Murder... Now and Then (33 page)

Christ murder, blackmail, burglary – was there anything Annabel hadn't thought of? Perhaps he'd kidnapped her and raped her while he was at it. ‘No,' he said. ‘I stole some money from a wallet and I failed to report a murder. In that order. I forgot I even had the bloody money until next morning.'

She looked at him steadily, her brown eyes unblinking. ‘It didn't occur to you to report the murder?' she asked.

‘No.'

‘Did you know the victim?'

‘No.'

The look in her eye indicated what she thought of that; Annabel had told them about that, too, the rotten little bitch. Now, too late he realized what a sitting target he had been. Anna mustn't have been able to believe her luck when he walked into the pub, complete with motive, asking her –
asking
her how he could get in there undetected by security.

‘Did you know the victim?' Judy was asking again, still quietly, still patiently.

‘No,' he said.

Annabel might have told them, but she sure as hell couldn't prove that he knew Holyoak, or that he had had a score to settle. He had a score to settle now, all right. And whichever of them ended up in jail for fifteen years, he would settle it. And this time he wouldn't let her off lightly.

‘Why didn't you report what you had found?'

‘I was in shock! I had entered the premises illegally and found someone stabbed to death on the bloody floor – all I could think of doing was getting the hell out! And when I remembered about the money it was too late – I had stolen from him, for Christ's sake!' He looked round the interview room, and held out his hands. ‘This,' he said. ‘This was going to happen if I reported it. I thought the little whore would keep her mouth shut when she sobered up, but I was wrong.'

She didn't speak. Didn't say a word. Bannister sat in silence too for as long as he could bear it, but that wasn't long. He couldn't be being done for this. He couldn't.

‘
She
killed him! She saw me coming – all right? I see her on the telly with her designer clothes on, and I can't believe what I'm seeing! A cheap little whore like that? I wanted to go and remind her who she was – that's all. She sent me up there.'

‘Did you try to blackmail her?'

He made a scornful noise. ‘Look – I had three quid in my pocket. She drives a bloody Porsche! Where's the justice?'

‘Did you try to blackmail her?'

‘Oh – if you want to call it that!' he shouted. ‘It got me nowhere! And she saw the answer to her prayers. She had just stabbed her sugar-daddy to death, and I—'

He clamped his lips together, clasping his hands at the back of his neck in frustration. With a supreme effort, he calmed himself down, lifting his still clasped hands over his head, slowly down on to the table in front of him. It looked like a gesture of prayer. It was a slow-motion gesture of violence. The table was Annabel's neck.

‘I was the fall guy,' he said, relaxing his hands, reaching over for the cigarettes that still lay on the table.

‘We'll be searching your flat, Dave,' she said. ‘Are we going to find anything?'

He nodded. ‘You'll find about a hundred and seventy pounds in the drawer beside my bed. Tell them not to frighten my wife and kids. Your custody sergeant's got the rest of the money, except what I spent on petrol.'

‘Did you know the victim?' she asked.

He closed his eyes. Was she never going to give up? Asking the same question, the same way, over and over. He looked back at her. ‘ I won't answer any more questions,' he said.

‘Now – if you look
here
…'

Lloyd was being shown a transparency of the photographs at the scene which had got forensic excited. He looked at the viewer, at a close-up of the wardrobe doors.

‘The blood has splashed,' said the girl in the white lab-coat whom Lloyd had learned to his horror was called Dr Greenfield, when he had taken her to be a sixth-former on work experience. Fortunately, his attitude to sixth-formers on work experience was indistinguishable from his attitude to people with Ph. D.s, so she would never know his mistake. He was just taking a little time adjusting, that was all.

The spray of someone's lifeblood was no easier to take in black and white – if anything, in an odd way, the starkness of the contrast made it worse. This particular transparency was of the thin streaks across the doors.

‘See?' she said. ‘It's spattered across both doors, but if you close in on it' – she suited the action to the word, and three individual streaks came into close-up – ‘ you can see that there's a break,' she said. ‘It hits the right-hand door, then there's a gap on the left-hand door before it continues. And it's two millimetres out of alignment.'

