Death on the Eleventh Hole (21 page)

Twenty

It was late morning when the phone call came. Richard Ellacott hesitated for a moment before he answered, hand poised over the instrument, wondering if it would be the blackmailer again with a change of orders. It was almost a relief to hear the rich Herefordshire voice of DS Hook.

The relief did not last for more than a few seconds. ‘We need to see you again. Right away.’ Hook’s voice was quiet, but there was a gravity in it which set Richard’s pulse racing.

‘All right. I was just about to go over to the golf club at Oldford. I could see you there after lunch, if you like. Shall we say two o’clock?’

‘It’s more urgent than that. And we don’t think Oldford Golf Club is the appropriate place, this time. Stay where you are, please, Mr Ellacott. We’ll be round at your house in quarter of an hour.’

Richard put the phone down and tried to think. But now, when he most needed it, his brain would not work for him. He could not think what preparations he should be making for this latest meeting, could not rehearse the answers to questions he might be asked, because his mind would not frame the questions.

He went heavily upstairs to his wife’s bedroom, sought refuge in the physical actions of tidying the room and straightening the bed where she lay. The multiple schlerosis was in one of the phases where it made the rapid and debilitating progress which alarmed them both. Eileen had fallen yesterday, and they had agreed that she should stay in bed today until the late afternoon or evening.

She had endured a bad night, and she lay still and quiet beneath the blankets. She had been trying to do the
Times
crossword, but had dropped the paper beside the bed and been too exhausted to retrieve it. Richard picked it up, folded it neatly, and put it back upon the bedside table. He saw with a pang that she had been able to insert only three answers in the puzzle.

She watched his every movement about the room, her febrile eyes glittering unnaturally large in the small white face. He opened the window wide, trying not to notice the stale smell of ill health in the room. He told her it was a bright day outside, but fresher, less warm than the previous one — as if the coolness were somehow a compensation for her being unable to go out into the air today.

The small statements about their life together which normally dropped from him automatically would not come easily now. He wanted to make bigger statements: to tell her that he loved her; to recall their life before her illness as the idealized partnership it had never been; to tell her that whatever he had done, he loved her more, not less, than in those earlier years. Yet how could he embark on such things and yet pretend that everything was normal, that nothing had happened to provoke such declarations?

‘Those CID chaps are coming to see me again, Eileen. Still trying to clear up a few loose ends, I expect, though I can’t think any of our members at Oldford would have been involved in the murder of that girl. They said they’d see me at the golf club, but I said I’d rather they came here, where there would be a little more privacy.’

He wondered as he went back down the stairs why he had produced that pointless lie for her.

He was glad to see as the policemen pulled into the drive that they hadn’t come in one of those garish police cars and advertised their visit to the neighbours. They were in the Superintendent’s big old Vauxhall Senator: a nice enough car in its day, but Richard wondered why he didn’t have something more modern. Still, the veteran detective with his quiet manner, who seemed all the time to see a little beyond the answers he was given, was plainly his own man.

Richard took them into his study, where he had set two armchairs out ready for them. He sat on his swivel chair and swung it round to face them. He felt at home here, with the framed confirmation of his qualification as a chartered accountant and his picture of the Swilken Bridge at St Andrews on the wall, and the modest collection of golfing trophies he had acquired over the years on the shelves. ‘We’ll be private enough in here,’ he remarked. ‘And we won’t be disturbed: my wife had a fall yesterday and is staying in bed today.’

‘I’m sorry about that,’ said Lambert. It was no more than formal politeness, and yet he found that he meant it. The frail woman upstairs was suffering quite enough without what he now had to bring to her.

Richard found he had to fill the pause which followed, as these two experienced men studied his face. ‘I’ve kept my ear to the ground at the club, as you asked me to, but I haven’t come up with anything useful. I must say that I shall be surprised if any of our members at Oldford have any connection with the dumping of this girl’s body on the course at Ross-on-Wye.’

There was no need for a cat-and-mouse game here, and Lambert found even the notion of one distasteful. He said quietly, ‘Mr Ellacott, we know how you killed her, and we think we know why. I’d be interested to hear your version of how it happened.’

Richard tried hard to simulate astonishment and outrage. ‘I hope you’re joking, Superintendent Lambert! Though a joke in such bad taste should surely not go unreported.’

But he felt now that he had known all along that this was inevitable, that he had known from the moment of the phone call today that this is what they had come here for, that he was doing no more than playing out the final scene in a play that was already fully scripted.

Lambert continued as though he hadn’t spoken: ‘Blackmail is an awful crime. As the victim, you would have had protection and a lot of sympathy. Your counsel will no doubt offer it as a mitigating circumstance, in due course. But you will be charged with murder, and the method you used was plainly premeditated rather than a spur of the moment action. There will be a mandatory life sentence, though it will be interesting to see what recommendations the judge will make about how long you should serve.’

It was almost like one of the solicitors Richard knew from Rotary, giving informed opinion about a case of the day. Richard wanted to join in, to put the case for mercy. He could scarcely believe that this was his own future which was at issue. Or his lack of a future.

With that thought, his pretensions towards resistance almost disappeared. He asked the token question, again feeling as though his part in this play demanded it. ‘What makes you think I was being blackmailed?’

‘You were always the likeliest candidate, once we had to account for that extra thousand in Kate Wharton’s account.’

‘You’re suggesting that I murdered the girl for the sake of a paltry thousand pounds?’

Lambert smiled, more it seemed in sorrow than in anger. ‘Blackmailers come back for more. We see it all the time. They may not even intend to as they make the first demand, but the money comes to them too easily, and they almost always go back to the well for more. It leads people into desperate actions to silence them, as it did in this case.’

