High Island Blues (18 page)

She expected another outburst about Mick’s ingratitude, but all Brownscombe said was: ‘I daresay he did what he thought was right.’

‘And how do you get on with your American daughter-in-law? I believe she’s an attractive woman.’ It was not the sort of comment she would usually have made but Wilf seemed convinced by it.

‘So I hear,’ he said resentfully.

‘You’ve never met her?’ She feigned surprise.

‘Never got the chance,’ he muttered.

‘I don’t think,’ Mrs Brownscombe interrupted, ‘that this is any of Mrs Palmer-Jones’s business.’

But Wilf was too drunk or too lost in regret to take any notice of her.

‘We didn’t even get an invite to the wedding,’ he said. ‘After all we’d done for him. He sent a letter afterwards telling us they were married. It was the same when the children were born. A card with their names. Not even a photo.’

‘Are you surprised, the way that you treated him?’ Mrs Brownscombe spoke quietly. She had not lost her temper. It was a warning: keep your stupid mouth shut. Then she smiled and there was even gold in her teeth. ‘As you’ll have gathered, Mrs Palmer-Jones, Michael and my husband never really got on.’

‘Will you get to the funeral?’ Molly asked.

‘No,’ Mrs Brownscombe said. ‘I don’t think we could face it. We prefer to remember Michael as he was. Here, as a boy.’

The love of her life, Molly thought. The apple of her eye.

She was woken at seven the next morning by the landlord banging on the door to tell her that she had a telephone call. He seemed to take delight in waking her. There was no phone in her bedroom so she took the call in the bar, surrounded by dirty glasses and overflowing ashtrays.

She knew it would be George with more of his instructions. She started to complain. Her head was aching and she was not sure what to make of the Brownscombes. He cut her short.

‘There’s been another murder,’ he said. ‘ I’ve just found the body.’

In Texas it would be one o’clock in the morning. Dark, but probably pleasantly warm. She had pulled a jersey over her winceyette pyjamas and still shivered. Rain lashed against the window.

‘The victim was a middle-aged spinster. Ineffective. Slightly batty,’ said George.

That would almost describe me, she thought.

‘We believe she must have been a witness to the first murder. It’s a distraction really.’

She could hear the impatience in his voice.

‘I doubt if her relatives see it like that,’ she said.

‘Well of course not!’ He hoped she was not going to be difficult. ‘What are your plans now?’

‘I thought I might try to trace a teacher of Michael’s. Someone who took him birdwatching. The Brownscombes claim Mick never had a girlfriend. Perhaps he made her up to impress Rob and Oliver. If that’s true this teacher is the only person he was close to before he left home.’

‘Would that wait?’ At least, she thought, he was asking her, not telling her.

‘I suppose so.’

‘You see this is all so
untidy
,’ he went on. ‘So many loose ends. So many distractions. I’d like at least to clear some of it up.’

And then, as she had expected, there came the list of instructions. She scribbled notes on the back of a beer mat.

‘Well?’ he demanded. ‘What do you think?’

She said that she supposed it all made sense.

George spoke to Molly on the phone in the hotel lobby. When the call was finished he stood on the veranda and looked over the garden to the block of staff houses. They were brightly lit by spotlights. The Identification Unit had already arrived from Galveston. The medical examiner would be there soon, but the body of Esme Lovegrove still lay where he had found it, like a rag doll tossed away by a playful dog.

The house was surprisingly quiet. Most of the guests were in bed when George had found the body and he had been discreet. He had walked quietly back to the house to speak to Joe Benson. There had been no drama, no screaming. Even Joan Lovegrove had accepted the news of her sister’s death with very little fuss. The authorities had given her permission to fly home but she had rejected the idea. She would stay with her sister, she said, until they could both leave. George thought she would probably be less lonely here.

Joe Benson came up behind him and they leant over the veranda rail together.

‘I left my room at seven o’clock,’ George said. ‘ She wasn’t there then.’

‘So someone must have dumped the body, while you were at dinner. Or later while we were waiting to see if the lady showed up.’

