A Murder to Die For Page 12

  The hotel’s rear gardens were bordered by tall square-trimmed privet hedges but there was a metal gate set into one that allowed access to and from the lane. Savidge gingerly stepped inside and, after surveying the area for enemies, made a swift dash to a substantial sycamore and hid behind it. As he caught his breath, he scanned the rear of the building, quickly identifying the biggest and most expensive room – the second-floor Victoria Suite. He was sure that that was where she would have made her nest. Her nest? Or her command centre? Either way, she would surely not have settled for anything less than the best. Savidge knew the interior layout of the building well. Before his burger van days, he’d worked as a handyman at the hotel until his lack of anger management had got the better of him. His overenthusiastic and explosive campaign against the moles that were ruining the lawns had been mostly successful, but his spectacular final assault had toppled an ancient oak and blown out all of the windows in the conservatory and he’d consequently been asked to collect his cards. He frowned at the fragment of memory and tried to reconcile it with his current mission. Why had he been working at a hotel? Had he been undercover? And why did the fresh and prominent molehills that dotted the lawn seem to be mocking him? He dismissed all such negative thoughts. There was work to be done.

  Looking around once again to make sure that he was unobserved, he moved stealthily to the hotel’s back wall, scrabbled atop the box-shaped heating-oil tank and began to climb an old cast-iron wastepipe.

  Shunter and Miss Wilderspin had spent a good half an hour wandering among the maze of alleyways that threaded their way through and around The Butts. They emerged next to the canal with nothing to show for their efforts except Miss Wilderspin’s sore feet.

  ‘That just leaves the towpath then,’ said Shunter. ‘And I’m pretty sure that the police will have combed it in both directions already. Still, I don’t suppose it will do any harm to have a look with fresh eyes. Any preference for which way we go?’

  ‘None,’ said Miss Wilderspin. ‘But I don’t think I’ll be able to walk very far in these shoes.’

  Shunter took a coin out of his pocket. ‘Okay then. Heads we go towards The Rushes, tails we go towards Dunksbury Locks.’ He flipped the coin and went to catch it but it bounced off his wedding ring, wheeled along on its edge and plopped into the canal. A paddling of mallards immediately surrounded the disturbed water looking for food.

  ‘Make a wish,’ said Miss Wilderspin.

  ‘I wish I hadn’t used a two-pound coin,’ said Shunter. He looked up and down the towpath and saw several groups of Millies searching the grass to the west. ‘My guts are telling me to go east, towards the reed beds.’

  Mrs Dallimore’s perseverance had been rewarded once again. She was now over a mile from the village and had come across a small industrial complex where narrowboats, barges and pleasure cruisers had once been refitted, repaired and redecorated. Back in the fifties, when a holiday on the water had been de rigueur among the upper middle classes, the boat works had done a brisk trade, but it had long since fallen into picturesque dilapidation. Mrs Dallimore strolled past former dry docks that, thanks to decades of rainwater collection, were now filled with a soupy green swamp of algae, Canadian pondweed and pennywort that buzzed and twitched with life. Plump moorhens dabbled on the surface, hoovering up fat tadpoles and getting their heads pointillistically decorated with duckweed. Dragonflies fizzed through the air, grasshoppers fiddled noisily and tall cow parsley waved in the whispering breeze. The site consisted of three large boat sheds, their corrugated roofs bronzed and pitted with rust, and a number of smaller and older ivy-covered outbuildings; the original Victorian boat works that had existed before the larger sheds had been added. Their walls were warped and leaning and the gutters sprouted miniature roof gardens. The grass surrounding the works had been left to grow to waist height but a fresh path had been recently trampled through it towards the nearest shed.

  Mrs Dallimore decided to follow the path, noting as she did so that the building had lost some of its wooden cladding and that she could see into and even through the structure. Her heart skipped a beat as she suddenly spotted a white box van parked behind the building.

