Not a Very Nice Woman

by John Eider

The hard-backed chair proved oddly comfortable, and Grey had soon begun writing his notes of the conversation with Campbell Leigh. After half an hour though he knew that whatever he hadn’t got down by then he would have to trust to memory, and cutting the light moved to the easy chair.

  Lying there he thought deeply on the mystery surrounding the building he now quite fittingly found himself residing in. How frustrating that the body needed sleep and that the world shut down for the night, when there was so much he felt mere hours away from learning – of Stella’s marriage, and of her and Charlie’s time as Councillors. He would know it soon though; indeed may already have some of that intel waiting for him at the office if Sarah had stayed late at her desk that evening; while Cori would find her portion out tomorrow.

  Grey summed up what he had though: two people killed in different but equally brutal and simplistic ways – ways simple for this killer as they were evidently strong and could rely on overpowering with hands or killing with one blow. A woman could be just as cruel a killer, but this suspect was a man, Grey was becoming certain. The picture formed itself in all but face: tall, broad-shouldered, thick-armed. Going on their best guesses so far, then the killer could get themself into a building at night unnoticed, and could track Charlie all the way from the Cedars to the Hills Estate before striking; nor were they squeamish at death, seemingly as at liberty to get themselves out of these situations as into them, without a hint of hysteria at the horrors they had caused or panic leaving careless clues behind.

  He made another assumption: that unless they had retained terrific strength into old age then they were not of the victim’s generation; nor he expected residents of the home, which, though this was a generalisation, seemed as caring and friendly a place as he could imagine. What of the staff: Rachel, Ellie? Similarly ridiculous.

  What else could he suppose? A criminal background? There was little technique in the killer’s methods, but they were carried out quickly and cleanly, with a minimum of fuss; but where was the theft, the gain, the reason any criminal would need to risk such action? Military then? A background in battle might indeed account for their acceptance of death and calmness in killing – a soldier gone bad could be a terrifying thing. Then Grey caught himself – had the suggestion that Stella’s husband had been in the Services influenced his train of thought along this track? Anyway, he had purportedly been a sailor, and they weren’t trained to kill in close quarters, were they? And from what Campbell Leigh had said, if alive then her husband would be older than the Cedars residents by now.

  He tried to get the picture these thoughts formed into as clear a focus as possible; yet as always with such speculation he knew that it could gain nothing, leading you along as many wrong roads as right, while forming conclusions that may be swept away with the next piece of hard evidence – whatever that may turn out to be.

  The next morning he woke to find the first residents down for breakfast. Perhaps having someone fast asleep beside you as you ate was commonplace here, but still…

  Ellie, fixing trays to arms of chairs for bowls and plates to sit on, broke from this task to bring him a cup of coffee, leaning over and whispering,

  ‘We’re going to tell them about Charlie in a bit; best you’re not here, just familiar faces.’

  Grey noted that the coffee, though properly made, was in a cardboard cup. He took the hint and, taking his notes with him, left that dedicated woman to her ministrations.

  Stopping home only for a shower and change of clothes, he arrived at the station early to find his office door locked. He hoped this meant that something had been left for him, as he normally kept nothing confidential there; and sure enough upon entering found a card file left on his desk bearing a sticky note from Sarah,

  ‘Marriage details enclosed, copy of certificate in the post. Dentist’s appointment, be in later, Sarah.’

  Assuming the last part referred to herself, which given that Sarah’s teeth always seemed to Grey like two bands of ivory then he couldn’t imagine what work she needed doing, he sat down to read the folder’s contents. The print-out, taken from a computerised archive of paper documents, confirmed the name Samuel Mars and his profession: which far from sailor (always unlikely in such land-locked country) instead read “Teacher”. They had been married in the church in town in June, Nineteen Sixty-five.

  ‘You qualified in Sixty-three,’ Grey muttered. ‘You met him teaching, you married two years later.’

  ‘Am I interrupting, sir?’ This was Sarah, just arrived.

  ‘I thought you were late in?’

  ‘It is nine thirty.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is. Thank you for finding this.’

  ‘There’s more, sir.’

  He turned to the second printed page, and found the system had cleverly – if bleakly – linked the record of marriage to that of their divorce.

  ‘Nineteen Seventy-four – the year she left the Council in absentia,’ he recalled Campbell Leigh’s phrase, ‘and pitched up at Tudor Oak Independent School still under the name Mars.’

  ‘But look at the reason, sir.’

  ‘“Abandonment”; and as it’s he who lodged proceedings, then does that mean that it was she who abandoned him?’

