The Case of the Missing Letter

by Alison Golden

  Janice sipped her coffee. “Anything interesting happen last night?” she asked.

  “Mrs. Hollingsworth, over by the library, called to report a ‘suspicious character’ again, but I’m not certain she’s not seeing things. She is ninety, after all.”

  “What kind of character?” Janice said.

  “She doesn’t say exactly. But I can’t not go out, can I? Not after the break-in at the museum. She’s called two nights last week and three this. I drive out there, only to find the place deserted, and no signs of anyone, suspicious or otherwise. All I see is the new librarian closing up for the night.”

  Janice shrugged. “Perhaps that’s it. She got confused. Old age always comes at a bad time.” It wasn’t unlike some of Gorey’s older residents to become concerned by people they didn’t recognize.

  “I’m thinking of getting Barnwell to stake out the area and deal with it once and for all.”

  “You’ll really put the wind up her if you do that,” She leaned over his shoulder. “So, what’s on the menu this morning?”

  “I’m going to re-read the pathology report on the night watchman at the museum,” Roach said. It was frustrating them all that the evidence relating to the break-in and Nobby Norris’ death pointed nowhere in particular.

  “The DI’s giving you some more forensics practice, is he?”

  “I guess,” Roach demurred. In truth, he had come close to begging Graham to let him read and digest the report.

  “So, what do we finally know about poor old Nobby?”

  Roach finished a note he was making on a legal pad. “He had a heart condition, though it seems undiagnosed and untreated,” Roach told her. “Tomlinson found signs of hardened arteries, and the levels of ATP in his blood indicated that he was under tremendous stress when he died. But here’s the thing, we can’t say how or even if anyone else was involved in his death. Nobby could have just happened to keel over on the same night the museum was burgled. A coincidence.”

  Janice examined the file briefly. “I thought the DI was training us not to believe in coincidences? And we did see someone on the CCTV,” she reminded him.

  “Yeah, you’re right. But we don’t even have a suspect. We’re nowhere in this case.”

  “Are there signs of a struggle?” Janice asked.

  “There’s no bruising to indicate defensive wounds or that Nobby might have hit anyone,” Roach said. “Just the one injury to his left temple, where he hit the desk. But that wasn’t enough to kill him. It was the heart attack that did for him.”

  Janice sat on one of the plastic chairs opposite the reception desk. “Alright, let’s think about it. Say that we’re burgling the museum, and we know there’s a guard. What do we do about him?”

  Roach closed the file. “Surprise him, tie him up, and gag him.”

  “Incapacitate him, in other words,” Janice said.

  “Right. Then burgle the museum’s treasures to our hearts’ content.”

  “But say for a moment that Nobby wasn’t in the mood to be tied up, and he fought back.”

  “But there’s no evidence. We can’t prove that,” Roach warned.

  “Hmm. Are we sure there was only one intruder?” Janice asked.

  Roach was in the middle of answering, “We’re really not sure of anything,” when the red phone rang. “Oh, hell.” He lifted the receiver and grabbed his pen. “Gorey Police.” He wrote quickly and flashed Janice a worried look before mouthing, “Get the boss.”

  DI Graham swore. That reputation he’d been gaining for engineering a big drop in the local crime rate had just been shot to pieces. “I’m not far from the crime scene now. Meet me there, would you? Have Roach hold the fort.”

  “I should say, sir,” Janice told him, “that Constable Roach is very keen to attend.”

  The DI’s reply was delayed by some labored breathing.

  Harding asked, “Are you running to the crime scene, sir?”

  “Yes, if you must know,” Graham panted. “And I wish the call had come in a little more than a few minutes after I’d finished one of Mrs. Taylor’s quite magnificent breakfasts.”

  Janice pictured the Detective Inspector dodging morning shoppers on Gorey’s high street, having already pelted down the hill from the White House Inn. “I’ll be at the victim’s workshop in a few minutes, sir. See you there,” she said.

