A Judgement in Stone (22 page)

Vetch took over the Village Hall, and there he set up a “Murder Room.” There, with his officers, he interrogated witnesses, examined evidence, received and made phone calls, spoke to the press—and had his first interview with Eunice Parchman.

He was an experienced officer. He had been a policeman for twenty-six years, and his career in the Murder Squad had been remarkable for displays of courage. He had personally arrested James Timson, the Manchester Bank Killer, and had led the group of officers who charged into the Brixton flat of Walter Eksteen,
an armed man wanted for the murder of two security guards.

Among his juniors he had the reputation of fastening onto one particular witness in each case he handled, of relying on that person for support and even, according to those who did not like him, of befriending him or her. In the Eksteen case this had paid off, and he had been led to the killer by Eksteen’s ex-mistress, whose trust he had won. The witness he chose for this role in the Coverdale case was Eunice Parchman.

No one had ever really liked Eunice. In their way her parents had loved her, but that is a different thing. Mrs. Samson had pitied her, Annie Cole feared her, Joan Smith had used her. Bill Vetch actually liked her. From the time of that first interview he liked her. For Eunice didn’t waste words or seem to prevaricate or show misplaced sentimentality, and she wasn’t afraid to say when she didn’t know.

He respected her for the way in which, having found four dead bodies in circumstances which had sickened the hearts of the police officers who first came, she had walked a mile in the dark to reach a call box. Suspicion of her hardly touched him, and a faint doubt, present before he saw her, vanished when she told him frankly that she had not liked the Coverdales and had been dismissed for insolence. This, anyway, was no middle-aged woman’s crime, nor could it have been committed singlehanded. And already, before he saw Eunice, he had begun to mount the hunt for the man with the injured hand and his companion.

This is the statement which Eunice had made to the Suffolk officers on the previous night: “I went to Nunchester with my friend, Mrs. Joan Smith, at half past five. We attended a religious service at the Epiphany Temple on North Hill. Mrs. Smith drove me back to Lowfield Hall and I got there at five to eight. I looked at the clock in the hall as I came in by the front door and it said five to eight. Mrs. Smith did not come in. She had not been feeling well and I told her to go straight home. There was a light on in the hall and in the drawing room. You could see the drawing-room light from outside. The drawing-room door was shut. I did not go into the drawing room. I never
did after I had been out in the evening unless Mr. or Mrs. Coverdale called me. I did not go into the kitchen either as I had had my tea in Nunchester after the service. I went upstairs to my own room. Mr. and Mrs. Coverdale’s bedroom door was open but I did not look inside. I did some knitting and then I packed my cases.

“Mr. and Mrs. Coverdale usually went to bed at about eleven on a Sunday. Giles spent most evenings in his own room. I did not know if he was in his room as the door was shut when I went upstairs. I did not think much about it. I was thinking about leaving on the next day, and I did not go out of my bedroom again until about eleven-thirty.

“It was not necessary for me to go downstairs to wash as I had my own bathroom. I went to bed at eleven. The lights were always left on on the first-floor landing and on the stairs to the second floor. Mr. or Mrs. Coverdale turned them off when they came to bed. When I could see under my door that the lights were still on at eleven-thirty I got up and went to turn them off. I put on my dressing gown as I had to go down to the first floor to turn that light off. Then I saw some clothes on the floor in Mr. and Mrs. Coverdale’s bedroom, and some broken glass. I had not seen this when I came up because then I had my back to the door. What I saw alarmed me and I went down to the drawing room. There I found the bodies of Mrs. Coverdale and Melinda Coverdale and Giles Mont. I found Mr. Coverdale dead in the kitchen. I tried to phone the police but could not get the dialling tone, and then I saw that the wire had been cut.

“I heard no unusual sounds between the time I came in and the time I found them. No one was leaving the Hall when I arrived. On my way home I may have passed cars, but I did not notice.”

