Wings over the Watcher (25 page)

She called Korpanski from the interview room. He looked irritated.

“I was just getting somewhere,” he said. “What is it?”

“Just listen to me for a minute, Mike. Not here. Let’s go somewhere more private.”

She could feel his resentment heating her back as he followed her along the corridor towards their office. “OK.” She closed the door behind them and sat down opposite him.

He waited, irritation all over his face.

“I’ll ask you the same questions I’ve been asking myself. Then I’ll give you the answers.”

“OK.”

“Why was Beatrice wearing such a flashy dress that morning when she usually cycled in more practical clothes?”

He regarded her steadily. “Possibly because she had an assignation.”

“Why was she wearing a cycling helmet when she didn’t normally?”

“Safety?”

“And in the statements they say she was wearing sunglasses?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Why did she bolt when Corinne Angiotti tried to approach her?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe because…OK.”

“Why did Pennington say what have
they
done to you?”

He shook his head.

Again he shrugged, confused.

“I’ll tell you why. Because the woman who cycled in the flowered dress into the library that morning wasn’t Beatrice. She was already dead.”

“So who was it?”

“Arthur Pennington.”

“That’s not possible. One he was at work at the time when we
know
she was on her bike and two nobody could possibly mistake him for his wife. For a start she was plumper.”

“He could have worn something bulky underneath the dress.”

“But?”

“Who looks at a cyclist? Particularly one in a helmet and sunglasses. People simply saw a woman on Beatrice’s bike wearing a flowery dress.”

Korpanski smothered a smile. “I don’t think Arthur Pennington could have thought up such an idea.”

“Not even fuelled by the fury with his wife?”

Korpanski’s eyes were fixed on hers.

“He knew about the letters and like the pedantic, unimaginative, unforgiving man he is he couldn’t hack it. He strangled her over breakfast that morning and left her body at home. He went to work to create his alibi then drove back. He dressed himself in his wife’s dress to make sure people remembered him when we started asking questions. He isn’t stupid. He would have known the way our minds work and that he would be prime suspect. He cycled in, assuming the other librarians would already be at work. He was just locking up the bike when horror of horrors Corinne Angiotti drives passed and tries to attract his attention by sounding her horn and manoeuvring in the road. By the time she’s pulled up he’s already bolted; my guess is to the area behind the iron staircase which is dark and unvisited. There he pulls off the dress, rolls his trouser legs down, takes off the helmet and glasses, probably bundling it into a carrier bag. Then he goes back to work.”

Korpanski leaned right back in his chair. “It won’t wash, Jo. How did he get out of his office without the secretary seeing him? She’s like a guard dog.”

“The fire door, Mike. He slipped out of the fire door,
probably told his secretary not to disturb him – a tricky bit of work or something.”

Korpanski sat up. “And evidence?”

“We’ve got the bike,” she said. “Let’s look for DNA, a hair from his leg, prints on the handlebars. We get the cycling helmet – well – I bet you we find some of his hair. And then we already have Beatrice’s fashion statement. Unless he’s a cross-dresser his skin cells or hair shouldn’t be inside.”

He stroked his chin. “And the murder scene?”

“We’ve probably already got evidence. We’re just waiting for the results on his car to be matched.”

Korpanski shook his head. “It could work,” he said. Then he smiled. “But the thought of Pennington wobbling along on his bike, dressed in his wife’s clothes. Well,” he said, “it doesn’t bear thinking about.”

“I told you from the first it was a ridiculous case. A domestic. Our instincts told us correctly. Pennington murdered his own wife then started acting the part of innocent, bemused husband. The burden of proof might not be heavy. I think once we face him with our story he’ll confess. My guess is he’ll plead guilty.”

“Why did he ask the question? Why use the plural? What have
they
done?”

“I’ve thought of two possible explanations,” she said. “It
could
have been simply to put us off. He’d blamed his wife’s two cronies for her changed behaviour or else it was the maggots,” she said, “and remember the nibbling of the animals on her legs? Maybe
that
was the
they
. I don’t know everything, Mike.”

