The House on Downshire Hill

by Guy Fraser-Sampson

“Yeah, I think that’s right. I seem to remember there was some sort of fight one day, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was Susan who caused it. The last thing she needed was to be protected from the boys. More like the other way round, I’d say.”

  “Apart from that fight he got into – and we understand he broke the other boy’s nose by the way – can you think of any other examples of violent behaviour by John?”

  Elizabeth took in a quick breath and stared at them one after another.

  “Here, what’s all this about? You surely don’t suspect John of anything, do you? He’s been in Canada for the last 20 years.”

  “We’re just trying to build up as full a picture as possible,” Willis cut in smoothly. “Every little bit of background helps us understand the context.”

  “Well, I’m not telling you any more about John. If you have any questions about him then you can ask him yourselves.”

  “So you will let us see him then?”

  Elizabeth hesitated, running one hand nervously up and down the other arm.

  “Like I said, he’s not well.”

  “But you said that he’s back on his medication now. So surely he’ll be on the mend, won’t he?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Elizabeth, you’ve been doing really well, and we are incredibly grateful to you for all your help, but this is a murder enquiry and we have to speak to anybody who may be able to tell us anything – anything at all – that might just be relevant. Surely you can understand that?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. All right then, you can see him tomorrow, but not here. Like I said, he’s not good with the police. You’d better come to the hotel. It’s the Palmerston in Earls Court.”

  “Okay, thank you. Would 10 o’clock be all right?”

  “Yeah, that would be fine.”

  “All right, thank you, in that case I think we can call it a day. But we may need to speak to you again once we’ve had a chance to interview John. So please don’t go away anywhere without telling us, OK?”

  •

  The team sat and looked at each other in the incident room as Desai finished her report of the interview.

  “By way of an update,” Metcalfe said during the pause, “we now have a DNA match. Our victim in the back garden is indeed Susan Barnard.”

  Collison nodded, and then asked “thoughts?”

  “Should we put John Schneider under surveillance, guv?” Evans suggested. “We know he’s been in trouble with the police before, and there’s always the chance he might do a runner when the sister tells him we want to see him.”

  “It’s a good question, Timothy. Bob, what do you reckon?”

  “It can’t do any harm, sir. After all it’s only until tomorrow morning.”

  “Very well. You organise that, will you?”

  “Right you are, guv.”

  “Now in terms of other enquiries which may be suggested by the interview with Elizabeth,” Collison went on, “it seems to me that we really need to find someone who knows the full story about Susan Barnard. Of course we can ask the parents, but I fancy they’ve already told us everything they know, and I’m reluctant to put them through it again.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” Desai said, “but if Susan Barnard was getting up to things with boys then she’s most unlikely to have told her mother about it anyway. I think what we need is one of Susan schoolfriends, somebody who knew her well, somebody in whom she might have confided.”

  “Right,” Godwin agreed.

  “Very well then. Let’s think about how we might be able to do that. Bob, why don’t you see if we can get hold of the class list for Susan Barnard’s last year at school, and we can try to trace any of the girls from that.”

  “We can try,” Metcalfe replied dubiously, “but it won’t be easy. Most of them will have changed their names at least once since then.”

  “Well then, let’s see if we can find the form teacher. They may know what’s happened to some of the class. You never know, they might even have stayed in touch with one or two of them. But somehow, we have to find someone who can tell us what Susan Barnard might have been doing during the last few days of her life. Schoolgirls don’t just end up buried in flowerbeds for no good reason.”

  “On a different point, guv,” Willis said, “we could get a photo of John Schneider and see if Rowbotham recognises him as the mystery caller.”

  “No,” Collison said slowly, “I don’t think I want to do that. I’d rather keep alive the chance of a formal ID parade, just in case we need it.”

  “But we know now that it was Conrad Taylor who killed Susan Barnard, don’t we?” Evans asked, sounding confused. “Which means that John Schneider can’t be a suspect for the first murder.”

