by John Eider
As Grey mulled over those last words of Rachel Sowton’s, he remembered her admitting overhearing at least something of his conversation with Derek Waldron, and Derek’s talk of Grey’s knowing Stella better than anyone by the end of his investigation. It was almost as though these people who’d lived and worked with her for sixteen years – longer in Derek’s case – even after all this time needed an outsider to come in and explain their friend to them. That this was on the occasion of that friend’s demise seemed doubly sad; yet perhaps it could not have been any other way, and that as long as she retained that sharp and organized mind Ms Stella Dunbar would have held her secrets safe and undiscoverable. That there was anything extra to find out about her was only confirmed in the manner of her death, that someone somewhere hated something about her so lividly to want to end her days by crushing her neck in their hands; and perhaps also in the over-orderly manner of her life, the total absence of history, and in the little blue bear and man’s pocket watch buried so deeply within her personal possessions.
As Rachel Sowton had left through the door to her flat so Sergeant Smith now exited from the one beside it and which led to the dayroom; or rather came out only far enough to gesture to her boss to join her inside,
‘I didn’t think you were ever coming back.’
‘How are things in there?’ he asked.
‘Interesting, but not very much use to us, I’m afraid.’
‘What about Charlie Prove? Is he in there?’
‘That’s the worst news, sir: the doctor’s been back and has had to sedate him – he won’t be available to speak to till the morning.’
‘That is a pain. So,’ whispered Grey as they approached the dayroom’s entrance, ‘any contenders?’
But the view when they reached the slid-back double-doors answered the question for him, as he cast his eye not over the collection of aging dockers and brooding Suez veterans his imagination was throwing up as candidates for the heinous crime; but instead the kind of gentle, aged folk that might be suggested by their being able to afford to spend the autumn of their years in such comfortable surroundings. Indeed, the only pair of hands sturdy enough to have applied that hold to Stella Dunbar’s neck were owned by a particularly well-developed orderly who moved among the scattered chairs. The room, glass-walled and -roofed and cantilever-blinded was newer than the building it extended from and in its elegant furniture, perfumed air and views of wildlife in the garden was more Continental hotel than the Health Service waiting room he had half-expected.
‘Hello,’ Grey nodded to the residents, as attention turned to his arrival. ‘I’m Inspector Rase, and I’m the senior investigative officer. I want to thank you all for giving statements to my colleagues, and to say how much we value your assistance at such a sensitive time.
There was a general murmuring of goodwill, before a man went to rise as if to speak.
‘Please don’t get up,’ said Grey as he and Cori moved over to him and sat down.
‘As I said to your delightful Sergeant here,’ the man’s eyes twinkling as he glanced at her, ‘I’m sure I speak for us all when I say how shocked we are at such an act occurring under our roof; poor Stella, who could ever have done such a thing?’
‘That’s what we hope to find out, sir.’
‘Carstairs,’ he announced and shook Grey’s hand.
‘Was Ms Dunbar’s flat near yours, sir?’
‘No; my wife has difficulty with the stairs, so we took one on the ground floor.’
‘Of course, you don’t have a lift. I don’t suppose you knew Stella before she lived here?’
‘No.’ He suddenly looked serious. ‘I don’t think any of us did.’
‘And how would you describe her to me, sir, as one who never knew her?’
‘A fine woman, but a stern one; brooked no nonsense, and she earned my respect all the more for that.’
‘Well, thank you again for your help,’ said Grey and went to rise.
‘Inspector, before you go, could you tell me: will you be putting a policeman here tonight?’
A new voice crept into his ear:
‘A lot of them are asking for it, Inspector; but as long as we don’t know why Stella was killed…’
Grey looked up to see it was the orderly who was talking to him, on her way past with a coffeepot in one hand and three stacked dirty bowls in the other.
He nodded, confident he could square the overnight posting of one Constable with the Superintendent.
‘You have their statements?’ he asked Cori as they stood to leave, she shaking a folderful of papers in response.
‘Come on, let’s get some space.’
They got as far as the car, where with the heater and map light on (for the afternoon was drawing in) they sat in silence; Grey finally speaking,
‘”We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’”
‘Sorry, sir?’
‘General MacArthur said that. It’s one of those terms you hear all the time but which I’ve never understood: like “self-parody” or “the exception that proves the rule”.’
