The Frame - from the author of the Sanford Third Age Club (STAC) series (A Feyer and Drake Mystery Book 2)

by David W Robinson

  She drew it around her shoulders. “What about you?”

  “They breed us tough in Howley. I’ll survive.”

  Silence reigned for long moments, each lost in their individual thoughts. It was Sam who broke it.

  “If Rachel didn’t kill Barbara Shawforth, then she didn’t murder Olivia Bradley or Alex Walston. So why have they been killed?”

  His answer came without hesitation. “To shut down your investigation.”

  The truth of the observation struck Sam at once. The Shawforth killing was a cold case, the simplest way to close it down was to bring it to a successful conclusion, i.e. charging someone – anyone – with the murder.

  “Naturally, the same argument applies to Rachel Jenner.”

  Drake’s second statement, honed her attention and he went on.

  “She may have killed Olivia, she may have murdered Walston, but very carefully left no physical evidence of such. You pursue her, she accuses you of harassment, she perhaps secures a larger compensation settlement, but ultimately, the aim is to get you to leave her alone. My gut feeling, based on observation, is that she was railroaded four years ago, but I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before.” He smiled weakly. “Mine is not a precise science.”

  “Whereas forensics is, and there was no argument with those two pieces of evidence which convicted her: stains on the bed linen and the blouse.”

  Drake’s forehead creased into a frown. “People keep talking about the stains on the bed linen which yielded her DNA. If it was seminal fluid, it would have been mixed with Alex Walston’s, yet the reports insist it was only sweat?”

  Sam agreed. “And if, as Rachel suggested, she had been there the day before and Pearson had not changed the bed linen, there would have been a mix of fluids from him and her.”

  “Buried in a welter of similar fluids shared with Barbara.”

  Sam shrugged, unwilling to get into the argument. “Whatever. It’s too late to get them to re-examine the traces. Four years. They would have decayed beyond even our science.”

  Drake’s brow knitted again, deep in concentration.

  “Whatever it is, Wes, get it said.”

  “I can’t, because I haven’t properly formulated the theory. All I can say is that we – correction – you should be speaking to Leonard Pearson again, and you really need to bring him into the station, put him under pressure. If anyone’s going to crack, it’s him.”

  Sam checked her watch. “I’ll bear it in mind. For now, I’d better get back to the coalface.” She stood up and passed his jacket back to him. “Dinner could be on tonight, if you still wanted.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  They made their way back into the building, Sam to the interview room, Drake to the observation room. As before, the audio was switched on and he listened through headphones.

  From the off, Hayley Killeen was in full flow, spending much of the time on her feet, shouting at the police, screaming harassment at them. When questioned, Rachel maintained her equilibrium and answered factually, and the only emotion she showed was anger, and then only now and again.

  She insisted that as on the day before, she had not left her bedsit all night, but she was unable to corroborate it, and when challenged on the possession of a firearm, she delivered a scornful laugh, demanding to know where she was supposed to get the money to buy an illegal gun. Eventually, she was released under caution, and ordered not to leave Landshaven without letting the police know where she was.

  As they were coming to the end of the irascible interview, Sergeant Czarniak stepped into the observation room.

  “Can I help, Paul?”

  “Sorry, sir. I need to speak to the boss, urgently.”

  “Repeat, can I help?”

  “No, sir. I’m sorry. The information’s confidential, but it might be significant.” Czarniak leaned over the control console and switched on the microphone. “Apologies, ma’am, it’s Paul Czarniak. I need to speak with you urgently.”

  Sam was not wearing an earpiece, Drake guessed that the noise must have boomed around the interview room. She turned in her seat, looked at the observation glass, nodded, and then left the room while Barker continued to read the conditions of release to Rachel.

  A moment later, Sam appeared in the observation room.

  “What is it, Paul?”

  He glanced worriedly from her to Drake and back again.

  “Whatever you have to say, you can say it in front of Mr Drake.”

