A Murder to Die For Page 14

  ‘Could you get me a dress from the walk-in wardrobe?’ she said.

  ‘What’s wrong with those clothes on the floor?’ asked the man.

  Greeley frowned. It had been too much to hope that the same trick would work twice. She stood and wriggled herself into her discarded Miss Cutter outfit.

  ‘So what are they?’ she said.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Your name, rank and serial number.’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ asked the man suspiciously.

  ‘I don’t. But it’s all you offered.’

  He pondered on the question. ‘Stingray. My name is . . . I mean my codename . . . is Stingray.’

  ‘And what do you want, Stingray?’ She was feeling quite calm, she realised. Undoubtedly the pre-nap drinks were helping, but there was something else at work here, some other factor she couldn’t yet identify.

  ‘I need to take you to my command post. To be held there until I get orders from above regarding your transfer to a more secure facility.’

  ‘Can’t you just guard me here?’ said Greeley. ‘I’m sure it’s more comfortable than your command post, wherever that is. We have a huge TV with lots of channels. And I can get room service to send up some food if you like. It’s really good here.’

  ‘No phone calls. Now get dressed.’

  ‘I am dressed.’

  ‘I mean get a coat on and some sensible shoes.’

  ‘Listen, I’m sure you believe that you’re on some kind of mission but—’

  ‘Please get dressed,’ said the man. He produced his penknife again and opened the longest blade with as much menace as he could muster. He began pulling the sheets off the bed.

  The Incident Room was filled with the delicious aroma of roast pork. Clifford Jaine had popped over to the village green to get something to eat and had returned with a substantial portion of hog roast for the investigation team to share. He’d also bought several cups of lukewarm grey liquid that might optimistically be called tea.

  ‘It’s still chaotic over there,’ he said, picking a piece of meat out from between his teeth. ‘There’s a fire investigation team climbing all over that burnt-out burger van. I asked about the driver, the one who went a bit bonkers, and they told me that he got taken off to hospital. Anything new happening around here?’

  ‘A very angry phone call from Miss Tradescant’s partner,’ said Banton. ‘I fielded it to the guv’nor.’

  ‘Seems only fair,’ said Jaine. ‘It was his call to tell him she was dead.’

  ‘I tried warning him.’

  ‘I was just thinking on the walk back, why did Tradescant bother to smash her victim’s face in? To make identification harder?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Banton. ‘And leaving her handbag behind threw us off the scent for a while. Well, it threw Blount off anyway.’

  ‘This case is a friggin’ mess. Glad it’s not my reputation resting on solving it. Where is the guv’nor anyway? He’s missing out on the pig.’

  ‘I think he’s having a sulk in the loo.’

  Blount sat on the toilet and pondered his next move. Or, rather, he squatted on the tiny, child-sized lavatory with his knees around his ears, and pondered his next move. Perhaps using the children’s section of the library hadn’t been such a good idea after all. But he needed somewhere quiet to think, somewhere without distractions, and the lavatory had become his sanctuary. The whiteboard in the Incident Room was a constant reminder of how little he’d achieved since assuming leadership of the investigation. He missed the peace and quiet and generally administrative work of his office at Bowcester.

  Telling a barefaced lie to his superiors had been stupid. But to then make such a public error of judgement over announcing the identity of the victim had been a whole new level of stupid. Unsurprisingly, Miss Tradescant’s fiancé had been very angry and very vocal on the subject of legal action and, as things stood, Blount couldn’t see any easy way to row himself out of trouble. Time was against him because most crimes of this kind were solved within the first forty-eight hours and, if they weren’t, they tended to drag on for weeks and months as the trail got colder and new evidence became harder to find. The first few hours were critical because potential witnesses would soon begin to forget vital details and forensic evidence could be lost or contaminated. Plus, of course, the culprit, or culprits, could be putting distance between themselves and Nasely. If he couldn’t crack this case in the next twenty-four hours, his prospects for promotion were bleak. However, if he did discover and arrest the killer, his mistakes so far might be overlooked.

  He flushed the toilet to make it look as if he’d used it for its proper purpose and walked back into the Incident Room.

