By a Narrow Majority (10 page)

She hadn’t even put her bag down on the desk before Janine swivelled her chair around to face her, a dark glower ruining the effects of her perfectly applied make-up. ‘Bloody judge wouldn’t roll over on the Matthews search warrant, boss.’

Hillary sighed, but she’d expected as much. ‘Who did you try?’

‘Phelps.’

Hillary nodded. The most pro-police of the lot.

‘Should I try going round him?’ Janine asked, but without much heat, and wasn’t surprised when Hillary firmly shook
her head. No, the last thing they needed was to piss Phelps off. He came in very handy at times.

‘We’ll just have to wait and watch them,’ Hillary said. And hope the press didn’t get a hold of it. So far, she’d been dodging reporters with ease, with most of them content to go through the press liaison officer, with the odd harassment of Lower Heyfordites thrown in. So far, most of the press
speculation
had, almost inevitably, centred around Valerie Dale, but that would quickly change when they got whiff that she wasn’t a serious suspect any more. Nobody but a tiny and rather ridiculously radical tabloid took the political angle seriously. Who’d want to knock off a man who hadn’t even been elected MP yet? But if the vultures got hold of Percy Matthews, and his story, she shuddered to think what the headlines would be.

And how long would it take the batty old coot to realize that he now had the perfect opportunity to immortalize his Wordsworth once and for all? All he had to do was show them his scrapbook and that would be it. Feeding frenzy.

Please, please, please, don’t let him ‘confess’ to a reporter live on air,
Hillary pleaded silently to whoever might be listening.

‘OK. Well, it’s not all doom and gloom. Tommy and I winkled a nice tit-bit from Marcia Brock yesterday
afternoon
,’ Hillary said, by way of cheering her up, and filled her in as Janine drove them towards the small village of Oxlip, not far from the Oxford suburb of Headington.

‘Brings back old memories, this,’ Janine muttered, as they parked up in the health centre’s large car park.

Hillary nodded. They’d had cause to come here before, on a previous case, to question one of the doctors. He’d since been struck off, or so she’d read. She wasn’t sure that that had been altogether fair, but then, she didn’t sit on the Medical Council.

Inside, the waiting room was half full, and Hillary felt all
eyes on her as she showed her warrant card to the
receptionist
. She felt guilty about pushing in ahead of the queue and lengthening their wait to see Dr Gemma Knowles, but that was life.

‘Dr Knowles is out on a home visit,’ the receptionist said worriedly when she heard what the policewoman wanted, and Hillary had to grin. Oh yes, that was life all right. It wasn’t fussy about who it shafted.

‘Will she be returning here when she’s finished?’ she asked hopefully.

‘Oh yes. And she shouldn’t be too long. She’s usually in before ten. She has patients starting at a quarter past,’ the receptionist added firmly.

Hillary smiled grimly. Not any more she didn’t.

‘We’ll wait,’ she said. ‘Please inform us the moment Dr Knowles comes in.’

Janine heaved a sigh as she selected a month-old
Homes & Gardens
magazine from the pile on the table, and took the seat farthest away from the children’s play area, where a loud three-year-old was playing with a wooden engine.

Hillary spotted Gemma Knowles the moment she stepped out of her car. She’d been gazing out of the window at a pretty, early flowering almond tree for the last ten minutes, when a smart and zippy new Mazda pulled in. The doctor wasn’t tall, but was dressed in a well-tailored, navy blue pair of slacks, with a matching, quilted Barbour coat. She had a short cap of dark hair that had been professionally highlighted with auburn streaks, and, even from a distance, big pansy-brown eyes. As Hillary suspected, she didn’t use the front door, but trotted off to a private entrance round the back.

Hillary tapped Janine on the top of her arm and got up, making her way to reception. The same receptionist noticed her approach and spoke quickly into the phone, then put it down. She nodded, and directed them to the first office down the corridor.

Gemma Knowles opened the door before they reached it and pulled it open. She looked rather relieved to find two female police officers, and Hillary suddenly knew that she wasn’t going to have much trouble with this witness.

‘Oh, hello. Yes, I’ve been expecting this,’ Gemma Knowles said, pointing to the single chair standing beside her desk. ‘Er, I’m afraid one of you will either have to stand, or if you prefer …’ She waved vaguely to the padded, narrow couch where patients could stretch out for more intimate examinations. Janine shuddered and leaned against the door, getting her notebook out. Hillary sat.

