Death Dues (21 page)

'I'd like to see your lodger's room, please. If you can tell me which one it is?'

Jones nodded. 'It's first left at the top of the stairs.'

Rafferty and Llewellyn went up to Peter Allbright's room. It was the box room. Fortunately, Allbright must have been the tidy sort or the necessity to be neat had made him so. He hadn't been a hoarder — unless you counted the stockpiled packets of Paracetamol, which he had dropped on the floor after removing their contents. Rafferty had a quick count up. The number of packets tallied with the number of days since Harrison had been murdered. So the deaths were connected, though whether the connection was that Allbright was their killer or just that each day after the murder Allbright had got closer to despair, he didn't know.

He found a diary in the drawer of the bedside table. Rafferty riffled through the pages until he came to the Friday of Harrison's death. But, not unexpectedly, there was no confession on the page. Nor on any of the others. It was just a sad little catalogue of gradually increasing despair and the worthlessness of life.

The other debtors, when questioned about their lies, made similar excuses to Harry Jones. As the old soldier, Jim Jenkins said, when they spoke to him and questioned him about what he knew of the affair, ‘If Harrison hadn’t been killed when he was, there might have been another death. Another suicide, like Peter Allbright. Maybe with the breathing space his murder has provided, anyone thinking of following his example will think again.’

Rafferty could only hope Jenkins was right.

With Peter Allbright dead and any secrets gone with him, Rafferty and Llewellyn resigned themselves to the investigation turning into a long haul rather than the easy option murder then suicide that Rafferty, at least, had hoped for. If Allbright
had
been the murderer, it seemed unlikely they would ever prove it. But even with his death the other suspects weren’t exonerated and they returned to the station to thrash out possibilities.

'I've been thinking,' said Rafferty after a silence of some minutes’ duration. 'What if our killer bought a new hammer in order to kill Jaws but kept their old hammer and was able to produce it when we hunted for the murder weapon?'

'You're talking serious premeditation.'

'Yes, but there must have been a certain amount of premeditation, surely? Jaws' killer must have lain in wait for his arrival, hammer poised.'

'Well, whether the weapon used was a new one or an old one, it's disappeared, so it doesn't much matter either way.'

'Only in so much that as it
has
disappeared we should perhaps be concentrating more on those who left the avenue that afternoon and had the opportunity to get rid of the weapon – the three women: Margaret Jones, Josie McBride and Emily Parker.'

'Of course, it doesn't necessarily mean that one of them committed the murder.'

'No.' Rafferty conceded, 'but it does point to possible complicity by one of them with whoever
did
kill Jaws.'

Llewellyn nodded slowly. 'Do you want to question the three women again?'

Rafferty shook his head. 'Not yet. I can't see there's much point. They've none of them admitted anything so far. I can't see them doing so now when silence has served them so well.'

'So what do you want to do?'

Rafferty contemplated the skin coating his now cold tea and pulled a face. 'You tell me. I've been through everything in my mind any number of times and I can't see a way forward. Perhaps something will break of its own accord,' he said with an attempt at optimism.

'Surely it's our job to do the breaking, not to sit around in the blind hope that the fates will do our breaking for us?'

'Go on, then' Rafferty invited. 'You can start.’ When Llewellyn failed to take up his invitation, Rafferty grinned. ‘Okay, that being a non-starter, let’s turn to another tack. What do you think of Tony Moran’s insistence that he and his pals had nothing to do with Harrison’s murder? You still believe he was telling the  truth?’

Llewellyn, dignity restored after his failure to put his conclusions up there to be knocked down, said, ‘The MO’s not the same. And he’s not a very good liar. He admitted his and their involvement in the non-fatal muggings; if he’d had anything to do with the murder I think he’d have been too shocked to tag along behind his friends on another mugging.’

‘Mmm. That’s your psychological assessment, is it?’

Llewellyn opened his mouth to reply, but Rafferty forestalled him before he could get a word out. ‘As it happens, I think you’re right. Though we forgot to ask Moran if he’d seen Leslie Sterling on the street that day. Have we still got him in the cells?’