  ‘We’ll find out when the copies of the original records arrive, boss.’

  ‘And there’s something else: I think there might have been at least one child.’

  ‘Well, we know the name and the timespan now which helps; and as we know they lived locally I’ll get going through the town records this morning, save having to send away for a copy.’

  ‘You might find the Sergeant there.’

  Just then the office phone rang, Grey answering,

  ‘Inspector Rase?’

  It was reception, ‘Inspector, there’s a Mrs Rossiter and Miss Painter here, with financial records you asked to see? They said you were expecting them this morning.’

  Raine Rossiter, with the paperwork of the flat transactions. Grey had quite forgotten about them.

  ‘Show them up, please, and ask want drinks they want.’

  ‘Very good.’

  He passed the file to Sarah, ‘Keep these safe.’ Just then the phone rang again.

  ‘I can’t answer it here.’

  ‘Leave it, sir, and it will trip over to the mess room. I can answer it there.’ And with that she left to take the message, just as the two women were shown up to the Inspector’s office.

  ‘Hello, Inspector. ‘

  ‘Mrs Rossiter.’

  ‘You remember Andrea, she helped me gather our records together.’

  Andrea was indeed the one holding the document box. Drinks and biscuits were soon brought into the sunlit office.

  So close were the public offices of Southney situated to each other, that in her short walk between the police station and library, and across the gardens that formed something of a town square, Sarah Cobb also passed the civic buildings where unbeknown to her their two murder victims had once met to debate the future of their town; a future Sarah’s generation took for granted as their unavoidable present, with the notions that the present town they lived in had ever been decided on or that different decisions might have been made back then both quite absent from her mind. The Inspector had once tagged his researcher an “Easy optimist”, and had done so with envy.

  ‘Morning,’ chirped Sarah to the librarian at the front desk. ‘Births, marriages and deaths?’

  ‘Hello, dear. I’ll buzz you through.’

  A frequent visitor, Sarah had no need now to introduce herself or explain her business, as the lady she knew by now to be the Senior Librarian took her through a pass-carded door from the public areas and down to where the town archive and the records of next-door’s registry office were kept for those who asked and were authorised to see it.

  ‘Any era in particular?’

  ‘Sixty-five to Seventy-four.’

  ‘I might know the name for you.’

  Sarah had come to regard the S
enior Librarian’s memory as a parallel archive, formed from a lifetime lived in the neighbourhood.

  ‘Mars, the child or children of Samuel and Stella Mars.’

  The woman’s face went white, ‘Well, I don’t know what anyone would want to go looking up that woman for. A boy, mid-Sixties, start here.’ She slapped a scratched dark-green filing cabinet and left the police researcher to her task.

  Brough Smith thought all his Sundays had come at once to find his wife still in bed with him as the sun poured over them to wake him that morning. An evening showerer and late riser, he had grown used to Cornelia being long-gone by the time he came around to that lazy half-consciousness that, as overseeing Regional Manager for the firm he worked for, he was under no pressure to have to rush to interrupt. The presence of Karolina in the house made his role of a morning even easier, it now reduced to an equal pleasant episode of hugs and chatter and issuing such generic instructions as “Eat your breakfast” and “Get your coat on” as the children left for school; while their combined maid and nanny did all the actual work.

  His wife’s phone ringing in the dead of night and her returning to bed in the early hours were events only half-acknowledged at the time and already forgotten, leaving her presence there now a inexplicable surprise,

  ‘Have you been fired or what?’ he issued lazily.

  ‘No, I quit. I told them my husband missed me too much in the mornings.’

  ‘Too true,’ he might have said had not some impulse even in his half-awake mind known it to be too close to what was better left unspoken. Instead he went with, ‘The maid can manage the kids’; and taking a slurred swig from his bedside glass of water, pulled the duvet over the pair of them.

  ‘It is such terribly sad news about Mr Prove’s death.’

  Raine Rossiter said this, thought Grey, as if he’d died choking on a pretzel. In the warm light of morning the horror of last night seemed a long way away.

  ‘You think it might be the same person responsible? Well, I wish you all speed in finding them.’

  ‘Indeed,’ he concurred.

  ‘Now, to the documents. I know you are more than authorised to see these, Inspector, though it does give me a shiver to bring such papers out of the office.’

  As the solicitor spoke her sidekick Andrea opened the legal box, handing Grey the records as cued.

  ‘Firstly, you asked about the will of Stella’s aunt.’

  Grey was passed what looked like a prop in a Dickensian dramatisation, a scroll bound in ribbon and which once unfurled was written in calligraphic script and sealed with a wax stamp at the top.

