Scene of Crime (3 page)

“But I do, darling,” said Marianne, with a flick of the scarves with which she draped herself. “Oh, I suppose you can read her lines from the wings, but you’ll have to speak up, darling, if anyone’s going to hear their cues. God
knows
how we’re going to get this production ready on time.”

Carl stayed in the troupe because he enjoyed acting and writing the script, but he found Marianne very tiresome. With her, the amateur dramatics were not confined to the stage.

“Has poor Estelle got this awful flu, too, darling?”

“Oh, no, she’s fine, really. Just a touch of the sniffles.” His answer to Marianne’s belated concern for Estelle’s welfare was far from truthful; Estelle hadn’t ever been
fine, and this year she’d been seeing Denis Leeward for depression and God knew what else, making his life hell while she’d been at it. The lies were automatic: he had been telling them for years, and could switch off his domestic circumstances as easily as he could switch off a light. “She’s having an early night,” he said.

“Good, good!”

Marianne went into a huddle with Prince Charming, a bit long in the tooth for the principal boy’s part, in Carl’s judgment, but her legs were as good as any he had seen, and that was the important bit when it came to fishnet tights and thigh-slapping.

“What do you do when you’re not understudying Buttons?” asked Lloyd.

“I’m an Ugly Sister,” said Carl.

“He’s a wonderful dame,” said Judy, taking the tape from him. “Really sexy. What do I do with this?”

“Do you ever wonder about all this cross-dressing in pantomime?” asked Lloyd. “Does it mean anything?”

Carl shrugged. “I think originally it just allowed a bit of gender-bending in safety,” he said. “Most people have a little bit of the opposite sex in them, don’t you think?” He turned to Judy. “I’ve put all the effects on there,” he said. “All you have to do is play them on cue, then stop the tape. They’re all in order.”

“Oh, right. So I should mark up a script with the cues.”

“Yes—I expect madam will want to hear them all, so you’d better put the tape in, and I’ll make sure we’re rigged up to the sound system.”

“Am I surplus to requirements now?” asked Lloyd. “Or will you want to concentrate on being ugly?”

Carl opened his mouth, but was forestalled by the voice that floated through from the stage. “Where’s my wonderful substitute Buttons? Are you there, darling?”

“There’s your answer.”

Eric Watson’s jeans-clad legs descended from the loft and he pressed the button that folded the ladder neatly back up, closing the hatch, then pulled over the hinged ceiling molding so the hatch disappeared altogether. There was no mistaking that knock; he had given his guests instructions to remain absolutely silent. He smoothed his remaining wisps of hair down, and glanced at the clock as he went downstairs and along the hallway to the front door. Ten to nine—it had taken them long enough to get here, he thought as they banged at the door again. He opened the door to a uniformed constable who looked to be about twelve and a half.

“Yes?”

“Constable Sims, Malworth,” said the young man. “We’ve had a report of a suspected break-in at your next-door neighbor’s house.”

“So?”

“We can’t get an answer, sir, and we can’t get round the back because the rear gates are locked. We wondered if we could get through from your garden.”

He was joined as he spoke by another, older constable.

“Can’t you climb over the back gates?” said Eric. “They’re not that high. You’re young and fit.” He looked at the older one and amended that. “Well, he is, anyway,” he said with a nod of his head at Constable Sims.

“We think that might be how the intruder entered,” said the overweight one. “We don’t want to disturb any evidence.”

“You’re actually going to look for some, are you?” But there was no harm in letting them go over the back wall, Eric supposed. He stood aside, motioning down the hallway toward the kitchen. He let Sims pass, but held up a hand when the other one tried to come in. “I don’t think I caught your name,” he said.

“Warren.”

“You’re supposed to give your name and station when you approach members of the public.”

He apologized; Eric allowed him entry.

“Did you see or hear anything, sir?” asked Sims as they walked through.

“I heard glass breaking. I thought it was these kids again.”

“Again?”

“They come here from the London Road estate. Throwing bottles at the wall and stuff like that. I heard them this teatime. But it sounded a lot closer this time, so I went out and had a look in case it was my greenhouse.”

