by Joyce Cato
But he wouldn’t go down without a fight.
‘Is it true that you had a flaming row with him about it?’ he asked straight out.
To the policeman’s surprise, Ian suddenly laughed, his hitherto taut body suddenly relaxing, as if somebody was letting the air out of a balloon. ‘Sure enough, I did,’ Ian admitted with some satisfaction. ‘He was so used to being the bee’s knees, I just couldn’t help showing him that not everyone felt the same way about him. I bloody well enjoyed myself doing it, too,’ he admitted candidly.
‘And just how did Mr Raines react?’ Trevor asked, with genuine curiosity.
Ian laughed again. ‘How do you expect? He puffed himself up like one of those blow-fish and spouted the usual guff and threats.’ Ian shrugged magnificently. ‘I couldn’t have cared less. He had no power over me – I don’t work for his company, glory be, and he can’t get me ousted from the society unless I either fail to pay my fees, or he can get the majority to vote me out. And believe me, there are enough of us in the society who didn’t respect our late unlamented chairman for me to be sure that would never happen.’ Again he shrugged. ‘So I just let the old sod have it, and that was that. There wasn’t much he could do about it in the end.’
‘But he would have got the tiger, Mr Glendower, wouldn’t he?’ Trevor said softly.
Ian went back to glowering at him.
Sensing his change of mood, Pippa stirred beside him, and squeezed her hand, which was still resting on his forearm. ‘Is that all now, Inspector? Only Ian has to get ready for his next lecture, don’t you?’ she said sweetly.
Trevor looked at her with a faint smile. Obviously she knew her boyfriend had a short fuse, and was probably used by now to trying to keep a tight rein on it. Lots of people had tempers, but it didn’t make them killers. Intriguing or not, getting to be the one to stuff a tiger, for Pete’s sake, wasn’t much of a motive for murder either. He sighed in defeat.
‘Yes, that’s all for now,’ he said heavily.
Once his sergeant had shown the couple out, Trevor turned around in his chair and contemplated his nemesis, but the cook was staring off into the distance, her lovely eyes narrowed in thought.
‘Now, Miss Starling, about Laura Raines and her lover-boy, and this clever plot to murder her husband. Let’s have your thoughts on it, please. And this time, I want it plain and simple, and leave nothing out,’ he demanded flatly.
Jenny dragged her thoughts back to the inspector, and looked at him blankly.
‘What clever plot to murder her husband?’
Trevor snorted. ‘Oh come on, Miss Starling. Her mobile phone. The poisoned coffee. The text message to get Simon Jenks to come to the college. It reeks of a frame up, or a double bluff, or something. It’s all such a damned convoluted muddle, you’re not trying to tell me that somebody, somewhere, hasn’t been up to some clever planning.’
‘Oh, yes. No, I agree,’ she said, somewhat confusingly. ‘Someone obviously planned a cold-blooded and cleverly thought-out murder plot.’
‘Exactly what I said,’ Trevor agreed smugly. ‘So who was it? Who went to all that trouble to kill Maurice Raines?’ he demanded impatiently. ‘And don’t try and tell me you don’t have it all figured out,’ he added angrily.
‘Maurice?’ Jenny said, with genuine bewilderment. ‘Well, nobody,’ she said. Then seeing Trevor gape at her, said, again with genuine puzzlement, ‘Obviously, nobody planned all that with the poisoned coffee and the mobile phone and what have you, in order to kill Maurice. Surely, that’s clear as day?’
She looked from Trevor to the equally gob-smacked Peter Trent. But it was the sergeant, who asked the obvious question.
‘What do you mean? Who was the intended target then?’
Jenny frowned at him. ‘Well, Simon Jenks of course. Who else?’
CHAPTER TEN
‘What?’ Trevor Golder gasped. ‘Tell me you’re kidding. We can’t have been investigating the wrong crime all this time!’
Then, without even giving her time to reply, he seemed to run through a mental, lightning fast review of the facts and conceded that they had, for his next question came with barely a pause. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell us?’
Jenny reared back slightly, unprepared for such an unwarranted attack. She looked helplessly from one policeman to the other, and said faintly, ‘But I thought you understood. It has to be obvious, doesn’t it? I mean, from the moment we learned about the poison in the coffee cups.’