  “No, but he could still be a suspect for the second,” Collison replied. “Granted we don’t know the exact date of Taylor’s death, but it seems almost certain that the Schneider brother and sister were back in the country by the time it happened.”

  “But if Schneider was the mystery caller,” Evans persisted, “then doesn’t that mean that he hadn’t managed to get to see his father? In which case, how could he have murdered him?”

  “Well, put it this way, Timothy. If you had managed to gain access to someone’s house and murder them, might you not then go round to the neighbour and say you haven’t been able to get in?”

  “Yes, of course. Sorry, guv,” Evans said, abashed.

  “Don’t be sorry, Timothy. These are good points and we should never be afraid to question what we’re doing.”

  Collison looked around the room.

  “Anybody have any other suggestions? No? All right then, so we interview John Schneider tomorrow morning, we concentrate on finding someone who knew Susan Barnard – knew her well – and we bring that person in for questioning. OK, Bob, carry on please, and when you have a moment, can you pop upstairs?”

  •

  “Was there something, guv?”

  “Yes, shut the door please, Bob. Now, come and sit down. Listen, I had Philip Newby on the phone earlier, but I couldn’t say anything in front of the others. There’s been a bit of a development.”

  “Yes?”

  “News from Singapore. The police there are pretty certain that the passport gang dispatched somebody to the UK to take care of Raj. Nothing specific, and we don’t know exactly when. But we do know they were prepared to murder that other informant.”

  “So that means that someone may have turned up at Wentworth House intending to eliminate Raj – some sort of professional killer presumably – and ended up killing Taylor instead?”

  “Exactly. Either because Taylor disturbed him, or maybe to put the frighteners on Raj, or maybe deliberately to implicate him as a murder suspect.”

  “There was no sign of a forced entry. Would Taylor have let this person in? We know he hated visitors.”

  “I thought about that, and I popped down the road to have a look at the front door myself. It’s a standard Yale lock with no security flap or anything. I managed to open it myself with a strip of plastic, and I’m no professional housebreaker. So access would not necessarily have been an issue.”

  “Then I guess we have yet another working hypothesis to consider.”

  “Yes, it looks like it, doesn’t it?”

  “So what do we do – to follow this up, I mean?”

  “Nothing at all. We can’t, you see, without breaching security to the rest of the team. Special Branch are going to follow this up themselves. They will let us know if they come across anything relevant to our enquiry.”

  “Well, good luck to them. It sounds like looking for a needle in a haystack. One person in a city the size of London? When you have no idea what they’re called, where they live, or what they look like?”

  “Actually, they do have a specific suspect.”

  “They do?”

  “Yes. Oh God, Bob, this is damned awkward. They’re taking a look at that translator woman, Sophie Ho.”

>   “Really? Well, OK, but how is that awkward? We never actually got her involved in the case, did we? We didn’t need to. So what’s the problem?”

  “I have to tell you this, Bob, because we’re the only two people inside the Chinese wall, but don’t for God’s sake mention this to anybody else, because it bears directly on the private life of a member of the team, and I’m desperate not to infringe on that whatever happens.”

  “A member of the team? Who?”

  “Priya Desai. You see, it turns out that the Branch have had Sophie Ho under discreet surveillance for a while now. Well – and now you’ll understand just how awkward this is – it seems that Priya and Sophie have been going out together.”

  “Well, that’s OK, isn’t it? So they meet up for a drink now and then, so what? Oh, wait a minute, surely you don’t mean …”

  Collison got up and strode to the window, staring out at the street beyond.

  “Yes, I do mean that,” he said without turning around. “The Branch are convinced that Priya and this woman are really going out together: that they’re having a relationship. Apparently Priya has stayed overnight at Sophie Ho’s flat.”

  “Wow! I would never have thought … well, you know.”

