Five Dead Canaries hf-3

by Edward Marston

  ‘There might have been somebody,’ he said, thoughtfully, ‘but if there was, then I don’t think it came to anything. At least, that’s the conclusion I’d draw. Jean passed on a remark that Florrie had made to her. It meant nothing to me at the time but — in view of what you’re asking — I fancy it may be relevant.’

  ‘What was the remark she made to your daughter?’ asked Marmion.

  Harte winced. ‘I feel embarrassed to be talking about such things, Inspector.’

  ‘I can understand that, sir.’

  ‘Do you have children?’

  ‘Yes, I have two — a son and a daughter.’

  ‘Then I daresay that you’d feel awkward, discussing what goes on in your daughter’s private life.’

  Marmion said nothing. Standing next to Keedy, he felt more than awkward. During a critical period, he’d been excluded from Alice’s private life and it rankled. He upbraided himself for his lapse into self-pity. Harte had lost a beloved daughter in the most horrific way. All that Marmion had done was to experience the humiliation of being deceived by Alice and Keedy. A sense of proportion was needed. Beside their host’s plight, Marmion’s was negligible. Reuben Harte was a father with a wound that would never heal.

  ‘I’m sorry to put you in this position,’ said Marmion, ‘but any information you have about Florrie Duncan is of interest to us. What was the remark that she made to your daughter?’

  ‘She said that she was going to drink herself into oblivion at the party.’

  ‘Isn’t that what we all do on our birthdays?’ asked Keedy with a grin.

  ‘Not in Florrie’s case — she was quite abstemious, actually.’

  ‘Everyone lets themselves go at a party.’

  ‘I don’t, Sergeant, and neither did my daughter.’

  ‘How do you interpret the remark?’ wondered Marmion.

  ‘I can only hazard a guess at what she meant, Inspector.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘It could have meant that she was planning to drink heavily in order to forget something. Alcohol can be a good sedative if you’re mourning a loss. I’ve found that out.’

  ‘If there had been a man in Florrie’s life,’ suggested Keedy, ‘then she’d have celebrated her birthday party with him, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘Good point,’ said Marmion.

  ‘Or the remark could simply have meant that it was the last time all six of them would be together,’ said Harte. ‘That’s why Florrie was going to overindulge. It was because there’d never be an occasion like that again.’

  ‘Why not, sir?’

  ‘She was going to leave the factory soon.’

  ‘Nobody told us about that.’

  ‘Jean was the only person she confided in and it rocked my daughter. She hated the thought of losing her. I can’t think why Florrie would even consider leaving. She was part and parcel of the factory.’

  ‘I wonder if her parents knew about her plans,’ said Marmion.

  ‘It’s unlikely. They weren’t on the best of terms with Florrie.’

  ‘So we gather.’

  ‘She went out of her way to shock them sometimes.’

  Marmion smiled. ‘I can imagine that they’d be easily shocked.’

  ‘I don’t flatter myself that I’ve been a good father,’ said Harte, soulfully, ‘but I’ve made a far better fist of it than Brian Ingles. Although we had differences, Jean and I were always able to talk, whereas he more or less drove his daughter away from that big house of theirs. Ingles is not so high and mighty as he appears,’ he said with a sly grin. ‘I learnt something about him today that I didn’t know.’

  ‘What was that, sir?’

  ‘A colleague of mine from the bank called to offer his condolences and see how I was.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I’m telling you this in strictest confidence, mark you.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Marmion.

  ‘We won’t breathe a word,’ added Keedy.

  ‘It will show Ingles in a very different light,’ said Harte. ‘In spite of the lordly way he behaves, he’s in no better position than we ordinary mortals. He loves to give the impression of being well off but, according to my colleague, he took out a huge loan at the bank and is having trouble paying it back.’

