Not a Very Nice Woman

by John Eider

The lady was removed upstairs to the Inspector’s office, where hot drinks were brought and the doctor was attending; alongside the family liaison officer who seemed to Grey to be almost always at the station in some capacity. Cori and Grey remained downstairs in the empty interview room, nursing bad coffee and feeling the atmosphere that lingered. The room was oddly charged as though the walls remembered what had just happened, the air still reverberating Ludmila’s last words, resonant from her shaking chair.

  ‘Perhaps I do need to go on more of those courses Rose is forever being pestered to put us on,’ mused Grey. ‘“Interviewing with Sensitivity” or “Fostering Empathy”. Aren’t those the kind of titles?’

  ‘Maybe,’ answered Cori non-committedly. She didn’t like hearing him talk like this. This was no time for him to lose his nerve, she thought.

  ‘A situation like that needs more skills than I am blessed with.’

  ‘I don’t know, sir,’ reflected his Sergeant, who had something of the personal touch herself, ‘Sometimes these courses seem to suggest that if you relax a person and build up a rapport with them that there still won’t be a truth that isn’t known one moment and which needs to be made known the next. I’m not sure a simple way of saying something hard isn’t the best way, or that any way would have made it easier for her to bear just now.

  ‘Anyway, sir, time to get down to business, down to brass tacks.’

  ‘The broken vase was telling,’ thought Grey aloud. ‘He still values some memory of his mother even as he believes she abandoned him.’

  ‘There’s a conflict there,’ she concurred.

  ‘And Ludmila was touched in turn by those feelings, trying her best to replace the vase for him, when at other times she was threatening to “burn down his house”.’

  As Grey shook his head at this, Cori’s own thoughts though were more practical, she summarising,

  ‘Mars has no alibi, and has had the freedom all week to come and go, to think and plan, stay up all hours, change and wash his clothes. We know that whether he knew his mother was living at the Cedars or not, he couldn’t bear to speak of her and obviously had a lot of turmoil over his parents.’

  Grey thought of Mars’s house as his wife had described it, memories of his parents all around him but it evidently hurting him to talk about them,

  ‘I wonder,’ she posited, ‘if this freedom – time to brood, and also to get out and about unseen – is a factor in our question “why now?”’

  ‘It’s possible, but don’t these kind of crimes need a spark, a flaring point? You don’t schedule a killing for the next window in your diary.’

  She knew he hadn’t meant that to come out as flippantly as it had done; she countering,

  ‘But if he’s been desperate to do it for years… What if, once a golden chance arose, he could no longer suppress the urge?’

  ‘You’re forgetting he’s a company man, a boss, free to come in at ten, leave at two, and take a three-hour lunch if he wanted.’

  ‘But they’re all daytime hours, sir.’

  ‘But doesn’t his firm handle security? Wouldn’t that be twenty-four hours a day? He could easily explain away a disappearance from home as a visit to one of his sites. It’s a shame we can’t ask Ludmila now if he took many “business trips”.’

  Back up to speed, his mind was already again snagging, as was its habit, on certain words, phrases, fragments of conversation,

  ‘What you said back there: “wash his clothes”.’

  ‘He’s had all week, sir; he could have put them through the cycle two or three times.’

  ‘But what if he hasn’t? A wife, cleaners? I doubt he’s lifted a finger to look after himself for years. Maybe it’s ingrained?’

  ‘You think he’d just leave them for someone else to do, even his clothes from the crime scenes?’

  ‘I’m a man, Cori, you don’t know how little we try and get away with doing for ourselves. It doesn’t sound that far-fetched to me. And what of those cleaners?’ he added, pursuing his theme. ‘Have they still been coming in to look after him? Would they know his comings and going?’

  ‘Maybe not that late in the evening, I’d have thought,’ she said, unsure of this whole argument.

  ‘But they might have noticed if he’s been sleeping in late or taking charge of the washing machine.’

  ‘Checking any of this involves going back to the house, sir,’ she added as if he didn’t know, but also knowing that one of them had to voice these things. ‘Which we told him we would be anyway, sooner or later.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see what the Super agrees to.’