  “Yes, I know what you mean. It came as a shock to me too, though thinking about it I’m not sure why. Perhaps I’ve allowed myself to succumb to those ridiculous male stereotypical images of gay women. I hope not, but if so then I’m ashamed of myself.”

  “Well look,” Metcalfe replied, floundering for something sensible to say, “Special Branch are a suspicious bunch, we all know that. They’ve probably picked on this poor woman just because she seems an obvious link with Singapore. As soon as they look into her more deeply I’m sure they’ll realise they’ve made a mistake. After all, she’s a translator, isn’t she? Not a contract killer.”

  “That’s the worst of it I’m afraid, Bob. Singapore is a very regulated environment. One of those regulations requires you to register with the police once you reach a certain standard in any martial art. It turns out that Sophie Ho is a second dan in karate.”

  CHAPTER 24

  As Desai and Willis arrived outside the front door of the Palmerston hotel they hesitated. Desai glanced at her watch.

  “It’s only 9:45,” she said. “What you want to do?”

  “Why don’t we go and sit with Timothy?” Willis suggested. “He’s over there in the coffee shop – look.”

  Desai followed her glance and saw Evans, once again struggling not to look like a plainclothes policeman. She frowned, and then sighed in resignation.

  “Oh, all right. If we have to.”

  They crossed the road and sat one on either side of Evans, who was perched on a stool looking out onto the street.

  “Is he still in there?” Willis enquired.

  “Well, I came on at six, Sarge, and he hasn’t come out since I’ve been here. I haven’t seen either of them.”

  “Good. Now, do we have time for a quick coffee?”

  As she spoke her phone started ringing inside her bag.

  “I’ll get them,” Priya said, and headed towards the counter while Willis fished out her phone and answered it.

  It was Metcalfe.

  “Karen? I’m glad I caught you. Listen, we’ve had a report in overnight from the police in London – London, Ontario, that is – and there’s something you ought to know, both of you. They’ve had five or six unexplained disappearances of girls around the age 15 to 16 in the last 10 years or so. They’ve said straight out that they think they may have a serial killer on the loose.”

  “And is Schneider a suspect?”

  “No, they don’t have any suspects. But they’ve indicated that they would be eager to interview him should we end up being able to link him to the Barnard murder.”

  “Are there any similarities?”

  “Well, the Barnard post-mortem report – which also came in this morning – says her hyoid bone was broken, so she was almost certainly strangled. The bodies they’ve found over there were strangled too. Other than that, there’s nothing obvious.”

  “OK. Thanks, Bob. We’re in a coffee shop over the road from the hotel and we’re heading over there in a few minutes.”

  “Please be careful, Karen. I don’t like the idea of you and Priya cooped up with him in a small hotel room. I think you should try to persuade him to go somewhere else: the coffee shop maybe. I’d be happier to know that you were somewhere public.”

  “Yes, I think so too. Don’t worry anyway, Bob. We can look after ourselves.”

  Desai was by now waiting for the drinks at the end of the counter, and Willis went over and passed on the news. When the drinks arrived they headed back to Evans.

  “Wow,” he said when Willis told him what Metcalfe had told her. “So are we going to pick him up and take him back to the nick?”

  “We can’t do that unless he consents,” Willis said at once. “We’ve got no grounds at all to arrest him. And, by the way, from what Elizabeth said yesterday he’s not likely to agree to come with us voluntarily. No, I think the best thing we can do is try to persuade him to come over here. At least that way we’ll have you lurking in the background as backup.”

  Desai muttered something which sounded suspiciously like “huh”.

  “Hold-up, Sarge,” her backup said suddenly. “Isn’t that the Schneider girl? There, by the front door?”

  The two women stared across the road. Elizabeth Schneider was standing in the doorway of the hotel looking around nervously.

  “Yes, it is,” Desai said. “I think she’s looking for us. Come on, we’d better go.”

  Leaving their drinks behind, they darted across the road. Elizabeth saw them coming and took a few steps towards them as they arrived.

