Murder in the Cotswolds (15 page)

Kate subjected him to a cold, unflinching scrutiny. “You want to play games?”

“Oh well,” he said philosophically, after failing to stare her down. “I suppose you wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t important. What is it you want to know?”

“I want a list of the bets Mr. Prescott placed with you over the last few months, complete with dates, plus a list of his payments and how they were made ... by cheque or by cash. I also want to know what sort of pressure you put on him to clear his debt.”

“Pressure? Me?”

“Yes, Mr. Tucker, you.”

“Listen, everyone has to lean a bit now and then.”

“You lean on him a bit, I lean on you a bit. That’s the way the world goes round. Shall we stop wasting each other’s time?”

Fifteen minutes later Kate emerged into the street with an interesting array of facts. George Prescott had been betting not wisely, but too well. On Gold Cup day alone, when the detective superintendent had seen him at the Cheltenham track, he’d lost more than eight hundred pounds. At that time he’d owed the bookie nearly seven thousand. He’d managed, gradually, to whittle that down to just over one thousand, mostly by payments in cash. Surely that sort of amount couldn’t all have come from creaming off the Leisure Centre funds? When pressed on the question of how Porter and Brown “leaned a bit” on bad-paying clients, Vincent Tucker had spoken vaguely of employing the services of a professional debt-collecting agency. In other words, threats of having Prescott worked over.

At Divisional HQ, she fortified herself with a cup of tea and a buttered scone in the canteen, freshened her make-up, then went along and tapped on the superintendent’s door.

“Enter!”

Jolly Joliffe was alone. “Can you spare a few minutes, sir?”

“Come in, Chief Inspector, come in. Do you have something interesting to tell me?”

“I hope so, sir.”

“Good, good ...” He creased his long face into the nearest approach to a smile he could manage and reached for the intercom on his desk. “How about a nice pot of tea?”

“I’ve just this minute had a cup, thank you.”

He looked pained.
Bad one, Kate! 
She shouldn’t have brushed aside his little gallantry.

“I’ve been following up on George Prescott. That tip you gave me about him being a gambler was extremely useful.”

“Excellent.” The superintendent leaned back in his chair, but as he listened to what she had to say his expression grew more and more sceptical.

“It’s all very interesting, Mrs. Maddox, but it’s not nearly enough to bring a murder charge. Hearsay ... a few betting losses ... the unsubstantiated statement of a man who is himself a main suspect in the case.”

“He wouldn’t persuade his sister to give him a fake alibi just for the hell of it,” Kate pointed out. “She’s not a woman who finds it easy to lie.”

“I accept that Prescott has something to hide. But that something isn’t necessarily murder. We mustn’t be swept along by our feelings, Chief Inspector. A few more solid facts is what we need.”

Don’t spit, Kate!

“I do appreciate that, sir. However, I’ve come around to thinking there might be more involved than a small-scale fiddle of charitable funds. Suppose there was some kind of fraud in connection with the Hambledon estate, and Prescott was scared Mrs. Latimer would latch on to that, too? That could have been a strong enough motive to kill her. He’d have been ruined professionally, not to mention facing serious criminal charges.”

“Hmm! Could Prescott have fiddled the estate funds without his own staff knowing?”

“He’s the only qualified accountant in the firm. The woman who actually keeps the estate’s books is very competent, but I imagine it would be possible for Prescott to do some juggling without her being aware of what was going on.”

Superintendent Joliffe pondered. “There’s a chappie over in Wye Division who’s a hot number on financial frauds. He did his chartered accountant’s training, I believe. Ken Murray ... d’you know him?”

Many was the drink she’d had with Ken, but Kate just said demurely, “Yes, I have met Inspector Murray.”

“So shall we borrow him and turn him loose on Prescott’s office records?”

Far too heavy-handed at this stage!
But Kate didn’t voice that opinion. Instead, she said with utmost tact, “I do realise that Inspector Murray would be very useful ... exactly the right man for such a job. But don’t you agree it would be nice if we could keep this within the division?”

“But do we have the resources, my dear?”

Call me Kate, if you like. Call me Chief Inspector.
Call me Mrs. Maddox. But I’m bloody not your dear!

“With your permission, sir, I’d like to have another crack at Prescott first. I think I might be able to break him.”

