by M. J. Trow
Spottiswood smiled grimly. He knew it would be a long time before he lived down his faux pas over Christmas. He was a frequent liar, just not a very good one. He could never remember what he had said. He decided to play it straight. ‘No, guv. It’s fine, thank you. A sure-fire bet in the 6.30 at Brighton next Thursday. I’ve brought Sandra back with me. I think you’ll want to hear what she has to say.’ He reached behind him and produced the WPC like a rabbit out of a hat.
‘Guv.’ She stood there, still pinched from the cold, eyes red with crying.
‘Sandra.’ Hall had an idea that some of the rookies were scared of him, but they didn’t usually cry.
Spottiswood was reluctant to give up the limelight. ‘Sandra knew the dead woman, sir. She has something to tell you.’
Hall looked down at the piece of paper on the table in front of him and folded it twice and put it in his pocket. Standing up, he said, ‘Let’s get out of here, Sandra. We’ll go up to my office. Pete?’
‘Yes, guv.’
‘Can you get us a couple of cups of coffee, please? Then you can get back to the scene. See if SOCO have any preliminary thoughts. Did I see Donald there?’
Spottiswood personally thought he would be hard to miss. ‘Yes, guv.’
‘See if he can give us a time for the post-mortem report being ready. We’ll need toxicology, alcohol, that sort of thing.’
‘There’ll be alcohol,’ Sandra Bolton said. ‘I was with her last night and we had a few drinks. Only a couple, so after all this while there won’t be much. She was certainly not over the limit to drive.’ She started to cry again, quietly.
Hall looked at her and his face was even more set than usual. ‘WPC Bolton, are you telling me that you were out drinking with Sarah Gregson last night and you have taken …’ he glanced at the clock on the wall, ‘you have taken over five hours to tell anyone?’
The woman nodded, miserably.
Hall sighed. ‘Come on, then,’ and he ushered her out. ‘Up to my office. Pete, get someone to come and minute this.’ He turned to Sandra Bolton. ‘You do understand that we have to take this seriously, Sandra? It may go further and we have to have a record.’
‘I’ll minute, guv,’ Spottiswood said, eagerly.
‘Thanks, but I’ve seen your shorthand. Send someone from the front office. And don’t forget the coffee.’ He led the way up the back stairs. He wished he hadn’t sent Jacquie home. He had a feeling that this was going to need a woman’s touch.
The phone was ringing when the Maxwells tumbled in through the front door. They were all wringing wet, but had had a marvellous time with Hector, who was indeed an expert tobogganer. He had even coined a new word for their experience, which covered both Jacquie’s and Maxwell’s vocabulary; slebogganing. The American and Nolan had bonded immediately, and just as well, because Maxwell and Jacquie had turned out to be a major disappointment on the makeshift piste on the slope behind the Dam. It hadn’t helped that half of Year Nine from Leighford High were there, the lads jeering (though quietly) at Maxwell’s Winter Sports efforts, the girls cooing over Nolan who was still little and cute enough to bring out the incipient mother in them all. He was now slung over his father’s shoulder like a deadweight and Jacquie answered the phone in the kitchen.
On his way into the sitting room where he planned to crash into his chair, having decanted his sleeping son on the sofa, Maxwell could only hear a muffled hum of a very one-sided conversation from across the landing. After a moment or two, Jacquie appeared in the doorway, holding the phone away from her and mouthing at Maxwell.
He mouthed back, ‘What?’
She tried again, but still with no success. She was clearly enunciating at least four syllables, but they didn’t seem to make any sense.
‘What?’ he mimed, in the silent version of a slightly testy shout. Marcel Marceau would have turned silently in his grave.
She gave up, dropping the arm holding the phone to her side. ‘It’s Mrs Whatmough on the phone, dear,’ she said. ‘Apparently, although she knows that I am a very senior police person, she would prefer to speak to you.’
At the sound of his Headmistress’s name, Nolan twitched in his sleep and made a lemon-sucking face. Maxwell stopped his task of stripping off the soggy siren suit and stood to attention. ‘Mrs Whatmough?’
‘You can say it out loud now, Max. I find it helps. Here you are.’ She handed him the phone. ‘I’ll take Nolan’s wet clothes off.’
