Scene of Crime (18 page)

Lloyd grinned. “That’s better,” he said. “You’ve gone back into tellycop mode. And I agree—Watson’s a suspect, even if he is an outside bet. But I think even you will admit that it would be quite a coincidence if he thought up the same lie as Ryan Chester.”

A WPC opened the dispatch room door. “Sir—that number you gave me? It’s a Saab 9000 registered to a Carl Bignall.”

Lloyd beamed at her, and she went back in. “Well?” he said to Tom.

“Ryan didn’t see it, guv. He’s just trying to give us someone else to suspect—Bignall gives Dexter lifts home from rehearsals, remember. So Ryan would know the number.”

He had just produced what he thought was his best rebuttal of Lloyd’s theory, but Lloyd was beaming at him in much the same way as he’d beamed at the WPC.

“
That’s
why Dexter was there,” he said. “He must have overheard Ryan and Baz arranging to steal Bignall’s car. He went there to try to stop them.”

There was something wrong with that, but Tom couldn’t put his finger on it. He frowned. “I don’t know, guv.”

“It’s possible,” said Lloyd, continuing toward the CID suite. “And one thing’s for certain—Dexter saw something while he was there that he’s afraid to tell us about. Now, I’m sure he wouldn’t tell us in a million years if he saw Ryan doing something criminal, but I don’t think he’d be frightened. And he is. So, I’m going to have a word with Watson. If he agrees that Bignall’s car was there …” He lifted his hands by way of finishing the sentence.

“And meanwhile Ryan Chester’s being given lots of time to think up a better story,” Tom grumbled as he pushed open the door to the incident room and Lloyd went off to his office. Lloyd would never accept that things were sometimes just not that complicated.

“Forensics has checked up on the bin bag, Sarge,” said DC Marshall, in his slow Glasgow drawl. “They say it came from a roll of bin bags in Bignall’s kitchen. The perforations match up exactly. So that’s no help. And
we’ve had the results on the shoe prints, but you’re not going to like them either.”

Tom learned with mounting disbelief and irritation that neither Ryan’s nor Dexter’s shoes matched the shoe prints found at the scene. He hadn’t been able to let rip at Lloyd, but he could and did at Marshall. “I don’t want to hear this, Alan! Ryan Chester knows how to get rid of evidence. He’d throw away the shoes they were wearing if he knew they’d left foot marks!”

“Ryan’s a size ten,” said Marshall stolidly. “Dexter’s a size seven. The shoe prints were left by a size eleven and a size nine.”

“One’s too big and one’s too small? I feel like bloody Goldilocks!”

“Well, at least you don’t look like her anymore, Sarge.”

“Very funny.” Tom ran his hand over his shorn hair. “What about the fingerprints?”

“No match there either. The fact is, Sarge, there’s nothing that places Ryan or Dexter in the house or the garden.”

Tom sat down at his desk. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Just how many people
were
there breaking into Bignall’s property last night?” He sighed. “About the fingerprints—how soon can they start checking them against known villains?”

These days the process was computerized, and if there was a match to be found, it didn’t take too long to find it. Providing someone started checking them.

“They say they’ll do it as a matter of urgency,” said Marshall. “But there’s a backlog,” he warned. “They’re not all in the computer yet. Still—we might get lucky.”

“We’d better. We’re back to square one with this.”

Marshall nodded, went back to his desk, then turned. “You know, Sarge—I think you were more philosophical when you had your curls.”

Tom threw an eraser at him, but it missed. He’d better let Lloyd know what was what, he thought wearily. He would be smug.

“See?” Lloyd said, when Tom told him what Forensics had—or more to the point had not—found. “Sometimes things
aren’t
the way they seem.”

Tom looked exceedingly disheartened. “Last night I thought I had this whole thing sewn up. I was up all night—and for what? So I could prove that Ryan Chester is guilty of theft by finding?”

“And taking and driving away without the owner’s consent,” said Lloyd, offering mock encouragement. “Why don’t you pay Watson another visit? See if he’ll admit seeing Dexter this time. And perhaps he can tell us if Ryan really did see Bignall’s car.”

Tom sighed and nodded, and walked to the door, then snapped his fingers and turned back to Lloyd. “Got it,” he said.