Korpanski looked at the door. “And Angiotti?” He had not given up on the teacher.

“Pete Angiotti still tried to kill one of our officers,” she said. “We’ll get him on an attempted murder charge, I hope. That’s if the CPS don’t water it down to a GBH.” A mischievous thought suggested itself to her. Everyone in the station knew that Bridget Anderton had a soft spot for the
burly sergeant. “I suggest you pop over the hospital at some point and take WPC Anderton a nice big bunch of flowers.”

It would cheer her up.

They cornered Pennington at his office and arrested him for the murder of his wife, Korpanski reciting the caution with undisguised relish. It is always satisfying to wind up a murder case.

Pennington looked astonished and for a while tried to bluster. “And how do you think I did it when I was busy working here at the very time when my wife, still alive, was riding her bicycle into work?”

“We can discuss that in the police station,” Joanna said, “where we can record all your explanations.”

On the way out she stopped by the secretary’s desk. She was watching, round-eyed, open-mouthed. “Can you remember back to the morning of June the 23rd? The morning that Mrs Pennington disappeared?”

The girl nodded. “What was Mr Pennington working on that he couldn’t be disturbed for half an hour?”

“It was the solicitor’s account,” the girl said. “He said to put no calls through as it was a really tricky one and would take some time.”

“How long?”

“An hour.”

“Thanks,” Joanna said. “I wondered what it was.”

They left the girl frowning after them. Joanna could read her mind.
And what has that got to do with it?

They set up the interview room and waited for Pennington’s solicitor. This case had to be watertight. Arthur Pennington sat opposite them, arms folded, looking comfortable – at first.

Joanna opened the questioning. “I want you to think back to the last morning your wife was seen alive,” she started.

And then she remembered the post-mortem findings.
The story was there, written in tissue and blood.

“I believe that you lost your temper that morning, at breakfast time,” she said, “and thumped your wife twice, once on her back, between her shoulder blades and again on her head.”

Pennington gaped at her.

“She must have tried to explain to you why she had fallen in love with her doctor and written her so many romantic letters,” she continued. “So you throttled her.”

It was the turning point. Pennington looked shaken. She had done this before, studied the post-mortem findings and used them when questioning a suspect. It was the spookiness of it – that they believed she must have been there to describe the attack in such detail. But it was never that. It was the simple rule of forensics – that encounters, particularly violent ones, invariably leave traces which can, in turn, be picked up by careful laboratory work.

Pennington had one last try. “And how do you explain,” he challenged, “that my wife was seen riding her bike half an hour after I’d arrived at work?”

“That,” Joanna said, “is the really clever bit. Your wife was already dead when you arrived at work. It was you, wearing a dress, cycling and pretending to be Beatrice.”

The solicitor looked startled. “This is preposterous.”

“Well,” Joanna said softly. “Preposterous or not it is what I believe happened and we shall search for forensic evidence to support my theory. In the meantime we shall hold your client here.”

Pennington began to laugh. “I think you’re mad, Inspector. Excuse me laughing but it’s so funny.”

“You think murdering the woman you’ve been married to for more than twenty years, leaving her body at home while you impersonate her before dumping her underneath a hedge for flies to lay their eggs in her eyes and rats to nibble her feet is funny?”

It was as though she had struck the man. Pennington visibly crumpled.

“I don’t…”

His voice ebbed away.

Joanna couldn’t resist turning round to give Korpanski a swift look. He raised his eyebrows and returned the ghost of a grin.

They had him.

The solicitor sat silently at Pennington’s side. He knew that they were in trouble. She knew he was already bringing up the word,
provocation
.

“Perhaps,” he said, “I should advise my client.”

Joanna nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Perhaps you should.”

Pennington was as good as in the bag.

In the end Corinne Angiotti had given her the solution on a plate. This is what men do to women they feel have betrayed them.

It was the cruel cost of misdirected adoration.