  “Mr Walston’s car has been found, ma’am, in a ditch on the Harmiston Road, about three miles out of town. Front tyre blown out.”

  “By pistol shot, I assume?”

  “Probably.”

  Sam sighed. “All right. Rustle up a forensic team and get them out there, oh, and a wrecker.” As Czarniak left, she turned her attention to Drake. “Have you learned anything watching Rachel?”

  “Nothing I didn’t already know. Harmiston Road?”

  “A back lane which leads inland. Nothing out that way other than a country club, and that’s ten miles along the road, so why Walston would need to be there, I don’t know. Unless he was hijacked.”

  Drake’s frown deepened. “His people said he was on his way to a business meeting. Sam, would you mind if I went out to his office, and poked around?”

  “No. We need to talk to his staff, anyway, so I’ll be sending Dominic Larne out. I’ll make sure he knows to expect you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Pamela Normington, the senior member of Walston’s small staff, was uncertain about allowing Drake access to her employer’s office, until Larne assured her that it was permissible.

  Left alone while the sergeant spoke to the staff, Drake ambled upstairs and into the generous space of Walston’s private domain.

  It was not significantly different to his place at Howley College. Box files arranged around the shelves, all labelled and stacked in date order, a couple of comfortable chairs, Newton’s Cradle on one corner of the modern, pale teak desk, and an executive, tilt and swivel chair in black leather behind the desk, close to the room’s only window.

  It was, however, conducive to work rather than idling away the hours. That solitary window looked out onto back streets, rear yards, and the kind of terraced housing common to towns like Landshaven. Like the view of Coronation Street as often seen on the credits, but without the basking cat, the overall impression anything but inspirational.

  The desk was untidy. The only clear space was the centre, where a laptop stood. Around it, files were stacked here and there, piled high in the trays, the modern, cordless telephone cast to one side, a pad of post-it notes, the top one blank, dropped haphazardly in front of a pencil holder, which in turn contained a range of cheap biros and pencils, a couple of coasters, upon one of which rested a half empty cup of coffee, an ashtray – a souvenir of Rabat – littered with cigarette ends, paperclips and, of all things, a nail clipper, finally, where the blotter would normally be found was an A4 sketchpad, the top sheet stained with a dusting of cigarette ash but otherwise clean. It spelled out Walston’s self-indulgent arrogance; as well as considering women to be there for his pleasure, he did not give a fig for anti-smoking regulations.

  When Drake checked the drawers, he found them equally untidy, one of them stashed with packs of cigarettes (none of which bore the ‘UK duty-paid’ sticker) and lots of disposable lighters in packs of ten. In the bottom drawer, he found prescription drugs, amlodipine 5mg and losartan 100mg, from which he deduced that Walston suffered from high blood pressure – one of the known side effects of smoking. In the third and final drawer, he found a plethora of IT equipment: memory sticks, USB hubs, a couple of web cams, both with USB cables, a freestanding microphone, and old software CDs, some of which he recognised, others which he had never heard of.

  On a nearby shelf stood a photograph of a woman in her late forties, a blonde who had once been attractive but whose eyes were red rimmed, bagging, her jowls hanging, mouth tu
rned down. He guessed it was Walston’s wife, a woman who – according to the Landshaven police – was an alcoholic. He wondered idly how she would react to the morning’s news. Would she spiral down into a fit of grief, hit the bottle, or both?

  He picked up the telephone and dialled 1471, and it returned a number which meant nothing to Drake, but the dialling code, 0121, indicated a Birmingham exchange, and the call had come in at noon the previous day.

  “He was on his way to a business meeting.”

  Pamela Normington’s words when they asked to see Walston at four the previous afternoon. It was feasible that he could be meeting someone from Birmingham. Four hours was ample time to get from the West Midlands to Landshaven, or York, or Hull. But there was something about the reason for his absence which did not ring true.

  Had he left another clue?

  What Drake knew about web design could be written on the back of an envelope, and he guessed the large sketchpad would be necessary for roughing out artistic ideas, and possibly flowcharts and costings.

