“I’d wait,” I said. “You’re not going to lose the story to Faro, and you haven’t written about Heather O’Toole yet.”
“Heather didn’t say much that I could use.”
“Perhaps you could add interest by combining that material with your Nettie Phillimore interview,” Mac said. He waved his hand in front of him as if envisioning a headline. “‘A TALE OF TWO WIVES.’ How does that sound?”
“Like a Daily Eye headline,” Lynda said. “But I get your point: There’s something to be said for fighting fire with fire.”
Excerpt from the Professor’s Journal
June 12, 2012
I didn’t expect the red herring about McCabe’s gun to collapse so soon. But no matter. I’ve managed to plant a seed of doubt and suspicion with Heath. That’s all I need. I’ll be leaving this game soon anyway.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Widow Carstairs
“We are going to the theater this afternoon,” Mac announced at breakfast the next morning at our hotel.
“Why are we doing that?” I asked.
“Not ‘we’ as in you included, T.J.” Kate told me with an unseemly cheerfulness. “We as in ‘Mac and me.’” Don’t look at me like that, sis! It was your idea to turn my honeymoon into a vacation for four.
“Faro had some young minion - one of his vaunted Fleet Street Irregulars, I presume - drop off a pair of tickets to today’s matinee of Cloak and Dagger at the Oliver Cromwell Theatre on St. Martin’s Lane,” Mac explained. “A generous gesture, no doubt, but galling in its assumption that we have nothing better to do at three o’clock.”
“We don’t,” Kate said firmly.
“Wow, that play’s been running five years in the same theater,” Lynda said. “It may eventually outlast The Mousetrap. I’d love to see it some time.”
I kicked her gently under the table, just to get her attention. “Some time, sure.” She was getting dangerously close to looking a gift horse in the mouth.
After a murderous look at me, Lynda announced, “I found Margaret Carstairs.”
“Who?” Kate said.
“The widow of the man who supposedly killed himself four years ago in a manner quite similar to Phillimore’s departure,” Mac said. “I told you about it last night. You hung on my every word.”
“Oh, that Margaret Carstairs.”
“Anyway,” Lynda said rather heavily, trying to get the conversation back on track, “I found her phone number online and I called her this morning. As you might imagine, she was taken aback when I started talking about her husband being murdered. But when she got over the shock, she said, ‘I knew it’ and started crying. She agreed to meet us at ten o’clock at her favorite Starbucks in Mayfair.”
Mac turned pale at the mention of the global coffee chain, transparently considering it insufficiently English, but he merely said: “I salute your enterprise, Lynda. Well done!”
That wasn’t the only thing she’d done before breakfast. She’d also taken advantage of the hotel’s free WiFi to run an Internet search on Aiden Kingsley. His name popped up about every other day on The Net, invariably with superlative adjectives attached. Nettie found him “brilliant,” “savvy,” “charming,” “handsome,” “astute,” “up-and-coming,” and “energetic.” Whether her fascination was political or personal, Lynette Crosby Phillimore was definitely besotted with her favorite backbencher.
I was still chewing on that when we set off to meet Margaret Carstairs. It turned out that she worked as an estate agent and didn’t have a showing until one o’clock. Kate opted out of the venture, heading instead for the Tate Britain gallery.
About a block from the address we’d been given, Mac’s cell phone went off. It’s always amusing to see the reaction to Ride of the Valkyries on a crowded street. Mac pulled out the phone and looked at the screen, which he usually forgot to do. “It’s Inspector Heath,” he announced before putting the phone to his ear.
“Hello, Neville. How may I help you? No, never. I am quite certain. Why do you ask? All right. Good-bye.”
He disconnected. “That was most curious. Inspector Heath asked me if I have ever exchanged e-mail with Arthur James Phillimore.”
“What’s up?” Lynda asked.
“He said he may be able to tell me later.”