  Maureen Quinn found herself alone that evening. Her father had gone out to the pub and her mother had taken Lily to visit the children’s aged grandmother. Not wishing to leave the house, Maureen remained in her room, reflecting on what Father Cleary had said to her and reading passages from the Bible that he’d recommended. Though the exercise gave her a measure of solace, it could not assuage the feeling of guilt. The inquest and the funerals would be separate ordeals but there was also her return to the factory to contemplate. Maureen would be stared at as a freak, the sole survivor of a grisly event that would lodge in the collective mind. In the wake of the explosion, she’d had a weird urge to go back to work but she wondered now if she’d ever do so. It would never be the same again. Every time she went through the factory gates, she’d think of her five missing friends. No amount of prayer could obliterate frightening memories.

  A banging noise from the garden caught her attention. She looked through the window but could see nothing in the dark. Going downstairs, she picked up the little torch in the kitchen then inched the back door open. She scanned the tiny garden but the beam was too weak to be of any real use. Yet she was sure that someone or some animal was there. When she heard a second noise, she realised that it came from the ramshackle shed. Moving the beam of the torch onto it, she saw that the door had swung partly open. The last time that the latch had slipped, a cat had climbed over the fence and got into the shed, knocking over some flowerpots. Assuming that the same thing had happened again, she went out and opened the shed door wide.

  ‘Shoo!’ she cried out.

  It was the only sound she was allowed to make because a figure was instantly conjured out of the darkness. Before she knew what was happening, Maureen was grabbed firmly and a hand was clapped over her mouth.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Back at the police station in Hayes once more, Marmion and Keedy reviewed the situation. It was mid-evening but they were loath to call it a day and return home. New developments had set their minds working and given them fresh energy. While both of them were annoyed about the impostor who’d lured them on a pointless journey to Rochester, the incident had proved one thing. The plea for information about the whereabouts of Herbert Wylie had been widely circulated and prompted a response. The impostor was only one of a number of people who’d contacted the police. According to Claude Chatfield, more people had come forward throughout the day to claim sightings of the missing man. When he’d rung the superintendent to tell him about their setback in Rochester, Keedy had heard about information that had come in from places as far apart as Torquay, Bradford and Perth. The claims were being investigated by local police. Only when the evidence was compelling would the detectives be dispatched again from their base in Middlesex. With the whole nation on the alert, their suspect could not elude them for ever.

  Herbert Wylie was at the top of their list. Marmion had put Niall Quinn in second place but had now dropped him down to third position. After their visit to Reuben Harte, both he and Keedy felt sure that Florrie Duncan had been involved in a romance at one point and that the man concerned was almost certainly employed at the munitions factory. She would not have been the first single woman there who’d become pregnant. Hasty wartime marriages would have been arranged in some cases but that was not an option available to Florrie — or so it appeared. The man in question might well have wished to get rid of the unwanted problem completely.

  ‘Why did she decide to leave the factory?’ asked Marmion.

  ‘The answer is that she had to go before the baby became too obvious,’ said Keedy. ‘Although they were very close, she didn’t confide that in Jean Harte. It was Agnes Collier who noticed the signs. She was the only mother in the group.’

  ‘
There is another explanation, Joe.’

  ‘I don’t see it.’

  ‘Well, if the man worked at the factory, Florrie might have been embarrassed to go on seeing him every day. A blighted romance can leave you feeling sensitive.’

  Keedy chuckled. ‘Do you speak from experience, Harv?’

  ‘No,’ said the other, pointedly, ‘I don’t. As men, we tend to have it easy. We not only have a monopoly on making the first move, we usually set the pace. If things don’t happen the way certain men want, they back away. Look at Alan Suggs, for instance. He picks women up and casts them aside all the time.’

  ‘I don’t think Florrie Duncan would fall for someone like that.’

  ‘Maybe not, but the factory could still hold unpleasant memories for her. She’d want to leave in order to put them behind her.’

  Keedy was sceptical. ‘That doesn’t ring true, Harv,’ he said. ‘Remember what everyone told us about Florrie. She was a fighter. If it was only a case of a blighted romance, then she’d be more likely to drive the man concerned out of the factory than quit her own job. Then, of course, there was that remark about drinking herself into oblivion.’

