Murder... Now and Then (32 page)

It was early May, and spring was in the air; even in the grey city streets birds flew from eaves and gutters where unsuspected nests had been built daffodils and crocuses were pushing up in the parks, and the tourists were taking photographs of him again.

He got down to be on the child's level, taking off his helmet. ‘Hello, sonny,' he said. ‘Have you lost your mum?'

The child nodded and bawled at the same time.

‘Do you know what she looks like?'

He nodded and bawled, but he hiccuped too.

Bannister smiled. ‘ Well – shall we look for her?' he said. ‘Tell you what – shall I lift you up? Then you'll be taller than me, won't you? You can look from up there. I'm too small to see that far.'

He unwound his six foot plus frame, and stood up, hoisting the child on to his shoulders, where he sat hiccuping solemnly, looking round at the crowds of shoppers.

‘Can you see your mum?'

Hiccup.

‘Shall we walk around a bit?' He took a few strides, but the bawling in his right ear began again, increasing to a pitch which threatened his tolerance level, and he stopped and walked back. ‘Is she in this shop?' he asked.

Hiccup.

‘Here,' he said, handing the child his helmet. ‘You wear this. Then you'll be a policeman, like me.'

It came down to the tip of his nose, and he pushed it back, hiccuped, and smiled.

‘There,' he said. ‘Now you'll see her. Policemen see everything.'

‘Oh, thank God!'

He turned to see a girl of about his own age; the child scrambled from his shoulders to hers, the helmet jettisoned in the process.

‘Mummy – I'm a pleeceman,' he announced.

Bannister bent down to retrieve his helmet; when he straightened up, they had gone. ‘Don't mention it,' he muttered to himself, and smiled. He liked kids. Maybe he should get married and have some of his own.

Yeah. He'd like that.

‘It isn't a form of contraception, you know,' said Geraldine, as Catherine Barnes looked away from her, down at her lap. At her baby. The baby she wanted to destroy. Max Scott's baby.

‘I know,' she whispered.

‘And there are alternatives to termination.'

The girl shook her head.

No. Well, it certainly wouldn't be in Max's interests for the police to find out that his girlfriend was three months' pregnant. Catherine had told the police that Max had been with her when Valerie died, and no one who knew Max thought for a moment that he had had anything to do with what had happened. But the police did, and that was presenting Geraldine with even more of a dilemma than usual in these circumstances.

Catherine's alibi had been a mixed blessing for Max; on the one hand, she was an apparently impartial witness, an ex-employee on whom he had paid a courtesy call at the time of the murder. As ever, Charles believed him. On the other hand, the police were, rightly, convinced that she and Max had had an affair, suspicious of her turning up when she did, and that made her a biased witness, and gave Max a motive. So they were trying hard to prove that there was something more between them, so far without success.

It didn't show yet; it would, very soon, unless Geraldine agreed to arrange for a termination. But she had to be very certain why she agreed; it couldn't be for expediency's sake. She would never normally agree to the termination of a healthy pregnancy this late – by the time she could get her in, she would be sixteen weeks gone. And low though Max had dropped in her esteem, she couldn't see him putting this little girl through something as traumatic as an abortion just to make his own life easier.

‘Have you told Max you're pregnant?' she asked.

‘No!' The girl looked up, her cheeks pink. ‘He mustn't know – you mustn't tell him. Please, you mustn't.'

‘I'm your doctor, Catherine. I can't and won't tell anyone at all. But you should tell him.'

‘No. I can't. Not now. I was going to, but – no. Not now that all this has happened – he's got too much to worry about as it is. I can't tell him.'

‘Have you talked to anyone?'

‘Mrs Driver. I was sick yesterday morning, and she … well, she guessed. She's promised not to tell Max. She says I can have a job at her place if I want. And she'll tell him she's sent me on a word-processor course, if you—'

Zelda had promised not to tell Max. Had she promised not to tell anyone else, though? That was the question. But even Zelda wouldn't tell anyone, not this time. She too was shocked at Max's behaviour. More shocked than Geraldine, come to that. But if the police discovered that Catherine was pregnant, Max's motive would be exposed, as far as they were concerned. And Zelda wouldn't let that happen, not even now.