“The breakthrough? Or just the answer to the riddle of the universe?”

“What’s been bothering me, guv. You said Dexter might have been there because he overheard Ryan and Baz planning to steal Bignall’s car, and went to try and stop them, but why would he bother? As far as he knew, Bignall’s car wouldn’t be there. Dexter would think he’d be at the rehearsal, wouldn’t he?”

Lloyd grinned. “You’ve been taking lessons from DCI Hill,” he said. “Another theory shot down. Well—
perhaps it’s just as he said. They were cruising round, and spotted it.”

“Or perhaps he’s lying his head off, guv.”

Meg had rung to see if Carl had gone to the surgery; she was worried about him because he went to give the police his fingerprints at half past eight and he still wasn’t back.

Denis glanced at the clock above his door; it was twenty past eleven. Carl was a grown man; it was up to him where he went and what he did, but he understood Meg’s concern, because the Carl who had sat at their breakfast table was not the Carl they knew.

He was sure Carl wouldn’t be contemplating throwing himself in the Andwell; people didn’t, not even people who had lost loved ones in this particularly horrific way. Somehow, people just picked themselves up and got on with their lives. That was probably what he was trying to do. And Denis knew Meg; she was kind and well-meaning, but she could be a little smothering. It wouldn’t surprise him if Carl was just keeping out of her way.

He would be busy, he had told Meg. There was a lot to do; death was a very bureaucratic business.

It was the American marine again. Eric didn’t like this one bit. Once again he showed Sergeant Finch into his sitting room.

“I think I told you everything I could last night,” he said.

“I thought your memory might have improved since then,” said Finch. “You were in your garden after you heard the window breaking. Did you see anyone?”

Eric sighed. “Is this too difficult for Bartonshire’s boys
in blue, or what? I must have said this ten times. I went out to check my greenhouse. So that’s what I was doing. I didn’t see anyone at all.”

Finch nodded, and looked out of the window. “Your greenhouse has got very large panes of glass, hasn’t it?” he said.

“Most greenhouses have,” said Eric, puzzled about the observation.

“I’d imagine one of them would make a hell of a noise if it got broken.”

“Probably,” agreed Eric. “Do you run a protection racket on the side, or something?”

Finch smiled. “It’s just that next door’s French window has got small panes. A foot square or so, wouldn’t you say?”

“Something like that—I can’t say I’ve measured them.”

“Seems a bit odd that you thought it might be your greenhouse. I mean—how much noise would a little pane of glass like that make?”

“Enough, apparently. What are you getting at?”

Finch shrugged. “Seemed odd, that’s all,” he said.

“Well, if that’s everything, Sergeant Finch …”

But Finch hadn’t finished. “You employ a schoolboy named Dexter Gibson, don’t you?”

Eric stiffened. “What about it?” he said.

“The description we were given of the boy seen running away fits Dexter.”

“Yeah? Well, I didn’t see anyone.”

Finch raised his eyebrows slightly. “What do you think of Dexter as an employee?” he asked.

Eric shrugged, not sure where this was going. “He’s a good kid,” he said.

“So if you had seen him last night, you wouldn’t tell us?”

“I might have told you, if I had seen him. But I didn’t see him.”

“Did you see anyone?” asked Finch. “I’m not talking about anyone in your garden. Did you see anyone or anything on the road when you were checking your greenhouse?”

Eric wasn’t sure what Finch was getting at. “Like what?”

“Like a person or a vehicle. Or both.”

“No, but I wouldn’t.” He jerked his head toward the back window. “See for yourself,” he said. “You can’t see the road—the back wall is too high.”

Finch wasn’t going to catch him that way. Watson had chased Dexter almost to the gate, but the kid had been too fast for him, haring off down the road, leaving him standing. And there hadn’t been anyone else there, but he couldn’t have known that if he’d just been checking his greenhouse.

“Do people ever park on that road?”

“Not usually. Visitors tend to park at the front of the houses, and the people who live here park in their own driveways or drive into their garages. Bignall’s car was parked there earlier, because some idiot driver dumped a load of bricks on his driveway, but it wouldn’t have been there when the window broke, because he’d left by then.”

“You saw him leave? Would you know what time that was?”