Gemma crossed a pair of legs, clad in expensive hosiery, and fiddled with a pen. Hillary guessed there was money somewhere about – either she’d married well, or she had private means.

‘It’s about Malcolm, I take it,’ Gemma Knowles said at once. Obviously the kind who liked to take the bull by the horns, which was fine by Hillary. Her face, though perfectly made up, was pale, and she had hollows under her eyes that looked dark, in spite of the powder. The GP was genuinely upset about her lover’s death, Hillary realized, and gave a mental nod.

‘Yes. We understand you and he were intimate?’ She asked the question bluntly, but her voice was kind. Gemma Knowles blinked, and Hillary could almost see her shoulders straighten. She’d been right to choose this no-nonsense but non-brutal approach. As a doctor who must have grown used to being firm but compassionate, it struck just the right chord.

‘Yes. Yes, we were. For about four months now.’

‘Was it serious?’

‘Oh no. I mean, neither of us was going to break up our marriages or anything,’ Gemma said. ‘Apart from the odd lapses, created by boredom mostly, I’m quite content with Larry,’ Gemma said frankly. ‘And Malcolm, of course, had so much more to lose than I did. So, no, we were very discreet, and we both knew exactly where we stood.’

Hillary nodded. Well, if that was true, then Gemma Knowles had no reason to kill Malcolm Dale. If it was true. If it wasn’t, well, it opened up a whole lot of potential. Had she really loved the man, and been angered by his refusal to leave his wife, so killed him in a fit of jealousy and rage? Or had
he
been the one pushing
her
to leave her husband, and had she then killed him to keep her marriage safe?

Of course, a lot of people were appalled by the thought of doctors, people who dedicated their lives to tending the sick and curing the ill, actually killing someone. But they were human, just like everyone else. And Harold Shipman had probably changed the British public’s conception of GPs for ever.

‘You’ll understand that I need to know where you were, two nights ago, from, say, five o’clock onwards, Dr Knowles.’

The GP nodded. An intelligent woman, she’d of course have expected that. ‘I can tell you all right, but I’m afraid it’s not ideal. We see the last of our patients here at 4.30. After that, we usually stay in the office for up to an hour or so finishing off our paperwork. That night, I’m afraid I had to stay even later. I’d had a few emergency call-outs the day before, and had more than two days’ worth of notes to put into the computer. I worked until nearly eight, then left.’

Hillary gave a mental head shake. Yet another one with no solid alibi. ‘What time do the secretaries leave?’

‘About five.’

‘And that night, did you see anyone? Did one of the partners pop his head around the door to say hello, anything like that?’ Hillary asked, although the other woman was already shaking her head.

‘I’m afraid not,’ Gemma Knowles said ruefully. ‘I wish they had.’

So did Hillary. Just for once, it would be nice to categorically rule someone in or out.

‘So, you got home about what time?’ Hillary ploughed on.

‘About twenty past. I only live in Bletchington, not far away.’

‘And your husband, Larry, was in?’

‘Yes, he’d cooked dinner, bless him.’

‘And you stayed at home all that night?’

‘Yes.’

Hillary nodded. Not that
that
helped. According to Marcia Brock and the pathologist, Malcolm Dale had been dead by then. So Gemma could have left earlier, motored to Lower Heyford, parked up somewhere dark, then walked to her lover’s door, been invited in, and killed him. And she could so easily have come back here to clean up. Even if she got
forensics
to go over the place, it was a doctor’s surgery, for pete’s sake. They’d come up with scores of blood traces and who the hell knew what else.

Hillary sighed. ‘And your husband? Had he been in all night?’

‘Larry?’ Gemma said sharply. ‘No. I’m pretty sure he said he’d been out to the pub.’

‘I thought you said he’d cooked you dinner?’ Hillary pointed out softly.

‘So he had, but only Chicken Kievs from the freezer,’ Gemma said. ‘Look, I promise you, Larry didn’t know about me and Malcolm. I’d have known if he had.’

Her voice, for the first time since the interview began, showed signs of strain. Hillary reached into the bag for her notebook and scribbled a quick message: ‘Go and speak to the hubby. I don’t want them to have time to confer. Grill him hard.’

This she handed over to Janine, who read it, poker faced, and got up and left without a word. Gemma watched her go, a real look of alarm on her face now.