  ‘Yes, that could be significant.’

  ‘It reminded me of a woman I arrested when I was on the beat. She was roaring drunk and swearing at passers-by. I had to manhandle her to get her back to the station,’ recalled Keedy. ‘She was barely seventeen, far too young for strong drink. I had to feel sorry for her. When she’d recovered, she told me her story.’

  ‘Was she pregnant, by any chance?’

  ‘It was worse than that, Harv. She’d got hold of the idea that if she drank enough, she could actually get rid of the baby. Instead of that, she ended up with a terrible headache and a charge of being drunk and disorderly.’

  ‘And she was still carrying the child.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That can’t have been the reason that Florrie Duncan reached for the bottle,’ said Marmion. ‘She was a married woman. She’d know that you can’t secure an abortion that way.’

  ‘As a married woman,’ said Keedy, ‘you’d expect her to know something about contraception as well.’

  The comment brought the exchange to a stop. Marmion was keenly aware of the situation in their private life. As a healthy and passionate man in his thirties, Keedy was more or less bound to have had sexual experience in his earlier relationships. It raised the question of whether or not he and Alice had been to bed together. Though he did his best not to think about it, the question kept popping up at random to jab away at Marmion. He forced himself to resume the conversation.

  ‘The person we really need is Agnes Collier,’ he said.

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘She could have told us exactly why she thought Florrie was pregnant.’

  ‘It was just a feeling she had — that’s what she told her mother, anyway.’

  ‘Who else did she tell?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m wondering if Agnes spoke to anybody else about it.’

  ‘There’s one obvious candidate,’ said Keedy, ‘and it’s Maureen Quinn.’

  ‘They saw a lot of each other and travelled to work together every day. Also, they were the only two members of the group who didn’t live in Hayes.’ He got up from his seat. ‘I can well imagine Agnes saying something to her friend.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m going to call on Maureen,’ said Marmion, ‘and you’re coming with me.’

  ‘The Quinn family won’t be pleased to see us.’

  ‘This is a murder investigation, Joe. I don’t care if they barricade themselves in and pour boiling oil down on us. Whatever it takes, I mean to speak to Maureen.’

  Before he could move, however, the telephone rang.

  When she’d been grabbed in the dark, Maureen Quinn had been seized with a feeling of shock and pain. There was worse to come. She was hustled into the house and warned not to scream because her attacker meant no harm. In fact, he apologised for frightening her. It was her cousin, Niall Quinn. She didn’t recognise him at first. He had thick stubble on his face and his hair was much longer than she remembered. In the year they’d been apart, he’d changed a lot. What had remained, however, was the beguiling lilt in his voice and the sense of purpose that he radiated. Niall was a very determined young man.

  ‘I didn’t mean to scare you, Maureen,’ he said.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded. ‘I know that you escaped because the police told us you had. It’s dangerous for you to come here, Niall.’

  ‘I wasn’t intending to stay.’

  ‘You were somewhere in Wales, weren’t you?’

  ‘That’s right. It was a nasty place called Frongoch. I was honest with them. The moment they locked me up, I warned them that they wouldn’t be able to hold me.’ He smiled at her. ‘Aren’t you glad that I got free?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she confessed.

  ‘I’m your cousin, Maureen. Blood is thicker than water.’

  ‘It terrifies me, having you here like this.’

  ‘I was only intending to come and go without disturbing any of you. If you hadn’t come out to the shed, you’d never have known I was even there.’

  She was nonplussed. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I came back for something,’ he told her. ‘I hid it in the shed when I was here last time. The police carried out a search when they arrested me but they never found the hiding place.’

  ‘What did you put in there, Niall?’

  He produced a gun from inside his jacket. ‘It was this.’