Llewellyn shook his head. ‘Moran and the other three have all been charged and released on bail. Do you want me to have him picked up again?’

‘No. Don’t bother. I’ll pop in and question him again on the way home. I imagine after the day he’s had, he’ll be lying low in case his friends also want a word.’

Given his lack of conversational skills, Peter Allbright had found an outlet for his feelings about his life, his debts and his inability to get a job in the diary. Rafferty read through it again when Llewellyn had gone off. He could imagine Allbright sitting hunched over in his bedroom pouring all his misery into the diary pages. He read through some more of the entries for the last few weeks and the sense of a growing despair was palpable. Clearly, Allbright’s mind had been disturbed enough for suicide. Had it been disturbed enough for murder also?

But no answers came to that particular question. He shut the diary and put it in his desk drawer with a mental reminder to return it to the Joneses so they could hand it and the rest of Allbright’s belongings over to his parents. He felt sorry for Allbright’s parents when they read it. How would they feel on finding out the extent of their son’s desolation? Harry and Margaret Jones were distraught enough and Peter had only been lodging with them.

Had Peter Allbright decided on suicide after the murder, a guilty conscience hounding him to his own death? Rafferty, a martyr himself to an accusation-prone conscience, thought it only too likely.

There had been nothing else in the bedroom beyond clothes and a few books and newspapers with job adverts ringed and a concertina file filled with application letters to local businesses, most of which had clearly not even received an acknowledgement. But then such courtesies were rarely gone through now; if you were unsuitable for a job you didn’t even get a formal rejection letter more often than not. Your application was just ignored. Several of Rafferty’s numerous nephews and nieces were now of an age to enter the jobs’ market. Their indignation at the lack of consideration of today’s employers compared to Rafferty’s youth, was regularly complained about in his hearing, so he was only too aware of the resultant damage to fragile self-esteem.

The diary had mentioned Harrison’s murder, but only briefly. Its purpose seemed chiefly to be the soul-mate and best friend, roles that had clearly been lacking in Allbright’s all too brief life.

Vaguely aware that Llewellyn had left him to thrash out possibilities on his own, Rafferty reluctantly acknowledged his growing conviction that Peter Allbright
hadn’t
been responsible for Harrison’s death. Llewellyn’s, oft-derided, obsession with the psychological angle, had some merit in this case, Rafferty accepted. Would a man so depressed and deflated be likely to find the spirit or energy for murder? His confidences to his diary had shown just how knocked down by life he had been; certainly, with each re-reading of the pages, the main thing that showed through was defeat. There had been no fight left in the man.

No, Rafferty was convinced that all he had been guilty of was going along with the others when they had decided to lie. And even that had been a half-hearted effort seeing as he hadn’t even opened his mouth but had merely nodded or shook his head in response to each question he and Llewellyn had put to him.

‘You know, it’s still possible we’re on the wrong scent and that someone else had reason other than debt to want Harrison dead,’ Rafferty commented when Llewellyn returned with what Rafferty hoped would be restorative tea.

‘We’ve no evidence for that,’ Llewellyn objected as he dug amongst Rafferty’s paper-littered desk for his coaster and carefully placed the cup on top. ‘The facts we have point the other way. Few enough could have had the opportunity to kill him without their entry to the alley being spotted.’

‘Maybe, but we’ve only the word of Tony Moran for that. Him and young Bazza Lomond. Moran himself admitted he and his pals were larking about and not always in view of the alley. And Bazza, in spite of what he said about keeping an eye out for Jaws in order to warn his mother of his imminent arrival, was probably paying more attention to his computer game than to what was going on outside his window.’

In spite of Llewellyn objection, it was certainly a possibility that someone other than one of the Primrose Avenue residents had a motive to kill Harrison, especially given the likelihood that his notebook contained evidence for blackmail. Harrison had spent his life throwing his weight about and threatening those in no position to retaliate; maybe he’d met his match, and his murderer, like Malcolm Forbes, had been another whose visit to the Avenue Moran had failed to report to the police, whether from reasons of self-preservation or simply because the alley hadn’t been in his view all the time.