“Nothing out of line,” he warned.

“I’ll be very careful.”

“Well ... I understand your enthusiasm. Your first case on this division, and a big one, too. Naturally you want to acquit yourself well. We all want that for you.”

Oh sure, no doubt!
The Latimer case neatly solved would be kudos to the Cotswold Division. But, in the solving, a little egg on Detective Chief Inspector Maddox’s face might come as a welcome bonus.

“I’ll spend the evening going through all the reports again,” she said, “and I’ll tackle Prescott in the morning.”

“Then I wish you good luck.” The detective superintendent rose to his feet to terminate the interview. Another wintry smile. “How’s the car going these days?”

Fall about laughing, Kate. Jolly has made a funny.

* * * *

“Caught in the act,” said Felix, grinning over her shoulder. “I’ll come quietly.”

Kate had just arrived home, after an evening wading through the huge pile of reports. The cottage was empty, and she’d found her aunt in the studio built onto the rear of the garage. Felix was bent over a table, using an airbrush on a photograph.

“What are you up to?” Kate asked.

“Come and have a look.” The photograph, a ten-by-eight black-and-white print, was of a small girl in riding gear taking her pony over a pole jump. “See anything wrong with it?”

“Been doing a spot of retouching, have we?”

“More than a bit. I took the shot over at Dodford on Saturday. This child was good, no question, and she deserved her rosette. But Mummy wouldn’t have been best pleased to have the picture appear in the
Gazette
with a look of petrified terror on her little darling’s face. So a bit of judicious switching from a picture of the child taken at the line-up a few minutes earlier, and hey-presto ... a portrait of true British grit, smiling triumphantly as she breaks the gymkhana record.”

“Felix, you’re a wicked old woman. I could charge you with misrepresentation. Or something.”

“Would I get off with a caution?”

Kate laughed. “A commendation, more like. God, I’m flaked out.”

“A stiff drink’s what you need, girl.”

“Your universal panacea?”

“You can’t say it doesn’t work.”

The whisky did help. When Kate went up to bed twenty minutes later, she almost instantly fell into an untroubled sleep. She awoke refreshed, and eager for her interview with Prescott.

She and Felix were having breakfast when the phone rang.

“For me, I bet,” said Kate.

And sure enough it was. Tim Boulter. “Sorry to trouble you so early,” he began.

“Not half as sorry as I am, Tim. My scrambled egg’s getting cold. What is it this time?”

“It’s George Prescott. His office cleaner has just phoned in to report that she found him dead at his desk. It looks like suicide.”

“I blame myself for this, Tim.” Kate felt sick with self-reproach.

“Why on earth should you?” Dextrously, Boulter slid the car round a lumbering farm tractor.

“I planned to interview Prescott again this morning. If only I’d seen him yesterday, I could have prevented his suicide.”

“With respect, guv, I don’t think that necessarily follows. Unless he confessed, you couldn’t have arrested him yesterday. So he’d still have been able to kill himself.”

But Kate couldn’t let herself off the hook that easily. “It’s a rotten way to solve a case of murder ... have the killer take his own life.”

“I suppose this clinches it that Prescott
was
Mrs. Latimer’s killer?”

Kate was surprised that the sergeant had even posed the question. The news of Prescott’s suicide, she realised now, had firmed her suspicions against him to rock-solid certainty. Had she been too hasty? Too eager to exonerate Richard Gower?

Already they’d covered the short distance between Stonebank Cottage and the accountant’s office in the centre of the town. In the outer room they found a uniformed constable offering a soothing cup of tea to a middle-aged woman in a shrieking-pink nylon overall.

“This is Mrs. Dorothy Hemmings, the cleaning lady, ma’am,” he said. “She found the body.”

She was, naturally, upset; she was also, forgivably, relishing the sudden limelight. Between noisy sobs, she said, “Such a shock, I can’t tell you. I never expected to find ... well, the office is always empty when I come in. But this morning I spotted him through the door, sitting at his desk. Well, it wasn’t any of my business, so I just called politely, ‘Morning, Mr. Prescott.’ But he didn’t answer me, and when I went in and took a closer look, he was all slumped and I knew he was dead. My heart just stopped, it really did. It was such a horrible shock. I’ll never forget it, never, not to the day I die.”