Yes. Gemma Knowles seemed very worried about her husband all right. But then again, perhaps she was simply afraid that he’d find out about her affair – if he really did know nothing about it, as she insisted.

It didn’t necessarily mean that she was secretly worried that he had killed her lover.

‘So, Doctor Knowles, tell me how you met,’ Hillary said, settling down to a nice long chat.

Janine got the home address of Gemma Knowles from the receptionist, who didn’t like handing it over, and quickly headed towards Bletchington. It was a small village, with a surviving village shop overlooking a triangular village green. The GP and her spouse lived in a small cul-de sac in one of six large, similar-looking mock Tudor detached houses that would be forever out of Janine’s price range.

But as she parked her sporty little Mini by the double set of wrought-iron gates, she checked the house out with a small smile of satisfaction on her lips. Mel’s house in The Moors was older, bigger and better-looking than any of these.

When they’d first started dating over two years ago now, she’d gradually begun to spend more and more time at his place, since the house she rented out with three other girls was hardly the place for romance. She had most of her stuff moved in now, including her CD set and her favourite chair. She loved living in the big house, with the pond and weeping willow in the front garden, and nodding hello to neighbours in the morning who were judges and architects, computer designers and art collectors. She was even thinking about approaching her three friends and asking them to find
somebody
else to help out with the rent. It seemed such an unnecessary expense.

But just lately, Janine had become less sure. She might be wrong, but she thought she’d begun to detect a distinct sense
of ‘cooling off’ in Mel. Nothing concrete, nothing she could put her finger on. Just stupid little things that ran warning bells. Like him insisting on watching a football programme on Sky, when she wanted to watch something else. In the early days, she’d always been able to wangle control of the remote. And he hadn’t come home with a bottle of wine, or box of Belgian chocs for a while. And sometimes, when she’d be talking to him, chatting in the kitchen or wherever, she’d suddenly realize he hadn’t been listening to her.

As she walked up the path and rang the doorbell of the Knowles’s family home, she wondered seriously, and for the first time, if Mel was getting ready to dump her.

She didn’t like that thought. Usually, she was the one that did the dumping – only two boyfriends of hers had ever been the first to break it off, and both times it had left her smarting and fuming. She didn’t take rejection well.

And this was far more serious than either of those losers dumping her. Mel was her first boyfriend to be on the job as well, in a position to do her career prospects good; the first to be so much older than her, to actually be marriage material. But perhaps she was reading it wrong. Mel had a lot on his plate, what with working under the boy wonder from the Met, Jerome Raleigh. Maybe he was just feeling generally stressed out.

Maybe.

But if Mel thought he could just dump her, he’d soon learn differently.

She leaned on the doorbell again, but nobody was going to answer. At this time of day, hubby was almost certainly at work. She went back to the car, made a quick phone call to records, and learned that Lawrence Peter Knowles worked, surprisingly, for a construction company, as a bricklayer. They were currently throwing up a series of warehouses out near Kidlington airport.

Mindful of her boss having to keep Gemma talking until she gave her the all-clear, Janine put her foot down.

Larry Knowles was a tall, lanky man with a mass of sandy hair, a smattering of freckles, and watery blue eyes. He was working steadily on an outer wall, laying bright red bricks at a surprising rate. His motions were fluid and unthinking, and when Janine walked up to him, he didn’t notice her at first. A wolf-whistle, from across the construction site, eventually made him look around.

He smiled and straightened up. ‘Take no notice,’ he said dismissively, as another wolf-whistle followed the first. Janine, who was used to attracting male attention, had already filtered it out. She showed him her ID and saw the usual wariness enter his eyes. She cast a quick look around. A cement mixer was grinding noisily away a few yards to their left, giving them as much privacy as anybody could hope for on a building site.

‘Mr Knowles, can you tell me where you were two nights ago, between five and ten?’ she jumped right in.

Larry Knowles slowly lowered the brick in his hand back on to a pile and lodged his trowel into some still-wet cement. ‘What’s this all about?’

‘Just routine, sir,’ Janine lied.

Larry sniffed, then wiped the back of his hand across his nose, making the sergeant wonder what had prompted such a chic and sophisticated woman like Gemma Knowles to marry a man such as this one. Perhaps opposites really did attract.

