A Choice of Victims (18 page)

‘Well, that was a piece of luck, of course. It meant they’d be blamed for the murder, and even if they managed to wriggle out of it there was little chance it could be traced back to me. I was lucky too that I didn’t bump into anyone on the way home. That was because it was lunchtime, I suppose. And it was still raining. Absolutely teeming.’

‘Weren’t you scared?’ she asked. ‘At what you’d done, I mean.’

‘Of course I was. So would anyone be. But I reckoned I could cope.’

Dusk was falling and the rain was still heavy, but he continued to drive without lights. Patricia tried to read the signposts, but visibility was blurred. And was it nervousness, she wondered, that made her think he was stepping up the speed again?

‘Why are you telling me this, Andrew?’ she asked. ‘Aren’t you afraid I might tell the police?’ That was a mistake, and she added quickly, ‘I won’t, of course. You can trust me. You know that, don’t you?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘They know.’

‘They do? But how can they?’

‘I don’t know. But they do. Hasted told my father. Not that it was me. Just that he knew who had killed her.’

‘Couldn’t it be some sort of a trick?’

‘No. My father believed him. Besides, he mentioned things that proved he knew it was me.’

‘Such as what?’

‘Well, that another person was involved.’

‘But there wasn’t, was there?’

‘Not at the time, no. But this chap rang me later. He’d been in the woods, he said, and he’d seen me kill her. He also said he’d got the piece of wood, and that it would cost me a lot of money to get it back. I’d dropped it, you see, and forgot to pick it up. There was blood on it, he said.’

Patricia tried to imagine what it would be like to commit a murder and then be blackmailed by an unscrupulous witness. The image was beyond her comprehension and she shook her head in a gesture of defeat.

‘What—what did you do?’ she asked.

‘What could I do? I’ve no money of my own. I tried to borrow from my father, but he said he can’t touch Elizabeth’s money until the will has been proved. It was when I explained this to the man that he told me to steal those things from your house. He said that if I didn’t he—’

‘Look out!’ Patricia screamed.

The unclipped headlights of the oncoming car formed an impenetrable blue of light across the wet windscreen of the Fiat as it rounded the bend. The bend was sharper than Andrew had anticipated and he had drifted too far to the right. He stamped on his brakes and the oncoming car scraped by. The Fiat was not so lucky. It mounted the verge, stayed poised for the briefest of moments and then plunged downward.

Chapter Eleven

It had been Frances’s idea that they should ask the Hasteds to dinner. Andrew had been killed in the accident; not wearing a seat belt, he had been thrown through the windscreen and had died on the way to hospital without regaining consciousness. Patricia had been more fortunate, suffering a broken leg and a dislocated shoulder and facial injuries that, although not severe, would take some time to heal. She had given the details of Andrew’s confession to the police and also to her parents, and the Scotts had passed on the information to the Holdens. But it was not enough to satisfy Frances’s curiosity. There was so much more she wanted to know. And who could have better knowledge of the affair than George Hasted?

‘You don’t think they’ll feel they’ve been invited just to pump him?’ she asked Tom.

‘Of course they will,’ Tom said. ‘They’re not idiots. Particularly as you’ve never asked them before.’

‘That’s true.’ Frances considered. ‘But then it’s only recently we’ve really got to know them, what with Sybil’s baby and George asking me endless questions. Anyway, what’s wrong with curiosity? It’s natural, isn’t it?’

‘Perfectly natural.’

‘Yes.’ She nodded to herself ‘Yes, I think I’ll ask them. They can always refuse.’

Two weeks had passed since the accident. Andrew had been buried with the minimum of fuss, Tony Bassett had been arrested and was awaiting trial, Patricia was still in hospital and David Doyle had gone on an extended holiday with his girlfriend. It was generally considered that if he returned it would be to put the Manor up for sale, and that he would then leave the village for good. He had been shocked by the disclosure of his son’s crimes. But in the opinion of some, among whom Frances and Tom were numbered, he was far from blameless for what had happened. A more caring interest in his son’s well-being might possibly have averted the tragedy.

Frances delayed the invitation until after the children were back at school—well-mannered though they were, like most young people they could sometimes be disconcertingly frank in their comments. ‘Besides, just the four of us will make it more intimate,’ she told Tom when, to her delight, the Hasteds accepted the invitation. ‘And there could be details he wouldn’t care to mention in front of the children.’

Tom laughed. ‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Frances! It wasn’t that sort of a crime.’

‘Perhaps not. But all the same...’ She paused. ‘I must get out my cookbooks. I want it to be a really super dinner.’

‘Why not?’ he said. ‘They’re a nice couple.’