To this statement Eunice adhered, changing it not in a single particular. Sitting opposite Vetch, her eyes meeting his calmly, she insisted that she had arrived home at five to eight. The grandfather clock had stopped because George had not been there to wind it at ten on Sunday night. Did that clock keep good time? Eunice said it was sometimes slow, she had known it
as much as ten minutes slow, and this was confirmed by Eva Baalham and later by Peter Coverdale. But in the days that followed Vetch was often to wish that George’s watch had been broken by shot, for of all elements in a murder case he most disliked confusion over time, and the difficulty of fitting the facts to the times was to cause him much frustration.

According to the medical experts, the Coverdales and Giles Mont had met their deaths after seven-thirty and before nine-thirty, rigor mortis having already begun when the bodies were first examined at a quarter past midnight. Its onset is accelerated by heat, and the drawing room and kitchen had been very warm, for the central heating remained on all night at Lowfield Hall in the depths of winter. Many other factors were taken into consideration—stomach contents, post-mortem lividity, changes in cerebrospinal fluid—but Vetch could not persuade his experts to admit the possibility of death having occurred before half past seven. Not when that heat, a temperature of nearly eighty, was borne in mind, not in the face of Eunice’s evidence that the meal the Coverdales had eaten at six—tea and sandwiches and cake—had been completely digested. And Vetch himself thought it odd that a family who had eaten tea at six should start drinking coffee at, say, seven.

Nevertheless, it could just be made to work out. The two youths in denim had come into the Blue Boar at ten to eight. That gave them fifteen minutes in which to kill the Coverdales—for what motive? For kicks? For some revenge against the social class the Coverdales represented?—and five minutes in which to leave the Hall and drive to Greeving. By the time Eunice came in at five to (or five past) eight, they were a mile away, leaving death and silence behind them.

In that fifteen minutes they must also have ravaged the bedroom, though why they should have poured tea on the bed Vetch couldn’t imagine. Wanton damage, he thought, for none of Jacqueline’s jewellery had been taken. Or had they been looking for money and been surprised in their hasty plundering by one of the Coverdales? At some stage the man with the wounded hand
must have removed one of the gloves he was wearing, for gloves had been worn, there were no prints, unless a glove had still been on the hand when shot grazed it. Fifteen minutes was enough, just enough in which to smash and tear and kill.

Vetch spent many hours questioning those patrons of the Blue Boar, among them Norman Smith, who had seen and spoken to the two young men in denim. And by Monday evening every police force in the country was searching for that car and its occupants.

Joan Smith lay in a coma in Stantwich General Hospital. But Vetch believed she had never entered the Hall that evening, and with her he concerned himself only to check that Eunice had been correct in stating that the two of them had left the Epiphany Temple at seven-twenty. The brethren confirmed it, but not one of them told Vetch’s officers that Joan Smith had threatened George Coverdale’s life shortly before her departure. They hadn’t known it was George she was raving about, and if they had, the conduct and desires of the Epiphany People must be kept from policemen who were not of the elect.

Eunice was allowed to remain at the Hall, for she had nowhere else to go and Vetch wanted her on the spot. The kitchen was open to her but the drawing room was sealed up, and that copy of the
Radio Times
sealed up inside it.

“I don’t know,” she said when Vetch asked her if George Coverdale had had enemies. “They had a lot of friends. I never heard of anyone threatening Mr. Coverdale.” And she made him a cup of tea. While she told him about the Coverdales’ life, their friendships, their habits, their tastes, their whims, the murderess and the investigating officer drank their tea at the table, well scrubbed by Eunice, on which George had fallen in death.

What had happened at Lowfield Hall struck the inhabitants of Greeving with incredulity, with horror, and some of them with sick sorrow. Necessarily, nothing else was talked about. Conversations that began on practical matters—what should they have for dinner, how was someone’s flu, rain again and bitterly cold, isn’t it?—turned inevitably to this massacre, this outrage. Who
would do a thing like that? You still can’t believe it, can you? Makes you wonder what the world’s coming to. Jessica Royston wept and would not be comforted. Mary Cairne had Eleighs the builders to put up bars at her downstairs windows. The Jameson-Kerrs thought how they would never again go to Lowfield Hall, and the brigadier shuddered when he remembered pheasant shoots with George. Geoff Baalham, mourning Melinda, knew that it would be a long time before he could again bring himself to drive past Gallows Corner on a Friday or Saturday afternoon.