‘I worked until six, as usual. Went home. Gemma, my wife, was still at work. There was a message on the answer phone to say she’d be working late. I got something out of the freezer and cooked it. We ate when she got in, watched some telly, and went to bed.’

Janine jotted it all down, her face giving nothing away. ‘Did you go out at all? To the pub maybe?’

Larry Knowles shook his head. ‘Nope.’

Janine nodded, a sharp tug of excitement making her
shorthand 
fly faster. It didn’t tally – well, not exactly – with Gemma Knowles’s statement. ‘Did you tell your wife that you’d been to the pub?’

Larry Knowles slipped his hands into his trouser pockets. It was a defensive gesture that didn’t go unnoticed. He stared at his feet for a while, then looked up at Janine. She realized he wasn’t going to answer and tried a more aggressive approach.

‘Does the name Malcolm Dale mean anything to you, Mr Knowles?’

The bricklayer sighed heavily. There was something really weary in that sound. ‘What is this? What’s up?’ he demanded bluntly.

‘Just routine, sir,’ Janine repeated the lie. ‘Do you and your wife have a good marriage, would you say, sir?’ she asked, knowing she was hardly being subtle. If her boss was here, Hillary Greene would no doubt be handling this very
differently
. But what the hell. This was
her
way of doing things.

Something interesting happened to Larry Knowles’s face as Janine asked the question. Not anger, but a knowing, almost shamed expression darkened his face.

‘In other words, what was someone as smart and classy as Gemma doing marrying a working-class know-nothing brickie like me?’ Larry said, repeating almost word for word Janine’s earlier thoughts.

So he had a chip on his shoulder. Not surprising. A lot of people must have wondered the same thing. And boy, did this man know it. Janine, having learned the trick from Hillary, said nothing. Most people didn’t like silence, and would say anything just to banish it.

‘My marriage is none of your business,’ Larry Knowles finally said and bent down to pick up his trowel. ‘Now, if that’s all.…’

‘You never said whether or not you knew a Mr Malcolm Dale sir,’ Janine said quickly.

‘No, I don’t,’ Larry said, laying the next brick in three short movements, and reaching for the next.

‘And you don’t want to change your statement about what you did two nights ago?’

‘No, I don’t.’

Janine nodded, and walked away.

Hillary, now back at HQ, listened without interruption as her sergeant reported her conversation with Larry Knowles almost verbatim. When she’d finished, Hillary sighed heavily. Another one with no alibi. Great.

‘Sounds to me as if he turns a blind eye,’ she mused out loud. She’d managed to snatch a rather wilted salad from the canteen and was still feeling hungry, and thus, grumpy. Tommy, who’d been updating the Murder Book, glanced across.

‘Blind eye, guv?’

Hillary nodded. ‘He married up, and he knows it. Wife’s better looking, got more brains, more class. And I reckon there’s money in her background too. So if she occasionally strays – well, he thinks, that’s only to be expected, isn’t it? Can’t expect to keep her, can he? She’s bound to realize what a mistake she made. Best just to pretend it isn’t happening. Perhaps she won’t leave him. I’ve seen that sort of mindset before.’

‘What the shrinks call low self-esteem,’ Janine put in with a twist of her lips. Men could be such wimps.

‘Or sound common sense.’ Hillary was never loath to play devil’s advocate. ‘Thing is, the poor mutt doesn’t realize that his wife, by and large, is probably perfectly happy with her marriage. She’s got a husband who doesn’t compete with her on a professional level, who’s got a steady well-paid manual job that keeps him fit and healthy. The last thing a GP would want is hassle at home. If she gets bored and strays now and then, so what?’ Hillary shrugged. Ronnie had cheated on her with every blonde bimbo that wandered across his path. Fidelity was something he thought only applied to sound systems. She knew all about maladjusted marriages.

‘Even so, he could have got jealous,’ Janine said. ‘One affair too many? The straw that broke the camel’s back.’

Hillary nodded, going along with the hypothesis. ‘He could have thought the “working late” message really meant she was with her lover. Could have gone over to confront them, expecting to find his wife there.’

‘But she wasn’t.’ Janine carried the scenario further. ‘So he thinks this is the perfect opportunity, goes in, bops our vic, and takes off.’

But even as she said it, it didn’t quite gel. If he’d gone
hotfoot
to Lower Heyford expecting to find Gemma and Malcolm together, wouldn’t he have been relieved to find Malcolm alone after all? Or at least, wouldn’t some of the heat have gone out of him? And why would Malcolm Dale have invited him in? Did he even know what Gemma’s husband looked like?