  When he held it up, Maureen almost fainted. Seeing her distress, he thrust the weapon out of sight again. It was too much for her. Maureen wished that she hadn’t reacted to the noise she heard from the garden. The news that a gun had been hidden in the garden shed all this time unnerved her. She knew that Niall had been arrested for trying to plant a bomb and she’d believed his claim that nobody would have been harmed by the explosion. The possession of a gun couldn’t be so easily explained away. It turned her cousin into a potential killer because she sensed that he’d be ready to use the weapon. Maureen had immediate proof of the fact. The sound of the front door key being inserted into the lock made her jump but it had a more dramatic effect on Niall. Fearing discovery, he drew the weapon once again.

  ‘It’s only us!’ called Diane as she entered the house.

  Realising there was no danger, Niall put the gun quickly inside his jacket again. A moment later, Diane came into the kitchen with her younger daughter. She froze when she saw the stranger there.

  ‘It’s Niall,’ said Maureen.

  ‘Dear God!’ exclaimed Diane.

  ‘I thought you were in prison,’ said Lily, goggling at him.

  ‘Go upstairs.’

  ‘But I want to talk to Niall.’

  ‘Go upstairs to your room now!’ ordered Diane, easing the girl through the door. ‘This doesn’t concern you.’

  Lily went off reluctantly, leaving her mother to assess the situation.

  ‘Your uncle will have to be told,’ she decided.

  ‘I wasn’t meaning to stay,’ said Niall.

  ‘You can’t stay. Maureen will explain while I go and fetch Eamonn. He’ll know what to do.’ She looked him up and down. ‘I know you’re family, Niall, but you’ve come at a very bad time.’ She moved away. ‘I won’t be long.’

  Niall turned to his cousin and gave her a winning smile.

  ‘What is it you need to explain to me, Maureen?’

  Before they left the police station in Hayes, they were delayed by a long telephone call from Scotland Yard. The superintendent wanted to defend his position. While exonerating himself from the charge of having sent them to Rochester on a fool’s errand, he reserved the right to criticise them for their naivety in believing that they were off to arrest their prime suspect. When Marmion told him they were seeking confirmation that Florrie Duncan might have be
en pregnant, he took care not to mention contraception. The subject was anathema to a strict Roman Catholic like the superintendent. While he didn’t put it into words, he was very unsympathetic towards Florrie’s predicament, clearly blaming it on the sin of having sexual intercourse outside marriage. When the call finally ended, Marmion rubbed his ear.

  ‘I’ve just listened to a sermon,’ he complained. ‘I’m surprised that Chat doesn’t have a pulpit erected in his office.’

  ‘You should have known better than to let him get on to religion.’

  ‘I couldn’t stop him, Joe.’

  ‘He roasted me earlier on,’ said Keedy. ‘Now it was your turn.’

  ‘Let’s be off before he rings again,’ said Marmion, reaching for his hat. ‘We need to get to Maureen’s house before she goes to bed.’

  They went out to their car and the driver set off. For most of the journey they travelled in silence, each wrapped up in his own thoughts. The purpose of their visit was to establish that Florrie Duncan was pregnant but it was something else altogether that made Keedy eventually speak.

  ‘What Mr Harte told us was very interesting,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Marmion. ‘We learnt a little more about Florrie Duncan.’

  ‘It was the bit about her father that surprised me. Brian Ingles goes out of his way to impress people. You’d think he was rolling in money.’ Keedy turned to him. ‘Why should he need a large loan from the bank?’

  Eamonn Quinn was very unhappy about being dragged out of the pub and having to leave an unfinished pint of beer on the table. The sight of his wife urging him to leave drew sniggers from the other men. Once outside, Diane told him why she was there and his ire subsided at once. They hurried back to the house to find Niall and Maureen in the living room. Quinn shook his nephew’s hand.

  ‘It’s always good to see you, Niall,’ he said, ‘but, as Maureen will have told you, this is not the ideal moment to call on us.’

  ‘Say the word, Uncle Eamonn, and I’ll be off.’