Trevor forced himself to take a long, slow, deep breath.
‘I’m afraid it’s not clear to me, Miss Starling,’ Peter Trent, seeing it as his duty, took the blow for his superior, and confessed his ignorance first. ‘Can you just spell it out for me, please?’
‘Well,’ Jenny began doubtfully, casting quick looks between the two policemen, and wondering if they really did want it spelt out for them. ‘As soon as we learned that the coffee cup had been poisoned, it was clear that somebody had been meant to drink it and die, right?’ she began tentatively.
‘Right,’ Peter confirmed. ‘The doctor’s report said that there was a massive dose of the stuff, and certainly enough to render someone unconscious and then dead within five minutes or so. So somebody definitely meant business.’
‘Yes. So someone was meant to drink the coffee and die very quickly. Maurice was lying on the floor dead and, as we now well know, there would seem to be any number of people who had ample reason not to mourn the fact,’ Jenny agreed. ‘So the most obvious conclusion to jump to was that Maurice Raines was intended to drink the poison, but for some reason didn’t, thus forcing the killer to go to plan ‘B’ as it were, and improvise. Hence the fleshing tool in the neck.’
‘Again, that seems fairly clear,’ Peter said again. It was, more or less, what he and Golder had been thinking.
‘But then in that case, and almost right away, we come up against a very sticky problem, don’t we?’ Jenny pointed out reasonably. ‘That is, everyone knew that Maurice didn’t drink coffee. Everyone knew, in fact, that he was a pedantic old sod in many ways, and made a big thing out of using his own special blend of tea. It was one of the many ways he had of demonstrating himself to be superior to the rest of the plebs, right?’
The sergeant nodded patiently. ‘Again, that’s all right as far as it goes, Miss Starling. We all know enough about his character now to see how that fits in, but perhaps the killer simply didn’t know about it? The killer could have just poisoned the coffee, believing Maurice would drink it.’
Trevor Golder let out a long, slow breath. ‘Yes, surely that makes more sense?’ he put in, glad of the reprieve. ‘More sense, anyway, than the wrong person getting killed?’
Jenny frowned at him. ‘Does it? You’re saying then that Maurice’s killer must be a relative stranger to him and his drinking habits? In other words, not his wife, or a member of the conference?’
Trevor saw the huge flaw at once and was forced, reluctantly, to concede the point. ‘It does seem unlikely,’ he had to admit.
‘Yes,’ Jenny agreed gently. ‘Quite apart from the fact that it raises the question of why would someone who didn’t know him very well want to kill him in the first place. It also makes a nonsense of all the other things that point to the fact that the killer must have been very well acquainted with Maurice indeed – in point of fact, a conference member, or a member of his family, or inner circle of friends.’
‘What pointers?’ Again it was the sergeant who asked, realizing that it would be much too galling for Trevor to have to keep doing so.
‘Well, the poison belonging to Maurice Raines’s mother, for instance. That in itself is inconclusive, as we can’t actually prove, for certain, that it was hers. It might be a massive coincidence if it wasn’t, but coincidences do happen, as we know,’ Jenny said. ‘But the timing of the murder makes it impossible that someone not already well in place could have committed the crime,’ she swept on, with inexorable logic. ‘I mean, it’s impossible to
believe that an outside agency would be able to arrange for Maurice to be alone, at that time, and for everyone else to be safely out of the way.’
Trevor sighed. ‘Go on.’
‘So, I saw at once that the poison in the coffee cup couldn’t possibly have been meant for Maurice. The killer must have been aware of his habit of only drinking his own special brew. Plus, the fact that there were two cups, one poisoned, one not, meant that there were clearly two people involved. Someone was meant to be with Maurice, and that someone, therefore, was meant to drink the poison. At the time, we had no idea who that was. But now we do. Ergo….’ She trailed off quietly.