  ‘There’s some pork left,’ said Jaine.

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Bad tummy? You were gone for ages.’

  ‘No,’ said Blount, frowning. ‘Any developments?’

  ‘Well, there’s some good news. Well, sort of good news,’ said Banton. ‘And there’s some maybe not-so-good news.’

  ‘What’s the good news? I could do with some.’

  ‘I think we can be pretty sure that the deceased isn’t Esme Handibode.’

  ‘And that’s good news, is it?’

  ‘We’re still awaiting confirmation by way of dental records but lots of people who know her well have assured us that she doesn’t ever wear jewellery,’ explained Banton. ‘So she would never have worn a fancy ring like the one we found on the body.’

  ‘So we can tick one more spinster in fancy dress off our list of possible murder victims and only several hundred more to go,’ said Blount. ‘If that’s the good news, I’m dreading the bad.’

  ‘I’ve checked Mrs Handibode’s paperback for fingerprints and it looks like it had been wiped clean before Mr Shunter and Miss Wilderspin handled it.’

  ‘Wiped clean? That’s suspicious, surely? I bet Shunter wiped the book clean just so that we couldn’t get anything useful from it.’

  ‘Why would he do that and then hand it in with his prints on it?’ said Banton.

  ‘Hmf,’ huffed Blount, stumped for an obvious answer.

  ‘The other news is that HQ has sent through the results of the autopsies on the two ladies who died in the car crash last night.’

  ‘What? Why?’ A sudden terrible thought struck him. ‘Oh dear god, please don’t tell me that their deaths are related to this investigation. I don’t think I could bear it.’

  ‘There’s no problem with Mrs Hatman-Temples,’ said Banton. ‘She died of her injuries, no question.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘But Miss Nithercott was already dead at the time of the accident. And there’s evidence that she was poisoned.’

  ‘Poisoned? What do you mean poisoned?’

  ‘Taxine,’ explained Banton. ‘Deadly stuff. You find it in yew trees; almost every single part of the tree is loaded with it. Except the berries, that is. Well, they’re not actually berries. They’re little red fleshy cups called arils with a seed at the centre and—’

  ‘I don’t want a bloody botany lesson,’ said Blount. ‘What has any of this got to do with me?’

  ‘The arils taste a bit like grapes,’ Banton continued. ‘You can eat them. And make jam. And Nithercott had the remains of jam sandwiches in her stomach. Yew-berry jam sandwiches.’

  ‘But you said that the berries aren’t poisonous.’

  ‘They’re not. But the seeds are. And the toxin isn’t neutralised by cooking. So if the jam was made with whole arils, seeds and all, it would be loaded with taxine.’

  ‘Who would be stupid enough to make jam with poisonous berries?’ said Blount.

  ‘Someone who wanted to do for Miss Nithercott?’ offered Jaine.

  ‘Exactly. Which is why HQ sent the analysis to us, I guess, in case it’s relevant,’ said Banton. ‘After all, this is a murder-mystery festival and Agatha Christie used taxine in A Pocketful of Rye. She put it in some bloke’s marmalade.’

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sp; ‘Marmalade?’ Blount shook his head in dismay.

  ‘Of course, it may just have been an unfortunate accident,’ said Banton.

  ‘I remember reading about some old duffer who cooked daffodil bulbs thinking they were onions,’ said Jaine. ‘They’re poisonous too.’

  ‘Full of lycorine,’ said Banton. ‘Not fatal generally, but if you’re old or infirm or have a heart condition they could kill you. Taxine is a lot nastier.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Jaine.

  ‘Welcome to the world of murder mystery,’ said Banton, smiling. ‘And you have to admit that it is kind of ironic, isn’t it?’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Poisoned jam,’ said Banton. ‘And with her being a leading light in the Women’s Institute. You know, “Jam and Jerusalem”.’

  ‘This is real life, not some ridiculous bloody detective novel,’ said Blount angrily. ‘Can you imagine what all those Millies will think if they start hearing about daffodils and poisoned jam? I want this idea nipped in the bud. Now.’

  ‘You mean the berry,’ said Jaine.

  ‘Or the aril,’ said Banton.

