by Wonny Lea
Elsie moved away from her sister and suggested they all give her some space.
‘We were going anyway,’ said Martin. ‘Will you be alright?’
‘Yes, we’ll be OK, but to go back to the question I asked earlier: do you know what happened to Catherine?’
‘At the moment I have no idea, I’m afraid, but we will be working hard to find out and I will definitely need to speak to Mr Romanes and Mr Washington.’
Elsie walked over to the telephone and looked at a list of numbers that was kept on the table. ‘I can give you Manuel’s number or if you prefer I can ring him and tell him you want to speak to him.’
‘No, don’t do that,’ said Martin. ‘I want to be the one to tell him.’
Elsie looked Martin straight in the eye. ‘You mean you want to assess his reaction and try to decide if he had anything to do with Catherine’s death. You haven’t said if she died of natural causes but I don’t see that being a possibility. My guess is that someone murdered my niece and for some macabre reason left her body in the place that was going to be her home.
‘Whoever is on your list of suspects, you can rule out Manuel, and not just because he was in Spain the night she disappeared but because he’s a genuinely nice person. What about the man Catherine is rumoured to have left with? Simon. You’ll need to speak to him.’
Martin watched Elsie as she spoke and was once again taken back to his childhood. No wonder his aunt and this woman had hit it off so well, they were well-matched in their direct speaking and clear observations.
He nodded and asked about the possibility of speaking to Peter Washington.
‘I’ll ring the hospital and see what the position is with Peter. Margaret didn’t exaggerate his condition and it sadly looks as if my sister is going to finally lose her daughter and say goodbye to her husband within days of one another.’
‘Really?’ questioned Martin. ‘His death is imminent?
Elsie nodded as she let the detectives out and waited at the door until they had driven off.
On the way back to Goleudy Martin asked Helen to call Matt and arrange for the team to be ready for an immediate briefing session. ‘Tell him to forget about the missing persons trawl and see if he can get our trio of professors to give us some options regarding cause of death. For me everything points to murder, although I suppose there is the outside chance it could have been an accident. I just can’t think why she would have gone to the building site, though.
‘On second thoughts keep the team on the missing persons files but get them to switch to looking for any men reported missing in the same timescale we were considering for Catherine. Speak to the people who run the riding stables that she frequented. If there was any particular gossip around the time of her disappearance somebody will remember.
‘Before we all meet I want to speak to Manuel Romanes, so I’ll go straight to my office and hopefully he’ll be available on the number Elsie gave us.’
On the way to his office Martin picked up a large mug of very strong coffee and a ham and cheese sandwich and then settled down to make the phone call to Spain. There was no problem getting hold of Manuel, but it was more than twenty minutes later when Martin ended the call.
Everything he had heard was in accord with what he’d learned when visiting the farm and Manuel had agreed to get the first available flight to Cardiff.
‘I was just coning to find you, guv,’ said Matt as Martin entered Interview Room One. ‘Helen said you wanted the team rounded up immediately but anyway we’ve spent the last quarter of an hour listening to her account of your visit to that address I gave you.’
‘Great,’ replied Martin and he walked across to the whiteboard he had started to write on earlier and added some facts to the first of his three columns. ‘I’m sure Helen also told you that she has given Prof. Moore some of Catherine Romanes’ hair which could well prove a positive DNA match with the skeleton. We now know the date and approximate time of Catherine’s disappearance and although it was five years ago we will go through the same process as if it were yesterday.’
He turned to Helen. ‘Did you get anything from upstairs regarding a possible cause of death?’
‘Yes the Professor told me that when you and Matt spoke to his colleagues you were shown a damaged bone in the neck of the skeleton. They are putting the damage to that bone down to something or someone that caused intense pressure. He said that if we had found Susan Evans’ remains five years after her death she would have given us a similar picture.
‘I asked him if that meant that Catherine Romanes had been strangled and he said it was the most likely conclusion. However he warned us not to forget that suicide by hanging could produce comparable injuries, though this would depend upon what material had been used for the purpose. He lost me a bit when he went into details of the different injuries caused by rigid things like leather belts versus softer things like bed sheets.’
There was a general discussion as officers remembered suicides they had attended and the bizarre pieces of equipment that had been used to carry out the act.
‘I don’t buy the idea of suicide,’ said Matt. ‘There was nothing in the area she was found that she could have thrown a rope over, and if she killed herself somewhere else how did she end up there? From what we learned at the farm her mother was the last of her family to see her alive, although she thought she had heard Catherine arguing with her father sometime before she left. We haven’t been able to speak to Peter Washington yet and time is running out on the possibility of us speaking to him at all.’
‘Did you manage to speak to anyone at the riding stables?’ he asked Helen.
‘Yes, and you were right about there being someone who would remember the gossip. The owner, Laura Green, didn’t have a good word to say about Catherine, but she did give me what she called a “comprehensive list” of all the people she hung out with at the stables. She has even promised to email me with their addresses and telephone numbers – and unlike most people nowadays, who delight in hiding behind the rules of confidentiality, she positively relished the thought of each one of them getting a call from the police.