Why everyone was so concerned with the amoral Max, even the poor little girl who sat in her surgery, was beyond Geraldine, but they all were. And the facts were that he was being hauled in for questioning every day by the police, that they were looking for the slightest shred of evidence against him, that he and Valerie had had a row that evening, loud enough for the neighbours to hear, and that Valerie had finally tired of his infidelity, and had been saying so, loud and clear to anyone who would listen, for a month before her death.

Max was in deep, deep trouble. The child was seventeen years old, she didn't have family in this country, and she would clearly suffer acute mental stress if she was forced to have the baby. She had given Max an alibi; her pregnancy would make it suspect, and anything that happened to Max as a result would hurt her immeasurably.

‘All right' she said. ‘But you must understand that it's something you have to live with. Having the baby may seem impossible to you now, but terminating the pregnancy can have considerable repercussions for the mother.'

It was a speech she always made, when she was unable to see an alternative to termination. Women sometimes went into it with their eyes shut, thinking that a simple operation would end all their problems, only to find they were just beginning. Catherine had to know about the possible psychological effects; she had to know what she was letting herself in for. But even Geraldine could see that it was probably preferable to what she would be letting herself in for if she had the baby.

It hurt her more than she could say, but there really was no alternative.

There was something irritating her, something that didn't quite make sense about Catherine's story. If she had intended telling Max about the baby, why hadn't she, if she was supposed to have been with him the night before? She pushed the thought that the alibi might be false to the back of her mind, because it made even less sense to imagine that Max had killed Valerie.

But then nothing made sense. She was about to make it possible to destroy the one thing she had used every means at her disposal to create. And where was the sense in that?

Bannister watched as Judy Hill opened her notebook. He remembered what a stickler she had been for getting her notebook written up. Everyone else's had always been days behind, but not Judy's. It was eight o'clock in the morning; she was in early to deal with him. He smiled.

‘You're in trouble,' she said. ‘I should try taking it seriously if I were you.'

He knew he was in trouble. His smile grew broader. He had spent a night in an uncomfortable cell, and he hadn't slept a wink for worrying about what Jackie thought, what was going to happen. There was no way he was showing Judy that he was worried.

He had told them that he was at home watching television when they had asked him to account for his whereabouts on Wednesday night; they had arrested him on suspicion of aggravated burglary, so they must think they had some sort of evidence. It was clearly a holding charge, while they sorted out what had really happened.

Judy pushed a large black and white photograph across the table. ‘Do you still insist that you were at home with your wife?' she asked. ‘The date and time are along the bottom.'

He looked at the computer-generated photograph of his beat-up old van, its number plate in sharp enough focus to be read, and sighed. He'd forgotten that his brief visit to the factory would have been recorded for posterity. He smiled again, and shook his head.

‘So where were you?'

She hadn't changed much. The same short dark hair, the same brisk, no-nonsense approach. She was older, but she looked as good as ever. Out of his league, though. She always had been, even as a probationer. Her father had been some sort of college professor or something. A desire to see the job done properly had taken Judy Russell into police work, and she had been good at it; if she had been a man, she'd have been way past DI status by now. It had always irritated her, that one area in which she could never be superior. Bannister wasn't sure that there should be women on the force at all, but if there had to be, then she was the kind they should have.

‘Where were you?' she asked again.

He inclined his head towards the photograph. ‘At …' he leaned over and checked the time. ‘At twenty-oh-four hours, I was driving into that factory,' he said.

‘Don't try to be clever, Dave,' she warned him.

He looked at her. ‘Do you still smoke, Jude?' he asked.

She reached into her bag and pushed cigarettes and matches towards him. No nonsense about calling her Inspector Hill. That was a relief.