‘Simon Jenks. Yes. I can see how that fits,’ the inspector admitted. ‘The killer lured Jenks to the hall with the text message from Mrs Raines’s mobile number. Everyone nowadays has that little gizmo on their phones that lets them know who’s calling, so he had no reason to suppose that it was anyone other than Laura Raines who was texting him. But who would want Jenks dead?’ he asked exasperatedly, and saw before him the whole new investigation that would have to be set up. ‘It could be anyone! We haven’t even looked at his background yet! He could have money troubles, or a drug or gambling habit. He might have done something bad in his past that got him killed, or he might have another woman on the side. Jealousy is always a strong … yes!’ Trevor snapped his fingers, beginning to look excited again. ‘Perhaps Laura Raines knew about another woman, and was jealous. She’d want him dead then. She’s so besotted with him, it would put her right over the edge.’
‘And she persuaded her husband to bump him off for her?’ Jenny asked sceptically, hating to bring him back to earth with such a bump. But, really, she couldn’t have him going off on such a flight of fancy without reining him in. ‘She was booking in to the hotel in Hayling Island at the time, remember? And why whould Maurice do her dirty work for her anyway?’
Trevor blinked, and then subsided back onto his chair. ‘Damn it, we’re right back at the beginning.’
‘Hardly that, Inspector,’ Jenny said with a smile. ‘Cheer up. There’s only one person who wanted Simon Jenks dead, and only one person who was in a position to arrange it.’
Trevor felt the hope rise up, cancelling out the sick feeling in his stomach. ‘There is? Who?’
Jenny all but gaped at him, then realized somewhat belatedly that she was being rather rude, and forced herself to frown gently. ‘Well, Maurice Raines of course.’
Trevor opened his mouth and then closed it again. He looked at his sergeant, who looked at him, and then looked at Jenny Starling, who was looking at him with a mixture of puzzlement and apology.
‘But Maurice Raines was the victim, Miss Starling.’ Again, it was Peter Trent who fell on his sword.
‘Yes, I know, but that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t the one who planned the murder of Simon Jenks,’ Jenny said, perfectly reasonably, she thought.
But Trevor Golder obviously didn’t think so, for that worthy policeman was beginning to huff and puff and turn a particularly unbecoming shade of puce.
‘That’s enough!’ Trevor snapped, then took a mammoth breath. ‘Miss Starling, I want you to start at the beginning. Explain everything, as if you were talking to two dunces. Leave nothing out, keep it simple, and make it clear. Now, if you please,’ he demanded, with ominous firmness.
Jenny responded to the command almost as the rawest of police recruits might, and stiffened her shoulders, and almost snapped out ‘Yessir’ in response.
‘All right,’ she began, not noticing that Trevor had just indicated to his sergeant to start taking notes.
‘Imagine that you’re Maurice Raines,’ Jenny began. ‘You’ve been very comfortably married to a wealthy woman for twenty years or so. You’re used to being a big fish in a small pond – that is, the world of taxidermy, running your own company and being the big chief of the Great Jessies. The recession has hit your business a bit, true, but you always have the safety net of your wife’s wealth to fall back on, so nothing really to worry about there. Everything is going along splendidly. You even get to indulge in extra-marital affairs without any real qualms, and then, suddenly, disaster strikes.’
Jenny paused, and glanced out of the window. ‘You find out that your wife, for once, is the one doing the straying. Worse, she’s serious about it!’ Jenny turned back to look at the inspector. ‘For a seasoned philanderer, I don’t suppose it was hard for Maurice to read the signs in his wife’s behaviour. Also, he was very much a ladies man, and I think he would have realized quite quickly how bad things were for him from the way Laura must have started acting. It must have been clear to him that his wife was in love, with a capital ‘L’, and he’d know it wasn’t with him.’
She sighed and rubbed the back of her neck absently. ‘Naturally, he’d need to investigate further and, I imagine, it wasn’t that hard to find out who the other man was, and realize at once that the competition was stiff indeed. Simon Jenks is handsome, unattached, in a reasonable profession, and not so young that Laura Raines would feel personally ridiculous, or suffer any serious social embarrassment, at taking up with him. Moreover, now that the children are grown and out of the marital home and away at university, what was to stop his wife getting a divorce?’
Trevor, who’d been listening closely, had no argument with her reasoning so far, but now he felt obliged to chip in.