  “Roger and out.” Graham cursed the weight of the bacon, eggs, and black pudding he had consumed not fifteen minutes earlier and pressed on until he saw the sign for Steadman & Barrios. “Of all the places,” he muttered, “for a violent incident. Not a pub, or a nightclub, but the workshop of a high-class furniture maker.” He puffed and made a mental note to think again about buying a car. Laura hadn’t hesitated in that regard, he’d noticed.

  When he reached the workshop, Sergeant Harding had already arrived in the marked police vehicle. Graham caught his breath and waved the sergeant inside.

  “The ambulance left a few minutes ago, sir,” Harding told him.

  “Good. Where’s the wife?” he asked.

  “In the ambulance with Mr. Barrios. I spoke with the dispatcher again and… well, it doesn’t sound good, sir.”

  “Damn,” Graham said. “What the hell is going on? Send Barnwell over to the hospital to get a witness statement from Mrs. Barrios.” The workshop door was open. Graham noted its elegant finish and precise fit as he entered the large, open-plan room.

  “The desk, again,” he said.

  “Here for repairs, sir,” Janice pointed out. “Mr. Barrios’ wife told the ambulance crew that he was working on it last night. But he never came up to bed. She found him this morning.”

  The rest of what happened was obvious by the large, darkened pool of blood on the workshop’s stone floor. “Head wound?” Graham guessed.

  “Yes, sir.” Janice was on hold with the emergency dispatcher, who was relaying the initial reports from the ambulance crew. She listened for a moment and frowned. “They suspect a fractured skull. Blunt force trauma. He’s gone into cardiac arrest twice already. I have to say they don’t sound hopeful.”

  “Which ambulance crew is it?” Graham asked.

  “Same crew as attended the museum.”

  “Let me speak to them. Can I be patched through?” Janice spoke to the dispatcher and handed Graham the phone. “Alan? What can you tell me?”

  “The patient took a severe blow to the back of the head,” the paramedic said. Graham heard no siren in the background. Experienced medics knew that it scared their patients, and it was usually only used in heavy traffic. “Seems to have been hit with a large metal or wooden object. He’s got a severe skull fracture. Sue thinks he’s likely to have intra-cerebral bleeding. He was unconscious for an extended period before being found. At least a couple of hours was Sue’s guess. His heart’s stopped twice in the ambulance, but we got him back both times. Still, it’s touch and go.”

  Graham ended the call and then walked around the broad, dried circle of blood to examine the desk. “You again,” he said. “What is it about you?”

  “Sir?” Janice asked, feeling lost.

  “Nobby hit his head,” Graham explained, indicating the damaged corner, “right here, and while it wasn’t the end of him, it played its part. Now we have Felipe Barrios working on the same desk, and now he’s in hospital with a cracked skull. Why?”

  “An attempted robbery?” Janice tried. “I mean, it’s clearly very valuable.”

  Graham stood, hands on hips, and regarded the Satterthwaite Desk. It seemed tiny by modern standards, fit for a more elegant time when the people were a little smaller, and quality was less often confused with quantity. “Hardly. Whoever it was incapacitated the victim and then left without the desk,” Graham pointed out. “There’s no sign of any attempt to even move it.”

  Harding’s phone rang. “Yes?” she said. “Okay, I’ll ask him.” She turned to Graham, who was staring, perplexed, at the desk. “Constable Roach requests permission to atten
d the crime scene, sir. And perhaps I should go to the hospital. Talk to Mrs. Barrios.”

  “Yes, do that Harding. Tell Roach to direct calls to St. Helier, and have Barnwell get back to the station ASAP.”

  Janice spoke again into the phone. “Roach says he’s already in touch with Adam Harris-Watts and suggests bringing him here to see if he can help us.”

  “Oh God, alright,” Graham grumbled. “But tell him to warn Harris-Watts about the blood would you? That curator is a fragile sort.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CONSTABLE ROACH WAS examining the desk as though searching for a hidden code within its very construction. “Interesting,” he said, more than once. “Very interesting.”

  Graham indulged him as far as he could, given the circumstances. They had no murder weapon, no suspect, and no reason for Felipe Barrios’ attack. He put this to Roach, who seized the moment.

