And None Shall Sleep (19 page)

Yolande had been a tidy girl of modest means. Her home held no luxuries. Her clothes were chainstore, her perfumes middle market and inexpensive. The same was true of makeup and the contents of her kitchen. And the decorations were neat and unimaginative. There was no hint of avarice.

‘She didn't do it for money.'

Mike frowned. ‘Why else?'

‘Just a thought,' she said slowly, apologetically.

‘If not for money, what about a moral reason?'

‘You mean Rowena Carter?'

She nodded.

He gave a wry laugh. ‘I suppose she would have heard about the case. You think she saw herself as an avenging angel?'

She watched his face change as he thought about it. ‘Could be.'

‘You realize, then, that she must have had some contact with the person who organized Selkirk's murder?'

‘Seems like it,' he said cautiously.

‘And they must have persuaded her to help in the abduction of Selkirk. So was it was someone Yolande already knew?'

She paused to think. ‘They must have been very persuasive to have conned her into helping.'

‘Unless they had some hold over her ...'

‘Over the Michael Frost case. So here we are, Mike.' Her eyes were sharp. ‘We've come full circle. And so this blameless girl, home-loving and indulged by her parents, praised by her employers, somehow got herself involved in of all things – a contract killing.'

Even as she spoke she was shaking her head. At the very least, I'm surprised, in fact I'm bordering on the sceptical.' Her eyes wandered back to the dead girl. ‘She had me fooled.'

Mike was silent and she aired her thoughts out loud. What did O'Sullivan say? She'd been talking to Frost for an hour before he jumped.' She met Mike's eyes. ‘I wonder what he said.'

‘We'll never know now, Jo.'

‘I'm banking on us finding out, Korpanski.'

Mike was scratching his chin with the tip of his thumb, was a habit he had when struggling to think. The rasping sound was threatening to annoy her. He stopped doing it Just in time and looked up. ‘She couldn't have known Selkirk was going to be murdered,' he said, ‘or she wouldn't have had anything to do with it. If you remember, Jo, when we spoke to her she seemed confident he'd turn up, didn't she? What if she thought he was just going to be abducted or kidnapped for money – or something,' he finished lamely.

She nodded. ‘Maybe.'

One of the uniformed officers returned from a tour of the building's exterior.

‘No sign of a break-in,' he said. ‘My guess is that she let the killer in herself.'

Joanna forced herself to bend over the girl's body and study the neck. Twined around it, lying loosely now, was a nylon stocking.

‘Let's go outside,' she said suddenly. It was dusk. The lights of the town looked falsely welcoming. One of them shone on a murderer. Distant traffic roared along the road. No sign yet of flashing blue lights.

‘It's time to go right back to the beginning, Mike,' she said decisively. ‘I think we'd better speak to the Selkirks again, both mother and son and not forgetting Grandpa Tony.' She stopped and gritted her teeth. ‘In fact, in the mood I'm in I could even suspect pretty little Lucy or our pregnant mare.'

Mike looked at her in surprise.

‘And then,' she said, ‘I'm going to revisit the Carter family.'

She couldn't ignore Mike any longer. ‘All right, all right. They lost their daughter. I'm sorry for them. I really am, but someone had Selkirk killed and that led to this.'

‘Joanna,' he objected, ‘they wouldn't have killed Yolande.'

‘Not even to get at Selkirk?'

He shook his head. ‘Not after three years.'

And the infuriating thing was, she knew he was right. She couldn't see either of the Carters having any involvement in the nurse's death. Their hatred had all been centred on the man who had destroyed ... no, murdered ... their daughter. But it hadn't made them lose their humanity. They would not have killed Yolande Prince.

Perhaps it was the enforced inactivity of the wait for Matthew and the SOCOs, or the return to the small room, but now a new horror was beginning to take shape. ‘Surely,' she said, ‘surely, Michael Frost's death
was
suicide?'

Mike, as usual, was prosaic. ‘Well, pushing someone out of a window would be a clumsy method of murder.'

She agreed.

‘Maybe the point isn't so much
whether
he committed suicide as why?'

‘Why what?' she said irritably.