Margaret Carstairs had told Lynda to look for “the gal in the white straw hat.” That made it easy to spot her as soon as we walked in the door. She was a plump, attractive woman in her mid-thirties with shoulder-length auburn hair sticking out of the hat. Her dress was a kaleidoscope pattern of yellow, orange, and white. She was reading The Daily Eye.
The lead headline of the paper was ragging on the Prime Minister for forgetting his young daughter in a pub after a night on the town. Faro, as promised, had unloaded his story about Scotland Yard investigating a tip about the Colt .32 that killed Phillimore. Lynda’s piece about the two Mrs. Phillimores, picked up by Grier News Service clients around the world, had a softer edge but I thought it was more interesting to read than a tale of a lead that went nowhere. Faro also had a small sidebar about Heather O’Toole returning to the set of Dragonfly in Barbados.
“Mrs. Carstairs?” Lynda said.
“Oh!” She looked up from the paper, startled, as if she’d been concentrating. She had striking green eyes. “Yes, I’m Margaret Carstairs.” She stood up, smoothing her dress with her hands. She stood about five-seven, taller than the average American woman but shorter than most of the women in my life.
“I’m Lynda Teal. Thank you for seeing us. This is my husband, Jeff Cody, and his brother-in-law, Sebastian McCabe.”
“You were with him when he disappeared, weren’t you? Mr. Phillimore, I mean.” She went on without waiting for an answer. “I’ve read all the stories in the newspaper. I was interested because Peter worked for Mr. Phillimore.”
“And they died in very similar ways,” Lynda said. “That’s what caught our attention. You said on the phone that you always knew your husband had been killed.”
She sat down next to Mrs. Carstairs while Mac and I arranged ourselves on the other side of the table.
“I tried to tell the police.” Mrs. Carstairs sipped her cup of coffee. “They thought I was just a silly woman, hysterical because my husband was dead and I had a bun in the oven. But I knew Peter would never leave our baby and me.”
“How did it happen?” Lynda said, managing to infuse those four words with a world of empathy. “I know that this must be very painful for you. I wouldn’t open up these wounds, Mrs. Carstairs, if I didn’t think it might help.”
“You’re not opening any wounds. They were never closed.” She took a deep breath and another gulp of java. “I came home for lunch one day after showing a house. I expected to be alone because Peter never came home for lunch. I happened to be walking by his den and I noticed that the door was standing open. He usually kept the door closed because it was messy in there, so I peeked in.”
Margaret Carstairs looked like she needed something a lot stronger than caffeine, but she kept talking. I give her full points for not giving in to the sobs that were lurking. “His body was on the floor and there was a lot of blood. He’d been shot through the head.”
Lynda put her arm around the widow. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“According to a news story I read, the weapon was a .22 target pistol,” Mac said. “Did your husband belong to a gun club?”
“No, he didn’t even own a gun. He hated guns.”
“Even the .22 is illegal under British law unless the owner belongs to a gun club,” Mac mused. “He would have had to have acquired it illegally.”
“You see? Peter would never do such a thing. He was a law-abiding citizen.” That’s “subject,” not “citizen.” But it didn’t seem like the time to corr
ect her.
“People sometimes act out of character when they’re having a problem,” Lynda said, “even to the point of killing themselves. Had he been depressed or otherwise acting strangely?”
“No, he - ” She stopped. “Nobody ever asked that question because they thought I was just daft, so I never thought about it until now. He wasn’t depressed, but I did think there was something on his mind. He seemed preoccupied. I thought maybe he was just a little nervous about the baby coming. But one night - probably less than a week before he died - I finally said to him, ‘Is something bothering you, Peter?’ And he said, ‘Not anymore. It’s about work, but I’ve made up my mind what to do. I’m going to tell someone.’
“A couple of days later, he seemed more like his old self, so I said to him, ‘Well, Peter, did you have that talk?’ He knew right away what I meant, and he said yes, and it was going to be, quote, ‘a big story.’”
“Did he say anything more about the matter?” Mac pressed.
Mrs. Carstairs shook her head, giving the big hat a workout. “Not that I recall.”