Lloyd nodded. ‘So the doors were open when the attack was going on?' he said.

‘One. The right-hand door was ajar. When we looked at the photographs of the
open
door …'

The next slide clicked in, and she began demonstrating all the proofs of her statement. He then got shown the results of the tests, they'd carried out at the scene and on a pair of mock-up doors. The inference to be drawn from their labours was clear. The wardrobe door had been almost, but not quite closed during the attack, and closed firmly after the attack. It couldn't close accidentally; it had to have been closed, quite deliberately.

The carving knife from the block of knives in the kitchen had been positively identified as the murder weapon. The sheets from the bed, and the bloodstains on the headboard indicated that that was where the attack had begun. Semen had also been found on the sheets, which came as no surprise to anyone; Holyoak's much vaunted fidelity to his wife seemed to have ceased that night, if it had ever been the case. And the wardrobe doors would appear to confirm Freddie's thoughts on where the assailant's clothes had been. The assailant had showered; traces of blood had been found in the shower basin, and on the towels. The same type as Holyoak's; the samples from the knife, the sheets and the towels had gone off for DNA analysis. The results would take a couple of weeks, but Holyoak's blood type wasn't common; it was unlikely that the body fluids were anyone's but his. So who was with him? All manner of theories went rattling through Lloyd's mind.

Anna Worthing and Holyoak had had a fight that had got out of hand. Bannister was set up, as he had insisted to Judy that he had been. And Anna had once come within an ace of doing Bannister a considerable injury, so she had the temper to lash out at someone. And if she had a knife in her hand, all right, she might even lash out with that. But whoever had stabbed Holyoak had meant business; that was not the result of a moment's frustration. And Lloyd didn't believe that Anna Worthing had killed him, not like that.

Someone had come in, found Holyoak with someone else, got a knife from the kitchen and attacked him. But not the woman? She had run away. Who was she? Anna? Was there something between her and Bannister? Bannister had attacked Holyoak … and what? Then Anna and Bannister had had a nice cosy heart to heart and agreed on a story that they would both tell when the police caught up with them? Then Bannister went home, got rid of the bloodstained clothes. No. He rejected that one too.

But something had made Anna go and get drunk. She said she'd had a row with him. And perhaps it was about this other woman, as Judy had said. Geraldine Rule seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth, according to Finch, who had been waiting for the Rules to come and let him have their fingerprints.

Lloyd drove back to Stansfield, aware as ever of the great good fortune of having a forensic lab built practically on the doorstep, and a Home Office pathologist within fifty miles, and tried another theory.

Bannister, if Anna's story about what Holyoak had done to him was true, could have killed him. Anna's with Holyoak, and his lady friend comes to the door. Anna leaves, goes to the pub to drown her sorrows, sends Bannister up there in the hope of embarrassing Holyoak and getting Bannister into deep water again. She succeeds, on both counts. The girlfriend runs away when they are discovered, and Holyoak comes after Bannister, who grabs a knife from the kitchen. But how come Holyoak was back on the bed when it happened?

Bannister was always going up there to kill him. He didn't fall for that line that Anna gave him about the flat being empty; he knew Holyoak was up there with someone. He picked up the knife on his way through the kitchen. But he had no quarrel with whoever the woman was, so she fled, and he didn't try to stop her, even though she was a witness. If so, where was she? Why hadn't she come forward? Because of this reputation that she had to preserve? Was Bannister so certain that she wouldn't come forward that he could
afford
to let her go?

Besides, according to the camera that took in the outside door to the flat, Holyoak had had no visitor at all – not one that came in by that door, at any rate. And none of that explained why someone closed the wardrobe door after the murder. That surely had to be so that no one would know that it had ever been open. He couldn't really imagine someone neatly closing the door after she had just stabbed someone to death and retrieved her clothes from it. If this hypothetical person was an automatic door closer, she would have closed it in the first place, and it wouldn't have been ajar during the murder. Another little puzzle.