  ‘This was written many years before she died. You’ll see she was as thorough as her niece in managing her affairs. She had no children, nor Stella siblings, and so all went to Stella. The amount of liquid assets isn’t mentioned there, but I can tell you that as well as the flat already paid for, Stella inherited something like fifty thousand pounds, which only increased as various policies and investments matured.’

  ‘Hence how she got by on tutoring.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Next, the deeds of that first flat, and the paperwork of its transfer in accordance with the terms of the will; and here those of its later sale enabling Stella to buy the flat on the second floor. You’ll notice the prices of each were not too different, enabling her to move without recourse to the bulk of her savings…’

  Grey was no legal man himself, but could see nothing obviously wrong in the procession of documents passing before him; though he wondered why the women were going into such detail.

  ‘Here are the deeds for the second flat, and also invoices for the moving of her furniture, the transfer of insurance policies…’ On and on it went. ‘The bill of works for the GPO rerouting her phoneline; and then of course the deeds for Charlie’s flat, the costs of which, as we told you yesterday, Stella was covering for him in an act of benevolence.’

  ‘Of course, I’ve no problem with that. I’ve had it confirmed by friends that she was touched by his story.’

  ‘So, if there was anything else..? I’d be glad to get these back and locked up again as soon as possible. Of course we can arrange to have copies made of anything you may need, with promises made of their confidential keeping of course.’

  Andrea was already gathering the papers back up into the box when it clicked in Grey’s mind what they were doing,

  ‘Hold up. Put those down a second.’

  Andrea, crestfallen, loosed her grip on the papers.

  ‘Now, I’ve hardly had a chance to think of our first meeting since yesterday, and was up half the night dealing with other matters; but something niggled me after we spoke and it’s only just come back to me now seeing all this paperwork; this superfluous paperwork, for the most important document is the one you haven’t bought here to show me and which you haven’t even mentioned. The will is fine, Stella’s flats are fine, but Charlie’s…’

  ‘But Inspector, the deeds.’ Raine looked nervously at Andrea as the latter passed that last document back to the Inspector.

  ‘And what will these tell me,’ he continued, ‘given a chance to look at them properly? That the flat exists, and that someone – Stella, the Trust or even Charlie – have the leasehold? But what you haven’t brought me are the documents of the sale or the transfer of ownership; and is that because you don’t want me to see them, or that they don’t exist?’

  He saw the pain in Raine’s eyes, and deeply regretted causing it; yet her lack of answer meant he must go on, albeit in a calmer tone,

  ‘The issue that niggled me, I see now, wasn’t with Stella’s own moves and manoeuvrings around the building or even with the fact that she was also paying Charlie’s way, but that what she was paying was his Trust subscriptions, rent, service charge to the building’s owners possibly… and nothing more.

  ‘Your words yesterday, what were they? “He was given – given – a flat to rent”. But given it by whom? The Trust don’t own the building, the landlords do. The Trust only own Rachel Sowton’s flat and another they use for cooking and laundry. The Cedars is a community of private tenants; so how did Stella and your father have a flat to rent to Charlie?’

  Seeing her flinch at the mention of the elder Rossiter, Grey recognised that he was the source of his daughter’s discomfort.

  ‘Now, this trick you’ve just attempted of blinding me with paper only confirms there is something hidden here. So please, tell me what troubles you.’

  ‘There was a tenant, Miss Wood, who died – quite conveniently, you might say, though I wouldn’t – just before the whole Charlie Prove saga. She had signed the Trust agreement, but hardly lived to see it enacted. I’d met her when I visited the Cedars with my father: she was a lovely old lady, had a thumb that had deformed and couldn’t straighten. She’d lived there for years, treated the Cedars as her world, her community. She was an embodiment of the Trust spirit before the Trust was even formed; and so it seems quite natural that when she died it turned out that she had left her flat and all in it “for the benefit and continuation of the Cedars Trust”.’

  ‘You remember the exact phrase?’

  ‘How could I forget it, with the difficulty my father had of interpreting it? This was at the very start of the Trust, before we began making sure everyone had a clearly written will, that a list of closest relations was kept updated, and had had the proviso added to the tenants’ contract that in the event of a death the Trust would handle the sale of a tenant’s flat if we didn’t hear otherwise from the family.

  ‘Yet Miss Wood had no beneficiary: no husband, children, siblings – her brother had died in the War, would you believe. My father found himself in the situation of having on his hands a flat within the Cedars that no one owned; yet neither in all professional honesty was he able to interpret the phrase “for the benefit and continuation of the Cedars Trust” as meaning “willed to the Cedars Trust”.