He took one, lit it, and pushed them back. ‘What am I supposed to have done?' he asked. He wasn't admitting to any more than he had to; that little bitch had told them something, but he didn't know what. And they had to tell him exactly why he was under arrest.

‘We are investigating the death of a Mr Victor Holyoak which occurred in the penthouse flat of Holyoak Industries offices on Wednesday the first or Thursday the second of April,' she said steadily. ‘We have reason to believe that Mr Holyoak was killed in the course of a burglary.'

They no more thought that than they thought the moon was made of lemon sorbet, but it did fit the facts at their disposal, and it meant that little Annabel had told them that he'd been there.

‘We have a statement to the effect, that you were given instructions on how to gain entry to the penthouse flat,' she went on, confirming that.

He drew deeply on the cigarette, and contemplated Judy for a moment or two. ‘Annabel thought I could do myself some good,' he said, coming down on the side of the truth, at least as far as the facts went. ‘She suggested it. And now we all know why.'

Judy's eyebrows rose in a query.

She'd had a bust-up with her boyfriend about some other woman,' he said. ‘She was drinking – she said there was stuff worth nicking up there, and told me how to get in. She wanted to get her own back on him, she said. But she already had, hadn't she?' He took another drag of the cigarette. ‘And I walked right into it.'

‘Into what exactly?'

‘Into finding him dead in a bedroom that looked like a designer abattoir, exactly,' he said.

She swallowed a little, and he smiled again. She had never been fond of blood, hadn't Judy. And the stuff had sprayed everywhere.

‘Wasn't pretty, was it?' he said, rubbing it in. ‘If you felt bad – think how I felt I'd just dodged past cameras and climbed a fire escape to get in there, and I find someone who's been stabbed to death.'

‘Did you steal a wallet?'

He finished off the cigarette and ground it out in the ashtray. If he got out of this, Annabel was in deep, deep trouble. He still had some faith in the forces of law and order, though. He imagined that they would get her for the murder.

‘Did you steal a wallet?'

‘No,' he said. ‘I stole money
from
a wallet, but I left the wallet there.'

‘Where?'

‘I just took the money out, and dropped the wallet on the floor. Then I went and found Annabel's redecoration job in the bedroom.'

‘So where exactly did you drop the wallet?'

‘On the sitting-room carpet, exactly. I can't give you the coordinates.' He frowned. ‘Didn't you find it?' he asked, not expecting an answer.

‘Do you think there was anyone else in the flat while you were there?'

‘I didn't hang about to find out. I left the way I'd come in as fast as I could.' He remembered the dreadful frozen moment when he had seen Holyoak's body, and frowned. ‘Though – I did hear a noise,' he said.

‘What sort of a noise?'

He couldn't explain. ‘I don't know. It was sort of familiar, but – I don't know. I remember feeling as if it made everything all right.' He looked at her. ‘ I know that sounds crazy. But I was faced with this body, and there was this sound. It didn't fit – it belonged somewhere else.' He shrugged. ‘Not much help,' he said.

She had written it all down, though. She looked up at him. ‘Well,' she said. ‘It might come back to you. Did you know the victim?'

‘Don't even know his name,' he said.

‘What brought you to Stansfield?'

He had been through all these questions on the drive back to London, where he had had visions of police cars screaming up behind him, sirens blaring, assuming, as he had by then, that she had been lying about the cameras. When that hadn't happened, he had thought that the sober Annabel would just keep her mouth shut about what had gone on. But the little cow was trying to make him carry the can for her crime of passion.

‘I saw little Annabel on the six o'clock news,' he said. ‘I thought I'd renew our acquaintance.'

‘How did you know where to find her?'

‘I didn't. That's why I went to the factory. But the offices were in darkness, so I went for a drink to the nearest pub, and there she was.' He smiled. ‘My lucky night – eh?'

‘Did you attempt to blackmail her?'