  He took a pencil from one of the holders and rubbed it across the top sheet. Nothing. It had not been used.

  He lifted the lid on the laptop, and switched it on. For an IT professional, Walston was careless. Drake expected a password, but there was no requirement for one. He found nothing that made much sense in the documents, nor the web history, but when he opened the photographs, bells rang immediately.

  Amongst the images there were plenty of Walston, almost invariably with a woman, and he readily recognised Barbara Shawforth amongst them. What interested him most, however, was Walston’s appearance. Without exception, he was wearing denim jeans, expensive trainers, and an open-necked shirt.

  He shut down the machine, and mentally re-ran the video Sam had received, in which Walston was wearing the same (or similar) shirt. A quick call to Sam confirmed that the dead man was found dressed in jeans and trainers. What kind of man would go to a business meeting clad in the same garb he employed for his assignations with various women?

  He left the office, returned to the ground floor and with Larne’s assistance, questioned Pamela Normington again.

  “I don’t think it’s right for me to say anything against Mr Walston.”

  Larne appeared as if he was about to lace into the woman. Drake was more patient. “Ms Normington—”

  “Mrs Normington. I’m married.”

  “I beg your pardon. Mrs Normington, your employer is dead. He was brutally murdered. No one is asking you to sully his memory, but he did have a reputation as a playboy. According to Chief Inspector Feyer, he was found wearing jeans and trainers. I’m a businessman myself. There is no way I would attend a business meeting dressed like that. He was going to meet a woman, wasn’t he?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, Mr Drake, sir, he was on his way home to change. If he was meeting any woman, none of us here would know anything about it.”

  Drake returned to the office, sat in Walston’s seat again and tried to put himself in the man’s place. He was here, pottering with his day’s work – whatever shape that took – possibly thinking about the murder of Barbara Shawforth now that the news was full of the reopened investigation, and he received a phone call. It was not, however, from a business associate or potential client, but a woman. Why didn’t it register on his office phone? Because it would not come to that number. It would be to his mobile; his private phone. The police had that… did they? He would need to check with Sam.

  His eyes fell upon the post-it notes. Not unusual to find the top one clear but had he…

  He took a pencil again, and scrubbed it lightly over the top sheet. Something began to show through. Doodles. First a square… No, not a square, a pentagon, then a large, neatly-drawn asterisk, the first letter of a word, C but blocked out to make it a three-dimensional shape. He rubbed the pencil across, more letters appeared: H, R, I, S… CHRISSY.

  He began to search the desk once again, looking for a personal directory, but he mentally cursed himself. If Chrissy was a lover, leaving her details lying around his desk would be the last thing Walston would do.

  He returned to the ground floor where Larne was finalising his statements.

  “Mrs Normington, who is Chrissy?”

  The woman shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Drake sighed. “Do we really have to go through this again? Just to remind you, we are trying to trace your boss’s killer. Now who is Chrissy?”

  Pamela Normington returned his sigh. “The only person I can think of is Christine Villiard. Mr Walston did have a… thing with her, but it’s a good few years ago, before she was married. She was Marc Shawforth’s PA, and that was about the time when Mr Walston was negotiating the contract with Mr Shawforth. She got married a couple of years later, and to my knowledge, gave up her job to help her husband on their smallholding.”

  “Thank you.” Drake concentrated on Larne. “It’s a long shot, but I think he had a call from this Christine Villiard yesterday, and she was the one he was going to meet, probably at Harmiston Country Club.”

  Pamela protested immediately. “Oh, I don’t think so. I said, they were history.”

  “And I think you’re wrong, Mrs Normington.” Once more Drake addressed Larne. “Speak to Sam Feyer, see what she thinks.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The time was coming up to one o’clock when Drake climbed back into his car. Where next?