‘But she wasn’t killed then,’ George said. ‘ Was she? She’d been missing all afternoon. So why take the risk of moving her? It was as if someone wanted to be sure that she would be found.’

‘Did you notice any of your party go missing during the evening?’

‘No, but people were coming and going all the time. It’s a big building and there wasn’t an organized event. Sometimes Rob Earl gives a slide show or lecture. There was nothing like that tonight. It would have been easy to slip away for half an hour.’

‘It might not even have taken that long if she was killed somewhere here in the woods. What about clothes? There might have been blood. Did anyone change their clothes during the course of the evening?’

George did not answer immediately.

‘When I came into the bar at about seven o’clock Rob Earl was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He’d just come in from a birdwatching trip. We discussed Esme’s disappearance then he went up to his room to put on a shirt and tie. He was gone for about twenty minutes. We had dinner together. He wouldn’t have had time to move the body, shower and change.’

‘No,’ Benson said. ‘I guess not.’

‘She must have seen something,’ George said. ‘Why else would anyone want to kill her? And if she did see something important on the day Mick Brownscombe died why didn’t she tell the detective who questioned her?’

They stood for a moment in silence. A barn owl cried from the trees and George realized that he still needed the bird for his trip list.

‘She wouldn’t have been the sort to go in for blackmail?’ Benson suggested tentatively. ‘That’s not the impression I got of her.’

‘No,’ George said, but he remembered Joan’s words: Esme always enjoys a drama. He tried to picture Esme in conversation with the other party members. She had gone in for arch comments, teasing of a vaguely flirtatious nature, anything to draw attention to herself. She might have seen any information about the murder as too valuable to simply pass on to the detective. Then it would become common knowledge. Wouldn’t she be tempted to save it so she could make some dramatic revelation? Without realizing that it actually gave away the identity of the murderer?

‘I don’t understand how Esme could have witnessed some significant event without Joan seeing it too,’ he said. ‘They were always together.’

‘But not this afternoon.’

‘No. I wonder if she’d made an excuse about the heat having exhausted her. She just wanted her sister out of the way.’

‘She’d arranged to meet someone?’

‘It’s possible,’ George said. He thought of Esme, who had never grown up, with her floaty dresses, her powdered face and her hyacinth blue eye shadow. ‘It would have been a man,’ he said. ‘If a man had flattered her, pretended to find her attractive, she’d have ignored any danger and gone with him.’

‘So the killer’s a man? Well, Sherlock. I didn’t realize this business was so damn easy.’

George smiled, nodded across the garden to the team of detectives.

‘Have they got a murder weapon?’

‘Nope. But I guess it’s more likely that’ll be found where she was killed.’

‘Any ideas?’

‘What do they call it in those TV series you sell us? A blunt instrument. That’s what they reckon it was.’

‘But not the chisel,’ George said, almost to himself. ‘I wonder why.’

‘You think there could be two separate killers?’

‘I don’t think anything at this stage.’

But in a sense there was too much to think about. Too many strands to the investigation. The case was messy and he hated untidiness. If he could clear up the minor mysteries, the distractions, then he might find out what lay behind the murders. He turned to Benson.

‘Would you give me permission to leave High Island for a few hours? I realize I’ve not made a proper statement but I’ll be back this afternoon.’

The constable rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. It was the only sign that he might be tired.

‘Well I told you, it’s not my case. It’s not my place to give permission for anything.’

‘If I asked Detective Grant, do you think he would let me go?’

Benson considered. ‘ No,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t think he would. He’s an ambitious man and he plays by the rules.’

They stood for a moment in silence.

‘I’ve just thought of something,’ Benson said. ‘Now you won’t take this the wrong way, Mr Palmer-Jones? You won’t take offence?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Well, you’re not as young as you were.’ He paused. ‘ What with the jet lag and all I’d say you were pretty tired by now.’

‘Jet lag is a terrible thing,’ George said.

‘You can’t sleep in your own bed. The IDU wouldn’t want you going over there, disturbing their good work. We could ask Miss Cleary to find you somewhere in the main house but she’s probably asleep by now and I wouldn’t want to wake her. It can’t have been an easy time for her. Two killings in a week.’