  She squatted down behind a stack of rusting oil drums, her heart hammering in her chest and a cold sweat prickling her forehead. Following a possible trail in search of clues was one thing; confronting a possible murderer was quite another. Up until this moment she’d got a genuine buzz from playing detective. But now the huge gulf between real life and the silliness of fictional murder-mystery descended upon her and she became very scared. With shaking hands, she fumbled in her baggy shorts for her mobile phone and discovered that she still had no signal.

  ‘I thought that only happened in films,’ she mumbled as it dawned upon her that she was well and truly on her own. Another quarter of a mile ‘up river’ she would find plenty of canal folk at The Rushes. But here there was no one and she hadn’t told anyone where she was going. She could die out here and no one would ever know.

  There was only one sensible course of action: she had to go back the way she had come until she got a phone signal and could dial 999.

  It grew suddenly dark and she looked up, expecting to see that the lowering sun had dipped below the trees. Instead there was a balaclava, a pair of staring, bloodshot eyes and gloved hands reaching for her throat.

  Blount furiously paced the Incident Room, all the while juggling words and phrases in his head as he tried to think of a way to save face. His press conference was imminent and he needed to say the right things to reassure his bosses that he was on the case while not making any false allegations that could come back to haunt him. Damage limitation was the name of the game.

  ‘Still no ID on the victim?’ he snapped.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Banton. ‘I managed to get someone to the mortuary but fingerprints had to be taken by hand because of the cadaveric spasm. It takes a lot longer than scanning. But we should get a result soon.’

  ‘I need something now.’

  ‘You could postpone the press conference.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Blount. ‘I’ve already told the . . . er . . . what about those reports of a man running around screaming and covered in blood earlier?’

  ‘We looked into it,’ said Jaine. ‘He’s a local bloke called Savidge. He was involved in that fracas on the village green when his burger van caught fire.’

  ‘And that was hours before the murder so the blood, wherever it came from, isn’t anything to do with our case,’ added Banton. ‘You could mention that we’ve circulated details of the ring.’

  ‘Ring? What ring?’ said Blount.

  ‘The one that the victim was wearing,’ said Banton. ‘It’s quite distinctive and someone might recognise it. There’s a photo of it in your briefing notes.’

  Blount looked at his watch. ‘A ring won’t keep them happy. I need names. I’ll just have to say that the victim is the Tradescant woman. We have her handbag next to the body and lots of the Millies have said that it’s her.’

  ‘Yes, but only based on her build and the colour of her dress. There’s been no proper confirmation of identity.’

  ‘It must be her.’

  ‘But what about the fingerprints on the knife?’ said Banton. ‘I thought you were considering her as a suspect?’

  ‘There could be a perfectly obvious reason for that,’ said Blount. ‘Maybe she was trying to pull it out of her chest at the moment she died? The point is that we have more evidence to suggest that she’s the victim, rather than the murderer.’

  ‘Only circumstantial,’ said Banton.

  ‘Admittedly, yes. Which is why I am not going to accuse someone of being a killer without more evidence. I could get sued for slander,’ said Blount. ‘But there’s no harm in saying that we think she’s the victim.’

  ‘There is if we do it before we’ve told her family. If her fiancé sees it on the Six O’Clock News before we’ve told him . . .’

  ‘Then
tell him now.’

  ‘Without a confirmed ID? Are you sure?’ asked Banton.

  Blount ran a finger around inside his sweat-dampened collar. His hangnail caught on the material and he winced. ‘Do you think it’s Tradescant?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s either her or Handibode, I reckon,’ said Jaine.

  ‘What about you?’ asked Blount.

  ‘It’s possible,’ said Banton. ‘But we can’t be sure and—’

  ‘We all know it’s probably her,’ said Blount, sucking his finger. It was really sore. ‘Tell her fiancé.’