But if a blackmail victim had been Harrison’s murderer, they were no further forward in finding out. Rafferty admitted that that had been his fault as the brain-box Llewellyn’s limited leisure time had been taken up with designing and printing
his
wedding invitations. But at least now that job was done. Llewellyn had promised he’d dedicate the few spare evening hours the murder investigation left to him in attempting to de-mystify the coded notebook they’d found in Jaws Harrison’s home.

Rafferty had had another word with Moran on his way home. Like Eric Lewis, Moran seemed to be nursing a cold and also seemed to be feeling sorry for himself.

'You did the right thing, you know, Tony. It's as well that you've confessed to the muggings and incriminated the others. It might just save you from landing in deeper trouble in the future.'

Tony Moran didn't look particularly consoled by this. 'What's going to happen to me?' he plaintively demanded. 'I'm scared to go out in case I see Jake and the others. They'll have it in for me for sure. Will I go to prison?'

'You might. These were particularly vicious assaults.'

'But I hardly touched any of them. Only put a kick or two in so Jake wouldn’t call me chicken.'

'That doesn't matter. That you were there and involved's enough, though the court might go more leniently on you seeing as you confessed. Take whatever punishment you get as a lesson for the future.' Rafferty paused. 'There was something else I wanted to ask you. Did you see Les Sterling at all on the afternoon of the murder?'

Moran shook his head. 'He'd have been indoors watching the racing. Or up the pub. I didn't see him.'

'Did you see anyone else? I was thinking particularly of Malcolm Forbes. He himself admitted he saw Harrison that afternoon. He came to the alleyway to collect something from Harrison.'

'If he did, I didn't see him. He can't have been there long.'

It wouldn't have taken long to kill Harrison, was Rafferty's thought. But at least now he thought that Tony Moran had told him the whole truth. And while he admitted to seeing no one else enter the alley, neither did he admit to seeing Leslie Sterling or Malcolm Forbes. They seemed to have reached a stalemate.

Chapter Fourteen

But it was a stalemate that was broken the next morning at Llewellyn’s triumphant entrance to their shared office.

‘I’ve managed to decode John Harrison’s notebook. It didn’t really take very long once I got into it. It was quite a simple code.’

‘I suppose it would have to be for Jaws Harrison to concoct it. So what did you find out?’

‘That the late Mr Harrison
was
a blackmailer. And that one of his victims is a suspect in his murder.’

‘Really? Sounds too good to be true. Which one?’

‘One of my preferred suspects. Harry Jones.’

‘And what had he done to make him interesting to a blackmailer? Did Harrison’s notes reveal that as well?’

‘Oh yes. According to Harrison, Mr Jones had been seeing a widow, a Mrs Singleton on a regular basis. The notebook even supplies the lady’s address.’

‘Interesting. I wondered how he expended his excess energy given that his wife looks like she’d struggle to find the enthusiasm for supplying marital conjugals.’ Jones had admitted he and his wife were having trouble paying off the loan, so if he was being blackmailed on top of that it could easily be enough to persuade him to violence.

‘What do you want to do? Shall I arrange to have him brought in?’

‘No. Not just yet anyway. I thought I’d try to catch him on his own. He’s got enough troubles without me dropping him in it with his wife. Maybe you can give him a bell later and ask him to pop into the station?’

Llewellyn nodded.

‘I think, in the meantime, we could at least have a word with his lady love. Find out how long it has been going on and when Harrison found out about it.’

Mrs Singleton lived in a pretty pastel house in the expensive Dutch Quarter of the town with a view over the River Tiffey. It looked like there was no shortage of money here. Had that been part of the attraction for the cash-strapped Harry Jones? Madeleine Singleton was tall and slim like Margaret Jones and around the same age, but any similarity ended there. She was vivacious and quick in her movements unlike the lethargic Mrs Jones and kept her attractive house looking spruce.

The Jones’s house, although clean, had shown a distinct lack of homemaking skills, but here, every wall was adorned with paintings, the shelves held books on a variety of subjects and when they called, Mrs Singleton was industriously making a set of blinds on an electric sewing machine. She seemed to have as much energy to spare as Harry Jones. No wonder they’d found mutual satisfaction in expending that energy together.