‘There were several men who chased after Catherine but only one, Simon Davidson, that she paid any attention to and – here’s the good bit – no one saw him after Catherine disappeared, and apparently there’s no shortage of money in his family. He sounds like her sort of man, doesn’t he?
‘When Catherine’s husband went to the stables to ask if anyone had seen his wife it apparently gave everyone a great deal of pleasure to tell him about his wife’s antics. They are such a snobby lot – the only decent thing about that place is the horses. I couldn’t stop Laura Green talking, and she told me that her most recent reason to dislike Catherine is that Manuel has taken the school’s best riding instructor, Rachel, to live with him in Spain.’
Martin explained to everyone that during his phone call to Manuel Romanes he had been told that Rachel was living with him and his son and that she was expecting a baby any day. ‘Obviously under the circumstances Mr Romanes didn’t want to leave her, but I could hear her persuading him to get the first flight and get things sorted. According to Elsie Hopkins she picked Manuel and his family up from the airport the day after Catherine disappeared, but we can’t take it for granted that he had flown in with his parents. He could have already been in the country, strangled his wife, dumped her body at a site he knew well, and met his family off the plane before Elsie even got to the airport. Matt, we need to check the planes from Malaga to Cardiff that day and see if his name actually is on the passenger list and that his ticket was used. Based on my phone conversation with him I agree with Elsie Hopkins, who rates him as a decent bloke, but as we all know that doesn’t mean he didn’t kill his wife. There is plenty of evidence to show that she publically made a fool of him; maybe he paid her a surprise visit and caught her up to no good.’
‘That would be a crime of passion,’ interrupted Helen. ‘Maybe he killed both of
them! Perhaps Simon Davidson had raided his family business with a view to running off with Catherine and Manuel caught up with them. Perhaps we should be looking for another skeleton – what do you think?’
Martin let the general buzz of speculative conversation that followed Helen’s words continue for a few minutes before answering her question.
‘What I think is that we can’t rule anything out and the sooner we get to work on some of the information we have got the better. I may have made a mistake in disclosing as much as I did to Mr Romanes. On the other hand I could hardly have got him arrested by the Spanish Guardia as we have nothing to support such an action. I hope my gut feeling about him is right and that Simon Davidson is alive and can be found to answer questions about what really happened that night. Everyone knows what has to be done so it’s a question of checking and double checking and reconvening here at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.
Chapter Twenty
Peter dies
‘This is it,’ said Matt as Martin drew up to the security gates of a property known as the Vale Cottage. ‘Is it some form of inverted snobbery to call your home a cottage when in reality it’s a bloody mansion?’
He got out of the car and looked for a way of opening the security gates and jumped out of his skin as a voice boomed out and seemed to come out of one of the pillars. ‘Yes, can I help you?’
The voice was not unfriendly and actually came from a circle of holes in a steel plate attached to Matt’s talking pillar. He could see a set of buttons that enabled him to respond.
‘I am Detective Sergeant Pryor, the driver is Detective Chief Inspector Phelps, and we have been given this address in connection with our enquiries into the whereabouts of Simon Davidson.’
The voice didn’t reply but some mechanical device began to operate and the gates opened inwards. Matt jumped back in the car and Martin drove into the grounds of the cottage.
The drive took them past an oval-shaped ornamental pond surrounded by several mature trees and some shrubs.
‘Now this is what I call taste,’ remarked Matt. ‘Consider this in comparison with the properties surrounding Tina Barnes’ home and they come a very poor second.’
Martin nodded. ‘Yes, but this is also in a different price bracket, and I’m guessing that this set up would be something like three times the asking price of any of those. What doesn’t square with me at the moment is that one of the rumours from the riding school suggests that Davidson wiped out the family business accounts before running off with Catherine – but if that was the case they couldn’t have continued living here on a shoestring.’
Surprisingly there were no other cars parked near the front door, but there were several stone-built outhouses and Martin guessed that one or more of them were used to garage the cars.
As they got out of the car they were met by a tall, slim woman dressed in a burgundy waxed jacket buttoned over denim jeans and knee-high boots. Martin tried to guess her age but gave up; she was one of those women who aged well and could have been anywhere between forty and sixty. She hadn’t come from inside the house but from one of the buildings that in years gone by had probably housed the livestock. The place had clearly been a working farm at some time.
Matt showed his official identification, but she brushed it aside and suggested they all go inside as she had just finished bedding down the horses and needed a drink. She didn’t seem surprised to see two detectives on her doorstep and they followed her through a large but higgledy-piggledy lounge into a very modern farmhouse-style kitchen.
‘If you’ve come to talk about Simon then we could be in for a long session, so what’s it to be – tea, coffee or something stronger? I’m Fiona Davidson and Simon is my son.’
Martin wondered if he was in danger of being beguiled by older women, as this was the second one recently that he had liked. She was self-assured but didn’t come over as arrogant, and soon handed over two mugs of strong coffee and poured herself a substantial gin and tonic before asking Martin the obvious question. ‘Why are you looking for Simon?’
