it’s used to getting all the attention, and then suddenly there’s this new baby. The older kid gets jealous. I think that’s what happened with Mary, only she never grew out of it.”
“So how would you describe your relationship with Mary?”
“Non-existent,” said Susan. “It was like I didn’t exist. Even when we were little she ignored me, and as we got older she froze me out of her life. I used to get her hand-me-down clothes – I felt as though I was just a kind of dustbin for any old rubbish she didn’t need or want any more.”
“But then you both grew up. Did it change when you weren’t children any more?”
“When you’ve had that kind of treatment all your life, you don’t change just because you’ve reached a certain age. Even when I got married I thought she’d probably just sneer at me. It was always the same with boys – if there was one I liked she’d say nasty things about him. She’d say, ‘Oh, yes, he used to ask me to walk out with him and I said no because I didn’t think he was good enough, but he might do for you.’ Anything to make me feel inferior, a failure compared with her.”
“So you feel better off without her?”
“You tell me – you’re the detective. But if you’re thinking I killed her, you can think again. I told you before, I was at home here all that night, and my husband can confirm that.”
“So you said, Mrs Fletcher,” said Jago. “But I’m afraid your husband is hardly in a strong position to act as a reliable witness at the moment.”
“I don’t care,” said Susan. “I’m not a murderer.”
She gestured in the direction of Celia.
“You can send him back to her, for all I care. If she had him first she’s welcome to him. Look at her – I can see why the stupid old trout lost him in the first place.”
“You watch your tongue,” said Celia, half rising from her seat.
“That’ll do,” said Jago, positioning himself between them. “Mrs Berry, you met Mary, didn’t you, and you told her about your husband?”
“Yes,” said Celia. There was a note of wariness in her voice.
“Did you know at that point that your husband had married for a second time?”
“Of course I didn’t.”
“And did you have any reason to believe Mary had had an intimate relationship with your husband?”
“No – he kept that a secret. Seems he was good at doing that.”
“So she was just a stranger you happened to meet at a dance.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t know anyone else who knew her?”
“That’s right.”
“But you did get to know Angela Willerson that night at the dance, didn’t you? And she was a friend of Mary’s.”
“Yes.”
“And you told me today that you and Angela have become friends since then.”
“Well, yes, I did, but what’s that got to do with anything?”
“I’m just wo
ndering whether Angela knew who it was that Mary had that liaison with – or at least had a strong suspicion. So if you and Angela became pals, maybe she told you what Mary had been up to. And I’m wondering whether you then decided Mary had destroyed your marriage. It’s not something she could have gone to prison for, but perhaps you decided to impose your own form of punishment. To take revenge on her and your husband. They’d betrayed you together – and the penalty for traitors is death.”
Celia gasped.
“That’s outrageous!” she said. “How dare you? It’s a pack of lies from beginning to end. Who put that idea in your head?”
She rounded on Angela.
“Was it you? Speak up, woman.”
Before Angela could reply, there was a deafening explosion as another bomb landed. This time the whole room shook. The water in the buckets slopped over onto the floor, and the books and magazines slid off the shelf and landed in a clumsy heap on the floor. Susan Fletcher clutched her head and began to weep quietly.
Jago waited for the noise to die away. The electric light had flickered, but it stayed on. He was relieved that the power supply had not been cut off by the explosion – he was anxious to keep an eye on everyone in the room.
He turned to Angela.
“And you, Angela,” he said. “You knew Mary, you know Celia, and you’ve just told us that you’ve had a very unpleasant contact with George Fletcher. Did Mary know about that? She was your friend, after all.”
Angela closed her eyes tight, as if in pain, and slowly shook her head. Then she looked up at the ceiling, saying nothing. It seemed to Jago as though she were trying to see through it to another place, perhaps another time. Finally she lowered her gaze and spoke.
“My friend? No, Inspector, she wasn’t my friend. She was the one who betrayed me.”
Jago squatted before her, looked her in the eye and spoke quietly.
“Mary betrayed you?”