“But you didn’t see anyone?”

“No.”

In the kitchen, Eric unlocked the back door and took them outside. As they walked out, the security light came on, turning the dark night into near daylight. “There you are,” he said, indicating the low ornamental wall that divided the gardens. “Make the most of it before they wall me in.”

Sims stepped over the low wall and made his way toward the house. “Window’s broken,” he called over. “I’ll have a look inside.”

Warren acknowledged that with a wave of his hand but didn’t join him.

“Aren’t you supposed to go in with him?” said Eric.

Warren raised his eyebrows. “Know a bit about the job, do you, sir?”

“You could say that. I did it for eighteen years.”

“I understand the intruder was seen running away,” the constable said. “I think my colleague can handle it on his own. You were saying something about the neighbors walling you in? What’s all that about, then?”

“That pile of bricks is for the new, higher wall that my friendly neighbors intend building.”

“Are you not on the best of terms, then?”

“Let’s just say we’re not bosom buddies.”

“And you definitely didn’t hear anything suspicious tonight?”

“I told you. I heard breaking glass—presumably it was their window. I came out to see if it was my greenhouse, but it wasn’t, so I went back in.”

“We’ve had a report of a row going on a few minutes before that. Would you know anything about that?”

Oh, so that’s what he wanted to know. “Are you asking if I had a barney with my neighbors? Do you think I heaved a brick through their window or something?”

“No,” said Warren. “We’ve had a report of a disturbance, that’s all. I wondered if you heard it, too.”

“No,” said Eric.

“And you definitely didn’t see anyone when you came out?” The policeman wandered down the driveway, toward the greenhouse. Eric followed him down.

“No,” he said. “No one.”

“And you saw no one hanging around before that?”

“No.”

“As I said, we’ve had a report of someone seen running away. You didn’t see anyone on the road at the back here?”

“No,” said Eric, beginning to lose count of how many times he had said that now.

Constable Sims appeared again. “Kev,” he said. “You’d better come in here.”

Eric didn’t say I told you so.

Tom Finch was working late, catching up on the paperwork that he could no longer ignore. Judy Hill had tried to make him do it on a methodical, regular basis like she did—she said that she had made herself do that right from the start, because she hated it, too. But while Tom could see the logic of doing something you didn’t like for a half an hour or so in the working day rather than waiting until you would be in real trouble if it wasn’t done, and then going at it for three and a half hours for which you would not be paid, he had never had the self-discipline necessary to carry it out. Besides, you got it done quicker in the evening—the bad guys might do their work under cover of darkness, but it was in the daylight that it was discovered, as a rule.

He wrote his signature with a flourish on the very last sheet in his tray, yawned, stretched, and scratched his head, startled, as he still was, to discover the strange bristly sensation.

He’d had his golden curls cut off the last time he went for a haircut; sitting in the chair, looking at himself in the mirror, he realized they had to go if he ever wanted to be taken seriously, and had issued the command to the hairdresser. He had expected an argument during which he could let himself be talked out of it, but she just asked him how short he wanted it, and went at it with the scissors when he had told her to remove as much of it as she
liked. He had watched it fall to the ground with a mixture of dismay and satisfaction.

Now, he looked at the phone when it rang with much the same feeling. If he had left at half past five, he wouldn’t have been here to answer it. He was tired. It was almost nine o’clock, and he’d worked a twelve-hour day. He wanted to go home. But you never knew—it might be some informant with a juicy piece of news for him. He picked it up. “CID, Finch speaking,” he said.

“Sarge,” said the girl manning the dispatch room, “Malworth attended a suspected break-in at 4 Windermere Terrace, Malworth, and they’ve reported finding the body of a woman in the house. She’d been bound and gagged—it looks as though she suffocated. Their inspector wants Stansfield CID to attend.”

Tom tried to suppress the little thrill he always got when a really serious crime presented itself. Windermere Terrace was at the moneyed end of Malworth; large town houses that were still owned by people who lived in them, rather than turned into flats. It was his job to investigate crime, of course, and the more serious the crime, the more interesting it was, but he felt that it wasn’t a particularly attractive trait. You shouldn’t be pleased, however professionally, that someone had died.