  After lingering over a meal in the still-open station cafeteria – his first of the day – the Inspector turned round at the table to face the young female officer who had just appeared at his shoulder.

  ‘Hello sir, a woman’s just called to leave a message for you in reception. She couldn’t stop, but said to give you this; she said that you’d know what it was, and that she’d call you in the morning.’

  Thanking her, Grey took the folded piece of paper, which he knew would be from Catherine, the social worker. There were just two words on the note: “Patrick Mars”.

  Dodging up the stairs toward the offices, he saw his Sergeant waiting to go into Superintendent Rose’s room. His own office occupied by Ludmila Mars and the female officer keeping an eye on her, a nod of the head brought Cori to instead join him in a vacant space he found further along the corridor, and to which he quickly pulled the door to after them; showing her the note in the barely lit space (for it was now early evening) and explaining,

  ‘This is from Catherine, the social worker.’

  ‘“Patrick Mars”’, read Cori on the note. ‘So he is Esther’s father?’

  Grey nodded, ‘Now we know. He did have a first wife: Maisie.’

  Cori told it to herself aloud as simply as possible, ‘Esther is Patrick Mars’ daughter. Esther is Stella Dunbar’s granddaughter.’

  So strongly had the pair of them been denying the inevitable here, ever since the visit to the Wheelwrights’, that confirmation of the fact hardly felt like news to them: the fact that here were not two broken homes, only one home doubly broken.

  ‘That would be Esther’s secret then, wouldn’t it?’ Cori mused, as if only for herself, ‘The thing not even her best friend or social worker could help her with, but only a member of her family, her biological family…’

  ‘The family that Esther’s present circumstances find her entirely divorced from,’ added Grey, ‘she living apart from both mother and father. And how quickly would you want to wait before being able to confirm such a secret fact? You certainly wouldn’t wait till the next scheduled visit to your mother, or even the end of the next school day; especially not an impetuous girl like Esther sounds.’

  ‘Point for discussion, sir: Is it conceivable that Stella was tutoring Esther without either knowing what they were to the other?’

  Grey quickly checked off possibilities, ‘Neither has a name the other would recognise, neither seem ever to have met elsewhere. Stella left Patrick growing up with Samuel when he was seven, and had had no contact with her son…’

  ‘…or his son’s family…’

  ‘…since. As for Esther, would her father have told her anything of the mother he considers abandoned him, before himself cutting all ties with his own wife and daughter?’

  ‘There are two schisms here, aren’t there. Two painful divorces.’

  ‘And it’s meant that hardly one member of the clan Mars is still in touch with any other.’

  ‘Esther was about to explode this.’

  ‘I think she might already have done so.’ He went on, ‘Our questions had been: one, when did Mars learn his mother was in town; and two, why choose that night to kill her?’

  ‘If he killed her.’

  ‘We’re surely past that point now.’

  Cori was conceding this fact too.

  ‘But what if the questions are actually: when did
either Stella or Esther learn who the other was; or if Stella knew before, why choose that day to tell Esther? Because it’s certain, however long Stella might have known, that Esther didn’t till that night, as it was obviously the shock of learning it that sent her from town in a hurry.’

  ‘Maybe Stella didn’t tell her,’ thought Cori. ‘Perhaps Esther found out on her own; and that would explain why she sought Stella out at the flat late that evening long after her lesson was over.’

  ‘God, I wish we could interview Esther this evening.’

  There was a knock on the door, it opening anyway,

  ‘I thought I saw you creeping in here,’ said Inspector Glass. ‘Not interrupting, am I?’

  ‘Not at all: just discussing recently received and very sensitive information.’

  ‘Can I share?’

  ‘The girl who was seen on the stairs that night is Mars’ daughter.’

  ‘Then that’s it then, isn’t it? What you were talking about, the link between them, the way he found out?’

  ‘Is it?’ Grey was asking Cori as much as himself; she concurring in his doubt,

  ‘But we don’t know that they’ve even spoke since the family split.’

  ‘She must have done,’ answered Glass blithely, ‘on that evening. See, it’s good to share. I’ve just solved your mystery for you.’