They had found two sets of keys to the flat in Holyoak's possession and Anna had to be tackled about that; if she had keys, her insistence that she was not Holyoak's mistress would seem a little unlikely, but Lloyd still felt that he wasn't the one to do the tackling.

It was almost ten o'clock when Lloyd arrived back in Stansfield; Tom Finch was wading through the private investigators' reports that Holyoak had received on Catherine all those years ago when she had run away from home.

‘Any joy?' asked Lloyd.

‘Not yet, sir. She's been traced, and they're keeping an eye on her.' He looked up. ‘Daily,' he said. ‘I'll let you know the next thrilling instalment when I get to it.'

Clearly, the frequency of the reports was Lloyd's fault. He smiled. ‘Have we had an answer from Holyoak's secretary about keys to the penthouse?' he asked.

‘Not yet, sir.'

‘You can leave these for the moment,' Lloyd said. ‘I want you to have another word with Miss Worthing.'

He told Finch the nature of the word, and went into his own office, where Judy had left him the files on the Scott murder. He flicked through the statements, door-to-door enquiry forms, progress reports, then took his glasses from their pouch and settled down to do some serious reading.

Mrs Scott had begun to tire of her husband's excursions beyond his own bedroom, it appeared. She had told a friend that her husband was having an affair – she had been very distressed, according to the friend, who was, of course, Zelda Driver. Mrs Scott had told Zelda that her husband had always been unfaithful, practically from the honeymoon onward, and she had grown to accept it. The variety was something that he needed, and he was, in all other respects, a model husband.

Lloyd looked up, and thought about that. He wasn't a wife-beater, then. And seemed to have been fortunate enough to find not one, but two wives who were prepared to put up with his infidelity. So why did he turn on his present wife on Wednesday? What truth had he tried to elicit from her with violence? Did he succeed?

He carried on reading Zelda's evidence, which would have been inadmissible if they had ever brought it to court anyway. This time, it seemed, things had been different. Scott's extramarital affairs had never before altered his attitude to his wife, but this one had. She had taxed him with it, and he had denied having an affair at all. Then he had suggested the move to Stansfield, and she had hoped everything would be all right. But it had still been going on; he had even stopped sleeping with his wife.

Lloyd felt his heart give a dip of guilt when he read that; it struck a little too close to home for comfort. Apart from the marriage-long infidelity, of which he had not been guilty, it read like the history of his own marriage, including the move to Stansfield which was supposed to make everything better. And the disinclination to share a bed with Barbara, brought about not by distaste, but the guilty knowledge that he wanted her to be someone else.

Would Scott have felt guilty, given his track record? Yes, Lloyd supposed, if he had fallen for Catherine, as opposed to amusing himself with her. And Catherine was sixteen years old when he met her, of course, which would only add to the problem. But surely divorce would have been a reasonable, if unhappy, solution? It was what Lloyd had done, in the end.

He checked back to see if religion had played any part; was divorce out of the question for one of them? Apparently not. So why kill her? Scott had married Catherine less than six months later, much to the glee of the press. A divorce wouldn't have allowed remarriage that soon, but there seemed to be no reason for their haste other than that there was nothing to stop them.

Mrs Scott, it seemed, had been uttering threats that very evening, at the top of her voice. It had been a warm evening; people had had their windows open, and the neighbours had heard her saying she could and would make trouble.

That puzzled him a little, but for the moment, he was just familiarizing himself with the investigation.

The election campaigners had been around, ensuring that the faithful went to vote, and that those less able got a lift to the polling station. It was thanks to a mistake being made at the Conservative Party campaign headquarters that they had been able to narrow down the time of death to between five forty-five and seven o'clock, because Mrs Scott had been alive and well when she had been canvassed at five forty-five, and the woman across the road had found her at a few minutes after seven.

But that lot of campaigners shouldn't have been there at all; the road had already been done earlier, by a team led by none other than Dr Charles Rule. No one on the first team had called on Mrs Scott; Rule had told them not to bother, as she was a committed socialist. Two of that team heard the row as they knocked on the doors either side; it had still been going on as the team moved on to its next target area.