‘Yes, but why resort to killing? I mean, why not just get divorced? It’s not as if it’s anything to fuss about nowadays,’ he pointed out. ‘Murder seems rather drastic, surely? Especially when there’s always the risk of getting caught and going to gaol.’
Jenny smiled grimly. ‘To you and me, yes, divorce would be inevitable. But we’re not Maurice Raines. We don’t have his ego, or his sense of entitlement. And, don’t forget, all the money in that marriage was Laura’s,’ Jenny reminded them. ‘Suppose they did divorce – why would any judge in the land give him a big alimony settlement? His wife’s money bought their house. His wife’s money set him up in business. The children wouldn’t need support. No, Maurice would probably have lost the house, and a large slice of the income that had him living the high life that he’d enjoyed for all his married life. Laura would almost certainly have let him keep his business I expect, but as we already know, that was suffering in these hard economic times. And all this doesn’t even take into account the blow to his ego,’ Jenny said. ‘He was Maurice Raines, the great ladies man, the man who had women eating out of his hand. Just think of the public humiliation if he got kicked out of his own house, and a newer, younger, better-looking man took his place.’
Jenny paused for breath. ‘No, it didn’t bear thinking about. He had to find another solution – but with his wife so enamoured, there really was only one way out, and that was to get rid of the competition. Since it was unlikely that Simon Jenks could be bought off, that meant murder,’ Jenny mused sadly. ‘And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Maurice hadn’t felt quite indignant and self-pitying about it.’
‘Come again?’ Trevor said. In spite of himself, the cook’s words, and the scenario they depicted, fascinated him.
‘Well, it’s just the way he was,’ Jenny said, almost apologetically. ‘I can just see him, stealing his mother’s pills, having to set it all up, and all the time telling himself that it wasn’t really his fault. That he was actually a decent man, but it was his cheating wife, and that wife-stealing lover of hers who were forcing him in to doing something so sordid.’ Jenny shrugged. ‘It was just the sort of hypocritical way that he would have seen it.’
Jenny looked back out of the window and gave a small sigh. ‘Anyway, Maurice, whatever else he was, was a clever man. He had brains, and he had a certain amount of cunning. He knew that if Simon Jenks turned up obviously murdered in Yorkshire, then the police would be bound to get on to his affair with Laura. Which would mean that both she, and then by association he, would become the obvious prime suspects. Even if they couldn’t bring Simon’s murder home to him, it wo
uldn’t take long for Laura to begin to suspect him, and then she’d divorce him, and he wouldn’t have gained a thing.’
Trevor nodded. ‘He needed to be cleverer than that,’ he murmured.
‘Exactly.’ Jenny nodded emphatically. ‘So, first, he had to arrange to do it a long way from home. And then in such a way that he could hold up his hands and say, “What, me? How could it have been me, Officer? I was in Oxford at the time, with scores of witnesses.” Also, he’d have claimed complete ignorance of their affair at all, which would have left him with no motive.’
‘But surely his wife would suspect him anyway?’ Peter Trent said. ‘If your lover turns up dead, you’d almost have to suspect your husband, wouldn’t you?’
‘Oh yes. If he turned up murdered,’ Jenny agreed. ‘But what if he just didn’t turn up at all? What if, on the day he was supposed to meet you, he just vanished? Well, then, Maurice would have some wriggle room. He could argue that perhaps Jenks had had a better offer. Or just changed his mind. Perhaps he met with some sort of freak accident. Perhaps he went abroad; perhaps he simply grew tired of being the plaything of an older woman and just made a new life for himself somewhere else.’ Jenny held up her hands in the classic ‘who knows’ gesture.
‘You’re saying that Maurice intended to hide the body then?’ Trevor clarified.
‘Oh yes,’ Jenny said. ‘As soon as I realized the significance of the stuffed bear, that became absolutely clear.’
Again Trevor found himself exchanging a puzzled glance with his sergeant. ‘OK, Miss Starling, let’s just get back to making it plain and simple, shall we?’ he said, his voice heavy with defeat. ‘We’ve got Maurice realizing he has to get rid of his rival and planning his murder. Just how did he intend that to go, exactly?’