  “Thank goodness you’re here. Look, I told him you were coming and he didn’t like it a bit. He had a real go at me about coming forward like I did. He really hates having anything to do with the police. He wanted to leave the hotel last night and not come back. I had a hell of a job getting him to stay.”

  Desai and Willis glanced at each other. So the surveillance had been a good idea after all.

  “How is he now?” Willis asked.

  “He’s in one of his angry moods. Is there any way we could put this off ? Do it another day?”

  Willis shook her head determinedly.

  “No, I’m sorry. We absolutely have to see him. If he won’t see us voluntarily then we may have to consider taking him into custody.”

  She waited anxiously. Would the woman know she was bluffing?

  “No, don’t do that. All right then, you can come upstairs with me. But please try not to upset him, will you?”

  “Perhaps he’d be happier meeting outside the hotel?” Willis asked as she followed Elizabeth up the grubby stairs of what was really quite a seedy establishment, even by the standards of Earls Court.

  “Where?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. What about that coffee shop across the road? We were just in there ourselves and it seems quite nice.”

  “That might work. He likes coffee – real coffee, I mean.”

  They came to a door and stopped. Elizabeth Schneider rapped on it quickly and then opened it with her key. She stepped back to allow the officers to go in.

  “No, you go first,” Desai said.

  They moved in after her. The room was very small, uncomfortably so with four people crowded into it, one of whom was glowering angrily.

  “Hello,” Willis said calmly, “you must be Johann, or is it John? I’m very glad you felt able to speak to us. I’m Karen Willis and this is Priya Desai.”

  “And you’re both cops?” the man asked antagonistically, his Canadian accident much more pronounced than his sister’s.

  “Yes, we’re both Detective Sergeants, and we are investigating the murder of a man we believe to have been your father, Conrad Taylor.”

  “I can’t help you with that. I never saw my father again after w
e left Hampstead and went to Canada.”

  “Well, there’s always the chance that you might be to help us with some background, and anyway we’re also investigating the death of a young woman who was found in the garden of the house next door. From what your sister told us yesterday, we think you knew her. Her name was Susan Barnard.”

  He glanced at Elizabeth. Willis wondered how much she had told him.

  “I knew her, yeah.”

  “Look,” Willis said, “we can’t really talk in here, can we? It’s much too small. Why don’t you let us take you over the road and buy you a nice cup of coffee?”

  To their relief, he agreed at once.

  “Sure,” he said, picking up his jacket from the bed, “I’m always ready for a cup of Joe.”

  “I’ll lead the way, shall I?” Willis suggested.

  Desai fell in carefully behind him as he followed Willis out of the door. Elizabeth came in her turn, locking the door behind her.

  “Is your room the same size as that?” Desai enquired as they went downstairs.

  “That is my room. We’re sharing it.”

  Desai said nothing, but concentrated on maintaining a space between herself and the man ahead of her. She needed time within which to react should he suddenly try something. However, he seemed quite docile as they crossed the road together and went back into the coffee shop. Fortuitously, a large seating area around a corner table came free as they entered, and they headed across to it. Desai took the orders and went to the counter for the second time. If the staff found this strange, they didn’t show it.

  “So,” Willis said when they finally had drinks in front of them, “why don’t you tell us what you can remember about the day you left home with your mum and your sister?”

  “My mum was a nutter,” he said tersely, hunched over his cup of coffee and holding it with both hands.

  He tried taking a sip but it was clearly too hot to drink. He put it down on the table and gazed into it reflectively, perhaps considering his last remark further.

  “By which I mean,” he went on, “that she was almost certainly mad. She was always getting angry about nothing at all, frequently stuff that it turned out she’d just imagined. My dad used to get it really bad. She couldn’t be in the room with him for more than a few seconds before she’d start on at him about something or other. The last few years before we left he kept as far away from her as he could. Can’t say I blame him, either.”