‘No,’ George said. ‘We shouldn’t disturb her.’

‘What I suggest is that you find a motel room for the rest of the night. The Gulfway’s full. Miss Lily told me that only today. But you should find something in Winnie. I don’t think Detective Grant could object to that. You have a good sleep and be back here in the afternoon.’

‘Thank you,’ George said.

Benson looked at him. ‘We old timers have to stick together.’ He was only half joking. ‘Now you take care, you hear.’

George’s car was parked with all the others in a space which had probably once been a stable yard. It was at the back of the house close to the kitchen and there was no view from there of the spot-lit body and the IDU. The area was lit by a white security light. There were three big dustbins and he supposed that they would be searched by the detectives looking for the murder weapon and bloodstained clothing. It was unlikely that the murderer who had been so cool, slipping out from dinner to move the body, returning later to join the discussion about where Esme might be, would give himself away so easily.

He stood by his car and looked up at the dark silhouette of the house. There were lights at the windows on the ground floor, next to the kitchen. He guessed that was where Mary Ann Cleary had her apartment. Benson had been wrong then, to suppose that she was asleep.

Only one other window was lit. The house was so big and so dark that it would be impossible in the daylight to work out whose bedroom it was. Perhaps Joan Lovegrove was there, lying awake, despite the sedation she’d been given. Perhaps someone with a guilty conscience had left the light on in the hope of driving away nightmares.

He got into his car and drove slowly down the track, expecting at any moment to be stopped, but the detectives from Galveston had only just arrived and there was no one on the gate. As he passed through the quiet streets of the town he met a small convoy of cars. Reinforcements, he thought. And perhaps the medical examiner. He hoped that Esme’s body would have been removed by the time it got light. Just before he joined the I10 at Winnie he saw a truck, with the logo of a television station on the side. Rob’s punters would wake up to a circus of flashlights and fast-talking reporters.

The freeway into Houston was clear and he seemed to come to the dramatic skyline at once. It appeared so unexpectedly that he realized he could not have been concentrating on the road. He switched on the radio to keep himself awake and heard the first news report of Esme Lovegrove’s death.

Although the business park where Brownscombe Associates had their office was marked on his road map, George had to drive round for a quarter of an hour before he found the actual building. The development was small-scale, providing accommodation for insurance offices, investment brokers and computer consultants, but the units – new brick and glass blocks – all looked similar. Brownscombe Associates was in a building at the edge of the park looking out over flat open space, which was probably a school sports ground.

It was 4 a. m. The door to the building which housed three other companies was locked. George parked in the shadow and dozed. At 6 a. m. a security guard turned up in a van. He unlocked the main door with a master key and drove away. As soon as his tail lights had disappeared George tried the door again but still it was impossible to get in. Access for employees was by a coded button press. He touched a few buttons hopefully but nothing happened. He returned to the car worried that if he made too many mistakes he might trigger an alarm system. As he had approached the entrance a bright security light had flashed on.

The first keen employee arrived at six-thirty. He carried a bundle of envelope files. From the car George had a good view of the button press but the man was so quick and deft that he could only make out the first figure. Two. Then two buttons pressed together. Then another single further down the pad. The man pushed the door open with his backside, his arms full of the files. George held his breath, hoping the door would just shut gently so the lock would not catch. But once inside the man pushed it tight again. A light went on in a second-floor office. Clarke Accountants. Brownscombe Associates was on the ground floor.

Five minutes later a pick-up truck drove down the road and stopped with a jerk outside the office block. George ducked down in his seat as it passed him. A heavy, middle-aged woman got out, and pulled a shopping bag after her. She shouted some words of Spanish at the driver, presumably her husband, and he drove away. She wore carpet slippers and a large overall tied at the back. The office cleaner.

It was obvious that she mistrusted the push button key. She set down her bag before tackling it. She fumbled in her overall pocket for a scrap of paper where the numbers had been written. Then she prodded the combination slowly and deliberately so George could see exactly what she was doing. Two, then four and six together, pressed with the index finger of each hand, then nine. The door clicked open. She turned her eyes skyward as if thanking heaven that the contraption had worked again.