‘You’ve no evidence for this.’

‘We wouldn’t be here to arrest you if we didn’t. We spoke to Tracey Boyd this morning. She admitted to demanding the sum of two thousand pounds from you.’

‘Kate Wharton’s flatmate.’ Richard found it a small, incongruous satisfaction to have the identity he had guessed at confirmed.

‘We know you drew that sum in cash from your bank yesterday. We could have let you take the money to her tomorrow night as arranged, but we didn’t want another dead woman on our hands.’

It was over, now. It was a relief not to have to go on with his hopeless denials. ‘I couldn’t let Kate ruin everything. I liked her, felt I’d got to know her, over the months. Then she tried to blackmail me.’

‘You should have come to us.’

Richard scarcely heard Bert Hook’s first words. ‘She said she was giving up the game, going away with her boyfriend to start anew somewhere else. She wanted more money quickly, to give them a start. She’d had her thousand, but then she came back with a demand for more.’

Lambert said with grim insistence, ‘As DS Hook says, you should have come and asked for police help. You’d have had protection. The victim’s identity is not reported, when a blackmail case is in court.’

‘But she’d have told people, before it ever came to court. Told people at the golf club and at my firm. I’d have been a laughing stock where I at present have respect. I couldn’t face that.’ He glanced automatically at the ceiling, as a proper sense of priorities belatedly asserted itself. ‘And Eileen would have found out. She doesn’t deserve that.’

And now she would have to face all that and something much worse. The husband who had ministered so diligently to her increasing needs revealed as not just a man with a secret sexual life but as a murderer, a man who had planned and executed the cold-blooded garrotting of a girl with her life before her. Ellacott might be a man who had wandered out of his depth, but there was no escaping the reality of what he had done.

He now waved his fingers vaguely across the front of his hair, as if he felt some of it must surely be out of place, and asked wearily, ‘What next?’

Lambert said evenly, ‘We shall arrest you here. You will be formally charged with the murder of Katherine Mary Wharton at Oldford Police Station.’

He nodded slowly, then looked up into the superintendent’s long, watchful face. ‘You didn’t come for me at first. There must have been others under suspicion as well as me. What put you on to me?’

Lambert shrugged. ‘You made a mistake. Told us a lie. One you needn’t have used, as a matter of fact. You said you hadn’t played recently at the Ross-on-Wye course. The steward there told us yesterday that you were there quite recently. Three weeks ago, in fact: I checked the date of the match with the Secretary this morning. Just eleven days before the body of Kate Wharton was dumped in that ditch on the eleventh hole.’

Ellacott nodded three times, as if it gave him satisfaction to see things falling into place. ‘I thought at the time that it would be a good place to dump a body. I must have already been feeling desperate.’

‘And on Sunday the sixth of May you did just that.’

‘Yes. Kate had come back with a demand for another two thousand four days earlier. Claimed it would be the last one, but she’d said that the first time. I decided I’d have to do something drastic. I said it would take me a few days to get the cash, but I knew I had to act by Sunday, because my car was already booked in for a service and a thorough valeting on the Monday, which would remove any traces of Kate Wharton from the upholstery before her body was even discovered. So I told her I’d pick her up in my car on Sunday evening, late on.’

‘What time was this?’

‘Ten fifteen, on a road near her flat. She was upset when she came, so she wasn’t even suspicious. She said she’d had a row with this boyfriend. I’d taken a waxed cord from a sash window with me. I pointed to something outside the car window, and had the cord around her neck as soon as she turned away from me. She didn’t make a sound. I couldn’t believe it was so easy to kill someone. I drove out to the Ross course and turned down that lane which runs alongside the tenth and the eleventh fairways. If there’d been anyone around, I’d simply have driven on, but there wasn’t.’

‘You put things over your feet before you went through the hedge.’

‘Yes. Just plastic bags from the supermarket, but they did the trick. You haven’t produced anything from the site.’

‘No. You didn’t even leave fibres on the hedge, it seems.’

‘I put on my golfing waterproof trousers so that I wouldn’t. They went into the dustbin and off to the dump the next day.’ He seemed proud of the precautions he had taken, anxious to confirm to himself that he had made only the one slip, in lying about his recent visit to the Ross golf course.

At a sign from Lambert, Hook moved forward and pronounced the words of arrest. Ellacott winced slightly at the iteration of the word murder, but was otherwise impassive. ‘What now?’ he asked.

‘You must come with us to the station at Oldford. You will be placed under arrest and held there for the moment. You will be taken to court for an initial hearing quite soon.’

‘I’ll need to make arrangements for Eileen.’

‘If you give us the name of a friend or a professional carer, Sergeant Hook will ask them to come here.’

He gave them a name and Hook made a careful, noncommittal phone call. He set down the phone, looked at Ellacott with a troubled face, and said, ‘She’ll be over in half an hour.’

Ellacott went out between them into the hail and stopped suddenly there. ‘I must tell Eileen. I can’t let this come to her from others.’

Lambert hesitated. ‘All right. It’s irregular, but in the circumstances, we’ll allow it. DS Hook will be watching the windows on that side of the house from outside and I’ll stay here. We can allow you no more than five minutes.’

As he stood awkwardly to one side and Richard Ellacott went heavily up the stairs, John Lambert could not rid his mind of the thought that he still had almost three months left before retirement. Still time, perhaps, for a final murder investigation. But how could you hope that someone amidst those anonymous thousands out there would be planning such awful things?

Richard Ellacott hesitated for a moment on the landing, then went into his wife’s bedroom and shut the door.

There would be hard moments for him to come, in court, and harsher times still, as a murderer in prison. But the worst nightmare of all was going on at this moment, behind that shut door in this quiet house.