Dead Money (A Detective Inspector Paul Amos Lincolnshire Mystery) (2 page)

BOOK: Dead Money (A Detective Inspector Paul Amos Lincolnshire Mystery)
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It was the last time that anyone was prepared to admit to having seen the victim alive.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 2

 

The closing hymn at the compact parish church lacked something of its usual fervour that Sunday evening. Sarah Miller, the organist, normally picked the hymns. It was one job fewer for the vicar to do so he was happy to delegate the task.

The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, is ended was Ray Jones’s favourite hymn but Miller could see, in the little mirror giving her a view of the congregation, the empty space that he usually occupied religiously.

She glanced several times into her mirror during the service as if to contradict what her eyes had already seen over and over again. It was rare, indeed, for Jones to miss Sunday evensong. Not even business prevented his ritual appearance.

Miller had seen Jones on Friday morning in town and he had remarked casually as they parted: “See you on Sunday.”

Miller pulled out the oboe stop instead of the cor anglais. Flustered, she selected a 32ft pipe instead of a 16ft, giving the tune a deeper tone. She always played the hymn as Jones wanted it, as a celebration of the day; now it sounded like a requiem for the ending of it.

“Don’t worry so,” the Rev John Thornley told her after the service. “I’m sure Mr Jones was held up on some unexpected business. You did tell me he was going to Nottingham earlier today, as I recall.”

He did not wish to be rude to Miller – her services as an organist were too valuable to him – but she did fuss over nothing. She was 50, and if anything looked older. Had she been in her teens people would have thought her anorexic.

Thornley was not anxious to get involved in a conversation appertaining to Raymond Jones. Miller could blow hot and cold on any topic, particularly so where Jones was concerned.

Miller had already virtually cleared the church by the simple expedient of playing the Hallelujah Chorus on full organ as the closing voluntary. It was her time honoured method, on the odd occasions when she wanted to get away quickly, of discouraging the little knots of people who gathered in the aisle after evensong and expected a musical accompaniment to their gossip.

Finding no sympathy with the vicar, she bustled off to her home just 100 yards away from the gate. Miller rang Jones breathlessly as soon as she was through the door, without even removing her hat. The rather flat voice belonging to the object of her concern answered on the fourth ring.

“This is Ray Jones. Please leave a message stating your name, your number and when you rang. This computer occasionally crashes, wiping out voice messages, so if I don’t respond please ring again tomorrow.”

“Ray, it’s Sarah. Where on earth are you? It’s not like you to miss evensong. I’m worried sick about you. Ring me whatever time you get back.”

But Jones did not ring back that evening. Miller tried again at 9 pm and again at 2 am, when she woke from her fitful sleep. Each time she left a similar but increasingly frantic message in vain.

She awoke with a start. It was 9.30 am. She would normally have been awake for the past two hours. She rang Jones’s office. No, he had not been in yet but that was nothing unusual. He would call in during the day and they would let him know that she had rung.

Miller left another message on the answering machine installed in the computer in Jones’s flat. Perhaps the wretched machine had crashed and he had not got her messages. That afternoon there was still no sign of Jones.

Finally Miller rang Jones’s housekeeper.

“I’m due in tomorrow morning,” she responded. “I’ll be there at ten o’clock.” No, she wasn’t prepared to go round that evening.

Miller begged, pleaded, cajoled. Frantically she began to threaten the unyielding housekeeper, who finally realised there was to be no reasoning with the infatuated women and put down the phone.

Miller rang the police. No, they were not going to break in. Their method of discouraging persistent callers was to leave the phone lying on the desk while they got on with their paperwork until the sound of the voice at the other end abruptly ceased.

That was why the body of Raymond Jones, businessman, entrepreneur, finger-in-every-pie man and staunch churchgoer, was not found until Tuesday morning.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 3

 

Detective Inspector Paul Amos dreaded the smell of death, and it hung over Ray Jones’s flat that sunny Tuesday morning. Jones lay in the bed, his skull crushed, dried blood covering the pillows. A rusty iron bar lay on the floor.

There was only one dip in the pillows on the double bed and that was occupied by Jones’s severely damaged head.