  ‘What should he have done?’

  ‘He should h
ave referred it to the Treasury as bona vacantia.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘Vacant goods – it’s the legal term for ownerless property.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Then various processes would have been entered into which might have taken years; and which if the state still couldn’t find an inheritor could have ended in a public auction with the proceeds going to the Treasury, which is the last thing anyone would have wanted…’

  ‘…because you’d have lost control of the flat?’

  ‘…because then no one would have benefited; just some dodgy landlord somewhere probably, wanting to put three students in there, and going against all our rules of tenant acceptability. How would that have honoured Miss Woods’ wishes?’

  ‘So, Stella bullied your father into instead renting the place to Charlie, when he was never even sure it was the Trust’s to rent?’

  ‘It was a chartable act – the rent barely covered our costs of collecting it. Nor could you say it wasn’t the solution closest to Mrs Woods’ intentions. Nor could you even say that had we argued the case then the Treasury Solicitor wouldn’t have awarded us the leasehold.’

  ‘But you weren’t prepared to take the risk…’

  Her silence said it all.

  ‘So,’ the Inspector mused, ‘this ultra-orderly process for the transition of assets has so far resulted in two legal nightmares, neither as it stands resolved?’

  ‘That’s only twice in fifteen years, Inspector, and with innumerable amicable handovers in-between.’

  The three of them sat in gloomy silence, before Raine Rossiter concluded bleakly,

  ‘Anyway, I promise you it will all be cleared up within the year.’

  Grey was glad to hear it, having precisely no desire to have to refer this to Financial Crimes or whichever unit in a neighbouring city would have such a situation fall under its remit.

  She continued, ‘Forgive me for saying it, but now Stella isn’t here to block the sale then Mrs Cuthbert’s flat next door to hers can be cleared of its… foliage and offered to the next on the waiting list; while Stella’s own will is to be read after the funeral, but I can tell you now that it instructs quite clearly and unambiguously for her flat and other assets to be transferred directly to the Trust.’

  ‘And so Charlie’s flat?’

  ‘That is another matter. Once Charlie was installed then my father’s doubts became rather past-tense.’

  ‘And with Charlie gone too?’

  ‘Then as soon as he’s buried I go to the Treasury Solicitor.’

  ‘And if they ask why you didn’t go to them fifteen years ago?’

  ‘Then I can do a bad thing, Inspector: I can claim the previous decision to be one made many years ago by a now-retired solicitor and a now-deceased Trustee, their actions a best attempt at doing the right if naïve thing.’

  ‘Thank you for being honest.’

  ‘Thank you for believing me.’

  The meeting at a natural conclusion, he gestured to the door,

  ‘I’ll show you out,’ yet as he stood he had a flash of memory, saying,

  ‘”RR, No Appointment.”’

  ‘Sorry?’ asked Raine, also rising.

  ‘Stella’s diary – she had a system of initialling names. RR is you, of course, I’ve just realised; so did you know she was coming to see you on Tuesday morning?’

  ‘The morning after she died? No. I swear. Andrea, was there anything..?’

  ‘There was nothing in the book,’ the receptionist confirmed, ‘but then didn’t you just say “No appointment”?’

  ‘Would she normally have called before seeing you?’ he asked Raine.

  ‘Yes: I can be out and about, I’m not always in the office.’

  ‘Then she decided to visit you the next day, deciding after working hours on the evening before; which was the night she died.’

  ‘What can that mean?’

  ‘I don’t know yet; but when I do I swear I’ll let you know.’

  With the two women and their treasured archive box safely escorted back through reception (and refusing the offer of a Constable to drop it back at the office for them) Grey returned to his desk, where he thought awhile before chasing his other leads. The finances of the Cedars were indeed a tangled mess, with Stella and Charlie squarely at the centre of them; but there was surely not enough here to warrant a motive for murder, was there? Yet in investigating their finances he had learnt so much about them both: Stella with her determination to always do what she thought was right, and this often leaving others in difficult situations; and as for Charlie… well, Grey wasn’t sure the man could have saved himself from destitution without Stella’s help – and all this for the man she had once battled across the floor of the Council Chamber, and who as chief advocate for the new estate she so opposed must have seemed to her no less than the destroyer of her town.

  This case was getting nowhere, only into deeper waters. Opening the blinds to let more sun in, the Inspector leant his head back and closed his eyes.

  Chapter 11 – An Administrative Oversight