Maxwell made frantic hushing sounds. ‘We’re probably not allowed to get him wet.’
‘He’s not a Gremlin, Max. Are you going to take this call?’ She held the phone out to him and shook it.
Maxwell took off his hat, ran his fingers through his hair and gave himself a relaxing shake from shoulders to toes, as taught in music and movement at his infant school so many millennia ago. Then, with tummy and tail tucked in, he took the phone and reluctantly put it to his ear.
‘Mrs Whatmough! Hello. We were just drying him off, so he doesn’t get a chill … Nolan. Yes, tobogganing.’
The phone gave an impatient quack.
‘Yes, he had a helmet on.’ He raised his shoulders at Jacquie, trying to make her complicit in the lie. ‘Yes, indeed. Exhausted. Anyway, how may I help you?’
Rosemary Whatmough was not quite herself on this Sunday afternoon. Her Pekinese, around whom her non-school life, such as it was, revolved, did not like having wet belly fur, so had had to be accommodated on newspaper in the utility room, and she was not sure who hated it the most, but she suspected it might well be the dog, who was making its extreme bad temper manifest by disembowelling a sofa cushion. In the middle of this outrage, Mrs Whatmough had received a phone call which had made the snow pale into insignificance and almost her first thought had been to call Peter Maxwell, for whom she secretly carried a bit of a torch. Not so much a torch, possibly, more of a glimmer, but she was not one to wear her heart on her sleeve in any case, so that was not the issue. No, she wanted to get to the bottom of the inconvenient behaviour of one of her staff and she knew he had a bit of a knack in that direction.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Maxwell said, aghast, at the end of her monologue. ‘Murdered? I had no idea …’ He looked down at Jacquie, kneeling on the rug removing Nolan’s soggy shoes and rubbing his feet dry. Catching the look in her eye, he backed out and continued the conversation on the landing. ‘I did know there had been a murder, of course, but I didn’t realise … No, my wife doesn’t tell me things about her work. Confidentiality, Mrs Whatmough, confidentiality.’
The angry quacking from the telephone made it clear that Mrs Whatmough understood all there was to understand about confidentiality and indeed had more or less written the book on it. Her point was that a teacher from her school had been murdered and … a strange sound made Maxwell listen harder.
‘Mrs Whatmough, are you all right? Are you crying?’ The Head of Sixth Form almost felt that he should look outside, to see if a flock of pigs were flying overhead. It was certainly cold enough for hell to have frozen over. ‘Mrs Whatmough, please. This isn’t getting us anywhere, is it? Are you able to get the car out?’
A muffled sob implied that the Whatmough drive was always snow-free.
‘In that case, why don’t you come over here and tell us about it? Jacquie – Mrs Maxwell – will probably be able to advise you better than I. Do you know … yes, I’m sorry, of course you do. We’ll see you shortly, then, shall we?’ He rang off and stood there for a second or two, tapping the phone against his chin. Then he went through into the sitting room. ‘Tidy away that child,’ he ordered. ‘Mrs Whatmough is coming over.’
‘Mrs Whatmough?’ Jacquie hissed. ‘What, are you nuts?’
‘She was crying,’ he told her, simply.
She looked at him for a long minute, then scooped the sleeping Nolan up in her arms. ‘I’ll just tidy away this child,’ she said, making for the door, then turned. ‘But you owe me, big time.’
Sandra Bolton eventually
stopped crying, blew her nose, took a huge gulp of something which may have been coffee and looked at Henry Hall. ‘Are you going to ask me questions, or shall I just tell you stuff?’ she said.
‘Let’s try a mixture, shall we?’ Hall suggested. ‘Start by how you met Sarah Gregson.’
‘That’s easy,’ the WPC said. ‘We met at Zumba classes, at the council health club. She was working for the council at the time and my other half works for them as well, so I have a family membership …’
‘Let’s try and keep the details to what we need, shall we, Sandra?’ Hall said, in a slightly frosty tone.
‘Sorry, guv. Well, we met and afterwards we would have a drink or something. Zumba is very exhausting, you lose a lot of fluid and …’ she caught the look in Hall’s eye and stopped.
‘When was this?’ he asked, to get it all back on track.