  Savidge cautiously climbed from the wastepipe across to one of the balconies of the Victoria Suite and, gratifyingly, found that the French windows were open. He peered inside. The room was large, ornate and tastefully decorated with striped and patterned wallpapers, ebullient swags and drapes, and a small crystal chandelier. A slightly incongruous and very large widescreen TV dominated one wall. There was a small dining table and two chairs, a quality leather sofa and matching recliner, and a well-stocked mini-bar. Several open doors led off from the suite’s main room. Savidge crept silently in from the balcony, barely noticing the depth of plush in the carpet that helpfully absorbed any sound his boots made. The first door hid a creamy-coloured bathroom with a sunken marble bath and jacuzzi. The second room was a walk-in wardrobe with a dressing table and a mirror with naked bulbs set all around it like he’d seen actors use in theatres. There was a suitcase in there and several outfits that had been hung up. All of them were Miss Cutter uniforms, he noted. The door to the final room was partially closed. Savidge put his eye to the crack and could see another set of French windows and a sumptuously draped dark wood four-poster bed. And asleep and snoring gently on top of the plump duvet was his arch-enemy, the criminal genius Miss Millicent Cutter.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this afternoon’s press conference. I am Detective Inspector Brian Blount, the officer in charge of the investigation into this terrible crime that has shocked everyone with its brutality, and which has soured what should have been a joyous celebration of the one hundred and twentieth birthday of our local heroine, Agnes Crabbe.’

  Outside the library, an eager audience of Crabbe fans and reporters with cameras and microphones had gathered. There was an audible murmur of expectation among the Millies.

  ‘Shortly before four o’clock this afternoon, the body of a woman was discovered at Nasely village hall. The victim had suffered fatal injuries inflicted by person or persons unknown. The crime would have happened some time between three and three forty-five p.m. We believe the deceased to be Miss Brenda Tradescant, president of the Millicent Cutter Appreciation Society.’

  The crowd began to murmur more loudly at this news. One member of the Millicent Cutter Appreciation Society uttered a long wailing ‘Noooo!’ and fainted.

  ‘At this time, we are anxious to trace the whereabouts of the solicitor Mr Andrew Tremens and Mrs Esme Handibode of the Agnes Crabbe Fellowship. We need to speak to both of them as a matter of some urgency.’

  Louder murmurs and exclamations of surprise.

  ‘We are also keen to interview the driver of a white Transit-style box van seen leaving the vicinity of the village hall at around three forty-five p.m. He was an unshaven white male in his late forties or early fifties and wearing a plum-coloured dress, matching hat and black driving gloves. He was, we presume, dressed as Miss Millicent Cutter, the fictional detective. We would greatly appreciate it if anyone with information that may be pertinent to our investigation could please come forward, especially as the event was so recent. Now, I will take a few questions but do bear in mind that this is a freshly opened investigation and I may not have the answers you want. Nor will I be able to give out any information that may prejudice or compromise any of our lines of enquiry.’

  ‘Are Mr Tremens and Mrs Handibode considered to be suspects?’ asked a reporter from the Mirror.

  ‘We would appreciate being able to speak to them as soon as possible.’

  ‘Is it true that both of them have been abducted in mysterious circumstances?’ asked a man from Aliens Are Here! magazine.

  ‘All we know at present is that we don’t know where they are.’

  ‘So we can’t rule out extraterrestrial involvement?’ said the reporter whose press pass declared his name to be Ray Dalekcat. His tinfoil hat caught and reflected the light from the photographers’ flashguns.

  ‘Er . . .’

  ‘Do we know of any motive for the killing?’ asked a man from the South Herewardshire Bugle.

  ‘It’s too early to say.’

  ‘There have been three deaths in less than twenty-four hours, all prominent figures in Agnes Crabbe fandom,’ stated Miss Ambrose-Leigh of the Agnes Crabbe Detective Club magazine. ‘Is there some connection?’

  ‘One is a homicide and the other two were the result of an unrelated road traffic collision,’ said Blount. ‘It’s hard to imagine any kind of link between the events.’

  ‘But you haven’t ruled it out?’

  ‘It’s not a line of enquiry that we’re following at this time.’

  ‘Do we know what Mr Tremens was going to reveal in his talk?’ asked a lady from the Agnes Crabbe Book Club, hopefully.

  ‘No. And that’s all I can tell you at the present time. There will be further updates as new evidence emerges. Thank you.’

  Blount stepped back inside the library and closed the doors behind him. Nicola Banton was waiting for him.