“He’s been dead some time, three or four days,” pathologist Brian Slater remarked gloomily. Slater hated his job but there was nothing else he was any good at so he was stuck with it.

“Looks like he was struck several times. This was a frenzied attack. They made a right mess.”

“Would you say it was likely to be a man to strike such heavy blows?” Amos enquired.

“Could easily have been a woman,” was Slater’s opinion, “and not necessarily a strong one at that. If she caught Jones sleeping she wouldn’t have needed to hit him hard. Just often.”

Detective Sergeant Juliet Swift was organising a detailed examination of the apartment.

“There’s no sign of a break-in, Sir,” she told Amos. “Either the intruder had a key or Jones let him in.”

“He?” asked Amos.

“This is a man’s work,” Swift commented curtly.

“Jones looks to have been asleep when he was attacked,” Amos continued as if ignoring her remark. “So either he let the killer in then went to bed with her – or him,” he added in appeasement to the sergeant, “or the killer has a key.”

“His housekeeper, Jan Morris, has one,” said Swift.  “She came in at ten this morning, her usual time. Some woman called Sarah Miller was with her. She was in a right old flap. She was the one who found Jones’s body. She says she doesn’t have a key – that’s why she came in with the housekeeper.”

“What do you mean, that’s why she came in with the housekeeper? Why did she come at all? Was Jones expecting her?”

“No, she says she was worried about him. She was a bit hysterical. I gather he never missed evensong unless he was on holiday. When he didn’t turn up on Sunday she kept ringing him. He wasn’t at work yesterday, either. Oh, and she keeps going on about the police not doing their job. Something about refusing to break the door down.”

Amos wandered over to the bedside light, which was switched on. He touched the bulb and withdrew his hand sharply. It was very hot.

Swift butted in: “The bedside light was on, Sir, when the two women came in. They say the main light was off and the curtains were closed. We opened them so we could see what we were doing.”

Amos nodded to Swift and she closed the curtains. The inspector then switched off the ceiling light. It was quite dark. The bulb in the bedside light was only 40 watts.

Nonetheless, the attacker would have been able to see Jones distinctly if dimly. Satisfied, Amos switched the main light on and Swift opened the curtains again.

Amos was apparently losing interest in Sarah Miller. His eyes were wandering to the telephone point in what was clearly a second bedroom converted into a home office.

“Where’s the answering machine?” he asked. “Surely Jones would have one.”

It was a young constable who supplied the information: “The phone’s linked into the computer, Sir. It’s on screensaver at the moment.”

Before Amos had a chance to tell the junior officer to speak English, the lad touched the mouse and the computer whirred into life.

“This is top bananas!” he called out appreciatively.

A coupled of clicks and the screen proclaimed two old messages and six new ones. The unreliable software had not crashed.

“I’ll play the old messages first, the ones Jones had listened to,” suggested the constable.

Amos grunted assent.

They were a couple of calls from Jones’s office, made the previous week and merely confirming business meetings. The new messages were more interesting.

The first was a man’s voice: “Look, Ray, can we have a quick word over the weekend. I’m sure we can sort out whatever’s bothering you. I’ll pop over to see you this afternoon. No need to involve Joanna.”

Then a woman: “It’s Joanna. I’ve been thinking about what you said. You could be right. I’m in Scunthorpe on Monday but I’ll drop in unannounced first thing Tuesday. Don’t worry, I’ll have a good excuse.”

Then followed four increasingly frantic messages from Sarah Miller, each meticulously stating who she was, the time of her call and her phone number.

“Get them transcribed,” Amos ordered. “Computers have a habit of losing things.”

He moved on through the apartment. Killiney Court was built in an octagonal with four flats on each floor. They were identical except they were grouped in pairs that were a mirror image of each other.

There were two bedrooms, a lounge, a bathroom, a shower, a separate toilet and a kitchen. Outside the kitchen was an open laundry area.

Amos looked out of the laundry. The outside was like a large window with no glass. Directly opposite was a similar arrangement for the other flat in the pair, 4A.