Sybil was secretly thrilled by the invitation. She was not a snob, but she was also not averse to climbing the social ladder if the opportunity offered. Hasted’s father had been a postman and her own father a railway signalman, whereas the Holdens seemed to know everyone worth knowing in the county, and Frances’s father, now deceased, had held a commission in the Household Cavalry. But she knew better than to mention this aspect of the invitation to her husband. George was a proud man and would probably have turned it down. As it was, he said cheerfully that no doubt the Holdens would expect him to sing for his supper and that, within limits, he would be happy to oblige.

Frances took particular care in her choice and preparation of the meal: a first course of crisply golden crepes aux sardines served with whipped cream and egg-white, followed by fillet of beef
en
croûte
and finishing with oranges
flambées
glazed in caramel. She had been slightly apprehensive about the crepes aux sardines, which she had prepared only once before and then not too successfully. This time, however, it went better. Certainly her guests seemed to enjoy it, as they did the rest of the dinner.

She had made up her mind to contain her curiosity until after the meal unless a suitable opening should occur earlier. But it was inevitable that the murder should be discussed, if only on its periphery, for it was still a major topic in the community. It was unanimously agreed that it would be good for the village if David Doyle decided to sell the Manor; he had never really fitted in. Sam Bates would certainly be pleased, Sybil said; according to Ivy he was already reassessing his plans for the proposed new estate. And talking of plans, she said, had they heard that Ed Mason was proposing to put the shop up for sale? ‘They’ve never really liked it here,’ she said. ‘Especially Cheryl. I’m surprised they’ve stuck it so long.’

‘Selling the shop won’t be easy,’ Hasted said. According to Derek, now back in favour with Alice, the affair with Cheryl was definitely over. So Cheryl had lost both her sugar daddy (or was that not how she regarded Philipson?) and her lover. And she had always hated the shop. She would certainly favour a move. ‘It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. How’s Mrs Mason’s wrist, Doctor?’

‘Should be out of plaster soon. It’s only a minor fracture. And the name’s Tom.’ He smiled. ‘After all, I gather you and Frances got pretty matey during the investigation.’

‘We saw each other practically every day,’ Frances said. ‘Did you know about that, Sybil?’

‘Of course not,’ Sybil said. ‘The police don’t disclose the names of their informants.’

Was I an informant? Frances wondered. Yes, I suppose I was. ‘If I was an informant I was a very uninformed one,’ she said. ‘Most of the time I hadn’t a clue what George was after. But I gather I helped.’

‘Considerably,’ Hasted said.

‘How? Or shouldn’t I ask?’

‘No reason why you shouldn’t. But do we really want to end such a delightful meal by talking shop?’

‘We do indeed,’ Frances said. ‘It may be shop to you and Sybil, but it isn’t shop to us.’ She looked round the table. Not a morsel of oranges
flambées
remained on plates or dish. ‘Take them into the sitting room, Tom, while I get the coffee. And don’t you dare say a word, George, until I’m back.’

For obvious reasons, Hasted said when Frances rejoined them and started to serve the coffee, the murder of a wealthy wife almost invariably caused the police to look closely at the husband. David Doyle had been no exception, and in his case there had been reasons additional to the obvious reasons, Hasted explained, which he preferred not to disclose. ‘Andrew was also suspect, of course; he made no secret of his antipathy to his stepmother. But he was just one of a bunch. Despite of couple of inconsistencies, he didn’t really stand out.’

‘What inconsistencies?’ Frances asked.

‘The first was on the day Mrs Doyle disappeared. When I saw him that evening he spoke of her in the past tense. “She didn’t like being photographed”,’ he said, when I asked for one. With hindsight one can see that that was significant. But at the time it really meant nothing. There was no suggestion that she might be dead, you see, let alone murdered. She had merely gone missing in what we then believed to be her own car.’

‘Brandy?’ Tom said. ‘It’s either that or Cointreau.’

Both Hasted and Sybil declined a liqueur. ‘What was the other inconsistency?’ Frances asked.

Hasted explained how, for the purpose of eliminating irrelevant fingerprints, he had asked Andrew if he had driven the Morris prior to the murder, and how Andrew had told him he had used it to collect timber from Bates’s yard. ‘So I checked with Rory. I didn’t doubt Andrew. But if Rory or Sam had helped him load up I’d have needed their prints too.’

‘And?’ Tom prompted, as Hasted paused.

‘Rory said neither he nor his father had touched the car. He had shown Andrew the timber and left him to it. He also told me that the timber consisted of half a dozen oak posts, each seven foot long. They wouldn’t have gone in the boot.’

‘Did Andrew say they had?’

‘Not in so many words. But when he told me he’d collected the stuff, I said, as near as I can remember, “So your fingerprints would be all over the boot,” and he agreed that they would. The implication was definitely there.’

‘That he’d used the boot, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you think he was providing an explanation for why his fingerprints were there? As presumably they were.’

