Murder... Now and Then (52 page)

‘And I got her dried, and dressed, and we worked out what we were going to do.'

Phoning the police would have been a very good idea, thought Lloyd. But he supposed one didn't come up with one's very best ideas under these particular circumstances.

‘I told her to stay in the car, in the car park. Not to draw attention to herself by driving out. I told her I would go back to Anna's. We would do what we had been going to do. She hadn't intended going home, because of how I'd reacted when I saw Holyoak – she had been going to come to the office to talk to me there. So that's what she did. But …'

But he wasn't there, because be had been taken in for questioning by Finch. And Catherine had had no support when she faced Judy's questions. Nothing but her wits to tell her what to do. And she had very nearly succeeded.

Scott spoke again. ‘I washed the knife, and put it back. Then I had a shower. I was getting myself dry when I heard a noise, and I almost died with fright. I thought he wasn't dead. But I came out and he hadn't moved.'

‘But there was an empty wallet lying on the floor,' said Lloyd.

Max nodded. ‘I picked it up before I thought. It was his. His credit cards were still in it. I had no idea how it had got there, but I realized that I had to take it with me. My finger-prints could be found anywhere at all in that flat without suspicion, but not on Holyoak's wallet, and I didn't know if I could get them off leather. I took my clothes out of the machine and got dressed.'

‘But they were still damp,' said Lloyd, and Scott looked impressed.

Lloyd was getting the credit for this bit of deduction, but it was Judy's. Because she had been looking at Max Scott with the appraising eye of a woman, and what she had seen had been at odds with what she had heard from Tom Finch about a drunken, naked, lewd yob. Or words to that effect.

‘I got out the way I had come in, and drove the Porsche back, and parked it the way Anna had.'

Not quite, thought Lloyd. Judy had wondered about this man who tried to get people out of bed to move cars that weren't blocking his garage. But it had been, of course. It just wasn't still blocking it by the morning. And Finch had got in and driven into the garage without the least trouble, despite being ten inches taller than Anna Worthing.

‘You forgot to put the seat forward again,' he told Scott.

Scott nodded. ‘I remembered, next day. But at that moment I was just praying that Anna would still be asleep, and she was. I pulled off my clothes as I went into the room in case she woke. Then I hung them over the chair. I thought they'd be properly dry by morning, but they weren't.'

So Scott had had to do his naked drunk act to get rid of Finch for long enough. No point in interviewing a drunk; you had to wait until they'd sobered up, and Scott had spent enough hours in a police station to know that. He had persuaded Anna back to bed, where Finch had interrupted them. The clothes had been dry by then.

‘How did you know to go to the penthouse?' Lloyd asked.

At first, when he had seen Holyoak at the reception, Max Scott had thought that Catherine had killed his wife. Then Charles Rule had told him about Catherine's abortion. Scott had thought his story was crazy, until Geraldine Rule confirmed it.

‘And I knew,' he told Lloyd. ‘ I knew that she had had a horror of sex since she was fourteen years old – I didn't know why, not then. But I knew that if someone had got her pregnant, then he had to have forced her. And I thought … I thought it must have happened after I left. Some drunk, some customer who'd been thrown out of a whore's flat. And I knew how desperate, how lonely she must have felt. I could see that she might have been driven to take desperate …' He didn't end the sentence. ‘But it wasn't Catherine,' he said.

‘No.' Lloyd hadn't told him who was being charged with his wife's murder.

‘Anyway – that's what I thought at the time.'

‘At the time you were waiting for Anna Worthing?'

‘Yes. I couldn't go home, not until I'd sorted it all out. It seemed to make no sense. But when Anna came she was stoned out of her mind, and telling me some rambling story about Holyoak wanting her to decoy gossips and reporters … I thought he was just queer, at that point, and didn't want people knowing. But he wasn't queer.'

Holyoak seemed queer enough to Lloyd, but that was another perfectly good word that had been hijacked. And another turnabout. Once, it had been an insult, like black had been, if you were talking about someone who was pale tan or very dark brown. Now, black was right, and queer was what homosexuals called themselves.