‘I’m afraid you’ve lost me, sir.’
‘Sorry; it was just something Derek Waldron told me: that Stella vetoed any attempt to get that end flat sold, the one with the cheeseplants.’
Alone at last and with a moment to breathe, they quickly caught each other up with all they’d learnt since the flat search.
‘So she blocked the sale?’ asked Cori.
‘Apparently she was terrified of who she’d get living next door, of they invading her corridor space; even when their Trust Committee vets new applicants.’
‘A fear response?’
‘Yes, when so much else about her suggests she was in complete control.’
Cori mused, ‘It’s interesting, you talking of her having a veto on what’s meant to be a committee – I got a definite impression from the residents that Stella was someone you’d look over your shoulder for before mentioning her name.’
‘Yes, definitely not one among equals.’
‘But I can understand her fear – I had a flat before I met Brough, and you can make it as homely as you like but you can never quite forget that you don’t own the building, that you can’t go far without sharing space with others and having to trust them. I love our house, I could never give it up now.’
‘In Paris whole families live in flats. They don’t even own them, don’t pass any property on to the kids. Still, this fear’s the only chink in Stella’s armour that we’ve found till now – we should bear that in mind.’
‘Stella this, Stella that… you’re on first-name terms now?’
‘Sorry?’ he was still deep in thought.
‘You way you talk it’s almost like you knew her.’
‘After today I’m not sure I didn’t – you know both Derek Waldron and Rachel Sowton told me I was her friend now, as if her memory had been placed in my hands. Anyway, I think I’m beginning to take to our Stella Dunbar. I’ve always warmed to cold people; don’t ask me why. I think it’s an admiration for stoicism, the effort it takes.’
Cori chuckled, ‘You make me laugh, sir.’
‘God, what a pair to have around in a crisis though: that Derek Waldron; and Charlie Prove sounds even worse.’
‘They’ve had a tough day, sir.’
‘But honestly, you think at a time like this they’d pull themselves together.’ Even as he said it it sounded harsh.
‘But these are the very times that people fall apart.’
‘We don’t.’
‘Well, that’s why we do the job we do.’
‘You’ll be Superintendent one day with a logical mind like that. So,’ he gathered up the arguments, ‘the major players, her friends: what did you make of them?’
‘Well, I saw Derek Waldron in the dayroom after you’d finished with him. He looked a bit shaken, I must say, I don’t know what you’d been doing with him. He just seemed like a very genuinely upset person, and has given us our only witness statem
ent of interest.’
‘Yes, the girl on the stairs. So, Rachel Sowton?’
‘I don’t think I saw her again after she left us at the third floor flats. You were rather hogging her, I was told – didn’t the pair of you go for a walk?’
‘We bought oranges.’
‘That didn’t do Marlon Brando any good. But from third-party accounts, she is an excellent Duty Manager – tireless, on call twentyfour-seven, even too-hard a worker – and no one here has a bad word to say about her.’
‘Not quite twentyfour-seven – she was out that evening.’
‘Yes,’ Cori rustled the papers. ‘She was one of the first to give a statement before we got here. She was out last night between eight thirty and one am, though she wouldn’t say where she was, only that she was in town and went straight to her ground floor flat afterwards, where no note had been left by the orderlies of anything requiring her attention, so went straight to bed.’
‘And that leaves Charlie Prove. You’ve seen him?’
‘Yes.’
‘A contender?’
‘Not big-big, but solid-shouldered. Of all of the men here I’d guess he’s the one strong enough. But…’
‘Go on.’
At these words Cori said quietly, ‘You haven’t met him yet, have you, sir.’
‘No, and won’t get to any time soon if the doctor keeps needing to sedate him. I do know he reacted so badly when they found her that Derek Waldron half-wished it had been Rachel Sowton’s sorry lot to have to find their friend’s body alone.’
‘Well I can’t say about any of that, sir, only what I saw with my own eyes, when Charlie came down to the dayroom later.’
‘Which was? Spare no detail – fact, not analysis.’
‘Well, I was with the Constables, going through statements, talking to residents, when in he came to sit at one end with people who must have been close friends. Ellie brought him coffee…’
‘Ellie?’
‘The orderly. You spoke to her, with Mr Carstairs?’
‘Oh yes, of course. Carry on.’