‘About a year ago, maybe a little less. She was a social worker and she was finding it all a bit stressful, so when she asked me if I did any other clubs or anything apart from the Zumba, I told her about poker.’
Zumba, Hall had heard of. His wife had briefly toyed with it as a way of losing weight, but the constant Latin music coming from the spare room had finally led to a frank exchange of views and she had switched her allegiance to the rather quieter option of fat-reduced meals from Marks & Spencer to help her battle of the bulge. For a moment he wondered what Poka was then realised what she was talking about. ‘Poker? You mean, as in … poker? Cards?’
‘Yes, guv. Well, not always poker, actually. Not then. Depending on who turned up, we sometimes played canasta or cribbage. We had a room we used above the Red Lion off the High Street. Someone who used to play cards knew the landlord, ages ago, and it had just carried on.’
‘For money?’ Hall could not believe his ears. This woman, this girl who was hoping to make a career in the police, was playing cards for money in a room over a pub.
‘Well, not much, guv. Just enough to make it interesting, you know. Penny a point, that kind of thing.’
Hall leant over his desk and she instinctively drew back. ‘Sandra. You do know that Sarah Gregson had one thousand pounds in her bag at the time of her death?’
Sandra Bolton nodded miserably.
‘And she won that playing cards, did she?’
Again, the nod.
‘At a penny a point?’
This time there was no nod, or shake, just another storm of tears. Henry Hall pushed the box of tissues across the table and waited; and eventually, she resumed her story.
‘A few weeks ago, we had a new chap join us. I’m not sure who introduced him, he just seemed to appear from nowhere. An American chap he was, said he was over here for a while and was looking for some action. I … I’m not sure how it happened, but by the second Wednesday, he had us agreeing to no table limit. We put our foot down,’ she paused a moment, wondering why that didn’t sound right, then carried on anyway, ‘and said we would have to have a limit of some kind. We agreed at five hundred pounds.’
Henry Hall had never been one of those policemen who complained about how much he earned, or rather how little. Even so, he would have been hard-pressed to take five hundred pounds to a poker game once a month, let alone more often, as this seemed to be. He asked, ‘How often did you play?’
Sandra Bolton sniffed loudly and wiped her nose. ‘Twice a week, but I think that sometimes Jeff got another game going in between.’
‘Twice a week?’ Hall’s famous imperturbability was being stretched to the limit. ‘So, how many times have you played with this kind of stake money?’
She rolled her eyes up and appeared to be calculating. ‘Last night was the fifth, I think. Or sixth. I can’t remember.’
‘So, let me get this right,’ Hall said. ‘Sarah Gregson had played at least five times since Christmas, with a five-hundred-pound stake. Was she lucky at cards?’
‘Not usually,’ the WPC said. ‘Jeff usually won, and sometimes Mark ended up about even. The rest of us lost, as a rule.’
Hall was aghast. ‘You’ve lost two and a half thousand pounds in less than a month? How could you afford that?’ His reply was a storm of crying. ‘Oh, I see. You couldn’t afford that.’ He pushed himself back from the table and walked across the room to look out onto the snowy car park. Winter Wonderland was not the first phrase that entered your head as you gazed over the rooftops of Leighford. ‘What happened last night?’ he asked quietly.
‘Well,’ she said, pulling herself together, ‘there were only five of us last night. There had been as many as eight, but the others had dropped out when the money got too much. Sarah won the pot and Jeff stormed out.’
She blew her nose with a finality that made Hall hope that it really was the last time in this exchange. ‘He isn’t a very nice man, guv. He is a real bully and doesn’t like to lose. He drinks a bit as well … not to be roaring drunk, you know, but just a bit more than the rest of us. Anyway, he lost. We all did, except Sarah. Jeff overturned the table and the money went everywhere. Then he left.’
The scratch of the shorthand minute-taker’s pen was all that could be heard for a while, then Hall spoke, carefully, gently so as to not upset the woman. ‘I’m not a card player myself, Sandra,’ he began, sitting back down behind his desk. ‘Just the odd hand of hearts or newmarket at Christmas, perhaps, so I don’t really understand this but, if everyone but Sarah lost and the limit was five hundred pounds … why did she not have two and a half thousand pounds in her bag?’