‘But later, I began to think about it all calmly. About Catherine running away from him as soon as he had found her, about how she had been that last morning in the office. It had to have happened then, if she was three months gone by the time she came here. And if she had been raped by one of the girls' customers, or someone in the street, she would have told me – she would have told the police. And I realized what must have happened to her. What must have been happening to her since she was a little girl – why she had a horror of sex. What she had been running away from when I picked her up that night.'

He looked up then. And then I remembered that Anna had thought that it was me at Holyoak's door,' he said. ‘She knew I hadn't left, but she hadn't seen me. And she had asked me why I hadn't taken my car. That meant she had seen the car. It had been there all the time.
Catherine
had been there all the time – she hadn't gone home at all.

‘I took Anna's keys, and drove over there. I got in the way Anna had said – I couldn't risk being stopped by security, because I had no business there at that time of night. I had to stop whatever was going on up there – I had to.'

He dropped his head again.

‘Thank you for your co-operation, Mr Scott,' Lloyd said.

It wasn't something he often said before charging someone, though others had been much more readily co-operative than the Scotts, who had tried very hard to get away with it.

Scott looked drained, but he summoned up a smile. ‘I knew when I saw the inspector coming up the path,' he said. ‘She looked like a foxhound who had just caught the scent and Catherine and I were too tired to keep running. We'd already agreed we'd make statements.'

Later, Lloyd sat with a ploughman's lunch at which he had nibbled, listening to Judy and Finch.

‘What do you think'll happen to them?' Finch asked.

Judy shrugged. ‘Depends on the judge, I suppose,' she said. ‘But Anna Worthing's prepared to give evidence for the defence about his obsession with Catherine, and how she herself was treated by him.'

‘And the Tarrant murder case has been reopened,' said Finch. ‘I think Bannister will give evidence when he realizes how much inside stories about Holyoak are worth to German news magazines. He was acting under duress too, after all.'

Judy nodded. ‘So with any luck, the defence will be able to make it clear what sort of man the Scotts were up against,' she said.

‘If I saw anyone raping my wife, never mind her bloody stepfather, I'd—'

Lloyd smiled. So would he, but he mustn't say so. Finch could, though. He hadn't been in charge of the investigation. He picked up his beer. ‘ Do you want to know what I think?' he said.

Two reasonably interested faces turned to him.

‘I think that if ex-PC Bannister had acted like a professional officer of the law, and kept his hands to himself fifteen years ago, none of this would have happened,' said Lloyd.

A slight frown came over Finch's face. ‘How do you make that out, sir?' he asked.

‘Have you ever heard the rhyme about the horseshoe nail?' asked Lloyd.

Predictably, Finch had not.

‘
For want of a nail the shoe was lost
,' said Lloyd. ‘
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost
.'

Finch's face held the faint look of alarm that it always did when Lloyd began quoting at him.

‘
For want of a rider, the battle was lost
,' Lloyd went on. ‘
For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost
.' He sat back and contemplated Finch. ‘
And all for the front of a horseshoe nail
,' he finished, and leant forward again. ‘Think about it,' he said. ‘If Bannister hadn't assaulted Anna Worthing, she wouldn't have made a complaint. And if she hadn't made a complaint, Bannister wouldn't have gone there to remonstrate with her.'

Finch's brow cleared a little. ‘So Holyoak wouldn't have rescued her,' he said. ‘He would never even have met her, and he would never have known that Bannister existed.'

Judy was nodding agreement. ‘So he couldn't have used Operation Kerbcrawl to establish his alibi for Tarrant's murder,' she said.

‘Tarrant would still have been topped, though,' said Finch.

Lloyd looked pained. ‘ It is probable,' he said, ‘ that Tarrant would have been murdered before he could give whatever information he had to the Drugs Squad. But it wouldn't have involved Raymond Arthur Wilkes, who wouldn't have boasted to Anna, and wouldn't have died the way he did.'

‘No,' said Finch.

‘And Anna would never have gone to Holland,' Lloyd went on. ‘So Max Scott wouldn't have seen Holyoak that evening.' He was rather proud of his assessment of what had happened, but Finch still wasn't convinced.