She had hardly slept, worrying she would not wake and she would miss Matthew at the airport. It had been easy to check with the airline a direct flight from Washington DC to Manchester. There was only one a day. It was due in at 10. She had put her alarm on for eight.

At some time in the middle of the night she had sat bolt upright, finding the answer to yet another of the little mysteries which had dogged her.

Another domestic.

And the answer was so blindingly obvious she could only blame the murder case for preventing her from reading the signs.

What had lain behind Eloise Levin’s newfound friendliness?

Her father, of course. He had promised to leave Joanna alone, to allow her to make her own mind up about him and the baby, undertaking not to influence her in any way, not knowing that nature would take one of the decisions from her. He had charged his daughter to keep some sort of watch over his mistress. The flowers had been from Matthew – not Eloise.

She gave a silent laugh. How could she possibly have thought that Eloise would ring
her
with such concern?

She padded downstairs and made herself a cup of tea to return to bed and ponder this new knowledge. As she passed by the photograph of Matthew holding his baby daughter it hit her. He had asked a lot of his daughter and she had complied.

How much a father and daughter love each other.

She went back to bed, nursing the mug of tea.

Would it have been so very terrible to have given Matthew what he wanted more than anything else in the world – another child? Women the world over combined
careers and a family. What was so different about her?

She sat up in bed, drained the mug and knew that when Matthew returned he would expect some changes in her. He was right. She had given up nothing for him. He had done all the sacrificing, his wife, his daughter.

As for her, she had refused to marry him, evaded the issue of further children, always always put her career before any other considerations.

She put the mug down on the bedside table and glanced at her radio alarm. Three a.m.

She switched her lamp off and tried to go back to sleep.

But all she could see were adoring faces. Beatrice’s as she must have looked at her doctor, Matthew’s face in the photograph, looking down at his baby daughter, Matthew’s face when he had looked at her, across the desk in his office, and first asked her to have dinner with him. Her own father, proud of her achievements. Even her sister, holding baby Daniel, her godson.

She went back to sleep, still seeing those green eyes fixed on hers with an optimistic expression. It had been that which had persuaded her to accept the dinner invitation even though she had suspected the pathologist must be married. That bright optimism.

The other questions which punched into her dreams at some time in the night was, had Matthew met someone who could return his love while he was in Washington?

She must wait for his answer.

She woke again to the alarm and half an hour later, fortified with plenty of coffee she felt wide-awake and alert.

She dressed carefully, in tight black trousers, a pink blouse and high-heeled black leather boots, arrived at the airport early, with plenty of time to park the car and browse the early morning papers. Time seemed to move all too slowly, the minute hand creeping around the clock reluctantly. Sometimes it seemed it slipped back a minute or two when she wasn’t looking.

At nine thirty-five she made her way to the arrivals barrier and waited.

Passport Control, Baggage Reclamation, Customs. It all takes so long.

Finally the moment came. A swell of people spilled out looking tired after their transatlantic flight.

What is it that we notice first about someone we love? With Matthew it was always his hair. The colour of darkened corn, invariably tousled. Shorter than it had been when he had left. That and his tall, slim figure, jacket slung carelessly over his shoulders, beige jeans, holding a black flight bag and pulling behind him a large suitcase on wheels. His walk. Loose limbed, long-legged. Quick. He was overtaking people walking slowly. No two people walk the same. It is the reason police line-ups often include a walk. She stood transfixed and inexplicably oddly nervous. Would he sense a grass roots change in her?

He looked up and saw her.

She held back, feeling her welcome smile stretch from ear to ear in a
Risus sardonicus.

And then he was there, wrapping his arms around her, holding her so tightly they might have been glued together and never separated. He held her for long minutes before moving back, cradling her face in his hands and kissing her mouth. Then, at last, they could speak.

“Matthew, I’m so sorry,” she said.

He kissed her again. “Don’t speak,” he said. “I’m knackered. It was a vile flight. I was wedged between a thirty stone man and an infant. Let’s get home, Jo.” He passed. “Then we can talk.”

For the time being there were to be no more questions.

Love is a many splendoured thing…