‘I caught Ellie’s eye and called her over, and she confirmed it was Prove. Only, no sooner had I got up to approach than he was suddenly crying, making this noise like a screeching that you wouldn’t credit, and hugging a poor old dear in a way I thought might break her in half. Ellie and another orderly went to soothe him and took him away, only for the doctor to arrive soon after and put him under again.’
‘So you didn’t get a chance to talk to him?’
‘No; and going through these papers it doesn’t look like anyone else has either.’
‘So, he’s the last person in the place to give a statement. Interesting timings too, not crying till he saw you there, and saw you were looking right at him.’
‘Yes, I wondered if he feared being interviewed.’
Grey wasn’t sure this was entirely what he was getting at, but then remembered the man’s history and felt bad,
‘Yes, you’re probably right. There are things I’ve learned about Charlie Prove today that I need to tell you now before I have a chance to write them up; most importantly, that he reportedly had a daughter who was killed, possibly on the Hills estates.’
‘Oh my. That might have been the last time he spoke to the police.’
‘It might have been the last time he found a body. A couple of other nuggets too: such as did you know that it was Stella who brought him to the Cedars, that she had known him in some capacity before he arrived here, and according to Derek Waldron, might even have been helping with his bills?’
‘And here I was doubting him,’ lamented Cori.
‘Oh, I think we have our doubts on all of them.’
‘I suppose it’s our job to doubt people.’
‘Quite right; and make no mistake, there’ll be one person we meet in the course of this for whom all doubts will prove right.’
‘You don’t thing the murder was in-house though?’
‘What do you think?’
After previous postings where she’d been little more than tea-maker and note-taker, it had taken some getting used to to have her senior officer ask, in all sincerity, what she thought about a case. She had made the decision before now that were she to achieve that rank herself (as she kept being told she would do) that she too would encourage her Constables and Sergeants in this manner. Yet on this occasion, she hadn’t much to offer,
‘Well, I think it’s too early to plump for one theory or the other, sir; but chancing my arm, we know that the schoolgirl didn’t kill her, so that leaves the killing earlier or later than ten; later if we go with the pathologist’s preliminary estimate.’
‘Well let’s hope so, as the other scenario leaves the girl running away after finding the body.’
‘Derek Waldron said she might have been upset when he saw her,’ remembered Cori from her own interview.
Grey considered, ‘But not hysterical, not screaming. She’d have gone and told someone. So if not ten, then what time?’ he asked rhetorically.
‘I’d say at least a half an hour later,’ said Cori leafing through the statements, ‘as ten was when half of these people went up…’
‘… and so no one could have gotten up and down those stairs at bedtime without falling over residents and orderlies. No, no outsider could reasonably have done it at that time.’
‘So,’ she surmised, ‘the attack was either later, or committed by someone they’d have expected to see on the stairs at that busy time, popping in and out of rooms, only disappearing for a moment.’
‘I’d say that’s the nub of it. You know,’ he reflected, ‘Rachel Sowton has a theory of her own: that Stella’s routine should have seen her in bed by this time, and so if she was killed later then something had already happened to keep her up.’
‘To do with the schoolgirl? After all, she wasn’t meant to be there so late.’
‘Maybe, maybe. What do I know? We know nothing about the victim yet, and less about her friends. Where is that Holmesian logic when you need it?’
Cori started the engine.
‘And I’ll tell you another person we’ve seen today,’ continued Grey, ‘with the strength to hold a person still and throttle them.’
‘Not Ellie, the orderly?’
‘You said yourself, Cori, it’s our job to doubt people.’
‘But I spoke to her, sir; and had you had a chance to have done properly then you’d know she loves those people like a mother, she couldn’t do a thing to harm them.’
‘Fair enough. As you say, too early to plump for just one theory.’
Cori moved the car off along the empty afternoon roads.
‘These trees are wonderful, aren’t they?’ suggested Grey for not the first time that afternoon, as they moved along Cedars Avenue.
‘I don’t know why you don’t move in, sir. I’m sure they’d have you; and Stella was only in her forties when she came here.’
‘Well you can mock – you’ll have your kids to look after you. Who’ve I got? I’m sure I wouldn’t mind a woman like Rachel Sowton having my wellbeing in mind.’
‘You’re barking up the wrong tree there, sir,’ answered Cori; but Grey was too distracted to question her meaning, and she didn’t elaborate.
Chapter 6 – Raine Rossiter