“He said it was about work,” Lynda pointed out. “I’m sure you’ve read all about the collapse of Phillimore Investments and the investigation of the Ponzi scheme there.”
“Yes, and I was totally shocked. Obviously, I had no idea.”
“But do you think Peter did? Could that be what was bothering him?”
Her perfectly penciled eyebrows shot up. How this thought had apparently never occurred to Margaret Carstairs before now, I could not fathom. “I suppose it’s possible. He was a director, so perhaps he would have been in a position to know if there was something crooked about the company. But Mr. Phillimore was so kind and so generous to me and Peter Jr. - Repete, I call him. Truly, the man couldn’t have been nicer.”
Guilty conscience? Maybe Ralston was on to something with her idea that Phillimore whacked Peter Carstairs, but then felt so bad about it that he killed himself in a similar way. But wait - the gun didn’t fit in with that. The fact that Phillimore was killed with the same kind of gun that Mac owns didn’t mean that Mac had anything to do with it, but it must mean something. I didn’t think it meant that Phillimore wanted to implicate Mac - whom he’d met exactly once - on his way out of this life.
“Why do you think the police failed to take your concerns seriously?” Mac asked.
Mrs. Carstairs shrugged. “They already had a storyline and they weren’t looking for another one. And they believed the text.”
Mac raised an eyebrow. “Text?”
“Peter supposedly sent me a farewell text from his cell phone. I’ll never forget the words: ‘Good-bye, Margaret. Please forgive me. I’ll see you on the other side.’” She looked at Lynda. “Bollocks!” I later found out that this is a Britishism for nonsense. “Peter didn’t write that. Like I told that man from Scotland Yard, my hubby never called me ‘Margaret’ in his life. ‘Maggie’ was his name for me.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Death in the Afternoon
“Some vacation!” I complained on the way back to the King Charles Hotel. “I’m wrung out.”
“I know what you mean,” Lynda said. “Listening to that poor woman was emotionally exhausting. I need some down time in our room.” My ears perked up. This sounded very appealing to me. “I think I’m on to a hell of scoop,” my dear spouse went on. “But I suppose you’re going to tell me I shouldn’t write it, Mac.”
“Not yet, please,” he said. “We are on the trail of someone who has killed at least twice. The earlier instance of a suicide note by text message, cleverly avoiding the sticky issue of the deceased’s handwriting, ties the two cases together unmistakably. At this point, the killer should have no idea that we know that. That advantage is not one to be tossed away.”
Lynda sighed. “Well, I need to talk to somebody from Scotland Yard first, anyway - preferably Assistant Commissioner Madigan.” He still hadn’t returned her phone call asking for an interview about the Carstairs case.
Back at the hotel, Mac went to his room to meet up with Kate and go to the matinee. Lynda and I... well, we were still on our honeymoon.
It was some time after three o’clock - I didn’t look at the bedside clock - when Lynda’s cell phone rang, dragging me out of a deep sleep. I felt like a punch drunk boxer who hears the bell and can’t figure out where that strange noise is coming from. Lynda, being made of stronger stuff, immediately reached over and answered the pesky device. Even with her honey-colored hair in disarray she was a bonny lass.
“Yes, this is she.” She sat up. “Oh, hello, Welles.” She made a gagging motion with her finger down her throat. I reached up and tried to distract her. She swatted my hand away, but I like to think her heart wasn’t really in it. “Yes, but how did you... I see. Well, that’s very generous of you. I appreciate it.” She had a pained look on her oval face as she choked the words out. “What’s the address?” She grabbed a hotel pen and pad from the night stand. “Okay. Got it. We’ll be there. Thanks again.”
She disconnected and threw the cell phone on the bed. “That was the enemy,” she said unnecessarily as she pulled on her bright red unmentionables. Hey, don’t get dressed on my account. “I don’t believe this. Madigan never bothered to call me back, but when Faro called him he told that scoundrel that he’d talk to both of us at the same time. He wants us to meet him at his house in Upper Norwood at four o’clock.”