Peter Coverdale and Paula Caswall came to Greeving, and Paula, who was to stay with the Archers, collapsed from shock and grief within hours of her arrival. Peter stayed at the Angel in Cattingham. There, in the cold damp evenings, over the electric fire that inadequately heated his room, he sat drinking with Jeffrey Mont, who was staying at the Bull at Marleigh. He didn’t like Jeffrey, whom he had never met before and who got through a bottle of whisky a night, but he thought he would have gone mad without someone to talk to, and Jeffrey said that, without his company, he’d have killed himself. They went to the Archers’ together to see Paula, but Dr. Crutchley had put her under sedation.

Jonathan Dexter, in Galwich, first learned of Melinda’s death when he read of it in the paper. He did nothing. He did not check or get in touch with his parents or try to get in touch with Peter Coverdale. He shut himself up in his room and remained there, living on stale bread and milkless tea, for five days.

Norman Smith went dutifully to visit his wife every evening. He didn’t want to go. More or less unconsciously, he would have liked Joan to die because it was very pleasant on his own, but he would no more have said this to himself than he would have avoided going to see her. That was what a husband did when his wife was ill so he did it. But because Joan couldn’t move or speak or hear anything, he couldn’t tell her the news. Instead he gossiped about it with other visiting husbands, and thrashed it over incessantly in the Blue Boar, where he was now able to spend as much time as he liked,

Nothing had been heard from Stantwich as to an enquiry into Joan’s interference with the mails. Norman, who still retained some shreds of optimism in spite of what he had been through, supposed this was because the principal witness was dead. Or the postmaster had heard of Joan’s accident and didn’t like to harass him while his wife was ill.

His van had been towed to a garage in Nunchester. Norman went to Nunchester on the bus to find out about it and was told by the garage proprietor that it was a total write-off. A deal was done for the usable parts of the van, and the garage man said, “By the way, this was under the back seat,” and gave him an object which Norman thought was a transistor radio.

He took it home with him, put it on a shelf with a pile of copies of
Follow My Star
, and forgot about it for some days.

Identikit pictures of the two wanted men appeared in every national newspaper on Wednesday, February 17, but Vetch hadn’t much faith in them. If a witness cannot remember whether a man’s hair is fair or brown, it is unlikely he will recall the shape of that man’s nose or forehead. The attendant at the self-service petrol station a hundred yards from Gallows Corner remembered the taller dark one of them. But it was a self-service station, the dark youth had served himself and had come into the glass-fronted office only to pay. The attendant had not even seen the other man, could not say that there had been another man, and remembered the car only because maroon is a fairly unusual colour for a Morris Minor Traveller.

It was from his recollection and that of Jim Meadows, Geoff Baalham, and the other Sunday night patrons of the Blue Boar that the pictures had been made up. They evoked hundreds of phone calls to the Murder Room in Greeving Village Hall from people offering sightings of grey or green or black Minor Travellers, or from those who possessed maroon-coloured ones respectably locked up in garages. But each one of these calls had to be checked before they could be dismissed.

Appeals were made to every hotelkeeper and landlady in the country as to whether any of their guests or tenants possessed a car answering to the description given by Geoff Baalham and the garage attendant. Had it been missing from its usual parking place on Sunday? Where was it now? These appeals resulted in hundreds more phone calls and hundreds of fruitless interviews that continued through Wednesday and Thursday.

But on Thursday a woman who was neither a landlady nor a hotelkeeper phoned Vetch and gave him some information about a car answering the description of the wanted vehicle. She lived on a caravan site near Clacton on the coast of Essex, some forty miles from Greeving, and Vetch was talking to her in her own caravan not much more than an hour later.

Residents’ cars were parked in a muddy and unsightly section of field adjacent to the entrance of the site, and Mrs. Burchall, though possessing no car of her own, had often noticed there a maroon-coloured Traveller because it was the dirtiest vehicle in the park and, because of a flat rear tyre, had sunk lopsidedly into the mud. This car had been in its usual place on the previous Friday, but she couldn’t remember whether she had noticed it since. However, it was not there now.