‘Before I go into that can you tell me when you last saw your son?’
‘Yes, of course I can. He and Melanie had lunch with us last Sunday. I haven’t seen him today but I spoke to him on my mobile just before you buzzed from the gates. If I hadn’t done I might have assumed that you were here to tell me he had been involved in an accident or something but as it was I knew he was well.’
Martin and Matt exchanged a look and remembered that they had earlier considered a very different possibility.
‘We want to go back a few years when, as we understand it, your son was involved with a woman called Catherine Romanes.’ Martin watched as the first signs of emotion showed on Fiona’s face – and that emotion was anger.
‘I was hoping to never hear that woman’s name mentioned again, and if you have come to tell Simon that one of his old flames has met with a terrible accident then don’t expect me to shed any tears. She nearly ruined my family, Chief Inspector, and if she is wanted by the police for anything it won’t come as a surprise to any of us – but what has it got to do with Simon?’
‘In what way did she nearly ruin your family?’ asked Martin without answering her question.
Fiona poured herself another gin and looked through the kitchen window onto acres of rolling countryside.
‘I was born here and my ancestors have farmed this land for generations. My husband’s business is property investment and when we married we transformed this farmhouse and the buildings surrounding it from years of neglect into what we think is our perfect home. Although my family were potentially sitting on a goldmine in terms of all this land there never seemed to be enough money for even basic repairs.
‘It wasn’t until after my parents died that our solicitors discovered all sorts of bonds and insurance policies that they had stashed away over the years and I became a very wealthy woman in my own right.
‘Simon is our only child and he went into business with his father but fell in with the wrong crowd. Oh don’t get me wrong, Chief Inspector, I don’t blame anyone other than Simon himself for his behaviour, but when Catherine appeared on the scene he became impossible.
‘We knew through the grapevine that she was a married woman, and most people seemed to think she was unstable and manipulative. He was besotted with her and apparently they hatched up a plan to run off and make a new life together, and it got as far as Simon transferring vast sums of money from the company accounts to his own.
‘I will never forget that Friday afternoon when I got a phone call from my husband Brian and he told me about serious irregularities and how the finger was pointing at Simon. He sounded worried sick and neither of us was able to contact our son as he wasn’t responding to our calls. Brian told me that it had to be Simon who had potentially bankrupted the company and we discussed what would happen when the truth was discovered.
‘We decided to use my money to restore six accounts back to their original position and my husband managed to persuade his fellow directors that there had been some sort of glitch with bank transfers. I don’t know what they actually thought but as nothing had been lost to the company they didn’t really care and it wasn’t investigated further.’
Martin wanted to ask a couple of questions but Fiona was at full throttle and so he let her continue.
‘I don’t know if Simon would have run away with Catherine Romanes if I hadn’t intervened – I just don’t know. I had barely finished agreeing certain transfers with my bank when I heard Simon’s car pull up outside this house. Of course he didn’t know that I knew what he’d done, so he just walked into the house and I heard him rummaging around in his room.
‘I wanted to throttle him and to this day I don’t know how I kept my cool, it was as if something was telling me that I was holding my son’s future in my hands and I made us both a cup of coffee. I hadn’t done that for a while because since Catherine had appeared on the scene he was hardly around.
He looked reluctant to join me and I knew he had good reason to want to get away but it really caught him on the back foot when I told him that I hoped he would be very happy.
‘Of course I didn’t know then, at least not for sure, that he was planning a new life with that Romanes woman but it was a fair guess. He asked me what I meant and somehow I calmly told him what his father had discovered and also that he had no need to worry because we had sorted it so that his theft would not be discovered.
‘During the next few minutes I saw my son go through every possible emotion and when he was sobbing with his head on this table I left him and went to be with the horses.’
‘Did he leave with Catherine?’ asked Martin.
‘No, he stayed, and that night marked a turning point in our son’s life. I know he didn’t leave the house as he got very, very drunk and I covered him with a blanket when he passed out on the sofa. Brian was still in London and so I slept on one of the armchairs in case Simon was sick. You hear of it, don’t you? People get drunk and then die when they choke on their own vomit and I was scared that could happen to Simon.
‘As you can imagine, world war three broke out when Brian returned from London the next day, and it has taken years for my husband to trust Simon again. He told us that after I had spoken to him he had been overwhelmed to think that we would risk everything we had to cover for him. He had also considered my wish that he should be happy and finally realised that his happiness would be at the expense of a man losing his wife and a little boy growing up without his mother.
‘With the courage of half a bottle of scotch he told us he had phoned Catherine and informed her it was all over. He was a bit sheepish when he explained that he made several attempts to speak to her directly but she wasn’t picking up and he had resorted to leaving her a message. To the very best of my knowledge he has not seen her from that day to this. There, that was very good. I’ve never told anyone about that black Friday but it has been very therapeutic, so thank you for listening.’