“That’s odd.”
“It sure is. And why would Faro go along with letting me in on this? He must have an angle.”
“Maybe he just likes you. I certainly do, my sweet.” My attempts to demonstrate this were gently rebuffed with the removal of my hands and the suggestion that I put some clothes on. Reluctantly, I did so.
Madigan’s place was a Victorian-era brick detached house on a leafy street. Faro was waiting for us on the porch when we arrived from the Tube station, a thick volume called The Napoleon of Crime under his arm.
“This is really nice of you,” Lynda said sweetly. “I don’t imagine you do many joint interviews.”
Faro bowed theatrically, no easy trick for a man of his waist size. “Consider it a favor to a fellow American, my dear lady. Besides, Andy insisted.”
“You’re friends, of course,” I said. As in, he’s your main pipeline into Scotland Yard.
“Of course. We go way back.”
He pushed the doorbell. We could hear it ring inside the house. We waited, but the door didn’t open. Faro was just about to push the bell again when we heard another noise - a loud pop, like a firecracker.
“That was a pistol shot!” Faro exclaimed.
He turned the door handle and pushed. Surprisingly, it opened.
We stood at the threshold, looking at each other. “This can’t be good,” Lynda said finally.
With Faro in the lead, we moved forward together into the house.
The door opened into a hallway, tastefully furnished with a combination hat rack and wooden bench on one wall and a seascape painting on the other. Not dawdling, we kept going until we came to a small home office at the back of the house.
Lynda squeezed my right hand in a death grip. Assistant Commissioner Andrew Madigan’s body was sprawled on the floor, his life’s bright red blood pouring out onto an oval area rug. He held a gun in his lifeless hand.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Echoes of Birlstone
“This may be a first,” Heath said about an hour later, looking down at the body. “I don’t believe we’ve ever lost an assistant commissioner before. Not this way, I mean.”
He knelt down and, wrapping the gun in his handkerchief, lifted it up to his nose.
“You’ll never convince me he killed himself,” I said.
Heath chuckled. “No, there’s not a chance of that. This gun hasn’t been fired.
Also, he was probably shot from a distance, judging by the lack of puckering on the flesh at the entry wound on his chest. The killer seems to have left by the back door, which is wide open.”
“Is that his service weapon?” Faro asked.
“That’s right, sir - Glock 26 semi-automatic, 9mm.”
Charming detail.
“Something tells me the murder weapon was a Colt .32,” Heath added dryly.
The Madigan domicile was already crawling with police. We’d called Heath directly as soon as we’d established that Madigan was as dead as he looked. The inspector had unnecessarily told us to stay put and not touch anything. But he didn’t tell us not to contact Mac. I sent my brother-in-law a text that began, “You won’t believe this, but...”
“I thought I was under a lot of pressure before, what with Mr. Roger Phillimore calling me two or three times a day,” Heath said, standing up. “This is going to make my life hell. Let’s take it from the top. What are you three doing here?”
“In my case, the possible murder of a man named Peter Carstairs,” Lynda said.
“What?” With ears his size, I figured that Heath had heard her, he was just having trouble processing it. So Lynda and I, basically by turns but occasionally tripping over each other, gave him the lowdown on Althea Ralston’s tip about Peter Carstairs and our interview with his wife.
“And since Madigan was the investigating officer, we thought maybe he could tell us something,” Lynda said.
“For instance,” I added, “why did Scotland Yard apparently never take a serious look at Mrs. Carstairs’s insistence that her husband didn’t kill himself?”
Heath looked thoughtful - or clueless. How was I supposed to know what that look meant?
“And you, sir?” he said to Faro.
The Anglo-American drew himself up to his full five-six or so. “I heard rumors of a new angle on the Phillimore fraud. I tried to pry the facts of it out of Andy, and he told me to meet him here. But he insisted that he would only talk to me and Ms. Teal at the same time.”
The Disappearance of Mr James Phillimore Page 15