  ‘We were coming to tell you all.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The Three Ms are all in place,’ expounded the Superintendent once his officers were gathered around him. ‘His Method his strength, his Means the freedom he’s had to come and go unseen this week, and his Motive the emotions backed up since childhood; and now you think we’ve a way of explaining how Mars knew his mother was living at the Cedars?’

  ‘Well, we didn’t quite say that sir.’

  ‘Come on, Grey, we’ve been over this.’ Glass was agitated. ‘You told us his daughter had found out who Stella was that night.’

  ‘The daughter was estranged from him, sir. We can’t know anything until we speak to her tomorrow.’

  ‘I say we bring him in, sir, at least for questioning.’

  ‘And what do you say, Grey?’

  ‘I say wait, sir; at least until we can say for certain if anything passed between Esther and Mars that evening.’

  ‘In that I concur.’

  ‘So where does that leave us?’ asked Glass, agog.

  Rose explained, ‘It leaves us unable to arrest him without any way of proving he even knew his mother was at the Cedars to be able to go and attack her there ­– and we still haven’t the first notion of why he then went after poor old Charlie Prove. Now we’ve more than enough grounds to bring Mars in for a second interview: not least the fact that we know he’s lied to us and his alibi’s fallen through; but you all know as well as I do that timing is everything in these situations, and that bringing Mars in before we’re iron-clad can leave us running out of interview hours before we have the proof we need to charge him.’

  ‘So we leave a dangerous man on the loose?’

  ‘Not if your men are doing their jobs right, Glass.’

  ‘Well, you can count on that, sir.’

  ‘It was never in doubt.’

  ‘But surely, in the interests of public safety…’

  ‘And where’s the public safety in us finding nothing in the house, the girl being too scared to speak, he giving nothing away in interview; and twenty-four hours later having to release him, he free as a bird and knowing everything we know about him?’

  Rose concluded, ‘No, I’m sorry Glass. It’s an impossible choice, but mine to have to make. Sorry also that you find yourself with this unpleasant bit of overtime ahead of you, and the pressures of what might happen if anyone slips up; but I really don’t see any other way. Grey? Your thoughts on tomorrow?’

  Grey knew his answer was important, ‘If we get the chance to speak to Esther – and she’s a vulnerable child, so it’s no way guaranteed – then I think we can then say for certain if we have a case.’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘But I have to warn you, sir. Guilty though I believe Mars to be; from what we’ve learnt of his familial relations, and given that Esther’s mother won’t have anything to do with him, even to the point of not asking him for maintenance, then I don’t know if a daughter of his would ever want to get in touch with him, especially alone and of an evening.’

  ‘Even if it was only to confirm something as important as this?’

  Grey had to concede the logic of that point, but couldn’t convince himself,

  ‘No. Sorry sir, there it is.’

  ‘Well, it’s all speculation anyway until tomorrow. Now we’ve a question of what to do with him. Do we acknowledge that we won’t be coming to see him this evening as he’s surely expecting (after telling us that that was when his wife was returning)? Do we even tell him his wife’s here?’

  Grey shook his head, ‘Any contact could enflame him when we need him calm.’

  ‘So could no contact,’ added his Sergeant sagely. ‘And we don’t know what he has planned for tonight: a call from us might make him delay any other attacks.’

  There wasn’t one of them in the room who enjoyed this situation. Their boss considered, before answering,

  ‘Then let’s call him and make an appointment for him to come in at, say, noon tomorrow?’

  ‘And if he asks about his wife?’ asked Grey.

  It was Glass who spoke, ‘He won’t: if he suspects she’s talking to us then he’ll be too scared of what she’s saying; and if he doesn’t then he’ll think she’s just ignored him and stayed in London.’

  Grey was impressed with the deduction.

  ‘Then call him, Grey, and make the appointment.’ Rose wound things up, ‘Glass, you’ve men in place? Shifts covered?’ (The uniformed division Inspector nodded) ‘Then we reconvene tomorrow. Those that can, go home: it may be a long day.’

  Chapter 19 – Night Watch