  His visit to Walston’s office told him nothing the police would not eventually discover, possibly just as quickly as he. The matter of the man’s murder concerned Drake only in passing, and only then because of his links to Barbara Shawforth on the day of her death. Nothing had brought him any closer to understanding the motive behind Barbara’s murder.

  He made a U-turn on the broad road, making his way back to the town centre, and switched the focus of his attention slightly off centre, concentrating on Barbara as a person rather than a victim.

  When speaking to Rachel Jenner, he had asked whether Barbara charged for sex, and Rachel replied offhandedly. She didn’t know, but Barbara was always short of money, so it wouldn’t surprise her. The train of thought prompted his recall of her presence in the Trafalgar on the night Kylie Griffiths had disappeared. The pub had a reputation as a popular watering hole with the sex workers. Why would Barbara Shawforth be there?

  From Stanhead Road, he followed the inner ring road, turned down Town Hill, to the seafront, and parked in the pay and display area alongside the harbour.

  The sun made occasional appearances through broken cloud, and the seafront was lively by comparison to the previous day when rain kept most people indoors. Now the daytrippers, holidaymakers, and locals, thronged the pavements, and the beach was busy with people lounging in deckchairs, youngsters playing in the chilly shallows, an impromptu game of cricket close to the edge of the sea, and in the distance, close to the spa complex, dogs romping along the sands. Food vans, ice cream stands, candy floss hawkers, were doing brisk business, the tempting aroma of fish and chips mixed with the salty sea air, and the whole was orchestrated by the joyous cries of children, and the electronic cacophony coming from amusement arcades on the other side of the road.

  The scene called to mind the many times Drake had visited Landshaven during his youth and teens, a part of his life when everything was right with the world, a time he yearned to revisit; a time before the darkness which had engulfed him since the spring.

  The Trafalgar stood adjacent to the Blue Dolphin snack bar where Sam, Czarniak and he had taken an unsatisfactory lunch the previous day.

  The pub appeared to be built of rough, grey stone, but from this distance, Drake could not tell whether it was genuine or cladding tacked onto the same red brick construction as the nearby buildings. The mahogany framed windows were leaded, the glass frosted, allowing drinkers to partake of their favourite tipple away from the prying eyes of the world outside.

  In common with most modern pubs, there was no swinging sign
outside, but above the door was a plaque with a picture of Nelson and in the background a ship which could have been HMS Victory, the Temeraire or any other sailing ship of the late 18th/early 19th century. The windows yielded only a fuzzy view of the outside world, and when he entered the lounge bar, he found the place enjoying a moderate to brisk trade for a Wednesday afternoon, but with the time at a quarter past two, the early dock shift would have just finished work.

  Not particularly well decorated or even warm and inviting, Drake could nevertheless imagine the pub becoming crowded at the height of the summer season.

  At least the place had dispensed with the traditional horse brasses, in favour of equally trite and hackneyed items of a nautical flavour: a ship’s compass, barometer, a sailing ship’s helm, one or two reproductions of famous naval paintings, and a model cannon which, when he checked it out, was bolted to the black bar top.

  He ordered a glass of beer, and while he waited for service, he glanced around the room. It was busy. Most of the tables were taken, and looking through the service hatch to the other bar, he could see young men playing a game of darts. Music came from a jukebox attached to the wall just inside the door, and the clack of pool balls knocking around the table reached his ears.

  In one corner, furthest from the door, was a clutch of women, all of them skimpily dressed, all aged somewhere between twenty and thirty-five. He had absolutely no grounds for believing that they were local prostitutes. For all he knew, they could be a hen party, but there was no other group so exclusively dressed.

  Collecting his beer, he ambled over to the corner where they sat.

  “Good afternoon. I’m—”

  “Filth is what you are.”

  The comment, spat out with an attitude of sheer scorn, came from a thirty-something redhead, tucked into the corner furthest from him. Her pale lemon dress was dangerously short, legs crossed, one knee over the other, baring an obscene amount of thigh. Ice blue eyes speared him with daggers, and her small mouth, the lips full, was screwed up in a scowl of distaste.