Still—it beat paperwork any day. He dialed Bob Sandwell’s home number. Bob was the acting Detective Inspector now that Judy had been transferred, and this would be his first real test. He was okay. Tom liked him. But Bob didn’t have Judy Hill’s flair. If you asked him, they’d have been better off sending Bob Sandwell to HQ to head up this LINKS project, and leaving Judy here.

“Hi, Kathy. Is Bob there?”

“Oh, Tom—I was going to call tomorrow morning.
I’m afraid he’s in bed with a temperature. He’s got the flu.”

Oh. “Right,” Tom said. “Look—tell him to get well soon, and … we’ll soldier on without him. ’Bye.”

For the first time in his life, Tom wished that he was an inspector and could take charge of this himself. Maybe he would take the exam again. Judy Hill was always telling him to do it. And maybe he’d pass it now that he didn’t look like an angel. But it would need someone more senior than he to deal with this, and Tom felt certain that DCI Lloyd would rather be called before someone he didn’t know was drafted from another division, so he’d have to try to get hold of him.

Lloyd’s cell phone was switched off, and he wasn’t at home, or at Judy Hill’s place. Tom left messages on all three phones, and went to assess the situation for himself.

Denis Leeward was sitting in his car in a rest area, one hidden from the road by trees, trying to get his head around everything that had happened. He’d driven toward home instinctively, but then had realized he couldn’t
go
home, and pulled up here just before the exit to the village. Meg wasn’t expecting him back for another hour and would expect some sort of explanation if he went home now. His ribs ached and he was still shaking; he couldn’t go home in this state.

But he couldn’t stay here. The pub, he thought, relieved that something approaching an idea had managed to penetrate the fog of fear and worry. He’d go to the pub.

He drove off, turned down the road into the bypassed village and parked, half on the pavement, half off, opposite The Horse and Halfpenny. No one knew how it had come by that name, and people assumed it was one of the
new wave of pubs with silly names, but The Horse and Halfpenny, once a coaching inn, had been given its name a hundred years ago. Denis couldn’t believe that of all the things he might be thinking about now, when he needed to think clearly, all he could do was wonder how The Horse and Halfpenny got its name.

He moved the rearview mirror and looked at himself, running his fingers through his longish gray hair to neaten it up a bit, straightening his tie. His face looked pale, but that might just be the streetlights. He got out of the car, sucking in his breath as his bruised ribs complained. He’d have to be careful not to do that. He didn’t want anyone asking him what was wrong; he had to take a deep breath, calm down, and act halfway normal. He’d had to do what he did, he told himself, justifying his actions to himself, fervently hoping he would never have to justify them to anyone else.

He locked the car, and waited for a motorbike to shoot past him before crossing over the village road to the pub. It was his local spot, but it was far enough away from home for him to be fairly certain that Meg wouldn’t see the car. He couldn’t think straight. He was going to go and get a stiff drink. He could walk home, leave the car there. And when Meg demanded answers, he might have some ready, or be too drunk to care. He had done something that he would never have believed he’d ever do, and already it seemed like a distant memory, like a dream fragment. A moment of indecision, that was all he’d had, before he quite definitely decided, and committed himself to a course of action from which there was no return.

He ducked under the low beam that had been the painful introduction to the Horse of many a visitor despite its notice warning those over five feet six inches.
The pub regulars were playing their weekly quiz game, and above their laughter at the question master’s inability to pronounce any word of more than one syllable correctly, Denis ordered a whiskey.

“On the hard stuff tonight, Doc?” the innkeeper asked.

He smiled. A weak, unconvincing smile, but he smiled. “Long day.”

“Well, there you are,” said the innkeeper. “Get that down you. You look as though you might be coming down with this flu—a bit green about the gills.”

“How do you pronounce the name of this pub?” Denis asked, when he had downed the tiny pub measure in one gulp and ordered a beer chaser, and just as the pub erupted into laughter once more. The quiz master took it all in good part.

The innkeeper leaned over the bar, cocking his ear toward Denis. “Say again?”