  ‘Shut up! Get someone to search her car. And get on to the local police where she lives to search her house. Find that jam. I want it eliminated from our enquiries. Find me something I can work with!’

  ‘Yes, guv,’ said Jaine.

  ‘My life is turning into a bloody Agnes Crabbe novel,’ said Blount. All of a sudden, he realised that he genuinely needed the toilet and excused himself, grabbing Esme Handibode’s annotated copy of Swords into Ploughshares as he left.

  ‘That’s the third time in less than an hour,’ said Banton.

  ‘He must have the runs,’ said Jaine. ‘Mind you, if I were him, I’d be shitting myself too.’

  Toilets were very much on Pamela Dallimore’s mind as well, and she cursed herself for having drunk so much tea earlier in the day. As the hours had slowly crept by, her bladder had become more insistent, but her captor had left her with no facilities to make use of. As desperation had kicked in, she’d attempted to call for help – even her kidnapper would be a welcome sight if he was willing to offer her a comfort break – but her muffled shouts for assistance had gone unheeded. And now, as desperation turned to pain, she began to realise that she’d just have to let nature take its course. As she did so, she pondered on the irony that, despite being at least twenty years younger than most of her rivals, she was the one who’d look like she had a weak bladder when they found her. If they ever found her. She felt utterly wretched.

  Inside the toilet cubicle, Blount did his business and tried to think calmly. The last thing he needed were more deaths to investigate. Just the one was proving intractable. He opened Esme Handibode’s dog-eared paperback distractedly and began to read. It was appearing increasingly likely that both Brenda Tradescant and Esme Handibode were involved, in some way, with both the homicide and Tremens’s disappearance. He wondered if, perhaps, Mrs Handibode’s notes would give him some insight into the kind of woman she was and whether she might be capable of brutally killing someone. However, he soon found himself being drawn into Agnes Crabbe’s prose instead.

  The thunderous roar of a shotgun interrupted the tranquillity of the early winter’s evening. Roosting birds hurriedly quit their temporary sanctuaries, complaining bitterly at being so crudely disturbed and evicted. The force of the shot punched a jagged hole in the chest of the police constable’s tunic as it propelled him backwards off his rattling bicycle.

  ‘Oh great. A dead cop on page one,’ Blount said to himself. ‘Just what I need to cheer me up.’

  The constable lay still, the front wheel of his bicycle continuing to rotate as it rested on its side on the grass verge. It made a ticking sound that became slower and slower and then stopped, as if marking the passage of the man’s life from this realm to the next. Blood mingled with the early dew and the autumnal coloured carpet of fallen leaves. A second shot barked and the constable’s body jerked in response, only to resume its previous inanimate state. Upon the face of the constable’s shattered service watch the hands stopped at seven o’clock and moved no more . . .

  ‘Good grief.’ Blount skipped forward a handful of pages.

  At police headquarters, Superintendent Curtis Godolphin busied himself setting up an Incident Room from where he would conduct the inquiry. Extra telephones had to be installed, and typists and uniformed officers for house-to-house enquiries were seconded from other duties.

  ‘Sergeant, I want a pro-forma prepared, and every person between the ages of ten and eighty living in the parish to fill one out,’ said Godolphin.

  Sergeant Angwin dutifully made notes in his pocketbook.

  ‘I want their names and addresses and don’t forget the married women’s surnames prior to marriage,’ continued Godolphin. ‘I want their date and place of birth, and a personal description. I want it to include where they were between 1800 hrs on Wednesday and 0700 hrs on Thursday and to include the names of anyone who can verify that. Did they see the constable between those times? And, if so, where? Also a description of anyone they saw and did not know by name. Oh, and make sure the woodentops note those people who are away at work or whatever, then get a team back in the evening to sort them out. Use the Voters’ List to mark off who has been seen. Have you got all that?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Angwin.

  So, things hadn’t been so very different back in Agnes Crabbe’s day, he mused. A homicide investigation was logical and methodical and built upon step-by-step procedures. The only real difference was that they’d used paper pro-formas back in the 1930s, whereas he was able to put all of his data directly on to a computer using tablets and smartphones. But investigation still came down to asking questions and slowly but surely eliminating people from enquiries. And, yes, there was still that frisson of rivalry between the CID and the ‘woodentops’ – the uniform branch – over eighty years after Crabbe had written those words.