‘I don't see that that would have made much difference,' he said. ‘To what happened here, I mean.'

Lloyd lifted his eyebrows in a little shrug. ‘Perhaps not,' he said. ‘But Catherine gave Max Scott a false alibi to replace the real one, as it were. The one she was desperate he shouldn't use. He didn't need an alibi – there was no evidence against him. It was the fact that she was obviously lying that made him the main suspect.'

‘That's true,' said Judy.

‘And it was a lie that she would have had no need to tell if the threat of Holyoak's return as a witness hadn't been hanging over her. If she hadn't lied, Holyoak couldn't have blackmailed her into going to his penthouse, she wouldn't have been with him, and Max Scott wouldn't have stabbed him to death.'

Finch was nodding slowly, but he still had another round to fire. ‘Valerie Scott would still be dead,' he said.

‘Would she?' said Lloyd. ‘ I wonder. Take Bannister and Anna Worthing and Operation Kerbcrawl away, and what have you got? Holyoak discovering where Catherine was living, which is what he'd spent a great deal of time and money trying to do. Operation Kerbcrawl took priority because it was coming to an end, and he had to set everything up – but without that to think about, I don't think he'd have hung about for three months before visiting himself on her, do you?'

‘No,' said Finch.

‘So what would have happened?'

Finch blew out his cheeks. ‘ What did happen,' he said. ‘The bastard would have raped her.'

‘Quite. But it would have happened in October, when he found her. Before Max Scott had even told Catherine that he was thinking of leaving London. So what then? What when she came into the office in an evidently distressed condition? He wouldn't have put it down to the fact that he was going anywhere, would he?'

‘And she'd have told him, in the end,' said Judy. ‘She wanted to tell him anyway – that was why she came here. The only reason she didn't was because his wife had been murdered.' She looked at Lloyd. ‘And he would never have left her alone in London to cope with that nutcase on her own,' she said.

‘No. So my guess is that he would never have come to Stansfield,' said Lloyd. ‘And Charles Rule would never have had any reason to murder Valerie Scott.'

Finch smiled a little sadly. ‘So it's all down to Bannister, is that what you're saying, sir?'

Lloyd shook his head. ‘I'm saying that Bannister unwittingly set in motion a train of events that culminated in Victor Holyoak's being stabbed to death on Wednesday night,' he said.

‘Good for him,' said Finch.

It was difficult, Lloyd reluctantly admitted, to regard Holyoak's death as anything other than a merciful release for those whose lives he had so brutally manipulated for his own ends. He stood up. ‘ It's all down,' he said, ‘ to Victor Holyoak himself. And he got his just deserts. But justice and the law don't always go hand in hand. Holyoak was the victim, and we can't forget that.' He picked up the empty glasses. ‘Same again?' he asked.

‘Please,' said Judy.

‘Yes, sir,' said Finch. ‘Thanks.'

‘Call me Lloyd, for God's sake, Tom,' he said. ‘ It's ridiculous to sit in a pub with a man and be called ‘‘sir'' like some feudal lord.'

‘Lloyd?' said Finch, a little diffidently. ‘But that's your surname, sir.'

‘Have you ever heard anyone call me anything else?'

‘No, sir. Lloyd. Sir Lloyd.' He grinned.

‘That's a thought Lloyd,' said Judy, her eyes dancing with mischief as she looked up at him. ‘What if you get knighted for your services to the English language or something?'

Lloyd glared at her.

‘Well? Maybe it's against the law to call yourself Sir Something Else. You might have to use it.'

Finch grinned at her. ‘Do you know what it is, then?'

‘Oh, I've been given little clues here and there,' she said, looking up at Lloyd again. ‘And I've worked it out.'

‘No, she hasn't,' said Lloyd.

‘Yes, I have,' she said, and smiled at him.

There was no mistaking that smile. It came right after the gun-dog look – or the foxhound look, as Max Scott had said. It hadn't come with the solution of the case, which had distressed her as much as it had its victims, but it was there now.

Judy knew his name. Oh, calamity.