  “Well, the attack seems to have taken place in the dead of night, when Felipe was alone in the workshop,” Roach pointed out. “The attacker probably knew they wouldn’t be disturbed. That constitutes an opportunity.”

  “Yes obviously, but for whom? We have no idea who, why, or how.” From outside, Graham heard the sounds of Adam Harris-Watts’ visceral reaction to the large pool of blood. He rolled his eyes. “We’ll check on him in a minute,” Graham said. “Carry on, Constable.”

  “We need to find the weapon that was used to attack the victim,” Roach said next, looking around the workroom.

  “No success there,” said Graham, who had spent the previous forty minutes memorizing and minutely examining every tool and object on the walls, in drawers, and on the workbench. “So, what about motive?”

  Roach shook his head. “Must be something to do with the desk. That’s the connection.”

  “Certainly. We’ve now had two incidents relating to it. But what’s the significance?”

  Roach looked at him and shrugged.

  Harris-Watts reappeared, looking gaunt and unsteady. “Sorry,” he said, for what seemed like the twentieth time. “I’m rather out of my element with all this crime scene stuff.”

  “We’d like you to focus on the desk,” Graham said. “And tell us if you notice anything unusual.”

  Doing his best to pull his attention away from the sickening evidence of brutal injury on the workshop floor, Harris-Watts examined the Satterthwaite Desk with an expert eye. “Felipe was obviously making progress on the repairs,” he said. “A good portion of the polish is in place.” His mind focused now, Harris-Watts stepped around the desk and examined the rear, and then the underside. Roach watched him, envious of the older man’s knowledge. “Nothing seems amiss,” Harris-Watts said, and then reached for the brass handle to open the main drawer.

  “No!” Both Graham and Roach leaped to intervene before the curator placed a naked finger on the desk.

  “Sorry, sorry. Of course,” Harris-Watts stammered as he put on the latex gloves Graham offered him. He leaned forward, bending over. He ran his fingertips along the drawer at the front of the desk and then reached underneath and did the same.

  His response, a pained, stunned gasp, immediately brought Graham to his side. “What? What is it?”

  Harris-Watts pressed the mechanism on the underside of the drawer. They all heard the “thunk” from deep inside the desk. Harris-Watts pulled the drawer out. He could barely bring himself to utter the words. “I’ve found it. At last. Of all the… ” He looked at Graham, his eyes wide. “There’s a secret compartment! It’s what Satterthwaite was known for. We always suspected there was one here. But no one could find the mechanism that opened it. Even Charlotte Hughes couldn’t find it.”

  “Who?” Graham asked.

  “Charlotte Hughes, the daughter of the original owner. Said the family looked for it many times without success. She was here a few days ago. Paid for the repairs. It was very kind of her. The museum wouldn’t have been able to afford them otherwise.”

  Roach fizzed with excitement. “Is there anything inside?”

  The curator showed the two officers the peculiar, but empty little nook at the very back. “No,” he said glumly. “Nothing.”

  But Graham’s mind was racing. “Nothing now,” he cautioned. “But I’m betting there was.”

  Photographing and documenting the crime scene took another hour during which Graham regularly called the hospital for an update. These situations were always deeply frustrating for investigating officers. The victim was perhaps the only person in the world with definitive information on the nature of the attack and its perpetrator, but Graham didn’t know if Felipe Barrios would ever speak again.

  Roach busied himself chronicling the desk, peppering the pale-faced Harris-Watts all the while with a sequence of questions which made him sound a far more accomplished and thoughtful investigator than his lowly rank might imply. Increasingly, Graham had been bringing him along to crime scenes and never regretted it, although Roach did allow his enthusiasm to boil over now and then. It took the occasional steadying glance from the DI to remind Roach that exciting as all this might well be, detective work was a serious, sometimes deadly business. To emphasize his point, Graham’s phone rang with news from the hospital. It was Janice. He knew immediately that the news wasn’t good.

  “I’m sorry, sir. Mr. Barrios’ injuries were too severe. They did everything they could, but the doctors pronounced him dead a few moments ago. Dr. Tomlinson says he’ll get to work shortly.”