Kate signed for Sergeant Boulter to go on through and see the body. She pulled up another chair and sat down beside the sobbing woman.

“Try and drink your tea, Mrs. Hemmings. There ... that’s better. I’ll ask you to give the sergeant a statement in a minute, and then I’ll get someone to drive you home.”

“Mr. P. was such a kind man. Gave me a nice bonus every Christmas, regular as clockwork. And he always remembered to ask me how my Arthur’s back was.”

“When did you last speak to him?” Kate enquired.

“Oh well ... not for a while now. I didn’t see him all that often. Only now and then on Fridays when I come back here for my money. But he always had a cheerful word for me. Always. He was such a gentleman, you can ask anybody.” She took a few more sips of tea. “What’s going to happen to this place now, d’you reckon?”

“It’s too early to say yet, Mrs. Hemmings.” Already, and why not, she was worrying about losing this nice little cleaning job. Mousy-haired, not fat but shapeless, she was one of that army of women who work their guts out for peanuts, who expect little from life and get even less.

Kate left her with the constable and joined Boulter. The plump figure sitting slumped forward in the swivel chair might have been asleep. The desk was tidy except for a half-full bottle of whisky, unstoppered, and a glass tumbler lying on its side. There was a faint smell of bitter almonds.

“Cyanide,” said Kate immediately.

“Is that what the smell is? I’ve never struck it before.” Boulter indicated a sheet of paper weighted down by the bookie’s silver ashtray. “There’s the suicide note.”

“Typed,” Kate observed.

“Not very expertly. About as good as my reports.”

“There’s no typewriter in here, which means he had to use one of those in the outer office. I wonder why he bothered.”

“Perhaps he thought it would be clearer than writing it by hand.”

“I wouldn’t have thought so, not this man. He was fussy about his handwriting, proud of it. Remember the way he shaped up to signing a letter, that first time we saw him?” Frowning, Kate read the note through again. She felt stirrings of doubt. Somehow it
didn’t feel
right. “You know, Tim, this note doesn’t sound much like the George Prescott we met. He was a pompous little man. I’d expect him to have a pedantic style. Listen to this: Tm at the end of my tether. I can’t go on any more. This is the only way out for me.’ “

“I doubt if he was in any mood to write fine prose.”

Kate shook her head, unconvinced. “He’d use the style that came naturally to him. His final literary effort. And why should he type it? Did he strike you as a man who’d use a typewriter?”

Boulter looked startled. “Are you suggesting that ... ?”

“Just considering, Tim, that’s all. Ah, here’s the doctor.”

The police surgeon’s resentment of her walked in with him. Kate, ready to forgive and forget (well, almost), greeted him with a smile.

“Good morning, Dr. Meddowes.”

“You seem to make a habit of early-morning calls, Chief Inspector.” He was as sour as she was bright.

“You know what they say about the early bird, Doctor.”

“Hmph!” He put his bag down on the floor and took a general, assessing look at the body. Like Kate, he recognised the smell at once. “Cyanide! Well, I suppose it’s a neat exit. You don’t seem to have made a lot of progress with the Latimer case, Chief Inspector. And now this! I take it they’re connected?”

“That’s a possibility I’m keeping in mind.”

He waved at the suicide note. “I heard that you’d been questioning Prescott concerning Mrs. Latimer’s death.”

“I’ve been questioning a lot of people.”

“Then let’s hope we don’t have a number of suicides to contend with as a result.”

Kate felt tempted to toss something back to wipe that superior smile off his face. But what would it achieve? And anyway, she wasn’t in the business of providing free entertainment for Tim Boulter.

The doctor didn’t take long. He didn’t need long. Prescott was dead and couldn’t have been deader. “Time of death?” he said with an impatient sigh. “That’s what you want me to tell you, isn’t it?”

“Any help you could give me would be appreciated, Doctor.” Kate spoke with forced meekness, and won the result she sought.

“All I can say with any kind of certainty is that he’s been dead for quite some while. But reading all the signs, I’ll stick my neck out and say somewhere between seven and ten hours. That’s only an educated guess, mind.”

“That’s very useful, Doctor. Thank you.”

He picked up his bag. “Well, I’ll be off to my breakfast.”