That’s a third way in, he remarked to Sgt. Swift. “I reckon a fit young man or woman with sufficient nerve – or sufficiently desperate – could jump across that gap. I think we had better have a list of all the residents in this block. We shall have to interview them all.

“And I shall start with whoever lives in that flat opposite.”

 

 

 

 

Chapter 4

 

The owner of flat 4A was not conveniently at home. One of the constables found and produced the caretaker, who supplied the information that Scott Warren ran the Ace Plus Video recording studio in Gainsborough Road.

“Did you get the impression that the caretaker was trying to get rid of us?” Amos

asked Swift as they drove towards the north west corner of the town. “He practically gabbled out where Warren worked.”

Swift agreed: “He was certainly keen enough to make out that Warren and Jones had a stand-up row on Friday evening then they arrived back at Killiney Court.”

Warren received them anxiously. His perturbation at the mention of Jones’s name, however, gave way to apparent relief when Swift informed him that it was a murder investigation.

“No, we didn’t have a blazing row on Friday evening,” he responded to a question from Swift. “Who told you that? We happened to arrive home at the same time and exchanged a few civil words. Jones invested in my firm. I needed his cash to set up and he needed my expertise to produce a profit.

“Jones invested in dozens of businesses in this town – and further afield. Some were more successful than others. Mine was among his better choices.”

So what had Warren done since that conversation, Amos wondered.

 “It was about quarter to five when I left Jones talking to Joanna Stevens. She’s his nosey parker accountant. She lives in the block two floors directly below Jones at 6B. You want to talk to her. I reckon Jones was making unwelcome advances to her. Maybe he went a bit too far.”

“Your movements,” Amos prompted him.

“I did a bit of paperwork, tidied up the week’s accounts, then I stuck in some oven chips and grilled a chop. I went down to the pub, had a couple of pints and a few games of darts with the usual crowd, and got back to the flat about 11.30 pm.

“I always have a lie-in on Saturday mornings and play squash in the afternoon. I took a girl friend out in the evening - I can give you the name of the restaurant – saw her home and got back latish on.

“Sunday I read the newspapers. It takes most of the day to get through the heavies. In the evening I had three friends round to play bridge until quite late.”

“I shall need the names of the people you say you have been with,” Amos interjected.

Warren hesitated for several seconds. Finally he replied reluctantly: “I can give you the names, of course, but I’d rather you didn’t approach them unless you really have to. I don’t greatly like the idea of my friends knowing that I’ve been interviewed in a murder inquiry.”

“You live alone, I take it?” Swift said.

Warren nodded.

“So for large chunks of the weekend you were in the flat on your own?”

“So was Joanna Stevens,” he ventured by way of a reply. “You should talk to her.”

“We shall talk to all the Killiney Court residents,” Amos said sharply. He was annoyed at being told how to do his job and doubly annoyed because Stevens was the next person he intended to interview anyway.

Nor was he best pleased when Warren added brightly: “You’re in luck. Here she is now.”

 

 

 

 

Chapter 5

 

Amos and Swift looked out through the internal glass window of Warren’s office overlooking the public area of the establishment. A woman was already pushing her way past the protestations of a secretary.

Warren squeezed out while the officers were momentarily distracted and opened his door to her.

“Don’t worry,” the intruder was saying to the unsuccessful keeper of the entry barrier. “I shan’t disturb Mr Warren.”

Then, seeing him at his office door: “Good morning, Scott. Just a routine VAT tidying up. I needn’t bother you. I know where the books are.”

She seemed slightly suspicious that Warren was taking her arrival with aplomb. She had expected him to be nervous if, as she believed, he had something to hide.

“No time for that now,” Warren answered cheerfully. “These people want to talk to you first.”

Stevens was becoming increasingly perplexed. Warren was certainly good at escaping under a cloak of confusion.

“VAT inspectors?” she asked with a frown. “I thought I knew everyone at the local office.”

“Police officers,” Warren replied deliberately.

Stevens glanced at the occupants of the small office. Had the police found out about something more serious than she suspected? Embezzlement, perhaps? Why was he looking so complacent? Had he blamed her as the accountant?”

BOOK: Dead Money (A Detective Inspector Paul Amos Lincolnshire Mystery)
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