‘She gave us ours back,’ Sandra Bolton told him. ‘Mark, Tim and me, she gave it back.’
‘But not …’ he paused, ‘do we have a surname for this Jeff?’
‘No. The rest of us all knew each other in various ways. For example, Tim works at the health club, Mark is with Highways in some capacity. He’s always chasing some kind of promotion, always talking about it but I don’t know what he actually does these days.’
‘Yes, I see. So how did this American chap come into the picture?’
‘I don’t know. He must have known someone, perhaps one of the ones who has dropped out.’
Hall was thoughtful for a moment. ‘You were telling me about her giving the money back.’
‘Yes. She insisted. She knew we couldn’t really afford to lose that much and she gave it back. She said she wouldn’t come any more either, and that we shouldn’t. I wasn’t going to go back. I wouldn’t have been comfortable without Sarah.’
‘What about the others?’
‘I’m not sure. When she gave us the money back, we all went home. We … we left her to clear up and we all went home.’
‘Had Jeff left the premises?’
‘He may have been in the pub, but there isn’t anywhere else he could have been. The room doesn’t connect with the pub, there’s just the room and the stairs and he wasn’t on the stairs. We heard the door slam when he went out and he wasn’t outside when we left. The door doesn’t open from the outside once we’re there. The landlord lets us in and then that’s it.’
‘It all sounds a bit hole-and-corner, Sandra, for a card school at a penny a point.’
She smiled wanly. ‘I know. I think the boys liked it. It was a bit James Bond.’
Hall conjured up a picture of the Red Lion in his mind. If the room upstairs had anything in common with the actual pub, James Bond was not the first thing that came to mind. More toothless old men playing dominoes still whingeing about that Margaret Thatcher and how she was ruining the country. ‘So he had gone, then, had he? You’re sure?’
Sandra Bolton went white. ‘Do you mean that it was Jeff? Who killed Sarah?’
‘No ideas yet, Sandra.’ He looked at her for the longest minute of her life. ‘Go home. I am suspending you from duty as of now, but I will have to ratify that with HR tomorrow. Please don’t leave Leighford, we’ll be needing to chat. Meanwhile, have you no contact details for any of the other three?’
‘I know where Mark and Tim work. I don’t know Mark’
s surname and I’m not sure of Tim’s. My partner will know that. I don’t know Jeff’s surname or where he lives.’
‘Not to worry,’ Hall said. He had a look of a man whose internal filing system had just come up trumps. ‘I think I may know a woman who does. Off you go now, Sandra. We’ll probably need you tomorrow, but I’ll send a car.’ He looked down at his tidy desk and the minute taker got up and left. Sandra Bolton knew when she had had a lucky escape and was through the door before it had closed behind the woman.
Hall sat there in silence for a moment and then reached into his pocket and took out the piece of paper. ‘Demons?’ he read, then screwed it up and threw it into the bin. ‘Well, that answers that question.’ He pulled the phone towards him and punched in the Maxwells’ landline number. After ten rings it went to the answer phone and he replaced the receiver. He could try her mobile, but this was one that would wait. If the man he was looking for was who he thought he was, he was going to need a long time with the Maxwells to find out all he could first and he needed all the calm he could muster before involving Mad Max in this one. Another New Year resolution had already bitten the dust and the year was scarcely two weeks old. He decided to break another and headed for the chocolate machine in the rest room. May as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.
Chapter Nine
Betty Carpenter had always kept a tidy house and one of the things that she had instilled into her daughter was that, as long as the sofa cushions were straight and there was no fluff on the carpet, you could make any room fit for visitors in less than five minutes. With the kitchen door closed on the toast-crumb/tomato-covered plates and a quick squirt of something down the loo, the house was Whatmough-ready in no time.
And in what seemed no time at all, there was a brisk ring at the bell, followed by two sharp raps.
Maxwell, who had hardly been relaxing in his chair anyway, leapt to his feet and dashed down to open the door. Unlike most of the audience of the old Monty Python sketch, he always expected the Spanish Inquisition. On the step, Mrs Whatmough had recovered her composure and nodded her head graciously to Maxwell, as if she were the householder and he the importunate visitor.