Eric smiled. It sounded as though Bignall might be a suspect, and, now that he thought about it, that was
hardly surprising. He’d been married to the mad cow—anyone unlucky enough to be in that position might want to do away with her. “Half seven,” he said. “Same time he always leaves on a Monday night.”

Finch looked pleased with that, but Eric wasn’t too happy with the situation—it sounded as though they’d gotten Dexter despite his best efforts to keep his identity quiet, and God knew what he’d be telling them.

“Oh, darling, I’m so glad I caught you in.”

Since Marianne knew perfectly well that she was working from home, she would have been very unlucky not to catch her in at ten to twelve in the morning, Judy thought. But she’d been hoping for a call from Marianne; she felt there was more information to be gleaned from that quarter. Marianne had said what she wanted to about Carl, but there was something about Estelle that she had perhaps been more reluctant to divulge, and Judy wanted to know what it was.

“I wondered if you might like to have lunch with me,” Marianne said. “There’s a wonderful restaurant that opened in Chandler Square—too expensive for most people, which is why they had a table at this time of year. I’ve booked it, so you must say yes.”

Judy hadn’t actually said anything but her name and number so far, and she did indeed feel a little like a prisoner of war about to be interrogated, because she was sure she would be. But she could hold out against Marianne’s interviewing technique, and she might find out exactly what Marianne had been hinting at so heavily last night.

“That would be lovely,” she said. “What time?”

“I’ve booked the table for one o’clock. I’ll meet you there, darling.”

She wasn’t sure how Lloyd would feel about her conducting her own private investigation into this business, but her lunch hour was her own time, Marianne was her friend, and there was no rule that said police officers couldn’t have lunch with a friend.

What harm could it do?

When he got back to Stansfield, Tom bought an evening paper; in the days leading up to Christmas, it appeared earlier and earlier, and Tom had never worked out why.

The headline screamed
WOMAN LEFT TO DIE BY BURGLARS
at him, and he read the item, more or less a rehash of the press release, but with more descriptive color than the press officer was allowed.

As he walked into the incident room, he got bombarded from all sides with information, almost all of it negative. There were no prints on the tape dispenser. The empty box that had probably contained the tie and handkerchief had Bignall’s prints and someone else’s—presumably his aunt’s, because the unknown ones didn’t match either the prints found on the door between the dining room and the kitchen or the ones found on the window frame. All the unidentified prints found at the scene, including these, had been checked against known felons, and they had drawn a blank.

Estelle Bignall’s bathrobe had no foreign fibers on it, so they had nothing on what her assailant had been wearing.

Two things that were of some interest: the mud that had been walked through the dining room into the kitchen
contained brick dust from the garden and glass from the window, and the muddy shoe prints on the patio did not. Therefore the person on the patio had probably not entered the house. Which, Tom thought ruefully, fitted nicely with Dexter being a lookout and running away, except they weren’t his shoe prints.

The other thing—the one that had distinct possibilities—was that someone had called to say that he’d seen a van parked on the main road, at a bus stop between the entrances to Windermere Drive and Eliot Way, at about eight-twenty. He had written down the number because of the burglary in which a van had been used, and the driver, a heavily built young man, had run back to it and driven it away as he’d done so. And it was the number of Baz Martin’s van. Of course, Ryan said he’d been there, but he said Baz had gone home before anything happened, and clearly Baz had not.

He’d let Ryan have his lunch while he went to have a word with Baz, and then interview him again, now that he knew he’d been lying about both that and seeing Bignall’s car. In fact—he’d take him his lunch himself, and let him look at the paper.

That might make him come to his senses.

Officially, Lloyd had to assume that Estelle Bignall’s death was the result of the treatment she received at the hands of burglars, because so far that was what the evidence suggested, but he still didn’t believe it. And neither did Freddie, so he had hoped that the full postmortem might produce something they could go on, but as Freddie said, it had been a long shot.

“No evidence of strangulation,” he said. “I think she was smothered, but not necessarily by being gagged. The
vaginal swabs were positive, though, which might be of assistance to you. They’ve gone off for DNA analysis.”

Lloyd’s eyebrows rose. “Really? I thought you said you didn’t think there had been a sexual assault?”