Hasted nodded. ‘I do now. I didn’t at the time. Or not for long.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because only minutes after speaking to Rory I was told, by someone I believed to be a reliable witness—I’m not mentioning names—that he had seen Andrew crossing the Green shortly after one o’clock. And that, if you don’t already know, was around the time Mrs Doyle was leaving Philipson’s cottage.’

‘Which meant he couldn’t have killed her,’ Tom said.

‘Exactly.’

Frances refilled the coffee cups. Putting down the pot, she said, ‘But he
did
kill her. So presumably your witness wasn’t as reliable as you thought, George.’

‘No.’ Hasted wanted to use her Christian name, but was embarrassed—as he had been throughout dinner—by Tom’s presence. ‘Unfortunately I didn’t discover that until I questioned him again on the day Andrew was killed.’

‘What prompted you to do that?’ Tom asked.

Hasted smiled. ‘Information supplied by the Holden family.’

‘All!’ Frances sat up. ‘Now for the nitty-gritty! What information, George?’

On the day of the murder, Hasted reminded her, Victor and Natalie had returned home from West Deering through the woods. ‘You may remember we discussed this, Frances,’—there, he thought, I’ve done it!—‘and we calculated they would have been in the ride from roughly ten minutes to one until five minutes past. Now—’

‘You calculated, George. Not me.’

‘All right, I calculated. Anyway, according to George Grover, Andrew had left the Falcon at ten to one, and another witness had seen him enter the ride about the same time. Yet your two hadn’t met him. They had seen someone in the distance, but they were positive it wasn’t Andrew. And they were right. It wasn’t.’

‘Who was it, then?’

‘No matter. He had nothing to do with the murder. But if Andrew didn’t meet your two he must have taken the track past Philipson’s cottage. That didn’t necessarily make him the murderer. But it meant he had lied about the route he had taken. It also meant he was unlikely to have reached the Green before a quarter past one at the earliest. So either your two had got the times wrong, or my West Deering witness was way out. I decided the latter was the more likely.’

‘Very proper,’ Tom said. ‘We Holdens are thoroughly reliable. Are you sure you won’t have a brandy?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘May I change my mind?’ Sybil said. ‘I’d like a Cointreau.’

‘Of course.’

‘Poor Sybil!’ Frances said. ‘You must be bored stiff. You’ve heard all this before, haven’t you?’

‘Not all,’ Sybil said. ‘And after such a delightful dinner I’m too contented to feel bored.’

Tom handed her a Cointreau. ‘So you confronted this unreliable witness, did you?’ he asked.

‘Not right away,’ Hasted said. ‘I couldn’t. It was a Saturday, and the—well, he wasn’t available over the weekend. But I saw him on the Tuesday and he admitted he had lied. It wasn’t shortly after one o’clock when he saw Andrew crossing the Green, he said, but nearer half-past.’

‘Weren’t you furious?’ Frances asked.

‘Not really,’ Hasted said. ‘I should have been, I suppose, but I wasn’t. Just relieved to know I’d got it right. Besides, he hadn’t realized the time was important. He was trying to protect his own image.’

On the morning of the day Andrew was killed, Tom said, while he and Hasted were having coffee with David Doyle at the Manor, Hasted had made the astonishing assertion that Cheryl Mason had been in no danger from the man who had threatened her the previous Sunday evening, that the man had had no intention of actually assaulting her. ‘I was sceptical about that,’ Tom said. ‘Your reasons for the assumption didn’t really impress me. Still, it seems you were right. But what made you associate Andrew with the incident? That seemed even more unlikely.’

‘I’m not sure,’ Hasted admitted. ‘Although obviously he was in the forefront of my mind. Besides, it seemed such a lucky coincidence that he should be around just when he was needed. I also thought it strange that a young man who was crazy about cars should have chosen to walk here and back when he could have used the Fiat. Anyway, I—’

‘He didn’t walk here,’ Frances said. ‘We collected him after church. Him and Blondie.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Hasted said. ‘Anyway, it was a possibility I couldn’t ignore. Hence my visit to you on the Monday.’

‘You were always visiting,’ Frances said. ‘What was special about that Monday? No, don’t tell me. I remember now. You said you had a problem. You wanted to know what time Andrew had left here the day before to walk home.’ She frowned. ‘What time did I say?’

‘Six-thirty. Which made the possibility a near certainty. It would have brought Andrew to the Philipson track some twenty minutes before the incident occurred.’ Hasted looked from one to the other. ‘The conclusion is obvious, isn’t it? For that twenty minutes he was just marking time for Mrs Mason to scream and come running.’

‘You mean it was a put-up job between him and the man who threatened her?’

‘Yes.’

‘But why? What was the point?’

‘To divert possible suspicion away from Andrew. They had discovered we were considering the possibility that Mrs Doyle had been killed in mistake for Mrs Mason. Faking an attack on Mrs Mason, they reasoned, would bolster that theory. And Andrew could have had no conceivable motive for killing her.’