  Blount’s eye was drawn to the scrawl of pencilled notes clustered in the margins of the book. Mrs Handibode’s jottings were extensive: historical details, character traits, weather conditions, the names of real locations in and around Nasely that had inspired the fiction . . . she had been very thorough. He ran his thumb along the edge of the pages, genuinely amazed that anyone could devote so much time and effort to studying and analysing a murder-mystery novel, when his eyes alighted on a word as the yellowed pages flickered past. He stopped and quickly worked his way back through the book and there the word was, clearly written and in capital letters. TAXINE. And below that, a set of notes about how a person might introduce it into the body of another. ‘Yew-berry jam’ was one of the options listed. Blount quickly cleaned himself up, pulled on his trousers, washed his hands and walked triumphantly into the Incident Room.

  ‘Upgrade our alert on Esme Handibode,’ said Blount. ‘She is now officially a murder suspect.’

  ‘She is?’ said Jaine.

  ‘I believe that she may have killed one of the drivers in that crash,’ said Blount, waving the paperback in the air. ‘And the silly cow has literally confessed to doing so in her own handwriting. So, what are the odds that she was responsible for today’s incident too?’

  Shunter was amazed by the expertise displayed by the young lad who operated the CCTV system, particularly as every other indication seemed to suggest that he was barely sentient. Certainly, he couldn’t string three words together without interposing some kind of animal grunt. It had also surprised Shunter how easily he had managed to persuade the lad to let him have a look at the CCTV recordings. After all, he wasn’t a cop any more. Maybe it was his air of authority, honed over thirty years. Or maybe it was the fact that Shunter had half-jokingly suggested that it would be easy for an unprofessional operator to misuse the system to leer at schoolgirls from Harpax Grange and they’d be bound to get the sack if someone, say, a police officer, or even an ex-police officer, suggested checking the video archive.

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p; There were only two cameras. Camera One was sited in a lamppost at the western end of the High Street and gave a clear view of the shops, Crabbe Cottage and the Masonic Hall. Camera Two was at the eastern end of the street by the Masonic Hall and took in the pub, hotel, library and village hall. While the smart money was on the suspect escaping by van, there was always a chance that they had escaped on foot using the crowds to hide in plain sight. If they had, one of the cameras would surely have picked them up. Shunter had therefore decided to look for evidence to support either theory by requesting video footage starting at around 3.45 p.m. when the body had been discovered. As he watched Mrs Dallimore open the doors for the Millies to flood inside, he spotted himself among the crowd. Or a figure that he assumed to be him; the CCTV footage wasn’t of the highest resolution. He was at least spared the screaming as there was no sound to accompany the video. It was soon obvious that there was no one trying to make their escape; the human traffic was all one way as the Millies attempted to push inside to view the crime scene.

  ‘Damn. We’ll have to start working back from here,’ said Shunter. ‘Can we put the video into reverse and run it at double speed?’

  ‘Yuurr,’ said the operator.

  The Millies began emerging backwards from the hall at a comical pace and started queuing up. Mrs Dallimore closed the doors and took up her position outside. A few minutes later the white van reversed along Sherrinford Road and into Handcock’s Alley, stopping only to have an altercation with a group of Millies. To Shunter’s frustration, the angle was all wrong to read the number plate and it was impossible to see the driver; Camera One was too far away and only the passenger window was visible from Camera Two. The van disappeared out of sight behind the hall and the number of fans standing in line began to dwindle. He then saw Esme Handibode walk backwards out of Handcock’s Alley and rejoin the front of the ever-shortening queue. Then, at a little after 1530 hrs, Mrs Dallimore suddenly left her post by the front door and walked backwards around the building before making off down the High Street. Another ten minutes passed by with nothing more exciting to watch than a few Millies walking about. But then Shunter spotted the white van as it reversed out of Handcock’s Alley and into the High Street. The time stamp said 1513 hrs.