  Graham pursed his lips and his knuckles whitened as he gripped his phone. He stomped around in a broad circle for a few moments, wincing at the tragic, pointless unfairness of such a death. He punched Tomlinson’s number into his phone.

  “Can you give me any preliminaries, Marcus?”

  “Nothing yet, old boy,” Tomlinson told him. “Look, I’ve got some paperwork to do here, and then I’ll begin the autopsy proper.”

  “Please make a start as soon as you’re able,” Graham snapped. “And get me everything you can on the likely murder weapon. This place is full of tools but there are no obvious signs that any of them was used. Shape, size, anything. Soon as you can.” He hung up.

  Roach eyed his boss nervously. It wasn’t unlike him to take these cases very personally. He watched Graham staring at the desk, as if willing the masterpiece to explain itself. “He’s gone, then, sir?” he finally said to the silent Graham.

  “A few minutes ago,” Graham scowled. “No CCTV. No witnesses,” he continued, mostly to himself. “No nothing.”

  Lillian awoke and immediately looked at her phone. Blast! It was gone 11 AM, and she’d had no phone calls or texts from Charlotte. Lillian reached for the packet of cigarettes by her bed but groaned and slammed it back down when she realized she’d have to lean out of the window to have a smoke, or worse, get up and go outside. In the mid-morning light, her room was small but bright, her view of the English Channel glorious. The water glistened in the sunshine. She could see a container ship crawling across the horizon.

  Lillian had arrived the previous evening. She had checked herself in to the White House Inn, having been assured it was the best guesthouse on the island. Noting the rubber plant and the oak paneling in the reception area, she considered the recommendation to bode poorly for the other accommodations on Jersey. Grousing, she had made her way to her room, determined to waste no time in getting hold of Charlotte. She needed to get her off this godforsaken island as soon as possible, but she’d had zero success in contacting her charge.

  Lillian stared at the ceiling for a few moments, before rising. She dressed, winding a purple scarf around her neck in order to guard herself against the chill of the spring morning. She was on a mission to protect her latest and brightest client. On this bucolic March morning, her mission was to save Charlotte Hughes from disaster.

  She tapped a message out on her cellphone. It sounded a lot more charitable than she felt. Charlotte, where are you, child?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  JA
NICE HAD FOUND Rosa Barrios still trembling, surrounded by three of her friends. They were sitting in stunned silence in one of the hospital’s quiet waiting rooms. Although Barnwell had taken an initial statement, he had remained aloof from the group and was relieved to see Janice approaching the room.

  “Sergeant,” Barnwell said simply, stepping out into the hallway to meet her.

  “Pretty grim, eh, Constable?” she said consolingly.

  “He was well-liked with no known enemies,” Barnwell reported. Being around grieving people put him in a distinctly thoughtful frame of mind. He was looking forward to leaving the hospital behind and returning to the station. He handed over a very brief witness statement. “She was upset,” was all he said.

  “Okay, Constable, thanks. The DI wants you back at the station. Roach is at the crime scene. I’ll call if I need you, and you do the same, alright?”

  Barnwell nodded and went on his way, happy to be out of the hospital and in the fresh air.

  Rosa Barrios made to stand as Janice entered, but the sergeant waved her back down. “Mrs. Barrios, I’m Sergeant Janice Harding,” she said. “I’m here to help you if you feel up to speaking to me.” She politely requested that Rosa’s three friends leave them for the moment.

  Rosa was a small woman with big brown eyes and hair pulled back in a bun. “I want to help,” she said. “I just don’t understand…” Tears welled up but were forced back down again. She would be strong at this moment, and when the time was right, she would allow her grief to wash over her again. “I told the other man everything. The big officer,” she clarified.

  Janice almost smiled. “Mrs. Barrios, tell me about your husband. You’d been married for, what, forty years?”

  “Yes, we were both born and raised in San Marcos. We met on the beach when we were just teenagers.” Rosa smiled at the memory. “We came here when we were first married.”