‘Why did he commit suicide?'

She frowned. ‘Because he was depressed.'

‘Yeah, but why was he depressed?'

She stared at him. ‘I don't know.'

‘Don't they usually have a reason? Maybe there's something there.'

She stared at him. ‘We could certainly follow it up,' she said, ‘see if anyone knows.'

‘She must have known,' he said. ‘She was the one who was talking to him just before he jumped. I bet he told her everything. She knew why he was depressed. She must have done. Maybe that's why she did what she did. I know I'm right, Jo,' he added defensively.

‘And it cost her her life?'

Mike was standing behind her. ‘She didn't put up much of a struggle, did she?' He glanced around the room. ‘No broken furniture. She just sat there and let whoever it was walk behind her and do it.'

The SOC officers, when they finally arrived, were a pleasure to watch, she thought as they began working methodically around the room, starting with the door, moving along the hall carpet, examining the walls for stains, brushing surfaces with fingerprint dust, taking sellotape samples from the long curtains.

With them worked the police photographer, who snapped every conceivable angle and drew diagrams to illustrate, hopefully in court, the positions of everything in the room.

Outside the front door a small cluster of neighbours was gathering. Joanna detailed the two uniformed officers to start gathering statements. ‘I'll talk to anyone later who thinks they saw something.'

They nodded and disappeared outside. It was another half an hour before Matthew arrived. And, like waiting for an ambulance, the time seemed long and impossibly drawn out. She heard his car pull up outside, the steps taken two at a time, then the door being pushed open. Timberland shoes, jeans, a navy sweater, the familiar honey-coloured tousled hair and a more familiar expression. He was smiling.

‘Well, good thing you cancelled,' he said ruefully.

She nodded and made a face. ‘Look,' she awkwardly, trying to keep her voice low. She was aware of the room full of watching police officers. ‘I know we need to talk but it'll have to wait until this case is finished. We're all working flat out, Matthew. I'm sorry.'

He gave her a quick look which carried in it an accusation that she didn't care enough. ‘I don't know whether you've noticed, Joanna, but our relationship,' he said very quietly, ‘is permanently on a back burner. I think I warrant more than that.'

She stood miserably, at a loss, and was relieved to hear sergeant Barraclough clearing his throat behind her.

She put her hand on Matthew's arm. ‘A weekend away,' she said urgently. ‘I promise, somewhere luxurious. As soon as this case is sorted. Please, Matthew.'

He stared at her for a moment, then turned away and directed his attention to the victim. There was an immediate change in his manner, an absorption in the thin face as he snapped on a pair of surgeon's gloves and opened his black Gladstone bag.

‘Nasty business,' he said as he fingered the stocking draped around the neck, prised open the glazed eyes. ‘Petechiae.' he murmured. He examined her tongue. He worked so swiftly and deftly, as she had seen so many times before.

It was only ten minutes later that he straightened up. ‘Superficially,' he said, ‘I'd say she's been dead three or four days. Putrefaction.' He gave an apologetic laugh. ‘Sorry.' He held up his hands. ‘I know you hate it. Ten guesses as to the cause of death.' He touched the stocking. ‘Easy, really. Strong stuff – pulled hard. Not even knotted. Just pulled very tight.' He stopped. ‘Crossed over at the back. Shock and strong hands,' he said.

‘How strong?' she asked. ‘Can women be excluded?'

He shook his head. ‘Unfortunately not. The element of surprise, plus a quick flick of the wrist.' He tapped her plaster cast. ‘You couldn't have done it though, Jo.'

‘Thanks,' she said drily. ‘That really narrows the field.'

He was peeling off his disposable gloves. ‘I suppose she's connected with the Selkirk case?'

Joanna nodded. ‘She was on duty at the hospital that night. She was probably the one who let the murderer into the hospital.'

Matthew raised his eyebrows. ‘It's the same ...?'

‘Not in a month of Sundays,' she said. ‘Not his style.'

‘So who ...?'

‘You tell me.'

‘When was she last seen alive?'

‘The morning Selkirk was missed.' She stopped. ‘I interviewed her.'