‘And did he take the murder weapon with him?’ Hillary asked quietly. ‘So far, there seems to be nothing missing from the family home. So the murder had to be premeditated.’ She too didn’t quite like the ring of it. But with no alibi, both the Knowles pair were still firmly in the frame.

‘Check it out, Tommy,’ Hillary said. ‘See if he really did go out to the pub – what’s the local called?’ she asked Janine, who checked her notebook.

‘The Black’s Head.’

‘Oh, very funny,’ Tommy said, and they all laughed.

‘No, that’s really what it’s called,’ Janine insisted.

‘Well, see if he was in that night. He might have forgotten about calling in,’ Hillary said wearily. ‘If not, see if any of his neighbours can put him at home, cooking dinner, when our vic got clobbered.’

‘Guv.’

Janine looked up as Frank came in. He tossed some reports on to Hillary’s desk, then jerked his head up to indicate the ceiling. ‘Have to go upstairs in a bit.’

Hillary’s face tightened. She hadn’t forgotten. The raid was
on tonight. But exactly why Jerome Raleigh was keeping Frank Ross, of all people, so tightly in the loop, still worried her. When Frank had gone, leaving the scent of old beer,
cigarettes
and stale sweat behind him, Janine reached into her bag and brought out some air freshener.

Hillary glanced at her watch, saw it was getting on for three, and decided it was time to fill her team in. There was no-one within earshot, but she pulled her chair a little closer to her desk anyway, indicating she wanted a private huddle. ‘Tommy, Janine, something’s on for tonight.’

Janine instantly caught her tone, and scooted closer. Tommy, looking more surprised, simply sat and waited. Slowly, carefully, and leaving nothing out, Hillary told them about the raid, and the super’s instructions to keep it quiet. When she was finished, Janine looked ready to chew the table legs. To think that Mel, the bastard, knew all about it, and hadn’t told her.

‘I wondered why you lot seemed to be upstairs so often just lately,’ she snapped. Then, remembering Frank Ross’s unsubtle head-nod a while ago, flushed with genuine rage. ‘Don’t tell me that toe-rag Ross has been in on this all the while?’

At this insult, Tommy jerked a little in his seat.

Hillary shrugged helplessly. ‘Don’t look at me,’ she told her outraged team. ‘It wasn’t my idea. The super has his own way of doing things.’

Janine subsided a little. ‘He was right to keep it quiet,’ she agreed grudgingly. ‘Everyone knows Fletcher’s got ears in this place.’ It galled her to say it, as much as it galled Hillary to hear it.

‘So, it’s back to Bletchington,’ Janine said. ‘Funny, the Knowles’s living there. But it’s got to be a coincidence, right?’ she asked sharply.

Hillary, who didn’t usually like coincidences either, had a quick think about it, then reluctantly nodded. Fletcher was blamed for nearly anything and everything dirty that went on
in their patch, but even she couldn’t see why he’d want to murder a wannabe Tory politician. Or have anything to do with a local GP and her husband who might or might not have anything to do with it.

That was taking paranoia a little too far.

‘The Fletcher farm’s a mile or so out of the village proper,’ Hillary said. ‘And, besides, everyone’s got to live
somewhere
.’

As per the super’s instructions, everyone worked their full shift, then left as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on. Because she lived so close to work, Hillary went home and changed into black trousers and black sweater, and wore her oldest, dullest brown coat, before heading out to the rendezvous point at Brian Doyle’s farm, a half a mile from Fletcher’s place. She suspected that all the others had gone straight from work to the farm, and only hoped they’d had the sense to stagger their arrival. The last thing they wanted was for a Fletcher lookout to spot a load of cars in convoy, turning into Doyle’s place.

She headed for an open barn, where a man stood in the darkness, beckoning her. She could only just make him out in the moonlight. She nudged Puff the Tragic Wagon under cover, noting Mel’s car, but not Janine’s Mini. They’d
probably
arrived together, cutting down on the volume of traffic. Likewise, she saw Tommy’s car, but not Frank’s, and a luxury saloon that could only belong to the super.

The Tactical Firearms Unit, she supposed, would have come in the usual heavy-duty vehicles, and would have been parked well away, and probably hidden by ex-army
camouflage
gear.