  ‘I thought that went rather well,’ said Blount.

  ‘We have a problem,’ said Banton. Her face was grave.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, what now?’

  ‘It’s the victim,’ said Banton. ‘She isn’t Brenda Tradescant.’

  Miss Wilderspin stooped to pick up a paperback that was lying in the thick grass that bordered the towpath. ‘This is Esme’s,’ she said.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Shunter.

  ‘Positive.’ Miss Wilderspin opened the book to show Shunter the name label inside. ‘This must have been what she went back to find. She wouldn’t have wanted to lose it. There’s years of work in here.’

  ‘But I didn’t think that you’d walked this far with her,’ said Shunter. He looked back along the towpath. ‘We’re a good hundred yards from The Butts and Handcock’s Alley.’

  ‘No, we didn’t come this far. She must have walked along here on her own for some reason. Oh dear.’

  ‘Something isn’t right here,’ said Shunter.

  ‘Perhaps she did it deliberately, like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs?’

  ‘People who are scared rarely think that clearly. Besides, I can’t see her throwing it away if it contains years of her work. I think it’s more likely that she dropped it by accident and didn’t realise, or someone else left it here. But that still begs the question of why she walked this way and when. And also why she didn’t notice that she’d dropped it. Maybe she was in a hurry. Or she was distracted.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Miss Wilderspin again.

  ‘And, as much as it galls me to do so, we have to tell Blount about this. Have you got a phone signal?’

  Miss Wilderspin checked. ‘No.’

  ‘Incredible,’ said Shunter, checking his own phone. ‘I thought that only happened in films. We can send photos back from Pluto but we can’t make a phone call to a building ten minutes’ walk away. Well, we can’t leave it here. There might be fingerprints other than ours and Esme’s on the cover. I don’t suppose you have a carrier bag with you?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Miss Wilderspin, rummaging in her handbag. ‘They charge five pence for them these days, you know.’

  ‘Perfect.’ Shunter put the book into the bag. ‘Besides, you really are in some discomfort, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Miss Wilderspin, looking down at her patent leather shoes. ‘I hadn’t anticipated doing quite so much walking and I’m paying the price now. I really don’t think I can go any further today.’
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  ‘Let’s head back then. We’ll drop this in at the library en route.’

  Miss Wilderspin took a last look up the towpath and sighed. ‘Poor Esme.’

  ‘Chin up,’ said Shunter. ‘She’ll probably turn up overnight with a completely understandable reason for her disappearance.’

  ‘I do hope so,’ she replied.

  Pamela Dallimore felt the bag being whipped off her head and squinted in readiness for the light but it didn’t come. Wherever she had been brought was almost as dark as the inside of the bag had been. It had been a short terrifying walk from where she’d been captured to where she now sat. She’d stumbled several times, having been blindfolded, but she knew that she must be somewhere inside one of the big wooden boat sheds. A formless shape lumbered away from her and by the time she was able to make out its human outline, it had climbed a short ladder and exited through a hatch in the ceiling. There was the sound of locks being thrown.

  As her eyes adjusted to the gloom she could see that she was inside the shell of a boat, a long-disused barge by the looks of it. The smells of mould and musty old timber came to her now; the bag had screened much of it out. Dim light streamed through a handful of thin cracks that had developed in the curved hull as old wood had dried and shrunk. Dust motes danced in the beams and something scuttled around in the dark empty spaces furthest away from her where the walls curved inwards to form the prow. Her hands were bound behind her back with what felt like a large cable tie and her legs had been immobilised with her own belt. Her long bootlaces and her hanky had been used to make a gag. The old vessel creaked and complained as she shuffled herself around in a circle to examine every part of her prison. There was no one else with her in the belly of the boat, that much was clear. But she was not completely alone. Apart from the noises being made by what she assumed were mice or rats, she could hear footsteps on the creaking deck above her head. Her captor was still on board. Her heart fluttered as she realised that they may be the same person who had committed the murder at the village hall. Pamela Dallimore was a strong woman, but it took all of her willpower not to burst into tears.