‘I think she died within a few hours of speaking to you.' He turned his head round. ‘Didn't they miss her at the hospital?'

‘Someone rang her in sick, claiming to be her mother.

The story fitted so well, that she'd had such a shock the doctor had said she should have some time off to recover. No one suspected a thing.'

‘Well, it looks as though she was murdered soon after getting home.' He gave the ghost of a smile. ‘She's still in uniform.'

She met the light in his eyes. ‘We had noticed.'

‘Sorry.' He raised his hand in mock defence. ‘Not trying to tell you your job.'

‘Good.'

‘I'll get in touch with the Coroner,' he said, ‘and provisionally we'll set the PM for nine tomorrow morning. OK with you?' She nodded.

‘You're giving me a lot of work lately.' He grinned at her affectionately.

‘Unfortunately.' She looked down at the body. ‘I wish
this
hadn't happened. She was a decent girl.'

Joanna stared out of the first-floor window across the town. Even by night she could pick out landmarks. Pinnacles of churches, the late-night supermarket and beyond that the deep, empty black of the Staffordshire moorlands. She sighed.

Something pricked at her consciousness and she wandered into the kitchen to find Korpanski.

‘The morning before Seikirk's death,' she said slowly, ‘he got a letter, didn't he?'

Mike nodded.

‘We thought it was meant to frighten him and it did, enough to give him a heart attack.'

Mike demurred.

‘I know. I know. I'm not saying the person who hired Gallini anticipated that, but it did, and he'd had letters before, hadn't he?' She was using him as a sounding-board. ‘The others had been sent by the Carter family.'

Mike nodded in agreement, wondering where all this was leading.

But Joanna was not to be hurried. ‘And they'd rattled him enough for him to contact the police. We warned them off. This new letter upset him again but this time he didn't consult the police but asked his partner to deal with it, or so Wilde claims.'

‘Wilde had already drafted out a reply.'

‘Incriminating evidence if the subject of the telephone conversation was not the letter but something else.'

Mike sighed. ‘We can't ever prove what they talked about.'

‘And that's the problem of a murder investigation. You never know who's lying and who's telling the truth. And sometimes people hide things for no good reason.'

‘So where does that lead us?'

Joanna gave a quick laugh. ‘I don't know, Mike. I'm simply bouncing ideas off you.'

‘Back to the letter,' Mike said. ‘The Carters deny sending it.'

‘As someone once said, they would, wouldn't they?'

‘Then where does that leave us as far as the letter is concerned?'

‘It's clouded the entire issue.'

‘Either that or it's the sternest pointer towards the truth, but I'm certain that no one could possibly have known that Selkirk would be so intimidated by the letter that he would be admitted to hospital. No one,' she said emphatically. ‘Not his wife. Not his doctor.' She paused. ‘And certainly not Gallini himself. But he was admitted and that must have meant a sudden change of plan. Someone must have instructed Gallini where to find Selkirk and just as suddenly they had to rope someone in to make sure Gallini got Selkirk out of the hospital without discovery.'

She motioned towards the living room door. ‘It was poor old Yolande's bad luck that she was the one they picked on, which leads us to wonder why. Why her? What hold did they have over her? What lever could they have used to coerce her into something so against her nature? And again, Mike, we're back to the Frost case, which seems the only blemish on an otherwise unexceptional and exemplary life.'

She peered out of the window through the slats of the blind. ‘Now if the connection had been with poor little Rowena Carter's accident I could have understood the whole thing better, but a suicide ...' She drew in a deep breath. ‘Once we've spoken to Yolande's parents we'd better study the facts surrounding Michael Frost's suicide a bit closer. OK?'

They moved back to the sitting room and Joanna took a last look at Yolande. She turned back to Mike. ‘Let's get her out of here,' she said. ‘Let the SOCOs have their way. Call a briefing for 8 p.m. and get all the files on the Frost case out. And get on to forensics for the comparison of the letter Selkirk got the morning he died with the Carter ones, will you?'

It was a half-hour journey to Meir, to a small, neat box of a house with a tidy, manicured front garden.

The lights were on, the curtains undrawn. They were being watched.